by Neil Gordon
“So. You lose the bozo?”
“Which bozo?” She answered without turning.
“The one you were with last night.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She turned now and put her coffee on the counter in front of me, inspecting my face carefully. “I thought you looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite…remember you.”
“Um-hmm.” Holding my coffee cup in two hands, I gazed directly at her, feeling my stomach turn. And as I felt that, I also felt a sense of abandon. “So did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Lose the bozo.”
She answered with a smile of her white teeth. “You know, you were so right. Till you pointed it out, I just didn’t get it. I thought he was a Rhodes scholar, about to get a law degree, and squash team captain. Good-looking, too. Then you showed up and cleared it all up for me. What a bozo.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Always glad to help.”
She widened her smile. “Um-hmm. See my dad today?”
“Nope. He blew me off.”
“Boy. Maybe he doesn’t know where Albany is either.”
I let my face show suspicion by deepening my frown and squinting. “Well, I doubt that’s it. I think there’s more to it than that. Much more.”
And now, at last, before my gravity, Rebeccah stopped smiling, as if something serious were going on. “Is that right? Like what?”
“Like, outside a few undergraduates writing earnestly for the college paper, no one gives a fuck about Jason Sinai.”
It was my turn to smile now, widely and innocently, and Rebeccah’s to frown.
“Well, you sure seem to.” Her concentration now was steady, and her big lips had settled into seriousness.
Not wanting to say what was on my mind, I shrugged, and Rebeccah, in response to a call from the cook, moved down the counter. As she did so, I suddenly remembered Osborne’s shrug from the day before.
In a moment, however, she was back with a plate of food, which she set in front of me and began to eat from, still standing behind the counter. She spoke with nearly complete uninterest. “So what are you doing here? I mean, your paper must think there’s a story to send you here.”
The question—a good one—made my stomach sink. And for lack of a better answer, I told her the truth. “Kind of. If you want to know the absolute truth, I’m using my vacation for this. And paying my own expenses. My editor thinks my talents would be better used covering the local 4H show.”
“You mean, you’re so obsessed by this story, you’re doing it on your own dime.” She seemed actually impressed by this—to me—depressing admission.
“Um-hmm.” Buoyed by her interest, I lit a cigarette. Then, noting her expression—she stared at me blankly, a forkful of food hanging in the air—I put it out again. With a nod, she let the fork finish its voyage to her mouth.
“Oh. Why?”
“There’s a story here.”
“And that is?”
“Well.” Now I dropped my voice and leaned forward on my elbows. “See, I think there’s still a vast underground out there, waiting to bring a revolution against capitalism. I think Sinai’s going to strike, and strike soon. And this time, they’re going to go all the way.”
Whispering, I smelled perfume.
“I see,” she whispered back while chewing, and now I smelled tamari. “So you’re a wacko.”
“Not at all.” Leaning back, I laughed now, and saw that she was laughing too. “Hey, I’ll tell you all about it. Come have a drink when you’re done.”
“No way. But thanks.”
“But why?”
“Why? It’s Monday night. I have work to do tomorrow morning. The only place I’m going is home.”
“Where’s that? I’ll come over tomorrow with my Doors collection. You got a bong?”
Now she laughed outright. “No thanks. I work tomorrow.”
“Well, when are you free?”
For a moment, she studied me. Then she said: “We can have coffee Wednesday afternoon, if you’re sticking around that long.”
“Oh, I am, I am. Where and when?”
And as I listened to Rebeccah Osborne’s directions to a coffee shop next to campus, I wondered what the hell I was going to do in Ann Arbor till Wednesday afternoon.
Date: June 15, 2006
From: “Daddy”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 23
And while Benny was stalking Rebeccah at her place of employ, I was sitting on the train to Milwaukee, staring at myself over a quarter century’s distance.
The picture on the front page of the Times showed eight young men and women gathered around a car, the car out of the fifties, the men and women out of the sixties. The caption called it an SDS protest in Ann Arbor in 1968, and in fact the car was leading a column of young people down what looked like State Street under trees dressed in late summer foliage. It would have been, I realized, the days leading up to the Democratic Convention.
In the shifting light of a moving train to Milwaukee, I peered close into the picture’s depth of field and identified Sharon Solarz, Diana Oughton, Bill Ayers, myself, Milton Taube, and Mimi Lurie. One by one, looking for some hint of what these young people in this grainy electronic halftone may have been thinking. Clearly, they had no idea they were being photographed. Sharon Solarz was focusing at distance and bending her neck to address her speech way upward to Skip Taube, who towered above her. Just looking at her crooked smile, I could hear the sardonic lilt of her voice. Mimi was drawing pensively on a cigarette, looking at Bill in black Ray-Bans; Bill speaking to Diana, who listened, frowning downward. I, myself, wore a wide, open-mouthed smile and eyes squinting into the sun.
