The Company You Keep (42 page)

October 1973. We’d traveled north from Washington separately. For three days I’d waited for him, camping out in the woods and coming to the diner in Rose City every day at four, as we’d arranged. Each day I grew more and more nervous. But it was not a fugitive’s nervousness; it was fueled by something other than fear for our physical safety.

In fact, the manhunt did not worry me. As always, the FBI had been our unwitting ally by working every influence they had to restrict national coverage, seeking to minimize the publicity Weather actions generated. They did this successfully: most of our actions were only reported regionally. The downside of that, for us, was reaching fewer people with an awareness of what we had done. The upside was that the national manhunt for us was not widely known, and its intensification after such a visible action did little to hamper our movements.

I was not frightened. I knew that our identities—as well as our craft in evading pursuit—were more than just good. And in 1973, with a nation of young folk on the move, one girl more or less in bell-bottom jeans worn nearly through at the ass, traveling by bus and thumb with a backpack: I attracted only the most cursory attention. It was not the danger of being caught by the FBI that worried me. It was the danger of being caught by my comrades in my desire to be alone—absolutely alone—with Jason Sinai.

For in fact, the manhunt that followed the bombing of the Capitol building was more an excuse to flee together than a reason—an excuse for being alone. The Weather Bureau, with their militant ban on couples, was a greater threat to us right now than the FBI.

Not that either of us admitted it. From the beginning, we had tacitly kept the depth of our attachment secret, and neither of us had ever been subject to pressure to break up what would have seemed, to the Bureau, a bourgeois monogamy. And yet, when we realized we had a plausible explanation for leaving the collective for a time, together, without discussing it, we’d both put the steps in action to make it happen.
Later—much later, when we were discussing these things openly—your father would even say that was why he went back to the Capitol a second time, the most dangerous thing he’d ever done, as a Weather member or otherwise.

See, if the bomb hadn’t been detonated, he and I would have had no reason to run away.

On the third day, when I came in he was there, a handsome young man with a head of loose, curly hair, dyed black, in jeans and a T-shirt, a pack of Winstons in the breast pocket, chatting with the waitress. On the floor, behind him, was a backpack. I’d had my own coffee, watching jealously from down the counter, not acknowledging him. Then I’d walked back out of town to the campsite and prepared to leave. In time he’d followed, and together, traveling by my skills with compass and topo map, we’d made our way out of state forest and into the great northern estate of the Linder family, heading for the cabin I knew from vacationing there, as a girl, with my father.

Christ. Sitting on the top step of the wooden flight of steps leading down into the Arboretum, I remembered that morning on the trail, hiking in to the cabin with Jasey. A golden late summer sun, as thick as honey, poured through the maple and oak leaf, the leaves themselves amplifying, rather than shadowing, the light with their spectrum of greens and reds. A silence as infinite as the sky was upon us, interrupted only by the breath of the wind through the woods, the wind that, if you stopped to listen, played out all the distances around you: huge sighs of rustling leaves across huge distances. And the light, the light: the light that seemed to combine in one shocking flash all the autumns of my life—of school years starting and Thanksgivings passing—with the unknown promise of this particular autumn, this autumn that promised nothing but the freedom of a new stage in my fugitive life, my life as a fugitive with Jason.

I rose now and went down the wooden steps to the Arboretum, watching the waning moon come out of clouds overhead and cast a silvery obscurity over the treetops. To go back north. To be alone with Jason in the
great north woods of my childhood. I’d known for twenty-two years that Jason wanted to see me, and I had known from the moment I heard about his flight what he was going to ask me to do. That wasn’t the problem. It was something more.

It was that Jason’s actual success in making contact with me was the final proof that my life, as it had been, was no longer tenable. This careful construction of Tess’s identity, shielding me not only from the police but from my old allies and, in particular, from Jason: it was ending now, in Ann Arbor, where it had all started, and once again I was going to have to face the unknown of the future and, even worse, its promise.

2.

