The City Below (6 page)

Much as he'd wished otherwise, his thoughts on the interminable ride from Charlestown that first morning had kept returning to the world he did know. As he'd left the house, Nick had wished him luck. Gramps had pinned one of the famous lapel shamrocks on his new corduroy sport jacket. And his mother had put a special sack lunch in his hands and kissed him. But he was sure they'd exchanged glances behind his back as he'd adjusted the clover flower on his coat and tugged his necktie into place.

In the reflection of the streetcar window Terry had played over and over vivid scenes of his life in Charlestown. All summer the thought of this first day of college had filled him with eagerness, but what he kept seeing now in the mirror of the streetcar window had undercut his every pulse of happiness. The flower store with his red-nosed, nip-sucking grandfather, the attic room with his brother, the rooms above the store with their shelves full of pill bottles and Madonna vases, their pictures of Curley, Cushing, and Pius XII—these were the places he belonged. What was he doing going off to college? Who did he think—in die masterpiece kneecapping question of his kind—yes, who did he think he was? One night Nick had laughed and said Terry's feelings were only fitting, since surely he'd been kidnapped in infancy by tinkers and sold to the peasants at the Kerry Bouquet That not even Nick understood his feelings had been the real surprise.

By the time he hopped off the streetcar opposite the entrance to BC, he felt hung over. He hadn't noticed them until now, but six or seven other guys got off too and headed toward the campus. They were as gangly and awkward as he was, with fresh haircuts that made their ears stand out dangerously. At Charlestown High, ears like that would get snapped from behind. All the boys wore new shoes and an air of timid isolation, but to Terry Doyle they seemed supremely at ease, upperclassmen probably.

None was carrying a brown paper lunch sack, and that stopped him just as he was about to trail across the street Without consciously making a decision, but also fully aware of the meaning of the deed, he turned back abruptly to the streetcar platform and went directly to the green trash barrel into which commuters stuffed stale newspapers. He pushed the bag his mother had given him deep into the newspapers, appalled at himself yet knowing he had no choice. Just as automatically, he pulled the shamrock off his coat and stuffed it in after the bag.

The demands stern Jesuits made on him that morning purged him not only of his morose self-doubt but of all feeling. "No salvation," he imagined them thundering, "outside of class!" In a welcome state of numb compliance, he went from intimidating orientation sessions in a succession of classrooms to the slow, snaking lines of course registration in the big gym. Even his ability to be impressed by the turreted campus was dulled when a warm, late summer drizzle began to fall. The rain made the figures passing each other in the quads slouch into themselves, yet Terry had concluded that not even his fellow freshmen were as lost in this new world as he was.

When he had finally accumulated all seven of his class-admit cards, he went to Lyons Hall where a temporary bookstore had been set up at one end of the large cafeteria. He bought his textbooks and terraced them under his left arm the way other guys were doing. His heart sank as he prepared to go back out in the rain. His books would be ruined before he got home. None of these other fellows had even looked at him. Nobody had said so much as hi. He felt lonelier and more displaced than he ever had—was this possible?—in the Town. This whole thing was a mistake.

But then Terry saw the tables against one wall of a congested corridor outside the cafeteria, each with a knot of guys clustered at it, each table, he saw then, with signs and barkers. Campus organizations were working to draw recruits,
ROTC
, he read,
GOLD KEY SOCIETY, THE HEIGHTS
. Terry walked slowly into the bustle, afraid that the disappointment that had so dogged him was evident. What would these eager, laughing upperclassmen make of him? He dreaded being branded.

Then he saw it, a card table with a felt banner skirting its front edge reading
YOUNG DEMOCRATS
. Above the table a professionally lettered cardboard sign running vertically on a pole, like a delegation banner at a political convention, displayed the one shimmering word, blue caps against white. Not
IOWA
but
KENNEDY.

Doyle pushed through the ebullient throng to that table, but when he got there his point of reference changed entirely. The student standing by the table, clipboard in hand, waiting to sign him up, was a Negro. He was taller even than Terry, and much thinner. He wore the uniform chinos and blue oxford cloth button-down, but the deep brown skin of his hands and face set him absolutely apart from the others. He was the first Negro Terry had seen at BC that day. His eyes were big and round, and the whites of his eyes looked like glass, and set against that skin his teeth seemed made of china. Doyle had never seen such a smile on a man.

