Читать книгу Jack's Book - Barry Gifford - Страница 14

THE TENEMENTS WERE, and are, Little Canada. There are others like it in Burlington and Nashua and Portsmouth, neighborhoods in which the shop signs are in English but the French language and ways prevail. You can still see the young French-Canadian men lounging by the front door of the Pawtucketville Social Club, the bowling alley and beerhall where Jack’s father, Leo, went on afternoons when business was light at his Spotlight Printshop in the “crowded metropolitan business section” across the river.

Like many New England towns, Lowell has swallowed up a collection of villages, each with its own history. Jack Kerouac was born in Centralville and grew up in a succession of rent-houses and flats in Dracut and Pawtucketville, all of them north of the Merrimack and the now-vanished mills that multiplied the Merrimack’s power by that of the leisurely Concord, a river which is a river only as Lowell is a city, on an old scale—New England’s.

During the early years of the industrial revolution Lowell was a wonder-town, literally a capital of industry. The mills spun Boston fortunes that survive to this day. Charles Dickens, a stern critic of factory slavery in his own country, visited Lowell and wrote home an approving report. He was impressed by the looks of the place and by the deportment of the farm girls who had come there to tend the looms, and he found no fault with their wage, two dollars a week. The mill owners gave the town a Textile Institute on the north bank of the Merrimack, but they were less generous with their workers. As the nineteenth century rolled on, the “operatives” became relatively less and less well-paid. The farm girls went to Boston, instead, to work as stenographers or telephonists. Their places at the looms were taken by immigrants from Ireland, France (via Canada), Poland, and Greece.

The mills hummed until the end of World War I, when imported cloth and southern factories provided competition that began to close them down. By the time Jack was born—March 12, 1922—Lowell’s splendid century was over. A hundred years of immigrants drawn by the mills had sorted themselves into a loose constellation of ethnic groups bound by a common Catholicism but separated by their loyalties to a particular parish or language. Every one of them was caught in an economic depression such as the rest of America would endure only ten years later.

Leo Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle Ange L’Evesque met and married in New Hampshire, where their families had immigrated from Canada. Leo was a job printer who had tried his hand at selling insurance before he got the money to open his own press. As a youth he had worked in New Hampshire sawmills. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was the third and last child. His sister, Caroline, “Nin,” was three years older and his brother, Gerard, five when Jack was born.

Leo and Gabrielle lived in separate worlds when they were away from their rented hearth. Leo was a hearty, outgoing burgher whose shop was crowded with his friends. They found little difficulty in luring him away for an afternoon of billiards or political talk. At one point they proposed that he run for mayor of Lowell, but he declined the draft. Leo passed on to Jack a complicated notion of his ancestry on the Kerouac side, explaining that his own father, a carpenter who had immigrated from Brittany, was descended from Cornish Celts. Leo supplied a nobleman for one branch of the family tree, a coat-of-arms with three carpenter’s nails and a motto which translated as “Love, work and suffer.” Jack’s father counted Greeks and Poles and Irishmen among his friends and customers, and he was entirely comfortable with English, the language that all of them could share. Gabrielle preferred French and conducted her household in that tongue, which was also the language of the parish where she performed novenas and sent her children to be taught.

When Jack was four, Gerard, then nine, died of rheumatic fever. Gerard was a bright, frail child who had treated Jack, his sister Nin, his pet cat, and the mice he rescued from traps with the same extraordinary kindness. Jack worshipped him and emulated him and was entirely bereft at his death, which was marked by ceremonious mourning by the teaching sisters. Gerard had been a favorite of the nuns. When he died, they thought over things that he had said and done in his brief life and spoke of him as a saint-in-the-making. The boy was buried with Gabrielle’s family in Nashua, New Hampshire, his soul consigned to a heaven which she sought to make comfortable and at-hand to Jacky and Nin. To Gabrielle there was no question that Gerard was a saint, and Jacky was told so again and again. The implication was that Jack, perhaps, was not.

