Alice, herself in coveralls, squinted up at Joe. “Ma told us we’re going to have to use the smelly stuff,” she said.
Joe laughed and patted her head. Her short blond hair was already warm from the sun. “That’s right.”
“But then how do the flowers end up smelling nice?”
“They just do, peewee,” Joe said.
Mike, wearing dungarees, was perched on an ancient iron bench whose sunburst back had once been white but was now brown and red with rust. He held up the instruction book. “Anyway, nitwit,” he said, “we’re not planting flowers. You can’t eat flowers.”
“Don’t call your sister nitwit,” Joe and Faye said in unison. Their eyes met, connected by instinct—and by Finn.
For the first hour all four of them worked in near silence, alternately bending over to yank up what was left of the dusty roots and vines, then throwing them into a pile in the middle of the yard. Joe was enjoying the feeling of the sun on his head and neck. He wondered, as he had many times before meeting Nora, what it would be like to work outside—as a railman on a country line, say. In a small town, he could work in the fresh air, moving levers that were aboveground—for trains that came every three or four hours, not three or four to a minute—and he’d smell the steel and take the time to chat with the men unloading the freight. Having worked all these years in the famous towers of Grand Central, Joe would have the reputation to get a job anywhere. But maybe a small town would be too slow. Or maybe he wouldn’t even work with trains. Maybe he’d be some kind of guide or scout in a place where nothing would be man-made except his clothes and the tools in his hands.
The sun climbed higher, and it got hot enough that he took off his shirt and worked in his undershirt.
“Jeez, Joey, your shoulders are broad,” Faye said, a remark so intimate and out of place that it made both Joe and Mike stop working and look up at her. Uncharacteristically embarrassed, she went inside, put the kitchen radio on the window ledge, and turned it around so the speaker faced the yard. She dialed up the volume on a station with musical-theater tunes. A few minutes later, standing at the screen door, she called above the music: “Who wants lemonade?”
No one helped Joe spread the compost, but Mike stepped up to shovel the fresh soil on top of it, and then Alice, a serious expression on her face, followed her older brother around the U-shaped bed, holding her nose with one hand and using the other to pat down the soil with a trowel.
By the time they were ready for the actual planting, it was already two in the afternoon, and everyone was ravenous.
In the kitchen they took turns washing their hands. Faye made them tuna sandwiches with her signature touch of cut-up pickles.
“Let’s see those muscles,” Joe said to Mike when they’d sat at the table.
“What?”
“Flex those arms.”
Mike grinned and flexed his arm muscles, which bumped up like round apricots from his pink freckled skin.
“All right, then,” Joe said. “You’ll be doing the raking, and Alice and your ma will plant.”
“And what will you be doing, Uncle Joe?” Alice asked.
“I’ll be watching you,” he said, “just sitting in the sun.”
* * *
—
They were finished by five and let Alice do the watering. It was what she’d been looking forward to all day, but she seemed disappointed when it was done. She stared at the darkened patches of soil as if expecting carrots, potatoes, and peas to appear at any moment.
“Give it time, peewee,” Joe said.
By now the day had cooled, and Joe put his shirt back on.
Faye had brought out a hammer and nails and now pulled a heavy piece of paper from the seed box.
“Mike,” she said, “let’s go around front, and you put up the sign.”
Joe could tell that his nephew was pleased. They all walked around to the front of the house to watch Mike proudly nail the government-issued sign to a fence post.
FOOD FOR FREEDOM
Our family will grow a Victory Garden. Realizing the
importance of reserve food supplies, we will
produce and conserve food for home use.
It wasn’t until the kids went inside that Faye, probably just too tired to fight it anymore, let her worry show.
“Do you think we’d know anything?” she asked Joe as they stood by the front door.
“Sure we would,” Joe said. “You know. The mail just gets tied up. We’ll probably get a month’s worth of letters all on one day.”
“I wish that day had been last week.”
“I know.”
Faye lit a cigarette and exhaled. “Are you worried? I mean, I know you’re worried. But how worried are you?”
“You can’t measure worry,” Joe said.
“I just—” Faye took another puff of her cigarette. “I just don’t know.”
“Stay busy,” Joe said.
“I just don’t know,” Faye said. “I keep thinking—”
“Don’t.”
Faye sighed. “But anyway, thank you for today.” She said it without irony or teasing. Joe wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her quite so incapable of either.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he said.
“You really lifted their spirits today,” Faye told him.
“It was nothing.”
“You’re good to me too,” she said, and Joe again sensed the need in her, but also the exhaustion—not only from the day’s work, but from the months of worry.
The sun lit up her hair, and for a shocking, illicit moment he wanted to touch it.
