Time After Time

by Lisa Grunwald

  PART THREE

  1

  EVER HEARD OF

  STONEHENGE?

  1941

  Joe was used to waiting minutes between trains, days between shifts, weeks between visits to Queens. Months—assuming you didn’t count the calendar in the tower’s shower room—were a different matter. Yet this had been the way he’d told time in 1941. How many months since the last December 5. How many months till the next one. The present was less and less vivid to him.

  The promise of love, the way Joe had heard it growing up, was that it might be plenty hard to find but much easier to recognize. You’d know the right moment. She’d be the right girl. And the rightness—implied, sometimes even spoken, so clear in Irish working-class Queens—was that she would be one of us. Like Faye with Finn, she would be like your sisters, cousins, and mother: freckled and strong-willed, God-fearing and sassy.

  Yet even beyond the strange details of Nora’s existence—or nonexistence—she didn’t seem to be anything like Faye or Katherine. She didn’t even seem to be anything like Joe. He knew that what should have stunned him—even scared him—was the apparent fact of her death. But she was what stunned him. Something about that laugh, those lips, that toss of her head. Maybe it was her energy, and the way she was trying so fiercely to take what had happened to her in stride. Or maybe it was the thrill she gave him of knowing that, after all the shocks of the Depression, a life could change course in an instant—not for the worse but for the better.

  Joe had been listening to weather reports since Thanksgiving. Starting the first day of December, the forecast was for clear skies and unusually warm temperatures. On December 4, Big Sal scared him by saying her rheumatism was acting up, a usually reliable predictor of rain or snow. Yet as Joe walked to the terminal just before dawn on December 5, the sky was clear and filled with stars, and his mind was filled with something he had heard Ralston Young say more than once: “Miracles are the children of the Earth and the Everlasting.”

  * * *

  —

  When Nora appeared, it was at precisely 7:05, just as the rising sun swept through the center east window, clear and bold as a beacon. Aside from its brief appearance the year before, Joe had never seen Manhattanhenge from inside the terminal. It looked like the light on the bullet nose of the 20th Century Limited, something you knew would hurt your eyes if you stared at it straight on, but something you nonetheless couldn’t avoid.

  When Joe moved out of the sun’s path, he could see Nora lying on the marble floor and scrambling to her feet. He saw her shake off her fear the way a dog shakes off water, then start running toward him.

  “You’re here again!” she said, and nearly knocked him over with her embrace. It was all she could say before he kissed her. No matter who might be watching, he had to kiss her. He had to feel how real she was. And Nora, having broken through that gray, paralyzing in-between, seemed to melt into Joe, her warmth radiating around them both.

  Maybe, Joe thought, the one good thing about Nora’s uncommon comings and goings was that so many of their kisses had the urgency of a first one.

  * * *

  —

  The Biltmore Hotel had opened in 1913 and had been designed by some of the same architects who had created the terminal and envisioned what they called Terminal City: a cluster of modern, related structures—hotels, apartment houses, office towers—all of which were physically connected to one another. Thus buildings had grown up around Grand Central every few years, like younger siblings. You could get to the lobby of the Commodore Hotel from the Main Concourse, and you could reach the Biltmore lobby from an elevator in the terminal’s so-called Kissing Room, where people waited to greet their friends and loved ones as they arrived.

  Today, three weeks before Christmas, there was mistletoe hanging above that elevator’s door, though Joe, having led Nora there, didn’t need any excuse to kiss her again.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as he fumbled to ring for the elevator.

  Joe reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a hotel room key. Nora was beautifully, spectacularly unshocked.

  * * *

  —

  Just as many of the buildings around Grand Central were connected to one another, so were the people who worked in them. Especially during the worst of the Depression, when everyone with a job had three relatives without one, a casual system of barter had evolved: this loaf of bread for those magazines; this pair of shoes for that manicure or haircut. The day before Nora’s arrival, Joe had traded a pair of Giants tickets for a Floating Key. Between the Biltmore’s nearly one thousand rooms and the Commodore’s two thousand, there were always—even in the best of economies—several dozen empty rooms on any given night. Each hotel had a source for the keys, but for Joe the most reliable was the Biltmore’s daytime doorman. Max Colton was a sweet, tall guy from the Midwest who unfailingly watched the street, rapt, as if it were a Broadway stage and the pedestrians were the performers.

  “Just leave the room how you found it,” he’d said to Joe the day before while handing him the key.

  “Hoping I’ll need it more than one night,” Joe had said.

  “Special lady?”

  “Very special.”

  “Well, no rush. I’ll let you know if you need to move.”

  Now, waiting for the elevator with Nora and more nervous than he wanted to be, Joe used his thumb to trace the ornate raised Biltmore B on the heavy oval key fob in his palm.

