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pression of invidious disgust. She was staring at me. . . . In the
absentmindedness of my guilt and excitement, I had taken the
nearest chair, the chair that Elie Norton had just left. "Lowell,"
Miss Manice shrieked, "are you going to sit there all morning like
a bump on a log?"
When Elie Norton came back, there was really no break in
her friendliness toward me, but there was something caved in, some–
thing crippled in the way I stood up to her and tried to answer
her disengaged chatter. I thought about her all the time; seldom
meeting her eyes now, I felt rich and raw in her nearness. I wanted
passionately to stay on at Brimmer, and told my mother a fib
one afternoon late in May of my last year. "Miss Manice has
begged me to stay on," I said, "and enter the fifth grade." Mother
pointed out that there had never been a boy in the fifth grade.
Contradicted, I grew excited.
"If
Miss Manice has begged me to
stay," I said, "why can't I stay?" My voice rose, I beat on the
floor with my open hands. Bored and bewildered, my mother went
upstairs with a headache.
"If
you won't believe me," I shouted after
her, "why don't you telephone Miss Manice or Mrs. Norton?"
Brimmer School was thrown open on sunny March and April
afternoons and our teachers took us for strolls on the polite, land–
scaped walks of the Public Garden. There I'd loiter by the old iron
fence and gape longingly across Charles Street at the historic Boston
Common, a now largely wrong-side-of-the-tracks park. On the Com–
mon there were mossy bronze reliefs of Union soldiers, and a cap–
tured German tank filled with smelly wads of newspaper. Every–
where there were grit, litter, gangs of Irish, Negroes, Latins. On Sun–
day afternoons orators harangued about Sacco and Vanzetti, while
others stood about heckling and blocking the sidewalks. Keen young
policemen, looking for trouble, lolled on the benches. At nightfall
a police lieutenant on horseback inspected the Common. In the
Garden, however, there was only Officer Lever, a single white-haired
and mustached dignitary, who had once been the doorman at the
Union Club. He now looked more like a member of the club.
"Lever's a man about town," my Grandfather Winslow would say.
"Give him Harris tweeds and a glass of Scotch, and I'd take him
for Cousin Herbert." Officer Lever was without thoughts or deeds,
