In January 1907, the young couple produced their only child, whom they named George, perhaps as a peace offering to his grandfather. That September, Charles Makechnie contracted typhoid fever, which the doctors blamed on “contaminated oysters.” Six days later, at age thirty-one, he died. His parents put their own construction on his final hours. Shortly before his death, Charles had gazed up at a vaguely religious painting and muttered something unintelligible. Convinced that his mumbling constituted an act of contrition, George and Sarah proclaimed that their son had made his peace with God.
Unable to accept her in-laws’ piety, Mabel became increasingly estranged from orthodox Christianity, eventually joining Charles Taze Russell’s International Bible Students’ Association. Russell had broken with his Presbyterian-Congregationalist faith to preach a millennialistic Christianity which eventually evolved into Jehovah’s Witnesses. If the elder Makechnies had condemned their son’s casual disregard for Christian dogma, they were horrified by Mabel’s overt break. Soon young George Makechnie found himself a pawn in the spiritual tug-of-war between his mother and his grandparents. The elder Makechnies insisted that he attend the First Baptist Church, where he shifted uneasily through apocalyptic sermons. Meanwhile Mabel took him along to the Bible study association, where he wondered at the renegade faith of these fervent malcontents. Before long, his curiosity focused on the Irish and Italian Catholics then moving by the thousands into Everett’s working-class neighborhoods. Ignoring his grandparents’ admonitions, he sneaked into Mass at Immaculate Conception, where he was strangely stirred by the solemn Latin cadences.
Mabel Makechnie never remarried; somehow she supported herself and her son by stitching tennis balls and taking in lodgers. When George entered Boston University, he worked his way through as a custodian in a private mausoleum. After taking a master’s degree in education, he served successively as assistant to the dean, registrar, and professor at the School of Education, ultimately becoming dean of the university’s Sargent College of Allied Health Professions. Along the way, he married one of his students, Anne Schonland, a descendant of William Prescott, the colonial commander at Bunker Hill. In 1952, they moved to an eighteenth-century clapboard house a musket shot from the Lexington Battle Green, with their three children: Norman, Arthur, and Joan.
Although George Makechnie had long since left the Baptist Church, spiritual questions remained central to his life. In Lexington, he gravitated to the Hancock Congregational Church overlooking the Battle Green, but even that flexible doctrine seemed only a marginal improvement on Baptist dogma. When the black minister, Howard Thurman, became dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel in 1953, George went to hear his colleague preach.
Almost from the beginning, he was intrigued by Thurman, who that very year had been named by Life magazine as one of America’s twelve greatest preachers. His homilies were unlike anything George had heard before, utter departures from the rigid screeds of his youth. Thurman preached what he called “the love ethic,” a mystic vision of an intimate relationship with God. His faith transcended all boundaries, it was “neither male nor female, Black nor White, Protestant nor Catholic.” Soon George Makechnie resolved to attend Marsh Chapel and gradually his family followed suit. After the Sunday service, blacks and whites mingled informally at a coffee hour, where George and Howard Thurman—already professional colleagues—discovered that they were kindred spirits. The two couples began exchanging visits. Finding that each had been married the same day—June 12—they held an annual anniversary dinner. Before long, their families developed a profound rapport.
Thurman rarely preached on racial issues or urged his congregation to overt action. His lesson was more oblique—the unity of all mankind, indeed of the entire natural world. But those who listened closely detected a fierce commitment to equality.
George Makechnie was a willing listener. Just as he had broken with his Baptist heritage, so he had cut the moorings to his grandparents’ hide-bound Republicanism. To him, the Makechnies’ revolutionary heritage implied a commitment to New Deal-Fair Deal liberalism and racial equality. In 1945, when he became dean of Sargent College, he had quietly passed the word that Negro students would no longer live in the Cambridge ghetto, but would share college dormitories with whites. Southern alumnae and conservative faculty raised the roof, but the dean held firm.
