by Neil Gordon
How to do it? Nearly gratefully, his mind set itself on the details. One, two, three. A well-placed newspaper article. Jason would know him to be sick. Then some smart planning on his part. They could get out of town without being followed—he and Danny-boy could engineer that. Where should they go? Where would Jason go?
Jack, in his study on this spring night, thought like this for a long time. He saw himself and his son sitting in the saturated light of a Montauk diner. He saw them up at Mohonk, a weekend of talk. For a time he indulged himself before, with a huge sigh, suddenly, he let it all go away.
It couldn’t be.
Ah, how long had it been since he had exhausted his ability to deceive himself? Years. Decades. He would never get to tell his son everything, never get to tell his son anything. He would never be able to tell his son that he did not disapprove of what he had done, that he admired him.
Because he would never allow his son to make contact.
Because if he did so, he could not protect his son, who was implacably hated by the law, from capture.
His son would make a mistake, come back, and be sent to jail for seventy-five to life, just like David Gilbert.
And therefore he could never let his son know that he was dying.
That was key. His son could never, ever know that he was dying. It would have to be a secret guarded in this house by his family.
All the more reason, Jack thought, for what he had decided.
See, after all, it couldn’t be.
4.
So here he is, Jack Sinai, at the end of his life, a man of massive age, and he is in the company of his father, as vividly as if he were alive, and of his son, as vividly as if he were there. And he is thinking, I never really left my father anywhere. His father’s example had come back to him with such vivid force when he had had his own children, and taken him through the endlessly ambiguous tasks of raising them with sure and kind humility. That old man with his smell of Bay Rum and cigarettes was there so often, long, long after he died. The real challenges of fatherhood are not those that you face when you are raising children, they are those that come after your death, the time when your own children are fathers and mothers and facing mortal danger, their fears for their children and of their own deaths, cancer, age, and the need to call on you for a kind of guidance that meant nothing when they were children, a guidance in how to give up children to adulthood and how to give up the self to age.
Outside, now, the torrent was coming to an end and beyond the chestnut, a moon-backlit sky showed that in the distance, the clouds were gone.
Oh, my Lord. There was no end to what they asked of you, demanded of you, these beings you created. You’d think that the act of creation would have been enough. In fact, there was no sacrifice was enough for them. Never enough patience, never enough money, never enough that you denied yourself to do what they needed, never sure that it was the right thing to do, either, and never, never, expecting any results. They have such a right, these children. The right to everything you have, and are, and wish for, and then some more, the incessant right of those you have caused to be born.
Jack didn’t actually say that to himself though.
He may have meant it, but it’s not what he said to himself.
What he said to himself, Jack Sinai, that night, as he made his way out of the study and up the stairs of his house, the house of his life, for the last conversation of the day, was something very different.
There was no point in waiting any longer. He knew what he was going to do, had known since the moment that Holmquist had pronounced the facts of his death. He must do it quietly, he reminded himself, secretly: it could not be in the news that he was dying, for that could make Jason try to come back.
He believed that, too. Quietly, thoroughly, and unexpectedly, Jack Sinai found that he knew throughout his being, as if he had just spoken to Jason on the phone, that if he knew, Little J.—an adult now, a man perhaps with his own children—would risk everything to try to come back.
Or was that just the foolish optimism of the old?
Perhaps, perhaps.
But at eighty-seven, you did not entertain that kind of thought.
It wasn’t that you couldn’t bear to.
You were at the Siege of Cape Tortuga; you can bear anything.
It’s the people around you who can’t bear you to.
