“Nora!”
She didn’t respond. Sweat dotted her forehead. Joe had never seen her like this, never. Over the noise of the street and the horses, he was horrified to hear her moan.
Holding her was like holding a lightbulb that’s just been removed from its socket. But Joe didn’t let go until he felt her starting to cool. It wasn’t until she opened her eyes that he pulled her to her feet, steered her gently into the terminal waiting room, and sat her down on one of the benches.
Hands on the worn wood of the bench, feet finding the subtle dips in the marble floor, Nora felt the pain ease, along with the heat and light that had overwhelmed her. Yet she was still caught up in the memory of the subway crash, the horror of Ollie dying, the panic of getting out, the smoke and darkness, the pain in her gut, the woman who’d pulled her to safety, and the burst of light on the concourse floor.
Gus the sweeper, who’d seen Joe bring Nora inside, had run to Mendel’s for a loaf of bread and a cup of tea. Joe thanked him and handed them to Nora. Gratefully, she had a bite of the first and a sip of the second.
“I didn’t flicker this time, did I?” she said. “It wasn’t like the Cascades.”
“No,” Joe said. “It was more like you were burning, like you were going to explode. You were all lit up. And you called for Ollie.”
“I was dying.”
“Because of the sunset,” Joe said. “It was burning you up.”
“The opposite of sunrise,” Nora said.
“Instead of bringing you here…”
“It was killing me.”
They both understood. This wasn’t what happened when Nora got too far away from M42; no trip to the in-between that could end when the weather and windows were clear. Nora would have been dead, for good, if Joe hadn’t pulled her away from the sun in time.
They bent toward each other, their foreheads just touching. They hadn’t expected to be in peril, so they hadn’t expected to feel such relief.
“So that’s how I could die,” Nora said. “Could really die, I mean,” she said.
“But you’re alive, Nora,” Joe said. “You’re alive.”
* * *
—
In her next painting class, Nora took a new canvas and placed it on the easel vertically instead of horizontally. For a while she stared at it, trying to impose a mental image on it. With the lightest charcoal pencil, she traced a rectangle within the rectangle and perspective lines stretching to the four corners of the canvas, so that what she had sketched looked like the inside of a box. Then she put the pencil down and, for the first time, filled her palette with dollops of heavy oil paint rather than watercolors.
She started with thin dark-blue lines—the frame of the Manhattanhenge sunset. Thicker strokes of blue and purple followed—the suggestion of a canyon that could have been natural or man-made, could have been sides of buildings or sides of mountains. As the lines approached the left and right edges of the canvas, she let the blues and purples darken into browns and blacks. She wanted a perfect symmetry between the left and right sides, because she understood that, just as at Stonehenge, the Manhattanhenge sun, so perfectly aligned, had cast no shadow on either side.
Mr. Fournier came by. “This looks as if it wants to be dark and bold,” he said to her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Something menacing.”
“Yes,” she said again. “Very menacing.”
“I will leave you, then,” he said. “But I will say one thing. If you are going to be dark and bold, be dark and bold in every way. In your idea. In your execution. In your heart. In your brush. Be dark and bold with your very soul.”
Nora nodded, half inspired, half amused.
Between the horizon line and the bottom edge of the canvas, she created a collection of small rounded shapes in mottled colors—a suggestion of the heads and shoulders of the spectators. After that came the sky. But how could she paint the sun? How could she paint the light? Tentatively, then vigorously, Nora started, adding coat upon coat of white paint, filling the sky to the edge of the buildings, the bright canyon shimmering before her and obliterating everything else.
8
BRAT DAY
1943
Joe had only been out to Queens a few times in June. Ever since Nora’s near death at Manhattanhenge sunset, he’d been finding it harder to leave her side. But Faye had made it clear that on July 3, his presence would be nonnegotiable—not in Queens, but in the terminal, for the annual circus that the old-timers called Brat Day. Every first Saturday morning in July, about ten thousand of the city’s kids squeezed into the terminal—along with their shouts, tears, suitcases, and mothers—and went off to summer camp. The noise in the concourse—almost always a low, pleasant hum—rose and fell on these mornings with spikes of drama. The younger children cried, the mothers nagged and fussed, the older children played tag and tripped over the younger ones. Usually this was the worst day of the year, but the servicemen’s departures for war had made the rowdiness of Brat Day seem a little more festive than annoying.
Most summers, Joe had made a point of helping to see Mike and Alice off, usually grabbing lunch with Finn afterward. This summer, in addition to Finn’s absence, the difference was that both kids—now sixteen and eleven—were dead-set against going. Standing on the north balcony, Joe searched the concourse for the three of them. Signs bobbed above the buzzing crowd. CAMP WAH-NEE MEET HERE. ECHO CAMP MEET HERE. WABIGOON. BRIAR LAKE. There were so many bodies and signs that it looked like a union protest.
The loudspeaker faltered and hissed with static. “North Shore Limited! Departing Track Thirty-nine! Departing ten minutes for Harlem! Yonkers! Poughkeepsie! Albany…”
Eventually Joe spotted a bright pink dress: unmistakably Faye’s. She and the kids were standing near the ticket booths, grimly looking around for him. He called their names and got their attention. “Stay where you are!” he shouted.
