Nora had gone too long without speaking. Danny could see that clearly—in his mother’s eyes, in Connor’s. If she’d ever held hope of denial, the moment had passed.
Connor said, “Nora.”
Nora closed her eyes. She said, “Ssshh,” and held up her hand.
“‘Ssshh’?” Connor repeated.
“Is this true?” Danny’s mother said. “Nora? Look at me. Is this true?”
But Nora wouldn’t look. She wouldn’t open her eyes. She kept waving her hand back and forth, as if it could ward off time.
Danny couldn’t help but be perversely fascinated by the man in the doorway. This, he wanted to say? You fucked this? He could feel the liquor sledding through his blood and he knew some better part of himself waited behind it, but now the only part he could reach was the one who’d placed his head to her chest and told her he loved her.
To which she’d replied: You love yourself.
His father said, “Mr. Finn, take a seat, sir.”
“I’ll stand, sure, Captain, if it’s all the same to ya.”
“What do you expect is going to happen here tonight?” Thomas said.
“I expect to walk back out that door with my wife in tow, I do.” He nodded.
Thomas looked at Nora. “Raise your head, girl.”
Nora opened her eyes, looked at him.
“Is it true. Is this man your husband?”
Nora’s eyes found Danny’s. What had she said in the study? I can’t abide a man feels sorry for himself. Who’s feeling sorry now?
Danny dropped his eyes.
“Nora,” his father said. “Answer the question, please. Is he your husband?”
She reached for her teacup but it tottered in her grip and she let it go.
“He was.”
Danny’s mother blessed herself.
“Jesus Christ!” Connor kicked the baseboard.
“Joe,” their father said quietly, “go to your room. And don’t dare argue, son.”
Joe opened his mouth, thought better of it, and left the dining room.
Danny realized he was shaking his head and stopped himself. This? He wanted to shout the word. You married this grim, grisly joke? And you dared talk down to me?
He took another drink as Quentin Finn took two sideways steps into the room.
“Nora,” Thomas Coughlin said, “you said was your husband. So I can assume there was an annulment, yes?”
Nora looked at Danny again. Her eyes had a shine that could have been mistaken, under different circumstances, for happiness.
Danny looked over at Quentin again, the man scratching at his beard.
“Nora,” Thomas said, “did you get an annulment? Answer me, girl.”
Nora shook her head.
Danny rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Quentin.”
Quentin Finn looked over at him. He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, young sir?”
“How’d you find us?”
“A man has ways,” Quentin Finn said. “I’ve been searching for this lass for some time now.”
Danny nodded. “You’re a man of means then.”
“Aiden.”
Danny lolled his head to look at his father, then lolled it back to Quentin. “To track a woman across an ocean, Mr. Finn, that’s quite a feat. Quite a costly feat.”
Quentin smiled at Danny’s father. “I see the boy’s been in his cups, yah?”
Danny lit a cigarette with the candle. “Call me ‘boy’ again, Paddy, and I’ll—”
“Aiden!” his father said. “Enough.” He turned back to Nora. “Have you any defense, girl? Is he telling a lie?”
Nora said, “He is not my husband.”
“He says he is.”
“Anymore.”
Thomas leaned into the table. “They don’t grant divorces in Catholic Ireland.”
“I didn’t say I got me a divorce, sir. I just said he was my husband no longer.”
Quentin Finn laughed at that, a loud haw that tore the air in the room.
“Jesus,” Connor whispered over and over again. “Jesus.”
“Pack your things now, luv.”
Nora looked at him. There was hate in her eyes. And fear. Disgust. Disgrace.
“He bought me,” she said, “when I was thirteen. Man’s my cousin. Yeah?” She looked at each of the Coughlins. “Thirteen. The way you buy a cow.”
Thomas extended his hands across the table toward her. “A tragic state,” he said softly. “But he is your husband, Nora.”
“Fookin’ right on that, Cap’n.”
Ellen Coughlin blessed herself and placed a hand to her chest.
Thomas kept his eyes on Nora. “Mr. Finn, if you use profanity in my home again? In front of my wife, sir?” He turned his head, gave Quentin Finn a smile. “Your path home will, I promise, become far less predictable.”
