The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  All the love in the world for you girl

  Thumbelina, in a great big scary world

  All the love in the world for you girl

  Take my hand, we’ll make it through this world

  Date: June 11, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 17

  You want to know how you walk out on your daughter.

  Like this: you empty the Sportsac shoulder bag of her books and her stuffed animals.

  Arrange them next to the bed.

  Without looking at her.

  Then you put some of your clothes in it.

  Doesn’t matter which clothes. All you need is the bag. Without a bag, you look strange, traveling.

  Then you walk out the door.

  Just like that.

  Isabel. Everyone always wants to know how I left my seven-year-old-daughter alone in a hotel room. Everyone always wants to know the true, inside story of the Weather Underground, the first exclusive interview, the secret we’ve never told. They want the little thrill of terror and pleasure. How does it feel to be on the run, to be in an explosion, to be hunted by the police? How does it feel not to see your family for thirty years? How does it feel to lie, day in, day out? To live incognito? Not to be able to tell anyone the truth? To read of your father’s death in the newspaper?

  The world is full of people who think they can ask you to tell them about the worst moment in your existence. You are a criminal, a fugitive, an icon of an age gone by, you are public property.

  Izzy. You, of course, you are the only one with a right to know, and you have never asked.

  How do you abandon your daughter in a hotel room?

  Like this: the freshly vacuumed carpet of the hallway, its synthetic pile all bending this way, then that, with the track of a vacuum cleaner, and far and away I hear the dulcet sound of a vacuum cleaner warping a childhood afternoon.

  Like this: the elevator panel, a broken button for the second floor flickering at me with blank accusation, and for a moment I hang on the very borderline of feeling that accusation to be real, and intentional, and personal.

  The denial of reality, as schizophrenics and acid lovers know, comes at a price. The symptoms of terror—tunnel vision, hypnagogic memory, distortion of vision, and paranoid delusion—years and years of practice are no good; each time they come, they are new. The tiled floor of the lobby, a chemical smell in my nose and mournfully, funereally, an orchestral version of “Harvest Moon” sounding faintly from hidden speakers. The hotel bar, a couple of men in suits with a woman between them, the bartender watching CNN, CNN being hosted by a woman with jagged black bangs, a background of desolate desert behind her, and the three people at the bar watching. Blackness beyond the bar’s door to the street, a virtually uncontrollable urge to run: the police are waiting for me outside that door, everyone knows it, the people at the bar, the bartender, the woman on the screen reporting from a desert, they know it.

  Outside, a moon I could not see angled silver light into the space between the buildings. A hooker in a leather minidress shifted from her perch next to the hotel bar to move down the deserted street. Air conditioners hummed from the windows above, and far away a police siren rose and faded.

  I waited for the hooker to move away, the street shimmering, swimming before my eyes, my heart racing. And when she was gone, before pure panic could overtake me, I began to walk.

  • • •

  How do you abandon your daughter in a hotel room in downtown Manhattan?

  In my case, badly. Stupidly. Dangerously.

  I should have known a good, long, circuitous route to take, preferably through a large and crowded place, to where I was going, though it was only two blocks away. I should have had a partner watching my trajectory, ensuring no one was following, and failing that, I should have had a rehearsed itinerary, one of those I had figured out in the old days, one that crossed large spaces, doubled back, gave me the chance to check my tail and, should I find anyone, lose them. Most importantly, I should have been doing it all by day, in crowded streets, not at night when I was virtually the only figure to be seen. “Going downtown during the workday is like putting water through a filter.” Mimi’s rule. “You may get stuck, but if you don’t, you’re as clean as you’ll ever be.”

  But to follow rules, you have to want to stay safe. The hollowness reamed through my body, the brute ache, the terror. And I knew it to be just the tip of the awfulness that was available to me. All of my being went into its denial. I had nothing left over to protect myself with. No energy to care about being safe. And so without the slightest thought for the safety of what I was doing, without ever looking back, I went toward the river, then turned north, then turned west, and had anyone been following me, they could have watched me as clear as in the light of day walking into the ornate lobby of an office building, where I signed the register in the name Daniel Sinai in front of the uniformed night guard who, once he had looked up the name, nodded me toward the elevators.