  When he and Nora stepped into the elevator, she seemed to shine amid the fine walnut interior. One short floor later, he took her hot hand as they entered the soaring, carpeted lobby of the Biltmore’s Palm Court, with its feathery potted plants and huge chandeliers. They walked over the vast Oriental carpets, each one like a separate country, with clusters of chairs and tables graced by people from all over the world. Wearing honeymoon smiles, Joe and Nora moved closer to each other and strolled through the lobby single-mindedly. Whatever looks they got—because of her flapper dress, his working clothes, their obvious intimacy—bounced off them as if their feelings had created a physical shield. Pressing her face against Joe’s shoulder, Nora allowed herself to revel in the scent of fresh laundry and in the simple, steady strength of him.

  Room 809 was the first of countless hotel rooms that Joe and Nora would share by the grace of Max Colton and the Floating Key. The room was so large that Joe’s single at the Y could have fit neatly inside it twice. Aside from the bed, there were brocade curtains and two small couches covered in muted tapestry fabrics, a small dressing table with a mirror, a large wooden desk that reminded Joe of Artie’s, and a wooden side table with a top shaped like a shamrock. The room was silent and musty, with the slight scent of furniture polish. Nora’s purse—the one they had recovered from the Lost and Found—was waiting for her on the dresser, her bracelet tucked inside it.

  “You brought my things!” she exclaimed. She fished the bracelet from the bag and expertly rolled it over her left hand. She hurried to the window, where she gazed out, excited, on the streets just starting to fill with the day. Then she turned and ran back to Joe, her eyes gleaming.

  Finding approval there, he reached for the back of her dress. Four years of knowing her, three of constant imagining, two of thinking he understood, a week of fretting about the weather—all powered his movements. He fumbled with the long row of small black silk buttons on the back of her dress, but after a moment he gave up all pretense of skill and said: “You’re just going to have to turn around.”

  Laughing, she obeyed him. His worker’s fingers tackled the buttons methodically, efficiently. Just before he undid the last one, Nora reached down to the hem of her dress and pulled it up over her head.

  She was wearing a peach-colored silk slip, which she peeled off boldly, revealing garters and the ivory stockings they held up. Joe stared, amazed, at her beauty, her youth, her conf
idence. He let out an unintelligible sound, locked the door, and stripped off his clothes. Diving with her onto the bed, he managed only to say her name.

  * * *

  —

  “So tell me,” Nora said, when they finally allowed themselves to catch their breath and were lying side by side. Calmly, almost casually: “If I’m dead, how could I have felt all that?”

  How do you explain the inexplicable? Joe had already tried, with Finn, and learned just how hard it would be to tell anyone else. Nora herself was the mystery, though, and she had more reason than anyone to want to find a solution. It had been sixteen years since she had begun bouncing through different states of being, different moments in time, none of which she had gotten to choose, none of which she had quite understood.

  “I think it’s the way you said it the last time you were here,” Joe said. “You said you thought you got stuck. I think I know how that happened. I think I know what brings you here. But I don’t know what keeps you here.”

  Nora put her slip back on. “Tell me,” she said simply. She walked to the sofa and sat expectantly, playing with the tassel on one of the silk throw pillows, tangling the fine gold threads around her forefinger.

  Joe pulled on his pants, took a pencil and a piece of Biltmore stationery from the desk drawer, and sat down beside her.

  “So, words aren’t going to be enough?” Nora asked.

  Joe drew the rectangle of Grand Central Terminal, centered on Forty-third Street and embraced by the split roadways of Park Avenue. He sketched lines for the East Side and West Side avenues that ran perpendicular to Forty-third Street, and wavy lines on either side of the page to represent the two rivers that cradled Manhattan Island in their arms.

  “Joe,” Nora said. “I was born in Manhattan. I know it’s got a river on either side of it.”

  “Just wait.”

  Next he drew three arches on the right and left sides of the terminal. “These are the big windows, okay?” he said. “The ones that face east and west?”

  “Okay,” she said. She touched his shoulder.

  He drew a dot in the center of the rectangle.

  “That’s the clock at the information booth, right?” she asked, and he nodded.

  Next, all the way over on the right side of the page, above where the East River was, Joe drew a smiling sun, like the kind Alice and Mike had always put on their kindergarten drawings.

  Nora laughed.

  Joe handed her the beat-up purse. “Can I borrow your lipstick?” he asked.

  Nora squinted slightly but reached into the bag for the little silver box and handed it to him.

  Using the tip of the lipstick, Joe drew a red line from the sun past each avenue—First, Second, Third, Lex—until it entered the middle of the terminal’s arched windows, passed through the clock, and continued out the window on the other side, all the way to the Hudson River.

  “Have you ever heard of Stonehenge?” he asked.

  “I went there!” she said.

  “You did?”

  “The summer before I came home. My flatmate and I drove half the night so we could get there in time for the sunrise.”

  “Did you make it?”

  Nora nodded. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “The sun came up dead center between the stones.”

  Joe ran his finger along the lipstick line he’d drawn. “So that’s what happens at sunrise here too. Only we call it Manhattanhenge. It isn’t stones. It’s buildings. And the sunrise isn’t in the summer. It’s in the winter.”

