The kitchen in those days had been a warm but dark place, with cabinets made of sturdy wood, a black-and-white-checked linoleum floor, and a stained flowered skirt hiding the legs and pipes of the kitchen sink. Even in summer the kitchen had smelled of their mother’s stews and soups: the constant, comforting aroma of boiled potatoes and slightly burned meat.
It had been sixteen years since their mother, Katherine, had died, and the kitchen was now presided over by Finn’s wife, Faye, a neighborhood girl with hazel eyes and dark brown hair who knew how to flirt and fight. In her constant battle to wipe out the losses and sadness of the past, Faye’s chief weapon was color. She dressed in the liveliest shades she could find, and she had brightened things up around the house. The scratched white porcelain table had long since been replaced by a round wooden one with Kelly-green trim; the cabinet doors had been painted yellow; and the treasured prints and maps of old Ireland that had lined the walls above them had been hidden by colorful bowls, pitchers, and vases. But the kitchen was still the kitchen, and on this Christmas Eve, Joe walked in with the intention of telling Finn about Nora.
First, though, Joe had to laugh. Finn was on his hands and knees, gathering up stray cranberries that his and Faye’s kids—Mike and Alice—had no doubt dropped while stringing garlands for the tree.
“Quit that cackling,” Finn said. “Faye’s going to kill these kids for making this mess. Or me, if I don’t clean it up before she sees it. Come on. What are you waiting for?”
Joe took a heavy striped bowl from the table and joined Finn on the floor, collecting the cranberries while trying to decide exactly how to start the conversation.
So, listen, Finny. I met this girl….
“Don’t forget under the stove,” Finn said.
“If I find any money, can I keep it?” Joe asked.
“If you find any money, it’ll be a fucking miracle.”
They were just standing up when Faye swung the kitchen door open—only enough for her voice to enter.
“Your pa wants his Old Crow,” she said, and the door swung shut again.
Joe reached up for the bottle of bourbon, which was strategically kept on a high shelf, beyond the reach of their father, Damian, who had been in a wheelchair since the Great War.
Say, Finn. You ever had something happen to you that you couldn’t explain?
Finn grabbed an ice tray from the freezer and cranked back the metal handle, popping up the cubes. Joe took down three of the good glasses, and Finn dropped in the ice. Then Joe poured two fingers of bourbon into the first glass and added a splash of water.
“Thin it down more,” Finn said.
“It already looks like ginger ale.”
“He won’t notice. I don’t want him tight. Did I tell you he pinched Faye’s fanny last week?”
“Bet she loved that.”
“Yeah. It’d be hard to say how much.”
Finn poured a shot for himself and one for Joe.
“Happy Christmas,” Joe said.
“Mud in your eye,” Finn said.
“Dirt in your nails.”
The brothers clinked glasses and drank.
I met this amazing girl, Finn, but there’s one little problem….
The swinging door flapped open again, and this time Faye stepped in. She was dressed for Christmas Eve mass in a smart striped dress, her hair tucked up into a bright green wool hat with a slightly droopy satin bow.
“Kids are ready now,” she said. She squeezed Joe’s shoulders from behind, kissed the side of his neck, snatched the glass from his hand, took a sip of his drink, and put the glass down. “Merry Christmas, Joey,” she said, and swung back out.
Joe followed her into the living room and handed Damian his drink.
“Happy Christmas, Pa,” Joe said.
“Mud in your eye,” said Damian.
* * *
—
At home and at the VFW, Damian always used his wheelchair, but at church—and especially for Christmas Eve mass—he didn’t want so many people to see him being rolled in by his sons. So there were elaborate, unspoken rules about which cane to bring, which son to lean on, and which entrance to use. Wounded in France in 1918, Damian lacked his left leg from the knee down and all but two of the fingers on his left hand.
Mike and Alice were endlessly fascinated by the missing parts of their grandfather and often asked him to hike up his pant leg so they could see his false limb. Alice was only six, but Mike, at eleven, was almost tall enough for Damian to lean on now. Still, Faye followed the usual protocol and ushered the children in front of the men, zeroing in on a pew near the front.
Joe went to church now only on the big holidays, or on a Sunday if for some reason Finn or Faye couldn’t take Damian. Joe still remembered the rules, though, and the rules said that when you died, you went to heaven, hell, or purgatory, not to Grand Central Terminal. The rules said there were no such things as ghosts. Occasionally, you might cross paths with a soul in purgatory, someone God had made visible for the purpose of teaching a lesson or inspiring a prayer. But even if you happened to see such a soul, she would not, Joe clearly understood, be someone who stopped to chat, eat a grilled cheese sandwich, and leave your winter coat lying like a tar stain on Lexington Avenue.
Joe looked to his left, at the rows of earnest worshippers, their round, red, interchangeable faces lined up like apples in a fruit stand. Before them, flanked by choirboys in wide white collars, Father Gregory presided in his white-and-gold robe. He had shrunk quite a bit over the years since Joe and Finn’s childhood, a fact that gave Joe continual, secret delight. The priest’s hair and beard were yellow-white now, and his face was so colorless that he could have passed for a barely living version of one of the stone saints carved over the entrance to the church.
