Grand Central: Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion

by Karen White

  She thought of Miss Turnberry. Of her sister Paulina, and her bandy-legged (for he must be bandy-legged, surely, as well as dull) sailor from Nevada.

  Marjorie closed her eyes and made a decision. She took another step. Forward or backward? Only time would tell.

  Meanwhile, down in the Kissing Room, no director had yelled “Cut!” An endless montage of reunions was played out, with each muffled announcement of an arriving train. Tearful and happy, successful and tense, alternately boring and overly dramatic. Actors and players all, some more natural than others.

  And another girl arrived in her best outfit, wearing too much makeup that didn’t disguise how young and unformed she was; clutching a well-worn business card inscribed with words Marjorie could recite by heart, along with any number of soliloquies and acceptance speeches and love scenes from Shakespeare:

  Abe Holmes, Talent Scout. MGM Studios, Culver City, California.

  I’ll Be Seeing You

  SARAH JIO

  For the great-uncles I never knew, Terrence and Lawrence Ruff—both war heroes who lost their lives in World War II.

  And to my dear grandmother, Antoinette Mitchell, who mourned the loss of her dear brothers every day thereafter.

  I told Sam not to come to the station. We said our good-byes last night on Bleecker Street. He’d kissed my cheek softly and begged me to stay, begged me not to make the journey. Why couldn’t I start a life with him? he asked. Here. Now. The war’s over, he said. It’s a new world. We aren’t the people we used to be. No one is. And that’s the truth. In some ways, the two years I’d spent working as a nurse in New York City had felt like a lifetime. I’d come to the city as a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old. I was scared and uncertain. Now, I hardly recognize that girl. I don’t want to go home to Seattle, and yet, last night I looked up at Sam on the sidewalk—hair slightly disheveled, big brown Clark Gable eyes fixed on me—and I knew I had to face my past.

  After all, I made a promise.

  Sam stands beside me at the station. His hand is on my waist, and he pulls me toward him. I think of the way he held me last night, cradled me in his arms. I think of what he said about us spending the rest of our lives together, how he’d make me his wife, how we’d start a family. Of course, I want that, too. But my hands feel sweaty, and my knees faint. Would Sam still feel the same if he knew the truth?

  A rogue tear spills onto my cheek. Sam whisks it away tenderly with his wrist and I take a deep breath. “Don’t you have one of the handkerchiefs I embroidered for you?”

  He places his hand on his forehead. “I keep forgetting to put them in my pocket. Guess I’m not in the habit quite yet.” He tucks a wisp of my hair behind my ear. “Darling, please don’t cry. You’ll sort things out in Seattle and come back. And we’ll be married and we’ll start our life together.”

  “Yes,” I say, forcing a smile.

  “What you need is rest,” he says. “You look pale. You’ve been working so hard. The train ride will be good for you. You can sleep.”

  I had been working hard, yes. With all the men returning home, there’d been loads of patients to tend to at the clinic, and paperwork. I hate paperwork. Yesterday, I couldn’t hold down my lunch. Three of the other girls had been out with the flu. I guess that’s the price you pay for living in such cramped quarters in the city.

  “I’ll rest,” I say, reassuring Sam. I don’t tell him that my mind will likely keep me awake, that I’ll be thinking about what I should do, or not do. That our future hinges on this cross-country journey of mine.

  “I’ll wait for you,” he says, searching my eyes. I love him, I do. And for a split second, I consider tearing my ticket in half and starting life over, right here. I’d tell him everything, and he’d forgive me. He’d understand. We’d handle it together. But then I remember the promise I’d made. And it all comes rushing back. And I know I can’t give myself to him entirely until I do what I need to do.

  An attractive woman about my age saunters by. She wears a chic black-and-white-checked suit that reveals the soft curves of her breasts. She approaches the information desk. “Excuse me, sir,” she says in a shy voice, cheeks flushed. “Please, can you tell me how to get to the Kissing Room?”

