The Given Day

Chapter twelve

The Babe spent his morning giving out candy and baseballs at the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children in the South End. One kid, covered ankles-to-neck in plaster, asked him to sign the cast, so Babe signed both arms and both legs and then took a loud breath and scrawled his name across the torso from the kid’s right hip to his left shoulder as the other kids laughed and so did the nurses and even some of the Sisters of Charity. The kid in the cast told Ruth his name was Wilbur Connelly. He’d been working at the Shefferton Wool Mill in Dedham when some chemicals got spilled on the work floor and the vapors met the sparks from a shearing machine and set him on fire. The Babe assured Wilbur he’d be fine. Grow up someday and hit a home run in the World Series. And wouldn’t his old bosses at Shefferton go purple with jealousy that day? Wilbur Connelly, getting sleepy, barely managed a smile but the other kids laughed and brought more things for Babe to sign — a picture torn from the sports pages of The Standard, a small pair of crutches, a yellowed nightshirt.

When he left with his agent, Johnny Igoe, Johnny suggested they pop over to the St. Vincent Orphan Asylum just a few blocks away. Couldn’t hurt, Johnny said, add to the positive press and maybe give Babe an edge in his latest round of bargaining with Harry Frazee. Babe felt weary, though — weary of bargaining, weary of cameras snapping in his face, weary of orphans. He loved kids and orphans in particular, but boy oh boy those kiddos this morning, all hobbled and broken and burned, really took something out of him. The ones with the missing fingers wouldn’t grow them back and the ones with sores on their faces wouldn’t look in a mirror someday and find the scars vanished and the ones in wheelchairs wouldn’t wake up one morning and walk. And yet, at some point, they’d be sent out into the world to make their way, and it had overwhelmed Babe this morning, just sucked the juice out of him.

So he ditched Johnny by telling him he needed to go buy a gift for Helen because the little woman was angry with him again. This was partly true — Helen was in a snit, but he wasn’t shopping for a gift, not in any store leastways. He walked toward the Castle Square Hotel instead. The raw November breeze spit drops of sharp, random rain, but he was warm in his long ermine coat, and he kept his head tilted down to keep the drops from his eyes and enjoyed the quiet and anonymity that greeted him on deserted streets. At the hotel, he passed through the lobby and found the bar almost as empty as the streets, and he took the first seat inside the door and shrugged off his coat and laid it over the stool beside him. The bartender stood down at the far end of the bar, talking to the other two men in the place, so Ruth lit a cigar and looked around at the dark walnut beams and inhaled the smell of leather and wondered how in the hell this country was going to get along with any dignity now that Prohibition looked a dead certainty. The No-Funs and the Shouldn’t-Dos were winning the war, and even if they called themselves Progressives, Ruth couldn’t see much progress in denying a man a drink or shuttering a place of warm wood and leather. Hell, you worked an eighty-hour week for shit pay it seemed the least to ask that the world give you a mug of suds and a shot of rye. Not that Ruth had worked an eighty-hour week in his life, but the principle still applied.

The bartender, a wide man with a thick mustache curled up so violently at the edges you could hang hats on it, came walking down the bar. “What can I get you?”

Still feeling a glow of kinship with the workingman, Ruth ordered two beers and a shot, make it a double, and the bartender placed the drafts before him and then poured a healthy glass of whiskey.

Ruth drank some beer. “I’m looking for a man named Dominick.”

“That’d be me, sir.”

Ruth said, “I understand you own a strong truck, do some hauling.”

“That I do.”

Down the other end, one of the men rapped the edge of a coin off the bar top.

“Just a second,” the bartender said. “Them’s some thirsty gents, sir.”

He walked back down the bar and listened to the two men for a moment, nodding his large head, and then he went to the taps and after that to the bottles, and Ruth felt the two men watching him, so he watched them back.

