The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (13 page)

Oh there were all sorts of details which would have been overlooked by anybody not as intelligently interested as the cousins—or the town. If he had the habit of light women, these were certainly not in the neighborhood, nor of course would they be; he would have mistresses, it was argued, whom he met in a hot, plush love-nest somewhere, though certain returned émigrés from the city (after all Sand Spring was less than four hundred miles away from it) said no, not that way, that it might very well be a much more rarefied business; in fact it might be what in smart circles was called not a love affair, but just “an affair.” Certainly he went regularly to New York, though the manner of his goings and comings anywhere, if by nature distant with the town, was never furtive; now and then anybody could see him and often did, though even if the observer was only a foot of railway platform apart from him, and courteously spoken to as well, it still seemed to be from afar. He was at that time of his return a partially bald but still good-looking gentleman, who, if it was possible to compare him with his coevals about town (which it wasn’t), already looked older than they did and yet younger; this latter characteristic was to emerge more and more. What we were looking at, I think, was a natural-born aristocracy, which the money had only added to—by keeping him in a certain state of organizational and philosophical health.

You’ve seen the type, we all have, and I’ve no doubt that the story of Adelbert Riefel, especially in those little details if not the big ones, has its place and specialty in the social rises of America at large, but we haven’t got time for more of it than is strictly necessary, which some of it is. For remember the Riefel basement. In it there was already growing that engrossing folly whose later development, though it still didn’t take up all of his time was to suck up almost all of his money, and would be of some concern to you also. For truly, in the furtive wheel-chain of life-events, those that can be picked out for sure as single and separate are very valuable. And it is a surety that without the folly that grew from Adelbert Riefel’s basement, to become, as follies may for a time, a kind of practical enchantment—you grandchildren here and your daddies before you—all those unto the second and third generation that stem from Jim Eck and Jim Morgan, heretofore known as Jim and his mate, and in general to be known so hereafter—might not have been born. I’d go further, I’d say the odds are, in spite of occasional spurts of possibility (like that just now recounted mention of the Pardees) that you all would
not
have been born. And I ought to know.

Now—to the Folly itself. Your generation, I don’t suppose it cares anything much yet for models or modelcraft that are not in the way of science or business—I mean model trains, boats, planes, collectors’ soldiers, even model toy warfare. You’re all for the hot-rod, or the stock-car race, or even the Saturday afternoon parachute jump at the county fair—for the moment, you’re
in
it, as you like to say for
real.
Chances are you don’t know anything more about that other world than the Lionel trains I once got for all of you, all of them now in attics, or maybe one or two balsa-and-rubberband airplane kits you and some crony bought at a dime-store and put together when you were thirteen. And I don’t suppose your sisters know any more about it than their old doll houses and tea-sets, or care—though there are always some women who go on to those other little pretties almost at once, to tiny furniture replicas of Williamsburg kept in a cabinet, or toy gardens with Dutch bulbs in them the size of nailheads—or even in their own lifesize houses, in not such an easy-to-see, boiled-down way, though in the end maybe nastier. Many childless couples have this fondness for the wee also—wee dogs, wee talk—and the Riefels were childless, but what fastened on Adelbert was not for coyness or charm, and came over him alone. It is a passion which can come over a grown man—maybe one who’s never had much of anything, or maybe a millionaire in his maturity—when either of them cries or sighs to himself “What lack I now?” This is the way it begins, often—but often there’s more to it, much more. You can’t see it yet. Wait.

