My Other Life (59 page)

T
HE MEDFORD SHIPBUILDER
Thatcher Magoun (his more famous father and namesake started the firm) gave the family mansion on Main Street to the town in 1875, two years after his last Medford ship was launched. This magnificent old house, "with all the expensive bronze gas fixtures, marble statues and vases" (as Magoun described the furnishings in his presentation letter), became the Medford Public Library.

When I was in high school, I did all my homework, all my writing, and most of my reading there. Shelves and stacks had been put up in the mansion, but the rooms were preserved; no remodel-ing, no walls torn down, no moldings removed; all the grandeur, including the fireplaces, the gas fixtures, the statues, the vases, the paintings, the French windows, the communicating doors, the window seats, the enormous columns and portico in front—it was all kept.

And it can only have been the same Magoun floor, because one of the things I remember best about the library was the sound of the floorboards, a creaking in sudden distinct phrases. A walk from the stacks to your chair, and it was usually a venerable wing chair, uttered a whole tortured statement. My own feet on the creaking floors made me anxious, because the sound of my footsteps seemed out of all proportion to my size, and I feared it called attention to my puny body and my restlessness.

The fireplaces were an agreeable feature. It was not until after I left Medford that I realized that libraries seldom had fireplaces. I had never seen fireplaces this big—they had cavernous hearth openings, with fire dogs inside, and a mantelpiece, and wood surrounds. There was a fireplace in each room and comfortable armchairs on either side of each one.

One winter afternoon in 1957 I sat with my friend George Davis at one of those fireplaces under a loudly ticking clock. George used the library for the same reasons I did—big family, busy household, no room. He was also one of my best friends. We were tenth-graders at Medford High School. We had been assigned a book report. My book was
The White Tower,
by James Ramsey Ullman—mountain climbing, and danger, and love, and even some sex.

I looked up from my writing. "What's your book, George?"

He took a long breath, and nodded, and looked into the middle distance, as though remembering.

He said, "It's about this guy, who goes to Mexico to sell cats, because," he paused, "they got mice in the village. And they call him the Cat Man. A woman there, she falls in love with him. She's like a mouse, see, and he's the cat. He cures the village of mice and they get married and, um," he laughed, "that's as far as I got."

"What's the name of it?"

He compressed his face into
Don't know.

"Is this a novel or what?"

"I think I'll call it just
The Cat Man.
"

It seemed bold and dangerous to invent a book, a title, a whole book report. I said, "Why don't you just read one?"

"What's wrong with my story?"

It was a good story. But this was such a sideways method for doing a book report. I said, "What if he asks to see the book?"

George had not thought of that. He frowned.

"Here's one you could read."

The shelf was nearby. The book was
The Scarlet Pimpernel,
by Baroness Orczy.

"You think so?"

Because he had spent so much time inventing his own story he did not have time to read
The Scarlet Pimpernel.
And so he claimed in his book report that it was a fairly boring story.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
was one of the teacher's favorite books. George got a C for his book report. He angrily showed me the mark on his paper. It was all my fault. If I had left him to use his made-up story, he would probably have earned an A.

He soon forgave me—he did not bear grudges. He was a very funny and confident person. Inventing a fascinating story rather than reading a dull one was typical of him. He seemed to get anything he wanted. He thought for himself, often saying unexpected things, and his skepticism made him seem rebellious. He had his own car; few others did. Never mind that his car was a small, misshapen vehicle, which George himself had painted purple—he had wheels. This made it possible for me to go out on a date and, double-dating with George and his girl, not be humiliated by having to take the bus. We went to jazz clubs. We were sixteen and then seventeen; we were served soft drinks while everyone else was drinking alcohol in the smoky room; we listened to Thelonious Monk and Maynard Ferguson and the Four Freshmen.

George and I were on the Medford High soccer team and track team. I was a second-stringer. George started and was a brilliant, deft, almost balletic soccer player. Few public schools offered soccer, and so we played Andover and Exeter, the exclusive private schools. We envied and hated most of those players—they were privileged, they had money. We figured their parents had gotten them into these schools to save them the embarrassment and challenge of public schools. We played Tufts freshmen and MIT freshmen. They always had foreign students, good at soccer, but even so, with George's great playing we often won. On the team bus back from one of the Andover matches we recounted with exquisite joy how one Medford player or another had kicked the ball straight into an Andover boy's face, sending him bruised and weeping off the field. But strangely one year, one of the Andover boys had been black. George, curious to see this black boy at such an affluent place, had talked with him.

I ran the 220. I was slow, I never won, I hardly ever placed. In those days, and perhaps now, no time was set aside in any practice to help someone learn a sport or even a skill. If you had it you were on the team, and if you didn't you were merely tolerated. There was no training. The emphasis on winning meant that it was a waste of any coach's time to teach technique to a poor athlete.

George had trained on his own. He wanted to run cross-country, but the coach insisted George was a sprinter and put him into the 220. George had an intensity in his running that I had seen before only in someone solving an intellectual problem; it was silence and concentrated thought and total absorption—strange, almost shocking in someone who was usually so outgoing and relaxed. It was a sort of controlled fury that had made him a superior athlete.

The passage from boyhood to adulthood was made emphatic on the sports field. An average boy who proved himself an athlete became someone to be reckoned with. George became a man, and was respected by the rest of us. I was a poor athlete—no team wanted me. George gave me advice— "Turn your foot this way," "Lean more," that sort of thing—but I knew that I was hopeless.

He was the fastest boy in the school, everyone knew that; and one of the happiest, the brightest, the most accomplished. He could sing—sometimes a small group would form in a corridor and I would hear George singing in a falsetto, "Oh, yeeahh."

