The Train of Small Mercies (23 page)

Miriam stood next to Roy and wrapped her arms around herself. “Oh God, oh God,” she whispered, and her eyes swelled with tears, though to Roy she seemed to be willing herself to cry. Mr. West took off his Baltimore Orioles cap and placed it over his heart. As the train crossed in front of them, Roy noticed that Sutton held his hand in a crisp and well-practiced salute. Next to him, Jamie put all his weight on one crutch and held the other one aloft—still, as if he were holding a flag. His chin jutted out, the way it did in his senior portrait in the Burton yearbook.

As the first cars rushed by them, Miriam suddenly dropped to her knees. Roy quickly bent down and put his arm around her shoulder, and he was surprised at how quickly she moved into him. He said, “It's all right,” though she couldn't hear him. He could feel Mrs. West turning her gaze toward them, but he could not take his eyes off the train. When the car bearing Robert Kennedy's body sailed past them, Roy was surprised to feel a fierce desire to pull Miriam even closer against him, to kiss her damp cheeks. But he knew it was really just Claire he was thinking of.

T
here you are,” said a voice.

Maeve was lying down on a low-slung cot, next to a few others similarly spilling over the small frames. She felt dizzy and couldn't be sure she wasn't dreaming. The man's voice wasn't Irish, but it reminded her of her father, the surprise in it, the tenderness. “Where am I?” she asked. “What happened?”

“Well, first of all, you're just fine,” said the man. He wore a white coat, and his hair was a nearly perfect match in color. “Fine now, that is. You're in the station's first aid room. You fainted. But lucky for you, you fell right into the arms of the woman next to you, so no head bump. But don't feel bad. You're hardly the only one to have fainted out there. The heat, the hours of standing, especially with the long delay. I wonder if you've eaten anything.”

“Just breakfast,” Maeve said, and she sat up, which made her even woozier.

“Easy now,” he said. “I'm Dr. Rayburn, by the way. I'm on loan, so to speak. I work over at Georgetown Hospital. How about we give you a little orange juice, just to get some sugar into you.”

Maeve nodded and took a paper cup from the nurse, whose starched white cap looked like it might topple off. “Thank you,” Maeve said, and took two long sips. “I've never fainted before.”

“It's nothing to worry about,” the doctor said. “It's your body's way of just shutting down if it's too weak or your brain isn't getting enough oxygen. There can be a few factors, but I suspect it's the heat and the lack of food. You're not hypoglycemic, are you?”

Maeve didn't know what that meant, but she shook her head no.

“It takes a little time to get your full energy back. And I want to see you standing up first and trying a little walking before I let you go.” He then attended to a man who had possibly broken his ankle.

“Did someone bring me over?” Maeve asked the nurse. “Is the woman I fell into still here?”

“You were brought through on a stretcher,” the woman said with the cheer of someone describing a shooting star.

“My goodness,” Maeve said.

“Your purse is right there,” the nurse pointed out.

Maeve put her feet on the ground and lifted them a couple of times to test her strength.

“How does that feel?” asked the nurse, who was as plump as a pumpkin.

“Fine enough, I guess,” Maeve said. “So has the train already come, then?”

“Still on its way,” the nurse said. “It won't get here until dark at this point. Some people were killed in New Jersey along the way, and they've just really slowed it down.”

Maeve's mind felt too cloudy to ask what she meant, or maybe she hadn't heard correctly. But she shook her head in an appropriate recognition of such news. She then took a few steps away from the cot and circled around.

“You're looking better—in the face,” the nurse said. “You've got some blood back in your cheeks.”

“Oh.”

“Well?” the doctor asked.

“Okay,” Maeve said. “A little weak.”

“You should eat something. There are places in the station, and the sooner the better. Take another few minutes, make sure you're strong enough. And no fighting your way back into that crowd. Do you have someplace where you can go and rest? Are you anywhere close by?”

“The Churchill Hotel,” Maeve said.

