I ’d never been on a subway at 3:15 in the morning before. There were certainly lots of places to sit. Except it smelled. A vagrant slept on the corner subway bench. Since the car was almost empty, he was sprawled out on the whole corner bench, no one to compete for the space, his feet hanging over the handrail. A beat-up fedora was smashed down on his head and he held his torn winter coat around him. Besides his intermittent snore the car was quiet. A Negro woman sat at the other end of the car in a bulky winter coat. A large satchel hung down toward her feet from a handle she’d wrapped around her wrist. She kept blinking—I think to keep herself awake—as she stared straight ahead. I sure understood that. As excited as I was to see Jule, my body was putting up a fight. I started reading subway ads to keep awake.
There was a picture of a Revolutionary War soldier wearing a triangle hat and an angry expression. The large print next to him said, “We can’t print words that fit people who spit.” Right next to the Revolutionary War soldier, another ad read: “Viceroy Cigarettes” in large red letters. There was a picture of a man sitting in a chair smoking a Viceroy and looking relaxed. The words in blue said, “Filtered cigarette smoke is better for your health.” Over by the sleeping vagrant was an ad that showed a cartoon of a guy pointing a finger at us. He was saying, “Your gum doesn’t belong on your subway.” Reading those got boring so I sat back on my bench and pulled my gray mink tighter around me to keep out the cold. I felt foolish riding in a subway wearing a mink, but all I had to keep warm was this mink and that torn wool coat I got at the Salvation Army. I couldn’t meet Juliana in that old Salvation Army hand-me-down. I s’pose I’ll have to sell the mink and the rest of my furs to pay off The Haven’s bills. Selling the furs doesn’t really bother me. I wouldn’t mind having a nice wool or gabardine coat. What does bother me is that I’ll be selling them because I need the money and that feels like a failure to me. Don’t think about that now. Today is Juliana’s Day!
I set my hair into a page boy. That’s all I could do with it on such short notice. It was shoulder length now. She liked my hair short, but she’d probably hate to see me with the pompadour. Oh, hell, it’s just hair. Who cares about hair? She’s so beautiful. I chose what I thought was my prettiest dress. A gray wool form-fitting one with a purple bow tied at an angle from the collar, the skirt pleated. I wore my purple pill box hat, my purple gloves and held a purple purse. I was sure it was much too daring for the Staten Island Ferry at four in the morning. Still, an assignation in the middle of New York Harbor was daring and called for daring colors. I kept my shoes at the level of slightly more than a flat. I didn’t want to be tripping all over her.
Soon we’ll be together. Just us. Well, there’ll probably be a few other people there, but still…. One stop to go. A fire of anticipation roared through my stomach, until… one of those thoughts. Will she really be there? At three-forty-five? Three-forty-five in the morning? Did I hear her right? She did say am, didn’t she? She coulda said pm. Oh, I hope I didn’t ger it wrong.
A transportation policeman pushed through the door at the end of the car and poked the vagrant with his billy club. “Okay, buddy. Let’s go. We gotta nice warm bed for ya at the precinct. Ya can sleep it off there.” Without getting up the guy put his hands out toward the policeman; the policeman secured a pair of hand cuffs onto his two wrists. The guy sat up just as the train came squealing into the last station. I followed the Negro lady out, but when she turned left, I turned right to follow the signs to the ferry, and they led me into Whitehall Terminal. In all the years I’d lived in New York I’d never taken the Staten Island Ferry. I never had any reason to go to Staten Island. Why would anyone go there?
The terminal was pretty empty and only a few people walked around. There was a guy in a suit and tie, the tie loosened away from his neck, sitting on a bench eating peanuts and reading a day-old New York Times. His winter coat was bunched up beside him. A few feet away on another bench a young woman fussed with blankets for what I guessed was her baby in the carriage while another child dressed all in pink, maybe three years old, laid her head on her mother’s lap.
