by Neil Gordon
“Yeah.” He drinks some wine with every appearance of satisfaction. “Exactly, missie. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. That we was wrong. But you keep not getting it. I’m not talking about our suffering, I’m talking about yours. Because the fact that we were wrong didn’t stop us from believing because we were too fucking stubborn, and too fucking stupid, and that’s what we did to you.”
“What does that mean, Joe?”
“What does it mean? It means what happened to Jasey, and Danny, and Klara, and Maggie. Don’t you see? It was our fault. We fucked up their lives. And now they’re fucking up yours, and that’s our fault too.”
“Every goddam generation has people who hope.”
“No. Not any more. Not the way we did. And not the way your father did. That was the last of that kind of hope, only, we were so full of it that we had to try to make our kids feel it. Me, who’s going to listen to me? My son’s a stockbroker. But Jackie, his kids listened.”
And at this I felt, for the first time in a very long time, discouraged.
“Oh, Joe. Then what the fuck am I doing here?”
“Oh, girl, don’t get discouraged on me. You’re way too brave for that.”
Brave? I know I look brave. But I don’t feel brave, I feel lost. For a moment I considered saying that to Joe. Then I said:
“I don’t feel brave. I feel lost.”
“I know you do, girl. Joe knows that better than anybody.”
“What do I do?”
He pointed at my bulletin board. “Exactly what you’re doing.”
On the bulletin board were the pictures of my family with, now, a multiplying number of Post-its with what I assumed were cryptic notes: “Passover 1996,” “Danny’s Yale Graduation,” “The night grandfather died.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Listen, missie. Families die. That’s natural. Jackie died, Eleanor died, and soon enough Uncle Joe’s going to die too. Then you get a little break, maybe, if you’re lucky, before Jason and Danny and Maggie die. But families also get destroyed, and when you come from a family that’s getting destroyed, you only have one choice.”
“Which is?”
“To find out what’s killing it.”
With that encouragement, with that shot in the fucking arm, with that fucking Bronx cheer, I go back to work. And now it’s May 6, and fueled by Uncle Joe’s endless talk and the Rasta-boy’s endless substances, I’ve gotten to the very end of the chapter about the VALB ceremony that you’ve just finished reading, and I’m just writing that last sentence about some of us not looking ahead and others not looking back, which I thought a good one, when I feel a hand on my shoulder and I jump out of my fucking chair.
2.
When I land, I turn to find Maggie, highly amused, standing there in business clothes and holding a briefcase. I turn down the music.
“What the fuck, Maggie. You serving me or something? You look like a goddam process lady.”
She looks briefly offended, and actually steps out of the study to look at herself in the hall mirror, then comes back in and takes off her jacket.
“Well, I happen to think I look like an eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer who does a boatload of pro-bono, which happens to be what I am, but whatever you say, Ace. Now tell me, what exactly are you doing to Jack’s study?”
At first I’m not sure what she means, but then I kind of see the place through her eyes, and she has a point. My grandfather’s papers are everywhere—the desk, the bed, the floor—liberally interspersed with glasses and wine bottles. A cigarette is burning in an ashtray. Visible also is a bag of New York State of Mind, a little vial of pharmaceutical speed—Focalin, if you must know—and on the bulletin board next to the desk, the same bulletin board that Joe looked at, all the family pictures, and so forth. All of this Maggie takes in, which is bad enough, because the little worry that has been percolating at the back of my mind—what my lovely family will think about what I’m writing—is suddenly right in front of me, huge. And then, to my extreme discomfort, she sits for a moment to look at the text you just finished reading. When, at last, she turns, it is with a quizzical expression.
“What is this, Izzalah? You writing Jack’s biography?”
I give it a moment, wondering if a lie might do. Then: “Not exactly.”
“Then what, doll? Who said you could go into Jack’s papers?”
She scrolls back on the screen and reads again for a moment, and as luck would have it, hits the exact line I was afraid of her seeing, about Danny and Klara on Hammonasset Beach.
“Jesus, Izzy. Is this why you’ve been harassing everyone from here to Sunday with questions?”
Finally, I find my voice, though in the event, it’s not the voice I meant. “Stop it, Maggie.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop quizzing me. First off, I don’t need anyone’s permission to go into my grandfather’s papers. They’re not fucking copyrighted and he’s my grandfather, not yours. Second off, stop yelling at me.”
“I’m not yelling at you.”
“Yes you are. You want to know what I’m doing? I’m writing. You want to know what I’m writing? Then fucking take the time to read it.” I reach over her, hit print, glower for a moment while the printer does its thing, then toss her the manuscript, and storm upstairs to the living room to sulk.
During which sulk I pour a substantial hit of Glenlivet, and am deep into it when, twenty minutes later, Maggie, considerably calmed, comes in. Again, she surveys the room with an expression by no means devoid of judgment, only this time, she is visibly restraining herself from comment, though whether she’s being restrained on the state of the room or the state of the now decimated liquor cabinet, I cannot tell. In either case, she pours herself a drink and sits across from me.
“What are you doing, Iz?”
“That all you have to say?”
