“Me, too,” the woman said. Her wide face was rough-skinned, well-powdered, scattered with coarse hairs. She was younger than she had first appeared. Something supple in her cheeks and chin, which gleamed softly with sweat, indicated this. She wore bright lipstick. There was lipstick on her small gray teeth as she smiled.
“Are you running away?” the woman asked.
“Oh no,” Sally said. It took an effort of will to meet the woman’s small eyes, not only because her face was so close, but because Sally so wanted to turn once again to the window, to the lovely light of dusk. They were no longer underground. But she had been raised to be polite. She had been trained by nuns to offer kindness to every stranger. “I’m going to a convent,” she said. “My novitiate. I’m going to be a nursing Sister.”
The woman sat back a little, moving her short arms, kicking the bags at her feet. Her hands, Sally noticed, were very small and plump, the short fingers all coming to little pale points. The woman smiled broadly, with real delight. “Mercy!” she said to the air above their heads, and laughed, a kind of rumbling, staccato laughter. “Mercy me. A nun.” Then she reached down again to adjust her shopping bags. “Well,” she said, “I’m sure that’s very nice for you, but I, for one, am running away.”
She straightened up again. “From my husband,” she added. There was something avian—was it pigeon or owl?—in the way she turned her head on her thick throat, moved chin and eyes in Sally’s direction. “He thinks I’m going to see my sister in Chicago, where I’m from, but I am going on through, all the way to California.” She nodded, smiling still. “He’ll never find me. He’ll never see my face again as long as he lives.” She raised her eyebrows, which were thick and wiry, all askew. “What does a little nun have to say about that?”
Sally hesitated. “I’m very sorry to hear it,” she said, imitating Sister Jeanne’s sunny sympathy. “I’ll pray for you.”
The woman smiled again. She was growing younger and younger in Sally’s estimation, growing closer to her own age, which seemed odd given how old she had first seemed. “We were married for six years,” the woman said. “I can hardly believe it. Six,” she said again. “Six years. I was just a girl.” She laughed again, moving from side to side in her seat. There was something sweetly unpleasant on her breath. A decayed tooth, perhaps. “And while I’m sure,” the woman was saying, “that a little baby nun would know nothing about these things, I can tell you with assurance that he had the tiniest penis known to man.” She held up her pale pinky. The nail, the flesh itself, came to a point and was rimmed with grime. And then the woman slipped the pinky into her mouth, pursed her lips around it. She widened her eyes as if in surprise. When she withdrew the finger, it was wet and stained at the base by her lipstick. Then she put her hand, with the fingers curled into her palm, over her wide lap. She wiggled the wet finger against the dark fabric of her skirt. “Can you imagine,” she said casually, “a girl the size of me spending her life riding a thing the size of that?”
Sally pulled her eyes away, her face burning. The woman touched her with her elbow and nodded down, drawing her eyes again to the dark lap, the wet pinky moving spastically like some pale blind thing.
“Of course,” the woman went on, closing her hand into a fist, “a little nun would know nothing about any of this, but when you get to your convent, ask around. Or ask your own mother when next you see her. Is your mother still living?”
Sally was shocked and embarrassed and confused enough to give a courteous reply. “Yes, she is,” she whispered.
“And your father?” The woman asked. “Is he still with us?”
Sally shook her head, once more averting her eyes. There was a man reading a newspaper just across the aisle. She thought he might have, briefly, glanced around it to see them. “My father died before I was born,” she said, even though, as untraveled as she was, her instinct told her to stop this conversation, to move to another seat, another train. To call to the man across the aisle for rescue.
The woman laughed again, a deep slow chuckle, even though, Sally saw as she glanced at her once more, her chest was rising rapidly, up and down, with the odd pace of her breathing. “I suppose a case could be made that a teeny weenie is better than none at all, as would seem is your poor mother’s case.”
