The Laws of our Fathers kc-4 Read online

  'Yeah,' says Seth. 'I was just curious. Did you ever reach out for June?'

  'Sure. Remember? During the election? When he ran for controller. You gave me that tip. I dug her up. She's in this little burg in Wisconsin?'

  'Right.'

  'Told her I wanted to talk about Eddgar. And I get the oh-fuck five-minute pause. And then she says, "I'm too old to remember that." Friendly enough otherwise. Ready to tell me anything I didn't want to know. She sounded like an old drank. You know, ditzy middle-aged dame, chasing every butterfly dancing through her brain. Afterwards, I get a call from Eddgar's flack. I'm "delving into his personal life." I'm like "Fuck-you, give-me-abreak. This guy's got secrets he wants to keep, let him join the CIA.'"

  'He's got secrets,' Seth says, somewhat ponderously.

  'So you keep telling me. But say what you want, maybe he was a bigger jag-off than Captain Hook, but he's gotten it done now. Christ, he gets awards. The whosycallit. Women,' he says.

  'The League of Women Voters?'

  'Exactly. Twice. Best legislator. Bleeding Heart of the Year. The century. You get him in the statehouse? He's in his element, he's high. You should feature this bird in his office, with four phones ringing and the staff people running in and out, the pols, the interest group people coming by to smooch his derriere. I mean, this is the guy. Manipulating. Plotting. The other side of it, you know – getting elected? Making them love him? I think he really hates campaigning. But the back doors? The back rooms? The deals. The doing. We're talking high, high on that stuff. And he gets his shit through. We got a new juvenile-justice scheme. He's got a program now where the state pays 250 bucks to poor kids who finish high school. College Preparation Awards, he calls it. Day care. Mental health care. And you know, he's czar of penal reform, prisons. Any warden sees him coming, they start moaning, he's all the time in their faces: Job training! Job training!'

  Just as Dubinsky on the other side of the partition explodes in laughter at a joke he's made – probably the most inappropriate remark I've heard yet – Gwendolyn reappears. I rise at once and greet her some feet from the table.

  'Are you done?' I ask.

  She wants coffee and I suggest the bar.

  'What's wrong with the table?'

  I raise a finger to my lips. We bear her packages into Gil's noted barroom, where the lawyers and law enforcers mix each week in a burly Friday-evening scene. It's another gorgeous room, if somewhat dimmer, centered on the oak bar, where carved pillars and vines surround a beveled mirror that runs forty feet above the whiskey bottles. We pile the shopping bags along the brass boot rail below and hike ourselves onto the stools. My explanation to Gwen about the occupants of the table adjoining ours is briefly interrupted when our heavy-browed Greek waiter bursts in, certain we ditched the check.

  'You mean the columnist?' asks Gwen. 'Your old squeeze? He's around now, too?' Gwendolyn's inquired once or twice about the case, because of the articles in the paper, but she's heard nothing of these events. 'Ooh,' she says, 'how cinematic. What's he look like?' She elevates herself on the stool in hopes of seeing over the stained-glass divider to the restaurant. Gwendolyn has a bold attitude toward romance and, particularly, sex. She's made love to colleagues in the Doctors' Lounge. Privately, I regard this as unconvincing feminist bravado, particularly since I've followed her counsel on a few occasions in the last year or so and each time found the experience alien and sad. She has been married three times, most recently to an Israeli doc several years younger than she, whom she was training. She met him, had his child, and booted him out the door in a whirlwind period of eighteen months.

  'He looks like he's approaching fifty, the same as I do,' I answer now.

  'Don't be dour, dear.'

  'Sorry. I'm a little sensitive. Marietta's giving me the business again. She's just biting her nails until I take up with him.'

  Gwen rolls her eyes. 'You're the only woman I know who got divorced and still has to put up with a mother-in-law.'

  I laugh heartily. It's too true. And Charlie's mother was easygoing, a delight.

  'It's crazy,' I say. 'This is complicated enough. Just sitting on this case, I feel like I'm Humpty-Dumpty ready to fall off the wall.' Above the demitasse from which she' s drinking an espresso, Gwendolyn's reddish face narrows.

