The Shape of Mercy

by Susan Meissner

  I didn’t even bother making a stab at conversation. There didn’t seem to be much point, since Abigail had clearly slid into silent mode. I would just eat my dinner, spend another hour or two afterward with the diary, and then go back to the dorm. Clarissa needed help with a research paper, and I had promised to give it.

  But after two bites of Esperanza’s bifana, Abigail lifted her head to look at me.

  “Have you read Great Expectations?” she asked.

  My fork was poised at my mouth. I’d been musing on what could have happened between Abigail and her lost love, and she brought up Great Expectations.

  Not exactly a love story, but certainly a story about regrets.

  “Yes.” I slipped the fork in my mouth, chewed, and waited.

  “Do you have a favorite line?”

  I licked a drop of rhubarb chutney off my lower lip. I don’t tend to memorize whole lines verbatim from any book. The only ones I know are the ones everybody knows. Call me Ishmael. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Et tu, Brute? And I certainly didn’t have a collection of quotes from Great Expectations swimming around in my head.

  “No, sorry. I dont.”

  I expected a look of subtle dismay, but Abigail looked past me to the sea of empty chairs around the table, smiling as if I had rattled off a great quote from chapter eight.

  “Mines fairly near the beginning,” she said, “before Pip becomes someone who judges people by outward appearance. ‘In the little world in which children have their existence … there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt as injustice. It may be only a small injustice that the child can be exposed to, but the child is small, and its world is small.’” She turned to me. “I like that line. It suggests what I’ve always known to be true. We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn’t.”

  I stopped chewing. At twenty years old, I certainly wasn’t going to argue with her. Perhaps she knew I wouldn’t and that’s why she went on.

  “Why do you suppose Pip loved Estella and not Biddy?”

  I shrugged. “Estella was beautiful. Wealthy. Desirable.”

  “But she was cruel to him.”

  Again I felt Abigail was revealing something about herself to me. Had she been cruel to the man she wished she had married?

  “Well, then I guess he loved what she represented,” I said.

  Abigail cocked her head, studying me. “Which is why he didn’t love poor, plain Biddy, isn’t it? Even though she was kind to him. Because of what she represented.”

  “Yes, I think so.” It didn’t seem like a terribly shrewd observation on my part. I thought it was rather obvious. But Abigail still looked at me like I had said something insightful.

  “Did you know, Lauren, that in the original ending, Charles Dickens didn’t have the garden scene at the end where Pip and Estella leave hand in hand? Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Instead, Pip one day hears that Estella has remarried. They meet only briefly and shake hands. They just shake hands. And then they part.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Abigail nodded. “Not many people do.”

  She began to cut the rest of her meat.

  I waited for her to say something more.

  We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

  Nine

  15 January 1692

  Papa was outside for a little while today, watching the icicles melt into muddy puddles. He wanted to muck out the barn but I told him I had already done it.

  God forgive me, I lied.

  I did it later while he slept.

  This afternoon Papa wanted to write a letter to his friend Rev. George Burroughs, who was a minister here in the Village some years ago, but he was too weak to form the letters. I wrote it for him. Rev. Burroughs is not at all like our Rev. Parris. I do not think he is like most ministers of the Gospel. He is loud and immense and I think he could break my arm just by looking at it if he wanted to. I do not think he should ever want to, but he could if he did. Papa likes to talk theology with him. Not because they agree on spiritual matters but because Papa likes to converse with people who are not afraid to say what they think. Papa told me once that George Burroughs left Salem under difficult circumstances. He owed someone money, or maybe someone owed him. I was too young at the time to know or care which and Papa does not discuss it. His letter to George Burroughs was brief today. Papa talked of the frustration of illness, the depth of winter and the oddity of Lot’s wife becoming a pillar of salt. I shall see that the letter is posted tomorrow when I go to the Village to sell my cider.

  Of all the things I am glad of I am most glad Papa taught me how to write.

  What would I do with all the stories in my head if I could not form letters? Papa has told me not to make bold of my ability to read and write. The Village elders do not think it wise that I know my letters. Only a few of my childhood friends know how to write their names. I showed my friend Mary Graham how to write her name when we were younger. I taught her other words too. But she was wedded two years ago and lives in Gloucester now. I never see her anymore. Prudence Dawes pretends she has no desire to know more than she does. She pretends knowing how to write is akin to knowing how to spit tobacco or shoe a horse. And Esther Harding just thinks whatever Prudence tells her to think.

  But I think I would go mad if I could not write. Papa says there is never any vinegar in the house because I use it all to make ink!

  Today I wrote a story about a girl who finds herself betrothed to a man who cannot speak. He must tell her everything in pictures he draws on the ground with a stick. After they are married, and after the pledge begets affection, she becomes enamored with his drawings. And so the clearing in front of their house is covered with etchings in the dirt that she refuses to sweep away.

  Wanderer, my little bird, has been here ten days. I think he likes it here. I think he will stay.

