The Given Day (33 page)

Luther nodded. "They seem a nice family."

She nodded, though Luther couldn't tell if it was a nod of agreement or if she'd just decided something about the apple she was considering. "Young Joe's certainly grown a fondness for you."

"Boy loves his baseball."

She smiled. " 'Love' may not be a strong enough word."

Once Joe had discovered Luther had played some baseball in his time, the after- school hours became games of catch and pitching and fielding instruction in the Coughlins' small backyard. Dusk coincided with the end of Luther's shift, so the final three hours of his workday were spent mostly at play, a situation Captain Coughlin had immediately approved. "If it keeps the boy out of his mother's hair, I'd let you field a team should you ask, Mr. Laurence."

Joe wasn't a natural athlete, but he had heart and he listened well for a child his age. Luther showed him how to drop his knee when he fielded grounders and how to follow through on both his throws and the swings of his bat. He taught him to spread and then plant his feet beneath a pop-up and to never catch it below his head. He tried to teach him how to pitch, but the boy didn't have the arm for it, nor the patience. He just wanted to hit and hit big. So Luther found one more thing to blame Babe Ruth for--turning the game into a smash-ball affair, a circus spectacle, making every white kid in Boston think it was about ooohs and aaahs and the cheap soaring of an ill-timed dinger.

Except for the morning hour with Mrs. Coughlin and the late- day hours with Joe, Luther spent most of his workday with Nora O'Shea.

"And how do you like it so far?"

"Doesn't seem much for me to do."

"Would you like some of my work, then?"

"Truth? Yeah. I drive her to and from church. I bring her breakfast. I wax the car. I shine the captain's and Mr. Connor's shoes and brush their suits. Sometimes I polish the captain's medals for dress occasions. Sundays, I serve the captain and his friends drinks in the study. Rest of the time, I dust what don't need to be dusted, tidy what's already tidy, and sweep a bunch of clean floors. Cut some wood, shovel some coal, stoke a small furnace. I mean, what's that all take? Two hours? Rest of the day I spend trying to look busy till either you or Mr. Joe get home. I don't even know why they hired me."

She put a hand lightly on his arm. "All the best families have one." "A colored?"

Nora nodded, her eyes bright. "In this part of the neighborhood. If the Coughlins didn't hire you, they'd have to explain why."

"Why what? Why they haven't updated to electric?"

"Why they can't keep up appearances." They climbed East Broadway toward City Point. "The Irish up here remind me of the English back home, they do. Lace curtains on the windows and trousers tucked into their boots, sure, as if they know from work."

"Up here maybe," Luther said. "Rest of this neighborhood . . ." "What?"

He shrugged.

"No, what?" She tugged his arm.

He looked down at her hand. "That thing you doing now? You don't ever do that in the rest of this neighborhood. Please."

"Ah."

"Like to get us both killed. Ain't any lace curtains part of that, I'll tell you what."

Every night he wrote to Lila, and every few days the letters came back unopened.

It was near to breaking him--her silence, being in a strange city, his self as unsettled and nameless as it had ever been--when Yvette brought the mail to the table one morning and placed two more returned letters softly by his elbow.

"Your wife?" She took a seat.

Luther nodded.

"You must have done something fierce to her."

He said, "I did, ma'am. I did."

"Wasn't another woman, was it?"

"No."

"Then I forgive you." She patted his hand, and Luther felt the warmth of it find his blood.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't worry. She still cares for you."

He shook his head, the loss of her draining him to his root. "She doesn't, ma'am."

Yvette shook her head slowly at him, a smile spread thin across her lips. "Men are fine for many things, Luther, but none of you know the first thing about a woman's heart."

"That's just it," Luther said, "she don't want me to know her heart anymore."

"Doesn't."

"Huh?"

"She doesn't want you to know her heart."

"Right." Luther wanted a cloak to hide in, duck in. Cover me, cover me.

"I beg to differ with you, son." Mrs. Giddreaux held up one of his letters so he could see the back of the envelope. "What's that along the sides of the flap?"

Luther looked; he couldn't see anything.

Mrs. Giddreaux traced her finger down the flap. "See that cloud there along the edges? The way the paper is softer underneath it?" Luther noticed it now. "Yes."

