Authors: Frank Juliano
Joyce watched with alarm as a musical number began and the conductor began pointing at different musicians. Bart pulled the reed out of his mouth, tightened it onto the mouthpiece and put his instrument back together, as the bass thumped away.
Just as the conductor pointed to him, Bart had the instrument to his lips and began to blow without missing a beat.
The show itself was less riveting for Joyce. “The Hot Mikado”
didn’t provide the same satisfaction that either a well-done Gilbert and Sullivan operetta or hot jazz alone could provide.
More innovative staging might have helped. The highlight of the evening came late in the second act, when Bill “Bojangles”
Robinson, a tall, lithe black man whose feet seemed to have a mystical connection to the floor, came out in a gold lame tuxedo, complete with spats, gloves and a top hat.
“Bojangles” danced fluidly up and down a steep set of stairs, 172
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his machine-gun fast tap stepping drawing loud cheers from the audience. Joyce watched him and marveled.
After the final curtain fell, she went up to the brass rail in front of the pit and leaned down to Bart. “You were wonderful,” Joyce called down to him.
He bowed, standing next to his chair, and the trombone player muttered to him, “You gonna be able to eat?”
Bart came to the edge of the pit. “Would you mind terribly missing the closing night party? I have an idea.”
Joyce shrugged, and agreed to meet him at the back of the auditorium. He came up the aisle a few minutes later, swinging his instrument case.
“Maybe Connie is in Hoboken. He might have convinced her that she is liable for murder charges too, and they might go on the lam together,” Bart said.
When Joyce shook her head doubtfully, he pressed on. “It’s a thought. We know she was sickened by what happened and ran out of there, but she might not be with this Dr. S willingly.
“Or, she may have decided with someone else also after her there is strength in numbers,” he said. “The thing is, we know she’s about to drop off the face of the earth and it’s likely that one or the other of these guys does her in.”
173
The cab ride downtown was one of the strangest Joyce had ever had, even given the whole time-travel thing, and the pressure of trying to prevent…something bad. Without thinking she had asked the driver to take them to the PATH station, at the corner of Church and Vesey streets. The driver glanced at Bart through the rear view mirror. “Where to, Mac?” he asked.
“We’re going to Hoboken,” Joyce tried again, determined not to be dismissed so easily. The problem was, she realized, that the Port Authority hadn’t been created yet. One thing stays the same though, she thought grimly. New Yorkers are rude.
Then, with an eerie sense of foreboding—future déjà vu?—
she realized that they were being let out of the cab in front of what would become the World Trade Center. Pulling on Bart’s sleeve, she whispered, “Do you have time for a quick history lesson, from my history? Something important happened—happens—
here you ought to know about. Not that you could do anything about it…”
The cabbie reached across and slammed the curbside door shut, and squealed off into traffic while Bart arranged his face expectantly. He must have thought Joyce was about to tell him 174
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something personal about herself because a quick look of disappointment flashed across his features when she launched into “On this site on Sept. 11, 2001…”, Joyce sounding like one of those Gray Line guides.
She quickly summed up the events of that horrible day, the two airliners flying straight into the towers, the buildings crumbing, trapping and killing thousands. The words sounded stupidly futuristic in this setting, where the squat Hudson Terminal buildings occupied 30-50 Church St., as it was then known. “Taliban” and “Al Quida” made no sense here; she might as well been reading a script from “Buck Rogers.”
Bart was a bit shaken, but he recovered quickly. “These are the largest office buildings in the world,” he said, waving a confident arm over the headquarters of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. “They’ll stand forever,” he said, a tad too defiantly.
The ride across the river was tense. Neither of them said much, not sure what awaited them on the other side, and not sure what future, so to speak, their relationship would have. Joyce glanced around the train car as it rocked her from side to side.
There were wicker seats—the kind you might find on a granny’s front porch, and bare light bulbs hanging down from the sides of the train, in between the rope luggage racks slung between the seats. There were ads for Sen-Sen, an early breath mint, and Flit, an insecticide.
