World Enough and Time Ch. 01

The following story was suggested to me by a reader, whose invaluable assistance in my rendering it to the printed page has been much appreciated. The story is dedicated to that reader. This is Part One of a three-party story.

*

We are all products of the places that we live. And assuming that's true -- and I believe it with every fiber of my being -- then perhaps no places are as important as the places where we grew up -- the farms, villages, towns, and cities that forged us into the people that we've become.

Whether you loved those places or struggled to endure each and every second of your life there, they are a part of you, are in your DNA, just as much as the chromosomes you inherited from your parents, grandparents, and all of your antecedents.

For me, where I came from and where I am today are one and the same place -- okay, maybe they're a few miles apart, and there is no question, as close together as they are, they are strikingly dissimilar. But as different as they are, the distinction between them is lost on me. I'm from Boston -- enough said.

Boston has changed a lot from the time I was born until today, but I think it was in the 1960s and 1970s when it changed the most. I sometimes wonder whether the story I'm about to tell would have turned out differently if it had happened at some other time or in some other place. Jesus, that was a stupid thing to say! Of course it would have turned out differently, though how differently I do not know.

What I do know is that Boston has an insular quality to it -- a lot of big cities are that way -- and because of that, I don't think that it was big enough for Ruth DeStephano and me, at least not big enough at that time. Let me clarify that. It's not that Boston was small by any measure, but it was so big that a lot of its residents looked inward, rather than outward. They just didn't seem to care about what went on in a lot of other places, but rather only seemed interested in their own people and neighborhoods, and so, a kind of tribalism existed in the city.

The largest among these tribes were the Irish who lived throughout the city -- in South Boston, Dorchester, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, Roslindale, and Jamaica Plain. Italians comprised another major group and resided primarily in the North End and East Boston. Blacks occupied Roxbury, and pockets of Dorchester and Mattapan, which they shared with Jews. The descendants of old "Yankee" wealth -- the Boston Brahmin, as they are sometimes called -- were confined mostly to expensive brownstones on Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay, and the exclusive Beacon Hill area, which ironically was where I was living. And then, of course, there were the suburbs, where people of all kinds went to escape everyone else.

And because of those tribes and their tribal interests, Boston seemed confined -- not just to the current affairs or preoccupations of people at the time, but to rigid social norms, mores, and ways of life that made, what was otherwise a progressive place, feel almost backwards at times. Perhaps no time in Boston history felt more backwards than 1976.

If my story had happened in the summer of 1986 or the summer of 1996, or any other time after that summer of 1976 when it did happen, maybe we would have made it. I guess I'll never know. But I think about that question fairly often. I wonder if Ruth does, too.

I don't remember exactly what I was thinking the first moment I saw her. It was a really crazy day, especially for a Monday afternoon. There was just too much going on, and somehow, someway, it all seemed to involve me, either directly or indirectly. It had been more than eleven years since the Massachusetts General Court passed the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, which led to the court ruling that ignited all of the tensions.

At that time, I was in boot camp in Fort Hood, Texas, and what was happening to the people back in my old hood and elsewhere in Boston was the least of my concerns. I was more consumed with what was about to happen to me.

Though in all likelihood the decision had not yet officially been made, everybody in my platoon knew what was coming. At the very least, we were all about to enjoy a yearlong vacation in a beautiful and exotic destination in Southeast Asia -- a little place called Vietnam.

For most of us, that "vacation" lasted longer than that year, unless, of course, you earned your way home earlier in a nice, walnut box. More than 50% of the boys I was bunking with were poor and black, just like me, while another 40% were white rural poor, urban working class kids, or Hispanic guys from Texas or California, and there was little doubt that we all represented the best cannon fodder America had to offer to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. We were going all right; some of us, if we were lucky, might even be coming back.

I guess when it came to being poor and black, I didn't really measure up to most of the rest of the brothers in my platoon. Though, like a lot of my fellow Army infantrymen who grew up in places like Nicetown-Tioga in Philly, Harlem, parts of the Bronx, the South Side of Chicago, or Watts, or dozens of other ghettos across the land, I had grown up on the mean streets of Roxbury, the Boston version of those other places.

But when Uncle Sam came calling, pointing his boney finger in my face and saying "I Want You," I had already managed to complete almost 90 credits of coursework at Northeastern while working full-time as a garbage collector to pay my way there. That distinction -- my education, along with my age (I was almost 25 at the time) -- clearly set me apart from most of my fellow black soldiers. Those two things may even have helped to keep me alive.

There was another difference, and it started long before I got to Northeastern -- my parents. They were like most of the adults in Roxbury, in that they didn't have the wherewithal to give me what I needed, but they would have given me anything if they could have -- and at least among the other brothers that I knew back in the old hood, that made me a hell of a lot luckier.

The one thing that they insisted upon in return was me getting an education. At first, I didn't listen -- was more interested in playing sports than in schoolwork, but then I lost them both -- in a car accident, a few days after my 19 birthday -- and that's when I grew up -- decided I owed them both what they wanted for and expected of me, and that's how I wound up at Northeastern.

