Heart of the City (7 page)

“The food,” she said, waving at the empty plate. “You already have. I don’t need anything else.”

“Let me give you some money for a room,” he said. “The streets are no place for a pretty thing like you.”

Fear clouded her face. “No,” she said, shaking her head and pushing back her chair suddenly. “No.”

“Oh, golly, Joey, it’s nothing like that,” he said, excoriating himself for his choice of words. He reached into his pocket and pulled out ten dollars. “Take it and leave. I’ll stay in this booth. There’s a cup of uneaten ice cream to keep me company for at least another half hour. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Just go somewhere safe.”

“No,” she said. “No, no. Thank you—it’s swell. No.”

He took a deep breath and looked over his shoulder at the streaking headlights of passing cars. “All right,” he said, patting the table with a note of finality. “Then I’ll stay up with you. We can walk the streets together. All night if we have to.”

Pushing a loose curl behind her ear, Joey gave a half smile and choked back a laugh. “You’re loony, you know that? You’ve got rocks in your head.”

ON THE sidewalk outside, the throngs of businessmen were thinning and the shopkeepers were locking up for the night. The air felt warmer, and, looking up, Joey could see that clouds were parting, and there were stars. The sailor and the runaway walked together under the streetlights on Fifth Avenue, stopping in front of the closed shops and admiring the mannequins in high-stepping clothes.

“If only I were rich,” Joey said, shaking her head at the mink stole in one window.

“Just make believe is what I do.”

She gave him a quizzical look.

“Follow along,” he said, stopping in front of the windows of a fancy dress shop. “Here! See that gown? I’ve just bought it for you. Why, the looks you’ll get at the ball tonight! The dress is just as yellow as your hair and just as pretty.”

Joey tittered.

“And this fur, and those shoes,” he said, stopping at the next store window and turning to an imaginary sales clerk. “Wrap them in tissue, and add it to my account.”

At the haberdashery down the street, Joey joined the charade.

“Now, what do you think of this suit, Admiral Bill?” she asked.

“Aces.”

“And that tie, in the corner, does it go with brown eyes?”

“If you say so, darling.”

“Consider it yours.”

She looped her hand through Willis’s arm, and at times had to skip to keep up with his longer strides. They sauntered up and down Fifth Avenue for the next hour, putting together a complete trousseau for her, a swank civilian wardrobe for him,
and, for both of them, a set of parlor- and dining-room furniture for what Willis called “our house.” By midnight, they were punch-drunk from laughter. They stumbled back into the park and, after a few false turns, found the bridge where they’d met. The sky winked with stars, and the air was grass-scented and clean. From the lake, somewhere behind them, came an occasional plunking sound. Joey imagined toads springing off rocks into the water.

They lay down under a tree, in the shadows away from the path, and spread Joey’s long wool coat over their chests. Joey curled into Willis, and, chastely, he cradled her head, a pillow of soft curls, against his chest. She fell asleep almost instantly. As he drifted off, Willis could hear short, rhythmic breaths that reminded him of his younger sisters’, when they had been babies, in their cribs back in Texas, long ago.

DAWN BROKE warmer than the day before, and the low-hanging sun fringed the buildings along Fifth Avenue in vermillion. Willis rubbed sleep from his eyes and, in a half-panic, glanced at his watch. It was 7:30 a.m. He was due back at the base in a half hour.

“Oh, darling,” he said. “It’s time.”

Rolling out of his arms, she propped her elbow on the grass and rested her head on her hand. She wore a dreamy smile and reached over to finger a few blades of grass from Willis’s hair. She felt happier than she had in a long time. It scared her a little, because the last time she’d been happy, it had been but a prelude to ruin.

“Time for what?” she said.

“Time for me to take a powder. Orders. Sailors gotta be back on base at zero eight hundred hours.”

“Are you going somewhere? On a ship?” A smile clung to her lips, but it was fragile now. It was like one of those fallen leaves
that look aflame with color, but break on touch into a million pieces.

“Darlin’, the only thing sailors do at a receiving station is run in circles and twiddle our noses.”

Joey laughed. “And such a pretty nose, too,” she said, tapping his with her forefinger.

As Willis got up and brushed the leaves off his uniform, Joey’s eyelids brimmed.

“Joey, I’m going to make you promise me something, okay?”

She nodded.

“That until I come back, you’ll take care of yourself, you won’t do anything stupid.”

