The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  For right then, what shook Jim was another one of those glances at the future, which is all that philosophy ever is, isn’t it? “What’s about this Lottie,” the mate had said. Jim coughed, to clear his voice. “I said ‘Lottie and Emily,’ didn’t I?” he asked. “Surely I said ‘Emily’ too?”

  The mate regarded him. Jim was never a target to him; maybe that’s why the mate sometimes looked at him as if safety was there.

  Jim saw that too—as the mate could always be sure of—but just now Jim himself was wondering. Had there been anything special in the way he’d said it, months ago? Or had it been in the way the mate had heard it—in which case, had it been with a hearkening toward something in Jim’s manner or something strictly private to the mate? “Surely I said ‘Emily’ too,” Jim said. “Didn’t you hear it?”

  Still the mate didn’t quite answer. After a pause, he said, “Are we ever going out there, sometime?”

  Whether they would or not, wasn’t what had given Jim the shivers. It was—that if they did, things had already been settled, or else were being, now. It was—that right now, if the choice hadn’t been settled on already, in secret archives somewhere—the choice was being made.

  “Sometime,” he managed to say, even nodding.

  The mate nodded slowly back at him. “It was Lottie I heard,” he said.

  And this is the way things were in that part of the state when the last summer came for its interurban, overhead-track trolley cars. Here several explanations are in order, all of them swimming in the full, sad pleasure which is to be had in the description of any event single enough for its influence to be seen, yet faithful to an old cycle—and gone. We can let the cycle be for the nonce, having already said enough of barges and stables. But there still has to be explained how the main street of a town the size of Sand Spring, a street scarcely big enough for its own traffic light, came to be the terminus of a passenger carrier line which—though it never reached its plotted end a hundred miles away in the town of Batavia—did go along, neat as a parlor car on a leash, for twenty-nine of them, only to end up against a hillside in a gentle meadow as wide as a small lake, in among the rushes brimming the sides of an even smaller stream called the Little Otselica. To explain this will be an easy pleasure, follies of this sort being so familiar to everyone, and so acceptable when committed by the worldly—as this one was. Lastly, we have to speak in detail—some of it loving, but still so that you can see it and maybe even smell it—about the mechanism of that fine old sparkler and grinder, an electric traction trolley car. This won’t be any harder, however, than you will someday find it to talk about your old Thundereagle, or Hawkspit, or whatever it is you call those ruby-throated sports cars.

  A Folly, says my dictionary, is a costly structure considered to have shown the builder to have been foolish. Add to this, that to my mind a folly is never really very national in outlook; men have been known to build castles-on-the-Rhine up the Hudson, and along the Colorado a Petit Trianon. Follies like these don’t say much about the spirit of a country. Or much that’s profound. But to my mind, a real, home-grown folly can be very local; I would know one of the upstate New York variety anywhere. On land, that is; what to say about the ones on wheels is still in question. But in any case—whether it’s a castle standing dark against the vegetable green of an impossible mountain, or the friendliest tramline trying to sputter between mile after mile of people’s herbaceous borders—what such a Folly shows is the spirit of the owner, just before that breaks through into humanity, or dies back into it. And humanity meanwhile being what it is, the kind of folly which delights it most is the hopeless expenditure of a man very well known not to have gotten his money the soft way, the whole history of his happenstance meanwhile being common knowledge round about home. On all scores, Adelbert Riefel’s folly was of such a kind.

