Chapter Thirteen

Jill looked around the Silver Banquet and saw the ­Carsons at a table in the middle of the car. There was Milly Demarest with her three children. Florian Rapace had managed to get a table right across the aisle. Uncle Sean was at the same table, along with Miss Brandon and a woman who was traveling in the first coach car.

“Miss McLeod, please join us for dinner.” Mrs. Warrick was at a table near the steward’s counter in the Silver Banquet. With her were Dr. Ranleigh and her niece Rachel.

“I’ll sit with those passengers,” Jill told the steward. She walked down the aisle and pulled out the empty chair next to Mrs. Warrick. Once she’d settled into the seat, she pulled the menu from the stand and opened it.

“We’ve just ordered,” Dr. Ranleigh said. “Geneva and I are having the trout.”

“Not me,” Rachel said. “I don’t care for fish. I’m having the roast sirloin.”

“I do like fish, so I’ll have the trout.” Jill marked her meal check for the boneless Rocky Mountain trout and selected a lettuce and tomato salad and green peas to go with it. “I’ve been told there’s chocolate pie for dessert.”

“Oh, good,” Rachel said. “I love chocolate anything.”

Jill turned her meal check over to the waiter. She looked around and saw Lois Demarest lean across the aisle to speak to Florian. At that moment the Olivers walked by, heading for a table. Once again Uncle Sean looked at Henry Oliver, a narrow-eyed assessment that told Jill he was trying to place the man.

She poured herself a glass of water and spoke to her dining companions. “Are you enjoying the trip?”

“I am indeed,” Ella Ranleigh said. “I always enjoy traveling by train.” She gestured at the window. Outside, the sun had dipped in the west, painting the rugged landscape of southeast Utah in hues of red and orange. “Just look at that sunset.”

“It’s been about two hours since we left Grand Junction,” ­Rachel said. “I wonder where we are now.”

“I live by the clock,” Jill said, checking her watch. “We’re about an hour from our next stop. That’s Helper, Utah. We’ll be in the station at seven-ten.”

“Why is it called Helper?” Rachel asked.

“The town is named for the helper locomotives the Denver and Rio Grande Western used to help the westbound trains get up the steep grade to a place called Soldier Summit, which is the other side of the town.”

The waiter brought their first courses, salads for Jill and Mrs. Warrick, vegetable soup for the Ranleighs. The doctor raised her spoon to her lips and tasted her soup. “Mmm, this is good. How long have you been a Zephyrette, Miss McLeod?”

“Two years.” Jill gave her dining companions an abbreviated history of her tenure on the California Zephyr.

“When we talked earlier,” Mrs. Warrick said, “you told me you grew up in Colorado.”

Jill nodded. “Yes. We lived in the City Park neighborhood in Denver. Then during the war, we lived with my grandmother near Cheesman Park.”

“You must have gone to East High School,” Rachel said, finishing up her soup. “So did I. Class of ’forty-one. Then I went to the University of Colorado in Boulder.”

Jill smiled. “Yes, I did go to East High. I graduated in ’forty-five. But I went to the University of California instead. You see, my father joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor.”

“Yes, Pearl Harbor.” Dr. Ranleigh glanced at her niece. There was a somber look in Rachel’s eyes. Jill suspected that the young woman on the other side of the table had lost someone that day, just as Jill had in Korea.

“Rachel was in school at Boulder and lived on campus,” the doctor continued. “Her mother moved in with me while her ­father—my brother—was overseas. And I started working at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in nineteen forty-two.”

“Dad went to officers’ training in ’forty-two,” Jill said. “Then he stopped in Denver on leave before going to the West Coast. He was a doctor on a ship. We didn’t see him again for three years. At the end of the war he was assigned to the Naval Hospital in Oakland, so we packed up and moved to California.”

The war. Interesting to talk about it now, but it was not so distant, really. It had been almost eight years since V-E Day.

How well Jill remembered those days after Pearl Harbor, when the United States had entered the war already raging around the globe. Since Cheesman Park was southeast of downtown and still in the children’s school districts, her parents had made the decision to sell the family’s much smaller house. Lora McLeod and her children had moved in with Grandma Cleary, for the duration, however long that might be.

During the war, the big rambling house, just a block from the park, was full of people. There was a housing shortage then, and Grandma offered space to a number of relatives who came to Denver to work, some of them at defense industry jobs at Lowry Field and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Lora McLeod got a job at Lowry Field, doing secretarial work, while Grandma volunteered at the USO.

