The Company You Keep (55 page)

“So. You must be Isabel Montgomery, for God’s sake. How very, very nice to meet you.”

I didn’t answer, but she went on in her slightly amused tone. “It’s so funny. Chevejon told me to expect you today. How the hell he knew…but listen my dear, welcome. You’re so among friends here, I can’t tell you.”

I nodded to her, not quite knowing what to say. But she was unconcerned, talking pleasantly while she led me through a steel door, past cameras and a Plexiglas security booth inside of which stood a guard with a machine gun, into an interior office where, on the wall, I recognized a Matisse sketch, a Derwatt, and something—if I didn’t know better—I would have thought a Caravaggio. “My name is Allison Rosenthal, Isabel. We have all kinds of things in common. My father and your
grandfather are friends. And I summered on the Island when I was a kid. West Tisbury, just down the way from your uncle. I know your grandfather’s house on Menemsha Bay, right next to Michael Herrick’s. The Spanish Barracks, my dad used to call it, I never understood why when I was a kid. Now, my dear—”

We were in an office that smelled of tobacco and orange juice, both items on view on the desk, and when the woman sat down at the computer, she lit a cigarette and sipped from the orange juice carton. I sat too and smoked, watching her work. Her face, focused on the screen, was composed and serious; her eyes, amazingly green, alive in a way that I couldn’t remember seeing before and which, somehow, like when I first met Rebeccah, opened new vistas of womanhood for me: strong, reliable, effective ways of being a woman; ways that diminished what any but the very finest men had to offer the world.

“Now, let’s see.” The woman was facing the computer screen but, apparently, talking to me. “Do you have papers?”

I guess I looked confused.

“Travel docs.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Alright.” Allison lifted the phone, spoke briefly in Italian, at which two towering suited men came into the room. Then she rose, as if everything were already all arranged.

“Very good then, Isabel. This is Paolo, and this is Giorgio. Shall we go?”

“Go where, Ms. Rosenthal?” I remained seated, unwilling—I see now—to accept that she knew so much about me.

“Why, to Detroit, Michigan. Isn’t that what you came for? Paolo and Giorgio, here, they’re going to see that you get there without anyone interfering.”

I stayed seated. “But who are you all?”

She looked surprised. “Why, we’re friends of Chevejon, of course.”

“And who is Chevejon?”

She stopped short. “My dear, there’s so much to tell you. Chevejon is Mimi Lurie’s brother. Come, I’ll tell you all about it on the way to the airport. I’m not allowed into the States, damn it. But we’ll talk on the way to the airport, and I’ll tell you all.”

And so I, Isabel Grant-Sinai-Montgomery, found myself, just like that, giving myself over entirely to this woman who smelled of tobacco and orange juice and her two bodyguards, and—my father’s daughter after all—walking calmly away from everything familiar and into the unknown.

4.

And that, essentially, is the end of my story. Except I guess you want to know the last details of how everyone ended up, so let me fill you in.

Ben Schulberg moved east with Rebeccah, after having written the entire story—or, I should say,
most
of the story—for the
Albany Times
, and been been snapped up by the
World News New York.
And because Rebeccah and Ben both lived in New York now, they could be married and begin to breed, which they promptly did.

Sharon Solarz refused to take a plea bargain, insisting that Gillian Morrealle try the case on its merits, which Morrealle did. The result was a sentence of twenty to life for murder, and she serves it today in Baraga maximum security prison, where she teaches reading to inmates and the children of inmates and, recently, won an award from the State of Michigan Board of Education for Innovation in Literacy Pedagogy.

