Andersen, Kurt (22 page)

Alex screwed up his face. “Oh, I
know.
”

“I’ve started
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,
” Chuck told Alex, “and you’re right, it’s great.
So
realistic. So much better than Fleming. Everybody keeps secrets and lies. Everybody’s betraying everybody else.”

“Although,” Alex said, “you’ll see in the end that true love carries the day. Sort of.”

It was late. I slid out of the booth. “Maybe I’ll see you guys Sunday at the thing on Winnetka Green?”

“Will we get to meet the mysterious Charlie Chan?” Alex asked.

I shrugged. Chan (short for Channing) Payne, my first boyfriend, had told me he’d be working at the thing on Winnetka Green. We were both volunteers for the North Shore Summer Project, which entailed knocking on doors in Wilmette and Winnetka, especially those with for-sale signs, and asking the owners if they were racist or anti-Semitic. Actually, the question we posed—”Would you be willing to sell your house on a nondiscriminatory basis?”—was so polite and anodyne that half the time the women who answered the doors didn’t understand what we were asking. When we made ourselves clear—”Would you sell your house to a family of Negroes or Jews?”—they rarely said no, but most of them got embarrassed and nervous, which was the real point of the enterprise, it seemed, more than gathering data.

For me it was a watershed. The girl who couldn’t stand selling Camp Fire candy was now selling the idea of integration and practically relishing the awkwardness. After one man shut his door and went back inside, we thought we heard him say something—to his wife? one of his kids?—about “niggers buying our house.”

I can’t say the North Shore Summer Project experience “radicalized” me, exactly. Instead, my longstanding beatnik-y belief in the timidity and complacency and hypocrisy of grown-ups now had seven sweaty, exhausting weeks of empirical confirmation. I understood that important change and real progress would be grindingly slow.

I started to feel like the hero in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
as if I’d discovered that the people in my hometown were clones. That summer my sister, Sabrina, received the sacrament of confirmation at St. Joseph’s. When she and her fellow inductees repeatedly lowed
“I do”
on command—“Do you reject Satan? And all his works? And all his empty promises?”—it was one more confirmation of my growing sense that I was surrounded by pod people.

On the last Sunday in July 1965, after my dad and brother and I watched the Cubs lose on TV, the whole family drove up to the Winnetka Village Green and claimed a spot of grass. My mother spread out a Marimekko tablecloth printed with giant pink flowers. We got dinner from a North Shore Summer Project chuck wagon—Chan was serving slices of Wonder bread; we said hi—and drank nonalcoholic sangria from a big plaid thermos that Mom had brought.

I spotted Alex squatting near the podium, holding his 16-millimeter movie camera, panning the crowd. We waved at each other. “And isn’t that Chuck,” my mother said too loudly, “over there, in line at the picnic wagon, with the Reichman girl?” It was. “Do you want to go invite them to come sit with us? Plenty of sangria left!” I did not.

Sabrina was reading a Laura Ingalls Wilder book,
These Happy Golden Years,
and Peter played with his favorite toy, a black plastic briefcase containing a fake passport and a cap pistol that could be converted into a sniper rifle. Violet was with us, too, more dressed up than I’d ever seen her, holding a handkerchief in one hand and her inhaler in the other, speaking only when spoken to. She and my mother were both self-conscious about her presence, Violet nervous and my mother proud. Every few minutes my mom or dad mentioned how perfect the weather was, sunny, dry, breezy, not too hot—except for a few chiggers, the ideal summer afternoon.

Everyone on the Green must have felt self-conscious. There were hundreds when we arrived and thousands by six o’clock, expectant and antsy, strenuously smiling at strangers and checking their watches as more people streamed in. Dozens of cops stood around the edges.

Suddenly, at the corner of the Green, fifty yards away, there was a commotion—first shouting, then a parked police car’s cherry top flashing. My parents exchanged a worried look, and Violet stared at her hands. People stood on tiptoe and craned their necks. Peter and I wanted to go see what was happening, my mother told us to stay put, I pooh-poohed her—”It’s
Winnetka
”—and as we took off, my father came along.

