Soon
after a group of liberal Texas Democrats and I started the Texas Observer, perhaps in 1955, Maury Maverick, Jr., invited me to
have lunch with his father and him. We met in a restaurant at the base of at
what was then called the
Smith
Young
Tower
,
which still spikes the sky,
San Antonio
’s
Chrysler
Tower
. This was the only time I met the
Congressman, the leader of the Young Turks, the Mayor, the rebel Texas
Democrat, one of the genuine heroes of the New Deal who stood up to the
retreating Roosevelt, though to no avail except for the long future. I do not
remember anything special about the lunch, but I knew at the time it was the
highest compliment Maury Jr. could pay anyone.
These were the
days of McCarthyism, the later stages of the hysteria that had driven Maury’s
father out of the Mayor’s office because he believed in free speech even for
communists, and in the Texas legislature Maury Jr. carried forward the same
extended fight, now reaching its dread climax 50 years later, to keep the
country free even though the Soviet-led communists were and theocratic
Christians and some few Islamic terrorists now are using their freedom here to
try to end it. The Texas legislature, led, back then on this, by an obnoxious,
bell-headed San Antonian named Marshall Bell, was outlawing the Communist Party
in Texas (I think on pain of death, I don ‘t remember exactly). In the Texas
House, to which he had been elected, young Maury fought a lonely fight against
the law from the front microphone, and in many other acts of courage he singled
himself out as the quivering target for the paintbrushes and spears of the
superpatriots of that era.
One night, in the
apartment of Senator Joe Russell near the State Capitol, where a few of us
assembled for whiskey and rueminations (permit me the spelling) after
particularly lamentable sessions of the state’s absurd lawmakers--or perhaps it
was as Maury and I were elbow to elbow taking a leak in the men’s room behind
the House chamber--Maury told me that the night before he had had a nightmare.
He was on his back, and Marshall Bell had torn open his shirt and branded into
his chest the word, “Communist.” He had
started up sitting, stark terrified, pouring sweat, the word reverberating.
That was Maury Jr., unafraid, but haunted.
Haunted, too, by being the son of his great father. This was
a burden, somehow awful in private ways, that he bore along almost visibly
curled into his humped-over slouch and his shuffling walk. He didn’t say much
about it, but in the Maverick homestead’s railroad car on the far North Side,
and later in Maury’s small stone home half a block from a long urban park that
runs off Broadway, his father, his father’s growls, and his father’s books and
achievements were as present as the very day and night. Maury Jr. was the son
of a famous hero and could not be other. I never heard his father speak in
public, but the son’s oratory, usually beginning quietly and wryly, inevitably
ratcheted forward and cascaded and charged back up through outcries of humane
fury and defiant patriotism that had always originated, it seemed to me, in
wells of pain.
One
naturally supposed that young Maury would advance to the Texas Senate and
Congress or statewide office, but he gradually became downcast about his
political future as
San Antonio
became a redoubt of Mexican-American electoral strength. He would mutter quite
a lot about this, not quite complaining, but not liking it, either. Perhaps, in
his gradual withdrawal from his own visions of higher office, there was some
recoil, too, from becoming his father’s notoriety-cloned reappearance in the
world. In 1961 he did run for the U.S.
Senate, but in the same Democratic primary when State Senator Henry B. Gonzalez
ran for the same Senate seat. Inevitably they split the liberal vote, and
John
Tower
began his compassion-ravaging career.
Many’s
the time, many’s the time Maury told me what his father said to him on his
deathbed. I doubt young Maury had a single real friend who hadn’t heard this at
least two or three times. One must imagine Maury the youngster, cast down, his famous Dad prone and dying, giving him his final blessing and
advice. There was something about the boy not having turned out so bad. But the
real point was the old lion told his son something like, “If you go into
politics, Maury, whatever you do, don ‘t do it for
gratitude.”
Bombastic,
saturnine, characteristically fretful and worried, Maury had a strong, but
mocking sense of humor. He aged prematurely and after some point in his 50s
complained frequently about his health. When I was in
San Antonio
I'd go out there to see him and
his wife the artist Julia Orynski. Sometimes,
when I got there in time for breakfast tacos somewhere on Broadway, he and I
and his hounds of the day would take his favored walk around the
Brackenridge
Park
golf course. During one of these he
really did, I took it for me, hug the giant tree where
he practiced, notoriously, his chosen role of treehugger.
Maury
played at least three pivotal roles in my personal life, he was as loyal and as
active a friend as a person can be. I played one in his that I know of. I was
living in
Alamo
Heights
then, on
Brightwood Street
, near my Mother, in the
precinct which, in quixotic act of will, although only with the help of my
found allies, I carried for Edward Kennedy for President in 1960. Somewhere
along in that period in my kitchen I heard on my answering machine this
message, more or less, from Maury: “Ronnie,
Charlie Kilpatrick has offered me a weekly column, but I figured you’d say I
had sold out, so I told him no.”
Kilpatrick
was the editor of the daily, the San
Antonio Express. At once I got Maury back on the phone and said to him,
more or less, “Goddam your eyes, you sorry son of a bitch, here you are, in the
great city you love, yearning to lead its people in the ways and crusades you
want them to go in, and you turn down the chance to be heard across the whole
damn city every week--to hold forth to your heart’s content--on what people here
should think and do. You goddam idiot, call him back and take it.”
He did, and as he composed his
columns, his columns composed the rest of his life. I heard that they tested
again and again as the most read feature, or one of the two or three most read
features, in the paper. He wrote them laboriously in his littered garage office
out back of his house, on an old typewriter, and often carried them down to the
paper himself on deadline. He always stood for compassion and social justice
through government action, for liberals and dissenters, for progressives and
the Democrats, for peace and the great idealists of our times; often enough, he
wrote as though he was orating.
Decades before
Jimmy Carter in 2007, Maury took on the Jewish lobby--AIPAC--the undue
influence of the American Jewish community in the policies of the Democratic
Party. Sometimes he did this so incautiously that even some of his Jewish
friends who loved him, such as Bernard Rapoport up in Waco, his law partner the
late Herschel Bernard, and his close friend Bernard Lifshutz, also now gone,
bridled, shaking their heads and gritjawing, “That God-damn Maury.” Some people who did not know him branded him
anti-Semitic, at least once in a published letter to the editor. That was my
first awareness of the vile misuse of that term with malice aforethought. The
truculence of the father lived on in the son. So did the melancholy, trembling
courage.
This
does not do justice to my friend. That will take much longer, if nature
permits. I went to his funeral, a festivity spreading vastly and freely across
the cemetery grounds, and was quite alone there, until, after the music was
over and most of the crowd had left, his sister Terrelita, and I, lofted one
after the other two pebbles onto his casket in the grave. I can still hear them
hit and bounce along a little. I miss his growl, I miss his courage, I miss his
uncertainty, I miss his complaints of his blindness
and hardness of hearing. I miss his father’s son.
—
Cambridge
,
Massachusetts
|