The Gun Runner's Daughter (23 page)

Later on the divorce came, her sophomore year of high school, the winter—she thought now—after she had made love with Dee on Hancock Beach. Her mother had quietly, with no
preparation and no explanation, disappeared from their lives, leaving their father to explain. Two summers later, while they were on the island, her father had quietly sold off the Grace Court
house and bought a prewar apartment on Park Avenue. Without ever returning to the house, she had gone off to Yale, Pauly had moved uptown with her father, and started at Dalton. And now the roles
were reversed. Now it was Allison, escaped from her family just when her family had fallen apart, who was at home in this new world in New Haven with Martha and a quarter of their graduating class
from St. Ann’s, and Pauly, torn apart by the divorce, who had to master a new place alone.

God, he had had a bad time that year. First the divorce, then her departure, then the move, all within a couple of years. Her father had had her bedroom moved intact to the new apartment, and
she had come home every weekend, and every weekend night little Pauly would huddle his tight, sullen body next to her, sleeping a tragic child’s sleep in which he tossed and talked and cried
out all night long.

And now a terrible ache was in her stomach as, step by step, starting from those nights in this house, the logic of her brother’s death came back to her. She didn’t say it, even to
herself, but she knew it. It all started here, in this house: this was where Pauly learned everything about love, and everything about hate, and it would be that hate that would lead him to be
killed on the cliffs of Gay Head.

Nobody knew that. It had nothing to do with suicide, Pauly’s death, and it had nothing to do with being gay. Being gay for Pauly meant having fallen in love only once, and that had been
with a man. That man had been like him in so many ways: so quick to laugh, so strong and beautiful, so in touch with that strain of yiddishkeit black humor and yet so at home in a world of WASPs.
But it wasn’t about being gay, it was about the fact that Johnny Eisenberg could have been his brother.

Or his sister.

No one else knew that. Not her father, not their neighbors, not the newspapers. They saw a traumatized child, sick with homosexuality, and when the day came that he stole his father’s gun
and on the red clay cliffs at Gay Head turned its muzzle into his chest, his beautiful strong chest, they saw an inevitability.

Only once had she had the chance to tell her father the truth, at the unveiling of Pauly’s gravestone, a year after his funeral. Only she and her father had been there, Acacia Cemetery in
Queens. Afterward, they’d gone to see her grandparents’ tombs, and stooping to put a pebble on his mother’s gravestone, his father had said, not looking at her but into the green
depths of the cemetery, “When did Davey take my gun, Esther?”

She knew he was referring to the night her brother shot himself. “Why, Daddy?”

His voice carried on under the vault of summer sky.

“I was thinking about it this morning. It was in my bedside drawer when I went to sleep. That night. I know because I checked it.”

“So?”

“So, Davey went out before I went to bed. According to the police report, he never came back.”

Watching her father crouching by his mother’s tombstone, she wondered what story, what other story, he was telling himself, and how close it came to the truth. That was when she had a
chance to tell him. But what she said was wooden, factual:

“He came back. During the night. I heard him. He came upstairs, then he went out again. I thought he was in the bathroom, but he must have come to take the gun while you were asleep. I
thought he was going back out to party. I let him go. I—I could have stopped him, Daddy.”

And now her father was standing, approaching her across the small distance of his mother’s grave, and then she was in his arms and as her tears came she knew he had, once again, believed
her.

With a start, she came back to herself. What was happening? All the implacable discipline of the years past, years where she had never once revisited this time in the past, was falling apart,
falling apart. Tears in her eyes—the second time she had cried since that day at the cemetery—she mounted, turned, and accelerated, hard, toward the bridge.

6.

Eight
P.M
., on Jane Street. Allison, drying her hair by the mirror, dressing after her shower.

She had met Martha for a drink, downtown at the Ear Inn, on her return to the city. Martha ordered dinner, Allison, waiting to eat later with Dee, had a couple of beers. Afterward, she’d
cycled home, somewhat drunk after not having eaten all day. Encouraged by the mixture of exercise and beer, a great lassitude had gone through her, and she had rested for a long time on her bed
before, noticing the time, rising. First she’d unpacked her knapsack, hiding the documents she’d taken from Borough Park in her desk drawer. Then she’d gone to shower.

Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom, brushing her wet hair, she considered her eyes dispassionately. It was time to go downstairs to the bar, to show herself so that Dee would know to
follow her up, but she found her mind resting not on that meeting she had awaited all day but on Drew. Drew, his pale face framed by black hair, his bent nose, his strong body hidden beneath a
crumpled white shirt above drab black pants, the fringe of his prayer shawl hanging loose above his pants pockets.

And suddenly she was consumed by a sensation of hatred for her old friend, a heat that swept through her, hatred for his right-wing politics, his disregard for freedom, his righteousness; hatred
for the pure unaestheticism of his life, the dreary clothes, the sun-starved skin.

