by Mendy Sobol
“My parents gave up in ‘82,” I said, “after the brick through the window, the break-ins, the threats.”
“Graft was part if it, too,” Kelly said. “Not like that’s a surprise in New Jersey, but since I’ve been at the station it’s more like official looting. And the school board, teachers, firefighters, police, none of them live here anymore. That disconnect, plus more corruption cases than prosecutors can handle—blue-collar, white-collar, black, white—wiped out everyone’s respect for The Man. The country’s richer than ever, but politicians and banks write off cities like Applewood like they’re writing off a bad loan they never made in the first place. So how does Applewood make up the difference? By raising property taxes—taxes no one can afford. This piece of crap house? Applewood’s billing us eighteen grand a year, and redlining banks won’t loan us a penny for repairs. It’s the same everywhere in this city. That means more bankrupt businesses, more abandoned buildings. And who do you think’s gonna fill that void?”
“Who?” I said.
Kelly looked at me like I’d just arrived from Mars. “Who else? Crips and Bloods, crack and drive-bys. Hilversum gave lots of official reasons for closing, but I saw its last graduation—scared-looking parents, and kids getting their diplomas in front of graffiti-covered buildings. That told the real story. I don’t know what it was like here when you grew up, Tesla. I wasn’t born yet. I only know that I’ve heard gunshots in the front yard and gunshots in the back yard. One night, some guys were shooting up the old dorms with automatic weapons—just for fun! I sneak in and out of here every day. If I didn’t love the station and love my job, I’d never set foot in Applewood.”
“Why doesn’t the station move to another city?” I said
Kelly laughed, but she wasn’t smiling. “We were planning to move to Hoboken until Toby showed up. He’s screwed up all our lives.”
“I’ve got to see my old house,” I said. “It’s where I grew up, where Meg and I were married. I can walk from here. I mean, if it won’t put you in danger, Toby.”
“Sure, Tesla,” Toby said. “Go see your home. Kelly’ll go with you, keep you safe. I wish I could go too. I can still taste your mom’s Friday-night roast-beef dinners.”
“Oh great,” Kelly said, acid edge returning to her voice. “Send the blond girl into the ‘hood to play bodyguard for the visiting dignitary. What the hell ever happened to chivalry?”
“Just make sure he stays in one piece. He’s the only hope we’ve got. And Kelly...”
“Yes, m’lord.”
“…bring back some pizza!”
When I moved to Vietnam, I brought a photo album filled with pictures of home and family. I never looked at it. Visiting the old places in the four dimensional world of dreams always seemed more real than two-dimensional images on paper.
In some dreams I made my way home heading west through Newark’s Branch Brook Park, passing Central Avenue’s apartment buildings and shops, crossing Grove Street by Holy Name Catholic Church and All Souls School, cutting through the Columbus School playground, down elm-lined Roosevelt, turning up Grant Avenue at the Presbyterian Church toward North Arlington. In others, I came south from the nearby Bloomfield border, passing Fredrick’s Tavern and the A.P. Smith manufacturing plant, under the Erie Lackawanna railroad bridge, following North Arlington all the way.
With Kelly, I walked east down Springdale past Roxy’s, within earshot of the Garden State Parkway’s steady drone. Turning left at the garden apartments on North Arlington, I asked her, “Do you agree with Toby’s plan?”
“I don’t have a choice. Sooner or later someone’s gonna squeal on him. Or drink too much at a party and brag about how they met the famous fugitive. I can’t believe we’ve hidden him this long. Toby’s plan is the only way out of this mess for all of us.”
“Aren’t you worried about what might happen to you if we change history back to the way it was?”
“I would be worried if I believed any of that stuff. You guys may be Einsteins, or Teslas, or whatever, but I still think you’re crazy.”
