The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Quickly, I answered. “Let’s not confuse Weather and what happened after Weather.”

  And now Osborne nodded. “I knew you were going to say that. But all these people were in Weather. You know, and I know, that if they hadn’t killed themselves, the town house bombers were going to take action against human targets. Excuse me.”

  To my disappointment, now Osborne rose to greet two women as they approached the table, one a trim middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair, the other a tall young woman in shorts and a tank top. The younger one gave me the sudden impression of a swan, but aware of her father’s gaze on me, I was careful not to stare. John Osborne greeted both with a kiss, then turned to me, who had by now risen too.

  “My wife, Marianne. And my daughter Rebeccah. I’m afraid I’m going to have to excuse myself now, Mr. Schulberg.”

  The introductions gave me the chance to reach my hand out to the daughter.

  “Oh, hi. I enjoyed your piece on Jason Sinai.” I could see the line of her ribs just above the low neckline of her T-shirt. Her hand, when she shook mine, thanking me, clearly without the faintest idea who I was, was slim and dry.

  “Well, I hate to ask too much, but I’d sure like to continue this conversation, Mr. Osborne.” I reached over to shake his hand. “Can I stay in touch?”

  “Well…” Osborne, clearly, had the disinclination of country folk to say no. “I’ll be back to Traverse City tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Maybe I could come by on Monday?”

  He answered hesitantly. “If you like. I don’t have much more to say.”

  I told him I’d come by in any case, then watched curiously as the family walked out.

  It wasn’t the first time that I had been shocked by how reasonable, educated, and thoughtful people on the right could be. I’d noticed the fact before: conservatives of a certain kind could, if not agree, at least understand people on the left, whereas leftists generally feel they have a monopoly on the truth. But it was an unusually strong experience of that shock. Then I brought my mind back to my real work.

  Was this, then, trail’s end? Was there nothing to learn in Michigan?

  I would, I decided, stay around till Monday—take a look around Ann Arbor, where Sinai had, after all, started his radical career. On Monday I’d go up to Traverse City and try one more time to get something out of Osborne. If that failed, well then, I’d go home.

  Though somehow I didn’t see myself going back to Albany, all of a sudden.

  2.

  Ann Arbor itself, I’m sorry to say, was a big disappointment. I’m not sure quite what I was expecting. Hippies, maybe, or an antiwar demonstration. What I did find failed to live up to its onetime status as epicenter of the youth movement. An orderly, pretty town, filled with restaurants and friendly midwesterners. Those who looked something other than out of Leave It to Beaver did so by virtue of being pierced in more places than I would have thought possible—and these were only the places I could see—while on campus, either summer school was in session or there was a casting call for a new installment of Girls Gone Wild, for the concentration of tall blond women with perfect legs showing out of short shorts defied belief.

  Sitting on the steps of a vast library, I half closed my eyes and tried to imagine what this had looked like when John Osborne, Jason Sinai, and Mimi Lurie had all been on campus. What would there have been? Most kids would have been dressed in, say, jeans and T-shirts; the girls in tank tops or Indian cotton prints, the boys often shirtless. There’d also have been well-dressed, clean-cut young men going in and out of the ROTC building, although by Jason’s time even these would have been growing out their hair and sideburns. With them might have been women in not-too-short minidresses and bouffant hairstyles—the silent majority, Agnew had called these ones. Then there’d have been freaks: white kids with Afros or long straight hair, purple people, hippies, yippies. There’d have been Black Panthers in leather and black berets. Girls in colored silk, hip-huggers, sandals. There’d have been booths set up: people selling Rat or Liberation, or New Left Notes. There’d have been dope: kids sitting cross-legged in small groups, passing a joint. There’d have been guitars. I opened my eyes again on the quiet, hot August day on campus and watched a Campus Ministry of Christ booth being set up.

  Finally, terminally bored, I registered in a Days Inn, had dinner in an Italian restaurant, and that evening wandered downtown, looking for a jazz bar I’d seen advertised in a local paper. Even in the evening, the town seemed sunk in a heat-induced lassitude, air so hot that it rippled above the sidewalk. For a time I wandered, unable to find the bar. And as if finding the damn place was the whole reason I had come to this town, frustration began to mount in me.

