The Given Day

  “Sure. I used to box,” he said. Then: “In Pennsylvania.”

  “But have you ever been physically pushed aside?”

  “Pushed aside?” Danny shook his head. “Not that I can remember. Why?”

  “I wonder if you know how exceptional that is. To walk through this world without fear of other men.”

  Danny had never thought of it like that before. It suddenly embarrassed him that he’d moved through his entire life expecting it to work for him. And it usually had.

  “It must be nice,” Nathan said. “That’s all.”

  “What do you do?” Danny asked.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m looking for work. But you? Your hands aren’t those of a laborer. Your clothes, either.”

  Nathan touched the lapel of his coat. “These aren’t expensive clothes.”

  “They’re not rags either. They match your shoes.”

  Nathan Bishop gave that a crooked smile. “Interesting observation. You a cop?”

  “Yes,” Danny said and lit a cigarette.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “A copper and a doctor. You can fix whoever I shoot.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “No really.”

  “Okay, I’m not a copper. You a doctor, though?”

  “I was.” Bishop stubbed his cigarette out. He took a slow pull of his drink.

  “Can you quit being a doctor?”

  “You can quit anything.” Bishop took another drink and let out a long sigh. “I was a surgeon once. Most of the people I saved didn’t deserve to be saved.”

  “They were rich?”

  Danny saw an exasperation cross Bishop’s face that he was becoming familiar with. It meant Bishop was heading for the place where his anger would dominate him, where he couldn’t be calmed down until he’d exhausted himself.

  “They were oblivious,” he said, his tongue lathering the word with contempt. “If you said to them, ‘People die every day. In the North End, in the West End, in South Boston, in Chelsea. And the thing that’s killing them is one thing. Poverty. That’s all. Simple as that.’” He rolled another cigarette and leaned over the table as he did, slurped his drink from the glass with his hands still in his lap. “You know what people say when you tell them that? They say, ‘What can I do?’ As if that’s an answer. What can you do? You can very well fucking help. That’s what you can do, you bourgeois piece of shit. What can you do? What can’t you do? Roll up your fucking sleeves, get off your fat fucking arse, and move your wife’s fatter fucking arse off the same cushion, and go down to where your mates—your brother and sister fellow fucking human beings—are quite authentically starving to death. And do whatever you need to do to help them. That’s what the bloody fuck you can bloody well fucking do.”

  Nathan Bishop slammed back the rest of his drink. He dropped the glass to the scarred wood table and looked around the bar, his eyes red and sharp.

  In the heavy air that often followed one of Nathan’s tirades, Danny said nothing. He could feel the men at the nearest table shift in awkwardness. One of them suddenly began talking about Ruth, about the newest trade rumors. Nathan breathed heavily through his nostrils while he reached for the bottle and placed his cigarette between his lips. He got a shaky hand on the bottle. He poured himself another drink. He leaned back in his chair and flicked his thumbnail over a match and lit his cigarette.

  “That’s what you can do,” he whispered.

  In the Sowbelly Saloon, Danny tried to see through the crowd of Roxbury Letts to the back table where Louis Fraina sat tonight in a dark brown suit and a slim black tie sipping from a small glass of amber liquor. It was only the blaze of his eyes behind a pair of small round spectacles that gave him away as something other than a college professor who’d entered the wrong bar. That, and the deference the others showed him, placing his drink carefully on the table in front of him, asking him questions with the jutting chins of anxious children, checking to see whether he was watching when they expounded on a point. It was said that Fraina, Italian by birth, spoke Russian as close to fluently as could be asked of one not raised in the Motherland, an assessment rumored to have been first delivered by Trotsky himself. Fraina kept a black moleskin notebook open on the table in front of him, and he’d occasionally jot notes in it with a pencil or flip through the pages. He rarely looked up, and when he did, it was only to acknowledge a speaker’s point with a soft flick of his eyelids. Not once had he and Danny exchanged so much as a glance.

  The other Letts, though, had finally stopped treating Danny with the amused politeness one reserved for children and the feeble-minded. He wouldn’t say they trusted him yet, but they were getting used to having him around.

