by Howard Fast
Boyd liked him. Within his perimeters, he was honest, and his word given was an unbreakable contract. He was a heavyset, stooped old man with a shock of white hair and an engaging smile that had won him more rewards than a key to Fort Knox — a smile that greeted Boyd Kimmelman. There was another man at the table, a slender, dark man who was introduced to Boyd as Congressman Al Ruddy. Boyd recalled that Ruddy represented an Oakland district, that he was one of the younger new leaders in the party, one of the bright young men who, typically, would snort in disdain at admiration rendered to Tony Moretti.
“You never ran for office,” Ruddy said to Kimmelman.
“No, thank heavens.”
The old man, Moretti, watched Kimmelman with interest. Vaguely, in Moretti’s encyclopedic memory, where odds and ends of trivia mingled with a detailed and intimate knowledge of San Francisco politics stretching half a century back, there was a reminder that Adam Benchly had run for mayor and had been defeated by the votes of the dead. Boyd had come into Benchly’s firm directly after World War II, and Benchly, dead these many years, had had a malignant hatred of politics. Moretti wondered whether Boyd shared it. He needed Boyd’s help. Al Ruddy, whom Moretti considered a donkey, had said, “I think it’s the worst choice in the world.” The object of choice had not yet been mentioned.
“Politics,” Moretti said to Boyd now, “is an art, and like all arts, it has its quota of genius, mediocrity, and too often, Boyd, plain goddamn fools. It calls for a combination of charisma, charm, organizational ability and old-fashioned common sense. Trouble is, we live in a land where they equate the politician with the crook. Not good, but it spells out an attitude.”
Moretti’s language intrigued Boyd. The man was self-educated, with neither high school nor college in his background, and Boyd had the impression that he spoke as the occasion demanded. On North Beach, he’d choose very different words.
“There’s no need to plead politics to me,” Boyd said. “I’ve lived without it. I intend to go on living without it.”
“Not yourself,” Ruddy began, but Tony Moretti cut him off and said, “Let me explain, Al, please. Like this, Boyd — you don’t mind me calling you Boyd?”
He would have damn well minded it from Ruddy. Since it was the old man, he simply shrugged.
Ruddy started to speak again, but a glance from Moretti silenced him, and Moretti, exercising his privilege of age, laid a hand on Boyd’s arm and said, “Please, hear me out. Don’t get upset.”
“You haven’t said anything yet to upset me.”
“I know. Also, you got a reputation. I say Barbara Lavette, and you’re likely to stand up and walk out of here.”
“It depends on what you say about Miss Lavette.”
“Look, Boyd, let me put it on the table. You know me. I don’t crap around and I don’t bullshit and I don’t double-talk. This isn’t the world I grew up in, but maybe it’s no worse. Different, yes. It’s different. Calls for different things. The party wants Barbara Lavette to be a candidate.”
“A candidate for what?” Boyd asked suspiciously.
“Congress. We want to run a woman. It’s about time,” Ruddy put in.
“Ask her,” Boyd said. “Why bother me?”
“It’s not so simple,” Moretti told him. “Not so simple.”
“You make it more simple by asking me? If that’s what you think, you’re out of your mind.”
“No, no. It’s not that. The party wants her to be our candidate in the Forty-eighth C.D.”
“No.” Boyd smiled sourly. “You must be kidding.”
“There are reasons and there are opportunities.”
“Tell me. The Forty-eighth is one of the four most solidly Republican districts in the state. You haven’t elected a Democrat there since the district was created. You don’t even campaign there. You put a name on the ballot, and that’s it. I can’t speak for Miss Lavette, but I’ll be happy to tell her it’s the stupidest idea of the year.”
“Maybe not,” Moretti said, unperturbed.
“Enlighten me.”
