The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  “No, sir.” He answered without a beat. “Not looking. Planning on it. Better get used to something new, counselor. You don’t have any more standing in the senator’s plans. That’s all over.”

  “And how exactly did that end?” I wasn’t being sarcastic. It was a real request for information. And in the pleasure that came into Norm’s thin little voice when he answered, you could understand why, despite his lifelong liberalism, your grandfather had chosen Fratelli and Rosen, house lawyers for George Pataki, who hated me only slightly less than they hated abortion rights activists—though slightly more than they hated the ACLU—to represent him in the matter of his granddaughter’s custody.

  “I should have been a little more precise, Mr., uh, Grant. It hasn’t quite ended yet. But, counselor, there is no doubt at all that it’s over by the end of the week.”

  At the time, a discouraging statement, I think you agree.

  At the edge of the field, the trail dipped right into the woods, and I passed into shadow and onto an uphill at the same time, an uphill that broke my heart each time I did it, long and even and steepening over perhaps three-quarters of a mile. As always, as I worked into the first pain of the run, my thoughts darkened; as always, I failed to note the connection. Rather, panting hard toward my second wind and breaking into a sweat, I thought I was looking at the question before me with calm, reasonable, and experienced legal eyes, the eyes I’d been using all week, trying to figure out what Norm had been talking about.

  Because, Isabel, you are a grown-up person now, and you know as well as I that when I sent her to England, your mother had had a drug and alcohol problem the size of a house. You do know, right? You know that she had virtually abandoned your upbringing, and let her compulsion for white powders take over her life, filling the space her dwindling career left empty. She had let you spend a night in an open convertible on the main street of Hudson, while she very, very nearly overdosed on smack in a dealer’s apartment. And once—just once, the last time she saw you until her first exercise of supervised visitation rights after rehabbing in London—she hit you, hard enough to leave you with the little scar you have on the bottom right of your chin.

  See, all that was true. And all the time it was going on, your grandfather and I had, each time, nursed your mother out of whatever kind of strung-out horrors she was going through; covered the trails of her crimes; called in favors from cops and judges; and ensured that no one knew. See? My father-in-law, at the time, was my partner in trying to save my wife, your mother, his daughter, whom we all adored. And it was only after a week when I thought she was clean but she had, fooling me completely, been snorting a stash of coke she had hidden in the pool house, she ran out, and got strung out, and while strung out hit you in the chin with her fist, that I drove her to Kennedy airport and left her at British Airways, and then, before I could be kicked out of the Woodstock house, took you down to our new house in Saugerties.

  At the time, it was very clear.

  I said nothing to anyone about Julia. I let Senator Montgomery keep his career; he let me keep my daughter.

  Except that now, he had found a way to take both, and leave me with nothing.

  I crossed Fresh Kill, the grade evened, and I let my step loosen, and lengthen, into the slow downhill past Beaver Pond: I was, now, sinking into the little hollow formed by Stoppel Point, to the east, and Thomas Cole, to the north: properly a “clove,” but one that had not been named. An easy mile of downhill. I increased my speed, enough to keep up my respiratory rate, but not too much to negotiate the long mud puddles as the sodden ground let up its water, which converted the trails into runoffs. While I ran, I checked on you on the Motorola, then got back into a careful rhythm: if I knew nothing else, I knew I could not, right now, afford a fall.

  So what was I to do, Isabel? Was I to let you go live with your mother? How were you to understand, at your age, that your mother was abusive and addicted? Should I have told you that Julia was an unfit mother because she let you watch too much TV? She should be denied custody because she fed you junk food? None of that meant anything, nor would it mean anything if I told you the truth, which was that I would not give you over to your mother because your mother, simply, did not know how to love, and had never known how to love, and if knowing how to fuck was a fair enough way to hide that fact from her husband, for a while anyway, it just wouldn’t do for a child. Especially a fiendishly verbal, precociously observant, and prematurely cynical child, who had been hit and left out in cars and whose only hope in the world was to be loved and loved well all the days of her childhood and on beyond too.

