What It Takes (42 page)

That was the school he decided to accept: with his grades, he could have had his pick. But Swarthmore (it was Stelian who’d first mentioned the college) was small, quiet, not too far away, outside of Philadelphia, in a well-to-do town not unlike Brookline. It was not socially elitist like Harvard, but committed to a brainy meritocracy, and serious about the business of learning, as serious as young Michael.

It was a perfect fit, and he dived into noetic training as he had into the marathon. He would not falter and he would not stop. His classmates marked him right away as a young man with much on his mind:

“He just seemed more mature ...”

“He wasn’t going to waste two minutes ...”

“More than the rest of us, he had his priorities ...”

It was all true, as far as it went. Michael was on his own program. It wasn’t that he was a grind, a drudge. Not at all: he played his trumpet, ran cross-country, made the JV basketball squad (at five-foot-eight, the shortest player), and even wrote sports for the student
Phoenix
in the larded style of the Boston sports pages (
the crack of the ash on the old horsehide ... Cooper flung the pigskin ...
). That first year, he led his classmates, two nights a week, into Philadelphia, where they canvassed for a slate of clean, smart Democrats—reformists, the able, decent few—to unseat a corrupt Republican machine that had held power in the city for almost seven decades. That fit into the program, just right ... as did the campaign to organize students against a McCarthyish loyalty oath then under discussion in the state legislature ... and the campaign against fraternities whose national charters barred Negroes, or Jews ... and Michael’s own makeshift dorm-hallway barber shop, which he set up when barbers in the “ville” refused a haircut to a black student from Nigeria. Michael had learned to cut hair when he worked as a counselor in a camp for underprivileged children. Now, for sixty-five cents a head, he offered a flattop and a political lecture. What he got was campus fame ... and pocket money.

What he erected was a neat system in which everything fit—or it was dropped. Some kids hung out at the Turf Villa (pizza and beer), or at the “druggie in the ville” (sodas or coffee at the fountain). Not Michael. Around exam time, the campus was wired. (Professor Laurance Lafore used to say he’d never seen
anything
like Swarthmore in exam week—except London during the Blitz.) Everybody was up all night. Not Michael. In later years, when he had to tell something about his life, he liked to say he ran into freshman physics, and that put an end to his medical career. In fact, his D in physics fit just right—it allowed him to tell Panos, finally, that he wasn’t going to be a doctor. At that point, Panos was a gingerly father: he did not insist to Michael that he could do well—in any class he chose. But that was true, and Michael knew it. One day, before psychology class, Michael and a friend were leafing through the thick text, studded with terms of mystery and menace. Leighton Whitaker, who was a sophomore, figured it would take hours to get through any one of these chapters. He asked Michael Dukakis, freshman, how much time he figured he’d need. “Twenty minutes a chapter,” Michael said shortly. “I’m just going for a B in this class.”

By his own sophomore year, Michael was head of Students for Stevenson, and he helped sign up a quarter of the campus for the ACLU mobilization against Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare hordes. These were serious endeavors at Swarthmore; the school’s Quaker-pacifist roots fed the free-speech, free-inquiry doctrines of the present. With the nation at war in Korea (Swarthmore voted
not
to host a ROTC corps), with an Army general heading for the White House, with loyalty oaths waving as weapons in the hands of the know-nothing right, the values of liberal education seemed to hang in the balance in 1952. But at Swarthmore, there was always the faith that intellect, knowledge, the Truth, would triumph, when spread by effort of the enlightened few. True, in Michael’s sophomore year, Stevenson was drubbed in the national vote by that general, Ike, the people’s choice. But one day in the spring of his junior year, the cafeteria was abuzz with the news that the Supreme Court had struck down segregated schools. (And wasn’t that Justice Black’s daughter, Jo Jo, eating lunch with her classmates over there?) There was no doubt that advancing enlightenment would solve the problems of race relations, just as surely as advancing medicine was finding a cure for polio, just as surely as urban renewal would cure the blight of city slums. ... And there was no doubt that these brainy, young Swarthmore savants would march in the forefront of Improvement. By the time Michael was a senior, spending a semester in Washington, D.C., he had the satisfaction, and confirmation, of
seeing
Joe McCarthy censured by the Senate. Truth and Knowledge were on the march.

