The Laws of our Fathers (13 page)

    'Ask the FBI, mate, Damon security, the town police. Know One Hundred Flowers well, I reckon. Refer to themselves as a "revolutionary council," I believe. The Black Panthers. White Panthers. Weathermen. PLP. The Brown Berets. Everybody, love. The Red Mountain Tribe. Honkies for Huey. Each little root and seed group, all the various head cases who begin nodding vigorously when anyone starts talking about taking up weapons. A treacherous fellow, that one. Believe me. Ordered an execution last year. Did you know that? Word from some poor devil who was involved. God, I hope you're not with the FBI.'

    I assured him I wasn't. Graeme took another belt of his whiskey to still his concerns.

    ' Someone from the Panthers they took for an informant. Coppers found him in a ditch down by the Bay. Injected the poor chap with heroin, forcibly, tucked a wee bit of powder in his pocket so the police would think it was a junkie overdose. Not give a bloody damn. Which they didn't.'

    Graeme briefly sketched Eddgar's history. He was the scion of Southern planters - his grandfather had been raised with slaves - a background of gentility and greed which Eddgar freely acknowledged and regularly denounced. He was an ordained minister and, until he had tenure, had been a promising professor in the School of Divinity, with a scholarly interest in comparing the teachings of the Gospels to Marxist doctrine. But after freedom riding and lunch-counter sit-ins in the mid-sixties, he had begun adhering more to Chairman Mao's
Little Red Book
than the Scriptures. Through his radical organization, Eddgar was suspected of inspiring riots the prior spring, when separate groups of black and white students occupying university buildings had been ej ected by a phalanx of city cops, culminating in the wounding of a university guard who had been shot from across the main quad.

    In those first days, Sonny heard the same things about the Eddgars - that they had taken part in planning the prison breakout at Soledad, that a faction in the faculty senate wanted to expel Eddgar from the university - and she repeatedly urged me to quit. Sonny herself was a red diaper baby, daughter of a labor organizer named Zora Klonsky, who briefly, during World War II, had served as president of a Kindle County pipefitters' local. I viewed Zora more prosaically, as the only real-live Commie I'd ever met, and - in utter privacy - a serious nut. But whatever her sanity, Zora was a unionist. She'd broken factory windows but never staged a prison breakout, never fired a gun. The Eddgars were too much for Sonny.

    'They're into very heavy stuff' Sonny warned. I was unconcerned. For one thing, I had learned that first day, as June was vetting me, that both the Eddgars were Easton graduates, fugitive Southerners who'd endured four years of Midwestern winters. I sentimentally assumed that made for a bond that would keep me safe. Beyond that, I was intrigued. Given the dismal results produced by the political process the year before - the police riot outside the Democratic convention; Richard Nixon's election and his subsequent refusal to bring the war to a close - many people on the left argued that it was time to move beyond civil protests to militant action. In Manhattan, bombs had decimated the Armed Forces induction station on Whitehall Street and the criminal courts building. SDS, the most prominent left-wing organization on many campuses, had splintered over the issue of violence, and in the fall of '69, the surviving Weatherman faction staged the Days of Rage in Chicago, in which dozens of rads ransacked the streets, smashing auto windows with case-hardened chains and going hand to hand with police. In Southern California, Juanita Rice, the daughter of a prominent industrialist and Republican fund-raiser, was grabbed at gunpoint out of her high school by some cadre called the Liberation Army, who held her for ransom. I regarded these actions as counterproductive and extreme, but I couldn't stifle a spark of excitement at the notion of reshaping the world from scratch. Amid my sense of wandering, dangling, the Eddgars seemed to represent reality, life, the thing I still felt was waiting to start.

    Over the years I've wondered of course why it didn't work out between Sonny and me. The times? Did I frighten her with all my crazy passions? Did I cling? Insight, like some sweet inspiration, remains temptingly beyond reach. But somehow living together was hard. The carrying through. The day to day. Neither of us really had the remotest idea how to be with someone else. Sonny's mother, Zora, hadn't lived with a man while Sonny was alive, and from an early age I'd known that my parents' high-strung, suffocated relationship was something I did not want to duplicate. As a result, virtually everything between us was definitional: who did the wash, who made the social plans, how clean to keep the apartment. We fought about it all.

