Split (3 page)

She found the beginnings of one when a group of her friends rented an old hotel on the Massachusetts seashore and convinced her to join them. We left Manhattan in the summer of 1968, when the garbage workers were on strike and the mercury was climbing into the nineties. "Every inch of air had its own vile and particular smell," my mother said later. She let go of our apartment, packed all our belongings into our VW bug, and drove up the West Side Highway, leaving those cloying streets behind.

Her fellow household members were computer programmers, psychologists—many of them old friends. "Suddenly, I was living the Sgt. Pepper life by the seashore," she said. Everyone pitched in for food and cooked together; chores were posted on a rotating wheel on the fridge, with each person taking care of a slice of the housekeeping pie. On Sunday evenings, the housemates gathered in the living room for meetings where issues were raised and occasionally resolved. Her share of the rent was about forty dollars, and since we ate rice, beans, and vegetables, and spent our days on the beach, she didn't need to work. She got a little pin money from her grandmother, and passed the summer in a pleasant haze. We would wake up late and eat oatmeal at the big farm table with whoever else was around. In the afternoons, she and her friends would gather down at the beach and stretch out a blanket. My mother would read, marvel over my dawning consciousness, then take a nap while someone dangled my feet in the surf.

When she talks about Manomet, my mother's voice goes soft and she looks out into the middle distance, conjuring the long green lawn below the house, the path through the dunes to the water. She was buoyed up by the company of her friends, by the salt breeze that slipped into our room at night, and her sense of freedom and ease seeped into me. On most days I wore nothing but sandals. Sometimes she put a diaper on me; more often I was allowed to squat where I pleased. My mother was in no hurry to potty-train me. She believed then that children were possessed of a native vitality, which would guide them toward good health and good human relations. She saw her job as one of gentle helmsmanship.

In fact, I was wild as a baby goat. I ate whole sticks of butter, bit anyone who crossed me, and pushed my mother's friend Miriam over the line one day when we sat down for breakfast together and she lifted the lid on the sugar bowl to find a turd curled up neatly inside. In the moment of shocked silence while Miriam's spoon was poised, my mother pointed out that the sugar bowl did look something like a toilet—it was round and porcelain, even if the scale was wrong—and then they howled together at my dainty replacement of the lid. But Miriam helped make it clear, if it hadn't been before: I was socializing myself for a society of one.

 

My mother's laissez-faire parenting style was a conscious overturning of the prim thinking of the time, and a rebellion against the conventions of her own childhood. Once or twice during that summer, we drove down to visit my grandparents on Long Island, and slipped back into the manicured world she had come from. Grandma Kate and Grandpa Bob's brick-fronted home was set on an acre of grass and maples, with a pool and cabana out back. I moved into the luxury of that world without question, jumping out of the car and running down the brick walk to the den: my grandfather's kingdom.

I remember my grandfather in the long slide of his retirement. He spent his days sunk in a La-Z-Boy recliner, holding the remote controls to two massive console TVs set side by side at the far end of the room. He would watch two sports games at once, muting one then blaring another as the action waxed and waned. He had been laid up by a wound in his foot the size of a golf ball, which began as a small nick from a piece of glass out by the pool and, because of his diabetes, never healed. That wound stayed open for the last years of his life, gathering infections and eventually gangrene, growing wider under the surgeon's knife.

On the table beside him was a spinning pipe rack topped with a brass statue of a boy and his hound, a well-thumbed TV guide, and a box of dog biscuits, which he would dole out to his beloved Yorkshire terrier. I would sit on his lap, lean against his drum-taut belly, and breath in his scent—tobacco and Vitalis and fresh gauze. Grandma brought him drinks from the bar at the back of the room—a fully stocked arsenal, with a slate floor, a chrome top-loading fridge, and a rack of shakers and stir sticks. While Grandpa sipped his Scotch, I sat on one of the barstools and downed glass after glass of Tropicana orange juice, a treasure that never appeared in the commune fridge. On the glass shelves above the bar were rows of matte black steins with handles in the shape of naked ladies. They touched their toes to the base of the mugs, then arched backward to grab the rim with dainty hands. When you lifted a mug, your thumb fit perfectly into their cleavage.

