Paige grabbed Nora by the elbow and pulled her back to the western side of the concourse, the better to take in the east wall.
“Picture this, sweetie,” she said dramatically, waving her arm in a large semicircle as if in doing so she could conjure the future. The lounge, she explained, was going to be divided into three sections and decorated in red, white, and blue. The red section was where the men would check their belongings and play pool, cards, or board games. The white section would have a five-hundred-book library, as well as couches, chairs, magazines, newspapers, stationery, stamps, and art supplies. And in the blue section, Paige said, there would be a snack bar, telephones, and—best of all—a Panoram, which was part jukebox and part miniature movie screen.
Nora tried to picture it all, but what inspired her most was when Paige reported that Travelers Aid would need four hundred volunteers to run the place.
“Do you think they’d let me be one of them?” Nora asked.
Paige let out a startled “Ha!” and followed it with a warm embrace. “Let you!” she said.
7
FROM THAT MOMENT ON
1942
On October 1, Nora proudly donned the blue garrison cap and apron of her fellow Travelers Aid volunteers, and from that moment on, she belonged. At the servicemen’s lounge, she had a husband in the navy, she lived in Queens, she was an amateur painter, she didn’t have children, and she was here to help. Other than occasionally humming an outdated tune or having to pretend to get a joke or a reference to a movie, she had become a completely convincing citizen of Grand Central’s Terminal City.
A month before the lounge’s official opening, painters and construction crews applied the finishing touches to each of the three sections while the volunteers organized the library’s books, set up the baggage and coat checks, hung patriotic and informational posters, and sorted out donated games and supplies. Paige was everywhere—maybe it was the widow’s peak, or maybe just her speed, that made her seem like a bright, quick bird. For her part, Nora spent most of the time in the art section, unpacking and arranging the art supplies on a couple of large wooden tables. There were sketchpads, colored pencils, boxes of crayons, and a dozen sets of children’s watercolors.
Throughout the first day, to her delight, volunteers of all ages started asking her advice. In her former life, Nora had often been a ringleader, with classmates at Barnard and with Margaret and other expatriate friends in Paris. She was thrilled to realize that she could still give the impression of someone who knew the answers. Where do we put the extra paper? Should we cover the art tables or let them get splashed with paint? The answers didn’t exactly require wisdom, but to be asked was invigorating.
Late in the afternoon, Nora painted a sign to hang above the art supplies:
PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE PAINTBRUSH
It was a play on a song she’d been hearing on the radio (ammunition instead of paintbrush), and she figured it might attract the men. A lot of the girls stopped to admire Nora’s artful lettering, and Hattie Pope, who was in charge of the whole lounge enterprise, went out of her way to applaud the effort.
That first day didn’t end until after seven in the evening. Nora had worked for ten hours straight, and she was elated, taking off her apron and cap reluctantly. She shared warm goodbyes with the women she’d met and, best of all, with Mrs. Pope, who already knew her by name and made a point of asking when she’d return.
“I’ll be here as much as you need me,” Nora said.
“That’s the spirit,” Mrs. Pope said, and although Nora hadn’t needed an extra blessing, there it was.
* * *
—
Smoothing her skirt, fluffing up her hair, Nora hurried through the Biltmore’s Palm Court and up to their current room. Flinging open the door, she exclaimed “I did it!” But Joe, unmoving, looking like part of the armchair in which he was sitting, gave Nora only the tightest smile, barely meeting her eyes.
“Joe?”
He looked down at a sports page she guessed he’d either already read or had no interest in reading.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“You know where. The servicemen’s lounge. Don’t tell me you didn’t see my note. I know I left you a note this time.”
“You’ve been there all day?” he asked suspiciously.
“Since nine this morning,” she said proudly. “What do you think? That I’m seeing someone else?”
He smiled faintly.
“It was so wonderful, Joe,” she said. “You should have seen me! I was setting out supplies and organizing books and figuring out the bag check system. These girls are so slow! Except Paige. I told you about Paige, didn’t I? She’s the one who signed me up in the first place. I think we could really be friends.”
This had all come out in a burst, and Joe didn’t respond to any of it.
Nora sat down, trying to tame her own enthusiasm.
“I don’t like you being out there,” Joe said at last.
“What do you mean, ‘out there’?”
“Out there. In the terminal. Working like that around so many people. Who knows what might happen?”
Nora’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What do you think might happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know. That’s the point. You don’t know.” Joe folded his newspaper and stood up to pace. “Don’t you realize? If anyone found out about you, they’d never let you alone again. People would think you were crazy. The minute they’d start asking questions, we’d never have any peace again.”
Nora sighed. “Why can’t I just be volunteering, like a regular girl?”
“Because you’re not a regular girl!”
Nora winced, then locked eyes with him.
“Why don’t you see that?” he said angrily.
“You’re saying I don’t understand my own situation?”
“I’m saying I want to keep you safe!”