    And some of what emerged couldn't be dismissed as mere adjustment. I regarded the girl I'd been dating as the most 'together' person I knew, thoroughly and enviably adult. Sonny was poised and rigorously logical in all circumstances, while maintaining a warm, frank manner. She was quick to laugh at jokes, if poorer at making them, easy with strangers, kind to street people and their dogs. My principal contribution to her, so far as I figured, was to add a combustible element to a life that was a little too confined by deliberation.

    Yet living with her, I found Sonny full of mysterious, molten emotions that seemed to defy both her understanding and mine. She was inclined to manic spells, isolated periods of zombie-like staring, as well as adolescent attachments: writers, classmates, clothes that were one week's passion and then were never spoken of again. And she was touchy. Criticisms from professors about papers, or even their disagreement with a remark she offered in class, could make her funky and combative with me. Listening to her at those loathsome departmental parties, I was struck eventually by the way she presented herself as largely
sui generis
- never any mention of a hometown, or of a childhood in which her father, Jack Klonsky, secretary of the bargehandlers' local, had died in a dockside accident before she was two and in which she thereafter had been traded back and forth to the household of her Aunt Henrietta while Zora traveled and organized. Like a sculpture, Sonny presented no apparent access to her interior space. Desperate for any handhold, I would sometimes study her class notes when she was not around, or inspect the marginalia in the books she read, the passages she highlighted. What was I to make of that exclamation point? What insight made her write ‘I see'?

    On no subject was she more confusing than school. At times, she was preoccupied by her department and its hothouse politics, the arch proclamations of her young adviser, Graeme Florry, and the complicated realms of thought she was required to master for her classes. Then periods would set in when she declared it all a waste of time. Philosophy was only about words, she'd say, or she'd repeat an observation of Nietzsche's disparaging the philosophic enterprise. In the catchword of the day, philosophy was no longer 'relevant.' For Aristotle, philosophy and science were one and the same. Now, she said, there were a thousand other fields of study, from psychology to physics, that we depended on to tell us more about the truth.

    'It's real things, doing things I admire,' she told me, 'not ideas about them. That's what I'm trying to say. I can't live like this, talking about imaginary categories or making more of them than they really are.'

    Often enough, as a means of encouraging her, I asked her to digest her reading for me, like a mother bird chewing and feeding this heavy stuff to me in lightweight bits. In order to speed the degree process, Modern Critical Thought required all students to complete a dissertation proposal by the end of the first term, which meant the work began at once at a furious pace. Sonny's emerging thesis concerned a philosopher named Brentano, who taught that consciousness was, at root, images shorn of all abstractions. Sonny was going to treat him as the unsuspected bridge between the depth psychologists, like Freud, and existentialists such as Sartre. In this connection, she was rereading the nineteenth-century German philosophers. One of her passing fixations was a term - from Nietzsche, I think -
traumhaft,
a sense that all beliefs - religion, love, the golden rule - were but a dream with no provable justification in morality or science. Our lives, Nietzsche claimed, our customs, were really no more than rote learning. We were, he said, actually afloat within sensation and otherwise unanchored, free but terrified, like the moonbound astronauts had been when they left their capsules and stood in space.

    'Get it?' she asked. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were, as was often the case on Sundays, in bed. It was our time of refuge before the forced march of the week began again. Sonny did not dress all day. We ate brunch and sometimes even dinner on the Goodwill mattress on the floor. In alternating periods, we went through the paper and screwed. When she dozed, I took up the sections she'd been reading. In the afternoons, Sonny moved on to her assigned texts.

    'Heavy,' I answered. 'Very heavy. But bullshit.'

    'Why is it bullshit, baby?'

    'Cause that's not how it is. Not for me. I mean all this raging volcanic shit, I feel? Everything's connected to everything else. The draft. My parents. The war. You. I'm not floating. Not hardly. Are you?'

    There was a round window, like a porthole, in our bedroom. Its existence had seemed a typically pointless Victorian frill until a night, a week ago, when the full moon had appeared there and filled the room with light so ghostly but intense I'd found it difficult to sleep. Lost in reflection, Sonny looked in that direction now.

