Small Mercies

14

The phone rings and rings. Mary Pat stares at it, no idea how long she’s been sitting on the couch in the living room, no idea how long that phone’s been ringing. It stops. And then, a minute later, it starts again. Stops after nine rings. A minute of silence. Maybe more. Maybe five minutes. And then the phone ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. It’s halfway through the fourth ring when Mary Pat gently removes the cord at the back.

It must be Meadow Lane. She’s supposed to be at work right now. That realization almost breaks through the numbness that has defined her since she opened the bag Marty Butler gave her. But the numbness is still too strong. It’s head-to-toe Novocain. It’s numbness with weight — there’s nothing gentle or calming about it. It clamps down on her skin, blood, brain, and nerve endings. Like a hand gripping the back of her neck and pressing her face against the ground because it fears what will happen should she ever get to her feet.

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.

“Mary Pat!” Carol says, and claps her hands joyfully. “Where have you been?”

“Here.” Mary Pat steps aside to let them in.

No one seems to notice the overflowing sink and overflowing ashtrays, the empty beer cans everywhere, the glasses sticky with liquor sediment, the takeout pizza boxes, the takeout fish-and-chips box, the McDonald’s bags crumpled on the kitchen counter.

“We need to get you ready,” Joyce says.

“Ready for what?” Mary Pat asks, and they all laugh.

“Ready for what!” Patty Byrnes says. “Oh, you’re a caution.”

“Come, come.” Maureen Kilkenny leads her down the hallway toward her bedroom.

A second later, or so it seems, Carol has joined them in there, and the two women are going through Mary Pat’s meager closet. They toss one dress on the bed, followed by another. Then a blouse-and-skirt combo. Next come the shoes — Mary Pat has only two pairs of dress-up shoes, one heels, one flats, so that immediately narrows it down to a 50/50 choice.

They hold each dress and then the blouse-and-skirt combo up to Mary Pat’s body, and she watches herself let them, can hear them chirping about which one looks best and which could go with the shoes — Has to be the flats, Carol says, no one can wear heels as long as they’ll be standing, plus it sends a conflicting message. Mary Pat sees herself standing in her bedroom but it’s not her, it’s Novocain Mary Pat, the lost, the numb, the beaten. Carol and Maureen decide on the blouse and skirt. The blouse is the red of wine and the skirt is a plaid number, vaguely tartan. The flats are black. Once the clothes are on, they work on her hair and makeup in the bathroom, and Mary Pat catches sight of herself in the mirror and feels a strange pride in acknowledging that she looks like a ghoul, like something that has been siphoned of all blood but nonetheless walks among the living.

They whisk her back out to the main room, where the other four wait. The fast-food boxes and beer cans are gone, the ashtrays are emptied, the glasses are drip-drying in the dish rack.

“Where are we going?” Mary Pat asks.

Again, they all laugh at the absurdity of the question.

But then Hannah Spotchnicki bursts out with “The rally!”

“At City Hall,” Carol says.

“Oh,” Mary Pat manages. “Right.”

“Can’t go there without you, silly!” Noreen Ryan says way too chirpily when you consider the fear in her eyes.

“We need everyone,” Carol says. “Everybody we can lay our hands on.”

The absurdity of the sentence in her present circumstances is not lost on Mary Pat. She smiles at Carol. “Every body you can lay your hands on?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What if you can’t?”

“What?”

“Lay your hands on the body?”

Mary Pat has no idea how long everyone just stares at her — could be a second, could be five minutes — but most of them seem like they’d prefer to run right out the fucking door.

Maybe, Mary Pat thinks, I’ll become one of those women who pushes her belongings around town in a shopping cart and sleeps in playgrounds.

“You need fresh air,” Carol says. “You need to be a part of something meaningful. You need purpose, Mary Pat. Now more than ever.”

Now more than ever.

So they do know.

“Okay,” Mary Pat hears herself say.

They move her out that door like she’s on a hand truck.