George’s second son, Arthur, felt the heavy weight of the past on his shoulders. Growing up a ten-minute walk from Lexington’s Battle Green, Arthur had been steeped in his community’s sacrifice for freedom. In 1965, seeking a subject for his master’s thesis in history at the University of Wisconsin, he was browsing through Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought when he was struck by Parrington’s description of Theodore Parker, the abolitionist minister from Lexington. Arthur knew that Parker was the grandson of the very Captain John Parker who had commanded the minutemen on the Battle Green. But not until that fall did he realize how Parker’s abolitionist fervor grew from his sense of being rooted in Lexington’s revolutionary tradition: “When a small boy my mother lifted me up, one Sunday, and held me while I read the first monumental lines I ever saw: SACRED TO LIBERTY AND THE RIGHTS OF MANKIND. Gentlemen, the Spirit of Liberty, the Love of Justice, was early fanned into flame in my boyish heart. That monument covers the bones of my own kinfolk; it was their blood which reddened the long green grass at Lexington. It is my own name which stands chiseled on that stone; the tall Captain who marshaled his fellow farmers and mechanics into stern array was my father’s father.”
Arthur had found his subject. All through the late sixties—through the agony of Newark and Detroit, the Kerner Report, and Martin Luther King’s assassination—Arthur Makechnie labored on “The Anti-Slavery Viewpoint of Theodore Parker.”
Not only was New England the wellspring of the Puritan “instinct for democracy,” the birthing ground of the American Revolution, it was also for Parker the home of the “free idea.” Parker regarded the Revolution as “a continuing undertaking, a New England crusade to implant the spirit of liberty throughout the continent.” But the “free idea” wasn’t merely an American doctrine; it was part of what Parker called “the higher law,” rooted in the medieval notion of “natural law.” When a man-made law like the Fugitive Slave Act came into conflict with “the higher law,” Parker had no doubt what the moral man must do. “You cannot trust a people who will keep the law because it is law,” he wrote, “nor need we distrust a people that will only keep a law when it is just.”
Arthur’s thesis breathed a sympathy for Parker’s stands on human rights, though it frankly confronted his prejudices, notably his contempt for the Irish immigrant. Parker recommended that the Irish newcomers be quarantined for thirty-one years: “Certainly it would take all this time to clean a paddy on the outside…. To clean him inwardly would be like picking all the sands of the Sahara.” Nor did Arthur disguise the central contradiction in Parker’s world view: his zeal for the black man’s abstract rights, his intense distaste for the Negro as a particular person. Despite these glaring paradoxes, or perhaps because of them, the abolitionists intrigued Arthur. When the time came for him to select a Ph.D. topic, he focused on yet another of them—Gerrit Smith, the wealthy New York farmer who helped arm John Brown for his raid on Harper’s Ferry.
Surprisingly, for a man so obsessed, Arthur took no part in the civil rights movement of the sixties, attending to his studies while other Northern whites went South to participate in Freedom Rides and sit-ins. But he came to admire the demonstrators’ courage, for Arthur had a tenacious will and a fierce determination on matters of principle.
This caused him great pain after his marriage to Heather Kellenbeck, a member of the Mormon Church, which at that time did not permit Negroes to enter the priesthood or participate in the sacraments. Nevertheless, so deeply did Arthur believe in the unity of the family that he determined to become a Mormon. In August 1971, he was baptized and for nearly three years he remained in
the Church, even holding a series of minor offices. But he couldn’t live with himself, particularly when he remembered that the abolitionists had called for people to “come out” of proslavery churches. In the summer of 1973, Arthur became so preoccupied with the matter that he couldn’t study or sleep. Finally, that autumn, he told the bishop that he no longer considered himself a Mormon.
