He smiled.
“But what is that?” she asked him.
“I work in a signal tower at the levers that make the train tracks move.”
“So, you’re like an engineer,” she said.
“No,” he said, still smiling. “I’m like a leverman.”
“Sorry,” Nora said. “I guess I don’t know much about trains. What does a leverman do?”
“Really want to know?” he asked.
She nodded.
Joe stood up, took a bunch of cutlery from the counter, and, back at their booth, laid two knives side by side.
“Train tracks, right?” Nora asked him.
“And you thought you didn’t know much about trains.”
Then he used a fork and a spoon and a few other knives to show her the basics of how a lever could make a straight track branch off into a diverging track.
“And you work the fork,” she said.
“Right. Except at Grand Central, every leverman is in charge of about fifty forks at a time.”
He couldn’t help feeling proud when he saw Nora’s look of admiration, but it was past nine o’clock now, and Alva was hovering. He looked at the check and put some bills on the table, then hesitated.
“What is it?” Nora asked.
“Your number,” he said. “Can I have your number?”
“My phone number?”
“I’ve got to see you again. Can I call you tomorrow?”
She looked suddenly doubtful. “You can try,” she told him.
Joe fished in the pockets of his coat and found a short yellow pencil and the stub of a movie ticket.
“What do you mean, I can try?”
Nora took the pencil and the ticket stub. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s hard to get through.”
“Too many Romeos on the line?”
“I’d explain it to you if I thought you’d understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I understand?” Joe asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She wrote down her number. “Thank you so much for dinner.”
She handed back the ticket, which, with her number on it now, immediately seemed like a ticket for something new. He put it in his coat pocket and, standing close beside her, remembered the gentle wood-and-whiskey bite of her perfume. They started walking toward the Main Concourse and the exit on Forty-second Street.
“What are we going to do about a coat for you?” he asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I never get cold.”
“Here we go,” he said gruffly. “Take my coat.” He draped it over Nora’s shoulders.
“Oh, Joe,” she said, her face close to his, as if she were telling a secret.
He smiled at her. “But you can’t have my hat or scarf.”
“Bossy,” she said, but she turned around and slipped her arms into the sleeves. The stiff wool collar brushed her left cheek. She inhaled. “It smells so good,” she said. “Like fresh laundry! Has anyone ever told you that you smell like fresh laundry?”
“Oh, sure,” Joe said. “All the time.”
She laughed again, he realized he was in love, and then they walked up the stairs.
* * *
—
Joe’s coat fell all the way past Nora’s knees, leaving just a few inches of her blue dress showing. She leaned forward, her face nearly touching his neck this time, and thanked him, her hand on his shoulder. All the day’s exhaustion faded. It might just as well have been morning. He opened the door, but now it was her turn to hesitate.
“Come on,” Joe said. “Let’s get you home safe and sound.”
Together they walked east on Forty-second Street, passing the stately Commodore Hotel; the streetlamps, curved like shepherd’s crooks; and the cabstand, where drivers were sleeping. Two streetcars rattled past each other like tired old men.
When Joe and Nora turned north onto Lexington Avenue, the wind hit them hard.
“You must be freezing,” she said.
“I’m not.”
She stopped walking and turned to face him.
“What is it?” he asked.
Wordlessly, she reached up to tug the brim of his cap down, then took hold of his scarf and wrapped it twice around his neck.
“There, Joe Reynolds,” she said to him tenderly. “Maybe that’ll help.”
They passed a dress shop and a cigar store, both closed up tight for the night. The traffic was thin. At this hour, there were usually only a few cars heading north to the Harlem nightclubs and a few horse-drawn carts heading south to the markets and warehouses.
“Do you always work this late?” Nora asked.
“Well, all the shifts are eight hours, but the BRT made it so we take turns on the late ones. That’s the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.” Joe pointed to the red tin union pin on the lapel of his coat. “Been a member for twelve years,” he said. Then he felt embarrassed for talking so much about himself.
“You’re kind of a pip, you know,” he said.
“A pip?”
He wondered if she was nervous to be out so late, even with him walking beside her. The streets were plenty menacing, as they’d been throughout the Depression. Just a few blocks from the terminal, two men were picking through a garbage can. Half a block down, a streetwalker was trying but failing to look proper. Somebody somewhere shouted, “Don’t think I won’t!” Next came the sound of glass breaking.
Nora stopped again. “Wait, Joe,” she said. “I’m not sure I’m ready—”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
They had just crossed the street at Lexington and Forty-sixth when a young guy stumbled out of a doorway. At first Joe thought he was just a drunk, but the kid planted his feet firmly, waved his arms, and shouted, “Stop!”
By instinct—protective and swift—Joe stepped in front of Nora.
“I want your watch,” the kid said.
“Yeah?” Joe said. “My watch is a piece of junk. But I want it too.”
