His Illegal Self

6

Not so long ago Dial had been sitting in a pleasant room near Poughkeepsie, New York. She had been dressed in a black cashmere sweater and a simple gray skirt and her Charles Jourdan court shoes had already produced their first expensive blister on her heel. There was, in this particularly cozy office, a Tabriz rug on the floor and a painting, clearly by Roger Fry, on the wall opposite. If it was puzzling that the chair of an English department, whose place of work this was, would own an artwork quite so valuable, then the location of the office, inside the gatehouse of Vassar College, suggested a history that might finally make it all explicable. Dial was a socialist, but snob enough to find this irresistible.

It was an early Monday afternoon in mid-October. All the crap with the selection committee, the so-called P &B, was finally done. The Pound scholar, who had been the committee’s first choice, had been nice enough to go to Yale instead. The Austen professor had been sucked up to, the prickly dean had been pacified and now there was nothing left to do but enjoy this milky tea, and maybe elicit the story of how this steel-blue Roger Fry had come to this American wall where it managed to look so dull and erotic all at once. There was a sleepy log fire in the grate and Dial could look down at the rolled lawns which, in spite of the efforts of the gardeners-three in sight just then-were littered with the tweedy colors of the fall. Dial experienced a delicious sense of possession you could never get from a state-owned park.

As the faculty had observed all day, the vermilions of an East Coast fall, the “red peak,” was just one weekend away. This was not an excitement she had ever felt in Dorchester where the yellowing leaves on the highway dividers suggested death by poisoning and triggered angry memories of too-thin coats, chilly ankle-high drafts blowing down the hallway of her childhood home, her “study.”

Dial’s companion settled back into her teal wingback chair and predicted the red peak once again. This was Patricia Abercrombie, a Chaucerian of fifty, lumpy, round faced with piano legs and a pasty sad sort of face with deep vertical lines in her upper lip. To Dial there seemed to be something missing, a lack of some element of character that made her appear out of focus or underwater. Indeed, if Dial was now insincere in the surprise she showed about the coming red peak, it was mainly in the hope that if she could only demonstrate enough interest, enough goodwill, she might penetrate the Abercrombie bark and somehow touch the living wood.

Patricia Abercrombie, being thirty years a Vassar girl, and far sharper than she appeared, retreated from all this shallow brightness.

I believe, she said at last, raising her pale red eyebrows as she lifted her cup. I believe we have a friend in common.

Oh? said Dial, to whom this seemed beyond the bounds of possibility.

Susan Selkirk, said the chair.

Now it was Dial who had her heartwood touched, not pleasantly.

You know of whom I speak?

Yes, I was at school with her.

The chair’s eyes clearly registered this for what it was, a cowardly attempt to deny a friendship. Susan was our son’s friend, she said softly. But she was our orphan baby, really.

Oh.

I think she’s terribly lonely, the chair said.

Of course, said Dial, hearing a sort of moo in her false sympathy.

That’s the other side of everything, said the chair, holding her gaze. Very sad and very lonely. Poor girl.

Patricia Abercrombie broke away to write something on the corner of her New York Times. Dial watched with perfect numbness, having gone through the entire selection process assuming that this aspect of her history was unknown and would, had it been unearthed, have immediately disqualified her. She watched as the chair tore a small strip from the Times. Dial knew what it was going to be. It was impossible, but it would be Susan’s phone number.

On the other side of the world she would recall the weird mixture of fear and satisfaction she had felt as she took that paper in her hand. Patricia Abercrombie smiled at her. This time Dial did not notice the lines on her lip-but the glint in her green eyes. God, she thought, who in the fuck are you?

Nothing more was said about the piece of paper, and soon she walked with Patricia Abercrombie across the grass where she was “delivered” with her secret blistered heel into the care of the dean.

Whatever conspiracy had been enacted was not acknowledged. There was not so much as an extra squeeze in their farewell handshakes and it would not be until, years later, reading Vassar Girls, that she had any inkling of the eccentric power she had brushed against so casually.

And what will you do now? the Dean asked her, when Patricia Abercrombie had gone, and her social security card had been copied and her health plan had been selected.

I think there’s a train to the city at two.

No, I mean until the spring semester.

You know, she said, and in that second she was vain enough to feel her youth, her beauty, her whole possibility. You know, she said, I have not the least idea.

What luxury, said the Dean who had previously been her greatest obstacle. How lovely.

