The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Dimly, confused, I realized that I had, in the singularity of my hunger, actually come to think of myself as a little girl. Rebeccah, Rebeccah, Rebeccah. She was a gift for someone else, someone who deserved a gift, not for me, not for me. Now, it would be with my death that I would guarantee her life.

  Rebeccah. I crouched now, on the path, and put my palm to the ground to stop from falling. Rebeccah. What I would do now, I thought, was lie down on the ground, on the path, with Rebeccah, and never get up again.

  Perhaps I would have. I think I would have. But as I, weak and lightheaded, lowered myself to the ground, that morning, I experienced a potent hallucination.

  I saw the sun come up over the trees, the weak sun of morning, and with sudden, absolute certainty, I knew that at that very second, my baby was seeing it too. In a very literal way, I knew she was lying on her back in her new home, at Johnny’s house, and that she was next to a window, and that her arms and legs were moving in their uterine weightlessness and her eyes, her eyes that couldn’t yet focus, were filling with light that she couldn’t understand.

  Watching the sun approach me through the woods, I knew that I had got it wrong. The boundless love that washed through me, through and through me, it was the only thing I had to offer my daughter. By its very existence, how could it not fill that child with confidence and possibility, with luck and with happiness? That my inability to imagine a circumstance in which she might need me did not mean that such a time would never arise. And I knew that nothing mattered, nothing mattered, but that I live out that love for her.

  And then the sun crept across the sky and touched me, and when it touched me, like a little girl in a fairy tale, without thinking, I got up and began to walk, guided by a good witch through a magical forest, to the coast.

  I didn’t have to think about what I’d do. I would walk to Point Betsie, and wait for night. At night I would go down to the Yacht Club and roll one of the little training dinghies into the water. I’d rig it, and then I’d steal a compass, and then I’d set off west across Lake Michigan to the Wisconsin shore. If I made it alive, I’d find a bar, find a man, find a way to hide for a week, two weeks. Then I’d go up to Milwaukee. Donal James had IDs I could use, I knew that; he’d always had an excess of IDs. And he could get me the name of the contact we had, in what seemed another life, with the Brotherhood. My last contact with anyone I’d ever known in my life would be Donal James. And then I would disappear even to him.

  It was a death, but a different kind of death. Everything about Mimi Lurie would die. But that love, that love that inhabited the very light of the spring sun, that light that held, and carried, my baby, that I would keep alive.

  In case one day, one day I could show it to Rebeccah.

  • • •

  Twenty-two years later I came out of the trail in the morning at the town of Oscoda, the east coast of Michigan, nearly twenty-four hours after I left your father at the Linder cabin. I made my way to the marina and stepped into the office. When I came out it was with a key, and this I carried directly down the dock to a twenty-nine-foot Pearson, the Evelyn I, kept here by a couple who worked for McLeod. The key opened the passageway, and when I came back out of the cabin, it was in yellow slickers to protect me from the wet fog. On diesel, I pulled the boat out of its slip and quietly moved out without lights.

  Offshore, the fog cleared, and a fresh north wind was blowing. I dropped anchor, then went below to wait for darkness. In the event, I slept: a heavy unconsciousness, conditioned by days of tension and nearly twenty-four hours on the trail.

  When I woke, it was night, and a north wind was blowing at ten knots. For a few moments I put my face into it, eyes closed. Then I moved quickly to weigh anchor, start the engine, and turn the boat to the wind, leaving it a touch of throttle for steerage, and set the automatic steering.

  Through the fore hatch I put out the number-four jib, a Genoa, and then scrambled out on the foredeck to rig and raise it. When it was up, fluttering in irons, I hooked the winch handle into my belt, moved back, and raised the main, winching it on the master. That finished, I moved back to the wheel and released the steering, but kept the boat throttling gently still into the north wind.

  And now? Standing, my face to the wind, my hair blowing backward, the sails luffing, I unzipped my slicker.

