The Company You Keep (6 page)

This was a well-known routine for us: you, who had grown up in the woods, were unafraid of holding down the fort for the hour of my run, and I, like many single parents—and I had been, to all intents and purposes, a single parent for your entire life—knew how to find the time I needed for myself within the context of the things we did together. This, the six-mile round trip to Dutcher Notch, was a very familiar one to me—believe me, I run it again and again in my imagination, these days, now that I cannot run it for real—and for the first mile or so I ran easily, thoughtlessly, watching the long afternoon shadows play in the little pools of thin light, all under the vast green canopy of the woods, shifting in the breeze. And only after a mile, as if my mind had moved backward through the events of the past couple days, searching for purchase, did I arrive back at my conversation in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green, and my anxiety come back.

Sharon Solarz, Christ. How that fucking name came up. It seemed like people got a thrill out of just saying it. There were other names like that. Bernardine Dohrn. H. Rap Brown. Mimi Lurie. When ex-Movement people gathered—and in the Catskills, not unlike the French and their heroes of the Resistance, everyone over fifty was
ex-Movement—it was only a matter of time till one of those names came up.

But now—I cannot tell you how emphatically now was not, repeat not, the time for Sharon Solarz’s sexy name to enter my life. Should I have seen how suspicious it was? I’m not sure. The fact is, it had been just a few days earlier that Norman Rosen had called to say that his firm had been retained by Ambassador Montgomery concerning the matter of Isabel Grant, aged seven, the single child of the fifteen-year union between James Grant and Julia Montgomery.

That had shocked me into silence, which, Benny will tell you, isn’t that common an event. Your grandfather and I, I thought, understood each other: for the two years I’d had you since Julia went back to England, it had been clearly understood that our relationship was governed by a kind of nuclear parity. I, for my part, did not tell anyone that Julia was a hopeless drug addict and a criminally negligent mother. He, for his part, left me alone with you.

Now, incredibly, Norm Rosen was telling me that Julia was no longer content with the original divorce settlement, which allowed her unlimited access to her child as long as she was willing to come back to America from London, where she had gone to rehab under her father’s care after I left her.

Finally, I got my voice back. “Norman, come off it, will you? She can see her daughter whenever she wants.”

“She’s seen her twice in the past year, Jim.” He had one of those phony western accents upstaters like to affect, and a reedy, annoying voice—see what I mean about Benny’s manipulation by your grandfather?

“That’s because she’s been too whacked out of her gourd to come to America.”

“That was then. This is now.”

“So now that she’s clean and sober, she’s decided that taking away my house, income, and reputation weren’t enough? She wants my daughter, too?”

“Her daughter, counselor.”

“Norm.” I couldn’t believe he knew what he was saying. But then, I couldn’t know how much your grandfather had actually told him, could
I? Nor did I know, then, that Norm was Benny’s anonymous tipster, putting Ben on my tail in the first place. So I temporized. “The only positive thing Julia ever did for her daughter was take her shopping at Anna Sui rather than Donna Karan. Or was it the other way round? There is no way I’m letting this child leave the country.”

His answer told me that your grandfather had told him a lot. Perhaps all. “Jim? You know what I’d do if I were you? I’d listen real carefully. You fight this, we’re taking you to the
show.
You understand what I’m saying?”

Okay, I admit, it is hard to shut me up. This did it. For a couple seconds, I was like a fish out of water, gasping for air. Then I said, as carefully as I could: “Norm, I thought that Senator Montgomery was looking to be named ambassador to the Court of St. James in the next Democratic administration.”

“No, sir.” He answered without a beat. “Not looking. Planning on it. Better get used to something new, counselor. You don’t have any more standing in the senator’s plans. That’s all over.”

“And how exactly did that end?” I wasn’t being sarcastic. It was a real request for information. And in the pleasure that came into Norm’s thin little voice when he answered, you could understand why, despite his lifelong liberalism, your grandfather had chosen Fratelli and Rosen, house lawyers for George Pataki, who hated me only slightly less than they hated abortion rights activists—though slightly more than they hated the ACLU—to represent him in the matter of his granddaughter’s custody.

