by Joshua Furst
Sometimes we had to stop so my mother could consult the hand-scrawled directions Lenny had instructed Kunstler to send her. Turn right at the boulder. But which boulder? This one? That one? The one back there? She’d pass the creased sheet of legal paper to me and ask me to verify her instinct. We rode on faith, not knowing if the last turn was correct until we found the next one, not knowing if the next or the next was correct either. We went on like this, groping our way forward until we reached a turn that might have been a driveway—a stone wall, a lantern, a barn-door mailbox. There were posted signs: RESTRICTED USE. NO TRESPASSING. NO HUNTING.
We crunched up a gravel path, around a corner, up a hill and then we were in a clearing, staring at an old stone house. So maybe we’d made it. But there weren’t any other cars in the driveway. No lights in the house. No signs of habitation.
I asked my mother, “Where’s Lenny?”
“Sometimes appearances can be deceiving,” was her answer.
We weren’t ready. Neither one of us. We got out of the car and dawdled for a while. Digging in the trunk for stuff we didn’t need.
I couldn’t find my shoes. Sinking into the soggy ground, one socked foot lodged in the mud, I felt around under the seat and found one but not the other. More groping around down there. I could just touch the laces. Flicking a fingertip back and forth, I coaxed the shoe forward.
My mother, annoyed, took her anxiety out on me. “Quit horsing around.”
“I’m not, it’s stuck on the bar.”
“Give me a break. It’s not stuck.”
“It is. I can’t get it.”
And she tried and she couldn’t get it either.
“So go barefoot, Freedom. Take your socks off. Come on.”
Off they went, and holding them by the stretched-out elastic bands I attempted to scrape the mud away with a stick.
“Just leave it. Here, roll up your jeans. Why’d you take the shoes off anyway?”
“ ’Cause—”
“No. Don’t answer. I don’t care. Watch the puddle, now. Let’s go.”
We marched to the door. Knocked. Rang the bell. We waited. Knocked again. Rang the bell again. No Lenny.
And I felt a sudden crash of panic: This was my fault. If he’d been caught, it was because of me and Rosalita and my moral failure, though I couldn’t have understood it like that at the time, my inability to separate shame from duty, to understand things I didn’t know, my deception, my betrayal, my—and Walker! I’d forgotten that what happened to me, what I did with my secret time, was always only a reflection of Lenny. “I…Mom…I…” I couldn’t find the words to confess.
“What? Freddy, what is it?” Guilt torqued in my chest. She must’ve noticed: Her hands fluttered around my face but she resisted the urge to touch me. “We’re there. What’s wrong? Tell me.”
“I did…something bad.”
She flinched and I saw that she saw it too—the possibility of my having said the wrong thing to the wrong person, even if by mistake. “You didn’t,” she said. What she meant was, how could you?
That’s when the tears came.
She walked me to the car and we sat there while I struggled with myself. She did me the favor of holding my hand.
“I have a friend,” I said eventually. “She…I visited her once. She lives…there’s this…Ronnie Walker was there.”
If I’d been more aware, I might have seen her struggle to mask the amusement—the adoration—playing on her face.
“Ronnie Walker, Mom! I found him…and he threatened me, or maybe he didn’t, or maybe…I don’t know…he broke my gun and…Ronnie Walker! And now where’s Lenny, Mom?”
I was cracking her up. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, baby.” She drew me across the seat and nestled me under her arm. “You’re cute.” She gave me a little squeeze.
“I’m not cute. Because look, he’s not here!”
“You’re right. He’s not here.” She gazed at the dark house, at the empty muddy clearing, the ruts and divots where there should’ve been a car. “But I promise you, Ronnie didn’t turn him in. Walker’s fine. He’s righteous. Kunstler’s PI found him. He wasn’t even hiding. He’d just been out of town. So…” She squeezed me again. “Okay?”
