He beckoned to me apologetically and then, when the other had left, pointed to a chair. “I’m the Billerica antiquary,” he said. “The local historians all call on me with their problems. Seventy-five years old I am. That gives me a life expectancy of five years—and it would take fifty for me to do all the things I have to do. You came here to ask me about Sacco and Vanzetti. What do you want to know?”
Without waiting for my answer he went on. “I don’t think the truth will ever be known. As to whether they did it or not, I don’t know and I’ve made a point of not trying to know. I tell you this, though. They weren’t criminal types. For a while I think I saw them as much as anyone. Sacco had a very winning way about him. Of course he was a more settled type, with a wife and family. Vanzetti reminded me of a trade-union leader. That rigid mentality. He once said to me that where he came from in Italy there was a castle above the town and one family living in it had been oppressing the ordinary people in the valley for eight hundred years. I told him that it wasn’t so in America, that a family scarcely lasted three generations here. He’d read a little, but he’d not digested it too well—an unstable, wandering type, paranoid at times. When I saw him once over in the Charlestown Prison he said to me, ‘I don’t deny the right of the state to execute a man, but they have no right to castrate me and make me a laughingstock.’”
The doctor had known personally almost everyone connected with the case on both sides. Katzmann was to him lazy and incompetent, though he thought better of his assistant, Harold Williams. Judge Thayer he gave credit for honest intentions, but found him irascible, a snob, and obsessed with the idea that the Communists were just about to take over the United States. Governor Fuller was merely a successful automobile salesman. Thompson he respected, but felt that he had gone into the case merely for the fee.
“I thought,” I said, making another stab at it, “that seeing Sacco and Vanzetti so closely, you might have formed some opinion as to their guilt or innocence.”
“I feel,” he said, “as William James did about psychic phenomena. I just do not know.”
When I left, he walked out with me through his back garden blooming with zinnias. “If you are interested,” he said finally, “I’ll try to find my files on Sacco and Vanzetti for you. There may be something there. I’ve had so many cases since that I can’t remember the details. But drop in when you’re by this way again.”
Three weeks later he was dead.
By chance I discovered that Beltrando Brini was living in Wollaston, a twenty-minute drive from my home in Wellesley. When a boy of thirteen, Brini had testified at Vanzetti’s first trial that the two of them had been delivering eels in Plymouth the day before Christmas, 1919—the day Vanzetti was to be found guilty of attempting a holdup in Bridgewater. As he grew up, Brini had broken away from the Italian community. He had graduated from Boston University and was now an elementary school principal. Community affairs seemed to take up most of his spare time. Two weeks passed before he could find a free evening to see me. I found his house easily enough, a decent inconspicuous house in a decent inconspicuous street. He was a small man in his fifties. Like many of the second generation he still looked Italian, but to a diminished degree. He showed me into his living room. His wife was standing near the fireplace, a thin fair-haired woman, not Latin at all. After he had introduced me to her we sat down, taking each other’s measure while she went into the kitchen to make coffee.
“You know,” he said finally, “I could have been a musician. I really could at one time have gotten into the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But I thought it was safer to be a teacher. That’s why I never seem to be home nights—always something they want a school principal to be doing, somewhere they want him to be.” He looked at me sharply. “You want to know about Vanzetti. He lived with us a long time. He paid more attention to me than my parents did. He was kind to all children. I remember one Halloween we all had jack-o’-lanterns. The others had theirs lighted but mine didn’t have a candle in it. Vanzetti came along and asked me why I didn’t get a candle. I said I hadn’t any money. He asked me how much candles cost and I said two cents, so he fished in his pocket and gave them to me. When I got to the hardware store I found he’d given me a cent and a dime. So I got my candle and I brought him back the nine cents. I’d never had that much money in my pocket before, but I remember how proud of myself I was that I brought that nine cents back to him.