The Gun Runner's Daughter (46 page)

At Ocean View, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Having a daughter had turned her father into a feminist. Now he was a gay-rights activist, too. Pauly silent, her father fuming quietly
for days until bursting out, “I don’t give a fuck what you are. It’s all the more reason to do what you have to. Hitler killed gays, too.”

And Pauly, in turn, grew more and more militant, less and less circumspect. He was drinking heavily that summer, drinking and doing coke and partying the nights away in the scene of young, hip
gay men on the island. And one night at a party in Ocean View, where many Israelis in their shirtsleeves milled with their wives around the room, holding drinks and talking to counterparts from
defense businesses on the mainland—Electric Boat, Bath Iron Works—and government figures from Washington and Jerusalem—Greg Eastbrook, Amiram Nir, Al Schwimmer, Robert
Earl—she saw Pauly approach her father unsteadily.

Worried, she excused herself from a conversation and came close enough to hear him say: “So this is what I’m going to defend, Dad?”

She took his arm, but he was raising his voice: “So this is the pioneers of Israel protecting the interests of the Jewish people, is it, Dad? This is what you want me to go give three
years of my fucking life for, is it?”

She tried to pull him away, while her father was saying in Hebrew—as if to keep it in the family of Israelis in the room: “Pauly, you are to leave the room this instant.” And
Pauly, as she pulled him, answered in Hebrew also.

“Lama ze, Abba?
What are you ashamed of? This is Zionism. Assassinating Gerald Bull was Zionism. Trying to buy Carlos Cardoen was Zionism. Training SAVAK and arming Mobutu was
Zionism. Threatening Greg Eastbrook was Zionism, and now serving him drinks in your fucking living room, it’s all for the good of the goddamn Jews, Dad.”

And as she pulled him, forcibly now, out of the room, Alley saw pass between Greg Eastbrook and Amiram Nir a look that sent ice into her blood.

She’d begged him to stop. She’d pleaded for him to stop.

Now she knew, because Nicky had told her, that it was already too late.

Now she knew, because Nicky had told her, that Pauly had already contacted Nicky twice, once to send him to Munich, and then again to send him to Paris.

And in Paris Peleg had told Nicky to come back to Pauly for proof, proof not of her father’s guilt, as Pauly wanted, but of Eastbrook’s. And the whole thing, the whole thing, had
been taped.

And now, years later in a Paris apartment, for the first time, she understood what that look between Eastbrook and Nir had said.

And then it was that late-June morning when they’d planned to sail to Cuttyhunk, and she’d woken before dawn and gone to wake Pauly for an early start, and his bed had been empty,
and she had known, deep in her, that something was terribly wrong.

She’d taken her bike—not the Canondale but the Mongoose mountain bike with its big sand tires—and ridden along the hard sand by the water’s edge, right up past Black Rock
Beach, Hancock Beach, Lucy Vincent, Philben, all the way up to the clay cliffs of Gay Head, because she knew he and Johnny camped there sometimes on the gay beach up around the point. And when she
saw him, lying clothed on the sand, facedown on the low-tide sand, she’d thought he must have fallen asleep drunk, only when she knelt to wake him, she found him wet, and cold, and when she
turned him and saw his beautiful face, his beautiful face, streaked with the red of the cliff’s red clay, like an Indian warrior, and the black of his eyes and the blue of his swollen lips,
and in his chest, the middle of his T-shirt, a black burnt hole in the middle of an aureole of blood drilling through to his heart.

For a time she sat, moans like an animal coming from deep in her throat, his head in her lap, while the waves lapped up at them. For a time she sat on the endless, empty beach in the crepuscular
dark. Nicky had explained to her how, but even then, even then, she’d known why. And because she knew why she stood, gingerly moving his limp neck to lay his head in the soft sand.

Later she realized that the whole way back to Ocean View she had ridden slowly, carefully, as if knowing that one bad fall, one blown tire, and everything was lost.

Later she realized that in the madness of her grief she had still known that Pauly was gone, and nothing would ever make that better, but that if her father knew what had happened he would be
gone too, and nothing would be left her, nothing. Tens of thousands of fathers had given their sons to Israeli wars. Her father must never know he had given his son to Israeli
industry
, he
could not stand it, and she, she who had now lost everything, would lose him too.

What she had to do, had to do, was make this be the death of Pauly alone, one death, Pauly’s death.

At Ocean View her father slept heavily in the rising dawn while she gingerly opened his bedside drawer and withdrew the nickel-plated handgun he kept there.

And then she was riding again, up the empty beach, the apocalyptic pink sun lighting the sea a weird, ghostly green, too early on a Sunday morning even for fishers, and then running again. And
in the silence of the empty beach where her brother lay she pointed the gun to the sea and fired once, a thin sound that the enormous landscape of sand and sea and sky swallowed up nearly before it
happened. And then, kneeling, she’d wiped the gun clean against her T-shirt and, lovingly, lifted Pauly’s limp hand and placed the gun in it.

