The Company You Keep (29 page)

“Never encountered Sinai or Lurie?”

“Not to speak of, no. I mean, I might have seen Sinai talking somewhere. But nothing past that.”

Osborne shifted, and I caught the edge of a light leather holster inside his open collar.

“Then you were in Vietnam from—”

“Sixty-three to ’65.”

“Two tours of duty?”

Pause. “One and a half. I came back on a medical evacuation.”

I pushed one more time. “Injured?”

Pause. Then, in a tone that showed this was his last answer, he said simply: “I took a bullet at Songbe. Phuoc Long Province. I got a medical discharge in December 1965, and came back to go to college.”

I answered quickly, changing the terrain. “That would have been quite an adjustment, coming back.”

Pause. “You could say. Convinced me to go into FBI work.”

“And undercover.”

“And undercover.”

“What convinced you?” I couldn’t resist asking. There were no more than three answers to this question, all of them bullshit, and which one this man subscribed to would be telling.

More telling than I expected, because it was a new answer altogether. “Where you fell on the question of Vietnam, Mr. Schulberg, didn’t depend on what you believed.”

“No?” I watched him now with new attention.

“No. People tell you that, I advise you to ignore them. Where you fell on the question of Vietnam depended on the company you kept, nothing more, nothing less. Your friends went, your neighbors went, your family went—then you went too.”

“That’s it? No politics, ethics, beliefs?”

“No, sir. Good people fell on both sides of the question of Vietnam. That’s the side I was on, and I’m not about to apologize for it now.”

I absorbed that. “And today?”

Osborne answered evenly, saying, I realized, something that sounded very simple, but which required a very complicated process to get to.

“Today, the question’s over, so it doesn’t matter anymore. Time only goes one way, Mr. Schulberg, and it happens to be in the direction away from the war in Vietnam, thank God.”

Pause, and I, sensing that time was going only one way, shifted the conversation slightly.

“I would have imagined that Jason Sinai was big business for you all just now.”

“Well, of course the Traverse City station’s following what’s going on. The manhunt is national, though—we don’t see any particular reason Sinai should return here.”

“Do you know what he’s doing?”

“Sure. That’s no mystery.”

I said nothing, and after a moment the man went on. “He’s saving his freedom, Mr. Schulberg. That’s what he’s been doing for the past twenty-five years; it’s what he’s doing now.”

“Saving his freedom by abandoning his daughter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t find that hard to believe?”

Pause. “No, sir. Lots of revolutionaries have children. You’re talking about people who’ve abandoned their families, their professions, their lives, for what they believe. Jason Sinai, his father died while he was underground, and Sinai never even contacted his family. His father
died
while he was underground. That didn’t make him surface. Now he has to lose his daughter. That won’t make him surface either.”

Osborne shrugged, as if he wished he could change the fact of life he’d just told me. The shrug, I felt, which was the only occurrence of this gesture in the whole conversation, was curious. Then I tried again.

“I see a difference between an eighteen-year-old who’s prepared to leave his parents and a thirty-nine-year-old abandoning his only daughter.”

“Forty-six, Mr. Schulberg. Jim Grant was thirty-nine. Jason Sinai’s forty-six. But I take your point.” Osborne thought for a time. Then he went on, in what seemed to me a very considered tone. “I myself can’t understand how someone could abandon their child for what they believe. I’d certainly sell out everything I believe for my daughter. Someone who could do that—that seems to me a very dangerous thing.”

Osborne paused for thought now, a long pause that I didn’t interrupt.

“However, these are dangerous kinds of people. I’ll tell you, Mr. Schulberg, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the work I’ve done, it’s that there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who believes in what they’re doing. Most of us who went to Vietnam—no way we were cold warriors. No way we were going out of some kind of patriotic fervor. We were going to share the danger that our friends and neighbors couldn’t escape, and I doubt you’ll find one in ten who thought beyond their duty. But folk like Sinai—it’s real different, Mr. Schulberg. They were true believers, and that’s why I was prepared to take an undercover assignment against them. You know that when twenty FBI agents came to Jeff Jones’s door to arrest him after fifteen years underground, fifteen years of terrorist activity, they found him inside with a four-year-old child? What’s the difference between that and the Branch Davidians going to war with children inside their compound? To my way of thinking, I’ve been fighting the same kind of threat all my life.”