  I was aware that I was losing focus, but I just didn’t know what else to do. There was no manhunt after Jason that I could follow. The battle for his daughter was being fought in New York City. There was just no entrance into the story, I thought with sudden clarity. For days, all I had been doing was looking for a way back in, like a crack addict trying to regain his original high. And yet I was morally certain a story was there.

  Bitterly, I felt how close I’d been to it, sitting in Saugerties with Jim Grant. Walking aimlessly, smoking endlessly, a deep weight defined itself in my chest. I had been right there, right on top of this story, and I’d let it slip away. Now what? I was supposed to forget it and let my pompous, smug editor reassign me elsewhere?

  For a long time I wandered through the hot night, lost in these thoughts. And as the sense of my rootlessness grew, so did a depression. At last, more by chance than design, I found myself in front of the Del Rio, the bar I’d seen advertised, and a small and not laudable decision to get drunk crystallized in me.

  When I entered the bar, I found that most of the town had had, apparently, that same idea. Still, it seemed a pretty good crowd—no one seemed about to break out into the Michigan fight song, or tell me to have a good day, or call me by my first name, if for no other reason than because they were all paying serious attention to the band. I elbowed my way through the crowds to the corner of the bar, then waited a long time for the bartender, a middle-aged woman with black hair, to make her way over. When she did, I ordered a double scotch and soda. It was busy enough that I drank it quickly, hoping to catch the bartender again while she worked my end of the bar. Although the strategy seemed to annoy her—she seemed, in fact, easily annoyed, as if she rather resented that she had to serve drinks in the first place—it was successful enough to leave me drinking my second double when she moved off down the bar and I turned to the band.

  A bald man, with a fringe of white hair, on an electric keyboard, a three-piece backup, all deeply into a long improvisation on a bluesy theme. And the crowd was not bad either: slowly, feeling the booze arriving in my brain in little increments of relaxation, I observed that it was an unusually pleasant-looking group of people, all clearly here for the music, for there was virtually no talking going on. To my great surprise I had even begun to enjoy myself—so much so that as the band wound down the song and announced a short break over the sudden surge of applause, I felt real disappointment.

  The clapping died down and was replaced by a wave of conversation, which threw me again into loneliness. Time, I thought with disappointment, to leave: I didn’t feel like being the only person drinking alone in a college-town bar. And perhaps I would have left had I not suddenly recognized a long-necked woman sitting at a table with a man I couldn’t see. The man’s arm was around her bare shoulders, and she was evidently listening, then laughing.

  It was, of course, Osborne’s daughter.

  Now I had a chance to look at her at length, and what I had suspected at the café turned out to be truer than I cared to admit. Her head, a highly oval-shaped object, was facing down at an angle while she listened to the man with her, and sat at the end of a neck that, it seemed to me, was so long that it literally curved up to balance it. Her hair, back in a tight ponytail, was blond, and seemed to h
ave a life of its own, so perfectly did it hang over her neck. The skin of her neck was of a paleness that was nearly translucent and blended into bare shoulders that sloped under her neck, showing one bra strap under her sleeveless silk shirt, which was white. Farther down the neckline, visible in contour under the shirt, her breasts sank heavily.

  I felt my breath literally catch. Then I stood and stepped to the right to try to see her through the crowd. Now I could see the flat of her stomach and the slim jeaned legs, crossed, ending at leather sandals over bare feet.

  I must have been staring, for she suddenly looked up, meeting my eyes directly, holding my gaze across the crowded room with a puzzled expression, as if trying to think if she knew me. And I, suddenly entirely at sea, found myself crossing the room.

  3.

  Now, as to my initial appraisal of Rebeccah’s attractions, closer inspection showed that I had, if anything, underestimated them. They were, I felt strongly, unusual, as if the classic American handsomeness of her father had been mixed with some rogue gene that screwed with the symmetry, the regularity of her features just enough to change her from pretty to beautiful. The man she was with, on the other hand, was so handsome, so clean-cut, and—when he stood up—turned out to be so broad-shouldered that I did not think he could appreciate the beauty of this woman. In fact, I was morally certain he could not.