The second picture carried in the paper was of Jim Grant, and I could not remember where it was from. This one I glanced at only quickly: Jim Grant had never much liked looking at himself, with his nose job and his balding head. It was if his image of himself was still the handsome Jewish face of Jason Sinai, and seeing it changed had always been something to be avoided. Neither photograph, in any case, could be connected to the black-haired, mustachioed man sitting on the Milwaukee commuter.
The train drew into the Milwaukee station at 10:30. I left in the small stream of travelers, emerging into a bright summer day, swimming with heat.
I walked for a while now, drank some coffee, browsed in a bookstore, and bought a new pair of shoes. This last purchase was totally unnecessary. Still, I found it strangely comforting, the very normalcy of the transaction, and I found it intelligent to be carrying a shopping bag with such an everyday item as a pair of new shoes in it—what cop would suspect a shoe shopper of being a fugitive? Still, for the following hour, walking downtown, I described the perimeter of a rectangle twice, crossing River Street for the short sides and reversing direction down the opposing sidewalk for the longs, and drank seltzers in two bars. Like that I looked for the shape of a tail: a person changing direction in response to my movement, a familiar shirt, any kind of order in the random pattern of movement around me. There was nothing I could see, though, and so at last, toward midafternoon, I made my way to the middle of the block, where a bouncer sat at the door of a small bar that a red neon sign in the window announced as the Old Town Café.
Inside, the room was surprisingly deep, with tables extending back to a small stage, on which a band was setting up. The tables were half full, a mixed crowd in age as well as color. At the long bar, the faces were mostly black, and the attitudes were of easy familiarity with the young woman, wearing a halter top, serving them. All the way down the bar a man sat alone over the sports section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
I ordered a beer as I came in, motioning down the bar with my head, then made my way down to the man sitting alone. Closer, you could see how tall he was, and how handsome: a full head of black hair over a strong Irish face, weathering well. When
the barmaid had brought the beer and gone away with my money, I took a pull, watching the man. Then I reached over in front of him and helped myself to one of his cigarettes.
The man looked up, briefly, then down to his paper again, evidently to finish a paragraph, which gave me time to light the cigarette. When he was ready, he looked up again, more slowly this time, and studied me.
“Now, what the fuck might you think you’re doing, asshole?”
I held his gaze, smoking.
Only then did he let some expression into his face. The expression was interest.
“Well, well. What are you doing here?”
“That all you have to say?”
“No.” Donal James held out his hand. “Hey. Nice to see you. What the fuck are you doing here?”
I didn’t answer, and after a moment, Donal went on.
“Jase, I have social touch with a couple people. That’s it. I mean—” I seemed now to have caught up with his surprise. “You need some money, man? Or anything else? No problem. But you didn’t come all the way here just for that. Did you?”
I shook my head. “Wanted to ask you some questions.”
“I can’t imagine what. But listen.” Now Donal took keys out of his pocket, and a pen, and wrote an address on the edge of his paper, tearing the number off with his left thumb and forefinger. “You don’t want to be out and about. Go up to my place. Last call’s two-thirty; I’ll see you then.”
I took it, feeling frustration. “Can’t you get away from here?”
“No. There’ll be a crowd for the music tonight. I can’t pay two bouncers on the volume I get. So I have to do the inside myself.”
I nodded now while I read the address, which was over on Mechanic Street. “Okay. Thanks, man.”
“See you later, boy.”
Donal James’s was a three-story brownstone in a neighborhood of the same, perhaps once a factory worker’s neighborhood, possibly constructed by a mill or a sweat shop and leased to its workers, now housing little bistros on corners and a few upmarket groceries. Donal’s place had clearly been his parents’: it had well-kept linoleum on the kitchen floor and was furnished with vintage pieces from the fifties and sixties, none of them showing refinishing or restoration.
I found the kitchen and hunted through the refrigerator, which had a brown paper bag of apples on one shelf, and the little pantry, in which I found a half-finished bottle of honey. In the freezer was a bottle of Finlandia. I washed two of the apples in the sink, found a knife, and cut them, then ate them, standing at the counter, dipping the slices in the honey. I opened the freezer and drank some vodka from the bottle. Then I carried the bottle through the archway with varnished bull’s-eye molding, through the little dining room, and into the living room.
This was a hexagonal room, its point made of bay windows over the street. The ceilings were low, and the furnishings looked as if they might have been brought from Ireland at the beginning of the century. Through the window lace, streetlamps threw a gentle luminescence over the carpet. I lay gingerly on a couch, put the vodka on the floor beside me, supine for the first time since I left you in a New York hotel room, and fell asleep.
2.
When I woke up Donal was sitting on the couch, long legs crossed and reclining, so that I saw his face over one black, Cuban-heeled boot.
“What you doing there?” I spoke from where I lay.
“Checking you out.”
“And?”
“Looking good, baby.”
“Hair’s not real.”
“Fuck hair. The important thing is, you didn’t get fat. You work out?”
“Uh-huh. You?”
“Nah. Never needed to. Cholesterol’s okay, never put on weight.”
“Quit smoking, and you may find that changing.”
