Heart of the City (18 page)

AS THE boat docked, passengers on the upper deck rushed to the exits. Everyone had been warned about the line into the statue. Chris stood up, but found himself lingering. Tina was the first American woman he’d met. She was in some ways a perfect likeness of the ones in movies: funny, extremely friendly, attractive in a wholesome way. He hadn’t expected there to be a child. But there he was, which meant there probably was a husband somewhere.

Tina had lingered, too, rummaging for longer than necessary, it seemed, through her bag.

“You know you could get hurt in this city by yourself,” Tina said.

“I’m not so worried.”

“Are you sure?” Tina said. “I don’t want to get in your way. But if you wanted to tag along with us for part of the day, you’re really welcome to.”

When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “Wait a sec. I’ve got this book.” She reached back into her bag. “
New York
,” the title said. “
A Picture Book to Remember Her By
.” Turning to the pages on Chinatown and Wall Street, she said, “If you were planning to see these, you should come along.”

He had never met anyone quite so direct. But wasn’t adventure, a plunge into the unknown, the whole point of his trip? What could he lose?

“Okay,” he said, shrugging. “Sure.”

Tina and Todd stepped onto the lawn beneath the statute’s granite pedestal and asked a tourist to snap a photo. Small waves splashed against the island’s rocky shore, and Todd peered up at Lady Liberty, in her verdigris robes and spiked crown, arm outstretched.

“Todd, look at the camera,” Tina said as the shutter clicked. “Okay, and now one with Chris.”

“Me?”

“Who else? Get up here, you.”

They climbed through the star-shaped pedestal and started up the narrow staircase that coils like a helix through the twenty-two-story steel skeleton. The inside of the statue was some twenty degrees hotter than the outside—there is no air-conditioning—and everyone was soon breathing hard and sweating.

“My feet, Mom,” Todd said, giving his mother a pained look. “I can’t do it.”

“You can, Todd. Breathe, then step. Breathe, then step. Don’t think about the top, honey, until we’re there, okay?”

At last, her chest heaving, Tina staggered to the light streaming through the arc of windows that ring the base of the crown.

“Are you okay?” Chris asked.

“I cry easily,” Tina said, laughing though the tears.

Chris handed her a handkerchief, and she touched it to the soft skin under her eyes.

“But Mom, we made it,” Todd said.

“We did, honey. We did.” She looked at the sun reflecting off the water and boats gliding silently below. Outside one window were Liberty’s sturdy forearm and the handle of her torch, almost close enough to touch. Tina tousled her son’s hair. “Just look at the view from here.”

Later, after descending into the base of the statue, Tina told Chris about her immigrant father—how he built a modest life for his wife and three children as a bakery deliveryman. She had grown up, she told Chris, in a working-class town on Long Island called Bay Shore. The whole family had lived in a one-bedroom apartment above a clothing store on Main Street. Even after he’d moved on to a better-paying job at an aviation factory, she said, her father never lost his fellow feeling for new arrivals to America.

Whenever he heard that a newcomer to Bay Shore—an immigrant from some godforsaken country—was down on his luck,
her father would go see him. “Stop by our house for dinner sometime,” he’d say. And when the man and his family showed up, along with the food went a helping of advice on the makings of American-style success. Her father’s impulsive charity vexed her mother, who wouldn’t know until the last minute whether she was cooking for one family or three.

At a small museum inside the pedestal, Tina studied the sepia-toned photographs of immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island: men and women slouching under the weight of bundled possessions, awaiting a battery of inspections, their faces webbed with fear.

“Look at all these souls,” she said, reaching for her son’s hand. “They came with only the things on their back. When we go back home, we have to be grateful for the things we have. Like a place to live, our friends, our possessions.”

They walked past a few black-and-white portraits of men who never made it past Ellis Island—the fabled 2 percent whom immigration officials sent back to their homelands, often because they seemed to have no means of support in America.

“I never knew my father,” Chris said suddenly.

He told Tina that his father had died of kidney failure when his mother was seven months pregnant with Chris. His father was just thirty-three. To support the family after his death, his mother worked as a live-in cook and housekeeper for the owner of a local shoe factory. Chris’s sister, eight years older, served as a kind of surrogate mother to her four younger siblings.

“The house had two rooms,” Chris said as they stepped outside into the sunlight. “My sister got one to herself. The four boys had to share the other.”

“Whoa, no fair,” Todd said. “I could never do that.”

Back in Manhattan, they walked through Chinatown and Little Italy, and visited the World Trade Center, Trinity Church, and the Federal Hall National Memorial. Soon it was 5 p.m.

An hour remained before Tina and Todd had planned to meet their friend Ron at his Wall Street office. Ron was going to ride
the train with them to his house on Long Island, where Tina had parked her car that morning after driving over from Aunt Helen’s.

“You hungry?” Tina asked Chris.

“Yes, okay, please.”

She saw a sign that said “German Pub,” and ducked down a few steps to a below-ground restaurant. A waiter waved them to a table.

“So what’s next, Schwartzie?” she said.

“Schwartzie?”

“Schwarzenegger’s too long,” she said, winking at her son. “When you were in the little boy’s room, Todd and I decided we’re calling you Schwartzie.”

“Yeah,” Todd said. “Can’t wait to tell my friends at school.”

