The Given Day

  A woman came in with her teenage daughter. The woman was thick-waisted and dark but her daughter was thin and almost yellow and she coughed without stopping, the sound of it like metal gears grinding under water. The teamster was the first of them to ask the nurse for a surgical mask, but by the time Mrs. DiMassi found Danny in the waiting area, he wore one, too, feeling sheepish and ashamed, but they could still hear the girl, down another corridor and behind another set of double doors, those gears grinding.

  “Why you wear that, Officer Danny?” Mrs. DiMassi sat beside him.

  Danny took it off. “A very sick woman was here.”

  She said, “Lot of people sick today. I say fresh air. I say go up on the roofs. Everyone say I crazy. They stay inside.”

  “You heard about…”

  “Tessa, yes.”

  “Tessa?”

  Mrs. DiMassi nodded. “Tessa Abruzze. You carry her here?”

  Danny nodded.

  Mrs. DiMassi chuckled. “Whole neighborhood talking. Say you not as strong as you look.”

  Danny smiled. “That so?”

  She said, “Yes. So. They say your knees buckle and Tessa not heavy woman.”

  “You notify her husband?”

  “Bah.” Mrs. DiMassi swatted the air. “She have no husband. Only father. Father a good man. Daughter?” She swatted the air again.

  “So you don’t hold her in high regard,” Danny said.

  “I would spit,” she said, “but this clean floor.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “She my tenant,” she said simply.

  Danny placed a hand to the little old woman’s back and she rocked in place, her feet swinging above the floor.

  By the time the doctor entered the waiting room, Danny had put his mask back on and Mrs. DiMassi wore one as well. It had been a man this time, midtwenties, a freight yard worker by the looks of his clothes. He’d dropped to a knee in front of the admitting desk. He held up a hand as if to say he was fine, he was fine. He didn’t cough, but his lips and the flesh under his jaw were purple. He remained in that position, his breath rattling, until the nurse came around to get him. She helped the man to his feet. He reeled in her grip. His eyes were red and wet and saw nothing of the world in front of him.

  So Danny put his mask back on and went behind the admitting desk and got one for Mrs. DiMassi and a few others in the waiting room. He handed them out and sat back down, feeling each breath he exhaled press back against his lips and nose.

  Mrs. DiMassi said, “Paper say only soldiers get it.”

  Danny said, “Soldiers breathe the same air.”

  “You?”

  Danny patted her hand. “Not so far.”

  He started to remove his hand, but she closed hers over it. “Nothing get you, I think.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I stay close.” Mrs. DiMassi moved in against him until their legs touched.

  The doctor came out into the waiting room and, though he wore one himself, seemed surprised by all the masks.

  “It’s a boy,” he said and squatted in front of them. “Healthy.”

  “How is Tessa?” Mrs. DiMassi said.

  “That’s her name?”

  Mrs. DiMassi nodded.

  “She had a complication,” the doctor said. “There’s some bleeding I’m concerned about. Are you her mother?”

  Mrs. DiMassi shook her head.

  “Landlady,” Danny said.

  “Ah,” the doctor said. “She have family?”

  “A father,” Danny said. “He’s still being located.”

  “I can’t let anyone but immediate family in to see her. I hope you understand.”

  Danny kept his voice light. “Serious, Doctor?”

  The doctor’s eyes remained weary. “We’re trying, Officer.”

  Danny nodded.

  “If you hadn’t carried her here, though?” the doctor said. “The world would, without question, be a hundred ten pounds lighter. Choose to look at it that way.”

  “Sure.”

  The doctor gave Mrs. DiMassi a courtly nod and rose from his haunches.

  “Dr….,” Danny said.

  “Rosen,” the doctor said.

  “Dr. Rosen,” Danny said, “how long are we going to be wearing masks, you think?”

  Dr. Rosen took a long look around the waiting room. “Until it stops.”

  “And it isn’t stopping?”

  “It’s barely started,” the doctor said and left them there.

