The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  God, but it had shocked me, how mad Jed still was. Now, I thought that perhaps it shouldn’t have. The last months, before B of M, when Weather had been a group of fugitives looking for a new role in the counterculture, horrific animosity had surfaced between us. Years of competition that had been held in check by group discipline suddenly showed; years of resentment, of jealousy.

  And still, we had found the way to talk, and as we talked, through four, five drinks, it had started to seem like those differences were less important, after all, than the things that once had united us.

  I rose unsteadily and walked to the window. In a house across the street someone was playing the piano. I could only see the hands on the keyboard, moving with an agility that spoke of a piece of considerable tempo and complexity. Up until my fifteenth birthday I had played the piano, hours spent at the Bechstein in the big living room of my parents’ house. They had thought, of course, I was going to be a musician, but at fifteen I had given it up, a decision that had cost real pain, and real guilt. Now, dimly, in the stoned and drunk swirl of my mind, I felt a hint of how responsible that guilt had been for what I was later to do; just dimly a hint, and no sooner had I glimpsed that insight than it whirled away again. But watching the hands play, pause, practice, and then play again, I thought of all the lives that could have been mine other than what I in fact was, and a searing regret went through me.

  And I knew the thought was a drunken indulgence. Watching the hands move under the light of a lamp, I knew that I was too old for that kind of regret. What you have to do is navigate this life, not another one, not a life you wish you had or a life you see in the window of a room across the street, but this life. And beyond doing that right, there’s nothing to think about, so clearly true is it that all lives are all equally apt, no matter what their actual circumstances, for the commission of right and wrong and for the achievement of brief glimpses of freedom that may or may not precede enlightenment.

  And this life? This life, this life. Perhaps Jed had woken in me all the things that I had once hoped to be, and hoped to do. But Jed had children, too. What did it matter what I was? I was nothing, anymore, except a father. I was nothing except the person who had a chance—a slim chance—of making you better than myself. And nothing I did with my life had any meaning beyond what it meant to you.

  Like Oedipus said at Colonus: it’s now, when I am nothing, that I become a man.

  Standing at that window, my forehead against the glass pane the only thing keeping me upright in my drunkenness, I wondered if ever my father had thought like this, about me, and as I wondered, I ached. My father. My daughter. And me, reduced to nothing and became everything in a by-the-hour hotel room in a tiny town in Dexter.

  So I was thinking, and while I thought, as I was to learn later, the long electronic loop from the Del Rio Bar to California and back again completed its course. In time, while Jed Lewis and Rebeccah Osborne and Ben Schulberg sat drinking shots and beers at the back table next to the telephone, in time the bartender at the Del Rio hung up the phone, and moments later, the pay phone next to where they sat began to ring.

  And moments later, again, in my hotel room in Dexter, the phone rang, and through the endless tunnel of my drunkenness I made my way from the window to pick it up, and as if from miles and miles away heard Jed Lewis say:

  “She says she’ll see you. In October of 1973, this weekend.”

  October 1973. This weekend. With the care of the utterly drunk, I wrote that down. Then, leaving until tomorrow the job of figuring out where we were in October of 1973, and how I was going to get there again by the weekend, I let myself go backward onto the bed, asleep before I finished falling.

  Date: June 21, 2006

  From: “Amelia Wanda Lurie”

 

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 31

  October 1973. We lived, from October to December of 1973, in a cabin at the end of a disused logging road on some three thousand acres of privately held northern Michigan forest.

  It was a place where I had spent some of the happiest times of my life.

  The Linder estate. The nearest neighbors were miles of thick woodland away. To the south, the Au Sable ran to Lake Huron. To the north I-75 crossed the Mackinac bridge and up to Ontario. One hundred and eighty degrees of the compass held escape routes ending in water.

  Even then, I knew how important that coastline was.

  Even then, I knew what bootleggers and Indians had known before me about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

  October 1973. Pronouncing the words to McLeod over the telephone from the Del Rio, I felt as if I were telling someone the secret I had never told before. And watching Jeddy Lewis receiving a phone call on the pay phone—a call I was certain was McLeod relaying my message to Jeddy, who would relay it to Little J, I felt as if I had just made an appointment to travel not through space, but through time.

  But then, how much stranger could I conceivably feel, after seeing Jeddy and Rebeccah sitting together in the first place?

  Strange? My dear, there are no words to explain how strange it was, that summer.

  • • •

  I had to let them stay in the bar after last call—local restaurant etiquette required that. And they did want to stay, ordering two shots of bourbon apiece and two pitchers of Stroh’s to drink while the waiter and I cleaned up the bar. Really, I shouldn’t have served them: the two kids were lit already, and Jeddy, Jeddy looked like he’d been drinking all day. While they drank, I cleaned up, not looking, trying not to listen. Seeing Jeddy—recognizing that this middle-aged professor was Jeddy—had been surreal enough. But it was like a nightmare come true when I overheard that Rebeccah and her boyfriend were quizzing Jed about Sharon Solarz in the days. I heard Jasey’s name in their conversation. I heard my own.

  It took them forever to leave.

