The Laws of Our Fathers

  'No, Marietta. Not really.' Was it? For a second I am faint with fear, until the past again returns to focus. 'No, the main thing, Marietta, is that Seth more or less dropped out of sight. And I went into the Peace Corps. The last I heard from him, there was something about being kidnapped.'

  'Kidnapped!' This declaration startles Annie, who has just entered the outer office. The keys on her broad black belt clink as she steals a few steps ahead, surveying the situation. 'Yeah, "kidnapped," ' says Marietta, and humpfs to herself. 'Judge, I hear better'n that every Friday night.'

  ‘It wasn't like that, Marietta. It's a crazy story. And I never knew much of it.' I look somewhat helplessly toward each of them, feeling suddenly vulnerable to the strange arc of my life. The two women, both dependent on my moods, watch me carefully. Time, I think. My God, time.

  'We were young,' I say.

  1969-70

  Seth

  When I was twenty-three and in the midst of crazy times, I arranged for my own kidnapping. I was not actually abducted. It was a ruse of kinds, but in the aftermath my life was sadly changed. One man was dead and I had taken another name. In the years since, I have always felt I had been stolen from myself.

  It was 1970, still the height of 'the sixties,' that period when America was in the midst of war and tumult. The combat raged not only in Vietnam but here, at home, where young people like me who opposed US involvement were openly regarded as enemies of the government and our way of life. This role pleased me in many ways, but it gave my existence a persistent renegade air.

  By April of 1970,1 had received my draft notice and was being forced to choose between conscription - and the likelihood of a tour of duty in the jungles of Vietnam - or exile in Canada.

  Each course seemed unbearable. My opposition to the war was unyielding. On the other hand, I was an only child, weighed down by my parents' many claims on me. Even 1,900 miles away from them and my home in Kindle County, I felt them close - a hot breath from behind - a phenomenon that left me alternately infuriated or resigned. They were camp survivors who had met in Auschwitz after their families - her husband, his wife and child - had perished. My father was almost seventy now, still robust, still full of his subtle commanding powers, but bound for decline. Even more troubling was my mother, a fretful person who seemed to sustain herself by clutching me close. When I was a child, a sensation of my mother's pain was always turning near my heart, and I had grown up feeling an unwavering duty not to add further to her suffering. My departure with my girlfriend for California the prior fall had prostrated her with grief. Actual exile, as my father never tired of reminding me, would revive for her - for both of them - unbearable horrors.

  Faced with the pressure of sorting this out, I allowed the other relations in my life to collapse. I fell out badly with my best friend since childhood, Hobie Turtle, who was a first-year law student in the Bay Area. But my greatest agony, as is usually the case, came from love. The spring before, in 1969, I had fallen helplessly for a young woman - strong, dark, and beautiful - named Sonia Klonsky, whom I had met on an overnight bus trip from Kindle County to D C, heading for one of the first of the Student Mobilization Committee's marches on Washington. At the time, we were both college seniors on the verge of graduation, she from the U. in the city and I from stuffy, renowned Easton College. With her striking dark looks, set amid a stormy abundance of jet hair, her long-waisted, full-busted proportions, and, most important, her air of frank seriousness about herself, Sonny was dazzling to me.

  I had never been in love. In fact, I had never been a notable success with women. My bleak outlook and sardonic manner made me somewhat fashionable, I guess, but under the strain of sustained female attention, I tended to come off as simply weird.

  My relationships all petered out after a few weeks. So my passion for Sonny was a great shock - the heat of it, the puppyish desire to be near, the amazing news that human loneliness, which I took as an elemental condition, could vanish like the reagents in a test tube. My mind and heart spun crazily on the magic of details: We were both left-handed. We both knew the words to every cut on Happy Jack. When we were alone, she called me 'Baby.' The news that I held a spot in the life of someone so fiercely intelligent, so beautiful, so surely destined to make her mark upon the world, clapped home three times a day with the breathtaking impact of divine revelation.

  This devotion, the stuff of legends, would have been perfect, had it been better received. Sonny enjoyed my company, my idiosyncratic humor, my headlong commitment to what she thought was right, my unruly, experimental side. But she forbade all talk of love. In September 1969 she prepared to leave for the Bay Area, where she had been accepted at Miller Damon Senior University in an accelerated, interdisciplinary Ph.D. program known as Modern Critical Thought and Philosophy. I moped around until she finally suggested I come with her to California, a step I'd already secretly contemplated, given Hobie's destination for the same locale.

