CM Spring 2013

CM Commonwealth School Magazine Spring 2013

For the Defenseless Mark Denbeaux ’61 searches for justice at Guantånamo

Also in this issue: The First R Unmixing Belayed Reaction

WALTER CRUMP

Why I Made It

“A series of old and forgotten documents cannot be neatly substituted for a life.”

“excavation”

By Zoe Wennerholm ’15

T

his piece began when I was browsing in an antique shop in Salem, MA. On a shelf next to some old books I found a plastic bag labeled only “Ephemera.” At the time, I was having trouble choosing a subject for my first artist’s book; this curious assortment of old documents seemed to lend itself to a project.

In the bag I found a book slightly smaller than the one I created, bound in crumbling leather and containing a grocery account along with a few pages in which the owner noted down sums and the like. There was also a folded exam book from a high-school exam, a program for a high-school graduation, a piece of original sheet music, and other relics from one man living in 1882 in New York. I had no idea who he was, and gleaned any information I could out of these artifacts alone. I spent a long time inspecting the contents before deciding how to use them. I hoped to display them in a way as to create a window to one stage in this person’s life, portrayed by these carefully chosen and preserved documents.

I decided to mimic the form of the grocery book in my own book: I used binder’s board and cloth to create the shell and lined the inside with patterned paper, and made an accordion-like attachment tied with braided string. Opening the book, two engravings of buildings I took from the original grocery book are inlaid on either side. Inside the accordion section are four envelopes, each with different artifacts: for example, one with the student’s schoolrelated documents. By organizing the book so neatly, I was hoping to portray the impossibility of this action in itself.

In fact, while making the book, I learned that a series of old and forgotten documents cannot be neatly substituted for a life.

“Excavation” received a Silver Key in the 2013 Boston Globe Scholastic Art Awards.

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FROM TH E ED I TO R

In my school days at Commonwealth, we had classes on Patriots Day. We even had to carry little slips of paper from the school affirming the fact so the T would let us use our student passes. It was a semisanctioned ritual to skip 7th period in order to watch runners cross the finish line. By the time I came back to work at Commonwealth in 2008, Patriots Day had become a day off. I understood why: practically speaking it was increasingly difficult to navigate the crowds in Copley Square and gain access to T stops and commuter rail stations.

Nevertheless, I scoffed a bit at this evidence of Commonwealth’s lost iconoclasm.

The decision to close the school on Marathon day now seems evidence of great wisdom. I quake when I imagine how many students could have found themselves in range of the bombs on Boylston Street.

And I shed selfish tears that none of our students, teachers, or staff, in fact no one I know, was hurt. At the school, three students and a teacher holding a rehearsal had to stay until officials told them it was safe to go home. One of our students participated in the race, and I spent an anxious hour or so before learning she was unharmed. She ran as a fundraiser for Oxfam in memory of a classmate who died a year ago. Just days before the marathon she announced at recess that she had raised more than $1,000, and we reacted with thunderous applause (she went on to more than double that sum). To have her selfless work overtaken by thoughtless violence is abhorrent.

As I looked at images of the bombings’ aftermath, I found my eyes moving to the background, finding familiar storefronts and buildings.

Placing these horrifying scenes in a familiar physical context somehow made them both more and less believable. This happened there. I’ve been there. I will need to go there again. What will it be like?

I have no doubt that in time—and fairly soon, I hope—we will ease back into our lives. For students, teachers, and staff, Commonwealth will play an important role in that process, as a home base, a place where we will gather with the time and space to think and talk about what happened. Working through the impact of that dreadful day will draw on our love of and support for these young people. We also will keep on challenging them to become adults who work to improve the world, thus becoming part of the ultimate response to acts of hatred and violence.

Tristan Davies ’83 Director of Communications, Editor tdavies@commschool.org

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Issue 4 Spring 2013 Headmaster William D. Wharton Editor Tristan Davies ’83 tdavies@commschool.org (617) 266-7525 ext. 290 Design Jeanne Abboud Associate Editor Rebecca Folkman Class Notes Editor Grayson Palmer Contributing Writers Emily Bullitt ’03 Mary P. Chatfield Ethan Forman ’84 Feyga Saksonov ’14 Zoe Wennerholm ’15 David McKay Wilson Special Thanks Catherine Brewster Jaquelin Harris www.commschool.org/cm www.facebook.com/commschoolalums CM is published twice a year by Commonwealth School, 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02116, and distributed without charge to alumni/ae, current and former parents, and other members of the Commonwealth community. Opinions expressed in CM are those of the authors and subjects, and do not necessarily represent the views of the School or its faculty and students.

We welcome your comments and news at commonwealth@commschool.org. Letters may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar.

Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.

CM Commonwealth School Magazine

Contents

Spring 2013

Why I Made It

1

“Excavation,” by Zoe Wennerholm ’15

News

7

25

4

Unmixing Commonwealth Goes to China An All-Star!

Awards and Honors

Overheard: The Best of Eric Davis

6

Words and art from the halls and classrooms of Commonwealth

Ages of Wisdom

20

7

A tribute to Eric Davis as he retires.

For the Defenseless

10

Black Panthers, Guantánamo detainees, the Mayflower Madam.

Underdogs all, and Mark Denbeaux ’61 has been on their side.

“The Red Balloon”

19

A short story by Feyga Saksonov ’14

History of a Friendship: Belayed Reaction

36

20

Friendship, newly discovered, becomes love.

The First R

25

Janique Parrott ’04 seeks balance in a D.C. classroom.

The Alumni/ae Association

26

News and events for alumni/ae Then and Now: The Kitchen

Class Notes

27

Alumni/ae Perspective: A Long Ride

36

Ethan Forman ’84 reflects on biking to Hancock—and beyond.

Cover: Mark Denbeaux ’61, an attorney and Seton Hall law professor, has been on the leading edge of civil rights struggles since the ’60s. Today he is best known for his fierce advocacy on behalf of detainees at the U.S. Navy’s Guantánamo detention camp, where he was photographed during a visit earlier this year. Photo: SSgt. Michael E. Davis Jr. / U.S. Army, for CM.

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News Ian Polakiewicz ’15

commonwea lth

Unmixing

R

achel Herrup ’13 was named as a semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search Competition. The honor came for her work in the lab of renowned Harvard chemist George Whitesides. This is the third year in a row that a female Commonwealth student has been so recognized, and no other Massachusetts school has had an Intel semifinalist in each of the last three years.

During her one-week independent project in January 2012 and then for six weeks during the summer, Rachel teamed with post-doctoral fellow Olga Taran, working to develop a device that can detect toxins or impurities in very small amounts of fluid. Using laminar flow, the device allows for controlled mixing of a sample droplet with reactants that change color to indicate the presence of contaminants. The sample and reactants are then unmixed so the test can be assessed.

Rachel’s work was part of the lab’s efforts to develop portable, low-cost diagnostic testing kits. “Such applications could bring important changes to small villages in parts of Africa and Asia, places left out of the development of sophisticated technologies,” Rachel says. “Being environmentally safe and reliable to use, devices like these can empower people to protect their own health and their communities.’”

Arthur Mateos ’15 on a stone lion along the Sacred Way at the Ming Tombs in Beijing.

Tristan Davies ’83

Commonwealth goes to China

Rachel Herrup ’13, Commonwealth’s third Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist in the last three years.

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I

n March, Mandarin teacher Stacy Tan, history teacher Barbara Grant, and French teacher Bob Vollrath accompanied nine students to Beijing and Shanghai. The 15-day trip was the school’s first-ever to China.

The tightly organized agenda enabled students to get a good look at numerous aspects of Chinese culture.

Traditional sights such as the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and Olympic Park were on the itinerary, of course, as was some exceptional hospitality. Students made new friends during a visit to a Beijing high school. The students’ guide on a one-day tour through the city of Wuxi had “experienced the Cultural Revolution as a college student who was sent to the countryside for reeducation,” said Barbara. “He told us his story, which was deeply moving.”

Parents of three different Commonwealth students treated the group to some spectacular meals: a gourmet banquet in Beijing; dinner in a rotating restaurant on the 45th floor of a Shanghai skyscraper; and another that ended with an extraordinary performance by acrobats.

