The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  “Shit.” Clayton shook his head and let out a loud yawn. “All this work for nothing but a higher ideal? Place for us in Nigger Heaven, sure.”

  Luther gave him a soft smile but didn’t say anything. He’d lost comfort with saying “nigger,” even though the only time he’d ever used it was around other colored men. But both Jessie and the Deacon Broscious had used it constantly, and some part of Luther felt he’d entombed it with them back at the Club Almighty. He couldn’t explain it any better than that, just that it didn’t feel right coming off his tongue any longer. Like most things, he assumed, the feeling would pass, but for now….

  “Well, I guess we might as well—”

  He stopped talking when he saw McKenna stroll through the front door like he owned the damn building. He stood in the foyer, looking up at the dilapidated staircase.

  “Damn,” Clayton whispered. “Police.”

  “I know it. He’s a friend of my boss. And he act all friendly, but he ain’t. Ain’t no friend of ours, no how.”

  Clayton nodded because they’d both met plenty of white men that fit that description in their lives. McKenna entered the room where they’d been working, a big room, nearest to the kitchen, probably had been a dining room fifty years ago.

  The first words out of McKenna’s mouth: “Canton?”

  “Columbus,” Luther said.

  “Ah, right enough.” McKenna smiled at Luther, then turned to Clayton. “I don’t believe we’ve met.” He held out a meaty hand. “Lieutenant McKenna, BPD.”

  “Clayton Tomes.” Clayton shook the hand.

  McKenna gripped his hand, kept shaking it, his smile frozen to his face, his eyes searching Clayton’s and then Luther’s, seeming to look right into his heart.

  “You work for the widow on M Street. Mrs. Wagenfeld. Correct?”

  Clayton nodded. “Uh, yes, suh.”

  “Just so.” McKenna dropped Clayton’s hand. “She’s rumored to keep a small fortune in Spanish doubloons beneath her coal bin. Any truth to this, Clayton?”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.”

  “Wouldn’t tell anyone anyway if you did!” McKenna laughed and slapped Clayton on the back so hard Clayton stumbled forward a couple of steps.

  McKenna stepped close to Luther. “What brought you here?”

  “Suh?” Luther said. “You know I live with the Giddreauxs. This is going to be the headquarters.”

  McKenna shot his eyebrows at Clayton. “The headquarters? Of what?”

  “The NAACP,” Luther said.

  “Ah, grand stuff,” McKenna said. “I remodeled me own house once. A constant headache, that.” He moved a crowbar to the side with his foot. “You’re in the demolition phase, I see.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Coming along?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Almost there, I’d say. ’Least on this floor. My original question, Luther, however, did not pertain to your working in this building. No. When I asked what brought you here, the ‘here’ I referred to was Boston herself. For instance, Clayton Tomes, where do you hail from, son?”

  “The West End, sir. Born and raised.”

  “Exactly,” McKenna said. “Our coloreds tend to be homegrown, Luther. Few come here without a good reason when they could find much more of their kind in New York or, Lord knows, Chicago or Detroit. So what brought you here?”

  “A job,” Luther said.

  McKenna nodded. “To come eight hundred miles just to drive Ellen Coughlin to church? Seems funny.”

  Luther shrugged. “Well, then, I guess it’s funny, suh.”

  “’Tis, ’tis,” McKenna said. “A girl?”

  “Suh?”

  “You got yourself a girl up these parts?”

  “No.”

  McKenna rubbed the stubble along his jaw, looked over at Clayton again, as if they played this game together. “See, I’d believe you came eight hundred miles for cunny. Now that’s a valid story. But, as it is?”

  He stared at Luther for a long time with that blithe, open face of his.

  Once the silence had gone on into its second minute, Clayton said, “We best get back at it, Luther.”

  McKenna’s head turned, as if on a slow swivel, and he gave the open gaze to Clayton Tomes who quickly looked away.

  McKenna turned back to Luther. “Don’t let me hold you up, Luther. I’d best be getting back to work myself. Thank you for the reminder, Clayton.”