Along the roadway just outside the projects, a school bus waits. If anyone grasps the irony, they don’t mention it. The bus is a faded denim blue with the ghostly words Franklin Middle School still visible under a layer of old paint. The tires look bald. About twenty women have been waiting on the bus the whole time. They’ve got the windows down and their cigarette arms out the windows. Several fan themselves. It’s not boiling yet — no sun, a cloudy morning — but it’s humid as hell.

Mary Pat knows most of the women. Almost all of them have beehive hairdos, which is hardly unusual for Southie. What is unusual is that most of them have placed small American flags or what appear to be tea bags in the center of the hives. They barely meet her eyes as she takes her seat near the front with the SWAB Sisters, but she looks at them long enough to confirm that, yes, those are tea bags. As the bus lurches out onto the roadway, Mary Pat looks down the length of it, sees Mary Kate Dooley, Mary Jo O’Rourke, Donna Ferris, Erin Dunne, Tricia Hughes, Barbara Clarke, Kerry Murphy, and Nora Quinn. Old friends all. And not one looks back at her. Stacked at the rear, taking up the final four seats and the space behind them, are the signs — some, Mary Pat is sure, she assembled herself a few nights ago on the floor of her apartment.

They drive out through South Boston in the humid gray. They smoke and make small talk, and the center of the city looms closer with every intersection they pass through.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Joyce O’Halloran is saying to Carol, her hands up by her ears.

“So why are you talking about her?” Carol asks.

“I’m not. She’s just a fucking, ya know, an embarrassment. She’s what you get with the spoiling and the TV and the music they listen to, everybody glorifying the drugs and the free love. That’s sure as hell not how we were raised, but she thinks it’s okay to mouth off about everything. Like, fucking everything. If I believe in something, she believes the opposite. And not because she believes it. But because she wants to hurt me.”

“She wants to hurt you,” Carol agrees.

“She wants to hurt you,” Hannah chimes in.

“Who’s this now?” Mary Pat asks.

“My daughter,” Joyce says, waving airily. “Cecilia. Little bitch. Me and my husband are raising five kids, and four of them aren’t bad, but this one? The middle one?”

“The middle one’s always a trial,” Noreen Ryan says.

The Swab Sisters all nod in agreement.

“She’s just a teenager,” Maureen says. “They go through their phases.”

“Mmmm,” Joyce says, clearly not convinced.

The bus bounces across the Northern Avenue Bridge and takes a right on Atlantic, and now they’re officially out of South Boston and into Boston proper. City Hall is only a mile away.

“Time for us, girls.” Carol reaches into her purse and comes back with a palmful of small flags and tea bags.

Mary Pat takes a flag. Instead of sticking it in her hair, she slips the little wooden stake into a buttonhole of her blouse.

Joyce, Carol, and Noreen choose flags. Patty, Maureen, and Hannah go with the tea bags.

Mary Pat watches them help one another place them in their hair and has to ask, “What’s with the tea bags?”

“You don’t remember? We discussed it at a meeting.”

“I must have missed that one.”

“The tea party, Mary Pat. The Boston Tea Party?” Hannah says. “When they chucked all the tea into the harbor?”

“I know about that,” Mary Pat says.

“Well, we’re throwing our own rebellion against tyranny,” Patty says. “Hence tea bags.”

“Is anyone going to get that?” Mary Pat says.

Several of the women blanch, and Mary Pat can hear murmuring behind her, but it’s too late for debate because now they’re turning off Sudbury Street onto Congress, the JFK Federal Building canting in the window at the northeast edge of City Hall Plaza, and Mary Pat getting a look now at the sea of people streaming into the plaza from what seems like every direction. The traffic is reduced to a crawl. As they creep along, the concrete edges of City Hall come into view. It’s an ugly building, colorless except for some brick at the base of it, graceless from head to toe. Inside, it’s worse. It seems constructed solely to make anyone who has to do business with the city realize before even entering the building that the house always wins.

“How many people are we expecting?” Mary Pat asks the group.

Carol says, “Maybe fifteen hundred?”

They reach the curb. As they exit the bus, the bus driver hands everyone another tea bag.

