The Train of Small Mercies

by David Rowell

  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.”

  Washington

  During 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.”

  New Jersey

  Michael 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.

  The sun had dipped almost out of view and had left the sky resembling a scoop of rainbow sherbet, Michael thought, but he was content to think it without saying so to his mother.

  “We’ll have to go to the movies sometime soon,” she said.

  Michael nodded. “Yep.”

  She absently let her hand touch his hair. He often moved closer when she did this—for his whole life he had believed there was no better sensation than feeling his mother’s nails draw little circles across his scalp—but she could feel a rigidness to his body now.

  “Yeah, that will be good,” she said. “I’ve missed my movie partner.”

  Michael nodded and closed his eyes.

  “I was so worried about you,” she said, and she was embarrassed that her voice had cracked. There was no mistaking it. Michael kept his eyes closed, but he didn’t mind about the crack. It was all right if she needed to cry. This was their swing, their porch, their house. No one was going to tell them what they could or couldn’t do.

  Washington

  Here we are, Maggie-McDunnough-just-one-drink-I-don’t-believe-in-wearing-a-ring.” The cabdriver brought two glasses of Irish whiskey—an order he had first thought to be clever but now lamented as unoriginal—to their corner table. He had hoped that the bar, which he frequented several times a week, would be quieter, since she didn’t seem like someone who would be willing to raise her voice to be heard, but it was a Saturday night, and he had little reason to be surprised by the raucous crowd. And he was pleased for the people he knew here—already he had spotted a lot of the regulars—to catch sight of him with a woman so striking. They would, he was sure, ask him about the dark-haired beauty later that week.

  Maeve took the glass and swirled the liquor
around while looking past his shoulder, as was her habit with men who showed any interest in her. He studied the long, elegant slope of her nose and considered how close he could lean forward. “So you say you like Washington so far, then,” he said. She had barely said anything to him since getting into his cab, and he knew enough that if he said anything much duller, she was going to insist he take her on to the hotel.

  “I do,” she said, and took her first sip, which burned her throat more than she had imagined. Maeve generally took a dim view of alcohol—mostly because she had rarely been around people whose company didn’t greatly deteriorate with drinking.

  “Well, like I said, I probably won’t be here much longer,” said the driver, whose name was Steve, though recently he liked to introduce himself as Vincent. He was finishing an adult education art class and had developed some affinity for Vincent van Gogh. “I’m sure I’m going to get called over. And who knows? If I survive, maybe it’ll give me some rich experiences to draw on. I’m an artist, so I might get my horizons expanded being in a foreign country like that.”

  “And what sort of artist would you be?” Maeve asked. He watched her drink more of her whiskey and could feel the time expiring with every sip. Even if she really was married, which he didn’t believe, she had given in to having a drink, and that let him hope for at least a slim chance with her.

  “I like oils,” he said, a rare answer of brevity that he thought made him sound self-assured. But when her face didn’t reveal the barest hint of being impressed, he added, “Yeah, I like painting street scenes, portraits—I do a lot of portraits. That’s probably my forte. I haven’t sold a lot yet, but I haven’t really put a lot of time into the whole commercial racket of it—selling for money. Working with dealers. I like just really focusing on the purest aspects of it—trying to capture a person’s soul, their whole being, just letting that come through on the canvas.” He had only completed four paintings: a picture, from memory, of a collie he had as a boy; a portrait of a girl he dated for two weeks; a portrait of a girl he dated for one week; and a self-portrait in his yellow taxi.

  “So you’re the starving-artist type—is that it, then?” Maeve said. “Drive around a taxi while you nurse your talents?”

  He couldn’t tell if she was mocking him. “Pretty much,” he said. “Painting, making a little bread how I can, studying the greats, just trying to grow as an artist.”

  He nodded at someone he recognized in an exaggerated tipping back of the head. “So do you like any particular artists or styles? Modern? Expressionism?”

  Maeve took another sip—two more, he noticed, and her glass would be empty. “I’m not very well versed,” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to talk about what I like, really.”

  “Do you like van Gogh?” he asked—too eagerly.

  “Maybe,” Maeve said. “What’s a famous work of his?”

  “A lot of his self-portraits are really well-known,” he said. “He painted a lot of fields of flowers. You’d recognize them, I’ll bet. I can’t think of the names. But I don’t really paint flowers too much. I like painting people.”

  “Yes, you said capturing people. Let me ask you a silly question. Why would anyone want to do that? What do you do with that, capturing a soul? You have to be really interested in people to do that sort of thing, I would imagine. Maybe that’s why I’m not much of a connoisseur. I don’t much like art with people in it.”

  She seemed engaged for the first time, he thought, and he wanted to offer an intellectual response. He looked up at the light fixture to give the impression of sorting through any number of complex theories on the matter; he was trying to remember something from the two chapters he had read from a biography on van Gogh that he had checked out from the library, but the early pages had dealt mostly with the painter’s childhood.

