Joe glanced around at the other passengers, marveling that they all seemed so unimpressed by the change from darkness to light. Some didn’t even look up as the sky brightened the whole car. They just reached for their newspapers, unfolding them like maps, and for many, Joe realized, whatever they were reading was probably more interesting than the journey. For Joe, holding his armrest, forehead pressed against the trembling window, tears filling his eyes, the journey would be everything. Only gradually did he recognize that what he felt was freedom.
For hours he watched out the window until the last light of the sunset turned the sky yellow and purple. Then the world seemed to widen, the fields blanketed by distant house lights that twinkled beneath a heaven of real stars.
12
ALL ABOARD
1947
Nora was slim enough to be able to hide her whole body behind a column on the platform, and that is where she was standing as she waited for Joe’s train to leave. She was confident he wouldn’t be looking for her: not now, not ever. She’d seen to that. As far as Joe knew, she had disappeared into a fatal Manhattanhenge sunset.
That was the lie.
Nora had counted on Joe to want to watch her go, and she had counted on the sun to blind him just long enough for her to duck onto a side street, out of the path of Manhattanhenge. Still, she was taking no chance that he might catch a glimpse of her. She had spent the days since then hiding in her studio, pretending to Leon that she needed total concentration and solitude for the art she was doing. She had stashed some food and wine in various corners. Leon faithfully brought her more food and even helped her scavenge the small couch that had been used by models for decades of life studies. For now, Nora would use it as a bed.
Peeking out from behind a column on Track 28, she watched the Red Caps loading bags into the passenger cars. The train was sleek, with fresh black paint and shiny rivets perfectly spaced. The conductor called “All aboard,” and Nora gripped the column. As she did, her charm bracelet wobbled down her wrist, a wrist that was exactly as pale and smooth as it had been on the morning of December 5, 1925. Head bent, tears dropping straight to the platform, she told herself that with each month that passed, she would grow only more certain that she’d been right to make sure Joe had left—and right not to call him back now, no matter how much she wanted to. Someday she might have another love in her life, a life she would end only when she had tasted every drop of joy she could find in it. But no one would ever compare to Joe. There couldn’t be another man with his rare, marvelous combination of kindness and strength.
The conductor’s whistle blew. Two decades had passed since the accident, but Nora had experienced only a fraction of them. She was greedy for more life, the life she’d been denied. Though she knew it would require some tricks of hair and makeup to stay inconspicuous to the people she met, she also knew she would make friends. She knew she would eat, and laugh, and paint.
Nora Lansing, who would have had enough energy for two lives of normal length, was not even remotely done with this one. She would stay as long as she wanted, and when she left, it would not be on some random day, or by accident, to be locked forever into the in-between. When she left, it would be in a fatal Manhattanhenge sunset of her choosing, when she’d walk over the threshold of pain into what she had come to assume would be either utter darkness or some other kind of light.
The Red Caps were stepping away from the doors, which closed in quick succession. The train made almost no sound as it started to move. Joe was going. He was gone. Nora was hugging the column now, her arms wrapped around it as she watched the train pull away and saw the electric blue taillight disappear into the dark.
13
SOMEONE SPECIAL?
Many Years Later
The young man is tall and thin. He’s probably in his late teens, though he might also be in college. His floppy hair is black as a bristle brush. He’s wearing a black coat and a green-and-black-striped scarf, and he’s pulling off his gloves impatiently as he makes his way through Grand Central Terminal. He’s been here many times before. The fact that some relative of his once worked here as a trainman gives him a vaguely proprietary air, as if every time he comes, he’s somehow visiting his familial home.
But today he is on a mission no different from that of the hundreds of other people who crowd the annual holiday fair. Gamely, he weaves his way through the other shoppers, scanning booth after booth. He stops at one selling Christmas ornaments. No good. Not good enough, anyway. He looks at silk scarves, handmade cards, bamboo bowls, and porcelain vases. Anyone watching him would quickly guess that a romance is involved.
