The Laws of Our Fathers

  Tommy looks off, rather than show much.

  'He got under my skin,' he says and shakes his tight, tired face about. When he looks back, he's gripped by a different thought. 'Why'd you do it, Judge?'

  'The mistrial? It was the right thing,' I say. 'Given all the circumstances.'

  'Sort of made my day.' He laughs at his willingness to settle for a tie. ‘I thought I was going to win this case when we started.' 'Maybe next time.'

  He laughs at that thought, too, the same self-deprecating little huffing sound.

  'It won't be me. They can play monkey in the middle with somebody else,' he says and again considers the distance. After a second, he says, 'Probably not anybody. Can't put Hardcore on again. Or the father. Not that I believe all of Turtle's stuff. I don't. I think the kid is wrong, Judge.'

  'You didn't prove it, Tommy.' We've arrived at the moment of candor we both wanted. He hitches a shoulder.

  ‘I got out with my boots on. I appreciate that.'

  I've been so focused on my own fortunes, I haven't considered anybody else's. They're all winners: the PA's Office, even Nile, who apparently will not be retried. Maybe Hobie, too. A fear strikes me: Brendan Tuohey may like this, may compliment my diplomatic style. Then, of course, there's Eddgar. He's still as ruined as he was at the start of the day.

  'I'm glad for your sake, Tommy. It's nice somebody's a hero.'

  Tommy in an ironical, reflective mood just shakes his head. It's a bitter thing for him, I guess, this system. I understand. Practicing, I had days when it did not seem there were rules at all, just random results and rationales composed after the fact.

  'Hero,' he says. 'You know what I am? I'm the chump. I'm the poor so-and-so who just does his job, who goes down to the factory every day and busts his butt and then comes home and gets sassed by the kids and nagged by the wife. I'm just doing my job. That's all I've ever done. "Try this case, Tommy." Okay, I'll try it. I read the reports, I talk to the witnesses. I come up to court. What they're doing or thinking downstairs, I don't begin to fathom. I never was a politician. That's my problem. I don't think their way. These guys have got wheels inside of wheels. You know, they're sitting in the back room with the PA, having skull sessions, drinking single-malt Scotch after hours and getting excited trying to figure what everybody else is really up to, and how much of what people say they ought to believe. I don't know. I don't know about that stuff. I'm just up there trying the case. They think I don't know I'm the burnt offering. They sent me up there to lose that case. I know that. I've known it all along. But I was up there anyway. Trying to win.' He gives me one further penetrating look - someone who knows he'll never be rescued from himself - and moves ahead of me, into the air growing brittle with the touch of winter.

  Then I go on with my life. I bring Nikki home. Near 6:00, the phone rings. Seth. He sounds as if he's in an airport or a train station. There is clatter thrown down from some huge space, drowning his voice.

  ‘I'm not going to make it.'

  'Oh?' Don't think it, I tell myself. I want to reach inside my chest and grab my heart.

  'I'm at the hospital.' He takes a breath. Nile? That's my next thought. 'My father had a stroke,' he says.

  'Oh God.'

  'Sarah was with him. They'd finished their stuff. She went to make him some soup for lunch and when she came in, he was on the floor. He was actually grey when we got him here.'

  'How is he?'

  'Not good. He's not quite dead. The word I keep hearing is "linger." '

  'Seth, I'm sorry.'

  Nikki, at the mention of his name, runs in from the den. ‘I want to talk.' I spend a second shushing her, but Seth tells me to put her on and a minute passes with them gabbing about the teeth he sent her.

  'The trial's over,' I say, when she hands back the phone. 'I saw it on a TV in the ER.'

  The prerecorded, robotic voice of commerce interrupts, demanding more change. A coin rings through. Afterwards, there is no more about the trial from either of us. I realize there never will be. There's only one real question.

  'Are we okay?' he asks.

  'I think so.'

  'Cause, look, I'm a straight guy. It's a pretty short list, you know, what I can say for myself. But that's on there.'

  'I'm sorry, Seth. You caught me by surprise, but I know you didn't deserve that.'

  'I want you to trust me.'

  'I'm going to try, Seth.'

  'All right. Well. I have to get back to Sarah.'

  We both wait, trying to figure out if there is any more to say. But there isn't, not right now. We have time.