"Why don't you take a picture? It'll last longer."

Terry had not realized he was staring.

"I'm Bright McKay." The young black put his hand out.

Terry took it.

"What's your name?"

"Terry Doyle."

"Hi, Terry. I'm a sophomore here, history major. Can I talk to you about Jack Kennedy? I think he's your kind of guy."

"Yeah," Doyle said. "Yeah, you can."

McKay's bony wrists and hands protruded from his sleeves like sticks, and it was easy to picture him on
The Ed Sullivan Show
with Harry Belafonte, singing the "Banana Boat" song. His cheeks were hollow, and his nubby hair was cut close to his scalp. A barber's clipper had furrowed a part on the left side of his head.

As McKay rattled off his spiel—"a chance for our future ... our time has come"—Doyle backed away, feeling as if he'd answered the door to a magazine salesman.
Jet,
he thought
Ebony.
"A turning point in history," McKay was saying, "when our country turns to us and we provide the leaders—" Suddenly he stopped. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Terry answered, but he knew he was blushing.

"You look confused."

"You said, We're the leaders now.'"

"Yeah, that's the point."

Doyle sensed McKay's mystification, but hadn't a clue how to explain himself, that "we're the leaders now" meant, in his world, the Irish, the Catholics.

"Wait a sec." McKay leaned in on him with eyes digging. "Wait a sweet goddamn see You think I'm talking N double-A C P. You think I mean 'we' as in 'We Shall Overcome.'"

"No I don't"

McKay laughed. He sat back against the edge of his table, hugging his clipboard. "Terry, my man. Terry ... Terry ... Terry. 'We' as in 'You and me, brother.' As in 'Young men shall dream dreams.' As in 'Our time has come!' People like us, people our age ..."

A door burst open in Doyle's mind. For the first time in his life he was being invited to think of himself as belonging to a group that was not his nationality or his race or his religion. He and this colored guy were "youth."

McKay had read his mind, and Doyle wanted to ask, How do you do that?

But McKay had resumed his spiel. "America under Ike has gone soft because there is no vision, and where there is no vision, the people perish ..."

As Terry listened, he was struck by the fact that the kid's accent was nothing like what it should have been. Belafonte: there
was
a lyrical curl in Bright McKay's voice that made him sound almost as if he were singing, and all the time he spoke, his smile never quite left his face. McKay repeatedly referred to the candidate as "Jack Kennedy," with such an air of familiarity that, at one point, Terry almost interrupted to ask, Do you know him?

Where did you learn to talk like that?

Even before McKay had finished, Terry Doyle had admitted to himself how drawn he was to him.

"Any questions?" McKay said finally.

"Yes, one," Doyle answered with a jauntiness unusual for him. "Where do I sign up?"

McKay's grin grew, if anything, wider. He held his clipboard steadily in front of Doyle. "Right here, my good man. Right here."

Aware of the relief he felt—landfall! Kennedy! And was this a friend?—Terry Doyle wrote his name as if that were what he'd come all this way to do.

***

Kennedy headquarters were on Tremont Street just down from the Parker House. Three afternoons a week that fall Terry Doyle interrupted his streetcar commute back to Charlestown to stop there and work. A cigarette between his fingers, his cord sportcoat flung over his shoulder, his tie loosened, Doyle put a picture in his mind, as he arrived, of young Jimmy Stewart. His personality had never seemed so vibrant. His status as a college student, entirely involved by day with people who had not known him before, gave him license to reinvent himself, and that's what he was trying to do. Often he arrived at the campaign in the company of other guys from BC, and they all instinctively adopted the manner of candidates, slapping shoulders, cracking jokes, aggressively inviting other workers to like them. That one of the BC guys, a leader of the group, was a Negro made Terry's experience of his new situation all the more exotic.

