Eastland Page 14

  Mae had told me all about the Grand Hotel. She’d said it was the most gorgeous, and expensive, place she’d ever stayed. Imagine, me in a posh resort like that with a dreamy suitor like Karel? I wanted to say a million things. I wanted to say “yes.”

  But all that came out of my mouth was, “I don’t know if I could miss the time at work.”

  “You don’t have to decide tonight. Talk to your mother about it.”

  “You talk to Mama. I have a feeling if you asked her, she’d agree to almost anything.”

  Karel released my hand and scooted his chair around the table. “Mind if I sit next to you?”

  I shook my head, I think. He had moved so close to me, I could feel his warm breath on my cheek. I had to stay calm. Focus on that adorable, dimpled cleft in his chin.

  But I couldn’t concentrate on anything because his lips were nearing mine. Karel was going to kiss me. My first-ever kiss on my very first date.

  I closed my eyes, as his breath grew hotter and more rapid. My mind went fuzzy, and then his lips were touching mine. He held them there, pressing gently. I melted into him, wanting more. The sensation was intoxicating.

  Was this how it felt to be drunk?

  Applause broke out from around the room. My head shot up. Had we caused a scene?

  But no one had taken any notice of us at all.

  Instead, all eyes were focused on the German pipe organ. Fritz Gruber, the middle son in a family of nine, smiled and bowed and then sat to play. Karel touched my cheek with the back of his hand. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. His lips had said it all. He stretched his arm across the top of my chair, his hand resting on my shoulder. I tipped my head back against his arm and let the breeze from the fan on the tin ceiling cool my overheated face.

  Fritz played while I relaxed. My mind drifted.

  “I see Fritz every Sunday,” Mae had informed me this past spring. She’d paid Mrs. Mazurski for the fruit and waved good-bye to the greengrocer. “And he doesn’t start playing the organ ’til I get there.”

  I had to bite into my apricot to keep from snickering. I chewed slowly until the impulse subsided. I swallowed and asked, “How do you know that?”

  “Fritz told me. Last night.”

  “You two went out?”

  “Not exactly. Fritz said he likes to stretch his legs after work. I mentioned my address and suggested he might like to “stretch” past my house.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Did. He told me what time he usually went out, and, as luck would have it, I was sitting on my front porch at that exact hour.”

  “Fancy that. What a coincidence.”

  Mae had laughed and pulled an apricot from her bag. “Yep,” she’d said, before taking a bite. “Fritz is going to play my favorite song for me next Sunday.”

  “I’m Simply Crazy Over You,” I muttered.

  “Right,” whispered Karel. “Mae loved this tune. Fritz played it every time we came, although it sounds a bit choppy today.”

  The smile Fritz had been wearing when he’d first started playing had sagged. His eyes blinked rapidly. He seemed to be rushing through the piece. He ended abruptly on a flat note, wiping at his cheeks before going on to his next song.

  Yet another broken-hearted casualty. The Eastland ripple never seemed to end.

  Beside me, Karel was blissfully unaware. He bobbed his head in time to the beat. I found myself wondering, What would life be like with him?

  Would we have more lovely outings like this? Could we buy a Victorian? Maybe live close to Mama? Would we summer in Michigan? Along the Great Lakes? Where Merchant Marines worked?

  The waitress appeared, startling me. She placed a gigantic chocolate soda on the table and then handed each of us a long paper straw. “We all good here?”

  “Of course!” Karel plunked his straw into our soda. “Everything’s perfect.”

  Oh, if only I could be as sure.

  26

  A half a day of work on Saturday always seemed like an exclamation point at the end of a tedious sentence. After an exhausting workweek, everyone dragged. Yet somehow on halfday Saturdays, employees found the energy to tease and flirt and slack off a bit. They knew that in four short hours, work would be over, and the weekend would begin.

  This weekend. The ballet benefit with Lars.

  I peered up at the bleak morning sky. After Friday’s reprieve, storms had returned. But who cared? I flipped up my umbrella and bounded down the porch steps, hopping onto the puddly pavement with a splash. I kicked at the water and laughed.

