The train station was simple, a little red brick waiting room where the stationmaster sat smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes behind the bars of the ticket window, looking like a convict. There were two long benches for the passengers waiting for their trains. A few years before, there had been no place to get out of the weather or to buy a ticket. The brick structure had been built with the use of private funds—the river families had chipped in a few thousand each to construct it. It had been quite awful to see how the Flemings had campaigned to be asked to contribute.
Peter pulled into the station. The tracks went along the river, south to New York City, north to Canada. The ice on the river looked like shattered glass; here and there it was melted and steam rose up toward the morning light. The snowy, still lawns of the great houses swept down to the river. On the west side of the river, where there were more workers, a cement factory, closed during the worst days of the Depression, was going again, and its smokestacks sent up puffs of gray smoke that looked somehow colder than the sky.
Caitlin peered out the car window at the tracks. She could see the southbound train a mile away. It was burning coal and the smoke was black. The train was slowing down now and the smoke trailed over the engine and then the next car, and then the next, like a long vaporous scarf.
“We better hurry,” said Caitlin.
Peter was looking at his pocket watch and shaking his head. “Either they’ve changed the schedule on us or the train’s early.”
“Maybe the Flemings paid extra to get rid of her that much sooner,” said Annie. As she often did nowadays, after saying the worst, she laughed.
“Annie, what kind of thing is that to say?” The voice Peter used when he addressed his wife had within it the tone of a teacher who is only biding his time before his new position comes through, a teacher who has nothing left to say and only wants to avoid anything that will impede his departure.
“I’m only saying what is true,” Annie said. “And what we all know to be true.”
“Annie—”
“She’s right, she’s right,” said Caitlin, opening the door. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you.”
“It’s not embarrassment, it’s disgrace,” said Annie. Her arms were folded over her bosom. She was wearing her black overcoat with the fur collar. Her face was too narrow for her large, staring eyes.
The train sounded its whistle. That whistle had always been a howl of loneliness to Caitlin, who would hear it from her bedroom and long to be on her way somewhere or other. Yet now it was calling to her and she did not feel joy. She did not feel fear, either, or sadness, or even excitement. All she felt was vague tension, as if she were at the sink washing her hands and wondering if she might be late to work.
Caitlin grabbed her suitcases—plaid cloth, brand new, a goodbye, good-riddance present from the Flemings—and Peter dragged the old battered blue metal trunk by its parched and crumbling leather handle across the snow-packed parking lot. They had to hurry; the pressure of the moment overwhelmed whatever impulse any of them might have had for last-minute embraces, promises, tears. Caitlin scurried down the steep, icy stairs toward the track. Annie trudged behind her, grasping the handrail, with a faraway, faintly amused expression on her face, the wind ruffling the fur of her coat collar so that it touched her creased white face. Peter was last, limping, frowning each time the trunk bounced against a step as he dragged it behind him.
Caitlin had her ticket in her purse. She was the only passenger getting on in Leyden this morning. The train was coming from Albany; it would be full of politicians and well-to-do housewives, on their way to the city. In New York, Caitlin would change trains for Washington. She had three quarters in a new leather change purse so she could tip Red Caps at Grand Central and not have to struggle with her luggage. She was looking forward to that particularly. She had never before paid someone to do her work for her.
The train’s headlight was on, shining pale gold in the gray morning air. The engineer was having fun with the steam whistle; Caitlin imagined people rolling over in their warm beds for miles around, heeding the train for a moment, and then pulling the covers over their heads.
They had just one moment for their final goodbyes. A conductor was hanging out the open door as the car pulled into the station. He pointed at Caitlin’s trunk, gestured for her to just leave it there.
“I’ll write you tonight as soon as I’m there,” said Caitlin.
“Mr. Fleming said for you to sit on the right side, so you can watch the river,” said Peter.
“I think I’ve seen enough of this river,” said Caitlin, and then immediately regretted it.
