Heart of the City (40 page)

Most of the couples in this book told me they would not have met but for place. The landmarks and public spaces where they spoke their first words were not mere backdrops. They were villages—a small place within a larger one—that slowed time just long enough for two busy people to catch each other’s eye. In rereading their stories recently, though, I noticed something that mattered at least as much: the couples were open, and ready, to fall in love.

I found the tale of the “Park Cinderella” and her “Sailor Prince Charming” in a newspaper database at the Library of Congress. I was entering search terms that I hoped would pull up stories about couples who’d met in Central Park. News articles were appearing in reverse chronological order, and toward the end of a very long list were pages of stories about this one couple: a Texas sailor who had met a runaway in Central Park. The story was charming, and heartbreaking. There was just one problem: they were all published in 1941. Neither Joey nor Willis appeared in a single story since. Was there any chance either were still alive?

Enter Google. My search for “Willis Langford” turned up a web page for a salesman of nutritional supplements in California. In the upper-right corner was a photo of a gray-haired man with a familiar-looking dimpled chin. In his bio, he said he had turned eighty-nine in September 2008. The age fit. I e-mailed, and two days later I got a reply. “I am indeed the same party,” Mr. Langford wrote.

We agreed to meet at an International House of Pancakes—his suggestion—near his home in Oceanside, a short drive north of San Diego. “My granddaughter is a waitress there, and they serve good common food,” he explained. “We can occupy a booth as long as we desire.”

The man with ruler-straight posture who greeted me on the bench outside looked at least two decades younger than his ninety years. He was tall, wiry, and slim, and wore a striped dress shirt, a gray goatee, and dark pants with a cowboy-sized belt buckle. He had a clear voice and a quick mind. Over lunch—he ordered ham with waffles—he told me he attributed his health to a “positive attitude” and nutritional supplements. He had brought a folder stuffed with newspaper clippings and family letters from the early 1940s, and photographs of his great-grandchildren.

Mr. Langford told me that he and Joey (she later went by Paula) had been married nearly sixty-four years when she died, at eighty-two, some four years earlier. They had four children, eight grandchildren, and sixteen great-grandchildren. Our waitress, Nikki, was one of those grandkids. When she heard us talking about her grandparents’ love story, she sat down on her grandpa’s side of the booth and wiped away tears.

“I miss Grandma, I really do,” she said. Nikki said that her grandmother had never told her the story of how she’d met her grandfather but, toward the end of her life, had shared it with Nikki’s own daughter.

Willis and Joey left Seattle after the Allied victory in World War II and moved to Long Beach, California, where Willis rose to the command of the landing tank ship USS
Tioga County
. He was released from active duty in the late 1950s and retired from the Navy in 1979. He then became a salesman and entrepreneur, selling everything from encyclopedias to aluminum pots and, most recently, vitamins.

The day after their wedding, Willis swore that Joey would never work again. Joey poured all of her energies into her children, and throughout her life she remained quiet and introspective. She never again heard from her mother or sisters.

Willis said I was the first writer to ask about their love story in sixty-eight years. It was a story that made him proud. In 1994, he committed his recollections to paper in a short personal account
he titled “A Tale of Prince Charming.” The nickname—which a Philadelphia headline writer had used in 1941—drew some ribbing from his shipmates back then. But it didn’t seem to bother him anymore.

Joey, however, had shared little of his nostalgia. Her years in New Jersey and New York—with her father’s death, her mother’s abandonment, her life on the streets—had been so painful that she never spoke about them, even with her husband. Despite the hoopla surrounding their fairy-tale meeting and marriage, most of her children didn’t learn the story until her death.

Matt Fitzgerald and Sofia Feldman (pseudonyms) were married on August 15, 2009, at a restored nineteenth-century steel foundry in Long Island City.

