The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Now I had already run and hidden, and it was time to think.

  My biggest concern was video surveillance—that scared me much more than a manhunt. They’d be watching the many video cameras in many transportation hubs all over the country. In some places face recognition software could already be in place, comparing thousands of faces to a computer-aged image of myself, and I wasn’t sure what protection a disguise afforded. I thought about that, then decided to stop thinking about it: it was out of my control.

  As for the manhunt, besides an FBI task force that could involve hundreds of agents, besides U.S. marshals, and besides bounty hunters, local police all over the country would have received photos of me. Never mind the newspaper, which made virtually every person I passed a potential captor. The best possible thing to do was to avoid public places.

  And that was the problem: I needed to be at the train station, which was precisely the kind of place that would be under the highest surveillance.

  The only answer was to be there during the rush hour. I needed to be disguised, be smart, and be lucky.

  So now I had thought. I knew what I would do when the sun rose. And beyond that, it was impossible to figure out in its details. Beyond details, in fact, I knew virtually everything. I knew, in fact, what I was going to do for the days or weeks ahead until this was over. Where I was going, and how: this was unknown, but an unknown considerably softened by my brother’s having saved me the arduous tasks of finding ID and money—it reduced the tasks ahead from weeks to days. Why my brother had done this, and on whose advice—as well as how he had done it, and what it meant to me that he had done it—were unclear. But as for what I was doing, this was crystal clear to me. I had thought about it for years.

  There were perhaps two hours till sunrise. Lying, now, staring at the sky I could not see, I searched for details that required planning, and found none.

  And that was why, for the first time since I had left you, thirty-six hours before, I could no longer keep myself from thinking about you.

  • • •

  It was as if an unknown clock had been counting the hours since I left you, the longest time in your life I had spent away from you. Where were you? I knew precisely: Maggie Calaway would have taken you promptly up to Martha’s Vineyard. Bob Montgomery was already on a plane to New York, surely, but you were in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, asleep in a bed above Menemsha Bay.

  Which room? I found my mind’s eye wandering, now, through my father’s Vineyard house, built in the fifties when he represented the New Bedford Carpenter’s Union in their strike against Mallory Shipyards. Perhaps you were in my own childhood bed, the little iron bed that looked out over the horse pasture, mowed trim and clearly lit by the same big moon that now drifted above me in Chicago. You’d met your uncle by now, and your cousins. And then, with a shot of adrenaline that ran from my kidneys to my scalp, I realized that by now you had probably met your grandmother.

  I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself. I saw you, in the living room with its low Eames couch and its Wakefield furnishing, with your grandmother, now a woman in her eighties, my mother whom I had not seen in twenty-six years. What would you make of her? What would you make of these people who claimed to be your family? Would they be able to communicate anything to you that would make it make sense? Was it possible for you to come to trust them? In the best of circumstances, I knew, no matter how kind these people were, it was nonetheless terrifying to you. In the best of circumstances, I knew, no matter how good a job they did, they were nonetheless forging a scar in your consciousness that would never go away.

  There in that alleyway, the worry gnawed me, gored me, till I had to stand and pace, small groans coming out of my throat. How would I possibly make that scar heal? How could I possibly turn the battering I had given you into muscle? How would I possibly teach you to turn that experience of abandon into strength? I would need to be with you, every day, for years and years; through tantrum and rebellion, through drugs and boyfriends, I would need to show you, daily, hourly, the extent of my love. Without that, that scar would close over a part of your heart; would filter reality for you for the rest of your life, would infect love, work, joy, and would make of your adulthood the great, central challenge to heal it, taking the great energy that you should have given instead to love, to work.

  I sat, and even through the wall of nicotine in me, for I was smoking cigarette after cigarette now, regret seared; remorse for all the scars I had dealt you, for all the places I had let fear and horror into your heart; for all the ways I had wounded you, and I ached.