“Safe!” Nora said. “When I was in Paris, I never thought about ‘safe.’ I went places. I did things. I had a job. A paycheck. Friends. When I was in Paris—”
“But, you’re not in Paris, goddamnit!” Joe shouted.
“Joseph!” she shouted back.
They had never raised their voices at each other. She had never used his full name. They both looked shocked.
Then they both started laughing. Laughter turned into an embrace, the embrace into kisses.
* * *
—
“You’re a feisty one, all right,” Joe said. She was lying in his arms.
“It’s so odd,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m more than a decade behind you, but you’re so much more old-fashioned than I am.”
“Not old-fashioned,” he said. “Just realistic.”
“If you say so, pal.”
She had found in Joe the irrefutable center of her inexplicable life. He clearly bristled at her independence and didn’t know the first thing about her art. But unlike Nora, he had never known the giddy freedoms she had, and it made sense that he would want to protect what he had. That now included her.
“Joe,” Nora said nonetheless, “it’s not like I can cook dinner for you every night.”
She fell asleep before he did that night, and for a long time he watched her. He had seen her sleep in the semidarkness many times, marveling at the fact that, unlike any woman he’d ever spent the night with, she somehow looked as beautiful asleep as she did when she was awake. Her mouth was closed, her cheeks pearly, and her hair fell across her forehead in a tumble of curls. She seemed to be barely breathing.
After a while he closed his eyes and thought back. It was 1914 or ’15, and his mother was standing by the stove in the kitchen in Queens, stirring one of her soups or stews. Her favorite apron was tied around her waist, several of i
ts stitched-on shamrocks hanging by threads. It was February, and it was so cold that she was wearing a cardigan over her housedress; so cold that Finn and Joe, eleven and nine, didn’t want to play outside. They sat at the white enamel kitchen table, playing gin rummy instead. Finn had recently learned this game from the older boys at school, but he changed the rules to suit his hand every time he had the chance.
Katherine Reynolds alternated between looking at her watch and stopping her stirring to listen for the sound of the front door.
Joe pulled a ten of diamonds from the deck and discarded it.
“So you don’t have any tens,” Finn said.
“What?”
“If you had tens, you would have kept that. You’re supposed to put whatever card you pick up into your hand so I can’t know what you don’t have.”
Joe shook his head, not understanding. “But I don’t need the card,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to pretend you might need the card.”
Katherine was humming one of her folk tunes—all of them sounded the same—and checking her watch.
“Clear that table and set it,” she told the boys.
“Okay, Ma,” they said in unison, but went on playing in silence, the snap of the cards like the ticking of a clock.
Joe had three fours in his hand and a run of three spades, and his extra cards totaled fifteen, so he needed only one low card to complete his hand, but at that point Finn declared “Gin!”
“Show me.”
Finn laid out his cards. He had twos, fives, and a run of jack, queen, king, and ace.
“No!” Joe said. “You told me ace is never high.”
“I never told you that.”
“Cheater!”
“Brat!”
Katherine knocked her wooden spoon twice against the side of the pot and whirled around, the spoon nonetheless dripping a few gray-brown spots on the floor.
“Do you think I have time for your bickering?” she asked. “Don’t you apes realize your pa is going to be home any minute?”
She made a point of straightening her apron and pinching her cheeks. She’d been married to Pa for twelve years, and she still pinched her cheeks for him. She was there, waiting for him, every single night, no exception. If he was five minutes late, she worried something had happened to him. If he was five minutes early, it was the same. This, Joe had always thought, was what a wife did. And Faye too. It was what Faye had done for Finn—even when they were first married; even when the kids were babies; even when his beat kept him out till all hours.
But Nora was not Faye, though they both made him worry. Joe worried that Nora might fly away, and he worried that, in Finn’s absence, Faye might weigh him down.
* * *
—
Joe felt that full weight on an October morning when Faye left a message with the tower director to call her as soon as possible. Joe moved slowly through the tunnel from Tower A to the concourse, dread about Finn making it hard for him to swallow.
When Faye picked up the phone, he could tell she was frightened.
“Finn’s fine,” she said, before Joe could ask, and he exhaled. “It’s Mike. He wants to enlist.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I said he wants to enlist.”
“Well, you’ve got to tell him he can’t,” Joe said.
“Gee, Joey, I never thought of that.”
“Sorry.”
“But I swear, Joey, he’s going to do it if you don’t talk to him,” she said.
Joe cursed inwardly. He realized that his teeth were set so tightly that his jaw ached.
“Want me to come out this afternoon?” he asked.
“No, I’m on the line this week.” For the past few months, Faye had been making ninety cents an hour working part time at the watch factory in Woodside.
