The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  This time, he countered, as if he had already prepared his response. “Agreed. On two conditions.”

  Suspiciously, she waited.

  “Firstly, when I sold Abba’s store to Metrotech I put the money in trust for you and Pauly. I want you to take that.”

  Through her head passed a quote from Balzac: Tout se transige. “Everything is negotiable.” It was a lawyer who’d said it, too.

  “I’ll take my half. Pauly’s goes to charity.”

  Her father nodded. “Secondly, I think you should have someone to talk to.”

  She rose now and walked to the room’s left-hand window, her arms crossed tight around her breasts. For a brief second, she felt regret. And then it was over, her moment of control gone, and she listened, a girl being spoken to by her father. “By talk to, you are meaning . . .”

  “Psychiatric help. Psychoanalytic, I think, but it’s up to you.” He was talking fluently now, fully in charge.

  “Essie, it used to be, I worried about you, I’d make you go to law school, or something.” He looked now, across the bay between the two windows, at her, and smiled a smile that strangely resembled, she thought, her own. “But you seem to have grown up now.”

  “So your solution to this rite of passage is to send me to a psychoanalyst.” She noticed she was childishly accentuating the educated in her diction, in counterpoint to Rosenthal’s emphasis of the Brooklyn in his.

  “Yeah, I think that’s appropriate.” He was watching out the window now, and she listened carefully. “Essie, you know the score. It scares me not to be able to take care of you. But then I think, well, maybe it’s time for Essie to take care of herself, anyway. She sure seems to want to.”

  Now it was her turn to look out the window. It occurred to her suddenly that she had thought only of herself as having lost everything when Pauly died. Suddenly she felt his . . . his asphyxiation by life, his panic at being forced to interrupt the idyll not of his, but of her privileged life with the reality of its buried roots. It was like a curse. She looked back, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, in a cashmere sweater and jeans, the only surviving member of what once had been a family sprawled throughout the Lithuanian shtetl, all gone now, all gone but her.

  “Okay.”

  He looked at her, pensive, then shook his head, once. “I need a lot better answer than that.”

  “I mean yes. I want to. I want to take care of myself.” And, when she saw how worried he looked, she said in a different tone: “It’s no big deal. I have a job. I’ll be living in Paris from now on.”

  “And you’ll find yourself a shrink?”

  A shrink. A shrink. Suddenly she wanted to scream. What right had he to try to help her? Even to have had her? What right had he to put an ideal, intellectualized and ridden with corruption, above his children? She wanted to pull from the darkest point in her the things no child should ever say to their father and coldly, harshly destroy the man she had sacrificed everything to save, as she knew she could.

  When she spoke, she said: “Yes, Daddy. I’ll find myself a shrink.”

  And then his breath of tobacco and his warm skin were against hers and then she was outside, standing on the rue de Rivoli again, not knowing how she had gotten there.

  Night. She lay on the bed in Mr. Chevejon’s apartment, the room dark but for the light of the street lamps coming in from the high, dry, wintry European night that had moved in over the rue de Fleurus.

  After she had left her father, she’d walked across the river and stopped, on her way home, for an omelette at La Palette: since she’d been sick, she found, she was nearly always ravenously hungry. She knew the owner there, and had sat at the bar in his warm presence for maybe an hour, as if putting off the inevitable. It had been toward seven when she’d gone up to her rooms then undressed and gone to bed without turning on the lights.

  She slept, immediately, mercifully.

  Then, just after midnight, the telephone had rung: short, scary bursts from the living room, and she had woken, eyes wide, fear expanding like a spill of water across ice.

  But only the innocent, she knew, wake unafraid, and she had risen to sit next to the phone until it stopped.

  Now, back in her bed, before her eyes were the father, his daughter, and her brother, that afternoon.

  And now it was night.

