Boston - cover

Book Proposal

by Errol Lincoln Uys

BOSTON - BOOK FIVE

BOSTON COMMON

I

1927-1931

In August 1927, LAWRENCE TRANE returns to Boston after a four-year odyssey in the Old World, his travels taking him from the shores of the Bosporus to the boulevards of Paris. He divided his time between a garret atelier on Rue de'Asses and the terrace of the Café du Dôme, Montparnasse. Lawrence is twenty-nine and has the classic features of his Lincolnshire ancestor, a disproportionately large but well shaped head, straight back and large feet. Neither handsome nor ugly, he has light brown eyes bordering on amber, a bright spirit shining in them.

Lawrence is the son of HUGH TRANE who heads the Trane Iron Foundry across Fort Point Channel. The company founded by Caleb and Jethro no longer turns out heavy guns or fine hunting pieces and hasn't enjoyed a boom since the Civil War. The place still employs four hundred men making boilerplate and sheet metal but seems a dying enterprise awaiting the last hammer blow.

Lawrence returns to Boston on the eve of the execution of Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, convicted of killing two employees of a South Braintree shoe factory during a robbery. For seven years, the world has argued over their innocence or guilt though it's widely believed they're damned for their race and religion by Judge Webster Thayer's prejudiced court. "Dago sons of bitches," Thayer calls the pair boasting to friends that "he got the anarchist bastards good and proper." On August 23, 1927, thousands attend a vigil for Sacco and Vanzetti on Boston Common before their execution at Charlestown State Prison.

In the crowd Lawrence finds himself next to a striking eighteen-year-old destined to become his "lovely lass in a beaver coat." She is CYRENE STEELE, the granddaughter of Judge Oliver Steele.

The family still lives in No 37½ Beacon Street built by Captain Ben. Ben's fortune is firmly anchored in a spendthrift trust designed to keep it intact until Judgment Day. There's not a single ship tied to the Steeles, not one chest of Houqua or dram of pepper. Cyrene's father, CLAYTON STEELE, only ventures into the business district to confer with Pollock and Pierce, trustees, crusty holdovers from the days of the counting-stool. The study in Beacon Street is filled with mementoes of Ben's voyages, his sable-lined greatcoat hanging on a peg fashioned from a belaying pin. On winter evenings, Clayton throws the heavy coat over his knees and sits with a highball navigating the columns of the Transcript.

Clayton Steele is forty-two, a stalwart of the Ancient and Honorable Company and a founder of the Good Government Association, the "Goo-Goos" to their enemies. Clayton's wife, Victoria Bamford Steele, is a sentinel of the Watch and Ward Society in the front lines of the war on smut. In 1927, the society bans sixty-eight current titles and bars the works of Eugene O'Neill from Boston's theaters. Victoria is a board member of Old South Meeting House, where she votes to keep out anarchists and rabble-rousers whose prattle will violate a "patriotic shrine."

Eighteen-year-old Cyrene has a sister HERMOINE, seventeen, and a brother, CHANDLER, twelve. Cyrene's independent spirit has been a problem for Victoria in the past, her mother disapproving of her playing with urchins on the Common and wandering alone into the wicked maze of Scollay Square. These are minor troubles next to Cyrene's adventures in Bohemia with Lawrence and his friends.

Even as Victoria prepares to prune the garden of Lady Chatterley's Lover , her daughter bares all for her painter in his studio on T-Wharf, where a polyglot colony of artists share their workspace with North End fishermen. The Blue Ship Tearoom and other wharf resorts are roaring speakeasies whose customers are regularly fished out of Boston harbor.

In October 1927, Nellie Lynch celebrates her eighty-eighth birthday in the brick and bow-fronted South End house that Roark O'Brien built forty-five years ago. Roark died in 1912 leaving Farrell's son, JOHN LYNCH, in control of the family business. NEAL LYNCH, John's grandson, is a lawyer who works in the fisheries head office. His main avocation is as a Curley man trawling for votes for The Boss.

James Michael Curley comes to tip his hat to Nellie, the grand old lady of Ward 17, one of the first to give the handsome brown-eyed rough-and tumble politician her vote. Word that Curley is in his old neighborhood spreads quickly drawing a crowd to the house, where James Michael brings a tear to the eye of his hostess singing the songs of Ireland for the famine girl from County Cork.

Farrell Lynch's second son, TERENCE LYNCH, is absent serving ten-to-fifteen years in Charlestown jail for armed robbery. Terence's son, REGAN LYNCH, has also done time for petty crime as a member of the Rattlesnakes, a Charlestown gang "looping" the streets around Bunker Hill. Regan now operates in Scollay Square behind a door with faded lettering, Massasoit Cotton Mills, a front for a bootlegging operation in the great tradition of contrabandists Milo Lynch and Dick Fletcher. Boston's "rummies" supply four thousand speakeasies in the city, four popular watering holes on the same block as police headquarters.

Regan's biggest customer is MARVIN FLETCHER who works the gin mills and clubs in the South End where the High Hat, Wigwam and Wally's throb to the beat of the Jazz Age. Marvin has a son, OSCAR FLETCHER, with a Creole beauty, ESTELLE "STELLA" LAMARTINE . Stella runs the classiest brothel in a district known as "Mommaland," a red-hot quarter off Massachusetts Avenue.

"Professor" GEORGE FLETCHER and his son, SHELBY FLETCHER descendants of Crispus Attucks, belong to the Black Brahmins, as exclusive as their white counterparts. Professor George owns a finishing school that grooms young debutantes for the annual "Snowflake Ball." He spends Friday afternoons at the Symphony, has a summer retreat on Martha's Vineyard and is a regular at Newport where he lectures on ballroom etiquette. The Fletchers still maintain ties with the Steeles, invited to take sherry with them on Beacon Hill every Christmas.

Neal Lynch heads Curley's push to win Massachusetts for Al Smith, the first Irish Catholic presidential nominee. They rent the defunct Young's Hotel on Court Street as headquarters renaming it The Bull Pen and using it for monster rallies for Smith.

The candidate's two-day visit to Boston in October 1928 is a triumph for Curley who leads the cavalcade toffed-up in a brown derby and a boxy raccoon coat. Hoover wins forty states but Massachusetts goes for Smith, with some wards giving him ninety percent of their votes. The following St. Patrick's Day, Curley launches his mayoral campaign in a touring car with its wheels painted bright green, handing out saucer size buttons urging Bostonians to VOTE FOR AL SMITH"S FRIEND.

Clayton and Victoria support Curley's opponent, Frederick Mansfield, a distinguished lawyer of Irish-Catholic heritage, "as spectacular as a four-day-old codfish and as colorful as a lump of mud."

On the stump for Curley, Neal uses every dirty trick of Boston politics. He sends "vicars" into South Boston to knock on doors for Mansfield, the sight of the Protestant interlopers a red flag to the faithful. Curley billboards sprout in Boston's neighborhoods: BRIGHTON NEEDS CURLEY, ALLSTON NEEDS CURLEY. The opposition swiftly defaces them: BRIGHTON FEEDS CURLEY, ALLSTON FEEDS CURLEY.

The airwaves crackle with slanders about graft and bossism, no clash more savage than one between Curley and Victoria Steele.

Curley is at the WNAC studio waiting his turn to go on the air as Victoria lambastes "an Irish hooligan of Tammany ilk." She attacks Curley's past administrations charging that no contractor could lay a tile in City Hall or supply a new school bench without a gift for "King Curley's" Shamrock Castle on Jamaicaway.

Curley takes the mike to answer "Mrs. Steele's racial slurs." She represents a decadent race, says Curley, "The New England of rum, codfish and slaves, which is as dead as Julius Caesar. "Tell the people, Vicky - " No one dares address Victoria Bamford Steele as 'Vicky.' - "What's the Ladies Sewing Circle of Beacon Hill dipping into this week? Lady Chatterley's Lover ? The Well of Loneliness ? " Curley reveals that a bookseller friend assures him every banned volume in Boston is readily available in Sewing Circle 93.

"A lie!" Victoria shrieks from the WNAC anteroom. Clayton Steele, a Harvard football hero in his youth, limbers up to belt the slanderer. Curley lands a blow that decks Clayton before Neal Lynch steps in to stop the match. Quizzed about the "riot" at WNAC, Curley admits knocking down dead Yankee wood. "A fossil fit to be exhibited in a glass case at Austin and Boone's dime museum in Scollay Square."

Curley wins the mayoral race two weeks after the Stock Market collapse of 1929. The Crash deals a crushing blow to Boston. Tens of thousands of breadwinners are thrown out of work. On Boston Common the first victim is found dead from hunger. - One of the Boston firms that collapses is the Trane Iron Works closing its doors one hundred and seventy five years after Caleb began the enterprise on Fleet Street.

