The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (2 page)

“No,” I finally said to it. “Not down an aisle. No drama.” The true vagrant, honor-bright refuser of houses, clothing, income and other disguises, appears as my young man of the coattails had appeared to me, unaware of the comment he makes by existing. I could never be that unsophisticate—or perhaps, only after years of the discipline, by the time I had come to be an old abbess of the byways, worn back into simplicity at last after a misspent youth in the world. My present object must be to conduct myself, though within the framework, with all possible reserve—for there is always the question of sanity raised in re those who give up the things of this world. (And today, I already yearn to do it with—yes, it must be said—with beauty. But yesterday, I hadn’t come that far.)

Smiling wryly, I said to myself, “Take it easy. Give yourself a headstart.”

It’s a thing of mine to make puns like that to myself, which no one else notices, nothing but a compensatory psychological adjustment, quite harmless and quite natural—and one which has helped until todate to keep me well short of the adjustment that is the most natural of all. But that was yesterday. When I reopened the door of the washroom, less than fifteen minutes had passed. I was back in my seat, with all plans figured out except for the final contingency (“case closed” it is sometimes called, in the profession) by the time we rolled into the stop for suburban Boston: Route 128.

I used to know the 128 stop very well. All one summer, a man who, as the saying goes, was once very important to me, used to meet me there with a car. Cars free people; in summer particularly, they are the vagabondage of the ticketed world. And no matter what season of the year I pass that station, I breathe in again the hot organdy smell of my own sleeveless dresses, of sour-wine picnics where the wine couldn’t wait any more than we could, and of meadow-love. Outdoor love is easiest for those who must beware the midnight-rumpling hand. Inside the waiting room, where I had to sit when he was late or it was rainy, the majestically coifed, redheaded stationmistress used to sit eternally in her little box-office, talking now and then in camaraderie with the round-faced policeman whose detail was 128. As far as I could see, he never did anything but point out the phone booth to people who had missed connections, or alert the crowd on the platform to the warning bell rung for an oncoming engine—as far as I could see then. After that summer was over, I more than once dreamt of the stationmistress with her masses of hair, not a wig but dyed, and not the plain dark red, neither bronze nor carroty, of the color which, until I was twelve, had been mine.

“One-twenty-eight,” the conductor called now, jumping off; it’s a very short stop. I had no intentions of getting off there, now or ever again, but as always, I leaned to look. Usually I saw the policeman, the same one, and once, in a snowy winter, I had seen the woman shoveling—and seeing them was always like a momentary return to a village where people are so little on the move that one can see clearly how all the life-stories have worked out, including one’s own. I didn’t see her now, but I saw the policeman, same old pieface in dark blue. They must rear a race of them from the cradle, I thought, nanny-faces all, puzzled, even kindly, with waists too big for wearing holsters. For though this one wore no gold-rims, in every respect there was no doubt otherwise. He was a ringer for the one in Providence. Or else his brother. And suddenly my ungloved hands sought to hide themselves, my nude shins rubbed nervously together, and I shrank away from the window, a warning ringing inside me. “Chickie!” it said. “Watch out for the railroad dicks!”

At first I was disturbed by this menial response, one so much lacking the insouciance I had expected, but then reminded myself that with my clothes still elegant, my purse stuffed, such a halfway state of mind was at least sensitive; I had after all scarcely touched upon, much less completed, my full conversion. The minute I thought of this latter, the fluttering pulse in my throat was silenced, and an enormous but active peace settled on me; only dwell on the crowning event that was coming toward me, and all the smaller stratagems flew to hand. After that everything went swimmingly.

