THE NEXT DAY, CHARLES HAD BEEN SITTING AT THE COUNTER AT Rosen’s for almost fifteen minutes when Aidan sat down next to him. Despite being kept waiting, Charles was still in fine spirits from all the cash filling his pockets. “What’ll it be, Sully?” he joked. “As if I even gotta ask. Egg cream, my good man!” he called out to the soda jerk with two quick slaps of his hand on the counter.
“I ain’t really thirsty,” said Aidan.
“Horseshit. You ain’t never gonna turn down an egg cream.” Charles considered Aidan for a moment and then cocked his head a few degrees. “Hey, what the hell?”
“Charles,” stated Aidan, and he paused. “I don’t know about this workin’ together thing.”
Charles contemplated this. “Well, I thought this would come, but not quite so soon. All right, I know your take last night weren’t enough for you plus your ma and sis. Twenty-five percent is more than fair, but I could go to a third if—”
“It ain’t that.”
“Then I repeat: What the hell?”
Aidan stirred his egg cream with his straw without drinking. “It’s . . . the work. Not the work, really, but where we did it. And the work. The whole thing. It’s so . . . it’s like hell on earth down there,” he finished, barely audible. He put his elbows on the counter and placed his palms over his eyes.
Charles started to protest but then stopped himself and thought about when he started to venture into North Street. Of course, he didn’t go right from the relative comfort of living with his mother to working the alleys near the waterfront. It had been a slow slide. Still, had Aidan thought they would be strolling down the streets of Back Bay?
“Listen, you gotta go where the money is. Unless you can take a billfold in broad daylight without nobody knowin’, the only way is to take it in the dark like we done. Plus, it ain’t like you’re a babe outta the cradle—what you and Willy done weren’t no saintly act.”
“That was different! Them marks was sober, regular businessmen, and we was workin’ in the light of day, with respectable folks all around. Even we was pretendin’ to be respectable! Where me and you was . . . that place is horrible.”
“It’s horrible,” Charles agreed. “But it’s profitable.”
The boys looked at each other, not sure what to do.
Finally, Aidan said, “Can we go to the Garden?”
They walked around the Public Garden without talking. After a while, Charles said, “I ain’t been here in a helluva long time.”
“I come here every day,” said Aidan. “‘Less it’s rainin’ or too cold. Ain’t so pretty in the winter, but just look at it now. Why wouldn’t you come here all the time?”
Charles kicked a stone from the path to the grass. “All these swells, puttin’ on airs, lookin’ down their noses. And if it ain’t folks puttin’ on a puss like they smell somethin’ bad when they see you, it’s the cops tellin’ you that you ain’t good enough to be here.”
Aidan looked around. The people they were passing were indeed far better dressed then either of them, but they seemed engaged in their own conversations. Once, recently, he’d inspired a look of mild disgust when he had brushed up against a woman’s skirts, but other than that, he didn’t quite see Charles’s point. Except, of course, about the police harassment.
“Well,” admitted Aidan, “the cops sure do like to bounce you outta here if they see you takin’ up the good spaces on the benches and such. But I know where to go if you wanna set a while and not be bothered. I’ll show ya.”
The boys walked to the end of the Garden near Charles Street, where there was a large tree near a monument that blocked the view of the street. They sat with their backs to the tree, looking out at the women with parasols, the barefoot children running on the grass in delight, the couples holding hands and waiting in line for the swan boats.
“You’re tellin’ me,” said Charles, “that you don’t feel like you don’t belong here?”
“I’m tellin’ you that I come here every day, more than any of these folks do. I know every monument—I’ve read every word on every one of ’em. I know what day the new flowers from the hot-house get put in the ground. I know what day they mow the grass. I belong here as much as anybody, maybe more, even if the cops can kick my arse outta here. They kicked me out a few times, but here I am, ain’t I?”
Charles seemed to ponder this. He took out his pocketknife and started to whittle a Y-shaped piece of branch he found lying next to him. “So I suppose you been on them swan boats with all the fancy people?”
“Hell no,” said Aidan as he plucked at the grass next to his shoe. “Ain’t gonna catch me near any water deeper than a rain puddle.”
Charles stopped whittling. “You’re pullin’ my leg, right? You live in a city right on the harbor, and you’re afraid of the water? Jesus!” When Aidan didn’t reply, Charles resumed whittling and said more carefully, “So, did somethin’ bad happen when you was trying to learn how to swim or somethin’?”
“I never tried to learn how to swim. Nothin’ bad ever happened, I just been like this since I can remember.” Aidan took the grass he had plucked and flung it away from him like confetti, but most of it settled on top of his shoes. “You ain’t afraid of nothin’, I suppose.”
“Everybody’s afraid of somethin’,” said Charles as he tried to shave off a knot in the branch.
“Yeah, and what’s your thing?” asked Aidan, turning so he could see Charles better.
“Sort of a long story.”
“I got nothin’ but time.”
