vii
Avondale had been a way station to college for its student body. At Radcliffe, everyone expected to continue on to graduate school. Medicine, law, humanities – we all saw an academic career path unfolding before us. My freshman year had convinced me psychology was the right major; clinical psychology became my goal. I spent many evenings alone on my bed, flipping through the course catalogue for 1968/69. I kept coming back to Developmental Psychology, with Jerome Kagan again. I sensed a need to start from the beginning, to learn how children developed from infancy through adolescence, to understand how people create their emotions and build their inner lives. I could see myself spending years at Cambridge, absorbing all I could.
But first, our family would have one more summer on the Vineyard together. With school ending on the 24th, Mike and I decided to celebrate my birthday the next day in Menemsha, then we’d drive home so he could help clean out the swim club right after Memorial Day, ready for the June 1st opening. On the way down, we talked about school.
“So how do you do this year? Still trying to be number one?” Mike teased.
I saw nothing funny about working hard to get good grades. “Half the school was number one in high school. I just want to do my best, learn as much as I can.”
“I’ve heard it said, they don’t award a valedictorian here at graduation, ‘cause no one’s smart enough to be number one at Harvard. I guess that goes double for Radcliffe?”
“Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, Magna and Summa, those are all a big deal here. I see it as competing with, not against, the other people at school, like we’re all in it together, trying to help each other. There’s so much work, I don’t have time to worry about what somebody else is doing.”
Mike smiled and added, “They also say Harvard deliberately admits a ‘happy bottom quarter’. You’re right, everyone there is so smart, so driven, so accomplished, but still, if they’re going to give grades and rank people, somebody’s got to be at the bottom.”
I thought about this, then said, “You might be right. The kids who have to worry about rank and test scores, those who want to go to med or law or B-school, and some science programs, they seem the most competitive. Then there’s these guys whose parents have had money forever, live in the Hamptons or somewhere, went to prep school. They know they’ve got a job sewn up. Some of them will never have to work a day in their lives. But they’ve got to get that degree, because grandad or their father did. So they do enough to stay in school, meet the requirements, and that’s all they need.”
“The gentlemen’s ‘C’,” Mike replied.
“At Radcliffe, though, there’s very little legacy. Everyone seems to know where she’s going, what she’s aiming for. It’s a top-heavy place, no loiterers at the bottom.”
As we pulled up to the ferry line, Mike looked over at me and asked, “What are you doing after you get home from here?”
I decided to try one last time. “I’ve asked you this before, I know. I really want you to go with me to Chicago. Charlie, and some guys from the SDS at Harvard, are going to the convention there. I’m joining them. It’s important, Mike! You sure you can’t take some time off that week?” I looked back at him, his tanning face, his graceful arms. I felt that pull I always got being around him. I couldn’t shake another feeling, though, that we didn’t make a seamless picture, that we weren’t like those optical illusions my mother and I had talked about at Christmas break.
Mike sighed. “I’d like to go. I don’t know if I can get time off. I haven’t even started work there yet.” That was the best I was going to get from him, so I let it drop.
On the island, we headed for our beach between the Bight and the Sound, the one where we’d capsized the Sunfish the year before. We took off our shoes and socks, rolled our pants up to our knees, and walked together past the dunes. Looking west towards the setting sun, we leaned back against the sand, where Mike pulled a folded page of lined green paper from his rear pocket, opened it up, and said, “Remember those daffodils you got me for my birthday? And those golden raisins we had at breakfast the next morning? With Bleu cheese on the bagel? I don’t know if I have anything like that for you, not even Hector Protector, but I do have this.”
He handed me the sheet, and I read these lines, written in green ink on the pale green page:
To Janie, On Her Nineteenth Birthday
All green and full and dark from night,
Our day’s first light now strokes our sight
And rising, grey and bleu above our eyes;
We vow our lives
Together.
A special time, a special year is here and
Gone and yet to come; but we must mark one
off from the rest
and pause, and rest, quite blest and
Tender smiling.
Your special day, our special life, no fear no fight
Against our time together.
We are but one
who lives in ever-present rolling love;
And I present my present for your day –
My present: wishful presence, for a day,
All days and every day
And night
Which slips up into dawn
As dark to blue lights up
The green, and you
And me.
As we walk, your yellow wrap will crinkle
in my arms.
As close we walk,
As close we talk
As close we are –
forever.
