The Laws of Our Fathers

  '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.

  No doubt, that night I dreamt about the numbers. Frail figures, they turned up in my dreams throughout my childhood, usually appearing to my horror somewhere on my body: under a trouser cufF, in the center of my forehead when I caught sight of myself in a mirror. Unlike my father, who wore long sleeves on all occasions, even in the mug of summer, who, so far as I can recall, never swam in public - unlike him, my mother made no exceptional efforts to hide the blue-green characters tattooed on her forearm, a few inches above her wrist. The marks, so distinct, were always remarkable to me - ineradicable and vaguely disfiguring, but dear and special because they were so identifiably hers. I can recall more than one occasion when I was very young when I wet a finger from my mouth and with no objection from her tried to wipe the numerals away. When I asked what they were, she said simply - always - 'Those? Those are numbers.' And when I wrote numbers - scribbles, really - on myself in pen, she walked me to the sink at once.

  As I learned to read, I remember noticing that the figures were peculiarly formed - hand-drawn in a style that struck me as foreign. There were tails of some sort on the fives and a dash across the middle of the seven. And around this age I began, at last, in some awful unspeaking way, to associate the numbers with that large, indescribable horror, that dark fog that lay somewhere in the past which was always the subject of silent allusion in my parents' home.

  My father never allowed any talk about the camps. If something appeared on TV, he watched it with unwavering silent attention. But he made no mention on his own and would discourage my mother with stark looks. And yet the few images I saw - of the naked skeletal bodies, the cyanotic corpses stacked and so profoundly without life - endured as specters. They lived with me inalterably, part of the high tension of my household, which had an atmosphere at all times like a tautened instrument string waiting to be plucked.

  Much of what I knew came from what I'd read - almost unconsciously - or what my mother eventually told me. I learned the few details I was allowed in my teens and largely in answer to my own ceaseless question to her: What was wrong with him, this man, my father? The stories I was told, in the barest strokes, were so alien to the secure envelope of University Park - its streets canopied by elderly elms, its confident persistent values and enduring social ethos of calm, intellectual debate - that I was truly years in absorbing them, some kind of titration of my own experience that took place in infinitesimal measure like medication being dripped by IV, tear by tear, into the blood. And even so they remain to me the very quintessence of horror: how my mother's husband had disappeared from her for good, as they were sorted by gender in one of Birkenau's lines. How my father's six-year-old boy was shot dead right before him at Buchenwald. The inhuman work. Meals of boiled grass. The unfathomable nature of what it means to have survived this utter blackness.

  I rigidly avoided any conscious thought of my parents as the victims of any of those barbarities, and never took account of the mark their experience had made on me. Sonny had shipped literally hundreds of books from home. I had taken only four or five: The Diary of Anne Frank; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Talcott Parsons; Alan Bullock's biography of Hitler. A few lonely volumes, they stood together on the lee end of one shelf amid the board-and-cinder-block bookcases erected along every free wall of our flat in Damon. Even seeing them side by side, I had absolutely no sense of what connected them. They were simply great books to me, consumed in college in hours of isolated reprieve from life's furies. I did not see any relationship between my parents' past and my political passions. I didn't recognize the futile deal I'd silently negotiated with myself: that if the world could be reformed, made right, if I knew there could never be another Holocaust, I would be free of the burdens they had placed upon me. It was all invisible to me. Instead, during those years, I had an unexplained phobia which filled me with so much racing panic that I was always forced to leave the room whenever I saw scenes in cowboy movies of cattle being branded.

  In the aftermath of the melee at the ARC, demonstrators -consistently reported to be wearing the red arm sash of One Hundred Flowers members - had rampaged on campus. Windows in most of the buildings on the main quadrangle were smashed and glass vials of sheep's blood were splashed on the buff bricks. A smoke bomb was hurled through a basement window into Ryerson, the main undergraduate library. It was closed for four days and hundreds of thousands of volumes were removed to protect them from the lingering stench. Another bomb had been dropped down the chimney of the headquarters of the Damon Security Corps. According to reports, the bomber had slipped in his haste and cascaded off the tile roof, thudding to the ground, feet first, right outside the police station windows. The cops claimed he had been gathered up by other arm-banded rads, who carried him away, his foot, or ankle, or lower leg severely injured. Emergency rooms throughout the Bay Area had been combed, but the bomber was not identified.

  On campus and on the Boul the talk for days afterwards focused on how it all went wrong. The campus police announced that Eddgar was under investigation for inciting to riot and claimed that his boisterous, singing quotation from The Little Red Book was the cue for the rocks to fly. But I spoke to dozens of people who had been at the head of the crowd and were certain the cops had struck first, clubbing a woman whose dog had innocently approached the police line. Pressed, most of these witnesses admitted they had merely seen
her bloodied face. No one seemed to recall the batons falling on her. Some said she wore a One Hundred Flowers sash, and others were clear she hadn't. The woman could not be found. Eddgar calmly denied any role in the provocation.

