“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?”