The Shape of Mercy (8 page)

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.”

M
y 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 strong 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.

It’s a lucky break—a providential one, rather—to be in the right place at the right time, like Abel Durough was.

But what about when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time?

How do you make something of yourself then? How do you show
that you are what you do, not what is done to you? What choices do you have then?

Two rooms in my parents’ home are largely ignored by the rest of the household. One is the little library.

It’s called a library because it contains books—mostly out-of-print first editions valuable because of their age, not the wisdom contained in them—and it is little because it’s smaller than the main library on the first floor, which is also my father’s home office. Mom and Dad both keep back issues of their favorite magazines in the little library, as well as banker’s boxes of files and papers and records. Otherwise, to them, it is a forgotten room.

For me, it was a kind of prayer room, although I never actually prayed in it. It’s where I went when I was especially mad or afraid or sad. It was hard to pray actual thoughts during those times. I don’t know very many people who can piece together eloquent prayers when their souls are wounded. Words don’t come at those times, but tears do. I have always thought of my tears as prayers. When Abigail asked me if I talked to God, I thought of the little library first, even though I never said much there. Bedtime prayers, offered with Mom at my side until I was twelve and now alone as I drift off to sleep, are far wordier, but those are not what popped into my head first on that afternoon in Abigail’s house. I thought of my tears first.

The little library is on the third floor, along with two seldom-used guest rooms and a large storage closet that houses my mother’s holiday decorations. Mom is big into holiday decorating. The closet is bigger than my dorm room and jam-packed. The library is next to it, and so is the Writing Room.

I named the Writing Room. It’s a former sitting room, used by
long-ago guests in the 1930s, when the house was new and it wasn’t customary to chat with another guest in your bedroom. Mom let me keep my journals, books, and half-finished stories in the Writing Room and decorate it however I wished. My bedroom on the second floor was another matter. It was professionally decorated, along with the rest of the house, and kept photo-shoot clean every moment I wasn’t in it. I painted the Writing Room a sunny yellow and brought in white wicker furniture from the main patio that had outlasted its usefulness. I started with pictures of cats on all the walls (I wasn’t allowed a cat), switched to dolphins during my “I want to train dolphins” stage, and then to black-and-white prints of the streets of Paris, the place my parents took me for my sixteenth birthday. Those pictures are still there.

When I came home from college, I usually greeted my parents, hugged Eleanor, the housekeeper, and headed up to the third floor to the little library and the Writing Room. I didn’t cry in the former anymore, nor write in the latter, but there was something comforting about visiting these rooms where I had done both.

It was a strange experience letting my eyes rove about the Writing Room, Mercy practically at my elbow, the day I arrived home for Uncle Loring’s party. I could almost see her sitting in my white wicker chair by the dormer window, sunlight falling across her face, penning the story about the girl who loved the man who could not speak. Mercy would’ve liked that room.

When I came downstairs later, my cousins—Uncle Loring’s sons—had arrived and were outside kicking a soccer ball on the immense patio while my mom and Aunt Denise scurried about, giving orders to the Spanish-speaking caterers. Tyler, twenty-five, who got his MBA at Stanford like a good boy, had brought a date named Bria, who sat with her cell phone to her ear while she watched the boys play. It was an hour before I actually talked to her. Cole, twenty-two, nodded a wordless greeting, and Blaine, my age and languishing at Stanford with Cole,
greeted me with a playful punch and a reminder that he was going to fail his lit class because I wasn’t there to help him. Kip, seventeen and preparing to take the ACT the following week, told me as he ran by that he was going to beat my score by at least two points. I had managed a 27. I watched him dash away and wished him luck.

There they were: the future of Uncle Loring’s vast transportation and logistics company. Four young men in various stages of Empire Building 101. Confident, brash, single-minded, and with the blood of Abel Durough coursing through their veins. And there I was with the same blood, the lone heir to Durough Design & Development Inc.—a monstrously large development firm that turned ordinary land into resorts, skyscrapers, and whole cities—watching my cousins frolic while white-shirted caterers bowed to the half-understood wishes of my mother.

I lingered a few minutes and then went back inside the house. As I stepped into the tiled entry, my sandaled foot hit something wet, and I started to slip. A Hispanic man wearing an untucked white oxford shirt and black pants was about to glide past me, and he reached out to steady me.

“That was a close one,” he said, smiling. “You okay?” His accent was pronounced but lilting. The other caterers did not have the command of the language he did.
Mom should be speaking to him,
I thought.

“I’m all right. Thanks.” I bent down to rub my ankle. I had twisted it slightly when I began to fall.

“No problem.” He started to walk past me, his concern already dissipating.

I called after him. “Hey. Maybe you could tell the kitchen staff to take care of that so no one else slips on it?”

He looked at the spill and then at me. He looked past me, as if he thought I’d been addressing someone else. Then he faced me again and slowly lifted the corners of his mouth in a relaxed smile.

“Sure.” He turned and went back toward the kitchen. I’d begun to
walk gingerly toward my father’s library when he returned with a wad of paper towels.

“Everyone is busy doing other things,” he said when I looked at him. “I can take care of it.”

“Thanks.”

Behind us, the patio doors opened and Cole stepped inside.

“Raul, what’re you doing?” Cole gazed down at him.

“Just mopping up a little spill. We wouldn’t want anyone to slip.” The man named Raul turned to me and winked.

I felt my face drain of color and poise.