THREE

FEBRUARY 21, 1929

It was the day after Caitlin’s birthday. She was eight years old, tall, graceful, with long, already shapely legs, delicate fingers, and her eyes had an element of virtuosity to them— they could accuse, appraise, they could even, in some childish, innocent way, smolder.

Her parents had imbued the story of her birth with a sense of drama that floated in Caitlin’s vague sense of herself like a long curl of blood in a glass of water. They thought at first that Annie was barren and then there was a miscarriage, and then another—Caitlin’s vision of miscarriage was based on the still-born calf she once saw: a liver-and-white creature glistening with its mother’s gore, which the other cows stomped on their way through the barn.

For Caitlin’s eighth birthday, Annie made a vanilla cake and spelled her name on the icing with nasturtium petals, which Peter had saved from the summer, pressed in his copy of Ivanhoe. Caitlin had wanted a dog or a cat, but the Flemings were strict about the families in the tenant houses keeping animals—the Flemings had expensive hunting dogs and an Abyssinian cat to whom they gave the run of the property and which they didn’t want polluted by the sperm of lesser animals. And so Caitlin was given a thick green sweater, which her mother had knitted, a smooth wooden bracelet, which her father had carved out of cherry, and a subscription to the Saturday Evening Post, which would come every week in a brown envelope and be placed in the tin mailbox on River Road and which would have her name typewritten on the wrapper— and this was paid for with cash money.

Now, the day after, she was in her bed, in the cold room at the north end of the house, wearing over her nightgown the new green sweater and wearing on her wrist the smooth, burnished oval her father made. A rime of ice was on the window and behind that was the faintly silver darkness of a winter morning without sun. Caitlin gripped the hem of the quilt; beneath her bed, currents of cold air twisted and turned like eels under ice. The window glass rattled in its pane.

She must go to school today, a journey of two miles, which she must make walking backward against the wind that would pant in her face like an eager dog no matter which way she turned.

But for now she could be still. She did not have to worry about oversleeping because she knew her father would come in when it was time.

He minded her now, after leaving the first years to Annie. Caitlin was like a baton that had been passed and now Peter was running with her. He had taken over her upbringing, if not her care. He showed her sunsets, the stars; they went often to the woods with a torch to see what went on in the night. He taught her the names of the trees, flowers, grasses, and weeds. She knew where the morels grew, and next year he said she could take them to town and sell them for money. He taught her poetry and chess. He made her a pair of real Dutch wooden shoes, and when she was too shy to wear them he made a pair for himself and together they walked the muddy fields, leaving in the soft earth marks that looked like small anvils.

It had been a disappointment for Peter when Annie did not produce a son—even as it was for Annie, for whom manhood was not necessarily exalted but for whom womanhood was a state of danger and humiliation. Peter had wanted one day to pass along the tools and costumes of his trade, the outfits that meant as much to him as caps and ribbons would to a soldier. He had wanted a boy to give the green-and-tan gum boots one wore when working in a mucky barn, the moleskin trousers one wore when clearing the brush, the heavy wool birding pants, the gloves, the hickory-handled hammer, the brilliant little carbon-toothed saw that could cut through lead, the thick and aged ropes. These were the things that represented a way of life, a way of doing things Peter respected; they were a part of a harmony he found comforting and even beautiful, though of course it drowned out whatever his own personal song might have been.

Caitlin heard the door below her room open with a groan. She slipped out of bed and ran to the window. She pressed her hand against the ice until a palm-shaped peephole melted, and then she looked through and saw her mother on her way up the black frozen path to the Flemings’. She must be there early to roll out dough for bread and to make the breakfast in case someone in the main house got up early. There was barely any snow on the ground, just a little crust here and there nestled into the bare branches of the forsythia or mixed in with the dead leaves along the stone walls. Annie wore a long black coat over her white uniform, and black rubber boots with the snaps open, and they seemed to want to come off her feet as she trudged up the incline.

