Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

He collected the compression suit and locked it in the vintage suitcase on the luggage stand, hiding it until he’d put it back on for Progression. Then he slipped on the vintage watch, already keeping time at three minutes after 9:00 p.m. He put the signet ring on his right hand, but remembered to leave the gold wedding band where it lay.

He saw the envelope on the desk, which would have his VIP passes for the Fair—he had ordered three for this, his last trip to 1939.

The window onto Eighth Avenue was open just a crack, allowing evening air to come into a room that had yet to know air-conditioning along with the sounds of traffic from Times Square. Bert wanted to get up, to get dressed and go out into the night, to walk down to East Thirty-Eighth Street, where Carmen lived in an apartment, but his body ached so. Damn the physics! He felt tired, just as before. He lay back on the bed and fell back to sleep, just as before.

He woke up when dim light was coming through the window and the city was quiet. He felt normal, like he’d taken a Green Tab and slept a healthy ten hours. His watch read ten minutes to seven. It was the morning of June 8, 1939, and he had all of twelve hours to find Carmen and Virginia. He lifted the heavy telephone receiver, pressed the only button on the phone, and was connected to the hotel operator. Once more, he asked for room service. After the same five minutes, a uniformed waiter named Percy was at his door with a tray holding a silver pot of coffee, a pitcher of real cream, cubes of sugar, a glass of water, and the morning edition of the New York Daily Mirror . On five previous mornings, Bert had tipped the waiter a dime, prompting a polite response of “I thank you, Mr. Allenby.” This morning, Bert palmed Percy the half-dollar coin, and the man’s eyed went wide. “Oh, Mr. Allenby, ain’t you flush !”

Real cream makes coffee a thick, heavenly pleasure. Bert enjoyed the second cup as the water for his shower heated up—with the plumbing of 1939, this took a few minutes. After his scrub, he dressed. He had been taught how to knot his tie, which he thought was a silly thing to wear, but he loved the double-breasted suit that had been tailored for him nearly a century later. The fabrics were from the period, the socks did not have much elastic in them, and the shoes were like gunboats, wide and heavy, but comfortable.

Riding down in the elevator, Bert again smelled the operator’s hair tonic. He didn’t think it was all that stinky.

“Lobby, sir,” the elevator operator said as he opened the meshed grate.

Bert was now familiar with all the smells of the Hotel Lincoln, and he liked them—the cigar smoke mixing with the wool carpets, the flowers being arranged by the black housekeepers, the florid perfume of the well-dressed ladies heading out for their day in Manhattan. Outside on Eighth Avenue, taxis idled and buses headed uptown, spewing fumes of combusted gasoline.

On foot, Bert turned right out of the lobby and right again on West Forty-Fifth Street, inhaling the scent of roasted coffee, wafting on a breeze from the Hudson River, from the Maxwell House Coffee factory in New Jersey, coffee that was good to the last drop.

This morning of June 8, 1939, he’d not take breakfast at the Hotel Astor, with its famous clock and its opulent décor. Instead Bert was going to poke his head into as many nearby coffee shops and cafes as time allowed. Carmen lived only seven blocks away. What if she was nearby, grabbing a quick breakfast before taking the subway to the Bronx to pick up Virginia? Maybe she was sitting in a Broadway diner right now, having coffee and donuts. He could meet her right then and not have to wait all day for that moment on the bench by the Four Freedoms.

He covered Times Square and the side streets, ducking in and out of cafes and peering through the windows of diners, but there was no sign of her. Reluctantly, he gave up, taking a seat at the counter of a place on Seventh, paying twenty-five cents for a breakfast of eggs, sausage, pancakes, juice, and coffee.

Bert was leaving a Mercury dime as a tip. “Ma’am,” he said to the uniformed waitress with overpainted lips, “is it possible for me take the subway to the World’s Fair?”

“Honey,” the waitress said, “it’s the best way to go.” She swept the dime into her apron pocket and gave Bert directions to the IRT line.

His first ever trip on the subway cost only an Indian head nickel. The car was a jumble of people, who all smelled of something, if only the laundry starch of their freshly pressed clothes. No one was staring at a phone or tablet. Most of the riders read the morning papers—some oversize rectangles of newsprint and ink, others the smaller-formatted tabloids. And there were magazines with pages that held more text than pictures. Many people were smoking, even a few men with cigars and two puffing on pipes. Judging from all the guidebooks and flyers, many passengers were, like Bert, making for the World’s Fair.

At each stop Bert stepped off the car just long enough to scan the stations for Carmen and Virginia because, who knows? They could be riding the IRT out to Flushing Meadows. If so, Bert could ask them for directions, they would volunteer to guide him along since they were going, too, he could confess that his three VIP passes were burning a hole in his pocket and why not let him treat the two ladies to a hassle-free day of no lines, no waiting? And just like that, what had in the past been less than two hours with Carmen would, in the present, become an entire day together.

But Carmen never got on the train.

“Wow! Look at that!” a rider shouted. Out the window were the Trylon and Perisphere—the Fair. Bert could see the huge globe and its attendant tower, bright and white in the morning sky. Everyone on the train gave the landmarks a glance.

The IRT discharged fairgoers at the Bowling Green Gate, where Bert paid seventy-five cents for admission and bought a guidebook for a dime.

It was only 10:30, so unless fate was to intercede there were hours before he would see Carmen again. He took a look at the Home Building Center, admired the sofa beds in Home Furnishings, and found the exhibits in the American Radiator Building just about hilarious. He kept chuckling to himself at the dazzling-in-those-days presentations by RCA, American Telephone & Telegraph, the Communications Building, and the museum-like presentations of the Crosley Radio Corporation.

He joined the line for Democracity, the lesson in social studies that was inside the Perisphere. He was soon talking with the Gammelgards, a family of six including grandparents, who had taken the train all the way from Topeka, Kansas, to spend a week at the fair. This was their very first day, and Pop-Pop Gammelgard said to Bert, “Young man, never have I dreamed the good Lord would allow me to see such a place as this.” Bert was happy to be considered a young man . His $756 billion afforded him every procedure in the world to look much younger than his sixty-one years.

He told the Kansans he had friends in Salina, which prompted an invitation for dinner at the Gammelgards’, should Bert ever find himself in Topeka.

All morning he checked out every woman dressed in green, hoping to find Carmen. He toured every building in the Court of Power, the Plaza of Light, and along the Avenue of Labor, where uniformed ladies working for Swift & Co. demonstrated the slicing and packaging of fresh bacon. At noon, he blew two nickels on hot dogs at Childs and compared the cut of his double-breasted suit to the fashions-to-come, according to the prophets of Men’s Apparel. He then walked all the way to the Amusements Area, heading for the tall iron tower that was the parachute drop. The Amusements were the Fair’s most popular attractions, and the carnival crowd was thick and jumbled. Bert circled the area again and again, stopping at the parachute tower repeatedly, expecting to find Carmen and Virginia as they rose up, up, up, and came down ka-joink . But they were never there. So he started one last, slow walk around the area and back toward the main fairgrounds.