30th Street Station
In 1958, Angelo Rizzuto took a photograph of a mother and child waiting in New York’s Penn Station, a glass-domed extravaganza. The child looks like a doll sitting a few inches away from the mother, who wears white gloves and appears absorbed in thought. Likewise, the child is looking in a different direction. What liberates them from their loneliness is the magnificent space of the railroad station. The station humanizes everyone in it. The photographer was a very troubled man, who lived alone and suffered from paranoid delusions.
I could be the doll-like child in that photograph.
But I am not.
I’m a different person in a different place, with a memory that must serve as a photograph in words.
I am waiting for my father in Philadelphia’s 30thStreet Station, and in my waiting, I will wait for whatever it is that you are waiting for. Everyone is waiting for something.
Every Friday, my mother and I went to the 30th Street Station to meet my father, coming back from New Castle, Delaware, where he worked in the oil refineries as a lead burner.
Yes. Lead. You can imagine what that did to his brain.
All week long he lived in a stripped-down boarding house for men. From his bedroom window, he could see the fire escapes of the buildings around him. There were no castles in New Castle, Delaware. No new ones, or old ones. He spent his evenings making detailed drawings of those fire escapes in the setting sun with the fires of the oil refineries blazing in the distance.
None of those drawings has survived the years of deciding what to keep and what to toss. They were tossed.
One Friday night, I pleaded with my mother to go to the concession stand and buy a package of gum for him. You know the kind of gum. It comes in what are called “sticks” of gum. I held the gum in my small hand, as we waited for his train to arrive.
What’s strange is that thirty-three years later I would marry a man who would take a striking color photograph of that concession stand, a photograph that is one of my favorites of his entire body of work.
My father was not on the train.
“How can I give him the gum?” I asked.
“You’ll give it to him when he gets here,” my mother said. “He’ll be on the next train. He must have missed this one.”
The clickety-clack information board was a marvel to watch and hear, an insane typewriter taking instructions from a trapped squirrel. The information was constantly changing, millisecond by millisecond. When it showed the next train from Wilmington, my mother pulled me up off the bench to go to the arrival gate.
We waited as the passengers, some fatigued, some excited, passed us. A man with a parrot. A woman with peacock feathers in her hat. Men with briefcases, lunchboxes, and backpacks. But not one of them my father. Not in a disguise. Not in his real self. Not as I remembered him.
My father did not appear. He was not on the second train.
“Well, I’ll be darned,” my mother said.
I still held the package of gum in my hand, as if it was some kind of talisman. A rabbit’s foot.
We returned to our seat on the commodious wooden bench that reminded me of the pews in the Catholic church, without the red velvet kneeling pad. In fact, the grandeur of the place—the high ceiling, the windows, the chandeliers—resembled that of a great cathedral. The pink marble floor glistened like polished light.
After the rush hour, the space became emptier and quieter, but the sound of the arrival-departure announcement board continued. The other sounds became more diffused, as if millions of dandelion seed sounds had dispersed throughout the space.
I started to fall asleep, the way children do when we are away from home. We can sleep anywhere, we children.
We moved to a different room to wait, a quiet room to the side of the main area, with a wall covered with carved stone figures. Here we were by ourselves.
I curled up into a kind of ball next to my mother.
My mother started to talk, in a quiet whisper. Almost as if she was talking to herself.
“He’ll be on the next one. I’m sure.”
I drifted in and out of sleep.
“When he was nine years old, your father and grandmother, came down with typhoid fever in Stone Harbor. That’s a beach town in New Jersey. It’s where Grace Kelly’s family had a house. Your grandmother died and no one could figure out how to tell your father. He came home from the hospital, thinking his mother was still alive, looking for her, asking, ‘Where’s mommy? Where’s mommy?’”
“You’re so dumb, you don’t know mommy died.”
Sometimes the words are worse than the reality.
He never recovered from those words.
We waited for the third train. When he wasn’t on the third train, I thought the worst.
He’s gone. I don’t have a father.
In this colossal space, we were miniscule, two pieces of gravel in a monumental cathedral of stone and marble. I was cold and curled up close to my mother, who warmed me with her coat. As the station grew emptier, a strange and haunting echo filled the space. I couldn’t figure out where the echo was coming from. An echo is a copy, not the original. The sounds of trains, human voices, the clickety-click of the information sign, footsteps, announcements over a godlike speaker system all melded together into one ambient echo purr.
