“Mr. Fox,” Joe said.
“Artie.”
“Artie, I’m not here to make trouble. I’m just worried about her.”
“You don’t need to worry about her,” he said, with an emphasis on the last word.
Artie struck the match, lit his cigar, and smiled behind the leaping flame.
Joe had never needed to be the smartest guy in the room, but he was damned if he was going to let someone make him feel stupid. “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Did Nora ever live here?”
Artie tried to draw a first puff from the cigar, pah-pahing until the tip glowed orange. “She grew up here,” he said. “I never met her, but I bought the place from her mother. Her, I met. Elsie Lansing.” He gestured around the room. “Most of this was her stuff. Not exactly my style, but the woman was in a hurry. And anyway, my wife liked it.” Artie puffed on his cigar again. “Ex-wife,” he added.
“Sorry.”
Artie shrugged.
Joe asked, “And where is Mrs. Lansing now?”
“Connecticut,” Artie said. “I called her a few times to tell her what I’d heard. That people had seen the daughter.”
“And?”
“She didn’t want to hear it. Cold as an Eskimo’s nuts.”
“So, what, Nora had a crack-up or something? She obviously thinks this is still her home. She wrote this phone number down for me.”
Joe took out the ticket stub, which was already smudged and slightly worn. Artie put his cigar in an ashtray, leaned over, and looked at the ticket. “Yeah. About that,” he said. “Notice anything strange about the number?”
Joe shook his head.
“Read it to me,” Artie said.
Joe read “P-L-A-4-9-8-8.”
“P-L-A,” Artie said. He lifted the telephone from the side table and showed it, face-front, to Joe, so he could see the number printed in the middle of the dial.
“Now read that,” Artie said.
“P-L-2-4-9-8-8.”
“P-L-2,” Artie said.
“I don’t understand,” Joe said.
“Remember? Before the thirties, the phone numbers used to start with three letters?”
Joe nodded slowly. “Not two.”
“That’s right.”
“They changed the third letters to numbers when the city needed more phone lines.”
“Exactly,” Artie said. “No one would have written her telephone number that way after 1929.”
“You’re saying she gave me the wrong number?”
“I’m saying she gave you the right number—but for the wrong decade.”
Joe merely stared back at Artie.
“So now,” Artie said, “it’s time for that drink.”
He put the phone down, took three steps toward a large oak console, and opened a door to reveal a miniature bar. He reached for a bottle of bourbon, filled two glasses, and handed one to Joe.
“Look, none of this makes a damn bit of sense,” Artie said. “I mean, none of it. You’re confused? I’m confused. When other people tell me about her, they’re confused. Drink.”
Joe hesitated a moment, then tossed back the bourbon. It was smooth, not at all like the Old Crow he sometimes had with his father or Finn.
“When have other people seen her?” Joe asked.
“First week of December,” Artie said, sitting back down. “Whenever she comes, it’s the first week of December. People see her, and then she disappears. Last year, she called here herself. Or anyway, someone pretending to be her. I hung up on her before I could stop myself. Wish I hadn’t done that.”
A chill jabbed at Joe’s back.
“And how do you—what do you—”
“What do I do about it?” Artie asked. “I drink to the first week of December.” He held up his glass in a vague toast, then took a long sip. “Do you know what happened that week in 1925?”
Joe knew all too well.
“There was a big crash at Grand Central,” Artie said. “A subway accident. Lots of casualties.”
“I was there,” Joe said softly. He would never forget that day or its impact: the chaos, the panic, the smoke, the smells—and the way that it had changed him.
“You’re still not getting it,” Artie said.
“What?” Joe asked impatiently. “What am I not getting?”
“Nora died in that crash. She’s been dead for thirteen years.”
6
SWIFTER, HIGHER,
STRONGER
1924
Nora didn’t know where she was.
