The little train was always running when she stepped out of the elevator in the morning, and when she finished work in the evening. She felt it cursed the hand that drew its switch each day. In the jerk of its nose around the curves, in its wild dashes down the straight lengths of track, she could see a frenzied and futile pursuit of a tyrannical master. It drew three Pullman cars in which miniscule human figures showed flinty profiles at the windows, behind these an open boxcar of real miniature lumber, a boxcar of coal that was not real, and a caboose that snapped round the curves and clung to the fleeing train like a child to its mother’s skirts. It was like something gone mad in imprisonment, something already dead that would never wear out, like the dainty, springy-footed foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose complex footwork repeated and repeated as they circled their cages.
This morning, Therese turned away quickly from the train, and went on toward the doll department where she worked. At five past nine, the great block-square toy department was coming to life. Green cloths were being pulled back from the long tables