Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  The next stage in this all too familiar process could have been designed to bring out the worst in a man and something approaching the best in a woman. I could not just light out for Canada without spelling out the cost, the circumstances and the rules to the parents. Cue the next card. Look out, kid, dunno what ya did.

  I went over to Mott Street around six in the evening. Mr DiMarco went nuke. I knew he would. He would bluster.

  ‘You think I got thousands of dollars to throw away on that no good kid?’

  Mrs DiMarco played the voice of reason.

  ‘That’s not what Mr Raines said, Louie. He said hundreds, that’s all, just a few hundred.’

  ‘Hundreds, thousands. What does it matter? It’ll all be wasted. Get it through your head, Gina. The boy has been a disaster. I mean. Is this what we raised him to be? A coward? A kid who runs away from his country when there’s a war on?’

  ‘He’s not a kid anymore, Louie. He’s nineteen. He’s got ideas of his own. Principles maybe.’

  ‘Principles my ass. He can’t even spell the word. You want principles I’ll give you principles . . .’

  Above the TV, given pride of place, between the Pope—not the current guy, the one before, John XXIII—and the Madonna, was a framed photograph of the President. Not the current guy, not even the one before, but the guy before him—JFK. Mr DiMarco snatched it off the wall and held it up like an orthodox priest in procession clutching an icon, nestling it on his chest opposite his heart.

  ‘I’ll give you principles. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Catholics’ President . . . “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.” Now that’s a principle!’

  Mrs DiMarco looked from her husband to me. I wasn’t going to tell him, but clearly she was.

  ‘Louie, you got it the wrong way round. It’s “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”.’

  ‘So? It means the same goddam thing, don’t it?’

  ‘No,’ she said quiet and firm. ‘It doesn’t.’

  He exploded. It sounded like ‘Sheeeeiiiiiitttttt!’ but I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t much matter. I’d heard this fifty times already. ‘His country needs him’, ‘My son is a coward,’ which would give way to ‘I have no son’, ‘We raised an ungrateful sonuvabitch’, ‘Where did we go wrong?’ A variation on this was ‘Better Dead than Red’ which, rarely, could lead to a half-baked discourse on the Red Peril, but that was not most men. Most men did not believe in ideology. In that generation most men had scarcely got their head above the parapet of ‘work, family, more work’, the quick quick slow working man’s shuffle from cradle to grave, to have an ideology. As his ‘the Catholics’ President’ made clear even the tissue thin ideology of Republican versus Democrat meant very little to Mr DiMarco. He was an American, after that an Italian hyphenate and a Catholic, and that’s about as far as it went.

  After this, and it could last fifteen minutes or more, they either stormed out, banging the door fit to shake down the building, or they got to sobbing, and an understanding wife would wave me away with a whispered ‘tomorrow’. Every so often, like one in ten, the husband—those who fancied themselves more Robert Mitchum than either Lee J. Cobb or Ed Begley—would try to throw me out. DiMarco opted for a practiced display of door slamming.

  Mrs DiMarco sat down as soon as she heard the outer door bang.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she said. ‘Louie is . . . Louie is . . . offended, yes that’s the word, offended by Joey. He was at Anzio. Did I tell you that? Imagine, a second generation Italian having to invade Italy. He takes all this too personally. You young people, you’re different, aren’t you?’

  Rhetoric or question? I risked an answer.

  ‘I guess so, but I never got asked to fight in a war. Too young for Korea, too old for this one.’

  ‘Then you’re lucky. I waited for Louie to get back from Europe. I’m not going to wait for Joey to come back from Vietnam, wondering all the time if he’s going to step off the plane or be carried off in a body bag. I lost two brothers in the World War, that’s enough for any woman. If you think my boy’s in Canada you go there. All I want to know is that he’s safe, and he knows he can come to me or his sisters any time. I’ll handle his father. God knows I’ve done that since 1943. Just find out what he means to do with himself, and if there’s anything he needs.’

  I asked a tricky one.

  ‘Mrs DiMarco. I’m pretty certain Joey is in Canada, but I’m curious. Why would someone like Joey have a passport?’

  I’d known New Yorkers who’d never been out of the state, no further than the public beaches on Long Island, people for whom Penn Station was the gateway to a foreign country, let alone out of America.

  ‘A kid like what, Mr Raines? No, don’t answer. You mean a blue-collar kid with no college education and a Three Stooges accent who reeks of garlic all day. What would he be doing with a passport?’

  ‘I guess I phrased myself badly.’

  ‘I’m sorry. This is getting to me. I apologize. But the answer to your question is his grandmother, my mother that is, died two years ago and left Joey some money on condition it was used to send him to the old country. That’s how come Joey has a passport.’

  ‘Like I said, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  §

  I kept my appointment with Mel that evening. If nothing else I had to tell him I wouldn’t be around for a few days. Let him know to keep an eye on my office. I walked across town to PS 41, the Greenwich Village School, at the corner of West 11th and 6th. A prime example of the modern–shabby school of public architecture. Built to rot. All toughened glass and steel panels. Ashes to ashes, rust to rust. I was late. The meeting was already under way. I stepped into the lobby and found myself up against a set of locked glass doors. I’m sure if I’d tried I could have found the way in, but what I saw and heard through the glass doors made me bide my time.

