Christmas Bliss (22 page)

Wandering in circles, I came to a turquoise Formica-topped dinette table in a 1950s-era boomerang shape. The price? Ten bucks. I could have wept. Back in Savannah, I could easily sell a table like this for $250. But there was no way to get it home.

An old army-green footlocker sat atop the table. Idly, I opened the lid and began to paw through the contents. I’d half expected to find some old soldier’s war memorabilia—maybe an army blanket or canteen, or some yellowing newspapers announcing
VICTORY IN JAPAN
.

But these looked like the peacetime souvenirs of a well-traveled civilian. I opened a dusty cardboard shirt box and found dozens of sheets of unused vintage hotel stationery. The kitschy logos and letterheads looked to be from the forties and fifties, gathered from hotels and motor courts ranging from Cheyenne to Omaha to Poughkeepsie to Montpelier to Clearwater. The box would fit easily into my suitcase. I set it aside and kept digging. Another shirt box held hotel “Do Not Disturb” door hangers from eight different hotels, all with fabulous old graphics. I added the box to my pile.

Peeling back the layers of the box I found half a hatbox. Careful not to tear the brittle old floral-printed cardboard, I heard a clink of glass as I removed the box from the trunk.

Lifting the lid, I saw folds of the palest pink tissue, which revealed a cluster of old mercury-glass Christmas ornaments. I exhaled slowly as I set each one on the tabletop. There were four little Christmas cottages, each in a different tarnished pastel color—pink, blue, green, and a dusty rose. Four more ornaments turned out to be mercury glass churches, complete with tiny steeples. Beneath the next layer of tissue were a baker’s dozen of mercury glass clip-on bird ornaments with hand-painted detailing and real feathers applied as wings and tails. Tiny bits of the feathers floated into the air, even as I added them to the pile of other ornaments.

More tissue layers revealed a whole forest of vintage bottle-brush Christmas trees. Each had a wire base screwed into a tiny red wooden pot. On the underside of one was the original McCrory’s price tag. Nineteen cents. Some of the trees were green, but others were tinted in pastel colors, with globs of snow dusted all over them. Others had the teeniest glass ornaments glued on, or fine coatings of silver, gold, or green glass glitter. There were fourteen trees, the largest ten inches tall, the smallest less than an inch.

Jackpot.

I examined the footlocker lid for a price, finally spying
$5
scrawled in black grease pencil on the underside of the lid. But there were no prices on any of the contents, and I guessed that the trunk had probably never been opened since it had been purchased.

“Hello?” I walked toward the back of the shop, hoping to find a salescounter.

A set of old wooden shutters cordoned off the rear of the shop from what looked like a back office. A grungy glass display case sat in front of the shutters, and behind that was an old black vinyl sofa. Stretched out on the sofa, softly snoring, was a very tall, very slender old gentleman with a scruffy white beard.

“Hello?” I called softly again. And then louder, “Sir?”

He sat bolt upright and stared right at me.

“What’s that?” His voice was hoarse, phlegmy. He rubbed his eyes. “Who are you?”

“Uh, I’m a customer. The door was unlocked, so I’ve been doing a little shopping. You are open for business, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” He walked around the counter and shook my hand. I saw that he was wearing a tattered red sweatshirt, red corduroy pants, and black boots.

“Frances LaFarge. What can I do you for?”

“I found some things in an old footlocker and was wondering about prices.”

He followed me through the maze of furniture until we’d reached the boomerang table.

He pointed at the footlocker. “You’re not talking about that, right? Because that’s not for sale. Definitely not.”

“Well, I don’t want the trunk.” I pointed out the hatbox and the cardboard boxes beside it. “I really just want these things.”

I’d hoped he’d glance at the pile and make me one price. In my dreams!

Instead he opened each box, rifling the contents. He pulled on his beard, coughed five or six times. Rifled through the boxes again and sighed.

“This trunk came from a very dear lady I met out in Connecticut,” he said. “She’d been an actress in her youth, with a traveling theatrical troupe. I cleaned out her house shortly before she died. These were her special treasures, you know.”

I nodded gravely. “I love old things like this. These sweet vintage ornaments and the old hotel stationery—they just speak to me.”

