Vida (54 page)

Kiley lowered one of her thin sharply angled eyebrows. “Interesting. But I think we should spread our cadre more widely. I was about to suggest Philadelphia, where we could use some intelligent liaison with local groups. Also there’s a fight about women’s issues that needs mediating among our people.”

“Buffalo or Philadelphia—which do you prefer?” Roger asked.

“Wherever I’d be most useful,” she said humbly, keeping her eyes on Kiley and ignoring Lark’s glance of appeal. Nobody here knew how involved she was with Leigh and how involved she wanted to be. Philadelphia was only two hours away from him. They could even live together and her real life would resume.

She did not want to become involved with Lark, she knew it through and through; she only wanted to keep him from guessing her decision. “I haven’t been effective politically. I’ve let personal turmoil cloud my judgment. I want to make it up.” She sounded humbly fervent, and she was not lying. She was truly ashamed of how little she had used her leadership role. She also guessed that Lark would take her decision at face value. After all, he had not made any overt suggestions that they become more intensely involved; he had expected working together to accomplish that for him, and he was not accustomed to examining personal motives closely. She thought of his face as he pushed away his plate after eating a little mound of rice and a few Brussels sprouts; she saw him in the car cracking his knuckles and staring grimly ahead. No! She saw Leigh toasting her in the squat motel glasses, the wine red as his lips against his curly beard. Yes. She wanted to be free of sexual entanglements and she wanted Leigh, both, passionately and at once. Free in Philadelphia but secretly married to New York.

Roger went ahead to reason with Kevin, but when the rest of them arrived at Hardscrabble, they walked into a house turned upside down. Kevin was leaving. He had loaded the black Dodge with his few things. Belinda, Jimmy and Bill were going with him.

“I won’t let you take the baby!” Marti said, arms folded on her ample bosom. “You’ve all gone crazy.”

“Leave her” Kevin ordered. “We’ll have to travel light till we knock over a couple banks. We’ll come back for her by summer.”

“I can’t leave her,” Belinda wailed. “I can’t!”

“You can’t take a baby along,” Kevin said. “Come or stay, but you can’t do the kind of fighting we have up the road with a kid on your back”

“She’s just a baby, Belinda” Marti said stubbornly: “She’ll get sick. She’ll be scared. She’ll miss me. She’ll miss the other kids.”

Belinda stood with stooped shoulders, worrying folds of her army jacket in her gaunt hands. She could not move from the front hall. She looked from one to the other and down again. Bill was sitting in the Dodge, warming it up. Vida knew he was running off with Kevin because he was angry at Alice for deciding to get an abortion, but he would not admit that was his reason. Alice sat on the stairway weeping.

“Jimmy!” Vida took him by the arm. “Why are you going? Why? Kevin’s not right!”

Jimmy was smiling a wan twisted smile. His gaze stayed on Kevin who held himself aloof in the doorway with a casual yet military bearing: Kevin looked less crazy, less crazed. He was jaunty poised there, burning with energy. He did not bother putting pressure on his comrades to stay or go. She felt a flash of the old attraction. It was not right for him to go off! Something had gone awry here. Or maybe it was right for Kevin to go and right for her to go with him: almost she felt that. Inaction had poisoned them both. They had scapegoated each other for their impotence. He was using the fight in the Board to pull free of an apparatus that was holding them back. She felt a burning of sorrow in her throat, yet she could not speak. She still wanted to be free of him.

“Jimmy, why are you going?” she whispered, turning his face so that he would look at her with his mild brown eyes.

“He needs me” Jimmy said softly. “If he can’t have you with him, by him, at least he has me. I do, sometimes.”

“Jimmy, don’t sacrifice yourself!”

His lips jerked, and the awkward smile deepened. “Why not?”

What had happened here in her absence? She doubted if anyone but Kevin or Jimmy could tell her. Jimmy was not angry at her, but he was closed to her in some new and final way. He had given himself over to Kevin absolutely. She remembered the feeling of that abandonment, and involuntarily she let go of Jimmy’s shoulder.