The doctor shook his head to indicate that he didn't know it, but the nurse let out a coo of satisfaction. “Would you believe my husband was the concierge there for a long time? Until about two years ago. It's such a lovely hotel.”

“Your husband was the concierge?” Maeve asked.

The nurse put her hand to Maeve's forehead. “Your skin is dry now, too. You were very clammy before. Yes, for nearly fifteen years. He loved it there. They have a colored man who took over for him. They say he's very nice, but I haven't been back in since Ralph died.”

“I'm sorry,” Maeve said.

“Thank you,” the nurse said. “Well, I'm sure they'll take good care of you over there. Now do you have cab fare? You really shouldn't be walking or even taking a bus. What you want to do is just climb into one of their comfortable beds and take it easy.”

Maeve agreed. She put her purse around her shoulder and turned to thank the doctor, who was still kneeling over the man's ankle. “Take it slowly,” he called out to her.

“Yes. I will.”

The nurse walked alongside Maeve to the exit, her thick fingers on the small of Maeve's back. “Yes, the Churchill was a big part of our lives. That's so interesting that you're staying there, of all the places in Washington.”

“The concierge there now is very good,” Maeve said. “I think your husband would have been pleased with how well he does.”

“Oh, that's nice to hear,” the nurse said, and she could see her husband again putting on his blue blazer in front of their bedroom mirror, the Churchill insignia over his breast, the fringes of his hair still damp.

The nurse gave Maeve's back a little pat. “I'm sure he would have,” she said.

E
llie walked Roy out to his car. She had been quiet since the train had passed, and he wondered if she had disapproved of his attempt to comfort Miriam. Now, as he fished for his car keys, the sound of loose change in his pocket was startlingly loud.

“It's been a real pleasure, Mrs. West,” he said. “I know it's been a sobering day with the funeral train, and I want to thank you for letting me spend so much time with your family, and for being so generous.”

“Jamie has good days,” she said, “and sometimes he has days where I know he's struggling. On days like that—like today—I really see his hurt so clearly. And as his mother, I will never be able to make that hurt go away. That's what is so painful for me.”

“Yes, ma'am.” They stood there for a time, both swatting at gnats. Finally, Roy said, “I may well call you tonight, if that's all right. If there's anything I'm not sure that I have exactly right, I'll call to verify it with you.”

“You know, Claire cast a spell on all of us. When they broke up, we all really missed her. Deeply. I suppose I really had come to think of her as my own daughter in some way, even though they were both so young, and I never really imagined they would stay together always. But when she was gone, I grieved for her in a way that I would have never let Jamie know about. Even Joe never really understood, I don't think, what she had brought to us, our home. And your being here today has brought all of that back. How things used to be, how much simpler and innocent.”

Roy smiled, or tried to. “Well, thank you again,” he said, and he stuck out his hand. But Ellie leaned in to hug him instead. She put her hand around his neck and put her chin over his shoulder and held him like that.

“We'll look forward to reading the article,” she said in a choked voice, and then, willing herself to believe, she added, “and on this day we'll try to remember those whose struggles are greater than our own.”

D
uring her father's wake, Maeve's uncle, Colum, did his best to entertain. In the next room, Larney was stretched out on the dining room table, his hands folded over a rosary and resting on top of his good blue suit. While Colum told stories about the troubles he and Larney got into when they were boys, Maeve sat a few feet from her father, shaking her head at how unskilled Colum was as a storyteller. He would get ahead of himself, then, when trying to backtrack, he would ask, “Wait—did I already explain how we got there?” If someone laughed, he would turn and insist, “But that's not the best part.” But generally there were no best parts to his stories.

The drunker Colum got, the harder he tried to keep the mood festive, until Maeve's mother finally put her arm around his shoulder and said, “Let's leave it at that, then, Colum.” Then she said to anyone who was listening, “My husband is dead, and I will be, too, if I have to hear any more of that.”

Her father's mouth looked particularly slack, Maeve thought, and it saddened her that he would be buried with such a frown. She wondered if she pushed his lips upward whether they would droop back down, and she started to move toward him when her mother came in and sat next to her.

