It was a rumor in the Coughlin home all summer, and even though Danny’s name was never said, Joe knew that he was somehow involved. The Boston Social Club, his father told Connor, was talking to the AFL, to Samuel Gompers about an impending charter. They would be the first policemen in the country with national affiliation to a labor union. They could alter history, his father said and ran a hand over his eyes.
His father aged five years that summer. Ran down. Shadowed pockets grew below his eyes as dark as ink. His colorless hair turned gray.
Joe knew he’d been stripped of some of his power and that the culprit was Commissioner Curtis, a man whose name his father uttered with hopeless venom. He knew that his father seemed weary of fighting and that Danny’s break from the family had hit him far harder than he let on.
The last day of school, Joe returned to the house to find his father and Connor in the kitchen. Connor, just back from Washington, was already well into his cups, the whiskey bottle on the table, the cork lying beside it.
“It’s sedition if they do it.”
“Oh, come on, boy, let’s not be overly dramatic.”
“They’re officers of the law, Dad, the first line of national defense. If they even talk about walking off the job, that’s treason. No different than a platoon that walks away from the field of battle.”
“It’s a little different.” Joe’s father sounded exhausted.
Connor looked up when Joe entered the room and this was usually where such conversation ended, but this time Connor kept going, his eyes loose and dark.
“They should all be arrested. Right now. Just go down to the next BSC meeting and throw a chain around the building.”
“And what? Execute them?” His father’s smile, so rare these days, returned for a moment, but it was thin.
Connor shrugged and poured more whiskey into his glass.
“You’re half serious.” His father noticed Joe now, too, as Joe placed his book sack up on the counter.
“We execute soldiers who walk away from the front,” Connor said.
His father eyed the whiskey bottle but didn’t reach for it. “While I may disagree with the men’s plan of action, they have a legitimate beef. They’re underpaid—”
“So let them go out and get another job.”
“—the state of their quarters is unhygienic to say the least and they’re dangerously overworked.”
“You sympathize with them.”
“I can see their point.”
“They’re not garment workers,” Connor said. “They’re emergency personnel.”
“He’s your brother.”
“Not anymore. He’s a Bolshevik and a traitor.”
“Ah, Jaysus H,” his father said. “You’re talking crazy talk.”
“If Danny is one of the ringleaders of this and they do strike? He deserves whatever’s coming to him.”
He looked over at Joe when he said this and swirled the liquor in his glass and Joe saw contempt and fear and an embittered pride in his brother’s face.
“You got something to say, little tough guy?” Connor took a swig from his glass.
Joe thought about it. He wanted to say something eloquent in defense of Danny. Something memorable. But the words wouldn’t come, so he finally said the ones that did.
“You’re a piece of shit.”
No one moved. It was as if they’d all turned to porcelain, the whole kitchen, too.
Then Connor threw his glass in the sink and charged. Their father got a hand on his chest, but Connor got past him long enough to reach for Joe’s hair and Joe twisted away but fell to the floor and Connor got one kick in before his father pushed him back.
“No,” Connor said. “No! Did you hear what he called me?”
Joe, on the ground, could feel where his brother’s fingers had touched his hair.
Connor pointed over his father’s shoulder at him. “You little puke, he’s got to go to work sometime, and you got to sleep here!”
Joe got up off the floor and stared at his brother’s rage, stared it straight in the face and found himself unimpressed and unafraid.
“You think Danny should be executed?” he said.
His father pointed back at him. “Shut up, Joe.”
“You really think that, Con’?”
“I said shut up!”
“Listen to your father, boy.” Connor was starting to smile.
“Fuck you,” Joe said.
Joe had time to see Connor’s eyes widen, but he never saw his father spin toward him, his father always a man of startling speed, faster than Danny, faster than Con’, and a hell of a lot faster than Joe, because Joe didn’t even have time to lean back before the back of his father’s hand connected with Joe’s mouth and Joe’s feet left the floor. When he landed, his father was already on him, both hands on his shoulders. He hoisted him up from the floor and slammed his back into the wall so that they were face-to-face, Joe’s shoes dangling a good two feet off the floor.