  'How did you end up in this position in the first place? One way or the other, won't somebody say your decision is based on how you feel about this boy or his family?'

  I explain the circumstances. I was free to keep the case if I wanted to. The week before the trial, I even took the precaution of describing my predicament to Brendan Tuohey, the Chief Judge. The thought of me in a ticklish situation seemed to spark some brief delight beneath the crafty veneer of his narrow rosy face, but he was reassuring. 'You're the right judge, Sonny,' he told me. 'You know the saying: "If you can't tell the difference between your job and your friends, you don't deserve either." Comes with the robes, you know. Besides, if you don't sit, no one in the Criminal Division will want to. Then the Supreme Court will make me pay the bill to bring in someone awful.' He regaled me with a long story about the extravagant expenses the court incurred when the Supreme Court designated an upstate judge named Farrell Smedley to sit on the fraud trial of Marcelino Bolcarro, the former Mayor's brother. 'Did you know, Sonny, that man never met a lobster he didn't like? I finally asked him, "Don't you ever get a taste for ground beef?" And the poor dumb backwoods s.o.b., he looked at me, I thought he was simply gonna cry. "L'il Abner," they called him behind his back.' Tuohey went off shaking his head.

  'But why did you?' Gwen asks.

  'What?'

  'Want it? The case? It sounds so messy.' 'Nostalgia?'

  'You're not nostalgic. I don't know anybody who was happier to grow up. You quake when I mention high school. You barely remembered me.' This, of course, is an exaggeration, but I did lose track of Gwen, like so many others. Then in 1983, I took a routine mammogram. In one of those strange twists, the radiologist at Bethesda who read the film was Gwendolyn. She showed up at my house in person, took my hand, wept when I wept after the biopsy, and promised we would arrive together on the other side of the experience, as we have. Another part of the past I don't much care to remember.

  ‘I don't know,' I say. 'Do you know anybody our age who doesn't look back at that time without feeling they did something amazing, like going off to the Crusades?' I've often heard recollections of Gwendolyn's experiences in Madison. She performed nude onstage in rock musicals and still relishes the memory.

  'You know what it is?' Gwen points a long nail at me, manicured in a persimmon shade. 'It's Zora. You're working something out with Zora.'

  'I'm always working something out with Zora. I'm working something out with Zora when I send Nikki to school in the morning.'

  She shrugs. I do as well, but Gwendolyn has exerted her customary power to upset me. I bundle her into a taxi, feeling low, feeling again that I'm careening about as the captive of mysterious forces and that I blundered taking this case. Everyone else knows something – about me, or the case, or what will happen with it – which has completely eluded me. Dubinsky had his own sarcastic prediction, the last thing I overheard from the next table. He was talking about Eddgar's role as a legislative advocate of penal reform.

  'Eddgar's in those prisons twice a month, looking them over and giving the wardens hell,' Stew said. Then his laughter, sharply nasal, always somehow derisive, pealed forth, loud even on the other side of the partition. He'd amused himself greatly with a thought.

  'Now he can go on Sundays, too,' Dubinsky said.

  FALL, 1969

  Seth

  Jolted by the million marchers who'd gathered on the Mall on November 15 to protest the war, Congress enacted the draft lottery system the next week. Now, instead of years of continuing jeopardy, eligible men would confront only a single night when their fate would be decided. Some would go; some would be free. I recognized the lottery for what it was, an ignoble effort to divi
de and demobilize the young. But privately I was near jubilation. All but certain to be drafted days before, I now had a chance to escape.

  The lottery was conducted on December 2, at 5 p.m. our time. We watched in our apartment. Hobie and Lucy were there. So was Michael. Sonny sat next to me, holding my hand. The local news yielded to Walter Cronkite and a live feed from Washington. It looked like my imagination of a court-martial – a bunch of old men up on a platform. A congressman pulled the first little capsule from the rotating drum. A date, September 14, was read aloud by an elderly colonel and posted on a board behind him. The point of the lottery was to place every day of the year in a random order, which would, in turn, become the sequence in which young men would be called. If you were born on September 14, you'd be drafted first. On the other hand, if Hobie's birthday or mine was pulled above a certain number – 200, we figured, given the many deferments in University Park – we'd be free.