For the hundredth time, and without exactly wanting to, Joe thought about Nora’s eyes, laugh, hair, hands—even the way she had said “Oh, Joe” and made it sound like a secret. He knew it was sacrilegious, but it hit him, as the mass droned on, that what he was feeling for Nora wasn’t all that different from what the people around him were feeling. He was simply—if not as confidently—believing in the wrong miracle and hoping for the wrong person’s return.
Joe knew dozens of girls at the terminal; he’d had sex for the first time back in his teens with one of the Century Girls, the secretaries on the 20th Century Limited who were usually as elegant and sleek as their train. Since then, he’d known all sorts of others. In Queens, as in the terminal, he was everyone’s favorite bachelor catch. Finn had set him up with the sisters of half the cops in the precinct. Faye had made him meet the girls who’d gone to school with her. He had dated the pretty ones and gone to bed with some of the willing ones. He’d learned what they wanted and what they feared; what they were willing to take and willing to give. Not one of them had made him feel what Nora had—this dynamic, electric thrill: a hint that not only he, but the whole exhausted world, might jump up and dance, and want to look its best.
Thinking about this, Joe only half heard what the priest was saying. Meanwhile, little Alice, wearing brown leather lace-up shoes that looked too small, was kicking her legs back and forth. Mike pretended his foot was in the way. Alice kicked Mike. Mike kicked Alice. Faye managed, impressively, to grab each of them by an ear.
The priest continued mercilessly, extolling the coming of God’s son and the mystery of his sacrifice. But for Joe it was the same way it had been in Ralston’s prayer meeting the morning he’d first met Nora. All he could think about was the mystery of her, and about what Finn would say if Joe got up the nerve to tell him what had happened.
* * *
—
Back at home, Finn helped Damian up the stairs while Faye put the kids to bed. Joe waited alone in the living room. The tree, trimmed with old ornaments and the kids’ strands of cranberries, loo
ked just like the trees of Joe’s childhood. He stood up to straighten the straw angel at the top. The smell of pine engulfed him, and he closed his eyes, finding his mother, his father, his brother, his younger self; the joy of an unopened present; the hopes of a Christmas morning.
The sound of Finn and Faye’s laughter broke the moment, and Joe turned to see them coming down the stairs, Finn chasing Faye. As they reached the living room, he grabbed her around the waist and kissed her shoulder.
“Quit your fooling,” she said. “There’s work to be done.”
Finn sighed but smiled as Faye went to the kitchen, and he moved the good crystal candlesticks from the center of the dining room table.
“Grab those scissors from the shelf, Joe,” he said. “Where’s the paper?”
Every Christmas since the Crash, Joe had talked Big Sal into giving him sheets of the bakery’s brown waxed paper to use for wrapping the presents. He took it now from his canvas satchel and laid it out on the table. “Sal was stingy this year,” he told Finn.
“Aw, we’ll make it. We’ve always got newspaper if we run out.”
Do you believe in an afterlife, Finny?
Can you promise not to make fun of me?
Faye emerged from the kitchen with a meager assortment of toys and clothes and two small balls of thick yarn. She put the gifts on the table and sighed. “Well, boys, it isn’t much, but it’ll have to do,” she said. “I’ve got to hit the hay now. Those two urchins are going to be up at dawn to see what Santa brought.”
She kissed Joe good night on the lips, a flirty habit she enjoyed more than he did but that came from years of teasing Finn that she’d married the wrong brother. From the top of the stairs, she called down, “Don’t forget—red yarn for Alice, green for Mike.”
Joe laid out a sheet of waxed paper, and Finn took a pair of gloves from the pile of gifts Faye had left them.
“I’m guessing these are for you,” Finn said. Joe laughed, opened the tin of Scotch tape, and scratched at the roll to find the edge. Finn did the wrapping and Joe did the taping, and they worked for a while without talking.
Hey, Finn, want to hear something funny?
But it was Finn who broke the silence. “Faye says she’s got someone new for you.”
“Faye always says that around this time of year.”
“She says she’s got a really great feeling about this one.”
“She always says that too,” Joe said.
“The girl’s named Emma. Ella. Emma. One of those,” Finn said. He shut his eyes, trying to remember, then counted off the items on his fingers, reciting. “Twenty-five. Irish. Catholic. Lives in Woodside—”
“Gee,” Joe said. “An Irish Catholic girl from Queens. What were the odds?”
Smiling, Finn held up a small red steel box and shook it, rattling its contents.
“Did Pa actually pick that out?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, can you believe it? He made me take him to Puck’s.”
The Erector sets, in their tin boxes, were a Damian tradition dating back to Joe and Finn’s childhood, when Katherine had also managed to knit each of them a new scarf every Christmas.
“Just one this year?” Joe asked.
“Had to be. He didn’t want them to have to share, but I told him if we bought two, then we’d have to give up the Christmas ham.”
“They’ll understand,” Joe said.
Finn nodded, then asked, “How can you be sure?”
“That they’ll understand?”
“That Faye’s friend might not turn out to be the one.”
