The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read Free Page A

for brahma in the first place. Crouched there, in my palm the little hoard to which I had added lapel-pin and pearls, I waited until we were well away from water, over a tiny settlement where I might predict, if not see, spire and gardens, a railway station too perhaps; then with a smile, imagining on whom that shower of peculiar manna, sent them down.
    Back in my seat again, I had certain canny misgivings, the tiresome ones of a woman with too many heads. How small did a diamond have to be not to burst its facets from such a height, how light a pearl, not to smash its baroque? I had retained my watch, and I had an hour to consider the lost rings of all those who had loved me, plus that most durable of all, the invisible wedding-band I had never let myself receive.
    What of love, then, for such a woman, for any—for anybody, what of love?
    My mother’s mother’s snakeband ring with emerald eye and my father’s father’s onyx seal I had worn joined on one finger, cabalistic bow to that minor hitch in the vortex of heredity which had caused me. Dear supervisors all, should they at the agency ever know the circumstances (and I might in time send them the case-record)—I could hear the descant that would follow, in the ballet of headshakes that always formalizes psychological gossip.
… (Would it have been better if the departed’s trauma had come to her through some normal community way such as radiation sickness, instead of having been visited upon her via the single, traumatic shock of birth? … What hopes could be held for a girl whose own sibling would one day ask her, eighteen years to her sixteen: “Haven’t you begun to … lose any of it … all over, yet?” … And who then would add in a whisper, turning away a face already shorn of brow and lash, a head already ennobled to its own bone—“What about … down there? ”) …
    Ah, we had our ribald humors, my brother and I, but that day wasn’t one of them, not when I had to answer him—for I was never to be as bad a case as he, and still have, though so faintly auburn, eyelashes—when I had to answer him … “No.” And on the record, I had a word of advice for them, my friends at the agency. Don’t be so quick to asperse birth, the plain fact of our beginnings. And don’t believe anything but the facts:
    Subject (who is I) and sibling born to elderly well-to-do émigré parents. Perhaps we were menopausal babies conceived after danger of such was deemed over, since both my parents, as distant cousins from same ancestral town, were well aware of hereditary traces.
    Both deceased during infancy of children, who were brought up under amiable legal guardianship, to best U.S. standards of oranges, lambchops, orthidonture and quarterly anti-pronation shoe-fittings.
    From extant pics of parents aetat 35, my father’s hairline may have been retouched, my mother’s even more susceptible to illusion.
    Hereditary condition well documented in European medical annals (though not endemic there) via easier observation in small, genealogically related loci, such as the German, North Sea town where my grandparents still reside.
    May or may not be Mendelian recessive, thought by some to be albino-related, no official name. (Not alopecia areata, which is temporary.)
    Males invariably lose facial as well as scalp-hair, fem, data less procurable though subject recalls, from youthful visit to grandparents, family portraits ranging back to the medieval, in which coif-line was shown almost as far back behind ears as a bridle.
    Classically appears at onset of puberty, when natal hair of a characteristically silky dark-red gives way to carroty coarse growth which in turn disappears partially or in toto, usually by time of patient’s majority. N.B. from subject: We were classical.
    And in fancy I could read, over their shoulders, my evaluation (after group study of further history up to March 21st):
    Subject, aided by economic status and first-class appliances, has made