5-23-68
I watched the sun sink below the shoreline across the Bight. Every day that happens, I mused. Every day could be an ending. We rest at night, and start again in day’s first light. “Oh Geez,” I thought. “I’m beginning to think like him.”
viii
Back in Cincinnati, we spent every evening we could together before I returned to the Vineyard. Days when he worked early, Mike would come to my house, and watch the TV news with us, before we ate. Some nights we’d go to a movie, or walk outside in the warm spring evenings. By that time, my parents had acquiesced to his spending the night with me. He’d worked late that Wednesday night, closing the club, so we just fell asleep together on my little girl’s bed. Coming down to breakfast, an unnatural hush engulfed the kitchen. Dad was still there, seated at the table watching the little TV mom had recently installed.
“Is he going to be all right?” he asked.
“They don’t know,” Mom answered. “They took him to a hospital there in LA, no one’s saying anything. But it doesn’t look very good.”
“What happened, what’s going on?” I sensed fear and anger in equal measures from my parents.
“Robert Kennedy. He’s been shot.”
Mike seemed to breathe in all the air in the kitchen, then sighed while sitting down, shaking his head. He looked about to cry. “Why now, why now,” he kept mumbling. “Wasn’t one enough? First Martin Luther King, now this…”
All my questions came pouring out. “Do they know who did it? Where did it happen? When? What does it mean? Did they catch the guy?”
My Dad calmly went through the details reported on TV. The last thing he said was “Sirhan Sirhan.”
“Sirhan Sirhan, his first name is the same as his last? What does that mean? Where is he from?”
“They say he’s from Palestine.” my mother answered.
Mike looked at each of us in turn. A year ago, he’d asked me about the Six Day War, about Palestine and Israel, and why they couldn’t get along. He thought it was not a recent thing, but a feud going back thousands of years between two tribes over the same land. I told him what my family said about it, which was very little, that Jews had wanted a homeland after the Holocaust, and they got it after the war, like reparations. He’d seemed skeptical then, and looked ready to raise that question once more.
“So has he said anything?” Mike asked.
Dad replied in a monotone. “Somebody heard him saying afterwards, ‘I did it for my country.’ He didn’t get a chance to talk, that Olympic guy Rafer Johnson and Rosie Grier, the big football player, were right by Kennedy, and they wrestled him to the ground. I’m surprised they didn’t kill him right there.”
“No more Lee Harvey Oswalds, I guess,” I said. Dad let out a hollow laugh. Dad and Mike both had to leave for work. Mom and I began to sort out our feelings.
“Sweetie, are you OK?” she asked. “Everything will be all right.”
“How can you say that?” I almost screamed. “Bobby Kennedy was perfect, he was going to stop the war, help so many people, make us whole again. I don’t know if I want to live in a world like this, where anybody who says…who does something good, they get killed!” I started crying, Mom held me close, softly saying, “There, there, I know, I know,” as we rocked back and forth in each other’s arms.
I pulled myself together, pushed away from her, and firmly announced, “That’s it. I’ve decided, I am going to Chicago with Charlie this summer. He’s right, we can’t let it go on anymore, all this has to stop.”
“Oh, honey, are you sure?” Mom looked worried.
That weekend, we left for Martha’s Vineyard. Charlie had told me earlier that spring, “Janie, I this could be the last summer we’re all going to be there together, you know. Henry has that job in New York, Lisa’s going to graduate next year, and Dad is getting tired of paying for a place he only gets to spend a few days in each summer.” If that were true, I was going to enjoy my final weeks there doing everything, going everywhere. Each morning, I took the Sunfish out on the Pond. Denise was big enough for Arlene to let her come with me. She looked so cute, bundled up in her orange life vest. Afternoons, Lisa and I, and sometimes Mom, would bike over to the towns, to Vineyard Haven or Oak Bluffs, and shop. Mom must have come back home with a dozen new scarves. Evenings featured sunsets, the Community Center, or a fire on the beach and a jigsaw puzzle after dark.
Throughout it all, Mike and I kept writing. Our letters seemed to center those days on kids. Mine featured Denise, and the playtimes I’d supervise with her and a few neighbor children, toddlers to school age. Even with only three or four of them, keeping them all safe at the edge of the water was a full time job. I watched each one, looking closely for signs of age-appropriate behavior. When I got a a chance, I started to read Kagan’s book on childhood development, comparing what he wrote to what I was seeing every day.
