The Masterpiece

CHAPTER TWO

New York City, November 1974

When Virginia signed with the Trimble Temp Agency, desperate to fill her empty days as well as her dwindling bank account, she’d expected to be sent to one of the fancy skyscrapers where lawyers conferred in hushed tones with their elegant, efficient secretaries. Not the dumpy train station that squatted like a toad beneath the New York skyline.

But she’d shown up at Grand Central at 9:20 the following morning and, as directed by the agency, taken the elevator near track 23 up to the seventh floor. A wooden door marked PENN CENTRAL IN-HOUSE LEGAL DEPT opened to a reception area where a pretty blonde with Joni Mitchell hair sat.

“I’m here from the Trimble Temp Agency.”

The receptionist motioned to the chairs along one wall. “Please take a seat. You can hang your coat in the closet.”

Not very fancy, this law office, with its oatmeal-colored carpeting and matching walls. But still as good a place as any to start a career. She liked to think she was changing with the times. The 1950s, when she got married and had her daughter, Ruby, were all about family. But the seventies, as Ruby liked to inform her, were about finding yourself. Of course, Ruby was more than busy finding herself these days, having withdrawn from Sarah Lawrence less than a month into her freshman year, telling Virginia she needed a breather. For now, Virginia had to admit she liked having her back in their apartment. Someone to take care of again. Fuss over.

She’d do the same with her new lawyer boss. Over time, she’d joke with his wife that they knew him better than he did himself, share a chuckle over the phone about how he’d forget his daughter’s birthday if they weren’t there to remind him. Just as she’d done with Chester’s legal secretary once upon a time. The tables had turned: She was now the secretary, no longer the wife, but what was life without a little shake-up? She sat up straighter and tried to believe it.

A woman around her own age, with tight curls and a rough voice, walked into the foyer. “Ms. Clay?”

“Yes.” She hated her married name but couldn’t imagine changing it back. After all, it’d been her identity for almost two decades. Still. Virginia Clay. Sounded like something you dug up in a quarry.

“Right. Follow me.”

The woman explained she was the head of human resources at Penn Central, the company that owned Grand Central Terminal, and that Virginia would be working for one of the lawyers whose secretary had left to have a baby. If all went well, Virginia had a chance of being hired full-time, once her contract with the temp agency was up.

“Have you worked for attorneys before?” asked the woman.

Virginia had already forgotten the woman’s name. She really needed to pay more attention, now that she was a part of the business world. “Yes, for a firm in Midtown.”

She’d said the same lie to the man who ran the temp agency, but she figured being married to a corporate lawyer for the past nineteen years was pretty much the same thing. He’d spent most weekends and evenings on the phone with clients and associates, and some of what she’d overheard must have seeped into her brain.

The woman led her to a desk with a typewriter and a fancy phone, with one of the plastic buttons lit up in red. “Mr. Huckle’s on the phone, so I won’t interrupt him to introduce you. He’ll be out when he needs something.”

Virginia tucked her purse into one of the lower drawers and explored the others, which contained pencils, pens, Wite-Out, and carbon paper, all the usual accoutrements of the modern secretary. Behind her was a big metal filing cabinet. As she rose to see what was inside, a man barreled out of one of the offices. He had movie-star eyes, a brilliant blue, and a thick head of hair. Not what she’d expected, and she tried not to gawk.

“You the new girl?” He eyed her, from her scuffed gray pumps to the top of her head. She tried not to squirm under his gaze. Earlier this year, she’d had her brown hair cut in what she hoped was a trendy shag, but without regular trims, it had curled into a bird’s nest.

Mr. Huckle’s gaze traveled back to her midsection and lingered there. Even if her nose was slightly too wide and her eyes deep-set, she’d always had a remarkable figure. Her waist stayed thin even after having Ruby, her chest double D’s. Single D, now, she’d remarked to Chester after the operation. He hadn’t laughed.

“How old are you?”