  It was a long time coming, the time when I at last found the will to swear, to swear that I would find a way to cure you. It was a long time coming, and I swore it not on my death but on my life: I swore that I would ache my whole life long unless I found a way to cure you of what I had done to you.

  By then the sun was rising, and I rose on stiff legs and walked back into the street.

  2.

  At a phone booth, using the 800 operator, I found the schedule for trains to Milwaukee. During rush hour, the busiest train would be the nine o’clock. By seven, the streets filling with downtown workers, I felt safe enough to walk across town until I hit the river, then head up toward the station. I had two hours to kill.

  Now, walking next to the river, the temperature rising toward the triple figures, where it would rest all day, it all seemed preordained. Jim Grant’s identity had been a very solid set of papers, one I had been preparing for years, preparing with the greatest possible care, as the identity that I would, if I had to, spend the rest of my life in. At the base of the identity was a dead baby, killed in a car crash in Bakersfield, California, in 1959. Two things made the identity extraordinary. First was the deaths of both of that baby’s parents in a second car crash in 1967. Now Jim Grant was an orphan, with no family to explain away. Second was a complete set of school transcripts through high school graduation in 1976. For this forgery, I owed a resourceful secretary at the Bakersfield Community Board, a woman who had not only typed up the transcripts but made sure they were added to each year of stored files all the way back to first grade. She had known she was helping a fugitive and trusting her had been a real risk. When, a few years later, I heard about her death by drowning—surfing off the coast of Big Sur—I felt real loss. Then I felt something else.

  Now there was no witness at all to Jim Grant’s falsity.

  After Bank of Michigan, as if it had all been preordained, I went out to Bakersfield under a transitional identity. From a motel room, I got copies of Jim Grant’s high school transcripts and applied to five colleges. While I waited for answers, I got a job at a local print shop and began to familiarize myself with the place of Jim’s birth. And, even more importantly, I began the process of becoming seven years younger.

  Most of it was easy. I cut my hair shorter, I learned the music that eighteen-year-olds listened to, I stayed in shape. When a collision with a wall during a pickup basketball game broke my nose, I took advantage of the situation to have it fixed, an operation that considerably changed my appearance, much more than I would have thought. Suddenly, if it weren’t for the brown eyes, I could be Irish.

  April 1975 was the first time I was required to file taxes under my new name. It was also the month that college acceptances came out.

  The IRS refunded me $3,500 in overpaid federal taxes.

  The University of Chicago offered Jim Grant, an orphan from Bakersfield, California, with a nearly perfect GPA and glowing references, a work-study scholarship.

  I had been in Chicago twice: once in 1968 for the Democratic National Convention, once in 1969 for the Days of Rage. Both times I had been arrested. Apart from those arrests, I knew no one in the city, not a soul.

  And so, in the summer of 1975, with the dreamlike feeling of revisiting the past, I became a nineteen-year-old college freshman named James Marshal Grant from Bakersfield, California.

  I started classes at
the university, taking step after step into the insane imposture that was to become my life, and step after step, I found I had not been caught.

  • • •

  You will ask me where Mimi Lurie was during all this. The answer is, I don’t know. The cutoff between us was absolute, never to be negotiated. I had no idea of her plans, her name, her intentions, her whereabouts. Nor did I ever intend to find out, ever.

  You will ask me how I forgot her so quickly.

  Isabel, I swear to you, it was as if she were dead. There was grieving, and it was intense. But so absolute was the fact before me—the fact that I would never see Mimi Lurie again—that after its course was run, the mourning ended, exactly as if she were dead. We both knew it. It was not negotiable: we no longer counted. All that mattered was that we never meet again.

  And then, there was another fact.

  There was the fact that after my first year in Chicago, in the Indian summer of 1976—the purest, most poignant autumn of my life—under the crystalline sun over the University of Chicago campus, I met your mother.