The special, official saint to whom Jack was taught to pray was Thérèse of Lisieux, whose life provided something of a stencil for Jack’s memories of Gerard’s saintliness. Thérèse was the consumptive daughter of a watchmaker in Brittany, the region of France the Kerouacs considered their ancestral home. In 1888, at the age of fifteen, she took the Carmelite habit. When it became plain that Thérèse would die of tuberculosis, her Mother Superior instructed her to keep a journal, which the girl crowded with bright, simple memories of a bourgeois childhood. At her death the Carmelites edited the diary into an obituary pamphlet, The Story of a Soul, which swiftly gained hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. In a section of the journal that came close to a campaign speech Thérèse had promised to “spend her heaven doing good upon earth,” and had forecast a “shower of roses” for those who prayed to her after her death, Gabrielle Ange L’Evesque among them. The Carmelites were deluged with letters about the resulting miracles, but the Vatican was adamant about the required waiting period before canonization could begin. Finally, having confessed his certainty of her sainthood to a visiting bishop, Pius X relented in 1914 and prepared the way for her recognition. In 1923, twenty-five years after she died at twenty-four, Thérèse was accorded beatification by Pius XI and immediate ranking with Joan of Arc as co-patroness of France.

She is known today as St. Thérèse of the Infant Jesus, and the chromolithographed iconography of her is rich in images of the Holy Child, of baby lambs, of roses, and of yolk-yellow shafts of light piercing back-lit clouds to illuminate her simple, adoring face. Forty years after the canonization of Thérèse, Jack Kerouac, literally hung over from success, would sprawl in a San Francisco park and explain to the poet Philip Whalen the comfort and refuge he felt in praying to Thérèse and “little lamby Jesus” to ease his woes.

Jack harbored bitter memories of the strict sisters at parochial school, an ordeal that ended when he was sent to public school at seven. Gerard’s coffin, the dark glade where the Kerouacs made the stations of the cross, the cheaply printed portraits of the weeping Christ—all of these images stayed in his mind and his mind stayed on Lowell, or “Galloway,” as he called it in his first novel, The Town and the City. The hard times would make Jack and his family wanderers throughout the crescent of poor neighborhoods north of the Merrimack, but despite the shadows, Jack remembered and spoke of a childhood that was full and rich, a time in his life that he never tired of reconsidering and re-creating in his writing, approaching it again and again from different angles.

In The Town and the City Jack multiplies himself and uses elements of his friends’ characters to create a large and complicated family he calls the Martins. Martin was St. Thérèse’s family name and an important mercantile name in Lowell. Jack gives his fictional family a sprawling, many-porched house that he had passed on summer-evening walks with his mother and his sister. The Martins of the novel are indifferent Catholics, and given the economic realities of Lowell in the thirties, almost unaccountably comfortable. Only Mrs. Martin, the mother, is of French descent, a trait Kerouac uses to shade her character, but not to define it. The Martins probably represent an amalgam of all the wealthy families on Varnum Road with whom Gabrielle wished her son could associate.

The Twelve Stations of the Cross—“I knew Doctor Sax was there flowing in the back darks with his wild and hincty cape. . . .”

(Doctor Sax, pp. 122–123). Photo by Marshall Clements.

Later in his writing career, when he was striving to set down his true feelings, Jack’s French self surfaced, as in Visions of Gerard, the thirty-five-year-old man’s prolonged meditation on the brother who had died when he was four. A world of steaming puddings and rainy afternoons home from school is keenly evoked. Jack portrays conversations with Gabrielle—Mémêre—in French, and then translates them. “When I read of Proust’s teacup,” he wrote, “—all those saucers in a crumb—all of literary history by thumb—all of a city in a tasty crumb—I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.”

Jack painted and drew and cocked an ear for gossip, and he was a faithful reader of the sports pages of the Lowell Sun and the Boston newspapers. By the time he was eleven he was amusing himself by writing sports coverage chronicling the fortunes of his racing stable, a box of marbles. In another season the marbles became the players in an elaborate statistical baseball game that Jack continued to play in one form or another for the rest of his life.

