The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  And I, who had by now been along for the ride since the night before, wrote the story.

  Now, I have just to add one more detail, Isabel, and I think we can consider the scene appropriately set—even to your father’s satisfaction—for what we have to tell you.

  And that detail is this. When finally Sharon Solarz had been read her rights, formally arrested and handcuffed, taken to Albany, and booked, she was then offered a chance to write and sign a full confession.

  And when she declined that opportunity, she was at last permitted to contact her lawyer.

  The lawyer she called was, per her instructions from Billy, Gillian Morrealle, a criminal defense lawyer at the Boston firm of Stockard, Dyson, Freeh and Kerry; one who had made something of a specialty of representing supposed “political” criminals, many from the sixties and seventies.

  There was nothing private about the call. It was overheard by the guards attending this high-profile prisoner, it was taped, and it was reported, verbatim, to Kevin Cornelius and, through him, to me.

  What she said, was, “Ms. Morrealle? My name is Sharon Solarz. Jim Grant told me to be in touch with you.”

  And now I think you see why, Izzy, I was suddenly, and deeply, curious. I hope you see why. And I think you see why. Because I know how smart you are, which is very, very smart indeed. Smart enough to understand that suddenly, this stopped being Sharon Solarz’s story, or Billy Cusimano’s, and became, in fact, your father’s.

  Date: Saturday, June 3, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 3

  It’s good to know some things never change. Benjamino, for instance. His little account of how he got involved in all this, it got to me this morning around one, and if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d swear that the e-mail smelled of bourbon, no matter that little Benny’s supposed to have given up drinking years ago.

  But I promised Molly I wasn’t going to get pissed off. I understand that everyone on this story experienced it from their own point of view. That some of those points of view reveal the excessive intake of alcohol and a warped sense of history, that need not detain us. I mean, I haven’t the slightest doubt that you read right beyond little Benny’s nonsense and understood how deeply, how profoundly, he had let himself be manipulated.

  Right, Izzy? I mean, you know your grandfather. Does it make sense to you?

  In any case, that Saturday, June 15, 1996, was a big day for a lot of people in this story. And my movements during the day would later come under some serious scrutiny. At the time, however, the only thing remarkable was the perfection of the spring morning, a blue sky empty but for wisps of fading night clouds, the silence of a sleeping neighborhood inhabiting our little corner of Saugerties like the dew hung in the air. In that silence, in your bed by the light-flooded window, you slept.

  Izzy. Do you know, all your childhood, I kept buying the newest video cameras available, and never once did I take a film? I’d lie in bed at night berating myself—your childhood was fleeing, and I was letting it go. But I could not make myself even try to capture it, and each new camera would go, like the one before, unused. What it was, I’d have a vision of myself watching those films at eighty, and I didn’t think I could bear it. Love and loss, for so long, the two had been inextricable to me. How could I stand to look, then, at what I could barely face now: the beauty of this tiny being who had taught me everything I knew about love and who, with each second of her life, was vanishing before my eyes? And yet now, after all these years, I find that it doesn’t matter whether I filmed it or not, because we lose our children not once but over and over again. That loss, I can feel it now, yesterday, tomorrow, every minute, and I promise you, I do.

  Shit. I swore I wasn’t going to say this sort of thing to you. But I swear to you, now, sitting here, I can see every inch of that house I have not been in for ten years, just as it was that morning. I can feel the early silence of the suburban street, the chill spring air moist with the dew from the lawn, the shafts of light through the kitchen windows with their stained oak and bull’s-eye molding. Your room. Your room, which I visit in dreams. The sun flooding through the blue Dr. Seuss curtains Molly gave us when we moved in, the curtains moving in the breeze, your body supine, so perfectly relaxed, arms around your head and head in a pillow of brown hair.

