The Laws of our Fathers (82 page)

    Sipping the tea, Seth takes an instant to imagine Nile and Michael together as Eddgar described them. Probably living on some rented farmette with a tiny frame house which the wind blows through in winter. Working day jobs in town, clerks or something, tilling the earth as weekends and summer light allow. They probably speak little. Michael these days surfs the Internet, instead of the shortwave bands. Nile watches TV. But they make allowances for each other. And to the world they are father and son, one of those odd pairs families often create, attuned to each other and hardly anybody else. Nile has become the man he always wanted to be: Michael, another erratic fugitive, the best example he had.

    'I could find them,' Eddgar repeats. 'But I'm not going to trail Nile as if I were a bounty hunter. When he wants to see me, he will. I understand how it is. He's likely to keep running, isn't he? If I pursue him?'

    ‘I think that's right.'

    ‘I think it's shame,' says Eddgar. 'His reason for fleeing? That's more or less how I explain it to myself.' 'Sounds more like anger to me.'

    'Anger?' asks Eddgar. He shows the first open surprise since the moment he saw Seth on his porch this morning.

    'I bet the sight of you on the witness stand lying your ass off to save him - playing along with Hobie, whatever you want to call it - was probably more than he could stomach. I take it neither one of you bothered to fill in Nile in advance.' They're both too high-handed to have troubled with that, Seth knows. Eddgar was right before, he thinks. Insight isn't everything. Because it's seldom complete. Eddgar might see himself as meddlesome, overly protective, but he'll never recognize the message he delivered to Nile on every possible occasion, that his son would always be beholden, incapable, incomplete.

    'But isn't it puzzling?' Eddgar asks. ‘I think about it every day. For hours. And I'm baffled. Perhaps he was angry, as you say, at the end of the trial. I surely meant well. But we could have misunderstood one another. That's an old story. But what could he have been thinking to start? Getting mixed up that way? With Core? In that kind of business? What did he want?'

    Seth takes his time, although he's known the answer from the moment Eddgar told him the story.

    'I imagine he wanted to be one of the people you cared about, Eddgar.' This observation, leveled with no more mercy than a hammer blow, provokes little visible reaction at first. Eddgar brings his hand to his mouth momentarily. On the wall, there's a large white clock. It buzzes faintly, clicking slightly whenever the second hand moves. Ten after eight. He may miss his plane, Seth thinks. But he has no desire to go.

    'It's so complex,' Eddgar says finally. He circles a finger through a little puddle of gathered moisture left on the table by the bottom of his cup. 'I'm not one to dwell on the past, Seth. But whenever I think back, what seems bleakest and most confused to me is Nile. I loved him so truly, so deeply. I still think of his birth as a moment like no other. I can describe the hospital waiting room - it was the days when men were not involved.' He permits himself the wee, reflective smile Seth recollects, as if neither of them should make much of the oddity that Eddgar, the great suspect of institutional power, lost his radar at a moment so essential. ‘I recall the other fathers sitting around, a sandwich one of these men was eating. It was peanut butter and bacon, which he'd brought from home in used-looking silver foil. I can remember everything. I can smell the smoke from everybody's cigarettes.

    'It seemed such a perfect recompense that a son should have been born to me who so suffered his own father, who was still wrestling him, the way Jacob in that wonderful passage in the Scripture wrestled the Angel of Death all night. I thought -' He gropes, staring to the distance and the past. 'It seemed very important,' Eddgar says.

    'It was,' says Seth.

    'Yes, it was. It was, of course it was. I mean merely that the path seemed clear. The way seemed certain - everything I should do and shouldn't do. And of course, it wasn't. I was terribly afraid of him, terribly scared of him, almost at once. Terrified. Of this little tiny child. Of course, I couldn't say to myself that it was fear I felt. I just seemed frozen up somehow. I seemed commanded by some kind of learned response, instead of my own inmost impulses. Oh God.' And there is another of those improbable moments Seth first witnessed in the courtroom. Loyell Eddgar is crying. He is probably entitled to comfort, Seth realizes. As a father, Seth has comfort to give. But not to this man. He sits on the other side of the table, in silence, as Eddgar sobs for a second, then recovers.

