now. “Tell me the truth, please.”
“I only speak the truth.”
“I gave her ten thousand dollars for you. I gave her cash. Did you or did you
not get that money?”
Her laugh was kindly. “Ten thousand dollars? Not yet, Daddy.”
“Then I must have an answer from you. Who is the Rita Cohen who told me where I
could find you? Is this the Melissa from New York?”
“You found me,” she replied, “because you have been looking. I never expected
not to be found by you. You sought me out because you must seek me.”
“Did you come to Newark to help me find you? Is that why you came here?”
But she replied, “No.”
* * *
“Then why did you come? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? You know
where the office is. You know how very close it is. Where’s the logic, Merry?
This close and …”
“I got a ride, and here I was, you see.”
“Like that. Coincidence. No logic. No logic anywhere.”
“The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any. I
relinquish all influence over everything. As to what constitutes a coincidence,
you and I, Daddy—”
253
“Do you ‘relinquish all influence’?” he cried. “Do you, ‘all influence’?” The
most maddening conversation of his life. The know-it-all-ism of her absurdly
innocent, profoundly insane, unstutter-ing solemnity, the awful candor of the
room and of the street outside, the awful candor of everything outside him that
was so powerfully controlling him. “You have an influence over me,” he shouted,
“you are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me! What you
sit there calling ‘coincidence’ is influence—your powerlessness is power over
me, goddamn it! Over your mother, over your grandfather, over your grandmother,
over everyone who loves you—wearing that veil is bullshit, Merry, complete and
absolute bullshit! You are the most powerful person in the world!”
There was no solace to be found in thinking, This is not my life, this is the
dream of my life. That was not going to make him any less miserable. Nor was the
rage with his daughter, nor was the rage with the little criminal whom he had
allowed to be cast as their savior. A cunning and malicious crook who suckered
him without half trying. Took him for all she could get in four ten-minute
visits. The viciousness. The audacity. The unshatterable nerves. God alone knew
where such kids came from.
Then he remembered that one of them came from his house. Rita Cohen merely came
from somebody else’s house. They were brought up in houses like his own. They
were raised by parents like him. And so many were girls, girls whose political
identity was total, who were no less aggressive and militant, no less drawn to
“armed action” than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their
violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to
take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most
ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that
propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They are willing to do
anything they can imagine to make history change. The draft isn’t even hanging
over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorize against the
war, competent to rob at gunpoint, equipped
· 254 ·
in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or
inner contradiction—girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably
extremist, completely unsociable. He read the names of girls in the papers who
were wanted by the authorities for crimes allegedly stemming from antiwar
activities, girls that he imagined Merry knew, girls with whose lives he
imagined his daughter’s to be now interlinked: Bernadine, Patricia, Judith,
Cathlyn, Susan, Linda… . His father, after foolishly watching a TV news
special about the police hunt for the underground Weathermen, among them Mark
Rudd and Katherine Boudin and Jane Alpert—all in their twenties, Jewish, middle
class, college-educated, violent in behalf of the antiwar cause, committed to
revolutionary change and determined to overturn the United States government—
* * *
went around saying, “I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework.
What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid,
their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think
they can find oppression. Can’t live without it. Once Jews ran away from
oppression; now they run away from no-oppression. Once they ran away from being
poor; now they run away from being rich. It’s crazy. They have parents they
can’t hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate
America instead.” But Rita Cohen was a case unto herself: a vicious slut and a
common crook.
Then how is he to explain her letter, if that is all she is? What happened to
our smart Jewish kids? They are crazy. Something is driving them crazy.
Something has set them against everything. Something is leading them into
disaster. These are not the smart Jewish children intent on getting ahead by
doing what they are told better than anyone else does. They only feel at home
doing better than anyone else as they are not told. Distrust is the madness to
which they have been called.
And here on the floor is the result in one of its more heartbreaking forms: the
religious conversion. If you fail to bring the world into subjection, then
subject yourself to the world.
