Free The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon

been, rather than arevolutionary, a crazy homicidal vet, had named his partners was no surprise. There was some suspicion that later, one of the three fugitives had given Dellesandro up, shocked by his willingness to shoot during the holdup. After all, there had been no proven casualties in any Weatherman action, although other Weather-inspired groups had not been as skillful, and three Weather members had been killed in the town house bombing. When he was arrested, apparently, Dellesandro claimed he’d been working undercover for the FBI all along. For all anyone knew, this might have been true. But before being tried for Bank of Michigan, he was extradited to New York to face prior charges and killed during the Attica uprising—strangely, because the article pointed out that surviving inmates told the ACLU that Dellesandro had been nowhere near the actual violence.
    The paper concluded by observing that with Solarz’s arrest, Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai were the last two fugitives from the Vietnam era remaining at large, which was also untrue. A where-are-they-now sidebar listed, as they always do on such occasions, a roundup of ex-fugitives. This time they got Katherine Power, Bernardine Dohrn, Patty Hearst Shaw, and Silas Trim Bissell, of whom only one had actually been in the Weather Underground at all.
    It was dawn when I got through this, and the dim light through the window washed the computer screen of colors. That struck me as appropriate to the black-and-white newspaper archive images on the screen. Those people, in the days when I had a husband in Vietnam, my blood had heated every time I’d seen their images. And now, for God’s sake, peering across twenty-five years from my computer screen, I found that they looked so vivid to me: real people, not these strange, ugly, shaved-headed, pierced and tattooed kids of today in their big baggy clothes—real people who might have believed in the wrong thing, but who at least believed in
something.
    And I guess I was lost in thought, because I found myself at the kitchen cabinet by the window, now, and with a mental maneuver that was growing all too familiar, I managed to open a drawer, extract a Marlboro,and light it without quite admitting to myself that I was doing anything other than looking out the window, down the driveway, watching for my son’s headlights. The smoke hit the back of my throat with an intimate familiarity. Mother’s milk. J was quite right. I was hooked again, through and through.
    And it was then, at that thought, that the meaning of the reference to Sharon having come looking for a lawyer at Billy Cusimano’s house struck me, though the coincidence with the first wave of nicotine electrifying my brain, disguised, to some extent, the shock.
    Not so much, however, that I was not able to pronounce, out loud: “Oh, my God, he’s talking about J.”
    And then I said, louder, again: “For God’s sake. It must have been Montgomery himself who had that one leaked.”
    And I thought, if this damnable paper keeps this up, they might as well buy you a one-way flight to London, Izzy, because you were never, ever coming back.
    Now I’ve gone this far, so let me finish off what happened, that Sunday morning, and then let me get back to the webcast because there is a State of the Union address in half an hour, and whether my son stays in Kabul or comes back home depends on what our fine president has to say. In this respect, let me tell you, no matter how big a decision you have to make next week, you may bear in mind, there are bigger things happening still. Far bigger.
    By the time Leo got home and bestowed on me a boozy kiss before ushering a woman who appeared to be all of sixteen up to his bedroom, it was way too late to go to bed. So I put on a swimsuit and drove down to Woodstock to get muffins at Bread Alone, then up the mountain to Colgate Lake to meet you and your daddy, and to tell J the news.
    But I was too late. By then, your father and