There’s the long way and then there’s the very long way, much farther west into mountains before turning east by way of angling south, which means rolling gradually down through the foothills instead of precipitately through the gorge. Even though she’s on none of the roads that she used to come up, she’s still glancing in her rearview so often she keeps crunching onto the shoulder. Rule number one is don’t drive, and if you must, please don’t drive like you’re sleeping or drunk. She tries not to drive all the time, but now she’s a regular face on the train. Known and liked by the different conductors: another rule broken. Hey, Iris. Going down to Poughkeepsie today? Knowing it’s bad that she smiles and says Hey. Bad that she’s friends with the ticket seller at the station because he sits all day reading the paper. Bad that she’s a familiar face in Rhinebeck, also, in spite of sometimes shopping down the river in Poughkeepsie, and getting her mail two towns over in Red Hook, and saving serious emotional collapses for the spot she’s just left, because the view is worth the risk of the bridge. Bad that she’s rooted in the transient train, the anonymous post office box, precisely the places that Frazer has managed to find her.
And because she’s taken the very long way she hasn’t managed to get back before tea. She’s usually ensconced deep in the house by now, after having boiled the water and spilled the box of cookies onto the dish and decanted the milk into the creamer and dropped the cubes of sugar in the sugar bowl with tongs—Miss Dolly is scrupulous about the use of tongs, to prevent spread of germs—and carried the rattling tray onto the porch with the old woman bringing up the rear in her fragile, methodical way. And then politely ducking off to some project-in-progress, before any visitor comes up the path. By that time she’ll be lying well out of reach and very nearly out of sight beneath the library ceiling, on her jerry-rigged scaffold with a bowl of soapy bleach-water, gently wiping away at one hundred years of brown pipe-smoke residue. And listening. Hiding from the ritual of teatime but anxiously listening. How’s that lovely Oriental girl working out? So-and-so saw her at Buell’s Hardware shopping for tools. Where is it she hails from, originally? Coming around the last bend in the Wildmoor road she can see that someone has already arrived, and unhooked the chain, and turned around the little sign from the side saying HOUSE TOURS to the side saying JOIN US FOR TEA. 4–6 P.M. DAILY. It’s just ten past four. Miss Dolly’s visitors are all extremely punctual and ancient, the men thin and erect and slow-moving, like large wading birds, the women tiny and blurry and loud. They all seem to have lived on the river for eons, and never had jobs. Whoever has unhooked the chain has left it lying in the dirt across the drive, and after she bumps over it she gets out of the car and pulls it properly off to one side, noticing as she does that there’s a small white streak of bird shit on the sign. She scratches it off with her thumbnail. The sign looks old and faded already. It’s one of the first things she made when she came here.
She drives the rest of the way through the trees and tries to slip in the back door, but then someone calls out “Iris!” from the porch. “Yes!” she calls back. Her voice snags and she falls over coughing. Too many smokes. “Come visit with us for a minute!” The speaker, unsubtly sing-songing, is clearly relishing some innuendo. Not Dolly, but Mrs. Fowler, the lady from the historical society who leads the house tours. Jenny’s heart picks up speed; the body’s quick fear, always five beats ahead of the brain’s. Still, she keeps moving and hacking toward the front of the house until she comes into the dining room and catches sight of herself in the huge sideboard mirror. Gray-skinned and red-eyed and with hair like Medusa’s, matted up from the wind, sticking straight off her head. She looks cringing and hunted and ugly but she also looks like herself, an upsetting coincidence, and though she can’t now put particular words to it, her shock has something to do with existence, with the continuing presence of her through these worlds upon worlds. She wants to sit down, on the nearest solid surface, but all her hand finds is the shiny gnarled upright of a thronelike velvet chair, and it doesn’t seem right to sit there. Is it all right to sit on the floor? Her body gives a panicked twitch the way it used to when she was so miserably high on something William had given her that she was secretly sure she was dying, that each labored beat of her heart was its last, that her lungs were somehow blocked from filling properly—she would involuntarily twitch out of fear she was dead. She leans heavily against the thronelike chair until the room stops moving and then sneaks a look at her reflection again—no real change. She turns very carefully around and edges her way through the rest of the house to the porch with her eyes on the floor. Miss Dolly is perched in her usual chair, stiff-necked, looking slightly bemused. Mrs. Fowler is bent over the tea tray, but when Jenny comes out she nearly pounces on top of her. “You’ve had a visitor!” she trills. Jenny has long suspected that Mrs. Fowler’s ideas about her involve rock gardens and tea ceremonies and slender bamboo writing tools; that Mrs. Fowler, a connoisseur of the Arts of the Orient, is stubbornly awaiting from Jenny some endorsement of her, Mrs. Fowler’s, very own aesthetic gifts. Mrs. Fowler has previously attributed Jenny’s avoidance of her to mist-enshrouded Oriental remoteness. Now she seems delighted to have Jenny on the spot. She picks an envelope up off the tea tray and waggles it suggestively. “I knew you had an admirer. From the way he asked questions about you, I could just tell that he’d met you before. He was trying to be subtle but I’m a very canny reader of men! And he just now dropped by here again with some adorable story about wanting to ask your advice about having his house painted. We tried to make him stay for tea but he wouldn’t, he just scribbled you a little note and then asked for an envelope for it. I was just saying to Dolly, We’ve got hot tea right here, we ought to steam it open! For heaven’s sake I’m teasing you, Iris. I’d never. Are you all right? You look green. Have some tea. Sit right there and I’ll get you some tea and we can open the envelope.”
“Quit fussing, Louise,” Dolly says. As usual, an exercise in sharing Mrs. Fowler’s excitement has given way to irritation. Like Jenny, Dolly tends to disappear from the house when Mrs. Fowler gives tours; this is one of the reasons Mrs. Fowler so regularly comes to tea.
“No, thank you,” Jenny says, trying to make a casual grab for the envelope and instead falling sideways into one of the porch chairs.
“There’s lemonade. Miss Dolly’s famous lemonade, of course,” Mrs. Fowler says, waving the envelope around busily, in the style of a symphony conductor. She winks over her shoulder at Dolly.
Dolly ignores her. “I bet it’s all those fumes you’re working with,” she tells Jenny. “What about those fumes in the porte cochere? I don’t know if you should be using that paint-stripper stuff on the porte cochere. It might be bad for my bluebirds.”
“Your bluebirds!” exclaims Mrs. Fowler.
Miss Dolly regards Mrs. Fowler remotely. “The bluebirds that nest in the porte cochere,” she says.
“That’s so darling!”
“That’s what birds do,” Dolly says. “Did you hear me, Iris? If those fumes are making you look so green, I bet they’ll fry those little birds.”
“I had no idea you had nesting bluebirds—I’ll have to add that in to my tour. I thought they said those PCPs or whatever they are have killed off all the bluebirds. Oh, did you want to look at this, Iris? What do you say, Dolly? Should we let her look?”
Once Jenny has the envelope in hand she tries standing up. “Excuse me,” she begins.
“Oh, no.” Mrs. Fowler pushes her, gently and firmly, back into her chair. “Miss Dolly and I have been climbing up the walls with curiosity, haven’t we, Dolly? You’re so mysterious, Iris. Won’t you just tell us a thing or two? Where in the world did you meet this young man? You never seem to have pals or go out or do anything except shop for paint. Tell us. Dolly, make her tell us.”
“Please recall our agreement,” Dolly says instead, in her bland, unoiled voice. “Regarding room and board.”
Jenny nods. “Of course,” she says.
Mrs. Fowler blinks at Dolly. “What agreement?”
“Regarding room and board,” Dolly says.
