by Neil Gordon
Chapter Six
Isabel Montgomery
June 15, 2011
Martha’s Vineyard
1.
My father will not know for years yet, unless what you are now reading is published before he dies—or unless, more unlikely, I show him the manuscript—everything that had happened that day.
My grandfather, of course, never knew.
Maggie, however, does, because I do show her the manuscript and she reads it in one sitting.
But not in Bedford Street.
She reads it on the porch of the Menemsha General Store in mid-June while I wait in Jack and Eleanor’s—now my father and uncle’s—house on the bay, where we’d gone in early June to spend a weekend alone. And while I wait, I sit on a rocking chair on the porch, hugging my knees and watching out over the pond.
There is a summer rain over us, today, coming down hard, patterning the surface of the pond with a million rings, which is apt. My earliest memory is of Momma taking me into the shallows of Colgate Lake, sitting me on her knee, my cheek against her wet bikini top, and showing me the rings that formed on the surface of the water when she dropped pebbles into it. Funny to think of Momma so young. Momma knew how to love when she was young. I know that, because I saw it once in Paris with some Nowhere groupies on four hits of some very fine acid, itself couched in 200 milligrams of MDMA. The only thing was—and this I remembered clearly under the influence of the Medicine—I didn’t understand her. See, I was focused on the sandy ground under the water, and for some reason I thought that the circles she mentioned were little silver bracelets—real ones—that were going to form and sink to the bottom, and with mounting frustration, I could not figure out why I could not see them. Under the drug, I thought to myself that that moment was, for me, the beginning of consciousness. Now, the millions of raindrops making millions of rings across the surface of Menemsha Pond seem only too apt a reminder of how entirely I had, all my life, misunderstood.
I never took either acid or MDMA again after that. Who the fuck wants to revisit the past when you’re trying to get high?
I fucking hate being read.
This is the house that Billy Flanagan’s union, the New Bedford Carpenters’ Guild, built for Jack as payment for his defense work, and it is virtually unchanged since then, a memorial to Wakefield and Greene and Greene, midcentury populist modernism, linoleum floors, Formica tables, a breakfast nooke. It is beautiful and, to me, like a prison. No matter how clean it is, and it is a very, very clean place, it feels to me as if everything is covered with a light sheen of grime.
And this is the house to which Israel Singer, my adopted aunt’s adoptive father, brought Klara when she came from Palestine in the early spring of 1969.
Sitting on the porch, watching the pond, I think of Israel Singer, in 1969 when he came to bring Klara to the States for a visit.
For a visit.
What a visit.
It was raining that day, too.
I close my eyes and imagine him, in the evening, walking gingerly down the sloped lawn, anxious not to fall. He had arrived that morning: Lydd—Ben Gurion Airport—to New York, New York by train to New London; then the ferry, trailing a eleven-year-old girl, his adopted daughter he hardly knew. Jack picked him up in his Dodge Dart; greeted him in Yiddish; then brought him home for dinner. When Eleanor met the girl, thin and gangly and tall, she was shivering and wet and Eleanor enclosed her in a long hug before taking her upstairs and dressing her, as it happened, in Jason’s old jeans and a sweater—she was taller than Danny and Israel had brought virtually no clothes for her. After dinner, Jack and Eleanor took Klara and Danny to the Bite in Menemsha for ice cream, which may have been the first normal thing she had ever done in her life, and Israel changed into his bathing suit and picked his way, gingerly in the wet grass, down to the edge of the pond, the pond textured with the millions of little rings from falling drops. He limped from four toes lost during the winter of ’44 in Bergen-Belsen. Jack’s house was the only one on the pond, then, and no one saw him.
See, I know all this. I know all this. I know that his wife had died not six weeks before in the market-bombing in Haifa, where they lived, herself a survivor of Treblinka—I’ve read the death notice, in Hebrew, in Yediot’s online archives. They were childless, she had been sterilized in the camps, and had only had the girl for weeks, since the Jewish Agency had convinced them to take her after her own parents were killed in an ambush on their kibbutz in the Negev, and the children were all evacuated. Klara, anyway, had refused to stay on the kibbutz. When Israel went into the water he swam out for a long time, a very long time. The next morning his body was found by a fisherman in Menemsha harbor. The autopsy found fifteen undigested hits of Seconal in his stomach, and enough in his blood to indicate another fifteen had been metabolized. In his bag, which was otherwise empty, they found the empty container, prescribed by a shrink in Afula. That, see, is how Klara came to the Sinais.