The question was unexpected. “I’m thirty-five.” Shaving off five years didn’t seem too egregious.

“Fine.” He took one last survey of her hips and motioned for her to follow him. “Come into my office. Bring your steno pad.”

The nameplate on the office door read DENNIS HUCKLE. She grabbed the steno pad from her desk and followed him in, her stomach queasy. Mr. Huckle began rattling off dictation, but she had to stop him almost immediately.

“In Ray?”

He looked at her as if she were mad. “What? Yes.”

“Is there a last name?”

He didn’t dress like the other attorneys she’d met before, at business dinners and off-site conferences. The top button of his shirt was undone, his striped tie loosened, exposing the strong tendons of his neck. But in-house lawyers probably didn’t need to impress the same way ones at white-shoe firms did. The client was already guaranteed. “This is a memo to files. There’s no last name.”

“Then who’s Ray?”

He leaned back, breathing like a dragon about to roar. “In re.” He spelled out the words. “It’s part of the subject line of a legal memorandum.”

“Right, sorry, I misheard. Never mind. Carry on.”

Back at her desk, she put a piece of clean white paper in the typewriter and looked down at her notepad. She’d tried her very best to keep up, but the squiggles meant nothing to her. Steno wasn’t something she’d ever learned, so she’d simply written the important words as quickly as possible and skipped the unimportant ones.

An hour later, Mr. Huckle came out of his office. “Where’s that memo?”

She yanked it out of the typewriter carriage and held it out to him, then sank back into her chair once his door was closed. She waited.

Thirty seconds later, she heard him screaming on the phone to someone. Kathleen. That was the human resources person’s name. At least now she knew. The woman tore down the hall and asked Virginia to follow her back to her office.

Virginia was already making excuses to tell the temp agency. The man was unreasonable, it wasn’t a good fit, personality-wise. She’d do better next time.

Kathleen sat behind her desk and folded her hands in front of her. “Mr. Huckle said you have no idea what you’re doing.”

Virginia shook her head. “I’m still catching up on my stenography, you see. Maybe if he spoke a little slower I could do it. I’m happy to try again.”

“You’re wasting everyone’s time.” She looked Virginia straight on, but not with anger.

With pity.

Somehow, in her head, Virginia had imagined herself as one of those fancy secretaries in the temp agency ad, sporting a lithe figure and knowing smile that emanated capability and discretion. When in fact she was a middle-aged frump in a pilled sweater set, a laughingstock. Ever since the divorce was finalized a year earlier, she’d tried so hard to maintain control. To prove to Ruby that they’d be just fine, you wait and see. When in fact their world had been shattered by Chester’s desertion.

She didn’t want to think about that, but the images came flooding to mind anyway. Ruby popping out of her room, singing some bittersweet Donny Osmond song, while she and Chester stood at the kitchen counter like frozen statues, knowing they were about to rip her world to shreds. Ruby had instantly sensed something was wrong. “Did I do something?” she’d asked.

Then, as Chester explained the situation, that they were getting divorced, Virginia had watched her crumple. That was the right word, the only word. Crumple. Bit by bit, muscle by muscle, a puzzled agony had worked its way down her darling daughter’s face: Her forehead crinkled, her nose went red, her chin wobbled. The worst was trying to keep her own expression calm and capable, to show that this was just another day, nothing was wrong, we’d all be fine. Ruby’s eyes went pink and wet, and she ran out of the room, slamming her bedroom door shut.

They’d done that to her. Chester had done that to her. Virginia would never stop trying to fix it for Ruby. To make up for the devastation they’d wrought.

Now, Virginia tried to keep her own face from crumpling, but the effort only made it worse, and finally she let out a strangled, choking sound. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. My husband is a lawyer. My ex-husband, I mean. I thought I could handle it.”

Kathleen looked up. “You’re divorced?”

“Yes.”

A hushed moment passed, like in church right before the choir begins to sing. “Me, too.”

The woman looked down at some papers on her desk. “There’s another position available, one that doesn’t require typing or steno. Would you be interested?”

