Nora died at 7:05 on the morning of December 5 on the marble floor of Grand Central’s Main Concourse, frightened until the sunlight coursed in from the east windows and washed over the ceiling, seeming to turn it into a real sky. Then for a moment sunlight filled the room—colossal and shadowless—pushing into every gray corner and making Nora’s last sensation one of vibrant, reassuring warmth.
PART TWO
1
THE WORLD OF
TOMORROW
1939
The idea of hosting a World’s Fair in 1939 had come from a group of retired New York City policemen who wanted to rejuvenate a broken city. This was a fact that Finn never failed to point out whenever he felt like bragging about the decency of his colleagues. “See, Joey, we have foresight,” Finn would say. “Some call it wisdom. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we don’t work in tunnels all day long.”
There was no denying the boost the fair had given the city. There were endless news stories, ads, posters, and talk. The Dodgers wore World’s Fair patches on their sleeves, a new three-cent stamp had shown up, and a line of amber lights had been installed along Queens Boulevard, making the route to Flushing Meadows seem like a heavenly path. Practically everyone Joe and Finn had grown up with had helped build the fair, were working at it now, or were profiting from it one way or another. It was the pride not only of Queens but of all New York City. Even weeks before the fair officially opened, Grand Central had been filled with ever more visitors, accents, and confusion. From all over the country, families were coming to see “the World of Tomorrow,” trying to put the broken, barren decade behind them.
Opening day fell at the end of April, and Finn had wrangled tickets. Faye had called Joe at least three times to remind him where and when to meet. Joe was excited. He had teased Finn about how the Trylon and the Perisphere—the huge white cone and sphere that were on all the stamps and posters—looked like a giant golf ball and a huge, misshapen club. Yet when Joe started walking toward the actual structures in Flushing, he was awed by their size and brilliance.
Getting closer, he could see the familiar silhouettes of Faye, Finn, and the kids, along with Damian in his wheelchair, looking as if they’d been painted onto the big white globe. Then he noticed a sixth figure with them, a short, well-formed figure wearing a straw summer hat. So, this was it, Joe thought—the reason Faye had been nagging him: the fix-up he had resisted on Christmas Eve.
“Emma, this is Joe. Joe, this is Emma,” Faye said abruptly. “Have fun. We’re taking the kids to the rides. Bye.”
Joe didn’t have time to hug the kids hello or bend down to Damian’s chair before Finn shrugged helplessly and Faye whisked everyone away. Joe stood alone with Emma. She was a slightly round, lovely-looking girl who, refreshingly, seemed neither nervous nor shy—the two things he’d always liked least in the women Faye usually chose for him. “It’s good to meet you, Joe,” she said. She had a map, and they stood side by side for a while, studying it. Joe had heard that the fair was huge, but he’d had no idea how huge: He realized he was crowding Emma a little as he tried to make out all the buildings on the map labeled with names of foreign countries.
“What do you want to do first?” he asked her, hoping she wouldn’t pick an exhibit about New York or textiles or Wonder Bread.
She didn’t. “Let’s go to Italy,” she said decisively, and Joe was happy as they started the long walk down the Constitution Mall. France and Brazil were on their left, Belgium and Russia on their right. There was no country that Joe didn’t want to visit, but Italy did look impressive, with a statue of a woman in a purple toga sitting high atop the pavilion. At her feet, a two-hundred-foot waterfall roared down a flight of aqua steps.
Inside, Joe and Emma heard opera music and saw exhibits about history, art, and engineering. Upstairs were fancy restaurants that they knew would be too expensive.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful, though,” Emma said.
“What?”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go there someday?”
Joe thought about all the maps that years of teachers had pulled down like window shades over dozens of blackboards—shades that had opened the world up instead of shutting it out. Italy, shaped like a boot, had always been the easiest foreign country to identify, and Joe remembered that his fifth-grade teacher had said she had gone there once, and that hundreds of cats lived in the Colosseum.
“Yes,” was all he said to Emma. “It would be wonderful to go there.”
Once, when Joe was little—before the Great War, before Katherine’s death—he had gone with his father and Finn to a cabin owned by one of the old man’s buddies. Joe had been so excited about fishing or hiking or doing whatever you did in the country. But it had rained, the men had gotten drunk, and Joe and Finn had ended up playing gin rummy with an incomplete, slightly mildewed deck. That weekend might just as well have been spent at the corner bar, listening to the men reminisce about their bachelor days. As a grown-up, Joe had never taken a vacation. He would have loved to know what swimming was like, or how it felt to climb a mountain or take a train to another city. In the twenties, though, he had gone to school and helped take care of his father, and in the thirties, you missed a day of work at your peril. These days, as far as Joe knew, no one except a millionaire could go somewhere just for pleasure.
Yet even during these bitter years, Joe had allowed himself to picture the travels he would take someday. There was a huge globe in the library at the Y, and once in a while—when no one else was around—he would spin it, close his eyes, and imagine what it would be like to go wherever his hand happened to land.
