“My parents’ friends in Washington,” Alex offered, “the ones I visited when we were down there? They say Johnson pushed McNamara out because he was going soft on the war.”
“I thought they lived in Virginia,” Buzzy said. “Your parents’ friends.”
“Right, they do. But they work, you know, for the government. In Washington.”
I was scanning the newspaper. “ ‘A twin-engine U.S. transport plane carrying twenty-six Americans and secret documents crashed in the enemy-held lowlands south of Saigon. There were no survivors, but the documents were recovered intact.’”
“Hooray,” Chuck said. I wasn’t sure whether he was being sardonic about the retrieval of the secret documents or expressing solidarity with the Vietcong for bringing down an American plane.
“That’s like the third plane crash over there in two months,” I said.
Chuck looked sad and nodded, which made Buzzy shake his head and say, “Hamlet here can’t quite decide which side are the good guys.”
I smiled, and Chuck flipped Buzzy the bird.
Three Sundays in a row I’d told my mother I would not be home for Thanksgiving, and that she’d “just have to deal” with having only one of her three children at the table for “your Norman Rockwell picture.” When the phone woke me sometime after midnight on the Monday before the holiday and it was my dad, my first thought was that she’d forced him to call to make one last try at persuading me.
That wasn’t why he was calling, although I did end up flying home to Chicago that day. He was calling to tell me about Sabrina. She had been in Los Angeles for the Esperanto convention and flying to Cincinnati to spend the holiday with her friend Jamie.
“Honey,” my dad said, “your sister died.”
Their plane had been landing in a snowstorm that night, came in too low, and crashed a mile short of the runway.
After a pause, Dad added, “In an apple orchard in Kentucky.” He spoke the words as if they were meaningful, like a line from a poem. After another pause, he said, “Jamie’s alive.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t killed. There were survivors. Jamie broke his collarbone and an arm, but he’s alive.”
I cried for a while and didn’t go back to sleep. It was weird being hugged by Chuck at seven-thirty A.M. in my nightgown in front of the lady at the desk downstairs. It was weird being stared at with such pity by girls I didn’t know as Chuck lugged my little suitcase out to the taxi. It was weird to board a plane fourteen hours after my sister had died in a plane crash.
I hadn’t been in a church since her confirmation, and it was only my fourth funeral. The first had been almost exactly ten years earlier, for my baby sister Helen, when I was too young to hold a candle during the Mass.
It was weird to attend Sabrina’s funeral and burial on the day after Thanksgiving.
Sometime that weekend, between crying jags, my mom started suggesting she had been responsible—because she had pushed Sabrina into Esperanto in the first place, and she was the one who agreed to let her fly to Los Angeles and Cincinnati despite the dirty-movie stunt, so maybe God was punishing her, my mother, for failing to punish Sabrina.
My father stared at her, speechless, and then took both her hands in his and said, “Your God may be mysterious, Helen, I understand, but He cannot be so perverse and cruel as that.” I’d never heard him say anything negative about religion in my mother’s presence. And he wasn’t through. “There are more than enough bad actions in each of our lives for which we should accept blame and guilt. But do not concoct reasons to hate yourself. It isn’t your fault Sabrina is gone.”
I felt no blame for Sabrina’s death. But I did feel acute guilt, like a physical pain, about being a bad sister, starting the moment the priest stood by her coffin at St. Joseph’s and said, “May Thy mercy unite her above to the choirs of angels.” A month earlier I’d failed to wish her a happy sixteenth birthday, and I had been consistently bitchy to her for the last five years of her life. She had died, and now I loved her.
It was weird seeing the smoldering wreckage of TWA 128 on TV and reading in the Sun-Times about the crash, finding Sabrina H. Hollaender among the seven-point names of the VICTIMS and James O. Harwood on the list of ten SURVIVORS.
I read in the paper that their flight had been two hours late arriving in Cincinnati because the plane was a last-minute replacement—the one they’d originally boarded at LAX had a mechanical problem. I read that the crash was the second at the Cincinnati airport in two weeks, the fourth in two years, the third since 1961 of a plane making the very same approach to the very same runway during the month of November.
