Heart of the City (17 page)

She thought for a moment of a favorite phrase of her late mother’s. It was about the two things parents owed children. “Give them roots,” her mother used to say, “and give them wings.”

AT GRAND Central Terminal, where he got off the train from the airport, Chris Holter felt shrunken by the city’s immensity. Hundreds of people—or was it thousands?—were crossing the vast marble concourse with a seemingly choreographed efficiency. He cradled his small bag and sheltered against a wall near a row of ticket booths. How well had he planned for America?

Twenty-five and single, Chris had left home for a simple reason: escape. From sameness. From routine. For the past three years, he had worked the overnight shift on a factory assembly line in Straubing, Germany, a small city at the foot of the Bavarian Forest where his single mother had raised him and four siblings. The plant made television parts, and his work involved spinning copper wires onto plastic circuit boards. At quitting time, his fingers throbbed with another night’s worth of nicks from where wire had caught skin.

In early August 1988, the plant shut for its customary summer furlough. Chris had always spent the three weeks off in Straubing, loafing with friends at the public swimming pool or beer hall. But this year somehow, that had no longer seemed enough.

His trip to America, he told himself, would be modest. He would visit New York and Washington, D.C., with a possible side trip to Pittsburgh. A friend of his Uncle Gerhard’s allegedly lived there—a man his uncle had corresponded with through an international pen-pal program and had met only once, decades before. But that’s where Chris’s planning ended. How he’d get around, where he’d stay, how much things cost, whom he might call in a pinch—such details, it dawned on him now, might have been best sorted out in advance.

On the streets outside Grand Central, the air was heavy with a gritty heat and the vague smell of melting tires. Chris stopped in the first cheap-looking hotel, dabbed at the sweat on his forehead, and booked a room for two nights. At the front desk, he asked directions to the one thing he knew for certain was in New York.

“Which way,” he said, “to the Statue of Liberty?”

A HORN blew, and Tina gripped the sides of her seat as waves knocked the ferry into the pilings. “Hold on, Todd,” she shouted across the deck, but her son was off in his own world.

Tina, forty, had spent the past year watching her marriage of two decades crumble. She had such a cheerful disposition that few of the other teachers at her school, in Newport News, Virginia, would have seen her suffering. But by the time she and Todd had moved out of the house, she felt isolated and at sea.

Her rock, as she put it, was her Aunt Helen, a no-nonsense Long Island woman who had taken on a maternal role after Tina’s parents died. “If it’s all right, I’d like to come up to Long Island for a few days with Todd,” Tina had announced to her one day on the phone. “We need to get away.” But that wasn’t exactly it, Tina realized. What she needed was to come home—to a different home, where people could help her and Todd feel like part of a family again.

A few days before her trip, at a bookstore in Newport News, she came across a picture book on New York City. When she reached the photographs of the Statue of Liberty, she stopped. Her father had been born in Bavaria, and was sixteen and alone when he steamed past the statue in the 1920s on his way to the immigration center at Ellis Island. He came with little money and no English but had somehow cobbled together a new life. Her circumstances were different, to be sure, but wasn’t she attempting a version of the same thing?

She pictured herself in his place, a boy from a faraway land, the son of a trolley operator, on a boat steaming into Upper New York Bay and the unknown. My God, Tina thought, how did he do it? I have friends, a job, people who care about me. Who did dad have?

William Wagenbrenner had met Tina’s mother, a farmer’s daughter from White Russia, at a dance on Long Island in the early 1930s. It was a glimmering moment, followed by a series of setbacks: his siblings never honored their promise to join him in America; a strike at his factory forced him into the bread lines. He served as a U.S. Army translator during World War II, only
to receive the news one day that his parents—still in Munich—had been killed by a stray American bomb. But if these things left scars, he didn’t let his family see. “Everything’s going to work out,” he told Tina after visits to the bread line. Then he’d pat his children on the shoulder and touch his fingers to his heart.