Now what? Juliana hadn’t been terribly specific. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes to four. Do I just stand here at this closed snack bar? Or do I buy a paper over there where the guy’s opening up his newsstand? Or do I go over by the ferry turnstiles and look for her there? Gosh, I don’t wanna miss her. I walked back and forth; my eyes wide in an attempt to see better. Oh, please, don’t let me miss her. I wanna see her so…
“Hello there.”
A flutter fluttered through me. I turned around. “Jule. It’s you. You’re right there. It’s really you.”
There she stood there in her own mink, black. Her hair loose and luscious. I wanted to… I wished I could… I just stood there with a silly grin on my face.
“Yes. I’m here,” she said. “And you’re here.”
For a moment we fell back into silence like we couldn’t remember how to talk to each other. We just stood there.
“Well,” Jule said on a gust of air. “Uh, so… What an ungodly hour, hey?”
“It’s worth it. Just to stand here. Seeing you. It’s like my eyes can’t take in enough of you. Do you think we could…? “ I hesitantly inched toward her. “Women often do. I haven’t seen you in a long time. It wouldn’t have to mean…”
“Well… I suppose.” I could see her body stiffening up. “If it wasn’t too long.” She took a few awkward steps toward me. “There’s probably no reason why we…” I took a few more steps toward her.
“Well,” Jule said, a rush of air bursting from her lungs. “Uh, so…”
And then somehow, we were in each other’s arms and I felt her all around me. It was just for the briefest of moments. I clung on, but Jule quickly broke it off, her eyes dating about the terminal. Although I still longed for her arms, a gentle ease had settled over me that remained even when we separated. I hadn’t known—it was a kinda an unawareness—but I found that anxiety must be running through me all the time without peace or ease ever. I didn’t know it until it left me in her arms.
A deep voice announced: “All those boarding the four am Ferry to Staten Island are welcome to board now.”
“We should get on,” she said.
We walked toward the turnstiles, fiddling with our purses, trying to capture a nickel. There were only a couple people getting in line before us. We put in our nickels and pushed through the wooden turnstile.
We walked from the dock right onto ‘The Miss New York’ ferry. That was the name they had for the ferry printed above the first deck. We didn’t have to wait long before the motor started, and we were off. Juliana and I watched as our ferry pulled away from the dock and into New York Harbor. Only a few other passengers joined us in watching our departure from the side railing, mostly men, but there was one normal couple who were either married or on a date.
“It’s freezing out here,” Jule yelled over the December winds and the ferry noise. “Let’s go inside.”
We hurried into an enclosed room situated in the center of the ferry where there was heat, seats and windows for seeing New York Harbor float by. “Well, we don’t have to fight for a seat,” Juliana said.
“No. Except for the guy in the trench coat staring out the window over there it’s only us,” I said.
“Let’s sit here.” She pulled off her black gloves and placed them in her purse. “If we get bored, we can change our seats and keep changing them until we dock again.”
“I don’t think I’m gonna get bored, Jule,” I said, taking off my purple gloves and putting them in my purse.
“Me either. You look beautiful.”
“Beautiful? Me? That’s a big word.”
“You’ve grown. You have an air of sophistication. It has something to do with the way you hold yourself.”
“It’s probably the mink coat and the purple gloves. It’s only been six months. I couldn’t have grown that much.”
She sighed. “It’s been a difficult six months.”
“I wanna know about you Jule. How is it we can be here together at this hour?”
“Well, I told you on the phone that Richard is taking his turn with an ailing cousin. An old woman who needs to take certain medications at certain set times. Very important. Richard never used to expect me to attend family things because his mother has such a bad opinion of me, which she wasn’t shy about sharing with me. But after he discovered you and me—Well I’ve been attending every foolish gathering those people put together and there are many of them. Of course, I get a reprieve for rehearsals. I have very little in common with Richard’s family, so I just sit there sneaking peaks at my watch to see when I’ll be let loose. In between yacking about whatever they yack about they stare at me as if I was a woman of the evening. Richard, of course, never told them about you and me. He’s completely shocked and embarrassed by that and could never say anything about it to his family. But they always looked at me that way because I earned a living as a singer instead of giving Richard children. Not having children is a real sore spot with him.” She sighed. “Oh, I don’t blame him. He’s good with children. I used to watch him with his niece and nephew when they were small. He should’ve been a father. He’s good at it. Of course, he married to the wrong woman for that. But I never lied to him. I never promised him children. Still, the relatives pour their sympathy all over Richard who had the misfortune of marrying a ‘barren’ woman.”
