Read Online The Shape of Mercy by Susan Meissner - Free Book Online
Authors: Susan Meissner
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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 showthat 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 bylong-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
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 showthat 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 bylong-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
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