Heart of the City (8 page)

In her darkest moments, when she doubted the worth of her life, she reached into her stocking, where, against her ankle, she’d kept his letter. Sometimes she’d mouth the words aloud—“Keep your chin up. You’ll make a go.”—as if they might like a spell summon him back to the park, to this bench, beside her. For three nights in a row, she slept on the cold wooden planks. She looked in no more mirrors, for fear of what she might see. Early one morning, still half-asleep, she felt meaty fingers on her arm. She bolted up, shrieking, and swatted the air in front of her.

“Ma’am,” came the man’s voice. “Ma’am.”

As her eyes adjusted to the light, she made out a tall man in a dark uniform standing over her.

“Ma’am,” he said. “New York Police.”

She stiffened, and frantically brushed flecks of dead leaves off her dress, now tattered at the sleeves.

“What do you want?”

“We’ve gotten some complaints, see. You got a place to stay?”

“No, sir.”

“Somewhere to go to clean up, eat?”

“No, sir.”

“Family, friends? Anyone to look after ya?”

She buried her face in her hands, shook her head, and began to sob.

“See, dollface, I gotta take you to the station on a charge of vagrancy,” he said. “Central Park ain’t a hotel, and, see, from what I hear you’ve been treating it like one.”

She felt as though the ground was splitting beneath her.

“Don’t be a pill, dollface, let’s go.” He hoisted her off the bench by her wrists, as thin as those of a girl half her age, and then guided her, a firm hand on her back, to a police car. She went along, rigidly at first, then without resistance, her eyes vacant, her face white as a shroud.

AT THE Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, the imminent deployment Willis had hoped for never came. The patrol boat whose crew he was billeted for was still under construction. While other sailors, swaggering, headed off to sea on President Roosevelt’s orders, Willis was mired in the kind of make-work that some sailors grimly called “shore duty.”

He grew restless. The only true adventure since his return from the China seas was the night he’d met that sad and beautiful runaway on the streets of New York. A girl he knew he’d never see again.

WHEN HELEN Worden entered the front office at the Women’s House of Detention, in Greenwich Village, a guard by the door smirked and said, “Well, if it isn’t our very own Girl Friday.”

“Zip it, Charlie,” Worden snapped. “The warden in?”

“What’s hot?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. My editor’s hungry for page-one color.”

Possessed of an angelic face and big eyes, Worden studied art in Paris before joining the
New York World
as a society writer. Despite her Colorado upbringing—she was born in Denver—she styled herself a connoisseur of all things New York. She turned
out no fewer than four books on the city from 1932 to 1939, with names like
The Real New York
and
Round Manhattan’s Rim
, and prided herself on her nose for everyday human drama.

Her big break had come in 1938 with her story about the Collyer brothers, reclusive hoarders whose Harlem mansion was being slowly overtaken by their collections of thousands of books, newspapers, and musical instruments. Bent on getting their story, Worden staked out the house at night. When the younger brother—“a wisp of a man in janitor’s overalls” with a “drooping Victorian mustache”—emerged briefly from a basement door, Worden cried out, “Good evening, Langley Collyer. Your neighbor tells me you keep a rowboat in the attic and a Ford in the basement. Is that true?” Worden’s story about the “Hermits of Harlem” became a sensation and made her a star feature writer at the renamed
New York World-Telegram
.

Today, though, Worden was after smaller game: stories about women in the city lockup.

“Uh-oh, here she comes,” the warden groaned. “Anything you know about my job that I don’t yet?”

“Who, me?” Worden laughed, giving the warden a teasing glance. “I’m looking for human interest today.”

“You mean like a sob story?”

“Why, you got one?”

A POLICEWOMAN led Worden through an art-deco corridor to the cell block. Behind a row of iron bars, Worden glanced a wisp of a young lady slouched on a narrow bench jutting from the wall.

“Have at her,” the policewoman said. “I’ll be right outside.”