“No male visitors,” says Jenny. “This man wasn’t visiting—I don’t know him. He must have made a mistake—”
“Oh, Miss Dolly. That’s so unromantic and unrealistic. This is 1974. The girls are going to do whatever they want no matter how you try to stop them. I know that with my girls, I’d much rather have the boyfriends coming by the house than taking them out God knows where. Just the other day Maureen—”
“Even if he was a boyfriend, which he wasn’t,” Jenny says, “because I don’t even know him, I would never have him visit—”
“Please correct me if I am somebody’s parent,” Dolly says. “So far as I know I am nobody’s parent. Whenever I have taken a boarder at Wildmoor I have forbidden lady visitors if the boarder was a male, and male visitors if the boarder was a lady, and it hasn’t been because I’m somebody’s parent. It’s because it’s my house!”
“Of course it is,” says Mrs. Fowler.
“No matter how many folks come tramping in and out at three dollars a pop. It’s my house.”
“And thank goodness for that!” Mrs. Fowler exclaims. “When I see some of these lovely old homes come separated from their owners it just breaks my heart. Like at the old Bellingham place? When the last Bellingham finally gave up and sold it to the state for the back taxes? They turned it into a park, and they didn’t even give it a budget for oversight or preservation or anything, just stuck an ‘Open, dawn to dusk’ sign at the gate and a line of Porta Potties on the drive. You go over there now and there are all these people who haven’t got anywhere better to go barbecuing hot dogs on the lawn. Remember that mosaic of lovely little colored tiles in the bottom of the fountain? Somebody’s pried those up, every single one of them. It doesn’t even matter because the fountain is practically a public swimming pool. It just breaks my heart.”
Miss Dolly lets this discourse dribble off into silence. “All I’m saying,” she concludes at last, “is it’s my house.”
After a time Mrs. Fowler says, brightly, “More tea?”
“I’ll take a splash,” Dolly says. “Iris, I need to hear how things are coming for the Fourth.”
“Good,” she says cautiously.
“Have you got my ball?” By this is meant the yellow croquet ball. The yellow croquet ball supernaturally vanished last summer, at Dolly’s yearly Independence Day picnic. Even the determined bushwhacking of dozens of guests at the time, and the denuding of the ground through the subsequent winter, have failed to produce the lost ball. It has been one of Jenny’s most urgent tasks to locate someone who will sell her a yellow ball pro rata, as Dolly is reluctant to buy a new set—this was the errand that had taken her down to Poughkeepsie this morning, returning from which she had found Frazer waiting for her—but so far she has not been successful.
“. . . no,” she says.
“No?” Although the project has been ongoing for some time, without any progress, Dolly seems newly amazed by this setback. “No? How hard can this be? Did you try Buell’s in Rhinebeck?”
Jenny nods. She had not wanted to try Buell’s in Rhinebeck—she hadn’t wanted to try anything in Rhinebeck. Being the nearest large town, Rhinebeck is a place she has sought to avoid. But the demanding nature of the yellow ball quest has sent her into nearly all such dreaded places, one after the other.
“What did Buell say?”
“He said if he gave you the yellow ball, then his set will be missing the yellow ball and he won’t be, able to sell it.”
“Did you tell him who it was for?”
“Yes.”
“And he still wouldn’t do it?”
Jenny shakes her head.
“Did you tell Buell he’s not invited to my Independence Day picnic this year?”
“Oh, Dolly,” says Mrs. Fowler.
“Well, fiddlesticks,” Dolly says. “And by that I mean something much worse.”
“I’ll try again tomorrow,” Jenny says.
“I think you’d better go down to the city. They’ve got to have some outfit that replaces croquet balls. Haven’t they got everything in Chinatown? You’d know your way all around there.”
“At this point you could get a new set for the cost of her train fare,” Mrs. Fowler says, rashly.
“Unfortunately, you don’t know half as much about this as I do,” Dolly snaps. To Jenny she says, “You go down to Manhattan tomorrow and I bet you’ll find it. We’ve got to get this thing taken care of. There’s a lot else to do.”
“Of course,” Jenny says. At the thought of going into Manhattan her heart must have sped up, but it feels more like it’s beating through sludge. Thump . . . Thump . . . “Excuse me,” she murmurs.
“You are excused,” Dolly says, lifting her teacup.
Making her way off the porch and back into the house, and holding the envelope as inconspicuously as she can, she hears Mrs. Fowler say, “I wanted to find out about her boyfriend.”
“I don’t pay her to have boyfriends,” Dolly says.
In truth, Dolly almost doesn’t pay her at all. She is frightened by how much Frazer seems to know about her—that her situation isn’t good but truly bad, that she’s far from indifferent to money. When Dolly hired her they’d agreed that her pay would be room and board plus a small hourly wage for her work, and that she would keep track of her hours. For the first few months Dolly had paid her, but now, whenever she tells Dolly she has worked, say, one hundred fifty hours this month, or thirty hours this week, or any chunk of time, large or small, Dolly tells her to wait until she reaches a good round number, because it’s such a production to go to the bank. Meanwhile giving her a very small allowance, which keeps her in groceries and train fare and gas and supplies for the housework—which keeps her, Jenny knows. Period.
She has to light a cigarette before she opens the note, and then she has to smoke the whole thing. Her nails are so bitten she can’t get a hold of the envelope’s flap and finally, in a burst of irritation, she just rips the end of it off with her teeth. The tiny piece of paper inside says, in Frazer’s childlike scrawl, RHINEBECK MOTEL ROOM 10 PLEASE COME TRUST ME HEAR ME OUT
—FRAZER
FRAZER’S FRIENDS Dick and Helen, a professor and his aspiring-writer wife, had lived in Riverdale, the Bronx. Frazer had met them during his brief career as the athletic director of the famously incendiary little college where Dick still taught, halfway upriver between the Bronx and Wildmoor. Jenny had gotten the sense Dick liked knowing Frazer but didn’t like Frazer, while Helen disliked knowing him as much as she disliked him, but they were both the kind of people determined to feel they were daring. They had subscriptions to the Evergreen Review and season tickets for avant-garde theater. Dick’s specialism was the nineteenth-century American novel but he was really an experimental poet, as yet unpublished, whose heated defense of one of his contemporaries against the assaults of a rival professor was being published, letter by letter, in the journal of the Modern Language Association. It would be Jenny’s task, among others, to archive these letters for a book Dick thought he might publish. Helen had been a housewife until the past year, when their youngest child had gone off to college. This was the change that had prompted them to do something they would never have dreamed of otherwise, and hire a housekeeper/assistant, so that Helen could go every day to the tiny Greenwich Village apartment she’d rented for use as a study, to work on her novel.
Frazer had told Dick and Helen that Jenny “needed a place to lie low for a while” and that it was best if they didn’t know more. She had to admit he’d been skillfully vague. He’d made it seem, on the one hand, that she might have a boyfriend who’d gotten abusive. On the other hand, he’d implied she might be a bona fide fugitive from the law. Either way Dick and Helen couldn’t say no to her without seeming hard-hearted, or square. Together they had worked out her story: Jenny was the daughter of old family friends, living with Dick and Helen to establish residency so that she could apply to a New York State school. Her name was Sally Chen. She planned to be a doctor.
Dick said to her, “One of the truly great things about academic life in this country, Jenny, is that it has always embraced people of every race and every nation. White, black, yellow, red. So it’ll make perfect sense to our acquaintances that Helen and I would have known Chinese people. Sally. Sorry. Should we celebrate?”