He shook his head. “It’s changing so fast, though. Factories, houses. Poor Henry Hudson wouldn’t recognize it.”
Steam poured off the train. The enormous iron wheels were white with frost.
She saw the men inside the train reading newspapers, smoking, talking to one another. Caitlin quickly glanced down a row of windows looking for a woman’s face but saw none. Ah: there. An older woman wearing a silly feathered hat, reading no newspaper, smoking no cigarette, talking to no one: just sitting there in perfect unmoving profile.
A man in a blue cap and uniform, handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows, had taken her suitcase in. The conductor, an older man with a round face, wire-rimmed spectacles, leaned out again and called, “All aboard!”
“Is it OK if we see her to her seat?” Peter asked.
“No visitors!” the conductor called out.
Peter saluted. Understood.
Caitlin turned quickly and hugged her mother. It was the first time she had touched her mother intimately in many years. She felt she had to take Annie by surprise.
“So now they’ve taken my only child,” muttered Annie into Caitlin’s painfully cold ear. Instinctively, Annie hugged her tight—but then quickly let go and seemed to push Caitlin away, in a gesture that might have meant “Hurry up” but which Caitlin knew more likely meant “Leave me alone.”
She turned to her father, embraced him, kissed him lightly on the cheek. He needed a shave; he smelled smoky from the wood stove. He clasped her hands and looked down at her. He was becoming stooped but he was still enormously tall. His eyes filled with tears. He looked mortified, as if someone had just slapped his face.
“Don’t be surprised if I turn up one day in Washington to pay you a surprise visit,” he said. “Both of us.”
“I’d give all my wishes away if that one would come true,” said Caitlin, hugging him one last time, backing toward the retractable steel steps that led to the mysterious amber warmth of the waiting train.
“That’s from a poem, isn’t it?” Peter called out.
The engineer let the whistle howl one last time. A fierce burst of steam hissed from the belly of the train as it started to roll. Caitlin looked back at the platform; her parents were enshrouded.
“Tickets,” said the conductor. He had looked friendlier when he was hanging out of the train; now that she was under his jurisdiction, he looked displeased with her.
Caitlin opened her purse and gave the conductor what he wanted. He tore pieces of the many-paged ticket out, put holes in others with his paper puncher, and handed it back to Caitlin.
“Second class, two cars down,” he said.
She nodded. “I was told if I wanted to change this ticket to first class I could do it on the train.”
He nodded, frowned. She was making work for him. “To New York, or all the way to Washington?”
“First class, all the way to Washington.”
“We have a club car, too,” the conductor said, meaning to be sarcastic.
“Is that better than first class?”
“Oh, much.”
“Then I’ll have that.” The car was swaying back and forth as the train picked up speed. Caitlin looked out the window a last time to see her parents. Peter was waving, unsure if he was being seen, and Annie was moving closer to him, touching him lightly on the sleeve, as if to reclaim h
im. She was still holding the basket she had packed for Caitlin’s journey.
“You should have got what you wanted in the first place,” the conductor said, handing Caitlin the blue-and-white ticket that would allow her into the club car.
“The person who made the purchase wasn’t aware of my requirements,” said Caitlin, opening her purse and counting out crisp dollars that were being spent for the very first time.
And so she traveled with the rich, on a dark velvet seat, adjusting and readjusting the footrests, and watching through her own reflection as the miles went by. The man sitting next to her worked in an investment house in New York. He was coming back from visiting his sister, who had married a farmer and was living upstate. The stockbroker was upset over the life she was making for herself. “The cold, the filth, everything stinks of horse or cow.” He had a way of folding his newspaper so it was no larger than a book. After he had had enough of decrying his sister’s new life, he asked Caitlin where she was going and she told him she was on her way to Washington.
“Family there?”
“No, I’m going to work for a congressman.” This was her first time out in the world with this new fact of life and she tried it on proudly.
“Say, that’s all right. Which crook? No, just kidding. Who’ll you be working for?”
