Track

The fourth tune was the shortest. It was a quick bright thing, almost a joke, that ran up and down twice and stopped dead, as if somebody had shut a door on it, and when it stopped the six or seven people who had stood on the floor for the third one laughed, all of them, at the same time, the way people laugh when a thing ends sooner than they thought, and two of them put money in the case.

Nico bowed. He bowed to them properly, from the waist, with the fiddle in one hand and the bow in the other, the way his grandfather must have bowed at the end of a wedding, and they went on across the floor, smiling, and the floor took them back.

He knelt down and put the fiddle in the case.

“Thank you, Constable Keane,” he said, to the case.

“Go on.”

“I’m going.” He closed the lid and did up the catches, one, two, and stood up with it. There were four or five pounds in coins in a little heap in the corner of the case, and a note, a five, and he had not touched them. “I’ll be at the bottom of the passage. By the subway. Nobody minds there.” He looked at Tom. “Did you like the third one?”

“Yes.”

“Everybody likes the third one,” said Nico, with satisfaction, and went down the passage with the case, past Mr Pettiford, who had gone back to his chair and did not say Musician this time, but nodded, which Tom had never seen him do to anybody.

---

It was twenty past ten. The rush was over and the floor was in its middle-of-the-morning state: slower, thinner, more tourists, more people with suitcases, the long-distance crowd for the eleven o’clock trains, and the light from the high windows on the Forty-Second Street side had moved round and was lying on the floor now in long gold panels nearer the booth, with dust going up through them very slowly, the way it did at this hour, so that the whole middle of the floor looked as if it were under water.

He stood at the mouth of the Lexington passage with his back to the wall.

On the board the ten forty-two to Albany had a track now. Thirty-one. Walter was at the gate for it, by his empty trolley, with his red cap on straight, and every so often he looked across the floor at the Vanderbilt stairs, and then at the board, and then at the Vanderbilt stairs again, the way a man waits for a train he is not catching.

Teresa was on the Vanderbilt side. He could see her from where he stood, a long way off across the floor, at the top of the west stairs, with her back to the balcony rail, watching the floor the way she watched it, with her arms folded. A man was talking to her with a map. She was not looking at the map.

At twenty-eight minutes past ten she came.

---

He saw her the way he had seen her on Wednesday: not her, first, but the shape on the floor, the woman crossing it differently from everybody else. The Vanderbilt stairs. A grey wool coat with the collar turned up. Flat black shoes. Short grey hair. The leather bag in her left hand, not much bigger than a lunch box. Her right hand in her coat pocket.

Nobody with her.

No car at the Vanderbilt door; nothing on the radio. No officer at her elbow. No young man with a folder half a pace behind. Nobody coming down the stairs after her. Nobody at the top of them watching her go. Just a woman of sixty in a grey coat coming down the west stairs of Grand Central at twenty-eight minutes past ten on the first of May with a small bag, on her way to open the Assembly of the Province of New York at Albany, in the old chamber, with the mace, and nobody on the stairs or the floor or the balconies looking at her twice.

He watched her come down the stairs and onto the floor and he thought: that is the oddest thing I have seen on this floor in two years.

He went on watching her. She came across the floor towards the gates, past the booth with its clock, through the gold panels of light with the dust going up through them, between a man with a suitcase and a family of four with a map, and the floor parted round her and closed behind her the way it parted round everybody, and she did not hurry, and she did not look round, and she crossed it the way you cross your own kitchen.

And he thought: no. That is the best thing I have seen on this floor in two years.

He did not know why. He could not have said it to Teresa or to the muster room or to anybody. He only knew, standing at the mouth of the Lexington passage with his back to the wall, that a woman who could have had a car to the door and a man at her elbow and a reserved carriage with a curtain had chosen instead to come down the Vanderbilt stairs on her own with a bag and cross the floor among the people with suitcases and the families with maps, the way they crossed it, and that there was something in that choice that he understood all the way down, and that it was the same thing that had made him stand on a beam forty storeys over Fulton Street at twenty and think this is not mine, and come down, and go and put on a uniform and stand on a floor. He did not know what it was. He knew it was the same.

Across the floor, at the top of the Vanderbilt stairs, Teresa had turned her head to watch the woman in the grey coat cross the floor, and then she turned it further, all the way round, and looked across the whole width of the concourse at him, at the mouth of the Lexington passage, and lifted her eyebrows.

He did not do anything back. He did not need to. He knew what she was saying. She was saying your girlfriend.

---

Walter went to her.

He came away from the gate for track thirty-one with the trolley, across the floor towards her, as fast as his knee would let him, which was faster than on Wednesday, the trolley rattling, and they met halfway, near the newsstand, in one of the long gold panels of light, and Tom saw him take the cap off.

