Free The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon Page B

watch. Then he glanced over at the paper they had left lying with their towels and books. The paper was open to the Solarz coverage, and he pulled it over and we looked together. The byline was Ben Schulberg.
    Now this Schulberg character, I was relieved to see, had not actually named your dad. That was because what he was talking about was an actionable offence: in New York State, concealing information on the whereabouts of a known felon was tantamount to being an accessory in that felon’s crime—and this felon, Sharon Solarz, was wanted for murder, which has no statute of limitations. If Schulberg had actually named your father, then the police would have been waiting at his door when we got home.
    But that was the only good news, that he had not been named.
    Everything else was disastrous.
    J pushed the paper back and, still without a word, looked at me.
    And suddenly, as if a gray ceiling had moved in over the sky and a sodden rain begun to fall, it was not such a perfect Catskill Sunday anymore.

Date:
June 5, 2006
From:
“Benjamin Schulberg”

To:
“Isabel Montgomery”
CC:
maillist: The_Committee
Subject:
letter 5
    And while, at Colgate Lake on Sunday morning, your father was realizing how very, very right he had been not even to discuss Sharon Solarz with his client, Billy Cusimano, and how, nonetheless, very, very little help that was going to give him now, I, up in Albany, was starting in on what was to be twenty-four hours of uninterrupted work.
    Now, on this matter, let me say this: What else is new? Right? Working a night, a day, then a night again—this did not in any way indicate any interest whatsoever in your father, or Sharon Solarz, or Billy Cusimano, or the Tet Offensive, or Earth Day, or Birkenstocks, or marijuana—well, I was interested in marijuana, but that had nothing to do with these bozos. This was merely the kind of work expected of junior staff at the
Times.
    The only difference, in fact, was the actual content of my work that Sunday and Sunday night. Lately, if it was happening in a town bigger than 200 and involved something more controversial than a farm animal, it went to someone else, which gives you an idea both of my status at my place of employ that summer and of the newsworthiness my editor ascribed to the Sharon Solarz story. Now I had not only been taken off my regular beat to spend a few days researching three in-depth stories on the meaning of the Solarz arrest, but had actually been ordered to read up on the very particular history that had started three decades ago and ended with Sharon Solarz being arrested the night before.
    •   •   •
    I wasn’t working enthusiastically. My bargain-basement status at the paper was due to a fresh graduate from Columbia J School having just been hired, and given preference for anything I might have gotten otherwise. And then, the fact is, I am not so big on research, if you want to know the truth, Isabel, though if you happen to be at the National Press Club, if you don’t mind not mentioning this, that would be fine. What I had going for me as a journalist was primarily luck, and secondarily a gift.
    See, people like to talk to me. Why, I can’t tell you. Rebeccah says that it’s because I’m so foolish looking, and God knows she’s right about that—I am too tall, and too thin, and the main reason my face inspires confidence is because it is incapable of inspiring fear. But the fact is, you put me in a room, or at a bar, or on a checkout line at a supermarket, and I’ll come back and tell you the most intimate details about the person nearest to me. It’s not skill, exactly. In fact, it’s nearly politeness: I have to listen, because I can’t stop people from telling me things.
    But let me not be modest. In 1996 I was a beat reporter, and I went out and got subjects to talk, and although it seemed to them as if it was just by chance that I happened to be there and they