Austin

Austin serves as a point of return and departure in the young woman’s story: a place where she pursues journalism and shares a routine with Bud Trent, then the place she reaches while trying to respond to his death. Its importance lies less in a detailed portrait of the city than in the way study, family life, and sudden bereavement converge around it.

Studies and Family Routine

The young woman goes to Austin to finish her journalism course, partly because she believes her presence there will help keep Bud on the straight and narrow. On Fridays, the two drive home together for the weekend in her Buick sedan. Austin is thus tied to both her education and a regular journey shared with her brother, a routine that gives their later separation its force.

News of Bud's Death

When a telegram from the War Department arrives announcing that Bud has been killed in a plane crash, their father is in Austin on business. The young woman opens the telegram and immediately thinks of how the news will affect him. After speaking by telephone with Joe Washburn, she wires her father at his law partner’s office that she is coming, then drives toward Austin through muddy roads. She reaches the city before dark, but her father has already taken a train to San Antonio.

Austin as a Point of Passage

Rather than ending her journey in Austin, the young woman continues south after learning that her father has gone on. Exhausted, she drives onward, suffers a blowout, and reaches a hotel at midnight. There she finds her father and Joe Washburn together. Austin marks the moment when her attempt to reach her father becomes a longer journey to meet him, connecting the telegram’s first shock to the family’s immediate gathering after Bud’s death.

Narrative Significance

The city’s two appearances in this sequence—first as the setting of coursework and weekend travel, then as a stop on a distressed drive—set ordinary movement against irreversible loss. The earlier Friday journeys with Bud belong to a dependable pattern; after the telegram, the road carries the young woman toward a family crisis she cannot undo. Austin therefore anchors the contrast between the life she had been arranging and the abrupt change that follows Bud’s death.