Beacon Street Mourning (3 page)

Edna, bless her, jumped right in. "Now you wait just a minute, Mr. Michael Archer Kossoff. Don't you go includin'
me in your hoity-toity objections. I toldja right off, I'm with Fremont in this, if she wants ta go to her daddy then she should go."

"But, Mama, Michael is right," Wish said earnestly.

Wish Stephenson is the most honest man I know. Both Michael and I, when need be, can tell convenient lies, whereas Wish is uncomfortable with anything but the complete truth. His face used to reflect everything that passed through his mind, which was a great detriment in his days as a policeman; but since coming to us he has learned to guard his facial expressions. I believe, in fact, that Michael has worked with him on this point. However, when he is with people he trusts, Wish's face is as open as ever, and now the conflict he felt inside showed upon his visage.

Wish pleaded with me; as he spoke his eyes wavered, and I knew he was resisting an urge to dart glances at Michael. "You mustn't go alone, Fremont. You must have a traveling companion. Someone to look out for you on the trip, and to ... to see to things when you've arrived."

"Nonsense. I shall be perfectly safe on the train. The culprit who caused so much trouble before cannot harm me—or the Union Pacific Railroad—again. I will have to change trains once, in Chicago, but I daresay that will not be a problem as there are plenty of redcaps to handle the luggage. And once I'm in Boston there will be any number of people I can call upon for assistance if need be. After all, I spent my whole life there until just a few years ago."

"I will go with her," Michael pronounced, in a tone of complete finality.

Edna gave a sigh of relief. "I'll look after yer cat, dearie. Best you let Michael come along."

I appeared to hesitate. To Edna I remarked aside, as if just between the two of us, "I don't know what makes him think he
can decide just like that, and assume I will fall in line with his wishes."

"He's a man, that's all it takes. Besides, if he stays here he'll drive me and Wish crazy, that's a fact. We won't get a lick of work done what with him fussin' and fumin' all over the place. Best you take him with you." She nodded vigorously, the tight curls of her old-fashioned hairdo bouncing.

Now I glanced back and forth, from Michael to Wish and back again. "What about our business? At present I'm contributing nothing, so I won't be missed. But, Michael, you haven't been putting much time into J&K lately. Wish can hardly be expected to continue to do everything all by himself."

"Don't worry about it," Wish said.

"Now you're just being stubborn," Michael pointed out.

He was right. I had what I'd wanted. The whole reason I'd brought this matter up with all of us present, and had started from a position of insisting I must go alone, was so that Michael would feel he'd won some sort of victory when I agreed he could come with me.

My ploy had probably saved me at least two hours of the particularly awful kind of disagreement that can happen between two people who know each other too well. I was, therefore, most pleased.

"I was merely trying to be prudent," I said, but weakly, as if I knew the battle was lost and I was conceding gracefully. "We do have a business to run, and it's hardly fair for you and me to keep going off and leaving Wish and Edna to run it alone."

"Now, now, we don't mind a bit," Edna said. "Do we, boy?"

"No, Mama, we don't. Of course not." Wish's honesty caught up with him again. "Well, we do like it best when you're both here"—he bit his lip and his high forehead wrinkled—

"and I'd be very happy to be your traveling companion myself, Fremont, if Michael were unable to go, but—"

"But I have said I'm going with Fremont to Boston, and that is that!"

"Very well," I said demurely. "More coffee, anyone?"

LATER THAT NIGHT, when we lay in bed together, I wondered if Michael had figured out my ploy. He did seem unusually ruminative.

"There will be snow on the ground in Boston," he said, "and ice. Had you thought of that?" He was winding a strand of my stubbornly straight hair around his finger.

"Well of course there will be snow and ice, it's wintertime. I lived in New England for twenty-two years, how could I forget something like that? And your point is—?"

"My point is, if you will forgive me for making a point out of your infirmity: Considering that you have a hard enough time walking here in San Francisco, where we have no obstacles—"

"Except hills," I interrupted.

Michael pulled his expressive eyebrows together in annoyance. "All right, no obstacles other than a few steep hillsides; nevertheless I shudder to think of you trying to walk unassisted in the ice and snow."

"I do not walk unassisted. I walk with two canes. And I have improved a great deal in the past two weeks, since you told me that doctor said exercise would be good for me. He was right, by the way—as I thought you'd observed. I grow stronger each day."

"I mean, my dear Fremont"—Michael let go of the strand of hair he'd been twisting and it unraveled without a kink, just as straight as ever it had been—"you need a person to hold your arm on the icy streets. To make sure you don't fall and
injure yourself again. To catch you if worse comes to worst and you lose your footing. You are an intelligent woman. Surely that would have occurred to you?"

I reached out and stroked the short hairs at the back of his neck. Yes indeed that very thing had occurred to me, but I wasn't going to admit it. I wanted him to think his coming with me was all his idea, just as I'd wanted our argument to be on the point of whether or not I was to go alone, rather than on whether or not I was to go at all.

I said, "I'm glad you're coming with me. Really, I am."

Then I kissed him, and he kissed me back, and one thing led to another as often happens in such a situation, and so we were occupied with one another for a while.

Eventually Michael turned out the light for good, and I snuggled in the crook of his arm. My body was relaxed, but my mind was not yet ready to let go. Nor were my thoughts anything I could share with Michael, because they were in a vague way about him. Something was working its way up from deep inside me, and it was disturbing; something that suggested there might have been more truth behind my ploy than I'd intended.