Up a flight of stairs from the den was the formal living room, with yellow brocade slipcovers on the couches, and on the coffee table a crystal paperweight with a sword-shaped letter opener thrust into its center, a mini Excalibur. The other day, I saw an ad for this very item, a Steuben it seems, priced now at thirty-one hundred dollars. "Timeless. Elegant. American," the copy read. Back then I was warned never to touch it, as I moved fast and left a trail of small calamities in my wake.

That Huntington house, down to the last detail, gave off a feeling of plenty. And it was this smugness that my mother was fleeing: the casual presumption of wealth; my grandparents' marriage, held together through rough times by decorum; the glistening dinners of roast beef and potatoes served in front of the television; the chemically enhanced lawns. It looked like the American Dream—two TVs, one pool, twelve black beer steins with naked ladies on the side—but it was full of holes.

Once, my mother told me of the life she had imagined making with my father once they married. They would buy a house in Harlem, adopt six or seven kids, plant a garden in an abandoned lot, and teach in the public schools. A fine dream, except she never once asked my father if he shared her vision. She says she knew he would have objected, but she figured she could talk him into it.

 

My parents' new life—separate but congenial—seemed to be working, but it was not to last. In June 1969, at the ninth and final national convention of SDS, a splinter group put out a pamphlet calling for, among other things, the creation of a revolutionary party. My father went to the convention and heeded that call, joining the two or three hundred people across the country who dubbed themselves Weatherman, after a line from Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." They believed that a revolution was imminent, but that it required a spark, some kind of violent action, to catalyze a mass uprising. In Boston, my father joined the local action project, whose members shared an apartment and spent their days training with weights and planning protests.

I don't know what attracted my father to this movement, such a long way from his early days in Newark. I know it is a period about which he has his own misgivings, although he is quick to defend the choices he made when they are criticized from afar. I believe that he joined the Weathermen out of a conviction that revolution was required—to end poverty and racial inequality, to end the war. But it's hard to imagine the context in which he came to such a conclusion, and easy, in hindsight, to see how badly he misjudged the national mood.

After he became a Weatherman, my father began to spend less and less time looking after me. As the summer wore on, my mother became exasperated, and finally she went to the Weathermen collective to confront him. It was an apocryphal moment, and they still don't agree on what was said. It is a measure of how far apart they had drifted that their memories refuse to match up.

My mother says she pounded on the door until they let her in. My father's comrades were gathered round, and in front of them she said her piece. What about the model childcare arrangement? What about his responsibilities? He told her that he had bigger responsibilities and urged her to leave me with Grandma Kate and join him in the struggle. She remembers looking at my father then and feeling that she barely knew him. "I can't believe you would give up your own kid," she said. And in her memory he replied with a line that would haunt her in the years to come: I was no more his child than were all the children in Vietnam. My mother screamed at him then, told him that political righteousness was no excuse for shitty behavior, her voice full of fury and fear, I'm sure, at what this meant to her—that she would have no help in caring for me, no one to consult with, no
air.

My father told me, years later, that part of him knew she was right, but he was already on a path and couldn't turn back. He remembered their conversation as one between people who agreed on a goal, if not the means: the war had to be stopped. He said my mother might just as easily have been in his shoes, ready to make such a sacrifice. In his memory, they spoke that day of her resentment—that he got to be in the vanguard; that she was stuck in the traditional role. One thing they both agreed upon: they loved me, and any choice that made me suffer was a difficult one. In a letter, my father once described it this way: "The watchwords of the time were urgency, militancy, combativeness, commitment, and sacrifice. I looked at you and loved you so much, and then I looked at children dying of napalm and rifle bullets inflicted by our soldiers. As a Jew I had heard so many times, 'What did the goyim do when Hitler was killing the Jews? Why didn't they stand up?' And then I heard stories of Christians who had hidden Jews at the risk of their lives, whites who had risked their lives on the Underground Railroad sheltering slaves, and it was that tradition that I felt a part of."

