You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  The Hudson was on his left, so he was walking north. It was 11 a.m., thereabouts, because the sun was high in the sky, heading for its apogee, and behind him. The photographer was therefore north of him, shooting into the sun, which can only mean one thing: it was not a posed picture. Otherwise, the photographer would have put the sun behind himself. Now how did that happen? Maybe he asked my grandfather for a shot, and my grandfather said no. Maybe my grandfather had a reputation, and the photographer knew there was no point in asking. Thus he’d taken the opportunity that presented itself and shot the image against the sun before my grandfather noticed he was there. No doubt he’d shot several frames, and in the one that got printed, my grandfather was looking up with an expression of surprise, and annoyance, tempered by the fact that he had been so surprised, and annoyed, so many times before.

  By now, I’ve been at my desk for a couple-three hours straight. Madame—which is how I’ve come to think of my roommate—has been snoring musically; my neck is aching, and my blood is screaming for nicotine. Still, I stay outside only long enough for a smoke and a mini, then I’m back. Now, next to the picture of my grandfather, I launch my iData dBase.

  But I don’t go to anything to do with my assignment for the New York Times.

  Instead, I go right back to the beginning, the very first document in the very first green folder.

  It is a birth certificate from Mt. Morris General Hospital, August 5, 1906, in the name of Yankel Aaron Sinai, 5 pounds, 4 ounces, born on the stroke of midnight.

  Seeing I don’t know what I’m doing it is, it seems to me, as good a place to start as any.

  6.

  I cannot blame my Aunt Maggie for the fact that my couple-three days in jail turns into three-four weeks.

  I want to, but I can’t.

  For one thing, the actual original charge—refusal to name my source—was indeed settled in a couple-three days, not because of Maggie’s fine legal work, but because my secret source turned out to have much more of a sense of obligation to me than I had had to her, when, just after we had told each other we loved each other, I had promptly left to cover Operation Cast Lead for the Economist. In effect, she lost her job at the Department of Defense in order to get me out of jail, which was, when you think of it, moving.

  I am moved. More than that. I find it sexy as hell, and more than a few of my nights in jail, listening to the Madame snore, are spent imagining just how I will show her how sexy I find it.

  For another thing, it is my fault—my second contempt charge—that I was there for so long, for His Honor Nathan Aronson was a vindictive little bastard and made me serve out nearly the whole charge.

  And for a third, I didn’t actually mind being there. I met Judy Clark, who had been transferred from Bedford Hills to serve out the end of her seventy-five to life in something a little kinder than she had known before, and Judy, who had known my father and his little band of brothers well in the day, had a lot of interesting things to tell me. I had a lot of visitors. Danny and Maggie came often, and I spoke to them at length—at real length, as you will see later, and learned a great deal from them and about them. So did my half-sister, Beck, and her whackjob husband Ben, who may be about the biggest dork I’ve ever met but whose work I knew well—he’s the reporter who smoked out my dad in the first place—and they, too, had a lot to tell. So much that I started recording them all and running their interviews through WordRec and then dBasing them right along with everything else in Jack.Sinai, just like I would an interview.

  And then, I had my work. In four weeks I had catalogued and read every piece of my grandfather’s study and I knew, I felt, his life just about as well as he knew it himself.

  So to speak. I have a lot to say about that.

  And finally, let us bear in mind the fact that Beacon Correctional Facility is a fairly pleasant place to be, at least, the minimum-security wing. Everyone wears these orange jump suits which can be quite flattering. My friendly local guard, who made a close to a hundred dollars for every day I was in jail, kept me in bourbon singles and even, a few times, baked me some marijuana brownies. There were plenty of cigarettes. And last, but by no means least, was this girl from Miami who had performed an act of civil disobedience at the School of the Americas protest and was serving six months. She was interesting, seeing my original contract with the Times had me covering exactly that same protest in a few months, and in fact, she was more than interesting, she was delicious, with a funny twisted smile and white-skinned shoulders that sloped down into what may have been the most perfect pair of breasts I’ve ever seen, incredibly and increasingly perfect, like a story, as you slowly unzipped her orange jumpsuit and let yourself see, ever so slowly, more and more of them, and we made each other climax many, many times during those three weeks which, after my long term in Saudi, was more than a little welcome, more than a little.