Few of the Makechnies could match Arthur’s commitment. Through her high school years, his younger sister Joan was absorbed by cheerleading, glee club, field hockey, and student council. Even the Makechnies’ switch from the suburban tranquility of Hancock Congregational to the more urgent ministry of Marsh Chapel didn’t stir her to action. To Joan, Howard Thurman was “Uncle Howard,” more a spiritual mentor and revered family friend than a prophet of social justice. But she wasn’t immune to the mythology of her famous village. In school she studied the battles of Concord and Lexington in excruciating detail. Her parents took her to the Buckman Tavern, where the minutemen had convened; to the Battle Green, and the “rude bridge.” Very early on she was conscious of being “special,” of being rooted in this terribly important place, this spot where it all began.
Each April 19, Lexington commemorated “the shot heard round the world” with a day of solemn festivities. Every year since she was nine Joan had participated in those Patriots Day ceremonies, rededicating herself to the “self-evident truths” for which men had shed blood in that place. In the dim moments before dawn, the old town bell would sound the alarm. Soon church bells joined the clangor. But Joan had been up for hours, washing her hair, pulling on her Girl Scout uniform, then running to join her troop at the Monroe School. Promptly at 7:00 a.m., the Sunrise Parade stepped off along Massachusetts Avenue, led by the “Spirit of ’76”—a hardware store clerk and an eighth-grader rapping on drums, an insurance man piping a wooden flute. Behind them came row upon row of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Brownies marching to the beat of high school bands.
Later in the morning, the modern company of Lexington minutemen massed before the statue of John Parker, dressed in leather jerkin and breeches, grasping his old musket and gazing sternly down the road toward Boston. At 1:00 p.m., two horsemen clattered up that road, impersonating Paul Revere and William Dawes, the colonists who had carried word of the British attack. Another horseman, playing Dr. Samuel Prescott, galloped off to Concord. Joan Makechnie liked that moment best of all, for her parents had told her she was related to Prescott—as well as to William Prescott, the colonial commander at Bunker Hill.
By then the town was filled with spectators, come to watch the afternoon parade with its military outfits from nearby bases, its “minutemen” in breeches and tricorns who streamed in from Acton, Chelmsford, and Tewksbury. Later that afternoon, as orators thundered from the bandstand, volunteers handed out souvenir “birth certificates.” Joan invariably filled in her name so it read: “This is to certify that a certificate of birth was recorded for all Americans in the name of Liberty and Justice for all at the Birthplace of American Liberty, Lexington, Mass., on the 19th of April 1775. I, Joan Makechnie, American, do reaffirm my faith in the glorious tradition born that day.”
By her senior year in high school, Joan had another reason for feeling special. When Massachusetts’ own John Kennedy was elected President that autumn, she was elated. He was so handsome, so intelligent, so idealistic! He was one of their own, a spokesman for spare, principled New England and for an energetic new generation which was ready to take over from those drab, Eisenhower Republicans.
George Makechnie was also an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, in part because he endorsed the Senator’s brand of liberal politics, in part because he had known him slightly through the years. When Boston University awarded Kennedy an honorary degree in 1955, George had been chosen to escort the Senator to the stage; after he became President, Kennedy sent him an autographed picture, which hung on George’s wall. Moreover, the college’s receptionist was Rose Kennedy’s sister-in-law, “Bunny” Fitzgerald, who kept the Makechnies well briefed on the Kennedys’ doings. Through Bunny, George received two precious tickets to the inauguration. Anne Makechnie was ill, so George took Joan instead. With hotel rooms impossible to come by, George called a former student, who found them rooms in the dormitories at Howard University. So far as Joan could tell, she and her father were the only whites on campus. The girls in her dorm seemed bemused by her presence and a couple of them made sly references to “Mrs. White.” Other than that, they treated her with elaborate courtesy.
