Strings Attached
Page 26
I climbed on the train and found my seat. They walked along the platform until they found me, and they waved until I was out of sight.
It was almost spring. The branches were fuzzy, as if you needed glasses to see, but you knew it was really the buds of the leaves ready to poke their way out into the world. One day those edges would be sharp and clear and startlingly green.
As the train picked up speed, I thought of Billy. This time, I thought of him as a boy, standing at the front of a subway car, watching the rushing tracks. On the night he died, did he see the light of the oncoming train coming toward him? That brilliant light, that flash, and then everything changed.
There were accidents in life, collisions, damage, and some happened through no fault of your own and some happened because you invited them. I had barely escaped the wreckage. Maybe I’d be haunted by Delia’s death for the rest of my life. Maybe I’d never get over Billy.
I’d been thrown clear of the wreck. I was alive.
The train pulled into Pennsylvania Station and I walked up the stairs into that great vaulting space. People rushed by with places to get to. I was in the middle of it, and I stopped, closed my eyes, and let my tears fall. I listened to the footsteps until I could swear I’d picked up the rhythm of a dance — triple-time steps, shuffles, and shim shams. My heart lifted for the first time since Billy died. Just a flicker, just a quarter note of a moment, not enough to hang on to, but still, I had felt it.
I was a girl crying in the middle of a crowd, and nobody noticed. Maybe there was something awful about that, but there was something good, too. I would dry my own tears. I opened my eyes and kept on walking.
Things can fall from the sky, it’s true, anything can, from radiation to salvation, a bomb raining fire, packages of food into outstretched hands in a desperate city.
Or on an ordinary day, nothing sinister. Nothing noble. Just balloons.
Acknowledgments
I hereby acknowledge that without the editorial guidance of David Levithan on this book I would have been facedown in the clam chowder. Most profound thanks to him for taking his red pencil and stabbing it right at the story’s heart. I am grateful to everyone at Scholastic who worked on this book, and those who were kind enough to read it. Special thanks to Becky “Bex” Amsel, who is so tolerant of my crazy, even when I make her miss trains. And thank you to the gifted and gorgeous book designer Elizabeth Parisi, whose vision I trust.
Thank you to Molly Friedrich, the agent who doesn’t do lunch, for being a champion of writers and readers. Thank you, too, to Lucy Carson for the thoughtful reading of this manuscript.
Research for this book was a treat. I lost myself in the pleasures of a Manhattan we’ve lost. For a taste of it, pick up E. B. White’s Here Is New York. I watched movies for ambience (All About Eve, of course, and Sweet Smell of Success) and haunted used bookstores for autobiographies of actors and dancers who began in the nightclubs and theaters of the early fifties. Ethan Mordden, wherever you are, thank you for all your brilliant books on Broadway musicals — you bring every era alive. And of course there are the treasures on YouTube. If you want to see dancing, take a look at Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon in “Who’s Got the Pain.” Or Carol Haney in “Steam Heat.” I’m sure Kit was at least half as good.
Thank you to John Sefakis, president of Dancers Over Forty, who got me in touch with the lovely Norma Doggett Bezwick, who started on Broadway in 1947, danced the choreography of Jack Cole and Michael Kidd, and was willing to talk to me about it. And thank you to my theater friends, John Bedford Lloyd, Anne Twomey, Larry Hirschhorn, and that walking Broadway encyclopedia, Mark McCauslin, for sharing tales, bringing books, and sending me down some fascinating paths.
Mary Cantwell’s memoir, American Girl, was a wonderful trip back in time to the Rhode Island of the thirties and forties. Thanks also to the Rhode Island Historical Society for answering my questions and for access to their library.
A shoutout goes to Ethan Marcotullio, who knows how to tell a girl he loves her with style, even in kindergarten.
Any mistakes in history or geography are my own. I admit to fudging one historical event for the sake of my own chronology — the citywide air-raid drill took place a year later, in 1951. The horrifying Thanksgiving Long Island Railroad train wreck is an actual event. I did not exaggerate the way the threat of the Bomb permeated American life in 1950, nor the chill of the blacklist on teachers in 1950s New York.
I offer here inadequate thanks for the patience of friends, family, and random acquaintances who listened as I anguished and languished for way too long over this manuscript. Thank you to Julie Downing, Katherine Tillotson, and Elizabeth Partridge for their daily unflagging support. Thanks especially to Betsy for her keen editorial advice early on, when I wanted to throw the proposal into any random river. Thank you to my dear Donna Tauscher, for everything she is in my life. And to Jane Mason, for saying over and over that I could do it. Thank you to fellow author and Clue hunter Peter Lerangis for one particular pep talk that helped.
I borrowed names, but not characters, from my Irish great-aunts and-uncles. Thanks be to the dear departed— the original Muddie, who never wrote a book but should have, and my beloved grandmother Kathleen, called Kit, with her collection of red dresses — her “slashers” — that she wore to every party. Thanks to my parents, who threw the parties.
There are no words for what Cleo Watson and Neil Watson bring to my life. I just know they hold me up.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Judy Blundell
Cover Photograph © 2011 by Michael Frost
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
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First edition, March 2011
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eISBN: 978-0-545-38844-3