In front of her, rising out of a wreath of mist, was the brick mansion with its towering, narrow chimneys, which seemed to impale it, pins through a butterfly. In the summer, Caitlin might spy her mother walking barefoot on this path, suddenly girlish, swinging her white, square-heeled shoes in her hand as she breathed her only free breaths of the day. But in the winter speed was all. Annie walked quickly, with her head bowed against the wind, and Caitlin watched as she got further and further away, in a landscape shaped by Caitlin’s small hand, until the ice formed again in the handprint, the fingers filled in and then the palm, and then the glass was opaque and Annie was gone.

Caitlin ran back to her bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and closed her eyes.

It was Peter’s job to awaken Caitlin, feed her, get her off to school. The Flemings could never complain about what time Peter started working—everyone knew he did more than his share on the property, did the work of two men, maybe three, and barely got the pay of just one.

He liked to wake her gently, recalling and recoiling from the raucous risings of his own Dutch childhood—his mother beating a spoon against a pot, his father simply throwing open the windows. Peter wanted his daughter to have mornings that allowed contemplation, gratitude for life, reverence, pleasure. He would say, “Only a still pond can hold a reflection.”

Sometimes he woke her by merely sitting on the bed and letting his thoughts stir her. Sometimes he stroked her hair until she opened just one eye, a dolphin breaking the water’s surface; she would smile at him, reach for him. And then there were the times when he would slip into the bed with her, the small bed that he had made with his own hands and he and Caitlin had lacquered one distant afternoon in an equipment barn while the rain had drummed on the tin roof, drummed and drummed and drummed.

This was one of those frigid winter mornings when even the wind is too cold to make a sound. Peter had made oatmeal—he believed in hot breakfasts, just as he believed in hard work. His long face was raw from a cold-water wash and the scrape of the straight razor; he smelled of brown soap and the strong coffee he had poured into himself. His hands were always cold, with something waxy and pious about them. He blew on them to warm his fingers. He was wearing dark brown boots that laced almost to the knee, and he was careful not to get them on the quilt as he stretched out next to his daughter and whispered in her ear, “Caitlin, rise and shine.”

She had a slight cold, she’d had it since the harsh weather settled in, and her breathing was raspy, belabored. It was only ten years since children died by the thousands from influenza and winter colds were still occasions for dread. Peter listened to her phlegmy breaths and he spun between the magnetic poles of concern and rapture: her beauty was braided around her vulnerability and it broke his heart.

He loved Caitlin with the core of his being. It was a love so deep, so alive, so boundless and incoherent that there were times he was lost within it. He walked through his love like a man through a blizzard. And he would never mean to hurt her, or frighten her in any way. But he must lie next to her; he must feel the abrupt curve of her spine through the quilt as she lay curled into herself.

His love of order bent beneath the burden of his love and he felt fear this morning, real fear. There was something lonely within him, something ravenous, and he didn’t know what this beast of appetite required of him. He wanted to cover his little girl’s face with kisses but he knew he must never. Desire came to him like a traveler from a distant land: he didn’t understand its language, he couldn’t communicate with it except for pleading, impatient gestures.

He was perfectly suited for running a large estate and there was not one man who worked under him who felt he ought to have Peter’s position. He knew every stone and tree on the property, his Dorset lambs, his Guernsey cows, his horses. He knew the proper mix of ash and oak and cherry to make a perfect sugaring fire, knew the exact direction to place the bales of hay for the best drying in July and how to change the angle slightly in August. He knew carpentry and plumbing, and was lucky when it came to wells. He knew everything on this property except his own heart, but this was the moment when everything else fell away and it was only this mysterious muscle with which he had to contend.

He stretched out next to his sleeping daughter and slowly brought his fingers closer to her hair, never knowing, never even suspecting, that though Caitlin’s eyes were closed she was entirely awake.

Maybe some men who dream of fondling their children, who want to press them close in a long, forbidden embrace, do so out of some need to debase and defile the innocence before them. Or perhaps they are compelled to reenact some childhood wound—a moment, perhaps, when an adult did the same to them. But in Peter’s case it was largely the consequence of a heart and a conscience unprepared for the love that was thrust upon it. His view of himself was small and tidy, and now he carried within him too much passion. He stumbled beneath it, just as a man staggering down the road beneath a load of kindling on his shoulders can drift far from the path and end up in the briars, the bog, in a world of trouble.