  Downside: I put on some weight.

  It was a fairly remarkable series of accidents, you’ll admit, and one that, in the end, I came to think of as just what I needed. Nor was I in any way uptight. The only thing I cared about was that I be out by April 15 which was, I knew, the date of the annual commemoration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade at the Borough of Manhattan Community College—the exact ceremony to which my grandfather had been walking along the Hudson, that day in 1995, the last spring of his life.

  It was also my next assignment for the Times, but I didn’t think about that. I planned to be there, and I will be honest, if I had had to, I was planning to walk out of the jail for it.

  See, by then I knew a great deal about that day. I knew a great deal indeed—including that, on April 15, 1995, I had been there too.

  Which perhaps explains something.

  Perhaps.

  Explains why, over my four weeks at Beacon Correctional, I did not fulfill my contract for the New York Times, did not write an autobiographical piece about my life as the daughter of an icon of the American left—yeah yeah, I got it: Daughter of the Left: my Life as Jason Sinai’s Daughter, my agent is upgrading his kids’ summer plans at the very name of it—but instead catalogued my grandfather’s study, following each name from each piece of correspondence—Dmytryk; Sanford; Odlum; Scott; Kazan; Schulberg; Dassin—through labyrinthine google searches, through encyclopedias and histories, through police records and memoirs; why, I spent hours each day on Skype with Maggie and Danny and my half-sister Beck and Ben and Molly, even going so far as to contact Mimi Lurie herself, Sinai’s first love from the days and Beck’s mother, not to mention all kinds of other members of the cast of characters from the historical soap opera of the Sinai family, some of whom played very obscure parts indeed.

  The thing is, April 15, 1995, was turning out to be a big day. A day when very, very many more things happened than any of the people involved ever understood. Anyone, that is, until I began looking at that photograph of my grandfather, and trying to understand what was behind that look in his eyes.

  Tintin had nothing on me.

  Sinai even FaceTimes me, his face popping up, though he could not know that, next to the picture of his father and watching him—his thinning face and hair, his unexpectedly blue eyes—for the first time I can see the resemblance.

  “Doll, what are you actually up to?”

  “Hi, Daddy. How are you? Everything well? I’m fine, thanks. Great to catch up. Sorry you’re dying of a disease you kept secret from me for the past ten years. Speak soon, okay?”

  “Sweetheart. Mimi says you called.”

  “Aunt Mimi? That lovely old lady in Michigan? Sure I call, regular as clockwork. I like to check up that she’s taking her Geritol and seeing her doctor regular and all.”

  That made him laugh.

  “Okay, doll. Now tell me.”

  I did, in a way—not that he got it. “Dad, is it right that we were at the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Memorial in 1995?”

  Now there’s a long pause—long enough for me to launch WordRec and route the c
all right into it.

  “How do you know?”

  “Does the name Walt Arden say anything to you? Or Bradford Flanagan? They were there.”

  “Ye-es. How do you know about them?”

  “Know about them? I know them. I’ve got about ten hours of tape on them.”

  “Jesus, Iz. What are you doing? Investigative journalism on your own life?”

  Now it was me who paused. I hadn’t quite put it to myself that way, and that he did perfectly illustrates why my father is such a pain in the ass.

  “Listen, Pops. I’m asking the questions.”

  And Sinai sighs this little sigh of his which he has been sighing at me all my life.

  “Yes, I took you there. I wanted you to see my father. It was perhaps foolish.”

  “Perhaps?”

  “Well look. Imagine my position.”

  And he was off, like always, he talking, I listening, and as I was listening, I was running through my iData transcripts from Walt Arden, and Bradford Flanagan, and filling in details, and making notes.

