You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  For a time, this very early morning in late autumn, Molly is carried along that wave of emotion. When it releases her it is one o’clock gone, the moon fifteen degrees further across the sky, the earth fifteen degrees closer to the moment when it would show Saugerties to the morning sun, and she, Molly—she realizes with shock—is one hour closer to something she had never had any idea that she was going to have to do, never.

  Before dawn, when I will awake with the rising sun, it is Molly’s job to tell her lover Jason Sinai that his father is dead.

  A little laugh now, involuntary, almost embarrassed.

  See, there is a terrible irony in this for Molly. It’s that, this is not the first time she’s brought news of death. She’s done it before, and it was the worst moment in her life.

  The only possible comfort, at the time, had been that she’d never have to do it again.

  2.

  But that night in her lighted kitchen, that huge gibbous moon outside the window, Molly still isn’t even close to understanding the enormity of what is about to happen.

  Perhaps one day she will look back and see that, of course, everything was about to change for her, that night.

  See, Molly doesn’t know it but there’s this little decision she made, in this same house, thirty years ago, that is about to bear fruit, and when it does, it will change everything. Really, it’s incredible that she doesn’t see, two moments of her life, thirty years apart, wrinkling time and meeting, like two folds in an origami bird, in perfect symmetry.

  Lies will do that.

  Lies will punctuate our lives like that.

  Especially the lie Molly told, and has been telling, all these last thirty years.

  Now, however, she has something else to think about. Now, she has a practical difficulty to surmount. And thinking about that, Molly purses her lips and whistles, low.

  The conversation she is about to have will be neither short nor sweet. It is going to sweep J off his fucking feet. But in the morning, there’ll be Izzy to deal with, and what could they do with an eleven-year-old girl while her father fell to pieces? Get a babysitter? Molly explains this to the computer: “Say I take her for early dropoff at school? Then where would I park J.? The second I leave him alone, J.’ll be reading the Times online—he has the damn newspaper up on the computer screen before he even has coffee.”

  No, it was clear, and what was clear was that sometime, sooner rather than later, she is going to walk out of her kitchen door into the moon-flooded, late autumn night, cross the unnamed road between her white clapboard house and Jason’s, dappled silver and black herself as she walks below the duotoned leaves, let herself in the front door and climb the back stairs to his bedroom where she will wake him and sweep him off his feet.

  She’ll need to be quiet, firm, and, to some extent, removed.

  She’ll need to be almost clinical.

  See, she has done this before, and so, she knows how much focus it takes.

  Thirty years ago, she had driven, as the locals say, “up the mountain” from Saugerties to Tannersville to lie to Don Sackler Sr. that his son, her husband, had been killed walking point in Songh Be Province.

  One o’clock. She considers the computer screen soberly, one eyebrow raised. When they slept together, this was when she left his bed. In this respect, her insomnia was useful: she could sleep against the hair of his chest for a couple hours, then go home, and Izzy never knew she had been there.

  She thinks: let him sleep the REM cycle out. Wake him around two-thirty. Have coffee ready, breakfast. She remembers how hungry Don Senior, her father-in-law, had been after his short, private outburst, for which he’d left the room: she’d heard him from behind closed doors, sitting alone in the living room of the dead silent Onteora Park house. But as quickly as her mind touches this she pulls it away. Later for all that. Now there is refuge in the practical. She’ll have to do it in his kitchen. Somehow have him composed by seven, when Izzy gets up for school. And be aware—of course—in case she wakes up during it all. Molly purses her lips now, taking resolve to be perfectly mindful of the possibility of Izzy waking up. To be ready to come out and take her back to bed before she could see her father cry. She will, she thinks, put him with his back to the living room and sit across the table from him, watching the door. But not yet. Two more hours of sleep before she changes his life.

  No worry, after all, that someone else would wake him with the news.

  The thought made her laugh, a little and without amusement.

