The Laws of our Fathers

WINTER, 1970

Seth

The early months of 1970 were terrible. We were in California's first season, whatever it's called. The acacias had bloomed; the purple ice plants flowered beside the freeways. But everyone I knew was miserable.

The Eddgars' household was in turmoil. The Faculty Senate voted to conduct hearings beginning April 1 to determine whether Eddgar should be expelled for inciting to riot at the ARC. The role of martyr suited Eddgar well. Anger, sacrifice, discipline -all his favorite attributes were called for. His public appearances were characterized by an intense nervy excitement. He stridently denounced the university's case against him as hokum, designed to stifle dissent. But at home, his mood was more ambiguous. He worried out loud about snitches. June was even gloomier, clearly depressed by what the authorities were about to dish out. She took to quoting from various Greek dramas she'd played in at college.

I stayed busy with Nile and had also advanced somewhat at After Dark. I now swept the office and was also getting up at 5:00 four mornings a week to fill the vending machines around the Bay Area. The publisher of After Dark was a potbellied, bald-headed guy in polyester pants named Harley Minx. I liked Harley and found him somewhat touching in his frank desperation to experience the life of lust imagined in his paper. In idle moments in the office, I'd recounted some of my Doobie Hour fantasies to him and Harley had persuaded me to write a couple down. He decided to run them as a sort of serialized comic strip, each tale stretching over three or four issues and accompanied by R. Crumb-like cartoon panels. The column was called 'Movie Trips,' and except for Harley's warm support drew virtually no attention. However, the sight of my words in print was dizzying.

The initial serial concerned a leader named A Bi and his son, IB2, and was set in the year 2170. By then, I suggested, medicine would have scored its ultimate triumph, allowing humans to live forever. As a result, the earth and the habitable planets would become a reeking overpopulated mess. Procreation was allowed solely with governmental license, and then only if one member of the parenting couple agreed that twenty-one years later she or he would die. In my story, A Bi, a man of some importance, decided that he could not keep that bargain, and so he set about pursuing the only alternative allowed under the law – sacrificing his child. At the end of the first installment, A Bi convinced IB2 to join the Fortieth SkyFighters, knowing that danger and even death often accosted the members of the galactic militia.

' This is like a parable or something,' Lucy said, when I brought the first edition home to Doobie Hour.

'Something,' I answered. Sonny put the paper down sadly, her eyes, when they found mine, flooded with shared misery.

'What happens to the son?' she asked.

'We'll find out soon.'

By now, I was in an endgame with my draft board, employing every gambit in a last-chance hope that a sudden breakthrough in the Paris peace talks would allow Nixon to end the war. I had filed for reconsideration of my C O and contested the results of my physical. When all that failed, I could transfer my induction to Oakland. That would provide me a few extra weeks. But the point – which never left me, even when I was driving my delivery route or laughing with Sonny – was that I was going. I was gone. When I received my draft notice, I would point the Bug north. That could be late April at best. I had gathered maps from all the motor clubs. I had spoken with the resisters' organization. At the border, I would say I was entering for a visit. Then I would stay. I knew a guy who knew a guy. He'd hire me for day wages at a nursery outside Vancouver. I would be digging and planting as long as the war lasted. After that, who knew? Often, I was wild with anger. The thought of abandoning the US – its crazy turbulence, into which I felt woven like a fiber – of giving up my friends, my food, my music, of being unable to visit my parents as they aged was horrible. I remained somewhat startled that the remote world of political abstractions was actually going to alter my life. But I could not back down. I had refused to come home over the holidays, knowing that my parents would create unbearable scenes, wheedling and demanding I change my plans. My ability to withstand their pleas to see me seemed to persuade them for the first time that I was actually going to take this step. Sonny was in her own crisis. Her dissertation proposal was due by the first of March. She would emerge from long hours in the library, bedraggled and bleak, describing her situation as hopeless, claiming to lack both ideas and interest. Her eyes were circled and ink smudges spotted the sides of her hands and the cuffs of her shapeless fisherman's sweater. Two or three times a week, I propped her up with lengthy pep talks, reminding her how brilliant and promising she was. But she rarely seemed convinced. In February, she requested an extension. And then two days later, to my astonishment, she simply quit. Reading the letter she wrote to Graeme resigning her fellowship, I felt short of air. I followed her around the apartment, arguing.

'You get this stuff. Husserl. Heidegger. I watch you and I can see all the little lights blinking on the Univac' I made twinkling gestures with my fingers until she actually smiled.

'That's what I've realized,' she said. 'I'm here because I get it, because I'm good at it. But that's not a reason to do something. This isn't me.'

She was in the living room, shelving her books, tidying up a portion of her life that was now declared past. 'So what's you?' I asked finally.