They open the back door and each grabs a sign. Mary Pat’s says End Judicial Dictatorship. The woman next to her lifts one that reads Boston Under Siege. Mary Pat finds herself wishing she’d grabbed that one — it’s a better acronym.

They climb the stairs leading from the back of the building to the plaza. The clouds are gone. The sun, bright and blistering, immediately bores into the back of Mary Pat’s neck. The crowd moving up the stairs — so thick that Mary Pat and her bus companions seem but specks in the larger throng around them — is already sweating, several faces pink with heat. There are a lot of flags — American flags, Irish flags, sheets tied to poles with neighborhood names: Southie, mostly, but also Dorchester, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and East Boston. Halfway up the stairs, the crowd starts shouting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Mary Pat has to admit it feels good as the words leave her mouth, particularly at the end, when the crowd kicks it up several notches and shout-spits the final words: “liberty and justice for ALL!”

She’s starting to suspect there’re more than fifteen hundred of them, and when they reach the top of the stairs and spill into the plaza, she’s overwhelmed to realize there are thousands of them. She can’t see to the end of them. They have to be nine thousand strong, maybe ten.

Carol leads the group to a fountain where they add their tea bags to hundreds more, the tea staining the water a rusty brown. Mary Pat once again wonders if anyone will get it. She imagines an old flatfoot standing over the fountain later, saying, “Ah, now, don’t these morons know that tea tastes better when the water’s properly boiled?”

Along the far edge of the crowd — most of them safely across the street at 3 Center Plaza — she notes the counterprotesters. Hippies, mostly, white and scraggly and living on their trust funds; a few blacks with confrontational Afros and dashikis; and finally, a cluster of men and women who look like Mary Pat and the people she knows — working-class Irish, Polish, and Italian. There’s not too many of them, but they’re there, holding signs that say things like end segregation now (not much of an acronym there either) and education is a civil right. Among the group, Mary Pat is shocked to see a few older folks she recognizes — Mrs. Walsh from Old Colony; old Tyrone Folan from Baxter Street; the entire Crowley family from M Street.

Before she can identify anyone else, they’re in the sea, buffeted along by some unseeable North Star that leads them to a spot maybe ten feet short of the stage. Here there are no counterprotesters. Who would dare? They’re packed in hundreds deep — not just Southie, white Dorchester, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and East Boston but the whole fucking city — Revere, Everett, Malden, Chelsea, Roslindale — except for (obviously) Mattapan and Roxbury and the sections of Dorchester that are fully black now. In what’s come to be called Phase 1, the city will be desegregating fifty-nine of the two hundred schools in the public school system, starting in less than two weeks. Within two years, all two hundred schools will be affected. And that explains the crowd — this will be a problem for all of them eventually.

The first three speakers are members of the Boston School Committee, those who fought hardest, for almost a decade, to keep the schools the way they should be. The first speaker, Shirley Brackin from St. William Parish in Dorchester, reiterates what all the people there already know — that none of those in charge of desegregating the schools in a manner as fucked up as busing actually live in the neighborhoods they’ve decreed must change; that not one of those people sends their kids to public schools; that not one of those people — the white ones, anyway — live in integrated neighborhoods (because there pretty much are no integrated neighborhoods in Boston). The next speaker, Geraldine Guffy of St. Augustine Parish in Southie, rips at the inevitable destruction of their way of life: Theirs is a village life within a city, where neighbors know neighbors because they all grew up together, went to the same schools, played in the same playgrounds and sports leagues, knew one another’s parents and grandparents so well, why, if one of those kids got out of line, those other parents and grandparents were free to step in and discipline — with a smack to the head or the backside or just a stern tongue-lashing — as if that kid were their own. “They say this will change the neighborhood in a good way,” Geraldine Guffy says, and then has to wait for the roar of boos to die down, “that in some sugar-sweet fairy-tale land, our kids and the colored kids will become friends. But our kids and the colored kids are going to return home every day to their friends and their families in their neighborhoods. They’re not going to become friends, just schoolmates. And our traditions, our way of life, our feelings of safety and security? We won’t be able to buy those back. You can’t buy back something when it’s already gone. And all those things will be gone the moment you see that very first bus roll down the street toward our high school.”

