Her husband, he remembered, had been some sort of financial analyst, a middle-level money man. She had been traveling to L.A. to join him at the end of a weeklong conference sponsored by the southern-California defense industry, then in its hearty youth. Oh, she could have gone with Tad and stayed in the hotel, but what would she have done all day—take bus tours to the homes of the stars? Her silvery eyes and dry intonation told Bech that she considered herself, at some level, as much of a star as they. At least she was a proximate presence, talking only to him. She had always wanted to travel across the country, she told him, and hated to fly, though she could do it, with a couple of stiff drinks inside her. Bech was going to the far coast on what he intuited would be a futile exploration of the cinematic possibilities of his first, somewhat sensational novel, Travel Light. He, too, would rather ride the rails than entrust his body to the bumpy, propeller-driven flights of the late Fifties, before the onset of the big jets. The dashing transcontinental trains were on the way out, and by taking one Alice and he disclosed a kindred romantic streak. All this emerged in their first conversation, they having been seated together, two singles, in the crowded dining car.

The shiver of their cutlery on the vibrating tablecloth. The reassuring, fairy-tale solidity of the heavy-bottomed cups and coffeepots, bearing the New York Central’s logo. The theatrically deferential black waiters in a world where happy black servitude was also on the way out. Bech sensed as soon as she was ushered to his tingling table that she would sleep with him. There was that pale light in her eyes, a slightly loud shimmer in her teal-blue gabardine suit, an eager electricity in the way she moved and, with a little wine in her, talked. Women who were talkative, the sexual lore of his youthful Brooklyn buddies had reported and his limited experience tended to verify, “put out” in other respects. He and this woman were as alone on that speeding train, clicking north beside the blue autumnal Hudson, as on a desert island.

His chaperone, the head librarian of Indianapolis, reclaimed him; it was time to go onstage and earn his fee. Alice Oglethorpe said, warmly but formally, that it had been good to see him after all these years.