I DEVOTED the next couple of weeks to pulling myself together. It was high time. I’d been drinking so much that my hand trembled every time I picked up a glass, and several mornings I had to go to a barbershop rather than risk shaving myself. Work was beginning to pile up at the office, and somehow or other I got through it. Actually I was glad to be busy because it kept me from thinking or feeling lonely, and I did so well in a couple of cases that they gave me a raise in salary. In some respects, life was very satisfactory.
On the other side of the ledger was the fact that there was at this time what amounted to an estrangement between Dr Lister and me. The way I had behaved before and after the wedding (and I was very drunk indeed—Thomas informed me afterward I said things that all present would remember for years) was unpardonable. Dr Lister told me frankly that he was ashamed of me and that he found it hard to forgive my conduct.
The result was that I found myself more alone than ever before in my life and for ten days I could not get adjusted to it. Coming home each evening to an empty apartment with the prospect of long hours by myself had a depressing effect on my morale, and there was the constant struggle to stay away from the Scotch.
Often I wondered if I had acquired some sort of obsession about Selena and her marrying Jerry. There seemed something unbalanced about the distrust of her that I felt whenever I thought about her. After all, there was little cause for my feeling except that LeNormand’s death was an ugly thing, and it was out of that horror that she and Jerry had met and not-so-ultimately married. The fate that had overtaken LeNormand, whatever its cause, was not a thing I could contemplate quietly as a possibility for Jerry, and there were too many unresolved mysteries about Selena and her first husband’s death to please me. Maybe the Italians can live happily on the slopes of Vesuvius, but I am not that sort of person.
While Jerry and Selena were still away on their wedding trip I rented a two-room apartment for myself farther uptown. For a time, at least, they planned to live in our old place, and I spent a good deal of time down there getting it ready for their return. I resolved that it would be in impeccable order when they got back to it, and believe me, it was. New paper on every closet shelf, everything put away in the proper place, wedding presents all unpacked and arranged, even the pictures hung for them. I put my Marin over the fireplace, where it looked very well indeed. Uncle Horatio’s lithograph of the Good Shepherd—a grisly sort of thing—I hung in the foyer where it would, if necessary, soften up bill collectors and help speed the parting guest.
I must admit that there was an element of selfishness in all this. I wanted Selena, in particular to be in my debt; it gave me a sensation of nobility to bury my personal feelings and think of her and Jerry’s pleasure and comfort. The whole performance was a piece of self-dramatization, but they got the benefit of it and it was harmless.
So far I haven’t mentioned the letter I had from Jerry. It was as reserved and noncommittal as all his letters, but I could read between the lines that he was happy: “The weather here has been warm and sunny almost all the time. You ought to see the moonlight nights we have.” And more of the same. He mentioned Selena only once. “I know you are going to like her when you know her better. She says to send you her regards.” Well, that was as might be. At any rate, it was rather a pointless letter except for a postscript: “P. S. Have you heard anything more from Parsons? I suppose he hasn’t made any progress? There’s not much American news in the paper down here.”
So far as I knew he hadn’t reached any solution. I hadn’t seen him again myself, but Dr Lister went down one day to New Zion. On the way home he dropped in at my new apartment—one cold February evening it was—and we had a drink together. He told me where he had been.
“Did Parsons have anything new to contribute?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No. I don’t believe he knows any more now than when he started on the case.”
I wasn’t so sure of that. Offhand I could think of one discovery of his, Luella Jamison. Of course, that had nothing to do with the case. But the coincidences were curious.
I decided to fish around. I wanted to find out whether Parsons had mentioned anything about Luella to Dr Lister. “What is he working on now?” I asked.
“That I don’t know.” He went on, a little embarrassedly, I thought. “When this engagement of Jerry’s first came up, I wrote Parsons.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Of course, I did. I had to make sure that the authorities didn’t believe she was implicated.”
I nodded.
“Parsons told me then that he could guess why I was writing to him. He assured me that so far they were fairly positive that Mrs LeNormand was not implicated. He said that she had a perfect alibi personally, and there was no evidence to show she was an accessory before the fact.” He smiled grimly. “He also remarked that there was no evidence that she was not.”
“That was just official caution.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “So I thought. But I went down to see him today to find out whether anything new had come up that concerned us. I’m pretty well satisfied that it hasn’t.”
“Thank God for that.”
