Joe waited, determined. Decades of Father Gregory’s words about grace and damnation had left him unconvinced about either. Still, there seemed something sinful about believing that dead people could walk among the living. For a moment, he felt relieved that she hadn’t come. He sighed and backed up to the wall, leaning against the cold tiles, watching the platform empty, seeing the tunnel darken, hearing the noise fade.
Joe wondered what exactly he had expected. Had he thought that Nora would just step like a regular passenger from a subway car onto the platform? Or if, as he feared, she had died on the tracks because no one had managed to help her up, what had Joe imagined—that she would rise from them now, like a mist?
Was that even what he wanted?
It was 6:40. Joe waited for a second train. Again, Nora wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and whatever relief he’d felt disappeared. Waiting for a third train, he suddenly found it unbearable to think he might never see Nora again. Nora, who seemed to be the answer to a question he didn’t even know he’d asked.
He told himself he would wait for just one more train, and as he did he started to relive the chaos of the accident. This subway platform had been dark, smoky, and loud, a scene of immense terror and pain. Joe remembered how exhausted his arms had become, pulling up one person after another from the tracks, some of them not in good enough shape to stand. What had happened to them? As he and Steady Max were pulling people up, other men must have been carrying them to the Main Concourse. Maybe Nora hadn’t died here at all.
Now, driven by an urgency unlike anything he usually felt, Joe ran back up the ramp to the Main Concourse, which had the hush of a day just beginning. In the quiet, he could hear the faint ringing of the rails from the tracks below. But the floor of the concourse was 38,000 square feet. If, as Esther Tettleman said, Nora might come back as a kind of echo, then what would be the source of her sound? Where had she died, exactly?
At which window of the information booth had she been standing that first morning when she’d asked about the bank? Doggedly, cautiously, Joe began to walk around the booth, a slow planet circling the sun. A few of the guys just coming up from their shifts waved energetic hellos. Joe, for his part, was exhausted.
Suddenly, he became aware that he was being watched. Turning around, hoping to see Nora, he found instead a cluster of the regulars coming down the staircase, bearlike in their winter coats, hats, and scarves. Of course, Joe thought. December 5 was the date of the accident. But it was also Manhattanhenge sunrise.
“Where the hell were you, Joseph?” Big Sal called down to him.
“Too cold out there!” he called back.
“You’re getting soft!” Sal shouted, followed by a chorus of the others.
“Go on!” he shouted back at them. “Don’t you people have jobs?”
They scattered, and for a moment Joe sat heavily on the marble steps, feeling the uniquely leaden emptiness that comes with lost hope. Obviously, Nora wasn’t returning. It had been foolish of him to think she would. He contemplated the year behind him, which was a pastime every bit as unusual for him as contemplating a year ahead.
Eventually Joe remembered that his shift didn’t start until 10 o’clock; he could go to Ralston’s meeting and still get back to the Y for some sleep. He stood up to leave and was halfway toward Track 13 when Nora grabbed him from behind.
3
BITS OF MEMORY
1929
The marble of the Main Concourse floor was cool and smooth beneath Nora’s back, and the first sight she had when she opened her eyes was the last one she’d seen at the moment of her death: the sun-washed sky and glittering stars of the Grand Central Terminal ceiling. But there were no people calling for help now, or shouting orders to each other. In fact, there was no one lying beside her anymore, no line of injured passengers, no doctors or other people scurrying about to help.
And there was no pain. Whatever had been twisting Nora’s insides had stopped.
Panicked, confused, she got to her knees, scanning the nearly empty concourse. A Red Cap in a black uniform with shiny brass buttons was standing before her, extending his hand.
“Miss, can I help you?” he asked.
Tentatively, Nora reached up as he pulled her to her feet. Nearly a decade before Joe would have the same reaction, the Red Cap quickly let go of her hand.
“Beg pardon, miss,” he said. “Are you feeling all right?”
She stared back at him.
“Did you faint, miss?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I must have.” She gestured to the ground. “But where did all the people go?” she asked.
“The people?”
“Porter!”
The Red Cap was being summoned by a woman near the ticket booths. He looked at Nora warily. “There’s a doctor’s office on the third floor,” he said. “Maybe you should go have them take a look at you, miss.” He tipped his hat as he left.
Nora stood still, fighting fear. She turned in every direction, trying to take in the scene. There were the ticket booths; there was the gold clock; there was the sunlight, coursing through the huge arched window, turning the pink floor orange and the blue-green ceiling lavender.
Bits of memory settled around her like ash. Her shoes were badly scuffed, and her dress was grimy in places, but this was definitely the same outfit she’d been wearing when she’d stepped off the ship, when she’d visited her father, when she’d gotten on the subway with Ollie to go home. Ollie. She remembered turning Ollie over and seeing the blood on his face. She remembered that Ollie was dead. Then she remembered the rest: the crash, the mayhem, being pulled up to the platform, her handbag falling, her charm bracelet being ripped away.
