"You know... We really have to stop meeting this way. People are starting to talk!"

The Burgundy Room was a space on the eighty-first floor that gave the appearance of either a break room alcove or an empty storefront with two semicircular display cases hiding the currently open pocket doors. We probably shouldn't have been surprised to find a familiar dark skinned man laying on a chaise lounger with a delivery man's bicycle propped against the sidebar. The fellow let out a couple wake up grunts to indicate he was still assessing his surrounding. The jangle of Jenny's ring of pass keys indicated her ownership of the space he'd intruded upon.

"Oh I'm sorry. I found this space a couple months ago. I didn't think anyone was using it. Heyyy! You're that lady!"

"Funny how people can walk down the same path in life and get surprised when they bump into each other. You must live in this building."

"Been coming here for twenty-five years. As a kid I used to look for empty places like this in case I wanted a little peace and quiet. How does a girl like you come into a place like this?"

As Jenny spoke she began unlocking various doors and flicking on lights to reveal a closet, bathroom, pantry and kitchenette. She disappeared into the last room to fix some drinks.

"Oh my granddad had to put some money aside in 'Thirty-three. With all the banks shutting down he took out a fifty year lease the top ten floors of the ESB and paid as much as he could in advance, figuring that when the economy picked up he could make it back by subletting. They'd owed him money on some engineering work he did so they gave him generous terms. This room he set aside to have a place to entertain clients."

Jenny emerged with four tumblers of liquid refreshment held by the fingers in one hand, a bucket of ice in the other and a spray bottle of seltzer under the arm holding the ice bucket. She dumped her cargo on the floor and passed drinks around. We helped ourselves to the ice and seltzer as Jenny pulled down the array of pins and clips on her head. Letting her hair down wasn't going to be a figure of speech.

"It's a funny thing about renting this floor. You know how you the main elevator ends on the eightieth? Well it seems people feel real stupid about switching elevators to go up one lousy floor so practically everyone who rents offices on this floor are those health fad kind that like taking stairs. I better close these doors or people will start thinking this is a break room."

"You're an awful trusting girl..."

"Oh if you were the type of person to try something, you'd be in jail by now. Besides I could probably take you. I once punched out a shark!" She had a minky expression when she said that.

"No shit! Really!"

"Yeah! I was diving in Bermuda with my grandmother and this frisky little Mako just kept bugging us so I cold-cocked him. He got the message and went to look for some she-shark to do what comes natural for young shark couples."

She got minky again.

"It's fun hitting stupid animals. They never see it coming."

She studied the scars on her right knuckle for a few seconds - Nahhhh! Crossing to the other side of the room , she unlocked a linen closet, drew a couple seat cushions from storage and planted them by the window.

"As kids we used to have camp outs up here. One summer we dragged up one of those inflatable kiddie pools. It was a lot of work filling that with one of these ice buckets. Emptying it was fun. We just dumped it over the side."

"I wish I'd met you when I was doing my sociology dissertation. Ended up doing something on the sociological effects of the railway system on the way people structured their lives."

"Gee. You can probably fill a book on the kids that picked their college based on being able to change trains at Penn Station. I had an offer to go to M.I.T. but I picked Carnegie Tech so I could take the train home on weekends if I wanted."

"I think I used to see you around the Cathedral with a sketch pad and some sort of stick thing coming out of your eye..."

"That's a camera lucida. That's so you can see your drawing and what you're drawing at the same time. I wasn't the great artist in the family..."

"We remember when you bought that. You walked right past the jewelry displays on Fifth but you were practically drooling in front of that specialty optical shop window. We can still hear you panting 'but it's a Ger-r-r-litz!'. Oh well, we get the same way with cameras..."

That was pretty much our contribution to this conversation. Nicky returned to the subject of crossing paths with Jenny.

"So what brought you over to Gilgo beach last Friday?"

"Dude! Surf was up! There was a big tropical storm offshore, so we were getting some decent waves for a change. Must've cleared out half the offices in The City. Why were you there for?"

"Funny you should ask. I'd heard about the storm too and was curious to see how something so far away could have an effect all the way up here. I didn't even KNOW people surfed in New York City... Hey, lemme ask you something. When I mentioned seeing your car go into the bay you asked if I'd seen anyone in it. There wasn't somebody else in that car was there?"

"Oh no, I was alone. I'd gone on a beer run. They tell me I was found in Islip trying to find my house. Next thing I know, there's half the contents of a hypodermic in my arm and a bunch of medical people staring at me like I'd just come back from the dead."

"Well I'll tell you something girl. God only takes something that big away from you if he thinks you can't handle it. Or that you'd had suffered enough. Things usually work out for the best."

"It is funny how things work out. Remember when to you took that picture of me in back of that paddy wagon? When I had the really short hair? Well my boyfriend at the time lost his commission in the Marines on account of them thinking he was a queer. He was too proud to tell them that 'boy' he was caught with was me. Well he ends up getting a job with General Dynamics working on submarines. Last we ever heard from him, he was supposed to be covering for someone on the Thresher."

"All that from a picture?"

"Well I was so out of sorts... "

She squirted a little more seltzer into her glass and took another sip before she continued

"You see I was on a tour of one of the steel plants in the area when a casting ladle broke loose. Molten steel splashed everywhere! Amazing that nobody got killed but a gob of steel melted the hard hat I was wearing. That was a bad day and I needed someone to make feel like I was still a woman. So Scott and I go off to some nice quiet lovers lane to do what young couples do naturally. Apparently a lot of queens used that spot and we get caught in a dragnet..."

Leave it to Jenny to whip out a double entendre on the spot...

"I hope you don't think I was blaming you for anything. It was a pretty decent shot. I woulda taken it myself... He asked me to marry him but I knew it wasn't a good idea. Told him that he ever got into a decent company they were going to send him all over the place to see if he'll take it and did he really need to have a wife and a buncha kids in tow?"

"Still... that's one hell of a butterfly to hurricane story. So how'd he end up on the Thresher?"

"Well he and his roommate went and got themselves a good old-fashioned Navy ass-kicking at some bar and I get a call from him at the hospital. I think he wanted me to drop everything and come over..."

Jenny pulls out one of her business cards and hands it to him.

"Our family business is set up so that if you call this exchange number we can be reached anywhere. My sister had a band and I was filling in for her in Liverpool cuz she just dropped another kid when I got the call. I told him he should stay with his roommate cuz he'd had a concussion and you're supposed to keep an eye on them. I think I said something like I'd be in Boston in seven hours and I'd hire a car from there. He muttered something about 'getting' the guys who beat him up. He's got that pride thing."

"Holy shit! You don't mean to tell me he took out a submarine?"

"That's what the Navy people tried me to get me to say. I told him he was way too afraid of small spaces to want to pull something like that. Poor Scott... I had to break into his apartment on account of his roommate had died in his sleep. Broke a slat off a venetian blind and jimmied the lock. That place was a mess. Bathroom floor was covered in little Japanese flags and pools of bloody sick."

"The worst thing is that they're not even sure he ever even made it to the dock. Car looked like he was steering by the guardrails and it wasn't his signature at the gate. It looked like it sure enough but he's left handed and his writing tends to rise up and the signature was in a straight line. I had some books of his poetry and song lyrics and I showed it to them. His father has them now... He's a cop... When he got up there we went around and checked all the morgues and hospitals. We thought we had a lead, but it turned out to be some writer from Maine who'd run his car into a tree."

"You certainly are a lady of mystery!"

Jenny poured another round for everyone, emptying the crystal decanter of its liquid nourishment. She stood at the window gazing in the general direction of the RCA building. There was still plenty of time to kill.

"Well stuff seems to follow me around. I went to Los Angeles last summer to lick my wounds and work on my doctoral. I end up meeting this guy and we hit it off and he offers to let me design him a home and one thing leads to another... I'd been trying to get in touch with him but when I called him last Christmas I get told that his number wasn't working. I called the studio he was working at and they sent me to another studio and I finally get a number from them. I call it and I get this woman on the line. I tell her who I am and she gets all sore, saying 'I don't think that's very funny!' and hangs up. I call back and she goes off and says if I keep calling she was going to sic the police on me."

She shrugged her shoulders for emphasis. After a pause an idea flashed before her.

"You still want to get a picture of the twins?" He did "I had an idea for a pose... get out of the chair I'll show you what I want to do..."

He got up and she turned the chair around so the head end faced the door. She motioned us over and got on with her stage directions.

"Lay on your side like this." She laid down behind us, making sure our heads were directly under hers...

"Put your arms out like this" She grabbed our arms and put them in the pose she wanted.

"Now I want you to close your eyes like your taking a nap. How does it look?"

"Awwww! That's got to be the cutest thing I've ever seen!"

We heard him go through three frames of film. Click, advance film, open lens, adjust shutter, focus and click for the next shot.

"Can you hold while I get one on flash?"

"Oh sure! I did some modeling for a summer in high school - one of the other girls taught me how to do poses for long sittings..."

"Anything I've seen?"

