Time After Time

by Lisa Grunwald

  Turning more pages, she came to the society section, where it seemed the world was still at peace. There were the everyday announcements of brides-to-be and preparations for an Easter luncheon for debutantes. Just as they had been during the Great War, the debs were more inclined to be doing volunteer work. But still, there were the dresses, and then there was this item:

  A son, their third, was born to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Raymond of 21 East Ninetieth Street on Monday in the Harkness Pavilion, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Mrs. Raymond is the former Miss Margaret Ingram, daughter of Mrs. Ruth Ingram and the late Mr. Alfred Ingram of this city. The child will be named for his grandfather.

  With a suddenness that nearly frightened her, Nora felt jolted, dislodged by memories. She closed her eyes, seeing the attic room she and Margaret had shared in the four-story house with the peeling green door and the dark wooden staircase worn down enough to be slippery. Margaret would be in her late thirties now, exactly as old as Nora would have been if her life had continued as she’d always imagined it would. Briefly, she considered trying to call Margaret, but she knew that would only terrify her—and might even threaten the equilibrium she and Joe had just found.

  Nora remembered how joyously she and Margaret had tackled the sights: Versailles and Montmartre, Mont Saint-Michel and the Tuileries. Margaret had flagged occasionally, but Nora had been intrepid. There hadn’t been a food she didn’t want to try, a cabaret she didn’t want to attend, or a neighborhood she didn’t want to explore. What more would she have tasted or seen or done if she had lived to be Margaret’s age? She could imagine all sorts of answers to that question, but she knew it made no sense to dwell on what and who she would have been or would never be. She had landed in a life both absurdly lucky and unlucky: She had infinite love in a finite space.

  One thought, however, was unavoidable: In that life, her former life, Nora would never have been pacing a hotel room waiting for someone to return and provide her happiness. She would have been making something, buying something, going somewhere, seeing someone. She would not have been caught dead just waiting, she thought, and chuckled to herself. That was it, she thought. Not caught dead.

  She took a deep breath, stepped back to the closet, and pulled on the plain skirt and blouse she’d been wearing this morning when she and Joe had bought the green dress. At the bureau she picked up her comb, teased her hair back from her forehead, and ruffled it a bit with her hands. Satisfied, she dabbed her lips with a fashionably matte red lipstick and used a tissue to blot them. She grabbed the room key, tucked it into a handbag, and without a backward glance firmly closed the door behind her.

  * * *

  —

  It was after three by the time Joe returned from Queens. He was sad about Finn and felt helpless about the family. But he was also desperate to see Nora, if only for a moment, before his half shift at four. Their room in the Biltmore was dark and empty, though, and Joe, for the second time that day, felt almost breathless with loss. For good measure, he turned on the light, hoping to find a note, but there was nothing, and the bed was made, the clothes put away.

  Hadn’t they specifically agreed to meet back in the room? He felt sure they had, though maybe not. The goodbye with Finn and the visit with Faye and the kids were filling up his head. He dove back into the hallway but, not wanting to wait for the elevator, vaulted down the steps. He headed to the concourse, scanning the clusters of visitors who as usual were squinting up at the mural, the families surrounding yet more departing men, the dotted lines of the Red Caps winding through the crowd. Nora was nowhere to be seen, and there was no time left for finding her before his shift began.

  At the Piano, the mechanical world of levers and lights did little to calm Joe this time. The green lights on the board—the manmade markers of manmade machines—blinked on and off as usual, tracing the trains’ progress along the numbered sections of each track. Joe wished there was a board of lights that could help him follow Nora. The trains kept arriving with their usual glare and noise, but the hours dragged. By the time Joe’s shift was over, he was, as always, drenched in sweat. He was tempted to skip his shower, but superstitiously, he decided that if he acted as though everything was normal, everything would be normal. In the ringing silence of the shower stall, he made the water as hot as he could stand it, letting it pound down on his shoulders and flatten his dark hair into bangs. He kept his shower time to three minutes, then used one of the stiff, nearly gray towels to dry himself. He felt unnerved, almost panicky.

