An Evening with the Waterbury Left
Dionne, Roger
A MEXICAN WIFE languishing in the brick-and-neon waste of an industrial town naturally leaps at any tropic glimmer—even a lecture amid the folding chairs of the Community Room of Trinity...
...I didn't know, I couldn't remember...
...She was a true daughter of the eighteenth century...
...They could forgive Joe Namath a lot, for he threw a hellova pass...
...In parochial school, he had played taps at every military funeral in town...
...Was it the Mafia he was after...
...She could certainly stomp a pacifist to death as easily as a 250-pound black woman in Plainfield, New Jersey, could stomp a policeman...
...We supply the weapons, he said, the bullets, the bombs, the planes, the napalm, the expertise...
...Then there are the more cynical liberals, the Rockefeller-Lindsay-Ribicoff axis, like Harland Griswold, president of the Waterbury National Bank, and Malcolm Baldridge, president of the Scovill Manufacturing Company...
...A few men shook their fist...
...They toast Wallace and LeMay at the VFW...
...Not even the Maryknolls...
...If Castro is so bad," the student went on, "why didn't you stay in Cuba and fight against him...
...Son gusanos," my wife whispered— "worms" in English, the Spanish pejorative for the anti-Castro Cubans who burrow through Mexico City en route to freedom in the U.S.A., where a man can be a man and fire-bomb consulates, theaters, and book publishers in New York in order to oust from office a man they don't like in Havana...
...Father Bonpane, the people listening to him, the millions of Castroist faithful in Cuba simply did not exist for these Cuban exiles, any more than those 83 living men from Dubuque and Tallahassee, who would blow it all once back in American hands, existed for the North Koreans...
...I told you to get down...
...Damn it, I thought, just let them get out of here...
...He had done a good job...
...John Parker of Trinity to give you a parish hall as you could count on Reverend Perry of St...
...The women sat in their black coats with a universal sneer directed at Father Bonpane...
...For while in Waterbury we were romantic and mouthy, in Guatemala they fought with real bullets and napalm...
...Or at the Hibernians...
...the priest asked...
...Once the Cubans were gone, the room exploded into talk...
...they escorted her slowly to the rear...
...Go back to Guatemala...
...After the room had settled down once more, Jose Salazar began The Speech...
...As you can see, Father, I am writing on the blackboard...
...As the priest continued, a little Oriental boy walked in...
...Naturally, he became a Maryknoll...
...With Kennedy, Inglis, and Provost, he was the fourth priest at the meeting— definitely a gathering of the Catholic Left, in exile at Trinity Church...
...She smiled at us, firstnamed us, cajoled us, and mocked us with implacable, winning confidence...
...When the priest said that students in Guatemala had begun to learn that only armed resistance could return the land to the people, an old man in a long, gray overcoat, who looked like he might at any moment dutifully pass a collection plate, laughed out loud, producing ripples of talk around him...
...Go ahead and keep writing...
...I couldn't help it, even while I hated the low-octane paranoia on which my suspicions were based, the feeling that the world was made up of only two kinds of people—friends and enemies...
...Yet he looked like a baseball pitcher or a clothes model and was not averse to admiring a bared thigh...
...Inside her home the breath of Yankee farmland, of lilacs and hay, still lingered, though the suburbs had long ago closed in upon her...
...It would exonerate me, I thought, for I couldn't have copped out completely if I was wearing a beard...
...I had my hand up first...
...The Maryknoll's dark features had the yellowish after-glow of long night hours, the markings of a hard year carrying his message across the country...
...B B UT THERE WAS one woman, Mrs...
...As Father Bonpane was answering her, the Bogart movie heavy went up to the blackboard...
...We oppose starvation and poverty and dictatorship...
...The priest pointed to a woman seated on our side of the room who looked safe...
...In the middle of a Bonpane answer, the man in the gray overcoat stood up...
...Father Bonpane tried, not too successfully, to resist the blood's urging simply to outshout Salazar and his friends...