  Canada was due east on a beam reach; a single tack with the wind on a gently curved suit of sails would take me right into the Kincardine Marina. With running lights off, my passage would never be known to man or satellite. And from Kincardine a bus went to Toronto, Ottowa, Montreal.

  Montreal has an international airport.

  To the south was Detroit, due south, a run: wheel around, luffing through all the points of sail, 180 degrees, then put the sails wing on wing with the wind at my back and run straight in to Detroit.

  Canada. Tess Sanders untouched by the whole affair. And if not Tess Sanders, then another: Paige James, Jennifer Howard, Pat Cremins. It didn’t matter what name I used. I was always myself, always myself. And the whole world waited on the other side of Canada.

  Detroit. Sail into the Bell Isle Yacht Club, leave the boat, take a taxi into Ann Arbor to the police station. Giving a cabbie such a good fare, there are worse last moves before you go to jail.

  Ha, ha. I laughed into the wind, but without much humor. West or south in a north wind: blue-water sailing either way.

  It was a funny thing, wasn’t it? Canada with its passageway to the whole world, to a whole life of freedom, that felt like a jail, but Detroit and jail, it seemed like freedom.

  But then, I had never been afraid of jail. I had been in jail since the day I lost Rebeccah. Imprisoning me changed nothing.

  And freedom?

  The only thing at stake was the highest principle of my life.

  For a last long minute I looked out into the vast possibility before me, Canada, savoring it in the taste of the north wind.

  Then I cut the engine, letting the boat drift backward on the wind in the sudden silence, falling off to the east. The sails, slowly, filled into a beam reach, and as the boat pointed east, it gained speed. The wind came around to the beam, and I winched the mainsheet, reeling the sail in, catching the wind and accelerating east. Canada.

  Only I could not seem to make my hands stop the wheel. I tried for a second, and then I realized I didn’t want to. And so the boat veered farther to the south, and farther, until the wind behind the boat jibed the closehauled mainsail to the starboard side, and now my hands were working again, because I found them letting the sheet run out, steadying the boat into the most beautiful run a boat can make, wing on wing, mainsail on the starboard, jib on the port, before the north wind, running south.

  Feeling, in a way I had not since the morning sun first guided me out of the forest in 1974, cleansed of every tie, carrying all the love in the world for a little girl, and a little boy, and knowing that nothing, nothing, would ever take it from me, free.

  EPILOGUE

  When we watch the children play

  Remember

  How the privileged classes grew

  And from this day we set out

  To undo what won’t undo.

  Looking for the grand in the minute

  Every breath justifies

  Every step that we take to remove what

  The powers that be can’t prove

  And the children will understand why.

  —Chrissie Hynde,

  “Revolution”

  Date: July 4, 2010

  Filename: Izzy_final.doc

  Author: Isabel Sinai Montgomery

  Time: 02:08:58 GMT

  I remember Saugerties, the Catskills, the Hudson Valley, always in the spring: a sea of undulating green stretching away forever to the horizon, always warm, always in bloom.

  My father and I never went back there. Not to live. We went back to hike, to visit: Billy Cusimano—until he moved back to the city—Charlie and Naomi, a few others. But we never went bac
k to live. And in time the place we lived when I was a baby—in time that whole summer—turned into a memory of green, the Catskills in midsummer, an endless and infinitely welcoming world of kind forests and magical trails, the place where I was a child.

  I’m not supposed to be telling this. In fact, I wasn’t supposed even to save the e-mails I got from what my mother called “the Committee,” those weeks leading up to Mimi Lurie’s parole date. I even worried that Big Billy’s computer geek put some programming in them, causing these e-mails to delete themselves after I read them. A neurotic need for secrecy, in my opinion, has always characterized my father and his friends. Just to be on the safe side I printed a copy, and burnt a DV, and put that in a safe deposit vault. And as it happened, things went a bit wild after Mimi’s parole hearing, and it took four years for the consequences all to play out. Which is why it is not until now, this very early morning in London in 2010, that I am finally doing something I have been meaning to do for years, that is, write down how everything ended up, that summer of 1996, when Mimi Lurie surrendered herself in order that I might continue to live with my father. And, more importantly, what happened when Mimi Lurie came up for parole in the summer of 2006, and what exactly they wanted me to do to help get her out of jail, and what I decided to do in the end. And then I’ll put the whole thing away again and hope that someone will one day in the future want to read this and, more importantly, that the South Asia War is going to leave us a future in which they can.