Jimmy stepped past her and took hold of Belinda, still fingering her coat, crouched over. “Come on, pal, let’s get moving. We’ll show all these jerks what guerrilla action is. We’ll show everybody.”

Belinda let herself be tugged along. “I’m coming back in the summer!” she called over her shoulder to Marti. “Take care of Roz. I’m coming back for her by summer!”

By summer only Bill had returned, and Jimmy and Belinda were dead.

PART VII

The Present, November

19

A woman in muslin pajamas whose head was shaved admitted Joel and Vida, telling them in a little voice to be seated on cushions in the room decorated mainly with posters about the Master Sajarahata of the Holy Darkness. Joel raised his eyebrows at her. She was having misgivings herself. The last time she had seen Brenda—in 1975—Eva and she had been traveling through Cleveland together. Brenda had been married to a big surly accountant whose passion was a refurbished Harley-Davidson. Brenda was no longer political but was happy to see them. She introduced them to her husband as her old college roommate (Eva) and her former teacher (Vida).

Brenda had been living in Shaker Heights and taking care of her six-month-old child. Her only outside activity was a Chinese cooking class at the high school one evening a week, and she was delighted to see them, more out of boredom than out of any sense of what they were doing as fugitives. She loved having two women home with her during at least part of every day to share child care and housework and above all, to talk to. At that time, Vida had been in between well-established identities and had used her general Movement pseudonym Peregrine or Perry. In the intervening years Natalie had received several change-of-address cards from Brenda and had passed along the new addresses to Vida. This address had turned out to be a two-story house on a residential block in Cleveland Heights.

Whining music came from below, and a smell of frying oil made the air heavy. An older man with shaven head, dressed in a long unbleached robe and clasping his hands before him, took up lotus position on a mat facing both of them. “You wish to see our sister who was called Brenda Warburton?”

That was Brenda’s married name. “I’m an old friend of hers. From college,” Vida said, beginning to get an uneasy prickling sensation along her skin, “Peregrine Nash. Doesn’t she remember me?”

“We haven’t asked her yet.”

“Would you mind?” Joel flashed his brightest smile, “We’re only passing through Cleveland.”

”And what kind of relations did you have with our sister Brenda while she was in the world?” The bald man made a steeple of his hands. He spoke as if English were a foreign language; yet she did not think so. Kick him and he’d curse in fluent Cleveland American, she was sure.

“Me?” Joel hesitated, unsure whether he should claim to know Brenda or not. “I never met her. Peregrine’s her friend.”

“You are not from her ex-husband, Frederick Warburton?”

The biker. “No” Vida assured him. “I’m a friend of Brenda’s only. Er, are you Master Sajarahata? Brenda and I have been friends since 1967”

“Our Master is in New Delhi” the bald man said, “We are only the poorest of the ashrams that study His way. What
kind
of friends?”

She glanced at the exit nervously. “Not extremely close. But good friends for many years.” What was this?

“You were lovers?”

“No” she said, barely suppressing a smile, Brenda had been almost tediously heterosexual, loving a series of large and macho men—Bob Rossi, a lump named El Raton and the biker.

“Our way does not encourage such attachments, and often those who come seeking our sisters and brothers are those bound to them by old chains of sensuality and ignorance”

“This is my wife,” Joel said.

“I see” The bald man rose gracefully. “Sorry if I have offended you. I will find out if our sister wishes to see you”

When he left the room, a girl, also with shaven head, brought them a plate of flat wheaten breads and chickpea mash, which they ate greedily. “Should we get out of here?” she whispered.