Dick and Helen made a point of living their lives as much as possible free of American commercialism. They had just been to the South of France, and had brought back—smuggled back, in two suitcases taken over empty for the purpose—quantities of handmade cheeses as well as brandies and wines that weren’t available for sale in the States. “The artisanal aspect of cuisine is being completely effaced,” Dick said, cutting into a round of cheese carefully, like a surgeon, to create extremely minuscule wedges, “by the corporatizing of agriculture, by commercialism—basically, by all the wonderful social ills our nation is so good at manifesting and spreading to other parts of the world. Have some cheese, guys,” he said to Jenny and Frazer. “And wine. Let’s not forget about the wine.”
“Right on,” Frazer said. They lifted their glasses.
“Can you taste that?” Dick cried. “If you had a more acidic wine, the cheese would taste chalky. That’s what’s being lost, all this knowledge—this culture. To freedom,” he added belatedly.
The arrangement lasted for barely six months. “I think,” Dick said to her one night, choosing his words with ostentatious care, “that you are a person of substance. A person that, under better circumstances, I could imagine as a very close friend. Don’t you think?” And another time: “The whole thing with not knowing your story has gotten kind of hard for Helen, because she tends to assume the worst. If you feel the same sort of respect for us that we feel for you, you might clarify things and put Helen’s mind at ease. I mean,” he held his hands surrender-style, laughing, “just a hint. By all means please don’t tell us who you are! Just the broad strokes. Are we talking multiple felony indictments or, ah, first offense? Maybe just a bad vibe that made you want to get away for a while?”
And then at last she had woken with him in her room, leaning into her bed, his old-cheese-and-tobacco breath hot on her neck. She’d sprung up. “Are you sleeping okay?” he had whispered.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, and cringed from him until he went back to his room.
The next morning, after they’d both gone to work, she packed her bag, put on her cleaning gloves, and wiped everything in the house. It took hours. She went through the kitchen drawers and wiped every fork, knife, spoon, and utensil. She wiped the spices in the spice rack and the Tupperware containers in the fridge. She went through the apartment room by room wiping even things she’d never touched before: the Rockwell Kent engraving in its frame, the Paul Robeson records. She saved the bathroom for last. When she arrived there she stood over the toilet she had cleaned once a week on her knees. She felt as if she’d never really seen this toilet before. Then she wiped it, for the last time, and left.
SHE’D CHOSEN Rhinecliff at random: She’d decided to go where one fourth of her money would take her. It was not very far. In Rhinecliff she had stood for a long time on the deserted station platform with her duffel bag and her accordion file, looking out at the river that had lain alongside the train the whole way from New York. She smelled rotting vegetation, but also brine. She sniffed, hard. It was low tide, and the ocean smell somehow seemed stronger, though the ocean was now two hours farther away. She’d finally walked out to the front of the station, called a taxi, and asked for the nearest motel. There had only been one, miles inland near a town called Rhinebeck. Everything riverine, rhine-something. The motel had subtracted another huge chunk of her funds, but then the ad for the Wildmoor job had appeared in the Rhinebeck Gazette the next day. Later she would learn that the ad had been running for months without any responses, because Dolly rarely made payments, a fact known all over the town. But she was an immigrant, unknowing, without options. She agreed to take board as a part of her pay. Late October, 1972. She would remember the Nixon placards at the ends of the secretive drives that slipped off through the yellow-leaved woods from the long country road.
She chose Red Hook for her post office box because it was barely a town; the post office sat by itself just past a desolate intersection, and served scattered farms, or so she guessed reading the flyers on the bulletin board. She called herself Iris Wong and subscribed to the Rhinebeck Gazette. Once it started coming she drove to Red Hook two or three evenings a week, after the post office window had closed, and took the slim accumulation of papers to a neglected little park on the river with a lone vandalized picnic table. She never saw anyone using this table and she didn’t use it, either. She read the papers in the car. She would tackle the AP capsules first, whipping open each of the two or three papers to the national news page and skimming it with eyes narrowed and head slightly averted, as if she expected to be struck blind by the newsprint. After she’d gone through them all without finding any mention of herself she’d start over, a little more calmly, and actually read, from beginning to end. There wasn’t much to be learned about the state of the larger world, or even about the state of the Rhinebeck area, from this newspaper, full as it was of church spaghetti-dinner announcements and tips for keeping Canada geese off the lawn. But she perversely enjoyed that aspect of it—enjoyed the sense it gave her that she, too, was imprisoned. She couldn’t be expected to do anything for now but familiarize herself with her cell.
November, December. The New Year, January. Her ritual with the paper had turned into a lazy indulgence. She would leave the engine on, blast the heat and the radio, slowly smoke at least a half a pack of cigarettes. One day at the beginning of February she read in the paper dated January 28, 1973, that cease-fire agreements had been signed in Paris, to end the war in Vietnam. The article had been reprinted from the Times: Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh, Foreign Minister of the Vietcong Provisional Revolutionary Government, wore an amber ao dai with embroidery on the bodice, an unusual ornament for her. Mrs. Rogers, wife of the Secretary of State, wore a dress with a red top and navy skirt. The man she loved was in prison, and she herself was a fugitive for the things they had done to protest—no, demolish—this war. Now it all had been calmly concluded, the outfits of the various parties described as if for a society column. She remembered letting the paper fall into her lap and lighting a fresh cigarette, then pulling the cuff of her shirt up over the heel of her hand to wipe away the condensation on the windshield. The sun had just set on the far side of the river, the afterglow a cool wintertime pink, like the flesh of a melon. The leaves were all gone from the trees, and against the suffused evening sky the bare branches formed a dark filigree. She heard, somewhere near the river’s surface, the frantic honking of geese settling down for the night. It had occurred to her that perhaps she should keep this article, as a memento. After one more cigarette, and one last look at the fading sky, she’d thrown away the rest of the papers and driven back to Wildmoor, but when she got there she threw away the article, too. It seemed empty, a memento of nothing.
BEFORE, IN her previous life, she had been a bomber. She and William had bombed several government targets, mostly draft offices, always deep in the night when no one would be killed. They’d known nothing better seized attention than violence, and that the rightness of theirs would be obvious, dedicated as it was to saving lives. They’d meant to persuade the most hawkish, resistant Americans, and been sure that they could—but after she’d gone underground Jenny realized they’d never known quite what they faced. They had known only like-minded people. Even so-called conservatives around the Bay Area had held views not so different from theirs. Jenny’s life at Wildmoor was the first time she was ever submerged in that part of the country she and William had meant as their audience, against which they’d fought with such hope, and so little success.
The scale of her situation at Wildmoor was exceedingly small, finite, knowable. A world of twenty-odd people or less, all living in the rhythms of a distant time, more like her vague ideas of 1933 or even 1893, the year Dolly had been born, than 1973. A true Shangri-la for its natives. After living there for a couple of months she looked up the legend of Rip Van Winkle, having seen reference to that person everywhere—it was the sort of thing that had been no part of her California education—and then began to see everyone around her as a race of Rip Van Winkles, still asleep. What would these people think if they were ever to take the train to the city, or even drive a half hour in their cars to Albany or Poughkeepsie, where the year 1973 was steaming along in all its anger and confusion without them?
The local trait found its most extreme expression in her new employer. She had never known someone with money—transcendent, atemporal money, money of such a baffling magnitude as to require only one intervention with the plane of reality to have eternal, irreversible effects. The kind of money impervious even to its own disappearance, over a couple of centuries of folly and abhorrence of labor. She had thought she knew all about class, she recognized the names and faces of the titans of American industry, had come to understand that none of these people were other than several lucky steps from the sort of hustling her father had done, lucklessly, all his life—but she’d never known someone with money. And never having known someone with money, she had never encountered what she now recognized as an axiom, that the rich are incurious. She had arrived at Dolly’s with an autobiography that was neither too exciting nor too bland, too local nor too foreign, too complete (no one remembers her life thoroughly) nor too full of strange holes, yet Dolly had never asked for it. Dolly had never asked her any questions at all, beyond, “Have you got your own car? That’s all right. You can drive mine.” It seemed to come as no surprise to Dolly that “Iris Wong,” “Chinese,” “from San Francisco,” should materialize to meet Dolly’s around-the-house needs. And Jenny found that, far from being grateful for the reprieve from scrutiny, she was increasingly driven to make herself known. Increasingly angry at not being asked. She knew better than to offer information that was not solicited, yet she increasingly volunteered tidbits that weren’t even true. “My parents never really understood my interest in drawing,” she announced one day, as Dolly sat watching the bluebirds in the sycamore tree. “My grandfather Brinson was a great collector of drawings,” said Dolly. “I wonder if we could get down some of the drawings he brought back from Peru, and hang them in the sun room.”
