IDA FORLORN

As the time of arrival grew near, Ida gathered her strength for the ordeal ahead. Whatever happened, she must not miss Lily. She would keep her place in the cars and watch all the passengers as they moved along the platform below her window.

The outskirts of Washington were ugly with cattle yards and wagon sheds. An enormous corral held thousands of horses. The smell of a slaughterhouse seeped into the car. Ida was disappointed. Could they really be approaching the great capital city of the United States? She had seen photographs of splendid marble buildings like temples in ancient Rome, but so far, it looked more like a stockyard or cattle market.

With a hiss of steam and a squealing of brakes, the train slowed down and chugged into the station. At once all the other passengers stood up and collected their bags and bundles and moved along the aisle. A moment later they appeared on the platform below Ida’s window.

The station was an imposing building with a tower that rose high above the track. Ida watched intently as streams of passengers from the other cars flooded slowly toward an open door—well-dressed businessmen, or perhaps they were congressmen, sharp-looking salesmen with heavy cases, shabby women in untidy bonnets, handsomely dressed ladies, whole families with children and babes in arms and strolling clusters of men in uniform, black soldiers as well as white. Some of their uniforms were outlandish, with baggy red trousers and tasseled fezes—like pictures in The Arabian Nights.

In the sodden August heat even the fashionable women looked disheveled, their crinolines tussled in the push and shove of other people’s baggage. One well-dressed man took off his tall hat and mopped his bald head, and Ida thought he must surely be a senator. A boy with a tray hanging from his shoulders was selling iced lemonade, and for a homesick moment Ida wondered if the ice had come from one of the ponds at home, packed in the hold of a ship that had sailed all the way from Boston harbor, the great blocks keeping each other cold.

She caught her breath and leaned closer to the window. Was that Lily’s pretty parasol?

No, it tilted sideways and the face beneath it was not Lily’s.

“End of the line,” said the conductor. “May I help you, missus?”

“Oh, thank you.” But Ida was grateful for his hand as she stepped heavily down to the platform.

She had missed dozens of people. Hungrily Ida stared right and left, looking for Lily. But the crowd was thinning, the train was gathering steam and blowing its whistle and the powerful rods on the driving wheels were beginning their mighty seesawing motion. The great wheels turned slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster. The locomotive whistled and thundered out of the station, followed by its rattling train of cars, leaving no one on the platform but a couple of baggage porters, a stevedore with a cart piled with mailbags, the lemonade seller packing up his ice—which came, perhaps, from the North Pole—and Ida, forlorn.

Only then did she see that there were two doors into the station. Lily must have gone into the farther door, never passing Ida’s window at all.

Almost running, she made her way through the other door. In the lofty waiting room a few people were sitting on benches and a few more were heading out the wide portal into the street. Ida hurried after the departing passengers, looking for a pretty plump woman in a soaring bonnet and a fetching outfit. When she had boarded the train in Baltimore, Lily had been wearing her favorite gown, her “Clothilde,” with its lacy little cape.

Outside on the broad avenue, cab horses were ranged along the curb. One had a nose bag, and Ida was reminded that she had not eaten a morsel since a hasty breakfast in the station at Baltimore, and then it was only a bun.

People were climbing into the hacks, the men handing in their wives, the wives gathering up their billowing skirts and settling down.

Ida hurried along the row as the drivers flicked their whips across the broad backs of their horses and set off at a trot, heading for splendid lodgings or magnificent hotels somewhere else in the city. Soon all the cabs had sped away in the direction of an imposing marble building a little farther up the avenue. The dome of the building was covered with scaffolding. Ida had seen pictures, she knew what it was. It was the Capitol of the United States.

Painfully disappointed, she sagged down on a bench beside the door of the depot. Every one of the passengers from the Baltimore train had left the station, including Lily LeBeau.