  Julia Frances Montgomery, at nineteen. Watching out a restaurant window as the square in front of Union Station filled, smoking from the pack of Export A’s, I could see her, moving through the campus of the U of C in an oversize plaid shirt and jeans.

  How do I describe your mother to you? She was like a perfectly ripe piece of fruit, warmed by the sun, glowing with vitality, nearly exquisite.

  It has been, for years, very hard for me to think about those days. It’s hard for me to remember the girl, then, who was going to become the woman who would be your mother. Everything that was going to happen later was in her then, but none of it was bad. We drank, but drinking was a celebration, a thing that enhanced everything we did rather than, as it came to for her, ruining everything she touched. We smoked dope, but it took us deeper into the now, the complex, exciting, hilarious now, that wonderland we were exploring, day after day, together. We shared a taste for the gutter, but the gutter was such a different place, so much less dangerous, so much more fun.

  It was 1976. I had always looked younger than my years, and by virtue of dressing carefully down passed easily for a hard-lived nineteen. Your mother at nineteen, on the other hand, passed easily for twenty-six, how old I in fact was. She had grown up in her father’s town house on Washington Square, a full turn-of-the-century town house looking directly at the park. She had been through two Senate campaigns with her father, a charismatic, beautiful daughter who knew how to play to cameras and interviewers, as if by instinct. She had tremendous native talent, and combined high ambition with the energy to work. She’d studied—after school, weekends, and summers—voice, tap, figure skating, and acting. By the time she graduated Dalton, she’d sung twice on Broadway and appeared in a half-dozen films, some in acting roles, some in dancing.

  Do you know all this? Has your mother told you? I cannot tell you, Isabel, how talented she was. She did not dance; rather, she let choreography be personified by her body, and as for dramatic roles, she inhabited her characters so completely, so thoroughly, that the lines of her own identity seemed simply to disappear. She had known all her life she would be an actor. College had been her father’s one demand, and the University of Chicago had the merit of being near the Steppenwolf Theater, where she was determined to work and where in fact she did, appearing in ensemble with Gary Sinise, Joan Allen, John Malkovich. It was watching her in a Steppenwolf Cherry Orchard that I fell in love. Blond, with nearly translucent skin; brown-eyed with depthless irony behind her pupils. Slim, with a grace that takes generations of ease to produce; angular of feature and sharp of wit in a way that, by contrast, comes from nowhere.

  I admit that later it did occur to me, it was made clear to me, that there were other advantages to marrying Julia Montgomery than the fact that I was in love with her. I admit that, Isabel. Later, it became clear that a marriage to Julia Montgomery was a very practical thing for me to do. It allowed me to become a lawyer, to establish a life, to work, for many years to come. But I absolutely deny that there was any calculation to it. That was all luck, that being married to your mother was so good for me. At the time, there was no thought of anything but love. She erased, for me, the years between 1970 and 1976. She allowed me, very literally, to do it all over again. This time there was no fumbling through first sex, no reexamination of monogamy, no politics, and no sharing. This time, there was just intense, focused love, and the chance to make up for all the things I had, for all those years, missed.

  And on this point, I would like you to be very clear. In my life as Jim Grant I had two lovers, and I told both of them who I was before I got into their beds. The second was Molly, and I hadn’t the slightest doubt that she would keep my secret. The first, however, was the single greatest risk of my life, and when I told your mother that I was Jason Sinai, I was ready to go back on the run.

  Do you see? I was in love.

  It was 1976. That summer, for the first time since 1970, I came east, staying in Bob Montgomery’s huge Oneonta Park house in the Catskills. It was easy to like my future father-in-law, a Bobby Kennedy protégé, and, the war over, even my contempt for his liberalism seemed possible to overlook. And of course, because Bob was, that summer, nearly constantly campaigning, we had the run of the summer house. Which is how your grandfather met me, coming home one night from upstate unexpectedly and finding me asleep in his daughter’s childhood bed.