The one on the left was strapping tall, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and so glamorous (it was the first word that popped into Babe’s head) that Babe wondered if he’d seen him in the flickers or in the pages of the papers devoted to returning war heroes. Even from down the other end of a long bar, his simplest gestures — raising a glass to his lips, tapping an unlit cigarette on the wood — achieved a grace that Ruth associated with men of epic deeds.

The man beside him was much smaller and less distinct. He was milky and dour and the bangs of his mousy brown hair kept falling over his forehead; he brushed them back with an impatience Ruth judged feminine. He had small eyes and small hands and an air of perpetual grievance.

The glamorous one raised his glass. “A great fan of your athleticism, Mr. Ruth.”

Ruth raised his glass and nodded his thanks. The mousy one didn’t join in.

The strapping man clapped his friend on the back and said, “Drink up, Gene, drink up,” and his voice was the baritone of a great stage actor hitting the back row.

Dominick placed fresh drinks in front of them and they returned to their conversation, and Dominick came back to Ruth and topped off his whiskey, then leaned back against the cash register. “So you need something hauled, do you, sir?”

Babe sipped his whiskey. “I do.”

“And what would that be, Mr. Ruth?”

Babe took another sip. “A piano.”

Dominick crossed his arms. “A piano. Well, that’s not too—”

“From the bottom of a lake.”

Dominick didn’t say anything for a minute. He pursed his lips. He stared past Ruth and seemed to listen for the echo of an unfamiliar sound.

“You’ve got a piano in a lake,” he said.

Ruth nodded. “Actually it’s more like a pond.”

“A pond.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, which is it, Mr. Ruth?”

“It’s a pond,” Babe said eventually.

Dominick nodded in a way that suggested past experience with such a problem and Babe felt a thump of hope in his chest. “How does a piano manage to get itself submerged in a pond?”

Ruth fingered his whiskey. “You see, there was this party. For kids. Orphans. My wife and I held it last winter. You see, we were having work done on our house, so we’d rented a cottage on a lake not too far away.”

“On a pond you mean, sir.”

“On a pond, yeah.”

Dominick poured himself a small drink and threw it back.

“So, anyway,” Babe said, “everyone was having a fine old time, and we’d bought all the little tykes skates and they were stumbling around the pond — it was frozen.”

“I gathered, sir, yes.”

“And um, I, well, I sure do like playing that piano. And Helen sure does as well.”

“Helen’s your wife, sir?”

“She is.”

“Noted,” Dominick said. “Proceed, sir.”

“So myself and some of the fellows decided to take the piano from the front room and push it down the slope onto the ice.”

“A fine idea at the time, I’m sure, sir.”

“And that’s what we did.”

Babe leaned back in his chair and relit his cigar. He puffed until he got it going and took a sip of his whiskey. Dominick placed another beer in front of him and Babe nodded his thanks. Neither of them said anything for a minute and they could hear the two men at the other end talking about alienated labor and capitalist oligarchies and it could have been in Egyptian for all that Babe understood it.

“Now here’s the part I don’t understand,” Dominick said.

Babe resisted the urge to cringe on his barstool. “Go ahead.”

“You’ve got it out on the ice. And does it crack through the ice, taking all those tads on skates with it?”

“No.”

“No,” Dominick said softly. “I believe I would have read about that. So, my question then, sir — How did it manage to go through the ice?”

“The ice melted,” Ruth said quickly.

“When?”

Babe took a breath. “It was March, I believe.”

“But the party …?”

“Was in January.”

“So the piano sat on the ice for two months before it sank.”

“I kept meaning to get to it,” Babe said.

“I’m sure you did, sir.” Dominick smoothed his mustache. “The owner—”

“Oh, he was mad,” the Babe said. “Hopping. I paid for it, though.”

