“Then sleep,” he said, leaning a shoulder toward her in invitation. “Anything exciting happens, I’ll wake you up.”
She laughed, rubbing her cheek against his jacket as if to find the right spot. “I wonder what would count as exciting on Staten Island. A deer on the tracks?” She had other questions about the route—if the train line ran close along Raritan Bay, whether there might be time to walk on the beaches later—and then she was asleep again without waiting for comment or answers.
He put his arm around her to hold her steady against the sway and lurch of the train and looked up to see that they were being observed by two old women—farmers’ wives, almost certainly, by their faded sunbonnets and aprons. Watching Anna sleep as attentively as they might have watched a play on the stage. Sleep robbed her face of its fierce intelligence and turned her into nothing more or less than a woman in the full blush of her youth at rest, innocent, almost otherworldly. Then the women turned to look out the window, and the moment passed.
For a moment Jack weighed the idea of getting the Times out of his valise, and then remembered the article just under the fold on the front page, where Anna’s name figured so prominently. She might not have seen it. He hoped she had not. Even more, he hoped she hadn’t seen the Post or any of the other rags that were having such a good time dissecting the Savard women. Tomorrow would be soon enough for all that, or the day after. For today they were free of everything and everyone.
They traveled along Raritan Bay for a while, slow enough to take in long stretches of dunes that revealed and then hid the shore where oystermen were hauling nets. On the horizon he could just make out boats like smudges of paint shimmering in the sun.
According to the train schedule the journey would take an hour, which Jack soon realized was more a fanciful guess than a statement of fact. He watched passengers amble along to get on and off as if they had never heard the word timetable. At one stop the conductor sat himself down on a convenient pile of luggage and launched into what looked like a serious conversation with the stationmaster, pausing only to light his pipe. So close to Manhattan, and a different world altogether, different from Greenwood, too, in ways he couldn’t quite pinpoint except that Greenwood was home.
Stapleton was a proper town, but the rest of the interior of Staten Island would be like this: farms, forest, wilderness. The next stop was in a village spread out around the train station like an apron: pretty, slightly tattered, and very quiet but for the huff of the train engine. A stand of tulip trees cast shade over the road where a leggy girl in wooden clogs was herding a couple of goats along the road. The baby balanced on her hip had one small fist knotted in the sleeve of her dress.
On the other side of the train tracks orchards spread out, apricot and plum and cherry in bloom, swaths of white and pink and red as far as he could see.
The stops were ten or twenty minutes apart, interrupted for long stretches for no apparent reason. Every station was simpler and smaller than the one before, with less of a village around it. The stretches of forest got longer, crab apples scattered between cedar and gum trees, their petals floating on the breeze. Passengers came and went, greeted each other, and talked in the way of people who knew each other’s parents and grandparents, secrets and foibles. Anna slept through all of it, unaware.
He had been told that Pleasant Plains was the stop closest to the new mission at Mount Loretto, but Jack bought tickets for Tottenville, two stops on, a more substantial village and the final train stop on the southernmost shore with another ferry station, this one with service to Perth Amboy in Jersey. In Tottenville he hoped they would be able to find lunch and directions and a livery stable to rent a horse and trap and then, finally, a hotel, if fate was kind.
When the conductor came through calling out Tottenville, end of the line, Tottenville! Jack got some basic information: the name of a restaurant where they could get a good lunch, and, when Jack mentioned they would be going to Mount Loretto, the news that Father McKinnawae had gone to the city just this morning, traveling north to the ferry on this very train. He wouldn’t be back for a couple of days, some kind of emergency at his Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, but then wasn’t that always the way with those street arabs. McKinnawae was a saint, papist or not, and you couldn’t convince Tom Bottoms any different.
“There’s nobody at Mount Loretto at all?” Jack asked.
“Didn’t say that, did I. The place is overrun with monkish types, you know, brown robes and bald spots”—he took off his hat to point to his own pate, shiny with perspiration—“they give themselves, on purpose. Like a hive of worker bees,” said the conductor. “Work till they drop.”