Children’s tickets for the movies cost eleven cents in those days, but Jack and Nin could attend for free because Leo printed the theater programs. Jack was seven when the pictures began to talk, which made him a member of the first generation to secure its fantasy in this noisy, American way. Until the talkies Lowell’s main theater, the Keith, was a stop on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit, and Leo’s connection with the theater provided his son with glimpses of the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields as stage performers, before their movie fame. As stars of the talking pictures they became full-scale comic heroes for Jack and his friends. The men of The Big Parade were real heroes, models in case the Kaiser decided to march again. The villainess of Murder by the Clock was frightening to Jack because she was only a shadow, never seen full-face.

At parochial school Jack’s catechism and his first reading of the Bible had been in French. After he began attending public school he read the popular children’s books of the day: The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and the adventures of the Bobbsey Twins, three brace of bland siblings whose existence defied statistical common sense. All of these books were case-bound volumes of great popularity, accepted by teachers and school librarians despite their lack of literary merit, because of their uplifting moral lessons. But Jack’s tastes soon led him to the pulp thriller magazine-novels that Street and Smith and other publishers produced weekly, which were sold on newsstands or in the little grocery-and-sundry shops called “spas” in Lowell. The character Jack followed devoutly was the Shadow, Lamont Cranston, who knew “what evil lurks in the minds of men,” and had the power to cloud men’s minds in order to triumph over that evil. The Shadow, the creation of the pseudonymous Maxwell Grant, had established beachheads in several media by the time Jack was twelve. The Shadow appeared in a magazine, in theater serials, and in a radio program.

On snowy days Jack came home from school and cranked up the phonograph to play thick, gutta-percha discs that provided the sound track for the race-meets, the ballgames, and the movies of mystery and adventure that played continuously in his head. But in spring and summer his fantasies spread to a wider stage, the sandbanks of the Merrimack, the woods of Dracut, the grounds of the mansion on Wannalancet Street, and the orphanage on the hill that he would consolidate into a single Castle and populate with a cabal of vampires and hangers-on, the arch-enemies of his shadow hero, Doctor Sax.

In Doctor Sax, Jack’s novel about the last weeks of childhood, Lowell’s ordinary, small-town shadows deepen and spread to contain a counter-world in which Doctor Sax, a shrouded figure with a green complexion, is pitted against the forces of evil, acting through comic and banal agents. Jack wrote the book when he was thirty-five and visiting William Burroughs in Mexico. Sax himself contains elements of Burroughs, and W. C. Fields appears under the name Bull Balloon, along with a good deal of intellectual décor that was no part of Kerouac’s boyhood world. There is, for example, a funny set-piece portrayal of Bohemianism, à la Isadora Duncan or Amy Lowell. But all of this material is identified with Kerouac’s fantasy subplot, a titanic struggle between good and evil played out under the unsuspecting noses of the Lowell townspeople. The sounds and smells and tastes of a Massachusetts boyhood are here, and the underground bungalow where Doctor Sax hides out is located on the real road that Jack and his friends walked to reach their playing field at the edge of the Dracut woods, just north of town.

The same small circle of boys—“a summer baseball team, a winter basketball team, and an invincible autumn football team”—populates all of Jack’s writing about Lowell. The boys do ordinary things, play ball, pull pranks, swim in the raw, and talk to one another in a code language designed to confuse their elders while cementing their alliance. But in all of his books and stories about boyhood Jack makes a clear distinction between himself and the others. He looks down on those who found their heroes in the pages of Alexandre Dumas instead of in Maxwell Grant’s chronicles of the Shadow. It is Jacky alone who can see and speak with Doctor Sax. There is a suggestion that the other boys do not realize what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but that Jacky does. He gently indicts his friends for the crime of insufficient imagination. As it turned out Jack was the only one of the circle to leave Lowell to seek his fortune.

George J. Apostolos was Jack’s closest boyhood friend. In the books, as in life, he is “G.J.,” sharp and aggressive. There is a well-thumbed copy of On the Road on the shelf behind his desk at the insurance agency he owns in Lowell.

