The Company You Keep (2 page)

What I don’t know, but I imagine, is that this e-mail isn’t any big surprise to you. You’ve always known it was coming. June 27, 2006—the date has been in your mind as long as you can remember. You have, I
think, long been expecting us to contact you. The Committee, your mother calls us. She’s entertained you no end, I’m sure, with stories of what we had to go through to get this to you. Group decisions. Pointless arguments. Criticism-self-criticism sessions. You have been waiting for June 27, 2006, for years, and now that it is only weeks away, you are not surprised, I think, to hear from us, nor are you surprised to hear what we are asking you to do.

I see you by the window, your delicate face illumined by a setting sun, the same sun I see outside my own window, right now, from such a different angle on the planet. You are a slight person, seventeen years old. You are, as you have always been, a denial of both of your parents: my round-nosed, high-cheeked daughter with her nut-brown hair; the olive-skinned, brown-eyed daughter of blond Julia Montgomery. And in each way that you do resemble one parent, you deny the other: the intensely studious daughter of the woman who makes European gossip columns every month; my cynical daughter, although I am, if nothing else, an idealist. What do they call you now, Isabel? The Naught Generation, right? The Millennial Generation. No politics, not even antiwar, no ideals, no drugs. The first generation since I was a child, nearly fifty years, not to use drugs! See, I have not seen you in a long time, Isabel, but I know you.

And I can hear what you’re thinking, too. You’re thinking, You know me, Dadda? I don’t think so. Or better yet, Dadda, I do not think so one bit.

Okay. I admit, maybe it is a little girl’s voice that I am remembering. But memory is telling, isn’t it? Because I think I understand also that if I want to get Isabel, the young woman, to do what I want her to do, it is still a little girl I have to convince.

Yes, my dear. We
are
going to ask you to do it. We
are
going to ask you to leave one of the nicest places on earth, three weeks from now, and fly to one of the worst. Detroit, Michigan. We are just what your mother says we are: the “Committee,” a bunch of balding ex-hippies, at least, I am bald, and I am an ex-hippie. And we are in fact contacting you—and that by e-mail, so as to avoid your grandfather and your mother—to convince you, just as you have always known we were going to, to do something very public, very exposed, and very awful indeed.

We want you, on Sunday, June 25, to escape your grandfather’s security, those bodyguards who are there ostensibly to protect Ambassador Montgomery’s granddaughter from kidnapping but in fact to keep you from doing exactly what we have contacted you to ask you to do. We want you to take a flight from your picture-book little school for rich kids in England to a maximum-security state prison in Michigan—note the difference—and there to testify at a parole hearing, and in so doing, to commit a horrendous act of betrayal.

I won’t blame you for saying no.

And still, I am going to try to convince you to do it.

This is why.

Because while it’s true that all parents are bad parents, there is something else true also. That as bad as we were—and we were very, very bad—we were also as good as ever we could be. Given the circumstances of our lives, which were dramatic, and were not circumstances of our making.

And that’s the point, Izzy. That’s the point. I don’t deny that I was a bad parent. I’m not writing to excuse that fact. I’m writing, and so are the others, to tell you why.

We’re writing to tell you why, in the summer of 1996, ten years ago, your good, kind, just father, a man widely admired in the picture-book little town where you lived, was revealed to be someone altogether other than who he said. We’re writing to tell you how the world he had constructed around you—a kind and just world; a world filled with sun and snow and water; a world of rich colors and high adventure; a world of safe interiors and long, fearless nights—how that world was all revealed to be a lie.

We’re writing to ask you to understand that not just your parents, but all parents are bad parents, and we are that because we have no choice.

That one day, you will be a bad parent too.

Okay. That’s
why
we’re writing. And we all agreed on that.
How
to write, on the other hand, was harder for us. The finer points of how—that required the extended debate that your mother, no doubt, would have
found amusing. See, we agreed to tell you the truth. But as to what was the truth, that was not so clear.

