by Janet Dawson
“Thank you, Miss McLeod. I will call on you if necessary.”
Again she noticed his accent. European, Jill thought. Like that Mrs. Cole who’d boarded the train at the Oakland Mole. But this man sounded familiar, and now, as Jill stared at him, he looked familiar as well. She had seen him before.
“We’ve met,” she said. “At the university in Berkeley. You’re a professor in the physics department, Dr. Laszlo Kovacs.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Were you in one of my classes?”
She shook her head. “No. I was a history major. I heard you speak at a colloquium, though. It was at the Faculty Club, in March of nineteen forty-nine. There was a reception afterwards. I was with a friend and he introduced us. He was a physics major. He took several of your classes and considered you his advisor.”
“And who is this young man?” The professor asked. “I’m sure I’d remember him.”
“Steve Haggerty.” There, she’d said his name. “We both graduated that spring.”
The professor nodded. “Steve Haggerty. I do remember him. A very intelligent young man, with a good head for theoretical physics. He was interested in engineering as well. Yes, and now I recall that evening at the Faculty Club.” He stopped and frowned, then he spoke again. “He introduced you as his fiancée. You were engaged to be married.”
Dr. Kovacs looked down at Jill’s unadorned left hand. She resisted the impulse to hide her hand. She’d taken the ring off and put it away.
“It’s none of my business, of course,” Dr. Kovacs began.
“Steve is dead.” Jill put on her brave smile, the one she used whenever Steve was mentioned. “He was killed in Korea.”
Dr. Kovacs hesitated, as though he didn’t know what to say. “I am so sorry.”
“I’m fine,” Jill said. “It’s been two years now.”
It had been two years and twenty-one days, to be exact. She should stop counting. She had to move on. Not that she’d ever forget Steve or all the plans they’d made, plans that wouldn’t happen now.
Jill changed the subject. “Where are you heading, Professor Kovacs?”
“Denver,” he said, picking up a file folder.
“Do you have family there?”
He shook his head. “No family. I have friends who teach at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They’ve invited me to spend the holidays with them. After New Year’s Day, I am going on to the University of Chicago, for a conference.”
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing more of you on the trip,” Jill said. “Excuse me.”
She walked forward and stopped in the middle of the Silver Palisade, looking out the window. The train was coming out of Niles Canyon. The engineer blew the whistle as the train approached the station in the little town of Sunol, another flag stop, but here there were no passengers. Once out in the countryside, the Zephyr picked up speed and headed northeast toward Pleasanton and Livermore.
Ah! Sweet mystery of life. Now she couldn’t get the tune from Naughty Marietta out of her head.
Jill recalled what Steve had told her about Dr. Laszlo Kovacs. He was from Hungary, a Jew who’d escaped Europe before the war. His family had died in the Holocaust. She wished she could take back the question about his family. She’d have to make it up to the professor, and be extra nice to him.
Suddenly thoughts of Steve overwhelmed her, making her feel sadness for things that would never be. Those feelings were usually kept at bay. But it was December, the anniversary of her fiancé’s death. That, and the fact that Dr. Kovacs had talked about Steve, brought those memories. Was that the prickling of tears in her eyes? She hurried through the sleeper cars to the Silver Hostel, to her compartment at the rear of the car. She went inside, locked the door, and sat down. The memories she’d kept at bay washed over her.
Chapter Four
Jill had never heard of Chosin Reservoir until Steve died there. She had taken classes in Asian history while at Cal, and she read the newspapers religiously, priding herself on being well read and well informed. So she knew the history. Korea had been occupied by the Japanese in 1905 and annexed in 1910. The peninsula was liberated by the Allies in 1945, with Soviet troops pushing the Japanese from the north and United States forces landing in the south. Korea was a country divided by ideology and in 1948 it was divided in fact, at the 38th parallel. Elections in the south brought anti-Communist Syngman Rhee to power. The north was ruled by a Communist called Kim Il Sung.
