But the attitude didn’t last. On a bleak, cloudy afternoon on the second-to-last day of 1938, Joe came up from Tower A to find Gus Bardello outside the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, sweeping the pavement with a heavy, splayed push broom. Like Ralston, Gus had been working at the terminal since its opening day in 1913. For years he had been an engineer’s assistant, but his health had begun to fail around the start of Prohibition, and he’d been kept on as a jack-of-all-trades—at least of all trades that didn’t require young legs or steady hands. He looked a bit like a marshmallow now: dusty, white, and soft; when he smiled, his mouth seemed to sink into the rest of his face, and his eyes nearly disappeared.
Gus barely glanced up when Joe said hello, hardly altering the rhythm of his sweeping. That was nothing personal. When you worked with a broom or mop in Grand Central, you usually looked down, not because you cared so much for the work, but because—never more than during Christmas week—you were always searching for the perfect prize: the dropped money clip or the lost diamond earring.
“Hey, Gus.”
“Hey, Young America,” Gus said.
“I’ve got to ask you a question.”
“Shoot.”
Gus stopped sweeping and knelt stiffly to pick up a scrap of paper, turning it over intently before tossing it back into the small pyramid of ticket stubs and cigarette butts he’d already created. He leaned on the broom, the tip of the handle pushing slightly into his pillowy face.
“What’s the question?” he asked Joe.
“Have you ever heard of there being a ghost in Grand Central?”
Gus smiled merrily, but fortunately he didn’t laugh. He formed a thumb and forefinger into the shape of a U and shakily wiped the corners of his mouth.
“Which ghost did you have in mind?” he said.
“Which ghost?”
“Crazy Mabel? Captain Beauregard? Or, wait, Maud S.? You have to have heard of Maud S.”
“Who is Maud S.?”
Gus reached into his coat pocket for a pack of Luckies and tapped one out. “Was,” he said. “Was. She was a horse. A famous racehorse.”
“No, Gus,” Joe said. “I was asking you about ghosts.”
Gus lit his cigarette and contentedly exhaled through enormous nostrils. Then he explained. Back in the days before they built the new terminal, William Henry Vanderbilt purchased one of the fastest racehorses in the country: a filly named Maud S. But instead of racing her, Vanderbilt hitched her to a carriage and built a stable for her, right near the train shed. So whenever he came back from any trip, Maud S. would be waiting, and he’d get the fastest ride home that could be had.
“And?” Joe asked. “Did she kick someone in the head? Or trample someone to death?”
Gus dropped his cigarette butt on the pavement, ground it out with his heel, and swept it into the pile. “Naw, naw,” he said. “It’s the horse. The ghost is the horse.”
“What?”
“Maud S. She’s a ghost horse. People hear her hoofbeats in the Vanderbilt Passage. That’s where the stables used to be.”
Joe looked at Gus and gently took the broom from him.
“What’re you doing?”
Joe led Gus indoors and laid the broom against the lobby wall. “I’m buying you a drink,” Joe said.
* * *
—
They sat at the bar called the Junction, a dive in the lower concourse more popular with workers than with visitors. Joe ordered Gus a scotch and himself a beer and sat back to listen. The ghost horse wasn’t Gus’s only story. He also told Joe about the odd sounds that came from the north wall in the men’s smoking room—the large public lounge off the main waiting room. It seemed that Captain Beauregard, a Civil War veteran, had dressed in his Confederate uniform and thrown himself in front of a train on Track 9; sometimes at night you could swear there was the sound of a train screeching to a stop, and then a lot of worried shouts. And that wasn’t all. In the catwalks that crossed the arched windows on the east wall—the passageways that looked like single windowpanes from a distance—that was where the old woman called Crazy Mabel was said to appear near dawn, shouting for someone to save her, although it was never clear from what.
Joe picked up his beer bottle, looked at it appraisingly, then swigged it high in the air. Gus took a sip of his scotch and, once again, wiped the corners of his mouth.
“Do you believe all this?” Joe asked Gus.
“What, do I believe in ghosts?”
“Yeah.”
Gus lit another cigarette and shook his head. “I don’t think God would want to make that kind of a mess.”
“Have you ever seen or heard anything yourself?” Joe asked Gus.
Gus shook his head. “Only thing I’ve heard are the stories.”
“Did you ever hear one about a young woman in a blue dress?” Joe asked.
“Sounds like a dime novel,” Gus said.
“I heard she shows up the first week of December and she doesn’t have a coat. She’s got reddish hair, sort of curly, and she wears a long blue dress, kind of like a flapper.”
“A flapper ghost?” Gus asked, amused.
“I guess,” Joe said.
“Who told you that one?”
Joe shrugged. “Don’t remember,” he said, though there was nothing, not a single thing, about Nora Lansing that he’d been able to forget.
