by Neil Gordon
As soon as his eyes were shut my father’s anxiety took shape in an image. He saw himself dressed in sandals and a T-shirt, perhaps a denim jacket in this season, his red hair thick and framing his face, a cigarette between two fingers. Like that, he understood something about what he was feeling. It was not his normal, adult fear of capture; it was the anxiety of adolescence, angst rather than fear, existential rather than situational. That’s what New York did to him, and only New York.
Once, traveling from Penn Station to Riverdale he found he had actually gotten out of the train at 72nd Street and walked west to the West End Bar, only realizing, when he found himself in front of a Borders Bookstore where the bar used to be, that it was twenty-five years since Jason Sinai had last sat there with Teddy Gold, that Teddy was dead, that he was a middle-aged man in a beige linen suit over a blue shirt, and that his name was Jim Grant.
Now he fixed himself in his awareness of the present, as if to insulate himself from the city’s influence. He was a forty-nine-year-old man called James Grant, a lawyer from Saugerties, New York, right next to Woodstock. He was born in Bakersfield, California; came east to college in Chicago, where he had met his wife, now his ex-wife, the actress Julia Montgomery. He was dressed in a corduroy jacket, chinos, and a baseball cap from Modern Apizza in New Haven, where he had gone to law school. He was in New York today to bring his eleven-year-old daughter, Isabel, to see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade celebration service, while there were still brigadistas left to see. He was in New York today to make sure his daughter heard, once, the International sung by Europeans who had sung it when singing it had meaning. And when he was done, he would go home to Saugerties.
Now the sun was warm on his face. Such a familiar sensation. A form of mindfulness. To become aware, specifically aware, of who you are and how that is different from who you are. The sun warm on his face; my hand warm in his. The anxiety ebbed, going out with huge exhaled lungfuls of river air.
And that was when he opened his eyes and found himself looking at his father, not fifteen feet to the south, staring into the river, and his heart went dead in his chest.
For a long moment my father froze. His father was standing, evidently finishing a conversation with a man and his daughter and then, when they took their leave of him, turning his gaze to the surface of the water. Then his father was alone. He could have walked up, and touched him.
But twenty-five years’ training, twenty-five years of never looking back, never resting, the habits of twenty-five years came to him, woodenly, automatically.
“C’mon, honey. We best get our seats while there are seats to get.”
“Aw, Daddy. I’m still eating. And I’m so tired. Can’t we wait?”
There was no question, of course, of anything like that. Holding my arm gently, Jason Sinai stood and together we moved—myself unwilling, he wooden—off up the promenade.
And therefore not seeing that behind him, not ten to fifteen feet, Jack had, still with his gaze on the water, turned right and begun to walk, following the river, a dozen steps behind.
8.
“C’mon, honey. We’d best get our seats while there are seats to get.”
Walt Arden, leaning against the fence, facing the water with Jack Sinai just a few yards to his left, listened to the voice of the girl and her father as they walked away from their conversation with Jack Sinai.
“Aw, Daddy. I’m still eating. And I’m so tired. Can’t we wait?”
“Later, baby. We got to go in now.”
“You’re mean.”
He didn’t even look back. He knew who the man and his daughter were—the same ones who had just been in conversation with old Sinai. Knowing that—putting together the details in a way that kept you from even having to look—was what made surveillance, rather than a science, an art.
It was while he was thinking this, with satisfaction, that Walt became aware, with a slight shock, that Jack, too, had just walked past him, heading north. In the same instant, Numeroff’s voice sounded in his earpiece. We’re moving, boys. Pattern three. Three was Walt on tail, Michael leading, and Richard trailing and calling changes. Walt stepped away from the railing, deliberately not watching as Jack passed. Richard stepped forward into lead. Walt didn’t see Michael step back, but heard his whispered voice in his ear—In position all. Let’s roll it up and move it out.