In February 1930, Victoria Steele's Old South committee refuses to let Margaret Sanger speak in the meeting hall. Cyrene joins a picket line standing with her mouth taped shut and scribbling messages on a blackboard about Dutch Caps and French Letters. Victoria is enraged, the explosion on Beacon Hill leading Cyrene to pack her things and move to the calmer waters of T-Wharf and a permanent berth in her lover's loft.

"Wharf Rats," the colony of artists and writers call themselves. T-Wharf juts out from Long Wharf and is home to six-masted coal and lumber schooners. Ross tugboats berth at the end of the wharf, Boston still one of the busiest harbors in the world. T-Wharf buzzes with scores of fishing boats, a blaze of oranges, blues, greens and reds, as colorful as the Italians who sail them. Most come from Sciacca in Sicily and ply the waters of Massachusetts Bay with the blessing of their ancient protector, Madonna de Socorso.

Lawrence's art is influenced by the Ashcan Movement of New York and follows Social Realists like Hart Benton and Shahn. The Depression is a seminal force in Lawrence's painting but destroys his chance of making a living from his work. He takes commissions from Filenes Art Department involved in the company's contributions to the Tercentenary celebrations of Boston's founding.

Cyrene works at a North End settlement house surrounded by tenements crowded with Italian immigrants and reminiscent of Broad Street's rookeries. Abigail House is supported by an Episcopalian charity that arouses the suspicion of local Fascisti who see a hotbed of Reds and radicals confounding Mussolini's appeal to Italian-Americans.

Abigail House is firebombed, but this doesn't stop T-Wharf fisherman Luigi Paterniani and his wife, Pietrina, belonging to the center. Luigi is a naturalized American who came to Boston with Pietrina seven years earlier. They left two boys then three and four with relatives in their hometown of Terracina on the Gulf of Gaeta until they had money to send for them. Two years ago they got the necessary papers and passports from the U.S. government and sent the steamship fares for Carlo and Arturo.

The North End Fascisti report to Rome that Paterniani and his wife are anti-fascists and Reds. At Terracina the Fascist secretary tells Carlo and Arturo, now ten and eleven, "You'll not go to America, now or ever." Abigail House workers appeal to the State Department and American consuls in Italy to no avail.

The Paterniani case is a cause célebre at T-Wharf's Megansett Jr. restaurant, a second home to every Wharf Rat. In the long smoky nights when the last piano player is worn out and the fog rolls in, a deep horn sounding across the way, the painters and poets sit talking about the two lost boys. It's Lawrence Trane who says: "Damn the fascisti ! We'll go over there and fetch them. Bring Carlo and Arturo home to their momma and papa!"

In June 1930, Regan Lynch and Marvin Fletcher go to Halifax, Nova Scotia to take delivery of Saracen , an armor-plated sixty-footer rumrunner powered by three airplane engines and mounting a pair of Browning machine-guns. Designed for the dash from Stellwagen Bank to the shore, Saracen can do an astonishing forty knots. Regan and Marvin sail on the maiden voyage making for St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The French island-outposts are afloat with Capone syndicate liquor supplied to mother ships that ply Rum Row, as many as 300,000 cases of the "real McCoy" shipped every week. Saracen stows a cargo of whiskey and heads out to sea under a smokescreen of burning tires.

Unlike his pirate ancestor William Fletcher, Marvin is a miserable sailor who hugs the deck as Saracen dances through the waves. A Coast Guard plane spots them in the Gulf of Maine and sends a cutter, Whistler , on a hundred-mile pursuit down the coast of Massachusetts. Whistler's engines pound away until the vessel's seams begin to open, the crew lobbing a few futile shells before they're forced to beach the waterlogged craft at Wellfleet. Saracen loops back to the South Shore and makes a midnight run into the North River to offload her cargo.

"So much liquor, you can swim in it," says Mayor Reuben Salter of Boston, England, when he attends the Tercentenary celebrations that begin in June 1930 and climax in a monster parade on September 18. Forty thousand marchers, two hundred floats and one hundred bands take part in the seven-hour cavalcade with King Curley holding court on a grandstand in Tremont Street. The mayor doffs his silk hat and croons " There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, " enough to wake the dead of Old Granary.

Victoria Steele organizes the Hancock Ball, a decorous affair in the Somerset Hotel's Louis XIV ballroom. It is marked at the witching hour of 10.30 p.m. by a lengthy monologue from "John Hancock" that effectively extinguishes all frivolity. When Arbella , a replica of John Winthrop's ship, makes the short voyage from Salem, Victoria's children, Hermione and Chandler, are in the landing party greeted by Reverend William Blaxton and the Shawmut. Feather-bedecked actors from the city's burlesque houses fill the roles of Chitanawoo and Wapikicho long since vanished from these shores.

In November 1930, Regan and his Irish bootleggers battle North End rivals who came as refugees from Il Duce. Sicilian-born Mario di Paloma, "The Dove," landed in Boston in 1926 working his way up from petty larceny to loan sharking and by 1930, he's running a booze operation in Brockton. Paloma makes his first move against Regan by hijacking Saracen off Duxbury. The Italians put the crew ashore, strip the rumrunner of its cargo and blow the boat to smithereens.

Regan's mobsters hit Paloma's Brockton warehouse shooting two men and stealing a truckload of liquor.

Around midnight on March 15, 1931, Regan and two associates are ambushed on Charlestown Bridge. Paloma's triggermen kill the trio with a hailstorm of machine-gun fire before melting away across Atlantic Avenue. News gets out and Charlestown's Irish mob prepare to cross the river and burn down the North End. Italian workers coming to Charlestown Navy Yard are beaten. Police swarm into Charlestown and stop the violence from escalating.

Ninety-two year old Nellie Lynch comes to Regan's wake on Monument Avenue. Mayor Curley pays his respects to a "victim of the ignoble experiment of Prohibition." James Michael persuades the Charlestown jailers to let Terrence attend his son's funeral. Regan leaves a widow, SARAH LYNCH, and a son, NOLAN LYNCH, who is four, his wife long neglected for the showgirls of Scollay Square.

Marvin Fletcher causes a stir arriving at the wake, African-Americans rarely daring to set foot in Charlestown. Marvin's visit is a godsend to Regan's penniless widow bringing her $5,000 from the bootlegging business.

In May 1931, Neal Lynch travels with Curley when the mayor makes a Grand Tour of Europe in the style of a Latin dictator descending on Dublin, London, Paris and Rome. In Ireland, Neal visits Lambskill, a bare field dotted with ruins of stone chimneys, all there is to recall that Easter Saturday in 1847 when Delmo Roux and his Crowbar Brigade came to tear down the cottage where Nellie and Farrell were born.

Curley and his party aren't the only Bostonians in Europe this spring. Lawrence and Cyrene sail to Italy in May 1931 with the mission of snatching Carlo and Arturo from the Fascists of Terracina. Aboard the Italia Line's Saturnia , the couple suddenly decide to marry in the mid-Atlantic, a celebration that conceals their plans from a shipload of fascists going home to Mussolini's Italy.

They leave the vessel at Genoa and travel by train to Terracina. The grandfather of Carlo and Arturo is a foe of the Blackshirts and helps with arrangements for their trip to the Swiss border. A day before they leave, the authorities unexpectedly announce that the Paterniani children are selected to attend a Fascist summer camp near Naples. They're to leave in the morning. That night Lawrence and Cyrene flee Terracina with Carlo and Arturo followed by a carload of Blackshirts on a hair-raising chase along the coast. They make it to Rome and hide out in a hotel near the Spanish Steps.

Lawrence is on the street when he sees a motorcade roll past with a familiar figure in the back of the Isotta Fraschini tourer. James Michael Curley has come to greet the man he calls The Moose and salutes as "savior of Christian civilization." Lawrence goes to the Excelsior Hotel and asks Neal Lynch to help them escape.

James Michael personally persuades The Moose to let the boys go, for the sake of good Italian-American relations. And for Curley when next he asks the North End to vote for a favorite Irish son. The official Boston party leaves on the Rome-Paris express, Lawrence and Cyrene on the train with the Paterniani boys.

On June 11, 1931, when the Leviathan arrives in New York harbor from Europe, Curley enthusiastically points out the Statue of Liberty to Carlo and Arturo. He gives each boy a silver dollar. "Never forget who gave you your start in America," he says with a wink. "James Michael Curley!"