  She hadn’t even liked Pauly when they were children. An annoying, active little child, always into everything, always taking her mother’s attention. Now, in her memory, it seemed that it was only when her mother had left, when they’d been at St. Ann’s that she’d started noticing him. By then he was a thin, graceful boy, blond as she, pretty as she with their father’s green eyes, but brash where she was retiring, rebellious where she was obedient, angry at everything. When their mother had gone he was fourteen, she sixteen. He took it very hard, her leaving, and from the moment he heard, he blamed his father. Nights in their suddenly empty brownstone on Grace Court, nights when her father was out, or away, and the maid was long asleep, he’d arrive at her bedroom door in tears of rage.

  That’s when she got to know her brother, really: that’s when he stopped being an annoying sibling and became, suddenly, a person. That year in Grace Court had been, perhaps, a lonely one for her, too: Dee was gone after the summer; by bad luck Martha’s father was teaching at Oxford, and had taken his family with him. And so she had the occasion to come to know the complex, smart person her little brother, in his loss, in his misery, had so precociously become. And so she had had the occasion for her little brother to become, in the solitude that year, her friend.

  Or so she thought.

  It shocked her, she remembered, when she had understood one day how utterly different he was from a friend. Martha was a friend. Pauly, for all he could smoke pot with her, joke with her, walk down the street with her in his jeans jacket and swinging blond hair, was fundamentally different. He was family.

  It was an early evening. Her father was out, they had gotten stoned together on the back porch, and under the sway of a towering ailanthus and the—suddenly so astounding—shiver of its leaves she had watched him standing, shirtless, watching the sky.

  What makes friends, she suddenly saw, is their difference. But Pauly was not different from her. For the first time she saw, in the fall of his thick blond hair, in the sway of his back, in the tone of his skin, how same they were, this boy and her, how equally one genetic dose of matter had been shared between them. No one would ever be the same to her as he, she thought, the lock and key of their creations had been taken apart, by divorce, by menopause, and now the meioses that defined the molds of their beings were unrepeatable historic events. And now they were, each, the key to the other. And as she thought that, Allison Rosenthal, at sixteen, standing under a bowing ailanthus at night on the porch of her Brooklyn house, had her first experience of adult love.

  Now, years later, that night stood in her mind as myth, so powerful, so seminal, that sometimes it seemed to her that this central event of her life could not have been simply a revelation, a vision, but must have been something more. And when she wrote about it, years later in a poem, she had found coming to her pen images of brute symbolism: a swan with beating wings, red blood on the white of a sheet. He himself she could feel, in that poem, in all his familiarity, his smell, his touch. And as time passed, it was as if the poem had replaced the memory, or rather as if memory had become confused with its own mythicality, and really, she no longer knew what had happened.

  Except that time passed. And she’d left for New Haven. Leaving Pauly alone to return to a new house, her father’s new apartment on Park Avenue.

  She’d left him, alone, to her father.

  Only her mother had understood. Her father, with his endless stories about growing up in the streets of Borough Park. Of the gang fights, the Jews against the Micks; the refugee life on the streets of New York; the jobs and petty crime. Of how at seventeen, the day of his graduation from yeshiva, her father had run away to Isra
el and enlisted in the army. How he’d returned to Brooklyn College, then against all odds gotten into Yale Law School, and how he’d worked his way through both. Only her mother had understood the indoctrination in righteousness, entitlement, and reparation to which Allison had abandoned her brother.

  The year she went to college Pauly had entered Dalton. Now, in his senior year, her father started in earnest. He wanted Pauly to go, as he had gone, straight out of school to Israel. The army was a great experience, for a boy, for a Jew, and as he had done his service, so should his son. He owed it to Israel, he owed it to his grandparents.

  Pauly hadn’t wanted to join the army. He wanted to join his sister at Yale. Pauly didn’t want to have anything to do with Israel, and as that year went on their arguments subsumed any other part of their relationship. Pauly had always been too young to understand the pathos of Zionism, to him his father was all kitsch, all rationalization, all bogus stories of a heroism that no longer meant anything in a world where Israelis were an occupying force and the Holocaust a subject for Hollywood films. And as the year went on he dug deeper and deeper into his father’s affairs to hold him in accusation, so deep that his father had grown, in the end, scared that Pauly was going actually to do something crazy. So scared that finally her father had agreed to let him go to college before the army.

