start earning my living as a translator, but it still wasn’t clear that my plan would work. In the meantime, I was also writing stories and doing occasional book reviews, and what with one thing and another, I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. Still, I saw Sachs more often than seems possible now, considering the circumstances. One advantage was that we had turned out to live in the same neighborhood, and our apartments were within easy walking distance of each other. This led to quite a few late-night meetings in bars along Broadway, and then, after we discovered a mutual passion for sports, weekend afternoons as well, since the ballgames were always on in those places and neither one of us owned a television set. Almost at once, I began seeing Sachs on the average of twice a week, far more than I saw anyone else.
Not long after these get-togethers began, he introduced me tohis wife. Fanny was a graduate student in the art history department at Columbia then, teaching courses at General Studies and finishing up her dissertation on nineteenth-century American landscape painting. She and Sachs had met at the University of Wisconsin ten years before, literally bumping into each other at a peace rally that had been organized on campus. By the time Sachs was arrested in the spring of 1967, they had already been married for close to a year. They lived at Ben’s parents’ house in New Canaan during the period of the trial, and once the sentence was handed down and Ben went off to prison (early in 1968), Fanny moved back to her own parents’ apartment in Brooklyn. At some point during all this, she applied to the graduate program at Columbia and was accepted with a faculty fellowship—which included free tuition, a living stipend of several thousand dollars, and responsibility for teaching a couple of courses. She spent the rest of that summer working as an office temp in Manhattan, found a small apartment on West 112th Street in late August, and then started classes in September, all the while commuting up to Danbury every Sunday on the train to visit Ben. I mention these things now because I happened to see her a number of times during that year—without having the slightest idea who she was. I was still an undergraduate at Columbia then, and my apartment was only five blocks away from hers, on West 107th Street. As chance would have it, two of my closest friends lived in her building, and on several of my visits I actually ran into her in the elevator or the downstairs lobby. Beyond that, there were the times when I saw her walking along Broadway, the times when I found her standing ahead of me at the counter of the discount cigarette store, the times when I caught a glimpse of her entering a building on campus. In the spring, we were even in a class together, a large lecture course on the history of aesthetics given by a professor in the philosophy department. I noticed her in all these places because Ifound her attractive, but I could never quite muster the courage to talk to her. There was something intimidating about her elegance, a walled-off quality that seemed to discourage strangers from approaching her. The wedding ring on her left hand was partly responsible, I suppose, but even if she hadn’t been married, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. Still, I made a conscious effort to sit behind her in that philosophy class, just so I could spend an hour every week watching her out of the corner of my eye. We smiled at each other once or twice as we were leaving the lecture hall, but I was too timid to push it any farther than that. When Sachs finally introduced me to her in 1975, we recognized each other immediately. It was an unsettling experience, and it took me several minutes to regain my composure. A mystery from the past had suddenly been solved. Sachs was the missing husband of the woman I had watched so attentively six or seven years before. If I had stayed in the neighborhood, it’s almost
Not long after these get-togethers began, he introduced me tohis wife. Fanny was a graduate student in the art history department at Columbia then, teaching courses at General Studies and finishing up her dissertation on nineteenth-century American landscape painting. She and Sachs had met at the University of Wisconsin ten years before, literally bumping into each other at a peace rally that had been organized on campus. By the time Sachs was arrested in the spring of 1967, they had already been married for close to a year. They lived at Ben’s parents’ house in New Canaan during the period of the trial, and once the sentence was handed down and Ben went off to prison (early in 1968), Fanny moved back to her own parents’ apartment in Brooklyn. At some point during all this, she applied to the graduate program at Columbia and was accepted with a faculty fellowship—which included free tuition, a living stipend of several thousand dollars, and responsibility for teaching a couple of courses. She spent the rest of that summer working as an office temp in Manhattan, found a small apartment on West 112th Street in late August, and then started classes in September, all the while commuting up to Danbury every Sunday on the train to visit Ben. I mention these things now because I happened to see her a number of times during that year—without having the slightest idea who she was. I was still an undergraduate at Columbia then, and my apartment was only five blocks away from hers, on West 107th Street. As chance would have it, two of my closest friends lived in her building, and on several of my visits I actually ran into her in the elevator or the downstairs lobby. Beyond that, there were the times when I saw her walking along Broadway, the times when I found her standing ahead of me at the counter of the discount cigarette store, the times when I caught a glimpse of her entering a building on campus. In the spring, we were even in a class together, a large lecture course on the history of aesthetics given by a professor in the philosophy department. I noticed her in all these places because Ifound her attractive, but I could never quite muster the courage to talk to her. There was something intimidating about her elegance, a walled-off quality that seemed to discourage strangers from approaching her. The wedding ring on her left hand was partly responsible, I suppose, but even if she hadn’t been married, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. Still, I made a conscious effort to sit behind her in that philosophy class, just so I could spend an hour every week watching her out of the corner of my eye. We smiled at each other once or twice as we were leaving the lecture hall, but I was too timid to push it any farther than that. When Sachs finally introduced me to her in 1975, we recognized each other immediately. It was an unsettling experience, and it took me several minutes to regain my composure. A mystery from the past had suddenly been solved. Sachs was the missing husband of the woman I had watched so attentively six or seven years before. If I had stayed in the neighborhood, it’s almost
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