And so they went, turn by turn, up the side of the river under the shadow of the Twin Towers, in the riverine light, Walt behind Jack Sinai, Jack Sinai behind Jason Sinai, and Jason, with me, behind Brad Flanagan: a procession of people walking north, some not looking forward, others not looking back.
Chapter Four
Isabel Montgomery
May 6, 2011
New York City
1.
Okay, so you want to know what I’m doing. You’re not the only one.
Uncle Joe, to name one example.
Although he seems, sometimes, to know more than I do.
For the next two weeks I work in my grandfather’s study at his desk, only I’ve moved my computer in here and moved the antediluvian Mac to the closet, and also have sent away for a little Bose minispeaker system which—with the help of the Rasta dope-delivery dude, who has taken to hanging around after his dropoff, and who turns out to have, in addition to a surprisingly textured critical vocabulary for pinots, a very useful set of handyman skills—I think though he’s still hoping to do me—I’ve installed and is blasting Billy Joel—Sinai is a corn dog, I swear, as you gathered when I told you there was Sinatra on this playlist.
The fact is, over the past two weeks, I have had human contact with exactly two people: the Rasta dope-delivery dude and Joe. I’ve got absolutely no problem with either. The Rasta boy is an unending source of interest, not just his sedulous efforts to do me but also his commentary on the world—the kid is a Chomskian anarchist, at heart, and smart as a whip. As for Joe, I got sick of this uncle-family-kindly-caretaker crap pretty quick; this dude was only pretending to be an old-school Soho wop. In fact he is a man who has thought long and hard about the near century of his life, and that thinking may have been fueled by copious amounts of his home-brewed wine, but it wasn’t in any way marred by it, and truth be told, even misanthrope that I am, I don’t get to see him half as much as I want to.
Oftentimes he is just not around, and when I go out into the garden—in which Joe’s bulbs, which turn out to be tulips, are pushing up, and the branches of the chestnut tree are dusted with fine green—and look over at his house, the garden apartment is dark and the cast-iron garden chairs are tipped up against the table. The upper three floors, the Yuppie families who live there are doing their thing—having cello lessons, trying to get appointed to their private-school boards of trustees, getting in SAT tutors, or heating up their Garlands, but Joe’s little garden apartment is dark and locked, which I know, because I tried the door more than one time. I don’t, and never will, have any real idea of where he goes, although I imagine that he is simply withdrawn into an interior room with a bottle of red, and as I think that I can feel the heavy interior air, the dark furniture, the dim lights.
Wherever, it is never more than a couple-three days until I see him outside the window of my grandfather’s study, carrying a bottle and two glasses, hear the back door open from the garden and feel his foot crossing the floor toward me.
At first I don’t quite get it, and I turn from my obsessive documentation, if that’s what it was, of the VALB ceremony of April 15, 1995, with something close to annoyance. What did I think? That I was humoring him, I guess. That there is nearly a century of pain in this old man, but I was not sure that his upkeep of the house was enough to justify being called on to listen to it. Deep in his wine—which is what made me think that the days I didn’t see him, he was in his cups in some windowless room in his house—his eyes lose focus, and for long moments he would be seeing something not there.
But I am a smart little girl, aren’t I just? Soon, I reali
ze that something else is going on.
First off, although I have not come to share his contempt for Washington State pinots that pulse mellow with ruby and cost in the thirties and forties per bottle—yes, I checked—and rivaled, as far as I was concerned, anything coming from anywhere between the Loire and the Rhône, Beaune included—Bordeaux, I’m not saying—I had come to appreciate the viscous fermentation experiment that he conducted in his basement, which, as the French say of their Beaujoulais Nouveau, se boit comme l’eau et monte directement à la tête. See, I like things that monte directement à la tête—as you may have noticed—and there may have been a half-century between me and Uncle Joe, but on the subject of inebriants that montent directement à la tête we were strictly contemporaries.
