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  She lets Mitch talk himself out, which he finally does, pushing his cap forward over his eyes for a little rest. Soon he is snoring softly, and the sound both frightens and thrills her. She watches the farmland roll by, sere and stubbled after harvest. She can see a yellow bus making its way down one of the long, straight country roads. It’s small from this distance, as she supposes her train appears to the students riding it. She can imagine the tumult and teasing going on inside. That was not a good mix, of her and schoolchildren. She doesn’t know what they’d wanted her to be like, but they soon found out that she was nervous, and somehow foreign, and they’d made sport of it.

  When she confessed to her father that she’d lost control of her class, he had advised only that she rule them with a firmer hand, precisely what she lacked in the first place. It had been his idea that she leave college and take her emergency wartime teaching certificate, the requirements shortened to two years instead of the full baccalaureate degree. Since she’d been unable to study with any concentration since her mother’s death, her grades had of course slipped drastically. I’m not stupid, she wanted to tell him. In fact, she loved reading, thought she might try to be a writer someday. But his general air of disappointment made it impossible to speak up for herself. First term, her marks had begun at the top of the class. She’d only been away nine weeks—had already joined the a cappella singers and begun performing with them—when she was summoned before bed to the telephone on her floor to hear her father say he was driving to get her in the morning. Even so, it had been too late to see her mother alive one final time. After that, yes, it was true: She’d been a failure as a student. She’d had no counterargument when he directed her to shorten her schooling and begin teaching.

  The train and the school bus are traveling roughly parallel, so that the students on their way to class look to be making little progress. Now the bus stops at a crossroads and takes a right-angle turn away from her. It soon becomes as small as the toy Dinky truck wrapped in her luggage for her young nephew. Then it vanishes altogether.

  Mitch sleeps all the way to Chicago. When the conductor passes through their car shouting, “Chicago! LaSalle Street Station!” he comes to with a start. He stares at her in a split second of wonder. Then he grins and says, “Already? Where was I?”

  He hands down her suitcase and unfurls her coat, helping her on with it. The train is stopped at a switch and then jerks forward, bumping them into each other. He insists on carrying her bag along with his off the car.

  This station is big and serious compared to the covered platform and small waiting room of the Rock Island Depot they left behind. Announcements crackle over an intercom; passengers getting off the Peoria Rocket are rushing through the doors, on to their cabs and Chicago destinations.

  Mitch glances at the station clock. “Say, do you have any time before your next train?”

  She has loads of time; it’s not even ten in the morning and the City of Portland doesn’t depart until six that evening. She had thought she’d check her bag and explore the stores in Chicago for a few hours. But now that she’s here, even the station seems to engulf her.

  Mitch has time, too, before his transport bus shows up late that afternoon. She agrees to have lunch, a walk. They check their bags and make their way through the bustle of the station.

  The steep buildings lining either side of the street make her feel a little dizzy, as does the river of traffic, honking cars, and the press of pedestrians. One woman actually pushes Kathryn along with her balled fists, until a gap presents itself where the woman can pass. She doesn’t even glance at Kathryn as she makes her determined way around her in a tweed business suit and a brimmed hat pulled low.

  Ever since they left the station Mitch has been guiding her along by her elbow. He’s kept hold of it, lightly, but Kathryn feels it as a glowing center of her whole being. At Goshen College, she’d been with boys in mixed groups. Maybe once in a while she’d been shoulder to shoulder with a fellow, squeezed into a restaurant booth. But she believes this to be the first instance that a man unrelated to her has held on to any part of her person with a particular claim. Even just this claim to be her protector in the crowd.

  “Hungry?” he murmurs into her ear. She knows he’s moving close to be heard, but the sensation of his breath on her skin makes her shudder.

  “Not cold, are you?” he asks, before she can even answer the first question. “In this beautiful coat?” He moves his guiding arm briefly to her shoulder to stroke the mohair, then returns his cradling palm to her elbow.

