Summary of the Lesson

Charley's claim

The story is narrated by Charley, an ordinary New Yorker of thirty-one. He begins by insisting on something no one believes: that Grand Central Station has a third level. Officially the great terminal has only two, and the presidents of the two railways that use it would deny a third exists. Yet Charley maintains that he not only saw it but walked upon it, even though his psychiatrist friend Sam has told him it is impossible and calls the whole thing a symptom.

Lost in the corridors

Charley recalls the evening it happened. Wanting to get home quickly to his wife Louisa, he entered Grand Central and, trying to find a shortcut, went down a stairway he thought he knew. The station is enormous, a bewildering web of tunnels, ramps and corridors that seem to keep growing, and people are always losing their way in it. Following one passage that kept sloping downward and branching, Charley found himself somewhere he did not recognise, in a corridor that grew smaller and older-looking as he went.

The world of 1894

He emerged at last onto a third level, and everything there belonged to the past. The room was smaller, lit by open gas flames rather than electric bulbs; there were brass spittoons, a hint of woodsmoke, and a small, old steam locomotive. The ticket clerk wore a green eyeshade and old-fashioned sleeve garters, and the people around him were dressed in the fashions of the 1890s, the men with beards, sideburns and fancy moustaches. Then Charley saw a newspaper, 'The World', and its date settled it: 11 June 1894. He had somehow reached a night in the summer of 1894.

The wish to buy tickets to Galesburg

Excited, Charley thought at once of Galesburg, Illinois, the quiet, tree-shaded town he loved, imagining it as it must have been in that gentle year, with big old frame houses and summer evenings that stretched lazily on before the two world wars had ever been dreamed of. He decided to buy two tickets there, for himself and Louisa. But when he offered his modern money at the window, the clerk refused it; the old-style currency was quite different, and the clerk even suspected him of trying to cheat. Charley hurried away, afraid of being arrested.

Sam's diagnosis

The next day Charley changed some of his ordinary dollars into old-fashioned bills - accepting a poor exchange rate in the process - so that he could try again, but he was never able to find the third level a second time, however hard he searched. His wife grew worried, and so did his psychiatrist friend Sam Weiner, who diagnosed the experience as a waking-dream wish fulfilment. Sam explained that Charley, like many people, was unhappy and insecure in the modern world, full of war, fear and stress, and that his mind had invented the third level as a means of escape into a safer past. The other friends agreed with Sam.

The twist