He ran down the ramp and staggered his way through the crowd until he reached them. Alice—wearing a pale-green gingham dress whose straps had fallen off her shoulders—was clinging damply to Faye’s side, but when she saw Joe she ran to him, and he lifted her off her feet. Mike, in slacks and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, stood apart, arms crossed, wanting to make it clear that he was going as a counselor’s helper, not as a camper.
“There it is, 4-H,” Faye said, pointing toward the west side of the hall. “Come on, kids,” she said. “Mike, help Uncle Joe with the bags.”
“You take the big one,” Joe told Mike.
Joe followed Mike as he followed Faye and Alice, the kid carrying the bag first with one hand, then two, then—embarrassed but determined—dragging it over the marble floor. It was comforting, in a way, to see Mike struggle. Since January, when the draft age had been lowered to eighteen, Mike had been agitating ever more passionately for the chance to sign up. Watching him now, Joe was secretly delighted to think that even if Mike tried to enlist, he wouldn’t be physically strong enough to make the grade.
When they reached the placard for their camp, the kids had to pose for a group picture.
“Mike looks like he could actually hurt somebody,” Faye whispered to Joe, her hand on his shoulder.
“He wants to be going to boot camp, not summer camp.”
“He’ll be fine unless he sees someone he knows.”
The announcement came again: “North Shore Limited! Departing Track Thirty-nine!”
“Mama, no!” Alice cried, as if it were one word, and ran back to Faye.
Joe hesitated, seeing her face. “Are you sure this was such a good idea?” he asked Faye. He had tried to say it quietly, but Alice and Mike had both heard him.
“Can I stay, Ma?”
“Yeah, Ma, can we?” Mike asked.
Annoyed, Faye cocked her head at Joe and tightened her lips. Alice squeezed Faye’
s waist with both arms, nearly knocking her over. Faye mouthed the word thanks to Joe above Alice’s head.
He shouldn’t have said anything. They had talked this through on the phone several times. When he’d asked whether camp was too expensive, she’d said the 4-H was practically free. When he’d asked whether they’d be extra homesick with Finn overseas, she’d said they could use some fresh air. And when he’d asked whether she’d be too lonely, she’d told him she couldn’t wait to get a moment to herself. Joe didn’t realize till later how much he wanted the kids to stay—not just because they wanted to, but because they served as a kind of buffer to what he sensed was Faye’s growing dependence—and the temptation and confusion he sometimes felt with it.
* * *
—
Down on the platform, the North Shore Limited loomed. Staring up at it, the kids looked as if they were standing at the foot of a giant’s castle. When a woman with a clipboard jammed against her waist called Alice’s and Mike’s names for a second time, Joe had to fight the urge to hold them back. But in one motion, clipboard still in hand, the woman slung an arm over each of their shoulders, keeping them clinched to her sides so that they couldn’t look around.
“Bye, kids!” Faye shouted. She pivoted decisively to walk up to the concourse. Joe didn’t follow immediately; on board the train now, Alice sat by the window, her large sweet eyes meeting Joe’s. Faye reached back to grab Joe by the shirtsleeve and pull him along with her.
In the concourse, the crowd had thinned only slightly. There were still shouts from group leaders, scoldings from mothers, tears from children.
“She already looked homesick,” Joe said to Faye.
“Let’s go, Joey,” Faye said.
“No, I’ve got to get to work.”
“Didn’t you tell me your shift wasn’t till later? And I’m free. Come on. Let’s go.”
“I’m not sure I like that look in your eye. Where is it we’re supposed to be going?”
“Just to the movies, Josephine,” she said. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
“Extra shift,” he told her, and when she looked doubtful, he pointed to the crowd and said, “Have you ever seen a mess like this? They need me right now.”
“Come by for dinner?”
“Some night this week, for sure,” he said.
After her usual kiss on the lips, she slung her purse over her arm and strode off toward the street.
Joe hadn’t told Nora that Faye and the kids were coming. He’d figured Nora would insist on meeting them, and the last thing he wanted was for either of the women to bombard him with questions about the other. But as Joe started back down the ramp on his way to Tower A, he glanced by habit toward the east end of the terminal and saw that Nora was standing there, waving at him from the edge of the servicemen’s lounge. How long had she been watching?
* * *
—
Having waved her casual goodbye to Joe, Nora turned back to the lounge, where several sailors, just waking from their naps, were trying to figure out whose cap was whose. After she’d helped them sort that out, she needlessly rearranged the art supplies on the table.
She had seen how the little girl had scooted into Joe’s arms, how he had picked her up, how he had let the boy carry the big bag, though obviously it was too heavy for him. Nora had seen in Joe an incredible tenderness. It was unmistakably a fatherly sort of affection: protective, supporting.