Even if she were locked in a windowless room to file papers eight hours a day, she’d take it. Something to do each day, a place to report to. A reason to wake up in the morning. “Of course. Thank you.” Kathleen’s sympathy only made her want to weep more. “Do you mind if I freshen up first?”

“Ask Annie out front for a key to the bathroom. Take your time.”

The receptionist yanked open a drawer full of keys and handed one to Virginia. Outside in the hallway, Virginia turned left and then right, trying to remember the woman’s mumbled directions. Around the corner, then third door on the left. Or was it the fourth? She tried the third door with no luck. On the fourth, her key slid in the lock.

She stepped inside and fumbled for the light switch, expecting to see a row of porcelain sinks and grungy tile walls. Instead, she stood in a small foyer, where a painted sign along one wall read THE GRAND CENTRAL SCHOOL OF ART in gold letters. Handsome art deco ceiling pendants threw a warm light down a long hallway off to her left. She ventured farther inside, curious, her despair momentarily forgotten.

At the first doorway, it was as if the art school were still open, a dozen easels at the ready for the next day’s class, paintings and drawings hung on one wall, a ceramic vase on a table in the center of the room. The only sign of abandonment was the coating of dust on everything, the vase an ashy green. A faint scent of chemicals made her sneeze, or maybe that was the dust. A large storage cabinet for artwork lined one wall, a mix of slots for framed canvases at the bottom and shelving above.

She checked each room, counting five studios in total, amazed at her find: a mummified art school at the top of Grand Central. The last room was some kind of storage area, filled with wooden crates stacked haphazardly on top of one another. The crate closest to her had been opened; a crowbar lay on the floor nearby. Inside, Virginia discovered course catalogs, accounting ledgers, and notebooks filled with names of students and tuition figures. A winter catalog from 1928 offered a snapshot of life right before the Depression, when a portrait painting class cost fourteen dollars a month.

She shouldn’t linger; Kathleen was waiting for her and she had yet to find the bathroom. But as she turned to go, an entire wall filled with artwork stopped her in her tracks. Still lifes, portraits, landscapes, some on yellowed canvas and others on brittle, tea-colored paper. Her eye was drawn to a familiar tableau that Virginia recognized as a Renoir, the festive one of the boating party, but in this version a figure clutched a bottle of Coke, of all things.

Surrounded by such ruined beauty, the faded artifacts of students who had once worked diligently and were now God knew where, Virginia burst into tears. At her recent failures, at the way her world was no longer within her control.

She grabbed a tissue from her purse. As she wiped under her eyes, she caught sight of a sketch of women wearing vintage tailored suits, like something from an old newspaper ad. For the Well-Dressed Secretary was written at the very top. While most of the models looked off to the side, the one in the center stared straight out. Her posture—shoulders flung back, chin raised—spoke of strength and character. On the bottom right-hand corner the name Clara Darden was scrawled.

Virginia struck the same pose, laughing at herself, but doing so gave her a burst of energy and confidence. Whatever Kathleen had in store, she could dig down and find the courage to face it. Today’s wasn’t the first humiliation she’d faced since her divorce, and it probably wouldn’t be her last. But at least she was putting herself out there in the world.

When Virginia returned, to her surprise, Kathleen led her out of the offices, back down the elevator, to the concourse level. She pointed over the crowds. “We need some help in the information booth.”

“The information booth? Right in the middle of the station?”

“Yes. It would be from nine to five, a trainee position. There’s a night shift as well, but I don’t recommend that for a woman. You don’t want to be hanging around here too late.”

Virginia didn’t want to be hanging around there at all. The circular booth stood smack in the middle of the main concourse like a little spaceship, the bottom half the same grungy-looking marble as the floor, the top covered in dull glass. She’d be totally exposed if she went in there. People would be able to see her. People who were headed off to their houses in Connecticut or taking the train to Boston. People she knew.

