The Given Day

  Joe said, “Hey down there,” and they looked up to see that he’d managed to reach the second-highest branch.

  “You crack your head,” Connor said, “Ma will shoot you.”

  “Not going to crack my head,” Joe said, “and Ma doesn’t have a gun.”

  “She’ll use Dad’s.”

  Joe stayed where he was, as if giving it some thought.

  “How’s Nora?” Danny asked, trying to keep his voice loose.

  Connor waved his cigarette at the night. “Ask her yourself. She’s a strange bird. She acts all proper around Ma and Dad, you know? But she ever go Bolsheviki on you?”

  “Bolsheviki?” Danny smiled. “Ah, no.”

  “You should hear her, Dan, talking about the rights of the workers and women’s suffrage and the poor immigrant children in the factories and blah, blah, blah. The old man’d keel over if he heard her sometimes. I’ll tell you that’s going to change, though.”

  “Yeah?” Danny chuckled at the idea of Nora changing, Nora so stubborn she’d die of thirst if you ordered her to drink. “How’s that going to happen?”

  Connor turned his head, the smile in his eyes. “You didn’t hear?”

  “I work eighty hours a week. Apparently I missed some gossip.”

  “I’m going to marry her.”

  Danny’s mouth went dry. He cleared his throat. “You asked her?”

  “Not yet. I’ve talked to Dad about it, though.”

  “Talked to Dad, but not to her.”

  Connor shrugged and gave him another wide grin. “What’s the shock, brother? She’s beautiful, we go to shows and the flickers together, she learned to cook from Ma. We have a great time. She’ll make a great wife.”

  “Con’—” Danny started, but his younger brother held up a hand.

  “Dan, Dan, I know something…happened between you two. I’m not blind. The whole family knows.”

  This was news to Danny. Above him, Joe scrambled around the tree like a squirrel. The air had cooled, and dusk settled softly against the neighboring row houses.

  “Hey, Dan? That’s why I’m telling you this. I want to know if you’re comfortable with it.”

  Danny leaned against the rail. “What do you think ‘happened’ between me and Nora?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  Danny nodded, thinking: She’ll never marry him.

  “What if she says no?”

  “Why would she say that?” Connor tossed his hands up at the absurdity of it.

  “You never know with these Bolshies.”

  Connor laughed. “Like I said, that’ll change quick. Why wouldn’t she say yes? We spend all our free time together. We—”

  “The flickers, like you said. Someone to watch a show with. It’s not the same.”

  “Same as what?”

  “Love.”

  Connor narrowed his eyes. “That is love.” He shook his head at Danny. “Why do you always complicate things, Dan? A man meets a woman, they share common understandings, common heritage. They marry, raise a family, instill those understandings in them. That’s civilization. That’s love.”

  Danny shrugged. Connor’s anger was building with his confusion, always a dangerous combination, particularly if Connor was in a bar. Danny might have been the son who’d boxed, but Connor was the true brawler in the family.

  Connor was ten months younger than Danny. This made them “Irish twins,” but beyond the bloodline, they’d never had much in common. They’d graduated from high school the same day, Danny by the skin of his teeth, Connor a year early and with honors. Danny had joined the police straightaway, while Connor had accepted a full scholarship to Boston Catholic College in the South End. After two years doubling up on his classes there, he’d graduated summa cum laude and entered Suffolk Law School. There’d never been any question where he’d work once he passed the bar. He’d had a slot waiting for him in the DA’s office since he’d worked there as an office boy in his late teens. Now, with four years on the job, he was starting to get bigger cases, larger prosecutions.

  “How’s work?” Danny said.

  Connor lit a fresh cigarette. “There’s some very bad people out there.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’m not talking about Gusties and garden-variety plug-uglies, brother. I’m talking about radicals, bombers.”

  Danny cocked his head and pointed at the shrapnel scar on his own neck.