“All right,” Moretti said, “I’ll try to. I knew old Dan Lavette, and I knew his wife and I know his daughter — not like you do,” he hastened to add. “You have a different kind of relationship, but I took old Dan and his daughter to dinner right here at Gino’s twenty years ago, and we talked pretty good, so it isn’t only the public record. I know, too, her time as a correspondent during World War Two, her involvement with the anti-Franco crowd and her stretch in prison. For the past three years, she’s been running the peace movement here on the Coast — for my money, the most effective antiwar movement in the country.”
“Not running it,” Boyd said. “She’s only a part of it.”
“Come on,” Ruddy said, “it wouldn’t exist without her.”
“I could argue that, but I won’t. What in hell’s the difference? I haven’t seen your goddamn party lifting a finger to stop that rotten bloodbath in Vietnam. It was your man, Johnson, who turned it into an abattoir.”
“Some truth,” Moretti agreed, unhappily. “But you’re pushing it, Boyd. You know by now how badly we want this cursed war over with. That’s why we’re sitting here, and that’s why I’m talking to you. We desperately want a woman candidate. We’ve been attacked on every hand as male chauvinist pigs, and the Republicans have pulled the rug right out from under us. We need a woman candidate, but not any woman. To just pick a woman out of the grab bag is meaningless. We need a woman like Barbara Lavette, and if you think it was easy to get the party caucus to agree to her —” He shook his big head. “No, not easy. Not easy at all.”
“Without asking her.”
“Because I know her. She’d be so damn mad at the notion of being used that she’d boot me out of the house. With reason.”
“I’m afraid you lost me somewhere,” Boyd said. He was thinking that he really didn’t give a damn. Too much had happened. The war in Vietnam had snapped him loose from whatever illusions he still cherished, and if he ever troubled to define politics, it was as a pig’s game. Ruddy was a skinny pig, and the state houses in fifty states and the Congress in Washington were filled with Ruddys, fat and thin and in between, noses in a long trough that the plain people paid for. Perhaps Moretti sensed what he was thinking and regretted bringing Ruddy, or perhaps not. Moretti’s feet were still wet with the mud and dirt of another world, seven thousand miles away, and for him, politics was the song of freedom. Politics was the warm wonder of an enormously extended family, and he contemplated Kimmelman curiously and thoughtfully. He saw before him a man neither short nor tall, stocky, a light complexion, blue eyes and sandy hair. The middle fifties, Moretti decided, a man who had stepped out of uniform into a job at Benchly’s office back in 1945. Moretti had known the city the way it was, the city in the hills that the Italians and Jews and Irish built with their own hands, city of wops and yids and micks, their city in spite of the fact that the Wasps owned the banks and the railroads. How much did a Boyd Kimmelman understand? Men like Ruddy understood little or nothing, but Kimmelman —
“I didn’t lose you, Boyd,” Moretti said gently. “I think you know what I mean. The lady believes. She’s not cynical.” Which Boyd Kimmelman knew. And Moretti, like so many in the city, knew that Boyd Kimmelman and Barbara Lavette had been living together yet apart for twelve years or so. It was not news anymore, not even gossip.
“She believes,” Boyd agreed. “She believes that you can stop war, that you can change history, that the good guys will triumph over the bad guys.”
“That’s it,” Ruddy said. “That’s the way we have to look at things.”
“God help us,” Boyd said.
“What in hell does that mean?”
“Eat your dessert and stop talking,” Moretti said to Ruddy. He had a huge piece of chocolate cake on his plate, one of Gino’s famous double desserts. For about thirty seconds, Ruddy ignored it, as if to say that he didn’t take orders from Tony Moretti. Then he began to eat hun
grily. Boyd felt sorry for him, and with that came the kind of guilt he might have felt in mocking the infirmity of a cripple.
“Good, isn’t it? I have a sweet tooth, too.”
Ruddy smiled with appreciation. His smile said that he held no grudge. He was a congressman. All people were voters and he loved all people and he loved all voters. No hard feelings. No hard feelings anywhere.
