ended.
You know what they told me once? They told me that the Vietcong firing squad that executed him, it had only three members over fifteen.
Don’t ask how old Donny was.
J and you came to me just when Leo followed his daddy into the marines, and as I think you know, Izzy, you stepped into a place in my heart as empty as a tomb. Aviation Guarantee. For God’s sake. Grown men promise an eighteen-year-old that if he enlists, they’ll guarantee him flight training. Just what they did to Donny. What the hell
can’t
you get an eighteen-year-old to do after you promise to let him fly supersonicjets? Donny they baited and switched, forcing him into CID, Criminal Investigations, which is how he got captured. At least Leo, they kept their word. Now it’s 2006 and I’m still up all night, with the single damn difference that now I sit around with hot flashes watching the webcasts of Greater Persia, where Leo’s commanding a stratospheric firefight, rather than waking up barfing with morning sickness and listening to the news from Nam. Oh, and in between? In between was me, sitting up all night, reading the Web to see that Leo hasn’t wrapped his damn car around a tree in Woodstock during his leave in that damn, damn summer of ’96.
Alright. The hell with it, I’m up all night right now, too, reading your daddy’s version of that Saturday night in 1996, the night Sharon Solarz was arrested while you two camped out on the Dutcher Notch trail, and I can watch Frank Smyth reporting from Baghdad in a window on my screen all the while I write this, as I promised your father I’d do, so let’s get it done. I am Molly Sackler. I took care of you for the couple years between the time your dad left your mother and the spring of 1996, and I hoped I was going to take care of you the rest of your life, but it didn’t happen that way. And this whole thing, it might be the way your father and his friends try to talk you into going to testify at the parole hearing, but for me, it’s just a way of explaining to you that I love you as much as if you were really mine, Izzy, and I love your father too.
You were too young to know it, by all rights we were an unlikely pair of friends. Your father a lefty lawyer married to one of the most glamorous residents of Woodstock. Me the principal at Mount Marion Elementary, a resident of the wrong side of decidedly unglamorous Saugerties, the widow of a marines intelligence officer perished in Vietnam, and get this, a
Republican.
The fact is, Donny Sackler, my late husband: when we were kids, he would sooner have taken a baseball bat to your father than speak to him. And as for me, in those days, makeup and bouffant hair and get this, an actual cheerleader, as far as your daddy was concerned, I could have been from Mars.
Now, 1996, we sat out our evenings on the upstairs porch like twoaging sweethearts, and even the two-three shouting matches we once had about the war never made as much difference as the fact that once, we both lost everything that meant anything to Vietnam. Just like thousands and thousands of other Americans. And at the time, of course, I was about the only one who knew exactly how much your father had lost, and how dearly he had paid for it.
We had met in ’94 when you were five and J represented Mount Marion Elementary in our strike against the state regents over our refusal to use state-mandated pass-fail criteria. I had adamantly opposed your dad’s selection as attorney until it turned out that no one else would take the case on for free. And because we had to work together so much during the trial, I didn’t have to admit that I liked being with this person who was so abhorrent to my every principle. When it turned out we both were training for the Albany Marathon, however, we started running together, and there wasn’t much business excuse for that.
Now, I didn’t know it then, but Julia was around less and less, in ’94, and your daddy was taking care of you
You know what they told me once? They told me that the Vietcong firing squad that executed him, it had only three members over fifteen.
Don’t ask how old Donny was.
J and you came to me just when Leo followed his daddy into the marines, and as I think you know, Izzy, you stepped into a place in my heart as empty as a tomb. Aviation Guarantee. For God’s sake. Grown men promise an eighteen-year-old that if he enlists, they’ll guarantee him flight training. Just what they did to Donny. What the hell
can’t
you get an eighteen-year-old to do after you promise to let him fly supersonicjets? Donny they baited and switched, forcing him into CID, Criminal Investigations, which is how he got captured. At least Leo, they kept their word. Now it’s 2006 and I’m still up all night, with the single damn difference that now I sit around with hot flashes watching the webcasts of Greater Persia, where Leo’s commanding a stratospheric firefight, rather than waking up barfing with morning sickness and listening to the news from Nam. Oh, and in between? In between was me, sitting up all night, reading the Web to see that Leo hasn’t wrapped his damn car around a tree in Woodstock during his leave in that damn, damn summer of ’96.
Alright. The hell with it, I’m up all night right now, too, reading your daddy’s version of that Saturday night in 1996, the night Sharon Solarz was arrested while you two camped out on the Dutcher Notch trail, and I can watch Frank Smyth reporting from Baghdad in a window on my screen all the while I write this, as I promised your father I’d do, so let’s get it done. I am Molly Sackler. I took care of you for the couple years between the time your dad left your mother and the spring of 1996, and I hoped I was going to take care of you the rest of your life, but it didn’t happen that way. And this whole thing, it might be the way your father and his friends try to talk you into going to testify at the parole hearing, but for me, it’s just a way of explaining to you that I love you as much as if you were really mine, Izzy, and I love your father too.
You were too young to know it, by all rights we were an unlikely pair of friends. Your father a lefty lawyer married to one of the most glamorous residents of Woodstock. Me the principal at Mount Marion Elementary, a resident of the wrong side of decidedly unglamorous Saugerties, the widow of a marines intelligence officer perished in Vietnam, and get this, a
Republican.
The fact is, Donny Sackler, my late husband: when we were kids, he would sooner have taken a baseball bat to your father than speak to him. And as for me, in those days, makeup and bouffant hair and get this, an actual cheerleader, as far as your daddy was concerned, I could have been from Mars.
Now, 1996, we sat out our evenings on the upstairs porch like twoaging sweethearts, and even the two-three shouting matches we once had about the war never made as much difference as the fact that once, we both lost everything that meant anything to Vietnam. Just like thousands and thousands of other Americans. And at the time, of course, I was about the only one who knew exactly how much your father had lost, and how dearly he had paid for it.
We had met in ’94 when you were five and J represented Mount Marion Elementary in our strike against the state regents over our refusal to use state-mandated pass-fail criteria. I had adamantly opposed your dad’s selection as attorney until it turned out that no one else would take the case on for free. And because we had to work together so much during the trial, I didn’t have to admit that I liked being with this person who was so abhorrent to my every principle. When it turned out we both were training for the Albany Marathon, however, we started running together, and there wasn’t much business excuse for that.
Now, I didn’t know it then, but Julia was around less and less, in ’94, and your daddy was taking care of you
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