The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Pause, while they watched me.

  “What actually happened is that Jim Grant ran to avoid being arrested as Jason Sinai. And Jason Sinai’s just evaded your capture in Clayton, New York.”

  Date: June 9, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 15

  In New York City the summer’s heat was coming in, the part of the year approaching when even Woodstock summer residents rented out their houses for criminal prices to unsuspecting New Yorkers and escaped to cooler climes, a killing heat interrupted, only if you’re lucky, by vicious rains.

  It was early afternoon when we arrived at the Port Authority, and I led you into the city as if into a magical forest. You had never, ever imagined that there could be a place like this, and for every moment that you found yourself, literally, squeezing my hand so hard that it hurt, you also found yourself utterly lost in your field of vision.

  For seven straight hours I led you, and carried you, and had you driven, and even had you pulled by a horse in a carriage. Without ever explaining to you how I knew this place so well. I took you to a round building where you took an elevator to the top and then skipped down in circles, like on the inside of a corkscrew, you running up and down while I watched, and when you were bored of running, we looked, together, at some of the paintings on the wall. I took you to a toy store to buy presents and a jewelry store for earrings and a grand, massive hotel for tea. I took you to the zoo, to the carousel, and there, next to the carousel, I had a horse and chariot take you through a park. A taxi swept you down a wide river, which I said was the same that flowed by your house, at home, the one I always said got so small that the people in the Adirondacks could step over it. Watching it, you thought of the people in the Adirondacks, who you always thought of as Indians. Watching, you wondered how far we were from home and when we were going back. Watching, you wondered why you were being so spoiled today.

  We went to a store where I dressed you in new clothes, then I bought you a whole bunch more. Then we went to a restaurant where you ate, for the first time in your life, a lobster. It was dark when we came out, and a taxi took us way into another part of the city, where the buildings were high and thin and the streets like long, shadowed canyons. In one building was a hotel, and here they were expecting us, because they greeted me by name. Admittedly, it was by the wrong name, but I had warned you they were going to do this. I had even told you the name: Robert Russell. From now on, I told you, I was going to be Robert Russell, and you were going to be little Isabel Russell. It was all part of the game.

  Here, in a hotel room, I bathed you by the open window, the slow summer dusk flowing in while you chatted away about the day before with Molly. Standing, your body was like a kidney bean on a stick: still round with baby fat, but your legs already showing the slim length they would, just like your mother’s, one day hold. When you were washed I dried you, first telling you to hold your hands up, then your chin up, then your legs open. Then I hit you lightly with the towel and said to go get dressed, which you did, still holding your chin up, hands up, legs open as you marched to the bedroom, until one by one I told you to resume normal stance.

  I had to call down to the front desk for a toothbrush, because in all the things I had packed to send to Clayton, and in all the things I had bought in New York, I had forgotten a toothbrush. While you waited, you watched cable TV, which you had never seen before.

  You argued over combing your hair, you argued over turning off the TV, I sang you a song, and we lay together in your bed by the open window, feeling the hot night wash in, smelling the sea. I told you you were just on the tip of the Island, the southern tip. It was, I told you, where sailors used to sail for the ocean to hunt whales. I talked until your eyes shut, and then I lay next to you, staring at you, until you were asleep.

  Or so I thought.

  Much later I found out, not from you but from someone you told, that when you opened one eye, to surprise me, you found me not waiting but crying, and surprised, you closed your eyes again to think.

  Only, so long had been the day, filled with so many things, that even seeing something this strange didn’t stop your descent into sleep, and the vision of your father crying, with your thoughts, turned into dreams.

  While you slept, I watched. I watched, lying on the bed next to you, stroking your forehead, while you slept, and I watched while the clock passed ten, then eleven, to twelve. I watched you, in fact, until the time when the Albany Times posted its next morning’s Web edition.

  At two o’clock, I finally got up from the bed and walked down the hallway to the little office suite the Wall Street Marriot advertised having on each floor. True to their word, a computer sat with an always-on Net connection. I found and launched Netscape, then entered the URL for the Times and then, for a long moment, shut my eyes; longer than it took for the front page to launch, much longer.

  When I opened them I was looking, of course, at a picture of myself.

  Three pictures, to be exact.

  One taken recently at a dinner at the Albany Civil Liberties Union, the second from a twenty-year-old wanted poster for Jason Sinai, and the third, a computer enhancement showing the effects of aging and plastic surgery, rendering it crystal clear that, as the article under Ben Schulberg’s byline made clear, they were the same.

  So Benny had done it. Twenty years before, Senator Montgomery had discovered who I was with the aid of the FBI’s background check of his daughter’s fiancé, and then he had used resources that only a U.S. senator could command to bury the truth again. Now, with a telephone and a computer, for the second time ever, Benny had figured it all out.

  Only Benny wasn’t going to keep it secret, the way your grandfather did, Izzy. There was no way.