  Clayton shook his head at his own stupidity.

  “Back out to the world,” McKenna said with a weary sigh. “These days? People who make a good wage think it’s okay to bite the hand that feeds them. Do you know what the bedrock of capitalism is, gents?”

  “No, suh.”

  “Sure don’t, sir.”

  “The bedrock of capitalism, gentlemen, is the manufacture or mining of goods for the purpose of sale. That’s it. That’s what this country is built on. And so the heroes of this country are not soldiers or athletes or even presidents. The heroes are the men who built our railroads and our automobiles and our cotton mills and factories. They keep this country running. The men who work for them, therefore, should be grateful to be a part of the process that forms the freest society in the known world.” He reached out and clapped Luther on both shoulders. “But lately they’re not. Can you believe that?”

  “There isn’t much of a subversive movement among us colored, Lieutenant, suh.”

  McKenna’s eyes widened. “Where have you lived, Luther? There’s quite the lefty movement going on in Harlem right now. Your high-toned colored got himself some education and started reading his Marx and his Booker T. and his Frederick Douglass and now you got men like Du Bois and Garvey and some would argue they’re just as dangerous as Goldman and Reed and the atheistic Wobblies.” He held up a finger. “Some would argue. Some would even claim that the NAACP is just a front, Luther, for subversive and seditionist ideas.” He patted Luther’s cheek softly with a gloved hand. “Some.”

  He turned and looked up at the scorched ceiling.

  “Well, you’ve your work cut out for you, lads. I’ll leave you to it.”

  He placed his hands behind his back and strolled across the floor, and neither Luther nor Clayton took a breath until he’d exited the foyer and descended the front steps.

  “Oh, Luther,” Clayton said.

  “I know it.”

  “Whatever you did to that man, you got to undo it.”

  “I didn’t do nothing. He just that way.”

  “What way? White?”

  Luther nodded.

  “And mean,” Luther said. “Kinda mean just keeps eating till the day it dies.”

  CHAPTER twenty

  After leaving Special Squads, Danny returned to foot patrol in his old precinct, the Oh-One on Hanover Street. He was assigned to walk his beat with Ned Wilson, who at two months shy of his twenty, had stopped giving a shit five years ago. Ned spent most of their shift drinking or playing craps at Costello’s. Most days, he and Danny saw each other for about twenty minutes after they punched in and five minutes before they punched out. The rest of the time Danny was free to do as he chose. If he made a hard bust, he called Costello’s from a call box and Ned met up with him in time to march the perp up the stairs of the station house. Otherwise, Danny roamed. He walked the entire city, dropping in on as many station houses as he could reach in a day—the Oh-Two in Court Square, down to the Oh-Four on LaGrange, across to the Oh-Five in the South End and as far up the line as he could go on foot in the eighteen station houses of the BPD. The three in West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Jamaica Plain were left for Emmett Strack; the Oh-Seven in Eastie, for Kevin McRae; Mark Denton covered Dorchester, Southie, and the One-Four in Brighton. Danny worked the rest—downtown, the North and South Ends, and Roxbury.

  The job was recruitment and testimony. Danny glad-handed, cajoled, harangued, and persuaded a solid one-third of all the cops he approached into writing down an accurate account of h
is workweek, his debts versus his income, and the conditions of the station house in which he worked. In his first three weeks back on the beat, he roped in sixty-eight men to meetings of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall.

  Whereas his time in Special Squads had been marked by a self-loathing so acute he now wondered how he’d managed to do any of it, his time doing BSC work in hopes of forming a union with true bargaining power made him feel a sense of purpose that bordered on the evangelical.

  This, he decided one afternoon as he returned to the station house with three more testimonials from patrolmen in the One-Oh, was what he’d been looking for since Salutation Street: a reason why he’d been spared.

  In his box, he found a message from his father asking him to come by the house that night after his shift. Danny knew few good things had ever come from one of his father’s summonses, but he caught the streetcar out to South Boston just the same and rode across the city through a soft snow.