“I had been to most of places we visited more than once, and even lived in one of the cities for four years,” said Stacy.

“But the questions and observations I heard from our group made me see things from a new perspective. Their curiosity, energy, and sense of humor made this a wonderful trip.”

Academic Honors to Many

F

orty-nine current and recently graduated students were recognized by the Advanced Placement (AP) Scholars program, including five honored as both AP National Scholars and Scholars with Distinction: Gabriel Alvarez ’12, now at Stanford University Asa Goodwillie ’12, now at Amherst College Keller Scholl ’13, who plans to attend Balliol College, Oxford Yonadav Shavit ’12, now at MIT Eloise Shaw ’12, now at Harvard University

Thespian Chops

A

t the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival, junior Colin McIsaac and sophomore Rachel Tils won the Scene Partner category with an excerpt from Pete Malicki’s The Goon. The scene plays out after Colin’s character has accidentally killed a superhero; he and Rachel’s­­ character have an animated discussion about what to do next.

Colin also won Commonwealth’s annual Shakespeare contest with a monologue he performed from King Lear. He moved on to the state semi-finals, where he added a recitation of Sonnet 143. From that competition, he was one of ten students chosen for the Massachusetts finals of the EnglishSpeaking Union 2013 Shakespeare Competition. Students at that level, in addition to their prepared lines, have just ten minutes to prepare a wholly new text.

Ten Commonwealth seniors were named National Merit Scholarship finalists: Gabriel Antonucci of Watertown Rachel Hahn of Marshfield Ruth Hanna of Brighton (daughter of Steven Hanna ’82) Benjamin Kim of Newton Highlands Amanda Lee of Watertown Carin Papendorp of Somerville Daniel Rubin of Waban Keller Scholl of Needham Meghan Smith of Marblehead Curtis Stone of Boston Over the last five years, 21% of Commonwealth seniors have been chosen as National Merit finalists; 67% of seniors overall have been recognized as National Merit finalists, semifinalists, or commended students.

KATHLEEN DOOHER

Print by Allyson Edwards ’14

National Awards

T

wo Commonwealth students won Silver Keys in this year’s national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Melanie Abrams ’13 won in the flash fiction category for her story, “What She Learned,” and a bottle by Francesco Drake ’15 took a ceramics and glass prize. Melanie and Francesco were two of the 17 students who won 18 Awards in the regional 2013 Boston Globe Scholastic Arts Contest, the area’s leading competition for high-school artists, where four students won Gold Keys, six students earned Silver Keys, and seven received eight Honorable Mentions. In the companion Scholastic Writing Awards competition, five students won nine awards.

An All-Star!

Dan Rubin ’13 may be the first Commonwealth student ever chosen as a Boston Globe All-Scholastic All-Star. A crosscountry runner, Dan was undefeated in six races this season, including the Massachusetts Bay Independent League championship meet; he was chosen as the league MVP.

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Overheard

The Best of Eric Davis With extra-special thanks to the Quote of the Week contest

“Language is a perpetual process of poison and corruption.”

“We’re all little infinitives, are we not?

And we get conjugated along the sentence of life.”

“Bad things happen to people who are too neat.”

“You can’t sit next to him in class and not be completely distracted by his eyebrows.”

“A metaphor is not a jellybean.”

“For now, I’ve written his title as ‘omniscient mentor to the masses.’”

“What do I care for puny-ass things such as bells when we are discussing something as grand and all-encompassing as the great wilderness of Missouri?”

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Ages of

Wisdom A Tribute to Eric Davis

Eric Davis joined the English faculty in the fall of 1972, a mere three years after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard, and fresh from a stint at Windham College in Putnam, VT. It was “a good decade to start teaching at Commonwealth,” he wrote many years later. “In the classrooms, very little was taken for granted…analysis was a subversive activity. Sexy!”

Jean Segaloff

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—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire”

As Eric concludes his tenure at Commonwealth, we invited the members of our community to send us their stories and memories of this legendary Commonwealth presence. Many responded. We asked Polly Chatfield, Eric’s dear friend and his colleague for so many years, to undertake the daunting task of selecting and knitting together some of these recollections. We thank everyone who wrote so lovingly about this great teacher, advisor, and friend. All the letters we have received will be collected and presented to Eric.

W

hy, when pondering about how to write something worthy of the wonder that is Eric Davis, did I first think of The Fatal Gazogene? Perhaps because that little one-act play by George Bernard Shaw, performed at Hancock in the long ago, and featuring Eric among the performers, embodies the spirit of joy in the ridiculous that has always filled his classroom. The preliminary stage directions for the play describe the furniture and props, adding that “a certain air of theatricality is produced by the fact that though the room is rectangular it has only three walls.” Just that sort of whimsical fun is what generations of Eric’s students and colleagues remember with delight.

They remember his profound kindness, his extraordinary empathy for the anxieties of adolescence and (as former teacher Richard Robinson put it) his understanding of “the disturbing energies of youth.” Students spanning the generations write of his “quiet, patient, deliberate inquisitiveness” (Emily Borman ’84), “the way his patient and thoughtful presence made me feel so safe” (Emma Sunog ’12), how “he always seemed genuinely interested in us” (Hao-Li Loh ’80). “Mr. Davis set an example of how to care about teenagers,” says Tom Brudney ’75. Amy Young ’76 echoes, “His kind, non-judgmental acceptance taught…deeper lessons than mere literary criticism.”

But most of all, even decades after their teenage years, students remember the twinkle in the bright blue eyes under those storybookowl eyebrows, as Eric persuaded them that reading could be deeply delicious, lovely, hilarious, and profoundly important all at the same time. Every encounter with this special man could be a source of learning and joy.

A meticulous teacher, he would rarely yield in his standards, but he might bend in surprising directions, as Elizabeth Swan ’78 recalled. “I had a meeting with Mr. Davis to discuss a writing assignment on the Joyce story ‘Araby.’ Mr. Davis had great things to say about my paper and told me he’d shown it to other classmates as an example of keen insight or good writing—I can’t recall which; I just remember that he had underlined parts of the paper multiple times in different colored pens. Feeling a surge of pride and basking in the glow of my favorite teacher’s approval, I asked him why my grade was only a B+. He looked down at my paper, took a beat, 8 CM

and then outlined my B+, gave it wings and a flourish and asked, ‘There, how’s that?’”

So many students feel that his teaching shaped their lives as readers—“Half a lifetime ago I was the beneficiary of the loveliest teaching one could hope for, meeting in a tutorial with Mr. Davis a couple of times a week to work our way through Twelfth Night,” muses Michael Train ’89—and even more as human beings. “I carry Eric Davis around with me every day,” says David Hershey-Webb ’75. “He is part of who I am, because he was one of the people who taught me how to read and how to care about literature.” And from Julian Lampert ’94, “Mr. Davis’ exquisite tact, sensitivity, and refinement…offered me words of wisdom and guidance…and helped me focus into what my own voice was telling me.”

Michael Sailsman ’06 wrote: “Even after I was no longer one of his students…we planned a weekly lunch which essentially served as a therapy session for me. During those 45 minutes each week I was able to divulge all my fears, my hopes, and what now seem like trivial concerns. Those are my most vivid memories of Commonwealth… Mr. Davis and me, sitting in his classroom eating Darryl’s chili, discussing whatever happened to be on my mind that day.”

“In the months I have left at school I’m going to tell lots of lies,” says the man himself, springing the familiar whimsy. “It surprises people. They don’t quite know what to think—Who is this man, really?” He continues, “I need people to tease; I love

“Eric is Commonwealth.”

—Melissa Glenn Haber ’87

Mary P. Chatfield

“WHAT I DO IS ME: FOR THAT I CAME.”

At Hancock, c.1983.

“I want to take the road less travelled by for a bit. I love it when you have time to get your talons into something so it really possesses you.”

KATHLEEN DOOHER

an audience.” And what will he do when, come June, he no longer has that audience? “I want to have real time to write, and, to quote Charles Merrill’s Amen, ‘If not now when?’ I want to take the road less travelled by for a bit. I love it when you have time to get your talons into something so that it really possesses you.”