The cell door clicked shut. The girl looked up expectantly. Worden gave a sympathetic smile and nodded at the bench. “May I?”

The girl nodded back.

“I’m a newspaper reporter, miss, and I’m writing about the jail and some of the women inside. I know a lot of the ladies never thought they’d wind up here. I’ll bet a lot of them are good people who just had a patch of bad luck.”

The girl’s face brightened a little. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“No, ma’am.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Four nights.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

The girl, Worden noticed, was anxiously clasping and unclasping her hands.

“And, sweetheart, what’s your name?”

“Josephine Filip,” she said. “Or just Joey.”

When the police had brought her to the station house a few days before, Joey refused to answer any of the desk lieutenant’s questions. No name. No home address. No names of relatives. She didn’t care what the police did with her.

But in the course of an hour, Worden had gotten the whole megillah.

THE STORY ran that evening, on the
World-Telegram
’s front page. It would soon be transmitted by wire to newspapers across the country.

“Josephine Phillips”—the last name was changed somehow—“a thin, white-faced girl of 18, sat in the Women’s House of Detention today and told how she came to be charged with vagrancy,” it began.

The story told of Joey’s fallout with her family, her ill-fated affair with a married man, her suicide attempt. And then the trip to New York, where she’d come in search of work and instead found a kind sailor named Bill, who was now somewhere
far away. At the end of the interview, Worden wrote, Joey pulled out Bill’s letter—“a worn sheet of paper covered with boyish handwriting.”

“My life hasn’t been a very pretty one,” Joey told Worden. “You’d call it dull and sordid. About the only nice memory in it, outside my father, is Bill. My father’s dead and Bill’s gone. That’s why I say ‘memory.’ Bill and I just saw each other one night, but I feel as if I’d known him always. I didn’t have to explain things to him. He understood.”

The two-column headline above the story read, “‘It’s Not Pretty’—Story of Girl’s Life; Bill Found Her Hungry on Park Bench, Then His Ship Sailed.”

It was a four-hanky weepie, if Worden’s editor had ever seen one.

WILLIS WAS on shore duty at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard a couple of days later when a friend—a fellow sailor—approached in the afternoon with a grin and, folded under his arm, a Philadelphia newspaper. “That nutty story you told me, about meeting that girl in New York? The one I didn’t believe?”

“Yeah.”

“Looks like I’m eating crow. She spilled to the papers.”

“Don’t be a wise guy.”

“The name Josephine mean anything to ya?”

Willis all but tore the paper from his friend’s hands. Looking at the headline, he felt his knees go soft. The “Sailor Bill” in the story had no last name. But the way they met, the food they ate, his letter—it was all there. That night had felt so private, so seemingly unobserved, that he wondered sometimes whether any of it had happened. But here it was, all of it, down to the color of the sun as it rose the next morning, remade into a story.

“She’s in jail,” he stuttered, looking up, his voice hoarse with emotion. “If only I’d stayed in New York—”

“But she’s alive, pal,” his friend said. “And from the looks of the story, it’s some thanks to you.”

On the phone at the PX that evening, Willis’s heart thudded in his ears as he asked the operator for the number for the
New York World-Telegram
.

The paper’s switchboard made a few clicks. Then came a woman’s staccato voice.

“Worden.”

He told her he was the Sailor Bill in her story and wanted to know how to reach Josephine.

“Yeah, you and every other beard in this town.”

“I swear on the Bible, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a sailor. I’m not in New York. I’m here at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. What else you want to know?”

“Your last name.” It was on the note Joey had shown Worden, but Worden had decided against putting it in the story.

He told her.

“Spell it.”

“L-a-n-g-f-o-r-d.”

“At ease, sailor,” Worden said, her voice slackening. “All I can tell you is you made a real impression on this girl.”

“Is she still in the brig?”

“Free as a bird, and looking better than ever. Some cousin in New Jersey saw my story, and got her sprung.”