  That summer, after my father was arrested, I lived with my uncle Daniel and my aunt Maggie, the redheaded lady who had shown up in the hotel to get me. I’ve never really decided whether I remember what had happened that night in the Wall Street Marriott, or if I’ve just read so much about it that I think I do. I do remember my uncle’s house by the sea on Martha’s Vineyard. I remember the ocean that lapped up against the bottom of the lawn, I remember the slap of water against the hull of the boat my uncle and aunt took me sailing in, I remember the enormous ticking clock in the hallway with the writing on it, B-R-E-G-U-E-T, I remember my two beautiful and brilliant little cousins, Leila and Jacob, Jakey three, Leiley almost my age.

  When Daddy was let out of jail, we moved in with my grandmother in New York City, which was a lucky thing, because I came to love my grandmother, and these turned out to be the last few years of her life. In the fall they put me in a school called Little Red Schoolhouse, which was where my father had gone, and because of that, I guess, everyone tended to gush over me somewhat, making me feel more like a historical artifact than an actual girl. More importantly, this was the time when I got to know my sister Rebeccah—my half sister—when she finished school and moved to New York. In fact, I spent a great lot of time with Beck after she moved to New York, but that’s another story, and I’ll tell it another time.

  Later I found out all the facts, some from Beck, some from Molly, who were apparently the only ones who believed that I should be treated like a human being with a right to know some of the truth. Like, how after Mimi’s surrender and confession, and Sharon Solarz’s identical testimony, the state of Michigan dropped charges against my father for murder and larceny, and the state of New York decided not to pursue charges stemming from his life as a fugitive; and the old federal charges, which were corrupted by illegal wiretapping under the Nixon administration, had long been forgotten. As a result, even though my father was known outside of the rules of evidence to have been involved in all manner of crime, Yale University transferred James Grant’s law degree to Jason Sinai. Jason Sinai, however, was never admitted to the bar: the Ethics Committee of the Bar was allowed to consider things that the courts weren’t. He kept working by keeping a staff of litigating lawyers, which became in fact rather a legendary job, springboard to many eminent legal careers.

  And how he was able to do this turned out to be very simple. During the time my father was underground, it turned out that my grandfather, Jack Sinai, had matched every penny he spent on his younger son Daniel—and on his daughter, Klara Singer, whom they took over when she was orphaned in Israel shortly after my father went underground—and put it away. When I tell you that both Daniel Sinai and Klara Singer went to Elizabeth Irwin High School and Yale for college and graduate school, not mentioning twenty-six years of other expenses, you can imagine what kind of money was involved. Every penny had been saved, and although my grandfather’s principles forbade him investing in secondary markets, my uncle Daniel’s did not, and under his stewardship it came to a considerable amount of money indeed. My father was therefore able to open up an office in, of all places, the Exchange Building, tenth floor. They did not, my father used to joke, have to change the sign on the door. When Mimi Lurie came up for parole, my father was able to set up an office in Michigan and work full time on her release, which is why all his e-mails came to me from Michigan that summer of 2006.

  And me? I moved to England in ’03, for a lot of reasons. One was that by then, it had become clear that my mother, Julia, might not ever be a Rhodes scholar, but she would be clean forever, and I had been spending summers and holidays with her for years—my father never tried to make me dislike my mother, though he never came to like her after he stopped loving her, and I admit I always did see Molly Sackler as my mom and my actual mother as more of a friend. Another reason was that I was not a particularly good adolescent, and that New York is a lousy place for an unhappy kid. And another reason might be that I, after a time, began to see my father as someone who had abandoned me just like, years before, he had abandoned my sister Rebeccah. At least, a shrink my dad made me see told me that, and who knows but that it’s the truth.

