Time After Time

by Lisa Grunwald

  “You mean women were looser.”

  Joe bent over Nora, combing her hair with his fingers. “I knew all about you flapper girls.”

  “Oh, did you?”

  “Our priest said you’d all lost your way.”

  Nora laughed, unfolding her arms with a flourish. “Boy did he get that right.”

  “So, you danced, and you smoked and—”

  “I never smoked. Well, that’s not exactly true. I did try a pipe once.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “On a dare.”

  Joe laughed. “Okay, so you didn’t smoke. But you went out dancing and you drank and you cut your hair short—”

  “It used to be even shorter than this,” Nora said.

  “And you didn’t want to get married?”

  Nora sat up and looked at him quizzically. “Well, I might have,” she said. “Eventually. But I wanted to be an artist first.”

  “What kind of artist?” he asked.

  Nora pointed to the watercolor. “Like whoever did that. But much better.”

  Joe tried to imagine any of the women he’d ever known wanting to be an artist before being a wife, let alone announcing it. He shook his head.

  “Say something,” Nora said.

  “All the girls I grew up with—all the young women I know now—I think they all just want to get married and have babies.”

  “My friends and I just wanted to live our own lives.”

  Nora reached across Joe to grab the pencil and notepad that he’d used to draw Manhattanhenge the day she arrived.

  “Sit up,” she told him.

  He did so, looking wary.

  “And don’t move for just a few minutes,” she said.

  Cross-legged at the foot of the bed, still in her slip, she started to sketch Joe’s face.

  “Are you drawing me?” he asked her.

  “Shush. Hold still.”

  “I—”

  “Shush,” she said again.

  Three minutes passed in complete silence, and as Nora drew, she rediscovered the particular joy of making something out of nothing.

  “Do you realize your ears don’t match?” she asked Joe.

  “I thought you told me not to talk.”

  She laughed. “That’s all right. I’m done,” she said.

  She turned around the pad so he could see what she’d drawn.

  “It’s me!” he said, as if she’d performed a magic act.

  Nora laughed. “Who did you think it was going to be?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just— It’s so good,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know what’s good. But I know the guy I see in the mirror every morning, and this looks a whole lot like him.”

  * * *

  —

  For two days now, they had done little except devote themselves to learning each other’s bodies, preferences, and pasts. They teased each other about their differences, even as they marveled at how little those differences seemed to matter. Nora told Joe about the Art Deco show in Paris; the women artists she’d sought out while scouting for Ollie’s gallery; the pastries, nightclubs, and jazz. Joe told Nora about FDR, Japan, and Germany; about Bugs Bunny, Ritz Crackers, and Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak.

  Joe had brought their meals and drinks from shops and restaurants all over the terminal, as well as magazines for Nora to study.

  “Homework,” he’d said. “You’ve got to catch up.”

  He’d snagged a few blouses and skirts for her from the Lost and Found. Both of them understood that she would need to change her appearance in order to leave the room without looking out of place. There was not a doubt in either of their minds that their challenge was no longer for Nora to get to Turtle Bay or even to the Y: She was going to have to stay here, until or unless they could figure out a safe way for her to leave.

  She had given Joe all her French money and the traveler’s checks that had been tucked into her clutch. He’d taken them to the bank and come back with an impressive stack of cash, as well as a few essentials: toothbrush, hairbrush, comb, shampoo.

  Meanwhile, Nora had curled up with an issue of Life—the same publication she’d first seen back in 1936—and paged past stories about the war heating up in Europe, defense preparations in the U.S., and ads for liquor, stockings, playing cards, cigarettes, and new cars that were longer, lower, and sleeker than the tall black boxes of the twenties and early thirties.

  Halfway through the issue, she’d seen an ad for a clothing company:

  FOR WOMEN WHO WANT

  THAT NEW YORK LOOK

  Mrs. Donald Lofink, national defense housewife, plans a 5-dress wardrobe of New York Creations for $40.00.

  Nora had no idea what a “national defense housewife” was, but she’d studied the styles of the five dresses, noting pleated skirts, belted waists, jeweled buttons, wide collars, and bell-shaped or puffed-out sleeves. The straight, slim look of the twenties was completely out; the boyish haircuts and tight helmet hats were gone. Now the hats had slouchy flaps or bows, and the haircuts had more waves and curlier bangs. Standing before the bathroom mirror, Nora had already figured out how to tease her hair up and away from her forehead, wiggling the comb up and down to make her curls fuller. Eventually, with a pair of tweezers, she would shape her eyebrows into whispery arcs and use an apple-red lipstick to update her darker twenties pout.

  In the meantime, there was this room and this bed. Stretched out again, her head on a pillow at the foot of the bed, Nora studied Joe’s face as he studied the drawing she’d made of it. Beside him on the night table there was a Philco radio—a nifty, small wooden job with dials for the tuner and volume—and also a built-in clock. After two days and nights, Nora already knew Joe well enough to understand the language of his glance at it.

