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D anny met Tessa Abruzze the same week people started to get sick. At first the newspapers said it was confined to soldiers at Camp Devens, but then two civilians dropped dead on the same day in the streets of Quincy, and across the city people began to stay inside.
Danny arrived on his floor with an armful of parcels he’d carried up the tight stairwell. They contained his clothes, freshly laundered, wrapped in brown paper, and tied off with a ribbon by a laundress from Prince Street, a widow who did a dozen loads a day in the tub in her kitchen. He tried maneuvering the key into the door with the parcels still in his arms, but after a couple of failed attempts, he stepped back and placed them on the floor, and a young woman came out of her room at the other end of the hall and let out a yelp.
She said, “Signore, signore,” and it came out tentatively, as if she weren’t sure she was worth the trouble. She leaned one hand against the wall and pink water ran down her legs and dripped off her ankles.
Danny wondered why he’d never seen her before. Then he wondered if she had the grippe. Then he noticed she was pregnant. His lock disengaged and the door popped open, and he kicked his parcels inside because nothing left behind in a hallway in the North End would stay there long. He shut the door and came down the hall toward the woman and saw that the lower part of her dress was soaked through.
She kept her hand on the wall and lowered her head and her dark hair fell over her mouth and her teeth were clenched into a grimace tighter than Danny had seen on some dead people. She said, “Dio aiutami. Dio aiutami.”
Danny said, “Where’s your husband? Where’s the midwife?”
He took her free hand in his and she squeezed so tight a bolt of pain ran up to his elbow. Her eyes rolled up at him and she babbled something in Italian so fast he didn’t catch any of it, and he realized she didn’t speak a word of English.
“Mrs. DiMassi.” Danny’s holler echoed down the stairwell. “Mrs. DiMassi!”
The woman squeezed his hand even harder and screamed through her teeth.
“Dove e il vostro marito?” Danny said.
The woman shook her head several times, though Danny had no idea if that meant she had no husband or if he just wasn’t here.
“The… la …” Danny searched for the word for “midwife.” He caressed the back of her hand and said, “Ssssh. It’s okay.” He looked into her wide, wild eyes. “Look…look, you…the… la ostetrica!” Danny was so excited that he’d finally remembered the word he immediately reverted to English. “Yes? Where is…? Dove e? Dove e la ostetrica? ”
The woman pounded her fist against the wall. She dug her fingers into Danny’s palm and screamed so loudly that he yelled, “Mrs. Di Massi!” feeling a kind of panic he hadn’t felt since his first day as a policeman, when it had sunk in that he was all the answer the world saw fit to give to someone else’s problems.
The woman shoved her face into his and said, “Faccia qualcosa, uomo insensato! Mi aiuti!” and Danny didn’t get all of it, but he picked up “foolish man” and “help” so he pulled her toward the stairs.
Her hand remained in his, her arm wrapped around his abdomen, the rest of her clenched against his back as they made their way down the staircase to the street. Mass General was too far to make on foot and he couldn’t see any taxis or even any trucks in the streets, just people, filling it on market day, Danny thinking if it was market day there should be some fucking trucks, shouldn’t there, but no, just throngs of people and fruit and vegetables and restless pigs snuffling in their straw along the cobblestone.
“Haymarket Relief Station,” he said. “It’s closest. You understand?”
She nodded quickly and he knew it was his tone she was responding to and they pushed their way through the crowds and people began to make way. Danny tried a few times, calling out, “Cerco un’ ostetrica! Un’ ostetrica! Cè qualcuno che conosce un’ ostetrica?” but all he got were sympathetic shakes of the head.
When they broke out on the other side of the mob, the woman arched her back and her moan was small and sharp and Danny thought she was going to drop the child onto the street, two blocks from Haymarket Relief, but she fell back into him instead. He scooped her up in his arms and started walking and staggering, walking and staggering, the woman not terribly heavy, but squirming and clawing the air and slapping his chest.
They walked several blocks, time enough for Danny to find her beautiful in her agony. In spite of or because of, he wasn’t sure, but beautiful nevertheless. The final block, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her wrists pressing against the muscle there, and whispered, “Dio, aiutami. Dio, aiutami,” over and over in his ear.