I understood it better, him
and
it, when, a middle-aged man myself and down to New York on a business trip, I happened to go shopping for toy trains for all of you children—grandchildren by marriage, and grandchildren by right. It was after-war time again, nineteen-forty-six, just after V-J Day—Victory-Japan, in case you never heard of it—and countless wheels we could all see had been turning like mad for years, as well as the silent ones also, which we could hear quite as well. But the little toy ones for the moment had stopped. That big toy store on the Plaza said that if the metal allowances were permitted they could still have what I wanted by Christmas—this was only August—but I wouldn’t be there then, and they had nothing to show, to order on. After they understood that the castles and drawbridges, anything with soldiers foot or mounted, didn’t attract me these days no matter how medieval—“We understand perfectly,” said the salesman, “we can scarcely wait for the
domestic
stuff, I mean the peacetime, ourselves”—they gave me a list of hobbyist shops where I might find secondhand plenty of what I had in mind. I chose a shop on Duane Street called the Train Center—trains, a simple standard set of childhood ones, being all I had in mind. This shop was out of business, I found, but I found another on Park Row, and another on Church. I had an afternoon to kill, and I killed it, and meantime old Riefel, whom I’d seen that summer of nineteen-twenty, and whom I had things to thank for, once more came alive.

You space-eater, you of the hot-rod—ever stand in one of those concentrated essence places called a hobby mart? Ever stand in a motoring headquarters for planes, boats, cars, railroads, and miles of track and roads for all of it, and miles of air too—which isn’t more than fifteen foot square? Only to find out that people don’t only buy them, they make them, with dinky models and construction kits and a host of suppliers and factors to this world—or they have them made for them, nowadays everything from TT trains to HO trains and roadways, to Frogkits and Minic Ships? From there I wandered into a shop that stocked ship-model supplies, blueprints and fittings, woods and veneers, then on to a shop that made only “experimental” models, by God, then to one which only did repairs. I saw them all—and, out of sentiment let’s say, I’ve even now and then kept up with them, though not to buy. You of the Thunderbird, ever hear of model-car racing? Slot-racing? With equipment radio-controlled? But it was already all there in essence back then, the world still hasn’t digressed that much, and it was then I understood what you’ve got no cause to yet, and what Jim and his mate didn’t have any cause to understand either, the afternoon that Adelbert Riefel let them see his basement plan.

It’s that after a certain age, and only after, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing the world once again in miniature. Call these things hobbies if you wish, or if they get larger, follies, but they’re not of childhood, nor of those akin to senility, and are never the devotions of youth. As for seeing the world in small but perfect, perfectly tidy, or having an urge to make it so, that’s as it may be; this is the passion the partners thought they were witnessing that day. But I’m inclined to think otherwise. I think of it as a passion to see a world in small all right, but an enchanting and difficult one, a world with all its power lights always blinking on and off again, always in need of experimentation or repair. A world in small, all right—but for
real.
And I think of it as a reflective passion. Some of us, as you have good cause to know, take it out in talk. That’s the commonest way. But Riefel had done it this other more solitary way, and perhaps even here had done it uniquely, for in shop after shop I saw nothing like he had, and maybe there never was. The urge to be unique in these affairs persists; maybe you remember what I came home with that year, the French-gauge electric train that no transformer could ever make really run? But Riefel’s fault, and no doubt his reflections too of course, ran deeper. And—so did his folly. For in the end, he tried to see his world both in the small and in the large.

He must have had his small system custom-made, perhaps even in Europe, the cars and the whole thing, though that afternoon he didn’t tell us this—the partners that is—saying only that he’d drawn the entire design and blueprints himself, taking the whole of one year to do it—the year he and his wife came back to Sand Spring. The execution of the plans had taken two years more. Maybe this explained the trips to New York, or maybe not—for when the mate made his acquaintance forty-odd years later (on a train connection out of Albany), he was still going there. Mrs. Riefel had long since died; her orchids had withered, replaced by housekeeper’s fern; the house had been cut into flats. In one way of looking at it, he was only an old man of eighty-odd living on the funds of a once-grand house and on only one floor of it: did I say he retained just the basement floor? But in another aspect he was marvelous, sharp as ever but quietly so, none of that eighty-year chirp in him; in a ghostly way he was still even redheaded—and going to New York. But perhaps, yes—though we couldn’t know for sure of course at our age—perhaps he wasn’t quite so distant any more. Although it was the mate he’d first met up with, he appeared to know about Jim; here was the town again, at its function.