  The Riefel house, running to pillars in the front, strange Amsterdam-style peaks in the servants’ quarters behind, and two lions couchant before—and as such merely one of countless minor monuments to the last quarter of the last century—is still to be seen, and still appears to belong to a town larger than Sand Spring. Built on a fine central plot at the beginning of its owner’s prime, always in heyday use in its carriage days, and later cut up into first-class apartments which never went unrented, it took care of him at the end of his prime, or what in some men would be past it, so that, except for what it harbored in its basement, the house itself was never a folly at all. Adelbert himself was the son of a scholarly Swedenborgian farmer—which belief we were taught in those days was part religion, part a sort of science—though that might be contested now. Adelbert, as far as anyone could see in the beginning, took over only the science part; like many another son of scholarly religionists, he went after money. First off, he went after a wife with it; he was a thinskinned redhead with a profile which must have taken on quite a nimbus at the courting hour, and indeed stood him well otherwise, all his life. Her money, it was said, was his stake. And the business he went for was fresh and decent enough: garden seed and related products, arboretums to hog-chows to fertilizers, but the rumor was that he was not benevolent. He was said to have taken advantage of all the financial panics of the eighteen-seventies except the last one, foreclosures sprouting an empire in his pockets. Mrs. Riefel sweetened the scent of their money by acquiring—at first not in the home house but in a conservatory in a rented one on New York’s Fifth Avenue—one of the largest collections in the east of cattleyas, which she told the home garden club later was a fancy word for orchids. Then, at about the time of the last panic, though the Riefels were still unquestionably solid rich if no longer fancy, they came home to stay. People always wondered why, in Sand Spring this kind of change not being considered reason enough. Maybe the people Riefel’d grown used to taking advantage of out there had become his enemies—or his friends. He was still a young man, not even forty, younger than his wife. Maybe Swedenborg had bit him in the brain after all. Anyway, he came home.

  Although Sand Spring social life wasn’t of any level for them to lord over, give the Riefels credit, they now and then visited the cousins they had in town, and now and then had them formally back. According to them, he was as polite as all get out with them and with everybody, with the staff that served the house (a cook and a man from the “east,” by which the cousins meant eastern New York of course) and with the rest of the neighborhood—he was even polite with his wife. According to these cousins, to whose social advantage if was of course to keep up the legend, anyone could see that formality was ingrained in Adelbert now. He had a library, so-called but also with books in it, in which he spent some time. His shirt collars sat out above his jackets in a way that none of those townsmen could match, even those who bought the best Rochester had to offer, and his cuffs were long. He was used to sitting in on committees and, it was suspected, champagne suppers, and though he didn’t take much of anything himself, kept a small cellar for occasional visitors from the East and sometimes farther, though compared to western New York’s groaning board his company dinners to anybody were very plain—the kind it took this sort of formality to be able to give.

  Oh there were all sorts of details which would have been overlooked by anybody not as intelligently interested as the cousins—or the town. If he had the habit of light women, these were certainly not in the neighborhood, nor of course would they be; he would have mistresses, it was argued, whom he met in a hot, plush love-nest somewhere, though certain returned émigrés from the city (after all Sand Spring was less than four hundred miles away from it) said no, not that way, that it might very well be a much more rarefied business; in fact it might be what in smart circles was called not a love affair, but just “an affair.” Certainly he went regularly to New York, though the manner of his goings and comings anywhere, if by nature distant with the town, was never furtive; now and then anybody could see him and often did, though even if the observer was only a foot of railway platform apart from him, and courteously spoken
to as well, it still seemed to be from afar. He was at that time of his return a partially bald but still good-looking gentleman, who, if it was possible to compare him with his coevals about town (which it wasn’t), already looked older than they did and yet younger; this latter characteristic was to emerge more and more. What we were looking at, I think, was a natural-born aristocracy, which the money had only added to—by keeping him in a certain state of organizational and philosophical health.

  You’ve seen the type, we all have, and I’ve no doubt that the story of Adelbert Riefel, especially in those little details if not the big ones, has its place and specialty in the social rises of America at large, but we haven’t got time for more of it than is strictly necessary, which some of it is. For remember the Riefel basement. In it there was already growing that engrossing folly whose later development, though it still didn’t take up all of his time was to suck up almost all of his money, and would be of some concern to you also. For truly, in the furtive wheel-chain of life-events, those that can be picked out for sure as single and separate are very valuable. And it is a surety that without the folly that grew from Adelbert Riefel’s basement, to become, as follies may for a time, a kind of practical enchantment—you grandchildren here and your daddies before you—all those unto the second and third generation that stem from Jim Eck and Jim Morgan, heretofore known as Jim and his mate, and in general to be known so hereafter—might not have been born. I’d go further, I’d say the odds are, in spite of occasional spurts of possibility (like that just now recounted mention of the Pardees) that you all would not have been born. And I ought to know.

