Charles McGrath
WERE MY MOTHER still alive, she would probably insist that she was not a Bostonian but a Brooklinian, or whatever you call someone born in Brookline, which she considered the grander address. But when she married my father, she moved into the house where he was born, in Brighton, and except for occasional nervous visits to Connecticut, where my brother and I both went to college, they seldom ventured beyond the Boston city limits. For them, and for many people of their generation, Beantown really was the Hub of the Universe. New York, where I moved in the early seventies, was just a distant rumor—a place Bostonians went only if they were lucky enough to have tickets to The Ed Sullivan Show or had some strange need to visit the top of the Empire State Building. (The Hancock Tower hadn’t gone up yet, and when it did, a few years later, and the windows started popping out, it confirmed—for my father, anyway—the folly of erecting tall buildings in the first place.)
Before I moved away, my mother took me aside and said, “I want you to promise me one thing. I want you to promise you will never root for the Yankees.” I never have. Nor have I ever said a single kind thing about the Knicks, the Rangers, or the Giants. (I do have a soft spot for the Mets, and I think my mother might have forgiven that.) But I have been pretty faithless to another promise I made: that I would come back and visit often. I seldom did even when my parents were alive, and now I rarely do, even though I still have family there and even though I spend much of the summer these days in a seaside town that is only an hour or so away.
Partly this is just laziness, and partly it’s that my Boston, the Boston of my childhood, isn’t really there anymore. The city is now cleaner, safer, more prosperous and cosmopolitan. It’s an altogether superior place. But it’s not the Boston I remember. You can walk for blocks now, even in neighborhoods like Charlestown and the North End, without hearing an authentic native speaker. (To hear the pure, R-less dialect now, and to keep my own accent in tune, so to speak, so I can turn it on at will, I listen a lot to the sports-radio channel WEEI, whose callers tend to be masters of traditional Boston speech.) Southie has been gentrified, and so has the South End, once a grim and foreboding no man’s land. The only reason you’d be afraid to walk around there now is that your clothes aren’t fashionable enough and you don’t own a pair of designer dogs. And where is the Combat Zone? I tried to find it a couple of years ago, remembering teenage evenings there of thrillingly illicit beer-drinking and gaping at strippers, and found that it had shrunk almost to nothing—to a single bar, as far as I could make out, with a doorman extracting an exorbitant cover charge.
Riding the T these days, and the Red Line especially, you sometimes get the feeling that the city has been taken over by interlopers, people in sandals or Birkenstocks who read the Economist instead of the Herald. I was briefly reassured two summers ago when I happened to be visiting a sick friend at Mass. General on the day of the Bruins’ Stanley Cup parade. Because I knew that driving around the city would be impossible, I left my car in Quincy that morning and took the T into town. The train was already packed with fans when I got on, and more got on at every stop, most of them wearing Bruins gear and many with the broad, toothy Irish smiles that used to be such a Boston trademark. In Dorchester, well before noon, a woman my age got on. She was wearing an ancient Bruins jersey—I’d like to imagine it was Bronco Horvath’s—and she was blissfully, unashamedly shitfaced. Now here are the real T passengers, I thought, but in fact that day was clearly an exception, and most of my fellow riders were probably like me: people from out of town—or from the suburbs, anyway—just trying to beat the traffic.
The Boston of my youth was a city of neighborhoods, clannish, suspicious, and a little territorial. People were neighborly—up to a point—but also fiercely protective of their turf. My father, normally the shyest and mildest of men, was driven to stuttering rages by people who allowed their dogs to pee on a little patch of ground in front of our house on which for decades he tried, and failed, to grow something resembling a lawn. And one winter he got into a shoving match, a near fistfight, with a man we called One Lung. One Lung—I guess nowadays you’d call him a cancer survivor, but we were crueler then—lived next door but for some reason, instead of completely moving in, used the trunk of his Cadillac as a clothes closet, and in order to have ready access to his wardrobe he usurped the parking place my father had shoveled out in front of our house. Snow and parking brought out the worst in Bostonians back then, and I think they probably still do. I happened to be in Southie on a rare visit a couple of winters ago after a big snow and I noticed that all the parking spots had been staked out or cordoned off with lawn chairs, traffic cones, sawhorses, or even shopping carts.
In Brighton, which we thought superior to any other neighborhood, we lived on Nottinghill Road, which my mother, who was fond of superlatives, claimed was the highest point in Boston, with the best air, at least ten degrees cooler than it was downtown. The street was largely working class, a mix of single- and two-family houses, and about equally divided between Catholics and Jews. When my younger sister was about six or seven she pointed out that you could tell the families apart because Catholics had blue eyes and Jews brown ones. Possibly, she ventured, Protestants were people with one blue eye and one brown one. None of us had ever seen a Protestant up close, and even decades later I couldn’t help being a little taken aback when on an airplane I fell into conversation with a woman who said her father had been the pastor of the Episcopal church in Brighton. I hadn’t known such a place existed, and I still can’t picture where it might have been.
Nottinghill Road was a one-way loop—imagine a lasso canted on its side—and it really was a hill, a steep one. At its highest end was Skeleton Mountain, or that’s what we called it, a large vacant lot with some scrubby woods and a stony outcropping on which some long-ago kids had painted a crude skull and crossbones. To us it seemed a nearly perfect place for climbing, hiding, tossing eggs into the backyards below, and for playing with matches. My brother and a friend once set it sufficiently on fire that the police and the fire department had to be summoned.
