The Company You Keep (8 page)

The paper concluded by observing that with Solarz’s arrest, Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai were the last two fugitives from the Vietnam era remaining at large, which was also untrue. A where-are-they-now sidebar listed, as they always do on such occasions, a roundup of ex-fugitives. This time they got Katherine Power, Bernardine Dohrn, Patty Hearst Shaw, and Silas Trim Bissell, of whom only one had actually been in the Weather Underground at all.

It was dawn when I got through this, and the dim light through the window washed the computer screen of colors. That struck me as appropriate to the black-and-white newspaper archive images on the screen. Those people, in the days when I had a husband in Vietnam, my blood had heated every time I’d seen their images. And now, for God’s sake, peering across twenty-five years from my computer screen, I found that they looked so vivid to me: real people, not these strange, ugly, shaved-headed, pierced and tattooed kids of today in their big baggy clothes—real people who might have believed in the wrong thing, but who at least believed in
something.

And I guess I was lost in thought, because I found myself at the kitchen cabinet by the window, now, and with a mental maneuver that was growing all too familiar, I managed to open a drawer, extract a Marlboro,
and light it without quite admitting to myself that I was doing anything other than looking out the window, down the driveway, watching for my son’s headlights. The smoke hit the back of my throat with an intimate familiarity. Mother’s milk. J was quite right. I was hooked again, through and through.

And it was then, at that thought, that the meaning of the reference to Sharon having come looking for a lawyer at Billy Cusimano’s house struck me, though the coincidence with the first wave of nicotine electrifying my brain, disguised, to some extent, the shock.

Not so much, however, that I was not able to pronounce, out loud: “Oh, my God, he’s talking about J.”

And then I said, louder, again: “For God’s sake. It must have been Montgomery himself who had that one leaked.”

And I thought, if this damnable paper keeps this up, they might as well buy you a one-way flight to London, Izzy, because you were never, ever coming back.

Now I’ve gone this far, so let me finish off what happened, that Sunday morning, and then let me get back to the webcast because there is a State of the Union address in half an hour, and whether my son stays in Kabul or comes back home depends on what our fine president has to say. In this respect, let me tell you, no matter how big a decision you have to make next week, you may bear in mind, there are bigger things happening still. Far bigger.

By the time Leo got home and bestowed on me a boozy kiss before ushering a woman who appeared to be all of sixteen up to his bedroom, it was way too late to go to bed. So I put on a swimsuit and drove down to Woodstock to get muffins at Bread Alone, then up the mountain to Colgate Lake to meet you and your daddy, and to tell J the news.

But I was too late. By then, your father and you had hiked out of the woods, changed into bathing suits, driven the quarter mile or so to Colgate Lake, and settled down on the grass, where I found J lying on a blanket, deep asleep, and you involved in a mudcastle-in-progress group project by the water’s edge.

It was a perfect Catskill morning. A perfectly cloudless Sunday, wind softly blowing, late lilacs in bloom. Already the grassy beach at the lake was filling with its particular summer mix: weekend New Yorkers, Jewish and Italian; all kinds of Eastern Europeans from the Ukrainian and Latvian resorts up Platte Clove; canoes going into the water, and dogs, and children. Sharon Solarz would have to wait: I wasn’t taking this sleep away from J. So I lay back next to your daddy, the sun on the front of my body and the warmth of his skin on the side, and let the murmur of mixed voices and languages around us lull me to sleep. Russian in the group of pretty young girls next to us. A dog’s feet padding by, water shaking on my thigh from its fur on its chest. A voice in a canoe, far out on the lake, calling to another. Next to us, two couples with New York accents were talking in what sounded, to me, like middle-aged friendship. And what they were discussing was the arrest of Sharon Solarz, the night before, in Rosendale, of all places.