  I see us all that night, in an Edward Hopper tableau through the window from the street. The three of them drinking their last calls at a table while the waiter upended chairs and mopped around them. And me, at the bar, a green-shaded light illuminating the cash-register drawer as I counted the night’s take.

  I doubt that my count was that accurate.

  Because what I was seeing was not the money in the drawer but another scene altogether. What I was seeing was afternoon light falling through the kitchen window of the Linder cabin in October 1973, a shaft of thick autumn light falling through dusty air and splashing, like water, onto the wooden floor.

  It was a place where I had been very happy, perhaps the happiest I had ever been. And yet this night, in Ann Arbor, closing the Del Rio after last call, it seemed that all I could clearly capture from the two months we spent there was that single view of the light falling in the kitchen window onto the floor.

  That light, that precisely defined shaft of light, so thick I had felt I could reach out and hold it in my hand. The light of the great northern woods in autumn, the woods in which I had grown up. And the silence in the cabin while Little J slept, a silence itself so multilayered with the the endless inventiveness of mourning, there was everything in it.

  The silence of a suburban house at noon.

  The silence of the beach at Point Betsie, on the dunes of which my father died.

  • • •

  The Del Rio in 1996, and I came back to the present as the waiter ushered Jed Lewis and the two kids out, then called good night himself. And I, at last alone, I lowered my head to the top of the cash register. My eyes tight shut to the present, traveling deep into the memory of that morning in 1973, lying on the floor of the cabin, listening to the low moan raised by the blustering wind moving through the woods outside the cabin, watching the light through the window.

  Every locale that had ever meant anything to me was in that light. I was in my childhood room, in the iron frame bed, upstairs at Point Betsie. I was about to r
ise by the window, look out to the little sandy road to the beach, through the turning woods of trees bowing their reddening crowns this way, then that. I would descend the dark stairs with their smooth wood surfaces, sit at the Wakefield table my mother had bought when we’d moved to Michigan in the fifties, drink hot chocolate, poured into chipped white tin cups from the white tin jug, sitting with my father. I was a little girl, a little girl in a lost time, before it was all taken away.

  But even then, in October 1973, it had already all been taken away. Our Point Betsie house with its chipped white enamel tin cups, our dear little house on the dirt road, lying in the slanting sun from the water, had long been sold, and not only was my father gone but also my mother, my mother. It was not 1958, or 1962, or even 1965—all of those times were gone now. As I watched the shaft of light falling through the window of the Linder cabin, illuminating the dust in the air and making it move with the complexity of a ballet, there was already an abyss between all those things and what I was now: a woman who had made her face and her name synonymous with outlaw life, a woman who had gone so far there was no coming back. And in place of all those things I missed, in this depthless, anonymous well of silence and light, of wind and memory, in this little cabin in the woods, there was just this one thing: this black-haired head asleep on my naked shoulder.

  October 1973. I saw myself lying there, cradling Jason’s sleeping head, in the shocked, thoughtless clarity of the newly awakened. In this sun so thick with the color of memory. In this wind moaning with the woods-carried scent of autumn. This black-haired head and no more and I, Mimi Lurie, fugitive and criminal, lying there in October 1973, had understood that I was learning with new poignancy, new and profound poignancy, exactly how much I had come to need this black-haired head.

  In the Del Rio in July 1996, under the light of the green-shaded lamp above the register, I came to myself. Quietly I took the night’s cash and zipped it closed into the vinyl bank bag. I shut the light, I left the bar, stepping out into the heat of the early morning. An hour after last call, two hours to sunrise.

  What could I expect? Sharon’s arraignment had been all over the news for days. Kids had even protested in support of Sharon outside the jail where she was being held, pending trial, and the Washtenaw County Police Benevolent Association had organized a counter-demonstration. Listening to Jeddy talk to the two kids, I told myself, I was crazy to come back to Ann Arbor. But then, what choice did I have?

  Carrying the deposit bag as I had been taught—under one arm, held by the other—I walked up to Main Street, deserted at 3:30 in the morning, then over to the Bank of Michigan branch on the corner of Huron Street. This was not the branch of the robbery—they’d closed that branch, which had been in the Briarwoods Mall, years before. Still, other nights, I had at least wryly observed the strangeness of it all. Tonight, with the sunlight of twenty-three years ago before my eye, I hardly noticed what I was doing.

  October 1973. Early in the month, a long and meticulous operation had concluded with the bombing of the Capitol Building in Washington. Placing the bomb had been the single most dangerous thing we had ever done, and still, when it failed to go off, Little J and I had returned from the safe house we’d rented in Baltimore to the Capitol and dropped another small explosive device in to ignite the bigger one. This one worked, and in the extreme heat of the manhunt that followed, we judged it reasonable to sever all links with the collective, for a time, and go off on our own.

  I took him north. I knew the cabin—had hiked the holdings extensively with my father. My father had been, in fact, instrumental in convincing the current generation of the Linders to deed the land to the Nature Conservancy. The last time I had been there before 1973 was 1962, when old Boris Linder had lent the place to my father and we had gone with Dougy Osborne and Johnny—and my brother Peter—to camp out for a week. It was one of the last times any of us were to be together: over the next six years my father killed himself and my brother disappeared. As for Johnny Osborne, our childhood friendship, already stretched thin, snapped when he enlisted to Vietnam. Two years later, my mother died. And then old Mr. Linder died, and by 1973 his grandchildren, who now owned the land, had long forgotten the cabin was even there.