  He hurried through the tunnel from Fiftieth Street, and once he reached the concourse he tried to be systematic in his search: ticket booths, no; gold clock, no; marble steps, no; track entrances, no. Down on the lower level, he tried to get past Bond’s without being spotted by Big Sal, but she called to him, and he went over.

  “That was your brother this morning, Joseph?”

  “That’s right, Sal.”

  “Aww, kid. Don’t look so worried. It’s just basic training for now. For all you know, he could get assigned to some desk stateside.”

  “That’s not why I’m worried. Have you seen Nora?”

  “Not since this morning with you. Where does that girl work, anyway? What’s her story?”

  “You want a story, Sal—”

  “I know, ‘Go buy yourself a magazine.’ ”

  He passed Alva’s and the Lost and Found, the Whispering Gallery and the Oyster Bar. How many times over the four years since he’d first seen Nora had he lost and then found her again? And how could he be expected to face losing Finn and Nora on the same day?

  Dejectedly, he returned to the Main Concourse, where he saw Mary Lee Read at the organ, accompanying today’s choir, some young women’s group. Their faces were the brightest thing in the room, and suddenly he found Nora’s among them. For the moment, anyway, his anger turned to awe. She stood out, not because of anything she was doing, but because her face was so filled with pride and glee, you’d have thought she was singing a solo on opening day of the World Series. She smiled as if she had a private joke with the whole world, and Joe was fairly sure he’d never seen anyone look as happy.

  5

  I WAS THINKING IT

  LOOKED LIKE FUN

  1942

  It hadn’t been difficult for Nora to get a place in the choir. The Salvation Singers was a group made up of young women from Salvation Army branches all across the country. Most of them had never met each other anyway, and all of them had needed to introduce themselves to the choir director. So, just like that, Nora had a place in the north gallery, where she could stand that much closer to the wondrous aqua sky, the dotted line of lightbulbs that surrounded it, and the six cap-shaped windows adorned with acorns and birds.

  Joe had seemed proud of her—or at least glad to see her—for about a minute. But as the choir kept singing, he paced the marble floor, stopping only occasionally to glare up at her. After the concert was over, he was silent as they crossed the Biltmore lobby, rode upstairs in the elevator, and walked down the hallway to their room.

  As soon as he closed the door behind them, he tore off his coat and windmilled it onto the desk. Coins burst from the pockets, some bouncing off the desk, most of them raining down noiselessly on the carpet.

  “Joe!” Nora said.

  He started to bend to pick up the coins but kicked the desk chair instead.

  “Joe!”

  He glanced at her, just barely, almost suspiciously.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Was it Finn? Or Faye? Was it me?”

  Agitated, he tugged at his tie knot, sliding it back and forth until it was low enough that he could lift the tie over his head.

  “What’d I do?” Nora asked him.

  Unbuttoning his shirt with one hand, he let the other swing free, the set of his mouth almost flattening his crooked smile away.

  “The choi
r,” he said at last. “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking it looked like fun.”

  “Like fun?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “It was easy,” Nora said. “I just told the choir director I was from Wisconsin.”

  “Why Wisconsin?”

  “I don’t know. Why not?”

  Joe shook his head, fuming.

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  “I couldn’t find you,” Joe said. “I thought maybe you’d flickered out.”

  “Oh, Joe,” Nora said slowly, understanding for the first time.

  “I expected you to be here, and when you weren’t—”

  She apologized. “I didn’t think I’d be gone that long.”

  Joe, usually so even and deliberate in his actions and words—so much the leverman incapable of being surprised—paced the length of their room, up and down the plush maroon carpet. Just two days before, Nora had accidentally spilled some red wine on it, and while she’d been frantic about leaving a stain, Joe had calmly gone to the bathroom, soaked a washcloth with warm water, and used it to clean the rug. You could barely see any trace of it now, but the way Joe kept walking up and down, Nora wondered if he would leave his tracks there instead. She stood up. “Stop,” she said. She put her hands on Joe’s shoulders and kept them there until she felt him starting to relax.