  First of all, he didn’t have his daughter’s happiness to think about, as Bobby Montgomery had, twenty years ago, when he faced the choice of quashing an FBI investigation or seeing his daughter go underground with her fugitive boyfriend.

  Second of all, Benny didn’t have a reason to blackmail me, as your grandfather later had, forcing me to keep Julia’s drug and law troubles secret in exchange for his keeping mine.

  Now your grandfather didn’t need to blackmail me anymore. Now Benny had told the whole story, and all your grandfather had to do was send someone to pick you up and take you to London.

  This time, when your mother remembered to look for you where she last left you, before she got high, who knows if you’d survive?

  Woodenly, I stood now and walked back to the room. I did not look at you again, nor did I touch you. Robotic, automatic—numbed. I simply picked up the Sportsac, put it over my shoulder, and left.

  When you woke up, of course, I was gone.

  Other people were there. A woman with red hair. A man in a suit. And policemen, lots and lots of policemen, all with their uniforms on and guns out, and all pointed at you, or rather, at the bed, where they thought that I was hiding, under the covers, next to you.

  See, it’s like I told you, Izzy.

  All parents are bad parents.

  One day, I promise, I promise, you will be a bad parent too.

  PART TWO

  Hush little darling

  Go to sleep

  Look out the window

  Count the sheep

  That dot the hillsides

  And the fields of wheat

  Across America

  As we cross America

  What’s important

  Here today?

  The broken line

  On the highway.

  —Chrissie Hynde, “Thumbelina”

  Date: June 10, 2006

  From: “Amelia Wanda Lurie” mimi@cusimanorganics.com

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 16

  Child
hood is a shadowed path into a fairy-tale forest. It’s dark in there, and scary, and we don’t want to go in, but the big hand holding ours is always pulling, and the voice somewhere above is always urging us to come ahead.

  For a while everything is okay.

  For a while, in fact, everything is even kind of good.

  The woods are beautiful, filled with sparkling streams and swaying trees, with enticing patches of sun on the bed of leaves and the huge, even breath of kind wind. There are furry beasts and glowing fires, and if it’s a little scary, so what? The adults around us, the kind, good adults, they’re sure and strong, and they have, for us, marvelous places waiting around every turn.

  It’s only slowly, a step at a time, that it happens. A half-truth, a tiny disappointment, a little lie, and guess what? They never even apologize. One day they expect us just to understand their dirty little secret. Life is a shadowed path into a fairy-tale forest, and we never should have gone in because the dangers are real, there is no way out, and as for our guides, they are now, and have been since the very beginning, completely lost.

  Isabel Sinai. Jason Sinai’s daughter, come back to haunt us. Come back to tell us: I am the voice of everyone you failed. I am the witness of every mistake you made. I am the little one you abandoned in the fairy-tale woods, the one you lied to and lost, and now, now, I have your life in my hands.

  Your father asked me to write to you. But what am I supposed to say? Should I beg? Should I plead? I’ve never even met you, but I can hear your answer. Do you have any idea—any idea at all—what you are asking me to do? Do you have any idea who you are asking me to betray?

  Yes. Yes, I know what we are asking you to do. I know who we are asking you to betray. It’s that your father asked me to write to you. The whole damn Committee asked me to write to you. How am I supposed to say no?

  So let me tell you a story, Isabel-Sinai-at-seventeen-years-old. Listen, Isabel Sinai who lost her childhood when she was abandoned in a hotel room at seven, and who will never get it back. Let me tell you a story about your father and his father.

  Of all the stories your father told me, the years and years that we were underground, and in love, it’s the one that stayed with me. It stayed with me the way it is when someone you love tells you a part of their past that becomes a part of your own past. Stayed with me as if it were my own memory, in all its details, in all its importance. For the twenty-five years that Little J was Jim Grant and I was Tess Sanders, and, now that I am Mimi Lurie again, it stays with me still.

  You may think this is a distraction.

  But I promise you, when all this is done, and your decision is made, and the events of June 2006, like those of June 1996, are a memory, it is this little story that will stay with you, the rest of your life.

  2.

  When your father was a boy, his father woke him in the middle of the night and took him on a trip.

  His memory starts in the backseat of a Dodge Dart, his father at the wheel, watching through the window as they pulled silently through the empty city, Sheridan Square, Seventh Avenue, Chambers Street, the Municipal Building with its gilded figure of justice aloft over the deserted streets. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and your father remembers as if in a photograph the smooth spread of heaving black, the basin of New York Harbor, on the mouth of which the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge glittered just as it would appear to him, all those years later after he left you in a hotel room.

  Even then, at ten, leaving the city made him scared for his father, your grandfather. There was a big country out there, he knew, and that big country had once put his father in jail.

  That, his father told him, was the bad old days of the fifties.

  Now, in this black of night, it was 1960, and by the time they hit Jersey, your father was asleep in the backseat of a Dodge Dart.