And second off, it didn’t take me long to realize that when Joe began to talk, I had better have a pencil poised—or, more accurately, a Bluetooth keyboard in my lap. Because when he did start to talk, his eyes still absented, he wouldn’t notice the fact that my little fingers never stopped moving, and that never a word he was saying went unrecorded by WordRec.
And here’s the strange thing.
It didn’t matter what he was talking about.
It was all—all—to the point.
Such as—and I quote:
“Your grandpa and I? We was kids, we had met in the street, we’d have beat each other to a pulp. But we’d nevera met. His type, come down to Little Italy? He’d not have gone south of 110th Street, not alone, and wisely so. And me, go to Mount Morris? Not without brass knuckles or a lead pipe. Down here, we were bare knuckles. But they were Harlem. Remember, we’re talking the ’20s. Say what you will, those Yids were thugs. Still . . .”
Long silence while Joe’s eyes abstract, and I wait patiently. Then, emptying his glass suddenly and holding it out for a new pour (I had become bartender long ago):
“I remember one. Iggy. My uncle—my mother’s brother—was out in Sheepshead Bay . . .”
But I am not willing to get lost.
See: it’s all too precious.
“One what, Joe?”
A moment of incomprehension. “Yid. I remember one Yid. Only one I ever met without beating the hell outa him, or getting the hell beaten outa me by him. Until I met Jackie and his crew of Reds, of course. But that was way later.”
Silence again. “Thought you said Yids didn’t come to Little Italy, Joe?”
“They didn’t. But we left, sometimes, missie, believe it or not. I had an uncle lived out in Sheepshead Bay. My mother’s brother. Those trips, oh boy. We’d catch the train at Chambers Street. City Hall? Like a castle floating up into the sky, it was to me.”
It happens that I, too, like City Hall, because I once was interviewed on WNYC up in the tower of the castle itself. So it is with feeling that I say: “Still is.”
“You should have seen it then. Chambers Street was like the fucking Champs-Élysées to me, missie, and I’ve seen the Champs-Élysées, in fact, I’ve marched the fucking Champs-Élysées. Going down there was like going to Europe for me. Then the train out to Sheepshead Bay, it was an El in Brooklyn—you know, elevated over the Gowanus Canal? You know it?”
And the thing is, it is important to him to know if I know it, because through those piercing blue eyes, when they focus, Joe is learning as much about me as I about him—or more.
“No.” So now Uncle Joe knows I have never been into Brooklyn.
I’m hoping he won’t also learn that I’ve never taken the subway.
“I see. Suddenly you’re shooting by Erie Basin, and you can barely see out to the Verrazano Narrows. That monster bridge wasn’t there then. And then you shoot past neighborhoods of free-standing houses, with front yards, which I had never seen before. And then, oh boy, suddenly we’d be next to the ocean. Only times in my life I ever saw the goddamn ocean was in Brooklyn, till I shipped out with Jackie.”
“And the Jew?”
“OK, the Jew. Well. Little scrawny kid lived down the block from my cousins. Never dared come near us, we was little, but later—in high school—one day . . . I don’t know.”
A long silence, while Joe stares at nothing. Then:
“One day, I don’t know, we start to talk somehow. Maybe he had some smokes, I don’t know. And this scrawny little Jew, he changes the world for me. Iggy was his name.”
“How?”
Joe looked up, now, smiling.
“Let me put it this way. He taught me the International.”
Bingo. “I see.”
“Stupid, tiny little Jewish kid. Never told nobody about him. Forgot, in fact, all about him for years. Then I’m at a Daily Worker rally in Union Square, like ’36, and there’s this City College student, thin as a rake, handing out pamphlets. Fuck me if it wasn’t Iggy. After, we get a beer, and you know what he told me? He was leaving the very next day for France. Died in the fall of Madrid. It was still months before me and your grandfather. Months.”
See what I mean? It was all good stuff. I never found out what Iggy was short for, but I managed to get his last name and some months later, by the purest chance, met him again in a book by another wop called Ben Morreale.
