“Here we are in Baltimore,” Jesse folded up his newspaper and hoisted himself out of his seat, taking hold of the hand rail to steady himself as the train lurched to a stop in the station.
Alice remained in her seat until the train came to a complete stop. When she stood up, she tugged at her valise, trying to free it from the overhead shelf amid the jostle of other passengers shoving and rushing to retrieve their own baggage and exit the train. Jesse tried to shield her with his body from the crush of activity surrounding them. Eventually, he lost patience and reached for the valise himself.
“I can do it!” Alice snapped, yanking the valise toward her and wrenching it from his grasp.
“I was just trying to help,” Jesse scoffed.
He followed her off the train, observing her petulantly. He would have carried the valise for her, if she showed the slightest inclination to ask for his help. Instead, she stubbornly lugged the heavy bag off the train and down the platform to the sign board that listed all the arrival and departure information for all the trains in the station.
Jesse hung close by her side. “Which is our train to Chicago?”
“That one there,” she pointed to the sign. “Train Number 17, Track 8.” She checked the big clock in the center of the terminal. “It departs at two-fifteen, and it’s one-thirty now. We have just enough time to get our bags transferred and get on board. I’ll go find a porter to transfer my trunk.”
“Leave it,” Jesse commanded. “I’ll take your trunk over to the other train.”
“No,” Alice insisted. “You have your own baggage to attend to, and we don’t have much time. You take care of your own luggage, and I’ll take care of mine.”
“There’s plenty of time,” he countered. “Just come back to the baggage car and point out to me which trunk is yours. I’ll take my trunk over to Track 8. Then I’ll come back and get yours. I can easily carry it over. You don’t need to waste your money on a porter.”
“No,” Alice barked again. “You’re not a porter. You’re a passenger. I won’t have you carting my trunk around the station like a hired man. I have the money to hire a porter, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Don’t be unreasonable, Alice,” he scolded. “Let me carry your trunk. I want to do it. Just tell me which one it is.”
“No!” she snapped. “You stay away from my trunk! I’ll do it myself!”
“Oh, you’re impossible!” he bellowed. “You have the thickest skull of anyone I know! Just let me help you, why don’t you?”
“I never asked you to come on this trip,” she accused. “I had this trip all planned out weeks ago, and I’m perfectly capable of handling the arrangements by myself. I’ll thank you not to go sticking your nose in where it isn’t wanted.”
He huffed in exasperation and stomped away. But they both marched directly to the baggage car, where a crowd of porters worked to unload the passengers’ luggage. Still annoyed at Jesse’s interference in her journey, Alice kept a clear distance from him as she negotiated with one of the porters to carry her trunk over to Track 8 and put it onto Train Number 17.
Scowling at her across the platform, Jesse located his own trunk, hoisted it onto his shoulder the same way the porters did with the passengers’ luggage, and carried it over to Track 8 himself. He even put it in the door of the baggage car and slid it in. The porters watched him curiously but made no move to hinder him. When he deposited his trunk in the baggage car, he brushed the dust from the shoulder of his suit, cast another belligerent glare in Alice’s direction, and stomped off to a nearby newsstand to buy a bag of peanuts.
Although her porter brought her trunk immediately behind Jesse’s, Alice trailed several yards behind, watching only to ensure her trunk’s safe arrival at the baggage car of Train Number 17. As soon as it reached its destination, she hurried up to the porter and paid him his tip. Then she hustled away to find something to eat for herself, studiously avoiding Jesse.
She found a tiny café at the far end of the terminal, where she purchased a sandwich and a glass of lemonade. By the time she dragged her heavy valise all the way there and back again to Track 8, she regretted silently to herself that she hadn’t treated Jesse more solicitously. Her arms and hands ached from carrying it, and her feet smarted in her tight shoes. She would have liked to browse the other shops in the station, but fatigue prevented her from taking another step. She dropped the valise next to a bench on the platform of Track 8 and slumped down on the hard wooden seat. She sat there, immobile, until the conductor called the passengers to board the train for Chicago.
