The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  All the chief officers of the nascent AFL—Boston Police Union were suspended except for Danny. All the men who’d distributed and collected sign-up sheets for the AFL charter were suspended as well. Except for Danny.

  He called his father. “Why not me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you, Dad.”

  He heard the rattle of ice cubes in a glass as his father sighed and then took a drink. “I’ve been after you your whole life to take up chess.”

  “You were after me my whole life to take up piano, too.”

  “That was your mother. I just enforced the idea. Chess, however, Aiden, that would have helped about now.” Another sigh. “Far more than your ability to play a rag. What do the men think?”

  “About?”

  “About why you were given an exemption? They’re all about to stand before Curtis for dismissal, and you, the vice president of your union, you’re free as a lark. If you were in their shoes, what would you suspect?”

  Danny, standing at the phone Mrs. DiMassi kept on a table in the foyer, wished he had his own drink as he heard his father pour a refill and add a few cubes to his glass.

  “If I were in their shoes? I’d think I still had my job because I was your son.”

  “Which is exactly what Curtis wants them to think.”

  Danny placed the side of his head to the wall and closed his eyes, heard his father fire up a cigar and suck and puff, suck and puff, until he got it going.

  “So that’s the play,” Danny said. “Dissension in the ranks. Divide and conquer.”

  His father barked a laugh. “No, boy, that’s not the play. That’s the opening act. Aiden, you silly, silly child. I do love you, but apparently I didn’t raise you proper. How do you think the press is going to respond when they discover that only one of the elected union officials wasn’t suspended? First, they’ll report that it’s proof the commissioner is a reasonable man and the city is obviously impartial and that the nineteen suspended men must have done something because the vice president himself wasn’t suspended.”

  “But then,” Danny said, seeing hope for the first time on this black day, “they’ll see that it’s a ruse, that I’m just a token symbol of impartiality, and they’ll—”

  “You idiot,” his father said, and Danny heard the thump of his heels as they came off the edge of his desk. “You idiot. The press will get curious, Aiden. They’ll dig. And fairly quickly they’ll unearth the fact that you are the son of a precinct captain. And they’ll spend a day talking about that before they decide to investigate further, and sooner or later, one honest scribe will run into one seemingly innocuous desk sergeant who mentions, quite casually, something along the lines of ‘the incident.’ And the reporter will say, ‘What incident?’ To which the desk sergeant will respond, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Then that reporter will really dig, my boy. And we all know that your recent affairs will stand up dimly to scrutiny. Curtis designated you the staked goat, son, and the beasts in the woods have already started sniffing your scent.”

  “So what’s this idiot supposed to do, Dad?”

  “Capitulate.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can. You just don’t see the angles yet. The opportunity will come, I promise. They’re not as afraid of your union as you think, but they are, trust me, afraid. Use that. They will never yield, Aiden, on the affiliation with the AF of L. They can’t. But if you play that chip correctly, they will yield on other issues.”

  “Dad, if we give up the AFL affiliation we’ll have corrupted everything we—”

  “Take what you will from my musings,” his father said. “Good night, son, and the gods be with you.”

  Mayor Andrew J. Peters believed implicitly in the primacy of a single principle: Things had a way of working themselves out.

  So many men wasted so much valuable time and energy placing faith in the canard that they could control their destinies when, in fact, the world would continue to entangle and disentangle itself whether they were part of it or not. Why, one just had to look back at that terrible foreign war to see the folly of making rash decisions. Any decisions, really. Think, Andrew Peters would say to Starr on late afternoons like these, what a different outcome would have been accomplished if, after the death of Franz Ferdinand, the Austrians had refrained from rattling their sabers and the Serbians had done the same. Think, too, how pointless it was for Gavrilo Princip, that hopeless fool, to assassinate the archduke in the first place. Just think! All those lives lost, all that earth scorched, and to what end? If cooler heads had prevailed, if men had had the temperance to refrain from acting until their countrymen forgot all about it and went on to other thoughts and other things? What a nice world we’d have today.