Eric insists this article contain some “bad things.” What bad things? There is an episode Ariel Stulberg ’01 remembers fondly.

“After asking me to stop chatting to a friend in class, first ironically, then politely, Mr. Davis finally picked up my backpack and dropped it on me with an over-the-top look of exasperation.” Or, somewhat ruefully, Eric himself recalls the day when, surveying his class, he remarked that one of his students appeared puzzled. “This topic seems like it might be going over your head,” he said, to which the student nodded in agreement. Eric then went on, “Well, if you stand up, maybe it will hit you in the face.” Members of that class still remember the incident, including Elisabeth Swan, who wrote, “What struck me was both Mr. Davis’ obvious merriment at the joke and his amazing ability to convey warmth and understanding to the student involved.”

Having Eric as one’s teacher or advisor or colleague was to let oneself in for surprises: gifts of fun, gifts of insight. As Anne (Morgan) Spalter ’82 remembers, “It was midterm exams in freshman English. We settled in with our blue composition books and there were only the sounds of writing and the hissing of the radiator. After answering a pair of challenging but not unexpected questions, I read, to my great surprise, essay question three: ‘Write about the Conquest of Peru.’ I vaguely knew there was a big book with this name but it certainly was not one we had read in class.

I paused, stunned. But then I gathered my creativity and wrote a ‘report’ on the book, involving much craziness. I think the radiator appeared as a character.” What a wonderfully wise way to defuse the anxieties of students’ first encounter with three-hour exams!

Or this from Sarah Stearns ’10: “In my freshman-year English class we were reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. In an early chapter one character stands on a hill and leads the others in a rousing battle cry of some kind. During our discussion of this chapter one student mused over the awesome power of that scene. ‘Would you like to try it?’ Mr. Davis asked him. We were all confused. ‘Let’s try it. Please lead us,’ Mr. Davis insisted. The student faltered but Mr. Davis was persistent. After another halfhearted go, Mr. Davis suggested that the student might need a spear to lead the rest of the class in a proper battle cry. There was always a mysterious eight-foot-tall wooden spear in his classroom—maybe it’s still there—and that was the only time we ever got permission to touch it. The leader stands above his tribesmen, Mr. Davis pointed out. So, spear in hand, this kid clambered onto the table and led us all in a cheer of ‘Umuofia Kwenu!’ until students from nearby classrooms were sent to tell us to keep it down.”

Colleagues most often mention Eric’s remarkably perceptive insights. Larry Geffin ’69 speaks for many: “In the long grading meetings, this wise, kind, and very funny man could always be counted on to steer the conversation in helpful ways. Eloquently and with compassion, he would launch into a thoughtful and unsentimental account of the tiny progresses, efforts, and rising aspirations of the student under discussion, things that apparently others of us had dismissed, or missed altogether. He reminded us that being an immature sixteen-year-old is not a sin; it’s a condition.”

It is no wonder that his former students love him and that so many took the time to craft loving reminiscences. “Eric is Commonwealth,” says Melissa Glenn Haber ’87, “its inventiveness,

its zest and good humor, its deep sensitivity, its orneriness, its conviction.” He is what any good teacher aspires to be. As Ivan Kreilkamp ’86 put it: “He didn’t simply teach methods or techniques of interpretation, but modeled a way of being an intellectual, an interpreter, a writer, and a thinker.”

Dear Eric, all of us who have felt the grace of your wisdom and mischievous wit will echo the words of Amir Soltani ’84: “Thank you…for being yourself…for the gift of your presence—it is deep enough to fill all kinds of absence and gentle enough to undo all kinds of pretense. May we all learn to live out of joy, out of love, and out of wonder.”

With love, Polly CM 9

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For the Defenseless

By David McKay Wilson

F

rom the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to the isolation cells at Guantánamo Bay, Mark Denbeaux ’61 has thrown himself into his generation’s defining civil rights controversies.

SSgt. Michael E. Davis Jr. / U.S. Army, for CM

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SSgt. Michael E. Davis Jr. / U.S. Army, for CM

Mark Denbeaux stands near a sign for Camp Justice, the area of the Guantánamo base that includes the high-security courtroom.

“

I

’m an activist who believes in bearing witness—in making a statement about where I stand on issues,” says Mark, who lives with his wife, Marcia, in Woodcliff Lake, NJ. “I’m aggressive, confrontational, and competitive. I take risks.

And drama attracts me.”

As a 22-year-old college student, Mark marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and 3,000 others along Alabama’s Highway 80 to protest the Jim Crow laws that deprived African Americans of the right to vote. Today, as a noted attorney, he travels to the U.S. Navy compound at Guantánamo Bay to meet with his clients: three detainees picked up in the “war on terror,” who had found themselves consigned to indefinite detention with neither charges filed against them nor access to a tribunal that could rule on the legality of their incarceration.

Denbeaux’s activism—be it in a courtroom or before a Guantánamo military tribunal—has developed over a lifetime on the cutting edge of social movements, the criminal justice system, and legal scholarship. Denbeaux is a fierce advocate for his clients, a motley lot that has included street criminals in the Bronx, Black Panthers, the escort-service entrepreneur known as the Mayflower Madam, performance artist Susan Kleckner, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and now Abu Zubeydeh, the “black site survivor” at Guantánamo who has yet to be charged after 11 years in captivity.

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unlocking secrets

“

I

’m utterly convinced that life is all about line drawing, and risk taking,” says Mark one January morning in his office at Seton Hall Law School, where he is a professor of law.

Mark has drawn his own lines—often beyond the borders of societal convention. That unconventionality has served him well over the more than half-century since he left 151 Commonwealth Ave. “They say you are supposed to be nice to get along,” he says.

“But that’s not clear, and I haven’t seen any data to prove it. I seem to do better if people think I’m formidable and am going to cause them a problem. People are more interested in avoiding problems than rewarding those who are nice.”

Early on, attorneys who were interested in representing detainees faced a wall of non-cooperation from the authorities. The first major fissure came in 2004 when, after two years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lawyers could challenge the incarcerations through the process known as habeas corpus, and that they had a right to meet with their clients to do so.

The barriers did not fall easily, however. Mark’s son, Josh, also an attorney, recalls when the Denbeauxs arrived at the base in 2006 after a long flight in a small propeller plane from Fort Lauderdale, only to be informed by a Navy commander that their clients had no desire to speak with them.

Echoes of Hancock

W

hile Mark was a suburban kid who grew to love the urban life, Commonwealth’s trips to the Merrill farm in Hancock, NH, also infused him with a love for weekends in the countryside. In the late 1960s, he and Marcia purchased some land in the countryside near North Petersberg, NY, by the Vermont border. Denbeaux, who has a knack for carpentry, built a modest three-bedroom home. For decades now, on Memorial Day weekend scores of friends and family, as many as a hundred, have descended on this rural retreat with coolers filled with food and drink for the annual “Katimbeaux” celebration, named for the three families that began the tradition. They swim in nearby streams, play volleyball, and sit around the poker table playing Texas Hold ’em into the wee hours. They wax nostalgic about the good old days, have water-balloon fights, and see how big a bonfire they can make.

The gathering often brings together his entire family: Marcia; Josh, now 44; a second son, Gregory, 41, an associate professor of nanotechnology at the University of Albany; daughter Abigail Kahl, an attorney; and their six grandchildren.

“It rekindles that happy Hancock feeling,” says a nostalgic Denbeaux.

Courtesy Mark Denbeaux ’61

“My Dad had an instant aversion to the guy, who was clearly into abusing whatever limited power he might have,” says Josh.

“We were being lied to and bullied. My dad and I got into a screaming match with the guy for what seemed like three hours.

They finally produced our clients.”

Being a “formidable” practitioner of jurisprudence, however, takes more than bluster. It takes a keen legal mind, a determination to find what can be proven true, and the wherewithal, in the cases of Guantánamo detainees, to sift through more than 250,000 pages of documents to make one’s point. Spurred by questions raised as he worked with his first clients, Mark organized the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law in 2005—he is still the director—to investigate the government’s detention and treatment of people labeled as terrorists and enemy combatants. Work by faculty and student fellows in the center has not only fueled the legal drama unfolding in Cuba but also helped move it onto firmer, fairer legal ground.

