The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  I thought about this. The thing was, I didn’t ask him a lot about Vietnam. In fact, my mother and I avoided subjects that were close to Vietnam—he had seen and done a lot of horrific things, and very nearly died. As it was, his injury had left him on lifelong hormone replacement therapy, and if you can’t figure out what kind of an injury it was from that, then you’ll just never know. It wasn’t the Jake Barnes injury—thank God for my mother—but the equivalent of a vasectomy, performed by machine-gun fire and without anesthetic. Still, I thought I could maybe ask a little more about Sinai.

  “Okay. Why not?”

  “Oh, God.” He had returned to his food now and was eating steadily. “See, they got a change of venue for the Solarz trial, they’re moving it up to Traverse City, and already, the bugs coming out of the woodwork, man, it’s intense. Up to Roby’s, you’d think it was 1965, the way these bastards are talking.”

  Roby’s was the bar Daddy went to up in Traverse City. “I fought that damn war once, Beck, that’s the truth. It was not fun, and I do not want to do it again. And I don’t have a lot of heart for any gung-ho manhunt. Sharon Solarz? She’s spent the last twenty-five years in jail, you ask me. Living underground is no life at all. I mean”—his plate completely empty now, he put his big hands on the table—“I got to watch every public school to see kids aren’t into their daddy’s arsenals to shoot up their cafeterias; I got crackheads blowing each other’s heads off to get high another sixty seconds; I got whacked-out white militias sealing off farms with barbed wire and buying satellite surveillance of synagogues from Russian companies; and I’ve got a population of depressed Michiganders who feel ripped off blind by the government and see no reason at all not to turn to crime. I do not need a trial of a twenty-two-year-old crime in my jurisdiction, and I do not need a bunch of liquored-up vets getting out their MIA black flags over this.”

  “Daddy, take it easy.” Like I always do, I reached over and rubbed my hand on his heart, thinking about the 250 pounds that little thing pumps blood to, and how once it stopped pumping for just a few seconds and nearly killed him. “I hear you. Let’s just have some dessert now.”

  We did have some dessert. Then we watched the news, and played some cards. And finally, toward eleven o’clock or so, I made up the couch for my father—it was the one piece of furniture in my house that hadn’t come, used, from Treasure Mart, because he needed a full seven feet to sleep on—and went into my own room. And as always, when my father slept over, it was with particular delectation that I changed into my nightgown and climbed into bed, particular comfort, and a particular sense of safety. If you come to Michigan later this month and meet him, I think you’ll see why: to have this man sleeping in your house is to know that whatever happens during the night, terrorists, war, or natural disaster—whatever morning might bring after he leaves, during this night, everything is going to be all right.

  Something, in other words, not far from how you felt, in June of 1996, before he abandoned you in the Wall Street Marriott, about your father too.

  Date: June 17, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 25

  So, that is all very interesting, Beck’s account of those days in Ann Arbor. Very interesting. And worrisome, if you want to know the truth. I mean, her claim that she did not in fact find me the single most seductive man she had ever met in her life, for example. It casts a certain doubt over everything else she has to say. But let it pass.

  As for me, if you want to know what I did for the days in between Wednesday and Friday, the answer is absolutely nothing.

  Nothing productive, that is.

  The heat over town was so intense, so enervating, that I never wanted to leave either my hotel or my car. The only real business I had was with Beck’s father, up in Traverse City—or, as they put it in Michigan, up to Traverse City—but by now I’d faced up to the fact that he was not going to see me. Just for the hell of it, I kept the pressure on by telephoning his secretary pretty frequently. He was unavailable all day on Tuesday, and on Wednesday failed to return any of my calls. Journalists are supposed to be inured to this kind of thing. Not me: some alcoholic bum in a county jail refuses me an interview, I take it personally. Not very polite of you, Osborne, was my feeling, and in fact I was spending quite a bit of time writing cutting letters to him about it, focusing largely on his obligations as a federal employee to the citizenry, and also mentioning the First Amendment frequently, but in the fight between my indignation and my laziness, I did no more than compose them in my head.

