Coming in the opposite direction, straight for Jamie, was Morris. He had two late editions folded in the armpit of his jacket.
“What just happened?”
“You didn’t see?”
“I had to go to the crapper and as I was coming out I heard a commotion.”
Jamie shook his head, lamenting his father’s horrendous timing. So that’s where he’d gotten it from.
Chapter Thirty-four
A block and a half south of the Trib, with only their long shadows for company, Jamie and Morris could still hear the striking drivers whooping it up. They were celebrating Brady’s sudden ignominy while forgetting the possibility that the spectacle they had just witnessed might under a certain set of circumstances also foretell their demise. For all they knew, the paper could fold.
Jamie filled Morris in. The oral version was somehow less believable than having watched it happen.
“They just handcuffed him and took him away?” Morris said. “They didn’t even check him for identification?”
The rain was falling harder, not quite a downpour. Fortunately, they had the elevated highway for cover.
They reached his car as the interior light went out in another that had just passed by. It rolled into a spot across the street from where Jamie had parked.
Jamie unlocked the driver’s door, reached across the front seat to lift up the latch on the passenger side. “It’s open.”
“Jamie?”
The voice, unmistakably familiar, came from the street. Jamie stood on his toes and peered over the roof of his car to see who it was.
“Is that you, Jamie?”
Morris turned upon hearing the voice a second time.
“It’s me, Steve.” Steven appeared out of the shadows and stood face-to-face with Morris. “Uncle Mo, hey,” Steven said. He gave Morris a pat on the shoulder.
“What are you doing out here?” Morris said. He seemed flustered by the unexpected appearance of his nephew.
“I was uptown, out with a couple of old friends from Columbia, and just as I got home, I got a call from my editor,” Steven said. “He said there was something on the news about Brady and the Trib, and I should get down here as fast as I could. But I didn’t hear anything on the radio other than the strike being over. What the heck’s going on?”
Jamie thought his cousin looked haggard, a bit frantic. His Trib press credential dangled from his neck. Steven apparently had been sent out into the night on assignment by his new boss before he could so much as be formally documented as a Sun employee.
Should he break the news to Steven that he was too late? That he was, on the scandalous subject of Lord Brady and the Trib, not one but two exclusives behind his good friend, Deb Givens?
Jamie didn’t get the chance. Morris, who was carrying the two late editions, offered one to Steven.
“There you go, Stevie. It’s all on the front page. Right here…in your cousin’s story.”
Steven took the copy and held it out for inspection, squinting to read in the darkness. He mouthed the headlines and hastily scanned the first couple of paragraphs. He looked up at Jamie, all bug-eyed.
“You got this?”
“Well, yeah, that is my byline, isn’t it?”
“How…where?”
Jamie shrugged.“You know, I had a source. With you gone, someone had to put the Lord in his place.”
A cheap shot, yes, especially in the context of the journalistic untruth.
Willis had grunted his approval when Jamie called from Morris’ office to repeat the fabrication he had told his father about having already accepted a job in Seattle.
“You leave the story without a byline, Brady will draw the obvious conclusion,” Jamie told Willis. “If Brady somehow survives this…”
Jamie got what he wanted—his name on the story—without even having to mention Blaine’s name.
What was one more little lie in a newspaper already contaminated with numerous byline fictions and other deceitful manipulations in the name of the ethereal Lord? Jamie convinced Willis to allow his final act as a member of the Fourth Estate to be—at best—one of mercy for and appreciation of the man who actually reported it.
At worst, it was an indulgent but understandable claiming of revenge for the Brady-engineered humiliation of Jamie and his father.
The unexpected payoff—and one Jamie surely could guiltlessly relish—was the fading sight of his cousin, the defected mercenary, literally chasing a story with Jamie’s name on it, already being delivered to outlets everywhere.
Chapter Thirty-five
“How many miles you have on this thing?”
“A hundred and nineteen thousand, plus,” Jamie told Morris. He dropped into second gear and turned right onto the narrow ramp leading to the Brooklyn Bridge. “The odometer stopped about a year ago, but these Toyotas apparently run forever.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
His announced plans being formulated minute-by-minute, Jamie had had no reason to consider the car or much else in the way of his unremarkable collection of worldly possessions.
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to figure out something.”
“Maybe Becky and Mickey would take it as a second car if they’re going to move to the Island,” Morris said.
“I’ll ask them,” Jamie said. He was still riding the high of his exclusive but every tick of the clock brought him closer to a decision he was beginning to dread having to make.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had been at the wheel with his father alongside him. They were so accustomed to steering their lives away from one another, trying to avoid head-on confrontation and mainly succeeding in disallowing the possibility of meaningful connection.
During Jamie’s junior year of high school, Morris had tried to teach him to drive after he had passed his written test for a learner’s permit. The mentorship ended by mutual consent after less than an hour. Morris was painfully intolerant of Jamie’s difficulty holding a lane, among other fundamental flaws of teenage judgment.
