Pennsylvania Station

by Patrick E Horrigan

  Just then a passerby interrupted: “What’s all this about?”

  “Don’t you want to save this magnificent building?” Seymour shouted.

  “What building?” came the brusque reply, and he continued on his way.

  Seymour spluttered something about how people can’t even see Penn Station anymore, but Deborah took hold of his hand to calm him down.

  “It’s because the Manhattan street grid doesn’t encourage people to look at their surroundings,” Alan offered.

  “It’s also because Penn Station is so rundown,” Jordan said. “Just look how black and filthy it is! You ignore a building when it gets like this. Most people have no memory of how Penn Station used to look. It was pink, for God’s sake, when it opened in 1910.”

  Now Frederick caught a glimpse of Philip Johnson crossing the picket line and coming this way.

  “Philip dear!” Deborah cooed and began comparing notes with him on who was there, who was who, who’d gone AWOL (“Have you seen Jane?” “Jacobs? Yes, she’s…over there somewhere”). After a couple of minutes, “Do you mind if I cut in?” Seymour said, then he and Philip exchanged words about the press conference prior to the protest.

  Deborah sidled up to Frederick. “You’ve met Philip before, haven’t you? Weren’t you at that gathering at the Glass House two, three years ago?”

  Frederick didn’t like to be reminded—he’d been invited to a salon at Johnson’s Connecticut compound, Philip made what Frederick took to be an advance, Frederick demurred (well-preserved for his age, he remembered thinking, but not my type, and anyway aren’t he and David Warner together?), Philip snubbed him the rest of the evening, and he was never invited to Connecticut again.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it,” Philip was saying. “Someone’s got to buy Penn Station, someone committed to saving it. Or it needs to be adapted to some other use like the Jefferson Courthouse.”

  “Which was just voted one of the ugliest buildings in the city,” Seymour said.

  “In 1880, it was voted one of the five most beautiful buildings in the whole United States,” Philip countered. “Tastes change. What’s beautiful today looks ugly tomorrow and vice versa.” But he had to return to a friend on the other side of the picket line (“Call you tomorrow,” Deborah said with a peck on his cheek), and the conversation carried on among the men as he made a quick retreat.

  “Philip’s a delight,” Deborah said to Frederick, “when you can catch him. We should all get together sometime.”

  He checked his watch.

  “Must you go?”

  Now the men were laughing at a lewd joke. “But let’s not get carried away,” Seymour could be heard to say, “historic preservation isn’t about effeminate men mooning over some antique chifforobe once owned by Aunt Esmerelda.”

  “Speaking of effeminate men, who’s the latest Mrs. Philip Johnson?”

  “Tell me about your affair in Pennsylvania,” Deborah said, as if to distract him. “Remind me where your family lives?”

  “Reading.” But she needn’t have tried—his attention was fatally focused on what the men were saying.

  “I’m not familiar with it.”

  (“You’d better watch your back, Al.”)

  “It’s one of the railroads on the Monopoly board.”

  “I always called it ‘reeding’!”

  “It’s pronounced ‘redding.’ Everyone makes that mistake.”

  (“He has a penchant for younger men.”)

  “And what’s the occasion?”

  A family reunion, he said, in honor of his father’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  “I rarely hear you talk about your parents. Your mother—she’s still living, isn’t she?”

  (“You could end up the next Mrs. Johnson!”)

  A siren pierced the air as an ambulance raced down the avenue, all other traffic pulling aside to let it pass, and for several seconds Frederick saw but couldn’t hear Alan, Jordan, and Seymour laughing together in dumbshow.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said your mother is still living, isn’t she?”

  Yes, he said.

  (“I’m not that ambitious!” Alan said. More comradely laughter.)

  “And how are they, your parents?”

  “I haven’t seen them in quite a while. I only know what my sister tells me. She lives in Reading and sees them often, naturally.” (Now the men were talking about whether the automobile industry would put the railroads out of business.) “My father is sharp as ever. In amazing health for someone his age. Walks several miles a day in every kind of weather.”

  “And your mother?”

  The picket line had grown steadily since Frederick’s arrival, and now he and Deborah were separated from Seymour and the others by a group of newly arrived protesters. Frederick welcomed the added distance from the men.

  “She’s seventy-seven and slipping. Physically she’s very frail. My sister tells me she gets more confused by the day.”

  “Listen, I forget what I did this morning!”

  Frederick was feeling sharply uncomfortable. “I better run. Do me a favor, give my regards to Seymour and the others?”

  “Of course, but—I want to make you a proposition.”

  He was already heading towards the entrance.

  “Come for dinner next week!”

  The words echoed in his ear as he entered the long corridor of shops leading to the waiting room. A black Cadillac DeVille sat sphinx-like on a platform as people streamed around it in both directions. Protected by a low railing, it looked like an exhibit in the dinosaur room of the Museum of Natural History—except, Frederick thought, it’s the way of the future. He noticed John Ryan’s Men’s Shop was gone. Half the businesses in the gallery, in fact, were shuttered.