At the relief station, Danny pushed them through the first door he saw and they ended up in a brown hallway of dark oak floors and dim yellow lights and a single bench. A doctor sat on the bench, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He looked at them as they came up the corridor. “What are you doing here?”
Danny, still holding the woman in his arms, said, “You serious?”
“You came in the wrong door.” The doctor stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood. He got a good look at the woman. “How long’s she been in labor?”
“Her water broke about ten minutes ago. That’s all I know.”
The doctor placed one hand under the woman’s belly and another to her head. He gave Danny a look, calm and unreachable. “This woman’s going into labor.”
“I know.”
“In your arms,” the doctor said, and Danny almost dropped her.
“Wait here,” the doctor said and went through some double doors halfway up the corridor. Something banged around back there and then the doctor came back through the doors with an iron gurney, one of its wheels rusted and squeaking.
Danny placed the woman on the gurney. Her eyes were closed now, her breath still puffing out through her lips in short bursts, and Danny looked down at the wetness he’d been feeling on his arms and waist, a wetness he’d thought was mostly water but now saw was blood, and he showed his arms to the doctor.
The doctor nodded and said, “What’s her name?”
Danny said, “I don’t know.”
The doctor frowned at that and then he pushed the gurney past Danny and back through the double doors and Danny heard him calling for a nurse.
Danny found a bathroom at the end of the hall. He washed his hands and arms with brown soap and watched the blood swirl pink in the basin. The woman’s face hung in his mind. Her nose was slightly crooked with a bump halfway down the bridge, and her upper lip was thicker than her lower, and she had a small mole on the underside of her jaw, barely noticeable because her skin was so dark, almost as dark as her hair. He could hear her voice in his chest and feel her thighs and lower back in his palms, see the arch of her neck as she’d ground her head into the gurney mattress.
He found the waiting area at the far end of the hall. He entered from behind the admitting desk and came around to sit among the bandaged and the sniffling. One guy removed a black bowler from his head and vomited into it. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He peered into the bowler, and then he looked at the other people in the waiting room; he seemed embarrassed. He carefully placed the bowler under the wooden bench and wiped his mouth again with the handkerchief and sat back and closed his eyes. A few people had surgical masks over their faces, and when they coughed the coughs were wet. The admitting nurse wore a mask as well. No one spoke English except for a teamster whose foot had been run over by a horse-drawn cart. He told Danny the accident had happened right out front, else he’d have walked to a real hospital, the kind fit for Americans. Several times he glanced at the dried blood covering Danny’s belt and groin, but he didn’t ask how it had gotten there.
A woman came in with her teenage daughter. The woman was thick-waisted and dark but her daughter was thin and almost yellow and she coughed without stopping, the sound of it like metal gears grinding under water. The teamster was the first of them to ask the nurse for a surgical mask, but by the time Mrs. DiMassi found Danny in the waiting area, he wore one, too, feeling sheepish and ashamed, but they could still hear the girl, down another corridor and behind another set of double doors, those gears grinding.
“Why you wear that, Officer Danny?” Mrs. DiMassi sat beside him.
Danny took it off. “A very sick woman was here.”
She said, “Lot of people sick today. I say fresh air. I say go up on the roofs. Everyone say I crazy. They stay inside.”
“You heard about…”
“Tessa, yes.”
“Tessa?”
Mrs. DiMassi nodded. “Tessa Abruzze. You carry her here?”
Danny nodded.
Mrs. DiMassi chuckled. “Whole neighborhood talking. Say you not as strong as you look.”
Danny smiled. “That so?”
She said, “Yes. So. They say your knees buckle and Tessa not heavy woman.”
“You notify her husband?”
“Bah.” Mrs. DiMassi swatted the air. “She have no husband. Only father. Father a good man. Daughter?” She swatted the air again.
“So you don’t hold her in high regard,” Danny said.
“I would spit,” she said, “but this clean floor.”
“Then why are you here?”
“She my tenant,” she said simply.
Danny placed a hand to the little old woman’s back and she rocked in place, her feet swinging above the floor.
B y the time the doctor entered the waiting room, Danny had put his mask back on and Mrs. DiMassi wore one as well. It had been a man this time, midtwenties, a freight yard worker by the looks of his clothes. He’d dropped to a knee in front of the admitting desk. He held up a hand as if to say he was fine, he was fine. He didn’t cough, but his lips and the flesh under his jaw were purple. He remained in that position, his breath rattling, until the nurse came around to get him. She helped the man to his feet. He reeled in her grip. His eyes were red and wet and saw nothing of the world in front of him.
