“Mom, great news,” Lizzie said straightaway. “He called.”
Stay neutral, I told myself.
“Well, that is good news,” I said.
“And he wants to see me and talk things through.”
“I’m very pleased.”
“And I’m sure that, after he’s heard what I have to say, he’ll come right back to me. I know it. It’s a certainty.”
“Now it might be best not to get your hopes too high,” I said.
“Mom, I can handle it. Okay?”
“Okay. You going to get some sleep tonight?”
“Oh yes.”
“Will you call me tomorrow in Burlington to let me know how it all went?”
“Sure, Mom.”
She sounded exactly like the fifteen-year-old she once was, getting all sulky about being asked to be home by eleven p.m. I wanted to take this as a sign that she was in a better place than she was half an hour ago, but I knew this was just wishful thinking. As soon as my flying Burlington visit was over, I’d be down to Boston.
“You know you can call me day or night, hon,” I said.
“You’ve told me that already, Mom. Anyway, everything’s going to work out fine.”
No, it won’t. But I couldn’t say that. All I could hope was that, between now and tomorrow, McQueen would figure out some self-preservation strategy that would allow him to disentangle himself from Lizzie while simultaneously restoring her fragile equilibrium. Personally, I didn’t know how the hell he’d pull it off. Because he wasn’t in any position to give her what she so desperately wanted. That was the rub. My greatest worry right now was that she had so convinced herself she could talk him into coming back that when he said no, she’d flip entirely.
But that was tomorrow’s problem. It was now nearly ten-thirty. I had a four-hour drive in front of me in the morning, not to mention all the attendant emotional baggage that would accompany me to my hometown. Right now, I just wanted to drink a final glass of wine, and take one of the herbal sleeping pills I use whenever I sense a restless night coming on. But there was the little matter of twenty-eight term papers . . .
I opened the first, written by Jamie Benjamin—a total knucklehead who spent much of my class sending notes back and forth to a girl named Janet Craig, whose daddy owned a Toyota dealership out near the Maine Mall, and who seemed destined, before she graduated next year, to get knocked up by a useless jock like Benjamin (he played tight end on the school football team, and though he always acted like Mr. Macho, he always got creamed by the opposing defense in every game I ever saw).
I read Benjamin’s opening sentence.
“Evangeline is a very, very unhappy woman.”
I don’t know why, but I started to cry. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, the three glasses of wine, the phone call with Lizzie, my fast-asleep husband down the corridor, the terrible, repetitive inanity of teaching the same stuff year in, year out, to kids who increasingly don’t really seem to care a damn about any modestly articulate sentence that comes out of my mouth. Or maybe it was being fifty-three and trying to fight the thought that, at best, I am in the final third of my life, and what does all this mean? And the sad realization (which has been there for ages) that it simply adds up to your little life, nothing more . . .
Whatever the reason, I covered my face in my hands and let go. I must have cried for a good five minutes—the first time I’d had a long, unhinged weep since . . . well, since my mother vanished into the netherworld.
When my crying finally subsided, I stood up and went into a bathroom down the corridor, threw some water on my face, and avoided gazing at myself in the mirror (something I don’t particularly like doing these days). Then I returned to my study and sat down at my desk. I reached for my cigarettes, lit one, and took a deep, pleasurable drag of smoke, drawing it way down into my lungs. As I released the smoke, I pulled the pile of term papers back in front of me. And I thought, At moments like these, there is only one solution: go to work.
ELEVEN
THE DRIVE FROM Portland to Vermont is long and wonderful. I should know, I’ve been doing it for several decades. As there’s no direct interstate route, it’s all back roads and two-lane blacktops—a slow cavalcade through small towns and lakelands and the best alpine terrain in the Northeast. I must have driven it over one hundred times since we moved back to Maine in 1980. Though I know every meander and bend of the route—the prosaic flat stretches, the deep woodlands, the sublime White Mountain vistas, the deep verdancy that announces the arrival of the Kingdom of Vermont—it never bores me. I always discover something new along the way every time I drive it—a reminder that, by looking closer, you can often find the unfamiliar amid the habitual.
But this morning, I wasn’t paying particular attention to the passing landscape. My mind was elsewhere. I’d finally finished the term papers at two-thirty, then scribbled a note to Dan asking him to reset the alarm (after he got up) for eight-thirty, and to call me on my cell phone when he had a chance. I slept badly—a toxic combination of worry, nine Marlboro Lights, too much pinot noir, and the thought that Lizzie might ring me in the middle of the night. When I woke, Dan was gone, and there were no messages on the voice mail. I showered and dressed, made coffee, and put a call through to Lizzie’s office in Boston. I wanted to speak with her directly to make sure she was all right, but I knew she’d probably get annoyed with me for checking up on her. One of her colleagues answered, and when I asked for “Ms. Buchan,” he said that she was in the morning staff conference. Any message? “None,” I said. “I’ll call back.”
I was relieved that she had made it to work, and knew that I’d be thinking all day about her meeting with Mark McQueen, which, I presumed, was scheduled for early evening, after they both got off work. Maybe I should leave a message on her cell phone, telling her to call me on my cell phone as soon as . . .
