The Laws of Our Fathers

  Over the years I've wondered of course why it didn't work out between Sonny and me. The times? Did I frighten her with all my crazy passions? Did I cling? Insight, like some sweet inspiration, remains temptingly beyond reach. But somehow living together was hard. The carrying through. The day to day. Neither of us really had the remotest idea how to be with someone else. Sonny's mother, Zora, hadn't lived with a man while Sonny was alive, and from an early age I'd known that my parents' high-strung, suffocated relationship was something I did not want to duplicate. As a result, virtually everything between us was definitional: who did the wash, who made the social plans, how clean to keep the apartment. We fought about it all.

  And some of what emerged couldn't be dismissed as mere adjustment. I regarded the girl I'd been dating as the most 'together' person I knew, thoroughly and enviably adult. Sonny was poised and rigorously logical in all circumstances, while maintaining a warm, frank manner. She was quick to laugh at jokes, if poorer at making them, easy with strangers, kind to street people and their dogs. My principal contribution to her, so far as I figured, was to add a combustible element to a life that was a little too confined by deliberation.

  Yet living with her, I found Sonny full of mysterious, molten emotions that seemed to defy both her understanding and mine. She was inclined to manic spells, isolated periods of zombie-like staring, as well as adolescent attachments: writers, classmates, clothes that were one week's passion and then were never spoken of again. And she was touchy. Criticisms from professors about papers, or even their disagreement with a remark she offered in class, could make her funky and combative with me. Listening to her at those loathsome departmental parties, I was struck eventually by the way she presented herself as largely sui generis - never any mention of a hometown, or of a childhood in which her father, Jack Klonsky, secretary of the bargehandlers' local, had died in a dockside accident before she was two and in which she thereafter had been traded back and forth to the household of her Aunt Henrietta while Zora traveled and organized. Like a sculpture, Sonny presented no apparent access to her interior space. Desperate for any handhold, I would sometimes study her class notes when she was not around, or inspect the marginalia in the books she read, the passages she highlighted. What was I to make of that exclamation point? What insight made her write ‘I see'?

  On no subject was she more confusing than school. At times, she was preoccupied by her department and its hothouse politics, the arch proclamations of her young adviser, Graeme Florry, and the complicated realms of thought she was required to master for her classes. Then periods would set in when she declared it all a waste of time. Philosophy was only about words, she'd say, or she'd repeat an observation of Nietzsche's disparaging the philosophic enterprise. In the catchword of the day, philosophy was no longer 'relevant.' For Aristotle, philosophy and science were one and the same. Now, she said, there were a thousand other fields of study, from psychology to physics, that we depended on to tell us more about the truth.

  'It's real things, doing things I admire,' she told me, 'not ideas about them. That's what I'm trying to say. I can't live like this, talking about imaginary categories or making more of them than they really are.'

  Often enough, as a means of encouraging her, I asked her to digest her reading for me, like a mother bird chewing and feeding this heavy stuff to me in lightweight bits. In order to speed the degree process, Modern Critical Thought required all students to complete a dissertation proposal by the end of the first term, which meant the work began at once at a furious pace. Sonny's emerging thesis concerned a philosopher named Brentano, who taught that consciousness was, at root, images shorn of all abstractions. Sonny was going to treat him as the unsuspected bridge between the depth psychologists, like Freud, and existentialists such as Sartre. In this connection, she was rereading the nineteenth-century German philosophers. One of her passing fixations was a term - from Nietzsche, I think - traumhaft, a sense that all beliefs - religion, love, the golden rule - were but a dream with no provable justification in morality or science. Our lives, Nietzsche claimed, our customs, were really no more than rote learning. We were, he said, actually afloat within sensation and otherwise unanchored, free but terrified, like the moonbound astronauts had been when they left their capsules and stood in space.

  'Get it?' she asked. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were, as was often the case on Sundays, in bed. It was our time of refuge before the forced march of the week began again. Sonny did not dress all day. We ate brunch and sometimes even dinner on the Goodwill mattress on the floor. In alternating periods, we went through the paper and screwed. When she dozed, I took up the sections she'd been reading. In the afternoons, Sonny moved on to her assigned texts.

