Free The Gun Runner's Daughter by Neil Gordon

with the Quill and Dagger; or whiskey at a tailgate party; or anything the hell he wanted, and as much of it, at Rulloff’s in
College Town. He was allowed to do drugs—everyone else who could afford to did. He was allowed, during all of these activities, to drive the factory-new Fiat with which his father had
presented him after his first semester’s grades came in, an unimaginable incentive and a very effective bribe indeed. Most of all he was allowed, even encouraged, to have a great deal and a
great variety of sex.
    Cornell was a moveable feast of body parts, belonging to all kinds of women from all over the world, and all of them, Dee realized to his shock, wanted, these first years out of their
parents’ houses and out on their own, to have sex. A lot of sex, often and with a minimal involvement of time from their busy and competitive lives. There were tough and accomplished girls
from Spence and Brearley and Andover and Rosemary Hall; there were girls from Chicago and San Francisco and Oklahoma City and Galveston, Texas, of whom every one had been among the smartest in
their classes, and many also the most beautiful; there were quiet, dark, curious girls from Beirut and Jerusalem, there were practiced and open-eyed girls from Paris and Berlin and Milan. There
were graduate students. There were assistant professors.
    In the article of seduction, therefore, Dee Dennis found himself gaining valuable experience, far beyond his clumsy encounter with Alley Rosenthal on Hancock Beach, and quickly. It helped that
some of the more physical skills he had learned on the streets of Exeter and Portsmouth turned out to have a surprisingly legitimate use on the rugby team, of which he was the captain for his
junior and senior years; it helped that his editorial by-line was soon an institution on the campus newspaper; it helped that when Al Gore came to Cornell, or Warren Christopher, or Sidney
Ohlinger, they always brought love from Edward Treat Dennis, founding partner of Dennis and McReady and counsel to the Democratic National Committee, and those regards were usually delivered over
dinner at the president’s house.
    All of this visibility, in the article of seduction, helped David Treat Dennis, Dee, and in time this article became naturally ascendant over his more childish and less complicated ways of
altering his sensorium which, in the mid eighties, were gradually falling out of vogue anyway.
    When he’d come back to the island the summer after sophomore year, he’d been with Dory Kerrigan, and he was never on the beach or at the Ritz, where everyone went at night, because
the Kerrigans took him sailing up to North Haven, Maine. And the next summer, and the summer after—perhaps he’d seen Alley once or twice, once walking in town, once at Paul
Rosenthal’s memorial, but she had no longer seemed quite real but a memory of youth, a mythical experience, and sometimes he wasn’t even sure what had happened those nights on the
beach. And he assumed that for her, too, he had passed out of memory and into myth. No longer a part of the real present, but of a past, vague, like a memory of a fall of light, or a season.
    Until the day he was told that he was to prosecute Ronald Rosenthal for the federal government, a prosecution on which depended his whole future, a prosecution he couldn’t lose, and then
those nights far in his youth had come back, come crashing back.
    And then Dee Dennis saw that what he always had feared was true: nothing was ever forgotten, and no one was ever allowed to change.
    He should have known. But Cornell had been offered, and he’d accepted. And that seemingly endless suite of willing women had been offered, and he’d accepted. And Harvard had been
offered, and the Walsh prosecutions had been offered, and the U.S. attorney’s office had been offered, and in full knowledge that it was an apprenticeship for his own entry into Democratic
politics, consulting to the same people he