“Do you have any more books?”
“No,” he says. “All out.”
They ride in silence.
“You could go to a palmist,” he says after a while. “They’ll tell you what’s up.”
“A palmist? Really?”
“Well, I don’t know. If you believe half they say . . .”
“You don’t believe them?”
“Well, I fool around with stuff like this, but I sort of pay attention to what I like and forget what I don’t like. The horoscope told me to delay travel yesterday, and I did.”
“Why don’t you believe them?” Cynthia asks.
“Oh, I think most of them don’t know any more than you or me.”
“Then let’s do it as a game,” she says. “I’ll ask questions, and you give the answer.”
Peter laughs. “O.K.,” he says. He lifts her hand from her lap and stares hard at it. He turns it over and examines the other side, frowning.
“Should I marry Charlie?” she whispers.
“I see . . .” he begins. “I see a man. I see a man . . . in the drinking car.”
“But what am I going to do?” she whispers. “Should I marry him?”
Peter gazes intently at her palm, then smooths his fingers down hers. “Maybe,” he says gravely when he reaches her fingertips.
Delighted with his performance, he cracks up. A woman in the seat in front of them peers over the back of her chair to see what the noise is about. She sees a hippie holding a fat woman’s hand and drinking from a flask.
“Coleridge,” Peter is saying. “You know—Coleridge, the poet? Well, he says that we don’t, for instance, dream about a wolf and then get scared. He says it’s that we’re scared to begin with, see, and therefore we dream about a wolf.”
Cynthia begins to understand, but then she loses it. It is the fault of the sleeping pill and many drinks. In fact, when Charlie comes back, Cynthia is asleep on Peter’s shoulder. There is a scene—or as much of a scene as a quiet man like Charlie can make. Charlie is also drunk, which makes him mellow instead of really angry. Eventually, brooding, he sits down across the aisle. Late that night, when the train slows down for the Georgia station, he gazes out the window as if he noticed nothing. Peter helps Cynthia get her bag down. The train has stopped at the station, and Charlie is still sitting, staring out the window at a few lights that shine along the tracks. Without looking at him, without knowing what will happen, Cynthia walks down the aisle. She is the last one off. She is the last one off before the train pulls out, with Charlie still on it.
Her parents watch the train go down the track, looking as if they are visitors from an earlier century, amazed by such a machine. They had expected Charlie, of course, but now they have Cynthia. They were not prepared to be pleasant, and there is a strained silence as the three watch the train disappear.
That night, lying in the bed she slept in as a child, Cynthia can’t sleep. She gets up, finally, and sits in the kitchen at the table. What am I trying to think about, she wonders, closing her hands over her face for deeper concentration. It is cold in the kitchen, and she is not so much hungry as empty. Not in the head, she feels like shouting to Lincoln, but in the stomach—somewhere inside. She clasps her hands in front of her, over her stomach. Her eyes are closed. A picture comes to her—a high, white mountain. She isn’t on it, or in the picture at all. When she opens her eyes she is looking at the shiny surface of the table. She closes her eyes and sees the snow-covered mountain again—high and white, no trees, just mountain—and she shivers with the coldness of it.
Dwarf House
“Are you happy?” MacDonald says. “Because if you’re happy I’ll leave you alone.”
MacDonald is sitting in a small gray chair, patterned with grayer leaves, talking to his brother, who is standing in a blue chair. MacDonald’s brother is four feet, six and three-quarter inches tall, and when he stands in a chair he can look down on MacDonald. MacDonald is twenty-eight years old. His brother, James, is thirty-eight. There was a brother between them, Clem, who died of a rare disease in Panama. There was a sister also, Amy, who flew to Panama to be with her dying brother. She died in the same hospital, one month later, of the same disease. None of the family went to the funeral. Today MacDonald, at his mother’s request, is visiting James to find out if he is happy. Of course James is not, but standing in the chair helps, and the twenty-dollar bill that MacDonald slipped into his tiny hand helps too.
“What do you want to live in a dwarf house for?”
“There’s a giant here.”
“Well, it must just depress the hell out of the giant.”
“He’s pretty happy.”
“Are you?”
“I’m as happy as the giant.”
“What do you do all day?”
“Use up the family’s money.”
“You know I’m not here to accuse you. I’m here to see what I can do.”
“She sent you again, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Is this your lunch hour?”
“Yes.”
“Have you eaten? I’ve got some candy bars in my room.”
“Thank you. I’m not hungry.”
“Place make you lose your appetite?”
“I do feel nervous. Do you like living here?”