“Well, if you can’t have children how can they hold it against you. It’s not your fault.”
“Well, it is, but they don’t know that.”
“I don’t understand. You said you were barren.”
“No, Richard says that to his relatives. It sounds terribly biblical, don’t you think? It’s the only way he can explain why we don’t have children. I just make sure we don’t have children, but I imagine I could have them if…. Well, I’m not actually sure. I don’t know.”
“Oh, you mean you use, uh, one of those uh… that you get at the doctor.”
“Yes. And you remember during the War when you came to my apartment and Richard was in Australia—I had my own room.”
“Oh, yes, that’s right. I always wondered about that.
“But I must say, you’ve certainly have grown. I didn’t expect such a conversation coming from you, especially not on the Staten Island Ferry.”
“Do you mind? I don’t mean to pry. I’m just worried about you.”
“Sweetheart don’t worry. I’m a big girl. At times, I do feel a little guilty, but I never lied to Richard. Well—not about that. I told him right from the beginning before we were married that I wasn’t interested in children. Still, he’s a man who needs children. And his relatives keep subtly tearing him down because he chose a wife who can’t or ‘won’t’ produce children and preserve the family name.”
I can’t imagine you putting up with his family treating you bad. That’s not like you.”
“I never used to put up with it and I can tell you I hate it now, but Richard has discovered my Achilles heel. He never tires of telling me that he could expose me to the world and run off with all my worldly possessions and destroy both my career and yours. But he’s not comfortable being this ogre he’s become. It’s not his true personality. He just doesn’t want to lose me…” She leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Especially not to a woman. Emasculating, I gather. So—I’m here with you this morning, very early, because I am unlikely to run into any of his friends or family or mine on this ferryboat at this hour.”
“I wish I could kiss you now.”
She laughed, “That’s all we need to do here. Oh, wouldn’t that shake things up? It sounds like fun, but we must restrain ourselves, dear. I don’t think I’m dressed properly for spending the rest of the morning in jail. And wouldn’t that make Richard’s relatives burst their girdles?”
I looked out at the rolling water going by as we sat in our warm and starkly lit enclosure. “I never realized how dark four a.m. is,” I said. “It’s completely pitch out there.”
“Yes, but those waves are certainly shaking us around.”
We heard the people outside cheering excitedly. “Oh, look! The Manhattan skyline is coming into view,” I said.
“Let’s go out and see it.” I reached for Jule’s hand. She pulled away sharply. We stared at each other with frightened looks. “Sorry. I forgot,” I said. “Are you mad?”
“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”
We rushed through the door. “How about we try the upper deck,” Jule said. “Probably a better view from there.”
We climbed up the steps to the top deck. No one, but us were up there. We quickly found out why. The wind almost blew us over. We held onto to the handrail, so we didn’t fall off. We took off our hats and stuffed them into our purses. Our hair was whipped by the wind as we hung onto the railing; it was tossed every which way. We looked at each other as the wind beat against us. There was nothing in our way. It was just Jule and Al, and we were flying. Flying together on the wind.
The Manhattan Skyline floated into clear view. “Look, Al! See it?” She yelled above the gales.
“It’s beautiful!” I yelled back. “All those colors. Red, green, yellow.”
“And those houseboats,” Jule yelled into the wind. “Wouldn’t it be fun to live on one of those.”
“Yeah! But not in December!”
She laughed as we fought against the wind knocking us over. “Let’s go downstairs and get a closer look!”
We balanced ourselves on the steps leading down, the wind shouting in our ears. We jumped from the last step and ran over to the handrail on the lower deck.