For now, the fair’s travels would have to do. After Italy, Emma and Joe walked to the USSR pavilion, where there was an exact replica of a famous Moscow subway station. They passed Texas’s Alamo and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, a Swedish pavilion and the Temple of Religion. They went to the Billy Rose Aquacade, where everything was shining: the instruments in the orchestra, the sequins on the swimmers’ suits, the squiggles and stitches in the huge swimming pool where the sunlight hit the water. A row of fifty women wearing identical bathing suits and caps dove in one after the other, like a line of falling dominoes.
By eight o’clock the temperature was dropping, it had started to rain, and the crowd was thinning as visitors either ducked into exhibit halls or decided to call it a day. Emma’s comments grew briefer and her smile more forced.
“Aw, Emma,” Joe said. “I’m sorry. I should have realized. You’re cold.”
He unzipped his denim work coat and held it for her as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. Then, as if the whole fair had vanished, Joe’s mind raced back to the moment in Grand Central when he’d given his coat to Nora, the night he’d spent six months trying to understand, when the strangest thing in his life had happened and left only one useless scrap of paper as proof that it had.
* * *
—
FDR had opened the fair with a speech first thing in the morning, but Einstein was going to speak at the official illumination of the fair’s lights this evening. Emma and Joe got to the Lagoon of Nations just as a light rain was starting. “I told the professor I was sorry about the weather,” the master of ceremonies was saying, “but he told me it was only water.”
That line, which was greeted with polite laughter, was one of the last things the audience understood. Einstein began: “If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially, but with their inner meaning, into the consciousness of people.” It was straight downhill from there. His accent was so thick that it was almost funny, and the microphone crackled and buzzed in the rain. Joe knew enough about engineering and electricity to understand—more or less—that Einstein was trying to explain how scientists could harness energy from the sky.
The plan to demonstrate this was ex
tremely complex: At the Hayden Planetarium, miles away in Manhattan, rays of electrically charged particles would be captured, modified, sorted, converted to audio signals, then sent by telephone to Flushing, where they would be converted back to electric current and used to switch on the lights of the fair.
The science wasn’t the point, though; the spectacle was. “Give us ten cosmic rays!” a dramatic voice could be heard over the public address system, supposedly calling out to the planetarium.
“Here comes the first ray!” another voice exclaimed.
With each command, the Trylon was lit up one layer and color at a time, until Einstein threw the switch for the last layer—the tip—and the whole system overloaded and all the lights blacked out. To Joe, it made sense. On the way home he explained it to Emma: how, despite the fact that a surge of electricity had caused a short circuit, cosmic power had in fact been brought down to earth and made into something spectacular.
* * *
—
Joe knew there was a place for him in the world of Faye, Finn, and Emma. It was like an extra chair at the dinner table, a spot that had, in a sense, been set for him, been saved for him. Damian was always saying, “Who are you waiting for? A trout in the pot is better than a salmon in the sea.” And yet the deepest part of Joe had always wondered why what was supposed to be so perfect had never felt right. Emma was a good sport. She looked nice. She was nice. But forty-five minutes later, Joe dropped her at her door in Woodside and didn’t make a pass or a plan. They both knew he wouldn’t be calling. She was too nice a girl to date twice.
Tonight, trying to sleep, Joe thought only of Nora. To want someone who was unavailable was not an entirely new experience for him. There had been unwilling girls in high school who had occupied his thoughts and the secret parts of his nights. Just a few years before, there had been a hairdresser named Sue at the terminal who had led him into the back room one day, made him take off his shirt, and rubbed his sore shoulders with witch hazel. But after that, for reasons he never understood, she would never go out on a date with him. Wanting Nora was entirely different. It was a constant, dominating ache that Joe knew could be soothed only by her actual touch.
When it came to women, it had never been possible for Joe to know where or when the right one might arrive. There was something more right about Nora than there had ever been about anyone else. What if Nora was the right one, but she never came back?
* * *
—
What Joe needed was patience, and you had to have patience to be a leverman. Steady Max had taught him that when he was just starting out. You had to have patience the way a nun had faith or a singer had pitch. As a leverman, you were always waiting: for the next shift to begin, the next train to come in, the next switch to throw. But patience, real patience, meant more than simply waiting. Patience meant you had to honor the moments before things happened the same way you honored the moments when they did.
Joe knew that most people didn’t do this. Most people—Finn, for example—always seemed to be rushing to get somewhere, something, or someone. Finn had starting dating Faye pretty much as soon as her parents had let her out of the house, and he’d married her when they were just twenty-one and twenty-two. Big Sal was always saying that someday her ship would come in. And Shoebox Lou, who ran the lower-level shoeshine booth and sat reading books in the leather chairs when he didn’t have a customer, was always flipping to the back pages, unable to wait even long enough to see how a book would end.
Sometimes, just passing through the waiting room, Joe would be amazed by how few people managed to sit still. They checked their watches, paced, adjusted their hats, made their children miserable by fussing with them—all, it seemed, to avoid the simple pleasures that could come with being patient.
