The Concourse

He came up the Lexington passage at ten to seven, the way he came up it every morning, on the left, against the people coming down it, because the people coming down it were in a hurry and he was not yet.

The passage was low and long and smelled of floor polish and coffee and the trains under it. At this hour it was mostly men in raincoats with newspapers folded under their arms and women in trainers carrying their good shoes in a bag, going down to the subway, and a few going the other way, up from the subway, towards the concourse and the offices on the far side of it. Tom went up with those. He had his hat on and his radio on his shoulder and his hands where his hands went, which was nowhere in particular, and people’s eyes went to the hat and off it, the way people’s eyes did.

Halfway up, on the right, against the wall, under the clock that said the time in AmRail’s colours and was two minutes fast, Mr Pettiford had his stand.

It was a high wooden chair with two steps up to it and a brass rail for the feet, and a box under it with his brushes and his tins, and a stool for Mr Pettiford, who was not on it. He was standing beside the chair in his brown work coat with a rag over his shoulder, the way he stood every morning at ten to seven, waiting for the first pair of shoes of the day. He had been there, Tom knew, since 1974. There was a photograph of the chair in a frame on the wall behind it, black and white, with a much younger Mr Pettiford standing beside it in the same coat and the same attitude, and a man in a hat in the chair reading a newspaper with a headline about a war.

“Officer,” said Mr Pettiford.

He said it every morning. He said it with a perfectly straight face, the face of a man saying a word of respect to a uniform, and Tom had walked past him every morning for two years before he had understood that it was a joke, and that the joke was the straight face, and that it was on Tom, and that Mr Pettiford would never once in his life let his face admit it.

“Mr Pettiford.”

“Those shoes,” said Mr Pettiford, looking down at them.

Tom looked down at them too. They were his work shoes, black, and he had done them on Sunday night in the flat in front of the television with the tin and the brush his father had given him when he passed out of the academy, and he had thought they were all right.

“They’re all right,” said Tom.

“They are a disgrace to the Corporation,” said Mr Pettiford, gently, as a statement of fact, and looked away up the passage at the next pair coming.

Tom went on up. He did not stop. He never stopped. He had stopped once, in his first month on the concourse, and climbed the two steps and sat in the chair, and Mr Pettiford had done his shoes in four minutes without a word and then told him the price, which was three pounds, and Tom had paid it, and Teresa had seen it from the top of the passage, and had not let him forget it for a year.

---

The passage opened out at the top and the concourse was there.

He still looked up. He did not say so to anybody, because it was not the kind of thing you said in a station house, but he still, after two years, every morning, came out of the low passage into the concourse and looked up, for one second, at the ceiling. It was green, a pale old green like the inside of a shell, and the stars were painted on it in gold, the signs of the zodiac with their stars picked out in little lights, the crab and the bull and the twins and the fish, and they were backwards. Everybody knew they were backwards. The tourists stood in the middle of the floor with their heads back and their mouths open and told each other they were backwards, as if they had found it out, and somebody in a guidebook had a story about why, and nobody who worked in the station had ever cared which story was true. It was the sky the wrong way round, over a room the size of a church, and the light came in through the high windows on the Forty-Second Street side in long dusty slants and lay across the floor, and the floor was full of people crossing it in every direction without touching each other.

That was the thing he had noticed first, in his first week. Nobody touched. A thousand people crossing a floor at a quarter past eight on a Tuesday, in every direction, with bags and coffee and children and telephones, and nobody touched anybody. They did it without looking. It was like weather. You could stand at the top of the west stairs and watch it and not understand how it was done.

He went across the floor to the information booth in the middle, the round brass booth with the four-faced clock on top of it, and stood with his back to it for a minute, the way you were supposed to, and let the floor go round him.

The departures board on the Forty-Second Street side said the Albany trains and the Boston trains and the Montreal train and the slow ones up the river to the towns. A man in a suit was running for the seven-oh-five to somewhere with his tie over his shoulder. A woman was standing very still by the ticket windows with a suitcase and a piece of paper, reading the paper and then the board and then the paper, which meant she would be at his elbow in about a minute and a half asking which way was Track Thirty-Four. Two kids from a school, in blazers, were doing the thing at the corners of the dining concourse ramp where you whispered into the wall and your friend heard it at the other corner, and laughing too loud. A man he knew by sight, a big man in a dark blue raincoat who came through at five to seven every weekday and bought a coffee at the stand by the Vanderbilt stairs and drank it standing up, was buying his coffee. A woman he knew by sight, small and grey with a tartan shopping trolley, who came through every Monday and Thursday at seven and went to the Lexington passage and down to the subway and he had never once seen come back, was going to the Lexington passage. The light came in in its slants.

He knew it by sight. That was the job, the part of the job nobody had told him about at the academy, because it could not be taught: you stood on a floor for two years and you learned it the way you learned a face, until you knew without thinking when something on it was wrong. A man walking too slowly. A bag on its own. Somebody looking at the people instead of the board. He did not know how he knew. He knew.

