The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  The second reason was because watching your father with you that day was when I fell in love with him, because as you know, that’s what happened. He had a gift with you, and let me tell you, as a teacher, I have been watching parents screw their children up for a long, long time. Watching him, this man who could not have been more different from me and my husband, I found myself thinking: This is how Donny would have been with Leo, Leo whom Donny never met. And that was the first time I felt desire for him.

  So we became friends. Either out running or, as Julia started disappearing for longer or longer periods, hanging out down at my house—I didn’t want to visit his place again, nor did he invite me to. And then, one day when you were perhaps six, we’re sitting at my kitchen table rehydrating from a run and Leo, who has just finished basic training and is waiting assignment to flight school, is practicing dives into the swimming pool, and I hear a sound precisely like an underinflated basketball slapping a concrete surface, and thank God your father had been lifting weights for ten years because Leo is on the floor of the pool in a cloud of red and he didn’t wake up until J had hauled him right out, 170 pounds of inert adolescent, and started CPR. He swears to me, he can still taste that blend of blood and chlorine in his mouth, these many years later.

  Know what? When someone saves your child’s life, you don’t need any more excuse to be friends. And so I made the first friend of my life who wasn’t a Republican, and your daddy made the first friend of his life who was. Not the second, not the third. The first. And in fact, it was kind of a kick hanging out with him in front of various Saugerties dignitaries, who tended to congregate together depending on whether they’d been at Woodstock or Khe Sanh, or rather, whether or not they remembered which was which.

  I may as well tell you, Izzy, now that you are a big girl, that although he insisted on keeping his own house, and making sure you didn’t see, because he thought it would confuse you, your father and I had become lovers by the spring of 1996. And I may as well tell you, also, that before he ever got into my bed, your father told me everything there was to know about him, all of his secrets, and I believed in him then, and I believe in him now.

  And if I have to say it explicitly, then I will: that’s why I’m writing. Because I think you should believe in him too.

  2.

  Alright. It is the summer of 1996, I live in the little clapboard house next to yours in Saugerties, which in fact I’d found for your father as soon as he left Julia. It was a change from what you were used to, my love, believe me. But in retrospect, it does seem that you should have been there all along rather than Julia’s Woodstock. I, for one, am convinced that you got something richer down there than you ever had up to Woodstock with the Montgomery money, and I like to think that I had something to do with that.

  So this had been my routine since early that summer Leo had come home from his first tour in the marines. Wait for him to wake up in the afternoon, sit and talk with him through dinner, then lend him the car to go out with his high school friends, and then, the high point of my day, wait for the 4 A.M. update of the paper on the Web so I could check the police blotter for car crashes and arrests. After that, a luxurious two hours of sleep before you came over in the morning, little ray of sunshine that you were.

  Christ. Leo had been around the world with the service by then. He had been in “combat” in the Persian Gulf, where he had served as private first class in a reconnaissance unit. Then he became a pilot and after that a strat commander. But nothing he had done then or was to do afterward terrified me quite as much as what he could get up to with his old high school buddies in Saugerties, or Catskill, or Hudson: depressed and hopeless places, rife with liquor, drugs, and guns. But of course there was nothing I could do or say, and so I had long resigned myself to sitting up all night, my stomach clenched with anxiety, waiting for the morning paper to be posted and listening to WDST Woodstock.

  Sharon Solarz. I remember the very layout of that computer screen. Once I had assured myself that by the Albany Times’ electronic deadline my son had neither been killed nor maimed nor shot nor robbed nor arrested—so far that night at least—I clicked back to the Solarz story and read it through: during the period Sharon had been famous, I had been the young wife of an active-duty marine, and the politics of the antiwar movement had been very alive to me. There was a vivid account of the manhunt and arrest, and I was by no means blind to the fact that it all started in Billy Cusimano’s house, where, the paper reported, Solarz had come hoping to connect with a lawyer to negotiate her surrender. I remember that vividly, because I remember thinking, Christ, her life must be awful for her to prefer a decade in jail. Then I read the summary of Sharon’s career: SDS member in Chicago, founding member of Weatherman, underground after the town house bombing, arrested briefly on explosives charges after Weather broke up in ’75, then jumped bail and underground again as part of the MDB—Marion Delgado Brigade—and not seen again until the Bank of Michigan robbery. She was named by Vincent Dellesandro, the only person arrested after the crime, who also named, in addition to Solarz, the other two members of the MDB: Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai.

  That Dellesandro, whom the article implied had been, rather than a revolutionary, a crazy homicidal vet, had named his partners was no surprise. There was some suspicion that later, one of the three fugitives had given Dellesandro up, shocked by his willingness to shoot during the holdup. After all, there had been no proven casualties in any Weatherman action, although other Weather-inspired groups had not been as skillful, and three Weather members had been killed in the town house bombing. When he was arrested, apparently, Dellesandro claimed he’d been working undercover for the FBI all along. For all anyone knew, this might have been true. But before being tried for Bank of Michigan, he was extradited to New York to face prior charges and killed during the Attica uprising—strangely, because the article pointed out that surviving inmates told the ACLU that Dellesandro had been nowhere near the actual violence.

