The train moved. She was heading north on the subway. The train was empty when it left Union Station, and at each screech and stop and jerk it gradually filled up. The people who got in were silent people. They did not seem to be alive: they merely sat (nobody sat beside her, although the half-seat next to her was the only empty space) and listened to their minds, or to their worries (their expressions did not reflect that they had happiness or hope inside them), with their hands in their laps. A brave, occasional man looked steadily at her when she wasn’t looking, and when she glanced at him and saw him looking at her, he lowered his eyes as if he was a sheep caught eating the wrong grass in a grazing pasture. A woman got in, and moved in the direction of Estelle, and when she saw who Estelle was (what did she see? what did she see in Estelle? what did she see on Estelle?), she veered off and decided to stand, holding on to the metal pole, instead. Estelle sensed the eyes in other passengers looking at her. There was some conspiracy, it seemed. And feeling this same fear of loneliness, of isolation, of being dirty, she took out the letter and discovered it was from Mrs. Macmillan.
Dear Ess (the letter said),
I did not give this to you personally, or leave it on your dresser when I was checking out, because I wanted you to have it just as you were leaving the hospital. I wanted you to be able to have something to read on the long trip up to Timmins. I grew very close to you when we were together in that slaughter-house, and I offered to help you — the word is not a good word but I am not good at words anyways — and see what I could do. I feel that if I was in your country, you would be doing the same to me. If I didn’t meet you, meaning you, Estelle that I know, as the person I met in the General, it would be somebody else like you. By now, I hope you already left Union Station, and are on the train heading north. It is a beautiful train ride, if you are not too tired. I have taken this trip many times myself. The people on the train are very friendly. You will see for yourself that the moment the train pulls out of Union Station, the people sitting with you will behave very different from those kooks, that’s what they are, who live in Toronto. You can ask anybody for help or assistanse. And when you reach Timmins, if for some reason I am not there at the station, you can ask anybody, or any one of the boys on the trains, for directions to my place. That is where I live. I am telling you this because you can never tell, accidents do happens. But everything will be all right. I am very happy that you are coming to live with me, with us. I know Joe will accept you. He knows many coloured boys from the American air base in Ramore, a few miles from Timmins. The first thing I intend doing when I reach home is to fix up a room for you. You will be a bit crowded, but what the hell? So, until then, your loving friend, Mrs. Macmillan. PS. The enclosed is to help you buy your train ticket, and for any little things you need on the way up.
Love, Mrs. Macmillan.
Estelle wondered if it was really necessary for Mrs. Macmillan to sign her name twice: Mrs. Macmillan? Was it a reproach intended to stress the difference between Mrs. Macmillan and herself; a warning, a hint even, that the similarity of their misfortune had no other common feature in their lives than the fact that they had spent some time in the same hospital ward, for some “female complaint”?
But she was travelling alone now. She had to address her mind to some direction and to some destination, even a temporary destination. But because she was in a strange city, she would not know whether a destination was temporary or final. All direction on this subway train was puzzling.
The subway train became more crowded: women looking young, but actually old, with the tan of misleading youth, and of some wealth, some wearing dresses that belonged on their teen-aged daughters; shouting, screaming merry children from school, of various whiteness of white, and various shorts and various hair styles and various shouts, and various cleanliness. And Estelle became tired now, travelling without direction, without a destination. But she got out of the subway through the underground passages again, past the man in a glass cage with TTC marked on his lapel, selling tokens and tickets; past the show windows in this long channel of a dungeon, wondering who would window-shop in this airless passage; through the cold (although it was only the beginning of the yellow and the brown and the brick of the fall season), down the inclining walk, into the noise of the railway terminal. And here she paused, deciding what to do next. She still had ten hours