  Pauly at Yale. Lying in a bed in a foreign city, a stranger’s apartment, she saw his beautiful, brilliant, boyish face, filled with strength and grace, eager to make everyone his friend. Every night he’d be at her dorm room, to study with her, to sit with her, to sleep curled on the floor.

  And then he’d met Johnny. When she first saw them together, toward Christmas of his freshman year, at a Lambda party, Pauly had looked momentarily afraid of her. Which was funny, because she hadn’t given it a second thought, so natural had he looked in that crowd of hip, handsome young men. Then, after seeing his expression, understanding had come in a flash and she’d stepped over to him without hesitation, to hug him, kiss him, to meet Johnny and talk to his friends. His expression—grateful to her, proud of her—had never long left her mind.

  Perhaps there had been something else in his expression. Perhaps he had seen her relief, and it had broken his heart.

  God, he’d blossomed that year. Nothing stopped him: the Writing Program, squash team, those endless coked-up parties, he had time for everything, and in everything he’d done well. He was a junior when she, having finally made her deal with her father, had gone, reprieved from law school, to Paris. And a senior when, on the phone from New Haven to Paris, he’d broken to her the unbelievable news that her father had started again on him to make plans for Israel after graduation.

  At first, the summer after he graduated, she’d thought that after all, it was going to be okay. Pauly was holding his own, determined to resist his father. He thought, in fact, that the old man was weakening: Pauly had come out to him, and was confident the shame of having a gay son would make his father want to keep him home, under wraps.

  At first. She stayed in Paris, the summer following his graduation, dawdling in the European summer, delaying returning for the late summer in Ocean View, having too much fun to want to end her precious time away. Anyway, she had agreed to give her father some time to be alone with Pauly. She thought Pauly would hold firm, she thought it would be all right.

  Then it had all started to go wrong, and when Pauly had called, in early June, she had understood quickly that it was not all right. Her father was entirely unconvinced by Pauly, more than ever determined to have his son follow in his footsteps, and was planning on leaning heavily. Allison knew what it was like when her father leaned. Pauly tried to sound cheerful on the phone, but the strain had come through. And when she heard his voice she’d known that she had to come straight home, right away, Charles de Gaulle to Kennedy to Logan to the little island airport in two days, abandoning her life and her possessions in Paris.

  At Ocean View, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Having a daughter had turned her father into a feminist. Now he was a gay-rights activist, too. Pauly silent, her father fuming quietly for days until bursting out, “I don’t give a fuck what you are. It’s all the more reason to do what you have to. Hitler killed gays, too.”

  And Pauly, in turn, grew more and more militant, less and less circumspect. He was drinking heavily that summer, drinking and doing coke and partying the nights away in the scene of young, hip gay men on the island. And one night at a party in Ocean View, where many Israelis in their shirtsleeves milled with their wives around the room, holding drinks and talking to counterparts from defense businesses on the mainland—Electric Boat, Bath Iron Works—and government figures from Washington and Jerusalem—Greg Eastbrook, Amiram Nir, Al Schwimmer, Robert Earl—she saw Pauly approach her father unsteadily.

  Worried, she excused herself from a conversation and came close enough to hear him say: “So this is what I’m going to defend, Dad?”

  She took his arm, but he was raising his voice: “So this is the pioneers of Israel protecting the interests of the Jewish people, is it, Dad? This is what you want me to go give three years of my fucking life for, is it?”

  She tried to pull him away, while her father was saying in Hebrew—as if to keep it in the family of Israelis in the room: “Pauly, you are to leave the room this instant.” And Pauly, as she pulled him, answered in Hebrew also.

  “Lama ze, Abba? What are you ashamed of? This is Zionism. Assassinating Gerald Bull was Zionism. Trying to buy Carlos Cardoen was Zionism. Training SAVAK and arming Mobutu was Zionism. Threatening Greg Eastbrook was Zionism, and now serving him drinks in your fucking living room, it’s all for the good of the goddamn Jews, Dad.”