He kissed her on the forehead, but after that, as usual, she kissed him on the mouth. He felt, for the first time, the pull not just of attraction—that was easy to fight down—but the threat of something deeper, almost magnetic, as if Queens, if he wasn’t careful, would draw him back into its orbit, and away from Nora’s.
* * *
—
He found her in the servicemen’s lounge, which was relatively quiet. She was drawing in an armchair, and she looked up, distracted, when she saw him.
“You look sunburned,” she said.
“It was hot out there.”
“How was Faye?”
“Worried about Finn but faking it.”
“And the kids?”
“Well, we planted the garden. They were good. Pretty good, anyway.”
Nora looked back at her sketchpad and started shading in one of the cornices she had drawn.
“How much do the kids know about me?” she asked.
“Mike saw your name in a letter, that’s all.”
“And Faye? What does she think, that you’re just this lonely guy who’s never gotten a girl?”
“She thinks I’m in love with some girl in the city named Nora,” Joe said, “and that I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You told her you’re in love?”
Joe nodded.
“That’s quite a coincidence,” Nora said, finally looking up. “I happen to be in love myself.”
* * *
—
A letter from Finn came the next day, and before Joe had read the first line, no matter what, underlined twice, jumped out at him.
Dear Squashface:
Here’s all I can tell you. We started out rough and green, and the Panzers ate us alive. We lost a lot of men, dead, wounded, walked away. I didn’t walk away but I caught shrapnel in my right ankle and my left knee. PLEASE don’t tell Faye. This is the realest no matter what of all. Ever.
She doesn’t need to know about this. I healed up pretty good, and so they let me go out again.
It’s weird but the hardest parts are when you’re not fighting. Don’t get m
e wrong. You piss your pants when the shelling starts. But at least you know what you’re supposed to be doing. Anyway, I’m OK now.
You know I can’t tell you much more than that, or it’ll just be censored. But I can say I thought that being on the force in Queens meant I’d seen the bravest of the brave. Not to knock any of the guys back home. But these guys I’m with. They give courage a whole new ring.
I know this much. I’ll never be sorry I came. You don’t want to be born, live, and die in one place, like you leave just one dot on a map. I’ve seen the ocean and some hills and some towns and the desert. A lot of desert. Look up Tunis and Bizerte. Have you heard our theme song?
Dirty Gertie from Bizerte
Mattress cover for a shirty
Put a mouse trap up her skirty
Made her boyfriends quite alerty.
Come to think of it, that’s another thing Faye could probably do without seeing.
Sending you love and prayers for now,
Your brother,
Finn
PS How’s that girl of yours? Still hanging around HA HA
* * *
—
“That’s quite a ditty,” Nora said that night, after he’d shown her the letter.
“Yeah, I know. But he’s just trying to sound tough.”
“Like brother, like brother,” Nora said. “That ‘one dot on a map,’ though.”
“What about it?”
“That got to you, didn’t it?”
Joe was silent, folding up the letter.
They were sitting on the couch, and Nora moved a bit closer to him.
“Joe,” she said softly.
“Sure,” he answered at last. “But getting shot? Watching your buddies die? That’s not how I want to see the world.”
“How do you want to see it?”
Nora knew the real answer: Joe wanted to see it freely, happily, fiercely. And she knew he wouldn’t say that, because to say it would mean reminding them both that he couldn’t see the world and keep her safe at the same time.
“Someday” was all he said.
Nora waited another moment and then, with a flawless instinct for what could soothe him, she said: “Bizerte. Let’s find out where that is.”
As if giving him the present all over again, she handed him his atlas, and he took it from her eagerly. Running his fingers over the Bible-thin pages, he found the city on the map of North Africa, a true dot on a map, specifically a map of Tunisia. Tunis was south of Bizerte. Joe put circles around the cities, drew a line between them, and figured Finn’s next letter might give him a new location and allow him to draw a new line.
7
MANHATTANHENGE
SUNSET
1943
It turned out that there were no vacancies in the Forty-first Street apartment building, but even as Joe and Nora continued to comb the want ads, they made frequent pilgrimages to the spot. The war rolled and sparked beneath everything, like the trains. But it was a stellar spring. There was very little rain, and there were lots of cool breezes and the kind of light that seems so much more special than that of any other season, light that’s emerged from darkness. On this Saturday evening, the last weekend in May, Joe and Nora were heading out of the terminal for a walk when they saw a crowd surging up the marble stairs to the front entrance.
“What’s the fuss?” Nora asked.
“Don’t know,” Joe said, trying to see over the people.
“Maybe some movie star?” Nora asked.
“Maybe,” Joe said. “Wanna see?”
They made their way up the staircase and found the source of the excitement: five fancy horses, with jaunty open carriages behind them and the word Saks emblazoned on their doors.
For a moment Nora was utterly confused, thrown back in time to the teens and twenties, when carriage rides were not a tourist novelty but a frequent means of transport. Feeling nostalgic, she walked straight up to the first horse in line. His mane and tail were braided with ribbons that matched the colors of the cart.
