1

I Know Where I Want to Go

1937

She wasn’t carrying a suitcase, and she wasn’t wearing a coat. Those were the things that struck him when he saw her for the first time. It was just a bit after sunrise on a Sunday in early December. Joe was heading across the Main Concourse for Track 13, but there she was—no bag, no coat—standing by the west side of the great gold clock, peering into a window of the information booth. If she was traveling, then she was traveling light. If she was working at the terminal, then she was drunk, or she should have known better. No woman who worked at Grand Central would ever go near the guys in the booth at this hour, not at the end of a long night, when their shifts were finally over, and they were probably handing a bottle around.

Then one of them must have made a pass, because she stepped back quickly, and he could hear them barking and laughing as she turned to walk away. Joe saw how young she was, and how completely out of place she looked. Why was she here at dawn, and what was she doing without an escort? Still, she didn’t seem scared by the guys as much as frustrated, even angry. Her eyes were enormous and bright green, and her lips were the same kind of hard-candy red as the stoplight on a signal lamp.

She stepped away from the stir she’d caused but stopped walking after just a few yards. A tramp standing on the marble staircase cupped a cigarette in his hand, flicked off the ash, and gave her the eye.

“Hey, princess,” he said. “Can you spare a grand?”

Joe hadn’t had his coffee yet, but he moved to her side in just a few steps. Her earrings might have been real pearls, and they dangled from glittering, flame-shaped tops. But “princess”? Joe didn’t think so. Her pale-blue dress was smudged and worn, and her shoes seemed old and scuffed.

“You look kind of lost,” he said to her.

Behind her, the tramp gave Joe the finger. Another guy whistled from inside the booth.

“I’m not lost,” the girl said. “It’s just that—”

“What?”

“Those men.”

“Did you need directions?” Joe asked.

“No,” she said. “No, I’ve been here before.”

“Well, what did you need those guys for, then?”

“I was only asking them what happened to the bank on the lower level. One of them said there’d been a little fire, and they all started laughing and saying things like ‘Fire down below.’”

She looked at the ground, then back at Joe. “Do you think they could be drunk?”

“Oh, they could definitely be drunk,” Joe said.

“How rude.”

“Want me to go chew them out?”

She smiled. “You’d do that?” she asked.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and lifted her chin just slightly. Joe realized she wasn’t just beautiful. There was something else about her, something vivid and exciting. She made him think of the cats in the tunnels far beneath the concourse: coiled up and waiting, all energy, no telling what they were going to do.

By now, the tramp had moved away, and the guys in the booth were leaving too—disappearing one by one down the booth’s hidden corkscrew staircase.

“So, you know where you’re going?” Joe asked the girl.

“I know where I want to go,” she said.

“And where’s that?”

“Turtle Bay Gardens.”

That was the neighborhood near the East River, just blocks from the YMCA where Joe lived but miles beyond him in all other ways. Turtle Bay was a high-class place with pale, private houses and rich, private people. That meant the pearls were real, Joe thought. But still this young woman seemed happy, even eager, to be talking to him.

Standing this close, he could smell her perfume: a blend of talcum and flowers and something sharper, like wood or whiskey. She was two or three inches shorter than he was. Her hair was a jumble of soft copper wires, and it fell at her neck in a cloud of curls. Her cheeks were smooth and pink, the same shade as the terminal’s Tennessee marble floors.

“So why do you need a bank at this hour?” Joe asked. “I thought they’d caught Ma Barker.”

She didn’t laugh at his joke. She reached into her dress pocket and pulled out a cushion of paper money. The bills weren’t green; they looked foreign. “This is all I’ve got,” she said. “I need to get it changed for American dollars.”

“There’s a branch a few blocks away,” Joe said. “But I don’t think it opens till nine. Where are you coming from, that you don’t have cash?”

“I do have cash. It’s just French cash.”

“Last I heard, they hadn’t laid any tracks under the Atlantic,” Joe said. “What train were you on, anyway? And why aren’t you wearing a coat?”

This time she laughed—a wonderful, confident laugh, deeper than he would have thought possible for someone who looked so young. But she ignored all his questions.

“Anything else you’d like to know, mister?”

“Didn’t mean to be rude,” he said.

“You’re not!” she exclaimed. “You’re being so kind.”

He told her his name, and he asked for hers.

“Nora Lansing,” she said, extending her hand, as if he’d asked her to dance.

Joe shook it, but hastily let it go. “Your hand’s really hot. Do you feel all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

Carefully, he took her hand back, cupping it now in both of his, as if it were a butterfly. Its warmth seemed to spread from her hand into his, then traveled the length of his spine, like a current along the railroad tracks.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Lansing.”

