The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  She smiled.

  Good Lord, it was gorgeous.

  She held out her hand.

  He crossed the grass. He dropped to his knees and took her hand and kissed it. He wrapped his arms around her waist and wept into her shirt. She lowered herself to her knees and kissed him, weeping, too, laughing, too, the two of them a sight, crying and giggling and holding each other and kissing and tasting each other’s tears.

  Desmond started to cry. Wail actually, the sound so sharp it was like a nail in Luther’s ear.

  Lila leaned back from him. “Well?”

  “Well?”

  “Make him stop,” she said.

  Luther looked at this little creature sitting in the grass and wailing, his eyes red, his nose running. He reached down and lifted him to his shoulder. He was warm. Warm as a kettle wrapped in a towel. Luther had never known a body could give off such heat.

  “He okay?” he asked Lila. “He feels hot.”

  “He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a baby been setting in the sun.”

  Luther held him out in front of him. He saw some Lila in the eyes and some Luther in the nose. Saw his own mother in the jaw, his father in the ears. He kissed his head. He kissed his nose. The child continued to wail.

  “Desmond,” he said and kissed his son on the lips. “Desmond, it’s your daddy.”

  Desmond wasn’t having any of it. He wailed and shrieked and wept like the world was ending. Luther brought him back to his shoulder and held him tight. He rubbed his back. He cooed in his ear. He kissed him so many times he lost count.

  Lila ran a hand over Luther’s head and leaned in for a kiss of her own.

  And Luther finally found the word for this day…

  Whole.

  He could stop running. He could stop looking for anything else. Wasn’t anything else he wanted. This right here was the full measure of every hope he’d harbored since birth.

  Desmond’s wails stopped, just snuffed out like a match in the wind. Luther looked at the basket at his feet, still half full with damp clothing.

  “Let’s get those clothes hung,” he said.

  Lila lifted a shirt off the pile. “Oh, you gonna help, uh?”

  “You give me a couple of those clothespins, I will.”

  She passed a handful of them to him and he hoisted Desmond onto his hip and helped his wife hang laundry. The moist air hummed with cicadas. The sky was low and flat and bright. Luther chuckled.

  “What you laughing at?” Lila asked.

  “Everything,” he said.

  Danny’s first night in the hospital, he spent nine hours on the operating table. The knife in his leg had nicked the femoral artery. The bullet in his chest had hit bone, and some of the bone chips had sprayed his right lung. The bullet in his left hand had entered through the palm and the fingers were, for the time being anyway, useless. He’d had less than two pints of blood in his body by the time they got him out of the ambulance.

  He woke from a coma on the sixth day and was awake half an hour when he felt the left side of his brain catch fire. He lost the vision in his left eye and tried to tell the doctor something was happening to him, something odd, like maybe his hair was on fire, and his body began to shake. It was quite beyond his control, this violent shaking. He vomited. The orderlies held him down and shoved something leather into his mouth, and the bandages on his chest tore and blood leaked from him all over again. By this time, the fire had raged all the way across his skull. He vomited again, and they pulled the leather out of his mouth and rolled him onto his side before he choked.

  When he woke a few days later, he couldn’t speak properly and the whole left side of his body was numb.

  “You’ve had a stroke,” the doctor said.

  “I’m twenty-seven years old,” Danny said, though it came out, “I’b wenty-vesen airs awl.”

  The doctor nodded, as if he’d spoken clearly. “Most twenty-seven-year-olds don’t get stabbed and then shot three times for good measure. If you were much older, I doubt you would have survived. In truth, I don’t know how you did.”

  “Nora.”

  “She’s outside. Do you really want her to see you in your current state?”

  “She I mife.”

  The doctor nodded.

  When he left the room, Danny heard the words as they had left his mouth. He could form them in his head right now—she’s my wife—but what had come out—she I mife—was hideous, humiliating. Tears left his eyes, hot ones of fear and shame, and he wiped at them with his right hand, his good hand.

  Nora entered the room. She looked so pale, so frightened. She sat in the chair by his bed and took his right hand in hers and lifted it to her face, pressed her cheek to his palm.

  “I love you.”

  Danny gritted his teeth, concentrated through a pounding headache, concentrated, willing the words to leave his tongue correctly. “Love you.”

  Not bad. Love ooh, really. But close enough.

  “The doctor said you’ll have trouble speaking for a while. You may have trouble walking, yeah? But you’re young and fierce-strong, and I’ll be with you. I’ll be with you. ’Twill all be fine, Danny.”

  She’s trying so hard not to cry, he thought.

  “Love ooh,” he said again.

  She laughed. A wet laugh. She wiped her eyes. She lowered her head to his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her against his face.

  If there was a positive outcome to Danny’s injuries, it was that he didn’t see a newspaper for three weeks. If he had, he would have learned that the day after the shoot-out in the alley, Commissioner Curtis proclaimed all positions of the striking police officers to be officially vacant. Governor Coolidge supported him. President Wilson weighed in to call the actions of the policemen who left their posts “a crime against civilization.”

