Small Mercies

“And it isn’t about race. She’d be just as angry if they told her she has to send her kid across the city to Revere or the North End of someplace mostly white. The thought occurs to her that maybe she wouldn’t be as mad, maybe she’d just be really annoyed, but then she hammers another sign to another stick and thinks, Fuck that, I don’t see color. I see injustice. Just another case of the rich fucks in their suburban castles (and their all-white towns) telling the poor people stuck in the city how things are going to go. In that moment, Mary Pat feels a kinship with black people that surprises her. Aren’t they all victims of the same thing? Aren’t they all being told How It Is?”

Mary Pat frequently tries to tell herself that she is not racist, and here she even imagines herself to be on the same side as the Black people who suffer the long-term effects of such racism, hatred, and hypocrisy, while the people who make the rules are under no pressure to follow those rules. Yet her inner voice reminds her that the racial component of busing contributes to the sense of injustice, and her sense of affinity with Black people is entirely in her head, as she will make no material effort to connect with any Black people on this issue or any other.

“Because the truth is they don’t understand one another. It’s not a plan of Mary Pat’s making, nor is it her desire, that they have different tastes in music, in clothing, in the food they put on their tables. But that’s the way it is just the same […] So if you don’t speak like us, Mary Pat wants to ask, and you don’t like our music, our clothes, our food, our ways, why come into our neighborhood? To sell drugs to our kids and steal our cars. That’s the only answer left.”

While Mary Pat does not regard herself as prejudiced, she also buys into the common attitude that integration is unwise because it is mutually harmful, and that people of different races are too incompatible to be able to live together. This attitude also provides cover for more pernicious attitudes than she admits to holding. She will not frankly admit her covert belief that Black people are more prone to criminality than white people, but the mere fact of a young Black man in a white neighborhood allows Mary Pat to assume that he can only be there for nefarious purposes.

“Mary Pat stares back across the table at her sister. Is that what people really think about her son? That it was Vietnam that turned him to drugs? Mary Pat tried thinking that way for a while, but then she faced the sobering truth that Noel didn’t’ discover heroin in Vietnam (Thai stick, yes, heroin, no); heroin discovered Noel in the projects of South Boston.”

The people of Southie have internalized the belief that the evils afflicting their neighborhood are entirely external, whether it be Black neighborhoods or callous politicians. The trauma that so many people suffered in Vietnam, for those lucky enough to return home, provides an easy explanation for Noel’s descent into drug addiction. But Mary Pat knows that there is no outsider to blame for her son’s fate, and so she has no illusions remaining when Southie takes the life of her daughter as well.

“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 downing.”

Mary Pat takes enormous pride in herself as a fighter, tough enough to endure in a world where nothing comes easily. Her ex-husband Kenny is no less a part of the neighborhood than she is, but he has grown tired of the obsession with struggle and violence that dominates Southie culture, and the therefore came to find life with a true believer like Mary Pat to be exhausting. In order to find stability and happiness, he chose a partner in a Black woman, knowing that it would make him an outcast to the members of his own community.

“‘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.’”

Southie is fiercely proud of its communal identity and justifies its exclusion of outsiders on the basis that homogeneity and deep social ties are required to make a community come together spontaneously. Certainly, Mary Pat has seen this side of Southie and has even believed in it, but she now finds that her community has strict yet unspoken limits, such as when helping a neighbor might anger a more powerful person, even when that more powerful person has grossly violated not only the code of the community, but basic standards of human decency.

“‘You know who didn’t send a lot of kids to Vietnam?’’ ‘I can guess,’ he says with a bitterness so old it comes out as apathy. ‘People in Dover,’ she says. ‘In Wellesley and Newton and Lincoln—their kids get to hide in college and grad school and have doctors who say they got fucking tinnitus or fallen arches or bone spurs or whatever other bullshit they can come up with. These are the exact same people who want me to bus my kid to Roxbury but wouldn’t let a black guy take two steps into their neighborhood once the lawns have been cut and the sun goes down.’”

Busing is not the first instance in which the poor neighbors of Boston, whether white or Black, have both suffered class-based injustice from their wealthier neighbors in the suburbs. As several scenes in the novel demonstrate, Vietnam was a war fought on the backs of the poor, for college students could secure deferments and those with political connections could secure immunity from the draft. Such an issue could have united the neighborhoods in their shared outrage, and so Mary Pat and others suspect that busing is part of an attempt by those same elites to keep them divided.

“I suggest you think of your daughter in Florida, sipping drinks, getting a tan. I suggest you remember that kids leave, that’s what kids do, but neighbors are forever. They shovel your walk when you’re sick, tell you when someone’s looking at your house funny, that kinda thing’ He lights his own cigarette, his pale blue eyes holding hers through the flame. ‘But you, right now, you are not being much of a neighbor. And we’re all getting pretty tired of it.’”