  “Stay,” she said, and he grasped her so tightly that she could feel his fear along with his need. She broke away and went to the dresser, where she poured a shot of bourbon into a New York souvenir glass that she’d pinched from the ladies’ lounge. “Your big brother left to become a soldier and fight in a war today. Then you went to Queens to buck up his family. Then you worked a shift. Then you thought I’d disappeared. Drink up.”

  Joe smiled. Angry as he was, he did have to admire Nora’s gutsiness. How many women did he know—how many people—who would saunter their way into a choir, pretending to belong?

  “Come on,” Nora said. “Throw it back.”

  “Throw it back?” he said. “Where’d you learn that expression?”

  “I get around,” she said.

  He sighed and took the glass from her.

  “Maybe that’ll warm you up,” she said.

  “Aw,” Joe said, cocking his head to one side. “Honey,” he added, and now it was her turn to pull him close, their mouths tilting around each other’s until they locked at just the right angle.

  6

  WHAT A WIFE DID

  1942

  For the next few days, while Joe came and went from his shifts, Nora reveled in the choir, feeling an old kind of happiness. Surrounded by other women, she sensed the music as a warm embrace: her voice a part of something; herself a part of something. As a choir, the singers were only fair, but people stopped to listen—old couples leaning against each other, women arriving from out of town, even terminal workers pausing to sing along or just watch. Occasionally a soldier or sailor, seeming to notice Nora’s exuberance, would catch her eye and smile or wink. She hadn’t realized how accustomed she’d become to trying to avoid attention, and she’d forgotten how much she enjoyed getting it.

  By Sunday the stint was over, and a different choir was beaming down from the balcony where the Salvation Singers had performed. That was that, Nora understood, and envy seemed to be her chief emotion now. Trying to read The New York Times in the ladies’ lounge, she was transfixed instead by the luggage of a tidy woman sitting nearby. The suitcase’s leather was old and battered, but it served as the perfect canvas for colorful stickers from hotels all over the world: Venezia, Dubrovnik, Napoli, Barcelona, Cairo. As the woman left, Nora caught a glimpse of one more sticker: PARIS, HÔTEL DES DEUX MONDES. Two worlds indeed.

  In her Paris world, Nora had lived like a true child of the twenties, rocked by the losses of the Great War and determined to waste not a moment of life. As enthralling as it was now to lie in Joe’s arms—shadows stirring the darkness at midnight or later—Nora had been here for five months now, and she couldn’t help feeling confined.

  In May, she visited the Biltmore’s library, a room with the hush of a vault and an unexpectedly old-woman smell of lavender and mothballs. Hundreds of the books left by decades of visitors were haphazardly shelved here without any consideration of subject or author. On one end of a high oak table sat an enormous globe the color of cornbread, encircled by iron bands bearing figurines of bare-breasted women.

  A few weeks later, Nora went to the Biltmore’s Turkish baths—known as the “salt-water plunge”—but was disappointed to find that they had been closed because of the war. For a long while she lay back in one of the striped canvas reclining chairs on the tiled deck, pondering the empty shallow pool. It was impossible not to think of the glorious Olympic swimmers under that perfect blue sky in 1924.

  On the sixth floor of the terminal building, tucked right under the roof, were the Grand Central Art Galleries. Founded by John Singer Sargent and filled with the works of other famous artists, the place seemed a similarly pale echo of Paris. Nora had seen signs for the Grand Central School of Art, and some of the classes offered were for abstract painting and mixed media. But the works on display here seemed staid, old-fashioned. There were fifteen exhibition rooms, but none held the excitement of the twenties’ cubism, expressionism, and surrealism. Most were traditional portraits or landscapes. Only a few were by women. Still, stopping on one of the large crimson rugs that added a homey touch to the place, Nora stared for a long time at one painting, in which a mitten-shaped cloud hung gracefully behind a confusion of alpine rocks. She took a deep breath, and when she exhaled, she imagined herself standing in that landscape. For a moment she thought she could feel the spiky, icy air, even smell the moss and heather. She had almost forgotten how entering a work of art could be an effective way to travel.