Joe felt sure that if he ever got to go somewhere, he would sit on one of those wooden benches, savoring the stillness of the moment, the moment between getting ready and going away. In a sense this was how he had lived a life that was weighted down by duty and bound to one place: He believed something was coming, and believing this gave him peace.
Even in his daily life, Joe had never been impatient. He had never tried to plot his rise in the ranks of the BRT or angle for higher pay or better hours. Like most men who’d managed to stay employed through the Depression, he was grateful to have work. And in the meantime, he was happy just aiming to be Steady Joe Reynolds.
All that had changed because of Nora.
Now Joe had begun to feel a subtle resentment about the slow passage of time. He had always been young enough that time hadn’t mattered a damn to him. But he’d never wanted anything as much as he wanted Nora to come back, and he had no idea if or when that would happen. Patience was a lot harder when you threw in so much doubt.
2
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
1939
Madame Rosalita’s real name was Esther Tettleman. She was a Jewish divorcée who wore gypsy skirts and told fortunes with a crystal ball, a deck of cards, and sometimes a scratched-up Ouija board. She sat most days in the lower concourse at a small table covered with a quilted floral cloth, her dark hair roped into long fuzzy braids, her silver bracelets jangling as she turned the pages of the latest movie magazine. Beside her table stood a crimson sign whose ornate yellow letters spelled out:
HAVE YOUR FUTURE TOLD
by Madame Rosalita
Fortunologist
Joe didn’t know how much she believed of the stuff she peddled, and he knew he didn’t believe any of it. He had never truly trusted anything he couldn’t see. But in the last week of November, just days before what would be the fourteenth anniversary of Nora’s death, he brought Esther a Coca-Cola, sat down at her table, and asked her what she knew about ghosts.
Esther turned a page of her magazine and didn’t look up. “Are you asking me or asking Madame Rosalita?”
“What do you think?”
Esther let out an unrelated roar about the article she was reading. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” she said. “You’ll never believe how many Munchkins they had in Culver City.”
“Could you please put that down a minute?” Joe asked.
Esther sighed, closed the magazine, lit a Chesterfield, and blew out a stream of smoke that scooped around and clouded her crystal ball.
“Ghosts?” she said. “Jeez, Joe, didn’t you ever go to Boy Scouts or something and listen around a campfire?”
Joe had to laugh, trying to imagine how in his life there could ever have been enough time or money for him to go anywhere but to school or work.
“No,” he said. “No campfires for me. So tell me. Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Well, spirits of the dead are supposed to talk to us through the Ouija board,” she said. “Would you like to place a call?”
Joe sighed.
“Madame Rosalita,” he said. “Do you know where I can find Esther Tettleman?”
Esther picked a flake of tobacco from her upper lip. “I have heard stories,” she said. “Some woman in one of the big windows here.”
“Crazy Mabel.”
“Yeah. Who told you that?”
“Gus.”
“Well, Gus has been around,” she said.
“Have you ever seen Crazy Mabel?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t pop in.”
“I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not.”
Esther put out her cigarette in an iron ashtray shaped like a spider. “Honestly? I’m not sure,” she said. “I do believe people have energy that has to go somewhere when they die.”
“And?”
“And one thing I’ve heard is that some people get stuck being ghosts because they die in the middle of doing something, and they don’t even know they’re dead. Unfinished business, that’s what people call it. That sort of makes sense to me. Their spirits are sup
posed to come back every year, exactly at the same time and in the same place they died. Kind of like an echo.”
“An echo?”
“Yeah. Kind of. Like an echo of the time they died.”
An echo, Joe thought as he walked away. It certainly seemed that Nora had shown up on the anniversary of her death. But since when could an echo laugh at your jokes, give you her phone number, and gently wrap a scarf around your neck to keep you warm?
* * *
—
On the morning of December 5, Joe left the Y at six. It might as well have been midnight. The sky was blue-black, and the streets were icy and still. Only a few cars passed him, and then an old coal truck with wagon-type wheels and one of its front lights out. Once inside the terminal, Joe stole past the information booth, hurried down the ramp to the lower level and then to the subway platform. If Nora had really died here, and if Esther was right about ghosts coming back where and when they died—then, Joe figured, this would be where Nora would show up.
Not many people were waiting at this hour, a time of more arrivals than departures. But the place wasn’t deserted, either. Wearing his black wool coat, his cap jammed into his pocket, Joe paced beside the tiled wall.
The newspaper had said that the accident happened “around 6:30 in the morning.” Nothing more specific. It was 6:20 when Joe felt the subway train before he heard or saw it: a buzzing under his feet. Next came the light, the roar, and the cars, which slowed to a shuddering stop. Terrified but excited, Joe studied the passengers who stepped off the subway, almost all of them working men and women by the look of it. Joe searched for Nora’s dress, her hair, her signal-red lipstick. When the doors closed, embracing the new passengers, it simplified Joe’s view and made it clearer that Nora hadn’t come.
Time After Time Page 8