  Whether I was right or wrong to approach the daughter of my interviewee, that’s a more difficult question, and has to do with the dubious ethics of my chosen profession. But as to my method of starting a conversation with her, I don’t think I was that off. When you are as beautiful as Rebeccah, you tend to see a lot of different kinds of introductions, and certainly mine stood out. Come to think of it, you probably are as beautiful as Rebeccah, and know exactly what I mean.

  Approaching her, I reintroduced myself, reminding her that we had met with her father that afternoon. She in turn introduced me to the man she was with. I disliked him immediately and with intensity. He, after a look at my face—admittedly unshaven, and probably showing both fatigue and drunkenness—seemed barely able to conceal amusement, and decided to go to the bathroom. At which point I, uninvited, sat in his chair.

  “I had a great talk with your dad this afternoon.”

  “Did you?” Rebeccah regarded me with curiosity. “What about?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No. Why should he?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was interesting.”

  “I’m sure he did too. I’m sure he found it interesting all thirty-five times he’s spoken to reporters about Jason Sinai this week.” At this, she delivered me a wide-mouthed, white-toothed smile.

  I watched her, rendered temporarily speechless by the smile. The waitress came, and I ordered another drink, wondering how drunk I was. And perhaps my next move was in fact an indicator of inebriation. I turned to her solemnly and let my voice drop nearly to a whisper, so she had to incline her ear toward me to hear. “I’m not a reporter, man. See, I was with him underground in the sixties. Jason, I mean. We blew up the Haymarket together. Brought the war home to the honky moneyfucking pig, man.”

  At that the wondering ovals of her eyes suddenly, in a flash, collapsed into dancing ellipses, and her mouth split into a smile.

  “Bullshit. You’re no older than me.” Her voice had then, as it has now, the inflectionless clarity of a midwestern accent.

  “Am so.” I put it in a five-year-old’s inflection. “What are you, a junior?”

  “Senior.”

  “See? I’m a real working person.”

  “Oh, yeah? Working at what—besides being a pain in the ass.”

  “Right now? Not much. Well, okay, I admit it, I am a reporter. Albany Times.”

  “Is that right?” She was still smiling. “Where’s Albany?”

  I didn’t answer that. “See, that’s why I came to see your father.”

  “Uh-huh.” The clean-cut man was coming back, and Rebeccah gave me her wide smile again. “So nice to talk to you.”

  “Um-hmm.” I stood, smiling agreeably at the man. For a moment, the thought of sticking my tongue out seemed an actual possibility. Then, just before leaving, I leaned down to Rebeccah and spoke quietly into her ear. “You’re aware that you’re out with a total bozo, aren’t you?”

  With which words I left her, and returned to the bar and the business of getting blind drunk.

  Fortunately, the crowd was by now too thick for me to continue observing her.

  Although, looking at her or not, I’m not sure I can say that she ever really left the focus of my inner eye again, that evening or in the weeks to come.

  4.

  One difference between Rebeccah Osborne and me has to do with how we each woke up Monday morning. For my part, I had a splitting headache and a mouth so evilly dry that I thought seriously about dehydration. Also, I was filled with remorse. Rebeccah, on the other hand—as she was later to tell me—woke as she always did, luxuriantly in her sun-flooded bedroom on East Ann Street, stretched out in the full length of her bed, and thought curiously about her day. I, covering my head with a pillow, felt my aloneness keenly, and wondered how hard it could possibly be to pick up a woman, no matter what woman, somewhere in this town. Rebeccah, as the night before reassembled itself, felt on balance glad she had sent her date back home—he was too damned handsome to go to bed with too quick, if at all. I, when I finally got out of bed, swung my legs to the ground, buried my face in my hands, and coughed for perhaps thirty seconds, clearing my lungs for the first cigarette of the day. Rebeccah, in contrast, was by then already out doing her daily four miles along the Huron River.