  Crossing the ornate vestibule at the end of the gallery, he nearly had his eyes put out by the mushroom of fluorescent light emanating from the ticket counter in front of him. He paused atop the staircase leading down into the massive waiting room and noticed, for the first time since it was installed a few years ago, how the modern ticket counter actually had the effect of decapitating the lofty space above it. Though high as the nave of Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the waiting room of Penn Station now couldn’t be seen above the level of the low-slung ticket counter, so blinding was its light and so distracting its effect. The design of the counter was better suited, he thought, to the TWA terminal at Idlewild—supersonic, sawtoothed, suspended from fans of cables bolted to the Corinthian columns that flanked what had been the passage from the waiting room to the train concourse. Gracefully sweeping movement, it was clear, was what McKim’s original design provided for, but movement was precisely what the space-age ticket counter now impeded as bottlenecks of commuters accumulated on either side of it.

  Every other modern “convenience” added to the waiting room, Frederick now realized, looked similarly intrusive: large aluminum-framed, backlit poster boxes advertising jewelry, cigars, international travel destinations, steak dinners; plastic vitrines containing hats and shoes; stark black-and-white telephone booths; gimcrack stainless-steel kiosks and shops; come-hither cigarette and soft-drink machines—all of it giving a 42nd Street tawdriness to what had been one of the great uplifting public spaces in New York. Whatever Penn Station was, whatever it was intended to be, he thought as he watched throngs of people shoving their way to the concourse to find their gates—but the concourse, he knew, would only be more of the same—crazed crowds of people rushing in every direction amidst billboards and booths and shops and candy counters and temporary lockers and not nearly enough benches to sit upon—however noble Penn Station appeared on Charles McKim’s drafting board, the reality, after fifty-some-odd years, he had to admit, was indisputably corrupt.

  “Dixie Squire, with stops in Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and points south, ready on Track 15.”

  Anyway, he said to himself, descending the stairs, no mat
ter what happens at home with my family, it’ll be a relief to escape New York for the weekend.

  And it was just as well Curt had no telephone. Sketchy little hustler, he thought. I simply won’t show up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Frederick’s father was seated in his favorite wing chair, opening gifts. His throne, Frederick thought, wondering why his mother never had a chair of her own in the living room. He glanced into the dining room and saw her sitting with the aunts at the table on one of those uncomfortable, straight-backed Chippendales.

  “And what have we here? A framed photograph of the Banks family! Thank you, Emily dear. And Bob and Tim and Kelly.”

  This was met with enthusiasm and passed from hand to hand around the room, the aunts remarking how grown-up Kelly had become and how it would be her time soon to marry now that her older brother was engaged (“taken care of” was the expression they used).

  Frederick stood near the back of the group gathered around his father, which suited him fine because it afforded the chance to take in the entire downstairs without being the object of anyone’s attention. The furniture mostly dated from the 1920s, he noted, the last time his parents spent any money on decoration. The lace doilies on the armrests and side tables were yellow with age, though everything was neatly maintained. Hanging on the wall above the dining table was a large copy, luridly colorful, of Leonardo’s Last Supper, made years ago by Fred Sr., a “Sunday painter,” as they said in the family. On the upright piano, a myriad of photos of himself and Marge from infancy through young adulthood. The largest was a studio portrait taken in 1918 when he was three, dressed in a sailor suit, hugging a balloon. He looked like a porcelain doll, like one of Mama’s ceramic Hummel figures, he thought, glancing at the china cabinet full of knickknacks.

  A burst of laughter came from the staircase where his cousins’ kids, all somewhere in their mid-twenties, sat like a flock of pigeons, giggling over Tim’s wedding and what kind of dress the bride-to-be should wear. Thinking they seemed awfully young, and then trying to place them in his mind next to Curt, Frederick realized all over again the absurdity of having made a date with the boy. Even the youngest of his cousins, Philip McDevitt, who had to be at least thirty by now (Aunt Sara always called him her “Depression baby” because he came along at “just the worst moment possible,” and she and Uncle George would laugh—Frederick envied the easy jocularity of the McDevitts as opposed to the Baileys, who were a quieter, more keep-to-themselves kind of people—in that sense he was a Bailey through and through)—even Philip belonged to a different generation altogether. “Depression baby”? Frederick had been born in the middle of the Great War! He bit the flesh of his thumb until he drew blood.

  “And this is from…what is this?” Frederick’s heart swelled. His father tore open the card. When he saw that it was from his son, his smile contracted ever so slightly (probably no one but Frederick noticed) and he merely nodded in his direction. He opened the package. “It’s a tie,” he said, holding it up for inspection. “Thank you.” Frederick came forward, bent over his father and opened his arms for an embrace, but the old man, remaining seated, abruptly thrust out his right hand for a handshake.

  “Unique gift idea, Fred,” Chuck Parisi said, barely keeping a straight face.