So Danny put his mask back on and went behind the admitting desk and got one for Mrs. DiMassi and a few others in the waiting room. He handed them out and sat back down, feeling each breath he exhaled press back against his lips and nose.
Mrs. DiMassi said, “Paper say only soldiers get it.”
Danny said, “Soldiers breathe the same air.”
“You?”
Danny patted her hand. “Not so far.”
He started to remove his hand, but she closed hers over it. “Nothing get you, I think.”
“Okay.”
“So I stay close.” Mrs. DiMassi moved in against him until their legs touched.
The doctor came out into the waiting room and, though he wore one himself, seemed surprised by all the masks.
“It’s a boy,” he said and squatted in front of them. “Healthy.”
“How is Tessa?” Mrs. DiMassi said.
“That’s her name?”
Mrs. DiMassi nodded.
“She had a complication,” the doctor said. “There’s some bleeding I’m concerned about. Are you her mother?”
Mrs. DiMassi shook her head.
“Landlady,” Danny said.
“Ah,” the doctor said. “She have family?”
“A father,” Danny said. “He’s still being located.”
“I can’t let anyone but immediate family in to see her. I hope you understand.”
Danny kept his voice light. “Serious, Doctor?”
The doctor’s eyes remained weary. “We’re trying, Officer.”
Danny nodded.
“If you hadn’t carried her here, though?” the doctor said. “The world would, without question, be a hundred ten pounds lighter. Choose to look at it that way.”
“Sure.”
The doctor gave Mrs. DiMassi a courtly nod and rose from his haunches.
“Dr….,” Danny said.
“Rosen,” the doctor said.
“Dr. Rosen,” Danny said, “how long are we going to be wearing masks, you think?”
Dr. Rosen took a long look around the waiting room. “Until it stops.”
“And it isn’t stopping?”
“It’s barely started,” the doctor said and left them there.
T essa’s father, Federico Abruzze, found Danny that night on the roof of their building. After the hospital, Mrs. DiMassi had berated and harangued all her tenants into moving their mattresses up onto the roof not long after the sun went down. And so they assembled four stories above the North End under the stars and the thick smoke from the Portland Meat Factory and the sticky wafts from the USIA molasses tank.
Mrs. DiMassi brought her best friend, Denise Ruddy-Cugini, from Prince Street. She also brought her niece, Arabella and Arabella’s husband, Adam, a bricklayer recently arrived from Palermo sans passport. They were joined by Claudio and Sophia Mosca and their three children, the oldest only five and Sophia already showing with the fourth. Shortly after their arrival, Lou and Patricia Imbriano dragged their mattresses up the fire escape and were followed by the newlyweds, Joseph and Concetta Limone, and finally, Steve Coyle.
Danny, Claudio, Adam, and Steve Coyle played craps on the black tar, their backs against the parapet, and Claudio’s homemade wine went down easier with every roll. Danny could hear coughing and fever-shouts from the streets and buildings, but he could also hear mothers calling their children home and the squeak of laundry being drawn across the lines between the tenements and a man’s sharp, sudden laughter and an organ grinder in one of the alleys, his instrument slightly out of tune in the warm night air.
No one on the roof was sick yet. No one coughed or felt flushed or nauseated. No one suffered from what were rumored to be the telltale early signs of infection—headache or pains in the legs—even though most of the men were exhausted from twelve-hour workdays and weren’t sure their bodies would notice the difference. Joe Limone, a baker’s assistant, worked fifteen-hour days and scoffed at the lazy twelve-hour men, and Concetta Limone, in an apparent effort to keep up with her husband, reported for work at Patriot Wool at five in the morning and left at six-thirty in the evening. Their first night on the rooftop was like the nights during the Feasts of the Saints, when Hanover Street was laureled in lights and flowers and the priests led parades up the street and the air smelled of incense and red sauce. Claudio had made a kite for his son, Bernardo Thomas, and the boy stood with the other children in the center of the roof and the yellow kite looked like a fin against the dark blue sky.