  Watched, of course, by the picture of my grandfather, looking in annoyed, unsurprised surprise at a camera on the walk next to the Hudson River, flood tide beside him, sun behind.

  And, Jesus Christ, I am understanding as Sinai talks, me in front.

  Yes, I’ll explain.

  On April 13th, His Honor Nathan Aronson exercises his benevolent discretion, in response to the seventh petition from Aunt Maggie, and commutes the remainder of my contempt sentence.

  On April 14th, after promising Jessie to be up during visiting hours over the weekend, which I of course know I’m never going to do, and bidding a fond adieu to the Madame as well as introducing her to the idea of sleep apnea, and leaving a generous tip for my Myeashea though I have paid her a clean twenty-five hundred dollars by now, I walk out into a Hudson Valley spring day, the sky a depthless blue, the trees coming into life, and find Uncle Danny waiting to take me back to the city—to be precise, back to Bedford Street.

  And on April 15th, at 11:00, I am walking next to the Hudson River, the spring sun declined just behind me, the neap tide lapping the edge of the walkway, the river pregnant beyond belief.

  In a few minutes I will go on up, as my grandfather did, to the Borough of Manhattan Community College where the 75th Annual Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade commemorative ceremony is about to take place.

  When my grandfather had gone, he had been one of a couple dozen or so surviving Lincoln Brigade members.

  Today there were of course almost none left, but there would be four generations of their descendants.

  I cannot know where exactly my grandfather was photographed. But at a certain point I stop and turn in a slow circle, watching the path, the water, pregnant beyond belief, the Jersey skyline, the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, the Verrazano Narrows with the span of the bridge, and the buildings of downtown New York among which, to be accurate, I have to try to imagine the World Trade Center, which my grandfather would have seen. Then I close my eyes and breathe in, deeply, feeling tweed on my arms, Bay Rum aftershave and pipe tobacco in my nose and mouth. I turn my face up to the sun and pause, for a long time. Then slowly, holding the rail, I go on.

  I think of my son, whom I have not seen in twenty-five years.

  I think of my wife, with whose life I am about to change for the last time.

  I sing to myself, softly, the line from that Bob Dylan song the kids so loved:

  Our conversation

  Was short and sweet

  Then I open my eyes again and slowly, one hand in my pocket, the other on the rail, move north.

  FBI Agent Walt Arden is sitting on a bench just a few yards to the north.

  My son, whom I will never meet again, with his daughter whom I will never know, my granddaughter, is about half a mile further on, walking south, seeing the World Trade Center for the first time.

  In a moment, Bradford Flanagan will stop me and make my heart launch into a tattoo of beats.

  See, I know all this. And after I go to the VALB ceremony, I will follow my father and my own self, in my mind, back up the 87 to Saugerties while in reality I will follow my grandfather’s footsteps back to the haunted house on Bedford Street, crack another bottle from my grandfather’s first-rate collection of vintage pinots—fuck it, wine was made to drink—roll a joint and light a cigarette and, on the kelim in the living room, launch and get back to work not on the article that the poor New York Times is expecting from me, but on the one I am, in contradiction of all the rules of professionalism, writing instead, and which you are, if you are still with me, about to read.

  And every now and again, as this night goes on and I grow drunker and drunker, I will go down to my grandfather’s study and steady myself by holding the desk and close my eyes and breathe in, deep into my lungs, the smell of his life, which began to end on this day sixteen years ago and which I no longer believe, not in any serious way, is different from my own.

  Hour by hour. At 7:00 was when my grandparents sat down to dinner at a restaurant called Grange Hall in the Village. Uncle Danny and Aunt Maggie dropped them off at nine, then drove home with their single child—they only had one, then—up the West Side Highway. Maggie was pregnant. My grandfather and grandmother sat, as they always did, at the kitchen table for tea and a debriefing of this amazing day—just where the Rasta from Triple-A Pot and I sat—but my grandfather didn’t tell her what was really on his mind. As usual, my grandmother went up to bed, and my grandfather to his study. He spent a few hours there, alone. Two a.m. was when, at last, he raised himself from this desk and went up to tell his wife what he had learned, just that morning, from Dr. Holmquist.