When the Guantánamo detention facility was opened in 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed it would house “the worst of the worst” of those locked up during the war on terror. Mark and his students took a look at the veracity of statements like these. Over the course of 18 months, the team created a database for each detainee. Poring over documents collected from dozens of attorneys, they found that lawyers representing different prisoners had sometimes received the same documents redacted in different ways. This discovery helped the researchers piece together detainees’ stories.

Their 2006 report—a blockbuster quoted in media and government circles around the world—revealed that of the 517 detainees, more than 60 percent of them had no ties to terrorist organizations. This disparity seemed to relate to how the suspects had been acquired: just 8 percent of them had been captured

by U.S. and allied forces, whereas 86 percent had been sold to the U.S. through a lucrative bounty system, by either Afghan or Pakistani warlords and tribal chieftains, during the height of military operations in 2001. Denbeaux and his students found there was not much hard evidence that the captives sold to the Americans were actually Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters.

“We were fighting in the battlefield of information,” says Josh. “The report was a paradigm shifter. We were able to demonstrate that the government had little data regarding many of the prisoners, and there weren’t any legitimate reasons to have them there.”

Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says Denbeaux’s report changed the debate from arguments over whether detainees had a right to a court hearing and the right not to be tortured to whether the US government had captured the right guys.

“It was a dramatic game-changer for the narrative at Guantánamo,” Azmy says. “The lawyers who had been there since 2004 knew the evidence was garbage, but it was just anecdotal. Mark’s study systematized the incompetence and injustice in a clinical and irrefutable form, and the government never had a response to it, because it was true.”

Within seven months after the report was issued, the Bush administration had closed the CIA’s secret detention facilities, also known as “black sites,” in Thailand and Eastern Europe and sent to Guantánamo 14 men they said were the real bad guys.

Since then, more than 600 detainees have been released; 165 are still incarcerated at Camp Justice.

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“People are more interested in avoiding problems than rewarding those who are nice.”

sister, Andrea Moran ’65, recently unearthed one of her brother’s Commonwealth report cards, with a poetic note from English teacher John Hughes: “Hope sprang eternal in all our breasts, but Mark failed to excel in any tests.”

Though his grades were mediocre, Denbeaux was intellectually curious and found encouragement from Commonwealth’s faculty and founder to develop his strong opinions on a broad range of topics.

“Commonwealth reinforced in me a considerable self-confidence,” he recalls. “We were full of intellectual pretention and affectation.

My teachers somehow appreciated me for my talents, even though I couldn’t transform them into any recognizable achievement.”

From “I Have a Dream” to Selma

D Getting to Gitmo

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here did this agitating academic come from, and what shaped his rather confrontational view of life?

Mark grew up in Wellesley; his father, Fred, a professor of biblical history at Wellesley College and former World War II combat chaplain, had become acquainted with Commonwealth founder Charles Merrill. In the late ’50s, the elder Denbeaux found himself looking for a private school for his son, who was in a bit of trouble; the administration at Wellesley High disapproved of Mark’s performance in a school play—his character, an injured war veteran, uttered several unscripted lines which drew laughs but lacked the proper patriotic spirit.

Commonwealth was more his style, and Mark became one of 14 students in Commonwealth’s first graduating class. Sophomores when they arrived in 1958, his tight-knit cohort would remain the oldest students in the building for the ensuing three years, a position of distinction not lost on the Class of 1961.

“We were kings of a wonderful but very small hill,” says Denbeaux.

Dressed in the recommended coat and tie, Mark commuted daily by train. At Commonwealth, he found like-minded teenagers coming of age in the late 1950s and preparing for their upcoming battles with the establishment in the 1960s. The gang he hung out with created a clubhouse on the school’s then-vacant top floor. Ben Blake ’61, an attorney and landlord, recalls that Denbeaux fit in well with what he called “our post-beatnik, pre-hippy crowd.”

“Mark always ran counter to the establishment,” he adds. “It makes sense that Mark has found clients who are among the most difficult to represent.”

At Commonwealth, Denbeaux did not distinguish himself academically—a standard that “he lived down to” throughout his undergraduate days at the College of Wooster and his post-graduate studies at New York University Law School, times when Mark bluntly characterizes himself as “a highly opinionated underachiever.” His 14 CM

enbeaux’s involvement in social change movements developed during his college years. On August 28, 1963, he joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he met up with his sister and parents. When the speeches began, he sat to the speakers’ left, by a corner of the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, listening to a long line of luminaries: John Lewis, Charlton Heston (reading a speech by James Baldwin), Josephine Baker—and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. As the civil rights movement stepped up its activism, segregationists responded with church bombings, murder, and police brutality.

Mark wanted to fight back. In 1964, he applied to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, when hundreds of white college students traveled south to register blacks to vote. He was rejected by organizers for failing to fully embrace SNCC’s stand against arguing with those who stood in their way.

“I was too confrontational,” says Mark.

A year later, the nation’s attention focused on Selma, AL, where people marching for the right to vote were brutally beaten by officers of the law, led by Sheriff Jim Clark, as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. A second march, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., was turned aside. King announced that twelve days later he would lead a third march to show the movement’s resolve.

Denbeaux, in his senior year at Wooster, drove south with college friends. When he arrived, Mark was sure that Sheriff Clark could learn something from a college student from Ohio, so he and one of his friends walked into the sheriff’s office, and spent two hours speaking with one of Clark’s assistants.

“The guys at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference went ballistic when they heard what we’d done,” Denbeaux says. “White guys like us could get killed.”

Tensions ran so high before the third march that the U.S. Justice Department became involved. Under the eyes of National Guard snipers in trees, military vehicles behind the stream of protestors, and helicopters circling overhead, there was no physical violence— though hardly peace.

“I remember walking along for the first eight miles, and hearing these very blond, white girls screaming at us with such gutter mouths,” Mark says.

“We marched along, two at a time, and I walked next to a stocky 16-year-old sharecropper’s daughter,” he remembers. “I reached out and took her hand, in this great act of interracial bonding. She didn’t pull away, but she was unenthusiastic. It was explained to me later: she lived in Selma.” He ruefully saw that acting on his ideals

Sean Sime

Mark in his office at Seton Hall Law School in Newark. One Seton Hall student called a course Mark taught “the most frightening and interesting course

at the law school.”

of biracial comity might carry a price paid by those left behind when he returned to college.

The impact of Selma has stayed with Mark. In 2005, he took Josh along for the fortieth anniversary of that historic stand for civil rights, which was also a reunion for the original marchers. While in Alabama, Denbeaux decided to talk with Jim Clark. He wanted to see if the segregationist sheriff’s views had changed over the ensuing decades as the nation diversified and racial minorities gained equal rights and political power. They found Clark in an assisted living center in rural Elba, AL, a four-hour drive away. They invited him out to dinner, and spoke for several hours.

“He was a grumpy old man, and unrepentant, telling us that he’d taken his oath of office from the state of Alabama, not the United States of America,” says Mark.

Josh says his father was determined to find some sign that Clark’s heart that had softened. “My father asked him: ‘Do you think it was a good thing that blacks got the right to vote?’ And Clark said yes, ultimately it was a good thing, but he just didn’t like the way they went about it.”

“Race relations are a little like a scab,” says Mark, “healing around the edges. But in the inner city, slavery, by other names, didn’t end in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. Some people are just as desperate today.” He set out to find and help those in need.

Arming for Justice

M

ark entered New York University Law School in 1965, intent on learning a profession that armed him with powerful tools. Upon graduation, and passing the bar exam on his second try, Denbeaux became a founding member of South Bronx Legal Services. The organization’s New York City neighborhood was in economic freefall and many apartment buildings became vacant. Those that remained occupied housed poorer and poorer families as the deterioration spiraled downward. The area soon seethed with poverty and street violence.

Evictions were rampant.

“Few lawyers knew how to represent poor people then,” Mark says. “This brought out the best in me. I’m better at organizing chaos than taking a good situation and improving upon it.”