    'That's what I feel,' she said. 'A lot.'
'Traumhaft?'

    
'Traumhaft.
There are times when I wonder. Do you know Descartes? Sometimes I wonder about everybody else. Like Descartes did. How do I know
they're
not in my imagination? How do I know for sure there's anything besides me? And even so, I wonder if I can really reach what's outside of me. There seems such a terrible abyss. Even between what I feel and what I can say about it. I can't -'

    'What?'

    'Get out? Does that make sense?' She scrutinized me with her searing, dark-eyed look. 'Am I too weird?' 'Not compared to me.' 'No. Really.'

    'For-real,' I answered. 'Listen, I'm here. I promise, man.' I took her hand. 'This is here,' I said and fell upon her.

    Sex was often the answer. It remains the most intensely physical relationship I've known. Words were the instruments of critical scrutiny to Sonny and talk, therefore, was as dangerous as a game of mumblypeg. In bed, she was somehow freer to give what remained often inaccessible. She was a willing participant in most of the experiments I concocted from a lifetime of unsatisfied fantasies: feathers and vegetable scrubbers; a large red dildo that briefly entered our lives. Our favorite was a tantric exercise we called The Touching Game. Naked and stoned, we faced each other in the dark, our eyes closed, legs folded yoga-like. The rules allowed us to touch with fingertips only - our bodies could not meet. No brushing knees, no kisses. And the genitals were out of bounds; they could not be caressed until some aching point when it became irresistible. Instead, we drifted our hands across each other for endless periods. I shivered when she stroked the skin behind my knee, my toe tops. We would fall, for long pieces of time, into the quivering zone above each other's lips, out of our minds with drugs and sensation, our mouths a breath apart as we trembled on the vapor of each other, of our beings.

    In the Eddgars' apartment, the hot-blooded personalities of the revolution came and went: the Progressive Laborites in their workingman's twills; the leader of the Campus Employees Collective, Martin Kellett, with his sloppy redheaded ringlets; and, of course, the famous Black Panthers from Oakland, turned out in shades and berets and their three-buttoned coats of shining treated leather. The most prominent of the Panthers was Eldridge Cleaver. More often, he was represented by Cleveland Marsh, equally famous in Damon, where he had been a college football star. Currently the Panther Party's Minister of Justice, Cleveland was a hulking guy with a terrifying, insolent look. He was a classmate of Hobie's in the entering law-school class, and Hobie, a notorious sucker for celebrities, was forever rushing into the hall whenever Cleveland appeared, the better to fortify their minimal 'Hey, man' relationship.

    The members of One Hundred Flowers appeared at the Eddgars' for meetings or occasionally arrived individually at odd hours to whisper with Eddgar on the back porch about some intrigue too sensitive for the telephone. Eddgar was obsessed with security. He assumed, probably correctly, that his organization and he were the constant targets of intelligence gathering and infiltration. That was why he'd removed Nile from a local baby-sitting co-op years before and barred me from his home the day we met. Once daily, the Eddgars swept the apartment for bugs. June used a device called a Private Sentry which looked like a voltmeter with a lightbulb attached, and Eddgar backstopped her, plugging a microphone into an AM-FM radio and his TV set. He chattered constantly - usually sayings from
The Little Red Book
- playing the channel knob across the U HF band or the full radio spectrum, awaiting any telltale feedback.

    According to the rumors about him always circulating on campus, Eddgar was careful never to issue any revolutionary directives on his own. Even the most treacherous orders - to kill the snitch in Oakland or to aid the Soledad breakout - supposedly had been delivered to One Hundred Flowers through the mouth of June.

    Coming and going with Nile or visiting with June to discuss his care, I now and then caught glimpses of the One Hundred Flowers meetings. The revolutionaries engaged in fierce doctrinal disputes, addressing each other as 'Comrade' and invoking the names of Gramsci, Fanon, Sorel, Rosa Luxemburg, and Bakunin, arguing about Lin Piao and China's role in Biafra. Meanwhile, June would slip off with different members to ride around the blocks in someone's car, where communications could take place securely. Before these ride-arounds, June and the passenger would search one another for recording devices, passing their hands across each other's bodies so casually that conversations were not interrupted.