  Nora answered the door, and Danny could tell she hadn’t expected him to be on the other side of it. She pulled her house sweater tight across her body and took a sudden step back.

  “Danny.”

  “Evening.”

  He’d barely seen her since the flu, barely seen anyone in the family except for the Sunday dinner several weeks back when he’d met Luther Laurence.

  “Come in, come in.”

  He stepped over the threshold and removed his scarf. “Where’s Ma and Joe?”

  “Gone to bed,” she said. “Turn around.”

  He did and she brushed the snow off the shoulders and back of his coat.

  “Here. Give it to me now.”

  He removed the coat and caught a faint whiff of the perfume she wore ever so sparingly. It smelled of roses and a hint of orange.

  “How are you?” Danny looked in her pale eyes, thinking: I could die.

  “Just fine. Yourself?”

  “Good, good.”

  She hung his coat on the tree in the hallway and carefully smoothed his scarf with her hand. It was a curious gesture, and Danny stopped breathing for a moment as he watched her. She placed the scarf on a separate hook and turned back to him and just as quickly dropped her eyes, as if she’d been caught at something, which, in a way, she had.

  I would do anything, Danny wanted to say. Anything. I’ve been a fool. First with you, then after you, and now as I stand here before you. A fool.

  He said, “I—”

  “Hmm?”

  “You look great,” he said.

  Her eyes met his again and they were clear and almost warm. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t?”

  “You know what I mean.” She looked at the floor, hugging her elbows.

  “I’m…”

  “What?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I know.” She nodded. “You’ve apologized enough. More than enough. You wanted to be”—she looked up at him—“respectable. Yes?”

  Christ—not that word again, thrown back in his face. If he could remove one word from his vocabulary, erase it so that it had never taken hold and thus he never could have used it, it would be that one. He’d been drunk when he said it. Drunk and taken aback by her sudden and sordid revelations about Ireland. About Quentin Finn.

  Respectable. Shit.

  He held out his hands, at a loss for words.

  “Now it’s my turn,” she said. “I’ll be the respectable one.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  And he could tell by the fury that sprang into her face that she’d misinterpreted his meaning yet again. He had meant to imply that respectability was a goal unworthy of her. But she took it to mean it was something she could never attain.

  Before he could explain, she said, “Your brother’s asked me to marry him.”

  His heart stopped. His lungs. His brain. The circumnavigation of his blood.

  “And?” The word came out as if strangled by vines.

  “I told him I’m thinking about it,” she said.

  “Nora.” He reached for her arm but she stepped away.

  “Your father’s in the study.”

  She walked away down the hall, and Danny knew, yet again, that he’d failed her. He was supposed to have responded differently. Faster? Slower? Less predictably? What? If he’d dropped to his knees and made his own proposal, would she have done anything but run? Yet he felt he was supposed to have made some kind of grand gesture, if only so she could have turned it down. And that would have somehow balanced the scales.

  The door to his father’s study opened as he stood there. “Aiden.”

  “Danny,” he corrected him through gritted teeth.

  In his father’s study, the snow falling through the black beyond the windows, Danny sat in one of the leather armchairs that faced the desk. His father had a fire going and it reflected off the hearth and gave the room a glow the color of whiskey.

  Thomas Coughlin still wore his uniform, the tunic open at the neck, his captain’s bars sitting atop the blue shoulders while Danny wore street clothes and felt those bars smirking at him. His father handed him a scotch and sat on the corner of the desk.

  His blue eyes cut through his glass as he drained it. He poured a refill from the decanter. He rolled the glass back and forth between his palms and considered his son.

  “Eddie tells me you went native.”

  Danny caught himself rolling his own glass between his palms and dropped his left hand to his thigh. “Eddie over-dramatizes.”

  “Really? Because I’ve been given cause to wonder lately, Aiden, if these Bolshies didn’t rub off on you.” His father gave the room a soft smile and sipped his drink. “Mark Denton is a Bolshevik, you know. Half the BSC members are.”