We walked another block past the Methodist Church on Rutledge, the street where Timmy Jorgensen once lived. Along North Arlington, some homes looked much the same as I remembered. Fresh paint, mowed lawns. Brick, wood, plaster. Windows, double hung and picture. Roofs, gray slate and brown shingle. Every style America could muster from before, between, and after the World Wars. The streets and sidewalks looked familiar, too, with kids walking to school, parents driving to work. These were the streets where my friends and I biked and roller-skated, built tree houses in summer, snow forts in winter, hid, and held hands. Timmy and I had a secret route on the long block between Rutledge and Renshaw, where from tree to roof to utility pole we traversed the half-mile from the Methodist Church to Ellen Hoffmann’s wooded yard without ever touching ground. I could imagine the children who walked past us discovering our route, enjoying its mysteries as much as we did.
According to the Applewood Record’s account, these were also the streets where last week a woman was carjacked from her own driveway. Some of the houses looked like they belonged in a neighborhood where that could happen. Injured, broken, abandoned.
A red Mustang convertible filled with a half-dozen teenagers drove past, the car radio blasting distorted bass. One, sitting high, almost standing in the back seat, pointed, saying, “Hey... white people!” no malice in his voice, only unselfconscious disbelief.
And at the corner of Grant and North Arlington, my home. The place where I grew up, the place where Meg and I were married. The safe and happy place, end-point in so many twilit odysseys, but no longer looking as it did in my time, in my dreams.
Twin white Georgian columns at the front entrance gone, replaced by rough, nailed-in four-by-fours. The century-old indestructible golden brick—no façade, but rather a fort-like foot-and-a-quarter thick—dirty, chipped, crumbling. Leaded French windowpanes opaque with grime. Lawn a mass of weeds and litter. Camellias, azaleas, peonies, roses—brown, dead, hacked down, rooted up. Walking to the yard, standing beneath the ruined rose trellis where Meg and I said, “I will,” Kelly, seeing my tears, took my hand, saying nothing.
In my dreams, I often made it to the house on North Arlington only to wake up before entering. Sometimes, Odysseus-like trials and obstacles kept me blocks away. Sometimes, through the power of the dream, I was inside my old house, still magically retained by my parents for east-coast visits, still filled with familiar things, with love, still home. Now, in my old back yard, in a world more angular and concrete than dreams allow, I thought how I could probably jiggle the third French window at the corner of the sun parlor, jiggle it just so, loosening the latch, opening it, sliding myself up and over and into the sun parlor of the obviously empty, unlived-in house, the same way I’d snuck out early or snuck in late so many times when I was a kid. But turning to Kelly, holding her comforting hand harder than I’d realized, looking in her eyes, I said instead, “Let’s go. Toby’s waiting.”
PART SIX
MEG
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Meg
“Meg Wells—do you know what they say about you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t even know who ‘they’ are.”
“They say you had it all. Energy, ambition, an Ivy League degree. You could have been a Fortune 500 C.E.O. living in a Park Avenue penthouse. Why choose life in a thatch shack? Why choose insects and snakes? Why choose Vietnam?”
Another perky, fresh-out-of-journalism-school, Diane-Sawyer-wannabe reporter, thoughtlessly asking canned questions. Shiny mauve fingernails absently scratch below the hemline of her black mini. She doesn’t realize a fat Mekong mosquito’s discovered the new blood in town, boring through her white pantyhose and soft, pale skin. Meanwhile, Paul’s busy at the other end of the compound. Like he always is when the media shows up.
“I never graduated,” I said.
“What?”
“I never graduated. Never got a degree. I dropped out.”
“I didn’t know.... I mean the research department never told me. I mean....”
“Look, why don’t we get you out of those hose and into some shorts. You must be sweltering. And how about some DEET to keep the bugs off?”
“No, I’m fine. Really. My family camps at Lake George every summer, and Daddy always says black flies never bite me because I’m so sour.”
Hearing myself sigh, not much caring if the reporter hears it too, I think, So it goes. Like Kurt Vonnegut said in that lecture my senior year at Wellston, So it goes.
