by Neil Gordon
It was the very next day that Jack gingerly placed in the safe in his office the little pile of thousand-dollar bills, in case Jasey ever came back, which a quarter-century later his granddaughter, whom he never met, found in his desk, and spent at the Apple Store.
3.
Now, in his study, at his desk, murkily lit by the ancient desk lamp and the big bulk of a Macintosh that Danny had bought for him and which he never used. It was, literally, book-lined. Next to the little bed he kept there, in the style of a Russian nobleman, there was a halogen lamp for reading, but he kept that off. On the floor was a rug worn thread-thin; a single easy chair, largely for the convenience of the cat. The ceiling was in stamped tin, the style of the house when they bought it in the early ’50s with a windfall from work he’d done for Dalton Trumbo. That is, a windfall from before the blacklist: while Dalton was writing in exile from Mexico, Jack had of course discreetly handled his pseudonymous work and refused any commission.
Midnight gone. Jack was no longer at the desk. He stood by the window, hands in pockets, looking up. The moon was fully behind clouds that were thickening to rain, a black, wet presence, felt rather than seen, beyond the branches of the chestnut, lit now only by the light from Eleanor’s window above him, where she lay reading, waiting for him to come up.
It would have taken Jason some time, had he been here, to recognize that expression on his father’s face. It was one his father had learned long after his elder son left. Nor would Jason have recognized the shape of the body before him: Jack’s elder son had only known him a vital, strong man—sixty-one when Jasey went underground. Now he was much shorter than the man he had left, rounded at the shoulders, bulkier. Still, as his younger son, Danny, would find, during the months of Jack’s illness when he did considerable nursing, unbelievably strong. It was, perhaps, no longer a strength you could see.
In any case, Jason would not really have been able to see it. The room was too dark.
Beyond the study door, in the garden floor of the house on Bedford Street, the family room with its walls of shelved novels, the kitchen and dining room with its ingenious table that, when you fully unfolded it, seated thirty on Passover. Upstairs was the living room, a full parlor floor-through with both the grand staircase leading up and the maid’s stairs going down to the kitchen; then two floors of bedrooms, three per floor, of which one was theirs—Eleanor lay in bed in it now, reading until he came up—and one was Eleanor’s studio and the rest were empty save for when Danny and his family stayed over, as they would doubtless do, Jack found himself noting, for the next several months. Then, he thought with satisfaction, those rooms would again be full.
And with this thought, Jack realized that he had shifted his mode of thought entirely.
A moment ago, he had been reminiscing.
Now he was planning.
Ah, what a relief. To be in the future, of which you had control, rather than the past. Clearly there was no question of going to the hospital. Jack had decided this the minute Holmquist said “pancreas,” though he had perhaps not admitted that he had decided it until now. He knew sixty-year-olds who had died from pancreatic cancer within a month of diagnosis, and that with every possible treatment. For Christ sake, the last time he had spent a night in hospital was with a bullet in his neck in 1937. In quick succession he saw hospital rooms, surgery, the half-consciousness of morphine, and although what he was seeing was a prewar Spanish infirmary, he knew that in no substantial way had anything changed, particularly the pain, the second-by-second experience of endless, unendurable pain. That, and the constant danger of infection. He wasn’t going into such a place, especially not with his immune system knocked flat by chemotherapy, for God’s sake. A final Passover; a few months of illness. They would jump to Israel right away, while he was still fine, and see Klary. Then, one day, he’d climb these steps to his bedroom for the last time and settle in. They had wonderful painkillers. He would have considerable control of their dosage. In his cupboard already were sixty-five tablets of Seconal, just like Israel Singer had used. At the rate he took ten huge Metamucil caplets every night, sixty-five Seconal would be in his stomach in minutes. Then you pump the morphine until you lose consciousness. That, as the kids say, was a no-brainer. And by winter he would be out at Acacia Cemetery, next to the Long Island expressway, next to his father, and his uncles, and his aunts and his cousins, all of those who had done what he was, in his turn, about to do—that is, die.
Telling Ellie he was staying home, that would be the hard part. There was no question about that. She would perhaps need a conversation with Holmquist before she understood. She was fifteen years younger than he, still in her seventies. Of course she’d get there in the end. Maggie could help, and then Klara. Until then, he could pretend he were considering treatment. Meanwhile, he could take Danny into his confidence.
That would be less hard. It was a good ten years since carefully, one step at a time, he had started treating his last son as a grown man. This shock, now, would be one for which he was prepared. He was, after all, nearly forty. Danny was an emotional person. But they would have a lot of time to talk; he would have many, many hours of talk to help Danny into this next stage of his life.
Then there was Klara. He would call the travel agent in the morning: they could spend a week, two weeks with her in Tel Aviv while he could. There are worse places to be when you’re ill than Tel Aviv. In fact, there are not many better. Klara had not been home for nearly ten years, and would likely not come now: even if she could bear to come home: her work, for the Commerce Department, would not allow it.