  For it was the war that had poisoned so many young men’s minds with thoughts of self-determination. This summer, colored men who’d fought overseas had been the main agitators behind the civil disorder that had resulted in the slaughter of their own people in Washington, Omaha, and most terribly in Chicago. Not that Peters was justifying the behavior of the whites who had killed them. Hardly. But you could see how it had happened, the coloreds trying to upset the applecart like that. People didn’t like change. They didn’t want to be upset. They wanted cool drinks on hot days and their meals served on time.

  “Self-determination,” he muttered on the deck as Starr, lying beside him, tummy down on a chaise, stirred slightly.

  “What’s that, Poppa?”

  He leaned over from his own chaise and kissed her shoulder and considered unbuttoning his trousers. But the clouds were massing and the sky was low and the sea had darkened, as if from wine and grief.

  “Nothing, darling.”

  Starr closed her eyes. A beautiful child. Beautiful! Cheeks that reminded him of apples so ripe they might burst. An ass to match. And everything in between so lush and firm that Andrew J. Peters, mayor of the great city of Boston, occasionally imagined himself an ancient Greek or Roman when he was inside her. Starr Faithful—what an apt name. His lover, his cousin. Fourteen years old this summer, and yet more mature and lascivious than Martha would ever be.

  She lay nude before him, Edenic, and when the first raindrop hit her spine and splattered, he removed his boater and placed it on her ass and she giggled and said she liked rain. She turned her head and reached for his waistband and said, in point of fact, she loved rain. In that moment, he saw something as dark and stricken as the sea pass through her eyes. A thought. No, more than a thought, a doubt. It unsettled him—she was not supposed to feel doubt; the concubines of Roman emperors, he was reasonably sure, hadn’t—and as he allowed her to unbuckle his belt, he felt visited by an ill-defined but acute sense of loss. His pants fell to his ankles and he decided it might be best to get back to the city and see if he could talk some sense into everyone.

  He looked out at the sea. So endless. He said, “I am the mayor, after all.”

  Starr smiled up at him. “I know you are, Poppa, and you’re the bestus at it.”

  The hearing for the nineteen suspended officers occurred on the twenty-sixth of August in the Pemberton Square office of Police Commissioner Curtis. Danny was in attendance, as was Curtis’s right-hand man, Herbert Parker. Clarence Rowley and James Vahey stood before Curtis as the attorneys-of-record for all nineteen defendants. One reporter each from the Globe, Transcript, Herald, and the Standard was allowed inside. And that was it. In previous administrations, three captains and the commissioner made up the trial board, but under Curtis’s regime, Curtis himself was the sole judge.

  “You will note,” Curtis said to the reporters, “that I have allowed the one nonsuspended officer of the illegal AF of L policemen’s union to attend so that no one can claim this ‘union’ was underrepresented. You will also note that the defendants are represented by two esteemed counsel, Mr. Vahey and Mr. Rowley, both with prodigious experience representing the interests
of labor. I have brought no counsel on my behalf.”

  “With all due respect, Commissioner,” Danny said, “you’re not on trial, sir.”

  One of the reporters nodded furiously at the comment and scribbled on his notepad. Curtis flicked a pair of dead eyes at Danny and then looked out at the nineteen men seated before him in rickety wooden chairs.

  “You men have been charged with dereliction of duty, the worst offense a peace officer can commit. You have, more specifically, been charged with violation of Rule Thirty-five of the Boston Police Code of Conduct, which states that no officer may affiliate with any organization that is not part of the Boston Police Department.”

  Clarence Rowley said, “By that yardstick, Commissioner, none of these men could belong to a veterans’ group, say, or the Fraternal Order of Elks.”

  Two reporters and one patrolman snickered.

