The Fence - Dick Lehr [7]
For his parents, the school was a stretch financially—a couple of hundred dollars in tuition plus the cost of school uniforms. He sometimes heard “grumblings” from his father when the bills were due. For his part, Mike just followed along, even if privately he wondered why he had to attend a school so far from home. It seemed so far away because of the family’s early morning routine—Mike was out of the house by 6 A.M. to ride along in the station wagon while his father drove his mother to work in Waltham and then backtracked to drop him off at school in Brookline. Mike took the bus home from school and went next door to stay with his grandmother. “My mother wouldn’t get home until later, and my dad worked pretty late all the time.”
St. Mary’s had about two hundred students. There was one class for each grade, with fifteen to twenty-five students. Mike realized right away he stood out—he was usually the only black student in his class. But he did get used to his surroundings. “There were a lot of kids who, although we looked different, we had a very similar background. Their parents weren’t wealthy. They were hardworking, middle-class people.” Nonetheless, things happened to remind him he was different from most kids at the school.
It happened once when he was eight when his aunt Ollie landed in the spotlight. Working for the Cahnerses, she answered the front door on January 19, 1974, to find a red-haired woman on the stoop. The Cahnerses were in Florida on vacation. The woman began asking for directions and suddenly pulled a pistol from her coat pocket. At the same time, a man wearing a ski mask stepped into view and pointed a gun at her. The burglars taped Ollie’s hands together, made her sit in the foyer, and stuffed paper into her mouth. They raced from room to room, yanking paintings off of walls. They fled with three, including The Rustics, by Winslow Homer, valued at up to $200,000. The next day’s newspaper coverage was extensive. “Masked Pair Loot Brookline Home of Publishing Executive,” ran the Boston Globe headline over a story that recounted how Ollie freed herself after the “bandits” left.
In school the next day the armed burglary was a hot topic, and one of Mike’s classmates carried a copy of the newspaper, which included a photo of Ollie.
“That’s my aunt,” Mike said.
Your aunt’s a maid?
Mike was embarrassed. He said no more and realized he should have kept his mouth shut.
By the time Mike was in the seventh and eighth grades—spent at a middle school in the city—teachers were encouraging him to spread his wings. Mike began reading a lot, thanks to an English teacher. “She’d hand me a bag full of books—read these!” His grades were strong and he was a natural athlete. With his teachers’ guidance, he applied to several private schools. Milton Academy offered him a scholarship. Mike liked the school because it was fairly close to home, in the town of Milton south of the city.
In September 1980, Mike began the ninth grade at the elite private school. His father drove him, but the school year was barely under way when David Cox fell ill. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Mike recalled, “He had surgery and they took out part of his stomach, and he was pretty ill. He came home and had lost of a lot of weight, a lot of weight, and he had stopped working.” The family was in crisis.
For Mike, Milton Academy was a crisis—academically and culturally. To get there Mike began traveling a network of buses and trains. He invariably arrived late. He usually got a ride home after playing sports, but it was well after seven o’clock before he