The Outsider (33 page)

“I didn't tell him what to do, Lucy. He did what he wanted to do.”

“Did you ever tell him anything?” she said with irritation.

“We'll see him in a little while. Until then, can't you just relax and enjoy the fall colors? I'm sure you haven't seen them for years.”

“You're wonderful, David. You're absolutely wonderful. We're driving to Danbury Prison to see my son, who has been locked up like a common criminal, and all you can think of are these goddamned fall colors. I don't give a damn about the colors! I can only think that those bastards may never let my son go. They can keep him there forever.”

“They can't keep him there forever. You're letting your fears run away with you, and this is still a country ruled by law — at least inside our borders — and in eight months he'll be released to begin a work program.”

“Yes, and what does that mean? A chain gang somewhere?”

“Probably Danbury Hospital, where he'll do whatever has to be done. The point is, I think, that when we see him, we shouldn't lay our own problems on him. He has enough of his own.”

“That's not what I meant to do.”

“I know.”

“Only if he had gone to Canada —”

“Lucy, Aaron would not go to Canada, and he would not label himself a pacifist. He simply took the position that the war in Vietnam was unjust and violated every principle of his belief. They had to send him to prison. For my part, I would have done anything, said anything, to keep him out of that butchery. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“He'll be very happy to see you.”

“I know.” She leaned over and dropped her head against his shoulder. “I'm so tired, David, so damned tired. I was all right, not seeing you. In five years, I was able to blur things, what you looked like, what our life here had been, and then seeing you loused it all up. I can't be married to you, I can't — and I love you so damned much. I can't live in this place. I feel choked here, with all your beautiful colors, closed in and choked. Everything's too small. Bob and I have a little place at Malibu, and when we drive back to Los Angeles, five minutes from the house we're in Malibu Canyon, with its great, towering mountains — no, it's not that. It's not the scenery. That's stupid. It's just the way you and Martin take on the world as some kind of personal responsibility. Well, it's not your responsibility — not yours or anyone else's. You want to know what the world is? I can tell you that. The world is a shitpile. The world is a conglomeration of idiots who let themselves be ruled by a maniac like Lyndon Johnson and who go out periodically and slaughter each other. You know what they call these people in the movie business — the shit-kickers. That's what the world is, the shit-kickers and the mental slobs. No one can change it. You and Martin can't change one damned thing, and you stumble through life with all your faith in a God who doesn't even exist, and what you lose is life itself—” Her voice broke and she burst into tears. “I love you,” she said. “I always loved you, and it's no damned good.”

David pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road.

“We'll be late,” she whimpered.

“Visiting goes on until three, and it's only nine-thirty now. Come on, baby. You've fallen into a deep hole of emotion, and what else could you expect? We haven't seen each other for years. You've been away from Leighton Ridge for years.”

“David, why don't you yell at me? Why don't you tell me what a bitch I am?”

“Because you're not — and because I love you.”

“Oh, David,” she sobbed, “you do, don't you, and I love you, and it's no use, is it?”

“Whatever use you want to make of it. We'll never live together again, but we have two kids that tie us together. We can love each other. It's better than hating each other or being indifferent to each other.”

She took some tissues from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “What do my eyes look like, David?”

“Very nice.”

“You're the dearest man.”

“Well — at times. I can be pretty nasty.”

“You?”

“At times. How do you feel now?”

“Much better. I had to get that out of me. I could go to jail — believe me, I could if I had to — but to see your kid go through it is a thousand times worse. And he didn't do anything. All he did was refuse to kill people.”

The guard at the entrance to Danbury Prison inspected Lucy's purse. She had a roll of Life Saver mints. “I wouldn't try to give him those,” the guard said.

“It never occurred to me.”

