The Key

Travis had never been to an Indian restaurant before. Nor had he ever been to Cambridge, though he had done a couple of runs into Boston from Maine when he was in high school—to the Museum of Fine Arts once, and another time to the science museum and the aquarium.

He left the restaurant with his mouth still on curry-fire and joined the others standing on Mass. Ave in Central Square. It was a windy early November afternoon, overcast but unlikely to snow yet. He could tell when snow was in the air. The few trees along the street—spindly little things—rattled brittle with brown leaves; most people bustled past the trees, and the visitors, without a sidelong glance. Everyone he had told about this trip had said that Cambridge was a city, yes, but a city different from Boston or New York or other big places. He didn’t see the difference, at least not on Central Square. A bus belched its exhaust into their faces as it passed them, heading west to Harvard Square, which was their destination as well.

Travis and Jonah’s anyway. They had agreed over lunch to split up, with Travis sitting in on Jonah’s meeting with his editor in Harvard Square, while Carla, Jason, and JackSon were to be off in the other direction, for a visit to Haley House, which Carla explained was Boston’s version of their place on Fourth Street.

“Keep an eye on him,” Jason said to Travis. “He’s liable to get into trouble in that hotbed of radicalism.”

“You mean Harvard?” Travis asked. Jason only smirked as the three took off east on Mass Ave to catch the trolley that had just stopped nearby. They boarded and the doors shut, but the car didn’t get very far before it lost its connection to the overhead wires and whispered to a halt in a shower of sparks.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Travis asked Jonah as they watched the driver jump down to the street and reposition his connection to the powerlines.

“Not nearly as dangerous as Harvard,” Jonah chuckled, and Travis took a second or two to decide if Jonah was being serious or not.

He ran to catch up to his mentor, who was already heading west into a crowd of people. Crowds seemed to be everywhere; everyone had someplace to go at lunch time, he guessed. They’d been on the move all day. They had driven to Boston last night and stayed with a man names Thomas, an old friend of Jonah’s from his seminary days. Thomas didn’t seem to have a job, but he had a huge old house that he was renovating one brick and board at a time.

Thomas was a good man, Travis knew at a glance, someone he could trust, and so he asked a lot of questions as they—all of them—prepared a vegetarian dinner together. How did Thomas wind up in Roxbury, anyway? The neighborhood seemed really poor, even though Thomas seemed to have an income to support himself (he did, after all, own the building). Did he have any white neighbors? Travis had never seen so many black people all in one place as they encountered on the hilly street they walked up from the Ruggles Station. It was his first experience of being a member of a racial minority there on the street.

On the radio in the kitchen, the local station was playing quiet classical music. Travis knew little about classical music, but he thought it was the perfect soundtrack for their evening together. Thomas’s big, old chocolate Labrador took an immediate liking to Jack, who was better with dogs, anyway, than he was with vegetables. The elders sipped white wine as they all worked the food, which seemed to be centered on a soy based substance that didn’t look like any food Travis had ever seen. Thomas called it toe-foo (Travis wasn’t sure how that was spelled), and he fried it with more confidence than Travis felt appropriate for such an amorphous blob, along with hard, green vegetables in olive oil.

The meal, despite his reservations, was excellent, and they had gone to bed early, exhausted by the long trip on route nine from Troy. The road was amazingly beautiful at this time of the year, with leaves everywhere on fire and shaking almost with delight in the autumn wind. But they were tired. Jack and Travis spread out sleeping bags in a room completely devoid of furniture.

“Hey,” Thomas had said, “at least this room has a floor,” and he warned them to be sure to read the signs he had posted on the other doors in the hallway, lest they enter the wrong room on the way to the bathroom during the night and enter one that Thomas still had not gotten around to, well, flooring.

The hard wood they slept on did nothing to dim Travis’s sense of adventure and warm pleasure at being in a new city with people who were becoming like family to him. His pleasure may have been warm, but the night was cold and the room unheated. The sleeping bag was warm enough, though, and Travis awoke the next morning with the sun—and with the mouse who, unbeknownst to Travis, had been his night companion, and who jumped out of the bag when he unzipped it.

+++++++++++++++

As they walked briskly toward Harvard Square, they approached the fortress-like brick walls lining Harvard Yard. Travis got glimpses of the green campus as they passed each entrance, but Jonah didn’t slow until he saw Travis hesitate at one entrance.