The norms of life in Southie are firmly rooted in an understanding of how certain kinds of people are assumed to behave. Within this culture, non-white people are labeled as lazy and criminal, a racist attitude that renders their mere presence immediately suspect. It is likely assumed that kids get in trouble, fight with their parents, and sometimes disappear for a while to cool off. Here Brian Shea is using that general idea as an absolute truth in order to stymie Mary Pat’s increasing concern with Jules’s whereabouts. In this way, he can reframe the entirely legitimate concern of a parent for her child into an irritating refusal to recognize the facts of life in Southie.

“‘What it is, Mary Pat, is a matter of order. Everything works when everything works a predictable way. Look at this bay.’ He waves his arm at the water around them. Pleasure Bay. Walled in by these causeways and the tiny park where they intersect. ‘No waves. No surprises. Not like out there.’ Now he’s gesturing at the ocean beyond. ‘Out there, you’ve got waves and swells and undertows.’ He turns his bland face to her. ‘I don’t like oceans, Mary Pat. I like harbors.’”

Like his real-life inspiration, James “Whitey” Bulger, Marty Butler represents himself as a pillar of stability in a dangerous world. He helps to fuel a fanatical mistrust of outsiders, including the police and Black schoolchildren, so that people come to see his rough methods as the price to pay for continuing their way of life. Mary Pat comes to realize that this is a myth designed to propagate Butler and his men’s enrichment of themselves and themselves alone, often at the expense of the people they claim to be protecting. It is therefore a stability achieved not by strong community ties, but by fear.

“Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t. They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall. 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.”

Even though he comes from nearby Dorchester, Detective Bobby Coyne is still inclined to view the people of Southie as a class apart. In this passage, they are both full of life and at the same time empty of all humanity, and left only with an animalistic drive to violence. They even wear this paradox on their faces, with the pale skin of a corpse that still refuses to lose its last flair of color.

“The corpses lay on the road afterward, and it was clear from their rib cages that none of them had eaten a full meal in months. Two of them were dead because they’d tried to kill Corporal Michael ‘Bobby’ Coyne of Dorchester, Massachusetts. But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren’t in charge of making them.”

Bobby makes an explicit connection between the racism he sees as a detective on the streets of South Boston and the horrors he endured as a Marine corporal in Vietnam. Both are expressions of violence meant to preserve a social order that systematically benefits certain people at the expense of others. The domestic and international theaters of this system fuel each other by training young men like Bobby to deny the humanity of those who oppose them; as a result, such men come to regard themselves as instruments of peace rather than of terror.

“‘You’ve never seen the color green until you’ve seen Vietnam […] I dunno, it looks like a place gods would go on vacation. Filled with wonder. But that beauty got all tangled up with death, and fucked up my head once I realized that I was death, walking around with my big gun. I was the one killing all the beauty.’ He notices he’s involuntarily hung his head and corrects it. Looks them all in the eyes. ‘But when I shot up, it felt like, like…’ He fixes on the face of the blond woman, sees something in her eyes that feels desperate and hopeful at the same time. ‘Like all that beauty spread through my veins. It found a home in my body. And I was perfect. I was whole.’”

Bobby has endured some terrible traumas, and part of what makes his suffering so acute is his self-awareness. Although he served in the Vietnam War, he did not accept the official narrative of American soldiers as pacifying and democratizing a backwater country. He saw clearly enough that Vietnam was a beautiful place, and that his role amounted to nothing more than meaningless destruction. Taking heroin therefore became a maladaptive way of dealing with his pangs of conscience, representing his attempts to recover a feeling internally that he could not experience externally.

“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 […] And suddenly, it’s like she’s lost her again. Like she’s losing her over and over and over […] Chambers of Mary Pat’s heart she was certain she’d shut tight fly open, and a sea of loss rushes in. She suddenly can’t remember what she’s doing here or why she should give two flying fucks why blacks or Jews or Orientals cross the bridge into Southie.”

At the anti-busing rally, Mary Pat initially finds herself swept up in the enthusiasm of the crowd, clinging to an instinctive sense of community as a way to compensate for the agony of losing her daughter. She then turns that narrative on its head, realizing that her daughter represented something so profound that it renders the idea of Southie’s way of life unimportant by comparison. The injustice of her daughter’s loss reveals just how petty the professed injustices of the rallies really are.

