by Fiona Davis
The woman looked down at some papers on her desk. “There’s another position available, one that doesn’t require typing or steno. Would you be interested?”
Even if she were locked in a windowless room to file papers eight hours a day, she’d take it. Something to do each day, a place to report to. A reason to wake up in the morning. “Of course. Thank you.” Kathleen’s sympathy only made her want to weep more. “Do you mind if I freshen up first?”
“Ask Annie out front for a key to the bathroom. Take your time.”
The receptionist yanked open a drawer full of keys and handed one to Virginia. Outside in the hallway, Virginia turned left and then right, trying to remember the woman’s mumbled directions. Around the corner, then third door on the left. Or was it the fourth? She tried the third door with no luck. On the fourth, her key slid in the lock.
She stepped inside and fumbled for the light switch, expecting to see a row of porcelain sinks and grungy tile walls. Instead, she stood in a small foyer, where a painted sign along one wall read THE GRAND CENTRAL SCHOOL OF ART in gold letters. Handsome art deco ceiling pendants threw a warm light down a long hallway off to her left. She ventured farther inside, curious, her despair momentarily forgotten.
At the first doorway, it was as if the art school were still open, a dozen easels at the ready for the next day’s class, paintings and drawings hung on one wall, a ceramic vase on a table in the center of the room. The only sign of abandonment was the coating of dust on everything, the vase an ashy green. A faint scent of chemicals made her sneeze, or maybe that was the dust. A large storage cabinet for artwork lined one wall, a mix of slots for framed canvases at the bottom and shelving above.
She checked each room, counting five studios in total, amazed at her find: a mummified art school at the top of Grand Central. The last room was some kind of storage area, filled with wooden crates stacked haphazardly on top of one another. The crate closest to her had been opened; a crowbar lay on the floor nearby. Inside, Virginia discovered course catalogs, accounting ledgers, and notebooks filled with names of students and tuition figures. A winter catalog from 1928 offered a snapshot of life right before the Depression, when a portrait painting class cost fourteen dollars a month.
She shouldn’t linger; Kathleen was waiting for her and she had yet to find the bathroom. But as she turned to go, an entire wall filled with artwork stopped her in her tracks. Still lifes, portraits, landscapes, some on yellowed canvas and others on brittle, tea-colored paper. Her eye was drawn to a familiar tableau that Virginia recognized as a Renoir, the festive one of the boating party, but in this version a figure clutched a bottle of Coke, of all things.
Surrounded by such ruined beauty, the faded artifacts of students who had once worked diligently and were now God knew where, Virginia burst into tears. At her recent failures, at the way her world was no longer within her control.
She grabbed a tissue from her purse. As she wiped under her eyes, she caught sight of a sketch of women wearing vintage tailored suits, like something from an old newspaper ad. For the Well-Dressed Secretary was written at the very top. While most of the models looked off to the side, the one in the center stared straight out. Her posture—shoulders flung back, chin raised—spoke of strength and character. On the bottom right-hand corner the name Clara Darden was scrawled.
Virginia struck the same pose, laughing at herself, but doing so gave her a burst of energy and confidence. Whatever Kathleen had in store, she could dig down and find the courage to face it. Today’s wasn’t the first humiliation she’d faced since her divorce, and it probably wouldn’t be her last. But at least she was putting herself out there in the world.
When Virginia returned, to her surprise, Kathleen led her out of the offices, back down the elevator, to the concourse level. She pointed over the crowds. “We need some help in the information booth.”
“The information booth? Right in the middle of the station?”
“Yes. It would be from nine to five, a trainee position. There’s a night shift as well, but I don’t recommend that for a woman. You don’t want to be hanging around here too late.”
Virginia didn’t want to be hanging around there at all. The circular booth stood smack in the middle of the main concourse like a little spaceship, the bottom half the same grungy-looking marble as the floor, the top covered in dull glass. She’d be totally exposed if she went in there. People would be able to see her. People who were headed off to their houses in Connecticut or taking the train to Boston. People she knew.
