The Station Girl (A Quiet Hour Alone)
It had started snowing again. I sat down in the bar and looked out the window and could see it falling in the light below a lamppost.
The year had been one of travel and frustration, and I was going home for simplicity and warmth, to regroup. My planning was bad; I had put things off until the last minute and was traveling on Christmas Eve. I had been away too long.
It was the last leg of my trip and the easiest. The bus had dropped me off at the small train station, and I put my bags except for my briefcase in a locker and went across the street to a bar for a drink. It was the only thing open. I had an hour and thirteen minutes to kill, and it would be over a glass or two of wine. In a few hours I would be home.
The station was a “Brown Decades” structure, the architectural equivalent of Eastlake and gingerbread. Old buildings make me think of shadows of the past. I could only imagine the lost words spoken on its platform—of boys going off to the World Wars, of boys and eventually girls leaving for college or starting new lives far away. Sad parting words, joyous words of greeting, the somber returns of failure and grief. Now it was deserted in the falling snow, with no words at all.
The pub too was deserted except for an old man, the bartender, who I assumed was the owner. I shook off the snow, ordered a glass of cab and sat at an elevated stool table by the large front window facing the station.
It was one of those hole-in-the-wall places you sometimes find in small towns. This one was old—many decades old—and an array of photos and news stories going back to the Great War hung with other bric-a-brac on the wall behind the bar. Prominently displayed was a framed photo of a man who I took to be a former owner shaking hands with Franklin Roosevelt in an open car in front of the station. I looked out the window again. Nothing had changed, except for the fallen snow.
What remained of my schedule was fixed and out of my hands, a sequence set in motion, like a line of falling dominos. My ticket was in my shirt pocket. I had nothing to do but have a drink and watch the snow fall. Somewhere down the tracks was a train that would take me home. A short ride, and by 11:00, I would be there. And they would all be there too. Someone would meet me at the station. And then the drive home in the snow with the heat on. Christmas dinner tomorrow and gifts after a good night’s sleep in the old house, in my own bed, and then nothing to do for two weeks—no places to be, no one to call, no plans hanging over me. But before all of that, I would have a quiet hour alone.
It was one of those moments that you knew you would remember forever but whose memory you could never impress anyone with as an anecdote, except in a similar moment with a loved one.
Behind the bar a discreet sound system played Christmas-themed lounge jazz. Train stations and adjacent bars and diners have a charm for me that airports can never match.
I looked behind me and saw a young woman standing in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come in, but I felt a rush, a draft of cold air. She wore a black overcoat with a white fur collar. She shook the snow off of her coat by the door and walked to the bar, but the bartender was not there. Our eyes met and she smiled. “Looks like it’s just us two,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit with you?” She was striking, and young—twenties. Her hair was cut in a Dutch boy bob. The sheen of her black hair was blue.
“Of course. You’re traveling?”
“Yeah, just back from school. I’m waiting for my ride.”
“Where do you go?”
“Deerwood College, upstate. They admit women, you know?”
“No, but I suspected.”
“I just got off of the train and I am waiting for my fiancé, Walter.” She held up her hand and rolled her fingers. On one of them was a ring with an Asscher-cut diamond set in platinum.
“It’s a beautiful stone,” I said. “I love the old cuts.”
“Old? He just bought it at Tiffany’s in October. Proposed at Thanksgiving. I haven’t taken it off since.”
“It’s a great ring. You must be very happy. Have you set a date?”
“Sometime in the spring. May, I think.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” I said.
“Really?” She looked around the place. “Sure, why not? I’ll have a 75.” She giggled and excused herself to go the “powder room.”
I went up to the bar. The bartender returned.
“Can I get a French 75?”
“With red wine?”
“What? No. It’s for her,” I said. The bartender looked over my shoulder to the empty table.
“Sure thing, pal.”
I brought the drink to the table and the girl returned a minute or two later.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I’m Mark, by the way.”
“Grace,” she said. “Grace Bowers.”
“I’ve always loved that name, Grace. What does your fiancé do?”
“He’s trying to get into advertising. He’s a nice guy. A bit reckless, though. He was in the war.”
“Which one?” I said. She smiled, tilting her head slightly.
“He was gassed in the Moselle region. But he’s okay now.”
“I think it is pronounced Mosul. But I never heard of any Americans being gassed there.” I had bounced around the Middle East as a freelancer for a few years and still followed events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. “It was some siege,” I said.
“Funny, I thought it was just a river,” she said.