  Curtis reached for a glass of water. “I’m not finished yet, Mr. Rowley. If you please, sir, this is not a criminal court. This is an internal trial of the Boston Police Department, and if you are going to argue the legality of Rule Thirty-five, you’ll have to bring a case before the Suffolk Superior Court. The only question to be answered here today is whether these men violated Rule Thirty-five, not the soundness of the rule itself, sir.” Curtis looked out at the room. “Patrolman Denton, stand at attention.”

  Mark Denton stood in his dress blues and tucked his domed hat under his arm.

  “Patrolman Denton, are you affiliated with Boston Police Union Number Sixteen Thousand Eight Hundred and Seven of the American Federation of Labor?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Are you not, in fact, the president of said union?”

  “I am, sir. Proudly.”

  “Your pride is of no relevance to this board.”

  “Board?” Mark Denton said, looking to the left and right of Curtis.

  Curtis took a sip of water. “And did you not distribute sign-up sheets within your station house for affiliation with the aforementioned American Federation of Labor?”

  “With the same aforementioned pride, sir,” Denton said.

  “You may sit back down, Patrolman,” Curtis said. “Patrolman Kevin McRae, stand at attention…”

  It went on for over two hours, Curtis asking the same monotonous questions in the same monotonous tone and each cop answering with varying degrees of petulance, contempt, or fatalism.

  When it was time for defense counsel to take the floor, James Vahey did the talking. Long the general counsel for the Street and Electric Railway Employees of America, he’d been famous since before Danny was born, and it was Mark Denton’s coup to bring him into this fight just two weeks ago at the urging of Samuel Gompers. He moved with an athlete’s fluidity as he strode from the back and flashed a slim, confident smile at the nineteen men before turning to face Curtis.

  “While I agree that we are not here today to argue the legality of Rule Thirty-five, I find it telling that the commissioner himself, the author of said rule, admits its nebulous status. If the commissioner himself does not believe firmly in the soundness of his own rule, what are we to make of it? Why, we are to make of it what it is—quite simply the greatest invasion of a man’s personal liberty—”

  Curtis banged his gavel several times.

  “—and the most far-reaching attempt to restrict his freedom of action I have ever known.”

  Curtis raised the gavel again, but Vahey pointed directly at his face.

  “You, sir, have denied these men their most basic human rights as workers. You have consistently refused to raise their pay to a level above the poverty line, provide them with safe and hygienic quarters in which to work and sleep, and have demanded they work hours of such duration that not only is their safety jeopardized but that of the public as well. And now you sit before us, as sole judge, and attempt to obfuscate the sworn responsibility you had toward these men. It is a low action, sir. A low action. Nothing you have said today has called into question these men’s commitment to the populace of this great city. These men have not abandoned their posts, have not failed to answer the call of duty, have never, not a sole time, failed to uphold the law and protect and serve the people of Boston. Had you evidence to the contrary, I trust you would have produced it by now. Instead, the only failure—and, for the record, I use that term ironically—that these men are guilty of is that they have failed to capitulate to your desire that they not affiliate themselves with a national labor union. That is all. And given that a simple calendar will show that your insertion of Rule Thirty-five to be of rather dubious urgency, I am quite confident any judge in the land will deem that rule the naked gambit to restrict these men’s rights that we all see it as here today.” He turned to the men and the reporters beyond, resplendent in his suit and his grace and his white-white hair. “I am not going to defend these men because there is nothing to defend. It is not they who should have their patriotism or Americanism questioned in this room today,” Vahey thundered. “It is you, sir!”

  Curtis banged his gavel repeatedly as Parker shouted for order and the men hooted and applauded and rose to their feet.

  Danny was reminded of what Ralph Raphelson had said about emotional rhetoric, and he wondered—even as he was as swept up in and stirred by Vahey’s speech as the rest of the men—if it had accomplished anything other than a fanning of the flames.