I close my eyes and watch this. I feel the ache of phantom toes, lost to frostbite during the winter of ’44, digging mass graves in shoes made of newspaper. I feel the wet grass against my feet, balancing down the slope, gingerly: I know I will break if I fall, and I do not want to go that way. I am dizzy, comfortably numb, as the first hints of Seconal titrate into my brain, and through the growing pleasure, I wonder for the first time about timing. How long will they be away? But I am at the water now, and I walk right into it, its textured, patterned surface of little rings under the rain. I swim out, slowly, on weak arms, not worrying about preserving the strength to get back to shore. Swimming to Shanghai, the sailors on the Haganah l’Aliya Bet steamer had called it, smuggling me to Palestine after the war; I remember it vividly. Then, when I can go no further, I turn on my back and close my eyes against the fall of the rain until slowly, slowly, I fall asleep. In my dream the raindrops, the millions of raindrops, turn into millions of corpses, tiny little corpses, thundering down from the skies, and the comfortable familiarity of Europe, Europe in the ruin it has meant to me, two thousand years of horrible Europe, washes through me: the smell of corpses, of garbage, of latrines and of gangrene. This is where I want to be, one last time; where I am meant to be—not that muddy, messy country next to the Med, but the ruined familiarity of Europe, and my thin body, as my lungs empty, lowers me in a headfirst backward arc into the ebbing tide out toward the harbor.
When Maggalah comes back, her Subaru grinding up the drive and into the carport, I am halfway through a breakfast beer.
Her hair is wet, glistening with rain, which I wonder about, as there was no need for her to have been exposed but for a moment climbing up to the porch at the general store. Her eyes are red at the rims, like she’s been crying, and instead of her normal frown of disapproval, she cracks a beer herself, then sits next to me at the little linoleum table.
“This really what happened?”
“Precisely.”
“Does Jason know?”
“Some.”
“He nearly got caught that day?”
“Um hmm.”
She hit her beer now, though just a tiny sip. “Would have been better if he had been, wouldn’t it?”
I consider this for a long moment. Then, sounding more adult than I would have wished:
“No. It wouldn’t have been. It would have been worse.”
She thinks now, for a while. Probably about how Sinai did, in fact, get caught, just the year after the VALB ceremony, and how much better it was that way: exculpated, then, by Mimi Lurie’s confession; able to resume his life and profession as Jason Sinai, reunited with his other daughter, my half-sister Beck. The only person for whom it was worse, the way it happened, really, was me.
But I don’t have to tell that story now. That story has been told. What I need, now, is for Maggie to tell me about the evening after the VALB ceremony. Impatiently, I light a cigarette, and rather rudely, toss my iPhone on the table and launch WordRec. For a time we sit and listen to the rain on th
e roof. Then, at long last, Maggie gives in and reaches a cigarette out of my pack for herself and, in a small voice, begins to talk.
On reflection, though, I think that in some way more important than what they knew, my grandfather and my father didn’t only miss meeting that day. Something else happened to them, too.
They certainly each thought very intensely about the other, that day, and did so under the same roof. You may say that makes no difference, because no communication actually occurred. But so what? This conundrum about communication, in my view, has always been a canard. In what did, in fact, happen during the months of his death, my grandfather may just as well have been speaking to my father daily on the telephone, so exactly did he do what my father needed him to. As for my father, say what you want, but I know for a fact—for a fact—that in the months after that April Saturday in 1995, my grandfather was never out of my father’s thoughts for more than minutes, and when he died, my father was all there, in body and—well, whatever you would call it when you sit shiva, as my father would be doing in a few months. So what more can a father and child ask of each other? Explain to me how things would have been different—what each could have asked of the other—had they actually met?
