by Greg Fields
Finnegan, watching, felt a surge of tremendous power enter him, an unrestricted exultation in where he was and who he was. His very existence, all he had known or could hope to know, culminated here, in this view, in the blood running through him now, in the sweat on his face. He had sought no more than this, for here, on this crisp Sunday evening, vibrant springtime consummated his youth. He knew his potential, he breathed it in, it cloyed to the linings of his throat and lungs, it braced the blood rushing around his brain, it seeped through every fluid and syrup within him. Every thought he conceived, every spasm of his grand Romantic heart revolved around the glorious brilliance of this quiet unspoken vista. He perceived it all together, here, on this hillside in the innocence of new spring.
Conor Finnegan looked at the angular features of his friend’s face. They betrayed nothing of the reactions pulsing under Tom McIlweath’s skin as he, too, stood there regarding the campus in the distance. Finnegan could not read him, could not read Tom’s sentiment that it had all worked out very nicely. This was exactly what he had wanted.
They stood silently for a few moments, Finnegan unconsciously pawing the ground around him. At length his exultation calmed. He noted it, and marked the time of this new passage.
“Ready to head back?” he asked.
“Whenever you are. Let’s take it slow.”
And they did, into a fading day too soon lost and too easily forgotten.
***
Greeley Welsh leaned back in his leather chair, his right leg propped on the edge of his desk, a file folder in his tilted lap. He looked alternately out the window to Wilshire Boulevard below and across to Conor Finnegan sitting opposite him. The morning sun streamed through the window to cut his legs in half.
“What’re you interested in, Conor?”
“What do you mean? Personally?”
“Professionally. What do you want to do for us?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me. You know what you need better than I do.”
“Issue work, Conor. You’ve got your choice. I’d like you to pick an issue, maybe two, and dive into it. You’ll be our point man out here on that issue, whatever it is. That means you’ll have to know it inside and out, and be able to represent accurately the senator’s position on it. We need someone to make studies, to write speeches, to recommend action, to get to know the right people. The senator’s never been inclined to go into any depth regarding issues. He generally takes his positions by sticking his nose out of the tepee from time to time and sniffing which way the smoke is blowing. We try to give him depth. We try to get him to look at a question rationally rather than fashionably. Believe me, it’s not easy. He’s bright, but he doesn’t have much time, as you can well imagine. We’ve got to feed him the relevant material to make him appear knowledgeable.
“Right now,” continued Welsh, “We’ve got a guy here working on housing problems and another working on relations with the Hispanic communities. Everything else is wide open.”
“What about the Middle East?” asked Finnegan. “Can I do something with that?”
Greeley Welsh sighed and pulled his leg down from the desk. He shook his head slowly. Finnegan noticed the sunlight catch the red hairs on his wrist.
“Jesus, I wish you could. I wish somebody could. Do you know what his position is?”
“I’ve read it.”
“It’s no position at all. ’Withdraw our military presence as soon as possible but only after we’ve secured our interests.’ He’s run up and down the state saying that, but what the Christ does it mean? What are our interests, other than easy access to the oil fields? And, presuming that we have broader motives, how do we secure those interests in that multiethnic zoo without a military presence? And what’s the diplomatic plan? Makes no sense at all. If he doesn’t change his song, we’re going to get killed with that in the next election.”
“Hasn’t anybody tried to talk him out of that?”
“Christ, we’ve all tried, but on this issue, of all issues, he doesn’t want any help. Gets angry if we persist. ’I have to go with my conscience,’ he says. Well, that’s bullshit. He’s trying to be all things to all people, that’s what he’s doing. Wants to paint himself as a liberal but doesn’t want to offend the war hawks because the hawks have all the money, and he likes money. He needs the right’s resources to get re-elected, or so he thinks.”
“So you’ve got one of the most volatile foreign policy situations for an entire generation and he’s doing nothing with it,” said Finnegan.
