Free Spygirl by Amy Gray Page A

Avenue and Fiftieth Street, listening to a parade of swinging dicks of the publishing world. Princeton classmates and colleagues from
The Wall Street Journal
told clever, sometimes stirring, elegiac stories about him. Newt was a social scientist who wrote vast, assiduously researched works of social conscience. There weren't many left like him anymore. The Ebersol children, Myer and Liv, sat in the front of the crescent before the stage like dolls, with tiny porcelain grimaces. The only-outside-the-establishment speaker was a black woman who had been a subject of Newlyn's Pulitzer-winning documentary book on the Crown Heights riots. She stood up in front of the 99 percent white, 98 percent male, 97 percent Century Club audience and collapsed into hysterical sobs, wailing, “Why he got to go do that? Oh, God, why? Why he gotta do that?” It seemed like the question everyone wanted to ask but no one had dared. A wave ofuncomfortable murmuring shook the otherwise stoic literati. The one-hundred-pound ivory-weave stock of the memorial programs absorbed many tears. Liv and Myer were quickly escorted by their nannies out of the auditorium. Some stiff upper lips slackened.
    I spent the next year reading and talking about Newlyn, sending excerpts from his published and unpublished works to magazines and papers and speaking expertly in the hushed, sympathetic tones used to speak of the tragically dead. I, like most of the reporters I was fielding, was trying to mourn someone I'd never known. Gloria almost never talked about him, but I would hear her occasionally muted tones on the phone with friends, talking about how Newt had broken an arm on that same mountain six months earlier, and how she had forbidden him from going again, but he insisted, even going so far as to start researching an article for
Harper's
about the tradition of ice climbing. Her voice would flail up and down in a way that divulged a profound anger—anger that he would
choose
to leave his family. I wondered how he could challenge death in a way that seemed so indifferent, that even mocked the grim effect it could have on his wife and his children. I imagined Newt, sitting on that mountain in a frenzy of swirling whiteness, calmly absorbing the baptism of the snow, closing his eyes as he yielded to the cleansing, to the wiping away, of everything. Slowly, I reconstituted Newt, gathering and amplifying data and repartees and minutiae until I could almost imagine having known him.
New Jersey Girl
    Two and a half years later, the van ride to Sol's father's funeral was not what I expected. Instead of being somber, everyone was joking and foul-mouthed. Vinny and I talked politics a little. “AmyGway! You came!” he exclaimed. I climbed in the bouncing tan Chevrolet that Evan got at a rental place for reconstituted and seized vehicles. The van was swimming with profanity. Vinny was a fourth-generation Italian-American New Yorker, and his great-uncle had been a big-time trade unionist in the twenties. Hence, Vinny explained, he believed in big labor and liberal government. Gus added “big breasts” to the list in a whisper right before we pulled into the aluminum-sided Yahrzeit Jewish Memorial Home. (Vinny called them “cans,” which he saw a lot of at dance clubs out in Bay Ridge, where Giuliani's topless-only statutes weren't enforced.) I talked to Vinny about the cases a bit—he had a photographic recall of the roughly five hundred the Agency had handled since he started working there. “Oh, yeah,” he'd say, “I wemember number fifteen-one-eleven, dat one was a doozy” or “Nine fifty-seven had a hundwed and seventeen lawsuits connected to it!”
    When we entered the funeral home, Sol was standing in the foyer, holding his infant son. His other son, Joshua, was holding a balloon and running in figure eights around the guests, yelling “Daddy, look, I'm an airplane. Watch me Daddy,
watch me
!” The Agency people got in line to give Sol their regards,