Heart of the City (14 page)

It was water—his love for it, and the fascination it held—that led Danny to the Navy. He was the shy son of a newspaper press-man. His father, hands streaked with ink, worked so much overtime to feed and clothe his five kids that they rarely saw him. Never was Danny more at peace than with a reel in his fist as the fish leaped in the ponds near their home in New Hyde Park. The place where land met water was a place where a boy could think. It was a place where a boy could see the everyday marvels of nature, mysterious and pure.

After high school, Danny won a concession at the pharmacy on Brian Street, selling sandwiches and shakes to folks in the neighborhood. The owner had offered to put him through pharmacy school if he came back to work for him. But Danny had other ideas. The conflict in Korea had been perfect cover for his decision to enlist, which had less to do with patriotic duty than with something else: a chance to be away from the rest of the world, inside a kind of floating observatory, with the sea as your mattress and for a nightlight the stars.

But water, he had recently come to see, had a kind of moral neutrality: it took life as readily as it gave. His neck twitched, and he lowered his eyes. A group of sailors was clowning around by the information booth. “You had a good time with that fuzzy duck, didn’t ya?” one said, with an exaggerated wink. “That dog, not a chance,” the other replied. Danny rifled through his bag for his corncob pipe, stuffed it with tobacco, and touched the bowl with a match. He inhaled and felt the heat in his lungs.

THE FIVE girls picked up their bags and bounded across the concourse in a loose pack. “Hiya darlins,” a sailor hooted as he dashed past. “Like that pretty blouse,” cried another. But as they skipped down the ramp to the platform, there was only the thud of stampeding feet and a lightning streak of white uniforms. Jean soon began to curse herself for overpacking. She had stuffed her
hard case with three choices of outfits for each day and four pairs of shoes. On top of that, she was toting a birdcage-shaped wire egg basket she’d bought at Macy’s. A few months earlier, on a ski trip in New Hampshire, she had fractured the bones in her right palm when her pole struck the snow the wrong way. She hadn’t felt pain in a few weeks. But now something in her palm was beginning to spasm.

“Go ahead, girls,” she shouted, out of breath, as her friends, lighter packers, began to outpace her. “I’ll catch up.”

Mary turned her head, with a concerned look, but kept shuffling forward. “Toward the front,” she shouted, nodding down the platform. “We’ll save a seat. Hurry.”

Jean gave a hard tug, trying to loft her suitcase above her knees for speed. Then came a sudden shudder in the muscles of her right arm. Then a feeling of something giving way. Her suitcase crashed to the platform and that silly birdcage basket tumbled after it.

She swallowed down a sob. She was sure now she’d never find her friends. To make the train, she might have to leave her things right there. Then, just as suddenly, a figure in white stopped to the right and in front of her. She turned only halfway, afraid of making eye contact. A sailor. He was on his knees collecting her bags.

“Where is your seat, ma’am?” came his voice, low and unhurried.

“My friends went ahead,” she stammered, keeping her eyes on the platform, which, with most passengers now on the train, had started look forlorn. “That second car, or the third, up there, I think.”

She stole a glance, long enough only to see dark hair, a sharp profile. A pipe jutted from the corner of his mouth.

“We’d better run,” he said.

The inside aisle was a slalom course of sailors and their bags. Jean pardoned her way through and found the four girls at the end of the car, in two rows of facing seats, two to a side. They had thrown Mary’s shawl over a pair of the seats on the other side of the aisle.

“Where are your bags?” Margaret asked.

“My word, what happened to you?” This, from Evelyn.

Jean gave a discreet sideways flick of the eyes, to indicate something behind her. Then she watched her friends’ faces undergo subtle changes of expression. Mary looked into her lap. Evelyn gently tickled Barbara’s elbow.

“Here?” The pipe in the sailor’s mouth wagged slightly as he spoke.

“If you would, sir, please,” Jean said.

He wrestled the suitcase into the overhead rack and gingerly handed her the egg basket.

“Thank you ever so much.” Jean lifted the shawl and handed it to Mary. When she sat down, she smiled coyly at her friends.

From the corner of her eye, however, she could see that the sailor boy was still in the aisle. He had his arms on his hips and a look of concentration, as if studying the crowded train car for signs of an open seat.

“Ma’am, may I sit with you until Providence?”

Jean turned slowly, not sure at first if he was addressing her. Except, she saw now, he was. He was smiling and, with his pipe, gesturing toward the window seat beside her.

A WHISTLE blew, and the train began clunking through a long, dark tunnel. When it surfaced, above rows of dimly lit tenement buildings, it picked up speed. But strangely, the sound of the wheels against the rails softened, as if the train had sprung a sail and were being carried by the wind.