The crowd erupts in a mixture of euphoria and threat. Mary Pat looks back over her shoulder and can’t fully grasp the size of it. She’s in the center of the plaza, yet the crowd is so immense she can’t see any of the streets that surround them.

She can feel their power and their outrage and their sadness, and she’s surprised to suddenly feel it with them. For the first time since she opened that bag of money and understood what it signified, she feels something. She thought that after losing her daughter, she had nothing, and she mostly does, but she needn’t forget that she still has her way of life. She still has her neighborhood and all the people in it. She still has community. And what these social engineers and limousine liberals are doing is taking a wrecking ball to that. To her way of life. To the only life she’s ever known and the only thing she has left to defend in this world.

By the time the third speaker, Mike Dowd of Most Precious Blood Parish in Hyde Park, takes the stage, he can get out only a sentence or two before he’s drowned out by the roars of the crowd. He waits them out, goes another two sentences, and they roar again. Mary Pat and the half-dozen SWAB Sisters are right there with them, screaming themselves hoarse.

“God made us,” Mike Dowd bellows. “God made us women and God made us men and God doesn’t make mistakes, right?”

The crowd is a little less sure how to answer, but they mostly cry out, “Right!”

Mike Dowd leans into the mic. “And God made us white and black and brown and Oriental. And was that a mistake?”

Again, a bit of hesitation, as if the crowd’s confused because no one told them there’d be a quiz, but eventually, a roar of “No!” roils up into the sky.

Mike Dowd shouts, “Exactly! No. God did not make a mistake. He chose to make us white and black and brown and Oriental and even red Indian. Those were the colors he wanted. If He wanted us to mix, then He would have mixed us. Made us half yellow, half blue. Purple and white.” Chuckles of approval roll through the crowd. “He didn’t make us mixed. Because He doesn’t want us to mix.”

Well, isn’t it the truth? Mary Pat thinks. Isn’t that just the bottom line? We have our way of life, the coloreds have theirs. The Hispanics, theirs. The Orientals have Chinatown, for God’s sake, and you don’t see anyone trying to force them to disband and disperse across the city. No, they know their place. And as long as they keep knowing it, they will be left in peace to manage their own affairs. And that’s all we want.

But 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. The woman’s face is rounder and older than Jules’s, but the hair is near identical. And suddenly, it’s like she’s lost her again. Like she’s losing her over and over and over. Like she can see the baby Jules cupped, naked and squawking, in her hand, and then she’s rushing straight through her daughter’s life, observing it the way you observe a train blasting past you — teething, first step, first flu, scraped knees, missing front teeth, first-grade pigtails, second-grade ponytail, a permanent broken heart in fourth grade after Mary Pat tells her Daddy’s never coming home again, acne at twelve, breasts at thirteen along with apathy for everything, eighth-grade graduation, high school dance nights, the end of the apathetic stage coinciding with Noel’s final decline, the return of her spunk, her humor, her loud, goofy laugh — and then she’s gone, her daughter’s gone, she’s left this life, she’s stepped off into a void. 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.

Jules.

Jules.

Why’d you leave me?

Where’d you go?

Has the pain stopped, baby?

Is your world warm?

Will you wait for me to find you there?

Please wait.

For a moment she wants to drop, just fall to her knees and wail her daughter’s name. And she might have if, at that moment, the crowd hadn’t surged to the right as though it were a single organism, and Carol, beside her, hisses one word:

“Teddy.”

Mary Pat looks through the throng, and now she can see him, flanked by security personnel and two MDC cops, his black hair slicked back and matching his black suit. Edward M. Kennedy. Brother to the dead president who gave his name to the federal building fifty yards away. Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the national stage, but here, in Boston, he’s Teddy. Mostly it’s because he’s Irish and the Irish don’t put on airs, so President Kennedy was always Jack, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was always Bobby, but maybe he’s also Teddy because of the three, he’s the one they all take a little less seriously. So clearly the youngest, so clearly the needy one, desperate for approval. And, of course, they all know he was kicked out of Harvard for cheating and abandoned his mistress in a sinking car in a Martha’s Vineyard lagoon and still has an eye for other ladies who aren’t his wife, particularly when he goes on his benders in the pubs of Beacon Hill and Hyannis Port. And all of that would be fine for his constituents, the good people of Southie and Charlestown and half of Dorchester, he’s one of them, after all, a Hibernian, a mick, a Paddy — except that Teddy’s bona fides have been suspect of late. Particularly in matters of race and even more particularly on the matter of busing, which he came out in full support of during several recent interviews.

