The Fence - Dick Lehr [6]
Under a careful eye, Mike was allowed to play at a nearby park. His parents mostly made him stick close to home, where he’d shoot basketball at the hoop in their driveway. Mike had no idea about his home’s fancy bones. The chandelier in the entry was long gone, and the handsome wood floors were covered with wall-to-wall carpet. Even if he noticed it, he never wondered about the remnant wiring still strung along the creases in the walls or ceilings—wiring for the “call bells” the Swains used to summon servants from their quarters on the third floor. The sinks in the bedrooms were left over from when servants carried water to the rooms in buckets because there was no running water. Mike viewed the large house with its three floors and two staircases as a playground.
His bedroom as a boy was the tiny room above the front entry with a country view, completely disconnected from typical Roxbury. The room looked over the high brick walls enclosing the Carmelite monastery: green lawns dotted with maple, oak, and fir trees. In springtime, the apple and cherry trees blossomed pink and white flowers. Bells rang daily, calling people to prayer and, as the nuns would say, “directing their thoughts to the faithful presence of God in their midst.”
The house at 60 Winthrop Street was like a sanctuary, sequestering Mike from the trouble not far away. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Dudley Square area became a no-man’s-land. “A day doesn’t go by without a stabbing or shooting or assault with a baseball bat or club,” a judge in the Roxbury District Court once said. “Unemployment is bad. Housing is bad. The schools are bad. When you have these conditions, you’re going to have crime.” Merchants suffered, and many stores closed and storefronts were boarded up. “People are afraid to walk the street,” complained one merchant to the Boston Globe. In 1971, when Mike was five, the city opened a new, $4 million police station across from where Winthrop Street ended at Dudley Square. More than three hundred officers were deployed. Several months later, a new $3.5 million glass and concrete courthouse was built next door. Both were seen as necessary to tackle the sharp rise in murders, rapes, and drugs.
Mike got to know some of the officers, and they seemed nice. He was also drawn to shows on TV about police, and he daydreamed about being a police officer. But the idea felt daring and even intimidated him. “I didn’t really think I could be a police officer for some reason. I didn’t know if I was good enough.” He really liked one officer named Will Saunders, a family friend who made a lasting impression on Mike, mainly because of his race. “There were not very many minority officers then, so he really stood out.”
Father and son shared a number of traits, but most notable was their reserve. In kindergarten, Mike suffered one of his recurring nosebleeds during nap time. He didn’t say anything to the teacher, and just lay there as the blood pooled. When nap time ended, the teacher saw Mike and was aghast. His parents were called in for a meeting. “He doesn’t talk,” Mike recalled the teacher saying with worry. “All he had to do was come get us and he didn’t even do anything.”
Cauterizing resolved the nosebleeds, but Mike’s quietness continued. It was a reason he repeated the first grade. “I was immature,” said Mike. “I didn’t talk. That was a big thing.” For elementary school, Mike followed his older brothers to a private Catholic parochial school in nearby Brookline, St. Mary’s School. “My folks didn’t know much about education, you know, my dad had a sixth-grade education and my mom, I think, eleventh grade. But they knew the Boston public school system wasn’t that good.” In the early 1970s, the escalating battle