The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “The actual damage,” John Holmes said.

  “—We’re not here to take sides. We’re here to determine what the right thing to do is. What’s right for the city and county as a whole. What makes sense.”

  “Martin—”

  “Martin—”

  “Martin,” Holmes said, “it sounds to me as if you’re saying we should continue doing nothing at all.”

  “I don’t agree. I’m just trying to eliminate the sour grapes from the discussion, and to point out the strength of our pro-county bias.”

  “Fiddling while the city burns,” the baked voice said.

  Probst ignored it. “Jim,” he said. “You had something to say?”

  Jim Hutchinson was looking at the three-foot-tall scale model of the Arch on the rear windowsill. “Yes.” He squared himself with the table. “We’ve been following—”

  “Who’s we?” P. R. Nilson immediately demanded.

  Hutchinson lowered his head an inch or so, as if to let the question sail over his head, over the Arch, and out the window. “We at KSLX,” he said, “have been following the development of a group called Urban Hope since its inception last month. In essence it seems to be a commercial redevelopment agency with close ties to the mayor and board of aldermen. The mayor has acknowledged privately that such a group exists, and while no one has been able to determine even approximately who’s in it, my guess is that it consists of all the MG members who aren’t here tonight. The ex-members, that is. Now, I thought it might be of interest if we took a straw poll here to see how many of us had been approached by a syndicate soliciting our involvement.”

  “Of interest to who?” Norris said, full strength.

  “Much obliged, General. Of interest to all of us. Since our topic is whether or not to take sides, I thought—”

  “All right,” Probst said. “The mayor approached me last month and offered me some sort of role in planning and constructing some of the North Side projects. I told him to go to hell. At that point, of course, I assumed not everyone was being offered special privileges. Otherwise, heh, they wouldn’t be special. Can I see a show of hands?”

  All but two of the men raised their hands.

  “So everybody but me and Hutch,” Norris said. “What do we make of this?”

  Probst was disappointed. He hadn’t been the only one.

  “I invite you all to review the facts,” Hutchinson said. “The city now stands where Clayton stood in the early sixties. The county now stands where the city stood in 1900. Yes, I agree, the county isn’t dead. But in the space of six months, a newcomer to St. Louis has reversed—reversed, not just altered—the balance of power in greater St. Louis. The reports tonight, and the show of hands, provide proof for another of the General’s contentions: Jammu is at the center of this, and she’s aware of our existence. Given her control of everything else, I find it highly unlikely that she isn’t the motivating force behind the syndicate called Urban Hope.”

  “Urban Warriors, Osage Hope,” Norris said.

  “And yes, there are those of us who infer an involvement in the terrorist group as well. But when all her other activities—and gentlemen, I can’t help saying again how remarkable it is that this woman has been here only five months—when all her other activities are both legal and extremely effective, why on earth should she be mixed up with the Osage Warriors? Now, to the fact that over half of MG appears to have left and joined a quasi-commercial syndicate, and to the fact that economic forces alone are speeding the city’s rejuvenation, we add today’s news that the General Assembly is about to authorize a merger referendum.”

  “Is about to consider authorizing, Jim.”

  Hutchinson looked at Probst. “Is about to authorize. We have an overwhelmingly Democratic House, a Democratic governor, and almost a Democratic majority in the Senate. If you haven’t noticed the strong party flavor to what’s been going on, you haven’t been thinking much.”

  Probst narrowed his eyes.

  “Because the Democratic leadership has never been more than marginally opposed to the idea of a merger, and Jammu knows how to counter what few objections they’ve had. They see it, and rightly so, as their chance to knock the Republicans out of power in the county. And the numbers make clear that they can do just that. Consider, further, that the mayor has gotten more attention this fall and winter than all the other prominent Democrats in Missouri combined. Consider that the attention has been 95 percent positive. Consider that this is the best thing to happen to the Missouri Democratic Party since Harry Truman. Consider that the mayor can make the merger vote out to be vital to his continued success. And then consider that the mayor owes his success entirely to one person. It started with the crime statistics. She was right there in the Christmas Announcement. And she’s right there now, and she wants this merger, and consider, if nothing else, her skill as a witness at the police hearings last month. I think we’d better accept that there’s going to be a special election in April.”

