by Mark Dunn
McCluskey’s searching gaze caught the eye of a shoeless secretarial type. The young woman was carrying her pumps in one hand and a purse and Macy’s shopping bag in the other. He signaled her with an undisguised “come hither” look while stroking the seat that he was in the process of vacating. The woman’s face radiated gratitude.
“Oh, you are a lifesaver!” she gushed as she sat down. “My feet are absolutely killing me!” She referenced her bag with a nod. “I was right in the middle of Macy’s when the lights went out. I paid for all this, by the way. I didn’t loot it in the dark.”
Selman got the same appreciative reaction when he gave up his spot on the bench to an older woman and little girl. “How do you like my twofer?” he boasted.
The Brit rose last, and as he was doing so, motioned for a nun in full habit to take his place.
“I think you have us both beat,” laughed McCluskey.
“I did hesitate for a moment,” confided the old man. “I’m Church of England, after all. But in a time of crisis, one sets all religious differences aside. The name’s Leister, by the bye. John Leister.”
“Not Niles or Beverly or, um, Jeeves?”
Leister shook his head. “Just John.”
“Let’s drift,” said Selman. “Maybe we can find a nice, quiet corner for our next encampment.”
The three men meandered over to the clock, which was actually one clock with four different faces, each presenting in a different direction. The faces were opalescent, the whole unit set in a brass stand that rose from the top of the information pagoda situated right in the middle of the vast main concourse. Perched on one of the pagoda’s counters was a young woman working a crossword puzzle with the help of those lolling in front of her. “I need a five-letter word starting with L. A synonym for ‘vertical column.’” The woman spoke loudly so that anyone within projected earshot might render assistance. At least two dozen people, enlisting themselves in her challenge, cudgeled their brains, both individually and cooperatively.
A few moments later a man called out, “Lally.”
Selman turned to his cohorts. “What’s a ‘Lally’?”
“I think it’s a kind of vertical column,” answered McCluskey with a mischievous wink.
Among the sea of tourists and suburban New Yorkers set adrift by the blackout was a nice-looking, fifty-something-year-old woman with graying red hair who didn’t seem to be killing time at all. She maintained a stance that was rigid and attentive. Her look was one of obvious anxiety. She glanced up at the clock—a futile act since the electric clock’s quadruple sets of hands remained frozen in time, the great timepiece suspended in its chronometry at precisely 5:27.
The two younger men in the trio caught sight of the woman at the same time. They traded glances that bespoke sympathy but did not indicate a desire for personal involvement. However, a moment later, Leister took full notice of her himself and made an immediate, albeit cautious, approach.
“Begging your pardon, madam,” he said, “but there appears to be something troubling you. I wonder if I may be of some assistance.”
The woman smiled. Leister’s accent was disarming. “I’m fine. I’m just a fretter.”
“I don’t know when the power will be restored, but I’m nearly certain that everything is being done to make that outcome an eventuality. In the meantime, it’s heartening—don’t you think?—to see the city behaving itself so well on this most Cimmerian night.”
“This what?”
Offering his hand: “The name’s John Leister. I teach philology. Historical linguistics. Across the pond. That means the U.K.”
“Hello, Professor. I’m Carole Adams. I teach second grade. Across the plains. That means Kansas. Wichita. Although I’m actually from Grand Island. That’s in Nebraska.”
“These are my new boon companions, Messrs. McCluskey and Selman. They work in advertising.”
The two ad men shook the hand of the fretful Midwestern schoolteacher.
“May I ask,” continued Leister, “if that which is troubling you could in some way be mitigated by any or all of the three of us?”
“You’re so kind. You’re like the Three Musketeers. I’d be happy to tell you. Over a nice cold Manhattan. It’s been a very difficult few hours. But for a while longer I really feel that I can’t leave this spot.”
“And why is that?” asked Selman. “Just how long have you been standing here?”
“I got here at about five fifteen.”
Selman glanced up at the clock. “Only twelve minutes. Not a bad wait.”