  'How foolish do you think I am, Seth?' he asked when I finally attempted to talk to him about it the following week. 'Do you really believe the faculty apparatchiks? The administration's theories -why, they're actually amusing. I'm not fooling. They paint me as the arch manipulator, the grand schemer with control over scores of lumpen rebels. And yet they want to claim I would stand in public and issue signals to a mob? Does that sound like a well-conceived attempt to subvert anyone but myself?'

  I knew that this speech was rehearsed, that it had been given a dozen times already. Only last week, I had heard Eddgar quote Sun-tzu to June. 'War is deception,' he had said. Eddgar never explained - nor did I dare ask - how the smoke bomber, with his broken leg, arrived under our stairwell. But I wanted to believe him when he denied orchestrating violence.

  Sonny was far more skeptical. We quarreled about Eddgar all the time.

  'At least he's not like the head cases out on Campus Boul saying, "How can I make the world better for me?" ' I explained to her one night. 'He doesn't say, "Let's change everything, but make sure there's still plenty of LSD and lots of cool James Bond movies and someone to do my cleaning." What I think is that he's said to himself, "If I was poor, if I was dispossessed, if I was, you know, like Fanon says, one of the wretched of the earth, how would I react? If I had these smarts, what would I do? Would I put up with this crap for an instant?" And he's being honest when he says the answer is no. He'd want to smash everything that kept him from being equal and free.'

  'And you agree with him?'

  ' "Agree?" No. Not completely. But I mean, I'm more with him than against him. "Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary." Right?' I smiled puckishly and Sonny made a face. 'Christ,' I said, 'why do I have to explain this to you. You're the one who was raised as a Commie.'

  ‘I wasn't "raised as a Commie." It's not like being a Baptist, baby. My mother belonged to the Party. Not me. And that doesn't make her the same kind of Stalinist zealot Eddgar is. He'd think she's a Trotskyist.'

  Sonny always stuck up fiercely for her mother. During her term as president of her pipefitters' local, during World War II, Zora had appeared on the cover of Life - Wendy the Welder - with her acetylene torch glimmering like the Lamp of Liberty on the lowered visor of her mask. She was famous then. But because she was a Communist, and female, she was hounded from leadership and, eventually, from the union once the men came back. At the height of the McCarthy years, Zora had packed canned goods and blankets in two suitcases, expecting the army any day to take Sonny and her to the camps.

  Sonny was cheerfully tolerant of her mother's eccentricities. Zora tended to call out of the blue and would keep Sonny on the phone forever. She would sit locked in the bedroom, even when we had guests in the apartment or people waiting elsewhere. By habit, Sonny never disagreed with her. She was silent. Zora talked.

  'So what did she say?'

  'Not much.'

  'In an hour and a half?'

  Sonny shook her head. It went beyond her power to explain. 'You know her.'

  I didn't really. I had met Zora on only a few occasions. She was a tiny woman, not more than five feet, if that, always smoking Chesterfields. She had one walleye and heavy glasses and barely filled out her shirtwaist dress. I recall being impressed by the strings of muscles in her forearms. A tough bird, you'd say. The few times Sonny brought me by, Zora had not directed a single word to me, including hello. Instead, she soon launched into an account for Sonny's benefit of some recent outrage she had suffered - unemployment, landlord troubles, a union steward who had become a management whore. Small and quick, racing back and forth, Zora reminded me of a hamster in a cage. She screamed, spat words, raged her hands through the air, as she rambled at enormous speed and volume.

  Sonny tirelessly consoled Zora. She sent her money whenever she could afford to and also maintained communications with

  Zora's enormous Polish family - the Milkowskis - with whom Zora, generally, was not on speaking terms. I took Zora with her wild look, erratic manner, and self-centered habits as clearly out of her mind. But this, I quickly learned, was not a view I was free to share.

  Late one night the meeting of one of Eddgar's collectives ended upstairs, while Sonny and I were in the rack, stoned and amorous. In order to confound the Damon police surveillance, the rads would head out from Eddgar's in all directions, and three or four of them came clomping down the back stairs in their work boots, passing right next to our open window. We ceased grinding, waiting for the loud voices to drift off into the thin night. One of the last remarks I heard was someone trying to be brassy, boasting about the oinkers he was going to off on the day the rev came. Drifting on the dope, I found myself pondering the question that life in Eddgar's midst was gradually forcing on me.