Then it was still Dolly’s unrealized plan—Mrs. Fowler’s, really, but Dolly needed the money—to open the house up for tours, but with Jenny’s arrival the plan gained momentum. Mrs. Fowler had decided the restoration work itself could be called an attraction. Jenny put herself to the task of learning restoration as she’d once taught herself to handle oil paint, to repair her old car, to assemble a timer and fuse. She began using the scrapbooks of Wildmoor in the local library, since Dolly’s own records of the changes the house had been through were all buried somewhere in her rooms, so that the excavation of them was its own separate task. One day, reading, she came across the accounts of a party Dolly had given to celebrate the marriage of a nephew, in 1954. Dolly had invited the entire towns of Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, as well as her social equals up and down the river. When the guests had arrived, they were divided in two—the river people ushered into the house for caviar and champagne, the townspeople sent down to the field, to the far side of a rope strung nearby the gazebo. The townspeople as one had walked out—it was 1954, after all! They weren’t serfs!—and Dolly had professed herself truly bewildered. But after a town representative explained peoples’ feelings to her she’d apologized in the newspaper, and added that she planned to be buried in the Rhinebeck cemetery, which was public, instead of her family’s plot. The insult was forgiven.
Not long after, standing in the aisle of the hardware store reading down her list of supplies, Jenny heard someone say, near the register, “So now we have the privilege of giving the old bitch three dollars to look at her house. I guess she’s finally broke.”
“She deserves to be,” someone else said.
When Jenny emerged from the aisle, with her supplies in her arms, the speakers, two Rhinebeck men, turned and stared at her. One was the proprietor. He’d been friendly the first time she’d shopped here. He rang her up on this day without speaking.
“That’s her,” she heard him tell the other man as she went out the door.
SHE NEVER meant to become a familiar face anywhere, yet she’d find herself chatting with people. Introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian. Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness—not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face. Trying to outflank suspicion. Sometimes she longed for a companion, to fulfill this desire for acceptance. A confidante, to make sure that she didn’t break down and confide in the plumber. It was more and more difficult for her to trust her intuitions, her judgments, her decisions. The one-year anniversary of the day on which William had been arrested in their bomb-making workshop by FBI agents; the day on which she had fled her apartment with two grocery bags of her snatched-up belongings; the day on which Frazer had driven her in the whistling darkness down 1-5 to the Los Angeles airport came and went and she failed to notice until several days later. The oversight made her feel panic, as if she had spoken aloud in her sleep, or gone into town naked, or committed some other rash act of exposure.
Beneath all this self-criticism was the thought that she tried not to think, of how terribly lonely it was to be in this alone. She pretended her longings were purely pragmatic: A companion would give her the gift of another perspective. Two were more likely than one to make crucial corrections, to compensate for extreme paranoia, or extreme tendencies toward the sense of invulnerability. She was capable of veering in the latter direction, though never for long. But even brief veering was reckless, like jerking the wheel while driving. You might jerk off the road, and then you’d be a jerk. That was just the kind of stupid, drunk-seeming funk her mind lately slumped into. Jerk/jerk. Drunk/funk. She had a growing catalogue of dangerous sins a partner might help her confront, chief among them the irrational but insistent idea that her time was almost done; that perhaps, in just a few more months, she’d be able to come out. Completely. She had always hoped, halfbelieved, that time was the answer, as if her problem were like anything in the physical world, subject to erosion. Or perhaps it was a narrow window of opportunity she awaited, a confluence of attitudes and events that could occur any moment. If this was true, she might have already missed it.
The Watergate hearings began her first summer at Wildmoor. She listened to them as she worked, finally painting the upstairs bedrooms, which she’d fully prepared while the weather was cold. She’d stored furniture, vacuumed great bales of dust, chosen colors and gotten them mixed. Gently scraped eons of shape-dulling paint off the moldings, covered countless complexly paned windows. The radio she listened to was a cheap little transistor she’d found in the stables, perhaps forgotten by some short-lived, never-paid, handy-man predecessor of hers. It could hardly hold on to a signal; every few minutes static would rise like a sandstorm and drown the words out. She’d climb down from her ladder and yank the antennae. Finally it occurred to her to put the radio on an extension cord, and then she lashed it to her ladder with duct tape and tweaked and adjusted it constantly while she never stopped painting. The little radio taking on siftings of paint like an outward expression of static. A spectrum of static in buttercup yellow and sea green and cabbage-rose pink. She felt almost happy, to finally have vigorous work. Or perhaps she was happy to feel herself drawn in again by the life of the nation. Sometimes Watergate felt as surreal as a dream, because she had no one with whom to discuss it. No one beside her to gasp—really gasp—when Nixon’s ex-secretary let fall that everything was on tape. She had rushed out of the room, in her amazement actually scrambled down from her ladder and rushed from the room to the head of the stairs—and stopped there, hearing Dolly’s bland voice drifting in from the porch. Hearing teatime visitation in session, the sound of the landed who lived on this river. The sound of the “set,” anchored in ancient greatness, where even the dirt and the trees justified them. For them there was no vivid convulsion in the life of the nation. There was no odor of change on the air. There was not even the melancholy of national shame that the “average American” felt. Theirs was a nation transcending such temporal things. What must that be like, she had thought, turning back from the stairs with her brush in her hand. That complacence that said, I have no need to watch the strange signs, to scent change on the wind. I have no need to pay any attention. It certainly wasn’t the thing that drove Nixon to tape conversations. That was the act of an insecure, paranoid man, never sure of his empire. On the river empire was eternal, even when funded by three-dollar tours.
When the first room was painted she rented a sander to start on redoing the floor, and sent a mushroom cloud of sawdust to the sixteen-foot ceiling. Sawdust settled thickly all along the painstakingly repainted moldings. Because the summer had been so humid, and the paint so slow to dry, the sawdust seemed as if it might stick to the new paint forever. It didn’t, but only after three days of additional labor. She’d let herself cry when this happened; and then she took back the sander and decided to paint with no thought of the floors for as long as she could. She would deal with those later. The first night she could finally shut all the windows, because the paint had all dried and no scent of it lingered, was the night of first frost. Only early September. For the fall she planned cleaning the library ceiling. She did a final dustmopping of the freshly swept floors after taking up all of the dropcloths. As she stood looking over her work Dolly came to join her. Dolly had looked at the rooms perhaps three times a day every day for three months. Now she said, “I don’t remember that shade on the wainscoting.
“It may be off by a tone or two. It’s hard to match these historical colors.”
“I don’t mean the tone, dear. I mean the color. I don’t recall having drab gray wainscoting when I was a girl.”
After a long silence Jenny said, very calmly, “I used the scrapbooks in the Rhinebeck library for all of the colors, and then you approved the paint chips.”
“The scrapbooks I donated? Did Mrs. McNulty go through them with you?” When this had been confirmed Dolly said, still with a touch of displeasure, as though an unfair point had been wrested from her, “Mrs. McNulty does a wonderful job.” Dolly’s eyes narrowed at the wainscoting.
