Heart of the City (15 page)

“YOU LOOK nice today, Barbara,” the chubby man in the green eyeshades said. Then he cupped his hand around one side of his mouth. “But what happened to ya friend ovah heya?” he said in a stage whisper. “She get into some kinda mix-up with a blendah?”

“A sailor.” Barbara winked.

“Hubba-hubba.”

“On a train.”

“Ring-a-ding.”

“We could hardly sleep for all the jabbering they were doing.”

“Now, Barbara, you make it sound scandalous,” Jean said, tiring of being talked about.

Jean’s shift at the bank began at noon, and it was senseless to travel home to Lexington first. So after the train pulled into South Station, at 6:50 a.m., she went with Barbara to Barbara’s job in the bookkeeping department at the
Boston Herald-Traveler
. When Jean went to the powder room, she saw what Barbara’s supervisor was getting at. The curls on the right side of her head were crushed flat, while the ones on the left seemed to have gained volume. Her mascara looked like a tire skid.

She felt for an instant like she had as a little girl, when kids called her String Bean and asked, “How’s the weather up there?” She was still a head taller than most of her friends, but she had grown into her height. She had dirty blond curls that inspired envy in some of her friends and a mirthful face that looked a little like Shirley Temple’s. She splashed water on her cheeks and retouched her face and hair. Looking again in the mirror, she knew she had improved since her string bean days.

By about 3 p.m., midway through her shift at the bank, she was fighting to stay awake. The numbers on the loan amortization she was reading began to blur, and her eyelids felt leaded. Did she have to prattle on so? Did that poor sailor really need to know about her latest dance recital or the walk-in dollhouse her carpenter father had built her as a girl? Did he really care that the neighbors she baby-sat for had an atomic bomb shelter in their basement? If I’d only stopped talking an hour sooner, she thought.

A FUNEREAL air hung over Newport. Danny heard from his shipmates that the death toll had been revised upward to eighteen. The disaster had been the result of multiple errors: a seaman apprentice—someone of Danny’s own low rank—was in
charge of the fifty-foot launch, instead of the regular coxswain; the officer who sent the launch ashore told investigators he hadn’t noticed the switch because the apprentice seaman “looked just like” the coxswain; at the landing in Newport, sailors ignored the seaman’s request that some disembark; and on the way back to the anchorages, the seaman inexplicably barreled through a set of three breakers at full throttle.

At the mess, Danny overheard a senior enlisted man say, “We’re supposed to have the smarts to beat the Communists in Korea, but we can’t get our own guys back to ship in Newport?” Danny felt only more down.

His orders the next day couldn’t have come too soon. His ship, the destroyer USS
Power
, was leaving Newport. It would be spending the whole summer in dry dock at the Boston Naval Yard, where it would be outfitted with new guns.
Boston
. Before taps that evening, he sat in his rack and stared for a long time at a blank sheet of paper.

“Dear Jean,” he finally wrote. “As you can plainly see I wasn’t joking when I told you I would write as soon as I had time.”

He said he’d just learned he was heading to Norfolk for a week of training. Yes, that same “hell hole of vice and corruption” they’d read about in the paper on the train. Then—she’d never guess!—his destroyer was steaming to Boston.

“While we are in Boston I expect to get a good many liberties and would greatly appreciate it if you would show me around town,” he continued. “You could never realize how much it means to a fellow to know someone in a strange place ... I don’t care too much for dancing, but I do like to go walking or to a stage show or movie and anything that you might like. I am sure I would enjoy anything you would suggest.”

IT WAS just after 11 p.m., and Jean was so spent from two nights of overtime at the bank that she almost stepped on the letter by
her bedroom door. When she saw the return address—Daniel John Lynch SA, USS
Power
, c/o Fleet Post Office, New York, New York—she threw off her purse, shut the door, and curled up on her bed. It was a sweet note, she thought, and she smiled at the way the lines of blue ink tilted slightly, like waves beneath a ship. She found a piece of ordinary paper in her desk. She wanted to say the right thing. She used a pencil, in case she needed to erase.

“Dear Dan, As you can plainly see,” she wrote, mimicking his first line, “I wasn’t joking either when I told you I would answer your letter.”

She told him she had to drink black coffee to survive the day after their train ride. She mentioned a friend named Lydia whose first anniversary passed with her husband fighting in Korea. Jean and her friends took her out alone to celebrate, but still, Jean wrote, “the poor kid ... I wouldn’t want to be alone on my first anniversary.”