She shook her head and looked vacantly at our secondhand furniture. We had an imitation Persian rug of magenta Belgian cotton that ran when we spilled water on it; an old brown tweed Hide-A-Bed which required two people to move; and a wing chair and hassock, on both of which the floral print upholstery had split, allowing the ticking to emerge through the strands of fiber in a herniated bulge. Against the walls stood the ramparted bookcases.

'I want to travel. Go other places. Be somewhere else.'

'How about Canada?' I asked.

She appeared tempted to smile, but withheld it for my sake, realizing I was earnest. ‘I could,' she allowed. We were both silent. 'I could,' she repeated. ‘I could do a lot of things, Seth.'

When I asked for examples, she removed an informational packet on the Peace Corps from her canvas book sack, a glossy brochure she'd picked up on campus. It featured a radiant, full-cheeked young woman on the cover amid a splash of red white and blue. Even I saw some slight resemblance to Sonny.

'I probably wouldn't even get in,' Sonny said. 'You know the story: It's Kennedy's program so Nixon's cutting the funding. But I think it would be far-out to go somewhere that was completely new, undeveloped. Unknown. I think about it, I don't know – I feel optimistic' She was clutching her hands near her heart.

'For what? What in the hell is this supposed to accomplish?'

'It's different, baby. I want to see what's different. To explore. Get out. Move out. Expand. I don't have to justify that. You understand.'

'Yeah, right.' I mocked her: 'Do your own thing, man. You know, you're worse than me. I can't sort all this shit out. But I admit it. I feel it jerking me one way, then the other. I can't even figure where you're at. You're traumhaft. You're in Surf City. I listen to you: "This option. That option." It'salmost like it scares you to actually move ahead with your life.'

'So what if it does? God, Seth, it's all this middle-class junk with you.'

'Oh, fuck that noise. You think it's bad to be committed to something? I don't.'

'I don't think it is either, Seth. But I can't be committed just because I think it's a good idea.'

We were in the bedroom by now, with its porthole window and glossy yellow enamel on the fleur-de-lis patterns in the walls. The heater spurted up out in the hall. I crumbled sadly on the bed.

‘I mean, really,' I said after another silence in which neither of us had the bravery to look at the other. 'What about us? Don't you think about it?'

'God, baby, I have. I have. Of course, I have. But it's not a thinking thing. I have to feel that it's right. To go up there – I might, but it's such an enormous step. For me. It means I'm following you. It means it's your stuff, not my stuff. It means I'm in purgatory, because you are. There are so many problems. I just have to work it through. You understand. I know you do.'

I couldn't believe it. The Future. The dread spot where my life fell apart. I was finally there.

A couple of weeks after New Year's, the phone rang in the middle of the night. Waking, I first thought something must have happened to one of my parents. But it was the line they didn't use that was ringing. Lucy was on the other end, asking me to come over, her voice shrill with distress.

'Bad trip,' she explained. 'Really bad.'

I'd never known Hobie to bum out. Senior year, he was heavy into hallucinogens – LSD, psilocybin, magic mushrooms. He loved to borrow a motorcycle and cruise the wooded hills of Greenwood County. I went along once and had a peak experience, my spirit seeming to flood out of me, crystallizing in the treetops of the oaks, where it shimmered magically as the undersides of the leaves spun in the wind. But for the most part I stayed away from acid, wary of confronting my own spooks.

When I reached their apartment on Grand Street in Damon, I found Lucy cowering behind the door, shooing away their dog, a large cream-colored husky named Mighty White. Hobie's late-term cramming had left the apartment looking as if a twister had hit. Throughout college, Hobie had indulged Gurney, his father, in a pharmacist's predictable dream that his son would go to medical school. Those of us who knew Hobie well realized his only interest was in getting his hands on his own prescription pad. In the end, he chose law school both to pacify his parents and because he'd heard the only required work was a single exam in each course. He didn't want to waste his time on papers and midterms just to get drafted. But now that the lottery had freed him, he had to learn something about law fast. The first exams were a few days away. His casebooks and notes were thrown all over the living room, and the place reeked of cigarettes, a habit he took up at the end of each semester, asking all his friends to save, from their flights home over the holidays, the little four-packs that the airlines handed out with meals. I'd seen this routine many times at Easton: Hobie begging every guy in the dorm for notes on the classes he'd cut, the texts he'd never bought. Ultimately, he always made the Dean's List, with grades higher than mine. At the moment, Hobie sat across the room on the sofa, a secondhand piece with rolled arms and a campy countrified floral pattern. He was sobbing. His cheeks shone and his arms hung loose between his knees. At the same time, he remained fixed on the TV, which, pursuant to the needs of his lifestyle, was positioned only a few steps from him. An old movie was running. Hepburn and Tracy.

Lucy explained that Hobie was enduring the results of playing chemistry lab with his own head: he had dropped some acid and taken a noseful of Cleveland's snow as a garnish.

'He's been crazy,' she said. 'Throwing stuff? Screaming?'

'Have we got like a theme?'