  “A little.” It’s true that the street’s shadowy chill—she knows the sun is out, but it’s somewhere behind these skyscrapers—suddenly grips her. “Cold, I mean, not hungry. Are you hungry?”

  “Nah, not yet. My mother gave me the full farm treatment—eggs, bacon, pancakes, you name it.”

  At sunrise, her father had pressed Kathryn with oatmeal, eggs, stewed fruit. But she was unable to eat a thing. She still can’t, now at mid-morning. It’s as if her body can focus on only so many sensations at once.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea. How about a matinee if we can find one, then lunch after?”

  She won’t tell him that she’s seen only one movie in her life, illicitly, with her friend Marlene from Goshen College. She’ll say that sounds like a good idea.

  They pause at a newsstand, where Mitch buys the Tribune. He thumbs through to find the listings.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen the new one with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.”

  “No, I haven’t.” She’s read all about it, though, surreptitiously at the drugstore—Photoplay and Modern Screen her secret vices, begun in the days of the ice cream shop when customers would leave the magazines behind on tables, and she’d hide them away in her binders until she could be alone with them.

  “I have, but it’s terrific, I’m glad to see it again.” Mitch confers with the newsboy about the location of the Clark, then determines that they can walk. He glances down at her two-inch square heels. “Good girl, sensible shoes.”

  She is happy to walk. He takes a couple of extra steps to maneuver himself to the outside of the sidewalk, returns the guiding hand to her elbow. He walks like a soldier, or a farmer, miles to march or acres to cross. But she has no trouble keeping up; they are in step. How marvelous the day is turning out to be—an escort, a movie, a guide in the big city.

  He pays for her ticket, insisting—“Who else am I going to spend this on now?”—and they enter what feels to Kathryn like a kind of temple, dark and gilded and velvety. They climb the carpeted stairs to the mezzanine, and find loge seats. It’s like being underwater, this darkness, lit just enough from the petaled sconces and footlights along the aisles. Mitch glides the coat off her shoulders, folds it back along the top of the seat, and Kathryn settles in, surprised that the chair rocks slightly under her. He leaves his arm casually along the back of her seat, a protective gesture, not touching her, but enfolding her within his zone of soldierly protection. She feels it even without feeling it, and it absorbs her consciousness so powerfully, in a pleasant, disorienting way, that the images from the previews—Ingrid Bergman’s soulfully lovely face, Bogart’s slightly mocking one—don’t quite penetrate. Then the movie comes on with the singing and dancing and gowns and cocktails and chiffon and sequins and fast, wise-cracking dialogue, and a plot that shows coupling and uncoupling that purports to be fated and yet seems so volatile and even random that Kathryn can’t quite grasp it.

  But it’s mesmerizing nonetheless—the shining, beautiful excess. Everything is beginning for her right now at this very moment with a boy from home but still a stranger, beside her in this lush, embracing dark. Life, the bright spectacle in front of her. And then Bing is at the piano with a Christmas tree and a fire in the background and Mitch leans in and says, “Boy, I’ll miss being home at Christmas,” and she looks at him with such affection and sympathy that he holds her eyes a minute, receiving it, then leans ove
r and kisses her very sweetly on the lips, then harder, with his arm crushing her to him in a way that doesn’t hurt but startles her, until he releases her and they look at each other for a few seconds partly stunned and partly wondering what’s next. Then she knows that it is she who must move back a few degrees, that he will take his signal from her, and though no one has ever told her how to let a boy know what to do, she does know how—by tucking herself back into herself, and letting something smooth fall across her expression.

  He keeps his arm there, though, directly around her shoulders for the rest of the movie, the bargain they have arrived at. She is his girl, today. But she is a good girl, a girl from home, and he is a nice boy, and also a boy from home. She is a woman in the world in a coat that could be in this movie, and he is man in uniform who will be shipped to Europe soon, and for this reason, and the reason of her six o’clock train, she can afford him a certain amount of leeway, and he knows how much and will ask no more.

