Forgotten Songs...Inclusive

A characteristic he passed on to his son, you might say.

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While Anders Sorensen sank deeper and deeper into his collective past, Tilly seemed to blossom as she more deeply accepted the traditions and customs of her new surroundings in West LA. And just one example of this dichotomy revolved around the holiday festivities at Christmastime. Anders was loath to recognize anything about the holidays beyond the simplest, most traditional expressions of Hanukah, while Tilly -- during their first Christmas in Brentwood -- put up a Christmas tree then went so far as to string lights around the eaves of her new home.

When, one evening after school, Ted asked her why she'd felt the need to do this she had remarked offhandedly that she simply wanted to "fit in," and besides, she intoned that the festive atmosphere was all rather optimistic. And now, what with the war in Southeast Asia dragging on and on, she felt that more optimism was just what she and Ted needed most.

Yet when Ted made his monthly hop up to SFO on PSA he was as suddenly immersed in the ancient customs of a much more traditional Judaism, perhaps because now his "uncle" Saul was a more integral part of his father's life. Yet as suddenly, when they went over to the Callahan house in Potrero Hills to celebrate Christmas Eve, he had to slip back into the uneasy space between these two opposing religious traditions -- and the space where these two met became a somewhat confusing place to Ted. Imogen Callahan hardly ever seemed to know how to react to Christmas, though Lloyd Callahan certainly got into the mood, yet Ted sensed that Harry had grown more and more ambivalent over the years, perhaps as the weight of the conflict within their little family took a toll on them all.

And harry had always been a kind of "big brother" to Ted. The older brother who taught him how to throw the football or how to break-in a baseball glove. Who taught him how to use a camera, a real camera, a Nikon F...and how to see the world in shades of gray. How you could compress space with a telephoto or distort reality with a fisheye lens. When Anders was too busy to help with a homework assignment, Ted turned to Harry. Ted turned to Harry. Ted turned to Harry.

Why? Even after Ted moved with his mother hundreds of miles away. Why?

What uncertain gravity pulled at the boy?

Destiny? Fate?

Yet before long Harry went to Germany, he learned to fly helicopters, and now that he was back home he had gone to the police academy. He was a cop now. One of San Francisco's finest. Yet Harry looked anything but happy and no one mentioned June, Harry's old girlfriend. And when Ted asked Harry what it had been like in Vietnam all he got in return was a thousand yard stare. When the families gathered around the piano that Christmas Eve, Harry played Silent Night then ran upstairs to his old bedroom -- and he didn't come back down again, either. Yet it was Harry's hands that had captured Ted's attention; his hands, and the way they trembled and shook now. Why?

Maybe because there was something about Harry's being a cop? Something that really didn't fit -- not that Ted knew any cops -- but when Ted thought about Harry the first thing that came to mind was the piano. Then again, Harry had joined the Army and he'd learned to fly helicopters and then gone to Germany, and did that fit? Then he'd decided to go to the police academy, but that was after he returned from Germany. Had something happened to him over there? He wondered why because Harry became a walled off creature after he strapped on his gun and put the badge on his shirt.

And after that the two drifted apart.

And so, maybe, being a cop took Harry away from Ted. Maybe there was a little resentment there? For that gun, for that badge.

Lloyd told Ted that sometime after Harry's return from Germany the Army called him up. Something about being in the reserves -- whatever that was. So a few years later the Army sent him over to Vietnam for some kind of special mission, but Harry wasn't over there the usual two years. Yet Ted sensed that Lloyd seemed to be apologizing for his son in the years after that, almost making excuses for him. But in the waning Christmas eves Ted spent with the Callahans, he cast little sidelong glances in Imogen's general direction and from time to time he recognized the same downcast eyes -- and the same shaking hands -- that had plagued his father...before the fall.

Who caused this reaction? Was Lloyd crushing Imogen? Had his mother crushed his father? What secrets were crushing the love out of these people? Was it simply Germans? Ha! Or...was it authority? Authority, as in...a gun and a badge?