  “Why don’t you like people in paintings?” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before. Is that because you’re only into abstracts? Like Jackson Pollock?”

  Maeve shook her head. “I guess I find portraits a bit intrusive,” she said. “A bit too intimate, or personal.”

  “But that’s the whole point,” he said, smiling like a schoolchild who finally knew an answer. “You want the intimacy. You want it to be personal. That’s what I was saying earlier. You want the whole person to come through. Yeah, intimate.”

  Maeve shrugged. “Oh, well. That’s why I don’t much fancy it.”

  His mouth began to droop. “Huh.” He tried to think of a different point of view to offer when he saw that she had finished her glass.

  “Well, my husband will wonder what’s keeping me,” she said. The lies she had told him were easy, but she couldn’t help feeling a little exhilarated by the old pleasure of them. Part of her wanted to sit there for the rest of the night and build more intricate stories, layer upon layer, but she was still feeling a little light-headed and fragile.

  “Okay,” he said in a mournful bass note. “I guess we can’t keep him waiting.” He felt for the car keys in his pocket. “What does your husband do, anyway? Is he some kind of Irish diplomat or something?”

  “He’s a writer,” Maeve said. “And thank you for the drink.”

  They worked their way up from the table, and as they walked out the door he saw that the bartender’s eyes were fixed on Maeve. That should have lifted Steve’s spirits, and he could still have offered the bartender a sly smile that suggested he’d have plenty to fill him in on next time, but he felt too defeated for that.

  Once back in the cab, he glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “So I don’t guess you’ve ever let anyone paint your portrait before?”

  “No, no. Not at all,” she said. She almost laughed at the idea, it was so absurd. After a couple of turns she saw that he was back to watching her in the mirror.

  “Yeah, I figured,” he said. “I was just curious.” The car turned a corner, and Maeve could see the outline of her hotel.

  “So what does your husband write, exactly?”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “all of his books are about people. The things they do, the things they say. They’re”—she waited for the right word to fall—“intimate. They’re all very intimate.”

  Pennsylvania

  Delores and Arch were on either side of Rebecca’s hospital bed. She was surrounded by so much equipment that she looked tiny, like one of her dolls. Occasionally one of the monitors, connected to her body by thick, gray cords, beeped or chirped, and they would turn their gaze in alarm to the bank of equipment, not knowing which of the pieces had sounded, or why.

  The doctor had explained that there was swelling on Rebecca’s brain, but he was less concerned about that than the fluid buildup in her lungs. What he said about her unconsciousness was less clear to them, but as he spoke Delores kept looking down at Rebecca. Her face was exceptionally pale, and the tube down her throat had left her thin lips white and dry. Every time the doctor finished a thought, Delores looked down at Rebecca and smiled, as if to reassure her that these were all good things they were hearing.

  They were uncertain how much longer they could remain in the room. Visiting hours were over in a few minutes—at nine o’clock—as one of the nurses had said earlier, but were parents considered visitors? They hadn’t thought to ask. Delores couldn’t imagine stepping away for anything besides getting a Coke from the machine around the corner, and the waiting room down the hall might as well have been the next town over. She didn’t know when the doctor would be back to check on Rebecca, or whether he would do so again until the morning, unless her condition changed. She should have asked him about that, she thought now. Her mind felt emptied out, as if someone had turned her upside down, like a purse. All she and Arch had been able to manage was to nod and say thank you whenever the doctor or nurse came in. She hoped that Arch better understood everything they had been told.

  Arch hadn’t asked much about the accident itself, and it was clear now that Delores’s version of the day would get
no further scrutiny. She had explained that she called Carlos about the tire only because she knew how busy Arch was on Saturday, and hearing this he had simply shaken his head in agreement.

  “You hungry?” Arch asked. “I don’t know what they have in the cafeteria. Cafeteria food. But I can go get you something, if you want.”

  “No, you go. I can’t eat.”

  Arch didn’t move. “You know, the last time we were in the hospital, she was seven pounds, eleven ounces. Seven-eleven. That was always easy to remember.”

  “She came right out, didn’t she? About an hour of pushing, and whoosh.” Delores’s mouth began to quiver, and Arch reached over and held her hand. With her other hand Delores gripped her face.

  “Hey, hey, she’s going to make it through this, Delores,” Arch said. He squeezed until Delores could look at him. “She’s going to wake up. They think she’s going to.”

  “If I had brought her to the doctor right away, she wouldn’t be like this. We wouldn’t be here.” Delores had kept circling back to this point, and each time Arch tried a variation to the same response. There was something almost soothing about the repetition of it, like the way the nurse kept coming in to check Rebecca’s vitals, or the constant paging of another doctor over the floor intercom.

  “It’s nobody’s fault, D,” Arch said. “Children fall. Children have accidents.” Then he added: “And sometimes parents have to bring them to the hospital.”

  For a time they listened to the low drone of the machinery in the room, and then Delores thought to ask, “What do the boys know?”