“Nora.”

Nora. It was an old-fashioned name, and she did seem a little old-fashioned. Her pale-blue dress had a black collar, black cuffs, and swirly flat black buttons that looked like rolled-up licorice wheels. What Joe knew about women’s clothing could fit inside an olive, but he knew the dress looked wrong somehow.

She leaned in closer to him.

“So, Joe, let me ask you this,” she said. “Is there any chance you could walk me home?”

“To Turtle Bay Gardens? What about the bank?”

“Well, I wouldn’t need to go there, see, if you could walk me home.”

Joe looked up at the gold clock and then back at Nora. “I wish I could,” he said. “Honestly. But I work here, and I’m late for a meeting, and right after that, I start my shift.”

The brightness in her eyes dimmed a bit. Joe realized, with some amazement, that he suddenly felt it was his obligation to bring the brightness back.

“What if I find a cop to walk you?” he asked.

“Oh, you’re so nice,” Nora said. “But I can do that myself. I should have done it in the first place.”

By now the Main Concourse was starting to bubble and steam with the morning rush: workers and travelers in seemingly random motion, except for the subtle dance steps that kept them from bumping into each other. No one stopped, unless it was at the clock, the ticket windows, or the blackboard where Bill Keogh stood on a ladder and wrote out the times and track numbers in lemon-yellow chalk.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Joe asked Nora.

“I’m sure.”

She circled her left wrist with her right hand. For just a moment, she looked confused, and he hesitated, reluctant to leave her. Then she said, resolutely: “Go ahead, Joe. You don’t want to be late.”

They walked off in opposite directions, and Joe checked the time as he hurried across the concourse. When he stopped to look back, he was half embarrassed, half thrilled, to see that Nora had done the same thing. Their eyes met the way their hands had: filled with heat and surprise. Finally, Joe turned to leave and, noting the time once more, he started to run.

2

As If the Sun Were Rolling By

1937

The meeting Joe was heading for had nothing to do with Grand Central, even though everyone who attended it had a job somewhere in the terminal. This was a prayer meeting run by a porter named Ralston Crosbie Young, also known as the Red Cap Preacher. Like virtually all the Red Caps, Ralston was abidingly polite. He had been carrying passengers’ bags and giving directions since the terminal’s opening in 1913. But for years now, at least three days a week, he had also been leading prayer meetings in an empty train car on Track 13. Joe had been born and raised a Catholic, and he attended church now only when he went with his family in Queens. Ralston’s meetings were more his style. “Listen, man,” Ralston frequently said. “God has a plan for your life.”

There were several dozen regulars, like Joan, who gave manicures at DeLevie’s and always had an eye out for Joe. There were Wallace and Delroy, Red Caps like Ralston who looked incomplete when they took off their hats. There was Doug from the Oyster Bar kitchen, whose shoes scraped the floor with the bits of shells that were caught in his soles; Tommy, the kid who swept the barbershop; and Mr. Walters, who wore a suit and tie, so no one ever quite got around to asking him what he did.

Joe wasn’t a regular, but the group always seemed to welcome him. He was thirty-two now, but he’d been seventeen when he’d gotten his first job at the terminal, and even people who hadn’t known him for years usually felt they had. In some ways, he still looked like a kid. His mouth, slightly crooked, always seemed to be smiling, no matter what his mood. His ears were mismatched: one straight, the other tipped like an elf’s. And though his thick black hair was parted along the tidiest line, some C-shaped locks were always flopping down on his forehead. Despite his youthfulness, though, Joe seemed sturdy in every way. His face was broad and Irish; more friendly than handsome, but steadfast, like his body.

Ralston had already started the meeting when Joe arrived, but he stopped, pointed a slender brown finger at him, and said, “Hoped I’d see you this morning.”

Joe pointed back at him, smiling. “Hoped I’d see you too.”

Ralston moved some newspapers from the seat beside him.

“Here’s your place,” he said quietly, and Joe sat.

Joe liked going to Ralston’s meetings now and then, but he’d rarely missed the ones that were held on December 5 and January 6. These were special meetings because they took place on special mornings. Clear weather permitting, these were the two mornings in the year when you could stand on certain side streets and, looking west to east, see the rising sun line up exactly with the street grid of Manhattan. The same thing happened on two summer evenings, looking west at sunset. During these sunrises and sunsets, the skyscrapers of Manhattan framed the sun exactly the way Joe had heard the towering rocks at Stonehenge in England did.