They agreed on a Sunday visit, and when Joe hung up, he went to look for Nora. The servicemen’s lounge was a muddle of uniforms: sailors in blue and white, soldiers in khaki and brown, marines in olive, and Travelers Aid girls in light-blue smocks. But Nora—as she had in the choir—stood out. She was bending over a sailor who was sacked out in one of the armchairs. With a gentle, nurselike smile, she pinned a card to his jacket lapel. A few yards farther on, she placed a reassuring hand on the arm of a soldier who seemed frozen before one of the bookshelves. They talked briefly, and Nora pointed him toward another shelf. Despite all Joe’s worries, he couldn’t help feeling proud. Nora was kind. She was confident. She was doing her part. And she loved him.
* * *
—
When Joe got to Queens on Sunday, a speechless Faye offered no greeting, merely pointing to the kitchen. Walking in, Joe could see through the screen of the back door that Mike was standing in the tiny backyard, his skinny arms crossed against his just-broadening chest. The expression on his face was basically identical to the one he’d had as a crabby baby.
“What are you doing out here?” Joe asked him.
“Ma said she didn’t want to look at my face.”
The screen door hissed shut behind Joe. It was a cloudy day, and the sky was the color of paste.
“You are fifteen years old,” Joe said.
“Almost sixteen.”
“Fine. Almost sixteen. That’s old enough to know that you can’t leave your ma and sister without a man around the house. Not to mention school. You’ve got to finish school.”
“Pete Sullivan already shipped out last month.”
“Pete Sullivan doesn’t have a father in the service.”
“That’s only because Pete Sullivan’s old man isn’t as brave as Pa!”
Joe sighed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Get it off your chest.”
Joe listened as Mike plunged into the speech he had obviously been preparing for months. What the Japs had done. What the Jerries were doing. The shame of sitting on his duff when Uncle Sam needed him. Joe had heard it all before. There was barely a trainman under forty who hadn’t bitched about having to stay behind. Back on the Fourth of July, the Central had had the nerve to hang an enormous service flag—a blue star on a field of white—in honor of the employees who’d enlisted. This was salt in the wounds of every railman who’d followed orders and bought the line about being too essential to serve.
“And don’t tell me it’s wrong to fake my age,” Mike was saying. “Because I know Pa had to have lied to get in, and if he could do it, I should be able to do it too.”
The sun moved out from behind a cloud. Several bees flew over the fence and left quickly, having found no place to work. Around the sides of the yard, where Joe’s mother had long ago tended a small but vibrant garden of black-eyed Susans, peonies, and wisteria, there were only the remnants of dead vines, twisted like dusty cables in what once had been soil and was now just dirt.
“Have you gotten a letter from your pa lately?” Joe asked Mike.
“Just at the beginning. He writes to Ma. And it’s always gooey sweet stuff.”
“Well, he wrote this to me,” Joe said, removing an airmail letter from his shirt pocket. “I don’t know if he’d want you to read it, but here it is.”
He handed Mike the most recent letter he’d gotten from Finn.
Dear Meatball:
Yes, I know I never called you Meatball before, but here everyone gets nicknames. There’s Noodle and Timber and Legs and Crab and Dubble Bubble and Snickers. Come to think on it, a lot of them are food names.
There’s not much I can tell you about where I am or what I’m doing. I’ll just say it’s hard work and Uncle Sam needs us to be doing it. I know you’re wondering if I killed anyone. I haven’t. But Snickers did, a few weeks back, and so it’s hard to call him Snickers anymore.
At night, he gets buggy. Doesn’t matter where we are or what we’ve done that d
ay. You always know he’s going to scream out in his sleep, if he sleeps. A couple times I heard him crying. This guy’s almost seven feet tall. Curses and carries on. A total cut-up when we started. Now he’s got blood on his hands.
Actually, I saw the guy he killed. Not just blood. Blood and guts.
It isn’t anything like I thought it would be. But then I guess, like Ma always said, “War isn’t a game.”
Well, that’s all for now. I’m not sure you and I have ever been apart long enough for me to write you any kind of letter. Hope this one’s OK. Give my two girls a kiss and a hug from me. And make sure Mike keeps busy. And don’t think I forgot. Tell Nora hi from me too—that is, if she hasn’t disappeared again.
Your brother,
Pvt. Finnegan Damian Reynolds
Mike folded the letter and handed it back to Joe.
“Who’s Nora?” he asked.
Joe shook his head. “That’s all you got from this?”
“Well, no. But who’s Nora?”
“Nora is none of your business,” Joe said, just as Faye stepped out into the yard. She blinked in the sunlight. She was wearing a bright-pink shirt and dungarees, and the freckles on her fair arms seemed to be darkening before Joe’s eyes. Joe didn’t know if she’d heard Mike say Nora’s name, but if she had, it obviously wasn’t her chief concern.
“Has your uncle explained the facts of life to you?” Faye asked Mike.
Mike crossed his arms again, sullen. He nodded and walked to the back door.
Faye put a hand around his upper arm, and her voice got husky as she said, “Mike-tyke. Don’t you understand? I wouldn’t know how to get by without you.”
Mike glared at his mother from under his bowed head and threw open the door.
Time After Time Page 20