“And what do they say?” he asked.

“Buy me!” I answered, with what I hoped was a winning smile.

“For how much?” he countered.

I did some quick math in my head. If I offered too much I’d never get my investment back, too little and I risked insulting him.

“How much were you thinking?” I asked.

“Hmm.” He ran his hands over the hatbox. “How’s $12.38? Cash.”

It was an odd number and a crazy cheap price. I reached for my billfold. “That sounds like a very fair price.” I handed him a ten and a five. “Please keep the change.”

“Merry Christmas,” he said, giving me a wink. I winked right back.

With my plastic tote bag bulging with my newfound bargains, I stepped out of the shop, directly back into reality.

Snow was falling. Not just falling, sheeting down. The sidewalk was already coated, and the cobblestones in the lane were blanketed.

I heard a ding coming from my phone, dug it out of my purse, and read the text message. It was from Daniel.

“U busy?”

I had to remove my gloves to tap out a reply.

“What’s up?”

He texted back.
“Meet @768 Fifth Ave. Take cab.”

Chapter 26

I had to walk several blocks through near white-out snow before I could finally get a cab. The city seemed eerily quiet, with snow muffling the usual Manhattan street racket.

The taxi’s heater was blasting and the noisy wipers were mostly ineffective at keeping the windshield clear. The cab crept along the streets with the driver hunched forward, trying to see through the curtain of snow.

It wasn’t until we’d pulled over at the curb and I stepped out of the cab that I realized where I’d arrived. It was the Plaza Hotel.

*   *   *

Daniel stood in the lobby, leaning against one of the marble columns, trying to look nonchalant.

I rushed over and threw my arms around his neck. “You remembered!”

We worked our way through the throng of fur-coated women and little girls dressed in their Christmas best red velvet frocks and patent leather Mary Janes, all of them waiting to enter the fairyland-looking Palm Court.

As befitting the holiday crush, service was agonizingly slow. But eventually the waiter brought us glasses of champagne and a three-tiered stand of dainty finger sandwiches, miniature elaborate frosted cakes and sweets, and jewel-colored fruits. As scenic as the food was, I was more impressed with the room itself. Enormous glittering crystal chandeliers lit the room, and overhead, the domed ceiling was made entirely of stained glass.

“How on earth did you manage to get us in here?” I asked after I’d polished off two glasses of champagne and about a million calories worth of tea cakes.

“Dumb luck,” Daniel said. “And BeBe. She texted me yesterday, asking if I’d taken you here yet. Everybody warned me that I’d never get a reservation—not this time of year. But I just kept calling, and right before I texted you, I managed to get through—and they’d had some cancellations for this afternoon. Probably because of the weather.”

“This place is divine,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant while I leaned over and unzipped a boot, easing my blistered right foot out of the faux-leather casing.

Daniel pointed at my tote bag. “What’s all that?”

I told him about my junk jaunt and showed him one of the bottle-brush Christmas trees.

“Are those to sell or to keep?”

“I’m keeping all of them! They’ll be my souvenir of my first trip to New York, Christmas, everything.”

“I’m glad the trip wasn’t a total bust,” he said, glancing down at his watch. It was past five.

“You need to get back to the restaurant, right?” I tried not to let my disappointment show.

“I’m worried about getting a cab in all this snow,” he admitted. “Traffic’s gonna be a bear.”

He paid up and we made our way toward the lobby exit, where a huge throng of people were standing around, staring out the window—at a sea of white.

“Damn,” Daniel said. “I can’t believe it’s snowing even harder than when I got here.”

I clung to his hand as we made our way through the crowd. Stepping out of the overheated hotel lobby felt like stepping into a deep freezer. The temperature had continued dropping, and a bitter cold wind sent gusts of snow whirling through the darkened night, even under the covered hotel parapet.

A quartet of scarlet-coated doormen stood out on the street, whistling ineffectively at the occasional cab that happened by on the oddly quiet street. But none stopped, and after ten minutes, we went back inside to get warm and regroup.

Daniel pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll call the car service Carlotta uses. I’ll get a Town Car to drop me at the restaurant and then take you back to the apartment.”