I got off at South Station, filled out a telegraph form “Unavoidably detained,” changed the latter to “prevented,” and grabbed a cab to Logan Airport, in time to board a shuttle plane which would even get me back to New York before bank-closing. Though incomes in my line are never impressive, my mixed family inheritance did include money, not enough, alas, to have allowed me that comfortable eccentricity which might have put me to rights in the very beginning, but there is no doubt that in a modest way I am a woman of property. From now on, the problem would be how to disencumber myself, down to the bone as it were, without incurring the verdict of either sainthood or insanity. I had no wish to decamp altogether, like those irresponsibles who dissolved themselves in a puddle of clothes left on the beach at Villefranche, or from an ownerless car on the Golden Gate Bridge. Any one of these eventualities would make me a mystery, not, as I faintly hoped, a statement. I regret that there’s also no doubt that I suffer from a certain ambition, akin perhaps to that of women just before they got the vote—a kind of suffragette swelling, part yearning and part vengeful, of the chest cavity and maybe even the heart. I am well aware that the true vagrant never even knows the nature of what he cherishes, in his case his right to be out of the organized world. Later on, I hope in my own way to achieve that brahma; I see myself holding up my naked head without knowing that I am doing it. Right now, however, though I deplore it, I want all the civil rights in my category.

And so it’s not surprising that the minute I got on the plane I started mulling what else I could take off, substitute gestures to placate that fire in me raging toward the ultimate one. Inside the washroom again, the only disposal unit that modern transportation allows us, I made friends again with my image. I was wearing my platform wig, its clubwoman curls now blown by airport and emotional currents into a bad semblance of one at home marked in my mental roster as Careful Disarray, but verging more on the brown than the blonde. (It is discreetly known at the office that I dye my hair myself, not always accurately.)

I regarded it, but was glad to feel full and strong in me the power to delay—“No, not yet. No travesty.”

As for statutory nudity, it had no charms for me at this point, indeed the reverse; exhibitionism was at all costs to be avoided. Teeth were excellent
and
personal, eyes never in need of glasses—the clear green eyes born to lucky people of my complexion.

Just then the stewardess knocked, and I watched my hands seek themselves.

“Quite all right!” I managed to say—this time, God save us, with some proper daring in it, and a minute later I was taking off my rings.

To my left there was a ventilator, whose exhaust slot must somewhere reach the outer air. The shuttles don’t fly very high, not nearly so high as the pan-orient jets on which I suppose I started my hunt for brahma in the first place. Crouched there, in my palm the little hoard to which I had added lapel-pin and pearls, I waited until we were well away from water, over a tiny settlement where I might predict, if not see, spire and gardens, a railway station too perhaps; then with a smile, imagining on whom that shower of peculiar manna, sent them down.

Back in my seat again, I had certain canny misgivings, the tiresome ones of a woman with too many heads. How small did a diamond have to be not to burst its facets from such a height, how light a pearl, not to smash its baroque? I had retained my watch, and I had an hour to consider the lost rings of all those who had loved me, plus that most durable of all, the invisible wedding-band I had never let myself receive.

What of love, then, for such a woman, for any—for anybody, what of love?

My mother’s mother’s snakeband ring with emerald eye and my father’s father’s onyx seal I had worn joined on one finger, cabalistic bow to that minor hitch in the vortex of heredity which had caused me. Dear supervisors all, should they at the agency ever know the circumstances (and I might in time send them the case-record)—I could hear the descant that would follow, in the ballet of headshakes that always formalizes psychological gossip.

… (Would it have been better if the departed’s trauma had come to her through some normal community way such as radiation sickness, instead of having been visited upon her via the single, traumatic shock of birth? … What hopes could be held for a girl whose own sibling would one day ask her, eighteen years to her sixteen: “Haven’t
you
begun to … lose any of it … all over, yet?” … And who then would add in a whisper, turning away a face already shorn of brow and lash, a head already ennobled to its own bone—“What about …
down there?
”) …

Ah, we had our ribald humors, my brother and I, but that day wasn’t one of them, not when I had to answer him—for I was never to be as bad a case as he, and still have, though so faintly auburn, eyelashes—when I had to answer him … “No.” And on the record, I had a word of advice for them, my friends at the agency. Don’t be so quick to asperse birth, the plain fact of our beginnings. And don’t believe anything but the facts:

Subject
(who is I)
and sibling born to elderly well-to-do émigré parents.
Perhaps we were menopausal babies conceived after danger of such was deemed over, since both my parents, as distant cousins from same ancestral town, were well aware of hereditary traces.