Or had she? For now, kneeling by her brother, the minutes past seemed to be clouding into the mythological past, just like the night with Pauly under the ailanthus, just like when she had
started to betray Dee and Nicky, and it was as if she did not know whether she had done what she’d done or just thought of doing it, a plausible deniability of the soul. Had she done it?
Remembering, now, it seemed to her she had just arrived on the beach, just come around the point and found her brother, and turned him from where he lay facedown in the lapping waves and seen the
black of his eyes and the blue of his swollen lips, and in his chest, the middle of his T-shirt, a black burnt hole in an aureole of blood, and in his hand the gun he had stolen from his father to
kill himself, and then all at once, on the empty beach at dawn, begun to scream.

There was never a question asked. When the police arrived, from nowhere in her mind came the next step, as if then, like now, her plan had been made somewhere in the covert
reaches of the soul. She told them that Pauly had been HIV-positive. That satisfied them, as she knew it would: the fag had killed himself, and there was no autopsy and no question. Pauly had
killed himself because he was gay, nice and neat, and his body had been taken and buried without ever a soul asking to match a bullet to the gun or checking the thumbprint on the trigger with the
impossible angle at which he would have had to fire. It satisfied her father, too: Pauly had killed himself because he was gay, and he was sick, and that was why he had said all those crazy things
also.

But Pauly never would have killed himself. Pauly, handsome and brilliant, so alive, would never have killed himself, not if he’d had HIV, not if he had been forced to go into the army.
He’d have died with grace had he been sick; he’d have excelled—as strong, skillful, and intelligent as the best Israeli soldier—in the army.

Besides Allison, only her mother, come from California for the funeral, had understood. Without knowing any of the details, she had still understood what Allison was determined to keep her
father ever from knowing. Only her mother had understood who had killed her son, and why, and after the funeral Allison had driven her, day after day, to the cliffs at Gay Head to stand on the
place where he’d shot himself and dropped into the sea while her mother, her rich, elegant, glamorous mother wept and wept into her diamond-ringed fingers.

And as for Allison, those days, standing next to her sobbing mother, slowly she felt the gray mist of memory rise and surround what she had done, pulling it into that mythological place where we
tell stories about the things we cannot explain, where we come from, why we die. So much so that when she came to write about Pauly in a poem she described the incest that she thought had happened
and a symbolic suicide that she knew had not and turned what she had done into a poetic myth just as her father turned what he had done into a political one. And that, too, she stored in the place
where we half forget the stories we cannot bear to remember and hide what we cannot bear to know, the promises we have broken, the creatures we have killed, the people we have betrayed and, for
some of us, the way we make our money. For Alley, the place where she kept the things she did for that man she had never wanted to love and could not bear to lose.

Now she saw it again, Pauly facedown on the empty beach, a sky of smoky clouds, the red clay cliffs.

She saw Ocean View, a lone house against the snow-swept beach, the green Atlantic raging beyond it.

She saw the face of the girl at Angelina’s with her father.

And suddenly, in the same visual detail, she saw, at last, the dead.

Bodies subjected to the force of cluster bombs, land mines, bullets. Bodies broken in mud, severed limbs, gaping holes in T-shirted chests, faces resting, cheek down, on pillows of blood and
dirt. She saw bodies sprawled like Pauly on the beach, covering the surface of the earth with their unnegotiable departures: every jungle, every desert, every corner of the vast breadbasket and
marketplace into which people like her father divided the world for their use and their profit, the millions of dead that traced the track of her father’s career.

Killed people, ruined people, wasted people. Children with ponytails and rosebud mouths, perfect beauty marks on their cheeks. Fathers with balding heads and graying beards, staring the worry of
love at their babies; babies with lips wet around the nipple of a bottle of milk.

And at last, the huge shame finished the gestation that had so long measured her growth, finished its gestation and burst out in her chest, like an incubus, like a monster. And she cried not for
Pauly, not for her father, but at last for herself, deep sobs that shook her body on the bed, weeping, whispering into the dark of the room: “Daddy. Daddy. How could we do that? How could we
do that to him?”

January 1995.
Fiesole.

1.

Throughout the night she had held me in the focus of those green eyes, as if more than anything that had happened, it mattered that I understand her.

Now, for the first time, that gaze fell away onto the carpet, and her face, which had been bathed in a pool of lamplight all night, fell into shadow.

I watched her for a long time, as if unwilling to accept that she was done. My heart was skipping beats on the waves of nicotine I had pumped into my blood during the night, and I rose and
opened the window to find some fresh air for my aching lungs. Outside, some of those odd winter birds were trying to sing in the glacial still of the air. A thin light was up on my winter-parched
lawn.

I never much knew my father, a sad man, I gather, who died under the blacklist when I was very small. My mother, I believe, is dead, and as for my only sibling, a sister, when, during the night,
Rosenthal’s daughter mentioned her incidentally, and without knowing what she had said—you who like mysteries, I will let you figure it out—it was the second time I had thought of
her in many years. I knew them all too little to understand this strange, nonnegotiable love that people seem to feel for even the worst families; and that of which I have no experience, I do not
like to judge. I will say this, though: in that distasteful choice between abandoning moral principle for love and abandoning love for principle, I tend to find the former slightly less
bizarre.

I knew I could not indulge my thoughts too long, and so when my heart had slowed, I turned and crossed back to the girl, still staring down at the carpet. I crouched before her and turned out
the lamp, which let me see her face. She did not turn away, although I was very close. That may have been because she did not notice me, so lost was her expression, so desolate; it may also have
been because she was past caring.