He listened without speaking, then hung up, his expression glum.

“Nobody answering the phone,” he reported. “I got a recording saying they weren’t dispatching cars due to inclement weather.”

“What do we do now?” I was starting to feel uneasy about all that snow. It had been a beautiful novelty earlier in the week, but now it seemed somehow ominous.

He was already working the phone again. “Carlotta has a four-wheel-drive. Maybe she can come get us.”

“Hi,” he said suddenly. “Look, we’re stuck at the Plaza. Cabs are nonexistent and the car service has shut down. Any chance?” He listened intently, shaking his head.

“You’re kidding?

“For real?

“What about all the dinner bookings?”

He nodded again.

“Okay. Talk tomorrow. Good luck getting home.”

“What?” I asked. “Bad news?”

“The snow’s worse than we knew. The weather service is calling it a full-blown blizzard. None of the rest of the staff can get into work, so Carlotta closed down the restaurant an hour ago. She was trying to drive back to her place on the Upper East Side, but there were so many abandoned cars she just pulled over to the side of the street to walk the rest of the way home.”

“Oh wow,” I said weakly. “A blizzard? What are we gonna do?”

He looked around the lobby and spotted a small brocade-covered settee on the opposite side of the room. “Go stake us out a place on that couch. I’m gonna see about getting us a room here.”

“For the night? At the Plaza? Can we afford that?”

“I don’t think we have a whole lot of other choices,” Daniel said. “We’re snowed in.”

*   *   *

Snowed in! How romantic. How terrifying. I was getting married in forty-eight hours. And I was scheduled to fly home in less than twenty-four. How would a blizzard affect the airlines?

I stayed on hold with the airline for forty-five minutes, listening to a recorded voice tell me how very important my call was to them. Every once in a while I looked up, to see Daniel, working his way through the line of people standing in front of the hotel desk.

Neither of us seemed to be making much progress.

I was still on hold when he drifted back across the lobby, his dejected posture telling me the situation without words.

“No luck?” I asked as he slumped down onto the settee beside me.

He shook his head. “The hotel’s completely sold out. I tried to get on a waiting list, but the desk clerk just laughed and called it a ‘quaint notion.’ I called some other hotels nearby while I waited. No go. Everything in Manhattan is booked solid. Who are you on hold for?”

“Delta. What if they start canceling flights?”

“They already have,” he replied. “I thought about the same thing. There’s a notice on the website saying all flights out of LaGuardia are canceled.”

“What about the other airports?” I asked. “JFK? And how far away is Newark?”

“Everything in the tristate area is shut down,” Daniel said. He leaned his head against the back of the settee and tucked his arm around my shoulders. “Better get comfortable. I think we’re in for a long night.”

I must have dozed off. When I awoke some time later, Daniel was standing over me, calling my name softly. He held out his hand to me.

Groggily, I took it. “What’s happening? Where are we going?”

He held out a large bronze key. “To our room. C’mon.”

People were camped out in various stages of sleep all over the lobby. Elegant sofas meant to seat three or four held five and six people, with blankets spread across their laps. Those fur-coat-clad women we’d seen earlier in the Plaza Court were sleeping sitting up in wing chairs, their daughters resting on their laps, the coats serving as makeshift comforters.

“How did you manage to get a room?” I asked, as Daniel led me toward the elevator.

“Dumb luck once again,” he said wearily. “I went up to the concierge desk to ask if they had an extra charger for my phone, and I even offered my credit card to pay for the thing. The guy looked at my card and remembered me.”

“You know the concierge here?” I was duly impressed.

“Not really. But he knows the chefs at all the important restaurants in town. It’s his job. He sent one of their guests over the other night, without a reservation, and Carlotta gave the guy a good table. So he’s giving us a room.”

“But they told you they were sold out.”

“They always hold a few rooms back for emergencies. He swears this is the last one left in the joint.”

The elevator doors slid open, and we were on the hotel’s top floor.

“The penthouse? We’re staying in the penthouse at the Plaza?”

“Don’t get yourself too worked up,” Daniel warned. “The concierge said it’s actually a maid’s room.”