by Neil Gordon
And instead of getting caught, in the spring of 1980, Julia and I were married under cherry blossoms in Oneonta Park. That fall I started law school at Yale, where your mother was to do an MFA in theater, and for the first time since 1970 I was at last safe.
In 1982 Julia Montgomery, having already earned a great deal of money on the stage and before the camera, inherited from her paternal grandfather and set up the Montgomery Foundation.
And in 1984, when Jim Grant passed the New York State Bar, and he and his glamorous wife moved to Woodstock, I became the Montgomery Foundation’s only full-time employee, practicing public interest law out of Saugerties and lending my glamorous wife’s splendid home the added celebrity of my radical chic.
The only difficulties were physical: my ever-hastening baldness, normal for a man of Jason Sinai’s age, premature for Jim Grant. And attending properly to Jim Grant’s prostate was a calculated risk, a necessary one after I read in an In These Times interview that my father was under treatment for prostate cancer: Jason Sinai’s prostate was seven years older than Jim Grant’s, and a history of prostate cancer was a positive indication for a PSA test.
But it was as if from the moment I came to Chicago, an angel had put his finger on me and guided me through everything, all the danger, all the hardship, all the lost opportunities and limitations of the life I had decided to lead, and kept guiding me, year after year.
The only thing was, that angel, he forgot to bring Julia along.
And now the whole trip was ending. Right here in Chicago. For a moment I looked out the window of the restaurant as if expecting to see that whole diorama of the seventies still out on the streets: Puerto Ricans in wide-brimmed hats, blacks in Afros, white kids with stringy long hair and oversize plaid shirts and denim, smooth dealers gliding in with loose joints, bare-stomached women in halter tops and hip-huggers, someone playing the Jackson Five on a transistor…. Instead, walking in and out of Union Station, I saw young women looking like movie stars sipping cappuccinos, young men in Donna Karan with shaved heads and Armani sunglasses, each one of them so smooth that if Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow walked by, no one would have batted an eye because you couldn’t tell anymore who was the movie star and who was the high school senior from Winnetka. Sitting there, that morning, the hot summer sun coming up, waiting, I felt incredulity that it had come to this, and not for the first, but for the thousandth time, I asked myself if there was no other way out.
But what way was there? I didn’t know what made Julia an addict—I had my theories, naturally—but I did know that addicts aren’t good mothers. They tend to leave their kids in front of the TV while they get high. They tend to take their kids to all manner of sleazeballs’ houses instead of the library or a playground. They tend, instead of teaching their kids to read, to pass out on the couch with their mouths open and their chests moving shallowly, as if content with only the minimal amount of air. I moved out, with you, after the police found you in Julia’s convertible Saab, alone, on Route 212, with Julia scoring an eightball from a high school kid in his parents’ house, and you with what later would turn into a black eye, for it came out that she had hit you when you objected to being left alone in the car. And she divorced me a year later, from London, where her father had taken her to clean up as soon as I left. At first Bob was my ally against her, or rather against her addiction. Then that changed.
For a time we had a truce: Bob could destroy me, but I could destroy Bob—a man who had concealed the identity of a known political fugitive throughout two terms in the U.S. Senate was not, repeat, not, going to become ambassador to England.
When Sharon was arrested, everything changed.
Now, it did not need to be Bob Montgomery who was going to expose me. Ben Schulberg would. As soon as Ben Schulberg realized how strange it was that I refused to defend Sharon, I knew it was all over.
Within two days the tender care of twenty years had fallen apart, and I knew it was time to do the thing I had most feared over the last twenty-five years.
Isabel. Had I not had you, I would simply have disappeared. You changed everything, for everyone. Your right to be Isabel, to be protected from your mother, and still not to become a fugitive: it was absolute.
That day in Chicago, steeling myself to leave my seat in a restaurant and walk out into Union Station, I wished that I had never done anything in the world, that I had never had any kind of a past, except as your father, and that there was nothing I ever had to do again but take care of you.
But I had, and now I had no choice.
3.
By 8:45 the entrance to Union Station was thick with people, a line of taxis perhaps fifteen long dropping off and picking up in front, buses arriving down the street on both sides, sidewalks full of commuters from the suburban trains both coming out and going in. There was of course no way to be sure what surveillance there was, but there was no obvious sign. I left the restaurant now and bought an “I Love Chicago” sweatshirt and a White Sox baseball cap at a little tourist storefront, then wandered into the crowd in front of the station and into the entrance.
The seconds of my transaction to buy the ticket, crossing the interior of the station, boarding the train, were as if in time lapse. As if I were watching each event pass seconds after it had in fact happened, and that from a slight distance. Whereas everything I’d done since leaving New York had been with a nearly suicidal abandon, unable to care if I were caught or not, now I found myself caring nearly too much. With the caring, with the fear, came its inverse, tiny bursts of excitement in my stomach. I recognized the feeling as that which came in the center of an action; stealing guns, planting a bomb: each second free opened a vista of another second, and another, and another, until you found yourself, despite all, believing in the possibility of success, and that that belief feels so good it hurts.
