Time After Time

by Lisa Grunwald

  Even the ladies’ lounge had an aura of neglect. Had it been like this last time? Maybe she hadn’t noticed. There were abandoned coffee cups with lipstick half-kisses on the rims, used napkins, and old magazines and newspapers on the round wooden tables. Around these tables, and against the paneled walls, women slept in velvet chairs, adrift on an ocean of beat-up shopping bags.

  Nora chose the nearest empty rocking chair and picked up a discarded New York Times: December 4, 1934. On the front page she read about a man who had killed himself by inhaling illuminating gas. “He had been out of a job,” she read, “since shortly after the stock market crash.” So that explained all the vagrants and the sad, stifling air.

  In the washroom Nora found no soap or fresh towels—but she did find herself in the mirror again. Her hair still fell against her neck in soft curls. Her lips were still a vivid red. She thought about her college friends, now in their thirties. She wondered if the market crash had hurt them, but also how their faces had changed. She tried not to think about Elsie’s at all. The horror on her mother’s face—like the blood on Ollie’s—was simply too terrible to recall.

  Back in the concourse, Nora stopped at a water fountain, with its elegant marble frame of carved acorns and oak leaves. The sink of the fountain was stopped up and filled with brackish water. Nearby was a woman with two little boys. Nora guessed them to be about four and eight, their faces pale as putty. The smaller of the two had his arms crossed inside a jacket that was at least two sizes too big for him. The larger boy had apparently wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “Can you help me?” the woman asked Nora.

  Nora almost laughed: Who was she to help anyone? She looked at the woman more closely. She had on a dirty green wool coat that was missing two of its four front buttons. Even through the coat, Nora could smell the woman’s body odor, and maybe a whiff of urine.

  “What’s your name?” Nora asked.

  “Isabel,” she said tentatively, as if it had been a long time since anyone had treated her with anything like civility. “Morton. Isabel Morton. Is there any way you can help me?”

  Nora reached into her dress pocket but realized as she withdrew the folded bills that these were the same five-hundred-franc notes she’d grabbed for tips when she and Ollie got off the Paris. Damn, she thought. She still had no American money.

  Together, she and Isabel stared down at the bills.

  “Is that play money?” the older boy asked.

  Nora shook her head. “Come with me,” she said.

  “Come where?” Isabel asked her.

  “Just follow me,” Nora said.

  Isabel started to fuss with her children’s hair but quickly gave up, instead gathering her bags and distributing them to the boys.

  “Would you mind?” she asked Nora, handing her a blanket to carry—a mustard-colored wool blanket with what had once been a silk border now hanging from it like a large, hideous necklace.

  Resolutely, Nora took the blanket and led the way down the ramp to the lower level. She was first in line when the teller opened the window, and she had him change her francs for what came to about eighty dollars. She gave half to Isabel and watched the woman’s face change from haggard and beaten to hopeful and beautiful. “Will you still have enough?” she asked Nora.

  “I’ll be fine,” Nora said. “We’ll go to my house, and they can help you and the boys get fixed up.” Nora gathered up the blanket.

  Isabel looked at Nora disbelievingly. “Oh, I wish I could find a way to thank you—”

  “Eleanora?”

  Nora snapped her head around, thinking for just a moment that it might be Elsie who’d said her name. Instead she realized with a start that she was only yards away from Margaret’s mother, Ruth Ingram, one of the porcelain women who throughout Nora’s teen years had come to play bridge with Elsie.

  “Mrs. Ingram!” Nora said.

  Now she watched the color drain from Mrs. Ingram’s face, her lips faltering as she tried to speak.

  “Eleanora?” she finally repeated, this time in a whisper.

  Nora started forward eagerly, and just as quickly, Mrs. Ingram turned and ran, actually ran, in the opposite direction, slipping a little in her haste to exit the terminal. Nora dropped Isabel’s blanket and called out the Turtle Bay address to her. Racing after Mrs. Ingram, she grabbed the heavy brass-and-glass door and pulled it open. Frigid wind was sucked in all around her, but she pushed through it and saw the older woman rushing off toward the corner.

  “Mrs. Ingram!” Nora shouted. “Mrs. Ingram!”

  Nora kept running, though the sidewalk was icy. And then, nothing again. Nothing.

  6

  LIFE

  1936

  Two years later, the terminal seemed even darker, despite the beam of light in which Nora once again found herself. The walls of the Main Concourse, which had always been warm and beige, were now so brown with grime that they looked as if they’d been singed. Many of the people Nora saw seemed even more lost and frightened than Isabel and her children had.

  It was now December of 1936. Eleven years had passed since the accident, and still, when Nora looked at herself in the washroom mirror, she found a twenty-three-year-old woman with wavy copper hair, dark-red lipstick, and a 1920s day dress that was splotchy and gray with soot. She also found the same five hundred francs in her dress pocket that somehow reappeared each time she returned. What a boon this might be, Nora thought as she counted the bills—if only she could figure out some way the money could help her. Failing that, she figured it might help someone else—perhaps another Isabel, she thought, with another couple of children.

