Synopsis
Book by Bratton William Knobler Peter
Extrait
MY MOTHER COULDN'T FIND ME.
I was only a year and a half old, barely a toddler, and there were a very limited number of places I could be. My parents and I lived in a small basement apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it was the dead of winter, and she and I had been playing in the yard out back. She went inside for only a moment. When she came out I was gone. My mother was just starting to panic when she heard cars honking. For a second, she paid no attention; her son was missing, that's all that mattered. I had been born with a collapsed lung and had been given last rites at the hospital when I was two days old. I had survived, and my mother never wanted to risk losing me again. When the honking grew as frantic as she was, she ran up the alley and out onto the street.
There I was, in my snowsuit and cap, standing a foot and a half tall in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue, directing traffic. Cars were stopped. There was a crowd around me. She ran across four lanes and swept me up in her arms.
I don't remember any of this, but family lore has it that that's when they knew I wanted to be a police officer.
My father, Bill, and my mother, June, had been high school sweethearts in the Charlestown projects in Boston. They were married when my father got out of the service after World War II, and I was born on October 6, 1947. My father was Big Bill; I was always Little Billy. He worked as a longshoreman on the Boston docks. Two years after I was born, he used benefits he had coming to him through the G.I. Bill and, with my mother's father, Joe DeViller, bought what was called a three-decker house at 62 Hecla Street in the Dorchester section of Boston.
Three-deckers were a Boston housing phenomenon--entire neighborhoods were made up of them. They were three-story, wood-frame houses, with each story a five-and-a-half-room floor-through apartment, the equivalent of what in New York are called railroad flats. They were inexpensive and functional.
Dorchester was a working-class neighborhood. We didn't think of ourselves as poor, but no one in the neighborhood had a lot of money. My mother, father, my younger sister Pat, and I lived on the second floor. If we wanted hot water, we had to heat it in pans. For years, my mother cooked on a four-legged cast-iron stove, one of those old black monstrosities that today are retro and all the rage but back then were just old-fashioned. I was already a teenager the day they hauled that huge, smelly thing out and put in a hot-water tank and a real gas stove. We didn't get hot running water in our home until the early sixties, and that was a big day for the Brattons.
The house was heated by coal. Once a year, a truck backed up to the side of the building and tilted five tons of it into the chute. At five o'clock every morning, my father had to go down to the basement and temper the flames in the furnace to get it going for the day. He did the same thing as soon as he came home at night and then again at eleven
o'clock before he went to bed. It was quite an art just staying warm.
Wednesday was ash day, when the city came to pick up the ashes that a week of coal had produced. This was different from Ash Wednesday, when Catholics would ponder their mortality. This was Wednesday ash day, when a cloud of soot rose all over the neighborhood. An old truck with wooden slats on the side showed up, and a city employee, the ash man, shoveled us out. That was a job.
Coal ceased being the municipal heating fuel of choice in the 1950s, and at some point its use had dwindled to the point where the city wouldn't pick up ashes anymore; there wasn't enough work to support the ash men. But we had the coal furnace well into the 1960s, and for about ten years the men of the three families in our building--my father, my grandfather, and Mr. McNulty, who lived on the first floor--began spreading the ashes under the back porch. After a couple of years, the whole underside of the porch was packed in solid. We lived near the corner with an empty lot on one side and an alley on the other, and when we filled up our porch, we arranged with other houses on the alley to take them. We shoveled our own soot for a decade.
For extra heat we had a kerosene stove. It was a fire hazard, but it was necessary. Everybody had one, and throughout the neighborhood everybody's back hall smelled of kerosene because when you poured it from the can to the heater, the fuel would spill over and seep into the linoleum.
When you entered our apartment, you came into a hallway that ran the length of the creaky wood house. First door on the right was the bathroom with an old cast-iron claw-foot tub and pull-chain toilet with a wooden seat. Diagonally across from that was my room. It had two entrances: a door from the hall on one side but only a curtain between me and the kitchen. I never understood that.
