Andersen, Kurt (54 page)

In August, an SDS girl I knew from Radcliffe phoned and asked if she and two friends could “crash” at my house in Wilmette. I said no, sorry. With the Democratic National Convention as a pretext, thousands of kids were coming to occupy Chicago, to protest the war, the government, capitalism, the American way of life.

On the second day of the convention, I was surprised when Alex told me he was driving into Chicago to attend the protests with Patti, his ex. “I need to shoot everything and everybody,” by which he meant he wanted to make films of the protests. “It’s important. Like the guy said on TV today, ‘the whole world is watching.’”

He could see I was shocked that he was going to put himself in the middle of such a spectacle.

“Hollaender, we can’t just hunker down for eternity. Life goes on.”

I didn’t reply, but I disagreed. I tried not to overdramatize our situation, and I found that my fear of getting busted was very slowly diminishing—its half-life would be years, I knew, not months—but I still felt like a fugitive. Waiting for the secret to be discovered and my life to be wrecked, I decided, would be like living with a chronic disease—like my diabetes, which I knew I would have forever, until, probably, someday, it destroyed me.

According to the news, President Johnson was staying away from Chicago, watching the convention—and the mobs and screaming and beatings—at home on TV. I did the same thing. My mom and dad were surprised.

I felt silly going to the college bursar’s office on my first day back in Cambridge to change the spelling of my last name from Hollænder to Hollander, but I needed to codify my rebirth.

I felt nauseated and dizzy a lot that fall. The University Health Service doctors could find no medical reason. They encouraged me to quit cigarettes. They asked if I wanted to see a psychiatrist. I didn’t. How could I honestly talk to some shrink about my secret torment? As my father had said when we’d discussed the Catholic sniper in Texas two summers before, psychiatrists don’t observe any priestly Seal of Confession.

To freshmen, I’d been that poor girl whose sister died in that plane crash, and to sophomores, I was that poor girl whose boyfriend died doing that drug deal in Washington.

As hard as I tried to resist overindulging in metaphors and taking my life cues from fiction, the universe didn’t cooperate.

In my class on the nineteenth-century European novel, the first book we read was
Madame Bovary,
and I considered it a personal rebuke. I had been Emma Bovary—a spoiled, dreamy, overimaginative, adulterous young thrill seeker who refashioned her life in imitation of the romantic stories and heroines she adored. Once again, I was overidentifying with a fictional character, this time a character whose tragic flaw was overidentifying with tragic fictional characters. I was glad when she killed herself, because I despised her, and because it meant I wasn’t as crazy as she was.

I was desperate for normalcy, but when my new girlfriends smiled and joked and bummed cigarettes and talked about boys and classes and the Beatles’
White Album,
I felt like an impostor.

Over the summer, Alex had said we needed to “avoid going all Edgar Allan Poe.” I’d figured he meant “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but I’d never read the story until one afternoon in October, standing alone in the dim, musty, silent stacks of Widener Library, hearing my breath and feeling my heart beat. The narrator is a murderer. “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight, with what dissimulation!” He’s hidden his victim beneath the floorboards, and when police come to question him, he hallucinates the sound of the beating heart of the dead man, imagining that the police must hear it, too. “The sound increased—and what could I do? … steadily increased … steadily increased … arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled … louder! louder! louder! LOUDER!”

I put the book back on the shelf and raced out.
I am not a character in fiction,
I told myself.
This is not a story by Poe or Sartre or Flaubert or Ian Fleming or anybody else. This is real life.

I remembered the retroactive precognition epiphany I’d shared with Chuck and Alex on that druggy dawn when we first talked about assassinating Johnson:
It’s what we were training for all along with the James Bond missions.
But now I realized that our Bond games had been a different kind of training, not for killing villains but for keeping secrets and leading a double life.

I threw up as soon as I got outside, on the library steps.

I mostly succeeded for the rest of college in leading a life that looked normal—in fact, abnormal in those years only for being completely apolitical.

