He had the blood on his hands where their marriage was concerned, however. He was reasonably certain of that. She’d been a girl when they wed, and he’d treated her as a girl only to wake one morning, who knew how many years ago, wishing for a woman to take her place. But it was far too late for that now. Far too late. So he loved her in memory. He loved her with a version of himself he’d long outgrown because she hadn’t. And she loved him, he supposed (if in fact she did, he didn’t know anymore) because he indulged her illusions.
I’m so tired, he thought as she removed the towel from his head, but what he said was, “He’s at Aiden’s?”
“He is. Aiden telephoned.”
“When?”
“Not long ago.” She kissed his forehead, another rarity that defied recent recollection. “He’s safe, Thomas.” She rose from her haunches. “Tea?”
“Is Aiden bringing him by, Ellen? Our son?”
“He said Joe wished to spend the night and Aiden had a meeting to go to.”
“A meeting.”
She opened the cabinet for teacups. “He said he’d bring him ’round in the morning.”
Thomas went to the phone in the entrance hall and dialed Marty Kenneally’s house on West Fourth. He placed the valise under the phone table. Marty answered on the third ring, shouting into the phone as he always did.
“Hello? Hello? Hello?”
“Marty, it’s Captain Coughlin.”
“Is that you, sir?” Marty shouted even though, to the best of Thomas’s knowledge, no one else ever called him.
“It’s me, Marty. I need you to bring the car around.”
“She’ll be slipping in this rain, sir.”
“I didn’t ask you if she’d be slipping, Marty, now did I? Bring her ’round in ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” Marty shouted and Thomas hung up.
When he came back into the kitchen, the kettle was nearing the boil. He stripped off his shirt and used the towel on his arms and torso. He noticed how white the hairs had gotten on his chest, and that gave him a quick, mournful vision of his own headstone, but he vanquished the sentiment by noting the flatness of his belly and the hard cords in his biceps. With the possible exception of his eldest son, he couldn’t picture a man he’d fear to go against in a fistfight, even today, in his golden years.
You’re in the grave, Liam, almost three decades, but I’m still standing strong.
Ellen turned from the stove and saw his bare chest. She averted her gaze and Thomas sighed and rolled his eyes. “Jesus, woman, it’s me. Your husband.”
“Cover yourself, Thomas. The neighbors.”
The neighbors? She barely knew any of them. And, of those she did, most failed to measure up to whatever standards she clung to these days.
Christ, he thought as he went into the bedroom and changed into a fresh shirt and trousers, how did two people vanish from each other’s sight in the same house?
He’d kept a woman once. For about six years, she’d lived in the Parker House and spent his money freely but she’d always greeted him with a drink when he came through the door and she’d looked in his eyes when they talked and even when they made love. Then in the fall of ’09, she’d fallen in love with a bellhop and they left the city to start a new life in Baltimore. Her name was Dee Dee Goodwin, and when he’d placed his head to her bare chest he’d felt he could say anything, close his eyes and be anything.
His wife handed him his tea when he came back into the kitchen and he drank it standing up.
“You’re going back out? On a Saturday?”
He nodded.
“But I thought you’d stay home today. We’d stay home together, Thomas.”
And do what? he wanted to ask. You’ll talk about the latest news you’ve heard from relatives back in the Old Sod who we haven’t seen in years, and then when I begin to talk, you’ll jump up and start cleaning. And then we’ll have a silent supper and you’ll disappear to your room.
He said, “I’m going to get Joe.”
“But Aiden said—”
“I don’t care what Aiden said. He’s my son. I’m bringing him home.”
“I’ll clean his sheets,” she said.
He nodded and knotted his tie. Outside, the rain had stopped. The house smelled of it and it ticked off the leaves in the backyard, but he could see the sky brightening.
He leaned in and kissed his wife’s cheek. “I’ll be back with our boy.”
She nodded. “You haven’t finished your tea.”
He lifted the cup and drained it. He placed it back on the table. He took his straw boater from the hat rack and placed it on his head.
“You look handsome,” she said.
“And you’re still the prettiest girl ever to come out of County Kerry.”
She gave him a smile and a sad nod.
He was almost out of the kitchen when she called to him.
“Thomas.”
He turned back. “Hmm?”
“Don’t be too hard on the boy.”
He felt his eyes narrow so he compensated with a smile. “I’m just glad he’s safe.”
She nodded and he could see a clear and sudden recognition in her eyes, as if she knew him again, as if they could heal. He held her eyes and broadened his smile and felt hope stir in his chest.
“Just don’t hurt him,” she said brightly and turned back to her teacup.
It was Nora who thwarted him. She raised the window on the fifth floor and called down to him as he stood on the stoop. “He wants to stay here for the night, Mr. Coughlin.”
Thomas felt ridiculous calling up from the stoop as streams of dagos filled the sidewalk and street behind him, the air smelling of shit and rotten fruit and sewage. “I want my son.”
“And I told you, he’s wants to stay here for the night.”
“Let me talk to him.”
