Lair of Dreams

Doors opened. Happy passengers trundled off and into the arms of waiting family and friends. Henry trotted up and down the platform, his heart leaping each time a handsome dark-haired young man came down the steps, but none was Louis. Porters loaded suitcases and trunks onto trolleys and wheeled them away. The teeming platform emptied of people until only Henry and the porters remained. Had he somehow missed Louis in the crowd?

“Excuse me,” Henry called up to a porter stepping back onto the train. “I’m looking for a friend who was on the three-ten. Are there still passengers on board?”

The porter shook his head. “No, sir. Nobody left on the train. They’re all off now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir. Not a soul left.”

He must’ve missed him. Louis was probably upstairs now in the wide lobby, suitcase in hand, his head tilted back, his mouth hanging open as he took in the grandeur of the big-city station. Henry raced up the stairs and into the main waiting room, walking briskly between the long wooden pews, where people sat reading newspapers or fussing with children. He thought he saw Louis walking toward a telephone booth, so he hurried after him, calling Louis’s name.

“Can I help you?” the man said, turning around. He was easily ten years older than Louis.

“Beg your pardon. I thought you were someone else,” Henry said and went back to walking the length and breadth of Grand Central. Henry’s excitement had now turned to fear. He remembered how hurt Louis had been when he asked him about the bribe. For all his good nature, Louis could be thin-skinned about a slight. What if he was so hurt by Henry’s careless remark that he’d decided not to come after all?

Then again, what if Louis had simply missed the train?

Hope restored, Henry hurried to the ticket window. “Pardon me, when is the next train in from New Orleans?”

“Half past six this evening,” the clerk answered.

Henry sat on a bench and waited. He was still waiting at half past six. And still at eight o’clock, when all the other passengers had gone off with their families. By nine o’clock, as the janitors pushed brooms across the wide marble sea of Grand Central’s main waiting room, and the tracks had gone mostly quiet, it was clear that Louis wasn’t coming at all.

Henry pushed out into a bright-lights city that had lost its luster and made his way down to a club he knew on Barrow Street in the Village. He’d wanted to show Louis everything, but now he just wanted to get drunk or punch somebody. Maybe both.

“Whiskey,” Henry said to the bartender. He slapped down the money he’d earmarked for his night out with Louis. It didn’t matter now. Henry gulped it down, enjoying the burn, then threw down twenty dollars and opened his flask, offering it to the bartender.

“Would you like to make a contribution to the Feeling Sorry for Myself Fund? It’s a very worthy charity, I assure you,” Henry said.

With a shrug, the bartender filled the flask to the top.

Henry was well on his way to being drunk when he stumbled to the speakeasy’s telephone booth and dialed his number at the Bennington. He rested his head against the folding glass door and listened to the tinny ringing coming through the receiver while he drank from his flask.

On the fifth ring, Theta picked up. “Nobody’s home,” she said, her usual greeting, and Henry wished he were sitting next to her at their messy kitchen table.

“Is this Czarina Thetakovich of the Orpheum Circuit?” Henry slurred. “Collect call from that cad, Henry DuBois the Fourth.”

There was a slight pause.

“Please don’t hang up,” Henry whispered.

“Hen? Where are you? Whatsa matter?”

Henry stared at the phone booth’s wooden ceiling. Tears streamed down his face. You can stop your sniffling, Hal. Men don’t cry. That was what his father had always said. Well, Henry was a man, and he had a lot to cry about.

“Louis never showed up. I spent the piano-fund money and made you mad, and all for nothin’, Theta. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, Hen,” Theta sighed. “Just come home.”

Henry wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You still my best girl?”

“You can’t get rid of me that easy. We’re family. Come home.”

“Okay. I will,” Henry said and hung up.

But first, there was something he needed to do.

Henry barreled down the streets of Lower Manhattan, past quarantine plasters and dark, closed businesses with signs in their windows reading THIS ESTABLISHMENT CLOSED BY ORDER OF NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. He was still drunk when he reached the quiet borders of Chinatown. The streets were nearly deserted, and eerie in their quiet. The Tea House was mostly empty, but Henry could see Ling inside. He waved to her and gestured to the alley, and a moment later, she joined him there.