“Look! Look, Jule! It is beautiful.
The ferryboat bounced and rocked through the waves. It was hard to believe that as we went through our daily city tasks, catching subways, yelling at traffic, trying to survive with less money than we wanted. Trying to get loved. At the very same time people were floating by us in this ferryboat seeing this incredibly beautiful skyline. While I’m running around like a nut trying to get the Haven ready for a show, or when I’m worried to death about the money that I don’t have to do the show, or scared outta my mind about that creepy guy with the money in my office will hurt me, there are people in a ferryboat seeing this incredible beauty that I’m a part of, but I don’t know it and I can’t see it. I’m in the middle of it, so I can’t see it.
Then we floated past the skyline toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Jule and I, our faces red with vigor and wind, ran to the warm enclosure in the center of the ferry. We bounced onto the wooden benches laughing. “Wow,” I said. “Wasn’t that terrific?”
“Listen. Music,” she said. She sat up straight and tuned her ears to the sound. It’s ‘A Sunday Kind of Love.’ Anita Ellis. She hasn’t sung in a long time. Beautiful voice. It’s a shame she has such stage fright. I heard she’s going to a psychoanalyst to cure it.”
“Is it working?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t been singing in the clubs for a few years, so I haven’t spoken to her about it.”
“I heard she dubbed the vocals for Rita Heyworth in Gilda.”
“That’s right. She did a terrific job, too. No stage fright when she’s off stage.”
Jule stood and extended a hand toward me. “May I have the honor, Miss Huffman.”
“Here? Dance with each other? Do you think we dare?”
“People usually don’t mind when two girls dance.”
“Yeah, but that’s usually a prelude to some man breaking in.”
“Do you see any men rushing to break in?”
“Well, no.” I put my hand on her extended palm. For a moment, my breath got stuck; when I finally made an exhale, a zzzz ran down my upper stomach and down into my lower parts. I felt myself opening, opening, my desire growing…
“Just not too close and no one will care,” she said.
Her hand pulled me toward her, and we were touching. I felt the softness of her mink.
She put an arm around my back as she said, “Shall I lead?”
“Oh, please do,” I said, more than alive with the touch of her hand against my back. She took my right hand in hers as I laid my left hand on her shoulder. We kept a “respectable.” distance from each other, but I was melting inside. Oh, how, I wanted to wrap my arms around her and kiss her and kiss her and, and…
The soft dance music continued so we kept dancing. The Captain of the ferryboat took a walk down the alleyway around four thirty. We didn’t notice him right off looking through the glass watching us. His arms were held against his back with one hand clasping the others’ wrist, the way you’d expect a ferryboat captain to stand. Jule saw him first and pulled away from me, nodding at the window and the captain. “It seems we have company.”
It felt creepy for the captain to be watching us in this kinda fishbowl enclosure. As soon as he saw we’d stopped dancing he came through the door. He took off his Captain’s hat revealing a bald head. “Oh, please don’t stop. Good morning, ladies. I’m Captain Fudd. You mustn’t stop dancing. I often play music for the passengers at this early morning hour. The sound pleases me, and I think it pleases most of my passengers. Please, continue dancing. That’s what dance music is for. I’ll see if I can find a couple of gentlemen on my walk and get them to come in here and dance with you.”
“Oh, that’s okay. Don’t disturb anyone,” I said.
“Too attractive ladies like yourselves should not be shut away dancing only with each other. Let me see what I can do.”
He left on his mission. “Maybe he won’t find anyone,” Jule said. “The only men I saw were those two sleepy guys on the front benches.”
Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra began to play, “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.”
“Shall we?” Juliana said and we began again. “This Captain Fudd has good taste.”
As the music played, we stared into each other’s eyes, sometimes so close to kissing it was scary.
“May we help out?” A man’s voice invaded our world of she. We stopped dancing. “I’m Gus and this is my buddy, Spunk.” He smiled too wide a smile.
