by Tom Corbett
“I’ve no defense, but I still want to say something.”
“Uh-oh,” she said without mirth.
“Just shush for a moment.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. A boat made one of those mournful warning sounds, and they both gazed off into the distance. “It is hard going back, even in my mind’s eye. It has been over four decades, and a lot is lost or reshaped in one way or another. For me, two things remain, feelings and sharp vignettes—memories and conversations that seem as if they took place yesterday. Still, I can feel the battle that raged within me after all these years. Nothing was simple. I wish to hell I could’ve been like most of the kids I grew up with, played ball with. Everything for them was simple, you only worried about getting high without finding any trouble and getting laid without knocking a girl up. Everything seemed so simple for the other kids—what to believe and feel, whom to like and whom to hate. We had a pecking order. Irish on top above the other white Catholic ethnic groups with the Mediterranean types being down the list. Then you came to the WASPs and Jews. At the bottom, you had the nonwhite racial groups. If you ran into a white guy, you asked what they were, Irish or Polish or Italian. Their response situated them within a defined world. You knew how to treat them, whether they could be trusted in a fight or date your sister or live next to you.”
“I remember.” She interjected.
“Even outside the rules of known world of the Irish ghetto, you knew what to believe and why. America was number one without question. The Commies were total shit, and anyone who had not decided between good and evil, us and them, fell into the enemy camp by default. There was no quibbling, no gray areas. If you were needed to defend the eternal verities, the true church, our way of life, that’s what you did, no questions asked. Not to do so brought your community and family into shame. And the church was at the center of it all, particularly the Irish version of the church. It figures. The native Irish hung on to Catholicism for centuries while the Brits killed their priests and stripped believers of all rights. You know the stories as well as I, Dad told them often enough. The soupers were shunned by their neighbors just because they renounced their faith for bread and soup to stay alive. The expected thing was to die a Catholic pauper rather than give up what was most dear. So of course, you hung on to that faith since it was the one anchor in a world of such injustice that many a man went mad. There were some eight million native Irish before the potato blight, and maybe four plus after the deaths and emigration. The Irish were little different from the Jews. Persecution brings you closer to core beliefs and your identity. You cling to some things with a desperation that others find naïve and childish. But it was not naïve and foolish to Dad, nor to me back then.”
Rachel was looking at him intently. She feared saying anything as if it might shut him down, but filled in his pause with, “Why do I sense a but coming?”
Josh forced a tight smile. “But, and I do not say this lightly, God cursed me with a seeking, restless mind. Oh, it was not just a fine mind. Hell, I knew kids who could whip through calculus and do all the Latin conjugations way better than I. Hell, they could even translate Virgil without cheating with a Trot. But I was cursed with an inquisitive mind, the kind that always asks why. It is a curse, make no mistake about that. I’ve watched the world very closely over the decades. How do most people survive? They simply live out programmed scripts. Essentially, they are unconscious, never questioning anything. Any little cognitive dissonance that might come their way gets buried out of sight. They push inconvenient or incompatible information far away or distort it to maintain the integrity of their existing world order. Change their worldview, forget about it. Think an original thought, not on your life. Conceptualize some new way of looking at things, you must be out of your mind. Remember talking with the locals. Every sentence was punctuated with the phrase ‘am I right or wrong.’ You were always supposed to tell them they were right, the need for confirmation was universal and insistent. This is what I grew up in, what I lived and believed in for a long time.”
“Me too, and then…”
“Then small shit happened. I met Morris and Carla and Peter Favulli and some others, but mostly Morris. We would talk about the larger world. None of my friends did that when I was a teen. Foreign policy would have been what was happening on the other side of Route 128. But he knew about what was going on across the globe and got me reading. I was shocked to learn that we overthrew other governments like Arbenz in Guatemala, to help United Fruit, I guess, and then engineered a coup to overthrow the elected prime minister in Iran, to help British Petroleum. So much for democracy. We failed to allow elections in Vietnam in the mid-1950s because we could not guarantee the outcome and feared the Commies would win. The democratic process and national sovereignty were only permitted on our terms and if the results could be guaranteed. That was crushing stuff for a naïve young kid raised to believe we always wore the white hats. But I didn’t waver, not for a long time. I would argue with Mo, and so did Peter, even more passionately. We had some great fights—verbal ones. He made me think. To this day, I don’t know if I love him or hate him for that. No, I love him, but it was painful. I can still recall some of the conversations. Why were we supporting colonial powers trying to hang on to their oppressive overseas regimes? Why would we support the French in Indochina, the French goddamn it? They were not exactly benevolent overlords. Was it all just our anticommunist obsession, or did we implicitly back the exploitation of commodities from countries that could not fight back? Why weren’t we fighting for democracy and self-government, for the right of people to find their own way? Were we not the ultimate hypocrites?”
When he paused, she said, “I don’t know. I was busy with high school biology and algebra at the time.”
