The Train of Small Mercies (22 page)

A reporter who had paid his respects to Mrs. Kennedy mentioned to Big Brass that she was doing very well, considering. While everyone else around her was falling apart, the reporter said, Mrs. Kennedy was trying to cheer people up. She told a joke to one of her girlfriends that the reporter didn't quite follow, but the point was, she was telling a joke. But Big Brass didn't believe that. That just couldn't be.

 

 

 

Lionel's lower back had turned stiff, and he couldn't remember when he had kept a hat on so long. The work was already monotonous.

Here and there he had time to think about Adanya. He wondered if she looked different somehow, though it had been just three weeks since he had seen her. But women talked about the glow, and if he saw her now, he wondered if he would recognize it. Could anyone else?

They had met the first week of that freshman year. A half-dozen students from his dorm were meeting up with some girls they had met at the first football game, and Lionel's roommate dragged him along to make the numbers work out. They met at a restaurant called Tubby's, Adanya seated in front of him. When Lionel introduced himself, she smiled and pointed to her throat, then shook her head. Lionel didn't understand until the girl next to Adanya put her arm around her and said, “We've been in rush, so we've been singing and shouting all week, the way they make you do. And Adanya lost her voice
completely
. They haven't made their selections yet, and she's worried no one is going to pick her because she can't say anything. But I told her they wouldn't turn such a cute face down.” The girl then reached over and squeezed Adanya's cheeks before Adanya playfully slapped her away.

“Well, at least you know you won't end up saying the wrong thing,” Lionel said. Adanya smiled, and as Lionel talked for the rest of the dinner, she kept on smiling. He asked her questions she could answer by shaking her head, and then for fun he asked her questions she couldn't answer that way. When he asked her what she planned to major in, she pantomimed playing the piano—she was a music major. When he asked her where she was from, she pointed to the floor. It took him a while to understand that she was from right there in Winston-Salem.

Within a few weeks they were spending all their time together, and he had already been fed twice at her parents' dinner table. In the evenings she would play piano in one of the music hall practice rooms, and he would bring his books or his art pad and sit in the corner of the cramped room and draw his characters. Lionel was planning to introduce what would be the first black superheroes in comics. His favorite creation was Reginald Warman, aka Black Justice, who had no superhuman powers to speak of but had trained as a detective and won international weight-lifting competitions; he was kicked out of the force by a corrupt white police chief who was caught by Warman taking payoffs from the city's most notorious gangsters. The police chief planted drugs in Warman's locker as a way to get him locked up, but this costly mistake gave birth to Black Justice, and Black Justice had been a thorn in the chief's side ever since, always apprehending the criminals before the chief's inept police force could. Black Justice's calling card, which he had pinned onto a suit jacket of one of the criminals he left piled in a heap for the police to arrest, was a black X made of iron.

Lionel had reams of characters with intricate biographies and stacks of notebooks that charted their current visual incarnation. Adanya liked hearing Lionel chronicle their stories—some written down, many still forming in his mind, though she had no particular interest in comics. She admired him for wanting to do something no one else had been able to do, for his conviction that there was a place in such a white-dominated business for him and his characters. That spring semester, they became pinned, and sometimes they laughed at how ludicrously secure they felt in their relationship, in each other. The plan was that they would wait to get married until after graduation, and the idea of children hovered out there on the horizon, real but plenty far away. She wanted to come to New York and, like her mentor, Alice Coltrane, start playing with New York jazz musicians on the scene. And with the two major comics publishers, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, based there, New York was the natural place for him as well.

But now there was a baby. Adanya could have the baby, he figured, and eventually return to classes while her mother watched over the child. But they would have to be married for her parents to support them in any way, and in any case, they would have to live with Adanya's family until graduation. He liked both her parents well enough, though they were much more traditional and conservative than his own, and their house was small; it was impossible to envision all five of them living there and his not feeling miserable. Or, Lionel wondered, would Adanya possibly consider putting the baby up for adoption? Maybe they could talk about all the options in some reasonable way.