In the winter, after the plows had come around but before too many cars had passed by, our street was a great and dangerous sledding spot. You could take a running start, throw yourself on your sled in front of our house, and if you weren’t clipped by a car coming up the other way, zip all the way down Nottinghill, shoot across the Colborne Road intersection, and then go all the way down Blenford Road. This was our version of the Cresta Run, the great bobsled course in St. Moritz.
In warmer weather, we accomplished the same descent, with nearly equal risk, in what we called go-karts—homemade buggies with wheels from baby carriages or from wagons we had outgrown. You steered with a rope and braked, if you had to, with your feet, usually ending in an elbow-scraping rollover. Sometimes we wore football helmets, but more for aesthetics than for true protection. Years later, when my brother had acquired a small motorcycle, we had the bright idea of having me tow him around the hill from the motorcycle while he sat in one of our old buggies. Neither of us gave much thought to the power of centrifugal force, or was prepared for the way the buggy whipped around as I accelerated, and smashed into a parked car, requiring a hasty visit to the emergency room at nearby St. Elizabeth’s. Because my brother was not yet eighteen, I tried to pretend I was his guardian, but no one was fooled. During our earlier teens we had made so many visits to the ER that we were practically on a first-name basis with the nurses.
More than we rode—until we got our licenses—we walked. In those days parents didn’t chauffeur kids around, and so we walked everywhere. We walked to the City Yard, an unused depot for public works vehicles, set fires in the abandoned garages there, and one year, after some spectacular flooding, went rafting through deep puddles in a sawed-off oil tank someone had dropped off. We walked to Cleveland Circle, no more circular than Harvard Square is square, where there were ball fields, an ice rink, and, as we in time discovered, a drugstore that wasn’t too fussy about selling beer to the underaged. Nearby, there were woods to drink it in. During winter, in search of ponds to skate on, we walked all the way from Chandler’s Pond, practically in Newton, to Hammond Pond, miles away behind the Chestnut Hill Mall. We walked all the way to Brookline, where on weekend winter afternoons you could swim in the indoor pool at the high school. I remember jumping off the high-dive and then opening my eyes on the way back up, looking through the water at the windows high above framing bare trees against the blue sky. It felt like levitation.
Looking back now, it seems to me that this was more nearly a small-town childhood, and a fairly idyllic one, than an urban one. Downtown Boston was far away, accessible only by the orange trolley car that ran down the middle of Commonwealth Avenue, and we seldom went there except to visit the city’s two great shrines: Boston Garden and Fenway Park. At what now seems an absurdly young age—I was eleven or twelve and my brother two years younger—my parents allowed us to go unaccompanied to day games, where we could sit in the bleachers for 75 cents, or to attend the open practices the Bruins sometimes held at the Garden. The slap shot was just coming into vogue then, and I remember once watching Johnny Bucyk and my idol, Don McKenney (known as Mary, alas, because he had the un-Bruin-like distinction of having won the Lady Byng Trophy for good sportsmanship), firing pucks high up into the stands just for the hell of it. That old Garden, leaky, smoky, rat-infested, was replaced by the FleetCenter, now renamed the TD Garden, but whatever you call it, it has none of the charm of the old barn. Similarly, Fenway Park, under new ownership, has been so tweaked and renovated and added on to that it now resembles an old two-decker that some fanatical homeowner has turned into a McMansion. It still has the same impossible, fanny-squeezing seats, though, the ones in right field facing in the wrong direction, and there is still that magical moment when you come in off the street, pass through the turnstile, and, right in the middle of the city, come upon that startlingly green expanse.
I’ve always loved that from the outside the brick façade of the ballpark looks like a factory, an old New England mill. What they manufactured in there—or did when I was a kid—was heartbreak. Boston is now a place accustomed to winning, and after so many years winning feels pretty good. I still remember how elated I was when the Sox finally won the World Series. I had opera tickets in New York that night, but was unable to sit still and left at intermission to watch the final game at a bar near Lincoln Center. And yet loss and disappointment had a sweetness, or bittersweetness, of their own. There wasn’t a Red Sox nation then, just a village, and we recognized each other by our long faces. A lot of nonsense has been written about how sports build character, but in Boston, sports, or sports-fandom, really has shaped the civic temperament. In a place so often riven by neighborhood clannishness, class, and racial resentment, passion for the local teams has become both an identity and a way of belonging. It’s how I belong still.
The other Boston—the Boston of the Brahmins, of Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Isabella Stewart Gardner—I learned about only later, when I began hanging out at McKim’s great public library in Copley Square and poking about in Richardson’s Trinity Church, across the way. I used to go there—to the library, not the church—to study and, I hoped, to pick up girls. I never once succeeded. I lacked the guile and the smoothness of a guy I once saw who, over the shoulder of a pretty girl, stole a glance at the book she was reading. He then sat down beside her and pretended to be surprised. “Malaria!” he said. “Fascinating.”
I used to daydream a lot in the library and plot my escape from Boston. I had concluded by then that unless I went somewhere else I would always be stuck with my Boston labels. I would always be Irish. I would always be Catholic. I would always be working class. I have a vivid recollection of sitting there one day in my junior year of high school, reading The Great Gatsby and feeling a powerful sense of identification with Nick Carraway. Like him, I decided, I would go to New York and make something of myself. Then I got to the great passage near the end where Nick remembers going home from prep school to Minnesota on the train at Christmastime, and in that melancholy, self-important way teenagers have, I started feeling nostalgic for my own past and for a city I hadn’t even left yet.