She decided to take a little rest on the back seat, with the cat.

To keep from falling asleep while he was driving along route 94, Jack turned on the radio. He listened to the news: the United States was sending military advisers to Central America, unemployment was up, there were floods in Louisiana and a drought in Egypt, Israeli planes were bombing Lebanon, the price of gold had risen, France was conducting nuclear tests in the Pacific, disarmament negotiations were at an impasse. He turned the knob, looking for music, and to his great surprise he suddenly heard a French song, sounding far away and lost in a sea of English words — an old French song that he knew very well; he adjusted the dial until he heard the words very distinctly:

America’s road is long
And long is the road of love
When suffering’s done, happiness takes its turn
So don’t you grieve, my dearest, I’ll be home
Wandering’s what holds you when you’re young
But I’ll grow old, my love, so don’t you mourn.

America! Every time he heard the word Jack felt something stir in the fog that muddled his brain. (A boat casting off and pulling slowly away from terra firma.) It was an idea wrapped in ancient memories — an idea that he called the “Great Dream of America.” He thought that in human history, the discovery of America had been the realization of an old dream. Historians said that the discoverers were looking for spices, gold, a passage to China, but Jack didn’t believe a word of it. He maintained that since the beginning of the world, people were unhappy because they could not recover paradise on earth. They had retained the image of an ideal land and they searched for it everywhere. And when they found America, it was their old dream come true, and they would be free and happy. They were going to avoid the errors of the past. They were all going to make a fresh start.

In time, the “Great Dream of America” had been shattered like all other dreams, but from time to time it was revived, like a fire smouldering under the ashes. It had happened during the nineteenth century when people travelled West. And sometimes, travellers crossing America found traces of the old dream scattered here and there, in museums, in grottoes and canyons, in national parks like the ones at Yellowstone and Yosemite, in the deserts and on the beaches like those in California and Oregon.

X

Al Capone,
Auguste Renoir
and the Nobel Prize

The feeling of sadness that had swept over them in Detroit melted away in the night, somewhere on the road between Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, and they felt relaxed, confident and almost happy despite their fatigue when they reached Chicago about two a.m.

The YMCA was at the corner of Chicago and State streets. This time, the girl disguised herself as a boy before they went in. They were given a room on the fifteenth floor, where they went to bed immediately and slept till noon.