Molly took one look at her son’s face when they walked into the apartment and immediately realized it had been a very bad idea. Her husband was so unforgiving in the passenger seat that she refused to renew her license when it expired in the early 70s. She engineered a raid on her underwear drawer—her reserve fund for the rare extravagance that Morris was bound to dismiss as unnecessary and wasteful—and purchased lessons for Jamie at a driving school.
“What will you do for a car out there?” Morris said.
“I don’t know. If the job’s in the city, maybe I’ll be able to afford to live downtown. It’s got to be cheaper than New York, right?”
“What the hell would I know about Seattle?” Morris said.
“Well, I’m just saying. It might be nice not to have to worry about a car, the insurance, and parking, after the last few years in Brooklyn Heights.”
Morris snickered, shook his head. “You never could park the damn car. What was it, five road tests you failed?”
More than disapproving, it seemed to Jamie that Morris was just bantering, being playful. At least that was the way he was taking it, in the spirit of the night. On top of that, impossible as his father had been as an instructor, it was true that measuring distance for Jamie had always been an imprecise science, putting it kindly. The body of the Toyota bore its share of incriminating evidence.
“Actually, it was six tests failed and it wasn’t just the parking that did me in. I got everything wrong on those tests, probably broke records for points deducted. I remember on one of them, I stalled out trying to back up and froze when the guy said to re-start the car. He told me to switch seats and didn’t even let me finish. Another one I screwed up the parallel and he said, ‘Forget it, just make the damn broken U.’ But I was so flustered that I tried to pull out with the car in reverse, backed up at an angle and knocked over a garbage can. This guy sitting on the porch of his house came running out like a ma
dman. That was it. The instructor said not to come back until I took more lessons, as many as they’d give me.”
“You went to the driving school, I remember,” Morris said. “Your mother sent you, not me. Those guys were such crooks.”
“I actually only went to them two or three times,” Jamie said, sheepishly. “Then Uncle Lou took me out—he made me promise not to tell you. He felt sorry for me and was pretty cool about it, even after I put a couple of small scratches on his car trying to parallel. He just kept making me do it again and again and after a couple of hours I got better, or at least good enough to pass. The next time I took the test—lucky seven. I got close enough to the curb, sticking out a bit, and the instructor—same guy who wouldn’t let me finish that time—shook his head and said, ‘Okay, good enough, just stay off my damn street.’ Probably the longest year of my life, but I finally did pass.”
Jamie shot Morris a sideways glance. Morris was staring straight ahead, but Jamie could see that his lips were moving. He appeared to be talking to himself.
“What’d you say?”
“What?”
“You just said something, didn’t you?”
“Nah, nothing.”
But Jamie, no question, had heard him say something.
Without the training to take notes shorthand, Jamie had always struggled to keep up with his interview subjects. He would furiously scribble while trying to sustain a semblance of eye contact and continuity. Soon as the person was out of view, he would finish the incomplete sentences with what he remembered or at least what he believed he had heard. In silent confessionals, he would admit his quotes were sometimes only reasonable facsimiles of what had actually been said. But what the hell, no one had ever challenged his veracity. In the grand scheme of things, what difference did it make? He never had knowingly changed the context of a quote. He did his best. He went with what he had.
“You sure you didn’t say something?” he asked Morris.
“Yeah. I mean, no, I was just thinking.”
Okay, have it your way, Jamie thought. But since the printers were technically under the editorial umbrella, and he officially was still in the employ of the Trib, still a reporter, it occurred to him that the last interpretative call on the conversation was his.
“That’s right, kid, you passed.”
That’s what Jamie had thought he’d heard Morris say. That’s what he was going with.
They rode over the bridge, Jamie for once enjoying the silence between them. He clicked the windshield wiper setting to off, the rain having slowed again to a barely perceptible drizzle. The traction was still slippery on the bridge’s metal grating. That always made him uncomfortable so he clutched the wheel with both hands and steered the car into the right lane to exit into Brooklyn under a sign with a curved arrow that read: 278 West.
He drew a deep breath, exhaling slowly as the light up ahead, around the bend off the exit ramp, blinked green to yellow. Jamie started to go but quickly jammed on the brake. Just as abruptly—as if the machine had taken control of him—his foot boldly switched pedals. He went down heavy on the gas, jerking the car forward, through the red light, upshifting into third.
He was heartened, delighted even, by his rashness, this recklessness—the sudden willingness to move forward after his long history of playing it safe or spinning his wheels. He had surprised himself and someone else too.
Out of the corner of his eye, he couldn’t help but notice his father lurching forward, hands extended on the dashboard to break his momentum. Startled, wide-eyed and perhaps momentarily frightened, Morris turned and gave him a look.
Chapter Thirty-Six
It was half past two when Jamie and Morris walked into the apartment. Molly was still up, sitting at the kitchen table looking exhausted. She wore a red bathrobe and, between sips of coffee, chewed on a fingernail.
Morris had phoned her from the office and said they were about to be on their way. When Jamie stepped into the kitchen, she hurried over and hugged him.
