The Train of Small Mercies

by David Rowell

  But to Lionel it was a job—a summer job cleaning up after mostly rich white slobs all day up and down the East Coast and doing everything possible to make sure they didn’t have to lift a finger for themselves. Yes, it paid particularly well, and he was grateful for that. (Maurice had only to make a few calls to get Lionel straightened away with the Penn Central Railroad.) But he wouldn’t be grateful for having to be on his feet for sometimes twelve hours straight at a time, and he wouldn’t be grateful for too many days of his first summer after his freshman year in college in a thickly starched shirt and jacket and a hat that cut into his scalp by the fourth hour of his shift, or for wearing shoes as stiff as toolboxes.

  For Lionel, it was hard enough living back at home after enjoying so much freedom down in North Carolina for two semesters, at Winston-Salem State. He could handle only so much forced reverence being slung his way between now and the middle of August.

  “What you have on your back is about tradition,” his father had told him, as Vera set down the sausage and eggs. His mother tried to offer Lionel a sympathetic smile that said, There’s nothing you can do but let him talk. “It’s about respect. The union. Men who knew the only way they could get respect themselves was to say, ‘Here is who we are, here is our service to you, and here is what we are going to demand for a job well done.’ Pullman porters are, or were, the only union black men had in this country, and you want to know what’s so special about the uniform? Boy, learn your history. Don’t go in that first train car like you don’t understand what I’m saying, because you do.”

  “I’ve been listening,” Lionel said, and began to eat.

  “All right, then.”

  “Most of the time,” Lionel said, and smiled, revealing his first mouthful. Maurice then folded the sports section and hit his son over the knee with it.

  “It’s an honor and a privilege for any man to be on that train, and I know you understand that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Senator Kennedy,” Maurice began, but then he hardly knew where to start. “Bobby Kennedy stood up for the black man when no other white man would.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lionel said.

  “Your father always likes to sell President Johnson short,” Vera said. “LBJ has done a lot for Negroes, too. And don’t you forget that, either.”

  Maurice shook his head. “You can’t mention LBJ in the same breath as Bobby,” he said. They had this conversation over and over.

  “Well, we’re not going to talk about all that this morning,” she said.

  “No, no, we’re not,” Maurice said. “But you’re on a train carrying the man who was well on his way to being the next president of this country. Well on his way, winning California like that. The Golden State. The big prize. And a damned important president he was going to be—for all of us. Not just black folks. Like Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy looked into the soul of this country and—”

  Vera put down her coffee and raised her eyebrows in a way that made clear that this morning was not the time for sermonizing. Maurice smiled and waved his hand in the air. “Anyway, son, if you see that coffin, you say a prayer for Bobby Kennedy, you hear?”

  Washington

  The room’s troubled air-conditioning unit rattled like a farm machine, and Maeve was happy to step back out again into the hallway. It was still and quiet there, and she stood in front of her room without moving until she was startled by a family of five spilling out of the door just across the hall. She moved past them quickly and waited for the elevator man, whose generally twitching mouth and roaming eyes made her fondness for Mr. Hinton even stronger.

  In the lobby she waited behind a rotund man in a pin-striped suit who was asking about the dinner menu at the Old Ebbitt Grill.

  “Would you know if they serve rack of lamb?” the man said in a wet voice. “I would most enjoy a good rack of lamb before I leave, and I haven’t found a place yet that serves it.”

  After Mr. Hinton had coached him, Maeve stepped up and said, “That was exactly the thing to do, Mr. Hinton. I reached someone, finally. They didn’t reschedule, of course—not with everything that’s happened, but I didn’t expect that. Now I just have to wait and see if they’ll call. Maybe it will be some weeks. They didn’t know.”

  “I certainly hope that they do,” he said. “The Kennedy family would be very lucky to have you.”

  Maeve blushed and let her eyes dart across the room before she could look back at him. “Well, that would indeed be an honor,” she said. “All those children, so heartbreaking, it is. And wee Douglas but just a few months. But I won’t count on it. I don’t want to get my hopes up. I do really love it here.”

  “Washington is a wonderful place,” he said. There was so much more he wanted to say—about Washington; about sitting in the Griffith Stadium bleachers on a Sunday afternoon with the sun pouring across your shoulders, despite knowing the hapless Senators would find a way to lose again; about fishing for perch in the Anacostia River on a summer evening or walking over to the glorious Howard Theatre for a concert by Bo Diddley or Smokey Robinson or Sarah Vaughan, or standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and trying to recite the words inscribed on the south wall: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation . . .”