  Even so, they spoke in accents so thick they’d soon tire of conversation with him and jump ship as soon as another Lett interrupted in the mother tongue. That night, they had a full docket of problems and solutions that had carried over from the meeting into the bar.

  Problem: The United States had launched a covert war against the provisional Bolshevik government of the new Russia. Wilson had authorized the detachment of the 339th, who’d joined up with British forces and seized the Russian port of Archangel on the White Sea. Hoping to cut the supplies of Lenin and Trotsky and starve them out during a long winter, the American and British forces were instead facing an early winter freeze and were rumored to be at the mercy of their White Russian allies, a corrupt group of warlords and tribal gangsters. This embarrassing quagmire was just one more instance of Western Capitalism attempting to crush the will of the great people’s movement.

  Solution: Workers everywhere should unite and engage in civil unrest until the Americans and the British withdrew their troops.

  Problem: The oppressed firemen and policemen of Montreal were being violently devalued by the state and stripped of their rights.

  Solution: Until the Canadian government capitulated to the police and firemen and paid them a fair wage, workers everywhere should unite in civil unrest.

  Problem: Revolution was in the air in Hungary and Bavaria and Greece and even France. In Germany, the Spartacists were moving on Berlin. In New York, the Harbor Workers Union had refused to report for duty, and across the country unions were warning of “No Beer, No Work” sit-downs if Prohibition became the law of the land.

  Solution: In support of all these comrades, the workers of the world should unite in civil unrest.

  Should.

  Could.

  Might.

  No actual plans for revolution that Danny could hear. No specific plotting of the insurrectionary deed.

  Just more drinking. More talk that turned into drunken shouts and shattered stools. And it wasn’t just the men shattering stools and shouting that night but the women as well, although it was often hard to tell them apart. The workers revolution had no place for the sexist caste system of the United Capitalist States of America—but most women in the bar were hard-faced and industrial-gray, as sexless in their coarse clothes and coarse accents as the men they called comrades. They were without humor (a common affliction among the Letts) and, worse, politically opposed to it—humor was seen as a sentimental disease, a by-product of romanticism, and romantic notions were just one more opiate the ruling class used to keep its masses from seeing the truth.

  “Laugh all you want,” Hetta Losivich said that night. “Laugh so that you look like fools, like hyenas. And the industrialists will laugh at you because they have you exactly where they want you. Impotent. Laughing, but impotent.”

  A brawny Estonian named Pyotr Glaviach slapped Danny on the shoulder. “Pampoolats, yes? Tomorrow, yes?”

  Danny looked up at him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Glaviach had a beard so unruly it looked as if he’d been interrupted swallowing a raccoon. It shook now as he tilted his head back and roared with laughter. He was one of those rare Letts who laughed, as if to make up for
the paucity in the rest of the ranks. It wasn’t a laughter Danny particularly trusted, however, since he’d heard that Pyotr Glaviach had been a charter member of the original Letts, men who’d banded together in 1912 to pitch the first guerrilla skirmishes against Nicholas II. These inaugural Letts had waged a campaign of hit-and-hide against czarist soldiers who’d outnumbered them eighty to one. They lived outdoors during the Russian winter on a diet of half-frozen potatoes and massacred whole villages if they suspected a single Romanov sympathizer lived there.

  Pyotr Glaviach said, “We go out tomorrow and we hand out pampoolat. For the workers, yes? You see?”

  Danny didn’t see. He shook his head. “Pampoo-what?”

  Pyotr Glaviach slapped his hands together impatiently. “Pampoolat, you donkey man. Pampoolat.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Flyers,” a man behind Danny said. “I think he means flyers.”

  Danny turned in his booth. Nathan Bishop stood there, one elbow resting on the top of Danny’s seat back.

  “Yes, yes,” Pyotr Glaviach said. “We hand out flyers. We spread the news.”

  “Tell him ‘okay,’” Nathan Bishop says. “He loves that word.”

  “Okay,” Danny said to Glaviach and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Ho-kay! Ho-kay, meester! You meet me here,” Glaviach said. He gave him a big thumbs-up back. “Eight o’clock.”

  Danny sighed. “I’ll be here.”