  'Do you think there's going to be a revolution?' I asked. ‘I mean, really?'

  Beneath me, Sonny groaned. 'Of course not.'

  'Oh.'

  'Seth, I mean - baby, I grew up with this. It's a crazy discussion. If there was no revolution in the United States in the 1930s, when 15 percent of the workforce was unemployed, how could it ever happen now?'

  I repeated, somewhat experimentally, what I'd heard Eddgar say about raising the consciousness of the working class. 'These guys on the assembly lines who think they love George Wallace? They're like avoiding the despair of their own lives.'

  'Seth, these are the people my mother has been organizing all her life. I've listened to Zora explain to them that they don't recognize their despair, and they've run her out of town.'

  'That's Zora.'

  Beneath me, Sonny slid her hips back so that I was suddenly on my own. 'What does that mean?'

  I knew I was on tender ground, but somehow I felt provoked, probably by her callousness toward my own screwy hopes.

  'It means, you know, no offense, but your mother can come across as a little weird.'

  'Meaning?'

  ' "Meaning?" Jesus, don't be dense, goddamn it. I mean, maybe all these working joes are like rejecting Zora, not what she's saying.'

  The light went on then, a painful brightness. Sonny, whose warmth seldom left her, was cold as stone. 'Not my mother,' she said. I shielded my eyes. 'Okay.' 'Never.' 'I get it.'

  She flipped the light off and turned her back on me. 'Sonny.'

  She shirked my hand.

  Eventually I slept, but about an hour along I woke. Some sense, perhaps just waiting for my bearings, told me not to move too quickly. Gradually I became aware of Sonny beside me, breathing heavily, jolting with small tremors. After a number of minutes, I realized that her hands were beneath her waist, finishing off what I'd begun. I lay there in the dark, absolutely still, not knowing what to do, whether it would be too humiliating if I intervened -or if, as I suspected, that was not even desired. Instead, I listened, as her breath slowly rose, reaching its summit and briefly ceasing as she thrilled to her own touch, and then resuming softly as she disappeared into sleep.

  Hobie's newfound alliance with Cleveland Marsh, which had uncharacteristically brought both of them to the ARC demonstration, had begun one night in the fall when Hobie was at our apartment for dinner. Heading up the stairs to a meeting at the Eddgars', Cleveland had caught sight of Hobie in our doorway, where he was lurking as usual in hopes of passing a word with his illustrious classmate. In his black turtleneck and shades, Cleveland drifted past, then thought better of something and, a few steps above, extended a finger Hobie's way. A.45-caliber cartridge, sleekly jacketed in copper, swung like an amulet around his neck.

  'Hey, Blood,' he said. 'We got a kind of study thing we might be doin’ in Contracts. You know? Maybe you be up for that?'

  Personally, I was somewhat unsettled by my passing contacts with Cleveland. Not because he was manife
stly angry. Leaving aside Hobie, every young black person I knew seemed perpetually pissed off, an attitude which required little explanation in 1969, a year after Martin Luther King had been gunned down, and one in every eight Americans had voted for George Wallace for President. But I'd grown up around black folks; I'd marched, I'd held hands; I'd dated black girls. I knew the churches and the preaching; the dance steps; the hierarchies of the black middle class. I knew what was different and what wasn't. Cleveland was the first black person I'd encountered who unrepentantly refused to look beyond the color of my skin. He viewed me with the sinister, unfeeling look you'd save for a snake.

  Nonetheless, Hobie was thrilled by Cleveland's comradeship. Cleveland had grown up in Marin City, the housing project at the foot of the Golden Gate, and had become an all-West Coast Conference running back for Damon. In the spring of 1968, he had made the national news shows repeatedly, first when he announced that he had joined the Panthers, and then when he was admitted to Damon Law School amid protests from faculty and alumni, who objected either to his political views or to his qualifications. Hobie regarded anyone who'd been on television as if they descended from a higher realm. In this, I suppose, he took after his father, Gurney, who had a treasured row of celebrity photos above his soda fountain, featuring baseball stars, jazz musicians, and boxers. Besides, Hobie's relationship with Cleveland soon took on a predictable dimension. Shortly after the ARC demonstration, Hobie arrived for Doobie Hour with a small bundle which he opened as soon as Michael was gone for the night.

  'Called co-caine,' he told Sonny and me, as he spilled a small white rock out of a test tube onto a pocket mirror. Sonny was always too earnest to really enjoy drugs of any kind. She described the near-ruination of Sigmund Freud's medical career when he'd unwittingly addicted patients to this miracle substance, and left the room in disgust. But with Hobie my watchword was to try anything once. Overall, I wasn't impressed.