I stared up at the coffered ceiling and drank in the chandeliers, all the while feeling as if I had died, and this was some kind of heaven-terminal-waiting room-purgatory. I’d heard all those words in my short life.
A pocketful of coins fell on the floor somewhere in the station. We all jumped. My mother and I and everyone we could see sitting in the other room looked up to see where the sound came from. Then, shoulder by shoulder, people shrugged.
Horses galloped toward me from the wall, all of them, with their heads nodding at me, pointing at me. We’re coming. I wasn’t sure if they were coming to get me or coming to get me. The same words, but different results. Attack me or carry me off. And where was my father?
In front of the horses in the wall sculpture, a woman had children spilling out from under her. If I died, I could just move right up onto the wall and stay there until my father got here, in a thousand years. That’s the title of one of the stories in the Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales book my mother carried with her everywhere, like a comb or a tube of lipstick.
She read from the book: “Yes, in a thousand years they’ll come on wings of steam through the air and across the ocean…In a thousand years, they’ll come!”
In a thousand years, he’ll come.
“He has a lot of nerve, leaving us alone like this. He could have called the station. They have a PA system. He could have gotten us a message. What’s wrong with that man?”
My mother held onto me so tightly that I felt she was squeezing me into a small package, like when you try to stuff a pillow with cotton or foam, and all this squeezing made me thirsty. Dry in my mouth.
“When it’s morning, we’ll go home, whether he’s come or not. We’ll go home and find out what happened.”
Have you ever been in a car traveling along a narrow road at a very high altitude? The road winds, and the views of the landscape are beautiful vistas, but there are no lookout points, no shoulder to lean from, no relief from the threat of danger, only the possibility that if you let down your guard, enjoy the beauty and grandeur of the earth, you might go over the precipice to your death.
That is what I was feeling in moments of those hours of waiting.
The hardening started when I held my breath too long. I shouldn’t have done that. A little game. You breathe in deep, then hold it, then breathe out. After a few times, I felt light-headed. A part of me seemed to freeze up, the way you feel when you can’t catch your breath or have an asthma attack. I’ve had asthma. Then my arms curled up around my body. The fetal position, they call it.
There is a disappearing father trope in the story universe. Jimmy Breslin’s alcoholic father, a piano player, went out one day to buy rolls and never returned. Where do they go, the disappearing fathers?
Only your mother really knows who you are.
Fathers can never be sure.
My father knew who I was, where I came from, so why was he not on any of the trains?
It must have been the gum. He didn’t want any gum. The only way to avoid having to refuse me was not to come home.
Suddenly he appeared. Standing in front of us, as if he had been there all the time, watching us wonder what had happened to him.
By then I was hard as a rock, the size of a football.
“She’s asleep,” my mother said.
“I’m sorry. There was a train wreck, on the other track. We sat for hours and hours waiting for the tracks to be cleared. There wasn’t any announcement?”
“I didn’t hear any,” my mother said.
I could hear their voices. My mother’s sounded like a bell tolling over and over again, near and far. My father’s voice, what I longed to hear, sounded like glass shattering. I tried to respond but nothing in my body would move. Only my eyes, fixed on the wall sculpture, touched the plaster. I was fascinated by the sculpture on the wall. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I touched with my gaze the fleece of the sheep, the toes and feet, the fruit, the fringes of pieces of cloth, the faces of the children. I was blinded by what I was looking at and made immovable by the sensation of wonder.
I had become a piece of limestone, not as hard as Tennessee marble, not as soft as clay. Too large to toss into a pond and make concentric circles.
My father picked me up and carried me like a loaf of frozen bread, as if I would thaw out and come alive when we got home.
Margaret Campbell: Philadelphia and Upper Darby, Pennsylvania are where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. With a BA in French from Muhlenberg College and an MA in Comparative Literature from NYU, I have spent much of my life with photographers and artists, creating literary installations at colleges and galleries in Pennsylvania and New York City. I consider my work to be a form of construction. I build poems and stories out of the materials of my life, making a home for memories, observations, and deep thought.