He put his fingertips together and stared at them. “I don’t believe the police will solve the LeNormand business.”
“No,” I agreed.
“It’s unfortunate, in a way. I think we’d all be happier if it were cleared up.”
Personally I wasn’t so sure about that. It depended on what the truth was. “I guess so,” I replied.
“You and Jerry haven’t suppressed anything that might come out later?” He sounded apologetic as he asked the question.
“We haven’t suppressed anything.”
“Good. I think the wisest thing we can all do is to forget the whole matter until the police have something more to report.”
“Absolutely.”
He talked on about small affairs for a while and then he left. I felt unhappy. We had talked together like chance acquaintances.
The Empress docked on a Wednesday afternoon, and I went down to see her come in and meet the two of them. Dr Lister had planned to be there too, of course, but an emergency operation came up at the last minute and he could not make it.
Jerry was looking magnificent, radiating a quiet happiness, and conspicuously proud of his beautiful wife. Selena did not seem much changed to me, and certainly she had lost none of her beauty. People, even in the irritating confusion of the customs, stopped to stare at her, and once a couple of schoolgirls sidled up to ask for her autograph. Apparently they thought anyone as gorgeous as Selena must surely be in the movies. They were plainly disappointed when I told them she was just my friend’s wife and nobody they’d ever heard of. Though after I’d assured them of that I wondered if it was strictly accurate. In fact, one of them did say, “We’re sorry, mister, but my friend and me thought sure we’d seen her in the movies or the papers or someplace.”
In the taxi going uptown, Jerry presented me with a pipe he’d bought in Bermuda, and I was glad to have it. They made me sit between them, and were so cordial and generally sweet, particularly Jerry, that I had a suspicion they’d decided I was a problem child and would have to have special, careful treatment. But all in all, things passed off pleasantly and I left them at the door of their place feeling glad that I had arranged it so perfectly for them. All they had to do was walk in and begin living in it. I’d even started the milkman to calling again.
The months that followed were good ones. Jerry must have told his family how decent I had been about the apartment. They began to look at me again as if I was human, and best of all, Dad and I returned to the old intimacy that meant so much to both of us. I went out to Long Island many times, and often when Jerry and Selena were not there. On such occasions Dad and I did not discuss them. We had an unspoken agreement about that.
I had hoped to grow to like Selena as I came to know her better. But it just didn’t happen, though I learned to admire her in certain ways. She had a quiet self-control that made any open break impossible, and an almost unbelievable modesty about her beauty, a very rare quality in my experience. As time went on, I found it easier to be with her because I finally discarded Parsons’ thought that she might be Luella Jamison. She knew too much, her mind was too clear and logical, she was too full of information about the most abstract subjects ever to have been an idiot. Watching her, I came to the conclusion that she had had a long and exceedingly thorough education. That alone could account for the way she could talk to Jerry and Dr Lister about astronomy, or mathematics, or archaeology. It might, too, account for her almost gauche insensitivity to the prejudices and peculiarities of the people around her. Wherever she came from, she had been educated in an atmosphere of objective intellectuality, and her interests molded in ways unlike those of most other women. Then I would remember the way she danced, and not be so sure.
When she was out at the house, she spent a lot of time in the library, reading every conceivable sort of book. Jerry and I would urge her to go driving with us, or play ping-pong in the basement, or occasionally, on a fair day, go out on the Sound in our sloop. She seldom came along, but when she did she was equal to the occasion. I remember one blustery March morning when we were out on the water and she was taking her turn at the tiller. A cold, shouting wind was coming down the Sound, and the sloop heeled under it till the cockpit coaming was all but awash. Selena sat there with the wind blowing her hair and whipping color into her face, calmly watching the level of the water racing along the lee deck. At the instant when I’d decided that we’d be wet the next second, she eased off the helm and the wash retreated from the coaming. She never batted an eye. That proved to me that she had courage and steady nerves. But I was glad to take my turn at the tiller. I like to play things with a margin of safety.
That side of her was, if anything, admirable, but beyond admiring her, there was nothing else you could do with Selena. She had somehow never learned the little easy give-and-take that lubricates every agreeable human relationship. She could talk well on many subjects, but she never seemed able to converse, and it is conversation liberally sprinkled with badinage that I enjoy. When she spoke she never made an allusion; she never reminisced, she never said anything silly. Every sentence was a statement or a question. She seldom laughed, but she did have a silent sense of humor of some sort. At intervals she would give a silent, almost secret smile that told me she was relishing something to herself. I find it hard to recall examples of the quality I am trying to suggest, but I remember one night when we had all been sitting in the library.
