All That Lies Beneath Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Betrayers

  Soixante Huitards, all

  Inter Nationals

  The Bailey Report

  Counteractual

  Avengers

  Pitfalls

  Socratic Dialogue

  Not Anna

  Copyright

  All That Lies Beneath

  Dai Smith

  Betrayers

  Soixante Huitards, all

  “Thirty three minutes straight through to the city,” he’d said. “Thirty three minutes of commuter hell in the week,” he’d added. “No time at all, though, on a Sunday or a Holiday, with empty seats and no need to stand either part or all of the way. She’ll sleep it off,” he was sure of it. “Take a window seat, enjoy the view, let her head rest on your shoulder. Be a mensch!” he urged. He told him he was one lucky son-of-a-gun, for a Welsh guy that is, as he helped to push her up the steep metal steps into the railroad car. “You’ll be there in no time, kiddo,” he called out as he stepped back down. Mamaroneck to Manhattan, a slider from Westchester County to New York City. Downhill all the way to the Big Apple. Then he said, his height allowing him almost to speak into the half opened window of the carriage, and he snapped his words out this time, that “Thirty three was a good number, the age Christ was when those bastards got him.” “Don’t forget the rule of numbers,” he shouted as the train began to shudder. He had earlier expanded on the theme. Sixty minutes to the hour sounds a lot, perhaps, but minutes were all we really had to hold fast to, moments not processes, and by no means could anything as big as a single year or as impossible as a decade be grasped in retrospect. Instants of for instance will be all that will be left inside you to recall memory. “ So goodbye,” he said.

  The dirty ochre train ground its way along the sunken platform where he still stood waving. The overhead neon tubes of the station picked him out, shape and size only now, in the fading light of the early winter. He waved rather alarmingly. He flapped at the air in front of him with his huge open palmed hands. It looked like a warning, this jerky, ill-coordinated wave. He was shouting some last words at the departing train. The train clattered past some sidings. It left the town behind. The last of the day’s sun dropped in the west before the train. Outside, it had become dark where they had been. Inside, the railway car glimmered a dim orange. On the train their profiles were reflected in an unwashed window. He moved slightly, so as not to disturb her, so that he could look into his own full face, front on. This was all in less than a minute amongst the recent hours which had passed. A moment that won’t ever be discarded, he thought. Or so he said to himself, in echo of his late host, at that moment of parting.

  * * * * *

  When they had set out from Grand Central Station at noon, winter sunshine had funnelled down into the city streets and splintered itself on the tall glass and metal buildings in the avenues. The sun darted and sparkled over and through the iron fretwork of the trestle bridges by which they left the city – and as the train went north the sun scratched diamond points on the row upon row of windows glinting from the high rise project housing in Harlem. They sat closely together on the train and he felt her pressing into him in her need to be calm and contain the anticipation which had built and built inside her for days. The train rattled along its elevated track until the city was reduced in its lee to shining battlements. And then the turquoise blue waters of the Hudson flanked it on its left-hand side, and on out into the country and to their destination in fabled Westchester County. The Mamaroneck home of Saul Kellerman. It was Thanksgiving Day, 24th November 1966.

  Every year the foreign students at International House on Riverside Drive and 125th street were assigned by lot random invitations to the American homes of IH supporters for the Thanksgiving Holiday, when life in the New World was ritually celebrated with a dose of gratitude and excess. He’d drawn the Kellerman invite. He hadn’t really thought to accept it until he told her. Then the quivering and the Omigods had begun as she, in turn, told him who Kellerman was. To meet him in the flesh, so to speak, for her she said, would be too, too amazing. He had to go. He could take a friend. He must, please, please, take her. He could see at once that it would do him no harm, the opposite in fact, in their on-going relationship. They had slept together already so there was no gain for him there beyond a further assurance. He felt somewhat uneasy thinking in that way but there it was, that was the way it was, and he wanted to keep hold of her, intimately, for a while yet. At least until he went home.

