I drifted closer, pretending I wanted to look through the window behind her. The 10:10 was on time for once, according to the notice board. All I could see was a segment of bare track, but I rested one knee on the bench and set my forehead to the glass and peered down. I think she felt crowded. She gathered herself together somehow; hid behind her paper. I backed off and turned away to show I posed no threat.
Of course, if she really was my angel, she would know that on her own.
Check out what I was wearing: a white oxford shirt and brown corduroys. No tie (there were limits, after all), but I had exchanged my leather jacket for my one tweed sports coat and trimmed my own hair as best I could and shaved that very morning. I was so clean-shaven, my face seemed to belong to someone else. Kind of plastic-feeling. A whole new surface to it. My skin felt stretched across my bones.
When the loudspeaker called out my train, I started down to the platform ahead of all the others so she wouldn’t think I was following her. And I kept my back to the stairs after I arrived. I could feel her approaching, though, like a current of air, a change of temperature in a room. Her presence, descending the steps. I fixed my eyes on a point far up the tracks.
Two young women stood nearby. Sisters, from the look of them, both dark and pretty and dressed in layers of black. The taller one was trying to convince the little one to come all the way to New York with her. The little one insisted she was getting off in Philly. I tallied up the other passengers: twenty or so, at the most. With luck, it wouldn’t be hard for Sophia to find a seat all her own. Then I would come along, nonchalant, couldn’t care less. “Is this seat taken?” Or maybe not ask. Just sit, kerplunk, looking elsewhere, before she could claim she was saving a place for a friend.
Not that she would tell an actual lie, you wouldn’t think.
But just to be on the safe side.
At the end of the track our train appeared, only a dot yet but growing. I stepped closer to the edge of the platform. The man next to me wore earphones looped beneath his jaw instead of over his head, which made him look like the bearded version of Abraham Lincoln. Just past him, Sophia rummaged through her bag for her ticket. Never mind that it was nowhere near time to have it ready.
The train drew up beside us, ding-dinging. Abe Lincoln and the two sisters entered through the door nearest me, but I walked over to where Sophia stood. Several people got off, and then a woman with a baby got on. Sophia followed her. I came next. I was too close behind and hung back, biding my time.
It was unfortunate that the car was almost empty. This way, she would wonder why I didn’t sit by myself. Well, too bad. She chose a seat at her right and for one awful moment seemed about to stay on the aisle but then, with a kind of flounce, she moved over. A good thing, too, because I was holding up a whole line of people behind me. Quick as a wink, I settled beside her. She kept her face turned toward the window. Her newspaper was nowhere in sight. She must have stowed it in her bag.
Passengers came shuffling down the aisle, and I watched the backs of their heads once they’d passed. A kid with a Mohawk, all prickly white scalp and pierced ears. Two nuns in short navy headdresses and square coats and thick-soled shoes. An old, bent man, creeping. I was trying so hard to sit still, to keep my elbow from touching Sophia’s, that I was almost rigid. (As a rule, I twitched and jittered, jiggled a foot, drummed my fingers.) Face it: I felt kind of shy. Kind of unconfident.
Scared to death, to be honest.
The train lurched and started moving. Sophia delved into the bag at her feet and came up with a section of newspaper. It was folded open to the business page. Business! Lord above. I wondered why I was kidding myself. Did I just not have enough to occupy my mind? Or what?
We were passing people’s wintry backyards, filled with scrap lumber and rusty shovels and plastic wading pools propped on their sides, everything skimmed with snow. The conductor came through saying, “Tickets, please.” When Sophia handed him hers, I saw that she wore a Timex watch with a wide black leather wristband.
She wouldn’t have any message for me. She was merely annoyed that I’d sat down beside her; and here I was, like a fool, waiting for her to inform me how to begin my life.
Wouldn’t she laugh at me if she knew!
When Great-Granddad saw his angel, she lit the air of the woodenworks. A golden dust, she dispersed, floating in the gloom, he reported. Lingering for an hour, at least, after she left the room. The rhyme was intentional. He wrote up his encounter in the form of an epic poem whose scheme was A, A, A … till he ran out of words to rhyme with A, evidently, and then B, B, B …, and so forth. Not what you would call a literary masterpiece. Even so, my family treasured it. They kept it in a glass-doored bookcase in my father’s study. A gray cloth ledger with maroon leather corners, containing three pages of penciled business accounts followed by seventeen pages of “A Providential Visitation, April 1898.” Since then, the tradition was for all the Gaitlins to file reports on their angels — though Great-Granddad’s was the only poem. Myself, I planned to stick to prose, when the time came. And right from paragraph one, I would stress my reliability, my solid and trustworthy nature. It’s a mistake to go all misty and poetic when you’re trying to convince your readers you’ve seen an angel.
Sophia said, “Excuse me, please.”
She had her bag in both hands now, and she was perched on the edge of her seat, knees angled toward me, getting ready to rise. I said, “Oh!” and stood up and stepped into the aisle. She sidled out, bulky and wide-hipped, and started toward the front of the car. Was she leaving me? What was she doing? I sat back down and watched her bypass first one empty seat and then another; so I was partly reassured. She didn’t stop at the rest room, either, but vanished through the end door. Maybe she was buying a snack. And her ticket stub was still in its overhead slot, her newspaper still in her seat. I was pretty sure she’d be returning.
I checked to see what news items she’d been reading. Plans for a merger between two banks. A growing concern over Maryland’s bond rating.
She was probably some kind of financial wheeler-dealer. And I was out of my mind; and this train trip had cost me a whole lot of money for nothing, not to mention the goodwill of my best-paying customer. Mrs. Morey had wanted me to take down all her curtains for laundering today. I’d told her at the very last minute that I would be out of town. “Out of town!” she said. “You can’t be out of town! This isn’t a Philadelphia week; it’s the first Saturday of the month!”
Oh, my life was a wide-open book to half the old ladies in Baltimore.
There was a sudden rise in the noise level, and I looked toward the front of the car and saw Sophia stepping through the door, gliding back in my direction at a stately, level pace. She hadn’t left me, after all. I felt so grateful that when I noticed something in her hands, I thought for a second she was bringing me a gift. But it was only a Styrofoam cup of coffee. She paused next to me, and I jumped up, and — oh, God.
Jostled against her coffee. Spilled it all down her front.
“Geez!” I said. “I’m so — geez! I’m such an oaf!”
“That’s all right,” she murmured, but in a faint and reluctant tone that made it clear it was not all right. And who could blame her? Dark splotches stained the feather coat. Even her hands were wet. She shook one hand in the air, meanwhile hanging on to the cup with the other. “Allow me,” I said, and I took the cup away from her — both of us still standing, braced against the swaying of the train — so that she could get a tissue out of her bag. She wiped her hands and then ducked into her seat and started dabbing at the splotches on her coat. I slid in after her. “I could kick myself,” I said. Even through the Styrofoam I could tell that the coffee was hot, which made things all the worse. “I hope you didn’t get burned,” I told her.