"Montgomery Wards, Junior Miss 'Fifty-eight fall catalog. Got a couple really smart outfits out of that. Also learned I didn't want to spend the rest of my working life getting my picture taken."

"So what are you doing now?"

"At the moment nothing. I just walked off the last job after a big fight with the boss. Another guy offered me a job with his firm right there on the spot woudja believe, but I told him I'd rather be a bowling alley waitress... And I meant it too..."

"Oh god... I'm gonna hafta tell N'eddie the whole building project's off!"

We were still laying in the chaise lounger with Jenny when she switched to another train of thought.

"Here... lemme get under you for a second..."

We rolled on top of her as she spread her legs to let ours drop into the chair. She lock her knees against ours and started waving her arms like she was swimming or something.

"I remember doing this a lot... It's gotta mean something.... When I came to my arms were dead tired. I felt just like a chupa cabra"

"Chupa what?"

"Chupa cabra. It's one of those baby sitting stories I used to tell the kids. It was the ferret like creature from outer space that went up your butt and took over your body. You could tell someone had a chupa cabra in them cuz they couldn't control your arms and legs at the same time and when you walked the arms didn't move - they just hung at your sides. They started race wars so they could feed off of people's hatred for each other."

"Chupa cabra.. that's Spanish isn't it?"

"Yeah goats like in 'goats go to hell' and 'sucker' for the way they trick people into hating each other. Of course the kids didn't get it. They just liked the idea of a creature going up peoples butts. That and they loved pretending to have a chupie in 'em. It's actually pretty tiring to run around with your arms not moving so I could get them into bed easy. When that kid got lynched in Mississippi, I stopped telling that story though. The way I had it, the chupie's spaceship had landed right on top of where some poor kid had been beat up by The Klan and thrown in a swamp for whistling at a white girl. I guess I got spooked when something I came up with happened for real."

"Well it's not like that doesn't happen all the time." He was trying to be reassuring. " You can't swing a dead cat in The South without hitting somebody's feet swinging in the trees."

"Oh it's not all that bad! I have it on good authority that they've cut out the Wednesday matinee lynching clean off!"
Jenny laid her glass on her forehead. Finding a balance point, she let go of it for a second and let out a moan before seizing it up again.

"You know... I give up... I've had it up to here swimming with the sharks. I think I'll just let go and see where the currents take me... Ohhh... but what am I gonna do about N'eddie? Friends a friend but this is real business . I've never dropped a story on her like this... She's... gonna... have... a... fit."

She slid the glass over her sore eye. The left eye.

"Screw it... Who needs to be another Howard Rourke? Nobody really cares now and in twenty years they'll denounce you. You know in all the architecture books they go straight from Louis Sullivan to the Lever House without so much as a how do you do to the greatest building ever built?"

She raised an arm and did a little flourish with her hand. The greatest building? We're sitting in it...

"Still... It would've been nice to get off one good show of force before settling down to whatever... Oh well at least I got some good data off that 'earthquake study'. There's a lot of old buildings in Europe that are stuck in traffic..."

"Well just don't burn too many bridges in your flaming youth. Traffic's bad enough in this city as it is..."

"Burn 'em? Hell, I bought one! No really! That's what got me into this mess. Found a surplus railroad bridge in the Carolinas. A nice truss job. Had the bright idea to flip it over and do one of those cliffside numbers for this guy I'd been going with up in the Hollywood hills. Was gonna suspend the floors from the roof and everything. Was working on a deal with Allied Chemical for some of their vinyl wall panels - made up these chrome plated 'hockey pucks' to hold 'em."

She held her thumbs and forefingers in a circular formation for emphasis and continued.

"Well N'eddie tells me there was a job just like what I wanted to do right here in The City so I high tail it out here for a look-see. Well one thing leads to another and here I am with no job and probably no guy and a derelict bridge sitting on a barge in the middle of the Panama Canal. You wouldn't happen to be in the market for a beach house? No?"
Jenny pondered her Lady Hamilton - even at it's tightest band setting, still manages to slide around to the underside of her slender wrists all the time. If she wanted to see the Beatles, (coming from outer space no less) she'd have to put the call through to her mother soon.

Stretching her legs we noted a twinge of pain or at least the twitching reaction to it on her right calf. If she had a reaction upstairs it was only to remind her of something.

"Oh hey! You don't have any model release forms on you?" Always thinking.

"Oh these were for personal."

"Well you might want to sell them anyway. Besides with a model release you can get Uncle Sam to pay for your camera. Doesn't hurt to keep that sort of thing in mind..."

"Yeah I think I keep a couple in here..."

He fished through his messenger bag for a form and the three of us duly signed off on it.

"Hey you still have that picture of the surfers on you?"

He did.

Jenny rolled down the sock on her right calf to reveal the bruised underside.

"What do you make of this..."

Studying the collision photo, he reached to cover the bruise with his left hand, keeping a little cushion of space between."

"It looks like you got clotheslined from behind... It looks like an arm hit you and then the hand tried to rip your calf off. See here where the fingers must've dug in..."

"But how? And why didn't I check on you? You said I'd run you down didn't you?"

"You didn't touch me directly. I ran myself into a dune from looking behind. Was pretty well out of your headlights. Heh... It's not like I show up too good in the dark anyway..."

"I must've hurt myself coming out of the car... It has a high door sill... I'm just not seeing it..."

"Well you know what. I hope they never find her. If it was me I'd feel real cheap sayin' 'Can I gets my reward?' after going through all that."

He did a little Bojangles shuffle and whipped his hand out for emphasis. The fellow knows his history.

"I hope I never need a steak dinner at the Kiwanis club that bad... Turning to us she inquired, "You think Carson will have us up to the Rainbow Room? He gets cranky when they make him do double shifts. That's what happens when you're still labor..."

Jenny pulled a old candlestick phone from it's little cabinet near the kitchenette to get the ball rolling on our ride to Thiry Rock. She'd first ring the ESB operator get the switchboard at NBC, then they'd try mom's office line. Failing that, they'd pass her around the various control rooms and studios.

"He seems to like watching us eat... Ehhhh. suppose we can do a floorshow for an old times sake."

Ride secured, Jenny began to tidy up the room. First to go were the glasses. Seeing that Nicky didn't finish his, she tucked it away herself and continued with her work.

"Gonna need all the fortitude I can get...." For the record Jenny really wasn't a big drinker. She wasn't above making a little joke on the subject.

She took out a logbook from the telephone's cubbyhole to record her time in The Burgundy Room, who was with her, what was consumed and what if any business was discussed. With a seventy percent top tax rate hanging over the family's head, being mindful of every possible business deduction was second nature to her.

"By any chance do you have a business card? Telling Uncle Caesar we did some publicity photos. Cousin Bitsey will love that one." She drew a business card as he handed him one of his. "You really ought to have a talk with her. For one thing, she could help you trade in that Huffy of yours on the government's dime..."

"If you're ever out on The Island we have a photography club that meets the first Thursday of the month. They're always looking for guest speakers. You do have slides of your work?"

Jenny had disappeared into the kitchenette to wash the glasses and ice bucket.

"I think I can put something together..." He replied as he folded up his chaise lounger.

We held to our cushion. We'd long learned to let Jenny do the putting away of things. Jenny soon emerged with a sponge to wipe down the counter.

"We keep the doors open for the cleaning staff. If you ever come back up here for a nap it would be nice if you left the wheels outside..."

That was pretty much code for 'Don't ever come back up here with that damn filthy bicycle again'.

When the phone rang to announce the arrival of our ride Jenny gathered up the cushions to put them in their place. We left the Burgundy Room as immaculate as Nicky found it and made the walk down to the elevator on Eighty. In the lobby Jenny pulled a 'Pee Chee' folder from her portfolio and a fiver from her purse - she had one last request of Nicky.

"Could you give this to N'eddie? It's the report on Walter Drake I was supposed to turn in. And this is a little something for the drinks you're gonna need when N'eddie hits the ceiling..."

We didn't go straight to Rockefeller Center but instead, Jenny directed the driver to a housing project to the southwest of Penn Station she wanted to have a look at. It was a Walter Drake project.

"You know," she mused. "The only reason why I took the job was because I liked the work he did on this one. Very nice composition on these..."

The minute and a half she spent there only cost us an extra half hour of drive time. We rode in silence till we passed Bryant Park. A random thought occurred to Jenny.

"You know how prejudiced people always start a tirade with "some of my best friends are colored people"? I just realized I don't have any colored friends!"

"Oh Bullshit!" We replied. "What about Wilfred Sykes?"

"No, he doesn't count. He was a mentor. Besides he used to work for my grandfather."

"Well what about Will Junior? He was always at the house."

"Oh noooo! Not him! Not him! Do you know what he did to me? In Third Grade when I had that stomach virus and I thought I'd gotten over. Well in school I got sick and had to run for the nearest bathroom. Turns out I was in the boys room when I looked up from the sink there was little Will at the urinal doing his business when he sees me and chases me around yelling 'Weeeeee!' with his pants down and peeing all the way!"

