Read Leviathan for Free Online Page B

father-in-law about the trial. The journalist was clearly looking to write a story about generational conflict (a big subject back in those days), but once Mr. Sachs caught wind of his intentions, this normally subdued and taciturn man pounded his fist on the arm of the chair, looked the journalist straight in the eye, and said: “Ben is a terrific kid. We always taught him to stand up for what he believes in, and I’d be crazy not to be proud of what he’s doing now. If there were more young men like my son in this country, it would be a hell of a lot better place.”
    I never met his father, but I remember a Thanksgiving that I spent at his mother’s house extremely well. The visit came a few weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected president, which means itwas November 1980—going on ten years now. It was a bad time in my life. My first marriage had broken up two years before, and I wasn’t destined to meet Iris until the end of February, a good three months down the road. My son David was just over three then, and his mother and I had arranged for him to spend the holiday with me, but the plans I made for us had fallen through at the last minute. The alternatives seemed rather grim: either go out to a restaurant somewhere or eat frozen turkey dinners at my small apartment in Brooklyn. Just when I was beginning to feel sorry for myself (it could have been as late as Monday or Tuesday), Fanny rescued the situation by asking us up to Ben’s mother’s house in Connecticut. All the nieces and nephews would be there, she said, and it was bound to be fun for David.
    Mrs. Sachs has since moved to a retirement home, but at the time she was still living in the house in New Canaan where Ben and his sisters had grown up. It was a big place just outside town that looked to have been built in the second half of the nineteenth century, one of those gabled Victorian labyrinths with pantry closets, back staircases, and odd little passageways on the second floor. The interiors were dark, and the living room was cluttered with piles of books, newspapers, and magazines. Mrs. Sachs must have been in her mid to late sixties then, but there was nothing old or grandmotherly about her. She had been a social worker for many years in the poor neighborhoods of Bridgeport, and it wasn’t hard to see that she had been good at her job: an outspoken woman, full of opinions, with a brash, cockeyed sense of humor. She seemed to be amused by many things, a person given to neither sentimentality nor bad temper, but whenever the subject turned to politics (as it did quite often that day), she proved to have a wickedly sharp tongue. Some of her remarks were downright raunchy, and at one point, when she called Nixon’s convicted associates “the sort of men who fold up their underpants beforethey go to bed at night,” one of her daughters glanced at me with an embarrassed look on her face, as if to apologize for her mother’s unladylike behavior. She needn’t have worried. I took an immense liking to Mrs. Sachs that day. She was a subversive matriarch who still enjoyed throwing punches at the world, and she seemed as ready to laugh at herself as at everyone else—her children and grandchildren included. Not long after I got there, she confessed to me that she was a terrible cook, which was why she had delegated the responsibility of preparing the dinner to her daughters. But, she added (and here she drew close to me and whispered in my ear), those three girls were none too swift in the kitchen either. After all, she said, she had taught them everything they knew, and if the teacher was an absentminded clod, what could you expect of the disciples?
    It’s true that the meal was dreadful, but we scarcely had time to notice. What with so many people in the house that day, and the constant racket of five children under the age of ten, our mouths were kept busier with talk than with food. Sachs’s family was a noisy bunch. His sisters and their husbands