“What is it you want me to say?”
“How about, shit, girl, that’s some fine fucking writing.”
Silence.
“How about, way to go, Iz. Finally writing yourself out of that ‘instantly disposable journalism’ I’ve been telling you to get away from for the past n+1 years.”
Silence.
“How about: At last. Iz, baby, you’re writing the book you’re meant to write!”
Finally, in a quiet voice: “What do you know about Danny and Klara and Hammonasset Beach?”
But I’m pissed. Defensive? Maybe. But pissed. “Not as much as I’m going to, that I promise you, Maggalah.”
“Christ sake, Izzy. What is this, you’re a reporter.”
“Precisely.”
“You reporting on your own family?”
And just like that, just like that, I start to cry.
Fucking baby.
Fucking girl.
“You fuckers with all your secrets. How the hell else am I supposed to make sense of Sinai before he dies?”
Which is all I have to say. Everything, just like that. Big, mean Isabel Montgomery. War reporter. International correspondent. Maggie is concerned enough not to listen to the last part of that sentence; she’s out of her chair in a second, and in another, I’m way deep in her arms, sobbing my ass off, and she’s not saying another word, not another word, just holding me and holding me and for a long time, in the living room, we stand like that.
Finally, at the tail end of my tears, sniffing. “You treat me like the fucking bad-girl orphan of the family. Bunch of goddam Jews with your little inbred language. How the fuck you think it feels.”
“Iz, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Eleanor loved you. Danny too. Molly too. Even your father, no matter what you say. You’re the apple of our eyes, you know that. You’re our hero.”
“No I’m not. Even Beck and that dork Ben know you more than I. I’m the weirdo little runt of the litter.”
“You are? You? I’m the shiksa of the family, girl.”
“Bullshit. Don’t be ridiculo
us. Jack loved you. Eleanor loved you.”
“Okay. Okay. It’s not that simple. But okay. It’s good. What you wrote is good. It’s really good. It’s like you were there. It’s like it happened to you. I believe it. I don’t know how on earth you did it. I knew you could write. Where are you going with it?”
“I don’t know yet. I need you to speak with me. I need to speak with Molly. I need to speak with Danny and Klara.”
A silence. “And our privacy?”
“Fuck your privacy. There’s been too goddam much privacy for too goddam long in this goddam family.”
I step back now, and now, I know exactly what I am going to say.
“I’m serious, Maggie. Thank you for the hug. Thank you for saving me when I was a baby. Thank you for everything. I love you. I really do. But that’s my position.”
A long silence. Then:
“So where next.”
“The VALB ceremony. That night. When Jack learned he was dying. It’s the heart of the story.”
She considers. “I was there at VALB. And the dinner after. I know he spoke to Eleanor that night. But I wasn’t there for that.”
See? That’s love. The real thing.
But this was work.
“Thank you.”
“Then?”
“Then the night my grandfather died. Molly and Daddy, up in Saugerties. When Molly spoke to Sinai about her husband.”
“I don’t know anything about that, love. I don’t even know what you mean. Molly was married before Jasey? I don’t know anything about that.”
“You will. And then I want to know about Hammonasset Beach in 1986 and then Passover of 1986.”
Now I thought she was going to cry. “You going to speak to Klara? In Israel?”
“Yes. No. I’m going to speak to Klara in the ’48 territories of occupied Palestine.”
She let that one float right on by. Remember, she’s a Dissent type. But she said: “You’re going to publish this?”
But I was adamant. “If anyone will print it.”
“What are you, the avenging angel? You going to leave us anything?”
I felt bad, but I felt sure, also, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like myself.
You may say I only feel like myself when I am being cruel.
“So? Do I have it right?”
A long sigh. “Yes, you have it right.” Maggalah shot her drink, like an Irishman, and stood up to leave, looking old, looking like an old woman practicing hard, unconditional love. “When you’re ready tell me, and I’ll tell you about the dinner after the VALB ceremony. Then if Molly will speak to you about the night Jack died, and if Klara—in Eretz Isr’ael—will speak to you about Hammonasset Beach, I’ll tell you about the Passover after. Fair enough?”
Now I really felt bad. “I’m ready now.”
We cried a little more.
And then she began to talk.
Aren’t you just the fucking consummate little professional. Aren’t you? Cry for a story?
I’ve done so much worse.
Molly Sackler once told me that my father had changed identities so many times that he could often not even remember the person he had been last. It was by way of an explanation, when I was fifteen; I didn’t understand it then and I am not sure I understand it now. As for my mother, by 2011 her memory had become as permeable—more precisely, semi-permeable—as her sinusoid capillary membranes, the osmotic porosity of which she had by then been testing for years, usually with fine white powders.
Not me. My problem is precisely the opposite. My problem is that my girlhood sits so close to the present that I feel trapped by it. In this I was, as you’ll see, more Molly Sackler’s daughter than either of theirs.
