Mercy Street(27)

Therapy embarrassed her. It was hard to talk about herself for fifty minutes straight. She was young and there wasn’t much material—at least, none she was willing to share. Her background, her entire history, was unmentionable, so she complained about her in-laws. Phil’s family was half the reason she’d married him, and yet she’d come to resent their generosity and concern and relentless advice, which she badly needed but couldn’t bear to receive. She had misrepresented herself to them and they had believed her, which made them seem stupid. The Claudia they loved was a fiction, the person she pretended to be.

Their sorrow at her miscarriage seemed disproportionate. She’d never told them about the fosters—of course she hadn’t—but she blamed them for not knowing. Children, actual children, were dying every day—of abuse, neglect, wholly avoidable causes—while these kind silly rich people cried over a fetus the size of a gumball.

It wasn’t a baby; it was a menstrual period. That’s what she wanted to say.

She went to therapy for four months, twice as long as she’d spent being pregnant. In the end, she and Phil divided their CD collection. At their age, it was what divorce looked like.

She has no idea what became of the South African photo editor, whose fall was cushioned by a breathtakingly extravagant baby shower. She married a Wall Street trader and moved to Connecticut and was never heard from again.

Boston didn’t, after New York, feel like much of a city. Restaurant kitchens closed at nine p.m. The slow, creaking underground trains went nowhere she wanted to go. In December Boston came into focus, a city with a certain idea of itself. On Beacon Hill, snow danced under the streetlamps. Men wore long wool coats and Burberry mufflers. Historic cobblestones were carefully preserved. Diplomas were the local industry, like steel or textiles, so she earned a master’s in social work. She’d been skeptical of therapy, which seemed like an expensive crutch for whining rich people, but it had helped her. It might have helped her mother or Uncle Ricky or any one of the fosters. Social work was therapy for people without money, for people like her.

BACK AT THE CLINIC, THE CROWD HAD THINNED. PUFFY HAD put down his sign to eat his usual lunch, French fries and Chicken McNuggets. He nodded in Claudia’s direction, a friendly guy in his real life. She gave him a half wave.

She was two paces from the door when she noticed the protestor leaning against the side of the building, a beardo in a red jacket, a ski lift ticket hanging from the zipper. He didn’t accost her, didn’t even see her. It was his sign that caught her attention—hand-painted, a bespoke creation. ABORTION CAUSES BREAST CANCER. Beneath this caption was a cartoon drawing of a naked woman, rendered in pornographic detail: melon breasts, nipples like small fingers. Over one grotesquely large breast was a red bull’s-eye.

It is said that certain animals—ornery males, bulls and roosters—are inflamed by the color red. Claudia imagines they have no idea why the color provokes them and no memory of their aggressive behavior unless, like her, they see a video posted later on the internet.

In the video she starts out calmly, conversationally, explaining that the sign is factually inaccurate. Just so you know, there is no connection at all between abortion and breast cancer. Her smile is tense, wincing. I mean, just so you know.

She can remember feeling a human presence behind her—a slowing of sidewalk traffic, pedestrians stopping to listen—but she had no idea that someone was filming her with a cell phone.

By the end of the video she looks and sounds like a shrieking madwoman. (Abortion is not a risk factor! Having breasts is a risk factor!) It was the man’s smugness that inflamed her, his undeserved power. The power to threaten strangers—female strangers—with the illness women fear most.

The video is sixty-eight seconds long. It ends with heavy footsteps, a male voice off camera. Luis, the security guard, had been watching on closed circuit.

Sir, please step out of the way.

The video doesn’t show what happened next: Luis dragging Claudia into the building, grasping her arm, hissing into her ear: “For God’s sake, have you lost your fucking mind?”

When they were safely inside, he let her go. “Claudia,” he said, more gently. “Are you all right?”

It was a hard question to answer. Was anybody all right? At best, she was mostly right. Objectively speaking, all right was an impossibly high bar.





6


Anthony went to the morning Mass, not every day but most days, often enough that he was seen and recognized. At St. Dymphna’s, early Mass was poorly attended, the crowd made up entirely of old people. He would remember it as the defining ritual of his time on Disability: the sonorous language of the liturgy, old people croaking out the hymns, the familiar prayers welcome as rain. Not to mention he needed to get out of the house.

The advanced age of the congregants didn’t trouble him. At Sunday Mass the mean age was younger, but this came with its own complications. For instance: some of the younger people had been known, during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, to raise their hands to heaven like Pentecostal snake handlers calling forth spirits, a practice that struck him as distinctly Protestant. The old priest, Father Cronin, wouldn’t have tolerated this. His replacement, Father Quentin Roche, seemed not to have noticed. He was twenty years younger, a brisk, busy man who zipped through a full Sunday Mass in thirty minutes, endearing himself to the congregation and earning a genial nickname, Quentin the Quick.