“I wonder what he’s grousing about,” Rita Tessinger said, as if he were ungrateful for the privilege of breathing the same air which she breathed with such pleasant undulations of her diaphragm.
“Don’t make personal comments, dear,” said Mrs. Tessinger, like a record prepared by Emily Post.
“What other kind of comments are there?”
“We could talk about the weather,” the woman on the other side of Rita said in tones of husky amusement. “Hellish, isn’t it? Those lake winds shrivel the flesh on my bones. Me for the sunny South.”
“I love the South,” said Rita, to indicate that she’d been there. “But I love Chicago too. It’s so exhilarating.”
“It’s a big city, that’s one thing you can say for it. But I can get fed up with a big city.”
She spoke as if she had seen a good many big cities. I wondered in what capacity. She was a sharp-nosed woman in her fifties with an overpainted weatherbeaten face, but with something of an air which even her taste in clothes couldn’t completely destroy. She wore a wool suit of robin’s egg blue, and a flame-colored blouse which matched the color of her highly decorated cheeks. Beneath the mascara camouflage her eyes were old, bland and shrewd. When her hands moved, a small travelling museum of junk jewelry clinked on her arms. Her hands moved constantly, shaking in a steady tremor of senile ecstasy. Yet she had an air. She looked like a woman who had been through a great deal and come out with money, or with power in some other form.
Mary caught me watching her and, with the impersonal cattiness of women, whispered: “Isn’t that hat a fright?” It was. It was large and haphazardly plumed. The whole woman was a fright. But the man next to her didn’t seem to think so. He looked sideways at her frequently with naïve interest.
At first glance, his interest in such a woman was the most noticeable thing about him. His plump, uncertain joviality, his carefully cut and thinning hair, his healthy shoulders becoming infiltrated by fat, his thick silk ankles crossed in front of him, his severely pressed and already crumpling grey pin-stripe suit, and his expensive and passionate tie announced: I am a successful American business man. His hands were large and hard-looking, indicating that he had once worked with them. He wore a handsome ruby ring, indicating that he would never work with them again.
The train trembled and came to life, jerked two or three times and began to move, and the successful American business man took his cue.
“It’s great to get under way, isn’t it?” he said to the object of his interest. “I thought we were never going to get going.”
“Me either,” she replied. “California here I come.”
“You live in California, do you?”
“More or less. Mostly more. Do you?”
“No, I can’t say I do. I have business interests there, take me down there two or three times a year. But I’ve never been able to stay long enough to get sick of it.”
“What business are you in?”
“Well, I have investments in various types of enterprise. Oil, for one thing. As a matter of fact, oil is getting to interest me more and more.”
He talked about the oil business.
Without a man to talk to, Rita estimated me, was challenged by Mary’s glance, dropped her eyes demurely, soon became restless again. She tapped a small neat foot on the rug, and puffs of dust rose up like smoke from little distant explosions.
“Don’t fidget,” said Mrs. Tessinger, without raising her fine eyes from Mademoiselle.
The morning wore on, and no one appeared to man the bar. The suburbs of Chicago fled backwards into merciful oblivion. The quick, monotonous rhythm of the train’s movement worked into my consciousness and beat there like a tiny extra heart. I began to get the feel of travelling, the slow excitement of escape.
After Bessie Land’s death every Detroit scene had a thin margin of nightmare, every Detroit building had a sub-basement of horror. I had told myself that I was going south to look for Hector Land, but I knew I was also running away from a city which had turned ugly in my eyes, and a problem that had become too tough.
One thing alleviated my feeling that I was evading responsibility, the fact that the FBI was working on the case. Hefler had attended the inquest on Friday, and had told me enough to assure me that it wouldn’t end there. He already had investigators at work on Black Israel, and while they were gathering their facts it was just as well to let Bessie Land remain officially a suicide.
I tried to convince my conscience that I had done and was doing what I could. Still, my sense of relief told me that I was running away. But it was soon borne in upon me that my running was as effectual as that of a squirrel in a wheel or a whippet on an endless oval. Wherever I went the rats had tunnelled under the streets. I thought I was taking a trip for the hell of it, but I found out that I was being taken for a long ride.
The first call for lunch brought me out of my thoughts. “I haven’t been a very brilliant companion recently,” I said to Mary.
“So what? I like you when you don’t talk, maybe even better.”
“I want to be loved for my eloquence alone.”
“No man ever was. Come on, we’d better get in line before it gets too long.”
Standing in line behind her I blew on the back of her neck and said: “Anyway, the things I want to say to you couldn’t be said with people looking on.”
She responded with the least pressure of her shoulder against my chest. The morning, which had seemed rather dismal, became a success, and the thought of the fun we were going to have on the trip went to my head like wine. The hangover from a wine jag is the worst there is.
An old lady directly in front of Mary turned around to look at her and, finding her appearance sympathetic, said: “Isn’t this an outrage, making us stand in line for lunch like this? I declare, if I had known it was going to be like this, I’d never have left Grand Rapids!”
“There are a lot of troops moving these days,” Mary said.
“Well, you would think the government would make some arrangement for people that pay their way.” The old lady noticed my uniform and became silent. Mary looked back at me with a quick smile.
“It used to be a real pleasure to eat on a diner,” the man behind me said. “Now I eat what I can get and call myself lucky. After all, there’s a war on. Isn’t that right, sir?”
It was the fat man in the oil business. I turned to acknowledge the question and saw that the woman in the flame-colored blouse was with him. Perhaps he was a faster worker than he looked.
The line slowly moved up to the diner, and we ended up at a table for four, with Mary and me on one side, and the oil man and his companion on the other.
“My name’s Anderson,” he said, reaching across the table to constrict my hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Ensign.”
“Drake is the name. This is Miss Thompson.”
“And this is Miss Green,” Anderson said.
Miss Green displayed teeth which were a little too good to be true, and said in a light bantering way: “So you two aren’t on your honeymoon, after all. The way you looked at each other I thought maybe you were on your honeymoon.”
Mary blushed and said, “We’re just friends.”
“Oh, well, you’re young yet,” Miss Green said surprisingly. “You’ve got plenty of time.”
“It’s us older folk that have to gather us rosebuds while we may,” Anderson said. “Isn’t that right?”
Miss Green laughed without meaning and lit a carmine-tipped cigarette with an automatic lighter. The tremor of her hand made the flame flicker steadily like a candle in a light draft. Something intangible about her reminded me of hospitals, and I wondered if she had a serious disease.