The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

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The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Page 12

by Hortense Calisher


  When he let them in they saw that he had his smoking-jacket on, as always when he had been working on the system, plus the foulard neckerchief which he wore when taking “infusions” for his “catarrh.” If things went as usual, he would apologize politely for the latter, the only apology he was ever heard to make. Shortly he did so, and as per custom, took them into the other room where, stripping his cuffs, he prepared to entertain them with a brief display of one or other of the elaborately worked-out schedules in the system’s repertoire. This was the moment, ordinarily, when either of the pair would bring out whatever they invariably had for him. “Look here, this lightbulb I found, think it’s small enough?” Jim might say, hauling out a pocketflash bulb that might just screw into a streetlight, or the mate would bring out a battery, the size of four sugar loaves, that he had made himself. Today they brought nothing, and he didn’t wait for it.

  Next, usually had come a moment when he offered them a choice of the schedule to be run off; you understand that in a run of a hundred miles, or even twenty-nine of them, and in thirty years, there could be a good many variations, mock breakdowns, accidents, full and partial runs, which could be evolved, a favorite run of the two partners being: Let’s see you run as far as Pell’s bridge in sixteen minutes (one minute of ours being five of the system’s), run into trouble (the least being to have some foreign object strike the vertical gate of the lifeguard, the worst being to have a “passenger” struck by the axle-boxes of the rear bogie truck, when leaving the car), then change cars and return. Riefel didn’t wait for a choice here either, but without preamble gave them the full hour program which they had seen only once before—that first time—in which all the powers of system, landscape and the hand at the helm of all of it were to the fullest vaudeville displayed. It ought to have brought down the house, as it had then, but this time they all sat silent. Then Riefel did something he’d never done before—made a criticism. “One thing I’ve never been able to add to it,” he said.

  “What’s that, Bert?” the mate said quickly—no mister or pulled forelock for him, for which Riefel, who always winced with pleasure at this style of address, may well have picked him up in the beginning.

  And: “Maybe we—” said Jim.

  But Riefel shook his head, tapping his fingertips to a rhythm, making and unmaking a finger cage. “Oh—I suppose I could burn some oil, make some sort of blower. But it’s really not tenable. Nor should it be.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Riefel,” asked Jim. “What is it?”

  He was turning his beautiful cuffs down again, and linking them. “Just the true trolley-smell,” he said. “Just—the smell.” He quirked at them, to show he shared their amusement, which however hadn’t yet appeared. “Just as well,” he added, linking the second cuff. “A line has to be drawn somewhere. Just as well.” What with the unintentional rhyme, it sounded, curiously enough, like an elegy. Then he stood up.

  “Boys,” he said, though often he called them “gentlemen”—“You might as well hand over what you have for me.” He even held out his hand toward the mate’s pocket. It was the town again, though they never knew via which part of it. He had known about the letter all the time.

  He read it in their presence, no excuses and no comment, only in his narrowed lips and raised nostril a glimpse of how once, when he had wanted to be, he could have been rude. It may even have been that he wanted them to see this, to see him too, in full vaudeville. But they hadn’t the experience for it, to enlarge on any further suggestions or displays he might have given them—what did that pair know of tickertapes and board rooms? So, in the end he had to tell them his answer, straight out. “No, boys,” he said. “No. But I’ll give you an answer to take back with you.”

  He went to a typewriter which must always have been there but they had never before noted, under one of the nudes they so often had. To the town-committee’s letter to him—handwritten in the best Spencerian for courtesy, he rattled off a reply at sixty words a minute—for modernity? Who knew, after all, what was this man’s cultivation? He slipped the sheet into an envelope which he left unsealed, and handed it over, back to the mate. “Read it if you like,” he said indifferently. Then he smiled, with that nimbus which might still have caught him a million, if not a woman, even then. “But not here.”

  They understood then that they were dismissed; though the pair acted so often in unison, each was still as sensitive a young man as any to be found acting on his own anywhere.

