Thirty-six was a sizable number. And anyway, it only took one.
A monstah nor’eastah. It was that year’s accepted usage, the agreed-upon nomenclature. In the winter of 2015, in Boston, a storm couldn’t be called severe or powerful or even wicked. By Ash Wednesday, the season had been branded. Another Monster Nor’easter? was on its way.
MERCY STREET IS BARELY A STREET. IT SPANS A SINGLE BLOCK SOUTHEAST of Boston Common, in a part of town once known as the Combat Zone. Long ago this was the city’s red-light district, a dark, congested neighborhood of taverns and massage parlors, peep shows and skin flicks, twentieth-century perversions that now seem quaint as corsets. Prostitutes loitered in front of Good Time Charlie’s, calling out to the men in uniform, sailors on shore leave from Charlestown Navy Yard.
They’re all gone now—the girls, the sailors. Over the years, the neighborhood has gentrified. By all appearances, combat has ceased. After the Navy Yard closed, the dive bars were razed, the crumbling streets repaved. The porn theaters hung on a few more years, until the digital age finished them off completely. Now lonely men stay home to masturbate in front of computers, a win for technology. There’s no longer any reason to leave the house.
Sex left the Combat Zone. Then the builders came. The new erections were office towers, parking garages, commercial space for shops and restaurants, easily accessible by the Chinatown and Downtown Crossing T stops. When they leased the building, the clinic’s board of directors—a thousand miles away, in Chicago—had never heard of the Combat Zone. Completely by accident, they made a poetic choice.
The clinic is a member of Wellways LLC—a small but growing network of detox centers, drug-testing labs, and women’s and mental health clinics, in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. Of these, the labs are the real moneymakers. Though technically a nonprofit, Wellways is a major player in the urine business.
Drug addiction and alcoholism, depression and anxiety, accidental pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. These conditions are believed to share a common etiology, the failure of virtue. Whatever their diagnosis, all Wellways patients have this in common: their troubles are seen to be, in part or in full, their own goddamn fault.
Hanging above the clinic’s front door is a wooden sign, painted blue and lemon yellow: WOMEN’S OPTIONS, a name no one uses. In Boston it is known, simply, as Mercy Street.
DOWN ON THE SIDEWALK, A PRIEST LED PRAYERS INTO A HANDHELD megaphone—at double speed, like a cattle auctioneer: HAILMaryfullofgracetheLordiswithThee.
The crowd answered in a low hum, like a swarm of bees.
“Hey, guess what?” Mary said with a certain satisfaction. “They’re all men.”
“Are you sure?” This was not typical. Claudia blamed Ash Wednesday, the overrepresentation of religious professionals. “I could swear I saw a woman.”
In hats and scarves and chunky winter coats, the protestors were ageless, shapeless, sexless. A few had set down their signs to pray the Rosary. A figure in a blue parka made its way along the middle ring, stooping to wipe the snow from each sign.
“There.” Claudia pointed. “That’s a woman. Coincidentally, she is cleaning.”
“Coincidentally,” Mary said.
The Ash Wednesday protest had been planned for weeks. Mary had heard about it in church. Her priest had made the announcement with great enthusiasm. On the first day of Lent, the faithful would hold a sidewalk vigil on Mercy Street. They would ask the Blessed Virgin to inspire the young women, to save the unborn babies. They would pray for wisdom, for divine forgiveness, for grace.
HAILMaryfullofgracetheLordiswithThee. The words ran together like the disclaimer after a radio commercial, a glib announcer racing through the fine print.
“Those fuckers,” Mary said, meaning the priests. “Anything to change the subject.”
The subject, in her mind, was unchangeable: the child victims, the Archdiocesan cover-up, hundreds of lawsuits settled in secret. There was only one subject, and Mary would not be distracted. Her convictions were solid and unyielding. Each year on Ash Wednesday, she did patient intakes—height, weight, blood pressure—with a smudge of holy soot on her forehead. How or whether she explained this to the patients, Claudia had no idea. It was a lesson you learned over and over again, doing this work: people live with contradictions.