We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  “People change, Daniella,” Eve had said. “You have to allow for people to change.”

  “ ‘I was once something of a radical, but now I realize the system works’!” said Daniella, parroting Eve’s quote in the Times back to her.

  “I stand by my words,” said Eve. “The system has flaws, of course, but it does work. It’s a work in progress.”

  “Would Ada agree that the system works after the state tore down her house, after her son was sent to die in an unjust war?”

  “Well, that’s exactly it, isn’t it?” replied Eve. “Ada is actually a perfect example of government overreach. You let the government have too much power and look at what it does to its citizens.”

  “The fact that Ada has been screwed by our country has much more to do with black people not being guaranteed their constitutional rights than with government overreach.”

  “Plenty of white boys died in Vietnam,” retorted Eve.

  “So what are you getting at here? What exactly is your point? Are you saying the answer is to rely solely on the kindness of individual citizens to help each other out? That sure worked well during Jim Crow. That sure stopped a lot of lynchings! And gee, come to think of it, that sure worked well for Ada when she asked you to co-sign for her loan!”

  Eve hung up the phone. She just hung up on Daniella.

  They didn’t speak to each other for a week, other than a cursory “hello” if Eve happened to be home when Daniella came to fetch Sarah after work. But then one evening, Daniella arrived with a vase of daisies for Eve. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can be such a judgmental bitch.”

  “Don’t use that word,” said Eve, though she was really just parroting Daniella, who years ago had promised never again to call a woman by the slur a man might use while beating or raping her.

  “I’m sorry I was so judgmental,” said Daniella. “You have every right to vote however you want.”

  Eve had hugged her friend tight, so grateful that only a week had gone by with the two of them on the outs. She found it was easy to forgive Daniella for her biting accusations. Her words had hurt, but not nearly as much as it would hurt to become estranged again, as they had been for so long during Eve’s lost years. Besides, Daniella hadn’t co-signed the loan with Ada, either. It helped to remember that.

  • • •

  She put down the Southern Living and turned to the other mail, tearing open the large envelope from Camp Manataka, where Anna would be going for a full month this summer instead of two weeks, as she had the previous summer. Inside were registration forms. She would fill them out when she had Anna’s immunization records and such in front of her. Lord, she would miss her daughter while she was off in the mountains of North Carolina. But Sarah would still spend weekdays at her house. Perhaps she would see if Sarah might like to take tennis lessons while Anna was away. She could sign her up for them at the Driving Club and either Sarah and Ada could walk there or Eve could drop Sarah off.

  Eve wished that Daniella would take more of an interest in Sarah’s extracurriculars. Daniella was a good mother, yes, loving and honest and (Lord knows) open with her daughter, but Eve didn’t think she did enough special things for her. It was almost as if Sarah were a physical manifestation of Daniella’s political views. Take Sarah’s clothing: Daniella dressed her mostly in consignment-store finds, though surely she could have occasionally afforded to buy her something new from the mall. Granted, Daniella purchased a lot of Sarah’s clothes from Sweet Repeats, which was upscale and stocked really cute stuff. Still, a brand-new dress, purchased just for your daughter, was a special way to let her know she was loved.

  Far worse was Daniella’s stubborn insistence that her daughter attend public school, even though Sarah was so very bright and would surely thrive at an academically challenging school like Coventry. Gracious, the child had taught herself to read at age four! And there was the science kit she requested for her eighth birthday, which included a real embalmed frog and tools for dissecting it. Sarah had spent countless hours occupied with the contents of that kit, even after Anna had lost interest and wandered away.

  Surely if Daniella wanted to send Sarah to private school, either her parents or Pete’s mother would pay for it. But Daniella was stubborn. Daniella was a purist, with her heartbreaking job, her small house that she made even smaller by renting out the basement, her refusal to cover up the gray that had now pretty much taken over her once-brown hair. It was easy to feel like a sellout around Daniella. It was easy to feel inadequate when your best friend was on a mission to be like Jesus. Not that Daniella would ever do something so pedestrian as to join a mainline church. (But she didn’t co-sign the loan, Eve reminded herself. She didn’t co-sign the loan.)

