Vista Dome

He sat in the chair by the window and looked across the platform at the Northern Pacific's "North Coast Limited", it's cars resplendent in two-toned green, and he watched fascinated as a trolly of fresh produce - including the NP's justly famous, huge baking potatoes - were loaded into the dining car across the platform. It always amazed him that the food on these trains was better than in most restaurants.

Crossfield jumped back into the present as the train jolted into motion and the overhead lights flickered momentarily, but moments later the westbound California Zephyr was underway, pulling out of Union Station and heading away from downtown Chicago. The train rumbled and swayed left and right as it made it's way slowly through the yards south of downtown, and Crossfield pulled back sharply from the window more than once when an oncoming diesel rumbled past - seemingly mere inches from his chair.

"So, Cap'n, what you been doin' with yourself all these years? Still in the Navy?"

Startled once again when the old porter entered the compartment, Crossfield turned and smiled at Polk: "No, no. I went back to school, here in Chicago as a matter of fact. I'm moving out to the Bay Area now."

Polk nodded and intoned "yessir" a few times as Crossfield spoke, then launched into his spiel about turning down the bed after supper, and wanting to know what time 'the Cap'n' would take his meals. Crossfield smiled as Polk went on, caught up in the pre-war nostalgia such service represented. How much longer would it last, he wondered, with the new upstart airlines sweeping aside the railroad's well-established passenger services like dust off a porch? The Zephyr crossed a river and picked up speed as snow began drifting by the window, the train now roaring westbound for Iowa, and on it's way to Denver and the coast.

Crossfield asked Polk how long he'd been working on the Zephyr.

"Well, sir. I've been with the company since twenty nine. Yessir, nineteen twenty nine. Long time. But it's been a good life, Cap'n. Mighty fine. Couldn't have asked for nothin' better, no sir."

"Do you live in Chicago?"

"No sir. Oakland, these days. Used to live in Saint Louis, when I worked for the Pullman Company. Well, I got to move on. Takin' care of the next sleeper too, this trip. I'll come get you before supper time, Cap'n."

"Alright, Polk, and thanks." After the old man withdrew, Crossfield stepped out and walked aft towards the lounge, then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a uniformed Zephyrette coming down the stairs from the Vista Dome. He felt his heart racing, his mouth was suddenly very dry, and he wondered what he'd say...

When the girl turned around Crossfield's wasn't quite sure if he was disappointed - or relieved. It wasn't Clair St Cloud, but this girl's smile was just as sweet and real enough and she brushed by gently on her way forward, the perfume in her wake a hammer blow of memory. He grabbed the handrail and walked up into the dome, saw that it was empty, and as quickly turned to go back to his compartment.

"May I get you something, sir?"

Crossfield turned, looked at the girl in the Zephyrette uniform. "Excuse me?"

"Do you need something? To eat, or drink?"

"No. I..." He staggered under the weight of her sudden familiarity.

"Are you alright, sir? I'm a nurse, if there's anything... But you see, you seem a bit pale."

"No, I'm alright, and I'm a physician."

"Oh, yes doctor. Are you in this car?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Well, when there are doctors onboard we like to know, just in case."

"Ah... I understand. Look, uh, I hate to ask, but could I get a Coke or something?"

"Yes, doctor."

"John, okay? Just John. John Crossfield."

On hearing his name the woman seemed to recoil as if from a blow, and to grow a bit pale herself, but she turned and went to the bartenders station and fixed his Coke, then placed the glass on the bar, pointing to a stool.

"Were you in the Navy?", she asked.

"What? Uh, yes, but how...why do you ask?"

"Oh, it's nothing."

Their eyes met. Her's were evasive; his were uncertain, of that much he was sure.

"Well, could you excuse me, Dr Crossfield. I've got to go help the porter. Perhaps I'll see you later?"

He stood. "Certainly. Look forward to it." He watched as she walked away quickly, admiring her form and the way she walked, suddenly sure that he had seen her before. He returned to his Coke, shook his head and smiled, then returned to his room and pulled some papers from his valise and started to read.

Just before noon Polk knocked and stuck his head in the curtained doorway. "Cap'n? Second call for lunch. I've got a table reserved for you, just in case."

"Thanks, Polk, but I'm not..."

"Cap'n, you lookin' mighty tuckered. I think some lunch might just do you some good." Polk was grinning, holding the door open, his meaning clear.

"Oh, alright," Crossfield said, standing. "Lead on, Polk. Onward, into the breech!"