That leaves just me, and I was only a child. But now, years later when I come to find out exactly how much had changed that day, I feel more strongly than I can tell you that I am learning nothing new. Just the exact terms by which an awareness of change had come to me, one that I would have the rest of my life.
Driving back upstate that early spring evening in 1995, my father and I, watching the greening borders of the Thruway grow dark as the sun came down in the west and the Catskills came up in the north, I think we all knew exactly how much everything was about to change.
What we didn’t know was how. And we did not understand, yet, that the change would come just months too late.
By winter, my grandfather would be dead.
Chapter Seven
Jack Sinai
April 15, 1995
New York City
1.
In the uproar of the ovation, no one had really noticed what had happened to Brad Flanagan and his daughter, and by the time the ceremony was over the FBI had totally cleared out. There had been the rest of the ceremony—Navasky, Richard Dreyfuss, more singing. There’d been the refreshments, surrounded by warm bodies in the packed college cafeteria, Jack’s eyes constantly focused beyond his interlocutor on the possibility of his son. A cocktail was hosted at someone’s Tribeca loft, and afterward, a long dinner at a Village restaurant, hosted by the Tamiment Collection at NYU Library, where Jack’s papers would be housed after his sons’ deaths: a long, drunken dinner at a table for twenty, ranging from young women with pierced noses and black clothes to old men in musty suits and black berets. That was one of the few perks of being on the left, Jack knew, the chance to be at table with the young.
The pleasure, however, was all visual. Eleanor and he had a running joke in which they assigned a date in the history of the American left appropriate to the level of political sophistication in any such discussion. This one, tonight, in which a particularly strident young woman with a crew cut was arguing the viability of domestic terrorism on global business and environmental targets, they agreed on with a single shared glance: 1970.
March 6, 1970, to be exact.
A particularly depressing moment in American history, and they had both, conspicuously to their peers although not to the young woman who was talking so much, stayed silent until someone with a bit more historical perspective, and tact, had directed the discussion away.
And after? They came out of the restaurant. There was rain in the air, the chill of an approaching spring rain. Looking up, Jack saw a half moon lighting the way for clouds moving in over Manhattan from the ocean. Under that sky they walked, Jack and Danny-boy with Laura on his shoulders; Eleanor and Maggie side by side, through the dark Tribeca streets and up to the Village.
They walked slowly, nearly aimlessly, the wind—revealed on the east–west cross streets—moist and smelling of the sea.
In front of the door to their house, Danny and Maggie took their leave. Jack thought the two were going to announce Maggie’s second pregnancy. But perhaps they did not want to do it in front of Laura, and so they parted company at the door, the kids to their car and then up to the Upper West Side; Jack and Eleanor into their house on Bedford Street.
A heaviness had come to Jack Sinai as they made their way from the parlor floor down the back maid’s stairs to the kitchen where Eleanor, in slow, practiced movements, put on the kettle for tea. Watching her from the table, he tried to weigh the feeling, which seemed an old one, distantly familiar, and to his surprise, the image that came to him was of a minor infidelity of his middle age, a woman who had kissed him once in a Chicago hotel. Now why would that image have come to him tonight, he wondered? Then he understood. It was because of the secret he was keeping from her now.
Still, he kept silent. They spent an hour at the kitchen table, drinking tea, Eleanor, her veined, aged hand on his, going over the evening with him, unaware that anything—everything—had changed. Jack had been on the verge of telling her about Holmquist. But it had been so long since they had basked, so thoroughly, in the potent narcotic of applause, so long since they had sat so peacefully here, in the kitchen, and Jack let her bask some more. Then he was going to tell her, but she’d risen to go upstairs, not to sleep but to read until he came up too, and he’d decided to wait until then.
And now it was heading for midnight and he had read the mail and still he had not gone up.
Rather he was sitting at his study desk in the yellow light of his lamp—lamp that had lit the same desk with the same yellow light for fifty continuous years—watching the branches of the ancient backyard chestnut out the floor-length window waving in the gusts of spring wind across, under the half moon, the dirtying sky of clouds.
