TO REACH JAPAN -- by Alice Munro

Once Peter had brought Greta’s suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained to her that he was just uneasy that the train would start to move. Once on the platform looking up at their window, he stood waving. Smiling, waving. His smile for their daughter, Katy, was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he to her, forever. The smile for his wife seemed hopeful and trusting, with some sort of determination about it. Something that could not easily be put into words and indeed might never be. If Greta had mentioned such a thing he would have said, Don’t be ridiculous. And she would have agreed with him, thinking that it was unnatural for people who saw each other daily, constantly, to have to go through explanations of any kind.

When Peter was a baby, his mother had carried him across some mountains whose name Greta kept forgetting, in order to get out of Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe. There were other people, of course. Peter’s father had intended to be with them, but he had been sent to a sanatorium just before the date for the secret departure. He was to follow them when he could, but he died instead.

“I’ve read stories like that,” Greta said, when Peter first told her about this. She explained how in the stories the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so the noise wouldn’t endanger the whole illegal party.

Peter said he had never heard such a story and would not say what his mother would have done in such circumstances.

What she did do was get to British Columbia, where she improved her English and got a job teaching what was then called Business Practice to high school students. She brought up Peter on her own and sent him to college, and now he was an engineer.

When she came to their apartment, and later to their house, she always sat in the front room, never coming into the kitchen unless Greta invited her. That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting, though in every single household skill or art she left her daughter-in-law far behind.

Also, she got rid of the apartment where Peter had been brought up and moved into a smaller one with no bedroom, just room for a fold-out couch. So Peter can’t go home to Mother? Greta teased her, but she seemed startled. Jokes pained her. Maybe it was a problem of language. But English was her usual language now and indeed the only language Peter knew. He had learned Business Practice—though not from his mother—when Greta was learning Paradise Lost. She avoided anything useful like the plague. It seemed he did the opposite. But she clothed her avoidance in contempt, which he never would have thought of doing.

With the train window between them, and Katy never allowing the waving to slow down, they indulged in looks of comic or indeed insane goodwill. She thought how nice-looking he was, and how he seemed to be so unaware of it. He wore a brush cut, in the style of the time—particularly if you were anything like an engineer—and his light-colored skin was never flushed like hers, never blotchy from the sun, but evenly tanned whatever the season.

His opinions were something like his complexion. When they went to see a movie, he never wanted to talk about it afterward. He would say that it was good, or pretty good, or okay. He didn’t see the point in going further. He watched television, he read a book, in somewhat the same way. He had patience with such things. The people who put them together were probably doing the best they could. Greta used to argue, rashly asking whether he would say the same thing about a bridge. The people who did it did their best but their best was not good enough, so it fell down.

Instead of arguing, he just laughed.

It was not the same thing, he said.

No?

No.

Greta should have realized that this attitude—hands off, tolerant—was a blessing for her, because she was a poet.

Peter’s mother and the people he worked with—those who knew about it—still said poetess. She had trained him not to. Otherwise, no training necessary, nothing like what she would have had to go through with the relatives she had left behind in her life, or with some people she met now, in her official role as a housewife and a mother. He thought it was fine. Poetess or poet.


It’s hard to explain it to anybody now—the life of women at that time. What was okay and what was not. You might say, well, feminism was not. And you would have to say feminism did not exist, you had never heard the word. It wasn’t just the round of housework and children, either. That was nothing. It was the way any serious idea, let alone ambition, was seen as some sort of crime against nature. Even reading a real book was behavior that was suspect, leading possibly to a child’s pneumonia, and making a political remark at a party might be said to be the cause of your husband’s failure to get a promotion. It wouldn’t have mattered what politics, either. It was the shooting off of your mouth that did it.

That was what Greta told people years later. Of course she exaggerated, but not altogether.

One thing, though. When it came to writing poetry it was maybe safer to be a woman than a man. That’s where the word poetess came in handy. Like a load of spun sugar.

She didn’t know for sure how Peter would have been about a man writing poetry, but she thought that there too he would have said, Sure, okay. Perhaps just having been born in Europe instilled an ease about some things?

This summer Peter was going to spend a month or maybe longer in charge of a job that was being done at Lund, far up, in fact as far as you could go north, on the mainland. There was no accommodation for Katy and Greta.

