The Other Washington.

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.

"Look, John, don't mind nothing I done."

I told Ringo he hadn't done anything.

"You lucky he ain't had more time," Billy said. "He can do some things."

I shook hands with Billy and thanked him for everything. Then

Tracy stuck out his big hand. "So long, John," he said. "It been nice knowing you."

The bus was coming down the street rather slowly, because of the fog.

When it pulled in, I picked up my suitcase and said goodbye again.

"Goodbye, honey!" Ruby yelled. "Take it easy."

Billy gave a serious little wave, and as I stepped into the bus, Ringo yelled, "I hope the bus break down!" and Ruby hit him on the head with her pocketbook. I heard Ringo say that he had said it for luck, and Ruby told him that she had also hit him for luck. I went to the back of the bus and waved to them from the rear window, and the fog closed in and covered them, and I couldn't see them anymore.

Modern readers may balk at Mazor's realistic depiction of these working-class black characters, but theirs is the voice of the propagandist who substitutes racial uplift for the reality that is, or should be, the goal of the novelist. There is such a thing as black English, just as there are unique cadences to the speech of Irish Americans. The amazing thing about "Washington," aside from its subtle prose, is that Mazor allows his characters to be fully human. John is no racist, nor is he a hyper-conscientious forward-thinker. Feeling too sick to stand, he tells Ringo when they meet to "get the hell away" from him. The blacks whom John meets are not, as is often the case today, either numb with rage or resplendent with the sanctified glow of liberal piety. (It's odd how books and films from pre-Enlightenment America-statements like the Sidney Poitier/Rod Steiger classic In the Heat of the Night-depict black Americans as much more fully human and therefore prone to flaws than do the thought police of today.) Ringo the boxer is funny, yes, but also a bit dumb and more than a little threatening. The black characters bicker with one another, and at one point Ruby and Billy get a big laugh recounting how Ringo was fired from a job.

The story was published more than 30 years ago, but it firmly holds its relevance-unlike the many ephemeral books about How Washington Really Works. "Mazor is a gentle, kind, and honorable man," wrote reviewer Robert Coles in 1968, "and his stories unashamedly convey life's ironies and ambiguities. . . . Apparently it is still possible for a writer to shun himself, shun all sorts of tricks and stunts and ruses, work hard and delicately with his characters, and speak warmly, softly and suggestively."

Warmly, softly, and suggestively: not exactly the blurb you'd see on any recent books about Washington. But then, those books are more about the bubbles containing the Washington Post and the Capitol than about a place where people like Ruby, Billy, and Julian Mazor live.