“Essentially. He’s trying his damnedest to steer clear. Much to my amazement, he’s been fairly successful, but that won’t last. Sooner or later, someone’s going to hang him on it. Politics by neutrality.”
“Or by duplicity,” rejoined Finnegan.
Greeley Welsh looked up at him and his face spread into a good-humored smile. “I think I’m going to enjoy having you around, Conor.”
“You still haven’t given me an area.”
“Like I said, take your pick.”
“What are my choices?”
“Anything you want. Taxation and tax laws. Entitlement reform. Environment. Urban problems. Drugs. The elderly. Whatever.”
“Can I think about it and let you know tomorrow? Maybe I can spend today getting acquainted with his positions, pending legislation, and all that. Nuts and bolts stuff.”
“That’s a good idea. I can tell you that whatever you decide to do, you’ll be spending a lot of time answering mail from constituents. We get a bunch of communication each week, and it all has to be answered. We divide it up, and everybody’s got to do some, so it’s good to know where he stands across the board.”
“I thought most communication went to Washington.”
“You’d be surprised how many people contact him here. They all expect a reply. Phone calls, too, which we log. People call every day with an idea or a bitch. Mostly a bitch. I’ve got a feeling we’ll be referring most of those calls to you. I hope you’ve got a thick skin. Come on, I’ll introduce you around and show you your office.”
“I get my own office?”
“Share it. With Ruben Garcia, who’s a Georgetown Law student. He lives in Santa Monica and he’s here for the summer. Ruben’s our man on Hispanic relations.”
Greeley Welsh stood up and moved out from behind his desk. He was a tall man, perhaps 6’3”, and seemingly too young for this type of position. But in reality Greeley Welsh had accomplished no small amount in his thirty-six years. He had graduated from a small Catholic college in New England, then spent two years in Kenya in the Peace Corps doing health outreach and vaccinations in the rural villages. From there he returned to New England with little money and a dread fear of malarial mosquitoes. He headed to California where it was warm, and landed a job as a city reporter with a San Diego newspaper. Five years later he had advanced to city editor, and it was in that capacity that he met the brash young congressman intent upon becoming a brash young senator. Three Novembers later, the senator-elect asked the city editor to drive up the freeway to Los Angeles to head his field office there. Greeley Welsh had tired of San Diego anyway; he had spent eight years there. There would be new women in Los Angeles, and better beaches.
Welsh walked his young intern through the office. Of the six people on staff, only one caught Finnegan’s attention, and that was Jill, the appointments secretary. Jill had silvery-blond hair, lots of it, green eyes, a deep tan and dimples. Her body had been shaped by some sculptor out of Grecian marble. Jill smiled when Finnegan was introduced, and he knew at once that he would have a hard time acting relaxed around this young goddess.
At the end of the small suite Welsh opened a thick door to a rather large rectangular office with two desks. One had papers and books heaped in piles, the other had nothing on it but a phone, a blotter and a computer monitor. The white walls were covered with enlarged photos of the senator, old campaign posters, and a California map.
“Ruben’s in Bakersfield thro
ugh the end of the week. Some dispute with lettuce growers again. Until he gets back, this is all yours.”
Welsh went to a bookcase in the corner and pulled out two thick volumes. “These are the senator’s position papers on every issue that’s ever come up over the past four years. Read through them and get an idea of who he is. Do some research online of the public records, too, and the news stories. There are lots of them. By the end of the day I want you to take any constituent calls we might get. I’ll listen in to see how you do. You can say damn near anything you want as long as you’re polite. Don’t be afraid to argue, but do it respectfully.
“Tomorrow we’ll decide what your area is and map out a game plan for the next three months. If you have any questions, just give a yell. Welcome aboard, pal.”
They shook hands warmly and Greeley Welsh left Conor Finnegan to his thoughts. They were many. Finnegan walked over to the window whose view was virtually the same as that in the other office. On the opposite side of Wilshire was a veterans cemetery. Beyond that, Finnegan could discern the UCLA campus, and beyond that the chic shops and theaters of Westwood. The Santa Monica Mountains backdropped everything. Finnegan thought the view spectacular.
