by Marge Piercy
“… and I don’t give a shit if Lenin carved it on a stone tablet, are we making a revolution or are we making paper?”
Experiencing a moment of deja vu, Vida decided to speak, “Gee” She looked straight at Kevin. “That reminds me of Randy. Same damn rhetoric. Act now, pay later. Last one in’s a coward. Hoopla, over the side and don’t watch to see if anyone follows”“
Kevin rose in his seat, the cords standing out in his neck. “Are you calling me an agent?”
“Of course not. I’m saying you didn’t learn from our errors”
“Good point” Lark flexed his fingers, cracking his joints mechanically, “We must learn from our errors, all of us”
They were ganging up on Kevin: maybe he represented an earlier phase they were rejecting as vehemently as they had embraced it. Even the quarrels between the ex-lovers were held against Kevin as they might as easily, two years before, have been laid to her. Lark and Roger did not exactly share a style, but they were not street fighters. Lark was too influenced by the Vietnamese to charge around waving his prick. He wanted to speak quietly and persevere for the long haul. He thought of himself with pride as an organization man. What went on in Rhodesia and in Angola was as important to him as what happened in this room; distant battles fed and drained him. He read long articles on the latest ideas of Kim Il Sung and Enver Hoxha. Since he had awakened in the hospital behind the lines minus a leg, he had viewed himself as a dead man. To a cause he had grown to despise he had given his leg; he would give his body, his mind, his life to a cause he respected. His personal life was only mortar between carefully fitted blocks of theory and practice.
Roger adopted a working-class style, dressing in baggy work clothes her dad would never have been caught dead in when he wasn’t lying under a truck. But Roger wrote poetry and read Neruda with more passion than the Guardian and she had seen him stop dead in the street upon catching sight a child with brown braids down her back, stop and swallow and swallow as his Adam’s apple bobbed with pain. He watched sports programs with the other men as if it was a discipline he was forcing on himself; always when he talked about some basketball player, he sounded self-consciously folksy. In Seattle he had been beaten by the police in relays, handcuffed to a radiator and beaten unconscious. When he had come to, they had beaten him again. Six months later he had enjoyed placing the bomb himself. Of course, they called in a warning first, but the records went up, and Roger was satisfied.
“You’re all turning yellow. Now, when we have them on the run, you’re getting scared. You want to let the troops down” Kevin was fighting, but not with his head. He pounded on the table, he threatened, used to getting his way; more used to it than anyone else at the table, because he had been king of the mountain at Hardscrabble and had become habituated to giving orders and being obeyed. Kevin had never been a member of SAW, a wildly democratic organization—passionately, agonizingly on all levels democratic—but the rest of them had. The four of them had been trained to argue for a position, to lose gracefully, plotting to rise again in a parliamentary motion, to compromise for support by accepting a friendly or even moderately hostile amendment, to shift support from one candidate to another and withdraw it behind the scenes. They were used to counting votes in their heads. That had been the purpose of sending Lark to Vermont and fetching her to New York. Lark had been feeling out the lay of the land. Kiley, Roger and Lark were allied against Kevin. Now would she be ousted from the Board?
“… time for outreach,” Roger was arguing. “We’re not a military organization exclusively. We must put out propaganda. We must influence the direction the Movement is taking. In short, we have to work on our mass politics”
“Sitting on our ass makes us more of a mass,” Kevin sneered. “People respect us because we act.”
“People mostly have forgotten us,” Vida said coldly. “They’re worried about Nixon and making a living and getting laid off and welfare cutbacks and losing food stamps and prices still going whoopee.”
“Fuck them, we’ll make them remember us” Kevin stood his face shining. “Why draw in our horns? It’s time to strike at the heart. People’s justice—suppose we offed Nixon?”
“We’ve never injured a person, never,” Vida said. “I don’t think ordinary people respect assassinations. All they think is, Jesus, one more gun-happy nut. People are sick of assassinations. I’m sick of assassinations. It’s always the right that does it, anyhow. Why borrow their rotten weapons?”