I made Time’s cover twice, once when I won the Peace Prize (Meg Wells, Mother of Vietnam), again the following week when I turned it down (The Woman Who Said No). Toby trumped me with three cover stories. May 1971, Electronic Meltdown, his Wellston Yearbook photo, the one with the beret and star and long dark hair making him look like a cross between Che Guevara and Meat Loaf. Then May 1996, The Hacker Who Changed History: Toby Jessup Twenty-Five Years Later, with a ridiculous police artist’s composite sketch. Paul and I laughed together over stupid stories of Toby sightings anywhere other than pizza parlors or pinball arcades, but Paul’s nightmare returned for months, waking him, leaving him sleepless, drained. And the next time, Lightning Strikes Twice, an illustrator’s imaginative rendering of a Toby who looked like Brando in The Godfather, separated by lightning bolts from the A.P. wire photo of Melora under arrest, bleeding and in handcuffs. After the exchange, we were all there together, a nifty collage of past covers under the banner, People of the Year – Three Who Changed History. Paul wasn’t mentioned. And Paul was the only true history changer among us.
At the cost of Toby’s freedom, I’d rescued Melora, Grendel, and the Modern Café gamers from prison, and gotten the obstruction-of-justice charges against the WFMH co-conspirators dropped. No deal for Cooperman, though. That was one miracle even Saint Meg couldn’t perform. The feds called his crimes “unrelated terrorism” and refused to budge. He still had twelve years left on his fifteen-year sentence.
Now it was time for another in-depth feature article in Esquire, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, whichever magazine sent this girl into the jungle to find me. Why did they bother? Their editors had already decided what she’d write. Meg’s a hero. Meg’s a villain. Meg’s a hero to some and a villain to others. In the end, what difference did it make?
“Where would you like to begin?” I said.
“At the beginning!” she said, giggling a little, scratching a little more.
“I grew up in Grosse Pointe. Do you know anything about Grosse Pointe?”
“One of my sorority sisters lives there. Do you know Shannon Willey?”
“Kim—or is it Kimberly?” She nods. I’m still not sure which she prefers, decide to go with Kim. “Kim, I’ve been in Vietnam since 1972. My parents have been dead for ten years. I don’t know anyone in Grosse Pointe.”
The photographer, who’s been swatting mosquitoes and fiddling with his lenses, laughs out loud, chokes it off with fake coughing, nearly drops his camera.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kim says.
I have no idea what she’s talking about. My face, as always, shows it.
“I mean about your parents.” Three new welts spread across Kim’s knee. Gleaming fingernails scratch.
“Listen, Kim,” rising, placing my arm around Kim’s shoulders, “I’m not saying another word until you change into comfortable clothes and rub on some bug juice. And Scooter,” (I can’t believe the photographer, a man of at least fifty, goes by the name Scooter), “why don’t you head over to the commissary. They’ll fix you up with some lunch, and Kim will call you when we’re ready.” He nods. I don’t know why, but all news photographers love food. Especially free food.
Kim raises her hand like an elementary school kid trying to get the teacher’s attention. “Uh, Scooter, I really think we should....” Scooter ignores her, hoists his camera bag, takes off toward the commissary at a run.
“Scooter hates me, my editor hates me, even my interns hate me.” Kim and I, in the empty clinic, Kim sobbing hysterically, head on my shoulder, like a child, like a daughter, tears soaking through my khaki shirt, through to the skin above my heart.
“It’s okay, Kim. You’ll be all right. Besides, they’re jealous.” Holding her, stroking her bleached yellow hair.
“You really think so?” Kim brightens a little.
“I’m thinking any guy named Scooter is jealous of everyone.”
Kim smiles, showing white, straightened teeth. I hold a handkerchief to her nose—Kleenex still an impossible luxury at the clinic—she blows long and hard.
“It’s because they think daddy got me the job. They don’t know how hard I worked in school, but everyone knows he golfs with the publisher. When they come back from the country club, daddy always drops by my desk and loud enough so everyone can hear says, ‘And how’s my little ace reporter today? Working on a Pulitzer?’ I hate it when he does that! And that’s why they sent me here. Everyone says you’re a horrible interview,”—not a hint of self-consciousness—“that you never talk about yourself, only the clinic. And they knew I wasn’t ready. They sent me here to fail!”
