The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Okay. Now I knew who had e-mailed me, and what he wanted. That is, I knew Jason Sinai wanted me to meet him on July 1, a Monday, Brendie’s seventeenth birthday, at the bar that served big German pickles out of a tub in Dexter, Michigan.

  Not a small thing to ask the chair of the Honors Program, holder of an endowed chair in the humanities at the U of M, ex officio of the Guggenheim Nominating Committee, and MacArthur Fellow. Not a small thing to ask him to meet a fugitive, wanted on charges of murder and kidnapping, the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

  On July 1, a Monday, the first thing I did was wish my seventeen-year-old son—whom I had to wake for the purpose—a happy birthday, and present him with his present: a book of practice SAT tests. Then I went through two of them with him: Brendan Lewis had spent far too much of the previous year stoned to be sure of getting into the U of M, where baby boomers’ kids competing for admission—not to mention the private-school kids from New York—had made even in-state entrance questionable except for the strongest students. This took the better part of the morning, but finally when I finished battling the boy through the two tests, I also gave him a 1976 Stratocaster I’d battled even harder for on eBay. I accompanied it with a short commentary, of course, on what, for him, passed for music. Brenden listened with forbearance—my son’s musical interest tended toward the Beastie Boys, intersecting with mine only once at Jimi Hendrix. While Nan, smiling, watched the boy holding the guitar in awe, I watched Nan, and while I watched, I debated whether to tell her what I was doing. By the time Brendan took off to show his girlfriend the guitar, I had made my decision, against.

  Not that she would have been scared. In the days, Nancy McGinn had been a far more prominent member of Weather than I, had planned and executed some of the most daring actions, and now, as an adult, was still ahead of me, as a doctor and—since Brendan had grown up—a frequent traveler for Médecins sans Frontières.

  Nan, in fact, probably could have planned what I was about to do better than I. Still, something decided me in favor of secrecy. A lot was at stake in meeting Jason Sinai, more than enough to outweigh the demands of communal interest in favor of the demands of compartmentalization. I was quite sure that Nan would agree.

  So without telling my wife what I was doing, I dressed in my bike clothes and, carrying my helmet, left the house.

  The bike allowed me to cross from Awixa Road to Highland Drive, through the Arboretum, out by the hospital, and against traffic all the way across town to Main Street, where I wheeled it inside the Avis office. Already Nan would have been unhappy with me: I’d washed rather than cleaned—washed away the chance of being followed rather than analyzed it and identified any possible followers. She, who had with Mimi evolved a virtual religion around how to detect a tail, would not have approved one bit.

  Against that, however, was my absolute surety that I was under surveillance. I absolutely could not believe that the FBI would not be watching me if they were looking for Jason. They would have to be deeply stupid not to, and I was no longer convinced that they were that stupid. Sometimes, even, I found myself supporting them. Waco, for example. And if they were following me, then a washing, quick and dirty, as I had just done, was appropriate: I didn’t need to identify people I was already assuming were there.

  In the Avis garage I carefully packed my bike into the trunk of a Dodge Intrepid, which I had arranged to have rented for me by the departmental secretary on a university account, in case my credit card records were subpoenaed. Then, sheltered by the open trunk, I took a pair of jeans out of my bag, slipped them on over my bike shorts, tucked in my T-shirt, put on a baseball cap, and slammed the trunk shut. Finally I pulled onto Main Street and out to the Huron River Drive toward Dexter, noting with satisfaction the empty road behind me.

  Reflecting that I would likely not recognize Jase.

  Wondering what Jase had in mind, coming to Michigan, finding me.

  Never once, however, questioning what I was doing, now, putting my entire life of the past twenty-five years in jeopardy, risking my family and safety, to see my old comrade when my comrade was wanted by the law.

  Date: June 19, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 28

  Did I think Jed was going to show?

  On balance, I think not. I was open, though, to the possibility that he would. And in any case, that afternoon of July 1, I found myself attracted by the very starkness of the possibilities.