Everything revolved around the kitchen with its cast-iron stove and black stone sink with the big brass fittings. The washing machine was in there as well, with a wooden hand-operated wringer and the revolving tub that shook wildly and made a thumping racket as it spun. My grandparents lived upstairs, and every morning my grandmother Ann would come down and hang out in the kitchen with my mother. They'd have coffee or tea, and the next-door neighbor, Dot Gorham, would come over and sit. Dinner, supper, all the important moments of the day happened there.
If you went left down the hall, my sister Pat's room was on the right. She is a year younger than I am. From there, you had to pass directly through my parents' bedroom to get to the living room at the front of the house. The living room had three windows facing out on the street; it was the perfect place to keep an eye on what was going on in the neighborhood. That was where I waited for my father.
From the time I can remember, my father worked a couple of blocks from home at a chrome-plating firm on Freeport Street. He would be out the door first thing in the morning for the eight o'clock shift and every afternoon at five past four I would look out that window, see my father walking up the block, and go running out to meet him.
I didn't have much time with my dad. In 1951, he got a full-time job as a mail sorter at the post office and from then on worked two jobs for the rest of his life. This was a much-coveted civil-service position, the kind a working-class family counted on for security, but it also meant I didn't see him a lot. My dad came home for supper, which we ate at four-thirty in the afternoon, and then either went off to work the six-to-two shift at the post office or went to bed so he could wake up at eleven-thirty and head over there at midnight. From the post office, he went directly to the plating plant.
Money was always tight. I don't think my parents to this day have a checking account. My father brought home his pay in cash and gave it to my mother, and she gave him some money back. They worked out of envelopes. My father kept his in the top bureau of their five-drawer dresser; my mother kept hers in the lower. There was an envelope for the egg man, who delivered every week and came up the back stairs on Friday nights to collect. An envelope for the milkman, who came every day. We had accounts at some of the local stores at the Field's Corner shopping area about a half-mile from the house, and a dollar or two a week went into those envelopes.
Like a lot of people in the neighborhood, my parents played the numbers each week, and once in a long while my father's number hit and he came home with three or six hundred extra dollars in his pocket. He was making forty or fifty dollars a week at the time, so you can imagine what that was like. The only reason the old Boston Record-American sold every day was that people all over the city needed it to find out the winning number.
Our neighborhood didn't have a large department store, we had Mr. Brown, who came and sold clothes on Saturday mornings. His appeal was that you could pay him just two dollars a week on account.
Sometimes on Fridays after work, if he had a little extra money, my dad and I would drive to a lounge/restaurant over on Upham's Corner called Haley and McGuire's and order a pizza to bring back home. We would wait in the little lounge and I would have a Coke, and my dad would get a beer. I think my father enjoyed going to Haley and McGuire's. That fifteen minutes was almost like a little night out. My dad didn't eat pizza, he was a meat-and-potatoes man; pizza was a treat for me and my mom and sister, so he would get some French fries for his dinner. Of course, I had to have some, and from then on I was addicted to French fries with my pizza.
One night as we were leaving, I saw my father put fifteen cents on the bar. I took it. "Dad," I said, "you left this money on the counter."
"No, no, no, son," he told me. "That's a tip." Three slices of pizza were sixty cents, the fries were probably twenty, with the beer and Coke, the bill probably came to a dollar five. "For the waitress." He put it back. I had never heard of such a thing.
Sunday was the one day my father had off, and Sunday dinner was the best meal of the week. It was usually turnips and mashed potatoes and meat. (Meat in the Bratton household was done when there was no longer a hint of red in it. I had gray corned beef until I left home.) I ate the leftovers in sandwiches at school until Thursday. Albert du Plain's bakery nearby made bread for restaurants, and on Sundays my mom would send me there on my bicycle for a loaf of French bread, which was a real treat.
After dinner, we would take a drive. We would all pile in my father's car and head off for four or five hours. It was an inexpensive way to spend the day together.
We always had an old car. The first one I remember was a 1951 two-toned Ford black bottom, white roof, standard shift. I loved that car. My dad ran that Ford until the floorboards rotted out. In 1958, we got a silver '56 Chevy Impala with a white roof. We called it the Silver Bullet. My father would drive me, my mother, and my sister all over New England--down the Cape, up to New Hampshire. Fifteen miles outside of Boston was very rural, so driving the Silver Bullet to the suburb of Canton was like going out into the country. That was a big thrill. A lot of kids in my neighborhood never got to do that.