After a time we fell to playing bridge in a desultory sort of way. Grace was out at the house that weekend, and Jerry and I had been playing against Selena and her. Incidentally, Selena was the most astonishing bridge player I ever met. She never seemed to lose an unnecessary trick, and though occasionally a finesse of hers would go wrong, I noticed that when it did she always smiled in that little private way of hers. After an hour or two we got bored, and decided to stop. Grace, who had been keeping score, had no trouble adding up Jerry’s and my side of the ledger, but the entries in the female column were staggering. Grace puckered up her forehead and wrestled with her pencil, muttering to herself, while Jerry and I laughed and told her we conceded the match.
Suddenly Selena leaned forward, picked the score pad out from under Grace’s nose, glanced at it casually for a moment, and remarked, “Three thousand eight hundred and sixty.”
Jerry took up the pad after her while Grace simply sat looking astounded and relieved. After a minute or so he said, “That’s right,” with a note of puzzled admiration in his voice. Jerry was exceptionally quick with figures himself, which was why he was such an asset to his firm of statisticians. I think he was piqued by Selena’s speed. “You’re quite a lightning calculator,” he observed. She simply went on smiling lightly and impersonally.
It was that summer, a few months after the bridge game, that Selena showed me a new side of her character, and one that I was to think of often later on.
One day, in August if I remember rightly, Jerry was playing in the club tennis tournament. He’d put me out the day before, to my relief, and it was really too hot to do anything. I suggested to Selena, on some impulse or other, that we drive out to Montauk. She agreed readily enough, though I felt that the idea didn’t specially appeal to her.
For an hour or so we rode in silence. From time to time I glanced at her, sitting coolly and easily in the corner of the seat opposite me. She was immaculate, in a dull blue, severely simple frock and a wide, plain straw hat with a white ribbon around it. Just looking at her made me feel cool, and in a way rested. I felt that there was a truce between us, and resolved firmly to do nothing to violate it.
After a while, without apparently speaking at me directly, she said, “I think Jerry is very happy.”
“Yes,” I told her. “Why shouldn’t he be?” It was meant to be gallant, of course, but she did not take it that way.
“You didn’t expect him to be happy after he was married to me.”
“Nonsense,” I said, but I thought to myself that it was going to be hard to keep civil if she went on this way. She was an infuriatingly direct woman.
“On the contrary,” she said, “you are thinking that I am being annoying. I want merely to know whether you have any suggestions.”
“Suggestions?” I said blankly.
“You remember how once, before Jerry and I were married, you told me to be good to him?”
The recollection made me squirm a little, but I had to admit it.
“So,” she said, “I have tried. Do you think I have succeeded?”
“Yes,” I told her.
She looked at me through those disturbing violet eyes of hers and said, “You know, I am not accustomed to people like you and Dr Lister and Jerry. Perhaps sometimes I make mistakes with you.“
“Yes,” I said, feeling that this was getting curiouser and curiouser, “from my point of view, you do. I think you ought to relax a little more.”
She sighed. “I don’t quite know how to do that.” Her tone of voice suggested that she would look into it in the near future and learn the technique of relaxing.
“Anyway,” I said, “let’s not talk personalities. You’re you and I’m me, and I guess that’s about all there is to it.”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled that odd smile of hers.
“Tell me,” I said, after a pause, “do you like this part of the world?”
She looked at me in surprise. “Why do you ask me that?”
When I had asked the question, I had been merely making casual conversation, but her reply put a sudden scheme into my head. “Oh, I was just wondering. Some people think California is God’s gift to geography. And I have a cousin who thinks highly of the state of Maine. Everybody has his favorite part of the country.”
“Long Island is a satisfactory place, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “The north shore, anyway. I like parts of the South, too—the Carolinas and Georgia. Ever been down there?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe I should like it. The Southern girls that Jerry knows always seem to me unintelligent, and they have double names like Mary Lou and Sue Ellen. They seem silly to me.”
“Well, there’s something in that,” I said, adding mentally that she could add a little Southern charm to her own character without loss, and feeling distinctly irritated that I hadn’t trapped her into some sort of admission about her past life and where she came from.