  He met her at a party in the Village. She’d been lolling on an armchair, her right bare arm outstretched, a slow-burning cigarette, or was it a joint maybe, dangling between two fingers of her left. She was talking to two men stood over her. She was, he discovered, inclined to talk. Her skirt rose up above her long outstretched legs. Yellow-stockinged legs. And when she stood up, later, he saw that she was a half-head taller than him, and by no means what his dwt of a mother would have called petite. Nor was she, in conventional eyes, pretty. But in that less conventional decade and unconventional place she was, as they said, a striking-looking girl. An explosion of tawny-blonde hair framed her square jawed face, and kohl-lined eyes drew you in past their black circle to the glitter of her blue eyes which seemed to smile at you even before she actually smiled. She had smiled at him, indeed, the moment he spoke. His accent intrigued them all. What was it, they asked. For him, that of Mary Ellen Robinson from Baton Rouge, Louisiana was just as exotic, intriguingly so. She was on a graduate course in Jurisprudence at Columbia University. New York City, added as a clincher. He was, she told him, the first boy from England she’d ever met. And even after he’d explained that he came from Wales she would ask him about England.

  After six months in New York he’d made it all easier by just saying, “This is Burr-naard Jenkins. And you are?” That way he didn’t need to correct their pronunciation, as if they were in the wrong ,and the mode of introduction, open and enquiring in the American manner, was one he’d quickly learned to adopt. He’d tell them he was on a graduate fellowship to work on particle physics, neutrons, after his first, stellar degree at Manchester. The name of that northern English city would usually lead on to the Beatles and a few helpful pointers from him, especially if his questioners were female, as to the proximity of Liverpool to Manchester. Special knowledge was implied. Places he really knew about, the stuff about Wales, was a harder sell since neither the name of the place nor the country’s existence registered with those Americans, of either sex, he might meet in seminars, in bars, in parties. He allowed himself to be from England. And his name was indeed Burr-naard. And he now had a further advantage, at least so far as Mary Ellen Robinson was concerned: a date with Saul Kellerman, which, naturally, in the light of her excitement, he’d accepted.

  Mary Ellen, ever since he’d given her the good news, could not stop fluttering at the prospect. She informed him, over and over, of the stature of the man they were to meet on Thanksgiving. And in his own home. Omigod she couldn’t believe it, she said.

  “Look at me, Burr-naard, I’m pinching myself,” she said. “The Saul Kellerman. Wow,” she said. “Can you believe it?” she asked. He said he could. “But, listen,” she said, sitting up in bed with him, “do you know? You do, don’t you? He’s the most outstanding Civil Rights lawyer of the day. Of his generation. In America, all of America,” she said.

  He told her that he guessed he’d got it by now. That didn’t stop her reeling off the cases Kellerman had fought and won. Against all the odds. Cases that were history already. Legislation in the making, case law, triumphs of forensic argument and moral courage. He’d caused moral outrage in her native South by
defending freedom-riders and civil disobedience activists, whether black or white. Kellerman was fearless. A reputation made in the 1950s as an advocate of the rights of Labor and Union organisation was put to one side, along with lucrative remuneration, for Kellerman had been radicalised by the injustice being suffered by black Americans who were daring to assert their rights. He was not the only good liberal legal practitioner to re-act like that but he was alone in the scope and intent of his advocacy. He sloughed off his middle age and his respectability. Mary Ellen was not sure what most offended people like her parents, whether it was what he was doing or how he was doing it. The ‘what’ had already begun to gather to include anti-war dissidents and direct-action protesters, and the ‘how’ had started to become displays of histrionics, in court after court, aping the outrageous otherness of his pro-bono clients. When judges called for self-control and demanded respect he accused them of acts of repression. When he was ejected from courts and barred from cases he was fighting, he compared the appointed judges to the Nazis he’d fought in Normandy, and in the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge. If a particular judge was a Jew, Kellerman made it personal between ‘two nice Jewish boys like you and me’, and asked if his friends had died in those snow-filled forests in 1944 in vain. For what? For nothing? Or for the Freedom they thought they were defending against repression.

