Time and Again (Time Series, Book 1) by Jack Finney

Author:Jack Finney [Finney, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2014-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

She liked the portrait: I could tell that she really did by the way she looked at it again and again; and some color came back to her face. My drawing was fully detailed, very literal; it could have been a Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper woodcut. But this one was also a good portrait. Not only did it look like her; I was a good enough artist to manage that, given the time and incentive, but it also caught something of Julia herself, of the kind of person she was, so far as I knew. Maybe it did capture something of Julia’s “soul.”

Anyway, it was good. The others had come into the house; Byron Doverman just as I was finishing, and then Maud Torrence, each stopping to admire and praise before going on upstairs. Aunt Ada came in from the kitchen to call upstairs, saying dinner would be on the table in five minutes. She admired the drawing too, and then insisted, since I was still here, that I stay for dinner. And unless I wanted to look as though I were running from Jake, leaving Julia to face him alone, I had to stay, and I said I would; the harm, if any, was already done. I was afraid, I realized—I didn’t know what the hell this guy might do—but I was curious, too. Still admiring her portrait, Julia looked up at me and asked me to sign it. I took it, fumbling in my pocket for the pencil, trying to figure out what to say: I couldn’t just write my name and nothing more. Then I thought, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” or whatever the saying is, and I wrote “For Julia—Affectionately, admiringly,” mentally adding, And to hell with you, Jake, and signed my name.

In the time I’d been here I’d thought almost not at all of Rube Prien, Dr. Danziger, Oscar Rossoff, Colonel Esterhazy, or even the project itself; they were motionless in my mind, at the small far-off end of the telescope, dwindled and remote. But at dinner they turned real again: what were they going to think of what I’d have to tell them? That I’d disturbed and interfered in events with inexcusable clumsiness? Probably; and maybe they’d be right, yet I didn’t know how I could have avoided it. The talk at dinner was all of Guiteau, with a little weather, and I wasn’t interested. For me now, Guiteau was once again only a name in an old book; tried, executed, and long forgotten, the world I was preparing myself for hardly even knowing his name anymore. I sat eating mechanically, trying to look as though I were interested, responding when spoken to. But as the project and the people in it returned to life in my mind, I began to recede from this time and place.

I was jerked back into it. We were finishing dinner, Maud Torrence already finished, politely waiting for the others before leaving the table; Felix finishing his

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