"What about Niké? You were always talking about her?

"Niké Gunnarsen? Oh I never had the guts to go up and talk to her. She was pretty. A bronze statue... I used to sneak a look at her in the shower after gym..."

Jenny held her hands over her chest for emphasis. "She had these perfect... breasts. The nipples actually pointed up about a degree or two... I'm not even close to being queer but if she wanted me she coulda had me from hell to breakfast. She coulda had half the school..."

"Gunnarsen? Shouldn't that be Gunnarsdottir?"

"No, she Abyssinian. Her father was killed during the Italian occupation. Mother married a Swedish diplomat. He was a delegate to the UN for a while but he got transferred to the Caribbean, Jamaica I think. Last I heard, she joined the Peace Corps."

"What about Nicky Schwinn?"

"You know I get the strange feeling we'll never see each other again. Sorta like we broke the spell or something..."

A bicycle messenger sped past us - not Nicky.

If you wanted insight into the basic nature of Jennifer Platt you would do well to ponder the formative years she spent in the bowels of Rockefeller Center. Her mom was good enough at her job that NBC management was more than willing put up with the Platt brood, who in turn were well enough behaved to be allowed virtual run of the place.

Jenny achieved a peculiar mascot status due to her uncanny ability to spot some seemingly trivial item out of place - a frayed cable, a loose rope, an unhooked microphone or maladjusted trim pot, unnoticed by anyone else that if left unattended would've at the minimum ruined a take or silenced a broadcast or in at least one known case, been a serious danger to life and limb. Over the years she was a particular comfort to stage-frightened newcomers in need of a single person to play to.

In return Jenny enjoyed the privileged backstage view of the world of entertainment, absorbing well the lessons in humanity the confluence of technicians, artists, personalities and egos bring...

Well...

Well to tell the truth she really didn't learn all that much. She was a kid and rubbing elbows with the famous and the people that helped to make them famous was her 'normal'. She didn't learn anything that she didn't already know deep inside of herself. Mind you every time some 'great artiste' browbeat some hapless underling at the slightest provocation, she did get a lesson in comportment - at least she learned who she didn't want to be.

The one big revelation to her was how surprisingly long and short peoples memories could be. She'd ask a guy in the control room what he thought of something that just happened maybe five minutes ago and he'd say in all honesty that he didn't remember yet the same fellow could wax rhapsodic in great detail about some fleeting moment twenty-five years ago.

For the most part, she got to see a bunch of people gather together for the purpose of artful creation and what more could a kid with creative aspirations ask for?

The driver let us off on the Fiftieth Street side where we were met by a studio page. Looking straight at us he inquired, "So... which one of you is Jenny?"

We just tilted our heads back to indicate the girl in sunglasses behind us. He gave her a once-over as if trying to figure out what she was famous for. Giving up, he led us to the elevators. We counted three 'Hey Jennys' and two 'Hey Jens' from passing staffers along the way.

"They said to send you up at 3K..." An old-timer we knew as 'Mister Gannon' greeted her with a 'Hey Jenny Penny!' - which is how we could tell the old timers. The page could stand no more.

"OK, I gots to know... Why is everyone giving her the royal treatment?"

"Oh she's a legend around here. Back in the radio days she practically lived here. You know some bean counter actually figured it out that she saved the company as much as fifteen hundred bucks a year just from catching some little problem before it got out of hand."

"Oh gee, now you're gonna break the spell!" Jenny shot back, just a bit embarrassed for the attention. She would have to endure more solicitude when we made it to the third floor, not that she didn't need some ego massaging at this point in her day.

"And lo! Our lost lamb has been returned!" Carson found her first.

"I feel more like the prodigal daughter!"

"Ahhh... Well I believe the commissary is fresh out of fatted calf... but I think they have some of those Salisbury steaks you like."

"Oh I'm so wound up today I don't think I can keep anything down." She really did like the commissary's Salisbury steaks. Carson led her up to the control booth to find her mother under the hood of a recalcitrant audio board with a voltmeter in hand. Seems a random channel would crackle intermittently till they opened the board.

"I'm just not finding it!" Evelyn finally declared handing it over to Jenny who had her own notion as to the problem. She patted down wires till the offending harness spoke up. Then it was a simple matter to tug at individual strands till she realized...

"Looks like the whole wiring bus has been chafing against... right here."
Her fingernail scraped at a rubber grommet that was supposed to protect the wiring bus on its way out of the cabinet. It had rotted clean though and just about every wire on that harness had been cut into in a way no-one could've seen if they didn't know to look for it.

So Jenny would save the National Broadcasting Corporation another fifteen hundred this year. Better yet, the task of replacing the wiring harness would take just enough time so that Carson wouldn't have to do a full second show that day. So that extra half hour Jenny made us spend in midtown traffic would serve a purpose after all.

As a reward for her good deed, Jenny was treated to the services of the NBC makeup lady down on the stage to give Jenny's shiner a proper going over.

"You suppose if they sent down a raw steak they could hose it off and cook it up when I'm done with it? I'd hate to see one go to waste."

"You must've had a really good time this weekend. You want I should get the nurse to have a look at it?"

Everyone mothered little Jenny - except oddly enough, Jenny's own mother. It always stuck us that there was an icy cordiality between them, like two people who didn't necessarily dislike each other but had nothing in common to bind them together.

"Ohhhh... I just ran into somebody on the beach" Jenny couldn't help playing with her words.

Evelyn put aside her need to supervise the board repairs long enough to have a go at seeing what she could do about Jenny - a considerably more difficult task.

"You know Jenny... I want you to know that no matter what the problem is we can always find some way to work through it. I know you feel like you have to tough it out but there's no shame in asking for help. I can always take some time off of work and we could go on that 'round the world cruise..."

That was a reference to a standing offer that if any of the Platt girls got themselves pregnant out of wedlock, Evelyn would take them on a long enough cruise to have the child. She'd put her name on the birth certificate and they'd have a new brother or sister. She somehow got the idea from that Theodore Dreiser play.

"You know mom, I think that problem took care of itself."

More coded language. You can bloody well figure that one out yourself.

"Speaking of problems taking care of themselves. I think I'm going to have room for that Salisbury steak after all." Jenny held her lower stomach. "Oof! Feels like I've got a water hammer going."

With that, she excused herself for the ladies room - even the best of us have to go sometime. We bided our time, wandering around to the rehearsal rooms, finally lingering outside a room where an unseen pianist was playing. After a few minutes we return to the studio to find that the satellite link to Europe was up and running. In leu of the planned Tonight Show run-through, they had set up cameras and monitors for more informal gathering. By this time Jenny had returned to the set in a lighter mood.

"Hey!!! Jenny Penny Umbra!" The mop-top known as John came up with that one. Seeing us in the picture he noted conspiratorially. "Oy! You said your friends were twins, but you didn't say anything about them being..."

"Jewish? Oh... I thought I'd mentioned that... " Jenny replied coyly before changing the subject. "Looks like you guys are getting as big as Sinatra now! Pretty soon you'll be wanting separate limos!" Frank Sinatra was Jenny's Gold Standard for measuring fame.

A spectacled BBC announcer came into the picture. "Well it looks like it's old home week... So this is the famous Jennifer you've been talking about."

John: "Yeah, we met her a few years back in Hamburg. She was in this band called the Aquanetters..."

Paul: "She'd sing 'guy songs' but she wouldn't change the gender or anything. Lotta of people didn't like it but it was really pretty gear you know. She was a first-class scrapper in a fight. You know how people try to push away someone? She'd pull a bloke in real close and just wail away on 'em..."

George: "Remember this one time she was giving us a ride to a gig? Dig this... We were driving past this old building they were fixing up, when she slams on the brakes and jumps out looking for the foreman and start screaming at him in German, 'Vas iss los mit dis bild!'"

"She points up to the top of the scaffolding. The bloody thing had pulled away from the building and the workers were putting boards across where the windows used to be. Well Jenny was having none of that and she was cussing and screaming like a banshee to make 'em put it right. She even grabs a passing copper sayin' 'I want to report a murder! I want to report a murder!'"

"Well that foreman finally had enough but before he could say anything more some poor fellow steps out of a window and falls between the scaffold and the building... which send the whole thing toppling over like a Buster Keaton movie. "John: "So we're standing there watching it happen and Jenny's got her hand dug into my shoulder saying 'Wait for it'. As it's coming down she pushing and pulling on me tills she finally yells 'NOW!' and we go down, right in between the bits. Not a scratch on either of us!"

Paul: "After all that, she goes looking for the guy who fell and finds him with a bit of metal sticking out of his chest. He was reaching to pull it out and Jenny stops him, saying 'You do that and you'll be dead before you can get a look at it!'. She took command like a little general and had us make a stretcher for him out of the boards to get him to the hospital while she got someone with a saw to cut the piece of metal so we could pick him up... Anyway, he made it."

Jenny never told us that story.

"Oh... People are always falling for me... How about a nice happy story for a change? Any of you heard of a bloke named Huddie Ledbetter?" Of course they did.

