by Tom Corbett
“Yes, yes, you have made your position clear…No, there is no room for negotiation, it is not like we’re closing on a house here…Ah-ha…I am sure I know exactly how your mother feels.” Cate turned and gave the finger to the world in general, just so the observing crowd knew her exact feelings. Rachel responded by laughing silently while Meena put her hand to her face. “Listen to me…No, no, just listen, goddamn it. I am marrying Meena. We are adopting the orphans I told you about if we can pull it off. You remember Usha? Yes, Rachel’s brother’s ex-wife. Good for you, I’m surprised you remember anyone outside the Ballentine circle…Okay, unfair. Anyways, she is a professor of law and is helping us with everything. It is happening…Fine, do what you must…No, just stop. There is nothing more to say. Goodbye, Father.” With that, she terminated the call and took a big sigh.
Josh broke that ensuing silence while everyone else searched for an appropriate comment. “So, I take it that this was not a telemarketer selling time-shares.”
Cate laughed aloud despite herself and walked over to hug her uncle. “Welcome home and welcome officially to the ranks of the old farts. Sorry for the dramatics, I thought about taking the call privately but having all you about me gave me strength. So, thank you.” Her gaze swept the expectant faces of the group gathered about. “Hear this! I am pleased to announce that I have been officially cast out of the Ballentine clan and cut out of the family fortune.”
Rachel joined her and kissed her on the cheek. “What should I say, sorry? Want me to talk with him?”
“Of course not. We both know who he is. I do wonder what you saw in him, though.”
“He was cute, and all the other girls wanted him. To be totally honest, I have no freaking idea what I saw in him. I was young and foolish and more than a little insecure. He really was a callous prick from day one.”
“Men, surely we can live without them, except for you of course, Uncle. You’re not so awfully bad. Come to think on it, you really are but still so adorable.” Cate gave a forced smile. “Still, I wish I had a better relationship with dad, but I long ago faced that reality. However, mom, you will have to labor in the operating room until you’re ninety to make up for my lost Ballentine fortune. I expect to continue in the life of leisure to which I’ve become accustomed.”
Rachel smiled. “Don’t count on it, kiddo.”
Cate noticed the stricken look on Meena’s face and took her into a corner to chat privately.
Connie broke the ensuing silence. “Josh, you’re now retired and officially useless. I mean, you were always useless, but now it is official. In any case, we have been catching up with your friends. Morris runs a bookstore in Seattle while Carla is a nurse or was a nurse.”
“Now part time.” Carla snuck in.
“And Peter is retired from the FBI, no longer protecting us from the bad guys.”
“That I knew,” said Josh, finding a seat, “but the rest is news. A bookstore? Somehow, if anyone had said you stopped trying to save mankind, I would have guessed you became a clock fixer.”
“What?” Morris thought that amusing.
“Sure, you would have a little shop filled with half-repaired clocks and watches. You would be sitting behind your counter wearing those granny glasses and working on a cuckoo clock. I would bring my broken one in around May, and you would promise to have it fixed by October. And before I left, we would talk politics for three or four hours. Of course, I would come back in October and you would be behind the counter working on that same cuckoo clock you were tinkering with six months earlier. You would tell me to come back next May and again we would talk politics for three or four hours. No one would bring a clock to you to have it fixed, just to sop up your wisdom.”
“Funny man, you have not lost that.”
“Bookstore…how, why?” Josh wanted to know more.
Morris sighed. “For someone with my…colorful background, options were limited. Fortunately, Carla had a sister who married very well. She and her spouse were in the computer field and rode the digital age to considerable wealth, had some innovation they sold to Bill Gates. I realized that capitalism is okay when you are related to it. Anyway, they asked us out to the West Coast and set us up, helped pay for Carla’s schooling. They never judged. Nice people, very liberal. I discovered that not all rich folk are assholes.”
“Yeah, wisdom comes to those who wait.” Josh observed. “Tell me, how did you two finally connect?”
Carla picked up the narrative. “You mean after you escaped my evil designs.” She chuckled at her comment. “I got out first. I started visiting Mo. He had the longer stretch, being our leader and all. I visited him as often as I could and we finally talked seriously about all kinds of things, about you, and life and what we had become. By the time he was released, we were in love. I was ready for love, something permanent. And he finally…loved you again.” She looked at Josh.
Silence was broken by Usha. “Got out? Is it okay if I ask…out of what? I am lost?”
Morris and Carla looked uncertainly to Josh, who returned their gaze. They nodded to him. “Time to fill in a few blanks.” Josh said. “As college students, we were committed to stopping what we considered an immoral war. I mentioned that part earlier. We forget now, but the Vietnam conflict tore the country apart a half century or so ago. Many students protested, either because of the draft or because they really hated what was going on there. But a few went beyond protest. A few did things that were against the law. Some,” he looked at Peter, “were wise enough to run off before things became…extreme. Others stayed with their convictions to the end. You can guess who the coward was, Morris and Carla went to prison for their beliefs while I ran away.”