Mike seemed to have his hands full, as a lifeguard, and a volunteer coach for their swimming team. All he talked about in his letters was the joy he got from seeing them play, and playing with them. Their screams in the water, jumping and splashing on each other, their endless energy, their laughter. He seemed fascinated with the big Catholic families who used the pool and its lifeguards as a baby sitter. “Four, six, even eight! It might be hard work for the moms, but those kids look like they get to have so much fun with everyone at home. Each family a clan to themselves, I guess.”
One day, in late July, he wrote about a thunderstorm which emptied the pool. He was sent home, and told, “Looks like we’re done for the day.” Half way to Woodland Park, he saw a band of cerulean sky to the northwest butting up against the shimmering rain clouds overhead, heralding an end to the lightening threat. “I just had to go back to the club, to see those kids again.” The way he wrote it made it seem like he wasn’t talking about the younger ones. I wondered why I felt jealous, as I read between the lines.
ix
My parents insisted I find something, anything, that would “look good on my resume” during August. “Honey, don’t mope around here all day. Your friends from school, Lizzie, Jerry, Phil, all of them, have jobs. Mike – we never see Mike anymore, he’s off working at that swim club. Why don’t you call up the hospital, see if you can volunteer, something that would help when you apply to grad school.” My mother had never stopped telling me what to do, even when I showed I could get good grades and avoid trouble in high school. I thought getting into Radcliffe would end all that, but apparently not. Dad, usually willing to let his baby girl do what she pleased, stayed silent.
While I didn’t wear a white-and-red smock, they still called me a “candy-striper” at Cincinnati General Hospital. The campus sprawled over several blocks, full of ancient stone buildings, sweltering in the middle of summer. I spent the day pushing patients down to X-Ray, up to a ward from admitting, sometimes delivering charts or equipment. Occasionally, I got to take kids to the pre-op ward for a tonsillectomy. Listening to the little ones chatter, I marveled at how a five-year old simply takes life as it comes, without fear or worry. My heart sank whenever I heard a parent chase away non-existent demons. I wished they’d let the kid be a kid; they’re perfect just the way they are.
The last weekend of August, Charlie and I drove his old VW beetle through Indiana to Chicago. Along the way, he told me what to expect.
“We’re staying with someone I met last year at the SDS convention, Howard Lehrman. I think you’ll like him – he went to Williams, is headed to Harvard Law this fall. His parents have a place along the lake, in one of those apartments north of the city. They’ve left town during the convention. Free room and board, easy in, easy out. We can take the “L” from there downtown to the Hilton, where the Democrats are staying.”
At first sight, Howard resembled a Russian revolutionary. Wild wiry hair sprouted above his eyes, made smaller by thick, square wire-rim glasses. A mustache and goatee framed thin lips, atop which perched a flaring hawk nose, He wore baggy, wrinkled khakis, a faded thin denim shirt and red bandana around his neck, but still couldn’t hide his patrician North Side roots. His hands, thick veined on the back, uncalloused on the palms, emphasized his never-ending observations and pronouncements. Velvet toned, methodical and persuasive, he already possessed an assurance his views were right.
Not waiting for an introduction, he looked at me, smiled, and said, “Sarah Jane, is it? Charlie’s little sister, right? You don’t look like a Janie. What should I call you? Jane doesn’t sound right, you don’t look like my stodgy old aunt. Can I call you Sarah?”
Charlie cautioned, “Howie, I already told you, she’s got a boyfriend, at Calvin.”
Howard snorted, “Jock U.” I sensed his eyes rove up and down my profile, assessing, judging. I tried to catch them, hold him steady on my face. Sitting down, he went on, “Psych major, huh? Where are you going with that?” Not waiting for an answer, he got up again, started pacing, and finally told us, “Right, let’s meet up with some people, figure out our plan.’
Soon, the apartment filled with cigarette smoking sloppily-clothed young men, and a few languid girls, stringy long hair hiding their sullen faces. They talked only of “strategy” and “tactics”, what phrases they might chant, posters they would hold, their expectations of tear gas and arrests.
Monday, the first day of the convention, we reconnoitered the lake-shore park across from the hotel. Helmeted police set up steel fencing across the streets, creating a pen between the hotel and the lake. Others on horseback kept onlookers away. I noticed with apprehension the slick long black clubs dangling from their belts.
“They sure look ready for a fight,” Howard observed.
That evening, our little clan of protesters attempted consensus. Some, including all the women, asserted we should stand with the other protesters, resolute but non-violent. Others, the majority led most vocally by Howard, advocated for a more aggressive posture. My brother, Charlie, was oddly quiet during all the talk.
