Gift of the Golden Mountain (24 page)

That spring of 1969 the campus and the center of town shook under a revolutionary barrage: birdshot and bottles, rocks flying, fire bombings, tear gas and shattered glass. It was a war zone, a long, steady scream of resistance, of change. Almost daily through January and February demonstrations boiled over, waves of students surged down Telegraph Avenue. Trash cans were heaved through plate glass windows, and the police moved in swinging billy clubs.

     They found their marks: somebody's child, yesterday's polite kids who had been raised to be seen and not heard, to speak when spoken to, above all to be polite. They had been children with shining faces and neatly cropped hair who had in the short years of their coming of age assumed a righteous indignation. They grew their hair long and wore rag-taggle clothes their parents did not approve of, sprinkled their vocabularies with four-letter words, and announced they didn't trust anyone over thirty. If they happened to be black they were saying "Freedom Now" and "Burn, Baby, Burn." If they were white, and of draft age, they were chanting, "Hell No, I Won't Go" and burning draft cards.

     They fought for a "People's Park" and they spoke in the name of the People, though in fact this was a presumption. Many,
perhaps most, of the people of the land believed these student rebels to be spoiled, disrespectful children of privilege.

     All the old slogans came into play, and I could not help thinking of May's father, who had been bloodied in labor disputes on the San Francisco waterfront fighting for another generation's rights. Quite purposefully during those months I chose to work on Porter Reade's papers from the 1920s, the period when he was a student at Berkeley. "It is exciting to me to see how intensely Sally feels about these issues," he wrote his mother about a woman who had once been his tutor, "and how she translates that intensity into action. It makes me feel that people who are totally convinced, who know what is right and stick with it until they can make others see, are the ones who will change the world." Attached to the letter was a yellowed copy of the words to "The Internationale." He had underlined the two lines that read:

     
The earth shall rise on new foundations.
     
We have been naught, we shall be all.

     I could close my eyes and see him still, a tall and gangly young man full of fire, of righteous indignation. There were times at the Peace Coalition office when I was certain I heard him in the next room, holding forth on some political issue. "Your father would have been in the thick of this," I told May.

     "That's what the Revolutionary Student Army people keep telling me," she answered, her voice bitter. "They want me to march at the head of their line, in what they call 'my father's place.' Isn't that wonderful? The man's dead, and they still want to use him."

     Police and demonstrators engaged in running battles. A new style came into vogue: bandanas, bright red and electric blue worn cowboy style so they could be pulled over the nose and mouth whenever police—some in low-flying helicopters—flung out canisters of CS gas.

     One sunlit morning the National Guard rolled into town, hundreds of men in battle gear standing in army trucks, bayonets drawn. The heavy silence was broken by the slow-rolling, ominous rumble of those trucks and the responding low recitative of the disaffected—the students and the street people and the blacks joined by a strange amalgam of townspeople, all those against the war, against racial discrimination, against poverty, against what some—but by no means all—of them called "The Establishment" and the "Pigs" and the "warmongers." In truth, against mistakes made by all the generations that had come before them, mistakes they wanted to correct now, all at once, and for all time.

     One afternoon I stood at the window of the Peace Coalition's second-floor office, looking down at the gathering storm. May stood next to me; Karin was late.

     "She'll have trouble getting across the street," May said.

     "Perhaps she's already on this side," I answered, hoping it was so.

     A strange, animal sound lifted from the crowd. It seemed to signal a movement down Telegraph Avenue. A distance away we could see a line of police in riot gear blocking the whole of the street. Directly below us, a rangy young man in a buckskin coat held a cigarette lighter high, touched it to a rolled-up paper, and used the torch to set fire to a trash can; a whoop rose with the flames; a bottle bounced soundlessly off a plate glass window, and then we heard glass shattering and a fusillade of bottles and rocks was flying, and war cries pierced the air.

     May gripped my arm. "Look, just under the bookstore sign," she pointed. A blond girl wearing a knit Peruvian cape was trying to push her way through the human maelstrom, which had washed over the sidewalks. What the girl could not see, but we could, was the current of movement that snaked down the center of the street. She was knocked down, and for a moment we couldn't see her at all. Then we saw that she had been caught up in the rush of it, was being pushed ahead, swept away. She was being carried into the line of police who stood, clubs raised in anticipation.