“Elias J. Stowe.”
“Say, Stowe’s all right.” The man tapped his forehead, apparently pleased he knew who Stowe was. “What we need is politicians with the guts to stand up to Roosevelt in case he tries to get us into a war against Germany.”
“I don’t think Mr. Stowe wants war.”
“You can say that again. He’s got guts. You know, like in Shakespeare, ‘Discretion is the better part of valor.’ ”
Caitlin turned away. As they headed south, parts of the river were already thawed. An old European-style castle was built off a little islet in the river and it was in ruins, its tower crumpled, its windows blue with sky. She felt the sudden pressure of tears in her eyes: she was just getting a glimpse of herself as a free woman riding a train, sitting in the best seats, next to a stranger quoting Shakespeare.
“You just tell your boss that Teddy Collington—here’s my card, by the way—is behind him all the way. You know what I think? Basically, Roosevelt’s too shrewd to get us mixed up in that war. You see that Gallup Poll the other day? Seventy percent of the country wants us to keep our noses out of it.” His eyes darted for a moment. “The only ones who want war are the crazy Army generals who have nothing to do but march around in the stink and the mud. And the Jews, who seem to think that this, like everything else in the world, is really all about them.”
He settled back in his seat, propped his feet up on the footrest, and bit down hard on a peppermint candy.
“I hope I haven’t gone on too much about it,” he said, smiling at Caitlin. There was something searching, vaguely and ominously flirtatious in his eyes suddenly. He seemed to be scrutinizing her for some possibility of sex—it struck her in the pit of her stomach because she had sensed him as a prissy bachelor type and now it seemed she had been wrong.
“No, not at all,” she said.
“I assume your views are the same, then?” he said, smiling.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve given it much thought.”
“Not much thought? There’s no more important question facing us now.”
They parted in Grand Central Station. Collington carried a small leather suitcase, draped his topcoat over his shoulders. They were underground, in a smoking, acrid tunnel. “You be sure to wish your boss good luck, now!” Collington called out as he walked out toward the circle of white clear light at the end of the platform.
On the train to Washington, Caitlin sat next to a priest who smoked a pipe and read a book in French. He never once glanced at her; even when she squeezed past him to go to the bathroom, he kept his eyes on the page.
The claustrophobia and exhaustion of traveling overwhelmed her high spirits, and she was suddenly weary and afraid of all the strangers around her, all the houses with the unknown lives taking place within them, the factories and fences, the unfamiliar skies, the lengthening shadows, the incessant chug and sway of the train, the fermented-apple aroma of the priest’s tobacco.
She closed her eyes and slept and the rest of the journey slipped away. None of it even lodged in memory. The unfriendliness of the priest, the smell of his pipe, the coils of an electrical generating station in New Jersey flashing red as they caught the rays of the sun, the thump of her head against the thick window glass as she dozed off, the distant voice of a conductor calling out the station stop in Philadelphia, and then a dream, oblique, just of light, of a jar full of violets, a trembling square of sun on the floor intersected suddenly by a shadow, and then she awakened as if from a nightmare, disoriented, trembling, waves of panic rippling through her like wind over the wheat.
Union Station was chaos. She walked behind the porter who dragged her luggage. She stared at the trunk’s handle, wondering if it would snap. Everywhere there were trains sweating in the tunnels, and the steam gathered around the travelers, who moved like phantoms. Here were people of all colors, speaking all the languages of the world—businessmen, lawyers, journalists, men in white suits with beards like Georgia colonels, Negroes, women in pillbox hats with cigarettes plugged into their brightly painted mouths. They had arrived on the great lurching and howling locomotives of the Atlantic Coast Line, the Southern, the Pennsylvania, the Fredericksburg & Ohio. Peter had told her that over two hundred passenger trains pulled into Union Station every day.
She walked through the tunnel, into the light. The Red Cap was a young black man with a deformed back. The skin beneath his fingernails was bright pink, like a calf’s tongue.