For three days Joan and her father made the endless round of festivities. The night before the inauguration, they were dancing at the Shoreham when Kennedy stopped by to acknowledge the revelers’ cheers and Joan caught a glimpse of her hero bathed in a spotlight. The next morning, through streets white with new-fallen snow, they found their way to the Capitol Plaza and stood in the sunlight as Robert Frost summoned “the glory of a new Augustan age,” and the young President intoned those stirring phrases which would stay with Joan for years to come: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”
Back in Lexington, she couldn’t get the image of that bright winter morning out of her mind. But something else lingered too: those days at Howard when she’d been the only white girl in a black dormitory. “Now I realize what it must be like to be a minority,” she told her father. “Now I see how a Negro must feel.”
The next fall, Joan went on to Wheaton College, where she soon displayed the public spirit that John Kennedy was urging on her generation. Vice-president of her class, editor of the yearbook, she majored in political science and dreamed of government service. But what pleased her father most was Joan’s defense of her roommate’s franchise. Candy Yaghjian was a white girl from South Carolina, which had no provision for absentee ballots. When Joan organized a campaign to send Candy home on election day, George Makechnie sent his daughter a poem by the abolitionist James Russell Lowell:
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west
And the slave where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century burst full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.
Joan basked in her father’s approval, but by then there was another man in her life. Neighbors and classmates, she and Colin had known each other all through high school, but only after Joan went to Wheaton and Colin to Amherst had they become romantically attached. The relationship bloomed in the summer after their freshman year and by the following fall Joan was spending every other weekend at Amherst.
Most people who knew the Divers assumed they were Yankees, associating the name with Dick Diver in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. In fact, it was a corruption of Dwyer, Dyer, and Dever, for the Divers were originally Irish Protestants. Colin’s grandfather, Ben Diver, was born at Killybegs in County Donegal, but as a young man he emigrated to London, where he enthusiastically adopted the English way of life. In succeeding years, Ben consistently took the English side in the bloody rebellions tormenting his native land.
He found a job at Ward’s, a tobacconist’s shop in the Burlington Arcade, which catered to wealthy Londoners who could afford to have their tobacco mixed to order. The orders invariably arrived on stationery with the family crest, which Ben brought home for his son, Ben Jr., to paste in a scrapbook. Ben’s wife, Sarah, was cook to General Sir Redvers Henry Buller, who, after violating military etiquette, had been forced to surrender his command and retire permanently to his country home, Downes, in Devonshire. Sarah shuttled between Downes and Sir Redvers’ town house in London’s Russell Square, often taking her young son with her. The general and his wife were entertainers in the grand style, and Ben Jr. grew up in a “real upstairs-downstairs world.” Ben was fa
scinated by the electrical box on the wall which flashed the floor on which service was required. Every afternoon at four his mother would trundle upstairs with tea and scones, while Ben tagged happily at her heels.
When he was fourteen, Ben was apprenticed to the antiques department at Liberty’s in Regent Street, where he was set to work polishing the suits of armor with Rangoon Oil and powdered pumice. When war broke out in August 1914, he signed on with Queen Victoria’s Rifles and fought for two years on the Western Front until he was temporarily paralyzed by an exploding shell. Back home, he had difficulty finding work and emigrated to Canada, where he became a society photographer. Still he couldn’t stay put. In 1924, he emigrated again, this time to Massachusetts, where he took a room in the South End, Boston’s shabby rooming-house district. Around the corner lived Ethleen Heuser, a young woman of German-Swedish ancestry who was a law student at Northeastern University. Eight years later—when Ben was forty-two and Ethleen thirty-two—they were married, and Ben got a job in the photo labs at MIT, where he worked for the rest of his life. The Divers found a tiny Cape Cod cottage in Lexington, where their only child, Colin, was born in 1943.
A precocious boy, Colin sailed through Lexington’s public schools at the top of his class. But by his third year in high school he had begun to slack off a bit, regarding his academic superiority as a social liability. At that point his parents sent him for a year to Deerfield, a private school in western Massachusetts that would guarantee he was well prepared for an Ivy League college. But they were after something else too: a touch of social panache. To Ben Diver, schools like Deerfield and Choate were the closest America came to the English public school, an experience he had been denied by his family’s modest circumstances but which he was determined that Colin should have.
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