“That seems unfair,” Usha inserted, looking at Mo and Carla. “Being imprisoned for one’s beliefs. America is known for free speech.”
Josh held up a hand. “Let me finish. There is something I need to say.” Then he went to get himself a drink. “Back in college, there were a couple dozen of us or so who were more committed than others protesting things. Even within our group, there was a core…Morris, Carla, Helen Mueller, Jimmie Daily, Bob Wilson, and me. Peter also was with us in the beginning but had the sense to bail early. We grew frustrated with teach-ins, marches, petitions, and the usual student protests. That was the free-speech part. We were generally treated as spoiled brats and just maybe that is what we were.” He looked quickly over to his friends, but they seemed not to object. “Anyways, we got inside our own little bubble. For hours, we would discuss politics and causes and why past revolutions for social justice failed. We went through the Wobblies and Fabian Socialists and the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the old Reds and the new Reds, Gus Hall, Caesar Chavez, Malcom X, Che, and for sure Tom Hayden and the SDS. The search for ideological purity was an obsession back then. In truth, it has always been like that. The Stalin purges were a case in point though ideological purity was little more than an excuse to consolidate power. But for us, it seemed so real and urgent. And in truth, so many were being killed for no reason at all. I remember thinking a bit later when the abortion debate exploded that those opposing abortion and those opposing the war were alike in one respect. While they differed on almost every political question, they felt a special calling to oppose murder as they defined it.” He paused to take a sip of his drink. “What do you do to stop unwarranted killing? What if you believe that thousands or hundreds of thousands are being murdered for no justifiable reason whatsoever? This is the rage we felt back then, many of us at least. Now, of course, Vietnam is a footnote in history books. Ask a college kid on this campus about the meaning of Vietnam and they give you a blank look. That is the bitter irony of reality, isn’t it? The most important moments of your life are soon lost to our collective memories, little more than insignificant trivia at best.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Peter Favulli said, raising his glass.
“Hear, hear!” The others chimed in.
Josh smiled but continued. “Still,
that war was the defining moment for our generation. It is what many of us cut our teeth on when shaping our worldview and fixing our moral compass. How can you justify not taking dramatic action? I recall a few old regulars in my father’s bar talking in low voices about the brave and illegal actions my father took to liberate Northern Ireland and forge one Irish nation. In that divinely blessed cause, nothing was illegal. I think, at some moments, I also felt that nothing was illegal for my youthful cause. I was raised Catholic. You can stop believing in the peripheral stuff, but what sticks with you is the moral obligation to do what’s right. You cannot escape your core responsibilities. And mine was to rectify this blight on our collective souls. Sure, there were all the other battles for black rights, women rights, Native American rights, and so forth. They were also important, but somehow could be sloughed off to others, like blacks or feminists or Indians. This was my cause, ours. And we knew, just knew, that that our generation would change the world. I recall so vividly our discussions back then. It was just a matter of time. As we evolved into adulthood, we would take over the positions of power. Wow, I guess our powers of prognostication were a bit lacking. When Goldwater was buried in the election of 1964, we felt that the forces of decay and evil were finished. Progressive ideas were on the rise around the world. What was to stop the preordained and inevitable rise of social justice and peace. It was merely a matter of will and determination. Okay, we were wrong, just a bit. Now we can look back and see reality. The right began a systemic push to take control in the 1970s. With Reagan, their takeover became a reality. They were backed by limitless money and laser-sharp focus. Many trace the organized push of the right to a memo written in the early 1970s by Lewis Powell, future court justice that laid out a multipronged strategy for taking control of both the institutions of power and, more importantly, the central tenets of the political debate, others to the creation of the Virginia School of Political Economy by James Buchanan after the public schools were desegregated. Wherever you start, the message was clear. Government was not the solution to problems, it was the problem. Get it out of the way so those born to lead might lead absent accountability. Free markets would protect us. And maybe, in our own misguided way, we contributed to that shift.”
“How so?” Connie asked. “I don’t see that at all”
“By feeding the fears of the common man, we leftists and protesters were to be feared and hunted down. Meanwhile, the right went about their campaign to reorder politics in America. Systematically, and over several decades, they erected the Federalist society, the Leadership Group, the Club for Growth, ALEC, a host of right-wing think tanks like Cato and Heritage and the Hoover Institute and so many others. They created Fox News and their own media empire. They worked tirelessly at the local level to alter how people looked at government. And they went about attacking anything that smacked of the public good. America pioneered free public education. In a few years, that great public good will largely be swept away by privatization. Everything will be about making a buck, prisons and health and schools and probably what we call national defense. What did we do, what did we do?” He stopped realizing that he was rambling a bit. He looked around, but people seemed mesmerized.
“Wow,” Cate murmured.
“Anyways, a book store?” Josh said to Morris when there was no further response, “By the way, what happened to Bob and Helen? I have always wondered.”
After an awkward silence as people tried to shift to a more mundane issue, Carla spoke up. “Funny story about both. When they caught up to Helen her family rallied to her defense with their wealth and the best legal defense. She did spend time in prison but not much. She is now a pillar of her community back in Philadelphia. She is an avowed Republican, advocates for conservative causes.”