But Greta had kept in touch with a girl she used to work with in the Vancouver library, who was married now and living in Toronto. She and her husband were going to spend a month in Europe that summer—he was a teacher—and she had written Greta, wondering if Greta and her family would do them a favor—she was very polite—by occupying the house in Toronto for part of that time, not letting it stand empty. And Greta had written back telling her about Peter’s job but taking up the offer for Katy and herself.

That was why they were now waving and waving from the platform and from the train.

There was a magazine then, called The Echo Answers, published irregularly in Toronto. Greta had found it in the library and sent them some poems. Two of the poems had been published, and the result was that when the editor of the magazine came to Vancouver last fall, she had been invited to a party to meet him. The party was at the house of a writer whose name had been familiar to her, it seemed, her whole life. The party was in the late afternoon, when Peter was still at work, so she hired a sitter and set off on the North Vancouver bus across the Lions Gate Bridge and through Stanley Park. Then she had to wait in front of the Hudson’s Bay, for a long ride out to the university campus, which was where the writer lived. Let off at the bus’s last turning, she found the street and walked along, peering at house numbers. She was wearing high heels, which slowed her down considerably. Also her most sophisticated black dress, zipped up at the back and skimming the waist and always a little too tight. It made her look somewhat ridiculous, she thought, as she stumbled slightly along the curving streets with no sidewalks, the only person about in the waning afternoon. Modern houses, picture windows, as in any up-and-coming suburb, not at all the kind of neighborhood she had expected. She was beginning to wonder if she had gotten the street wrong, and was not unhappy to think that. She could go back to the bus stop, where there was a bench. She could slip off her shoes and settle down for the long solitary ride home.

But then she saw the cars parked, saw the number, and it was too late. Noise seeped out around the closed door and she had to ring the bell twice.

She was greeted by a woman who seemed to have been expecting somebody else. Greeted was the wrong word—the woman opened the door and Greta said brightly that this must be where they were having the party.

“What does it look like?” the woman said, and leaned on the door frame. It seemed that Greta was not the person she was looking for, and she barred the way till Greta said, “May I come in?” and then she stepped aside as if the movement gave her considerable pain. She didn’t ask Greta to follow her but Greta did anyway.

Nobody spoke to her or noticed her, but in a short time a teenage girl thrust out a tray on which there were glasses of what looked like pink lemonade. Greta took one and drank it down at a thirsty gulp. She thanked the girl, then helped herself to another. She tried to start a conversation about the long hot walk but the girl was not interested and moved away, doing her job.

Greta moved on. She kept smiling. Nobody looked at her with any recognition or pleasure, and why should they? People’s eyes slid round her and then they went on with their conversations. They laughed. Everybody but Greta was equipped with friends, jokes, half-secrets, everybody appeared to have found somebody to welcome them. Except for the teenagers who kept sullenly, relentlessly passing their pink drinks.

She didn’t give up, though. The drink was helping her and she resolved to have another as soon as the tray came around. She watched for a conversational group that seemed to have a hole in it, where she might insert herself. She seemed to have found one when she heard the names of movies mentioned. European movies, such as were beginning to be shown in Vancouver at that time. She heard the name of one that she and Peter had gone to see. The 400 Blows. “Oh, I saw that,” she said loudly and enthusiastically, and they all looked at her, and one, a spokesperson, said, “Really?”

She was drunk, of course. Pimm’s No. 1 and pink grapefruit juice downed in a hurry. She didn’t take this snub to heart as she might have done in a normal way. Just drifted on, knowing she had somehow lost her bearings but getting a feeling that there was a giddy atmosphere of permission in the room, and it didn’t matter about not making friends, she could just wander around and pass her own judgments.

In an archway, there was a knot of people who were important. She saw among them the host, the writer whose name and face she had known for such a long time. His conversation was loud and hectic, and there seemed to be danger around him and a couple of other men, as if they would as soon fire off an insult as look at you. Their wives, she came to believe, made up the circle she had tried to crash into. The woman who had answered the door was not one of either group because she was a writer herself—Greta heard someone call out her name and it was a name familiar from the magazine in which she, Greta, had been published. On these grounds, Greta thought it might be possible to go up and introduce herself, and the woman might see her as somebody worthy of being talked to, in spite of the coolness at the door. But she saw then that the woman had her head lolling around on the shoulder of the man who had called out to her and they probably would not welcome an interruption. Before that, she thought, such a woman might have been isolated as she herself was, not being a wife or a man poet. But she didn’t go around weasling and smiling, as Greta did, she was braver.