  What did I do? I lay around my hotel a lot. I smoked. I drank at a sports bar up near campus, though never, I assure you, before breakfast. I used my mobile Nexis connection on my notebook computer, looking for something, anything, anywhere, that might indicate that someone knew something about where Sinai had gotten to. I called everyone I’ve ever known in either journalism, law enforcement, or any criminal activity whatsoever. Jay Cohen, out in Los Angeles, who knows as much about people who do things secretly, and illegally, as anyone else in the country, laughed at me.

  “You want to find Jason Sinai? Easy. Just sit back and relax, Benjamino. He’ll show up. When and where he wants to.”

  Thanks a lot, Jay. You asshole.

  Thanks to the town’s many and excellent used bookstores and the fact that my entire life had become a totally useless waste of time, I read, cover to cover, Judy and Stewart Albert’s collection The Sixties Papers, Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, and Ron Jacobs’s The Way the Wind Blew.

  Mostly, however, what I did was I avoided Rebeccah’s neighborhood altogether.

  See, that was a careful professional calculation. I did not want a source to think of me as some pathetic loser who was hanging around a totally irrelevant town in the Midwest pretending to work because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his vacation.

  I certainly did not want her to think of me as some useless geek who was using up his whole vacation and spending his own money on a wild goose chase.

  Finally, I did not care to have her thinking of me as a ridiculous bozo who had become convinced that she was his only chance.

  His only chance, I mean, of course, to find Jason Sinai.

  Because, whatever else may have been going on, and I admit that something else was going on, the fact remained that I knew, with moral certainty, that the way to find Jason Sinai was to hang around Ann Arbor. No, I don’t know why I was convinced. I never know why I’m convinced of anything. Yes, I believed on a logical level that Rebeccah’s father, sooner or later, was going to become involved in the manhunt. And yes, I knew that Sharon Solarz would soon be extradited back to Michigan, and I could go to her arraignment, and see who else was there, and all that kind of reporter’s crap. But that wasn’t really it. It was on another level that I knew it. I knew it as if the whole shape of what was about to happen, what was on the very verge of exploding, was just waiting for me to discover it. I didn’t know what I was going to find, but I knew it was there, and that has been how every good story in my career has worked.

  Now, in the interests of my credibility with you, I will admit freely that I had another hunch about Rebeccah. I admit that I had come to suspect that my acquaintance with her was likely to end up with me taking someone hostage somewhere on a rooftop until she agreed to marry me.

  But that was easier to explain than my conviction that unlike every other reporter covering this story, I and only I was in the right place, at the right time. That somewhere, somehow, the tiny clue that was going to break this story wide open was going to happen here, and if I could only be around for it, I would be the one to get it.

  Call it desperation.

  Now let me settle the one big question you will have right away. If I had to choose between using Rebeccah to get to her dad to get my story, and taking Rebeccah to bed, did
I know which I would choose?

  Yes, I did.

  Fuck fugitives. Fuck issues. Fuck Vietnam.

  At last Friday night came around, and I—now with Kai Bird’s Color of Truth, William O’Neill’s Coming Apart, and Fredric Jameson’s Sixties without Apology under my belt, was back at the Del, standing at the bar, leaning over an ashtray, drinking beer and bourbon, feeling like I was twelve.

  Good Christ, I had it bad. What was I going to say to her? Was she going to stand me up? Did she like me? Was that a zit on my chin? It was as if everything in between high school and now had all been a dream—the college degree from Stanford, the Porter Fellowship at Yale, the three years of beat reporting in Albany—all a dream, and I was an adolescent sitting at a bar in a college town, drinking Dutch courage, feeling terrified.

  In short, I was a dead man. I had met the girl two, three times, and she was like a smell in the back of my throat to me, a sense so interiorized, so inward, that I felt I had known her not three, four days, spoken to her on two occasions, but that she was as familiar to me as my own family. I woke, I swear to you, every night since I first saw her, early in the morning hours, with an image of her oval face in my mind. It had been so strange to me, that week. Doing nothing in the middle of nowhere, being all alone, all day long, and yet somewhere in this town she was walking around, and talking, and eating, and sleeping. I’d never, in all of my life, felt anything like what I was feeling now. I never, ever wanted to feel it again.