Feeling her empty left wrist with her right hand, Nora walked unsteadily toward the ticket booths and picked up a timetable for the New York Central Hudson River Line. On its cover were the month and year: December 1929. She struggled to take this in. Nora knew she had come home from Paris in December of 1925. How could four years have passed since then? Had she lost her memory in the accident?
More quickly now, she moved along the concourse to the Travelers Aid station and the tall wooden desk with its half-dozen heavy telephones. Not once in her life had she wanted this much to hear her mother’s voice.
She dialed the number with a shaking finger. When Elsie answered, Nora started to cry.
“Hello?” Elsie said. “Who is this?”
Nora tried to keep her voice from shaking. “Mother,” she said. “It’s me.”
A flat, hoarse voice said, “Pardon me.” It sounded less like a question than an accusation.
“Mother!” Nora said again. “It’s me. It’s Nora!”
Two words ripped through the receiver like electric shocks. “It’s who?”
“Mama!” That was a word Nora hadn’t used since childhood. “It’s Nora! I’ve been in an accident. I’m at Grand Central. I need to get home. Please, Mama, come and get me!”
For a dreadful moment Elsie said nothing, and then Nora heard her catch her breath.
“Whoever you are,” Elsie said, emphasizing each syllable, “I don’t know why you would ever think to be so cruel to me.”
“But—”
The phone cut off as Elsie hung up.
Nora returned the receiver to its cradle with both hands and rested her forehead against them. Tears filled her eyes again. She lifted her head, wiped them away, and dialed the number a second time.
The phone rang once, twice, ten times, a useless pulse.
So although Nora had no coat, and although it was just past seven on a frigid winter morning, she stepped outside the terminal and started to walk home.
4
YOU READ ME
PETER RABBIT
1931
When she was ten years old, Nora had had her tonsils out,
and for months and even years afterward she had found herself shuddering at the memory. Her distress hadn’t come from recalling the pain, or even the imperious way that Elsie had ordered the nurses around. What Nora had never shaken was the memory of fighting to come out of the ether. One nurse and then another had tried to coax her back into wakefulness, but for what seemed like a very long time, Nora had simply remained suspended. On one side of her there had been the ether, which was so much darker and more timeless than sleep, and on the other side there had been the nurses’ voices, the sense of light and movement. In the awful grayness that lay in between, she had been unable to get free, unable to speak, to move, even to open her eyes.
This suspension, at dawn two years after her first reappearance in Grand Central, was exactly the feeling she recognized now. She sensed herself being pulled between darkness and light, tugged back and forth in some gray in-between place, until the bright force became so powerful that at last, to her relief, it drew her in.
Then, once again, she found herself lying on the marble floor inside a shaft of sunlight. This time, though, her most recent memory was not of the injured people on either side of her. This time, it was of calling her mother and walking out to the street to go home. But what had happened since then?
Nora hurried to her feet and grabbed another train schedule: 1931, it read. Not only a different year, but a different decade. And how could that be?
Today, the Travelers Aid desk was already busy. A young woman in a blue apron was handing a map to a small man who looked as lost as Nora felt. Several other people stood in a cluster, and Nora sensed all of them staring at her as she picked up the phone.
Avoiding their gaze, she brushed soot and dust from her pale-blue dress. She knew she must look awful.
“Please, please be there,” she whispered to no one as, once again, she dialed her home number. The phone rang several times and Nora stiffened in panic, but finally she heard her mother’s voice—proper and sharp as always.
“Hello?”
“Mother, don’t hang up!” Nora shouted.
“Oh, no!” Elsie said. “No, no, no! Not again!”
“Don’t hang up. Please, Mother, listen. Please.” Nora gripped the receiver. “It’s me. It really is. We live in Turtle Bay. I went to Paris. I came back in December. I saw Father in the hospital. It was 1925. My bedroom is on the second floor. There’s a chandelier with flowers that are painted different colors.”
Nora paused to catch her breath. There was silence on Elsie’s end, but at least she hadn’t hung up.
“I went to Barnard,” Nora continued. “You read me Peter Rabbit.” She was aware that the details she was choosing were scattered through time, but time was evidently ignoring the rules with her as well. “I was a debutante. You put my coming-out dress in a big purple box. We always had brunch at the Plaza on Easter Sunday. You didn’t like people calling me Nora as much as—”
“Eleanora,” her mother said, and at that, Nora felt her knees start to shake.
“Mama,” she said quietly.
“How is this possible?” Elsie said. “We thought— We knew— Don’t you see? The accident. Where have you been all this time? I thought— I thought it was you we buried. We buried you.”
“That must have been someone else,” Nora said. “Please, Mama. Please come and get me.”
“Where? Where are you?”
“Grand Central.”
“Grand Central?”
“Yes. Please come and get me,” Nora said again. “Mama, I’m so scared.”
Nora heard Elsie exhale a staccato breath. “I’ll meet you at the gold clock,” she said firmly. “For heaven’s sake, don’t go anywhere.”
Nora held on to the phone for a few moments after Elsie had hung up. Home, which before Paris had stood for everything old-fashioned and confining, now seemed to be more than she could ever want.
