The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  “You mean—her …” said Jim.

  “You know who I mean,” said the mate.

  Then, at least in that part of the world and its wars, it was time for the last trolley ride.

  Lottie even said it out loud, in the tone of one who reads articles. “It’s the last of the old Batavia. We must remember it.”

  “Remember what old Bert said?” said the mate—who was now sitting next to her—to Jim. “He never could get it, the true trolley smell.”

  Think he never notices—that’s what people often think of the mate. And then, months after, or forty years on—out with it. Anyway, it was the last anybody there spoke of Riefel.

  And now to the night. Will you be shocked at the story from now on, and if so, which part of it? That’s what I’m wondering. But even if we held hands in a circle, a seance, and tried, your generation could never tell us; you’re not shockable yet, you think; you wouldn’t know. And now to that night.

  All the time they had been loading, that sulphur-green quiet before a summer storm had been building, so that children cried out, peevish against the invisible weight in their breasts. The night grew glassier. Outside the waiting line of cars—a whole arkful, racked up tidy with their bundles—the moon was high over the hilltop, struggling with a barrage of clouds. A ring around it last night—clustered up in all the front seats, as old women do, the hens were telling over the almanac of their bones. The head motorman, their cossetted pet whom they had fed and nagged and now looked up to trustfully, up in front with his back to them, now suddenly got down again, and was anxiously observed in consultation with the other two drivers. Meanwhile, in the car at first so welcomedly anonymous to the two men and the two girls, character once more began willy-nilly to surface to the faces and to peer from unexpected corners: veterans, librarians, other stall-keepers met tonight. In answer, their own town faces surfaced, and they sat with their eyes lowered: the two buddies, and the two Pardees. Nobody spoke. In the yellow gloom of the trolley car, it was the familiar moment, the one before take-off, before—lurch and away!—the gathering clop-clop of the post chaise. The motor-man climbed back in, and waited. Then thunder was heard, bringing the hills in closer, as it does in these parts. Then they were all lively at the windows, pulling them down as the storm broke, and the spell with it, or so it at first seemed. Inside the sealed car, while the rain swept white over the windows, the chatter softened almost to dove-talk, the tender, fraternal talk of the safe. Then it was over, and—they had started! Who had noticed it, the spark and the start, except maybe a child? What a success even the storm had been! It was a real cloudburst, the hens said.

  Then they were swaying through the trees again. For the party in the rear, the spell had just begun.

  The trees were a dark aisle of plumes now, as if the train of four trolley cars was running a gauntlet which never closed in. The trees held the night up for them, out to them, and there was only twenty-nine miles of it—unbearable not to crush it around someone and to one’s breast. A waitress would not have been safe here. How locked and stoppered all their mouths were, in the moonlight that leafed their faces, through open windows that poured their first ride together back at them, cool summer balm. There was a zest in the air no sweater could slake, only arms. If the silence went on like this, or back into chatter, this ride would be their last anywhere; all felt sure of it but could do nothing. Only twenty-nine, eight, seven—back to autumn, to Oriskany—and out of mind. At what mile of it the current in the overhead wire went out—and stayed that way for two hours by hen-watches—I wouldn’t be able to say. But I shall be able to describe it to the inch, to the nerve, as a man’s tongue does, touching it. If you laugh at it, I’ll smile with you; if you shock at the wrong moment of this account, I’ll slap your faces.

  Well … a few motormen’s lamps were lit, of course, one glassed-in red oil-glow to a car, just the right light for the old to nod by, or the mothers to cradle their lot with a put your head down, but nothing to what the moon did for all the other restless ones. Two by two or in bunches, all the young folk, except for two pair of them, slipped to the back of the platform, then down. All had to pass the two men and two girls sitting in the seats chosen as the most anonymous, the best. As the others went by they would see the mate and Lottie stiffly figured in the lurid light, her bust, his forelock. Across from them, the other sister and the buddy sat rigid too, but like those garden statues which have the beginning of a stone smile. And after a while, if any hen was watching, she could have seen only the one pair, in the red light still unclasped. Opposite them, that other pair had gone.