1942-1949

Lt. CHANDLER STEELE'S final day of shore leave falls on the last Saturday in November 1942. A graduate of Harvard and avid sailor, Chandler joined the Coast Guard after Pearl Harbor and served aboard an armed trawler on the Greenland Patrol. In July 1942, he transferred to Mohegan , a Secretary-class cutter on escort duty in the North Atlantic. He has made two crossings protecting convoys against Nazi wolf-packs that have sunk two hundred and sixty Allied ships in the first four months of 1942.

On his last night ashore, Chandler attends a birthday party for his friend, Archie Bell, who crews for him on Rocket , a Dragon-class sloop he races at Marblehead. There are ten guests including Archie's sister, Pam, a handsome girl with a crush on the tall, reddish-haired lieutenant.

Archie's party begins with dinner in the Oak Room of the Copley Plaza. A little past nine o'clock, they leave the hotel and head over to the Coconut Grove on Piedmont Street. The nightclub is packed with a thousand patrons, many of them soldiers and sailors. Just after 10 P.M., a busboy sent to replace a light bulb in the Melody Lounge strikes a match to find the socket. The flame catches the tinsel fronds of a fake palm and shoots toward the blue satin ceiling billowing above the dancers. The inferno spreads to the top floor sending a column of fire that engulfs the main room. Patrons dash for a single revolving door that becomes a death trap. In fifteen minutes, the Coconut Grove is destroyed.

The five couples are in the Melody Lounge when the fire starts. Three pairs join the rush to the first floor. Chandler and Archie go in the opposite direction toward a restroom, where Pam and Archie's fiancée, Diane, went moments earlier. They find the girls in the narrow corridor and are the last people to reach the top of the stairs.

Chandler forces them to turn back from the writhing mass at the front entrance. He remembers a door near the coatroom. Bodies are piled up in front of the exit. Chandler pushes Pam over the barrier and into the hands of rescuers struggling to clear the opening from outside. They're pulled to safety but tragically learn that the three couples with them perished.

Chandler's return to Mohegan is delayed for a week, flying to Yarmouth Air Base in Nova Scotia to rejoin the cutter at a secret assembly-point for a convoy that sails in late December 1942.

On March 17, Mohegan is attached to Convoy HX229 bound from New York/Halifax to Liverpool. Convoy SC122 is eastbound on a parallel course. There are eighty-seven ships in the two convoys with fourteen escorts. Forty-five U-boats in three battle groups, "Robber Baron," "Harrier" and "Daredevil" converge to attack the convoys in waters known as the Devil's Gorge lying in an "air gap" out of range of land-based patrol planes.

Mohegan attacks and drives off three submarines using all its depth charges. Falling back to look for a straggler they surprise a raider being refueled by a "milch-cow" U-boat. The cutter's five-inch gun opens up as she steams to ram the enemy. The Germans dive frantically, several men abandoned on the milch-cow's deck and swept into the sea.

On March 18, long-range bombers from Iceland begin to harass the wolf packs. Five additional ships fall victim to the U-boats before the attack is called off six hundred miles from the English coast. Twenty-two Allied ships are sunk in the Devil's Gorge and 372 men lost. A long German submarine is destroyed. "Happy Time," the U-boat commanders call this period.

Mohegan picks up one hundred survivors of the convoy. No one is more solicitous toward the mariners than twenty-year-old ship's cook, OSCAR FLETCHER, the son of Marvin and Stella. Oscar is a fine and resourceful sailor unlike his father who was sick as a dog on Saracen . Oscar has also inherited the genius of caterer Jason Fletcher of Congress Street. Lt. Steele and his fellow officers marvel at what Oscar cooks up from Mohegan's mean rations. Of course, there's also a touch of the pirate Fletcher in Oscar's dealings with the warehousemen of Atlantic Avenue.

Fourteen-year-old EDWARD LYNCH , Neal's son, is built like his great-great-grandfather Farrell, a robust broad-shouldered lad with huge paws. Eddie Lynch's best friend, Brian "Cocky" Malloy, is the son of the South Boston Boy's Club boxing trainer, a former champ who boxes the ears of any hellion of West Sixth Street caught fighting outside the ring. It doesn't stop the turf wars of Southie's gangs or their raids on other neighborhoods.

At South Boston High School on March 17, 1943, three thousand attend a St. Patrick's Day event addressed by Father Edward Curran, who preaches the "Social Justice" advocated by Father Charles Coughlin. Flanked by parish priests and local politicians, Curran beats the isolationist drum and excoriates the Bolsheviks. He spews vintage anti-Semitic shibboleths gleaned from The Protocols of Zion . The audience greets Curran's words with roars of approval. When the meeting ends, most take their places along Broadway for St. Patrick's Day Parade.

One gang of young crusaders heads for "Jew Hill Avenue." There are sixty thousand Jews in the Mattapan-Roxbury-Dorchester area, an Old World Warsaw in a New World venue, with many refugees from pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Eddie Lynch, Cocky McCoy and their gang spot an elderly Jew walking down Blue Hill Avenue. "Old Moses!" shouts Cocky. The old man has a long gray beard. "Christ-killer!" Cocky screams giving the beard a vicious yank. The man curses in Yiddish. Cocky shoves the man off the pavement and sends him sprawling in the gutter. "Dirty Jew!" Eddie and the others chant. They see that he has a wooden leg, not "Old Moses" but Isaac Shapiro who lost the limb fighting for America at the Battle of Belleau Wood.

Eddie is careful to hide the incident from Neal Lynch. His father totally rejects these acts of anti-Semitism, a view shared by his boss, Curley. Eddie's mother, CALLISTA LYNCH would also disapprove of her son's gang shoving the Jew into the gutter but only because he was an old man with one leg. Callista sympathizes with Irish boys resisting what the Church militant perceives as a Jewish invasion of Catholic Boston.

In October 1943, Eddie and Cocky Malloy's gang precipitate Boston's worst anti-Semitic incident that follows nineteen attacks on Jews through the summer. Two seventeen-year-old Jewish boys are severely beaten by the gang. The police arrive on the scene and send the Irish boys on their way. The victims complain about the release of their attackers and are arrested for "taking part in a fray." At Police Station 11 in Fields Corner, Dorchester, officers thrash the pair with rubber hoses. An Irish Catholic judge fines them $10 each.

Eddie is identified as one of the attackers and faces the fury of Neal. Neal and Curley meet with Jewish leaders to diffuse a crisis that rages six months more. Christian Fronters launch a wave of scurrilous propaganda plastering war plants and bars in South Boston and Charlestown with flyers like one dedicated to the "The First American:"

First American killed in Pearl Harbor - John J. Hennessey

First American to sink a Jap ship - Colin P. Kelly

Greatest American air hero - "Butch" O'Hare

First American to get four new tires - Abraham Lipschitz

In March 1944, Neal takes Eddie to Washington where Congressman Curley offers his constituents and the entire nation a history lesson on Jewish sacrifice for America, from the Revolution to the current conflict. For twenty minutes, James Michael reads a list of Jews awarded Purple Hearts, Silver Stars and Distinguished Service decorations, a roll of valor that fills sixteen pages of the Congressional Record .

Eddie Lynch sits silently next to his father listening to The Governor's speech. It is a lesson against bigotry Eddie will remember for the rest of his life.

Mohegan is stationed at Reykjavik, Iceland in March 1944 when an engine-room fire cripples a Canadian corvette. Mohegan is ordered to take the vessel's place in a Murmansk convoy. Chandler is on the bridge as thirty merchant ships and seven escorts begin the perilous fifteen-hundred-mile voyage to the Russian port. Forty-eight hours later they come under attack by Nazi planes flying out of Norway. The raids don't let up for seven days, the time it takes for the convoy to reach its destination.

Oscar Fletcher mans one of Mohegan's ack-ack guns that bring down three enemy planes. The half-frozen gun crews are at battle stations for twenty-six hours at a stretch. The convoy arrives at Murmansk with the loss of one freighter.

In April 1944, Mohegan heads back to Iceland. Heavy fog shrouds the ship in the Barents Sea, but as they pass the North Cape the weather lightens. A lone Heinkel spots Mohegan , drops two torpedoes and misses. Two hours later four Junkers attack. A stick of bombs hits aft hurling fragments of steel from bow to stern. Mohegan's captain and chief officer go to inspect the damage and are killed instantly in a secondary explosion.

Command passes to Chandler Steele. The cutter's steering-engine requires sixteen hours for repairs. They finally get under way in the pre-dawn hours of April 6, Chandler plotting a course from the Norwegian coast to Scotland. They're three hundred miles away when a lone U-boat attacks Mohegan . One torpedo demolishes the engine room killing all on watch. A second torpedo slams into the cutter's starboard side, the explosion blowing apart the bridge-house.