  Members of President Nixon's Selective Service Youth Advisory Board grabbed the remaining little bullets from the drum. They were draft-age men with haircuts which revealed their ears, work-within-the-system types whom I despised. One of them drew my birthday, March 12. It was the fifteenth number selected. I would get a draft notice by April at the latest.

  'Luck of the Irish,' I said, but the joke was bad and my tone was worse. Somehow I'd gotten to my feet. From behind, Sonny wrapped both arms around my chest, just to hold on. 'I am fucked,' I told her. There was no counter.

  The local newscast resumed, with the numbers from DC scrolled along the bottom of the screen. I watched stupefied, trying to envision my future and hating everything in America. In Hartford, two students were on trial for criminal libel for publishing an obscene cartoon of Nixon in the college paper. Mark Rudd and the Weathermen had been indicted in Chicago for the Days of Rage. And the saga of Juanita Rice, currently riveting California, was continuing. The girl was the object of occasional sightings across the state, while her captors issued various communiques demanding five evenings of national TV time. Since it had occurred, the Rice kidnapping had been of irrational concern to my mother. Having heard about my radical acquaintances in the building, she convinced herself they might kidnap me, too. It was, I suppose, some kind of coping mechanism, a danger she could reasonably dismiss – unlike Vietnam.

  In the meantime, Hobie sat silently before the TV, watching the numbers roll. Hobie was as intent on avoiding Nam as I was, but he had a different approach. He swore he would show up for his induction physical in a dress. He was going to claim to have had homosexual relations with every prominent black Communist from Patrice Lumumba to Gus Hall. He also sometimes attached his leg to a concrete cinder block and pulley, hoping to aggravate a high-school football injury. Now, once the numbers passed 275, we knew he would not have to go through any of those antics. Inconsolably jealous, I nonetheless roused myself to kiss him on the forehead.

  'Luck of the Irish,' Hobie said. He did not hit until after 300. The last one to go was Michael at 342 – and him with a 1-Y. Even though he had grown up mowing and baling, Michael had been exempted from the draft for hay fever and asthma. It did not seem fair, but very little at that moment did.

  My mother and father had viewed the lottery with almost pitiably high hopes. They did not find the courage to call until the following afternoon. It was 6:01 p.m. Central Time, the very minute long-distance rates went down. No matter how extreme the circumstances, my father would never violate his personal dogma about money.

  When my parents phoned on Sundays, my father and I barely spoke. He made a few correct inquiries regarding my health or the California weather, then passed the phone to my mother, who painfully elaborated a list of questions I knew she had been assembling all week. With a rush of constricted feeling, 1 would visualize the two of them, my mother holding a ball of Kleenex, her fingers touching her mouth, my father close enough to overhear, but with his head in a paper to show he did not have much interest. But this was a moment of confrontation with his renegade son, a challenge from which my father never retreated.

  'I believe this decision is unwarranted,' he said at last, when I told him I had no choice now about Canada. 'There are alternatives.'

  'Such as?'

  ‘I have the name of a doctor. He is conversant apparently with all the regulations.'

  'Oh great. I'm going to bribe some MD to find something wrong with me. Is that the idea?'

  'The idea is this man feels as you do and will assist you.'

  'Oh sure. What other ideas have you got?' I imagined that my mother had rushed him straight to the phone as soon as he came in from work, still in his heavy wool suit. Beside him stood his briefcase, which, as a child, I had improbably associated with a cowboy's saddle bags.

  'I have talked with Harold Blossman. He tells me his son has joined the Naval Reserve. There is some period of training, then you are free to go on your way. Write movies, whatever.'

  'And what happens if you get called up?'

  'Called up?'

  'You know, they activate your unit. Then when you run away they call it treason.' 'Apparently that is rare.' 'And if it happens?'

  'Then you confront the matter at that time, Seth. Dear God, you cannot make plans for the rest of your life concerning a matter of this sort.'

