The platform at Chicago's Union Station smelled of coal smoke and rain on Thursday afternoon, and the train waiting at the gate was longer than anything Martha Ellison had ever boarded. The Rocky Mountain Limited of the Continental Pacific Railroad lay along the platform in a silver line, its cars lettered in a flowing script, its windows already lit though it was barely four o'clock. A porter in a dark uniform was loading suitcases into the baggage car with the unhurried rhythm of a man who had done it ten thousand times. Martha stood with her one suitcase at her feet and her handbag over her arm and felt, absurdly and completely, like a girl on the first day of school.
She was forty-seven years old. She had taught fifth grade in Dayton, Ohio, for nineteen years. Her husband had died in 1949, of the heart trouble they had both pretended was nothing, and she had sold the house on Kenilworth Avenue in the spring and put the money in the bank, and written to her sister Clara in Sacramento, and accepted a post teaching fifth grade again, in a school with a different name, to children she had never met. She had packed one suitcase. She had checked out a library book she would never finish before Sacramento. She had locked the rented rooms behind her that morning, given the key to the landlady, and taken the train west with nothing left in Ohio to be called back to.
The conductor at the gate checked her ticket and her Pullman reservation and pointed her down the platform. He was a man of fifty-eight with a face that had been weathered into authority, and the brim of his cap sat level as a ruler.
"Car Seven," he said. "Porter will look after you."
Car Seven was a sleeping car, roomettes and sections, and the porter was waiting at the vestibule with a step box already set. He was a Negro man of middle height, fifty-one, with close-cropped graying hair and the kind of posture that suggested the train itself was something he carried.
"Mrs. Ellison," he said, reading her ticket stub. "Roomette nine. This way, ma'am. I'll take the bag."
"Thank you, Mr. —"
"Avery, ma'am. Thomas Avery. This car's mine."
He led her down the narrow corridor, past the closed doors of roomettes, past the open sections at the far end where a young couple was laughing over a card game. The drawing room at the end of the car had its door open, and Martha glimpsed a woman of perhaps sixty-three in a tailored traveling suit, rings on every finger that mattered, directing a young man of twenty-nine who was stowing hatboxes with visible anxiety.
"That'll be the Vance party," Avery said quietly. "Drawing room. They'll want the car kept quiet past ten. We keep it quiet anyway."
Her roomette was small and immaculate, a miracle of compactness: a wide seat by the window, a washbasin that folded out of the wall, a mirror, a little net for her handbag. The berth was folded up into the wall above the seat; tonight it would come down.
Avery set her suitcase in the rack, showed her the lock on the door, the call button, the reading lamp.
"Dinner's in the diner, ma'am. First seating six, second eight. You tell me which and I'll put your name down. The washroom's forward. Anything you need, you ring."
"That's very kind."
"It's the job, ma'am," he said, and smiled, and was gone.
Martha sat by the window and put her handbag in the net and her book on the seat beside her, and watched the platform begin to move. The train pulled out of the great shed into the gray October afternoon, and Chicago slid past in brick and smoke, and then the yards, and then the suburbs thinning into fields. She had lived in Dayton all her life. She had never seen the Mississippi from a train window. She found that the prospect of it, still a day away, made her sit straighter.
At six she went to dinner at the first seating. The dining car was all white cloth and polished glass, the tables set for two and four, the stewards moving between them with the practiced balance of men who pour coffee on a curve. She was seated with a couple from Iowa, the Hendersons — Arthur, sixty-six, and Grace, sixty-one — who told her within four minutes that they were retired schoolteachers, that this was their first trip west, and that they had already decided the dining car was the finest restaurant in America. Martha liked them at once, with the instant recognition of one teacher for another, and they talked about pupils and principals and the price of chalk until the dessert came. After dinner she walked back through the cars to the observation lounge at the rear of the train. The big windows showed a black Illinois night rushing past, red signal lights receding, and once a whole town laid out in a grid