  And it was in this spiraling suite of thoughts that I arrived at the big expanse of what the local kids from Tannersville and Hunter call Strawberry Field, and paused.

  From here, the run’s steepest uphill did the last mile to Dutcher Notch, a grueling uphill in which steady climbs were interrupted by hills so steep as to seem a personal insult. At the edge of my vital capacity—I had failed to pace myself, for being lost in defeatist thoughts—I leaned over, hands on knees, panting hard. If I was going to abbreviate the run—six miles was nothing to be ashamed of—this was the time. But then, I never abbreviated my run; only when a muscle was in real danger of injury, real enough to keep me from running again. And so I turned and pushed up, taking my respiration into rarefied territories.

  For a time, accelerating my heart into the uphill, my mind was clear, the first thought to articulate itself being simply to ask, Where the fuck was the notch? The trail was mounting alongside a true moonshine gully, a mountain stream running a deep, thickly wooded gash in the forest, typical of the vast Appalachian range of which the Catskills were four hundred miles south of the northern edge in Canada and the Tennessee Cumberlands were a thousand miles north of the southern edge in Alabama. Unlike the Cumberlands, the Catskills had never been still country—vast, now exhausted supplies of hemlock had served a local tanning industry and kept the locals out of the moonshine business. Now, however, both gave serious shares to the marijuana breadbasket, with Tennessee quoting pot as its biggest cash crop. And the same exact qualities that made these woods so apt to hide marijuana made this trail a heartbreaking run. Until I at last came to a stop, bending over and spitting, at Dutcher Notch, I did not think at all. Not, in fact, till I had started again, with abandoned speed, down the path.

  What did it mean, Norm’s call? And how was I to respond? Izzy, I was a lawyer. My job was to go to court and oppose my will to that of others. I argued for what I felt was right, publicly, without protection. Often I did it at great personal risk. Some thought that I was, for this reason, a hero. No one mistook me, however, for a gentleman. You’re not required to be a gentleman to defend the Constitution, because whatever else the law is, it’s a dirty business, and like it or not, it’s appropriate for a lawyer to be properly dirty too.

  Now, running the downhill from Dutcher Notch, I asked myself, how ungentlemanly could I be to retain custody of my daughter? My ammunition, remember, was good. I could prove your mother’s every affair in a Woodstock summer house, her every episode of steroid psychosis caused by self-medicating for cocaine-induced sinus polyposis, her every miserable meth-induced bedroom tantrum, and her every failed attempt to detox at the Lucy Freeland Clinic in Saratoga Springs. I could prove her two abortions of planned pregnancies that unexpectedly turned out to interfere with acting roles. I could, moreover, prove that all of this, which involved several serious run-ins with the police, had been effectively concealed by the ex—U.S. senator, Julia’s father. And I could leave Bobby Montgomery waiting for his next incarnation before he got into politics again.

  No—Rosen was bluffing. Evening out into the long, gentle downhill back to the campsite, I concluded again: Rosen was bluffing. The stakes were too high for Bobby. It was a nice try, but the stakes were simply too high.

  And I found you—as if proving my reassurance—lying happily in the tent with Bun Bun, your stuffed rabbit, singing a song and
kicking your legs, on which, through the nylon roof, trees nodding above cast lazily shifting shadows.

  4.

  As the afternoon lengthened, the two of us—as you used to say—“hop-rocked” up the stream to where a waterfall dropped down a mossy face in the rock perhaps thirty feet high, me throwing handfuls of dirt or sticks in front of you to scare away any rattlers that may have come down the mountain looking for water. So infrequent were visitors here that we saw two snapping turtles clatter away with their always surprising speed and, when we returned to camp, scared a hawk into flying off with a half-eaten chipmunk in his claws.

  Having repossessed the campsite from the hawk, we ate dinner, watching the thin fall of water into the shaded pool—already, that year, the rivers were low, and later that summer there would be some severe drought. I had packed artichokes, chicken salad, Bread Alone bread, iced tea. And slowly, the air turned grainy and the evening fell softly down.