He saw her stop. He saw her turn and look at Walter, and her face open, the way it had on Wednesday, the way a face opens when it sees somebody it knows, and he saw Walter say something, with his cap in his hand, bending his knee a little, the left one, and straightening it again, to show her.

And he saw her laugh.

He could not hear it from where he stood. The floor was too wide and too full of its own noise, the voices and the footsteps and the announcements and the trains under it, all of it going up into the green ceiling and coming down again as one sound, like the sea. But he saw it. She put her head back, a little, and laughed, with her whole face, the way people laugh at a thing that has really pleased them, and Walter laughed too, his big low laugh, with his cap in his hand, and two people going past them on the floor turned round to see what was so funny and saw a Red Cap and an old woman in a grey coat laughing about a knee, and smiled, and went on.

She gave Walter the bag. He put it on the trolley as if it weighed a hundredweight.

Then she said something, and pointed with her free hand, and they turned together, not towards the gate but towards the newsstand, and went to it.

Mrs Abelson was on her high stool behind the counter in her cardigan. Tom saw her look up and see who it was. He saw her take her glasses off their chain and put them on, and look again, over the top of the counter, through the glasses, at the woman in the grey coat. And then he saw Mrs Abelson do a thing he had never once seen her do in two years, which was get down off the stool.

She stood up behind the counter. She stood up very straight, a thin old woman in a cardigan with white hair in a net and red lipstick, and took a paper off the rack, the top one, and folded it, the way she folded the ones she kept for her forty people, and held it out across the counter with both hands.

The woman in the grey coat took it. She held out money. Mrs Abelson shook her head. The woman in the grey coat held the money out again, firmly, the way Tom’s mother held out the money for the bread at Hrynko’s when Mr Hrynko tried to put it on the book, and after a moment Mrs Abelson took it, and gave her change, without counting it, and the woman in the grey coat did not count it either.

Then she said something to Mrs Abelson, and Mrs Abelson said something back, and the woman in the grey coat laughed again, and put the paper under her arm, and turned, with Walter and the trolley, towards the gate for track thirty-one.

---

It was twenty-five to eleven. The ten forty-two was boarding.

She came past the booth, on the far side of it from him, with Walter beside her pushing the trolley, and as she came past the booth she looked up, at the board, to check the track, the way everybody did, though she knew it; and then she looked down, and across the floor, and her eyes went round the floor the way they had on Wednesday, once, all of it, the ceiling and the clock and the people, the way you look at a room you like before you leave it.

And they stopped on him, at the mouth of the Lexington passage.

She nodded.

She nodded first. Small and quick, across eighty yards of floor, with the paper under her arm and the corner of her mouth going in, the nod of a woman acknowledging a young man doing his job, for the third time, and finding it, this time, he could see even from there, very funny that it was the third time.

He did not nod back.

He meant to. He was going to. But at the same moment a man came up the Lexington passage behind him in a hurry and said excuse me, officer, the Forty-Second Street doors, and he turned his head to the man, and pointed, the way he had pointed ten thousand times, and said straight across and to your left, and the man said thanks and went; and when he turned his head back she had turned too, towards the gate, towards Walter, who was saying something to her, and she was listening to Walter, and the moment was gone.

He thought: next time.

He thought it quite clearly, standing at the mouth of the passage with his back to the wall. Next time. She’ll come through again in a week or a month, going up to Albany or Poughkeepsie or somewhere with her scissors, and I’ll nod first, and that’ll be four, and Teresa will say it’s a marriage.

She went to the gate with Walter. They stood at it together for a moment, at the top of the ramp down to track thirty-one, the woman in the grey coat and the tall grey man in the red cap, talking, and Walter was showing her his knee again, bending it, and she was looking at it with her head on one side the way his mother looked at a patient’s leg, and she said something, and Walter laughed.

Mrs Abelson was back on her stool behind the newsstand. She was watching them too, over her glasses, with a face Tom had never seen on her, a face like a girl’s.

On the Vanderbilt side, at the top of the west stairs, Teresa had turned back to the floor, with her arms folded, and the man with the map had gone.

Nico was at the bottom of the passage, by the subway, behind him, a long way down. Very faintly, under the noise of the floor, he could hear the fiddle start again. The first tune. The one that went up at the end like a question.

The light lay across the middle of the floor in its long gold panels, with the dust going up through them very slowly, the way it did at this hour, and above it the ceiling, green, with the stars the wrong way round, and the floor went round the booth in every direction, and nobody touched anybody.

He looked at the clock on the booth.

It was a big four-faced clock, brass and glass, on top of the round information booth in the middle of the floor, and it was the most looked-at clock in the city, and it was right, it was always right, people set their watches by it, and its four faces said the same thing in four directions over the heads of the people crossing the floor, and he looked at the face that was turned to him.

It said twenty-three minutes to eleven.