An excellent scene in McDermott's The Ninth Hour

So many great passages and moments in Alice McDermott's 2017 novel, The Ninth Hour, including a particularly powerful section in which the teenage Sally, believing she has a calling to become a nun, leaves home for the first time - a tearful parting from her widowed mother who says this will break her heart - and takes an overnight train from NYC to Chicago; on the train she encounters a # of crude, rude, and predatory people - a woman who sits next to her and talks incessantly about her sex life (while eating a liverwurst sandwich, uch), a young woman in the dining car who basically scams Sally out of her $20 in emergency $, a scabrous young boy and his abusive mother - all enough to push her past her limits and to the point where she punches and swears at her boorish and provocative seatmate and to determine that she's not meant for the novitiate. Really good scene - and topped, to a degree, by her return home to find her mother not alone but in fact entertaining the local milkman, another widower w/ whom she's had a relationship for several years it seems. This confrontation provides a dramatic kick at the end of the chapter, though I have to say I can't believe that Sally, an intelligent young woman, would not have had any idea about her mother's sex life - others in the convent where her mother works are well aware of this, so why not Sally? Wouldn't there be clues and hints? In fact, wouldn't they want her to know, at least that they're "dating," whatever that may mean in what appears to be about 1930? 

[Note: See correction in the following day's post.]
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