The Company You Keep (35 page)

Now, in the interests of my credibility with you, I will admit freely that I had another hunch about Rebeccah. I admit that I had come to suspect that my acquaintance with her was likely to end up with me taking someone hostage somewhere on a rooftop until she agreed to marry me.

But that was easier to explain than my conviction that unlike every other reporter covering this story, I and only I was in the right place, at the right time. That somewhere, somehow, the tiny clue that was going to break this story wide open was going to happen here, and if I could only be around for it, I would be the one to get it.

Call it desperation.

Now let me settle the one big question you will have right away. If I had to choose between using Rebeccah to get to her dad to get my story, and taking Rebeccah to bed, did I know which I would choose?

Yes, I did.

Fuck fugitives. Fuck issues. Fuck Vietnam.

At last Friday night came around, and I—now with Kai Bird’s
Color of Truth,
William O’Neill’s
Coming Apart,
and Fredric Jameson’s
Sixties without Apology
under my belt, was back at the Del, standing at the bar, leaning over an ashtray, drinking beer and bourbon, feeling like I was twelve.

Good Christ, I had it bad. What was I going to say to her? Was she going to stand me up? Did she like me? Was that a zit on my chin? It was as if everything in between high school and now had all been a dream—the college degree from Stanford, the Porter Fellowship at Yale, the three years of beat reporting in Albany—all a dream, and I was an adolescent sitting at a bar in a college town, drinking Dutch courage, feeling terrified.

In short, I was a dead man. I had met the girl two, three times, and she was like a smell in the back of my throat to me, a sense so interiorized, so inward, that I felt I had known her not three, four days, spoken to her on two occasions, but that she was as familiar to me as my own family. I woke, I swear to you, every night since I first saw her, early in the morning hours, with an image of her oval face in my mind. It had been so strange to me, that week. Doing nothing in the middle of nowhere, being all alone, all day long, and yet somewhere in this town she was walking around, and talking, and eating, and sleeping. I’d never, in all of my life, felt anything like what I was feeling now. I never, ever wanted to feel it again.

Jesus, Isabel, I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. Except that for me, in the story of the summer of 1996, believe it or not, your father was only a little part of it all. Rebeccah Osborne was the rest.

And then at last, it was Friday night, the minute hand of my watch inching toward ten, and I was back at the Del Rio, sitting at the bar, watching the bartender—the good-looking rude older one again—work the mobbed bar, Keith Jarrett on the stereo. And I had had a couple of beers and a couple of scotch and sodas and a half dozen cigarettes and was wondering whether to look at my watch again or just lower my forehead to the wooden surface of the bar and howl when at last I felt a presence next to me and looked up to see her in jeans and a black silk shirt, standing, looking at me with a grave expression that made my heart first squeeze in my chest, then sit still for a long moment, and then, at last, shoot a jet of pure adrenaline into the center of my being.

2.

“So, Schulberg. You look like you’ve been sitting here since last we met. Drinking.”

To my surprise, I heard myself speaking. “Not at all. Early to bed, healthy eating, exercise.” I paused while the bartender brought her an Elm City, slammed a new drink down on the bar in front of me, and walked away. “Good deeds, religious observance, chastity, charity, piety, patriotism. This bartender does not like me.”

Rebeccah looked at the bartender, then back.

“Cleo? Why on earth would she not like you?”

“Not sure. But I do get that vibe.”

“Oh, well, so you’re a paranoid. That goes with your particular kind of liberalism, doesn’t it?”

She had settled onto her stool now, and to speak through the noise, she had to lean quite close to me, which I appreciated. “My father always says, ‘You’re given a face till you’re forty; after that, you have to make your own. You ask me, that woman’s done a good job.”

“You know her?”

“Yeah, everyone who works downtown in the restaurants knows each other.”

She sipped her beer. And I, ignoring her look of distaste, with which I felt quite familiar by now, I lit a cigarette and started talking.

“So, Osborne, I’ve been thinking it over, and my feeling is, these little sombitches, playing at being revolutionaries with Mommy and Daddy’s money. Fuck ’em. It’s not just that they were turning the boys our president sent to Vietnam into devils, it’s that they risked life and limb all over this land. Their death trip, their stupid orgies, their glorification of Manson. And in the Bank of Michigan, they killed a father of three. I want to see Solarz jailed, and Sinai and Lurie caught. Lurie’s dad was a Commie spy, too. And, let’s face it, Sinai’s a J-E-double-ew.”