Grandma even rented out rooms, to help make ends meet. So Jill had to double up with her sister, Lucy. A walk-in closet was turned into a bedroom for their younger brother Drew. There was always a bed available for the family members, men and woman, who were in uniform, passing through the Mile High City on their way to wherever, even if that meant a cot in a hallway. Queuing for the bathroom was crowded, and time-consuming.

“I was still teaching at Colorado Women’s College during the war,” Mrs. Warrick said. “My late husband was in the civil service. He traveled quite a bit, working for the Office of Price Administration, at the regional office in Denver.”

“Rationing.” Rachel rolled her eyes and sighed. She reached for a roll from the basket on the table and buttered it. “I’m so glad to have real butter. That nasty margarine we had in the dorms was white. It looked like lard. You can’t imagine how I hated that stuff.”

“Yes, I can,” Jill said. “I hated it too.”

The Office of Price Administration had been formed before the United States entered the war. Its role was controlling prices and rents. In May 1942 the OPA froze prices and issued ration books. Butter, sugar, milk, coffee, meat—everything was in short supply for civilians, who now had to keep track of their rationing points as well as their money. Favorite recipes had to be rewritten to take into account the restrictions of rationing.

That first spring, Jill, her siblings and several cousins dug up the grass in Grandma’s yard, front and back. They planted a huge victory garden, growing enough vegetables to feed the house’s occupants. On one side of the backyard was a tree that produced plenty of McIntosh apples, so they didn’t let any of the fruit go to waste. On the other side of the lot, they built a chicken coop. Several hens provided precious eggs. Relatives who lived in Boulder County kept bees. During trips to Denver they brought jars of honey, to take the place of hard-to-get sugar.

Those trips from the beekeeping relatives were infrequent. Gas, oil, tires, all of these were rationed. People walked, or carpooled, and the Sunday drives to the mountains Jill remembered from her childhood became just that, memories. Such recreational travel was discouraged. Because of gas rationing, most ordinary citizens got an A sticker for their cars, entitling the holder to three or four gallons of gas per week. War workers got B stickers, which gave them eight gallons per week. C stickers went to doctors, like Dr. Ranleigh, and to ministers, mail carriers and railroad workers, while the truckers who hauled goods from place to place had T stickers, giving them an unlimited supply of gas.

The waiter appeared at their table, bringing their entrées. Jill picked up her fork. Thinking about wartime rationing made her even hungrier. The trout that was a favorite on the California Zephyr menu looked wonderful and smelled even better. It had been dredged in flour and sautéed, finished with a lemony brown-butter sauce. She cut off a small piece and raised her fork to her lips, savoring her first bite. Delicious.

The conversation turned away from the war to subjects more current—the first months of the Eisenhower presidency and Dag Hammarskjöld, who had just been named Secretary-General of the United Nations.

“The most exciting news for me,” Dr. Ranleigh said, “is that announcement by Doctor Jonas Salk a couple of weeks ago. He’s developed a vaccine for polio.”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Mrs. Warrick said. “I had a cousin who had a severe case when he was a young man. He was confined to an iron lung.”

Jill nodded, remembering a high school classmate who’d been stricken with the disease. The girl had recovered, but she walked with a limp.

“That epidemic last year was the worst in a long time,” Dr. Ranleigh said. “Nearly sixty thousand cases, and over three thousand deaths.”

They talked about the promising vaccine a while longer, then they moved on to lighter topics, such as books and movies. Jill confessed to her passion for Agatha Christie, while Mrs. Warrick preferred historical novels, such as her current book, The Silver Chalice by Thomas Costain. Rachel was enjoying a new book, a historical romance called Désirée, by an author named Anne­marie Selinko. The doctor’s reading was usually confined to medical journals, she said, but she was reading The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle. “I saw the movie years ago,” she added, “with Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey. It was good, and I’m enjoying the book.”

The Academy Awards had been televised for the first time in March, and The Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture. It was something of an upset, since everyone seemed to think High Noon was going to win. At least Gary Cooper won the Best Actor award.

“I liked The Greatest Show on Earth,” Jill said.

Rachel laughed. “So did I. It was a lot of fun.”

“You just like Charlton Heston,” her aunt said.

Jill and Rachel agreed on something else, that the chocolate pie was delicious.