At the Break of Day Read online

  The music was slow and she felt his chest against hers, his hips, his legs. She wasn’t going to think about moths any more, about anything any more. Not about school, not about ninth grade – only kids were in ninth grade. She was sixteen, Joe was eighteen. They were no longer kids.

  Her breath made a wet patch on his shirt and she concentrated on this, not on the mailbox which would one day soon hold the letter.

  Then they were dancing in the darkness beyond the lanterns, and all she could smell was him, all she could feel was him, as he moved his hand all over her back and kissed her, again and again, and her mouth opened under his, but this time his tongue didn’t flick into hers.

  The hand which led her off to the shelter of the wood was soft and sure and kind. The ground was dry, his kisses were on her face, her neck, and hers were on his, but then he unbuttoned her dress, slipping his hand across her shoulders, her neck. Her breathing felt strange.

  She put her hands either side of his head, holding his face so that she could kiss his mouth, see his eyes which looked at her, then through her, heavy-lidded. At his lips which were as full as hers felt. Now she let his hands stroke her breasts and she knew the adults would not approve and she thought they could go to hell.

  She closed her eyes as he pushed her dress back off her shoulders and it was now that he kissed her breast with his open mouth, with his tongue. She felt it, soft and warm, and allowed him to do all this because the adults were making decisions, had always made decisions, and this was hers. And they wouldn’t like it.

  But then she opened her eyes. The wind was howling now and she saw his head down against her skin, her body felt his hands along her thighs and his mouth was no longer soft and neither were the sounds which came from him. She was frightened, wanted Nancy. Everything was so quick. After six years everything was rushing, too fast, too goddamn fast, even this, and she didn’t know how to stop Joe, how to stop anything, anything at all.

  But then the rain came and Joe lifted his head, pulled back her dress, took her hand, helping her from the ground, laughing, running, and that night the waves on the lake were three feet high as they drove along the surface of the water. Tomorrow the sand would be solid and wet as she walked on it and she knew now it would be all right because the rain had fallen tonight when she needed it. So that meant everything would be fine, wouldn’t it? And she and Joe would have the time they needed to take everything so much more slowly.

  But she did not walk on the sand the next day and everything was not all right, because there was a letter from England in the mailbox. Norah insisted that she came home and Grandpa agreed. The waiting was over. There was only grief and anger to take its place.

  Rosie lifted her hands now, leaning against the rail, standing on her toes, looking back, and, yes, Manhattan was still visible, she hadn’t quite left, not yet.

  She hadn’t said goodbye to Joe, or to Sandra. Frank had driven them back to the house on the last day of June and there had been an ache inside her which seemed to reach into the air, taking the colour from the maples, the sky, the whole world. The ache hadn’t left her still. She wondered if it ever would.

  She had packed her trunk, listening to Louis Armstrong, ignoring the visitor from the Children’s Aid Society who called to speak to Frank and Nancy. She folded her clothes neatly but left her baseball bat, skis, her pennants on the shelves and on the walls, because there would be no place for them in London.

  She looked out at the baseball target set up by Frank on the back of the garage, then took the ball from the shelf, feeling its stitches, its leather-covered hardness, the slap as she whacked it into her other hand. The mitt was there on the shelf. She put the ball with it. It was all over and the tears would not stop running down her face.

  They took a cab from the house the next day and she waved at Mary, the domestic help, who cried, but Rosie did not, she seemed too empty, too grey, too tired. But she had cried all night. Had Frank and Nancy?

  They talked on the train to New York but the words were dry and flickered from her mind and it was as though everything were happening two feet above the ground and there were no shadows.

  At Grand Central Frank showed her the bulbous clock above the information desk.

  ‘This is a good meeting place,’ he said, taking his pipe from his mouth. ‘You just remember that when you come back.’

  For a moment she had seen the colours and shapes of Grand Central Station and then it slipped back to the flatness and to the noise which whirled around her, sweeping in and out of her head but never staying, and she turned away but Frank pulled her back, put his arm around her. His brown eyes close to her brown eyes.

