Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

Even in the flat gray of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. Not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot over the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, is an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.

She takes the leaflets. Glances at the top one: BOSTON’S UNDER SIEGE!!!!!!!! JOIN ALL CONCERNED PARENTS AND PROUD MEMBERS OF THE SOUTH BOSTON COMMUNITY FOR A MARCH TO END JUDICIAL DICTATORSHIP ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, AT CITY HALL PLAZA. 12 NOON SHARP! NO BUSING! NEVER! RESIST! BOYCOTT! “We’re asking everyone to cover specific blocks. We’d like you to cover . . .” Brian reaches into his Baracuta, comes back with a list, runs his finger down it. “Ah. Like you to cover Mercer between Eighth and Dorchester Street. And Telegraph to the park. And then, yeah, all the houses ringing the park.” “That’s a lot of doors.” “It’s for the Cause, Mary Pat.”

Jules, she’s come to realize over the last couple of years, never should have been raised here. Mary Pat—one look at her baby pictures and childhood snapshots, all scrunched face and wide shoulders and small powerful body, ready to audition for the roller derby or some shit—looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads. Most people would sooner pick a fight with a stray dog with a taste for flesh than fuck with a Southie chick who grew up in the PJs.

Jules is tall and sinewy, with long smooth hair the color of an apple. Every inch of her is soft and feminine and waiting on a broken heart the way miners wait on black lung—she just knows it’s coming. She’s fragile, this product of Mary Pat’s womb—fragile in the eyes, fragile in her flesh, fragile in her soul. All the tough talk, the cigarettes, the ability to swear like a sailor and spit like a longshoreman, can’t fully disguise that.

For a moment, Mary Pat sees herself in the gaze . . . but what self? Which Mary Pat? How long since she yearned? How long since she dared believe something so foolish as the idea that someone anywhere has the answers to questions she can’t even put into words?

Mary Pat hugs her daughter on the sidewalk and lets her cry into her shoulder. She ignores the stares of passersby. The more they stare, the prouder she grows of this weak child she’s borne. At least Commonwealth hasn’t erased her heart, she wants to say. At least she held on to that, you thickheaded, coldhearted Hibernian assholes. I might be one of you. But she isn’t.

Jules takes another shower when they get back, and then her poor excuse for a boyfriend, Ronald “Rum” Collins, and her sidekick since second grade, Brenda Morello, come calling. Brenda is short and blond with huge brown eyes and a figure so full and fleshy that it seems designed by God to make men lose their train of thought whenever she walks by. She knows this, of course, and seems embarrassed by it; she continues to dress like a tomboy, something Mary Pat has always liked about her. Jules calls Brenda into her bedroom to ask about what she’s wearing, so Mary Pat gets stuck in the kitchen with Rum, who, like his father and uncles before him, has the conversational skills of a baked ham. Yet he’s mastered the art of saying very little around girls and his peers at Southie High, replacing the natural dullness in his eyes with a lazy contempt that a lot of kids take as a sign of cool. And her own daughter fell for it.

“I like Froot Loops.” “They’re your favorite, huh?” He nods several times. “’Cept when they’re in the milk too long and they turn it, like, different colors.” “That’d be unfortunate.” “So I eat it fast.” He gets a look in his eyes like he’s putting something over on Kellogg’s. While her lips say, “That’s quick thinking,” her head says, I pray you don’t breed.

Find someone else. Find someone good. Find someone who might be dumb but won’t be mean. This one will grow mean because he’s only one or two elevator stops above retard, and yet he thinks he’s kind of smart, and the ones who are like that grow mean when they realize the world laughs at them. You’re too good for this boy, Jules.

And then Jules is gone. Lost to the night.

