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PARTISAN REVIEW
But so long as we were on Revere Street, Father tried to come to
terms with it and must have often wondered whether he on the whole
liked or disliked the neighborhood's lack of side. He was still at this
time rather truculently democratic in what might be described as an
upper middle-class, naval, and Masonic fashion. He was a mumbler.
His opinions were almost morbidly hesitant, but he considered himself
a matter-of-fact man of science and had an unspoiled faith in the
superior efficiency of northern nations. He modeled his allegiances
and humor on the cockney imperialism of Rudyard Kipling's dirty–
mouthed Tommies, who did their job. Autochthonous Boston snobs,
such as the Winslows or members of Mother's reading club, were
alarmed by the brassy callousness of our naval visitors, who labeled
the Italians they met on Revere Street as "grade-A" and "grade-B
wops." The Revere Street "grade-B's" were Sicilian Catholics and
peddled crummy second-hand furniture on Cambridge Street, not
far from the site of Great-great-Grandfather Charles Lowell's disused
West Church, praised in an old family folder as "a haven from the
Sodom and Gomorrah of Trinitarian orthodoxy and the tyranny of the
letter." Revere Street "grade-A's," good North Italians, sold fancy
groceries and Colonial heirlooms in their shops near the Public
Garden. Still other Italians were Father's familiars; they sold him
bootleg Scotch and
vino rosso
in teacups.
The outside of our Revere Street house was a flat red brick
surface unvaried by the slightest suggestion of purple panes, delicate
bay, or triangular window-cornice-a sheer wall formed by the seam–
less conjunction of four inseparable fac;ades, all of the same com–
mercial and purgatorial design. Though placed in the heart of Old
Boston, it was ageless and artless, an epitome of those "leveler"
qualities Mother found most grueling about the naval service. 91
Revere Street was mass-produced,
regulation-issue,
and yet struck
Boston society as stupidly out of the ordinary, like those white
elephants-a mother-of-pearl scout knife or a tea-kettle barometer–
which my father used to pick up on sale at an Army-Navy store.
The walls of Father's minute Revere Street den-parlor were
bare and white. His bookshelves were bare and white. The den's
one adornment was a ten-tube home-assembled battery radio set,
whose loudspeaker had the shape and color of a Mexican sombrero,