  'Heavy,' I answered. 'Very heavy. But bullshit.'

  'Why is it bullshit, baby?'

  'Cause that's not how it is. Not for me. I mean all this raging volcanic shit, I feel? Everything's connected to everything else. The draft. My parents. The war. You. I'm not floating. Not hardly. Are you?'

  There was a round window, like a porthole, in our bedroom. Its existence had seemed a typically pointless Victorian frill until a night, a week ago, when the full moon had appeared there and filled the room with light so ghostly but intense I'd found it difficult to sleep. Lost in reflection, Sonny looked in that direction now.

  'That's what I feel,' she said. 'A lot.' 'Traumhaft?'

  'Traumhaft. There are times when I wonder. Do you know Descartes? Sometimes I wonder about everybody else. Like Descartes did. How do I know they're not in my imagination? How do I know for sure there's anything besides me? And even so, I wonder if I can really reach what's outside of me. There seems such a terrible abyss. Even between what I feel and what I can say about it. I can't -'

  'What?'

  'Get out? Does that make sense?' She scrutinized me with her searing, dark-eyed look. 'Am I too weird?' 'Not compared to me.' 'No. Really.'

  'For-real,' I answered. 'Listen, I'm here. I promise, man.' I took her hand. 'This is here,' I said and fell upon her.

  Sex was often the answer. It remains the most intensely physical relationship I've known. Words were the instruments of critical scrutiny to Sonny and talk, therefore, was as dangerous as a game of mumblypeg. In bed, she was somehow freer to give what remained often inaccessible. She was a willing participant in most of the experiments I concocted from a lifetime of unsatisfied fantasies: feathers and vegetable scrubbers; a large red dildo that briefly entered our lives. Our favorite was a tantric exercise we called The Touching Game. Naked and stoned, we faced each other in the dark, our eyes closed, legs folded yoga-like. The rules allowed us to touch with fingertips only - our bodies could not meet. No brushing knees, no kisses. And the genitals were out of bounds; they could not be caressed until some aching point when it became irresistible. Instead, we drifted our hands across each other for endless periods. I shivered when she stroked the skin behind my knee, my toe tops. We would fall, for long pieces of time, into the quivering zone above each other's lips, out of our minds with drugs and sensation, our mouths a breath apart as we trembled on the vapor of each other, of our beings.

  In the Eddgars' apartment, the hot-blooded personalities of the revolution came and went: the Progressive Laborites in their workingman's twills; the leader of the Campus Employees Collective, Martin Kellett, with his sloppy redheaded ringlets; and, of course, the famous Black Panthers from Oakland, turned out in shades and berets and their three-buttoned coats of shining treated leather. The most prominent of the Panthers was Eldridge Cleaver. More often, he was represented by Cleveland Marsh, equally famous in Damon, where he had been a college football star. Currently the Panther Party's Minister of Justice, Cleveland was a hulking guy with a terrifying, insolent look. He was a classmate of Hobie's in the entering law-school class, and Hobie, a notorious sucker for celebrities, was forever rushing into the hall whenever Cleveland appeared, the better to fortify their minimal 'Hey, man' relationship.

  The m
embers of One Hundred Flowers appeared at the Eddgars' for meetings or occasionally arrived individually at odd hours to whisper with Eddgar on the back porch about some intrigue too sensitive for the telephone. Eddgar was obsessed with security. He assumed, probably correctly, that his organization and he were the constant targets of intelligence gathering and infiltration. That was why he'd removed Nile from a local baby-sitting co-op years before and barred me from his home the day we met. Once daily, the Eddgars swept the apartment for bugs. June used a device called a Private Sentry which looked like a voltmeter with a lightbulb attached, and Eddgar backstopped her, plugging a microphone into an AM-FM radio and his TV set. He chattered constantly - usually sayings from The Little Red Book - playing the channel knob across the U HF band or the full radio spectrum, awaiting any telltale feedback.