No, she might think I’m crowding her. Anyway, she might not meet him until late. They might go out for dinner (no, he’ll want to get it over with as fast as possible), or they might be talking for a long time. Maybe she will have arranged to see a girlfriend afterward (wishful thinking—she’s expecting to fall back into his arms and pull him off into bed). Or perhaps she’ll try to work off her upset in the gym. Anyway, if she’s very upset, I’m sure she’ll call me, and . . .
Stop. There’s nothing you can do until you hear from her. The fact that she’s reported for work is a good sign. It’s out of your control. Get on with your day—which, under the circumstances, is going to be difficult enough.
I drank two mugs of coffee, then started coughing heavily. Nine cigarettes. I vowed not to smoke today or tomorrow. Then I filled the thermos mug with more coffee, grabbed my overnight bag, and was out the door by nine. I drove over to the school, turned in my midterm grades to the registrar, picked up a couple of pointless internal memos in my mailbox, and was gone from the place ten minutes after I first got there, giving silent thanks that I wouldn’t be back for another ten days, when school reconvened after the Easter break.
Then I negotiated my way through Portland’s mishmash of residential areas—a little pocket of remaining High Colonial architecture on Park Street, leading to Depression-era apartment blocks (which I used to write off as kitschy, but which I now recognized to be retro-cool). Then the usual low gray-shingle houses that seem to characterize the old blue-collar section of every modest New England city. Then the subdivisions near the highway. Then, in a matter of minutes, empty country. That’s one of the many things I love about Maine—the sense that the land always dwarfs the population, that the wilderness is never more than a few miles from your front door.
I picked up Route 25 heading west. Thirty minutes later I saw signs for Sebago Lake, Bridgton, and Pelham.
Pelham. I hadn’t been back there since . . . well, since we left the damn place in the summer of ’75. Even after we finally got out of that wretched apartment and into the house of Dr. . . . What was his name again (thir
ty years is such a frighteningly long time)? . . . Bland! . . . Yes, even once we moved into Dr. Bland’s house, Pelham still convinced us both that we’d never, ever, live in a small town again. Of course, I was so racked with guilt after that business with . . . (even now, after all this time, I don’t like recalling his name) . . . that I simply kept my head down and got on with being the perfect doctor’s wife and mother, somehow convincing myself that as long as I kept Dan happy and didn’t make trouble, he might just stand by me when the feds finally came to pick me up, and the conservative Maine newspapers turned me into the Madame Defarge of the Weather Underground, and I was facing two-to-five for aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice.
But the feds never showed up, and the assorted catastrophic scenarios I painted in my head never came true. No one around town ever mentioned my visitor again. And poor Billy (I wonder if he’s still alive?) was as good as his word and never talked about what he saw that night. I beat myself up for a long time afterward, telling myself that there had to be a punishment for what I had done, and constantly waiting for it to arrive at my door. But winter gave way to spring, and nothing happened—except that Dan’s poor father finally died, which, after over six months in a coma, was a relief to both of us. Shortly afterward I finally made my first visit to New York. During that long, crazy weekend with Margy (during which I kicked myself for waiting so long to get to that mad marvel of a city, which, even at the height of its mid-seventies dinginess, still struck me as the great testament to everything dynamic and out there in American life), the question finally arose one drunken evening. We were at a jazz joint up near Columbia University, listening to a fantastic boogie-woogie pianist named Sammie Price. After the final set—it was about one-thirty in the morning and we were both a little ripped—Margy asked: did I ever tell anyone else about the things that happened when Tobias Judson (there, I’ve said his name) came to town?
“You’re still the only person who knows,” I said.
“Keep it that way,” she said.
“No worry about that.”
“You still feel guilty about it all, don’t you?”
“I wish I could just shake it off, like flu.”
“Flu doesn’t last six months. You’ve got to stop punishing yourself. It’s all in the past now. Anyway”—she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone—“say he did somehow get picked up in Canada by the Mounties, why would he suddenly tattle on you? It would get him nothing. By this point, he’s probably forgotten all about you. You were just a little adventure, someone he used to get out of the country. Trust me, he’s using someone else by now.”
“You’re probably right.”
“You still giving your dad the cold shoulder?”
I nodded.
“You’ve got to forgive him.”
“No, I don’t.”
I continued to refuse to forgive him—for almost the next two years. He did try to call me again, several times, but I always cut him off, always told him I would never speak to him again. On the few occasions when we were together as a family, I was civil but distant with him. Dan noticed this gulf between us, but said little about it, except, “Everything okay with you guys?” But he accepted my vague excuse that we were just going through a slightly disenchanted phase with each other right now.
Of course, Mom constantly tried to find out what was going on—but I refused to explain. I know she also hassled Dad—because he eventually cracked and confessed what he had done. God knows what sort of fireworks followed this admission. What I do know is that Mom called me up one day at the library and said, “All right, I have finally been told what this rift is all about—and I think your father is walking bent over right now because I’ve just torn him a new asshole.”
Mom really did have such a subtle turn of phrase. She went on.