Danny recognized Federico as soon as he stepped out on the roof. He’d passed him on the stairs once when his arms were filled with boxes—a courtly old man dressed in tan linen. His hair and thin mustache were white and clipped tight to his skin and he carried a walking stick the way landed gentry did, not as an aid, but as a totem. He removed his fedora as he spoke to Mrs. DiMassi and then looked over at Danny sitting against the parapet with the other men. Danny rose as Federico Abruzze crossed to him.
“Mr. Coughlin?” he said with a small bow and perfect English.
“Mr. Abruzze,” Danny said and stuck out his hand. “How’s your daughter?”
Federico shook the hand with both of his and gave Danny a curt nod. “She is fine. Thank you very much for asking.”
“And your grandson?”
“He is strong,” Federico said. “May I speak with you?”
Danny stepped over the dice and loose change and he and Federico walked to the eastern edge of the roof. Federico removed a white handkerchief from his pocket and placed it on the parapet. He said, “Please, sit.”
Danny took a seat on the handkerchief, feeling the waterfront at his back and the wine in his blood.
“A pretty night,” Federico said. “Even with so much coughing.”
“Yes.”
“So many stars.”
Danny looked up at the bright splay of them. He looked back at Federico Abruzze, getting the impression of tribal leader from the man. A small-town country mayor, perhaps, a dispenser of wisdom in the town piazza on summer nights.
Federico said, “You are well known around the neighborhood.”
Danny said, “Really?”
He nodded. “They say you are an Irish policeman who holds no prejudice against the Italians. They say you grew up here and even after a bomb exploded in your station house, even after you’ve worked these streets and seen the worst of our people, you treat everyone as a brother. And now you have saved my daughter’s life and the life of my grandson. I thank you, sir.”
Danny said, “You’re welcome.”
Federico placed a cigarette to his lips and snapped a match off his thumbnail to light it, staring at Danny through the flame. In the flare of light, he looked younger suddenly, his face smooth, and Danny guessed him to be in his late fifties, ten years younger than he looked from a distance.
He waved his cigarette at the night. “I never leave a debt unpaid.”
“You don’t owe a debt to me,” Danny said.
“But I do, sir,” he said. “I do.” His voice was softly musical. “But the cost of immigrating to this country has left me of modest means. Would you, at the very least, sir, allow my daughter and I to cook for you some night?” He placed a hand to Danny’s shoulder. “Once she is well enough, of course.”
Danny looked into the man’s smile and wondered about Tessa’s missing husband. Was he dead? Had there ever been one? From what Danny understood of Italian customs, he couldn’t imagine a man of Federico’s stature and upbringing allowing an unwed, pregnant daughter to remain in his sight, let alone his home. And now it seemed the man was trying to engineer a courtship between Danny and Tessa.
How strange.
“I’d be honored, sir.”
“Then it’s done.” Federico leaned back. “And the honor is all mine. I will leave word once Tessa is well.”
“I look forward to it.”
Federico and Danny walked back across the roof toward the fire escape.
“This sickness.” Federico’s arm spanned the roofs around them. “It will pass?”
“I hope so.”
“I do as well. So much hope in this country, so much possibility. It would be a tragedy to learn to suffer as Europe has.” He turned at the fire escape and took Danny’s shoulders in his hands. “I thank you again, sir. Good night.”
“Good night,” Danny said.
Federico descended through the black iron, the walking stick tucked under one arm, his movements fluid and assured, as if he’d grown up with mountains nearby, rocky hills to climb. Once he was gone, Danny found himself still staring down, trying to give a name to the odd sense he had that something else had transpired between them, something that got lost in the wine in his blood. Maybe it was the way he’d said debt, or suffer, as if the words had different meanings in Italian. Danny tried to snatch at the threads, but the wine was too strong; the thought slipped off into the breeze and he gave up trying to catch it and returned to his craps game.
A little later in the night, they launched the kite again at Bernardo Thomas’s insistence, but the twine slipped from the boy’s fingers. Before he could cry, Claudio let out a whoop of triumph, as if the point of any kite were to eventually set it free. The boy wasn’t immediately convinced and stared after it with a tremble in his chin, so the other adults joined in at the edge of the roof. They raised their fists and shouted. Bernardo Thomas began to laugh and clap, and the other children joined in, and soon they all stood in celebration and urged the yellow kite onward into the deep, dark sky.