Jenny had an acoustic guitar in hand that she'd found where the Tonight Show's band was supposed to have set up. She noodled for a few seconds before she began idly strumming to the tune of In The Pines.

"Well when I was a kid mother used to take us to work with her so she could keep an eye on us. We lived out on The Island so I guess she wanted us closer. Well this one day this nice old man was up in the studios to do a show or something. We didn't know anything about him except he had that funny name..."

"So we let him into our play group like he was just another kid and we're having a fun time when he gets this idea in his head. 'Come on children! I'm gonna learn you yer readin'!' he says and leads us down the elevator and out the building. Now we knew our reading, but he was so nice we all just played along. Besides that I think we were all getting sick and tired of being cooped up indoors on such a nice summer day."

"Anyway he takes us all the way over to the West Side train yards by the Hudson and when we get there he points to a boxcar and says 'Now tell me the letters on that one'. We'd say out the letters like we were really trying and then he'd have us say out the word, which we did. We spent most of the afternoon doing that till around three o'clock when he announces that 'schools over' and we walked back over to Radio City."

"Funny thing... mother was more relieved that he made it back in time for his show than to see us returned unharmed!"

Her strumming got more strident as she played her way into the opening verse. The Beatles picked up the tune and they spent the next few seconds trying to synchronize their playing with the time delay built into satellite transmissions.

"My girl... my girl... don't you lie to me. Tell me where did you sleep last night..."

"In tha pines... in tha pines... where the sun... refuse to shine... I vould shiver-r-r-r-r the whole night through..."

"My girl... my girl... where wi-i-i-ill you go? I'ma goin' where tha cold wind blows..."

"In tha pines... in tha pines... where the sun... refuse to shine... I vould shiver-r-r-r-r the whole night through..."

She had a surprise for the main verse.

"I hear'd... she was... a hard working girl.... lived about... a quarter mile... in the sky...."

"Her head... was found... in tha dri-i-i-ivers seat... but the money... it never was found..."

Everyone in the room was visibly chilled by what was the first time she ever had anything to say about that incident. Carson had wandered back into the room and after she finished that verse leaned over to her and growled "Shiver for me!"

Jenny looked up at him, smiled briefly and went back into character to finish the song, working herself into a half crying whelp to finish the last verses.

"My girl... my girl... where wi-i-i-ill you go? I'ma goin' where tha cold wind blows..."

"In tha pines... tha pines... the sun... the shine... I vould shiver-r-r-r-r...."

"the whole..." She held a long pause that made you think she wasn't going to finish.

"Nn-n-night.... through..."

She played the final round alone having dusted the Fab Four if not in quality - realistically, she was at best a yeoman player - but in raw delivery of emotion. Finished with the song, she peeled off the guitar and put it behind her, dabbing a few tears as she pulled out of character.

"Wow... That song really takes a lot out of ya, doesn't it! I think I could go for something to eat if anyone else is hungry..."

At this point, our minds had blown open the tops of our skulls and were flipping into each others open brainpans with excitement over this little nugget of Jenny history. We were obliged to sit through a few more endless minutes of small talk between studio technicians before we could say anything to Jenny - what we had to say couldn't be uttered under a red ON AIR light.

"Holy shit! Holy shit! You know The Beatles?" We were pacing the floor of elevator cab like a rat in a cage on our way up to The Rainbow Room.

"Well they weren't The Beatles when I ran into them! Well no... I think they were calling themselves The Beatles at the time but you know what I mean. They were just a bunch of kids from England working in Europe like our little bunch. Gee, we were playing better gigs than them at the time and we were just doing it for fun! Guess that just goes to show you what people can do when they're hungry enough..."

One of the perks of Radio City life for Jenny and family was access to the NBC dressing room and its wardrobe supply. Another perk is that one of the seamstresses makes or adapts outfits for our particular needs. We had picked out a nice frilly strapless 'wench' outfit that perhaps did duty in a Middle Ages sketch and that we could wear without altering. Jenny, ever punctilious about using company property, merely wore one her own dresses - in this case a nice lacey black number - that she had 'parked' in mother's office for use in town. Jenny mom found a nice sheer flowey purple number.

The elevator was passing the fifty-ninth floor when Evelyn decides to mention to Jenny, "Oh, by the way Gloria said she might be joining us..."

If there was an icy cordiality between mother and daughter, Jenny's relationship to her maternal grandmother was simply icy. Gloria was one of those old-line socialite types who regards any education or occupation a woman might undertake only for its utility in acquiring a 'decent' husband. Jenny, being the first Van Der Plaat grandchild, bore the brunt of her attempts at grooming a successor on the social scene with the usual result that Jenny, who was already pretty civilized to begin with, resolutely followed her own path in life - for better or worse.
"I suppose the Fates would have to go for a hat-trick today..."

When we got off on sixty-five we noticed a couple clean-cut Government Men in dark suits and darker sunglasses casing the elevator lobby, paying particular attention to anyone entering the Grill Room. There's only one person living in New York City that rated that kind of security and if you guessed Jenny was some going to have some sort of involvement, well keep reading, it gets good.

"Hey Jennifer!" One of them had either seen her before or had been through her Secret Service file.

We did know that Jenny, freelancing for Panorama, had been given an interview and tour with the First Lady concerning her restoration work at the White House a couple years back and presumably they had given her 'Permanent Record' the once over beforehand, but it was still a surprise having a Government Man call her by name.

"Oh this should be a fun evening", Jenny noted. "I bet Gloria doesn't even get off the car."

"OK... Wait... You and the Kennedys? There's no way you're in that circle!" Carson was calling bullshit on the implication.

"Oh god no! You see... It's just that grandmother is from Boston and had the last name of Fitzgerald, so now we're on their mailing list. Every time one of them runs for dogcatcher of something they hit us up for a donation or to do campaign work. Oh, they just loved me down at the Rockefeller '64 headquarters."

"Didn't you end up voting for Kennedy?" We'd heard he mention that once.

"Yeah, well I guess I had this thing about not voting for former Vice Presidents. Don't like ruling dynasties... Besides, Nixon just looked like a thieving weasel!" Musing about the current election season, "Dunno what I'll do now that Rockefeller's out. Still don't like Vice Presidents, but Johnson did cut the top tax rate from ninety-five to seventy..."

"Well... let's lay off the politics for dinner time, huh kids?" mother hen chided lightly as the waiter led us to our table. We were obliged to take the southwest corner since Miss Kennedy had dibs on the slightly more private southeast corner. Not that menu prices here don't keep out the riff-raff and not that there was anyone else in the room. Not counting the staff the room was empty... except for Gloria Van Der Plaat.

"Looks like Miss Kennedy is dining with the Luces," She observed icily. "Must have a Life article in the works... or one of those 'books'..."

"And to think you wanted me to grow up just like her."

"And to think in the grand scheme of things you are just like her. Only you have nothing to show for it. At least she has her children, some memories and enough money to take care of herself. But you're still young, I suppose."

"How did you manage to get a table mother?" Evelyn tried to change the subject. "It looks like they're not letting anyone else in."

"I'd come from the pied-à-terre and got here first," she noted with pride. "They just showed up at the last minute and expected everyone to drop everything, I suppose."

Turning her attention to us, she observed. "Well Mister Carson, I see you've brought some of your 'show business' friends. What kind of act do they do?"

"Oh no grams. These are my friends, Shoshanna..." Point, point "and Ariel... I've told you about them."

"Well you did mention something about twins..." Raising the eyeglasses she had chained around her neck, she added, "They do look quite... inseparable, don't they?" Guess that's where Jenny gets her love of wordplay.

"Sooo... what menu are we ordering from?" We had a choice between bar, pre-theatre and regular dinner menus. "We'd love to try one of these five dollar hamburgers. Wonder what they want to slap a piece of cheese on it..."

"For some reason I feel like a steak dinner. You want to go three-ways on this pepper steak?"

Looks like we were going three-ways on the pepper steak.

The Van Der Plaats settled on a chicken dish and Carson decided, "Well now I've gotta try that five dollar hamburger... Oh, and a saucer of milk for the old lady?"

Orders taken, Jenny asked for a telephone to be brought over to the table. Now was as good a time as any to deal with N'eddie.

"Panorama Publications? I need to speak to Naomi Edelson? It's Jennifer... Platt..." One of the Government Men hovering in earshot fired off a dirty look. "Uhmm... This is personal business... Do I look like a Hedda Hopper?"

To be fair, Jenny actually did revamp Panorama's architectural notes page to resemble a gossip columnist's style of reporting.

Any Government Spook listening in would've had to file for disability pension on account of hearing loss as soon as N'eddie got on the line, she was that upset at what happened. Jenny kept an even, almost fatigued tone through the whole thing.

"Well he had been in my bag and was going through my project book... I don't know, maybe it fell out... I get upset about it and he goes off on me. No, he didn't hit me or anything..."

"I'm trying to get out of there and he gets a wild hair about how my stuff is all of a sudden 'work for hire' and is now company property.... No I didn't ask to see the contract... I just wanted out of there. Van De Lay would've had any paperwork anyway and he's in no condition... I just wanted out of there."