  Connor chuckled. “Right, right. Look who I’m talking to. I guess I just never knew how…how…fucking evil these people are. We’ve got a guy now, we’ll be deporting him when we win, and he actually threatened to blow up the Senate.”

  “Just talk?” Danny asked.

  Connor gave that an irritated head shake. “No such thing. I went to a hanging a week ago?”

  Danny said, “You went to a…?”

  Connor nodded. “Part of the job sometimes. Silas wants the people of the Commonwealth to know we represent them all the way to the end.”

  “Doesn’t seem to go with your nice suit. What’s that color—yellow?”

  Connor swiped at his head. “They call it cream.”

  “Oh. Cream.”

  “It wasn’t fun, actually.” Connor looked out into the yard. “The hanging.” He gave Danny a thin smile. “Around the office, though, they say you get used to it.”

  They said nothing for a bit. Danny could feel the pall of the world out there, with its hangings and diseases, its bombs and its poverty, descend on their little world in here.

  “So, you’re gonna marry Nora,” he said eventually.

  “That’s the plan.” Connor raised his eyebrows up and down.

  He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Best of luck then, Con’.”

  “Thanks.” Connor smiled. “Heard you just moved into a new place, by the way.”

  “No new place,” Danny said, “just a new floor. Better view.”

  “Recently?”

  “About a month ago,” Danny said. “Apparently some news travels slow.”

  “It does when you don’t visit your mother.”

  Danny placed a hand to his heart, adopted a thick brogue. “Ah, ’tis a fierce-terrible son, sure, who doesn’t visit his dear old mudder every day of the week.”

  Connor chuckled. “You stayed in the North End, though?”

  “It’s home.”

  “It’s a shit hole.”

  “You grew up there,” Joe said, suddenly dangling from the lowest branch.

  “That’s right,” Connor said, “and Dad moved us out as soon as he was able.”

  “Traded one slum for another,” Danny said.

  “An Irish slum, though,” Connor said. “I’ll take it over a wop slum anytime.”

  Joe dropped to the ground. “This isn’t a slum.”

  Danny said, “It ain’t up here on K Street, no.”

  “Neither’s the rest of it.” Joe walked up on the porch. “I know slums,” he said with complete assurance and opened the door and went inside.

  In his father’s study, they lit cigars and asked Danny if he wanted one. He declined but rolled a cigarette and sat by the desk beside Deputy Chief Madigan. Mesplede and Donnegan were over by the decanters, pouring themselves healthy portions of his father’s liquor, and Charles Steedman stood by the tall window behind his father’s desk, lighting his cigar. His father and Eddie McKenna stood talking with Silas Pendergast in the corner, back by the doors. The DA nodded a lot and said very little as Captain Thomas Coughlin and Lieutenant Eddie McKenna spoke to him with their hands on their chins, their foreheads tilted low. Silas Pendergast nodded a final time, picked his hat off the hook, and bade good-bye to everyone.

  “He’s a fine man,” his father said, coming around the desk. “He understands the common good.” His father took a cigar from the humidor, snipped the end, and smiled with raised eyebrows at the rest of them. They all smiled back because his father’s humor was infectious that way, even if you didn’t u
nderstand the cause of it.

  “Thomas,” the deputy chief said, speaking in a tone of deference to a man several ranks his inferior, “I assume you explained the chain of command to him.”

  Danny’s father lit his cigar, clenching it in his back teeth as he got it going. “I told him that the man in the back of the cart need never see the horse’s face. I trust he understood my meaning.”

  Claude Mesplede came around behind Danny’s chair and patted him on the shoulder. “Still the great communicator, your father.”

  His father’s eyes flicked over at Claude as Charles Steedman sat in the window seat behind him and Eddie McKenna took a seat to Danny’s left. Two politicians, one banker, three cops. Interesting.

  His father said, “You know why they’ll have so many problems in Chicago? Why their crime rate will go through the roof after Volstead?”

  The men waited and his father drew on his cigar and considered the brandy snifter on the desk by his elbow but didn’t lift it.

