Small Mercies

A bust goes down outside her window. Two cops chase one of the Phelan brothers (who knows which one; there’re like nine of them, all heading to jail from the moment they left the maternity ward) into Commonwealth and tackle him on the asphalt in front of the Morris Building. A Phelan brother getting busted is no big deal — like a leaf falling from a tree — but one of the cops is black. That brings out the neighbors with their loud mouths screaming nigger this and nigger that, and then some kids get up on the roofs, and the bottles and the rocks rain down. Pretty soon, black-and-whites and paddy wagons pull down the small lanes that twist between the buildings. They screech to a stop. Car doors snap open and closed.

The parents back off, but the kids on the roofs find some bags of garbage somewhere and start pelting the cops with rotten lettuce and empty cans of Dinty Moore, soft potatoes that explode when they hit cars or heads. After a while, the kids bolt, and it all settles down. One of the cops looks around at the off-white splatter of potato everywhere and the windows pocked with fresh cracks and splinters from rocks and the shattered bottles all over the ground, and he calls out to all the window screens surrounding the spot where the melee took place: “You can clean this yourselves. We ain’t sending Sanitation, you fucking animals.”

And they pull out of there like an occupying army disgusted by those they’re forced to govern.

Later, the women and the kids who did it (several with fresh abrasions or black eyes courtesy of the men who fathered them) come out with brooms and dustpans and buckets and set to cleaning up the mess. Normally, Mary Pat wouldn’t blink before she hopped to and helped them — that’s what community is based on, she’s always thought, pitching in — but she just can’t get off the couch. It’s like she’s nailed to it.

And where is that community for her? By this point, she knows the gossip has to be all over the neighborhood — no one has seen Jules Fennessy in six days. Word will also be out that it’s best no one ask about her either. So everyone knows, as she does, that her daughter is dead.

But no one visits. No one checks in.

Big Peg came once. Banged on the door a few times, but Mary Pat didn’t answer. She knew no matter what evidence she presented to Big Peg that Marty Butler’s crew had killed Jules, Big Peg would reject it. Marty isn’t just Southie’s protector. He isn’t just Southie’s favorite son. Marty isn’t just the rebel for them all who thumbs his nose at the outside establishment. Marty is Southie. To believe Marty is evil — not merely criminal, not a practitioner of hijinks and shenanigans, not just running an underworld that needs to be run by someone, so why not him? — is to believe Southie is evil. And Peg could never do that. So, instead of baring her soul to a sister who would turn her back to that soul and ask it to put its clothes back on in the name of common decency, Mary Pat didn’t answer the door.

She finally does answer the door when the SWAB Sisters come calling. There’re half a dozen of them, unrelated by birth or marriage, but so called because they’ve been friends for at least twenty years and were the first group to form against the school committee’s decision to even hear the case of the colored families who sued in Morgan v. Hennigan. SWAB stands for Southie Women Against Busing. Mary Pat attended one of their earliest meetings, way back in ’71, long before anyone truly believed this could turn into anything real; she’d just shown up for the donuts and the Riunite Lambrusco. Back then, SWAB consisted solely of the six women who now show up at her door on the seventh day since she’s seen Jules — Carol Fitzpatrick, Noreen Ryan, Joyce O’Halloran, Patty Byrnes, Maureen Kilkenny, and Hannah Spotchnicki (née Carmody).

Mary Pat agreed to become an actual member in 1973, when it was starting to appear like, holy shit, this busing bullshit might actually happen, but she isn’t what you’d call an avid member. She’ll do something if asked, but she never seeks them out. Most of the women in SWAB — and there are a couple hundred now — are like Mary Pat, but the SWAB Sisters, the original six, those bitches are evangelical.

The face of their leader, Carol Fitzpatrick, looms in the eyehole in Mary Pat’s door, the other five fanned out behind her. Mary Pat is fresh from a shower she can’t remember taking, standing there in a robe that saw better days before the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and feeling number than ever. The women on the other side of the eyehole look like something from a cartoon — if not harmless, certainly comical. Carol has to knock only a few times before Mary Pat opens the door.

They seem taken aback, as if they didn’t truly expect to see her. Or, if they did, they expected her to look better.

“Mary Pat!” Carol says, and claps her hands joyfully. “Where have you been?”

“Here.” Mary Pat steps aside to let them in.