B y the end of the week, the undertakers had hired men to guard the coffins. The men varied in appearance—some had come from private security companies and knew how to bathe and shave, others had the look of washed-up footballers or boxers, a few in the North End were low-rung members of the Black Hand—but all carried shotguns or rifles. Among the afflicted were carpenters, and even if they’d been healthy, it was doubtful they could have kept up with the demand. At Camp Devens, the grippe killed sixty-three soldiers in one day. It rooted its way into tenements in the North End and South Boston and the rooming houses of Scollay Square and tore through the shipyards of Quincy and Weymouth. Then it caught the train lines, and the papers reported outbreaks in Hartford and New York City.
It reached Philadelphia on the weekend during fine weather. People filled the streets for parades that supported the troops and the buying of Liberty Bonds, the Waking Up of America, and the strengthening of moral purity and fortitude best exemplified by the Boy Scouts. By the following week, death carts roamed the streets for bodies placed on porches the night before and morgue tents sprang up all over eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. In Chicago it took hold first on the South Side, then on the East, and the rails carried it out across the Plains.
There were rumors. Of an imminent vaccine. Of a German submarine that had been sighted three miles out in Boston Harbor in August; some claimed to have seen it rise out of the sea and exhale a plume of orange smoke that had drifted toward shore. Preachers cited passages in Revelations and Ezekiel that prophesied an airborne poison as punishment for a new century’s promiscuity and immigrant mores. The Last Times, they said, had arrived.
Word spread through the underclass that the only cure was garlic. Or turpentine on sugar cubes. Or kerosene on sugar cubes if turpentine wasn’t available. So the tenements reeked. They reeked of sweat and bodily discharges and the dead and the dying and garlic and turpentine. Danny’s throat clogged with it and his nostrils burned, and some days, woozy from kerosene vapors and stuffed up from the garlic, his tonsils scraped raw, he’d think he’d finally come down with it. But he hadn’t. He’d seen it fell doctors and nurses and coroners and ambulance drivers and two cops from the First Precinct and six more from other precincts. And even as it blasted a hole through the neighborhood he’d come to love with a passion he couldn’t even explain to himself, he knew it wouldn’t stick to him.
Death had missed him at Salutation Street, and now it circled him and winked at him but then settled on someone else. So he went into the tenements where several cops refused to go, and he went into the boardinghouses and rooming houses and gave what comfort he could to those gone yellow and gray with it, those whose sweat darkened the mattresses.
Days off vanished in the precinct. Lungs rattled like tin walls in high wind and vomit was dark green, and in the North End slums, they took to painting X s on the doors of the contagious, and more and more people slept on the roofs. Some mornings, Danny and the other cops of the Oh-One stacked the bodies on the sidewalk like shipyard piping and waited into the afternoon sun for the meat wagons to arrive. He continued to wear a mask but only because it was illegal not to. Masks were bullshit. Plenty of people who never took them off got the grippe all the same and died with their heads on fire.
He and Steve Coyle and another half-dozen cops responded to a suspicion-of-murder call off Portland Street. As Steve knocked on the door, Danny could see the adrenaline flare in the eyes of the other men in the hallway. The guy who eventually opened the door wore a mask, but his eyes were red with it and his breaths were liquid. Steve and Danny looked at the knife haft sticking out of the center of his chest for twenty seconds before they realized what they were seeing.
The guy said, “Fuck you fellas bothering me for?”
Steve had his hand on his revolver but it remained holstered. He held out his palm to get the guy to take a step back. “Who stabbed you, sir?”
The other cops in the hall moved on that, spreading out behind Danny and Steve.
“I did,” the guy said.
“You stabbed yourself?”
The guy nodded, and Danny noticed a woman sitting on the couch behind the guy. She wore a mask, too, and her skin was the blue of the infected and her throat was cut.
The guy leaned against the door, and the movement brought a fresh darkening to his shirt.
“Let me see your hands,” Steve said.
The guy raised his hands and his lungs rattled with the effort. “Could one of you fellas pull this out of my chest?”
Steve said, “Sir, step away from the door.”
He stepped out of their way and fell on his ass and sat looking at his thighs. They entered the room. No one wanted to touch the guy, so Steve trained his revolver on him.
