by Neil Gordon
Enough wasting time.
First things first. First, get some dope delivered.
Second, check my email and get to work.
But before any of that, I cross over to the bed by the window, lie down, and look up into the bare branches of the chestnut going right up to the sky and remember a magical world of green watched from a silent refuge in a huge, strange house by a tiny little girl.
4.
And aren’t you just the consummate professional? Aren’t you just the intrepid girl reporter? By noon I am spread out on the big kelim in the living room, with the antediluvian Mac all set up and glowing, my iPhone getting the web, toggling between websites and databases and taking notes and emailing sources and plying my trade like a motherfucker, three thousand words background on the PVI by closing tonight. I’ve blocked the GPS on my iPhone so I can’t be tracked, and have installed Tor on the Mac so I have some encryption, and having done that, not only Skyped in lunch, but dope too, which is why I’ve also got a little saucer serving as an ashtray with a loaded cigarette sitting on the window sill, letting up a cheerful little flag of pot smoke out into the wet spring air.
Earlier, after I called the number I had for the pot delivery service in New York, a motorbike messenger had shown up at the door under the stoop. I sat him down at the little Formica table on the linoleum floor and counted out a couple hundred of my dollars from the ATM in Riyadh, then he weighed out twenty-four—misdemeanor quantity in New York—grams of green weed, “New York State of Mind,” he called it, and promised it was organic. We sparked up a little taste, and while he toked he looked slowly around from under his helmet, then looked me up and down.
“What is it you doin’ in this museum, girl? Ain’t you ready to come out and play in like the twenty-first century? You too hot to hide.”
I thought about that, hitting the J, which was wet from his lips. Then I said: “I don’t play with your kind.”
Surprise darkened his face. “You shitting me.”
“Men. Stupid.”
“Ah, that what you mean? That cool, that cool.” And with my two hundred dollars and the promise to return with anything else I might require—coke, K, ecstasy, acid—he took his leave.
Stoned, I got busy. I muscled the antediluvian Macintosh up to the living room, jacked in my iPhone, got online. I searched the neighborhood restaurants, then ordered Chinese delivered from a place round the corner, then went down and found a wine closet in the kitchen, which took some searching, but was well worth it, cause it appears that someone had laid in a collection of American pinots from which I chose a ’96 Russian River vintage that cost $75 even then, the color of a translucent ruby, and ate while I worked.
And aren’t I just the proverbial rolling stone, gathering no moss? I went right at it and started reporting a straight-out history of the PVI, three thousand words, including the lawsuits that were filed to limit it when it was first unveiled after 9/11, and the Supreme Court ruling that denied its deployment in Times Square on New Year’s Eve the year after, and how therefore, shocking, it was that Homeland Security had used it again in New York.
After a couple hours, though, I find myself, instead of reporting the article, googling “Dalton” and “Mexico” and “Sinai” and I come up with a page in a book by Griffin Fariello about the Hollywood Ten screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whom my grandfather apparently represented while he was blacklisted and living in Mexico. Coincidentally, the Fariello page is part of an interview, my grandfather talking about how he bought his house on Bedford Street on what he earned from representing Trumbo before the blacklist.
Trumbo, dude. Thank you, brother. From me and my four cousins who one of these days will own this fine place.
And that makes me more curious. I go downstairs to the study and pause, looking at the wealth of paper in this little room. There’s work to be done here, I find myself thinking. But what work? I got an article to write. Upstairs again, I focus on the PVI piece for a while. For a while. Because soon I find myself standing and staring out the back window to the garden. There’s late spring afternoon sun out there, and under the shadows of the chestnut, a gardener is working, apparently, planting bulbs in a flower bed. I watch him for a time, his back curved over a little trowel, working with deliberate, very slow movements, and I’m idly wondering how he got there before I realize that it is Uncle Joe. Then, as if I actually know what I’m doing, I go back down to the kitchen, open a fresh bottle of pinot, pour two glasses, and carry them out into the garden.