  “Man can always use a tie” Fred Sr. said, though Frederick couldn’t tell where at that moment his sympathies lay.

  “No, I don’t think they have the same values we do.”

  Frederick’s cousins Steve and Bill Galen, instead of watching Uncle Fritz open presents, were arguing over the Russians.

  “I’m talking about human values. You really mean to say they don’t have the same concern for life, the same instinct for self-preservation?”

  “It’s not the same as a concern for life.”

  “You think the Russians would rather see the whole world destroyed than negotiate with the American gov—”

  “Yes! Their system is evil. They’re bent on dominating the world, and if that means destroying half the world to do it, they’ll do it. All this liberal egghead nonsense about human feelings and community…”

  Seeing her brothers heading for their usual standoff, Emily got up from the dining table, where she’d been telling the aunts about Tim’s wedding, all the while keeping her eyes and ears on “the boys,” as she persisted in calling her now-middle-aged younger brothers, and entered the parlor.

  “Can’t we just have a nice visit for once? Does it always have to turn into a contest?”

  “Aw, c’mon, Em, we’re just talking.”

  “No one wants to hear about the Russians on Uncle Fritz’s birthday.”

  “I don’t mind hearing about the Russians on my birthday!” Fred Sr. said, the tie still in his hands, and everyone roared. The conversation proceeded in spite of Emily’s attempts to make peace. The Russians led to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which in turn led to Pope John and the Second Vatican Council. The recurring theme was that things in this country were steadily getting worse.

  “What’ll be next?” Fred Sr. was baiting his nephew Bill, the only man in the family willing to stand up for the liberal point of view. “Lady priests?”

  Bill’s wife Liz asked, “Would it be so bad if someday we had women priests?”

  Shouts of laughter and outrage filled the room.

  Thinking Emily was right—whenever Steve and Bill got together, everyone, male and female, young and old, got conscripted into their fraternal dueling match, and then there was no point in trying to engage in adult conversation, but in less than forty-eight hours, he reminded himself as he entered the dining room and saw the chair Emily had vacated, I’ll be back in New York (he wasn’t sure how to break off the engagement with Curt—it would be rude not to show up; on the other hand, he simply couldn’t go through with it)—Frederick went to his mother and sat beside her. The aunts were talking about people they knew from fifty years ago. Clare sat staring vaguely at the centerpiece of flowers on the table.

  “How are you, Mama?”

  “I don’t know who they’re talking about.”

  “It’s okay, once they get going about who married whom and his second cousin on his mother’s side once removed, the rest of us don’t have a prayer.” He smiled.

  “It’s so good to have you home,” she said. “How long can you stay?”

  He’d gone over this with her upon his arrival Thursday night, and then again several times yesterday and earlier today. “Remember I told you, I must go back to New York tomorrow.”

  “When was the last time you were home?” she asked, as if to a stranger.

  “Last summer.”

  “You should come more often.” She put her hand over his hand and squeezed it. He was surprised by the strength of her grip. Her hand was cool and dry. Her nails were badly bitten, like his own. “Do you know that I love you?”

  She’d already told him so half a dozen times today.

  “Clare, you givin’ your little boy a hard time?” Aunt Peggy asked, sensing tension. (Why did all the women in the family speak as if all the men were infants? he wondered.)

  “He loves his mother, don’t you, Freddy?”

  “Sure, Ma,” he said as she gave him a kiss.

  “How long has it been?” She looked as if she were asking it for the first time.

  “It’s been a year, Mama,” he said slowly and with emphasis.

  “It’s so good to see you. How long will you be home?”

  “Mama! You keep asking me the same questions over and over!”

  “Until tomorrow, dear,” a voice came from behind. At what point his father had entered the dining room Frederick didn’t know. “He has to go back to New York early to prepare for an important meeting on Monday.” The old man joined them at the table. “So tell us, what’s new? Haven’t really had a chance to talk to you yet.”

  Flustered, all he could say at that moment was, “I’m fine. Work is fine.”

/>   “Where do you work?” his mother asked.

  “I work at an architecture firm. In New York.”

  “You remember, Clare, he’s an architect.”

  “I work at a firm called Emerson, Root and Sons. It’s going well.”

  “They made you a partner yet?” his father asked.

  “No.”

  “Is there some normal progression where you’ll eventually become partner, or is it more merit-based?”

  Feeling an implied criticism in the question, Frederick answered, “It’s a little more complicated than that.” He tried to explain it wasn’t just about merit, but neither was there a routine procedure by which one was made partner, there were other factors that entered into it, and in any case he liked his current position because it allowed him to do one of the things he most enjoyed, which was—but every time Frederick tried to articulate a complete thought, his father was on to another question.

  “They pay you enough? …Like your co-workers? …Your boss a good man?”

  “He’s—” (“Good” was hardly the word he would have used to describe Wilbur Emerson.) “—a decent boss.”

  “How’s New York?”