As for Faye, it was clear that no matter how Joe saw her, she clearly had plenty of feelings for him that were more than sisterly. And Faye was beautiful, there was no denying that. Even from a distance, Nora could see that Faye was tall and fair, with dark brown hair that wispily escaped the bun at the back of her neck. She’d looked worried and worn, but somehow no less lovely for that. It seemed momentarily unfair to Nora that whatever experiences she might have would never deepen her face into anything that showed endurance, let alone wisdom, let alone the kind of beauty those things could create. Even if Nora didn’t exactly envy the lines and wrinkles that would eventually appear on Faye’s face, she did yearn to be, like Faye, the same age as Joe. Watching him with Faye and the kids had made Nora’s heart hurt. How much was he choosing to give up by loving her?
9
GESSO
1943
Waking the next morning to an already steamy July room, Nora dressed quietly so as not to disturb Joe. She had rubbed his neck the night before until her own neck and hands were cramped from the effort. He had been so worn out. She looked at him now from the hotel room door. His face, unshaven, was relaxed in sleep, though his cheeks had their usual scribbled-on look. His breathing was just audible: a warm, moist sound, perfectly even, steady, sure.
She stepped back into the room and dashed off a cartoon of the two of them, lying next to each other in bed. “Loving you,” she wrote beneath it, left it on the pillow, and slipped out the door. She wanted him to feel that she was with him today. But with the images of Faye and the kids in her mind, she also needed to feel that she could be on her own.
She had started another landscape in painting class the week before, and as she set up her palette and brushes, Mr. Fournier walked over and stood behind her.
“Interesting,” he said.
“ ‘Interesting,’ Mr. Fournier?” Nora asked, smiling. “When you say ‘Interesting,’ why do I always think you mean ‘What a shame!’?”
Mr. Fournier laughed. “No, no. It is just I observe something about your painting,” he said with his wonderful French accent.
“And what is that?” Nora asked.
“Why do you never paint the people?”
Nora laughed. “I don’t know.”
“Or chairs? Or cats? Or bowls of fruit?”
“I can see people and chairs and cats and bowls of fruit whenever I want,” she said.
“But not landscapes?”
She hesitated. “A lot less often. Anyway, I like landscapes.”
“Évidemment,” Mr. Fournier said. “But someday, I must put a vase of flowers in front of you, there, là, and you will have no choice. You will have to live in those flowers.”
“Yes. Someday,” Nora said.
Mr. Fournier nodded and began his customary tour of the room, stopping to talk to each of the old men before settling at his desk to eat his customary sandwich and turn on the radio.
As she worked, Nora thought again about Faye, the kids, and Joe, trying to fight her quiet, guilty resentment of them and even of Finn. The burden Finn’s absence had placed on Joe—the need to be the perfect uncle, the perfect brother-in-law—was becoming more real to Nora, no matter how much Joe insisted on taking it in stride.
Nearly an hour later, Mr. Fournier was hovering behind her again. Palette and brush still in her hands, Nora stepped back to join him and survey the scene she had painted. She knew immediately that something was off. There was a line of trees clustered on the left side of the canvas that was deep and engaging, warm and inviting. Nora had painted these trees the week before, and she had layered on different hues of green and blue, able to imagine them from a distance but also up close. Today, on the right side of the canvas, she had added two trees that, by contrast, seemed flat and lifeless.
“These two,” Mr. Fournier said in a confidential tone. “Les deux.”
Nora laid her brush against her palette, as if she were putting a sword down. “Tell me,” she said.
“I do not feel your sympathy with this picture,” he said.
“My sympathy?”
He pointed to the trees. “You have had a little trouble with these two, I can tell. The more you worked on them, the more trouble they gave you, until finally you got angry with these trees and you left them to fend for themselves. But you cannot walk away from these trees. You see? You need to embrace these trees.”
Nora smiled and no
dded, as if she had just heard the deepest wisdom the world had to offer. It didn’t matter that what Mr. Fournier had said was essentially gibberish. What was clear to Nora was that the picture didn’t work. With only a bit of hesitation, and only a few minutes left in the day’s class, she used a damp rag to wipe away as much of the scene as she could.
In one of her first classes, Mr. Fournier had shown Nora how to reuse a canvas by coating it with gesso. Now, racing the clock, she used a large flat brush to spread out the white chalky mixture, in effect creating a blank page. When the gesso dried by the next class, there would be only a wan green tint on the canvas, and she would be able to start anew.
* * *
—
“I made a mess in class today,” Nora told Joe that evening.
He had asked her how the class had gone, but she wasn’t sure he was listening. They were waiting on line at Bert’s, on the lower level. Bert sold hand-cranked ice cream in spring and summer, soup and bread in winter and fall.
“What kind of mess?” Joe asked.
“A real mess. With my painting.”
“I don’t believe that.”
A little boy who couldn’t have been more than six was jumping and spinning with excitement, waiting for his ice cream cone.
“It’s true. I was working on a new landscape,” she said. She paused, aware that Joe was distracted. “It’s hard to explain,” she said.
“I know what a landscape is, Nora.”
Nora raised an eyebrow at him. “It was about the kids,” she said.
Joe braced himself.
“Faye’s kids,” Nora added.
“So you did see them.”
“On Brat Day? Of course. Did you actually think I wouldn’t look?”
Joe smiled faintly. “But I thought you told me the painting was a landscape,” he said.
“It was. But in a way it was also about you and me and Faye and the kids.”
Time After Time Page 26