It is kind of as if we have an appointment. At my approach, the old man leaves off his work and we sit, together, at a little iron table. His first sip of the wine is more a draught—a long, deep draught—and he exhales loudly as he puts it down.
“Well thank you, missie, but if you pardon my saying so, that ain’t wine. I’ll bring you some of my own next time.”
“I’d love that. Joe, can I ask you a question?”
He answers immediately. “That’s what I’m here for, missie.”
And that, of course, gives me pause. “What do you mean?”
“Oh . . . All you Sinai kids. Always going backwards. You’ll see. Now what’s the question?”
“Well . . . how you knew my grandfather?”
“Like I told you. Met him on the way to Spain. Don’t talk to me about Spain. Can’t stand it. He got me my house, you know that?”
“No. I don’t really know anything about him.”
“That right? Well, after Spain they won’t let him go back to the war, right? Bastards. Premature anti-fascism, right? Me, they don’t care: I’m wop trash and they’re drafting every wop man who can stand on two legs, six weeks’ training and to the front. Cannon fodder. Nearly every house on the street has a death—remember, we’re four, six families to the house in those days. Some more than one. And me, I can read maps, I can handle artillery, I can judge distance. Me, I’m back in Europe by 1941 and I’ll tell you something, young missie, you are looking at a man who participated in the liberation of Paris. But Jackie? Don’t even talk to me about Jackie. He’s got command experience too. But he’s also got a fucking college degree, and that means he’s too suspect to kill Nazis, right? Not only him but the FBI agents following him, day and night: strong young men, all of these young men here, none of them over there, while over there the fucking world is in flames. When I come home? I’m still a wop draftee. I got the GI Bill but that’s not what wop draftees do. I go to work for my father, over on Sullivan, Igneri Electric. One day your grandfather calls me, says, Joey, the house next door to me is for sale. I’m buying it, you’re taking it from me for cost.”
“Now, I’m living in a flat over on Sullivan; a rental. Third-floor walkup, railroad apartment, wife, three kids, we didn’t care. It’s what, ’56? ’58? My father had just died, but he never owned nothing but the business. I say, Jackie, how am I going to pay for a Village townhouse? He says, I’m taking your note, Joey. And you’re putting your money into the business. I say, Jackie, what are you talking about? He says, Joe, this isn’t your little Village anymore. The prices here are about to skyrocket. You mark my words. You take this house now on my note at a hundred large, you’ll retire to Las Vegas on the sale in thirty years. Hundred large, Christ sakes. My house was valued at seven million last year. For me, Jackie says jump, I say, how high? I did what he said and you know what? Forget about the house. The house, fine. Split it up—did the work myself—I put three kids through college on the rental units and lived like a king in the garden apartment. Still am. The house? Forget about the house. But get this: altogether, Igneri Electric made more than Jackie ever did. Italian electrician in the West Village? These people. I got twenty people on payroll, by the end of the ’70s. Central air, security, Jacuzzis, two dishwashers, two ice boxes, each the size of my house on Sullivan. Lap pools in the damn garden, excuse my fucking French, missie. Lap pools in the garden! You couldn’t charge them enough. When Danny bought his place on the Upper West Side, you
know who took his mortgage? I took his mortgage. Straight three percent, on a handshake. Paid me every single penny in five years. I tell you, Italians, Jews? Like this. Used to be, anyways.”
“So you’ve lived next door since the late ’50s?”
“That I have, missie. Next to Jackie, every step of the way. Lived our lives together. Raised our kids, worked our jobs, lived our lives.”
“And your kids are still there?”
Now the old dude pauses, and hits the wine again, another deep draught. “No. That’s the difference with you Jews. You all never leave home, even after you’ve left home. We never managed to do the family thing, did we? Uncle Joe’s children? You’d think Jersey was a foreign country. Watching you all? Your uncle, your aunt. Even the girl, Rebeccah, and that ass of a husband of hers. You know I came to your family, what they call it, seder? Every year. You know how to honor your elders. Wish we knew that. Wasn’t till my grandchildren started circling around the company that I even started hearing from them. Well, they didn’t get the company, did they now? No sir. You know who got the company? Erick Jefferson Jr. got the company. Thirty years his father worked for me. We saw Erick through Brooklyn Tech, Brooklyn College, and then into the business. Know what he’s doing with it now? Just did Susan Sarandon’s place up in Nyack. Know what color he is?”