“Hello,” Spunk said, taking his hat off.
Gus hurried to take off his hat, too.
Gus looked to be in his fifties and Spunk in his thirties. They both wore heavy jackets. When they unzipped them, we saw they were wearing tie shirts with the ties tied tight against their Adam’s apples.
“We’re headed back home to Staten Island after a night on the town,” Gus said.
“And that was some night on the town,” Spunk said. “New York City folks sure know how to have a good time. Are you city gals or Island girls?”
“We live in the city,” Jule said, with a sigh, looking at me.
“You girls out on the town tonight too?” Gus asked.
“No. We’re just enjoying the view.” I said, wondering, how we could get rid of these guys.
A recording of Billie Holiday singing, “You’d Be Easy to Love?” came over the loudspeaker. “Would you like to dance?” Gus asked.
Well, we couldn’t say no, that we’d rather dance with each other. We might find ourselves swimming home.
“Sure,” I said, my heart sinking to the ground.
I got Spunk and Juliana got Gus. We made faces at each other over their shoulders. I wanted so much to reach over Spunk’s shoulder and grab her. These guys were sweet. I had nothing against them. Only that they weren’t Jule, and they were stealing my precious time with her.
After a second round, Jule howled out this amazing huge yawn, open mouthed, arms stretched to the ceiling. Completely unladylike. I think she might’ve scared Gus. I had to pinch myself hard to keep from cracking up. She complained of severe exhaustion. “We’re going to catch a few winks here before we dock. I hope you don’t mind. You know fellas,” she went on. “I saw a couple of attractive ladies with no male companionship going down that way. She pointed. I bet they would love to meet two handsome men like yourselves.”
They bought it and were gone. And the best part was we didn’t have to view the Statue of Liberty with them.
“She makes you proud, doesn’t she?” Jule said as we stood on the dock viewing this enormous lady who’d welcomed immigrants to our country for decades.
“Proud and small. Gosh, she’s big,” I said.
“She carries a big idea. Imagine how it must’ve felt for immigrants escaping some horror and the first thing they see when they hit American shores is that beautiful lady welcoming them. Gives me chills.”
I put my hand on her arm. She looked down at my hand. I said, “Well, those two women over there are standing like this so I figured…”
She looked over at the two women. “They look like mother and daughter.”
“Well…” I began.
“Don’t you dare. I am too young to pass as your mother.”
We laughed together.
We docked in Staten Island. We had to disembark there and wait in the St. George Terminal to pay our nickel again and get back on the ferry again to go back to New York again. In the terminal we each purchased a New York Times we didn’t read. We were too interested in talking to each other. After a few minutes we put nickels in the turnstiles and entered the ferry to see it all backwards. Of course, “backwards,” all depended on your point of view.
On the trip back we stayed mostly in the enclosed room talking about our lives since we last saw each other. I told her about the trouble Max, and I were having with our clubs. I told her about the show I was rehearsing for the Haven. I didn’t tell her about the guy in my office with the briefcase filled with money.
Mostly, I wanted to hear about her life. “Jule, is he keeping you like some kind of prisoner?”
“No. He really believes that I could be harmed by you so it’s not just jealousy. It’s deeper than that.”
“What does he think I would do to you?”
“I’m not sure, but you’ve heard those myths about people like us. How we hypnotize people. Ever since he found out he hasn’t had his teenaged niece over. And they’re close. I can’t help thinking he’s worried I’d cast some spell on her.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know but tell that to half the world. He can’t believe I’m like one of those people, that I came to it of my own volition, so he figures you did something to change me. He’s hoping if he keeps you away from me long enough eventually your spell will wear off and I’ll come back to myself. He can’t accept that this is myself. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been this way. My mother knew. She didn’t say anything. One didn’t talk about that , but I knew she wasn’t pleased with me. He thinks you did something to make me do things—w ith you.”
“I did ‘things’ to you? Now that’s wild.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t rub it in.”