  Mel reckoned this was the night Mailer would pull his irons out of the fire. This was to be the most prepared, well-argued address of the campaign so far. Tonight the numbers would be rolled out. Statistics tripping from the tongue. What had we spent on defense since 1960? Apparently 551 billion dollars. As much, if not more, than had been spent nationwide on housing and education. That was America at the end of the decade of riches. And then Norman would paint a picture of the powder keg and tinder that were the cities of America. I had queried whether anyone needed to be told this anymore. It was only just a year since the death of Martin Luther King. The flint that struck the tinder in Detroit, Washington, Baltimore and a hundred other powder kegs the breadth of the country. ‘Just be there,’ Mel had said.

  What I saw was a circus. A bunch of hairies seemed to have hijacked the meeting. Balloons were batted back and forth across the aisles by skinny, bearded guys, like a weightless basketball game. Fine—Abbie Hoffman always said revolution should be fun, that this was America’s contribution to the revolution; something so American it could happen only in America. Fun, revolution as the great put-on. The great game. Hairy clowns in hippie garb for whom nothing should be sacred. The motley denim, tie-dye crew for whom the three-piece suit was just a walking prison.

  I could only just make out Mailer on the stage, for all the guys surrounding him. Bobbing up and down and gibbering. Then a Viet Cong flag was unfurled onstage. Predictably, Norman asked for it to be removed or he’d leave. Then the even more predictable cry went up: ‘Fuck you!’ And as if by prior consent it began to turn from sporadic ‘Fuck you’s’ to rhythmic, concerted, mantra-like ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ Twelve or twenty voices chanting in unison. And ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ elided, slid effortlessly, into a chilling, a blood-can-run-cold ‘Kill for Peace!’

  How many turning points can one life have? I had seen Chicago in ’68. A turning point. To h
ear this again was to live a piece of it all again. A momentary flash of the worst we could offer. The worst I had seen. I was debating with myself whether I should just walk away without finding Mel, when Mailer’s voice roared out over the PA. He named the hairies as ‘the Motherfuckers’, a group he was prepared to say had been infiltrated by the CIA.

  He was wrong. On both counts I am sure. They weren’t the Mother­fuckers, a Lower East Side bunch simply named for the slogan ‘Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers’, that I’d seen around for a couple of years. They were the Crazies. A fine difference you might say. And I would agree with you. And I would add that maybe Mailer got off lightly. I had known the Crazies to do a bare-ass routine, in which whatever ‘phony fuckin’ liberal’ they were targeting would be presented with a pig’s head on a silver platter. And whatever Mailer really thought of ‘fuckin’ phony Manhattan liberals’, to the Crazies we were all fuckin’ liberals and all legit targets—just made to eat our own words.

  The room emptied. A sudden surge towards the back, a hundred and more people heading for the street. A little guy with a button of a face was pressed up against the glass, shaking the doors and yelling at me. He looked for an instant like the central figure in a Francis Bacon painting, one of those popes in glass booths or whatever, where rage seems red and muted, the body rigid and the mouth and throat exaggeratedly, silently animate. I pointed to the side, to where the open doors were flooding with people. Then I looked again. This little guy, round of face, shiny of cheek, angry of mien, was wearing Mel’s clothes. It was Mel. Mel without a beard. As the tail end of the crowd followed Mailer across 6th Avenue, he emerged, the last straggler from the ruins of the meeting.

  ‘Jesus Christ! Did you see that? Did you see that? The fuckers just shouted us down!’

  ‘You mean you didn’t expect it?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t expect it.’

  ‘Let me guess . . . you’re the good guys, right? So all the Crazies and the Motherfuckers and the God Knows Who should just leave you alone.’

  ‘Fuck you, Turner.’

  Fuck solves a lot of things. There should be a dictionary devoted solely to the word.

  ‘When did you shave off the beard?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I hear Norman does not like beards. I hear he’s against dope too. You going to give up the weed next?’

  ‘You think I shaved off my beard for Mailer?’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  ‘Of course not. Why would I do a thing like that?’

  None of this quite had the toothpaste ring of confidence. He’d had that beard as long as I’d known him. He’d shaved it off just once.

  ‘Last time you shaved it off was when we were in Philadelphia. Some horny sophomore got you to do it.’

  Good God, he was blushing. I’d hit home.

  ‘You shaved your beard off for a woman? Who is she?’

  ‘Nobody you know.’

  ‘Somebody who doesn’t like beards?’

  ‘Look—stop raggin’ me and come with us.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘We’re moving the meeting to Union Square.’

  ‘Well, that’s traditional if nothing else. But I need an early night. Canada in the morning.’

  ‘Naw. Come with us. We might just shake off this bunch of crazy motherfuckers. Now, you coming?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  I should have. I really should have. I never saw him again.