  And as she pulled him, forcibly now, out of the room, Alley saw pass between Greg Eastbrook and Amiram Nir a look that sent ice into her blood.

  She’d begged him to stop. She’d pleaded for him to stop.

  Now she knew, because Nicky had told her, that it was already too late.

  Now she knew, because Nicky had told her, that Pauly had already contacted Nicky twice, once to send him to Munich, and then again to send him to Paris.

  And in Paris Peleg had told Nicky to come back to Pauly for proof, proof not of her father’s guilt, as Pauly wanted, but of Eastbrook’s. And the whole thing, the whole thing, had been taped.

  And now, years later in a Paris apartment, for the first time, she understood what that look between Eastbrook and Nir had said.

  And then it was that late-June morning when they’d planned to sail to Cuttyhunk, and she’d woken before dawn and gone to wake Pauly for an early start, and his bed had been empty, and she had known, deep in her, that something was terribly wrong.

  She’d taken her bike—not the Canondale but the Mongoose mountain bike with its big sand tires—and ridden along the hard sand by the water’s edge, right up past Black Rock Beach, Hancock Beach, Lucy Vincent, Philben, all the way up to the clay cliffs of Gay Head, because she knew he and Johnny camped there sometimes on the gay beach up around the point. And when she saw him, lying clothed on the sand, facedown on the low-tide sand, she’d thought he must have fallen asleep drunk, only when she knelt to wake him, she found him wet, and cold, and when she turned him and saw his beautiful face, his beautiful face, streaked with the red of the cliff’s red clay, like an Indian warrior, and the black of his eyes and the blue of his swollen lips, and in his chest, the middle of his T-shirt, a black burnt hole in the middle of an aureole of blood drilling through to his heart.

  For a time she sat, moans like an animal coming from deep in her throat, his head in her lap, while the waves lapped up at them. For a time she sat on the endless, empty beach in the crepuscular dark. Nicky had explained to her how, but even then, even then, she’d known why. And because she knew why she stood, gingerly moving his limp neck to lay his head in the soft sand.

  Later she realized that the whole way back to Ocean View she had ridden slowly, carefully, as if knowing that one
bad fall, one blown tire, and everything was lost.

  Later she realized that in the madness of her grief she had still known that Pauly was gone, and nothing would ever make that better, but that if her father knew what had happened he would be gone too, and nothing would be left her, nothing. Tens of thousands of fathers had given their sons to Israeli wars. Her father must never know he had given his son to Israeli industry , he could not stand it, and she, she who had now lost everything, would lose him too.

  What she had to do, had to do, was make this be the death of Pauly alone, one death, Pauly’s death.

  At Ocean View her father slept heavily in the rising dawn while she gingerly opened his bedside drawer and withdrew the nickel-plated handgun he kept there.

  And then she was riding again, up the empty beach, the apocalyptic pink sun lighting the sea a weird, ghostly green, too early on a Sunday morning even for fishers, and then running again. And in the silence of the empty beach where her brother lay she pointed the gun to the sea and fired once, a thin sound that the enormous landscape of sand and sea and sky swallowed up nearly before it happened. And then, kneeling, she’d wiped the gun clean against her T-shirt and, lovingly, lifted Pauly’s limp hand and placed the gun in it.

  Or had she? For now, kneeling by her brother, the minutes past seemed to be clouding into the mythological past, just like the night with Pauly under the ailanthus, just like when she had started to betray Dee and Nicky, and it was as if she did not know whether she had done what she’d done or just thought of doing it, a plausible deniability of the soul. Had she done it? Remembering, now, it seemed to her she had just arrived on the beach, just come around the point and found her brother, and turned him from where he lay facedown in the lapping waves and seen the black of his eyes and the blue of his swollen lips, and in his chest, the middle of his T-shirt, a black burnt hole in an aureole of blood, and in his hand the gun he had stolen from his father to kill himself, and then all at once, on the empty beach at dawn, begun to scream.