  “Wooey! That must have been some ice cream you had last night.” Dolly sauntered up the sidewalk, twirling her umbrella.

  “The soda was scrumptious.”

  “Who cares about that? I want to hear about that heartthrob, Karel Koznecki.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell.” Or maybe I didn’t know what to tell her. About Karel. Or Lars. Or anything in my mixed-up mind. I changed the subject. “But hey! What’re you doing here? You never come past my house on your way to work.”

  “Thought you might like the company this morning.”

  “You thought you could get some good gossip about my evening with Karel.”

  Dolly let out a squeaky, girly giggle. “Oh, come on now, chickadee.”

  I stiffened. “Don’t ever call me that.”

  She held up both hands. “Don’t get your knickers all knotty. Okay, you’re not a chickadee.”

  “But I am! I mean I was.” Tears flooded my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Dee. I don’t understand. What’s the matter?”

  “Mae used to call me that. Only Mae. No one else.”

  Dolly stared at me, her emerald eyes wide, her cheeks flushed as if all her freckles had bled together. “I didn’t know.”

  I exhaled. “Of course not. How could you?” I touched her arm. “Sorry I snapped at you, but that was Mae’s nickname for me. Hearing you say it made me kind of crazy.”

  We strolled up the rest of my block, neither of us saying much. At the corner, I paused, waiting for Dolly to turn and head north toward the shops on Twenty-Second Street. Instead, she went straight across Fiftieth Avenue.

  “Thought we should probably take side streets.” She waved to me from the opposite curb. “You know, to avoid all the shoppers.”

  I stared at her for a moment and then shrugged and raced after her. We walked east along my new route together. “So, you gonna tell me about your date with Karel or not?”

  I took one breath and the words came tumbling out. By the time we reached Western Electric, Dolly knew all about the spectacle of the love-struck couple, the smell of roasted peanuts, the giant chocolate soda, and of course, the two straws. I left out the bits about Fritz Gruber and my plans with Lars.

  Fritz would remain a secret between Mae and me. And talking about Lars was strictly off limits.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to share. Heck, I needed to talk to someone because everything seemed so strange and weird. I didn’t understand what I was feeling. How could I care about two guys at the same time? What kind of person did that make me? Oh, if ever a confused, desperate girl needed a friend. But was I ready to reveal my most intimate thoughts to Dolly? So soon after Mae?

  We scampered past the twenty or so unemployed still waiting outside the north gate. Mr. Bruno maintained his vigilance, though his presence didn’t really seem necessary today. The small group looked quiet and orderly. Mr. Bruno spotted us and waved his billy club in greeting.

  “Last day of interviews,” I shouted to him. “New crew will start in two weeks.” The unemployed cheered.

  “Quiet! Or there won’t be no interviewing no how,” Mr. Bruno threatened. But I saw the smile that flickered across his bulldog face.

  Soon, it would be business as usual. There would be no more unemployed hopefuls at the gates, no job vacancies, and no near-empty departments. The only things still lurking about would be the ghosts that haunted the halls, and our
hearts.

  Mr. Bruno went back to his patrol. We hurried into the inner yard and headed for the Central Office buildings.

  “You told me all about Karel,” Dolly said, “but what about that other fella?”

  “What? There’s no one else.”

  “You’re a bad liar, Delia Pageau. You’re hiding something. I know it. There’s more to this story than Mr. Koznecki.” She held opened the door to Twenty-Five for me. I shook out my wet umbrella and ducked inside. “You’re one sly little peanut.”

  “Peanut?” I waited as Dolly closed her own umbrella.

  “It fits ya, don’t cha think? Yep, peanut. That’ll be my pet name for you. So, you want to meet back here at eleven-thirty? Walk home together?” Without waiting for an answer, she waltzed away but then paused to look back at me. “Seriously, Dee. Good luck with the interviews. I know this has been awful for you. Remember one miraculous thing. You survived.” Dolly waved over her shoulder as she sashayed toward the switchboard in Twenty-Seven. “Toodles.”

