The Company You Keep (7 page)

At last, heavy on my arm, your hair creeping along my shirtsleeve, while I watched your face in the dim light from the tent’s star window, in that hour of pure silence in the woods when the sun first goes down before the nocturnal sounds come out, you fell asleep.

And did I think, that night, how much I would one day give to see that sight before my eyes? Did I think of the absolute unrepeatability of what was before me, a vision of a single nexus of so many confluent paths of change—the fall of the evening, the turn of the seasons, your steady climb out of childhood, my steady growth through middle age—an intersection of so many things that would never appear again in the same way, ever again, in all the millions of years of our species’ life?

You may say that beauty is everywhere, Isabel. But never before, and never again in this life, have I ever seen anything as beautiful as my sleeping daughter. You slept, and for that long first hour of darkness, when the night animals wake and the woods, as if worshiping the moon, come out of their sunset hush, I watched you.

And for perhaps the single last time of my life, watching you that night, Izzy—the ten years to come until I sat down to write you this—I felt peace.

Izzy, because I couldn’t go camping with you, it was I who got the news of the Solarz arrest first, very early that Sunday morning.

This is because, while you were sleeping that night in your tent with J, I was sitting up, waiting for my son to come home.

And while I was waiting, I was beating the delivery boy by reading the paper on the Web.

Just like insomniacs do all over the world.

You know my whole story now, my love. You know that in 1996 I only had my son, and that by the barest of luck. My husband never even knew he’d gotten me pregnant during a one-week leave in Okinawa, a few weeks before he was killed in Vietnam. By the time Leo was a megabyte of cells big, Donny was dead in the jungle at Songbe. Then the war ended.

You know what they told me once? They told me that the Vietcong firing squad that executed him, it had only three members over fifteen.

Don’t ask how old Donny was.

J and you came to me just when Leo followed his daddy into the marines, and as I think you know, Izzy, you stepped into a place in my heart as empty as a tomb. Aviation Guarantee. For God’s sake. Grown men promise an eighteen-year-old that if he enlists, they’ll guarantee him flight training. Just what they did to Donny. What the hell
can’t
you get an eighteen-year-old to do after you promise to let him fly supersonic
jets? Donny they baited and switched, forcing him into CID, Criminal Investigations, which is how he got captured. At least Leo, they kept their word. Now it’s 2006 and I’m still up all night, with the single damn difference that now I sit around with hot flashes watching the webcasts of Greater Persia, where Leo’s commanding a stratospheric firefight, rather than waking up barfing with morning sickness and listening to the news from Nam. Oh, and in between? In between was me, sitting up all night, reading the Web to see that Leo hasn’t wrapped his damn car around a tree in Woodstock during his leave in that damn, damn summer of ’96.

Alright. The hell with it, I’m up all night right now, too, reading your daddy’s version of that Saturday night in 1996, the night Sharon Solarz was arrested while you two camped out on the Dutcher Notch trail, and I can watch Frank Smyth reporting from Baghdad in a window on my screen all the while I write this, as I promised your father I’d do, so let’s get it done. I am Molly Sackler. I took care of you for the couple years between the time your dad left your mother and the spring of 1996, and I hoped I was going to take care of you the rest of your life, but it didn’t happen that way. And this whole thing, it might be the way your father and his friends try to talk you into going to testify at the parole hearing, but for me, it’s just a way of explaining to you that I love you as much as if you were really mine, Izzy, and I love your father too.

You were too young to know it, by all rights we were an unlikely pair of friends. Your father a lefty lawyer married to one of the most glamorous residents of Woodstock. Me the principal at Mount Marion Elementary, a resident of the wrong side of decidedly unglamorous Saugerties, the widow of a marines intelligence officer perished in Vietnam, and get this, a
Republican.
The fact is, Donny Sackler, my late husband: when we were kids, he would sooner have taken a baseball bat to your father than speak to him. And as for me, in those days, makeup and bouffant hair and get this, an actual cheerleader, as far as your daddy was concerned, I could have been from Mars.