  Mary Ellen had a file of newspaper cuttings of his cases, and grainy newsprint photographs. She had shown them to Burr-naard. This one of Kellerman being thrown out of a courthouse in Georgia by police marshals. This one of Kellerman, without coat or neck-tie, harangueing a crowd of supporters the very next day on the steps of the same courtroom. Another of Kellerman under arrest in a state trooper’s car in Oxford, Mississippi. And Kellerman pushed to the ground. Kellerman interviewed. Kellerman profiled. Kellerman denounced on the Op Ed pages of heavyweight newspapers. Kellerman lionised in campus mimeographs. Kellerman speaking at student anti-war rallies across the USA. Kellerman urged to run for political office. Kellerman everywhere, using the Press as a platform, even as it denigrated him. Kellerman the most vital force against the legal establishment from within its ranks since Clarence Darrow in the 1920s. Kellerman was a sensation. Kellerman was a phenomenon. Kellerman was her Hero and he was waiting for them at the railroad station in Mamaroneck, Westchester. Omigod.

  Whatever prospect of self-fulfilment was in Mary Ellen’s mind as the suburban train pulled into the station, was not matched by Bernard. Here, in 1966, in America he was already fulfilled. He was, daily, astounded that he was there at all. A life to that point only pricked out, amidst the normal flatness of his existence, by the American jag of disturbance, which came from a distance and acted across his senses with music and movies and perhaps promises of power to take what you wanted when you wanted it, had somehow been transported into the whole of his life ,and day by day. Americans of his generation did not seem to stop to savour this. He did, astonished not by what might happen, in any specific way, to him next but by what, in general, was making him float where once he had trudged. He was not yet twenty-two.

  He was, for the first time in his entire post-war life, made buoyant by the depth of sensation which he felt day by day, and it was enough to keep him poised on the verge of a grateful wonder for the New World, and all its works. Simple stuff, really. Like an Idaho baked potato, as big as a small rock, its mottled brown papery skin slashed open so that its fluffy white insides would be slathered yellow with dollops of butter. He would wait in line at the cafeteria to have a T-bone steak, something he’d never seen before, grilled and plonked onto his plate to match the baked potato in its size and desirability. All for $1.25. Or breathing in the city’s compound heat in Columbus Circle at midnight,with traffic still in an endless flow all around him, and drinking an Orange Julius. The drink such an unlikely concoction of juice and milk and sugar and vanilla flavouring, a supreme if peculiar blend of the tart and the sweet, and loved by New Yorkers since the 1920s as proclaimed by the strapline above the Juice Bar. He believed it, and he joined the line of addicts. Its syrupy tanginess chilled cold in a paper cup tasted a world away from the tepid, watery orange juice in half-pint glass bottles from his welfare childhood. As far away as the ersatz coffee of his undergraduate days compared to the rich, brown succulence of American coffee and the endless, free re-fills offered and drunk along with iced water whilst perched at a Diner’s counter on a white leather-seated high stool. The unfriendliness of this scary city exhilarated him. It made no demands. It let you be. It promised nothing. It suggested everything. Nothing about it from first light to electric night was insipid. Nothing was lukewarm. Nothing was quite how it seemed. Nowhere was less like home where nooks and crannies of people and memory could always offer the comfort of relapse. Bernard loved to wear the mask which the city had given him.