As for Danny’s proposal that they meet, Jean decided to respond with nonchalance, as though such a meeting had already been decided but was of no special consequence. “I have been trying to think of things you might like to do,” she wrote, “but we can talk about that when I see you.” She reached into her vanity for her bubble gum-colored lipstick and rouged her lips. She puckered up and pressed them to the back of the letter. She thought for a moment about how that gentle sailor boy would react, and giggled.

The truth was, she was mostly a novice with boys. Up at her family’s cabin in New Hampshire, counselors from the Boy Scout camp across the lake sometimes rode over on their horses to flirt with her and her friends. But the only kissing that went on was with “Prince Charming,” a rock sticking out of the water that looked like some man’s face in profile.

At Mosley’s on the Charles, the dance hall just outside Boston, she had always liked when boys asked her to the floor. But they usually came over while she was seated, before they
could gather that she was five feet ten. When she stood up, accepting, she could see some of them wince. Their partner was taller than they were. Danny, she remembered as she sealed her letter, was not just over six feet. He wore a uniform.

“Who’s this Daniel Lynch?” her father asked over breakfast that morning, peering over the sports pages. “I know him?”

She explained.

“A sailor? I’d like to meet him.”

THERE HAD been no reply to her letter. So Jean was startled when she answered the phone on a Saturday in mid-June and heard Danny announce that he was at that very moment at the trolley stop nearest her home.

“The sign says
Orr-
lington Heights,” he said. “Golly, Jean, I hope I’m in the right place. I don’t know how I’ll get back if I’m not.”

“You mean
Ah
-lington Heights?”

“A-r-l-i-n-g-t-o-n,” Danny said. “
Orrlington.
”

“Your accent is something funny, Danny. Really, you should have let me know you were coming. Weren’t you going to give me any notice?”

Her father snatched the receiver from her hand. “Who’s this?” he said gruffly. “Who? Where? Right ... Yes ... Fine ... Stay where you are. Yes. Fifteen minutes.”

And then he hung up.

“Daddy!” She took stock of her plain dress and tousled hair. “I’m in no condition.”

“Hurry, Jean,” her father said impatiently. “The boy says he’s never been to Boston. We don’t want him, God forbid, getting lost up here.”

They found him in his dress whites at the edge of the parking lot looking more than a little nervous. He shook hands with her father, a tall man with high Norwegian cheekbones and a steely face. Jean made it her business to keep up a stream of amiable
chatter the whole way home. She was their only daughter, and she feared Danny would receive an interrogation.

Over lemonade in the living room, her parents got in only a few polite questions—about his ship, his family—before her mother remembered her bridge group over at her sister’s house in Somerville.

“Why don’t Dan and I drive you there?” Jean suggested. “Then I can drop Dan back at—what was it?—
Orr
-lington Heights.”

She looked at her father, whose normally impassive face gave way to a grin.

“Do you see any problem with that, dear?” her mother asked her father.

“Not from where I’m sitting, Mabel.”

“Just be sure to drop Dan off before dark,” her mother said, “because I’ll need you to pick me up before Auntie starts the roast. If I stay too long, she’ll insist I eat.”

“Of course, Mother,” Jean said.

The twenty-five-minute drive to Somerville brought a few long silences. When Jean’s mother finally got out and she and Danny were safely down the road, they broke into big smiles. Over ice cream sundaes at a nearby soda fountain, she scolded him again for not giving her more notice. “I would have put something nicer on,” she said.

“You look nice to me,” he said. “And anyways, I don’t worry too much about clothes.”

“Easy for a man in uniform to say.”

He laughed, then began telling her about life on the ship. His eyes flashed when he mentioned the marine creatures and aquatic birds he’d spotted from the deck. She was surprised at how much he seemed to know about the natural world. He was something of a loner, she could see. But like Jean, who turned friends into the siblings she never had, Danny had found ways to fill the voids.

“Will you make a life in the Navy, Danny?”

“I’d like to give it my level best. Don’t you have a dream? Something you’ve always wanted?”

“I like horses,” she said. “I think sometimes about going west, somewhere with big open spaces, and raising them.”

The more she talked, the more Danny liked the way he felt around her. She made him feel interesting. And she was so good at keeping a conversation going. With her, unlike with so many other people, he never felt at a loss for words.

JEAN AND many of her friends saw their office jobs as way stations—and, it was hoped, brief ones. Every month or two at the bank, it seemed, another beaming girl announced an engagement or pregnancy and tendered her resignation, never to return. So when word spread of the surprise visit from “Jean’s sailor friend from the train,” there were titters and teasing.