“On the streets, she fought girls, boys, and packs of both. Anytime one person attacked her, she fought back against all of them, throughout her history, who’d ever hit her or twisted her hair or ear or nipple, anyone who’d ever screamed at her or snapped at her, hit her with a belt or shoe. Everyone who had ever made her feel like a frightened little girl wondering what kind of fucked-up fire shed’ been born into. She can’t remember that girl, but she can feel her. She can feel her bafflement and terror. At the noise and the fury. At the storm of rage that swirled around her and spun her in place until she was so fucking dizzy from it, she had to learn to walk in it without falling down for the rest of her life. And she learned well. She’s happiest when she’s opposed, most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.”

Southie’s reputation for fighting approaches a cliché, but Mary Pat’s account of her childhood shows just how much of her life has been a struggle to survive and claim some share of honor and respect from people constantly trying to take it away from her. Now that someone has taken away what is most precious of all, she will respond with the most intense fighting of her life, and even though she cannot reclaim what has been lost, she will prove that nobody can harm her and get away with it.

“Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot exist. A broken person can’t be unbroken. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable […] When you meet those people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.”

As he delivers what is arguably the most succinct and profound description of Mary Pat’s character in the entire novel, Bobby may also see a trace of those qualities in himself, given his own willingness to persist in the wake of tremendous hardship. Yet he acknowledges Mary Pat to be a special case, someone who has had everything taken away from her, including her reason to go on living, and yet whose willfulness grows more propulsive and whose capacity for destruction only escalates.

“Now, standing in front of Carmen Davenport’s building, holding both her hands by the fingers as she tells him she had a nice night and he agrees that he did too and they both smile goofily and wonder if they should try another kiss, he realizes that what scares him about her is what scares him about all intelligent women—that’s she’s smart enough to see, very quickly, how completely full of shit he is.”

Here is another passage where Bobby’s self-awareness is both an admirable quality and a drawback. He has no illusions about his torrid romantic history and wants to make sure that he and Carmen establish a proper basis of trust before proceeding any further. Like him, Carmen is a person with a difficult past who is trying to let the more decent parts of herself finally win out, but Bobby is so deeply aware of his own flaws that he assumes she must eventually see them and decide that they represent the whole of his personality, even as he refuses to pass the same judgment on her.

“Look, we all get how it works. Maybe you don’t, but we do. You don’t talk to each other. It’s that simple. I don’t want no trouble in my life—I really don’t—but if I was stupid enough to roll up on some colored girls in Mattapan Square and start talking to them and their boyfriends show up? I would fucking expect them to beat the ever-living piss out of me. Nothing personal. Just the way it works.”

Many of the characters in this book cite some version of informal neighborhood rules to justify behavior that is contrary to all notions of law and decency, so that the unthinkable instead becomes completely normal. It does not matter that Auggie Williamson is asking a distraught woman if she is all right. The simple fact of a Black man talking to a white girl is seen as an instant excuse for brutality, based simply on the idea that a white man would receive similar treatment in the opposite situation.

“‘I look at you now, George, and I see a little boy who’s scared, who wants a second chance. But they don’t hand out second chances when you’re an adult. Not around here. As a mother, I want to hold you in my arms. I want to whisper ‘Shh’ in your ear and tell you everything will be all right.’ He’s looking at her wildly, like maybe she’ll do these things. ‘So, so, help me, Mrs. Fennessy. Please.’ ‘I’d love to, George. I would.’ She caressed the back of his head and presses her forehead to his for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is kind and motherly. ‘But then? I remember that you sold my son the drugs that killed him, you murdered that poor black boy who just wanted to get home, and you helped bury my daughter in a basement.’ She removes her forehead from his, holds his hateful gaze with her own. ‘So I don’t give a flying fuck, really, whether you die tonight or live a long hellish life in prison.’”

In a neighborhood full of unfeeling men, George Dunbar stands out for his icy gaze and utter lack of a conscience. He is not much of a bruiser, but his reliance on intellect over brawn grants him the appearance of hovering above the fray. But like all the tough men that Mary Pat encounters, he has a breaking point, and Mary Pat finds it when she steals and hides the drugs that belong to the Butler operation. Mary Pat’s motherly gestures are not just a gloss for cruelty; she does seem to have a slight reservoir of empathy for her son’s friend, someone who could have been better and chose wrongly. But George insists that weakness is a death sentence, and so Mary Pat will consign him to follow the same rules he has imposed on others.

“‘Mary Pat,’ he says, ‘don’t wreck your life trying to do something that is doomed to fail.’ ‘My life,’ she says,’ was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby. I’m a testament.’ ‘What?’ ‘That’s what ghosts are—they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.’”

This passage offers an icy denouement to Mary Pat’s character development. Her struggle to find meaning in life has ended; there is nothing left for her to live for. Although she continues to breathe, she is no longer living in any meaningful sense. She has no capacity to recover from the pain that afflicts her. All that remains of her is a near-supernatural drive to mete out justice before she loses all forward momentum and gives up the last of her life.