  I smile to myself, realizing that her journey will be a lot different from the lonely one I have ahead of me. And then I think of the first time I kissed Sam, at a speakeasy in Brooklyn. Against my better judgment, I’d been talked into going out with a group of girls from the clinic. My friend Elaine had insisted I wear her red dress with fire-engine red lipstick to match. Sam was at the bar when I walked into the club. Like a beacon of light in the fog, his face shone bright through the dim, smoky room. He smiled; I smiled back. Then he stood up and walked toward me. We talked all night.

  I close my eyes tightly as I feel Sam’s hand on my chin, turning me toward him. “I don’t know what you think you must face in Seattle,” he says, bringing each of my hands to his lips and kissing them lightly, “but please, don’t let it cloud your love for me.”

  I nod, wiping away another tear. It isn’t fair. None of this is fair. Sam. Handsome, kind, good—he’d been relegated to a desk job during the war because of a childhood leg injury that prevented him from being able to run. But that didn’t stop him from sweeping me off my feet, even though, given my past, I’d tried very hard not to let him. And now he’d given me his heart, and I’d all but taken it.

  “Don’t cry, baby,” he whispers in my ear. “I have something that will cheer you up.” He reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a blue box from Tiffany and Co., then places it in my hands. “Go on,” he says, grinning. “Open it.”

  I untie the ribbon with trembling hands and lift the lid of the box. Through tears, I see a silver chain. A necklace. I lift it into my hands, and a diamond ring dangles from it. It sparkles under the lights in the station, and I gasp. “Sam, what is this? You’re not . . .”

  His smile is cautious, tentative. He lowers onto one knee. “Rose, I know you told me you weren’t ready to get engaged, but I couldn’t send you across the country without you knowing how I feel about you, really. I want to be with you, forever. I want to marry you, and have a family with you. You know I want that with all my heart.”

  I’m too choked up to say anything. His words are beautiful and real, and they’re piercing my heart in a way I could have never expected.

  “You don’t have to give me an answer,” he says, standing up. “Just wear the necklace, and think of me. When you come back, you can decide whether you want to put the ring on your finger or not.” He smiles, a nervous, boyish smile. “But I really hope you do.”

  He’s so handsome standing beside me. I reach up and caress his cheek. A tear streams down my own, and I long for a handkerchief to mop up the mascara that must now stain my eyelids. “Thank you,” I say. “I wish I could give you an answer right now but I—”

  He places his finger to my lips and shakes his head. “I don’t need you to tell me now. Go. Do what you need to do. But come back to me. Please come back to me.” He searches my eyes again. “Because, Rose, I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t.”

  I hear a whistle in the distance, the shuffle of footsteps. There’s hugging, kissing, commotion all around. I reach for my bag. “I better go,” I say.

  Sam kisses me once more. And I close my eyes, and know the life we’d have together would be beautiful. I can see it play out like a movie in my mind: There’d be laughter and love and so much passion. And yet, there would also be a shadow hanging over us . . .

  “Good-bye, my darling,” he says as I take a step closer to the train. Another whistle sounds, and I know I must board or risk being left at the station.

  “Good-bye, Sam,” I say. Walking away from him is like fighting gravity.

  “Will you wear it?” he asks suddenly. “The necklace?”

  I smile and nod as I step onto t
he platform. “Of course I will.”

  I hand my ticket to the conductor and walk inside the train. The sleeping car, where I have a tiny compartment with a bed, is several cars behind. Right now I just want to sit, so I tuck my bag beside me and sink into a seat lined with scratchy red fabric. I look out the window and there Sam stands. I smile at him through the glass and clutch the necklace in my hand.

  If only he knew that I’m already wearing someone else’s ring around my neck.

  Three years prior

  Seattle

  “Don’t look now, but someone has eyes for you,” my best friend, Elsa, says.

  It’s late. The sun has set, and Mama will be worried if I don’t come home soon. But Seattle is so gorgeous in the month of July, temperate in a way that you can leave your cardigan at home and never worry about catching a chill. There’s music playing on the lawn in the distance. Jazz, the kind I love to dance to. I like the way my feet feel dangling over the dock into the cool, glacial water of Lake Washington.

