Telling Lies

Chapter Nine

At 5:00 A.M. the desert sky was deep black, the stars hidden by a canopy of haze. I sped through the void between the black sky above and the black road below, trying to keep the speedometer of Uncle Max’s Beemer from slipping past 100 mph. I didn’t try very hard.

The trucks in the lanes to my right were a blur as I passed, or more likely I was their blur, sailing down the left lane as if it were a chute out of the abyss.

I had the beginnings of a hangover, house wine on an empty stomach, and my neck ached dully where I had been struck in church. I wanted a hot shower, fresh clothes, a toothbrush, a handful of aspirin. And the truth. I was depending on Jaime Orozco to have it all.

Jaime, as I remembered him, probably wouldn’t be up and coherent for hours yet. I kept thinking about margins of time, about the hour I spent sitting on Emily’s stoop, possibly the same hour during which she was shot. Had I taken an earlier flight, I might have found Emily on time, I might have made a difference in someone’s decision to put a gun to her head. Everything was timing. I forgot about the highway patrol and let the car go.

The speed, the cold air streaming in the window, made my head feel a little better as, over and over on Max’s tapedeck, I replayed the message tape Flint had taken from Emily’s answering machine. I was thinking about Aleda, the fresh pain in her voice when she said Marc’s name. Max had said that he half-expected Marc to show up with Emily.

It was a ridiculous idea, born I’m sure from the mating of anxiety and a bottle of scotch. But it was a notion I grasped for, longed for, as I thought of Emily immobile in her hospital bed, slipping away from me just as Marc had.

What had pushed me toward the edge was the strange service at La Placita and the even stranger conversation in the Bonaventure bar afterward. Max, I think, had been well-lubricated, though eloquent, when he delivered his eulogy. Later, he had been plain old drunk.

In the bar, I took him to task for speaking of Emily as if she were dead. He had said, “Don’t let it bother you. We buried Marc before he was ready, too.”

I asked him to explain himself, but he only grew more incoherent. As Lucas was finally helping him upstairs, Max had turned to me and said, “Marc lives.”

In a metaphysical sense, sure. Just the same, it was an idea I could not let go. Every time I learned something about Emily on the day she was shot, I tripped over Marc.

Driving Max’s car, as far as Riverside, I had tried to convince myself that the voice of the mystery caller on the tape was Marc’s. I aged it twenty-two years, made allowances for substandard fiber optic transmission, adjusted the pitch to account for stress. I gave him a cold.

Then somewhere after the 60 interchange, I decided it couldn’t be Marc at all. By the time I passed Banning, I had waffled back and forth so often, I couldn’t even recognize my own voice. The only thing I was sure of was that I felt no shame over the method I had used to liberate the tape from Flint’s pocket. He’s a cop; he should be more careful. He shouldn’t get drunk with distraught women.

As I neared the Indio off-ramp, I saw the first red sliver of sunrise over the Cottonwood Mountains. The moment of desert dawn came in a hurry. When the sun broke the ridge, soft rose light washed across the black desert floor like spillwaters pouring down from the mountains.

During the long drive through the night, I had felt a strong sense of isolation, as if I were passing alone through a vast and desolate wilderness. But in the first light, the illusion vanished. Desert-pink condos, new strip malls with turquoise trim, and the rolling green lawns of freshly planted golf courses emerged in relief as the night receded.

The arrival of another day reminded me I had missed a night’s sleep. I felt tired, but there was too much I had to do to waste time in bed. At least, I thought, remembering the goofy look on Flint’s face when I left him, wasting time sleeping.

I exited the freeway at Washington Street and was stuck immediately in a bottleneck of construction traffic. On both sides of the wide street the skeletons of new, half-framed condos cast long shadows across what was left of the open, white desert sand.

Trapped behind an earthmover, I found the last few miles to Jaime Orozco’s house excruciatingly slow going. Like everything I had been looking for, he was so close yet so unobtainable.

I hadn’t seen Jaime since his divorce from Emily, probably eight or nine years ago. I couldn’t remember exactly. They had planned to be a one-family medical mission to the Third World, a team, he the orthodontist/dentist, she the specialist in communicable diseases. But somewhere between the amoebic dysentery they brought home from Honduras and the malaria they contracted in Bangladesh, the plan had soured. And so had the marriage. It was too bad, too, because I always liked Jaime. I can only describe him as loose. He was good for Emily.

