If at sunrise, for whatever reason, you happened to find yourself inside instead of outside the terminal, you could see that amazing line of light blast through the middle of the three high arched windows. The sun would flood the floor and make the famous blue ceiling come alive in a wash of pale-purple light. In a place made of marble, limestone, steel, and brass, where almost everyone worked underground, dependent on electric light and attending the constant circuits of trains, Manhattanhenge was a reminder that there was power, order, and beauty in the natural world as well.
Ralston Young wasn’t usually particular about what he preached. He could rip a page from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue and find a message from God in it. But today, an hour after December’s Manhattanhenge sunrise, Ralston didn’t need to look for extra inspiration. Gratitude for the majesty of the Lord’s universe, that was what Ralston preached this morning. Gratitude for the way the planets circled the sun, for the way the ancients had built Stonehenge, and for the way William K. Vanderbilt had built Grand Central Terminal.
Joe would have loved to see Stonehenge. It was one of a hundred places he had sworn to himself he’d go someday—if the lousy Depression ever ended and he had the money or got the chance. But Manhattanhenge was pretty damn good itself, particularly when its special light was being praised by Ralston Young in the dimness of an unused train car. Today, Joe closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, to marvel at the glory of God’s handiwork. But he kept imagining Nora disappearing into the crowd—her copper hair, the spark in her green eyes, the licorice buttons on her dress—and all he could think was that he should have asked for her phone number before letting her get away.
Hastily, he stood up.
“You all right, Joseph?” Ralston asked him.
“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “Just late for my shift, that’s all.”
He checked his watch as he sprinted up the ramp to the concourse. In truth, he still had twenty minutes before he was due to start work, and he spent all but the last few of them standing by the gold clock, scanning the crowd for Nora, wishing that he had been the one who’d gotten to walk her home.
* * *
—
Joe Reynolds was a leverman, the youngest in Grand Central’s history. His job was to guide the incoming trains through their final miles under Park Avenue and into the terminal. With its two-level layout, Grand Central had forty-eight tracks that could be in use at any one time, and when things got really busy, a new train might roll in every twenty seconds.
Joe was assigned to Signal Tower A, not a tower at all, but the upper room of a narrow, two-story brick sweatbox that was situated under Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street, almost half a mile north of the Main Concourse. Joe’s responsibility was to push and pull the levers that, connected by underground cables, moved the tracks from side to side just in time to line up before the trains reached them. In Tower A alone, there were more than three hundred levers, each one numbered, together making up a vast chest-high console that the men called the Piano. The handles were made of brass, and the spots where they’d been gripped so often gleamed like the Red Caps’ jacket buttons. There were five signal towers for Grand Central, three men to a Piano, forty or fifty levers to a man, and above each man a panel showing the dozens of tracks converging.
There was not much in a tower room except light and noise and men. There was no idle conversation. There were no cigarettes, no food, no coffee—except at the desks where the tower directors manned the phones and called out the routes and the track changes. The room always smelled of metal and sweat.
It was bright, no matter the season or hour. God had separated the day from the night when he created the world, but when the engineer William J. Wilgus created the tower system, it was always day, and the lights ranged from twinkling to blinding. There were the tiny green emeralds that twinkled on the boards and showed the trains’ positions. There were the overheads, so strong that when anyone entered the room, he had to shield his eyes. And finally, there were the bursts of light that came from the trains rumbling past the tower windows. Every few minutes, a flash and a roar, as if the sun were rolling by. The whole thing had its own music, with the rhythms of lights and sounds, and the movements of the levermen, and the directors, setting the tempo from the desks and the phones. The heat from the lights was so intense that the men always worked with their sleeves rolled up, used the showers afterward, and kept a stack of fresh shirts in their lockers. It was exhausting work, but Joe had a knack for it. Like Steady Max Sullivan, who had started training Joe when he was barely twenty, he had mastered a perfect level of alertness, a suitable halfway point between caring too little and caring too much.
There were fail-safes in the system, but the goal was never to need them. Hanging on the wall, in a dusty black frame, was a now honey-colored New York Times article from 1913. With a thick black pencil, someone had long ago circled one paragraph as inspiration:
In a signal tower, every moment is an emergency, either actual or possible. “Why, I eat, drink, and breathe emergency in my work,” said one of the operators. “It’s funny, but you can’t surprise me with anything.”
3
IT IS YOU!
1938
It was a year later, and she saw him before he saw her. He was coming down the ramp that led to the restaurants on the lower level. He was wearing a short black coat and a plaid hat, tying a fuzzy red scarf around his neck. The last time, it had been morning by the information booth, and he’d been kind and gallant about that guy who’d called her “princess.” This time, it was just past six in the evening, and Nora was standing outside the Oyster Bar, the terminal’s oldest restaurant. She didn’t have to speak loudly. She said “Joe,” and he stopped cold.
