The Laws of our Fathers (14 page)

    The only time Eddgar's security concerns yielded was with regard to Nile's baby-sitting arrangements. June-called Nile a 'troubled sleeper' and insisted he be put down each evening in his own bed. I could tell the Eddgars had quarreled about this, but June apparently felt I was trustworthy and I stayed in their apartment, alone with Nile, on the nights the Eddgars were out with their 'cells,' or affinity groups. Eddgar kept a deliberate distance from me, to be sure, I guess, that I didn't learn too much.

    In truth, Eddgar didn't have casual dealings with many people in Damon. He gave his lectures and spoke at public rallies; he carried on passionately at the faculty senate, delivering speeches which appeared to have been borrowed in tone and, worse, in length from Fidel Castro. Otherwise, he was remote. It was something of a privilege if he made any gesture of recognition when I saw him around the theology department. I was going there regularly in the mornings for meetings of the Damon chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War, which was coordinating local planning for various nationwide demonstrations that took place that fall.

    Early in November, I was there mimeographing observations on draft resistance when the machine broke. I sputtered and wrestled with a reluctant gasket, until someone edged in behind me and extended a hand. When I looked back, I found Eddgar. On good behavior at the department, he wore a plaid shirt and contrasting knit tie, and looked almost raffish. Under one arm, he carried papers for the class he was about to meet. He accepted my gratitude without comment, but took an instant to look over the mimeo, still slopped across the machine's canister in a reeking puddle of toner. He could not have made out much reading backwards, but he seemed to get enough and turned away with a wee, telling smile, which, to my credit, irritated me.

    'It's not funny, man,' I said. 'Okay, you don't agree, but it's not funny.'

    I could tell I had struck a note Eddgar never expected. He lifted a pale hand in a remote gesture of compromise.

    'I don't dismiss good intentions, Seth.' He smiled tautly as he quoted Mao: ' "Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary."'

    'But you don't think that's enough, right? Good intentions?'

    He reared back and observed me at length. 'Seth,' he said finally, 'you sound like you're trying to involve me in an argument you're havin with yourself I sensed instantly he was right. This kind of susceptibility, as I was to learn, never passed Eddgar's notice, and he took a step closer now. ‘I understand you, Seth,' he said quietly, ‘I believe I do. I've seen you here, toing and froing with these Mobilization folk. I see what you're doin. And I confess I've thought of myself. I think of all those high-hope little mimeos and prayer sheets we used to turn out in church basements in Mississippi. I'd say that you bring to mind all the passions of a young Christian activist, if you were a Christian.'

    I think Eddgar was making one of his rare efforts at being humorous. Perhaps he knew that I thought of myself as quite a card and was trying to meet me on my own terms. But the remark had an unsettling undertone. I was never much at ease, to start with, when someone else mentioned I was Jewish. It called up my parents' lifelong warnings that my gentile acquaintances would never let me forget this difference. Inwardly, I looked forward to a new world where the need for such self-consciousness would be erased. Besides, Eddgar knew little about me, and it seemed to reveal the abiding attitudes of a small-town Southern boy that he kept this detail in mind. He frowned deeply at himself and remarked that what he'd said had not come out right at all. We hung there, both afraid of the implications were we to part. The vacuum made me bolder.

    'What happened?' I said then. ‘I mean to the young Christian activist. Why did he change?' At the age of twenty-two, the news of how lives turned out the way they did gripped me like a thriller.

    'What happened?' Eddgar asked himself. He walked as he thought and I followed him into an open courtyard. Although it was fall in the land I came from, Miller Damon was lush with blooming vines and flowering cactuses and ivies with shiny leaves that climbed the sandstone-colored bricks of the low buildings with their terra-cotta roofs. The sheer abundance of the place was still strange to me. Tall eucalyptus trees with hairy, peeling trunks formed a jungle line at the edge of campus, their aromatic leaves mentholating any breeze. At the back of the campus toward the Bay, the brass-colored hills burned to acres of straw, broken now and then by solitary live oaks, each lonely tree looking as if it had been placed there to accommodate a hanging.