“Oh, cut it out.” But she couldn’t help laughing. “Just cut it out. Okay?”

“’Kay.” I sipped my beer, watching her over the rim. “How was your dad’s visit?”

“Good. You ever catch up with him?”

“Naw, gave up. I know when I’m not wanted.”

She laughed again. “I doubt that.”

“Ah, you mean I’m not not wanted. That’s a relief.”

“I don’t mean that at all. I mean I doubt you know.”

“You ask him about those days at all?”

“A little. He never talks about it that willingly.” Then she stopped to think. “How much do you know about my dad?”

“Well, there’s the public record. And I asked him a few questions when we met. I know he worked undercover on campus here.”

“Uh-huh.” She watched me for a second. Then she said, “I don’t think those are anyone’s proudest memories. Chasing a bunch of college students across country and not being able to catch ’em. You know, I have a professor who was caught by my dad? Jed Lewis, head of the American Studies Department. He’s directing my senior thesis. He told me he had to practically walk into the FBI station to get arrested.”

“What was he, Weather?”

“Um-hmm. Not a major member, and he left early. But he was wanted on explosives charges, and served time. Some coincidence. Now he’s directing my thesis about the siege of Khe Sanh.”

“I bet your dad says that no one had ever developed any criminology to capture internal revolutionaries, those days. Hadn’t been any since the American Revolution itself. I bet he says they had fixed that deficit by the time the FALN came along.”

“No.” That seemed, unlike most of what I had to say, to make sense to her, and she nodded. “My dad isn’t so interested in Jason Sinai. I think he wishes Sinai would just go underground again.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Oh, he’s a lot like you. Feels that the war
in
Vietnam is over, and the war
over
Vietnam should be too.”

“Yeah.” I nodded, appreciating the tone of the conversation, and she went on.

“Besides, Dad and Mimi Lurie were childhood friends. Isn’t that strange?”

3.

So there it was. I remember turning from Rebeccah as if she had said something tasteless, then taking a big hit from my drink to cover my dismay. It was like a bad dream: the absolute center of the ethical dilemma before me rearing its head so early.

I did not—I did
not
—want to be in the position of using this woman for the story.

And yet, on the other hand, it wasn’t me who had lied to Osborne,
but he who had lied to me. Because
he
had told
me
, as clear as day, when we met for coffee, that he had never met Mimi Lurie.

All this took perhaps ten seconds.

I turned back and said nothing.

But Rebeccah didn’t have any reason to think that my hesitation was anything other than the time it took to drink a sip of my drink. She went on readily. “My dad’s family had a summer house up in Point Betsie, where the Lurias lived. Way the hell up north.”

“Wow.” I smiled now, and what I said, you have to admit, could have been meant to change the subject. I certainly meant to change the subject. I think. “Good story, Beck.”

“Uh-huh. I asked my mom about it this morning, on the phone. She told me that every year the Luria family would take my dad with them on a camping trip. Martin Luria, he was friends with this Detroit beer baron, Carl Linder—there’s lots of Germans in Michigan. Linder had like a three-thousand-acre estate up by Rose City, virgin forest. They say Linder’s father bootlegged Canadian whisky from there; bought up the land to protect his trade from Lake Erie. Anyway, when my dad was growing up, summers, the Osbornes and the Lurias would all go and camp there. The locals say that Mimi used it as a hideout, later, when she was underground. That’s probably a myth.”

I stopped her at that. “Is it possibly true?”

“Sure. Vincent Loonsfoot evaded capture up on the UP for, what, thirty days? Thick woods up there. Someone who knows the territory? Could stay at large a very long time.”

In my defense, I have to say that I was edging her off the subject. “What did he think of her once she became a revolutionary?”

She snorted. “I don’t think he thought of her as a revolutionary. A spoiled-brat hysteric, more likely.”

Drinks arrived, and I insisted on paying. Then I got off her father altogether: “So I gather you agree with him.”

“About Mimi Lurie? Sure I do. I’d say just about everyone in the world does, with the exception of you.”

