American Woman: A Novel

by Susan Choi

  And so one freezing morning she boarded the train at Rhinecliff, at an hour unusual for her so she’d see no conductors she knew, and rode farther south toward the city than she’d been since the night she had left. She got off at Peekskill. Here the river emerged from the vise of the highlands and pooled open again to the width of a lake. Beside the quaint station were a few scarred benches facing the water and the cement plant a half mile away on the opposite bank. “If it’s raining I’ll meet you inside,” she’d told him, “but if not I’ll be out on a bench. The wind is brutal off the river at this time of year. I’m sure we won’t have company.”

  The lawyer, when he finally came, turned out to be much younger than she’d expected. She had imagined a salt-and-pepper moustache and eyebrows, some sort of socialist party survivor who’d seen darker days and far worse situations. Instead he was smooth-cheeked and handsome, with a pair of steel-framed glasses to lend gravity. His voice, when he said hello to her, had the hard city edge she had heard on the phone. Then it had been persuasive; in person she found it too dissonant, matched with his face. “Nice spot,” he said, pulling his collar tightly around his neck. It was a dark, windy, quintessentially upstate New York day. Clouds the color of pewter rolled over them, pushed by strong wind. The air felt pregnant with snow, a worse cold than dry cold would have been. She had been waiting for almost half an hour, in her thin jeans and an old leather jacket that was missing two buttons, and a sweatshirt rolled up for a scarf. She couldn’t feel her hands or her toes, but she was used to it. She hadn’t bought winter clothes since she’d been here. She’d never had enough money.

  “I won’t keep you long,” she said, feeling embarrassed. She realized that in some part of herself she had actually wanted the older, grandfatherly man. The one who would arrive with a gruff nod but a warm gaze, who would be knowledgeable and relaxed, having won harder cases than hers more times than he could count. She suddenly longed to be sheltered by someone like that. Instead she was huddled outside on a bench with a very young man, and their meeting so far felt as awkward and fraught as a date.

  He was watching her, waiting, and so she finally choked out her question. “In light of the current political climate,” she began awkwardly, in the way she’d rehearsed. When she was finished he said, after a moment, “I think it’s fair to say that the current climate is pretty much the same as it’s been. No deals for fugitives. They’ll talk to you once you surrender. It’s safe to assume that coming in on your own will help out, later on.”

  “I didn’t just mean the climate inside the Justice Department. I meant the political climate in general. The Watergate scandal.”

  “I’m not seeing the connection.”

  “With abuses of power at the executive level so certain, it struck me there might be more sympathy now for the radical movement.”

  “I don’t know about that. You’d be safer just putting that out of your mind. It won’t bear on your case.”

  Now she no longer felt she was just quoting phrases of William’s. The young lawyer’s tone was so breezily certain she wondered just how young he was. Was he younger than her? “How can you say that?” she demanded. “The government’s prosecutorial habits are always political.”

  “Sure, but the charges against you are serious. I’m not trying to stick up for Nixon. I think the guy’s as crooked as they come. But you can’t say the executive office did criminal acts, so my criminal acts aren’t important.”

  “It’s not the so-called crimes, it’s the underlying reasons for them. You can’t strip our acts of their context and say they were crimes, and at the same time strip something like Vietnam of its crime, and call it a legitimate venture.”

  “Vietnam was a war. A distinct body of law applied to it.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, but your case will be decided on law. I agree with you, Jenny. But we’re talking about your chances in the justice system. We’re not in ethics class.”

  This made her wish for the meeting to end. She stared across the water at the glowing cement plant. Although it was midday the sky looked like dusk, and the plant’s green and gold lights shone intensely. A plume of white smoke, perhaps steam, emerged and was steadily snatched by the wind. The river looked like the ocean downstream at its mouth, green and full of harsh chop. She said, barely hearing herself over the wind, “I don’t have any money.”

  “We don’t need to talk about that.”