I wasn’t interested in taking the new courses—”Imperialism and the University,” “Radicalism in America”—that Buzzy and other undergraduates helped teach. A thousand kids signed up for these “cooperative explorations.” and until the college put its foot down, grades were to be assigned randomly.

I wasn’t among the hundred students who staged a sit-in at the faculty meeting about ending course credit for ROTC, or the hundred who barged into the design school’s course on preventing urban violence, forcing the cancellation of the class.

Nor did I join up with the hundred SDS kids who took over the main university administration building for most of a day and a night in the spring. I ran into Alex the next afternoon as I was going to the library, and he couldn’t wait to tell me that he’d filmed the bust from outside University Hall at four that morning, including a cop billy-clubbing a kid in a wheelchair.

“It was amazing,” he said, “it was almost like a scene from
If …
”

If …
was Alex’s new favorite movie, and not just because everyone told him he looked like its twenty-four-year-old English star, Malcolm McDowell. It was about a teenager leading an armed uprising at his English boarding school in which the insurrectionists fire on other students and parents and faculty. I didn’t want to see it.

When my roommates went to the mass meeting at the stadium after the University Hall takeover and bust, and voted with the majority of the thousands of students to strike, I stayed in our room studying. When I went to dinner that night, I stopped to read one of the silkscreened posters that had been plastered all over campus encouraging students to strike and giving thirteen reasons to do so, printed entirely in capital letters. I thought two of the reasons—
STRIKE
BECAUSE
THERE’S
NO
POETRY
IN
YOUR
LECTURES
and
STRIKE
BECAUSE
CLASSES
ARE
A
BORE
—were factually untrue. And although two others—
SEIZE
CONTROL
OF
YOUR
LIFE
and
BECOME
MORE
HUMAN
—were precisely what I was now trying to do, I didn’t think skipping classes was the best means to that end. The next day was the first anniversary of Chuck’s death.

Coats and ties were no longer required in dining halls, more lectures were disrupted, people screamed at college officials, bomb scares were called in, classes stopped meeting, final exams were canceled once again.

In the fall, I did not go with the super-radical new SDS faction calling itself Weathermen to vandalize, twice, the Center for International Affairs. One afternoon in the spring, on my way to a lecture on luck and morality by a visiting British philosopher, I happened to run into a huge mob of kids, hundreds, marching from the Yard to the ROTC building. They were chanting, “Burn it down, burn it down.” As I kept walking in the opposite direction, I passed some stragglers, hippies, who had their own chant: “Dare to struggle, dare to win, Charlie Manson, live like him!” They were smirking as they said it, but still.

I continued to feel like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, suspended in midair just past the edge of the cliff, waiting to fall. My heart beat faster every time I picked up the phone and heard an unfamiliar voice, or found a letter from an unfamiliar address in my mailbox. When I got a call from the dean’s office in the spring asking me to come in for a chat “as soon as possible,” I warned Buzzy and Alex. But the dean just wanted to gauge my feelings about moving into one of the coeducationalizing Harvard dorms the next fall. “You seem able to stand on your own two feet around boys,” she said.

During junior year, I’d begun to accept the idea that maybe, somehow, we really had gotten away with it. But at the end of a nervous week in March, I was reading yet another newspaper story about the three SDSers who’d accidentally killed themselves making bombs in a New York town house. The
Times
said that one of them had bragged of sloughing off “bourgeois hang-ups like privacy and monogamy” and recently told a college buddy that “for security reasons,” they were dividing into cells of four people. “I know now I’m not afraid to die,” he’d said to his friend two weeks before he blew himself up. The article had a photo. I recognized him. He was one of those
resistance
and
struggle
Columbia boys I’d met with Sarah in New York in the summer of 1967, and I remembered him writing down my name and Radcliffe dorm. In the spring of 1970, I found myself hoping that his little address book from three years before had been destroyed in the town house explosion.