The guy smirked as if they were in a poker game and he had a fistful of aces, but he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Out came his switchblade, the steel catching the light and gleaming like an icicle. Joe’s brother, Finn, was a cop, and even as kids, they had taught each other how to fight. Now, almost as if he were playing in the backyard in Queens, Joe hit the kid’s wrist, and the knife fell easily from his hand. Joe kicked the knife to the gutter. When he looked up again, the kid looked scared.
“Get lost!” Joe shouted, then chased him for half a block. “Beat it!” he called after him.
It had all taken less than a minute.
Slightly winded, slightly proud, Joe watched until the guy was out of sight, and then he turned to go back to Nora. But Nora was gone.
The cold air whipped Joe’s hair and made his shirt flap against his back. He looked in every direction, scanning the buildings and their empty shadows. He felt his throat tighten, but he called her name. Then he called it louder. Had someone gotten hold of her? Had she just run away?
“Nora!” he shouted. “Nora!”
Joe started back to the corner where the kid had come out of the doorway. He crossed Forty-sixth Street again, and then he saw it: his coat, lying on the sidewalk. He threw it on and started to run, but somehow, he was colder now than he’d been before.
5
GOT SOMETHING
GOOD?
1938
No place could have been more convenient or better suited to Joe’s life than the YMCA on East Forty-seventh Street. Just a short walk from the terminal, it was named the Railroad Branch because it had been built by the Vanderbilts as a home base for trainmen and engineers. The rooms upstairs were small and bare, but the common areas downstairs were lavish, decked out in the ornate Vanderbilt acorns and oak
leaves, furnished in leather, paneled in wood.
Coming in chilled and unsettled by his search for Nora, Joe nodded hello to the half-dozen guys who were still awake in the club room, but he walked past them to the phone booth in back. Exhausted, he sat on the small wood seat, staring at the phone’s dial, with its white petal tabs for the tiny red letters and black numbers. Then he picked up the receiver, took out the ticket stub, and dialed Nora’s number. When a man answered, Joe thought maybe Nora had given him a wrong number on purpose.
He leaned forward to speak into the phone’s bell-shaped mouthpiece. “Can I talk to Nora Lansing?” he asked.
“Oh, God.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve been wondering if I’d get another call,” the man said.
“I’m looking for Nora Lansing,” Joe said.
“I know.”
“Are you her father?”
“No.”
“Is she there?” Joe asked.
“No.”
“When do you expect her?”
“I don’t expect her. Not much, anyway. She doesn’t live here,” the man said.
“What do you mean, ‘Not much’? She gave me this number.”
“Right.”
“Turtle Bay?”
“Right.”
Joe took a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you tell me where I can find her?”
The man gave Joe his address and told him to come the next day after work.
“I don’t understand,” Joe said. “Can’t you just tell me now?”
“I’m going to have to explain this in person,” the man said.
“Why?” Joe asked.
“Because you’re going to want a drink.”
* * *
—
Joe couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t remember another night when his room had felt so empty. He kept imagining all the things that might have happened to Nora, kept trying to figure out what the man on the phone had meant.
At two A.M., he heard his neighbor Mitchell rattle and roar in from work.
“Joseph Damian Reynolds!” Mitchell shouted, gleefully drumming on Joe’s door as he passed. Mitchell was a leverman who rarely ended a night shift without some kind of celebration. Joe chose to ignore him. The aroma of his cigar smoke lingered after the sound of his footsteps faded, but Joe imagined he could still smell Nora’s perfume as well. Involuntarily, he played and replayed the scenes in his head. The Whispering Gallery. The red leather booth. The look on her face when she ate the grilled cheese. And then the kid with the knife.
At five o’clock, Joe got out of bed and glanced once more at the ticket stub, the only proof that any of what he remembered had actually happened. He dozed, but at seven he gave up trying to sleep. Though today’s shift didn’t start until ten, he had showered and left the Y by eight. He arrived at the terminal just in time for the crest of the morning rush hour, when commuters swarmed up from the platforms in sevens and eights instead of twos and threes.
Roughly three thousand people worked at Grand Central, and like most of them, Joe had long since stopped noticing the countless visitors who moved through it. To be more precise, he did notice them, but rarely as individuals. Instead, they belonged to a system: a swarm of bees, say, or a school of fish.
Grand Central Terminal was the destination, departure point for half a million travelers a day. For the thousands of people who worked there, though, it was really more like a hometown: beige, pink, and amber; cool in summer and warm in winter. Grand Central had a town square, which was the Main Concourse, and it had a main street, which was the lower concourse—also called the lower level, the commuter level, the dining concourse—with its coffee shops and restaurants, barbershop, bank, and shoeshine stands.
Grand Central had an art gallery and a newsreel theater, where Joe routinely went on breaks to learn about the wider world, the world he had never yet had the chance or the money to see for himself. The terminal had town tramps and town drunks, a drugstore and a bakery, a doctor’s office, a police force, and even a small morgue. When Joe walked through the terminal in the mornings, he imagined it was the way his father had once strolled past the neighbors on his way to work in Queens. So Joe would nod his good mornings—to Patsy, at the florist, or to Jim, at the drugstore. “You need a haircut!” Charlotte might shout from the barbershop. “So do you!” he might shout back.