Well, sort of. ’Cause why hadn’t anyone told me that? Why hadn’t anyone thought I ought to know? They told me all kinds of other inappropriate things. My mother could go on about the Queen for hours. Were they trying to protect me? When had they ever done that? And what about the setup? Who was that other guy—the one they’d all talked about and who’d then disappeared? Had he even been there? What was and wasn’t Lenny guilty of, exactly? Did it matter? It had to. They’d told me it did.
“Then why…Lenny said—”
“You know how Lenny gets when he’s nervous. He’ll be here. I promise. We just have to wait.”
We sat there for hours. What else could we do? My socks dried and I picked off the crusted mud. We extracted my shoe from under the seat. Mom read a whole magazine, front to back. The ads, too. And then the sun set invisibly behind the clouds and the woods and the clearing and everything in it turned murky.
Later still, after dark, we saw a pair of headlights moving up the road. They turned in to the driveway—a station wagon. It circled the clearing, its lights skimming over us, shining on the house and then aiming back at the main road. The engine cut, the lights snapped off. Out stepped two people. A man and a woman. It was hard to make them out in the dark. They gathered a few things from the front seat. The man locked the car. He was doughy around the waist. When he stood up straight it was like he was still slouching, like life had defeated him. A shlub.
The woman called out to him. “Don’t forget your camera, Nick.” Her voice smoky and sharp with the diction of private school.
“Got it,” the guy said. Not a hint of Brooklyn.
They trudged past us toward the house, two gentle people digging a pastoral rut. Seeming not to notice us sitting there in the dark car. When they reached the front steps, the guy stepped off the slate and found a switch hidden behind a bush. Now the house light came on, a globe above the door. They turned and waited, letting us stare. Posed there in silhouette, silent, tired, while we took them in. There was something ritualistic about it. A slow hello. Something almost Japanese.
“Well, you coming in, or what?” called the man. This Nick.
The woman nudged him flirtatiously with her hip. She called out to us too. “Welcome!”
My mother and I went through the saga of gathering our things again, self-consciously now, aware of their eyes on us.
As we picked around the puddles in the driveway toward them, the woman said, “We would’ve been here earlier but we were at a meeting.”
Flopping his arms in the air, making fun of himself, the man barked, “Save the river!” and something familiar ghosted in this gesture. Lenny. But a Lenny who’d been pulled and stretched into someone else. Up close, I could see his nose was different, that honking Jewish bulb replaced by something flatter, not better, but stubbier. His Jewfro was gone—he was graying at the wings. And he had a beard now, sort of, unkempt wisps of hair growing in patches around his face. He didn’t even dress like Lenny. Wide-wale corduroys in some dark shade of green. A duck-hunting jacket and a button-up plaid shirt. Lenny! In plaid! A button-up! And sandals! With socks!
He studied me, unsure of how to proceed. Then he hiked up his cords and squatted. Squinted. Judged. There was an element of spectacle to the moment; the women, Mom and the other one, the Queen of Sheba, who I’d thought would be black for some reason, deferring, looking on as we acted out our parts.
“You must be Freedom. Good to meet ya. My name’s Nick Dixon.” He held his hand out, but I was too confused to shake it.
“Really?” my mother said. “Nick Dixon?”
The guy threw
her this look full of suppressed mischief. He winked. “Why not?” he said. And there was Lenny again, peeking through.
He clapped once like ha! and cackled and my mother laughed too, and something shifted and fell away. “Well, all right then,” he said, pulling himself to his feet and giving me a noogie. “Let’s get this party started.”
And that was it. Lenny wasn’t one for sentimental reunions. He’d rather be the poem, the joke, the threat.
He and the Queen led us inside and what I remember next is him showing us around. Or not us, actually, just me. My mother must’ve begged off, I don’t know. Maybe the Queen had stage-managed the whole thing. Maybe there’d been some agreement between her and Lenny: educate the kid, bond with him a little while I charm your wife.
In any case Lenny dragged me from room to room, showing it off like of course I’d be impressed. And I was, I guess. Man, how that house reeked of money. Dusty money. Frayed, graying money. Money so old the blood had been washed away. Everything in the place was nicked and roughed up by history. Mirrors the size of New York apartments. Furniture mixed and matched from throughout the centuries, like we were in a way station for the favorite castoffs from generations upon generations of shifting fashion, every chaise, end table and Persian rug worth a fortune if appraised, but why bother if you could hoard it all here.