  “Oh stop,” I say. “No one is looking at me. Besides, there isn’t anyone here I’d even want to look at. If I meet another boy from Seattle Prep, I think I may be sick.”

  Elsa and I had been invited to a party thrown by our much wealthier friend, Mary, who lives in the Windermere neighborhood, where people reside behind fancy iron gates and employ cooks and housekeepers and dog walkers and other sorts of staff who buzz around you and meet your every need. To her credit, Mary doesn’t behave like a spoiled child; she never has. It’s why we’re friends, I suppose. She’s turning eighteen, and her parents have thrown her a lavish party, with dancing and music, ice sculptures, and champagne passed around by waiters in white suits.

  Mary is not beautiful. She has a plain face, and her thin brown hair is a constant target of her mother’s anxiety. (I once overheard Mary’s mother complain that she’d never find a boyfriend if she didn’t change the way she wore her hair.) But what she lacks in beauty she makes up for in generosity and kindness. She saw to it that Anna, a poor friend of Elsa’s, was able to buy new dresses for school last year; books, too. Mary didn’t swoop in and write a check in a showy way; she’d simply whispered to the shopkeeper to put the charges on her account, then smiled at Anna and discreetly told her not to worry.

  “Hello, you two,” Mary chirps to us. She’s wearing a navy dress that looks a little too big for her thin frame. I imagine her mother, already tipsy in her low-cut designer dress, disapproved of her daughter’s plain wardrobe selection. “Having fun?”

  “It’s a divine party,” Elsa says.

  Mary looks to her right and smiles to herself, then turns back to us. “I see you’ve met Louis and his friends.”

  Elsa smiles. “No, we haven’t,” she says. “But I was just telling Rose that she has an admirer.”

  I turn around, finally, and catch a glimpse of the men on the lawn. There are five, maybe six. They must have come to the party late, because I hadn’t seen them when we arrived. All are in uniform. They’re tall, clean-cut. One smiles in our direction, but his eyes are entirely fixed on me. He’s a few years older, at least. He looks restless, wise.

  “That’s Louis,” Mary whispers. “Isn’t he a dreamboat?”

  “Well, yes,” I say honestly, a little dumbfounded. “How do you know him?”

  “Our fathers are in banking together,” she says. “I grew up with him.”

  “Are you . . . I mean, do you—?”

  “Am I in love with him?” She giggles. “Rose, he’s like a brother to me.”

  I smile.

  “Come on, let me introduce you,” Mary says, suddenly. “He’s here with his friends before shipping off to Europe. He’s a part of the Second Armored Division.”

  My eyes widen with interest. “You mean, he’s going to war?” Boys from school had already shipped off, left for Europe. I guess I’d somehow accepted that. But now? I feel a flutter in my heart, like when you spot a beautiful butterfly in your garden and you know that, in three seconds, it will fly away.

  Mary nods, and I think I see a flash of emotion in her eyes, but it vanishes. “Of course he’s going to war, silly,” she says. “He doesn’t wear the uniform for kicks. Come on, let me introduce you. Trust me, you’re going to like him.”

  “Louis,” she says. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is my friend, Rose.”

  He takes a step toward us. He’s even taller up close, and I feel a little quivery in his presence. “Hello,” he says, looking directly at me. I take his hand in mine. It’s strong, solid, and also tender. I let go reluctantly.

  Elsa’s talking to one of the other men, but I don’t hear what she’s saying. I barely notice Mary standing there, either. The periphery is all a blur.

  “Some night,” he says.

  I smile. “Yeah.”

  A waiter approaches with a tray of champagne flutes, and Louis selects two. “Cheers,” he says, handing me a glass.

  “I really don’t drink,” I say, smiling. “And my mother will murder me if she detects alcohol on my breath when I get home tonight.”

  He smiles, producing a pack of peppermint gum. “Try this,” he says.