  I can see you, waking in the silent room, opening your brown eyes into the morning light and, after a moment of recollection, sitting up on the side of the bed and delivering yourself of a wild, arms-akimbo stretch. Isabel Miriam Grant, seven years old in the spring of 1996. Your face, which was very round and distinguished by Julia’s cheekbones, was of enormous vivacity; your eyes, huge and intense. You had, in fact, a particularly American type of baby-boom beauty, the union of the regularity of your mother’s long-standing American features, which had participated only in British and Protestant bloodlines since the 1600s, and your father’s European irregularity, a long Mediterranean gene line, also protected by community, at least 500 years back to Spain. You had what is called a “rosebud” mouth, full lips always pursed, but the speed and intensity with which you talked mitigated against its roundness, for you had to tighten its corners in order to get out all the words you wanted as quickly as possible—in this, too, you showed both of your parents, both of whom were, in their ways, primarily verbal people. Your hair, also brown, fell far down your back, and already you had the tic of brushing it out of your eyes.

  I can close my eyes and see you. Quickly you registered what was going on in the house—the early morning, your father still asleep. Then, moving silently and with determination, you dressed in bell-bottoms, a tank top tight over your still baby-round stomach, sandals. Perhaps you came to my room, watched me sleeping for a moment. But you did not wake me. For the fact was, what awaited you in your father’s house on a Saturday morning was a bowl of granola and a book, whereas if you could get out the front door without waking me and across the lawn to Molly’s, you would be able to avail yourself of a wide-screen color TV with satellite service, eggs and bacon, and possibly even a little time with your hero, Molly’s son Leo, in the event that Leo had both gotten home from his night’s adventures and not yet gone to bed.

  So, with the faultless egocentricity of a seven-year-old, you beat a quiet retreat and, still in your bare feet, ran lightly over the lawns to Molly’s house.

  I only woke, that Saturday morning, when the sun slipped over the eave of the roof and cast light over my face. Then I, in turn, finding your room empty, went out the front door in my bare feet and across the lawns to the next-door house. Here, I found Molly sitting on the front steps, smoking and reading the paper, while inside the screen door you were watching Pokémon. Without a word, I corrected both of these infractions: first I entered the house to turn off the TV, kiss you, and serve myself coffee. I came out the door again, removed Molly’s cigarette from her hands, and threw it into the bushes. Then I leaned back against the doorjamb with my coffee.

  “Godammit, Moll. Leo’s going to get you hooked again.”

  Molly did not look up, and her black bangs, reaching to her big glasses, made her face, from this angle, impregnable to me. As for you, you had by now wandered outside and sat down next to her on the steps, regarding her open paper with curiosity, the pair of you united in your absolute lack of interest in me. Silence reigned while I drank my coffee, watching the two women in my life, then you, entirely disregarding the fact that you had willfully disobeyed me and been caught, asked, “Dadda, who’s George Bush?”

  “He’s a governor, doll. From Texas.”

  “Why does he have thirty-five million dollars?”

  “Well, he wants to be the next president. After Clinton’s turn is up.”

  “Is he good or bad?”

  “Well, not so good. No better than he has to be.”

  You tho
ught about this for a moment. “Moll likes him.”

  “Really?” I carried my coffee to the stairs, steering an exaggerated path around the pack of cigarettes sitting on the top step, then sat down so you were between me and Molly. “I don’t believe that, darling. Bush is a criminal maniac bozo. Molly’s way too smart not to know that.”

  “Iz.” Molly spoke from behind her newspaper, her low voice without emotion.

  “Yup?”

  “I like Bush just fine and plan to vote for him so he can become our next president, which he’ll do very well. Lots and lots of people agree with me, win or lose.”

  Now she lowered the paper to reveal a round face behind owlish glasses. “See, you don’t have to hate your opponent in this country, you just vote for the person you think best. That’s called democracy, which people like Jimbo here don’t understand so good.”

  “Democracy’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Lifting the paper out of Molly’s hand to read the front page, I sang the words, absently. “W’s an out-and-out Reagan Republican, Molly Wolly my dear. That means he’s a radical and an activist. Ideological radicalism, judicial activism, the heart of the Bush regime. And you know it.”