This disturbing suspicion grew stronger as I lay there in the dark listening to Michael's breath lengthen into the long, regular exhalations of sleep. Grew stronger until it became a fullblown premonition: I had been more right than I knew when I'd said I should go alone—in the weeks to come, Michael would prove to be a problem or a complication, and I would wish that I had gone to Boston alone.

Cross-Country
·
February
1909

ONCE UPON THE TRAIN we were engulfed by winter. Living in the northern part of California where the seasons are softer, more forgiving—one hears the same of Florida, although I have never been there and so cannot say firsthand—I had gradually forgotten the hard beauty of the cold season. But I soon became reacquainted with it during the course of this cross-country train ride.

To see our country unfold before you—through mountains, over plains, through towns small and cities large—is to know the vastness of Nature and how puny by comparison are we humans who seek to tame it. The ultimate futility of such an endeavor, particularly in the wintertime, is inescapable. A humbling experience, to say the least.

On our way through the Sierra Nevada the train was delayed for a fall of snow and rocks to be cleared from the tracks—the first of several such delays over the course of the entire journey. While we were waiting there in the Sierras I thought of the Donner Party, who had become lost in the nearby place that has since been named for them, Donner Summit, and had starved to death; except for a few who had eaten the flesh of their dead companions, if the stories told were true.

Those few flesh-eaters had survived but they had gone mad, all but one, who both bravely and ashamedly lived to tell the tale.

When our train was traversing the state of Utah, I felt decidedly unwell and stayed in my compartment with the shade pulled all the way down on the window. I could neither put a precise cause to this sickness nor define its symptoms, which seemed multiple and variable—one moment nausea, another weakness in the knees; at some times a headache and at others the chills. It was really most odd, even a little frightening. To stay in bed seemed best, and so when the porter came to convert my bunk back into its daytime configuration, I told him I was ill. He offered to summon a doctor, which I declined, saying I believed a day of bed rest would make me right again.

Later in the morning I said the same to Michael when he came knocking at my door. I did not leave my compartment until night fell and I could no longer see those mountains, the Wasatch and the High Uintas, out any of the train's windows. On joining Michael in the dining car that evening, I was not unduly surprised to learn that the train had left Utah for Colorado almost simultaneously with my beginning to feel better. The body remembers, I suppose, what the mind tries to forget; it was in Utah that all those things I prefer not to think about had occurred.

The next day we traveled over a great expanse of flatland, acres and acres, miles and miles of snow. It was very beautiful. We even lowered the window for a time in order to smell the clean, cold air. But then the wind shifted and we got smoke from the locomotive instead, and quickly closed the window before any sparks could fly in.

The farther east we went, the more my anticipation rose, and my heart lifted too.

"I've stayed away too long," I said to Michael as we approached Chicago, where we would be changing trains. The
one we'd taken across the country to this point would continue on without us, making a southerly swing down to New York. On a different train we would follow a more northern line of tracks, skirting the edge of the Great Lakes and on across the widest part of New York State to Albany, then into Massachusetts and the Berkshire Mountains, and finally to Boston. Though I had been this way only once before, and in reverse at that, I'd traced the route on the map with my fingertip until I knew it by heart.

"You never said you wanted to return home," Michael remarked curiously, "never once in all the years I've known you. Until now."

"My
home
is in San Francisco. That is, if home is where one's heart is. Yet I must admit, I do
feel
as if I am going home." I looked deep into his eyes and my heart turned over; I was both happy and unhappy at the same time, which was more than confusing. "I've never felt quite this way before."

Michael and I were at that moment together in my compartment; he had come to carry our hand luggage in anticipation of the train's imminent arrival in the Chicago station. Sensing a degree of distress in me, he sat down for a moment and took my gloved hand.

"Fremont, I was born at Fort Ross in California and lived there until I was nineteen years old. Yet when I went to Moscow for the first time at twenty, I felt as if I were going home. And in a way, I was. There must be something inside us that makes us this way, creates these ties. Perhaps it's in our minds, or in our blood ..."

He looked away through the small window, silent for a moment, musing. "But how could that feeling have been so strong in me, when I myself had never been in Russia at all? I do not understand it now, any more than I ever did."

"Yet it's real, is it not?" I asked, but it was not really a question.

The train had slowed. The rotation of the wheels no longer went
clickety-clack, clickety-clack,
but rather
clack . . . clack . . . clack,
each clack farther from the one previous.

"Yes, it's real," Michael said. He gave my hand a squeeze, then got to his feet and went on, looking down at me: "You're a Bostonian for many generations back, and I'm a Californian with strong Russian roots. We won't either one of us get away from that. Everyone in America is from somewhere else—"

"Except the Indians," I interjected.

"Very well, except the Indians who were here all along. Leaving them aside, the point I was about to make is that you New Englanders have been here longer than the rest of us, which I suppose accounts for a certain proprietary attitude I've noticed among Bostonians during my own travels."

The train lurched to a stop. Michael took up my small valise and his own portmanteau.

"Ah," I said lightly, "then you will understand why Boston is called the Hub of the Universe, and why a certain elderly Aunt Pembroke—she was my father's mother's sister—"

"Spare me recitations of relations," Michael complained lightly.

I went right on: "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, Aunt Pembroke maintained that the Wild West begins on the other side of Framingham."

"Doubtless she would consider the entire state of California to have fallen off the globe."

"I am certain of it," I agreed, "consigned to that part of the map marked
Here there be monsters."

A cane in each hand, I preceded Michael out of our compartment and into the narrow corridor where others were already passing. "But then we need not be concerned, because Aunt Pembroke is long since dead."