Hands thrust in back pockets, though, I am ready to be used; to lend a hand, prove myself guileless as old Huck. There might, in fact, be a late-night cocktail invitation in the works as a “thankee,” an intime in the dark taproom of the August, alongside the bushed lawyers. After that, who knows? More? Less?
Deep in my pocket my fingers touch an inconclusive paper. Walter’s poor letter, folded in thirds and tucked behind my wallet, forgotten to this moment. And a sudden cheerless warmth rises out under my chin and stings my ears and scalp.
This is Walter’s sister, this woman! Wicker basket. Healthy shoes. Roosevelt bio. She has already arrived for her doleful duties, and with enough dry, grief-dispelling practicality to send a drowning man clambering for the bottom. She is some miserable Montessori teacher from Coshocton. A woman with a reading list and an agenda, friends in the Peace Corps, an NPR program log deep in her Brazil bag. A tidy, chestless Pat or Fran from Oberlin or Reed, with high board scores. My heart pounds a tomtom for the now disappeared blondie, whirling away in her Grand Prix to some out-of-the-way Italian snuggery with the nerve to stay open Easters. I ache to be along. Dinner could be on me. Drinks. The tip. Don’t leave me to sensible grief and a night of plain-talk. (Of course I’m not sure it’s her, but neither am I sure it isn’t.) This woman has the look to me of trouble’s sister, and I’d rather put my trust in my heart and my money where my mouth isn’t.
“Excuse me, please,” scratchy Fran/Pat says in her bony, businesslike voice as she comes toward me. She has an iron handshake, I’m sure, and knows death to be just one of life’s slow curves you have to stand in on, brother or no brother. I would hate to see what else she has in that basket. “I wonder if you’d mind terribly….” She speaks in a phony boarding school accent, nose up, seeing me — if at all — out the bottom third of her eyes.
The train discharges a loud hiss. A bell rings a last shrilling peel. “Boooard,” the trainman shouts from his dark vestibule. The train lurches, and in that sudden instant I am aboard, hurt knee and all, unexpectedly a passenger, and away. “I’m sorry,” I say, as my face slides past, “I’ve got to catch a train.”
The woman stands blinking as I recede, her mouth open for the next words I will not have to hear, words for which even a roll in the hay would not be antidote.
She grows small — gnawingly small and dim — in the powdery depot light, poised in a moment when certainty became confusion; confuseci among other things, that people do things so differently out here, that people are more abrupt, less willing to commit themselves, less schooled in old-fashioned manners; confused why the least of God’s children would do anyone a bad turn by not helping. Maybe Pat/Fran is right. It is confusing, though sometimes — let me say — it’s better not to take a chance. You can take too many chances and end up with nothing but regret to keep you company through a night that simply — for the life of you — won’t end.
13
Clatter-de-clack, we swagger and sway up through the bleak-lit corridor of evening Jersey. Mine is one of the old coaches with woven brown plastic seats and bilgy window glass. A cooked metal odor fills the aisles and clings to the luggage racks, as the old lights flicker and dim. It is another side to the public accommodation coin.
Still, it’s not bad to be moving. With the traveling seat turned toward me, it’s easy to make myself comfortable, feet up, and watch float past the sidereal townlets of Edison, Metuchen, Metropark, Rahway, and Elizabeth.
Of course, I have no earthly idea where I’m bound or what to do once I get there. Fast getaways from sinister forces are sometimes essential, though what follows can mean puzzlement. I haven’t ridden the night train to New York, I’m sure, since X and I rode up to see Porgy and Bess one winter night when it snowed. How long ago — five years? Eight? The specific past has a way of blending, an occurrence I don’t particularly mind. And tonight the prospect of detraining in Gotham seems less spooky than usual. It seems a more local-feeling place with a sweet air of the illicit, like a woman you barely know and barely want, but who lets you anyway. Things change. We have that to look forward to. In fact, climbing down tonight onto the streets of any of these little crypto-homey Jersey burgs could heave me into a panic worse than New York ever has.
Only a few solitary passengers share my coach. Most are sleeping, and I don’t recognize any as faces I saw from the platform. I wouldn’t even mind seeing someone I knew. Bert Brisker would be a welcome companion, full of some long, newsy ramble about the book he’s reviewing or some interview he’s conducted with a famous author. I’d be interested to hear his opinion about the future of the modern novel. (I miss this clubby in-crowd talk, the chance to make good on the conviction that your formal education hasn’t left you completely shipwrecked.) Usually Bert is deep in his own work, and I’m in mine. And once we leave the platform, where we chuckle and grouse in special code talk, we rarely utter another word. But I’d be glad now for some friendly jawboning, I haven’t done enough of that; it is a bad part of being in the company of athletes and people I don’t know well and will never know, people who have damned little of general interest to talk about. To be a sportswriter, sad to say it, is to live your life mostly with your thoughts, and only the edge of others’. That’s exactly why Bert got out of the business, and why he’s at home tonight with Penny and his girls and his sheepdogs, watching Shakespeare on HBO, or dozing off with a good book. And why I’m alone on an empty, bad-smelling milk train, headed into a dark kingdom I have always feared.
The young mackerel-eye trainman sways into my car and gives me a look of distrust as he processes my ticket money and dedicates a stub on my seatback. He does not like it that I have to buy my passage en route, or that I wouldn’t give a lift to Walter’s sister back up the line, or that I’m wearing a madras shirt and seem happy and so much his opposite when the rest of the world known to him — in his sheeny black conductor’s suit — is strictly where it belongs. He is not yet thirty, by my guess, and I give him a good customer’s no-sweat smile to let him know it’s really all right. I’m no threat to any of his beliefs. In fact, I probably share most of them. I can tell, though, by his fisheye that he doesn’t like the night and what it holds — inconstant, marauding, sinister, peaceless thing to be steered clear of here inside the thrumming tube of his professional obligation. And since I’ve come out of it, unexpectedly, I am suspect too. Quick as he can, he pockets his punch, scans the other passengers’ stubs down the aisle and abandons me for the bar car, where I see him begin talking to the Negro waiter.
When I paid for my ticket, I’ve once again fingered Walter’s letter, and under the circumstances there’s nothing to do but read it, which I do, starting in Rahway, with the aid of the pained little overhead light.
Dear Franko,
I woke up today with the clearest idea of what I need to do. I’m absolutely certain about it. Write a novel! I don’t know what the hell it will be for or who’ll read it or any of that, but I’ve got the writer’s itch now and whoever wants to read it can or they can forget about it. I’ve gotten beyond everything, and that feels good!
What I wrote was: “Eddie Grimes waked up on Easter morning and heard the train whistle far away in a forgotten suburban station. His very first thought of the day was, ‘You lose control by degrees.’” That seemed like a hell of a good first line. Eddie Grimes is me. It’s a novel about me, with my own ideas and personal concepts and beliefs built into it. It’s hard to think of your own life’s themes. You’d think anyone could do it. But I’m finding it very, very hard. Pretty close to impossible. I can think of yours a lot better, Frank. I’m conservative, passionate, inventive, and fair — as an investment banker, which works great! But it’s hard to get that down and translated into the novel form, I see. I’ve gotten side-tracked in this.