The woman with the suitcase arrived at his elbow.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Which way is Track Thirty-Four?”

---

Mrs Abelson’s newsstand stood on the Forty-Second Street side of the concourse, between the ticket windows and the gates for the upper-level tracks, where it had stood, she said, since the war, which war she had never said.

It was a green wooden stand with a counter and a canvas awning and a little television on a bracket in the corner, turned to the ABC with the sound down, and racks of papers and magazines on three sides, and sweets and chewing gum and cigarettes and batteries and the small folding umbrellas that sold all day when it rained and not at all when it did not. Mrs Abelson sat behind the counter on a high stool with a cardigan round her shoulders, a thin woman of seventy-one with very white hair in a net and very red lipstick and her glasses on a chain, and she had sat there, she said, since she was fifteen and her father had stood her on a box behind the same counter to make change.

“You’re late,” she said.

“It’s seven.”

“It’s two minutes past seven. You’re late.” She reached under the counter and brought out a paper, folded, and held it out. “Here. I kept you one.”

She kept him one every morning. She kept them for about forty people, he had worked out, the regulars, under the counter, in a pile, each one folded the same way, and she knew which forty people they were and which paper each of them took and what time each of them came, and if one of them did not come she noticed and asked the next morning whether they had been ill. She had asked him once, after he had been off for three days with his chest. He had not told her he had been off. She had known by the paper.

He held out a pound. She took it and gave him the change without counting it, the way she always did, and he did not count it either.

“New York won the hockey,” said Mrs Abelson.

“I saw.”

“You didn’t see. You were asleep. It was overtime.” She looked at him over her glasses. “Three two. In overtime. Thirty-one seconds in, the little one with the teeth, off the post. I nearly had a heart attack. My son rang me from Long Island at eleven o’clock at night to see if I had had a heart attack.” She turned the page of her own paper on the counter. “I told him I’d tell him if I had one.”

“You’re a cruel woman, Mrs Abelson.”

“I’m seventy-one,” said Mrs Abelson, “and I’ve been watching that team lose since Roosevelt, and I’m entitled.” She looked past him. “Your partner’s here. She looks like she wants something.”

---

Teresa Moran came across the floor from the Vanderbilt side with her hat on the back of her head and a coffee in each hand.

She was forty, or about forty; she had never told him and he had never asked and it was not the sort of thing you looked up. She was from Staten Island, from a street off Victory Boulevard where her father had been a fireman and her grandfather had been a fireman and she had been, she said, the family’s mistake. She had fifteen years on, and she had walked the concourse with him for two of them, since the week he was moved up from the Fifty-First Street house’s sector cars, and on his first morning she had looked at him for a long time across the information booth and said Keane, as if it were a diagnosis. She had called him Keane ever since. He called her Teresa. She had not objected, and he had worked out after a year that this was because nobody else on the job did.

She gave him one of the coffees.

“Two sugars.”

“I don’t take sugar.”

“You do today. You look like a man who didn’t sleep.” She drank from her own. “Did you watch the hockey?”

“I was asleep.”

“Then why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like that,” said Teresa, and looked at him, and then away at the floor, at the floor going round the booth, and did not ask anything else, which was the other thing she did, and the reason, he had decided some time in their first winter, that he would have walked into a burning building behind her without asking which floor.

They did the floor. They did it the way they did it every morning: Teresa on the Vanderbilt side, Tom on the Lexington side, meeting at the booth on the hour and the half hour and going round again, and in between they walked. A man had fallen asleep on the floor of the waiting room by the Forty-Second Street doors with his shoes under his head for a pillow and needed to be woken and told, which Teresa did, kindly, by kicking the sole of his foot and saying Arthur until he woke up and looked at her and said Hello, Teresa. A child was lost at twenty to nine, a boy of five or six in a red anorak standing by the ticket windows with his face screwed up and not crying yet, and was found by Tom at the same moment his father found him, running, from the other side of the floor, and the father picked him up and held him against his shoulder and said something into his hair and then looked at Tom over the boy’s head and said thanks, as if Tom had done something. Two women from out of town wanted the whispering gallery. A man wanted to know where he could smoke. A man wanted to know where he could buy a gun, and turned out, when Tom had walked him to the Vanderbilt doors and looked at his eyes, to want to know where he could buy a gun in a story he was writing, for a magazine, about New York, and to be very sorry, and to be from Ohio.

It was an ordinary day. He had had six hundred of them.

---

At half past nine Walter Odom came up from the lower level with his trolley and stopped at the booth.

Walter was a Red Cap. He wore the cap, which was red, with the badge on the front, and the dark jacket with AmRail’s crest on the pocket, and he had carried bags at Grand Central for thirty-one years, mostly for the Albany trains, because the Albany trains carried the people from the Assembly and the ministries up and down, and the people from the Assembly and the ministries had bags, and tipped. He was fifty-eight. He was a tall, grey, careful man from the Bronx with a voice like a church organ, very low, and very bad knees, and every morning at half past nine on his way up from the lower level he stopped at the booth and told Tom about his knees.

