Heart of the City (16 page)

“Now tell the truth, Jean,” Margaret said. “When you saw him walking toward you, how did you know how far to throw your suitcase?”

“I heard something on the radio today,” a friend at the bank said, in mock seriousness. “Drop a suitcase, pick up a sailor.”

“No, no, I got it,” said another girl at the bank. “What’s the best way to land a husband? Toss a suitcase.”

“Now, now, girls, no one’s getting married,” Jean said. “I’ve known Danny less than a month.”

But she had to admit, he was dedicated. On each of the next two weekends, he came to see her in Arlington Heights, sometimes hitchhiking his way up Route 2. They mostly stayed at her house, talking with her parents or sitting beside the radio listening to shows like
Truth or Consequences
,
The Shadow
, and
The Lone Ranger
. When he came up that third weekend, he was a perfect gentleman: he helped her father mow the front lawn while she lay on a blanket in the backyard, sunning. But she could tell something was amiss. He was affectionate one moment, fidgety the
next. Bouts of talkativeness were broken up by stretches of brooding silence.

That evening, a Sunday, before he was due back on ship, they parked her car at the bottom of Shade Street. The streetlights filtering through the tree branches turned his face into a study of shadows and light.

“Jean?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Instead of raising horses out west, would you raise children with me?”

“Danny, I don’t understand.”

“Well, what I mean is, Will you marry me?”

Jean felt for a moment as if she’d fallen through a trapdoor into some dark sea. She slid her hands under Danny’s and, suddenly aware of her fast breathing, searched his face.

“Oh, Danny.”

“Well?”

“It’s so soon.”

She looked at the windshield, her heart thrashing against her chest. At the neighbor’s house at the dead end, a man was standing, backlit, in the frame of the open front door. The porch light flashed off and on, as if to signal that Shade Street was not a suitable place for couples in darkened cars. She turned back to the sailor in the passenger seat and dug her fingers into his wrist. “I am a little shocked, Danny. Do you think we know each other very well?”

“I know everything I need to know.”

“Oh, Danny, I have to think.”

IN THE days ahead, she felt his absence more sharply than in any of the previous weeks. How often did men like him come along? How often did they propose marriage by asking a woman if they could raise children together? That is where his aim had been most
true. Children were what she had wanted more anything. Her longing, she felt, was a symptom of growing up an only child. And here was a man who wanted the same thing. A picture took shape before her eyes of a house filled with bright voices and little feet.

By the end of the week, she had made up her mind. She couldn’t hide his proposal from her parents any longer. When she told them after work one day, she was nearly bursting. “I am going to accept,” she declared. She stood with her purse in hand, legs firmly planted on the floor.

Her mother set her spoon back into her bowl and slowly turned to her.

“I’ve prepared some lentil soup,” she said. “Would you like some?”

“Mother, I want to get married.”

“Eat some soup,” her father said.

“Why won’t anyone answer me?”

After a dinner taken in silence, her mother spoke. “He seems like a very nice boy,” she said. “But you have known him a few weeks only. It is too fast.”

Her uncles had eloped with women they hadn’t known well enough, she reminded her daughter. “You see their problems now.”

“I am telling Danny yes.” Jean was defiant. “I love him.”

“What you tell him is your business,” her father said. “But there will be no wedding for a year.”

“But Daddy, his ship could sail,” she protested, tears welling. “He could be halfway around the world then.”

“All the more reason to wait,” her mother said.

IN OCTOBER, the refurbished USS
Power
, with Danny on board, steamed out of Boston. It was the start of a long deployment that would take him around the world: Guantánamo Bay, Halifax, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro, Valparaiso, Glasgow, Cannes, Oslo, Lisbon, Gibraltar, Algiers. The destroyer rounded nearly every maritime
Everest: Cape Horn, the Panama Canal, the equator, the Arctic Circle. While other U.S. forces were at war in Korea, the USS
Power
cruised, showing the flag at friendly ports and taking part in training exercises. For a Long Island boy who had longed for a sea-faring adventure, it should have been one of the greatest years of his life. It turned out to be one of the loneliest.

In the letters they traded—as many as one a day some weeks—reports of the humdrum were salted with confessions of pained yearning.

“It isn’t too bad during the day when we are working but after hours while I lie in my rack as I am doing now, I think about you constantly,” Danny wrote. He lamented that “it isn’t my good fortune to be able to express my feelings in a letter as my mother does when she writes to me.”

“Dearest Dan, I feel no more like writing tonight,” Jean wrote. “I just want you here with me, no distance between us ... When we are married and your sea duty is over I want to go wherever you are stationed. I wouldn’t care if I saw anyone if you were only with me.”

New Year’s 1952 came and went. A bitter New England winter turned to spring. They set a wedding date of December 4, 1952, soon after Danny’s expected return. Jean began calling churches, ministers, and photographers. She put in for time off from work. But for a long while, all they had were their letters. Jean wrote about Red Sox games (a 6-3 win over the Senators!) and the age-old Lexington vs. Concord football match (Lexington lost 20-0). She cataloged the early wedding gifts—a covered casserole dish, a damask tablecloth, a pair of hurricane lamps, a pink nightgown—that she had already socked away in her hope chest.

