The Laws of our Fathers (42 page)

    'Look, let's not fight about this. I'll call you in a couple of days.'

    'Seth, I want your word that we will have a further discussion before you take any ultimate steps. I expect such a promise.'

    'Yeah, I promise. But something has to happen by Monday. Look, Pa. Don't say anything to Mama, okay?'

    He snorted. Of course not. In her state. Ransom demands. That is the last thing she needs to hear. 'It would be straight to the asylum,' he said.

    'That was great,' said June, as she took the phone. 'What?'

    My father's last remark about the asylum was like a stab wound.

    'We've talked about this,' June said. 'Your safety will never be in doubt. They'll know you're safe at every moment. It will simply be a question of your release.'

    The insanity of this, the debased frantic nature of everything, inside me and elsewhere, swam over me. Eddgar came down to my apartment in a few minutes. It was just as everyone said: he was never present when anything of consequence occurred. June related all the plans. Eddgar sat beside her, brittle as glass, the muscles popping up along his jaw. Occasionally, when something required discussion, the two of them left the room.

    'Everything's all right,' June said. He nodded remotely, so that even now you could not say for certain he knew what she was talking about.

    Out on the landing, there were footsteps, a heavy thump, before a piffling knock on the door. Eddgar had wheeled with alarm, but when he threw the door back, Lucy was there, whipping her hair out of her eyes and sniffling. She wore her backpack. A huge green duffel, stuffed oozingly, slumped over the threshold. Her pillow was beneath her arm. She considered the three of us, seeming to hold her ground.

    'I'm coming to Canada,' she told me.

    'we have your son,' the note read. As in the movies, the message was a collage of letters clipped out of the newspaper and pasted on the page. The words had been surprisingly easy to find. A Sears ad in the
Chronicle
proclaimed, 'we have your size! Sale on Friday.' June had stood over the opened pages. She said, 'Fate.'

    It was Saturday night. Lucy was downstairs with Nile; Eddgar, of course, was nowhere to be seen. Assembling the package, June wore yellow rubber gloves. She and Eddgar were deadly earnest about precautions, even though I continued to explain that my parents would never contact the authorities.

    'Control the random element,' she said. When June finished, she headed off for Railway Express. Sent by air, the package, a small white gift box, would be delivered to my father's office on Monday before noon. Within, he'd find the note and the mezuzah I had received from our congregation at my bar mitzvah. It was a tiny silver cylinder, emblazoned with a Star of David, containing a parchment scroll on which were written the words Deuteronomy required all Jews to speak each day. I wore it mindlessly, regarding it as an implement of fashion, a Jewish equalizer, so that in gym I would have neckwear like the gentile guys who wore St Christopher's medals and crosses. Yet it didn't seem strange that my parents would recognize this as emblematic of me. That thought, unexpected, was the only tweaking of genuine feelings I experienced. I handed the mezuzah to June with the disembodied emotions that had accompanied much of what I'd done lately. Once again, I was undergoing something momentous, but time just passed, things just happened.
Traumhaft.
When the word came to mind, I suddenly beamed. June looked at me oddly, but did not wait to ask if I was having second thoughts.

    

    'So he comes back yesterday,' Lucy explained to Michael at dinner on Sunday night, 'and he just starts packing. I mean, Jesus. "Where's my dashiki? Where's my pic." He's running all over. That's all he's saying. And I'm like, "Hobie, what's going on here, talk to me, honey," and it's like I'm not even there. I'm following him around -' She couldn't bear more. She started crying. It was nothing to notice by now. She had been crying constantly for twenty-four hours.

    'He said, "You better get out of here, too. The shit's coming down now and it ain't too funky." '

    'What did that mean?' I'd heard the story too many times, but in each telling there was something new. 'Cops?'

    She had no idea. 'He was in this like for-real sweat? He kept running to the window? And I'm trying to ask him about, you know, us - Honestly. He looked at
me!
Like I was flipped out completely. Like, who could bother. And I'm like, "Jesus, Hobie, where am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to do?" And it's -' Weeping, she couldn't find words to relay his indifference.