His eyes widened, and he glanced from left to right, as if he were hoping to find a witness. “You again!” he exclaimed. “It is you!”
“Nora,” she said.
“I didn’t forget. Nora Lansing,” Joe said. “From Paris.”
“Joe Reynolds,” she said. “From right here.”
He smiled as he undid the scarf he’d just tied. He pulled off his cap and, with one large hand, swept the locks of black hair from his forehead. She had forgotten how kind his face was, in its slightly uneven way.
“Don’t tell me you never found someone to walk you home,” he said with a grin. “Have you been waiting for me all this time?”
Nora laughed, but waiting for Joe Reynolds was exactly what she’d been doing.
He was looking at her intently now. “Why are you—” he started to say, but apparently thought better of it. He gestured to the restaurant. “How was your dinner?” he asked instead. “Were you brave? Did you try the oyster stew?”
“No.”
“The pan roast?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t eaten.”
“You’re here all by yourself again?”
He looked confused and excited, but before he could ask another question, a middle-aged couple, obviously tipsy, emerged from the restaurant arm in arm. It wasn’t clear who was steadier.
“Can we, Jack?” the woman asked.
They were just feet from Joe and Nora, eyeing the famous Whispering Gallery, where people could stand on diagonal spots, backs to each other, yards apart, and—whispering into the corners—have their voices carry above them through the pale zigzags of the arched tile ceiling.
The man sighed so dramatically that he was either teasing or truly annoyed.
“Oh, come on, Jack,” the woman said.
“All right, Patsy, all right.”
Wobbling a little, they let go of each other and shuffled to their opposite corners.
Patsy kept looking back at Jack.
“Jack,” she said, but he didn’t turn around.
“Jack!” she barked.
“What?” he shouted back, turning.
“Remember!” she nearly yelled at him. “Whisper! Whisper!”
Joe’s and Nora’s eyes met in amusement.
“Have you ever done it?” he asked her.
“What? The Whispering Gallery? Of course not,” she said. “I’m no tourist. I grew up here. Have you ever done it?”
“Me? The people around here would never let me live it down.”
But even as Joe said this, he was ushering Nora into the corner that Patsy had just left.
Standing thirty feet apart, each of them leaned into a corner.
“Nora Lansing,” Joe whispered into the corner of the alcove. His voice was distant but clear. “Will you have dinner with me?”
“Joe Reynolds,” she whispered back. “Only if you’re buying.”
They turned to each other and smiled the way people do when they learn that they love the same song.
“That’s a deal, Patsy,” Joe said to her.
“Shake on it, Jack,” she answered.
Joe took her hand, then held it tighter, apparently not as startled by its heat this time as he’d been the year before.
“What is it about your hand?” he asked.
“What is it about your questions?”
* * *
—
At Alva’s Little Coffee Shop, a skinny, tall woman with close-set eyes greeted Joe with a lipsticky smack on the cheek, grabbed a couple of menus, and used them to swat Joe on his backside. She led them to a red leather booth, leaned against its coat-hook post, and gave Nora a long look up and down.
“So, who’ve we got here?” she asked Joe, her eyes not leaving Nora’s.
Nora tucked her hair behind her ears, hoping she didn’t look too disheveled.
“Alva, Nora,” Joe said. “Nora, Alva. Alva, haven’t you got some coffee to brew? Or someone else to torture?”
“I’ll give you a minute,” Alva said. She put the menus on the table and used her thumb to smudge off the lipstick her kiss had left on Joe’s cheek.
“Well, she seems to know you pretty well,” Nora said.
Joe shrugged. “Everyone who works here knows everyone.”
He took off his coat and put it beside him.
“Now I’ve got ask,” he said. “Don’t you ever wear a coat? It was snowing today. And is that your only dress?”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for someone who was interested in women’s fashion,” she said.
“What, with me wearing fancy clothes like these?” Joe asked. He tugged at the collar of his blue twill shirt, then leaned forward confidentially and touched a smudged part of Nora’s sleeve. “Honestly, though. Are you down on your luck?”
Just about everyone Nora had ever known had treated her—either with deference or disdain—like the rich girl she’d grown up being. She looked at Joe with wonder.
“Are you?” he asked again quietly.
She was so moved that she almost couldn’t find an answer. Finally, she said: “This is just my traveling dress.”
“And where are you traveling from this time?” Joe asked her. “Let me guess. China? Peru? New Jersey?”
“Closer to Jersey, I guess,” she said.
“As in where?”
“As in it’s not important.”
“Oh, a woman of mystery,” Joe said.
She didn’t want to be that. She wanted to tell him everything—everything starting with Paris and going all the way through till this evening. There was something so straight and solid about him that it made her certain he’d understand. But she didn’t want to scare him away. Perhaps if he could just walk her home, though, things would be all right.