  But as a black man serving white people, he could never forget himself, even for a moment. There were already plenty of people, he knew, who questioned a black concierge in a hotel like the Churchill, in downtown Washington, of all places. Since he had held the job, by and large the hotel guests had treated him with politeness, but he was the most relaxed around the guests from France or England or Spain, guests who had no memory of lynchings and who were quietly appalled by a country that had only a few years ago made legal equal accommodations for black people. Mr. Hinton had worked at the hotel first as a janitor, then as a bellman. He had always been a favorite of the manager’s—Lawrence Whetton, who had been raised by a black woman he loved more than his own mother. For many years Whetton had watched with admiration Mr. Hinton burdened with so many suitcases while smiling as widely as if he were carrying home all the cash he could put his arms around. Hinton’s attitude at work had always been stellar, and he had been dependable in every way—during snowstorms, he never failed to arrive early to sweep the sidewalks when other, younger men complained of their aching backs. There had never been an electrical problem he couldn’t fix or a room’s television he couldn’t set right again. There had been frequent occasions over the twenty years Whetton had run the hotel when he observed guests belittle Hinton. (Once, he had watched Mr. Hinton bend over to get a purchase on a man’s suitcases, and the man said, in an accent long baked in Mississippi, “Boy, those bags cost more than your house, so watch yourself.” The comment so upset Lawrence Whetton that the next day he brought Mr. Hinton into his office and increased his salary by three percent.) When the longtime concierge had died of thyroid cancer, Whetton didn’t hesitate to appoint Mr. Hinton to the job. When the bell captain asked him privately, “Is that really such a good decision, sir, about Hinton? Is that the public face we want for this hotel?” Lawrence Whetton said, “Well, I’m not hiring his face. I’m hiring the whole man.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Mr. Hinton said again to Maeve. “I think you’d really like it here. Nothing against the Bay State. I know it’s special up there, too. But cold. No, you’re at the center of the world when you’re in Washington. I know it would suit you fine.”

  “That it would,” Maeve said. “That it would. Do tell me what you would think of this, Mr. Hinton: I know the senator’s body is coming here by train, and I know they expect a large crowd, but do you think it would be too much for me? I’ve seen so much already, and this was a day to be devoted to the Kennedys, anyway. I’d like to be there, but would it be too much, do you think?”

  Mr. Hinton stroked his chin some more. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Not too much at all. It’s true they’re expecting quite a crowd, and I can
’t say for sure what you’d be able to see exactly. But I think anyone who thought highly of Bobby Kennedy and what he was trying to do for this country—especially anyone from Ireland—should go if they can, by all means. I would go myself if I wasn’t working. Saturdays are the big day for me, the long shift, but I’ll be thinking about Robert Kennedy all day—and his family—and that’s the truth. No, I think that’s a fine idea, as long as you can handle being in a crowd like that. You’re going to be just like me—you’re going to be standing all day.”

  “I can try,” Maeve said. “I’ve never really done anything like that. But I think I’ll try it. My mother would be especially proud of me for seeing the train like that. It’s all so terrible, isn’t it? Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand this country at all, and I’ve lived here for more than ten years. The leaders get killed here, and I don’t understand it at all.”

  Mr. Hinton threw his head back, his eyes closed for a moment. “Well, I’ve lived here all my whole life,” he said, and then he lowered his voice. “And the problem is, I understand it all too well.”

  Pennsylvania

  Delores King sat in Angela’s newly decorated nautical-themed den, paintbrush in hand, while on the television Ted Kennedy was finishing his eulogy. He was reading from a speech his brother had given in South Africa two years earlier.

  “. . . Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.”

  “I wish they’d show Ethel again,” Delores said to the television.

  “They just showed her,” Angela said.

  “How can you be pregnant like that and bury your husband?” Delores asked. “How in the world is she supposed to get through this?”

  “She’s a Kennedy. They just have a way of coping. But it’s beyond me. Remember our Pekingese, Ringo? He got run over over a year ago, and I still fall apart about it.”

  Delores looked at the wet red paint on her posterboard. It read: “Our prayers are with you, Ethel,” but now her choice of red filled her with regret. It was blood red. How could Ethel see this sign and not think of blood? It was just three and a half days ago that Ethel had cradled her husband’s bloodied head in her lap in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, where a busboy named Juan Romero had managed to put a rosary into his hand.

  “I need to start over,” Delores said. She looked over at her daughter, Rebecca, who was not yet five. Rebecca was moving a paintbrush back and forth over her paper, the blue paint long drained from the brush. “You’re doing a good job of painting, Rebecca. I like your pretty blue.”

  Rebecca nodded vigorously. She was much paler than her brothers, since there weren’t any outdoor activities she particularly enjoyed. Her nose came to a sharp point, like a ferret’s, and before she answered a question, she often tilted her head back, which made her look as if she were sniffing out the possibilities of food.

  Delores removed another sheet of poster board and began anew. “I’m going to pick blue, just like you, Rebecca,” she said. Then her eyes went back to the television.

  “Faye and Betty Jean are going to meet us there,” Angela remembered. “Faye’s really busted up about it. You should have heard her on the phone.”

  On screen a camera panned across the congregation, which showed Jimmy Durante sitting a few rows back of a bespectacled Cary Grant.

  “So many people are going to be on that train, they’re saying,” Angela said. “Ethel’s going to feel like she has to entertain them all. What she’d probably like to do is just ride the whole way with the casket and not have to focus on anyone else.”

  “But she’s going to want to be with her children, too,” Delores said quickly. “Kathleen is almost seventeen, and she can maybe help.”