“There’s nothing else, nothing in the office? I thought I was hired by Penn Central.”
“Penn Central owns Grand Central Terminal and runs the railroad, so you would be working for us. The only opening right now that doesn’t require experience is as a trainee clerk for the railroad.”
“I don’t know anything about the trains or the station.”
“You won’t deal directly with the public, not yet. Just do what the head clerk tells you, answer the phone when the corporate office calls down, and restock the schedules. It’s not a fancy job, but it pays one hundred and eighty dollars a week. To the agency, of course. I don’t know what you’ll get from that.”
Around $120, Virginia figured. As a legal secretary, she had been promised $200.
As they neared the booth, Virginia kept her head down, hoping no one she knew was nearby. Kathleen waved to one of the people inside, who opened a small door and ushered them in.
Two of the clerks sitting closest to the door stared at her before turning back to the mob of people that encircled the booth. The interior was cramped, with hardly enough room to maneuver between the high stools where the clerks perched. A large metal cylinder rose up in the middle of the booth, taking up even more room. Decades of shuffling feet had worn the floor around the tube into a circular groove, while the marble counters inside the perimeter were scratched and sticky-looking.
Under the countertop, brown paper lunch bags sat next to dirty rags and newspapers in open compartments, like the storage cubbies in Ruby’s old kindergarten. Kathleen and Virginia stood near the door, practically touching, as there was nowhere else to go.
Kathleen pointed to a dapper older man sitting two windows away. “That’s Terrence. He’s the head clerk. He’ll tell you what to do and can sign your time sheet on Fridays.” Kathleen gave her a sympathetic pat on the arm and was gone, swept away in the swarm of commuters outside the information booth.
Virginia sidled over to Terrence. He held out a hand to stop her from speaking while he explained to a woman the best way to get to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He turned a WINDOW CLOSED placard to face out and swiveled around, using the countertop as leverage. “Who are you?”
She held out her hand. “Virginia Clay. I’m the new trainee.”
The clerk sitting on the other side of Terrence glanced over at her. The two looked like brothers, both stick-thin, close in age, each sporting a shock of gray hair. Both wore the same dark blazer, white shirt, and tie.
The brother sniffed the air. “This one uses perfume. I think I may be sick.”
“Enough, Totto.” Terrence cocked his head. “No more perfume, okay? He’s very sensitive.”
She’d sprayed a little Charlie Eau de Toilette that morning, hoping to suggest an air of mystique and class. What a mistake. Claustrophobia washed over her. She feared she could not spend another minute in this place without screaming.
“You okay?” Terrence asked, not unkindly.
She nodded, unable to speak.
Terrence gestured to Totto. “Ignore him; he’s always looking for trouble. You can put your purse there.” He pointed to one of the cubbies. “Right above, on the counter, is the Information Clerk Handbook. Take that and memorize everything in it. If you pass the test after a year, you get a promotion. For now, you can sort all the timetables by the door. The nigh
t crew knocked over a box of them and didn’t do anything about it. When you’re done, go outside and refill any of the stacks that need it. Can you handle that?”
The sorting helped calm her down, her focus drawn to the different colors and letters. All those H’s, the Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines, the pastoral names of towns she’d never been to, Valhalla, Cos Cob, Beacon Falls, and her favorite, Green’s Farms. She could sell her apartment and buy a place there, where life was easier and simpler. Though Ruby would never agree—her daughter was a city girl, all the way.
Virginia stepped outside the booth with her cardboard box of sorted timetables. Metal holders lined the counters. She circled the booth slowly, the box digging into her hip, as she matched up the piles in her box with the ones already set out, eavesdropping on everyone who came up to ask a question.