“Are you hungry?” she said out of habit.
“No, Ma,” he said. “I’m just beat. It’s been a long day.”
“I made up the bed in your room,” she said. “You heard about Becky?”
“Dad told me. Such great news—can’t wait to see her. ”
“A blessing,” Molly said. “Now I’ll have two grandchildren.”
She kissed his cheek and went into the bathroom. Morris handed him his copy of the Trib.
“Show your mother,” he said. “She’ll get a kick out of it.” Morris went off to bed. Jamie went into the adjacent bedroom—his old room—and shut the door.
On the drive home, Morris had asked him when he intended to tell Molly about the plans to move to Seattle. Jamie alibied that he didn’t want to upset her at such a late hour. The next day would come soon enough. But that also meant he would need to actually make a decision because Morris would be expecting him to tell his mother something. The question was what?
What if going out West turns out to be a road to a nowhere job in a city where I don’t know a soul? What if Karyn finds a new man—if not the computer book-salesman himself—and I feel like an intruder around Aaron?
Jamie also worried about how he could remain a growing presence in his son’s life from 3,000 miles away. Then again, he did have visitation rights. Aaron could spend holidays and parts of the summer with him in New York. Molly would surely help with babysitting. Soon—knock on wood—there would be a little cousin to have as a younger companion, a surrogate sibling, and a home in Long Island with all the suburban trimmings.
True, I told Willis I was quitting tonight but wouldn’t he, of all people, understand if I called for a do-over? He was the man who’d walked away from the woman of his dreams for journalism. Plus he likes me. Carla said so.
Ah, Carla. Unless Jamie had completely misread the moment, her wet kiss on the cheek in the bar was more amorous than platonic. She’d made it clear she didn’t need a man, but there was also the matter of what she wanted. And while her life seemed as child-complicated as was Jamie’s, maybe they could figure out a way to give it a go.
Of course, staying in New York for a relationship with Carla would also assume that he—and she, for that matter—would still be employed by daybreak. A man of Brady’s wealth could not be so easily vanquished. He would use every resource available to discredit and punish those who had conspired to harm him. There were bound to be aftershocks from the earthquake Morris had triggered with the pressing of a computer key and the launching of the re-plated edition. They might continue for weeks or months. Even if he could stall a few days, Jamie would have to make up his mind without knowing what awaited the Trib and its workforce.
I need to get this over with as soon as I can. I have to decide by morning at the latest.
More than anything, Jamie wanted to do right by Aaron. That much he was certain of. But he could also appreciate that Morris had tried to do that with him when they lived under the same roof—and look what a mess he’d made of that.
At least Morris seemed to finally acknowledge that he could have tried harder, done better. Jamie, in turn, could finally see and appreciate the sacrifices his father had made for others.
“You were responsible for a lot of careers and families,” Jamie had told Morris in the car.
“I just did what I could,” he said.
“You did what you had to do,” Jamie said. “There’s a big difference.”
Morris shrugged, uncomfortable with the compliment. “You know, if you told me yesterday that I would live to ever cross a picket line, I would have told you that you were out of your damn mind,” he said. “What the hell? Maybe none of this stuff should ever be set in stone. Maybe you just have to live in the moment and make the best decision you can.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Jamie said. “As long as you can make one and stick with it.”
Jamie knew he was at that point now. There was no middle ground left for him to
stand on, no way to straddle the line. He had to choose. He had to be less of a reporter and more of a columnist. Like Pat Blaine and—yes—Steven too.
He wished he could be sure, but there apparently was no sure thing.
Should he go to Seattle with Aaron and try to be the doting father he never had? Or stay in Brooklyn and try to build something with Carla and the Trib that his son might someday understand was worth fighting for?
He got into bed and drew the blanket up to his head.
Got to get some sleep and figure this out.
He predictably spent the next few hours tossing, turning and flip-flopping.
It was a little past six when he surrendered to insomnia. The boiler kicked on, sending bursts of steam through the old radiators. A garbage truck groaned as it passed by. From the other side of the wall, Jamie could hear his father’s light snoring.
Jamie reached over to the night table and turned on a light. He swung his legs from the bed to the floor and looked around the room for something to read—a book, even a leftover Marvel comic would do. There was nothing. Only the Trib that he’d set down on the top of his old dresser.
He walked over and grabbed it, then returned to sit on the edge of the bed, his bare feet still on the carpet. He stared at the exclusive that within hours would be the talk of the town. What a crazy story, he thought. What a strange and totally unforeseen turn of events.
He would be getting calls for interviews—no doubt from the persistent Debbie Givens—to explain how he had gone from front-page humiliation to the get of a lifetime.
He studied the byline and mouthed the words: “By Jamie Kramer.” He began reading the story, but lost concentration after the lead.
Damn, I slept so peacefully with Carla. But reading Aaron his bedtime stories—how cool had it been to watch his eyes gradually close, to hear him say he wanted me to stay?
So what would it be? Go to Seattle with his son or stay for a new-found celebrity?
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