Their religious differences had loomed large during their engagement. Neither was particularly observant. But Matt had gone to Catholic school in Rochester and had gone with his family to church every Sunday. Both of his older siblings had married Catholics. But in faith, as in other parts of his life, he had cut his own path, resenting the way the Catholic tradition seemed to “force-feed” worshipers its doctrine. Sofia had gone to a Jewish Sunday school and was bat mitzvahed, though outside the High Holidays her parents rarely went to synagogue.

Matt’s parents liked Sofia right away—his dad took her out for a milkshake on her first visit to Rochester. But they had a lot of questions about Judaism: What’s a seder? What are the rituals? What is the structure of the family? Sofia’s parents were more guarded, and Matt wondered how they felt about him. In October 2008, about a week after Yom Kippur, Matt asked to speak with her father. During a walk together, Matt asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. “It was the most nerve-racking moment in my life,” Matt told me when I met the
couple for brunch at Rue 57, a restaurant near the spot where they met.

Mr. Feldman gave his blessing and then launched into a speech that made him sound like a real estate agent congratulating a buyer on his new home. “She’s really a great girl, Matt,” he said. “She’s funny. She’s cute. You made a great choice.”

Their wedding ceremony was a showcase of religious amity, with both a rabbi and a priest officiating. Matt smashed the glass, a Jewish custom said to ward off evil spirits, and drank from the rabbi’s wine cup. The priest spoke a little Hebrew, then read from the New Testament. Their chuppah—the Jewish bridal canopy symbolizing the couple’s future home—consisted of a giant wreath hung from the rafters. The hora, however, was not without its rough spots. “It was the most chaotic hora I’ve ever seen,” Sofia told me.

“Once the music started,” said Matt, “some people got into the circle and started doing the concentric circle thing. Other people were standing still and clapping, and they didn’t know what to do, and it just turned into a mosh pit.”

Less than a month had passed since their wedding, and after brunch I followed the couple as they retraced the steps of their first encounter some five years earlier. We walked to the crosstown bus stop where Matt first spotted Sofia, then across the street to the length of sidewalk—under the marquee for Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall—where Sofia, with her big viola, fell into him. “It’s like hallowed ground for us in some ways,” Matt said, part of the mythology of their relationship. “If two people worked together, how they first met doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter if they met on Monday or Tuesday, or in this conference room or that conference room.”

But this was different. In their wedding program, Sofia retold the story of their meeting as a fairy tale.
Once upon a time, a knight was strolling down a lane and looked upon a fair maiden conversing with some friends ...

As the relationship deepened, it wasn’t so much the randomness of their meeting that they marveled at. Plenty of people meet in the streets of big cities only to discover they have nothing in common. What struck them was the improbability of such an encounter ever leading to marriage—and the realization, however paradoxical, that they could have met almost no other way. “We’ve often thought that these dating websites would never put us together,” Sofia said. “Catholic, Jewish—the algorithm would definitely bypass us.”

“In that first year of medical school,” Matt added, “even when times were a little difficult, we both had a certain sense of, ‘Maybe there’s something bigger than us at work here.’”

Neither is converting to the other’s faith, and they recognize the choices they will face when they have children. But Sofia says that their chance meeting has deepened her sense of spirituality. “Whenever we would hit a rough patch, I would always think, This is not just about me and Matt, It’s about me and Matt and whoever brought us together. I actually became a little more religious.”

It was late afternoon on a clear September day in Midtown, and the sun was dipping through the spaces between the buildings. We were standing outside the Duane Reade pharmacy on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, where five years earlier a lost boy had first asked a wary girl if she wanted to keep talking and she’d said okay. Before we said our goodbyes, Sofia looked at the corner, and at Matt, then slid her arm around his waist. She said, “It’s a private miracle that makes you believe in something.”