“I should have been a little more precise, Mr., uh, Grant. It hasn’t quite ended yet. But, counselor, there is no doubt at all that it’s over by the end of the week.”

At the time, a discouraging statement, I think you agree.

At the edge of the field, the trail dipped right into the woods, and I passed into shadow and onto an uphill at the same time, an uphill that broke my heart each time I did it, long and even and steepening over perhaps three-quarters of a mile. As always, as I worked into the first
pain of the run, my thoughts darkened; as always, I failed to note the connection. Rather, panting hard toward my second wind and breaking into a sweat, I thought I was looking at the question before me with calm, reasonable, and experienced legal eyes, the eyes I’d been using all week, trying to figure out what Norm had been talking about.

Because, Isabel, you are a grown-up person now, and you know as well as I that when I sent her to England, your mother had had a drug and alcohol problem the size of a house. You do know, right? You know that she had virtually abandoned your upbringing, and let her compulsion for white powders take over her life, filling the space her dwindling career left empty. She had let you spend a night in an open convertible on the main street of Hudson, while she very, very nearly overdosed on smack in a dealer’s apartment. And once—just once, the last time she saw you until her first exercise of supervised visitation rights after rehabbing in London—she hit you, hard enough to leave you with the little scar you have on the bottom right of your chin.

See, all that was true. And all the time it was going on, your grandfather and I had, each time, nursed your mother out of whatever kind of strung-out horrors she was going through; covered the trails of her crimes; called in favors from cops and judges; and ensured that no one knew. See? My father-in-law, at the time, was my partner in trying to save my wife, your mother, his daughter, whom we all adored. And it was only after a week when I thought she was clean but she had, fooling me completely, been snorting a stash of coke she had hidden in the pool house, she ran out, and got strung out, and while strung out hit you in the chin with her fist, that I drove her to Kennedy airport and left her at British Airways, and then, before I could be kicked out of the Woodstock house, took you down to our new house in Saugerties.

At the time, it was very clear.

I said nothing to anyone about Julia. I let Senator Montgomery keep his career; he let me keep my daughter.

Except that now, he had found a way to take both, and leave me with nothing.

I crossed Fresh Kill, the grade evened, and I let my step loosen, and lengthen, into the slow downhill past Beaver Pond: I was, now, sinking into the little hollow formed by Stoppel Point, to the east, and Thomas
Cole, to the north: properly a “clove,” but one that had not been named. An easy mile of downhill. I increased my speed, enough to keep up my respiratory rate, but not too much to negotiate the long mud puddles as the sodden ground let up its water, which converted the trails into runoffs. While I ran, I checked on you on the Motorola, then got back into a careful rhythm: if I knew nothing else, I knew I could not, right now, afford a fall.

So what was I to do, Isabel? Was I to let you go live with your mother? How were you to understand, at your age, that your mother was abusive and addicted? Should I have told you that Julia was an unfit mother because she let you watch too much TV? She should be denied custody because she fed you junk food? None of that meant anything, nor would it mean anything if I told you the truth, which was that I would not give you over to your mother because your mother, simply, did not know how to love, and had never known how to love, and if knowing how to fuck was a fair enough way to hide that fact from her husband, for a while anyway, it just wouldn’t do for a child. Especially a fiendishly verbal, precociously observant, and prematurely cynical child, who had been hit and left out in cars and whose only hope in the world was to be loved and loved well all the days of her childhood and on beyond too.

And it was in this spiraling suite of thoughts that I arrived at the big expanse of what the local kids from Tannersville and Hunter call Strawberry Field, and paused.

From here, the run’s steepest uphill did the last mile to Dutcher Notch, a grueling uphill in which steady climbs were interrupted by hills so steep as to seem a personal insult. At the edge of my vital capacity—I had failed to pace myself, for being lost in defeatist thoughts—I leaned over, hands on knees, panting hard. If I was going to abbreviate the run—six miles was nothing to be ashamed of—this was the time. But then, I never abbreviated my run; only when a muscle was in real danger of injury, real enough to keep me from running again. And so I turned and pushed up, taking my respiration into rarefied territories.