  'Because you need a ride?' I was always trying to trap her.

  'Seth.'

  'No, seriously, man. What'll we be, roommates?'

  'We'll be "living together." Dangerous words then for a man and a woman, full of a subversive appeal I could never reject. So we had driven west in my yellow VW Bug, in a two-car caravan with Hobie and his young girlfriend, Lucy McMartin. Big and good-looking, smooth-talking and funny, Hobie was a hit with many women, and Lucy had dropped out of her sophomore year at Easton to follow him. Lucy was cute in a Betty Boop way, a little freckle-faced white girl, narrowly made, always clothed in stylish items culled from second-hand stores - leather vests and a short-billed cap like the ones the Beatles wore in Help! Hobie found Lucy pliant, sweet-natured, and bright, if chronically naive, but she was generally overwhelmed by Hobie and his lunatic manner. Behind her back, we called her 'Groovy,' since that was her automatic reply to any inquiry from 'How do you do?' to discussion of the Tet Offensive.

  Entering the town of Damon, California, was much like crossing a national border. Beyond the campus environs dwelled men who looked as if they had gotten their haircuts in pencil sharpeners and women in girdles, but here along Damon's main drag, Campus Boulevard, the culture of the young flourished in a tumbling bazaar atmosphere. The town's transient elements - students and street freaks, hippies, home runaways, and communards - now far outnumbered the indigenous residents, the faculty families, and various grumpy Latinos who had watched as Campus Boul sprawled, surrounding the bookstores and student hangouts and mercados with head shops, candle stores, and the new 'boutiques' vending tie-dyed dresses and garments of macrame. The traffic, thick at all hours with touring gawkers, staggered by, while street performers - mimes and bongo drummers and gentle pipers - did their things, and the Damonites, in leisure suits and floral granny gowns, strolled the avenue among the soiled barefoot hippies, each one inevitably accompanied by a mongrel dog leashed on a piece of string. On the building sides, the trisected peace sign was spray-painted, while harsher words praised the NFL in Vietnam, and Huey Newton, then in jail for supposedly killing a police officer. Appearing often amidst the graffiti in Day-Glo shades was a round-lettered injunction which simply urged, 'Be Free.' Arriving with Sonny, I found all of this, the commotion, the array, the slogans inspiring; I could feel the life of my generation - historical, dynamic, epochal - like a rush flowing through my arms. This was the bold new world, its shape as yet uncertain, but sure to be better than the one our parents had given us.

  On the first weekend in town, Hobie led us to Dionysus '69, the theater-of-assault piece, in which cast members mingled naked with the audience. The next night it was Fillmore West, a teeming environment of maximum amplification, sweat, and drug deals, where amoeba-like colored visuals swarmed on enormous projector screens, and various rock maniacs cruised about with a hipper-than-thou air. Hobie, particularly, loved the Bay Area scene: so many wiggy new things to dig, so many new drugs to take. First citizen of the counterculture, he wore shirts mottled with balls of color the s
ize of grapefruits, bell-bottoms bigger than his shoes, and tinted aviator shades. He'd also grown a large globe Afro, somewhat reluctantly, since he'd been at constant odds with the Black Power types at Easton, who called him a Tom for rooming with a white guy.

  Hobie and I had grown up together in University Park, the only neighborhood in the Tri-Cities anybody might have called cosmopolitan and probably one of the few in America which, during the years of our childhood, could pass as integrated. Blacks had arrived in U. Park during the Civil War, brought by the Underground Railroad, and were quickly isolated through the device of four public parks laid out around the small area where they resided. But beginning in the 1930s it gradually became acceptable for Negroes of sufficient stature - doctors, dentists, lawyers, certain entrepreneurs - to settle on the white sides of the park. This depressed land values somewhat, and my father, always in relentless pursuit of a bargain, could not resist. Thus, I moved in down the street from Hobie Turtle. As youngsters, we had little contact; Hobie went to Catholic elementary school and, always large, was known as something of a bully. It was only in junior high that we suddenly found each other. He was someone else who openly admitted having weird thoughts about science, girls, his parents.

