Trains to Atlantic City left from Pennsylvania Station, not from Grand Central. Waiting for Faye beneath the dark steel framework of a ceiling that rose even higher than Grand Central’s, Joe couldn’t help feeling he was in the wrong place, which was hard to separate from worrying that he was doing the wrong thing. Faye didn’t seem too certain, either. She greeted him wearing a pale hat and a nervous look, neither of which was typical for her.
On the train, she took out a pack of cigarettes and a pack of cards and suggested they play gin, but Joe had bought a newspaper and said he’d rather read it. Shrugging, Faye lit a cigarette and leaned back in her seat. Joe figured she would think the cards reminded him too much of Finn, and they did, but it was the banter with Nora that he didn’t want to remember right now. He could hear her saying “That’s how you shuffle?” and “Nice going, pal.”
If he didn’t want to play cards with Faye, how did he think he’d be able to make love with her?
* * *
—
Faye was knocked out by the room. It had two small beds, a low dresser, and an easy chair. For Joe, it couldn’t hold a candle to the smallest, least tended of the Biltmore rooms, and that was not just about Nora. There was something pale and worn about this room in the President, as if not only the drapes but the bedspreads, the rug, and the very walls had been faded by too many seasons of sun. Joe was happy that after a quick freshening up, Faye seemed as eager as he was to leave their bags unpacked and go see the sights.
They stepped out of the hotel onto the boardwalk, and for possibly the first moment in his life, Joe didn’t just recognize but truly felt the bigness of the world. The boardwalk was almost as wide as the beach, and the two stretched together, in both directions, into the shimmering distance. It was thrilling. The breeze was filled with moisture, and the sky went on forever. Just for that moment the past receded, and anything seemed possible.
It wasn’t close to being warm enough for swimming, but the beach was crowded and busy anyway, dotted with folding chairs, striped canopies, umbrellas of every color, signs for food, women in bright spring dresses, men in light-colored jackets. Faye and Joe kept to the boardwalk and followed it to the Steel Pier, with its loud and crowded attractions: Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, fairground games and puppet shows, acrobats on high wires, and an enormous seal named Jumbo whose barks nearly drowned out the swing band. Like the other visitors, Joe and Faye stopped here and there, listening, watching, occasionally laughing. The smells were nearly overwhelming: hamburgers, fried chicken, funnel cakes, popcorn. Everyone seemed so happy, and though plenty of men were still in uniform, this was a country no longer at war.
The big draw—and the reason Faye had insisted they visit the Steel Pier before any of the others—was the so-called High Diving Horse, a large brown mare that, with a woman rider holding on for dear life, was said to jump from a forty-foot-high platform into a fifteen-foot-deep pool of water. Faye was the one who had told Joe about this. He had thought she was pulling his leg, but a girlfriend of hers had sworn she’d seen it on a visit before the war. So they stood in a line for quite a while until they could buy their tickets, settle into their seats, and wait with the rest of the crowd. Finally, at exactly one o’clock, after a dramatic buildup by an announcer, a huge horse started trotting up the ramp to a towering platform, and Faye buried her face in Joe’s shoulder.
“Faye!”
“I can’t look!”
“Faye! You’ll miss it!”
“Tell me when it’s over!”
One moment the horse was on the platform, a girl in a sparkly blue bathing suit straddling its back, and the next moment it went falling nose first, almost parallel to the tower. Straight down, like a locomotive plunging over a cliff.
On the way back to the boardwalk, Joe gave Faye the kind of grief that she would have given him if the roles had been reversed.
“I can’t believe you chickened out. Brought us all this way—”
A little farther on, Faye insisted they stop at a booth where birds were chirping and fortunes were being told.
“Don’t you want to know the future, Joey?” she said, flirting, and he realized at that moment that the only future he was interested in was the night ahead of them. All other futures were tied up with larger doubts. But Joe smiled and paid a dime so Faye could have her fortune told, and then a bright yellow parakeet hopped up a narrow plank into a dollhouse, where it pecked a slip of yellow paper from a pile and delivered it, by beak, into Faye’s waiting hand.
“Well?” Joe asked. “What’s it say?”
Faye lit a cigarette and exhaled, unfolding the yellow paper.
“Hah!” she said. “Perfect!”
“Yes?”
She read it to him: “ ‘Elegant surroundings will soon be yours.’ ”
“Has the bird seen the drapes upstairs?”
Faye laughed. “Your turn,” she said.
“Nothing doing.”
“Come on, Joey. Let’s see what’s in store for you.”
With exaggerated grumpiness, he put down another dime and watched the yellow bird do its work, hopping up the little ramp, bringing back another folded note.
“Well?” Faye asked.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Some people say you shouldn’t know the future.”
“Now who’s chicken?” Faye asked, and grabbed the paper from him, shielding it from his grasp. “ ‘You will have quarrels, lawsuits, and family disagreements,’ ” she read.
She crumpled up the paper and tossed it, comically, over her shoulder. “I don’t see a family disagreement right now,” she said. She pushed up the brim of her hat, leaned forward, and kissed him.