  It was probable, in fact, that no one at all had been in the cabin between 1964, when the Luria family had our last happy vacation, and 1973. It was probable, in fact, that no one had been there since.

  Now, walking slowly back from the bank past the Del Rio again, I wondered if J would remember how to get to the cabin.

  For a moment, the thought made me intensely anxious.

  Then I thought, well, if he didn’t, then he wouldn’t see me: there was no reason for us to meet, anyway. Just Little J being Little J, wanting to torture himself, and me, with things that could not be changed.

  He had never been able to accept defeat. It was what made him a good activist, and I had no doubt that it made him a great lawyer.

  Probably, I thought with an ache in my belly, it also made him a good father.

  There was, however, nothing I could do for him.

  I knew that, and I hoped that beyond the sentimentality of wanting to see me, he knew that too.

  I walked slowly, heading across the deserted town to the little apartment I had rented on Hill Street, close to where the SDS offices had been. There was no hurry: I was unlikely to sleep this night. And in fact, as I approached campus I turned suddenly past the Rackham Building, past the old observatory and over to the medical school parking lot above the Arboretum. On the stairs leading down to the Arb I sat and the night, the hot June night with its symphony of cicadas, rose around me.

  October 1973. We’d traveled north from Washington separately. For three days I’d waited for him, camping out in the woods and coming to the diner in Rose City every day at four, as we’d arranged. Each day I grew more and more nervous. But it was not a fugitive’s nervousness; it was fueled by something other than fear for our physical safety.

  In fact, the manhunt did not worry me. As always, the FBI had been our unwitting ally by working every influence they had to restrict national coverage, seeking to minimize the publicity Weather actions generated. They did this successfully: most of our actions were only reported regionally. The downside of that, for us, was reaching fewer people with an awareness of what we had done. The upside was that the national manhunt for us was not widely known, and its intensification after such a visible action did little to hamper our movements.

  I was not frightened. I knew that our identities—as well as our craft in evading pursuit—were more than just good. And in 1973, with a nation of young folk on the move, one girl more or less in bell-bottom jeans worn nearly through at the ass, traveling by bus and thumb with a backpack: I attracted only the most cursory attention. It was not the danger of being caught by the FBI that worried me. It was the danger of being caught by my comrades in my desire to be alone—absolutely alone—with Jason Sinai.

  For in fact, the manhunt that followed the bombing of the Capitol building was more an excuse to flee together than a reason—an excuse for being alone. The Weather Bureau, with their militant ban on couples, was a greater threat to us right now than the FBI.

  Not that either of us admitted it. From the beginning, we had tacitly kept the depth of our attachment secret, and neither of us had ever been subject to pressure to break up what would have seemed, to the Bureau, a bourgeois monogamy. And yet, when we realized we had a plausible explanation for leaving the collective for a time, together, without discussing it, we’d both put the steps in action to make it happen. Later—much later, when we were discussing these things openly—your father would even say that was why he went back to the Capitol a second time, the most dangerous thing he’d ever done, as a Weather member or otherwise.

  See, if the bomb hadn’t been detonated, he and I would have had no reason to run away.

  On the third day, when I came in he was there, a handsome young man with a head of loose, curly
hair, dyed black, in jeans and a T-shirt, a pack of Winstons in the breast pocket, chatting with the waitress. On the floor, behind him, was a backpack. I’d had my own coffee, watching jealously from down the counter, not acknowledging him. Then I’d walked back out of town to the campsite and prepared to leave. In time he’d followed, and together, traveling by my skills with compass and topo map, we’d made our way out of state forest and into the great northern estate of the Linder family, heading for the cabin I knew from vacationing there, as a girl, with my father.

  Christ. Sitting on the top step of the wooden flight of steps leading down into the Arboretum, I remembered that morning on the trail, hiking in to the cabin with Jasey. A golden late summer sun, as thick as honey, poured through the maple and oak leaf, the leaves themselves amplifying, rather than shadowing, the light with their spectrum of greens and reds. A silence as infinite as the sky was upon us, interrupted only by the breath of the wind through the woods, the wind that, if you stopped to listen, played out all the distances around you: huge sighs of rustling leaves across huge distances. And the light, the light: the light that seemed to combine in one shocking flash all the autumns of my life—of school years starting and Thanksgivings passing—with the unknown promise of this particular autumn, this autumn that promised nothing but the freedom of a new stage in my fugitive life, my life as a fugitive with Jason.

  I rose now and went down the wooden steps to the Arboretum, watching the waning moon come out of clouds overhead and cast a silvery obscurity over the treetops. To go back north. To be alone with Jason in the great north woods of my childhood. I’d known for twenty-two years that Jason wanted to see me, and I had known from the moment I heard about his flight what he was going to ask me to do. That wasn’t the problem. It was something more.