“I never heard of U.S. combat troops there, much less Americans being gassed. Was he with Spec Ops?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Special operations.”
“He was with the 82nd Division.”
“Airborne.”
“No, he’s wasn’t a flyer,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone, but they may have been hit by American gas shells.”
“That happens a lot more often than people think—‘friendly fire.’ But my understanding is that it was ISIS that used chemical weapons at Mosul.”
“I thought Isis was an Egyptian goddess,” she said.
“Was he there in ’16 or ’17?”
“Eighteen,” she said. For someone whose fiancé had served in Iraq, she sure didn’t know much about the war. I changed the subject. “Did anybody ever tell you that you look like Louise Brooks?”
“I don’t know her. Does she live around here?”
“No.”
“I just cut my hair.” She took out a compact and looked at herself in its mirror. “Do you think it’s too short? It’s too short, right? My folks are going to hate it. My father didn’t want me to go off to college.”
“What are you majoring in?”
“American Literature.”
“Have you read This Side of Paradise?”
“I love Fitzgerald. All of my girlfriends do.”
“You must like Gatsby, then.”
“Don’t know. I never read him,” she said. I changed the subject again.
“This pandemic is really something,” I said. “I got sick a couple of months ago, but I had the vaccine and it was gone in 72 hours,” I said.
“Is the pandemic back? Walter came back in ’19, and got sick right away. After his being gassed and all, I didn’t think he would make it. But he did.”
“That sounds awfully early for the pandemic. Had he been in China?”
“China? No,” she said laughing.
We talked and the time flew. But sometimes it seemed as if we were talking past each other, like two people waltzing to different music. I couldn’t figure out where the offbeat came from or why it fell the way it did in our conversation. Perhaps we were both trying to lead.
The first few notes of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas wafted from the bar. It was an instrumental version.
“I think that this is my favorite Christmas song,” I said.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “I don’t think I have ever heard it before.”
“You’ve never heard this song before?”
“No. It’s nice, though.”
“Some of the words go: ‘Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow…’ I love that. It haunts me.”
“Have you heard When Christmas Chimes are Ringing?” she said.
“It doesn’t ring a bell.”
“I heard it just before I left school.” She listened to the music for a moment. “It’s not as nice as this song though.”
It was around a quarter to eight and she grew restless. She looked at herself in the compact again priming her hair and pursing her lips. “I have to go,” she said.
“But, you haven’t touched your drink…”
“No, I have to go, Mark. Walt will be waiting… I really have to go. It was nice to meet you. Happy Christmas, and all that.” Her expression became distant, withdrawn, and she looked at me. “Look Mark, I know you don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but be careful. And remember that all of this is a gift. You know? A gift? Don’t throw it away.”
“What do you mean ‘don’t throw it away’? Throw it away on what?”
“Just by being born you have won a million-million lotteries,” she said. “It’s a precious thing. Don’t give it away. Goodbye, Mark.” She got up and walked away.
“Wait a minute…” My phone rang and I turned and opened my case. The call could wait. I turned around and she was gone. I ran to the door and looked out. There were no footprints in the snow, except for the ones I had left when I came in. They were now mostly filled-in impressions.
I went back to the table and signaled the bartender. He brought my tab to the table. I gave him cash. He saw the untouched cocktail. “Guess your friend didn’t show up?”
“Do you know who that girl was?”
“What girl?”
“The girl who was just sitting here. I think she lives around here. She said her name was Grace Bowers.”
“There used to be a Bowers family a few miles out of town. An old couple. But they’ve been gone … 60 years,” he said.
On the table in front of where the girl had sat was the compact. I put it in my case. It was 7:51—nine minutes until my train. I put on my coat and picked up my case. As I left, an old, framed newspaper story on the wall caught my eye. The paper was brown and foxing. The headline read “Local Couple Killed by Train.” It was dated December 25, 1922. The engineer told the reporter that it looked as if the car—a small roadster—was racing the train to an at-grade crossing about a mile out of town. Their names had not yet been released.
My train left on time. I was agitated about what had happened, or rather what seemed to have happened, at the bar. I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t go in for ghost stories and didn’t know what to think. Seemed too elaborate to be a hoax and anyway, what would have been the point? I took the compact out of my case and examined it. It was old, tarnished silver and on its cover had an engraved diamond-shaped monogram “GB.” I tapped it against the train window. It wasn’t a hallucination. I didn’t notice when the train began moving and it was still going slowly as it left the town. I looked out the window and saw a country road running parallel to the tracks on the right side. It gradually closed with them at a crossing.