Now, 1996, we sat out our evenings on the upstairs porch like two
aging sweethearts, and even the two-three shouting matches we once had about the war never made as much difference as the fact that once, we both lost everything that meant anything to Vietnam. Just like thousands and thousands of other Americans. And at the time, of course, I was about the only one who knew exactly how much your father had lost, and how dearly he had paid for it.

We had met in ’94 when you were five and J represented Mount Marion Elementary in our strike against the state regents over our refusal to use state-mandated pass-fail criteria. I had adamantly opposed your dad’s selection as attorney until it turned out that no one else would take the case on for free. And because we had to work together so much during the trial, I didn’t have to admit that I liked being with this person who was so abhorrent to my every principle. When it turned out we both were training for the Albany Marathon, however, we started running together, and there wasn’t much business excuse for that.

Now, I didn’t know it then, but Julia was around less and less, in ’94, and your daddy was taking care of you more and more, and in fact, the time we were spending together made up most of his life outside working and taking care of his daughter. In fact I knew nearly nothing about him: so little that I had no conception of how he lived. I mean, I knew who Julia Montgomery was about as good as any other
People
magazine reader, but I hadn’t ever really put together how
rich
they were.

I found out because we used to run a trail your daddy knew on private land up to Meades, just outside Woodstock, and one day when we had pushed on an extra mile we emerged suddenly in what looked to me to be an endless expanse of mowed pasture, in the middle of which sat a sprawling ranch house. When I realized it was his, and in fact, the whole trail we’d been running on went with it, I couldn’t help myself.

“Jim, my God, you
own
this.”

He shrugged. “I don’t own anything. I’m just the token Jew here.”

Though I guess he was enjoying my shock, because he took me in and gave me the tour: a living room as big as the auditorium in Mount Marion Elementary, a sunken couch area, a wall of windows looking out over the mountains to the north. Huge bedrooms decorated in Arts and Crafts, no reproductions. A swimming pool in a glass geodesic
dome. Then he explained that Julia had inherited from her maternal grandfather, and was in fact richer in her own right than her father—as well as far more willing to spend the money.

I may as well tell you, seeing we’re all friends here, that I remember that day not just because it was the only time I was ever in Julia Montgomery’s house, but for a couple of other reasons, too.

One was because, in the tour of the house, we unexpectedly came upon you, Izzy, in your room, playing on your bed while a baby-sitter sat reading a magazine, and when you saw him, I swear, I don’t think you even touched ground on your way into his arms. And your father is surprised, but he pretends not to be and asks where Julia is in this offhand voice. The baby-sitter answers, without even looking at him, that Julia had gone out. What time? Nine o’clock, which you had to figure was right after your father left for work. A silence greeted that. Then your father told the baby-sitter she could go; he’d stay home now. “I’ll need pay for the whole day, mister,” was the baby-sitter’s response.

The second reason was because watching your father with you that day was when I fell in love with him, because as you know, that’s what happened. He had a gift with you, and let me tell you, as a teacher, I have been watching parents screw their children up for a long, long time. Watching him, this man who could not have been more different from me and my husband, I found myself thinking: This is how Donny would have been with Leo, Leo whom Donny never met. And that was the first time I felt desire for him.

So we became friends. Either out running or, as Julia started disappearing for longer or longer periods, hanging out down at my house—I didn’t want to visit his place again, nor did he invite me to. And then, one day when you were perhaps six, we’re sitting at my kitchen table rehydrating from a run and Leo, who has just finished basic training and is waiting assignment to flight school, is practicing dives into the swimming pool, and I hear a sound precisely like an underinflated basketball slapping a concrete surface, and thank God your father had been lifting weights for ten years because Leo is on the floor of the pool in a cloud of red and he didn’t wake up until J had hauled him right out, 170 pounds of inert adolescent, and started CPR. He swears to me, he can
still taste that blend of blood and chlorine in his mouth, these many years later.