What I remember, I remember. And I remember that auditorium of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, in April of 1995, exactly. I can shut my eyes and see the orchestra, a descending sea of the backs of heads to the stage. I can see it: the stage itself, empty, with two wooden chairs in profile, stage right, facing a lectern on stage left. I can hear it: the murmur of the audience as, greetings finished, it settled into its places, the lights flashing once. And I can smell it: the musty smell of coats, all bathed in a heavy suspicion of something I recognized but could not name, the smell of the coat closet in Molly’s rarely used formal living room. This last detail confirms for me that it is actually the VALB ceremony where my grandfather received his award that I remember, because Sinai remembers wondering about the same smell, only he could name it: camphor, and later, came to understand its source.
We found our seats in the last row of the orchestra, stage right. Here our view of the lectern was not great, but in retrospect I understand that the seats allowed my father a view of the entire audience and access the emergency exit, next to him on the left. These were the seats he had reserved after finding a seating chart of the Borough of Manhattan Community College’s auditorium on the web.
And this, a couple-three weeks deeper into the spring of 2011, most of which I spent on Bedford Street listening to Maggie talk, is what I know—know—happened that night in April, 1995, to my father, my grandfather, and to me.
Chapter Five
Jason Sinai
April 15, 1995
New York City
1.
Sinking into his chair next to his daughter, as the auditorium lights flashed, Jason Sinai felt he was breathing normally for the first time since he had seen his father. He saw himself as a boy, shy and safe, taken to the theatre by his family. From fifty years away he smelled the camphor of his grandmother’s coat at a matinee on Broadway, smelled it far within his nose, at his brain stem, with exactitude. Then, as had been happening to him more often recently, he wondered to whom that memory belonged: Sinai or Grant? Was he remembering New York in the ’60s, which he lived, or Bakersfield, California, which he had invented? The invention was fact-based, researched, and precise. The problem was not that it was true, because it was. The only difference was that it was not real. It was like suddenly owning the memories of a stranger.
The lights flashed again, more slowly, and in the momentary darkness he felt inexplicably comfortable. So, then: he owned also the remembered feelings of a stranger, so what? Fugitives, too, had to become comfortable with middle-aged memory loss. But comfortable, for Jason, was always a word that demanded attention, because with comfort comes complacence, and so when the lights came back up he told himself to sit up, adjusted his hat and collar, checked on me and only then, when he was satisfied that there was no danger around him, did he lean back again.
On stage left, Victor Navasky was coming out now, taking one of three chairs behind the podium, followed by Henry Foner, a childhood family friend of Sinai’s parents, uncle to Eric, his childhood nemesis. From far away came the memory of his mother talking about him, “the Foner boy.” Next was the actor Richard Dreyfuss. For a moment Jason was taken aback by his presence. What was Dreyfuss doing there? Ah, but wasn’t Dreyfuss a Red Diaper baby? He was, Jason remembered, a man deeply imbued with his sense of his history’s pathos. Unlike Sinai, who was infused with a sense of its kitsch. The Spanish Ambassador, also a man in his middle fifties, resplendent in ceremonial clothes, was next.
Now what would these three make of Jason Sinai’s presence there, if they had known? As the audience went silent, although the lights were still up, Jason found that he was able to catalogue their reactions with ease. Navasky: against. Navasky, from the younger end of the old left, would hold that Weather had stranded the Mobilization Against the War in ’69, decimated it, and in the process given Nixon an excuse to demonize the Left under COINTELPRO. For a second Jason felt that the auditorium was cold. But then he reminded himself, correctly, that Dreyfuss would disagree. Dreyfuss would be happy to be in the company of Jason Sinai: a romantic, the same quality that made him susceptible to the drama of his parents’ story, would make him romanticize Weather, too.
Nor would he be alone. Jason reminded himself that ma
ny, many other people would welcome Jason Sinai’s presence, likely a majority here.
And he was right, too. He was perfectly right there were more who sympathized with Sinai than who condemned. Even Molly admitted it, in the endless conversation about Vietnam that still characterized their existence together, although she said that this was because they don’t understand the history, and on balance, Jason knew—and sometimes, even, admitted—she was likely right. But the fact is, there is no litmus test of historical understanding for political conviction, is there? It’s not like you have to know what you’re talking about in order to hold an opinion, do you?
The train of thought was interrupted, but not stopped, when Moe Fishman, who now ran VALB in New York, stepped up to the lectern and in a few short phrases invited the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, those attending, to make their way to the stage. Throughout the audience, a stirring now accompanied the Veterans as they rose from their seats. And shifting his gaze away from the stage and into the audience, Jason found himself pursuing the same thought: he knew that many, many of these people had, in the day, been energized by the direct, simple expression of Weatherman, artful violence against the state, smart kids playing, successfully, with fire. Now, these years of dormancy later, many would see him as an avatar of their own best hopes from a time when they thought change was possible, a refreshing reminder now, when they accepted that it was not. And it was not only the old. Many young people, Jason knew, felt this way: both Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn swept the country on the lecture circuit, lionized by young folk who had no purchase in any existing movement for change. What movement was there, anyway? Anti-globalization? Radical environmentalism? The School of the Americas Protest? In each one of them, the romance of political violence was potent, had never gone away, never would.