  ‘You’ve got to fight a good corner. Make something positive out of the next three days before you get on that boat. We want you to soak it in, remember it. Remember America. That’s why we’re filling in the time here, not back home. The future is yours, Rosie. You must make something positive out of the rest of your life. Have we got a deal?’

  Rosie looked at Nancy and then back to Frank and wanted to shout, But there’s this pain, deep inside and it’s because I’m leaving you, the lake, Sandra, America; and Joe. And I’m angry with Grandpa and Norah and you, for letting this happen. And I’m frightened because I’m going to a place which used to be home but which isn’t any more.

  Nancy touched her face as the people parted around them. ‘None of this is the end of the world, you know. We can write. You’ll come and stay, or we’ll come over.’ Her voice was heavy with sadness, her eyes shadowed as Frank’s were, and Rosie knew that these two people were hurting too. That they loved her, that they didn’t want her to go, any more than she wanted to leave.

  They walked on through the pillared hall and the noise was greater. People clustered at the ticket booths. Were they going home? Were they laughing and smiling because they were going to people they knew and loved?

  Frank had gripped her then, as Rosie now gripped the rail again, her hands down from her face, Manhattan all but gone, though not quite.

  He had gripped her, pulling her back to him. His hands had been the same as they had always been, short-nailed, strong. Would they be old when she saw him again?

  He had said, ‘Nearly sixty cleaners come in the early hours, just so you can put your toots down on the great big shine. Now isn’t that something?’

  She had nodded, but it was nothing in amongst the pain. She had leaned her head back at Nancy’s command and looked at the picture of the zodiac on the towering ceiling.

  ‘There’s something wrong with it, so people say. Maybe Orion is back to front or something. But it looks pretty good to me.’ But it was nothing.

  They called in to the Oyster Bar, then passed the movie house and stood and looked at the bronze doors behind which the trains waited at their platforms. There would be one taking Nancy and Frank back to Pennsylvania on the fourth, but not her. No, she would take a ship and a train and then a cab, each one taking her further from them, from Joe, from them all.

  ‘These trains leave at one minute past the scheduled time. Always one minute past. Remember that when you come back,’ Nancy said.

  They took a cab to the Plaza Hotel but Rosie turned before they left the station and saw 89 East 42nd Street in gold lettering above the main doorway. Did Euston have its address written up? She couldn’t remember. She didn’t care.

  She still didn’t care, standing here, surging away from America, remembering the avenues they had driven along and across, the streets they had turned down which were plunged into darkness by the shadows of the skyscrapers. They had driven beneath bridges, slicing in and out of the shadows of the girders.

  ‘In winter the tops of these skyscrapers are sometimes in the clouds,’ Frank had said, his hand clasped over the bowl of his pipe because Nancy would not tolerate that goddamn smell in the car.

  The buildings reared up, jagged against the blue of the sky. They were complete, untouched. But the place she was going to wasn’t. The bomb
s had made sure of that.

  In the Plaza lobby there were plants with rich green waxy leaves. They looked so cool in the heat, like the lake. She touched one. It was plastic and warm.

  Her bedroom was silent, empty. She had no energy to draw the drapes across the full-length window, she just let her clothes drop to the floor in the bathroom and stood beneath the cold water, wanting the sharpness, the intake of breath, the soothing of the pain which could not be soothed.

  They walked in Central Park. There were tennis courts.

  ‘Will the Lake Club raise the money for another one?’ she asked and Frank nodded.

  ‘They usually do.’

  Would Joe take someone else to the next Subscription Dance? Would he kiss her breasts too? If she had stayed, would they have been able to take it all more slowly? Would she have been able to ask him to kiss her gently, to hold her in his arms, not press his lips against her nipples, not yet. Not until she was less of a child. Not until they really knew one another.

  Would Frank and Nancy still sit around the pool, would the glasses still stick to the table? Would the world go on?