  I nod and tuck the stick of gum into my purse.

  Louis grins again. “Surely she wouldn’t fault you for having a drink with a soldier who’s about to go to war?”

  I answer with a smile and then take a long sip from one of the flutes, letting the pink bubbles fizz in my mouth.

  “Walk with me,” he says. “It’s a beautiful night.”

  I don’t see Mary. She must have weaved her way back to the lawn, where people are dancing. Elsa’s still talking to one of the other soldiers. She grins at me, an encouraging “go walking with him” grin.

  “Okay,” I say. “But I really shouldn’t go far. I have to be home soon.”

  Louis takes my hand, and as we pass the buffet table, he swipes a bottle of champagne and tucks it, nose down, in his back pocket.

  “You’re something,” I say with a laugh.

  “Can you blame a guy for wanting to drink champagne with a beautiful woman before shipping out to the unknown?”

  My heart seizes for a moment, for this stranger, for his uncertain future. And I smile. “So you’re saying it’s my civic duty, then?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, then,” I say, holding out my empty champagne glass, “when you put it in those terms.”

  He pops the cork and pours more bubbly into my glass.

  “Where to?” Louis asks. We’re standing on a little vista of the lawn that looks out to the lake. “Want to walk along the beach?”

  “Alright,” I say, as he takes my hand again. We wend our way along the gravel path, which deposits us onto a sandy beach. Soft gray waves splash onto the sandy shore, near the charred remnants of a campfire someone had enjoyed earlier.

  “Here,” Louis says, pointing to a large piece of driftwood wedged into the rocks. “Let’s sit.”

  I take a seat beside him and spread my yellow dress over my legs. “So you grew up with Mary?”

  “Yes,” Louis says. “I spent many happy days of my childhood right here, swimming along this shore. Mary’s like a sister to me.”

  Louis tops off my glass. I think about setting it down, but instead I take another sip.

  “You mean, you never thought of her as anything more?”

  Louis shakes his head. “I mean, when I was thirteen or fourteen, maybe the thought crossed my mind. And there was this one time when we were on her dad’s boat.” He laughs to himself. “But no, I could never love her that way.”

  “Well,” I say. I feel light, airy; the champagne has gone to my head. “And what if she loves you?”

  Louis shakes his head. There’s a seriousness to his expression, a look of warning, as though I may have crossed a line, a boundary.
“No, I would never lead her on,” he says. “I respect her too much to do that. Mary and I have been friends our whole lives, and I intend for our friendship to remain the same.”

  “Well, of course it will,” I say.

  His smile returns. “And you? Are you seeing anyone?”

  I shake my head.

  “Why not? You’re beautiful.”

  “Lots of my friends are getting married,” I say with a sigh. “I don’t know, I guess I haven’t met the right person. Don’t they say you know when you meet the person you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with?”

  He grins. “Like a bell goes off in your head or something?”

  Just then, the dinner bell sounds on the lawn above us. Mary’s parents have used it at parties before, but now it sends goose bumps down my spine. Our eyes meet, and I quickly look away.

  “So you believe in love at first sight, then?” Louis asks.

  “I don’t know what I believe,” I say. “I guess mostly I’m just afraid of making the wrong choice. That or being left behind.”

  “Left behind?”

  “Remember in school when kids would line up to form teams? Well, I was always the last to be chosen. I was small. I couldn’t throw a ball to save my life. But it hurt. It hurt to be the last chosen, or not chosen at all.”

  Louis smiles. “I can’t imagine anyone not choosing you.”

  I feel his gaze on my cheek, but I don’t let my eyes meet his.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

  “And where do you suggest we go?”

  “I’ll take you dancing, downtown. At the Cabana Club.”

  I imagine the way he’d lead me out to the dance floor. Just the two of us, on the eve of the unknown. His unknown, and mine, too. But we’d dance. I’d let him hold me close. My heart races, and then I remember Mama. “But it’s getting late,” I say.

  “Do it for me,” he says. “On my last night. Just let me dance with you.”