  §

  The date I drove north has stuck in my mind for lots of reasons. What happened when I got there. What happened when I got back. But, simplest of all I remember it because I picked up a paper at a corner newsstand on 7th Avenue as I drove out of the city. May 28. The news had broken that we’d given up Hamburger Hill. It became the Iwo Jima for our times. Iwo Jima, whatever the truth behind that flag hoisting, had been a symbol of American courage since 1945. Hamburger Hill’s been what? A symbol of waste and stupidity. Fifty dead and five hundred wounded and nobody knew why. Hill taken, hill given up and fifty body bags get sent back to Mom and Pop Averageamerica.

  I took a slightly eccentric route north. As the crow flies, and as long as you didn’t mind blacktops that dodged and weaved, it would pay to head out towards Scranton and wind your way along the banks of the Susquehanna and head for a crossing into Canada at Niagara. That was how I’d done it the first few times. Ever since, well almost ever since I’d taken the Hudson Valley route, north out of the city, across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey and up the interstate and over the Catskills to follow the railroad track from Albany to Niagara. It enabled me to call in on an old friend from Georgetown.

  As soon as I heard the name I knew it had to be the same woman. Mel and I had gone through College with a Tsu-Lin Shin—mostly Chinese, part German—damn missionaries get everywhere—and part Vietnamese. I doubt she was ever going to practise law, any more than Mel or me. The third or fourth time I had to drive up to Toronto I checked with the War Resisters League down on Beekman Street, not a block from Rose’s apartment, and they said, ‘You might save yourself half the journey. Look in on Tsu-Lin in Palenville. She gives the runners a halfway house for a while. The kids seem to know about her the way the moms and pops know about you.’ Had to be the same woman. Had to go see.

  Palenville? Never heard of it, but it wasn’t hard to find. A short hop off Interstate 87, which runs all the way up the valley to the Quebec line, a small village nestled in the Blackhead range of the Catskills. First sight of it, the kind of one store and a gas-station place (make that one store, gas station and video rental today) most likely to be populated by Irish and English from way back, made me wonder what the locals made of a hybrid like Tsu-Lin.

  ‘Johnnie, what brings you to this neck of the woods?’

  She sat on a wicker chair in front a vast, crumbling turn-of-the-century mansion, something probably built by a New York tycoon in the days when steamships ploughed all the way upriver to Rome or Athens for the convenience of Vanderbilts or Rockefellers.

  ‘I just drove up from New York.’

  ‘Well, John Turner Raines, you don’t look like a big city lawyer to me. Too hairy by far.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m a private eye.’

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘God’s truth.’

  ‘What exactly are you detecting up here, Johnnie?’

  ‘Draft-dodgers?’

  ‘Uh uh?’

  ‘It’s not what you think. I don’t chase kids and bring ’em back. I find ’em and I try to keep families in touch. I’m legit—check me out with the War Resisters League if you don’t believe me.’

  She got up, stretched to the tips of her toes and kissed me on the cheeks.

  ‘I already did. They called and told me you might be dropping in. Of course I believe you—but you have to admit at first hearing it’s a pretty unbelievable story. You must have had to work to establish yourself with those kids.’

  ‘I did. Took months.’

  ‘Me too. They come here wanting God knows what from me and suspicious as sin. Now which of my waifs are you hoping to reunite with his loving parents?’

  I named whichever kid it was that week—Tommy this, Ricky that . . . whatever.

  She led me indoors, pointed to a cork board on the studio wall—six feet across and almost as high—plastered with Polaroids and stuck her finger on a mug shot.

  The kid’s parents had given me a high school yearbook print of the runaway—white shirt, tie, lots of teeth. I could just discern the man beneath the mask, a waif in hippie’s clothing.

  ‘This guy?’

  I stared just to be certain. When I turned back to her the camera was aimed at me—a quick flash and I was part of her portfolio.

  ‘Yep. That’s him.’

  ‘Wen
t north two days ago.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think this collection might be somehow incriminating?’

  ‘How so? Is what I do illegal? Is what you do illegal? You tell me, lawyer man.’

  ‘No—but there are men in suits who can stand on your doorstep and ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘Let ’em. Do I give a fuck? Besides do we either of us think any of these kids are ever coming back? Do we think LBJ’s Amerika is going to amnesty them? Every last damn one of them is safe in Canada, tucked up in Toronto, marooned in Montreal . . . and I can’t think of an alliteration for Quebec.’

  ‘Coralled in Quebec?’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  ‘Why do you take them? Why do you keep them?’

  ‘Work in progress. What does every painter need? Brush fodder. Better brush fodder than cannon fodder.’

  ‘You paint?’

  She looked at me with that eye-roll that meant I’d just stated the all-too-obvious, threw the dust cover off her easel. A small canvas was maybe half finished—twenty or thirty heads in juxtaposition, in unnatural colors. A touch of Bosch about them. It seemed to me that heads were either devouring or disgorging one another.

  ‘I’ve ground to a halt on this. Something that wasn’t quite right about it. Something just not working out. I think maybe it’s the scale. Too small.’

  I looked. I turned my head this way and that, but I hadn’t a clue. What I knew about art you could jot down on the back of a map of Rhode Island. Nor, to screw up a cliché, did I know what I liked.