91 REVERE STREET
449
Yankee families had upset expectation by regammg this section
of the Hill from the vanguards of the lace-curtain Irish. This was
bracing news for my parents in that topsy-turvy era when the Re–
publican Party and what were called "people of the right sort" were
no longer dominant in city elections. Still, even in the palmy, laissez–
faire '20s, Revere Street refused to be a straightforward, immutable
residential fact. From one end to the other, houses kept being sanded
down, repainted, or abandoned to the flaking of decay. Houses,
changing hands, changed their language and nationality. A few
doors to our south the householders spoke "Beacon Hill British" or
the flat
nay nay
of the Boston Brahmin. The parents of the children
a few doors north spoke mostly in Italian.
My mother felt a horrified giddiness about the adventure of
our address. She once said, "We are barely perched on the outer
rim of the hub of decency." We were less than fifty yards from
Louisburg Square, the cynosure of old historic Boston's plain-spoken,
cold roast elite-the Hub of the Hub of the Universe. Fifty yards!
As
a naval ensign, Father had done postgraduate work at Har–
vard. He had also done postgraduate work at M.I.T., preferred the
purely scientific college, and condescended to both. In 1924, how–
ever, his tone began to change; he now began to speak warmly of
Harvard as his second alma mater. We went to football games at
the Harvard Stadium, and one had the feeling that our lives were
now being lived in the brutal, fashionable expectancy of the stadium:
we had so many downs, so many minutes, and so many yards to go
for a winning touchdown. It was just such a winning financial and
social advance that my parents promised themselves would follow
Father's resignation from the Navy and his acceptance of a sensible
job offered him at the Cambridge branch of Lever Brothers' Soap.
The advance was never to come. Father resigned from the
service in 1927, but he never had a civilian
career;
he instead had
merely twenty-two years of the civilian
life.
Almost immediately he
bought a larger and more stylish house; he sold his ascetic, stove–
black Hudson and bought a plump brown Buick; later the Buick
was exchanged for a high-toned, as-good-as-new Packard with
a custom-designed royal blue and mahogany body. Without drama,
his earnings more or less decreased from year to year.