255
“I love you,” he was telling Merry, “you know I would look for you. You are my
child. But how could I find you in a million years, wearing that mask and
weighing eighty-eight pounds and living the way you live? How could anyone have
found you, even here? Where were you?” he cried, as angry as the angriest father
ever betrayed by a daughter or a son, so angry he feared that his head was about
to spew out his brains just as Kennedy’s did when he was shot. “Where have you
been? Answer me!”
So she told him where she’d been.
And how did he listen? Wondering: If there was some point in their lives before
she took the wrong path, where and when was it? Thinking: There was no such
point, there was never any controlling Merry however many years she managed to
deceive them, to seem safely theirs and under their sway. Thinking: Futile,
every last thing he had ever done. The preparations, the practice, the
obedience; the uncompromising dedication to the essential, to the things that
matter most; the systematic system building, the patient scrutiny of every
problem, large or small; no drifting, no laxity, no laziness; faithfully meeting
every obligation, addressing energetically every situation’s demands … a list
as long as the U.S. Constitution, his articles of faith—and all of it futility.
The systemization of futility is all it had ever been. All he had ever
restrained by his responsibility was himself.
Thinking: She is not in my power and she never was. She is in the powe
r of
something that does not give a shit. Something demented. We all are. Their
elders are not responsible for this. They are themselves not responsible for
this. Something else is.
Yes, at the age of forty-six, in 1973, almost three-quarters of the way through
the century that with no regard for the niceties of burial had strewn the
corpses of mutilated children and their mutilated parents everywhere, the Swede
found out that we are all in the power of something demented. It’s just a matter
of time, honky. We all are!
He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of
the violent Uncorrupted who called him a
* * *
· 256 ·
criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have. The
Swede finally found out! They were delirious with joy, delighted having
destroyed his once-pampered daughter and ruined his privileged life, shepherding
him at long last to their truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every
Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for
everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their
insatiable greed. The something that’s demented, honky, is American history!
It’s the American empire! It’s Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard
Oil and Newark Maid Leath-erware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the
fucked-over-by-America human race!
She told him that for the first seventy-two hours after the bombing she had been
hidden in the Morristown home of Sheila Salz-man, her speech therapist. Safely
she made her way to Sheila’s house, was taken in, and lived hidden away in an
anteroom to Sheila’s office during the day and in the office itself at night.
Then her underground wandering began. In just two months she had fifteen aliases
and moved every four or five days. But in Indianapolis, where she was befriended
by a movement minister who knew only that she was an antiwar activist gone
underground, she took a name from a tombstone in a cemetery, the name of a baby
born within a year of herself who had died in infancy. She applied for a
duplicate birth certificate in the baby’s name, which was how she became Mary
Stoltz. After that, she obtained a library card, a Social Security number, and
when she turned seventeen, a driver’s license. For nearly a year, Mary Stoltz
washed dishes in the kitchen of an old people’s home—a job she got through the
minister—until one morning he reached her on the pay phone and said that she was
to leave work immediately and meet him at the Greyhound station. There he gave
her a ticket to Chicago, told her to stay two days, then to buy a ticket for
Oregon—north of Portland was a commune where she could find sanctuary. He gave
her the commune’s address and some money to buy clothes, food, and the tickets,
and she left for Chicago, where she was raped on
257
the night she arrived. Held captive and raped and robbed. Just seventeen.
In the kitchen of a dive not as friendly as the kitchen at the old people’s
home, she washed dishes to earn the money to get to Oregon. There was no
minister to advise her in Chicago and she was afraid that if she tried to make
contact with the underground she would do something wrong and be apprehended.
She was too frightened even to use a pay phone to call the Indianapolis
minister. She was raped again (in the fourth rooming house where she went to
live) but this time she wasn’t robbed, and so after six weeks as a dishwasher
she had put together enough money to head for the commune.