David and Lucy, each of them, had their hands stamped, an invisible mark on the back of the hand. “That's to keep us from switching clothes with desperate characters like Aaron,” Lucy said. “I think they get all their ideas from the movies.” They were waiting in the very large visiting room, already filled with prisoners and their visitors. A guard brought Aaron to them, a tall, long-limbed, lean young man, nineteen years old, and so much like his father that Lucy caught her breath in surprise. She had not seen him in months, and she had created in her mind a vision of prison clothes, a bowed head, and a shambling gait. Instead, she saw a sunburned young man in blue jeans and a blue work shirt. He embraced her in a bear hug, and then, unexpectedly, embraced David too.

“I am glad to see both of you,” he said. “So glad. Mom, you look absolutely beautiful.”

“Because she is beautiful,” David said.

“Sure. Absolutely.” He was measuring both of them, and David realized that the boy hadn't known what to expect.

“Aaron, listen,” David said softly. “Your mother and I love each other. We will always love each other. The fact that each of us must go his own way in his own place doesn't change the fact that we love each other. Can you understand that?”

“Not too well.” He stared at them for a long moment. “I'll try.”

“All right. Now tell us about yourself.”

“Do you have enough to eat?” Lucy asked him.

“There's plenty of food, and it's pretty good. They treat us all right. The prison's on the shore of the lake, so that helps, and we get outside. There are enough kids in here for the same reason that I'm in here for me to have friends and people to talk to. You know, this is the place where they send the crooked politicians, you know, even congressmen like J. Parnell Thomas, who once ran the Un-American Committee — he did time here — so in that way it's considered the real Class A top-dog prison in the United States. That doesn't mean it's any country club, but it's all right. It's not like those places you see in the movies.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Lucy said. “I had visions of something dreadful.”

“It's okay. You go back to California?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I have eight months more. Pop is right here, so I get to see him, but will I see you again before I'm released?”

“I promise you. At least twice more. And when you're out, you'll come to California.”

“And Sarah? How is she?

“Just great. I didn't bring her because I thought this prison was so much worse. I'll bring her next time.”

“When I get out, I have two years of service. I think I start at Danbury Hospital here, but maybe I can get that switched to California. I know, Pop,” he said to David. “But I've been seeing you right along. Mom and Sarah are three thousand miles away. Are you still going to marry Bob Greene?” he demanded, turning to Lucy.

“Yes.”

“Well, I mean being here — you and Pop are so friendly. You said you love each other.”

“We can't live together,” Lucy said. “Someday you'll understand why.”

“I don't understand,” he said stubbornly. “I don't understand it at all. I know that if I loved a girl, I'd want to live with her.”

“Suppose she had both feet firmly planted in midair,” David said. “How would you ever get her down?”

They all laughed at that. It did David good to watch Aaron laugh, and somehow it shifted the subject to college. Aaron brought that up. “Talk about midair, I've just barely finished one year at Yale. Do you suppose I could do the hospital work and college at the same time? And what college? I'm not sure I want to go back to Yale. You know, if I wanted to be a doctor, the hospital service would make some sense.”

“What do you want to do with your life?”

“I think I want to be an engineer. I don't want to deal with philosophy, any kind of philosophy. I want to learn to build something. There are plenty of Jewish doctors and lawyers, but there was a woman here from Israel — headhunters, they call them — and she spoke at Yale. She was recruiting engineers, and what they desperately wanted in Israel was an electric-utility engineer, and do you know she couldn't find one Jewish electric-utility engineer in the United States? I might go to Israel if I could build something there that no one else could.”

At three o'clock, visiting hours were over. Lucy clung desperately to Aaron. He was as tall as David, so much taller than his mother, reassuring her, “Mom, I'm going to be all right. Nothing's going to happen to me. When you come right down to it, this jail is the safest place in the world.”

“Visiting time is over,” a guard called out. “Three o'clock. Visiting time is over.”

“I forgot to tell you,” Aaron said. “I'm learning another language. Spanish.”

“Why?”

“It's the California language. Who knows where I'll be?”

Outside, crying again, Lucy said, “How can he laugh about it?”

“He was laughing because we were there, because it made him feel good. Lucy, he's young and strong and full of the future. And he's alive.”