Now, there was less and less doubt in Michael’s mien, less hesitation in his talk. He participated in all issues of the day, large and small, but not in debate. He knew what he thought. If the question was, say, whether a communist should be allowed to speak at Swarthmore, others might resort to arguments from Jefferson or Rousseau ... not Michael. “What is this?” he’d snap. “It’s a
campus
. Of course he should speak.” End of argument. If someone in the dorm liked the Indians’ chances in the World Series, Michael had three reasons why the Giants were clearly superior. Cleveland would be destroyed. End of argument.

There were lots of fellows in the Wharton dorm who thought they should end up in Washington: the capital, after all, was the locus of great doings, and the federal government was the engine of progress. ... Not Michael: he claimed it was state government that affected people’s lives, the State House was where the action was. Not for him some vague plan to climb the great greasy federal pole. He knew what he wanted, and he wasn’t afraid to say it:

“I want to be Governor of Massachusetts.”

In their fourth year in that hothouse (they used to say: at Swarthmore, you major in Swarthmore), most of his friends were planning, scheming, to see the world, to go somewhere far away and new—Europe ... or, at the very least, California. But there was no doubt where Michael was headed: he was going home. The only question, he told friends, was whether to head straight to Boston for law school, or get the Army out of the way. In the end, he decided it would disrupt his career less if he got through the Army first. So he made plans, in an orderly way, to sign on for a two-year hitch, right after college. Meanwhile, for holidays, and some weekends, he went ... back home to Brookline.

Sometimes, he’d bring a friend along, and proudly show them his home. There they’d meet his imposing father, and Euterpe, who was the life and warmth at the table, explaining and proffering the strange Greek dishes, asking about their schoolwork. There, too, some of them met his big brother, The Duke (Michael was probably the last still to call him that), who was quiet, diffident, but obviously fond and proud of Michael.

Stelian had made it out of the hospital, and after a hiatus of more than a year, back to Bates, where he made it to graduation. But he did not emerge with Michael’s confidence in his armor, or Michael’s determined route-of-march toward his chosen destination. In fact, somewhere along the line, Stelian lost track of destination.

For a while, he lived and worked in a settlement house, doing social work in Boston’s poor South End. He didn’t want to live at home anymore. He wanted to make it on his own. The settlement house only paid a pittance, but it offered a room and communal meals, and there was the wonderful, WASPy director, a kindly woman named Beatrice Williams. Beatrice became like a mother to Stelian.

In 1958, Stelian entered the Boston Marathon ... but he doubled over after sixteen miles and could not finish the race. In 1960, he ran for Brookline Town Committee, and won. But that was the year Michael and his friends took over the whole Town Committee.

In later years, he had his own apartment, an efficiency near Coolidge Corner, in Brookline. And he had brief jobs as an assistant in the City Manager’s offices, in a couple of small towns around Boston. For several years, he taught government at Boston State College. The job never paid much. Stelian never could afford a bigger place, or a car: he rode his bicycle everywhere, sometimes thirty miles and back, to see an aunt or a cousin in Lowell, where the Dukakis clan had started out in America. But the subject matter of his classes was congenial: politics was still his abiding interest.

He was always active on the fringe of Democratic politics in Brookline—always around, anyway. A few more times, he filed to run: for the Town Board of Selectmen, or the Massachusetts House. But he wasn’t well known, and often, not a comfortable presence. He was friendly, sometimes too friendly, somewhat odd. A few old friends tried to fix him up with dates, but he didn’t have much money for that, and he never did find a girl to share his life. He even stopped going home to Rangely Road for Sunday dinners, or holidays. He was, through the sixties, a solitary man, always with dreams of office, but never with much chance. Sometimes, he’d buttonhole a cousin, or someone he knew in the past, and urge them: “You’d be great in office. You run ... I’ll be your campaign manager.” But they never did, and nothing came of Stelian’s dreams. His final race, he ran as a Republican, for the House seat Michael vacated when he was on his way to his first run for Governor. But Stelian finished last in that vote. The way his old schoolmates described him, he was a shadowy figure, at the end.

And the shadow was getting longer. A couple of times, Stelian was back in the hospital: now, it was drug therapy, instead of shock ... and endless talk with psychiatrists, about his family. And one night, in the sixties, something finally welled up in him and burst into the open. Michael’s volunteers were leafleting Brookline for Michael’s reelection to the House of Delegates. They were going door-to-door, leaving fliers in the boxes, and after they’d passed, Stelian came, and took out Michael’s literature and put in his own:

Not Michael Dukakis ... STELIAN Dukakis
...