  Enough about her old friend. Eve had her own life to attend to, her own family to manage. She opened the last piece of mail addressed to her, a letter with her name typed on the front and no return address. Most likely it was a solicitation, another nonprofit asking for money. She unfolded the letter and began to read:

  Dear Eve,

  Or should I say DeeDee, Mary Jane, or Harriet? Might one of your former aliases help you remember who you once were? I certainly received an eye-opening update on who you have become. A whole article in the New York Times, featuring none other than our little Evelyn Whalen from Atlanta, Georgia. Your mother must have been so proud! Three cheers for you!

  Tell me, baby, is Robert Powers, committeeman of the Georgia Republican Party, aware that his little debutante-in-training has a living father who might not be so fucking keen on a B-movie actor occupying the White House? And you! Voicing your support for that moron! For fuck’s sake, Eve, do you not remember what your beloved Ronnie said back when he was governor of California, when asked how he would respond to riots in Berkeley in 1969?: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with, no more appeasement.”

  And people called us radical—Jesus H. Christ!

  I’m not saying I don’t understand your decision to swim in the mainstream. Shit, we all do what we need to do to survive. (And yes, obviously, I survived, and at a huge cost.) But to become a mouthpiece for the Republican Party of the South? Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever heard of the term ‘the Southern Strategy,’ first employed by your good pal Richard Nixon? To refresh your memory, here it is: Get white southerners to migrate to the Republican Party by quietly affirming their racist beliefs.

  You have certainly fallen right into their trap, baby. I mean, goddamn.

  Okay, fine. Whatever politics you choose to support in 1984 are really none of my goddamn business; I know that, I really do. Whatever gets you through the night and all that. But Anna is my business. She is my daughter, whether Robert Powers, GOP spokesman-at-large, admits it or not.

  Even though the family picture in the paper is small, I can see you in Anna. And I can see me, too. Am I right that she has my eyes? Do something for me, Eve. Do me this one favor if you do nothing else. Send me a photograph of her. A school picture, a vacation shot, whatever. Just let me see my daughter without Bob Powers’s arm around her.

  You were right to have kept her. I will give you that. And while I’m sure Bob Powers makes a fine provider, don’t you think she needs to know who her real father is? I’m assuming she has no idea. I’m assuming Daddy Powers passes himself off as her progenitor, or perhaps she thinks her father is dead and that Daddy Powers adopted her.

  I’m not saying you need to tell her who I am. At least not now. I’m just saying I would like for the two of us to exchange letters. You could say I was an uncle, or a second cousin. I could send a present and you could insist that she write a thank-you note. (I know you, baby. I know the world you returned to! I know you would insist on the thank-you note!) And I could write her back and we could begin a simple correspondence. Nothing scary. Just a way for a man about to turn forty to make some contact with his own flesh and blood.

  You can send the picture to P.O. Box 3455 / 195 41st Street / Oakland, CA /
94611

  Think about it, Eve. It would certainly be easier than me coming to Atlanta.

  Eve’s hands were shaking as she let the letter fall to her lap. Warren St. Clair was alive? No. He couldn’t be. He absolutely could not be. He was in the house on Linwood Avenue when the bomb went off. He had to have been. They had found his Ho Chi Minh dog tags among the rubble. How could anyone walk away from that? Panic blossomed like a spiky flower in her chest and she thought of the bottle of Valium she had in her medicine cabinet upstairs. Instead, she walked on shaky legs to the liquor cabinet, a heavy piece of furniture on the opposite side of the sun porch stocked with crystal stemware and drinkware and all manners of alcohol. A drink. She would have a drink. A drink would help.