  See, no one else knows who Jim Grant, one of n-plus-one lawyers in the Saugerties telephone book, is. So no one else is going to have any reason to wake him in the middle of the night to tell him of the death of the great Jack Sinai except insofar as Jack Sinai could be said to be an inspiration—like Leonard Boudin, or Martin Garbus, or William Kunstler—for Jim Grant’s law practice.

  So she has a plan. Briefly, she wonders what else needed taken care of. J. has a mother, brother, a half-sister. As far as she knows, J. has not been in touch since 1970, when he became a federal fugitive. Need she contact them? Immediately, she rejects the thought. That was precisely how fugitives got caught.

  How awful it felt to her, not to have family available. How unnatural. Like not being able to bury Donny because, according to the Marines, there wasn’t enough of him to ship home. It felt like something else, too, something else unnatural. For a moment she sought, sitting at the computer in the lighted kitchen, the similarity. When she found it, she pronounced it before she could stop herself.

  It was like having to lie about how Donny died, to his own father, to her own parents.

  But there is no time for this, no time for this. She rises to go get dressed, to take a shower, to have something to eat, to get ready.

  And still she finds herself, moments later, standing rifling through the dump-everything kitchen drawer, just in case the past fifty times she searched it she missed a cigarette, tears coursing down her cheeks.

  Thirty years had passed since she drove up the mountain to lie to Donny’s father about his son’s death in Songh Be Province. Johnson was president. She wore her hair in a center-parted perm wave, owned a mini-dress. A paisley one. She remembered perfectly how it felt. The thought itself didn’t upset her. Thirty years after your husband’s death, you can be matter-of-fact about it. What weighed on her was that the other person she hadn’t told the truth to, that was J.

  She hadn’t told J. the truth about Donny. It had felt like a betrayal too. Not because J. was her lover, but because J. was a radical, the kind of person, in the war years, Donny hated. And vice-versa.

  It wasn’t personal, and that was what made her feel so bad. It was political.

  Of course, she hadn’t told anyone else, anyone else in the whole wide world, the truth about Donny either, had she?

  And why was that?

  3.

  Molly and Jason met nearly ten years earlier when Mount Marion school district had to hire a lawyer to sue the Board of Education on behalf of the Teachers’ Union. The lawyer turned out to be this celebrated local liberal, Jim Grant from Woodstock, married to the actress Julia Montgomery, who wanted to take the case pro-bono. Had she been in charge, then, they never would have hired this caviar-left asshole with his starlet wife. Then, however, she had been a high-school French teacher, not the grammar-school principal, and had no say.

  That turned out not to matter. He won the case, for one thing. Nor was that all. Because after months of working together on the law suit, it turned out they were both training for the Boston Marathon, and so they came to run together first sometimes, then frequently, then regularly. Grant never told her that he and his wife were splitting up, had in fact split up. She heard it one day in Aunt Lucy’s when she ran into Betsy Pelliteri, a real-estate agent from up the mountain. She said Grant’s wife was already in England rehabbing a drug problem the size of a house; that Grant, because the sprawling ranch he lived in on a hundred and ten acres in Woodstock
belonged to his wife, was looking to move—and looking, now, as a virtually impoverished public interest lawyer, not as the husband of an heiress. Of course, she called him that night and offered him the empty carriage house, kitty-corner across the dirt road to the old Bentley Farm. So they became neighbors, Grant, his daughter Isabel, that is, me, and Molly Sackler.

  And then it was the afternoon they came home from a run. Rain had broken out around mile three, they’d stuck it out five more. So they were soaked, and Izzy was in school, and they were on the intersection of the two dirt roads between their houses, in soft afternoon light, the rain sheeting down. There had been a sort of ecstasy in the run, shoes slapping against wet grass, the roadside passing field, house and tree, melting into the gray light, the body’s machine hot in the wet air. And suddenly his lithe, long body, the warm working muscle, the rain-cooled skin, was in her arms, and his wet mouth was open against hers, and fatigue and heat and comfort and utter thoughtlessness, utter thoughtlessness, were pouring into her like water into a glass, the rain whispering shh, shh, shh, the light like a blanket, and just then, when all her strength and courage and age and desire were perfectly equal to what was about to happen to her, just then, he stepped away.