The guy placed both hands on the haft and tugged, but it didn’t budge, and Steve said, “Put your hands down, sir.”
The guy gave Steve a loose smile. He lowered his hands and sighed.
Danny looked at the dead woman. “You kill your wife, sir?”
A slight shake of his head. “Cured her. Nothing else I could do, fellas. This thing?”
Leo West called from the back of the apartment. “We got kids in here.”
“Alive?” Steve called.
The guy on the floor shook his head again. “Cured them, too.”
“Three of ’em,” Leo West called. “Jesus.” He stepped back out of the room. His face was pale and he’d unbuttoned his collar. “Jesus,” he said again. “Shit.”
Danny said, “We need to get an ambulance down here.”
Rusty Aborn gave that a bitter chuckle. “Sure, Dan. What’s it taking them these days—five, six hours?”
Steve cleared his throat. “This guy just left Ambulance Country.” He put his foot on the guy’s shoulder and gently tipped the corpse to the floor.
T wo days later, Danny carried Tessa’s infant out of her apartment in a towel. Federico was nowhere to be found, and Mrs. DiMassi sat by Tessa as she lay in bed with a wet towel on her forehead and stared at the ceiling. Her skin had yellowed with it, but she was conscious. Danny held the infant as she glanced first at him and then at the bundle in his arms, the child’s skin the color and texture of stone, and then she turned her eyes to the ceiling again and Danny carried the child down the stairs and outside, just as he and Steve Coyle had carried Claudio’s body out the day before.
Danny made sure to call his parents most every night and managed to make one trip home during the pandemic. He sat with his family and Nora in the parlor on K Street and they drank tea, slipping the cups under the masks Ellen Coughlin demanded the family wear everywhere but in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Nora served the tea. Normally Avery Wallace would have performed that duty, but Avery hadn’t shown up for work in three days. Had it bad, he’d told Danny’s father over the phone, had it deep. Danny had known Avery since he and Connor were boys, and it only now occurred to him that he’d never visited the man’s home or met his family. Because he was colored?
There it was.
Because he was colored.
He looked up from his teacup at the rest of the family and the sight of them all—uncommonly silent and stiff in their gestures as they lifted their masks to sip their tea—struck him and Connor as absurd at the same time. It was as if they were still altar boys serving mass at Gate of Heaven and one look from either brother could cause the other to laugh at the least appropriate moment. No matter how many whacks on the ass they took from the old man, they just couldn’t help it. It got so bad the decision was made to separate them, and after sixth grade, they never served mass together again.
The same feeling gripped them now and the laugh burst through Danny’s lips first and Connor was a half step behind. Then they were both possessed by it, placing their teacups on the floor and giving in.
“What?” their father said. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Connor managed, and it came out muffled through the mask, which only made Danny laugh harder.
Their mother, sounding cross and confused, said, “What? What?”
“Jeeze, Dan,” Connor said, “get a load of himself.”
Danny knew he was talking about Joe. He tried not to look, he did, but then he looked over and saw the little kid sitting in a chair so big his shoes barely reached the edge of the cushion. Joe, sitting there with his big wide eyes and the ridiculous mask and the teacup resting on the lap of his plaid knickerbockers, looking at his brothers like they’d provide an answer to him. But there wasn’t any answer. It was all so silly and ridiculous and Danny noticed his little brother’s argyle socks and his eyes watered as his laughter boomed even harder.
Joe decided to join in and Nora followed, both of them uncertain at first but gathering in strength because Danny’s laughter had always been so infectious and neither could remember the last time they’d seen Connor laugh so freely or helplessly and then Connor sneezed and everyone stopped laughing.
A fine spray of red dots peppered the inside of his mask and bled through to the outside.
Their mother said, “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus,” and blessed herself.
“What?” Connor said. “It was a sneeze.”
“Connor,” Nora said. “Oh God, dear Connor.”
“What?”
“Con’,” Danny said and came out of his chair, “take off your mask.”
“Oh no oh no oh no,” their mother whispered.
Connor took off the mask, and when he got a good look at it, he gave it a small nod and took a breath.
Danny said, “Let’s me and you have a look in the bathroom.”
No one else moved at first, and Danny got Connor into the bathroom and locked the door as they heard the whole family find their legs and assemble out in the hall.
“Tilt your head,” Danny said.