  “I have two kids, and my husband is alive, and I still don’t know how I make it through the day,” Angela said. Her girls were ten and twelve, and she and her husband had just sent them off to their first summer camp, a hundred miles away.

  “Where did you say the boys were again?” Angela asked. “Or did you tell me?”

  “They’re with Arch’s mother,” Delores said. “I had to make up two big—” She mouthed the word “lies.” She had a small laugh at this—at the very idea—but then glancing back at the television, she quickly fell back to her somber expression.

  “What did you tell her?” Angela blew on her paint. Delores glanced over at Rebecca, who had now discovered the baby bottle filled with green.

  “I just said that R had an early B-I-R-T-H day event in the morning and the boys would make it miserable if I had to drag them to it, and that in the afternoon I was signed up to deliver meals for the church, and the boys would go crazy if they were cooped up in the car like that on a Saturday. I ask that kind of thing of her so rarely, and you should see her—” Delores let her mouth drop, and she narrowed her eyes to little slits. “‘Well, I guess if you don’t have any other option.’ She’s always talking about options. As much as Arch works, I have about as many options as I do fur coats.”

  Angela might have laughed at that, but lately she had grown worried about Delores, who seemed to constantly be making some reference to her difficulties or unhappiness. What Angela knew was that in the last year, Delores’s boys had both been suspended from school—Brian, eleven, for fighting, and Greg, twelve, for writing “Fuck Face” on the blackboard when the teacher stepped out of the classroom. She knew, too, that Arch was increasingly bothered by her spending time with Angela—and Faye and Betty Jean. All three friends’ husbands were members of the Rotary Club. They all belonged to the local country club, and all of them went to the First Presbyterian Church, and once a month one of the couples would throw a barbecue. Delores and Arch were always invited, but they almost never attended. Arch called the group the Cocktail Club, and with that name he believed he had picked out a particularly despicable moniker.

  The four families all lived within a few blocks of one another—Delores and Arch were the latecomers, having bought the house five years ago. Only Arch hadn’t attended college, but he had grown his modest tire business, which he started when he came back from the Korean War, into the town’s biggest tire supplier and service center. Tire King, he called it, and that’s how everyone referred to him. The company’s three tow trucks all had the logo emblazoned on the side, with Arch’s grinning face painted underneath.

  Once a year, in the summer, Delores could persuade him to come out for an afternoon on the lake—Faye and her husband had bought a lake house an hour or so outside of town—and she could count on Arch to be polite and hold an expression of contentment for most of the day. He wouldn’t shy away from small talk, since there was common ground enough around the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Arch sometimes had insights into automobile manufacturing that the other men were interested in. But before he and Delores would climb into bed that night, Arch would quietly work himself into a litany of complaints about them.

  “They’ve got everything all figured out,” he was fond of saying. Though only one of the husbands had gone to an Ivy League school, Arch referred to their Harvard degrees and their “perches from their ivory towers,” and he was fixated on the generally soft-looking appearance of their hands.

  Lately, when Delores did mention that she had been with Angela or Betty Jean or Faye, Arch made it a habit to ask what they talked about.

  The night of the California primary, Delores said, “What? Do you want to be in on our makeup tips?”

  “I just know how they like to talk, is all. Life is more complicated than they like to believe,” he said. “There’s a lot going on right now in this country, and more and more people are going to have to choose sides. And all I’m saying is, don’t let the
m fill your head with their revolution talk. And all that baloney.”

  The day after RFK’s assassination, Delores stayed fixated in front of the television. Because there was a gun involved, Brian and Greg were modestly interested, and only complained of boredom by the mid-afternoon. They wanted her to take them to the Moose Lodge to go swimming, but Delores couldn’t tear herself away. For dinner she ordered fish plates from Captain Jim’s, and as Arch and the children ate at the table, Delores ate from a TV tray in the other room.

  There was no uncertainty about what Arch thought of Kennedy. Over the last year, as Kennedy had gone from downplaying any interest in the presidency to actively campaigning that spring, Arch had called him “a mama’s boy” and “arrogant,” and when Kennedy began to more sharply criticize America’s policy in Vietnam, Arch said he wouldn’t mind “taking a swing at those big Kennedy teeth of his.” Now, after he had the children help clear the table, he threw a leg over the easy chair in which Delores was sitting and squeezed his arm around her. “An Arab,” he said. “A stinkin’ Arab, of all people.”

  “So what if Arch asks little R about the birthday party?” Angela asked. “How are you going to keep from getting caught?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet. Do I tell R to L-I-E to him? Maybe. God, what have I gotten myself into?”

  “Would his mother really have said no if you had just told her you were going to see the train, the same thing that thousands of people are going to be doing? Is she really that bad?”

  Rebecca was done with her paints and had moved to Delores’s lap. Delores was becoming frustrated with her friend’s questioning. She stared at the television as she stroked Rebecca’s hair. A camera set high above showed Ethel, her black veil flowing over her shoulders.

  “It’s him, not his mother. Arch would hit the roof, the way he feels about the Kennedys. No, today Rebecca and I are regular fugitives from justice.”