First we thought we’d write it together. Billy Cusimano got his computer geek to give us all e-mails on his Web site, so people like Ben and Rebeccah don’t have to use their work e-mails, and none of us have to worry too much about confidentiality: apparently Billy—who doesn’t quite understand that Cusimano Organics is actually a legal business—uses some pretty far-out encryption. So I get started, write a dozen pages, send them to the Committee. Not ten minutes later, Rebeccah IM’s me, that damn little AOL Instant Messenger window popping up on my screen. “This a walk down amnesia lane, Pops? Or are we trying to tell the girl something about what really happened?” Pops, for Christ sake. Then Jeddy chimes in, wondering whether I’m drawing on a Trotskyite historiographical framework, here, because he wants to know how to interpret my blatant falsifications of fact—propaganda or Alzheimer’s. Then Ben, always useful, asks if we’re trying to get Isabel to help us or to hurt us, cause from what I’ve written so far, it looked like we should
all
be jailed without parole, and soon it’s clear that no one is going to agree on anything. Until Molly suggests that we just each take turns, the five, six of us who played direct roles in what happened the summer of 1996.

Here’s her plan: we’ll each tell you a piece of the story, and then hand it on to the next one, and like that we won’t have to agree with each other, but just let you see the whole thing. And furthermore, we each do it alone, so whatever contradictions there might be in our accounts, you can hear them yourself. I’ll go first, and when I’ve done as much as I can in one sitting, I’ll e-mail it to you and cc the rest of the Committee, then someone else will take the story a step further. And like that, unless you start blocking our e-mails, little by little, the whole story will come to you, and all you have to do is read.

So everyone agreed to that, and everyone agreed that I had to start, and so the problem then became, Where? The day you were born? The day I was born? The day civil war broke out in Spain? I fretted over that for a good few days of Michigan spring rains. And then I thought, the hell with it, we are telling the truth, aren’t we? And trying to tell it in the
way it actually happened, aren’t we? Well, if that’s the case, it all really started in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green in June 1996, and it is, therefore, with Billy that I am going to start.

2.

Today you know Billy Cusimano as the owner of a national chain of organic supermarkets that he runs from a loft in SoHo, runs with a vengeance: he’s paying three college tuitions, and still has one more to come. But in 1996, when I became Billy’s lawyer, he was a very different man than he is today.

For one thing, he still had some hair. Not much, but enough for one of those phony little ponytails guys our age wore in those days. For another, he was enormous, with a huge fat belly that stuck out of his T-shirt: at forty-seven, before his first heart attack, Billy had not yet learned it was eat better or die—a phrase, believe it or not, he once tried to adopt as his supermarket’s slogan before his advertising firm told him to lose it, and quick. Last, but not least, in 1996 when he became my client, Billy had either not yet had the brilliant idea of opening Cusimano’s Organic Markets, or America wasn’t ready for them. In either case, he was not a successful and legitimate businessman but a criminal defendant in a federal case. Billy, you could say, came a long way in the past ten years.

Ostensibly, in 1996, he ran a fleet of six small trucks delivering to New York City greenmarkets for a dozen or so Hudson Valley organic farms. In fact, he made his living the way he had since the mid-sixties: by growing pure, hybridized, state-of-the-art marijuana in an underground Sea of Green.

Yes, Isabel, marijuana, a substance to which I’m sure you are an utter stranger, right? Well, as you’re going to see throughout this story, I’m emphatically not, so if that shocks you, just think of it as another way I was a bad parent.

Anyway it was from this career path, you may have guessed, that stemmed Billy’s need for my services as a lawyer.

There are policy mistakes in the world of criminals, and performance ones. Nine times out of ten, surprisingly, what causes a criminal to be caught is not in fact performance, but policy. Billy’s policy mistake happened the autumn before, and consisted of not letting one of his drivers know that under a truckload of sweet corn bound for the Union Square market he was carrying a late summer harvest: thirty kilos of cured, hybridized, hydroponic marijuana, so seedless it could never be reproduced, so resinous that your fingers got dirty rolling a joint, and so strong that a hit had you spending the next three hours staring, ego shattered, at the cat.

The upside of this policy was that the driver could neither rip you off nor turn you in, and besides only cost a fraction of what Billy’s real mules—the ones who moved bud across state lines and who knew the risk they were running—got paid.

