Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

A week later, another round of negotiations with Harry Frazee. Frazee’s office smelled like whorehouse perfume and old money. The perfume came from Kat Lawson, an actress starring in one of the half dozen shows Frazee had running in Boston right now. This one was called Laddy, Be Happy and was, like all Harry Frazee productions, a light romantic farce that played to SRO crowds night after night. Ruth had actually seen this one, allowing Helen to drag him to it shortly after the new year began, even though Frazee, true to the rumors of his Jew heritage, had failed to comp the tickets. Ruth had to endure the disconcerting experience of holding his wife’s hand in the fifth row while he watched another woman he’d slept with (three times actually) prance back and forth across the stage in the role of an innocent cleaning woman who dreamed of making it as a chorus girl. The obstacle to those dreams was her no-good Irish blatherskite of a husband, Seamus, the “laddy” of the title. At the end of the play, the cleaning woman contents herself by becoming a chorus girl on the New England stage and her “laddy” makes his peace with her pipe dreams, as long as they remain on a local level, and even lands a job of his own. Helen stood and applauded after the final number, a full-cast reprise of “Shine My Star, I’ll Shine Your Floors,” and Ruth applauded, too, though he was pretty sure Kat Lawson had given him the crabs last year. It seemed wrong that a woman as pure as Helen should be cheering one as corrupt as Kat, and truth be told, he was still plenty sore about not getting the tickets comped.

Kat Lawson sat on a leather couch under a big painting of hunting dogs. She had a magazine on her lap and her compact out as she reapplied her lipstick. Harry Frazee thought he was putting one over on his wife, thought Kat was a possession to be envied by Ruth and the other Sox (most of whom had slept with her at least once). Harry Frazee was an idiot, and Ruth didn’t need any more confirmation than the man leaving his mistress in the room during a contract negotiation.

Ruth and Johnny Igoe sat before Frazee’s desk and waited for him to shoo Kat from the room, but Frazee made it clear she was here to stay when he said, “Can I get you anything, dear, before these gentlemen and I discuss business?”

“Nope.” Kat smacked her lips together and snapped the compact closed.

Frazee nodded and sat behind his desk. He looked across at Ruth and Johnny Igoe and shot his cuffs, ready to get down to business. “So, I understand—”

“Oh, hon’?” Kat said. “Could you get me a lemonade? Thanks, you’re a pip.”

A lemonade. It was early February and the coldest day of the coldest week of the winter thus far. So cold Ruth had heard that kids were skating on frozen molasses in the North End. And she wanted lemonade.

Harry Frazee kept his face stone-still as he pushed the intercom button and said, “Doris, send Chappy out for a lemonade, would you?”

Kat waited until he’d released the intercom button and sat back.

“Oh, and an egg-and-onion.”

Harry Frazee leaned forward again. “Doris? Tell Chappy to pick up an egg-and-onion sandwich, too, please.” He looked over at Kat, but she’d gone back to her magazine. He waited another few seconds. He released the intercom button.

“So,” he said.

“So,” Johnny Igoe said.

Frazee spread his hands, waiting, one eyebrow arched into a question mark.

“Have you given any more thought to our offer?” Johnny said.

Frazee lifted Ruth’s contract off his desk and held it up. “This is something you’re both familiar with, I take it. Mr. Ruth, you are signed for seven thousand dollars this season. That’s it. A bond was forged. I expect you to hold up your end.”

Johnny Igoe said, “Given Gidge’s previous season, his pitching in the Series, and, may I mention, the explosion in cost of living since the war ended, we think it only fair to reconsider this arrangement. In other words, seven thousand’s a bit light.”

Frazee sighed and lay the contract back down. “I gave you a bonus at the end of the season, Mr. Ruth. I did not have to do that and yet I did. And it’s still not enough?”

Johnny Igoe began ticking points off on his fingers. “You sold Lewis and Shore to the Yanks. You unloaded Dutch Leonard on Cleveland. You let Whiteman go.”

Babe sat up straight. “Whiteman’s gone?”

Johnny nodded. “You’re flush, Mr. Frazee. Your shows are all hits, you—”

“And because of that, I’m to renegotiate a signed contract made in good faith by men ? What kind of principle is that? What kind of ethic is that, Mr. Igoe? In case you haven’t been following the news, I am locked in a battle with Commissioner Johnson. I am fighting to have our World Series medals rightfully given to us. Those medals are being withheld because your boy there had to strike before game five.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Babe said. “I didn’t even know what was going on.”

Johnny quieted him with a hand to his knee.

Kat piped up from the couch. “Honey, could you ask Chappy to also get me a—”

“Hush,” Frazee said to her. “We’re talking business, bubblehead.” He turned back to Ruth as Kat lit a cigarette and blew the smoke hard through her thick lips. “You’ve got a contract for seven thousand. That makes you one of the highest-paid players in the game. And you want what now?” Frazee held his exasperated hands up to the window, the city beyond it, the bustle of Tremont Street and the Theater District.

“What I’m worth,” Babe said, refusing to back down to this slave driver, this supposed Big Noise, this theater man. Last Thursday in Seattle, thirty-five thousand ship workers had walked out on strike. Just as the city was trying to get its noggin around that, another twenty-five thousand workers walked off the job in a sympathy strike. Seattle stopped dead — no streetcars, no icemen or milkmen, no one to come pick up the garbage, no one cleaning the office buildings or running the elevators.

Babe suspected this was just for starters. This morning the papers had reported that the judge conducting the inquest into the collapse of the USIA molasses tank concluded that the cause of the explosion was not anarchists but company negligence and the poor inspection protocols set up by the city. USIA, in a rush to convert its molasses distillation from industrial purposes to commercial ones, had overfilled the poorly constructed tank, never guessing unseasonably high temperatures in the middle of January would cause the molasses to swell. USIA officials, of course, angrily denounced the preliminary report, charging that the terrorists responsible were still at large and thus the cleanup costs were the responsibility of the city and its taxpayers. Ooooh, it made Babe hot under the collar. These bosses, these slave drivers. Maybe those guys in the bar fight a few months back at the Castle Square Hotel had been right — the workers of the world were tired of saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” As Ruth stared across the desk at Harry Frazee, he felt swept up in a rich wave of brotherhood for his fellow workers everywhere, his fellow citizen-victims. It was time for Big Money to be held accountable.

“I want you to pay me what I’m worth,” he repeated.

“And what’s that, exactly?”

It was Babe’s turn to put a hand on Johnny’s leg. “Fifteen for one or thirty for three.”

Frazee laughed. “You want fifteen thousand dollars for one year?”

“Or thirty for three years.” Babe nodded.

“How about I trade you instead?”

That shook something in Babe. A trade? Jesus Christ. Everyone knew how chummy Frazee had become with Colonel Ruppert and Colonel Huston, the owners of the Yankees, but the Yankees were cellar dwellers, a team that had never been near contention in the Series era. And if not the Yanks, then who? Cleveland? Baltimore again? Philadelphia? Babe didn’t want to move. He’d just rented an apartment in Governor’s Square. He had a good thing going — Helen in Sudbury, him downtown. He owned this burg; when he walked its streets, people called his name, children gave chase, women batted their eyes. New York on the other hand — he’d vanish in that sea. But when he thought of his brother workers again, of Seattle, of the poor dead floating in the molasses, he knew the issue was larger than his own fear.