Chandler is flung onto the deck severely wounded. Oscar Fletcher and another gunner carry the lieutenant to the port lifeboat lowered into heavy seas. The cutter breaks in two and sinks in minutes. The survivors are rescued by an English destroyer and taken to Loch Ewe, Scotland.

Chandler is flown to a naval hospital at Netley outside Southampton where he gets a surprise visit from Lawrence Trane. Unlike Victoria who still resents a Bohemian who made her daughter "a tramp of T-Wharf," Chandler gets on well with his brother-in-law. Lawrence reached England in April 1944 as a member of the Army Art Program, only to learn that Congress refused to fund "a piece of foolishness." Lawrence and other civilian artists are stranded, until Life magazine offers to employ them. - Lawrence lands in Normandy two days after the storming of Omaha Beach. On August 25, 1944, he is with a tank unit of the Free French Forces, when the first liberators roll into his old haunts in Montparnasse.

Chandler returns to Boston and is admitted to Chelsea Naval Hospital on Admiral's Hill. - The same hill where Samuel Maverick's "murtherers" guarded against attack by zealots out to ruin Maverick's rustic playhouse and the pleasures enjoyed by Chandler's ancestor, Nicholas Steele. - Chandler is hospitalized for four months from July to October 1944.

On arrival he's put in Room 208 across the corridor from a scrawny gregarious fellow who comes over to greet him.

"Chandler, you sorry son of a bitch! Handsome Henson told me they were shipping you in. You'll meet him soon enough, a madman with a knife!"

"How are you, Jack?"

"Ready for the Old Sailors Home, I'll say. A rocking chair, sunny spot on the lawn, thanks of a grateful Republic ringing in my ears."

Chandler's fellow patient is Lt. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Chandler was two years ahead of Kennedy at Harvard, and in the same class as his older brother, Joe Jr. Chandler and Jack both roomed in Winthrop House and belonged to the Spee Club. In 1938, their shared love of sailing saw them competing together in the Intercollegiate Regatta at Osterville. Chandler never warmed to Joe Jr. finding him standoffish and humorless and disturbingly pro-Fascist. "The brutality used by the Nazis against the Jews is necessary," said Joe Jr. "It's a horrible thing but in every revolution you have to expect some bloodshed."

Jack Kennedy is in Chelsea Hospital recovering from a failed back operation. The previous August in the Solomon Islands, a Japanese destroyer sliced PT109 in two, Jack and eight surviving crew given up for dead. Kennedy's unflagging courage led to their rescue and made him a legitimate American hero. On patrol in the Pacific for three months more, his poor health finally caught up with him and he was sent back stateside.

At Chelsea Hospital, the two young men say little about their personal encounters with the horrors of war but speak of the future. In 1939, Jack had traveled to Soviet Russia, "a slave state run by a small clique of ruthless, powerful and selfish men." He shares his forebodings of a new Red terror with Chandler. Chandler has a sense of Jack's destiny, an aura about his frail fellow patient that sees him striding the world in seven league boots.

One August evening the invalids drag themselves off Admiral Hill to the roof garden of the Ritz-Carlton for a night of dancing with two nurses. When the couples leave the Ritz-Carlton, they find Jack's car stolen from Newbury Street, prompting a State House representative to call for stickers for servicemen's cars, so auto-thieves will give fighting men a break. And save the heroes, too, from love's labor lost.

A week after Jack's car is stolen, he's with his family at Hyannis Port when they get news that Joe Jr. is missing believed dead over England. Joe volunteered for the Navy's air wing in summer 1941 still an isolationist at heart but able to see the writing on the wall. He was flying a near-suicidal mission in a plane packed with ten tons of TNT to blast a German munitions factory when an electric fault detonated the explosives.

When Kennedy returns to the hospital, Chandler commiserates with a quote from Buchan's Pilgrim's Way , Jack's favorite book. "For the chosen few, there is no disillusionment. They march on into life with a boyish grace and their high noon keeps all the freshness of the morning."

"I appreciate that, Chandler," Jack says quietly.

In 1946, Chandler is with a brains trust of ex-Navy men and Harvard friends who back Kennedy's run for Congress. Nowhere is Chandler's politicking more challenging than in the house on Beacon Street. Clayton and Victoria are lifelong Republicans alarmed at seeing their son in the camp of "a carpetbagger toting a portmanteau stuffed with his father's loot." There's worse to come when the carpetbagger introduces Chandler to another campaign worker, Carmela di Antonini. A Radcliffe graduate, Carmela is one of twelve females who enter Harvard Medical School in 1945, the first class to include women. Carmela may have breached the walls of Harvard Medical School but will have a hard time penetrating Sewing Circle 93. Victoria ignores Carmela's allure and achievements associating the young woman with what she calls, "the dusky swarm of Hanover Street."

Carmela's father, Luigi Antonini, is a professor of electronics at MIT who came to America with his family in the 1920s. Antonini was at the center of the technological battle against Germany and Japan spearheaded by MIT. An impetus that becomes the peacetime catalyst for a revolution that again makes Boston "the hub of the solar system." Chandler's contact with the professor and his protégés will lead to his unmooring the Steele fortune and establishing The Houqua Fund, a venture capital group backing the high-tech pioneers of the computer age.

This lies in the future and for now the wartime boom in the shipyards of East Boston, Quincy and Fore River is over. The sprawling army base in South Boston that brought tens of thousands to the city is deserted. Decrepit wharves and warehouses rim Atlantic Avenue. Block after block behind the waterfront is boarded up. The South End is becoming the most notorious skid row in America, the main stem on Dover Street a jungle of abortion mills, quack doctors and dope peddlers.

On November 5, 1945, Kennedy trounces his opponent by 69,093 votes to 26,007, though the Republicans take the governor's seat and sweep the venerable Democrat senator David Walsh out of office.

The following summer, Jack is a guest at the wedding of Chandler, where the ladies of Sewing Circle 93 stand guard for their distressed chairwoman. Victoria finds it hard to resist the Kennedy charm though does remind her circle that the congressman's father was blackballed at The Country Club. She confidently predicts that the son will have a short run in Congress.

Neil Lynch is the rock behind embattled Mayor Curley, now serving his fourth term in office, partly thanks to a deal with Ambassador Joe Kennedy. The congressman's father paid a $12,000 debt for Curley and underwrote his campaign in return for the resignation of his seat in Congress leaving it open for Kennedy to contest.

For three years, Curley has been fighting charges of mail fraud stemming from a partner's war contracts, until a jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to eighteen months in prison. In June 1947 Curley's appeals run out and the old political warhorse is led into the federal pen at Danbury. His golden voice falters as he invokes Shakespeare's exchange between Wolsey and Cromwell: "Had I but served my God with half the fervor that I have served the Democratic party, they would not leave me thus in mine old age naked before mine enemies."

Neal circulates a petition asking President Truman to grant clemency to Curley. One hundred thousand Bostonians endorse the request for mercy. President Truman commutes Curley's sentence sending him home in time for Thanksgiving.

Neal and Callista are at a combination Thanksgiving Dinner/ birthday party in the Jamaicaway mansion. The lettering on Curley's cake reads: HAP:PY BIRTHDAY TO OUR BELOVED BOSS. The next morning Curley returns to City Hall where a dedicated city clerk John Hynes had served as temporary mayor. At day's end, a jaunty James Michael quips to a reporter, "I've accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence." The remark infuriates the mild-mannered Hynes and inspires him to run for the office in 1949 winning the race and effectively ending Curley's fifty-year political career.

On Christmas Eve, December 1949, Curley's last month in office, James Michael slips out of City Hall for a private meeting with two young men. He passes Old Granary Burying Ground and heads for the Common. The two men are waiting near Frog Pond.

"Merry Christmas, Governor."

"Merry Christmas, my boys!" Curley says. "Buon Natale!"

Carlo and Arturo Paterniani, Curley's favorite sons of Italy, have prospered with construction contracts handed out by The Governor. They reward Curley with a gift of $10,000 in crisp new bills embracing their benefactor like a beloved grandfather.

After the Paterniani brothers leave, James Michael rests awhile on a bench in sight of a bas-relief that depicts William Blaxton, the reverend bearing an uncanny resemblance to Curley, a suggestion made to the artist who created it for the Tercentenary. Curley is sitting there when an old adversary walks past on her way home.

"Ah, Vicky!" the mayor says, tipping his hat. "Merry Christmas, ma'am!"

Victoria Bamford Steele glares at the great hooligan. "Bah!" she growls, her low heels clattering along the snowy path as she hurries away to her fortress on the hill.

James Michael is still laughing when he leaves Frog Pond, a wily old sachem of Boston, who walks where Chitanawoo and the Shawmut greeted the dawn.