And your daddy must have heard too, because when I turned my head on my neck to look at him, his eyes were wide open, staring at the sky. The air, suddenly, was thick with heat. Quickly now, I looked over at the group talking next to us, then back to your dad, studying the afterimage against the pink of the sun through my eyelids.

It was a fifty-something foursome, two sets of parents up from the city, and now three of them were listening with interest as the fourth, lying on the grass with the
Albany Times
, gave a summation of the article, pausing after each sentence for discussion. He read next that it appeared that Solarz may have been in the area seeking to make a negotiated surrender. At this one of the wives snorted. That was the way they always did it, said the other woman, this one apparently a lawyer herself—a surrender would mitigate in favor of the defendant, so they always went for the arrest rather than the surrender, in order to get the harshest sentence they could. None of them seemed to have any doubt who “they” were.

Your daddy and I listened. What next? Eventually, someone would say that Sharon to some degree deserved what she was getting: this wasn’t a Weatherman bombing, where only property was destroyed, but an actual armed robbery in which a guard was killed. And someone else
would say that Sharon—they would all use her first name—Sharon’s only crime was having anything to do with Vinnie Dellesandro. And from there someone was sure to say how they knew Billy and Bernardine, only they knew them under their fugitive identities when they lived on the Upper West Side; or someone would say how they had dropped blotter acid with Susan Stern out in Seattle, or Chicago, or recently seen a letter from Jeff Jones in the
New York Times
, or had a friend who had a friend who had a friend who knew David Gilbert…A lulling, gentle conversation, four middle-aged ex-hippies discussing the familiar, comforting righteousness of their youths, of menace to no one.

Except us.

Because instead of the thousand things I could have predicted these guys would say, they said the one thing they shouldn’t have.

“…says here she was coming to consult a lawyer in Saugerties.”

“Lawyer? In Saugerties? What kind of lawyer would practice in Saugerties?”

“Hey, babe, that’s where Jim Grant is. Must have been him. Who else could it be? The local bankruptcy lawyer?”

By now, little adrenaline shots were running through my whole body and, I knew, your daddy’s too. We didn’t move, of course, and in time the foursome waddled off to the water, and we sat up.

First, your daddy made a big show of looking at his watch. Then he glanced over at the paper they had left lying with their towels and books. The paper was open to the Solarz coverage, and he pulled it over and we looked together. The byline was Ben Schulberg.

Now this Schulberg character, I was relieved to see, had not actually named your dad. That was because what he was talking about was an actionable offence: in New York State, concealing information on the whereabouts of a known felon was tantamount to being an accessory in that felon’s crime—and this felon, Sharon Solarz, was wanted for murder, which has no statute of limitations. If Schulberg had actually named your father, then the police would have been waiting at his door when we got home.

But that was the only good news, that he had not been named.

Everything else was disastrous.

J pushed the paper back and, still without a word, looked at me.

And suddenly, as if a gray ceiling had moved in over the sky and a sodden rain begun to fall, it was not such a perfect Catskill Sunday anymore.

And while, at Colgate Lake on Sunday morning, your father was realizing how very, very right he had been not even to discuss Sharon Solarz with his client, Billy Cusimano, and how, nonetheless, very, very little help that was going to give him now, I, up in Albany, was starting in on what was to be twenty-four hours of uninterrupted work.

Now, on this matter, let me say this: What else is new? Right? Working a night, a day, then a night again—this did not in any way indicate any interest whatsoever in your father, or Sharon Solarz, or Billy Cusimano, or the Tet Offensive, or Earth Day, or Birkenstocks, or marijuana—well, I was interested in marijuana, but that had nothing to do with these bozos. This was merely the kind of work expected of junior staff at the
Times.

The only difference, in fact, was the actual content of my work that Sunday and Sunday night. Lately, if it was happening in a town bigger than 200 and involved something more controversial than a farm animal, it went to someone else, which gives you an idea both of my status at my place of employ that summer and of the newsworthiness my editor ascribed to the Sharon Solarz story. Now I had not only been taken off my regular beat to spend a few days researching three in-depth stories on the meaning of the Solarz arrest, but had actually been ordered to read up on the very particular history that had started three decades ago and ended with Sharon Solarz being arrested the night before.