“Caitlin?” he said in a whisper like a flame guttering in a candle.

She pretended to sleep.

“Caitlin,” he said again, this time louder.

And she knew, without exactly knowing why, that he was testing to see if she was asleep and, if so, how deeply. She slipped her arm beneath her pillow and breathed herself deeper into the mesh of the mattress.

He moved closer to her and then closer still, until he could not be closer without being on top of her. “Shhh, shhh,” he said.

And then he pressed himself against her, hard, and he was hard, too, though it would be some years before she could remember that part of it, that hardness at his center.

“Shhh,” he said, “sleep. I love you, my darling. I love you.”

It was an incantation, and as he said it he was pressing against her and moving, rubbing, once, twice, again and again. And then he rolled away and got quickly out of the bed, ran from the room, and out of the house.

She heard his footsteps going away and she heard his voice. His voice was low, it sounded stunned, he was talking to himself but she could not understand the words. The wind carried them away.

She lay there for a long while, lonely for him, confused, feeling queerly ill at the pit of her stomach, the way she once did when she heard something she was not meant to—her mother saying to Peter: “It hurts when I pass my water. Do you think I should see the doctor?”

It was cold in that room and she pulled the covers over her head to be away from the air, which moved everywhere, looking for someone to make miserable. The darkness beneath the quilt was cold, too, but at least it was still and soon she was asleep again, thinking as consciousness faded that if no one came to waken her then she would not go to school.

When she did awaken, it was well past the time to go to school. The sun had streaked the icy window; long ovals of blue showed through the gray glass. She heard voices below, excited. She heard Shorty Russel saying, “Put him down here—careful now, careful.”

She sat up in bed, knowing something awful had happened. And then someone said, “Go up to the house and tell Mr. Fleming.”

“Yes, and Annie, too,” another voice said.

“My leg is broken,” she heard her father say, his voice filled with anger and wavering with the effort to remain calm.

“You’re lucky you ain’t dead,” Shorty Russel said. “What could be the matter with you? And what were you doing with that tractor in the woods anyhow?”

“I was bringing in some wood, the red oak we cut down last week.”

“Well, I think you must be crazy. You just drove that tractor off that ledge as if you was blind. Here, I’m going to put your leg up here to make you more comfortable.”

And more than anything else that day, she would remember sitting up in her bed and holding her ears as her father made one final strangled shout of pain.

FEBRUARY 21, 1940

Years later, Caitlin would learn that today the Germans began building the concentration camp at Auschwitz. But in her own life this day seemed only the beginning of her first true adventure, the day she left Leyden for Washington, D.C., the day when the restless and grandiose part of herself that had always dreamed of a life away from the estate, a life full of sleek errands and witty friends, a life of real importance, had suddenly to find a heretofore undiscovered internal ally—a self who could actually manage such a life.

Her parents brought her to the train station. Mr. Fleming had loaned Caitlin’s father the Buick to take Caitlin to the station and eighteen dollars to buy the ticket, which Fleming had handed over in a flour sack into which he swept spare change from his bureau at the end of every week—the eighteen dollars was in pennies, nickels, and dimes and weighed as much as a fieldstone.

Peter drove slowly, with his knuckles like bleached stones from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Caitlin sat beside him, watching the snowy countryside go past in fits and starts. Annie sat in the back, checking through the wicker basket full of provisions she had packed for the train journey. Fleming had neglected to give Peter the key to the trunk, so Caitlin’s trunk and suitcases were also in the back; Annie sat precariously perched on the suitcase with her feet propped on the trunk while she touched now the apples, now the jar of pickled green beans, now the little tin of biscuits.

They were silent. It was six in the morning; dawn was two red furrows in an ice-gray sky. Peter drove the car over a slushy pothole and gasped at the thought of having damaged Mr. Fleming’s car. “What did Dr. Freeman have to say for himself?” Peter Van Fleet asked, as he took the turn off River Road. They were just a half mile from the train station by now.