By early evening, it seemed the families had disappeared and there were mostly couples left on the boardwalk. Joe and Faye headed back to the President, somewhat awkwardly hand in hand, and although Joe was certain that they wanted the same thing, he wasn’t sure they wanted it for the same reason.
* * *
—
In the end, they spent only one night in Atlantic City. It seemed clear to each of them that they had confused need with desire.
Joe woke in the morning to find Faye already showering. Maybe she was trying to wash him away. Maybe she was a better person than he was—certainly she was a better Catholic—and maybe she was more wracked by guilt about Finn than he was. He didn’t actually feel guilty as much as he felt a quiet disappointment that Faye had turned out to be a station, not a terminal.
Before they left, they stopped at the legendary saltwater taffy place. They each chose a flavor for the other to try, and they bought a box to take back, the souvenir of a trip that neither of them would end up wanting to remember.
They rode the train home as brother- and sister-in-law. In Grand Central Terminal, Joe walked Faye to the Queens line. For the first time since he had met her, back when they were teenagers, she kissed him on the cheek instead of the mouth.
3
UP IN THE AIR
1946
After Atlantic City, Joe let himself want Nora again. For more than three years, he had kept her tucked into the back of his mind, along with other things he’d lost: his brother’s laughter, his mother’s voice, his faith in Damian’s heaven. Until now, he had left Nora’s boxes unopened, thinking that might help keep his thoughts about her locked up as well. But on a spring evening close to Manhattanhenge sunset, he opened one of her boxes and found, near the top, the green dress they’d bought together the morning she’d met Finn. Gathering it up in his large hands, bringing it to his face, he inhaled as deeply as he could, longing for the sense and the powdery smell of her, finding or imagining it—despite the years that had gone by—still deep in the threads of the cloth.
Among her things, too, Joe found stacks of sketches, many of them with Nora’s initials in the lower right-hand corner.
Some were views of the terminal done from different angles and distances: details he knew like the back of his hand but had never quite noticed. Others were drawings of Joe that Nora had done without his knowledge. He saw himself as she’d seen him: serious, sleeping, laughing—and always a little more handsome than he’d ever thought he was. He wished she had left him a self-portrait. But especially at night, in the gray and brown shadows that came before sleep, he had no trouble remembering her body and her face.
* * *
—
With the servicemen’s lounge now dismantled, the question was whether the east windows could be cleaned in time for Nora’s sunrise. The one remaining barrier was the layer of black paint and tar that still coated the hundreds of windowpanes. But in May, as in buildings throughout the city, teams of window washers had finally been hired to rub and scrape the stuff away, and Joe no longer passed through the concourse without checking on their progress. To him it seemed that these workers lacked the urgency so many men had shown during the war. He would look up on his way to or from a shift and see them taking what seemed like far too many breaks. No matter the time of day, some of them would always be sitting in the catwalks between the outer and inner windows, drinking coffee, having a smoke, chatting among themselves.
Toward the end of May, the entire country’s railroad unions—including the BRT—went on strike, and Joe, waiting for a settlement, volunteered to pitch in on the windows. At the rate the window washers were going, who knew how long they would take, and until there was a chance of another Manhattanhenge bringing Nora back, Joe felt as suspended in his life as the men were in the windows.
He had never been wild about heights. Once, Jake had invited him up to see the works of the thirteen-foot-tall Tiffany clock that adorned the terminal’s main entrance, the clock Jake called the Big Fellow. Its famous face was made of stained glass: a petal-like yellow sun on a turquoise field, with white Roman numerals set into deep-crimson circles. The circle holding the numeral VI was hinged, which allowed it to open so a narrow platform could be guided outside when maintenance was needed. Jake’s was a prized invitation, the clock room a hallowed spot, and Joe had been thrilled to stand there beside Jake. Yet even climbing up the worn iron ladders to the room, he had felt as if the world were shifting beneath him. So, despite whatever temptation he had to see the view from that special perch, he had laughed when Jake offered to slide him outside on the platform.
Today, a Wednesday at the end of May, Joe took his first steps onto the lowest of the four east window catwalks. To his right were the blacked-out windows facing the street; to his left were the clear ones facing the concourse. Beneath him was a floor of thick, opaque glass. Before him were a bunch of guys accustomed to dangling like spiders at all heights of the terminal, outside and in. Joe knew they’d see he was edgy, and he tried his best to hide it. The view of the concourse, even from this lowest level, made him catch his breath. Every person crossing the floor below looked like a toy soldier; the gold clock seemed small enough to strap onto a wrist. Joe was grateful that the windows needing to be cleaned were the ones on the street-facing side of the catwalk, so he could turn away from this dizzying view of his daily world.
Doug Cafferty was the head of the work detail, and he must have sensed Joe’s discomfort, because he strode toward him on the catwalk and clapped him on the shoulder warmly. “Grateful for the help,” Cafferty said. “These are some big fucking windows.”
Joe nodded and, careful not to look down, followed him back along the narrow passageway, past a dozen or so men, to a small supply room.