Mark needed to find a way to keep his tenants in their apartments. Case law at the time provided a road map for attorneys who wanted to evict tenants for nonpayment of rent—but few were defending the rights of those about to be evicted. Instead of arguing on questions of poverty, justice, or racism, then, Denbeaux appealed to judges on procedural grounds. His clients, said Denbeaux, had not been served with notice of their eviction. If they had not been served, he argued, their cases should be dismissed.

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Mayflower Madam calling

D

enbeaux’s reputation in the legal community grew in the 1980s. When socialite Sydney Biddle Barrows was arrested in 1984 and charged with running a prostitution ring, the case heated up the New York City tabloids, who dubbed Barrows the Mayflower Madam. Her clients, listed in accounting documents, were said to include United Nations diplomats and scores of well-heeled New Yorkers.

Barrows’ attorney recruited Denbeaux to lead the defense. During the trial’s voir dire phase, in which potential jurors are quizzed to determine if they can fairly judge the guilt or innocence of the defendant, Denbeaux announced he planned to read the names of each of Barrows’ 3,000 clients to make sure that the potential juror didn’t know one of her customers.

“He called their bluff, and the prosecutor caved,” recalls Barrows, now an author and marketing consultant in Manhattan.

Denbeaux arranged a deal in which Barrows pleaded guilty to fourth-degree promotion of prostitution—a misdemeanor—and paid a $5,000 fine. Her customer ledger remained private.

“Mark is such an out-of-the-box thinker,” Barrows says. “He’s clever, and despite the seriousness of the issues at hand, he has fun.

It’s not just a tactic; for Mark, it’s fun.”

At Seton Hall, he developed an expertise in forensics evidence, with a focus on the reliability of handwriting analysis. His research found that there was no scientific standard to certify someone as a handwriting expert. He wrote law review articles on the issue, and has testified at hundreds of trials across the country.

In the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the prosecution was prepared to call a handwriting expert to prove that McVeigh filled out the rental form for the truck that he later loaded with the explosives that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The defense hired Denbeaux to debunk the expert

“Mark is such an out-of-the-box thinker.

He’s clever, and despite the seriousness of the issues at hand, he has fun. It’s not just a tactic; for Mark, it’s fun.”

Mario Suriani / Associated Press

“I’d take the position that the court had no jurisdiction,” said Denbeaux. “I could spend all day proving that my clients hadn’t been served. If I had 300 cases, I’d spend the entire day on one case, and 299 would be adjourned. It provided a defense for the tenants, and landlords started to lose eviction cases.”

By 1970, he’d been promoted to citywide coordinator for Community Action for Legal Services, a job he held until joining the Seton Hall law faculty in 1972.

Not long after he began teaching at Seton Hall, Denbeaux was contacted by classmate Suzanne Carver ’61, whose friend was in a pinch. In the early 1970s, Suzanne was a painter living in a loft in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. Her friend, the late Susan Kleckner, a photographer and radical feminist, was known for her outrageous confrontations with those in authority. Following one row with the cops, Kleckner was arrested and brought to court, where she unleashed an attack of such belligerence that the judge committed her to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital.

Carver remembered her Commonwealth chum, tracked him down in New Jersey, and told him about Kleckner’s involuntary commitment to Bellevue.

“I had no money; Susan had no money; but Mark took the case on,” she says. “He did it for the sake of justice.”

“Most things in life aren’t so hard; you just do them,” says Mark. “But once you start, you have to finish it.”

Mark, left, enters Manhattan Criminal Court in July 1985 with his client, Sydney Biddle Barrows, a.k.a. the “Mayflower Madam.”

testimony. He waited eight days in federal court to make his case, but the prosecution decided on the last day not to offer the truck rental form as evidence.

“I’m the expert on the non-existence of handwriting experts,” says Denbeaux. “I can certify you right now. It takes nothing.

There’s no science to it. It’s the same bogus bull.”

Lessons Learned

tepping into Mark’s office on the fourth floor of a sleek highrise near the Passaic River in Newark, the first thing you might notice is a sepia-tinted poster of Native Americans armed for battle, over the slogan “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.” On another wall hangs an oversized photograph of an automobile pockmarked with bullet holes, where one of Mark’s clients huddled in fear after police opened fire in a botched ambush.

Pinned to the wall over the desk is an envelope addressed to “Liberal Commie Mark Denbeaux.” On the shelf are copies of his book, The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, a compendium of first-person accounts of lawyers who since 2003 have represented detainees at the U.S. Navy facility.

There’s also a student’s review of one of Denbeaux’s courses: “It was the most frightening and interesting course at the law school.”

At 6 feet, 5 inches tall, Denbeaux has a commanding presence behind the lectern. In a class of about 50 second-year students a few days after Martin Luther King Day, he begins with some recollections of the Selma march, then dives into the day’s material: the

S

continued on page 18

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44 Questions from Detainees

ark Denbeaux and fellow Seton Hall law professor Jonathan Hafetz edited Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, a 2009 collection of essays by scores of attorneys who represented detainees at Guantánamo. Mark and his son, Josh, contributed to one chapter with a narrative that included this poignant list of questions asked by two Tunisian detainees unfamiliar with the Western system of justice.

M

1. Who is paying you?

Spec. 2 Marcos T. Hernandez / US Navy, released

2. Why are you doing this?

3. Do you work for the government?

4. Do you think that I know something?

5. The interrogators know everything. I have told them

everything, over and over again. Why do you keep asking?

6. Are you my new interrogator?

7. Why do you want to know the name and address of my family?

8. I do not know how many days I have been at Guantánamo.

How could I tell?

9. Do you think the courts will make Bush let me go free?

10. You say that court helped me last year, but why am I still here?

11. Does the court have guns or bombs? How can they stop

the American Army?

12. What difference does it make if the Congress and courts

share power with the president?

13. Do you care about me?

14. Why do you care about me? You do not know me.

15. Do you know that everyone here is Muslim? Why is that?

16. If I were not a Muslim, I would not be here. Does America

hate all Muslims?

28. How can telling me the reason that I am here hurt America?

29. Did you know that Pakistanis do not speak Arabic?

30. Do you know that Pakistanis want all Arabs to leave?

31. I see a dentist, but never have my teeth cleaned. Because

of my heart problems, I have to be very careful about

infection. Can you get my teeth cleaned?

32. Can you bring me toothpaste?

33. If I am an enemy combatant, who would be afraid of me?

34. What could I do to anyone? Is the American army afraid

that I will hurt their planes or hurt their soldiers?

18. Are you Jewish?

35. How are you different from the interrogators? They want

me to talk, and they tell me nothing. You want me to talk, you will not tell me anything!

19. Could you send me something to read?

36. Why can you not call me by telephone?

20. Do you know that I have nothing to read but the Quran?

37. Why does it take so long for you to arrange a visit?

21. How can you help free me from the American Army if

you cannot send me newspapers? What about soccer magazines?

38. You are my lawyer; you say that you can help me, but you

can only see me when the government says you can?

17. Isn’t the name Joshua a Jewish name?

22. How is the Milan soccer team doing?

23. So what if there are elections, will that stop the Army and

make them let me go home?

24. Can I have an English-Arabic dictionary?

25. What is the reason that I am here?

26. How can you help me if you do not even know why I am here?

27. You know the reasons, but the reasons are secret so you

cannot tell me what they are?

39. You say the Supreme Court has said twice that I have a

right to go to court?

40. Why have you not gotten me to court?

41. Thank you for the food, but this is Ramadan. I will eat it

later tonight. Do you mean that you cannot leave food for

me to eat after sundown?

42. Do you know that I never get any mail from you or anyone else?

43. Why don’t you send me mail?

44. Will the army let you come again?

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Listening

“How many lawyers do you know who want to get their client charged with a crime?”

standards for evidence in legal disputes. He engages students with questions about what constitutes “personal knowledge,” illustrated with one of his life’s formative experiences. While working as a baggage agent at Boston’s South Station in the 1960s, he witnessed the aftermath of an accident in which a woman wheeling her baby in a carriage had been struck by a car. Mark had come upon the scene after the impact, and found the woman sprawled on the ground, writhing in pain, with a leg splintered so badly that the bone protruded from her shin. Adding to her agony, she’d lost sight of her child. As Mark testified at the subsequent trial the judge admonished him for testifying that the fallen woman was “in pain.” The judge wasn’t interested in his conclusion about the victim’s state, he said: he wanted to know what Mark had observed.