This reflection made her feel like sitting down and she didn’t see any chairs so she sat on the floor. She thought of something interesting to explain to somebody but there was nobody around to hear it.

It was this. When she went to an engineers’ cocktail party with Peter, the atmosphere was relatively pleasant, striving to be pleasant, though she found the talk boring. Here, the talk might not be boring if you could get into it, but the atmosphere was rather frightening. And why? At Peter’s business party everybody’s importance was fixed and settled, at least for the time being. Because of that, they all behaved in a friendly way, at least for the time being. But the people at this party didn’t have any such assurance. Not even if they got regularly published and were always being sought out and sidled up to. Judgment might be passed behind their backs or by some smirker in the kitchen. Some other writer could come along and trounce them. So everybody was in a state of nerves, including herself, Greta, who had been longing for somebody to throw her any old bone of conversation.

She never did find out who the editor from Toronto was.

When she got her theory of the unpleasantness worked out she felt relieved and didn’t much care if anybody talked to her or not. She took off her shoes and the relief was immense. She sat with her back against a wall and her legs stuck out on one of the lesser thoroughfares. She didn’t want to risk spilling her drink on the rug so she finished it in a hurry. Then she pushed the glass to wait in a safe spot behind a chair leg. If she forgot which chair leg she would just grab another anyway, when they came around.

A man stood over her. He said, “How did you get here?”

She pitied his dull, clumping feet. She pitied anybody who had to stand up.

She said that she had been invited.

“Yes. But did you come in your car?”

“I walked.” But that was not enough, and in a while she managed to offer up the rest of it.

“I came on a bus, then I walked.”

One of the men who had been in the special circle was now behind the man in the shoes. He said, “Excellent idea.” He actually seemed ready to talk to her.

The first man didn’t care for him so much. He had retrieved Greta’s shoes, but she refused them, explaining that they hurt too much.

“Carry them. Or I will. Can you get up?”

She looked for the more important man to help her, but he wasn’t there. Now she remembered what he’d written. A play about Doukhobors, and it had caused a big row because the Doukhobors were going to have to be naked. Of course they weren’t real Doukhobors, they were actors. And they were not allowed to be naked after all.

She tried explaining this to the man who helped her up. She asked what he wrote. He said he was not that kind of writer, he was a journalist. Visiting in this house with his son and daughter, grandchildren of the hosts. They—the children—had been passing out the drinks.

“Lethal,” he said, referring to the drinks. “Criminal.”

Now they were outside. She walked in her stockinged feet across the grass, just barely avoiding a puddle.

“Somebody has thrown up there,” she told her escort.

“Indeed,” he said, and settled her into a car. The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.

“North Vancouver,” he said. She must have told him that. “Okay. We’ll proceed. The Lions Gate.”

She hoped he wouldn’t ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would seem so drearily typical. It wasn’t dark out, but it was evening. They seemed to be headed in the right direction, along some water, then over a bridge. The Burrard Street Bridge. Then more traffic. She kept opening her eyes to the trees passing by, then shutting her eyes again without meaning to. When the car stopped she knew it was too soon for them to be home. That is, at her home.

Those great leafy trees above them. You could not see any stars. But there was light shining on the water, between wherever they were and the city lights.

“Just sit and consider,” he said.

She was enraptured by the word.

“Consider.”

“How you’re going to walk into the house, for instance. Can you manage dignified? Don’t overdo it. Nonchalant? I presume you have a husband.”

“I will have to thank you first for driving me home,” she said. “So you will have to tell me your name.”

He said that he had already told her that. Possibly twice. But once again, okay. Harris Bennett. Bennett. He was the son-in-law of the people who had given the party. Those were his children, passing out the drinks. He and they were visiting from Toronto. Was she satisfied?

“Do they have a mother?”