'You'll hear.' She rolled her eyes in a rare show of exasperation.

Near the sofa, a picture of Hobie's family was smashed in its frame. An ashtray had been emptied. I sat down next to him carefully. He was wearing a T-shirt of his own design, which he had produced and marketed at Easton – an anatomically perfect heart and lungs brightly serigraphed above a black legend which read 'Be My Transplant.'

'So, Mr Gordon, any sign of the evil emperor Ming?' In his eyes, you could see my question lost like quicksilver in some crack in his brain. Somehow it was always a gas for me when Hobie was fucked up and I was straight, making me, for a brief interval, the master in our tangled relationship. 'So like what's flipping across the screen, dude, got you so unhappy?'

'Hey, man, you know.' Blasted by the drugs, he was softer, deprived of his usual hard-shell hipness. His round face was puffed up by tears.

'Are you in-body?' I asked. Hobie had experienced reliable sensations two or three times during acid trips of being someone else: a fourteenth-century woman in Avignon who worked on the weaving of one of the Papal tapestries, and a Nepalese peasant named Prithvi Pradyumna, whose life each day, treading behind his oxen, was consumed with unrelenting bitter anguish that his brother, rather than he, had been permitted to become a monk. His eyes flickered up now.

'It's all bad,' he told me.

'You mean the dope. What are we saying?'

'Dope? Huh? It's dope. It's everything. It's being skulled and crazy. It's all the dope.'

I agreed: he did too much. I told him that. Immediately, he began to rage at me.

'No! You know why I been stoned for five years, man? You know?' He thundered to his feet abruptly and loomed over me. 'I've been killing the pain, boy! I've been ignoring the facts! Did you know that?' 'No.'

'Did you know that?' he screamed with his substantial arms outstretched. Lucy peeked in from the kitchen. Now that I had arrived, she had given way. She was crying, her face a mess of melted liner. 'Man, there is something I ain't never wanted to tell myself. And you know what it is? Do you know what it is?'

'No.'

'He doesn't know what it is,' Hobie bellowed to the ceiling. Up there, he had glued one of his casebooks with a note reading 'Law is a natural high' dangling from a corner. He faced me so suddenly that I flinched. 'I'm a black man,' he declared and briefly descended into a terrible grief-strained spasm of tears. 'Do you know what it means to be a black man? Do you know?'

Growing up in my father's home, I'd felt a special sense for the brute pain of oppression. I began to remind Hobie of my efforts, the meetings, the marches I'd made with his parents. It only infuriated him. 'Don't tell me about that! You think cause you went marching up and down the street askin people not to be so mean, I have to send you a fucking thank-you note? What'd that ever do, man? That was nothing more than a walk in the fresh air.' Hobie kicked the coffee table, a miserable piece of cheap wood with a scarred veneer, so that it jumped against my knees.

'I know the world's fucked up, man. But it's changing. It's changed, for Chrissake. Twenty years from now, man, there isn't going to be a slum left in this country. Poor Negroes -'

'Blacks! Blacks, man.'

It was Hobie's dad, Gurney, in his avuncular way, who'd taught me one day in his drugstore when I was seven to say 'Negro' rather than 'colored.'

'Right, blacks. Blacks, poor blacks are like immigrants who got off the boat in 1964. They're newly arrived. You think they won't jump into the melting pot, too? They'll stop speaking dialect, they'll-'

' "Di'-alect"? Man, that's our language. That's our culture. Shit! You know, I just can't talk to you about this.' Both Lucy and the dog cringed by the wall as Hobie strode from the room. In time, I found him on the back porch, a rickety wooden construction off the kitchen, where the floor was reinforced to hold a washer. He was ripping wet laundry out of the machine. He picked up three or four items, slinging them without aiming across the bright kitchen. A shirt stuck to the refrigerator. A sock hung on the clock. A pair of jeans hit the yellow wall with a moist thwack and after a time crawled down to the floor, leaving a glistening trail. He reared up in fury when he saw me again.

'America is a nation conceived in original sin and that sin is slavery!'

'Oh, stop it,' I said. 'Stop trying to bend my mind with how bad the Negro people have had it. I get it, okay? And they aren't the only ones who have suffered.'

'You tell me who's had it worse?'

'Who? Oh, fuck you, Jack. Man, I wouldn't even be standing here -'

'Oh, that. That! Except the whole fucking white world got its little act together, man, and kicked Adolf Hitler's ass. Now, let's lookee here, over in the US of A, man: We got lynchings and rapings and burnings. We got KKKs and White Citizens Councils and Orval Faubus. We got Bull Conner lettin his hound dogs loose on black teenagers who just want to sit at a lunch counter, have a sandwich, man. And did all them European leaders say, "We got us another threat to civilization"? Don't tell me, man. I've already heard it a thousand times: that's different.'

'It is different. Even slavery isn't annihilation.'

From her corner, Lucy said it was all terrible and asked why it mattered which was worse. Neither of us was paying any attention.