...The old man kept intermittent counsel with a Humphrey Bogart movie heavy sitting next to him, who was constantly shuffling a large sheaf of well-worn papers...
...Insidiously the word "spy" bored its way into my brain...
...Again the man in the gray overcoat urged the girl to her chair, moving his hand up and down like a mother consoling a crying baby...
...Vietnam had taught much to the youth of America...
...A jumble of statistics now filled half the blackboard...
...As their shavelings intoned sticky Christian adages from County Cork and Calabria, these sweaty interlopers refused to treat the black man like a human being and took four and five dollars an hour to produce fuses and antipersonnel bombs for Vietnam...
...He turned to go...
...faith is the Rock of Gibraltar...
...Salazar," a student called from behind me...
...Perhaps coincidentally with Father Bonpane's next reference to American imperialism, a pretty, olive-skinned girl of thirteen or fourteen stood up in silence...
...They had done everything but take up arms, for they were not yet ready to believe that Waterbury was Guatemala...
...A few months ago, he turned up in Waterbury, on his way to Baltimore to demonstrate in support of the Catonsville nine, who were being tried for napalming draft records...
...That isn't necessary...
...Trinity, the High Episcopal church where we were going, crouched behind the Immaculate, up Prospect Street, unseen from the Green, as though indeed crowding back from what that old WASP Faulkner called "the coastal spew of Europe...
...Three Cuban men rushed solicitously to her aid...
...Perhaps some not unimportant men will read this story of my hometown, the hometown of millions...
...We oppose concentration camps...
...What else could I do...
...We knocked on unfriendly doors during Vietnam Summer...
...What about the 30,000 American boys killed in Vietnam...
...She lurched from her seat and began screaming as though in a fit of apoplexy...
...with such faith she was as immovable as a mountain...
...We are all Latins here—Cubans and Puerto Ricans...
...She had flaming red hair shooting in all directions, a face like unbaked dough, legs like bowling pins, and weighed in easily at 200 pounds...
...So there we were—enemies...
...There were a few Vista volunteers...
...In Hartford we heard you praise Fidel Castro," said Salazar...
...The Waterbury Peace Committee, which I had helped organize, was sponsoring the talk...
...Whatever happened to the little missionary...
...What can we do," she asked, "to get more information to the public about conditions in Latin America...
...When the boy sat next to his father, whom the priest was sure of (no spy would wear a madras shirt and Bermuda shorts) he seemed relieved...
...We know Latin America, and this man is telling you lies...
...police dogs, gas grenades, shotguns in every car, highpowered spotlights, more patrol cars...
...I almost didn't recognize you with the beard," he said...
...6 oz...
...It was apparently not yet time— but time for what...
...Wally Inglis was there too, down from Boston for the weekend...
...The interminable figures he read from his sheaf of fingerstained papers were as real, as solidly fleshy, to him and his friends, from Miami to New York, as were the signed confessions of Commander Bucher and his crew to their North Korean captors...
...I said you'll get your turn—Now, what was your question...
...No one said, "Well, glad to see you back in the fold," for though they did it part-time, the same way that others joined bowling leagues and bridge clubs, these people played the reform and revolution game for keeps and would not stoop to banalities...
...My family killed by that murderer...
...Yet there they are sitting at the head table at the NAACP banquet, giving money to the Black Youth Movement when a lot of those punks haven't even finished high school like our kids, hobnobbing with the Jews at the Temple Israel art show and the United Jewish Appeal fund-raiser...
...He grabbed Jose by the shoulder and half escorted, half pushed him to his seat...
...A long time ago we had debated the hawks, laid out the facts, discussed militarism and racism with housewives and toolsetters, "not asking for much," as Gene McCarthy had put it, "just a modest use of intelligence...
...I am Jose Salazar from Hartford, Connecticut...
...Hello, my little man," Father Bonpane said much too gaily...
...Father Bonpane's timing was off, however, for he finished his answer just as Jose poised himself for action...