My hope was that during long, intimate nights in Honduras, or during delirious ramblings in Bangladesh, or maybe some-where in between, Emily had said something to Jaime that would help me now.

As the sky grew brighter, it became easier to recognize the few remaining landmarks. After getting lost only twice, I man-aged to find Jaime’s place along what was now the road to Lake Cahuilla.

Last time I visited Jaime, there hadn’t been a paved road, or a lake, either. His acreage had become trapped in the contagion of resort development that crept steadily, inexorably, across the sand and into the date palm groves. I wondered how close Jaime would let the new stucco walls encroach before he fled. He loved mankind in concept, but not necessarily as neighbors.

Jaime’s weathered adobe and tile house was set well back from the road, still surrounded by a buffer of grapefruit, tangerine, and palm trees. I pulled into the long gravel drive, looking for signs of life in either the house or the attached dental office. I didn’t relish waking him. Especially waking him with the news I had to bear.

When I came through the trees I saw that the rear office lights were on. A round little woman in a white pantsuit stood on the porch steps watching a collie relieve himself on the trunk of a palm tree.

I parked beside a pickup truck and got out. The crisp air was tinged with sweet tangerine blossoms and pungent sage. I took a deep breath and stretched my stiff muscles.

“Forgot your lights,” the woman called.

I reached back into the car and snapped them off. The collie sauntered over, sniffed my hand, nudged my crotch. I must have passed muster, because he stayed close beside me, licking at my hand and trying to get his nose between my legs, all the way across the gravel drive.

The woman came down the porch steps to meet me. “You have an emergency? Otherwise you need an appointment.”

“I only want to speak with Dr. Orozco,” I said. “I’m his sister-in-law.”

“Jaime ain’t married,” she said, widening her stance.

“When he was married, I was his sister-in-law.”

“I know,” she said. “Max called and said you was coming.”

“You know Max?”

“Sure. Don’t you?” She outweighed me by a few stones, and had a lower center of gravity, but I decided that if push came to shove-and at that point, I almost hoped that it would-I had speed and reach on my side.

I tried once more. “May I please see Jaime?”

“Sure”-she shrugged-“why not?”

She led me through a small reception room and into Jaime’s brightly lit examination room.

“What is it, Lupe?” Jaime had his back to the door, bent over a patient in his chair. From behind, he looked wonderful. Tall, slim, firm. There was more gray in his black hair than I expected, and his long ponytail was gone, but overall he wasn’t much changed. In his 501 jeans and cowhide boots, he seemed more natural to the desert environment than the Polo-clad golfers I had seen waiting on the greens for enough daylight to tee off.

The dental chair was enormous and the patient in it very small. From where I stood, I couldn’t see much of him except skinny elbows on the armrests and a stiff thatch of very straight, blue-black hair above Jaime’s hands. Whatever Jaime was doing to him required all of his concentration. I moved into the small room and found a spot between the spit bowl and a magazine rack.

Lupe waited for Jaime to notice me by himself, then gave up and announced, “She’s here.” Then she left.

“Thanks, Lupe.” Jaime glanced over at me. First he registered surprise, then pleasure. “Yep, she really is here. Heard you had a rough night, Maggot, took a pretty good shot.”

“Max talks a lot,” I said. “You’re at it early.”

“It’s grapefruit season. I have to be available before these kids go out to pick in the morning. They won’t give up a day’s wages to see the dentist. Right, Rafael?” He grinned at the boy in his chair, showing off a good number of his own perfect teeth.

“Hey, Rafael,” he said. “You know who this is? An honest-to-God TV star, Miss Margot Eugenie Duchamps MacGowen. You ever heard of her?”

The boy leaned around and took a long, very doubtful look at me. He had a beautiful face, smooth oak-colored skin, huge, liquid brown eyes. It was his mouth, however, that caught my attention; he had a bite like an alligator. His teeth, top and bottom, protruded at such acute angles that his lips wouldn’t close over them.

“You really a TV star?” he said. He sounded as if he had a mouth full of straw.

“Dr. Orozco’s teasing you.” I took out the Dodgers cap I had stuffed in the raincoat pocket and put it on his head. “You have my permission to bite him.”

Rafael laughed and made a few experimental nips at Jaime with his deformed choppers. Jaime picked up a plaster cast of those same teeth and nipped back. Then, manipulating the plaster teeth like a puppet, Jaime said, “Tell your mother we’ll be ready to start putting the bands on your teeth Thursday, the day after Christmas.”

“We’re going south to pick lettuce.”

“You come here before you leave. Promise?”