“So I hear.” He stood up now. “Go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”
But I sat up. “You going to bed?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s talk now.”
“Oke. Want a drink?”
“Sure.” Donal left the room, and I followed, picking up the vodka from the floor.
At the kitchen table, the black summer night swimming in the alleyway outside, we talked, not about what I needed, but about what had happened since last we met. Donal had surfaced in ’79 and served a negotiated two in New York for charges stemming from Columbia—days before coming back to Milwaukee to take care of his aging parents. He’d inherited the house from his father, and mortgaged it to buy the bar—when he got kicked out of Columbia over the occupation of Bryant Hall, he had lost a full scholarship, which would have made him the first member of his family to get a college degree, and while underground he’d worked in enough bars to learn the business well.
“Want to hear something funny?” A shaded lamp lit the kitchen table, and in the fall of its light he showed a missing tooth in his smile, which seemed to me a fond smile. “I just paid off the damn mortgage. Fifteen years. That makes it exactly fifteen years since I got out of the slammer.”
“Congratulations.” I watched him, remembering something I had heard. “That why you sold film rights?”
Donal’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
I shrugged. “Heard it from an entertainment lawyer, once. Said most of the major folk from SDS and Weather had sold life rights to a producer. That true?”
Donal shrugged. “Not only me. Why should someone else make the money from our lives?”
I shrugged again. “You see anyone?”
“Sure. Not particularly Weather people, though. Bernardine and Billy. Each of their kids worked at the bar the summer they turned eighteen. Jeff and his family come out for Thanksgiving, I go east each spring. Oh, shit, Stew and Judy out in Seattle, Cathy in New York. I go see Dave Gilbert a couple times a year. Klonsky, Mike James, lots of people, man. There was an SDS reunion in ’94. You should have seen the number of children out there.”
“None yours?”
He shrugged. “Mine live out west with their mothers.”
“How many?”
“Kids or mothers? Four and two.”
Donal didn’t ask me about whom from the old days I saw—he knew the answer. But he did, now, ask me his original question again.
“But none of these people, I don’t think, are what you want from me.”
“No.”
“So what do you want?”
Now I watched him, wondering not so much what to tell him, but how to phrase my question. Finally I said, “To ask an historical question.”
“Shoot.”
“After Bank of Michigan, Sharon came to you for help.”
His eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”
“Because of the name she lived under until she was married. It was in the paper when she was arrested. Coyle. That was you when you went under in ’70. I figure you must have married her out of her first identity to give her a new name. Then she went somewhere else, and after a couple years, you did an uncontested divorce that left her with the name.”
He whistled. “How’d you figure that out?”
“Just logic. Am I right?”
He watched me for a moment. “Let’s say you are. Then what?”
I nodded. “Want to hear something funny? Jim Grant’s seven years younger than me. I’ve been thirty-nine for the past seven years. So I have a thirty-nine-year-old’s memory.”
“Very funny.”
I sat up. “I’m not kidding. I went to college again. When I was twenty-six. Four straight years.”
He whistled again. “Shit. Lay a bunch of freshman women?”
I shrugged and sat back. “Just one. Married her.”
With a smile, he brought the conversation back. “So Sharon came to me, so what?”
“Did Mimi come too?”
“Why?”
“I’m not telling you why,” I answered evenly.
“I realize that. I mean, why would she have come to me?”
We watched each other, me thinking that, really, it was amazing the way this man had grown handsomer as he aged.
“You know my answer.”
“Say it.”
“They both knew you had transitional identities available. You know, papers to live under while building a more solid set.”
“Yeah.” Donal snorted. “Neither of them had any fucking right to ask me a thing. I wasn’t with you for B of M. I wasn’t even on the damn revolutionary committee. I was the fuck out of it, and you knew it.”
I answered readily. “We’re talking about twenty-five years ago. Nothing happened to you because of Mimi or Sharon. No one knows they came to you but me. I’m sorry they did it.”
Now Donal deflated, emptying his lungs, dropping his shoulders from the ready response of someone used to fighting.
“And you, boy? Why didn’t you come to me?”
Was that, I wondered, what had really offended him? “I had a waiting identity. I didn’t need to involve you.”
“Okay.” Donal lit a cigarette, watching with interest as I did the same. “So Mimi came to see me. I gave her some papers. I doubt they lasted her very long. I never saw her again.”
“Right.” I spoke carefully now. “But Mimi didn’t only ask you for ID. She asked you for a name. The name of the dude from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The one who gave you the money for Dr. Leary’s breakout.”
Donal answered without expression, he was that surprised. “And you know that because?”
“Because Mimi always thought that way.” I stood up now and walked to the window, where a thin sun was beginning to light the little tenement backyards. In Donal’s, I saw, were tomato plants, which made me feel, suddenly, very old. Before my eyes was a memory of the two of them, descending the stairs in the house Sharon Stern had in Seattle, flushed and stoned and smiling, with Donal’s hand in hers. I was nineteen then. Really nineteen. And now, a quarter century later, my face burned. I spoke without turning.