But this morning was different. Joe felt as if, for once, he was the rube—wide-eyed, gawking—as he stood in the concourse, scanning the ever-moving crowd, marveling at the variety of human beings, at the hope and dismay he felt in his unaccustomed search for just one person. He stayed for a long time, looking for Nora, and finally, a bit reluctantly, he went to buy his breakfast.
Big Sal, giving a customer change at Bond’s Bakery, gestured for Joe to come over.
“Got something good?” he asked her, eyeing the rows of Danish and muffins that she always lined up with military precision.
“No, but I hear you did.”
“Oh, Sal,” he said. “Who’s been telling you lies today?”
“Oh, Joseph,” she said, and she winked at him. She was old, and her eyelids drooped, so at times her wink looked more like a tic.
“All right, Sal. What’d you hear?” he asked.
“You know what I heard. Quite a bombshell, this girl was, Mr. Movie Star. Alva said you couldn’t take your eyes off her.”
Joe sighed for effect, but the ribbing didn’t really bother him. Sal was one of the old-timers who basically felt they’d watched him grow up.
“I was a perfect gentleman,” Joe told Sally.
“No one is perfect, Joseph, except our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Black coffee and a cheese Danish, Sal.”
“Come on, what’s the story?” Sal asked.
“You want a story? Go buy yourself a magazine.”
* * *
—
He used his breakfast as an excuse to return to the Main Concourse, where he leaned against the marble stairs, slowly eating his Danish and, once more, searching the crowd. Above him was the famous vaulted ceiling, an indoor heaven with a shining frame and 2,500 stars that twinkled against an improbable blue-green sky.
Years before, the clock master, Jacob, had told Joe that the mural had been painted all wrong—with the constellations backward and from different parts of the sky. The Vanderbilts claimed this was not a mistake, that the mural had been intended to show how God saw the stars from heaven. According to Jake, the painters had just screwed up.
The reason didn’t matter to Joe, who loved the ceiling the way it was—no matter if the color of the sky was even less realistic than its stars. Joe had memorized the names of its constellations: Leo, Orion, and all the rest, which stayed fixed in their places, predictable as the stations on a train line’s route. If one of those stars had suddenly whirled off as a comet and crashed down from the ceiling, it would have been every bit as startling to Joe as meeting and losing Nora had been.
* * *
—
The locker rooms in the signal towers shook as the trains came in, but the shower stalls were clean, with oatmeal soap that felt like sandpaper and could scrape off a good work sweat. After his shift, Joe braced himself against the tiled wall as if he were trying to push it away. He let the water scald the back of his neck, his shoulders, his scalp. Staring into the steamed-up mirror over the sink, he waited until he could see his face. His eyes looked gray and questioning.
Snow had been falling all afternoon, and the winter sky was almost purple when Joe left the station at five. The snow had outlined the building’s edges. High atop the entrance, the huge Mercury statue’s outstretched hand looked as if it were armed with a giant snowball.
Joe made a second knot in his scarf, pulled the brim of his cap down, and ra
ced off toward Turtle Bay.
* * *
—
Number 229 East Forty-eighth Street stood in the elegant row of Turtle Bay townhouses whose brass numbers and large door knockers gleamed in the dusk. The entrance was down a half flight of stairs, and Joe nearly slipped on the ice-slicked steps. He rang the doorbell and waited. The wind had picked up, and his cheeks were numb. He rang the bell again and was about to try the knocker when he heard an inside door open and close. A moment later, a heavyset man in a striped shirt, high-waisted tweed pants, and round black glasses opened the door.
“Arthur Fox,” the man said, extending his hand. “Call me Artie.”
“Joe Reynolds,” Joe said. “Joe.”
They shook hands.
“So, what wouldn’t you tell me on the phone?” Joe asked. His eyes were tearing from the cold. A blast of wind lifted Artie’s tie.
“Come in,” Artie said. He put his hands on Joe’s shoulders and steered him inside. The entranceway was warm and smelled of steam heat. It was dim, and Joe could just make out flowery wallpaper and a pair of gold wall lamps with flame-shaped bulbs that reminded him of Nora’s earrings.
Artie’s living room didn’t look like Artie. He seemed tough and wise-guy sure, but the chairs were covered in silk or something shiny, and the heavy curtains, tied back with fringed ropes, looked like tall women in fancy robes.
Artie sat down in a deep-blue armchair but leaned forward enthusiastically. He gestured for Joe to sit too, but Joe kept standing.
“You met her in Grand Central, right?” Artie asked.
“How’d you know?”
“And she was wearing, what, no coat? Just a dress?”
Joe nodded.
“And she wanted to go home?”
Joe nodded again.
Artie offered an exaggerated shudder. “Sit down,” he said, and now Joe did.
Artie reached over to a curved marble side table and flung open a polished wooden box. He took out a cigar, then rolled it appraisingly over his thumb.
Time After Time Page 3
