The Laws of our Fathers (34 page)

    I hug him quickly. Half a foot shorter than he is, I face him. I know now I was right when he initially stood up in the courtroom and I thought I detected depletion of some kind. Wreckage. Pain. At the Judge's Entrance, I leave him with a slogan of our foregone times.

    'You're a good man, Charlie Brown.'

    

    

    
Seth

    

    Eddgar's expulsion hearings before the university Senate commenced in the third week of April. Sessions ran from 4:00 in the afternoon to 10:00 at night, so faculty members could attend without interrupting their classes. After each evening's adjournment, the Eddgars and their lawyers met for a lengthy planning session, arguing about strategy, gathering information about coming witnesses. Eddgar and June seldom arrived home before 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, only a couple of hours before I had to get up to begin distributing
After Dark
to the coin boxes. As a result, I began putting Nile to bed on the living-room sofa in my apartment. Roiled up by my imminent flight to Canada and my breakup with Sonny, I was not sleeping soundly and usually heard one of his parents steal in to retrieve him.

    My life in those weeks felt dismal, stillborn, lost. I could not figure out why I had gone on working, why I had not left yet,

    except that it didn't seem I could take any substantial step in such a shattered state. My induction remained a couple of weeks off, on May 4. Michael, Nile, and I continued to eat dinner each night, but they were sorry gatherings, silent except for the TV which Nile watched. I felt Sonny's absence acutely, and Michael, even for Michael, was remote. He claimed his lab was preoccupying him, but I sensed his affair with June had moved to a critical new stage. Those days each of them seemed tense in the other's presence.

    After Nile was asleep, I would lie on the mattress on our bedroom floor - where I now slept alone - my transistor clutched to my ear as I listened to the hearing sessions being broadcast on campus radio at Eddgar's demand. It reminded me of when I was seven or eight and used to lie beneath the blankets at home with the volume on my radio reduced to a secretive hush, listening to the Trappers' baseball games in what I now unexpectedly regarded as happier times.

    The case against Eddgar depended principally on evidence gathered by the campus police. For all the talk of snitches, none had come forward. Nor did they appear to be needed. The cops had photographs. They showed the PLP members in their gas masks. And in the picture that became more or less the signature of the case, the mystery woman, the girl who'd shrieked and disappeared, was portrayed emerging from the crowd. One moment, she was unmarked. Then her hand was at her face. Streaks of dark blood were shown running from her crown, but, said the faculty prosecutor, something was dropping from her hand. A vial? She was identified from mug shots as Laura Lancey, an employee at Bayside Packers, the canning plant where June worked. As Eddgar's lawyers pointed out, none of this proved she was not beaten; none of this implicated Eddgar, even if it was assumed that Eddgar was acquainted with the young woman, which he emphatically denied. But the sequence of photos - the university produced the numbered contact sheets - showed Eddgar looking twice across his right shoulder, behind himself to the area of the broad pea-gravel plaza where Laura Lancey eventually emerged. As if he knew something was going to happen there. Eddgar's lawyers claimed the negatives had been reversed.

    In the cafe discussions on Campus Boul, there were few testimonials to Eddgar's character. No one supposed he was above violence or lying about it afterwards. He was, after all, a revolutionary, dedicated to undermining bourgeois institutions. But if the university was held to the standards of the system it wanted to defend, its evidence seemed flimsy. Eddgar's speech was just that, a speech. The faculty prosecutor tried to establish that Eddgar had been on campus, aiding the rioters. Two cops claimed they had glimpsed Eddgar, supposedly helping the fellow who tumbled from the police-station roof, but they admitted being several hundred feet away at the time. The police had also retrieved a shirt from a trash container on campus. It had a One Hundred Flowers armband tied on one sleeve and the pointillistic remnants of what the prosecutor claimed were Eddgar's initials printed in the collar years before when he still sent his shirts to the Chinese laundry. The ironies of this bit of evidence were not lost on anyone.