“But whatta ya gonna do?” she says to Mary Pat after finishing a brief rant on the subject. “Right?” “Right,” Mary Pat says. “Whatta ya gonna do.” It’s a refrain they all hold dear. Goes alongside It is what it is and Shit happens. They aren’t poor because they don’t try hard, don’t work hard, aren’t deserving of better things. Mary Pat can look at almost anyone she’s ever known in Commonwealth in particular, or Southie in general, and find nothing but strivers, ballbusters, people who treat ten-ton burdens like they weigh the same as a golf ball, people who go to work day in, day out, and give their ungrateful-prick bosses ten hours of work every single eight-hour day. They aren’t poor because they slack off, that’s for fucking sure. They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any. If it doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do. There are way more people in the world than there is luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore. Or you aren’t. In which case . . . Shit happens. It is what it is. Whatta ya gonna do.

She tries it for a bit, finds herself thinking of Dreamy Williamson facing life without her child, and recalls that Dreamy sent her a beautiful card when Noel died. She roots around in a drawer where she put most things related to Noel’s death—his dog tag and war medals, his laminated funeral card, the sympathy cards—and eventually finds the one Dreamy sent her. On the front is a cross and the words May the Lord Grant You Strength in Your Hour of Need. Inside the card, filling up both sides, she wrote to Mary Pat: Dear Mrs. Mary Patricia Fennessy, It’s a terrible thing for a mother to lose her child. I cannot imagine the hurt you are feeling. Many times at work you have brought a smile to my face or made the day go quicker by telling me stories of your beloved Noel. What a scamp he was! What a rascal! He loved his mama, that was clear, and his mama loved him. I do not know why the Good Lord would ask something so painful of a fine woman such as yourself, but I know He makes our hearts so big so our dead can live in them. That’s where your Noel is now. Living in his mother’s heart like he once lived in your womb. If I can ever be of assistance, please reach out to me. You have always shown me every kindness and your friendship is something I value. My sincerest condolences, Calliope Williamson

Mary Pat sits at the kitchen table staring at the letter until the words blur. This woman wrote to her as if she were a friend. She signed her last name, which Mary Pat couldn’t even recall this afternoon. She called Mary Pat a fine woman and spoke to a friendship that Mary Pat is hard pressed to grasp. Yes, she’s friendly with Dreamy, but friendship is something else entirely. White broads from Southie aren’t friends with black women from Mattapan. The world doesn’t work that way. For a minute or so, Mary Pat looks for a pen and paper to write a note of condolence to Dreamy, but she can find only a pen and some scrap paper. She resolves to find a proper sympathy card tomorrow and puts the pen back in the drawer.

She doesn’t go with any preamble. “Where’s Jules?” “Fuck should I know?” “Don’t let the beer give you too much stupid right now, Ronald. You might confuse it with courage.”

For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years—like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.

Rich words

She reaches out and pats his knee. “George, if anything happened to my daughter, and you were involved?” “I said, leave me the fuck—” “Marty won’t be able to save you. No one will be able to save you. She’s my heart.” She squeezes his knee a little harder. “So, pray—on your knees tonight, George—that my heart turns up safe, or I might come back and rip yours right out of your fucking chest.” She stares into his flat eyes until he blinks.

Rum makes it to his knees this time, but he vomits, and the vomit is red. “She mighta punctured a fucking lung,” Pat Kearns says. “Bring him to the doc on G,” Brian says. “Make sure the doc knows he don’t get the Cadillac treatment. This one’s a Dodge. A used Dodge.”

Dodge

“It’s not gonna take that. It’s probably gonna take, like, three, but you can’t be running around like Billy Jack—fuckin’ Mary Pat Jack—beating the fuck out of people. You can’t do it. It’s gonna bring attention.”

Getting out at Harvard Station, she enters Harvard Square, and it’s as bad as she suspected it would be—fucking hippies are everywhere, the air smells like pot and B.O., every twenty feet or so someone’s playing a guitar and crooning about either love, man, or Richard Nixon, man. Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn almost three weeks ago, but he’s still their bogeyman, these pampered, overeducated, draft-dodging pussies. She loses count of how many of them are barefoot, tromping around dirty streets in their frayed bell-bottoms and their multicolored shirts with their beads and long hair, the girls without bras and their ass cheeks spilling out of their cutoff shorts, filling the air with cigarette smoke and clove cigarette smoke and pot smoke and every one of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents, who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world—a school no poor person could ever get into, that’s for fucking certain—and they return the favor by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.