“I can’t be,” Joe said. “But I think I may have met the one.”
“At the terminal?” Finn asked.
Joe nodded.
“Gee,” Finn said. “Another Century Girl. What were the odds?”
“Not this time,” Joe told Finn.
“Let me ask you this,” Finn said, laughing. “Do you date them because they’ve gone all the way to Chicago or because they’ll go all the way with you?”
“Do you know how many times you’ve used that line?”
“Do you know how many Century Girls you’ve dated?”
“This is different,” Joe said softly. “Really different.”
“Okay, so, who is she?” Finn asked.
Joe was silent, taping the present that Finn had just wrapped.
“Who is she?” Finn asked again.
“Look,” Joe said, putting down the tape roll. “I’ve got to tell you something about her, Finny, and there’s no one else I can tell.”
“About this one you met?”
Joe nodded.
“What, is she married?” Finn asked.
“No. But Finny, this is a No-Matter-What.”
It was something they’d had since childhood: A No-Matter-What was not just a secret, but the understanding that went with it—that some things would always transcend any fight, any bribe, any girl, any moment. A No-Matter-What was a secret sealed by the struggles and joys of their shared childhood.
“Give,” Finn said.
So Joe told Finn about Nora: not just about how and when he had met her, or how she had looked or made him feel, but also about the way she’d disappeared, and how he’d gone to her house, and how Artie had told him that she had died in the subway accident.
“In ’twenty-five?” Finn asked.
Joe nodded.
“You were there for that,” Finn said.
“I know.”
Then Joe whispered, “Do you believe that people can come back from the dead?”
Joe could see Finn fighting the urge to laugh.
“A No-Matter-What, Finny,” Joe repeated.
“All right,” Finn said. He looked down at the pile of gifts again. He picked up one of Alice’s presents: a doll from the coming World’s Fair, decked out in New York orange and blue. “You mean do I believe in ghosts?” he asked, holding the doll in one hand as Joe smoothed out another piece of brown paper.
“Yes,” Joe said, still whispering. “Do you?”
“Well, Pa would probably say she’s a fairy. You know, the fairies, they can make themselves look any way they want, and he says no one can ever resist them.”
“So, you believe in fairies,” Joe said, and Finn laughed.
Finn placed the doll faceup and laid the wrapping paper over her, a move that suddenly struck Joe as creepy.
“This girl,” Finn said. “She was probably just some floozy trying to pick you up.”
“This was no floozy, Finn. And her earrings had real pearls in them.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re a jeweler all of a sudden?”
“Finny, they were real. And she grew up in Turtle Bay Gardens.”
“And that proves she wasn’t scamming you?”
“For what?” Joe asked. “What was the scam?”
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
Joe took a breath. “Finny,” he said. “Did you ever see something you couldn’t explain?”
“You mean aside from your—”
“Don’t,” Joe said, heading off the inevitable insult: Joe’s fat head, his ugly mug, his tiny dick, whatever.
Finn recognized Joe’s tone of voice. He peered into his younger brother’s eyes and seemed to see both Joe’s worry and his hope.
Finn sat in the desk chair now, and Joe leaned against the sofa.
“There’s a guy at the precinct,” Finn said. “He was on a case in Staten Island once. Some mob runner got bumped, and there was supposed to be cash in the guy’s house. So, Frankie—that’s my guy—he and his partner go to check out the place. It’s late. They’re tired. But they’re sober, right? Frankie says he’s looking through the upstairs bedroom, and he sees this thing, this shadow, walk right across in front of him. Frankie can t
ell it’s a fireman, because he can see the shape of the guy’s hat.”
“Was there a fire?” Joe asked.
Finn shook his head. “No fire,” he said. “So, a few minutes later, he feels a hand on his back. He turns around. No one there. Scares him down to his boots, but he decides not to say anything about it. Doesn’t want the other cop to think he’s cracked. They keep looking for the dough, but nothing turns up, and it’s not till they’re back in the squad car that Frankie’s partner says, ‘Did you see that fireman?’ ”
Joe said nothing.
Finn stood up. “No lie,” he said, then wordlessly went to the kitchen and returned with the bottle of bourbon and glasses. As he had hours before, Finn poured two shots, and the brothers drank.
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “Think of the mass we just went to. Wasn’t it all about miracles?”
“Sure,” Joe said. “But this?”
Finn leaned forward, big-brother protective.
“Were you scared when you were with her?” he asked Joe softly.
“Not even a little,” Joe said, and as he said it, he realized both how odd and how thrilling that fact was.
8
NO MORE
STRANGE WOMEN
1938–1939
The week between Christmas and New Year’s was always a critical time at the terminal, with added trains, extra shifts, and double the number of travelers and lines at the markets and shops. In Tower A, as on most holidays, resentment was at its height because the levermen were denied the very leisure they were making possible for others. Joe, for his part, was relieved to have the distraction of the heavier workload, and he tried to summon Finn’s attitude about Nora and about what Artie had said. Maybe there were such things as ghosts. Maybe there weren’t. Maybe only God knew.
Time After Time Page 5
