Heart of the City (6 page)

“Swell to be back on land,” Willis said, shimmying his chest so his uniform straightened over his tall, lean frame.

“And how,” said his shipmate, Joe.

It was hard to tell from the proud, ruler-straight way Willis carried himself, but he’d grown up poor on the outskirts of Victoria, Texas, the son of subsistence farmers. With no other prospects—his grades, at an unaccredited high school, would impress no college—he answered a postcard from the Navy that arrived a few days before graduation. The Navy promised adventure and, more important, a living. Enough money to send home to his nine younger siblings—all girls—who spent summers barefoot because there was no money for shoes.

Serving on a coastal gunboat off South China for the past two years, Willis had sent his family fifteen dollars a month, out of his salary of twenty-one dollars. Liberty was cramped enough in Asia, with its different customs and language. But it could be downright frustrating if all you had in your billfold was six dollars. While shipmates were drinking themselves into a stupor in bars in Hong Kong or the Philippines, Willis often found himself on solo walking tours through town. And so yes, back in America for a few weeks, awaiting new orders, Willis, twenty-two years old, with dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a leading man’s smile, was ready to have a little fun.

Liberty came early on September 11, 1941, and sailors at the Naval receiving station on Manhattan’s Pier 51 didn’t have to be back until eight the next morning. “This could be a long night,” Joe said, jutting his chin at a pair of smartly dressed
young women who were just then passing. “Ready to start the hunt?”

“How about the lake over there,” said Willis, nodding to a green crescent of water visible through some trees where couples in rowboats were paddling.

“Fish?” Joe smirked. “I thought you boys from the country liked big game.”

JOEY SAT on a bench at the edge of a curving walk, just before it dropped and wound under a short bridge. Every time a man who looked like Steve walked by, she felt the fury inside her. A crumb. A cad. A heel. There was no word strong enough for him.

She had met Steve at the woolen mill in Passaic that had hired her as a spool girl after she ran away from home. She fell in love with him—he was older, a supervisor at the mill, but what did that matter? He was a gentleman. He even bought her a ring. Then, one morning, another girl whispered that Steve was married. He’d preyed on other spool girls before, she told Joey, seducing them with false promises of marriage before throwing them over for someone new.

Joey had felt so sick at the news that she left the mill in the middle of a shift, never to return. She scampered, sobbing, to her boardinghouse, where she persuaded a young man she cared nothing for to take her to a bar. After three glasses of beer, she returned to her room and opened a bottle of iodine that some other boarder had left in a closet. Priests said that people who took their own lives went straight to hell. But hell, whatever it was, couldn’t be as bad as the past few months of her life.

The liquid stained her lips blue and burned the back of her throat. Before the dizziness set in and she heard the bottle crash against the floor, she thought, Was my father the only good man in the world?

The sky over Central Park was darkening, and the wind shook the trees. Joey felt a twinge in her stomach, and gulped down the bile at the back of her throat. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, but she would make herself wait. There was no money for food. The wind was blowing so hard now that she could not keep the match burning. She left her sack on the bench and walked into the underpass of a short footbridge. There, shielded from the wind, she struck another a match and, with a trembling hand, raised it to her lips.

THE SAILORS rounded a sharp curve beside the lake. A flotilla of ducks glided over the rumpled surface, trailed by a lone swan.

“Any scoop on where Uncle Sam’s gonna ship you?” Joe asked.

“Heard an officer talking about one of those new net tenders,” said Willis.

“You mean the ones with the horns? Those things give me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Look like walruses.”

“Beats me how Roosevelt thinks we’d ever bag a German sub with one of them.”

“Trapping subs? Officer told me we’d just be primping buoys.”

Ahead, where the walk sloped down, a girl in a beige coat was leaning against the abutment of a low bridge. Willis elbowed Joe in the arm and nodded. The girl’s face was pale. She was so skinny it was hard to make out her age. The sailors slowed down.

“What’s she doin’?” Joe whispered, leaning in.

“Think she’s trying to light a cigarette.” Willis put his hands in his pockets and strode toward her.

“Ma’am, can I help you with that?”

The girl jumped at the sound of his voice, took him in with a flash of fluttering eyelashes, then turned away, toward the darkness of the tunnel. She pulled her coat around her.

“It’s just that, you see, ma’am, the fire stays better if you cover the match with your hand. Something you learn real quick on a ship.”

Looking over her shoulder, and seeming to take his measure, the girl sputtered, “Why should I care? I don’t even smoke.”

“You are holding a cigarette, ma’am.”

Silence.

“Okay, so you don’t smoke. What about eat? You do that?”

She turned around, backing into the abutment, and narrowed her eyes into a scowl. “Don’t be a goof.”

“It’s just, you look hungry, ma’am, like a starved kitten I once found,” Willis said. “I’d like to buy you dinner is all.”

She turned her head away and raised her chin. “You don’t even know my name.”