"Well what am I gonna do? Take him to court? Whose side do you think they'd be on? Even if I won, I wouldn't be able to get a job anywhere. He got me... and he got me good. I threw the damned thing down the incinerator so he's got nothing... Yeah... Well... I know... What's done is done. No use crying over it."

"Nooooooo! Don't you do anything... Oh good god, don't do that... That'd make it a million times worse... Well... where would that get anybody?"

Ducking down and lowering her voice she adds, "You know who's in the room with me? The First Lady... Yeah... her... No... Really... I don't know, probably felt like getting out of the house for a change... Well look what happened to her... Some jackass decides his opinion of the president was worth shootin' over and now his wife and kids gotta go without a father... Do you think I want to be like that? I don't need that kind of hate in my life."

"Oh shit... don't print anything about her being out and about. She doesn't rate that kind of treatment. At least not now. She's had enough people pecking at her..."

"Professor get his report OK? Good. Yeah, I gave him a pass. Well there wasn't any call for anything. Well if I did that, he would've just said I was doing it for spite anyway. Look, I'm not gonna throw away my professional reputation when I hardly even have one yet. He's not worth it. There's at least a half a million dollars payroll at that place. Those people gotta eat too."

"Look, what's done is done. It's not like I can't come up with something else. Every minute of my life I spend on this is a minute I'm not gonna get back... Well some guy from the Zeckendorf company gave me his card, said he'd get me a job... Yeah, but he does business with Drake so I'm think I'm gonna hafta pass on that. Anyway I'll probably hafta sit out for a year. Something about an exclusivity clause. I know Wesley had to sign one of those when he got hired by Grumman...."

"Well I really wasn't going to ask, but thanks for the offer... Well, I wouldn't need a lot of money, just expenses if any... I just need enough to fill out my resumé so it doesn't look like I've been sitting around... Good thing I took that minor in journalism isn't it?"

"Well let's not pin anything down right away. I'm still hurting a little from this weekend... Looks like dinner's here... Tell Nicky, I got my steak dinner after all..."

The pepper steak came in five 'medallions' and were apportioned amongst us, with Jenny taking two and leaving three for us - halving one of them so we'd have one and a half 'medallions' apiece. Depending on what we eat we'll either ask for separate but smaller plates or like tonight, go with one plate but we always ask for separate utensils. We may share the same blood, but we do draw the line at sharing saliva.

Even though we've lived for twenty-five years, we were still not so jaded about ourselves that we couldn't appreciate an audience and tonight we got two 'customers' in Carson and Gloria.

"We trust you'll forgive our sacrificing proper utensil etiquette for utility...", we noted as we laid out our forks, knives and glasses to our sides. "It's pretty basic logistics, we just tap our fork where we want it cut and hold it down a little the other one and we take turns... We just nudge heads when we're ready for another bite."

"Does it all go into one big pot?" Gloria inquired with an almost childlike curiosity.

"Oh no. We have our own stomachs... But we're not sure where everything joins up. We've never been sick enough for anyone to have a reason to go and look."

Curiosity satisfied, the meal more or less passed with just the hushed conversation the Luce party across the room. Well we did ask about Carson about the five dollar hamburger.

"Not bad....", He concluded, then adding, "but I bet it would taste a whole lot better off the chest of a hundred dollar a night hooker!"

That went over pretty well for the table despite the emotive self-restraint imposed by the nature of the room, hearty snirks all around, with Jenny, who had the peculiar ability to laugh uproariously without engaging the vocal cords, the most rewarding of the bunch.

"Oh, you should try to put that in your monologue tonight..." Jenny gave him her seal of approval.
Which reminded Carson to check the time. "Oh speaking of... I think I better get back downstairs..." Turning to us and Jenny, "You gals going to stick around for the taping? I might be able to pull a few strings and get you front row seats..."

"Oh that's all right. I think we'll stick around for dessert. Maybe we'll come sit up in the booth with mum later. If not, I was going to take the train home and call it a night."

"Oh, Jen... you might not want to do that. Jamie called this afternoon saying he was having a little get-together with some of his friends."

"Couldn't he use the clubhouse?" They have a clubhouse. More on that later.

"Oh sorry, that's being rented out for the evening. Rehearsal dinner, I think."

"You could stay with us..." As hospitable as Jenny can be, she's awful shy about accepting the hospitality of others.

"I suppose I could do that... This is gonna sound silly, but I never liked being in that house. Always gave me the creepies... You know, I'm almost positive Al Capone left somebody down in celler when they redid the floor. You know that spot where it sound sorta hollow? I did some looking and it seems that back in the twenties this fellow known as Rajneesh 'The Swami' Brahmaputra had one of those little 'love colonies' for the artsey set around town like they used to have. Vanished around the same time Al Capone left town for Chicago. Supposedly, he was feeding lotus blossoms to Misses Capone on the side..."

"Campout at the Burgundy Room?"

"Oh... I think I'll just sleep on the boat... Mmmmmmm...." At least her weekend experience hadn't made her afraid of the water. For a life-long 'boatie' like Jenny, that would've been the unkindest cut of them all.

Carson and Evelyn left us with Gloria - Carson put up the dinner on his cuff. Having gone easy on the main course, we were going to avail ourselves to a full desert - priorities y'know. Jenny went with the über-choccie cake we went with the apple pie and a plate of ice cream. Gloria had the peach sorbet.

"Jennifer. I do want to discuss with you the matter of your share of the family trust account. You're twenty-five now..."

"I was under the impression I wasn't getting anything. 'Cut off without a cent' you said," Jenny interrupted with a tone of confusion.

"Whatever gave you that idea? Oh, I never meant that! Anyway... this is old family money. I have no say in it. It's yours free and clear. You wouldn't have to take it all at once. We could set up an annuity account for you. Even at three and a half percent, you'd have a tidy little income to fall back on."

"Well maybe I don't want it anyway. It's not like I bothered making plans for it or anything. Probably more trouble than it's worth."

While this was going on we were momentarily distracted by something going on at the other table. One of the Government Men handed a slip of paper to Mister Luce who in turn showed it to Miss Kennedy while pointing towards our table. That can't be good.

"Jennifer... dear... Pride is pride... but a hundred fifty thousand dollars isn't something to walk away from lightly!"

"Well it's like the man said, the minute you can't walk away from something is the minute you better start running." Jenny tugged at the sock on her gammy leg. "Not that I'm in any condition to run any marathons right now..."

"I've seen how you've been hiding that limp of yours... You know, we were awfully worried about you....

The arrival of desserts interrupted her as did the waiter who had a message for Jenny. Seems Miss Kennedy wanted to have a 'little chat' with her and would she like to come over to her table?

"Oh nooooo... I'm not walking into that minefield," she declared to no-one in particular. To the waiter she said, "Look, be polite about it, but I've had a really, really bad day and I can't think of anything she'd have to say to me that would make it any better."

When the waiter left she added, "Not there's isn't a sick little part of me that would love nothing more than to be the most hated person in the country for throwing JFK's piano lessons in his poor widow's face in the middle of a cat fight... but that wouldn't right, now would it?"

She heaved a sigh before looking down at her plate.

"Mmmmm! Choccie cake!" That cheered her mood.

"You should've been a Mennonite Jenny." For no good reason, we just felt like saying that.
In her school days she's known as 'The Fightin' Amish'. Through brute force of will, she could soak up a lot of abuse, but if you went and got her fightin' mad, you've unleashed a tempest that won't be stopped till it's run its course - or she gets her hand back on the throttle. The way she could pull out a full-fury tantrum was a thing of beauty.

Gloria picked at her sorbet as if the right words to say were hidden somewhere in the bowl.

"I know... you don't like this sort of thing... just the thought of losing you forever... and not even having a grave to visit... Ohhh.. Oh I'm sorry... I'd forgotten about Scott..."

"Oh that's all right," Jenny reassured her as she leaned back into her chair.

A thought struck her, "I wonder... how does a boy who couldn't get in the Marines all of a sudden get the security clearance to work on submarines?"

"Should've asked the Merry Widow." We can be little stinkers can't we?

"Maybe he was 'sheep-dipped'," Gloria suggested. "They do it all the time. Drum a guy out of the service so he can play the cheese in a spy trap."

"You read too many spy novels grammy... No.... The best I can figure is... that the Electric Boat people did their own background check and saw him for what he was."

"Well I'm very grateful the Lord didn't take you too. I'm not the most religious person in the world... but I'm sure this has to mean something. Like some sort of line on the sand..."

"I know," Jenny sighed. "I feel like one of those soldiers just back from the war. I wish I could get that missing day back. That's really going to bug me. What do you suppose Jesus first thought was when he woke up on the resurrection?"

"Well Philip has to shake off the morning wood so he can go pee." Gloria growled. Now you know how Carson got away with blue humor at the table.

Gloria drew her checkbook and registry from her purse and continued.

