“You can’t compare the public schools here to the private schools in the suburbs. It’s not apples and oranges.”
“Why not?”
“Because people pay for the right to...” She turns in the bed and looks at him. “Ooooh, you bastard.”
“Right?”
“You set me up.”
“I did not.”
After a bit, she says, “But something had to be done.”
He flashes on Mary Pat Fennessy in the morgue the other day. Talk about someone who believes something has to be done, no matter what the fallout is. Jesus.
“Yeah, something had to be done,” he agrees.
“Because if not now, when?” she asks.
He sighs and stubs out his cigarette. “There’s the rub.”
“Can I ask you something... delicate?”
“I’ll gird my loins.”
“You’re an Irish cop from Savin Hill,” she starts.
He knows exactly where this is going. “How come I’m not a racist? Is that the question?”
“Kinda. Yeah.”
He drinks some water. “My parents were, let’s say, difficult people. They’d both given up their dreams when they married, so to be their kid was, uh, not fun. They were angry and hated each other and couldn’t admit to themselves that they were angry and hated each other. So they drank and they fought and they found a million different ways to make us kids proxy soldiers on their battlefield. Then my mother got sick and died. And my father realized he’d loved her as much as he’d hated her. And that fucked him up even worse. So, when I say my parents weren’t saints, probably weren’t even good people, you can believe me.”
She’s watching him with a curious half smile. “Okay.”
“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 were 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.”
“I think I might have liked your parents.”
“Until the fifth drink,” he admits, “they could be a lotta fun.”
“What were their dreams?”
“Hmm?”
“You said they’d given up their dreams.”
“My father was a painter. Not a housepainter — well, he was that too — but a genuine artist.”
“And what did your mother want to be?”
“Anything but a mother. Or a housewife. I think she just wanted to be free.” He can feel her looking deeper into him than anyone’s cared to look for a long time. “What about your parents?”
“They wanted me to marry well. And live in the suburbs. And not need a job. I was always fairly certain I’d been a disappointment to them. But just before my mother died, she told me, ‘We never approved, but we were always proud.’ Isn’t that a weird thing to tell your kid?”
He thinks about it. “It’s nice, actually. She’s saying you took your path, and it wasn’t what she would have chosen, but you did well.” He finds himself flashing on Mary Pat Fennessy again, a woman robbed of both her children. Christ, he wonders, what could possibly give her the strength to get out of bed in the morning?
Fury.
Anguish.
Rage.
“You come from the upper middle class,” he says to Carmen, “but you left it all behind to help people. To actually fucking matter in this world. If I was your parent, I’d be proud of you.”
She taps his nose with her index finger. “If I was your mom, I’d be proud of you.”
“This is a weird conversation to have naked.”
“Ain’t it?”
She rolls on her side and he tucks in tight behind her and they fall asleep with the windows open to the night and the TV still on.
26
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.