“I was about to ask.”

“You want a cigarette? Is that why you’re talking to me?”

Willis took a few steps back and glanced over his shoulder at his friend, who had taken a seat on a bench a few paces up the path. “I’ll leave you be, ma’am. Good evening.”

“It’s Paula, if you must know.”

“Pardon?” Willis had already turned to leave, but pivoted now.

“My name. But they call me Joey because my middle name’s Josephine, and the kids in school used to say I was a tomboy.”

“My name’s Willis, or Bill’s okay, too. And if you don’t mind my saying, ma’am, you look like no boy I’ve ever met.”

She felt heat rush to her face. Before she could think the better of it, she pinched the sides of her jacket and did a small curtsy.

“Gosh, I sure am hungry,” Willis said, putting on his best smile.

Joey pointed her elbow at the bench. “Who’s your friend?”

“Who, that fella? Oh, that’s just Joe, just met him down at the pier.”

Joe lifted his cap and hollered. “Glad to meet you ma’am.”

“Joe was about to hit the silk,” Willis said, winking at his shipmate.

“He’s right, ma’am,” Joe said. “Got someplace I need to be.”

Joey raised a delicate-looking hand and gave an emphatic wave. “Farewell,” she said, smiling. Then, without warning, she wound a small scarf around her neck, brushed past Willis and strode down the walk, plucking her sack from the bench. “I don’t eat much,” she called without looking back.

Catching up with her, Willis said, “I know just the place.”

AT A diner off Fifth Avenue, the waitress brought two plates of chicken with cream gravy and two glasses of beer.

Joey heaped forkfuls into her mouth, barely looking up from her plate.

“You make a habit of lollygagging in parks alone?” Willis asked.

She swallowed a mouthful of chicken and let her glance fall on the spoon beside her plate. “It’s not what you think,” she said. “I’m a good girl.”

“How about I talk for a spell,” Willis said. “You eat.”

He told her doozies about being the only boy in a houseful of girls. He told her about reading every Zane Grey book he could get his hands on—had she ever heard of him? “He’s the best scribbler in the U.S. of A.,” he said. He talked about how his Texas hometown during the Great Depression wasn’t so unlike the Old West. He said his grandfather, a genial old man who loved regaling his grandchildren with cowboy stories, had been working on a construction site when for reasons no one ever figured out someone cut him down with a shotgun.

“That’s awful,” Joey said, with a look Willis took for genuine sadness.

“He was a good man. A real good man. I miss him.”

When Willis looked up, he saw that Joey was in tears.

“What is it, darlin’?” Willis said. He wondered if the beer had gone to her head.

“My poppa,” she said, and the tears ran harder now. Willis reached for the napkin dispenser. “He died just a while ago,” she said, pressing the napkin to her cheeks.

“Was he old?”

“No. Young. The doctor said it was lead that killed him. He mixed rubber at the tire plant. The gases, they say, were something awful.”

“If he raised you up, Joey,” Willis said, “he must have been a good man.”

“A saint,” she said. Then came another round of tears and more of the story. She had been the youngest of six in their small home in Passaic. Her older sisters tormented her. And when her father, her only protector, died, no one understood how she felt. Instead, her mother seemed to live to make her life miserable. She demanded Joey quit school and follow her older sisters into a life of chastity at a nunnery. When Joey refused, her mother raged, calling her “boy crazy” and destined for the agonies of hell. Joey ran away from home, found a mill job, and fell in love—only to discover that the man already had a wife.

“I wanted to die. I didn’t do that right, either.”

“I thank God you didn’t, Joey, or else this would have been a pretty lonely dinner,” Willis said, trying in vain to make her laugh. The skin around her eyes, he saw, was so pale that he could make out the blue veins underneath.

“I was two weeks in the hospital,” she said. “You know how many times my mom and my sisters visited?”

Willis shook his head.

“Not once.” The day the hospital discharged her, she said, she took a train to New York, hoping to find a job that would let her live on her own.

The more she spoke, the more Willis found himself drawn in by her helplessness. He was miles from Victoria, but he had seen the same broken look on the faces of sharecroppers back home, the ones beaten down by hurricanes and hard times. Something about her—he wasn’t sure what—reminded him of the feral cats he’d taken to pouring bowls of milk for on the farm. Maybe it was a product of being a big brother to so many sisters, but he’d always been drawn to helpless things. And because of his height and sympathetic face, it seemed, they’d been drawn to him.

The waitress set down two tin cups of vanilla ice cream. Joey pecked at hers joylessly, then set down her spoon. “I won’t fail next time,” she said darkly. “I won’t.”

“Joey, please listen to me,” Willis said. “I know troubles. My mom and pop are farmers, and dirt poor to boot. We got through the Depression by the skin of our teeth and because weak folks leaned on stronger ones until they could stand again on their own. It’s only right that you let me help you.”