Dominick drummed his thick fingers on the bar. “So if it’s paid for, sir …”

Babe wanted to bolt the bar. This was the part he hadn’t quite worked out in his head yet. He’d installed a new piano in both the rental cottage and the restored house on Dutton Road, but every time Helen looked at that new piano she’d look at Ruth in a way that made him feel as attractive as a hog in its own filth. Since that new piano had taken residence in the house, neither of them had played it once.

“I thought,” Ruth said, “if I could pull that piano from the lake, I—”

“The pond, sir.”

“The pond. If I could pull that piano back up and, you know, restore it, it would make a swell anniversary gift for my wife.”

Dominick nodded. “And what anniversary would that be?”

“Our fifth.”

“Isn’t wood usually the appropriate gift?”

Babe said nothing for a moment, thinking that one through.

“Well, it’s made of wood.”

“Point taken, sir.”

Babe said, “And we’ve got some time. It’s not for six months, my anniversary.”

Dominick poured them each another drink and raised his in toast. “To your unbridled optimism, Mr. Ruth. It’s what makes this country all that it is today.”

They drank.

“Have you ever seen what water does to wood? To ivory keys and wire and all those little delicate parts in a piano?”

Babe nodded. “I know it won’t be easy.”

“Easy, sir? I’m not sure it’ll be possible.” He leaned into the bar. “I have a cousin. He does some dredging. He’s worked the seas most of his life. What if we were to at least establish the location of the piano, how deep it actually is in the lake?”

“The pond.”

“The pond, sir. If we knew that, well, then we’d be somewhere, Mr. Ruth.”

Ruth thought about it and nodded. “How much will this cost me?”

“Couldn’t say without talking to my cousin, but it could be a bit more than a new piano. Could be less.” He shrugged and showed Ruth his palms. “Although, I make no guarantees as to the final fee.”

“Of course.”

Dominick took a piece of paper and wrote down a telephone number and handed it to Ruth. “That’s the number of the bar. I work seven days from noon to ten. Call me Thursday, sir, and I’ll have some details for you.”

“Thanks.” Ruth pocketed the number as Dominick went back down the bar.

He drank some more and smoked his cigar as a few more men came in and joined the two down at the other end of the bar and more rounds were purchased and toasts given to the tall, glamorous one, who was apparently giving some kind of speech soon at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church. Seemed like the tall man was big noise of a sort but Ruth still couldn’t place him. Didn’t matter — he felt warm here, cocooned. He loved a bar when the lights were dim and the wood was dark and the seats were covered in soft leather. The kids from this morning receded until they felt several weeks in his past, and if it was cold outside, you could only imagine it because you sure couldn’t feel it.

Midautumn through winter was hard on him. He never knew what to do, couldn’t gauge what was expected of him when there were no balls to hit, no fellow players to jaw with. Every morning he was confronted with decisions — how to please Helen, what to eat, where to go, how to fill his time, what to wear. Come spring, he’d have a suitcase packed with his traveling clothes and most times he’d just have to step in front of his locker to know what he was going to wear; his uniform would be hanging there, fresh from the team laundry. His day would be mapped out for him — either a game or a practice or Bumpy Jordan, the Sox travel secretary, would point him to the line of cabs that would take him to the train that would carry him to whichever city they were going next. He wouldn’t have to think about meals because they’d all been arranged. Where he was going to sleep never crossed his mind — his name was already written in a hotel ledger, a bellman standing by to transport his bags. And at night, the boys were waiting in the bar and the spring leaked without complaint into summer and the summer unfurled in bright yellows and etched greens and the air smelled so good it could make you cry.

Ruth didn’t know how it was with other men and their happiness, but he knew where his lay — in having the days mapped out for him, just as Brother Matthias used to do for him and all the other boys at St. Mary’s. Otherwise, facing the humdrum unknown of a normal domestic life, Ruth felt jumpy and mildly afraid.

Not here, though, he thought, as the men in the bar began to spread out around him and a pair of large hands clapped his shoulders. He turned his head to see the big fellow who’d been down the end of the bar smiling at him.