She had asked the Red Cap to take her to the information booth, where, by prearrangement, she was to meet Betty Sinclair, who was then nothing but a name written on a piece of paper to Caitlin. “Miss Sinclair will be wearing a tan coat and a dark green hat,” the instructions from Stowe’s departing secretary read. “She will see to your lodgings, as well.”
Everything echoed in the station: voices, footsteps, even her own heartbeat. She stopped for a moment, to calm herself. People streamed past her like rushing water past a boulder in the streambed.
“It’s just up here, miss,” said the Red Cap. “Information.”
Caitlin nodded her head. Her breath was shallow and felt useless. She had never spoken to a black person before.
Then a voice said, “Are you Caitlin Van Fleet?” It was a deep, melodic voice, and though Caitlin did not think of it as seductive at the time she would come to remember it so.
She turned toward the voice and faced Betty Sinclair. She was dressed in a trenchcoat and a green hat that looked like something Errol Flynn would wear. She was tall, angular, with blond hair, bright, aquamarine eyes.
“I knew I’d recognize you,” she said, smiling at Caitlin. “And it’s a good thing, too. There’s at least ten women in this place wearing hats like mine. You could have ended up going home with anybody.”
She looked at Caitlin, squinted her eyes a little, and then took her by the arm. “Long ride, isn’t it?” she said. She waited for a response, though surely she could not have cared what the answer to her question was. Betty Sinclair was verbally taking the pulse of the beautiful young girl who stood before her and who seemed not to possess the power of speech.
“Are you all right?” Betty asked, softly. She gestured for . the Red Cap to follow them with Caitlin’s luggage. “I’ve got a taxi waiting for us outside.”
The porter was dexterous with Caitlin’s luggage. He carried the suitcase with just the index finger of his left hand hooked through the handle, and he suddenly hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder. He walked in front of them and weaved through the crowds.
“It’s like being on safari,” said Betty.
Caitlin stopped. She felt so short of breath that even the m
ild exertion of walking seemed a risk. She had such a clear vision of herself sinking to the floor of the station and the patterns the people made as they shifted this way and that to avoid treading over her that it seemed to be not dread but some real prescience, a vivid memory of the future.
“Are you all right?” Betty asked again.
“I just can’t believe I’m here,” said Caitlin, the first words she’d spoken to Betty.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Betty. “Really, it’s not so bad.”
“I just can’t believe I’m here,” Caitlin said again. She felt vaguely the comforting weight of Betty’s arm around her but more than anything she was conscious of a voice that resonated like a drum within her and the voice said, I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.
FOUR
APRIL 9, 1933
The day before Easter, a day in which winter usually still lay furled in every hollow of Windsor County, but this year the spring was early, extravagant—flowers were scattered everywhere like coins from the purse of a drunken sailor. The sky was dark blue, and seemed to tremble, a sail filled with warm wind.
Caitlin was twelve years old. She wore a loose-fitting shirt to camouflage the changes in her body. Her hair was cut short in that practical, not terribly becoming way of a country girl. She was not being raised to believe that adornment was a sin but only that it was foolish. “As stupid as a rooster with its feathers spread,” was how her father had described a friend given to expensive, store-bought clothes, and surely the barbs directed against a preening woman would be sharper still.
It was Saturday and she was with her father in one of the barns. Peter was organizing the hay left over from the winter, hay that they would not need now that the snows had melted and the fields were already pale green—though the sheep, he told her as he hauled the bales of rye and timothy hay, had to be pastured gradually, or else they would get diarrhea from the rich new grass. Caitlin’s parents were either silent or oblique about matters of the body and even the heart—they were always fully clothed; her father ran water in the sink when he urinated; menstrual supplies were nowhere to be found in the house—but they exercised whatever frankness they possessed in casual, graphic talk about the estate’s animals. Bitches in heat, runny cow stools, a nanny goat with an infected teat, all were discussed openly and at great length.
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