Common Ground (119 page)

But her sense of grievance persisted; she’d had it with Charlestown High. Beginning that last week in March, Cassandra was absent from school two out of every three days. Morning after morning she set off for Shawmut Station as if on her way to Charlestown, then headed for Roxbury to see her friends. Rachel began skipping Boston Tech as well: she let Alva drive her to Codman Square, waited until her aunt’s car was out of sight, then boarded a bus for Massachusetts Avenue. They ran the same games at night, telling Alva that they were visiting their mother while staying with their boyfriends till well past midnight.

For though Alva’s house had once been a welcome refuge from the rigid regime at home, now it seemed less hospitable. Overt attacks on 185 Centre Street had largely ceased, but neighborhood youths kept watch, venting their anger on blacks who came and went. Whenever Cassandra or Rachel strayed very far from the front door, whites threw snowballs at them and chanted, “We’ll get you, nigger!” Inside, the Debnams and their guests, at close quarters all through that long winter, had begun to turn on each other. Rachel and Cassandra grated on Charlene’s and Maria’s nerves. There were constant arguments about bathroom rights, squabbles about household chores. One evening after Rachel refused to wash the dishes, she and Charlene got into a shouting match which ended with them rolling about on the kitchen floor. Alva, too, had grown impatient with her charges. She suspected Rachel of disobeying her orders to stop seeing Horace, and she accused Cassandra of flirting with Sam Jones, while Cassandra suggested that Sam was making passes at her.

Things came to a head on April 19, when Alva called Philippa Myers to complain that the girls were up to their old tricks. The probation officer ordered the girls to report to her on April 21 and, when they did, she warned them that unless they obeyed their aunt, the judge might be forced to place them somewhere else. But Cassandra knew that so far as she was concerned such warnings were largely bluff. On March 16 she’d turned seventeen, putting her beyond the Juvenile Court’s reach. With her high school years coming to an end, she’d thought about going to work. On an earlier visit to Mrs. Myers she’d talked about applying for an assembly-line job at the General Motors plant in Framingham, or a secretarial position with the John Hancock Insurance Company. In any case, she’d come of age: she didn’t have to take orders from her mother, her aunt, the judge, or the probation officer any longer.

On Tuesday, April 26, for the first time in months, Cassandra spent the whole night with Ricky. It was nice, and Ricky liked it too. Why couldn’t they do it all the time? he asked. Why not? Cassandra wondered. Later that morning,
she consulted her friend Barbara, who invited Cassandra to share her apartment for only twenty-five dollars a month, some help with her kids, and a hand with the housework. That afternoon, while Alva was at work, Cassandra went back to Centre Street, gathered up her clothes, and took them to Barbara’s place on Ruthven Street.

On April 28, Alva called Mrs. Myers to report that Cassandra had disappeared. The probation officer told her to call the police, track Cassandra down, and have her in court for the scheduled case review on May 4. But Alva never spoke to the police. Instead, a few days later, she called Carol Cullen at the Welfare Department to say that, even if Cassandra was found, she didn’t want her at the house anymore. Nor Rachel either. She’d had it with both girls.

On May 4, despite the misgivings of social workers and psychologists, Judge Cashman ordered Little Rachel returned to her mother (although he required her to attend a summer work and counseling program supervised by the court). With Cassandra still missing, he issued a default warrant in her name.

In early May, Cassandra got a job at the Morgan Laundry on Massachusetts Avenue, ironing sheets for seventy dollars a week. She rarely went to Charlestown High anymore. When she missed her appointment for a yearbook photo, Lisa McGoff asked her for a short poem to fill the space. Cassandra wrote “Because,” which she dedicated to Ricky.

For a while it was fine indeed: good sex at night, long, lazy weekends in bed, Chinese food and beer while Ricky watched the Red Sox on TV, Cassandra curled against his knee. Then her idyll turned bad around the edges. She got strung out on dope, stayed out a little too late a little too often, wasn’t eating or sleeping right. She and Ricky had a fight and one night she found herself standing on the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues, a notorious haunt of black hookers serving the white hunter trade. As it happened, her uncle Arnold drove by that night. Pulling to the curb, he drawled, “Well, Cassandra, it looks like you’re a midnight social worker.” At first she didn’t understand what he meant. Then it hit her. Oh,
please!
That had never entered her mind! And if she was going to hook, would she do it just a couple of blocks from home, where her own family could see her? She wished they’d give her a little more credit. But the incident unsettled her and she stayed off the corner for a while.