In May, the night I arrived home in Wilmette, as my family sat down to dinner, Dad very ceremoniously told me that he wanted to apologize.

He had been fifteen minutes late picking me up at O’Hare that afternoon.

“Oh, come on, don’t worry about it. I’m twenty-one! And I didn’t think you’d
forgotten
about me.”

“No, I’m apologizing for what I said when we were sitting at this table three years ago, the night before you left for college. Talking about the war, you said the Johnson administration was ‘fascist,’ and I got very angry with you.”

I remembered, and so did my fourteen-year-old brother. “It was ‘
fucking
fascists.’”

“Peter,”
my mother said.

Dad sighed and shook his head. “So many more people have died since then, tens of thousands of American kids. For no good reason.”

My eyes were filling with tears.

“And My Lai,” Dad said. The world had just learned of the massacre by an army company of several hundred unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, and its cover-up by the U.S. government. “And now these kids in Ohio.” Three weeks earlier, Ohio National Guardsmen had shot thirteen students at Kent State University during an antiwar protest, killing four of them. “I’ve realized you weren’t so wrong after all, Karen. And I’m sorry.”

“
No,
Daddy,” I said, my voice quaking, “
I’m
sorry.
I’m
sorry.”

I started sobbing, and as I rushed away from the table, I heard Peter ask, “What’s Nuthatch sorry about?”

That summer, my last at home, I worked for Alex’s father’s law firm in Chicago, doing more or less the same stuff I’d done at my uncle’s in Evanston, though the cases were more interesting, and my title was one they’d made up for college-educated girls who didn’t want to be called secretaries. I was a paralegal. “You’ve heard of paramilitary forces in the war?” the office manager asked me on my first day. “It’s like that, but for attorneys.”

The last time I spoke to Buzzy Freeman for the next quarter century was at a party during senior year. He was imitating what he called George McGovern’s “faggy preacher” voice and regretting his “piss-poor timing”—because Harvard and Radcliffe had fully merged and the number of black and Asian students was ballooning he’d be “missing out on so many fantastic new fucking opportunities.”

Alex and I got together for drinks right before commencement at a preppy bar called the Casablanca. He had majored in Visual and Environmental Studies, but he’d always been “fairly clever at maths,” as he once said to me. After they installed a computer console in each dorm connected to what Alex called “the SDS mainframe”—I’d thought he was joking, but it stood for Scientific Data Systems—he had also become a computer whiz. After graduation, he was heading out to San Francisco for a job writing computer programs for the movies and television.

“You’re not worried about getting drafted?” I asked. Most boys I knew were going to grad school in order to keep their student deferments.

He’d had three gin and tonics. “Not remotely. The war’s ending. And I’m covered.”

“What about your terrible number?” In the draft lottery, his birthday had gotten him 43 out of 366. Boys as low as 195 had been drafted.

“What can I say, darling? I know people. I’m covered.” I assumed he meant that some of his father’s well-connected Washington friends had pulled strings.

Another drink later, I asked about his senior thesis, a half-hour-long film I hadn’t seen. All I knew was the title,
The Fourth Man,
and assumed it was some kind of homage to
The Third Man.
Alex told me it was “actually more like
Citizen Kane
” and consisted of fictional monologues by him, in old-age makeup and wig, reminiscing in 2021 about his life back in the 1960s, intercut with the documentary footage he had shot of protests and demonstrations in Cambridge and Washington and New York and Chicago during the last four years.

I was not entirely surprised that he’d done something so close to the bone. Liquored up, I welcomed the chance to talk about Operation Lima Bravo Juliet. “I’d love to see it. When he was young, did your fictional old guy plant any bombs or try to kill anybody or anything?”

Alex’s smile became forced and fixed. He was a good actor but not a flawless one.

“Or was your character,” I asked, “just an SDS wanker? Or what?”

“You are a sly bitch, Hollander.” He took a long drink. “In New Haven next fall, you should get to know my friend Ed, who’s going to the drama school.”