“The time is long past to play Gandhi. We have to push back, bring the fight home to them. Our brothers are dying in Vietnam. What are we afraid of?” Howard boomed.
The talk turned to self protection. Bandanas moistened against tear gas, which could also be used to cover our heads, so the pigs couldn’t drag us by our hair. No belts or pens, as those would be taken away at the jail. Sneakers, not loafers, to make running easier. Tuesday would be a practice run, feints and taunts, but trying to avoid direct confrontation. I stayed close to Charlie, feeling out-of-place in my cotton blouse and skirt. Charlie must have noticed, as we stopped to buy a pair of jeans for me on the way back to Howard’s place. I’d never felt right in them; to fit my hips and shorter legs, they ballooned around my thighs. But I didn’t want to stand out, so I went along.
On Wednesday, the day Eugene McCarthy would finally be denied the nomination, we joined the massed crowd outside, ready to confront the delegates as they headed to the convention. More and more people came, filling the confined space cordoned off by the steel fence, our designated protest area. A low murmur built from near the lake, at first indistinct but forceful, rhythmic. Large TV cameras, some on platforms, panned across the crowd. Finally, those of us near the front heard the chant and joined in: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” We all seemed to move, to speak as one. Charlie and I drifted apart as everyone tried moved closer to the edge, where the temporary chainlink fence kept us from the street.
Suddenly, some of the bigger guys clambered up and over, while others repeatedly shook the barrier and finally pulled it down. I felt people all around me surge, moving towards freedom. I tried to stay, to swim against them, afraid of the police rushing at us with raised billy clubs and shields. Horses neighed on hind legs, snorting and spitting. Cops grabbed people indiscriminately from the leading edge of our group, yanking their limbs, pulling their hair. Dark blue armoured police vans awaited with open doors in the grassy area across the street. Some willingly went in as cops more forcibly tossed the stragglers. I lost sight of Charlie in the melee. I screamed his name, feeling terrified and alone.
I spun around, looking for my brother, who should have stood out in the crowd, wiry Jewish Afro atop his lanky frame. As I floundered, the mob pushed, shoved, and pulled in all directions. I finally fell down amongst the rampaging feet. A sharp clang reverberated in my skull, followed by bright flashes, and then darkness engulfed me.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I was aware again, Charlie, seated on the asphalt, was holding my head in his lap, rocking back and forth while holding his bloody shirt across my forehead. “Oh, my God, Janie, oh my God! Miriam’s gonna kill me, she’s just gonna kill me.”
I wanted to reassure him I was OK, not to worry about mom, she’d understand, but the pounding in my head overpowered that attempt. I let him pick me up, hold me steady as we slowly walked away.
x
In the ER, they shaved my temple before sewing up the two-inch long gash left by someone who must not have been wearing sneakers. The nurses were thoughtful enough to collect the hair after they cut it off, so I got to carry it back home in a paper bag.
“It doesn’t look that bad, with your head band over it,” Charlie observed when we stopped for lunch in Indianapolis. He was still dreading the return to Clifton, rehearsing possible cover stories. “Maybe we could say you fell down the stairs outside the convention or something?”
“Charlie, there’s no way around it. It’s really my fault, I should have taken better care of myself, watched what was happening and gone with the crowd, instead of trying to fight my way out.” Charlie needn’t have worried. I’d already called, given them the news about my head, keeping quiet when they sounded angry, telling me to be careful, simply saying, “Yes. mom, yes. Uh huh, all right, I will.”
Mom and Dad had of course watched the news, seen the beatings by the police that night, and knew we had been outside when the riot erupted. Any anger or blame they might have felt was overwhelmed by their relief we were both basically all right. I got hugs, and all Charlie got was a soundless reprimand, a click of the tongue and shake of the head from Dad. Charlie went up stairs to wash up, call Arlene.
Mom was first to speak. “Janie, was it worth it? I know how deeply kids feel things, how it all seems so important. When I was your age, in Cleveland, the depression was just starting. We didn’t have any time, didn’t have the luxury of complaining, that wouldn’t put food on the table.”