It had been there as long as they’d had the house; had accompanied his children from birth to adulthood, its branches moving in wide, sweeping gestures across the window, and it was there now.
And then, out of all the day’s impressions, from the morning with Dr. Holmquist to the award ceremony, what he saw was the young crew-cut woman at the dinner table, arguing a defense of political violence, entirely unaware of the effect her words were having on the aged couple at the table; unaware, perhaps, that these two interlocutors of the conversation she was monopolizing were the parents of Jason Sinai.
2.
March 6, 1970. The papers had been breathing sighs of relief that the ’60s were over; Students for a Democratic Society had self-destructed in December of ’69; the first three months of the decade had been nearly ominous in their quietude. Then, on March 6th in the morning, the Wilkerson house on West 11th Street had erupted in a long dynamite explosion that had shattered windows all the way down to Fifth Avenue. Jack learned about it when Lenny Boudin called; the Lawyers Guild offices at 5 Beekman were only a few minutes’ walk from Jack’s office in the Exchange Building. He and Lenny had met out on the corner of Nassau Street and taken a cab up to the Village. That Jason, and Kathy—Lenny’s daughter—had been involved with the Wilkerson girl was not in doubt: Lenny and Jack both knew her, as they knew Ted Gold, and Mark Rudd, and Brian Flanagan, and Harold Markson, and David Gilbert, and all the other SDS kids from Columbia who had come together in New York over the strike and occupation. There was every reason in the world to believe that their children had been in the townhouse, and they rode the taxi north in a silence so tense, you could hardly breathe.
The newspapers took days to catch up, but by midafternoon Jack was certain that the two women who had left the burning house after the explosion and begged clothes from the neighbor had been Lenny’s daughter Kathy and the other one, Cathy Wilkerson—the neighbor was Susan Wanger and Jack had been able to get to her, discreetly, through a client, her ex-husband Henry Fonda. Even after he knew that his own daughter was safe
, Lenny stayed on with Jack and Eleanor right through the night. By evening they knew—this time through a Manhattan DA—that two of the bodies had been identified as Diana Oughton and Ted Gold. There was evidence, however, that a third person had been there too. But the third body had been virtually vaporized by the blast—presumably it was the bomb-builder—and they had to rely on the FBI to identify it from a single surviving finger.
That shouldn’t have been any problem: COINTELPRO had prints of the entire anti-war movement by then, and Jack had long been convinced that it had taken them not hours but minutes to make their identification of the final body. That they’d let parents across the country sit up all night in anguish was a policy decision. This was how they operated. Even in the ’50s they had been implacable, brutal. It was their policy that required them to sit up that night on Bedford Street, so literally sick with worry that Jack had at a certain point, suddenly and without warning, leaned over and thrown up on the living-room kelim.
All through that night Lenny had sat up with them and later, when she came over with some food, so had Jean, who was still well enough to do such a thing. And it was not until 5 a.m., when Eleanor and Lenny and Jean had all dozed off in their chairs, that Jack, acting on a hope so slim that he had been embarrassed to pronounce it, even to Eleanor, had let himself out of the house into the chill dawn, in his shirtsleeves, and walked down to his office in the Exchange building.
There, on the twenty-second floor, he’d opened his office and examined the contents of the room. So enormous was his desire to find something changed that he could nearly not tell the difference between fact and fantasy, could not be sure of the simple forensic evidence that might reveal whether Jason had been there. Had someone been sitting in his desk, using the telephone? Papers seemed to have been moved, and a box of his cigarettes, Shermans, was nearly empty—had he left it so? The universe before the bomb explosion seemed so distant it was impossible to recall with any certainty. Finally Jack had opened the office safe, reached in for the little package Jason had asked him to keep there, a package—he’d assumed—containing documents necessary for constructing a new identity, and found it gone. That was conclusive: Jason was the only person in the world with the combination to that safe. For long, long moments by the open safe Jack had leaned his head against the surface of the desk. Now the entire office arranged itself in confirmation: the phone, the papers, the cigarettes. Jason had been there—after the explosion. So one kind of pain, which had lasted all night, ended, and another, which was to last the rest of his life, began.