    'Teaching happened,' Eddgar answered at last. 'Scholarship. Mostly, however, I would be inclined to say Mississippi. That was the intervening force.' He seemed mildly amazed, recollecting the person he now so clearly renounced.

    'Did you lose your faith?' I asked this casually, as someone who's never believed much, but I saw from his astonished expression I couldn't have pried more deeply if I'd asked what went on in bed between June and him. We walked on for some time along the single diamonds of Carrara marble that had been laid out beneath a columned esplanade.

    'Every semester,' he said at last, 'there's a student who by the second or third class becomes confident that he or she has got me. "How can you claim?" this student will say, "how can you claim that Christianity, which hallows the life of the spirit, has any common ground with Marxism, which recognizes
only
a material world?" But that isn't what Marxism teaches. Do you think Che isn't spiritual? That Mao or Marx didn't believe in -indeed revere - the life of the spirit? The Marxist believes that the spirit can only find expression in this material world, and in Mississippi, slowly, I came to understand that point of view.

    'Slowly, I say. On the night that the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 - on that night, I felt
ecstatic.
I felt that years, decades of goodhearted efforts had been vindicated, that the world was finally changed. And, you know, two years later, I went back to Mississippi and there was not a thing different for those folks. Lord knows, I didn't have to go to Mississippi to see that. I could have walked down the road from my father's house and seen the people who have been cutting black tobacco in his fields for generations. But I had to go to Mississippi to
see
it, if you understand me, and I saw. The same little shacks. The same laundry on the line. The barefoot kids, bathin in big tin tubs. No runnin water, save what came up from the ground. Same ten hours in the field, twelve bits an hour. Still wasn't a school for them within ten miles. Oh, there was some talk of change when I asked. But I had to wonder.

    'And I wrestled with myself. I struggled. Viewing that squalor, I would look at those babies, those precious babies, and wonder, "How do I say to you, after all this work, after this great triumph, how can I say to you that it will be no better in your lifetime? How do I, where do I, derive the right to tell you to wait?"

    'You see, I couldn't really comfort myself with hopes for future generations, because that meant accepting
her
misery, the misery of the child I saw now. And I couldn't agree to the sop of the religious,
heaven,'
he said with mild contempt, 'the poor received in glory, because after all, after
all,
it was not just the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus said the meek would have - he said they would inherit this earth. Was he merely taunting them? So that was the question, you see: How do I temporize with this generation? With any one child? What mandate of law, of God - where in anyone's teachings, Christ's or Marx's or Adam Smith's, where does it explain how a government derives the moral authority to tell the poor to languish in squalor, to wait and wait for the earth that is theirs while it is consumed by the rich? What happened to me, Seth, was that my faith, or my conscience, or my moral sensibility, told me there is no logic to this life but revolution.' His dramatic eyes were wide and pale as a wolf's. I was never of anything but two minds about Eddgar. I always recognized how theatrical he was. But as he finished his tale of ardor and personal pain, as he headed off alone beneath the arches of the esplanade, I was barely breathing.

    

    Near 3:30 each day, chubby little Nile Eddgar limped home from first grade and became my responsibility. June had chopped Nile's straight brown hair into a bowl-shaped do a la the Little Rascals, but it would have been a stretch to call him 'cute.' He was an unsmiling, slow-moving soul, a turbulence of shirttails, smudged cheeks, and dirty fingernails. After devouring a snack his mother had left, Nile languished, child of the revolution, in front of my television. His parents prohibited TV and had gone so far as to get rid of their set, but somehow I found myself powerless to keep Nile from the dials. He would sit entranced, stroking one of the few toys he was allowed, Babu, a handsome bear with a pelt of shiny synthetic fur. I seldom interested Nile in the list of kid-time activities June had suggested - the park, the library, projects from school. He seemed to have no friends, partly because Eddgar, wary of government snoopers, didn't allow visits with families he hadn't approved. Instead, Nile moped around, telling me often how much better he liked Michael Frain, the physics graduate student who lived next door to Sonny and me and who had been Nile's sitter for the last two years. Frequently Nile would sneak away and hide in Michael's apartment, waiting for him to come home, at which point Nile would follow Michael around, resisting my efforts to recapture him.

