The City Below Read online

  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."

  "What do you mean 'going to be,' asshole?" Terry deflected the uncool impulse to express affection. "You've got some neat assumptions of your own."

  "Like what?"

  Doyle tossed his head toward the blue-haired lady and the other busy middle-aged Irish volunteers. "That they were all Joe McCarthy's people. Since Nixon was too, that they should be with him. That they're only here because Kennedy is Irish Catholic."

  McKay showed those teeth of his again. "But that's true, isn't it?"

  They laughed. Hell, maybe it was true. But Terry wanted to repeat himself. These are good people, he wanted to say. They don't know you, that's all. I love these people.

  McKay put his arm around Doyle's shoulder. Terry was aware of Blight's hand falling across his sweater as they started across the floor again. He was aware of the volunteers watching them now.

  "And I've got other surprises for you," McKay said.

  "No you don't. Your father's a Brit? Nothing could surprise me more than that."

  McKay said, "He's a priest."

  Doyle stopped, sliding out from under his friend's arm. McKay continued for another step and a half, then froze with his leg in midair, a bit of slapstick.

  "What?"

  McKay swiveled around. "An Anglican priest, man. Ever hear of St Cyprian's?"

  Terry shook his head. There was a lot he'd never heard of.

  "On this same street, Tremont Street, out across Mass. Ave., in the Berry. You've heard of the Berry?"

  Doyle did not react.

  "Roxbury, Terence. St Cyp's is the Turkish parish."

  "Turkish?"

  "West Indian. My dad is the rector."

  "He's a minister?"

  "A priest Just like the priests at BC. Mass every morning. Chasuble, alb, transubstantiation."

  "But he's got a kid, so we're talking Protestant, right?"

  "Christ, if my father ever heard you say that As if he were Baptist, as if he were fucking Methodist! St Cyprian's Episcopal Church. Not AME! C of E!"

  "Okay, all right." Terry put his hands up, surrendering the point. But only because it had been made: Episcopal was Protestant. "Now I see why you're excused from theology class at school. Because you're Episcopal."

  "Episcopalian, actually. And yes, that's why I draw a bye. But"—McKay raised his hands now too, calling this game off, this one on one, this keep away—"the truth is, unlike my father, I am not a Christian, period." He leaned in, and Doyle could smell his cologne, spicy and sweet. "Don't tell my old man when you come home with me for Sunday dinner—you will come home with me, won't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't tell him or Mom either, but I'm an atheist."

  The stark expression on McKay's face hit Terry, the dead earnestness at last He understood that there was more integrity in that statement, more virtue, than in all the easy, countless credos he himself had made. He answered quietly, "I'm not an atheist, Bright. But I have my version of the same thing. I am supposed to be a priest And I mean priest! I am the elder son. It's the landless Irish version of primogeniture. They still expect it of me."

  "Shit, man, and you want no part of it."

  "Right."

  "Don't blame you. Who in hell could blame you? Tell you what." He slugged Terry's shoulder. "Stick with me. I'll teach you a thing or two."

  McKay turned and strode back toward the Young Dems' corner. He glanced back and said, "Come on."

  But Doyle did not move. For a moment he just stood there watching McKay and thinking, You already have, you bastard. You already have.

  ***

  On another afternoon he stood inside the front door for a moment, just in from Tremont Street, having come down from BC alone. The room had been enlarged by the removal of walls and false ceilings, and it sprawled from the front of the building to the back. Light bulbs hanging in factorylike tin cones made a checkerboard of light and shadow. There were dozens of card tables, metal desks, folding chairs, and wooden benches, most piled high with cartons to be opened, sheets of paper to be folded into flyers, envelopes to be stuffed and addressed. Doyle watched the workers checking off names, moistening wads of envelope flaps on sponges, dialing telephones—all brimming with the edgy happiness of former athletes. In Boston politics, volunteers could be pros too.

  Not only the lift of the campaign lightened Doyle's step as he crossed the spirited room. One of the things that had heightened his interest in the far back corner where the college kids worked was the fact that, as the weeks had passed and the momentum picked up, more and more of the Young Dems were girls. "Young Debs" was what McKay called them. They came from local women's colleges, Regis, Emmanuel, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Wheaton. They were suburban extroverts, flirtatious and surprisingly sexy in their blazers and pleated skirts. They seemed completely free of the feeling of displacement that he took for granted in himself and had sensed in the girls he'd known in Charlestown. In their double-your-pleasure levity, in their twin-sweater sets and penny loafers and pageboy hairdos, it was easy to picture the neatly trimmed lawns in front of their family houses—barbecues and patios out back—in white-collar Forest Hills, Roslindale,
and even Wellesley and Winchester. What an anti-Xanadu the pinched, tavern-ridden milieu to which he returned at night would be to them. Much was made in the Town of Kennedy's having started out there, but the truth was he'd never had anything to do with the place. Some of these girls, on the other hand, were daughters of men who knew Kennedy. They were English majors, or history or poli sci or even economics majors. They were smart They talked of going to Washington when Kennedy won. They talked of working for him after graduation. The Kennedy girls gave no indication they thought the world was made for anyone but them.

  But there was one thing the debs couldn't do so well, which was use a typewriter. That afternoon's crisis in the Young Dems' comer was about typing.

  While Doyle draped his sportcoat over the back of his chair, he listened as the team captain cruelly berated a girl, waving a page of typescript in her face. He was Ed Lake, a Harvard senior whose blond hair fell across his forehead. "Where'd you learn to type, Ginger? At Disneyland?" he shrieked. "Or was it a home for retards? You have a dozen erasure scars on here, and they're a mess." Lake swung around to his audience of eight or ten Young Dems. "This letter is going to fifty college deans! It asks to get our people excused from school for the last push. It has to go out tonight, and it has to be perfect! Can't anybody here use a goddamn typewriter?"

  "If perfection is what you want, why don't you do it yourself then, Ed?" one of the other girls said.

  Terry liked her guts, and he looked for her eye. When he got it, he winked, Good for you. But the girl looked at him as if one of them were dead.

  The typist was crying softly in front of Lake. It's fun, making girls cry. Lake made a show of collecting himself, taking a deep breath, boosting his shoulders, bunching up the letter, and tossing it in the wastebasket.

  Terry felt he was watching a performance in a war movie, an officer confronted with a case of shell shock. A British officer.

  Lake turned away from the girl and said calmly, all leadership now, "Seriously, folks. We need this typed. We can't send out a generalized mimeo. These are deans. We need the letter typed fifty times, each one separately, before Ken O'Donnell leaves tonight, so he can sign them."