  On the lower level, just past the bank where she once again had her francs changed to dollars, she saw a tall, thin man nearly blending into the column against which he was leaning. There was a handwritten sign hanging from a frayed string around his neck:

  WILL WORK FOR FOOD

  He had one greasy hand on the top of the sign and the other outstretched, palm up.

  “Miss! Miss!” the man said. “Spare some change?”

  Nora remembered the bald man at the stadium in Paris who’d tried to make her buy postcards from him, and she pressed several dollars into this man’s hand, then walked on and furtively doled out dollars to a few other people. She felt as if she had landed in some artist’s crazy, dark painting. As if Max Beckmann or Picasso or Braque had splintered the beauty of this place into a black-and-gray nightmare.

  It was past noon when she made her way back to the ladies’ lounge. Around the tables, abandoned velvet rocking chairs were tipped in haphazard positions, as if they themselves were deep in conversation. Discarded newspapers were spread out on the tables. A large magazine, nearly the size of a desk blotter, caught her eye. The cover image was of a young cadet, but it was the title of the magazine that drew Nora’s attention—four large white capital letters nearly filling a bright red rectangle: LIFE.

  Nora had to smile at that. A magazine about life.

  Was this life, after all? If she was alive, then why did she keep disappearing? If she was dead, then where were all the other dead people? Surely she couldn’t be the only person who had died in this great building. Even during the accident, she knew, there had been other fatalities. Ollie, for a starter. Where was Ollie? Then, too, if she was dead, why did she feel so completely and restlessly alive?

  Leaning back in her chair, Nora closed her eyes. The accident had been in 1925. She’d been back in ’29, ’31, ’34. More than a decade had passed, but she’d really lived only a handful of days. She had never stayed longer than a few hours. She had never had coffee or a piece of cake. She had never exchanged more than a few words with anyone. What might happen if she stayed? Could this be a life?

  She picked up the magazine and started to turn the pages. She had never seen a magazine that was mostly photogr
aphs. Image by image, she tried for the first time to understand the world to which she’d been returned. There were pictures of a President Roosevelt whose first name was Franklin, not Theodore; a party to protest a gas tax; a human brain during an operation. In a story about a talent agent, twenty models were posed on a high-diving platform, wearing alternating white and black bathing suits, slim and straight as piano keys.

  A middle-aged woman with badly dyed hair the color of salmon entered the lounge, glanced over at Nora, then grunted and looked down, twisting a thread around a loose button. Another woman, with runs in her stockings, was wearing a hat that must once have been jaunty but now looked as if it were part of her hair. Eventually a third woman came in, and Nora couldn’t look away. This one was all eyes, cheekbones, and perfect posture. Her hair was mostly brown, but a patch of her scalp was showing. She was wearing a fur coat that, like her hair, had evidently thinned disastrously. Nora couldn’t stop staring. Give the woman an appointment with a hairdresser, some makeup, and a new coat, and she could have been Elsie.

  Two questions struck Nora in quick succession. The first: What if her mother had been hit by the Depression and was herself destitute and living in some broken place? The second, even worse: What if Elsie had died? Before Paris, the two of them had been so harsh with each other. And here in the terminal it had been so painful for Nora to see Elsie—and then to scare her—that Nora had concluded it would be cruel to try to get in touch with her mother again. Yet Nora felt hollowed out by the thought that she might be completely alone in the world now. She had almost accepted the notion that in order to get home she would have to build some sort of bridge. But it hadn’t occurred to her till this moment that even if she succeeded in doing so, Elsie might not be there to greet her.

  Meanwhile, she realized she was still staring at the balding woman, who shouted “What? What the hell do you want?”

  Nora shoved a five-dollar bill into the woman’s hand, then ran from the room and kept running until she reached the public telephone booths on the lower level. She closed the door of a booth and dialed home. Maybe it would be enough just to hear her mother’s voice, she thought. But nobody picked up. Nora could picture the empty living room, with the telephone ringing on the chinoiserie side table next to Elsie’s prized statue of a sleek black Egyptian cat.

  She began walking around the lower level. At a Salvation Army table near the subway entrance, a line of expressionless people waited in front of large iron kettles, and the steamy smells of chicken and vegetable soup were nearly conquering the more human and unpleasant odors of the people in line. At a bakery called Bond’s, a round woman with droopy eyes was busily selling rolls, Danish, and coffee. Commuters approached her counter, the tops of the men’s fedoras lightly dusted by snow, like alpine peaks. Once served, they hurried away looking guilty—perhaps because they could afford such treats.

  Every hour, Nora called home. After a while she chose a small table and chair against one of the walls near the phone booths. Looking around for a clock, she found at least four in view. They were perfectly synchronized, down to the second hand. While she waited, she watched the clocks and eavesdropped on the conversations around her. Someone had a cousin who’d just gotten work. Someone else had an uncle with a factory that had just closed down. Everyone seemed to be in some kind of trouble. Their predicaments formed little tents around them, even as their words spilled out.

  Still unable to get an answer at home, Nora realized that she was getting sleepy. She’d never stayed in the terminal long enough—or perhaps calmly enough—to risk falling asleep.

