It needn’t fear. She can’t imagine regaining her feet. Not in any way that matters. She definitely can’t imagine going back to work for a while. Doubts there’ll be a job still waiting for her by the time she’s ready to return. And that’s fine.
She’s found a station on her radio — WJIB — that plays only classical music, and she can’t stop listening to it. She doesn’t turn it off even when she goes to sleep (not that there’s much sleep happening in her life these days). She’s been a Top 40 girl her whole life, never into any particular band, just always liking the music of the day. This summer it’s been “Rock the Boat” and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and her favorite, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” But all that music sounds silly to her now, because it wasn’t made with someone like her in mind. Even that lyric “Losing everything is like the sun going down on me” feels insufficient, because losing everything doesn’t feel like the sun going down on her, it feels like an atom bomb went off inside her and she’s now part of the mushroom cloud, a thousand little pieces of her breaking apart and floating out into space in a thousand different directions.
With classical pieces, she doesn’t know the song names or the names of the composers (unless the DJ chimes in at the end of a four- or five-song block, at which point the early songs are too far back to place a name to the appropriate tune), but the music speaks to her grief in a way nothing else can. It slides through the Novocain. Not enough to find her heart but enough to find her head. She floats through the notes as if the notes are currents in a larger body of water — a dark body of water, she’s sure, a wide river at night — and travels into a space in her mind where her entire history and that of her family before her and the family she’s made are all intertwined. She can sense — though not feel or articulate — a connection between all who have lived and died in her bloodline. Of course, part of the connection is ethnic heritage — they were all Irish and all married only other Irish since the first of them, Damien and Mare Flanagan, stepped off the boat at Long Wharf in 1889 — but the other part of the connection is more elusive. And yet, riding the current of Beethoven or Brahms or Chopin or Handel, she can touch a part of herself that feels far more true than factual, an Original Mary Pat, a Mother Eve Mary Pat, a Mary Pat rooted so far back she may have breathed her last on a peat bog in the village of Tully Cross in the townland of Gorteenclough back in the twelfth century. And that Original Mary Pat understands something in the music about the ties that bind them all in this family — from the firstborn American Flanagan (Connor) to the lastborn American Fennessy (Jules) that gives meaning to the story of the bloodline. Present-Day Mary Pat can’t put her finger on what that is, but she listens to the notes in numb belief that she might one day.
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.