Jean shifted in her seat. “Where is your ship?”

“Newport, ma’am,” said the sailor. “Rhode Island. We have to report to duty at zero eight hundred hours.”

“Is that the same thing as eight in the morning?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do sailors always cut it so close?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He was smiling. “You don’t get any stripes for showing up early.”

“No medals?”

“Just infractions if we’re late.”

“And here
I
am talking your ear off. You must want to sleep.”

“Not sure I can, ma’am,” he said, looking out the window. A half moon hung in the sky, fringing the trees along the tracks in a spectral light.

“Well, if you want to talk, you’re sitting next to the right person.” Jean looked across the aisle at her friends, who were by now slumped in their seats, nearly asleep. “The thing about being an only child is we never get tired of hearing ourselves carry on.”

“Danny Lynch,” he said, nodding.

“Jean Westrum, of Lexington, Massachusetts.”

Soon, with Jean leading the way, they were talking and talking. They discovered they were the same age. They both had working-class families. They both had fathers whose hard work had let them move to leafier neighborhoods—he from Hell’s Kitchen to New Hyde Park, she from Somerville to Lexington.

When Jean said her father had been a farmer in Norway before immigrating to America, Danny smiled. “That sounds like a nice life,” he said. He told her he had lived next door to a farm as a boy. After the harvest, the owner let the Lynch kids glean the fields for leftover potatoes, lettuce, and radishes. Once, they found rabbits living in the rhubarb field, and Danny taught his younger sister Ruthie how to feed them. “I had a business,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I’d go over to the farm to fill my red wagon with topsoil. Then I’d wheel it over to the neighbors on the other side and dump it in their backyard.”

“Clever,” Jean said, giving him a playfully skeptical look.

“It’s true,” he said, defensively. “They paid me a penny a load. Whatever I couldn’t sell, well, my dad would buy back from me.”

IT WAS 2 a.m. now, and the train was quiet except for the sound of a few sailors playing chess in the back and the buzz saw of some man snoring a few rows down.

Danny put his pipe in his bag and withdrew the newspaper he’d bought at Grand Central. He read for a while, then handed it to Jean. “Would you like a look?”

“Oh. Sure.” She blushed. He must be tired of hearing me talk, she thought.

She read articles about Korea, air-raid sirens, Iranian oil. On one of the inside pages, she found an article about the life of sailors at Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia. The city, it seemed, was a sewer of vice.

“Did you read this?” she asked, sliding the paper over the armrest. “It sounds just awful.”

He picked it up and read silently.

“Is Newport anything as bad?” she asked, with a solicitous look.

“It hasn’t been a real happy place, not after last week. You must have seen the papers.”

“No,” she said. “I haven’t heard a thing.”

The previous Thursday, he said, a Navy launch carrying more than 140 sailors to their ships in Newport Harbor had capsized in a storm. At least fifteen young men had drowned. “A few were newlyweds,” he said, shaking his head. One sailor’s wife learned of her husband’s death while packing her bags for a move to his parents’ home, where they had planned to await the birth of their first child.

The sailors were returning to their ships from overnight liberty in town, he told her. Too many crowded onto the launch, far more than was safe, particularly during a storm. All the same, the launch somehow steamed off, toward anchorages in Narragansett Bay. In the end, for no good reason, more than a dozen men were lost. It was one thing for men to die in battle, he said. But this?

Jean looked at him now, face downcast, and saw anguish.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “And how awful for those families. Had you been in Newport very long?”

“Less than a week.” Newport, he said, was where the Navy had sent him to await orders after boot camp. “I couldn’t stay there over the weekend. It’s why I came home.”

Jean felt moved by the story. You wouldn’t know it from his looks: he was over six feet tall, she thought, and as husky as any man. But he was a gentle soul, introspective, without the roughness that came to mind when she thought of what people said about sailors.

It was now 5:25 a.m., and when the conductor called out “Providence, next station,” Danny drew his pipe from his rucksack and stuffed tobacco into the bowl. She could see from his movements that he was exhausted.

“I get a bus from here,” he said, the pipe wagging again.

“Try to get some sleep if you can.”

He stood up with his duffel and set his cap on his dark hair. “Miss Westrum?”

“Yes?”

“If I wrote you a letter, would you think about writing me back?”

She pulled a pen from her purse and wrote her address in the margins of his newspaper.

“I would.”

As soon as the train doors shut, she spread her long legs across the seat, still warm, where Dan had sat. She was soon fast asleep and dreaming.