Small Mercies

“Won’t change anything.” Her daughter tries for a tone of casual apathy, but Mary Pat sees the fear swimming in her eyes, darkening the pouches underneath. Always such a pretty girl, Jules. Always such a pretty girl. And now clearly aging. At seventeen. From any number of things — growing up in Commonwealth (not the kind of place that produces beauty queens and fashion models, no matter how pretty they were coming out of the gate); losing a brother; watching her stepfather walk out the door just when she’d finally started to believe he’d stick around; being forced — by federal edict — to enter a new school her senior year in a foreign neighborhood not known for letting white kids walk around after sundown; not to mention just being seventeen and getting into who knows what with her knucklehead friends. A lot of pot around these days, Mary Pat knows, and acid. Booze, of course; in Southie, most kids came out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies. And, of course, the Scourge, that nasty brown powder and its fucking needles that turn healthy kids into corpses or soon-to-be-corpses in under a year. If Jules keeps it to the booze and the cigarettes with the occasional joint thrown in, she’ll only lose her looks. And everyone loses their looks in the projects. But God forbid if she moves on to the Scourge. Mary Pat will die another death.

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 then fuck with a Southie chick who grew up in the PJs.

But that’s Mary Pat.

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. Mary Pat’s mother, Louise “Weezie” Flanagan, a Hall of Fame Irish Tough Broad who’d stood four-eleven and weighed ninety-five pounds soaking wet after a Thanksgiving dinner, told Mary Pat a few times, “You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”

Mary Pat sometimes wishes she’d found a way to get them out of Commonwealth before Jules finds out which she is.

“So where’s this rally taking place?” Jules asks.

“We’re going downtown.”

“Yeah?” That gets a wry smile from her daughter as she stubs out her cigarette. “Crossing the bridge ’n’ shit.” Jules raises her eyebrows up and down. “Look at you.”

Mary Pat reaches across the table and pats her hand so she’ll look at her. “We’re going to City Hall. They can’t ignore us, Jules. They’re gonna see us, they’re gonna fucking hear us. You kids ain’t alone.”

Jules gives her a smile that’s hopeful and broken at the same time. “Yeah?” She lowers her head. Her voice is a wet whisper when she says, “Thanks, Ma.”

“Of course.” Mary Pat feels something clench in the back of her throat. “You bet, sweetie.”

This may have been the longest she’s sat with her daughter, just talking, in months. She’d forgotten how much she likes it.

A tiny clap of thunder shakes the floor beneath their feet, rattles through the walls, and the lights come on above the stove. The fans start moving in the windows. Radios and TVs in the other apartments return to battle with one another. Someone whoops.

Jules shrieks, “I call shower!” and bolts from her chair like she owes it money.

Mary Pat makes coffee. Takes it into the living room with one of the freshly emptied ashtrays and turns on the TV. They’re all over the news — South Boston and the coming school year. Black kids about to get bused into Southie. White kids about to get bused out to Roxbury. No one on either side happy about the prospect.

Except the agitators, the blacks who sued the school committee — been suing it for nine years because nothing was ever good enough.

Mary Pat has worked alongside too many blacks at Meadow Lane Manor and the shoe factory to believe they’re bad or naturally lazy. Plenty of good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes want the same things she wants — a steady paycheck, food on the table, children safe in their beds. She’s told both her children if they’re going to say “nigger” around her, they better be sure they’re using it about those blacks who aren’t upstanding, don’t work hard, don’t stay married, and have babies just to keep the welfare checks rolling in.

Noel, just before he left for Vietnam, said, “That describes most of the ones I’ve ever met, Ma.”