“That’s funny, I was just thinking about him,” said Caitlin.

Peter smiled, pleased and regretful—he always said they had a special communication, and now it was ending.

“A clean bill of health and all that?” he said.

“He said I should eat more,” said Caitlin.

“As if we didn’t feed you,” said Annie, from the back seat.

It struck Caitlin then that her mother was always a voice from the back seat, or the next room, someone just out of earshot, someone not entirely included. She turned to look at her mother but it was difficult, wearing such a bulky coat, sitting as she was. She straightened herself out and felt her heart grow heavy.

“We may as well face it,” said Peter. “Freeman’s a quack. He moved here from the city. Running from something, I’ll bet.” As respectful as Peter was toward the Flemings, he was just that scornful toward everybody else.

“Then why did you make such a fuss about me going to him?”

“Well, with you going off halfway across the country …”

“I’m going to Washington, not Kansas City.”

“You got that right,” Peter said, smiling. “Kay Cee. Halfway across the country.”

“If I put it on your plate and you don’t eat it, I don’t think it’s my fault,” said Annie.

“I know that, Mama,” said Caitlin. This time she did not attempt to turn around. She just said it and left it at that.

“Everything else check out, though?” asked Peter. “Ticker?”

Caitlin had had scarlet fever when she was ten and there had been persistent concern about her heart since then.

“Ticker’s great, pulse is the cat’s pajamas.”

“I always actually see a cat wearing pajamas when you say that,” said Peter, grinning happily. He had been sullen for days, dreading this goodbye at the train station, but now his spirits were rising like a fever.

Caitlin was thinking about the look on Dr. Freeman’s face—he was a small, dapper man, with a pencil mustache and brilliantined hair—when he said, “Are you still intact?” She had told him it was none of his business and he smiled, smoothed his mustache down with his forefinger, and interpreted her little flash of temper as a kind of confession.

The train station was simple, a little red brick waiting room where the stationmaster sat smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes behind the bars of the ticket window, looking like a convict. There were two long benches for the passengers waiting for their trains. A few years before, there had been no place to get out of the weather or to buy a ticket. The brick structure had been built with the use of private funds—the river families had chipped in a few thousand each to construct it. It had been quite awful to see how the Flemings had campaigned to be asked to contribute.

Peter pulled into the station. The tracks went along the river, south to New York City, north to Canada. The ice on the river looked like shattered glass; here and there it was melted and steam rose up toward the morning light. The snowy, still lawns of the great houses swept down to the river. On the west side of the river, where there were more workers, a cement factory, closed during the worst days of the Depression, was going again, and its smokestacks sent up puffs of gray smoke that looked somehow colder than the sky.

Caitlin peered out the car window at the tracks. She could see the southbound train a mile away. It was burning coal and the smoke was black. The train was slowing down now and the smoke trailed over the engine and then the next car, and then the next, like a long vaporous scarf.

“We better hurry,” said Caitlin.

Peter was looking at his pocket watch and shaking his head. “Either they’ve changed the schedule on us or the train’s early.”

“Maybe the Flemings paid extra to get rid of her that much sooner,” said Annie. As she often did nowadays, after saying the worst, she laughed.

“Annie, what kind of thing is that to say?” The voice Peter used when he addressed his wife had within it the tone of a teacher who is only biding his time before his new position comes through, a teacher who has nothing left to say and only wants to avoid anything that will impede his departure.

“I’m only saying what is true,” Annie said. “And what we all know to be true.”

“Annie—”

“She’s right, she’s right,” said Caitlin, opening the door. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you.”

“It’s not embarrassment, it’s disgrace,” said Annie. Her arms were folded over her bosom. She was wearing her black overcoat with the fur collar. Her face was too narrow for her large, staring eyes.

The train sounded its whistle. That whistle had always been a howl of loneliness to Caitlin, who would hear it from her bedroom and long to be on her way somewhere or other. Yet now it was calling to her and she did not feel joy. She did not feel fear, either, or sadness, or even excitement. All she felt was vague tension, as if she were at the sink washing her hands and wondering if she might be late to work.