  “On December fifth.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The day of the accident.”

  Joe nodded. “Somehow,” he said, “the sunrise must have hit you just at the exact minute when you were—”

  “Dying,” Nora said. “It’s all right, Joe. You can say it.”

  “Dying,” he repeated, his voice just a bit shaky. “I don’t know. It must have given you some kind of special energy.”

  “Just me?”

  “I think you were the only one lying in just the right spot and dying at just the right moment.”

  Nora stared down at the page and took her lipstick back from Joe, meditatively sliding it into its box. Joe said nothing while he gave her time to take in what he’d said.

  “Special energy,” she repeated.

  “That’s the best I’ve been able to figure it,” he said.

  “So I come back on Manhattanhenge.”

  “When the weather’s clear.”

  “And when it’s not, that’s why I can’t get through.”

  “That’s how I figure it.”

  “So I really am kind of alive,” Nora said.

  “Well,” Joe said, “I think we’ve just proved that.”

  “Which is why I can eat and drink and kiss you and—”

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “But naturally everyone thinks I’m dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “My poor mother. You should have seen her face when she saw me.”

  Nora told Joe what had happened with the phone calls and then with the taxi.

  Joe’s look was all Nora needed in order to know what he was going to say.

  “When did she die?” Nora asked before he could say it.

  “Five years ago.”

  Nora sighed and pulled one of the pillows onto her lap. She hugged it as if it could hug back, buried her face in it as if such a childlike gesture could bring her childhood back. After a few minutes, she looked up.

  “How did you find out?” Nora asked.

  “The guy who lives there now gave me the phone number of a friend of hers. I called.”

  “Ruth Ingram,” Nora said.

  “You saw her too?”

  “She saw me. Then she ran.”

  Joe nodded.

  A single tear traveled over Nora’s round, smooth cheek. “You never ran,” she said.

  “I couldn’t,” Joe said. “It was you.”

  Gently, Joe eased the pillow from her grasp and tucked Nora into his arms.

  He had known she would be sad, but nothing could diminish the joy he felt at being able to hold her, the uncommon elation of knowing that somehow they were both exactly where they were meant to be.

  * * *

  —

  For Nora’s part, she could not recall a moment in her life—either the real one or this after one—when she’d felt both so powerful and so powerless. Somehow, she had been given a second kind of life. The sun, as if it were capable of choice—as if it actually possessed the smiling face that Joe had drawn on it—had tapped her on the shoulder with a finger of light.

  She thought back to Stonehenge, how she and Margaret had paid for admission at the gate, just like at a fair. On the grounds around the huge stones, there had been hundreds of people who’d come with picnic blankets and tents. They’d called themselves modern Druids, and they’d spent the morning praying and chanting, believing in the mystical power of the rising sun.

  Nora looked at Joe. He was smiling like a doctor who, with a great bedside manner, has just given a complicated diagnosis.

  “It’s all right,” he said, which was needless, because everything about him was reassuring to her.

  “You make it seem all right,” she said.

  “Well, that’s how it’s going to be.”

  She nestled beside him, and he stroked her hair.

  “Do you understand?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “When I was in high school and college, my mother was always nagging me to tell her what I was doing and where I was going and when I’d be back. It was one of the reasons I went to Paris. ‘When are you going to be home?’ ‘Don’t forget to call me.’ I used to hate that so much. But now—”

 
Nora’s eyes filled with tears again, and Joe took her hand and kissed it.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Now,” she said, “I love that you want to know where I am.”

  “Good,” Joe said softly. “Get used to it.”

  2

  NO ONE’S WINNING

  1941

  There was a flowery padded headboard on the bed in Room 809, the kind that climbed, like a wedding cake, into a high rounded peak. Two mornings after Nora’s arrival, she lay with her feet up on this headboard, her legs lithe and smooth and not much wider than Joe’s arms. The only garment she had on was her peach-colored slip, the hem of which had risen to her waist while she and Joe had been making love. Her forefingers fell over her lips, as if she was trying to hide her smile.

  “Why are you hiding?” Joe asked.

  “Hiding!” she said. She pointed her toes and stretched and laughed. “In what way am I hiding?” she asked.

  Joe’s head lay against a stack of pillows, but now he leaned forward on one elbow, raised Nora’s slip another inch, and kissed her stomach, which wrinkled when she laughed.

  Sighing, eyes up, she had the luxury of wondering how she would sketch the rosette surrounding the ceiling fixture. She looked past Joe to the window, where sunlight split open the dark brocade curtains. A terrible framed watercolor hung beside them, an old-fashioned painting of a train beside a river, steam rising from its engine like the plume of a fancy hat.

  “I’m getting pretty good at this lovemaking, aren’t I?” Nora asked.

  “You’ve been good at it from the start,” Joe said. “Too good, I’m thinking.”

  “It was the twenties, Joe. The twenties. Things were…freer.”