  Chapter 17

  PHOTOGRAPH, MEMORIES

  Atlanta, 1984

  That night she lay beside a sleeping Bob, her mind racing despite the fact that she had taken a Valium. She had hidden Warren’s letter in the antique stationery box that she kept in her study. That was where she kept the one photo of Warren that she still had, the one object from that time that had not been destroyed by the bomb that ripped through the Linwood house. She had taken the photo with her to Jane’s house that last night she saw Warren, the night she had told him she would not get an abortion. They were breaking up, yes, but she had no reason to think she would never see him again. Yet somehow she must have known.

  After placing Warren’s letter underneath the felt lining of the stationery box, she had taken out the photo and studied it. It had been a long time since she had looked. The girl in the picture (could that militant creature really be her?) wore her hair so short she looked as if she were a cancer patient, and her thinness added to that impression. She was not smiling in the photo, though Warren was, an arrogant smirk that suggested he alone had all of the answers. She held the photo up closer, studying his features. Anna did have his eyes—not in color, but in shape. How had she not noticed that her daughter had Warren’s eyes? She had not wanted to notice, of course. She had not wanted to think of Warren ever again, and yet a memory surfaced so quickly she could not push it back down in time. It was after everyone else had abandoned Smash and just she and Warren remained. They were moving from New York down to Atlanta, traveling in Warren’s old pickup. Eve hated driving with Warren because he wouldn’t talk to her. (Whereas other times, especially when they were around other people, he often wouldn’t shut up.) But during road trips he would either space out, presumably lost in his own thoughts, or become completely absorbed in whatever music was blasting from the radio. If she tried to start a conversation he would wave away the attempt, adding, “I don’t like to talk while I’m driving.”

  She always felt so alone during their drives, so erased. She thought that perhaps Warren might make an effort to talk if she brought up how much his silences bothered her before they started their trip. So the night before they left New York, she told him how she felt and asked if he would please, please engage with her during the drive. He had thought for a minute and then said, “Give me a blow job and I will.”

  And she had. My God, she had.

  She couldn’t look at his photo anymore, and so she dropped it back in the box, along with the letter she had just received from him—if it was actually Warren who had written it. She had spent the rest of the night trying to distract herself from thinking about him, from thinking about his body on top of hers. His pushy, hairy body.

  She had kept busy filling out Anna’s camp forms, then organized her study, then cleaned out the refrigerator. But now here she was in bed, unable to escape her thoughts. Warren St. Clair was supposed to be dead.

  There was absolutely no way for him to walk away after the bomb exploded. Unless he wasn’t there when it exploded. Unless he had put his dog tags around someone else’s neck. Lord. But who would do that, who would agree to act as Warren’s body double?

  Maybe it wasn’t Warren writing her. Maybe Warren was dead and it was someone else, someone who knew her history, posing as Warren. Maybe Abby. But why would Abby stir the pot? Abby had already brilliantly reinvented herself, having resurfaced a year after Eve. Just as Eve had, Abby turned herself in to the authorities, and though it was believed that she had participated in several “symbolic” bombings during her time underground, bombings that only damaged property, not people, most of the charges were dropped. She ended up serving just nine months in a federal penitentiary in Connecticut for the few minor offenses the FBI was able to charge her with (the FBI had broken so many laws in pursuing radicals that very little of their evidence was admissible in court). Upon release, she went to law school. Now she was a professor of constitutional law at UC Hastings.

  Abby would not risk her prestigious new life to send Eve a forged letter. Why would anyone but Warren send it? But how could Warren still be alive? Even if he had somehow managed to fake his own death, how could he have survived underground for so long? Well, he was a St. Clair, and his father did send him money during his Smash days. So maybe his father was continuing to support him now.

  She felt the first stab of a blinding headache. Stress-related migraines, her doctor had said during her last checkup, adding that she should try to take it easy and writing her a prescription for a higher dose of Valium. How was she going to tell Bob about the letter? She had to, didn’t she? She had to let Bob know that Warren was alive. But if Bob knew, wouldn’t he, as a lawyer, be mandated to alert the authorities? Weren’t there strict guidelines around such things? Or maybe he could keep quiet because of spousal privilege. She could ask Daniella for clarification on the law. But Daniella would want to know why she was asking and would surely insist that Eve take the letter to the police.