And in that instant, Finnegan heard the siren’s call through the voluptuous, seductive pull of youthful power.
***
Across the city at an exclusive private swim club in one of the interchangeable eastern suburbs, Tom McIlweath sat in the guard’s chair a few feet above ground level. The sun on his bare shoulders and chest warmed him. He was baking, and he knew it. Tonight he would feel the familiar sting of sunburn.
The sun reflected brightly off the pool below him. Even his dark glasses could soften only slightly the slash across his eyes. Eight or nine kids, all between seven and ten, splashed and kicked, a school of sleek sea otters at play. Around the pool’s edge their socially conscious mothers spread oil on each other and sat in the hot plastic lounge chairs. When they stood up, McIlweath noticed the stripes from the chairs’ bindings running across the backs of their legs.
He had worked out in the morning, the first time in several days. His arms and legs felt limply feeble, his back tight. He wished he could take a nap.
Tom McIlweath had flown home two days after Conor Finnegan. A late exam, Latin, had caused him to stay. He had hoped that he and Finnegan could have driven back across country, but Finnegan said no, the old car probably couldn’t take it. Instead, he had placed it in the keeping of Dan Rosselli. McIlweath thought that if he earned enough money this summer, he would buy himself a car back at school. It would be nice to be mobile.
McIlweath sat in his chair, felt the warmth, and thought of Finnegan, whom he knew he had misjudged. He regarded Finnegan now as his closest friend, a link between his two worlds, east and west. Finnegan had not been a reminder of McIlweath’s shallow younger existence; instead, he had enriched the human dimensions of his new one.
This summer they had both come home, and McIlweath knew that they might see each other only two or three times at most. But that didn’t matter. They had come forth together from a womb, conjoined twins linked at the spirit, and if they spent the summer months in their own realms despite their proximity, then so be it. They would still be as close as friendship allowed in the autumn, in the east.
McIlweath reached into his bag tied to the base of his perch and pulled out a floppy white tennis hat. ’My crown.’ He thought. ’He who wears the droopy white cotton rules supreme.’
After an hour or so he hopped down from the guard’s chair. He walked to one end of the pool, took off his glasses, whistle and hat, and left them in a pile at the edge. Only two young boys frolicked in the shallow end, their mothers chatting under a sun umbrella a few feet away.
McIlweath dived into the pool, extending his body in a familiar arc. The water slapped him coldly. As he drew his arms alongside him underwater, he opened his eyes. The water covered the sun, making it a cycloptic liquid eye directly over and in front of him. McIlweath’s head broke the plane of the water. He reached for his first stroke, and drew breath.
CHAPTER IX
Did ye not hear it?—No! ’twas but the wind
Or the car rattling o’er the stony street.
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure
Meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
In late autumn, after the leaves have finished changing and the first snowfall has come to cover their musty piles, a young man settles into a winter frame of mind. His collective memory silently takes sway, he becomes more primitive, more concerned with survival. And in a modern society if survival is not at issue, the elements of survival take on a deeper texture, and we relish them. Beds are warmer in winter; we sleep late, thick blankets pulled to our chins. We become wary of every sneeze and sniffle. Food tastes better. The grandest, most rapturous meals of the year we eat in winter. It is a way to confirm our place, this sumptuous feeding. We reassure ourselves that, through the cold, the ice and the snow, indeed we remain alive. We shall beat the devils of winter once again.
As he folded his notebook and walked out of class, Finnegan thought of food. It was mid-November, and as the cold air stung his face he could see his breath. In late afternoon the Mall was virtually empty. Finnegan hustled through it, past Scott Hall, and stepped onto College Avenue. Music from one of the fraternity houses across the street blared through closed doors. Already it was dark. The headlights of passing cars cut broad lines through the asphalt. An acrid pain in his stomach drew up through his gullet, and Finnegan knew he wanted a big meal tonight. He would cook it. Rosselli would be there, and possibly O’Hanlon if he got back from Trenton in time. McIlweath would be at practice. Finnegan rarely cooked for McIlweath.