“We broke with old forms of terror,” Kiley said icily, “because of our analysis. Attacks directed at leaders are individualistic. They further the myth that presidents make history rather than executing the policy of the corporate ruling class.”
“We’ve aimed our attacks at corporations—the invisible government,” Vida argued. “Every time we attack IT and T or Union Carbide, we make them visible. We define their crimes. We’ve always made a sharp distinction between the corporate enemy and employees” For a moment she heard Jimmy saying those words. She had not seen him since she and Lark had got back from New York with Kiley.
“We’ve never tried to do significant damage”“ Lark said. “Why should we? Our aims are political. Blowing up one liquid-gas tanker or a storage facility or a gas pipeline would make an incredible mess out of a city—someday that’ll happen through corporate stupidity and corner cutting. But they’re our cities”
She was helping things along without a clear notion exactly what was afoot. A deep and thorough shift in Network policy was being effected by Kiley, Roger and Lark. They must have decided the Network was isolating itself from aboveground politics. The women’s movement had shaken them. The disappearance from public view of the New Left worried them. They were responding, too, to discontent in the organization; she was sure of that. If Alice cried in Lark’s arms that she didn’t know what were doing, many must feel the same. She found those fears in herself, but she had thought she was alone in doubting.
“I think what’s been going on is that most of us in the Network are secretly scared we don’t know what we’re doing anymore,” she said slowly, nervously. Kiley could mow her down, but the time had come to speak truth to each other. “We go on bombing. We’re better at it. But the purpose is lost. The war’s almost over, the Vietnamese are finally winning. We have to get back to work building an indigenous movement. We have to change or we’re relics. Remember that fossils are also located underground.”
Roger actually smiled. “I agree. We need to have an impact again. Repeating ourselves, the sixtieth bombing, is to persist in what we do only because we’ve learned to do it well—”
“We need direction,” Kiley said briskly. “And I think we need a BOD weighted down toward analysis. We need to put out a document that will move us forward. Jesse, you’re out of touch politically. Perhaps you’ve been leadership too long. Cadre is cadre because it serves the people. The arrogance of power is beginning to cloud your judgment”
Vida realized at the same moment as Kevin did that he was being ousted from the Board. She felt like giggling, and yet she was astounded and even frightened. Kevin had been leadership from the first day they’d run upstate, the first night they had slept in a car Kevin had stolen. A BOD without Kevin was inconceivable. Kevin, Kiley and Lark had been the original and lasting power figures from that cold night in Pennsylvania when they had begun to forge the Network. From the time they had met during a full-scale armed manhunt into which the government had thrown hundreds of agents and millions of dollars, when their Wanted posters had adorned every post office until supporters tore them down, Kiley had been the brains; Lark, the conscience; Kevin, the energy, the fist. Vida felt too startled to speak. She was disqualified by personal rancor, and yet she was not as pleased as she would have expected.
Slowly Kevin rose, towering over them. “What are you motherfuckers trying? I am the Network! You can’t sneak around behind my back. Don’t get funny with me. Vida’s behind this!” he roared.
“Wrong as usual,�
�� Lark said almost amiably. “We didn’t take her into our confidence. We have the votes” He put a pile of petitions on the table. “The membership’s behind us. Eva’s been elected.”
“Eva! That dumb dyke!”
“We agreed to support gay liberation” Roger said. “That’s what’s wrong! You’ve become increasingly individualistic. You’ve encouraged a cult around you. You need to spend more time with the rank and file and pay more heed to the line we hammered out.”
“We have a majority of women,” Vida said wonderingly, wishing she could tell Natalie. See, that would show her sister they were changing, but Board membership was secret.
Only Kiley heard and glared at her as Kevin bellowed, “I’m not getting off! We’ll see who the troops really support!”
“You’re off, as of right now”“ Lark also stood. He was six inches shorter than Kevin and weighed half as much, but he stood up without hesitating, without diffidence. “You’ve been voted off and you’re off. No one has a right to be leadership—no one! We earn it by being responsible revolutionaries. We keep it from the trust of those we lead. You’ve lost that trust”
Kevin clenched his fist and took two steps toward Lark. Kiley rose in his path, tiny and furious. “What do you think you are doing?”
