Small Mercies

Damn, Bobby thinks, if I’d met Mary Pat five years ago and she worked the street like this? I’d have made lieutenant by now.

“Leave town,” he tells her.

“Oh, Bobby,” she says in a mildly baffled tone, “no one’s gonna chase me out of my hometown.”

And she hangs up.

25

Bobby and Carmen’s first time together is awkward and fumbling at the outset. There’s no sense of rhythm; it’s like trying to dance after someone turns off the music. He has no idea what her body will respond to, and he makes a few poor guesses. But then he gets a whispered “Yeah, right there” and a quickening of her breath in his ear. Her heel glides along the back of his calf, and he moves his hip just a tad to his left, and she says “Yup” in such a way that yup becomes his favorite sound that week.

In the end they find a groove that works. It’s not fireworks, but it’s promising. The fireworks could be just up around the next bend. They’ll find out next time.

After, they lie in her bed and listen to the sounds of Chandler Street three stories below on a humid night in early September, and Bobby embraces a sentiment he’s never grown sick of since he returned from the war — It’s wonderful to be alive.

She gets out of the bed. “Would you like some water?”

“Love some.”

She walks naked into the kitchen. When she returns with two glasses of water, he notices that one of her breasts is slightly larger than the other, and her green eyes carry a shimmer in the half dark. She sits on the bed and hands him his water, and they look at each other for a bit, saying nothing.

“I like how considerate you are,” she says.

“When?”

“In general,” she says, “but in bed too. You listened to my body. A lot of guys don’t do that.”

“You’ve had a lot of guys?”

“For sure,” she says easily. “You?”

“Guys? No. But women, yeah.”

“So we won’t judge each other’s histories.”

“Nothing good ever comes of that.”

She slides down in bed beside him and holds her water aloft as she gives him a long kiss. Her hair tickles the side of his face. The kiss is warm and unhurried. Another of life’s blessings, he thinks, the leisurely kiss.

When Carmen pulls out of the kiss, she glances at the clock on the bedside table. “Didn’t you say you were on TV tonight?”

“I said I could be on TV. They filmed us walking those kids into their arraignment.”

She crawls down the bed and turns on the small black-and-white on top of her dresser.

WCVB is wrapping up its intro. They cut to the studio and then cut in close on the anchor desk, and suddenly, there’s Bobby in a little box to the right of Chet Curtis’s shoulder. (Lead story, he thinks. Damn.) Bobby and Vincent and Rum Collins and George Dunbar, the latter two trying to keep their heads down, are frozen in the shot as Chet talks about the big break in the death of a young Negro on the eve of the city’s controversial desegregation of two public high schools.

And just like that, they cut away from Chet and run footage of the latest anti-busing protest, this one over by Broadway Station.

“My new boyfriend,” Carmen says, “a TV star.”

“I’m your new boyfriend?”

“You’re not?”

“I just wasn’t sure I’d achieved that status.”

“Oh, you got the status, m’ man.”

On the screen, the protest turns predictably violent. The camera jerks a few times. A fleshy guy from the school committee talks into a bullhorn, throws around words like “tyranny” and “subjugation.”

“If the school committee had just acted in good faith years ago,” Carmen says, “instead of trying to throw a wrench in things from the start, maybe we wouldn’t be here.”

“You’re definitely not wrong,” he says. “But how come it’s always the poor who are expected to eat the food that’s good for them no matter how it tastes? You don’t see anyone in the rich neighborhoods dealing with this.”

“Because they’re not part of Boston Public Schools.”

“Right. They don’t want to be part of the public school system, and they don’t want subway lines or bus lines coming into their towns because they don’t want to mix with poor people in general and black people in particular. Or so it would seem.”

“Not all the suburbs are white.”

“Name one that isn’t. Just one.”

She tries. “Um...”

He waits.

“I can feel your look,” she says. “It’s very smug.”

“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.”

“But the schools are segregated,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “And they shouldn’t be. You’ll get zero argument on that from me. It’s racist bullshit, and it’s unforgivable. But this is not the solution.”

“What is?”

He opens his mouth, still caught up in the rhythm of the debate. Then freezes. “I have no idea.”