“They’re wonderful scrapbooks,” Jenny heard herself saying. “I’ve learned so much from them. I read about that big party you threw.”
“That must not have been me. I’m not one for big parties.”
“You had a big party in 1954, when your nephew got married.”
“Did I? I much prefer just hosting tea.”
“I wondered whether that’s why you began hosting tea. To open the house to the town, after closing it to them.”
“I’m not sure what you mean. Tea is just a tradition. My mother held visiting hours, and my grandmother, and all our set.”
“But anyone can come to tea. Not just your set.”
“You’d have a hard time finding any of my set anymore.”
“What I mean is, you wouldn’t let people who were not of your set in the house, at your nephew’s big party.”
Dolly looked at her for what seemed the first time. “That was a long time ago. I hadn’t realized how much things had changed.”
“Things are still changing,” Jenny said. To stop herself saying anything else she went quickly downstairs.
IT WASN’T UNTIL the late fall, when the leaves were yellow on the trees again, and then on the ground, and brief flurries of snow had begun, that she understood what the Watergate scandal might mean for her. She’d been to Red Hook for the papers, and had a letter from William. In the papers were the reports of the president’s having fired the special prosecutor and abolished his office, and the attorney general and deputy attorney general having resigned. Congress seemed daily more in favor of Nixon’s impeachment—but these things she already knew from the radio news. In the letter was this:
“We’ve finally come back through the looking glass to the side that is sane. When even the crooks in the government are ready to call the president the biggest crook of all, I can see the conditions for general uprising we once feared would never arrive. The “average American” wants Nixon out. The critical faculty we tried so hard to inculcate with regard to the war has arrived with regard to the White House. I wonder how I—or any person like me—would fare now, brought before the robed judges, in this altered climate.”
Attached was a short note from Dana. “William asked me to get you the name of this very good friend. William thinks you should look this friend up. Write to him at the address below and set up a phone call.”
The language of the note, the good friend that she should look up, was obviously William’s. She hadn’t known Dana and William corresponded with each other independent of her. That behind her back the two of them pondered something so private as her, Jenny’s, fate. It annoyed her, or at least, something did. She was aware of a childish unwillingness in herself to realistically face what surrender would mean. When she imagined it, she saw herself among the neatly dressed, anxious visitors to San Quentin, placing her hand on the Plexi partition with her palm matched to his, somehow feeling the warmth of his skin. Not herself on the far side of the glass, without even William among her rare visitors. She couldn’t really imagine surrender at all. Although she was amazed to realize it, she and William had never discussed what they’d do if they got separated. They had endlessly discussed what they’d do if they both were arrested, but they had never discussed, perhaps because it had never occurred to them, what they would do if only one of them was caught. Every action they had ever done they’d done assiduously together. That had been part of the power of it, that their every movement was in tandem. Then his arrest seemed to come as a freak, a complete accident. On his way home he’d planned to drop by their workshop, a garage that they rented, to pick up a tool. She’d been at home making salad to have with their dinner. Listening to the police band, as was her around-the-clock, paranoid habit. Peeling a carrot, listening less to the cops than for William’s footfall on the stair. Lasagna in the oven. Sometimes the harvester’s scythe falls and you are left standing. Running through the apartment with grocery bags, grabbing your things. But why? she asked. Why was she spared? A true marriage, he’d once said, was one in which the fear of outliving the other rendered minor the fear of one’s death. His arrest had been like his death to her, and she’d wanted to be dead as well. But she’d known that she had to live on, to wait for him, and this was the thing that she felt she lived for. His suggesting she turn herself in somehow seemed like his cutting her loose, though she knew this was not what he’d meant.
She wrote back, “I’ll let you know when I reach our good friend,” and glued the slip of paper with the lawyer’s name and phone number on it into one of her shoes, underneath the insole, so that all day long she had to step on it, and think of it. Merely calling the lawyer wouldn’t mean she had chosen surrender. But a week passed, and then several weeks more, and she still didn’t call. As winter deepened she sometimes went down to the river and sat watching the train. That close to the water the wind was much worse; she would smoke, without gloves, as her fingers went bluish and stiff. It was the same train on which she’d arrived here. She remembered what satisfaction it had given her to find that the Wildmoor property ran along the same tracks, as if staying nearby would ensure that one day she’d get back on and finish the trip. Now she knew that the train went to Canada. Sitting blue and numb on the dead grass, looking down at the dross that washed up from the river, she would feel the train register itself first in her bones, amplify her teeth-chattering before it burst into view and she saw, as it streaked past the curve, a conductor’s pale face and raised hand, briefly waving to her before whipped out of sight. She would pretend she was ruminating the plausibility of it, the chances she’d save enough money, the chances of crossing the border, but she knew—as she might not have known if the train were just a little bit farther away, if it were gliding on the river’s other side, if it were merely a wail she heard in the night—that the train was a dream. She didn’t have the documents or the money, or Canadian friends.
Then, as February began, something happened having nothing to do with her own ruminations, and she stopped hesitating and flew to the phone. In Berkeley, a band of masked, armed, black-clad women and men kidnapped the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of California’s premier families. The girl’s last name was as well known as Fremont’s, familiar to all Californians from big granite buildings and vast public parks. The kidnappers were a revolutionary cadre that nobody had heard of before, but they claimed kinship to a long list of better-known threats, like the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party. The kidnapping had taken place in full view of the neighbors, Berkeley graduate students and young couples who’d thrown themselves on their floors as machine-gun fire shattered their windows and the screaming girl was dragged from her house wearing only a bathrobe, and dumped in the trunk of a car. All over the country the kidnapping was greeted with outrage and horror. It even made the front page of the Rhinebeck Gazette. If William was right—if Watergate had made mainstream Americans more sympathetic to radicalism—something like this would exhaust that new sympathy quickly. She didn’t know anything about these kidnappers, who they were, what they hoped to achieve, but she could see they were being portrayed in the worst possible light. She had dreamed of a window that might open for her. What if Watergate really had opened it? Now the public’s dismay at the kidnapping would close it again.
And so one freezing morning she boarded the train at Rhinecliff, at an hour unusual for her so she’d see no conductors she knew, and rode farther south toward the city than she’d been since the night she had left. She got off at Peekskill. Here the river emerged from the vise of the highlands and pooled open again to the width of a lake. Beside the quaint station were a few scarred benches facing the water and the cement plant a half mile away on the opposite bank. “If it’s raining I’ll meet you inside,” she’d told him, “but if not I’ll be out on a bench. The wind is brutal off the river at this time of year. I’m sure we won’t have company.”
The lawyer, when he finally came, turned out to be much younger than she’d expected. She had imagined a salt-and-pepper moustache and eyebrows, some sort of socialist party survivor who’d seen darker days and far worse situations. Instead he was smooth-cheeked and handsome, with a pair of steel-framed glasses to lend gravity. His voice, when he said hello to her, had the hard city edge she had heard on the phone. Then it had been persuasive; in person she found it too dissonant, matched with his face. “Nice spot,” he said, pulling his collar tightly around his neck. It was a dark, windy, quintessentially upstate New York day. Clouds the color of pewter rolled over them, pushed by strong wind. The air felt pregnant with snow, a worse cold than dry cold would have been. She had been waiting for almost half an hour, in her thin jeans and an old leather jacket that was missing two buttons, and a sweatshirt rolled up for a scarf. She couldn’t feel her hands or her toes, but she was used to it. She hadn’t bought winter clothes since she’d been here. She’d never had enough money.