He stopped. Then he picked up a chair and threw it at Lark who ducked. It slammed into the wall. “If you don’t leave the meeting, you’ll be thrown out of the organization as well as the Board,” Roger said quietly as he stood also facing Kevin.
Vida did not believe the threat, but Kevin shouted, “You can’t throw me out! I’m quitting! And you’ll come on your bellies to me begging me back before the month is over!” He slammed out.
The silence was complete for several minutes. “If he really quits,” Roger muttered, “could be awkward. He knows a great deal.”
“He’s shooting off his mouth” Kiley said, sitting down firmly and reaching for her pen. “A fugitive alone is a sitting duck.”
“I wouldn’t care to see him arrested,” Roger continued. “We should send a delegate after him to soothe the battered ego and get him to back down from what has to be an uncomfortable position. Peregrine, how about you pour oil on the troubled waters?”
“He already tried to stick a knife into her this week,” Lark said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go after him yourself, Roger, as the one he has the least against. We should fetch Eva from the farmhouse and resume tomorrow in full session of the new BOD Agenda: new priorities. Relationships to liberation struggles abroad. Relationships to liberation struggles inside this country: Black, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Native American, Union organizing and strikes. Oh, and women.”
“And gay,” Vida said.
“We’ll have to soft-pedal that for international consumption” Lark said. “Peregrine wants to leave Vermont. I’m not even sure Eva should remain. It seems to have been a hotbed of political inactivity. People come up to this farm and vegetate.”
“The whole BOD ought to be active in the field” Kiley said briskly. “We aren’t in the business of growing cabbages and potatoes. Peregrine has not taken any political initiatives or carried out tasks of leadership since the last action. You aren’t on the BOD as decoration, you know.”
I hate that stupid name, Peregrine, she thought; she had found it romantic-sounding that first year, when Kevin had taken Jesse for Jesse James. Roger and Eva had the names they had first used underground; Kiley’s name came off a building, probably in ironic reaction. Lark kept his previous made-up name. “I don’t mean to be,” she said evenly, wanting to give Kiley a hard kick. “Fighting with Kevin has drained my energies, and we’ve been locked in political battle inside the house.”
“I’ll stay for a while” Lark volunteered. “I’ll straighten up the house before I go back to Buffalo. I could use Perry there. A lot is happening”
Kiley lowered one of her thin sharply angled eyebrows. “Interesting. But I think we should spread our cadre more widely. I was about to suggest Philadelphia, where we could use some intelligent liaison with local groups. Also there’s a fight about women’s issues that needs mediating among our people.”
“Buffalo or Philadelphia—which do you prefer?” Roger asked.
“Wherever I’d be most useful,” she said humbly, keeping her eyes on Kiley and ignoring Lark’s glance of appeal. Nobody here knew how involved she was with Leigh and how involved she wanted to be. Philadelphia was only two hours away from him. They could even live together and her real life would resume.
She did not want to become involved with Lark, she knew it through and through; she only wanted to keep him from guessing her decision. “I haven’t been effective politically. I’ve let personal turmoil cloud my judgment. I want to make it up.” She sounded humbly fervent, and she was not lying. She was truly ashamed of how little she had used her leadership role. She also guessed that Lark would take her decision at face value. After all, he had not made any overt suggestions that they become more intensely involved; he had expected working together to accomplish that for him, and he was not accustomed to examining personal motives closely. She thought of his face as he pushed away his plate after eating a little mound of rice and a few Brussels sprouts; she saw him in the car cracking his knuckles and staring grimly ahead. No! She saw Leigh toasting her in the squat motel glasses, the wine red as his lips against his curly beard. Yes. She wanted to be free of sexual entanglements and she wanted Leigh, both, passionately and at once. Free in Philadelphia but secretly married to New York.
