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.”