They made their way forward through two sleeping cars, and then into the dining car, where Polk led him to an empty table and pulled out his chair. "Steward will be right with you, Cap'n."

"Right. Thanks, Polk." Crossfield turned to see the old porter scuttling his way forward, so he turned his attention to the menu.

Lost in aimless speculations about club sandwiches versus rainbow trout, Crossfield felt more than saw Polk pull out the chair opposite his, then looked up to find Clair St Cloud sitting across from him at the table.

+++++

"Hello, John."

Crossfield looked up at Polk, who smiled ever-so-slightly before turning and walking aft, and only then did her voice register.

His eyes turned again to Clair's, to those eyes he thought he remembered so well, from what suddenly felt like another lifetime, and in a blink he was thirteen years old - again, or was he thirty, again? There was his heart, beating like a marching drum in his temples, but even more interesting was how hot it had become; he knew he was on the verge of breaking out in a torrential sweat, and that only made the feeling worse.

"What?" Crossfield said.

"John? Hello?"

"My God. Clair! What...how...are you? When did you get here?"

"I'm fine, John. Got on in Chicago. And you?"

"I'm a little surprised," he said. He looked away from the insinuations in her voice, looked out on passing early winter landscapes that arced by at speed, at fallow fields of corn only recently harvested, but then he was aware he was trying to hide his eyes from the reflection he saw in the window. He was trying to hide his feelings - again - only once again there was nowhere to hide. Not from her. She knew all his secrets, didn't she?

"You ran into my sister this morning," she said pointedly. "She told me you were aboard."

He looked at her hands. No rings. His heart skipped a beat. "I see. So, you didn't know I was on this train?"

"No, John. How could I?" He sensed hurt; he felt stupid, ridiculous and obtuse. And evasive.

"Do you still live out west?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes, but my grandmother...she passed away, last week. We came out for the funeral."

"I see. I'm sorry."

"Rebecca, my sister...you told her you're a physician?"

"Yes. After Washington. You remember? I was headed back there?" She nodded, holding his eyes in her own. "I just couldn't go on with it anymore, not after Tetsuko-san. It, life, had become a lie. It was disfiguring...me. So, I did what I felt was right; I resigned my commission, and somehow talked my way into medical school. The University of Chicago. Did my internship and residency there as well." He watched her eyes and the way she responded to his words, and he was suddenly quite aware that he could see the machinery of her mind turning over as he spoke, yet there was something new, something he had never noticed about her eyes. Something odd...unsettling.

"Do you live there now?" She crossed her hands on the table as she spoke, looked down at them. Crossfield too looked at her hands. Her fingers were so fine boned, her skin so ethereally pale, such an extreme contrast to her blue eyes and copper colored hair. To his unpracticed eye she seemed at once exotic and comfortable, like a rare stone in a casual setting. She was still beautiful, but now there was a hardness in her eyes he didn't remember. Hardness, or was it calculating? Quicksand...he was walking into quicksand...

"No," he said at length. "I've taken a position in San Francisco. Stanford. But the rumor is we'll be moving down to Palo Alto soon, so I've rented a place down the peninsula."

But her hands were visibly shaking now. Crossfield looked up, saw tears forming in her eyes, watched as they welled and started to run down her cheeks; startled, suddenly quite unsure of himself and what he'd been thinking in the echo of a hearbeat, he took a handkerchief and dabbed her face, then put his hand on hers.

"Clair?"

"John, I..." Again, something in her eyes caught him, held him in a vice of caution.

"We need to talk, Clair."

"John, I know, but things are, well, they're complicated."

"Why did you leave. You didn't even say good-bye. I didn't understand. I still don't. I don't know what you felt, how you feel..."

Her eyes were like a frightened animal's, unsure, hunting for a way out one moment, then sure of her safety the next. She nodded, looked away. "I know. I'm so...sorry, John."

"I thought for the longest time that I...that I loved you, Clair. "

At that, she turned, looked him squarely in the eyes. There was sudden serenity on her face, a preternatural calmness in the air around her. He was taken aback by the transformation. Serenity? Perhaps certainty was a better word than serenity. He sensed that she had suddenly grown certain of her course.

So, with his speaking the obvious, there had come certainty? If that was what he saw in her eyes now, what had she seen in his? At the mention of the word 'love', she had grown certain of herself, and certain of John Crossfield. Was she a...predator?