I started to object. She held up her hand. “No, wait. Hear me out. I don’t want to see you lose the chance you’ve got. You are a special person, Sarah Jane. Lisa’s still, probably always will be, a flighty self-centered play-girl. Henry, he doesn’t seem to have any real ambition. Charlie – Charlie’s very smart, and he’s got a beautiful family, he’s such a wonderful person. But I don’t see him changing, he is what he is. You…you, sweetie, have always had your eyes forward, always knew what you wanted in life. Even when you were five, we couldn’t tell you what to do. And you’ve made me – made us,” she added, glancing over at Henry, “so very proud, the choices you’ve made, the things you’ve done. I don’t want to see you throw that away, don’t want to lose you to people who only want to use you…to use you, I don’t know, as cannon fodder.”
“Well, what should I do? There’s so many things wrong with the world…”
“You can’t fix them all,” Dad interjected. “What was it that French guy said, in the book you told me about last year. What was his name, Vult-something?”
“Voltaire.”
“Yeah, that guy. What did he say?”
“‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ We’ve got to tend our own garden.”
“Well, maybe that’s what you should keep doing. A little more topsoil, don’t forget to water, and fertilize.”
That night, as I tried to avoid laying the left side of my head on the pillow, I couldn’t sleep, partly from the pain, the headache, but partly from wondering what my garden was. My head was spinning, and not only from those pulsating stitches above my ear. Feeling like Dorothy, watching the tornado whirl outside her window, I saw my mother, my friends at school, Professor Kagan and his lectures about child development. I saw laughing kids, angry marchers, dying leaders. I saw a boy with beautiful hands who seemed so sure of where he was going, who said he loved me, and whom I knew I loved. Over and over, I thought, “I don’t know…I just don’t know…who’s going to tell me?”
I don’t know when I finally dozed off. I was still asleep at noon when Mom knocked on the door.
“Janie? Janie, you got a letter. From Mike.”
Janie – The most amazing thing happened. Here’s the story…
My father grew up in Miles City, on the windy high plains of Eastern Montana. He told us of skating on the frozen Yellowstone River in the winters, riding horses through the draws, and watching his father work as a deputy sheriff, banker, and rancher. His career took him and my mother first to Boston, then to Cincinnati, neither of which is much like Montana, or Grace’s Iowa, for that matter. I’ve told you about the long car trips we take each summer, to Seattle or California, where their families had ended up after WWII. On the way, whenever we drive through the Rockies, my father lights up, seems more alive.
After that trip to Sun Valley last Christmas, when we got hooked on skiing, he and Grace decided to go to Colorado this summer, to look for a retirement spot. They’d decided they wanted some place with land, where they could see and be in the mountains, where people would come and visit them, not the other way around. We looked outside of Boulder, in Vail, and along the continental divide near Dillon. We’ve spent several summer vacations in Aspen, hiking the mountains, trying to fish, admiring the scenery. So Jack took us back through there over Independence Pass on the way to Glenwood Springs. As we drove down into town, we heard on the radio a real estate ad pitching Snowmass, a new ski resort going up at the base of a mountain eight miles outside of town, still very much under construction.
We parked in the middle of the beginner ski slope, amidst the debris and dirt. Jack left us in the car, saying “Wait here, I’ll be right back. I just want to see what this is all about.”
Excited as that first morning skiing in Sun Valley, he comes back about an hour and a half later, saying “I want to take you to this lot we’re going to buy.”
Our jaws drop to the car floor. My father the engineer NEVER buys anything without thinking for two months, comparing a thousand prices, and making sure he isn’t being swayed by the emotion of the moment. Now he wanted us to see what he was so excited about.
We got there after 15 bone-cracking minutes in the jeep, and stopped on a ridge looking over a mountain valley five miles wide and long. To the south, an unimpeded view of all four Aspen ski mountains. Snowmass, the closest, spread out before us covering half the sky, rising from the valley floor of 8000′ to 13,400’ at the top. To the east are several Colorado Rockies of the granite sky-scraping variety, still with a little snow in clefts and shaded gullies. To the west, thirty miles away,, the continental divide, with Mounts Massive and Elbert, the highest points in the state, peaking over the ridge line. Red and Smuggler mountains, rising 3000 feet out of Aspen, dominate the middle view. A ridge to the north fills the foreground, horses grazing in the ranch meadow below. We saw at once what had entranced him.
Imagine an English spring day, shimmering green after a shower; clouds building to thunderheads like fuzzy-bottomed anvils; blue so deep (less air up there to lighten the sun) you think you’re looking into a mountain lake; and scrubby little man-sized oaks everywhere,with leaves like hands. Quiet and rustling wind, through the little aspen grove down the gully to the south. A perfect place for my parents to rebuild their life, I think. – Love, Mike