  Life, I was thinking, hardly ever gets as clear as it as now.

  Dexter, Michigan. A booth at the back of the Sportsman bar. The bar darkened against the afternoon sun, all mahogany, all smoke, all the murkiness of a place where light was totally unnecessary to the business of men drinking seriously, all just the way it was twenty-five years ago and more. The only nod to the present was the races from Saratoga on high-definition satellite TV. Other than that, the horrors of the present were as if still a quarter century away.

  Life, I was thinking, sitting in the furthermost booth in the dark bar, drinking more beer than I had drunk in the past twenty years all together, watching the windows casting through the half-closed Venetian blinds, narrow bars of light against the smoky air—life hardly ever gets as clear as this.

  Three choices. If Jed showed, then I stood a chance of coming closer to what I was looking for. If the police came, then the run was over, and I had lost everything. And if no one came? Don’t waste time trying to answer questions you don’t have the data for. Mimi’s voice, sounding the old rule, as if reverberating within my skull.

  My job, for the instant, was to wait. As so often in these things, waiting was the hardest job.

  I, Jason Sinai, in a bar. A handsome, determined man, handsomer than even my disguise alone would have made me, due to the fact that people look their best when they are facing danger. Their skin flushes, their features set, their eyes hold their steadiest gaze. Perhaps they look their worst—pale, drawn—when they’re scared, but surely they’re at their best when they’re being brave.

  There are two consolations in facing real danger—which few of us ever do—as opposed to running from imagined danger—which happens all the time.

  The first is how good it makes you look.

  The second is how free it makes you feel.

  I, Jason Sinai, alone in a bar. A bar I had last been in during an operation to procure dynamite, in 1969. We’d used the dynamite in four different bombings, and never was any connection made with the I-94 construction in Dexter, Michigan, never, to this day. Now I was back in that bar after twenty-six years, and for the first time it occurred to me that, these twenty-six years later, I had not only escaped capture for the robbery of the explosive, for the bombing itself, but I had somehow remained free. And for the first time since leaving you, a deep sensation of that freedom passed through me.

  Isabel. Should I try to describe that day in the Sportsman’s bar, Dexter, Michigan?

  Let me put it this way. Buddhists say enlightenment is preceded by four glimpses of freedom. I had long felt that two such glimpses had come my way, both years ago while I was fugitive.

  Once, I felt I had glimpsed freedom as an ideal for which I was fighting—freedom from a whole system of repressive rules, of course, but a freedom deeper than that: the freedom that comes, as the Port Huron Statement put it, from seeking what might be unattainable but what was a liberation, in its very pursuit, from the unimaginable.

  Another time I felt I had glimpsed freedom as what I was living as I crisscrossed the country under phony names: freedom from the expectations that defined me; freedom from the oppressive; above all, freedom from the constant awareness of an unwitting network of police, computers, tax collectors, doctors, schools. To be unknown. To be anonymous. Together, they meant to be autonomous, in a way that few people ever experienced in their lives.

&
nbsp; Both experiences had been greatly potent, so much so that it became a question I was always asking myself, in the long, searching, torturous exercises we called “self-criticism sessions,” in the soul-searching kind of conversation we used to have, whether I was more fundamentally motivated by a selfish wish to feel free than a revolutionary principle. For there was, at the heart of the experience, something in being a fugitive I valued more than any other experience of my life. A fundamental freedom, one that I had never been able entirely to define. Was it the chance no longer to be yourself? Was it having no responsibility? I wasn’t sure.

  And thinking of that, now, in a bar in Dexter, Michigan, I experienced what I now think of as my third glimpse of freedom.

  It was the first time I was here, with Jed, that I had first committed myself irrevocably to ending what I had been becoming and to becoming who I was, in fact, to become. Jed was older than me, had been in SDS while I had been in high school, and in his person I had first seen the possibility of transforming myself. They were still so clear to me, then, the inexorable dullness of the years that came before, living in my parents’ vast West Village town house. The big Sinai family gathering for Passover, for Rosh Hashanah, in the same rooms where I could still remember watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on my parents’ first black-and-white television. The Sinais, Singers, and Levits: a collection of vested American interests and middle-class ambitions that gathered a few times a year in my father’s rambling house; a collection of hypocrisies too varied for me to catalog, and yet which I knew, at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen, were more than I could bear.