'Our slavery never ended,' Hobie said. 'We will never be anything here but slaves or the children of slaves. Never! There is no forgetting.' Standing over the machine, he was virtually hyperventilating.

'You and I never remembered.'

'Bullshit!' he screamed.

'Hobie, you're tripping.'

Somehow this was the worst thing I had said yet. He took fierce hold of my shirt. As I was trying to break away, I ended up getting butted hard by his forehead. My lip bled freely. Lucy brought me a cloth and ice and I sat at the kitchen table, attending to myself. Hobie did not seem to notice. He came back in my direction, still screaming.

'This Is Not a Fucking Trip! This Is My Fucking Life!'

Afterwards, replaying the conversation for Sonny, what shocked me, as much as Hobie's anger, was the instinctive speed with which I had seized my parents' experience as my own. I'd been indignant that Hobie, of all people, would forget the solemn moral claims of my heritage.

Our relationship was never fully repaired. I knew Hobie better than to expect an apology, but he made no amends of any kind. His appearances at Doobie Hour became infrequent and Lucy often arrived without him. We simply let time pass. The night of my birthday, March 12, we tried it again. The four of us went out to a little Vietnamese restaurant Hobie had found in San Francisco. It was a hole in the wall on Van Ness, specializing in spring rolls and savory soups. Catholics, the owners had dolled up the little place for Mardi Gras with boughs of gilt leaves.

'Three great cuisines, man,' Hobie pronounced. 'Chinese. Indian. French. And only one place they've met. We're bombing the finest fucking cooks in the world.'

Lucy wore sparkles in her hair for the occasion and had brought sequined pinwheels for each of us. Sonny gave me a copy of Abbey Road. We all drank Chinese beer. Hobie said it was the best high he'd had since he'd given up cocaine. I – and especially Sonny – was pleased by that news.

'No lie, man,' Hobie said. 'I'm totally checked out of this white-is-right bag.'

Against the counsel of an inner voice, I asked what he meant.

'The American thing, man. White men have been destroying people of color around the globe since the sixteenth century, taking their countries, killing them, or making them slaves. The war in Vietnam and the war on the US plains, man – same damn thing. You think it's just coincidental that those grunts in Nam call NLF territory "Indian Country"? Think it's an accident we dropped the A-bomb on the yellow folks in Japan and not the whites in Germany? And now, man, if one planet ain't enough, now you-all gonna colonize the fucking moon.' These imperialist designs, Hobie said, were betrayed everywhere, not merely in the gross manifestations, as in Vietnam, but in the seemingly innocuous items of daily life. Hobie was now convinced that refined sugar was the product of a ruthless oligopoly, the subjugators of Cuba and Hawaii, who had purified their product in order to addict children, while appealing to the basic racist subtext of American life by turning a brown commodity white. The same was true of cocaine. 'White,' said Hobie. 'Purity, propriety, cleanliness, and stature. This country's got white-is-right on the brain. Look at all those dudes going to work every day in white shirts, washing their hands in Ivory soap. Think about it, man,' he demanded. 'Think about it.'

I studied him for quite some time, then told him he was mouthing Black Panther bullshit. He became incredibly provoked.

'They are powerful black men!' he shouted. 'Can't you dig? The Panthers are exactly what America has not wanted to see for four hundred years, man. They are African males, with their great big guns, not runnin, not hidin, sayin, Stick 'em up, motherfucker, I want what's mine.'

'You're fucked,' I said. 'You're out of your gourd.'

'Man,' Hobie told me, 'you can't even see me anymore. If I'm not just some cute Negro with a bunch of amusing things to say, you can't cope. Let's go,' he told Lucy and stalked out.

I sat there an instant, unhappy with myself. I briefly looked to Sonny and Lucy for consolation, but I finally followed him out. On the crowded street of low dun-colored buildings, Hobie stood on the walk, observing the streaming traffic mounting the hills of Van Ness. One of the aboriginal fern bars was down on the corner.

'If I've been talking down to what you believe, then I'm really sorry,' I told him. 'I've got my own thing right at the moment. But I get it. You know. I'm with you. I've always been with you.'

'You won't be there forever, man. Nobody white's gonna be there forever.'

'How's that?'

'This country's for you, man. It's for you.'

'It is, huh? That's why I have to run away from it?'

'Oh, you know. Time passes.'

I couldn't believe it. I swore at him.

'Okay,' he said. 'I'm just saying how it is. I know you're against things right now. Cause right now they're gonna draft your ass.'

'Right and you're a disinterested philosopher. You care about the oppression of people of color because you're a Negro – or black, or whatever word it is this week.'

'But here it is, man.' He pounded on his palm. 'Twenty years from now, you'll be rich and fat and white – and I'll still be a Negro, or whatever it is that week.'

'And I'll be a fucking Canadian.'