Singing got George into trouble one time. And it was characteristic of George that he could get out of trouble as quickly as he got into it. The singing incident was typical. He was in a corridor with two other students, extemporizing—doo-wop was in vogue. A teacher nearby objected and, more than that, spoke crudely to the students, using abusive language. When the teacher tried to grab him, George said, "This is it," and hit back. There was a fight, and later all three students were brought to the headmaster, Henry Hormel.

Hitting a teacher was grounds for expulsion. But George's case involved the sort of paradox that compelled me to admire him. About a month earlier George had become a local hero by rescuing a boy from drowning. The boy had fallen into a water-filled hole near the excavation for Route 93, the interstate that accounted for Medford's eventual division and decline, and George had happened by and saved the boy. The rescue was an item in the
Medford Mercury
—the boy was the son of a policeman. For his bravery and quick thinking, George was to be awarded a medal. George the brawler was George the hero. Mr. Hormel expelled the other two boys and allowed George to stay in school.

George joked about his survival. He could be a clown. Studying lenses in physics, we learned the meaning of the word "concave." Turning to a huge Italian boy, George said, "Mess with me and I will concave your chest."

George and I took our girlfriends to the prom together. We both worked in the library. In spite of our different abilities, we were friends on the teams—the fall soccer, the spring field sports. I lived in North Medford, at the edge of the Fellsway, the woods. George lived near the Mystic River in West Medford, three houses from where my mother had grown up. George and my mother had gone through the same schools, thirty years apart, but the neighborhood had not changed, nor had the schools. That was another link. And my widowed grandmother still lived in George's neighborhood. I stayed with her on Friday nights when I worked late at the Stop & Shop supermarket.

At graduation, George looked dapper, as ever, and proud. He went off to a prep school and was confident of winning a full scholarship to the University of Rhode Island. I was pleased to be leaving Medford High, not realizing that I was starting what would prove a two-semester stay at the University of Maine.

After the ceremony my Italian teacher, Miss Pietrangelo, said, "I saw you and George Davis walking down the steps. You looked like you owned the world."

That was 1959. In the three long years of high school, we had never discussed or even remarked on the fact that George was black and I was white.

Thirty-two years passed. In that time I did not see George, though I often thought of him. In high school we had done everything together, and so it seemed natural to think: Where is George while I am here? I had the feeling that I would run into him, not in Medford but in the places where I lived or traveled—Uganda, Singapore, Europe, Mexico, South America. I looked for him at our twentieth high school reunion. He was not there. I never went to another one. I thought about him a great deal, because no one I had grown up with had seemed more alive, more eager for experience.

One day, out of the blue, George wrote me a letter. He said he had read some of my books and that he had thought about me over the years. He suggested we meet.
I've been on a hellified trip,
he wrote. George seldom exaggerated.

I called him that same day, and I understood that when George said that he had been on a hellified trip he did not mean a recent trip or any single journey. He meant his life since high school, all those years.

Soon after, we met at his house—the old family house on Jerome Street in West Medford, where we had met on high school afternoons and weekends. George was back home. He even looked his old self. Apart from his hair, which was profoundly white and as dense as a ball of cotton—the startling whiteness that comes from the shock of experience rather than age—he was exactly as he had been in high school. The same smile, the same weight, the same build, the slightness so deceiving, because he was an athlete, a whip. He had begun running cross-country again, two miles around the Tufts track.

He said, "I'm training for a seniors' meet in January."

"You look the same," I said.

"That's good and that's bad," he said, and hardly parting his lips to laugh, a
heh-heh
scraping deep in his throat, the George Davis laugh.

We went up the road and found a spot under the trees on the rocky shore of the Upper Mystic Lake and talked.

After graduation from Medford High, while I passed a futile year in Orono, Maine, George attended Huntington Prep in Boston. The next year I switched to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst—it cost $100 a semester—and George won a full scholarship to the University of Rhode Island, a track scholarship. There were seven black men in the university, hardly enough to form a fraternity. George was rushed by Tau Epsilon Pi and considered joining.

This mainly Jewish fraternity employed two black women who cooked and cleaned the frat house. George was insulted by the way the fraternity brothers treated the older women with casual rudeness, or demeaned them in an offhand way when their backs were turned. Actively offensive, they seemed oblivious of the fact that George was black—or perhaps they didn't care? George got to know the women. They were sisters whose roots in Providence went back to before the Civil War, when their families had been smuggled north by abolitionists on the Underground Railroad.

These sisters, unknown to the members of this fraternity—who had clearly not inquired—were also members of the Nation of Islam. They were scrupulous in their dress and their demeanor. They studied the Koran. They observed the Muslim diet. George moved in with them as a lodger and discovered them to be energetic proselytizers. They told him about Elijah Muhammad; they preached to him the doctrine that whites cannot offer salvation to blacks, that blacks have to find their own way. George was fascinated, but he was uncomfortable at the university.

One day as a freshman runner at Rhode Island, George ran past the track coach, who urged him to pick up speed and, comparing his times with another teammate's, said, "Come on, George, you can run faster than that Jew."

Afterwards, George began pacing. "When I get really agitated I walk." He spent hours pondering the coach's remark. His first thought was, "If he said that to me, what's he saying to the guy behind me?" The man behind him was white.

"Something in me broke that day—confidence in the school, in the team, in the coach. Field sports are great for having no rah-rah. Everyone's running for himself and interested in what the other guys are doing. There's real spirit in running." He guessed what was being said behind his back in Rhode Island. And he felt lost in the sea of white students. "I knew I had to go."

He quit and went home, back to Medford, and applied for jobs through an employment agency. While George sat in front of the desk at the agency, the middle-aged white clerk made a phone call to a Boston bank.

The clerk said, "I have a Negro here." There was a pause. Then the clerk added, "He is not hard to look at."