“He always looked good in that suit,” she said. Maeve nodded that that was true.

“If I turned my back on your father for a second, he was always off somewhere. If I was setting the table, then he remembered he was supposed to meet the boys at the pub. If I said I needed firewood, he would forget the bundle we had out back and head into the woods with his ax. Be gone for two hours, he would. And now he's done it again. And how am I supposed to manage this time, Larney? Hmmm? I'm asking you that much. How will we get by this time?”

She put her face in her hands and rocked back and forth. Maeve put her hand on her mother's shoulder and she was surprised when her mother leaned into her. Her mother smelled of baking soda, and there were coarse, wiry strands of gray shooting out from her unraveling bun at the center of her scalp. Maeve pulled her closer in and took over the rhythm of their rocking, slower now, not back so far against the chair. “There we are,” Maeve said after a moment, and she felt like she was cradling a gigantic baby. She put her lips to her mother's forehead, the way she often did with her sisters when they were upset or had hurt themselves. “I know,” she whispered in her mother's ear.

That was the last time they had touched like that, Maeve was remembering on the cab ride back to the hotel. She had been trying to decide if she would even tell her mother about trying to see the senator's casket. There wasn't much point, she figured, since it had ended in failure.

Maeve thought she should feel more foolish for fainting than she did, but in some ways, the fainting had brought a kind of relief. Seeing Robert Kennedy's casket might have just compounded the misery of it all. Part of that misery—the part that was selfish—was an increasing certainty that there wouldn't be any more contact from the Kennedy family. If she had ended up working for the Kennedy family, Maeve would have been so busy with so many children around that no one would have even thought to consider her life outside work.

“So how do you like Washington?” the cabdriver asked. He had been looking in the rearview mirror a few too many times for Maeve's taste, and he had taken half the drive to work up his nerve to start a conversation. He wasn't much older than she, if at all, and his voice was so full that it sounded like he was speaking through a cabinet speaker.

“It's beautiful,” she said without enthusiasm.

“Sure. Of course, it's a lot less beautiful right now. The city really got torn apart back in April. That was madness.”

He looked back at her in his mirror, hoping he could go on. “I was working the night of the riots. I had parked on the street and was getting a little dinner, and while I was eating, my cab got blown up. Got hit with a Molotov cocktail. Boom! Everyone inside had to run out the back, and we just kept on running. Running for our lives. Just crazy.”

Maeve looked out at the tranquil downtown streets—the young men whose faces beamed slightly from razor burn and who were anticipating an evening of buying drinks for women in miniskirts; the tourists who hadn't expected their children to be so depleted from a day of walking and who now carried them collapsed over their shoulders. “You were quite fortunate, then,” she said at last.

The driver thought about that. “I mean, I'm sure I'll get drafted— it's kind of a miracle I haven't so far. But here I am ducking bombs and I'm still in
Washington
?” He realized that he had veered into a rant and tried to recover. “That was a real crowd back at Union Station. You're not just arriving, though? I noticed you didn't have any luggage.”

“Maybe you're noticing too much, then.” She flashed a hint of a smile before she could suppress it.

“Maybe,” the driver said, but he saw some promise in her expression in his mirror. In the shadows of the backseat he could see the fine angle of her jaw as she turned away. “Maybe. So are you here visiting someone?”

They drove another block in silence, and he could barely look at the traffic in front of them as he waited for whatever else she might say.

“If you must know,” Maeve said, and she found just the right note of resigned anticipation, “I'm meeting my husband.”

M
ichael and his mother were sitting on their porch swing. He had been quiet since he got home—quieter than any other day since his return, but she had refrained from asking too many questions. Besides, sitting out on the porch was his idea, and that tempered her concern. For dinner she had fixed flank steak and the frozen French fries he liked, and now they were working on two orange Popsicles from the icebox, their slurping sounds helping to drown out a low chorus of crickets hidden in the grass that needed mowing.