“I had to reverse engineer it, to figure out what I’d seen to come to that conclusion,” Denbeaux told his students. “I told about her wailing for her baby and clawing at the snow. I was specific, I was vivid, and I was awesome.”

He takes a few minutes after the class to confer with two of his students who came to Seton Hall Law following their service in the U.S. military. They are working with Denbeaux to develop a program to attract more veterans to the school and to serve veterans struggling with federal bureaucracy.

Denbeaux was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War; he avoided the draft when his wife, Marcia, gave birth to Josh in 1968.

While he continues to fight the government on behalf of his clients, he has developed enormous respect for those who have served in the armed forces, including military attorneys who work alongside him in Guantánamo.

“There was nothing heroic about being a draft dodger, but I thought I was being a hero,” he says. “I think my generation treated terribly those who went to Vietnam. Now there are people coming out of the service who don’t know what they want to do, and law school is a very wide open door. I’ve found veterans to be overwhelmingly mature and competent.”

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I

n early February of this year, Mark returned to Guantánamo, where he met with his client, Abu Zubaydeh, a “high-value” Palestinian who spent four years in CIA custody before being moved to Guantánamo in 2006. Zubaydeh, described during the Bush administration as al-Qaeda’s number three, was waterboarded 83 times during his interrogations. His treatment while in the custody of U.S. authorities prompted the White House to solicit legal cover for its interrogation methods from the Justice Department. The resulting series of memos asserted that detainees were outside the scope of the Geneva Convention and that American officials could not be charged with war crimes for their actions.

After more than 30 trips to Guantánamo, Mark knows the routine. He arrives at the military base, gets processed at various checkpoints, and meets his client, who is dressed in prison garb, in a cramped interrogation hut. They sit in plastic chairs at a plastic table. His client’s ankles are shackled to the floor. Mark brings Middle Eastern foods—dates, honey, pita, and red hot-pepper sauce.

He’s prohibited from talking to any client about current events or the classified evidence against him. They talk about religion, personal hopes and ambitions, and the progress—of lack thereof—in the case.

As they sit and talk, three surveillance cameras monitor their every movement. In February, Mark learned that what appeared to be a smoke detector in the hut actually concealed a microphone. The military has denied listening in to what Mark had hoped were confidential conversations between himself and his clients. Others have speculated the CIA may have been monitoring the meetings, keeping tabs on prisoners who had been in their custody.

“Once I learned there were mikes in the room, I was depressed for several days in a low-key, profound way,” he said. “During that week in February, I’d given my client information about how I was going to win his case. Now the government could know my theory.”

In the meantime, he’s still waiting for the government to charge Zubaydeh, who hasn’t been charged, Mark says, because the government can’t identify any crime that he committed. “The government made a big mistake. My client didn’t know anything and hadn’t done anything.”

As legal challenges to the process at Guantánamo have cycled through the courts and Congress, some of the most basic expectations of the American justice system have yet to materialize. The slow progress only seems to make Mark more dogged.

“How many lawyers do you know who want to get their client charged with a crime?” he asks. “I do. We are begging to get him charged because the government will lose the trial. But even if we win that, and he is charged, there is no right to a speedy trial. So it’s far from over.”

New York–based journalist David McKay Wilson has written for alumni publications at 112 colleges and independent schools, including four profiles, since 2004, of attorneys representing detainees at Guantánamo.

Red Balloon

by Feyga Saksonov ’14

ii.

When we were ten years old, you got sick. You got sick, and you didn’t get better.

Everyone thought it was just the flu at first, but eventually your parents got worried and you ended up in the hospital.

They told us there was something wrong with your heart. It was a long, complicated something that I didn’t understand.

They did some surgery, put something in you that would keep your heart beating, and sent you home. They put you on the transplant list.

They never got to you.

i.

When we were little children, playing in the yard and scraping our knees, you gave me a balloon. It was red, and shaped like a heart.

You told me you wanted me to keep it forever. I smiled. It made you blush.

You blushed a lot, in those days.

I took the balloon home, and then, standing on my stoop, I let it go and watched it fly away until it was just a speck against the endless blue sky.

If you love something, we are told, set it free.

iii.

I never told you.

You never asked.

iv.

You spent your last few months in the hospital. I was in high school by that point. I visited you almost every day, talked to you for hours. I told you which celebrities were dating, who had broken up with whom, what you’d missed on our favorite TV shows.

I told you which college I’d gotten into. I told you I would be leaving you, going very, very far away.

Sometimes, you would be able to respond. But even on the bad days, I kept talking.

Sometimes, we just sat in silence, and the only noise would come from the machines keeping you alive.

I think I kept coming, even when you were unconscious, because I needed to see you.

I wanted to be sure I would be able to remember you.

v.

You died on a warm day in June, the day that would have been our graduation.

I was still in my cap and gown when I rushed into your room.

You were smiling.

You looked so peaceful, like you were just sleeping.

I left the room. I didn’t want to cry in front of your parents.

vi.

Photograph by Julia Wu ’15

The funeral was a few days later. I stayed by your grave after everyone else had left. They’d put you next to a plot with an angel statue.

You would have hated that.

I said a few last words to you. I promised to come back here whenever I could.

I promised never to forget you.

As I turned to walk away, a thin red ribbon descended from a tree in front of me. I tugged on it, and the balloon attached to the other end came loose from the branches.

It was bright red and shaped like a heart.

I tied it to the little flower arrangement on your grave, and walked away.

When I turned around a few steps later, the balloon was still there, swaying slightly in the summer breeze.

“Red Balloon” received an honorable mention in the 2013 Boston Globe Scholastic Writing Awards.

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20 CM

H istory of a F riendshi p

Belayed Reaction

By Tristan Davies Photographs by Kathleen Dooher

V

era Broekhuysen ’02 and Michael Lis ’04 believe that their relationship has deep roots in their Commonwealth experience. This although neither can recall even having a conversation with the other in the time they overlapped at the school. But then during their post-Commonwealth years, they developed a friendship. One day last June, under a canopy of trees at Child’s Memorial Park in Northampton, the friendship became a marriage.

CM 21

“I ended up at Commonwealth because I was fed up with private school,” Vera declares. She explains: after a socially happy but academically unchallenging education at a community charter school in Cambridgeport, she transferred to an all-girls private school.

Entering as a seventh grader was untraditional there, and Vera characterizes her two-year experience as “terrible.” She found her “classmates heavily privileged and with clearly defined friendships and boundaries already established.” When the time came for high school, she wanted something different and adamantly told her parents “that I was done with private school.” They listened, but nonetheless “gently suggested I take a look at Commonwealth, which I visited...and loved.”

“I came to Commonwealth primarily for two reasons,” Mike remembers. “The first was academic. The teachers were brilliant and clearly loved what they did, and the students were engaged. The other reason was that the students felt like my kind of ‘misfits.’”

They seemed to love classroom argument and academic challenge.

Broadminded and curious, they were also funny. They projected “a sense of social independence that I found very attractive.”

“Commonwealth was where I started to become at ease with who I was,” says Mike. “I entered as a rather closed-off, defensive kid, and left a lot more comfortable with myself. Forming strong bonds with a crew of friends I’m still close to was an important part of that development. They stuck with me despite a lot of my rough edges, and I’m forever grateful for their support.” Academically, this self-professed “science nerd” appreciated the variety of courses Commonwealth offered, but “perhaps even more important [than the science] was the education I got on the humanities side. I would have been OK at science wherever I went, but I might never have learned to write were it not for the wonderful humanities teachers at Commonwealth.”

Vera’s stretch in seventh and eighth grades with “classmates who were not open to me” dampened her natural gregariousness.

Moreover, “the transition back into mixed-gender education was awkward for me, and I was shy.” But she, too, profited from the breadth of Commonwealth course offerings and the freedom students had to sample them. “I took every art and music elective I could cram in. I especially enjoyed Life Drawing and Chorus and

Finding a Footing

A

lthough at their previous schools they saw themselves as outsiders, and though Vera and Mike’s interests did not particularly coincide during high school, it turns out that they matched personalities with and had experiences familiar to those of many other Commonwealthers. And as they discovered later, in their individual ways they went through similar transformations while growing up in the school.