McCluskey groaned.
“And why have you been standing in this spot since this afternoon, Miss—is it Miss?—Adams?” asked Leister.
“It’s Miss. I used to be a Mrs. But now, by choice, I’m back to being a Miss. I’ve been waiting for someone. It’s an involved story. It’s now become a potentially embarrassing one. I’d tell it to you, but—”
“But what?” asked McCluskey, grinning. “But we don’t have the time? Miss Adams, we have nothing but time.”
Carole Adams laughed and nodded. Her story was this: that she had met a man on a visit to New York twenty years earlier. He worked for a war orphans relief organization and was killing time in the city before steaming off for Europe. He had two days left to his Gotham sojourn. Carole had come to New York to spend a few days with an old girlfriend who was traveling secretary for a Hollywood bond tour. “Come to New York while I’m there,” the friend had written her. Carole had come, but then the tour was rerouted through New England at the last minute. Carole now found herself alone in the city, although this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it was nice to be on her own after a dozen years in a crowded classroom, and more importantly, a dozen years in a bleak, loveless marriage.
It was 1945. 1945 was about trains and ships and everybody on the move. It was about going places and doing things that one had never done before—taking risks, not knowing what the next day might bring.
The man’s name was Nick Gombert. Like Carole, he had also been in his mid-thirties back in 1945. Like Carole, he was also married. And like Carole, he was also unhappily married. Nick and Carole tumbled inexorably into an impetuous two-day whirlwind romance—a romance that coincidentally included a night at the movies. The movie was The Clock, a story which, though dissimilar in many respects to the story of Carole and Nick, had two things very much in common: a time-compressed love affair and a climactic rendezvous beneath a clock.
“Is this your fated rendezvous, my dear?” asked Leister, who, like the Y & R men, had been thoroughly captured by Carole’s tale.
“Well, I don’t know. I think I’m going to sit down now. I’m very tired.”
Carole’s new friends moved with her to a spot on the floor next to the information booth. The woman who had been publicly working her crossword puzzle, having now apparently completed it, sat cross-legged on the counter flipping languorously through a copy of Harper’s Bazaar. Once Carole was settled, the three men sat down in an improvised crescent in front of her.
“Our agreement was this: that if after twenty years we had been successful in detaching ourselves from our respective unbearable marriages, and if we were not attached to someone else, then we would come to New York and, like Judy Garland and Robert Walker, meet under a particular clock.”
“This clock?” asked a middle-aged woman who’d been standing within earshot nearby, and who now plopped herself down on the floor next to Carole. “Hello,” she added. “I’m Sylvia.”
“Hello, Sylvia. I’m Carole.”
“Carole lives in Kansas,” added Leister. “She’s come to see if her war beau is conveniently unattached and willing to pick up where the two of them so poignantly left off. Their very own real-life version of An Affair to Remember.”
The woman named Sylvia gasped in slow motion. “You came all the way from Kansas on the chance that he might be here waiting for you under this clock?”
“Not this clock. The one in Penn
Station. That’s where they met: Judy and Robert. There was another clock where they rendezvoused later in the movie. It was at the Hotel Astor. But Nick and I—we both liked the idea of meeting under that beautiful suspended clock at Penn Station, because it’s close to where we met. At the Chock full o’Nuts only a couple of blocks away.”
“But honey,” said Sylvia in a strong Flushing Meadows accent that had apparently followed her up to Westchester County, “the old Penn Station building isn’t there anymore. They tore it down.”
“I know. That’s why I thought he might come here instead.”
“That’s a lot of ‘might,’” said Selman with a sympathetic frown. “He might be divorced. He might not have remarried. He might still want to see you again. He might—like you—substitute the Grand Central clock for the one in old Penn Station. If this was Belmont, sister, I wouldn’t place even a two-dollar bet on that horse.”
“But if I hadn’t come, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if he had.”
