I'll Meet You Under the Big Clock
I saw him standing outside Union Station, looking uncertainly at the bank of brass-framed doors. Slight build, thin hair, age indeterminate, but on the right side of thirty'-five.
He held a manila envelope, but then half the people who walked into the station did. Everyone knew the Main Post Office was housed in the southwest corner. Still, if you didn’t know which direction of the compass to align to, the simple vastness of the building could throw you.
All this — the restaurants, the shops, the events, the Post Office, the businesses, the crowds, the bars, the museum — came about when they restored the monumental structure from dilapidation into the beauty it was now; the interior metal surfaces gleamed and the bright colors leapt.
“Looking for the Post Office?” I ventured. “I can drop that off if it‘s already stamped.” I put my hand out.
He tapped the envelope against his open palm. “No, not at all. That’s not what I’m looking for at all.”
His tone was measured, like someone otherwise sure of his ability to handle the world…who nonetheless found himself forced to improvise.
He cocked his head towards me. “Say, maybe you can help me in another way though. Does the big clock still hang in the North Hall?”
No one would have to ask which big clock, the Station was famous for it.
At the intersection of the two Main Halls it hung in the air, massive and visible from all directions. That clock had never stopped all through the years of monumental ruin. It seemed that as long as that clock ticked, the Station still had a heartbeat.
“Still ticking,” I said.
“Good,” he said, “good.”
He turned directly to me. “Then I’d like you to do something for me.” He put his hand on my shoulder like a lifelong chum. He had a way about him that was compelling — his eyes had a hawk’s look to them — making you want to go along with whatever he suggested.
“There was a girl,” he said.
A man can pack a lot a meaning into those four words, and he was silent so long after them that I wondered if he was going to say anything further.
“There was a girl….and we promised to meet under the big clock once I made my way back here from the war. You see,” he continued in a confiding tone, “the battalion demobilized in Atlanta, and some of the boys went up to New York City. At that age I had never seen the city.”
Rueful, that might be the word for his tone. The voice of someone in the back third of life looking back to a time when he was living the first third.
But this fellow hadn’t the right to be rueful, he couldn’t be any more than…well, what age was he?
Walking up I had taken him for a young man — the stance, the athletic ease — but now that the February sun was upon him, he looked much older. Maybe he spent a lot of time outdoors. The sun and the wind take their toll.
Seeing me look at him, he stepped away into the cold shadows and stopped to light a cigarette, unfiltered. He probably had to order them online, you never see them in the convenience stores anymore.
He had a lighter, the old metal style, rectangular, scuffed till the surface was non-reflective. He flipped the lid back, scraped the wheel with his thumb. The blue flame bloomed and I thought to myself that I hadn’t smelled lighter fluid since I watched my grandfather make exactly that same one-handed move. Flip, scrape, bloom of flame.
“Not just any girl,” and regret was the tone now. “I promised that when I got home from the war, we would start to live our lives seriously. The two of us. Anyone would know what I meant by that, don’t you think?”
He blew out a stream of smoke.
“But I wasn’t up to it. My promise must not have meant what I thought it did. Once I saw the big city, I lost all interest in…meeting under the big clock.” Another stream of smoke. “My loss,” he said flatly.
A steady statement of fact, as men will sometimes do, without regard to how they’ll look in the telling. His gaze was fixed on something far away; he came back to me with a visible effort. His voice was thinner now, reedy.
“So what I’m asking you, young man, could you take this in and see if she’s waiting there still? We had set a time and a day, that’s been these many years, yet you hear of people coming back to a meeting place on the anniversary, year after year. And I can’t summon the courage.”
He grappled with the envelope. I was shocked to see his hands, thick purple veined, spotted, the bones of his fingers individually visible.
“Six months before, we went to the Jamboree Club, it was our best date. We knew when I was getting out of the service — if I lived — so we each wrote the date we were to meet on our menus and took them with us. That was our joke: we’d show them to each other when we met under the big clock, just as though life would have changed us so much we’d need a secret sign to recognize each other.”
The menu came out slowly from the envelope. The Jamboree Club — was it upstairs on the club level? I didn’t know it — must have been playing the nostalgia card for all it was worth even back then. The font, the language, the size, the colors, all had the look of a time far ago.
I had a desk full of tasks back at the office, a meeting with an unhappy client after lunch, and a month’s worth of expense reports to fill out.
“Well, when?”
He named a time, and it was within the five minutes.
What would you have done?
For my part, I took it and said that I would look around when I got inside.
I looked back at him as I entered the vast hall, I wanted to know what to do with the envelope when the appointed time came and went without a meeting, as it was sure to do.
He was already through the double doors to the outside though. Seeing him through the twin set of panes made him seem bent and twisted. It might do that to anyone though.
The Grand Hall was all but empty, the clock hung over everything like an unblinking eye.
I stood directly under it, as thousands had done before me. Tens of thousands over the years.
I was about to turn away, taking pains to exit from a door far, far from the old man…but why did I call him an old man? …and as I thought about that, I heard the clack of heels behind me on the granite floor.
For a minute I was afraid to turn around — afraid? of what? — but when I did, I saw a perfectly ordinary young woman. Carrying an ancient menu.
We both held them out to each other awkwardly, like the signal they had always been meant to be.
“She wanted to explain why she never showed up,” she said. “She said that sometimes when you’re young you can’t see the obvious in front of you, it can take a lifetime to know the truth…and then it’s too late.”
“He regrets not having been here. When they demobilized after the war he had a chance to go to New York City. He knows now that he should have taken the train home.” I had a thought, “you know, there’s no reason that we have to talk for them, we can bring them together in the flesh, there’s still….”
But there was a reason, it became clear, as the menus in our hands first yellowed, then flaked, then crumbled into dust, but not so fast that the eye didn’t catch the date at the top, August 1945.
Above us the clock, as it had always done, snipped seconds off of time and tossed them into eternity, irretrievable.
