The Train of Small Mercies (3 page)

It was still early, but his father had insisted on Lionel's getting out the door well in advance. Maybe before reporting in he could step into a diner, order a Coke, and read the letter once more. If he did that, he thought, he could clear his head for the rest of the day and fully concentrate on the job. His father was going to want a report of his first shift in excruciating detail—there was no getting out of that—and when he asked Lionel how he thought he did, Lionel wanted to be able to say, “You're asking the new star of the Penn Central how he
did
?” and be convincing.

Down on the subway platform, the heat draped riders like a thick blanket until another train could sweep it away again. Lionel started to remove his hat when he felt the gaze of a little girl holding her mother's hand. Lionel smiled at her, and the girl produced a little tremor of a wave. The mother watched her with some amusement and said, “She said you look nice in your uniform.”

“Well, thank you,” Lionel said to the girl, who was working up the nerve to speak.

“Do you work on the trains?” she asked in an elfin voice.

“That's right,” Lionel said.

“Do you work on this train?”

“No, not this one,” he said. “One that goes farther, that leaves New York.”

The girl then whispered something to her mother, who didn't catch it the first time and needed her to say it once more.

“She says have a good trip.”

The lights of the E train grew wide in the tunnel, and Lionel tipped his hat once more as the crowd shuffled a few steps back. When the train doors opened and Lionel stepped in, he stood next to three nuns who gripped the vertical pole as if the train were still moving. Their faces were as pale as onion skins, and one of them was crying softly, her tears flowing around a large mole on her cheek.

“It's all right, dear,” one of the nuns said to her. “It's all right.”

E
ven as a small child in Cahir, Ireland, Maeve McDerdon had always had a special gift with babies. She was the oldest of four girls, and at six, only she could soothe the piercing cry of Derry, the second child, even when Derry had an ear infection or diaper rash. Maeve wasn't allowed to hold her sister while standing up, but she liked to cradle her in the softest chair in the house—her father's chair—and lock eyes with her and say, “There, there,” in such a way that soon held Derry in a state of mysterious calm. “That's right,” said Maeve as her parents looked on in equal parts admiration and bewilderment. “Listen to Maeve,” Maeve said, and she couldn't help smiling a little with pride. “Sister has you. There, there.”

She had this effect on all her sisters as babies—after Derry was Christine, then Fran—but it was to her father that she felt the most drawn. Larney McDerdon and his brother owned a small pub together, selling fish and chips, champ, and boxty, but Larney was mostly useless with the cooking. Instead, he played the role of regal host, making sure everyone's glasses stayed filled with the bitter ale they served or whiskey, and mostly by telling stories.

“Did I ever tell you about what my brother did to me when I was five years old?” he would say to a table after setting down their plate of soda bread.

Or: “Did I ever tell you about the time my father's bull got loose and made it to Dublin?”

“Did I ever tell you about the time Old Man Dyer went and grabbed a hatchet after me?”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly drowned while sitting in a bucket?”

Some of the stories he told his customers bore some scrap of truth, but he enjoyed the fuller freedoms of making up stories from whole cloth. His wife had long ago grown bored and irritated by his endless stories, and if he and his brother hadn't opened up a pub so that he could tell them to someone else, she claimed she would have gone mad. But Maeve hung on to every word of every tale—even the ones she had heard countless times, even when the stories deviated dramatically from their last telling. Sometimes, that was for the better. At a young age she understood that when her father winked as he spoke, he had broken any obligation to stick to the facts, and she, too, found this possibility joyous.

“Daddy, did you know that Jack Moan came into school with a balloon where his head was supposed to be?” she said to her father one night as he was putting her to bed.

“You don't say,” he said, and even in the darkness she could see his face lighting up.

“It was a red balloon,” she said, “and since that's my favorite color, I didn't tease him the way other children did.”

“They teased him, did they?”

“Yes,” she said. “And one boy tried to pop his head with a pencil, but I took the pencil away and said to leave him be. It was a very red balloon, and I thought it looked nice, and for the rest of the day I had to protect him so nothing would happen to it.”

“Oh, that makes me so proud,” he said. “Raised you right, I have—and your mother.”

Maeve nodded that that was indeed true.

Soon Maeve and her father found themselves trading stories at every turn, and he was so impressed with her imagination that one night, while attending to a dying fire in the stone fireplace, he said to his wife that their Maeve might have found her calling. “Maybe she'll go on to write plays, or write stories same as Joyce,” he said. “I don't see why not, with the mind she has. Why, just the other day she was telling me about—”

“It's all just foolishness,” said his wife. “And please for the love of
God
don't be telling me that her fantastical stories are the thing that she should set her sights on—that
that's
what to do with her life. She's telling lies is what she's doing, and lying is a sin. Or have you forgotten that? It's one thing to have you telling her all the crazy tales of things that happened to you that never happened at all. That may work for your sodden customers at the pub, but do you have to encourage the girl to spend all her time thinking of the same kind of silly rubbish? Really, Larney, what are you thinking?”

In the mornings Maeve was the first to wake up, tending to the littlest girl, and when she had diapered her she crept into her parents' bedroom and looked to see if he was awake yet. If he wasn't, she would tiptoe out again, but not before her mother, eyes wide open, could say, “So I'm of no interest at all to you, is that it?”

As Maeve got older, her body remained as flat as a post, but she was pleased about this, since she had no interest in any of the boys she knew. Instead, she liked working at the pub, cleaning and drying glasses. She had become just as quick to say to a confounded patron, “Did you ever hear about the teacher I had that choked on a poem?” as her father looked on with enjoyment—and some sense of inadequacy, since she was producing new, remarkably detailed stories every day, and he was only recycling his, adding variations and side stories, yes, but he knew she had surpassed him as the better storyteller.