And inside that moment she stood, all decisions made, no more tears in her eyes. "Meet me here," she said, pointing sternly at the table, "at five this evening, for dinner."

Then she left him. Again.

Crossfield was taken aback by the authority in her voice. "She'd have made a damn fine admiral!" he said to no one in particular, then, without ordering lunch he too stood up and retreated aft to the safety of his compartment.

+++++

The afternoon was impossible. He sat in his room watching an early winter's storm batter marled fields full of stubbled corn, snow slipping silently, horizontally, past his window. In the distance, white clapboard farmhouses with amber glowing windows disappeared under drifting white waves, yet as he watched his reflection superimposed on the passing landscape all he could think about was of a future that, until just a few hours ago, had seemed all but impossible. But his bemused ramblings were of course quite mad, his wanderings the ravings of a hopelessly, relentlessly immature loneliness.

And her eyes. What was it he had seen? A manic, trapped feeling? Then sudden resolution? But could he trust himself to understand what he'd seen? Had he seen certainty, or the pure, unadulterated ambiguity of a predator closing in for the kill?

He felt lost, inadequate to the moment. And as always, alone.

He wasn't a romantic, after all. He was, had always been, a scientist.

And then Goethe's Werther slipped into his consciousness. Goethe...the scientist, the romantic. The poet who'd made his Faust relevant to every nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. But no, Crossfield knew he wasn't a romantic, wasn't in the slightest way a Goethe. He was, if anything, an inarticulate cynic when it came to women and presumed affairs of the heart.

Then, clarity. Another day or so on this train and he'd be in San Francisco, joining Shumway's new team on the cutting edge of cardiovascular surgery. Did he have time for Clair St Cloud and her impossible ambiguities? No, of course not. He thought of the way she had pointed at the table in the dining car, how she'd told him to come back to dinner, how she was beyond making assumptions, quite adept at calling the shots. Did he have time to deal with someone so demanding, so uncompromising?

No.

Once again without thinking he focused on his reflection in the window, his pale visage superimposed over the blue winter light that lay beyond. He looked at his eyes, and the steely purpose he imagined he saw there. Then he heard the harsh command in her voice, that pointing finger, and he felt a cautionary dread fill the room.

No. No room at all for that nonsense. "We'd drive each other mad!" he said aloud.

Polk knocked and stuck his head in; he looked at Crossfield lost in thought and withdrew, shaking his head and muttering as he walked aft. A few minutes later Clair's sister, the Zephyrette, knocked and stuck her head in and looked at Crossfield, then quite unexpectedly she came into the little compartment and sat next to him. Without missing a beat she handed him another Coke.

He shook his head and looked at her, waiting for her to speak.

"Doctor...uh, John? Are you alright?"

"You are kidding, right?"

"All right. I guess I deserved that."

"So, you're the kid sister? What's your name again?"

"Yup, that's me. Rebecca, the kid sister."

"The wise-beyond-her-years, the all-knowing, all-seeing kid sister?"

"You got it, doc."

"I knew it. What's on your mind?"

She smiled at his direct manner, and his obvious uncertainty. "You've got a big night ahead of you. I thought I might say: 'Keep an open mind and think before you speak'."

"Always a good idea. Why the concern?"

"Listen, she's talked to me about you. A lot. After...that night. Whatever you two talked about, whatever happened between the two of you, something changed inside her. Something big. She was always the headstrong free spirit in our family, always the explorer, pushing boundaries. After you...I don't know. She quit her job, quit nursing, went back to school, and now she teaches at Berkeley, writes poetry. A lot changed, but to me she's been fragile, almost broken."

He seemed taken aback. "Broken?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know quite how to describe it." She seemed confused, almost reluctant to go on.

"I saw something. In her eyes."

"Yes. I know what you mean."

"Something dangerous," he said, almost under his breath.

"Dangerous," she echoed. "Yes...sometimes I think so too..."

"Has she... have there been... other..."

"Nope. Not one." She knew that one was hard to swallow, on the surface, anyway. She stood. "Listen, can I get you a sandwich, something besides your fingernails to nibble on?"

He looked at his fingers; they were pristine, a surgeon's vanity. He laughed. "Sure, I don't think I ate lunch. Sounds good."

"Be right back."

Crossfield shook his head and turned to the window. 'Well, that's two remarkable girls', he said to the reflection in the passing landscape.