...For of course the Irish and Italians and Poles and French-Canadians and Lithuanians had arrived decades earlier, before the southern blacks came up to challenge them, to work the Yankees' mills and ungratefully take over their town, scattering the WASPS up Cracker Hill and Bunker Hill and out to neighboring Middlebury and Woodbury and Watertown...
...Ever see any of them at the Franco-American Club...
...Salazar," she said, "don't you understand that there are so many things upon which we can agree...
...And so they went on, like a very old record...
...It is an approach to the language of people...
...Using the statistics on the blackboard and others Noonan had prevented him from getting up there, he compared the life of black slaves in Cuba in 1842 to that of citizens of Cuba today...
...He wore heavyduty boots, dungarees, and a khaki fatigue jacket...
...But then there was my friend Wally Inglis...
...he looked genuinely sad...
...for Vista and Job Corps and Outward Bound and Food Stamps and Head Start and Legal Aid and Youth Enrichment, all for blacks, Negroes, niggers, and lazy white trash who didn't work their asses off like they had done to get ahead...
...Or at the Knights of Columbus...
...AN EVENING WITH THE WATERBURY LEFT "God bless you, Jose," Florence Foley crooned...
...I recognized the boy to be Reed and Martie Smith's adopted Korean son, but Father Bonpane looked as though he suspected more trouble, perhaps mistaking the boy for a Latin or wildly supposing him to be a Vietnamese orphan in American employ, somehow smuggled 13,000 miles into Trinity Church especially to sabotage the evening...
...Though of course I believe—especially since my views have not always been the most popular at the forums of Waterbury— in the right of free speech, after Chicago I couldn't help feeling, against my better judgment, that Humphrey had forfeited that right...
...The women in their black coats sat as grim and funereal as Salem judges: in the silence of their eyes Father Bonpane was already a condemned man...
...I still wonder as I sit here writing...
...Now another Maryknoll was coming to Trinity Church—Father Blase Bonpane, ex-Marine, ex-amateur boxing champ, expelled from Guatemala for revolutionary activities...
...All the phrases so convenient for speeches repeated night after night— like The Speech of candidate George Wallace— all these phrases now tumbled out: "institutional violence," "military-industrial complex," "gringos," "United Fruit Company," "the United States thinks of them as things...
...For the first time that evening he looked genuine...
...I would like to know if you are aware of the fact...
...The Latins cheered, and, my God, the person who had shouted was Florence Foley, sitting in the last row...
...I haven't finished," Father Bonpane snapped...
...A Chicago cop's night stick cracking a dirty bastard's head is the best sort of therapy...
...The problem is that so many of us simply don't know what's going on...
...I lost my family...
...Perhaps it was my suspicion of the young man that made me eye the Puerto Ricans more closely...
...I wanted to shut the Cubans up too, but all I could think of were news shots of students disrupting Humphrey's campaign speeches...
...Fielding, who still did not understand the situation...
...What do they care about the Negroes or the Jews...
...Across the aisle from us were perhaps 25 Puerto Ricans— men in work clothes, women in black wool overcoats straight out of Garcia Lorca, and children of all ages...
...Father Bonpane apparently decided it would be impolitic, under the circumstances, to intervene...
...every sound in the night became a gun-toting vigilante...
...I know...
...I have a family," he said, "and no matter what, my family comes first...
...however, though he secluded himself under the elms of Cracker Hill, you could count on the Reverend Mr...
...What he is saying," the man in the gray overcoat added, "what he is saying is that revolution has brought blood to Cuba, death, starvation, poverty...
...Untheoretical, nervous about language, unable to be hurt no matter how much gaff he took from more temperamental people like myself, he was always the man of last resort—to make the contact no one else dared, to get those leaflets run off somehow, to lead a picket in front of the Armed Forces recruiting centers, to drive black protesters down to City Hall, to tell off the mayor or anyone else who needed telling off...
...They run the Americanism Forum, which is a front for the paramilitary Defense Survival Force, which is a front for the Minutemen...