She looked at me and smiled. “You’re strange, Bark. You ask one question and really want to find out the answer to another one, don’t you?”
I felt annoyed at her for calling the turn so exactly. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”
“You give it away,” she answered.
“How?” I asked her.
“Why,” she said, and paused. “I suppose you’d say that if a person went into a room and shouted something loudly, even if he was all alone in the room, he wouldn’t be keeping what he was saying entirely to himself?”
“Yes, but—”
“That’s what you do with your mind, Bark.”
“You mean you can read my mind?” The idea terrified me and embarrassed me simultaneously.
She smiled. “Not the way you mean it. But everybody gets some thoughts from the people round them. You know that.”
“Well,” I began hesitantly.
“You all talk incompletely,” she went on. “Listen to what people say to each other sometime. The real conversation isn’t wholly in the words. The words are clues to what the person speaking is trying to convey. The rest of it goes direct from one mind to another. You must have noticed that.“
“This is odd,” I thought to myself. “But I suppose she is partly right.” Aloud I said, “And I give out clues to what I don’t say as well as to what I do?”
“Of course.”
“Hmm.” I decided to try her out. “Suppose you tell me, then,” I said, mentally deciding that her theory was ridiculous, “what I’m thinking now?”
She laughed. “Stop the car. I’ll give you a demonstration.”
I pulled up along the edge of the road.
“Now,” she said, “you don’t believe I’m right. Just sit back a moment and listen.”
I leaned back in the seat and waited. Selena was not smiling any more, but I did not feel that she was wholly serious, either. I felt suddenly and uncomfortably that she was amusing herself at my expense. Gradually I felt that she wanted me to do something. What, I did not know at first, and I looked at her puzzledly. She never smoked, of course, but I thought I might offer her a cigarette. The silence between us was getting uncomfortable. I pulled my case out of my pocket and extended it to her. “Have a cigarette,” I said.
The tension between us snapped at once. “Drive ahead,” she said. “You know I never smoke, Bark.”
“Listen,” I said. “What the hell was all that about?”
She said composedly, “I just asked you for a cigarette without speaking. And you offered me one.”
That was that. I thought about it as we drove along, but I didn’t come to any conclusion. “It’s a good stunt,” I said once.
“Yes,” she said.
“I hope you don’t pull that sort of thing on your poor defenseless husband.”
“Oh,” she said, lightly, “Jerry isn’t a bit like you.”
And with that I had to be content.
We had a picnic lunch out by the lighthouse, and watched the waves come in, and it was all very agreeable except for a few minutes in which Selena undertook to explain to me the theory of neap and spring tides, all in response to some idle remark of mine about how far above the water the high-tide mark seemed to be that day. I was too sleepy and full of sandwiches and iced beer to care much. But it annoyed me mildly that she should know everything like that. A certain amount of ingenuous ignorance, I decided, was a great factor in feminine charm.
Riding home that afternoon, I thought to myself that I had never before spent a day alone with a person and learned so little about them. Inevitably it is an irritating thing to have a person—man or woman—refuse to let you see a single inch into his or her character. My stock of small talk had run out, and I was simply driving along the turnpike, watching the road and the other cars and thinking of little, when a curious thing happened. Selena reached forward suddenly and ratched up the emergency. Instantly the car began to skid; the tires screamed on the asphalt, and I had the devil of a time keeping us from turning turtle.
In the middle of my struggle with the wheel a bright yellow roadster full of prep school kids shot out of a narrow drive in front of us and swerved roaring off down the highway. They must have missed our front bumper by inches. I unlocked the emergency and we rolled on; sweat was running off me in rivulets. It was the closest call I ever had in my life; undoubtedly Selena’s quick yank on the brake had saved us from an ugly smash. As I thought of it I realized that the road down which the yellow car had come was entirely hidden from the highway by a stone wall and a belt of trees. There was no way I could have known that that car was coming.
“God!” I said to Selena, who was sitting perfectly quietly beside me. “Thanks! That was too close. I can still hear the angels singing.”
She nodded quietly. “There was no way you could see that road.”
“No,” I agreed. “Damn kids like that. Their parents oughtn’t to give them cars.” She was silent, and a belated question came into my mind. “How did you know they were coming?”
“I—what is it Jerry says?—I had a hunch.” And she smiled.