“You want to have a look?” Jonah said.

“Do we have time?”

“We have a few minutes before I meet Laura,” Jonah said, and they entered the Yard.

“It looks just like it did in ‘Love Story,’” Travis said, referring to a wildly popular romantic motion picture from a year or two ago. “Except that it was covered in snow in the movie.”

They walked along a path to the famous statue of John Harvard, and Jonah pointed out the “three lies” associated with the statue: that Harvard was not the founder of the university as the inscription claimed, that the date of the college’s foundation was wrong, and that the face of the statue belonged to some unknown model, not the seventeenth century Briton.

Jonah steered them across the Yard past Massachusetts Hall—the oldest surviving building at Harvard College—through the arched gate and into Square proper. All Travis saw at first were brick buildings and the wires strung overhead for the trolleys—and then the wildest collection of people he had ever encountered. They crossed Mass. Ave to an old church and then crossed a small street and walked into the thick of what could only be described as human chaos.

Students made up the bulk of the crowd, of course, but they were dressed in every conceivable costume. Two guys walked by dressed like medieval court jesters, with bright red sleeves and purple leotards. A huge black woman was practically buried in multiple fringed shawls crusted with spangles and trailing tassels by the hundreds. Three men in white-face juggled balls silently at one intersection, a hat in front of them for proffered donations. They passed a store devoted exclusively to selling Earth Shoes next to a head shop that looked particularly well trafficked. From the storefront blasted Janis Joplin’s full-bodied, if scratchy, plea for anyone listening to “HOLD ON! HOLD ON! HOLD ON!”

As if in response, Jonah did the opposite and proceeded to part a crowd of saffron-garbed Hari Krishnas in front of the the Harvard Coop like Moses portioning out the Red Sea. The Haris didn’t miss a syllable of their gentle, rhythmic chant as Travis and Jonah passed through their cloud of Krishnaic incense.

But just beyond the swaying Haris, Jonah was stopped in his tracks by two flaming-haired women who were clearly sisters. They were older than Travis—he guessed in their late twenties—and they were determined to get Jonah’s attention.

“You’re a priest,” one of them said to him, which seemed obvious to Travis, since Jonah never travelled anywhere unless he wore his collared black suit. The woman wore a blue cotton peasant blouse with a swooped neck, black jeans, and Birkenstocks, with a large gold ring in each ear.

“I am indeed a priest,” Jonah said to her. “And what might you be?”

She gestured to the other woman, who wore bell-bottoms and an oversized mauve sweatshirt covered with symbols that Travis did not understand. “My sister and I,” she said, “want you to buy a copy of ‘The Militant.’”

“What’s ‘The Militant’?” Travis asked her, but Jonah surprised them all by replying.

“It’s the newspaper of the Socialist Workers’ Party,” he said, as he fumbled for his wallet.

“You know what that is?” the woman called Lynne said.

“Oh, yes,” Jonah said. “Catholic Workers and Socialist Workers go way back.”

“You’re Catholic Workers?” Lynne’s sister asked them.

“Not exactly,” Travis said. “But sort of . . . .”

“Well,” Lynne’s sister said, “we’re only sort of Socialist Workers, too.” Her smile was even more radiant than her red hair in the early afternoon sunlight.

“Yelena the kind hearted one,” Lynne said with a bit of an exaggerated wag of her thumb toward her sister, “dragged us down here today. She’s been volunteering as their bookkeeper, but they were short-handed on the delivery front. So here we are.”

“I love these people,” Yelena said. “The socialist workers, I mean. But I need this today like I need a wart.”

“My beloved sister has committed us to cook tonight at the Cambridge Adult Center,” Lynne said. “Unless she can somehow figure out how to be in two places at once . . . .”

“Give me five papers,” Jonah said, and handed Yelena a five dollar bill. “That should get you off the streets a bit sooner.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Lynne said, as Jonah made to go. But Yelena stopped him.

“You’re not gonna toss them in the trash, are you?” she asked him.

“Not at all,” Jonah said, a bit startled at the suggestion. “Where we come from, these are quite rare. I’m thinking I can raise quite a bit of hell with them where I teach.”

“You teach?” she asked.

“I do,” he said, fumbling in his wallet once again, this time for his card, which he gave her.