On his break Lionel read her letter once more, the whiff of perfume still faintly on the page, despite how many times he had opened and closed it. He studied the little heart she made at the bottom, plump and radiating. Since they'd been dating, her hearts had improved measurably.

Lionel rejoined Big Brass, who was due his own break now.

“You think you're ready to handle the bar for a little bit, rook?” Big Brass asked him. “I was going to take five.” As the trip had extended, more passengers were coming into the snack car, and a few had asked Big Brass for drinks Lionel had never heard of. There was a list of drinks and their ingredients under the bar, but it looked at least twenty years old, with the type badly faded, the paper worn so thin that it wouldn't survive another folding.

“Yes, sir, take your time,” Lionel said, too confident to be convincing, but Big Brass moved behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. They were approaching a packed station platform, and the conductor slowed the train to a speed so halting, it felt like it was being pushed by crew members. From his window Lionel caught a glimpse of the crowd: most were so slick with perspiration that they looked as if they had just stepped out of a rain shower, but they were suddenly revived by the train's arrival. As the train went past, the crowd surged all at once as several police officers shouted their gruff warnings about getting too close.

The snack car was filled with smoke, which had begun to irritate Lionel's eyes, but maybe he would get used to this, too. The men with the press tags around their necks talked casually to men Big Brass had told him were senators and congressmen, but it was clear these were not conversations that would make their way into the next day's paper. The reporters ordered the most drinks. The air conditioner had remained broken, and with each state the train passed through, the reporters' ties became more open at the throat.

A man in a dark suit, with a face not much wider than the knot of his tie, entered the car and moved purposefully to the bar. “Mrs. Kennedy would like a Coke,” the man said brusquely. The request hit Lionel like an electric jolt. How much ice did she like? Should he send along what was left in the can? Lionel tried to steady himself and poured slowly. When he handed the man the drink, the man stuffed two dollar bills into the tip jar.

Lionel wondered if it was possible for him to go to the last car, before the coffin was unloaded at Union Station, and steal a glimpse—at least for his father. This was too risky, he knew, and he wasn't going to ask, but until Big Brass was back from his break, it was nice to try to imagine how he could do it.

I
nside Union Station they were all stretched along the platform of track 17. The man behind Maeve had his arm pressed against the middle of her back, and the woman next to her was pushed squarely against her shoulders. That woman was getting the occasional report from the man next to her and told Maeve that the train was even further off schedule. It was only puttering through Delaware now.

Sometimes there was a sudden, violent surge of movement, pushing Maeve and those around her almost off their feet. The air was as heavy as wet laundry, but if Maeve pushed her way through, back up to the main hall to quench her thirst, she knew she would never get her place back. As it was, her position in the crowd didn't seem half bad. She was fifteen feet from the platform's edge, toward the end.

“It's so hard on the legs, and I'm
used
to being on my feet the whole day,” the woman next to Maeve said. Around her dull blond hair, she wore a kerchief which mostly matched the scarlet shade of her lipstick.

Maeve nodded vaguely. For the last couple of hours she had mostly avoided attempts at conversation, but it was occurring to her that this was probably only making the time go by that much more slowly.

“Are you here by yourself?” the woman asked.

Maeve said she was.

“My sister was supposed to come, but she decided to drive up to Maryland because she thought she would have a better view. She was smart.”

Maeve smiled.

“They're just lining the tracks the whole way, the reports say,” the woman said. “Sometimes it's miles at a time. It's amazing. It's a real tribute.”

“'Tis,” Maeve said.

“Where are you from, if I may ask?” said the woman.

“I live in Boston,” Maeve said. “But I'm originally from Ireland.”

The woman's face brightened. “You drove all this way from Massachusetts? My, I'm impressed.” She tugged on her kerchief, trying to straighten it but only making it more lopsided.

“Actually, I was already here—on vacation, really.”