“Well,” I told her, “keep on having them!” But it seemed to me that she acted with amazing speed and directness for a woman with nothing but a hunch.
I ought to have felt grateful to her, and in a way I did. In another, the incident had in it one of the seeds of the irritation and uneasiness that Selena always seemed able to evoke in me. How had she known that car was coming? I went back a day or so later and looked at the place; there was absolutely no way of seeing past the wall and the trees. The only explanation was a sort of clairvoyance. Hunches as good as that one of hers simply couldn’t be due to chance.
The months that followed flowed into one another without anything of importance to this story. I was getting on well in my work, and devoting more and more time to it in consequence. I saw less of Jerry and Selena that winter than I had expected to, and I could see, when we did meet, that Jerry was delighted with my progress and puzzled by it. He himself was not deeply interested in the statistical work he was doing, though I understand he did it brilliantly. On several occasions he told me that most of it bored him. He admitted he put in as little time at his office as he could, and I wondered if he was growing lazy, which would have been unlike him, or just what he was doing that occupied the rest of his time. One evening I found out.
He and Selena and Dad and Grace were to come round to my apartment for a buffet supper on a Sunday night. I liked to give a sort of informal meal once or twice a month that way and ask just the people I really was fond of. I suppose partly because I was making some money and wanted to spend it on entertaining the people who’d done so much for me, especially Dad. Sunday was the best night for my schedule, and Grace was glad to come because Fred was playing in a golf tournament somewhere in Florida.
This particular time Jerry and Selena came early. The cocktails were not even ready and I was in my shirt sleeves, but Jerry was so plainly excited and enthusiastic over something that details like that didn’t matter. He had something under his arm, and as soon as the greetings were over he presented it to me with a flourish.
“Here, Bark. With the compliments of the author.” And he grinned.
It was a thin, gray-covered little magazine with a three-deck title, some sort of journal of mathematics. I ran my eye down the table of contents, and sure enough, there was the name of Jeremiah Lister.
“I’ll be damned!” I said, turning over the leaves to his article. “What hath God wrought!”
“You may well say that,” he told me exultantly. “That obscure and droopy-looking little publication is more exclusive than the Racquet Club. And I have crashed its austere gates.”
“Well,” I said, sparring for time and looking at the article, “this is a surprise. And my novel only half done. You’ve beaten me to publication, all right.”
Jerry’s piece occupied only two pages and it might as well have been a Sanskrit inscription for all the sense I could make out of it. There was a short editorial foreword by the brain that conducted the magazine in which Jerry’s work was spoken of as “brilliant,” “original,” and “highly suggestive.” After looking helplessly at the text for a few seconds, I said, “I bet Selena helped you with this.”
“No,” she said, apparently taking my jest seriously, “I didn’t help him.”
“I should say not,” he added. “She was opposed to the thing from the start. She told me it was a waste of time, but even in the face of discouragement I persevered. I like doing stuff in that field.”
“As that immortal opus we had in school, Fraser and Squair’s French grammar, would say, ‘chacun à son gout.’” I was really pleased about the article. Jerry was a bright lad, all right.
“What does that mean?” asked Selena.
“Every man to his own brand of folly,” I told her.
She looked surprised. “But this isn’t foolish. Jerry’s article is absolutely correct.”
“I was being flippant. The real translation is, ‘every man to his own taste.’”
“Oh.”
Jerry said, “Don’t try to read the thing, Bark. Just put it away on your shelf of first editions. It’ll be a collector’s item someday.”
“Nuts,” I told him. “I’m intellectual as hell. Everybody knows that. I’m going to leave this lying round on the living room table to impress people.”
He laughed. “It’ll be all over rings from highball glasses in a week, then.”
I took it across to the bookcase. “In that case, I’ll put it beside the Gertrude Stein book Grace gave me for Christmas. The two of them will serve to remind me that there are plenty of things I’ll never be able to understand.”
Selena followed me. “Who is Gertrude Stein?” she asked me with interest. “A woman mathematician?”
“Not exactly,” I informed her. “Here. Take a look,” and I handed her the volume.
She opened it and looked at the first few pages. “Are there people who understand this?” she asked me.
“Well, there are people who say they do.”
She went over to the sofa and sat down with the book. I hung up their coats and began mixing a cocktail. In a few minutes Selena got up and put the Gertrude Stein back on the shelf.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “You ought not to put Jerry’s article next to it.”