  This is settled then, in the space of what they saw in each other’s face after the kiss, and so she can relax into the movie in a new way, and lean against the warmth of his arm.

  The daylight and city noise crash around them as they emerge from the theater. Mitch now gives himself permission to steer her in a variety of ways—by the elbow, as they hurry across the street, or with an arm around her waist, keeping her close against him from the noontime press of pedestrians. They pause to look at a menu taped to a restaurant window and agree that it will be perfect.

  When she watches him talk as they eat their sandwiches—naming the guys in his unit, sketching the eccentricities of his commanding officers—she has time to study his features. They are all Illinois farm boy, a fullness of face that is guileless and friendly, sandy hair, eyes that don’t register as any particular color unless you ask yourself, and then determine that they are blue. He could be one of her cousins. He is not, she realizes, the sort of man she could be in love with, though she has little notion what sort of man that might be. But she has a buzzing, almost flying feeling that she thinks must be like love—in this case, love of her circumstance, here in a steamy, clattering restaurant in a big city lunching with this soldier she has just kissed. Even her egg salad sandwich, with its little frill of parsley on the side, looks unfamiliarly glamorous, and her dewy glass of Coca-Cola, sitting on a scalloped paper coaster, decidedly so. She slips the coaster in her coat pocket when they stand to leave, and one of the folded paper menus from beside the cash register as well, feeling that her life from this moment forward must be documented; that things are about to happen to her that she will have to retain evidence of to believe.

  By the time they begin their stroll back to LaSalle Street Station, the day is slanted toward afternoon. Everything is winding them in separate directions, the flags and war bond posters speaking straight to them. She is his girl, and this is measured in minutes. It’s irrelevant now that she wouldn’t want to be his girl for weeks or months or forever, because war hangs over him, and a train and transport are about to decide matters. For this reason and this alone, she is his girl more than ever, and they walk in the comfortable silence of lovers who have been together for a long time. There is nothing to say; he has kissed her in the dark and he is the first boy to ever do so. This marks him and this day and grants him rights. She allows her hand to be held, and she takes it for granted that he will pay for the taxi that carries them to the Chicago and Northwestern Terminal. It is his right and even his duty to pay for her; she is his girl. Because she is, she sits demurely beside him in the grand marble space of the waiting room, their luggage at their feet, while he clasps her hand and has a cigarette. She could scold him for this, it is her new right as his girl, but the war grants him privileges, too.

  Time, when he is done, bears the press of urgency. He must get a cab back to LaSalle, where the transport will be, and he must do this within minutes. They scribble their addresses for each other, hers in care of her brother, his a series of army identifiers. “This will find me anywhere,” he says. The prospect of her letter searching him out at an encampment somewhere—amid rockets, shells—of the army seeing to it, makes a profound impression on her, so much is she now a part of something large, a matter of grave consequence. She feels bonded to it, like a vow. Then he really does have to go, and he kisses her again and she is ready for it this time and tilts toward it, recoiling a little from something acrid, then realizes it is the trace of his cigarette. She leaves her suitcase by the wooden bench, a bit of a risk, she thinks, but risk now is necessary—needing to see him to the brink of it—and follows him to the line of Checker Cabs waiting in front of the station.

  “Make sure you write,” he says. “I don’t want to lose track of you.”

  “I will.”

  They kiss once more and then wave until his cab has rounded the corner, and she is even fuller now, full of his absence. She must spool the day back to its beginning, to the first sound of him bumping along the aisle toward her on the train at Peoria. She must turn over every moment, until she has the shape of each one memorized.