Nazis! I’d never seen Peter so excited. I was excited, too. There were four of them, men who looked to be in their early twenties, dressed in khaki trousers and long-sleeved brown shirts, each wearing a swastika armband just above his left elbow. We got only intermittent glimpses of the Nazis, because half a dozen cops had formed a protective circle around them, and scores of angry bystanders had formed a circle around the police cordon. Shockingly, the librarian from Locust Junior High shouted at the Nazis—”Crawl back under your rocks!” I had never seen more than one or two people at a time so upset, let alone a whole crowd.

“Sick boys,” my father muttered. I wondered what it felt like for him seeing Nazis again, twenty years after the end of the war. I’d seen old pictures of fascists wearing swastikas, but it was something else again to see the real things, those black right angles on bright red. After a while my fascinated horror cooled to curiosity—
How do they earn a living?
Where did they get the armbands?
—and I realized these four losers were
playing
Nazis, not entirely different than the way we used to play European secret agents and killers.

The Winnetka police chief arrived, made his way through the crowd, and walked to the very center, where he spoke quietly for a minute to the Nazis. Then the Nazis, accompanied by a phalanx of cops, walked out of the park. People applauded, which made it seem even more like a theatrical performance.

It was after seven when the official show began. One of the women in charge of the North Shore Summer Project stepped up on the small unpainted wooden platform. As she delivered her introduction, the buzz of cicadas and crickets got louder and louder and then stopped the instant before she uttered the speaker’s name. As he took the stage and we all clapped, the sun dipped beneath the boughs along Maple Street and bathed him and us in light. My first thought: how
young
he looked.

“He’s a
doctor
?” Peter said loudly over the applause. “I thought he was a
priest.
”

“A Ph.D.,” I explained to my brother as he snapped shut his James Bond 007 Shooting Attaché Case and started clapping.

We were no more than twenty yards away from the stage. Malcolm X had been assassinated a few months earlier giving a speech in New York. If Peter’s gun were real, I thought, he could easily shoot Dr. King from where we sat.

When Dr. King said we all needed to “go all out to end segregation in housing” right here on the North Shore, a few people booed, but immediate cheering and clapping by the multitude, including us, drowned them out. “Every white person,” Dr. King told the thousands of white people, “does great injury to his child if he allows that child to grow up in a world that is two thirds colored and yet live in conditions where that child does not come into person-to-person contact with colored people.” When I sneaked a look at Violet, she was wiping tears from her eyes. I knew it wasn’t exactly what Dr. King had in mind, but I did wonder if she appreciated the person-to-person contact we had with her.

I was very glad to have been there. When he delivered lines I’d read and heard on TV—”We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools”—it was like when I’d finally seen the Beatles at the International Amphitheatre and knew all the lyrics by heart. Martin Luther King was saintly and moving, but what thrilled me that night was the antagonism he stirred up—the Nazis, the spontaneous anti-Nazi counterprotest, the booing, the spontaneous anti-booing. Also the fact that Chuck Levy was served by Chan Payne at the chuck wagon, ate a piece of Wonder bread touched by the fingers that had touched my breasts, and only I was aware of the encounter.

17

A few weeks after King’s speech in Winnetka, thousands of Negroes in Los Angeles burned and looted hundreds of buildings in their neighborhood for days. I still have the
Newsweek
about the Watts Riots in my moldering-cardboard-box archive: on the cover is a picture of four white National Guardsmen holding rifles in an open Jeep at the front of a convoy driving toward the photographer on a wide, empty L.A. boulevard, with the headlines L
OS
A
NGELES:
W
HY?
and, honest to God, T
HE
R
IOTS
IN
C
OLOR.
It was also the week of the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II, an anniversary that is, astonishingly, mentioned nowhere in the magazine. Can you imagine? We are now so compulsively anniversary-crazy, I think, because people are much more comfortable looking backward than forward. The past, they think, doesn’t alter, isn’t confusing or frightening, cannot
loom.

