The Train of Small Mercies (4 page)

He went about the construction with a meticulousness Lolly had never seen in him before. He marked out the pool's circumference, drawing a line through the grass with a piece of chalk as thick as a candle. He removed all the sod from the circled area, and then he laid out the pool's frame by uncoiling the wall into a track. That Wednesday he mixed equal parts cement and vermiculite for the pool bottom and smoothed it and packed it with a trowel until it was well past midnight.

“There's a man building his dream by hand,” Lolly said. “But do you know what you're doing?” She had brought out some lemonade, which he drank down in two gulps.

“This Saturday,” Edwin said. “That's our day. I'm going to have it ready. The question is, will
you
be?” He then put down his glass and gave Lolly a playful smack on her behind. “Get your suit out. In fact, get yourself a new suit. I thought we'd invite Ted and Georgia over to help us break it in. Have our first pool party. Maybe I'll barbecue chicken. We'll get a big beach ball, a couple of rafts. We'll just float the whole summer away.”

During his lunch breaks at work, Edwin studied the manual's instructions about chlorination, the importance of keeping a pool slightly alkaline, and keeping up the condition of the pool filter. He learned about the right balance of calcium and magnesium needed so that the water would not appear cloudy. He jotted notes in the margins of the thick manual, and sometimes he would read a passage and then look away from it to see if he could recite it back to himself.

As far as he knew, no one on the street had a pool. On one side of the Rupps were the Gregsons, who were in their seventies, their children grown and living in other towns now. On the other side were Linda and Harry Pyle and their twin girls, aged nine. Linda Pyle made pottery in her basement that was shipped to art galleries all over the East Coast, and Harry, as far as Lolly and Edwin could tell, spent most of his time playing guitar and was always trying to organize a rock-and-roll band. Harry spoke often of once having played with the drummer from Jefferson Airplane, and to hear him tell it, that brief encounter had been the apex of his life.

Edwin imagined Harry and Linda and their twin girls splashing around in his pool. He could see Harry stretched out on one of the rafts, his long ponytail trailing behind like a snake, and Linda's clay-soaked fingers trailing through the water, the clay crumbs melting off and floating to the surface.

They were his neighbors, but that didn't mean they got to swim in his pool.

 

 

 

The Rupps had tried for ten years to have a baby. When they got married, both twenty-five, they had imagined that by thirty they'd have their first child, first of several, perhaps. Despite the lack of success, they held off consulting a doctor. For the first three years, Edwin insisted that their luck was about to change, but already he had decided privately he was to blame. The doctors would do tests, and they'd confirm it. It occurred to him that Lolly might leave him when this became clear. She was still young and attractive. She could find a new husband and get pregnant. But Edwin kept telling her not to give up hope.

When more time passed, Lolly insisted that they submit to doctors' tests to identify the source of their problem. When the tests revealed that Edwin was sterile, he wept for two days out of shame. He begged Lolly not to leave him, and every time she said, “I would never leave you,” he begged harder, as if she had said nothing.

Edwin had felt something more than guilt. For the first time that he could remember, he had kept something from her—not quite a secret, but a hunch, a dark suspicion. And she had never detected it. Occasionally, it made him wonder what else he could get away with.

I
t was Maeve's first time staying in a hotel, and before she went out for the day, she liked to sit on one of the couches in the lobby and watch all the goings-on. The bellboys at the Churchill were no older than she was, and even in their first hour of work they generally loaded guests' luggage onto their carts with their mouths downturned and their eyes squinting in monotony. Sometimes the manager swept through, a strikingly tall, bespectacled man whose pants swished like flags in a stiff wind, and the bellboys quickly found what they passed off as smiles. “Good morning, Mr. Whetton,” they said in unison, and then just as quickly their faces slid to the floor.

Two modest chandeliers hung over a dark marble floor that captured ghostly reflections of the guests and hotel employees as they crisscrossed. The elevator bell rang out so loudly and frequently that it was easy to imagine that a trolley careening through was part of the daily bustle.

Maeve worked as a nanny for the lieutenant governor, and he had insisted on putting her up in the Churchill—that's where he stayed when he came to Washington; otherwise she could not have afforded it. But the concierge was the only employee she spoke to, if she could help it.

“I can see it's a busy morning already,” Maeve said to him that morning. Her voice ran up and down like a flute, and when she had stepped out of the Churchill Hotel for the day, Mr. Hinton spent the rest of his shift trying to recall the sound of her. As a concierge in Washington, he had, he believed, heard just about every accent one could hear in the world, but he never ceased to be delighted by how many ways the English language could be vocalized.

Until Maeve and her mother and sisters left Ireland, she had never seen a black man in person. Living in the western part of Massachusetts for the next few years, she barely saw one there, either. But at twenty-two, after four years of working as a nanny in town, she had landed a job taking care of the lieutenant governor's baby boy in the family's large home in Boston. While pushing the baby's stroller through the Boston Common in the mornings, she liked to stop at the fountain and watch the Negro boys, who, stripped to their shorts, splashed and yelped with a disregard she could only marvel at, until a police officer chased them off again.

Maeve was in Washington for a second interview for the nanny position; the latest Kennedy baby was due in December. The lieutenant governor, who had since become state attorney general, was friendly with the Kennedys, and he had helped her land the first interview, which took place when the family was in Hyannis. This past week had been her first true vacation in America.

She had enjoyed imagining herself in the midst of all the Kennedy children—their loud whoops and shrieks of laughter and angry screams playing like sirens all around her. “Maeve, what are we going to play
now
?” Christopher might demand of her. One child would be throwing Mary into the pool.
Was she just pretending or was she really in trouble?
It would all be a remarkable but beautiful chaos, Maeve had decided, and it had been all she could think of lately. But now she realized that possibility had most likely drained away on a kitchen floor in Los Angeles.