  Tessa’s father, Federico Abruzze, found Danny that night on the roof of their building. After the hospital, Mrs. DiMassi had berated and harangued all her tenants into moving their mattresses up onto the roof not long after the sun went down. And so they assembled four stories above the North End under the stars and the thick smoke from the Portland Meat Factory and the sticky wafts from the USIA molasses tank.

  Mrs. DiMassi brought her best friend, Denise Ruddy-Cugini, from Prince Street. She also brought her niece, Arabella and Arabella’s husband, Adam, a bricklayer recently arrived from Palermo sans passport. They were joined by Claudio and Sophia Mosca and their three children, the oldest only five and Sophia already showing with the fourth. Shortly after their arrival, Lou and Patricia Imbriano dragged their mattresses up the fire escape and were followed by the newlyweds, Joseph and Concetta Limone, and finally, Steve Coyle.

  Danny, Claudio, Adam, and Steve Coyle played craps on the black tar, their backs against the parapet, and Claudio’s homemade wine went down easier with every roll. Danny could hear coughing and fever-shouts from the streets and buildings, but he could also hear mothers calling their children home and the squeak of laundry being drawn across the lines between the tenements and a man’s sharp, sudden laughter and an organ grinder in one of the alleys, his instrument slightly out of tune in the warm night air.

  No one on the roof was sick yet. No one coughed or felt flushed or nauseated. No one suffered from what were rumored to be the telltale early signs of infection—headache or pains in the legs—even though most of the men were exhausted from twelve-hour workdays and weren’t sure their bodies would notice the difference. Joe Limone, a baker’s assistant, worked fifteen-hour days and scoffed at the lazy twelve-hour men, and Concetta Limone, in an apparent effort to keep up with her husband, reported for work at Patriot Wool at five in the morning and left at six-thirty in the evening. Their first night on the rooftop was like the nights during the Feasts of the Saints, when Hanover Street was laureled in lights and flowers and the priests led parades up the street and the air smelled of incense and red sauce. Claudio had made a kite for his son, Bernardo Thomas, and the boy stood with the other children in the center of the roof and the yellow kite looked like a fin against the dark blue sky.

  Danny recognized Federico as soon as he stepped out on the roof. He’d passed him on the stairs once when his arms were filled with boxes—a courtly old man dressed in tan linen. His hair and thin mustache were white and clipped tight to his skin and he carried a walking stick the way landed gentry did, not as an aid, but as a totem. He removed his fedora as he spoke to Mrs. DiMassi and then looked over at Danny sitting against the parapet with the other men. Danny rose as Federico Abruzze crossed to him.

  “Mr. Coughlin?” he said with a small bow and perfect English.

  “Mr. Abruzze,” Danny said and stuck out his hand. “How’s your daughter?”

  Federico shook the hand with both of his and gave Danny a curt nod. “She is fine. Thank you very much for asking.”

  “And your grandson?”

  “He is strong,” Federico said. “May I speak with you?”

  Danny stepped over the dice and loose change and he and Federico walked to the eastern edge of the roof. Federico removed a white handkerchief from his pocket and placed it on the parapet. He said, “Please, sit.”

  Danny took a seat on the handkerchief, feeling the waterfront at his back and the wine in his blood.

  “A pretty night,”
Federico said. “Even with so much coughing.”

  “Yes.”

  “So many stars.”

  Danny looked up at the bright splay of them. He looked back at Federico Abruzze, getting the impression of tribal leader from the man. A small-town country mayor, perhaps, a dispenser of wisdom in the town piazza on summer nights.

  Federico said, “You are well known around the neighborhood.”

  Danny said, “Really?”

  He nodded. “They say you are an Irish policeman who holds no prejudice against the Italians. They say you grew up here and even after a bomb exploded in your station house, even after you’ve worked these streets and seen the worst of our people, you treat everyone as a brother. And now you have saved my daughter’s life and the life of my grandson. I thank you, sir.”

  Danny said, “You’re welcome.”

  Federico placed a cigarette to his lips and snapped a match off his thumbnail to light it, staring at Danny through the flame. In the flare of light, he looked younger suddenly, his face smooth, and Danny guessed him to be in his late fifties, ten years younger than he looked from a distance.