“I won’t keep you long,” she said, feeling embarrassed. She realized that in some part of herself she had actually wanted the older, grandfatherly man. The one who would arrive with a gruff nod but a warm gaze, who would be knowledgeable and relaxed, having won harder cases than hers more times than he could count. She suddenly longed to be sheltered by someone like that. Instead she was huddled outside on a bench with a very young man, and their meeting so far felt as awkward and fraught as a date.
He was watching her, waiting, and so she finally choked out her question. “In light of the current political climate,” she began awkwardly, in the way she’d rehearsed. When she was finished he said, after a moment, “I think it’s fair to say that the current climate is pretty much the same as it’s been. No deals for fugitives. They’ll talk to you once you surrender. It’s safe to assume that coming in on your own will help out, later on.”
“I didn’t just mean the climate inside the Justice Department. I meant the political climate in general. The Watergate scandal.”
“I’m not seeing the connection.”
“With abuses of power at the executive level so certain, it struck me there might be more sympathy now for the radical movement.”
“I don’t know about that. You’d be safer just putting that out of your mind. It won’t bear on your case.”
Now she no longer felt she was just quoting phrases of William’s. The young lawyer’s tone was so breezily certain she wondered just how young he was. Was he younger than her? “How can you say that?” she demanded. “The government’s prosecutorial habits are always political.”
“Sure, but the charges against you are serious. I’m not trying to stick up for Nixon. I think the guy’s as crooked as they come. But you can’t say the executive office did criminal acts, so my criminal acts aren’t important.”
“It’s not the so-called crimes, it’s the underlying reasons for them. You can’t strip our acts of their context and say they were crimes, and at the same time strip something like Vietnam of its crime, and call it a legitimate venture.”
“Vietnam was a war. A distinct body of law applied to it.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No, but your case will be decided on law. I agree with you, Jenny. But we’re talking about your chances in the justice system. We’re not in ethics class.”
This made her wish for the meeting to end. She stared across the water at the glowing cement plant. Although it was midday the sky looked like dusk, and the plant’s green and gold lights shone intensely. A plume of white smoke, perhaps steam, emerged and was steadily snatched by the wind. The river looked like the ocean downstream at its mouth, green and full of harsh chop. She said, barely hearing herself over the wind, “I don’t have any money.”
“We don’t need to talk about that.”
“We will. Maybe there’s no point in our talking at all. I’ll have to have a court-appointed lawyer.”
“Would your family help?”
“My mother died when I was a baby. My father isn’t sympathetic to my views.”
“Enough said. Jenny, if you go forward with me I want you to assume money isn’t an issue. Money will be worked out somehow. The issue is, do you want to go in? Do you want to surrender?”
The white plume was still steadily tom from its smokestack. She sighed; she must sound like a truculent child. “Let’s pretend that I do.”
“What happens after that will have a lot to do with how much you cooperate.”
“I won’t name names.”
For the first time she was aware of impatience. “Then you’ll have a hard time,” he said, crossing and recrossing his legs. “I hope you weren’t expecting me to tell you that there’s some kind of Watergate amnesty for the government’s enemies. Your only advantage is the stuff that you know. You had a large circle of friends when you lived in Berkeley. Your boyfriend was convicted of bombing draft offices. At the time they were claimed by something called the People’s Army and no one believes that was just him alone, or even just him and you. You see, I did my homework before coming here. If you surrender and offer no information you’re going to get a very hostile reception.”
“I can’t betray friends. I don’t mean to drag you back to ethics class, but it’s a principle for me.”
“Maybe you have information that doesn’t involve your close friends. Things you’ve heard on the grapevine.”
“Like what?”
“Information about this kidnapping would help you. A lot.”
She knew she shouldn’t be surprised this had come up, but she still wondered whether he sensed this was why she had called him. Flamboyant behavior elsewhere in the Left; sudden desire to get herself cover. “Not my circle,” she said.
“Same hometown. You might know someone who knows one of them.”
“I don’t, and if I did we’d just be back in ethics class. I’d be willing to talk about general things. Common techniques, types of targets—”
“You wouldn’t betray kidnappers? That’s beyond the pale, Jenny. They snatched a little girl. God only knows what they’re doing to her.”
“She’s not ‘a little girl,’ she’s a nineteen-year-old college student, not that that means she deserved to be kidnapped. They say they’re treating her in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.”
“Oh my God, that’s not even the most absurd thing they say. You can’t really believe that.”
“I don’t yet disbelieve it! Almost the entire world believes the worst of them. Who’s left to believe the best, if not us?”
“Kidnapping’s not politics, regardless of what those clowns want to claim.”
“I’m not in agreement with them, I’m extending them the benefit of the doubt. Isn’t that part of your legal discourse? Kidnapping’s not a tactic I’d ever embrace.”
“I hope not. And don’t talk about what you have or haven’t embraced, even hypothetically. I’m not representing you yet.”
This stung her. “You haven’t exactly said whether you would,” she said, after a minute.
“Of course I would. But you haven’t said whether you want me, and I’m not sure you do. I’m not sure you’re ready to go through with this. If you become my client I’ll do everything in my power, but you’ll still face the same choice. You’ll feel a lot of pressure to talk, and not just from the government. You may feel a lot of pressure from yourself. You don’t want to go to prison for ten years, maybe more. I’m not saying we’re certain to lose. I’m not saying you should abandon your principles, either. I’m saying you need to face facts. There won’t be any Watergate amnesty.”
She’d flushed from his tone, but she knew he was right. Perhaps she’d already known. William was in prison, she realized. Sometimes she realized this incredible fact with fresh force. William was in prison, and his capacity to gauge the political atmosphere was not the same as it had been when he was out in the world. She’d wasted this young lawyer’s time. In some way, though, she’d enjoyed it. She’d liked arguing with him.
“I understand,” she told him.
It was time for the city-bound train. Before he turned back toward the station he said, “It’s too bad you don’t know where those kidnappers are. That would be worth at least three Watergates.”
“Really?” She knew it was a peace offering.
“Oh, yeah. They’d throw out all the charges and make you an FBI agent.”
“The worst fate of all!” she said, laughing.
“Write me.” He put his hand out and she took it. Even through the numb chill she could feel his hand’s warmth, and the shock, the warm touch, made her stomach turn over with longing. She pulled her hand away quickly.
“I’ll write you,” she said.
IT WAS HARD, she had to admit, to give the kidnappers the benefit of the doubt. They’d taken weeks to convey their demands, and when they finally did she had the sense of a panicked all-night study session, or a coffee-soaked chainsmokers’ mad argument that had collapsed in indiscriminate compromise. There were pages on typewritten pages. There were declarations of principles and sociological tracts, and a mythlike explanation of their symbol. There was a long list of other revolutionary movements with which they shared ideological ties or—perhaps this was meant as a threat—“logistical/material reciprocity arrangements for ammunition, supplies, and ground troops.” There was a tape with the victim’s voice on it. “They’ve chosen me as a symbol of the problems of capitalism, Mom, Dad, and I think if you try you can see what their point is.” The victim detailed—clearly reading, her voice strangely girlish yet dull—the demand: that a week’s worth of “good, healthy food” be distributed to every California resident whose annual income was below the poverty line, or who suffered some form of social marginalization, for example was a recently paroled criminal, or a resident of the state’s substandard low-income housing, or otherwise verifiably poor. Every person in need must be fed. The food was to be distributed, no strings attached and no hassles, starting in no less than a week and continuing for no less than a month, anywhere that was not a social services center or some other record-keeping arm of any level of government and preferably at normal supermarkets where The People were accustomed to going, so as to make it convenient. The distribution was not even the actual ransom, but a goodwill gesture, after which ransom talks would commence. Periodically the girl would pause, and a rustling of sheets would be heard. “I just had to turn over the page,” she murmured at one point.