She had the map that the hotel clerk had given her, but she must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. She had been walking for more than half an hour, and each street had led to a smaller one, the way tree trunks lead to branches, then twigs. I’m on a twig, she thought. Je suis sur un…But who knew the French word for it? Je suis sur un twig? Usually she had no trouble finding her way. But this was Paris, not New York, and she had arrived only the day before, and she was still a little unsteady from nearly a week on board the ship. Now she couldn’t find her way back to any of the broad, open avenues, the ones where she’d seen the Métro signs on the way from Le Havre to her hotel.
She was wearing a new green-and-white-plaid dress with green shoes and a white floppy hat, and she felt wonderfully stylish, despite her fatigue. It was only ten in the morning, but it was July, and even in the shade of the narrow streets, Nora could feel the stubbornness of the summer heat, the kind of heat that lurks between fevers.
A man with grayish cheeks and a white stubbly beard approached her.
“Pardon, mademoiselle,” he said.
“Oui?”
“Vous êtes perdue?”
“No, I’m not lost,” she said, as if the man had insulted her. “Non,” she said. “Je sais où je suis.”
The man waved his hand as if pushing aside a cloud of smoke. “Bon,” he said, walking off. “Ça va.”
Nora folded her too-conspicuous map and decided to trust her instincts. It was a summer morning in Paris. How bad would it be to be lost?
* * *
—
She was so glad to be on her own. Back at the hotel, she had left a note on Margaret’s night table and tiptoed past her. She wanted to let Margaret sleep, but she also didn’t want company on this first venture out. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Margaret, but she’d always believed she would fall in love with Paris when she finally saw it in person, and Nora thought it old-fashioned to need a chaperone, whether for meeting a man or a city.
Now she walked the sleepy streets, wondering where everyone was, until finally she started to hear horns honking, people shouting, and whistles blowing. Eventually, by trial and error, she found herself borne along with an eager crowd, back to a loud, vivid boulevard. All over the buildings and streetlamps, she could see Olympics posters: three men standing proudly before billowing blue, white, and red French flags, their pale torsos thrust out like doves’ breasts and their arms raised high in salute below the bold capital letters:
PARIS—1924
Nora was now part of the group bobbing toward the Métro, then down the steps and onto the packed, hot platform, where visitors were vying for better positions as their hats collided and they held their purses close. An older woman on shipboard had warned her that there had been some sort of riot between Frenchmen and Italians at a boxing match, and once inside the Métro car, Nora could sense the tribal tension among the riders, their loud voices and languages crossing in the air like unseen swords. She found this tension less menacing than thrilling. She listened to the arguments, not saying a word even when a man took off his cap and—in Spanish or Italian, she wasn’t sure which—stood up to offer her his seat. She merely nodded her thanks and sat, trying to ignore the annoyed looks of the women who’d been passed over.
“What are you, then, a duchess?” one of them asked in an Irish accent.
Nora pretended not to understand. As long as she didn’t speak, she figured, she was free to be anyone here; she could have come from anywhere. On the event programs, in magazines, and in newspaper ads, she had seen the Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius—“Swifter, Higher, Stronger.” She read it as a personal mandate.
* * *
—
The Olympic swimming pool had been built on the outskirts of Paris, the last stop on the Métro. The streets around it were nearly as crowded as the train had been, with people carrying small Olympic or national flags, clutching their tickets, glancing at their guidebooks, and trying to find their way around or between the people in front of them.
Inside the stadium, Nora managed to get a ticket, although her seat was high up in the stands. Above her, the sky was perfectly blue. Below her, the huge pool gleamed like a square-cut sapphire, with the timers and photographers inset around it like other gems, their white straw hats brilliant in the sun. How would it feel, Nora wondered as she watched the swimmers putting on their bathing caps and taking off their robes, to parade around the side of a pool with bare shoulders, bare legs, and a thousand people watching you? Even the American swimmers—who had presumably grown up wearing the same heavy wool bathing skirts and black tights that Nora had—seemed perfectly natural about it, maybe even a little bit proud.
