The Unwitting (23 page)

Elliot suggested I write a piece on the railroading of Randall White. I was surprised. He usually tried to tone me down, not fire me up. But I found the idea repellent. I told him I was in the middle of an article about the last days of Richard Wright. It was the one I’d been working on the day Charlie died. I hadn’t been able to look at it for more than a year, but a few weeks earlier I’d gone back to it.

“This is more timely,” Elliot said.

“I’d feel as if I were exploiting Charlie’s death.”

“Write it, Nell. Charlie would want you to.”

He couldn’t persuade me, but Charlie did.

It was the hardest article I had ever written. For weeks I lived with the violence of Charlie’s last moments of life. Again and again, I saw his body, the body I knew so well, crumpling to the ground.
Once, I tore up the pages. The next day, I taped them back together and kept going.

Compass
published the piece. Several newspapers ran articles about it. Elliot insisted it was the best thing I’d ever written.

“You only say that because it’s not controversial. Who isn’t opposed to police brutality and miscarriages of justice?”

“I say it because it’s true, and because this one even did some good.”

I told him I resented the implication that nothing else I’d written had, but he had a point. The wrongful imprisonment of Randall White turned out to be one of several cases around that time that led the U.S. Supreme Court to issue the Miranda Rights ruling, and New York State to abolish the death penalty, except in special cases.

ONE NIGHT A
few weeks later, I walked into Abby’s room, where she was supposed to be doing her homework, to find her reading the article. I was surprised. She was twelve, and, though she liked to see my byline, she never read what was beneath it. My impulse was to snatch it out of her hands. The world was rife with brutality and bloodshed. On the Pettus Bridge in Alabama, so-called law enforcement officers had used tear gas, whips, and clubs against unarmed marchers. Halfway around the world, in a place called Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, Americans were killing and dying. It was bad enough that the ugly headlines spilled across the table as she ate her cereal in the morning, blared from the television on the evening news, and screamed up from the magazine covers that lay around the apartment. She knew Charlie had been shot. She did not have to read the details. But trying to stop her from reading it would only make her more determined to.

I stalled and asked if she had finished her homework. She said she had and went back to reading. I stood, no, hovered indecisively in the middle of the room.

“Mom!” She did not even bother to look up from the magazine.

I turned and left.

Half an hour later, I went back. She was just getting into bed. I sat on the side of it. I often sat for a moment to talk when I went in to say good night.

“Why did you suddenly decide to read that?”

She shrugged her bony shoulders.

“Did it upset you?”

“No.” She hugged her knees to her. Through her pajamas, I could see the outline of her spine, fragile as an X-ray.

“It upset me writing it.”

“I felt sorry for the man, Randall White. I felt bad that I used to hate him.”

“That was only natural.”

She shrugged again. Whatever was going on, she was not ready to tell me about it. Charlie had always known how to wait with her. I was learning.

A WEEK OR
so later, she brought up the subject with Elliot. He was around a lot lately. I suspected he felt some obligation or loyalty to Charlie, though I wasn’t sure why. I had never understood their friendship. It didn’t make sense that two men who were so different could form such a bond. But I had never doubted the strength of it. I also think he genuinely enjoyed spending time with Abby and me. Perhaps he wanted an instant family that would provide the superficial pleasures without the messy intimacy. That was fine with me. Messy intimacy was the last thing I wanted. Elliot’s careful handling, as if he knew I was broken, fit just fine.

The Sunday that Abby asked Elliot about Charlie’s death, they had just come back from the Museum of Natural History. I was grateful to him. I loved taking her to the Met, MoMA, and other art museums, but the dusty exhibits of Indians sitting around campfires working with primitive tools and animals in their habitats depressed me. When they came back to the apartment that afternoon, they
teased me about my limitations. Elliot called me naturephobic. Abby chimed in with Europhilic. I was glad. She needed someone with whom she could gang up on me.