Everyone nodded. Sylvia went, “Mmm-hmm,” while the Englishman said softly, “Yes, I see. You’re so right. And unlike Irene Dunne and Deborah Kerr, you haven’t been hit by a car. You just happen to have found yourself in the middle of a blackout.” Leister smiled. “And perhaps your beau is similarly inconvenienced.”
Carole’s face brightened. “I’ve thought about that. Do you think that could be it?”
“Honey,” said Sylvia, taking out a pack of gum, “the poor schlimazel could be trapped in the subway for all we know.” There was one stick left; she gave it to Carole.
“Of course, it’s probably best not to build your hopes up,” said McCluskey.
Carole nodded, her jaws beginning to work on the fresh stick of spearmint gum. “Who has food? I’m famished.”
Food was procured. The Oyster Bar was all but giving away seafood at their door because of concerns that it would quickly spoil without refrigeration. The quintet on the floor in front of Grand Central’s information kiosk feasted on fried oysters and tartar sauce, fried whole Ipswich clams (also with tartar sauce) and cultivated Maine mussels steamed with white wine and garlic.
Because Carole did not wish to leave her post, her four companions kept her company for the rest of the night.
When the power came back early in the morning and the trains started to run, there were awkward goodbyes exchanged among the kindred strangers: Sylvia and her two new friends, McCluskey and Professor Leister, departing for points north, and Selman returning to his office, where an important client presentation waited for no act of man or God. Carole left for her tiny room in the Taft Hotel, having decided to catch the first available flight back to Kansas, her faith in romance and the triumph of the human heart severely shaken both by the blackout and by the strong possibility of other human factors equally beyond her control.
When at the end of day the exhausted ad man plodded back down to the great Beaux Arts terminal to head home, he noticed someone waiting beneath the famous clock, which had been reset. It said 5:30 upon all of its four faces, and below it was the face of a man in his mid-fifties anxiously searching the crowd.
“What the hell,” said Selman to himself.
He walked over. Without shaking hands or even introducing himself, the Y & R account executive accosted the concerned-looking man with, “You’re a day late. You were supposed to meet her here on the ninth, not the tenth.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Aren’t you Nick Gombert?”
“Yes, but—wait a minute. I’m almost positive it was supposed to be the tenth.”
“Okay, so then she got it wrong.”
“Where is she?”
“On her way back to Wichita, if she’s not there already.”
“You got her address?”
“Uh huh. We got her address.”
“We?”
Selman threw his arm around Nick’s shoulder. “Long story. Long night. Let me buy you a drink at the Oyster Bar and fill you in.”
“She came.” A private smile. “I can’t believe she came.”
“An almost perfect happy ending. So tell me: where were you when the lights went out?”
“Trapped on a subway train. On my way over here, if you can believe it. I wanted to come a day early to see the clock where I’d hoped the two of us would be meeting today.”
1966
OUTRAGED IN IDAHO
The Sound of Music was released in 1965. It was enormously popular and succeeded in yanking its studio, Twentieth Century Fox, back from the brink of bankruptcy after the disastrous cost-overruns of the obscenely expensive Cleopatra, a film which, to add insult to injury, was then only tepidly patronized by a public that, unknown to the studio, had become bored with toga cinema.
By 1966, The Sound of Music had entered the world’s cultural consciousness. Its songs were covered by hundreds of popular singers. Community theatres throughout America were mounting productions of the movie’s original stage version. Story-wise, there was very little difference between the two versions. You had your seven Austrian children, who discovered that they could sing. You had your widowed father, a navy captain. And there was this nun with a guitar and a fine voice of her own. For a musical about singing songs, it is interesting to note that not all of the songs from the musical play are to be found in its Hollywood incarnation and vice versa.
It’s more than interesting, actually. It’s the reason for this story.