Then in early June she lost her job at the laundry and, short on cash, she had trouble coming up with the rent. Tired of minding Barbara’s kids and cleaning the cluttered apartment, she wanted out. A dozen times that month she felt like calling her mother to say hello, but she knew that if she did there’d be a huge hassle. Then on Sunday, July 24, a freak storm hit Boston. For hours that afternoon a thick layer of sooty clouds hung over the city, shutting out the sun, turning the streets as dark as midnight. Cassandra was frightened—and feeling terribly homesick. Almost before she knew it, she was knocking on her mother’s door.

Little Rachel opened it and said, “Well, damn!”

Big Rachel was still in bed when Cassandra popped in to say, “Hello, Mother.”

“Hello, Cassandra,” her mother replied.

On July 29, Big Rachel told Philippa Myers that she was “quite satisfied” to have Cassandra and Rachel at home as long as they wanted to be there.

A week later, Philippa met Rachel on the street outside Methunion Manor, reporting later that she “seemed much more relaxed and less rigid than the last time I spoke with her. The problems [with Cassandra and Little Rachel] seem to have diminished. The mother’s attitude has softened quite a bit.”

Cassandra had feared her mother would be furious with her for failing to graduate from Charlestown High, but to her astonishment, she discovered that she
had
graduated. Her repeated absences in the fourth marking period should have ensured an unbroken string of failing marks, but Murphy and Jarvis decided to overlook that. Although nobody responded when Cassandra’s name was called at the graduation ceremonies, her mother had gone to Charlestown High a few days later to pick up the parchment in its blue leatherette folder. She hung it on the wall near her favorite Martin Luther King memorial plate and a plaque embossed: “There are no limits on God’s ability to make things right in my life.”

It had been a terrible year, culminating on June 21, when Freddie was found guilty on four counts of rape—he was acquitted of four others—and sentenced to six to ten years in Concord Prison. But Rachel gave thanks that God had made some things right in her life. Her daughters were home at last, eager for reconciliation. Richard, still running an elevator at Massachusetts General Hospital, was planning to enroll in pharmaceutical school. George was at Tennessee State College working toward his BA. Wayne, completing his college preparatory program, planned to become a cadet in the Boston Police Department.

Of all her children, Wayne best exemplified the bourgeois values Rachel had sought to instill in her family. Every Saturday he worked as a busboy in the Bird Cage Restaurant at Lord and Taylor’s. All morning, expensive cars deposited well-groomed suburbanites at the exclusive Back Bay store, and by noon the restaurant was filled with women chatting about their children in college, their trips to Europe, their houses on the Cape. Another black youth—searching in vain for a black face among the elegantly dressed ladies
—might have bristled at all that wealth and privilege, but Wayne found it “a whole new trip. I’ve seen things like that on TV, but now I see them in real life. I don’t resent those ladies. I just want to figure out a way to make some of that money too.

“I like the ideal,” Wayne confided. “Like, what’s that show on TV,
The Brady Bunch?
That’s an ideal, you know, where they’ve got lots of money and they’ve got lots of kids—three boys and three girls—and everything’s kosher. Something happens, but it always comes out straight. And people, they’re always happy. They never have to get mad and, you know, have fights and things. They’re always happy. That’s a good show, a good family show.”

I
n his penthouse suite overlooking the Miami Beach skyline, George McGovern is eating Total with bananas and cream. Across the room on the 25-inch screen comes word from the convention floor: Delaware puts him a little closer. Two minutes before midnight, Dick Wall of Illinois rises to cast 10.5 votes for “Scoop” Jackson and “119 resounding voices for a great humanitarian …” McGovern is the Democratic nominee for President.

The candidate huddles with press secretary Dick Dougherty and aide Fred Dutton on the vice-presidential nomination. A survey by McGovern pollster Pat Caddell shows that Ted Kennedy would be the strongest running mate; a McGovern-Kennedy “super-ticket” would begin the race only two percentage points behind the incumbent Nixon and Agnew. Just after midnight, McGovern calls Kennedy in Hyannis Port. Ted listens attentively, but declines.