  There was a silence.

  “And you love it, don’t you,” the General said.

  Probst cleared his throat explosively. “It’ll get hung up in the Senate.”

  “Aw, Martin,” Holmes said, “not with Clark Stallhamer co-sponsoring it.”

  “Yeah,” said Probst, a little unsteady. “What about that?”

  “Stallhamer’s on the same boards as Chuck Meisner,” Lee Royce answered wearily. “He’s never let his constituency get in his way. His wife’s brother is Quentin Spiegelman. He owns a mountain of Ripley stock.”

  “You see, Martin,” Hutchinson said (now that the form of the meeting had become Make It Comprehensible to Martin), “that’s why the county Republicans are in trouble. The shift of Ripley’s and Murphy’s operations to the city is simply bottom-line corporate thinking. Urban Hope is not a radical group—although I imagine it gives Ross no joy to contemplate the fact that Meisner’s a registered Democrat. You see what we’re up against here?”

  “A double whammy,” Probst said.

  “You got it. Someone has studied the political dynamics of eastern Missouri and seen an opportunity to form a coalition. That someone is Jammu. In the history of St. Louis there’s never been a phenomenon like her, nothing even close. She’s masterly.”

  There was another silence—Hutchinson had a newsman’s flair for the dramatic—which Probst allowed to lengthen before he spoke.

  “What I’d like to do now,” he said, “is hear some other opinions on whether it’s worth our while to try to block action in the legislature, or whether, as Jim has implied, we should concentrate on the inevitable election. I for my part—”

  “Don’t you think—”

  The small voice checked him. It was Buzz. “Don’t you think,” he asked the rim of the table, “that we should determine if a merger would be so bad in the first place?” He retracted his head, and coughed a little.

  “Good point,” Probst said. He found his eyes drawn helplessly towards Hutchinson for more information. “I should think it depends on how—”

  “What you can depend on,” the General boomed, “is that the wording and effect of the referendum will, like every other action in the city since July, further the aims and power of one group, the group led by the Queen of the Blacks, the King of Toasters and the Princess of Darkness (and I mean she’s a slut, Buzz boy, and we all know it).”

  Here the General stood up. He hooked his thumbs in his black suspenders. “This group makes me damn impatient,” he confided, “and so help me, I ain’t gonna stay muzzled one second longer.” He snapped the suspenders magnificently. “For two whole hours we been ignoring the main fact, and the main fact is motives. It’s all very nice to talk about what’s happening, and how it’s happening, and through the agency of who, whom, whomever, and God knows what else it’s happening, but what counts, ladies and gentlemen, is the whys and the wherefores.”

  He began to pace, circling close behind the ring of heads, each of which nodded fo
rward at his approach like a daisy in a shower. “I see before me a group of human beans that’s refusing to come to grips with the fact that there’s a conspiracy here in St. Louis, dedicated to anarchy and socialistic propositions and the overthrow of the government and the values we all cherish deeply. I defy any man among you to prove it ain’t so. The very fact of Jammu’s sponsorship of this merger referendum faggotry is proof to me it stinks, proof enough.”

  He had stopped at the rear window, laid his hands on the model of the Arch, and lifted it from the sill. He turned with it and held it at arm’s length like a man warding off a vampire with a cross. One of the tiny plastic trees at the base of the Arch shook loose, rolled across the plaster river and fell to the carpeting. The model was old and fragile. Probst was relieved when the General set it down again.

  “Now, some of you still seem to need reasons to oppose this merger, and for your convenience and peace of mind I’ll list me the many reasons and defy any man among you to contravene a one of ’em.” He winked at Probst. Probst winked back involuntarily. “First thing, it’s a power play and nothing but. We already seen from the municipalization of Hammaker that she has no respect for the sanctity of corporate structure. Your way of life and that of your workers ain’t no concern of hers. The only reason she gives a damn about anybody’s way of life is votes. ’Course, the way she’s drawn the lines, you may see the merger as making sense, but that don’t make it right. I can’t stop thinking about Adolf Hitler. The way he drew the lines, total war made sense. OK, number two, it violates the spirit of St. Louis. I think you know what I’m talking about. Let me ask you this, Martin. How many times you reckon you been lied to, outright lied to, in the last four months?”