  In high school, we went through phases together. For a while, we were beatniks, appearing each day in berets and shades and black turtlenecks and calling each other 'Daddy-o.' We spent weekend nights in the paneled basement of Hobie's home, eating pizza, listening to Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer records, and debating the philosophical issues of male adolescence, such as whether vaginas, like snowfiakes, were each unique. In college, we'd become mildly notorious on the Easton campus as performers. During rush week, we did our own minstrel show, a Negro and a Jew, pining together in Jolson-faces before a picture of the honey-haired homecoming queen - Muffy or Buffy or Betty -crooning Bing's old tune: 'I'm dreaming of a' -

  Hobie: 'White'

  Seth: 'Christian.'

  We thought we were hysterical. Both Lucy and Sonny had met the inevitable measure, proving tolerant of our strange riffs. The apartment Sonny and I found in Damon was only a block from them.

  So we arrived, and in less than a year I had been handed over to doom. I look back at that young man with his hand-tooled-leather headband, his Sergeant Pepper mustache, the froth of mid-shoulder blondish hair, which my father in his correct Viennese accent never tired of comparing to Jesus's, and feel weak with shame. In spite of my degree from a fancy, famous Midwestern university, I was largely aimless. For a year or two in college I'd had thoughts that Hobie and I would become a comedy act, but I was simply not funny enough; these days I was talking about writing underground movies and had broken all records for repeat watchings of Jules et Jim and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. For the most part, I saw the draft as having rudely barricaded my way, but at moments, especially when I was stoned, I would recognize how large and undifferentiated my universe seemed, how lost I was inside myself. I was liable to fall under the influence of any strong suggestion, acting at moments with no more forethought than a person trying on hats. I knew only a few things for certain: That I was in love. That I wanted the world to be better than it was. Yet my passions seemed powerful enough to light the planet. And now that the earth is somewhat dimmer, I look back with a solitary heart, limp not merely with regret, but also with longing.

  *

  Sonny had her fellowship and I supported myself with hand-to-mouth measures typical of the era, food stamps, and a variety of odd jobs. I sold The Good Times out on Campus Boul and was eventually recruited to distribute a rival publication called After Dark, basically a skin mag, whose cover each week featured a blurry color separation of an unclothed full-busted beauty whose smoky look smoldered above the fold in the vending machines where I placed the papers. My principal occupation, however, turned out to be baby-sitting for a six-year-old named Nile Eddgar. His parents lived in the same apartment building as Sonny and I, a brown-shingled Victorian with a round bulb extension at one end that rose three floors to a roof pointed like a wimple. The inner construction was shabby - the usual marked walls and devastated carpeting of a typical student slum - but our apartment had an ample kitchen and many nifty Victorian touches, including a raised pattern in the plaster.

  I'd found my job with Nile purely by accident. The day we moved in, I knocked on the door to the single upstairs flat, looking for a hammer, and was greeted by Nile's father, Loyell Eddgar, whose movie-star looks undoubtedly contributed to his charisma. He was a slighter, shorter version of Bruce Jenner, an Olympic athlete of the day, with the same long, lank hair smoothly groomed, and a similar Barbie doll handsomeness. I was struck by his eyes, a remarkable limpid blue, which gave him the pale haunted gaze of a mystic. Eddgar, however, had none of a jock's relaxed way - he was rigid as someone taking an electrical shock. As I explained what I needed, he stood his ground in the threshold and clearly would have slammed the door on me had it not been for a mild Southern voice behind him. A pleasant-looking woman in jeans and a chambray shirt approached, her stiff, bronze hair ponytailed, her measured smile reflecting self-control and excellent breeding.

  'Will you sit?' June Eddgar asked, as soon as we'd made our introductions. As it turned out, this was a job offer, rather than an effort to improve on Eddgar's congeniality. June explained that both she and her husband, a theology professor at Damon, worked full-time. Their former baby-sitter, our neighbor downstairs, Michael Frain, had quit unexpectedly only the day before in order to supervise a lab in the Applied Research Center. She was, frankly, desperate, and hoped I could step in with Nile, after school and on some evenings.

  The notion of me as a baby-sitter seemed slightly preposterous. I had no younger siblings and naturally thought of it as girls' work. On the other hand, I was without any means of support at that point, which meant, even halfway across the country, I felt myself vulnerable to my father and his perpetual craziness about money. He was an economist, one of the first of the money-supply experts, whose lifework - his very consciousness - was given over to money, which, as a result, was the frequent terrain of our many conflicts.