  “Gosh, Dad, they just seem like cops to me.”

  “They’re Bolsheviks. Talking of a strike, Aiden? A strike?”

  “No one’s said that word in my presence, sir.”

  “There’s a principle to be honored here, boy. Can you appreciate that?”

  “And which one is that, sir?”

  “Public safety above all other ideals for men who hold the badge.”

  “Putting food on the table, sir, that’s another ideal.”

  His father waved at the sentence like it was smoke. “Did you see the paper today? They’re rioting in Montreal, trying to burn the city wholesale right to the ground. And there’s no police to protect the property or the people and there’s no firemen to put out the fires because they’re all out on strike. It might as well be St. Petersburg.”

  “Maybe it’s just Montreal,” Danny said. “Maybe it’s just Boston.”

  “We’re not employees, Aiden. We’re civil servants. We protect and we serve.”

  Danny allowed himself a smile. It was rare he could watch the old man get worked up needlessly and be the one holding the key to his release. He stubbed out his cigarette and a chuckle escaped his lips.

  “You laugh?”

  He held up a hand. “Dad, Dad. It’s not going to be Montreal. Really.”

  His father’s eyes narrowed and he shifted on the edge of the desk. “How so?”

  “You heard what, exactly?”

  His father reached into his humidor and removed a cigar. “You confronted Stephen O’Meara. My son. A Coughlin. Speaking out of turn. Now you’re going from station house to station house, collecting affidavits regarding substandard working conditions? You’re recruiting for your purported ‘union’ on city time?”

  “He thanked me.”

  His father paused, the cigar cutter wrapped around the base of the cigar. “Who?”

  “Commissioner O’Meara. He thanked me, Dad, and he asked Mark Denton and me to get those affidavits. He seems to think we’ll resolve the situation very soon.”

  “O’Meara?”

  Danny nodded. His father’s strong face drained of color. He’d never seen this coming. In a million years, he couldn’t have guessed it. Danny chewed on the inside of his mouth to keep a smile from
breaking wide across his face.

  Got you, he wanted to say. Twenty-seven years on this planet and I finally got you.

  His father surprised him even further when he came off the desk and held out his hand. Danny stood and took it and his father’s grip was strong and he pulled Danny to him and clapped him once on the back.

  “God, you made us proud, then, son. Damn proud.” He let go of his hand and clapped his shoulders and then sat back on the desk. “Damn proud,” his father repeated with a sigh. “I’m just relieved it’s all over, this whole mess.”

  Danny sat down. “Me, too, sir.”

  His father fingered the blotter on his desktop and Danny watched the strength and guile return to his face like a second layer of skin. A new order of business in the offing. His father already beginning to circle.

  “How do you feel about Nora and Connor’s impending nuptials?”

  Danny held his father’s gaze and kept his voice steady. “Fine, sir. Just fine. They’re a handsome couple.”

  “They are, they are,” his father said. “I can’t tell you what a trial it’s been for your mother and me to keep him from sneaking up to her room at night. Like children, they are.” He walked around to the back of the desk and looked out at the snow. Danny could see both their faces reflected in the window. His father noticed it, too, and smiled.

  “You’re the spitting image of my Uncle Paudric. Have I ever told you that?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “Biggest man in Clonakilty,” his father said. “Oh, he could drink something fierce and he’d get a sight unreasonable when he did. A publican once refused him service? Why, Paudric tore out the bar between them. Heavy oak, Aiden, this bar. And he just tore a piece of it out and went and poured himself another pint. A legendary man, really. Oh, and the ladies loved him. Much like you in that regard. Everyone loved Paudric when he was sober. And you? Everyone loves you, don’t they, son? Women, children, mangy Italians and mangy dogs. Nora.”

  Danny put his drink on the desk. “What did you say?”

  His father turned from the window. “I’m not blind, boy. You two may have told yourselves one thing, and she may very well love Con’ in a different way. And maybe it’s the better way.” His father shrugged. “But you—”