Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Money was never discussed. Nor were the vagaries of public opinion and the new modern mores, both of which were deemed anti-Catholic and anti-Hibernian as a matter of course. There were dozens of other items on the list, but you never knew what they were until you mentioned one and then you saw from a single look that you’d wandered out into the minefield.

What Joe missed most about Danny’s absence was that Danny couldn’t have given a shit about the list. He didn’t believe in it. He’d bring up women’s suffrage at the dinner table, talk about the latest debate over the length of a woman’s skirt, ask his father what he thought of the rise of Negro lynchings in the South, wonder aloud why it took the Catholic Church eighteen hundred years to decide Mary was a virgin.

“That’s enough, ” his mother had cried to that one, her eyes welling.

“Now look what you did,” his father said.

It was quite a feat — managing to hit two of the biggest, boldest items on the list, sex and the failings of the Church, at the same time.

“Sorry, Ma,” Danny said and winked at Joe.

Christ, Joe missed that wink.

Danny had shown up at Gate of Heaven two days after the wedding. Joe saw him as he exited the building with his classmates, Danny out of uniform and leaning against the wrought-iron fence. Joe kept his composure, though heat flushed from his throat to his ankles in one long wet wave. He walked through the gate with his friends and turned as casually as he could toward his brother.

“Buy you a frankfurter, brother?”

Danny had never called him “brother” before. It had always been “little brother.” It changed everything, made Joe feel a foot taller, and yet part of him immediately wished they could go back to how it had been.

“Sure.”

They walked up West Broadway to Sol’s Dining Car at the corner of C Street. Sol had just recently added the frankfurter to his menu. He’d refused to do so during the war because the meat sounded too German and he had, like most restaurants during the war, taken great pains to change the name of frankfurters to “Liberty Sausages” on his menu board. But now the Germans were beaten, and there were no hard feelings about it in South Boston, and most of the diners in the city were trying hard to catch up with this new fad that Joe & Nemo’s had helped popularize in the city, even if, at the time, it had called their patriotism into question.

Danny bought two for each of them and they sat atop the stone picnic bench out in front of the diner and ate them with bottles of root beer as cars navigated horses and horses navigated cars out on West Broadway and the air smelled of the coming summer.

“You heard,” Danny said.

Joe nodded. “You married Nora.”

“Sure did.” He bit into his frankfurter and raised his eyebrows and laughed suddenly before he chewed. “Wish you could have been there.”

“Yeah?”

“We both did.”

“Yeah.”

“But the folks would never have allowed it.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

Joe shrugged. “They’ll get over it.”

Danny shook his head. “No they won’t, brother. No they won’t.”

Joe felt like crying, but he smiled instead and swallowed some meat and took a sip of root beer. “They will. You’ll see.”

Danny placed his hand softly to the side of Joe’s face. Joe didn’t know what to do, because this had never happened. You slugged each other on the shoulder. You jabbed each other in the ribs. You didn’t do this . Danny looked down at him with soft eyes.

“You’re on your own in that house for a while, brother.”

“Can I come visit?” Joe heard his own voice crack, and he looked down at his frankfurter and was pleased to see no tears fell on it. “You and Nora?”

“Of course. But that’ll put you in the doghouse with the folks if you get caught.”

“Been in the doghouse before,” Joe said. “Plenty. Might start barking soon.”

Danny laughed at that, a bark unto itself. “You’re a great kid, Joe.”

Joe nodded and felt the heat in his face. “How come you’re leaving me, then?”

Danny tipped his chin up with his finger. “I’m not leaving you. What’d I say? You can come by anytime.”

“Sure.”

“Joe, Joe, I’m fucking serious . You’re my brother. I didn’t leave the family. The family left me. Because of Nora.”

“Dad and Con’ said you’re a Bolshevik.”

“What? To you?”

Joe shook his head. “I heard them talking one night.” He smiled. “I hear everything in there. It’s an old house. They said you went native. They said you were a wop-lover and a nigger-lover and you lost your way. They were really drunk.”

“How could you tell?”

“They started singing near the end.”

“No shit? ‘Danny Boy’?”

Joe nodded. “And ‘Kilgary Mountain’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”

“You don’t hear that one a lot.”

“Only when Dad’s really snockered.”

Danny laughed and put his arm around him and Joe rocked against it.

“You go native, Dan?”

Danny kissed his forehead. Actually kissed it. Joe wondered if he was drunk.

Danny said, “Yeah, I guess so, brother.”

“You love Italians?”

Danny shrugged. “I got nothing against ’em. You?”

“I like them. I like the North End. Just like you do.”

Danny bounced a fist lightly off his knee. “Well, good then.”

“Con’ hates ’em, though.”

“Yeah, well, Con’s got a lot of hate in him.”

Joe ate the rest of his second frankfurter. “Why?”

Danny shrugged. “Maybe because when he sees something that confuses him, he feels like he needs an answer right then. And if the answer ain’t right in front of him, he grabs onto whatever is and makes it the answer.” He shrugged again. “I honestly don’t know, though. Con’s had something eating him up since the day he was born.”

They sat in silence for a bit, Joe swinging his legs off the edge of the stone table. A street vendor coming home from a day at Haymarket Square pulled over to the curb. He climbed off his cart, breathing wearily through his nostrils, and went to the front of his horse and lifted its left leg. The horse snuffled softly and twitched at the flies on its tail and the man shushed it as he pulled a pebble from its hoof and tossed it out onto West Broadway. He lowered the leg and caressed the horse’s ear and whispered into it. The horse snuffled some more as the man climbed back up onto his cart, its eyes dark and sleepy. The vendor whistled softly and the horse clopped back into the street. When it dropped a clump of shit from between its flanks and cocked its head proudly at the creation, Joe felt a smile spread across his face he couldn’t explain.

Danny, watching, too, said, “Damn. Size of a hat .”

Joe said, “Size of a breadbasket .”

“I believe you’re right,” Danny said, and they both laughed.

They sat as the light turned rusty behind the tenements along the Fort Point Channel and the air smelled of the tide and the clogging stench of the American Sugar Refining Company and the gases of the Boston Beer Company. Men crossed back over the Broadway Bridge in clusters and other groups wandered up from the Gillette Company and Boston Ice and the Cotton Waste Factory and most entered the saloons. Soon the boys who ran numbers for the neighborhood were dashing in and out of those same saloons, and from across the channel another whistle blew to signal the end of another working day. Joe wished he could stay here forever, even in his school clothes, with his brother, on a stone bench along West Broadway as the day faded around them.