  Now—to the Folly itself. Your generation, I don’t suppose it cares anything much yet for models or modelcraft that are not in the way of science or business—I mean model trains, boats, planes, collectors’ soldiers, even model toy warfare. You’re all for the hot-rod, or the stock-car race, or even the Saturday afternoon parachute jump at the county fair—for the moment, you’re in it, as you like to say for real. Chances are you don’t know anything more about that other world than the Lionel trains I once got for all of you, all of them now in attics, or maybe one or two balsa-and-rubberband airplane kits you and some crony bought at a dime-store and put together when you were thirteen. And I don’t suppose your sisters know any more about it than their old doll houses and tea-sets, or care—though there are always some women who go on to those other little pretties almost at once, to tiny furniture replicas of Williamsburg kept in a cabinet, or toy gardens with Dutch bulbs in them the size of nailheads—or even in their own lifesize houses, in not such an easy-to-see, boiled-down way, though in the end maybe nastier. Many childless couples have this fondness for the wee also—wee dogs, wee talk—and the Riefels were childless, but what fastened on Adelbert was not for coyness or charm, and came over him alone. It is a passion which can come over a grown man—maybe one who’s never had much of anything, or maybe a millionaire in his maturity—when either of them cries or sighs to himself “What lack I now?” This is the way it begins, often—but often there’s more to it, much more. You can’t see it yet. Wait.

  I understood it better, him and it, when, a middle-aged man myself and down to New York on a business trip, I happened to go shopping for toy trains for all of you children—grandchildren by marriage, and grandchildren by right. It was after-war time again, nineteen-forty-six, just after V-J Day—Victory-Japan, in case you never heard of it—and countless wheels we could all see had been turning like mad for years, as well as the silent ones also, which we could hear quite as well. But the little toy ones for the moment had stopped. That big toy store on the Plaza said that if the metal allowances were permitted they could still have what I wanted by Christmas—this was only August—but I wouldn’t be there then, and they had nothing to show, to order on. After they understood that the castles and drawbridges, anything with soldiers foot or mounted, didn’t attract me these days no matter how medieval—“We understand perfectly,” said the salesman, “we can scarcely wait for the domestic stuff, I mean the peacetime, ourselves”—they gave me a list of hobbyist shops where I might find secondhand plenty of what I had in mind. I chose a shop on Duane Street called the Train Center—trains, a simple standard set of childhood ones, being all I had in mind. This shop was out of business, I found, but I found another on Park Row, and another on Church. I had an afternoon to kill, and I killed it, and meantime old Riefel, whom I’d seen that summer of nineteen-twenty, and whom I had things to thank for, once more came alive.

  You space-eater, you of the hot-rod—ever stand in one of those concentrated essence places called a hobby mart? Ever stand in a motoring headquarters for planes, boats, cars, railroads, and miles of track and roads for all of it, and miles of air too—which isn’t more than fifteen foot square? Only to find out that people don’t only buy them, they make them, with dinky models and construction kits and a host of suppliers and factors to this world—or they have them made for them, nowadays everything from TT trains to HO trains and roadways, to Frogkits and Minic Ships? From there I wandered into a shop that stocked ship-model supplies, blueprints and fittings, woods and veneers, then on to a shop that made only “experimental” models, by God, then to one which only did repairs. I saw them all—and, out of sentiment let’s say, I’ve even now and then kept up with them, though not to buy. You of the Thunderbird, ever hear of model-car racing? Slot-racing? With equipment radio-controlled? But it was already all there in essence back then, the world still hasn’t digressed that much, and it was then I understood what you’ve got no cause to yet, and what Jim and his mate didn’t have any cause to understand either, the afternoon that Adelbert Riefel let them see his basement plan.