...The young girl was not to be denied...
...What else could they do...
...I didn't think vigiling and chest-pounding were of much use in a land of nerve gas and missiles...
...Then Jim Noonan stomped up the center aisle from his station at the back entrance...
...The saliva seemed to freeze in the air...
...I had forgotten about my beard...
...Finally, the exiles apparently decided they had carried the day and it would be a long drive back to Hartford...
...He was more in tune with Che Guevara: "In revolution one wins or dies...
...meat « 1968...
...When Salazar ground to a stop under the tumultuous applause of his supporters and the "You tell 'em, Jose" 's tolling from Florence Foley, Father Bonpane asked, "What is your question...
...we all wondered...
...We here oppose political murder...
...ARMY...
...Castro killed my whole family...
...Everyone in the room looked at her nervously...
...I wondered where all the people had come from, for I had not expected more than a handful—our side and a tight rabble of right-wingers...
...She stood up again...
...Fielding's vision...
...the woman who had choreographed the fit began again...
...There were many young people I didn't know...
...A roar of laughter from the Latins...
...I said hello to Janet Vigezzi and Reed and Martie Smith...
...One heard through the flood of dry sobs and moans, "My father killed by Castro...
...AN EVENING WITH THE WATERBURY LEFT No, one didn't like allying oneself with the Parkers and Griswolds, but the working stiffs, even when they applauded a wellturned extended metaphor, were still less felicitous...
...She was on committees to start neighborhood houses in the ghetto and to transport black children to the country for summer vacations...
...They gathered up the children with great to-do and scraping of chairs...
...Those 30,000 dead Americans-20,000 a year ago, 10,000 two years ago, 40,000 or 50,000 next year—who went silently over the hill for something named God or Country or anti-Communism or simply to satisfy the metallic taste in their mouths of desire to kill the gooks, those innocent boys and bloody henchmen of American imperialism, were forever nobly unfurled skyward in the speeches of every crass partisan of this fractured country from Tom Dodd to Blase Bonpane...
...You understand...
...He erased the priest's material and began to write: 1842 .....................12 oz...
...4 oz...
...The woman of the fit moved to the center of the room for a final flourish...
...The man in the gray overcoat leaped up...
...There were strange movements among them, whisperings, snickers...
...she moaned...
...Suddenly, an attractive Cuban woman, perhaps thirty, took matters into her own hands...
...We parked in front of the Immaculate Conception Church, which rose in marble baroque mockery of the otherwise quaint New England Green...
...Undoubtedly, Paul had scoured the Puerto Rican barrio to find ROGER DIONNE people willing to hear about their brothers in Guatemala...
...was all Salazar could think to ask, for that was what it all came down to...
...Working together meant as little to him as President Johnson's politics of consensus meant to the Black Panthers...
...He had a hoarse voice and eyes that seemed tough and a little sad...
...Dictator...
...She was a regular at the Wednesday noon vigils and attended all the Peace Committee lectures...
...My brother...
...On the other hand, few Catholic priests in this overwhelmingly Catholic town had even read, let alone agreed with, Pope John's Pacem in Terris or Paul's Populorum Progressio...
...Father Bonpane tried to ignore her, but her silent witnessing might have overcome him had she not been waved down by the old man in the gray overcoat...
...It was impossible to hear his defense over the shouts of the exiles, but he struggled on in good faith, and his supporters matched the Cubans an eye for an eye with shouts of "Let him talk...
...We will be heard," said the man in the gray overcoat...
...But it is at least an avenue that remains open...
...and he undoubtedly took heart from what Time magazine was so fond of pointing out: Che died...
...At the start, there was some hesitation in the priest's voice, the slight tremor of a man about to speak truths which, though obvious to so many, are yet, even after all these years, terrifying to utter to an uncased audience...
...Once again the flannel American colossus burned in verbal effigy...
...I felt as though I were returning to a discussion after a trip to the men's room instead of after an absence of six months...