  It was 2:15, and his shift didn’t start until five.

  “There’s a game today, isn’t there?” she said. “You want to listen to a game, am I right?”

  “It’s the Giants and the Dodgers,” he said. “Uptown at the Polo Grounds.”

  “You know what I’m going to do?” Nora said. “I’m going to take a bath. Do you know how they make these bubble baths?”

  “These what?”

  “I don’t know. I saw a picture of a woman covered up to her neck in suds.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to figure that out,” Joe said.

  “Yet another mystery,” Nora said.

  She grinned and, like a ballerina, extended a slender right calf toward the side table. Clutching one knob between her big and second toes, she just managed to turn the radio on. Joe and she both laughed.

  “You have talented toes,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a gift, pal.”

  Joe watched, his arms around her. The dial started warming up, its color deepening from dark brown to yellow to nearly white as the scratch and static of sound began to fill the room.

  Nora switched to the second dial and, still with her toes, began to turn it, rolling past a burst of music and a spray of talk to find the station airing the football game.

  “I still can’t get over how small this radio is,” she said.

  The announcer’s voice came over the crowd noise and into the room, staccato and enthusiastic.

  Nora slipped out from under Joe’s embrace, kissed him, and glided into the bathroom.

  Joe leaned back on the pillows, his arms behind his head. He listened for a few minutes, as perfectly content as he could remember ever having been. He knew this could not be a real life. He understood how a real life was supposed to be. A husband, a wife, a job, a home, children. Not some accident with the sunrise. Not some magical gift of power and light. But this gift had been given, and he could hear the water running in the bathroom and hear Nora singing in a sweet, surprisingly
delicate voice.

  Joe turned up the volume slightly and lay back again to listen to the game.

  Dodgers are ready to kick off now. They just scored. Ace Parker did it. Jock Sutherland’s boys lead the Giants seven to nothing. Here’s the whistle….

  He checked the clock. It was only 2:30—still more than two hours before he had to report to Tower A. But he couldn’t remember a time when the thought of work had been less appealing. Whatever Joe usually liked about the Piano—the sense of power and order it gave him—seemed completely humdrum now. How could that feeling, how could anything, compete with the woman who was singing in the bathroom now, the woman he’d been waiting for all year and, in another sense, all his life?

  Ward Cuff takes it. Cutting up to his left and over to ten. Nice block there by Leemans. Cuff still going….

  Suddenly the sounds of the crowd disappeared, and the familiar shout of the game’s play-by-play was replaced by a lone, insistent voice:

  We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash, Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned to WOR for further developments which will be broadcast immediately as received.

  Joe sat up straight, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood up with primal urgency. Faye’s brother, Junie, was stationed at Pearl. It was Hawaii. It was America.

  In the bathroom, Nora was still singing.

  Joe could hear horns honking and people shouting in the street. Weirdly, the radio went back to broadcasting the game. Strong, young New York men were chasing each other up and down the green-gray turf, but now Americans were going to be fighting on a map instead of a football field, fighting for kills and countries instead of points and yards.

  Joe started to get dressed. Your country gets attacked by the Japanese Empire, you don’t want to be naked. You feel naked enough. He walked around to the other side of the bed and began to turn the radio dial, searching for any station that might be broadcasting more news.

  When Nora emerged from the bathroom, she had one white terrycloth towel wrapped around her body and was drying her hair with another.

  “Why are you dressed?” she asked. “Who’s winning?”

  Joe didn’t answer at first. He looked stricken.

  Nora was at his side in a moment.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  “No one’s winning,” Joe answered, and he told her what had happened.

  * * *

  —

  He had expected the terminal to be in chaos, but it was in shock. People were either standing completely still or moving unusually slowly, as if they were all trying to keep their balance. For two years, while Americans had debated what their role in Europe’s war should be, the noise had been growing, as had the propaganda and the production of weapons. Now all debate would be silenced.

  On the Main Concourse, normal speech was hushed, perhaps in an instinctive tribute to however many men had just been killed—or perhaps in the hope that some sort of announcements might be made or instructions given.

  Joe knew Faye and Finn would be frantic about Junie, but the pay phones were swarmed. He rushed over to the baggage room, and the guys let him join the shorter line there.

  Faye answered on the first ring.

  “Oh, my Lord, Joey,” she said. “Do you know anything?”

  “Just what I heard on the radio.”

  “There’s no way to find out how bad it was,” Faye said.

  “Or if it’s over,” Joe added. “Where’s Finn?”

  “They wanted more men on the Queensboro Bridge.”

  “How’re the kids?”

  “Well, Alice doesn’t know anything yet. But Mike’s up in the attic, looking to see if your pa had a bayonet,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “No, stupid. We cleaned out the attic. I just mean he’s excited.”

  She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “Joey,” she said. “You know, Finn’s going to want to sign up, no matter whether Junie’s alive or—” Joe heard Faye stifle a sob.