In addition to the dress she was wearing, Nora had purchased two short flapper dresses at Saks Fifth Avenue the day before she sailed, and seeing the swimmers strutting, she couldn’t wait to wear her new clothes.
“Which one do you fancy?” a red-cheeked, chubby young man to Nora’s left asked his friend.
“I’ll take the I-tie,” the friend said, and Nora understood him to mean the girl with the Italian flag sewn onto the front of her swimsuit.
“Nah, Hugh, you’re blind! You’re blind! Look at Sweden over there.”
“Ohhhh,” Hugh said, as if the Swedish swimmer had been delivered onto his lap to stroke his temples and twirl his hair. “Yeah, look at the diddies on that one. ’Course she floats.”
They laughed loudly enough that a few people turned. Nora gave them the same look her mother would have given one of the servants if he’d dropped a silver tray.
“Shh, mate,” the friend said, as if Nora couldn’t hear him.
But Hugh didn’t want to be quiet. “Guess you think they should be more covered up,” he said to Nora. “Old-fashion-like.”
Nora summoned her mother’s frost. “Actually,” she said, “if they were totally naked, they’d swim even faster.” Then she turned away from the two of them, delighting in their shock. Every once in a while, she had to admit, it was fine to be Elsie Lansing’s daughter. Elsie knew her power. By example, by conflict, or by both, she had taught Nora to know hers.
“À vos marques,” an announcer said, and with the rest of the crowd Nora leaned forward to watch the first five of the marvelous women line up at the edge of the pool.
“Prêt,” the announcer said, and the women crouched into dive positions.
“Partez!” he said, and the splashes came up from the water as the cheers came up from the crowd.
* * *
—
Nora stayed through the four heats and the semifinals of the women’s 100-meter freestyle, cheering the Americans, who placed every time. The diving heats were next, but it was after one o’clock by then, and Nora suddenly felt unsteady. It was hot, and she hadn’t eaten, and she could still feel the lilt of the ocean.
“So nice to have met you,” she said drily as she slid past the two red-faced men.
Up the aisle and out the entry she went, then down staircase after staircase, which did nothing to steady her. Back on the ground floor, Nora heard the cheers from the arena sounding even louder, and she looked back with momentary regret.
At the exit, a bald, damp-looking man who smelled horribly of sweat held the door for her, then handed her a postcard of the arena.
“Merci,” she said, and kept walking as she looked down at the card.
Citius, Altius, Fortius, it read. Just as she smiled, she felt a strong hand clutching her shoulder.
“Pardon,” the bald man said.
“Oui?”
He gestured excitedly toward the postcard and spoke very fast, his words tumbling out and around her, as unpleasant as his smell. She tried to hand the postcard back.
“Non, non!” he cried. “Non!” and he pointed repeatedly at her purse.
“They do this,” a starchy voice said, and there, quite unexpectedly, was a thin, tidily dressed older man with a sharp nose and blue-gray eyes, smoothly pressing a colorful bill into the man’s hand. “Don’t let it bother you,” he said to Nora. “They’re totally mad for their tips. You’ll see. We foreigners get used to it.”
He took off his straw hat and ran a hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, which was parted down the middle but wiry and wild despite what seemed to be a good deal of brilliantine. Nora guessed he was in his mid-forties.
“Thank you,” she said, nodding in the direction of the bald man, who was already taking aim at another departing spectator.
“Don’t mention it,” the man said. His English accent was as crisp as his white shirt. He peered down at her. “You look a little parched,” he said.
“I am, actually,” Nora confessed.
“Then let me buy you something cold to drink.”
She looked at him warily.
“Nothing with alcohol, I assure you,” he said.
“I’d love something cold to drink,” Nora said, and as the man walked off toward the nearest concession stand, she leaned gratefully against the stadium wall, taking off her hat to fan herself. There were the posters again, those three men with their chests bare, their thighs just covered by foliage, and their insignificant athletes’ shorts painted flat and beige, an afterthought. A few yards away, several young women about Nora’s age pointed at one of the posters, giggled, and turned around, apparently embarrassed. Nora would never be that kind of girl.