"Now I don't want you to make any decisions about your money right away. Maybe you'll want to do one of your architectural projects..."

"Oh... I suppose I could put it away for an emergency."

"Well you know Philip and I aren't getting any younger. We were hoping to do some traveling this summer..."

"I was thinking of maybe letting Bitsey look after it. She's got a head for that sort of thing. Do you suppose she could get her cut early?"

"Oh no this was the legacy money left for the first grandchild. Everyone else will have to wait till we pass away."

"Well, that ought to make me the most popular girl in the family!"

"Oh I wouldn't worry about that. You know it's been eleven years since you used to come over. We'd like to see you a little more often..."

"I suppose it's been long enough... well it looks like I'll have the time!" She leaned back to look at the sky through the window before another think occurred to her. "I better see if my father has anything planned for me. I was supposed to help out with the company at some point."

Gloria started cutting a check. "Here's... a little walking around money for the summer. I think fifteen hundred ought to be enough to tide you over..."

She filled out the registry before tearing out the check and handing it to us to pass to her. Jenny just held it in her hands and stared at it as if too tired to make the next move.

"You know, somebody once killed themselves over this very amount... I actually held the money in my hand. Can you imagine that?"

She looked back towards the Empire State Building. The money, it never was found.

"Oh God... I am so spoiled..."

"You earn your keep," we tried to reassure. "We've seen how hard you work at things."

"Yes but everything I get has been handed to me! I never had to fight for anything, even that last job was offered to me. All those people down there that had to sell their souls for something..."

"Jenny... we've seen what you can be like when you do fight for something. If you're spoiled you're a much nicer person because of it."

"Yeah... well everything has a cost doesn't it? Books have to be balanced don't they?"

"Hey, we're living proof of that. Of course, we'll never have to work a day in our lives but you don't hear us complaining. We're not complaining at all. We're getting value received in this life. You've paid enough anyway. Collect a little."

"You have very wise friends Jennifer. I know I've been hard on you growing up... and I know you how you hate apologies. Well... you've turned out far better than anyone would have the right to expect..."

Jenny stood up with the check in one hand and her purse in the other. "There's nothing I can do about this today anyway," she declared as she stuffed the check into her purse.

"I'll be right back. I just have to give a little something back to the sea," she added as she headed for the ladies room.

We hadn't planned to follow but we saw Miss Kennedy alight from her table a few minutes after.

"Looks like the floor show is moving to another hall..." We drew a ten spot from our purse and left it on the table. "Here... In case we don't come back this is for the tip."

By the time we got there Jenny had finished with the main business and was at the mirror re adjusting her hair. We slipped into a stall with a magazine we'd found. It seems someone had 'sanitized' the room prior to Miss Kennedy showing up and stashed a Life Magazine issue from November of last year behind one of those big ashtray canisters. We turned it to an article we were interested in doing an update on. It was a photo essay on this 'modern' French family from around the turn of the century.

"Jennifer? You are Jennifer? I did want to talk to you..."

Jenny held her tongue.

"I know I'm just an outsider but I just have to know what horrible thing the Kennedys did that you wouldn't even attend a family funeral. It wasn't an easy thing to track you down and to get the Mexican Air Force to have a transport ready for you on such short notice."

We had visited Jenny in California for two weeks in November of last year. When we returned to Oklahoma she was getting ready to take a sailboat down to Panama to look at that bridge she'd purchased. The one she was going to convert into a cliff house.

"But I'm not family."

"Your grandmother's a Fitzgerald isn't she?"

"Well that's the thing. She isn't. I'd done some looking into that. From what I'd been able to find, she swapped birth certificates with someone else to get back at her parents. Her real name is Sylvia Marshall."

"I don't follow..."

"Well you see, she was going around with someone her parents didn't approve of, and they threatened to disinherit her. As it turns out the relationship had run its course and she had someone else cut from the herd, but she simply wasn't going to be told what to do, so she disinherited them."

"Her new beau was friendly with some of the Fitzgeralds and found out about a child of theirs that died shortly after birth. It was close enough to her age and they were just the kind of people to appreciate the level of spite she was working on. I mean... how often do you get a Boston Brahmin willing to become an Irishman?"

"She pinned a suicide note to a set of clothes, left them in a pile by the Sumner Street Bridge, boarded the next train for New York and never looked back. You know what the note said?"

'Dearest Mother and Father.
You win. Enjoy your nothing.
Love Sylvia.
P.S. Fuck you.'

"Growing up we never got along... I think that's probably the only thing I'll ever really respect her for."

"To think all I had to rely on was the expertise of some rank amateur going by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. I suppose she snubbed the Fitzgeralds to keep her cover?"

"Something like that.... She didn't exactly keep a low profile though. Every so often her parents would get little press clippings about her mailed from some out-of-the-way place like Schenectady. Usually just a photo cut out and pasted onto some black paper so they couldn't figure out what newspaper it was from. It was the twenties. People were rebelling against their parents back then"

"I think they finally found her sometime during the war because I vaguely remember her taking me up to Boston around Thanksgiving time for some reason. It was just me and her and her driver. We stayed in this big house real close to the river. I can still remember sitting in the waiting room of some lawyers office. Must've been four at the time... So no... No. Im not in the family."

Miss Kennedy considered that for a spell before inquiring, "Suppose you had found out you were a Fitzgerald? What would you have done then?"

"Nothing. I was only looking for newspaper articles about my grandmother, and I was only doing that because I happened to be in Boston on other business. If it wasn't for my finding her death notice before I got to the page of her birth announcement, I would've been satisfied about finding a little something about her and left it at that. But no, I had to keep pecking away at it. I finally had to stop myself before I went and bothered anyone from the Marshall family."

"Oh well... I'm happy enough with the family I've got... Besides, I have enough people to send Christmas cards to as it is."

"You know... in the past few years there have been so many people crawling out of the woodwork claiming some sort of Kennedy connection... I rather feel like Diogenes finally finding an honest man!"

"If it's all the same to you, I don't really want that to get out or anything. I feel bad enough knowing about it myself... say what was that note Mister Luce handed to you? He seemed to be pointing at me at the time."

"It was something about that 'Surf Angel' story that's been going around all weekend. Someone thought you might be connected to it somehow."

"Yeahhhh... I don't really remember much about that. It seems to me that I'd gone into the drink on the bay side and not the ocean side... You know, I'm just going to have to stop dwelling on that or I'll just go..."

Jenny cut off abruptly and there was a long silence - it didn't need to be said where the conversation was drifting towards.

"Well... I suppose I'd better get back before they send a search party in here for me... It's been nice to be able to talk to you. I don't suppose we'll ever run into each other but don't think you couldn't say hello..."

Jenny waited about a half minute after the bathroom door closed before declaring, "It's safe for you two to come out now!"

Naturally we flushed before emerging from the stall.

"That was a whole lot of weird for one day, huh Jen?"

"Let's just get back in our street clothes and go home. I sure could go for a cigarette and a beer right now."

We bade our farewells to Gloria who rode down with us to the studios - it seems she felt like sitting in on a taping after all - changed into our street clothes and headed down to the concourse level. We could've just taken the Sixth Avenue subway down to Penn Station but Jenny wanted to 'look up an old friend' so we ended up going east - threading our way under the plaza and over to the International Building, finally emerging at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first.

We walked up to Fifty-third and headed east towards Park Avenue and Jenny's 'old friend' - the Lever House. Of all the buildings in New York it was the Most Perfect. Every time she visited she'd flesh out some new detail of its Perfection - like how the vertical strips of chrome were slightly thicker in front of the inner support column or the way the top row of windows didn't go all the way to the corners. We followed as she silently made her way into the courtyard - she wasn't being figurative about 'looking up' an old friend. She took her time in savoring whatever detail she might fix upon before turning to another. She paid particular attention to the south-east corner where the new Seagrams Building had displaced the Montana apartments. It looked to us like she was trying to line up the corner of the Seagrams with the corner of the courtyard enclosure - she was making little adjustment steps. Finally she walked up to one of the stainless steel columns to give it a loving pat. It was time to leave.

We kept going down Fifty-third over to Walter Drake's contribution to the Park Avenue landscape but Jenny was more intent on studying the Seagrams Building. It was one of those designs by a 'big name' architect and from the Park Avenue side was a rather lovely composition in bronzed steel and glass. The only quibble Jenny had at this point was that it revealed that the Sheraton East Hotel had only a small wedge of building on the Fifty-second street corner.

"Should've built it a block north. The plaza would've been framed better"

Then we walked further to look at the back side.

"Oh that's just awful. He did the masses all wrong. He should've built out the corners... And look at that! He put marble panels where the glass is supposed to go. That's just awful! He sure lived up to his name."

Mies in German means 'lousy'.
Jenny kept going till she got to the corner of Fifty-third and Lexington and turned to look at the northeast corner.

"See that church? My pastor told me that they were thinking about modernizing and were considering the idea of doing a deal with some developer about selling their air rights in exchange for a new building, but they wanted to stay on their piece of land. The way I had my building, there would've been a sort of church yard in front with shops like a medieval square. You would've even been able get on the subway. Oh well... I think we're done here."