“Don’t be a hero,” Doug said, handing Joe the necessary tools. “If you can do one pane in a day, that’s going to be plenty. This stuff was slapped on fast, but it comes off slow.”
“Got it.”
“And watch out for Crazy Mabel,” Doug added.
“Crazy Mabel,” Joe repeated. He had forgotten the bunch of Grand Central’s ghostly characters that Gus had once described.
“They say this is where she shows up,” Doug said, winking. “So far we haven’t seen her.”
* * *
—
Joe’s arms were strong from years of pulling the levers, but scraping and wiping the windows, sometimes a square inch at a time, demanded a slightly different set of muscles. Also a different kind of patience. Despite those requirements—and despite the prickly fumes of the turpentine—Joe did manage, on this first day, to clear one whole pane of glass. The simplicity of this work was surprisingly satisfying: After the right combination of solvent, scrubbing, and scraping, a whole chip of tar or paint might pop clean off.
Sipping a cup of coffee—Joe now understood why the men seemed to take so many breaks—he realized he was closer to the concourse’s painted sky than he had ever been. Whether it was the height or the turpentine or something else, he found himself envisioning Finn. What part of heaven had been above Finn’s head when his unit had been shelled into dust? Was there a heaven after all? Was it like the dark ether on the other side of Nora’s in-between? Or was there something beyond that: the heaven Damian and Katherine and Father Greg had always tried to sell him, a heaven where Finn and his parents might be watching over him?
The rail strike was settled within a week, but Joe continued on the catwalks on his days off from the Piano. As the weeks went by he became used to the height. Even on the top catwalk, where the windows formed the arches, he had no trouble looking down at the concourse now. But most of his focus remained on the world outside the terminal, and as the tar fell away, his view of Forty-third Street grew from keyhole to knothole to porthole. While the work progressed and the view widened, buildings rose behind shop signs and doorways; avenues appeared beyond corner streetlamps. And each day a little more sunlight came through the glass the men had cleaned. From the floor of the concourse, the still-dark panes on the top catwalks seemed to form an enormous but rising black shade.
4
EMPTY AS A KETTLE
1946
The double jobs of leverman and tar scraper left Joe useless for most activities at the end of the day. It was rare now for him to shoot the breeze with the guys at the Y; rarer still for him to pick up a pool cue or sit down at a poker table. At night, after he’d had a beer or two, he would settle, exhausted, onto his bed and listen to the radio. Sometimes he just looked at the sports pages. Often he studied the atlas Nora had given him. Occasionally he might also sort through the magazine pages she had saved. He wanted to figure out what she’d been thinking: What was the thread that had led her from stories about Russian troop movements and the devastation of North Africa, say, to the girl pilots of Avenger Field and close-up photos of enormous beetles fighting? Why the hell had she pulled out articles about a giant potato in Walla Walla, Washington, and a female dogcatcher in Westport, Connecticut?
One evening, irritated by his lack of understanding, and by Nora for leaving him with these riddles, he had one bourbon too many and threw a bunch of her clippings across the room. They flapped and scattered onto the floor, and finally Joe saw what he’d been looking for without knowing it: the other sides of the pages. What Nora had clipped weren’t the articles but the ads: ads for Brillo scouring pads, Palmolive soap, a Sunbeam coffeepot. Everything she had torn out had to do with things that would furnish their apartment, a destination that now seemed every bit as exotic to Joe as the places he might someday travel.
On days when Joe was too tired to moonlight on the blackened windows, he would often find a seat in the little newsreel theater off Track 17. The world on the screen inside the theater was black and white, but what it lacked in color it made up for in fascination. Through that summer of ’46, Joe watched newsreels about a new president in Argentina, a foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris, a fencing instructor in Scotland, and the Major League All-Star Game at Boston’s Fenway Park.
But on the simmering morning of July 7, when the
theater was jammed because it had air-conditioning, Joe was gut-punched by the images of another world entirely. Above the usual heroic newsreel music, there was footage of sailors shaving farm animals, applying supposedly protective ointments, and leading them grimly into crates and cages destined for ships. First came the pigs, being walked like wheelbarrows, then the goats and lambs. Along with the rest of the stunned audience, Joe next watched the first images civilians had gotten to see of an atomic blast. Nearly a year after it had obliterated more than 150,000 humans in Japan, the atom bomb was being tested on farm animals in the Pacific. The newsreel screen went white at the moment of impact, and the ocean was covered by a bright hat-shaped cloud that spread outward as another huge cloud grew from its center, high into the sky.
Sickened, Joe wondered why anyone would expect to find a patch of skin, let alone an animal, let alone a ship, after the blast was over. Joe thought back to V-J Day, to the night the Japs had surrendered. Like everyone he knew, he had rejoiced, not thinking too much about what it had been like on the ground when the bombs that ended it fell. Now, seeing the animals being led onto the ships was like watching a horrifying, twisted version of Noah’s ark.
* * *
—
Joe was not the only one in the theater who went to Ralston Young’s prayer meeting the next morning. Along with three or four others, Joe tried to describe the sense of helplessness, waste, sadness—everyone had a different name for the feeling.
Time After Time Page 29