After Con Edison, I got a job as the night girl at WVBI, the radio station. The nocturnal life appealed to me. The night shift, which began at eight o’clock in the evening, paid more than the day.
We worked on Forty-Sixth Street, across from a theater that cycled through cha-cha revues and a fur emporium where you could pay to have your minks stored in a refrigerated box. The night girl at WVBI was expected to sweep the floors, empty the ashtrays, brew coffee, and handle the switchboard for callers who wanted to dedicate songs.
We had an elderly engineer named Kirkland who began drinking at midnight and started missing his cues at two, and Hal, the station manager, handled it by making Kirkland teach me his trade so I could step in when he began to fade. Kirkland was offended by it at first, but he could see the use of it. He was about seventy years old, with a courtly manner that was not undone by the smell of bourbon in the air.
I liked the work. Things went awry and I learned to fix them. Kirkland taught me the thousand and one ways that a transmission can fail to be transmitted, and then fail to be received, and I enjoyed the range of these problems, from a squirrel nest in a transformer box to encrypted interference from navy destroyers off the coast. The air was full of radio signals.
My roommate moved out to live with her boyfriend in Hell’s Kitchen, which meant that I had to find a new place, and that was a problem. My salary from the station was barely enough to keep me in deli sandwiches and replace my stockings when they ran. Landlords in decent buildings didn’t want to rent to a single girl anyway. The first of the month came and I found myself in a dirtier boardinghouse, a place on Columbus Avenue where I shared a room with a nurse who kept bottles of gin hidden under her bed and sang to herself when she couldn’t sleep. Before my shifts, while I tried to make coffee on a hot plate, I could hear the mice busy in the wall. Soon I was spending all my days off trying to find another place, a real apartment. I looked at a dozen cold-water flats in Hell’s Kitchen, but no one would let me sign a lease, and every time I managed to save up the two months’ rent that I would need upfront, some disaster took it away—a filling that had to be replaced, a week at home with the flu and no sick time to cover it.
As a child I had a book, clothbound, with intricate illustrations, that told the story of a squirrel, rabbit, and chipmunk who lived in a house together in the woods. The crumbling flyleaf was dated 1918. It had belonged to my father. In each chapter, the animals met and bested another challenge. The chapters matched the seasons of the year. In the winter chapter, their stores of nuts and seeds were swept away in a late flood, and they were left hungry. The rabbit, a cheerful character in the summer and autumn chapters, grew thin and sad in the illustrations. The animals did less and less, spoke less and less. One moonlit night, the rabbit was awakened by scratching at the door. He looked out the window. A wolf was there.
The rabbit was changed by having seen the wolf. Spring came, and there were fresh shoots and grubs and eggs to eat, and the animals got fat again. But the rabbit’s fur had turned gray.
It was during the week I spent in bed with the flu, wracked with fever and then aching with boredom, that I saw my wolf.
When I recovered, I went back to work. I used an X-Acto knife and the Ditto machine in the secretary’s office to mock up a letter from the First Bank of Chevy Chase claiming I had fifty thousand dollars in trust. Then I went out to Brooklyn to look for apartments. Within a few weeks, a landlord accepted the fake trust letter, and I moved into a run-down apartment with tall windows on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Kirkland was expected to make monthly journeys to the station’s transmitter in Queens to run maintenance checks. It was in Rockaway, out near the beach. He hated doing it; it was a long trip in the dead of night. I volunteered to go with him. By September I was making the trip by myself, finishing up at six in the morning.
If I had some fire left in me after running the checks I would go and sit on the boardwalk, pulling my skirt around my knees, drinking a paper cup of Lipton tea from a deli and watching the sun rise over the Atlantic. Then back to Brooklyn, nearly two hours, a knish eaten as I climbed the stairs to my apartment, a morning and an afternoon in bed. In my apartment on Eastern Parkway, the floors creaked and the radiators whistled when the heat came on at night. A brightly lit, steam-filled shop on the ground floor of the building sold the knishes that I liked, alongside trays of jam-filled cookies. Orthodox women in navy coats walked up and down the parkway with flocks of red-haired children. On Tuesdays—I never worked on Tuesdays—I would rise in the afternoon and walk down to the Central Library on Grand Army Plaza, check out a few mystery novels, and sit on the steps eating a chocolate doughnut and gazing up at the arch that honored the Union Army. At the top of it a woman stood in a chariot with horses rampant, attended by angels, a bronze banner unfurling over her head.