  There in that bar in Dexter, Michigan, where I had been twenty-five years before, drinking beer after years of abstinence, I remembered how I had seen myself, the product of a liberal arts education, carrying the expectations of postwar America. Twelve years of private school education, an education specifically arranged by Old Left New Yorkers virtually indistinguishable from my own parents, Little Red Schoolhouse, Elizabeth Irwin. And all the while my parents and their self-congratulatory friends built their schools, and did their jobs, and had their parties and meetings and arguments; all the while they carried their candles in midnight vigils, voted for Kennedy, Humphrey, McCarthy, the big machine churned on.

  Why couldn’t they see it? To me, it was so obvious, and I was only a high school student. Their pacifism and their complacency, their money and their houses and country houses, the steady rise in their fortunes through the farce of the war against Hitler, the Holocaust he carried out with virtual impunity, the cold war evil of America’s compromised process of de-Nazification. And all the while they got richer, had children, collected honors, and argued their arguments in the pages of the Nation, all the while, McCarthy rose, the Rosenbergs were killed, Mississippi happened, and the war in Southeast Asia grew, and grew, and grew.

  Sitting there, drinking, waiting for Jed, I could remember the exact feel of it, the texture of evenings in the Bank Street house, smoking dope in my room, door locked against my brother, while outside in the garden my parents and their friends drifted in one of their endless arguments, Israel, Castro, Czechoslovakia. SNCC, Marcuse, Mills, Mailer. Phil Ochs and Lenny Bruce. My father had fought in Spain. My father still limped, in 1969, from shrapnel taken at the defense of Cape Tortuga. And now what was he if not a liberal, a comfortable New Yorker arguing in the backyard of his town house while that red-hating, imperialist, warmongering pig Johnson and his henchmen rained liquid fire on Southeast Asia. I was thirteen when JFK was killed, and even then I’d known that the world had tragically, horribly, lost a murderous, dangerous phony. Why hadn’t my father known? Liberal. It was the worst insult I could think of.

  I, Jason Sinai, your father. Forty-six years old. In a bar in Dexter, remembering with drunken clarity the rage that had animated me a quarter century ago when I was barely older than you are now, and the freedom I’d glimpsed, one day, in this same bar. It was that I couldn’t stand the roles available to me. I couldn’t stand it: doctor, lawyer, professor, politician. Living and dying in the compromises of my parents. Nothing that was available to me in my parents’ expectations could offer me a way out. I could make more money, I could have greater exposure. I couldn’t, however, be any more involved than they were, nor could I be any less of a phony.

  Unless I got out.

  And as my mind cycled into that train of thought, that familiar train of thought that I had followed all those years ago, I remembered, not for the first time, but more strongly than I had before, what it had felt like, the very first day I came to Ann Arbor in 1968, when I’d walked into the SDS offices on Hill Street—before I even went to my dorm room—and met Billy Ayers and Diana Oughton.

  Now, in 1996, I was not sure I could even stand to be in the same room as Billy, and Diana, of course, was dead. For so long had I felt such horror at having been a part of Weather—regret at the risks we had taken, remorse at how mean we had been to each other, and foolishness at what we had done to the left—that the real experience, the original experience, had become lost to me.

  Sitting at the bar in Dexter, drinking too much and waiting for Jed to show or not to show, it came back to me with shocking clarity, those fall days of 1968 when I first came to Ann Arbor, and first went to the SDS headquarters on Hill Street, and first realized that all the while I, in New York, was figuring out for myself what liars the Kennedys were, these guys already knew it. All the while I, an adolescent smoking dope in my room, was figuring out why my parents’ long history of leftism that started in Spain had become a compromise, a lie, these guys already knew it, and not only did they know it, they had argued it, analyzed it, written it, and were, most importantly, acting on it.