Just then, the conductor reached them, “Good evening, ladies,” and took their tickets. Her companion said, “Good evening, kind sir,” leaning forward a bit as she reached for her ticket, which was wedged into a corner of one of her bags, and then bringing her head up too close to his belt buckle. She looked at Sally as she handed her own ticket to the man and then shifted her gaze back to the trainman’s blue pants, nodding, as if Sally should consider what was hidden under the gabardine.
She had an image of the woman’s wriggling wet pinky, writhing in the darkness, and felt herself blush again. She turned her face to the window.
“Did you ever read The Teenie Weenies?” the woman asked her in what suddenly seemed a pleasant, conversational voice. “They were in the Sunday funnies? Adorable little pixies, they were. Little spools of thread for chairs and chestnut leaves or some such for clothes. Did you ever see it?”
Sally shook her head. “No,” she said.
“It’s really quite charming,” she went on. “I’m a great reader of the Sunday funnies. I love Orphan Annie, being orphaned myself. Almost like you. And that big Daddy Warbucks with his beautiful bald head. I also love Li’l Abner. Do you go to the pictures much?”
“Sometimes,” Sally said.
The woman turned her head, doubling her chins, and cast her eyes over the girl once more. “You really want to go through life all alone, without a man to protect you?”
Sally shrugged, smiled. Instinct told her not to squander her belief on this dirty woman, but still she struggled with the impulse to say, Betrothed to Our Lord.
The woman was studying her. “But you’re just a baby,” she said without waiting for a reply. “You’ll see what I mean soon enough.”
Then the woman reached up to unpin her hat, getting further settled. She fluffed her hair. “I’m going to go bleach-blonde when I get to California,” she went on. “I think it will suit me. Do you think it will suit me?”
Sally smiled politely—it was the response she’d been trained for—and said, “I think so,” wanting once more to turn away from the woman, toward the window, both to see where they were going and to put this conversation to an end. But she was uncertain about how this was done.
“Of course, the muff gives it away,” the woman said. And again she touched her elbow to Sally’s side. Sally, still smiling, shook her head. Her mother had once found a white muff made of rabbit fur in the donation basket, but Sally had refused it—she was old enough by then, maybe ten or eleven. She had, by then, become aware of the haughty eyes of other girls, on the street, even in church, when they saw her wearing their own outgrown clothes.
But the woman was nodding toward her lap, speaking to her as if she had suddenly lost her hearing. “A muff,” she said. “Don’t you get it? Down below. I’m not about to bleach that.” And she laughed into the air, once more moving her bottom from side to side to get more comfortable in her seat. Her arms were too short for her body. She crossed and then uncrossed them over her broad chest. “The way I figure it,” she went on, “by the time you’ve got a man eye-to-eye with your muff, he’s not worried if you’re a natural blonde or not.”
Sally shook her head, uncomprehending, and the woman laughed again, panting still. “Oh, you baby,” she said, all-knowing. “You’ll find out one of these days.”
Sally turned her burning face to the widow. The train was moving through the flat outskirts of the city. There were still tenements and long avenues in the distance, lights coming on here and there, although the sun had yet to set. She was vaguely aware of the woman leaning forward again to arrange her bags, pushing them out into the aisle, drawing them back in again, over the high insteps of her small feet.
And then her voice was at Sally’s shoulder again. Hot puffs of words on her neck. “One time,” the woman said, “I was riding the train from Chicago and a man came down the aisle selling nuts. Have you heard this one?”
Sally shook her head—misunderstanding once again.
“He was selling nuts, yelling out, Peanuts, roasted almonds, cashews. So I said to him, ‘Do you have any pecans, kind sir?’ And he said, ‘Pee cans? Back of the train, lady.’”
She laughed. Her exhalations gave a taste to the air between them. “Do you get it? Pee cans. Toilets.” She waved her little hand. “What I’m saying is, I’m going to go find the pee can,” and Sally, the habit of politeness so well engrained, smiled and nodded, as if their conversation thus far had been refined. Suddenly the woman gave her a long, penetrating look, not kind. “Keep your hands to yourself while I’m gone,” the woman said. “Lay off my stuff.”