  This talk of compromise, difficult to counter, tended to terrify me. In my passionate disapproval of the war, I had found one thing – perhaps the only thing – which I knew to be right and which was thoroughly mine. To believe so strongly and not to act on it, to capitulate to my parents' needs, was to condemn myself to a murk in which I'd never find my own outline.

  'I'm against this. You don't understand. I'm against this war machine. I want to resist. I don't want to just skate through so that some Puerto Rican kid from the North End can go die for me. I don't want to pretend I'll serve and let them torture me in basic training and then run away if they're going to ship me out to Nam. It's another form of involuntary servitude, to go fight the war that the defense contractors want. There is one alternative.'

  'This is not an alternative.'

  'Dad, this is the kind of thing that has to be fought. I would think you'd understand that.' I knew this was a vain argument. My father and I agreed that there were lessons in history, but not about who was who. He scoffed at the parallels I drew between our national government and Germany in the thirties. It was the students at Columbia whom my father compared to the beer-hall putsch; the Panthers, in his eyes, were the brownshirts with berets.

  'Your mother would feel that her life had come to nothing,' he finally said. 'You should have some feeling for her. I do not need to remind you.' As I had gotten older, my conflicts with my father were all supposedly conducted for her sake. What he wanted, did not want, was never purportedly in his own behalf. He was her spokesman, her defender. I begged him not to start with that.

  'And Hobie?' my father asked. 'What will he do? Will he run away with you?' My father and Hobie always had a peculiar kinship, on some weird wavelength of their own. My father had the usual Viennese snob's appreciation for high intellect, and he listened to Hobie's smart remarks with a dry, approving smile he never found for me. When I told him that Hobie had pulled a high number, he sounded relieved. 'So you will take this step alone,' he pointed out. 'And when is that?' 'I don't know. Not for a while.' 'I see. We can hope then for your better senses, can we not?' I did not answer. Sonny had come in by then and she stood tensely listening to the conclusion of my conversation. I looked to her as I cradled the phone.

  ' "Zere are alternatifs," ' I said, mocking my father's accent. I had made fun of both my parents this way all my life, even to their faces, never quite focusing on why this teasing was acceptable to them. Yet it was always vital to my parents that I be genuinely American, fully at home here – and secure. They spoke English whenever I was around, and had even given me a name which to my enduring puzzlement neither of them could correctly pronounce. I was 'Set' in my mother's Czech accent, 'Sess'
to my father. This passionate desire of theirs that I fit in was my sole avenue of escape in a home where my father's humorless correctness and my mother's anxieties left me little other refuge. My claim that something was 'American' – cap guns, when I was six; watching too much TV; my irregular sense of humor – almost invariably caused them to yield. Which, in large part, was why so much seemed to be at stake in my decision to leave the United States.

  'Did he have any new ideas?' Sonny asked.

  'Zip,' I responded. In truth, there were other courses that fit my moral regimen. I could go underground. False IDs – especially a social security number – were needed, but it was really life on the run, with the constant anxiety of apprehension, that seemed impossible to me. There was also the more noble alternative of accepting prosecution. Brad Kolaric, a fellow I knew at Easton, had done it and was now in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute. But the prison butt-fuck stories kept me up at night, and I didn't feel my government should be imprisoning me for its errors. Exile seemed my only alternative.

  'Maybe I can trade myself for Juanita Rice. Maybe the Gypsies would kidnap me. Carry me away with them. My mother always told me how they snatch children.'

  Sonny had heard the same from her Aunt Hen.

  'You think they have an age limit?' I asked.

  'They might.'

  'Shit. I thought I had the solution. They could take me to Canada.' I looked at Sonny. 'It's such a down,' I told her. 'There's no answer, baby.' 'Kidnapping,' I said.

  Sonny gave me a melancholy smile. 'I don't think so.'

  'Hey, look, I know what bothers me. It's not Canada really. It's deserting them. That's the way they see it. If they knew I was safe in a real nice country but being held against my will -' I shot out a hand: smooth sailing. More than the government, what I needed to escape was my parents' unspoken condemnation -that I would dare forget what was never to be forgotten.