“There’s nothing else, nothing in the office? I thought I was hired by Penn Central.”

“Penn Central owns Grand Central Terminal and runs the railroad, so you would be working for us. The only opening right now that doesn’t require experience is as a trainee clerk for the railroad.”

“I don’t know anything about the trains or the station.”

“You won’t deal directly with the public, not yet. Just do what the head clerk tells you, answer the phone when the corporate office calls down, and restock the schedules. It’s not a fancy job, but it pays one hundred and eighty dollars a week. To the agency, of course. I don’t know what you’ll get from that.”

Around $120, Virginia figured. As a legal secretary, she had been promised $200.

As they neared the booth, Virginia kept her head down, hoping no one she knew was nearby. Kathleen waved to one of the people inside, who opened a small door and ushered them in.

Two of the clerks sitting closest to the door stared at her before turning back to the mob of people that encircled the booth. The interior was cramped, with hardly enough room to maneuver between the high stools where the clerks perched. A large metal cylinder rose up in the middle of the booth, taking up even more room. Decades of shuffling feet had worn the floor around the tube into a circular groove, while the marble counters inside the perimeter were scratched and sticky-looking.

Under the countertop, brown paper lunch bags sat next to dirty rags and newspapers in open compartments, like the storage cubbies in Ruby’s old kindergarten. Kathleen and Virginia stood near the door, practically touching, as there was nowhere else to go.

Kathleen pointed to a dapper older man sitting two windows away. “That’s Terrence. He’s the head clerk. He’ll tell you what to do and can sign your time sheet on Fridays.” Kathleen gave her a sympathetic pat on the arm and was gone, swept away in the swarm of commuters outside the information booth.

Virginia sidled over to Terrence. He held out a hand to stop her from speaking while he explained to a woman the best way to get to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

He turned a WINDOW CLOSED placard to face out and swiveled around, using the countertop as leverage. “Who are you?”

She held out her hand. “Virginia Clay. I’m the new trainee.”

The clerk sitting on the other side of Terrence glanced over at her. The two looked like brothers, both stick-thin, close in age, each sporting a shock of gray hair. Both wore the same dark blazer, white shirt, and tie.

The brother sniffed the air. “This one uses perfume. I think I may be sick.”

“Enough, Totto.” Terrence cocked his head. “No more perfume, okay? He’s very sensitive.”

She’d sprayed a little Charlie Eau de Toilette that morning, hoping to suggest an air of mystique and class. What a mistake. Claustrophobia washed over her. She feared she could not spend another minute in this place without screaming.

“You okay?” Terrence asked, not unkindly.

She nodded, unable to speak.

Terrence gestured to Totto. “Ignore him; he’s always looking for trouble. You can put your purse there.” He pointed to one of the cubbies. “Right above, on the counter, is the Information Clerk Handbook. Take that and memorize everything in it. If you pass the test after a year, you get a promotion. For now, you can sort all the timetables by the door. The night crew knocked over a box of them and didn’t do anything about it. When you’re done, go outside and refill any of the stacks that need it. Can you handle that?”

The sorting helped calm her down, her focus drawn to the different colors and letters. All those H’s, the Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines, the pastoral names of towns she’d never been to, Valhalla, Cos Cob, Beacon Falls, and her favorite, Green’s Farms. She could sell her apartment and buy a place there, where life was easier and simpler. Though Ruby would never agree—her daughter was a city girl, all the way.

Virginia stepped outside the booth with her cardboard box of sorted timetables. Metal holders lined the counters. She circled the booth slowly, the box digging into her hip, as she matched up the piles in her box with the ones already set out, eavesdropping on everyone who came up to ask a question.

The inquiries she overheard were, for the most part, dull. Directions, train schedules, where to get a taxi. One couple wearing matching Hawaiian shirts asked about tickets for the next train to the Statue of Liberty. The clerk behind the window—a tetchy, sallow woman in her late sixties, sporting an ill-fitting black wig—laughed in their faces before sticking out her tongue at Virginia for staring. Not much in the way of customer service, this crew.