Connor tilted his head. “Dan.”
“Shut up. Let me look.”
Someone turned the knob from the outside and his father said, “Open up.”
“Give us a second, will ya?”
“Dan,” Connor said, and his voice was still tremulous with laughter.
“Will you keep your head back? It’s not funny.”
“Well, you’re looking up my nose.”
“I know I am. Shut up.”
“You see any boogers?”
“A few.” Danny felt a smile trying to push through the muscles in his face. Leave it to Connor—serious as the grave on a normal day and now, possibly facing that grave, he couldn’t keep serious.
Someone rattled the door again and knocked.
“I picked it,” Connor said.
“What?”
“Just before Ma brought out the tea. I was in here. Had half my hand up there, Dan. Had one of those sharp rocks in there, you know the ones?”
Danny stopped looking in his brother’s nose. “You what?”
“Picked it,” Connor said. “I guess I need to cut my nails.”
Danny stared at him and Connor laughed. Danny slapped the side of his head and Connor rabbit-punched him. By the time they opened the door to the rest of the family, standing pale and angry in the hall, they were laughing again like bad altar boys.
“He’s fine.”
“I’m fine. Just a nosebleed. Look, Ma, it stopped.”
“Get a fresh mask from the kitchen,” their father said and walked back into the parlor with a wave of disgust.
Danny caught Joe looking at them with something akin to wonder.
“A nosebleed,” he said to Joe, drawing the word out.
“It’s not funny,” their mother said, and her voice was brittle.
“I know, Ma,” Connor said, “I know.”
“I do, too,” Danny said, catching a look from Nora now that nearly matched their mother’s, and then remembering her calling his brother “dear” Connor.
When did that start?
“No, you don’t,” their mother said. “You don’t at all. The two of you never did.” And she went into her bedroom and closed the door.
B y the time Danny heard, Steve Coyle had been sick for five hours. He’d woken that morning, thighs turned to plaster, ankles swollen, calves twitching, head throbbing. He didn’t waste time pretending it was something else. He slipped out of the bedroom he’d shared last night with the Widow Coyle and grabbed his clothes and went out the door. Never paused, not even with his legs the way they were, dragging under the rest of him like they might just decide to stay put even if his torso kept going. After a few blocks, he told Danny, fucking legs screamed so much it was like they belonged to someone else. Fucking wailed, every step. He’d tried walking to the streetcar stop then realized he could infect the whole car. Then he remembered the streetcars had stopped running anyway. So a walk, then. Eleven blocks from the Widow Coyle’s cold-water flat at the top of Mission Hill all the way down to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Damn near crawling by the time he reached it, folded over like a broken match, cramps ballooning up through his stomach, his chest, his throat for Christ’s sake. And his head, Jesus. By the time he reached the admitting desk, it was like someone hammered pipe through his eyes.
He told all this to Danny from behind a pair of muslin curtains in the infectious disease ward of the intensive care unit at the Peter Bent. There was no one else in the ward the afternoon Danny came to see him, just the lumpen shape of a body beneath a sheet across the aisle. The rest of the beds were empty, the curtains pulled back. Somehow that was worse.
They’d given Danny a mask and gloves; the gloves were in his coat pocket; the mask hung at his throat. And yet he kept the muslin between him and Steve. Catching it didn’t scare him. These past few weeks? If you hadn’t made peace with your maker, then you didn’t believe you’d been made. But watching it drain Steve to the ground powder of himself—that would be something else. Something Danny would pass the cup on if Steve allowed him. Not the dying, just the witnessing.
Steve spoke like he was trying to gargle at the same time. The words pushed up through phlegm and the ends of sentences often drowned. “No Widow. Believe that?”
Danny said nothing. He’d only met the Widow Coyle once, and his sole impression was one of fussiness and anxious self-regard.
“Can’t see you.” Steve cleared his throat.
Danny said, “I can see you, pal.”
“Pull it back, would ya?”
Danny didn’t move right away.
“You scared? I don’t blame ya. Forget it.”
Danny leaned forward a few times. He hitched his pants at the knees. He leaned forward again. He pulled back the curtain.