The address Bart got was an old tenement, on a side street a few blocks from the station. The fence around the front entrance to the rickety wooden structure was chained shut, but there was the faint glow of light from the back, where flies zipped around overflowing metal garbage cans. A metal fire escape bolted to the wall was pulled up and locked, so that anyone using it would have to jump the last 10 feet into the stony yard.
Bart and Joyce smiled nervously at each other, and then 175
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shrugged. “What the hell?…” Bart said. “It looks cozy in there.”
They went in through the open rear door, Bart fighting his usual good manners that would have let Joyce in first. He pushed through, like a tackle looking for a quarterback.
As they reached the top of the creaky wooden stairs a door opened halfway down on the right, bathing the hallway in a harsh, sickly-looking light. A tall thin man in an undershirt and baggy pants held up by leather suspenders just stared at Joyce, amazed.
It seemed like whole minutes ticked by while the three people in the hall stared and waited. Then the thin man—but not William Powell’s suave “Thin Man”—sprang suddenly to life. “You bitch!”
he screamed at Joyce. “You came back, huh?” He pulled back into the apartment and darted back out, holding a small revolver in his hand. Joyce watched transfixed as the muzzle flashed and chips of plaster flew off the walls, until Bart pulled her out of harm’s way.
They ran out of the building, the guy following them, screaming and firing his gun, adjusting his suspenders as he gave chase.
* * * *
“In case… WHEN she comes back,” Joyce’s mother corrected herself firmly, “she’ll need something to wear.”
Doug and Debbie saw them off after a quick brunch, everyone promising to call as soon as there was news. But there still had been no activity in any of Joyce’s bank accounts, and Debbie had picked up on a subtle change in the way the police—both the suit-176
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and-tie detectives and the uniformed patrolmen—treated her, Doug and the Waszlewskis. She realized with a start that the new demeanor was sympathy—these hard-boiled, street savvy cops no longer expected Joyce to be found alive. Debbie decided not to share her insight with anyone.
Doug too had started to speak of Joyce in the past tense, without realizing it. He seemed to accept that whatever happened, the relationship that he had with Joyce was over. If she returned safe, the only explanation would be that she was hiding from him. And Doug had to admit that was pretty sad. He’d rather slink off and leave her alone than be such an embarrassment that his one-time girlfriend had to fake her disappearance to shake him off.
So after two more days book-ending an uncomfortable night on Debbie’s couch, Doug too was off to Maine. He’d heard the young woman lock her bedroom door, and whisper to someone on her cell phone that she wished that Doug would “just go back where he came from.”
Doug and Debbie had made one last bid to draw attention to Joyce’s case by appearing together on “Good Day New York,” a local morning news-and-talk show, They dutifully told the story for the umpteenth time and held up the headshot of Joyce that the oily photographer had taken of her. As they climbed down from their stools the perky hostess changed her tone, from concerned to saucy. “How high WILL hemlines go this summer?” she smiled into the camera. “We’ll see in a minute, so come right back.”
They said their goodbyes in front of the apartment, dividing up the stacks of flyers they had printed at Kinko’s into two neat piles. One set Doug would distribute in Joyce’s familiar haunts at home. The rest Debbie would plaster all over the city. “Maybe we’ll hear something,” Doug said as his cab pulled away from the curb.
177
Joyce let herself into the apartment Muriel and Connie share, not surprised to find the kitchen dark. She snapped on the overhead light and saw a note from Muriel on the table. “She is at another party,” Joyce thought irritably. “My grandmother has more energy than I do.”
Walking toward the bedroom, she was startled to see movement in front of the tall window. Joyce’s heart raced, the blood roaring in her ears. After the experience she just had across the river, Joyce’s first instinct was to flee for her life. But in the light from the street coming through the curtains she discerned that the intruder was a slight, blonde woman. Sizing up the situation, Joyce’s confidence grew, and she clicked on the light.
Both women shrieked in surprise, and then stared at each other. Joyce and Connie were face-to-face, and except for the hair color, they were almost identical!