A decade ago, as the fiftieth anniversary of their meeting neared, Jean wanted to surprise Danny. Without telling him, she decided to write a short account for their local newspaper of the day they met. She wanted her husband to “discover” it. But Danny was
diagnosed with cancer in 2000, and Jean felt she couldn’t wait any longer. She wrote it a year early and turned it in to
Newsday
. The paper published it in a regular column written by readers called “Love Story.” The headline: “A Long, Happy Journey for Strangers on a Train.”

I came across the story while searching electronic newspaper archives for couples who met in Grand Central Terminal. A moment later, however, I discovered that
Newsday
had published another story about Danny nearly five years later: his obituary. He died, of cancer, on July 11, 2005, at seventy-three. When I called Jean in the summer of 2009, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Their son, Dan Jr., picked up the phone and told me his mother wasn’t feeling so well anymore. He had moved from San Diego to help take care of her. I told him about the book and asked whether his mother might be inclined—and well enough—to share her love story.

“I think she would like that very much,” he said.

When he put his mother on the phone, I understood almost right away what he’d meant. Jean Lynch was by turns high-spirited and wistful as she told the story; Danny had been the center of her life for a half century. In the weeks after that first conversation, she sent me e-mails rich with illuminating details. “You have made me feel good in so many ways, as I am enjoying looking back through my life with different eyes,” she said in one. “I thank you for this, even if Dan’s and my story doesn’t end up in your book.”

On a brisk morning in late November 2009, I visited her and Dan Jr. in her cozy house, on a leafy street in Hauppauge, New York. She was as tall as she had advertised, and was warm, down-to-earth, and even something of a cutup. She and her son seemed to enjoy teasing each other. I could see why a shy, introspective man might have taken an immediate liking to her.

We spoke at a kitchen table piled with photo albums and neat stacks of letters she and Danny had exchanged during their
courtship. Beside her at the head of the table was the birdcage basket, only a little tarnished, that she had been carrying when she and Danny met. Over coffee and homemade nut cake, she told the story in greater detail, veering between laughter and tears. Afterward, Jean and her son drove me to a Long Island Rail Road stop, and as I got out, she said, “Thanks for making an old lady happy.”

She and Danny (as an older man, he preferred Dan) married on December 27, 1952, at Hancock Congregational Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. Their first child, Dan Jr., was born in January 1954, and two girls would come later. Dan was honor-ably discharged from the Navy in July 1955, a torpedoman first class. But his transition to civilian life was anything but easy. He had contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for a year and a half. When he was released, doctors told him to avoid strenuous work. He drove a cab around Lexington for a year.

His confinement deepened his longing for the outdoors. When he was well enough, he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on the G.I. bill and studied wildlife biology and conservation. He got a job at the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game, releasing pheasants and stocking fish ponds, before moving with his family to New York, where he worked his way up through parks and wildlife jobs with the state. He retired in 1993 as general parks manager for the entire Long Island region, where he was credited with developing nature centers, improving streams, and building woodland trails and fish hatchery ponds.

“It was pretty much his dream job,” Dan Jr. told me. “He was always outside, going to all the different parks on Long Island. You could walk through the park with him, and he’d see things no one else saw.”

Jean worked as a teacher’s aide for a few years and made oil paintings while raising the children. She has five grandchildren. Despite a few health problems, she seems as open to new experiences now as she was as a nineteen-year-old at Grand Central.
On our way to the Long Island Rail Road station, she confided that she’d recently attended a concert of a heavy metal band a grandson played in. Did she like it? “I had to wear earplugs,” she said. “But yes!”

In 2005, Danny spent about ten days in the hospital before slipping into a terminal coma. One day, toward the end, while Jean was at his bedside holding his hand, he opened his eyes and looked at his wife. Before closing them again and drifting off to some faraway place, he said, “I’m glad I met you.”

I found the Holters through a search of online newspaper archives. Mike Holtzclaw, an arts critic at the
Daily Press
of Newport News, had written a Valentine’s Day piece in 1998 about local couples’ favorite romance movies. Toward the bottom was a paragraph about the Holters.