  Well before dark, I led you back down the river to the little pool, washed your hands and face in the icy water while you sang variations on the Pete Seeger song Molly’d been playing to you that day:

  Here’s to England

  Here’s to France

  Here’s to Leo’s crazy rants

  And here’s to the lovely Izzy Grant’s

  Brand new purple un-der pants

  We climbed back up to the tent; I changed you into pajamas and a sweatshirt, then watched you brush the hair around the soft curves of your face, your cheeks, your massive brown eyes with their endless lashes. Changing into pajamas, your little body’s perfect balance on bare feet was as enticing, as perfect as a wild animal, and I watched you with enchantment, with fascination, in the silence of evening’s fall, as if all the forest were hushing for you. The sun was setting, and next to the little fire I sat cross-legged with you in my lap while I read you a book. Then I cajoled you inside the tent, and you lay, watching through the tent’s star window the wind moving the leaves above in the thickening grain of the dusk while I sang you the real Pete Seeger song.

  Here’s to Cheshire

  Here’s to cheese

  Here’s to the pears and the apple trees

  And here’s to the lovely straw-berries

  Ding dang dong go the wedding bells

  At last, heavy on my arm, your hair creeping along my shirtsleeve, while I watched your face in the dim light from the tent’s star window, in that hour of pure silence in the woods when the sun first goes down before the nocturnal sounds come out, you fell asleep.

  And did I think, that night, how much I would one day give to see that sight before my eyes? Did I think of the absolute unrepeatability of what was before me, a vision of a single nexus of so many confluent paths of change—the fall of the evening, the turn of the seasons, your steady climb out of childhood, my steady growth through middle age—an intersection of so many things that would never appear again in the same way, ever again, in all the millions of years of our species’ life?

  You may say that beauty is everywhere, Isabel. But never before, and never again in this life, have I ever seen anything as beautiful as my sleeping daughter. You slept, and for that long first hour of darkness, when the night animals wake and the woods, as if worshiping the moon, come out of their sunset hush, I watched you.

  And for perhaps the single last time of my life, watching you that night, Izzy—the ten years to come until I sat down to write you this—I felt peace.

  Date: June 4, 2006

  From: “Molly Sackler”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 4

  Izzy, because I couldn’t go camping with you, it was I who got the news of the Solarz arrest first, very early that Sunday morning.

  This is because, while you were sleeping that night in your tent with J, I was sitting up, waiting for my son to come home.

  And while I was waiting, I was beating the delivery boy by reading the paper on the Web.

  Just like insomniacs do all over the world.

  You know my whole story now, my love. You know that in 1996 I only had my son, and that by the barest of luck. My husband never even knew he’d gotten me pregnant during a one-week leave in Okinawa, a few weeks before he was killed in Vietnam. By the time Leo was a megabyte of cells big, Donny was dead in the jungle at Songbe. Then the war ended.

  You know what they told me once? They told me that the Vietcong firing squad that executed him, it had only three members over fifteen.

  Don’t ask how old Donny was.

  J and you came to me just when Leo followed his daddy into the marines, and as I think you know, Izzy, you stepped into a place in my heart as empty as a tomb. Aviation Guarantee. For God’s sake. Grown men promise an eighteen-year-old that if he enlists, they’ll guarantee him flight training. Just what they did to Donny. What the hell can’t you get an eighteen-year-old to do after you promise to let him fly supersonic jets? Donny they baited and switched, forcing him into CID, Criminal Investigations, which is how he got captured. At least Leo, they kept their word. Now it’s 2006 and I’m still up all night, with the single damn difference that now I sit around with hot flashes watching the webcasts of Greater Persia, where Leo’s commanding a stratospheric firefight, rather than waking up barfing with morning sickness and listening to the news from Nam. Oh, and in between? In between was me, sitting up all night, reading the Web to see that Leo hasn’t wrapped his damn car around a tree in Woodstock during his leave in that damn, damn summer of ’96.

