Strings Attached (6 page)

Eight

 

New York City
November 1950

The call came in the morning while I was deeply asleep. I stumbled to the phone and said hello.

“Will you accept a collect call from Virginia?” the operator asked, and that woke me up.

“Yes, operator, put it through.”

“I got your letter.” Billy never said hello. I’d teased him about it so many times. He just opened with what he wanted to say. Over the hiss of long distance, I could hear the nervousness in his voice. “I was so glad to get it.”

“I wanted you to know where I was.”

“I was thinking … I have leave. Before we ship out. I could come up to New York. Maybe around Thanksgiving.”

My heart was thudding, banging. I put my hand over it.

“Would that be all right?” he asked.

“Yes. That would be all right.”

“I’ll call back with details when I know. Kit?”

“Yes?”

“I woke you.”

“It’s all right.”

I hung on to the receiver, picturing his face. I closed my eyes, remembering how his mouth moved.

“There’s so much to say. I can’t talk. I’m in town, in a drugstore. I just have a minute. Thought I’d grab it before I lost my nerve. I have to go.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

“I like the sound of that.” He stopped, and I listened to the hiss of the line. I wanted to hear his breath. His voice sounded so far away and yet it hit me in every muscle, every bone. “I’ll let you know.”

The phone clicked. He never said good-bye, either.

I put down the receiver and sank down on the floor, hugging my knees. I stared at the phone. I would have to call Nate and tell him. I’d thought that would be easy, picking up the phone with the simple news that Billy was coming. But now that the moment was here, I couldn’t do it. This was my news, not Nate’s.

But he had made it his, somehow, and I had let him.

 

I sat in the kitchen in the early afternoon, stretching out the kinks in my hips and back when I saw a fishing line bobbing down, down, outside the window. A hook dangled, a piece of paper stuck in the barb. I threw open the window and reached out, detaching the paper carefully. Then I looked up. Hank sat on the fire escape above. He didn’t look down. Instead he pretended to be absorbed in his book, the fishing rod held casually in his hands.

I read the note.

Sunday Dinner with the Greeley Family 5 p.m.?

 

I lived on canned soup and melba toast and cottage cheese, tea and toast and apples. There was nothing in my icebox for supper but an orange.

I’d thought on my day off I’d be roaming the streets, traveling down to Greenwich Village, exploring the parts of the city that Billy and I had talked about, the museums and jazz clubs and coffeehouses. But instead I stayed inside, reluctant somehow to go on my own.

I thought of Hank’s mother, the way her eyes had narrowed when she’d seen me close to dawn in my stage makeup. What had he had to do, to get her to agree to ask me to dinner?

Well, let her cook for me, then.

I scrawled
Gratefully accepted
and sent it back up. This time when I looked up, Hank was reading my note. He looked down and grinned.

 

The Greeleys’ apartment was stuffed with books. Bookshelves in the foyer, in the living room, even in the dining room. I was suddenly aware that there was not one book in my apartment. I tried to remember the last one I’d read. Or had pretended to read.
A Tale of Two Cities,
maybe? Actually, I’d never finished it. Muddie had told me the whole story one night while I’d washed out our underwear.

I’d dressed carefully for the evening, drawing my hair back in a ponytail and wearing just a touch of makeup. Plaid skirt, white blouse, flats. Take that, Mrs. Greeley.

Hank wore a gray crewneck sweater and gray pants. He’d tried to wet his hair down with water, but it was
already starting to curl. I realized that I was wrong about his eyes and hair; they were the color of dark honey.

A man didn’t so much as rise from the armchair as push himself up with his arms, as though he were too heavy to lift. Yet he was slender, his belly flat in the plaid shirt he had tucked into his trousers. He had Hank’s narrow, boyish face, and his eyes were too soft behind black-framed glasses. He shook my hand and looked into my face in a curious way.

“Hank tells me you live alone.”

“Well, my dad is up in Providence and can’t leave his job, so …” I smiled. “Don’t worry, I have family friends who look in on me.”

“And now you have us.”

A vein began to pulse in Mrs. Greeley’s forehead. “Tomato juice?” she asked, pronouncing it
to-mah-to.
I nodded, although I’d actually never tasted it. It wasn’t bad, cold and lemony and thick.

Mr. Greeley slid back into the armchair. I wondered if he was sick. There was something in the air here that I didn’t understand.

“So, Hank tells me you work,” Mr. Greeley said.

“At the Lido,” I said. “I’m a dancer.”

“A dancer! Did you hear that, Nancy?”

“I’m right here, Sam.”

“But you don’t go to school? Education is so important.” Mrs. Greeley got up abruptly and said she had to check the roast.

“I was just in a Broadway play —
That Girl From Scranton!
“

“I haven’t heard of that show. We don’t get around much anymore,” Mr. Greeley said apologetically.

With a lead-in like that, I couldn’t resist. I hummed the tune of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

Mr. Greeley brightened and sang out the first line. It brought back a world to me, of music on the radio, of dancing with Billy on a Saturday night.

“Please, Dad,” Hank said. “You’ll crack the glasses.” Smiling, he turned to me. “So you sing, too?”

“I’m a better dancer, but sure,” I said. “I’ve been taking voice lessons since I was nine — plus tap, ballroom, ballet, jazz. I want to start acting lessons now that I’m in New York.”