"That's from steam, son. Steam."

Luther reached for the envelope and stared at it.

"She's opening your letters, Luther, and then sending them back like she hasn't. I don't know if I'd call that love," she squeezed his arm, "but I wouldn't call it indifference." chapter fifteen Autumn yielded to winter in a series of wet gales that carved their way across the eastern seaboard, and Danny's list of names grew larger. What the list told him, or anyone for that matter, about the likelihood of a May Day uprising was a mystery. Mostly he just had the names of ass-fucked workingmen looking to unionize and deluded romantics who actually thought the world welcomed change.

Danny began to suspect, though, that between the Roxbury Letts and the BSC, he'd become addicted to the strangest of things--meetings. The Letts and their talk and their drinking led to nothing he could see but more talk and more drinking. And yet, on the nights there were no meetings, no saloon afterward, he felt at loose ends. He'd sit in the dark of his cover apartment, drinking and rubbing the button between his thumb and index finger with such agitation, it seemed a miracle in retrospect that it never cracked. So he'd find himself at another meeting of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall in Roxbury. And another after that.

It wasn't much different from a meeting of the Letts. Rhetoric, rage, helplessness. Danny couldn't help marvel at the irony--these men who'd served as strikebreakers finding themselves backed into the same corners as the men they'd manhandled or beaten outside factories and mills.

Into another bar one night, and more talk about workers' rights, but this time with the BSC--brother policemen, patrolmen, foot stampers and beat walkers and nightstick maestros filled with the stunted rage of the perpetually pushed-aside. Still no negotiations, still no decent talk of decent hours and a decent wage, still no raise. And word was that across the border in Montreal, just 350 miles north, the city had broken off negotiations with police and firemen and a strike was unavoidable.

And why not? the men in the bar said. Fucking starving, they said. Ass-fucked and broke- down and handcuffed to a job that gives us no way to feed our families and no way to see them properly either.

"My youngest," Francie Deegan said, "my youngest, boys, is wearing clothes he got from his brothers and I'm shocked to discover the older ones ain't wearing 'em still because I'm working so much I think they're in second grade, but they're in fifth. I think they're at my hip, but they're at me fuckin' nipple, boys."

And when he sat back down amid the hear-hears, Sean Gale piped up with:

"Fucking dockworkers, boys, are making three times as much as us coppers who bust them on drunk-and-disorderlies on Friday nights. So somebody better start thinking of how to pay us what's right."

More shouts of "Hear! Hear!" Someone nudged someone and that someone nudged someone else and they all looked over to see Boston police commissioner Stephen O'Meara standing at the bar, waiting for his pint. Once the pint had been drawn and the quiet had fallen over the bar, the great man waited for the tender to shave off the foam with a straight razor. He paid for the pint and waited for his change, his back to the room. The bartender rang up the sale and handed the coins back to Stephen O'Meara. O'Meara left one of those coins on the bar, pocketed the rest, and turned to the room.

Deegan and Gale lowered their heads, awaiting execution.

O'Meara made his way carefully through the men, holding his pint aloft to keep it from spilling, and took a seat by the hearth between Marty Leary and Denny Toole. He looked at the assembled men with a soft sweep of his kind eyes before he sipped at his beer, and the foam crept into his mustache like a silkworm.

"Cold out there." He took another sip of his beer and the logs crackled behind him. "A fi ne fire in here, though." He nodded just once but seemed to encompass each of them with the gesture. "I've no answer for you, men. You aren't getting right-paid and that's a fact."

No one dared speak. The men, who just moments before had been the loudest, the most profane, the angriest and most publicly injured, averted their eyes.

O'Meara gave them all a grim smile and even nudged Denny Toole's knee with his own. "It's a fine spot, isn't it?" His eyes swept them again, searching for something or someone. "Young Coughlin, is that you under that beard?"

Danny found those kind eyes meeting his and his chest tightened. "Yes, sir."

"I'll take it you're working undercover."

"Yes, sir."

"As a bear?"

The room broke out in laughter.

"Not quite, sir. Close."

O'Meara's gaze softened and was so stripped of pride Danny felt as if they were the only two men in the room. "I've known your father a long time, son. How's your mother?"

