Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

On June 21, 1974, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., ruled in Morgan v. Hennigan that the Boston School Committee had “systematically disadvantaged black school children” in the public school system. The only remedy, the judge concluded, was to begin busing students between predominantly white and predominantly black neighborhoods to desegregate the city’s public high schools. The school in the neighborhood with the largest African American population was Roxbury High School. The school in the neighborhood with the largest white population was South Boston High School. It was decided that these two schools would switch a significant portion of their student bodies. This order was to take effect at the beginning of the school year, on September 12, 1974. Students and parents had less than ninety days from the date of the ruling to prepare.

“You just, you know, you ever have the feeling that things are supposed to be one way but they’re not? And you don’t know why because you’ve never known, like, anything but what you see? And what you see is, you know”—she waves at Old Colony Avenue—“this?”

“But you know, right?” “Know what?” “Know it’s not what you were meant for.” Jules taps the space between her breasts. “In here.” “Well, sweetie,” her mother says, with no fucking idea what she’s on about, “what were you meant for?” “I’m not saying it that way.” “What way?” “The way you’re saying it.” “Then how’re you saying it?” “I’m just trying to say I don’t understand why I don’t feel the way other people seem to feel.” “About what?” “About everything. Anything.”

While her lips say, “That’s quick thinking,” her head says, I pray you don’t breed.

And it isn’t about race. She’d be just as angry if they told her she has to send her kid across the city to Revere or the North End or someplace mostly white. The thought occurs to her that maybe she wouldn’t be as mad, maybe she’d just be really annoyed, but then she hammers another sign to another stick and thinks, Fuck that, I don’t see color. I see injustice.

“G’bless,” he says before hanging up. G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless. Blameless, sure, but powerless too.

As a project rat herself, Mary Pat knows all too well what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you. And if they’re wrong about you, then they’re probably wrong about everything else.

“We were happy.” He says, “We were happy?” It hits her—they weren’t. She was. But he never seemed to be. “We hit a few bumps.” He says, “Those weren’t bumps, Mary Pat. They were our fucking lives shriveling. From the time I could walk, all I ever saw was hate and rage and people pounding booze so they wouldn’t feel it. Then they’d get up the next day and do the same fucking thing all over again. For fucking decades. I spent my whole life dying. Whatever time I got left, I’m living it. I’m sick of drowning.”

Donna shrieks again. And so does Mary Pat. It feels good for a moment to remember who they were before they again have to sit with who they are.

“What’d you fucking say?” Dottie asks. “Aren’t you from a broken home? Didn’t your husband fuck around and then leave you to raise the kids by yourself? I’ve noticed the people who bitch most about the coloreds and their bad qualities, they usually have those qualities themselves. I mean, when’s the last time you did even half the amount of work around here the rest of us do?”

They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall. He has no idea where it all comes from—the loyalty and the rage, the brotherhood and the suspicion, the benevolence and the hate. But he suspects it has something to do with the need for a life to have meaning.

It’s a soft summer night that smells of imminent rain. Bobby walks Carmen toward her car. He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.

She hasn’t seen any of her brothers in years. Michael Sean joined the Merchant Marines and drops occasional Christmas cards from ports of call she otherwise would be unaware of—Cabo Verde, Maldives, South Sandwich. Donnie lives in Fall River and installs gutters. There’s no bad blood between them, just the unspoken acknowledgment that blood itself is all that ever tied them together.

Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby.

She was trying to tell me, Mary Pat thinks. And I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear. Because I didn’t want to. Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your world.

“Our suburbs,” he says, “are designed to escape the melting pot. But now they’re telling all the people they left behind precisely how they should go about rubbing elbows.”

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.” “Phew,” she says. “You’re cynical.” “I prefer skeptical.”

“When you’re a kid and they start in with all the lies, they never tell you they’re lies. They just tell you this is what it is. Whether they’re talking about Santa Claus or God or marriage or what you can or can’t make of yourself. They tell you Polacks are this way and wops are another and don’t even get us started on the spics and the niggers but you sure can’t trust them. And they tell you that’s the Way. And you, you’re a fucking kid, you think, I want to be part of the Way. I sure don’t want to be outside the Way. I gotta live with these people my whole life. And it’s warm in there. So warm. The rest of the world? That’s so fucking cold. So you embrace it, you know?”

“I told you, Detective Coyne, that you can’t take everything from someone. You have to leave them something. A crumb. A goldfish. Something to protect. Something to live for. Because if you don’t do that, what in God’s name do you have left to bargain with?”

“I think . . .” he manages as he works his way back into a sitting position, “I think she did it as a small mercy.” She looks back at him. “What?” “Possibly,” he says. “Mercy from what?” He doesn’t say anything for a bit. “Mercy from what?” “I told them to fry him.” “Huh?” “Throw him on the third rail,” he explains. “Fry him. Show the rest of the spooks in this city what happens if they come down to our part of town.” He looks at the blood slowly consuming his coat and the tape she’s wrapped around it. His skin is the blue-white of mackerel. “Jules didn’t like that. She kept saying let him go.” He snorts. “We couldn’t let him go. No. I told them, ‘Fuck that. Fry him.’ The boys, they listened—boys do that. They picked the kid up and were about to toss him between the second and third rail, and yeah, that’s when she hit him. Which ended any idea that it was a fucking accident, thank you very much. He was dead the second he hit the ground.”

“And you couldn’t forgive her, could you?” she asks. “For the mercy?” He hisses against the pain for a moment. “If she was weak there, where else would she be weak? In a police station? On the stand? I’m sorry, Mary Pat, but you know there’s a code down here. Live and die by it.”