    I knew Eddgar was guilty. Until the hearing, I'd never bothered squarely facing that, but the recognition settled on me with barely a ripple of surprise. But I found myself vaguely hopeful that he would get off anyway, even though I still wasn't sure I was on his side. In my present mood, though, I was sympathetic to anybody forced to confront harsh authority.

    Over the months, Nile and I had found our own rhythm. Sometimes we drew on the sidewalk with chalk, sometimes he let me play a snarling man who could not reach him when he threw things down at me from the treehouse. He still preferred to watch TV in my apartment, but he favored me with questions now and then, provoked by what he was seeing. Why was the boy mad at the girl on account of the other girl? Sometimes he called on me to confirm the lessons his father relentlessly taught him.

    'Commercials are just big lies, right?' 'A lot of them.'

    'They just want you to buy stuff. They're just greedy, right?'

    'Maybe they think what they're selling will help you, man.'

    'They're greedy,' Nile repeated. Greed was a sin that Eddgar, especially, furiously denounced. 'They don't want to help the peoples. They don't care about the peoples.' His eyes lit in space, fixing on some troubled judgment about the world and, perhaps, himself.

    Despite June's persistent efforts to shelter him, Eddgar's expulsion hearings inevitably took a toll on Nile as well.

    'We're moving,' Nile told me one night in April. 'Did you know we're getting another house somewhere else?'

    I tried to be encouraging and suggested that might not be the case.

    'June says.' His head bobbed emphatically. 'Are you getting another house with us?'

    At June's insistence, I made only the vaguest references to my plans. She believed he couldn't handle my departure, particularly with their own situation so unsettled, a judgment that seemed well supported by Nile's surprisingly morose response when Sonny had moved out. Sonny had spent time with Nile only at meals, but she was always kind to him and from the start she had been far better attuned to his moods than I was. Back in the winter, I'd complained about the way Nile seemed to disappear into the TV, immune to any other distraction.

    'Don't you see he's depressed?' she had answered. She was seated, legs akimbo, on our bed, surrounded by books like tribute.

    'Depressed? He's a kid. What's he got to be depressed about?'

    'Weren't you depressed as a child? Isn't that what you're always talking about?'

    'I was terrified, man. I'm not sure that's depressed. Why? Were you depressed?'

    She shrugged and turned a page, intent. But some impulse escaped her.

    ‘I mean, baby,' she said, 'you have to look at that house. Think what that's like: to be the child of a revolutionary, someone who's always spouting off about these visions of what's bigger and more important than anything or anyone, including you.'

    'You mean Nile's got like sibling rivalry with Chairman Mao?' I was, as usual, greatly entertained by myself and could not understand Sonny's sizzling, vexed expression, or why she turned back to her books so bitterly.

    Yet she was right. Nile was one of those kids for whom growing up just seemed to be hard. He was always in scrapes of one kind or another at school and often perceived himself as the victim of terrible physical ailments. Any cut, no matter how microscopic, inspired prolonged weeping. He sometimes wore as many as six adhesive strips on his limbs.

    One night in the fall, when I was alone with him, I had heard Nile padding to the John. I was startled because he had never gotten up before. He had stripped off his clothes and stood shivering. He wore only a huge diaper which lapped gigantically around him.

    'I'm wet,' he said, hardly a necessary announcement. The smell was strong. I washed him, as he quivered, his eyes, dark like his mother's, heavy with sleep.

    'Tell my mom I go'd,' he said.

    During the hearings, I covered my sofa in a plastic sheet and assured Nile that I was unconcerned about accidents. With my departure at hand, I didn't care if the place reeked. Throughout the months June had never addressed the subject with me. She never told me what to do to help, or confessed that this was why she'd insisted Nile sleep in his own bed. It was one more secret of their household, which, like the rest of what I knew, I was expected to maintain in silence.

