Grand Central is the gateway to my past
BellA PolleN, 57, gave up her award-winning career as a fashion designer to become a successful novelist. Her latest book, the memoir Meet Me in the in-Between (Picador, £8.99), is out now. she is married with four children.
WHEN I was a child living in New York, my father bought a Lincoln Continental Special from the widow of an art collector whose paintings he had valued for Sotheby’s. The old collector had revered the car and never took it out in the rain.
The Lincoln, one of only 50 ever made, had pristine ivory paintwork and coffee leather interiors.
My father dubbed it the Great White Monster, and at weekends liked to cruise us upstate through the fall leaves, tap-tapping his cigarette ash out the window.
One day, he ran over a skunk. The smell permeated every upholstered pore of that beautiful car, and thereafter began our love affair with the train.
Grand Central Terminal is the world’s most romantic station. Built by the Vanderbilt family during New York’s golden age, it’s a paean to the grandeur of architectural imagination.
Now, on Friday nights, instead of piling my brother, sister and I, bickering, into the car, my mother would herd us towards the fourfaced clock of the cavernous marble concourse, where we’d peer through commuter legs for the sight of Dad hurrying towards us, straight from the office.
My father’s lawyer Jay Wolf and his wife Betty became our adopted grandparents while we lived in New York. The first time we went to visit them on Long Island, my father told us we were staying with a family of wolves.
I vividly remember being perched beside my siblings on the red leather seats of the Metro North line, wondering whether we’d be eaten or not.
Grand Central became the beginning and end of all our weekend adventures. ‘New Rochelle! Larchmont, Mamaroneck!’ The guard would stand at the entrance of the carriage and shout destinations as we ate blueberry doughnuts and read Batman comics.
When we were older, our parents took us to the station’s Oyster Bar, where we sat goggle-eyed while shouting white-aproned chefs hustled along, stirring clam chowder and prising open shells.
If it’s pure nostalgia for me to revisit New York with my father, it’s still bittersweet for us without my mother, who died last year. Everything my family enjoy doing together began in this city. Movie double bills, hot dogs by the fistful, cruising around museums deciding which pictures to hide in our coats.
We start by doing things that remind us of Mum — revisiting our old apartment on 92nd Street. Breathing in the musty scent of the Central Park Zoo. We go to Nightingale Bamford School — ‘Aha, so this is where you went,’ my father says — but inevitably gravitate towards Grand Central.
It’s a long time since I swung through those big brass and glass doors with either parent. We wander slowly round, gazing up at the blue-and-gold vaulted ceiling, admiring the stone acorns carved above the track entrances, gobbling shad roe in the Oyster Bar.
Somewhere in the labyrinth of the lower floor, we fall into conversation with an old janitor, sweeping up for the day.
‘I’ve worked here for 53 years and still find it a thrill,’ he says. ‘You know they tried to close it down in the Seventies, but Jackie Kennedy saved us. Made the building a landmark. Oh, it was a terrible mess then, grimy and neglected.’
‘Still magnificent though,’ my father interjects. ‘Oh, sure,’ the janitor says, leaning on his broom. ‘But not many people remember those days now.’
Because he is feeling sentimental, Dad gives my hand a squeeze. ‘We do,’ he says. ‘We remember.’