  Mol.

  Jim. It came out like: Ji-im.

  Molly. I have to tell you something.

  The long shh, shh, shh of the rain, near and far. What, for God’s sake, is worth telling me now?

  Who I am.

  I know who you are. She was trying to say: and I know what I want you to do.

  He said, no. You don’t. I have to tell you.

  So that was the love story. Like so much in his life, outsized. You did not have to know J. well to see that he lived very large: huge accomplishments, huge mistakes. Later, there was more. Later she learned about his whole life: how he was a founding member of Weatherman at the University of Michigan, how he narrowly missed the townhouse bombing on March 6, 1970 and went underground, how he escaped again after the Bank of Michigan robbery and created Jim Grant’s identity from a dead baby’s papers in Bakersfield, California, and went back to college, where he met Julia Montgomery, and married her and went to law school and finally came to live in her house in Woodstock and have a daughter with her. How after all the other fugitives from the ’60s surfaced and resumed their lives, one even claiming his social-security earnings from his false identity, J. failed to, because of the murder charge; for fear of the consequences to his daughter, in fact, to his daughters, for my half-sister Rebeccah was born when he was underground with Mimi. Later Molly came to grips with the fact that J. was not only a person, he was also an icon, and being in love with an icon is a job. Now, there was just the contained heat of his body with its red chest hair drawing her, up to her childhood bedroom, toward him, less—now—because of its inherent attraction, although he was attractive, than because of the realization cascading within her of what he had entrusted to her, himself, his daughters.

  And here is Molly, midnight gone in her kitchen, not lost in reminiscence, hardly. Aware, rather—shockingly, lucidly aware—of the facts before her, because now she turns from the hold-everything drawer, which is entirely devoid of cigarettes, and addresses the computer screen: “Naw, let him sleep till five. Don’t give him too much time. Two hours till Iz wakes? He’ll have to step right up to the plate.”

  Was that better? Evidently. Because right away, as if guided by remote control, she turns, walks to the sun porch and takes a barely smoked Marlboro Light from a pot of narcissi even though she had no memory of putting it out there. Lights it and, exhaling smoke, nods conspiratorially to the new green shoots of the plants, just emerging from their bulbs. “He can’t handle himself by seven, he takes off and I wake Izzy. That’s all. Tell her he had to go to work early.”

  So it was a plan. And this was a cigarette. She says aloud: “That is a plan. And this, man oh man, is a cigarette.”

  For a moment, on the flood of nicotine in her blood, she feels something like normal.

  Then the rush passes and soberly she thinks that she is going to own Jason and Izzy a little more after this. Jason with his iconic, strange, secret life; Izzy with her lithe little spirit. In a serious way, they were going to be a little more hers than ever before, after this.

  Another zone of vulnerability, as Tolstoy would say. Was she ready? Extend her life of sitting up reading the news to two more people? Have to worry about a daughter too? You worry about your son? Try having a daughter. Her father used to say that. She could see him. Worrying about their physical safety? Just wait, young lady, till it’s their emotional safety that’s at stake.

  That it was a worry she knew so well, that added no value whatsoever.

  The world of worry for your child, she knew, everyone who came to it was the first explorer, and discovered it anew.

  And—pay attention now—the little truth that had just barely shown itself to her, the little thing she had neglected to tell anyone in the thirty years since her husband died, that inconvenient detail that, a moment ago, had shown itself to her in sudden glimpse of a realization as unalterable, inevitable—the lie—backed off.

  As lies, if you try hard enough, will.

  4.

  How he cried. She had never seen anyone cry like that. It was like turning on a faucet. Inconsolable wasn’t the word. She didn’t think there was a word.