“I know.” They were at David's car in the parking lot now. The bright sunshine had gone, and now the sky was covered with heavy, dark clouds. “Oh, David, I think he'll want to come to California, and then you'd have no one here. I mean, why else would he try to learn Spanish?”

“French was his important language in school. He's not going to France. Who knows where he'll go? He might go to Israel.”

“Oh, no. David, I'm cold.”

He put an arm around her, holding her to him while he rummaged in his pocket for the car keys.

“Let's get away from here. I hate this place. It's an ugly place.” In the car, however, she added, “But I will come back. I didn't mean I wouldn't come to see him again. David, all that about the electric-utility engineer in Israel — what makes him so Jewish?”

“He is Jewish.”

“I don't mean that. There's something I feel about him that I don't even feel about you, and it's not in anything he says or does. Do you remember, when he was a
Bar Mitzvah,
he handled the Torah with such love. Does he have a girl?” she demanded suddenly.

“He certainly does, a beauty. She lives in New Haven. But for heaven's sake, Lucy, he's just a kid, only nineteen, so this is no candidate for marriage. Just a girl.”

“Is she Jewish?”

“I never thought to ask.”

“You never thought to ask!”

“Lucy, what difference does it make?”

“You're a rabbi, and you ask me what difference does it make?”

“And you're a self-proclaimed atheist.”

“Don't confuse me, David. Being an atheist has nothing to do with my feelings about being Jewish. What's the girl's name?”

“I think — yes, Susan Andrews.”

“Susan Andrews. And you don't know whether she's Jewish.”

“It doesn't matter. I don't know what you're afraid of, but let me tell you something about your son. Do you remember — think he was about twelve — he came down with an awful case of poison ivy, all over his face and arms, and he invented some silly story about how it happened.”

“I'm not likely to forget that. It was terrible.”

“What actually happened was that three boys, three fine young men, each of them a year or two older than Aaron, began to bait him, calling him a dirty Jew and a Christ killer — yes, right in Leighton Ridge, where such a thing could never possibly happen — and when he resisted their pushing him around, they grabbed him and rolled him in the poison ivy. A year later, the year of his puberty, having grown and filled out, he took on each of the three boys separately and beat them. He gave each of them a bad beating.”

“How do you know this? Did he tell you?”

“No, he hasn't mentioned it to this day. That was just before you left for California with the kids. No, I got the story from Martin. The father of one of the boys came to him, knowing we were friends — in a rage, I may say, for the way his son was beaten — and I was so shocked I was sick over it, after a lifetime of living and preaching nonviolence. But then I talked to the boy, and then Martin and I got the three boys together and put all the pieces together. I don't condone what he did. There are moments when it frightens me to think about it. But you asked me why he seems so Jewish, and he is, in a way that's hard for you or me to comprehend.”

“You never spoke to him about it?”

“No. It's nothing I could discuss with him, and I can't sit in judgment.”

“It's so strange,” Lucy said, “so inexplicable. We raise two children and they're strangers to us, and we live together for years with each other, and still we're strangers to each other.”

“Is that true of Sarah?”

After some hesitation, Lucy nodded and said, “Yes. It's true of Sarah. There's a wall between us. I try to understand her. I try.”

“Was she happy this past summer?”

“I know you wanted her with you, David, but believe me, I didn't influence her either way.”

“I know that.”

“She wanted the Oklahoma thing. She said, ‘Mom, I'm going to be an archeologist, and this is a chance to begin, and I can't miss it,' and the truth is she was as excited as a kid with a new doll about uncovering an Indian mound in Oklahoma. And David, do you know what she took with her as luggage and wardrobe? Four pairs of denims, cut off above the knee, and when I offered to hem them, she said absolutely not — well, four pairs of denims and eight T-shirts and two pairs of sandals, and that was it. No socks, no lipstick even, and she's such a beautiful kid, oh, yes, tampons, and she comes back burned brown, with that marvelous strawberry-blond hair of hers all streaked and discolored by the sun, and when I tried to send her to my hairdresser, she just looked at me as if I were out of my mind.”