  When Vahey returned to his seat, the men sat. Now it was Danny’s turn. He took the floor in front of a red-faced Curtis.

  “I’m going to keep it simple. The issue before us, it seems to me, is whether affiliation with the American Federation of Labor will lessen the efficiency of the police force. Commissioner Curtis, I say with full confidence that it hasn’t thus far. A simple study of arrest records, citations given, and overall crime rate in the eighteen districts will bear this out. And I further state, with utter confidence, that it will remain so. We are policemen, first and foremost, and sworn to uphold the law and uphold the peace. That, I assure you, will never change. Not on our watch.”

  The men clapped as Danny took his seat. Curtis rose from his desk. He looked shaky, impossibly pale, his tie loosened at the throat, strands of hair pointing askew.

  “I will take all remarks and testimony under consideration,” he said, his hands gripping the edge of his desk. “Good day, gentlemen.”

  And with that, he and Herbert Parker walked out of the room.

  ABLE-BODIED MEN NEEDED

  Boston Police Department seeking recruits for Volunteer Police Force to be headed by former Police Supt. William Pierce. White males only. War experience and/or proven athletic ability preferred. Interested applicants apply at the Commonwealth Armory between the hours of 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., M—F.

  Luther placed the newspaper on the bench where he’d found it. A volunteer police force. Sounded like arming a bunch of white men either too dumb to hold on to a regular job or so desperate to prove their manhood they’d leave the good jobs they had. Either way, a bad combination. He imagined the same ad soliciting black men to fill those jobs and laughed out loud, a sound that surprised him. He wasn’t the only one—a white man one bench over stiffened, stood, and walked away.

  Luther had spent a rare day off wandering the city because he was about to come out of his skin. A child he’d never seen waited for him in Tulsa. His child. Lila, softening toward him by the day (he hoped), waited there, too. He’d once believed the world was a sprawling party just waiting for him to join it and that party would be filled with interesting men and beautiful women and they’d all fill the empty parts of him somehow, each in their own way, until there was nothing left to fill and Luther would feel whole for the first time since his father had left the family. But now he realized that wasn’t the case. He’d met Danny and Nora and felt for them a fondness so piercing it continued to surprise him. And, Lord knows, he loved the Giddreauxs, had found in them a pair of grandparents he’d often dreamed were out there. Yet ultimately it didn’t make no difference beca
use his hopes and his heart and his loves lay in Greenwood. That party? Never going to happen. Because even if it did, Luther’d just as soon be home. With his woman. With his son.

  Desmond.

  That was the name Lila’d given him, one Luther remembered half agreeing on back before he’d run afoul of the Deacon. Desmond Laurence, after Lila’s grandfather, a man who’d taught her the Bible while she sat on his knee, probably gave her that steel in her spine, too, for all Luther knew, because it had to have come from somewhere.

  Desmond.

  A good firm name. Luther’d taken to loving it over the summer months, loving it in a way that brought tears to his eyes. He’d brought Desmond into the world and Desmond would do fine things someday.

  If Luther could get back to him. To her. To them.

  If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life. He was building a life, working for a white man, yes, but working for his wife, for his children, for his dream that their life would be better because he’d been part of it. That, Luther finally understood, was what he’d failed to remember in Tulsa and what his father had never known at all. Men were supposed to do for those they loved. Simple as that. Clean and pure as that.

  Luther had gotten so sucked up, so turned around by the simple need to move—anywhere, anytime, anyhow—that he’d forgotten that the motion had to be put in service of a purpose.

  Now he knew. Now he knew.

  And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Even if he took care of McKenna (one hell of an if), he still couldn’t move toward his family because Smoke was waiting. And he couldn’t convince Lila to move toward him (he’d tried several times since Christmas) because she felt Greenwood was home and also suspected—quite understandably—that if she did pick up and move, Smoke would send someone to follow.

  Going to come out of my skin, Luther thought for the fiftieth time that day, right fucking out.