Lying flat on the scaffold she’d built beneath the library ceiling, watching the colored lozenges of light from the faux-Flemish windows moving over her legs as the March sun came through the bare trees, gently swabbing the foul brown stains with her soap-lathered sponge, Jenny still had the transistor beside her. After its dizzying summer and fall the Watergate scandal had been in eclipse for the whole of the winter. Congress wanted the tapes, the president had refused them, and now it was up to the courts to decide. Like the rest of the audience—the sofa citizenry, she thought ruefully, whom she’d been forced to join—her attention had been taken up by the kidnapping everywhere Watergate let it go slack. But for her there was also the oddly secretive family dimension that the rest of the sofa folk knew nothing of. The ransom demand was picked apart in the Left-leaning press. It was grandstanding, self-righteous and impractical, out of touch with the actual needs of The People. A one-time food handout was just the kind of ostentatious paternalistic gesture the United States government was fond of making in the Third World countries it had previously helped to destroy. This must have frustrated them, Jenny imagined—to have labored to come up with a ransom that would clearly denote them as selfless and noble, and then to have it thrown back in their faces. Even the most radical guests on the student-run radio show she could sometimes tune in said things like, “With the movement dying out, you can’t be surprised at these macabre developments. It’s like a corpse twitching. You could call this the decadent stage of the Left; if there was ever a golden age, this is our signal it’s over.” She felt mingled outrage and shame, and a certain fiery defensiveness for the cadre, hearing comments like these. Yes, they were probably crazy. But who with legitimate, fervent belief hadn’t also been looked on as crazy? The kidnapping was a public mortification for the Left, an occasion for shirt rending and excommunication, but it also gave Jenny the sense of One Nation she’d felt during Watergate summer. Except that this nation was hers, her own nation-within, sharing borders yet pursuing itself on an alternate plane.
A few weeks after their meeting she wrote the young lawyer No. “You were right,” she explained. “I’m not ready for this.” She took the train back to Peekskill to mail the letter, so he would only have that place linked to her. Then she hoped for relief. In the weeks since they’d met she’d been desperate to see him again, even just to say No to his face. He was the first person in almost two years she had spoken to truthfully, and so it wasn’t her desire so much as her failure to anticipate her desire she found so unnerving. She had dreams about him: mortifyingly sexual dreams in which they made desperate love to each other, which weren’t even as bad as the abstract emotional dreams, in which she “knew” that he loved her. She wished she missed William as she’d missed him at first. She tried to summon those waves of blind pain she had felt at their first separation, even tried to revisit the worst lows of their history together in the hopes she could “plumb from their murks certainty?” of her love. She finally wrote William to explain her decision and felt guilty for some of her phrases: “Your idea that the robed judges might now be more kindly disposed gave me hope, but it isn’t the case. You or anyone like you might do worse at present, or so I am told by a very good source.”
The Rhinebeck library sat on the town square, a graceful little building of cut stone and stained glass that had a kinship to the Rhinecliff train station. The two had been designed by the same architects, hired by a titan of railroads who had summered out here and who’d wanted his guests to embark from the train—and page through the newspaper, and bow head in prayer (there was also the wonderful church)—in the splendor to which they were accustomed, but on a quainter, more countrified scale. “Our historic river valley,” Mrs. McNulty would say. “Everywhere you look there’s a door to the past.” She had become fond of Jenny for her supposed role as a restorer. When Jenny first ventured into the library not for the Wildmoor scrapbooks but for West Coast newspapers, Mrs. McNulty kept confusedly bringing her clippings about Queen Anne decor; but after some days she perceived that the errand had changed. Now when Jenny dropped into the library, always trying to seem casual, she would find the most recently arrived San Francisco Chronicles and Examiners neatly laid out stair-step style, the dates showing, at the large corner table she liked. “Please don’t, it’s all right, Mrs. McNulty,” she said, but it kept happening. Sometimes while she read, a new bundle of mail would come—the newspapers came on delay, as always with libraries. She’d hear Mrs. McNulty humming and clipping the string with her small pair of scissors. Then Mrs. McNulty would come to her holding the new ones like freshly baked bread. “Oh Iris, I’m afraid you’re homesick,” she’d say, setting them down.
The girl’s family had responded to the demand for the goodwill gesture with a fastidious attention under which the demand could only look absurd. “We’re sure grateful to those folks, honey, for shooting straight with us,” the girl’s father said to a lawnful of cameras. “And we’re working away to see how we can meet this demand. But the thing is, it’s a little bit vague. A week’s worth of food, over the course of a month—we’re thinking, a few times a week for a month? We just want to be sure we get everything right. As for the numbers—well, honey, I hope you can convey to these folks that, in a big state like ours, it’s not easy to find everybody who’s poor. We have so many ways of calculating that number, and it’s likely to be such a big number—and that doesn’t make anyone happy. But that’s the way that it is. We’ve got some folks here who are praying for you, and are helping us out just so much—they’re mathematicians and statisticians. And they think—well, their estimate is that maybe we’re talking about half a billion dollars’ worth of food.” Here his voice cracked. “And I have to say, there’s no way I can do it. But I’m going to do the very best that I can.”
The response came within just a few days, another tape at the door to a radio station—the tapes seemed to drop from the sky, and bore no fingerprints. “These people want you to know, Dad, they didn’t mean to make a demand that nobody could meet. Um—what you said, about doing the best that you can, that’s just fine. Just do it, really quickly, okay?” But the girl’s nervousness seemed to alternate now with a different, peeved tone. “These people want you to know they’re not crazy. Don’t try to make them look crazy. Their message is a political message, it’s about poverty and the problems of capitalism, and I’m a symbol of all that, as they said. They are fulfilling the conditions of the Geneva Conventions . . . in accordance with the Codes of International War.” She had a script, but she seemed to be straying from it. “And if you’d tell Mom the way she keeps crying—that’s really depressing. It’s like she’s standing right next to my grave.”
Doing the very best that he could seemed to involve, in the end, compliance with some of the least advisable of the cadre’s demands, and disregard of many of the others. With the dispatch of exceptional wealth the girl’s family set up a food-distribution command center and rented a flotilla of refrigerated trucks. And then, pointing out that the cadre had insisted they do so, they hired to distribute the food only welfare recipients, paroled criminals, and other often-unemployed individuals. There was a predictable range of results. A few ex-cons told the papers they were grateful for the second chance in life. One truckful was hijacked at gunpoint. Others vanished in more subtle ways. Where the trucks did arrive unmolested, workers hurled the food hand over fist out of the back, while crowds trampled each other. An eight-year-old boy was knocked out by a frozen whole chicken.
Jenny knew she shouldn’t have found it surprising how skillfully the family was able to present itself as the beleaguered party, doing its best to accommodate, but outflanked on all sides by plain greed. Public sympathy for them kept increasing; they were the quintessence of noblesse oblige, they were doing the best that they could, and who doesn’t prefer the rich who give a crumb of their wealth, to the poor who rush forward to take it? This was where the Left lost its last shred of patience. Only this band of irresponsible adventurers, they complained, could have made the rich so sympathetic. The one observer of the spiraling affair who seemed displeased with the family was the victim herself. The food program debacle unfolded, and like a missile the third tape arced out of the sky. “It seems to me you’re not doing your very best at all, Dad,” the girl said, and now she was starting to sound really angry. “It looks like that food program was a complete total sham. I know it’s a tax write-off anyway. Isn’t it, Dad? And I just have to wonder, I feel like if you or Mom, or Alexa or Katie was kidnapped I would just do whatever it took. Which is not what you’re doing!” She didn’t seem to be reading a script at all anymore—or perhaps her kidnappers had started to know how she spoke, how she tended to phrase things. Perhaps their new scripts showed a talent for slickness they seemed to lack everywhere else.