Quentin Finn scratched his beard some more.
Thomas tugged Nora’s hands gently until he covered them, and then he looked over at Connor. Connor had the heels of his hands pressed to his lower eyelids. Thomas turned next to his wife, who shook her head. Thomas nodded. He looked at Danny.
Danny looked back into his father’s eyes, so clear and blue. The eyes of a child with irreproachable intelligence and irreproachable intent.
Nora whispered, “Please don’t make me leave with him.”
Connor made a noise that could have been a laugh.
“Please, sir.”
Thomas ran his palms over the backs of her hands. “But you will have to leave.”
She nodded and one tear fell from her cheekbone. “Just not now? Not with him?”
Thomas said, “All right, dear.” He turned his head. “Mr. Finn.”
“Yes, Cap’n.”
“Your rights as a husband have been noted. And respected, sir.”
“Thank ye.”
“You’ll leave now and meet me tomorrow morning at the Twelfth Precinct on East Fourth Street. We’ll properly adjudicate the issue then.”
Quentin Finn was shaking his head before Thomas had half finished. “I didn’t cross the bloody ocean to be put off, man. No. I’ll be taking me wife now, thank ye.”
“Aiden.”
Danny pushed back his chair and stood.
Quentin said, “I have rights as a husband, Cap’n. I do.”
“And those will be respected. But for tonight, I—”
“And what of her child, sir? What’s he to think of—”
“She has a kid?” Connor raised his head from his hands.
Ellen Coughlin blessed herself again. “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus.”
Thomas let go of Nora’s hands.
“Aye, she has a little nipper back at home, she does,” Quentin Finn said.
“You abandoned your own child?” Thomas said.
Danny watched her eyes dart, her shoulders hunch. She pulled her arms in tight against her body—prey, always prey, searching, plotting, tensing for the mad dash.
A child? She’d never said a word.
“He’s not mine,” she said. “He’s his.”
“You left a child behind?” Danny’s mother said. “A child?”
“Not mine,” Nora said and reached for her but Ellen Coughlin pulled her arms back into her lap. “Not mine, not mine, not mine.”
Quentin allowed himself a smile. “The lad’s lost, he is, without his mother. Lost.”
“He’s not mine,” she said to Danny. Then to Connor: “He’s not.”
“Don’t,” Connor said.
Danny’s father stood and ran his hand through his hair, scratched the back of his head, and let out a heavy sigh. “We trusted you,” he said. “With our son. With Joe. How could you have put us in that position? How could you have misled us? Our child, Nora. We trusted you with our child.”
“And I did well by him,” Nora said, finding something in herself that Danny had seen in fighters, usually the smaller ones, in the late rounds of a bout, something that went far deeper than size
and physical strength. “I did well by him and well by you, sir, and well by your family.”
Thomas looked at her, then at Quentin Finn, then back at her, and finally at Connor. “You were going to marry my son. You would have embarrassed us. Besmirched my name? This name of this house that gave you shelter, gave you food, treated you like family? How dare you, woman? How dare you?”
Nora looked right back at him, the tears finally coming now. “How dare I? This home is a coffin to that boy.” She pointed back in the direction of Joe’s room. “He feels it every day. I took care of him because he doesn’t even know his own mother. She—”
Ellen Coughlin stood from the table but moved no farther. She placed her hand on the back of her chair.
“Close your mouth,” Thomas Coughlin said. “Close it, you banshee.”
“You whore,” Connor said. “You filthy whore.”
“Oh, dear Lord,” Ellen Coughlin said. “Stop. Stop!”
Joe walked into the dining room. He looked up at them all. “What?” he said. “What?”
Thomas said to Nora, “Leave this house at once.”
Quentin Finn smiled.
Danny said, “Dad.”
But his father had reached a place most sensed in him but few ever saw. He pointed at Danny without looking at him. “You’re drunk. Go home.”
“What?” Joe said, his voice thick. “Why’s everyone yelling?”
“Go to bed,” Connor said.