  Alright. The hell with it, I’m up all night right now, too, reading your daddy’s version of that Saturday night in 1996, the night Sharon Solarz was arrested while you two camped out on the Dutcher Notch trail, and I can watch Frank Smyth reporting from Baghdad in a window on my screen all the while I write this, as I promised your father I’d do, so let’s get it done. I am Molly Sackler. I took care of you for the couple years between the time your dad left your mother and the spring of 1996, and I hoped I was going to take care of you the rest of your life, but it didn’t happen that way. And this whole thing, it might be the way your father and his friends try to talk you into going to testify at the parole hearing, but for me, it’s just a way of explaining to you that I love you as much as if you were really mine, Izzy, and I love your father too.

  You were too young to know it, by all rights we were an unlikely pair of friends. Your father a lefty lawyer married to one of the most glamorous residents of Woodstock. Me the principal at Mount Marion Elementary, a resident of the wrong side of decidedly unglamorous Saugerties, the widow of a marines intelligence officer perished in Vietnam, and get this, a Republican. The fact is, Donny Sackler, my late husband: when we were kids, he would sooner have taken a baseball bat to your father than speak to him. And as for me, in those days, makeup and bouffant hair and get this, an actual cheerleader, as far as your daddy was concerned, I could have been from Mars.

  Now, 1996, we sat out our evenings on the upstairs porch like two aging sweethearts, and even the two-three shouting matches we once had about the war never made as much difference as the fact that once, we both lost everything that meant anything to Vietnam. Just like thousands and thousands of other Americans. And at the time, of course, I was about the only one who knew exactly how much your father had lost, and how dearly he had paid for it.

  We had met in ’94 when you were five and J represented Mount Marion Elementary in our strike against the state regents over our refusal to use state-mandated pass-fail criteria. I had adamantly opposed your dad’s selection as attorney until it turned out that no one else would take the case on for free. And because we had to work together so much during the trial, I didn’t have to admit that I liked being with this person who was so abhorrent to my every principle. When it turned out we both were training for the Albany Marathon, however, we started running together, and there wasn’t much business excuse for that.

&
nbsp; Now, I didn’t know it then, but Julia was around less and less, in ’94, and your daddy was taking care of you more and more, and in fact, the time we were spending together made up most of his life outside working and taking care of his daughter. In fact I knew nearly nothing about him: so little that I had no conception of how he lived. I mean, I knew who Julia Montgomery was about as good as any other People magazine reader, but I hadn’t ever really put together how rich they were.

  I found out because we used to run a trail your daddy knew on private land up to Meades, just outside Woodstock, and one day when we had pushed on an extra mile we emerged suddenly in what looked to me to be an endless expanse of mowed pasture, in the middle of which sat a sprawling ranch house. When I realized it was his, and in fact, the whole trail we’d been running on went with it, I couldn’t help myself.

  “Jim, my God, you own this.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t own anything. I’m just the token Jew here.”

  Though I guess he was enjoying my shock, because he took me in and gave me the tour: a living room as big as the auditorium in Mount Marion Elementary, a sunken couch area, a wall of windows looking out over the mountains to the north. Huge bedrooms decorated in Arts and Crafts, no reproductions. A swimming pool in a glass geodesic dome. Then he explained that Julia had inherited from her maternal grandfather, and was in fact richer in her own right than her father—as well as far more willing to spend the money.

  I may as well tell you, seeing we’re all friends here, that I remember that day not just because it was the only time I was ever in Julia Montgomery’s house, but for a couple of other reasons, too.

  One was because, in the tour of the house, we unexpectedly came upon you, Izzy, in your room, playing on your bed while a baby-sitter sat reading a magazine, and when you saw him, I swear, I don’t think you even touched ground on your way into his arms. And your father is surprised, but he pretends not to be and asks where Julia is in this offhand voice. The baby-sitter answers, without even looking at him, that Julia had gone out. What time? Nine o’clock, which you had to figure was right after your father left for work. A silence greeted that. Then your father told the baby-sitter she could go; he’d stay home now. “I’ll need pay for the whole day, mister,” was the baby-sitter’s response.