    I found Nile's relationship with Michael humiliating. I knew I was a pretty lousy baby-sitter. I was quick to regard myself as wounded by my childhood, yet I had little memory for a kid's preoccupations, while Michael, who was mute, virtually flash-frozen, with adults, could fall with Nile into the rhythms of children's play. I'd find them in a treehouse in the back yard, or in the park, making funny noises and ugly faces at each other as they twisted around a jungle gym, engaged in games where the rules changed moment by moment. 'Let's say I'm the guy who wants the treasure, no, you're the bad guy, okay then we're both the good guys, and these other guys… No, wait.'

    Michael had come from a small town in Idaho, and he had about him the arid, silent mystery of those high, empty plains. Michael spoke slowly and only after considerable reflection in a voice with a heehaw monotone that climbed uphill at the end of every sentence. He had a bit of a stammer, too, so that you had to wonder if perhaps he'd been taunted into silence at home or in school. His looks, I was told, were a little like mine - tall and thin with a prominent nose - but he had a fragility I never saw in myself. His head appeared delicate as a china bowl, his skin drawn tightly across his skull, with the wiggly purplish trace of a prominent vein near his temple. Grown long in blondish dreadlocks, his hair was already receding.

    I initially viewed Michael as a hapless turkey, with his slipstick hanging from a plastic holster on his belt. But he eventually sifted his way into our life. I found him uncommonly generous. Michael filled in with Nile when he could, and also helped me keep up a preposterous fiction I'd created for my mother that Sonny and I were living in different apartments. The idea of me cohabiting with a woman was much too much for my mother. In her Old World view, marriage would have been morally required, an impossible thought both because Sonny was not Jewish and because it would represent one more rending of the strong fabric that bound me to her. Instead, I'd had a second phone installed in our apartment which I alone answered when my parents called. With Michael's permission, I gave my mother his address and thumbed through his mail each day for her letters.

    Nonetheless, what drew Sonny and me to Michael most strongly was probably our stomachs. He could cook, a skill we each decidedly lacked. With the wok, Michael was a master. He could tell the temperature of hot oil within a few degrees, by dropping a scallion on the surface and watching it wither. Since it was often my job to give Nile dinner, and Nile always craved Michael's company, the four of us often ate together. I shopped. Michael was the chef. Sonny did the dishes. We pooled our student food stamps for costs and also fished scraps out of the Eddgars' refrigerator. On the weekends, we were frequently joined by Hobie and Lucy. She was a terrific cook herself and would add exotic touches - cilantro and peppers she'd found in the mercados along Mission Street, or watercress which she'd discovered growing wild beside the golf course in Golden Gate Park.

    Michael also began to join us for something we called 'Doobie Hour.' In college, Hobie and I had always ended the day together, passing a joint with dormmates, and we'd more or less kept the custom alive in Damon. In our living room, amid the tattered, used furnishings, we'd all watch an 11:30 p.m. rebroadcast of Walter Cronkite that followed the local news. We smoked or drank wine, making smug remarks in reply to Nixon or Agnew or Melvin Laird when they appeared on the TV screen. Michael would pass on the j, but always seemed to enjoy Hobie's and my late-hour riffs.

    Usually during those first months in California, when the news was over, I became the entertainment, reciting weird little sci-fi fantasies that ventilated my grim obsessions and which I liked to pretend could be turned into movies. There was one about a fakir who somehow lost his ability to walk across hot coals; another about a heartless mercenary from Vietnam who became the ruler of a South Seas nation and met a chilling end when the natives saw through his magic. One night Michael told us how the universe was expanding but might someday reach its limit, contracting like a rubber band. According to Einsteinian theory, this would cause time to run in reverse. I spent a number of nights thereafter spinning out tales about this inverted universe in which effect preceded cause, where people at birth sprang out of their graves like tulips and grew ever younger, where you knew the lessons of life before you'd had the experience, and where you perished while your parents were at the height of passion. Michael was especially amused by my freewheeling improvisations on the principles of physics.