We met in 1968, freshman year at the University of Michigan. I was a work-study student, and the work I’d been assigned was at the cafeteria in East Quad: I was an efficient, neat person, good in a kitchen, not a hippie yet, nor an urban revolutionary—in any case, if you don’t know it, let me tell you that in those days, it was revolutionary girls, using the skills taught to us by our fifties moms in our clean kitchens, who kept the revolutionary boys warm, fed, and at least somewhat clean.

My work-study job started when dinner was finished: to clear the tables of salt and pepper shakers, collecting them on a big tray and then taking them back to the kitchen to refill, as well as any odd crockery or silverware left by careless students. Behind me, another work-study student wiped the tables clean. By the time I began, the cafeteria was meant to be empty, but there was always a group left at one table, emptying the coffee urn, cup after cup, and talking. Jason was one of them.

A thin guy, wiry, strong in black T-shirts with a pack of Winstons in the breast pocket, jeans, work shoes, curly black hair cascading onto his shoulders, a strong face with an aquiline nose, a brown-eyed man. Now, when the
Michigan Daily
was running pictures of Jason Sinai from the sixties, I saw a child, a child young enough to be my son, and I asked myself how I had ever thought this child sexy. Then he was beautiful to me, an animated, intense person, with a body always poised for fight.

Or, I knew now, for flight.

The group that sat talking with him, East Quad hippies, were a gang of guys who dressed like him, except one was black. The black guy went on to become a press secretary for Christopher Dodd—often I wondered if Dodd knew that his secretary’s political education had started in East Quad, listening to dark, intense Jason Sinai talk sedition. For what he was there for, no pretense was made. He was there as a representative of a far-left faction—the Action Faction—of the University of Michigan SDS; he was recruiting members; and what he had in mind for them to do, already in the fall of 1968, a month after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, was against the law.

Later, I was to know exactly how few of the people Jason recruited actually became functioning members of the Weather Underground. In fact, the one person he convinced, those nights in the East Quad dormitory cafeteria, was the one person he was not talking to: the girl cleaning the tables, ignored by them, as they talked. Nor did he really convince me. He didn’t need to: I had come to the same conclusions as he—and the several hundred-odd members of what was soon to be named Weatherman—on my own.

I was born in Ann Arbor. You know, by now, who my father was, Martin Luria, a physicist at the university, himself born in Germany, exiled to America before Hitler, not as a Jew but as a Communist, inducted into the Manhattan project, and then tenured at Michigan until, just after my birth in 1951, blacklisted by McCarthy. He committed suicide in 1966, on the beach in upstate Michigan, leaving his wife his insurance to bring us up, me and my older brother Peter. My mother survived to see Peter vanish: he disappeared on a dig in Turkey while doing an archaeology Ph.D.; and me be admitted to the university. Then she died of a stroke. I buried her during the summer after my high school graduation, alone: even if I did not really believe my brother was dead, I did not know where he was. On some level I understood that he did not intend to be found. Then I moved to Ann Arbor. When I got there, I legally amended the spelling of my last name. “Luria” was too known a name in Michigan.

Nights after my mother died. Home from my work-study job, in Betsy Barbour, the all-girl’s dorm on the hill: my mother had insisted I
live there, one of the last things she did before she died. For so long had I feared this death, the loss of this last tie, that at first I hardly felt it, a numbing sensation. Then, nights, in Betsy Barbour, it had begun to ache. Sometimes I thought that loving my mother had been the greatest, the only, success of my life. Now, when there was no longer anyone to love, I could no longer recapture the reality my mother had had for me. I knew only that I had adored her. I had adored every inch of the little clapboard house in Point Betsie, filled with Teutonic kitsch and the smell of cabbage. I had loved to touch her, hold her hand, kiss her cheek, put my slim, strong body against hers on the sofa, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, and my mother, forbearing, had given in to her daughter’s constant demand for intimacy. Then she was gone, like a blanket falling off the bed at night, leaving my thigh, my shoulder, cold.