    The night Eddgar finished his testimony, he showed up to collect Nile. I had heard every word on the campus radio and thought he had done a fine job in his own behalf. He denied any intention of

    inciting to riot, said he'd never met Laura Lancey, and claimed he had returned to his apartment as soon as the demonstration at the ARC turned to violence. He had no role, he said, in the ensuing melee on campus. He sounded equable, the soul of reason. I suspected that much of what he said was true - that he had been careful never to meet Laura Lancey. But his voice did not betray him in any way, even in the moments that I knew he was uttering unvarnished lies. On cross-examination the prosecutor contented himself with the text of Eddgar's many classroom lectures and public speeches.

    'In addressing a group, have you ever repeated the saying "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"?'

    'Of course, I have. That's a matter of theory.'

    'You have called for armed struggle, for violence?'

    'At the proper time.'

    'And who is it who decides the time, Dr Eddgar?'

    The defense lawyer objected, and eventually the senate president cut off questioning.

    I told him now I thought it had gone well.

    'To no avail,' he answered. 'The end is a foregone conclusion. I must admit that was always one of my favorite theological puzzles. Why did Jesus say what he did on the cross? You know the part I'm referring to? About his father forsaking him? Hadn't the poor fool known what was coming? Did his father send him down here with no warning? What kind of relationship did they have, any old way?' He laughed in his usual quiet fashion when something amused him alone.

    I asked about the closing arguments, scheduled for tomorrow, but Eddgar appeared uninterested. His eyes fell to the two cardboard boxes of Sonny's belongings she'd left behind. I'm sure he assumed they were mine.

    'When will you go?' he asked.

    'Next week.' This was the second week in a row that I'd said that. At times, I feared I would never propel myself, that I'd wait until some ugly vortex - the FBI or secret military dragoons sucked me down to a blackish fate. For the moment, though, I used the hearings as my excuse. I would go as soon as the Eddgars were settled again.

    'And your parents - are they still hounding you?' he asked.

    'Relentlessly.' My mother had taken money - her own funds, her
knipple,
saved out of the household money - and bought an open ticket to Vancouver. My father said she had also packed a suitcase. There was only one in the house I knew of, a brown lacquered valise hard as an insect shell, and I imagined it now poised by the front door.

    'Perhaps you should rethink being kidnapped.'

    We laughed. I had, at moments, returned to the idea. It gave me a vicious thrill to imagine my father pinioned that way -between his child and his money. An antique theme. Midas came to mind, although I tended to think more about Jack Benny, one of my father's favorites, and his famous bit where a robber with a gun and a mask accosts Jack.

    'Your money or your life,' the robber demands, and Jack, after a splendid long take, answers, 'I'm thinking, I'm thinking.'

    Driving my delivery route, turning things over obsessively, like rolling dice, I thought I could measure the true probabilities. Each time, I pushed my imagination further along the train of likely events. My father was too shrewd not to sense the ruse. Of course. He'd see it was far too convenient. Far too coincidental. But my mother would never rouse herself to disbelief - no matter how unlikely the threat to my well-being. She would cry. She would pull on the sleeves of her dress, fumble with her hands, follow him about, crying all the time, begging him in German, shrieking and beleaguering him. He would give in. He would part with the money, suspecting all along that I had exacted a price to leave him in peace.

    'It's like I said a while ago: he'd pay in the end and I'd be no better off than I was to start. It's not really workable.'

    'Oh, there's always a way. It's only details,' Eddgar added, as if particulars were not the stuff of life.

    I was seated in the living-room armchair, picking at the threadbare patch where the ticking showed through.

    'You don't honestly think I should do this, man, do you?'

    'Seth, what I think you should do is join the armed struggle. But I'm not so foolish as to believe that's likely to occur right now.' He'd picked up Nile's stuffed animal and his blanket and he put them down now on the sofa, where the boy still slept, oblivious to our hushed conversation. 'May I tell you a story? This is the worst story I know. The worst. I hate even to think about it. But I have a point to make.'

    He sat down on a milk crate we used as a coffee table and paused to hike each of his pants legs, his preparations deepening the mood.