...You'll get your turn," said Father Bonpane...
...He couldn't have been a reporter, yet his outfit looked too perfect for him to be one of us...
...Bonpane thundered that assassinating hated village chiefs was more humane than indiscriminately napalming women and children...
...Salazar looked at her with a face bespeaking not a little knowledge of the history of the past few years...
...Paul was one of those shy selfeffacing people who spend their lives serving soup in Bowery kitchens, registering black voters in Mississippi, searching slum tenements for health code violations, and reading the Catholic Worker...
...Nevertheless, I agreed to hear the Maryknoll...
...Then after years of estrangement, when he was presumably saving little Laotians or Filipinos from the Chinese juggernaut, there was his name, clear as day, in an ad condemning the Vietnam war...
...This is what brought the cheers: "We serve notice on all civil rights gangsters here and now that if discussions and negotiations fail, we will put their long hot summer in a deep freeze, and we intend to have enough ice boxes to do it at a minimum risk to ourselves...
...Salazar now stood in the center of the room machine-gunning statistics at anyone who would listen...
...Salazar was shocked by the confiscation without compensation of private property in Cuba...
...Father Bonpane's voice sped up as the details accumulated...
...During the past two years she has passed out enough anti-Communist Christian Crusade and Minuteman literature to supply every household in Waterbury...
...Father Bonpane wandered from person to person, answering questions which I couldn't hear...
...rice "What are you doing up there...
...Adios...
...We noticed Frank Kennedy, a young priest who said underground masses for a handful of people every Sunday in the Berkeley Heights ghetto after counseling despondent spouses on Saturday night...
...He, the entire room, fell silent...
...John's, Reverend ROGER DIONNE Clinton of the First Congregational, Reverend Lanham of the First Methodist, and other Yankee clerics...
...There was nothing you could depend on anymore...
...But I'm not sure how this effort of mine serves the battle against the pietisms of the Immaculate Conception, the hypocrisies of the Citizens' Action Committee, the machismo of the Police Union...
...It caught the light and like a great, newly cut diamond ROGER DIONNE refracted it in all directions, then fell in a long, silver arc, tumbling heads behind it in my view, and spattered somewhere around Father Bonpane's waist...
...Reason is as fine and erratic as sand in a clear mountain stream...
...I noticed a bearded young man near me, scribbling in a notebook...
...Father Bonpane's talk now became re AN EVENING WITH THE WATERBURY LEFT citative, like the Ordinary of the Mass, for everyone was watching for what the people my wife said were Cuban would do next...
...That is what revolution brings, and that man there preaches murder when he talks to you of revolution—murder and starvation...
...She lived on Bunker Hill in an eighteenth-century colonial cottage...
...I know what revolution is...
...Long hair and sit-ins and priests getting married and lesbians making out right there on the screen for any kid to see spell nothing but trouble for them because no one's speaking to them, no one's even speaking their language...
...Yet the Yankee clerics' love affair with the blacks and the Viet Cong was often a modish way of looking down their aquiline noses at the confused rabble of Waterbury, who came home from ten hours at the shop to noisy, mortgaged houses, whose taxes kept growing to pay, it seemed to them, for welfare for blacks, for special education for blacks, for black history in the high schools ("We never demanded Irish history...
...1842...
...He went through Taft and Yale with scholarships and honors and never smoked or drank or dated...
...He introduced us to Father Bonpane...
...I was unenthusiastic...
...Fundamentally, it didn't matter one bit, for the dead family of her mind was the thing that was real to her—as real as the harmony of Mrs...
...and "Stop trying to take over the meeting...
...No one invited you up there...
...Congratulations, Jose," said Florence, rippling from head to foot as she pumped his hand...
...Fury and grief overcame her...
...What about Wallace...
...He was as well-scrubbed as a Westport commuter on his way to work...
...We waved to Father Frank Dumont, the theologian at the Montford Seminary in Litchfield...
...Father Paul Provost, who had organized the evening for the Peace Committee, stood in front of the small room talking with the speaker...