His father’s eyes bulged in their sockets and Joe noticed how red they were. He gritted his teeth and exhaled through his nostrils and a lock of his newly gray hair fell to his forehead. His fingers dug into Joe’s shoulders and he pressed his back into the wall as if he were trying to press him straight through it.
“You say that word in my house? In my house?”
Joe knew better than to answer.
“In my house?” his father repeated in a high whisper. “I feed you, I clothe you, I send you to a good school, and you talk like that in here? Like you’re from trash?” He slammed his shoulders back into the wall. “Like you’re common?” He loosened his grip just long enough for Joe’s body to slacken and then slammed him into the wall again. “I should cut out your tongue.”
“Dad,” Connor said. “Dad.”
“In your mother’s house?”
“Dad,” Connor said again.
His father cocked his head, eyeballing Joe with those red eyes. He removed one hand from Joe’s shoulder and closed it around his throat.
“Jesus, Dad.”
His father raised him higher, so that Joe had to look down into his red face.
“You’re going to be sucking on brown soap for the rest of the day,” his father said, “but before you do, let me make one thing clear, Joseph—I brought you into this world and I can damn sure take you out of it. Say ‘Yes, sir.’”
It was hard with a hand around his throat, but Joe managed: “Yes, sir.”
Connor reached toward his father’s shoulder and then paused, his hand hovering in the air. Joe, looking in his father’s eyes, could tell his father felt the hand in the air behind him and he willed Connor to please step back. No telling what his father would do if that hand landed.
Connor lowered the hand. He put it in his pocket and took a step back.
His father blinked and sucked some air through his nose. “And you,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Connor, “don’t let me ever hear you talk about treason and my police department ever again. Ever. Am I quite clear?”
“Yes, sir.” Connor looked down at his shoes.
“You…lawyer.” He turned back to Joe. “How’s the breathing, boy?”
Joe felt the tears streaming down his face and croaked, “Fine, sir.”
His father finally lowered him down the wall until they were face-to-face. “If you ever use that word in this house, it’ll not get this good again. Not even close, Joseph. Do you have any trouble comprehending my meaning, son?”
“No, sir.”
His father raised his free arm and cocked it into a fist and Joe saw that fist hovering six inches from his face. His father let him look at it, at the ring there, at the faded white scars, at the one knuckle that had never fully healed and was twice the size of the others. His father nodded at him once and then dropped him to the floor.
“The two of you make me sick.” He went over to the table, slammed the cork back into the whiskey bottle, and left the room with it under
his arm.
His mouth still tasted of soap and his ass still smarted from the calm, emotionless whipping his father had given it after he’d returned from his study half an hour later, when Joe climbed out his bedroom window with some clothes in a pillowcase and walked off into the South Boston night. It was warm, and he could smell the ocean at the end of the street, and the streetlamps glowed yellow. He’d never been out on the streets this late by himself. It was so quiet he could hear his footsteps and he imagined their echoes as a living thing, slipping away from the family home, the last thing anyone remembered hearing before they became part of a legend.
What do you mean, he’s gone?” Danny said. “Since when?”
“Last night,” his father said. “He took off…I don’t know what time.”
His father had been waiting on his stoop when Danny returned home, and the first thing Danny noticed was that he’d lost weight, and the second was that his hair was gray.
“You don’t report into your precinct anymore, boy?”
“I don’t really have a precinct these days, Dad. Curtis shitcanned me to every cold-piss strike detail he could find. I spent my day in Malden.”
“Cobblers?”
Danny nodded.
His father gave that a rueful smile. “Is there one man who isn’t on strike these days?”
“You have no reason to think he was snatched or something,” Danny said.
“No, no.”
“So there was a reason he ran.”
His father shrugged. “In his head, I’m sure.”
Danny placed a foot on the stoop and unbuttoned his coat. He’d been frying in it all day. “Let me guess, you didn’t spare the rod.”