  Ads seeking the new police force contained within them new standards and rate of pay, all in keeping with the strikers’ original demands. Base salary would now start at fourteen hundred dollars a year. Uniforms, badges, and service revolvers would be provided free of charge. Within two weeks of the riots, city cleanup crews, licensed plumbers, electricians, and carpenters began arriving at each of the station houses to clean and remodel them until they met safety and sanitation codes at a state level.

  Governor Coolidge composed a telegram to Samuel Gompers of the AFL. Before he sent the telegram to Gompers, he released it to the press where it was published on the front page of every daily the following morning. The telegram was also released to the wire services and would run in over seventy newspapers across the country in the following two days. Governor Coolidge proclaimed the following: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

  Within a week, those words had turned Governor Coolidge into a national hero and some suggested he should consider a run for the presidency the following year.

  Andrew Peters faded from public view. His ineffectuality was deemed, if not quite criminal, then certainly unconscionable. His failure to call out the State Guard on the first night of the strike represented an unforgivable dereliction of his duties, and popular opinion held that it was only the quick thinking and steely resolve of Governor Coolidge and the unfairly maligned Commissioner Curtis that had saved the city from itself.

  While the rest of the active police force found their jobs in jeopardy, Steve Coyle was given a full policeman’s funeral. Commissioner Curtis singled out former Patrolman Stephen Coyle as an exemplar of the “old guard” policeman, the one who put duty before all else. Curtis repeatedly failed to note that Coyle had been released from the employ of the BPD almost a full year before. He further promised to form a committee to look into posthumously reinstating Coyle’s medical benefits for any immediate family he happened to have.

  In the first days after the death of Tessa Ficara, the papers trumpeted the irony of a striking police officer who, in less than a year, had brought about the demise of two of the most wanted terro
rists in the land as well as a third, Bartolomeo Stellina, the man Luther had killed with the brick, who was reputed to be a devoted Galleanist. Even though the strikers were now viewed with the enmity once reserved for the Germans (to whom they were often compared), accounts of Officer Coughlin’s heroics turned public sympathy back toward the strikers. Maybe, it was felt, if they returned to their jobs right away, some of them, at least those with distinguished records akin to Officer Coughlin’s, could be reinstated.

  The next day, however, the Post reported that Officer Coughlin might have had a prior acquaintanceship with the Ficaras, and the evening Transcript, citing unnamed sources in the Bureau of Investigation, reported that Officer Coughlin and the Ficaras had once lived on the same floor of the same building in the North End. The next morning, the Globe ran a story citing several tenants in the building who described the relationship between Officer Coughlin and the Ficaras as quite social, so social in fact that his relationship with Tessa Ficara may have crossed into unseemly areas; there was even some question as to whether he had paid for her favors. With that question in mind, his prior shooting of her husband suddenly looked as if it could have been colored by more than a sense of duty. Public opinion turned wholly against Officer Coughlin, the dirty cop, and all of his striking “comrades.” Any talk of the strikers ever returning to work ended.

  National coverage of the two days of rioting entered the arena of myth. Several newspapers wrote of machine guns turned on innocent crowds, of a death toll estimated in the hundreds, property damage in the millions. The actual dead numbered nine and the property damage slightly less than one million dollars, but the public would hear none of it. The strikers were Bolsheviks, and the strike had unleashed civil war in Boston.

  When Danny left the hospital in mid-October, he still dragged his left foot and had trouble lifting anything heavier than a teacup with his left hand. His speech, however, was fully restored. He would have left the hospital two weeks earlier, but one of his wounds had developed sepsis. He’d gone into shock, and for the second time that month a priest had delivered last rites.

  After the stories that defamed him in the papers, Nora had been forced to leave their building on Salem Street and had moved their few belongings to a rooming house in the West End. It was there they returned when Danny was released from the hospital. She had chosen the West End because Danny’s rehabilitation would be taking place at Mass General, and the walk from there to the apartment took a matter of minutes. Danny climbed the stairs to the second floor, and he and Nora entered the dingy room with one gray window that looked out on an alley.

  “It’s all we could afford,” Nora said.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I tried to get the grime off the outside of the window, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, it just—”

  He put his good arm around her. “It’s fine, honey. We won’t be here long.”

  One night in November, he lay in bed with his wife after they’d managed to make love for the first time since he’d been injured. “I’ll never be able to get a job here.”

  “You could.”

  He looked at her.

  She smiled and rolled her eyes. She slapped his chest lightly. “That’s what you get, boy, for sleeping with a terrorist.”

  He chuckled. It felt good to be able to joke about something so bleak.

  His family had visited the hospital twice while he was still in a coma. His father had come once after the stroke to tell him they would always love him, of course, but could never again admit him to their home. Danny had nodded and shook his father’s hand and waited until he was five minutes gone before he wept.

  “There’s nothing to keep us here after my rehabilitation,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Are you interested in an adventure?”

  She slid her arm over his chest. “I’m interested in anything.”

  Tessa had miscarried the day before her death. Or so the coroner told Danny. Danny would never know if the coroner lied to save him the guilt, but he chose to believe him because the alternative, he feared, could be the thing that finally broke him.

