The Rail Read Free Page A

such ragged, hoarse, blatant agony.
    Later, his mother told him that Blanchard had a lot of problems.
    Today, he figures she must be in her mid-to-late 50s, but in this light, at least, she is still a fine-looking woman, firm and blonde enough to be 20 years younger.
    â€œLet’s go inside,” she says, then turns to lead them past the arches and up the steps into Penn’s Castle, the crystal glass hanging sideways and empty in her right hand. “I need a drink.”
    David fetches his one small suitcase and follows them.
    Blanchard guides them along the cold stone floors, then turns right and finally stops in front of what will be David’s bedroom. Across the wide, tall hallway is another room, Neil’s. The ceilings here are at least 20 feet high, but there are floor vents, indicating that someone has, somehow, gotten central heat installed to fight the cold and damp that the walls themselves seem to be breathing on them.
    She makes sure they can find the great hall and from there the sitting room, then says, “You all look like you need something to cut the chill,” and goes toward the kitchen.
    â€œJust Coke for me,” Neil calls after her.
    Half an hour later, they’re all seated before a roaring fire in a room surrounded by two floors of Penn’s Castle, the one above them bordered by a walkway. The ancient stone, carried across an ocean for Blanchard Penn’s great-grandfather, is set off by wood paneling from another world. There are bookcases everywhere. The room appears to be the size of a small house, and the five chairs drawn around the fire, surrounding one small coffee table, are overwhelmed.
    Still, the fire is warm. David has two bourbons; his father insists on soft drinks, and David thinks Blanchard, who has matched his two plus whatever she drank before they arrived, pushes him too enthusiastically to have another.
    The lights in the room—and, David has noticed, in the hallways, bedrooms and bathrooms—are no match for the November night. There is barely enough illumination for reading. But his chair is comfortable and the day has been very long, and soon he is as comfortable as he’s been in weeks. He is near nodding off when Blanchard, who has been filling Neil in on her move back to the town and the castle, turns to him.
    â€œSo, David,” Blanchard says, “you must have a very exciting life. Covering Washington politics and all.”
    David gives her a vague but affirmative answer, staying away from specifics. He is not yet ready to tell his father, let alone his half-aunt, that he actually is only a Washington newspaper correspondent in the loosest sense of the word, one who is at present, as one acquaintance unkindly but accurately put it, being paid not to write.
    This leads Blanchard to tales of a long-ago liaison with a United States representative “from one of those little states; I think it was Delaware,” and from there to tales of her former life in New York.
    Neil’s back is used to hard, unyielding furniture, and he squirms to find a comfortable position in the armchair that holds him. He looks around the large room, and his eye is drawn to a row of items on the mantel high above the fire that Blanchard occasionally feeds. He sees (and in squinting to see realizes that, for the first time in his life, he probably doesn’t have perfect vision) that they are minie balls, standing, with their conical heads and the horizontal lines on their sides, like forgotten soldiers on the dark wood.
    They might be the same ones, Neil thinks, that he used to play with, so long ago. How else would they have gotten here?
    He was, in the days when he was still Jimmy Penn, allowed the run of this place, as the accepted son of the resented daughter-in-law (who would become the even more resented ex-daughter-in-law).
    Before he was banished, Jimmy was indulged in various ways. His favorite pleasure, though, was The Box.
    In the last