“Well…” I hesitated and drank half my drink. Then I asked her, “Do you have a pretty good idea of what it was like to be alive in, say, 1969?”

She eyed me a little, almost as if I were setting a trap for her. “What’s that mean?”

“I mean…” So maybe I was a little drunk. I had been sitting in a hotel room reading about the sixties for a week. Maybe, in fact, I was half crazed. I leaned forward and spoke seriously through the noise of the bar. “Well, what I don’t mean is what it was like to drop mescaline and listen to the Moody Blues while having sex at a Summer of Love be-in or any of that shit. I mean, what it was like to be, say, eighteen and facing the draft to Vietnam. Having friends being killed. And watching Johnson on TV. Now wait.”

I held up a hand to stop her. “I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit this week. And I don’t mean, like, ’63, when your dad volunteered. I mean, ’67, when there’s already a Vietnam Vets against the war movement. And you’re eighteen, right? Johnson is lying to you, and that’s a fact, not an opinion. Everyone knows it. And he’s such an ugly bastard, this jowly Texas gladhander; he’s so transparently phony, you’re thinking, how the fucking hell did this guy get to be president, and what the fucking hell is the presidency worth if some total jackass like this can do it? Remember, you’re thinking like an eighteen-year-old. Chances are, in fact, you’re stoned on that weak dope they had back then, and the whole world looks like a cartoon anyway. And there’s this virtual civil war going on, with police and hard hats beating up demonstrators, and all manner of real, horrible violence. If you had been to just one demonstration that flared up, then you know what the sound of wood hitting a skull is, you know in a very personal way what it feels like when the state comes down on its citizenry. And remember, the state isn’t treating you like a kid, except of course it won’t let you vote. It’s sending you to war, it’s getting your friends killed, and when hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people say to it, Stop, it’s implacable. The state? It’s beating you up and putting you in jail, and it doesn’t listen to any explanations.”

I stopped now, and she, to my relief, answered calmly. “Okay. I know what you mean. I’ve talked to Professor Lewis about this. And in fact, what he said was quite a lot like what vets say. When the state steps in between what you want and what’s actually happening to you at the most basic level—like, you want to be home soaking in Epsom salts but
you’re being beaten up and dragged into a Black Maria, or you want to be out getting your deer in the woods but instead you’re being forced to go down a booby-trapped Vietcong tunnel with a knife in your teeth—it’s a devastating experience. People never get over it.”

I nodded, grateful to her for what she’d just said. So grateful, in fact, Isabel, that I went on and spoke for quite a while more.

It’s that, Isabel, as smart as Beck is—as smart as you are—to a certain degree, understanding your father is not only about facts. It’s also about context. It’s about understanding that it’s 1969, and it doesn’t matter which side of the war you’re on, on either side, you see every day that the state is causing citizens’ deaths. You may support it, you may not, but it is a chilling part of your life. And there’s been so much violence: it’s so close you can touch it, that mass violence had swept through the South, violence of white Americans against black.

And then what the fuck happens? What happens next? Not only does the war not end; not only is there no accommodation from government; but by Christ, Nixon is elected! Nixon! It’s like a nightmare. He brings with him this entire history of anticommunism and COINTELPRO and this vile, antidemocratic red-baiting. And then, one, two, three, there’s the bombing of Cambodia, there’s Kent State, there’s Jackson State. And you’re
right
there, right there waiting to go to Vietnam, or watching your friends go, and seeing this fucking all-out slaughter going on, day after day after day.

I said all this to Beck, more or less like I’m saying it to you. Just imagine the choice, on one hand, between this jowly, unhealthy, vile, lying son of a bitch Nixon with his horrid little sidekicks, and on the other hand, this vast movement throughout the country where people are not just getting laid, and getting high, and listening to fine music, and having fun, but to boot, they’re right! Remember, this is the war that Martin Luther King called “that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.” What they’re saying is so obviously true, you can’t believe everyone doesn’t know it! The cold war is a damn excuse for an imperialist incursion that’s killing millions of foreigners while making billions for American defense contractors. Blacks are being systematically colonized throughout the whole country. Sexual repression and materialistic ambition is
the name of the game, and the schools—the schools, with these caricatures of buzz-cut gym teachers and home ec classes taught by ladies in perms—these bogus schools.