The Given Day (Coughlin 1)
Page 69Luther nodded. "They seem a nice family."
She nodded, though Luther couldn't tell if it was a nod of agreement or if she'd just decided something about the apple she was considering. "Young Joe's certainly grown a fondness for you."
"Boy loves his baseball."
She smiled. " 'Love' may not be a strong enough word."
Once Joe had discovered Luther had played some baseball in his time, the after- school hours became games of catch and pitching and fielding instruction in the Coughlins' small backyard. Dusk coincided with the end of Luther's shift, so the final three hours of his workday were spent mostly at play, a situation Captain Coughlin had immediately approved. "If it keeps the boy out of his mother's hair, I'd let you field a team should you ask, Mr. Laurence."
Joe wasn't a natural athlete, but he had heart and he listened well for a child his age. Luther showed him how to drop his knee when he fielded grounders and how to follow through on both his throws and the swings of his bat. He taught him to spread and then plant his feet beneath a pop-up and to never catch it below his head. He tried to teach him how to pitch, but the boy didn't have the arm for it, nor the patience. He just wanted to hit and hit big. So Luther found one more thing to blame Babe Ruth for--turning the game into a smash-ball affair, a circus spectacle, making every white kid in Boston think it was about ooohs and aaahs and the cheap soaring of an ill-timed dinger.
Except for the morning hour with Mrs. Coughlin and the late- day hours with Joe, Luther spent most of his workday with Nora O'Shea.
"And how do you like it so far?"
"Doesn't seem much for me to do."
"Would you like some of my work, then?"
"Truth? Yeah. I drive her to and from church. I bring her breakfast. I wax the car. I shine the captain's and Mr. Connor's shoes and brush their suits. Sometimes I polish the captain's medals for dress occasions. Sundays, I serve the captain and his friends drinks in the study. Rest of the time, I dust what don't need to be dusted, tidy what's already tidy, and sweep a bunch of clean floors. Cut some wood, shovel some coal, stoke a small furnace. I mean, what's that all take? Two hours? Rest of the day I spend trying to look busy till either you or Mr. Joe get home. I don't even know why they hired me."
She put a hand lightly on his arm. "All the best families have one." "A colored?"
"Why what? Why they haven't updated to electric?"
"Why they can't keep up appearances." They climbed East Broadway toward City Point. "The Irish up here remind me of the English back home, they do. Lace curtains on the windows and trousers tucked into their boots, sure, as if they know from work."
"Up here maybe," Luther said. "Rest of this neighborhood . . ." "What?"
He shrugged.
"No, what?" She tugged his arm.
He looked down at her hand. "That thing you doing now? You don't ever do that in the rest of this neighborhood. Please."
"Ah."
"Like to get us both killed. Ain't any lace curtains part of that, I'll tell you what."
Every night he wrote to Lila, and every few days the letters came back unopened.
It was near to breaking him--her silence, being in a strange city, his self as unsettled and nameless as it had ever been--when Yvette brought the mail to the table one morning and placed two more returned letters softly by his elbow.
"Your wife?" She took a seat.
"You must have done something fierce to her."
He said, "I did, ma'am. I did."
"Wasn't another woman, was it?"
"No."
"Then I forgive you." She patted his hand, and Luther felt the warmth of it find his blood.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't worry. She still cares for you."
He shook his head, the loss of her draining him to his root. "She doesn't, ma'am."
Yvette shook her head slowly at him, a smile spread thin across her lips. "Men are fine for many things, Luther, but none of you know the first thing about a woman's heart."
"That's just it," Luther said, "she don't want me to know her heart anymore."
"Doesn't."
"She doesn't want you to know her heart."
"Right." Luther wanted a cloak to hide in, duck in. Cover me, cover me.
"I beg to differ with you, son." Mrs. Giddreaux held up one of his letters so he could see the back of the envelope. "What's that along the sides of the flap?"
Luther looked; he couldn't see anything.
Mrs. Giddreaux traced her finger down the flap. "See that cloud there along the edges? The way the paper is softer underneath it?" Luther noticed it now. "Yes."
"That's from steam, son. Steam."
Luther reached for the envelope and stared at it.
"She's opening your letters, Luther, and then sending them back like she hasn't. I don't know if I'd call that love," she squeezed his arm, "but I wouldn't call it indifference." chapter fifteen Autumn yielded to winter in a series of wet gales that carved their way across the eastern seaboard, and Danny's list of names grew larger. What the list told him, or anyone for that matter, about the likelihood of a May Day uprising was a mystery. Mostly he just had the names of ass-fucked workingmen looking to unionize and deluded romantics who actually thought the world welcomed change.
Danny began to suspect, though, that between the Roxbury Letts and the BSC, he'd become addicted to the strangest of things--meetings. The Letts and their talk and their drinking led to nothing he could see but more talk and more drinking. And yet, on the nights there were no meetings, no saloon afterward, he felt at loose ends. He'd sit in the dark of his cover apartment, drinking and rubbing the button between his thumb and index finger with such agitation, it seemed a miracle in retrospect that it never cracked. So he'd find himself at another meeting of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall in Roxbury. And another after that.
It wasn't much different from a meeting of the Letts. Rhetoric, rage, helplessness. Danny couldn't help marvel at the irony--these men who'd served as strikebreakers finding themselves backed into the same corners as the men they'd manhandled or beaten outside factories and mills.
Into another bar one night, and more talk about workers' rights, but this time with the BSC--brother policemen, patrolmen, foot stampers and beat walkers and nightstick maestros filled with the stunted rage of the perpetually pushed-aside. Still no negotiations, still no decent talk of decent hours and a decent wage, still no raise. And word was that across the border in Montreal, just 350 miles north, the city had broken off negotiations with police and firemen and a strike was unavoidable.