  “Because Chicago is a new city, gentlemen. The fire wiped it clean of history, of values. And New York is too dense, too sprawling, too crowded with the nonnatives. They can’t maintain order, not with what’s coming. But Boston”—he lifted his brandy and took a sip as the light caught the glass—“Boston is small and untainted by the new ways. Boston understands the common good, the way of things.” He raised his glass. “To our fair city, gentlemen. Ah, she’s a grand old broad.”

  They met their glasses in toast and Danny caught his father smiling at him, in the eyes if not the mouth. Thomas Coughlin alternated between a variety of demeanors and all coming and going with the speed of a spooked horse that it was easy to forget that they were all aspects of a man who was certain he was doing good. Thomas Coughlin was its servant. The good. Its salesman, its parade marshal, catcher of the dogs who nipped its ankles, pallbearer for its fallen friends, cajoler of its wavering allies.

  The question remained, as it had throughout Danny’s life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man’s honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be spoken aloud. It was, purely of necessity, conciliatory to the Brahmins on the outside while remaining firmly anti-Protestant on the inside. It was anticolored, for it was taken as a given that the Irish, for all their struggles and all those still to come, were Northern European and undeniably white, white as last night’s moon, and the idea had never been to seat every race at the table, just to make sure that the last chair would be saved for a Hibernian before the doors to the room were pulled shut. It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private.

  His father said, “Heard of the Roxbury Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

  “The Letts?” Danny was suddenly aware of Charles Steedman watching him from the window. “Socialist workers group, made up mostly of Russian and Latvian émigrés.”

  “How about the People’s Workers Party?” Eddie McKenna asked.

  Danny nodded. “They’re over in Mattapan. Communists.”

  “Union of Social Justice?”

  Danny said, “What’s this, a test?”

  None of the men answered, just stared back at him, grave and intent.

  He sighed. “Union of Social Justice is, I believe, mostly Eastern European café intellectuals. Very antiwar.”

  “Anti-everything,” Eddie McKenna said. “Anti-American most of all. These are all Bolshevik fronts—all of them—funded by Lenin himself to stir unrest in our city.”

  “We don’t like unrest,” Danny’s father said.

  “How about Galleanists?” Deputy Chief Madigan said. “Heard of them?”

  Again, Danny felt the rest of the room watching him.

  “Galleanists,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “are followers of Luigi Galleani. They’re anarchists devoted to dismantling all government, all property, all ownership of any kind.”

  “How do you feel about them?” Claude Mesplede said.

  “Active Galleanists? Bomb throwers?” Danny said. “They’re terrorists.”

  “Not just Galleanists,” Eddie McKenna said. “All radicals.”

  Danny shrugged. “The Reds don’t bother me much. They seem mostly harmless. They print their propaganda rags and drink too much at night, end up disturbing their neighbors when they start singing too loud about Trotsky and Mother Russia.”

  “Things may have changed lately,” Eddie said. “We’re hearing rumors.”

  “Of?”

  “An insurrectionary act of violence on a major scale.”

  “When? What kind?”

  His father shook his head. “That information carries with it a need-to-know designation, and you don’t need to know yet.”

  “In due time, Dan.” Eddie McKenna gave him a big smile. “In due time.”

  “‘The purpose of terrorism,’” his father said, “‘is to inspire terror.’ Know who said that?”

  Danny nodded. “Lenin.”

  “He reads the papers,” his father said with a soft wink.

  McKenna leaned in toward Danny. “We’re planning an operation to counter the radicals’ plans, Dan. And we need to know exactly where your sympathies lie.”

  “Uh-huh,” Danny said, not quite seeing the play yet.

  Thomas Coughlin had leaned back from the light, his cigar gone dead between his fingers. “We’ll need you to tell us what’s transpiring with the social club.”

  “What social club?”

  Thomas Coughlin frowned.

