The Corrections

face. “What are you taking them there for?”
    “Bea says it’s very interesting and fun for kids.”
    Alfred shook his head, disgusted. “What does Bea Meisner know about transportation?”
    “It’s perfect for a den meeting,” Enid said. “There’s a real steam engine the boys can sit in.”
    “What they have,” Alfred said, “is a thirty-year-old Mohawk from the New York Central. It’s not an antique. It’s not rare. It’s a piece of junk. If the boys want to see what a real railroad is—”
    “Put a battery and two electrodes on the electric chair,” Gary said.
    “Put an M-80!”
    “Chipper, no, you run a current and the current kills the prisoner.”
    “What’s a current?”
    A current flowed when you stuck electrodes of zinc and copper in a lemon and connected them.
    What a sour world Alfred lived in. When he caught himself in mirrors it shocked him how young he still looked. The set of mouth of hemorrhoidal schoolteachers, the bitter permanent lip-pursing of arthritic men, he could taste these expressions in his own mouth sometimes, though he was physically in his prime, the souring of life.
    He did therefore enjoy a rich dessert. Pecan pie. Apple brown Betty. A little sweetness in the world.
    “They have two locomotives and a real caboose!” Enid said.
    Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating. It galled him that romantics like Enid could not distinguish the false from the authentic: a poor-quality, flimsily stocked, profit-making “museum” from a real, honest railroad—
    “You have to at least be a Fish.”
    “The boys are all excited.”
    “I could be a Fish.”
    The Mohawk that was the new museum’s pride wasevidently a romantic symbol. People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn’t understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they bellyached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.
    (Schopenhauer: Amongst the evils of a penal colony is the company of those imprisoned in it .)
    At the same time, Alfred himself hated to see the old steam engine pass into oblivion. It was a beautiful iron horse, and by putting the Mohawk on display the museum allowed the easygoing leisure-seekers of suburban St. Jude to dance on its grave. City people had no right to patronize the iron horse. They didn’t know it intimately, as Alfred did. They hadn’t fallen in love with it out in the northwest corner of Kansas where it was the only link to the greater world, as Alfred had. He despised the museum and its goers for everything they didn’t know.
    “They have a model railroad that takes up a whole room!” Enid said relentlessly.
    And the goddamned model railroaders, yes, the goddamned hobbyists. Enid knew perfectly well how he felt about these dilettantes and their pointless and implausible model layouts.
    “A whole room?” Gary said with skepticism. “How big?”
    “Wouldn’t it be neat to put some M-80s on, um, on, um, on a model railroad bridge? Ker-PERSSSCHT! P’kow, p’kow!”
    “Chipper, eat your dinner now ,” Alfred said.
    “Big big big,” Enid said. “The model is much much much much much bigger than the one your father bought you.”
    “ Now ,” Alfred said. “Are you listening to me? Now.”
    Two sides of the square table were happy and two werenot. Gary told a pointless, genial story about this kid in his class who had three rabbits while Chipper and Alfred, twin studies in bleakness, lowered their eyes to their plates. Enid visited the kitchen for more rutabaga.
    “I know who not to ask if they want seconds,” she said when she returned.
    Alfred shot her a warning look. They had agreed for the sake of the boys’ welfare never to allude to his own dislike of vegetables and certain meats.
    “I’ll take some,” Gary said.
    Chipper had a lump in his throat, a desolation so obstructive that he couldn’t have swallowed much in any case. But when he saw his brother happily devouring seconds of Revenge, he became angry and for a moment understood how his entire dinner might be scarfable in no time, his duties discharged and his freedom regained, and he actually picked up his fork and made a pass at the craggy wad of rutabaga, tangling a morsel of it in his tines