Good character passage.

What both groups have in common, though, is a deep-seated confusion about what she could be doing on their campus. She’s not dressed like a slob from the projects. She’s dressed like many a housewife walking around South Boston (or Dorchester or Rozzie or Hyde Park) at this very moment—red polyester shirt, tan slacks, and a plaid shirt jacket in defiance of the heat. She wore the outfit to work this morning because she wanted to say to anyone who cared to look—I am in control. I have my shit together. Ignore the cuts and bruises on my knuckles and see only the classy lady your eyes behold. But some part of her must have also known that she might not be heading straight home after work, that she might be making a trip across the river into a world so alien she’d feel more at home in another country. Ireland, for sure. Canada, maybe. She’d thought she looked smart, put together, but judging by the sidelong stares she’s getting from the snot-noses and the hippies in Harvard Yard, she sticks out for exactly who she is—a working-class broad from the other side of the river who came into their world in her laughable Sears-catalog best. They presume she took the wrong subway car, ended up wandering the Harvard campus like a child lost in a supermarket, before she’ll return to her grimy world to tell her grimy kids about all the shiny things she’s seen but was never allowed to touch.

Vulnerable

Kenny Fennessy grew up in the D Street projects, a place so fierce it made Commonwealth and Old Colony look like Back Bay and Beacon Hill by comparison. Huge guy. Six-three. Hands that turned into coiled rebar when he clenched them into fists. If you fucked with him, you better bring three of you because he would not stop fighting until a coroner called it. But if you didn’t fuck with him, Ken Fen would never lay a hand on you. Never bully you or poke at you. He’d much rather listen to your story, hang out with you, find out what you liked to do, and do it with you. Since birth, Ken Fen had no choice but to buy into the violence. He just never bought into the hate.

“Jesus, Mary Pat.” He comes to her. Takes her by the elbow. “Come sit down.” Even though he hadn’t wanted to see her, even though he’s still mad at her (or are his feelings for her worse than anger somehow?), even though he had been so irritated and impatient the last time they spoke—in her moment of need, he comes right to her. He’s a rock, Kenny. Always has been. First one to give support, last one to ask for it.

“I haven’t seen her since the other night, and I have this feeling? I have this feeling, Kenny, and it’s the worst feeling, it’s worse than any I had that whole year Noel was in Vietnam, and worse than the one I had the day Dukie, God rest him, left the house and I never saw him again. It’s like a part of her never left my womb, you know? It stayed in there and became something else, became, like . . . molded . . . to my body. The inside of it, with the blood and the organs and all the other shit you can’t survive without? That’s where part of her has always lived. But, but, but I can’t feel her there for the first time since she was born.” She thumps her own chest harder than she intended. “She’s not in here anymore.”

He thinks for a bit, his eyes, as always, brimming with an intelligence he could never fully hide no matter how hard he tried, the thing she loved about him only a little less than she loved his kindness.

Intelligence and kindness

But it’s been building up for so long, ever since Kenny left her, and the words just fall out of her mouth. “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.”

“Oh. What about the second one?” “Never. He was a gent.” “But he left you.” “Yup.” “Why?” It takes Mary Pat so long to speak that by the time she finally does, Donna’s finished her cigarette and the light in the room has changed. “I embarrassed him.” “How?” “I dunno.” “Your hair?” I have bad hair? “Your face? Your tits? Your . . . what?” “My hate.” Mary Pat lights a cigarette of her own. “I don’t understand.” “I don’t either.” Mary Pat exhales a long stream of smoke. “But that’s what he said the day he left. He said, ‘Your hate embarrasses me.’”

My hate

“You’re lucky to be rid of him.” “Eh.” “No?” “I’m alone. I’m fucking forty-two.” “You’ll meet a guy.” “I liked him.” “A better guy.” Mary Pat shrugs. “You will.” “I might meet a guy who’s better for me, maybe, but I’ll never meet a better guy.”

