For over a year—since her husband passed away—Florence had lived alone in her Yonkers apartment overlooking the wide, silent Hudson River. She had her plants, her books, her piano. All in all, she felt she had done a good job keeping despair at bay. She was no brooder. Though there were other widows and widowers in her building, she tended to avoid them. They complained too much. One was losing her eyesight, another her hair, a third said the building was much, much too cold. Why don’t they turn up the heat? Do they want to freeze us all to death? And why did they cut down that beautiful elm tree in the side yard? That was my favorite tree! Florence—Flo to herself and her closer friends—considered such people radioactive.They lorded over their own sufferings like rulers over an army of sweaty slaves. They never did anything, never went anywhere. The real world won’t come to you; you have to meet it half way.
Each morning, having risen at six, having eaten her breakfast of coffee and two slices of toast, buttered, having played the piano for half and hour and, while paying, enjoyed her view through the window of barges, tugboats, and freighters plying the river’s corrugated waters, she dressed warmly, made her way to the train station, and boarded the 7:15 local to Grand Central Terminal, where she would buy another ticket and board another train to a destination as yet unknown.
This was her routine, started less than a month after her husband died, after a series of strokes did away with parts of his mind like dishes washed and put away after a feast. They’d had no children and loved to travel. Together they’d seen half the world. She would have liked to see the other half. The Far East. India. Indonesia. Australia. She had never been to a country with tigers or kangaroos. She’d never see Sumatra, or slept in a yurt, or touched the antlers of a reindeer. She would have gone by herself. She wasn’t afraid, not at all. But she had no money. Martin’s medical bills. The nursing home. She had barely enough income to feed herself and pay the rent.
And yet she still had the world.
Morning sunlight bounced off the hoods of parked cars. A harsh wind blew in from the river, shaking trees. She carried her white canvas tote bag with a dog-eared, badly foxed early edition of Khyber Caravan, by Gordon Sinclair, inside it. She liked antique travel books, the older and fustier the better. Their mildewed covers and musty dark pages smelled of the past and distant places. Through them she traveled not only through space but through time. Last month she’d read Halliburton’s Flying Carpet, the month before that Yeats-Brown’s The Life of a Bengal Dancer.
The 7:15 local was late, of course, which didn’t bother her. She still hadn’t decided where she would go, and having no particular destination she couldn’t very well get upset at not arriving there on time. She watched a family of ducks—mallards, she believed they were—paddle toward an open sewage duct, intent on the warm, flowing stream. A sightseeing boat throbbed by, its passengers lined up in coats and scarves on the deck, waving at the people on the platform, who read their newspapers and talked on their cellphones until the wash from the passing vessel struck the shore with a heavy sigh, so that they looked up briefly, then lost themselves again. Flo smiled. She liked this little parcel of land, this brackish backyard where river, railroad, and bridges converged in a tangle of rocks, wind, water, and steel. From here she could go nearly anywhere. From here the world stretched out in all its elements, including the wind, which lifted a corner of her coat as it nudged her down the platform, as if with enough persuasion she might fly. She squinted against its grit and gripped her collar close around her neck. It made her feel young again, closer to twenty than eighty. A young college girl off on a ramble.
Aboard the train she chose carefully among seats, preferring not to share the ride, to sit by the window, hoarding the sounds of clacking rails and newspaper being folded, and the sun entering the window in thick slices. She left her book in its bag, choosing instead to admire the view of derelict buildings and junk lots lining the river’s edge. As the train rounded the next bend she saw the first of several large bridges spanning the river, which had turned a pale, greenish-brown. In the dazzling sunlight the bridges looked less like solid objects of steel than like sugary confections spun out of sky and water.
At Grand Central she threaded her way through the crowds hurrying to work. She’d worked enough in her life. So had her poor husband, George, who, near the end as he lay in a nursing home bed with half his mind gone, said to her, “Why did we work so hard? Why didn’t we fool around more?” But Flo was not prone to regret; she withdrew from regretful souls as from a contagion. Nor was she the least bit sentimental. She had grown up with too large a family to be sentimental. Of her seven siblings, two died before she reached the age of majority, another brother died during the second world war. By the time she turned thirty she’d lost both parents, her father to drink, her mother to tobacco. All this had steeled her against death and regret. Everyone had to go sooner or later. The point was to do what you could while still living. And so twice a week she boarded a train to Grand Central and from there to wherever her heart, her purse, and the Metro North railroad would take her.
She moved from one gaping entryway to another, scrutinizing the signs posted at each, listing the names of towns, cities, and track numbers. Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Botanical Garden . . . For her each numbered list was as enticing as a desert cart laid out with pies, puddings and powdered tortes, or a poem in measured verse. She rolled each destination around in her mind, savoring it, trying to imagine its sidewalks and lanes, the noon sunlight striking its rooftops and steeples, glinting off shop windows. Where to today? The possibilities, as always, seemed endless. She’d already done most of the towns on the New Haven line, though she’d yet to explore the Danbury and Naugatuck spurs. To ride in a bud car: how exciting! As exciting as the prospect of riding a Ferris wheel would have been to a six-year-old. More exciting, since a Ferris wheel would only let you see the sky above your head and the ground at your feet, with the horizon spread out like a blanket under a Christmas tree, whereas from a moving bud car one passed from world to world, ending up who knows where?