Then a thought came to Ted while Saul was driving he and his father back to the Little Dutch House after what turned out to be his last Christmas Eve with the Callahans. He'd been racing up Beverly Glen a few weeks before Thanksgiving and he'd been stopped by an LAPD motorcycle cop; Ted had not been completely deferential to the cop and he'd watched, at first amused and then with growing alarm, as the cop's hands began shaking and his voice grew belligerently strident. What had at first been an innocuous encounter had grown, in the blink of an eye, into a life or death encounter, and he'd spent days the stop after going over everything he'd said and done out there on the street, trying to figure out what had happened, and what he'd done wrong.

In the end it was the cop's shaking hands that gave up the game. The cop had been using the power of his position to command a certain level of unspoken obeisance, and when Ted's wasn't forthcoming the cop took that as a challenge to his authority. Okay. Easy enough to understand, but there was a lot more than that going on. Again, Ted thought the shaking hands and tremulous voice were the key to it all, because he'd seen the same thing time after time growing up, usually whenever he'd encountered bullies on the playground. Because he'd noticed that when a bully came at him in school he could see the same kind of reaction: the bully's hands and voice would shake, and the more you challenged them the more upset they became, but it didn't take too much to figure out that these guys, these bullies, were really just scared. They were, in a word, cowards. The bullies he ran across at school were usually big, fat, and stupid, too -- yet the motorcycle cop wasn't. Then it occurred to Ted that the cop was hiding the depths of a certain kind of cowardice behind the implicit authority of his badge. And, oh yes, his gun, too. His hand had never left the reassuring comfort of that gun, and in Ted's eye that made the cop a new, and a very different kind of bully. A more dangerous kind of bully. A bully with a badge now had relentless authority to back him up.

So maybe that's what it was about Harry Callahan that didn't exactly fit the paradigm he had been constructing in his mind, ever since their last Christmas Eve together.

Neither Harry Callahan nor his mother appeared to be the bully-type, at least they'd never acted like a bully around Ted or his family, so he immediately concluded that it was foolish to make bold, generalized statements like "all cops are bullies," or "the motorcycle cop on Beverly Glen was a coward," just as the Callahans didn't act like bullies. Yet as uncertain as he was now, there was one thing that had been made abundantly clear to Ted after his encounter with the motorcycle cop: if you didn't have such power your life could be rendered meaningless in an instant by to those who possessed it.

And this was an important lesson to learn for a seventeen year old rich kid, a young man who had come of age in the lap of extreme luxury. He'd led a life shielded from this kind of reality by his mother, who took great care to shield him from the day to day life that other children experienced, especially kids raised in places like South Central LA -- kids who lived just a few miles from their house in Brentwood. And who knows...maybe it goes without saying that when you grow up in one reality it's almost impossible to understand what's happening just a few miles away.

Ted Sorensen watched the evening news as much as anyone else did. He went to a school that was quite literally tailor made to meet the expectations of the richest people in the richest city in America, the kids of movie stars and politicians and musicians, yet the students at his school all seemed peculiarly interested in 'social justice' these days. They read and learned all about discrimination and racism and more than anything else they seemed to want to understand Hate.

Ted Sorensen grew up in the shifting sands of the sixties, and he came of age in Southern California, where good vibrations and strawberry fields colored the sidewalks, and where incense and peppermint almost covered the stench of more blood pooling under another Kennedy's silenced eyes. And then just to shake things up a little more, after Tricky Dick pulled a little heist in the Watergate the world knew the foxes were loose in the henhouse and suddenly there was nothing left to do but laugh at the absurdity of life. So...Ted came of age when everyone laughed, yet at the same time no one seemed to feel that life was especially funny anymore.

What do you call that? Cynicism?

The cynicism of shaking hands? His mother's empathy? His father's overwhelming paranoia? Had these things shaped the boy?

Maybe. But as the 70s came along something was different going on. Like a rustling of leaves outside your bedroom window, something was stirring out there, something was waking up, coming alive. The sixties were dead and gone now, just like the blood on the sidewalks around the commons at Kent State had been washed away, reduced to a footnote, just like all that Kennedy blood. Distance was making everything easier to swallow, even the disillusionment of kids trying to see through all that blood -- but for some, for kids like Ted Sorensen, the disillusioned landscape of the early 70s was nothing so much as it was a new kind of shadowland. A land where the questions came at you hard and fast -- but where the answers didn't seem to make sense anymore.