Three months later, he would have the chance to prove his mettle: the protest at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, for which he was arrested and charged with assault and battery. And nine months after that he would stand trial, the story of which strikes a chill in my heart. My father represented himself, hopeful that he could avoid jail time, and was sentenced to one year, a shockingly stiff term for the time. A lawyer who had done pro bono work for other activists offered his services and encouraged my father to appeal. But the man turned out to have qualms about the Weathermen and their tactics. He did almost nothing to prepare for the trial, and had the gall to inform my father only when they reached the courtroom that there was a chance his sentence could be increased. The judge returned from chambers and doubled his term to two years.

M
Y FATHER BEGAN
serving his time at Billerica in December 1969, just days after his twenty-seventh birthday. I was three years old. Shortly after he went to prison, my mother took me to see him. He had written her a letter asking for books and a new pair of tennis shoes; he was playing a lot of pickup basketball in the yard to keep his head clear. On the ride out to the prison, I clutched a box of black Converse high-tops in my lap, half queasy with excitement, practicing the things I would tell him.

That visit has the etched clarity and foggy blanks of a fever dream. I remember pulling into the broad parking lot and stepping out to face a gray building punctured by a grid of tiny windows. Mother lifted her hand against the glare, then pointed to a figure in one of the barred openings. Was it my father? She hoisted me onto the roof of the car, and I held the shoebox over my head and shook it. The figure waved back. I'm not sure if it's right, this memory of a prison room with a view, but it's a memory my father and I share, perhaps out of the desire to have recognized each other from afar.

In the waiting room, a guard called our names in flat tones, then led us down a series of long corridors, countless hydraulic doors peeling back and shutting behind us, until we arrived at the visiting room. Once we were inside, something softened in the guard's face. "Sit right here, missy," he said. Mother lifted me into a plastic chair and my feet jutted straight out, so I stared at the toes of my tennis shoes, printed with directives in blocky capital letters:
LEFT, RIGHT.

I sat still until a door on the far wall opened and a flood of men filed in. Out of the mass of bulky shapes, my father stepped forward. He grinned and reached for me across the tabletop, and despite the no-touching rule, the guards said nothing. When he took my hand, every manic bit of news I had rehearsed in the car deserted me. I was stunned by the dry warmth of his skin, his white teeth, the way he cleared his throat before speaking.

My father read out loud from a children's book that my mother had brought, his voice roving from bass to falsetto as he acted out the dialogue. I told him what I had eaten for lunch, and in the silence that followed I remembered the tennis shoes, flushed with relief to have something to give him. "Look what we got you," I said, and then tore the box open myself. I beamed while he admired them. "All Stars!" he said. "I'm gonna tear up the court."

It is my father who often recalls my worldliness in that visiting room. At the end of the hour, the guard rested one hand on his gun and called the time. Extended visits were reserved for ass-kissers, and my father refused to kowtow to the guards, but apparently I turned to the stranger by the wall and flashed a saccharine smile. "Daddy," I asked, pointing at the guard, "is that the nice man you told me about?" The guard squinched his face at me, in what passed for kindness in that place, then made a slow turn to the window and gave us a few extra minutes.

What I recall is the pressure of those visits. I sat there, straining for something to tell him, until my chest hummed and my head felt light. Then the guard said, "Time's up," and we shuffled to our feet.

In the clamor of chair legs and murmured goodbyes, we could speak again. "Hey, what do you want for Christmas?" my father asked. I stopped in the doorway and stared at his dark bulk. I wanted
him.
But his voice was filled with a sudden expansiveness, and I knew I should ask for something he could give.

"Something purple," I told him. I was partial, for some reason, to that color.