He tried to telephone her from a town called McCook in Nebraska, two hundred miles east of Denver. Stump Creek was a week behind him when he called the magic number and reached only her mother.

I’m afraid she’s not here, Mr. Lightcap. No she’s not. I said she’s not. She’s in Rhode Island now, visiting her grandmother. Spring break, you know. Where in Rhode Island? Does it really matter, Mr. Lightcap? Where are you, if I may ask? On your way to Utah, I suppose? That “seasonal” job, as you call it? I said she’s with her grandmother now. In Newport. No, I think I’d rather not divulge the address. There’s a quality of enthusiasm in you, Mr. Lightcap, that suggests madness. I think you’re a dangerous man, Mr. Lightcap, and frankly would prefer that you not see my daughter, frankly. Yes, frankly. I know you appreciate frankness. We have something in common then, don’t we? I’m sure that she’ll write to you from time to time, if she wishes. I’ve no control over that. But I will not encourage your interest in her. She sees various young men, you know. Young men, I said. Men her own age. Do you have difficulty hearing me? Your right ear? From what? Guns, you say? Gunnery? Mr. Lightcap, this information does not surprise me in the least, indeed it confirms my worst fears and suspicions. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Lightcap. Good-bye now. I said good-bye.

Thinking that the mother might be lying, he tried again when he reached the city, slunk about the Mellon house for two days and nights hoping for a glimpse of Claire; she did not appear. He called the secretary of the Symphony Association and learned only that the concert season was over and that Miss Mellon, like other members of the orchestra, had been furloughed for the spring and summer. He visited the music department at the University of Colorado in Boulder but found nobody there except a departmental assistant who refused to reveal any information whatsoever about any student. Henry left a message for her sealed in a departmental envelope:

Claire—

Come.

—Henry

That Didn’t Work.

HE WROTE HER LETTERS, long rambling humorous and pathologic letters, often in blank verse, sometimes in rhyme, from his sun-cooked outpost in the Utah desert. Sent her pictures of himself in ranger suit, Smokey Bear hat, smug smirk, with views beyond of a rearing phallic monument silhouetted against the pure indigo of desert sky. Sent her sketches in his own hand of Navajo hogans, buckboard wagons, tired saddlehorses, sick cowboys vomiting in the horse trough. Sent her a sprig of sagebrush, a corsage of juniper, a mountain lupine wreathed in maidenhair fern. She acknowledged his gifts—some of them—with cryptic notes, highly delayed, that promised nothing.

Finally she agreed to meet him for a day, on his day off, at the town of Glenwood Springs in western Colorado, a midway point between Denver and Moab, Utah. She would not stay overnight with him, no she would not. Would not or could not? Both. She would arrive on the westbound morning train—Denver, Western & Rio Grande—and depart on the eastbound evening train. She owned no car of her own and preferred not to borrow one from her mother.