“May I?” she asked the driver. He was perched up on the seat, riding crop in hand and stovepipe hat on his head.
“Be my guest, miss,” he said.
Joe stepped up behind Nora, intrigued as he watched her confidently show her hand to one of the horse’s blinkered eyes and begin to stroke the bottom of its nose.
“How do you know how to do that?” Joe asked.
“I learned to ride when I was little,” she said distractedly.
Nora slowly moved her hand from the horse’s nose to its jaw and then its neck. With a little shudder of pleasure, the horse turned its head away from her, exposing more of its neck to her hand.
“Did you ever go riding, Joe?” she asked, dreamily petting the horse.
“Oh, sure,” Joe said. “On all those family vacations we took out west.”
“Sorry,” Nora said.
“That’s okay. In Queens the horses mainly pulled things, like fire wagons and wood and scrap.”
“A lot better use for a horse than having its hair braided,” the carriage driver said just as a gangly blonde in a WAAC uniform waved to him and approached with two shorter companions.
“It goes right to Saks?” the tall one asked.
“Right up to the door,” said the driver.
“And you bring us back?” she asked while the other women looked on, excited.
“We do,” the driver said. “Might not be me, but we’ve got crews coming and going.”
“How much?”
“Free for anyone in uniform.”
“That’s it. Hop in, gals,” the woman said.
As the driver helped them into the carriage, Nora looked on enviously.
The driver clucked and touched the horse’s back with the crop. Nora started to follow along.
“Don’t even think about it,” Joe said.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” she asked, still following.
“Slow down,” Joe warned. “Not too far.”
“I know,” she answered testily.
Out on Vanderbilt Avenue, they turned left and came upon another small crowd, all looking in one direction as if they were listening to a speaker. There was no soapbox, though, and no speech. Only a bunch of regular people in light spring clothes, talking among themselves, checking their watches, and facing west. Right, Joe thought. Manhattanhenge sunset. It always drew more of a crowd than the sunrise did. You didn’t have to get out at dawn in the freezing cold to see it.
Nora had never seen a Manhattanhenge sunset. She had only spent one spring in the terminal before now. Joe was amazed that he had been so caught up in their lives that he hadn’t been thinking about it, but May 29 was a New York summer solstice, half a year after Nora’s winter sunrise.
She stopped, spellbound, looking west toward New Jersey as a second Saks horse and carriage trotted on. The path down Forty-third Street was as holy and straight as a church aisle. Buildings framed the distant sky, pale yellow with a creamy line of clouds on top and a gaudy streak of neon yellow along the horizon.
“Looks like a slice of lemon meringue pie,” Nora said, and Joe laughed.
“Well, this is Manhattanhenge sunset,” he said.
“And look at all these people,” she said.
“Yeah, a lot more than when you come, because then it’s sunrise in winter, and it’s pitch-black and bone cold.”
With the other onlookers, Joe and Nora watched in wonder as a bright red sun slowly appeared from behind the most distant building on the left. A few seconds later, it sent forth two beams of bright red light that reached like elegant fingers around the building’s corner. Next, on the opposite side of the street, more red light shimmered off the windows and streetlamps. Standing behind her, Joe locked his arms around Nora
, feeling her warmth, sensing her excitement.
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” he whispered to her.
The crowd around them buzzed and chattered.
“It’s a blessing,” one woman declared.
“A blessing?” a man asked.
“It’s a sign from God.”
“It’s just astronomy,” the man told her.
“Well, who do you think made the stars?”
Gradually, over several exuberant moments, the sun made its progress toward the center of Forty-third Street. As it did, Nora unwrapped Joe’s arms as if she were removing a shawl, and then she stepped forward.
At first Joe didn’t notice. Like everyone else in that small congregation, he was spellbound as the sun gradually claimed its place on the altar of the city’s horizon. But just before it filled the entire space—dead center—between the buildings, Nora let out a cry and lunged forward.
“Nora!” Joe shouted.
She dropped to the ground a few yards ahead of him and doubled up on her side in pain.
Like a soldier looking for a sniper, he spun around to find the perpetrator: the sun, the blazing light of the Manhattanhenge sun.
“Ollie,” she said, her eyes shut tight.
Joe was terrified. Ollie?
He dragged Nora out of the crowd—springing backward, away from the sun and into the shade on the sidewalk, his hands under her armpits, no time for anything more gallant.
“Ollie,” Nora repeated.
Even before Joe had touched her, he’d felt the heat coming from her. This was no fever, no natural heat. This was like machine heat: searing, explosive, dangerous. Nora’s cheeks looked as if they’d been painted scarlet. Her eyes were still squeezed shut.
Time After Time Page 25