  “More times than I’d care to count.”

  “And before that? Pick a year. 1979. How many times in a whole year in 1979 did a man you trusted lie to you?”

  Probst believed he hadn’t been lied to at all in 1979.

  “Right. What’s it tell you about the spirit of these developments? What’s it tell you about the quality of the city’s new leadership, this Urban Hope, when all them fellers are too yeller to show their faces here tonight? If they had a good case for the merger, or even just a honorable case, they’d be arguing it here right now. But they ain’t. And then there’s a practical case against it, number three.” Norris was completing his circuit, reading over shoulders. He stopped at the chair of Billerica and bathed him in pity and contempt. Billerica grinned bizarrely, a dental demonstration, which seemed to throw the General. He looked at a picture on the wall, of Probst and former senator Symington shaking hands in Washington.

  “Number three,” he repeated. “S’posedly it’s now to the county’s advantage to take on the burden of the city, because s’posedly the city’s going to be making more money and the county s’posedly less, and this is s’posedly the county’s last chance ever to claim its fair share. All righty. Now let’s forget the good chance this is all a flash in the pan. Let’s forget that the reason the merger looks good now is that you all are projecting these rates. If the businesses keep moving to the city. If the real estate keeps falling in the county. Forget that these rates of change are based on one single solitary bit of do-daddling, namely Ripley and Murphy’s move. Forget that if the trend stops in March—and, my boys, it will, it will—then the county will get plain swindled in a merger and only Jammu will come out on top. Let’s us forget all this and let me ask: What the hell difference will it make to West County if we merge? Are the powers of economics so miserly and our hearts so weak and faithless that only one half the region can be on top at a time? Listen to me. Look at Martin, sitting there like the Mona Lisa smiling. Ain’t he the pitcher of the average man, the common man? Our fellow man? He’s centrally located, Martin is, he’s the man to watch, and so I ask you as a fellow man here, Martin: if there isn’t any merger, are you going to move out of—excuse me, uh—”

  “Webster Groves.”

  “Out of Webster Groves? You going to start hurting for contracts? How much would a cut in county services really mean to you?”

  “He may be ordinary,” Billerica interposed, “but Webster Groves hisn’t Valley Park. The close-in suburbs are hnot the problem.”

  “Neither are the outlying areas,” Norris said. “I mean yes they is. But merging ain’t going to help them much more than not merging is. The only folks really hurting is the speculators and the live-dangerous real-estate men, no offense, Lee and Jerry, I don’t mean you. You understand us, Ross? We’re saying merger is bad. The status quo is good.”

  “Hexactly my point, General. That’s hexactly what I’m saying.”

  Fellow Man was thinking about his visit in December to Wesley, and Wesley’s gall in taking him for a man of average moral means, of ordinary scruples, in even suggesting he join the fellowship of the syndicate. Fellow Man needed this parable, this clear-cut arrangement of right and wrong, to cinch his decision: the merger deserved opposition. It was the right thing to do. He owed it to the loyal men around him.

  “How do we stop it?” Fellow Man asked.

  Hutchinson tried to give him an answer. He said he didn’t share the group’s abhorrence of the merger. His view was that once a good thing, always a good thing. But he was willing to act as a consultant for as long as he was welcome. Assuming the wisdom of writing off the legislative action as a foregone conclusion, he suggested that the city voters also be written off. The 1962 consolidation scheme had failed in the city too, of course, but by a smaller margin than in the county, and circumstances had changed a great deal; even the mayor hadn’t supported the scheme in 1962. It would be a far wiser allocation of resources to focus on defeating the referendum in the county, and that (if you asked Hutchinson’s opinion) was do-able, if not exactly easy.