McGovern instructs campaign director Frank Mankiewicz to convene the high command that morning and give him half a dozen names by noon. Traditionally a presidential candidate relies on a few old cronies to help him select a running mate, but McGovern is committed to participatory democracy. At 8:30 a.m., twenty of his senior aides assemble in the Doral Hotel’s executive conference room. Most of those at the table are suffering from a lethal combination of overwork, undernourishment, late-night celebration, and little sleep. Some confess to nasty hangovers, several have hurled themselves into the surf in a vain effort to revive their clouded senses, but nobody is quite up to par when Mankiewicz raps his glass and announces: “We have three hours to choose the deputy commander of the civilized world.” Reminding his colleagues that the McGovern campaign has blazed new trails across the American political landscape, he urges them to show the same imagination in their search for a Vice-President. “Let’s not limit ourselves to a few tired old faces,” he says. “Let’s bring up every name we can think of, including people in the private sector.”

Over the next hour, thirty-seven names are mentioned. Despite Mankiewicz’s admonitions, no fewer than seventeen are McGovern’s colleagues in the United States Senate. Another six come from the nation’s state houses. Three are congressmen. Three are mayors: Moon Landrieu, John Lindsay, and Kevin White. Eight are from the “private sector,” ranging from Walter Cronkite to Father Theodore Hesburgh.

In that first hour, the mood is light, almost frivolous—“like a group of fraternity boys who had spent most of the night successfully stealing the other school’s mascot,” Gary Hart recalls. But, after a coffee break, the atmosphere grows more earnest. Each name must be supported by a sponsor and at least one second. Heated debate ensues. At 11:40, only seven names remain: Walter Mondale (the group’s “pie in the sky” choice; most participants believe he will refuse); Sargent Shriver (Pierre Salinger’s candidate); Larry O’Brien (Rick Stearns’s man); Pat Lucey (the candidate of South Dakota’s Lieutenant Governor Bill Dougherty); Abe Ribicoff (believed to be high on the candidate’s own list); Tom Eagleton (a long shot); and Kevin White (the group’s “realistic” choice, backed by a solid consensus).

Just before noon, Mankiewicz, Hart, Salinger, and Jean Westwood take the names to McGovern’s suite. For the next hour, he reviews the list with representatives of four of his principal constituencies—women, blacks, Chicanos, and mayors. Then, joined by more advisers, he decides to offer the nomination to Mondale, but just as expected, the Minnesotan declines, unwilling to jeopardize his reelection to the Senate that fall.

Campaign coordinator Hart, who sponsored Kevin White at the morning meeting, renews his advocacy. Hart has met the Mayor only twice but finds him attractive and articulate, with “a sense of what America is all about.” Now he reminds the candidate that White would be an ideal ticket balancer, strong in precisely those areas where McGovern is weak: urban, Catholic, a New Englander, a proven administrator, with strong ties to organized labor and traditional powers in the party, notably the redoubtable Richard Daley. Moreover, no one can think of anything substantially wrong with him. McGovern barely knows White. But his first two choices—Kennedy and Mondale—are out of the running. Shriver is in Moscow. O’Brien is too much the “old pol.” Pat Lucey’s wife is too outspoken. Time is running short. At about 1:40 p.m., the candidate picks up the phone to speak with the Mayor of Boston.

His call does not altogether surprise Kevin White—though, two hours earlier, it would have seemed highly unlikely. Like most of Massachusetts’ prominent Democrats, White had chosen that spring to run for delegate-at-large on Ed Muskie’s primary slate and, like all his colleagues, he was easily routed by McGovern’s insurgents. Although he had met secretly with McGovern the Saturday before the primary, he saw that as a routine courtesy call, designed to keep channels open to an important big-city mayor. With little hope of playing a prominent role in the fall campaign, he hadn’t even bothered to go to Miami, dispatching three aides as observers. As the balloting began on
Wednesday, July 12, the Mayor joined his wife, Kathryn, and their five children at his summer place near Bourne on Cape Cod.