What Mimi Lurie did after being paroled, in late June of 2006, that is a story still being written, and you will need to hear it elsewhere. I will tell you that she spent that summer traveling in America, seeing old friends, thanking some of the many, many people who had come forward after she surrendered, to visit and to help. The trip started with a visit to the Krosney family—the family of the guard killed at the Bank of Michigan robbery—who had informed the board that they would not oppose her parole. Then she went on to McLeod’s, and to Donal James, and to friends from Chicago to Albany and many points in between. With her, for much of that time, was her birth daughter Rebeccah, who had found a variety of pretexts to visit her in prison over the years—easily done, seeing she spent all her vacations with her much-loved parents in Traverse City, and does to this day—and had grown to know Mimi
well. Then, that autumn, Mimi left for Italy to be with her mysterious brother, who had disappeared so long ago, and who reappeared, during the years of her incarceration, as an Italian businessman by the name of Peter Chevejon, showing that the taste for new identities can run in families. Chevejon had visited her in prison so often—despite the fact that he was coming each time from Europe—that he had eventually purchased a house outside Ann Arbor along Huron River Drive to stay in during his visits, a house in which his old high school friend John Osborne was a frequent visitor, as was Osborne’s daughter and Chevejon’s niece Rebeccah, with her husband Ben and, later, their children.

But I will tell you one thing Mimi Lurie did not do. She did not return to the great love of her life, for my father and Molly Sackler were married in the summer of 2002. A year after, Leo Sackler—Molly’s son and my childhood hero—and his wife were both killed in a bombing at the USMC station in Kabul, where Leo was stationed during the war, which was by then over in Iraq but still smoldering in Afghanistan, and so as if my father hadn’t screwed up enough daughters by then, he set out screwing up a few more: Leo’s two infant daughters, my other half sisters, whom Molly and my father more or less raised from then on.

Who else is there? Well, Jed Lewis took some substantial heat for his role in the whole thing when a group of big donors to the university raised a fuss over the prominence of a former fugitive in the American History Department and withdrew quite a bit of money. The university, however, held firm, and indeed the
Michigan Daily
published an editorial by one Rebeccah Osborne, who pointed out that having been a revolutionary was a pretty appropriate qualification for an American history professor. Still, in retrospect, Dr. Lewis came to feel that the publicity had cost him the chair of his department, and rather limited the second half of what had been a pretty illustrious career, a fact that failed to move many other former members of Weather, whose lives had been limited to high schools rather than universities by taking orders from Jed Lewis in the days when Jed Lewis gave orders, and who thought that Jed had a lot to be thankful for—and sorry for—whatever happened.

Mac McLeod, with predictable prescience, began the process of extracting himself from the marijuana trade the moment Mimi Lurie left
California for Ann Arbor. His name never surfaced in connection with the whole story, which was a good thing, for it enabled him ultimately to funnel his fortune into a number of charities, where thousands of people all over the country benefit from it still, blissfully unaware that the money buying them medicine, or sending them to school, or helping them with their houses, or researching their diseases, started as a jagged, hairy, glistening leaf in one of McLeod or Cusimano’s Seas of Green.

As for Billy Cusimano, with whom my father started this whole story and with whom, therefore, I will end it, he never grew a Sea of Green again. He was rearrested in the midsummer of 1996, and although his case was thrown out due to the illegality of the FBI’s wiretap—the same one that caught them Sharon Solarz—when he got his house back he found that the harvest had been burnt, the planting beds smashed, the gro-lights broken, the computer circuitry torn out.

It was a sad thing for Billy to inspect the ruins of his summer harvest. His last visit to his basement Sea of Green, just before he moved his family out of Tannersville altogether, his house packed and the moving vans waiting, he was sentimental enough to take a J with him and smoke it down there, a last look at the ruins of his lifework.

Dope growing was the thing he had been best at, and he had been doing it for thirty years, spreading his bud all over America, where it made thousands and thousands and thousands of people, one way or another, see the world in a different way than they ever had before. It was a good thing for him, of course, that he was no longer a criminal, with McLeod altogether out of it, now. The future would definitely prove this: because Billy really couldn’t plant the seed again, he was forced aboveground, and of necessity—he had three children in high school and one still in middle—founded Cusimano’s Organic Market, and from then on everything Billy touched, more or less, turned to gold. His kids went to college, one to Bard, one to Antioch, one to Skidmore, and the fourth, surprise, to Yale and then Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He and his wife lived in great comfort in SoHo, and then, after 9-11, moved out to Brooklyn.