The other campaign volunteers were mostly older people, retirees and housewives, middle-aged hooky-playing city workers, men in sleeveless sweaters and women wearing little hats like Jackie Kennedy's, or eyeglasses shaped like cat's eyes with rhinestones at the corners. They waved at the friendly college kids, youthful examples of the jaunty American masculinity of which Kennedy himself was the beau ideal. What a relief for Terry, a secret relief, to be out from under the low, dark ceiling—pallium—of his mother's wish for him. Down here he was no longer an apprentice priest He could live without the good opinion of the nuns. He could be virtuous—the cause of freedom!—without being pious. And he could look at girls, want them, have one.

The Young Democrats were pulled together from several area colleges, and had their own section of phone banks and Ditto machines in the far rear of the huge open space on the first floor of headquarters. Warrens of campaign offices filled the floors above, but those were staffed with the pros who ran the whole country. Kennedy's brothers and sisters, Larry O'Brien, Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, Kenny O'Donnell—word was they all had offices upstairs, though no one ever saw them; they were always on the road. The volunteers' domain was this room the size of a roller rink. As Terry Doyle, Bright McKay, and three other eagles crossed it one day in October, they rattled off their greetings.

Terry stopped once to snuff his cigarette out in an ashtray. Except for McKay, the others kept going. The blue-haired woman at one of the desks grinned up at Terry. "That's a nice crop of daisies," she said. She had a pleasing Irish accent like his mother's, and was about her age.

"Daisies?"

"Freckles."

"Thanks, dear," Doyle answered. He liked the woman, but he felt his skin heating up.

"You know what freckles are, don't you?"

"No." He squinted at her through the smoke of his last drag. He had not come this far in life to have attention drawn to his freckles. One summer he had applied Man Tan to his face every day for most of a month to blot the damn things out His mother had said he looked like a coal miner. He hadn't stopped until his brother began calling him Smoke.

"Angel kisses," she said. "Every freckle is a place where an angel kissed you."

Bright McKay had been hanging back, but now he pushed himself between them, opening his hands, ta-da! "Well, look what them angels done to me!"

The woman's face froze, and Terry did not need to wonder why. He took McKay by the arm and waved at her while pulling him away. "You're the angel, sweetheart. See you later." Then, when they were several desks away, he said to McKay, "And they call you Bright?"

McKay took his arm back and stopped, halting Doyle too. He channeled his reaction into an arch pompousness. "My name is not a comment on my mental acuity, Terence. As an alternative to Neville, I accept it." He smiled impishly. "Neville McKay. How 'bout that flag? I'll take Bright any day. In our part of town it means light-skinned, as in mulatto."

"But that's ridiculous. You're so ..."

"Black? You can say it" He was speaking a little loudly, as if he wanted the biddies to hear him. "It's a joke, Terence, a joke of opposites, like calling Fats Waller Sprat. My skin was always this black. One huge freckle from Ghana. A less ironic people would have called me Shine."

"Shit, Bright, I'm sorry if she—"

"Some brogue, that lady. A voice like that is a colored man's warning bell."

"Relax. My mother has a voice like that Take it from me, she'd hate the British a lot sooner than she'd hate you."

"Then I'm in double trouble. She probably sensed it that my father still sings 'God Save the Queen.'"

"What?"

"My guv is British," McKay said with a sharp new accent.

Doyle stared at him.

McKay burst out laughing, slapped Doyle's shoulder. "Yowsah, Mis-tah Da'll. Camptown races, do-da-day!" McKay did one quick hoedown dance step, then shifted completely to draw himself up like a butler, snapping his words off. "And, my good sir, you are of the conventional conviction that all British subjects are of the Caucasian persuasion."

"No, no. I'm not."

"I can read your mind," McKay said simply.

And once again it seemed to Doyle that he had. Could he read feelings too? This confusion? This distress at having said something wrong? But what? Some insult? Why was McKay angry?

"My father comes from Barbados." McKay smiled with sudden warmth. "My mom is from cotton country, but they met here. I'm Boston through and through, Terence. Same as you."

"You think you've got yourself a thick mick here, don't you? Puncturing his neat assumptions." Doyle was aware that he could have said this bitterly, but bitterness was not remotely what he felt.

McKay shrugged. The bustling room around them had fallen away. "I hadn't expected that this would necessarily happen. But it had to if we were going to be friends."