Small Mercies

As the protagonist of the novel, Mary Pat is portrayed as the epitome of a South Boston woman who “looks like she came off the conveyer belt for tough Irish broads” (6). Yet even as Lehane’s callous description of Mary Pat flirts with the stereotype, there are slight indications that she is not as typical as she initially presents herself to be. Looking at her daughter Jules, who bears none of the physical signs of Mary Pat and her lineage, Mary Pat lets slip the thought, unconscionable in her social circles, that “she sometimes wishes she could get them out of the Commonwealth” (6) before the harsh facts of the neighborhood collide with Jules’s gentle and frail nature. The progression of the novel also serves to widen the gulf between Mary Pat and her fellow Southie women, for while the other women merely make a show of being combative before backing down, Mary Pat exhibits the same aggression with even greater intensity, especially with her penchant for never backing down from a fight. In the midst of these intimate personal struggles, the imminent onset of busing reveals the depths of racial bigotry that exist amongst her friends and neighbors, and while she retains many racist attitudes herself, the death of Auggie Williamson gradually causes her maternal feelings to triumph over her fear of outsiders. As she learns more and more about her daughter’s secret life, she realizes that her community kept silent while Jules walked down a dangerous path that eventually killed her. Additionally, that same community fed Mary Pat lies couched in the reassurance that “girls […] go missing all the time” (81).

Once she realizes that Jules is dead, Mary Pat briefly clings to the idea of community as her last remaining refuge, but she soon realizes that the community is largely responsible for her daughter’s death, having encouraged the Frank Toomeys of the world to do as they please with no fear of consequences. Nothing she can do will bring Jules back or change the world around her, and so her trajectory toward the end of the novel is to make herself a pure vehicle of destruction in order to take down as much of a corrupt system as she can before inevitably burning out. She is not the only one in Southie who has been deprived of the things that make life worth living, although the amount of suffering she has endured is quite extensive. But whereas Butler and his minions want their victims to fall back on fatalistic conclusions such as, “Shit happens. It is what it is. Whatta ya gonna do” (18), Mary Pat will not go down until she has her chance to “fuck up the king’s court” (287).

Detective Bobby Coyne enters the novel as one of the few people who cares enough to talk to Mary Pat about Jules while sharing her goal of finding the truth, rather than concealing it or persuading Mary Pat to ignore it as her friends and neighbors have done. As a police officer, Bobby would typically be regarded as an enemy within the community: the foot soldier of a corrupt establishment that cares little for the plight of ordinary working people and forces them to rely on extralegal means of protection from the likes of Marty Butler. Yet in a sharp contrast to this community-wide attitude of distrust, Mary Pat can barely muster the hostility expected of a Southie resident before she develops a reluctant liking for Bobby, who is a near-local man himself. Like her deceased son, he is also a Marine who served in Vietnam, although she does not realize that he also shares a history of heroin addiction similar to her son’s. Later on, Bobby becomes the second focus of the narrative as he follows his own investigation of Jules’s disappearance and murder, among other concerns. As he pursues his course of action, often playing clean-up to Mary Pat’s wrathful trail of destruction, he remains painfully self-aware of the many conflicting roles he has played. As he states of his time in Vietnam, “I realized that I was death, walking around with my big gun. I was the one killing all the beauty” (121). In a contrast to his earlier days at war, his tenure as a law enforcement officer is marked by acts of mercy; for example, he once granted a reprieve to someone whom he arrested for drug use, and now, years later, she re-emerges as a love interest whom he desperately hopes might be able to accept him despite all of his shortcomings. As a police officer, Bobby is largely reduced to a secondary role, reacting to the situations that Mary Pat precipitates. If he learns anything from Mary Pat, it is the precariousness of life and the limits of a parent’s promise to protect their child While the novel as a whole does not have an optimistic conclusion, Bobby does give the reader one broken person who still has a reason to go on.

The most powerful criminal in South Boston, Marty Butler is based on the real-life crime boss, James “Whitey” Bulger, who dominated the Boston underworld before going into hiding in 1994. The FBI found him in 2011, and he was murdered in prison in 2018. The fictitious Butler only makes a handful of direct appearances in the novel, but his presence looms over the entire neighborhood from the very beginning. He is the ultimate cause for both murders at the center of the plot, and he provides the point of connection between them. In his mind, Auggie Williamson had to die to send a message that busing would be met with violent resistance. Butler is undoubtedly a racist, a fact that becomes blatantly evident when he tells Mary Pat that countries “have unity and prosperity because they stay whole. They stay whole because the races don’t mix” (90). In a more instrumental sense, he is catering to the racism that consumes the neighborhood he rules, thereby upholding racist attitudes to validate his bona fides as the neighborhood’s true defender while corrupt politicians impose rules that he believes the people of South Boston need not follow.

However, it becomes evident that racial segregation plays a more pivotal role within Butler’s criminal organization. Butler depends upon the complicity of Southie even as he brings in drugs, has sex with young girls, and kills anyone who dares to cross him. He also encourages the locals to hardening their xenophobic attitudes against all those they believe to be outsiders. And within this widespread racism, it soon becomes apparent that Butler’s criminal indifference and hatred to the fate of Black children can easily spill over into similar attitudes toward white children who for one reason or another are seen as violating the rules. Stability therefore becomes a law unto itself and justifies all manner of brutality if the alternative is scrutiny from the outside. What ultimately dooms Jules Fennessy is not so much her affair with Frank Toomey and consequent pregnancy, but her act of comparative mercy for Auggie Williamson, killing him quickly rather than permitting his death by electrocution. The smallest act of kindness toward an outsider, even one resulting in their death, is a threat to stability requiring her disappearance. Butler does not require much character development because there is no depth to his personality. His greatest success is to prey upon people’s weaknesses to convince them that he is something other than what he is: an empty human being leaving nothing but misery in his wake.