Roger went ahead to reason with Kevin, but when the rest of them arrived at Hardscrabble, they walked into a house turned upside down. Kevin was leaving. He had loaded the black Dodge with his few things. Belinda, Jimmy and Bill were going with him.
“I won’t let you take the baby!” Marti said, arms folded on her ample bosom. “You’ve all gone crazy.”
“Leave her” Kevin ordered. “We’ll have to travel light till we knock over a couple banks. We’ll come back for her by summer.”
“I can’t leave her,” Belinda wailed. “I can’t!”
“You can’t take a baby along,” Kevin said. “Come or stay, but you can’t do the kind of fighting we have up the road with a kid on your back”
“She’s just a baby, Belinda” Marti said stubbornly: “She’ll get sick. She’ll be scared. She’ll miss me. She’ll miss the other kids.”
Belinda stood with stooped shoulders, worrying folds of her army jacket in her gaunt hands. She could not move from the front hall. She looked from one to the other and down again. Bill was sitting in the Dodge, warming it up. Vida knew he was running off with Kevin because he was angry at Alice for deciding to get an abortion, but he would not admit that was his reason. Alice sat on the stairway weeping.
“Jimmy!” Vida took him by the arm. “Why are you going? Why? Kevin’s not right!”
Jimmy was smiling a wan twisted smile. His gaze stayed on Kevin who held himself aloof in the doorway with a casual yet military bearing: Kevin looked less crazy, less crazed. He was jaunty poised there, burning with energy. He did not bother putting pressure on his comrades to stay or go. She felt a flash of the old attraction. It was not right for him to go off! Something had gone awry here. Or maybe it was right for Kevin to go and right for her to go with him: almost she felt that. Inaction had poisoned them both. They had scapegoated each other for their impotence. He was using the fight in the Board to pull free of an apparatus that was holding them back. She felt a burning of sorrow in her throat, yet she could not speak. She still wanted to be free of him.
“Jimmy, why are you going?” she whispered, turning his face so that he would look at her with his mild brown eyes.
“He needs me” Jimmy said softly. “If he can’t have you with him, by him, at least he has me. I do, sometimes.”
“Jimmy, don’t sacrifice yourself!”
His lips jerked, and the awkward smile deepened. “Why not?”
What had happened here in her
absence? She doubted if anyone but Kevin or Jimmy could tell her. Jimmy was not angry at her, but he was closed to her in some new and final way. He had given himself over to Kevin absolutely. She remembered the feeling of that abandonment, and involuntarily she let go of Jimmy’s shoulder.
Jimmy stepped past her and took hold of Belinda, still fingering her coat, crouched over. “Come on, pal, let’s get moving. We’ll show all these jerks what guerrilla action is. We’ll show everybody.”
Belinda let herself be tugged along. “I’m coming back in the summer!” she called over her shoulder to Marti. “Take care of Roz. I’m coming back for her by summer!”
By summer only Bill had returned, and Jimmy and Belinda were dead.
PART VII
The Present, November
19
A woman in muslin pajamas whose head was shaved admitted Joel and Vida, telling them in a little voice to be seated on cushions in the room decorated mainly with posters about the Master Sajarahata of the Holy Darkness. Joel raised his eyebrows at her. She was having misgivings herself. The last time she had seen Brenda—in 1975—Eva and she had been traveling through Cleveland together. Brenda had been married to a big surly accountant whose passion was a refurbished Harley-Davidson. Brenda was no longer political but was happy to see them. She introduced them to her husband as her old college roommate (Eva) and her former teacher (Vida).
Brenda had been living in Shaker Heights and taking care of her six-month-old child. Her only outside activity was a Chinese cooking class at the high school one evening a week, and she was delighted to see them, more out of boredom than out of any sense of what they were doing as fugitives. She loved having two women home with her during at least part of every day to share child care and housework and above all, to talk to. At that time, Vida had been in between well-established identities and had used her general Movement pseudonym Peregrine or Perry. In the intervening years Natalie had received several change-of-address cards from Brenda and had passed along the new addresses to Vida. This address had turned out to be a two-story house on a residential block in Cleveland Heights.