G. J. Apostolos:

Everything hurt the guy. Just a drizzly November day would zing him. I guess if you read his books, I guess somewhere you’d find the answer.

Jacky’s mother wanted so very much for him. Jack had everything. His mother tried to get him to associate with “better” people.

“I can never be what she wants. I can’t live with her. I’m disappointing her,” he’d say. Jack always tried to please his mother. It seemed to eat away at him. He went off with the Beat Generation, but he always worried about his mother.

Roland Salvas stayed in Lowell, too. He is the Albert “Lousy” Lauzon of Jack’s novels, a member of a teeming French-Canadian family that Jacky Duluoz (Kerouac) encounters in crowded kitchen parties or accompanies on summer picnics by the river.

Roland Salvas:

I always thought Jack was going to get up there somehow. I mean, being a writer—wanting to be a writer—you don’t become a writer in your own town. You have to go out and give what you can and learn what you can. But you don’t do that around your own town or city. You get the education step by step. That’s what he did.

He was a clean-cut kid—clean-cut and clean-shaved. He was a hard-nosed backfield man. Right halfback or left halfback, I don’t remember which one. He liked football. He used to tell the quarterback, “Pete, let me take the ball next. I know I can outrun that guy.” He was a speeder, a real speeder.

In the neighborhood there was all French. His mother spoke French. I don’t think the father did much of it, but his mother was a true Frenchman. Jack’s father was a big man and a chain-smoker. A tremendous man, really big. He liked to joke with you. I can’t say anything bad about that family at all.

I think Jack wanted to be something out of life rather than just normal. He did talk much about the Shadow. He liked that kind of stuff, you know: “Mwee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”

He really did like the Shadow.

G. J. Apostolos:

I remember one time he was the Silver Tin Can. If there was a window open, or a door, he’d throw a tin can through it with a note: “The Silver Tin Can Strikes Again!” He’d wear a cape and give his Doctor Sax laugh. “Mwee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”

Everybody thought it was the dirty Greek, me. Jack’s mother just couldn’t believe Jack would do anything like that. He’d be in his cape—thirteen years old—jumping over fences and running, always running.

I’ll tell you something about Doctor Sax’s castle.

We met an old man walking along Textile Bridge, and he was drunk and we took him home to this big old house, and he kept saying, “There’s Chinamen under the floors.” We put him on the cot and he rolled off the other side and hit his head. This house was off Riverside Street, down in Dracut.

Writing about that incident in Maggie Cassidy Jack recalled that G.J. was convinced that the old man had died of his head injury. The next day the three boys waited in suspense for the afternoon edition of the Lowell Sun. To their relief the old man’s obituary was missing.

Joseph Henry “Scotty” Beaulieu, Scotty Boldieu of the novels, was nicknamed for “his thrift among five-cent candy bars and eleven-cent movies.” Jack described him in Dr. Sax as “a very heroic-looking boy in the morning.” He was a bit older than Jack and something of an idol, especially when it came to sports.

Scotty Beaulieu:

Jack was hard as a rock, a great athlete. When I tackled him, or tried to, once, when I grabbed his legs—man, I saw stars! He plowed right through me.

He was a funny guy. His family had a lot of problems and bad luck, but Jacky never mentioned them. Of course, we all had problems, but us boys never talked about them, so maybe it wasn’t so unusual.

Me and Jack and G.J. were like the Three Musketeers. We were always together and never had no fights. Jacky’s parents didn’t like us hanging around him, though, like we wasn’t good enough for him. But his mother was a very nice woman. His father was nice, too, but never had much to do with us.

In the spring of 1936, the year that Jack turned fourteen, floods swept New England. Safe on the Pawtucketville hill, Jack and his family watched the Merrimack rise out of its banks, covering the sandbars that were the boys’ usual playground and, finally, the Textile Bridge itself, isolating Little Canada from downtown Lowell. One of the old locks protected the business section from thorough destruction, but as it was Leo’s shop was filled with water to a depth of six feet. The flood drowned his prospects as an independent businessman. From that point on he made his living working for whatever printer would hire him, picking up extra money by tending the bowling concession at the Social Club.

