An Owl's Whisper (36 page)

At Penn Station, Eva and the other war brides went to a roped off area. Hope gave each an envelope containing travel itinerary, train tickets, and meal vouchers. Her clipboard held the master check sheet correlating names, destinations, and train numbers. Watching the massive, clattering train departure board overhead, Hope sent groups, escorted by one of the Mayor’s ladies, to the appropriate track for their rail passage. Before each left, there were tears, hugs, kisses, and exchanges of paper scraps with addresses hurriedly scribbled.

When Eva’s group was called, she ran to embrace Hope. “
Merci
for a new beginning.”

Hope patted Eva’s back. “Oh, shug, it’s me that’s obliged to ya’all. Till I have a kid of my own, I reckon you Pocahontases’ new starts will be this bayou gal’s acme.”

Eva’s train departed Penn Station at 7:50 p.m. on August 23. Twenty-three of the brides were aboard, assigned to compartments in Pullman car number two. Nine of the women got off at destinations before Chicago. Two more stayed in the Windy City. The rest transferred to west- and southbound trains.

Eva and three others took a westbound Burlington, departing early on August 26. Lucie, the farm girl from Brittany who’d won five silver dollars for spotting the Statue of Liberty, passed time writing in her diary and sketching other passengers, waiting to meet her husband in Boone, Iowa. Irva, a Flemish-speaking Belgian, traveled to Salina, Kansas with her husband Chuck, who’d come to Chicago to meet her. Chuck sold shoes at the Carter Store in Salina. They sat in the back of the car cooing and kissing like teenagers at the drive-in picture show.

Marie, the millinery shop girl Eva met at the embassy, was the third. Her destination was Medicine Bow, Wyoming. On the ocean crossing, Eva grew to love Marie’s playfulness—she was pleasant as a ripe peach. On the train, the pair had a ball smoking American cigarettes and playing pinochle in the parlor car. Between card games, they sometimes sat silent and watched the endless fields slip by. Eva liked to scan the horizon for Sioux warriors in bead and eagle feather headdresses, perched on paint ponies, watching her iron horse whistle west. But all she ever saw was rippling heat waves rising in the distance.

Once when Eva looked back at Marie, she saw tears tracking her cheeks. She wiped them with a napkin and drew Marie close. Eva whispered, “Hard, isn’t it?”

Marie took a silk handkerchief from her purse and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “Phillip talked of white-topped mountains and cattles in pastures. I thought of The Alps. As a girl, I spent summers near Geneva. Oh, the high meadows and the smiling Swiss cows!” She inhaled, hoping her memories had turned the air Alpine. When she exhaled, her shoulders sagged. “Look at this: Flat as Holland, plains of grass like Africa and just as hot. No cows. No cities. No villages. No people. I was foolish to come.”

Eva brought Marie’s head to her shoulder and stroked the curl behind her ear. After a quiet moment, she whispered, “Know the story of the two little wrens whose forest home was devastated by fire?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “These wrens heard of a lovely new forest, untouched by the fire, and they set off together to make it their new home. But when they got to the new forest, it wasn’t the one of their dreams, and the birds they found there were unfamiliar, with colors and sounds different from their own, and even the trees seemed different. The wrens were so disappointed and frightened that they wished they had never left their old home, even ravaged and ruined as it was. For it had been familiar, and familiar things, like battered, old chairs, are comfortable. But they couldn’t turn back, so the wrens had to reconcile themselves to their new place. They decided to put their own special mark on it. And this they did with their singing. Singing that all the animals in the new forest came to cherish. And the wrens grew to love their new home and the birds there, not for the small bits of sameness as the old but for its freshness and its difference. For how they changed it with their song and for how it changed them.”

Eva caressed Marie’s cheek as she would her own child. And she whispered, as much to herself as to Marie, “It can be so for us too. We need only to let it be.”

Marie pulled away from Eva’s shoulder. She looked into her friend’s eyes, and a teary smile was her reply.