Mrs. Greeley came back in and sat on the edge of her chair as though she was ready to jump up any second, and it wasn’t for the roast. “Perhaps you could sing for us,” she said. I could tell — she didn’t want me to be good. She wanted to expose me, not show me off. “Something from the show perhaps?
That Girl From
…”

“Scranton,” I said. “It wasn’t very good.”

I sang a few lines.

Let’s go to the Dappledown Dreamery
Right next door to the cold ice creamery
Don’t even stop to admire the scenery…

 

I stopped. “You see? Pretty awful.”

“It’s sort of catchy,” Hank said politely.

“Do you know ‘The Way You Look Tonight’?” Mr. Greeley asked. “Always loved that song.”

“I’ll play if you’ll sing,” Hank said. “C’mon.”

Hank sat at the piano and I sat next to him.

I loved the song, too. It was the saddest love song. It was like the person was singing how perfect a moment was even while they knew they were going to lose it. I sang it gently,
softly, and when the last note faded, I turned and saw that I’d won over Mr. Greeley, at least.

“That was lovely,” he said. “Wasn’t it, sweetheart?”

“Yes.” For the first time, Mrs. Greeley smiled at me. “It was.”

And the lamps seemed to glow a little more golden, and the room seemed to come closer around us, because suddenly we were all getting along.

Hank swung into a popular tune, “Don’t Tell Me.”

Don’t tell me this is just for tonight,
Don’t tell me that hearts are meant to be light.
Your dreamy smile, your shelt’ring arms tell me what’s true.

No turning back, no second chance, forever us, forever you…

 

“It’s funny, you remind me of someone,” Mrs. Greeley said. “I just can’t place it.”

“Rita Hayworth,” Mr. Greeley said.

“Oh, Sam, really.” Mrs. Greeley shook her head. “I’ll think of it.”

I decided to ask the question I’d come here to ask. “Hank said the apartment has been empty for years,” I started.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Greeley said. “Since the war ended. We don’t know why. Especially because of the housing shortage, we thought for sure it would be rented. Such a shame; we even asked about it because we knew a family looking for an apartment. One of the other teachers.”

“I didn’t realize you were teachers.”

Mr. and Mrs. Greeley exchanged a glance.

“Well. Not right now. We, uh…”

“Mom and Dad lost their jobs,” Hank said. “In the purge.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The Board of Education has been investigating teachers for what they call ‘subversive activities.’ With the help of the FBI,” Hank explained. “They targeted Mom and Dad.”

“You go to a meeting or a rally ten years ago, and they come after you,” Mr. Greeley said. “I’m not a Red, Kit. I’m just on the side of the workingman. I have the class read
The Grapes of Wrath,
and the next thing I know I’m under investigation. And Mrs. Greeley? They go for her next. She’s interested in politics, but four hundred years ago. Cromwell is her bailiwick.”

I wasn’t sure what a bailiwick was, and I only vaguely remembered Cromwell from European History, but I didn’t want to look like a dumbbell in front of the Greeleys. “You mean you were fired?”

“I was the one interested in politics before the war,” Mr. Greeley said. He straightened up and leaned forward, so I knew he didn’t mind talking about it. Mrs. Greeley, on the other hand, just clutched her glass of tomato juice and shot him a look that told him to shut up. He didn’t. “Nancy got called in because she’s married to me. She refused to answer about her ‘affiliations,’ they call it. So she got the boot, too.” He clapped his hands. “But it’s all right, we’re looking for work in the private schools. We’ll get a job next year. It’s just that they’re already in the term, so that’s why they’re not talking to us. We’re getting by. Mrs. Greeley has a secretarial job, I’m delivering milk and cheese in the mornings, and Hank is lending a hand. We’re making honest money.”

“Maybe if you two didn’t still go on those Teachers Union picket lines and Ban the Bomb meetings they’d call
us back,” Mrs. Greeley said, holding on to her smile by her teeth. “You know the FBI is watching who’s there.”

“We’ve got to stand up for what we believe in, Nan,” Mr. Greeley said. “They tried to shut us up, but they can’t. We’re allowed to have political beliefs in this country, or are we going back to your beloved Cromwellian days? Off with our heads, is that it?”

“So, how did you find out about the apartment, Kit?” Mrs. Greeley asked me. I could tell she wanted to change the subject, but she’d managed to change it to a subject I didn’t want to talk about.

“A family friend,” I said.

“Ah, our mysterious landlord, I bet,” Mr. Greeley said. “We’ve never met him. We just mail in our checks to a management company.”

They waited politely for me to tell them who the landlord was, but they could wait until the roast burned.

“So it was a couple who lived in the apartment before me?” I asked. Mrs. Greeley wasn’t the only one who could change the subject.

She suddenly leaned forward. “I know why you seem familiar. How uncanny. You look a little like the woman who used to live in the apartment. We’d just moved in, so I only saw her once or twice before they moved away. A married couple, he was in the army, stationed somewhere down south. He came up on weekends. But they were so quiet.”

“Newlyweds,” Mr. Greeley said. “Kept to themselves. The Wickhams.”

“No, it was the name of a hotel — the Warwicks! And of course they had their own private entrance, so we didn’t bump into them in the lobby. We only had one conversation. She wasn’t very social. But, oh, I remember the last day, I saw her just for a minute, moving out… she was
so changed. Her husband was dead, she said. How sad, when it was so close to the end of the war. What was her name, Sam?”

“Don’t remember. I think I only saw her a couple of times. Never met him. I can’t see the resemblance myself.”