Mary Pat can feel the crowd turning on him before he even opens his mouth or they theirs. Who is he to stroll down here in his fine suit and slick haircut and expensive tie and shoes and explain to them what’s what? They know what’s what.

“Hey, Teddy,” some guy shouts, “where do your kids go to school, Teddy?”

Teddy ignores the voice, even though the guy keeps asking the question about every fifteen seconds.

By this point, Teddy’s almost reached the stage, but the crowd swarms the steps so he can’t walk up. He turns to one of the organizers, Bernie Dunn, who wears a brown suit far less expensive than Teddy’s, and says, “Are they going to let me up?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Bernie says. “Listen to me, Teddy. I—”

“They need to let me up on the stage,” Teddy says.

“No, they don’t. You’re not hearing us. It’s despicable what’s going on, Teddy.”

“I understand your point, but—”

“But nothing. We’re not going to have some judge tell us how to run things, tell us where our kids are going to go.”

“I understand, but you have to agree something had to be done.”

“They’re gonna rip our neighborhoods apart, parish by parish, and you’re letting them. Hell, you’re helping them.”

“Are you going to let me talk?” Teddy asks.

“No.” Bernie seems a little surprised himself. “We’ve heard all you have to say.”

And Bernie Dunn turns his back on a Kennedy.

Everyone adjacent to him does the same. The next cluster of people follows suit. And on and on through the crowd. When the surge reaches the SWAB Sisters and Mary Pat, Mary Pat feels light-headed as she turns her back on Senator Edward M. Kennedy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It’s like turning her back on the pope.

Those who don’t turn away from Teddy turn toward him, and Mary Pat can hear it getting ugly quick.

“Where do your fucking kids go to school, Teddy?”

“Where do you live, Teddy?”

“You’re an embarrassment to your brother and to your people.”

“Go back to Brookline, you fucking faggot.”

“You’re not one of us anymore!”

“Fuck you, nigger lover! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

They hear the commotion and turn back to see the MDC cops and the security guys hustling Teddy toward the building named after his brother. Mary Pat is baffled by the back of Teddy’s suit. It’s almost completely white now, as if he’s been shit on by a flock of birds. It takes her a second to realize it isn’t bird shit.

It’s spit.

The crowd is spitting on a Kennedy.

Mary Pat feels ill. Isn’t there a line we don’t cross? she wants to ask the crowd. Isn’t there a place we don’t allow ourselves to go?

The crowd keeps spitting on the senator until his guards and the two cops get him into the federal building. The front of the building is clear glass, so Mary Pat can see them hustling him toward the elevators, and that should have been the end of it — everyone should have regained their sense — but then a pane of glass the size of a semitruck shatters.

The crowd lets out a roar of approval. Joyful shrieks split the air like birdshot.

Half a dozen police officers rush into the crowd from the edge of the plaza. It serves as a reminder that an entire police station sits less than a block away, so no one rushes the building. The cops don’t swing their clubs or anything stupid, they just hold their hands at arm’s length so the crowd will take a few steps back. They say a lot of “Now, now, we understand” and “We get it, we do,” as if they’re talking to children having a tantrum.

The crowd keeps yelling — at least a hundred voices screaming about Garrity and Kennedy and hell no we won’t go — but the violence stays confined to that one pane of glass, unless you count the spitting.

“Well, they heard us,” Carol says to the other SWAB Sisters. “They sure as hell heard us.”

Joyce O’Halloran’s daughter, Cecilia, approaches the group of women with a scowl on her face. She’s got her mother’s sharp cheekbones, thin lips, and lack of chin. Her eyes are red with recent tears.