  According to the rumors about him always circulating on campus, Eddgar was careful never to issue any revolutionary directives on his own. Even the most treacherous orders - to kill the snitch in Oakland or to aid the Soledad breakout - supposedly had been delivered to One Hundred Flowers through the mouth of June.

  Coming and going with Nile or visiting with June to discuss his care, I now and then caught glimpses of the One Hundred Flowers meetings. The revolutionaries engaged in fierce doctrinal disputes, addressing each other as 'Comrade' and invoking the names of Gramsci, Fanon, Sorel, Rosa Luxemburg, and Bakunin, arguing about Lin Piao and China's role in Biafra. Meanwhile, June would slip off with different members to ride around the blocks in someone's car, where communications could take place securely. Before these ride-arounds, June and the passenger would search one another for recording devices, passing their hands across each other's bodies so casually that conversations were not interrupted.

  The only time Eddgar's security concerns yielded was with regard to Nile's baby-sitting arrangements. June-called Nile a 'troubled sleeper' and insisted he be put down each evening in his own bed. I could tell the Eddgars had quarreled about this, but June apparently felt I was trustworthy and I stayed in their apartment, alone with Nile, on the nights the Eddgars were out with their 'cells,' or affinity groups. Eddgar kept a deliberate distance from me, to be sure, I guess, that I didn't learn too much.

  In truth, Eddgar didn't have casual dealings with many people in Damon. He gave his lectures and spoke at public rallies; he carried on passionately at the faculty senate, delivering speeches which appeared to have been borrowed in tone and, worse, in length from Fidel Castro. Otherwise, he was remote. It was something of a privilege if he made any gesture of recognition when I saw him around the theology department. I was going there regularly in the mornings for meetings of the Damon chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War, which was coordinating local planning for various nationwide demonstrations that took place that fall.

  Early in November, I was there mimeographing observations on draft resistance when the machine broke. I sputtered and wrestled with a reluctant gasket, until someone edged in behind me and extended a hand. When I looked back, I found Eddgar. On good behavior at the department, he wore a plaid shirt and contrasting knit tie, and looked almost raffish. Under one arm, he carried papers for the class he was about to meet. He accepted my gratitude without comment, but took an instant to look over the mimeo, still slopped across the machine's canister in a reeking puddle of toner. He could not have made out much reading backwards, but he seemed to get enough and turned away with a wee, telling smile, which, to my credit, irritated me.

  'It's not funny, man,' I said. 'Okay, you don't agree, but it's not funny.'

  I could tell I had struck a note Eddgar never expected. He lifted a pale hand in a remote gesture of compromise.

  'I don't dismiss good intentions, Seth.' He smiled tautly as he quoted Mao: ' "Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary."'

  'But you don't think that's enough, right? Good intentions?'

  He reared back and observed me at length. 'Seth,' he said finally, 'you sound like you're trying to involve me in an argument you're havin with yourself I sensed instantly he was right. This kind of susceptibility, as I was to learn, never passed Eddgar's notice, and he took a step closer now. ‘I understand you, Seth,' he said quietly, ‘I believe I do. I've seen you here, toing and froing with these Mobilization folk. I see what you're doin. And I confess I've thought of myself. I think of all those high-hope little mimeos and prayer sheets we used to turn out in church basements in Mississippi. I'd say that you bring to mind all the passions of a young Christian activist, if you were a Christian.'

  I think Eddgar was making one of his rare efforts at being humorous. Perhaps he knew that I thought of myself as quite a card and was trying to meet me on my own terms. But the remark had an unsettling undertone. I was never much at ease, to start with, when someone else mentioned I was Jewish. It called up my parents' lifelong warnings that my gentile acquaintances would never let me forget this difference. Inwardly, I looked forward to a new world where the need for such self-consciousness would be erased. Besides, Eddgar knew little about me, and it seemed to reveal the abiding attitudes of a small-town Southern boy that he kept this detail in mind. He frowned deeply at himself and remarked that what he'd said had not come out right at all. We hung there, both afraid of the implications were we to part. The vacuum made me bolder.