  Jim spoke up this time, the mate after all having had the letter to present. “Then, Mr. Riefel—” he said—it was curious how this “Mr. Riefel” sounded more intimate than the mate’s “Bert”—“Then you’re not—”

  “Going?” said Riefel. He glanced down at the letter he had just answered. “A last trolley ride?” he said. “And a medal?” He looked down again, as if to check what hadn’t been important enough to remember precisely, or else didn’t cater to his brand of recall. “For a past pioneer?” At a jerk of his head, quickly gentled though he didn’t smile again, the ascot fell back from his throat. He didn’t look ruined any more than he looked eighty. The ruin, if anywhere, was in the minds that looked at him; it can be wondered if for lots of follyists it isn’t the same.

  “Oh no, gentlemen,” he said. “That isn’t for me.”

  He was telling us what the world is, for a man of risks—not that we heard him.

  “No,” he said, gentler with us than we had ever heard him. “No, you two go. It’s for you.” He gave us a searching look; it could even be said he bowed, to what he found. “Yes, you two go,” he repeated. “It’s for you.”

  Then the pair went out of there, never to see him again or thank him, or curse him, for what it took two weeks—and forty years after that—to understand.

  Outside, the two walked along with Riefel’s reply. Should they read it, they asked each other; did he mean them to? From street lamp to street lamp they pondered, in separate silence, and aloud. In their ears that alternating voice echoed, offering them advice they couldn’t see, calling them gentlemen, then boys.

  “What did he mean!” The mate’s voice was angry. “About the trolley doings. That it was for us.”

  Jim was silent. “I dreamed,” he said then. He turned excitedly. “I just remembered. That he shot himself. Tomorrow morning.”

  They both saw him according to their joint experience, his chin at that certain ghastly angle, blood all over the olive-green foulard—which was a color quite suitable to combat—alone on a foreign field all his own.

  “No,” said the mate judiciously. “That’s your dream.”

  They walked on. The mate reared up his forelock. “It’s a cinch he doesn’t see us the way the town does. Or only. Reason I always liked going there.” There was an implication that they wouldn’t go, again.

  Jim thought it over a few paces. “He sees us,” said Jim.

  Finally, one of them—it doesn’t matter which—opened the note and read it to the other. It contained absolutely nothing the librarian couldn’t have read out in the children’s reading-room—nothing beyond a formal thanks and a formal refusal, saying that he would always have an interest in transportation, but expected not to be in town for the ceremonies.

  “He just wanted to get us out of there,” said the mate disgustedly. But a few steps onward, he stopped again. “‘No, gentlemen,’” he said, in a falsetto that certainly wasn’t Riefel’s. “‘No, that isn’t for me. It’s for you.’” He turned to his companion. “You suppose he meant we shouldn’t go for the town; we should get out of here?” He paused. “Or—Oriskany.” They had spoken to Riefel of it. The mate considered. Then he shrugged, drawing himself up with a pomp that was a little growing on him; after all, there has to be some answer to the terrors of the world. “I suppose he only meant—we were young.”

  “And simple,” said Jim. He looked down at the note. “We did the wrong thing. That the town asked us to do it isn’t any excuse.”

  “They onl
y wanted to honor him.”

  “For what? For being—passé?”

  That was a word much in the newspapers, those days.

  “For being self-made, that’s what.”

  Jim already knew the mate’s aspirations, of course; his own were harder to explain, though he had tried. He wasn’t sure he was a man for risks, though he might be one for responsibilities. What worried him uniquely was the thought of so many men returned from the war with twenty-twenty vision, but still, if they weren’t careful, going to live it out in the dark, not knowing which of the two choices was happening to them. What he wanted—almost as good as a religion it would be, mate—was just to understand what happened to him, as he went along. Was that so enormous?

  He tramped on awhile. “Maybe they don’t know why either,” he said. “Why they asked him.”

  “Who?”

  “The town.”

  The mate trudged along, hands in pockets. “Passé, eh? Then why should those hijinks be for us?” He gave an angry laugh; how mystery always angered him! “What’s he preaching?”

  The pair mulled the rest of the way home without talking, like two apprentices leaving the house of a master who had never quite seen fit to declare openly the nature of the subject under study.

  At their door, the mate gave a snort, then a swagger. “Sunday week, that junket is—You for going?”

  “Why not?” said Jim. “Nobody’s going to shoot himself over it in the morning.”

  Going up the stairs, the mate yawned and stretched. “Transportation interests, huh. Maybe we ought to sell him a car.”