In Chicago the loneliness had been so all-enveloping, she felt it as a current
coursing through her. There wasn’t a day, on some days not an hour, when she did
not set out to phone Old Rimrock. But instead, before remembering her childhood
room could completely undo her, she would find a diner or a luncheonette and sit
on a stool at the counter and order a BIT and a vanilla milk shake. Saying the
familiar words, watching the bacon curl on the grill, watching for her toast to
pop up, carefully removing the toothpicks when she was served, eating the
layered sandwich between sips of the shake, concentrating on crunching the
tasteless fibers from the lettuce, extracting the smoke-scented fat from the
brittle bacon and the flowery juices from the soft tomato, swilling everything
in with the mash of the mayonnaised toast, grinding patiently away with her jaws
and her teeth, thoughtfully pulverizing every mouthful into a silage to settle
her down—concentrating on her BLT as fixedly as her mother’s livestock focusing
* * *
on the fodder at the trough—gave her the courage to go on alone. She would eat
the sandwich and drink the shake and remember how she got there and go on. By
the time she left Chicago she had discovered she no longer needed a home; she
would never again come close to succumbing to the yearning for a family and a
home.
In Oregon she was involved in two bombings.
· 258 ·
her; after Fred Conlon, instead of her being crippled by conscience, she was
delivered from all residual fear and compunction. The horror of having killed,
if only inadvertently, an innocent man, a man as good as any she would ever hope
to know, had not taught her anything about that most fundamental prohibition,
which, stupefyingly enough, she had failed to learn to observe from being raised
by Dawn and him. Killing Conlon only confirmed her ardor as an idealistic
revolutionary who did not shrink from adopting any means, however ruthless, to
attack the evil system. She had proved that being in opposition to everything
decent in honky America wasn’t just so much hip graffiti emblazoned on her
bedroom wall.
He said, “You planted the bombs.”
“I did.”
“At Hamlin’s and in Oregon you planted the bombs.”
“Yes.”
“Was anyone killed in Oregon?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“People.”
“People,” he repeated. “How many people, Merry?”
“Three,” she said.
There was plenty to eat at the commune. They grew a lot of their own food and so
there was no need, as there had been when she first got to Chicago, to scavenge
for wilted produce outside supermarkets at night. At the commune she began to
sleep with a woman she fell in love with, the wife of a weaver whose loom Merry
learned to operate when she was not working with the bombs. Assembling bombs had
become her specialty after she’d successfully planted her second and third. She
loved the patience and the precision required to safely wire the dynamite to the
blasting cap and the blasting cap to the Woolworth’s alarm clock. That’s when
the stuttering first began to disappear. She never stuttered when she was with
the dynamite.
Then something happened between the woman and her hus-
· 259 ·
* * *
band, a violent argument that necessitated Merry’s leaving the commune to
restore peace.
It w
as while hiding in eastern Idaho, where she worked in the potato fields,
that she decided to flee to Cuba. At night in the farm camp barracks she began
to study Spanish. Living in the camp with the other laborers, she felt even more
passionately committed to her beliefs, though the men were frightening when they
were drunk and again there were sexual incidents. She believed that in Cuba she
could live among workers without having to worry about their violence. In Cuba
she could be Merry Levov and not Mary Stoltz.
She had concluded by this time that there could never be a revolution in America
to uproot the forces of racism and reaction and greed. Urban guerrilla warfare
was futile against a thermonuclear superstate that would stop at nothing to
defend the profit principle. Since she could not help to bring about a
revolution in America, her only hope was to give herself to the revolution that
was. That would mark the end of her exile and the true beginning of her life.
The next year was devoted to rinding her way to Cuba, to Fidel, who had
emancipated the proletariat and who had eradicated injustice with socialism. But
in Florida she had her first close brush with the FBI. There was a park in Miami
full of Dominican refugees. It was a good place to practice Spanish and soon she
found herself teaching the boys there how to speak English. Affectionately they
called her La Farfulla, the stutterer, which did not prevent them from