  “No, J. You’re the one around here who knows things.”

  The silence that followed, you observed with interest, turning from one to the other. Then you stood between us and stretched your body, a perfect curve, like a comma with a belly, and when you were done, lowered your arms around my neck.

  “Be a gladdy daddy, not a saddy daddy.”

  I hitched you into my lap with one arm around your waist, letting my face go into your hair. For a long moment, I sat like that. Then I shifted.

  “So, what’s the plan, Stan? Let’s hit the road and feel the wind in our hair.”

  “And where are we going?” Molly, too, was watching now.

  “Well, I just got to drop some paper off at the courthouse in Albany. You all stay here, get packed up, then I thought we could camp up in the Blackheads. Spend the night, hike out, go to Colgate Lake in the morning? It’s going to be perfect weather.”

  “Dad-ee. You said you weren’t going to work today.”

  “Just a delivery, doll, up to Albany. Won’t take an hour. Moll?”

  Molly was hesitating—seriously hesitating, because everyone always wanted to go into the woods with me due to the fact that I knew them like almost nobody, anymore, knew the Catskills, even many of the old-timers. Yet another fruit of the moneyed life, was what I told people, having the time to explore the woods, but in fact there were spots I used to take you to that probably hadn’t been visited since, well, since my father took me when I was your age. Not just dinky little spots, either: waterfalls, scooped-out rock baths in mountain streams, pine groves, ginseng hollows, caves. Old Charlie Thorpe up to Haines Falls used to look at me sideways and say that I had Esopus Indian blood in my veins. I don’t believe he meant it as a compliment.

  But finally Molly shook her head. “Not me, guys. Not while Leo’s here. I’ll meet you at Colgate Lake in the morning.”

  She meant that while her son, Leo, who had just finished marine corps flight training and was about to be posted to Italy, was staying, she was too scared to leave the house at night, and in fact, I knew she was too scared to go to sleep, too.

  “Well, doll.” This was me, to you. “Just you and me, then. I nip up to Albany, come back down, go camping.”

  You looked at Molly as if for permission. And she, in turn, shrugged.

  “So I baby-sit till you get back?”

  “You mind?”

  “I don’t mind. If Iz doesn’t.”

  A look passed between you and Molly in which I read the following exchange: TV? TV. Then you turned back.

  “Oh, okey-dokey. Baddy Daddy.”

  More TV. I hated to give in. But I had something to do.

  2.

  Later on, a lot would be made of what I did that trip to Albany. Some of it was known, and some—well, there were folk who had me more or less plotting the World Trade Center attacks, that day, even though the attacks and all that followed on them were still five years off. In fact, there was a time when some of the main evidence for jailing me was to do with that trip to Albany. So for the record, let me tell you exactly what I did when I met you that Saturday morning.

  First, I packed a Sportsac bag with clothes and toiletries—mostly yours—as well as some books and a few little toys. Then I threw it in the trunk of the car and drove up to Albany. When I got there, I went to a Mailboxes Etcetera downtown and bought a large cardboard box, some packing tape, and some labels. I packed the bag of clothes in the box, then addressed it to John Herman, care of General Delivery, Clayton, NY 13624—Clayton being a town on the St. Lawrence River, just across from Canada. I did not need to look up the zip code, having done so long before.

  I took the box then into the store and express-Mailed it, paying by credit card. Then I went and bought a tank of gas with the same credit card.

  Later, that would look like a serious mistake.

  When I’d finished that, I left back down the Thruway for home.

  And that’s all, Izzy. Later, they tried to say I met with people from Fidel Castro to Saddam Hussein, communed with the ghost of Timothy McVeigh, and joined the Taliban. But nobody ever proved that I did anything other than what I just told you, and they never will.

  And in fact, not three hours after I finished, you and I were parking at the trailhead to the Dutcher Notch trail, then hiking in on the trail to where, finally, I led you down through thick growth, bushwhacking a good half mile in from any known trail, ignoring your complaints and looking forward to your gasps of surprise when, as you soon did, you emerged onto a pool in the little stream that flows down Thomas Cole Mountain.

