“Not that I’ve noticed,” Danny said.
“He sent you out on a detail,” his father said. “Did he not?”
“He offered me the detail and I accepted.”
“To a boat filled with plague-ridden soldiers.”
“I wouldn’t call it the plague.”
“What would you call it, boy?”
“Bad cases of pneumonia, maybe. ‘Plague’ just seems a bit dramatic, sir.”
His father sighed. “I don’t know what gets into your head.”
“Steve should have done it alone?”
“If need be.”
“His life’s worth less than mine then.”
“He’s a Coyle, not a Coughlin. I don’t make excuses for protecting my own.”
“Somebody had to do it, Dad.”
“Not a Coughlin,” his father said. “Not you. You weren’t raised to volunteer for suicide missions.”
“‘To protect and serve,’” Danny said.
A soft, barely audible breath. “Supper tomorrow. Four o’clock sharp. Or is that too healthy for you?”
Danny smiled. “I can manage,” he said, but his father had already hung up.
So the next afternoon found him walking up K Street as the sun softened against the brown and red brick and the open windows loosed the smell of boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and boiled ham on the bone. His brother Joe, playing in the street with some other kids, saw him and his face lit up and he came running up the sidewalk.
Joe was dressed in his Sunday best — a chocolate brown knickerbocker suit with button-bottom pants cinched at the knees, white shirt and blue tie, a golf cap set askew on his head that matched the suit. Danny had been there when his mother had bought it, Joe fidgeting the whole time, and his mother and Nora telling him how manly he looked in it, how handsome, a suit like this, of genuine Oregon cassimere, how his father would have dreamed of owning such a suit at his age, and all the while Joe looking at Danny as if he could somehow help him escape.
Danny caught Joe as he leapt off the ground and hugged him, pressing his smooth cheek to Danny’s, his arms digging into his neck, and it surprised Danny that he often forgot how much his baby brother loved him.
Joe was eleven and small for his age, though Danny knew he made up for it by being one of the toughest little kids in a neighborhood of tough little kids. He hooked his legs around Danny’s hips, leaned back, and smiled. “Heard you stopped boxing.”
“That’s the rumor.”
Joe reached out and touched the collar of his uniform. “How come?”
“Thought I’d train you,” Danny said. “First trick is to teach you how to dance.”
“Nobody dances.”
“Sure they do. All the great boxers took dance lessons.”
He took a few steps down the sidewalk with his brother and then whirled, and Joe slapped his shoulders and said, “Stop, stop.”
Danny spun again. “Am I embarrassing you?”
“Stop.” He laughed and slapped his shoulders again.
“In front of all your friends?”
Joe grabbed his ears and tugged. “Cut it out.”
The kids in the street were looking at Danny as if they couldn’t decide whether they should be afraid, and Danny said, “Anyone else want in?”
He lifted Joe off his body, tickling him the whole way down to the pavement, and then Nora opened the door at the top of the stoop and he wanted to run.
“Joey,” she said, “your ma wants you in now. Says you need to clean up.”
“I’m clean.”
Nora arched an eyebrow. “I wasn’t asking, child.”
Joe gave a beleaguered good-bye wave to his friends and trudged up the steps. Nora mussed his hair as he passed and he slapped at her hands and kept going and Nora leaned into the jamb and considered Danny. She and Avery Wallace, an old colored man, were the Coughlins’ domestic help, though Nora’s actual position was a lot more nebulous than Avery’s. She’d come to them by accident or providence five years ago on Christmas Eve, a clacking, shivering gray-fleshed escapee from the northern coast of Ireland. What she’d been escaping from had been anyone’s guess, but ever since Danny’s father had carried her into the home wrapped in his greatcoat, frostbitten and covered in grime, she’d become part of the essential fabric of the Coughlin home. Not quite family, not ever quite that, at least not for Danny, but ingrained and ingratiated nonetheless.
“What brings you by?” she asked.
“The Old Men,” he said.
“A planning and a plotting, are they, Aiden? And, sure, where do you fit in the plan?”
He leaned in a bit. “Only my mother calls me ‘Aiden’ anymore.”
She leaned back. “You’re calling me your mother now, are you?”
“Not at all, though you would make a fine one.”
“Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
“You would.”
Her eyes pulsed at that, just for a moment. Pale eyes the color of basil. “You’ll need to go to confession for that one, sure.”
“I don’t need to confess anything to anyone. You go.”
“And why would I go?”
He shrugged.
She leaned into the door, took a sniff of the afternoon breeze, her eyes as pained and unreadable as always. He wanted to squeeze her body until his hands fell off.
“What’d you say to Joe?”
She came off the door, folded her arms. “About what?”
“About my boxing.”
She gave him a small sad smile. “I said you’d never box again. Simple as that.”
“Simple, uh?”
“I can see it in your face, Danny. You’ve no love for it anymore.”
He stopped himself from nodding because she was right and he couldn’t stand that she could see through him so easily. She always had. Always would, he was pretty sure. And what a terrible thing that was. He sometimes considered the pieces of himself he’d left scattered throughout his life, the other Dannys — the child Danny and the Danny who’d once thought of becoming president and the Danny who’d wanted to go to college and the Danny who’d discovered far too late that he was in love with Nora. Crucial pieces of himself, strewn all over, and yet she held the core piece and held it absently, as if it lay at the bottom of her purse with the white specks of talc and the loose change.
“You’re coming in then,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She stepped back from the door. “Well, you best get started.”
The Old Men came out of the study for dinner — florid men, prone to winking, men who treated his mother and Nora with an Old World courtliness that Danny secretly found grating.
Taking their seats first were Claude Mesplede and Patrick Donnegan, alderman and boss of the Sixth Ward, as paired up and cagey as an old married couple playing bridge.
Sitting across from them was Silas Pendergast, district attorney of Suffolk County and the boss of Danny’s brother Connor. Silas had a gift for looking respectable and morally forthright but was, in fact, a lifelong toady to the ward machines that had paid his way through law school and kept him docile and slightly drunk every day since.
Down the end by his father was Bill Madigan, deputy chief of police and, some said, the man closest to Commissioner O’Meara.
Sitting beside Madigan — a man Danny had never met before named Charles Steedman, tall and quiet and the only man to sport a three-dollar haircut in a room full of fifty-centers. Steedman wore a white suit and white tie and two-toned spats. He told Danny’s mother, when she asked, that he was, among other things, vice president of the New England Association of Hotels and Restaurants and president of the Suffolk County Fiduciary Security Union.