His friend sat upright, the pillow dark from his head. His face was swollen and skeletal at the same time, like dozens of the infected, living and dead, that he and Danny had run across this month. His eyes bulged from their sockets, as if trying to escape, and ran with a milky film that pooled in the corners. But he wasn’t purple. Or black. He wasn’t hacking his lungs up through his mouth or defecating where he lay. So, all in all, not as sick as one feared. Not yet anyway.
He gave Danny an arched eyebrow, an exhausted grin.
“Remember those girls I courted this summer?”
Danny nodded. “Did more than court some of them.”
He coughed. A small one, into his fist. “I wrote a song. In my head. ‘Summer Girls.’”
Danny could suddenly feel the heat coming off him. If he leaned within a foot of him, the waves found his face.
“‘Summer Girls,’ eh?”
“‘Summer Girls.’” Steve’s eyes closed. “Sing it for you someday.”
Danny found a bucket of water on the bedside table. He reached in and pulled out a cloth and squeezed it. He placed the cloth on Steve’s forehead. Steve’s eyes snapped up to him, wild and grateful. Danny moved down his forehead and wiped his cheeks. He dropped the hot cloth back into the cooler water and squeezed again. He wiped his partner’s ears, the sides of his neck, his throat and chin.
“Dan.”
“Yeah?”
Steve grimaced. “Like a horse is sitting on my chest.”
Danny kept his eyes clear. He didn’t remove them from Steve’s face when he dropped the cloth back in the bucket. “Sharp?”
“Yeah. Sharp.”
“Can you breathe?”
“Not too good.”
“Probably I should get a doctor, then.”
Steve flicked his eyes at the suggestion.
Danny patted his hand and called for the doctor.
“Stay here,” Steve said. His lips were white.
Danny smiled and nodded. He swiveled on the small stool they’d wheeled over to the bed when he arrived. Called for a doctor again.
A very Wallace, seventeen years the houseman for the Coughlin family, succumbed to the grippe and was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in a plot Thomas Coughlin had bought for him a decade ago. Only Thomas, Danny, and Nora attended the short funeral. No one else.
Thomas said, “His wife died twenty years ago. Children scattered, most to Chicago, one to Canada. They never wrote. He lost track. He was a good man. Hard to know, but a good man, nonetheless.”
Danny was surprised to hear a soft, subdued grief in his father’s voice.
His father picked up a handful of dirt as Avery Wallace’s coffin was lowered into the grave. He tossed the dirt on the wood. “Lord have mercy on your soul.”
Nora kept her head down, but the tears fell from her chin. Danny was stunned. How was it that he’d known this man most of his life and yet somehow had never really seen him?
He tossed his own handful of dirt on the coffin.
Because he was colored. That’s why.
S teve walked out of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital ten days after he’d walked in. Like thousands of others infected in the city, he’d survived, even as the grippe made its steady way across the rest of the country, crossing into California and New Mexico the same weekend he walked with Danny to a taxi.
He walked with a cane. Always would, the doctors promised. The influenza had weakened his heart, damaged his brain. The headaches would never leave him. Simple speech would sometimes be a problem, strenuous activity of any kind would probably kill him. A week ago he’d joked about that, but today he was quiet.
It was a short walk to the taxi stand but it took a long time.
“Not even a desk job,” he said as they reached the front taxicab in the line.
“I know,” Danny said. “I’m sorry.”
“‘Too strenuous,’ they said.”
Steve worked his way into the cab and Danny handed him his cane. He came around the other side and got in.
“Where to?” the cabdriver asked.
Steve looked at Danny. Danny looked back, waiting.
“You guys deaf? Where to?”
“Keep your knickers cinched.” Steve gave him the address of the rooming house on Salem Street. As the driver pulled off the curb, Steve looked over at Danny. “You help me pack up my room?”
“You don’t have to leave.”
“I can’t afford it. No job.”
“The Widow Coyle?” Danny said.
Steve shrugged. “Ain’t seen her since I got it.”
“Where you going to go?”
Another shrug. “Got to be somebody looking to hire a heartsick cripple.”
Danny didn’t say anything for a minute. They bumped along Huntington.
“There’s got to be some way to—”
Steve put a hand on his arm. “Coughlin, I love ya, but there’s not always ‘some way.’ Most people fall? No net. None. We just go off.”
“Where?”
Steve was quiet for a bit. He looked out the window. He pursed his lips. “Where the people with no nets end up. That place.”
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