I'll never meet a better one

They hold each other’s gaze and time falls away, and the girls they were once could maybe, just maybe, become the angels on the shoulders of the women they are now. But Donna’s eyes grow distant. “I’m no one’s keeper, Mary Pat.” “You’re the second person to say that to me this week.” Mary Pat stands. “You know, we always say we stand for things here. We might not have much, but we have the neighborhood. We got a code. We watch out for one another.” She flicks her fingers and overturns her beer can. She watches it flow across Donna Shea’s parquet table. “What a crock of shit.” She lets herself out as Donna runs to get the dish towels.

“Can we skip this back-and-forth shit?” she says. “Of course,” Coyne says easily, and she likes his easiness. Maybe he’s the first cop she’s ever met who’s not a drunken, philandering asshole. Or maybe he’s just perfected the art of resembling a decent man.

Ronald Collins in Marty Butler’s bar last night?” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Coyne laughs. “It’s all over town, Mrs. Fennessy.” Pritchard says, “You snip his fucking balls while you were at it?” “Hey,” Coyne says sharply. “What?” “You don’t swear around a woman. You don’t talk about genitalia.” “Gena-what?” Mary Pat shoots a look of gratitude at Coyne. It’s a neighborhood thing—if you don’t know a woman, you don’t curse around her, even if she herself swears like a drunken trucker. It’s considered discourteous. Same rule applies to discussing private parts.

Discourteous to swear around someone you don't know.

He stands and brushes at the wrinkles in his trousers. Pritchard flips his notepad closed. “If you see your daughter,” Coyne says, “do the smart thing, Mrs. Fennessy.” “And what would that be?” “Have her call us first thing.” She nods. “Is that a yes?” “It’s a nod.” “As in you’ll think about it?” “As in I heard the words that left your mouth.”

Back in seventh grade, Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void. It was an eternal separation from love. What love? God’s love. Anyone’s love. All love. The pain from a pitchfork or even from an eternal flame cannot compare to the pain of that void. “Everlasting exile,” Sister Loretta said, “the heart forever untouched and forsaken.”

The heart forever untouched

Brian Shea doesn’t offer her a seat, but she takes the one across from him anyway. The first thing he says, with a hint of cruelty in his tiny smile, is “You went to my house?” “Yes.” “Why would you do that?” “You didn’t keep your word.” “My what?” “Your word. You told me you would reach out to me by five o’clock. You didn’t.” The smile grows a little larger, a little crueler. “You’ve been around long enough, Mary Pat, to know that someone like you doesn’t make demands of someone like me.” “And you’ve been around long enough, Brian, to know I don’t give a fuck what you think I’ve been around long enough to know.”

“But you, right now, you are not being much of a neighbor. And we’re all getting pretty tired of it.” “You’re getting tired of it?” “Everyone is.” “Well, tell everyone I’m just warming up.” She stands.

A nasty little smile finds Dottie’s little green eyes. “Because it’s the truth.” And a question that’s been nagging at Mary Pat for a while—maybe her whole life, who knows?—finds her tongue. “It’s your truth too, though, ain’t it?” A few of the girls make audible noises, something between gasps and moans. “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?” Dottie clenches her fist and steps hard up to Mary Pat. “You listen to—” “Dottie, you’re gonna unclench that fist before I snap it off at your wrist and shove it straight up your fat fucking ass.”

When she walks out of work at the end of the shift, Marty Butler’s butterscotch AMC Matador is parked at the curb. Weeds stands by the back door, and as soon as Mary Pat has exited Meadow Lane Manor, he opens that door and she spies Marty sitting in the back.

AMC Matador!!!

And she knows her daughter is dead. She knows her daughter is dead.

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. Bobby is a child of the ’40s and ’50s. When, as he recalls, you knew who you were. Without question.

And he and Vincent laugh their asses off. Not for the first time in his life—or even the eightieth—Bobby hates humanity. Wonders if God’s great unforgivable crime was creating us in the first place.