“Black?”
“As the ace of spades, missie.”
“How come I’ve never heard of you?”
“Well, you haven’t exactly been around, have you now, missie? Oh, I know all about you. Isabel Montgomery. I’ll tell you something else, missie. I know what you’re doing here.”
“What I’m doing here?”
“Oh, you’ll find out my girl. You’ll find out, sure as the sun is coming up tomorrow. You don’t know, Uncle Joe’s not going to tell you. Tell you what. Of an evening, you come over to Uncle Joey’s garden and I’ll show you what red wine is meant to be. Not that crap your grandfather drank, California, Washington State. I’m talking the real thing, made from my grapes, in my cellar. You promise me, now, okay?
“Okay. I promise you.”
And that seems to be it. Uncle Joe goes back to his planting and after a moment or two I go back in and read the correspondence with Dalton Trumbo in my grandfather’s study. It is not chronologically organized—it does not appear that my grandfather was a very methodical person, although he was certainly a pack rat—so it takes some time to divide out by postmark into what turns out to become three piles: one of Trumbo’s letters from Los Angeles during the Hollywood Ten trial; another from prison in Kentucky, where he clearly served his contempt of court sentence after he and his nine comrades declined to testify before HUAC—perhaps, I am thinking, they will let me serve mine there after I refuse to name my PVI source; a third from Mexico.
By now I’ve given up all pretense that I’m not smoking in the house, and am exhaling big lungfuls while I stand at the oak desk, shuffling paper. Next, I give up all pretense that I’m not snooping. It is, after all, my chosen profession. There are ten or so of these big green portfolios, and the one on the very far left opens on a birth certificate, Julius Aaron Sinai, August 30, 1908. The last one, I already knew, covered the ’50s. Then I open one of the desk drawers. This thing is a fucking rat’s nest: credit-card receipts, photos, newspaper clippings. The receipts range through spring and summer of 1995, and I think about that for a while. Then I go back upstairs to the Mac, and get my grandfather’s obit from the New York Times.
JACK SINAI, 87, RADICAL LAWYER, DIES IN MANHATTAN HOME
The New York Times, November 21, 1995
Julius Aaron Sinai, a civil-rights lawyer best known for his appearances before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, died in his Manhattan home on Saturday night. He was 87. The cause, announced by his son, Daniel Sinai, an author and professor at Columbia Law School, was pancreatic cancer. Mr. Sinai had been diagnosed within the past six months and had refused treatment.
Julius Sinai, known as Jack, first gained prominence for his defense of Hollywood Ten defendant Dalton Trumbo before the Hollywood hearings of HUAC, for which he was dubbed by Senator Joseph McCarthy the “most dangerous lawyer in America.” His numerous politically charged defenses included members of the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican separatist group The Young Lords, and Black Liberation Army defendants in the 1981 Brinks Robbery Trial. He appeared three times before the Supreme Court, where he was known to Justice Thurgood Marshall as a “regular customer.”
Citing his Spanish Civil War service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and his subsequent Dies Committee classification as a “Premature Antifascist,” McCarthy attempted unsuccessfully to have Sinai’s passport revoked in 1951, a defeat widely thought to have been the beginning of the senator’s decline in power.
But Jack Sinai was best known as the father of the ’60s radical Jason Sinai, a fugitive of the Vietnam era, who disappeared as a member of the Weather Underground after the accidental bombing of a Manhattan townhouse in March, 1970. Four years later, Jason Sinai was implicated in the Bank of Michigan robbery in which a security guard, Hugh Krosney, was killed. With his alleged partners Mimi Lurie and Sharon Salzburg, Jason Sinai is one of the last “Weatherman” fugitives remaining at large.