She stared at the poster and its many copies, which ribboned the stadium wall. Three mostly naked men, then six, then nine, then twelve—as far as she could see.
“You don’t know one of them, do you?” the British man said, winking as he handed her a club-shaped green bottle with a label that said Perrier.
“I used to be married to that one,” Nora declared without missing a beat. She pointed to the man on the right. “His name is Eugene.”
The man smiled. “How extraordinary,” he said. “My name is Eugene.”
* * *
—
His real name was Oliver Halliday, and he ran a small art gallery on the Left Bank. Ollie would be the first friend Nora made in Paris; her guide and advisor and eventually, once she’d run out of funds and begged him for a job, her employer. In her position as his assistant, Nora would get to spend three days a week prowling smaller galleries or the stalls of Montmartre, engaged in a constant treasure hunt for undiscovered talent—and sneaking away whenever she could, to do her own work.
Nora had taken drawing and painting classes all through high school and college; at her graduation from Barnard, she had even won the senior prize for achievement in the fine arts. Now, inspired by the art and the city around her, she drew or painted every day. At lunchtime, she would choose a café, order a croque-monsieur and nurse a lemonade or a café au lait while she studied and sketched the customers. Relentlessly Nora tried to capture the bustle and idleness, the roughness and restraint, of the people around her.
In Notre-Dame, she sketched the leaves and scrolls on the capitals of the stone columns, the endless rows of towering organ pipes, the praying hands on the statue of Saint Joan. No matter the size of her purse, she always kept a
sketchpad and a pencil tucked somewhere inside it. She allowed herself to dream that someday people might see what she’d drawn.
She and Margaret shared a small attic flat with red toile bedspreads and a copper-framed sky. At night, Nora would lie in bed and look up at the skylight, where, on clear nights, she could see subtle layers of darkness behind and around the stars. She would watch for the only constellations that, as a city girl, she had managed to learn: the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Leo. Enclosed by the skylight’s copper frame, the stars were a painting that changed above her every night. Sometimes she could even see wisps of chimney smoke darting by like spirits.
7
I MET THIS GIRL
1938
For days Joe looked for ways to explain away what Artie had said about Nora. At one point, he even wondered if he was being scammed in some way. Joe knew about all sorts of con games. Especially during the desperate thirties, you couldn’t work in Grand Central without seeing them come and go. But neither Nora nor Artie had asked him for a dime, and in any case, Artie was the one with the money.
For three long weeks, ever since their talk, Joe had spent almost all his free nights playing pool or poker at the Y. He drank a bit more than usual, and he talked less. He told no one about Nora—not about meeting her, and not about what Artie had said she was. And yet there, carved over the fireplace, the YMCA motto had seemed haunting in itself: Spirit, Mind, Body.
Joe was the son of two Irish Catholics. He had grown up keeping most things to himself. He’d been told that whatever secrets he had should be revealed only in the confessional, but as a child, he’d feared that small wooden closet as soon as he’d found out what it was. He had imagined that there was a chute inside the booth, and that if Father Gregory didn’t like what you said, he could pull a handle, the floor would open, and down you would slide into hell.
As a result, Joe had saved up most of his doubts and sins to tell his big brother, Finn. With Finn, the risk was of ridicule, not damnation. Finn was older than Joe by two years, still taller by nearly two inches, and had always been the one to start a scuffle or pull a prank. But after school, they had sat at the kitchen table, eating sponge cake or last night’s leftovers, playing gin rummy, arguing about whose turn it was to do what chores, and letting their secrets travel back and forth along the same worn brother-to-brother path. At this table, with its white porcelain top and its faded pattern of red diamonds and squares, Finn had told Joe that he was making extra pocket money selling pinched cigarettes, and Joe had told Finn about his passionate longing for Mrs. Belknap, his eighth-grade history teacher.
Time After Time Page 4