  The five-minute warning whistle sounded. I rushed toward the personnel office. Not the regular, official personnel office. That was a small room run by two men on the second floor of Dolly’s building. No, I was on my way to the temporary personnel office that had been set up in the ground floor lunchroom of this building. There I joined the nineteen other specially selected representatives from nearly every department in the company.

  Applicants were screened at the door. Family members of deceased employees had first crack at any available jobs. Once all relatives had been hired, the remainder of the unemployed would have the chance to interview for a coveted position at Western Electric.

  Since Thursday, I’d interviewed dozens of people, but it didn’t seem to be getting any easier. Each applicant had a story—some tragic, many desperate, and a few almost too unbearable to hear. At precisely seven-thirty, the starting whistle blew. I watched as the first of the family members paraded into the lunchroom.

  A teenage boy, who appeared somewhat small for his age, sat across from me at my designated round table. “Good morning.”

  “Morning, ma’am.” The boy twitched, his shoulders popping up.

  “Please don’t be nervous. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.”

  His head jerked to the right. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I pushed a blank application across the table. “Can you fill this out? Or would you like me to do it for you?”

  “You do it, please ma’am. I can read. Don’t you worry. Finished the eighth grade. But I’m kinda nervous today.”

  I fought down a smile and leaned forward. “Don’t need to keep calling me ma’am. You and I are about the same age.” I pressed back.

  The boy exhaled so hard, I felt the puff of air across the table. I waited for some kind of tic, but nothing moved.

  “Right, well. Let’s begin. You’re related to someone who wor—”

  “My pop.” The boy’s hand convulsed up from his lap.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I repeated, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “What was your father’s na—”

  “Henry Stanley. But he went by Hank.”

  I flipped through the seven-page Roster of the Dead until I found the S’s. I ran my finger down the column. “Ah, here he is. And yes, we have him listed as Hank Stanley.”

  The boy’s eyes glazed over as he stared past me. “Pop preferred that. Never liked Henry. Thought it sounded too highfalutin for his taste.” His smile widened as he spoke, but I knew he wasn’t talking to me. I seemed to be a bystander in this conversation. “Hank. Short and simple, Pop used to say.” A few seconds passed and then the boy shook his head as though waking from a dream. “Sorry, ma’am.” His entire body jolted. His foot stomped on the floor. “Oh, I did it again. Sorry for calling you ma’am, miss.”

  “Pageau. But you may call me Delia.”

  “Delia. Yes, miss.”

  “And you are?”

  “Nathan. Nate for short. Like Pop.”

  “So, tell me, Nate. What department did your father work in?”

  “Shipping.”

  “Would you like to work there?”

  Nate shook his head, hard. “Not there. Anywhere else. I used to visit him in shipping on Saturdays. I couldn’t stand to work there. To be reminded of him all day long.”

  “I understand. Well, we have lots of other openings.” I thumbed through the list of available jobs and then stopped on page four. “How’d you like to be an office boy?”

  The woman interviewing at the table to my left whipped her head around and glared at me.

  Office boy positions were sacred, saved only for the select few. Everyone knew ‘office boy’ could put someone on the fast track to management. Johnny Volo had been on that track. His job was still open. Until this moment, I had not dared to think of offering an applicant such a prized position. But short and simple Nate seemed like he deserved something select.

  “Office boy? I was thinking maybe I could work in the warehouse. Do something with my hands.”

  “Office boy pays more than shop work.”

  The interviewer to my left cleared her throat. I shifted to my right, ignoring her. “Office boy is the best position available.”

  “Really? Wait ‘til Ma hears!” Nate jumped up so quickly, he knocked over his wooden chair. As he bent to pick it up, the woman to my left leaned toward me.

  “Only the personnel director can give away an office job.”

  “I’m here to hire replacements. And that’s just what I did.”

  The woman turned abruptly away.

  “Now, Nate. Let’s finish the paper work, and I’ll tell you more about your new job.”