“Indeed they do. But she is in a hospital.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need. It’s quite a nice hospital. It’s for mental problems. Or you might say emotional problems.”

She hurried on to tell him that her husband was named Peter and that he was an engineer and that they had a daughter named Katy.

“Well, that’s very nice,” he said, and started to back out.

On the Lions Gate Bridge he said, “Excuse me for sounding how I did. I was thinking whether I would or wouldn’t kiss you, and I decided I wouldn’t.”

She thought he was saying that there was something about her that didn’t quite measure up to being kissed. The mortification was like being slapped clean back into sobriety.

“Now, when we get over the bridge do we go right on Marine Drive?” he continued. “I’ll rely on you to tell me.”

During the coming fall and winter and spring there was hardly a day when she didn’t think of him. There really wasn’t a day. It was like having the very same dream the minute you fell asleep. She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she’d remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent and uniquely desirable.

She nearly wept with longing. Yet in the evenings when Peter came home all this fantasy disappeared, went into hibernation. Daily affections sprang to the fore, reliable as ever.

The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather—a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.

So what about the rejection of kissing, which had seemed to her an ungallant blow?

She simply canceled it out. Forgot about it entirely.

And what about her poetry? She wrote not a line, not a word. The view wasn’t there.

Of course she gave these fits house room mostly when Katy was napping. Sometimes she spoke out loud, she embraced idiocy. “You are the love of my life.” This was followed by a scorching. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

Then a jolt came, the prospect, then certainty, of the job at Lund, the offer of the house in Toronto. A clear break in the weather, an access of boldness.

She found herself writing a letter. It didn’t begin in any conventional way. No Dear Harris. No Remember me.

“Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—

And hoping

It will reach Japan.”

Nearest thing to a poem in some time.

She had no idea of an address. She was bold and foolish enough to phone the people who had given the party. But when the woman answered, Greta’s mouth went dry and felt as big as a tundra, and she had to hang up. Then she carted Katy over to the public library and found a Toronto phone book. There were lots of Bennetts but not a single Harris or H. Bennett.

She had a shocking idea then, to look in the obituaries. She couldn’t stop herself. She waited till the man reading the library copy was finished. She did not usually see the Toronto paper because you had to go over to Vancouver to get it, and Peter always brought home the Vancouver Sun. Rustling through its pages, finally she found his name at the top of a column. So he was not dead. A newspaper columnist. Naturally would not want to be bothered with people calling him at home.

He wrote about politics. His writing seemed intelligent, but she didn’t care anything about it.

She sent her letter to him there, at the newspaper. She could not be sure that he opened his own mail, and she thought that putting Private on the envelope was asking for trouble, so she wrote only the day of her arrival and the time of the train, after the bit about the bottle. No name. She thought that whoever opened the envelope might think of an elderly relative given to whimsical turns of phrase. Nothing to implicate him, even supposing such peculiar mail did get sent home and his wife opened it, being now out of the hospital.

Katy had evidently not understood that Peter’s being outside on the platform meant that he would not be traveling with them. When they began to move and he didn’t, and when the train’s gathering speed left him behind, Katy took the desertion hard. But in a while she settled down, telling Greta he would be there in the morning.

When morning came Greta was apprehensive, but Katy made no mention at all of Peter’s absence. Greta asked her if she was hungry, and she said yes, then explained—as Greta had explained before they ever got on the train—that they now had to take off their pajamas and look for their breakfast in another room.

“What do you want for breakfast?”

“Crisp peas.”

“We’ll see if they have them.”

They did.

“Now will we go and find Daddy?”

There was a play area for children but it was quite small. A boy and a girl—a brother and sister, by the looks of their matching bunny-rabbit outfits—had taken it over. Their game consisted of running small vehicles at each other, then deflecting them at the last moment. CRASH BANG CRASH.

“This is Katy,” Greta said. “I’m her mom. What are your names?”

The crashing took on more vehemence but they didn’t look up.

“Daddy isn’t here,” said Katy.

Greta decided that they had better go back and get Katy’s Christopher Robin and take it up to the dome car and read it. They wouldn’t be likely to bother anybody because breakfast wasn’t over and the important mountain scenery hadn’t started.