...We picketed, we demonstrated, we politicked...
...Noonan and other's tried now and then to shut up Salazar, but they were shouted down by the Cubans and Florence Foley...
...We all want peace...
...A A T LENGTH, looking somewhat like a man opening a cage full of lions, Father Bonpane asked if there were any questions...
...For more than a year I had been carefully examining faces before opening my front door...
...ROGER DIONNE While Father Bonpane again returned to his answer—he was saying something about the New York Times—Paul Provost went and tried to reason with Jose, but to no avail...
...What counted were the statistics, their statistics...
...You certainly couldn't count on the immigrants...
...he asked the womann looked safe...
...We all want justice...
...Bonpane fired back with as much logic as his opponent...
...Bonpane invoked the young draft resisters in prison here...
...In the few seconds we looked at each other, he searched my face as though for some sign that would pigeon-hole me: friend or enemy...
...Damn right you haven't...
...My wife thought the woman was a Waterbury Puerto Rican we had both met...
...Salazar blasted Viet Cong terrorism...
...Each of those exiles had decided at some painful point during the last ten years that any supporter of Castro forfeited that right...
...But the jingoism that oiled Communion breakfasts and Elks Club picnics mounted like a wave of lead so that here at Trinity Church I returned to what I considered the noblest minds of Waterbury to find them swept like refugees upon a desolate shore, talking a lost dialect...
...My wife and I took seats next to Paul in the first semicircular row and looked around...
...Come on, let's go," said the man in the gray overcoat...
...They greeted us warmly and directed us upstairs, where we found Jim and Kathy Noonan at the entrance to the meeting room...
...He wrote on the blackboard behind him: "THE ENEMY—THE ARMY —BRANCH OF U.S...
...They don't even treat us like human beings unless they want our money or our vote...
...Salazar berated the absence of democracy in Cuba...
...As she stood up, a woman in the front row pulled the lapels of her coat violently against her shoulders as though some act was necessary to uncap the non-English-speaking anger in her heart...
...The Latins burst into applause and shouts...
...Florence, as we affectionately called her, was the most dedicated right-winger in the Waterbury area...
...Are you aware of the 6,000 brave Cubans whom Castro has murdered...
...What I remembered about Maryknoll missionaries were collections taken up in parochial school to save Chinese children from heathenism and Communism, and a monthly bulletin my mother used to receive with pictures of pith-helmeted servants of God reading the Bible to fat-bellied African primitives...
...Her cause was God's cause...
...Mister," he shouted from the door, "you are a preacher of hatred and violence...
...But Jose Salazar was not one to pass up an opportunity for a parting cannonade...
...Mr...
...But Dionne, they laughed, he probably couldn't make it to the line of scrimmage, and here he is telling me all about Vietnam when I served three years in the South Pacific...
...She must have just come in...
...You've been told three times to sit down," he shouted...
...Bonpane was outraged by the bombs that destroyed villages and cities in Vietnam and Laos without compensation...
...Father Bonpane's penchant for the neat phrase was so strong that he took to inventing his own, which smacked rather loudly of rejected advertising copy: "Selective Slavery," "Alliance for Profit...
...Salazar talked about concentration camps in Cuba...
...Of course, it is from these, often boorish, poker-playing papists that the ranks of the Waterbury Right are filled...
...We don't want you," a woman finally dared to shout from the door...
...Soon he quieted the room and introduced Father Bonpane...
...Salazar paused...
...As Lenin said somewhere, everything depends upon who controls the police...
...Every Latin over ten shot up his hand...
...She believed in her eighteenth-century cottage, in its power, its glory, its immortality...
...Now please get down...
...Then she spotted my wife and rushed directly at us, perhaps because we had cut her off earlier...
...Identify yourself," a student shouted...
...The rest of us took up the cry: "Adios, Jose, Adios...
...A A s MY WIFE and I entered Trinity Church, under the looming cupola of the Immaculate Conception, I realized we hadn't seen any of our radical friends for more than six months...