She had some trouble maneuvering out of the seat. Once again, the way she moved—shuffling, heavy-bottomed—gave the impression of great age. As she moved away, the man across the aisle lowered his newspaper and looked at Sally with a kind of amused sympathy. He was an older man. Or maybe a young man made old by the vague shadow of his hat brim over his eyes. Her face flushed again to think he had overheard.
A small child appeared in the aisle beside her. Or small-bodied, thin-limbed, but with a large and dirty face. His head was unevenly shaven, down to white scalp in some places, prickly with dark hairs in others, which made his skull seem battered and misshapen. There were scabs on his scalp and on his chin and nose. He stood beside her for a moment, a bit wobbly because of the movement of the train. And then he put his hand on the armrest of the empty seat and smiled, his crooked teeth nearly green. She smiled at him and said hello. He said hello. “Are you going to Chicago?” she asked. He shrugged. There was a fine white crust around his nose. “Would you like a piece of chocolate?” she asked him.
He raised his pale eyebrows. She noticed another maroon scab along one of them. It seemed to crack dryly as the skin moved. She reached into her bag for the dinner her mother had made, and just as she put her hand on the chocolate bar, another hand, reaching upside down and backward from the seat in front of her, clawed the air until it touched the boy’s arm, then his collar, and then pulled him out of sight, nearly off his feet. She heard a woman’s voice say “Sit,” and the crack of a hand against flesh. No sound from the child, but the man across the aisle again looked up from his paper, observed what she couldn’t see, and then again looked at her and shook his head sorrowfully.
The dirty woman was some time in coming back, and when she did return, and once more maneuvered herself rear-first into her seat, the unwashed odor beneath her violets and cooking oil was vivid.
Sally had taken out her missal by then—much as she would have preferred opening the novel, she feared what conversation it might lead to—and the woman leaned over elaborately to see what she was reading. Then she sat back again.
“Ever had a boyfriend?” she asked.
Sally turned a page and nodded with a small, apologetic shrug, as if she were too absorbed in her prayers to speak aloud. But already she was rehearsing how, if the woman pressed her, she would use the name and the personality of Patrick Tierney, whom she had known all her life, to create an image of an adoring boyfriend, finally refused. In the story she would have told the woman, had she pressed her, her imaginary Patrick Tierney was better looking than the real one, something like tall Charlie with his blue eyes, and with a flourish to his background (his father a soldier, not a doorman) and his profession (a medical student, not a laborer). She would tell the crude woman that this Patrick Tierney held back his tears—stoically—when he saw her off at the train station today, rather than, as was the actual case, merely saying last night when he came over with his two sisters to tell her goodbye, “You’ll be back, I guarantee it. That’s not the life for you.”
But the dirty woman didn’t press her. She waved her hand in the air as if she knew the girl’s nod was a lie and then leaned forward to rummage through her bags. She took a sandwich from one of them—now there was the smell of liverwurst and onion—and ate hungrily, but silently, panting as she did.
All over the car, as the world outside lost light, people were bringing out food, odors of canned meat and cheese and old apples. Cigarette smoke gathered like mist over the hats and the heads of the passengers. A shouting argument erupted at one end of the car. She saw the conductor stop in the aisle to wave a finger at the culprits. The bald-headed child walked by again as if in a trance, balancing himself between the seats. Some minutes later, when the train lurched, he let out a wail that could be heard even over the noise of the tracks and the engine. His mother, whom Sally could only see from behind, a crushed cloth hat over a tangle of thin and graying hair, was slumped against the window. She sprang from her seat and raced down the aisle in a stooped, hunchbacked way. A second later, she was dragging the boy through the aisle. He was wailing. He had his hands over his eyes, his little mouth a moldy circle. The mother threw him into his seat and dove after him. Again there was the crack of her hand against his flesh, but to clear effect this time: the boy’s outraged cries reached another register.
Someone on the train said, “Shut up.”
The woman beside her said, “Serves them right.”