Rafael’s smile faded.

“If you wait as long to come back as you did this time, your face will grow some more,” Jaime said. “We’ll have to start all over again, make new casts and everything.”

Rafael, looking depressed, unclipped his paper bib and started to rise from the chair. Jaime leaned over him, putting his hands on the child’s shoulders. “What do the kids call you now?”

Rafael said something that I think was Scissors Mouth.

“When your teeth are fixed, they will call you Rafael,” Jaime said.

Rafael turned his soulful eyes on Jaime’s rugged face. “Promise?”

“You bet. Give those braces two years and you’ll be as cute as me.”

Rafael shook his head, smiling his distorted smile. “Cuter.”

“Don’t push it.” Jaime laughed. He gave Rafael a hand out of the chair. “You tell your mother to bring you here before you go south for lettuce. No matter what.”

“I will.”

“Good. Lupe’s cooking chorizo. You better hurry and get some before this TV star goes in and eats it all.”

Clutching the Dodgers hat to his head, Rafael paused to give Jaime a quick, shy hug before he ran to find Lupe.

“You’re such a softy,” I said. “You fix their teeth, fill their bellies, feed their self-esteem. I hope you have a few paying customers.”

“Not enough,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have ten thousand dollars, would you?”

“Not on me,” I said. “Or anywhere else. I’m paying retail for Casey’s braces.”

“Casey,” he sighed. “God, I haven’t seen her for so long. How is she?”

“She’s fine, Jaime. She’s with her dad for the holidays,” I said. “How are you?”

“How am I?” He went over to the sink and began lathering his hands. “At the moment, I feel old. Ever since Max called last night, I’ve been thinking about Emily, and the old days, the people we knew, the vision we had. I vowed I would always keep the flame alive.

“Max kept talking about old friends, old shit we’d gone through together. I finally had to say to him, ‘Twenty-two years is a long time. Who can remember so far back?’ Yesterday, I probably wrote December twentieth eight or nine times, before I made the connection. How could I forget what that date meant to us? It started me thinking. Time and again, Em and I risked so much, but I think I’ve forgotten that thing that was so damned important to us. Maggie, I think it’s young people who are meant to fight the good fights. And I’m not young anymore.”

“You’re just tired.”

“God bless you.” He smiled. “If I had said all that to Emily, she would have diagnosed some hormonal skip and given me a chemical adjustment. But Maggie, the problem is in my heart. If you put your hand on my chest, you wouldn’t find anything beating in there.”

“Jaime,” I said.

“More proof,” he said, slowly drying his hands in a white towel. “Old men get morose. I’m morose.”

“You’re not old. You’re not morose.”

“What then?” he demanded.

“Simply, grief,” I said. “How much did Max tell you?”

“What he knew-not enough. How is Em?”

“No change. I called the hospital from Max’s car about an hour ago. Mom and Dad are with her.”

“How are they?”

“Numb,” I said. “Emily called them yesterday and told them she was bringing someone home for Christmas. Someone very special.”

“Who?”

“She didn’t say. They decided she was getting married again.”

“Ouch,” he said.

“Didn’t she call you?” I asked. “She seems to have called everyone else.”

“She called. I wasn’t here yesterday was my day up at the Tahquitz Reservation. She left a message with Lupe. I never got back to her.”

“Did you try?”

He started piling used instruments on a tray and tidying up, and making a lot of noise doing it.

“Jaime?”

He sighed as he dropped the tray beside the small sink. “No. I didn’t call her back.”

“Still hurts, huh?”

“Bleeds,” he said.

“Max said something bizarre last night.”

“Not unusual for Max.”

“He said Emily had been behaving so strangely that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had shown up with Marc.”

Jaime grew very still. He looked at me the way a parent looks at an idiot child, baffled, worried, fond.

“How have things been with you, Maggie? You’ve had a pretty full dance card yourself lately: divorce, teenage kid to raise alone, big job, earthquake through your living room. Now Emily. Adds up to a lot of pressure.”

“I’m fine, Doctor Freud.”

“There’s no way around it, Maggie. Marc died in Vietnam twenty-two years ago.”

“Identification mistakes were made all the time. We both know deserters who came back to the States and disappeared into the underground.”

“It’s a tempting idea, Mag, but it won’t wash,” he said. “Marc knew we loved him unconditionally. Thinking from your head only,” he said, “is it in any way possible that Marc is still alive, and in all that time he never contacted us?”