  It’s that after a certain age, and only after, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing the world once again in miniature. Call these things hobbies if you wish, or if they get larger, follies, but they’re not of childhood, nor of those akin to senility, and are never the devotions of youth. As for seeing the world in small but perfect, perfectly tidy, or having an urge to make it so, that’s as it may be; this is the passion the partners thought they were witnessing that day. But I’m inclined to think otherwise. I think of it as a passion to see a world in small all right, but an enchanting and difficult one, a world with all its power lights always blinking on and off again, always in need of experimentation or repair. A world in small, all right—but for real. And I think of it as a reflective passion. Some of us, as you have good cause to know, take it out in talk. That’s the commonest way. But Riefel had done it this other more solitary way, and perhaps even here had done it uniquely, for in shop after shop I saw nothing like he had, and maybe there never was. The urge to be unique in these affairs persists; maybe you remember what I came home with that year, the French-gauge electric train that no transformer could ever make really run? But Riefel’s fault, and no doubt his reflections too of course, ran deeper. And—so did his folly. For in the end, he tried to see his world both in the small and in the large.

  He must have had his small system custom-made, perhaps even in Europe, the cars and the whole thing, though that afternoon he didn’t tell us this—the partners that is—saying only that he’d drawn the entire design and blueprints himself, taking the whole of one year to do it—the year he and his wife came back to Sand Spring. The execution of the plans had taken two years more. Maybe this explained the trips to New York, or maybe not—for when the mate made his acquaintance forty-odd years later (on a train connection out of Albany), he was still going there. Mrs. Riefel had long since died; her orchids had withered, replaced by housekeeper’s fern; the house had been cut into flats. In one way of looking at it, he was only an old man of eighty-odd living on the funds of a once-grand house and on only one floor of it: did I say he retained just the basement floor? But in another aspect he was marvelous, sharp as ever but quietly so, none of that eighty-year chirp in him; in a ghostly way he was still even redheaded—and going to New York. But perhaps, yes—though we cou
ldn’t know for sure of course at our age—perhaps he wasn’t quite so distant any more. Although it was the mate he’d first met up with, he appeared to know about Jim; here was the town again, at its function.

  “I understand you two are mechanical in bent,” he said, shooting one of those cuffs. The cufflink in it, as the mate described and Jim saw later, was as modern as anything you might wear, but in those days was still very advanced—an abstract design. “Perhaps you’d like to take a look one of these days at my little system,” he added. He always referred to it that way, to differentiate it from the big one. “Of course I can’t quite keep it up in the style to which it was accustomed, can’t get the parts for it. But it’s still worth a look.”

  Worth a look! We knew (the town again) that this was precisely what very few people did get; the cousins, in addition to knowing all the other nuances of his history, had continued to keep the town well informed. It all began, they said, back in his financial days, the peak of them, when he floated some debentures for such systems, or whatever it is that men like him floated. While men like Harriman and Frick had been doing it with the railroads, our Swedenborgian had sectioned out this little specialty of his own. Perhaps he’d even been the czar of it. Whether or not this had been true, the toy system we saw that afternoon was in commemoration of—or reflection on—a czar.

  Though this was what impressed me most, and you may record still does—once inside, we had to stare first (though he certainly didn’t make us) at the living-half of the basement. For though the entry door had been very natty in a way entirely new to us, we hadn’t been prepared, even by gossip, for all the tricks of books and low shelves and high-hung pictures, and colors, and white spaces and black nudes, and—culture, I suppose it was—we now saw. I don’t have to prepare any one of you; get married even here, you’ll have it. It was merely certain parts of Paris and New York at the time, that we were staring at. Or nineteen-sixty-six, in Sand Spring. Only, this time we didn’t feel any flicker of the future to make us tremble. Before it might have had a chance to, he opened the door to the other half of his establishment, and there we were, in his system or staring down at it, at his vast little world.