  “The Boston Social Club?” Danny looked at Eddie McKenna. “Our union?”

  “It’s not a union,” Eddie McKenna said. “It just wants to be.”

  “And we can’t have that,” his father said. “We’re policemen, Aiden, not common laborers. There’s a principle to be upheld.”

  “Which principle is that?” Danny said. “Fuck the workingman?” Danny took another look around the room, at the men gathered here on an innocent Sunday afternoon. His eyes fell on Steedman. “What’s your stake in this?”

  Steedman gave him a soft smile. “Stake?”

  Danny nodded. “I’m trying to figure out just what it is you’re doing here.”

  Steedman reddened at that and looked at his cigar, his jaw moving tightly.

  Thomas Coughlin said, “Aiden, you don’t speak to your elders in that tone. You don’t—”

  “I’m here,” Steedman said, looking up from his cigar, “because workers in this country have forgotten their place. They have forgotten, young Mr. Coughlin, that they serve at the discretion of those who pay their wages and feed their families. Do you know what a ten-day strike can do? Just ten days.”

  Danny shrugged.

  “It can cause a medium-size business to default on its loans. When loans are in default, stock plummets. Investors lose money. A lot of money. And they have to cut back their business. Then the bank has to step in. Sometimes, this means the only solution is foreclosure. The bank loses money, the investors lose money, their companies lose money, the original business goes under, and the workers lose their jobs anyway. So while the idea of unions is, on the surface, rather heart-warming, it is also quite unconscionable for reasonable men to so much as discuss it in polite company.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Does that answer your question, son?”

  “I’m not exactly sure how your logic applies to the public sector.”

  “In triplicate,” Steedman said.

  Danny gave him a tight smile and turned to McKenna. “Is Special Squads going after unions, Eddie?”

  “We’re going after subversives. Threats to this nation.” He gave Danny a roll of his big shoulders. “I need you to hone your skills somewhere. Might as well start local.”

  “In our union.”

  “That’s what you call it.??
?

  “What could this possibly have to do with an act of ‘insurrectionary violence’?”

  “It’s a milk run,” McKenna said. “You help us figure out who really runs things in there, who the members of the brain trust are, et cetera, we’ll have more confidence to send you after bigger fish.”

  Danny nodded. “What’s my end?”

  His father cocked his head at that, his eyes diminishing to slits.

  Deputy Chief Madigan said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s that—”

  “Your end?” his father said. “If you succeed with the BSC and then succeed with the Bolsheviks?”

  “Yes.”

  “A gold shield.” His father smiled. “That’s what you wanted us to say, yes? Counting on it, were you?”

  Danny felt an urge to grind his teeth. “It’s either on the table or it isn’t.”

  “If you tell us what we need to know about the infrastructure of that alleged policeman’s union? And if you then infiltrate a radical group of our choosing and then come back with the information necessary to stop any act of concerted violence?” Thomas Coughlin looked over at Deputy Chief Madigan and then back at Danny. “We’ll put you first in line.”

  “I don’t want first in line. I want the gold shield. You’ve dangled it long enough.”

  The men traded glances, as if they hadn’t counted on his reaction from the outset.

  After a time, his father said, “Ah, the boy knows his mind, doesn’t he?”

  “He does,” Claude Mesplede said.

  “That’s plain as the day, ’tis,” Patrick Donnegan said.

  Out beyond the doors, Danny heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen, the words indecipherable, but whatever she said caused Nora to laugh and the sound of it made him picture Nora’s throat, the flesh over her windpipe.

  His father lit his cigar. “A gold shield for the man who brings down some radicals and lets us know what’s on the mind of the Boston Social Club to boot.”

  Danny held his father’s eyes. He removed a cigarette from his pack of Murads and tapped it off the edge of his brogan before lighting it. “In writing.”

  Eddie McKenna chuckled. Claude Mesplede, Patrick Donnegan, and Deputy Chief Madigan looked at their shoes, the rug. Charles Steedman yawned.