Not even the house was left: I had had to sell it at once to cover death duties and pay my tuition. I did have enough left over to put its contents in storage until the eighties, when the FBI tracked it down and confiscated it, nearly following the paper trail of the storage rental to me, forcing me into Canada for six long months. As for my brother, a few years later I traveled to…well, to another country to be trained in the use of a new blasting cap, and on the way home, looked for him in Turkey, where he had disappeared from the Cornell-Harvard dig at Sardis. There was not the slightest trace—Peter Luria had disappeared from the face of the earth. But by then, so had Mimi Lurie, hadn’t she?

So in the autumn of 1968, Betsy Barbour, with its oak-paneled hallways, its lamplit lounges, had become the only home I had; the dining hall my hearth; and the little room I shared with two girls from Dearborn my only privacy. Nights, I listened to Dana and Haley’s whispered secrets fade into even breaths and the silence of five hundred girls sleeping under one big roof. The big Michigan sky first quilted over with fall cloud and silver moon, then grayed with high storms and chilling air and began to snow. At first, a vast numbness had sheltered me.

Then I began to ache.

The house in Point Betsie yielded four years’ tuition for me and a good portion of my room and board. My brother’s half, as far as I know, still
sits under his name in Washtenaw Savings and Loan, if Washtenaw Savings and Loan survived the S&L crash. Freshman year passed, 1968 to 1969; classes in the day, the East Quad cafeteria at night, listening to Jason meeting with an ever-shifting group of recruits. At the end of the winter semester, the Point Betsie Boat Club, where my father had sailed a little skiff, offered me three thousand dollars, a collection made after my mother’s death. That was a surprise: the club, like most of Point Betsie, was as Republican as Henry Ford. It made more sense when I found out that the collection had been organized by Douglas Osborne, Johnny’s dad. Three thousand dollars meant, I slowly realized, that I needed not work for the entire summer. It meant, I realized, that I could volunteer full-time to help in the SDS office.

That was not what Doug Osborne had meant to make of me.

I stood five-nine, a tall, slim, well-made girl, with waist and breasts of an adolescent but a woman’s hips under tight jeans. I was blond, gray-eyed, perfectly pretty but for the imperfection of my sloping shoulders and long neck, which made me, instead, beautiful. Now, looking at the picture the
Michigan Daily
ran—for they ran as many photos of me as of Jason—I understood, which I hadn’t really, then, how beautiful I was, my breasts bare under the cotton of an Indian embroidered shirt, my hips full in my jeans. In May, when school let out, the People’s Park uprising happened in Berkeley, and I became the corresponding secretary for the Ann Arbor SDS. It happened so naturally. Jason, Nan, Jeddy—articulate, passionate people, like I had met around my parents’ dinner table for years—they welcomed me into the Ann Arbor office and made me at home. We were motivated, oddly, I saw now, by the same naive optimism that had animated my father, before the blacklist, at least. But it was, so unexpectedly, the same naive optimism that would animate Johnny Osborne when, to my shock, I heard that he’d enlisted and was going to Vietnam. A belief in his own possibilities; a belief in the country’s boundless capacity. It was, I saw now, an equal but opposite measure of the postwar American optimism—same as had caused educated, liberal men to undertake the war in Vietnam; same as had allowed our government to plant a flag on the moon. Now it was making us think we could end the war and reinvent our society.

In June,
New Left Notes
published “You Don’t Need a Weatherman,” the primary accusation that the New Left as we had known it, the antiwar movement as we had known it, had failed to stop the escalation of the war as well as the intensification of governmental repression. This was true, and many people listened. And when, later in June, SDS split into Progressive Labor on one hand, and Revolutionary Youth Movement on the other, I naturally went with RYM, the same group as Jason and his friends. When, over the rest of the summer, RYM split again, a small group going on to start planning the Days of Rage in Chicago, I went too.

Trotsky or Lenin or Mao, Sweeney or Baron, Marcuse or Mills, everyone had their own analysis much as they had their own taste in music. To lead in this environment the most immediate challenge was to discern whether people see beyond our attachment to our own analytic framework. If so, they were potential for cadre; if not, they were part of the well of people on which a vanguard depended: support staff, sources of money, covers, protection, alibis. That is not a pejorative: if you number those people, around Weather, in the low hundreds, you still have to measure on one hand the number who betrayed our trust in any serious way.