  Not for the first time, but with a clarity fueled by alcohol and the absolute bizarreness of the fact that I was back in Dexter, a place I had never thought to visit again as long as I lived, I remembered the clean, serious awareness I had experienced, standing at this bar with Jed while we waited for Mimi’s signal. Pretending not to be scared. Aware that we were taking steps from which there was no coming back, no coming back. And in the glow of Jed’s eyes, I knew that Jed was feeling it too.

  These people. I saw them suddenly neither as I had come to see them over the quarter century of my adulthood—as arrogant, violent, deluded young children of privilege, stealing SDS and cheating their friends—nor as I thought of them now, as middle-aged people with only a hint of the beauty that had once been theirs, but as I saw them then: big-hearted, articulate, brave, beautiful. Billy Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Ellen Radcliff, Bernardine Dohrn. Suddenly I could vividly see each and every one of them, their names, their aliases, the actions they were in. Cathlyn Wilkerson, David Miller, Nancy Ruth, Paul Millstone, Marsha Cole, Richard Rudd, Lou Cohen. Michael McGinn, Sharon Gresh, Judith Freed, Ann Delaney. Their names flooded into my consciousness, names of people I had not thought about in years and years. Teddy Gold and Terry Robbins. David Gilbert. They had, to a one, been older than me, upperclassmen when I was a freshman, the ones who had gone before. After the town house bombing, and the decision was taken to go underground, Mimi and I had been two of the very last to be picked to join them. The ones left behind, the ones who had not been picked, they were devastated. But the ones who were picked, the ones who made the cut, we had been free.

  I had been waiting too long, I knew. I had been drinking too much: after years of not drinking, the beer was buzzing in my ears, and my vision had the clarity of real drunkenness. And yet it was there, sitting in this bar in Dexter, that for the first time in twenty years and more I remembered what it was we had fought for, what it was we had risked our lives and even worse, made fools of ourselves for. It was for this feeling: this feeling of clarity, of courage, of strength—of freedom.

  Life, I thought in words that pronounced themselves with clarion clarity, hardly ever gets this clear. There were three choices. I would be okay, or I would not be okay, or nothing would change. Jed would show up, or I would be arre
sted, or I would go on looking. There was simply nothing else that could happen, and therefore nothing to imagine, nothing to plan, and above all, nothing to fear. And for long seconds, as I sat, I glimpsed, for the third time in my life, what it was to be free, not because of an ideal or a hope, but because there were simply no more choices.

  And in the middle of that feeling, the door opened in the front of the bar and out of the square of blinding sun framed in the open doorway a silhouetted figure entered, stopped, observed, then crossed the room toward me slowly. I, blinking against the light, watched as my eyes adjusted again to the darkness and the figure revealed itself as a middle-aged man who once had been my friend and comrade in freedom.

  2.

  “Are you the person I’m looking for?”

  It had not occurred to me that Jed would not recognize me, but of course he didn’t. Nor did it occur to me that there would be so little affection in his manner. It should have: Weather was a competitive organization, and Jed and I had competed for status, for assignments, and for women. These were old wounds, and they did not appear to be healed now. Looking up from my seat at the man in front of me, a portly, somehow outsize middle-aged man who bore some distant, nearly imaginary resemblance to a kid I had known, I nodded. “I am.”

  “Mind giving me some proof?”

  “Not at all.”

  Jed had evidently thought about this, for he asked two questions relating to specific crimes, one committed by him, one committed by me, neither of which I intend to describe to you now. When I’d answered correctly, he sat down.

  “You’re in a great deal of shit, aren’t you?”

  I nodded again, and this time I smiled. “Hi, Jed, how are you these twenty-five years? Nice to see you, old friend.”

  Lewis actually grimaced. In a false voice, he answered: “Fine, thanks. Great to see you, too. What do you want?”