There were police in two sets of three toward the center of the hall; I kept to the side by crossing first to a newsagent for a paper, then to a Starbucks. When I started a trajectory toward my gate, I tried to visualize their focus, predicting what in the crowd might attract it—two businessmen laughing, a beautiful woman—and keeping away. An impossible task, I knew, though I also knew that there was the movement of a policeman’s optic muscle between freedom and failure for me, and that every tiny advantage I could give myself could make all the difference. And in fact my luck held, because I was sunk in my seat behind the paper before I noticed that my picture—bearded and surprisingly bald—was again on the front page under the headline: “Sixties Radical Fugitive Thought to Be in the U.S.,” and the subhead, “FBI Thinks Flight to Canada Was a Ruse.”
Date: June 14, 2006
From: “Benjamin Schulberg”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 22
As for me, the drive to Ann Arbor took somewhat longer than I had anticipated. In retrospect, this probably had something to do with the speeding ticket I was given somewhere just south of Niagara Falls. That is, the ticket itself didn’t take that long, but the fact that the police records turned up my car as unregistered, as well as the couple dozen unpaid tickets stemming from that registration…that took quite a while to straighten out, and in fact required following the police into a town called North Tanawanda—Mohican, I believe, for “speed trap”—and calling my editor, and then going to the local MVB, paying all the unpaid tickets—over a thousand dollars, with penalties—and getting my new registration. The entire process was rendered all the more humiliating by the fact that I had to be grateful for not having the car confiscated outright, and furthermore I now owed not only my career and livelihood but my very freedom to my effete, officious, and phony editor.
The upshot was that I spent a night in a motel in Canada, a room with cinder-block walls that resembled nothing so much as the hole in a maximum-security prison, an impression much strengthened by what sounded like a ga
ng bang in the next room. In the morning, up bright and early by ten o’clock, easy, I had all the time in the world to get to Michigan—or would have, had I not found that every item of clothing in my always-ready suitcase had been worn on my last business trip, a month before, and I had apparently neglected to wash them. The smell struck me, interestingly, as very familiar, and after reflection I was able to place it as not unlike that of a bagel and lox left in a refrigerator for an indeterminate time during which the electric supply to the refrigerator may or may not have been cut off due to nonpayment of bills. The next few hours were spent in a charming Laundromat, then I had to rent another hotel room for a shower—a hundred and twenty bucks for a shower, North Tanawanda’s meaning turning out to include, in some linguistic innovation peculiar to Mohican, “hapless tourist ripoff”—and in the end I arrived in Ann Arbor with minutes to spare. Minutes that I spent finding State Street by a process of pure chance—necessarily, since I could not bring myself to ask directions—and, at last, the café where John Osborne was waiting.
Immediately on entering the café, I saw a large man of about fifty with thick brown hair and a long face sitting over a table by the window. The little café table seemed dwarfed under his arms. He wore khakis and a blue denim shirt showing sweat under the arms. I’m not sure how I knew it was Osborne, a guess really, but a good one because as I approached, he rose, courteous and curious, and shook my hand; then we sat and regarded one another in silence while I decided on a soft start to the conversation. He seemed, despite his size, gentle.
“So, you have a daughter at the U of M, Mr. Osborne?”
Pause. He did not ask me to use first names—not very midwestern of you, Osborne, I thought to myself. “Yes, sir. A senior. Going on to Quantico next.”
“Quantico?” I was surprised. “To work?”
“For a few years. Until she begins her training.”
“Wow. You must be proud.”
Pause. “Yes, sir.”
There was something strangely distant in the response. I tried again. “Do you come down to visit a lot?”
Pause, and I sensed a struggle in which a surprisingly moving pride suddenly won: this large man, I saw, loved to talk about his daughter. “We do. It’s hard for her to get upstate with her work. She’s always insisted on having a job, even though we tell her she doesn’t need to. She’s our one and only, so there’s enough to go around. But she says we can save our money for someone who needs it. Has a three-point-nine; Dean’s List every semester here, and three evenings a week and Sunday afternoons, she waits tables at a diner downtown. My wife’s picking her up now—they’ll be here in a half hour or so. That enough human interest for you?”
The last sentence was unexpected. Now, in this man’s kind face, I also saw wryness. But I didn’t feel that confrontation was what I needed, so I carried on as if I hadn’t noticed.
“I was just thinking, coming to town here must be a blast from the past for you. I mean, you were here in the days, no?”
“Well, yes.” Pause. “I was on campus from ’65 to ’68 as a student. Then again from ’70 to ’71, but that was undercover. Yes, you could say I have a lot of nostalgia for Ann Arbor. But you know, a lot of people in Michigan feel the same way.”
“So you must have known the folk in Weather, then?”
“Well…not the ones who went underground. I only started on FBI work in the end of ’70, after they were gone.”
I experienced a moment of dissociation, hearing Weather referred to so factually, and nonjudgmentally, a historical event rather than a question of culture.
“Never encountered Sinai or Lurie?”
“Not to speak of, no. I mean, I might have seen Sinai talking somewhere. But nothing past that.”
Osborne shifted, and I caught the edge of a light leather holster inside his open collar.