“What’s good here?” she asked him instead.
“Everything except the coffee,” Joe said. “What do you like?”
“I like coffee,” she said, smiling. “And I like grilled cheese.”
“Also, a woman who knows what she wants.”
“It’s absolutely my favorite,” Nora said. “In Paris, they make them with ham and mustard, and they call them croques-monsieurs. If you get them with an egg on top, they call them croques-madames. I don’t know why.”
“Because women are more complicated than men,” Joe said.
Nora laughed, delighted. “Joe!”
He shook his head at her, smiling.
“What?”
“No, nothing,” Joe said.
“What?”
“It’s just the way you laughed.”
“Do you like it or hate it? My mother hates it. She used to say it isn’t ladylike.”
“It isn’t, Nora,” Joe said. “It’s swell.”
She liked how he said her name. It was just her name, but it had been a long time since she’d heard it.
They were still smiling at each other when Alva came back. “What’s it going to be, lovebirds?”
Joe ordered a grilled cheese for Nora and a plate of silver-dollar pancakes for himself.
“Coffee too, please,” Nora said.
“You’ll regret it, believe me,” said Joe, and this time Alva swatted him on the head.
“Apart from the grilled cheese,” he asked Nora when Alva had gone, “what did you like about Paris?”
A dozen images came to her in succession, as if she were flipping through the pages of one of her sketchpads. The tallest spire of Notre-Dame, which looked like a compass arrow. The attic flat she and her friend Margaret had shared, with its copper-framed skylight and sloping floors. The cafés where the waiters wore black vests and crisp white aprons and where she’d sat outside drinking café au lait and drawing the passersby.
“Everything,” Nora said. “I loved every single thing about it. But I think what I loved most was that I got to be on my own. You know, I had a job and a paycheck and a flat, and I guess I just liked feeling like a grown-up.”
“A grown-up.”
“Yes,” Nora said. “Do you know what I mean?”
Joe cleared his throat. “Everyone I know grew up the day the stock market crashed,” he said. For a moment, he looked puzzled. “There’s something different about you,” he said.
“No, there’s something different about you.”
“About me?” Joe said. “What’s that?”
“That you know there’s something different about me.”
4
HERE WE GO
1938
Joe kept trying to fix his gaze on Nora’s forehead, her shoulders, the table, his own hands, but his eyes kept drifting stubbornly to hers. He told himself to concentrate harder on what she was saying.
“What were you doing in Paris?” he asked.
“Well, I went after I graduated.”
“From college?”
Nora nodded.
“So, did you see the Eiffel Tower? The Mona Lisa?”
“Of course.”
“And take one of those boat rides on the river?”
“The Seine.”
“Right,” Joe said. “And Notre-Dame?”
“I did all that,” Nora said. “I didn’t mind being a tourist there. But I also worked for an art gallery. And I did a lot of painting.”
“You were a painter in Paris?”
“Well, on my best days I was.”
“I’ve never met a painter,” Joe said, trying to make it sound as if that was the most exciting thing about her.
Now his eyes were on Nora’s lips, the same stoplight red he remembered from the year before.
“Have you ever been to Paris?” she asked him.
“I’ve never been to Turtle Bay Gardens.”
She laughed—that deep, unexpected laugh.
Alva brought their food, along with a smirk, and filled two coffee cups. Nora took a paper napkin and placed it elegantly on her lap. Turtle Bay manners, Joe thoug
ht. She traced a graceful forefinger around the thick rounded rim of the diner plate, looking at her sandwich expectantly but not yet picking it up.
She asked Joe where he’d grown up.
“Sunnyside,” he said.
“Like the eggs?”
“Like the eggs.”
“Where’s Sunnyside?” she asked.
With his thumb, he slid back the chrome bar on the syrup jar top and spilled a figure eight over his plate of bite-sized pancakes.
“Sunnyside is in Queens,” he said.
“Queens?”
“Queens is a borough in New York City, Nora.”
“I’m well aware of that, Joe,” she said.
She sipped her coffee and grimaced.
“I told you it was terrible,” Joe said.
“Have you eaten here a lot?” Nora asked.
“Only about a thousand times.”
For a while, they sat in silence, at last allowing their eyes to meet. Then Joe used his fork to spear several of the pancakes and took an enormous first bite.
“Eat up,” he told Nora. “It’ll help the coffee go down.”
She held her sandwich up, as if it were a sacrament. She took a bite. “Heaven,” she said. Her eyes seemed to fill with light.
* * *
—
It was nearly nine o’clock by the time Alva cleared their plates away, asked if they wanted more coffee, and cursed mildly when they both said no too quickly and then laughed.
Nora asked Joe what he did at the station.
He told her he was a leverman.
“I’ve never met a leverman.”
Time After Time Page 2
