Mercies To Ourselves

From a long-ago TV show: two men, in conversation.

“Small world,” one mused to another.

“Yes,” the other replied. “Microscopic.”

And so it can be. My mother passed along to me her fascination with destiny – those incidents where the irony or coincidence seem too extraordinary, too inevitable to be counted an accident. But where, often enough, the larger implications of fate are harder to read.

I wonder if Robert had any trouble reading them.

It was nearing midnight, and those in the tired crowd at the Jersey City train station were eager to purchase their sleeping car berths and settle in for the ride and the night. The conductor stood at the entrance to the car, whose bottom step was at the same level as the platform but with a small, tight space in-between.

The War between the States had been raging for more than three years, and many on the platform were soldiers, making their way to or from home. A sharp whistle warned that the train would be pulling out of the station in just a few minutes. The restless line surged forward.

Robert was in the line. Tired, he had one hand stretched across the small gap between train and platform, leaning against the nearest car. Suddenly, the train lurched forward, just as someone jostled into him from behind. He lost his balance and slipped down into the gap.

He tried to push himself back up, but the space was too tight, and the other passengers were too intent on reaching the conductor. The train moved again. Another whistle blew. Any moment, Robert knew, he could be crushed beneath the iron wheels.

Then, from behind him, a great hand reached down, seized his coat collar, and yanked him back up onto the platform.

Robert turned to thank his rescuer, then paused as he saw the man’s face. He recognized Edwin Booth, one of the most famous actors in America.

The line was moving, the conductor waiting. Robert expressed a quick word of gratitude, which Mr. Booth, making his own way in the line, graciously waved off. He had no way of knowing that the young man he’d just saved was Robert Todd Lincoln … the then-president’s oldest son.

Robert never seems to have told his father what happened that night. He was on his way to look in on his family at the White House, but more eager to move on from there and take his newly appointed place on the staff of General Ulysses S. Grant. He did mention the incident to some of his Army friends, one of whom happened to be a friend of Booth's, too. The man wrote Booth a note of appreciation, wondering if he realized whose life he had saved at the train station.

Booth was pleasantly surprised. He was a great supporter of President Lincoln, and glad to have done his hero (as well as Robert) the kindness. He’d really thought nothing more of what had happened that night. He’d been more intent at the time on his conversation with his traveling companion, John Ford – owner of Ford’s Theater, in Washington D.C.

About a year later, President Lincoln and his wife opted to take in an evening show at that theater. They invited Robert, just back from the war, to join them, but he demurred, preferring to spend the evening with a friend. He never forgave himself for being absent when his father was shot that night – by Edwin Booth’s younger brother, John.

Robert stood for hours by the deathbed, watching his father fade into eternity.

Watching presidents die became a tragic lifelong habit for Robert. He was standing near President James Garfield on the platform of a D.C. train station one Saturday morning in 1881 when a crazed office-seeker shot the president down.

Twenty years later, Robert had just stepped away from his friend, President William McKinley, who was shaking hands with a long line of admirers. Robert heard a shot ring out, and the cries of the horrified crowd. McKinley, too, had been felled by an assassin.

Small wonder, perhaps, that Robert lived a rather grim, solemn life. Those who knew them both noted that he had none of his father’s famous humor, or special gift for enjoying people. He achieved considerable professional success, but could never be sure how much of it was his own, and how much came with being the son of the nation’s favorite president.

In his old age, he was invited by yet another president to attend an upcoming social event. Robert declined. “They’d better not ask me,” he said. “There is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”

It is said that Edwin Booth – shattered by his younger brother’s murder of Lincoln – took some comfort, in years to come, from what happened that night at the train station. Knowing he was at least able to save Robert’s life … to do that small kindness for the president he admired so much.

Most of us try to do what we can for people, in the moments God puts before us. In truth, we have so little say in whose path we cross, or in what instant we encounter them. Sometimes, we are graced to make a small difference … to speak a timely, encouraging word … to intercede, perhaps, in a moment of quandary or pain or frustration. Or danger.

Often, we want to do so much more. All of us have souls we especially yearn to see saved.

But there are limits. Edwin could spare Robert from dying, but not from a lifetime of Death. In the end, the actor’s kindness turned out to be as much a mercy to himself as it was to the ill-fated president, or his son.

Are the people in whom ‘ve made my small investments of time and effort any the better for what little I could do for them? Am I any better, for doing it?

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Jesus said. Maybe He sees to it that we do exactly that – touch our own destiny, in brushing the fate of others.

“You can’t free a fish from water,” I heard another man say this week, on another TV show. Maybe not.

Still … trying makes me feel a little less wet.