  Just outside the car, the trees flung themselves in dark fountains, like Versailles. Then came a meadow, shimmering like parkland and as vast, then more trees. Through the window, and a round break in the trees like the bright end of a kaleidoscope, the mate watched that other couple disappear until they were gone. Though their story might take years to be made into words, as he sat there beside Lottie he knew it already, and forever.

  Out there, where it looked so mysterious—“Oh it was,” said Jim forty years later, “and I don’t mind telling you of it; indeed don’t we almost have to, now?”—out there, Jim walked along beside Emily, slow through the wet grasses and in rhythm too, though they had not yet touched even hands. A paragraph from one of Riefel’s manuals, he said, kept blotting in and out across his sight—“For simplicity of operation the overhead system is best … supply of power is not interfered with by heavy rains or snow … duplicate conductors are used and repairs rapidly executed.” He hadn’t known until now that he learned things so profoundly, and wondered that she couldn’t hear these words duplicate, execute attached like a hissing refrain to his steps. Then he thought of what the motorman here had called out: “Take two hours at the outside to fix things, two and a half at the outside; things are that wet!”—and exulting life over miniatures, he laughed aloud on that black air—and was heard.

  It was silver air that the mate saw, though he could no longer see them.

  But under the trees, the air was surely black, in a patent-leather night with a gloss whose source could no longer be seen, and the ground was dry. Jim saw his own coat, miraculous on the ground, and couldn’t remember laying it there. Then it was the moment that the locusts stopped, and in that buzzing silence, he thought he remembered everything else.

  He could see the barge-canal, the lock bearded with green at the waterline, then the pocked brick and the flower-stuck crannies of the sides—if the barge was coming up in the lock—or the waving weeds on the lock’s broad lip, even under the crossbeam of the gate, if the barge was sinking down. He could see the linkage, like an overhead wire or an underwater length of line, between trolleys and barges, though what it meant he couldn’t say, or why it was a woman, the frittering women, who made him see it; she and this were fathoms deep. The war names came on now as never before and tumbled through his kisses, from Verdun to Chateau-Thierry, all the great plaque-names he had never been at, down at the bottom the faintest script of those he had—and all telling him what up to now he had avoided: that it was his lot, his common lot to have to choose between terror and charm in all the moments of life past and to come—either to remember blood and death, to rise on their crests toward acts of atonement and change he knew he was not capable of—or to sink, sink, in the arms of the daily, under the daily charm. He remembered the washlines of that spring, and their mystery; what was the message of daily life, of a profundity that never stopped?

  As he wrestled there, the town came and stood at his side, almost as if it needed to have people break out and away from its conversations—even lived by it. By how much or how often a man himself broke out of it, was that how his life was made?

  And all the time, there was Emily hot as roses under him, learned in all that Europe hadn’t taught him, or virginally born to it. She made him feel as if she was on the barge—a figurehead of those lost certainties—and he was on the land. The doubletalk that belonged to
life was inside her. He reached it. She played him up and down like a ball on a fountain, and all the time, he saw the seriousness of her eyes.

  When they came back to where the four cars were still lined up on the track, with the electric lights on again inside, they managed to attach themselves to a noisy young group just coming out of the woods from another direction, their trumped-up catcalls and banter fake even to themselves. “Why—” he whispered to Emily, doing it for the intimacy—“the woods are full of us.” Looking back, he whispered to her, “Anyway, we’ve left the town there.” He was bold enough to say so, if somewhat darkly, to the mate, not a week later, when certain preparations were already in order. Whatever Emily thought, they had stepped back into the car just then, and she had turned majestic, her cotton dress somehow straight as tin again; that he had slipped beneath it surely no one would believe. Nothing showed on him he felt sure, not even to his friend. When things go so right, a man’s flesh—and I suppose a woman’s—feels calm and even, doesn’t it? Only the mind, mindless to its roots, is drenched.