Now was not the time to entertain philosophic doubts. For Eleanor’s sake, sure, but Eleanor was an adult. It was for Danny, for Klara. Maybe the thing that would make the two of them at last stop their stupid little self-exiles, the one from the other. Maybe the thing that would at last get them to get over what had happened to them, up at Yale, that day out on Hammonasset Beach. It was the time to lie, just as he had done that morning to young Brad Flanagan: lie about how bad it all in fact was. And above all, it was time to do it quietly, quietly, for Jason’s sake, and so in this way it was not just for Danny-boy and Maggalah and Klary, but also for Little J. too. Yes, Jack thought to himself, yet another time that Jason is in my mind and Danny not. But then, it was now he must think very carefully, very centrally about Danny, because Jason was not going to be here for this, and Danny was. Briefly, before his eyes, Jack Sinai saw the crying face, that morning, of the Flanagan boy, and remembered his ersatz words of hope for him. But this was different. Then, he had been lying. This time, it was about love.
He rose now and turned out the desk lamp, went out the study door and—after closing up for the night—upstairs for the conversation he needed to have with his wife. A conversation—he thought wryly to himself—that would be neither short nor sweet. And so it was quoting Bob Dylan that my grandfather set out on his last act of fatherhood, dying for his family, just the way he had lived.
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
Isabel Montgomery
June 30, 2011
New York City
1.
By the end of June I have knocked out the chapter you have just read with the help of a steady diet of my grandfather’s pinots and some timed-release Focalin, a drug usually used for ADHD but which is as pure a speed high as I myself could ever want, and which turned out to be in good supply from my young Rasta friend from AAA Pot Deliveries.
Maggie, of course, is all over me to read it, so we slip back up to the Island where a few days in a bikini under clear blue skies on Hancock Beach are so precisely what I need that I can even handle the lugubrious fatalism of Maggie contemplating the publication of the Sinai Family Saga, not that this is ever very likely to happen. But she is as good as her word, and for the ensuing days she tells me what she promised me she would, about Danny, and Klara, and Yale, and Hammonasset Beach—what she knows of it, anyway—and about Passover of 1996, and I am deep into it, deep into it, when Uncle Joe dies.
Just like that.
Maggie is sitting there on the porch in Menemsha, talking her head off, and her cell rings and she checks it, planning not to answer, but it is Danny, and he’s calling to tell us that Uncle Joe has died.
You cannot—I swear to you—invent this stuff.
We’re lucky to get Maggie’s Volvo on the Oak Bluffs ferry the next morning—the Vineyard Haven ferry is full, but Kennedy’s office, where Maggie knows an aide, intervenes—and we are in New York by midafternoon.
Maggie, I note, takes the 86 through Hartford, neatly avoiding the Long Island Sound coastline and thus Hammonasset Beach—though she does take the 95, rather than the Merritt, which adds fifteen minutes to the drive and condemns us to navigate the evils of the 95 which is charging, I note, tolls again—that enough authenticating fucking detail to convince you that I know how to drive from Woods Hole to New York?—but which allows us to stop in New Haven for a pizza and beer lunch—we go, like Sinai, to Moderna, fuck Pepes—after which she rather weaves down the 95 and over to the Hutch. We’re in New York by three, and—of course—at Bedford Street where, it appears, a tribal experience is in order.
Oh, don�
�t make me tell you about it. The Igneri clan is all there, and seeing Joe only ever had the garden apartment so he could rent out the other three floors of his townhouse to yuppies, they are all disposed variously in Sinai family beds, and I suppose they’re nice enough people in their own way with their olive skins and their pretty kids and their endless dishes of manicotti, and their grief, I suppose is real, but it doesn’t feel that real to me, it feels like they all thought Joe dead long ago, and all the while I’m either bustling around the kitchen with them warming up dishes of eggplant parmigian that, apparently, half of Little Italy has seen fit to cook for them, or I am huddling in my room and trying to stay out of their way and waiting for the day when we all troop out to Queens in a procession of limousines following a hearse from Racuglia Funeral Home where Joe’s now unrecognizable corpse with a pink face, scrubbed and shaved, has been lying on view and consign him to the earth, and then troop back for another orgy of red wine and pasta and Muzzarell and baked artichokes and eggplants and olives and cannelloni and espresso and grappa and then, the women folk having, despite being impeccably dressed in Gucci and possessing the longest, brightest nails I have ever seen—as well as the biggest hair—scrubbed the entire house to a state of perfection, they all disappear in a roar of white SUVs and Maseratis and Camaros west to the Holland Tunnel leaving me, alone in the house for the first time, wondering what the fuck just happened and realizing, for the first time, that Joe is gone.
