His Illegal Self Read Online Free PDF Page B

Susan Selkirk said suddenly. Tonight. Can you do that for me? Please, please. This is not cool, not now.
    I’m going out to see
The Godfather
with Madeleine.
    You’re seeing the fucking
Godfather.
    Sure. Why not?
    There was a silence and Dial didn’t rush to fill it.
    Sure, said Susan, why the fuck not!
    Another silence.
    I need this favor, Susan said at last. If not for me, then for the Movement.
    Dial was a sucker. Susan knew she was a sucker. She wandered back down through the car, hefting her awkward heavy pack, laughing incredulously at herself, at Susan Selkirk who could still issue commands like the revolution was a family business. For the Movement! Please.
    She tucked the phone number in her purse and let her mood be made by bigger things, by the great luxury of time, a fall day with sunshine, and the Hudson still as glass. If Susan Selkirk affected her at all, it was only to highlight the richness of her new life which was intensifying daily—Vassar, MoMA, Manhattan, all the possibilities suggested by this gorgeous ride beside the Hudson with the sun pushing down above the golden Palisades.
    By the time the train dipped underground at 125th Street, she had forgotten Susan Selkirk. And it was only very late that night, on calculating her expenses and counting the remaining money in her purse, that she found the scrap of paper. When she called it was not because of any deep friendship for Susan. But she had all the time in the world, so she made an arrangement to meet her near Clark Street in Brooklyn. Susan, quite typically, sent two strangers to interrogate her and again she was too curious to be decently offended.
    Later all she would remember was their teeth, big and long on one, small and square on the other, but both young women’s mouths were full of perfectly straight teeth, clear signs of class that contradicted their dowdy clothes which were a sort of depressed portrait of the unhappy working class. Their hair had been cut gracelessly with kitchen scissors and they had about them a severe judgmental quality that made Dial feel too tall, too pretty, too frivolous for their company.
    You know the kid, right? Her son?
    Once I did. Freshman year.
    She wants to see her son.
    Susan does?
    We don’t use names. OK.
    The one with the long teeth was tall and skinny. Her dowdy little sweater was gray cashmere. She lit a cigarette and smoked it with both hands pushed in the pockets of her thrift store coat.
    OK, said Dial. It did not help her that she noticed the privileged teeth, the expensive sweater. Neither undercut the moral authority she had been raised to respect. She never could be far enough left for Susan, SDS, herself. She thought the student left were fantasists, yet when the Maoists told her she would be shot after the revolution she was inclined to believe it was true.
    She’s going on vacation, dig?
    Dial understood that
vacation
was code for something else but she was staring at the girl’s stringy blond hair, wondering if there was something in that un-made-up face, something under those pressing dark eyebrows, that might give Dial human entry.
    It’s dangerous, the girl said, looking over her shoulder at a skinny beat-up plane tree as if its shivery branches might reveal a bug. The grandmother will let you take him.
    Mrs. Selkirk has no idea who I am.
    Yes, she does. If you meet with her at eleven, you take the kid back by noon. Done. That’s all we’re asking. You will have done your little bit.
    Little bit, thought Dial. You patronizing little bitch. Do you actually know Phoebe Selkirk? she asked the short one. Have you met her?
    Listen, Susan is begging you. You know, like
begging,
man.
    Dial thought, You said her name, moron. Plus where does all this “man” shit come from.
    Oh sure, she said.
    You know why the old lady trusts you? You want to know? You want to just stand there being sarcastic?
    Dial shrugged. But of course she wished to know.
    You never talked to the
Post.
    And that,