When Eva, Lucie, and Marie lunched in the dining car that noontime, they wanted to toast the future with a glass of wine. They ordered sandwiches. Handing the head-shaved waiter their vouchers, Marie asked about wine.

“Can’t be no wine,” the waiter groused.

“We have money…we’ll pay separately,” said Marie.

“You got rocks in them heads? Can’t have no war brides what’s fixin’ to meet they’s husbands gettin’ all liquored-up!” The waiter huffed off, shaking his head.

The tirade brought the women more giggles than the wine ever could have.

Lucie got off in Des Moines. Through the window, Eva and Marie watched her bounce into the arms of her husband, a large man sweating in an undersized, brown woolen suit.

After Des Moines, Eva knew it would only be a few hours until the train got to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she would meet Stanley. The travel that had started over two weeks earlier had been so exciting, she felt sorry to see it end. But still, she was anxious to see her husband, to be held by him, to experience his great land, perhaps to make her own little mark on it. To start a new life. To distance herself from an old one.

Car No. 1120, Compartment Two

When the conductor came through the car calling, “Lincoln. Lincoln. Your next stop is Lincoln, Nebraska,” Marie shifted close to Eva and clutched her arm.

Eva stroked Marie’s hair. “You won’t forget to write, will you?” She put fingertips under Marie’s chin and raised her head to look into her eyes. “I’m depending on you.”

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Marie nodded.

Eva winked. “I knew a nun, the mother superior at our school. She used to say Paris girls never cry. She was Parisian and we never did see her cry, even in the Occupation’s darkest days.” She looked out the window. “If only she had cried. Things could have been so different.” She turned back and pulled Marie close. “You cry if you want. Crying’s a good thing.”

The train slowed. Outside, buildings had sprang up where moments before there were only grain fields. Eva pulled her valise off the luggage rack. She straightened the jacket of the blue linen suit she had put on an hour earlier and smoothed the skirt.

By this time Marie was composed. In fact, she was hanging out the open window as they pulled into the station. “Which one is he, Eva? The one who looks like Maurice Chevalier? No? Perhaps the distinguished fellow with the pipe?”

“No.” Eva peered down the platform, panicked for a moment when she didn’t see Stan. Then, “There! He’s there, with the maroon tie. No jacket.”

Marie craned her neck. “Where? Him?
Ooh-la-la
. He’s cute!” She popped her head back inside as the train halted. “I’ll remember the wrens, Eva. I’ll remember you.”

The women embraced for a moment. The next thing Eva knew, she was on the platform, flying into the arms of the man with the maroon tie. They were still kissing as, wheels clattering, the Burlington’s caboose disappeared into billows of smoke and steam.

As Eva held him, Stan shook and tears flooded his eyes. “I just can’t believe you’re here with me, honey.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I figured something, don’t know what, would go haywire. Maybe that time’d just stop. Today wouldn’t come. I sat in front of the clock last night, talkin’ its hands past the twelve. Sounds stupid now, but I whooped like a drunk injun when they made it.”

“
Dieu merci
—it’s thank goodness—for your resolute clock.” Eva kissed him. “This moment tells me I have no place but with you.”

Stan wanted to believe it. And when Eva pulled him close again, there on the platform, there on the day that Stan doubted would happen, there on a summer evening hot enough to fuse them into one, when she pulled him so close that the people around them faded and they were alone, he did believe.

As they walked down the platform, Eva asked, “Will we go on with a motorcar?”

Stan beamed. “Well, it’s a ways to Hooker County, nigh unto three hundred miles. Too far for the old fliver. I figured it made sense to go hog wild and celebrate our reunion by takin’ the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy’s Pullman service overnight for the trip. Married as we are. I ain’t never took a Pullman car. What do you think, hon?”

W
e’re discussing finances!
“It’s okey-dokey, if we can afford it.” She snuggled Stan’s arm, enjoying her partnership in Chandler, Inc.