“I’m just teasing him,” I told her.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, darling,” said Jerry, lolling back in my best chair. “He’s trying to keep me from getting a swelled head.”
I poured the cocktails. They were good Grace came in and we had another round. I showed her Jerry’s piece.
She wrinkled her forehead over it for a minute. “Goodness, Jeremiah my sweet, I don’t see how you have time for such things with a wife who looks like Selena.”
Jerry blushed and laughed. “What I haven’t got time for,” he said, “is my job at Howard and Neurath, Statisticians. I’m quitting the end of next week.”
“You are?” I was surprised, though I knew he was not tremendously keen about working in an office.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve about decided that what I really want to do is teach.”
It seemed right to me, and I told him so.
“First, though, I’ve got to get a Ph.D. That means writing a thesis.”
“Swell,” I told him. “I can think of nothing more repulsive than writing a thesis, but you’re the type to enjoy it.”
“Thanks. It’ll be a year’s work, anyway. Selena and I are thinking of going to that place of Dad’s out west.”
I remembered then that the Listers owned some sort of house in Arizona or New Mexico that neither Dad nor Jerry, I think, had ever been to. An artist or somebody left it to them, but they’d never made any use of it.
“Isn’t it way the hell and gone in a desert?” I asked him.
“Yes. But it’ll be quiet and give me a good chance to work. We won’t be lonely.” He looked fondly at Selena.
Grace turned to Selena. “Are you going to let this entirely mad young man make a female anchorite out of you, Selena? I wouldn’t tolerate it for a moment!“
“She doesn’t mind,” said Jerry.
“No,” Selena admitted. “I don’t see any reason why we should not go. Only I wish Jerry didn’t have to write this thesis he has in mind.” She turned to me. “Can’t he teach without writing anything?”
“Well,” I told her, “you can’t get a job these days in any good college without a Ph.D. And that means a thesis, as Jerry says.”
“I see,” she said, and her voice sounded thin and curiously disappointed. I did not understand why, but she was an incomprehensible woman.
They left within a few weeks, and we all went down to see them off. When the train had pulled out into the cavernous gloom of the Grand Central cave and left us standing on the platform, I felt an obscure feeling of sadness and foreboding. Jerry and I had been growing apart, of course, as our lives diverged, but this time, as we separated, it felt like the end of something.
We wrote, of course, from time to time. Jerry’s letters were postmarked “Los Palos,” and at first they came about once a week. Gradually they grew more infrequent, and so did mine. I gathered that he and Selena were enjoying their lonely life out there, but in the last one or two of his scrawls there was an unfamiliar note that I could not quite analyze:
“Selena seems to like the country out here [he wrote me in June] and it certainly is big and impressive after you get over the bareness. I’m working hard and making real progress; the only trouble is that there are so many things I’d like to be working on at once. My study window looks right out over fifty miles of desert—it would be as easy as hell to get lost out there and nobody would ever find you. Selena walks a lot and sometimes I get worried for fear she won’t get back before dark, but I guess she can take care of herself. You’d get a kick out of this place, Bark; why don’t you come out here sometime later?“
I wrote him and said that I’d like to come sometime, but that I was hellish busy and doubted if I’d find much time even for a week’s vacation. His letter left an uncomfortable impression in my mind, though. I felt that he wanted me to come and was too proud to ask me. Then, when I thought it over, I realized that he was just lonely, and I stopped worrying about him.
A month later my doorbell rang at nine o’clock in the evening. It was a Western Union messenger. The telegram said:
I cursed, got leave of absence from my office, and caught the Century the next day. Dad came down to the train with me.
“You’ll let me know at once,” he said, “if it’s anything serious.”
“Sure,” I told him.
Both of us were wondering why Jerry had wired only to me, and what had happened, but there was no certainty of reaching him in time with a telegram from us. They had no telephone at Cloud Mesa, and Dr Lister thought it was too far from Los Palos for Jerry to come in every day.
As the train pulled out, I saw his anxious face watching me through the glass of the Pullman window. I gave him a grin that I hoped was reassuring, and settled back in my seat. Something told me that what was ahead was all of a piece with the strangeness of the last year and a half. The switch points clattered under the wheels, and the train began to rush northward through the tunnel under Park Avenue.