Despite all the turmoil here—and the fact that she was completely unfamiliar with it—Maeve had decided that Washington was an ideal place for her to start over, even though the work would have been more or less the same. She knew enough that a flood of young people swept into Washington when there was a new administration. When she told her mother over the phone about the job possibility, her mother said, “Are your sisters and I still too close to you, being on the other end of the state—is that it? Working for the Kennedys would be an honor—I grant you that—but I don't know why you have to keep picking up and moving farther away. And to
Washington
, with all the violent shenanigans going on there. But then, Maeve, I've never understood what goes through your mind, have I? Never once.”

Maeve liked the busy pace of cities, but she was eager to leave Boston. She had grown tired of being around so many young Irish men and women with backgrounds so similar to hers. And too many people had become bent on getting her married. At mass at Saint Clement's each week, the old widows and the mothers whose children had just moved out of the house circled around her after the service like a gang of thieves, telling her that they had just met the most interesting young men they knew she would enjoy talking to. And wouldn't she come over sometime for tea and just give Robert or Mark or Daniel a chance to say hello? It was getting so that even Father Frances, if left alone with her, might say, “Maeve, I thought of you the other day because I met a most intelligent young man who I think you would appreciate.”

At the Kennedy house in McLean, Virginia, Maeve was expected to meet with Ethel Kennedy herself, who was scheduled to come home for a couple of days after the California primary. Now, with the unbearable news of the senator's death, Maeve felt paralyzed about what to do. She had called her mother for counsel, but her mother's heavy sobs had distorted everything she said.

“And what do you have in mind for today, Miss Maeve?” Mr. Hinton said. He had sent her to the Lincoln Memorial, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Natural History—where she stared at the Hope diamond through the glass safe for twenty minutes—to a musical called
Promises, Promises
at the National Theatre, and also to the department store Garfinckel's, where she purchased scarves for her youngest sisters and a blouse for the older one. And each morning she had given him detailed reports of her impressions. It was unusual for her to be so animated with him; generally, Maeve preferred the company of children, but she had noted that Mr. Hinton was about the age her father would have been, and his smile reminded her of the way her father was so quick to reveal his happiness—which often came as easily as blinking.

She liked the gleaming white marble of Washington, in contrast to the redbrick facades of Boston, she had told Mr. Hinton. He had given her such reliable advice—there wasn't anyplace she had visited by which she felt let down—and she had decided that he would have the answer to her predicament.

“Today I'm a bit muddled,” Maeve said, and already the lilt of her voice buoyed him. “You see, I was supposed to have an interview at Senator Kennedy's residence for a nanny position, if you can believe it. For the baby to come. Of course, I don't expect anyone to still meet me, but should I taxi over there and leave a note? I'm due to go back home tomorrow. I don't want to bother anyone there on the day of the funeral about a
job
—of all days. But I also don't want them to think that I didn't keep my appointment. Maybe Mrs. Kennedy and the children won't even live here anymore.”

Mr. Hinton shook his head, and he had shaken his head so much since Kennedy had been shot that his neck had become sore from it. “I see your dilemma,” he said. “That's very delicate, no question.” But even this response made Maeve feel hopeful.

“I hate to burden you,” she said, “but it would be splendid to know what you'd recommend.”

Mr. Hinton put his hand to his chin, as he often did when he wanted to assure a guest he was about to arrive at the right piece of advice. There was an elderly couple from Michigan standing behind her, and Mr. Hinton said, “Let me see how I can help these folks, and I will get right back to you on that.” The couple wanted to know the best entry point into Rock Creek Park, and Mr. Hinton, who preferred drawing his own detailed maps to the faded, blurry ones the Churchill printed, immediately set to his careful work. When he finally handed his map to the couple, the man regarded the piece of paper with awe, like a child given a picture of a clown or a horse.

“You should go into the mapmaking business,” the man said, to which his wife heartily agreed.

“I do get my practice,” Mr. Hinton said, and the compliment had made him feel so good that he had to let out a small laugh. In fact, he had been told that almost every day for the two years he had held the concierge position, but it never failed to bring out the smile that stretched almost unnaturally wide across his face. Some of the other black employees of the hotel, who watched his interactions with the overwhelmingly white guests and white staff and had decided that he smiled too broadly and too often, called him Pops—one of the nicknames for Louis Armstrong.

“Look at Pops over there drawing his little doodads for the white folks,” Lanetta Jackson had said one morning to her fellow chambermaid Rosie DeBerry. “They tell him thanks, and he gets to grinning like one of those little lawn jockeys.”

“Aw, he's nice,” Rosie had said. “And he's old. I guess that's all he knows to act around white folks. He sure likes his job, always smiling.”

“That's what I mean, always smiling,” said Lanetta. “That's what I'm talking about.”

After the couple from Michigan strolled away, Maeve stepped back in front, twitching slightly. “There's always a solution,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you have a number to call at the Kennedy house?”

“I've the number in my purse.”

“Well, see, I'm sure there is someone whose job it is to answer the phone and receive all the condolences that are coming in, and so forth. That phone is probably ringing off the hook from leaders all over the world.”

“Right,” Maeve said eagerly.

“So I would recommend calling and say that you're here, but you know you'll have to come back at a later date. Without Bobby, Ethel Kennedy is going to need more help with those children than ever before. That poor woman. It's just such a tragic shame it
hurts
. All of it.”

“Indeed,” said Maeve.

“I'm just saying what you
might
do,” Mr. Hinton said.

Maeve felt foolish that she hadn't worked all this out herself. “To call over there, you mean?” she said. “Yes, yes, I'm sure you're right. I'll run back up to the room, then, and see if I can get someone to answer.”