The inquiries she overheard were, for the most part, dull. Directions, train schedules, where to get a taxi. One couple wearing matching Hawaiian shirts asked about tickets for the next train to the Statue of Liberty. The clerk behind the window—a tetchy, sallow woman in her late sixties, sporting an ill-fitting black wig—laughed in their faces before sticking out her tongue at Virginia for staring. Not much in the way of customer service, this crew.
But she reconsidered after watching the one with the name tag WINSTON, who had a southern accent that rumbled easily through the glass barrier. He seemed to know the answer to any question without having to check the timetable book first, and he gave Virginia a wink as she circled by.
She committed the four clerks’ names to memory: Terrence and Totto, the fearless leader of the crew and his snarky brother. Winston, the sweet black gentleman from the South. Doris, with the fake hair and nasty laugh. All four seemed like they’d been working in the booth for as long as the station had been standing.
Back inside, Virginia took an empty stool and leafed through the handbook while she waited for another assignment. She studied the map of the layout, figuring she should know her way around. The gates for the trains were arrayed on the north side of two large concourses, the one she was on and the one directly below it. The ticket windows ran along the south side of the main concourse, below an electronic board displaying departures and arrivals. A cavernous waiting room, filled with street people and addicts, loomed on the far side of the ticket windows, the shrieks and screams within cutting through the din of commuters at least once an hour. She’d be sure not to venture that way.
To the west, a once-grand stairway led up to Vanderbilt Avenue, which she knew from experience was its own kind of hell, with drug dealers pushing their wares right outside the doors and along the narrow street. The Oyster Bar, which years ago was her parents’ favorite restaurant, sat directly under the waiting room, off the lower concourse. She overheard Winston advise a traveler looking for lunch to take the ramp to get there and bypass the lower concourse entirely, so as to avoid getting mugged.
According to her map, the train operations offices were all located on the upper office floors, which ran in a rectangle around the main concourse. That art school was up high in the east wing, labeled on the map as STORAGE. Other than the law offices for Penn Central, most of that floor appeared to be uninhabited.
The main concourse reminded her of Times Square at night, the billboards and brightly lit ads for Newsweek and Kodak a flamboyant contrast to the tarnished walls and blackened ceiling. The immensity of the space was broken up by a Chase Manhattan bank booth a few hundred feet away, next to a freestanding display for Merrill Lynch.
She had feared feeling like she was in a fishbowl, exposed on all sides, but in fact the information booth acted as a kind of bubble of invisibility. No one looked her way, not a soul. She stared at all the faces, not recognizing anyone, and in no fear of being recognized herself. By eleven thirty, the crowd had thinned considerably. Terrence closed up his window and slid off his stool. “You did all the timetables?”
She nodded. “Do you mind if I ask how long you’ve worked at Grand Central Station?”
“Terminal.”
“What’s the difference?”
From behind him, Doris snickered. “Rookie question.”
“The difference is that a station is a place where a train passes through, on the way to somewhere else. A terminal, as the name suggests, is the end of the line.”
“I see. Grand Central Terminal. Got it. How long have you worked here?”
“Since 1942. Why don’t you do a coffee run? It’s in the Station Master’s Office, under the stairs that way.” He pointed west. “That’s also where you should use the restroom if you have to. Whatever you do, don’t use the public bathrooms; it’s too dangerous.”
The tube in the center of the booth began to vibrate. Virginia gasped and almost fell off her stool when a wiry man with thick black hair emerged and stood not two feet away from her, as if he’d appeared out of thin air.
Terrence handed him some papers, and then he disappeared back inside. “That’s Ernesto.”
“But where did he come from?”
Doris mocked in her high-pitched squeal, “But where did he come from?”
“Enough, Doris. There’s a set of spiral stairs that connect us to the information booth on the lower level.”
“How many people work down there?” She glanced at Doris to see if she’d do another echo, but a traveler had stepped up to her window and she was otherwise engaged.
“Just the one. He’s only part-time, though. Back in the day, we had fourteen clerks up here, two below. Not a lot of elbow room.”