The Russians withdrew from Korea in 1948. United States troops remained in the south until early in 1949, the last of them leaving in June, not long after Jill and Steve graduated from the university.
She met Steve Haggerty in the spring of 1948, as she finished her junior year at Cal. It was a blind date set up by her friend Marcia, who was dating Steve’s roommate, Dean. The four of them went to a concert at the Greek Theatre on campus. Steve had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and an easy smile to go with them. She liked him from the start, and he seemed to like her. After the concert was over, he suggested a movie the following weekend. She said yes, trying not to appear too eager. One date led to another, and soon they were seeing each other every weekend, and sometimes during the week, sharing their lunches on the benches below the Campanile, just a few steps from LeConte Hall, which housed the physics department.
That Thanksgiving, Steve took Jill up to Sacramento to meet his family. Steve’s father and uncle both worked for the Western Pacific Railroad. Mick Haggerty was a mechanic based in the Sacramento rail yard, where he repaired the big diesel locomotives that pulled the trains. His younger brother Pat was a conductor and he lived up in Oroville. Jill liked both men as soon as she met them. And she adored Steve’s mother, Betty, a good-humored woman who immediately took to Jill. Steve was the oldest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters. And there were lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins there for the Thanksgiving dinner, crowding around the table and filling the two-story house where the Haggertys lived, in midtown Sacramento, not far from the Western Pacific Depot.
By that time Jill was in love with Steve. Through that last semester in school, spring of 1949, they talked about marriage, on long walks through the wooded hills and grassy lawns of the campus, and sitting on the banks of Strawberry Creek. The formal proposal came in April, when Steve gave her an engagement ring set with a small square-cut diamond. They set the date, in August 1950, and continued making plans, for the ceremony, the honeymoon, and their lives together. They would wait a few years before having children. Jill planned to get her teaching credential and look for a job teaching history to junior high or high school students. Steve, with his degree in physics and his interest in engineering, talked of building bridges and roads. But first he had a commitment to fulfill, as an officer in the Marine Corps.
Steve had gone through college in the Navy Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, four years of education in exchange for a commitment to serve in the Navy or Marine Corps. He’d chosen the Marines, since his father had been in the First Marine Division, “The Old Breed,” in the Pacific during World War II. After graduation, Steve had received his commission as a second lieutenant. In June 1949 he reported for duty at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, while Jill waited for him.
Not that she was idle. The receptionist in her father’s medical office had quit to get married, so Jill took the job, temporarily, of course. She lived at home and saved her money, picking out china and silver patterns, looking at furniture, mentally furnishing the home she and Steve would share once they were husband and wife. Several times she took the train down the coast to visit Steve in Oceanside, the site of Camp Pendleton. He borrowed a car from a friend and they spent time exploring San Diego.
On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops poured into South Korea. Jill was ready to go ahead with the wedding, move up the date if necessary, to forgo the church ceremony and stand in front of a justice of the peace. But Steve was cautious. He wanted to wait. He knew his unit was going to Korea. So they p
ostponed the wedding. In September, Steve’s regiment was in Korea, assaulting the beaches at Inchon. By October the Chinese army had joined the fray.
Chosin Reservoir was a man-made lake in the northeast of the Korean peninsula. In the battle that began in late November and lasted until mid-December, the First Marine Division had been outnumbered by the Chinese army, assaulted not only by enemy troops but the worst weather in fifty years, with snow, wind, and temperatures dropping to forty below zero. The American troops fighting there called it “Frozen Chosin.”
Steve died on Friday, December 1, 1950, in a place called, ironically, Hell Fire Valley. Jill found out about it several days later, on Tuesday, December 5th.
They’d just finished dinner that evening. Her brother, Drew, had set the table, so it fell to Jill and Lucy to help Mom clean up the kitchen and wash dishes. Then the whole family sat down at the dining room table, playing cards. When the doorbell rang. Jill got up from the table and went to the foyer to answer it.