She hoped she had inherited some small measure of his resilience. But with the turmoil of the past year, she wasn’t sure. She was still daydreaming when a warm voice with a foreign accent brought her back to the ferry deck. A man in shorts and a loose tank top was standing a couple of feet away, at a deferential angle, pointing to an open spot beside her.

“Ma’am,” he said, but it came out sounding like “Mom.” “Is this seat taken?”

OFF BALANCE from the long journey, Chris awoke unsure of whether he’d slept for two hours or for ten. As the bus rolled through Midtown and Wall Street on the way to Battery Park, he marveled at the heights of the buildings. The tallest structure in Straubing was its five-hundred-year-old clock tower, which measured just sixty-eight meters, a dwarf by New York standards.

“This is an adventure,” he told himself, smiling, as the city’s sights and sounds rushed him.

For years, he had dreamed of visiting America.

Half of what he knew of it came from his Uncle Gerhard. A Falstaffian fellow, Gerhard had visited as a young man in the 1950s and came back prattling on about American-style freedom and singing songs with lyrics like “You say tomato” and “Hey, good-looking.” The other half came from
The Terminator
,
Top Gun
, and other action movies, which had absorbed Chris in dubbed German in the two-screen cinema in the town square.

Still, the United States seemed a world away. Chris had never been farther from home than Austria. But with no wife or
children to support and free rent—he lived with his mother—he eventually put aside enough money for a nonstop flight to New York.

That morning, every seat on the ferry’s bottom deck was taken. So he climbed the stairs and quickly noticed two things: a single empty seat and the woman sitting next to it. She had coal-black hair and a slender figure, with a deep tan. She was exotic—nothing like the blondes back home. She was alone, it seemed, and looking at some distant point over the heads of the other passengers. A smile played on her face, as if in recollection of some long-ago happiness.

When Chris asked if the seat beside her was taken, she seemed almost to shudder. He hoped she hadn’t misunderstood his accented English. But then, just as suddenly, her smile returned and she waved him to the seat.

“Oh, please,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Not five seconds passed before she spoke again. “So I hear that accent, where ya from?”

Now it was his turn to be startled. Back in Germany people tended to be reserved, particularly with strangers. He remembered from the Hollywood movies he’d seen in Straubing that American women were often outgoing. But a direct personal question to a stranger?

“Sorry? Me?”

“Yeah, you,” she said, with a throaty laugh. “I hear something in the way you speak. It’s different.”

“I am from Germany.”

“Where in Germany?”

“Bavaria. You know where it is?”

“This is very funny.” She shook her head. “You won’t believe this.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s where my dad’s from, same part.”

“Yeah?” Chris said, raising his eyebrows a little.

WHEN TINA turned to face the strange man, she saw he was quite a bit younger than she was. He had blond hair, a broad mouth, and eyes that seemed to squint when they looked at you.

“So you just moved to the United States?” Tina asked.

“No,” he said. “Here just two weeks. Vacation. Yeah?”

“First time to New York?”

“First time to America.”

“Well, where’s your group?”

“No group,” he said, smiling. “Just me.”

Is this man out of his mind? Tina thought. I need help in New York City, and I’m an American.

She shot him a look of concern but held her tongue. He probably didn’t want a lecture.

“Okay, but what about a camera?” He was carrying nothing so much as a bag. “How will you remember your trip?”

“I take pictures in my head,” the man said, tapping his temples with his forefingers. She laughed, and then he laughed, too.

With the boat slowing as it reached Liberty Island, Tina’s son returned.

“Todd, this person is from Germany.”

“Okay,” Todd said. “So?”

“I am Chris,” the man said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Whoa, Mom, he sounds like the Terminator,” Todd said.

“Honey, be nice,” Tina said.

“Yeah, it’s rad. It’s like that guy, Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Chris looked at mother and son, paused for a moment, then deadpanned: “Ahl be bahk.”

“Oh, whoa,” Todd said. It had been a long time since Tina had seen her son with so free a smile.