Besides being a sixth grade teacher at Eisenhower Elementary School in Pocatello, Idaho, Carla Willard was music director for the school’s annual Autumn Evening of Song. Carla had loved musicals since at sixteen she saw Judy Garland in the 1954 film musical A Star is Born sing about being born in a trunk in Pocatello, Idaho. Carla imagined herself being born in that same trunk right next to Judy, whose name in the movie was first Esther Blodgett, and then, thankfully, Vicki Lester, which didn’t sound as much like somebody throwing up.
Carla had seen Mary Martin play Maria Von Trapp on Broadway. She had delighted in Julie Andrews’ interpretation of Maria in the film. Delighted in it thirteen times, actually—all in the span of a month. Carla was understandably thrilled when Gilbert Greene, Eisenhower’s principal, agreed to allow Carla to pay tribute to The Sound of Music by having each of the school’s fifth- and sixth-grade classes sing a song from the musical for the autumn concert. She was even more excited to be given creative control over what songs would be sung, especially since this meant that she could choose in smorgasbord fashion songs from both the stage and film versions of the musical.
“So there’s a difference?” asked Greene, when Carla met with him in his office one morning in early October to go over her plans for the November concert. “I don’t understand.”
Carla took a sip of her Tab. Whereas most of her teaching colleagues had a cup of coffee or tea in the early morning to steel themselves to face their sometimes unruly pupils, Carla preferred the soft drink Tab, though her brother, a college chemistry professor, told her it contained cyclohexylamine, a known chemical toxin. (“When they take it off the market, I’ll stop drinking it, Wade. Right now it gives me a lift.”)
“Most of the songs are the same, Gil,” she explained to her principal, “but there are three in the stage version that are different from the film. And after Oscar Hammerstein died, Richard Rodgers wrote a couple of new songs for the movie.”
“Why can’t you just have the children sing the ones that everybody knows?”
“Because there are at least two absolutely gorgeous songs from the stage version that got dropped when they put the movie together, and I plan to right that wrong—at least with regards to one of them.”
Carla respected the point that her principal made, but she didn’t respect it enough not to choose a song from the stage version that very few members of her audience would know. It was called “No Way to Stop it.” It was sung mostly by Captain Von Trapp’s socialite girlfriend, Baroness Schräder, and the captain’s
impresario friend, Max Dettweiler. Through the song the Baroness and Max try to convince the captain to show his support for the oncoming annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, because it would make things easier for him. The gist of the song is this: there are things that happen in this world that can’t be stopped, and it is easier to simply accept this fact than waste time fighting the inevitable. It was a philosophy that Carla didn’t necessarily comport with, but she liked the catchy tune. It made her smile. In 1948, the city of Pocatello had passed a law making it illegal not to smile. Including the song in the program, she circuitously reasoned, would help make her audience more law-abiding.
Carla’s brother Wade, the chemistry professor, didn’t necessarily dislike the tune when his sister played the song for him, but he took strong issue with its message.
“The sentiment’s pretty loathsome,” he stated without qualification over dinner that night.
“Still, I think it would be perfect for Mrs. Roesler’s class. They’re the mischief-makers among the sixth graders, just like Max and Baroness Schräder in the movie.”
“So what are you saying to those students, Carla? Accept everything that comes to you as ineluctable? Don’t bother trying to make any kind of difference in this world?”
“You’re overanalyzing, Wade. Should I stop Mrs. Beamer’s students from singing ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ because not a single one of them is over the age of twelve?”
“I’m curious: are you putting ‘No Way to Stop It’ before or after ‘Climb Every Mountain’?”
“First of all, it isn’t ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ It’s ‘Climb Ev’ry—Ev’ry Mountain.’ Two syllables to fit the meter. Secondly, I haven’t come up with an order for the songs yet, and does it really matter?”
“I’ll say it matters. ‘No Way to Stop It’ is a cynical piece-of-shit song, so you’ll need something like ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ afterwards to get the bad taste out of everybody’s mouths. See, the first song says, ‘Some things, like the Nazi plan for world domination, as evil as it was, are simply too big to fight.’ On the other hand, the old nun tells us in the other song to never stop climbing mountains and fording streams in the pursuit of our dreams.”