But none of this shit was important, not to Lenny. What he wanted to show me was the art. The mementos. The flashes of identity displayed on the walls. Things that would reveal just whose world we’d wandered into. He wanted me to see the mythology of the place. The leftist celebrity smoked into every crevice. Original Ben Shahns, Max Ernsts, a George Grosz cartoon of a baton-wielding pig—obese and deranged, all nostrils, fangs and blubber. A photo taken by Walker Evans of a kid sitting in the mud. A framed letter signed by Diego Rivera, written in Spanish so I couldn’t read it; thanks for the hospitality or some shit. And the posters. A whole history of the Left yellowing on the walls. Pleas from the ’30s urging people, through blocky constructivist imagery, to join the Communist Party. Spanish Civil War posters glorifying the anarchist POUM—¡BARCELONA LIBRE! Woodcuts of sombreroed skeletons hiding their faces behind bandannas, wielding guns—¡VIVAN LOS ZAPATISTAS! Interestingly, there was one we had at home—crude flowers and peace signs and musical half notes framing a funky, freaky list of promises. COME TO CHICAGO. FREE JAMS. FREE DRUGS. FREE CONSCIOUSNESS. DIG IT! A poster Lenny himself had designed. Up on the wall with the legends.
And photos too, telling the story. The same one dude I’d never seen before, accompanied sometimes by a casually gorgeous blonde. Dude with Eugene Debs. With FDR. Dude with Leon Trotsky. With Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Fidel Castro. Che Guevara. JFK. MLK. Cesar Chavez and Harry Belafonte. Dude with motherfucking Gandhi. I tell ya, the guy was everywhere. In one dark corner under the stairs there was even a photo of him with Phil Ochs. And in the place of honor, above the downstairs toilet, there he was with Lenny—the Lenny I remembered, not this Nick Dixon—sporting a cowboy hat, a black eye, and a smirk, waving a North Vietnamese flag above his head.
Throughout this tour, Lenny kept up the façade of Nick Dixon and talked about himself in the third person. “That’s when Lenny Snyder blew the cap off the Capital.” “That’s when they called in the National Guard to stop Lenny Snyder from crossing the Delaware.” So proud to be on that wall with all the VIPs. “Someday you’ll be up here too, kid,” he said. “It’s in your blood.” A bid for connection, but instead of drawing me closer, it pushed me away from this place with its excesses and comforts, this man who both was and wasn’t my father. I didn’t see myself anywhere here.
The old dude turned out to be the Queen of Sheba’s father. From the heretic strain of the Emerson family. She had pedigree. What they call progressive royalty. After flopping around Groton and disappointing his ancestors, living and dead, by betraying Harvard for Yale, he’d landed at Union Theological Seminary to study with Paul Tillich. Again and again in the decades that followed, he used his ecumenical humanism and the moral authority that adhered to his calling to press the social connections he’d inherited toward noblesse oblige, to bend the course of history toward justice, as they say. And when he died, he left his family’s old country house—this house—to his daughter.
I’m sure he meant well. I’m sure he tried to do good. But the pride Lenny took in his connection to the man bewildered me. Because Lenny—the Lenny I remembered—never gave a shit about what anybody thought. Especially not the scions of power. You can’t destroy the system and revere it at the same time. Or you can, I guess. If you’re Lenny.
But really, you can’t.
The Queen of Sheba’s real name was Caroline. She was the kind of woman who never wore makeup. The kind for whom blue light filters were made. She came with a soundtrack. Joni Mitchell. James Taylor. Had that I’ve-seen-fire-and-I’ve-seen-rain-I-met-all-my-best-friends-at-McLean look. The worry lines around the edges of her eyes just made her that much more beautiful.