  17 January 1692

  Today there was news from Papa’s sister in Maine. My cousin Samuel is to be married in the autumn. He is bringing his bride from England this summer. I have visited my aunt’s home in Maine. Papa’s friend George Burroughs lives there, and he and Papa like to talk about the things of God when they drink ale together. The last time we visited Wells, Papa and Rev. Burroughs debated yet again why our all-seeing God made the serpent that tempted Eve. They have never happened upon an answer upon which they agree. Many pints of ale and many years later, they are still at it.

  I hope Samuel’s bride likes it here. I should imagine the colony will seem very primitive. I hope she likes birds and trees and wide spaces. And that she does not mind linsey-woolsey in place of silk.

  I am running out of ink again.

  Mercy’s mid-January entries were hard to transcribe. The ink was especially faint.

  It became a puzzle to me, Mercy’s long January 15 entry. I brought in different magnifying glasses, including a jewelers loupe Abigail insisted on paying for, and a special light I borrowed from an art student. I studied other samples of writing from the same time period at the library. I was fairly confident when I finished that I had eked Mercy’s original thoughts out of the faded words. I read the transcription to Abigail when I was done. She asked me to read the paragraph twice about the girl who marries a man who cannot speak. I could see her picturing the lines in the dirt as I read it to her.

  She’d never heard this snippet of story before. It had been too difficult to read. I looked up at Abigail when I was done reading it for the second time, and she nodded, apparently satisfied.

  “So you’re going home this weekend,” she said.

  I’d expected her to say, “That was excellent transcription work.” It took me a second to tell her yes, I was going home. My uncle Loring’s fiftieth birthday extravaganza was set for that Saturday.

  “So how do the Duroughs celebrate fiftieth birthdays?” A mix of cynicism and longing laced Abigail’s voice, like she already
knew how my wealthy family honored a milestone birthday: with excess.

  After I saved the transcription, I decided to do what I’d always done in the company of adults who thought themselves shrewd, which in my childhood and adolescence was often. I answered her soft sarcasm with soft sarcasm.

  “Pin the tail on the donkey and a water-balloon toss.” I closed the laptop and heard Abigail chuckle behind me.

  “Touché, my dear,” she said.

  I smiled back at her.

  “Oh, I do miss the parties.” The cynicism in her voice was gone; the longing was not.

  I carefully closed the diary and placed it back inside its plastic sheath. I tried to imagine Abigail as a young woman dressed in chiffon or organza, milling about a rose garden filled with young party-goers, a cup of punch in her gloved hand. I couldn’t do it. It was strangely easier to picture Mercy that way.

  “Do you?” I said, as I laid the book in its foam-lined box.

  “Don’t believe me?”

  I turned to face her. She sat in her usual place, in a lime green armchair with a tea service at her side, a hardback book open spine-down on her lap. She was stroking the delicate handle of a Royal Doulton teacup that boasted an explosion of roses on its porcelain sides.

  “I didn’t mean to sound like I doubted you,” I ventured. “You just don’t talk much about your past. It’s hard for me to picture what you were like when you were young.”

  She looked at her withered hand holding the teacup. “It must seem to you that I’ve always been old and odd.”

  “I never said you were odd.”

  “Good heavens, Lauren, how many people say to other people, ‘You’re rather odd’?” She laughed. “You wouldn’t have said it.”

  “So what were your parties like?” I asked, wanting to move on.

  Abigail lifted her chin as if to peer into her past on tiptoe. The humor from before was replaced by sweet contemplation. “My parents held parties in our garden nearly every weekend in the summer. Just outside those french doors.” She inclined her head toward curtained doors in the far corner of the room that I hadn’t noticed before. Stacks of books lay against them. “My cousin Dorothea and I would be allowed to stay up late if the guests lingered into the evening. Dorothea spent every summer with us while her parents traveled for their business. She was my age and had the most beautiful auburn hair. We wore beautiful dresses and did each other’s hair, and sometimes we snuck into my mother’s bedroom and used her perfume and talcum powder. When the sun went down, Dorothea and I slipped our shoes off and danced about the patio in our bare feet. Sometimes there’d be a string quartet or a guitarist there. Dorothea was a wonderful dancer. My father let her dance for the guests sometimes. She took ballet. I wanted lessons, but my father wouldn’t let me have them.”

  She paused for a moment. I asked why her father wouldn’t let her take ballet lessons, but she didn’t seem to hear me. Her gaze lingered on the curtained doors, but also on a far-off moment invisible to me.

  “I couldn’t dance like she could, but I could recite poetry,” she continued after a moment. “I could recite bits and pieces of The Song of Hiawatha. There was a man my father worked with who liked to hear me recite. He always asked me to tell him more about the Indian princess when he and his wife came to my parents’ parties. I’d stand in the middle of his friends, they with their tumblers of expensive bourbon and me in my bare feet, and I’d recite whatever part of the poem I had memorized that week. After a few minutes my father would say, That’s enough.’ He said it to Dorothea, too, when his friends asked her to dance. He’d watch her with his lips pursed in a pained smile and after a little while he’d say, ‘That’s enough.’”

  Her voice fell away. I hesitated to say anything. I didn’t want to break the spell. This was the first moment of vulnerability I’d seen in Abigail. It intrigued me.