And that afternoon, at Poughkeepsie railway station, Dial, whose real name was Anna Xenos, redeemed what had once been her father’s backpack and lugged it to the bathroom and kicked off her shoes and changed out of what seemed to her to be a rather specious sort of drag. Sitting on the toilet, she repacked so that her interview clothes were on the very bottom. She changed into tights, a camisole, not so much for warmth as protection against the abrasions of a long Nepalese dress patched together from reds and browns and tiny mirrors. She had carried a Harvard book bag to the interview, worn casually as Cliffy girls did that year, over the shoulder and on the back. Now she fitted the bag into the pouch where her father had once carried shotgun cartridges, and, still sitting on the toilet, pulled on a loose-fitting pair of fur-lined boots. Her blister thus soothed, she steadied herself with one hand and undid her hair and fluffed it out not minding, no matter how often she said the opposite, that she did, indeed, look kind of wild.

She was on the 2 platform just as the train from Albany came in, and when she boarded she found a telephone waiting, directly opposite her. If not for this she might never have called Susan Selkirk. But she was high on life, on possibility, and she was on the phone before she even took a seat…215? Philly? She wasn’t sure. It took six of her quarters. Ridiculous. Like phoning a rock star or a famous author whom your aunt had known, something you only did because you could, because you were not nobody.

Hello, Susan. It’s Dial.

Give me your number, said someone, not Susan. We’ll call you back.

There was a number, too. She gave it, not unhappy to see a few quarters returned.

She waited for the famous felon as if she were herself some kind of actor in a film, resting her head against the glass, watching the power lines dance like sheet music across the reflection of her extraordinary dress. She was about to talk to America’s most-wanted woman. She was going to MoMA before it closed this afternoon. She was staying with her friend Madeleine on West Fourteenth Street. That’s all she knew about her future. She had no lover, no father or mother, no home but Boston whose “rapcha” and “capcha” occasionally burst the surface of her speech. She watched the power lines rising and falling beside the Hudson and thought, Remember this moment, how beautiful and strange the world is.

When the phone rang, she saw her hair reflected in the sky.

Hello.

Well, said that piercing girlie voice, if it’s not the “bvains.”

Hi, she said not at all offended by the “bvains.” Rather pleased.

Far out, cried Susan. Dial had forgotten how she sounded, the shrill pitch.

What a coincidence, Susan said. Listen I’m going on vacation, you dig. I was just wondering where you are?

Dial could see the conductors walking through the car. The conductor could see her. But she could see Susan Selkirk in the Boston Globe, photographed from the ceiling of the Bronxville Chase Manhattan. What might or might not have been a revolver was in her hand. That was what had happened to SDS. Students for a Democratic Society?

No shit, said Susan. I was just talking to my mom about you. I mean, like, now.

Your mom remembered me?

She’d rather remember you than me. But listen, I sort of was wanting to say hi to my guy.

Which guy?

He was your guy too.

On the telephone, blasting through Croton-on-Hudson, Dial blushed, pulling her hair by the roots, looking at her staring face in the glass.

The baby, Susan Selkirk said. For Christ’s sake. I mean my son.

Right.

Call back, Susan Selkirk said suddenly. Tonight. Can you do that for me? Please, please. This is not cool, not now.

I’m going out to see The Godfather with Madeleine.

You’re seeing the fucking Godfather.

Sure. Why not?

There was a silence and Dial didn’t rush to fill it.

Sure, said Susan, why the fuck not!

Another silence.

I need this favor, Susan said at last. If not for me, then for the Movement.

Dial was a sucker. Susan knew she was a sucker. She wandered back down through the car, hefting her awkward heavy pack, laughing incredulously at herself, at Susan Selkirk who could still issue commands like the revolution was a family business. For the Movement! Please.

She tucked the phone number in her purse and let her mood be made by bigger things, by the great luxury of time, a fall day with sunshine, and the Hudson still as glass. If Susan Selkirk affected her at all, it was only to highlight the richness of her new life which was intensifying daily-Vassar, MoMA, Manhattan, all the possibilities suggested by this gorgeous ride beside the Hudson with the sun pushing down above the golden Palisades.

By the time the train dipped underground at 125th Street, she had forgotten Susan Selkirk. And it was only very late that night, on calculating her expenses and counting the remaining money in her purse, that she found the scrap of paper. When she called it was not because of any deep friendship for Susan. But she had all the time in the world, so she made an arrangement to meet her near Clark Street in Brooklyn. Susan, quite typically, sent two strangers to interrogate her and again she was too curious to be decently offended.