“And then you left?” he asks Seamus Riordan. Seamus Riordan’s laughter trails off. “Yeah, I left.” “And a kid died.” Something catches in Seamus Riordan’s eyes. A glint of shame, perhaps. Or maybe Bobby’s just being hopeful. Because in the next breath, Seamus shrugs and says, “Wasn’t my kid.”

He’d stood with the parents, Reginald and Calliope Williamson, as they identified their son in the morgue. They didn’t cry or wail. They took in the breadth of their son lying on the metal table and each ran their hands down one of his arms—Reginald on the left, Calliope on the right. Then they did the same to his cheeks. With their hands there—each pressed to their son’s face—Reginald said, “I love you, my son,” and Calliope said, “We are always with you.” Bobby’s seen a lot of parents identify their dead offspring. It stopped getting to him some time ago. But the way the Williamsons beheld their son, how they’d caressed his arms and face, as if doing so might provide warmth on his journey to the other side, stuck with Bobby for most of the day.

If four black kids had chased a white kid into the path of a train, they’d be facing life. If they entered a plea, the best offer would be a minimum of twenty years hard time. But the kids who chased Auggie Williamson into the path of a train won’t, Bobby knows, face more than five years. If that. And sometimes that disparity wears him the fuck out.

you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

On the front steps, as Bobby’s leaving, the blond woman comes down the steps alongside him. She says, “Do people in there know you’re a cop?” He considers her, realizes there’s something vaguely familiar about her. “It’s not something I advertise.” “You arrested me once. Two years ago.” Shit. This is exactly why Bobby doesn’t admit his profession in the meetings. “I’ve never forgotten you,” she says. “The hard face but the kind voice.” She lights a cigarette and stares through the smoke at him when she exhales. “Were you using then?” “Two years ago?” He nods. “That would have been right before I kicked it.” “So, you were using, but you were busting addicts like me.” Bobby tries not to hide from his ugly truths anymore. “Yes.”

The hard face but the kind voice.

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.

With classical pieces, she doesn’t know the song names or the names of the composers (unless the DJ chimes in at the end of a four- or five-song block, at which point the early songs are too far back to place a name to the appropriate tune), but the music speaks to her grief in a way nothing else can. It slides through the Novocain. Not enough to find her heart but enough to find her head. She floats through the notes as if the notes are currents in a larger body of water—a dark body of water, she’s sure, a wide river at night—and travels into a space in her mind where her entire history and that of her family before her and the family she’s made are all intertwined. She can sense—though not feel or articulate—a connection between all who have lived and died in her bloodline.

But as the morning moves along and the speakers grow louder (and a lot more repetitive), Mary Pat has begun to feel her outrage thin when she catches sight of a woman with the same hair as Jules move through the crowd. The woman’s face is rounder and older than Jules’s, but the hair is near identical. And suddenly, it’s like she’s lost her again. Like she’s losing her over and over and over.

and then she’s gone, her daughter’s gone, she’s left this life, she’s stepped off into a void. Chambers of Mary Pat’s heart she was certain she’d shut tight fly open, and a sea of loss rushes in.

Why’d you leave me? Where’d you go? Has the pain stopped, baby? Is your world warm? Will you wait for me to find you there? Please wait.

They hear the commotion and turn back to see the MDC cops and the security guys hustling Teddy toward the building named after his brother. Mary Pat is baffled by the back of Teddy’s suit. It’s almost completely white now, as if he’s been shit on by a flock of birds. It takes her a second to realize it isn’t bird shit. It’s spit. The crowd is spitting on a Kennedy. Mary Pat feels ill. Isn’t there a line we don’t cross? she wants to ask the crowd. Isn’t there a place we don’t allow ourselves to go? The crowd keeps spitting on the senator until his guards and the two cops get him into the federal building. The front of the building is clear glass, so Mary Pat can see them hustling him toward the elevators, and that should have been the end of it—everyone should have regained their sense—but then a pane of glass the size of a semitruck shatters. The crowd lets out a roar of approval. Joyful shrieks split the air like birdshot.