  But I personally see it this way: having a hero for a father is not an easy thing. And having a whole generation of hippies—whom I’d see at Billy Cusimano’s famous SoHo loft after he became the organic king of the world—going all teary-eyed every time they see you gets to be a big drag too.

  Whatever, by the time I was thirteen, it was pretty clear that Elizabeth Irwin—that’s the high school of Little Red Schoolhouse—and I were not going to get along anymore. And because, by then, it turned out that my mother’s sobriety was real, and true, and that her worst sin now was a life-long commitment to shopping, and my father and she had reached some kind of peace, my father agreed to let me come over to Exminster, which I did. It was the right thing to do, as it happened. For one thing, I discovered that in many ways, I’m my mother’s daughter too. I’m one mean shopper, and I like to dress. We pierced our eyebrows together, and I got my first tattoo with her. And lastly, as everyone knows, being a hopeless parent doesn’t keep your kids from loving you. Mom, I had never stopped loving her, now I learned to like her, too—though why she and my father had gotten married was a mystery I’d never answer and which gave me one of my first insights into how childish adults are. And somehow, understanding that I was my mother’s daughter, that made it easier to see the ways in which I wanted to be my father’s, too. See, it was definitely my father’s daughter who, one day when I was fifteen, trapped Benny Schulberg in a hotel room while he was visiting in London with my sister Beck and made him tell me a few key details about the summer of 1996, key details that had been left out, so far, from everyone else’s account. And Benny, tough-guy reporter, caved in about twelve seconds flat.

  What he confessed to me—what I wanted to know—was that for all the time my mother and father were married, my grandfather had known and concealed Jim Grant’s true identity. Benny says, “The old bastard didn’t have a choice, Iz. What was he supposed to do? On one hand, he turns your father in to the police, and he loses his daughter. On the other hand, your father goes back underground, and takes Julia with him. Either way, Montgomery loses.”

  Then he thinks for a while, looking miserable. And says: “These fucking Vietnam stories, Iz, ‘scuse my French. I mean, every war has its war criminals, they’re easy. But once you’re done with the politicans and the murderers, it’s not that easy to tell the good guys from the
bad. Your dad? Take my word for it, he made some moves in Weather that make Mussolini look like Jack Kennedy. Your grandfather Montgomery? Can you really argue with what he did?”

  Well, maybe not. Maybe, on the other hand, given how he used his good deed against my dad in the summer of ’96, so.

  Which leads me to what they were actually asking me to do about Mimi Lurie’s parole hearings in 2006, and what I decided. And to tell you about that in turn, I have to tell you about the last thing that happened with all these people in the summer of 1996.

  2.

  Mimi Lurie turned herself in to the Ann Arbor police on July 10, 1996. She was taken into custody, pleaded guilty at her arraignment, and took—as they say—a twelve-year hit in state court on July 15, which she began serving immediately.

  Several days later, the U.S. attorney announced that all criminal charges had been dropped against my father, and he was released from prison in Traverse City, where they’d been holding him. Naturally, he showed up immediately at John Osborne’s house, not only because I was by then staying there with Aunt Maggie and Molly, who had brought me out to Michigan as soon as Mimi surrendered. And after they had all talked, and cried, and slobbered on each other or whatever they actually did, well, then they had a surprise. And that surprise came from John Osborne himself.

  Want to know what happened? Benny—the open book—told me all about it. It was pretty brilliant, I guess. In its way. What happened was that when all the emotion had settled down, and everyone was sitting around at the kitchen table, John Osborne suggested something. He suggested that now that my father was cleared, there was no necessity now to reveal publicly the fact of who Rebeccah’s birth parents were. No one had a lot of objection to that. But when, right after that, he suggested that another part of my father’s story be kept secret, that was another matter altogether.