The Other Washington.(Review)

Mark GaUvreau Judge

Every few years, a politician or journalist publishes a novel or memoir that is declared to be a penetrating work about "the real Washington." This "real Washington" usually consists of capital-city cliches: power, money, scandal, narcissism, and rampaging egos. Whenever I get sick of this fare, I always reread Julian Mazor's Washington and Baltimore. Though out of print for many years, it is still the best book ever written about the real Washington: the place where people live in rowhouses, go to diners and jazz clubs, and couldn't identify Kay Graham in a lineup; the place where my grandfather, a baseball player for the Washington Senators, raised a family, including my late father, who worked as an editor for National Geographic and found himself on Capitol Hill maybe three times in his life.

Washington and Baltimore is an obscure collection of short stories by Mazor, a native Washingtonian who wrote fiction for The New Yorker in the 1960s and still lives in Washington today. Published in 1968 by Knopf, it is a subtle and moving collection of stories about baseball players, troubled kids, and race relations in a city with a black majority.

The finest entry here, called simply "Washington," tells the story of John Lionel, a white, 23-year-old salesman who has just been fired from his job in New York. On the train home to Washington, he eats a bad tuna sandwich, gets violently ill, and is forced to get off the bus in a Negro neighborhood. My guess is that the neighborhood is Shaw, an historically black part of town near Union Station. Here John meets an ex-boxer named Ringo, a store owner named Billy, a large, imposing man named Tracy, and a woman named Ruby who all nurse him back to health. I never forgot the scene where John, feeling better, gets his bus to head home:

"Look, if you ever sick again," Ringo said, "you come back and see us."

"Aw, shut up, Ringo," Ruby said. "He don't have to be sick to come back and see us. Right?" She put her arm around my shoulder as I shook hands with Ringo. "He talk like we is some kind of hospital or something," she said.

"Aw, Ruby, you take everything I say and twist it," Ringo said.