  The paper concluded by observing that with Solarz’s arrest, Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai were the last two fugitives from the Vietnam era remaining at large, which was also untrue. A where-are-they-now sidebar listed, as they always do on such occasions, a roundup of ex-fugitives. This time they got Katherine Power, Bernardine Dohrn, Patty Hearst Shaw, and Silas Trim Bissell, of whom only one had actually been in the Weather Underground at all.

  It was dawn when I got through this, and the dim light through the window washed the computer screen of colors. That struck me as appropriate to the black-and-white newspaper archive images on the screen. Those people, in the days when I had a husband in Vietnam, my blood had heated every time I’d seen their images. And now, for God’s sake, peering across twenty-five years from my computer screen, I found that they looked so vivid to me: real people, not these strange, ugly, shaved-headed, pierced and tattooed kids of today in their big baggy clothes—real people who might have believed in the wrong thing, but who at least believed in something.

  And I guess I was lost in thought, because I found myself at the kitchen cabinet by the window, now, and with a mental maneuver that was growing all too familiar, I managed to open a drawer, extract a Marlboro, and light it without quite admitting to myself that I was doing anything other than looking out the window, down the driveway, watching for my son’s headlights. The smoke hit the back of my throat with an intimate familiarity. Mother’s milk. J was quite right. I was hooked again, through and through.

  And it was then, at that thought, that the meaning of the reference to Sharon having come looking for a lawyer at Billy Cusimano’s house struck me, though the coincidence with the first wave of nicotine electrifying my brain, disguised, to some extent, the shock.

  Not so much, however, that I was not able to pronounce, out loud: “Oh, my God, he’s talking about J.”

  And then I said, louder, again: “For God’s sake. It must have been Montgomery himself who had that one leaked.”

  And I thought,
if this damnable paper keeps this up, they might as well buy you a one-way flight to London, Izzy, because you were never, ever coming back.

  Now I’ve gone this far, so let me finish off what happened, that Sunday morning, and then let me get back to the webcast because there is a State of the Union address in half an hour, and whether my son stays in Kabul or comes back home depends on what our fine president has to say. In this respect, let me tell you, no matter how big a decision you have to make next week, you may bear in mind, there are bigger things happening still. Far bigger.

  By the time Leo got home and bestowed on me a boozy kiss before ushering a woman who appeared to be all of sixteen up to his bedroom, it was way too late to go to bed. So I put on a swimsuit and drove down to Woodstock to get muffins at Bread Alone, then up the mountain to Colgate Lake to meet you and your daddy, and to tell J the news.

  But I was too late. By then, your father and you had hiked out of the woods, changed into bathing suits, driven the quarter mile or so to Colgate Lake, and settled down on the grass, where I found J lying on a blanket, deep asleep, and you involved in a mudcastle-in-progress group project by the water’s edge.

  It was a perfect Catskill morning. A perfectly cloudless Sunday, wind softly blowing, late lilacs in bloom. Already the grassy beach at the lake was filling with its particular summer mix: weekend New Yorkers, Jewish and Italian; all kinds of Eastern Europeans from the Ukrainian and Latvian resorts up Platte Clove; canoes going into the water, and dogs, and children. Sharon Solarz would have to wait: I wasn’t taking this sleep away from J. So I lay back next to your daddy, the sun on the front of my body and the warmth of his skin on the side, and let the murmur of mixed voices and languages around us lull me to sleep. Russian in the group of pretty young girls next to us. A dog’s feet padding by, water shaking on my thigh from its fur on its chest. A voice in a canoe, far out on the lake, calling to another. Next to us, two couples with New York accents were talking in what sounded, to me, like middle-aged friendship. And what they were discussing was the arrest of Sharon Solarz, the night before, in Rosendale, of all places.

  And your daddy must have heard too, because when I turned my head on my neck to look at him, his eyes were wide open, staring at the sky. The air, suddenly, was thick with heat. Quickly now, I looked over at the group talking next to us, then back to your dad, studying the afterimage against the pink of the sun through my eyelids.

  It was a fifty-something foursome, two sets of parents up from the city, and now three of them were listening with interest as the fourth, lying on the grass with the Albany Times, gave a summation of the article, pausing after each sentence for discussion. He read next that it appeared that Solarz may have been in the area seeking to make a negotiated surrender. At this one of the wives snorted. That was the way they always did it, said the other woman, this one apparently a lawyer herself—a surrender would mitigate in favor of the defendant, so they always went for the arrest rather than the surrender, in order to get the harshest sentence they could. None of them seemed to have any doubt who “they” were.