Caitlin grabbed her suitcases—plaid cloth, brand new, a goodbye, good-riddance present from the Flemings—and Peter dragged the old battered blue metal trunk by its parched and crumbling leather handle across the snow-packed parking lot. They had to hurry; the pressure of the moment overwhelmed whatever impulse any of them might have had for last-minute embraces, promises, tears. Caitlin scurried down the steep, icy stairs toward the track. Annie trudged behind her, grasping the handrail, with a faraway, faintly amused expression on her face, the wind ruffling the fur of her coat collar so that it touched her creased white face. Peter was last, limping, frowning each time the trunk bounced against a step as he dragged it behind him.

Caitlin had her ticket in her purse. She was the only passenger getting on in Leyden this morning. The train was coming from Albany; it would be full of politicians and well-to-do housewives, on their way to the city. In New York, Caitlin would change trains for Washington. She had three quarters in a new leather change purse so she could tip Red Caps at Grand Central and not have to struggle with her luggage. She was looking forward to that particularly. She had never before paid someone to do her work for her.

The train’s headlight was on, shining pale gold in the gray morning air. The engineer was having fun with the steam whistle; Caitlin imagined people rolling over in their warm beds for miles around, heeding the train for a moment, and then pulling the covers over their heads.

They had just one moment for their final goodbyes. A conductor was hanging out the open door as the car pulled into the station. He pointed at Caitlin’s trunk, gestured for her to just leave it there.

“I’ll write you tonight as soon as I’m there,” said Caitlin.

“Mr. Fleming said for you to sit on the right side, so you can watch the river,” said Peter.

“I think I’ve seen enough of this river,” said Caitlin, and then immediately regretted it.

He shook his head. “It’s changing so fast, though. Factories, houses. Poor Henry Hudson wouldn’t recognize it.”

Steam poured off the train. The enormous iron wheels were white with frost.

She saw the men inside the train reading newspapers, smoking, talking to one another. Caitlin quickly glanced down a row of windows looking for a woman’s face but saw none. Ah: there. An older woman wearing a silly feathered hat, reading no newspaper, smoking no cigarette, talking to no one: just sitting there in perfect unmoving profile.

A man in a blue cap and uniform, handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows, had taken her suitcase in. The conductor, an older man with a round face, wire-rimmed spectacles, leaned out again and called, “All aboard!”

“Is it OK if we see her to her seat?” Peter asked.

“No visitors!” the conductor called out.

Peter saluted. Understood.

Caitlin turned quickly and hugged her mother. It was the first time she had touched her mother intimately in many years. She felt she had to take Annie by surprise.

“So now they’ve taken my only child,” muttered Annie into Caitlin’s painfully cold ear. Instinctively, Annie hugged her tight—but then quickly let go and seemed to push Caitlin away, in a gesture that might have meant “Hurry up” but which Caitlin knew more likely meant “Leave me alone.”

She turned to her father, embraced him, kissed him lightly on the cheek. He needed a shave; he smelled smoky from the wood stove. He clasped her hands and looked down at her. He was becoming stooped but he was still enormously tall. His eyes filled with tears. He looked mortified, as if someone had just slapped his face.

“Don’t be surprised if I turn up one day in Washington to pay you a surprise visit,” he said. “Both of us.”

“I’d give all my wishes away if that one would come true,” said Caitlin, hugging him one last time, backing toward the retractable steel steps that led to the mysterious amber warmth of the waiting train.

“That’s from a poem, isn’t it?” Peter called out.

The engineer let the whistle howl one last time. A fierce burst of steam hissed from the belly of the train as it started to roll. Caitlin looked back at the platform; her parents were enshrouded.

“Tickets,” said the conductor. He had looked friendlier when he was hanging out of the train; now that she was under his jurisdiction, he looked displeased with her.

Caitlin opened her purse and gave the conductor what he wanted. He tore pieces of the many-paged ticket out, put holes in others with his paper puncher, and handed it back to Caitlin.

“Second class, two cars down,” he said.