“I see. My husband and I honeymooned in Boston,” the woman said.

Maeve smiled once more.

“He was home on leave—this was during World War Two,” the woman went on, grateful for the occasion to talk. “He had two weeks, and we didn't know each other very well at all. We had gone on a few dates the prior year, in 1942. And he was called up. We exchanged some letters, nothing—the way I saw it—too serious. I did send him a picture because he had asked for one, but it wasn't anything glamorous. My mother had a picture of me out in the yard washing our dog. I sent it to him without thinking anything of it. He always said that picture was what sealed it. When he came home on leave—we lived in Rhode Island then—he had arranged to have dinner, and it was all candle lights and a nice booth. And wine. And before the check could come, he had gotten down on his knee and proposed. And that was that. He wanted to be married right away, before he went back, and that's what we did. We eloped and drove the two hours to Boston for nearly a week—stayed at a little inn in Beacon Hill. And then he shipped off, just like that. Just like I knew he had to.”

Maeve looked into the woman's eyes, then said, “That must have been hard, having to be apart so quickly like that.”

“Oh, I never saw him again,” the woman said. “No, he was killed in Normandy. About three months later.”

“My goodness!” Maeve said. “Oh. So tragic.”

“That it was,” the woman said, and she showed a smile that made clear there were no more tears for him. “But it was happening to so many young men. It was a long time ago. And yet.” The woman stopped and brought her husband back into her mind once more. His hair was dark, with a little cowlick in the front that she played with constantly that one week together. One of his teeth had been chipped in a fight when he was a teenager, and she followed along the uneven bottom of it with her finger, the sharp edge like a broken shell. One of his eyes was blue, the other green, and when they married she wondered if she ever would get used to that. It was as if he were two men in the same body. She remembered the way he looked leaning down for his duffel bag at the airport on their last day together. He sucked in his lip, like a child determined not to cry.

“Yes, a long time ago,” she said. “I've been in Washington for twenty years.” Ordinarily, she might have stopped there, but going back to being silent was too much for the woman to consider. “I work as a tour guide at the Capitol. Taking visitors through the House chamber and the Senate chamber, the interior galleries, through the rotunda. Narrating the history. I've been there for sixteen years now.”

The Capitol was a world away from holding babies and changing diapers and singing little nonsense songs to lull them into their naps, and suddenly Maeve felt a little foolish. “Did you ever get to meet Senator Kennedy, then?” she asked.

“I did get to meet him once, yes,” the woman said. “Just about a year ago. Before he entered the race. He was standing by himself, just outside the Senate chamber. There was about to be a vote, and he was standing almost like a nervous schoolboy, almost like he had to work up the nerve to go inside. I was between tours, and I just walked over to him. I explained that I worked there, and he wanted to know all about what I did, how long I had been here, and he told me his favorite painting in the Capitol, which he said was
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
, by Emanuel Leutze. Said he liked the sense of‘manifest destiny' of it—I'll always remember that. He was exceptionally charming. Talking to me like I was the only person in the world.”

“That's wonderful,” Maeve said. Her legs felt rubbery, her shoulders pulled to the ground. She tried to bend her knees, and that was the last thing she remembered before everything went dark.

D
espite his deadline, Roy had stayed for the train because he was sure the scene in their backyard would give him some powerful image, some metaphor to work with: Jamie's war injury seen against the body of the man who was likely to have been the next president, who might have ended the war. Jamie surrounded by family, the Kennedy family possibly gathered around the casket. Roy was trying to write the lead paragraph in his mind when the rumble of the train's locomotive engine announced its arrival. Everyone on the Wests' back lawn jumped to their feet and rushed to the edge of the tracks, except Ellie, who waited for Jamie to get his crutches under his arms. As he moved to join the others, she ran her hand over his back and said, “Well, here we go.” Next door, the two Wilkinson boys had mostly fallen apart waiting for the train, and their mother was inside putting them down to bed. But now she came running out, as if the train were returning her husband from Vietnam.