“I can’t think from my head only right now,” I said. “You may feel empty inside. But if you put your hand on my chest, you would certainly find the heart beating.”

Jaime sighed and covered his face. He seemed to be over-come. Then I saw a slow smile curl around the edges of his lips. “What?” I said.

“If I put my hand on your chest, my love, I wouldn’t be looking for your heartbeat.”

I laughed. “You’re not old yet, Jaime.”

“Maybe there’s hope. Okay kid, either hop into the chair and let me look at your teeth, or come into the kitchen for some of Lupe’s chorizo and eggs.”

“How about just coffee, black.”

“Not in Lupe’s kitchen.”

He took my hand and led me, and it felt very nice, very familiar. But nothing more.

Jaime had been my first adolescent crush. I was about fourteen when Emily had brought him home to meet the family. He had been a lot like her, a head taller than the crowd and full of fire. In comparison, the pimply-faced boys my own age seemed incredibly dull and immature. Jaime was unfair competition.

Seeing Jaime again after a space of time, I saw that he was attractive, but I didn’t feel it. For one thing, he smelled like a dentist. I’m sure now that when I was fourteen, I fell for Jaime primarily because he was Emily’s boyfriend. She had weaned me on competition.

Being with him again, I realized how much I had missed Jaime, and how much Emily had lost out on. But you can never know what happens between two people. I know for a fact that there are many intelligent, discerning souls who still believe that my ex is a wonderful man, and that I am an idiot for cutting him loose. They may be right on both accounts. Doesn’t make me wrong.

Lupe was just seeing Rafael out when we walked into the kitchen. She cleared the boy’s dishes from the table before she set in front of us plates heaped with a mixture of scrambled eggs and fried chorizo sausage. It was a spicy, greasy-looking mass. My stomach was as iffy as my head, and there was no way I could eat the stuff. I took a hot tortilla from the basket on the table and used it to push the eggs around my plate.

Lupe watched to make sure we were eating, then picked up a broom and went out the back door.

Jaime swallowed his mouthful. “Lupe will know if you don’t eat anything,” he said.

“Could be.” I put down the tortilla and looked up at him.

“So?” he asked.

“I saw Aleda last night.”

“Max told me.”

“What else did he tell you?” I asked.

“That he was worried about his car,” he said. “If he’d been sober he wouldn’t have given you the keys.”

I smiled. “If I’d been sober, I wouldn’t have asked for them.” He poured me fresh coffee. “How did Aleda look to you?” “Ragged. Older.”

“Too bad. She was such a doll. Everyone was in love with her.”

I held the warm cup to my forehead, a small comfort. I had to push the plate far enough away so I couldn’t smell it.

“Do you believe in coincidence?” I asked.

“Now and then.”

“On December twentieth, Emily is shot and Aleda Weston comes in out of the cold. Suggest anything to you?”

“Old wounds,” he said. “If you keep picking at them, they never heal.”

“Whose old wounds?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Try,” I said. “I asked Aleda who would hurt Emily. She said, ‘Any of them.’ Tell me who she meant.”

“You were around, you remember all that.”

“I wasn’t there, I was in a convent, for chrissake.”

“Any of them, huh?” He got up and started stacking dishes in a distracted way. “Them covers a lot of territory, unless she meant them as opposed to us. Think about 1969 and everything we were involved with: we made a trip to Hanoi, we organized a big peace demonstration in Berkeley, the death of Tom Potts, our indictment, then Marc. If them is anyone who opposed us, wanted to arrest us, was offended by us, you could have a list half as thick as a phone book.”

“And us?”

“The core group. The seven of us indicted for conspiracy, inciting to riot, manslaughter, and whatever else was trumped up. You could throw in our families-at least some of them-attorneys, fellow-travelers of one stripe or another. That would net you the other half of the phone book.”

“The seven of you were close, like a family?”

He laughed. “More like the Hatfields and the McCoys. We feuded all the time. About the moral extent of the use of violence, and political bedfellows, over whose turn it was to make the coffee, and whether Camus or de Beauvoir was more correct, what to watch on TV, and over rumors that one or more of us was on the FBI payroll. It was always a fractious group.”

“But you stayed together,” I said.

“We came together for a moment, for one cause that intersected all our ideologies on the same axis: a tiny point in time and space. By early 1970, we had split up.”

“Just like that, you split up?” I helped him carry the dishes to the sink and scrape the remains of eggs into a plastic bowl. “I don’t hear the angst I expected.”