  He woke in light, a place unlike any he had ever seen before. An endless vista of people composed the landscape, thousands and thousands of them in an undulating, unbroken mass. It seemed the car had been swallowed by this crowd of people, all of whom seemed to be facing in the direction of a loudspeaker, sometimes listening, sometimes roaring a response. Such a roar that, when at last the car could go no farther and its doors opened from the outside, your father drew back in fright. But his father took his hand, and they climbed out into the crowd.

  It was 1960, my dear, forty-six years ago today. A lifetime. The place was the mall in Washington, D.C.; the crowd was gathered to demand the passage of a law called the Voting Rights Act—a law that protected the right of black Americans to vote, and would not be passed for five years yet—and your father’s father had driven him through the night to come and demand it too.

  But your father doesn’t remember any of that. What your father remembers is a forest of legs, a jungle of identical black-suited legs in black shiny dress shoes, and how sweaty and slippery was his father’s hand, and the slow waves of the crowd shifting ahead, and then back, and a big voice booming, disembodied, from a loudspeaker somewhere he couldn’t see.

  And then his father’s hand was gone. In an instant, gone, leaving only the memory of its grip, its warmth, leaving your father alone. For a time he stood in shock as the black-suited legs pressed all around him, closer and closer as a great roar rose from the crowd and there was a long surge forward, and he had to move with it to stay upright, as best he could. Then the crowd surged back, and back again, and he was jogging backward away from the legs in front of him, constantly about to fall on those behind. Above him the adults were shouting, and above them farther he saw a flash of ice blue sky, a brilliant October sun, and as he struggled in the shifting mass of adults—as your father tells it, he found his gaze fixed on that blue, as if in its distance, in its utter unknowability, lay some kind of hope. And then, just as suddenly as he had been pushed ahead, he was lifted up by a pair of long hands that lifted him under his arms and carried him high up into the air over the crowd as his father, panic-stricken, struggled back through the thick press of people who had separated them, and took him back.

  It may seem a small thing to you, you who were really abandoned, and really lost, what happened to your father in Washington. But your father never forgave his father that day; never. And for all the people on earth who adored Jack Sinai—for Jack Sinai was a massive figure of his times—never did your grandfather recover from the fact that even before he lost his eldest son, he lost his eldest son’s trust. As for your father, before too long he was back on the mall in Washington, D.C., and he was feeling, again, rage. Rage at all the people, like his father, who had marched on Washington before. Rage at their failure to achieve civil rights, to stop the war, to change the government. Rage at their compromise, their ineffectiveness; rage at their rage, which had lost their battles, again and again. And in many ways, it would be for that loss—not for losing him, but for losing the battle for what was right—that your father would never forgive his father.

  But Isabel—this is the part I want you to understand. Your father, too, would come to be an adult who lost a child, and when that happened, your father began to think of his father in a new way. You may say that it was because it was then that for the first time your father stopped blaming his father for having lost him and began blaming himself for having lost his own child. Maybe so. The fact remains that from that day on his memory of his father began to change, as if he had never really recognized his father when he could actually see him, talk to him, touch him. As if, because his father had died while he was underground, he had never really lost him but would find him, with the rest of his family—his mother, his brother—where he had left them, in a Greenwich Village of twenty-six years ago.

  He discovered in his mind remarkable detail, remarkably vivid memories of remarkably precise times: his father under the Atlantic sun next to water at Martha’s Vineyard; in the vast green woods of the Catskills, summer after summer, at the window in his offices at the Exchange Building, staring out over the East River; and in a sudd
en rush of longing, at the dinner table at home on Bedford Street. Food gave him vivid memories, as if his father’s tastes all along had inhabited your fathers’ palate, waiting to be found. And as the decisions and the dangers of his life became adult, he found very new images of his father becoming dominant in his imagination, much more complex ones than the man who drove his ten-year-old son from New York to Washington to attend a voting rights demonstration and once there, lost him. Some were historical: his father—like your father—had played big roles in his time, as a lawyer, as an activist, and once even as a soldier. Others were intimate: in memory he recognized as never before the old man’s patience, his forbearance, his fundamental goodness. And some were purely physical: the quiet strength of the middle-aged man who had raised him, and whom he had never seen grow old.

  And so it was that when it came to your father, in turn, to lose his child, he found it was to his father’s image that he turned immediately and repeatedly to measure each step of what he was about to do.

  And always, his father was there. As if his father was a voice deep in his mind, and that voice was whispering help. In a very real way, your father’s father came to him more directly than when he had been alive. And perhaps that is the answer to the conundrum that all parents are, one way or another, bad parents; the conundrum that one day we will each be a bad parent too. Perhaps the more flawed performances of our lives as parents are, in the deepest sense, our practice for that more complicated job we will have to do long after we’re gone, long after we’re dead, guiding our children through the high dangers of adulthood, giving them directions they will not even know they need for many, many years to come.

  When your father came to need so his father’s example was many years after his father lost him at a civil rights demonstration in Washington, when your father lost his own daughter. And it was then, when a series of events with which we are required to reckon today, began.