“Buy you a drink, Mr. Ruth?”

The man came around to his side and Ruth again caught a whiff of the heroic from him, a sense of scale that couldn’t be contained by anything as small as a room.

“Sure,” Ruth said. “You’re a Red Sox fan, then?”

The man shook his head as he held up three fingers to Dominick, and his smaller friend joined him at the bar, pulling out a stool and dropping into it with the heaviness of a man twice his size.

“Not particularly. I like sport but I’m not beholden to the idea of team allegiance.”

Ruth said, “Then who do you root for when you’re at a game?”

“Root?” the man said as their drinks arrived.

“Cheer for?” Ruth said.

The man flashed a brilliant smile. “Why, individual achievement, Mr. Ruth. The purity of a single play, a single display of adroit athleticism and coordination. The team is wonderful as a concept, I grant you. It suggests the brotherhood of man and unionism of a single goal. But if you look behind the veil, you see how it’s been stolen by corporate interests to sell an ideal that is the antithesis of everything this country claims to represent.”

Ruth had lost him halfway through his spiel, but he raised his whiskey and gave what he hoped passed for a knowing nod and then he took a drink.

The mousy guy leaned into the bar and looked past his friend at Ruth and mimicked Ruth’s nod. He tipped back his own drink. “He doesn’t have a fucking clue what you’re on about, Jack.”

Jack placed his drink on the bar. “I apologize for Gene, Mr. Ruth. He lost his manners in the Village.”

“What village?” Ruth said.

Gene snickered.

Jack gave Ruth a gentle smile. “Greenwich Village, Mr. Ruth.”

“It’s in New York,” Gene said.

“I know where it is, bub,” Ruth said, and he knew that as big as Jack was, he’d be no match for Babe’s strength if he decided to push him aside and tear that mousy hair off his friend’s head.

“Oh,” Gene said, “the Emperor Jones is angry.”

“What’d you say?”

“Gentlemen,” Jack said. “Let’s remember we’re all brothers. Our struggle is a shared one. Mr. Ruth, Babe,” Jack said, “I’m something of a traveler. You name the countries of this world, there’s probably a sticker on my suitcase for every one.”

“You some kind of salesman?” Babe took a pickled egg from the jar and popped it in his mouth.

Jack’s eyes brightened. “You could say that.”

Gene said, “You honestly have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?”

“Sure I do, Pops.” Babe wiped his hands off each other. “He’s Jack. You’re Jill.”

“Gene,” the mousy one said. “Gene O’Neill, in point of fact. And this is Jack Reed you’re talking to.”

Babe kept his eyes on the mouse. “I’m sticking with ‘Jill.’”

Jack laughed and clapped them both on their backs. “As I was saying, Babe, I’ve been all over. I’ve seen athletic contests in Greece, in Finland, in Italy and France. I once saw a polo match in Russia where no small number of the participants were trampled by their own horses. There’s nothing purer or more inspirational, truly, than to see men involved in contest. But like most things that are pure, it gets sullied by big money and big business and put to the service of more nefarious purpose.”

Babe smiled. He liked the way Reed talked, even if he couldn’t understand what he meant.

Another man, a thin man with a profile that was hungry and sharp, joined them and said, “This is the slugger?”

“Indeed,” Jack said. “Babe Ruth himself.”

“Jim Larkin,” the man said, shaking Babe’s hand. “I apologize, but I don’t follow your game.”

“No apologies necessary, Jim.” Babe gave him a firm shake.

“What my compatriot here is saying,” Jim said, “is that the future opiate of the masses is not religion, Mr. Ruth, it’s entertainment.”

“That so?” Ruth wondered if Stuffy McInnis was home right now, if he’d answer the phone, maybe meet Babe in the city somewhere so they could get a steak and talk baseball and women.

“Do you know why baseball leagues are sprouting up all over the country? At every mill and every shipyard? Why just about every company has a workers’ team?”