“There’s nothing like belaying and cheering each other on through sweaty, muscle-aching fun to craft a friendship.”

Mike and Vera took up rock climbing while in college: she at the University of Toronto, he at Cornell.

22 CM

my one semester moonlighting as a jazz singer with the band; I kept going with Spanish for all four years; I loved writing and the English classes; and I threw myself into the drama program and reveled in the plays.” Soon enough, her old “loud and bumptious” self re-emerged.

Much of Mike’s “outside-of-the-classroom life centered on Commonwealth”; but Vera (“I thrived on activity”) had wanderlust.

For example, she sang with Village Harmony, a teen world folk music vocal group based out of Vermont, and left school to tour the country with them for two weeks every winter.

What about their interactions as high-school students? “Well, we must have been on lunch crew together a few times.”

“I have very few memories of Mike, really and truly!” Vera insists. “I recall seeing him around; he was tall and pale, with dark spiked hair and what seemed to me an angry-looking expression most of the time; I knew he fenced; I was in dance class one year with his sister, Becky. But I can’t recall a single sentence passing between us.” Mike concurs, adding “That has to be some sort of school record! We knew of each other, of course. In particular, I remember her holding an assembly where she sang some Georgian songs (the country, not the state). I remember thinking the music was very strange.”

Vera graduated and happily headed “far away from home,” to the University of Toronto. “I loved it; the urban variety: full of activity, full of new people, a very independent setting for me living in a new country (however familiar the language and a lot of the culture!).” During the time she studied music history and theory, Vera says, “I was able to ‘re-invent’ myself: I learned to cook; to budget my time and money; I began working as a professional singer. I became much more confident.” She “lost the inability to laugh at myself”; she established and led singing groups; she started rock climbing.

Two years later, Mike graduated and went to Cornell, where he earned a degree in materials science and engineering. He, too, took advantage of the larger world he found himself living in. “I became more social in college. Cornell felt huge, but I was able to engage with a wide array of people. And Cornell is also where I developed a real love of the outdoors. Ithaca is incredibly beautiful, and you become almost compelled to spend most of your time out-of-doors exploring. I began rock climbing, hiking, and cross-country skiing a great deal.”

Switchbacks

R

ocks, Facebook, and Ben Stroud ’03 share the responsibility for bringing Mike and Vera together. “Ben had been a friend of mine ever since preschool, and Mike became good friends with him during middle school,” Vera recounts. They all attended the Commonwealth Reunion dinner in January 2008, and, as Mike tells it, Ben “dragged a bunch of us out for drinks afterwards.” At the Penguin Pizza Parlor, Vera and Mike actually “chatted a bit during the evening.”

“At that point,” recalls Vera, “I was still living in Toronto, but I knew that I’d be moving back to Cambridge the following May. So when on Facebook later I noticed a picture of Mike rock climbing, I sent him a message asking if he’d be interested in climbing together when we were both in town. He agreed, and we became climbing buddies. There’s nothing like belaying and cheering each other on

“I’d never dated a friend before and was hesitant to risk a good friendship for an uncertain relationship.”

through sweaty, muscle-aching fun to craft a friendship.”

And a friendship it remained. “It may sound improbable,” Vera says, “but I don’t think either of us saw the other as a potential romantic partner for the first couple of years.” She points out that she had been dating someone semi-seriously, and Mike was seeing others, too. But in late 2009, she found herself back in Boston, and unattached. “I posted (on Facebook! again! modern media to the rescue!) that I was home, and Mike happened to be the first person to see that post. He got in touch with me just hours later, asking me to come climbing with him. I agreed, and we had a great time.”

“I can actually tell you the instant I began to see her differently,” says Mike. “We were climbing down in the Quincy Quarries. Vera had just returned home.” (This time from a four-month road trip through the national parks out west.) “At one point that afternoon, she took about a 15-foot horizontal (and probably 10-foot vertical) swing right into a slab of rock. This would shake most people up considerably, but not Vera. She resumed climbing without hesitation.

She had me from that point on.”

Not that Vera noticed right away. “Later that week I was up one night and griping to Mike (over Facebook), expressing some of my dissatisfactions about living with my mom again and being home rather than on the road. Mike suggested that I come out to western Massachusetts and visit him—he was in the first year of his Ph.D. program in polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst. I decided ‘what the hell,’ threw a sleeping bag and some clothes in my car, and drove out. We had dinner and played pool.”

By the next evening, “it dawned on me that he was interested in me. I’d never dated a friend before and was hesitant to risk a good friendship for an uncertain relationship. It was, I think, the first time I consciously made the decision to pursue a romantic interest having thought it out rather than having just fallen into it. But for me, there

CM 23

was no single moment when I felt everything had changed; rather there was a gradual build of moments. I began to think, ‘Hmm, there’s a different dynamic here now.’”

When Vera threw a Hanukkah/home-again party the following weekend, she invited Mike. This time it was he who climbed in the car at the drop of a hat and drove across the state. They began dating. They clicked comfortably and naturally. “There were few of the missed cues, miscommunications, frictions, and accommodations between habits and values that I’d experienced at the beginning of other relationships. Very quickly we fell in love. The next summer, following my mother’s death (from lung cancer), I moved out to Sunderland and in with Mike.”

By nature a bit more categorical, Mike declares, “I realized pretty early on that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.” After living together for about a year, the pair went on a hiking trip to Yosemite National Park. As they climbed together, Mike “decided to forget about trying find the ‘proper time’ in our lives to be married. I proposed to her the next morning, at the top of Yosemite Falls.”

In Tandem

W

hile joined in spirit, Mike and Vera still must spend much of their time apart. Vera is at Hebrew College in Newton, studying to be a cantor. “It combines so many of my interests: singing; ethnomusicology; a little bit of psychology through the homiletic and pastoral care that

is part of every cantor’s job; and getting to know people deeply and leading and encouraging them in song and in prayer through music.” This said, she also still moves around (“I overschedule myself very happily”) and does “occasional work as an EMT-Basic in Springfield.”

Mike’s life as a graduate student at UMass is more grounded, geographically and in the physical. “I work with polymers that help carry genes and proteins and the like into cells. My aim is to understand how these polymers interact with the cell’s outer membrane in order to make that delivery possible. I love the work (and sometimes hate it) because I’m trying to solve problems that no one has yet been able to solve. Although the road there is often excruciating, there’s no feeling more thrilling than attempting to do something that’s never been done before.”

When the two contemplate the years they spent apart, or at least living parallel lives, they see it not as lost time but as time needed. As Mike says, “our interests and personalities as they expanded and matured didn’t really begin to converge into something compatible until well after we left Commonwealth.”

But Vera adds, “I believe our background at Commonwealth made a big difference. It gave us a common history and culture to refer back to; we knew a lot of the same people—even if we didn’t know each other well—and we worked on developing ourselves as teenagers with mentors and classes in common. Hard work, critical thought, clear writing, and passionate discourse are values we each hold dear—and neither of us has ever doubted the importance of those to the other. Commonwealth fostered in us both, I think, our shared system of ethics.”

Mike and Vera at Quincy Quarries this spring. During a climb there a few years ago, Vera impressed Mike with her tenacity, and he began to see her as more than a friend, although it took her a little while to feel the same about him.

24 CM

James Kegley

a young alumna: JA N I QU E PA R ROt T ’04

The First R

by Tristan Davies “

F

or me, Commonwealth set the model of what education should be: critical reading, improved writing through multiple drafts and teacher conferences, and a focus on discussion.” And ever since high school, promoting literacy has been Janique Parrott’s passion. Her community service included work for the Prison Book Program. She recalls that inmates sometimes had to wait six months for the books they requested. “I was moved by how much trouble they went through to improve their education.” Janique’s senior project at Washington Irving Middle School in Roslindale provided a startling comparison with Commonwealth: “No books, crowded classrooms, a much more violent environment.” And yet she found students there (including Stuart Spina ’09) who wanted to learn.

What could she do to help?