“Let me be explicit,” Moretti said, “and tell you what I mean by belief. It’s a faith. I’m a Catholic. I have to believe. If I say I believe in Mary the mother of God — which I do — it’s not because I can reason it out or win an argument from you about is the Virgin the mother of God. No. The belief is part of me. I can’t exist without it. It doesn’t make me good or bad, it’s just something I have to have. Now this lady, Barbara Lavette, she has to believe. That’s why she breaks her back with her peace movement. What she has is either grace or an affliction. I don’t know. When I retire, I’m taking a trip to Italy, and I’m going to put that to the Pope. No, not really.” He smiled. He had a good smile. “You see what I’m getting at, Boyd?”
“She believes. What then?”
“Do you know what a free election is, Boyd? It’s one of the most beautiful things man ever invented. I’m not talking about the turkeys we put in office. I’m talking about the process. Let me tell you what we’ll give your Barbara Lavette if she agrees to be our candidate. First of all, we’ll help her raise money from our sources, aside from what she might decide to raise on her own. She’ll have a sound truck, posters, at least ten hours of radio time, and this is a radio city. We’ll make sure she can buy some TV time, and she’ll have some free TV coverage, the equal-time privilege, and the party behind her for two large mass meetings. Furthermore, we’ll put her on the platform with our other candidates. I can’t be specific now, but believe me, she’ll talk to millions. And she can say her piece. No one is going to censor her or interfere. That’s what the process means, an opportunity to say your piece.”
Boyd had come to her to repeat Tony Moretti’s proposal, and to add, “Before you agree or disagree with this, Barbara, I have to tell you how I feel about it.”
“Shouldn’t that wait until you hear how I feel about it?”
“No — for one reason. I know the Forty-eighth Congressional District and you don’t. I also know you. I’m not going to wait until you grab on to this with all your enthusiasm and then try to talk you out of it. You’re too damn stubborn for that.”
“I’m stubborn? Oh, I like that, Mr. Kimmelman — I certainly do like that.”
“Good. When you’re really hating me, I become Mr. Kimmelman. Well, I know how your mind works. Know the truth and the truth will make you or your constituents free. Baloney. You can deliver the truth as passionately as only Barbara Lavette can. You can evoke the whole dirty stink of this war in Vietnam, and it will not win you a vote. But halfway into the campaign, you will come to believe that you can win, and when you don’t, it will break your heart. And in the Forty-eighth C.D., there is no way you can garner even a respectable losing number.”
“You’re a dear man,” Barbara said.
“Yes. Which means that in spite of what I said or might say, you’re going to run.”
“You can bet your sweet patooties.”
“Yes, I suppose I can.”
“Now you’re peeved with me,” Barbara said. “Don’t you even want to know why?”
“I know why.”
“Not really, because you’re a lawyer, and no matter how cynical or horrified you may become, you still see yourself living in a land that is ruled by the law.”
“Sort of. Don’t you?”
“No. I see my country ruled by nincompoops, governed by pompous fools, driven witlessly into a terrible war — and we’ll pay the price of that war for years to come. And I don’t like it, and if your friend Moretti will give me TV time and radio time and a sound truck to boot — well, Boyd, I’m going to shout my head off.”
“All right. And who knows, miracles happen.”
The miracle did not happen, but Barbara lost the election by only three thousand votes, whereas the general pattern was for a Democrat to come in at least twenty thousand votes behind his Republican opponent. She spoke, pleaded, unrolled facts and figures, and drew applause from those who would not vote for her as well as from those who would. It was a catharsis she needed desperately, and in the course of lashing out against a war she hated, as she hated all war, she came to know Tony Moretti. A half-dozen times during the course of the campaign, Moretti turned up to sit and watch her and listen to her speak. He never had a comment. He never spoke of approving or disapproving of anything she said, but he always chatted with Barbara for a few minutes, mostly about the old times and the people he had known in the twenties and the thirties.
The day after the election, Wednesday evening, Moretti asked Barbara and Boyd to join him for dinner at Gino’s place. Gino was dead these many years, but the place had not changed, defying the freeways that laced the city and the hordes of tourists that had invaded the city during the sixties. It was still an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, with straw-bottomed bent-wood chairs and checked tablecloths, maintained by one family for over seventy-five years — a long, long time in San Francisco. Barbara wondered whether it was as filled with memories for Moretti as it was for her.