I understood all right. It was clear now. We had been through college, we had been through everything. We had been children, we had played intense boy-games, football on cold afternoons, wrestling where he always was pinning me, sitting on my throat or bloodying my nose. We'd done junior high school who-loves-who, showed each other our pubic hair when it started to grow in. In high school we'd made friends with Weird John Savio, who took us driving on the frontage road behind the highway in his mother's three-speed Fairlane, which he ran at no miles per hour until the engine smoked. In college, we stayed up all night at least twice a week, drawing anyone we liked into our discussions about

Occam's razor and various proofs for the existence of God, pondering the implications if it turned out that it was actually life on Earth that was really Hell. We secretly knew we were the instigators of Easton's legendary freshman-sophomore water fight. We'd done heavy doses of cannabis and Benzedrine hoping to bend our minds about what Einstein had meant when he postulated that matter equaled time. We had been through everything. But we were not going to get through this.

I turned into a nag, worrying at Sonny: Come with. In my anxiety, she glimmered like a treasured object. I needed love's comfort, a body to hold, her to believe in. If she would come, I could go. Sonny continued to toy with the idea. I could tell she wanted to think of herself as valiant and right-thinking. But she took a job waiting tables at Robson's, a ham-and-egger on Campus Boul, and proceeded with her Peace Corps application. As time grew short, I insisted on personalizing things. The real issue, I told her again and again, was her commitment to me. She'd sit in the living room with her eyes closed, trying to endure my stupidity.

' Seth, it's not how I feel about you that matters. I'm twenty-two. If I was thirty-two, if I was forty-two and we were together, that would be one thing. But I want a life. My own life. I've never lied to you. Or led you on. Have I?'

'Sonny, I don't have any choices now.'

‘I know, baby, and that's what makes it hard. Because what you're doing is important. And I support it. But thinking it through, I've spent hours, days – And look, how is this any different than if you were doing something else that was important – if you got into grad school somewhere or found a great job someplace? Suppose somebody offered you a job in Hollywood, writing movies? You'd go. Right? Would you expect me to jump up and follow you?'

Most of these discussions ended up as fights – bitter, accusatory. Without Hobie, I felt bereft, especially as my parents grew more frantic. One night late in March, Sonny and I arrived home from a movie on campus to hear the second phone ringing in our apartment. It was my mother, no doubt hoping to twist my innards. She was beleaguering me, calling almost daily, either to implore me to come home to visit them or to see if magically I had divined some alternative to going to Canada. 'Oh man.' I was in no mood.

'Call them back,' Sonny suggested. But I went to the phone. It was, instead, my father. There were few pleasantries. He got to the point.

'Your mother has informed me that if you carry through with this plan to emigrate, she feels we have no choice but to follow you wherever you settle.'

For quite some time neither of us said anything further. It seemed preposterous. My parents never vacationed, never left Kindle County, travel for them long before having lost any association with pleasure.

'You're kidding.'

'Deadly serious,' he said.

'She's crazy,' I finally managed.

'We share an opinion,' my father replied. My mother, no doubt, was standing nearby, a hand poised dubiously near her mouth as she listened.

'Have you tried to talk her out of this?'

'Repeatedly.'

'You're not coming, are you?'

'Me? My business, as you know, is here. At my age the possibility of starting again in another city – let alone another country-is unthinkable.' Retirement was unmentionable. Without an income stream, my father would feel cut off from his vital source.

'So?'

'Your mother is determined.'

'She wouldn't go without you. Who would take care of her?' My father did not answer at first. ‘I do not know precisely what she envisions. Her son, of course, will be nearby.'

A sound of pure agony escaped me. 'Will she talk to me?'

He spoke to her momentarily, then informed me sternly, 'No. There are no discussions. This is, you see, a decided matter. PUrikt'

I was reeling, but crawling through me was the unlikely sensation of some sympathy for my father. He sounded collected, almost cheerfully so, but if she left, I knew he would sink into the clutches of his own peculiarities, afraid to venture beyond home, spooked by wrath and paranoia.

'Seth, I hope this goes to illustrate-' My father could not continue. His voice shook, with either rage or the humiliation of having to prevail upon me. But eventually he forced himself to finish. 'I hope you will reconsider.'

I waited quite some time, but told him at last what I always did: I had no choice.

'This is not a plan,' he cried. 'This is madness. You have no concept of what you are doing. How will you support yourself?' my father asked, always to him the foremost question. 'You cannot provide for yourself, let alone two people.'

'She's not coming,' I said. 'You know she's not coming.'

'On the contrary,' he said. 'Can you not see what is happening?' Of course, gradually, I could. For more than thirty years my mother had accepted my father's stiff personality, his thousand rules, as the price of his assurance he would safeguard her and me. Now, if he could not honor that compact, she considered herself the victim of a fraud. There was no use talking to her about the damage in her own life, because that was beside the point. She had long since agreed to an existence where she had ceased craving satisfaction in her own right, as if that only invited further terror. Her credo was simple: My child is my country. My duty. My life. She had survived solely so as not to abandon the future. No matter how ghastly it seemed, I knew she would follow me. While that reality crept over me, my father went on with his denunciations.