Both deceased during infancy of children,
who were brought up under amiable legal guardianship, to best U.S. standards of oranges, lambchops, orthidonture and quarterly anti-pronation shoe-fittings.

From extant pics of parents aetat 35,
my father’s hairline may have been retouched, my mother’s even more susceptible to illusion.

Hereditary condition well documented in European medical annals (though not endemic there) via easier observation in small, genealogically related loci,
such as the German, North Sea town where my grandparents still reside.

May or may not be Mendelian recessive, thought by some to be albino-related, no official name. (Not alopecia areata,
which is temporary.)

Males invariably lose facial as well as scalp-hair, fem, data less procurable
though subject recalls, from youthful visit to grandparents, family portraits ranging back to the medieval, in which coif-line was shown almost as far back behind ears as a bridle.

Classically appears at onset of puberty, when natal hair of a characteristically silky dark-red gives way to carroty coarse growth which in turn disappears partially or in toto, usually by time of patient’s majority.
N.B. from subject: We were classical.

And in fancy I could read, over their shoulders, my evaluation (after group study of further history up to March 21st):

Subject, aided by economic status and first-class appliances, has made excellent progress in resolving toward conventional norms the original handicap of birth. Irredentist impulses not to be taken too seriously. As cosmetic use of wigs gains community-wise, subject’s sense of unity with the general population will increase. Subject’s quasi-humorous diagnosis of her sublimation to be taken as a real testimonial to our profession, fine objectivity from one of the solidest gals in the office.

And down in the corner of our biannual personality sheet I could even read a handwritten scrawl from my immediate supervisor:
Mildly bizarre thoughts a good sign of nonrigidity. Do I detect a sign that my quiet one may be getting espoused? Hats off!

With all the abstract sociological kindness going about the world, it’s hard to get a true story listened to on the level, even by oneself. What could I say, for instance, of my brother, become that perennial movie star whose trademark is hairlessness (in his case not however like old Von Stroheim, a villain, or a horror man like Peter Lorre, but cast as a straight romantic hero). Rumor has it that he is forbidden by contract to show so much as a single hair, some saying that he complies only by means of terrifying sessions of electrolysis, others that he keeps a young valet-of-the-tweezers ever by his side. When first out in the world, we used to envy one another, I him for his public baldness, he me for my disguise. Now we no longer saw each other, having usefully agreed, like enemies in entente, that we no longer had anything in common. Like many ties of love, ours was too painful to eat dinner with.

And so—I looked at my watch—I was back to love again, only twenty minutes out of Logan. And I had two more rings to dispose of in memory.

On the fourth finger of my right hand, where unmarried women often wear a parental diamond or an engagement ring that hasn’t worked out, I had worn, until yesterday, a small blue-white Tiffany in platinum, of the size given virgins by young men on modest budgets, as indeed it had been, by the one all hands would have said I should have married, the medical student, childhood friend and sole remaining witness of all my real changes, who had followed me East—and who had declined to make good his promise of marriage if I aborted the child he had already engendered.

“We could adopt some,” I said.

“No,” he replied, “I want our own first, if you don’t mind. I’m going to become a gynecologist.”

And so he has done, fat as a woodchuck too, and full of Christmas cards. But he was thin then, and staunch, and what he said sounded unanswerable. I wanted to answer it, at the time still believing that the apogee of life would be to have one secret witness forever at my side.

“
But I
mind!” I said. “I should mind forever. For
them.
” He shrugged, and I caught him looking with distaste at the wig I had just bought—the first one.

“Children can learn to be bald,” he said.

I was wounded beyond reason by this coldness.

“Already we differ,” I said. “Not mine.”

I handed him his ring back, strange gesture across the child I still carried (and stranger miscalculation?) for I understood his intent now—to bring me with it, out into the open.