As he scurried down the cold avenue Finnegan smelled the pungency of burning leaves. The odor surrounded him in a wave, conjuring traditional autumnal images of football, apples and the coming of the great holidays. He noticed the earth beside the sidewalk was spongy. Several footprints sank deeply into the muck where people walking two or three abreast had over spilled the concrete.
At the stately white-pillared brick library, Finnegan turned left and headed southward down a residential street that adjoined Buccleuch Park. At the end of their second year he and his friends decided that they had outgrown dormitory life. They had split up each afternoon that spring, each scouring a different part of the city looking for a suitable place to live. After several weeks had passed unsuccessfully and a grim despondency had set in, Dan Rosselli met a fellow at the pool one night who said he had just pledged a fraternity and, if he could find someone to take over his lease on a two-bedroom apartment near the park, he would be moving into the chapter house the next autumn. After the four of them—Finnegan, McIlweath, Rosselli and O’Hanlon—had perused the place, they jumped at the chance to take it. At that stage they would have been willing to agree to anything with four semi-solid walls and a roof, but they had been universally surprised at the quality of this serendipitous flat. None of them had seen a place anywhere in the city so large and so comfortable.
The apartment occupied the upper half of an old house adjacent the park. The frame window looked out from the living room onto Buccleuch Park across the street. McIlweath in particular fell in love with the view. He would sit next to the window most nights with his books, quietly studying and intermittently pausing to look out to the street, the park and the sky.
The place itself had been well preserved. Obviously college students had only recently taken it over, for the damage was minimal. The door opened to a long hallway, the foot of which, adjacent to the entryway, was the extreme end of a blocky, square living room. Down the hallway, in order and opening to the left (for the right wall of the hallway was the edge of the building) were a large bedroom, shared by Finnegan and O’Hanlon, a smaller bedroom, the d
igs of McIlweath and Rosselli, and the kitchen, a greasy linoleum chamber with a rickety table at one end. Fittingly, at the head of the hallway stood the bathroom. The four learned quickly to stagger their wake-up schedules to get maximum use of the solitary bathroom.
To be sure, it was no palace, but in comparison with the grimy, dimly-lit hovels into which students regularly crammed themselves, the light-colored, orderly apartment seemed luxurious. O’Hanlon and Rosselli spent the summer ferreting unwanted furniture and dishware from relatives. By late August, when McIlweath and Finnegan arrived from the West Coast, it was furnished in a charmingly eclectic fashion: cinderblock bookshelves, threadbare rugs that did not match anything, and bunk beds for the smaller bedroom.
The house itself was a looming, wooden thing, painted a dull gray. Finnegan opened the outer door and then bounded up the stairs three at a time. The top door was locked. No one was home, but he knew that already.
Finnegan’s hunger had become ravenous. Once inside the apartment, he tossed his books on his unmade bed as he bolted down the hallway to the kitchen.
’Spaghetti tonight. Big, thick, heavy spaghetti, with sauce a la Conor,’ he thought. He pulled cans of tomato sauce, puree and paste from the cupboards. Only after he started to fry the ground beef did he realize that he had not yet taken off his coat. The scent of the sizzling meat and simmering sauce permeated the small kitchen and wafted down the hallway. While it cooked, Finnegan pulled an apple from the refrigerator and bit in. The animal joys of winter.
By the time the sauce was mixed it was nearly 6:00. Finnegan sat in the living room reading The New York Times while the dinner heated. He loved the Times. He loved the intelligent text and its cosmopolitan tone. He flattered himself in reading it and made a point each day to go through at least one article on a subject about which he knew absolutely nothing. In spite of his own sporadically slothful tendencies, he was faithful to that task. That was the whole point of a paper like this, he reasoned. He loved its weight, its very heft that intimidated so many others. He even loved the black inky smudge it left on his fingertips.