'Do you know what it is to be a penniless immigrant with no means in a country that is not your own? I have some idea. War is not the only thing in life that is intensely unpleasant, Seth. I will say to you what I have said to your mother: If you choose this course, if you cross this border, do not expect to receive aid from me.'

'I know better than that, Dad. Believe me.'

'You know better about everything, Seth.'

'I will never ask you for money.' We had now reached the absolute core of what was between us. 'Underline: never. Do you hear me?' He did not. He had already hung up.

Someone said that money is the root of all evil. For my father it was far more than that. Originally a professor of economics at the U., he eventually became a consultant to banks and brokerage houses, one of the first of the nation's money supply experts. As a result, I heard the theoretical justifications throughout my life: How money is the medium through which everybody competes for what they want – the more you want something, the more you'll pay. It's emotion made tangible, or comparable at least, a sort of river Ganges of life into which all desires somehow pour. A perfect theory, I suppose, ignoring things like how much everybody has to start with, or what the songwriter had in mind when he declared that the best things in life are free. But at least it recognizes that if you want money, you really want something else. What my father wanted, though, was never clear to me.

His name was Bernhard and thus he was frequently confused with Bernard Weissman, a Kindle County developer of vast wealth who owned the Morgan Towers in DuSable and several of the largest shopping malls in the country. 'No, I am the poor Weissman,' my father would always say, in a tone which, given his modulated manner, struck me as ridiculously abject. I knew that he was doing well – this came from the comments of his business acquaintances whom we met on the street – but he made no admission of the fact and seemed to die inside any time he had to spend a dollar.

In college, a group of us in the dorm used to conduct Legendary

Cheap Contests, exploring a strange common ground in which we matched, competitively, the miserliness of our parents. My main rivals were other ethnic sons, Slavs and Greeks, although there was one Yankee who was usually in the race. But I always won. My father took the cake. Our dormmates roared as I told the stories: How my father, rather than replace the evergreens in front of our simple hip-roofed bungalow, colored them with green spray paint after they died one particularly harsh winter. How my father would return merchandise to stores, two or three years after purchase, when a button broke, a collar frayed, and haggle for some partial refund of the original price. How my father would keep important clients, bankers, waiting, so he could go buy a case of toilet tissue on sale. How my father late at night could be found refolding the brown lunch bags that I brought home from school, per his instructions, balled in my coat pocket. How my father put a timer on the bathroom light because as a little boy I often forgot to turn it out, with the result that I was frequently left terrified, still sitting on the can as the room went black.

Yet it wasn't the lack of possessions but the atmosphere that mattered most. My father wasn't motivated by a spiritual disdain for material things; he felt none of the pleasure of people of little means, who enjoy the few things they can afford. There was a tight-fisted compulsive quality to my father's refusal to spend, a kind of death grip he held on the household against which I always chafed, and which had led to our most wrenching prior dispute at Christmas time in 1963.

In my household, there was never really a holiday season, at any point in the year. In Vienna, my father had been raised as a freethinker. He identified himself as a Jew and was ever on alert for anti-Semitism, which he found pervasive, but even after his wartime experiences – perhaps because of them – he disdained all form of religious practice. That was not true of my mother. Having lost everyone who mattered in the camps, having seen everything precious destroyed, she clung fervently to the customs, albeit in a fairly unobtrusive way, since she preferred no disputes with my father. She bought kosher meats, did not mix meat and dairy, and lit candles on Friday nights. On holidays, she celebrated in muted fashion – a polite Pesach Seder and a Yom Kippur fast. My father went to work. For her sake, I was given a religious education at Temple Beth Shalom, where professors from the U. sent their kids.

At Hanukkah, we lit the menorah, and my father and she gave gelt – not the foil-wrapped chocolate coins but real money. In my father's eyes this was a gift with meaning. The closest we came to any other form of seasonal celebration was driving down the snowy streets on Christmas Eve to admire the lighted decorations of our gentile neighbors. My father, of course, approved of any form of entertainment which did not require spending money, and the lights always thrilled me: the brightness, the festivity, the whole season of free-spending and openhanded generosity.

At any rate, the year before I turned sixteen, I took the $10 bill my father had given me for Hanukkah and on impulse bought a four-foot aluminum Christmas tree. I made the purchase at a local five-and-dime and had the tree set up on its green wood base before either of my parents saw it. In shock, my mother stood before the tree, which was mounted on a small end table in my bedroom, a bit like an altar, and remonstrated with me in each of the four languages she spoke.

