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Using a title taken from a poem by Anne Sexton, he begins “Mercy Street” with Claudia, 43, who lives in Boston and has a stressful job. Claudia isn’t really the urban type. She was born in Maine as a 17-year-old girl who probably didn’t want her. The junk stuck on the shaggy carpet of their trailer lives on in his brain. “She still remembers the first time she heard the term. white trash. He was 9-10 years old, watching a stand-up comic on TV, and he knew right away that he was talking about people like him.”
“Mercy Street” opens on Ash Wednesday, 2015. Claudia is at work making phone calls from pregnant women at a health clinic on Boston Common, and she knows every call is a window into someone’s life. Outside, the season of high protest has just begun and will continue through Lent. Most of the protesters are men. One will look big in Haigh’s narrative, but not in the way you might expect.
Claudia lived many lives before that. Her past seeps into the book, in part through her responses to callers and visitors. She detests privileged types who can afford to erase unwanted pregnancies from their bodies, career prospects, and memories. Similarly, addicts who are too drunk to care for nearly viable fetuses reveal his disgust. Acted by fear, women – a mother of four who think her ex might kill her – reveal their compassion. And she hates to hear the constant “It was my fault” cry.
Hours later, Haigh directs Claudia to a weed dealer named Timmy. In a book that is by no means serious and full of quirks, the always stoned Timmy and his big plans and the larger TV screen serve as comic relief. Timmy doesn’t understand golf, but watches him for his soothing tones: “rolling green grass, announcers speaking softly as if a baby were asleep.” Claudia likes to light up and just talk with Timmy. He added layers of gentrification to his trailer, which grew up with a mother who pushed him aside for his numerous adopted children. The ramshackle place where Timmy meets a number of buyers and broods about the imminent legalization of marijuana somehow feels like home.
Claudia, Timmy, and all the other cast of the book—including, inevitably, a few characters from Bakerton—have one thing in common: They weren’t wanted. They were born offended. There are two “sisters” and two “brothers” who are not blood related but reluctantly raised in the same households – and both couples are focused on women and what they represent, sexuality or reproduction. These people come from wildly different ends of the political spectrum, but they were all damaged early on in similar ways. Claudia was smarter than most, but she didn’t know what she wanted when she was targeted by her mother’s older boyfriend at age 13. Marry him or adopt him?
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