That question stuck with her. As she earned her B.A. at Bryn Mawr, she kept her focus on the importance of reading. “If you can read and write well, you have access to so many opportunities. You can advocate for yourself, you can learn what you want to know about. If not, people can take advantage of you.”

After a year as a teacher’s assistant and one more to earn a Master of Arts in Teaching at Brown, Janique is now in her third year at Paul Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. She and her colleagues have set up their sixth-grade curricula to bolster academic achievement: each homeroom has two teachers, and students are rewarded for scholarly behavior.

Despite a supportive setting, “it’s exhausting!” she admits. “By sixth grade, children should be reading to learn, but some of my kids haven’t learned to read in the way that’s needed.” About half her students come in underprepared both academically and socially.

“Teaching is a draining job. I love it, but…” she trails off, thinking of the huge challenges she and her students face.

She considers her future: how to seek balance in life while staying true to her calling. “I might become a literacy coach,” she speculates, “or maybe a reading specialist, or someone who works with teachers to help improve how reading is taught.” Whatever her choice, Janique remains determined to help people understand that learning how to read is key to a better life.

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The Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association

Tristan Davies ’83

cwsaa

Emily Bullitt ’03, president of the CWSAA

Institute explores the genetics underlying complex diseases. The evening includes dinner. For more information and to register visit www.commschool.org/merrill2013.

Invitations to a pair of June reunions: from the president

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reetings, alumni/ae and friends! It’s been a lively spring for the school and for the members of the Alumni/ae Association, who are busy planning several events.

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On June 8, alumni/ae from 1986–88 are invited to catch up

with each other during a dinner at the Cambridge home of Ben ’86 and Lisa Deily. n

The class of 2003 will celebrate its tenth reunion (can it really have been that long already?) on the evening of June 15 at the school.

RSVP to Grayson Palmer at gpalmer@commschool.org, or visit www.commschool.org/reunions.

First up, the Merrill Series, on Monday, May 20. A discussion panel on obesity and diabetes will feature David Altshuler ’82, Alison Hoppin Murchison ’79 P’10, and Elizabeth Kass ’76.

Elizabeth is a primary care physician at Fenway Health in Boston.

Alison is a pediatric gastroenterologist and part of the Mass.

General Hospital Weight Center. David’s research at the Broad

Then and Now: The Kitchen

If you’re at all interested, I strongly encourage you to attend a reunion. Even in this age of social media nothing beats seeing each other face to face. Reunions also provide excellent opportunities for networking, which alumni/ae (no matter how long ago they graduated) tell us they find one of the most useful aspects of Commonwealth gatherings.

Then n Ila

Moore: The kitchen was her domain from the 1970s into

the ’90s. n

Student help: Meals were served family style with each table having its own student waiter. Students bused tables and did the dishes.

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The menu: Teachers remember Ms. Moore introducing such exotic fare (for the time) as quiche and polenta. Former students may recall the chicken à la king. Everyone relished her fresh gingerbread with real whipped cream.

NOW

Darryl Hollister and Ila Moore, c. 1987

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Darryl Hollister: Darryl began as Miss Moore’s assistant in 1986 (see photo). A man of multiple talents, he also accompanies the chorus and chorale on piano.

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Student help: A self-serve cafeteria line replaced waiters, but the jobs program continues strong. Students still wash dishes, pots, and pans.

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The menu: While now accommodating to a range of diets— vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, nut-free—Darryl and his assistant, Paulina Martinez, have also introduced new foods from around the globe such as plantains, quinoa, tagines, and Korean bibimbap. Of course, Paulina’s chili is still a favorite.

Alumni/ae Pers p e ctive

A Long Ride

By Ethan Forman ’84

Photograph by John Husson ’13

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he first long bike trip I ever took was the 60-mile ride to Headmaster Charles Merrill’s farm in Hancock, NH. I grew up in Revere, where pedaling along Revere Beach Boulevard in unfriendly traffic meant almost taking your life in your hands. The chance to bike to Hancock seemed as exotic as joining an Italian cycling team, the way Dave Stoller did in that most famous of cycling films, 1979’s “Breaking Away.”

My overprotective Jewish mother, God rest her soul, was not crazy about the idea; the school provided a bus to get me there, after all. But she didn’t want to disappoint me either. She even bought me a helmet, which was required for the ride. Unlike the sleek version some racers wore in those days, though, my bulky Bell helmet made me look as if I had a marshmallow on my head.

I didn’t train as hard as “Dave” did. In truth, I barely trained at all, taking the occasional spin around Revere Beach on my silver and blue Raleigh Grand Prix. But the Sunday before Hancock, I furiously covered the beach three times—six miles up and back; two to my house. I’d done more than 20 miles, I figured, so 60 wouldn’t be that bad, right?

On an overcast morning, parents dropped us bikers in Lexington, and we headed out. I rode strong the first few miles, and I still recall that trip every time I take the rotary by the prison in Concord. At about 30 miles, we stopped at a country store for snacks. That’s when I knew something was wrong. I was no “Dave,” with legs of steel, racing in the name of small-town, working-class redemption.

My legs had a heavy feeling that to this day signals they are about to cramp. Moreover, the emptiness in the pit of my stomach meant I was nearing my limit, about to “bonk.”

As the hills grew steeper, and eventually endless, my cramps became so bad that I could neither pedal nor coast. But I knew that if I stopped pedaling, my legs would seize; I had to keep going or, humiliatingly, hop off and walk. Climbing a particularly steep hill, I cramped so severely that I fell off my bike, swearing.

That’s when my classmate Stefan Forbes, whom I had barely noticed before, became my mellow guardian angel. He watched me as I writhed in physical and psychological pain and ranted about how stupid and weak and defeated I felt. I kept apologizing for slowing him down. Stefan remained serene. I think he said something laconic like, “Don’t worry,” in a manner that told me he would wait for me. I felt overwhelmingly grateful.

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The rest of the ride went something like this: I would pedal on the flats, go up each hill as far as I could before the cramps set in, walk the bike to the top of the hill, then coast down.

Finally, as our bunch of stragglers regrouped at the access road to Hancock, I somehow regained my ability to push the pedals normally. I will never forget my amazement at how we all flew in together.

Of course, that first long ride didn’t instantly catapult me into a lifetime of charity cycling. I have other reasons, and demons, to explain why I ride so much today: a bad car accident, which shattered my left femur; a friend whose death from breast cancer at age 44 spurred me to begin riding the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge for the Jimmy Fund.

The life lessons I learned on my initial ride to Hancock, however, I still carry with me, like a spare tube and tire irons in my saddlebag:

1. Practice and prepare.

2. If you have a bad day, don’t beat yourself up; just try to finish as best you can.

3. Don’t stop moving forward. Push through the pain.

4. If you feel really bad, keep going—sip water, nibble some food. You will find strength to carry on.

5. No matter how it affects your personal goal, never, ever leave a fellow rider behind—even one you have befriended for the first time only that day.

Ethan Forman is a serious biker and a staff writer for The Salem (MA) News. This September, he will participate in MS Global 2013 in Big Sky, Montana, a moveable charity ride started by former racer and bestselling author Tyler Hamilton. All proceeds support the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for MS in Waltham, and Ethan is training intensely for it.

Photograph by Ian Polakiewicz ’15

The Annual Fund at work

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—and you helped make it happen

uring Commonwealth’s trip to China in March, students walked the Great Wall, made friends at a Beijing high school, heard first-hand stories of the Cultural Revolution, visited Buddist temples, and dined high above the streets of Shanghai.

Sharing such marvelous experiences with classmates was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

The school’s Mary P. Chatfield Cultural Scholarship Fund, established to allow all students to experience the riches of other cultures, enabled some of our young travelers to take advantage of this unique opportunity. We thank you on their behalf.

With your contributions to the Annual Fund, we can continue to provide programs like this one for generations of students to come. Please give today. www.commschool.org/makeagift For more information, contact Director of Development Janetta Stringfellow 617-266-7525 x293 jstringfellow@commschool.org

Commonwealth School 151 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02116

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Following a remarkable tenure of more than 40 years, English teacher Eric Davis (seen here in a yearbook photo from about 1990) retires this year. Read a tribute from Mary P. Chatfield on page 7, and share your thoughts at www.facebook.com/commschoolalums.