After they had been greeted effusively by Gino’s son, Alfred, escorted to the best table, and there ordered their dinner, Moretti nodded at Barbara and said, “Now we’ll talk about it.”
“While I was banging my head against the wall,” Barbara said, “I thought you might tell me to stop, or shift my position and let the bloody side dry up.”
“No, you had to do it your own way. You made the best race of anyone in the party. I didn’t think there was any way you could win, and neither did Boyd here, but maybe you could have won. I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Oh?”
“Did you think you might win?”
“Yes, I guess I did.”
“Ah—”
The spaghetti came. Moretti had ordered, and without emphasis he had included a Higate Cabernet Sauvignon 1968, their very best year. Barbara took note of this. It was as if the man knew everyone in San Francisco who was worth knowing, and perhaps he did, and their ways as well.
They finished the spaghetti, and Barbara asked him what she had done wrong.
“I don’t like the question,” Boyd said. “You knew who she was. I told her she was being set up.”
“I wasn’t set up!” Barbara exclaimed. “And if you don’t mind, this is between Mr. Moretti and myself. I want to know.”
“I don’t like the question so much either,” Moretti said, “because it wasn’t what you did wrong. You’re a political person, Barbara, but you’re not a politician. What do I mean by that? First, let me say something about a political person. I remember you when you were a young woman. I can remember once, right here at Gino’s place, must have been just before the end of the war and you had been writing for the Chronicle in the Far East and you were having dinner here with your father, and I came over to wish him the best, and he introduced us.”
Barbara knitted her brows and closed her eyes, and then, “Oh, yes. Of course. But your hair was black—”
“And I weighed sixty pounds less. Well, thirty years is a long time. But I recalled that, Barbara, because there was a beautiful young woman, richly endowed, and like fifty million other young women, you could have settled for a family, for kids, or for a job or a career — the way this new women’s movement puts it.”
“I had a family and a son,” Barbara reminded him.
“Yes, but you know what I mean. You started way back with the longshore strike, when you went into the soup kitchen, and then you ran your car right into Bloody Thursday and set up a first-aid station. Guilt, I suppose. You know, three men from my family were on strike there, and Limey — Harry Bridges — well, we still see each other about once a year
. A lot of threads in my life. But it wasn’t only guilt. You were a political animal — and I mean that in the best way. One of our Stanford sociologists would say you had developed a social conscience, and when the oppressed bled, you bled. Maybe so, but to me, you became political — in the best way again. You were connected. That’s one part of politics, the best part. You follow me?”
Barbara nodded, smiling slightly. “I think so, Tony, and now you’re going to tell me why I’m a rotten politician.”
“No. Leave out the rotten part. You’re not a politician, good or bad, and the fact that you and your friends organized Mothers for Peace, maybe the biggest headache Nixon has with this lousy, stupid war of his, doesn’t change it. You’re a damn good organizer.”
“But not a politician.”
“No. Now listen to me carefully, Barbara. I’m pretty long in the tooth. Now maybe you’re thinking that I don’t call you a politician because a politician has to be elected, and that’s the only way he can work at his job. No. That’s not the crux of it. I’ll admit that maybe ninety percent of politicians will jump to sell their souls just to be elected, but we still got the other ten percent. The core of the matter is that the politician, if he’s a good man and not an asshole like Nixon, studies where his constituency stands, and then he tries to give them one small push. He accepts the world the way it is because he knows he can’t change it. All he can do is push in the right direction without losing his people. And sometimes that little push pays off.”
Barbara nodded. “I see what you mean.”
“Now if you want it, this district is yours. Go in there two years from now, and the party will put everything it has behind you. What do you say?”
“A political animal,” Barbara reflected. “Perhaps so, perhaps not. I’ve tried to understand why I do what I do, but that’s just as hard as trying to find out who I am. I’m fifty-six years old, Tony, and you want me to become a politician.”