     At that moment Karin appeared, out of breath, in the doorway behind us. When we turned back to the window, we could no longer find the girl in the Peruvian cape.

Philip Ward did not equivocate. He supported the student antiwar movement. While several of the men gathered at his table did not agree with him, most had assured their wives they would not become embroiled in a heated argument. Philip Ward's table was viewed by some as the last civilized place in Berkeley.

     Karin bought a dress for the occasion at one of the shops that made new dresses in old styles: an ankle-length blue tie-dyed silk of cornflower blue, trimmed with velvet and bits of old brocade which she wore with boots. With her hair loose and curling over her shoulders she looked like a Renaissance princess. May put on what had become her "dressup" uniform, effected so she did not have to think about clothes: a heavy cream-colored silk blouse edged in braid and a leather miniskirt from a Paris boutique which made them for her in a variety of colors. Tonight she wore the aubergine, with matching shoes.

     A young girl opened the door. She had long, Alice-in-Wonderland hair caught up with a blue ribbon and was wearing a long dress, but it was her face that completed the fairytale effect: she looked like the little princess in the tower.

     "You must be Thea," May said.

     "Let them in, love," Philip Ward called, and then he appeared behind his daughter and her smile became radiant.

     "May," he said, giving her a small kiss on the cheek as if they were old friends, "and Karin Rolofsen," he added, taking her hand.

     There was an awkward moment then, when no one said anything. May thought it strange, that the charming Philip Ward should be at a loss for words.

     "Thank you for letting me come tonight," Karin managed, a flush spreading on her neck.

     "Thank you for wanting to come," Philip answered, regaining his composure.

May's name card was at Philip Ward's right at dinner, Karin was at the opposite end of the table, between a political correspondent on his way to Vietnam and the curator of the Asian art collection at the de Young Museum. By the time the lobster bisque was cleared, the correspondent was making pronouncements about the war to his end of the table, with the exception of Karin and the curator, who were having their own quiet conversation.

     Philip scanned the table and, satisfied with the way the talk was going, said to May: "I thought Karin might enjoy talking to Byron—she is an art major, isn't she?"

     "You certainly do your research," May laughed.

     "Old habit," he grinned, slightly embarrassed. "That really is all I know about her."

     "What else would you like to know?"

     "Oh, everything," he answered lightly, touching her arm as if to convince her of his sincerity, even as he turned to answer another guest's question.

When they moved to the living room for coffee, Philip skillfully negotiated the seating so that Karin was at his side.

     May slipped into a chair next to Marge Fromberg. "What's new on the academic gossip circuit?" she asked in a teasing tone.

     Marge laughed and lowered her voice. "Well, for a while there at dinner the money was on you—but I'm afraid it's shifted to your friend."

     "Is it a burning question in the department?"

     "Maybe not burning," she answered, "more like smoldering. I have to admit the man has good taste . . . if only she wasn't so confoundedly . . ." Marge raised her eyebrows archly.

     "Young?" May filled in.

     "Yes," she made a show of sighing. "Both of you. Young and beautiful and bright. An unbeatable combination."

"Move immediately," the voice boomed out over the speaker of a patrol car cruising downtown Berkeley, "You are in violation of the governor's declaration of emergency."

     "Our movie star governor thinks Berkeley is a war zone," Sam said as he slouched in the van, tired and angry at having been shoved and pushed by both demonstrators and police. "Thanks for giving me a lift—a couple of minutes more and I think they would have loaded photographers onto the bus for Santa Rita. Jesus! Mass arrests, this is insane."

     Real insanity was reported every night on the evening news, up close and in color: TV taught us about Apbia mountain— "Hamburger Hill"—where North Vietnamese defenders rolled hand grenades down on the advancing American paratroopers as they crawled to take the summit of the 3,000-foot peak. "Sure we want the hill," a twenty-year old Specialist 4 from Oakland said on camera, "we want it because we can't get the hell out of here until we get it."