“People change, evolve, have different destinies to pursue. Some of our group split off into other movements, became more radical, found Jesus, disappeared like Aleda. Whatever.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “You evolved away from the Movement? I’m looking for the source of a festering wound that may have led to murder. What you offer me is Jesus?”

Jaime chuckled softly. “Maybe Jesus has better answers than I do.”

“Try again.”

“You want old wounds?”

“Yes. As you said, open, bleeding wounds.”

“Where to start? We all took some pretty good licks,” he said. “Going to Hanoi was a big mistake. We got a glimpse of the real world over there, and came home damned scared, with a message to share that no one seemed to want to hear. We were tailed, bugged, harassed by the Feds. From the pulpit, Billy Graham called us Satan’s children. There were death threats. Your parents’ house was firebombed. We organized a demonstration at Berkeley that got out of hand, and a perfectly innocent kid died as a result. We were indicted on charges that ranged from conspiracy all the way to murder. We did some jail time – jail time being the one essential rite of passage for an organizer. Police and National Guardsmen thumped us now and then. Is that enough?”

“What about the other side, them?”

“That’s vast territory. Far and away the biggest hurt, as you know, was the death of Tom Potts. He was an only child, a grad student on a hardship fellowship. That’s a lot of hope dashed.”

He became very thoughtful. “The rest seems petty in comparison. At least one of us was an FBI informant; there was some foundation to the rumors. I have my suspicions, but I don’t know for a certainty who it was. If that came out even now, it could be damned embarrassing.”

He poured himself the last of the coffee in the pot, tasted it, then dumped it into the sink. The bitter residue showed on his face.

“We weren’t caught for everything we did that was illegal, or immoral,” he said. “We slept with each other, did some drugs together, plotted mischief together, went to court ensemble. How serious it might be to have some of that old shit made public depends, I suppose, on one’s career or position. Or, maybe, family.”

“Starting at the beginning,” I said, “I guess the big question is, whose idea was it to set the bomb that killed Tom Potts?”

“Oh, God,” he moaned. He spent a lot of time putting dish soap in the sink, running water, getting out a fresh towel. He avoided looking at me.

“Are we picking at the old wounds yet?” I asked.

He looked at me sideways, almost smiling. “You were always the most persistent kid.”

“Who made the bomb?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Anyone can make a bomb.”

“I can’t,” I said, feeling some heat.

“If you have the right cookbook you can.” Jaime picked up the dish towel and wiped his hands as he headed out of the room. “Hold on a minute. Maybe I have something.”

The collie waited until Jaime was out of sight, then came over and laid his head against my leg. I took the bowl of table scraps off the counter and sat down on the floor beside the dog. He was a clever creature; he refused the bits of chorizo I offered him, but eagerly ate clumps of egg and a few pieces of tortilla. I didn’t know if doggie snacking was allowable, but it gave us both something to do while we waited for Jaime to come back. Besides, Lupe’s feelings might be hurt if she saw how much of her breakfast had been rejected.

For me, there was some uncomfortable deja vu involved in being left behind to wait for Jaime. Time does distort reality, but it seems to me that, as a kid, I was always being left behind by big people dashing off to do endlessly interesting and mysterious things. Em and Marc, because they were so much older than I was, and thus bigger, more competent, more independent, used to infuriate me. No matter how much I grew and matured, they always had a head start. Whenever I hit a milestone, they had already been there and were long gone. Especially Emily, primarily because we were the same sex. For instance, by the time I finally entered school, Emily already had a bra. When I got my first bra, Em had thrown hers away and was taking the Pill. I was doomed to always miss the good stuff.

I was certainly left out in 1969. I was shielded, given an expurgated version of everything because of my tender age. It made me mad. Even twenty-two years later, no one had told me the whole truth. Maybe that’s why I was always so nosy-I just wanted to know what was going on. I still do.

The dog was a big help merely by being warm and available. He sighed contentedly and was just closing his eyes with his head in my lap when Jaime came back into the kitchen.

Jaime held a faded color snapshot in front of me. “You can have this.”

The picture wasn’t very clear. I took it from him and looked at it closely. It was the core group, plus Marc.

The group in the snapshot was casually posed, squeezed in together to fit into the frame. Marc looked sharp in a fresh Marine uniform. He was sandwiched between Emily in a wilted cotton sundress and Aleda in shorts and Madras shirt. Clustered around them were six others.

“Where was this?” I asked.

“Honolulu Airport. We were on our way to Hanoi. Marc had some R and R coming between tours of duty. We arranged to meet.”