Consciously, I had persuaded myself that because he was not observant, my father would not mind the tree. Of course, he was in my room within instants of arriving home. He was a person of medium size – my height comes from my mother's people, and I think that neither of us could get used to the fact that I was already two or three inches taller than he was. He was one of those bald-headed men who lets the hair on one side grow long and pastes it across his scalp. He wore metal-framed glasses and a heavy woolen suit, three pieces. He rocked on his toes.

‘I see,' my father said, in his heavy accent. With his talent for the most prosaic, he added, 'This is how you spend the money we give to you?'

'I thought it was a gift.' I was lying on my bed reading. 'A gift means a person buys what he likes.'

'No,' said my father staring up at the Christmas tree. He shook his head ponderously. 'No gifts for this.'

The next day when I returned from school, the Christmas tree was gone. Neither of them ever offered an explanation. And my father never willingly gave me another dollar. The idea, I suppose, was that I was first required to make some amends. But that I refused to do. I know, in retrospect, how they saw what I'd done. Not simply a rejection. But an act of emotional vandalism. I ignored their pain, no doubt. But I took no pleasure in it. My concern was myself. I wanted to break out of the lightlessness, the dead air, the suffering and silence of my parents' home. I wanted to stake my claim to a life where every moment is not shrouded by the memory of the most terrible deeds and to ask them, I suppose, to recognize that desire in me, to give me their blessing to be different from them in that fundamental respect. But this was not a destiny either of them had ever envisioned for me, and such permission, as it turned out, was never to be granted. After that, I had board and shelter in my parents' home. Otherwise, I provided for myself. I had a collection of odd jobs after school and over the summers: hardware-store clerk, busboy, fry cook. My mother was always tucking $20 in my pocket when my father was not around, but she did not dare confront him. In college, I financed my tuition with a federally subsidized loan. To embarrass my father, I went to his bank, where they knew how wealthy he was, and when I'd saved enough money for a car, I bought a Volkswagen, the Hitler-mobile, knowing it would drive him wild. But in time, I realized that given impossible choices, I had lost anyway. I had indulged my father in his fundamental selfishness. And I never removed the restraint of their expectations. My mother never lifted her prayerful gaze from me, never stopped fussing over me or begging me in a million silent ways to redeem her life. I was never free. And the weight of all of that fell over me again now in the wake of my father's call.

As Sonny watched, I replaced the phone. I sat first, then lay down fully on the rug. My hands were over my face.

'Oh, kidnap me,' I cried, 'kidnap me, kidnap me. Somebody kidnap me.'

When I opened my eyes, Eddgar was across the living room on the threshold of the open front door. Ironically, he held money – a few bills – rolled in his hand. He had come down to pay me for the week. Unspeaking, he watched me lying there in agony, his perfect, mad eyes unblinking, intent.

'What did you mean?' Eddgar asked me the next night. 'Kidnap you?' June and he had just returned from another long evening with their lawyers. A number of attorneys from the ACLU and Damon Law School had come forward to mount Eddgar's defense, joining the old standbys, renowned lefties, who'd been defending the Panthers for years. I had the sense there were sharp divisions in the legal team over tactics, about whether the forthcoming hearing should be conducted to make a political statement or to save Eddgar's job. Arriving home, the Eddgars often appeared wrung out and at odds with each other. Scrutinizing me now, Eddgar already looked exhausted, so dark beneath the eyes he might have been bruised.

I'd often explained my differences with my parents to June and I was in no mood to go over the subject now. But Eddgar's look lingered. I sensed, as I often had, the special reprieve for Eddgar in moving about in someone else's life.

'So if someone wanted to kidnap you, you'd go?' he asked.

'I don't think they'd believe it.'

'I would think not,' June said. She was drinking bourbon and smoking. Sitting at the sofa's edge, she flicked ashes from the end of the cigarette more often than necessary, flipping her thumbnail against the filter. For whatever reason – practicing perhaps for the demeanor she'd affect in the hearing room – she'd taken on more of a subdued, girlish appearance, a bit of the homespun country gal. Her hair was pulled back and secured with bright rings of yarn. She wore a little sundress, and the length of her smooth legs, without hose, glowed as she sat there. Leaning toward the ashtray, she jerked a bit on her hem, in response to my inspection. 'They'd certainly have suspicions,' she said.

Eddgar held his jaw. A sign might as well have lit up on his chest, reading, I am scheming.

'What if there was ransom?' he asked. 'Can your father afford it?'

'Afford it? Sure. He could probably afford a lot. But knowing my father, he wouldn't pay it.'

June laughed. 'Seth, you remind me of Eddgar when you carry on about your father.' Eddgar's father was a physician by training, but he made his living as a tobacco planter. If you could credit their descriptions, he was a man of ruthless temper, rigid, unforgiving, a hard-shell Christian more excited by the damnation of the wicked than the eternal grace of the saved. June and Eddgar both referred to him in an act of academic derision as 'The Mind of the South.'

For the moment, Eddgar ignored June, struck by my prediction that my father would refuse any ransom request. He threw up his hands.