  PART THREE

  THE SIXTIES ARE OFTEN REGARDED AS A STORM THAT CAME and passed, a cyclone that blew through, its damage long repaired. But among the era's more enduring legacies was establishing a style of youth, of being young, that's been passed on for thirty years now by example in an endless chain of kids. Whether it's matters of speech - using the word 'like' as an article, or the omnipresent 'man' - or the torn jeans, the shoulder-length hair like Spanish moss, or the hazards of sex, drugs, and rock 'n 'roll, we developed rites of passage of a surprisingly enduring nature. Listening to my daughter, I often feel a little like the American natives who puzzled as Columbus told them he'd discovered a New World.

  Which only goes to augment the fundamental Boomer dilemma. Unable to reform the world, many of us decided to have families in hopes of creating a more perfect order at home. We didn't want children so much as allies. Thus, the sixties became the nineties tied together by the motif of child worship. And as a result there can be no generation more thoroughly unprepared for the inevitable discovery that we've become our parents.

  - MICHAEL FRAIN ' The Survivor's Guide,' May 16, 1900

  APRIL 1, 1996

  Sonny

  On a spring morning, so fragrant and perfect that winter, ferociously present only a few days ago, seems a stark impossibility, Bernhard Weissman is laid to rest. Gathered for the graveside service is a small party, no more than thirty or thirty-five persons, on the rows of folding chairs placed over the soft lawn. Mr Weissman had no siblings or cousins, none that survived, and he has outlasted his contemporaries. He was like Ishmael. But the people whom Sonny knows Seth and Sarah want are here. Lucy has flown in from Seattle; Hobie from DC. Lucy and Sarah both stayed at the old man's house last night, preparing for the visitation, the shiva, which will take place there after the ceremony. Seth was with them past midnight, cleaning, pushing around the furniture, looking through his father's papers, remembering if not reminiscing. This morning, so that the three of them had a final, private moment at the funeral parlor, Sonny took over, stopping at Mr Weissman's to plug in the coffee urns and receive delivery of some trays. Then she raced through traffic to the service, only to find it had commenced seconds before, without her.

  The casket, a plain pine box with a Jewish star - 'the economy model,' Seth called it, sure this much would meet his father's eternal approval - stands on a steel contraption over the bleak opening in the earth. On either side, the grass has been peeled back and the mounded soil heaped over the small granite stone that carries Dena Weissman's name. A few clods have tumbled down and touch the shoes of the front-row mourners, Seth and Hobie sitting stiffly, Sarah weeping with her mother's narrow arm about her. From the distance, Lucy appears as Seth has described her, still very much the figure of a girl, small and slender in a black sheath and flat shoes. Her tiny, freckled face, observed at various angles, is chafed at the nose and puffy with tears.

  Officiating at the graveside ceremony is Rabbi Herschel Yenker of Temple Beth Shalom, who Seth says presided at his barmitzvah. Seth portrayed him as a cranky, fulsome character, but Sonny finds the rabbi's round tones and eyes-clenched transport in prayer to be somewhat soothing. Eulogies are offered by Seth and Hobie. Each talk is heartrending, forthrightly emotional and honest to the core. Neither man pretends the old man was sweet or kindly. He was fierce, brilliant, immeasurably and inarticulately anguished by the evi
l he had survived and the incomprehensible conspiracy of forces which had allowed that to occur. More clearly than ever, some sense of the way torment has traveled between generations invades Sonny, and throughout the eulogies, she, like a number of those present, finds herself in tears. She thinks alternately of her mother, and also of Seth, a good person, she feels, truly a good man, yet, for all his privileges and success, tortured at moments. As the ceremony ends, he makes his way to her, palpably uncomfortable in his dress-up clothes - his blue suit and his white shirt, his tie a bit too narrow for current fashion. The new beard he's grown, which adds an element of conviction to his appearance, has filled in everywhere now but the hollows of his cheeks. He holds Sonny at length.

  'What I'm trying to figure out,' he whispers, 'is if I'm free now, or damned forever.' Some of both, that's what she knows, but he'll find out on his own. He moves off then to the funeral-home limo that will take Sarah and Lucy and him to his parents'. At the curb, Lucy, still weeping fiercely, is hugging Hobie's parents, whom she's known forever. Seth takes his wife's elbow to help her into the car.