  Dear God in heaven, what if her bag is not at the bench—that might serve her right—but there it is. She vows to be responsible again, the girl with her feet on the ground. Though, finally, maybe, not so different anymore, no longer invisibly foreign in her own country. She could tell by the way Mitch looked at her that he saw an American girl, not a person awkwardly between worlds—India and Illinois, Mennonite and modern. The wooden bench is hard like a church pew, and she wraps her coat around herself and begins the pleasant task of waiting, situated where she can watch the black schedule board change, with the times and trains ticking past in black tiles. The coaster in her pocket is reassuringly tactile as she fingers the scalloped edge. She will begin a letter to him on the train. When her brother Russell sees her bent over an aerogram at the kitchen table in his house, he will wonder. A friend from Peoria, she will tell him, and it will be absolutely true.

  After half an hour Kathryn needs to use the Ladies Lounge, and after another ten minutes quite desperately so, but there is again the question of the luggage, and no one reassuring nearby to watch it, just an older businessman on the next bench over. But she can’t possibly wait the forty minutes until she boards the train. Must she carry the big bag all the way there and back? She could leave it for just the two minutes it would take; it was fine before, and this time the idea takes shape in her mind like a dare: How much can she get away with? She leaves the suitcase but has her handbag, of course, and wears her coat.

  She hurries, even avoiding a glance in the mirror as she finishes by running a dash of water over her fingertips.

  As she leaves the Ladies Lounge, she sees that a soldier has taken a seat in the middle of her bench. She’s startled, because from the rear she thinks it’s Mitch again—and why would he be back?—but, no, this uniform is taller, the shoulders narrower. In that second her gaze widens to take in the tableau of the whole waiting room: more than a dozen soldiers now, talking in clumps, dotted across the rows, standing in line to buy tobacco or magazines—how had she missed seeing so many? Or have they just arrived, a sudden influx? It’s like in Landour, when you’d feel a rustle off in the pines beyond the path. When you stopped and stared into the green, a langur materialized, starkly silver. But then, all of a sudden, you saw not one, but three, seven, ten; it was the shift of vision that showed them to you.

  Occasionally when she would walk to the bazaar down the steep turns of Tehri Road, a troop of rangy langur males would descend in a succession of lightning-quick swoops from the hillside to her right, swinging off branches with raspy barks that sounded like laughter, then leaping ten, twelve yards, to land on the road in front of her. They weren’t coming for her, they were en route down the mountain, but when they saw her—upright, earthbound—they were ready to stop and take an interest. They’d spring up to the stone wall at the lip of the road and stare. The trick was not to look directly at them, but to
stroll on exactly as you had been. Her mother never got over her terror of being taken by surprise, always stifling a scream, but even as a child Kathryn knew that these muscular, graceful beings were like gods, meant to be adored. And although you weren’t supposed to meet their eyes—you might invite something you wouldn’t want—she paid silent tribute to them as she went past, pretending to ignore them. When she could finally allow herself a backward glance she’d see that they’d all leaped off the stone wall down the slope, disappearing in the shadowed pines. She wanted nothing more than to fly after them, share the immense sport they made of freedom.

  On her way to the bench she doesn’t see her suitcase and makes a small bet with herself: If it is there, she is meant to do what she will do, without remorse. She is meant to leap into her life. If it is not, she will have learned her lesson, and will never be so reckless again.

  But on the other side of the bench it squarely sits, dark marbled blue with white stitching, a going-away gift from her father. Unstolen. From it hangs the new leather luggage tag holding the identification card written three years ago with her mother’s good hand. Even hampered by her paralysis, she’d wanted to help Kathryn get ready for college. Belatedly Kathryn realizes what she just offered up to chance by leaving the suitcase unattended—she could have borne all loss except that small card, her mother’s determined act of rallying behind whatever journey she was undertaking.

  Kathryn reclaims her seat, then after a few seconds, glances over to see the soldier’s face. He is ready for that glance, already smiling in her direction, and says, pointing at the suitcase, “I kept an eye on it for you.” Then he winks, removing a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and shaking it just enough so that one cigarette is loosed and leveled toward her, which she might, if she chooses, reach for. If she did that, she would hold it aloft in a moment of stillness while he fished for his lighter, then she would lean in to his flame and take the fire inside her. She has studied this ritual wherever she’s seen it, and knows it exactly.