  Waking, in his room, he was Jim Grant—a lean, middle-aged man, his warm body covered with still-red hair that had all but abandoned his head—waking to face another responsibility, another request for help, another demand. Waking he was, as always, in control; as always, instantly collected, open for business. He’d leaned up on an elbow in the black room, shaking off sleep, then swung his legs out of bed and stood up.

  “Moll, Izzy okay?”

  “All okay, J.”

  “You okay?”

  “Everyone’s okay.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “’Kay.” Little J. No more questions, no objections. He stepped naked across to the bureau, slipped on a pair of underpants, then a bathrobe from the closet, and followed her out of the room. On the staircase she waited by the window while he checked on his daughter. Late November, the trees trumpeting their mad duotoned cacophony, the pregnant, hugely gibbous moon on the wax, dropping a silvery light over the street, and across the street, her home. Not that the night-time view from J.’s house had much mystery for her: she saw it too often. Rain was due that day, the paper said, but there was no sign of it in the moon-flooded sky. Still, it seemed a long time that she waited by the window, a long enough time that even she had to admit that the stillness, the absolute quiet of the street under the silvery fall of moonlight, the street her Royalist family had owned since Washington’s army had driven them up the Hudson two centuries before, was a testament to something. For a moment she sought for what. The best she could do, though, was to how much they took the solidity of the world for granted, which, Molly thought then, was not quite it.

  Later, she’d know otherwise. It was it, exactly.

  And then Little J. was there, and she took him down the stairs, sat him at the kitchen table in front of a cup of coffee, just like she had planned, his back to the living room in case Izzy woke up, and instantly, he was a different man.

  It lasted a full hour. Sitting at his table, serving him food, holding his hands. They read the Times coverage on the Web, the Guardian, J. peering out from behind a mask of tears, Molly half perched on a chair she’d pulled up next to him, so she could keep him in her arms as he read. How he cried. He talked, he made the kind of wry jokes the grieving make, then he cried some more. And just as she was beginning to prepare him for me to wake up, as abruptly as it had started, it stopped. He stood up and, for a long time, let her take him in her arms, stooping slightly so he could put his face in her neck. Then he asked her if she could take care of Izzy for a couple of days. She was ready for all this.


  “Little J., I do not want to hear you’re going to the city.” She was ready to say: Your father was so, so careful to keep you from that. She was ready to say: You owe it to him to be careful. She was ready to say more, too, much more—perhaps too much more. But he shook his head and answered softly.

  “No, baby. It’s that, I always promised myself that when Pop died, I’d sit shiva at Huckleberry Point.”

  Huckleberry Point was a rock ledge off Platte Clove that looked clear over the Hudson Valley. It was, she knew, a place J. and his father had camped, in the early ’60s, when Jack Sinai first introduced his eldest son to the Catskill Mountains that would later be his home. She asked softly, “What does it mean to sit shiva?”

  “It’s like a wake. You’re supposed to do it for seven days, at home, with your family. All your friends come to visit. They’ll be starting today on Bedford Street.”

  Then he began to cry again, his sodden face against her neck, his body heaving with sobs, so much she thought this time he’d never stop.

  Jason Sinai kept two bags ready under his bed in case he was discovered. One was a suitcase to disappear into the city, one a pack to run to the mountains. Now he was out the door with his pack in ten minutes.

  He didn’t trust himself to see his daughter.

  That gave Molly an hour and a half to wait until she had to wake her. She spent it online, reading about Jack Sinai. It wasn’t that she hadn’t known who he was. She had. But the lefty pantheon of which he was a part was filled with luminaries who meant nothing to her. The attention paid to him in the papers was astounding. It seemed that Hillary Clinton was planning on attending the funeral. The Albany Times Union chimed in with an op-ed on entitled “Eleanor Clinton.”

  That the wife of a sitting president should even consider attending the funeral of an avowed Communist, a lawyer who defended the Brinks Robbery cop killers, and the father of notorious fugitive Jason Sinai is as much of an insult to the state of New York as was Eleanor Roosevelt’s support for the Communists in Spain an insult to the people of the United States of America.