Jenny was never one to double back up a street on a walking tour so we continued down Lexington around to the Fifty-second side of the Seagrams building with the idea of getting back onto Park Avenue. She wanted to get a look at the brand-new Pan American building. We stopped at the corner of Park and Forty-eighth to consider the massive new Union Carbide building.

"Now there's a building that gets it right! Dome and Campanile... See how the masses are pure and true? Because of the train tracks underneath they had to put the elevator lobby on the second floor. Lets get a closer look... Ohhh... no...."

"Jenny? Jenny? Is that you?" A familiar voice and an even more familiar head of red hair emerged from a black Cadillac waiting at the light. With traffic bumper to bumper, it was a car away from us.

"Just keep walking.... Just keep walking...." Jenny muttered as she quickened her pace towards the sheltering arms of the New York General Building two blocks to the south. It used to be known as the New York Central Building but it had been sold and according to Jenny, the new owners cannily selected a name that only required two letters to be changed on the signage.

We were practically in full gallop by the time we got to the little arcade that goes through to Forty fifth Street so we missed the spectacle of cars emerging from The General's great portals that we liked so much. It was one of those 'Big City' architectural effects that made an impression on us early in life, back when Park Avenue still had it's rows of matching stone buildings that looked so lovely together.

We could also see that Jenny's limp had gotten noticeably worse by the time we got to Forty-fifth Street. She still intent on continuing the tour. We had read about how a lot of people didn't like the Pan American building - too big, in the wrong place and all that. Naturally Jenny liked the thing.

"It's got a nice shape, it didn't really kill anything important and it's not like the New York General building is hidden by it. Besides that, Grand Central Station gets to live forever - not that'll do us Long Islanders any good... We can take the Forty-second Street shuttle to Times Square."

We didn't get that far.

"Hey lady... what happened? Didja get hit by a car?"

Jenny was able to make it through the lobby of the Pan American building but her leg finally called it quits at the escalator leading down into Grand Central Terminal. Or rather...

"Owww.... It's my hip. I've been walking defensively all day..."

With the help of a few helpful 'Dashing Dans' we eased her down onto the station floor, trying to keep out of everyone's way. In no time, a flock of lawyers circled her carcass, business cards in hand. An MD managed to push his way through to have a quick look at her.

"That leg doesn't look so good. You want I should call an ambulance?"
"All I need is to lie down for a bit. I'm not gonna spend fifty bucks just for a nap. If someone could get me one of those luggage carts and wheel me over to the Commodore..."

"Lotsa luck getting a hotel around here lady. Everything's booked solid for The Fair. You'd be better off taking the next train back to where you came from... come back when you feel better."

"Just my luck... I live on The Isle of Long..."

The fellow had the right idea though and she was close enough to the platform...

"Hey Jen! Which way do you wanna go? Boston, Montreal or Buffalo?"

"Why don't we go to Rochester and see if we can find some film. I hear it's tough to get up there..."

At least Jenny's sense of humor was all right. We show our mugs at the ticket counter looking to book a Pullman.

"We're gonna turn right around when we get there so if you can get us a short layover that'd be peachy."

The ticket lady takes a look at us and asks, "You sure you don't want an upper berth or just a seat?"

"We like our privacy when we travel. Besides we have a friend going with us. We're gonna want one coming back too."

The ticket lady took another look at us and called for her supervisor, "Hey Ezzie! I got a couple Siamese twins out here lookin' for a Pullman. What are we supposed to charge 'em?"

"How many legs do they have?"

She lean over the counter to look. "Two!"

"Mother traveling with baby in arm! One fare! Hey lemme come out there!"

"The Pennsy people charge us for two children's fare same with Long Island Railroad." We noted to no-one in particular. "Not that we can't afford full price or nuthin." We love train travel. We really do.

The supervisor was a short stocky savage looking pug of a girl with a pretty elfin face framed by a short mod haircut with bangs combed in a triangle that nearly covered her right eye.

Needless to say, we fell in love with her right on the spot. She sized us up - and down - before asking in this thick-tongued accent that sounded kinda like the way deaf people talk.

"You said something about Long Island... that where you're from?"

"We have a summer place over in Amityville..."

"Amityville? You ever heard of a girl named Jenny? I used to go to Christian School with her."

"Heard of her? She's sitting over there! We wanted to get a Pullman so she could..."

'Ezzie' disappeared from view only to emerge from a side door. She blew past us and went straight for Jenny.

"Hey you old sea-dog! What are you doing blockin' up my station!"

"What! It's not like this is Grand Central Station anything... I thought you were working the Lackawanna."

"I got sick of living in Jersey. 'Sides I lost my job in The Merger."

That would be the Nineteen Sixty merger with the Erie railroad. Did we mention we love trains?

"Where are you shacked up now?"

"Give ya a hint. It's the only part of Manhattan that isn't an island."

Jenny considered that for a second before giving a smile of recognition. She loved those little radio show style quiz things.

And for those of you scoring at home, the answer was 'Marble Hill'. The neighborhood used to be attached to Manhattan Island until the Harlem River was rechanneled in the 'Twenties. They 'attached' it to the Bronx with fill, but it's still legally part of New York County which encompasses Manhattan Island. Marble Hill...

"So where you guys headed too?"

"Jenny's leg is hurtin' her so we were gonna take a Pullman out to Rochester and come right back. Prolly won't even get off the platform. We do it all the time in Oklahoma when we want to sleep off a drunk. We like takin' trains."

"We could use a million more people like you. Heard some mumbling about us and Pennsy merging... looks like I'm gonna hafta suck it up and apply at one of the airlines. So what have you been up to?"

"Well I'm out of school now... and I'm out of work. Gee it's been a while hasn't it? Hey, I'm kinda hurtin' down here."

"Oh gee, let me go get you a wheelchair... Hey Vinnie!" She whistled for a minion and went off to find a chair. Jenny used the time to give us her proper name, EsmÈralda Gustafsson as well her full nickname 'Ezzie the Viking'. Parents were from Norway but they followed the path of their Viking ancestors, moving to Sweden then Iceland before finally settling on one of the islands in the Great South Bay.

Ezzie returned with 'Vinnie' the wheelchair and some Company pillows and blankets for padding.

"I also got you some bedclothes from Lost and Found, they're clean - and this is stuff we're gonna put on auction in a couple days anyway so don't worry about it. Just leave it on the train when you're done with it."

She certainly knew Jenny's sense of ethics. Jenny took the clothes and hid them under her snail bag as she made herself comfortable in the chair.

She handed a paper sack of clothes to us noting, "I had to get you something a couple sizes bigger cuz I don't know how stuff fits on you."
We understood. Since we were going to push the chair we handed them to Jenny for Snailie to sit on.

"You guys wanna catch a drink at the bar? I'm pretty sure they have Rhinegold... Vinnie! Tell Mister Brownlie I'm takin' a break..."

"Oh, I've done my drinking for the day, but if you're twisting my arm..." Jenny wasn't really a big drinker.

"We usually like to hit the bar car, but if you're twisting our arms..." We really are big drinkers.

Having been lifelong 'Pennsies' we actually had to marvel at the superior layout of Grand Central Terminal. For one thing, everything is pretty close at hand. For another they used long ramps to get around - pretty handy if you're pushing someone in a wheelchair. Ezzie led us down a ramp to the Oyster Bar. Upon the sight of a mollusk-eating establishment, Jenny instinctively covered the 'eyes' of her snail bag.

"Ohh.. I better not go in there. If I even smell shellfish, I get sort of queasy."

"Oh shit, I forgot about that! Why don't we just go over to the Commodore?"

We didn't even have to turn around, we just kept going up the other ramp and through a little tunnel to the Commodore Hotel lobby. As luck would have it, they actually did have a few rooms left, but we'd already bought the tickets. Besides that, they look at you funny when you try to check in to a hotel without bags. We made our way the to the Sixty-Four Bar & Grille and settled into a table that had a good view of a clock on the wall - we had to keep track of the time.

"I should've known when you said your friends were real close to each other you weren't being figurative. How come we never met?"

"You were on that island of yours all summer. They were usually out the door by Labor day. It's not like I was hiding them or anything.

"We used to hang out with N'eddie and Stacey. Remember when the DDT truck would come by? We'd be hiding in some bushes and N'eddie would stagger in like she was dying or something and we'd come staggering out in the same outfit she was wearing, wondering why everyone was looking at us funny."

"Ohhhh! Man! I wish I coulda seen that!" Looking at Jenny's bad eye and leg she inquired, "So, who'd you get into a fight with and why wasn't I invited?"

"Oh I ran into somebody out on the beach. Next thing I know I was in the emergency room. I got nuthin' else."

"Damn! What's the point of fightin' if you can't even remember afterward? Hey... remember that time you got hit by that car? Oh that was so funny! Me and Stacy were carrying this building model Jenny made up Ireland and we were in the middle of Ocean when this dumbass in a green Volkswagen comes screaming up the street. He sees us - I can still remember this twisting movement I did when I dropped to the ground - and swerves right up Jenny's driveway and hits her from behind. She bounced off the hood and landed right on her ass! That look of surprise on her face when she went flying was so funny!"