“Rhetorical question, kiddo.” He stared at the harbor again. “You know, we should have been holding up the North Vietnamese as heroes, not villains. They were the ones trying to create a strong independent nation free from foreign control. I remember seeing cartoonish depictions of Ho Chi Min in the Boston papers as if he were some ghoulish monster with fangs and long fingernails. Hell, the guy was educated in France, was lied to and screwed by the western powers time and time again. But he never gave up. He fought the Japanese, the French, and the Americans for decades. George Washington fought the Brits and the Hessians for seven years and had the French army and navy on his side at the end. Hell, France went bankrupt, and Louis eventually lost his head in a popular revolution since he bankrupted the treasury just to give us freedom. Sure, Ho had supplies from China and the Soviets but no real fighting assets. It was really an amazing story of David versus Goliath. But what did our geniuses do? We came up with the domino theory. Yes, if Nam fell, could Australia be far behind, then New Zealand and Japan? In a month, the Hawaiians would be speaking Vietnamese. It was all so insane, but people lapped-up this crap.”
Rachel looked at him intently. He was not present to her at that moment, looking over the harbor in Victoria. He was back in his youth reliving old struggles. She said nothing. Perhaps she was understanding him just a little bit better. Damn, she thought, she was beginning to feel sorry for him, how did that happen? “Damn, you are way too charming and glib. I hate that.”
“Also a curse. In any case, the more I read and talked, the angrier I would get. At times, I would become enraged at the stupidity and simplistic patriotism around me. Didn’t anyone have the balls to question what we were doing? Didn’t people question anything we did? My god, how could we possibly hold any high moral ground when we held people of color in economic and legal bondage? How could anyone watch the fire hosing of blacks who just wanted to sit at a goddamn lunch counter and not go ballistic? How could people stand watching black churches burn or young girls get blown up in a church basement just for asking to vote and not be enraged. I went ballistic when I saw those images. This was America, goddamn it. In whose universe could we claim any moral authority? Later, I was to become even more familiar with the cou
rage of those who protested and the evil of those who opposed them. The freedom riders made out final wills before getting on the buses. Shit, what courage! And the establishment at the time embraced violence and fear and red-baiting as they prayed to their God on Sundays…the pathetic hypocrites! What was all this talk about freedom and opportunity and democratic principles and faith?”
“I have no answer.” She stammered.
He paused and looked at her. “Of course, I’m making this sound a lot more linear and inexorable than it was. Inside, I was engaged in a constant internal battle. I would conclude something and then immediately doubt myself. Maybe I was just being a kid. I mean, really, the adults must know more than I. Perhaps they had information on what the Communists were doing that was classified. Maybe they were not as narrow and brain-dead as they appeared. My reservations ran deeper than that, of course. You don’t just shed the scripts of your youth overnight. It is not like someone hits a switch and you go from good Catholic altar boy to long-haired revolutionary over the course of one afternoon.”
“You never shared what you were going through with me. I never knew…”
He looked at her, but it was not clear that he heard her quiet complaint. “There was an article I read once, a long time ago. But it always stayed with me. It was by a New York State Supreme Court justice. He’d come of age in the 1930s in the Big Apple. Like many of his peers, he was taken with the suffering and despair around him. Like so many of his friends, he searched for solutions. They argued for hours about what must be done and, in due course, stumbled on socialism, even communism, as possible solutions. Oh, he matured out of these early infatuations and went on to an exemplary judicial career. But he wrote that he was forever grateful for growing up in such a difficult decade. He had to think hard about things. He could not just take what his parents told him as the truth. No, he had to work out his own view of things, his own philosophy of life. All those late-night discussions, the intellectual sparring, it is not a waste of time. It is how you learn how to think. Shit, most of school is absorbing facts. That is not what real education is all about, not simply memorizing crap. It is developing analytical skills, being able to think deeply and even creatively about things. Anyways, he was convinced that he would never have become the deep thinker that he was had he merely survived a conventional childhood. But he hadn’t. He had grown up in a crucible of turmoil and challenge. Well, the sixties were the same, a decade of turmoil and challenge.”
Rachel’s phone rang. She glanced at the number and said, “Sorry, I must answer.” After a discussion on medical matters about a patient back in Madison, she hung up and looked directly at him, saying nothing.
“I am sure Dad just thought I lost my mind. Of course, he could not see what was going on inside. He blamed Morris, drugs, hippies, whatever. It had nothing to do with that stuff, not much anyways. I’m convinced that some of us are cursed with an ability to engage in nuanced thinking. We possess an ability to dissect the usual scripts, see beyond them. We can understand relationships across things and events that do not look connected on the surface. We have a passion for understanding things and, worst of all, caring about them. I think of Galileo challenging the church in Rome. Yeah, he probably said something like this to the cardinals that were persecuting him. ‘Okay, you have centuries of consensus and the authority of God, but I have my reason and curiosity. You see, things as you were told must be where I see things differently, as my reason and observation tell me they are.’ I can see Galileo telling them that he sees things as God really wanted us to see them.”
“Foolish man, indeed.” Rachel tried a smile.
Josh also smiled. “Can you imagine the courage that took? Dad would rail against me. He could not understand my disloyalty, to him and the church and the country. God, what he never understood is that I was like him, too much like him. I had inherited his integrity and his passion for stuff. Hell, he broke the law to fight for what he thought was right. He plotted revolution and ran guns for a cause, for a cause that he believed in. Why could he not see that? He and I were the same, the same.”