III

1949-1976

LILY BANKS is a slender, attractive child with large hazel eyes and long, shining black hair. Her features come from Black Seminole ancestors, once warrior chieftains in central Florida. On the night of July 18, 1949, eleven-year-old Lily sees the house her father built with his own hands burned to the ground. Some wreckers try to set fire to Luther Banks's orange grove dousing the trees with gasoline, but the blaze doesn't spread beyond the first row.

Luther's property is at Stuckey's Still, Groveland, thirty-five miles west of Orlando. Two nights earlier, a seventeen-year-old white housewife reported that four black men had raped her. Three alleged assailants are captured and held in Tavares jail. Six hundred whites led by unmasked Klansmen surrounded the lockup earlier that night. Sheriff Willis McCall sat on the steps of his jail and talked them out of a lynching. Frustrated at being denied a chance to torture, hang and burn the three prisoners, the mob piled into their cars and sped off to terrorize the African-American section of Groveland.

After burning Luther Bank's farm, a carload of whiskey-swigging louts race along Route 50 toward Clermont heading for a late-night bar. They career into the path of an oncoming car that swerves and crashes headlong into a giant oak. The vehicle bursts into flames, its occupants trapped inside. In a horrible coincidence, they are Luther's wife and his mother and a friend driving them home from Orlando where the older woman had been in hospital.

After the funerals, Lily and her father stay alone on the farm living in a shack that stood there when Luther bought the property seven years earlier. Luther abandons his orchard and won't allow a single orange to be picked. He sits on a packing crate and watches his trees go to ruin.

Lily has courage and wisdom beyond her years. The only schooling she's had has been at a one-room building next to Ma Willie's general store. Ma Willie Sherman is from Arkansas, the widow of "General" Sherman, a bird-hunter who shot his way through the Everglades until felled by a stray bullet from another plumage collector. The white kids who play in the dirt around Ma Willie's store are never unfriendly, Ma Willie's daughter, Mabel, often walking a long way down the road with Lily when she heads home. Her memories of Orlando are different. She first went there when she was five, going with her mother who had to see a doctor. She wandered away from the clinic to a nearby park, where she climbed on a roundabout with other children, all who happened to be white. A woman pulled her off the ride and pushed her out of the playground. Her mother found her sitting on the pavement, weeping. On another visit with her father, she was thirsty and wanted to drink from a water fountain, but Luther stopped her. "Why can't I drink the water?" she asked. Luther didn't answer but promised his child a red cool drink and an ice cream instead, which he bought from a window hatch at the side of the Orange Blossom Café.

A September night in 1949, Henry Shepherd comes to visit Lily's father. Henry's son, Sammy, was one of the three men accused of raping the Groveland housewife. On September 8, in the palm-surrounded courthouse at Tavares, Sammy and Walter Irvine are sentenced to death. Sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee who never met the others until thrown into a cell with them is jailed for life. "They're going to kill my boy for a rape he never did," says Henry says to Luther. "It's not the law, it's a legal lynching."

The day after Shepherd's visit, Luther writes to his sister, IDA BANKS, who he hasn't seen for ten years, since she joined the great migration from the South and went to Boston. Will Ida give Lily a home? His ruined farm is no place for the child, nor is Florida where the Klan is rising again.

In October 1949, Luther's sister agrees to take Lily until her brother can rebuild his life. "In Boston, you can drink the water," Luther tells his child. "You can play on the swings and no one will stop you. You can go to a proper school. You can eat ice cream in a restaurant like Orange Blossom Café not on the sidewalk."

Lily doesn't realize that her father isn't going with her and when she learns this she is devastated. Luther is gentle but insistent fighting back tears as he hands her over to Jake Johnson, who will take her to Boston. "Split-Nose" Johnson's parents own a jook joint on the road to Tavares. Split-Nose is visiting them from Connecticut, where he works for a tobacco company. Johnson came by his nickname after a fight in a cigar factory, his nose mangled with a billhook.

Lily and Johnson take the Greyhound Line from Orlando. At Sparks, Georgia, when he leaves the bus station, Split-Nose is caught in a drive for "vagrants" who get thirty days on a chain gang, a seasonal sweep to garner free labor to repair county roads. Johnson was doomed had the lawmen not brought in another "vagrant," young Lily who tearfully confirms that he's a legitimate traveler. Lily is confused and frightened as she travels north, forced to ride in the back of buses, denied food at white lunch counters, kicked off benches reserved for white women. When a bus driver sees Lily go into an on-board toilet, he steers the vehicle onto the rough shoulder terrorizing the child. It's a way of discouraging blacks from using the new facilities on interstate runs.

Lily arrives in Boston on a gray November day in 1949. Her Aunt Ida meets her and takes her to her home in the West End, a labyrinth of decaying tenements and rooming houses. Ancient babushkas and bent-over paisans huddle in doorways, not one word of English falling from their lips. Rag pickers and icemen ply their trades, adding their cries to the Boston Babel. Big Normie Schipper, the fruit and vegetable man, curses in Yiddish as a light-fingered Turkish boy swipes a pomegranate. The "O Sole Mia's" of Vito Vitale, a hurdy-gurdy player coming down from the North End, drown out Normie's howls. On the corner outside Max Levy's American United Deli and Café, a bunch of young guys hang out, second and third generation West-Enders in the only village they know.

Ida Banks, a short, plump woman with a cheerful face, is divorced and stays alone in a five-story walk-up on Spring Street. She works as a nanny on Mount Vernon Street, Beacon Hill, caring for the children of the Bickels, Maryland transplants to Boston. There are eight tenants in Ida's building, including two Italian families, a Polish family, and four Jewish families. There are a several hundred African-Americans among the twenty thousand souls in the predominantly Eastern-European and Jewish quarter.

Lily quickly comes to love Aunt Ida, who enrolls the child in a Beacon Hill public school and sends her to the Elizabeth Peabody Settlement House. Several days a week, Lily spends her afternoons at the Bickel brownstone on Mount Vernon Street doing her homework in a corner of the kitchen. The Bickel children range from three to eleven, the oldest a girl the same age as Lily. Gladys Bickel's mother doesn't believe in "mixing" and her daughter rarely exchanges a word with Lily.

On Spring Street, Lily has many friends. Some ancient babushkas like to rub the little schwartze's head for good luck! When she goes to Max Levy's store for ice cream, she recalls her father's promise, for instead of throwing her out Mr. Levy lets her sit at the counter and drops an extra scoop in her bowl. At Christmas, Ruth Levy gives Lily a bag of Schrafft's candy and ribbons for her hair. Many kids in the tenements come from countries where a black person was never seen. The girl from Florida delights them, a place their parents tell them where the sun never stops shining. They can't understand why Lily left this paradise.

Lily never goes back to Stuckey's Still and never sees her father alive again. In 1952, Ida gets a letter from Henry Shepherd with news that Luther Banks died of a broken heart as he walked in his ruined orchard.

Growing up in Boston in the 1950s, Lily rarely leaves the West End, except on trips with Ida and members of Tremont Temple where they worship every Sunday. To her Spring Street neighbors, Ida is a "good Negro" who never swears, drinks or curses. Lily is held up as an example for their own offspring: "Even a little schwartze knows to behave better than you."

As Lily gets older and moves beyond this sheltered world, she begins to see a dark side of the City on a Hill, not the blind race hatred of the South but a more refined separation that determines where blacks may live, work, eat and study. A handful of elite families occupy the "Hill" on Franklin Park, but the majority of blacks are segregated in slums of the South End and on Poverty Street in Roxbury and Dorchester. The pockets of African-Americans in the West End and on the back of Beacon Hill are invisible to the majority of white Bostonians.

When Lily is seventeen, she enrolls in a business college and earns a diploma in typing and dictation. When she looks for a job, no manager slams the door in her face but they may as well for when they see she's black, their typing pools are suddenly overflowing. Angry and dispirited after six weeks of trudging through the snow, it's Ida who brings Lily's frustration to the attention of Reverend JEROME Fletcher, assistant minister at Tremont Temple. In March 1956, Lily goes to work for Reverend Fletcher and moves into the orbit of the Fletchers of Boston.

For Ida and Lily and thousands who live in the West End, the winter of 1956 is a bitter one. Since 1953 there's been a movement at City Hall to redevelop the thirty-eight -block neighborhood, one promoter declaring, "The West End is a cancer that cries out for a municipal hysterectomy." By 1956, the juggernaut of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) rolls toward demolishing the West End.