* * *
—
Joe woke up on the first day of 1939 with a blistering hangover and his clothes still on. He tugged off the tie he’d worn to the union party, but otherwise unchanged—unshowered, unshaved—he went downstairs to have breakfast in the Y’s club room, where most of the guys seemed to be nursing their own pounding heads. The long narrow tables—usually covered in pleated white tablecloths—this morning looked as rumpled and used as the men, several of whom were either sleeping or still drunk, their heads resting heavily on their crossed forearms.
The guys spoke in single words:
“Blind.”
“Blotto.”
“Bent.”
The resolutions came next: never again; no more booze.
“No more strange women,” one of the guys said.
Joe had to smile grimly at that. Strange women. No fooling.
He put down his coffee cup, pushed back his chair, and walked off to the game room, where he settled into a worn brown leather sofa. A fire hissed in the fireplace, and he put his head back and closed his eyes, letting his fingers explore a winding crack on the side of the armrest. An old blues tune played on the radio, and it carried Joe back to December of 1925.
He had been just twenty on the day of the subway accident, still working for Damian’s friend Mr. Brennan, who ran the Lost and Found. In fact, Joe had been with Mr. Brennan on the morning of December 5, having come in early to do the regular Saturday inventory. They had both been on their way to get coffee when all the regular early-morning sounds had been drowned out by shouts and urgent calls for help. Everyone had started running. Even the ticket sellers (who’d seen it all), even the information men (who knew it all)—almost everyone in the terminal had started rushing toward the subway tracks.
The accident had occurred about six hundred yards from the platform, and there was so much thick black smoke that at first it had been hard to see the train at all. Many of the men around Joe stopped short after rushing down the stairs, but Joe followed others straight into the darkness, where only a few flashlights and one of the subway car’s dim emergency lights made navigation possible. The smell of burning insulation was putrid; the moans and cries of the victims were horrifying. Trainmen were yelling for passengers to wait until the power to the third rail was shut off, but once it had been, even the emergency lights went out, and then the true panic started. Along with the cries and shouts came the sounds of windows being smashed by passenger
s struggling to get out.
Joe hurried farther along the platform, then stopped and reached down to start pulling people up from the tracks. He took them by the elbows, the armpits, the hands—whatever he could find in the dark. Every time his eyes started to adjust, there came a fresh cloud of blinding, choking smoke. He didn’t know how long he stayed or how many people he helped to safety. For weeks afterward he barely slept, coughing from the dense smoke that had filled his lungs. But what had happened that day changed the way people saw him and the way he saw himself.
* * *
—
Eyes closed, listening to the radio now, he was grateful that he had today off. He would spend the whole of it here, at the Railroad Branch, in some ways simply a smaller version of the terminal: a self-contained world providing most of what a man could need—food, showers, barbershop, library, gym, bowling lanes, card and billiard tables. Everything except women.
By noon, Joe had sweated it out in the gym, showered and shaved in the locker room, and glanced at the sports pages. Just before lunch, he went up to the roof. Looking out at the skyline, which was gray and yellow with a coming snow, he still had December 5 on his mind, and he wondered—not for the first time—how his life would have unfolded if the accident hadn’t happened. There had been so much mayhem and terror that day, so much tragedy and grief. But it had also been the day when Joe was discovered by Steady Max Sullivan. Max, it turned out, had been standing next to Joe on the platform as they pulled people up from the tracks. Max had seen Joe’s calmness, strength, and stamina, and that very afternoon had plucked him from his job at the Lost and Found, taken him under his wing, and started training him as a leverman.
Was it possible—in any way possible—that the very day Joe thought of as the start of his real life was the day that Nora’s had ended?
* * *
—
The main branch of the New York Public Library was a mere two blocks from Grand Central, but Joe had never once been inside. There had always been a quiet rivalry between the people who worked in one great building and those who worked in the other. They crossed paths sometimes at the neighborhood bars, but the trainmen thought the librarians kept their noses in their books or up in the air. Joe had dated one once, and she’d lived up to the reputation. The few times he’d gone to pick her up, she had met him outside on the library steps, as if, like the big stone lions out front, she was there to guard the building.
What struck Joe when he walked through the doors this day was the relative barrenness of the place. Like Grand Central, it had beautiful arches, marble floors, and sweeping staircases. But at the terminal, though there was always a sense of peace, there was a sense of life as well. There were layers of noise—every place, any hour. You could always hear carts rolling, people talking, the loudspeaker sputtering, trains arriving and leaving, and underneath it all there was a distant thrum, like the sound of the ocean in the big shell Joe’s parents had brought back from their long-ago Newport honeymoon.
Here at the library, the quiet seemed flat, dead, and gray, and even in the entrance hall, where no one was reading or studying, Joe felt as if the walls themselves were telling him to be quiet. Upstairs, in a special room behind heavy wood-and-glass doors, the old newspapers were kept in huge bound volumes that were stored in huge flat drawers. A male attendant wearing prissy white gloves and looking vaguely annoyed was in charge of opening the drawers and taking out the books. Joe felt awkward being waited on, and the guy who brought him the volume for 1925 didn’t seem thrilled about the arrangement either.