  “Appearance was everything, and Papa didn’t like show-offs,” she continued, but not to me. “People are always watching you, so you can’t give them something to talk about. If you reveal a weakness, they will use it against you. You must always guard your appearance.”

  Something clattered to the floor outside the library doors. Esperanza must have dropped something in the hallway.

  The transparent moment skittered away.

  Abigail flinched in her chair and blinked. The vulnerability disappeared, and in its place came the familiar resilience.

  “I wonder if you’ll miss the parties,” she said, her eyes back on mine, and I wondered if she saw my future stretching out like hers, empty and solitary.

  “Who says they have to end?” I reached down and grabbed my book bag.

  “Oh, believe me, they end.” She stood but made no move to see me to the front door. She never did.

  “Have a nice weekend, Abigail.” I meant it. I didn’t think she would, but I meant it.

  “Drive carefully.”

  I turned and walked toward the library doors. Her voice called out to me as I placed my fingers over one of the handles.

  Lauren.

  I turned.

  “Nice transcription work today.”

  Ten

  My dad and his brother are perfect Durough specimens. They are inventive, perceptive, methodical, and sharp. They aren’t afraid to take risks, but they don’t gamble. They are generous but not extravagant. They thrive on the beauty of economics, the fact that it is both art and science. My father and Uncle Loring are smitten with it. I cannot count the number of conversations around the Durough dinner table that began with Ludwig Von Mises’s ideas on free economics and ended with the Durough ideal that wealth isn’t delivered—it is made. People who are free to choose will choose the best use for whatever it is they possess. Wealth and prosperity begin with the freedom to choose.

  I’m not sure if this is beautiful. Or completely true.

  Duroughs accumulate wealth, in my opinion, because that is what the concept of wealth is. It is the concept of having because it is there to be had. It is the concept of pride in ownership. To possess is to be successful.

  My father once debated a man in our church parking lot about this concept. My father made the point that you can’t be wealthy and possess nothing. The other man, an ordinary guy with an ordinary bank account, told my dad you certainly can be wealthy and yet possess nothing. My father said that was impossible. The very essence of the word wealth implies ownership of something. The other man said plenty of poor people are content with nothing more than their good health and the love of their families. And Dad said, “So you’re saying good health and the love of your family is nothing? Means nothing? Has no value?” And the man said, “That’s not what I said.” My dad smiled cleverly and paused before replying, “My mistake. Have a nice one, Felix.”

  And we got into our Bentley and drove to the country club to eat Belgian waffles on a terrace awash in linen and sterling silver. I was probably eleven. I remember licking strawberry syrup off my finger and telling my dad I thought Mr. Turney—Felix—was probably jealous that we had lots of money and he didn’t. Dad told me Mr. Turney’s problem was that he wasn’t content with what he had, so he pretended it didn’t matter what he had.

  At that point Mom told Dad to please pass the marmalade and for heavens sake could we talk about something else. Other diners were stopping to listen.

  The interesting thing is, Dad has never been where Felix Turney is. Money has always flowed in the family gene pool. He can guess what it might be like to want more than you can afford to have, but how can he know?

  My great-great-great-grandfather Abel Durough might have known. He was the son of an East Coast aristocrat and a commoner mistress. The story goes that Abel left home at age sixteen when he was unable to win his father’s affections, jumped a train bound for the West, and eventually landed in northern California during the height of the gold rush. He hooked up with a miner named Sam Cabot, who knew a lot more than Abel did about finding the mother lode, and who needed a pair of st
rong arms and a healthier set of lungs. Just days before Abel found a giant ribbon of gold, Sam Cabot suffered a heart attack and died. The claim went to Abel and so did the money. Lots of it.

  Abel was only eighteen.

  He bought land, a shipping company, and shares in a railroad. By the time he was thirty, he was one of the richest men in San Francisco, far wealthier than the man in Boston who fathered him but refused him his last name. Durough was the last name of the Boston washerwoman who did the rich mans laundry and gave birth to Abel out of wedlock. The rich man’s name was Fellowes.

  Abel had long since moved his mother out to California when Fellowes fell upon hard times and came crawling on his knees to San Francisco, begging his illegitimate son to have pity on him. Abel, so the story goes, gave Fellowes what Fellowes had given him when he told Abel he would never amount to anything—five dollars and a tin of cheap tobacco—and sent him on his way.

  Fellowes walked back to the train station, opened the tin of tobacco, and found inside a nugget of gold the size of a walnut and a note from his son that read, Make something of yourself.

  I’ve always thought that we Duroughs, who like to point to Abel Durough as a model of ingenuity and verve, forget his life made its monumental turn not by anything he did, but by being in the right place at the right time. All of Abel’s successes thereafter were made with money in his pocket. Money gave him the confidence to do what he did.

  Confidence tends to minimize the magnitude of the choice.

  When I asked my father about this the summer I turned fourteen, he told me there is nothing wrong with being in the right place at the right time, and that getting to that place involves the freedom to choose. And the responsibility to choose.

  As I drove home to attend Uncle Loring’s party, Mercy hovering over me, I knew the freedom of choice was as dangerous as it was beautiful. I knew Mercy would soon be given the awful freedom of choosing her destiny. Confess or perish.