But once they finished Christopher Robin, Katy wanted it started again, immediately. During the first reading she had been quiet, but now she began chiming in with ends of lines. Next time she chanted word for word, though she was still not ready to try it by herself. Greta could imagine this being an annoyance to people once the dome car filled up. Children Katy’s age had no problem with monotony. In fact, they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if words were a candy that could last forever.

A young man and woman came up the stairs and sat down across from Greta and Katy. The young man and woman said good morning with considerable cheer, and Greta responded. Katy rather disapproved of her acknowledging them and continued to recite softly with her eyes on the book.

From across the aisle the young man’s voice came quietly.

“They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace

Christopher Robin went down with Alice—

I do not like them Sam-I-am.”

Greta laughed but Katy didn’t. She was a bit scandalized. She understood words coming out of a book but not coming out of somebody’s mouth without a book.

“Sorry,” the man said to Greta. “We’re preschoolers. That’s our literature.” He leaned across and spoke seriously and softly to Katy. “That’s a nice book, isn’t it?”

“He means we work with preschoolers,” the woman said to Greta. “Sometimes we do get confused, though.”

The man went on talking to Katy.

“I maybe could guess your name now. What is it? Is it Rufus? Is it Rover?”

Katy bit her lip but then couldn’t resist a severe reply. “I’m not a dog,” she said.

“No. I shouldn’t have been so stupid. I’m a boy and my name’s Greg. This girl’s name is Laurie.”

“He was teasing you,” said Laurie. “Should I give him a swat?”

Katy considered this, then said, “No.”

“Alice is marrying one of the guard,” Greg continued. “A solder’s life is terribly hard, said Alice.”

Katy chimed in softly on the second Alice.

Laurie told Greta that they had been going around to kindergartens, doing skits. This was called reading readiness work. They were actors, really. She was going to get off at Jasper, where she had a summer job waitressing and doing some comic bits. Not reading readiness exactly. Adult entertainment, was what it was called. “Christ,” she said, and laughed. “Take what you can get.”

Greg was loose and stopping off in Saskatoon. His family.

They were both quite beautiful, Greta thought. Tall, limber, almost unnaturally lean, he with crinkly dark hair, she black-haired and sleek as a Madonna. A bit later on, when Greta mentioned their physical similarity, they said they had sometimes taken advantage of it, when it came to living arrangements. It made things no end easier, but they had to remember to ask for two beds and make sure both got mussed up overnight.

And now, they told her, now they didn’t need to worry. Nothing to be scandalized about. They were breaking up, after three years together. They had been chaste for months, at least with each other.

“Now no more Buckingham Palace,” said Greg to Katy. “I have to do my exercises.”

Greta thought he meant he had to go downstairs or into the aisle for some calisthenics, but instead he and Laurie threw back their heads, stretched their throats, and began to warble, caw, and do strange singsongs. Katy was delighted, taking it all as a show for her benefit. She behaved as a proper audience too—quite still until it ended, then she broke out in laughter.

Some people who had meant to come up the stairs had stopped at the bottom, less charmed than Katy and not knowing what to make of things.

“Sorry,” said Greg, with no explanation but a note of intimate friendliness. He held out a hand to Katy.

“Let’s see if there’s a playroom.”

Laurie and Greta followed them. Greta was hoping he wasn’t one of those adults who make friends with children mostly to test their own charms, then grow bored and grumpy when they realize how tireless a child’s affections can be.

By lunchtime, she knew she didn’t need to worry. What had happened wasn’t that Katy’s attentions were wearing Greg out, but that various other children had joined the competition and he was giving no sign of being worn out at all.

No. That was wrong. He didn’t set up a competition. He managed things so that he turned the attention first drawn to himself into an awareness of each other, and then into games that were lively or even wild, but not bad-tempered. Tantrums didn’t occur. Spoils vanished. There simply wasn’t time, with so much more interesting play going on. It was a miracle, how much ease with wildness was managed in such a small space. And the energy expended promised naps in the afternoon.

“He’s remarkable,” Greta said to Laurie.

“He’s mostly just there,” Laurie said. “He doesn’t save himself up. You know? A lot of actors do. Actors in particular. Dead offstage.”

