THE NEXT MORNING, AIDAN SLEPT IN. HE HAD TOLD MAEVE HE HAD the day off, and she’d asked no questions. Now that she was up and about more, she must have noticed how much money was in the biscuit tin. If she wondered what good fortune had befallen Aidan at his job to earn him so much, she kept that wondering to herself.
When Aidan got up, he went out with Maeve’s list of things to buy for dinner that night, stopping at the butcher and the greengrocer in their neighborhood. When he returned, she told him she had forgotten to put carrots on the list.
“Ach, I’ll just make the stew without the carrots,” she said.
“No, Ma, it’s gotta be great, ya gotta have carrots,” insisted Aidan.
“’Tis a fine thing to have a friend that is so discriminatin’ in his victuals. Tell me, what wine shall we be servin’ our visitin’ royalty?” she said with a wry smile.
“I’ll go get the bleddy carrots,” said Aidan, ignoring her teasing.
“Oh, don’t bother. I’m goin’ out later anyway to talk to Mr. McGuire about gettin’ some piecework to do again—there’s another greengrocer right on the corner there. Not to worry, there will be carrots in the stew!” Her merriment was cut short by a fit of coughing.
“You’re sure you’re up to shoppin’ now, right?” asked Aidan.
Maeve recovered and peeked at the rag she had held to her mouth before folding it quickly and tucking it into her apron pocket. “I’m fit as a fiddle, lad—go off and have yer fun on yer day off, but don’t be late for this supper I’m makin’ with special carrots for yer royal friend!”
After an afternoon of blacking boots, which yielded a disappointing forty cents in profit, Aidan packed up his brushes and headed over to Scollay Square. As he rounded the corner, he could see the steaming teakettle hanging over the door of the Oriental Tea Company. When Aidan was little, one of his favorite stories Maeve told was of the day that the kettle was unveiled. There had been a competition on New Year’s Day to guess how much the kettle could contain, and a huge crowd, including seventeen-year-old Maeve, had gathered to see the answer revealed. Thousands of people had submitted their guesses in advance to the company, hoping to win a forty-pound chest of tea. But Aidan’s favorite part of the story was when Maeve described the moment that they lifted the lid on the kettle to begin pouring the water in, and to everyone’s surprise, out popped a young boy who had been hiding inside. Regardless of how old Aidan was at the time of the telling, Maeve always speculated that the “wee lad was just your age,” and sometimes she went on to insist that he even looked a little like Aidan. She described how the crowd went wild when the boy appeared and how they cheered for him as he waved with both hands. Aidan always closed his eyes at this point, imagining that he was that boy and the crowd was cheering for him.
Charles was a bit late arriving at the kettle. “We’ll have to hoof it,” said Aidan, “or we’ll catch it from my ma. She’s been cookin’ all afternoon.”
As they made their way into the West End, Charles said, “You know, Sully, this damn stew better be good—you been buildin’ it up ever since we ate at that place the first night.”
“You’ll be wonderin’ how them saloons can call their swill by the same name.”
Charles smiled and said, “So what the hell are we waitin’ for—I’m half starved!” and they ran the rest of the way.
When they got to the tenement, they raced up the stairs, vying to get to the third floor first. Aidan knocked off Charles’s cap and raced ahead of him when he stooped to pick it up. Laughing, Aidan burst into the apartment with Charles right behind him.
The smell hit them right away, but instead of the savory scent of Maeve’s famous stew, it was the sharp smell of gin. Aidan stopped in his tracks and took in the situation. Maeve was at the kitchen table with her head resting on her arms, a bottle to one side of her, some paper on the other. She looked up slowly with red eyes swimming, her red hair unpinned and tumbled down on one side. When her eyes could focus and she saw it was Aidan, she started crying and put her face in her hands. Aidan moved closer and saw that the paper on the table was the wrapping that had contained the baby blanket. The note was out of the envelope, and the ink had mingled with Maeve’s tears all over her hands so that she was unwittingly rubbing it onto her face.