Know what? When someone saves your child’s life, you don’t need any more excuse to be friends. And so I made the first friend of my life who wasn’t a Republican, and your daddy made the first friend of his life who was. Not the second, not the third. The first. And in fact, it was kind of a kick hanging out with him in front of various Saugerties dignitaries, who tended to congregate together depending on whether they’d been at Woodstock or Khe Sanh, or rather, whether or not they remembered which was which.

I may as well tell you, Izzy, now that you are a big girl, that although he insisted on keeping his own house, and making sure you didn’t see, because he thought it would confuse you, your father and I had become lovers by the spring of 1996. And I may as well tell you, also, that before he ever got into my bed, your father told me everything there was to know about him, all of his secrets, and I believed in him then, and I believe in him now.

And if I have to say it explicitly, then I will: that’s why I’m writing. Because I think you should believe in him too.

2.

Alright. It is the summer of 1996, I live in the little clapboard house next to yours in Saugerties, which in fact I’d found for your father as soon as he left Julia. It was a change from what you were used to, my love, believe me. But in retrospect, it does seem that you should have been there all along rather than Julia’s Woodstock. I, for one, am convinced that you got something richer down there than you ever had up to Woodstock with the Montgomery money, and I like to think that I had something to do with that.

So this had been my routine since early that summer Leo had come home from his first tour in the marines. Wait for him to wake up in the afternoon, sit and talk with him through dinner, then lend him the car to go out with his high school friends, and then, the high point of my day,
wait for the 4
A.M.
update of the paper on the Web so I could check the police blotter for car crashes and arrests. After that, a luxurious two hours of sleep before you came over in the morning, little ray of sunshine that you were.

Christ. Leo had been around the world with the service by then. He had been in “combat” in the Persian Gulf, where he had served as private first class in a reconnaissance unit. Then he became a pilot and after that a strat commander. But nothing he had done then or was to do afterward terrified me quite as much as what he could get up to with his old high school buddies in Saugerties, or Catskill, or Hudson: depressed and hopeless places, rife with liquor, drugs, and guns. But of course there was nothing I could do or say, and so I had long resigned myself to sitting up all night, my stomach clenched with anxiety, waiting for the morning paper to be posted and listening to WDST Woodstock.

Sharon Solarz. I remember the very layout of that computer screen. Once I had assured myself that by the
Albany Times’
electronic deadline my son had neither been killed nor maimed nor shot nor robbed nor arrested—so far that night at least—I clicked back to the Solarz story and read it through: during the period Sharon had been famous, I had been the young wife of an active-duty marine, and the politics of the antiwar movement had been very alive to me. There was a vivid account of the manhunt and arrest, and I was by no means blind to the fact that it all started in Billy Cusimano’s house, where, the paper reported, Solarz had come hoping to connect with a lawyer to negotiate her surrender. I remember that vividly, because I remember thinking, Christ, her life must be awful for her to prefer a decade in jail. Then I read the summary of Sharon’s career: SDS member in Chicago, founding member of Weatherman, underground after the town house bombing, arrested briefly on explosives charges after Weather broke up in ’75, then jumped bail and underground again as part of the MDB—Marion Delgado Brigade—and not seen again until the Bank of Michigan robbery. She was named by Vincent Dellesandro, the only person arrested after the crime, who also named, in addition to Solarz, the other two members of the MDB: Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai.

That Dellesandro, whom the article implied had been, rather than a
revolutionary, a crazy homicidal vet, had named his partners was no surprise. There was some suspicion that later, one of the three fugitives had given Dellesandro up, shocked by his willingness to shoot during the holdup. After all, there had been no proven casualties in any Weatherman action, although other Weather-inspired groups had not been as skillful, and three Weather members had been killed in the town house bombing. When he was arrested, apparently, Dellesandro claimed he’d been working undercover for the FBI all along. For all anyone knew, this might have been true. But before being tried for Bank of Michigan, he was extradited to New York to face prior charges and killed during the Attica uprising—strangely, because the article pointed out that surviving inmates told the ACLU that Dellesandro had been nowhere near the actual violence.