I try to get my head back into it for a while, only, I find myself not going to my grandfather’s study so much any more.
In fact, I find myself avoiding it.
I am weak, depleted by the writing. The dope has turned on me, making me anxious and unhappy, and the booze, to which I turn for relief, is not helping at all. The only thing I’ve got going for me, in fact, is the Focalin which, I know, is going to exact a high price, and that sooner rather than later.
I’m also lonely. Jessie finished her six months at Beacon and came down on her way to wherever the fuck—Berkeley, Oregon, somewhere alternate. Outside of the orange jumpsuit, she turned out to be pretty whole wheat. Certainly, since I’d been out, she had not shaved her underarms, which turned me off: I am the girly kind of lesbian, not the dykey kind. I like my lovers to be hairless, preferably with some pearls or gold against their skin, and an ankle bracelet, and some diamonds, and smelling just so faintly of tobacco and alcohol, like your folks when you’re a kid and they come home from a party.
Not for the first time, I realize that I have in some profound way invented a lover rather than discovered her, which, not for the first time, discourages me profoundly.
That’s not a good thing, for me. To get discouraged.
Because once it starts, it goes on, and soon, as a shrink once told me, I have used a sort of psychic pathetic fallacy and invested my entire world with it. The lead-glass windows, the polished parquet and kelims, the chestnut tree out the window, weeping leaves, the shadowy hazel grove. Room by room, parts of the Bedford Street house start becoming closed to me. First the study, once the repository of a wealth of history that I had no choice, no choice, but to master, now become the place where my grandfather began the process of his impeccable death. Then the entire first floor, with its library of beautiful editions of forgotten books, each the highest aspiration of a long dead soul, utterly forgotten, Edward Dahlberg, Julian Shapiro, John Sanford? That it is all accessible on a computer screen turns out, in the end, not to make the slightest difference. Once, there was a literature masterable by a real reader. Now, the literature of our language is known only to scholars and that which survives in print does so at the mercy of editors of reprint series.
That means the kitchen is off limits to me, which puts me, in turn, at the caprice of local restaurants. But the only one I find myself using is the Corner Bistro, and how long can one live on bourbon and hamburgers?
Not long, I know.
As a palliative measure, although likely in error, I cut out the hamburgers.
I spend a lot of time in my grandmother’s old studio, breathing deep the smell of oil paints which, like a ghost, was the one dimension of the past that would not quit this room. I am able to remember her precisely, a short woman, grown increasingly round with age, with a gaze that could shuck an oyster and who, I strongly believe, loved me.
But in time, I come to wonder whether it’s time for a break from this house, as beautiful a crib as it might be. Momma, of course, is lobbying for me to return to London, and I do agree to meet her for a weekend in Marbella.
I do three things before I leave Bedford Street.
First, I clean the house, thoroughly, and destroy all the evidence of the debauchery of my stay, although I can’t possibly repair the damage to the wine cellar or the liquor cabinet.
Second, I go shopping in the meat market, and buy myself a California wardrobe.
It feels good to spend money. Very good.
And finally, I invite the Rasta Dope Dealer for dinner, an act that apparently amazingly raises his hopes and libidinal level, until he realizes that it’s just dinner—and, incidentally, a final chance for me to re-up.
I don’t bother with dope, as I know I’ll get a medical marijuana card in LA. What I do take is coke, Focalin, and some methamphetamine, all in good but concealable quantities. These I transfer into empty capsules then deposit them in pill bottles in the bottom of my toiletry bag, which I bring to the table so as to get the Rasta Dope Delivery dude to help me with my little arts and crafts after-dinner project.
