“But honey,” said Sylvia in a strong Flushing Meadows accent that had apparently followed her up to Westchester County, “the old Penn Station building isn’t there anymore. They tore it down.”
“I know. That’s why I thought he might come here instead.”
“That’s a lot of ‘might,’” said Selman with a sympathetic frown. “He might be divorced. He might not have remarried. He might still want to see you again. He might—like you — substitute the Grand Central clock for the one in old Penn Station. If this was Belmont, sister, I wouldn’t place even a two-dollar bet on that horse.”
“But if I hadn’t come, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if he had.”
Everyone nodded. Sylvia went, “Mmm-hmm,” while the Englishman said softly, “Yes, I see. You’re so right. And unlike Irene Dunne and Deborah Kerr, you haven’t been hit by a car. You just happen to have found yourself in the middle of a blackout.” Leister smiled. “And perhaps your beau is similarly inconvenienced.”
Carole’s face brightened. “I’ve thought about that. Do you think that could be it?”
“Honey,” said Sylvia, taking out a pack of gum, “the poor schlimazel could be trapped in the subway for all we know.” There was one stick left; she gave it to Carole.
“Of course, it’s probably best not to build your hopes up,” said McCluskey.
Carole nodded, her jaws beginning to work on the fresh stick of spearmint gum. “Who has food? I’m famished.”
Food was procured. The Oyster Bar was all but giving away seafood at their door because of concerns that it would quickly spoil without refrigeration. The quintet on the floor in front of Grand Central’s information kiosk feasted on fried oysters and tartar sauce, fried whole Ipswich clams (also with tartar sauce) and cultivated Maine mussels steamed with white wine and garlic.
Because Carole did not wish to leave her post, her four companions kept her company for the rest of the night.
When the power came back early in the morning and the trains started to run, there were awkward goodbyes exchanged among the kindred strangers: Sylvia and her two new friends, McCluskey and Professor Leister, departing for points north, and Selman returning to his office, where an important client presentation waited for no act of man or God. Carole left for her tiny room in the Taft Hotel, having decided to catch the first available flight back to Kansas, her faith in romance and the triumph of the human heart severely shaken both by the blackout and by the strong possibility of other human factors equally beyond her control.
When at the end of day the exhausted ad man plodded back down to the great Beaux Arts terminal to head home, he noticed someone waiting beneath the famous clock, which had been reset. It said 5:30 upon all of its four faces, and below it was the face of a man in his mid-fifties anxiously searching the crowd.
“What the hell,” said Selman to himself.
He walked over. Without shaking hands or even introducing himself, the Y & R account executive accosted the concerned-looking man with, “You’re a day late. You were supposed to meet her here on the ninth, not the tenth.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Aren’t you Nick Gombert?”
“Yes, but — wait a minute. I’m almost positive it was supposed to be the tenth.”
“Okay, so then she got it wrong.”
“Where is she?”
“On her way back to Wichita, if she’s not there already.”
“You got her address?”
“Uh huh. We got her address.”
“We?”
Selman threw his arm around Nick’s shoulder. “Long story. Long night. Let me buy you a drink at the Oyster Bar and fill you in.”
“She came.” A private smile. “I can’t believe she came.”
“An almost perfect happy ending. So tell me: where were you when the lights went out?”
“Trapped on a subway train. On my way over here, if you can believe it. I wanted to come a day early to see the clock where I’d hoped the two of us would be meeting today.”
1966 OUTRAGED IN IDAHO
The Sound of Music was released in 1965. It was enormously popular and succeeded in yanking its studio, Twentieth Century Fox, back from the brink of bankruptcy after the disastrous cost-overruns of the obscenely expensive Cleopatra, a film which, to add insult to injury, was then only tepidly patronized by a public that, unknown to the studio, had become bored with toga cinema.
By 1966, The Sound of Music had entered the world’s cultural consciousness. Its songs were covered by hundreds of popular singers. Community theatres throughout America were mounting productions of the movie’s original stage version. Story-wise, there was very little difference between the two versions. You had your seven Austrian children, who discovered that they could sing. You had your widowed father, a navy captain. And there was this nun with a guitar and a fine voice of her own. For a musical about singing songs, it is interesting to note that not all of the songs from the musical play are to be found in its Hollywood incarnation and vice versa.
It’s more than interesting, actually. It’s the reason for this story.
Besides being a sixth grade teacher at Eisenhower Elementary School in Pocatello, Idaho, Carla Willard was music director for the school’s annual Autumn Evening of Song. Carla had loved musicals since at sixteen she saw Judy Garland in the 1954 film musical A Star is Born sing about being born in a trunk in Pocatello, Idaho. Carla imagined herself being born in that same trunk right next to Judy, whose name in the movie was first Esther Blodgett, and then, thankfully, Vicki Lester, which didn’t sound as much like somebody throwing up.
Carla had seen Mary Martin play Maria Von Trapp on Broadway. She had delighted in Julie Andrews’ interpretation of Maria in the film. Delighted in it thirteen times, actually — all in the span of a month. Carla was understandably thrilled when Gilbert Greene, Eisenhower’s principal, agreed to allow Carla to pay tribute to The Sound of Music by having each of the school’s fifth- and sixth-grade classes sing a song from the musical for the autumn concert. She was even more excited to be given creative control over what songs would be sung, especially since this meant that she could choose in smorgasbord fashion songs from both the stage and film versions of the musical.
“So there’s a difference?” asked Greene, when Carla met with him in his office one morning in early October to go over her plans for the November concert. “I don’t understand.”
Carla took a sip of her Tab. Whereas most of her teaching colleagues had a cup of coffee or tea in the early morning to steel themselves to face their sometimes unruly pupils, Carla preferred the soft drink Tab, though her brother, a college chemistry professor, told her it contained cyclohexylamine, a known chemical toxin. (“When they take it off the market, I’ll stop drinking it, Wade. Right now it gives me a lift.”)
“Most of the songs are the same, Gil,” she explained to her principal, “but there are three in the stage version that are different from the film. And after Oscar Hammerstein died, Richard Rodgers wrote a couple of new songs for the movie.”
“Why can’t you just have the children sing the ones that everybody knows?”