  If the authorities were alerted and they decided to, say, stake out the P.O. box Warren had provided, what would happen? Warren probably didn’t check his own P.O. box, even all these years later. But still, if the authorities knew that Warren was alive and somewhere in the vicinity of Oakland and they managed to capture and arrest him, twelve years after he had supposedly died, would that be considered national news? Would it warrant coverage not just in California but all over? Of course it would. Just look at what happened when Cathy Wilkerson turned herself in a few years ago. Her face was everywhere, and she hadn’t even murdered anyone.

  And if Warren were caught, what would keep him from talking? She knew from her own experience that Warren would be encouraged to reveal all pertinent information he possessed. Hadn’t she shared everything she knew about Smash when she turned herself in? At the time, all past charges against her had been dropped, and no new charges were filed. But could that change? Cathy Wilkerson served time for unlicensed possession of explosives. Could she retroactively be charged with that, having known that Warren was in possession of stolen dynamite? But she had told the police about the dynamite. They couldn’t press charges all of these years later, after she fully cooperated back in the day. Even if they wanted to, wasn’t there some sort of statute of limitations that would protect her?

  If somehow she were charged, would a judge or a jury understand that the Eve who joined the Smash Collective was not the same person she was today? That she had been seduced and brainwashed? Half of the time, she had just been trying to survive; she had just been trying to avoid being the point of focus during a Smash session.

  She could not think about that time. She could not allow her memories to take her there, not for one more minute. It was unbearable to think of being that girl. That Eve was as dead to her as Warren St. Clair was supposed to be.

  If Warren were to talk or, worse, pen some sort of prison memoir outlining all of the deranged things they used to do, she could lose everything, including the carefully constructed life she and Bob had built together, with Anna at its center. If Bob knew of the grittier details of her time in Smash, would he still love her? She remembered how outraged he had been when he had learned that Abby was a law professor. At the time, Eve had been surprised that Bob didn’t seem to r
emember her connection to Abby. Surely she had spoken of Abby back when he and Daniella were her lawyers, back when she first surfaced. But Bob had no memory of that. He only knew about Abby because one of the talk radio shows he listened to featured her on a segment called “Dangerous Radicals in Academia.” Except the talking heads got it wrong; they said Abby had been a member of the Weather Underground. Eve had kept her mouth shut. There was no need to correct their mistake.

  Couldn’t she simply pretend that Warren’s letter had never arrived? Couldn’t she toss the cheap piece of notebook paper it was written on into the fire, assume it was only a mean prank, written by some peripheral Smash member who was trying to mess with her in the wake of the New York Times piece? (She knew she should have said no to being in the article. But Bob was so excited! So thrilled by who they both had become!)

  If the letter was from Warren, if he was actually still alive, it seemed he had a lot more at stake than she did. He had murdered J. T. Higgins, after all, and he had probably murdered a second person to stand in his stead and wear his dog tags. Were he to show up at her house, God forbid, he would be immediately arrested and he would be sent to jail for the rest of his life. He might even receive the death penalty. He wouldn’t risk it. Eve was almost certain he wouldn’t risk it.

  Chapter 18

  COVENTRY

  Atlanta, 1987–1990

  During the fall of my freshman year of high school, I finally convinced Mom to let me apply to Coventry by sitting her down after dinner one night and arguing my case as if I were a lawyer before a judge. I had all sorts of exhibits to present, including my grades and academic awards, as well as promotional materials from Coventry highlighting their 12:1 student-teacher ratio, their zillions of AP classes, their state-of-the-art facilities, and their generous financial aid program aimed at helping “bright students in need.” After showing Mom what Coventry could offer, I reminded her that they had changed their hiring policy the year before and now hired teachers from all religious backgrounds, and not just Christians. (Their hiring policy had always been a sticking point for Mom.) I also reminded her that the previous year two members of their debate team had won the national tournament, meaning the school was clearly molding great future lawyers, which I might want to become. But my final argument was one of free will and choice.