The Rail by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online

people, and he wondered how a graduate of a fine university could have failed to foresee the effects of a relatively easy life and good, ample food on a young woman unused to either and barely five feet tall.
    She ate, James Penn’s mother noted to one of the aunts, “as if meat and potatoes would be prohibited forever within the hour.” She gained 10 pounds before getting pregnant, added another 20 before Jimmy’s birth, and lost almost none of it.
    James Penn began catching the eyes of other young women, who seemed likely to gain in beauty and worldliness. He saw in those eyes sympathy for one so obviously above (literally and figuratively) the round woman sometimes at his side.
    He began to make business trips to Richmond, where he often spent time with women whose families’ stock was similar to that of the Penns—old money going slowly down, relatively new money still rising. His mother knew some of this and was not entirely offended by it.
    Jenny knew, too, and for a time she was determined to endure it, because her day-to-day life now included so much that she never had before and would never have again. Her hands, like the rest of her, became soft. There were still servants.
    What finally sent Jenny O’Neil Penn away, and eventually into the arms of William Beauchamp, was cards.
    When she first moved into Penn’s Castle, she noticed that there were unopened packs of playing cards everywhere she went. She saw them as a sign of careless wealth. The Penns liked to play bridge, and they had apparently decided that never again would they be without a fresh deck of cards. They were everywhere—inside drawers in rooms all over the house, somehow in nooks of the attic, atop the mantel and on the bedside tables. She once found a new pack under the seat on the passenger’s side of James’ Ford.
    Jenny, who had learned something of penny-ante poker from her father, determined that she must learn bridge.
    But while the Penns, with their large hands and quick minds, seemed made for the game, Jenny struggled. She was prone to drop cards and to shuffle them badly, and she tended to get absent-minded, especially after a couple of glasses of Mrs. Penn’s sherry.
    Her game seemed to diminish after the birth of her son, and there were nights that ended quite literally in tears of frustration.
    The last hand of bridge Jenny O’Neil played with the Penns was in late January of 1937. There had been a foot-deep snow that started the afternoon before and was only now abating. Everyone had been indoors all day, and the closeness was wearing on them. Jimmy had been sent to bed early after his whining had caused one of the aunts to wonder out loud if “that child” was ever going to learn any manners.
    Jenny and the aunt were partners, against James and his mother. They had been drinking since dinner, and it was now past 10. In some way that Jenny herself never quite understood, she got spades and clubs mixed up in her mind, and when the inevitable annihilation from bidding on that assumption fell upon her and her partner, the aunt slammed her cards down.
    â€œI believe,” she said, “that it is more likely that your hands will grow large enough to hold the cards, my dear, than that your mind will grow large enough to play them correctly.”
    Jenny knew, when she let herself think on it, what the Penns thought of her in general and her bridge-playing in particular, but she had never before been so bluntly and openly insulted. And when she turned to James for aid, she caught him and his mother looking at each other and shaking their heads, smiling slightly.
    She left the table, went to the bedroom where their son was not yet asleep, bundled him up and walked out the front door. James called after her, and she knew part of her was waiting for him to follow and bring her back. The long coat and boots she put on in haste and anger were no match for a foot of snow.
    But he