By Hope Reeves, NY Times Magazine, September 16, 2011
Earlier this summer, I found myself in the passenger seat of 83-year-old Mary Donnelly’s Ford Escape as she darted around Block Island, dodging dozens of half-drunk tourists spilling into the street. Finally, after several more terrifying minutes of navigating the island’s winding roads and swerving around bicyclists, we made it to the Block Island Power Company. The sign outside said “Closed,” but it was Thursday afternoon—business hours—and Donnelly didn’t so much as pause as she pushed through the front door.
“Nice try with the sign,” she said to the office manager, as a deeply tanned woman slouched in a chair nearby, “but you had to know it wouldn’t work with me.”
After a few more friendly gibes, Mary D., as she’s known on this picturesque island that is 13 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, handed over a check for $184.44 to cover someone’s electric bill. As every Block Islander knows, that’s what Donnelly does: she pays other people’s bills.
Aside from being a nurse on the island for the past 53 years, the 5-foot-2 mother of seven is the sole administrator of the Mary D. Fund, a charity meant to help the 1,000 or so residents who call Block Island their year-round home. They’re a different breed from the upper-crusters who flood the island in May and take off around Labor Day. Many are paid under the table during the busy months and then struggle to live off that through the winter. The unemployment rate can reach 27 percent in the off-season.
Last year, thanks to donations and fund-raisers like the annual Mary D. Ball, Donnelly distributed about $50,000. She estimates that she has helped close to 30 percent of the island’s families over the past few years.
Tracy Muller was filling in behind the counter at an antique shop on a recent Monday afternoon (she also works as a school-bus monitor), and she had no problem telling me her “Mary story”. “This past winter, I had been in an accident, and I had broken about three of my front teeth,” she said. Muller, who doesn’t have health insurance, had to go to the mainland for the dental work. The cost of the first two appointments alone added up to more than $1,500. She didn’t know what to do. “Then I was talking to someone who was a really good friend of Mary’s,” Muller told me, “and they said, ‘Why don’t you give me the bill and let me submit it to Mary?’ So she sent it in, and the bill was paid. I never even saw her.” Muller’s eyes went teary right there in the antique store. “I cried for three days over it,” she said. “I’ve only been out here five years, and for someone I didn’t even know to be so generous? You have to be kidding me.”
The requests for Donnelly’s help usually come through the mail or as little notes jammed into her cubby at the Block Island Medical Center. Some feature family portraits crayoned by children; others are simply envelopes stuffed with bills to be paid.
Over the years, Donnelly has given as much as $2,500 for a mortgage payment and as little as $13.95 for a ferry ticket to the mainland so a man could go to therapy. Sometimes she deals with people she calls “chronic, chronic”—the ones she has to bail out repeatedly. And every now and again, people will grouse about her paying certain bills for certain people, because even though the whole process is supposed to be anonymous, Block Island is an amazingly small place.
Donnelly has only two stipulations: One, that applicants be year-round residents, and, two, that they let her pay the bills herself so that they don’t take the money and blow it all at the Poor People’s Pub (until recently the Albion), a local dive bar.
“I always just say, ‘I am only able to pay this much this month and, p.s., I think you need a class in money management,” she said. “People write me back and say that I’m the rudest person they’ve ever met, but I have to say it.”
As she filed through the latest requests in her office at the medical center, she went on at length about how much she loves her job, how good it feels to forestall foreclosures or get the lights back on. But then she said that she’ll retire “sooner than you think” and that she hoped to pass the baton to someone else.