He ran into another bully at school after the new semester began. Another big, fat kid with piggish eyes and a vile tongue. This one didn't push him around or try to pick a fight. No, this bully spat words of unfettered Hate, and when the bully said that Hitler had "fucked up," that Hitler's "biggest mistake was not making sure that all you Jews were dead." Gas chambers and ovens had obviously not been enough for this bully...but Ted wondered if anything would ever be enough.

Sticks and stones and all that makes a certain kind of sense, yet the hatred Ted saw in the bully's eyes was unimaginable. He saw a cold, hard blackness in those eyes and he didn't understand where it was coming from, why someone he hardly knew felt the need to say these things to him.

Ted was so utterly shocked by the outburst he hardly recognized that this bully's hands weren't shaking, that this boy's hatred was a cold, dense place -- and that quite suddenly he was in real danger. Again.

Was Hate just another kind of power? Could you strap on Hate just like a cop could strap on a gun?

But if Hate was power, what then was Love?

As Ted Sorensen looked into this bully's soul he knew only one thing -- that this bully believed what he was saying. Things like Hate and Love were of little consequence in these shadows.

The only thing that mattered here was power.

Cynicism?

Oh, really?

What accounts for the death of peace and love and the counter-culture that came alive on college campuses in the 60s? Cynicism? Greed? Materialism? Capitalism? Communism?

If anyone knew the answers to these questions they either weren't talking or they were dead, their blood running down sidewalks into drains that just didn't give a fuck.

Part II: The Broken Road

Chapter 9

Beverly Hills, California 1 July 1976

Anders picked up the telephone and dialed Tilly's number. He did not need to look up the number because he knew it by heart, yet there was nothing ordinary about this particular call. Or, for that matter, this particular day.

When Ted picked up the phone on the second ring Anders felt a little wave of relief. "Ted?" he asked. "Got a minute?"

"Sure Dad, what's up?"

"I wanted to know if you could come up this weekend."

Ted knew his dad's voice -- and his moods -- well enough by now to know that something was wrong. "Uh, well, Kat and I were going down to the marina on Sunday. They're having a big fireworks display down there..."

"Okay. That's fine. What about coming up tomorrow afternoon and I'll get you back out to SFO on Saturday morning?"

"It's important, isn't it?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Is Saul going to be around?"

"Yes, this concerns him -- as well as you...and the Callahans."

"Okay, Dad. My last class gets out at noon-thirty, so I can probably make the one-thirty on PSA."

"Sounds good. I'll pick you up at the usual place."

Ted clicked the receiver and then dialed his mom's office, and her secretary picked-up.

"Hey Margie, it's Ted. Is Mom free?"

"Yup, I'll put you through."

Tilly had just wrapped up her last patient for the day but getting a call from Ted was a little out of the ordinary on a weeknight, so she was instantly on guard. "Ted? Is something wrong?"

"Not sure, Mom. Dad just called. He wants me to come up tomorrow afternoon..."

"What about Sunday -- with Katharine and her family?"

"Coming back Saturday afternoon?"

"Just one night? That is strange. You want me to give him a call?"

"No, I can handle it."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. He said Saul was going to be there, and the Callahans, too."

"The Callahans? Really?"

"That's what he said."

"What flight are you trying for?"

"The one-thirty."

"Okay. I'm coming too."

Ted sighed and shook his head. "You sure you wanna do this, Mom? He might get all wound-up again, ya know?"

"I know," Tilly said. In fact, because of all the scheduled bicentennial celebrations she was halfway expecting Anders to be in rare form. "Are you and Kat going out tonight?"

"No, she's got an MCAT study session Saturday morning."

"I thought you had something going on with Sam?"

"No, that's next weekend."

"Well, looks like you're stuck with me for dinner, Kid. Anything sound good to you?"

"How 'bout Gladstone's?"

"She crab soup, right?" Tilly said, grinning at Ted's latest craving.

"How'd you guess?"

"You'd think that maybe I know you by now, right? Maybe just a little?"

"Maybe so, Mom. You never can tell, though...right?"

She sighed -- then scowled. "You know we loved each other, right? Your father and I? Things just got out of control."

"Yeah, Mom, I know." But, he sighed to himself, control was the operant word, wasn't it?

Just like that cop and his shaking hands...was all about control.