Eleanor, Danny, Klara. As for himself, everything was in order. Living will, DNR instructions. There was a substantial estate. Eleanor, then Danny and Klary, would be fine. As for Jasey, when he surfaced he’d find not only his third of the estate, but every penny Jack and Eleanor had ever spent on Danny—high school, college, law school, summer camp, birthday—sagely invested in the ’70s and quadrupled in value through the ’90s, since Danny had taken over management of the money, all waiting. The only thing left undone was his papers, stuffed into the drawers of his desk. In the morning he’d go over to the stationers on 6th Ave—not the big new Staples, but the stationers that charged twice as much and had been there as long as he—and buy some of those big legal portfolios. He didn’t need to do much. Sort them by decades maybe. That way, Danny and Jasey could make sense of them, if they wanted, before Tamiment got them after their deaths.
Now the sky was slapping the leaves of the chestnut with fat, gusty drops of rain.
There was only one piece of unfinished business.
Little J.
My father.
Now what could he do for Little J.?
The steps were as clear as one, two, three.
Give an interview. Say he was dying. Sit back and watch. One, two, three. Because as sure as there would be sun, somewhere, tomorrow, when Little J. read that he would come find his father. When Little J. read that, he would come find him. Without the slightest hesitation, Jack measured his son’s awareness of the world, a man heading to fifty, perhaps with children, who had lived in regret for twenty-five years. As sure as there was a T in goddam Tennessee, Little J. would come to him then.
No matter what the danger.
No matter what the cost.
Watching the rain slapping the leaves, Jack traversed a long moment in which he told himself that he knew it, he knew it, he knew it.
And then, in a slow movement, he admitted to himself what he knew, had always known, to be true.
It couldn’t be.
And he had to stop it.
It was the murder charge, you see. The preposterous murder charge. Jasey would never kill a person. Jasey would kill himself before he killed a person. But Dellesandro had, and accessory—given mens rea—was what they were calling, these days, a superprecedent: it was bedrock law. If Jasey were in fact there at the Bank of Michigan, which all evidence said he was, then he was accessory
after the fact, and nothing in God’s green earth was changing that.
The problem was that the Michigan Three—Jason and Mimi Lurie and Sharon Solarz—had not only gone underground in 1970 with the rest of Weather, but they’d then broken with Weather in ’74 when the self-styled “Weather Bureau” had publicly disassociated themselves from the Bank of Michigan robbery. Up until then, from ’70 to ’74, while Jasey had been underground, it had been horrible, but less horrible. There was an actual network of communication; some kids—not Jasey, but others—even found ways to communicate with their parents, and parents found ways to get money to their kids. Jasey hadn’t gotten in touch, not once, ever, but thank God Annie Stein had sometimes been more of a mother than an ideologue and had checked up on Jasey through her daughter and let Jack know, from time to time, that his son was okay. Then Annie had died, and that slim conduit of communication had disappeared.
At first they had kept up with some parents. Which ones, that’s a secret they kept and which even he never found out: there are many more Weather fugitives than remain in the public eye, and some of those parents had sought each other out, desperate for any information they could get from each other, those horrific weeks when, like a ghastly fairytale, all their children had disappeared. Sometimes they’d help each other, get a chance to get some money to one of them for a medical bill; get news of a family death.
Then, like another kind of fairy tale, their kids came back. In the late ’70s, when kids from Weather began to surface, he’d gone to them each, one by one. Everyone had told him they didn’t know where Jasey had gone. Was it true? A ridiculous old man begging for help from the young, but he had scoured their faces to see. Some, clearly, didn’t know. Others wouldn’t have told him if they could. Some were unbelievably cruel, like the one from the Midwest, a beautiful blond-brunette girl with a law degree. He particularly remembered the look in her eyes, the tortuous glare of contempt of the young and powerful. He’d seen it in Spain; he’d seen it in Washington; he’d seen it in Union leadership; and he’d seen in it in Roy Cohn’s saurian eyes. And yet, that same girl had gone to prison for eight months in the ’80s rather than testify against her former friends, and had since then done wonderful work in environmental law. So people were complicated. It wasn’t required to be kind to be right. He’d also seen that in Spain.
Finally, Annie’s daughter—a girl sometimes capable, like her mother, of being kind rather than being right—explained to him that, in fact, none of them had known where he was, not for years. Jasey and his two partners had severed all ties from their former colleagues as early as ’73, and after the robbery were in absentia kicked out of Weather. She had told him that on the Upper West Side, walking outside, just as Annie, with her experience in the Communist underground of the ’50s, would have done, on the banks of the Hudson, watching that same damn river flow.