She nodded. “I was told if I wanted to change this ticket to first class I could do it on the train.”

He nodded, frowned. She was making work for him. “To New York, or all the way to Washington?”

“First class, all the way to Washington.”

“We have a club car, too,” the conductor said, meaning to be sarcastic.

“Is that better than first class?”

“Oh, much.”

“Then I’ll have that.” The car was swaying back and forth as the train picked up speed. Caitlin looked out the window a last time to see her parents. Peter was waving, unsure if he was being seen, and Annie was moving closer to him, touching him lightly on the sleeve, as if to reclaim him. She was still holding the basket she had packed for Caitlin’s journey.

“You should have got what you wanted in the first place,” the conductor said, handing Caitlin the blue-and-white ticket that would allow her into the club car.

“The person who made the purchase wasn’t aware of my requirements,” said Caitlin, opening her purse and counting out crisp dollars that were being spent for the very first time.

And so she traveled with the rich, on a dark velvet seat, adjusting and readjusting the footrests, and watching through her own reflection as the miles went by. The man sitting next to her worked in an investment house in New York. He was coming back from visiting his sister, who had married a farmer and was living upstate. The stockbroker was upset over the life she was making for herself. “The cold, the filth, everything stinks of horse or cow.” He had a way of folding his newspaper so it was no larger than a book. After he had had enough of decrying his sister’s new life, he asked Caitlin where she was going and she told him she was on her way to Washington.

“Family there?”

“No, I’m going to work for a congressman.” This was her first time out in the world with this new fact of life and she tried it on proudly.

“Say, that’s all right. Which crook? No, just kidding. Who’ll you be working for?”

“Elias J. Stowe.”

“Say, Stowe’s all right.” The man tapped his forehead, apparently pleased he knew who Stowe was. “What we need is politicians with the guts to stand up to Roosevelt in case he tries to get us into a war against Germany.”

“I don’t think Mr. Stowe wants war.”

“You can say that again. He’s got guts. You know, like in Shakespeare, ‘Discretion is the better part of valor.’ ”

Caitlin turned away. As they headed south, parts of the river were already thawed. An old European-style castle was built off a little islet in the river and it was in ruins, its tower crumpled, its windows blue with sky. She felt the sudden pressure of tears in her eyes: she was just getting a glimpse of herself as a free woman riding a train, sitting in the best seats, next to a stranger quoting Shakespeare.

“You just tell your boss that Teddy Collington—here’s my card, by the way—is behind him all the way. You know what I think? Basically, Roosevelt’s too shrewd to get us mixed up in that war. You see that Gallup Poll the other day? Seventy percent of the country wants us to keep our noses out of it.” His eyes darted for a moment. “The only ones who want war are the crazy Army generals who have nothing to do but march around in the stink and the mud. And the Jews, who seem to think that this, like everything else in the world, is really all about them.”

He settled back in his seat, propped his feet up on the footrest, and bit down hard on a peppermint candy.

“I hope I haven’t gone on too much about it,” he said, smiling at Caitlin. There was something searching, vaguely and ominously flirtatious in his eyes suddenly. He seemed to be scrutinizing her for some possibility of sex—it struck her in the pit of her stomach because she had sensed him as a prissy bachelor type and now it seemed she had been wrong.

“No, not at all,” she said.

“I assume your views are the same, then?” he said, smiling.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve given it much thought.”

“Not much thought? There’s no more important question facing us now.”

They parted in Grand Central Station. Collington carried a small leather suitcase, draped his topcoat over his shoulders. They were underground, in a smoking, acrid tunnel. “You be sure to wish your boss good luck, now!” Collington called out as he walked out toward the circle of white clear light at the end of the platform.

On the train to Washington, Caitlin sat next to a priest who smoked a pipe and read a book in French. He never once glanced at her; even when she squeezed past him to go to the bathroom, he kept his eyes on the page.

The claustrophobia and exhaustion of traveling overwhelmed her high spirits, and she was suddenly weary and afraid of all the strangers around her, all the houses with the unknown lives taking place within them, the factories and fences, the unfamiliar skies, the lengthening shadows, the incessant chug and sway of the train, the fermented-apple aroma of the priest’s tobacco.

