The Laws of Our Fathers Read online

  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.

  At 10 a.m. precisely, we placed the call to my father's office. The terror that raveled his voice was extraordinary. I realized again how close it lurked beneath the surface of his life. 'Oh my God, Seth.'

  'Dad, I'm all right. Really, I'm all right.' 'Where are you?'

  ‘I can't tell you. They're right here. It's been a little wild.'

  'Okay, that's enough,' June said, beside me, loud enough to be heard. The motel room was dismal, clean but otherwise on its last legs. It must originally have been war construction, a barracks perhaps. The walls were clad at half-height in plastic sandalwood-colored paneling, presumably to hide the gouges. June had drawn the heavy green drapes.

  "They understand that they have the wrong guy,' I told my father. 'I mean, they do now. I finally got them to take me over to the library this morning. I showed them Bernard Weissman in Who's Who. And your biography in American Economists. It took a while to find something that had your son's name.'

  'They have let you go?'

  'Not exactly.'

  'Okay,' said June. 'So he's alive. He's breathing. He's fine.' She'd grabbed the phone. Her voice was hoarsened in a way that nearly made me laugh. After all her talk of Drama School, I had expected an inspired performance - something Method, wholly unique. Instead, she seemed simply to have borrowed the manner of the gritty radio dramas - The Shadow or Johnny Dollar - which were still on the air when I was a boy. But she'd correctly calculated the effect. This was, after all, real life, where the overdone suggested someone sinisterly bent beyond normal restraint. My father was terrified.

  'Who is this?' he cried. I was poised, not far from the earpiece.

  'This is me. This is the Dark Revolution. This is the voice of the truth. Okay? Next time I call, I'm going to tell you what you can do to make us let him go. First thing, you have to listen to the rules. And obey the rules. Rule One: No phone calls over one minute. And your minute is up right now. Bye-bye.'

  After she'd clapped down the phone, my father must have sat in his office for some time, perhaps checking his own pulse until he could re-establish his normally orderly thoughts. Perhaps he stared at his coarse, pallid face reflected on the glass of one of his diplomas or citations. Certainly, as always, he talked to himself. The world, he thought, had ceased being a reasoning place. People roamed like beasts, seized by unpredictable emotion, giving vent to wretched fantasy. Waking or sleeping - daylight was the only membrane that separated him now from the turbulence of dreams.

  But a fragment of him must have been contented and serene. He had spent so many years preparing himself. He had always known he would see it all again.

  June called back in fifteen minutes to tell him they wanted ransom. 'You have money. You can pay.'

  ‘I am a university professor. I am a poor man.' I heard that cunning tone I'd listened to at store counters a thousand times, as he criticized quality, the price, hoping for some edge with which to bargain. With a bitter smile, I had predicted exactly what he would do. And even so, something in me crumbled. There was no hope. 'What am I to pay? How? You understand. I am not that Weissman.' He went on that way another instant before she interrupted.

  'You want to know where your son is now? You have any neighbors with a dog? That's where your son is. He has a dog's choke collar around his throat. It's attached to the fucking wall. His hands are manacled. So are his feet. He sits when we say, he stands when we say. He gets to pee every four hours. Maybe we'll let him go next year. Maybe the year after. I don't care. Dog food's cheap. Do you understand me? Now it's your choice. If that's what you want, you just have to say it. That's Rule Number Two. You tell me what you want. Do you want that? You want us to treat your son like some mangy, flea-ridden, shedding, dogshit-shitting dog we'll do that. You just say. Is that what you'd like? I want to hear you say that. Come on. Follow the rules.'

  I had never heard my father cry before. He emitted a stifled wheeze, then his voice shattered. I bent over completely and covered my head.

  'I want $20,000. That's all. Just twenty. We went into this figuring $2 million. It's fucked up, okay, but we have expenses. This whole fucked-up operation wasn't cheap. We have mouths to feed. We have a lot of people who are a lot of disappointed. Okay? And we need time to make some nice new plans. Now either you help us with that or we won't be helping you. Okay? That's a rule too. Dig?'

  He was crying too hard to answer.

  'No police, FBI, kiddie cops. Pinkertons. No one. Okay? We set the conditions,' said June. She nodded as she held the receiver in the wan light of the cheap lamp. I had sunk
to one of the beds and could no longer hear him. 'You pay this sum and he's free. Subject to conditions: We don't get caught. This never happened. That's how it goes. I don't trust you, you don't trust me. So we set the conditions.'

  What conditions? he must have asked.

  'Next call.' June smacked down the phone. She closed her eyes to grab hold of herself, to find her real life, before she looked down at me.

  'It's going fine,' she said.

  DECEMBER 9, 1995

  Sonny

  The home in which Nikki and I live is a narrow, rehabbed greystone in University Park. The contractor carved a garage out of the cellar and laid a downsloping drive that floods in the winter thaw. Beneath the limestone ledges of the tall double-hung windows of the upper floors, wrought-iron flower boxes hold fall geraniums, now withered in their terra-cotta pots. Charlie and I paid too much for this place and I will never get what I need if we sell, a step I often contemplate. The suburbs on the East Bank, with their stable, well-funded public schools, and quiet tree-lined streets, seem tempting. At least a quarter of the families of the children who started in Nikki's nursery-school program are gone to that safer world, but whenever I contemplate the move, I hear Zora. "The suburbs!' she used to exclaim. 'Better a lobotomy.'

  This morning, Saturday, is crowded. Nikki demands a pancake breakfast and then time with her cartoons. I have to get the car

  into the shop; it's leaking oil again, a shimmering, gunmetal puddle on the garage floor. Walking home from Boyce's Repair, both of us are grumpy. I fret about how to handle the working woman's travail of Saturday grocery shopping without a car, while Nikki fears we'll miss Sam, Charlie's son by his first marriage, who is coming by to take his little sister to the Drees Center for a production of The Princess and the Pea.

  I often say that I had more anxiety about parting from Sam than Charlie. From infancy, Sam was with us every weekend. He is a special kid, even more so to me, because he proved to be the one human being on earth who finally reassured me I would check out okay as a mother. Sam's own mom, Rebecca, is high-strung and still scorns me a decade later as a homewrecker. Once Charlie left, I was positive she'd never allow Sam back into my home. But Sam tolerated no change. He calls Nikki at least once each week and bikes over from his mother's house, a few blocks away, most Saturday afternoons. He lets himself in, sits while I run errands. He makes them snacks. They play at the computer. I find them, both agape before the screen, Nikki seated on one of his knees.