  Only after I accepted June's offer did I find out what I had gotten myself into. 'Oh, lad. You're a flippin employee of the chairman of One Hundred Flowers,' I was informed that night by Sonny's departmental adviser, Graeme Florry. We were at the first of what I quickly came to regard as dreadful events, the departmental party, where the grad students chattered brightly and sized each other up. Graeme, a tall ruddy Englishman with a blond pageboy, wore a skinny Jacob's beard fringing his jaw and narrow yellow-tinted granny glasses suggestive of some psychedelic orientation. I had no idea what he meant by One Hundred Flowers or why he seemed so agitated.

  'Ask the FBI, mate, Damon security, the town police. Know One Hundred Flowers well, I reckon. Refer to themselves as a "revolutionary council," I believe. The Black Panthers. White Panthers. Weathermen. PLP. The Brown Berets. Everybody, love. The Red Mountain Tribe. Honkies for Huey. Each little root and seed group, all the various head cases who begin nodding vigorously when anyone starts talking about taking up weapons. A treacherous fellow, that one. Believe me. Ordered an execution last year. Did you know that? Word from some poor devil who was involved. God, I hope you're not with the FBI.'

  I assured him I wasn't. Graeme took another belt of his whiskey to still his concerns.

  ' Someone from the Panthers they took for an informant. Coppers found him in a ditch down by the Bay. Injected the poor chap with heroin, forcibly, tucked a wee bit of powder in his pocket so the police would think it was a junkie overdose. Not give a bloody damn. Which they didn't.'

  Graeme briefly sketched Eddgar's history. He was the scion of Southern planters - his grandfather had been raised with slaves - a background of gentility and greed which Eddgar freely acknowledged and regularly denounced. He was an ordained minister and, until he had tenure, had been a promising professor in the School of Divinity, with a scholarly interest in comparing the teachings of
the Gospels to Marxist doctrine. But after freedom riding and lunch-counter sit-ins in the mid-sixties, he had begun adhering more to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book than the Scriptures. Through his radical organization, Eddgar was suspected of inspiring riots the prior spring, when separate groups of black and white students occupying university buildings had been ej ected by a phalanx of city cops, culminating in the wounding of a university guard who had been shot from across the main quad.

  In those first days, Sonny heard the same things about the Eddgars - that they had taken part in planning the prison breakout at Soledad, that a faction in the faculty senate wanted to expel Eddgar from the university - and she repeatedly urged me to quit. Sonny herself was a red diaper baby, daughter of a labor organizer named Zora Klonsky, who briefly, during World War II, had served as president of a Kindle County pipefitters' local. I viewed Zora more prosaically, as the only real-live Commie I'd ever met, and - in utter privacy - a serious nut. But whatever her sanity, Zora was a unionist. She'd broken factory windows but never staged a prison breakout, never fired a gun. The Eddgars were too much for Sonny.

  'They're into very heavy stuff' Sonny warned. I was unconcerned. For one thing, I had learned that first day, as June was vetting me, that both the Eddgars were Easton graduates, fugitive Southerners who'd endured four years of Midwestern winters. I sentimentally assumed that made for a bond that would keep me safe. Beyond that, I was intrigued. Given the dismal results produced by the political process the year before - the police riot outside the Democratic convention; Richard Nixon's election and his subsequent refusal to bring the war to a close - many people on the left argued that it was time to move beyond civil protests to militant action. In Manhattan, bombs had decimated the Armed Forces induction station on Whitehall Street and the criminal courts building. SDS, the most prominent left-wing organization on many campuses, had splintered over the issue of violence, and in the fall of '69, the surviving Weatherman faction staged the Days of Rage in Chicago, in which dozens of rads ransacked the streets, smashing auto windows with case-hardened chains and going hand to hand with police. In Southern California, Juanita Rice, the daughter of a prominent industrialist and Republican fund-raiser, was grabbed at gunpoint out of her high school by some cadre called the Liberation Army, who held her for ransom. I regarded these actions as counterproductive and extreme, but I couldn't stifle a spark of excitement at the notion of reshaping the world from scratch. Amid my sense of wandering, dangling, the Eddgars seemed to represent reality, life, the thing I still felt was waiting to start.