  “We will. Maybe there’s no point in our talking at all. I’ll have to have a court-appointed lawyer.”

  “Would your family help?”

  “My mother died when I was a baby. My father isn’t sympathetic to my views.”

  “Enough said. Jenny, if you go forward with me I want you to assume money isn’t an issue. Money will be worked out somehow. The issue is, do you want to go in? Do you want to surrender?”

  The white plume was still steadily tom from its smokestack. She sighed; she must sound like a truculent child. “Let’s pretend that I do.”

  “What happens after that will have a lot to do with how much you cooperate.”

  “I won’t name names.”

  For the first time she was aware of impatience. “Then you’ll have a hard time,” he said, crossing and recrossing his legs. “I hope you weren’t expecting me to tell you that there’s some kind of Watergate amnesty for the government’s enemies. Your only advantage is the stuff that you know. You had a large circle of friends when you lived in Berkeley. Your boyfriend was convicted of bombing draft offices. At the time they were claimed by something called the People’s Army and no one believes that was just him alone, or even just him and you. You see, I did my homework before coming here. If you surrender and offer no information you’re going to get a very hostile reception.”

  “I can’t betray friends. I don’t mean to drag you back to ethics class, but it’s a principle for me.”

  “Maybe you have information that doesn’t involve your close friends. Things you’ve heard on the grapevine.”

  “Like what?”

  “Information about this kidnapping would help you. A lot.”

  She knew she shouldn’t be surprised this had come up, but she still wondered whether he sensed this was why she had called him. Flamboyant behavior elsewhere in the Left; sudden desire to get herself cover. “Not my circle,” she said.

  “Same hometown. You might know someone who knows one of them.”

  “I don’t, and if I did we’d just be back in ethics class. I’d be willing to talk about general things. Common techniques, types of targets—”

  “You wouldn’t betray kidnappers? That’s beyond the pale, Jenny. They snatched a little girl. God only knows what they’re doing to her.”

  “She’s not ‘a little girl,’ she’s a nineteen-year-old college student, not that that means she deserved to be kidnapped. They say they’re treating her in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.”

  “Oh my God, that’s not even the most absurd thing they say. You can’t really believe that.”

  “I don’t yet disbelieve it! Almost the entire world believes the worst of them. Who’s left to believe the best, if not us?”

  “Kidnapping’s not politics, regardless of what those clowns want to claim.”

  “I’m not in agreement with them, I’m extending them the benefit of the doubt. Isn’t that part of your legal discourse? Kidnapping’s not a tactic I’d ever embrace.”

  “I hope not. And don’t talk about what you have or haven’t embraced, even hypothetically. I’m not representing you yet.”

  This stung her. “You haven’t exactly said whether you would,” she said, after a minute.

  “Of course I would. But you haven’t said whether you want me, and I’m not sure you do. I’m not sure you’re ready to go through with this. If you become my client I’ll do everything in my power, but you’ll still face the same choice. You’ll feel a lot of pressure to talk, and not just from the governm
ent. You may feel a lot of pressure from yourself. You don’t want to go to prison for ten years, maybe more. I’m not saying we’re certain to lose. I’m not saying you should abandon your principles, either. I’m saying you need to face facts. There won’t be any Watergate amnesty.”

  She’d flushed from his tone, but she knew he was right. Perhaps she’d already known. William was in prison, she realized. Sometimes she realized this incredible fact with fresh force. William was in prison, and his capacity to gauge the political atmosphere was not the same as it had been when he was out in the world. She’d wasted this young lawyer’s time. In some way, though, she’d enjoyed it. She’d liked arguing with him.

  “I understand,” she told him.

  It was time for the city-bound train. Before he turned back toward the station he said, “It’s too bad you don’t know where those kidnappers are. That would be worth at least three Watergates.”

  “Really?” She knew it was a peace offering.

  “Oh, yeah. They’d throw out all the charges and make you an FBI agent.”

