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The Given Day

Dennis Lehane
Contents ( 59)
  1. Dennis Lehane
  2. The Given Day
  3. CAST OF CHARACTERS
  4. BABE RUTH in OHIO
  5. PROLOGUE
  6. The MILK RUN
  7. CHAPTER one
  8. CHAPTER two
  9. CHAPTER three
  10. CHAPTER four
  11. CHAPTER five
  12. CHAPTER six
  13. CHAPTER seven
  14. CHAPTER eight
  15. CHAPTER nine
  16. CHAPTER ten
  17. CHAPTER eleven
  18. BABE RUTH and the
  19. WORKERS REVOLUTION
  20. CHAPTER twelve
  21. WORKING CLASS
  22. CHAPTER thirteen
  23. CHAPTER fourteen
  24. CHAPTER fifteen
  25. CHAPTER sixteen
  26. CHAPTER seventeen
  27. CHAPTER eighteen
  28. CHAPTER nineteen
  29. CHAPTER twenty
  30. CHAPTER twenty-one
  31. CHAPTER twenty-two
  32. CHAPTER twenty-three
  33. BABE RUTH and the WHITE BALL
  34. CHAPTER twenty-four
  35. CHAPTER twenty-five
  36. RED SUMMER
  37. CHAPTER twenty-six
  38. CHAPTER twenty-seven
  39. CHAPTER twenty-eight
  40. CHAPTER twenty-nine
  41. CHAPTER thirty
  42. CHAPTER thirty-one
  43. BABE RUTH and the
  44. SUMMER SWOON
  45. CHAPTER thirty-two
  46. The BOSTON POLICE STRIKE
  47. CHAPTER thirty-three
  48. CHAPTER thirty-four
  49. CHAPTER thirty-five
  50. CHAPTER thirty-six
  51. CHAPTER thirty-seven
  52. CHAPTER thirty-eight
  53. CHAPTER thirty-nine
  54. The BABE GOES SOUTH
  55. CHAPTER forty
  56. Acknowledgements
  57. About the Author
  58. Also by Dennis Lehane
  59. Copyright
cover

Dennis Lehane

The Given Day

for Angie, my home

When Jesus comes a calling, she said,

He’s coming ’round the mountain on a train.

—JOSH RITTER, “Wings”

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Luther Laurence—houseman, athlete
Lila Waters Laurence—Luther’s wife

Aiden “Danny” Coughlin—Boston police officer
Captain Thomas Coughlin—Danny’s father
Connor Coughlin—Danny’s brother, assistant district attorney, Suffolk County
Joe Coughlin—Danny’s youngest brother
Ellen Coughlin—Danny’s mother
Lieutenant Eddie McKenna—Danny’s godfather
Nora O’Shea—domestic help for the Coughlin household
Avery Wallace—domestic help for the Coughlin household

Babe Ruth—baseball player, Boston Red Sox
Stuffy McInnis—Ruth’s teammate
Johnny Igoe—Ruth’s agent
Harry Frazee—owner, Boston Red Sox
Steve Coyle—Danny Coughlin’s patrol partner
Claude Mesplede—alderman of the Sixth Ward
Patrick Donnegan—boss of the Sixth Ward

Isaiah and Yvette Giddreaux—heads of Boston chapter of the NAACP
“Old” Byron Jackson—head of the bellmen’s union, Hotel Tulsa
Deacon Skinner Broscious—gangster, Tulsa
Dandy and Smoke—enforcers for Deacon Broscious
Clarence Jessup “Jessie” Tell—numbers runner, Luther’s friend, Tulsa
Clayton Tomes—houseman, friend of Luther’s, Boston

Mrs. DiMassi—Danny Coughlin’s landlady
Frederico and Tessa Abruzze—Danny’s neighbors

Louis Fraina—head of the Lettish Workingman’s Society
Mark Denton—Boston Police Department patrolman, union organizer
Rayme Finch—agent, Bureau of Investigation
John Hoover—lawyer, Department of Justice
Samuel Gompers—president of the American Federation of Labor
Andrew J. Peters—mayor of Boston
Calvin Coolidge—governor of Massachusetts
Stephen O’Meara—Boston police commissioner until December 1918
Edwin Upton Curtis—O’Meara’s successor as Boston police commissioner
Mitchell Palmer—attorney general of the United States
James Jackson Storrow—Boston power broker, former president of General Motors

BABE RUTH in OHIO

PROLOGUE

Due to travel restrictions placed on major league baseball by the War Department, the World Series of 1918 was played in September and split into two home stands. The Chicago Cubs hosted the first three games, with the final four to be held in Boston. On September 7, after the Cubs dropped game three, the two teams boarded a Michigan Central train together to embark on the twenty-seven-hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.

They’d had to pour him onto the train in the first place. After the game, he’d gone to a house a few blocks east of Wabash where a man could find a game of cards, a steady supply of liquor, and a woman or two, and if Stuffy McInnis hadn’t known where to look for him, he would have missed the trip home.

As it was, he puked off the rear of the caboose as the train chugged out of Central Station at a little after eight in the evening and wound its way past the stockyards. The air was woolen with smoke and the stench of butchered cattle, and Ruth was damned if he could find a star in the black sky. He took a pull from his flask and rinsed the vomit from his mouth with a gargle of rye and spit it over the iron rail and watched the spangle of Chicago’s skyline rise before him as he slid away from it. As he often did when he left a place and his body was leaden with booze, he felt fat and orphaned.