But she reconsidered after watching the one with the name tag WINSTON, who had a southern accent that rumbled easily through the glass barrier. He seemed to know the answer to any question without having to check the timetable book first, and he gave Virginia a wink as she circled by.

She committed the four clerks’ names to memory: Terrence and Totto, the fearless leader of the crew and his snarky brother. Winston, the sweet black gentleman from the South. Doris, with the fake hair and nasty laugh. All four seemed like they’d been working in the booth for as long as the station had been standing.

Back inside, Virginia took an empty stool and leafed through the handbook while she waited for another assignment. She studied the map of the layout, figuring she should know her way around. The gates for the trains were arrayed on the north side of two large concourses, the one she was on and the one directly below it. The ticket windows ran along the south side of the main concourse, below an electronic board displaying departures and arrivals. A cavernous waiting room, filled with street people and addicts, loomed on the far side of the ticket windows, the shrieks and screams within cutting through the din of commuters at least once an hour. She’d be sure not to venture that way.

To the west, a once-grand stairway led up to Vanderbilt Avenue, which she knew from experience was its own kind of hell, with drug dealers pushing their wares right outside the doors and along the narrow street. The Oyster Bar, which years ago was her parents’ favorite restaurant, sat directly under the waiting room, off the lower concourse. She overheard Winston advise a traveler looking for lunch to take the ramp to get there and bypass the lower concourse entirely, so as to avoid getting mugged.

According to her map, the train operations offices were all located on the upper office floors, which ran in a rectangle around the main concourse. That art school was up high in the east wing, labeled on the map as STORAGE. Other than the law offices for Penn Central, most of that floor appeared to be uninhabited.

The main concourse reminded her of Times Square at night, the billboards and brightly lit ads for Newsweek and Kodak a flamboyant contrast to the tarnished walls and blackened ceiling. The immensity of the space was broken up by a Chase Manhattan bank booth a few hundred feet away, next to a freestanding display for Merrill Lynch.

She had feared feeling like she was in a fishbowl, exposed on all sides, but in fact the information booth acted as a kind of bubble of invisibility. No one looked her way, not a soul. She stared at all the faces, not recognizing anyone, and in no fear of being recognized herself. By eleven thirty, the crowd had thinned considerably. Terrence closed up his window and slid off his stool. “You did all the timetables?”

She nodded. “Do you mind if I ask how long you’ve worked at Grand Central Station?”

“Terminal.”

“What’s the difference?”

From behind him, Doris snickered. “Rookie question.”

“The difference is that a station is a place where a train passes through, on the way to somewhere else. A terminal, as the name suggests, is the end of the line.”

“I see. Grand Central Terminal. Got it. How long have you worked here?”

“Since 1942. Why don’t you do a coffee run? It’s in the Station Master’s Office, under the stairs that way.” He pointed west. “That’s also where you should use the restroom if you have to. Whatever you do, don’t use the public bathrooms; it’s too dangerous.”

The tube in the center of the booth began to vibrate. Virginia gasped and almost fell off her stool when a wiry man with thick black hair emerged and stood not two feet away from her, as if he’d appeared out of thin air.

Terrence handed him some papers, and then he disappeared back inside. “That’s Ernesto.”

“But where did he come from?”

Doris mocked in her high-pitched squeal, “But where did he come from?”

“Enough, Doris. There’s a set of spiral stairs that connect us to the information booth on the lower level.”

“How many people work down there?” She glanced at Doris to see if she’d do another echo, but a traveler had stepped up to her window and she was otherwise engaged.

“Just the one. He’s only part-time, though. Back in the day, we had fourteen clerks up here, two below. Not a lot of elbow room.”

Indeed, if each window had a clerk sitting behind it, the booth would have been impossibly crowded. Until now, she hadn’t noticed how many spots were empty.

Winston spoke up. “The average clerk answers 167,440 questions a year.”