I couldn’t let this pass. “You don’t see a difference between the radical
left during a brutal, undeclared war and the radical right during the most democratic period in American history?”

“No, sir. I see true believers who don’t think that American democracy is good enough for them. Don’t forget, Mr. Schulberg, it was Democrats who got us into Vietnam, and Republicans who got us out. So where’s the failure of democracy there?”

“Well, the war
was
unconstitutional, Mr. Osborne.”

“And millions of people told the government that without becoming federal fugitives. Jason Sinai, David Koresh, what’s the difference? Let me tell you, Mr. Schulberg: one thinks he’s saving the Constitution from the government, the other that he’s saving the government from the Constitution.”

“One holes up, armed, in a compound, and starts shooting at the FBI, that’s one difference. When the FBI came after Jeff Jones, he surrendered.”

“Question of circumstances. Who was it that said, ‘If it takes fascism to stop the war, then let’s have fascism?’ And don’t forget that Sinai, Lurie, and Solarz—like Boudin, Gilbert, and Clark—are accessories to murder of policemen.”

Quickly, I answered. “Let’s not confuse Weather and what happened after Weather.”

And now Osborne nodded. “I knew you were going to say that. But all these people were in Weather. You know, and I know, that if they hadn’t killed themselves, the town house bombers were going to take action against human targets. Excuse me.”

To my disappointment, now Osborne rose to greet two women as they approached the table, one a trim middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair, the other a tall young woman in shorts and a tank top. The younger one gave me the sudden impression of a swan, but aware of her father’s gaze on me, I was careful not to stare. John Osborne greeted both with a kiss, then turned to me, who had by now risen too.

“My wife, Marianne. And my daughter Rebeccah. I’m afraid I’m going to have to excuse myself now, Mr. Schulberg.”

The introductions gave me the chance to reach my hand out to the daughter.

“Oh, hi. I enjoyed your piece on Jason Sinai.” I could see the line of her ribs just above the low neckline of her T-shirt. Her hand, when she shook mine, thanking me, clearly without the faintest idea who I was, was slim and dry.

“Well, I hate to ask too much, but I’d sure like to continue this conversation, Mr. Osborne.” I reached over to shake his hand. “Can I stay in touch?”

“Well…” Osborne, clearly, had the disinclination of country folk to say no. “I’ll be back to Traverse City tomorrow afternoon.”

“Maybe I could come by on Monday?”

He answered hesitantly. “If you like. I don’t have much more to say.”

I told him I’d come by in any case, then watched curiously as the family walked out.

It wasn’t the first time that I had been shocked by how reasonable, educated, and thoughtful people on the right could be. I’d noticed the fact before: conservatives of a certain kind could, if not agree, at least understand people on the left, whereas leftists generally feel they have a monopoly on the truth. But it was an unusually strong experience of that shock. Then I brought my mind back to my real work.

Was this, then, trail’s end? Was there nothing to learn in Michigan?

I would, I decided, stay around till Monday—take a look around Ann Arbor, where Sinai had, after all, started his radical career. On Monday I’d go up to Traverse City and try one more time to get something out of Osborne. If that failed, well then, I’d go home.

Though somehow I didn’t see myself going back to Albany, all of a sudden.

2.

Ann Arbor itself, I’m sorry to say, was a big disappointment. I’m not sure quite what I was expecting. Hippies, maybe, or an antiwar demonstration. What I did find failed to live up to its onetime status as epicenter of the youth movement. An orderly, pretty town, filled with restaurants and friendly midwesterners. Those who looked something other than out of
Leave It to Beaver
did so by virtue of being pierced in more places than I would have thought possible—and these were only the places I could see—while on campus, either summer school was in session or there was a casting call for a new installment of
Girls Gone Wild
, for the concentration of tall blond women with perfect legs showing out of short shorts defied belief.