  “Don’t think the worst, Faye,” he said. “Let’s take this as it comes.”

  * * *

  —

  Bill Keogh, the daytime caller at the arrival station, had a box of yellow chalk and a loudspeaker, and with these, he usually announced the trains’ arrival and departure times. Today, people were looking to him, hoping for more information, but there was nothing official. Bits of news circulated through the crowd the way rumors traveled when a celebrity came in on the 20th Century Limited and the red carpet was rolled out on the platform. Today’s rumors were grim: first that Manila had also been bombed, then that a lumber transport had been torpedoed, then that the number of fatalities was in the hundreds but was expected to rise. Already the terminal was filling with servicemen: Guys who’d already enlisted seemed eager to show that they were prepared. There would be tens of thousands more in the days, weeks, and months to come, and it would become stranger to see young men out of uniform than in.

  Gradually the noise of the crowd deepened. Calls and curses rose above the rumble. Then Mary Lee Read, who had been playing concerts on the electric Hammond organ in the north balcony since the late 1920s, appeared, and the mood changed again. Her fingers touched the keys even before she sat down, and she launched into a string of patriotic tunes: “Over There,” “Anchors Aweigh,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” The songs were intended to galvanize, but when she played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the travelers, the ticket agents, the soldiers, and the Red Caps froze, humbled, their hands over their hearts.

  After the national anthem, Joe started back toward the Biltmore. On the lower level he passed Bond’s, where, through the glass case of the bakery counter, the tears on Big Sal’s cheeks seemed to catch the light twice.

  Upstairs he found Nora still listening to the radio, though she turned it off when he came in, reporting that she’d heard nothing new.

  “I’ve got to go to work,” he told her dejectedly.

  “Eight hours?”

  He nodded. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “I just got here,” she said, shaking her head.

  “I know.”

  Her face did a dozen different beautiful things. The last was to mask whatever fear or unfairness she felt.

  “Are you going to enlist?” she asked. She put the question in such a careful tone that it almost didn’t seem like a question.

  Joe shook his head. “They’re not going to let us. Levermen, I mean. No. They told us a year ago. Took too long to train us.”

  She didn’t try to hide her relief. She hugged Joe tightly around the waist and put her head against his chest.

  Joe pressed the Floating Key into her hand.

  “Leave the room if you have to, but don’t you dare leave this building while I’m gone,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Down in Tower A, some of the men were just hearing about the attack as they came off their shifts. Others were waiting outside, near the showers. Steady Max, it turned out, had ordered an extra crew, just in case.

  “In case of what?” Joe asked, folding his shirtsleeves up, precisely, as if he were folding an American flag.

  “Attack,” Max said. “Spies. I don’t know. How can you know?”

  Like Damian, Steady Max had been bitterly spoiling for America to get into the war, and he seemed almost buoyant amid the shock and confusion.

  “What’s going on out there?” he asked as Joe took his place at the Piano. “Does it feel like the end of the world?”

  “Damn close,” Joe said. “But no one’s heard anything new yet.”

  Once the guys from the previous shift were gone, the work became blessedly unexceptional.
The trains ran as usual, the lights blinked as usual, the engines roared, the sweat poured down Joe’s back. Years ago, Max had told Joe that the best levermen didn’t think about the trains at all, and certainly not the passengers on the trains. The best levermen worked solely by reflex—“thinking with your arms,” as Steady Max put it. Today was like that for Joe.

  The director would call “Y-143 to Track I,” and Joe would answer: “Y-143 to Track I.”

  “Track I to Ladder W.”

  “Track I to W.”

  On it went, the trains rolling in like parts on an assembly line, and Joe’s only job not to drop a single one.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as his shift was over, Joe hurried back through the tunnel to the terminal. He hadn’t taken the time to shower, and as he walked he could feel the sweat drying on his back. For the first time in his life, he understood rage; he understood vengeance and the violence it seemed to demand. He understood why what his father had lost in the war hadn’t made him feel less like a man, but more.

  The blessing of Nora’s return had collided with the horror of the Japanese bombing. Either event would have dazed him. Together they threw off questions the way that wheels on the rails could throw off sparks. Still, there was nothing for Joe to do except return to the Biltmore and make sure Nora understood that, in the coming weeks, no matter how badly he wanted to be with her, he would need to turn his attention to his family in Queens. Later, it would seem almost funny that he had ever imagined this need could be measured in weeks, not months or years.

  Joe found Nora sitting stiffly on one of their room’s small couches. She had made the bed. She had folded the towels. She had put away Joe’s few clothes, her flapper dress, and what there was of her Lost and Found wardrobe. In their two days and nights together, Nora had done none of these things, and Joe had even teased her about whether she was expecting Housekeeping to pick up after them. She had laughed—they had done so much laughing already—but now here she was, with all the laughter, the silk slip, and the terrycloth towels tucked away.