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.

He held a manila envelope, but then half the people who walked into the station did, the Main Post Office was housed in the southwest corner. If you didn’t know where you were going the vastness of the building could throw you.

All that — the Post Office, the restaurants, the shops — came about when they restored the monumental structure from dilapidation into the beauty it was now; the interior 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, that’s not necessary.” His tone was measured, like someone sure of his ability to handle the world…who nonetheless found himself forced to improvise. He cocked his head towards me. “Say, does the big clock still hang in the North Hall?”

No one would have to ask what 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 even during the years of decay. 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 onto 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 very old looking back at when he was very young.

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.

He stepped away from me into the cold shadows and stopped to light a cigarette, unfiltered, which you never see anymore. He had a lighter, the old style. He flipped the lip 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.

“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. Anyone would know what I meant by that.”

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. 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.” 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 — if I lived — so we each wrote the date we were to meet again 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.”

The menu came out slowly from the envelope. The Jamboree Club must have been playing the nostalgia card for all it was worth, the font, the language, all had the look of a time far ago.

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 and he exited the structure entirely; through the double doors the stacked panes made him seem bent and twisted.

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. I was about to turn away, taking pains to leave 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? 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….”

But there was a reason, it became clear, as the menus in their 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 as into a fire, carelessly, irretrievably.