I asked Elliot to stay for dinner. That was how I overheard their conversation. Elliot was teaching her to play chess, and they’d set up the board on a table in front of the window in the living room. The days were getting shorter, and beyond their heads the sky over the park had a bruised black-and-blue look. I was in the dining room setting the table. Actually, I had finished setting the table, but when I heard Abby’s question, I lingered.

“Can I ask you something about how my dad died?”

In the moment of silence that followed, I sensed Elliot debating the answer.

“Sure,” he said finally. “What do you want to know?”

“If that man, the one my mom wrote the article about, didn’t kill him, who did? She says we’ll probably never know.”

“She’s probably right.”

“So it was just some stranger who came along and wanted his money?”

“Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Maybe it was like the President. Someone wanted to shoot him because of who he was.”

“Nobody wanted to shoot your dad. Everyone liked him. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

LATER THAT NIGHT
, after Elliot left, when I went into Abby’s room to say good night, I sat on the side of the bed.

“I heard you asking Uncle Elliot about who killed Daddy.”

She sat staring at me for a moment. “Lauren says her dad says there was more to what happened in the park that day than meets the eye.”

Now I knew where the questions were coming from. What I didn’t understand was why Bill Dreyfus was stirring them up. He had barely known Charlie. The only connection was our daughters and some
legal work he had done for
Compass
, thanks to the Drinkwater Foundation, a few years earlier. According to Charlie, he was a good lawyer but had a wacky streak. I agreed. Recently, he had buttonholed me at a school function with a lecture on the Warren Commission Report cover-up. Talking conspiracy theory to a sentient adult was annoying. Spreading it among children was unconscionable.

“Tell Lauren her dad is full of hot air.”

“What?”

“Years ago he tried to sell Daddy shares in a hot-air balloon company.”

Her eyes widened. “Really?”

“Daddy’s reaction exactly. So you can tell Lauren there is not more there than meets the eye. Daddy was mugged. It was a senseless random crime. You can also tell her to tell her father to mind his own business.”

Now her eyes were round and dark as Oreos. “Can I?”

“Maybe you’d better leave that to me.”

I DID NOT
tell Bill Dreyfus to mind his own business. If he said something again, I would, but I did not want to give his comment that much credence. Nonetheless, I could not help wondering what he meant. Charlie had decided to walk to work through the park that morning because it was a beautiful day. And because he wanted to walk off the anger I had directed at him. The knowledge continued to fester. If I hadn’t made a scene, if I hadn’t followed him to the door quarreling about Frank Tucker, he might have taken the subway or a cab, and … I was haunted by the contingency.

But Bill Dreyfus made it sound as if Charlie had done something to invite the mugging. It was an old ploy for warding off fear. Crimes don’t happen to innocent people. Therefore they can’t happen to me.

I WENT BACK
to the piece on Richard Wright, though I was having difficulty making it work. The story had too many loose threads. At
nine o’clock on the night Wright died, he rang for the nurse. When she arrived, he joked with her. Two hours later, he rang again. He was dead by the time she reached his room. His close friend, the cartoonist Ollie Harrington, had written me, in answer to questions I’d sent him, that every black man he knew believed Wright had been the object of foul play, but I wasn’t sure how much credence to give his words. Harrington had fled America and requested political asylum in East Berlin. Nonetheless, I kept at the article, putting in paragraphs, taking them out, and putting them back.

The harder I worked, the easier it was to get through the days. I still hadn’t found a way to get through the nights. Two years is a long time not to be held. My body ached for the casual affections of marriage, fingers brushing fingers while passing the salt, a hand trailed across a backside on the way to somewhere else, a cheek laid against a shoulder in sleep. My hair longed to be stroked. My skin hungered to be touched. I missed the pilfered glances while I dressed and undressed. I knew all that was too much to ask. I decided to settle for sex.

Occasionally I flirted with the idea of settling for sex with Elliot. Perhaps
settling
is the wrong word. Even when I’d been happy with Charlie, I’d noticed the hum he gave off to females of the species. But I was afraid of ruining the friendship, with me, and even more with Abby. A stranger would be safer.