  Wrapped up in thoughts of Elsie, she drifted back to a morning in 1921. She remembered lying across the foot of her mother’s bed, tracing the raised chenille patterns on the Wedgwood-blue bedspread. It had been January, the morning after Nora’s debut. Enamored of every suffragist who’d finally secured the women’s vote, enthralled equally by Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Ziegfeld Girls, Nora had fought participating in this society milestone with every ounce of her budding flapper spirit. Nevertheless, Elsie Lansing had, as usual, prevailed, and so, the night before, wearing a white dress, white pearls, and a crown of tiny white roses, Nora had been escorted by Frederick, dressed in a morning suit and betraying a tender pride.

  It had been warm in the bedroom. Little flames had skittered across a log in the fireplace as Elsie carefully folded the dress, wrapped it in white tissue, and laid it in a large purple box.

  “This isn’t the last white dress you’re ever going to need,” her mother had said. Nora had rolled her eyes, the signature gesture of a generation that had no use for tradition. But a moment later, she had glanced at her mother’s dresser, where framed family photographs were staggered like stadium seats, as if the people in the pictures were all watching her expectantly.

  Too tired now to go back to the velvet chairs in the lounge, Nora rested her head on her arms and finally drifted to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  She woke to the relief of realizing that no years had passed. There had been no tug of war, no gray in-between. She had slept a normal sleep. Not much else was normal, but the sleep had strengthened her hope that she could make something of her predicament. Citius, Altius, Fortius. Swifter, Higher, Stronger.

  Determinedly, she went back to the phone booth and once again called home. This time a man with a deep voice answered.

  “May I speak with Mrs. Lansing, please?” Nora asked evenly.

  “Sorry,” the man said brusquely.

  “When do you expect her?”

  “I do not expect her,” he said, then ran through answers to questions that Nora hadn’t yet asked. “No, she doesn’t live here anymore. No, I don’t have a phone number for her. No, I haven’t seen her.”

  “Who is this?” Nora asked.

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Mrs. Lansing’s daughter.”

  There was a silence, and when the man spoke again, the rudeness was gone.

  “Eleanora?” he asked tentatively.

  “Yes!” Nora said, thrilled to be known. “This is Nora Lansing!”

  The man hung up.

  * * *

  —

  If she could break the telephone, if she could smash the glass of the booth, if she could let out one long, piercing scream—and then she thought, Well, why not? Why not scream? What would happen? People would surround her. They’d call the police. The police would ask her where she lived. She’d say she didn’t live anywhere. They’d ask to call her parents. She’d say she didn’t know where her mother was. They’d ask her what had made her scream. She’d tell them she was pretty sure she’d died in a subway accident in 1925. And at that point, even if they could get her out of this place, it would be straight to an asylum.

  As angry as she was, Nora knew one thing: If she was going to be trapped, it wasn’t going to be with people who thought she was crazy. And so far, with the possible exception of Isabel, who didn’t look all that balanced herself, Nora had met no one who seemed likely to believe her. Moving away from the phone booth, she did a quick accounting. She had walked out of the terminal the first time; had taken a cab with Elsie; had chased after Mrs. Ingram. But there were a few other things she hadn’t tried. She had never had another person walk her home. And she had never left by subway or by train. Now, squaring her shoulders, she walked past the shops and the bank and straight to the sign that said SUBWAY. Taking a breath, she continued down the stairs to the platform, the scene of the mayhem, the screams, the smoke. She stood waiting on the now calm platform beside the tiled wall, where a huge mosaic of an old-fashioned steam engine seemed to be, like Nora, out of place and time.

  I am a ghost, she thought as she stood against the mural, as far from the tracks as she could get. And yet people could see her. So, maybe not ghost, she thought as the train approached with a rattle and roar. Spirit, she th
ought gamely, more pleased with that word and its livelier implication.

  She found a seat at the back of the subway car, picked up a newspaper that someone had left, and began to read. Most of the front page was filled with stories about the British king, who had been having a love affair with a woman named Wallis Simpson. It seemed the king was so in love with this divorced American that he was planning to give up his kingdom so he could marry her.

  The subway car was filling up now, and other passengers were apparently reading the same stories.

  Edward VIII Shows No Sign of Yielding

  Nora heard riders speculating about whether the king would insist on marrying this woman or follow his cabinet’s wishes and break off the affair. No one glanced up as the train began to pull out. And if anyone had noticed Nora in the first place, all they would have seen after emerging from the tunnel under Park Avenue was a newspaper lying across the seat where she had been.

  7

  I CAN’T BELIEVE

  YOU’RE HERE!

  1939

  The next time Nora came back was the morning she first met Joe. The following year she had waited for him, they’d had dinner, and he’d tried to walk her home. And this time was the one she’d never really believed would happen: He had been waiting for her.

  Eventually, Nora would tell Joe as much as she could recall about all her visits in the twenties and thirties and her attempts to leave. For the moment, the only thing that mattered was that he was here. He was wearing the same red wool scarf she’d tied around his neck the night she’d vanished from the street. The same shiny red union pin was fixed to his lapel.