Stewart has been sending me terse text-message bulletins every week or so since I asked for his help. “Working it,” one said. Then: “Might have found a new way to retrieve something interesting, but no promises.” This morning, when I get off my plane in Newark, I receive another: “Still working it. Stay tuned. P.S.: Your middle name is Scattergood? LOVE that. And your old man: Hollaender, Nils R., DOB 3/29/20, Danish national naturalized 1946—that him?” As I wait in the taxi line, I answer yes, yes, and yes. My taxi trip from Newark airport to New York City costs more than my bus trip from New York to Miami will cost.

Greta’s not home from work yet when I arrive at their apartment, and Waverly’s in her bedroom, so it’s just Jungo and me. He makes me put on special battery-powered glasses to watch his 3-D TV, and I try to sound enthusiastic. “Those cows do look real,” I say. “I’ve never seen cows like that before.”

“Breathtaking, right?”

I won’t go quite that far. I take off the glasses. “Cool,” I say, and glance at the clock on the TV: 6:03. “How about a martini?”

“Sorry, no gin, but let me see …” Jungo crouches down by the cabinet under the kitchen sink, one in which most people keep a garbage can and poisons. He reaches deep into the back, feeling for dusty bottles. “Sambuca? No? Wait, here’s a little souvenir bottle of tequila we received at some event. It is what it is.”

“I’ll pass, don’t worry about it.” I haven’t adjusted to Greta’s teetotaling, Even though I don’t eat sugar, I keep plenty on hand for guests. I’ve never expected the people around me to pay a price for my illness. On the other hand, maybe I’m an insensitive jerk.

Seth shows up, and my motherly pleasure in seeing him has some extra zing because he’s brought a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc.

When I left Jack and moved to L.A., Seth was living with us at age twenty-four and told me that even though he knew it was ridiculous, he felt abandoned, like the little boy in
Kramer vs. Kramer.
I still send Seth a few hundred dollars a month, even though when I was his age, I was on my third full-time grown-up job and had a four-year-old.

As a boy, he was a math-and-technology whiz, and we always figured he’d be the scientist, not our artist-philosopher Greta. He was a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, and even got a patent for his project, a digital camera sensor and software that allow you, as you’re taking a picture, to select any section of the image and replace it with adjacent background bits; in other words, he invented a simple way to make people disappear from photos on the fly. I thought it was a brilliant, perverse work of conceptual art, but eighteen-year-old Seth expected it to make him rich—a cheap VampireCam for kids, since vampires can’t be photographed. I guess he was ahead of the curve, vampire-wise, because the camera companies weren’t interested.

Seth suspected he’d been screwed by backroom corporate malfeasance. Eventually, he forgave me for refusing to file suit against Intel on his behalf, but when I sold the big family apartment after Jack died two years ago, thus requiring Seth, at age twenty-eight, to move out and find his own place, he told me I didn’t have his back, “just like with Intel.” He’s now an electronic musician of whom certain cognoscenti are very respectful. Like father, like son. Except he’s a lot more fun than his father. Seth calls himself Seth Hollander instead of Seth Wu, because he doesn’t want avant-garde music people to think he’s “some kind of Miley Cyrus or Sean Lennon or something,” trying to coast on the reputation of his avant-garde composer father. “I want to be obscure on my
own,
” he said when he asked permission to start using my surname professionally.

In addition to the wine, Seth has brought along a medal he recently won in Reykjavík, and the award citation, which calls his music “a sui generis hybrid of extraterrestrial neo-baroque strings and musique concrète interlarded with fat grime beats.”

“That’s
wonderful,
Seth! Wow. But tell this old lady who hasn’t bought new music since Talking Heads what ‘fat grime beats’ are.”

“The turntable sounds I simulate on the computer and use as percussion. What you thought were timpani.”

“Here you go, Mom,” Jungo says as he hands me a tumbler of wine. Perhaps other mothers-in-law actually enjoy being called “Mom” by their children’s spouses.

“Jungo, Greta tells me you’re in the running for a new job, at Princeton?”

“Yup—director of institutional effectiveness. Big process-reengineering gig. Setting up an innovation pipeline. Giving back.”

I nod, even though I understand what he means about as well as I do fat grime beats. Having glanced at thousands of freshly dealt business cards over the years, I’m accustomed to having no idea what particular job titles mean. When Greta first met him, Jungo was a “coordinator of learning immersion experiences targeting value shoppers.”