“Is there a chance, Jule,… I don’t know. That there’d be some way you and I…”
“I’m trying, Al. Really. It’s taken me a long time to admit this to myself, but being away with you in the cabin, surrounded by the mountains, the lake, the trees…
“Wasn’t that wonderful?”
“It was Life changing for me.” She turned her face away from me. “Al—I, I don’t like living apart from you. I thought I could do it, but…” She looked down at the gloves in her hand and squeezed them, like she was hanging on, maybe so she didn’t cry. Juliana didn’t cry easily.
“Jule, there’s got to be some place for us. We are so right. The—the two of us. How can we feel this way and not be able to fix it?”
“We will. Somehow.”
“Gosh, even if we gave up everything except each other there’d be no place for us. No people would receive us. We’d be ostracized wherever we went.”
“There have been some who have managed it somehow.”
“Really? Where? Who?”
“I think most of them lived in the eighteen hundreds. Pioneer women could get away with it. I’ve read a little about this. You have friends who manage, don’t you?”
“Yeah. They stick with people like them in the bars and they’re okay. Most of the time.”
“The bars…”
“Yeah, I know. Not your style. A bar life wouldn’t be right for either one of us.”
“Don’t give up on us, Al. I am working on something. I can’t really talk about it now.”
“You’re sounding very mysterious, Jule.”
She put a hand on top of mine. “I know.” She took her hand away. “Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
Captain Fudd was announcing our arrival in Manhattan. “Let’s go outside,” Juliana said. “We can watch ourselves arrive.”
We ran out to the railing, the wind tugging at our fur coats and hair. We stretched our necks and back over the side so we could see the propeller kicking up foam. It was almost five. The sky was still pretty dark, maybe it had lightened up a tiny bit. Sunrise wasn’t for two more hours. The wind seemed to have calmed down, probably ‘cause we were coming in toward the dock. Jule, leaning on the railing, looked at the moon and recited,
“We were very tired; we were very merry.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry
And you ate an apple, and I ate a peach,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere…”
Jule took an apple from her coat pocket and handed it to me. “I forgot to give you this before.” She took out a peach from her other coat pocket. “Come! Eat. We’re making the poem come true.”
We both took a bite from our fruit. She swallowed quickly and continued,
“And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
Edna St. Vincent Millay”
“I love that poem,” she told me. “It’s how I got the idea to come here. Edna St. Vincent Millay is my favorite poet.”
“Really? I didn’t even know you had a favorite poet. Or that you liked poetry. I should know these things about you, Jule.”
“Someday. You want to go back to Staten Island?” she asked with a child’s thrill in her voice.
“Yes!”
“Let’s go back and forth all night long and watch the sunrise from the ferry.”
“Can you?”
“Richard won’t be home till afternoon.”
“Then—let’s do it.”
And that’s what we did. We talked and danced and even fell asleep, but we woke up in time for the sunrise.
“This sunrise is us,” I told Juliana, standing next to her. “We’re gonna rise together and find a way to live our lives with each other. Forever!”
She took off one black glove— “Let’s shake on it, partner—" and she put out her hand; I took off one of my gloves and pressed her hand in mine. We stayed like that, not moving, as the ferryboat rocked us into the dock.
Then the time to say good-bye arrived. Passengers scurried off, Jule and I among them. We walked into White Hall Terminal and stopped. Rush hour passengers hurried by us, running to turnstiles. We stood staring at each other; it was hard to find words. The newsstand was open, and passengers crowded around it throwing change at the man, then grabbing their papers and running.
“We can both take the BMT,” I said, hopeful that we wouldn’t have to say parting words yet.
“I think it best we say good-bye here,” she said. “And quickly. There are a lot of people in this area and there’ll be even more in the subway. You never know.”
“Yeah. I s’pose you’re right. I had—had—had a… It was wonderful.” I was fighting hard to keep the tears from coming.
“Me too. I—I… You know how I feel.”
“Yes.”
Knocked about by harried commuters, I watched her disappear into the crowd. “When will I see you again?” I called out, but she had disappeared into the crowd.