    'And I would watch him with you and Michael. You recall how he was with Michael, Seth? I would just watch the two of them, out there in that tree, pounding, sawing, laughing at one another - I'd feel terrible. Just terrible. Because I still loved him so. So much. I was brimming with feeling. Looking back, I think I felt more honest emotion toward Nile than any other person in my life.

    'And I would worry and worry and worry about one thing, one question all the time. It sounds like madness now, but I was haunted by this question, maddened by it, absolutely obsessed. If I had to give him up, I kept thinking, if I had to give him up, could I?'

    'Give him up?' asks Seth.

    'Yes. To the revolution. If the day came. If I had to let him fight. Do things that would endanger him. It never seemed - you can take this as you like, I'm sure you're doubtful, question motives, I'd do the same probably - but it never seemed awful to be placing ourselves in danger. June. Me. I could imagine - I had imagined that. You know all the prison literature that's been created by captured leaders. I'd read that. Torture. Isolation. I'd imagined that.'

    And gloried probably in the prospect, Seth thinks. Eddgar's greyish hair has fallen forward, over his brow, as he looks down to his folded hands.

    'But I was riven,' he says, 'agonized, by the total quandary of being a parent. How could I show Nile everything I treasured and believed, which I seemed impelled to do, how could I do that and then confront the moment decades on when that led to his sacrifice? Would I be able to pay that price, I kept asking, would I be able let him go, my son, my love, my life, my future? I avoided thinking about it for months, and then the question would strike me, more powerfully than any fear I've ever felt for myself, and I found no comfort really, but was led back again and again, by some distraught impulse, to the words of the Scripture, that God's greatest love was shown by this, that He gave us the life of His only son. As if that thought could really be any help, as if it could do anything but deepen the mystery.'

    He stands, draining the last from his cup. He claps his shirt pockets and, not finding what he's seeking, removes his glasses and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. On the worn heels of his loafers, he crosses into the brilliant path of light that emerges from the window, an elongated parallelogram divided by the shadowed mullions, and nods from the doorway, older and littler than he was in Seth's memory. With one hand, he attempts some heartless gesture, a farewell and a direction to Seth to show himself out.

    He goes. It will take pure luck now to make his plane to Seattle. Traveling far too fast, he dodges traffic on 843 in the morning rush. So are you done now? he finally asks himself. In part, he still valiantly resists everything pulling on him in the wake of this visit. It wasn't genuine, Seth keeps thinking. The tears. The torment. Like all great actors, Eddgar will always become exactly who his audience wishes him to be. But there is no turning away from his vulnerability to Eddgar. That was fixed long ago, in the stars, in the genes, in nature. So what's the point? Seth asks himself. Everybody has his story? His grief? He knew that. Already. He knew it. Maybe it's what he said to Hobie last night. About love and justice. Maybe there is no difference. In the ideal, at least. Maybe love and justice are one.

    He drives on.

    Are you done now?

    

    

    Seth

    

    Who writes letters anymore? This is probably an act of craziness. But Dubinsky dropped off the copies of the eulogies the
Trib
people had printed. (Beautiful, aren't they? This was a touching gesture, Seth.) I'm a little too hard-headed to hold on to them on the assumption you're coming back. And I can't simply slide them into this envelope without a word of my own. It's 9:30 now. Hot Time, as you say. The hour we have spent together most nights. I miss you. The laughter, the connection. I have nasty thoughts. The body yearns.

    Which means what? I've been running all the what-ifs in my mind, watching each clip to see the different endings to our movie. Nothing is exactly right. But I thought I' d take you at your word and speak my mind, at least the part I know. We're both relatively honest. I regard that as one of our pluses.