“As you wish,” Chris said. “Maybe you can tell them you met Arnold’s cousin.”

“Isn’t this great?” Tina said, tapping the top of his menu. “They’ve got knockwurst, bratwurst, wieners. Just like home, right?”

“Yes, just like home,” he said. “That is why I will eat this,” he said, tilting the menu toward her and running his finger under the words “cheeseburger with fries.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t come to New York for bratwurst,” he said, smiling.

“Okay, so what kind of beer do you want?” Tina said, looking at the drink list.

“Beck’s is good,” he said.

“Ooh, I’ve never had that before.”

“It’s German.”

“I’m usually a Budweiser gal. Mostly ’cause I can’t afford anything imported.”

“The Budweiser people I think were German, so you have been drinking German beer, just in American clothes.”

“I never thought of that, Schwartzie.”

The waitress brought out cheeseburgers and the bottle of Beck’s, which Chris and Tina poured into separate glasses to share.

When the check came, Tina grabbed it. Chris protested, but she insisted. “As an American,” she said, ceremoniously, as she straightened herself in her seat, “as the person who lives here and the host, I should treat you. It’s only right.”

“But you have already done too much I think—”

“So, anyway, Schwartzie,” she said, cutting him off, “like I said, where you off to now?”

Chris said he was going to spend another day or two in the city before heading south to Washington and Pittsburgh.

“How ya gonna get there?” Tina said.

“Bus, train, whichever is costing least.”

“You know,” she said slowly, turning to Todd, “Washington’s really not that far from us. It wouldn’t be any trouble to give you a ride.”

“Again, please?” He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.

“I mean, my friends Ron and Liz are driving back with us to Virginia on Saturday,” she said. “We could pick you up in the city on our way out of town and then let you out in Washington.”

TINA’S FRIENDS thought she had lost her mind.

“What are you, insane?” Ron said at Aunt Helen’s the next night.

Liz said, “You don’t know this guy from Adam, and you’re gonna spend five hours together in a car. I mean, this guy could be a serial killer.”

“Who’s a serial killer?” said Aunt Helen, emerging in her smock from the kitchen.

“Nobody,” Tina said, flushing. “I met a nice German man at the Statue of Liberty yesterday who I offered to give a ride to tomorrow.”

“What did he do, ask you out or something?” Aunt Helen said.

“I know what you’re thinking, Aunt Helen, but please, I’m not rushing into things,” Tina said. “He didn’t ask me out. Didn’t
even make a pass at me. He doesn’t have a lot of money and was thinking about how to get to Washington, and since we’re going that way, I offered. Is that wrong?”

“Well, honey—”

“Do you know he’s from Bavaria, near where dad grew up?” Tina added.

“Oh?” Aunt Helen said, her expression changing.

“He even knows Hans and Gerta,” Tina lied, referring to her cousins in Munich.

“Then I doubt he’s a serial killer,” Helen said matter-of-factly, patting her on the hand and returning to her dinner preparations. “You’re a big girl. You do what you feel is right.”

Liz shook her head at Tina and rolled her eyes at the obvious deception.

Aunt Helen’s son John, a thirtysomething Manhattan bank executive who heard the whole thing from the other room, could no longer contain himself. “Look, foreign men want just two things—one’s a green card, and you know what the other is,” he said. “New York’s not Newport News, Tina. Don’t be a rube. It’s not going to last.”

Though she didn’t let on, their warnings gave her pause. She had always made small talk with strangers. In the supermarket line. On trains. At the park. That wasn’t new. But why
had
she spent the whole day with this strange man? Why was she so quick to invite him on a long ride with her?

She had told herself at first that she was only doing what her father would have done. It was poetic, too, that they met on the way to the Statue of Liberty: here’s this foreign guy who is coming to greet this lady who greeted so many foreigners. But there was something more. After a year of hurt and hostility, it felt good to be with someone who held doors, carried handkerchiefs, and laughed at her jokes. He was young, which made her feel less than her forty years. And he was playful with her son—so unlike her estranged husband, who could be strict, angry, and
controlling. She felt safe because Schwartzie—she loved that he went along with the name—had been a gentleman. Back in Virginia, she’d been to three “Parents Without Partners” singles events, but they’d felt like meat markets. She knew that if Chris had touched her or made so much as the slightest pass, she would not have offered him the ride. All the same, she worried that prudence may have given way to impulse.

WHEN TINA was a girl, her mother would argue with the priests at their Catholic church about whether priests were really necessary. If worshipers wanted to talk to God, why should they need a go-between? Tina hadn’t been to church much as an adult. But a more secular version of her mother’s philosophy had endured. “If you put something out to the universe,” as Tina had once phrased it, “the universe adapts to meet your needs.”

In the weeks after her separation, she had closed her eyes and asked her parents—wherever they were—to watch over her and her son. “If there is someone for me, please let me find him,” she whispered into the dark some nights. “If not, I’m okay being alone.” She was in no hurry, she told herself. In fact, she needed time alone to recover the person she was before her marriage began to unravel.

Still, when the young man on the ferry said he was from Bavaria—her father’s homeland—she believed the universe had winked at her. “It’s like a fairy tale,” she thought at one point. Then, just as soon, came doubt: New York in the summer was probably crawling with German tourists.