  The Pine Street entrance of the Exchange Building. Daniel Sinai, tenant. Come to burn some midnight oil over a contract, a lease, a negotiation. The night guard went back to sleep and, not hurrying, I moved toward the elevators. Then my heart began to accelerate.

  Not from worry, however. I had no doubt that my brother would still hold the lease on my father’s law office, a two-room suite on the twenty-second floor that had once been my grandfather’s. At least while my mother was alive, there was no chance of that office ever leaving the family.

  That, as the elevator doors closed and the floor lifted, carrying me to a place I had not been for a quarter century, was not what made my heart pound.

  2.

  Here’s a rule for you: when you are afraid, take the stairs. At least your beating heart can process the adrenaline in your blood. Left passive in the elevator, panic returned, not just an edge, this time, but the real thing: bad panic, so strong that I had to crouch down on the floor.

  First it was physical, burning in my underarms and crotch, as if my skin had been massaged with pepper. Then it passed in a wave, leaving me dripping with sweat, and in its wake I felt a gravitational pull, like an ocean undertow, toward the hotel room where you still slept. All this happened in the moments of the elevator rising, that quickly, and yet it left me so weakened that I nearly could not get out when finally the doors opened on the twenty-second floor. I held the door until I was afraid the alarm would sound, and it was only that risk that made me, at last, step out of the elevator and walk, one step after another, down the hallway, my steps hollow against the green-marbled linoleum floor that had not, apparently, been changed, for it was as familiar to me as the very smell of the hall. Number 2232. At the door, another debilitating wave of panic came over me. I let my back go against the wall and, eyes clenched, lowered myself onto the floor, trying to visualize something, anything, that would organize my thoughts and make my panic recede.

  Two-two-three-two, Exchange Building. A single-room office overlooking the Brooklyn docks. Sitting in the hallway, I could close my eyes and see the view. Once my grandfather, your great-grandfather, wrote deeds and supervised closings here. My father, your grandfather, joined the practice after his graduation from Fordham Law School in 1935. Sinai and Son: when I was a child, the clouded glass window of the office still held that name. In fact, it was not Sinai and Son for long: while my father was in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, his father died, and when he came back, a twenty-five-year-old man with shrapnel scars up his left leg from the defense of Cape Tortuga, my father was no longer interested in property law.

  His heroism in battle, however, was little celebrated in his own country, and likewise the law that my father now practiced did not impress the other lawyers in the Exchange Building. In the fifties, the building management moved to evict him. My mother, your grandmothe
r, used to say that it was the single rejection that had really hurt Jack Sinai. Dies Committee blacklisting, rejection from the U.S. Army due to “premature anti-fascism,” attacks by McCarthy and Hoover, death threats; my mother told Kai Bird for his biography of my father that the single thing she could remember depressing—as opposed to outraging—Jack Sinai had been the Exchange Building’s attempt to evict him. He sued them, of course—disproving the adage about a lawyer who represents himself, necessarily, as virtually no lawyer would represent him—and in 1996, two years after my father’s death, my brother Daniel now kept the lease out of pure spite.

  The key had always been kept in a tiny hollow behind the door molding. When I at last was able to look for it, my heart sank to see that the molding had been changed to steel. Still, when I twisted my body, in its sitting position, to look more closely, I found the drywall hollowed out just where the wood used to be, and a Medeco key nestling inside. With a fingernail I pulled it out, letting it fall to the ground with a thin ping. Then I stood and opened the door onto the most perfectly preserved piece of the past I had ever seen.

  3.