“If you ever get out our way,” Jonah said, “look us up.”

They were now late for their appointment and so, taking their leave, they headed down Brattle Street toward their destination.

The editor was waiting for them, having commandeered the only table with a view of the street. Jonah had told Travis that the Blue Parrot had a long and colorful history as one of the best places to find original music in the evenings and finely flavored coffee in the afternoon, the latter being a pleasure that, while Jonah and his editor might indulge in, Travis surely would not. They entered the smoky room and Jonah provided introductions. If the woman was surprised to find Jonah with a student in tow, she didn’t betray it.

Jonah had told Travis about Laura Sterling. She was the best editor he’d ever encountered, he said, and although they weren’t working together now, they always made a point to get together when he was in the Cambridge area.

She was apparently not someone given to small talk, though.

“So, what are you working on now?” she asked Jonah even before their waitress had turned away from the table with their order for drinks.

“I’m up to my neck in students and in between writing projects,” he told her. “Doubleday wants me to propose a volume for that New Testament series they’ve launched, but—”

“They’re calling it the Anchor Bible,” she said, cutting him off. “What volume do they want you for?”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said.

“You don’t want to do another commentary, do you?”

He smiled. “Not really, no.”

Their drinks arrived: a Coke for Travis and two steaming cups of coffee laced with whiskey—what did Jonah call the concoction? Irish coffee? That was a new one for Travis. Technically, Travis could drink, since the legal age for alcohol consumption was eighteen and he was a year past that benchmark. But he knew that Jonah wouldn’t want to be drinking with one of his students, so that was that. Besides, Travis wasn’t much of a drinker. Not like Jack, anyway. And Jack was two years younger than he was.

“If you could write anything you wanted to,” Laura asked Jonah, “what would it be?”

Jonah thought for a moment.

“If you could publish anything you wanted to,” he asked her, “what would THAT be?”

“Good question,” she said, and sipped her coffee. “I think . . . “ she paused for a moment as they watched the three mimes they had seen earlier pass below them on the street, tossing their juggling balls among themselves with precision, not dropping one of them.

“I think,” she continued deliberately, “I would like to see someone like you answer this question.”

She smoothed out the blue linen napkin in front of her.

“We have all sorts of books coming out commentaries on the books of the Bible,” she said. “People like Koester, Stendahl, and your fellow priest George MacRae at Harvard, and Meeks and Malherbe at Yale, are all filling out as best as anyone can the life of the first Christians. Hell, with the Nag Hammadi texts and now the Dead Sea Scrolls, this stuff is turning out to be a growth industry for religious publishing.”

She stopped as the waitress came to the table to check on them.

“What I would like, is to see what you can do with this single question,” Laura said.

She paused again, hesitating—as Travis figured it—because an editor’s job is to get the words just right.

“What one thing do you think the first followers of Jesus ‘got’ that we don’t get?”

“What did they get that we don’t?” Jonah repeated.

“Yes,” she said. “Is there one insight that you think first century Christians took away from the teachings of Jesus that we have somehow lost track of?”

They sat in silence for a moment as Jonah pondered the question.

“You’re not asking for the one thing that summarizes all his teachings are you?” he asked.

“Of course I know better than to ask such a question,” she said. “What I want is a book, not on the essence of biblical thought, but a book that will serve as a key, a key that will unlock what it is that most people—that we—are missing.”

“Why do you think something is missing?” Jonah asked her.

“Look around,” she said. “Look at our own church.”

Travis was surprised for some reason that Laura Sterling was a Catholic. She seemed, well, too independent a woman to abide by the rules of the Church. He had, he suspected, a lot to learn about these matters, women and church and all.

“We are obviously missing something,” Laura said. “What is it? Give us the key, Jonah.”

“You think people would want to read something like that?” he asked her.

“Oh, I know they would,” she said. “And hell, you know it, too.”

Travis was listening closely to this, and wondering how he would answer the question. Right, he thought. After one course in scripture.

Only now did he notice that there was a hearth at the other end of the room and that a wood fire flickered and warmed the pub.

“It’s an interesting question,” Jonah said. “Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”

But as things turned out, he never did.

[This ends the first, introductory section of the narrative, and it ends as well our sojourn in the 1970s. Up next: “Time Passes.”]