“Left one,” said Walter.

“Still?”

“Still.” Walter leaned on the trolley. “My wife says go to the doctor. I says the doctor’s going to tell me stop carrying bags. She says then stop carrying bags. I says then who carries the bags.” He looked at the board. “The nine fifty for Albany. Seventeen people from the Assembly on that train and fourteen bags each. You’d think they were moving house.”

“They’re opening the session next week.”

“Monday.” Walter nodded. “Monday the first. The Lieutenant-Governor goes up and opens it, in the old room, with the mace and the hats.” He said it with the satisfaction of a man who knew how a thing was done. “I carried her bag, you know. In January. When she first went up.”

“You told me.”

“I’m telling you again. It’s a good story.” Walter straightened up off the trolley, slowly, with a face. “She comes across the floor from the Vanderbilt doors with a bag the size of a sandwich, on her own, no car, no detail, no nothing, just a woman in a coat, and I think, that’s a lady going up to see her daughter in Schenectady. And I say carry your bag, ma’am, because you always ask. And she says I can manage, and I say I know you can, ma’am, that’s not the point, and she laughs and gives it me. And I carry it to the train. And she gives me a pound, and she asks me about my knees.” He looked at Tom. “My knees. How did she know about my knees?”

“You were walking.”

“I was walking,” Walter agreed. “She was a nurse. Thirty years. She knew about my knees from the way I was walking across a floor with a bag the size of a sandwich.” He took hold of the trolley again. “Then she gets on the train and I look at the ticket she left on the trolley, which she dropped, and it says the name. And I think, Walter, you just carried the Crown’s bag across Grand Central and asked her if she was visiting her daughter.”

“You didn’t ask her that.”

“I thought it,” said Walter, with dignity, “and she knew I thought it, and that’s the same thing.” And he went off across the floor with the trolley to the gate for the nine fifty, slowly, with his left knee doing what it did, and the bags of seventeen people from the Assembly waiting for him on the platform in a heap.

---

The boy with the fiddle came at eleven.

His name was Nico. Tom knew it because he had asked, the first time, in March, and the boy had told him, and had told him also, without being asked, that he was nineteen, that he was from Astoria, that his grandfather had been a fiddler in a village in the mountains of somewhere that the boy named and Tom had not caught, and that he knew four tunes. Only four. He had learned them from his grandfather, by ear, and his grandfather had died before he could learn a fifth, and he played the four of them over and over, in order, at the mouth of the Lexington passage where it came out onto the concourse, with the case open at his feet, and he played them very well, and they were sad, all four of them, sad in a way that made people slow down as they went past without knowing why they had slowed down.

He was not allowed to. The station’s rules were on a board by the Vanderbilt doors, and one of them said no busking in the concourse without a licence from the Corporation’s market office, and Nico did not have one, because the market office gave out eleven a year and had a waiting list of four years and Nico, he said, would be dead by then, or in Ohio.

He got out the fiddle and tuned it and started the first tune. It was the one that went up at the end like a question.

People slowed down.

Teresa came across the floor from the booth. She did not hurry. She came and stood by the mouth of the passage with her coffee, which was cold by now, and listened to the first tune all the way through, to the end, to the question, and then she said:

“Nico.”

“Hello, Constable Moran.”

“You know.”

“I know.” Nico lowered the fiddle. He did not argue. He had been moved on four times since March, twice by Teresa and twice by Tom, and he had never once argued, which was the reason, Tom thought, that they had never once done anything more than move him on. He knelt down and put the fiddle in the case, carefully, the way you put a child in a cot, and shut the case, and stood up, and looked at Tom.

“I was going to play the third one,” he said. “The third one’s the best.”

“Next time,” said Tom.

“There’s never a next time,” said Nico, cheerfully, and went off down the Lexington passage with the case, past Mr Pettiford, who said Musician to him with a perfectly straight face, and was gone.

Teresa watched him go.

“He’s good,” she said.

“He’s very good.”

“He’s not allowed,” said Teresa, and drank her cold coffee, and made a face at it, and went back across the floor to the booth.

---

At three the late tour came on and they went off, down the Vanderbilt stairs and along to the post by the taxi rank where the City’s police kept a room in the station with a desk and a kettle and a book, and signed the book, and Teresa said see you tomorrow, Keane, and went for the boat.

He went home the way he came, down the Lexington passage. It was the other crowd now, the afternoon crowd, slower, with shopping. Mr Pettiford was doing a pair of shoes, a man’s, brown, with his head bent over them and his rag going, and did not look up, and as Tom went past he said, to the shoes:

“Officer.”

On the stand at the top of the passage, Mrs Abelson was pulling the canvas awning half down against the light, which came in low at this hour through the Forty-Second Street windows and fell on her papers. She saw him and lifted one hand, the hand with the red nails, without stopping what she was doing with the other.

He lifted his.

Behind him, the floor went round the booth in every direction, under the stars the wrong way round, and nobody touched anybody.