“I understand you two are mechanical in bent,” he said, shooting one of those cuffs. The cufflink in it, as the mate described and Jim saw later, was as modern as anything you might wear, but in those days was still very advanced—an abstract design. “Perhaps you’d like to take a look one of these days at my little system,” he added. He always referred to it that way, to differentiate it from the big one. “Of course I can’t quite keep it up in the style to which it was accustomed, can’t get the parts for it. But it’s still worth a look.”

Worth a look! We knew (the town again) that this was precisely what very few people did get; the cousins, in addition to knowing all the other nuances of his history, had continued to keep the town well informed. It all began, they said, back in his financial days, the peak of them, when he floated some debentures for such systems, or whatever it is that men like him floated. While men like Harriman and Frick had been doing it with the railroads, our Swedenborgian had sectioned out this little specialty of his own. Perhaps he’d even been the czar of it. Whether or not this had been true, the toy system we saw that afternoon was in commemoration of—or reflection on—a czar.

Though this was what impressed me most, and you may record still does—once inside, we had to stare first (though he certainly didn’t make us) at the living-half of the basement. For though the entry door had been very natty in a way entirely new to us, we hadn’t been prepared, even by gossip, for all the tricks of books and low shelves and high-hung pictures, and colors, and white spaces and black nudes, and—culture, I suppose it was—we now saw. I don’t have to prepare any one of you; get married even here, you’ll have it. It was merely certain parts of Paris and New York at the time, that we were staring at. Or nineteen-sixty-six, in Sand Spring. Only, this time we didn’t feel any flicker of the future to make us tremble. Before it might have had a chance to, he opened the door to the other half of his establishment, and there we were, in his system or staring down at it, at his vast little world.

Did I say it was a trolley system? It was, of course, though it wasn’t the one in
this
room which had ruined him. Though his story was all in trolleys (or as the bond issues said, tramways), the one we were looking at wasn’t the one which had solidified him down from really gossamer rich, years before. That other system which
had
bankrupted him or nearly, over the period of fifteen years during which it had been built, brought up dead against a hill, but nevertheless run, and during a subsequent period of five in which he had paid back local investors who wouldn’t have paid him in similar circumstances but whom he chose to call his creditors—religion again!—well, the two young men standing there didn’t need to have that trolley system described to them, by cousins or anyone else. They had ridden it many a time, sometimes when it carried them near one of the few places it was near, or now and then, on a warm spell like this one, for the fun of it, with a girl. For Riefel, after his miniature was completed, had done what a fool always does, or a hero (he was Jim’s and the mate’s for a while): he had exaggerated. Intending to glorify man and country, but forgetting what small potatoes both were in that neighborhood, he had imposed his vision not just on a basement room, but on a region. The state hadn’t helped, nor the public much either, but he had done it, whether for Mrs. Riefel to smile at him over dinner for, after a hard day in the conservatory, or for him to show off to someone else (the prospectuses and finally the pictures maybe) on hot Sundays—did I say he always went there Sundays, summers and winters too?—in New York. Anyway, with his own money, he had gone and completed to the third stage an idea which had graduated from the stock exchange to a hobby, and should have stayed there. He had gone on to build his transport system not only for real, but to human scale.

The two young men gloated down on this other one; they shook their heads and shuffled, open-mouthed. The way they hungered (until it was seen that their interest was mechanical not reflectional) it might have been thought that they were old. Riefel smiled, watching not his system, but them. Unlike most owners of machinery, he seemed not to want particularly to be asked questions on it itself, but Jim and the mate were at liberty to examine it, which they did for a long time. When Riefel finally sat down, his cufflinks glittered and shook; this might have been all that was said between the three except that it was clear to the pair from the first that they had touched him in some way; they could only think it because they were a pair, for afterwards he sometimes called one of them Damon, the other Pythias, though never especially caring which name went with which. And it was plain that he wanted to give them something—not the system itself of course, which the whole town knew was willed to the Smithsonian—but something he must have known wouldn’t be apparent to them for a long time. Well, he gave it, eventually—as most of us elders do. Meanwhile, that evening and others, the pair looked.