When March came to an end Jenny drove to Buell’s for wood stripper, paint, new dropcloths, and a safer stepladder. It was warm enough to work with open windows again and she could start the restaining job in the upstairs conservatory; soon enough it would be hot and humid, and the stain would goo up like molasses and never get dry. In the course of the winter opaque bumpy ice had closed over the river, but now they heard the ice groaning and cracking at intervals all through the day. Sometimes it went pop! with a suddenness, like a shotgun. As she drove back to Wildmoor with the ladder sticking out the back window, the newly mild wind filled the car; spring still had the power to move her, to make her feel burgeoning change. It was always a short, vivid, heartrending spring in this place. White filigree cherry tree blooms, the hot pink apple blossoms; crocus and daffodil and narcissus spearing out of the ground. This was her second spring here. The autumn would be her third autumn. When she thought about this her enjoyment evaporated and instead she felt something—despair, more credible each time it came. She shrugged it off harshly, as if despair were an irritating though well-meaning person with a hand on her shoulder. Turning south between fallow gold fields, parallel to the river, she could smell the sea brine on the air. Sometimes, driving this road in a deep reverie, she would feel as if snatched from the car by a hand and raised high in the air. She would see the Atlantic tide pushing kelp miles up the river, and the Atlantic itself, spreading out from the foot of Manhattan. And Manhattan’s wild spires casting shadows halfway to Ohio, and then the vast carpet of grass racing toward California. Her life there, and her shadow life here. She would see all of that and herself seated in Dolly’s car—and then it would end and she was in the car, driving again. She pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter, and turned up the radio loud when she heard a voice say another tape had arrived from the cadre. She pulled over to the side of the road and lit her cigarette there; she’d never mastered using lighters while driving. She was always afraid she would weave and be stopped by a cop. The tape, like the three before it, was broadcast after assurances from the newscaster that it had not been at all shortened or altered. The girl’s voice sounded hollow again, as it had at the start, almost two months before. “Today is April 3, 1974. I have been given the following choice: to be liberated to rejoin my family, or to join these comrades in their battle. My decision is made: I will stay with these comrades forever, because theirs is the only just battle there is. They are my family. My old family did not care for me; this new family does. My old family did not care for the poor; this new family does.” To go with her new life the girl had taken a new name: Pauline. Jenny felt her gaze space out, refocus. She realized irrelevantly that the windshield was spattered with bugs: it had gotten that warm. Sitting there on the mill road from Red Hook, with the old fields stretching away. All the old fields going to seed and the old stone wall crumbled in places and bristling with weeds. She felt an odd tremor, from what source she could not have said. There had never been a Watergate amnesty; there had not been a window. Still, she felt something slide quietly shut. She tried to restart the car and it let out a horrible shriek, because it was already running. The post-tape commentary began, and even the newsmen made no effort to hide their revulsion. It made you disgusted, one said, to imagine the tortures the poor girl had endured, to say something like that.
Getting back to the house she was surprised to see that even Dolly had the television on. “Brainwashed,” Dolly said from her chair, as the newscasters droned.
“How do you know?” Jenny said. “How do you know that she doesn’t agree with them?”
“Oh, please,” Dolly said, with a voice full of scorn for the people that would have to be agreed with. “Not a girl from a family like that. Not a girl like her.”
TWO WEEKS LATER the cadre held up a bank and made off with fifteen thousand dollars, “Pauline” clearly visible on the security tapes, looking either brainwashed or eerily calm, depending on your view. The money would fund The People’s Liberation. The bank happened to belong to a prominent business partner of Pauline’s father. Then the cadre disappeared; they seemed to have slipped through the dragnet with remarkable ease. Over the protests of her family the attorney general declared Pauline a criminal, no longer a crime victim, and issued a Wanted poster with her face. The Left-leaning press scolded those of its own who stole Pauline’s poster to decorate their apartments. They were equally displeased with the people who were spray-painting things like WE LOVE YOU, PAULINE! onto buildings. Jenny floated in clouds of wood stripper, lightheaded and vague, as the radio droned and the languid breeze failed to siphon enough of the fumes. Unthinking and wood stripper—stoned. Unmolested by Dolly or anyone else. In the late afternoons when the teatime approached she would lurch from the house for a walk, and drink in the fresh air. The house, still a shaggy King Lear despite all of her efforts. For more than half of the mile-long slope that led down to the water it stayed visible at the top of the hill, though it sank by degrees. Lines of trees began to appear as the slope grew more steep; the trees seemed to form doorways through which, as you looked riverward, the water loomed larger and larger. There was the gazebo just past the first line, giving a view of the water in front and of the uppermost point of the house, its ridiculous tower, behind. Then at last the house sank out of sight. The grounds had been laid out a century before to look carefully wild, like an English farm going to seed, but now the effect was much more natural. The screens of trees had widened with decades of new growth, and grown gaps where some old trees had died. And the fields were truly overgrown with weeds now, not made to appear that way. There really were moors, and a sense of forsaken remoteness, though once you reached the last vista before the drop-off you saw the railroad tracks just by the water, and the electric lines just beside them.
Coming back to the house she sometimes felt such pleasure in the progressive unfurling of the landscape, such a sense of poignant recognition as the battered old house rose again from the grass into view, that she would forget how unlike her it was to pretend this was hers. Forget her deepening shock, the first time she’d gone walking and realized the property went on for miles. The days grew longer, and if Dolly was ensconced with a tea visitor she could slip back in through the side door, and go up to the second-floor ballroom, where the gold light that bounced off the river poured in through the giant windows. She could move with her crisp shadow over the boards through the turning dust motes, as the air started losing its heat. She had bought painters’ lights to offset the dramatic shadows of the late afternoon, but this also meant she could work late at night, after Dolly was sleeping. That was its own lonely pleasure, working at night when it grew really cold in the room, and the velvety darkness outside sometimes echoed with owls, and she knew that her bright yellow light could be seen miles away, from the river’s far side.
And always the radio on, somehow underscoring her loneliness more than relieving it. She had plenty of distance from Dolly but still, late at night, she would turn down the radio low. In the vast nighttime hush she could play it quite softly and hear. The contrast of her life with the world outside sometimes felt too great on these nights. The radio was like a tiny porthole in her drifting balloon. One night in the middle of May her evening music broadcast was interrupted by the news that the cadre had finally been traced to a house in a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. They were surrounded by FBI agents and local police and SWAT teams. All twelve members, including Pauline, were presumed to be there. Calls for surrender had been answered by gunfire. “We take you live to Los Angeles,” the newscaster declared, and then a maelstrom erupted in the small radio such as she wouldn’t have thought it could hold. A badly stammering reporter who could barely be heard. Such a roar of gunfire she thought it was war. Smoke, the reporter was saying, rising out of the house, a smoke bomb—no, orange flames could be seen. No, that’s fire, he said. We’re told that these are . . . the rules of engagement . . . they say that they’ll call for surrender again. I’m up here on a neighboring roof. Oh, my God. That’s a real, that’s a very hot fire. Those deafening booms that you hear, we’re told that’s ammunition they had in the house, blowing up from the heat. Through the smoke a lone person was seen, crawling out the back door, and was quickly picked off by the SWAT team. Jenny had stopped in mid-stride with a big can of wood varnish hanging from her hand, her breath frozen inside her, the weight of the can almost pulling her over. It wasn’t until it had ended—fifteen minutes? an hour?—that she found herself standing this way. Slowly, she set down the can, her right arm muscles wildly trembling. And then turned the radio off. Never imagining that in the twilight beyond what she’d heard, the three fugitives somehow spared death were driving north on 1-5, being bundled into an apartment. That on the opposite coast, in New York, Frazer’s telephone was ringing, in the middle of the night.