“What now?”
He said, “Nothing, just let me look at you a while,” and that was what he did, his eyes lowered, his hands clasped. His admiration made her shivery-sick and she was careful not to look down, not to see what he saw. He cleared his throat.
“What?”
“Perhaps you would sing the Mendelssohn.”
She closed her eyes, remembering the words. It seemed to her deeply irreverent, but she found having something to do diverting. She started in almost a murmur but her voice settled into itself. She no longer trembled as she stood, and only felt awkward again when she fell quiet and began putting everything back on, each step all fingers and thumbs because he was watching her and saying, “Shame to cover that. And that. And that.” She felt naked inside her clothes walking back to Aunt Sedge’s house. She wrote him a letter that night resigning her position as his secretary.
A day or two later he sent ￡1000 to her by messenger. Ten notes, one hundred quid each, new-looking and sharp, unsoiled. It was a startling sum, so immense that for a while she regarded the packet as though it were a genie’s lamp. He had enclosed a brochure for the TSS Transylvania, a steamship of the Anchor Line. It departed, like the Caledonia, from Glasgow.
Go and be happy, he wrote. As you have made me.
Under the hard-bottomed davenport in Leenie’s flat, in a suitcase, she kept the brochure for the Transylvania, which in turn held Dr. O’Malley’s money and his note. When Leenie and Will had gone to bed, she quietly slid the case out and read the note again. Go and be happy. What remained of the money was ￡700 6s. 3d. Less than $200 once she handed it across the counter at the bureau of exchange. It might be enough for the train ticket to Kansas, she thought, if she added her wages to it. It would have to be.
9
Two days and nights Aldine sat on the train and stared at fields through her own reflection, and saw no water to speak of. She carried three blood-spotted handkerchiefs in her pocketbook when she stepped off the train in Dorland, touching the last one to her nose and wishing for a river to make everything wet and cool, as it had been in her imagination. But she saw no lochs, no rivers, not even a burn. She had to settle for a station bog where water trickled into a rust-bloomed sink near a ghastly commode. When she’d combed her dusty hair, washed her face without soap, and checked the chapped edges of her nose for blood, she changed her dress to the black one printed all over with shells and pinned once more to her hair the tan beret just like the one in Vogue that she’d knitted in Leenie’s flat. Her skin looked ashy white against the rouge she rubbed into her lips.
None of this quite killed the pleasure of the letter of acceptance in her purse that said she was just what they were looking for. That was it exactly—just what we are looking for—and written in such a fine hand it might have come from a hotel menu. Yours sincerely, Ansel Price. She took the letter out and held it while she waited for this very man to appear and fetch her.
Dorland, Kansas, appeared to consist of plain pastel houses in a row, each one small and lonesome in its own dry yard, and a huge white building made of columns that looked like stone tubes. FARMER’S CO-OP, it said in painted black letters near the top. Beyond the lane where she stood, which was called Spruce Street, she could see leafy trees, bits of red brick buildings, and a gray structure that had an impressively tall hedge along one side. The street in front of those buildings was so straight she could see all the way to the end, and it wasn’t a very long way before the trees and buildings stopped and the yellowish countryside began again. She wanted to walk into town and see if there was a hotel or pub where she could get something to drink, but she was afraid to leave the vicinity of the platform.
Minutes passed, and she ventured off the platform to the road, which was unpaved. She felt the sun heating her bare arms—scorching them, most likely—but the air felt clean and good after so many hours in the stuffy train. She walked, little stones rolling under her shoes, to the end of the block that contained the platform, then turned back. No one came, not by foot or by car. A bug leaped away from her foot, his body the color of dust. Another popped out every time she moved, so she bent down, curious, and saw one hiding in a clump of weeds: just a grasshopper like those at home but striped in alien colors, gold and black, with a big reptilian eye. She straightened up with a feeling that was part exhilaration, part unease. The road went on being empty, so finally she asked the man in the ticket booth if Mr. Ansel Price had already come to the station and left.
The man cocked his head. “Ansel Price, do you mean?” and when she nodded, the man said, “Nope. Haven’t seen Ansel at all today.”
She strode back into the glaring sun. What a disaster if she’d gotten it all wrong somehow. The man knew Ansel Price, so it was not the wrong town. Maybe he’d had car trouble. She was telling herself it would just be another minute when the man from the ticket booth came out and said, “You family of the Prices?”
Aldine shook her head and hid the blood-spotted handkerchief in her fist. “I came out to be the new teacher,” she said.
“What?” he said, as if she were speaking Chinese.
She said it again, more slowly.
He seemed not only uncertain of her meaning, but irritated that he was made to feel uncertain. “Which school?” he asked.
“I think it’s called Stony Bank.”
“Stuny Bonk?” he said, echoing her.
“Stony,” she repeated. “Stony Bank.”
He still looked baffled. “Well, Mr. Tanner lives near the Prices,” he said, gesturing toward a round bearded man reading something in front of the post office. “He’ll take you if you want to go with him.”
She did, she supposed. She certainly couldn’t stay here.
“Thank you,” she said, and the ticket booth man nodded and said she was lucky it was Saturday; folks come to town on Saturday.
Aldine thought she could not have understood him; other than themselves and the man across the street, there was not a soul to be seen. She said so, and he said what sounded like, “Cinema.”
“What?”