Sometimes I would get him started with a question, which worked, because I never got the answer I was looking for. Like this one, right out of my notes:
“So where did you and my grandfather meet?”
“Meet?” His blue left eye hard on me for a moment. “Well, strictly speaking, I heard him speak at the Daily Worker rally in Union Square. Same one I met Iggy. Then we met on the way to France. But it ain’t where we met. It’s what we did.”
“Meaning?”
“See, missie, everything we did, was for you. You know what we really, truly, thought? We thought we were building the International. The future of peace. The world that would be completely different. And what do we find when we get home? I should have known when the Stalinists came into Spain. We all should have known. We thought we were destroying the old world. But fuck me, there it was again, the moment we got home. That was the problem.”
“That the world didn’t change?”
He stares at me know with a moment of incomprehension. “No, missie. Of course the world doesn’t change. That’s just the way it is. People who mourn that, they’re stupid. The problem wasn’t that we thought it could. It was that he taught his children to think the same thing. It was the regret of Jack’s life. That he taught Jason to hope the way he had hoped. That’s what you got to understand, young lady. Not all this crap about New York in the ’30s.”
I thought about that one for a long, long time, and went back to writing, and thought about it some more.
And then I came back to it, albeit obliquely, and when I did Joe was right there too.
“Every century is a tragedy, Joe.”
“There you go, missie. Now you’re talking. And it’s just where you’re wrong. Ours was unique. Till you get that, you get nothing.”
But like I say, I had been thinking about it.
“Joe, there are tens of thousands of combat-scarred veterans from Vietnam to Iraq. Don’t tell me that Spain was worse, or World War II, or Korea. You didn’t have Tony Molinari from over on Thompson Street coming back from Germany having inadvertently shot up the Jaibaji family’s Sunday outing because old Abu Ali didn’t slow down fast enough at a checkpoint and thus lost Ali, Nahla, Umm Ali, and Teta—the whole goddamn Jaibaji family, daughter, son, mother, and granny—to a twenty-two-year-old from Little Italy, who, in turn, lost a leg, an arm, and an eye to an IED planted by a teenager, and then went home and started thinking about three of his friends who were killed by mistake by a friendly fire drone missile and then decided to shoot up his local bar.”
“Missie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh come on, for Christ sake, Joe.”
“Missie, you are wrong in so many ways I hardly know where to start. No, you shut up a second there, young lady. Lemme remind you a couple-three things. One: I
was in Normandy on June 6, one-nine-forty-four, okay? Two: In 1945 I was seconded to the British 11th Armored. You don’t know what that means, do you?”
“No, goddam it, Joe.”
And you believe it or not, but if you don’t, I got it recorded, so just fucking ask me.
“I bet you don’t, young missie. And I bet you something else.”
“What?”
“That you’ve never even been on the New York City subway because you always take taxis.”
See what I mean?
“Why were you seconded to the British 11th Armored, goddamn it Joe, and what does it mean?”
“Well, have you?”
“No. I’ve never taken the subway because I always take taxis.”
“Um hmm. Well I was seconded to them because by then I was a map-man, and no one knew lower Saxony like me, and what it means is that I was at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. So don’t you fucking talk to me about atrocity. Atrocity is not the issue. The issue is that we didn’t come home having fits about it. We didn’t even talk about it. Why is the issue, and the answer to the question why is what I’m talking about. The precise, exact difference between these boys coming home from Eye-raq and us is that we believed in something. We had hope in something.”
“Oh fuck that, Joe.” “Fuck that. A: Your goddamn 11th Armored, just like every other part of your Allied armies, fought the war against the Germans and tacitly let the Germans fight the war against the Jews for them. B: Half the rocket scientists working for the Wehrmacht went straight on to jobs in the US. C: the real war your fucking army of doughboys was fighting was the war against Stalin, only, they didn’t bother telling you that, did they, cause they didn’t want you to know that they didn’t give a fuck about the Nazis, about you, or about whatever you believed. They had eyes only for Moscow. Believe? Hope?”