But that was a long time ago and, it seemed, a world apart. Of course, Vietnam was a world apart, literally. But now, some of the chaos and craziness of 'Nam seemed to have migrated to Boston, and despite the fact that I wasn't the same poor, black kid from Roxbury that I had been back in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, I was involved in the shit that was going down in Southie and some other neighborhoods of Boston, whether I liked it or not.

That day in early April, my mentor and friend, a distinguished black attorney and college professor who had worked tirelessly on Civil Rights issues that were rocking Boston at the time, had been attacked with, get this, an American flag!

Theodore Landsmark was walking to City Hall downtown and was late for a meeting when he took a short cut, turned down the wrong street, and found himself in the middle of a protest against the court-ordered busing of white students in the Boston Public School System that had already ignited two years of sometimes violent clashes between white protestors and police or integration activists. Those protests would last for another two or three years, though that day -- April 5, 1976 -- was one of the more violent ones during the whole sordid mess and may have represented its turning point.

Ted had been one of the first people I met when I was accepted to law school. He was an adjunct professor who only taught one class at BU, but since there weren't very many black law students at the university at the time, he sought out two other young, black guys and me, so as to encourage and mentor us during those challenging years. I doubt that I would have made it through the gauntlet of law school without him.

I had just gotten the call. One of Ted's colleagues at his firm had wanted to let me know, not so much to inform me that my friend was in the hospital, but, in essence, to warn me that, were I not careful, the same fate could befall me. Ted had been bloodied, his nose and glasses broken, but he would be okay. Still, if the person that had attacked him was angry enough to have done so, he or somebody else was angry enough to do it again.

The irony to the whole thing was that prior to that day, Ted Landsmark had not been involved in the forced busing issue. He had nothing to do with it, though the protestor, if he had wanted to keep Ted out of things, should have left him alone. Without realizing it, he had unleashed a tiger.

It was just bad luck that Ted had inadvertently run into a group of protestors that morning. Maybe the guy recognized him as an advocate for Civil Rights causes or maybe all he recognized was the color of his skin and the three-piece suit that concealed much of it, and those two incongruous images cemented him as some kind of "uppity black man."

But the young man, carrying a flag on a pole with scary, pointed, ornamental eagle's wings projecting from the fly end, had swung it upside his head, breaking his nose and knocking him unceremoniously to the cobblestone street. In defense of some of the protestors, if it had not been for one or more of them who dragged him to his feet and got between him and the flag-wielding crazy man who was swinging the pole at his head, Ted could have been much more seriously hurt, maybe killed.

The next day a photojournalist, who happened to be downtown covering the protest that morning, published a photograph of the attack on Ted in the Boston Herald American, a picture that was captioned, quite inflammatorily, The Soiling of Old Glory.

That caption and the photograph itself were a bit misleading. The photo appeared to show the attacker, a white teenager by the name of Joseph Rakes, just as he was about to skewer Ted with the end of his flag pole, while another unidentified protestor held Ted's arms behind his back.

The truth was, as I alluded to previously, the unidentified man was actually helping Ted to his feet after Rakes had already hit him in the head with the end of the pole, and along with a couple of other protestors, he had protected him from Mr. Rakes' further wrath. In addition, Rakes never tried to stab Ted with the pole; he only swung it at him, a distinction that probably only matters to attorneys like myself.

Apparently, it didn't matter to most people who saw that picture, and so that's not the way the whole story was understood, and the publishing of the photograph proved to be a watershed moment in the forced busing protests by turning public opinion against the protestors, who were now painted as bloodthirsty racists.

Some, people like Rakes himself, probably were precisely that, but a lot were not, and as much as I found myself on the other side of the busing debate, I have to admit, I understood the protestors' anger.

The greatest number of white, high school kids that were forced to transfer to a "black school" had been shipped from South Boston High School to Roxbury High School, and coincidentally, approximately the same number of black students from Roxbury was sent to "Southie High."

As a "distinguished" alumnus of Roxbury High (I use the term facetiously), I was well aware of how bad a school it actually was, and if I was white, I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to go there. Hell, I was black, and I didn't want to go there!

On the other hand, if I had been sent to South Boston High School, which was probably every bit as bad a school as Roxbury, I would have been equally upset. I guess I understood the anger on both sides of the debacle, but the bottom line was that a judge had made a decision and so a good many of both the black and white citizenry of Boston -- those that couldn't afford to send their children to private schools -- were going to pay the price, whether they liked it or not.

Ted's colleague had surmised -- probably with good reason -- that I could be next, even though I wasn't involved in the forced busing mess either. But I had been working on housing discrimination cases, and since there were three or four of those that had already gone to or were about to go to court, I was as much a symbol of "uppity black rage" as Ted was. In fact, I was ten times worse. I was scarier looking -- a lot scarier looking than Ted.

All of this makes her appearance at my downtown law office that afternoon that much more astounding. It was true that my office handled a lot of legal issues related to real and business estates and housing issues related to them, but not many of those involved the sale of companies. Most of my clients at the time were black people, and let's face it, not many blacks in Boston in 1976 owned their own businesses. Besides, she was clearly solidly upper middle class, slightly older than I, and, most significantly, white. Why had she picked me out to help her?