Seven months prior to his death Jack Sinai had been awarded the Medal of the Legion of Honor by the government of Spain in recognition of his “heroic wartime service to the citizens of the First Spanish Republic,” during the Spanish Civil War and “a postwar career incarnating the noble ideals of the International Brigades.”
In a statement announcing the death, Daniel Sinai explained that his father had concealed his illness for fear that his fugitive son would attempt to make contact. The Sinai family, Professor Sinai explained, had been under police surveillance for most of the twenty-five years since his brother’s disappearance.
In addition to his sons, Jack Sinai is survived by his wife, the painter Eleanor Singer, an adopted daughter, Klara Singer of Tel Aviv, and two grandchildren.
Correction: Due to an editing error, the number of Supreme Court appearances made by Jack Sinai was incorrectly reported as three. Mr. Sinai appeared five times before the Supreme Court.
November 21, 1995. I go back to the drawer, and look at some of the receipts. These would have been my grandfather’s last few months, and in fact, down at the bottom of the drawer, the last dates are in late summer. At the very bottom, I discover two other things. One is a newspaper clipping. The other is a small stack of thousand-dollar bills.
The newspaper clipping is from the Times, dated April 16, 1995, and has a headline “Radical Lawyer Honored for Wartime Service in Spain.” The subhead reads: “Jack Sinai, Communist-era backlistee and Spanish Civil War Veteran, receives Spanish Legion of Honor Award at annual Veterans Memorial.” And the picture is the one I found earlier: my grandfather, walking next to water on a bright spring day.
This time, I look more closely, leaning down under the light of the lamp. He is walking on a promenade next to what must be the Hudson, because you can see the Colgate Clock across the water, in a tweed jacket and blue denim shirt. He has a full head of white hair and, in the flat morning light, an expression of great gravity, and was clearly walking unaided, some six months before his death.
I go back upstairs now, and work on the Times piece a little. A very little. Then I smoke by the back window for a while. Then I finish the last glass of the Russian River pinot, which now, having opened up some, justifies the price amply. Then I go back downstairs and take the pictures of my grandfather, my father, my uncle, and my aunt and pin them up on the bulletin board above the desk.
For a while I watch them, plagued by the sense that there is someone missing. Something deep in my memory, some memory, some mystery. I go back to the portfolio, and leaf through the pictures, until I find one of Danny and Maggie, at their wedding. This strikes a chord, for in it you can see, already, the strange, attenuated tension that has always existed between them. I co
nsider the picture for a while. Then I go back to the other photographs and search until I find one more: a woman with vivid black hair, a red mouth, and brilliant eyes. Klara Singer, graduating from college in Yale blue.
The whole lineup is on the bulletin board now, and for a long time I examine them, my elders and betters. Then I open some of the other five drawers. Each is full of paper, and I’m able to see quickly that the dates run backwards by drawer, roughly by half-decades, to the ’70s. I go back upstairs, write a couple lines for the Times, then I roll a joint and smoke a little. Then I go back downstairs and open the rightmost of the green portfolios. The final document is a letter on Lawyers Guild stationery, with an address of 5 Beekman Street, and signed Lenny. So the portfolios cover Jack Sinai’s life through the ’60s, but the huge desk has, unfilled, the next thirty-five years of his life. Thinking about this, I go back through the dining room from the study, into the kitchen, and back to the little wine closet. This time I go for a Washington State vintage, an ’82 with a deep ruby hue. I pop it and pour a taste, thinking it will need to breathe, but this thing is so smooth you could take it for acid indigestion. Upstairs, with a real pour, I google “Lenny” and “Lawyers Guild” and come up with a hit on Leonard Boudin—aha, the famous civil-rights attorney, father of my father’s old comrade Kathy, jailed for her part in the Brinks robbery until a few years ago, and that after surviving the townhouse bombing in 1970 in which three of her friends died. I read about him for a while, then I carry my wine back down to the study and read the letter, dated February 23rd, 1970, more closely. I don’t know what the kids are up to, haven’t heard from Kathy in a few weeks. But whatever they’re doing, it must be better than doing nothing, and Jean and I are staying hopeful. February 23rd.