He has almost made up his mind to buy a wooden music box when he sees something in the distance, on the opposite side of the aisle. He passes five or six other booths to get a closer look. What’s drawn him in is a painting of the terminal, unusual in its focus. The most famous image of Grand Central—the black-and-white photograph he’s seen so many times on postcards and in books—shows fluted columns of light pouring onto the floor from the half-circle windows. But in this painting, the light comes from the middle of the three larger windows, and it’s beautiful and different. He stops when he sees the painting, as if imagining what his friend will think.
“How much?” he asks the young woman behind the counter. She’s making change for another customer and takes a moment to answer.
“Sixty dollars,” she says, and turns to face him with playful eyes and a lively smile. Her mouth is raspberry red and almost seems to glitter. She’s more than merely beautiful.
“Sixty?” the young man says. “Maybe fifty?”
“Fifty?” she says. “Maybe sixty.”
Sheepishly, he takes out his wallet and three twenty-dollar bills. She reaches across the counter for them, a crowded gold charm bracelet jangling against her thin wrist.
“Do you need it wrapped?” she asks him.
“No, that’s okay. I’m in kind of a rush.”
“Trying to catch a train?”
“No.”
“Someone special?”
He smiles.
“Good luck,” she says, and hands him the painting.
They thank each other and say Merry Christmas. A new customer is browsing through the woman’s artwork now, but she keeps her eye on the young man, recognizing something familiar about him. She almost runs after him, but he’s already hidden by the crowd, so she reaches for her sketchpad and a heavy charcoal pencil, and with just a few lines she captures the strong, solid look of him and the crooked half smile that another artist might never have seen.
For Stephen, Ziz, and Jonny,
because it happened to all of us
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this novel had certain things in common with the love affair of its main characters: an unlikely beginning, a stubborn attraction, and a bunch of unforeseen obstacles causing its many stops and starts.
Unlike Joe and Nora, though, I had an abundance of help along the way, and I have to start by acknowledging James Sanders—architect, historian, friend—who was the first person to tell me about Manhattanhenge and the first to give me a hint of Grand Central’s secrets.
I am lucky enough to have friends who are not just generous and encouraging but really, really smart. Susie Bolotin, Sharon DeLevie, Lee Eisenberg, Darrel Frost, Peter Lurye, Dan Okrent, James Sanders, and Sally Seymour all read parts or all of different drafts and offered help and priceless insights. My niece Caroline Grunwald explained how to approach a horse. Her father, Peter Grunwald, patiently reminded me about the difference between story and plot. My sister, Mandy, checked in constantly.
In addition to becoming an outstanding source of encouragement and support, my friend and physical therapist, Marcus Forman, risked being put on a watch list when he used a surveyor’s tape to measure the yardage in and around Grand Central. He and my doctors—Phillip B
lumberg, Richard Cohen, Alexandra Heerdt, Jon LaPook, and Saud Sadiq—have helped me navigate the medical obstacles I’ve faced in the past decade. I am deeply grateful to them all.
I want to thank Chris Jerome, the copy editor anyone who dreams of copy editors dreams of (and what she would do with that sentence!). Beth Pearson brought rigor and sanity—a rare combination—to the production.
My agent, Julie Barer, is effervescent and brilliant; she was encouraging, insightful, and exacting from the start and patient even when I wasn’t. My editor, Kara Cesare, got to know Joe and Nora so well that she eventually joined me deep in the weeds around them but fortunately helped me find the way out. Finally, Susan Kamil, Random House Publishing’s boss of all bosses, said yes in the first place and eventually wielded a pencil that was part wand and part scalpel. I’ll be forever grateful to all of these remarkable women. I would have loved to thank Barb Burg.
Betsy Carter has read, edited, de- and reconstructed this novel so many times that she could probably recite parts of it by heart—a heart that is as loyal as it is wise. This book didn’t just get better because of her. It got written.
From the first beach walks we took on Martha’s Vineyard to the last brownie crumbs we ate at Zucker’s, my daughter, Elizabeth Adler, shared her wisdom, compassion, and benevolent logic, even as she challenged and eventually embraced the idea that not all love stories end the same way.