  A Steel Age desk, massive, sat against the window; two smaller Wakefields, where the para and secretary had sat, against the wall. A black fan, its blades worn glossy by use, rested on top of a bank of black steel file cabinets. The windows had been replaced—they were double-glazed and aluminum—but the green venetian blinds lowered halfway over the glass were original, and the oak molding was too. With something near reverence I ran my hand over the wood, watching out at the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, at the black of the river. The moon was over the West Side, and I could not see it, but the intensity of the light spoke of its size, lighting the whole of the cloudless sky. Far away the glitter of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was faintly visible next to the ambient lights of Bay Ridge. As if in prayer I leaned my forehead against the glass and shut my eyes.

  You want to know how I left you. By standing, for a very long time, thus, my eyes clenched shut against reality. I must tell you, Isabel, I have no memory of that time. Perhaps, eyes closed, I saw the view before me better than I had with my eyes open. Perhaps I was seeing the light glittering on the surface of the East River, the black water swollen with tide, inscrutable, lapping against the pilings of the Brooklyn Ferry. For so long, in fact, did I stand thus that again, far in my mind, I felt panic approach, and it was only when I felt that that I stood straight and opened my eyes, half expecting to see a hallucination in the place of the view, proof that I could not take the strain, that I should give up.

  I would have welcomed that proof.

  But once again, reality held.

  I sat now, at the desk in the swivel chair I’d used to play in as a child, and put my hands on the surface of the desk where lay the draft of a Nation article my brother was working on. In the drawers, I knew, were the letters and deeds and records of a lifetime in New York, the office here, the house on Bedford Street, the Vineyard house over Menemsha Bay. Everything was here, preserved forever in the tiny office over the water, precious reminders of a glorious life, a life that would never be repeated. Only the smell was gone, the smell of my father’s Bay Rum shaving lotion, and as I realized that, for me, suddenly the whole office became a tomb.

  I rose and crossed the room to kneel in front of a squat black safe. The combination came immediately to mind, as did the workings of the ancient lock. I swung the door open and pulled out the sliding shelf on top. And here was my first surprise.

  The papers were there, precisely where I had left them. March 8, 1970, my last time in New York: two days after the town house bombing I had traveled from the Midwest in the identity that I was to live in until 1974, just to hide this identity, Robert Russell. It was, I knew, the best identity I would ever build, and although I had no use for it in mind, although I had spent months building it, and although I was risking my liberty to be in New York at all, two days after the town house blast, while the rubble on West Eleventh Street was still smoldering, I had traveled east to hide it, here, in the one place I knew would never be touched by time. A social security card, a Wisconsin driver’s license, and a passport—the big green kind they used to use—in the name of Robert Russell. Now they sat in the back of the safe, just where I had left them. That did not surprise me.

  But below them was another set of IDs, and as I looked at them, I grew confused, so confused that I thought I had perhaps lost my mind. Here was another driver’s license—also Robert Russell’s, also Wisconsin—with a picture of myself wearing a black beard. The license was, however, current, renewed some eighteen months before. And here was another passport, not one of the big green ones from the seventies, but one of the little navy blue ones they used in the nineties. With confusion, I saw that this, too, was current—it had been taken out in 1995. The photograph on this one, clearer than the computer-generated license, was less convincing—it had clearly been taken before I’d had my nose fixed. The thought made my head swirl: the man in the picture was middle-aged, and yet I’d had my nose fixed twice, the second time in 1982, when I could still be described as young. The passport and driver’s license shared the same address: Water Street in Racine, Wisconsin.

  Dizzy with confusion, I looked back into the tray and found two more baffling items. The first was a stack of twenty-dollar bills, all old, tied with a rubber band. Later I would count a total of twenty-five thousand dollars. And there was a page torn from a perpetual calendar. Each day had a New York telephone number written next to it—a pay phone number, if this was in fact what it seemed to be. A yellow Post-it, clipped to the top, had in the same writing, the key.

  Ascend by one hour a day, starting 6 AM, ending midnight, in 12-day cycle, skipping the 6th and 7th of each month.