"I didn't think it was very funny! But then I didn't get to see it coming. It didn't even really hurt... I'm always missing the good stuff!"

Everyone had a quaff from their glasses before Ezzie changed the subject.

"So did you ever do anything with that architecture stuff? Or did you go into writing. I remember these stories you used to make up. I loved that one you made up about old Miss Orlando..."

"I got a Masters in Architecture and a minor in Journalism. If I never do a building, I can at least write about them."

"If you don't mind our asking, why do you talk like a retard?"

"I bit part of my tongue off..." She stuck it out and sure enough, a bit of the tip was missing.

"Suppose there's some story behind that?" As if we had to ask - her eyes had brightened up as soon as we'd asked the first question.

"Oh yeah! Lemmie tell ya! We had this big cookout - you were there Jenny - and it was getting late and everyone was loaded and my dad had passed out on his war wound. He's got shrapnel and he's not supposed to be on his stomach. So I kinda get under him so I can get him on his back. Well he musta had a war dream cuz we he woke up he just clamped his arm around my neck and started screaming at me in Korean or something. He was choking me so hard my eyes popped right out of the socket. Felt like my head was gonna explode... I finally had to elbow him in his wound just to get some air."

"Oh man I remember seeing that! I was so loaded I thought I was dreaming. He had you over that Koi pond of yours and I saw one of the fishies snap up a chunk of meat. I thought he'd got your eye! That got me so spooked I didn't start drinking again till I was in college."

"Holy shit! So were they like dangling off your chin!" We imagined something like Jenny's snail or one of those Tex Avery cartoons. "How'd you get 'em back in?"

"Oh no... they were maybe three quarters of the way out - but they were pointing down. I kept having to lean way back just to see straight. Even though I'd flipped out because I was bleeding out my mouth, for a second it was kinda neat. At this point my poppa had come to and was in a panic over what he had done, which got everyone else panicked."

Putting her fingers on an eyelid as if to demonstrate, she continued, "Eventually I was able to pull my eyelids apart and work 'em back down into their sockets. Didn't even hafta touch 'em!"
"My poppa was so upset he checked himself right into the VA hospital. He won't even see me anymore, he's so ashamed..."

She took another sip of her beer and sighed. "I miss him so much... It's not like it was his fault or anything, y'know..."

She looked at the clock and pulled out her pocket watch to get a second opinion. It was almost time for the train.

"You mind if I ride out with you? My apartment is along the way. Engineer slows down so I can hop off... Is that leg of yours feeling any better?"

"It's not as bad as it was but I wouldn't want to ride home on it." We could tell from the way Jenny kept shifting around in the chair, it was not much better than before, but that's how she was with injuries.

We got to the platform just as our train had emptied its load and just before they started boarding so Ezzie flagged down a porter to help get Jenny into our stateroom and into her berth. Our itinerary was going to cut it real close, we'd be in Rochester around five-fifteen in the morning and we'd be catching the five-twenty back to The City but Ezzie assured us that everything was taken care of personally.

"You wouldn't happen to have one of those padded face masks thingies? We sometimes sleep on our sides and someone else's head is not the most comfortable thing to sleep on..."

"If we can't find one on board we can have one for you when we get to Poughkeepsie," the porter replied. Try that on your next airline flight.

Even though we're old enough to remember traveling on steam trains we still enjoyed the masculine throb of a diesel-electric idling on the platform and the little ceremonies of a train boarding were still pretty much the same. We had the lights on and the stateroom door open because we remembered back from our first train trip seeing a group of college girls settled into their stateroom with the lights on and the door wide open. With the train otherwise darkened, it made us think of the caveman days and how welcoming that first cave ever lit by a fire must've been.

The porter found us a couple of those padded face mask thingies at the station drugstore - they were still in their packages. We went to tip him, but Ezzie waved us off. She had something much more valuable - she was going to fix his time sheet so that he was getting overtime and credit for a full round trip and in return he'd take care of just us and would ride with us back to The City. We did mention how much we loved train travel, didn't we?

We missed the clarion call of 'All aboard' on account of us having to help Jenny get her clothes off and ready for bed. At least Ezzie had learned something from her dealings with her father as she rolled Jenny out of her blouse and into a nightgown like a seasoned war nurse. We made quick work with her skirt and belt as well as her shoes and socks.

"Hey Ezzie, have a squint at that bruise! Pretty nice, eh?" Jenny was inordinately pleased to show it off. But then Ezzie looked to be the bruise-admiring type.

"Oh that's pretty nice!" Told ya so. Proffering one of those pump-handled bug-sprayer nozzle thingies, she added, "Hey, I picked up summa this stuff we spray on clothes so they don't get all smelly in storage..."

"Suh-weet! I hate it when that happens. Amazing how stinky stuff get even when you're just coming back from a swim. Where do you get that stuff? I'd love to get some of that..."

She was interrupted by the train's lurching away from the platform. We were on our way now.

"Oh jeeze, I almost forgot... I should've let mother know where I was gonna be all night. I was missing all Saturday... You got a phone where you live?"

It was still necessary to ask people that. Ezzie did have a phone so Jenny fished through the shell of her snail bag for one her her business cards. Another slip of paper took the opportunity to make a bid for freedom.

"Hey, what's this?" Ezzie unfolded it to find out. "Whoa! Fifteen hundred bucks!"

"Yeah, gramma gives me that just in time for the banks to be closed."
"I could wire Rochester and have them cash it for you."

"Don't want to carry that much money on me when I'm on the road! Besides I'm not sure I want to cash it anyway. Gramma always make us earn anything she gives us and I don't feel like doing fifteen hundred dollars worth of work. Maybe I'll just hang it on the wall next to the check she gave my dad."

Jenny thrust her arm out and Ezzie handed the check back to her. She turned it over a couple times.

"Or not. Maybe when you have some time off we do a nice shopping adventure. Can never find enough friends for that and I hate shopping alone and I always feel bad going with the twins cuz they gotta have all their stuff special ordered..."

"Hey, we don't mind going out with you." Funny the things she feels bad about. "Yeah, we get some good ideas offa you. You know, we still have that Brooklyn Bridge shirt you made for us. We loved showing it off back at the ranch and in town."

She used the double neck holes we have on some of our shirts to outline the suspension cables in a embroidered Brooklyn and now that we remember it, Manhattan bridge harborscape with little boats and ships and little cars coming off the bridges even a little subway train crossing the Manhattan. In our admiration of her, we sometimes forget the girl stuff she knows how to do.

We left Jenny to her pleasant dreams around the time the train lumbered its way out of its tunnel at Ninety-sixth Street and onto the elevated stretch going into Harlem to join Ezzie in the bar car for a quick round before she had to make her jump for home. As brief glimpses of domestic life flashed by the windows we amused ourselves and fellow patrons with our little dicephalic smoking trick - we each light a cigarette but we phase our inhaling and exhaling so it looks like smoke is going in one head and coming out the other. Never fails to amuse.

It was another thirty five blocks or so till we crossed the Harlem River into the Bronx and would be another ninety till we got to where Ezzie so we had to pace ourselves. We took our drinks over to the vestibule to look out at the riverscape - the Bronx side was mostly a cliff.

"That's a lot of city, " We observed. "We always come in from Jersey so we've never seen this end."
"You know it seems to spread out more east to west," Ezzied noted. "Tapers off into country pretty quick once you get past Westchester."

"Yeah, you're practically into Pennsylvania before you see a cow. Long Island's getting pretty built up too."

"Yeeppp... High Bridge coming up... next is the Sandy Ham..."

That would be the Alexander Hamilton bridge. There was another few minutes of parkland to look at before the landscape returned to a few more blocks of walkups. The sight of a subway yard was Ezzie's cue that she would be hopping off soon.

"Engineer slows it down to almost nothing and I can practically walk off... head office doesn't care cuz we gotta take these curves slow anyway... hey Jenny I thought you were goin' to sleep!"

Jenny stood in the doorway in a bathrobe and slippers with her hair down and all frizzed out, looking kind of like someone who had tried to kill themselves with sleeping pills only to find it somehow didn't take.

"Leg was a little better so I figured I'd see you off..."

We could hear the brakes squealing in these little staccato bursts as the train slowed to midtown traffic speed. We're almost sure we heard 'shave and a haircut - two bits'.

"He's giving me my signal..." Ezzie said as she opened the door on the Bronx side as one of those lift bridges came into view on the river side. We could see a little parking lot by the track past some bushes as the brakes let out a long squeal.

"Abyssinia!" she shouted as she clambered down to the ground and into the lot, waving to the engineer to signal she was clear. The squealing stopped and we could feel the motors picking up speed as we rounded our way through the Spuyten Duyvil.

"What a lucky day! I never thought I'd get to see her again..."

All we could do is give her a long stare.