She shook her head and he pictured wrenching her out of that window by her hair.
“Nora.”
“I’m going to close the window.”
“I’m a police captain.”
“I know what you are.”
“I can come up.”
“Won’t that be a sight?” she said. “Sure, everyone will be talking about the ruckus you’ll make.”
Oh, she was a righteous cunt, she was.
“Where’s Aiden?”
“A meeting.”
“What kind?”
“What kind do you think?” she said. “Good day, Mr. Coughlin.”
She slammed the window closed.
Thomas walked off the stoop through the throng of reeking dagos and Marty opened the car door for him. Marty came around and got behind the wheel. “Where to now, Captain? Home, is it?”
Thomas shook his head. “Roxbury.”
“Yes, sir. The Oh-Nine, sir?”
Thomas shook his head again. “Intercolonial Hall, Marty.”
Marty came off the clutch and the car lurched and then died. He pumped the gas and started it again. “That’s BSC headquarters, sir.”
“I know right well what it is, Marty. Now hush up and take me there.”
A show of hands,” Danny said, “for any man in this room who’s ever heard us discuss, or even say, the word strike.”
There were over a thousand men in the hall and not one raised his hand.
“So where did the word come from?” Danny said. “How is it suddenly that the papers are hinting that this is our plan?” He looked out at the sea of people and his eyes found Thomas’s in the back of the hall. “Who has the motive to make the entire city think we’re going to strike?”
Several men looked back at Thomas Coughlin. He smiled and waved, and a collective laugh rumbled through the room.
Danny wasn’t laughing, though. Danny was on fire up there. Thomas couldn’t help but feel a great swell of pride as he watched his son on that podium. Danny, as Thomas had always known he would, had found his place in the world as a leader of men. It just wasn’t the battleground Th
omas would’ve chosen for him.
“They don’t want to pay us,” Danny said. “They don’t want to feed our families. They don’t want us to be able to provide reasonable shelter or education for our children. And when we complain? Do they treat us like men? Do they negotiate with us? No. They start a whisper campaign to paint us as Communists and subversives. They scare the public into thinking we’ll strike so that if it ever does come to that, they can say, ‘We told you so.’ They ask us to bleed for them, gentlemen, and when we do so, they give us penny bandages and dock our pay a nickel.”
That caused a roar in the hall, and Thomas noted that no one was laughing now.
He looked at his son and thought: check.
“The only way they win,” Danny said, “is if we fall into their traps. If we begin to believe, even for a second, their lies. That we are somehow in error. That asking for basic human rights is somehow subversive. We are paid below the poverty level, gentlemen. Not at it or slightly above it, but below it. They say we can’t form a union or affiliate with the AFL because we are ‘indispensable’ city personnel. But if we’re indispensable, how come they treat us as if we’re not? A streetcar driver, for example, must be twice as indispensable, because he makes twice what we do. He can feed his family and he doesn’t work fifteen days in a row. He doesn’t work seventy-two-hour shifts. He doesn’t get shot at either, last time I checked.”
Now the men laughed, and Danny allowed himself a smile.
“He doesn’t get stabbed or punched or beaten down by hooligans like Carl McClary did last week in Fields Corner. Does he? He doesn’t get shot like Paul Welch did during the May Day riot. He doesn’t risk his life every minute, like we all did in the flu epidemic. Does he?”
The men were shouting, “No!” and pumping their fists.
“We do every dirty job in this city, gentlemen, and we don’t ask for special treatment. We don’t ask for anything but fairness, parity.” Danny looked around the room. “Decency. To be treated as men. Not horses, not dogs. Men.”
The men were quiet now, not a sound in the room, not a cough.
“As you all know, the American Federation of Labor has a longstanding policy of not granting charters to police unions. As you also know, our own Mark Denton has made overtures to Samuel Gompers of the AFL and has been—several times in the last year, I’m afraid—rebuffed.” Danny looked back at Denton sitting on the stage behind him and smiled. He turned back to the men. “Until today.”
It took some time for the words to sink in. Thomas, himself, had to replay them several times in his head before the enormity of them took hold. The men began to look at one another, they began to chatter. The buzz circled the room.
“Did you hear me?” Danny smiled big. “The AFL has reversed its policy for the BPD, gentlemen. They are granting us a charter. Sign-up petitions will be distributed in every station house by Monday morning.” Danny’s voice thundered across the room. “We are now affiliated with the biggest national union in the United States of America!”
The men rose, and the chairs fell and the hall exploded with cheers.
Thomas saw his son up on the stage embracing Mark Denton, saw them both turn to the crowd and try to accept the outstretched hands of hundreds of men, saw the big, bold smile on Danny’s face, caught up in the thrall of himself a bit, as it would be near impossible not to be, given the circumstances. And Thomas thought:
I have given birth to a dangerous man.
Out on the street, the rain had returned, but it was soft, caught somewhere between a mist and light drizzle. As the men exited the hall, Danny and Mark Denton accepted their congratulations and handshakes and shoulder pats.