'Then you're free!' For an alarming, split-brained instant, my liberty seemed to dwell in the tender field between Eddgar's open palms. Then the dreary misery of a better-known reality reclaimed me.

'Well, then he'd pay it to spite me.'

They both laughed again. Clapping her hands to her thighs, June said she was exhausted and I headed down. Kidnapping. I laughed at the thought. Outside, as I neared the foot of the wooden stairwell, I heard Eddgar speak my name. He'd come out to the landing above, and stood in the intense beam of the floodlight.

'Would they call the FBI?' he asked quietly.

'My parents?' I was startled he was still on the subject, but I shook my head. Given their history, my parents were terrified by encounters with the police. I had been in the car on more than one occasion when even a routine traffic stop had crashed my father into disorder and panic. His hands shook so fiercely he could not hand the copper his license, and it required half an hour at the curbside afterwards for him to regain his tenuous hold on the present. There was no prospect he – or my mother – would ever involve law enforcement. 'No chance,' I told Eddgar.

Standing a floor above me, he smiled. Amid the mounting anxieties of his own situation, this notion had become a diversion. He tapped a single index finger on his temple to show that he was going to keep it in mind.

Four days after I received my draft notice, Sonny told me she was moving out. It was the middle of April.

'It's no good, Seth,' she said. ‘I have to do it. We're going to end up hating each other.' We were fighting all the time, bloody battles in which I spoke of love and she of independence.

'So you'll desert me now, rather than later?'

Sonny shivered to show she was exerting self-control. She had to make the point, she said. The 'point' was never specified, but I understood. I couldn't have her. I was on my own. If she remained in the apartment, I'd keep hoping, keep putting off departure, instead of facing what was now inevitable.

‘I have to find something else, anyway,' Sonny said. ‘I can't afford the rent here by myself.' 'Where will you go?'

She hitched a shoulder as if she hadn't thought about it much. 'I'll stay with Graeme for a while. He's been trying to find someone to take a room.'

This was a hammer blow, worse than mere desertion. He'd be in her bed within a week, I realized, if he hadn't been already.

'Not what I think, right?'

'It isn't,' she said. 'And it's none of your business anyway.' We went at it again, of course.

In the end, I helped her move. It was just as easy for me to load a few boxes every morning into the Bug. I mailed her books to her aunt's from the post office. The other items I dropped outside Graeme's door as I was on my way to After Dark. I watched her disappear from the apartment in stages, like something melting.

On the last morning, a Monday, we filled the Bug and put on the portable rack to load the roof. Even so, a couple of boxes remained that I'd have to drop offlater. Then I drove Sonny across the Bay Bridge, out of sunshine and into the fog. She hugged me on the street, although I refused to return any visible sign of affection. So this is how it is, I thought, this is how it turns out. An epic moment in my own life, which I would always recount – how could it simply be happening, like any other moment in the ever-present is? There was only fog, carried like smoke on the ocean winds, and seagulls whose hoarse cry could be heard even though they were lost from sight. I noticed, marking him for life, a slender bearded fellow in bell-bottomed trousers and a V-neck sweater moving down the steep hill in the usual heavy-footed way, his weight back to the heels. I had a sudden vision that I'd accost him on another street someday: I saw you when I said goodbye.

'Call me,' she said. 'All the time. Promise I'll see you before you go.' I took her hands from my face and studied them – broad sturdy hands sculpted with working grace. I figured I would leave for Canada by the end of the week. My draft board had obliged me in my last tactical move by transferring the site of my induction to Oakland. May 4 was the day, but there was no point in waiting now.

'People don't just walk out of each other's lives,' I said. I wasn't sure if this was a protest or a response.

'It's just another phase, baby. We're both going to survive. And nobody says it's forever.' Sonny often talked vaguely of getting together again in the future – after the Peace Corps, after I was able to come home. This notion – the hopes it raised and my certainty that it was cruelly false – brought the unwanted impact of a sob halfway through my throat every time the subject came up.

'Thank you.'

'For what?'

For uttering enough intolerable bullshit, I had been about to say, that I actually had some desire to leave. But I had no control over myself and the words emerged hollowly. By accident, I'd found the note I wanted to strike.

'Just thanks. I love you. It's been a gas.'

I drove away. I had always known, I told myself. Some shock-proof, inner apparatus, a black box near the heart that invariably registered what was true, had never lost account of the fundamental facts: she did not care for me, not in the abandoned, soaring way I cared for her. I'd known but trudged on anyway, dumb and hopeful, and now I was paying the price. Was there anything in life more painful than that inequality? A few blocks on, suffering miserably, I stopped the car across from the enormous rolling park near Mission Dolores. I knew I was back to where I'd started, to the unendurable agony of the young. I could not have put words to it then, but through time I can make out that inner cry: Who will love me for myself? Whose love will let me know myself? I looked at the palm trees rising starkly above the median while I wept.