So Charles told Aidan about how a year ago, he’d been caught stealing a sandwich from a restaurant with outdoor seating. One that had an owner who was paying above and beyond the usual graft to secure more police presence and who insisted on a robust prosecution of the street Arabs stealing his food. So whereas stealing a sandwich might normally have incurred probation in court, Charles instead found himself in Westboro at the State Reform School For Boys for a month of his young life that he would rather forget. He was originally supposed to be there for more than a year. “There was at least twice as many boys in there than the place was built for, plus rumor was they was gonna shut the place down, so they went through the files and let all them go that were there for status offenses and some of the littler crimes that didn’t hurt nobody.”
“What’s a status offense?”
“It’s something you done that wouldn’t have been a crime if you done it when you was older, like playin’ dice on Sunday, or bein’ in the park after dark.”
Aidan found a thin stick and snapped it in half. “So what was the scary part?” he asked.
“What wasn’t scary about that place?” Charles answered. He tossed his whittled branch aside and slowly exhaled a deep breath. “Mostly for punishment, they flogged you with a big wide leather strap. I got it twice while I was there, and that was the worst of it for me. But other boys, the older ones, that weren’t enough for them, they was hard bastards, so they had other ways of dealin’ with them. Really bad ways. Straightjackets and gags. Or they’d stick you in The Lodge and only give you bread and water for a week. But that wasn’t the worst of it.” He folded up his knife and put it in his pocket. “The guards said they weren’t allowed to use the Sweatbox since ten years ago, but the older boys said they still had it somewhere in the building, that they never got rid of it. They said it’s only twenty-one inch by seventeen inch, a long and skinny box, and when you get in, you can’t even move. And then they leave you there, alone. For hours. And your hands and feet swell up, and you can’t walk right when you get out. First I didn’t believe them, that they ever used this thing—I was sure they was just tryin’ to scare the new boys—but once I seen all the other stuff they done to them hard bastards, I started to believe it. I couldn’t stop thinkin’ about it, ’specially at night when I was tryin’ to fall asleep. Even though I knew they didn’t use it no more, probably didn’t even exist no more. But I couldn’t stop imaginin’ it. What it would be like. How you’d struggle, and then you’d start to panic, and how nobody would come when you called.”
Aidan’s mouth hung open briefly before he shut it.
Charles said, “Scary enough for ya?” with a wry smile, but there was no smile in his eyes. “So whaddya say we talk about somethin’ else?”
“Yeah. Jaysus. Yeah,” said Aidan as he took off his cap and ran his hand through his hair.
They were quiet for a while, and then they talked of lighter things. The antics of a scrappy but entertaining boy in their school that they both remembered. The penny candy store with the nicest proprietor. The underground trolley they’d heard was to be built near where they sat, about which they had friendly disagreement. “Never gonna happen,” said Charles. “Once they start diggin’, buildings is gonna start cavin’ in nearby. Can’t be done.”
Aidan wasn’t so sure. “I bet they thought of that. Plus they’re just gonna dig under the Common. Not like they’re gonna dig right under a building. That’d be crazy,” he admitted.
They walked into the Common along one of its many crisscrossing paths. “Hey, what time is it?” asked Aidan suddenly. They found a clock on a building that said five minutes of five. “We can just make it. Let’s go. I gotta show you somethin’.”
They made their way to the edge of the Common that fronted Boylston Street. Aidan sat down on the grass facing the street. “This is what you gotta show me? I seen Boylston before,” said Charles, but he sat down.
“Ever been here this time of day?”
“I dunno. What’s so special about this time of day?”
“You’ll see. Just wait.” They watched the commotion in the street—the logjam of horse-drawn carriages, the trolley cars packed like tins of sardines, the people weaving between traffic to cross to the opposite side. Several clocks began to strike five, each competing to be heard. Less than a minute after the sound of the last bell drifted away, the music started.
“Do ya hear it?” asked Aidan, smiling.
“Yeah. Who’s playin’?”
“Look across the street.” Aidan pointed to a set of double doors that had been opened to the street. A man sat at a grand piano, playing with great flourish. “Five o’clock he starts. Tryin’ to get some mug coming home from work to buy one. Piano Row, that’s what they call these two blocks that hug the corner of the Common. There’s five different piano stores. Most of ’em advertise like this. But this one, he’s the best. Listen.”
The sweeping arpeggios of Chopin’s No. 1 in C Major, otherwise known as the “Waterfall Etude,” drifted over the trolleys and crowds and wafted onto the Common. The music was relentless, the notes traveling up and down the keys from low to high to low again, moving from major to minor to minor seventh, never pausing. The only music that Charles heard in his daily life was the occasional creaky fiddle tune seeping out of a brothel, accompanied by clapping and stomping on worn wooden floors. This piano piece bore no relation to that or anything he had heard before. The more he listened, the more the street noise fell away, until he was so focused that he could have been sitting in a room alone with the piano player. When the music ended, he felt a little wilting in his chest, as if he had dropped a Morgan dollar in the harbor, never to see it again.
Charles looked over at Aidan, who looked as content as a cat after polishing off a saucer of cream. The Public Garden, Piano Row. He could see it now, why it was hard for Aidan down on North Street. Aidan’s Boston wasn’t anything like his.