  “The worst fate of all!” she said, laughing.

  “Write me.” He put his hand out and she took it. Even through the numb chill she could feel his hand’s warmth, and the shock, the warm touch, made her stomach turn over with longing. She pulled her hand away quickly.

  “I’ll write you,” she said.

  IT WAS HARD, she had to admit, to give the kidnappers the benefit of the doubt. They’d taken weeks to convey their demands, and when they finally did she had the sense of a panicked all-night study session, or a coffee-soaked chainsmokers’ mad argument that had collapsed in indiscriminate compromise. There were pages on typewritten pages. There were declarations of principles and sociological tracts, and a mythlike explanation of their symbol. There was a long list of other revolutionary movements with which they shared ideological ties or—perhaps this was meant as a threat—“logistical/material reciprocity arrangements for ammunition, supplies, and ground troops.” There was a tape with the victim’s voice on it. “They’ve chosen me as a symbol of the problems of capitalism, Mom, Dad, and I think if you try you can see what their point is.” The victim detailed—clearly reading, her voice strangely girlish yet dull—the demand: that a week’s worth of “good, healthy food” be distributed to every California resident whose annual income was below the poverty line, or who suffered some form of social marginalization, for example was a recently paroled criminal, or a resident of the state’s substandard low-income housing, or otherwise verifiably poor. Every person in need must be fed. The food was to be distributed, no strings attached and no hassles, starting in no less than a week and continuing for no less than a month, anywhere that was not a social services center or some other record-keeping arm of any level of government and preferably at normal supermarkets where The People were accustomed to going, so as to make it convenient. The distribution was not even the actual ransom, but a goodwill gesture, after which ransom talks would commence. Periodically the girl would pause, and a rustling of sheets would be heard. “I just had to turn over the page,” she murmured at one point.

  Lying flat on the scaffold she’d built beneath the library ceiling, watching the colored lozenges of light from the faux-Flemish windows moving over her legs as the March sun came through the bare trees, gently swabbing the foul brown stains with her soap-lathered sponge, Jenny still had the transistor beside her. After its dizzying summer and fall the Watergate scandal had been in eclipse for the whole of the winter. Congress wanted the tapes, the president had refused them, and now it was up to the courts to decide. Like the rest of the audience—the sofa citizenry, she thought ruefully, whom she’d been forced to join—her attention had been taken up by the kidnapping everywhere Watergate let it go slack. But for her there was also the oddly secretive family dimension that the rest of the sofa folk knew nothing of. The ransom demand was picked apart in the Left-leaning press. It was grandstanding, self-righteous and impractical, out of touch with the actual needs of The People. A one-time food handout was just the kind of ostentatious paternalistic gesture the United States government was fond of making in the Third World countries it had previously helped to destroy. This must have frustrated them, Jenny imagined—to have labored to come up with a ransom that would clearly denote them as selfless and noble, and then to have it thrown back in their faces. Even the most radical guests on the student-run radio show she could sometimes tune in said things like, “With the movement dying out, you can’t be surprised at these macabre developments. It’s like a corpse twitching. You could call this the decadent stage of the Left; if there was ever a golden age, this is our signal it’s over.” She felt mingled outrage and shame, and a certain fiery defensiveness for the cadre, hearing comments like these. Yes, they were probably crazy. But who with legitimate, fervent belief hadn’t also been looked on as crazy? The kidnapping was a public mortification for the Left, an occasion for shirt rending and excommunication, but it also gave Jenny the sense of One Nation she’d felt during Watergate summer. Except that this nation was hers, her own nation-within, sharing borders yet pursuing itself on an alternate plane.