  Frank had stopped and was pointing his pipe towards the grey rocks, the drying grass.

  ‘This was covered with squatters’ shacks in the Depression but wars are good for us. We make money, we save money. Now we need something to spend it on, so we’ll have a boom. Poor old Europe won’t. It’s been drained white. It’ll be tight back home, Rosie.’

  But London wasn’t home, and neither was Pennsylvania any more. She was in no man’s land. Didn’t anybody see that but her?

  That night when midnight had been and gone she stood at the window of her room, a strange room in a strange city. She listened to the garbage trucks wheezing and clanking, the air-conditioning humming, the police sirens wailing, and knew that she had felt this lonely before. She recognised the panic which surged and tore into her, gripping her hands into fists, squeezing the breath from her throat. She recognised the pain which tumbled along with it.

  It was the pain Grandpa had tried to hug and kiss away so long ago on the wharf at Liverpool but he had not been able to touch the rawness inside her because he was the one saying she couldn’t stay.

  He was the one saying those words again.

  Rosie held the drape tightly, screwing it up, holding it to her mouth, leaning her head against the glass. All around her was the humming, the wailing, the clanking, and now there were tears too. Tears which turned to sobs and the drape was creased and damp when she turned to her bed, but even then there was no peace because the waves of the lake lapped and rippled and its glare hurt her eyes as she dipped in and out of sleep. In and out. In and out, until she woke, sweat-drenched, the sheets twisted about her limbs.

  But it was still night, and the water was cold from the shower as she let it run over her face, her body. She was almost a woman now and had been a child when Grandpa had held her with the cold September wind whirling around them on that Liverpool dock.

  ‘My little Rosie,’ he had said. ‘My darling little Rosie. It won’t be long, my love. I promise you that. It really won’t be long but I want you safe.’ And he had cried. Tears had smeared – not trickled – just smeared all over his face which had been old even then.

  Rosie turned the shower on harder. ‘It’s been too long, Grandpa. It’s been such a very long time and I don’t remember you any more. I don’t belong any more. You are tearing me away from my home again and I think I hate you.’

  In the morning they watched the riders exercising their horses in Central Park, then took a steamer which smelt of diesel. They looked at Staten Island, Ellis Island, the ancient ferries which plied to and fro, one with funnels, and it had meant nothing because she was leaving.

  They took a cab up to Fifth Avenue, driving past the steam that drifted from manhole covers and came from the cracks in the hot water system carried in underground piping.

  They shopped in stores for a crêpe de Chine nightdress for Norah which Nancy chose and Rosie knew should have been flannelette, but then, Norah might have changed. But what did it matter?

  She looked up. Behind her, captured by the mirror tilted on the counter, was a red-haired girl, and for a moment she thought it was Sandra. But of course it wasn’t.

  They moved on to the candy department and bought maple candies, butterscotch and toffee because, Nancy said, the neighbours would like sweets especially now that the rationing was so intense.

  She bought gum and fruit-flavoured envelopes. And stockings for herself, for Norah, for Jack’s mum – and Camel cigarettes, too, because Maisie was a twenty a day girl. She bought a toy car for Lee, Jack’s new brother, but she didn’t mind whether it was a Buick or a Cadillac. None of it mattered. She bought a sweater for Grandpa and another for Jack, another for Jack’s dad, Ollie.

  For lunch they put nickels in a slot in a diner and she saw a boy who she thought was Joe. But of course it wasn’t and by this time tomorrow she would be drawing away from Manhattan, hearing the gulls, losing Frank and Nancy, losing them all.

  Now Rosie, standing by the rail, looked up at the sky. She hadn’t noticed the gulls before.

  They hadn’t been able to eat their meal and had taken a bus to the Rockefeller Center and Rosie had watched the coins clink through the driver’s change machine, like the hours and minutes of these last few days. They had stood on the sidewalks as Nancy told them of the cleaner employed full-time to keep the Center floor clear of gum and she had thought of her Grandma who had worked as a cleaner at the bank. It was there that she had died when the bomb had fallen just before Rosie left for America.

