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Authors: Neil Gordon
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And in fact, it was kind of a kick hanging out with him in front of various Saugerties dignitaries, who tended to congregate together depending on whether they’d been at Woodstock or Khe Sanh, or rather, whether or not they remembered which was which.
I may as well tell you, Izzy, now that you are a big girl, that although he insisted on keeping his own house, and making sure you didn’t see, because he thought it would confuse you, your father and I had become lovers by the spring of 1996. And I may as well tell you, also, that before he ever got into my bed, your father told me everything there was to know about him, all of his secrets, and I believed in him then, and I believe in him now.
And if I have to say it explicitly, then I will: that’s why I’m writing. Because I think you should believe in him too.
2.
Alright. It is the summer of 1996, I live in the little clapboard house next to yours in Saugerties, which in fact I’d found for your father as soon as he left Julia. It was a change from what you were used to, my love, believe me. But in retrospect, it does seem that you should have been there all along rather than Julia’s Woodstock. I, for one, am convinced that you got something richer down there than you ever had up to Woodstock with the Montgomery money, and I like to think that I had something to do with that.
So this had been my routine since early that summer Leo had come home from his first tour in the marines. Wait for him to wake up in the afternoon, sit and talk with him through dinner, then lend him the car to go out with his high school friends, and then, the high point of my day,wait for the 4 A.M. update of the paper on the Web so I could check the police blotter for car crashes and arrests. After that, a luxurious two hours of sleep before you came over in the morning, little ray of sunshine that you were.
Christ. Leo had been around the world with the service by then. He had been in “combat” in the Persian Gulf, where he had served as private first class in a reconnaissance unit. Then he became a pilot and after that a strat commander. But nothing he had done then or was to do afterward terrified me quite as much as what he could get up to with his old high school buddies in Saugerties, or Catskill, or Hudson: depressed and hopeless places, rife with liquor, drugs, and guns. But of course there was nothing I could do or say, and so I had long resigned myself to sitting up all night, my stomach clenched with anxiety, waiting for the morning paper to be posted and listening to WDST Woodstock.
Sharon Solarz. I remember the very layout of that computer screen. Once I had assured myself that by the
Albany Times’
electronic deadline my son had neither been killed nor maimed nor shot nor robbed nor arrested—so far that night at least—I clicked back to the Solarz story and read it through: during the period Sharon had been famous, I had been the young wife of an active-duty marine, and the politics of the antiwar movement had been very alive to me. There was a vivid account of the manhunt and arrest, and I was by no means blind to the fact that it all started in Billy Cusimano’s house, where, the paper reported, Solarz had come hoping to connect with a lawyer to negotiate her surrender. I remember that vividly, because I remember thinking, Christ, her life must be awful for her to prefer a decade in jail. Then I read the summary of Sharon’s career: SDS member in Chicago, founding member of Weatherman, underground after the town house bombing, arrested briefly on explosives charges after Weather broke up in ’75, then jumped bail and underground again as part of the MDB—Marion Delgado Brigade—and not seen again until the Bank of Michigan robbery. She was named by Vincent Dellesandro, the only person arrested after the crime, who also named, in addition to Solarz, the other two members of the MDB: Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai.
That Dellesandro, whom the article implied had
I may as well tell you, Izzy, now that you are a big girl, that although he insisted on keeping his own house, and making sure you didn’t see, because he thought it would confuse you, your father and I had become lovers by the spring of 1996. And I may as well tell you, also, that before he ever got into my bed, your father told me everything there was to know about him, all of his secrets, and I believed in him then, and I believe in him now.
And if I have to say it explicitly, then I will: that’s why I’m writing. Because I think you should believe in him too.
2.
Alright. It is the summer of 1996, I live in the little clapboard house next to yours in Saugerties, which in fact I’d found for your father as soon as he left Julia. It was a change from what you were used to, my love, believe me. But in retrospect, it does seem that you should have been there all along rather than Julia’s Woodstock. I, for one, am convinced that you got something richer down there than you ever had up to Woodstock with the Montgomery money, and I like to think that I had something to do with that.
So this had been my routine since early that summer Leo had come home from his first tour in the marines. Wait for him to wake up in the afternoon, sit and talk with him through dinner, then lend him the car to go out with his high school friends, and then, the high point of my day,wait for the 4 A.M. update of the paper on the Web so I could check the police blotter for car crashes and arrests. After that, a luxurious two hours of sleep before you came over in the morning, little ray of sunshine that you were.
Christ. Leo had been around the world with the service by then. He had been in “combat” in the Persian Gulf, where he had served as private first class in a reconnaissance unit. Then he became a pilot and after that a strat commander. But nothing he had done then or was to do afterward terrified me quite as much as what he could get up to with his old high school buddies in Saugerties, or Catskill, or Hudson: depressed and hopeless places, rife with liquor, drugs, and guns. But of course there was nothing I could do or say, and so I had long resigned myself to sitting up all night, my stomach clenched with anxiety, waiting for the morning paper to be posted and listening to WDST Woodstock.
Sharon Solarz. I remember the very layout of that computer screen. Once I had assured myself that by the
Albany Times’
electronic deadline my son had neither been killed nor maimed nor shot nor robbed nor arrested—so far that night at least—I clicked back to the Solarz story and read it through: during the period Sharon had been famous, I had been the young wife of an active-duty marine, and the politics of the antiwar movement had been very alive to me. There was a vivid account of the manhunt and arrest, and I was by no means blind to the fact that it all started in Billy Cusimano’s house, where, the paper reported, Solarz had come hoping to connect with a lawyer to negotiate her surrender. I remember that vividly, because I remember thinking, Christ, her life must be awful for her to prefer a decade in jail. Then I read the summary of Sharon’s career: SDS member in Chicago, founding member of Weatherman, underground after the town house bombing, arrested briefly on explosives charges after Weather broke up in ’75, then jumped bail and underground again as part of the MDB—Marion Delgado Brigade—and not seen again until the Bank of Michigan robbery. She was named by Vincent Dellesandro, the only person arrested after the crime, who also named, in addition to Solarz, the other two members of the MDB: Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai.
That Dellesandro, whom the article implied had
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