  Jesus, Isabel, I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. Except that for me, in the story of the summer of 1996, believe it or not, your father was only a little part of it all. Rebeccah Osborne was the rest.

  And then at last, it was Friday night, the minute hand of my watch inching toward ten, and I was back at the Del Rio, sitting at the bar, watching the bartender—the good-looking rude older one again—work the mobbed bar, Keith Jarrett on the stereo. And I had had a couple of beers and a couple of scotch and sodas and a half dozen cigarettes and was wondering whether to look at my watch again or just lower my forehead to the wooden surface of the bar and howl when at last I felt a presence next to me and looked up to see her in jeans and a black silk shirt, standing, looking at me with a grave expression that made my heart first squeeze in my chest, then sit still for a long moment, and then, at last, shoot a jet of pure adrenaline into the center of my being.

  2.

  “So, Schulberg. You look like you’ve been sitting here since last we met. Drinking.”

  To my surprise, I heard myself speaking. “Not at all. Early to bed, healthy eating, exercise.” I paused while the bartender brought her an Elm City, slammed a new drink down on the bar in front of me, and walked away. “Good deeds, religious observance, chastity, charity, piety, patriotism. This bartender does not like me.”

  Rebeccah looked at the bartender, then back.

  “Cleo? Why on earth would she not like you?”

  “Not sure. But I do get that vibe.”

  “Oh, well, so you’re a paranoid. That goes with your particular kind of liberalism, doesn’t it?”

  She had settled onto her stool now, and to speak through the noise, she had to lean quite close to me, which I appreciated. “My father always says, ‘You’re given a face till you’re forty; after that, you have to make your own. You ask me, that woman’s done a good job.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah, everyone who works downtown in the restaurants knows each other.”

  She sipped her beer. And I, ignoring her look of distaste, with which I felt quite familiar by now, I lit a cigarette and started talking.

  “So, Osborne, I’ve been thinking it over, and my feeling is, these little sombitches, playing at being revolutionaries with Mommy and Daddy’s money. Fuck ’em. It’s not just that they were turning the boys our president sent to Vietnam into devils, it’s that they risked life and limb all over this land. Their death trip, their stupid orgies, their glorification of Manson. And in the Bank of Michigan, they killed a father of three. I want to see Solarz jailed, and Sinai and Lurie caught. Lurie’s dad was a Commie spy, too. And, let’s face it, Sinai’s a J-E-double-ew.”

  “Oh, cut it out.” But she couldn’t help laughing. “Just cut it out. Okay?”

  “’Kay.” I sipped my beer, watching her over the rim. “How was your dad’s visit?”

  “Good. You ever catch up with him?”

  “Naw, gave up. I know when I’m not wanted.”

  She laughed again. “I doubt that.”

  “Ah, you mean I’m not not wanted. That’s a relief.”

  “I don’t mean that at all. I mean I doubt you know.”

  “You ask him about those days at all?”

  “A little. He never talks about it that willingly.” Then she stopped to think. “How much do you know about my dad?”

  “Well, there’s the public record. And I asked him a few questions when we met. I know he worked undercover on campus here.”

  “Uh-huh.” She watched me for a second. Then she said, “I don’t think those are anyone’s proudest memories. Chasing a bunch of college students across country and not being able to catch ’em. You know, I have a professor who was caught by my dad? Jed Lewis, head of the American Studies Department. He’s directing my senior thesis. He told me he had to practically walk into the FBI station to get arrested.”

  “What was he, Weather?”

  “Um-hmm. Not a major member, and he left early. But he was wanted on explosives charges, and served time. Some coincidence. Now he’s directing my thesis about the siege of Khe Sanh.”

  “I bet your dad says that no one had ever developed any criminology to capture internal revolutionaries, those days. Hadn’t been any since the American Revolution itself. I bet he says they had fixed that deficit by the time the FALN came along.”

  “No.” That seemed, unlike most of what I had to say, to make sense to her, and she nodded. “My dad isn’t so interested in Jason Sinai. I think he wishes Sinai would just go underground again.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “Oh, he’s a lot like you. Feels that the war in Vietnam is over, and the war over Vietnam should be too.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, appreciating the tone of the conversation, and she went on.