Though the train was crowded, Jesse still managed to position himself in the seat across from Alice for this leg of the journey. For the first hours of the trip, he and Alice scowled across the space and refused to speak to one another. Around them, the other passengers chatted back and forth, some becoming acquainted with strangers near them, exchanging pleasantries and laughing at jokes. In time, the monotony of the trip subdued them all. The hubbub quieted down, men read newspapers and books, women dozed, and children stared out the windows at the greenery slipping by. Alice retreated into her own thoughts and visions of the future life awaiting her out there on the opposite coast of the country, until Jesse broke the silence.
“Come on, Alice,” he invited. “Let’s put our differences aside and be friends again. I won’t meddle with your journey if you don’t want me to. Let’s make it up with one another. What do you say?”
A joyous smile of relief lighted Alice’s face. On general principle, she refused to make any concession to reconcile with him. Nor did she admit her sincerest wish to put their argument behind them. But she longed to regain the pleasant familiarity of their relationship, and she even wished she could relax her stiff self-sufficiency just a little and avail herself of his chivalrous attention.
“Okay,” she conceded. “We’ll be friends again.”
He smiled back at her. “We won’t have long to travel before we arrive in Chicago. We should be there in time for supper. Why don’t you join me? I’ll take you out to a restaurant.”
“Are you sure you can afford that?” she asked. “It’s kind of expensive.”
He waved her concerns away with his hand. “Don’t worry about that.”
For some reason, she couldn’t remember the timetable for her transfer to the next train. “What time does the train get into Chicago?”
“I can’t remember,” he admitted. “but I can’t imagine it being too late. It’s not that far from Baltimore to Chicago.”
“But we have to stop in Detroit and Cleveland and who knows where else,” Alice pointed out.
“Don’t worry,” Jesse assured her. “We’ll get there in time for supper. Just say you’ll let me take you out.”
“I’ve never eaten in a proper restaurant before,” she remarked.
“My grandfather took me once, when he was alive,” Jesse recalled. “I haven’t been in one since. I always ate with my mother’s boarders.”
“I wouldn’t want you wasting your money unnecessarily,” Alice demurred. “I can get food in the shops in the station and eat it on the train. It will be cheaper that way.”
“You don’t know that for certain,” Jesse returned. “Train station food is always more expensive than regular food you buy in the store, and it isn’t as good, either. Anyway, I want to take you out. Say you’ll come with me for a nice supper in a real restaurant. If you haven’t been in one before, then that’s all the more reason to go.”
“Alright,” she agreed. “I’ll go with you.”
A wicked glint sparkled in his eyes. “And you’re forbidden from asking what anything costs. You better eat a proper supper, and maybe even drink a glass of wine. You better not cheat by ordering a ham sandwich. I’ll be offended if you do.”
“Well, I can’t have you blowing your money buying me fancy meals in restaurants,” she objected. “We still have a long trip ahead of us before we get to Bend. You need to conserve you money so you have enough.”
“Oh, I have enough,” he assured her. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“Where did you get the money for the trip?” she inquired. “I got mine from Mr. Emerson. I never could have left Greensborough if he hadn’t sent the fare.”
“Never mind where I got the money,” he mumbled.
His evasive answer sparked her curiosity and she narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t rob a bank or anything, did you?”
“No,” he growled. “I didn’t rob a bank and I didn’t do anything else against the law.” He twisted his face in a wry smirk. “You don’t mean that much to me.”
“And that reminds me,” Alice continued. “What did Mr. Leary say when you told him you were leaving your apprenticeship? He must have been pretty angry about it.”
“Quite the contrary,” Jesse disagreed. “He released me from my apprenticeship and said I was as good a journeyman as any other tailor in the city. He wished me luck and even gave me a bonus on my last wages.”
“So that’s where you got the money for the trip!” Alice exclaimed.
“No, it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of this trip,” Jesse responded. “but it was a very generous bonus nonetheless. He told me he was sorry to lose me, but as there was no way of convincing me to stay, he wished me luck.”
“That was very kind of him,” she observed.