“He realized that,” she whispered.
“No way, he didn’t. I tried reaching out, even after I left. I sent letters, even called. Once, he answered the phone. I said, ‘Dad, this is Josh, your son, can we talk?’ Do you know what he said? ‘Sorry, you must have the wrong number, I have no son.’”
Rachel thought there was moisture clouding his eyes. “Josh, why didn’t you reach out to me?”
“I did,” he said. “I sent notes to you, quite a few, but got nothing back. I thought you’d written me off as well.”
“I never saw any of them. Shit, shit, shit! They kept them from me. Jim or Ora got the mail every day. I guess you were persona-non-grata for sure. I think Dad controlled Mom on this. She was strong in her own way, but not when he had dug in. I think she lost some of her independence as she aged, lost her…beauty. And he could be stubborn. You know, the typical Irishman.”
He laughed bitterly, wanting to correct her on what their mother really thought about him back then. Instead he said, “Ya think, I suppose I could be just a bit stubborn myself.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“But sometimes it took me a long time to get where I was going,” he paused to decide where to go next. “There is one life lesson that took me a long time to embrace. For a while, when I was young, I thought my intellect was the key. I was the smartest guy in the room, except for Morris.”
“And me, except I guess I’m not a guy,” she added with a grim smile.
“Right, that was the only reason, now shush. I was convinced that I could bring everyone else to my way of thinking through evidence and reason. Hell, all the arguing we did to sharpen our critical thinking skills had to be good for something. I got even better with more academic training and proved a natural at policy analysis. I seamlessly embraced the challenges of sorting through complex tradeoffs, detecting externalities, and figuring out the nuances of the cui bono question. Others saw the surface of things while I could get to the heart of the matter. I could do the essential stuff like distinguish correlation from causation or think through the direction of causal paths with some precision. And being full of myself, I thought that was all I needed, all that counted. But the bitter truth is that it is not. In the end, values matter. Norms and cultural dispositions cannot be casually dismissed. So much is post rationalization. We decide, or merely accept, and then construct complex rational edifices to support what we want to believe. And where do those core values come from? I am almost convinced that some of what we believe is hardwired, at least how we process input and information. Some of us see threat everywhere where others of us like new things and diverse stimuli. Why did the hard-right see Communists everywhere in the 1950s? Shit, the Birchers thought Eisenhower was pink for Christ sakes and fluoride in our water was a goddamn Commie plot. You cannot dispel such beliefs with reasoned argument. Why did I go and save Morris from getting the shit beat out of him by some Irish thugs? I thought he was being treated unfairly. Unfairly? No one else in my neighborhood would have done that. He was a Jew in the wrong place. But I could not look away. That should have been clue number one. The head is important, but the heart, you know, is everything.”
“You know, Josh, you’re not quite as dense as you look.” She lay her head on his shoulder.
“Why, thank you, Rachel, that’s a big concession on your part.”
“I still can’t figure out why you stayed away. For all this time, you have been a virtual stranger. You never returned to the States for a long, long time, even for a visit. What was with that?”
“Part of it was that I was scared, at least at first. Yes, scared. It wasn’t the selective service problems or at least not the only issue. Okay, I fled the draft. That would have been problem number one. Then there were the break-ins and other stuff.”
“Was a warrant ever issued?” she asked.
“Frankly, I never knew f
or sure. I knew I was a person of interest for many things. It turns out Kit’s older brother, much older, was with the Justice Department at the time. I got word that he was keeping an eye on me. I suppose that’s how Kit found me when she did. I figured that if I ever returned, I would be brought in for questioning at the least. The Canadians would protect me from most of that, they would at least drag their feet on stuff.”
“But not everything?”
“There was other stuff.” Then he went silent, and Rachel sensed he wasn’t ready to go there. But I think I know the real reason I stayed away. Guilt! Good old fashion Irish guilt. It overwhelmed me and I…just could not face it, not really.” His lip quivered.
It was Rachel’s turn to back away. “Maybe we should head back to the hotel for the funny sandwiches and tea.”
As they passed the steps to the harbor, the scene was in full bloom. There was a group playing haunting sounds from South America, street artists of amazing technical skill, imaginative body art, and jugglers and others vying for the crowd’s attention. Rachel observed aimlessly that it was amazing how much talent there was and how many of these people survived on near- starvation wages.
“Listen,” she suddenly said with too much assertiveness.
“Uh-oh,” Josh responded before she could continue. “Suddenly I sense doom.”
“No, no, at least I don’t think so. You mentioned Kit’s brother being with justice. Wasn’t Peter Favulli with the FBI at this time?”
“Yeah, after law school, he went right in.”
Rachel grunted. “Did he have anything to do with your…situation?”
As they reached the hotel, Josh looked at her with increased suspicion.
“And why do you ask?”
“Let’s get seated. Yeah, better you be seated.” When the logistics were completed, she resumed. “Okay, I should have mentioned this earlier. You had a secret with Cate, I also have a secret, so I guess we’re even. Peter is coming.”