“You kept the picture?”

“So I’m sentimental. It’s a sin I’ve paid for dearly,” he said. “I loved Marc like a brother.”

I didn’t want to cry again; I didn’t want the tears welling in Jaime’s eyes to fall. I got up for a drink of water.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes. These people have changed so much.”

“You’ve kept in touch?”

“No. I’ve seen almost all of them during the last twenty-four hours,” I said. “All except Arthur Dodds and Celeste Baldwin.”

“Arthur Fulham Dodds,” he said, running his thumbnail under the earnest young face in the picture. “He blew himself up making bombs in a basement in New York City about a year after this was taken.”

“Was he a bomb expert?” I asked.

“Obviously not very expert. Art’s eternal address is the Mount Carmel Cemetery. The dumb shit.”

“Was he?”

“He should have studied more chemistry before he tried cooking explosives,” Jaime said, frowning. “Art went east after the acquittal, joined the Weather Underground. He always got his high from confrontation. We were just too tame for him.”

I pointed to the skinny young boy with masses of kinky red hair framing his narrow face. I can’t believe that’s Rod Peebles,” I said.

Jaime laughed. “Every time he comes up for re-election, he hopes everyone forgets he was there. For most of us, that isn’t too difficult, he was just a limpet. He was always around, but he never had much to contribute. Except money.”

“Look at Lucas,” I said. “He looks so young. I always thought he was ancient.”

“Age is relative.” Jaime smiled. “You used to think I was old, too.”

“Yeah, I did. I thought you were gorgeous, though.”

“Wish you had said so, somewhere along the way.”

I stood up to pace a little, trying to force down the lump gathering in my throat again. Most of these people had been so familiar to me, a sort of extended family. I hadn’t thought about most of them for a long time.

My parents’ house is a short uphill walk from the UC, Berkeley campus. My father teaches there. During the Peace Movement, Emily had run their two guest bedrooms like a hostel for Movement organizers. A lot of people, including everyone in Jaime’s snapshot, had found succor in those rooms at some point.

Mornings, when I still lived at home, I never knew who I might find in the hall waiting for a turn at the bathroom. I remember on more than one occasion taking my place in line behind the Reverend Lucas Slaughter – in the snapshot he was standing behind Aleda.

I used to wonder what Lucas slept in, because in the bath-room line he never wore anything except a towel sarong and a heavy crucifix, which lay in his thick mat of chest hair like a tiny Jesus sunning in tall grass. He taught me two verses of “Did My Savior Bleed” one morning while we waited for Daniel Berrigan to shave:

Alas! and did my Savior bleed?

And did my Sovereign die?

Would he devote that sacred head

For such a worm as I?

Was it for crimes that I have done,

He groaned upon the tree?

Amazing pity! Grace unknown!

And love beyond degree.

I don’t know whether our hymn singing made Berrigan shave any faster, but he came out laughing.

There was only one surviving person in the snapshot I hadn’t spoken with.

“What do you hear from Celeste Baldwin?” I asked.

“Nothing. You know who she married?”

“Yes.”

“So you know as much as I do,” he said. “I told you, I didn’t keep up. You were the newsperson. You should still have the contacts to reach her.”

“Possibly,” I said. I studied the faces in the faded photograph. “All I have now is a list. Can’t you tell me what I need to know? Were these people Emily’s friends? Her rivals? Her enemies?”

“It was so long ago, Maggot.” He turned the picture over. “Who remembers?”

I watched him for a moment. He was obviously uncomfortable and fighting my prodding. I didn’t want to make him hurt. I just wanted some truth.

I stood and stretched. “You know what I remember most about that time?” I asked.

“What?”

“The passion,” I said. “And not only passion for the cause. Remember Marcella, my mother’s cleaning lady?”

I think so.”

“She hated the years of the Movement in Berkeley. You know why?”

“Tell me.”

“Because of the love stains she had to bleach out of the sheets when Emily’s house guests left town again. You would all come back from a rally or teach-in or march so fired up the house seemed to shake with the leftover passion. There was always a terrific racket: hot debates, loud music, enormous amounts of food, lots of grass. Then, two by two, people would peel from the group and slip up the stairs. Sleep was impossible with all the headboard banging during the night.”

He smiled. “That was the best part.”

“So you do remember?”

“Passion I remember.”

“Passion can wear many faces.”

“So?”

“So, it would take a lot of passion to put a gun to an old friend’s head and pull the trigger.”