“It don’t look good” he muttered back. “No money here”

“Come on, let’s get out.” She rose. “I’m afraid she may decide to save us”

“One second” He scooped up the rest of the chickpeas on the flatbread and rolled it into a napkin provided them. “Picnic by the side of the highway. The romantic swoosh of diesel trucks, the scent of burning rubber”

As they turned to flee, a woman waddled in, looking round as a beach ball in muslin pajamas. It took Vida a long moment to recognize the beach ball as Brenda, bald and grossly overweight. Her face was moonlike in shape and pallor. Where was her child? Vida was afraid to ask. Shaved and bound somewhere? With the biker? Probably with Brenda’s long-suffering mother in Jersey. “But Vida, wait!” Brenda howled, as Vida did recognize her voice and broke into a trot, leaping over the cushions. “I have to talk to you!” Fumbling with the door, Joel got it open and they rushed through. “Come back! I’ve found peace and tranquility. Inner peace! No more drugs! Vida! Vida Asch! Come back and listen to me!”

They ran into the snow where their old car, Mariah, was parked at the curb. For a moment the engine would not start. Brenda appeared in the doorway to wave eagerly to them, beckoning them back. The woman had served them leaned around her, giggling behind her hand. Since Brenda was barefoot she did not come outside, but waved wildly, shouting something. As the ignition finally caught and they barged off sluggishly in a wake of badly combusted oil, Brenda was still beckoning, hopefully.

“Where the hell do we go now? It’s 9 P
.M.
Who else do you know in Cleveland? Anybody who’s really crazy?”

“I’m scared about hanging around. Do you think they got a good look at the car?” She wrung her hands nervously. “I have a headache”

“She’s enough to give you one. Calling you by name out loud. Where’s she at? I don’t think anybody looked at the car. Where to now?”

“I know a guy, if he’s still around … Mason, he was called. He camped out in my living room for a month while he was in New York. Let’s see, I heard he went back to school … in social work—that’s it. He was going to social-work school in ‘75. Next phone we see, let me try”“

“I better keep the engine running. The battery’s dying. We’ve put a couple of thousand miles on the car already, so we can’t complain of the old darling. But she needs some help, and that means time and money and tools.” He let her out at a pay phone.

Mason was in the phone book, but when she dialed his number, intending to hang up if he was home and go over to scout, she got a recording saying that the number had been changed. Moved, probably. Nothing to do but call the new number and talk to him on the phone. “Hello, is Mason home?”

“This is he speaking. Who’s this?” A little flirtatious.

Difficult moment, “Why, Mason, once you slept on my living-room floor for a month … Do you remember … Peregrine?”

“Your
floor?”

“In 1968. In the fall, in New York” Come on, slowpoke. Connect a little. “On the Upper West Side.”

“Holy shit! Oh, my god. Oh, no!” He hung up.

She stared at the buzzing phone. Gee, thanks, Mason. I hope your teeth fall out right now, one at a time and starting in front.

“That was a ringer,” she said. “He hung up on me.”

“Well, imagine you answer the phone some dumb night. You’re drinking Colt 45 malt liquor and feeling like a he-man watching the Browns on the TV and suddenly the phone rings. Hi, there, it’s me, Jesse James. Thought I’d come by with the boys and hang around your living room. Don’t worry, the posse’s at least a mile behind and we can take them easy. We’ll put the horses in the john.”

She laughed and felt better. “That exhausts my Cleveland contacts. I know somebody in Cincinnati . . “ She thought of Saul and Dee Dee embedded there with good I.D., real jobs. She envied them because they had come underground as a couple and they were still a couple. They never seemed to get lonely or strung out.

“Listen, we got to score soon. The car’s in trouble. The battery’s dying. We got less than fifteen bucks, and every time I look at the dash, the gauge sings out Fill me up again.” He took out the napkin gooey with chickpea mash. “Let’s eat!”

“In four days I contact the Network.” She pushed away the proffered food, feeling nauseated.

“Sure, they’re rolling in dough. We need a plan. Listen, nothing is easier to steal than cars. I mean, they got wheels, you just get in and off you go. Always a market for newish Caddies and Lincolns. You run them south.”

She chewed her nails, then stopped, feeling age ten. She had a moment of fearing Joel would suddenly turn into Kevin. Money. That was always the sticking point. “Going into New York makes me nervous as hell … but we can come up with money there.”