She was surprised to see Steve’s Uncle Pat on the porch. What was he doing here?
Jill invited him in and introduced him to her family. Pat refused Lora McLeod’s offer of coffee and he looked at Jill with a somber face. Jill didn’t connect the dots, but her father did. Amos McLeod crossed the living room and put his arms around his elder daughter.
Pat Haggerty cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and said, “I was on a run from Oroville to Oakland. When I stopped in Sacramento, Mick was at the station. He asked me to come over and see you. He and Betty…they got a telegram this morning.”
“Frozen Chosin” reached out and placed icy fingers on Jill’s skin. She sat down abruptly in the wing chair, her face wet with the tears that were streaming from her eyes.
Next thing she knew, Pat was gone. She was in her bed upstairs, her sister hovering with a hot water bottle, her brother in the doorway. Her parents sat on either side of her, speaking words that were supposed to comfort her. Her cat, Sophie, instinctively knowing something was wrong, burrowed into Jill’s left side, kneading with her paws.
Jill stared up at the ceiling as her parents’ voices washed over her. She thought about the last time she and Steve were together, that August weekend in San Diego, right after his division had been mobilized at Camp Pendleton. They had walked arm in arm on a beach, and later, as the sunny afternoon gave way to evening, they clung together, passion stoked by the impending separation. But they hadn’t made love. Fear of pregnancy and the uncertain future had stopped her, stopped both of them.
I wish I had, she thought now. I wish I was pregnant. At least I’d have something of him. Something besides photographs. And…
The engagement ring was on the third finger of her left hand. She raised it from Sophie’s soft fur and looked at the golden band with its little diamond promise. Then she dropped her hand and stroked the cat, finding comfort in the calico’s warm body and steady purr.
Jill wore the engagement ring when she and her parents took the train up to Sacramento for the memorial service for Steve. On the way back, staring out at the rich farmland of California’s Central Valley, she wondered what she would do with the rest of her life. When she got home she took off the engagement ring, wrapped it in a lace handkerchief, and tucked it into her jewelry box.
“Now what?” Jill asked herself, looking in the mirror. On the bed, Sophie meowed as if to say she didn’t have the answer.
Teaching? That was what Jill had planned to do, but it didn’t appeal to her now. Nor did spending the next few years working in her father’s office near the hospital.
She met Uncle Pat one afternoon three months later, in a hole-in-the-wall café near the Western Pacific depot at Third and Washington. It was March of 1951. Whoever had been at the table before them had discarded that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. While Pat went to the counter to fetch coffee for both of them, Jill glanced through the newspaper. The headlines were full of the Rosenberg espionage trial that was taking place in New York City. David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, was on the stand, and it looked like his testimony was implicating his sister and brother-in-law.
March already. She folded the newspaper and deposited it on another table. March had memories associated with it, just as December did, and always would. Jill’s birthday was at the end of the month. Last year Steve had sent her a bouquet of lush red roses, and a little gold locket on a chain, something else she’d tucked away, out of sight.
She pushed the memory aside and smiled up at Uncle Pat as he set two crockery mugs of coffee on the table. He was in town, laying over at the end of a run, due to head back to Oroville the following day. He’d called and asked her to meet him for coffee.
“I feel restless,” she told him. “I want to do something different, something besides working in Dad’s office. Travel maybe, but I can’t afford it. I need a different job.”
Pat stirred sugar into his coffee and took a sip. “I got just the ticket. Why don’t you become a Zephyrette? You’d be good at it.”
“A Zephyrette?” Jill tried on the idea. She knew about Zephyrettes, of course. She’d ridden the California Zephyr several times to Denver, where her grandmother and the rest of her mother’s family lived. She smiled. “That would be fun. And you’re right, I’d be good at it. That’s a great idea, Pat. How do I get to be a Zephyrette?”