  'What happened?' I said then. ‘I mean to the young Christian activist. Why did he change?' At the age of twenty-two, the news of how lives turned out the way they did gripped me like a thriller.

  'What happened?' Eddgar asked himself. He walked as he thought and I followed him into an open courtyard. Although it was fall in the land I came from, Miller Damon was lush with blooming vines and flowering cactuses and ivies with shiny leaves that climbed the sandstone-colored bricks of the low buildings with their terra-cotta roofs. The sheer abundance of the place was still strange to me. Tall eucalyptus trees with hairy, peeling trunks formed a jungle line at the edge of campus, their aromatic leaves mentholating any breeze. At the back of the campus toward the Bay, the brass-colored hills burned to acres of straw, broken now and then by solitary live oaks, each lonely tree looking as if it had been placed there to accommodate a hanging.

  'Teaching happened,' Eddgar answered at last. 'Scholarship. Mostly, however, I would be inclined to say Mississippi. That was the intervening force.' He seemed mildly amazed, recollecting the person he now so clearly renounced.

  'Did you lose your faith?' I asked this casually, as someone who's never believed much, but I saw from his astonished expression I couldn't have pried more deeply if I'd asked what went on in bed between June and him. We walked on for some time along the single diamonds of Carrara marble that had been laid out beneath a columned esplanade.

  'Every semester,' he said at last, 'there's a student who by the second or third class becomes confident that he or she has got me. "How can you claim?" this student will say, "how can you claim that Christianity, which hallows the life of the spirit, has any common ground with Marxism, which recognizes only a material world?" But that isn't what Marxism teaches. Do you think Che isn't spiritual? That Mao or Marx didn't believe in -indeed revere - the life of the spirit? The Marxist believes that the spirit can only find expression in this material world, and in Mississippi, slowly, I came to understand that point of view.

  'Slowly, I say. On the night that the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 - on that night, I felt ecstatic. I felt that years, decades of goodhearted efforts had been vindicated, that the world was finally changed. And, you know, two years later, I went back to Mississippi and there was not a thing different for those folks. Lord knows, I didn't have to go to Mississippi to see that. I could have walked down the road from my father's house and seen the people who have been cutting black tobacco in his fields for generations. But I had to go to Mississippi to see it, if you understand me, and I saw. The same little shacks. The same laundry on the line. The barefoot kids, bathin in big tin tubs. No runnin water, save what came up f
rom the ground. Same ten hours in the field, twelve bits an hour. Still wasn't a school for them within ten miles. Oh, there was some talk of change when I asked. But I had to wonder.

  'And I wrestled with myself. I struggled. Viewing that squalor, I would look at those babies, those precious babies, and wonder, "How do I say to you, after all this work, after this great triumph, how can I say to you that it will be no better in your lifetime? How do I, where do I, derive the right to tell you to wait?"

  'You see, I couldn't really comfort myself with hopes for future generations, because that meant accepting her misery, the misery of the child I saw now. And I couldn't agree to the sop of the religious, heaven,' he said with mild contempt, 'the poor received in glory, because after all, after all, it was not just the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus said the meek would have - he said they would inherit this earth. Was he merely taunting them? So that was the question, you see: How do I temporize with this generation? With any one child? What mandate of law, of God - where in anyone's teachings, Christ's or Marx's or Adam Smith's, where does it explain how a government derives the moral authority to tell the poor to languish in squalor, to wait and wait for the earth that is theirs while it is consumed by the rich? What happened to me, Seth, was that my faith, or my conscience, or my moral sensibility, told me there is no logic to this life but revolution.' His dramatic eyes were wide and pale as a wolf's. I was never of anything but two minds about Eddgar. I always recognized how theatrical he was. But as he finished his tale of ardor and personal pain, as he headed off alone beneath the arches of the esplanade, I was barely breathing.