Greta thought, That’s what I do. I save myself up, most of the time. Careful with Katy, careful with Peter.

In the decade that they had already entered but that she had not taken much notice of, there was going to be a lot of attention paid to that sort of thing. Being there was to mean something it didn’t used to mean. Going with the flow. Giving. People were giving, other people were not very giving. Barriers between the inside and outside of yourself were to be trampled down. Authenticity required it. Things like Greta’s poems, things that did not flow right out, were suspect, even scorned. Of course she went right on doing as she did, fussing and probing, secretly tough as nails on the counterculture. But at the moment, her child surrendered to Greg, and to whatever he did, and Greta was entirely grateful.

In the afternoon, as could have been predicted, the children went to sleep. Their mothers too in some cases. Others played cards. Greg and Greta waved to Laurie when she got off at Jasper. She blew kisses from the platform. An older man appeared, took her suitcase, kissed her fondly, looked toward the train, and waved to Greg. Greg waved to him.

“That’s her present squeeze,” he said.

More waves as the train got going, then he and Greta began to talk softly, Katy between them, asleep where she had fallen in the very middle of a jump. They had opened the compartment curtain to let in more air, now that there was no danger of Katy falling out.

“Awesome to have a child,” Greg said. Awesome was another new word, or at least new to Greta.

“It happens,” she said.

“You’re so calm. Next you’ll say, Life.”

“I will not,” Greta said and outstared him till he shook his head and laughed.

He told her that he had got into acting by way of his religion. His family belonged to some Christian sect Greta had never heard of. This sect was not large but very rich, or at least some of the members were. They had built a church with a theater in it, in a town on the prairies. That was where he started to act before he was ten years old. They did parables from the Bible but also present-day ones, about the awful things that happened to people who didn’t believe what they did. His family was very proud of him, and of course so he was of himself. He wouldn’t dream of telling them all that went on when the rich converts came to renew their vows and get revitalized in their holiness. Anyway, he really liked getting all the approval and he liked the acting.

Till one day he just got the idea that he could do the acting and not go through all that. He tried to be polite about it, but they said it was the devil getting hold. He said, Ha-ha, I know who it is getting hold.

Bye-bye.

“I don’t want you to think it was all bad. I still believe in praying and everything. But I never could tell my family. Anything halfway true would just kill them. Don’t you know people like that?”

She told him that when she first moved to Vancouver her grandmother got in touch with a minister of her church there. He came to call, and she, Greta, was very snooty with him. He said he would pray for her. But the strange thing was that Greta’s grandmother never mentioned it in her letters. She was dying at the time. Greta felt ashamed and mad about being ashamed when she thought about it.

Peter didn’t understand all that. His mother never went to church, though she had carried him through the mountains so that she, and presumably he, could be Catholics. He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.

This was the first time she had thought of Peter in a while.

Greg and Greta were drinking while all this anguished but also somewhat comforting talk went on. He had produced a bottle of ouzo. She was fairly cautious with it, as she had been with any alcohol since the writers’ party, but some effect was there. Enough that they began to stroke each other’s hands and then to kiss and fondle. All of which had to go on beside the body of the sleeping child.

“We better stop this,” Greta said. “Otherwise it will become deplorable.”

“It isn’t us,” said Greg. “It’s some other people.”

“Tell them to stop, then. Do you know their names?”

“Wait a minute. Reg. Reg and Dorothy.”

Greta said, “Cut that out, Reg. What about my innocent child?”

“We could go to my berth. It’s not far along.”

“I haven’t got any—”

“I have.”

“Not on you?”

“Certainly not. What kind of a beast do you think I am?”

So they arranged whatever clothing had been disarranged, slipped out of the bunk, carefully fastened every button of the berth where Katy was sleeping, and with a certain fancy nonchalance made their way from Greta’s car to his. Caution was hardly necessary—they met no one. The people who were not in the dome car taking pictures of the everlasting mountains were in the club car, or dozing.

In Greg’s untidy quarters they took up where they had left off. There was no room for two people to lie down properly, but they managed to roll over each other. At first no end of stifled laughter, then the great shocks of pleasure, with no place to look but into each other’s wide eyes. Biting each other to hold in some ferocious noise.