“If I were you, I’d be angry, furious, rabid. At the very least, he should have told you the guy was on the run . . .”
“Mom . . .” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If that was for the feds, don’t sweat it. I’m not on our home phone and I called you at work, to make sure nobody was listening to any of this. But what I want to tell you is this: your dad made a wrong call . . .”
“He made a terrible call,” I said.
“Okay, a terrible call—and he dropped you into a situation you shouldn’t have been dropped in. Still, the thing is: you did decide to drive the guy into Canada, which was both honorable and gutsy . . . You could have easily told him to take a hike.”
No, I couldn’t have—because he virtually blackmailed me into helping him flee. But if I told her that, I would have to explain why he had me in a corner—and that would have meant entrusting her with a secret that, bar Margy, I knew I would never share with anybody. Anyway, the idea of confiding in Mom was anathema to me—because I knew that she’d somehow use this information against me. So I said, “That’s right—I could have told him to take a hike. But having been landed with him—and as I was there when he discovered that the FBI were on his tail—what choice did I have?”
“A lot of people would have taken the easy way out and refused to have anything to do with it. You didn’t—and I genuinely admire you for that.”
It was the first time my mother had said she admired me for anything.
“Dan never found out, did he?” Mom asked.
“God, no.”
“Well, keep it that way. The less people know the better. But you’re going to have to forgive your father . . .”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“No, it’s not. He’s done plenty of things over the course of this screwy marriage that I’ve found hard to excuse, but eventually, I have forgiven him. Because he’s forgiven me stuff too. He may be a jerk sometimes, I may be a jerk sometimes . . . but we’re jerks in this together. It’s the same thing now with you. Your father’s tried to apologize to you—he feels bad about what he did to you—but you still refuse to forgive him. And it’s eating away at him.”
I held out for another year. By this time, we were settled in Madison—Dan doing his orthopedic residency at University Hospital, while I was substitute teaching at a local private school, and heavily pregnant with Lizzie. One afternoon, at our rented house (a Gothic revival dump—very Addams Family), the phone rang—and Dad was on the line. “I just called to say hello.”
No, there wasn’t a Movie-of-the-Week denouement to this scene. I didn’t suddenly break down on the line, telling him how much I missed him (which I certainly had), or saying the magic words: I forgive you. Nor did he get choked up and burst out with something lachrymose like: You’re the best daughter in the world. That wasn’t our reserved Yankee style. Instead there was a long pause after his first sentence, during which the realization came to me that I simply wanted to start talking to my dad again; that, though what he had done was wrong, I was also punishing him for my own bad judgment.
So I simply said, “It’s nice to hear from you, Dad.” And we started to chat about general things—like Jimmy Carter’s chances of beating Ford in November, and Nixon’s pardon, and the news that I was going to be a mother again, and my work as a teacher. We kept the conversation light, we laughed at each other’s jokes, we ended the breach between us by silently agreeing to dodge the matter. After all, what more could we say? So gradually, over time, we were able to find a way back to the relationship we once had. Looking back on it now—especially in the light of my knotty dealings with my own kids—I do appreciate that, like most interesting people, Dad is a very complex, contradictory guy, one who, back then, was never completely able to balance his public persona and his private life. In his own tangled way, he tried to do the best he could as a father, amid his own immensely tricky marriage to my mother.
Still, we never brought up the Toby Judson business again, even after it was widely reported in the newspapers that, following five years on the run in Canada, he had cut a deal with the federal prosecutors. In ret
urn for his testimony against the two Weathermen who had planted the bomb in Chicago (and whom the FBI had finally apprehended in New Mexico), Judson was able to return to the States and receive a suspended sentence for harboring fugitives. The trial, in 1981, was covered as a “Good-bye to All That” kiss-off to the era of sixties radicalism. None of the commentaries I read—even in what was left of the underground press—ever criticized Judson for ratting on his former comrades. Murder was murder—and the killers both got life, courtesy of Judson’s testimony. Afterward, when he was asked how he felt about his radical years, Judson said, “I’d like to be able to blame it all on youthful folly, but I realize now that my politics were simply wrong. By harboring those killers, I denied justice to the families of the innocent men killed in the bombing. I hope that, through my actions now, I will bring some sort of closure to the loved ones of these brave men—though I know that their deaths will be on my conscience for the rest of my life.”
Oh, he has a conscience now, I thought at the time. And then decided to think no more about it. Life moved on, and after his brief public reappearance at the trial, Judson disappeared into obscurity.
Sebago Lake suddenly came into view. Though the water hadn’t frozen, its banks and surrounding country were frosted with last night’s freak snowfall. It looked sublime. For a nanosecond I saw myself thirty years ago in a canoe on the lake—Judson rowing us along, Jeff and me sitting in the stern, the surrounding hills awash with autumn colors, me falling for Mr. Revolutionary’s bullshit charm. Oh God, the naiveté of it all—and the terrible guilt that followed. Guilt that finally abated, but can still catch me unawares. But I made good on the bargain I cut with myself on the trip back from Canada: I stuck with the marriage, even when I felt totally frustrated by it. And I was never unfaithful to Dan again. And the payoff was . . .
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