Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin Page B
Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
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sofa, as I sometimes did when I could not fall asleep.
I must have dozed off, because the long-drawn-out squeal of a siren awakened me. Three times the siren wailed, paused, then started again, summoning members of the volunteer fire department. I ran downstairs to find my worried parents and their friends. “They’re calling
all
the surrounding towns!” my father exclaimed, listening to the pattern of the alarm. “Not just Rockville Centre,” said my mother. At that moment, my sister Jeanne ran into the house with her friends. “There’s been an awful train wreck!” she announced, breathless. “Two trains—it’s gruesome!” Shaking, she burst into tears. We found out fromher friends that they had followed the crowd to the station after a basketball game at the high school, but the scene was so appalling that they had to turn around and come home. My parents and their friends debated whether they should go into town; I remember my mother remarking that it was ghoulish to be a spectator to misery and unable to do anything about it.
As I eavesdropped, I began to discern in this calamity an opportunity for my own redemption. If there were no priests present, if I could locate a dying person and baptize him “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” thus granting his entrance to heaven, I would earn considerable points toward purging my sin. I grabbed my coat and slipped undetected out the front door while my parents were still absorbed by the catastrophic news. Although it was cold and dark, I wasn’t afraid as I set forth on the familiar route to my grammar school, knowing the train station was in the same direction. Once I rounded the corner at Brower, the pitch-darkness scared me and I considered returning home, but just then one of my sister’s friends offered me a ride, and soon we were joined by hundreds of people, all moving in the same direction. Emergency floodlights and car headlights leached the color from faces as the crowd surged forward. My heart hammered with excitement. I was ready. Though I had no water to pour on the forehead of my convert, I figured I could find some clean snow that would serve the same purpose.
My zeal gave way to horror as I approached the station. The fitful lights picked out people huddled in shock and misery, bandaged heads and limbs, men hustling with difficulty up the embankment carrying a stretcher on which lay a motionless blanketed body. I fought the impulseto flee. Pushing my way toward the tracks, I was small enough to maneuver through the immense crowd that had gathered around the carnage.
It was the worst wreck to date in the history of the Long Island Rail Road, a head-on collision of two trains, one eastbound for Babylon, the other westbound for New York. The collision occurred on a short temporary stretch of single track set up to run trains in both directions while a construction project was under way. The engineer of the eastbound train had inexplicably failed to heed a stop signal and plowed straight into the oncoming train. Most of the casualties were from the front cars on both trains, which were split down the middle by the force of the collision. “It looked like a battlefield,” one policeman said later. “I never heard such screams. I’ll hear them till I die.”
More than forty doctors were at the scene, some still dressed in the tuxedos they had worn to a big event at the local hospital. It was hard to see at first through the haze of the blue light from the acetylene torches used to cut away the steel that was trapping bodies inside the cars. Scores of volunteer firemen aided the doctors in amputations performed by flashlight with only local anesthesia.
Ambulances arrived from as far away as twenty miles. In the glare of their floodlights7 I saw at once that I wasn’t needed. A half-dozen priests were moving through the wreckage, bending down to minister to those in pain, giving last rites, providing comfort to
I must have dozed off, because the long-drawn-out squeal of a siren awakened me. Three times the siren wailed, paused, then started again, summoning members of the volunteer fire department. I ran downstairs to find my worried parents and their friends. “They’re calling
all
the surrounding towns!” my father exclaimed, listening to the pattern of the alarm. “Not just Rockville Centre,” said my mother. At that moment, my sister Jeanne ran into the house with her friends. “There’s been an awful train wreck!” she announced, breathless. “Two trains—it’s gruesome!” Shaking, she burst into tears. We found out fromher friends that they had followed the crowd to the station after a basketball game at the high school, but the scene was so appalling that they had to turn around and come home. My parents and their friends debated whether they should go into town; I remember my mother remarking that it was ghoulish to be a spectator to misery and unable to do anything about it.
As I eavesdropped, I began to discern in this calamity an opportunity for my own redemption. If there were no priests present, if I could locate a dying person and baptize him “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” thus granting his entrance to heaven, I would earn considerable points toward purging my sin. I grabbed my coat and slipped undetected out the front door while my parents were still absorbed by the catastrophic news. Although it was cold and dark, I wasn’t afraid as I set forth on the familiar route to my grammar school, knowing the train station was in the same direction. Once I rounded the corner at Brower, the pitch-darkness scared me and I considered returning home, but just then one of my sister’s friends offered me a ride, and soon we were joined by hundreds of people, all moving in the same direction. Emergency floodlights and car headlights leached the color from faces as the crowd surged forward. My heart hammered with excitement. I was ready. Though I had no water to pour on the forehead of my convert, I figured I could find some clean snow that would serve the same purpose.
My zeal gave way to horror as I approached the station. The fitful lights picked out people huddled in shock and misery, bandaged heads and limbs, men hustling with difficulty up the embankment carrying a stretcher on which lay a motionless blanketed body. I fought the impulseto flee. Pushing my way toward the tracks, I was small enough to maneuver through the immense crowd that had gathered around the carnage.
It was the worst wreck to date in the history of the Long Island Rail Road, a head-on collision of two trains, one eastbound for Babylon, the other westbound for New York. The collision occurred on a short temporary stretch of single track set up to run trains in both directions while a construction project was under way. The engineer of the eastbound train had inexplicably failed to heed a stop signal and plowed straight into the oncoming train. Most of the casualties were from the front cars on both trains, which were split down the middle by the force of the collision. “It looked like a battlefield,” one policeman said later. “I never heard such screams. I’ll hear them till I die.”
More than forty doctors were at the scene, some still dressed in the tuxedos they had worn to a big event at the local hospital. It was hard to see at first through the haze of the blue light from the acetylene torches used to cut away the steel that was trapping bodies inside the cars. Scores of volunteer firemen aided the doctors in amputations performed by flashlight with only local anesthesia.
Ambulances arrived from as far away as twenty miles. In the glare of their floodlights7 I saw at once that I wasn’t needed. A half-dozen priests were moving through the wreckage, bending down to minister to those in pain, giving last rites, providing comfort to
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