  For a long time I stared at the documents, unable to understand. An identity I had created and hidden twenty-five years before had been updated with photos of myself. An impossibility.

  Then I got it.

  Peering closely at the pictures on the IDs, I saw that it was not me at all but my younger brother, Daniel.

  Jesus Christ Almighty. I said the words out loud in the empty office. Daniel had been twelve when I went underground. I barely remembered the child.

  How long had he been keeping a valid identity in the safe? And how had he known to do it?

  Slowly, I saw that my forgotten little brother, in the forgotten little office, had for at least the last ten years kept up Robert Russell’s identity. He must have grown a beard for the pictures, and dyed it black, for I distinctly remembered him as a redhead. And therefore the nose, which so resembled mine before it was fixed, an aquiline, Jewish nose.

  Now why the fucking hell—I said it out loud—would he have done that?

  And yet, even if speaking to myself about it would have helped, there wasn’t time.

  I checked my watch and found it to be nearly midnight on June 20. Starting my brother’s time cycle, that made my first chance to call at six the next morning. Fair enough—in that case, I knew what to do. My plan had always been to contact my brother—this only made it easier. I rose now, packed the bills and the ID into your Sportsac shoulder bag, and left the office.

  Now, at last, exiting onto Pine Street, I had the presence of mind to start following a trajectory.

  4.

  New York City. The financial district at two-thirty in the morning. Down the long canyon of Pine Street a garbage truck idled while a worker tossed bales of papers into it. In front of it, a limousine pulled into the intersection and passed, and I remember that instinctively, I stepped against the wall. When the limo was gone, I began to walk, watching the garbage man carefully. He did not turn, working his way steadily through a small mountain of corporate recycling. At the corner of Pine and Williams, where a delivery truck was turning north, I slowed, waiting for it to block the intersection, then ran across Williams Street under its cover, pulling on a baseball cap from my pocket as I reached the sidewalk. I jogged for a time at th
e side of the truck before, suddenly, coming to a halt. The truck passed and, walking slowly now, I crossed to Maiden Lane, doubled back to Cedar, then went north on Pearl, taking a long look at the empty street behind me.

  The tunnel, we called it. At the beginning you are straight, and at the end you are underground. A long, clean passage away from everyone who knew you, unnoticed and unremarked. If it works right, absolutely nothing happens, and yet, at the other end, you are in another world. Your legal identity is changed. Your appearance is changed. And because there are no witnesses to either transformation, you are, now, literally, someone else.

  The patterns were as simple as a three-point turn in a driving test. If there were two of you, you could walk a known trajectory—through a department store or public plaza—and have your tail watched. If you were solo, you could stop on the street, look in a store window, turn to look behind you, watch each face passing and pronounce its details to yourself. Change directions, walk, repeat. Each set of circumstances had been carefully choreographed by intensely smart, detail-oriented people, and the police were absolutely unable to follow us. That’s why, Izzy, we thought we could rob a bank: everything else, from jailbreak to planting a bomb in the Pentagon, it had been so easy. We thought we could do anything.

  Later, we had delighted in bringing friends through the tunnel, giving them directions to follow and, out of nowhere, appearing at their sides. It had been Thai and Arthur who had brought Emile de Antonio through the tunnel out in Sheepshead Bay, then choreographed all the twists and turns, the backtracking and switches, to bring a whole camera crew to their safe house near Los Angeles for the filming of Underground.

  Now, at the top of Pearl, I walked quickly past Wolf’s Deli and into the courtyard of the Mitchell-Lama housing development. I crossed the central courtyard and, at its edge, hid behind a corner and waited. For ten long minutes the courtyard was empty. Then I crossed back, still meeting no one. Walking slowly now, I took Fulton to Nassau, Nassau up past 5 Beekman and Pace. At Pace I descended the subway stairs, took the deserted underpass—a place literally impossible for any surveillance to hide—and climbed back up onto the Brooklyn Bridge.