  He waved his cigarette at the night. “I never leave a debt unpaid.”

  “You don’t owe a debt to me,” Danny said.

  “But I do, sir,” he said. “I do.” His voice was softly musical. “But the cost of immigrating to this country has left me of modest means. Would you, at the very least, sir, allow my daughter and I to cook for you some night?” He placed a hand to Danny’s shoulder. “Once she is well enough, of course.”

  Danny looked into the man’s smile and wondered about Tessa’s missing husband. Was he dead? Had there ever been one? From what Danny understood of Italian customs, he couldn’t imagine a man of Federico’s stature and upbringing allowing an unwed, pregnant daughter to remain in his sight, let alone his home. And now it seemed the man was trying to engineer a courtship between Danny and Tessa.

  How strange.

  “I’d be honored, sir.”

  “Then it’s done.” Federico leaned back. “And the honor is all mine. I will leave word once Tessa is well.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  Federico and Danny walked back across the roof toward the fire escape.

  “This sickness.” Federico’s arm spanned the roofs around them. “It will pass?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I do as well. So much hope in this country, so much possibility. It would be a tragedy to learn to suffer as Europe has.” He turned at the fire escape and took Danny’s shoulders in his hands. “I thank you again, sir. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Danny said.

  Federico descended through the black iron, the walking stick tucked under one arm, his movements fluid and assured, as if he’d grown up with mountains nearby, rocky hills to climb. Once he was gone, Danny found himself still staring down, trying to give a name to the odd sense he had that something else had transpired between them, something that got lost in the wine in his blood. Maybe it was the way he’d said debt, or suffer, as if the words had different meanings in Italian. Danny tried to snatch at the threads, but the wine was too strong; the thought slipped off into the breeze and he gave up trying to catch it and returned to his craps game.

  A little later in the night, they launched the kite again at Bernardo Thomas’s insistence, but the twine slipped from the boy’s fingers. Before he could cry, Claudio let out a whoop of triumph, as if the point of any kite were to eventually set it free. The boy wasn’t immediately convinced and stared after it with a tremble in his chin, so the other adults joined in at the edge of the roof. They raised their fists and shouted. Bernardo Thomas began to laugh and clap, and the other children joined in, and soon they all stood in celebration and urged the yellow kite onward into the deep, dark sky.

  By the end of the week, the undertakers had hired men to guard the coffins. The men varied in appearance—some had come from private security companies and knew how to bathe and shave, others had the look of washed-up footballers or boxers, a few in the North End were low-rung members of the Black Hand—but all carried shotguns or rifles. Among the afflicted were carpenters, and even if they’d been healthy, it was doubtful they could have kept up with the demand. At Camp Devens, the grippe killed sixty-three soldiers in one day. It rooted its way into tenements in the North End and South Boston and the rooming houses of Scollay Square and tore through the shipyards of Quincy and Weymouth. Then it caught the train lines, and the papers reported outbreaks in Hartford and New York City.

  It reached Philadelphia on the weekend during fine weather. People filled the streets for parades that supported the troops and the buying of Liberty Bonds, the Waking Up of America, and the strengthening of moral purity and fortitude best exemplified by the Boy Scouts. By the following week, death carts roamed the streets for bodies placed on porches the night before and morgue tents sprang up all over eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. In Chicago it took hold first on the South Side, then on the East, and the rails carried it out across the Plains.

  There were rumors. Of an imminent vaccine. Of a German submarine that had been sighted three miles out in Boston Harbor in August; some claimed to have seen it rise out of the sea and exhale a plume of orange smoke that had drifted toward shore. Preachers cited passages in Revelations and Ezekiel that prophesied an airborne poison as punishment for a new century’s promiscuity and immigrant mores. The Last Times, they said, had arrived.

