On August 25 Jackvony and Bagdikian drove to the house on Toledo Avenue. Jackvony went in alone, arranging to signal from the porch when Joe was ready. Bagdikian waited in the car for twenty-five minutes. A man in a large yellow convertible pulled up behind him, watched him suspiciously for fifteen minutes, then drove away. Bagdikian learned later that he was Joe’s brother Frank.
As soon as Jackvony entered Joe’s bedroom he was aware of the death smell. The white face on the pillow gave him one frightened appealing glance of recognition, the blue lips moved slightly, then Joe slipped into a coma. Jackvony stepped to the bed, tapped Joe’s knee, and called out his name, but there was no reply. He bent down, put his mouth to Joe’s ear, and shouted, “Sacco and Vanzetti!” There was no response. The secret still hovered inside Joe’s skull, but it was to remain there. Early next morning he died.
On a summer morning in South Braintree, just forty years after the holdup, I started off with Bob McLean of the Boston Globe to retrace the route of the 1920 getaway car. The day was heavy even at nine o’clock. Bob just managed to squeeze his amiable bulk into the driver’s seat of his ten-year-old Buick. I sat beside him as navigator, with map board, green and red pencils, and the topographic sheets of the U.S. Geological Survey—as I used to do with the survey maps in the Army in what we called tewts—tactical exercises without troops.
Suburban developments were sprouting up all round the Braintrees. The hard little core of industrial South Braintree had also seen changes. Opposite the station the mansarded Hampton House had been torn down and the space was now a parking lot. The Romanesque granite-and-sandstone station itself was boarded up and year-old signs in the windows of the empty waiting room announced the suspension of passenger service on the Old Colony Line. Rice & Hutchins’ brick building was still standing, as was the wooden Slater & Morrill factory, but both had been taken over by the Atlantic Abrasive Corporation, whatever that was. South Braintree’s shoe industry had long since disappeared. Where the Italians had been excavating on April 15, 1920, there stood a brick building, no longer a restaurant, occupied by a lamp firm and the Braintree Observer.
One afternoon in February I had dropped in at the Observer office to ask what Sacco-Vanzetti material they might have in their files. The woman at the desk did not know, but she went in back to the presses and returned with a man in his sixties wearing a printer’s apron. As soon as he heard the words Sacco and Vanzetti his face mottled. “Why do you people still come round writing sweet stuff about those two gangsters?” he shouted at me. “Why are you wasting your sympathy on them when you got none at all for that poor Mrs. Parmenter that lost her husband? They raised thousands of dollars for those two Eyetalians, and she got nothing. Afterward she had no money, she lost her house. No one ever gave her a thought. Why don’t you write about her? Why don’t you?” There was no arguing with him, but I was surprised, as I was to be on other visits, that the old emotions could still smolder beneath the small-town tranquillity and be brought suddenly to a flame by some casual word.
Almost every inhabitant of South Braintree over fifty seemed to have his own pet bit of gossip about the case. One story is that Mrs. Sacco was seen early on the morning of the murders at a South Braintree filling station. Another has it that Sacco and Vanzetti were observed wandering about town several days before April 15. The retired express agent tells of a local Italian who knew Sacco before the crime and saw him do the shooting, but was too scared to go to court to testify. Sacco is said to have confessed to one of his lawyers, and Jerry McAnamey is said just before his death, to have told a friend they were guilty. Amid the distortions of gossip there is the more coldly remembered fact that those who testified for the defense lost their jobs. Among others, Brenner and McCullum, who contradicted Pelser in court, were discharged soon afterward, as was Lewis Wade, who disappointed the prosecution by not identifying Sacco positively. All South Braintree still firmly believes that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.
“Criminal exercise without criminals,” McLean announced as we pulled away from the curb where Berardelli’s body had lain. Pearl Street still kept its underlying pattern even though the spindle-legged water tower had gone, along with the gate-tender and his shack. Cain’s livery stable had been replaced by the Pearl Street Ramblertorium, and Schrout’s Bakery was now Adel’s Pizza Parlor. But the outline was the same, the wooden two- and three-decker workers’ houses still kept their old gray ranks, the barber shop was still there, and Torrey’s Drugstore—duly modernized—still hugged the corner.
“Here’s where they threw out the tacks,” McLean said as we turned left into Washington Street. At the Plain Street railroad crossing we made the sharp right turn and went up the hill past the white wooden grotesqueries of the South Congregational Church, then dipped down, skirting the edge of Sunset Lake.
Joe-pye weed spread in mauve masses along the roadside. There were smaller white patches of boneset, and the first spatterings of goldenrod. Most of the elms we passed were dying of the Dutch elm disease, and even the leaves of the other trees looked frayed and weary. I sensed the pause of the season, like the turn of the tide—that short breathing space between summer and autumn. Somehow it seemed more apparent in this flat browning landscape. Before World War II such sandy outlying acres had been scarcely more than squatters’ land. Now they had become dear to the heart of the developer, with his flat-topped regular rows of pastel ranch houses. The Randolph Woods were flat as a punctured tire.