  That same day, Nora treated herself to a large tin of colored pencils and a large sketchpad at the stationery store on the lower level. Thereafter she would sit in the waiting room or in the Biltmore’s Palm Court or in any one of the hotel and terminal’s coffee shops and, just as she had in Paris, draw the people she saw. She noticed how the veins at one man’s temple abutted the heavy stubble on his carved-out cheeks, a miniature landscape of river and valley. How a shock of ice-white hair crowned another man’s head. How a third man—with his companion seeming not to care—walked with his arm not around her waist or shoulders but hooked tightly around her neck like a scarf.

  Sometimes in the terminal Nora studied the details in the details. Sketching the terminal’s logo, she noticed how the T, turned upside down, looked like an anchor. On the elevator indicator in the lobby of the New York Central building, she found lightning bolts, a hammer, stars, ribbons, and a winged helmet. The staircase in the concourse was, like the one on the SS Paris, modeled after the original in the Paris Opera House. The carvings over the windows included symbols of transportation—wheels, ships, and wings. She was living inside a masterwork whose vast size and constant motion sometimes obscured its magnificence, but Nora was determined not to take any part of it for granted.

  Drawing made Nora feel tied to the part of herself that had been planted in high school and had bloomed in Paris, dependent on no one’s presence or praise. Drawing was the piece of her that didn’t so much transcend her situation—transcendence, right now, was the last thing she needed—as much as anchor it. She might be a witness, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be an active witness. Having landed in this vibrant Terminal City, she felt compelled to become as much a part of it as any other element was.

  Throughout that spring, Nora heard on the radio about clothing drives, Victory Gardens, women being mobilized to work in factories. In Joe’s Central Headlight newsletter, she read that there had been a national call for twenty-five thousand women to serve as volunteers or be tr
ained as nurses’ aides. On top of that, the Central itself was planning to hire fourteen young women as the first female ticket sellers in the terminal’s history. Nora ached to be one of them, or at least to find a useful place for herself.

  On a Tuesday morning in June, quite by chance, she discovered that place. She was standing on the Main Concourse amid a buzzing crowd, watching as the war bonds mural was being dismantled to make way for an even grander patriotic project. Panel by panel, the pieces were handed down the scaffolding, carefully wrapped, and stacked on large carts.

  “Well, hallelujah,” Nora heard someone say as the panel displaying the face of the forty-foot-high sailor was taken from the scaffolding. Nora turned toward the voice to find a tall, solid woman with tapered cheekbones, shockingly blue eyes, and ebony hair that formed a slightly off-center widow’s peak. “Good riddance, sailor boy,” the woman said to Nora.

  Nora laughed, grateful for this minor bit of treason. “ ‘Sailor boy’?” she asked.

  “I always thought he was undressing me with his eyes.”

  Nora pointed to the other tall figure on the opposite side of the mural. “And what about his army friend?”

  The woman shook her head. “Apparently I’m not his type,” she said.

  That was how their friendship began, the first of many friendships Nora would make in time. Paige Barrow was twenty-nine, or, as she preferred to put it, “not yet thirty.” She was about a head taller than Nora, and though she pushed away compliments as if they were brambles, she was darkly, richly beautiful. Despite her marriage, her three children, and their apartment on the West Side, Paige had become a Travelers Aid volunteer the week of the Pearl Harbor attack, and she told Nora that it was the Travelers Aid Society that was assembling the replacement for the mural—not another advertisement filling the east windows, but a servicemen’s lounge filling the whole east balcony in front of them.