  Sonny has yet to speak a word to Lucy and isn't looking forward to it either. No matter how sage or life-rumpled they pretend to be, it will be awkward. She doesn't know exactly what Seth has said to his wife about their relationship. 'Seeing each other,' probably, that wonderfully vague nineties locution. Of course, she doesn't know precisely what she'd say herself. Often, at the smallest moments, Sonny feels as if Seth and she sprang from the same soil. The twenty-five years - an entire adult life in which they did not really exist to one another - occasionally seem to have inexplicably steered both of them into the same estuaries of habit. They each subscribe to The Nation and Scientific American, both crave strawberry frozen yogurt and pad thai. Often some forgotten fashion or event of the bygone decades comes up - the Chrysler bailout, pet rocks, Wilbur Mills, quarry tile on kitchen floors - and they will respond with identical remarks. 'Exactly,' they are always saying to each other.

  Yet overall, there's a distance to travel. 'Guarded' is the word she'd use in assessing the present temper of their relationship, certainly on her side. She's heard that about the second time around. Either you make the same mistakes all over again or at every moment labor not to repeat them. Last month, Seth did a column on two tightrope walkers. They made it sound like Zen: You keep your eyes forward. You believe the rope will be where you place your foot. That's their life together at the moment. Counting the trial, Seth has remained in Kindle County for more than sixteen weeks, but his father's condition, which seesawed dramatically for four months, has allowed both of them to avoid any clear declarations. He sleeps at Sonny's usually, and made a point of being there last night, but his clothing's at the Gresham, where he goes each day to write his column. The paper pays for the room anyway, he says. Yet she suspects he'd move in lock, stock, and barrel if she suggested it, which she won't until she's really sure he'd stay, and that she wants him to.

  Shining black, the mortuary's stretch Cadillac lumbers off, trailing exhaust. Sonny's heels stick in the soft lawn as she makes her way to the minivan, alone. Outside the old man's house, at the top of the concrete stoop, Sonny finds a pitcher and bowl placed on an old-fashioned TV table with foldaway aluminum legs. 'To wash away the soil of the graveyard,' Stew Dubinsky explains, as he comes wheezing up the stairs. His belly, the size of a large globe, parts both his suit jacket and his overcoat.

  Inside, taking her wrap to Seth's old bedroom, Sonny spies Sarah. She's in her grandfather's study, where old Mr Weissman privately surveyed his account statements and brokerage confirmations, locking the door, even when he was alone. Sonny, who has not had a moment with Sarah yet today, enters. Turning from her grandfather's desk, Sarah throws her arms wide to Sonny, her face again a mask of grief. She is a terrific girl, possessed of all the gifts, sincere, sober, if sometimes frenetic with her many commitments, everything from varsity volleyball to teaching English to Russian immigrants. Often, when she has shown up at Sonny's on Saturdays after visiting her grandfather, she confesses she hasn't slept. In private, Sonny wonders if Sarah somehow feels obliged to accomplish everything two children might.

  On the desk, where Sarah was occupied, a toy of some kind stands, not fully constructed. A castle?

  'It's a three-dimensional puzzle.' Sarah displays the box cover. 'We worked on it last night. My folks and I? Whenever we're together the Weissmans do puzzles,' Sarah offers with a somewhat helpless smile. 'Isaac was awesome.' She turns and fits a piece into a jigsawed opening along the parapet. The image of the three of them - Lucy, Sarah, Seth - working here at the roiltop comes to Sonny clearly. The metal desk lamp, with its old-fashioned beetle-shell head and flexible coiled arm, was burning. They seldom spoke. But each of them knew what they were doing and did not care - they needed the union, the memory, the way Isaac lives when they are together. Sarah offers a handful of the foam-plastic puzzle pieces to Sonny, but she has a strong reaction. She could no more touch them than the dead boy's bones.

  In the kitchen now, Lucy has taken charge, giving directions to Seth and Hobie and Dubinsky, who've all removed their jackets, rolled their sleeves. She addresses Seth as 'Michael,' a habit born in their paranoid, terrified dodger days in the early 1970s, when Seth's freedom depended on making no slips. Seth married with that name; Sarah's birth certificate still reads 'Sarah Frain.' The practice seems a little precious now, a boast about the excitement of the past, and yet Sonny has heard herself occasionally calling Seth 'baby.' What's in a name? That old question. She will have to be sure to call him Seth today.