Not many people knew about these special days, but those who did waited for them. They were sometimes called the Manhattan Solstices because—due to the particular angle of the New York streets—they occurred several weeks before and after the true winter and summer solstices. In the terminal, they had always been called Manhattanhenge, and a Manhattanhenge sunrise was one of the few things that could bring even old-timers to work at dawn. If you were game to stand out in the cold and dark, you would first see the sky start to lighten, then a small halo on the horizon that slowly grew taller, as if an angel were rising from the edge of the world. Finally, the sun would appear, and the light would come coursing down the street.

If at sunrise, for whatever reason, you happened to find yourself inside instead of outside the terminal, you could see that amazing line of light blast through the middle of the three high arched windows. The sun would flood the floor and make the famous blue ceiling come alive in a wash of pale purple light. In a place made of marble, limestone, steel, and brass, where almost everyone worked underground, dependent on electric light and attending the constant circuits of trains, Manhattanhenge was a reminder that there was power, order, and beauty in the natural world as well.

Ralston Young wasn’t usually particular about what he preached. He could rip a page from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue and find a message from God in it. But today, an hour after December’s Manhattanhenge sunrise, Ralston didn’t need to look for extra inspiration. Gratitude for the majesty of the Lord’s universe, that was what Ralston preached this morning. Gratitude for the way the planets circled the sun, for the way the ancients had built Stonehenge, and for the way William K. Vanderbilt had built Grand Central Terminal.

Joe would have loved to see Stonehenge. It was one of a hundred places he had sworn to himself he’d go someday—if the lousy Depression ever ended and he had the money or got the chance. But Manhattanhenge was pretty damn good itself, particularly when its special light was being praised by Ralston Young in the dimness of an unused train car. Today, Joe closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, to marvel at the glory of God’s handiwork. But he kept imagining Nora disappearing into the crowd—her copper hair, the spark in her green eyes, the licorice buttons on her dress—and all he could think was that he should have asked for her phone number before letting her get away.

Hastily, he stood up.

“You all right, son?” Ralston asked him.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “Just late for my shift, that’s all.”

He checked his watch as he sprinted up the ramp to the concourse. In truth, he still had twenty minutes before he was due to start work, and he spent all but the last few of them standing by the gold clock, scanning the crowd for Nora, wishing that he had been the one who’d gotten to walk her home.

Joe Reynolds was a leverman, the youngest in Grand Central’s history. His job was to guide the incoming trains through their final miles under Park Avenue and into the terminal. With its two-level layout, Grand Central had forty-eighttracks that could be in use at any one time, and when things got really busy, a new train might roll in every twenty seconds.

Joe was assigned to Signal Tower A, not a tower at all, but the upper room of a narrow, two-story brick sweatbox that was situated under Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street, almost half a mile north of the Main Concourse. Joe’s responsibility was to push and pull the levers that, connected by underground cables, moved the tracks from side to side just in time to line up before the trains reached them. In Tower A alone, there were more than three hundred levers, each one numbered, together making up a vast chest-high console that the men called the Piano. The handles were made of brass, and the spots where they’d been gripped so often gleamed like the Red Caps’ jacket buttons. There were five signal towers for Grand Central, three men to a Piano, forty or fifty levers to a man, and above each man a panel showing the dozens of tracks converging.

There was not much in a tower room except light and noise and men. There was no idle conversation. There were no cigarettes, no food, no coffee—except at the desks where the tower directors manned the phones and called out the routes and the track changes. The room always smelled of metal and sweat.

It was bright, no matter the season or hour. God had separated the day from the night when he created the world, but when the engineer William J. Wilgus created the tower system, it was always day, and the lights ranged from twinkling to blinding. There were the tiny green emeralds that twinkled on the boards and showed the trains’ positions. There were the overheads, so strong that when anyone entered the room, he had to shield his eyes. And finally, there were the bursts of light that came from the trains rumbling past the tower windows. Every few minutes, a flash and a roar, as if the sun were rolling by. The whole thing had its own music, with the rhythms of lights and sounds, and the movements of the levermen, and the directors, setting the tempo from the desks and the phones. The heat from the lights was so intense that the men always worked with their sleeves rolled up, used the showers afterward, and kept a stack of fresh shirts in their lockers. It was exhausting work, but Joe had a knack for it. Like Steady Max Sullivan, who had started training Joe when he was barely twenty, he had mastered a perfect level of alertness, a suitable halfway point between caring too little and caring too much.

There were fail-safes in the system, but the goal was never to need them. Hanging on the wall, in a dusty black frame, was a now honey-colored New York Times article from 1913. With a thick black pencil, someone had long ago circled one paragraph as inspiration:

In a signal tower, every moment is an emergency, either actual or possible. “Why, I eat, drink and breathe emergency in my work,” said one of the operators. “It’s funny, but you can’t surprise me with anything.”