“Then you were in Vietnam from—”
“Sixty-three to ’65.”
“Two tours of duty?”
Pause. “One and a half. I came back on a medical evacuation.”
I pushed one more time. “Injured?”
Pause. Then, in a tone that showed this was his last answer, he said simply: “I took a bullet at Songbe. Phuoc Long Province. I got a medical discharge in December 1965, and came back to go to college.”
I answered quickly, changing the terrain. “That would have been quite an adjustment, coming back.”
Pause. “You could say. Convinced me to go into FBI work.”
“And undercover.”
“And undercover.”
“What convinced you?” I couldn’t resist asking. There were no more than three answers to this question, all of them bullshit, and which one this man subscribed to would be telling.
More telling than I expected, because it was a new answer altogether. “Where you fell on the question of Vietnam, Mr. Schulberg, didn’t depend on what you believed.”
“No?” I watched him now with new attention.
“No. People tell you that, I advise you to ignore them. Where you fell on the question of Vietnam depended on the company you kept, nothing more, nothing less. Your friends went, your neighbors went, your family went—then you went too.”
“That’s it? No politics, ethics, beliefs?”
“No, sir. Good people fell on both sides of the question of Vietnam. That’s the side I was on, and I’m not about to apologize for it now.”
I absorbed that. “And today?”
Osborne answered evenly, saying, I realized, something that sounded very simple, but which required a very complicated process to get to.
“Today, the question’s over, so it doesn’t matter anymore. Time only goes one way, Mr. Schulberg, and it happens to be in the direction away from the war in Vietnam, thank God.”
Pause, and I, sensing that time was going only one way, shifted the conversation slightly.
“I would have imagined that Jason Sinai was big business for you all just now.”
“Well, of course the Traverse City station’s following what’s going on. The manhunt is national, though—we don’t see any particular reason Sinai should return here.”
“Do you know what he’s doing?”
“Sure. That’s no mystery.”
I said nothing, and after a moment the man went on. “He’s saving his freedom, Mr. Schulberg. That’s what he’s been doing for the past twenty-five years; it’s what he’s doing now.”
“Saving his freedom by abandoning his daughter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t find that hard to believe?”
Pause. “No, sir. Lots of revolutionaries have children. You’re talking about people who’ve abandoned their families, their professions, their lives, for what they believe. Jason Sinai, his father died while he was underground, and Sinai never even contacted his family. His father died while he was underground. That didn’t make him surface. Now he has to lose his daughter. That won’t make him surface either.”
Osborne shrugged, as if he wished he could change the fact of life he’d just told me. The shrug, I felt, which was the only occurrence of this gesture in the whole conversation, was curious. Then I tried again.
“I see a difference between an eighteen-year-old who’s prepared to leave his parents and a thirty-nine-year-old abandoning his only daughter.”
“Forty-six, Mr. Schulberg. Jim Grant was thirty-nine. Jason Sinai’s forty-six. But I take your point.” Osborne thought for a time. Then he went on, in what seemed to me a very considered tone. “I myself can’t understand how someone could abandon their child for what they believe. I’d certainly sell out everything I believe for my daughter. Someone who could do that—that seems to me a very dangerous thing.”
Osborne paused for thought now, a long pause that I didn’t interrupt.
“However, these are dangerous kinds of people. I’ll tell you, Mr. Schulberg, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the work I’ve done, it’s that there’s nothing more dangerous
than someone who believes in what they’re doing. Most of us who went to Vietnam—no way we were cold warriors. No way we were going out of some kind of patriotic fervor. We were going to share the danger that our friends and neighbors couldn’t escape, and I doubt you’ll find one in ten who thought beyond their duty. But folk like Sinai—it’s real different, Mr. Schulberg. They were true believers, and that’s why I was prepared to take an undercover assignment against them. You know that when twenty FBI agents came to Jeff Jones’s door to arrest him after fifteen years underground, fifteen years of terrorist activity, they found him inside with a four-year-old child? What’s the difference between that and the Branch Davidians going to war with children inside their compound? To my way of thinking, I’ve been fighting the same kind of threat all my life.”
I couldn’t let this pass. “You don’t see a difference between the radical left during a brutal, undeclared war and the radical right during the most democratic period in American history?”
“No, sir. I see true believers who don’t think that American democracy is good enough for them. Don’t forget, Mr. Schulberg, it was Democrats who got us into Vietnam, and Republicans who got us out. So where’s the failure of democracy there?”
“Well, the war was unconstitutional, Mr. Osborne.”
“And millions of people told the government that without becoming federal fugitives. Jason Sinai, David Koresh, what’s the difference? Let me tell you, Mr. Schulberg: one thinks he’s saving the Constitution from the government, the other that he’s saving the government from the Constitution.”
“One holes up, armed, in a compound, and starts shooting at the FBI, that’s one difference. When the FBI came after Jeff Jones, he surrendered.”
“Question of circumstances. Who was it that said, ‘If it takes fascism to stop the war, then let’s have fascism?’ And don’t forget that Sinai, Lurie, and Solarz—like Boudin, Gilbert, and Clark—are accessories to murder of policemen.”