We always made it home in time to watch Walter Cronkite on The Twentieth Century. For Sunday supper, my mom took the mashed potatoes and turnips from dinner and made potato patties and sometimes fried up some baloney with it. At eight, we watched The Ed Sullivan Show, and then it was off to bed.
But no matter what the financial situation, every week my mother put away a dollar for vacation. And every summer we had fifty-two dollars, enough to take a cottage at the beach or go to a lake for a week.
We were a family that loved each other, but we were not outwardly emotional. There was no hugging or kissing. It was just something we didn't do. I don't think I've ever seen my father hug or hold my mother, apart from when they're dancing, but these are two people who are very much in love. Some people are great backslappers, quick with an embrace, a peck on the cheek, or a pat on the butt. I didn't grow up with that.
Dorchester was a lace-curtain Irish neighborhood, but not first- generation right off the boat. Besides the Brattons (we were Scottish and Irish and French-Canadian) you had Walshes and Quinns and McNultys and Devines. When I was growing up, there were still gas lamps in the street, and once in a while a city worker would come down the block with a ladder, climb up, and fiddle with the gas fixtures. Eventually, we got electric streetlights. The rag man was around with his horse-drawn drays, and the fruit vendor with his pushcart, and Charlie the ice-cream man in the Good Humor truck with no top on the cab.
We lived one house off the corner of Hecla and Adams streets, two blocks from the Edward Southworth School, where I went from kindergarten through third grade. Edward Southworth was a twelve-room brick-and-granite public school built at the turn of the century. It looked and felt like a fortress and was located on Meeting House Hill, one of the highest points in the city, which George Washington occupied when Revolutionary troops drove the English out of Boston.
I always did well in school, never had to work very hard, and was kind of a teacher's pet. Whenever a note had to be run over to the Mather School next door, I was the one chosen to run it. When it came time to clap the erasers--don't ask me why we thought that was such a great honor, you'd just get chalk dust all over yourself; maybe it was because you got out of class for a couple of minutes--I got the job. I moved across the courtyard to the Mather School, a much larger building constructed in the 1930s, for grades four through six. The separation of church and state wasn't very wide in those days, and one of my strongest memories is that every Tuesday afternoon at one o'clock, every student was marched out of Mather for two hours of religious instruction. The very few Protestants went right next door to the Universal Church of God in Christ. Almost all the rest of the school went to catechism class at Saint Peter's Church and School down the block. (I don't know if we had any Jews at Mather.) We lined up two by two, flanked by the school traffic monitors and the school crossing guards and the nuns in habits, the whole bit, and off we marched.
Saint Peter's was a gorgeous old church with a high spire and a beautiful interior. It would have been inspiring if I hadn't wanted to get out so bad. I went to church there on Sundays and then had to hang around afterward for Sunday school. I got a good education and a good moral grounding, but I could not wait for eighth grade to come so I could be confirmed and not have to go to Sunday school anymore.
One afternoon when I was about eight years old, a half dozen of us were out playing ball in front of the Edward Southworth School when we caught the attention of a local gang called the Parksmen. Local kids, twelve-year-olds, they were the big neighborhood bullies, and they used to fight with another gang called the Red Raiders all the time. We'd been playing ball, and the Parksmen broke up the game and took us hostage.
They put us on the front steps of the school and wouldn't let us go. They were much bigger than we were, so there was no chance of us fighting our way out. We were stuck. It started getting late.
Four-thirty came and went, and they wouldn't let us go. Finally, they let their guard down and I ran home.
"Where were you?" my father demanded. He and my mother weren't particularly worried about my safety--kids hung out in the streets all the time. What had him riled was that it was five o'clock and I had missed supper. There were rules--the family eats together was one of them--and I had broken one.
"The Parksmen held us hostage," I panted. "They wouldn't let us go.
They've still got some of the kids."
My father hopped up from the table, grabbed my arm, and off we went. He stormed up the hill to Edward Southwo...
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