Dabbing at Kim’s mascara-streaked cheeks, too late for my ruined shirt. “Have you got your makeup kit handy?” Kim looks up, touches her shoulder bag, nods. “Then let’s make a trade. Promise you’ll show me how you do your makeup. In return, I’ll give you the interview of a lifetime. Deal?”
I stick out my hand. Kim takes it in both of hers like she may never let go, powder-blue eyes smiling above damp cheeks.
“Deal!”
“And I’ll tell you what. When we’re done, you’re going to get that Pulitzer.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Meg
Sweeping lawns, manicured landscapes. Huge mansions of stone and brick. Castles for the royalty of America’s classless society kept safe from Detroit’s pollution, poverty, and housing projects by moats of interstate highways and hundreds of blue-uniformed knights. In Mary Margaret Wells’ Grosse Pointe castle—thirty-two rooms on six acres—Dad was king. Within its walls he ruled with absolute power. Whether the subject was politics, clothes, or what we ate for dinner, only one opinion counted in my house, and that was Dad’s.
My first memory was of watching the Korean War on our black-and-white TV, asking my parents to turn it off, my dad saying “No, you have to watch because your mother and I are watching.” My second memory is our first trip to Florida.
I was six. Dad liked to begin car trips at night when “all the trash got off the highways.” We piled into our cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with its gleaming chrome fins and tan leather seats, me in my footsie pajamas clutching a pillow under one arm and Gingie, my Teddy bear, under the other, heading down our quarter-mile driveway for the interstate.
I woke in Savannah.
Me stretching groggily on the back seat, Mom sitting up front next to Dad, Dad driving, Dad smoking a cigar. Even the stench of his El Rey del Mundo couldn’t block the smell of Savannah’s black shantytown, the smell of rot, garbage, and fouled water. As far as I could see through the Eldorado’s half-open rear window, black people, going about their business in seemingly aimless patterns like busy ants on a hot day. And it was a hot day. The sun barely risen and it had to be ninety. In and out of windowless shacks pieced from corrugated cardboard and tin, black men, black women, black babies, clothed in rags, barely clothed, nearly naked. Poverty—no, much more than poverty—poorness, poor people, people with nothing but tin and cardboard, brown water and rotting waste.
“Dad, when we get home, can I call President Eisenhower? I want to tell him about the poor people in Savannah. He’ll help them!”
Turning, billowing gray smoke toward me, Dad answers. “Come on Princess, those Negroes aren’t doing so bad. Why look—they’ve got air conditioning.”
I looked, seeing no sign of big grey units like the ones that cooled our stone castle on hot Michigan days.
“I don’t think s
o, Daddy. They don’t even have real windows, just holes in their walls.”
“That’s what I mean Princess—natural air conditioning!”
Then Dad laughed and laughed. He must have laughed all the way to St. Augustine.
Fifteen years later in Professor Stinson’s U.S. History class at Wellston, Stinson’s delivering a lecture on politics and society in the 1950s.
“So you see, it wasn’t that America didn’t have problems in the ‘50s—poverty, racism, political repression—but those problems were hidden. Most Americans had no way of knowing about them.”
Raising my hand from the back of Lafayette Hall, I interrupted Stinson, saying, “I was six years old, and I knew.”
Dad graduated from Harvard. He never doubted I’d go there too. Of course he meant the women’s college, Radcliffe, but never referred to it, only Harvard. “Hell, for all the donations I’ve made to get my Meg into Harvard, they should name a library after her!” At dinner parties, birthdays, funerals, Dad let everyone know he was making sure I’d be accepted. And Mom decorated my room with souvenirs from Dad’s reunions—pennants, pillows, ashtrays, and plaques—all of Harvard crimson.
Senior year in high school, I went through the motions of a Harvard interview. The interviewer was Brownell “Brownie” DeWolfe, stuffy, arrogant, rude, a classmate of Dad’s.
“Do you think I should consider some other schools besides Harvard?” I asked.
“Now Meg, there are no guarantees you’ll get into Harvard. But I hope you realize one can’t really consider oneself educated unless one has a Harvard diploma.”