  3.

  While you marveled at this perfectly formed, and perfectly secret, swimming hole, I pitched a tent and unrolled the sleeping bag. After I’d uncovered a fireplace, hidden under leaves since the last time I was here, I settled you down with a book and a bottle of water, changed into my gym shorts and a pair of well-used trail-running shoes, and then, giving you one of two Motorola shortwave receivers, set out for a run while there was still enough light.

  This was a well-known routine for us: you, who had grown up in the woods, were unafraid of holding down the fort for the hour of my run, and I, like many single parents—and I had been, to all intents and purposes, a single parent for your entire life—knew how to find the time I needed for myself within the context of the things we did together. This, the six-mile round trip to Dutcher Notch, was a very familiar one to me—believe me, I run it again and again in my imagination, these days, now that I cannot run it for real—and for the first mile or so I ran easily, thoughtlessly, watching the long afternoon shadows play in the little pools of thin light, all under the vast green canopy of the woods, shifting in the breeze. And only after a mile, as if my mind had moved backward through the events of the past couple days, searching for purchase, did I arrive back at my conversation in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green, and my anxiety come back.

  Sharon Solarz, Christ. How that fucking name came up. It seemed like people got a thrill out of just saying it. There were other names like that. Bernardine Dohrn. H. Rap Brown. Mimi Lurie. When ex-Movement people gathered—and in the Catskills, not unlike the French and their heroes of the Resistance, everyone over fifty was ex-Movement—it was only a matter of time till one of those names came up.

  But now—I cannot tell you how emphatically now was not, repeat not, the time for Sharon Solarz’s sexy name to enter my life. Should I have seen how suspicious it was? I’m not sure. The fact is, it had been just a few days earlier that Norman Rosen had called to say that his firm had been retained by Ambassador Montgomery concerning the matter of Isabel Grant, aged seven, the single child of the fifteen-year union between James Grant and Julia Montgomery.

  That had shocked me into silence, which, Benny will tell you, isn’t that co
mmon an event. Your grandfather and I, I thought, understood each other: for the two years I’d had you since Julia went back to England, it had been clearly understood that our relationship was governed by a kind of nuclear parity. I, for my part, did not tell anyone that Julia was a hopeless drug addict and a criminally negligent mother. He, for his part, left me alone with you.

  Now, incredibly, Norm Rosen was telling me that Julia was no longer content with the original divorce settlement, which allowed her unlimited access to her child as long as she was willing to come back to America from London, where she had gone to rehab under her father’s care after I left her.

  Finally, I got my voice back. “Norman, come off it, will you? She can see her daughter whenever she wants.”

  “She’s seen her twice in the past year, Jim.” He had one of those phony western accents upstaters like to affect, and a reedy, annoying voice—see what I mean about Benny’s manipulation by your grandfather?

  “That’s because she’s been too whacked out of her gourd to come to America.”

  “That was then. This is now.”

  “So now that she’s clean and sober, she’s decided that taking away my house, income, and reputation weren’t enough? She wants my daughter, too?”

  “Her daughter, counselor.”

  “Norm.” I couldn’t believe he knew what he was saying. But then, I couldn’t know how much your grandfather had actually told him, could I? Nor did I know, then, that Norm was Benny’s anonymous tipster, putting Ben on my tail in the first place. So I temporized. “The only positive thing Julia ever did for her daughter was take her shopping at Anna Sui rather than Donna Karan. Or was it the other way round? There is no way I’m letting this child leave the country.”

  His answer told me that your grandfather had told him a lot. Perhaps all. “Jim? You know what I’d do if I were you? I’d listen real carefully. You fight this, we’re taking you to the show. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Okay, I admit, it is hard to shut me up. This did it. For a couple seconds, I was like a fish out of water, gasping for air. Then I said, as carefully as I could: “Norm, I thought that Senator Montgomery was looking to be named ambassador to the Court of St. James in the next Democratic administration.”