Why did Sabrina die and her boyfriend live? If the American Airlines mechanics in L.A. had managed to get the cabin door to shut tight on the original plane, would that flight have avoided the tree in Kentucky? Was the run of crashes at the Greater Cincinnati Airport a coincidence, random statistical noise, like flipping a coin and getting tails seven times in a row, or did it mean some technician or air traffic controller or aviation bureaucrat was to blame?
My mother eventually found consolation in retreating to her faith in God’s plan, in all of its beautiful riddling black-box mumbo-jumbo. But to me, the deaths of both of my little sisters made “God’s plan” seem like a sick joke. After Sabrina died, I started thinking hard—obsessing, really, for the rest of my life—about the unholy power of chance, good luck and bad luck, in governing human affairs. Luck became my subject, the animating mystery of my life.
23
Your Honor, I intend this to be an explanation of why my client was led to do what he did, not an excuse for it. When I was a Legal Aid defender, that was my customary preface before I asked a judge to cut my convicted client some slack—the “mitigation report” tally of extenuating factors that might, if you were lucky, get your unlucky robber or drug dealer or killer a lighter sentence. I don’t like whiners or people who reflexively blame “society” for the bad things individuals choose to do. But. But. But.
Between 1964 and 1967, the war and the antiwar countercultural fantasia grew symbiotically, centrifugally, exponentially, like a cascading nuclear reaction. I was eighteen at the very moment when American teenagers were being conscripted to kill and die in a deranged war and being encouraged to believe they could see and feel more clearly and vitally than anyone else on earth the differences between smart and stupid, authentic and fake, free and oppressed, right and wrong.
I was a fissile creature by the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968. In the space of a year, having redefined myself as a radical, I’d started using mind-altering drugs, lost my virginity, come down with the incurable illness that occasionally addled and would someday kill me, experienced true love, lost my closest (black) adult friend to casual (white) malfeasance, left home, been beaten by a deputy U.S. marshal on the steps of the Pentagon, gotten punished by my college for opposing the manufacture of napalm, and lost my sister in an airplane crash.
My impatient belief in my own higher sanity became so sure and fierce that it eventually moved into the suburbs of insanity. Sarah, who is the sanest person I know, always says about expensive heels that snap off the second time you wear them or people who use “literally” wrong or her husband spitting into the kitchen sink, “That makes me so crazy.” The Vietnam War literally made me crazy. But it didn’t and doesn’t make me not guilty.
Something is buzzing somewhere. I remember and run to the kitchen, yank open the drawer, rifle though the screwdrivers and pens, and grab the second disposable cellphone, the burner.
“Hi, fella,” I say, since it can only be Stewart.
“Did you know your boyfriend’s old man invented the Internet?”
“Professor Levy? I knew he was some kind of computer engineer.”
“In 1968 his company got one of the early contracts from the Pentagon to help build ARPANET, which became the Internet.”
“Okay. So?”
“Spent half the rest of his li
fe working on MILNET, the Penatgon’s private Internet.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. It’s a new fact. It’s at least ironic, given what his son did. I thought you were a connoisseur of irony.”
“That’s why you called?”
“I called to tell you I’m still working it and may have a new way into the lockbox. And that I’m going to be out there next month, in the Mojave, and if you’re not otherwise engaged, it’d be my privilege and pleasure to buy you dinner the evening of the nineteenth at Osteria Mozza, let you drink most of a bottle of Selvarossa Riserva, drive you home along Mulholland, and then, with your kind permission, fuck you silly.”
“Okay. Except that’s a Monday and I kayak late Monday afternoons, and I’m not drinking half bottles of wine until the book’s finished, and Mulholland Drive’s totally out of the way.”
“I’m just—”
“Also, that’s my birthday.”
“Don’t you think I know that, you unromantic harpy?”
24
I stayed an extra week in Wilmette after Sabrina’s funeral. When I got back to school, Chuck seemed a little different, more anxious, weird. I chalked it up the obvious—being eighteen, the academic squeeze of the end of our first semester, the world continuing to shatter—but then Chuck told me that he and Buzzy had dropped acid together while I was gone.