Some men winked at Thomas or tipped their hats and he returned the gestures because he knew they didn’t see him as The Enemy, knowing he was far too slippery to be caught holding fast to either side of a fence. They mistrusted him as a matter of course, that was a given, but he caught the glint of admiration in their eyes, admiration and some fear, but no hate.
He was a giant in the BPD, yes, but he wore it lightly. Displays of vanity, after all, were the province of minor gods.
Danny, of course, refused to ride in a chauffeured car with him, so Thomas sent Marty on to the North End alone and he and Danny took the el back across the city. They had to get out at Batterymarch Station because the trestle that had been destroyed in the molasses flood was still under repair.
As they walked back toward the rooming house, Thomas said, “How is he? Did he tell you anything?”
“Somebody banged him up a bit. He told me he got mugged.” Danny lit a cigarette and held out the pack to his father. His father helped himself to one as they walked in the soft mist. “I don’t know if I believe him, but what are you going to do? He’s sticking to the story.” Danny looked over at him. “He spent a couple nights sleeping on the streets. That’d rattle any kid.”
They walked another block. Thomas said, “So you’re quite the young Seneca. You cut a fine figure up there, if I do say so.”
Danny gave him a wry smile. “Thanks.”
“Affiliated with a national union now, are you?”
“Let’s not.”
“What?”
“Discuss this,” Danny said.
“The AFL’s left many a fledgling union hanging out to dry when the pressure got upped.”
“Dad? I said let’s leave it.”
“Fine, fine,” his father said.
“Thanks.”
“Far be it from me to change your mind after such a triumphant night.”
“Dad, I said quit it.”
“What am I doing?” Thomas said.
“You know damn well.”
“I don’t, boy. Do tell me.”
His son turned his head and his eyes were filled with an exasperation that gradually gave way to humor. Danny was the only one of his three sons who’d picked up his father’s sense of irony. All three boys could be funny—it was a family trait that probably went back several generations—but Joe’s humor was the humor of a smart-aleck boy and Connor’s was broader and borderline vaudevillian on the rare occasions he indulged it. Danny was capable of those kinds of humor as well, but more important, he shared Thomas’s appreciation for the quietly absurd. He could, in effect, laugh at himself. Particularly in the most dire hours. And that was the bond between them that no difference of opinion could ever break. Thomas had often heard fathers or mothers over the years claim they didn’t favor any of their children. What a load of bollocks. Pure bollocks. Your heart was your heart and it chose its loves regardless of your head. The son Thomas favored would surprise no one: Aiden. Of course. Because the boy understood him, to his core, and always had. Which wasn’t always to Thomas’s advantage, but then he’d always understood Aiden, and that kept the ledger balanced now, didn’t it?
“I’d shoot you, old man, if I had my gun.”
“You’d miss,” Thomas said. “I’ve seen you shoot, boy.”
For the second time in as many days, he found himself in the hostile presence of Nora. She didn’t offer him a drink or a place to sit. She and Danny went over to one corner of the room by themselves and Thomas crossed to his youngest son, who sat at the table by the window.
The boy watched him come, and Thomas was immediately shaken to see a new blankness in Joe’s eyes, as if something had been hollowed out of him. He had a black eye and a dark scab over his right ear and, Thomas noted with no small regret, that his throat still bore a circle of red from Thomas’s own hand and his lip was still swollen from Thomas’s ring.
“Joseph,” he said when he reached him.
Joe stared back at him.
Thomas went to one knee by his son and put his hands on his face and kissed his forehead and kissed his hair and pressed him to his chest. “Oh, Jesus, Joseph,” he said and closed his eyes and felt all the fear he’d trapped behind his heart these last two days burst through his blood and his muscles and his bones. He tilted his lips to his son’s
ear and whispered, “I love you, Joe.”
Joe stiffened in his arms.
Thomas released his grip and leaned back and ran his hands over his son’s cheeks. “I’ve been worried sick.”
Joe whispered, “Yes, sir.”
Thomas searched for signs of the boy he’d always known, but a stranger stared back at him.
“What happened to you, boy? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, sir. I got mugged is all. Some boys near the rail yards.”
The thought of his flesh and blood being pummeled spiked his rage for a moment, and Thomas almost slapped the boy for giving him such fright and lack of sleep these past few nights. But he caught himself, and the impulse passed.
“That’s it? Mugged?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jesus, the chill that came off the child! It was the chill of his mother during one of her “moods.” The chill of Connor when things didn’t go his way. It wasn’t part of the Coughlin bloodline, that was for certain.
“Did you know any of the boys?”
Joe shook his head.
“And that’s it? That’s all that happened.”
Joe nodded.
“I’ve come to take you home, Joseph.”
“Yes, sir.”
Joe stood and walked past him to the door. There was no child’s self-pity, no sense of anguish or joy or emotion of any kind.
Something’s died in him.
Thomas felt the chill of his own son again and wondered if he was to blame, if this was what he did to those he loved—protected their bodies while deadening their hearts.
The Given Day Page 52