  Your daddy and I listened. What next? Eventually, someone would say that Sharon to some degree deserved what she was getting: this wasn’t a Weatherman bombing, where only property was destroyed, but an actual armed robbery in which a guard was killed. And someone else would say that Sharon—they would all use her first name—Sharon’s only crime was having anything to do with Vinnie Dellesandro. And from there someone was sure to say how they knew Billy and Bernardine, only they knew them under their fugitive identities when they lived on the Upper West Side; or someone would say how they had dropped blotter acid with Susan Stern out in Seattle, or Chicago, or recently seen a letter from Jeff Jones in the New York Times, or had a friend who had a friend who had a friend who knew David Gilbert…A lulling, gentle conversation, four middle-aged ex-hippies discussing the familiar, comforting righteousness of their youths, of menace to no one.

  Except us.

  Because instead of the thousand things I could have predicted these guys would say, they said the one thing they shouldn’t have.

  “…says here she was coming to consult a lawyer in Saugerties.”

  “Lawyer? In Saugerties? What kind of lawyer would practice in Saugerties?”

  “Hey, babe, that’s where Jim Grant is. Must have been him. Who else could it be? The local bankruptcy lawyer?”

  By now, little adrenaline shots were running through my whole body and, I knew, your daddy’s too. We didn’t move, of course, and in time the foursome waddled off to the water, and we sat up.

  First, your daddy made a big show of looking at his watch. Then he glanced over at the paper they had left lying with their towels and books. The paper was open to the Solarz coverage, and he pulled it over and we looked together. The byline was Ben Schulberg.

  Now this Schulberg character, I was relieved to see, had not actually named your dad. That was because what he was talking about was an actionable offence: in New York State, concealing information on the whereabouts of a known felon was tantamount to being an accessory in that felon’s crime—and this felon, Sharon Solarz, was wanted for murder, which has no statute of limitations. If Schulberg had actually named your father, then the police would have been waiting at his door when we got home.

  But that was the only good news, that he had not been named.

  Everything else was disastrous.

  J pushed the paper back and, still without a word, looked at me.

  And suddenly, as if a gray ceiling had moved in over the sky and a sodden rain begun to fall, it was not such a perfect Catskill Sunday anymore.

  Date: June 5, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

 

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 5

  And while, at Colgate Lake on Sunday morning, your father was realizing how very, very right he had been not even to discuss Sharon Solarz with his client, Billy Cusimano, and how, nonetheless, very, very little help that was going to give him now, I, up in Albany, was starting in on what was to be twenty-four hours of uninterrupted work.

  Now, on this matter, let me say this: What else is new? Right? Working a night, a day, then a night again—this did not in any way indicate any interest whatsoever in your father, or Sharon Solarz, or Billy Cusimano, or the Tet Offensive, or Earth Day, or Birkenstocks, or marijuana—well, I was interested in marijuana, but that had nothing to do with these bozos. This was merely the kind of work expected of junior staff at the Times.

  The only difference, in fact, was the actual content of my work that Sunday and Sunday night. Lately, if it was happening in a town bigger than 200 and involved something more controversial than a farm animal, it went to someone else, which gives you an idea both of my status at my place of employ that summer and of the newsworthiness my editor ascribed to the Sharon Solarz story. Now I had not only been taken off my regular beat to spend a few days researching three in-depth stories on the meaning of the Solarz arrest, but had actually been ordered to read up on the very particular history that had started three decades ago and ended with Sharon Solarz being arrested the night before.

  • • •

  I wasn’t working enthusiastically. My bargain-basement status at the paper was due to a fresh graduate from Columbia J School having just been hired, and given preference for anything I might have gotten otherwise. And then, the fact is, I am not so big on research, if you want to know the truth, Isabel, though if you happen to be at the National Press Club, if you don’t mind not mentioning this, that would be fine. What I had going for me as a journalist was primarily luck, and secondarily a gift.

  See, people like to talk to me. Why, I can’t tell you. Rebeccah says that it’s because I’m so foolish looking, and God knows she’s right about that—I am too tall, and too thin, and the main reason my face inspires confidence is because it is incapable of
inspiring fear. But the fact is, you put me in a room, or at a bar, or on a checkout line at a supermarket, and I’ll come back and tell you the most intimate details about the person nearest to me. It’s not skill, exactly. In fact, it’s nearly politeness: I have to listen, because I can’t stop people from telling me things.

  But let me not be modest. In 1996 I was a beat reporter, and I went out and got subjects to talk, and although it seemed to them as if it was just by chance that I happened to be there and they happened to be baring their souls, everything they had to say—everything relevant, that is—was in the paper the next day. And—at least before the eminent graduate of Columbia J School came to do a better job than I—the halls of power in Albany, New York, were filled with people who wished they had never met me or that, when they met me, they had kept their mouths shut tight.

  When, therefore, my editor, Richard Harmon, told me to spend a few days researching who Sharon Solarz was and what she had done, I experienced an instant regret at having gotten involved in the story in the first place. The hell with that geek who called me with his anonymous tip, was my feeling. What I said to my editor, however, was:

  “Rick, they’re about to put a generator in Saugerties that’s like to raise the ambient temperature of the Esopus enough to kill the entire trout population. Let me get to that, will you? You’re wasting me on some ancient hippie history.”