“Wow.” Virginia tried to look suitably impressed.

“We don’t get nearly that many now, though.” Terrence’s voice had a hint of nostalgia. “That was back when trains, not planes, were the way to get around the country.”

“You must know everything about this building.”

“Probably do.”

“I heard there used to be an art school in Grand Central.” Better not to mention that she’d been inside; she didn’t want to get in trouble on her first day.

He nodded. “The Grand Central School of Art, it was called. Every September and January we’d get students asking how to get to it. East wing, top floor.”

“You have a good memory.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

“Why did it close?”

“World War II, probably. No one had time for frivolous vocations during the war. There were Nazis right in the terminal, trying to sabotage the trains by dumping sand on the power converters. Luckily, we caught them just in time.”

Doris cocked her head. “‘We’? Did you personally make the arrest?”

“Well, the police did. But you bet I would have caught them, had they asked a question.”

“Like ‘Vo ist de power converter?’” Doris broke out in a full-throated laugh.

Terrence smiled. “Exactly.” He had a dreamy, faraway look in his eyes. “Back in the day, Grand Central was the beating heart of New York City. Soldiers, artists, businessmen, all dashing to get where they needed to go.”

Winston piped up. “Did you ever see Jackson Pollock?”

“Afraid not.”

“Winston, do you know a lot about art?” asked Virginia.

“I like the ones who splash all the paint about.”

“Right.” The jump from Nazis to abstract art made her head spin. Of course, it probably should come as no surprise that the info booth clerks were chock-full of facts, many of which had nothing to do with trains. Nature of the job.

“The art school, though. They say it’s haunted.” Totto’s eyes were narrow slits. “An art teacher was killed in a train crash and all the artwork was destroyed. They say the ghost of the artist haunts the place, and no matter how hard Penn Central tries, no one will rent it.”

Doris tossed an empty paper cup into the garbage. “No one will rent it because this place is a dump, and who wants to have offices in a dump? Hey, trainee, I need more coffee.”

Virginia took the coffee order, writing it down on the back of one of the train schedules, and walked to the Station Master’s Office. The inside of the terminal was dark, even at midday, the ceiling stained by decades of cigarette and cigar smoke and the bare-bulb chandeliers encrusted in soot. The whole place felt noxious.

Even so, hints of its former grandeur existed. A railing dripped with delicate brass filigree, topped by a scratched oak handrail. Even flaking paint couldn’t obscure the ornamental detail of the metalwork. Virginia found the coffee machine in the Station Master’s Office and trundled back out, balancing five paper cups on a plastic tray. Once back in the booth, she bolted the door behind her and handed out the coffees. Totto even said thank you.

The rest of her day went by fairly quickly. She tidied the area around her, grabbed a hot dog outdoors for lunch in order to get out of the gloom, refilled the schedules again, and answered the phone, which was usually for Terrence.

A few minutes before five, Terrence told her to head home. Not until she was outside the booth did she realize she didn’t have her coat. She’d left it in the closet at the Penn Central legal offices.

Spun around by the crush of commuters, Virginia decided to take the elevator on the far side of the station rather than fight her way across the concourse. She got off on the seventh floor and stepped into a long hallway with trash piled up high against the walls and a general air of disuse. She headed right, figuring she’d end up at the offices soon enough, but only found more of the same. Had she gotten off on the wrong floor?

She turned another corner and froze. Three men sat in an alcove, sharing a joint that turned the air acrid and sweet. They wore jeans and leather jackets. Virginia’s mother had always warned her to check the footwear of men who lurked about. “If they’re in sneakers, it means they’re planning to rob you and make a fast getaway.”

Typical of her mother to make such a sweeping generalization. But all three wore sneakers. Her mother’s words seemed to ring true as Virginia stared at their jagged faces.

“Whatcha doing here, lady?” The tallest one spoke up, pointing his finger at her like it was a gun.

They rose, slowly, the way cats move when they don’t want to startle their prey.

She turned around and ran.