“Who are you?” they demanded of each other. Joyce thought a moment and decided not to say that she was Connie’s grand-niece. Instead she said that she was a cousin, “Aunt Helen’s daughter, from up in Fort Kent.” Joyce hoped her family history was accurate; Muriel had always complained that Helen and her 178
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daughter…whose name Joyce couldn’t recall, always avoided her parents. “I ran away from home,” she told Connie, plopping down next to her. “I heard you were down here and I need help.”
Connie, sadly, admitted that she needed help too. “I’m in way over my head, kiddo,” she said, slumping onto the bed. “At least two people want to kill me.”
Her great aunt told Joyce the whole story, the words spilling out of her like soda fizzing out of a shaken bottle. The hood in Hoboken, the slimy “Dr. S.” was an abortionist; no surprise there.
What Joyce wanted to know was how a good girl, a Christian girl from Maine of all places, got hooked up with a back-alley butcher.
She supposed, if she thought about it, that she was pro-life.
Joyce flashed onto the line the elephant repeats in “Horton Hears A Who,” one of her favorite childhood books,: “A person is a person no matter how small.” That pretty much summed up her feelings on the hot button issue that lay 30 years in the future.
But Joyce also knew that her outrage wasn’t only over the moral wrong being committed in Hoboken and—she knew—
most anyplace else a girl felt short of options. What really was making her angry was that Connie could have been so stupid.
“He told me I’d be like a nurse, and I always thought I’d be a nurse if dancing didn’t work out. I helped get him customers,”
Connie said between dainty sniffles into her hanky. “At first I didn’t understand what was involved. I didn’t think about it being a baby. I’m from a small town in Maine…”
“Waldoboro,” Joyce murmured, nodding sympathetically.
Connie looked startled for a moment, then realized that her
“cousin” would know that.
“A few nights ago a girl I brought over to him bled to death,”
Connie said. “He didn’t even care. He just said “I guess I solved her problem.” HE DIDN’T EVEN CARE!” Connie suddenly 179
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screamed. Joyce jumped up, alarmed. She could hear doors opening in the hallway, followed by murmurs of concern.
A few times Dr. S simply abandoned his “patient” and his
“nurse,” fleeing the dingy, fly-specked apartment. In those cases, except the last one, Connie had been able to save the young woman’s life. She had met an older pharmacist, Edward A.
Toomey, who had a shop in Malvern, N.Y., out on Long Island.
Toomey, a handsome but married man, had come up to Connie and one of her more ardent suitors on the sand in Long Beach one summer Sunday.
“This guy I met at a party in the city, his name was Doug something…,” Joyce picked her head up and then laughed.
“What a coincidence,” she said to Connie. “I had a boyfriend named Doug too.”
“Was he hard to get rid of?” Connie asked, and when Joyce collapsed into paroxysms of laughter, waving her hand to convey agreement, Connie dissolved too. Both women shook with laughter, a release from all the tension that they’d each been under.
Picking up her story, Connie said that Edward Toomey had come to her aid, a gallant knight helping a damsel in distress. “He kind of growled at Doug, “I must warn you, I was the boxing champion of my regiment,” and Doug took a powder. He was a real masher anyway. All hands,” Connie said. After that Connie and Toomey developed a chaste friendship. “Once in awhile he called me Jeanne; that’s the name of his daughter about my age.
He is real proud of her. She is a writer or something,”
It was Toomey who told Connie to wash her hands before helping the women, and he gave her bottles of hydrogen peroxide, alcohol and other sterile supplies. But the pharmacist was a devout Roman Catholic and he strongly disapproved of what Connie was mixed up in. He wanted her to tell him where 180
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this “clinic’ was, so he could intervene, and now Connie was ready to do that.
“When Monica died, that girl I told you about, I wanted to leave but Dr. Stevens wouldn’t let me. He said that I was as responsible as he was, and the only chance we had was to stay together,” the slim blonde said. “But after he fell asleep, I snuck out. I just came to get a few things and then I’m going to high tail it back to Maine.