Ida has lived here for sixteen years and dreads being compelled to move, but every month sees more and more residents accepting the inevitable. Rows of tenements stand deserted, overrun by rats and roaches. "See, how right we are," say the men from BRA. "The West End is a breeding ground for pestilence." When wrecking crews close in, defenders sabotage their equipment. Concrete slabs are dropped onto cranes from rooftops. Molotov cocktails are flung at invaders' bulldozers. Empty tenements on Spring Street are firebombed threatening the last thickly populated blocks.

One morning, Lily encounters a BRA planner surveying the widening swath of cleared land. She's in a heated exchange with the young man, a robust fellow with a large well-shaped head, who defends the decision to raze the slum.

"We're living in the Atomic Age in a city built for horse-and-buggy days. We're building the New Boston."

"For who? For rich people who'll live in your towers with their valets and wine cellars."

"A place will be found for everyone."

"Yes, just so long as it's not here, where we belong."

The BRA man is KENNETH TRANE, the son of Lawrence and Cyrene, who left T-Wharf for bucolic Concord after the war. Lawrence is a Little Brown art editor and commutes to Boston twice weekly. Cyrene no longer marches for anarchists or tapes her mouth shut but is a strident voice nonetheless in the modern battles of Concord fighting for the town's preservation. The Wharf Rats have swapped their Bohemian nights for quiet rambles between the pitch pines and birches of Walden Pond.

Besides Kenneth, they have a daughter, FRANCES "FRANNY" TRANE , born in 1946. Franny has her father's light brown eyes with the same lively sparkle, an uninhibited and plucky twelve-year-old who is a Massachusetts junior show-jumping champion.

Ida and Lily are the last occupants of their walk-up. Their fellow tenants leave tearfully to be scattered around the city, many older people harried into their graves by the BRA bulldozers. Ida procrastinates until City Hall formally seizes the remaining properties. The city offers Ida an apartment in a new housing project. She rejects it saying she doesn't want to live with "common people."

Again, it's Reverend Jerome Fletcher who comes to the rescue. He introduces Ida and Lily to his cousin, OSCAR FLETCHER, who owns a house in the South End and has an apartment to rent.

The gunner-cook of Mohegan has done well since the war. Oscar returned to civilian life in 1946 working at the Parker House hotel for two years and then at Locke-Ober's until 1952. He opened "Oscar's" on Massachusetts Avenue, a restaurant and music club patronized by Boston's black community and white jazz fans. The coolest dude of all is there to greet customers, Oscar's father, Marvin Fletcher, still cutting a snazzy figure in the old Mommaland quarter.

Oscar's wife, Arlene, died in 1956 leaving two children, RAYMOND FLETCHER, born in 1945, and MILLIE FLETCHER, a year later. Marvin's wife, Stella, is also dead, father and son employing a housekeeper, Joyce "Gold-Teeth" Topman, a virago from Barbados. The shabby bow-fronted brownstone owned by Oscar, Number 25, Easthampton Street, is the same house that Roark O'Brien built seventy-five-years ago for green-eyed Nellie Lynch.

Lily Banks marries Oscar Fletcher in 1959. They have two children, JOHN FLETCHER, born 1960, and SHIRLEE FLETCHER, born 1962. Hostility between Lily and Oscar's teenage son, Ray, intensifies over the years, until 1965 when Oscar kicks out the twenty-year-old after a fight with Lily. His son hits the streets and becomes a hustler and petty criminal. In 1967, Ray is involved in the riots that explode along Blue Hill Avenue and plunge the city into anarchy.

BARBARA "BABS" LYNCH is the wife of NOLAN LYNCH, son of Regan the Rumrunner who was gunned down on Charlestown Bridge in the Thirties. Before "The Taking" as West End people call the land seizure, Babs's grandparents, Stanislav and Lottie Kaminski lived on the first-floor of Ida and Lily's building. The Kaminski's raised three children on Spring Street, where they'd been since they arrived in America from Poland. Their son, Joseph, left the neighborhood in 1933 when he married Marja Slowacki and moved to a Polish enclave in Irish South Boston. Their daughter, Barbara, was born there on July 4, 1937 but came to spend so much time with her grandparents that she was one of the Spring Street gang of kids. Babs was fleeing the turmoil in her own home, her father a butcher at Quincy Market whose shifts invariably ended in the bars that served the thirsty market men sending him home drunk three or four times a week.

Babs first meets Lily when she arrives from Florida in 1949, their stories seen unfolding alongside each other. In her own house, Babs overhears talk about "Nigger bastards" and every other "sonofabitch" who gets butcher Kaminski going when he's inebriated. Babs's grandparents never use such language and are good friends with their neighbor and her niece.

When Babs is five, Stanislav takes the child's hand and leads her across town to share his greatest joy. Soon after landing in Boston, Stan decided that the surest way to become an American was to learn everything about baseball. His education began with the Boston Braves at South End Grounds, but he switched to the Boston Red Sox when they moved to Fenway Park in 1912. Stan knew he made the right choice when he saw his team win four World Series Championships between 1912 and 1918.

When the Red Sox go up against the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1946 World Series, Stan and nine-year-old Babs are in the bleachers. Two-to-one favorites, the Sox lose the series and Babs cries for four hours. When her tears dry, she pulls herself together. "Wait until next year," she says to Stan brave as the rest of the faithful.

In 1954 Babs quits school in the tenth grade and takes a job as a waitress in Scollay Square. Two years later she joins the ranks of the ancient and dishonorable company of Durgin Park Dining Hall, every customer a potential target for razor-sharp barbs. Durgin Park is a stone's throw from the site of The Beaver where Recompense West was equally ready to take on the world.

When the BRA moves against the West End, Babs and Lily stand together in the futile protests against The Taking. This camaraderie is radically different from their positions fifteen years later when the city teeters on the brink of a race war.

In 1957 Stan and Lottie pack up and move to two rooms in Dorchester. It's heart wrenching for Babs to see her grandparents shattered by the expulsion from their home. The experience leaves a deep distrust of City Hall that fuels her anger in the struggles to come.

In 1958, Babs is waiting on tables at Durgin Park when she meets big Nolan Lynch, the image of his ancestor Farrell. They date for three months before Nolan introduces Babs to his mother, SARAH LYNCH . Sarah never remarried after Regan's murder and took in boarders on Monument Avenue. She dislikes Babs on sight believing her son can do better than a "Polack" waitress. A night at Nantasket Beach and sex on the backseat of Nolan's Studebaker leads to Babs becoming pregnant. They marry in 1959.

Nolan works in the Boston Globe pressroom ladling molten metal into casting boxes for printing plates. Before the Globe moves from Newspaper Row, Nolan's workdays usually end on Pi Alley where last call is at 8.45 in the morning. On his way home, Nolan often meets his mother returning from morning mass at St. Mary's. Sarah's devotion to the Church borders on the fanatic, her belief that Babs enticed her son to commit a mortal sin adding to disdain for her daughter-in-law.

Babs and Nolan have three children, WILLIAM "BILLY" LYNCH, BARRY and TRACY. With little else for her behind the lace curtains of Monument Avenue, Babs's life centers on the children during the turbulent sixties, a time that sees the Boston sky lit by fires scorching Blue Hill Avenue and brings thirty thousand war protestors to Boston Common. In Charlestown churches bells toll for sons killed in Vietnam, more boys than from any other part of town. On Bunker Hill Day, Babs stands with Townies who greet heroes of past and present but she remains an outsider.

In summer 1964, Babs and Billy go to Fenway Park where the "Yaz" and "Tony C" lead the newest crop of Red Sox hopefuls. When Tony Conigliaro bats one over the Green Monster, five-year-old Billy lets fly with a heaven-piercing yell. There's a tear in Babs's eye as she hugs her son fiercely and remembers white-haired Stanislav Kaminski sitting there. "This year, Billy," she imagines Stan promise. "This year, boy!"

For Frances "Franny" Trane every year is a winner whether riding "Santayana" down Concord's Battle Lane or climbing the grand staircase of the Ritz-Carlton to have tea with a grandmother who dotes on her. Seventy-four-year-old Victoria Steele widowed in 1956 maintains her place on the Social Register , her mastery of Sewing Circle 93 and her watch on the morals of Boston. In 1959 Victoria takes Franny to Europe for six weeks crossing the Atlantic in Queen Mary and going from London to Istanbul on the Orient Express. When they return, Victoria declares her traveling companion a proper young lady of Boston.

Chandler Steele's investment in the post-war high-tech boom nets millions for the Houqua Fund, almost an embarrassment of riches in a city clothed in Depression rags. In 1959 with Boston teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Chandler and other city leaders meet in the basement boardroom of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. "The Vault" drives a renewal of the City on the Hill beginning with the redevelopment of Scollay Square's sixty acres cleared for a civic plaza on the site where Shawmut wigwams stood.