No one was sure if Stelian was even running for an office. But that wasn’t the point:

DO NOT VOTE FOR MY BROTHER ...

MICHAEL DUKAKIS IS THE LAST MAN TO VOTE FOR ...

I, STELIAN DUKAKIS, WILL RUN AGAINST HIM AND RID THIS DISTRICT ...

Michael’s friends were horrified, for him, for the family. They called each other frantically all night: go down your street and get Stelian’s fliers out of every box!

And they did. They got most of them. Stelian had only poked them into the slots of the mailboxes. He hadn’t stuffed them all the way in. For the most part, his leaflets of pain never saw the dawn. Their existence was only whispered.

The following day, Kitty called her friend, Sandy—that same special woman who’d been Michael’s first girlfriend—but all she could say was, “Oh, God ... you don’t know what we’re going through here.” Michael never talked about that night. If someone, a close friend, asked about Stelian, Michael would literally hunch his shoulders, shake his head, sadly, and mutter: “We have to live with it ...” But that was all: the wall of silence remained.

It wasn’t too long after that, just a few years ... a Saturday night ... a car—someone—hit Stelian as he pedaled his bicycle down Winchester Street, near his apartment, in Brookline. Stelian’s skull was smashed. The motorist drove away.

Stelian lay in the hospital with the membrane of his head exposed, still pulsing with life. But he never came out of the coma. Panos and Euterpe and Michael all came, and stood by the bed. Then, they sat. The parents came for months. Sometimes, one or the other would hold his hand and call to him,
Stelianos!
... and think they felt something in his hand. But probably they did not. Stelian died four months after the accident, July 29, 1973.

T
HERE WAS NO MAN
more equable, sweet-natured, than Carl Hartpence, who had a few things to blame the world for, if he had been so disposed. There was, for one, the pressure of money: the family finances were always a strain. But that did not alter Carl’s disposition, and the kids grew up without much thought that they were poorer than anyone else.

One of Nina’s brothers, Neal Pritchard, was a prosperous man, owner of Ottawa’s finest grocery store. The family story was, Neal stocked the basement of his store with foods just before World War II ... and when the rationing hit, well, Neal had money. After the war, it was Carl who sold Neal a new Packard, and that helped out in Nina’s household. Anyway, if Neal’s son, Jon, got a new bike, Neal made sure that cousin Gary got one, too. Carl never seemed to mind that, just as he never seemed to chafe at abiding amid a gaggle of Pritchards, in general.

It was with quiet resignation, too, that he accepted his status in Ottawa, Kansas, which was pretty much nil. Ottawa had four distinct social orders, which offered the advantage that three of the four had someone to look down on. Within the top stratum, there were the bankers and professional people and the high-muckety-mucks of Ottawa University. That was the country club set. Just below that was the Main Street crowd, the merchants, contractors, landlords, and other businessmen who formed the Chamber of Commerce. And then there was the general run of working people and farmers, into which third stratum Carl Hartpence was born, and in which he stayed. The only stratum below was peopled by blacks and Mexicans, who were talked about with disdain and mistrust by many people in town. But Carl never went in for that.

In fact, you could go years and never hear Carl utter a harsh word about anyone. He’d try to find the good in whatever came. When his own leap for the next stratum foundered ... when he went into business with a cousin, trying to start an insurance agency ... when the cousin then left Carl high and dry, without means to keep his dream afloat ... Carl just went back to selling farm equipment, and all he said was: “Well, Jim had a different way a doin’ things. ... Jus’ couldn’t work it out.”

Carl seemed oblivious to inequity. Which is what made it so remarkable, that Friday night, on Main Street, when Carl and Gary were sitting in Carl’s car, his old Chrysler, which he’d nosed into a parking place, diagonal to the curb, like folks did in those days—in Ottawa, anyway—just to take the evening air and watch the people go by. Carl was talking quietly, and just what brought it on is lost in time now. Maybe it was something Gary said, something with a shot of ambition behind it. Or something about the wider world and what a man might do in it. Anyway, the remarkable part was what Carl said when he half turned away from the windshield, toward his son, and tried to explain how the world was.