At a party at Gideon Abel’s to celebrate a book of poetry he’d published, I made up my mind to go home with an English writer whom I’d spent most of the evening talking to. He had a plummy accent, a quick wit, and a façade of kindness. I wasn’t setting the bar high, but then I wasn’t looking for love, only a connection. He suggested we go someplace for a nightcap. I was about to say yes when Sonia joined us and asked how his wife was.

“I didn’t know if you’d care,” she told me later, “but I thought you ought to know.”

I did care. I wasn’t looking for love, but I didn’t want to sow mayhem.

The few other times I was tempted, something always intervened. Abby had persuaded me she didn’t need a babysitter, so I wanted to get home early. I was on deadline and had to be up and working at the crack of dawn. Sonia said it had nothing to do with Abby or deadlines, only with fear. I wasn’t sure she was wrong. My senses were withering from neglect, but my emotions were still raw. I had always been uncontrolled in sex. Now I could not trust my reactions. I did not want to break down sobbing in a strange bed at an inopportune moment. That was why I had flirted with the idea of Elliot. He already knew how broken I was.

I PUT ASIDE
the piece on Richard Wright again and wrote an article opposing the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Wally refused to publish it. The logical thing for me to do was to take it elsewhere, but I wanted it to run in what I still thought of as Charlie’s magazine, because I knew Charlie would want it there. A memory loomed in my peripheral vision. Charlie was leaning over me in a smoky apartment crowded with students, talking about an antidraft rally he had attended the day before. I looked up from the typewriter and tried to catch the vision, but he was gone.

I finally took the piece to
The New York Review of Books
. The
Review
was one of the few magazines that was publishing articles against the war in Vietnam.

The country was coming apart over the war. Elliot and I tried to stay off the subject, but when I refused an invitation to the White House that I had originally accepted, we got into an argument.

The problem started when Robert Lowell agreed to read at a White House arts festival, then changed his mind and refused. His letter to President Johnson made front-page news.

I waited for the act of conscience to become a literary dogfight.
Within twenty-four hours, Saul Bellow and John Hersey went on record to say they would read from their own works at the White House as planned, though they were quick to add that they, too, disapproved of the administration’s foreign policy. The lines were drawn. Letters and telegrams poured into the White House. Friends fought with one another about whether they should attend the festival or boycott it.

“You can’t refuse an invitation to the White House,” Elliot said.

We were at his place in Connecticut, sitting on the wide porch that wrapped around the house like an embrace. Beyond the striped green awnings, the sun was a dim glow in an ashen sky, and the air was still and thick with an impending storm. Abby had gone inside to read.

“I’ve been to the White House,” I said, and suddenly I was back in those halcyon days when Charlie and I had gone down the receiving line to a golden-boy President who said he had read an article I’d written. Perhaps the war was not the only reason I was boycotting the festival. The memory of that last time was so raw that I could not risk repeating it without Charlie, and without illusions.

“Your problem is that you confuse the dignity of the office with the policies of the man holding it.”

“Your problem is that you refuse to recognize that the country is fighting an unjust imperialist war, and please, no speeches about the domino theory.”

“It’s disrespectful not to go.”

“It’s immoral to go,” I said and wondered again how he and Charlie had gotten along so well.

We went on that way for some time. He infuriated me. But here’s the odd thing. My anger did not drown out the hum.

A FEW WEEKS
later, Elliot did something that surprised me. Perhaps this is vain, but I like to think it was due to my influence. It wasn’t his fault that he got it wrong, or at least not completely right.

One night at a dinner party—I was not there; he told me the story later—he was seated next to the wife of a diplomat on the staff of the UN delegation from Chad. She mentioned that she, her husband, and their five-year-old son had driven up from Washington the week before. They’d stopped for lunch at a restaurant in Maryland. At least, they’d tried to stop for lunch. Three different restaurants turned them away. At the third, they asked for a glass of water for their son. The manager told them they did not serve coloreds.