“But they also weren’t racists. Something about the idea of it—the pure irrationality of it—offended them. They didn’t think black people were necessarily good, don’t get me wrong, they just thought everyone—regardless of what color they were—was probably an asshole. And to say you were less of an asshole because your skin was lighter was reprehensible to them. It just made you a bigger asshole.’ He smiles, remembering their utter core contrariness. ‘There only two big sins in the house on Tuttle Street—feeling sorry for yourself and racism, which, when you think of it, are two sides of the same coin.”

Unlike Mary Pat, Bobby has not had to struggle with internalized racism, and he was gifted this enlightened attitude through the least likely of sources: misanthropic parents who had such a low opinion of humanity as a whole that they refused to accord special virtues or vices to one race or another. The last line serves as a fitting statement for racism as a whole: that when people feel sorry for themselves, as many in Southie do (not entirely without reason), they find an easy scapegoat in others who differ from them in the most obvious ways.

“You raised a child who thought hating people because God made them a different shade of skin was okay. You allowed that hate. You probably fostered it. And your little child and her racist friends, who were all raised by racist parents just like you, were sent out into the world like little fucking hand grenades of hate and stupidity and, and, and you can go fuck yourself, Mary Pat, if you think for one second I’m okay with that. Or that I forgive. I do not forgive. So go back to your neighborhood and sit with your monster friends and get yourselves all worked up to stop us from attending your precious school or whatever. But bitch, we’re coming whether you like it or not. And we’re going to keep coming until you quit, not the other way around.”

The entire book foreshadows the eventual meeting between Mary Pat and Calliope: the parents of the two murder victims at the center of the plot. Mary Pat appears to hope that her previous relationship with Calliope, along with her own status as a grieving mother, will earn the kinship that she imagines them having. This illusion is quickly dispelled upon her entry into the Williamson house, where she is finally forced to confront a truth that should be obvious: Jules’s murder does not absolve her of the central role she played in Auggie’s murder, nor does Mary Pat’s halfhearted rejection of racist attitudes excuse the fact that she herself passed on those same racist attitudes to her children.

“New law enforcement philosophies coming out of L.A. and New York have begun to advocate for special teams of combat-ready police cells. In L.A., the first of these has been given a name, SWAT, and they took on the Black Panthers and the SLA in sustained firefights that armchair John Waynes love to believe put the order back in law and order. In reality, Bobby knows, those gunfights led to limited results, a shitload of property damage, and a new micro-generation of substandard cops who think they can compensate for bad instincts, poor people skills, and limited intelligence with high-powered weaponry.”

Although this passage seems random and brings up an issue with only a tenuous connection to the primary plot, it allows Lehane to deliver a social commentary and draw connections between the time period of the novel and the present day. The Vietnam War resulted in a massive uptick in the production of weaponry, armor, armored vehicles, and the like, which then remained as a surplus following the final withdrawal of US troops in 1973. Combined with an influx of former soldiers who apply their skills to police work, such as Detective Bobby Coyne, the result was a militarization of police work that many cite as a contributing factor to the enduring problem of police violence in American cities. The author therefore implies that just as themes of racism and violence echo over time, specific manifestations of those problems have discrete historical origins.

“When you’re a kid and they start in with all the lies, they never tell you they’re lies. They just tell you this is what it is. Whether they’re talking about Santa Claus or God or marriage or what you can or can’t make of yourself […] And they tell you that’s the Way. And you, you’re a fucking kid, you think, I want to be a part of the Way. I sure don’t want to be outside the Way. I gotta live with these people my whole life. And it’s warm in there. So warm. The rest of the world? That’s so fucking cold. So you embrace it, you know?”

Mary Pat delivers the ultimate verdict on the norms and attitudes that have characterized her upbringing, especially the fatalism that states that things are as they always have been and always must be. The desire for belonging is a core aspect of the human experience and can provide comfort even when a shared understanding among some people directs vitriol and cruelty against others. It is her inadvertent confrontation with Calliope Williamson, and the brutal realization that Mary Pat had even a slight and indirect hand in Auggie’s death, that finally forces her to reckon with the racist attitudes she had too long taken as a basic fact of life in Southie.

“‘You just fucking killed him.’ ‘Why are you shocked by this? You kill people all the time.’ ‘We,’ he says. ‘Not you.’”

This brief exchange offers a fitting conclusion to the theme of tough men who all eventually reach their breaking point. As inured as they are to violence, they are cushioned by the expectation that violence is theirs to deal out to whomever they see fit, and while they may catch a bullet or a beating from someone who lives as they do, they believe that civilians (especially women) are theirs to command. Mary Pat did not just kill their friend. With a single bullet, she shattered the assumptions that underlie their whole self-conception.