The man on the aisle folded up his paper, neatly, and tucked it under his arm. Then he pulled his hat down over his eyes.
When Sally finally got the courage to get out of her seat and use the toilets, the floor there was wet. The soles of her shoes were tacky when she returned to her seat. When she went to the dining car—at the tail end of the dinner service, as the Sisters had advised—she was made to wait in the swaying corridor, and while she did so, a man, smelling of alcohol, passed by her too closely and rubbed his chest against hers, breathing into her face. A girl her own age—she was certain this one was her own age—was already at the table where they sat her, finishing her dinner. She wore a smart dark suit and a hat with a veil, and at first Sally feared she might be a rich girl, the daughter of a prosperous father, the kind who would snort through her nose, even in church, when she looked Sally’s outfit up and down. But it took no more than a minute for Sally to see the shine on the fabric of the girl’s jacket, the pale threads at the edge of her cuffs. Sally knew secondhand when she saw it. There was a tear in the veil as well. The girl had tried to hide it with a hat pin, but the material had come undone and now stood up stiffly, showing the hole to anyone who looked—as if the hat itself disdained this unworthy owner. The girl’s outfit, Sally recognized, was all effort.
When Sally ordered her tea, the girl asked for the same, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
Then she smiled warmly across the small table. “Going to Chicago?” she asked, and Sally only nodded warily. She had learned the first lesson of her first journey from home. But the girl barely registered the reply. She began talking, leaning into the table as she did, as if without it between them she would crawl, talking, into Sally’s lap. There was something endearing about the tumble of her words. She was from the Bronx, she said, going to Chicago to meet her husband, who had, at last, found work there. He hadn’t had work, she said, for two years. As long as they’d been married.
Here she straightened up to allow the waiter to set down their tea and her silver dish of ice cream. She opened the purse on her lap and began to rummage through it, talking all the while.
She missed him so much, she said. Missed him like crazy. “It’s like an itch,” she said.
Mrs. Tierney sometimes said, “An itch where I’ve never had a bite,” which always got her mother laughing.
“I’m just going crazy with it,” the girl said. “I’m so lonesome for him.”
Talking, she extracted a small perfume bottle from her purse and tipped a little of the clear perfume into her hot tea. Without pause, she reached across the table and poured some into Sally’s cup as well.
Astonished, Sally put out her hand.
“It’s good for you,” the girl said, merely as an aside to her tale.
When they were first married, she said, they lived with her mother in the Bronx, but they were always fighting because he couldn’t find a job. So he left for Chicago. (The girl licked the ice cream from the back of her spoon.) She didn’t even know where he’d been living. Her mother said he must live on the street. She wrote to ask him if he lived on the street, but he never answered. For six months, all she had was two letters that said, No luck, still looking. She said again, “I was going crazy, missing him so much.”
She sipped her tea and pursed her lips. “It’s good,” she said, and nodded that Sally should try hers. “Better than cream and sugar.”
Reluctantly, Sally lifted the warm cup. She was expecting the taste of lavender or rose water—the taste of perfume—but what hit her tongue was hot and clenching; it seemed to sear, simultaneously, her nose and her throat. Her eyes watered. She coughed.
The girl laughed.
“This is whiskey,” Sally said. She knew something of the taste of it—given to her by her mother, on a spoon, when she had a cold. Or rubbed on her gums for a toothache.
The girl agreed. “Sure it is,” she said. “It’s good for you,” and then she reached for the sugar cubes on the table between them. She tossed two of them into Sally’s tea. “Now try it,” she said, and Sally did. Again the watering of her eyes and the impulse to cough, although the sweetness helped.
The girl said, “So, as I was saying.” Finally, her husband wrote to tell her he had work—he didn’t even say where—and a room. The stationery he used was from a Chicago hotel, it had the name and address printed right on it. That was good enough for her. She got the letter only yesterday—but, she said, she was never one to let grass grow under her feet. She was going crazy, missing him so much.
The Ninth Hour Page 13