Pat grinned. “Good to see you smile, kid. It’s been a while. Well, how to go about it? I’m not sure, but…” He looked up and waved at a willowy brunette in slacks who’d just entered the café. “Here’s someone who can answer that question. Hey, Fran. Grab some coffee and join us.”
“Hey, yourself, Pat.” The brunette got a mug and walked over to their table.
Pat made the introductions. “Fran Ellis, meet Jill McLeod. I’m doing some recruiting for you, Fran. Jill’s interested in becoming a Zephyrette. What’s the first step?”
“You’re in luck,” Fran said. “Mama McPeek’s in town.”
“And who is Mama McPeek?” Jill asked.
Fran laughed. “Her name is Velma McPeek. She’s our den mother, so to speak. The way I hear it, she sort of invented the Zephyrettes. She’s based in Chicago, but she rides the rails quite often. Checking up on us girls to make sure we make all the proper announcements at the proper times. I happen to know we are short a Zephyrette because one of the other girls based here just quit. There are only ten or eleven of us, with six on the road at any one time, three in each direction. And a couple laying over in Chicago and San Francisco.”
“How often do you travel?” Jill asked.
“About three round trips a month. How old are you, Jill? The girls are supposed to be between twenty-four and twenty-eight.”
“I’ll be twenty-four later this month,” Jill said.
Fran looked her over. “I can’t tell how tall you are since you’re sitting down. You’ve got to be between five four and five eight. I’m a whisper over five eight but I made the cut.”
Jill smiled. “Five four and a half.”
“Close enough. Good character and a pleasing personality?” Fran asked.
“I can vouch for both,” Pat said, saluting Jill with his coffee cup.
“I thought as much,” Fran said. “College degree or nurse’s training? Do you speak any languages?”
“Bachelor’s in history from UC Berkeley,” Jill said. “My father’s a doctor and I’ve been working as a receptionist in his office. I know my way around a first-aid kit. Got a merit badge in first aid when I was in the Girl Scouts. I took French in high school and college. I can ask for directions in Spanish, Italian, and German. And I can say ‘Happy New Year’ in Chinese.”
Fran laughed. “Gung hay fat choy. Living in the Bay Area, so can I. That’s great. Sounds like you’re covered in the language department. Let’s see, you’ve got to be single. But I guess you are. You’re not wearing a ring.”
Jill’s smile dimmed a bit and she rubbed her ring finger, thinking of the engagement ring
hidden in her jewelry box. “Yes, I’m single.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got the job,” Fran said. “Of course, you’ve got to talk with Mrs. McPeek. Give me your phone number and I’ll see what I can do.”
Three days later Jill took the ferry to San Francisco, where she had an interview with Mrs. Velma McPeek at the Western Pacific Railroad headquarters on Market Street. A week after that, Jill boarded the California Zephyr for an eastbound run to Chicago, as an employee rather than a passenger. This was her on-the-job training, accompanying Fran Ellis, who was the Zephyrette on the run. She shadowed Fran and soaked up as much information as she could on the eastbound and westbound journeys. Then, six days after her return to Oakland, Jill was riding the rails on her own.
By the time Jill celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday at home with her family, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death.
Three railroads—the Western Pacific, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy—operated the California Zephyr. The conductors, brakemen and stewards were employees of the various railroads. And the Pullman porters worked for the Pullman Company. But the Zephyrettes were considered Western Pacific employees and paid by that road.
As Fran had said earlier, there weren’t that many Zephyrettes. Jill was one of eleven. There were six young women based in the San Francisco area and five in Chicago, plus the occasional trainee. Many of the Zephyrettes stayed only two or three years, but Fran had been working for the CZ since the start, in March of 1949. Once Jill was on her own, she made three round trips a month. When she wasn’t on the road, she helped out in her father’s office.
Weeks blurred into months and a year passed, now almost two. Hard to believe, but in three more months, March 1953, Jill would celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday, and her second anniversary as a Zephyrette.