In summer 1963 when Franny is seventeen she's a guest at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. President Kennedy invites Chandler and a group of wartime friends and their families for the weekend. Chandler and Carmela's children are away and Franny gets to go with her uncle and aunt.

Four months later, Franny is her class at Radcliffe when news comes that the president has been shot. Her disbelief turns to utter despair, as she struggles to keep the image of a smiling JFK at the helm of Victura sharing a joke with Chandler as they sailed the waters of Nantucket Sound.

In June 1964, Franny and two friends, Joel and Rebecca Epstein, travel to St. Augustine, Florida to participate in Freedom Summer. The three students join a group of NAACP youth who attempt to integrate the whites-only Monson Motel putting on their swimsuits and heading for the pool. The manager pours acid into the water to prevent its pollution.

Franny and the Epsteins are beaten and arrested in a rally at St. Augustine's four-hundred-year old slave market. They're in jail when they learn of the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. The next day, Lawrence Trane arrives and secures the release of the trio taking them back to Boston.

In her second year at Radcliffe, Franny is living in Cambridge and takes part in the protests that begin after the bombing raids on North Vietnam. She is with thousands who gather on Boston Common when Martin Luther King Jr. comes to talk on the training ground, and she takes part in the battles around Harvard Square.

She graduates from Radcliffe, and goes to England to attend the London School of Economics, arriving as Tariq Ali and Danny Cohn Bendt lead a generation of disaffected youth to the barricades of London and Paris. In July 1968, Franny and hundreds of students storm the barriers outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Driven down a side street by mounted police, Franny stumbles and falls. She narrowly escapes the pounding hooves, pulled to safety by another demonstrator.

Franny's rescuer is 23-year-old Raymond Fletcher. An instigator of the Boston ghetto riots that destroyed fifteen blocks of Blue Hill Avenue in 1967, Fletcher was suspected of being a sniper and wounding a police officer. He fled to Canada and afterwards to England where he also attends courses at LSE when the college isn't under siege by one or another revolutionary group.

Three weeks after their meeting, Franny moves into Ray's digs on the second floor of a Victorian row house in Brixton. They're passionate and loving but tormented, too, by small differences that loom large, sometimes just a word taken wrongly. Suddenly it's as though they're standing naked, all the eyes of the past on them. The moment passes and they walk together again not always on the path of revolution. Ray Fletcher is the grandson of marvelous Marvin and this is the London of Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, where the flower children "turn on, tune in, drop out" in the psychedelic city.

Their intense, volatile love-in lasts ten months. In November 1969 Franny stands alone at the stern of Clerkenwell Merchant , as the passenger-cargo ship clears the docks and moves into the Thames to begin the voyage back to Boston.

The stories of Lily Fletcher, Babs Lynch and Fanny Trane converge in the Seventies amid the agony a city divided against itself. What follows are some ideas for the roles each play in the pivotal episodes.

• On a blustery afternoon in November 1971, Lily Fletcher storms from Easthampton Street to Elijah Lovejoy School, where her youngest child, Shirlee, is a pupil. The Lovejoy is a crumbling brick building with grimy walls and sagging floors built ninety years ago and more like a prison for its six hundred children. Eighty-seven percent of the pupils are African-American, seven percent are Latino, and two percent are Asian. Twenty-four students are white. One teacher and one custodian are black; every other staff member is white. Shirlee's class teacher, Miss Madeline Mahoney, earlier in the day punished the child for speaking out of turn striking her with a metal ruler and sending her home in tears.

Lovejoy's headmaster and two male teachers block Lily's path but can't silence her outburst against "an Irish bitch from South Boston." Headmaster O'Connor promises an investigation though is well acquainted with Mahoney's harsh treatment of her black pupils.

In January 1972, Lily attends a meeting of the NAACP'S Public School Committee chaired by Reverend Jerome Fletcher. The members opt to file a federal lawsuit against the Boston School Committee and seek an order declaring the city guilty of systematically segregating its schools. The case falls by lot to Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., who will hand down his opinion fifteen months later.

• Babs finds it harrowing to visit her childhood home in South Boston, where Joseph Kaminski's chronic alcoholism has left him a double amputee in a wheelchair, still able though to ride down Broadway to Plank O'Malley's bar. Marja works as a waitress at Amrheins, the hangout of Southie's political bosses.

Babs has two sisters both married to Polish-Americans and living in South Boston with children of school-going age. As busing looms, the women vow to fight any law that will force them to send their kids to high-crime slums where they believe they'll be raped or murdered, fears exacerbated by Louise Day Hicks, Iron Maiden of South Boston, and other demagogues.

• Father EDWARD LYNCH , S.J. also has mixed feelings when he visits his mother's house on East 8 th Street. Eddie is forty-four; his father Neal died in 1968. Callista is as prejudiced as ever less against Jews who've migrated out of her vision than the multitude of African-Americans now considered the prime threat to Irish Boston. Callista's oldest daughter, Irene, who lives three houses away, has two teenage sons at South Boston High.

No one in the family can say precisely what Father Eddie does, though they know he lectures at Boston College and is somehow connected to the Portogee's office. "The Portogee" is His Eminence Humberto Sousa Medeiros, Archbishop of Boston, a disappointment to his Irish flock who disapprove of a Portuguese-American, a former floor sweeper in a Fall River mill replacing the grand dynasties of Richard Cardinal Cushing and William Henry O'Connell. Father Eddie is the eyes and ears of Cardinal Medeiros, a thankless task given Medeiros' inclination to wash his hands of "Gethsemane," as he calls his Boston archdiocese.

• Professor Leon Harbling, a Harvard sociologist, assigns Franny to monitor the Boston school case. Her fact gathering takes her from City Hall to the streets of Roxbury, South Boston and Charlestown. Franny's reports are instrumental in Harbling's selection as one of Judge Garrity's assistants charged with finding a peace formula acceptable to all sides.

• In September 1974, Babs and Billy join thousands marching to Government Center to protest school busing. Babs and other mothers toss tea bags into a fountain on Boston Common, emulating the Boston Tea Party. Today's tyrants are "King Arthur Garrity" and royal traitors like Senator Edward Kennedy. The senator is attacked when he speaks at the anti-busing rally. "You should be shot like your brothers," shouts one woman.

• On the first day of busing, Lily Fletcher is in charge of the hotlines at Freedom House in Roxbury, as black children head for South Boston. The buses climbing Dorchester Heights run the gauntlet of hundreds hurling bottles and rocks and chanting racist epithets. "No Niggers in South Boston," "Klan Kountry," "Bus 'em Back to Africa." Babs's sisters and their sons battle the TPF, Boston's tactical police force, a riot corps clad in powder blue outfits. The rioters see only "black and tan."

• Ray Fletcher returns to Boston in 1971 cleared of the Blue Hill Avenue shooting. He is a delegate to the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana where African-Americans chart a course for their future. A militant nationalist with Maoist leanings, Ray supports the establishment of black enclaves in the United States. He covers Boston's "race war" for radical journals personally against busing that he sees as a threat to a separate black nation.

• Franny works in "The Bunker," a basement command post in City Hall, as violence escalates and riots spread from South Boston to Mission Hill. Brawls erupt in school corridors, knives flash, and bomb scares empty schools. The city gets called "Little Rock of the North."

Young David Duke, "Imperial Wizard" of the KKK, comes to Catholic Southie to promise "a great victory in South Boston for the white race." The Grand Dragon breathes fire into his audience of six hundred, mostly youths clutching beer cans of beer, but when he asks for recruits at $3 a head, the crowd vanishes into the night.

At the Bunker, Franny and Father Eddie Lynch are brought together by their search for answers in a city ruled by fear. Franny comes to have a deep respect for the priest's strength of purpose. An admiration that sometimes touches Franny differently, with an affectionate glance at the big Jesuit and a journey that can never be theirs.

• Chandler and the Vault meet Mayor Kevin White in the Parkman House on Beacon Street to plan Bicentennial of events like the re-enactment of the Boston Massacre. The prospect of the NAACP and ROAR marching for "inalienable" rights takes on a vital meaning with heightened concerns about a bloody confrontation.

In March 1975, two unscheduled reenactments take place at the Old State House. At noon, Reverend Jerome Fletcher and one hundred and fifty African-Americans pay tribute to Crispus Attucks. All the living descendants of Nixie Fletcher are present, except Ray, who refuses to celebrate events tied to "two-hundred year-old white men."

At 6 p.m. Babs and Billy are with a ROAR crowd that comes down New Congress Street led by drummers beating a funeral dirge. Pallbearers carry a coffin with the corpse of Miss Liberty - Born 1770-Died 1974.