In each letter she noted the days left until the wedding. She reminded him of any odd anniversary of the night he’d rescued her—and her suitcase—at Grand Central: the five-month anniversary, the fifteen-month.

Danny wrote of a plane that crashed on a nearby aircraft carrier and the water his ship took on during a refueling. He wrote
of his “Shellback Initiation” into the “Kingdom of Neptune.” It was a rite of passage, he explained, that all new sailors, or “pollywogs,” undergo on their first equator crossing. (“Boy was my rear end sore.”) And he wrote of the school of porpoises that had trailed the ship one day and the changing, deepening colors of the stars and sea.

He confessed to getting too drunk on liberty in Guantánamo Bay but vowed that he had been faithful to her, even in the face of temptation. “I wish there were some way to atone for it but at least I didn’t give myself to any Cuban girls. I hope you believe me my darling because if I had I wouldn’t have been able to write this letter to you. I suppose I got drunk because I kept thinking about how much I love you and how decent you are.”

She replied with understanding. “Even if you had gone with one of the so called girls, Dan, I could and would have forgiven you,” she wrote. “You don’t have to tell me everything you do honey because I do trust you and believe in you.”

He wrote that she was “crazy to put up with a guy like me.”

Her parents, she saw, had been right to make her wait. The thousands of words that had spun out across the oceans during their separation were like threads that pulled them ever closer, forming a seam that life on land together would surely test. For Jean, that test came sooner than expected. In late September, Danny wrote that the Navy was extending his cruise. Their wedding would have to wait. How long, he couldn’t say.

A few days later, when she read the letter, Jean could not contain her tears. She had already booked the minister and the photographer for December 4, and had gotten the time off work. She cried in her room for a half hour, shuddering, then folded her legs into her chest. Their wedding date had been sacrosanct. It was the fixed spot on the horizon she’d been gliding toward, the one that during their long separation had given her courage and hope. Now there was nothing except the prospect of telling everyone that the wedding was in limbo.

“My Darling, Please forgive me for not writing but I have been in such a state of depression,” Jean wrote in early October 1952. “No one could even speak to me Friday in work or I would burst into tears.”

She wrote again a few days later. “If I could just hear from you now tomorrow to tell me everything is definite, I could go along and make my plans all over again. It is just this awful indefinite feeling that gets you down.”

Danny apologized in letter after letter. In one, he included an article from the
New York Times
about low morale in the Navy, so she knew not to take the postponement personally. The article made clear that the service wasn’t great at keeping anyone happy.

Days passed with no news. The girls at work threw her a shower, but Jean couldn’t shake a horrible feeling of uncertainty. What if he did give himself to some other girl? What if his ship was sent to war? Many nights, she awoke at some ungodly hour with a start, her hair damp with perspiration.

Then—yes, there it was at the foot of her door—a letter. And inside—she looked for it before she read anything else—the name of a real month and a real day. Danny wrote that his commanders were all but certain his ship would be home by December 5.

Cautiously, Jean began a new set of wedding preparations. For the ceremony, she chose Saturday, December 27, a date that left plenty of room for another extension of Danny’s cruise. It also happened to be an “anniversary”—the nineteen-month, to be exact—of the night they found each other at Grand Central.

As she sat at her wooden writing table on a brisk fall night, wind rocking the window frames, she reread Danny’s last letter. He told her he was passing Gibraltar, near the meeting point of two continents. And would she believe? From the ship’s deck, he could see large apes—so humanlike—climbing the ragged bluffs along the coast. She fell asleep that night, her deepest sleep in weeks, thinking about how happy the sight must have made him.

Freestanding

LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD

Tina Wagenbrenner’s friends Liz and Ron were consummate New Yorkers, the type who dispensed advice on all things Big Apple whether you’d asked for it or not. “The lines are so big, you gotta get there first thing in the morning,” said Ron. “He’s right, Tina,” said Liz, whom Tina had known since those long-ago days when Liz had dated her brother. “Otherwise, fuhgeddaboudit.”

So at dawn on that summer day in 1988, Tina and her son, Todd, boarded a train from her aunt’s place in Long Island and got to the ferry at Battery Park early enough to have their pick of seats.

“Let’s go up top,” Tina told Todd, glimpsing the outlines of the Statue of Liberty through the haze of an August morning. “I want you to see what the immigrants saw.”

Tina took a seat on an empty bench, but her son ran off.

“Not too far, hon,” Tina cried out. His father hadn’t been around much since the separation. Todd was a tough kid, ten years old now, a skateboarder who played it cool and never wanted for friends. But she could sometimes still see the hurt in his eyes, the kind that could make him seem like a little boy. She spotted him at the ferry’s railing, gazing out over the harbor as the wind caught his hair. “He needs this,” she told herself.