Ruth said, “Sure. It’s fun.”

“Well, it is,” Jack said. “I’ll grant you. But to put a finer point on it, companies like fielding baseball teams because it promotes company unity.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Babe said, and Gene snorted again.

Larkin leaned in close again and Babe wanted to lean back from his gin-breath. “And it promotes ‘Americanization,’ for lack of a better word, among the immigrant workers.”

“But most of all,” Jack said, “if you’re working seventy-five hours a week and playing baseball another fifteen or twenty, guess what you’re probably too tired to do?”

Babe shrugged.

“Strike, Mr. Ruth,” Larkin said. “You’re too tired to strike or even think about your rights as a worker.”

Babe rubbed his chin so they’d believe he was thinking about the idea. Truth was, though, he was just hoping they’d go away.

“To the worker!” Jack shouted, raising his glass.

The other men — and Ruth noticed there were nine or ten of them now — raised their glasses and shouted back, “To the worker!”

Everyone took a strong slug of liquor, including Ruth.

“To the revolution!” Larkin shouted.

Dominick said, “Now now, gents,” but he was lost in the clamor as the men rose on their seats.

“Revolution!”

“To the new proletariat!”

More shouts and cheers and Dominick gave up trying to impose order and started rushing around to refill drinks.

Boisterous toasts were made to comrades in Russia and Germany and Greece, to Debs, Haywood, Joe Hill, to the people, the great united working peoples of the world!

As they whipped themselves into a preening frenzy, Babe reached for his coat, but Larkin blocked the chair as he hoisted his drink and shouted another toast. Ruth looked at their faces, sheened with sweat and purpose and maybe something beyond purpose, something he couldn’t quite name. Larkin turned his hip to the right and Babe saw an opening, could see the edges of his coat and he started reaching for it again as Jack shouted, “Down with capitalism! Down with the oligarchies!” and Babe got his hand into the fur, but Larkin inadvertently bumped his arm and Babe sighed and started to try again.

Then the six guys walked in off the street. They were dressed in suits, and maybe on any other given day, they’d have seemed respectable types. But today, they reeked of alcohol and anger. Babe knew with one look at their eyes that the shit was going to hit the fan so fast the only hope would be to duck.

Connor Coughlin was in no fucking mood for subversives today. In truth he was in no fucking mood in general, but particularly not for subversives. They’d just had their heads handed to them in court. A nine-month investigation, over two hundred depositions, a six-week trial, all so they could deport an avowed Galleanist named Vittorio Scalone, who’d spoken to anyone within earshot of blowing up the State House during a meeting of the Senate.

The judge, however, didn’t think that was enough to deport a man. He’d stared down from his bench at District Attorney Silas Pendergast, Assistant District Attorney Connor Coughlin, Assistant District Attorney Peter Wald, and the six ADAs and four police detectives in the rows behind them and said, “While the issue of whether the state has the right to pursue deportation measures at a county level is, in some minds, debatable, that is not the issue before this court.” He’d removed his glasses and stared coldly at Connor’s boss. “As much as District Attorney Pendergast may have tried to make it so. No, the issue is whether the defendant committed any treasonous act whatsoever. And I see no evidence that he did any more than make idle threats while under the influence of alcohol.” He’d turned and faced Scalone. “Which, under the Espionage Act, is still a serious crime, young man. For which I sentence you to two years at the Charlestown Penitentiary, six months time served.”

A year and a half. For treason. On the courthouse steps, Silas Pendergast had given all his young ADAs a look of such withering disappointment that Connor knew they’d all be sent back to petty crimes and would not see the likes of this type of case for eons. They’d wandered the city, deflated, popping into bar after bar until they’d stumbled into the Castle Square Hotel and walked in on this. This … shit.