•   •   •

I wasn’t working enthusiastically. My bargain-basement status at the paper was due to a fresh graduate from Columbia J School having just been hired, and given preference for anything I might have gotten otherwise. And then, the fact is, I am not so big on research, if you want to know the truth, Isabel, though if you happen to be at the National Press Club, if you don’t mind not mentioning this, that would be fine. What I had going for me as a journalist was primarily luck, and secondarily a gift.

See, people like to talk to me. Why, I can’t tell you. Rebeccah says that it’s because I’m so foolish looking, and God knows she’s right about that—I am too tall, and too thin, and the main reason my face inspires confidence is because it is incapable of inspiring fear. But the fact is, you put me in a room, or at a bar, or on a checkout line at a supermarket, and I’ll come back and tell you the most intimate details about the person nearest to me. It’s not skill, exactly. In fact, it’s nearly politeness: I have to listen, because I can’t stop people from telling me things.

But let me not be modest. In 1996 I was a beat reporter, and I went out and got subjects to talk, and although it seemed to them as if it was just by chance that I happened to be there and they happened to be baring their souls, everything they had to say—everything relevant, that is—was in the paper the next day. And—at least before the eminent graduate of Columbia J School came to do a better job than I—the halls of power in Albany, New York, were filled with people who wished they had never met me or that, when they met me, they had kept their mouths shut tight.

When, therefore, my editor, Richard Harmon, told me to spend a few days researching who Sharon Solarz was and what she had done, I experienced an instant regret at having gotten involved in the story in the first place. The hell with that geek who called me with his anonymous tip, was my feeling. What I said to my editor, however, was:

“Rick, they’re about to put a generator in Saugerties that’s like to raise the ambient temperature of the Esopus enough to kill the entire trout population. Let me get to that, will you? You’re wasting me on some ancient hippie history.”

It was not a good choice of words. For one thing, my editor promptly made a mental note—at least I believe he did—to assign the J school
graduate to write on the ambient temperature of the Esopus, which he’d known nothing about till I mentioned it. For another, however, my editor, at fifty-five, defined himself precisely by the time that I had called “ancient history,” in particular by the reporting he’d done in Saigon when his father edited the
Times.
And, like a lot of people around Albany at the time, in 1996 Harmon was already looking toward Kathy Boudin’s 2001 parole date, and planned to use every chance he got to keep the Weather Underground in the negative glare of publicity.

But lastly, and most importantly, Rick knew something that I, as it turned out, was too young to know: that an important portion of the paper’s demographic—forty-five to sixty—would read anything connected to the antiwar movement, which, for or against, had played a central role in their lives, and that stories of the last radical fugitives always sold issues. So and therefore, in the face of my disagreement, Rick let a moment of thought play behind his gray eyes, and then inquired politely whether or not I actually wanted my job, because if I didn’t, there were plenty of others who did. To my shock and embarrassment, he used not one, but two four-letter expletives in this sentence, both beginning with an
f.
Nonetheless, I took the man at his word, and seriously entertained the issue, to no small effect. For in fact, a few moments later, it emerged from our conversation that yes, I did want the job, at least enough to sit there quietly, agreeing with a man whose sole qualification to do his job was having inherited the goddamn business from his father, who was also an idiot. In brief, having enthusiastically agreed to research the Sharon Solarz story, I left my editor’s office and returned to my desk, vowing to go to business school, build up a multinational communications empire, buy the paper, and fire his ass.

But only briefly. Some of Harmon’s sources were so old that I couldn’t even get them on Nexis, and I had to go for the first time in my career to find actual printed sources in the document morgue. By the time I returned, sneezing, the question that most bothered me was how I was going to stay awake through the research.