No one said anything.
“Then,” Mr. Muirhead continued, “there was the San Cataldo Cemetery in Italy.”
“That hasn’t been completed yet,” the young man said hurriedly. “It’s a visionary design by the architect Aldo Rossi. In our conversation, I was just trying to describe the project to you.”
“You can be assured,” Mr. Muirhead said, “that when the project is finished and I take my little family on a vacation to Italy, as we walk, together and afraid, strolling through the hapless landscape of the San Cataldo Cemetery, Jane’s mother will be screaming at me.”
“Well, I must be going,” the young man said. He got up.
“So long,” Mr. Muirhead said.
“Were they really selling postcards of the mummies in that place,” Dan asked.
“Yes, sweetie pie, they were,” Mr. Muirhead said. “In this world there is a postcard of everything. That’s the kind of world this is.”
The crowd was getting boisterous in the Starlight Lounge. Mrs. Muirhead came down the aisle toward them and with a deep sigh, sat beside her husband. Mr. Muirhead gesticulated and formed words silently with his lips as though he was talking to the girls.
“What?” Mrs. Muirhead said.
“I was just telling the girls some of the differences between men and women. Men are more adventurous and aggressive with greater spatial and mechanical abilities. Women are more consistent, nurturant and aesthetic. Men can see better than women, but women have better hearing,” Mr. Muirhead said.
“Very funny,” Mrs. Muirhead said.
The girls retired from the melancholy regard Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead had fixed upon each other, and wandered through the cars of the train, occasionally returning to their seats to fuss in the cluttered nests they had created there. Around midnight, they decided to revisit the game car, where, earlier, people had been playing backgammon, Diplomacy, anagrams, crazy eights and Clue. They were still at it, variously throwing down queens of diamonds, moving troops through Asia Minor and accusing Colonel Mustard of doing it in the conservatory with a wrench. Whenever there was a lull in the playing, they talked about the accident.
“What accident?” Jane demanded.
“Train hit a Buick,” a man said. “Middle of the night.” The man had big ears and a tattoo on his forearm.
“There aren’t any good new games,” a woman complained. “Haven’t been for years and years.”
“Did you fall asleep?” Jane said accusingly to Dan.
“When could that have happened?” Dan said.
“We didn’t see it,” Jane said, disgusted.
“Two teenagers escaped without a scratch,” the man said. “Lived to laugh about it. They are young and silly but it’s no joke to the engineer. The engineer has a lot of paperwork to do after he hits something. The engineer will be filling out forms for a week.” The man’s tattoo said MOM AND DAD.
“Rats,” Jane said.
The children returned to the darkened dining room, where Superman was being shown on a small television set. Jane instantly fell asleep. Dan watched Superman spin the earth backward so he could prevent Lois Lane from being smothered in a rockslide. The train shot past a group of old lighted buildings, SEWER KING, a sign said. When the movie ended, Jane woke up.
“When we lived in New York,” she said muzzily, “I was sitting in the kitchen one afternoon doing my homework and this girl came in and sat down at the table. Did I ever tell you this? It was the middle of the winter and it was snowing. This person just came in with snow on her coat and sat right down at the table.”
“Who was she,” Dan asked.
“It was me, but I was old. I mean I was about thirty years old or something.”
“It was a dream,” Dan said.
“It was the middle of the afternoon, I tell you! I was doing my homework. She said, ‘You’ve never lifted a finger to help me.’ Then she asked me for an aspirin.”
After a moment, Dan said, “It was probably the cleaning lady.”
“Cleaning lady! Cleaning lady, for god’s sake. What do you know about cleaning ladies!”
Dan felt her hair bristle as though someone were running a comb through it back to front, and realized she was mad, madder than she’d been all summer, for all summer she’d only felt humiliated when Jane was nasty to her.
“Listen up,” Dan said, “don’t talk to me like that anymore.”
“Like what,” Jane said coolly.
Dan stood up and walked away while Jane was saying, “The thing I don’t understand is how she ever got into that apartment. My father had about a dozen locks on the door.”
Dan sat in her seat in the quiet, dark coach and looked out at the night. She tried to recollect how it seemed dawn happened. Things just sort of rose out, she guessed she knew. There was nothing you could do about it. She thought of Jane’s dream in which the men in white bathing caps were pushing all her grandma’s things out of the house and into the street. The inside became empty and the outside became full. Dan was beginning to feel sorry for herself. She was alone, with no friends and no parents, sitting on a train between one place and another, scaring herself with someone else’s dream in the middle of the night. She got up and walked through the rocking cars to the Starlight Lounge for a glass of water. After 4:00 a.m. it was no longer referred to as the Starlight Lounge. They stopped serving drinks and turned off the electric stars. It became just another place to sit. Mr. Muirhead was sitting there, alone. He must have been on excellent terms with the stewards because he was drinking a Bloody Mary.