    'Where is he?' Michael asked. 'Does he know where you are?' She flapped both arms uselessly. Michael, for his part, was somewhat better. He still looked desolate and bleary, but he appeared more contained.

    'I don't know. Sort of. I told him, "I think I'll help Seth get up to Canada." ' She looked at me. 'Do you think he'll call?'

    'No,' I said. ‘I don't.' I was well past the point of humoring her. It would be some drive north - honking geese and a blubbering hippie. Not that I wouldn't have welcomed the chance to see

    Hobie before I left tomorrow. Except for the grimy twisted bit between the Eddgars and my father- the direst secret, they warned, which I would have been far too ashamed to share anyway - my plans remained more or less as they'd been. The Eddgars would collect the ransom; I would leave.

    Michael and Lucy and I were drinking wine, supposedly celebrating my last night before becoming a fugitive of the state. We'd lit a candle, stuck in a Chianti bottle, and picked at a crab and a big sourdough bread that Lucy had bought the day before, preparing for a sentimental reunion with Hobie. Our conversation never got much beyond Lucy's tortured recollection of how those plans went awry. Somehow the subject offered heartsore reminders to each of us of the failures of romance.

    'What a trio we are,' I said suddenly. There was a bedtime story I had read a dozen times to Nile. One animal's blind, one's deaf, another can't speak. They find each other and thrive. They form a band. But I always closed the book thinking, What a wretched depleted community. I couldn't help myself. I laughed out loud. 'Love's wasted remains.'

    Michael received my remark with his worn, silent smile and cleaned his plate.

    By the time the late news came on, Lucy was asleep on the sofa. I tried once or twice to revive her, to share my amazement over what was taking place. On Saturday, at the New Haven rally in support of Bobby Seale, demonstration leaders had called for a national student strike to protest the war. Nixon had denounced the campus radicals as 'bums' but the idea of a strike was spreading. Eleven college newspapers across the country - including the ones at Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, and Damon - had endorsed the plan.

    In Cambodia, on the other hand, the invading U S troops were finding few signs of a North Vietnamese presence.

    As a base of 'operations,' as they called it, June had selected the Campus Travel Motel, located down on the east side of Damon, where Campus Boul met the highway. From there our business would be done and my departure made. I was supposed to meet June there around noon on Monday.

    That morning, I went upstairs to see Nile off for school.' Shake,' I said. He grabbed my thumb handover-style, an obedient trainee in the rev. June had begged me not to say goodbye to him. She couldn't endure a scene. I explained only that I was taking a trip and wouldn't be around after school. 'I'm going to send you lots of postcards.'

    'I like candy,' Nile said, somewhat solemnly, as if I didn't know.

    I pitched my bags into the Bug and drove down to Robson's. I had seen Sonny's little white waitress outfit in the closet, the stiff apron and white shoes inspiring a few half-humorous overtures about playing nurse. But it was disconcerting to see her dressed that way. It made it seem as if years had passed, instead of a few weeks. Her hair was bundled back into a net, and a little white cap, a crepe tiara, sat atop her like some nesting bird. She lit up when she saw me push through the door, so that unruly emotions suddenly overcame me as I drew up to her at the old lunch counter.

    'D-Day.' I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans, for lack of anything else to do.

    ‘I know.' She'd been counting of course. ‘I was afraid you'd gone already. I wish you'd let me call. Gus, I'm going outside.'

    Behind the lunch counter, Gus wiped a hand on his greasy apron and nodded without other comment. He was sucking the last from a cigarette. She grabbed her jacket off a peg in the back and walked me out the rear through the commotion of the kitchen. The floor was red concrete and grimy. 'Right back,' she yelled in response to someone's protest, and clanked through the back grate into the alley. The refuse of the restaurant - melon husks and thick freezer bags from french fries - was piled beside the Dumpster, rotting fragrantly in the sun. Down one doorway, a cat sprawled on its back on a wooden step, waving its paw in the sunshine in a moment of feline languor, invulnerable and relaxed,

    seeming to enjoy some memory buried in the DN A of its foregone glory as a tiger.