When she returned, he asked her to sit again, and they talked shop for an hour: where had she gone to school; why work on a train; was there a long list of suitors waiting for her back in San Fran? She'd gone to school in Los Angeles, she loved to travel, and no, she spent way too much time away from home and besides, she wasn't ready to settle down just yet.

"So what about you?" she asked. "Where'd you go to school?"

"Annapolis. Then the University of Chicago."

"Shabby schools." She looked at him anew, sizing him up again.

"So I've heard." She noticed he had a shy, boyish grin.

"Internship?"

"Stayed there."

"Yikes! I've heard that's a toughie, too."

"It was a nightmare. One long, unending nightmare."

"That good? So, I'm assuming you didn't go for gynecology? So...was it...dermatology?"

"Cardiology. Then thoracic surgery."

"Wow. You fix broken hearts. That...suits you, John."

He looked puzzled. "Oh?"

"You spent the night with her, then you left her. Broken hearted."

"Oh. I see."

"What...? Oh. So, that's not how it happened, is it?"

"Oh... Maybe it's best we just skip it."

"Okay. So, what's next? Why California?"

"Taking a position at Stanford, some pretty exciting stuff going on. Good people, too."

"I'll bet. So, there are no Mrs Crossfields lurking in the closet?"

He laughed at the absurdity of her question, the absolute ridiculousness of the reality behind his laughter, the naked loneliness of his life since that night on this Zephyr so many years ago. No, he'd turned away from all that in the desolation of Clair's disappearance, he'd walked away in shock and fallen to the stark, simple pursuit of knowledge, and to developing his skills to almost superhuman perfection.

But what was going on, really? Had he simply been running away, or had he simply been atoning for the sins of his intellectual fathers? Or was he running away from any kind of relationship that would force him to confront his demon-haunted dreams again and again.

Did the pain of that brief nocturn betray him, or sustain him?

"No. Not hardly," he finally said. "No Mrs Crossfields lurking in the shadows."

"May I ask you...a personal...question?"

He didn't know what to say. All he could manage was a blank stare.

"The thing is, John...well...do you love her?"

He blinked, hard, and his throat constricted. "I don't think I've ever loved anyone before, or since," he said ever so quietly.

"That's not quite an answer, is it?"

"Perhaps. She was... important. Something of a... turning point."

Now it was her turn to stare in disbelief. "Why do I find that kind of hard to understand, John?"

"My life is kind of hard to understand, Rebecca."

"Okay, let me try again. What did you feel? When you saw Clair this morning? What went through your mind?"

"You do like to ask personal questions, don't you?"

"I have my reasons. I hope you don't mind."

"Okay, I think I get it," he said, shaking his head at her tenacity. "Well, I think on the one hand I felt lucky. Lucky, like a future I'd never thought possible was suddenly opening up, right then and there. On the other hand, a lot's happened the last few years that makes going into any kind of relationship almost impossible. So, I guess it's complicated, hard to understand. I know that doesn't make much sense, but there it is."

"Oh, I think I understand, but this isn't exactly a simple, uncomplicated situation, is it?" She looked at him, saw what looked like pain drift across his face... like clouds across an open prairie.

"It doesn't seem all that complicated to me."

"Well, I mean, you met this girl on a train ten years ago, you talked for a while, you had a very intense emotional experience, and then you never saw her again. And you never tried to find her, to see her again? Yet you say you've never loved anyone before, or since. It doesn't add up, John. Sorry. It just doesn't."

"No?" He looked out the window, nodded, mesmerized by his reflection superimposed on the bleak landscape outside. "Nothing in my life ever has."

"What? Added up?"

His reflection met his stare as he said, "Things rarely add up for me."

"Really? Annapolis, Chicago? Medicine? I don't get it, John. What didn't add up for you?"

"Clair."

"Clair?"

"Sounds silly, I guess, but..." and his voice cracked as he stumbled through his thoughts, "there haven't been many people in my life...people like her."

She looked at him and suddenly it all came together. Lost in life, overcome by events, consumed by intellectual pursuits, and lonely...oh so lonely. And out of the blue, Clair. A lightning bolt to the heart, then... nothing. Clair had bolted, true to her free-spirited form, and as always, leaving scattered human wreckage in her wake. And John? Back into the void, only he'd never known the chain he had unwittingly become a part of, and so, back he drifted into his race against time and loneliness. Alone again, and all she could see before her now was that after all these years he'd grown resigned to his solitude, perhaps even welcomed it, so he'd never seen this coming. Who could?