Small Mercies

Mary Pat spends a night in a motel on Huntington Avenue, just across from the Christian Science Mother Church. The motel accepts cash and doesn’t ask for ID and, most importantly, has an underground garage where she can tuck Bess away in a dark corner that smells of oil. She sits in the motel room in the near dark and looks across the street at the church plaza. She doesn’t know much about architecture or anything about Christian Scientists, but the mother church is an impressive structure. Two buildings — the smaller, sharper one with a pointy granite steeple is something she’d expect to see in Paris, maybe; the larger one behind it makes her think of pictures she’s seen of Rome: a big dome at the top, presiding over wide arches and thick columns, all of it mirrored in the long, narrow reflecting pool that stretches the length of the plaza.

If Jules had come to her just two weeks ago and said she was converting to Christian Scientology, or whatever they call it, Mary Pat would have disowned her. Fennessys and Flanagans were Roman Catholics. Always had been, always would be, end of story. But now Mary Pat finds the whole idea — of disowning someone for choosing to believe in a different interpretation of God — ridiculous. If Jules lies right now in the embrace of the Christian Scientist God or the Buddhist God or whatever the Episcopalians believe in, Mary Pat cares only that it’s an embrace. And that her daughter no longer knows anything of fear. Or hate.

She turns on the small TV on the dresser and, after fiddling with the antenna, finds the clearest picture on Channel 5. She catches the last half hour of a Harry O episode she’s seen before, floats away sitting there, has no idea where she goes or that she went anywhere at all until she snaps back from wherever she was to find that the news is now on.

This has been happening a lot lately, these little episodes of vanishing within herself. She doesn’t fall asleep or even doze, but time vanishes nonetheless. And she seems to vanish with it.

Halfway through the news, just before sports, they mention that “Funeral services will be held tomorrow morning at Third Baptist Church for Augustus Williamson, the young Afro-American man who died tragically at Columbia Station, further inflaming racial tensions on the eve of desegregation of our schools.”

She recalls the note Dreamy wrote to her when Noel passed. If Mary Pat could write half as well as Dreamy, maybe she’d consider writing a note of her own. But she can’t. Not only is her grammar bad, her handwriting is atrocious.

She finds herself staring across the street again at those remarkable buildings reflected, along with several other local buildings, in the long pool of water. We pass on and the buildings remain. And eventually, even buildings as magnificent as these crumble.

I’m not afraid to die, she tells those buildings, the room, God. Not even a little bit.

Then what are you afraid of?

Living in a world without her.

Maybe she feels the same way.

Jules?

No, you idiot. Dreamy.

Third Baptist Church of the Blue Hills sits on a small plot of land on Hosmer Street in the heart of Mattapan. When Mary Pat was very young, Mattapan was where the Jews lived in uneasy truce with a contingent of poor Irish. Then the blacks showed up, and the Jews headed for the suburbs or parts of Brookline while the Irish pushed into Dorchester or wandered into Southie. Synagogues and bakeries gave way to chicken joints and hair salons — as she drives along Morton Street looking for parking, Mary Pat loses count of how many hair salons. Not to mention army-recruitment billboards, menthol-cigarette billboards, and liquor stores. Southie’s got Mattapan beat when it comes to bars, but Mattapan has the edge when it comes to purchasing your booze for home consumption. Parking’s just as hard to find as it is in Southie, though, and people here love to double-park just as much. The walls and storefronts are more colorful, however — lots of vibrant murals, something you never see in Southie; plenty of bright awnings and clothing, on both men and women, that runs to tropical colors: bright yellows, mango greens, cotton-candy pinks. Before she can start feeling too kumbaya, like she could move here and be happy if she could only change skin color, she notices how many grates they have above their storefronts and how many of their windows have bars on them, how many of the side streets are cracked and ridden with potholes, and how many yards are so overgrown it would be impossible to see the fences if the fences didn’t sag and poke out through the growth.

Have some self-respect, she thinks with a sudden defiant pride.