“It was really intense,” Chuck said. “It got heavy.”
I had to pry out the details of the heaviest heaviness. It wasn’t Buzzy’s rap about wishing he didn’t have a foreskin, or Chuck’s sudden terror that he’d been somehow responsible for Sabrina’s plane crashing, or the two of them staring out their dorm room window at an unleashed collie on Harvard Street and making it dance, or the nearly endless pause between the sixth and seventh chimes of the church bell in the morning. About halfway through their trip, Chuck “suddenly grokked” that Buzzy was probing and testing him. The boys had rebonded over their tag-team psychic-puppeteering of the dog, but the trip had shaken him.
I mentioned it to Buzzy when I saw him the next day. He told a different version. During a conversation about the Pentagon protest, he’d asked why the cops had let Chuck out so quickly, and Chuck moved very close to him, put his face right up to his, and whispered, “You aren’t who you pretend you are, are you?” For the next hour or so, Chuck would rephrase and ask the question again—”Who are you actually?” and “If there’s a God, lying isn’t possible, you know?”
“At first,” Buzzy said, “I thought maybe he was doing some kind of snitch jacket. Earlier he’d said he wanted to phone you, and I thought maybe he had, secretly, you know. And that you were listening in long-distance. I unplugged the phone from the wall.”
“What’s a snitch jacket?
“An informer accuses someone else in the group who’s not an informer of being an informer. To fuck everybody up.”
“You are paranoid.”
“Yeah, I guess he was just really, really high. That’s Lima Sierra Delta for you.”
And that was that. A couple of afternoons later, Chuck told me he was going to Kirkland House after dinner to hear a professor give a talk about politics. “He used to work for Johnson. You want to come with?”
“I thought we were out of Mace.”
“Buzzy got another can from his buddy in Nevada,” Chuck said, “but no, I don’t mean to do an action, I actually want to go hear this guy talk—he was the War on Poverty guy, and my freshman seminar teacher says he’s not a racist like everybody says …”
“Yeah, right, and Johnson has a heart of gold.”
“This guy has been against the war. He’s a pal of Bobby Kennedy’s.” Chuck liked Kennedy, and Alex adored him. My parents had trained me to disapprove of him because of his early red-baiting work in government, and he reminded me of all the cute, mean, well-to-do, self-satisfied Catholic boys I’d known growing up. But I agreed to go.
With their high ceilings and arched widows and fireplaces and nineteenth-century portraits and wood paneling, the fine old public rooms at Harvard had a powerful bipolar effect: the clubby grandeur simultaneously seduced and disgusted me. That’s the speedball feeling I remember on that dark, wet night in the Kirkland House junior common room listening to Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan talk in his ridiculous and arrogant, charming and brilliant fake-patrician way about America’s nervous breakdown.
“The most compelling phenomenon in the United States today,” he said to a hundred of us, “is the advent of a level of violence that no one believes to be characteristic of our society. We are approaching a crisis.” He said he thought that antiwar protests would make it impossible for President Johnson to campaign effectively for reelection next year.
I raised my hand. “Why is that a bad thing?”
He started to smile but quickly pursed his lips, suppressing it, and defaulted to some boilerplate about unfettered free speech being the mother’s milk of democracy, and said he hadn’t lost his faith in the wisdom of good, decent, ordinary Americans to put things right.
“Hitler was elected,” some kid said, “by good Germans.”
Moynihan replied that he was about our age during World War II, and he could assure us unequivocally that Lyndon Johnson was no Adolf Hitler.
I looked at Chuck, expecting him to make his Nazi-death-camp analogy that I’d heard so many times, and when he didn’t, I spoke up again to offer his two cents as mine. “Johnson may not be a Nazi,” I said, “but there are twenty-five thousand Vietnamese civilians dying every week as a result of his policies. Same as the extermination rate at Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
As Chuck walked me the mile back to Radcliffe and asked if I was crying, I lied, saying it was raindrops on my cheeks. But then I said, “We can’t just go on like this, discussing and debating forever.” Our roles had reversed from when we were fourteen, when I was the one bringing up moral uncertainty and unintended consequences. “There has to be something we can do.”