“You should start writing them down—the best ones,” he told her one night while closing the pub.

“Why would I go and do that?” she said. He had never mentioned such a thing to her before—out of fear of what her mother would say if Maeve ever brought it up.

“That's what the best storytellers do,” he said. “How can you be known as a great storyteller if you don't get any of them down?”

“Do you? Write them down, I mean?”

“No,” he said. “But I run a bar, love. My telling stories is just part of the menu, if you see what I mean. I already have my livelihood. But there should be more to it for you. You've two gifts, Maeve: your way with babies and storytelling. And you can do both, of course. No one's saying you can't. But you've got a wonderful imagination that goes well beyond this pub or talking for fun back at the house. I'm just wanting you to know how grand you are, is all.”

Two weeks later, as Maeve was drying the last of the shot glasses, a terrible clatter came from the kitchen. All night Larney had gotten the orders confused and said his head felt like it had been worked on by a potato masher. When Maeve and her uncle raced in, they found him doubled over on the rubber mat of the floor. He would only live for another couple of hours.

With both her parents and now her husband dead, and her only sister having moved away to America, Maeve's mother decided the only way to go forward was to start their lives anew and leave Ireland. By that point she had no interest in running her half of the pub, and her sister, Meg, had done fine opening up her own dress shop in a small town in Massachusetts. They packed up and moved just a few months after the burial.

In that first year in America, no one could remember Maeve saying anything. She was fourteen and seemed to go about her life just waiting for it to be over. She was still attentive and good to her sisters, but at school she could barely look at anyone—not even the few boys who worked up the nerve to whistle at her in the hallways.

Mostly Maeve found ways to avoid being around kids her own age, who bored her with their ridiculous fascination with “the Twist” and
“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”
and the Boston Celtics with all their championships, and she knew she could make money taking care of babies. The first time was for a family that owned two car dealerships in the state, and after that baby became a toddler, she became the nanny for a captain in the army and his wife, who had twins. Somehow she was even better with two babies at a time, but in another couple of years she was ready to move on. It wasn't that she didn't love the children once they could walk or say her name, but babies turned into children who wanted to know why the sky was blue and why fire was hot, and as they got older, they wanted to know why you weren't married and where were your mother and father?

Maeve had never told another story after her father died, and keeping that so had become important to her, though she knew how disappointed he would have been. But not having him as an audience, or a reader, would have taken any pleasure out of the telling. Anyone could make up things, she reasoned. She wasn't interested in impressing people she didn't know or would never meet. And as he had said, there was another gift she had, and that had taken her far away, after all. In recent weeks she had even begun to wonder if it could take her as far as the White House.

E
dwin had wanted a pool in his backyard for as long as he could remember. He was only an average swimmer, quick to get breathless, and when he turned his head out of the water, it had a ruinous effect on his stroke; his legs began to sink, his arms went quickly outward, and yet he was able to regain himself when his face turned back in once more. Mostly he preferred soaking or floating on a raft. He wanted a pool not for the exercise but for the status of being a pool owner.

In his richest fantasy, the pool resembled the Clampetts' luxurious, statue-lined oasis in
The Beverly Hillbillies
. In his more modest visions, he pictured the kind Rock Hudson and Doris Day were always luxuriating beside in their movies: rectangular but generously sized, outfitted with a stiff diving board, with a small pool house for changing. But Edwin worked in the payroll department of the sanitation department, and Lolly worked as an X-ray technician at the local hospital. Their combined salaries allowed them a two-bedroom ranch house that was small by most measures, though it managed to suggest a particular, if shabby, charm.

Edwin still drove a 1958 green Mustang that was unlikely to make another summer's trip to Rehoboth Beach, where he and Lolly rented an oceanfront hotel room at the Sands for one week a year. Even in the extreme temperatures of August, the water at Rehoboth was frigid—too uncomfortable for Lolly—and the appeals of the boardwalk pavilion had worn thin for her over the many years they'd been going. Without children of their own to accompany, she had become too self-conscious to ride the bumper cars or the Saturn 7, which rocked its passengers up and down with jerky, terrifying thrusts. Lolly had come to think, with some resentment, of their time at Rehoboth as more Edwin's trip, a chance for him to play arcade games and sit next to kids a third his age on rides and to play in the ocean with the abandon of a child. What she liked to do most was shop for antiques, or rent a bike or search out a garden tour, but these excursions held little interest for Edwin.

Affording a cement pool was no more realistic for them than buying a seaside cottage, but Lolly had gotten a significant raise earlier in the year, and they could, she said, consider an aboveground one, if they would also put their funds for this year's Rehoboth trip into it. It would be a way to celebrate her raise.

“You can still have pool parties with an aboveground,” Lolly said. “It's still a real pool.” They were sitting in their backyard patio chairs for the first time that spring, and they could hear the rustle of birds once again flying from branch to branch. “They're probably a little less maintenance. Anyway, something to think about.”

“Above ground,” Edwin said, inflecting the words with exotic wonder. Their feet were perched on the ottoman, and Lolly gave his foot a slight tap.

In late May, Edwin bought a model called the Galaxy from the one pool company in town. When completed, it would be eighteen feet long and fifty-two inches tall. In the pool showroom, there was a cardboard cutout, life-size, of a woman in a peach-colored bathing suit standing in the middle of the pool, one hand on her hip, winking. “Let the Galaxy take you to the moon!” she said in a little white bubble.

After all the materials were delivered, Edwin spread everything out across the back lawn. Their yard was small, and there was little question of the pool going anywhere but in the middle, which Lolly could now see would further dwarf the space. Edwin set himself the task of assembling the Galaxy in a week's time, as the pool salesman assured him he could.