At first, Jack, G.J., and the others regarded the flood as a wonderful adventure. For a moment Lowell was important. Photographers came up from Boston to record the devastation. Interesting flotsam from New Hampshire rushed downstream, and Jack watched it drifting out of sight, out of Lowell. Remembering the occasion twenty years later as he wrote Doctor Sax, Jack more or less ignores the effect of the flood on his family’s fortunes, recording instead his fear that the high water would prevent his weekly walk downtown to the public library for a fresh armload of books.

But by Saturday morning the water had receded. Jack and Nin went downtown as usual, passing the movie house where they had gone together before either could read properly, “—now we are grown up, we read books.” Kerouac’s record of this day and night is one of his most brilliant acts of remembrance. The events no doubt were selected from many weeks or months of real experience, but it was this particular Saturday that Jack chose to regard as marking the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his young manhood. (This thresh-hold had nothing to do with sexual discovery. That was another occasion, the night when he idly invented masturbation while pondering the death of a pet dog.) It was, instead, a subtle and profound change in the way that he looked at the world.

Jacky spends the day alone, climbing “Snake Hill” and exploring the grounds of the empty mansion that shelters the forces of evil. After dinner, standing on the sandbank, he is joined by Doctor Sax, who speaks to the boy for the first time: “ ‘The Flood,’ said Doctor Sax, ‘has brought matters to a head.’ ” Sheltered by Sax’s cloak of invisibility, Jacky joins the phantom on a tour of the neighborhood, unobserved by his friends and family. Gabrielle hurries home from a late shopping trip for cold cuts; Leo is planning a party. Nin catches up with her mother, to tell her about a dress she has seen downtown. A dance band on the radio plays a Gershwin tune. A shed-door slams. A woman laughs raucously at a dirty joke.

LOWELL LOWLANDS in the Rosemont section saw 2000 flee their homes as the Merrimack rose about their houses. Boston Globe photo by Callahan.

The boy and the phantom vault fences to spy on neighbors: Scotty pensively eating a candy bar, G.J. surveying the dusk, Gene Plouffe in bed with the covers up to his chin, reading a Street and Smith pulp western. An older boy strides confidently home. Jacky knows, without knowing how, that the story that the youth will tell his parents about working late will be a lie, that he is returning from an episode of furtive love-making with his girl in a barn in the Dracut woods. Lowell goes about its night business, but Jacky is no real part of it. With his Shadow by his side he is, this night for the first time, quite self-consciously the bystanding recorder. He watches. He listens. He files it all away. Sax’s running commentary provides an infuriatingly muddled obbligato, and then, this sentence, pronounced upon Gene Plouffe, abed with his thriller:

Bye and bye you’ll rise to the sun and propel your mean bones hard and sure to huge labors, and great steaming dinners, and spit your pits out, aching cocklove nights in cobweb moons, the mist of tired dust at evening, the corn, the silk, the moon, the rail—that is known as Maturity—but you’ll never be as happy as you are now in your quiltish, innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night.

Rainclouds obscure the moon, and presently Sax and the boy are at the castle, where the satanic world-snake stirs from its sleep to stage a direct assault. During the titanic struggle that follows, an amalgam of all the scenes in all the B-movies in which the peasantry destroy the mad scholar’s laboratory, Sax whips off his cape and hat, revealing himself to the terrified boy as a bit-player wholly inadequate to deal with the forces he has helped to unleash. It doesn’t matter. As the storm gathers the snake is subdued in a manner Kerouac borrows from the mythology of Mexico, where he was living when Doctor Sax was written, and it is for Sax himself to deliver the moral: “I’ll be damned. . . . The Universe disposes of its own evil.”