Indeed, if each window had a clerk sitting behind it, the booth would have been impossibly crowded. Until now, she hadn’t noticed how many spots were empty.
Winston spoke up. “The average clerk answers 167,440 questions a year.”
“Wow.” Virginia tried to look suitably impressed.
“We don’t get nearly that many now, though.” Terrence’s voice had a hint of nostalgia. “That was back when trains, not planes, were the way to get around the country.”
“You must know everything about this building.”
“Probably do.”
“I heard there used to be an art school in Grand Central.” Better not to mention that she’d been inside; she didn’t want to get in trouble on her first day.
He nodded. “The Grand Central School of Art, it was called. Every September and January we’d get students asking how to get to it. East wing, top floor.”
“You have a good memory.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
“Why did it close?”
“World War II, probably. No one had time for frivolous vocations during the war. There were Nazis right in the terminal, trying to sabotage the trains by dumping sand on the power converters. Luckily, we caught them just in time.”
Doris cocked her head. “‘We’? Did you personally make the arrest?”
“Well, the police did. But you bet I would have caught them, had they asked a question.”
“Like ‘Vo ist de power converter?’” Doris broke out in a full-throated laugh.
Terrence smiled. “Exactly.” He had a dreamy, faraway look in his eyes. “Back in the day, Grand Central was the beating heart of New York City. Soldiers, artists, businessmen, all dashing to get where they needed to go.”
Winston piped up. “Did you ever see Jackson Pollock?”
“Afraid not.”
“Winston, do you know a lot about art?” asked Virginia.
“I like the ones who splash all the paint about.”
“Right.” The jump from Nazis to abstract art made her head spin. Of course, it probably should come as no surprise that the info booth clerks were chock-full of facts, many of which had nothing to do with trains. Nature of the job.
“The art school, though. They say it’s haunted.” Totto’s eyes were narrow
slits. “An art teacher was killed in a train crash and all the artwork was destroyed. They say the ghost of the artist haunts the place, and no matter how hard Penn Central tries, no one will rent it.”
Doris tossed an empty paper cup into the garbage. “No one will rent it because this place is a dump, and who wants to have offices in a dump? Hey, trainee, I need more coffee.”
Virginia took the coffee order, writing it down on the back of one of the train schedules, and walked to the Station Master’s Office. The inside of the terminal was dark, even at midday, the ceiling stained by decades of cigarette and cigar smoke and the bare-bulb chandeliers encrusted in soot. The whole place felt noxious.
Even so, hints of its former grandeur existed. A railing dripped with delicate brass filigree, topped by a scratched oak handrail. Even flaking paint couldn’t obscure the ornamental detail of the metalwork. Virginia found the coffee machine in the Station Master’s Office and trundled back out, balancing five paper cups on a plastic tray. Once back in the booth, she bolted the door behind her and handed out the coffees. Totto even said thank you.
The rest of her day went by fairly quickly. She tidied the area around her, grabbed a hot dog outdoors for lunch in order to get out of the gloom, refilled the schedules again, and answered the phone, which was usually for Terrence.
A few minutes before five, Terrence told her to head home. Not until she was outside the booth did she realize she didn’t have her coat. She’d left it in the closet at the Penn Central legal offices.
Spun around by the crush of commuters, Virginia decided to take the elevator on the far side of the station rather than fight her way across the concourse. She got off on the seventh floor and stepped into a long hallway with trash piled up high against the walls and a general air of disuse. She headed right, figuring she’d end up at the offices soon enough, but only found more of the same. Had she gotten off on the wrong floor?
She turned another corner and froze. Three men sat in an alcove, sharing a joint that turned the air acrid and sweet. They wore jeans and leather jackets. Virginia’s mother had always warned her to check the footwear of men who lurked about. “If they’re in sneakers, it means they’re planning to rob you and make a fast getaway.”