My son, Jonathan Adler, was still in middle school when I began this book, but as he grew up with it, he grew into one of the most clearheaded, precise, patient, and inspiring editors I’ve known (and I’ve known a lot of editors). I will treasure in particular several messages he sent me from the characters in this book, urging me to finish their story.
And finally, and always, there is Stephen, whose mind, strength, kindness, loyalty, and love are as rare and miraculous to me as Manhattanhenge light.
SOURCE NOTES
Among the many joys of writing historical fiction is the research involved in trying to get the facts right. Many special challenges accompany this joy, one of which is keeping track of where the facts end and the fiction begins. With that in mind, a few notes:
The names and occupations of the following characters are real: John Campbell, Bill Keogh, Louis Landsman, Mary Lee Read, Ezra Winter, and Ralston Crosbie Young. But what they say and do in the novel is invented.
Conversely, the art teacher Alphonse Fournier is a fictional character, but some of his dialogue comes from a 1934 pamphlet, privately published, that consisted of notes taken during a Grand Central School of Art class taught by an artist named Harvey Dunn.
Though there was a subway accident in 1925 and I’ve cribbed a paragraph from the New York Times story about it, I have changed the date of the event and a number of the details.
Naturally, most of the books I consulted were about Grand Central itself—including Sam Roberts’s wonderful centennial volume, Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America, and John Bell and Maxine Leighton’s Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives. But no book was more important to me than the one I happened upon in the stacks of Columbia’s Butler Library. This one was written by David Marshall and published in 1946; it is called simply Grand Central, and it is an incomparable guide to the place and its past.
About Manhattanhenge: Sometime after finding David Marshall’s book about Grand Central, I had lunch with my friend James Sanders. James has never read a page he’s forgotten, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew Marshall’s book and remembered its beautiful description of dawn in the Main Concourse on several special days of the year. I had read about how the rising sun seemed to bring the ceiling to life, but I wasn’t sure I understood why it happened so infrequently. That’s when James introduced me to Manhattanhenge.
Once called the Manhattan Solstice or the Solar Grid Day, Manhattanhenge is a celestial phenomenon that occurs when the annual progress of the Earth around the sun coincides with the geographical alignment of Manhattan and its street grid. On these days alone—which happen a few weeks before and after the summer and winter solstices—the rising or setting sun is perfectly centered between the buildings along the east–west streets of the city.
“But you can’t see Manhattanhenge sunrise in Grand Central the way Marshall describes it anymore,” James said, and by way of explanation, took out a pen and drew the sketch opposite.
That arrow going from the sun down Forty-third Street through the terminal represents the light of sunrise as it comes up over the East River and crosses the avenues, heading west. The high arched windows of Grand Central’s Main Concourse, centered on Forty-third Street, allowed that light to shine through into the terminal. That is, James explained to me, until the United Nations Secretariat was built along the East River. At thirty-nine stories, the building was tall enough to block the light of dawn from reaching the terminal’s Main Concourse.
It is Neil deGrasse Tyson who popularized this wonderful phenomenon, and for the purposes of this novel, I have simplified some aspects of it. For anyone who wants to understand it more fully—or find the dates on which you might see it in person—I refer you to the American Museum of Natural History website: www.amnh.org/our-research/hayden-planetarium/resources/manhattanhenge.
BOOKS BY LISA GRUNWALD
Time After Time
The Irresistible Henry House
Whatever Makes You Happy
New Year’s Eve
The Theory of Everything
Summer
WITH STEPHEN J. ADLER
The Marriage Book
Women’s Letters
Letters of the Century
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LISA GRUNWALD is the author of the novels The Irresistible Henry House, Whatever Makes You Happy, New Year’s Eve, The Theory of Everything, and Summer. Along with her husband, Reuters editor in chief Stephen J. Adler, she edited the anthologies The Marriage Book, Women’s Letters, and Letters of the Century. Grunwald is a former contributing editor to Life and former features editor of Esquire. She lives in New York City.
lisagrunwald.com
Instagram: lisagrunwald
Facebook.com/LisaGrunwaldAuthor
Twitter: @lisa_grunwald
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Time After Time Page 35