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watch his father drink. Neat and controlled. "Your mother, Michael.
She filled you with all that romantic shit. The rights of working peo–
ple , the need for dignity. The whole
schtick."
"You were a goddamn organizer ," Michael pleads .
"No different from working in Wall Street, Michael. Only the
stakes aren't as high . It was your mother who gave you those ideas ."
\
"I took what I wanted," Michael says angrily .
"Then take stability," his father urges . "It's not a crime. It's
more real than some old man who knew Trotsky . Michael, that's
nonsense. Even if it's true . Don't you understand, those things don't
matter anymore. Not here . Not in 1986 ."
Perhaps he could have forced his father to acknowledge that it
was not the times but the men that had changed . Only he didn't
want to quarrel with his father. And he suspected his father was
right. About the Left and about a lot of other things , too . God
knows , life was better for his father now, better than it had been dur–
ing the long three years of his mother's dying and the years after
that, when he and the twins would sit down at supper with his father
and stare at him as if he were some stranger arbitrarily set down in
their midst. Absence engulfing the apartment. And his father using
concern for their future as a way to give up organizing. He
remembers the afternoon his father came home to tell them Scheref–
sky had asked him to serve as the labor man on the largest mutual
fund in the country . "I'm taking it," his father announced , as if he
and the twins-how old were they then , eleven, twelve-had it
within their power to change his decision . Within five years, before
Michael finishes his junior year in college , his father will be presi–
dent of the fund. "Better rich," he remembers his father saying
caustically . "Even for writers. Like you. And your mother."
Well, his father was certainly right about that. It was better
rich and easier, too. It was his father's money that had bought him
the fourteen months in Paris after his graduation from Columbia
and it was his father's money-living rent-free in New York-that
allowed him to write now. His father had never put any pressure on
him . Writing, too, was cash-and-carry in America. There was little
sacrifice to it. And less virtue.
Only he still had difficulty accepting that they had all become
what they had once feared to be. His living father, his dead mother.
Myths collapsing all around them. "You can't run from history,"
screams his dying mother. "Not your own, not the world's ." History
was fact. Stalin, Hitler, the murder of the Jewish doctors . Facts that