  You have to remember, Isabel, that once your grandfather and I loved each other. True, in 1996 Bob Montgomery was hiring the highest-powered, most right-wing lawyers in the state to take you away from me. But in the summer of 1976, when he found me asleep in his daughter’s bed, a different set of responses prevailed. Call it a sign of the times. He knew, anyway, that his control over us was practically nonexistent, and his best way of reeling us in was to give us our heads. So to speak. Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t outlast the summer. What he found was that Julia and I stayed together right through college, and that four years later we were back in the Catskills, this time for our wedding.

  My wedding present from my father-in-law was a new social security number.

  • • •

  It was the night before the wedding when your grandfather asked me to walk out on the lawn with him, in the middle of what passed, in those days, for a bachelor party. On the edge of his property in Oneonta Park, looking out at the Blackheads he stood silently, while I tried to guess what kind of speech was coming. What he said, however, was something very different from what I ever could have guessed.

  It may seem obvious to you. When you marry a senator’s daughter, an FBI background check is run on you. In fact, when you date a senator’s daughter, it’s FBI business. For four full years, your grandfather had known who I was.

  The other thing he knew, however, the FBI hadn’t told him.

  He knew that I could cost him everything. Not just his career, but his daughter, too.

  Because neither your grandfather nor your mother had the slightest doubt that if I went on the run again, Julia was going to run with me.

  Can you understand? Now, since 9-11 and the War on Terrorism, we aren’t part of the “counterculture” anymore, we’re “internal terrorists.” But that wasn’t the case in 1976. With the war just a year over, then; with the insults against the Constitution from the Nixon years still so fresh; with COINTELPRO still being revealed, it was a very different thing, then. Everyone who was still underground had the same experience of being recognized, again and again, by strangers who never thought to call the police; of meeting old friends who kept our secrets; even of taking new friends into our secret. All of our families and known friends were constantly subject to interrogation, surveillance, and never did a single soul turn a single one of us in. In context, what Bobby Montgomery did was not only understandable, it was sensible. When the first FBI check produced grounds for reinvestigation, Bobby Montgomery thought for a great long time about what to do.

/>   Then he called in a favor.

  The same kind of favor he would later call in for your mother, to ensure that her arrests and rehabilitations were never recorded.

  Jim Grant’s identity was expunged in every federal and state record, his social security was redone, and he passed his FBI background check.

  What had I thought was going to happen? Uptown, in Jersey, in the Rondout Valley of the Catskills, across the Midwest, in California; all the Weather members who had been underground were surfacing, whether they had, while underground, been part of the Revolutionary Committee or, like me, been expelled from the organization. I had no contact with any of them: the B.O.M. robbery had alienated me from every contact, every old ally. I, Sharon Solarz, and Mimi Lurie, none of us knew where each other was, except that we all three lived in a different legal dimension from our old Weather comrades. For us, there was no possibility of surfacing; for us there was no possible legal way out. One by one the others came aboveground, protected by the gross illegality of the government’s evidence gathering, unprosecutable. One by one they settled their problems and launched aboveground lives as parents, educators, lawyers, activists. Others—Judy Clark, Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert—stayed under, graduating into the May 19th Movement, the Black Liberation Army, ending up finally jailed in a robbery gone wrong. And still others were then in jail. But of us all, only three were still fugitives, actively wanted as accessories to murder for the Bank of Michigan robbery, and I was one.

  So what had I expected? Not much, is my impression. I expected to have a run for my money as Jim Grant, and I expected, eventually, to get caught. Until then I planned to do the thing that the war had stolen from me. I worked at college with a vengeance, an energy channeled from all the frustration of my career in Weather, an abandon fueled by my awareness that each day of liberty, of productivity, could be my last. Do you know, Isabel, how well you can do at college if you go as an adult? To say that youth is wasted on the young is, I assure you, an incredible understatement. With the focus of an adult I did brilliantly.