The Mineral Palace [antikvár]

umii piimi soon as the Ford Touring Car crossed the St. Paul city hmits on April 20, 1934 ("You Are Leaving St. Paul, Minn., Home of the Inlagd Sill Herring Festival, Please Visit Us Again"), and passed into the great, square-upon-square expanse of the surrounding farmland, Bena jotted down the odometer reading with the golf pencil she kept in the ashtray: 5,434. She did this cautiously, steering with her left hand. She wrote it on the cover of Lectures on Surgical Pathology, the first in a stack of medical journals that rested between her and Ted. She wanted to record the mileage, because it would provide a way to appreciate the distance they were about to create between their old existence and their new one. As the city receded in the rearview mirror, so, she fervently believed, did their life up to that moment. Ted glared at her scribblings. No doubt he wanted to scold her for defacing his reading materials. But he held his tongue. Bena knew he considered himself fortunate that his vwfe was an inquisitive woman, not bound by the usual female fears and preoccupations, such as ringworm, rabies, cold cream, colic. Besides, she imagined, it would be entertaining, when his interest in, say, "Synovial Cysts of the Choroid Plexus" lagged, to try to break the code of numbers jotted in the empty margins. A string of 22s, 23s, and 24s that he might attribute to the daily high temperatures one week in March could actually be a tally of the birds that visited the feeder outside their kitchen window. Bena was comforted by numbers, and found a sense of assuredness and di-