  “We have fun,” Glaviach said and slapped Danny on the back. “Maybe meet pretty women.” He roared again and then stumbled away.

  Bishop slid into the booth and handed him a mug of beer. “The only way you’ll meet pretty women in this movement is to kidnap the daughters of our enemies.”

  Danny said, “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a Lett?”

  “Are you?”

  “Hoping to be.”

  Nathan shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I belong to any one organization. I help out. I’ve known Lou for a long time.”

  “Lou?”

  “Comrade Fraina,” Nathan said and gestured with his chin. “Would you like to meet him some day?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d be honored.”

  Bishop gave that a small, private smile. “You have any worthwhile talents?”

  “I write.”

  “Well?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Give me some samples, I’ll see what I can do.” He looked around the bar. “God, that’s a depressing thought.”

  “What? Me meeting Comrade Fraina?”

  “Huh? No. Glaviach got me thinking. There really isn’t a good-looking woman in any of the movements. Not a…Well, there’s one.”

  “There’s one?”

  He nodded. “How could I have forgotten? There is one.” He whistled. “Bloody gorgeous, she is.”

  “She here?”

  He laughed. “If she were here, you’d know it.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Bishop’s head moved so swiftly Danny feared he’d blown his cover. Bishop looked him in the eyes and seemed to be studying his face.

  Danny took a sip of his beer.

  Bishop looked back out at the crowd. “She has lots of them.”

  CHAPTER fourteen

  Luther got off the freight in Boston, where Uncle Hollis’s chicken-scratch map directed him and found Dover Street easily enough. He followed it to Columbus Avenue and followed Columbus through the heart of the South End. When he found St. Botolph Street, he walked down a row of redbrick town houses along a sidewalk carpeted in damp leaves until he found number 121 and he went up the stairs and rang the bell.

  The man who lived at 121 was Isaiah Giddreaux, the father of Uncle Hollis’s second wife, Brenda. Hollis had married four times. The first and third had left him, Brenda had died of typhus, and about five years back Hollis and the fourth had kind of mutually misplaced each other. Hollis had told Luther that as much as he missed Brenda, and he missed her something terrible on many a day, he sometimes missed her father just as much. Isaiah Giddreaux had moved east back in ’05 to join up with Dr. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, but he and Hollis had remained in touch.

  The door was opened by a small slim man wearing a dark wool three-piece suit and a navy-blue tie speckled with white dots. His hair was speckled with white, too, and cropped close to his skull, and he wore round spectacles that revealed calm, clear eyes behind their panes.

  He extended his hand. “You must be Luther Laurence.”

  Luther shook the hand. “Isaiah?”

  Isaiah said, “Mr. Giddreaux if you please, son.”

  “Mr. Giddreaux, yes, sir.”

  For a small man Isaiah seemed tall. He stood as straight as any man Luther had ever seen, his hands folded in front of his belt buckle, his eyes so clear it was impossible to read them. They could have been the eyes of a lamb lying down in the last spot of sun on a summer evening. Or those of a lion, waiting for the lamb to get sleepy.

  “Your Uncle Hollis is well, I trust?” He led Luther down the front hall.

  “He is, sir.”

  “How’s that rheumatism of his?”

  “His knees ache awful in the afternoons but otherwise he feels in top form.”

  Isaiah looked over his shoulder as he led him up a wide staircase. “He’s done marrying I hope.”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  Luther hadn’t been in a brownstone before. The breadth of it surprised him. He’d have never been able to tell from the street how deep the rooms went or how high the ceilings got. It was as nicely appointed as any of the homes on Detroit Avenue, with heavy chandeliers and dark gumwood beams and French sofas and settees. The Giddreauxs had the master bedroom on the top floor, and there were three more bedrooms on the second, one of which Isaiah led Luther to and opened the door long enough for him to drop his bag on the floor. He got a glimpse of a nice brass bed and walnut dresser with a porcelain wash pot on top before Isaiah ushered him back out again. Isaiah and his wife, Yvette, owned the whole place, three floors and a widow’s walk on top that looked out over the entire neighborhood. The South End, Luther discerned from Isaiah’s description, was a budding Greenwood unto itself, the place where Negroes had carved out a little something for themselves with restaurants served their kind of food and clubs played their kind of music. Isaiah told Luther the neighborhood had been born out of a need for servant housing, the servants being those who attended to the needs of the rich old-money folk on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay, and the reason the buildings were so nice—all redbrick town houses and chocolate bowfront brownstones—was that the servants had taken pains to live in the style of their employers.