...Recently ordained, he worked with the city's Puerto Ricans and with Frank Kennedy in Berkeley Heights...
...Vamonos," he said to his cohorts...
...Didn't he see they were as intractable as cinder blocks...
...She toted her hate signs to every Peace Committee event, heckled every speaker, counterpicketed every Wednesday noon vigil...
...they think of themselves as people," "a humanist revolution," "existential perspective," "armed resistance," "the guerrilla movement," "ten, twenty Vietnams," "CIA," "Special Forces troops," "Fascism...
...He was talking with four or five nuns...
...He'd be taking the three-hour drive back after the talk...
...Don't listen to him, Jose...
...I am the leader of the Cuban exiles of Connecticut, so I know what revolution does to a country...
...We marched for peace in New York and marched for peace on the Pentagon...
...but not everyone can come up with a line like "Put a tiger in your tank...
...the Bogart movie heavy shouted...
...She just did not see the flesh around the ideas of the evening...
...someone yelled...
...It was another one of those talks—statistics on the infant mortality rate, malnutrition, disease, per-capita income—"now 2 percent of the people own 80 percent of the land"—a record of military repression, napalm from the U.S., antipersonnel bombs...
...It is worth trying...
...Muchas gracias," my wife said as pleasantly as she could, "y adios...
...So for God's sake, let's work together while there is still time...
...They squeeze the desire-laden papists dry, while they play bridge—whist, they call it—in their low-mill-rate Woodbury hideaways, collect municipal bond interest, and invent high-faluting schemes on the Citizens' Action Committee to spend still more of the Waterbury taxpayers' money...
...He honed each syllable to a sharp point, stretching out the vowels to double or triple their normal length...
...Perhaps they'll see a parable or two for America...
...We became petrified in a world view that might have been fabricated in the chambers of the FBI...
...The Parkers and the Perrys—and the New Left as well, which is more important, for the Parkers and the Perrys would do best to mind their business—have never tried to understand the desolate anxiety of these immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants, who with Thornton Wilder made it through the thirties, went off to war with John Wayne under the banners of my country 'tis of thee in the forties, and who in the sixties can never loosen the knot in their stomachs no matter how many backyard cook-outs and beers they serve up nor how many probowls they watch in color as though they were right there—"It's better than being right there...
...A MEXICAN WIFE languishing in the brick-and-neon waste of an industrial town naturally leaps at any tropic glimmer—even a lecture amid the folding chairs of the Community Room of Trinity Church...
...You can ask questions when I'm finished...
...Listen to some of their names: Goggin, Foley, Teubner, Fabiano, Kearney, O'Donnell, Seliokas, Russo, Scott, Calo, Desaulniers, Ariola, Brazenas, Pont, Scully, Cutillo, Moynihan, Crafa, Barbieri, Tremaglio...
...I had lost faith in the group long ago...
...Looking like a tough Boston Irish sailor who has difficulty approaching women, Jim was the backbone of the Waterbury Left...
...Walking past the priest, who was saying goodbye to the Cubans and telling them he would pray for them, she suddenly turned back, leaned forward, and spat...
...AN EVENING WITH THE WATERBURY LEFT "Do you support Fidel Castro in Cuba...
...I would like to ask you a question," he said, jumping up, "which I know you will have some little difficulty answering...
...In his nomination acceptance speech last year, Paul Ariola, the president of the Police Union, saw the need for...
...You are a traitor and no Christian...
...Mr...
...He looked like a pallid, fierce-eyed fox searching for revanchist heresy...
...Father Bonpane returned to his answer, but the man Florence called Jose kept writing...
...Bonpane made light of the choice between Humphrey and Nixon...
...So let's see how we can work together instead of shouting at each other and spitting...
...a Latin shouted...
...Florence's tuberous hands beat ecstatically in the back of the room...
...You'll have your chance to talk...
Vol. 16 • November 1969 • No. 6