  The interior of their car, left in the pall of one red lamp, had changed. Now that the current was back on, it was bathed in yellow light reflected from all that varnished wood and cane, portaled by the in-pressing dark. In other ways too, it was like a picture. The mate and Lottie were the center of it. They hadn’t changed their seat, instead seemed to have grown there, with big hamper and box beside them, or was it that the balance of the car—old wives and young, widows and a few men either old or woman-humbled—had turned to or gathered round them? The mate glanced up once as the others trooped in; he was talking. All were listening to him. Lottie’s eyes were gleaming, and her fresh mouth too; though candy was circulating from a big goldpaper box beside her, no one would know she ever ate the stuff, except for the heap of candypapers in her lap, between her demurely draped knees. The mate had been telling them what people ate and drank in the county of Lancashire where he was a boy, such talk being a way to the hearts of many, as well to one. He had been discoursing for some time.

  “They’ll offer you tea, luv,” he was saying—to everybody, or to one. “And they’ll offer you what they call ‘ornaments’ with it. ‘Ornaments, luv?’ they’ll say.” His voice was charming, self-charming. “And what’ll they mean by this?” He roared it.

  Just then, Emily and Jim sat down in the seat across the aisle, and they and the others who were trickling in, immediately they were seated, turned round to watch him.

  “What’ll they mean?” he asked in a smaller voice, like an actor. He flicked one glance at the pair in the opposite seat, then did not look at them again. “Why—” he said, in the big voice “—why, they’ll mean whisky, or rum!” He turned to Lottie. Sitting down next one another, their eyes were just even, he being short legged but long waisted, her waist being where one could not quite tell. “That’s what they’ll say, luv,” he said to her, and for her only. “‘Will you have ornaments?’”

  But if nobody therefore looked at Jim or Emily, or seemed to search for other miscreants, this didn’t mean nobody knew, or wasn’t going to gossip about such walks in the woods, later. If they let it go for now, this was because another morsel had been handed them, more tangible, and—wrapped in candypaper as it was—more palatable. This way the town could claim itself audience only to what happened in ways which were seemly. This way, the proprieties were kept—and the mate and Lottie were assisted by them. And no one at that time, not even Jim and Emily, took their need of such assistance as a sign. For in the sight of all, as is said in the marriage service—in the golden, interior light of half-past ten of an August voyage, in that arkful of people, idly waiting among the crumbs and the children sleeping like pigeons, waiting to ride home again—as well as to endorse, countenance and recall by date any and all contracts or other engagements entered upon during said voyage—in the sight of all, Lottie and the mate were holding hands. As the motormen signaled one to the other, and the train of cars was off again, this time to ride silkily all the way home, the mate stretched an arm straight across the back of their seat, but the hand dangling on her shoulder, and began singing. He had a light baritone voice, sweet enough to be a tenor’s had he been Irish, and he was singing the catch he’d begun the morning with.

  “Four arms, two necks, one wreathing,” he sang, “Four lips, two hearts, one breathing; fa la-a-ah, fa la-a-ah, fa la la la la la!”

  Through all the bypasses of the night, the whippoorwill starts, and once a stop and an owl-call, as we went banging through the countryside, he sang it. “Four lips that mul-ti-ply, all in-ter-change-a-bly!” and after a while some in the car answered him: “Fa fa-ah-a, fa la-ah-a, fa la la la la la!” There was the special smell; combined with the clinging odor of fritters, it made a perfume they knew they were never going to smell again. The lights were out again now, but only for the babies’ sakes; the motorman’s searchlight, cast on the tracks, seemed the other end of a glowworm—a trolley car is long. Deep in its well somewhere, a voice called out, “This is the life!” and another answered, “This is life,” and a third one said, “Oh, razzmatazz,” and none was identified—who speaks in his own voice? But everybody knew what was meant; we were just as smart in those days—in our Greek-revival farmhouses, which we didn’t even know bore the name—and before, back to the days of Greeks a-riding the Aegean, in what was probably called the last trireme. People have that kind of dull knowledge built in the bones by time; it’s only poetry and uncomfortable when they mention it. Or song. So they rode on, and at last came the solemn forever, the stop. It was the last time, the last in life or eternity, and each leaned back in his seat with the pleasure of one who had survived even that. People make these solemn ceremonies for themselves of course, just the way they have to cast back and cast back over an event of love, to help remember they’ve had it.