Josh laughed, a bit too loudly he thought. “Well, not surprising. I recall a colleague of mine always saying that the political spectrum is not a straight line but a horseshoe or even a circle. The ends curve back to each other. If you’re at either extreme, you’re more likely to slip to the other side than back to the middle.”
“Bob,” Carla picked up, “is an interesting story. As some of us know, he had been in a Catholic seminary before college, the Maryknoll Catholic Foreign Mission Society. He was very serious about his spiritual life and a devoted adherent to what we called liberation theology back then.
Apparently, some of the Maryknollers embraced socialist principles in their work with poor indigenous populations in Central and South America. Some of them eventually gave their lives in that cause. Anyways, when Bob got out of prison, he tried several things before finding his place.”
“Which is?” Josh asked.
“He is in a monastery, in Iowa. Mo and I visited him. He is very content.”
Josh took in her words. They had visited Bob? Then why had they never sought him out until now? Had he been the traitor? Did they really hate him but were too polite to say so? He almost asked when Connie raised her voice. “Listen, everyone, it is getting late. We all snacked at the big event, but Usha and I want to run out and pick up something to eat. We shall return and,…well, that’s it.” Meena joined them as they left.
Rachel looked around the group waiting for someone to say something. Finally, she spoke up. “Okay, I am sorry but I’m not following all of this. Prison, why prison? Lots of students protested the war. Some were arrested, but maybe spent a few days in jail at most.”
“Josh apparently never told you,” Morris intoned, slightly surprised.
“No, Josh and I…have been distant, at least until this week.”
Josh did not hesitate at this moment. “This clown Josh is an idiot in case no one has noticed. I’ve shared some of this with Rach over the past few days, but maybe I need to finish this for Cate.”
“Uncle, really, it is not—”
“It is, dear, you might as well know about the horse thieves in the family tree. I walked up to the truth back at the ceremony but still could not quite do it. I keep asking myself why. Is it fear? Peter, can you still arrest me?” But he did not wait for an answer, looking in the direction of his sister and niece. “Here is the thing. Morris, Carla, and the rest of our merry band went right past protesting, collected our two hundred dollars, and did all kinds of things that landed us, all but one, in prison. We broke into government facilities, destroyed records, committed arson, and started making bombs. One of us, poor Jimmie, killed himself building one of those damn things. A woman in the neighboring flat was badly injured, and her fetus died when the shock of the blast caused a miscarriage. It became quite a legal tangle at the time with the abortion debate beginning to percolate. Killing Jimmie ripped my heart out. He was one of my first friends in the neighborhood. He followed me everywhere, to college and even into the revolution. I killed him just as much as if I put a bullet into his head.”
“Oh,” escaped from Cate. Rachel looked on, mute.
Josh could see that others were going to take issue with him about Jimmie so he quickly pushed on. “And I stole a lot of money to finance our little revolution.”
At that, Peter spoke up. “What, I never knew that. Maybe I don’t want to know.”
“That’s okay. We’re way past the point of caution here.”
“Okay, what bank did you rob? Shit, I really am not sure I want to know.”
“Nothing that prosaic, Peter. I stole from the Irish wise guys.”
“What! Are you fucking crazy?” Peter Favulli realized his language and started to apologize but realized no one cared. “What I mean is you stole from the freaking mob? That’s a death sentence! How much?”
“I think almost forty Gs.”
“Josh, it was over forty-four grand,” Morris corrected.
“Shit,” Peter groaned, “that was a fortune back then. You’re lucky you’re not part of some Boston highway somewhere. If they knew, they would have killed you dead, real dead, no matter who your father was.”
“When I was in Toronto, I died every damn
time there was a knock on the door. I would walk down the street looking over my shoulder, wondering if that tough-looking guy behind me had a contract on me. I became totally paranoid. When someone did knock, I prayed it was Chuck Olson with a warrant for my arrest. At least he would not pump a dozen bullets into me, unless not until I despoiled his sister. Then all bets were off.”
“Kit?” Peter asked.
“Yeah, she tracked me down. She also had hung around our group for a while but mostly to be near me, I guess. I never noticed her. I lost touch. What happened to her?”
There was a silence. Then Peter spoke. “Well, I might as well be honest here. Old habit, keeping things close to the vest. I did know about Kit and Toronto.” Josh looked confused so Peter continued. “We kept tabs on you during the early years, don’t ask how. Sad about Kit, very sad indeed. She was a very lovely girl but spiraled down into drugs. No one could turn her around. She was a walking shell toward the end, before she died.”
“Maybe Chuck would have shot me if he had the chance. He must have blamed me for that.”
“I don’t think so, Josh. Let me put it this way, he shouldn’t have. Kit was hot on you no doubt, but she went after lots of guys as she spun out. She even hit on me and I was happily married with three young kids. Still, Chuck Olson really did hate your guts so maybe.”
“Yes, no doubt about it. It was personal,” Josh mused.
“Hmmm, maybe I should arrest your sorry ass for being a heartless schmuck,” Peter shot back.
