The Sunday train from New York City

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

The Sunday train from New York City (the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station) comes right into town. If it's on time, Roz and Ted will walk in the front door - they'll walk, or Roz will walk and Ted will wander, from the station, it's only six or seven blocks (depending on how you count them) - still, they'll walk in the front door together a little after three. Nils will be on his way out. They'll ask him how I am, and I will interrupt and say I am fine.
        And Ted will come over as Roz sees Nils out. Still in his long, black, wool overcoat but unbuttoned, in his bright plaid scarf. He'll sit down on the coffee table in front of me, lean over put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, look up.

"What did you guys talk about while we were gone," he'll ask me. And I'll say, "Women."
        Meaning Kristi.* And Nils's sisters, April, May, and Sigrid, who lives somewhere south and west from Roanoke on an alpaca and one-time emu farm and talks to the "Spirits of the Air," various angels, arch angels, thrones, and dominions "'of her own making,' Nils says, 'or, at least, her own naming: Gamaliel, Fothering-El, Hermeneia, Mariela.'"

April married a Lutheran minister, divorced him, married another and left him. "And 'lit out for the territory,' Nils said." "Huckleberry Finn," Ted says. "Yes," I say. I glance down at him; he is still sitting, elbows on knees, face in hands, looking up at me. "Yes, very good," making him wonder why he piped in.
        May is "Nils says, ' the only normal one, if not only of the sisters but probably of all five of Karl and Sonja (Pastor and Fru Pastor) Sundstrøm's children - the only one not bedeviled by God or the Holy Spirits.' She went to medical school, became a dermatologist, married a secular Jew high school teacher, and is living 'happily ever after' in a suburb of Cincinnati. But 'he's something of a health-food nut,' Nils says. 'So how happy can she be truly.'

"May," Ted says to get it straight.
        "Yes, if you had stayed on the train you could have visited her. From here it goes south and west - Clifton Forge, White Sulfur Springs, Hinton, then north again to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago."
        "But we didn't," Ted says. "Stay on the train."
        "Because you didn't know," I say.
        "Yes, because we didn't . . ." he stops.

Roz has come over. She's put her coat and scarf away in the closet. "Uncle Albert was telling me about Nils and Axel's sisters," Ted tells her.
        "So, what about Kristi?" she asks.
                                                                        01/07/24
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* See here and here.