Joyce seems to notice her without really seeing her because her tone stays light. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Can you hear that?” Cecilia says, pointing at the crowd, her eyes growing redder.

Joyce lights a cigarette and stares at her problem child. “Hear what?”

“That.”

Mary Pat notices now. The chants of the crowd have coalesced. At first it was a smorgasbord of “Re-sist!” and “End dic-tator-ship!” and “Southie won’t go!” but now it’s one unified chant:

“Nig-gers suck! Nig-gers suck! Nig-gers suck!”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Joyce says.

The child’s eyes widen. “You don’t hear that?”

Joyce’s thin lips grow thinner, and she blows her smoke almost directly into her daughter’s face. “I hear a lot of things. I hear people laughing at you and your nipples poking through your hippie T-shirt. When you wear that to the colored school next week, let me know how they treat you.”

“I’m not afraid to go to Roxbury High, Ma. It’s you parents making it a nightmare, not us kids. We’re fine.”

“Put on a bra,” Joyce says, and this time her smoke goes directly into her daughter’s face.

Cecilia’s face tightens. Her jaw clenches and unclenches and her eyes grow cold. “I can put on a bra no problem. What’s your cure for being an asshole?”

Joyce punches her daughter in the side of the head. Joyce is big, her daughter is small, and the punch knocks Cecilia to the ground. When she starts to stand, Joyce grabs her by the hair and swings at her neck with a closed fist, but Mary Pat hooks her arm around Joyce’s and stops the punch.

She looks into Joyce’s eyes. There are two doses of rage in there — one for Cecilia, one for Mary Pat.

“No,” Mary Pat says. “Stop.”

Behind her, Cecilia scrambles to her feet.

Mary Pat separates from Joyce, and now they face each other from three feet apart.

The rest of the SWAB Sisters are frozen in shock.

“Mary Pat,” Joyce says, “step aside.”

Mary Pat shakes her head.

“Step aside!” Carol says.

“Step aside!” Maureen shrieks.

“Mary Pat,” Joyce says, breathing shallow, “I will discipline my child as I see fit.”

Again Mary Pat shakes her head.

“Get out of her fucking way!” Hannah Spotchnicki screams.

“No one touches this girl,” Mary Pat says.

Joyce charges and immediately comes up short when Mary Pat buries her fist in her solar plexus. Joyce hits the ground on her hip, lies there with her mouth open and gasping desperately for breath that’s still a good ten seconds away.

Three of the five remaining SWAB Sisters — Hannah, Carol, and Patty — attack as one. They must think they’re tough, Mary Pat reasons, because they’re from Southie and they’ve waged reigns of terror over their husbands and children for years. But being from Southie is one thing; being from Commonwealth Housing Development is quite another.

Mary Pat keeps her head down like a bull and hits whatever’s nearest. Doesn’t just hit — she squeezes, she scratches, she yanks. It’s pure street fighting like she hasn’t done since she was jumped by three girls at Old Colony back in high school. She rips off earrings, punches pussies, yanks on sagging tits as though milking a cow. She stomps ankles, kicks knees, bites a set of fingers that claw at her face. She loses some hair, gets her face and ears all scratched up, but pretty soon three more bitches are on the ground moaning, and Mary Pat is still standing — no one even got her off her feet — wiping at the blood in her eyes.

She looks around for Cecilia, but the girl is long gone. Noreen and Patty hold up their hands so she knows not to attack them. Both appear petrified and revolted.

Mary Pat turns back to her victims, sitting or lying on the pavement amid torn scraps of clothing, little plastic flags, splatters of blood, and flattened tea bags. Carol is the one nursing the freshly bloody fingers and staring up at her in a kind of dumbfounded fury. The flesh around her right eye is already turning stone blue. It takes her a bit to form a proper sentence, but when she does, it comes out as clear as a bell.

“You’re dead to us,” she says. “And when word gets out what you did here today, you’ll be dead to everyone in Southie.”

Mary Pat shrugs. The time for talk has passed. She turns and makes her way out of the crowd, which parts before her every step.