  But a few days later, they learned what these interests had been. Riefel had sold the house, as the good income property it was, for a crackerjack sum (the town’s phrase) only to reinvest it promptly in some crackpot scheme (its phrase also) for motor coaches to go down the very highway which was to supersede the Batavia-Sand Spring. The housekeeper was retiring on her annuity, only waiting for the new owners to take formal possession—and for the Smithsonian. As for the basement, except for the art work and the books, which Mr. Riefel had taken with him where he was going, the rest of the stuff there was left to her also. Apparently he had already everything else necessary where he was going—in New York.

  “Sonufa gun,” said Jim. “So that’s what he was saying!”

  “What—buses?” said the mate. “That was his interest, huh?” He wasn’t stupid, only not reflective—or unable to wait to be. And Jim, to give him credit, always understood this, just as the mate gave Jim credit for being such a thinking chap, if slow.

  “O.K., buses, New York City, what does it matter. Can’t you see what he was saying to us?” Jim had to walk twice around the table, he was so excited.

  “What?” said the mate, much used to these dialogues, which he thoroughly enjoyed. “What’s the revelation?”

  “I’ll tell you what he was saying.” Jim whipped a napkin from the table, folded it around his own neck, ascot-style, and raised his chin, Riefel-style. “See my dust,” he said. “That’s what he was saying.” Then he pulled the napkin off again, and sat down to his meal.

  The mate made no reply for a bit, as often when he was stumped, or slowed. See my dust. It was a transportational interest all right; it could be the supreme one.

  The two of them could see it underwriting—or overriding—all others, a little searing tail-light disappearing round the bend.

  “Going away permanently,” said the mate after a while. Such had been the message to the housekeeper. “At eighty.” He shook his head, the prime of life not being connected in his mind, with age. “Old men—” he said.

  That’s a chorus for you. For you, hot-rods.

  Old men, old men, old men. And young.

  And so there we have it all now—the war, the town, the Pardees, Oriskany, and Riefel—and the two Jims. And all entirely natural.

  We need only a ride on the Batavia line, to make it all clear.

  III

  PEOPLE CAME WHO WANTED picnics. The August day at the start was one of those gray, limp ones which make bunting look weak, but the powerful trees of the region would have done this anyhow. Even at the edge of town, at the siding where the four long, striped cars waited, the trees were as thick as if only they held the year up; once past it, and the green billowing would go on for miles. Nobody minded that it wasn’t a day when colors flew; a couple of the mothers were heard to say tranquilly that the children would be the quieter, for not having to match their doings to a broad sun.

  “Local adage?” whispered the mate, digging Jim with his elbow. Usually, he never went at the town for any of its doings—as was sometimes Jim’s privilege. For months at a time, the mate’s very speech would be as Sand Springish as if he had been born there; in matters like these, his control, then and later, was scarcely to be believed. Today he looked marvelous, with life, if not top good looks. He had as much as said so to the mirror himself, while shaving with a razor stropped to a murder-edge and singing over and over a little catch that Jim had never heard him on before. Talcum was delicate on his jowl, and he had on the tweed jacket he’d got in London on their way home and had stored since, but the bow tie he sometimes wore for the waitresses was supplanted by a proper four-in-hand tie. Jim, though not as rakishly clean, looked all right alongside; he was never a dresser. He was a worrier though, or some would call his bent by that name, and now he didn’t answer, scanning the crowd, his hands squirming a bit in their pockets. Bunting had its own way of theatering up a crowd, as if the parts to be played were already evident; within its framing ribands and below its fluttering pennants, grannies jostled what used to be called sparking couples and drugstore cowboys; family circles were storming the cars to set up two seats facing one another, then tonguelashing the juniors for slapping back the seats too roughly; everybody looked distinctly himself as long as he stayed away from the trees; the trees could do nothing just now but wait. A group of black-cloth notables clung together, speeches in hand; the ceremonial part of this jaunt would take place at Otselica, or so everybody supposed.

  “All sorts here,” said Jim, his eyes roving; then his hands came out of their pockets, having found what they were looking for. “I know what it is,” he said, smacking his thighs. “We forgot lunch.” They hadn’t forgotten to bring it; they hadn’t made it. Domestic as they could be inside the house, outside it, like bachelors, they forgot.