  A few weeks after their meeting she wrote the young lawyer No. “You were right,” she explained. “I’m not ready for this.” She took the train back to Peekskill to mail the letter, so he would only have that place linked to her. Then she hoped for relief. In the weeks since they’d met she’d been desperate to see him again, even just to say No to his face. He was the first person in almost two years she had spoken to truthfully, and so it wasn’t her desire so much as her failure to anticipate her desire she found so unnerving. She had dreams about him: mortifyingly sexual dreams in which they made desperate love to each other, which weren’t even as bad as the abstract emotional dreams, in which she “knew” that he loved her. She wished she missed William as she’d missed him at first. She tried to summon those waves of blind pain she had felt at their first separation, even tried to revisit the worst lows of their history together in the hopes she could “plumb from their murks certainty?” of her love. She finally wrote William to explain her decision and felt guilty for some of her phrases: “Your idea that the robed judges might now be more kindly disposed gave me hope, but it isn’t the case. You or anyone like you might do worse at present, or so I am told by a very good source.”

  The Rhinebeck library sat on the town square, a graceful little building of cut stone and stained glass that had a kinship to the Rhinecliff train station. The two had been designed by the same architects, hired by a titan of railroads who had summered out here and who’d wanted his guests to embark from the train—and page through the newspaper, and bow head in prayer (there was also the wonderful church)—in the splendor to which they were accustomed, but on a quainter, more countrified scale. “Our historic river valley,” Mrs. McNulty would say. “Everywhere you look there’s a door to the past.” She had become fond of Jenny for her supposed role as a restorer. When Jenny first ventured into the library not for the Wildmoor scrapbooks but for West Coast newspapers, Mrs. McNulty kept confusedly bringing her clippings about Queen Anne decor; but after some days she perceived that the errand had changed. Now when Jenny dropped into the library, always trying to seem casual, she would find the most recently arrived San Francisco Chronicles and Examiners neatly laid out stair-step style, the dates showing, at the large corner table she liked. “Please don’t, it’s all right, Mrs. McNulty,” she said, but it kept happening. Sometimes while she read, a new bundle of mail would come—the newspapers came on delay, as always with libraries. She’d hear Mrs. McNulty humming and clipping the string with her small pair of scissors. Then Mrs. McNulty would come to her holding the new ones like freshly baked bread. “Oh Iris, I’m afraid you’re homesick,” she’d say, setting them down.

  The girl’s family had responded to the demand for the goodwill gesture with a fastidious attention under which the demand could only look absurd. “We’re sure grateful to those folks, ho
ney, for shooting straight with us,” the girl’s father said to a lawnful of cameras. “And we’re working away to see how we can meet this demand. But the thing is, it’s a little bit vague. A week’s worth of food, over the course of a month—we’re thinking, a few times a week for a month? We just want to be sure we get everything right. As for the numbers—well, honey, I hope you can convey to these folks that, in a big state like ours, it’s not easy to find everybody who’s poor. We have so many ways of calculating that number, and it’s likely to be such a big number—and that doesn’t make anyone happy. But that’s the way that it is. We’ve got some folks here who are praying for you, and are helping us out just so much—they’re mathematicians and statisticians. And they think—well, their estimate is that maybe we’re talking about half a billion dollars’ worth of food.” Here his voice cracked. “And I have to say, there’s no way I can do it. But I’m going to do the very best that I can.”

  The response came within just a few days, another tape at the door to a radio station—the tapes seemed to drop from the sky, and bore no fingerprints. “These people want you to know, Dad, they didn’t mean to make a demand that nobody could meet. Um—what you said, about doing the best that you can, that’s just fine. Just do it, really quickly, okay?” But the girl’s nervousness seemed to alternate now with a different, peeved tone. “These people want you to know they’re not crazy. Don’t try to make them look crazy. Their message is a political message, it’s about poverty and the problems of capitalism, and I’m a symbol of all that, as they said. They are fulfilling the conditions of the Geneva Conventions . . . in accordance with the Codes of International War.” She had a script, but she seemed to be straying from it. “And if you’d tell Mom the way she keeps crying—that’s really depressing. It’s like she’s standing right next to my grave.”