When we’re done, he pulls one more thing out.
“Here’s one on me, baby. Two, in fact.”
It’s two plastic capsules filled with white crystal.
“What’s that?”
“MDMA. Pharmaceutical grade. Almost impossible to get.”
“Ah, baby. Thank you. I don’t do X.”
“I noticed that. Why is that?”
“Don’t need drugs to make me think, dude. I do enough of that without ’em.”
“Um hmm. Well, I tell you what, Ms. Izzy. First off, this isn’t X, and it isn’t Molly. You just hang on to these, in case you change your mind sometime. This is the real, real deal. I’m telling you.”
With that, he takes a piece of scrap paper from his pocket, folds it into a little envelope, and draws a heart on it with a red sharpie, also from his pocket. Then he puts the two white pills inside, and puts the envelope into my toiletry bag.
So I fly to Marbella, first class, overnight, change in Madrid. But when I get to Marbella it turns out that Momma isn’t there: she’s tied up over some garbage in London—her father left her with a foundation—so I go to the hotel to wait for her to get in, thinking I’ll spend a weekend and try to get over myself. But no sooner do I get to the hotel—Momma favors the Four Seasons—than this little guy tending bar convinces me to buy a gram of coke, and instead of lying out on the beach relaxing, I hole up in my hotel smoking coke in tobacco, which does me no good at all and which Momma must not have the slightest hint of or she will be back on the pipe for months, perhaps years.
The thing is, I am antsy there, and want to come back.
And what I want is not Momma, but Molly.
And what I want from Molly is to spend three-four days speaking with her, at least in part, about the night of November 18, 1995, the night my grandfather died.
This one, unlike my little visit to New York with Sinai, six months earlier, I remember vividly.
Here’s something no one knows. Not even Molly. After Momma and Sinai split up—I was like eight, and we moved down to Saugerties, into the house kitty-corner from Molly’s—I woke up every night just before midnight, nearly every night, and crept across the hallway to see if my father was in his bed, and if he wasn’t, then waited until Molly’s kitchen light came on, which it did, every single night at midnight. I did so very silently, so as not to alert the baby monitor they left on. Then I waited awake until Sinai crossed the lawn back to his own bed, an
d only then, only then, did I go back to sleep.
To this day I don’t understand why they didn’t want me to know they were fucking. I guess they thought it would make me uptight, Momma just having been dragged off to rehab and Sinai having moved me from the house in which I was born. Make me uptight? You got to be kidding me. Molly was the best thing ever to happen to me. That Sinai had the good sense to be sharing her bed—and that, furthermore, there is something to him, something I’ve never seen but that Molly assures me is there, that makes him worth her while? The only thing that’s ever given me any confidence in him. Remember Laura Whitehorn, who told me that my father was an asshole? Something else she said to me, once. She said, Izzy, you’re not really gay. Your dad’s just made you phobic of men. Well, not quite. The truth is, in my opinion, that sexual proclivity can originate not only on the interiorization of a person we hated, but also of one we loved. It’s not just that Sinai made me phobic of men. It’s that Molly made me love women.
Lying there in Marbella, in my room, waiting for Momma, what I long for is Molly.
And won’t you just guess what? Don’t you just know what happens next? It is an amazing series of accidents. The whole fucking thing is this amazing series of accidents. Because there I am, going downhill very fast in a hotel room in Marbella, when my iPhone beeps with a beep reserved for my always-on agent, and guess what he wants to tell me?
I cannot tell you the number of times this guy has called with an assignment that has lifted me off the bottom of my life like an egg on a spatula, just in time. Want to know why I’ve written three hundred and twenty thousand words—now three hundred and seventy, with the last two done—of instantly disposable journalism in the past four years? Because it’s the only thing that’s kept me out of the morgue. Want to know who made it possible?
And this time, this time, this glorious fellow, sitting in his corner office on Madison Avenue, has something better than even I, who believe in my luck, could have imagined.