“With your voucher, it’s just a supplement for you. Mine’s the full sleeper fare, but what the heck, I’d give my last nickel for a night on the train with you.”

When they got to the ticket window, the white-haired agent looked up. “Yes sir, back again are you? And this would be your war bride, I presume?” His glasses rode low on his long, pointy nose and he peered over the lenses at Eva. She nodded to him and produced her travel voucher. Stan brought out a roll of bills and a bagful of coins and counted out the fare: a ten dollar bill, a pile of ones, a small stack of silver dollars, a tall stack of halves, four dimes and a nickel.

The agent completed the tickets in triplicate—carbon copies for his nail and for the train crew and the originals for Stan and Eva. He reviewed the tickets with Stan, circling the train number, track and departure time with a stubby pencil. “That should do it, sir. Get your compartment number from the conductor when you board. Anything else I can do you for?”

Stan scrutinized the tickets for a moment. “Number 211’s due in at 9:59. I think that’s what you said before. We just need to be here then, I guess.”

“9:59 is correct. On track number one, sir”

“Swell. Say, how’s that little silver diner down the street?

“Calandra’s? Oh, not bad. Thelma’s cherry pie’s always good.”

“Much obliged, Mister.” Stan made a bit of a salute.

Just to be safe, Stan and Eva got to the platform at 9:25. Moths fluttered around the big lights overhead and crickets chirped. Stan slipped his arm around her waist. Eva turned, placed a hand on his chest, and rising up on her tiptoes, she kissed him. Holding hands, they peered down the track, excited as kids waiting for July Fourth fireworks to start.

The train arrived nine minutes early, and before 10:00 they were checked into car number 1120, compartment two. When Stan told the beefy conductor that he was a recently discharged veteran taking his Belgian bride to their new home, the trainman looked wistful. “Served in Belgium, did ya? My boy, too.” Stan nodded. The conductor turned to the car porter. “Take good care of these passengers, hear?” He tipped his hat and closed their compartment door.

The train lugged out of the station at 10:07. Stan turned off the light in their nest and the couple sat on the bed. He put his arm around Eva, and she snuggled to his chest. They gazed silently through the window at the city creeping by, its streetlights and neon signs casting a dancing montage of color and shadow inside. As they reached Lincoln’s outskirts and the train sped up, the click-clack of wheels became excited heartbeat—a counterpoint to the drowsy landscape lolling outside in the moonlight.

Stan felt like the fire that had been smoldering inside him was suddenly a blaze. It was quite a contrast to the space around him: To the relaxed samba of the train. The compartment’s soft darkness. The pencil of moonlight caressing Eva’s cheek. The slip of air from the vent window tickling his ear. He loved the moment. He both wished it would go on forever and wanted to burn it up in a flash of carnal fire.

A knock sidetracked those thoughts. Stan turned on the light and opened the door. The porter stood at attention, a loaded stainless steel food cart before him.

“Must be someone else’s,” Stan said. “We didn’t order nothin’.”

“Sorry to disturb ya’ll. This here’s the courtesy of Conductor Larkin.” The porter wheeled the cart in and set the covered platter and a pair of bottles on the table next to the window. He removed the silver, domed cover with a flourish, revealing an assortment of
hors
d’oeuvres
. Then he backed toward the door.

Stan fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a quarter. “Much obliged,” he said, pressing the coin in the man’s hand.

The porter nodded, and with a “G’night, sir and ma’am,” he was out the door.

Stan and Eva peered silently at the food. In the eye-catching center, ringing a bowl of blood-red cocktail sauce, were six pink shrimp, big around as a thumb and lounging on a bed of cracked ice. Outside the shrimp were four fans of tan saltine crackers alternating with four fans of cracker-sized slices of yellow cheese. A garnish of green pickles and orange carrots and red radishes ringed the crackers and cheese. And there were two frosty bottles of Schlitz beer, each topped with a frosty glass, and starched linen napkins.