  Word spread through the underclass that the only cure was garlic. Or turpentine on sugar cubes. Or kerosene on sugar cubes if turpentine wasn’t available. So the tenements reeked. They reeked of sweat and bodily discharges and the dead and the dying and garlic and turpentine. Danny’s throat clogged with it and his nostrils burned, and some days, woozy from kerosene vapors and stuffed up from the garlic, his tonsils scraped raw, he’d think he’d finally come down with it. But he hadn’t. He’d seen it fell doctors and nurses and coroners and ambulance drivers and two cops from the First Precinct and six more from other precincts. And even as it blasted a hole through the neighborhood he’d come to love with a passion he couldn’t even explain to himself, he knew it wouldn’t stick to him.

  Death had missed him at Salutation Street, and now it circled him and winked at him but then settled on someone else. So he went into the tenements where several cops refused to go, and he went into the boardinghouses and rooming houses and gave what comfort he could to those gone yellow and gray with it, those whose sweat darkened the mattresses.

  Days off vanished in the precinct. Lungs rattled like tin walls in high wind and vomit was dark green, and in the North End slums, they took to painting Xs on the doors of the contagious, and more and more people slept on the roofs. Some mornings, Danny and the other cops of the Oh-One stacked the bodies on the sidewalk like shipyard piping and waited into the afternoon sun for the meat wagons to arrive. He continued to wear a mask but only because it was illegal not to. Masks were bullshit. Plenty of people who never took them off got the grippe all the same and died with their heads on fire.

  He and Steve Coyle and another half-dozen cops responded to a suspicion-of-murder call off Portland Street. As Steve knocked on the door, Danny could see the adrenaline flare in the eyes of the other men in the hallway. The guy who eventually opened the door wore a mask, but his eyes were red with it and his breaths were liquid. Steve and Danny looked at the knife haft sticking out of the center of his chest for twenty seconds before they realized what they were seeing.

  The guy said, “Fuck you fellas bothering me for?”

  Steve had his hand on his revolver but it remained holstered. He held out his palm to get the guy to take a step back. “Who stabbed you, sir?”

  The other cops in the hall moved on that, spreading out behind Danny and Steve.

  “I did,” the guy said.

  “You stabbed yourself?”

  The guy nodded, and Danny noticed a woman sitting on the couch behind the guy. S
he wore a mask, too, and her skin was the blue of the infected and her throat was cut.

  The guy leaned against the door, and the movement brought a fresh darkening to his shirt.

  “Let me see your hands,” Steve said.

  The guy raised his hands and his lungs rattled with the effort. “Could one of you fellas pull this out of my chest?”

  Steve said, “Sir, step away from the door.”

  He stepped out of their way and fell on his ass and sat looking at his thighs. They entered the room. No one wanted to touch the guy, so Steve trained his revolver on him.

  The guy placed both hands on the haft and tugged, but it didn’t budge, and Steve said, “Put your hands down, sir.”

  The guy gave Steve a loose smile. He lowered his hands and sighed.

  Danny looked at the dead woman. “You kill your wife, sir?”

  A slight shake of his head. “Cured her. Nothing else I could do, fellas. This thing?”

  Leo West called from the back of the apartment. “We got kids in here.”

  “Alive?” Steve called.

  The guy on the floor shook his head again. “Cured them, too.”

  “Three of ’em,” Leo West called. “Jesus.” He stepped back out of the room. His face was pale and he’d unbuttoned his collar. “Jesus,” he said again. “Shit.”

  Danny said, “We need to get an ambulance down here.”

  Rusty Aborn gave that a bitter chuckle. “Sure, Dan. What’s it taking them these days—five, six hours?”

  Steve cleared his throat. “This guy just left Ambulance Country.” He put his foot on the guy’s shoulder and gently tipped the corpse to the floor.

  Two days later, Danny carried Tessa’s infant out of her apartment in a towel. Federico was nowhere to be found, and Mrs. DiMassi sat by Tessa as she lay in bed with a wet towel on her forehead and stared at the ceiling. Her skin had yellowed with it, but she was conscious. Danny held the infant as she glanced first at him and then at the bundle in his arms, the child’s skin the color and texture of stone, and then she turned her eyes to the ceiling again and Danny carried the child down the stairs and outside, just as he and Steve Coyle had carried Claudio’s body out the day before.