"She's fine, sir." Danny could feel the eyes of the other men now.

"As gracious a woman as any who ever lived. Tell her I said hello, would you?"

"I will, sir."

"If I may inquire--what is your position on this economic stalemate?"

The men turned in his direction while O'Meara took another sip of his beer, his eyes never leaving Danny's.

"I understand," Danny began, and then his throat went dry. He wished the room would go dark, pitch- black, so that he could stop feeling their eyes. Christ.

He took a sip from his own pint and tried again. "I understand, sir, that cost of living is affecting the city and funds are tight. I do." O'Meara nodded.

"And I understand, sir, that we are not private citizens but public servants, sworn to do our duty. And that there is no higher calling than that of the public servant."

"None," O'Meara agreed.

Danny nodded.

O'Meara watched him. The men watched him.

"But . . ." Danny kept his voice level. "There was a promise made, sir. A promise that our wages would freeze for the duration of the war, but that we would be rewarded for our patience with a two-hundred-ayear increase as soon as the war ended." Danny dared look around the room now, at all the eyes fixed upon him. He hoped they couldn't see the tremors that rippled down the backs of his legs.

"I sympathize," O'Meara said. "I do, Officer Coughlin. But that cost- of-living increase is a very real thing. And the city is strapped. It's not simple. I wish it were."

Danny nodded and went to sit back down and then found he couldn't. His legs wouldn't let him. He looked back at O'Meara and could feel the decency that lived in the man like a vital organ. He caught Mark Denton's eye, and Denton nodded.

"Sir," Danny said, "we have no doubt that you sympathize. None whatsoever. And we know the city is strapped. Yes. Yes." Danny took a breath. "But a promise, sir, is a promise. Maybe that's what all this is about in the end. And you said it wasn't simple, but it is, sir. I would respectfully submit that it is. Not easy. Quite hard. But simple. A lot of fine, brave men can't make ends meet. And a promise is a promise."

No one spoke. No one moved. It was as if a grenade had been lobbed into the center of the room and had failed to go off.

O'Meara stood. The men hastily cleared a path as he crossed in front of the hearth until he'd reached Danny. He held out his hand. Danny had to place his beer on the mantel above the hearth and then he placed his own shaky hand in the older man's grip.

The old man held it fast, not moving his arm up or down. "A promise is a promise," O'Meara said.

"Yes, sir," Danny managed.

O'Meara nodded and let go of his hand and turned to the room. Danny felt the moment freeze in time, as if woven by gods into the mural of history--Danny Coughlin and the Great Man standing side by side with the fire crackling behind them.

O'Meara raised his pint. "You are the pride of this great city, men. And I am proud to call myself one of you. And a promise is a promise."

Danny felt the fire at his back. Felt O'Meara's hand against his spine.

"Do you trust me?" O'Meara shouted. "Do I have your faith?" A chorus rose up: "Yes, sir!"

"I will not let you down. I will not."

Danny saw it rise in their faces: love. Simply that.

"A little more patience, men, that's all I ask. I know that's a tall order, sure. I do. But will you indulge an old man just a little longer?" "Yes, sir!"

O'Meara took a great breath through his nose and raised his glass higher. "To the men of the Boston Police Department--you have no peers in this nation."

O'Meara drained his pint in one long swallow. The men erupted and followed suit. Marty Leary called for another round, and Danny noticed that they had somehow become children again, boys, unconditional in their brotherhood.

O'Meara leaned in. "You're not your father, son."

Danny stared back at him, unsure.

"Your heart is purer than his."

Danny couldn't speak.

O'Meara squeezed his arm just above the elbow. "Don't sell that, son. You can't ever buy it back in the same condition."

"Yes, sir."

O'Meara held him with his gaze for one more long moment and then Mark Denton handed them each a pint and O'Meara's hand dropped from Danny's arm.

After he'd finished his second pint, O'Meara bade the men good- bye and Danny and Mark Denton walked him out into a thick rain that fell from the black sky.

His driver, Sergeant Reid Harper, exited the car and covered his boss with an umbrella. He acknowledged Danny and Denton with a nod as he opened the rear door for O'Meara. The commissioner rested an arm on the door and turned to them.