“He’s a kind man,” Jesse concurred. “He said I had nothing more to learn from him, and he wondered why I stayed on with him as long as I had. He said he was very grateful for my loyalty these last few years, because he knew I could be earning considerably more working for someone else as a journeyman.”
“What about your mother?” Alice prompted. “Was she upset when you told her you planned to leave Greensborough?”
“No,” Jesse replied. “She expected it. She knew I didn’t want to stay there without you, and she understood why I wanted to leave town to look for a better place to ply my trade. So she was happy about it, too.”
“She can’t have been happy about you leaving,” Alice remarked. “any more than Dad was happy about me leaving.”
“No,” he conceded. “But she isn’t ill the way he is, either. And she’s happy about being able to get her full rent from your dad again.”
“She is?” gasped Alice. “She never said so!”
“No, she would never say so,” Jesse confirmed. “because she has too much respect for your dad and she didn’t want to embarrass him. But she’s grateful to you for doing what you did. She knows perfectly well she couldn’t go on giving him a break on the rent for very much longer.”
“I don’t even need to ask if your mother gave you any money for the trip,” Alice told him. “I know she doesn’t have money to spend on anything.”
“No, she hasn’t got a penny to spare on anything,” Jesse remarked. “That’s why she’s glad to be getting the full rent from your dad.”
“But wherever you got the money, you still need to be conservative,” she continued. “You still have to establish yourself in Bend. When I get off the train, Mr. Emerson will pick me up and take me straight to his house. Maybe we’ll stop off at the church or the judge’s chambers on the way. But at least I don’t have to worry about how I’ll support myself once I arrive there. You need to plan to find yourself a place to live and a means of maintaining yourself until you establish a flow of income.”
“I’m glad you’re planning my life for me,” he teased. “I need a manager.”
“Think about it, Jesse,” she persisted. “You need to handle your funds carefully. You can’t go buying me glasses of wine every evening.”
“I never said I was going to buy you one every evening,” Jesse retorted. “I said I’d buy you one this evening. And I think you better let me take care of my own money. You wouldn’t let me help you with your trunk. Now, you let me handle my own money and you handle yours.”
“You have me there,” she conceded. “Alright. I’ll drop the whole subject.”
“Thank you,” he exclaimed.
They lapsed into separate reveries as the train rumbled through the towns and fields. The sun crossed the sky and cast their carriage into shadow. Alice leaned her head against the window and drifted off into a doze, lulled by the clackety-clack of the wheels over the rails. The sound muffled all other noises inside the car, providing an insular bubble of quiet to each person. In this bubble, each passenger rode alone with his own thoughts and daydreams, rocking and swaying in a cradle of constant noise.
Jesse observed Alice falling asleep against the window frame. A strand of her hair fell over her face. Her lips parted and drooped open. Her eyelids shivered and fluttered, but didn’t open. Underneath, the dark orbs slithered from side to side and up and down in the rapid movements of sleep. In spite of how well he knew her, the fact struck him suddenly that this was the first time he ever saw her asleep. In all the years they lived together under the same roof, he never even saw her in her own room. He didn’t know what the quilt on her bed looked like. He never saw her with her hair disheveled or her shoes untied.
He had told her he loved her, and she replied that she loved him as a brother and a friend. He returned this fraternal love for her. He loved her with the familiarity that breeds contempt. He knew enough about her to see all her shortcomings and her frailties. He knew her well enough to criticize her to her face and get away with it.
But in the fading light of the train car, he realized that he loved her as a stranger. He admired her from a distance as a novelty. She remained enough of an enigma to him to fire his imagination and make him yearn to know every detail of her most intimate secrets. What did she look like in her nightdress? And out of it? What did she look like when she woke up in the morning, with the crust of sleep in her eyes and the creases of the pillow cover still indenting her face? What would she look like when she aged and faded with weather, child-bearing, and the passage of years? All those secret details rightfully belonged to him. He coveted them, and he guarded them with the jealousy of ownership. With the possible exception of her father, he refused to allow anyone else to claim them. He would do violence to any other man who tried.