Ellen Coughlin held out a hand for Joe, but he ignored it. He looked to Nora. “Why’s everyone yelling?”
“Come now, woman,” Quentin Finn said.
Nora said to Thomas, “Don’t do this.”
“I said close that mouth.”
“Dad,” Joe said, “why’s everyone yelling?”
Danny said, “Look—”
Quentin Finn crossed to Nora’s chair and pulled her out of it by her hair.
Joe let out a wail and Ellen Coughlin screamed and Thomas said, “Everyone just calm down.”
“She’s my wife.” Quentin dragged her along the floor.
Joe took a run at him, but Connor scooped him up in his arms and Joe batted his fists against Connor’s chest and shoulders. Danny’s mother fell back into her chair and wept loudly and prayed to the Holy Mother.
Quentin pulled Nora tight to him so that her cheek was pressed against his and said, “If someone would gather her effects, yah?”
Danny’s father held out his hand and shouted, “No!” because Danny’s arm was already cocked as he came around the table and smashed his scotch glass into the back of Quentin Finn’s head.
Someone else screamed, “Danny!”—maybe his mother, maybe Nora, could have even been Joe—but by that point he’d hooked his fingers into the socket-bones above Quentin Finn’s eyes and used them to ram the back of his head into the dining room doorway. A hand grabbed at his back but fell away as he spun Quentin Finn into the hallway and ran him down the length of it. Joe must have left the front door unlatched because Quentin’s head popped the door wide as he went through it and out into the night. When his chest hit the stairs, it pushed through a fresh inch of snow and he landed on the sidewalk where the flakes fell fast and fat. He bounced on the cement and Danny was surprised to see him stumble to his feet for a few steps, his arms pinwheeling, before he slipped in the snow and fell with his left leg folded under him against the curb.
Danny came down the steps gingerly because the stoop was built of iron and the snow was soft and slick. The sidewalk had some slush in the places Quentin had slid through and Danny caught his eye as Quentin made it to his feet.
“Make it fun,” Danny said. “Run.”
His father grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him halfway around, and Danny saw something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before—uncertainty, maybe even fear.
“Leave him be,” his father said.
His mother reached the doorway just as Danny lifted his father by his shirt lapels and carried him back to a tree.
“Jesus, Danny!” This from Connor, on top of the stoop now as Danny heard Quentin Finn’s shoes slap through the slush in the middle of K Street.
Danny looked into his father’s face, pressed his back gently against the tree. “You let her pack,” he said.
“Aiden, you need to calm yourself.”
“Let her take whatever she needs. This is not a negotiation, sir. We firm on that?”
His father stared back into his eyes for a long time and then eventually gave him a flick of his eyelids that Danny took for assent.
He placed his father back on the ground. Nora appeared in the doorway, her temple scraped from Quentin Finn’s nails. She met his eyes and he turned away.
He let out a laugh that surprised even him and took off running up K Street. Quentin had a two-block head start, but Danny cut off through the backyards of K Street and then I Street and then J, vaulting fences like he was still altar-boy age, knowing that Quentin’s only possible destination was the streetcar stop. He came barreling out of an alley between J and H and hit Quentin Finn up at the shoulders and brought him sliding down into the snow in the middle of East Fifth Street.
Christmas lights had been strung up in garlands above the street, and candles lit the windows of half the homes along the block as Quentin tried to box with Danny before Danny ended a series of light jabs to both sides of his face with a torrent of body blows that finished with the one-two snap of a right and left rib. Quentin tried to run again, but Danny caught him by his coat and swung him around in the snow a few times before releasing him into a streetlamp pole. Then he climbed on top of him and broke bones in his face and broke his nose and snapped a few more ribs.
Quentin wept. Quentin begged. Quentin said, “No more, no more.” With each syllable he spat another fine spray of blood up into the air and back down onto his face.
When Danny felt the ache bite into his hands, he stopped. He sat back on Quentin’s midsection and then wiped his knuckles off on the man’s coat. He rubbed snow into the man’s face until his eyes snapped open.