She closed her eyes and slept and the rest of the journey slipped away. None of it even lodged in memory. The unfriendliness of the priest, the smell of his pipe, the coils of an electrical generating station in New Jersey flashing red as they caught the rays of the sun, the thump of her head against the thick window glass as she dozed off, the distant voice of a conductor calling out the station stop in Philadelphia, and then a dream, oblique, just of light, of a jar full of violets, a trembling square of sun on the floor intersected suddenly by a shadow, and then she awakened as if from a nightmare, disoriented, trembling, waves of panic rippling through her like wind over the wheat.

Union Station was chaos. She walked behind the porter who dragged her luggage. She stared at the trunk’s handle, wondering if it would snap. Everywhere there were trains sweating in the tunnels, and the steam gathered around the travelers, who moved like phantoms. Here were people of all colors, speaking all the languages of the world—businessmen, lawyers, journalists, men in white suits with beards like Georgia colonels, Negroes, women in pillbox hats with cigarettes plugged into their brightly painted mouths. They had arrived on the great lurching and howling locomotives of the Atlantic Coast Line, the Southern, the Pennsylvania, the Fredericksburg & Ohio. Peter had told her that over two hundred passenger trains pulled into Union Station every day.

She walked through the tunnel, into the light. The Red Cap was a young black man with a deformed back. The skin beneath his fingernails was bright pink, like a calf’s tongue.

She had asked the Red Cap to take her to the information booth, where, by prearrangement, she was to meet Betty Sinclair, who was then nothing but a name written on a piece of paper to Caitlin. “Miss Sinclair will be wearing a tan coat and a dark green hat,” the instructions from Stowe’s departing secretary read. “She will see to your lodgings, as well.”

Everything echoed in the station: voices, footsteps, even her own heartbeat. She stopped for a moment, to calm herself. People streamed past her like rushing water past a boulder in the streambed.

“It’s just up here, miss,” said the Red Cap. “Information.”

Caitlin nodded her head. Her breath was shallow and felt useless. She had never spoken to a black person before.

Then a voice said, “Are you Caitlin Van Fleet?” It was a deep, melodic voice, and though Caitlin did not think of it as seductive at the time she would come to remember it so.

She turned toward the voice and faced Betty Sinclair. She was dressed in a trenchcoat and a green hat that looked like something Errol Flynn would wear. She was tall, angular, with blond hair, bright, aquamarine eyes.

“I knew I’d recognize you,” she said, smiling at Caitlin. “And it’s a good thing, too. There’s at least ten women in this place wearing hats like mine. You could have ended up going home with anybody.”

She looked at Caitlin, squinted her eyes a little, and then took her by the arm. “Long ride, isn’t it?” she said. She waited for a response, though surely she could not have cared what the answer to her question was. Betty Sinclair was verbally taking the pulse of the beautiful young girl who stood before her and who seemed not to possess the power of speech.

“Are you all right?” Betty asked, softly. She gestured for . the Red Cap to follow them with Caitlin’s luggage. “I’ve got a taxi waiting for us outside.”

The porter was dexterous with Caitlin’s luggage. He carried the suitcase with just the index finger of his left hand hooked through the handle, and he suddenly hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder. He walked in front of them and weaved through the crowds.

“It’s like being on safari,” said Betty.

Caitlin stopped. She felt so short of breath that even the mild exertion of walking seemed a risk. She had such a clear vision of herself sinking to the floor of the station and the patterns the people made as they shifted this way and that to avoid treading over her that it seemed to be not dread but some real prescience, a vivid memory of the future.

“Are you all right?” Betty asked again.

“I just can’t believe I’m here,” said Caitlin, the first words she’d spoken to Betty.

“You’ll get used to it,” said Betty. “Really, it’s not so bad.”

“I just can’t believe I’m here,” Caitlin said again. She felt vaguely the comforting weight of Betty’s arm around her but more than anything she was conscious of a voice that resonated like a drum within her and the voice said, I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.