All the talking stopped when they were noticed. They were met with nervous, patronizing smiles, and Connor and Pete Wald went up to the bar and ordered a bottle and five glasses. The bartender spread the bottle and the glasses on the bar, and still no one spoke. Connor loved it — the fat silence that ballooned in the air before a fight. It was a unique silence, a silence with a ticking heartbeat. Their brother ADAs joined them at the bar rail and filled their glasses. A chair scraped. Pete raised his glass and looked around at the faces in the bar and said, “To the Attorney General of these United States.”

“Hear! Hear!” Connor shouted, and they threw back their drinks and refilled them.

“To deportation of undesirables!” Connor said, and the other men joined in chorus.

“To the death of Vlad Lenin!” Harry Block shouted.

They joined him as the other crowd of men started booing and hooting.

A tall guy with dark hair and picture-show looks was suddenly standing beside Connor.

“Hi,” he said.

“Fuck off,” Connor said and threw back his drink as the other ADAs laughed.

“Let’s all be reasonable here,” the man said. “Let’s talk this out. Hey? You might be surprised how many times our views intersect.”

Connor kept his eyes on the bar top. “Uh-huh.”

“We all want the same thing,” the pretty boy said, and patted Connor’s shoulder.

Connor waited for the man to remove his hand.

He poured himself another drink and turned to face the man. He thought of the judge. Of the treasonous Vittorio Scalone walking out of court with a smirk in his eyes. He thought of trying to explain his frustration and feelings of injustice to Nora, and how that could go either way. She might be sympathetic. She might be distant, indistinct. You could never predict. She seemed to love him sometimes, but other times she looked at him as if he were Joe, worthy only of a pat on the head and a dry kiss good night on the cheek. He could see her eyes now — unreadable. Unreachable. Never quite true. Never quite seeing him, really seeing him. Or anyone for that matter. Something always held in reserve. Except, of course, for when she turned those eyes on …

Danny.

The realization came suddenly, but at the same time it had lived in him for so long, he couldn’t believe he’d just faced it. His stomach shriveled and the backs of his eyeballs felt as if a razor scraped across them.

He turned with a smile to face the tall pretty boy and emptied his shot glass into his fine black hair and then butted him in the face.

As soon as the mick with the pale hair and matching freckles poured his drink over Jack’s head and drove his forehead into his face, Babe tried grabbing his coat off the chair and making a run for it. He knew as well as anyone, though, that the first rule of a bar fight was to hit the biggest guy first, and that happened to be him. So it wasn’t any surprise when a stool hit the back of his head and two large arms wrapped over his shoulders and two legs folded over his hips. Babe dropped his coat and spun with the guy on his back and took another stool to his midsection from a guy who looked at him funny and said, “Shit. You look like Babe Ruth.”

That caused the guy on his back to loosen his grip, and Ruth surged for the bar and then pulled up short just before he hit it and the guy flew off his back and over the bar and hit the bottles behind the cash register with a great crash.

Babe punched the guy nearest him, realizing only too late but with complete satisfaction that it was the mousy prick, Gene, and Gene went spinning backward on his heels, flailing his hands as he fell over a chair and dropped to his ass on the floor. There might have been ten Bolsheviks in the room, and several of them were of good size, but the other guys had a rage on their side the Bolshies couldn’t touch. Babe saw the freckled one drop Larkin with a single punch to the center of his face and then step right over him and catch another with a jab to the neck. He suddenly remembered the only piece of advice his father had ever given him: Never go toe to toe with a mick in a bar fight.

Another Bolshie took a running leap at Babe from the top of the bar, and Babe ducked him the way he’d duck a tag, and the Bolshie landed on a tabletop that quivered for just a second before collapsing under the weight.

“You are!” someone called, and he turned to see the jake who’d hit him with the stool, a smear of blood on the guy’s mouth. “You’re Babe Fucking Ruth.”

“I get that all the time,” Babe said. He punched the guy in the head, grabbed his coat off the floor, and ran out of the bar.