    Once we were alone, Sonny came up and hugged me, held on just to be close, as if there weren't any time or differences between us. The feel of her body, so familiar, crushed me in a vise of difficult emotion.

    'You waited to the last minute,' she said.

    'Yeah, I've been jailbait for about an hour. There's some recruiting officer looking at my name on a list, checking the traffic reports for the highway, and hoping like hell he doesn't have to fill out all the goddamn paperwork.' Amid all the uncertainties of the moment, this decision still felt inalterably correct.

    We talked about the Peace Corps. Her designation had come through with unexpected speed. She'd be leaving for Manila within the next month. Her assignment was at a family-planning center in the north part of the country. She spoke without notable enthusiasm. It was already a particular place, a job. Signing up, she'd envisioned the bush, the jungle, contact with timeless, indigenous cultures. But the descriptions of the center brought to mind those teeming Asian cities - Bombay, Bangkok: desperation, debasement, filth, an entire population longing for the corruption of the rich. For the time being, she seemed less certain that in journeying ten thousand miles she was going to find adventure or truth, whatever it was she thought she'd miss hanging out with me.

    'It'll be great,' I said.

    ‘I hope so. Graeme is quoting Horace: "They change their clime, but not their minds… who rush across the sea." ' She shrugged, somewhat melancholic. She had on white tights and clunky white Earth shoes. Her coat, probably Graeme's, a black jeans jacket, covered her hands.

    'Guess what?' I said, 'Groovy's hitting the road with me.'

    'Really?'

    'She and Hobie are splitsville. You know, she's being a pal. Moral support. That kind of thing.'

    'Right, moral support,' said Sonny. 'She's been wanting to get next to you forever.' 'Bullshit.'

    'Hey, women can tell this stuff.'

    It was making her happy, I knew. This kind of flirting. Pretending I already had a happy, separate life. 'I'm just a ride, Sonny.' 'What about your parents?'

    ‘I think I've worked it out,' I said stoically. She had lived with me too long, however, not to register the change of tempo. I was helpless as she measured me with one of her dark, searching looks. She understood more about me, I realized, than I'd ever really figured out about her.

    'Are you up to something, baby?'

    'Something,' I answered. It was calling me 'baby' that did it. I had planned to be remote, to guard absolutely the secret, as the Eddgars insisted. With Lucy, for example, I had said we were leaving from the motel in case the army recruiters came looking for me, a silly fiction, since by every account there would be no hunt for me for weeks, until my name was reported to the FBI.

    'Cross your heart?' I asked.

    She stood back, wary already.

    'I'm being kidnapped.' I smirked, in spite of the sick breach that opened in me at the mere thought of the next step.

    'Kidnapped?' She zeroed in quickly. 'What does that mean? What are you telling them?'

    'Don't ask,' I said. 'You wouldn't believe it.'

    She grabbed my sleeve. 'Is Hobie involved with this?'

    'Forget it. It's cool, really. It's a bit of a mad stunt, but it's safe for everyone. Just keep it to yourself, okay?' Now that she had hold of me, she did not let go. She came close again.

    'Seth, don't go crazy on me.'

    'It's the times,' I said. 'It's in the air.' I didn't say a word of blame about her, but we both knew.

    'God,' she said, 'why do I feel so terrible? Have I been really lousy to you?'

    'The end could have been better. But it's like the stories I make up. It's usually the case.'

    'I like your stories,' she said, nestled against me.

    Here we were again, like that cry lost in the fog: I want to be with you; I can't. I had no understanding of what tethered her inside herself, only that she was straining against it, and that, however faintly, I was not completely without hope.

    'Twenty-five years from now you may feel real bad about this.'

    ‘I feel real bad now.' She took a deep breath. 'Call me as soon as you're safe. You promise?' 'For sure.'

    ‘I want to know just where you are.'

    'In case you change your mind?'

    She smiled faintly.

    'It's not too late,' I said.

    ‘I know.' It was the closest she had been yet.

    'I'll be waiting.' I walked on that observation. I had my movie dream that I'd hear her racing up from behind. But she didn't. Not yet. I turned to check, to wave. The best I got was that she lingered amid the garbage cans in a patch of sun, and tapped the spot over her heart.