  “KSLX is conducting a phone survey tonight,” he said, “and I think it will show the county opposed by two to one. But that stands to turn around once the issue is publicized and once the big guns—Jammu, Wesley, Stallhamer, the Hammakers—get involved in pushing it. In the case of Jammu and the Hammaker family, popularity transcends the city-county split. Jammu’s popular no matter how you slice the cake. To stand a chance of defeating the referendum, I’d say it will take more than the dollar contributions of your respective companies and the Republican Party. The cause is going to require a spokesman who’s widely known and absolutely trustworthy, someone to take your case before the public and give it some weight. Your side has to have a voice.”

  All eyes were on Fellow Man.

  Home, and turning to drive up the driveway, he was a little surprised to see that the house was dark. Usually Barbara left at least the kitchen light on. He parked the Lincoln by her BMW and activated the garage door, ducking out ahead of it. The wind, in the time it had taken him to drive home, had turned cruel. It had the brutality of a certain kind of bleeding, not the spurt of a severed artery, but the cold seep and puddling of a mangled limb. It dragged over the neighbors’ eaves and gables, rent itself on chimneys, carried sirens and a throbbing from the Mopac tracks to the north. Like a wind in Chicago or Boston, some city on open water, it brought more of an ache than a sting to his cheeks. He hurried into the house.

  The kitchen was too warm.

  He noticed it immediately. It was downright stifling for such a late hour. She never failed to lower the heat before she went to bed. Wasn’t she home? Was she sick? Hurt? Had she gone out? Was someone hurt? Was someone dead? Had she fallen in the tub? Choked? Electrocuted? Asleep in the wrong room? Dead? The ever-latent questions coalesced. He dispelled them, but the house was too warm. They came back.

  He stopped in the living room to turn down the heat (yes, 70°) and climbed the stairs. Was she home? He heard nothing, smelled neither the soap nor the toothpaste that haunted the hallway near the bathroom door at night. Still he expected to enter the bedroom and find her, the bed mussed and her body raising the blankets, to accept her presence instantly and totally.

  But t
he bed was smooth. He’d expected this as much as he’d expected to find her. She simply couldn’t sleep with the heat set this high. He bent his back, and his fingers found the switch on his nightstand lamp. Its light revealed an envelope on the pillows.

  She’d cleaned the bedroom. Her sneaker prints dotted the freshly vacuumed carpeting in methodical angles. Against the wall by the television stood four paper grocery bags, from Schnucks, from Straub’s, full of clothes. A note was pinned to one of them. He crossed the room and read it. CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, it said.

  Would she pin this note to remind herself? Of course not. Time itself was panic here. He’d been in the house only sixty seconds, and he was aware of the largest bite of experience he could safely swallow whole. This was just about the limit. He saw time as corporeal. He was a tube of man with a man-shaped cross-section, the one-dimensional squeezure from the kitchen to this point, where he paused in his heavy winter coat, in the heat, and then sat down on the bed. He picked up the envelope with a sportive flick of his wrist, as he might lift an envelope with happy contents: careful, it might contain a check. He played with its weight, its center of gravity, shrugged, and flipped it. Sealed. There was a trace of lipstick. She’d sealed the envelope. He slit it with his finger, sundering the BARBARA PROBST from the rest of the engraved return address.

  Dear Martin,

  This will seem so sudden to you that I hardly know where to begin explaining it, or whether I should even try. I’ve been seeing John a lot, practically every day. That’s where I was on Saturday afternoon. And most days, though you couldn’t know it. I know I told you I didn’t plan to make a habit of it, but it’s turned into a habit anyway. Which doesn’t mean you and I couldn’t keep hobbling along together for the rest of our lives, but every time I sit still I hear you telling me to shut up and I hear me telling you I don’t really love you, and I wonder what the point is anymore. I never intended to have a stupid life. I’m leaving for New York this afternoon. Maybe that’s stupid. If I thought this would kill you, if I thought it even might mess up your life for a while, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. But I don’t see you having a hard time without me. That’s almost reason enough for me to leave. I’m tired of taking care of you when you don’t even need me. I don’t want to sneak around like everyone else in this city. You hardly seemed to notice Lu was gone. You’ll hardly notice me gone either. You have your work. I’ll call you soon. I respect you, Martin. You deserve better than to have me meeting a lover in a hotel room. You deserve the truth, and this is it. Don’t expect me back.