  That evening they went to Chinatown and she bought a jar of spice from a shop which had varnished ducks hanging in the open shop-front. An old woman passed with shoes that slopped as she walked.

  They sat and drank cold tea at an outdoor café and Rosie bought a book of Chinese art from an old street vendor. Maybe Jack would like that. And still the minutes clicked away.

  The cloud layer had not dispersed with the coming of night and reflected the Manhattan lights. The London skies had been aglow on the nights before she left. Not with light but with flames.

  It was nine o’clock now. It would soon be the fourth. They flagged down a cab and drank Manhattans in a restaurant which spilled seats out on to the pavement.

  They sat and watched the women in hats, the men in smart grey suits, the boys in shirtsleeves, the girls in cotton dresses. Each girl looked like Sandra, each boy like Joe. She picked out the ice-cube from her drink. It numbed her tongue, but not her pain.

  ‘I’m saving the best for tomorrow,’ Frank said, taking her hand in his. ‘It’s somewhere you’ll never forget, somewhere that’ll warm you on the long trip home, on the nights when maybe you can’t sleep.’

  Nancy touched her shoulder and smiled.

  Frank continued. ‘It’s a place I always think of when times are tough. It’s the street where Bob and I used to visit to soak in jazz. Real original jazz.’

  Rosie looked at him and saw that his eyes had lost the shadow of pain which he had carried over these last days.

  She stood at the window again that night listening to the lorries, the garbage truck, the sirens. She showered, she cried and drifted in and out of sleep and there was Joe, his wristwatch glinting, his hand on her skin, his mouth too. There was Grandma, lying beneath the rubble. Jack reaching out to her. Then Frank and Nancy holding her, sure and strong, then Grandpa calling her from their arms but she couldn’t see his face.

  They didn’t talk over breakfast. The pecan waffle looked good, the celebrations in the street outside were loud for the fourth of July but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

  It was hot again, so hot. They took a cab to Frank’s favourite place. She stretched out her arm along the window, loosening her fingers, breathing slowly, keeping the panic in, mixing it up with the pain. They passed in and out of shadows and the noise of the streets was loud. Life was all around them but not in h
er. Not with her.

  Frank was clenching his unlit pipe between his teeth, his fingers tapping on the armrest of the door.

  ‘Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played in clubs next door to one another down fifty-second Street, this goddamn great street. I heard them. Billie Holiday sang too. Dixieland and New Orleans just roared out across the street all day and into the night.’ He was stabbing the air with his pipe now. ‘There was nothing to pay, just the price of a beer and the love of the music. It’s stayed with me. It’ll stay with you, keep you warm. It’s special for me, and for Nancy, and Bob. Now it’ll be special for you.’

  The cab slowed, turned into the street and Rosie watched as Frank leaned forward, his face eager, and then she saw the bleakness begin in his eyes and his mouth set into a tense line. She had looked then, out of the window, at the clubs which would warm her, remind her, and she saw what Frank had seen.

  She saw the smoky brownstone buildings which were still there, but without the clubs. There was just paper which scudded about the street and paint which was peeling off doors and window glass which was cracked or gone. Dented cars lined the street, a trash can rolled on the sidewalk.

  They drove down slowly and where there had once been jazz sweeping out of the windows were groups of men lounging, staring. There were more standing in dingy doorways, buying drugs, selling drugs, taking drugs, and Rosie held Frank’s hand and told him that it was jazz sweeping across the sloping lawn that she would remember. It was Uncle Bob’s groups, the barbecues, the baseball target, the maple syrup on pancakes at breakfast – those were the things that would warm her.

  ‘This is nothing. This doesn’t matter.’ But then she could speak no more and her pain was gone as she saw his in the tears which were smeared across his face, as Grandpa’s had been. Frank looked old too.

  And now, standing on her toes again at the rail, she could no longer see Manhattan. They were gone and she finally turned from the wind and wept. It was over. All over.