Later all she would remember was their teeth, big and long on one, small and square on the other, but both young women’s mouths were full of perfectly straight teeth, clear signs of class that contradicted their dowdy clothes which were a sort of depressed portrait of the unhappy working class. Their hair had been cut gracelessly with kitchen scissors and they had about them a severe judgmental quality that made Dial feel too tall, too pretty, too frivolous for their company.

You know the kid, right? Her son?

Once I did. Freshman year.

She wants to see her son.

Susan does?

We don’t use names. OK.

The one with the long teeth was tall and skinny. Her dowdy little sweater was gray cashmere. She lit a cigarette and smoked it with both hands pushed in the pockets of her thrift store coat.

OK, said Dial. It did not help her that she noticed the privileged teeth, the expensive sweater. Neither undercut the moral authority she had been raised to respect. She never could be far enough left for Susan, SDS, herself. She thought the student left were fantasists, yet when the Maoists told her she would be shot after the revolution she was inclined to believe it was true.

She’s going on vacation, dig?

Dial understood that vacation was code for something else but she was staring at the girl’s stringy blond hair, wondering if there was something in that un-made-up face, something under those pressing dark eyebrows, that might give Dial human entry.

It’s dangerous, the girl said, looking over her shoulder at a skinny beat-up plane tree as if its shivery branches might reveal a bug. The grandmother will let you take him.

Mrs. Selkirk has no idea who I am.

Yes, she does. If you meet with her at eleven, you take the kid back by noon. Done. That’s all we’re asking. You will have done your little bit.

Little bit, thought Dial. You patronizing little bitch. Do you actually know Phoebe Selkirk? she asked the short one. Have you met her?

Listen, Susan is begging you. You know, like begging, man.

Dial thought, You said her name, moron. Plus where does all this “man” shit come from.

Oh sure, she said.

You know why the old lady trusts you? You want to know? You want to just stand there being sarcastic?

Dial shrugged. But of course she wished to know.

You never talked to the Post.

And that, of course, was completely true. Not just the Post but the News, the Globe, even the Times. And that was why she would call Grandma Selkirk, because the old lady, at least, had seen the steel at Dial’s core, that although she could not stand Phoebe Selkirk’s Upper East Side ass, she would never betray her trust. That was who she was.

Dial dropped a dime in Brooklyn Heights, and the phone rang on Park Avenue. Hello, she said, this is Anna Xenos.

Yes, I am recording this.

The Selkirks were like animals in the zoo. How amazing she should know them at all.

Yes. This is Anna. Hi.

Did they give you the address of my apartment?

I know your apartment, Mrs. Selkirk. Remember I worked for you.

When you get to my age everyone has worked for you.

What is it you want me to do?

They’ve told you.

Yes, broadly, Dial said, thinking, Oh please don’t piss me off too much.

Very well, the old lady said. Would you please come to me tomorrow at 10:45. You must bring him back in sixty minutes.

And that’s it, right? She thought, Must.

Will you be asking for a fee?

Oh please listen to yourself, she said. And returned the phone to the care of the Puritans. She could so easily not do this. She stood above the gritty artery of the BQE wondering why, of all the extraordinary things she could do in New York, she would waste her time this way.

Well, there was the boy, but who would remember that she carried the weight of his squirming life from May until September 1966-cruel ear infections long ago, jagged teeth like shards of quartz attacking from inside, high fevers, cold baths, all the smells of cloves, shit, jasmine oil she mixed with Johnson & Johnson so he always smelled like a newly anointed prince. She had thought she loved him then.

You’ll go with her to Bloomingdale’s, the tall one said, refusing to lean companionably across the rail. She wants to buy Susan a gift. You accompany her while she purchases it. Then you take the gift and you take the 6 train to Grand Central, then the shuttle, then walk through the passage to Port Authority. Susan will meet you both there.

The number I called was in Philly.

Yes. That’s right.

I’m from Boston. I don’t know Port Authority.

Just walk, Dial. OK? We’ll be watching you.

Dial was mostly thinking, Wait till I tell Madeleine this. Madeleine was a Long Island Jew with a Communist father. Who else would understand these fucked-up feelings swelling in her breast right now, her scorn for the cashmere sweater, the guilty certainty that these joyless bank robbers were on the right side of the war.

If not for me, then for the Movement, Susan Selkirk had said.

Every time it got her, every goddamn time.