Sitting on the steps of a vast library, I half closed my eyes and tried to imagine what this had looked like when John Osborne, Jason Sinai, and Mimi Lurie had all been on campus. What would there have been? Most kids would have been dressed in, say, jeans and T-shirts; the girls in tank tops or Indian cotton prints, the boys often shirtless. There’d also have been well-dressed, clean-cut young men going in and out of the ROTC building, although by Jason’s time even these would have been growing out their hair and sideburns. With them might have been women in not-too-short minidresses and bouffant hairstyles—the silent majority, Agnew had called these ones. Then there’d have been freaks: white kids with Afros or long straight hair, purple people, hippies, yippies. There’d have been Black Panthers in leather and black berets. Girls in colored silk, hip-huggers, sandals. There’d have been booths set up: people selling
Rat
or
Liberation
, or
New Left Notes.
There’d have been dope: kids sitting cross-legged in small groups, passing a joint. There’d have been guitars. I opened my eyes again on the quiet, hot August day on campus and watched a Campus Ministry of Christ booth being set up.

Finally, terminally bored, I registered in a Days Inn, had dinner in an Italian restaurant, and that evening wandered downtown, looking for a jazz bar I’d seen advertised in a local paper. Even in the evening, the town seemed sunk in a heat-induced lassitude, air so hot that it rippled above the sidewalk. For a time I wandered, unable to find the bar. And as if finding the damn place was the whole reason I had come to this town, frustration began to mount in me.

I was aware that I was losing focus, but I just didn’t know what else to do. There was no manhunt after Jason that I could follow. The battle for his daughter was being fought in New York City. There was just no
entrance
into the story, I thought with sudden clarity. For days, all I had
been doing was looking for a way back in, like a crack addict trying to regain his original high. And yet I was morally certain a story was there.

Bitterly, I felt how close I’d been to it, sitting in Saugerties with Jim Grant. Walking aimlessly, smoking endlessly, a deep weight defined itself in my chest. I had been right there, right on top of this story, and I’d let it slip away. Now what? I was supposed to forget it and let my pompous, smug editor reassign me elsewhere?

For a long time I wandered through the hot night, lost in these thoughts. And as the sense of my rootlessness grew, so did a depression. At last, more by chance than design, I found myself in front of the Del Rio, the bar I’d seen advertised, and a small and not laudable decision to get drunk crystallized in me.

When I entered the bar, I found that most of the town had had, apparently, that same idea. Still, it seemed a pretty good crowd—no one seemed about to break out into the Michigan fight song, or tell me to have a good day, or call me by my first name, if for no other reason than because they were all paying serious attention to the band. I elbowed my way through the crowds to the corner of the bar, then waited a long time for the bartender, a middle-aged woman with black hair, to make her way over. When she did, I ordered a double scotch and soda. It was busy enough that I drank it quickly, hoping to catch the bartender again while she worked my end of the bar. Although the strategy seemed to annoy her—she seemed, in fact, easily annoyed, as if she rather resented that she had to serve drinks in the first place—it was successful enough to leave me drinking my second double when she moved off down the bar and I turned to the band.

A bald man, with a fringe of white hair, on an electric keyboard, a three-piece backup, all deeply into a long improvisation on a bluesy theme. And the crowd was not bad either: slowly, feeling the booze arriving in my brain in little increments of relaxation, I observed that it was an unusually pleasant-looking group of people, all clearly here for the music, for there was virtually no talking going on. To my great surprise I had even begun to enjoy myself—so much so that as the band wound down the song and announced a short break over the sudden surge of applause, I felt real disappointment.

The clapping died down and was replaced by a wave of conversation, which threw me again into loneliness. Time, I thought with disappointment, to leave: I didn’t feel like being the only person drinking alone in a college-town bar. And perhaps I would have left had I not suddenly recognized a long-necked woman sitting at a table with a man I couldn’t see. The man’s arm was around her bare shoulders, and she was evidently listening, then laughing.

It was, of course, Osborne’s daughter.

Now I had a chance to look at her at length, and what I had suspected at the café turned out to be truer than I cared to admit. Her head, a highly oval-shaped object, was facing down at an angle while she listened to the man with her, and sat at the end of a neck that, it seemed to me, was so long that it literally curved up to balance it. Her hair, back in a tight ponytail, was blond, and seemed to have a life of its own, so perfectly did it hang over her neck. The skin of her neck was of a paleness that was nearly translucent and blended into bare shoulders that sloped under her neck, showing one bra strap under her sleeveless silk shirt, which was white. Farther down the neckline, visible in contour under the shirt, her breasts sank heavily.