Danny took a few gulps of air. “I haven’t lost my temper since I was eighteen years old. You believe that? True. Eight years. Almost nine…” He sighed and looked out at the street, the snow, the lights.
“I won’t…be a…bother to ya,” Quentin said.
Danny laughed. “You don’t say?”
“I…just want…me…w-wife.”
Danny took Quentin’s ears in his hands and softly banged his head off the cobblestone for a bit.
“As soon as you’re released from the charity ward, you get on a boat and leave my country,” Danny said. “Or you stay and I call this assault on a police officer. See all these windows? Half of them belong to cops. You want to pick a fight with the Boston Police Department, Quentin? Spend ten years in an American prison?”
Quentin’s eyes rolled to the left.
“Look at me.”
Quentin’s eyes fixed in place and then he vomited on the collar of his coat.
Danny waved at the fumes. “Yes or no? Do you want the assault charge?”
Quentin said, “No.”
“Are you going home as soon as you get out of a hospital?”
“Yah, yah.”
“Good lad.” Danny stood. “Because if you don’t, God is my witness, Quentin?” He looked down at him. “I’ll send you back to the Old Sod a fucking cripple.”
Thomas was out on the stoop when Danny returned. The taillights of his father’s car glowed red as his driver, Marty Kenneally, braked at an intersection two blocks up.
“So Marty’s driving her someplace?”
His father nodded. “I told him I don’t want to know where.”
Danny looked at the windows of their home. “What’s it like in there?”
His father appraised the blood on Danny’s shirt, his torn knuckles. “You leave anything for the ambulance driver?”
Danny rested his hip against the black iron railing. “Ple
nty. I already called it in from the call box on J.”
“Put the fear of God into him, I’m sure.”
“Worse than God.” He fished in his pockets and found his Murads and shook one out of the pack. He offered one to his father and his father took it and Danny lit both with his lighter and leaned back against the railing.
“Haven’t seen you get like that, boy, since I had you locked up in your teens.”
Danny blew a stream of smoke into the cold air, feeling the sweat beginning to dry on his upper chest and neck. “Yeah, it’s been a while.”
“Would you have honestly hit me?” his father said. “When you had me against the tree?”
Danny shrugged. “Might have. We’ll never know.”
“Your own father.”
Danny chuckled. “You had no problem hitting me when I was a kid.”
“That was discipline.”
“So was this.” Danny looked over at his father.
Thomas shook his head softly and exhaled a blue stream of smoke into the night.
“I didn’t know she left a child behind back there, Dad. Had no idea.”
His father nodded.
“But you did,” Danny said.
His father looked over, the smoke sliding out of the corner of his mouth.
“You brought Quentin here. Left a trail of bread crumbs and he found our door.”
Thomas Coughlin said, “You give me too much credit.”
Danny rolled his dice and told the lie. “He told me you did, Dad.”
His father sucked the night air through his nostrils and looked up at the sky. “You’d have never stopped loving her. Connor either.”
“What about Joe? What about what he just saw in there?”
“Everyone has to grow up sometime.” His father shrugged. “It’s not Joe’s maturing I worry about, you infant. It’s yours.”
Danny nodded and flicked his cigarette into the street.
“You can stop worrying,” he said.
CHAPTER twenty-three
Late Christmas afternoon, before the Coughlins had sat for dinner, Luther took the streetcar back to the South End. The day had started with a bright sky and clear air, but by the time Luther boarded the streetcar, the air had turned indistinct and the sky had folded back and fallen into the ground. Somehow the streets, so gray and quiet, were pretty, a sense that the city had gone privately festive. Soon the snow began to fall, the flakes small and listing like kites at first, riding the sudden wind, but then as the streetcar bucked its way over the hump of the Broadway Bridge, the flakes grew thick as flower heads and shot past the windows in the black wind. Luther, the only person sitting in the colored section, accidentally caught the eye of a white man sitting with his girlfriend two rows up. The man looked weary in a satisfied way, and his cheap wool flat cap was tilted down just so over his right eye, giving a little bit of nothing a little bit of style. He nodded, as if he and Luther shared the same thought, his girlfriend curled against his chest with her eyes closed.
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