Months later, once we were together and had come to be more relaxed around each other, she told me that she didn't even know that I was black when she found my name in the list of Boston Property and Real Estate attorneys in The Yellow Pages. She also said that she didn't care -- that she judged people not "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." It only took her a few minutes, she said, to learn to trust me.

But on that April afternoon, having her own history as a born and bred daughter of one of mid-century Boston's plethora of Irish, Catholic families, she thought she had found an attorney of Irish descent when she arrived at the Beacon Street entrance of The Law Offices of Marcus Murray -- that would be me.

But if my name was deceptive, so was hers. "Ruth DeStephano" didn't sound Irish any more than I looked it. And even more than that, she lived in Brookline, far enough out that it didn't make any sense for her to come looking for an attorney in the city.

But apparently, there was a method to her madness in that, too. Of her husband's holdings, a handful of "shoe warehouses," the main branch was on Washington Street, less than a half a mile away from my office in Beacon Hill.

He'd died -- that was the main gist of her story -- and though that had happened almost a full year before, she had waited, out of respect I gathered, to do something with his businesses. She didn't feel as if she was qualified to run the stores, and she had relied in the meantime on an exceptionally gifted and trustworthy manager at the downtown location and the charity of some Brookline neighbors and friends who ran their own businesses and felt sorry for a young widow. All of them joined together to take care of things for her during those intervening months.

Joseph DeStephano had died of a massive heart attack. He was in his mid-40s at the time, and so his death had come as a tremendous shock, not just to her, but to his entire family. In consequence, everyone was ill-prepared for his loss, especially her.

She mentioned that she and her husband had a son who was now 10 years old, and that, beyond her ignorance of business in general and her belief that she was ill-equipped to run her husband's stores, she felt that her first priority was Tommy. As a 41-year-old mother, she simply didn't have the time or the motivation to begin to learn how to run her dead husband's little shoe empire. She wanted to sell, but didn't know anything about how to go about doing that either.

But when my secretary ushered her back to my office that afternoon to ask me for my assistance in selling a chain of shoe stores, I wasn't instantly drawn to her as you might think that I would have been, considering that she was a woman that would soon become a really important part of my life, at least throughout that upcoming summer.

I guess it took a little while, because I don't think that I really began to absorb Ruth's charms, as obvious as they were, until after we had been talking for a half an hour or so. I was distracted by the crazy day. But when I started to take notice of her physical appearance, I liked what I saw, and the better I got to know her, and she me, the more we liked each other.

She was short, much shorter than I am, and considering my prodigious weight, skin color, and overall appearance, I may have perceived her as even shorter than she really was when, a few minutes later, I caught my first glimpse of us in a mirror in the hallway standing side by side just as we were about to exit my office. I later found out that she stood 5'3" tall, which, I suppose, was not much smaller than the average woman her age.

She had deep auburn hair, hazel eyes, and porcelain skin. And she was buxom, though not flamboyantly so. Instead, on that day, at least, she carried her curvaceous figure in a dignified, almost demure manner. She was dressed stylishly, but modestly so, perhaps in an effort not to call attention to herself.

In short, she was a lovely creature. But she was white, and I was black, and considering the state of affairs in Boston at that very moment, she and I were certainly not destined for a storybook romance. Had we met where and when there would have been world enough and time to nurture the feelings that we had for each other, I'm certain things would have turned out differently.

"Do you think that you will be able to help me, Mr. Murray?" Ruth asked me after the 25 minutes or so of preliminary explanations which I have just described. "And, if so, what do I need to do to secure your services?"

"Thank you for sharing your story with me, Mrs. DeStephano. I am so sorry for your loss. This past year must have been a very difficult time for you. Please know that you have my heartfelt condolences." I smiled empathetically before continuing.

"Yes, I am certain that I can help you. We simply need to define the extent of my services to you. I am certainly able to draw up a sales contract that will effectively cover all aspects of the transfer of your husband's business holdings to a buyer and, in addition, protect you from all potential liabilities, but you will need to decide if, after I do so, you want to seek out a business agent to represent you in putting the stores up for sale, much in the same way that you would hire a real estate agent to help you to sell your home." She looked at me with this incredibly sad look in her eyes, one that suggested that either she didn't like what she'd just heard or was confused by what I was saying. So, I continued in an attempt to clarify.

"If you are unsure about doing that or don't feel you want to do so, I can also represent you in that regard by contracting with a business sales agent on your behalf. Of course, if I do that, I would charge you for my time in securing that representation, and you would have to pay the agent for his or her services in addition to my own. Just like a real estate agent, they usually charge a percentage of the sale price."

Ruth reached to her forehead and covered it and her eyes with her left hand as if, at that very moment, her poor head could no longer tolerate the insufferable burden of thinking about her strange and cruel destiny -- living in a world she no longer understood nor enjoyed.

As she did so, I noticed the diamond still clinging to her ring finger, glinting in the afternoon light from my office window. Its shimmering brilliance seemed to focus a ray of light with laser-like precision directly on me as if to indicate that I was the primary cause of her suffering.