    When I left Charlie, at the age of forty-four, I had to recognize that I'm one of those people who may never come to rest, never find the opening in the world where I am going to squarely fit. My life, in its current shape, will tumble on for a while, and then I'11 feel the way I always do, that it's not quite right, that maybe there's something better, or not quite as bad, over the next hill and I'll be gone in that direction. There are times I think almost abstractly about my lifetime of shifting obsessions and feel washed away by a pounding wave of shame. Four different graduate programs. All my jobs. And men. And a thousand pastimes undertaken with unflagging ardor, each intended to save my spirit at night while my body slaved in obeisance to the future during the day. The relics are in that horrible Fibber's closet of a basement where I won't let you roam: an enormous loom; plastic jugs and curing vats (I was going to culture my own wine); bridles, bits, and saddle from the period I decided to retake my squandered childhood by riding. Not to mention the boxes of Y-Me literature and the books on various dietary obsessions. Each of these phases passed away, lifted like fog, traceless, if you do not count the accessories that mildew in the cellar or a single blanket I wove which Nikki still clutches for comfort when she sleeps. At my worst moments, I suspect I bore Nikki simply to have an anchor.

    And even having done that, I'm never right, never fully at ease. I know there's a chance I' ll be here by myself at the end, on the other side of something I'm still longing to get over. There's a lot of pain in that. Not just the recognition, but the fact. Yet there are moments, like now, when I'm more or less at peace and willing to say, Maybe that's me. If this thing - us - if it doesn't work out, I'm going to be okay. I know that. It's one of the best lessons I learned from Zora: I know how to wrap my arms around myself. And I don't mean that as a sop. It may even be a warning.

    Which is not to deny I'm angry. I am. I'm aggravated that you' re gone and that you let it come to this, with two women reaching after you. I ask myself questions I heard in my head all the time with Charlie: Why does it seem to be women who have to stand up for everything of real value in the world? For children, first of all; for nurturance. For homes. And, yes, even love. I know that's not entirely fair. I sometimes watch you with Nikki in mild amazement - unloading her backpack, making snacks. I leave you a lot more room to be that person than Lucy ever did. But it's your confidence and contentment that are striking, the way you see a household. Not a war zone. Not a field of mutual striving. Not some prolonged adolescence inwhich the partners travel, each for themselves. But a family. You can show me how to do that, as Charlie, of course, never did. And even so, that's hard for me, because it leaves me wrestling with the hardest question of all, whether it's me you need or Nikki. In the end, we both have to deal with the fact that it's loss that brings you to me.

    History. Circumstances and events. They still stand between us. I never would have suspected the degree to which I'm haunted by our past together. Twenty-five years, you think. We were only children. And yet it feels like it could be fatal. What's the difference now? I wonder. Why won't we fail the same way we did a quarter-century ago? I suspect these are the furthest questions from your mind, Seth. What's the saying?
Within the body of every cynic beats the broken heart of a romantic.
You still believe in the transforming power of Will and

    Love. It's so endearing. I want to let you win, to triumph at this quest. I know how important it is for you.

    But I worry I may let you down the way I did decades ago. Back then, you needed my devotion, probably so you had the strength to stand apart from your parents. And I couldn't provide it. Not, as I think you feared then, because I didn't believe in or admire you. You do not know ten people, Seth, who feel more vindicated or less surprised by the way the world has embraced your talent. No. What troubled me was your celestial devotion to me. To the girl philosophy student who was supposed to light up the skies at Miller Damon. Because I knew she was a fake. Oh, I had certain gifts. I've never sold myself short. I read Plato while I was still in high school. And believed what Socrates said about knowledge as life's highest quest. To the thought of replacing passion with reason, some singing (passionate?) chord in me responded. Instead, over time, I learned that the differing endpoints of various philosophical excursions were due largely to the places they'd begun. The zero points. The irreducible assumptions. It's who you are to start that makes the difference. And in that light, Plato was, if not wrong, at least deserving of correction. All knowledge derives from passion. And what my passions werewas largely a mystery. Certainly not philosophy. I read the texts in a bloodless way, like an inspector on a tour. I was, I suddenly decided, leading someone else's life. Whose? I didn't have a clue then. But my mother knew like Holy Writ those heavyweight German philosophers I studied. To this day, I can hear her shrilling at meetings, 'That is
not
what Engels meant! Never!' So l fled, mystified about my motives.