His father looked up at him, squinting into the setting sun. “I didn’t spare it with you and you turned out none the worse for wear.”
Danny waited.
His father threw up his hand. “I admit I was a little more impassioned than usual.”
“What’d the kid do?”
“He said fuck.”
“In front of Ma?”
His father shook his head. “In front of me.”
Danny shook his head. “It’s a word, Dad.”
“It’s the word, Aiden. The word of the streets, of the common poor. A man builds his home to be a sanctuary, and you damn well don’t drag the streets into a sanctuary.”
Danny sighed. “What did you do?”
Now it was his father’s turn to shake his head. “Your brother’s out on these streets somewhere. I’ve put men on it, good men, men who work runaways and truants, but it’s harder in the summer, so many boys on the streets, so many working jobs at all hours, you can’t tell one from the other.”
“Why come to me?”
“You damn well know why,” his father said. “The boy worships you. I suspect he may have come here.”
Danny shook his head. “If he did, I haven’t been around. I’ve been working a seventy-two on. You’re looking at my first hour off.”
“What about…?” His father tilted his head and looked up at the building.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“Say her name.”
“Don’t be a child.”
“Say her name.”
His father rolled his eyes. “Nora. Happy? Has Nora seen him?”
“Let’s go ask her.”
His father stiffened and didn’t move as Danny came up the steps past him and went to the front door. He turned his key in the lock and looked back at the old man.
“We going to find Joe, or not?”
His father rose from the steps and brushed off the seat of his pants and straightened the creases of his trousers. He turned with his captain’s hat under his arm.
“This changes nothing between us,” he said.
“Perish the thought.” Danny fluttered a hand over his heart, which brought a grimace to his father’s face, then he pushed open the door into the front hall. The stairs were sticky with heat and they climbed them slowly, Danny feeling like he could easily lie down on one of the landings and take a nap after three straight days of strike patrol.
“You ever hear from Finch anymore?” he asked.
“I get the occasional call,” his father said. “He’s back in Washington.”
“You tell him I saw Tessa?”
“I mentioned it. He didn’t seem terribly interested. It’s Galleani he wants and that old dago is smart enough to train ’em here, but he sends them out of state to do most of their mischief.”
Danny felt the bitterness in his own grin. “She’s a terrorist. She’s making bombs in our city. Who knows what else. But they’ve got bigger fish to fry?”
His father shrugged. “It’s the way of things, boy. If they hadn’t bet the house on terrorists being responsible for that molasses tank explosion, things would probably be different. But they did bet the house, and it blew that molasses all over their faces. Boston’s an embarrassment now, and you and your BSC boys aren’t making it better.”
“Oh, right. It’s us.”
“Don’t play the martyr. I didn’t say it was all you. I just said there’s a taint to our beloved department in certain corridors of federal law enforcement. And some of that’s because of the half-cocked hysteria surrounding the tank explosion, and some of it’s due to the fear that you’ll embarrass the nation by going on strike.”
“No one’s talking strike yet, Dad.”
“Yet.” His father paused at the third-floor landing. “Jesus, it’s hotter than the arse of a swamp rat.” He looked at the hall window, its thick glass covered in soot and a greasy residue. “I’m three stories up, but I can’t even see my city.”
“Your city.” Danny chuckled.
His father gave him a soft smile. “It is my city, Aiden. It was men like me and Eddie who built this department. Not the commissioners, not O’Meara much as I respected him, and certainly not Curtis. Me. And as goes the police, so goes the city.” He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Oh, your old man might be back on his heels temporarily, but I’m getting my second wind, boy. Don’t you doubt it.”
They climbed the last two flights in silence. At Danny’s room, his father took a series of breaths as Danny inserted his key in the lock.
Nora opened the door before he could turn the key. She smiled. Then she saw who stood beside him, and her pale eyes turned to ash.
“And what’s this?” she said.
“I’m looking for Joe,” his father said.