God, the audacity of his sanctimonious nonsense. Bitterly, she thought, not for the first time, of the hypocrisy of the religious, thinking themselves holy for their willingness to sacrifice
everything to their belief. But how holy was that? Everyone, Allison knew, thinks they are making some holy sacrifice. Her father was prepared to sacrifice the lives of people and the freedom of
countries to protect Israel’s ability to defend itself. Dee was prepared to sacrifice her father to bring legal questions into court. Dee’s father was prepared to sacrifice justice to
satisfy the overarching demands of foreign policy. And even Nicky had been prepared to sacrifice her—her very freedom—to stop Greg Eastbrook from being elected. So how different was
Drew, thinking he had given so much to the pursuit of sanctity?

And then, as that anger faded, she just as suddenly felt something other, and as it grew she acknowledged that it had always been there, and it had always been guilt. Guilt for her goyish good
looks, guilt for the changed name, guilt for the happiness she had had, guilt for the degree to which she had escaped the thorny obligations and questions of these people’s lives.

And as she felt guilt she felt a longing, shocking in its depth, for the pure simplicity of Drew’s beliefs, the conviction that God has 613 rules, no more, no less, and all
we—Republicans, Democrats, gun runners, or rabbis—have to do is follow them. How quickly, how easily, she could turn right around from her entire life and go back! Slip clearly into the
religious belief, the xenophobia, the racism, Zionism, faith. The zealotry. As if all her life, to this moment, all her cherished beliefs, faded as easily as an ex-smoker gives in to the
seductiveness of tobacco and suddenly, from a militant antismoker, becomes again a profound addict.

Longing. That longing flowing through her, alive and hot. She carried it across the room, out the door, and down into the night to find Dee. Carried it downstairs, carried it around the corner,
carried it to the bar and to Dee—cradling it, cherishing it, nursing it until she could masquerade it as that other longing—until she could end this terrible day with Dee’s body
in hers.

And still, that long, long day had another surprise coming.

Or, to be exact, two.

A large crowd was in the bar, and she had to maneuver for position before she could see that Dee was not in yet.

Nervously, impatiently, she waited while Bobby brought her a beer and a letter, a messenger delivery, which he had received for her during the day. It was from Bob Stein, and idly, expecting
more in the endless stream of court-related documents, she opened the envelope and leafed through its contents.

And then the first thing happened. Inside, a letter with a handwritten note on top from Bob:

That made her, nearly, smile. Stein would be shocked indeed, she thought, to find out what this matter was about, and that it was certainly not going to be resolved in any timely manner.

She put the package down and turned to her beer. What would Stein find out? That in addition to her father’s other problems, now she—not her father, but she—was going to be
pursued for wire and mail fraud.

Later, she knew, she would be scared. Later, when she came to think seriously about what had happened to her, she would be even panicked.

For now, however, in the familiarity of the bar’s noises and smells around her, she smiled, not just at the thought of Stein’s surprise, but also at how perfect it could have
been.

For it was perfect. What had Drew called her? A modern-day Esther? Drew didn’t know how perfect the analogy was. After all, hadn’t Esther—in the king’s harem—slept
with the enemy in order to save her own father? Hadn’t Esther sacrificed her very virginity, and then, from her conjugal bed, ordered her people saved and her enemies destroyed?

The only thing lacking was that Nicky was dead. If Nicky were alive, she thought, she would have the perfect plan. If Nicky were alive she could, just like her namesake, save the Jews.

And then she shook her head, as if to wake from a dream. Of course, nothing was the same. Nothing. Esther was taken into the harem with no control over the choice, but she, Allison, had loved
Dee from her childhood on, adored him. And deep within herself, she admitted that she would love him still, just as much, had she not met Nicky.

But far in her mind a voice was saying to her, so what? Her precious love for Dee, was that worth allowing her father to be convicted a criminal before the world? Her father was innocent,
innocent. Everyone knew he had been authorized to sell arms to the Bosnians; everyone knew he was being scapegoated for a foreign policy agenda, and that were he not a Jew, it would not be
happening.

And Dee, the instrument of a vicious king, was carrying out this scapegoating, this terrible injustice. So what did it matter what happened to Dee? And what was she prepared to sacrifice, not
for some religious myth, or for some political aim, but for her father, a real person, and even more, for the truth?

Then the second thing happened.

With a sigh, she turned to the second letter, a FedEx envelope sent to her care of Stein from California. It had left California, she noted idly, the day before. Something, no doubt, to do with
the Diamond prosecution. For a moment she considered leaving it unopened. Then she tore the perforated tab and pulled out the contents: legal documents relating to the filing of a criminal action
against her, motion for discovery in Massachusetts court, a filing for interstate warrant.

Slowly, she realized that these were letters from the inside of the Diamond prosecution. Now, at last curious, she turned to the cover letter accompanying the documents, her eye falling on the
signature.

Nicholson Jefferson Dymitryck

She read the letter, or better, devoured it in a glance.

He was alive.

It did not matter how. It did not matter how, it did not matter why.

As Allison sat on the bar stool, the Corner Bistro disappeared, and in her ears a roaring silence seemed to obliterate her surroundings.

Nicky Dymitryck was alive.

And if Nicky Dymitryck was alive, then she knew precisely—precisely, although she could not remember ever having thought it out—what to do.