“Nice,” said Greg. “All right.”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“So soon?”

“Katy might wake up and I’m not there.”

“Okay. Okay. I should get ready for Saskatoon anyway. What if we’d got there just in the middle of it?” he said. “Hello, Mom. Hello, Daddy. Excuse me just a minute here while I—wa—hoo!”

She got herself decent and left him. Actually she didn’t much care who met her. She was weak, shocked, but buoyant, like some gladiator—she actually thought this out and smiled at it—after a session in the arena.

Anyway, she didn’t meet a soul.

The bottom fastener of the curtain was undone. She was sure she remembered fastening it. Though even with it open Katy could hardly get out and surely wouldn’t try. One time when Greta had left for a minute to go to the toilet, she had explained thoroughly that Katy must never try to follow, and Katy had said, “I wouldn’t,” as if even to suggest that was treating her like a baby.

Greta took hold of the curtains to open them all the way and saw that Katy was not there.

She went stupid. She yanked up the pillow, as if a child of Katy’s size could have managed to cover herself with it. She pounded her hands on the blanket as if Katy could have been hiding underneath it. She got control of herself and tried to think where the train had stopped, or whether it had been stopped, during the time she had been with Greg. While it was stopped, if it had been stopped, could a kidnapper have gotten on the train and somehow made off with Katy?

She stood in the aisle, trying to think what she had to do to stop the train.

Then she thought, she made herself think, that nothing like that could have happened. Don’t be ridiculous. Katy must have wakened and found her not there and gone looking for her. All by herself, she had gone looking.

Right around here, she must be right around here. The doors at either end of the coach were far too heavy for her to open.

Greta could barely move. Her whole body, her mind, emptied. This could not have happened. Go back, go back, to before she went with Greg. Stop there. Stop.

Across the aisle was a seat unoccupied for the time being. A woman’s sweater and some magazine left to claim it. Farther along, a seat with the fasteners all done up. She pulled them apart with one grab, and the old man who was sleeping there turned onto his back but never woke up. There was no way he could be hiding anybody.

What idiocy.

A new fear, then. Supposing Katy had made her way to one end of the car or the other and actually managed to get a door open. Or followed a person who had opened it ahead of her. Between the cars there was a short walkway where you were actually walking over the place where the cars joined up. There you could feel the train’s motion in a sudden and alarming way. A heavy door behind and another in front, and on either side of the walkway clanging metal plates. These covered the steps that were let down when the train was stopped.

Greta always hurried through these passages, where the banging and swaying reminded her how things were put together in a way that seemed not so inevitable after all. Almost casual, yet in too much of a hurry, that banging and swaying.

The door at the end was heavy even for Greta. Or she was drained by her fear. She pushed mightily with her shoulder.

And there, between the cars, on one of those continually noisy sheets of metal—there sat Katy. Eyes wide open and mouth slightly open, amazed and alone. Not crying at all, but when she saw her mother she started.

Greta grabbed her and hoisted her onto her hip and stumbled back against the door that she had just opened.

All the cars had names, to commemorate battles or explorations or illustrious Canadians. The name of their car was Connaught. She would never forget that.

Katy was not hurt at all. Her clothes hadn’t caught as they might have on the shifting sharp edges of the metal plates.

“I went to look for you,” she said.

When? Just a moment ago, or right after Greta had left her?

Surely not. Somebody would have spotted her there, picked her up, sounded an alarm.

The day was sunny but not really warm. Katy’s face and hands were quite cold.

“I thought you were on the stairs,” Katy said.

Greta covered her with the blanket in their berth, and it was then that she began to shake, as if she had a fever. She felt sick, and tasted vomit in her throat. Katy said, “Don’t push me,” and squirmed away. “You smell bad,” she said.

Greta took her arms away and lay on her back.

This was so terrible, her thoughts of what might have happened so terrible. The child was still stiff with protest, keeping away from her.