  Fortunately, being hung over wasn’t an altogether unknown experience to me, and therefore didn’t keep me from doing what I had to, which was to take a mouthful of aspirins, drink a dozen or so cups of coffee from room service, smoke a few eye-opening cigarettes while padding around the room in my bare feet, and finally drink half a single of vodka from the minibar. Then I left immediately for Traverse City, a five-hour drive.

  Long enough to allow me to piece together all I could from the night before, which was not much. I wasn’t quite sure what Rebeccah and I had talked about during our conversation, but I was fairly convinced she had not given me her address, her phone number, or an invitation for dinner. Still, there was something tugging at me about her, and although I certainly tried to shrug it off, it didn’t seem to want to go away.

  I arrived at the Traverse City FBI office just before lunch—so closely before, in fact, that Osborne had already left. Apparently he had left word that he was expecting me—it made me worry that we’d been meant to eat together, and I’d forgotten—because they seated me not in the waiting room but in the little lunch area, where I could drink weak coffee and eat from a vending machine. What I couldn’t do, however, was smoke, and as the lunch hour ticked by, that became a more and more imperative need. In the end I asked for, and received, permission to make my way through a little communications room with a back door open to a little rear parking lot, and stood at the door smoking, while I listened to radio reports coming in from the field in the room behind me.

  All that came of the waiting, however, was being there to overhear Osborne radio in that I was to be told he was being kept away by a murder investigation, and discouraged from returning. And whether simply by his voice or by a more obscure association centering around the rejection, I remembered what had been evading me earlier: Osborne had said his daughter worked in a diner in town.

  Back in Ann Arbor that evening, without ever quite pronouncing to myself what I was up to, I liberated—or expropriated—a yellow pages from a phone booth and, guided by the Restaurants section, began a leisurely tour of the town. It was not until an hour later that I reached the first of the two entries under F and turned up outside a tiny corner diner close to the bar I had been in last night. The place was crowded, but nonetheless, through the window I could see Rebeccah working behind t
he counter.

  For a time I sat and watched her through the car window: in a sleeveless T-shirt again, her strong shoulders steady as she took two overloaded plates from one end of the counter, next to the cook, and carried them smoothly, the weight on her hips, to a table. Her hair was up again, this time under a baseball cap, and while the oval of her head was so pronounced as to be nearly absurd, the length of her neck and slope of her shoulders obviated any suggestion of ungainliness. She was, I thought again, like a well-muscled swan, a combination of grace and strength that at the moment struck me as virtually impossible. It was, I thought to myself, a beauty so particular that no one in the world could possibly appreciate it to the degree that I did. And that, I know now, is a typical attribute of great feminine beauty: to make young men feel that only they are good enough, or sensitive enough, or in love enough, to understand.

  At length I got out of my car and walked hesitantly into the little diner, without any clear idea of what I was doing. Inside, the noise was that of a party. There was an empty seat at the counter, which I took. Then I waited, watching as Rebeccah moved surely and definitely up and down the small restaurant—clearly she was the only waitress, and clearly she knew what she was doing. She did notice that a new customer was in—on one trip, passing by with more of the diner’s signature overladen oval plates, she dropped a menu in front of me and asked if I wanted coffee. She did not, however, seem to notice who I was, which gave me the leisure to study her face in search of what it held, exactly, that made her so different from the superabundance of sun-bronzed, blond, pretty college girls that filled this, like any campus town. It was, I finally decided, that although her bearing was so American—the blond hair, the well-exercised body, the white teeth—there was also a somehow un-American, nearly Slavic cast to her face: the brown eyes, the slightly crooked smile.

  Still without noticing who I was, Rebeccah took my order, and I continued my inspection while I ate, slowly. So slowly, in fact, that by the time I’d finished, the dinner rush was over, and the crowd in the little diner had thinned considerably. Now Rebeccah was much more involved in clearing tables than serving customers, and her pace slowed, enough that she actually poured herself a cup of coffee, standing with her back to my inspection. It was an appreciative inspection. Still, I cut it off finally by speaking to her, conversationally, as if continuing a discussion that had been going on all evening.