  There are lots of things I do that Tintin would not approve of. I drink like Captain Haddock, smoke like General Alcazar, take the kinds of drugs that he spent books eradicating in mysterious suks and ports and illegal freighters, and as for my sexual proclivities, well, we all know Tintin never had sex but if he did, it would not have been with boys.

  Or come to think of it, would it? That’s actually a good question.

  But one thing that’s sure is that Tintin, brave little Tintin, would never have abandoned an assignment for the New York Times Magazine and, instead, written a piece with no future and no genre that could not possibly get him anywhere but into trouble.

  7.

  And as for this piece, let me just say one or two last words about it before you read it. May I?

  As for this little opus on which I am about to immolate my entire career—and note, note that my career, apart from retail therapy with Momma and a series of stunning women in many different countries of whom some I have sex with and some I fall in love with but all, repeat all, I leave, is really all that I have to show for my nearly thirty years of life, my education at SOAS and Cambridge, my bylines in the Guardian, Harpers, the Economist, and now, the New York Times; note that my career is really the only thing onto which I can hold, increasingly, by the nails of my fingers—but as for this magnum opus, the opus suicidus, this is what I have to show for my illustrious little career; this is what I know.

  I know that on April 15, 1995, a Saturday sixteen years ago, my grandfather Jack Sinai walked north along the Hudson River promenade in downtown Manhattan, a man of eighty-seven with a full head of white hair and, in the flat light, great gravity, walking unaided in a tweed jacket and open-necked denim shirt.

  Sometimes, it seems to me, it is the only fucking thing I know.

  The river was on his left, on high tide and, this early on a Sunday, textured by wind and undisturbed by wake. I know this.

  I know this. I can see the proof of it, right in front of me, sitting here in my grandfather’s study, staring at my computer. I can read the tide charts, the weather reports, and the declination tables of the sun. So this I know.

  And this I think.

  Above him the sky was marine blue, brilliant, with a delta of distant birds coming back north for the summer.


  I think it because so it looked, this morning, when I walked there myself, on the neap tide with the sun behind me to the south, and as I looked up and around, feeling the scratch of tweed on my arm and the smell of Bay Rum in my nose, this is the sky I saw. High above, I saw a delta of geese, so distant as to be translucent, and far and away in my mind I thought, exactly as my grandfather would have thought, of a day nine years earlier when my Uncle Danny and Aunt Klara walked out on Hammonasset Beach, up the Connecticut coast from New Haven, and saw just the same delta of migrating geese etched nearly translucent against a sky of marine blue.

  Now let us talk about accuracy, just for a moment. Let us take this question by the horns.

  You will say that my grandfather may have made that connection—indeed, I know that Danny had already told him the story of that day on Hammonasset Beach, and what it meant later, to Klara, to Maggie, because Danny told me he did—but that there’s no knowing that he saw birds. To which I answer: true. True, but trite. We don’t know if the birds were there. We do know, however, that they could have been. We know that in 1995 there were still migrating geese in North America; we know that the evolutionary shift that, as global temperatures rose, made a portion of the species non-migrating, had not yet occurred, so if he did not in fact see them—as, nine years earlier, Danny and Klara, in fact did see them on Hammonasset Beach—that it really doesn’t matter, because my grandfather’s eyes were directed down, focused with such concentration below the surface of the water, as if on a submerged object, or a fish, that when a young man approached he had to ask twice—“Excuse me, are you Jack Sinai?”—before my grandfather looked up.

  So let’s let that be enough for the birds. Maybe they were there; maybe they weren’t. Maybe he saw them; maybe not. But whether or not he did, he could have, and the detail is authenticating, and so helps us set the scene for what he did see.

  The point here is one of truth, and if you’re going to fuck me up every goddamned time about facts, then I’m never going to be able to tell you the truth.