  Sonny asks for an assignment, and Lucy, busy at the sink, says it's all done. She turns only as an afterthought and, when she sees it's Sonny, cries out, 'Oh!' and instantly rises to her toes to embrace her, tugging at Sonny's neck and saying how wonderful she looks. Lucy smells of various herbal scents and feels much stronger than Sonny imagined, given either her size or Sonny's memories of her as a girl.

  The house fills. Several neighbors filter in, a few elderly friends of Seth's mom. Lucy's brothers and their families arrive. Sarah's boyfriend has led a group up from their residential house at Easton. Alert young people, they stand about together, the girls noticeably better dressed than the boys, all somewhat at a loss for the proper gestures. Sonny spends time with Hobie's parents. They are spectacular - warm and funny, wise with age, one of those perfect couples everyone dreams of being a part of. Now well into their seventies, they are each overweight and arthritic, but still sharp. They tease one another constantly. Then Solomon Auguro and Marta Stern, who have both taken to Seth, come in, and Sonny passes time with them. Across the room, Sonny catches sight of Jackson Aires. What's he doing here? She never gets the chance to ask, because the publisher of the Tribune, Mas Fortunato, arrives, joining Dubinsky and a group of his executives, who've been here for a while. They've been courting Seth for weeks, hoping he'll make the Tribune his home paper, now that his contract in Seattle with the Post-Intelligencer is about to expire. In the last two weeks, Seth has had interminable phone conversations with his lawyer in Seattle, Mike Moritz, every night.

  Across the living room, Sarah, who's been summoned to receive Fortunato's condolences, casts Sonny a desperate look and Sonny begins searching around the house for Seth. Through the dining room's bay window, she finally spots him, touring the perimeter of the small back yard with Lucy on his arm. Seth and his wife arrive at the far corner where his father's narrow barnwood shed stands. From somewhere, Seth produces a key and for a moment the two slip inside. In the fissures between the planks, Sonny can detect motion, like figures glimpsed through the trees. She has the wildest association. Long ago, one Sunday afternoon in California, when they'd gone apricot picking, Seth wanted to screw in the woods. From the grove a hundred yards away Hobie, stoned as always, singing 'Sunny Afternoon' at top volume along with a phonograph booming from a window, suddenly spotted them, naked as creation. He cried out, 'Nymph! Satyr!' Grabbing her clothes off the twigs an
d leaves, she ran away, shamed and angry. She wonders if it would work to cry out the same thing now. Instead, when Seth emerges from the shed, he's wearing a plastic watering can on his head and Lucy's laughing. For her amusement, Seth tries it on again with the spout over the other ear. He has almost none of that frivolity with Sonny. It's there all the time with Nikki, but she wouldn't have even known he could share it with a grown-up, let alone another woman.

  'How you doin?' She marks the voice behind her as welcome before she turns. It's Hobie.

  'I've had better moments. We all have.' His tie is dragged down and he looks even bigger without his jacket, the white shirt stretched across his upper body reminiscent of the skin over a large drum. She can smell his cologne, the same scent that traveled with him when he came to the sidebar during the trial. 'Are we on speaking terms?'

  'Hell, yeah. I'm off duty. You do your job, I do mine, that's how I look at it.'

  'Me too.'

  'Mind,' he says, in the same intonation she heard half an hour ago from his father, 'I didn't say I don't care. I do. Or that I agree. I don't.'

  'I heard what you said. I can pick on you, too, you know. I had my reasons and I'm not apologizing.' Sonny has spent little time reflecting on the trial. The principal sensation in memory is one of grateful escape. Nile Eddgar by now is one of the thousands of younger people who pass before her, headed for moral oblivion. There is no figuring, anyway, what really happened. Everybody was lying. She knows that much. Once that starts, you can never tell. For her, the trial is one more conquered portion of the past. In some ways, she feels it was only a prelude to other things: to something firmer in herself, to this time with Seth, and also, of course, to the cautionary tale he finally related to her so abjectly about the crazy events of twenty-five years ago - the 'kidnapping,' Cleveland's death, Michael Frain's disappearance. He says he's tried at times to write it all down for Sarah, as if that might abate his anger at himself and Eddgar, both of which somehow remain alive to him, despite the years.