To regard the mature writer’s vision of this watershed Saturday is not to conclude that its lessons were clear or even available to the fourteen-year-old Jacky, but it does seem that behind many of Kerouac’s later choices and actions, some of which could be regarded as impulsive and destructive, there lay an essential reliance on the universe as a self-regulating mechanism. The wealthy Presbyterians up Varnum Road could comfort themselves with their doctrine of predestination, but that doctrine wasn’t available to the Kerouacs of St. Jean-Baptiste parish. Much later the Buddhist notion of dharma would supply Kerouac with a name for this attitude.

Jacky was Jack now, that season and each season for three more years, a little sturdier, a little more certain of his skill as an athlete. He was good at all sports, but football was his game. For all his life Kerouac regarded October as the kindest month—“Everybody goes home in October,” he wrote—and in those years of the late 1930s, each October promised four or five Saturdays when the boys and a gallery of their fathers and brothers would troop up Snake Hill to the Dracut Tigers’ Field, conducting their games in at least three languages, sometimes four. Some of the boys were taller, but Jack was heavily muscled—and quick. His thick legs belied the speed and the startling changes of direction that he could command whenever he got the ball.

There were girls now, too, but not a great many. Some of them read Jack’s shyness as conceit. He was quick in class, he was a skilled athlete, and he was becoming a classically handsome young man. The boy-girl gap then was probably no wider than now, but Jack appears to have had less ease in bridging it than his friends. The resulting distances and silences were enough to ratify his image as stuck on himself.

However, one girl, Mary Carney, captured his heart. She was a year ahead of Jack in school, a girl from the Irish neighborhood across the river. Her little brother was enlisted as a matchmaker, and Jack became a familiar fixture on the Carneys’ front porch. Mary’s father was a railroad man, an occupation that fascinated Jack, and it may be that the Carneys supplied a warmth and closeness that Jack found difficult to demand or accept from Leo and Gabrielle. Jack and Mary had long, soul-baring talks. G.J., Scotty, and Roland had listened to Jack talk about his complicated perceptions and ambitions, but Mary Carney appeared to understand them. Like those three, Mary Carney never left Lowell, either.

Mary Carney:

There was something deep between Jack and me, something nobody else understood or knew about. After that book Maggie Cassidy came out I had a lot of trouble. People calling me and the neighbors talking. It was awful.

Jack was so sweet. He was a sweet, good kid, and the people in Lowell didn’t understand him. They never did. Nobody ever reads here. They wouldn’t even put up a plaque for him.

Jack was so sensitive. All he wanted was a house and a job on the railroad. Jack used to tell me everything.

Nobody would understand anyway, so I’m not going to talk any more. I made up my mind a long time ago I wouldn’t, so I’m going to stick to it. Nobody listens anyway.

G. J. Apostolos:

There was no connection between Maggie Cassidy and Mary Carney. Jack invented her. I remember Jack came back after the war and made me call up Mary Carney. He wanted to see her. She said all right, for ten minutes, so we went over there: me, Jack, and a couple of my buddies.

Mary was sitting on the porch Jack talks about in Maggie Cassidy. She was surrounded by her fiancé, her mother, and her father.

Jack and she just stared at each other. He didn’t say anything. He was frozen. There wasn’t anything between them. It was all in Jack’s mind, his imagination. There really wasn’t anything between them in the first place.

After Leo lost his shop in the flood the Kerouacs moved to the top floor of a tenement over a lunch counter on Moody Street. One night as Jack sat in his room reading, he heard a stranger’s voice calling his name from the street. The caller was Sammy Sampas, a boy a year older than Jack who lived on the other side of town. He had heard of Jack by reputation—not as a halfback, but as a voracious reader, and as a writer. Like Jack, Sammy was studying serious authors according to his own syllabus, but his tastes were a little loftier and a good deal surer. Perhaps most important of all, Sammy was certain that he would be able to make his living as a writer, and his personal vision of success included Broadway, where he hoped to be a producer as well as a playwright.

Roland Salvas:

That guy Sammy was a smart person. I met him through Jack and George. Their vocabulary was much higher than mine, so when they’d talk, the three of them, there’s lots of times when I’d shake my head. Even Scotty and I couldn’t understand. But it didn’t matter, you know. It didn’t matter.