But all that—all that was going to happen in the years to come. Billy didn’t know any of it when, in the late summer of 1996, the moving vans
packed and waiting, he climbed down to look at what was once his Sea of Green. And whatever he might have become later, that’s how I will always see him: standing stoned, bemused, next to the ruin of all he had worked on for so much of his life, and knowing it would never come back. Perhaps he shut his eyes tight and saw, in their darkness, the resplendent, resinous thick growth of marijuana, hairy and seedless, shocking green, and somehow joyous, as a loud electric switch turns on the rain and water fills the air, water that the plants reach up to with their arms, bathing themselves, full of life. Then he opened his eyes again to his ruined aspirations and leaned heavily against the basement wall.

Knowing that he would never produce that kind of life again, nor would his product produce the kind of insight, and experimentation, and visions, that so much of his own life had been given to. And maybe that’s the first time that Billy saw himself for what he had become, a man moving over to the other side of middle age, with children to raise in a world that he would, from then on, only live in, never think that he could change.

Well, what the fuck. He smiled a little, stoned, realizing where he was at. So was this, then, it? Like poor Oedipus, dying at Colonus, realizing that it was only now, because he was nothing, that he became a man? Settling all the big questions of life with the simple necessity of children? Giving up?

Well, maybe. With a huge, huge sigh he exhaled the last hit of his J and flicked the roach onto the floor. Fact was, the age his children were getting, it was about time he stopped smoking joints anyway, and why not stop now? The thought made his heart tear a little. Such a long time, defining himself by the things he believed, the herb he grew, the company he kept. Well, the company would never change, that was sure. But maybe it was time to let the kids grow their own dope and plan their own revolution, and who knows? With parents this good—parents like Jason, Molly, the Osbornes, McLeod, and even, in his own small way, Billy himself—maybe it would be their children who’d at last, at long last, do better with this rotten, corrupt world.

After all, everything they’d done themselves, it was like Chrissie Hynde said, right?

It’s the children who’ll understand why.

And it was with that thought that he climbed out of the basement and turned off the lights for the last time on what had for so long been the source for so many people of so many dreams, Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green.

During the writing of this book, a number of people agreed to speak to me about their experiences on both sides of the war in Vietnam. Foremost among them is Eleanor Stein, who was a steadfast friend to me and to this book throughout its writing. Like Ben Schulberg, I have been lucky enough to have the help and friendship of William J. Taylor. And I am deeply appreciative of interviews and insights given me by Bill Ayers, Chesa Boudin, Lieutenant Colonel John W. Capito (USMC, ret.), Joshua Cohen, Bernardine Dohrn, Lieutenant Colonel David Evans (USMC, ret.), David Gilbert, Ron Jacobs, Michael James, Jeffrey Jones, Vivian Rothstein, and, not least, the interviewees who spoke to me, with such generous honesty, on condition of anonymity.

Four books were indispensable to this book. Ron Jacobs’s
The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground
(Verso); Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert’s
The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade
(Praeger); Harold Jacobs’s
Weatherman
(Ramparts Press); and David Wallechinsky’s
Midterm Report: The Class of ’65
(Viking). Other published sources include Jane Alpert,
Growing Up Underground
(Morrow); Bill Ayers,
Fugitive Days
(Beacon); Tom Bates,
Rads
(HarperPerennial); Noam Chomsky,
The Chomsky Reader
, James Peck, ed. (Pantheon); John Castellucci,
The Big Dance
(Dodd, Mead); Frank Donner,
The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System
(Knopf); Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties:
Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(Bantam); Brian Glick,
War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
(South End Press); Larry Grathwohl (as told to Frank Regan);
Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen
(Arlington House); Stanley Karnow,
Vietnam: A History
(Penguin); Kirkpatrick Sale,
SDS
(Random House);
Biographical Dictionary of the American Left
(Johnpoll and Klehr); David Farber,
The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s
(Hill and Wang); Thomas Powers,
Diana: The Making of a Terrorist
(Houghton Mifflin); and Susan Stern,
With the Weathermen
(Doubleday). Filmed sources include
The Weather Underground
, directed by Sam Green and codirected by Bill Siegel (The Free History Project);
Rebels with a Cause
, a film by Helen Garvey (Shire Films); and
Underground
, a film by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler (First Run Features).