The formal re-enactment of the Massacre begins. ROAR members watch seven "lobsterbacks" raise their rifles and fire. Five Bostonians fall. The ROAR demonstrators also drop silently to the ground beside the re-enactors. They lie next to a black man representing Crispus Attucks.

In April, President Gerald Ford comes to Boston to celebrate the Lexington-Concord battles. Franny spends the night of April 18 with Joel and Rebecca Epstein and thirty thousand protesters camped under the banners of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission. In the morning, President Ford delivers an address on Concord Bridge: "From a militia of raw recruits, the American military stands on the front lines of the Free World . . ." Across the river, the crowd roars in response: "No more war! No more war!"

Waving yellow "Don't Tread on Me" flags, Franny and the Epsteins wade into the river trying to reach the presidential stand. Coast Guard patrol boats cut them off. Mounted police splash into the water and swing their clubs. Joel is beaten into the mud but manages to rise to his feet. He holds up his middle finger. Thousands on the hillside give their president the same send-off.

When Franny gets home drenched and muddied, Lawrence and Cyrene embrace their daughter. They don't forget they were also Water Rats sitting by the dock on T-Wharf waiting for a new dawn on Boston Harbor.

• In 1975, Lily's children, John and Shirlee, are assigned to Charlestown High. On a July evening, Lily and six Roxbury parents are invited to a meeting at City Hall to elect a Racial-Ethnic Parents Council. Their Charlestown counterparts sit in a huddle in the large conference room. Lily recognizes Babs sporting a blue windbreaker embroidered with the insignia of "Powder Keg," Charlestown branch of ROAR. Their greeting is cold and awkward. Babs has difficulty finding words under the eyes and ears of her contingent.

The meeting is conducted by Frank Powers, Charlestown High's headmaster. The Townies come with the sole purpose of blocking the attempt to form a multiracial parents' council seen as an endorsement for forced busing. After two hours, Powers gives up and calls off the parley. The black parents beat a hasty retreat from City Hall. The whites leave with their fists aloft, a crowd of Powder Keg supporters cheering them as they emerge.

• The Second Battle of Bunker Hill begins on September 8, 1975, opening day of school. The slopes of Breed's Hill teem with belligerents, the approaches manned by baton-wielding TPF men, the skies patrolled by police choppers. There are no Redcoats making for Charlestown Neck, only a line of canary-yellow buses rolling toward the pickets of Powder Keg.

Babs has opted to send her two younger children to a private school in Medford. Billy is in his senior year at Charlestown and elects to stay on and complete his schooling. When he leaves for classes on September 8, he heads up Monument Avenue toward the towering granite obelisk and the High School. Police mass on the steps below the statue of Colonel William Prescott - "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes." - Pockets of sign-waving Townies stand glowering at the cops.

A convoy of six buses climbs Breeds Hill flanked by motorcycles and led by patrol cars. John and Shirlee sit in the third row of the first bus, their fear-filled eyes on their mother. Lily is a volunteer safety monitor and stands up front on the platform next to the driver. The buses pass through the jeering crowds and roll to a stop outside Charlestown High.

Billy never forgets his first glimpse of John Fletcher. He's watching from a third floor window and sees Fletcher climb out of the lead bus. All six foot seven of him. Around Billy others crack jokes about "apes" and "baboons" and other slurs. "Giraffe!" thinks Billy. Watching Fletcher lope toward the school, he can't help picturing him driving down the lane for a slam-dunk. And he's right, for John is a basketball star.

• On the second day of school, Townie mothers adopt a new form of protest. "We're going to pray for our children; we're going to pray for our town. If Martin Luther King can do it, so can the women of Charlestown." A three-year-old girl carrying an American flag leads the marchers. Babs is in the front row in shorts and sandals. "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. " A block from Monument Square police cordon off High Street. Motorcycle cops gun their machines. Mounted police in flak jackets steady their horses. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners." The women halt ten feet from the wall of policeman. The cops tighten their grip on the shafts of their clubs . "Now and at the hour of our death, Amen."

Father Eddie Lynch steps up to the line and begs Babs and others to stand down. The women respond with one word: " Judas!"

An hour passes. Mothers make their children leave their ranks. Then, the four hundred advance, shoulder to shoulder. The police push back but women begin to break through the line. The TPF officers give the order to advance. "Bastards!" Babs curses the new cudgel boys. She's pummeled and hurled to the pavement. In five minutes, the women are driven from the crest of Breed's Hill.

• Billy and his Townie classmates change their Bicentennial motto of " '76 " for another: " TLWC " - The Last White Class. Billy walks the hallways with smoldering resentment feeling robbed of what should've been his best and brightest year at Charlestown High. Half of his friends boycott school or drop out altogether. Plainclothes detectives roam the corridors. TPF storm troopers hunker down outside. There are skirmishes and swearing matches with black students. Six weeks after the start of the school year, Headmaster Frank Power quits a job he held honorably for two decades.

After the Red Sox, Billy's second passion is basketball. When he reports for the first practice, twenty black players turn up for the try-outs. Three blacks and two whites are selected for the starting five. Billy Lynch and John Fletcher are starting guards.

Billy and John slowly build respect for each other on the basketball court and in the locker-room, with the josh and jive banter of teammates. They ride the team bus into North Dorchester and Roxbury places Billy knows only by fearsome reputation. John has to run the gauntlet of raging Townies stubbornly refusing to accept the black players.The season's high spot is Charlestown's stunning overtime defeat of league champions, Jeremiah Burke High. A home-game victory, the Charlestown team leaves the gym under police protection to avoid clashes with their elated though still confused fans.

Billy goes secretly to Oscar's Restaurant invited to celebrate John's sixteenth birthday. Billy sits down with John's family with no idea that marvelous Marvin was his granddad's sidekick in MASSASOIT COTTON MILLS during Prohibition. He, too, leaves this celebration elated but confused.

• In the violent spring of the bicentennial year, white students attack an African-American lawyer on City Hall plaza, a photo of Theodore Landsman's assailant "spearing" him with the staff of an American flag becoming a modern version of the shot heard around the world. Two weeks later, one hundred thousand Bostonians are shamed into marching for peace in their city.

On a night in May, Billy visits his Southie cousins who belong to the militant South Boston Defense League. They're with a mob that heads for the city to set fire to a replica of the Boston Tea Party ship. Billy and his cousins go over to Downtown Crossing and rage down Washington Street smashing store windows and vandalizing cars. They're outside Filene's trying to set fire to a Globe delivery van when they see other Defense Leaguers surround two black men at the corner of Washington and Boylston. One victim escapes, but the second is trapped in the doorway of a building and hit mercilessly. Billy and his cousins rush to join the assailants.

"O, Christ!" Billy cries out.

John is beaten senseless. He lies directly below a plaque that depicts the Liberty Tree. The same place where Milo Lynch and Dick Fletcher began their fight for freedom.

John is in a coma for five weeks in Massachusetts General Hospital, where Lily keeps vigil at his bedside. She's there when Billy comes to visit. Lily has some suspicion about Billy's role that night but lets it go. It means a lot to have Babs Lynch's son sitting next to her and praying that her boy will be OK.

• Franny is alone in the study at 37 ½ Beacon Street. She loves the room filled with mementoes of generations of Steeles. The early light that falls through the bay window catches Privateer Emory Steele's expression of perfect agony as he posed for Copley. There's a fine oil, too, of Captain Ben's Lady Sarah in Whampoa Reach. Franny is up all night working at Captain Ben's desk, as she puts the finishing touches to her thesis, The Unfinished Revolution , a dissertation on the struggle for busing that Franny sees not as an end but another beginning in Boston.

The foregoing represents some of my thinking for plotlines and themes carrying the book through the 20 th century. The novel doesn't end in the 1970s but moves to the present drawing on its multi-faceted parts and characters for the finale. The story of the modern generation of Steeles, Tranes, Lynches and Fletchers includes the obvious events of the hour such as 9/11 and bitter irony of Boston's role in an epoch-making tragedy; it shows the emergent multi-ethnic face of a city deeply scarred by racism and sectarian hatreds; it celebrates a moment old Stan Kaminski and the entire Red Sox Nation dreamed of for decades. It captures the big moments and the small unexpected twists, as when Lucy, a young archaeologist descended from the Paterniani brothers, discovers the remains of The Beaver tavern in the Dock Square area and unearths the great three-seater privy where Adam Trane and his Irregulars sat enthroned. And for good measure Lucy also finds a sealed bottle of Pungasak Gold made by three devils who tormented the life out of Reverend Thomas Steele.

BOSTON - FAMILY TREES

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