There was no mention of an accident on the front page of the afternoon Times for December 5, so Joe started turning the pages, recalling how everyone had been on edge for a while, and how all that next year, the New York Central had issued safety notice after safety notice. As Joe searched for the stories in the paper, the ads brought back pleasanter memories: the licorice flavor of Black Jack gum, the tart fizz of orange soda pop, the cozy flannel of knickers. Finally, Joe reached a small item at the bottom of page eight:
TRAIN DELAYS
An accident causing numerous injuries and some fatalities on the Lexington Avenue subway line was to blame for delays throughout the borough for most of the day. Quick thinking on the part of an engineer who cut power to the third rail may have saved many lives. Read the Times’s full report, including lists of the injured, in tomorrow’s morning edition.
Eagerly, Joe turned to the next day’s paper. The article was on the front page, in the far-left column of the December 6 Times.
DOZENS DIE, 100 INJURED
IN SUBWAY ACCIDENT
Smoke, Darkness, Add to Panic
According to eyewitnesses, women desperately used lunch boxes and shoes to smash the car windows, literally flinging themselves and pulling each other through the jagged frames of glass and falling in heaps on the tracks on either side. Scores of patients were treated for cuts they admitted they had received in their wild efforts to smash their way out.
Joe’s mother used to say there were two kinds of people in life: the kind who’d walk around a brick wall and the kind who’d try to knock it down. She thought the second kind were better. Joe remembered the spark in Nora’s eyes, the energy in her step, and he wondered if she had been one of the women crashing her way through a window to get out. Had he crossed paths with her? Had he failed to help her?
Joe read that victims who couldn’t walk had been carried upstairs from the smoky tracks and laid out on the floor of the Main Concourse, which had quickly been set up as a first-aid station.
In the confusion, it was difficult to keep track of all the victims, some of whom were deemed fit enough to leave, others of whom were taken to nearby hospitals, and still others of whom waited, many still in shock, to have their injuries tended to. “It was chaos,” said one witness. “Everyone running this way and that. People bleeding. Windows smashing. Women fainting, and even some of the men were crying.”
The story didn’t give the names of the dead, but the next day’s paper included two lists: one of the known injured, the other of the known dead. Aware of his heartbeat, Joe searched both lists for the name Lansing, running his forefinger down the capital letters on the left margin of each list, finding Lackamore, Lawrence, Liberman, Ludden—until the librarian shot over and said, “Patrons may turn the pages but please do not smudge them—”
“Sorry,” Joe said.
Nora was not listed among the injured. She was not listed among the dead. Joe felt simultaneously relieved and frustrated. He closed the enormous book, noticing the librarian’s grimace at the slight creaking of the spine.
* * *
—
Joe had walked all the way to the elevators before a thought made him pivot and head back to the reading room. The attendant gave him the fish eye. “Is there something else?” the guy asked.
“I’d like to see that again,” Joe said.
“What, the same volume?”
“Yeah. The same book.” Joe said it with self-assurance, but he’d started sweating through his shirt.
He sat down as the attendant again placed the huge book before him. Joe had never liked studying. He wasn’t what you’d call a book reader. And he usually only glanced at the front-page stories before turning to the sports section of the World or the Journal. But right now he seemed to have no choice but to pore over each page of the following days’ papers, scanning for later stories about the accident. The items became shorter and placed farther back every few days, but the lists of the dead grew longer and the lists of the missing grew shorter. Nine days after the crash, in the Times’s morning edition for Monday, December 14, Joe found what he’d been looking for with hope and dread. He stood up quickly and instinctively pushed the book away, then took a breath and leaned back over. The list of dead was by now more than two dozen lines long, and roughly halfway down it, Joe read: Lansing
, Eleanora, 23 years old.
9
WHERE WERE THE
REAL STARS?
1925
It was Nora’s last night in Paris, and she wasn’t going to waste a minute of it. She had spent two whole days cleaning and packing so she would be free to enjoy herself. The drawers of her wardrobe trunk were crammed with the sketchpads she’d used up and the postcards, matchbooks, and menus she’d saved. The hangers along the top of the trunk held her fanciest dresses, though she had left out her favorite and most daring for tonight: a wine-colored satin masterpiece of shimmering sequins and beaded fringe.
Margaret had put out the word that Nora was sailing in the morning, and a host of their French and expatriate friends converged on the Caveau in the Latin Quarter. Nora’s women friends wore dazzling dresses and haircuts tidy as helmets, and her men friends sported bold neckties and wanted a turn with her on the sticky dance floor. Every time she was spun around, Nora caught sight of herself in the mirror behind the bar, which also doubled the bottles and glasses and brass coffee urns. The whole place smelled wonderfully of coffee, spilled drinks, and cigarette smoke. Sometime during the evening, Nora kissed a young man from Cincinnati whom she’d never met before. And there was an artist named Jean-Paul who spoke not a word of English, but who led her from the dance floor to sit at one of the small tables. His hands, blue and gray with pastel dust, reached for Nora’s across the table, a gesture more intimate than a kiss, though a kiss soon followed.
Time After Time Page 6