Beautiful Little Fools(9)

But the rocky start to the trip made me wonder if I’d made a mistake, if I shouldn’t have come here, after all. The trouble with the train had caused me to well up with dread, and here I was now in New York City, days later than I should’ve been. I already felt a pit of homesickness in my chest. Rockvale was quiet, snow covered and serene. Father longed for me to stay there and marry Harold Bloom, who owned a respectable dairy farm and who had been sweet on me for years. But I didn’t want to marry anyone… yet. Much less a dairy farmer. New York was so much more modern—that’s what had gotten me to finally step on the train in the first place. As of last month, women could even vote here. I could be someone in New York. Not someone’s wife. Someone.

“Come on,” Myrtle was saying now. She’d picked up my suitcase with one hand and she took my arm with her other. “Let’s get out of the mess, Cath.”

Grand Central was a mess. It was so crowded, we could hardly make it through the giant lobby out onto the street. All around us there were hordes of soldiers getting off trains. I looked at them for a moment before allowing Myrtle to drag me along. It was almost Christmas, and here all these men were, away from their families, getting ready to go halfway around the world to fight.

“It makes me so sad,” I said to Myrtle, as we stepped out onto Forty-Second Street. The street was even more crowded than the station, and as we pushed through a wall of people to move forward, it was hard to breathe.

“What makes you sad?” Myrtle asked, once we’d reached a clearing, and stopped to wait to cross the street.

“All those men, those soldiers. They’re off to war, aren’t they? How many of them do you think will make it back here alive?”

“Come on, let’s not think bad thoughts,” Myrtle said, as we walked across the street. “You’re here now. We’re finally together again. I’m going to stay in the city with you for a few days, help you get settled. Let’s go get freshened up at your hotel now and enjoy a night out on the town.” Her normally steady voice crackled with excitement.

“What about George?” I asked. George and Myrtle had fallen in love in a whirlwind in Chicago in 1911. Myrtle had gone for a week to visit our aunt, and George had been in town for an auto show; they’d bumped into each other on the street, literally. Myrtle fell—he’d helped her up. Myrtle liked to say he’d swept her off her feet, and as she’d always dreamed of a divine, rich life in the big city she was more than happy to marry him, leave Rockvale, and move to New York.

I’d met Myrtle’s husband only once, the weekend of their wedding. But in the six years since, I felt I knew him from the stories about him and his garage in Myrtle’s letters. From what I could tell, he was a hardworking man, a decent man, even if not the most romantic, and even if his garage in Queens wasn’t exactly what Myrtle had dreamed of when she’d longed for the big city. He’d bought Myrtle a yard chicken for her birthday last summer. But Myrtle did like eggs, so I told her I thought it was sweet, even though, at the time, she was livid. What kind of husband buys a birthday chicken?!

I always had a feeling that Myrtle was a little bored, a little restless, that she was waiting for something else, someone else. I hoped that someone would be me. That both of us would be happier now that I was finally here in New York.



* * *



“WHAT DO I have to do to get a drink around here?” Myrtle cried out. A few hours later, I’d changed, and washed my face, and now we were at an underground saloon in Midtown that Myrtle said was frequented by all the people I’d want to meet. Young, fashionable people, she’d said, lowering her voice, as if the clientele were famous.

But inside, the small saloon was packed, and the floor pulsed with loud music. Despite the chilly December air up on the street, it was too hot in here. And looking around, all I saw were soldiers. More soldiers. Soldiers everywhere. The city felt overrun with them. In Rockvale, there weren’t any soldiers. The war was only something distant we read about in the paper. Here it was palpable. The city seemed to pulse with green-clad men awaiting grim futures.

There weren’t any saloons like this in Rockvale either. It was getting harder and harder to get a drink anywhere these days, and since the Eighteenth Amendment had passed in Congress just this month, I suspected it was about to get harder still. But Myrtle was more persistent than me, and she’d finally gotten a bartender’s attention. She pushed her way to the front so she could get us drinks, while I found an empty stool and sat down.

A soldier was sitting next to me, and I couldn’t help but stare at him. He was handsome, with broad shoulders and clipped blond hair, but that wasn’t what made me stare. It was the expression on his face as he read a piece of paper he was holding in his hands, like someone had punched him. The words he read took away his air, and he grew pale.

“Are you all right?” I asked him, shouting above the music.

He lowered the paper, startled. He hadn’t realized there’d been anyone else in the crowded room, much less sitting next to him.

“Sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help but notice you looked upset.”

He nodded slowly, picked up the glass in front of him, whiskey I presumed, and swallowed it all down in one fast gulp. Then he grimaced. “You ever loved anyone, Miss—Sorry, I didn’t even ask your name.”