Once they had passed through the bustle of the Grand Central Depot at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt, Jesse hired a coach to carry them to the Broadway Central Hotel.
The hotel had been considered one of the finest in the city when August Kemp’s men took it over and refurbished it. Kemp had reportedly offered the building’s owners a deal they could hardly refuse: He would install elaborate new amenities—electric lights powered by a dedicated generator, improved heating and fire protection, a twenty-first-century kitchen—in exchange for exclusive use of the facilities by City tourists for a four-year period. At the end of that time the hotel would revert to its owners, who would be supplied with enough spare parts and diesel gasoline to keep the amenities running for another decade. Newspapers had since taken to calling the hotel the “Electric Grand” for the way its electric lights shone through the many windows of the eight-story building; gawkers came from miles around to see it, and on pleasant summer evenings the crowds were thick enough to block traffic on Broadway.
Tonight the crowd seemed unusually dense despite the cool spring weather, and Jesse directed the coach driver to a gated side entrance to avoid the press of bodies. He showed his City identification to the gate guard, who examined it methodically before waving him through. In the lobby of the hotel Jesse handed off Mrs. Standridge to the night clerk, a man named Amos Creagh. Creagh was a local hire, a beefy veteran of the Army of the Potomac who owed his stiff right leg to an injury he’d suffered at Chancellorsville. Creagh had not yet forgiven General Lee for the insult. Jesse sometimes took meals with him. He stood by now as Creagh welcomed Mrs. Standridge—there was no mention of her being anything other than a valued guest arriving at an odd hour—and summoned a bellboy to escort her to the elevator.
“Strange night,” Jesse said once Mrs. Standridge had gone to her room. “Big crowd on Broadway.”
“That ain’t the half of it,” Creagh said.
“Why, what’s up?”
“I guess you haven’t seen the papers? Big trouble. Oh, and that City woman you’re always asking about? The big-shouldered gal?”
Elizabeth DePaul. “What about her?”
“Arrived by train this morning, along with a whole raft of City bosses, including August Kemp himself.”
9
ALARMING TRUTHS ABOUT “FUTURITY” EXPOSED
The advent of the City of Futurity on the Illinois plains southwest of the city of Chicago four years ago has inspired intense curiosity among all those who have heard of it. It is a curiosity about the years to come, a curiosity the operators of the City have exploited, but have been reluctant to entirely satisfy. The City’s spokesmen, including its founder Mr. August Kemp, eagerly boast of scientific and mechanical wonders, but they have reserved comment on political and social subjects until a comprehensive written account can be prepared and formally presented to the president of the United States. That document was handed to President Hayes last week, on the condition that its contents remain private until a general publication to take place at the end of 1877. Two other documents, said to contain useful advice for medical practitioners and mechanical engineers, are already being brought to press.
Absent these disclosures from Mr. Kemp, rumors have proliferated. Citizens of Manhattan have had ample opportunities to observe the behavior of individuals visiting from Mr. Kemp’s “future,” and many peculiarities have been noted. It is not a secret that Negroes, Orientals, and women in masculine dress mingle freely with white men in these crowds. Some have understood that observation as evidence that the world of the future is blind to distinctions of race or sex, as in a radical dream-vision of universal egalitarianism. Others take it as a token of the sort of haphazard morality too often associated with great wealth and aristocratic excess.
Until now it has been impossible to know the truth of these matters, but certain letters sent to Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell of the American Woman Suffrage Association and lately published in the Woman’s Journal appear to be genuine, and, if authentic, constitute a shocking indictment of “the world of futurity.” According to Mrs. Blackwell, she began receiving these anonymous letters on a monthly basis beginning in September of 1876 and continuing until March of this year. The author of the letters claims to be an unnamed visitor from the future, and his communications contained predictions of both near and distant events. Mrs. Blackwell naturally dismissed these missives as fabrications, but as the nearer prophecies seemed to come true, including detailed statements about the controversy between Mr. Tilden and Mr. Hayes, and the compromise that eventually resolved it, she gradually became convinced of the letters’ authenticity.
It is no doubt flattering to Mrs. Blackwell that the author of the letters, who signs himself only as “an American citizen who wants to speak honestly,” thinks of her and other radicals as harbingers of the future condition of humanity. This is no doubt what has moved Mrs. Blackwell to expose these communications to the public. We cannot view their contents with equanimity, however, for the letters are incendiary. Our nation has survived a great conflict, and we have no wish to see old wounds reopened, yet the anonymous “American citizen” would do exactly that. By denouncing home rule for Southern states as a “Jim Crow” regime that exchanges slavery for serfdom, the letters threaten to reignite racial tensions and stoke the embers of sectional discord. By holding up female suffrage as a moral ideal that ought to be enacted into law, they threaten to pit husbands against wives and daughters against fathers. By their endorsement of the broadest possible conception of the territorial rights of Indians, they repudiate our army and would push the former president’s ill-advised “peace policy” beyond the point of absurdity. And even these horrifying assertions pale next to the claim that our nation will one day become one in which men may enter into marriage with men, and women with women. It is, we are inclined to say, so grotesque a proposition that it simply cannot be true, though observation of the behavior of visitors from the future does little to dispel our fears.
Similar letters are rumored to have been mailed to other prominent or notorious persons, including Mr. Frederick Douglass and Mrs. Woodhull, but only Mrs. Blackwell has admitted to receiving them, and perhaps we should thank her for doing so. If the claims are not true, we hope Mr. Kemp or his representatives will say so. In the event the claims are verified, we may take solace in Mr. Kemp’s oft-repeated declaration that the future he represents need not be our own. Indeed, that knowledge would serve a tutelary purpose, in that we would then labor mightily to avoid such an outcome.
Jesse took a sip of orange juice, spilling a drop on the folded page of the newspaper. The word “outcome” became an illegible blot.
He was still not entirely accustomed to taking breakfast in the restaurant of the Electric Grand, where the morning meal was presented twenty-first-century style: a buffet table offering eggs, miniature sausages, thinly sliced bacon, and various breads, along with juice and coffee dispensed by luminous machines. He had chosen juice because the dispenser was simple to operate, but he kept an eye on the coffee machine as the tourists used it, planning to make an approach as soon as the crowd thinned. He dabbed the spot of juice from the newspaper with a napkin, which caused an entire paragraph to disappear. When he looked up, Elizabeth DePaul was standing at his table.
“We meet again,” she said.
Jesse stood, banging a knee on the table edge. “Elizabeth!”