  Short of weddings not one’s own, somebody said—or funerals ditto, somebody added—all were agreed it was a perfect experience. And so, Jim and the mate named Jim and the sisters Pardee had their audience, captive to them as they were captive to it, and this was the way, with a fa and a la, two and two made four.

  Weddings are supposed to be all the same, it being the long, long road winding away from them that counts. We ought to describe these two nevertheless, leaving you, the fruit of them, to judge.

  Lottie, as the elder, was to be married first—“Did you know she was older, Jim?” asked the mate, and when Jim nodded slowly, the mate came back with: “Oh, not that it matters, I’ve still got the edge on her; it’s only that sometimes, it’s hard to believe.” He was leaning in his old place for talk, in the dining-room archway of the little house they shared, and he looked less burly than usual; the worries of approaching matrimony had scored dark circles under his eyes.

  “Emily does—look older,” said Jim carefully. During these intervening weeks, though confidences had come to a standstill for the moment, in a queer way this had further ripened the friendship; since the old, dangerous nights in French territory, they hadn’t been so tender and sparing of each other’s feelings and needs.

  “Ah—it’s not looks.” The mate spoke judiciously also, now that each was speaking of his partner’s choice. “That’s a wonderful girl you’ve got there.”

  “There’s no one like her,” said Jim with a deep laugh he couldn’t help; he was stunned by her, enthralled. He and she were meeting daily in all the places that were open to rural lovers, building themselves the kind of private legend that never hurts a marriage; he had climbed out of her window; they had slept naked in leaves. Often he had climbed in his own window at dawn. Lottie might have kept herself from knowing what her sister surely didn’t speak of, but the mate couldn’t help knowing of it.

  “Ah, that’s where I differ.” All this ah-ing was part of the mate’s new manner, as practical master of his own romance. “Lottie’s—like everyone else. And I shan’t mind that, you see. It’ll be a help.” He waggled his forelock, where once he might have
clapped Jim’s shoulder. “But she’s just right for you, you old dreamer. Whatever you do.” This was the first casual reference to another decision—to split their business destiny—since the decision had been made. “So we’re both satisfied.”

  It was the uneasiest conversation they had ever had between them, but still the mate lingered.

  “Goes a bit heavy on the eats,” he said. There was no doubt of course as to of which sister he spoke. He looked over at Jim—gawking there by the mantelpiece as if he was pinned to it. “But that’s good for the milk then, Jim, isn’t it?”

  “The milk?” It took Jim a blush to understand. “I suppose,” he said then, imitating the mate’s heavy manner. “Seems to be I have heard that. Yes, I suppose. And beer too, they have to drink, don’t they.” Mercifully the phone rang—as it did a lot these days—interrupting this exchange on nursing mothers. From the way the mate answered, it was Lottie, and Jim signaled quickly, as usual, for the mate to take the car. A car was still conspicuous; he and Emily went shanks’ mare. Lottie and the mate went much to restaurants. So, here too, as the mate said, everybody was satisfied.

  Later though, to Emily, Jim spoke of his own doubts, though delicately, not mentioning the milk. For you must understand that though he and she might not be every conventionally plighted couple of those days, socially, just the same, they were living through a state of being which is almost unknown now. In those days, the “engagement period” was as much a part of the common experience, and with actions and emotions proper to it, as is today the state of being divorced. It was the time when the male, being usually the less innocent, had to act it the more, while the woman formally took over the future of their days. Was he being less responsible than the mate? “Children—” he said. “Of course, we’ll have them. But I have to tell you something.” He hesitated. “I—never really think of them much. To tell the truth, I never think of them at all.” Was he unnatural?