  * * * * *

  Now, the movie in which he was so unexpectedly starring provided a new GV for his POV. From the train window, opening up its vista on the wealth of the citizens who had fled the city for up-state living of style and substance, he surveyed the America that thought it was Camelot. No location, she’d told him, was more stylish or required more substantial income than Mamaroneck in Westchester County. On this sunny day, in the crisp air, the French -blue and antique- white clapboard colonial houses played their part on his film set. So, too, did the tail-finned pastel coloured Chryslers and the sleeker Buicks, metallic bronze and boat-like in dimension, parked haphazardly but carefully in the lot by the station. Telephone wires criss-crossed overhead from ranks of wooden poles and gave the whole picture the small-town feel of the earlier America which this America still loved to memorialise in sentiment and song. The cast had assembled, on the train and those waiting for it on the platform: women in long top-coats, holding the hands of children in lumber jackets and jeans; men in light, fawn and belted raincoats, but hatless, or with windcheaters zipped up over plaid shirts. Greetings. Kisses. Modulated shouts. The only black faces were those in attendance on the train or on the platform as station porters. They stood out, but only if they were noticed, and no-one noticed. Bernard and Mary Ellen were more conspicuous, being young and students, he in a faded pink button-down shirt he’d bought in the university Co-op and wore without a tie over his old university blazer to make him feel himself to be, from his new Levis to his new Penny Loafers, an all-American American, albeit one considerably shorter than the norm; and she, holding his hand, her thickly-tressed hair falling loose and long over a man’s white shirt and a raspberry-red cardigan, with her long yellow-stockinged legs on show beneath a dark grey, almost mini-skirt. She had chosen flat shoes to stay as decently level as she could with her exotic Englishman from Wales. They, too, attracted no real attention, unless you were looking out for them. And then, right in front of them was Kellerman himself, so that Mary Ellen stopped abruptly and Bernard Jenkins nearly stumbled into her.

  He stood before them, blocking their path and that of any others who might be coming behind them, and he opened his arms high and wide as if he were a windmill ready for motion. His splayed arms looked as if they had extensions at the elbow so that his forearms seemed longer than was proportionate and his hands, black wiry hair curling wildly over their backs and their knuckles, were as broad as a longshoreman’s and as long-fingered as those of a classical pianist. He was also plainly huge. Not fleshy anywhere but over-sized everywhere. His head. His round, black eyes in deep-set bony sockets. His chest which expanded away from his shoulders which were themselves as wide as a bedroom’s tallboy. Nor did he fit his three piece, green tweed suit which sat on him as if it had been pre-shrunk on his frame. Nothing about him was congruent, from his black and scuffed sneakers to his white T-shirt underneath an open-necked, navy blue poplin shirt. Kellerman was six feet four but somehow seemed even taller since above the bald expanse of his head, but coming from the sides, was a riot, a tangle, an electrified bush of grey and black hair which gave him an unlikely halo. Hair sprouted from inside the to
p of his T-shirt. Hair bristled from the black recesses at the tip of his prow of a nose and stuck out like needles where he had shaved. Hair cascaded in hirsute rillettes from his shaggy eyebrows and shaded his eyes. His arms whirled up and around, and unexpectedly on the downward movement clamped Mary Ellen close to him whilst somehow managing to flip Bernard into their embrace as they did. When he spoke it was in a deep growling tone.

  “Hi’y’a kids. How you doing? Trip okay? Here you are, then. I’m Saul Kellerman by the way. Car’s over here , Okay?”

  They were propelled rather than guided by this bear of a man who had grabbed them and taken them on, to the parking bays beyond the platform, and thrust them into the back seat of a Ford Sedan. The car was old, dented in places and less shiny than the gleaming newer models parked around it. Kellerman’s car reeked with the stale fug of cigarette smoke and the leather-panelled seats were sticky with the discarded wrappers of chocolate Hershey bars and packets of Lifesavers whose mintiness had not lingered. Kellerman wheeled his car out of its bay with no regard for the other vehicles politely jockeying their way past one another. He accelerated immediately with the confidence of a driver born to crash, sometime soon, or indeed again.

  “It isn’t far,” he had told them, whilst going through an overhanging red light and swerving off Main Street. “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes say,” he had said and, “See if we can make it quicker, beat the numbers, must need a shot by now,” and he’d grinned in the driver’s mirror at his passengers. Apart from a few gulped hellos, neither Mary Ellen nor Bernard, had spoken. She was gripping Bernard’s hand, not in fright at Kellerman’s fast and erratic driving, but still a-quiver with the delight of all that was happening to her. Once out of town, the white sedan skidded down intersecting blacktop roads until, near the ocean, it began to pass small copses with houses half-hidden by the closely planted trees. They were each slightly different, these detached houses, though all were fairly recent, modern split-level dwellings aproned by driveways, and fronting the lawns and woodland which sloped gently to the shore at their rear.