He took her down to Canton to meet his one close relative, a great-aunt whom he boarded with in a row house twelve feet wide. She was a sharp-faced, unsmiling woman who might have been daunting if she had not treated Mercy so deferentially. She insisted that Mercy should sit in the only comfortable chair, and she apologized several times over for the supper she served them—a pot of beet soup and then some kind of rolled-up cabbage leaves with ground meat inside. “I know it’s not what you’d call upper-class,” she said, and Mercy said, “Oh, goodness, my dad’s a storekeeper,” and Aunt Alice said, “I know.” Mercy had a sense of futility then, and in fact for as long as Aunt Alice lived—eight more years—she never seemed fully relaxed around Mercy. She attended their wedding, an understated, street-clothes affair, in a hat with a bird on it and a church dress more formal than the bride’s dress.
After Mercy and Robin were married they rented the upper floor of a little house in Hampden, and Mercy slipped into domestic life as if she had been born to it. Which she had, really. No one she knew back then imagined any occupation for wives besides keeping house and rearing children. When the war began and other women started going off to jobs, Mercy was already pregnant with Alice. Then, two years later, along came Lily, and Mercy no longer wondered what to do with herself. She was busy night and day; she felt panicky, sometimes, and Robin would not have thought of offering to help even if he had been around, which he seldom was. Sometimes it seemed they barely exchanged two words before they fell into bed at night, exhausted.
He was a good husband. He worked hard, and he loved her. And Mercy did love him back. But occasionally, for no particular reason, she used to entertain fantasies of leaving home. Oh, not seriously, of course. They were no more than the idle, he’ll-be-sorry fantasies that she assumed must flit through all women’s minds on those days when they felt taken for granted. She enjoyed picturing what disguise she might choose—dyeing her hair a vivid black, for instance, and switching to tailored black slacks with creases ironed down the front, and perhaps even taking up cigarettes, because who would ever dream that Mercy Garrett would be smoking? She could sashay right out of the neighborhood, blowing smoke rings all the way to Penn Station, and no one would give her a glance.
At least she had not acted on that fantasy, she thought now. At least she had dutifully stuck around, fixed untold thousands of meals, cleaned house each day and then risen the next day and cleaned the same house all over again. And now she looked back on that time quite fondly, in fact, even though she had no earthly desire to relive it. She could still feel her children’s soft cheeks pressing against hers. She could still feel their little hands tucking themselves into her hands. She heard Lily’s comically sultry voice singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider”; she heard David’s infectious chuckle. Oh, and the birthday card that Alice had made her in third grade! “Dear Mama promise me you will never ever ever die.” And that lovely carefree week they had spent at Deep Creek Lake, their very first vacation and, in fact, their last, with the girls almost grown up by then and halfway out the door. It all happened so fast, she thought, even though it had seemed endless at the time. And generally, she had managed well. She had nothing to reproach herself for.
Still, she dreamed now that she lived in some sort of police state and she was walking down a gray street in a gigantic black fur coat. A man in uniform stopped her and said her coat looked to him like the coat belonging to X, a well-known revolutionary, and what should he make of that?
She said, “Well, let’s just say it would be very, very difficult to get in touch with X these days.”
And she blew out a long whoosh of smoke, and both of them laughed evilly.
* * *
—
Mr. Mott telephoned twice—first a week or so into Desmond’s stay, just asking how things were going with him and saying their daughter had had her surgery but would be longer in the hospital than they’d originally expected; and then in early February, apologizing for how much time this was taking but giving no further information. Nor did Mercy ask; she sensed she shouldn’t. “Don’t you worry about us,” she said. “We’re doing just fine here.” And she meant it.
One Sunday morning, she woke to a foot and a half of snow. The round metal table on the Motts’ patio wore a dome of snow like an igloo, and their roof so exactly matched the opaque white sky above it that she couldn’t see the line dividing them. The two dormer windows seemed to be hanging in empty space.