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Almost everyone met up at the Little Dutch House before heading down to the wharf, where they picked up Harry before walking down to Scoma's for an early lunch. No one seemed talkative, and even Harry seemed caught off guard -- or was he simply annoyed -- by all the unasked for importance attached to the outing. Imogen, for her part, seemed more than a little nervous, and for some reason that made Tilly hastily put up a few more walls of protection.

Anders ordered two bottles of riesling to go with a couple of platters of chilled seafood appetizers, and after their waitress left them he cleared his throat and looked at everyone seated around the table. "I am sorry for all the drama, but I have some news."

"Dad?" Ted said, and though still not sure what this was all about his father's voice sounded more than somber. "Are you okay?"

"Me -- okay? Why yes, of course, but wait -- oh, this has nothing to do with my health. In fact, if I may get to the point, I have decided to go home and I wanted to tell each of you personally."

"Home?" Tilly said, more than a little interested now -- but still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But Anders merely shook his head. "I am going to Israel," he said. "To our home."

"Israel?" Ted cried. "But Dad -- why...there?"

"Because," Anders said, "I have grown tired of having to look over my shoulder, of waiting for the 'stab in the back' -- again. I am tired of feeling no control over my life...again."

"Again?" Ted asked.

But it was Saul who spoke next. "This was Herr Hitler's favorite saying, Ted. That Jews in the Weimar Republic stabbed all Germans in the back by agreeing to surrender when -- and how -- they did."

"So, Hitler blamed Jews for that, too?"

Saul smiled, a rueful, apologetic smile. "The word is scapegoat, Ted. Blame does not adequately describe what Herr Hitler was conjuring just then."

"So," Ted continued, "moving next door to ten million pissed off Arabs is supposed to be safe?"

"You misunderstand, Ted," Anders interjected. "Israel is our homeland. God has ordained this."

Harry cleared his throat -- before he spoke next. "Anders, if you don't mind me asking, just what are you planning on doing over there?"

"Teaching," Anders said, though a little defensively.

Harry nodded. "Well, I for one will miss you."

And for some reason this made Anders cry -- just a little. "Thank you, Harald. You will always be welcome in our house."

"Our house?" Tilda Sorensen said, her left eyebrow arching tremulously.

"Yes, Tilda. You see, I am getting married once I arrive," Anders sighed unapologetically, perhaps even a little defiantly -- though he was almost imperceptibly grinning...just a little.

"Dad!" Ted growled. "What the fuck!"

Tilly signaled their waitress and ordered a double martini, dirty.

Harry Callahan leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling, trying his best not to get up and leave the table -- perhaps because he'd noticed his mother's hands had begun trembling.

Yet...in that instant Ted's eyes were drawn to Imogen's hands, and while at first he wondered why, it took just a moment for his eyes to drift to Lloyd Callahan and then back to Imogen. When his eye caught Harry's upturned sidelong glances he too realized the truth of the moment...there was something wrong now between Lloyd and Imogen...and in the moment he wondered how long their troubles had been going on...?

Then he watched Saul and saw him looked away, and Ted wondered what secrets the old man was carrying around -- until he followed Saul's eyes to another table across the dining room.

An Old Man was sitting at the table, alone, and he was staring at Imogen.

And to Ted it seemed as if the Old Man was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

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Ted and Kat met Sam Gold down at the Marina del Rey, at the end of a finger-pier behind a fence that belonged, apparently, to a sprawling apartment complex located just above the slips. Sam was talking to the yacht's captain and chef when Kat led Ted up the boarding ramp to the main deck.

Though Ted had been down to the boat twice before, the sheer size of Sam's latest toy simply left him awestruck each time he saw it. Her name was The April Fools, and she had been built in Holland a couple of years before by a consortium of naval architects and ship builders known as Feadship; she was the largest yacht permanently berthed in the marina and was universally regarded as the most luxurious yacht on the West Coast. At 178 feet length overall and with a permanent crew of seven -- that lived on board -- The April Fools was also one of the few yachts on the West Coast that kept a Bell JetRanger semi-permanently onboard.

And of course Ted knew all this and much more. He knew that the people watching him walk up the gang-plank were envious, and that the half dozen or so paparazzi posted up there were here to shoot whoever boarded The April Fools that evening. They were taking his picture -- his picture! -- as he boarded, and this was a singular moment for the boy, if only because it fed the little voice inside that kept saying "I want, I want..." as he watched the world unfolding -- for him!