It was the murder charge, you see, that made this story so unendingly hideous. The others, even the few who served time, had come back to their parents, to their families. The Stein girl was a woman with a career and a husband, a house and two sons. Bernardine Dohrn and her husband lived in Chicago, both professors, raising their own two children and Lenny’s grandson, worrying about private schools and SATs; Mark Rudd lived and taught in New Mexico. All of them had repaired the horrible injury to their own families and gone on to be wonderful parents themselves, even those who remained as adults what they were as children, that is, pricks. But Jasey was wanted as an accessory to murder. David Gilbert was serving seventy-five years to life for a murder of which he’d had no knowledge, just for driving the car. And there was no statute of limitations on accessory to murder.
It was pouring now, the skies wide open, the wind blowing the sodden branches of the chestnut, this way, then that. You were supposed to lose your children to puberty. Then you were supposed to get them back. An endless adolescence was a form of hell. But Jack, by the window, watching the spring rain, was convinced that it would have ended. If Little J. had been able to come back, Jack was sure that they could have found . . . found what? he asked himself. Found . . . a way across the ’60s. He was sure that Jason, with age and time, would have come to understand the similarity between his father’s experience and his own; would understand that the rejection of his father, the cruel rejection by the harsh New Left of the Old Left had been a personal act rather than a political one. Jack was sure that Jason would have come to see that what he and his friends believed wasn’t the slightest bit different from what Jack and his friends believed—that the worker’s paradise was inevitable, that the final fight was at hand to transform the world from the old to the new. It’s the last fight. The last fight, for Christ sake.
Hadn’t they both failed in identical ways?
And hadn’t Jack walked away from his father too?
Hadn’t he, too? Heading to Spain to a fight as insane as Jason’s, at his age too, and never had he seen his father again either, because by the time he was back from Spain, his father was dead.
God. How he would have liked to explain. He had gotten to tell Danny, in detail. It meant something different to Danny. To Danny, it was bibliography; to Jason: biography. Jason would have had an entire other understanding of his father, especially of his father leaving his father. Little J. would have been able to travel to the depth of the experience, understand the full profundity of what his father had done, and the comparison would have helped because it would have relieved Jasey of guilt. Jack was an only son; a precious commodity in the New World, born in an age where children died at shocking rates. His father, at one year old, had been brought to New York by his father’s uncle, old Yankel Singer, then only fourteen—a fourteen-year-old and an infant crossing the Atlantic in steerage!—after his mother had died in a pogrom and his father was drafted into the Russian army. The primitiveness of that world! And Jack had, a generation later, left his father in New York without a second thought, buying passage on a cargo ship from Brooklyn to Biarritz and then walking across the border to Spain, the Bay of Biscay glittering below him on the mountain trail.
The deepest regret in his life, Jack thought, the single most horrific regret is that he couldn’t tell Jason that; couldn’t tell his son that he did not disapprove, he agreed with what he had done. He had to. Others could perhaps be contemptuous. But the same impulse that had driven Little J. into Weather had driven him into the Lincoln Brigade. Nor was it the slightest bit more stupid to have gone up against the American government in Weather than it had been to go fight Franco and Hitler with a couple thousand other volunteers, a tiny army of idealists backed only by a revolutionary government in the Soviet Union that the Wehrmacht, occupying the countries at its borders at will, had laughed at. So who was stupid?
Weren’t there those who thought Churchill stupid, with his minuscule island-nation country, for thinking of opposing—alone, without America—Hitler? Was Ho Chi Minh stupid, or Castro, or Che, or Ortega, or Allende? Was Nelson Mandela stupid? Were that little group of wealthy Englishmen in the mid-1700s any different from this group, two hundred years later? What about the fact that everything they asked, every little thing Weather stood for, despite all their mistakes, despite all their cruelty, was proved by the march of history to be absolutely, word-perfect, right?
The intense pain of the experience had been that, from the beginning, Jasey and his friends had refused to allow him to help. To join their fight. Not for the first time, watching the rain’s full fury pass and, the wind dropping, the sky set out to soak the earth, it occurred to him that they had done precisely what the Dies Committee had done: refused him the chance to fight. Senator Dies in World War II because of that pissy bureaucratic misnomer, “premature antifascist;” these young people because of their own pissy misuse of another word, “liberal.” How a Spanish brigadista had failed their litmus test for radicalism, he was not sure. Of course, he had been the kind of Red they disapproved of: the Weather kids had been as orthodox as anyone, the POUM, the Stalinists
. He’d been suspicious of the orthodoxy of the left even before Spain, as suspicious of the left as he had been contemptuous of the right. Then Trotsky had brought forward that possibility that had rung so true to so many, “Anti-communist Leftist.” To true believers, heterodoxy was a serious crime. And just like the Stalinists in Spain, these young people were nothing if not true believers.
Intensely, more intensely than he could have imagined possible, Jack longed to talk to his son about this. So intensely, he could not distinguish the real impossibility of what he was wishing, he felt it impossible, to the contrary, that he would not see his son, and soon, within days, or hours, or minutes. He felt he had only to walk to the front door. I knew it, I knew it. Surely, surely now that he was dying, he would find a way to communicate with Jason, and Jason would find a way to come see him just as so many of the others had, and then he could tell his son everything.