  “Besides, Dad and Mimi Lurie were childhood friends. Isn’t that strange?”

  3.

  So there it was. I remember turning from Rebeccah as if she had said something tasteless, then taking a big hit from my drink to cover my dismay. It was like a bad dream: the absolute center of the ethical dilemma before me rearing its head so early.

  I did not—I did not—want to be in the position of using this woman for the story.

  And yet, on the other hand, it wasn’t me who had lied to Osborne, but he who had lied to me. Because he had told me, as clear as day, when we met for coffee, that he had never met Mimi Lurie.

  All this took perhaps ten seconds.

  I turned back and said nothing.

  But Rebeccah didn’t have any reason to think that my hesitation was anything other than the time it took to drink a sip of my drink. She went on readily. “My dad’s family had a summer house up in Point Betsie, where the Lurias lived. Way the hell up north.”

  “Wow.” I smiled now, and what I said, you have to admit, could have been meant to change the subject. I certainly meant to change the subject. I think. “Good story, Beck.”

  “Uh-huh. I asked my mom about it this morning, on the phone. She told me that every year the Luria family would take my dad with them on a camping trip. Martin Luria, he was friends with this Detroit beer baron, Carl Linder—there’s lots of Germans in Michigan. Linder had like a three-thousand-acre estate up by Rose City, virgin forest. They say Linder’s father bootlegged Canadian whisky from there; bought up the land to protect his trade from Lake Erie. Anyway, when my dad was growing up, summers, the Osbornes and the Lurias would all go and camp there. The locals say that Mimi used it as a hi
deout, later, when she was underground. That’s probably a myth.”

  I stopped her at that. “Is it possibly true?”

  “Sure. Vincent Loonsfoot evaded capture up on the UP for, what, thirty days? Thick woods up there. Someone who knows the territory? Could stay at large a very long time.”

  In my defense, I have to say that I was edging her off the subject. “What did he think of her once she became a revolutionary?”

  She snorted. “I don’t think he thought of her as a revolutionary. A spoiled-brat hysteric, more likely.”

  Drinks arrived, and I insisted on paying. Then I got off her father altogether: “So I gather you agree with him.”

  “About Mimi Lurie? Sure I do. I’d say just about everyone in the world does, with the exception of you.”

  “Well…” I hesitated and drank half my drink. Then I asked her, “Do you have a pretty good idea of what it was like to be alive in, say, 1969?”

  She eyed me a little, almost as if I were setting a trap for her. “What’s that mean?”

  “I mean…” So maybe I was a little drunk. I had been sitting in a hotel room reading about the sixties for a week. Maybe, in fact, I was half crazed. I leaned forward and spoke seriously through the noise of the bar. “Well, what I don’t mean is what it was like to drop mescaline and listen to the Moody Blues while having sex at a Summer of Love be-in or any of that shit. I mean, what it was like to be, say, eighteen and facing the draft to Vietnam. Having friends being killed. And watching Johnson on TV. Now wait.”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit this week. And I don’t mean, like, ’63, when your dad volunteered. I mean, ’67, when there’s already a Vietnam Vets against the war movement. And you’re eighteen, right? Johnson is lying to you, and that’s a fact, not an opinion. Everyone knows it. And he’s such an ugly bastard, this jowly Texas gladhander; he’s so transparently phony, you’re thinking, how the fucking hell did this guy get to be president, and what the fucking hell is the presidency worth if some total jackass like this can do it? Remember, you’re thinking like an eighteen-year-old. Chances are, in fact, you’re stoned on that weak dope they had back then, and the whole world looks like a cartoon anyway. And there’s this virtual civil war going on, with police and hard hats beating up demonstrators, and all manner of real, horrible violence. If you had been to just one demonstration that flared up, then you know what the sound of wood hitting a skull is, you know in a very personal way what it feels like when the state comes down on its citizenry. And remember, the state isn’t treating you like a kid, except of course it won’t let you vote. It’s sending you to war, it’s getting your friends killed, and when hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people say to it, Stop, it’s implacable. The state? It’s beating you up and putting you in jail, and it doesn’t listen to any explanations.”