For a time, accelerating my heart into the uphill, my mind was clear, the first thought to articulate itself being simply to ask, Where the fuck was the notch? The trail was mounting alongside a true moonshine gully, a mountain stream running a deep, thickly wooded gash in the forest,
typical of the vast Appalachian range of which the Catskills were four hundred miles south of the northern edge in Canada and the Tennessee Cumberlands were a thousand miles north of the southern edge in Alabama. Unlike the Cumberlands, the Catskills had never been still country—vast, now exhausted supplies of hemlock had served a local tanning industry and kept the locals out of the moonshine business. Now, however, both gave serious shares to the marijuana breadbasket, with Tennessee quoting pot as its biggest cash crop. And the same exact qualities that made these woods so apt to hide marijuana made this trail a heartbreaking run. Until I at last came to a stop, bending over and spitting, at Dutcher Notch, I did not think at all. Not, in fact, till I had started again, with abandoned speed, down the path.

What did it mean, Norm’s call? And how was I to respond? Izzy, I was a lawyer. My job was to go to court and oppose my will to that of others. I argued for what I felt was right, publicly, without protection. Often I did it at great personal risk. Some thought that I was, for this reason, a hero. No one mistook me, however, for a gentleman. You’re not required to be a gentleman to defend the Constitution, because whatever else the law is, it’s a dirty business, and like it or not, it’s appropriate for a lawyer to be properly dirty too.

Now, running the downhill from Dutcher Notch, I asked myself, how ungentlemanly could I be to retain custody of my daughter? My ammunition, remember, was good. I could prove your mother’s every affair in a Woodstock summer house, her every episode of steroid psychosis caused by self-medicating for cocaine-induced sinus polyposis, her every miserable meth-induced bedroom tantrum, and her every failed attempt to detox at the Lucy Freeland Clinic in Saratoga Springs. I could prove her two abortions of planned pregnancies that unexpectedly turned out to interfere with acting roles. I could, moreover, prove that all of this, which involved several serious run-ins with the police, had been effectively concealed by the ex—U.S. senator, Julia’s father. And I could leave Bobby Montgomery waiting for his next incarnation before he got into politics again.

No—Rosen was bluffing. Evening out into the long, gentle downhill back to the campsite, I concluded again: Rosen was bluffing. The stakes
were too high for Bobby. It was a nice try, but the stakes were simply too high.

And I found you—as if proving my reassurance—lying happily in the tent with Bun Bun, your stuffed rabbit, singing a song and kicking your legs, on which, through the nylon roof, trees nodding above cast lazily shifting shadows.

4.

As the afternoon lengthened, the two of us—as you used to say—“hop-rocked” up the stream to where a waterfall dropped down a mossy face in the rock perhaps thirty feet high, me throwing handfuls of dirt or sticks in front of you to scare away any rattlers that may have come down the mountain looking for water. So infrequent were visitors here that we saw two snapping turtles clatter away with their always surprising speed and, when we returned to camp, scared a hawk into flying off with a half-eaten chipmunk in his claws.

Having repossessed the campsite from the hawk, we ate dinner, watching the thin fall of water into the shaded pool—already, that year, the rivers were low, and later that summer there would be some severe drought. I had packed artichokes, chicken salad, Bread Alone bread, iced tea. And slowly, the air turned grainy and the evening fell softly down.

Well before dark, I led you back down the river to the little pool, washed your hands and face in the icy water while you sang variations on the Pete Seeger song Molly’d been playing to you that day:

We climbed back up to the tent; I changed you into pajamas and a sweatshirt, then watched you brush the hair around the soft curves of
your face, your cheeks, your massive brown eyes with their endless lashes. Changing into pajamas, your little body’s perfect balance on bare feet was as enticing, as perfect as a wild animal, and I watched you with enchantment, with fascination, in the silence of evening’s fall, as if all the forest were hushing for you. The sun was setting, and next to the little fire I sat cross-legged with you in my lap while I read you a book. Then I cajoled you inside the tent, and you lay, watching through the tent’s star window the wind moving the leaves above in the thickening grain of the dusk while I sang you the real Pete Seeger song.