She kept her eyes on Danny, as if she hadn’t heard him. “You bring him here?”
“He showed up,” Danny said.
His father said, “I have no more desire to be here than you—”
“Whore,” Nora said to Danny. “I believe that was the last word I heard from this man’s mouth. I believe he spit on his own floor to emphasize the point.”
“Joe’s missing,” Danny said.
That didn’t move her at first. She stared at Danny with a cold rage that, while it encompassed his father, was just as much directed at him for bringing the man to their door. She flicked her gaze off his face and onto his father’s.
“What’d you call him to make him run?” she said.
“I just want to know if the boy came by.”
“And I want to know why he ran.”
“We had a moment of discord,” his father said.
“Ah.” She tilted her head back at that. “I know all about how you resolve moments of discord with young Joe. Was the switch involved?”
His father turned to Danny. “There’s a limit to how long I’ll stand for a situation I deem undignified.”
“Jesus,” Danny said. “The two of you. Joe’s missing. Nora?”
Her jaw tightened and her eyes remained ash, but she stepped back from the door enough so Danny and his father could enter the room.
Danny took off his coat straightaway and stripped the suspenders from his shoulders. His father took in the room, the fresh curtains,
the new bedspread, the flowers in the vase on the table by the window.
Nora stood by the foot of the bed in her factory uniform—Ladlassie stripe overalls with a beige blouse underneath. She gripped her left wrist with her right hand. Danny poured three whiskeys and gave a glass to each of them, and his father’s eyebrows rose slightly at the sight of Nora drinking hard liquor.
“I smoke, too,” she said, and Danny saw a tightening of his father’s lips that he recognized as a suppressed smile.
The two of them raced each other on the drink, Danny’s father draining his glass one drop ahead of Nora, and then they each held out their glasses again and Danny refilled them. His father took his to the table by the window and placed his hat on the table and sat and Nora said, “Mrs. DiMassi said a boy was by this afternoon.”
“What?” his father said.
“He didn’t leave a name. She said he was ringing our bell and looking up at our window and when she came out on the stoop, he ran away.”
“Anything else?”
Nora drank more whiskey. “She said he was the spitting image of Danny.”
Danny could see the tension drain from his father’s shoulders and neck as he took a sip of his drink.
Eventually, he cleared his throat. “Thank you, Nora.”
“You’ve no need to thank me, Mr. Coughlin. I love the boy. But you could do me a courtesy in return.”
His father reached for his handkerchief and pulled it from his coat. “Certainly. Name it.”
“Finish up your drink, if you please, and be on your way.”
CHAPTER thirty-one
Two days later, on a Saturday in June, Thomas Coughlin walked from his home on K Street to Carson Beach for a meeting regarding the future of his city. Even though he was dressed in the lightest suit he owned, a blue and white seersucker, and his sleeves were short, the heat soaked through to his skin. He carried a brown leather satchel that grew heavier every couple of hundred yards. He was a little too old to be playing the bag man, but he wasn’t trusting this particular bag to anyone else. These were sensitive days in the wards, where the wind could shift at a moment’s notice. His beloved Commonwealth was currently under the stewardship of a Republican governor, a transplant from Vermont with no love of, nor appreciation for, local mores or local history. The police commissioner was a bitter man of tiny mind who hated the Irish, hated Catholics, and therefore hated the wards, the great Democratic wards that had built this city. He only understood his hate; he did not understand compromise, patronage, the way of doing things that had been established in this town over seventy years ago and had defined it ever since. Mayor Peters was the picture of ineffectuality, a man who won the vote only because the ward bosses had fallen asleep at the switch and the rivalry between the two main and two true mayoral candidates, Curley and Gallivan, had grown so bitter that a third flank had opened up, and Peters had reaped the November rewards. Since his election, he had done nothing, absolutely nothing of note, while his cabinet had pillaged the till with such shamelessness that it was only a matter of time before the looting hit the front pages and gave birth to the sworn enemy of politics since the dawn of man: illumination.
The Given Day Page 50