“The poll in the paper the other day said half of Americans think the war’s a mistake.”
“A mistake,” I said, “running a red light and rear-ending somebody is a mistake. Spilling coffee on your notes while you’re studying is a mistake.”
“Harvard stopped buying grapes.” The boycott of nonunion California grapes had been the great progressive victory of the fall semester.
“Whoop-de-do.”
“It took Castro and Che six years to win their revolution.”
Six years ago we were twelve. Six years was forever.
“Of course they let us ‘dissent,’” I said, “because it makes everybody feel better and does nothing to stop the war.” President Johnson had just announced his intention to continue full speed ahead with the bombing in Vietnam. “In fact? That’s like a definition of ineffective resistance—it’s permitted by the authorities.”
“The Dow sit-in was a start,” Chuck said.
As punishment for imprisoning the Dow recruiter for seven hours, 245 students were either “admonished” or, like the four of us, put on probation. Chuck’s parents had been surprisingly mellow about it, which I figured was because Chuck had agreed to return to Wilmette in February for his little brother’s bar mitzvah. Alex’s father was livid, and Buzzy said his mother either threw away the dean’s letter unopened or was too drunk to understand what it meant. My parents, naturally, were a little proud, especially since in her form letter to them, my Radcliffe dean apologized for “the sternness of tone” and referred to “your daughter’s moral objections to various features of our society.” Not one kid had been kicked out of school.
“I’ll bet Dow won’t be back on campus,” Chuck said.
“Well, exactly. Exactly! Physical action works! Liberals freak out and give in.”
He was shaking his head. “White people are not going to rise up and revolt like the black people in the ghettoes. They just aren’t. They’re too comfortable. We’re too comfortable. We’re pussies.”
&
nbsp; Chuck’s ambivalence and hesitance had started to annoy me. “Something’s got to be done, something more than ‘protest’ and symbolic bullshit. Like Buzzy says, the only moral choice is to act, as individuals, to stop the evil. Like my dad when the Nazis occupied Denmark. Like your uncle in Israel.” Mrs. Levy’s brother had been an anti-British guerrilla in Palestine in the 1940s.
Just ahead in Harvard Square, we saw some Christmas carolers and then recognized them—four SDS kids. We heard the end of “O Come All Ye Mindless” and the first verse of their “Jingle Bells” spoof:
Preppie boys, corporate joys, Harvard all the way,
Oh what fun it is to have your mind reduced to clay!
I didn’t even smile. A week earlier, as my dad drove me to O’Hare for the flight back to Boston, he’d said he was my age when World War II started, but that during the five years the Nazis occupied Denmark, even in the internment camp, he’d never lost his sense of humor. He said he worried that, during the last year, I had. “Sorry, Dad,” I replied humorlessly, “but I don’t find pointless wholesale slaughter very amusing. Maybe I will when I’m older.”
The four of us had stopped going to rock concerts and Hollywood movies. The weekend before Christmas, we went to see The Survivors, a documentary filmed in North Vietnamese hospitals about the women and children maimed and burned and widowed and orphaned by American bombing. I was crying by the end, and I was the one who suggested we stay and watch it a second time.
Over Christmas break, Alex went skiing in Switzerland with his parents and made a side trip to visit his friend Darko in Belgrade. Buzzy drove his old wagon home to Las Vegas, so Chuck and I got a ride with him as far as Chicago. I was surprised by how sad I felt when he dropped us off in Wilmette—sad about being home, where Sabrina’s death cast a pall, but also about saying goodbye to Buzzy for two weeks.
My parents were hopeful about Senator Eugene McCarthy, who’d announced he was running as a peace candidate for the nomination against Johnson. Mom had even memorized lines from the poem McCarthy had written and recited at the press conference launching his candidacy—”I’m an existential runner / Indifferent to space / I’m running here in place.”
True Believers Page 30