For weekday mornings, she and I developed our routine. I took the 8:13 train from Tuckahoe, positioning myself to where the first door of the third car would open. (Commuters learn how to do this.) Since during rush hour my stop was only the second one for the train, the car was not crowded and I sat at the window in the third row on the right side of the train’s center, putting my now-treasured Columbia backpack on the empty middle seat. The woman who took the aisle seat each day, who we learned was Jane Elliot, smiled and said “good morning” and I responded in kind.
Then the train continued the short distance—less than three minutes—to Bronxville. As it did I glanced past the lake to where we sat that Sunday morning, that wonderful Sunday, in August. I watched as the train passed the bench. In Bronxville, Suze got on-board, she, too, having positioned herself precisely so that she came through the same door that I had. She’d look to her left and her eyes and mouth would brighten when she saw me. And she sat after Jane Elliot rose to let her by and I lifted my backpack. We’d exchange “good morning my love”s and hold hands as the train headed into the City. We wouldn’t speak much, mostly just random gossip—we spoke all the time late in the day when we were almost always together—and I’d glance out the window or read The Times on my tablet and she’d nestle her head against my shoulder, sometimes reading The New Yorker, as we held hands on my lap.
As we approached 125th Street, we got up, smiled and said “thank you” to Jane Elliot, and I got off to go to school and Suze continued on to Grand Central to work.
And every morning, I need add, after Suze said, “good morning my love” and I said, “good morning my love,” she asked, “today?” and every morning I replied, “not today.”
And now it was, as I say, mid-November, Thanksgiving approaching. I said hello to Jane Elliot and took my seat by the window as I did each morning. Glanced at the bench when it came into view. The train eased into Bronxville. Suze was the third person to come through the door, and she beamed at me and me at her as she moved towards me. She said good morning and thank you to Jane Elliot, getting up so Suze could take the middle seat, and my Suze sat. She looked at me, kissed me, and said, “good morning my love.” She waited for me to say the same thing to her and I did.
“Today?”
“Today.”
She sat up quickly. I opened the box I held in my right hand and took my Mom’s resized engagement ring. Suze said, “Yes.” I slipped it on the third finger of her left hand, the finger I caressed on that park bench months earlier. She looked at it and told me she had loved me for so long and I told her the same. Then, as always, we quietly sat as we went to the City.
As the train slowed into 125th Street, Suze said “excuse me” to Jane Elliot, who got up. Suze said “thank you” as did I. And as we passed, she whispered, “Congratulations. I am so happy for you both.”
And I got off to go to school and my Suze continued on to Grand Central to work.
Simon Douglas
“Eileen? Eileen Neally.” She was walking for lunch on Main Street in White Plains when she turned to see Simon Douglas rushing up to her. “Eileen? I thought that was you. How are you?”
Simon and Eileen had worked together in her small bank until he left for a job in New York City about five years earlier and since then, she’d heard, he’d done well for himself, ending up with a small hedge fund with its office along the water in Greenwich.
“Simon. My goodness. How long has it been? Four, five years?”
“From when I last saw you? Five years, three months, six days and”—a glance at his watch—”13 hours, eight minutes, and…32 seconds. Far too long.” It was a completely arbitrary figure but he said it with such flair that she almost believed it, down to the second. He was a charmer this Simon. A solid five-ten with the build of a rugby player and thick, short hair, a bit weather-beaten; it was clear that whatever else might have happened in his life he had not given up on staying in shape.
“Such a tease. What are you doing here?”
“A meeting with our bankruptcy counsel. We’re looking to get involved in the auction of assets of a firm in Chapter 11 that filed up here. I confess I hoped I’d see you. And I did.”
It was mid-September 2017. Were it a year earlier, Eileen would have left it with a curt nice-to-see-you-again/keep-in-touch but she was different now. After her husband, Michael, died in 2010, she threw herself into her work and her daughter. She had neither the time nor the inclination to do anything for herself. Now her daughter Kerry was living at home while going to law school in the City and through Suzanne, Kerry’s girlfriend, Eileen met other women her age and started enjoying being social again, emerging from her self-imposed shell.
So when Simon asked if they could go to lunch, she readily agreed and in ten minutes they were sitting in a small Italian place on quiet side street near the courthouses and she was sipping on her water and breaking off a piece of bread.