Aidan looked around. It didn’t appear that Maeve had found the blanket underneath his mattress. “Jaysus,” he said, and he grabbed the bottle to throw it out the open window. Faster than he would ever have believed Maeve could move in her condition, she grabbed his forearm and brought her face close to his. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her gin breath was so overpowering it made him squint. “What was in the package?” she demanded. “Where is it? What was it?” Her grip became painful on his arm.
How could I have left the wrapping on the shelf? he berated himself. How could I have been so bleddy stupid? “It was . . . a little blanket. But it was all chewed up by the mice or somethin’. I threw it away.”
“You threw away my baby blanket?” Maeve screamed at him. “Just who in the feck do you think you are? That was MINE! He gave it to ME!” She grabbed the bottle out of Aidan’s hand.
“Ma, it had bugs in it. It was disgusting.”
Maeve let go of his arm and pointed a trembling finger at him. “No. You wanna know what’s disgustin’? This feckin’ tenement, that’s what. This hellhole with a stove for heat and a toilet down the feckin’ hall. He was gonna take us OUTTA HERE. He had PLANS, for feck’s sake. We were gonna be a dacent family together in a dacent apartment in a dacent part a’ town, the four of us. Because he LOVED ME!” She sank to the floor sobbing and cradling her bottle like a lover.
Suddenly, Aidan remembered that Charles was there. He grabbed Charles’s arm and muttered, “Let’s go.”
Once out on the street, Aidan walked as fast as he could back the way they had come, and Charles had to run a few steps to catch up with him. “Sully—” he started.
“Just don’t say anything,” Aidan snapped.
“Sully, people is drunk every day in this city. It ain’t unusual.”
“Yeah, but they ain’t your ma, now are they?” he shot back.
They walked a while at Aidan’s angry clip until they reached the Common, where Aidan plunked down on the first available park bench.
“What the hell use is it that she’s feelin’ better,” said Aidan, “if she’s drinkin’ again? She ain’t gonna be able to do work like that.”
“Just because she fell off the wagon once doesn’t mean—”
“You ain’t never lived with no one that’s got this problem, I see,” spat Aidan. Then, less angrily, he continued, “Maybe you’re right. I want you to be right. I dunno what I’m gonna do if you ain’t right.” He put his head in his hands.
“Why didn’t you throw the paper away with the blanket?”
“I never throwed the blanket away. I hid it.”
“Why’d ya keep it?”
“I dunno,” said Aidan. After a pause, he said, “I guess I do know. I just did it at the time without thinkin’ or nothin’, but after a while, it came to me.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up, arching his back over the bench to look straight up at the sky. “When Dan died, she never said nothin’ to me about it. I came home from school, and some of the neighbors were in our kitchen, and one of ’em told me, but my ma was just starin’ straight ahead, like she didn’t even know I come into the room. Everyone was frettin’ and fussin’ over her, but all they could say to me was, ‘Now stay out of her way, she’s gonna have a rough time of it for a while,’ and ‘You be a good lad and help your ma out.’ Nobody, not my ma or nobody else, ever stopped to think that I lost the only pa I was ever gonna get a chance to have.”
Charles looked out across the Common, pretending not to see the single tear that ran from the corner of Aidan’s eye.
Aidan rubbed the tear with the back of his hand and looked at Charles. “So I took the fecking blanket ’cause it was the least I deserved.”
They both sat on the bench and watched the fading daylight.
As it got darker, Charles said, “You hungry?”
“Nah,” said Aidan. “Lost my appetite.”
“Wanna go make some money?” asked Charles.
“You serious? You’re cuttin’ me in?”
“I wanna see how you do. Give you a try. No promises or nothin’.”
“You feel sorry for me. That’s why you’re doin’ this,” Aidan stated.
“Maybe. You comin’?” asked Charles to the air as he rose from the bench.
Aidan stood, and they walked out of the Common toward Beacon Street, headed down to the heart of all sin in Boston.