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By Root 21820 0

him along to a Maine island, found scholarship money to support him through St. Paul’s, and when he graduated, got him a scholarship to MIT. Reasons enough for gratitude. But put that kindness of Dr. Rhinelander’s against the fact that my father did not come home again for ten years. Until he graduated from St. Paul’s, he spent every summer vacation with the Rhinelanders; after he started at MIT he took summer jobs. One of them brought him out on a surveying crew to the Idaho mountains where his father had worked years before. By then his family were living here in Grass Valley, but their son did not come the rest of the way west to see them. He saw his father once or twice a year in New York. His mother he saw not at all. When he graduated from MIT he found a job in Korea–and sailed from Seattle without a visit home–and he stayed in Korea until the Russo-Japanese War drove him out. Then, and only then, he accepted Grandfather’s offer to become superintendent of the Zodiac when Grandfather became general manager.

Ten years. What am I to make of that? Especially when I remember the lifelong taciturnity that was more like a disease than a mere quality of his temperament? Especially when I remember how Grandmother deferred to him, and feared his silences? Especially when I remember her frantic haste to get rid of him in the summer of 1890? I have to conclude that he knew something, or suspected something, or had seen something, or thought her to blame for the catastrophes that within three or four days had shaken down his world. I have to believe that in her distraction and self-loathing–he could not have blamed her more than she blamed herself–she could not bear the look in her son’s eyes. And though I could probably make up some episode to corroborate what I suspect, I think I shall not. Let it go at the fact that from that time on he had an aversion, all but incurable, against his mother; and that she read his mind before they left Idaho, and could not stand what she saw.

So there they go again on a transcontinental train, this time not merely in defeat but in utter rout–a sullen white-faced boy, a scared little girl not quite ten, a mother strung up like a piano string, turning a white blank smile toward people who came up to her or called from the platform–Boise was a town that met the through trains. But it all came apart when Nellie broke down into terrible weeping, grabbed the children and hugged them and wet them with her tears, clung to Susan with sobs that shook and shattered them both. They were all crying. With streaming eyes Nellie stood back, tried to say something, strangled, looked at them all piteously for a moment with her weak English chin trembling, and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and put her head down and fled. Susan herded the children aboard, a sympathetic porter found their seats and brought their bags and left them, they huddled in the high Pullman plush and hid from the eyes of the curious. It was like coming into a room full of people with all their desolation plain upon them. They could hear the rustling of newspapers. For some reason the man across the aisle chose that moment to pick up the orange skins and litter on the seat and floor around him. They turned their faces away from his peeping. Susan took Betsy’s head in her lap and bent into the corner, stroking the child’s trembling back. Ollie put his forehead against the window and stared out, blind as a daytime owl. Eventually the train jerked and started.

Five days of it–a day of Idaho, a night of Wyoming, a day of Wyoming and Nebraska, a night of Nebraska, a whole morning of sitting at the platform in Omaha. An afternoon of Iowa, a night of undistinguishable dark prairies, another whole morning of sitting in the station in Chicago. An afternoon of Illinois and Indiana before they burrowed under the dense night heat. Their windows were open, their car was littered with papers and the remains of food, they were grimed with cinders, their hands came black off the plush, their beds, made up crisp and white in the evening, were wrinkled,