The downside was that because he knew nothing about his cargo, the driver was smoking a joint while heading downstate at 80 miles an hour, all the while listening, get this, to the Grateful Dead.

Which, in turn, gave the state police probable cause to shovel the entire load of corn onto the side of the road, where the gophers feasted on it for a week. The joint, I mean. Gave them probable cause. Not the Grateful Dead, who, contrary to what people like your grandfather thinks, were still legal.

Now, despite what a bad parent I was and a bad person I am—you need a refresher course on that, Izzy, hop up to London and my ex-father-in-law will be glad to oblige—the fact that I had even taken on a criminal client like Billy may just seem to you like another of the many lousy things I did that summer. In fact, it did look pretty odd to a lot of people at the time. See, James Marshal Grant did not soil his hands by defending criminals. James Grant, it was well known in the little world of Albany law, worked only for principle.

What you have to understand, though, is that in the summer of 1996 my little moral universe was changing pretty radically, and what was changing it was that I had to earn a living. And to understand that, you have to know that when your mother and I got married, it was clearly
understood—check with her, Izzy, she won’t deny it—that I was going to practice law exclusively in the public interest, given that the Montgomery fortune needed some kind of expiation.

It did make sense at the time: we were in love, and the fortune was enormous. Your mother inherited from her grandfather, as you will inherit from yours, and even at the time of our marriage she was so rich that any thought of doing anything other than public-interest work was absurd.

When I left your mother, of course, I also left the Montgomery fortune. The reputation of the most idealistic lawyer between Miami and Montreal, however, remained mine, as did a full docket of pro bono clients, many of whom had no hope of a decent defense except for my services. On the other hand, your grandfather’s lawyers had ensured that I had no income from the family, none at all, despite the fact that I had a little girl to take care of.

Billy Cusimano, in the summer of 1996, therefore looked like a very good client to me: an old hippie with closets full of cash, and in fact he constituted my entire source of income between the winter of 1995, when your mother went into rehab, and the spring of 1996, a year and a half later, when she sued me for custody.

Custody, I mean, of you. Because in the summer of 1996, your mother had just announced her intention of suing me for full custody of our daughter. Bet she didn’t tell you that part, Iz, did she? That she was barely out of rehab, and already her father’s phalanx of high-powered lawyers were starting to bring legal action against me?

Still, Billy would not be so important to my story if not for the fact that, at the worst moment possible, he got his criminal present all mixed up with his political past.

This was on a June afternoon in, as it happened, Billy’s underground Sea of Green itself.

3.

Picture pitch-blackness: an absolutely lightless space, in which the sound of a steady spring rain is hissing endlessly down. It is an all-encompassing
noise, and as you listen, you can hear its depth, for it is composed of thousands of tiny little jets of water: When it stops, all of a sudden, the sound that takes its place is that of millions of drops of water falling, dripping, and gathering into little rivulets that, in their turn, run down a distant, hollow storm drain. For a time, the dripping is everything. The air is thick with moisture, nearly tropical, and a loamy smell rises in it. Then, with a sudden electric buzz, a switch is thrown, and a low ceiling of brilliant light floods the room in which a thin concrete border surrounds a lush, thick carpet of tall, lush, glistening cannabis plants, sweating resin, absolutely without seed, hydroponically planted in a sealed basement chamber, blazing with a bank of gro-lights.

For the past three months the room has been sealed, taking in carbon dioxide from canisters, feeding oxygen out into a vent that connects with the furnace burning in the basement, getting twenty-hour days of blazing UV light and four-hour pitch-black nights, all controlled by a computer on a workbench next to the back wall. Juice for the whole thing comes from a Honda generator, off the grid so consumption can’t be detected, held in a concrete bunker so it makes no sound. If you must know, gas for the generator is supplied from Billy’s fleet of trucks, each of which is always full up when returned for the night to Billy, and somewhat less than full when taken out the next morning, a fact disguised from the drivers by a cunningly altered fuel gauge. Entry is provided by a hole in the bricked ceiling—bricked three layers thick with two layers of insulation, to obviate the possibility of airborne heat detection—through which Billy and I have climbed in for this, the single inspection of the four-month growing cycle, and which will duly be bricked in again when we climb out.