“You’ll be back?”

“Yes, but you have to promise.”

“I promise.”

“Tonight, at six, as soon as we get liberty, all right?”

He pointed to a bench across the sloping lawn. It was at the edge of the path a few meters from the bridge they’d met under. “Where my friend Joe docked last night, remember? I’ll meet you right there.”

She touched the stubble on his cheeks, and then watched him—with that straight-backed, handsome frame—lope across the lawn and onto the curving path, until he was gone.

NO SOONER had Willis passed through the security checkpoint at the pier than he sensed the air of commotion. Sailors were buzzing about with an intensity not often seen at a receiving station, where boredom and inaction were the rule.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“You haven’t seen the paper?” A sailor tossed a copy of the
New York Times
onto his rack. A headline in large type said, “Roosevelt Orders Navy to Shoot First If Axis Raiders Enter Our Defense Zones.”

Willis muttered, “Holy mackerel,” and drew the newspaper close.

In his fireside chat to the nation the night before, President Roosevelt cataloged a series of unprovoked German attacks on U.S. vessels—including a recent torpedo strike on the destroyer
Greer
—and warned of an increasingly dangerous Nazi quest to conquer the Western Hemisphere through control of the seas.

“Holy moly,” Willis said.

Roosevelt said he had ordered the Navy to destroy on sight any German or Italian submarines entering waters necessary for American defense. “The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility,” the newspaper quoted the president as saying. “It is time for all Americans, Americans of all the Americas, to stop being deluded by the romantic notion that the Americas can go on living happily and peacefully in a Nazidominated world,” he said. The time had come for America to tell the Germans, “You have now attacked our safety. You shall go no further.”

That afternoon, an officer handed Quartermaster Third Class Langford orders for an immediate movement. He was to report that evening to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Construction on an antisubmarine patrol craft was nearing completion there, and he was to join the crew.

Willis’s first thought was of Joey, and their date that evening. “What about the net tender here?” he asked his officer.

“New priorities, sailor. Pack your sea bag.”

Willis felt his heart in his chest. History was calling. He was ready. But the girl ... With an hour left before his train to Philadelphia, he sat in the mess and composed a short note. “I’m so worried about you, honey,” he wrote. “I’m afraid you’ll die of pneumonia or hunger. But I don’t blame you for not taking money. I respect you all the more. Keep your chin up, honey. You’ll make a go. You have what it takes.”

Willis ran into his friend Joe as he gathered his bags for the train. “I don’t know what she’ll do if she shows up and I’m not there,” Willis said. “The girl’s been through hell already.”

“Gee, Bill, you’d hardly be the first swabbie to break a girl’s heart.”

“Just take this note to her, will you? Tell her what happened. That duty called. And that I’m sorrier than she’ll ever know.”

His note had no forwarding address.

OVER THE next week and a half, Joey drifted through the streets of New York. Every day she felt more like a ghost. A lunch counter in the Bronx had given her a job as a waitress but decided after a couple of days that they didn’t need her.

After a man had tried to grab her as she slept in the park, she took to spending the night on the subways. You could ride all night on a single token, she discovered, shuttling between Brooklyn and the Bronx. After a certain hour, the cars cleared out enough for a small woman to lie down on a bench and disappear under her coat. Tramps and loonies stalked through the cars in the wee hours, some staring, some muttering to themselves. Mostly, though, they left her alone. She slept until the start of the morning commute, when she was awakened by the sounds of serious men, with their stamping feet and clanking umbrellas and talk of stocks and the price of precious metals.

The clean clothes she had on when she arrived in New York were now streaked with grime. She had lost her scarf. The hem of her wool coat had started to blacken and unravel. Entering the washroom at Grand Central Terminal one morning, a matron in a fur coat looked at her and recoiled. Joey gazed at her reflection in the mirror and saw that her cheek was smudged black. Had she accidentally lain in something that night on the subway?

She had come with three dollars, and after the first week she was penniless. The nights grew colder, and, with no money for subway tokens, she returned to the bench in Central Park where Sailor Bill had told her to wait. She had managed to be angry for only a day. For a day, she had lumped him in with all the other scoundrels in her life, the ones who turned on her, who lied and left. But she couldn’t keep it up. Not when she thought about his generosity, his restraint. If he wanted to give her the high hat, why would he have sent the note? Why, with no obvious advantage for himself, would he have tried to buck her up?