That first night, while “Nick Dixon” gave me my tour, she served my mother tea in the high style indicative of her class—matching china arrayed on a silver tray, Chessmen cookies fanned across a plate on the side. As Lenny led me from room to room, we walked past them, again and again, and there would be the Queen of Sheba, curled on the couch with her legs wrapped under her, self-consciously projecting coziness and trust while Mom remained planted like a gnarly mushroom on the pod-like chair across from her, glowering, smirking sometimes, resisting. Each time we passed through, the same tense summit.
Sometimes I heard them lob remarks across the distance between them. The Queen: “We’re so pleased you could make it up. This whole ordeal has been difficult for Nick. You know how sensitive he can be.” Or, from Mom: “You’re everything I expected you to be.” Remarks that fell flat, unreturned, making it that much clearer that no real connection would be possible.
“Nick” left them to each other. Let them fight over him, or not, either way.
What mattered to him right then was impressing me with tales of Old Dude’s accomplishments. How he’d camped out on the mall in DC to show his solidarity with the Bonus Army. How he’d drawn up a risky, unpopular petition protesting the government’s treatment of the Rosenbergs. How he’d walked by Castro’s side in 1959 as the great man took his New York victory lap. How he’d been the single white guy in the room with MLK and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as they planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And somehow, in the telling, these feats became Nick’s own. More proof of his all-consuming importance.
That these stories bored me, that I was too young to understand their importance and would’ve been more impressed if he’d told me a knock-knock joke or pulled out a djembe and asked me to jam, or hell, if he maybe asked me a question, any question at all—none of this ever occurred to him. I was there to bask in his light.
And at that, I let him down. I resisted his control. While he went right on telling stories to himself, I tagged behind him thinking my own thoughts, barely hearing the words rolling out of his mouth.
Eventually, Nick noticed. He stopped showing me things. He circled back to the room where my mother and the Queen of Sheba were waiting. And seeing we were there to stay, they lit up like hostages glimpsing the sun. Lenny, now Nick, did a little dance, a few clumsy moves that might’ve been supposed to suggest the mambo. He waggled his fingers above his head, said, “Let’s get this party started!” again—it must have been his new mantra, his new “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” And he plopped onto the couch next to the Queen.
He touched his lips to the nape of her neck and she—oh, what class—she patted his knee and drew into herself, wincing at my mother with an embarrassed little shrug. The women laughed the moment off, united for once in their willingness to indulge him.
Somehow, then, everyone focused on me. I remember the pressure of their eyes.
How Nick Dixon’s face seemed to change shape, the Lenny I knew rising to the surface. I remember the blushing sensation. The gratitude. But also the sense that they expected something I had no idea how to give them from me.
“How old are you now, Freedom?” Lenny said.
“You don’t remember?” my mother asked him.
See, I’d already blown it. I burrowed into the beanbag next to her pod and hoped none of them could see my disappointment.
The Queen whispered in his ear.
“Eight,” he said. “That’s old enough to know a few things.”
He pulled himself up from his crevice in the couch, gingerly, like someone much, much older than the man I remembered, and shuffled over to the bookcase, where he slid a massive book—Ulysses, I think it was, or Moby-Dick, the Bible—from a shelf, brought it back, plopped it on the coffee table, and flipped the cover open like a lid to reveal a plastic baggie full of marijuana. An impressive stash. Felony-worthy. And there sat Lenny, this triumphant expression smeared all over his face, waiting for me to collapse in awe. All I could think was: Really? In a book? Dude, you’re getting soft. He’d never have chosen such a weak hiding place back in NYC.
“You ever seen this stuff before?”
“Um, what do you think?” I said. Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.
“Nah, man. You think you have, but dig it. What you’ve seen is the skunkweed they sell in Tompkins Square. This is the real deal. One hundred percent Jamaican Kush. We got it smuggled up straight from Kingston.”
“Okay.”
“You know Bob Marley?”
“Sure.”
“This is what he smokes.” He glanced at the Queen as though for reassurance. “His pal Stinkeye Steven Braithwaite grows it out de countreeside, ya?”
“Okay.”
“So, that’s pretty groovy, ain’t it?”