  “There’ll be hawkers surely,” said the mate comfortably. “Or the Women’s Auxiliary, with a bang-up supper. Can’t be bothered ourselves with aught of that, today.” Jim had never heard him speak like this, British but not his own Lancashire, more like one of their comics. The mate’s forelock went up, as he surveyed crowd, trees, women, men and children—the world. The small exclamation he made then might have been in his own woolly, boyhood dialect.

  “What is it?” said Jim. For a moment he had half an idea that it was Riefel, here after all for his honoring. A charge of disappointment—as of a hero dropped—went over him. The mate saw it, and understood it too, and shook his head. “No, Jim. Going toward the rear car.” He lowered his voice. “Am I right? Look there.”

  He was right of course, about the women if not the hawkers. A buzzing line of them, burdened with salad bowls, pitchers and the like, were climbing one after the other into the rear car, surely setting up a commissary there. But this wasn’t what made the mate’s hand clamp Jim’s nape in a vise, forcing him to stare only one way. Tag at the end of the line, a procession of three straggled after. The two girls in front might have been any young pair, sisters or not, one thin and striding, one full-blown—but the thin one had a large wire strainer on top of her bundles, and the rosy one held in her arms a cannonball pot. The sun glinted through the trees now on this strange armor, as the pair came shyly but steadily forward. A boy with a handcart pushed after them. The potbellied iron affair in the cart might have been the sisters’ catapult, trundled along to storm a town’s ramparts. It was too small to be Bismarck,
but it was a stove.

  The mate came around from behind Jim and stood in front of him, watching, and continued so all the time the stove was being hauled up onto the platform of the car, though the girls had long since disappeared inside. His hands crept to his tie and he spoke thickly to the tip of it. “We’ll eat, luv,” he said. “Ohh, we’ll eat.”

  By the time the ten o’clock departure hour had stretched on, in the way of outings, to eleven, the mate had managed everything, Jim following behind. Inside the commissary car, a few tame husbands and boys at their mothers’ apron strings were helping make things fast for the journey, and the mate, quickly attaching himself and Jim, in short order found himself at the head of the crew. The day’s plans were for a box-lunch on the way or there, an evening supper at Otselica, for which the women had brought everything from Sterno heaters to wrapped ice, and a moonlit journey home; it was the full-moon part of the month. There would be swimming, of the mild, foot-or-two-deep water which mothers love, if the dryish Little Otselica would cooperate, and opinions were that after such a moist summer it would. For, just as it sometimes happens with a certain dinner-party, a regatta, or any other form of social endeavor which may or may not revolve around some science of human motion, every portent for this day on the Batavia Line—even the gradual gilding of the sun through the trees as the cars waited there—foreshadowed success.

  The rear car had been singled out because, unlike the ordinary ones whose seats were arranged toast-rack style from stem to stern, it had an open middle section where two pew-style slatted wooden seats faced one another, leaving a space between where the picnic goods could be piled; Riefel had a car like it in his system at home. Front and back of the center, the seats were like the trolley-style anywhere, made of that old yellow cane which wore forever—or would have—and with a metal handle at the aisle-side top corner of each, so that the seat might be reversed for the return ride. In the last seat, forward of the platform where the stove stood in readiness for unloading again, the Pardee girls were sitting. Both of them had a high color, whether from pleasure at the committee’s having remembered to invite them, or over their own business initiative in getting themselves here, who could say? Jim, for the life of him, couldn’t walk straight over; he didn’t even want to begin all that doubletalk again, but in front of him the mate was working steadily toward that end of the car, and might have made it first if a sweet, Quakerish old lady-hen with a round eye, tight skin and china teeth—I can see her yet—hadn’t stopped him for talk and then proclaimed—“Why these poor boys have no lunch along!” In the general banter—“Now just who were you counting on?”—Jim found himself facing the girls. He’d only got as far as a nod when the mate came up the rear, close behind him. Jim turned—yes, that’s how it was, Jim turned—and the mate, coming abreast of him, stopped short, and gave the two girls the onceover. He meant to treat them as ladies, then and later, but a little of the waitressy warmth came through. Lottie had her plump little hand in the box-lunch; perhaps that was why she raised her eyes full wide, while Emily, for all her spirit, lowered hers. The mate’s eyes were on Emily, no doubt of it.

 

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