She knew she would have at least half an hour before Elsie composed herself and got to the terminal, so she left the Travelers Aid station, walked through the waiting room, and slipped into the ladies’ lounge, an opulent place paneled in oak, with high ceilings and low chandeliers. Through the marble-framed doorway that led to the washroom, Nora approached a line of white porcelain sinks beneath a row of gilt-framed oval mirrors. Her hair was disheveled, her dress smudged at the elbows and waist, but she looked exactly the way she had when she’d glanced at the mirror just before leaving the Paris with Ollie. How could it be that nothing had changed except time? She splashed water on her face, patted it dry with a hand towel, and rushed back to stand at the gold clock. It was nearly eight o’clock now, and all she could do was wait.
* * *
—
Elsie Lansing was a perfectly assembled woman whose thin arms and slim frame had always, in Nora’s experience, been less useful for embraces than for ornamentation. There was almost nothing soft, round, or warm about Elsie. Even now, as she strode toward the gold clock and scanned the crowd for Nora, her high heels clipped like tiny hammers against the marble floor. Nora waited only a moment before she ran to her mother and hugged her. The embrace was warmer than any Nora remembered from her childhood. Leaning her cheek into the exuberant white fur collar of Elsie’s brocade coat, Nora felt her mother’s arms grip her tightly.
“Mama!” Nora said.
Elsie pulled away. “How can this be? How can this be?” she asked. She searched the huge room desperately, as if looking for someone who would tell her she wasn’t asleep or insane.
Elsie studied her daughter—from scuffed ivory shoes to missing hat—exactly as she used to do before Nora went out on a date or to school. Then she reached out a hand, removed her glove, and awkwardly, shakily, stroked Nora’s hair.
“Eleanora,” she finally said.
Unlike Nora, Elsie had aged; what had previously been brittle now seemed fragile. Her skin, always fair, was gray and drawn against her white collar. She shook her head slowly, as if trying not to injure herself. Nora had never imagined that her mother could look so unsure.
“How did you get here?” Elsie finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Nora said.
“Where have you been all this time?”
“I don’t know!”
Elsie tightened the belt of her coat, closing it up like armor. “Well, come,” she said, either feigning or regaining her usual aura of command. “I have a taxi waiting. Where’s your coat? Why aren’t you carrying a purse? We’ll have to call Dr. Lascher.” Following her mother’s voice up the steps to the street, Nora smiled a little. Elsie had always felt there was an expert to call, no matter what the problem was.
“You’ll freeze,” she told Nora, as if it had been Nora’s plan to be without a coat. “But just for a moment.” Elsie waved at one of the waiting taxis. “This is us,” she said.
It had snowed, and the streets were as white as Elsie’s collar, the perfect canvas for the colorful figures who were checking their watches, whether hurrying to or from the terminal.
Nora turned to look at her mother. “When did Daddy die?” she asked her gently.
Elsie gave the cabbie the address.
“Mother?”
“Just a few months after you—” Elsie stopped herself. “After we lost you.”
The driver started the car.
“Oh, Mother,” Nora said.
Elsie sat up a bit straighter.
Nora thought about the Turtle Bay house, which had always been so busy with guests and servants and plans. She mentally clicked off the lights in her bedroom, then gently closed the tall doors of her father’s study.
“That must have been awful for you,” Nora said.
Elsie seemed to teeter between emotion and restraint. “Yes,” she finally said, and stoically lifted her chin.
The taxi started to move.
“And poo
r Daddy—”
It was excruciating for Nora to imagine Frederick, already so sick, learning that his daughter had died.
“Yes, poor Daddy,” Elsie said—and then, more quietly: “But Daddy didn’t have to be the only one left.”
On the street, tradesmen were sweeping the snow from their storefronts, and a mother and two children, noses identically pink, were waiting at a bus stop.
“Well, I’ll be home now,” Nora said.
The last sight she had was a horrific one: her mother, as scared as anyone she’d ever seen, eyes open wide, shouting Nora’s name. Then Nora felt herself being pulled into the grayness, after which she felt and saw nothing at all.
5
IS THAT PLAY MONEY?
1934
Each time Nora came back, she was a little less frightened. Three times now, she had fought through the awful gray in-between to appear at the same hour, on the same date, in the same spot, in the same clothes, and she had never left the terminal without disappearing. She still didn’t have the vaguest idea how any of this was happening, and it would be a while before she would meet Joe and longer still before they would figure out why she appeared some years and not others.
But she knew that time was passing. The terminal seemed grimmer than before, and derelict. At the edges of the vast room, several dozen people stood, looking glazed, as if they were waiting for something to start. Nora was alarmed by the main waiting room, where she saw at least fifty people either sleeping or reluctantly waking up. These didn’t look like regular travelers. They looked like vagrants. On the heavy wooden benches that striped the room like church pews, some of them were using newspapers as blankets or pillows. Others had bundles of things beside them. Still others had children by their sides. Nora saw one little girl asleep on a large corner bench clutching a Raggedy Ann doll, which she dustily resembled. Everything in the room seemed colorless and terribly sad. There was an odor too: pungent, zoolike, shocking.
Time After Time Page 9