When you talk of Sampas, you’re talking of Sampas, Jack, and George, those three. They were more serious-minded.

By the fall of 1938, the first semester of Jack’s senior year at Lowell High School, Gabrielle had returned to her old trade as a skiver, or cutter, in a shoe factory. Aside from his duties at the social club Leo had a more or less regular income from his job in a printshop owned by an Irish family. Roland Salvas had dropped out of school to work in the Boston Navy Yard. George Apostolos had enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps and was in Colorado, helping to build Estes National Park.

“I wanted to go to college and somehow knew my father would never be able to earn the tuition,” Jack wrote. Football offered a way. Despite his swiftness and his solidity Jack was smaller than his compatriots on the Lowell varsity, boys who had played against one another in the sandlot games in Dracut Woods. The coach had held Jack on the bench for most of the 1937 season, and Jack’s jealousy of the starters was intense. But in the fall of 1938 he made a series of brilliant, last-quarter appearances that caught the attention of the Boston sportswriters—and of scouts for Boston College, Duke, and Columbia.

In one game Jack ignored the coach’s direct order, and attempted his flashy, one-handed carry. He fumbled, and his conscience was stung. But in the game that really counted, the Thanksgiving Day meeting with Lawrence, Jack scored the only touchdown. From that moment his college scholarship was secure. The question was, which offer to accept?

Leo’s bosses at the printshop were enlisted by the recruiters from Boston College to help them get Kerouac for their team. Jack resisted. He didn’t want to be taught by Jesuits, and Boston wasn’t far enough away. He was in love with the New York City of the movies, and the visions of high life there that he had shared with Sammy Sampas. Gabrielle sided with Jack, sketching a fantasy of the whole family following him to New York. Jack chose Columbia. Soon afterward Leo was fired from the printshop, and ever after, Jack believed he had been responsible for Leo’s misfortune by refusing to go to Boston College.

The Lowell High School yearbook for 1939 shows Jack in his track uniform: dark, clear eyes; a tangle of black hair; powerful legs that permitted him to elude all but the craftiest defensive players. That spring he began to cut classes one day a week, spending the morning in the library looking at chess books and whatever else caught his attention: “Goethe, Hugo, of all things the Maxims of William Penn, just reading to show off to myself that I was reading.” Afternoons he went to the Rialto to “study the old 1930s movies in detail.” To Jack the Manhattan that Don Ameche and Alice Faye toured by limousine was a real place with real penthouses, and he would visit them soon.

G. J. Apostolos:

In ’38, ’39 the letters he wrote me were books. I was in the CCC’s in Estes Park, Colorado, where we were digging ditches, painting barracks. But it was the West to Jack. To him, I was breaking stallions. I had to walk bowlegged when I got off the train, to go along with him.

I remember one day I made the mistake of going down to see Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier. I had a beer, and thought I was the hero. We went to Canolie Lake and went on the dodgeems. So I went over to this girl and Jack said, “There’s Heathcliff!” I whispered in her ear, “Why can’t there be the scent of heather in your hair?”

I got panicked. A cop came over and asked me what I’d said, and I told him. I did it for Jack. He flipped over it. He was so impressionable when he was young. He never forgot his buddies.

Despite his starring runs on the football field and his excellent grades the Columbia recruiters decided that Jack needed a year of prep school before he would be ready for the Ivy League, athletically or academically. His scholarship was arranged to begin with a year at Horace Mann School for Boys, where trainers would introduce him to the theories and methods of Columbia’s famous coach, Lou Little, while the teachers, most of them Ph.D.s, prepared him for Columbia’s tough version of a liberal arts program. Horace Mann is at 246th Street on Van Cortlandt Park, the northernmost reaches of New York City. Jack was to live with Gabrielle’s stepmother, her new husband, and their family, in Brooklyn. It was two hours each way by subway, a journey that would sweep Jack beneath the Manhattan he had dreamed about.

G. J. Apostolos:

When he went to Horace Mann Jack’s mother told me, “Now Jack’s going to meet the people he should have grown up with. Jack’s much better off.”