  We huddled together to complete the application. I gave him a time card and sent Nate, Short and Simple, on his happy way.

  A woman with silver hair took Nate’s place. “Good morn— Wait. Don’t I know you?” I studied the older woman for a moment, and then it came to me. “You’re the one who accosted me at the gate Thursday morning!”

  “You’re that girl! The one who said she wouldn’t help me!”

  A pang of guilt shot through me. But why should I feel bad? I wasn’t the one pulling at people and tearing sleeves.

  “I couldn’t help you, not wouldn’t. I didn’t have the authority, at least not then. But I do now.” I threw back my shoulders, willing away the guilt. “I can help you today.”

  “My son died. My only son. My only child.”

  “I remember.” She was a widow. Alone in the world. Frightened. Desperate. “I’m so sorry. Really. Very sorry for your loss.”

  The silver-haired woman sighed, her breasts heaving. I caught the glimmer of a gold cross at her throat. She sniffled. “Thank you.”

  “Your name, ma’am?”

  She fidgeted with her necklace, rolling the cross between her index finger and thumb. “Helen Volonowsky.”

  “And your son?”

  “John Augustus Volonowsky.” She sniffled again.

  I could tell she was fighting back tears, so I didn’t offer to have her complete the application. I filled in the blanks for her as she spoke.

  “John worked where in the company?”

  She cocked her head, looking confused. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what did your son do? What did he tell you about his job?”

  “He worked in an office.” She seemed to brighten with pride.

  “Then your son was an executive?”

  “Oh my, no.” Her pleased smile drooped. “He was only nineteen.”

  ‘Then he must have been an office boy?”

  “Yes.” She rolled her cross again. Something clicked in my brain.

  “Did your son go by any other name?”

  Mrs. Volonowsky nodded. “I didn’t like it. Wanted him to use his full name. Be proud of his Russian heritage. But he said he was born an American and needed a snappy, American name.”

  “Your son was …” A chill washed
over me. “Johnny Volo?”

  “Yes! Did you know him?” She stared at me with big, hopeful eyes.

  “I knew him.” A tear trickled down my cheek. “I saw him before …”

  “Before what? Did you see him that day? Were you on that boat?” She seized my wrist. “Please, tell me what you know.” She let out a strangled sob and released me, collapsing back into her chair. I rubbed at my tender wrist and tried to explain.

  “Johnny had been dancing with my friend, Mae Koznecki. The two looked so happy, so wonderful together.” I reached into my pocket for a hankie and wiped my eyes, blew my nose. All the while, Mrs. Volonowsky sat stone still, waiting for me to go on. I feared she might not be breathing, so I quickly tucked away my hankie. “I saw him again.”

  “Before the boat tipped over? Do you know where he was when he died?”

  “I believe he was with Mae. In the salon, near the dance floor.” My shoulders sagged. I was having trouble staying in control. “I saw Johnny again after the capsizing.”

  Mrs. Volonowsky clutched her cross. “In the water?”

  I shook my head, unable to utter the words.

  “The morgue,” she choked out, finding the words I couldn’t.

  There we sat, both of us consumed by grief. And all the while, people came and went and filled out paperwork. But I knew I had to pull myself together. I had responsibilities.

  “Mrs. Volonowsky, I’d like to offer you a job.”

  “It’s Volo now. Like my John.”

  “Mrs. Volo.” I scribbled her new name and department number on a time card and held it out to her. “You’ll be coiling telephone wire. With me.”

  27

  “Mama, I’m home!” I shook out my wet umbrella on the porch before dropping it into the stand inside our front door. Half-day Saturday was over. I was ready for my Saturday night. I wanted to twirl through the parlor singing, but I knew I had to contain my excitement. Mama didn’t know anything about my ballet plans.

  In fact, Mama knew nothing about Lars—period. I breezed into the kitchen, where I was greeted by the lovely sizzle of something frying. Mama stood at the range, mastering two skillets at once. I kissed her on the cheek.