  They took the stairs back down to the parlor, where a pot of tea waited for them.

  “Your uncle speaks highly of you, Mr. Laurence.”

  “He does?”

  Isaiah nodded. “He says you have some jackrabbit in your blood but sincerely hopes that one day you’ll slow down and find enough peace to be an upstanding man.”

  Luther couldn’t think of a reply to that.

  Isaiah reached for the pot and poured them each a cup, then handed Luther’s to him. Isaiah poured a single drop of milk into his cup and stirred it slowly. “Did your uncle tell you much about me?”

  “Only that you were his wife’s father and you were at Niagara with Du Bois.”

  “Doctor Du Bois. I was.”

  “You know him?” Luther asked. “Dr. Du Bois?”

  Isaiah nodded. “I know him well. When the NAACP decided to open an office here in Boston he asked me to run it.”

  “That’s quite an honor, sir.”

  Isaiah gave that a tiny nod. He dropped a cube of sugar into his cup and stirred. “Tell me about Tulsa.”

  Luther poured some milk into his tea and took a small sip. “Sir?”

  “You committed a crime. Yes?” He lifted his cup to his lips. “Hollis deigned not to be specific what that c
rime was.”

  “Then with all due respect, Mr. Giddreaux, I…deign the same.”

  Isaiah shifted and tugged his pant leg down until it covered the top of his sock. “I’ve heard folks speak of a shooting in a disreputable nightclub in Greenwood. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  Luther met the man’s gaze. He said nothing.

  Isaiah took another sip of tea. “Did you feel you had a choice?”

  Luther looked at the rug.

  “Shall I repeat myself?”

  Luther kept his eyes on the rug. It was blue and red and yellow and all the colors swirled together. He supposed it was expensive. The swirls.

  “Did you feel you had a choice?” Isaiah’s voice was as calm as his teacup.

  Luther raised his eyes to him and still said nothing.

  “And yet you killed your own kind.”

  “Evil got a way of not caring about kinds, sir.” Luther’s hand shook as he lowered his cup to the coffee table. “Evil just muck things around till things go all sideways.”

  “That’s how you define evil?”

  Luther looked around this room, as fine as any in the fine houses on Detroit Avenue. “You know it when you see it.”

  Isaiah sipped his tea. “Some would say a murderer is evil. Would you agree?”

  “I’d agree some would say it.”

  “You committed murder.”

  Luther said nothing.

  “Ergo…” Isaiah held out his hand.

  “All due respect? I never said I committed anything, sir.”

  They sat silent for a bit, a clock ticking behind Luther. A car horn beeped faintly from a few blocks away. Isaiah finished his tea and placed the cup back on the tray.

  “You’ll meet my wife later. Yvette. We’ve just purchased a building to use as the NAACP office here. You’ll volunteer there.”

  “I’ll what?”

  “You’ll volunteer there. Hollis tells me you’re good with your hands, and we have repairs that need seeing to in the building before we can open for business. You’ll pull your weight here, Luther.”

  Pull my weight. Shit. When’s the last time this old man pulled any weight outside of lifting a teacup? Seemed the same shit Luther had left behind in Tulsa—moneyed colored folk acting like their money gave them the right to order you around. And this old fool acting like he could see inside Luther, talking about evil like he’d know it if it sat down beside him and bought him a drink. Man was probably a step or two away from whipping out a Bible. But he reminded himself of the pledge he’d made in the train car to create the New Luther, the better Luther, and promised he would give it time before he made up his mind about Isaiah Giddreaux. This man worked with W.E.B. Du Bois, and Du Bois was one of only two men in this country that Luther felt worthy of his admiration. The other, of course, was Jack Johnson. Jack didn’t take shit from no one, black or white.