Someone would have found Katy, surely. Some decent person, not an evil person, would have spotted her there and carried her to where it was safe. Greta would have heard the dismaying announcement, news that a child had been found alone on the train. A child who gave her name as Katy. Greta would have rushed, having got herself decent, she would have rushed to claim her child and lied, saying that she had just gone to the ladies’ room. She would have been frightened, but she would have been spared the picture she had now, of Katy sitting in that noisy space, helpless between the cars. Not crying, not complaining, as if she was just to sit there forever and there was to be no explanation offered to her, no hope. Her eyes had been oddly without expression and her mouth just hanging open, in the moment before the fact of rescue struck her and she could begin to cry. Only then could she retrieve her world, her right to suffer and complain.

Now she said she wasn’t sleepy, she wanted to get up. She asked where Greg was. Greta said that he was having a nap, he was tired.

Greta and Katy went to the dome car to spend the rest of the afternoon. They had it mostly to themselves. The people taking pictures had worn themselves out on the Rocky Mountains. And, as Greg had commented, the prairies left them flat.

The train stopped for a short time in Saskatoon and several people got off. Greg was among them. Greta saw him greeted by a couple who must have been his parents. Also by a woman in a wheelchair, probably a grandmother, and then by several younger people who were hanging about, cheerful and embarrassed. None of them looked like members of a sect, or like people who were strict and disagreeable in any way.

But how could you spot that for sure in anybody?

Greg turned from them and scanned the windows of the train. She waved from the dome car and he caught sight of her and waved back.

“There’s Greg,” she said to Katy. “See down there. He’s waving. Can you wave back?”

But Katy found it too difficult to look for him. Or else she didn’t try. She turned away with a proper and slightly offended look, and Greg after one last antic wave turned too. Greta wondered if the child could be punishing him for desertion, refusing to miss or even acknowledge him.

All right, if that was the way it was going to be, forget it.

“Greg waved to you,” Greta said, as the train pulled away.

“I know.”

While Katy slept beside her in the bunk that night Greta wrote a letter to Peter. A long letter that she intended to be funny, about all the different sorts of people to be found on the train. The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on. Katy’s generally agreeable behavior. Nothing about the loss and the scare. She posted the letter when the prairies were far behind and the black spruce went on forever, and they were stopped for some reason in the little lost town of Hornepayne.

All her waking time for these hundreds of miles had been devoted to Katy. Greta knew that such devotion on her part had never shown itself before. It was true that she had cared for the child, dressed her, fed her, talked to her, during those hours when they were together and Peter was at work. But Greta had other things to do around the house, and her attention had been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical.

And not just because of the housework. Other thoughts had crowded the child out. Even before the useless, exhausting, idiotic preoccupation with the man in Toronto, there were the admittedly commonplace fantasies of other work, the work of poetry, which she’d been doing in her head for most of her life. That work struck her now as traitorous—to Katy, to Peter, to life. And because of the image in her mind of Katy alone, Katy sitting there amid the metal clatter between the cars—poetry was something else Greta was going to have to give up.

A sin. The inattention. Coldhearted foraging attention to something else than the child. A sin.

They arrived in Toronto in the middle of the morning. The day was dark, with summer thunder and lightning. Katy had never seen such commotion, but Greta told her there was nothing to be afraid of, and it seemed she wasn’t. Or of the still greater electrically lit darkness they encountered in the tunnel where the train stopped.

She said, “Night.”

Greta said, No, no, they just had to walk to the end of the tunnel, now that they were off the train. Then up some steps, or maybe there would be an escalator, and then they would be in a big building and then outside, where they would get a taxi. A taxi was a car, that was all, and it would take them to their house. Their new house, where they would live for a while. They would live there for a while and then they would go back to Daddy.

They walked up a ramp, and there was an escalator. Katy halted, so Greta did too, till people got by them. Then Greta picked Katy up and set her on her hip, and managed the suitcase with the other arm, stooping and bumping it on the moving steps. At the top she put the child down and they were able to hold hands again, in the bright lofty light of Union Station.

There the people who had been walking in front of them began to peel off, to be claimed by the people who were waiting, and who called out their names, or who simply walked up and took hold of their suitcases.

As someone now took hold of theirs. Took hold of it, took hold of Greta, and kissed her for the first time, in a determined and celebratory way.

Harris.

First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an immense settling.

She was trying to hang on to Katy but at that moment the child pulled away, she got her hand free.

She didn’t try to escape, she just stood. Downcast, waiting for whatever had to come next.

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