  When he’d met Tessa, she’d been in labor. When he came across her again in May, she’d been pretending to be pregnant. And now, at her death, pregnant again. It was as if she’d had an overpowering need to remake her rage as flesh and blood, to be certain it would live on and pass down through the generations. This need (and Tessa, as a whole) was something he would never understand.

  Sometimes, he woke from a sleep with the cold echo of her laughter ringing in his ears.

  A package from Luther arrived. There was two thousand dollars in it—two years’ salary—and a formal portrait of Luther, Lila, and Desmond sitting before a fireplace. They were dressed in the latest fashions; Luther even wore a coat with tails over his winged collar.

  “She’s beautiful,” Nora said. “And that child, good Lord.”

  Luther’s note was brief:

  Dear Danny and Nora,

  I am home now. I am happy. I hope this is enough. If you need more wire immediately and I will send it.

  Your friend,

  Luther

  Danny opened the packet of bills and showed it to Nora.

  “Sweet Jesus!” She let out a noise that was half laughing—half weeping. “Where did he get it?”

  “I have some idea,” Danny said.

  “And?”

  “You don’t want to know,” he said. “Believe me.”

  On the tenth of January, in a light snow, Thomas Coughlin left his station house. The new recruits were coming along faster than expected. They were mostly smart. And eager. The State Guard still patrolled the streets, but the units had begun to demobilize. Within the month, they’d be gone, and the restored Boston Police Department would rise in their place.

  Thomas walked up the street toward home. At the corner, under a streetlamp, his son leaned against the pole.

  “Believe the Sox traded Ruth?” Danny said.

  Thomas shrugged. “I was never a fan of the game.”

  “To New York,” Danny said.

  “Your youngest brother is, of course, distraught over it. I haven’t seen him this beside himself since…”

  His father didn’t have to finish the thought. It pierced Danny just the same.

  “How’s Con’?”

  His father tipped his hand from side to side. “He has good days and bad. He’s learning to read by his fingers. There’s a school in Back Bay that teaches it. If the bitterness doesn’t overwhelm him, he could be all right.”

  “Does it overwhelm you?”

  “Nothing overwhelms me, Aiden.” His father’s breath was white in the cold. “I’m a man.”

  Danny said nothing.

  His father said, “Well, then, you look back to trim. So I guess I’ll be going.”

  “We’re leaving the city, Dad.”

  “You’re…?”

  Danny nodded. “Leaving the state actually. Heading west.”

  His father looked stunned. “This is your home.”

  Danny shook his head. “Not anymore.”

  Maybe his father had thought that Danny would reside in exile but close by. That way Thomas Coughlin could live with the illusion that his family was still intact. But once Danny left, a hole would open that not even Thomas could have prepared for.

  “You’re all packed then, I take it.”

  “Yeah. We’re going to head to New York for a few days before Volstead kicks in. We never had a proper honeymoon.”

  His father nodded. He kept his head lowered, the snow falling in his hair.

  “Good-bye, Dad.”

  Danny started to walk past him and his father grabbed his arm. “Write me.”

  “Will you write back?”

  “No. But I’d like to know—”

  “Then I won’t write.”

  His father’s face stiffened and he gave him a curt nod and dropped his arm.

  Danny walked up the str
eet, the snow thickening, the footprints his father had left already obscured.

  “Aiden!”

  He turned, could barely see the man in all the white swirling between them. The flakes caked his eyelashes and he blinked them away.

  “I’ll write back,” his father called.

  A sudden boom of wind rattled the cars along the street.

  “All right, then,” Danny called.

  “Take care of yourself, son.”

  “You, too.”

  His father raised a hand and Danny raised one in return and then they turned and walked in separate directions through the snow.

  On the train to New York, everyone was drunk. Even the porters. Twelve in the afternoon and people were guzzling champagne and guzzling rye and a band played in the fourth car, and the band was drunk. No one sat in their seats. Everyone hugged and kissed and danced. Prohibition was now the law of the land. Enforcement would begin four days from now, on the sixteenth.

  Babe Ruth had a private car on the train, and at first he tried to sit out the revelry. He read over a copy of the contract he’d officially sign at day’s end in the offices of the Colonels at the Polo Grounds. He was now a Yankee. The trade had been announced ten days ago, though Ruth had never seen it coming. Got drunk for two days to deal with the depression. Johnny Igoe found him, though, and sobered him up. Explained that Babe was now the highest-paid player in baseball history. He showed him New York paper after New York paper, all proclaiming their joy, their ecstasy about getting the most feared slugger in the game on their team.

  “You already own the town, Babe, and you haven’t even arrived yet.”

  That put a new perspective on things. Babe had feared that New York was too big, too loud, too wide. He’d get swallowed up in it. Now he realized the opposite was true—he was too big for Boston. Too loud. Too wide. It couldn’t hold him. It was too small, too provincial. New York was the only stage large enough for the Babe. New York and New York alone. It wasn’t going to swallow Babe. He was going to swallow it.