Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

4

  Jeannie insists on seeing me in person to talk. Margie Feller, my secretary, shows her into my office. I notice as she comes in that she is leaning less heavily on her cane than she did at the exhibition.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She lowers herself to the chair across from my desk, adjusts herself until she is comfortable, and says, “You tell me.”

  I tell her about my meeting with Erickson Bruce.

  She says, “So you think he’ll go with the ethics violation.” I nod. “I figured he would. Then I’m looking at fines. How big, do you think?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And fraud is out?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What does that mean?’’

  “I mean based on what you testified to and what all the supporting documents say, I’d be surprised. Though you can never rule it out. Grand juries can—”

  “Hey. If push comes to shove, there’s always one way to rule it out. If I’m not around, they can’t indict me. No show-trial.”

  “Not around?”

  “Not alive. Dead.”

  “Do me a favor. Don’t joke about it.”

  “Am I laughing? They’ll use me to smear Bobby.”

  I stare at her. She stares back, unblinking.

  “I see. And who will be around to make it clear Bobby had no involvement? And what about Brendan and Andrew, for God’s sake?”

  “Andrew,” she says, exhaling and lowering her gaze.

  “Remember a conversation you had with me a few years ago? Know what you said? ‘Suicides are quitters. I hate quitters.’ Word for word.’’

  “You were depressed. I’m being rational.”

  “Right.”

  She holds up a hand. “All right, all right. I’m just considering my options. But I agree, all in all, it’s probably not my best choice.’’

  “Hold that thought. Tight.’’

  She tilts her head back and, though she doesn’t wear glasses, looks at me as if through the reading half of bifocals. “Speaking of holding, I heard through the grapevine you had yourself a few after Brendan’s thing. And Gail tells me she’s told you she is pregnant. Any relationship between those two events?”

  “Are you trying to change the subject?”

  “I asked a question is all.”

  “I know your questions. If I say yes, you’ll accuse me of self-pity. If I say no, you’ll accuse me of lying. Let’s call it a coincidence.’’

  “Fine, then we can go ahead with the surprise baby shower for her at your house?” She looks at me with such a perfect deadpan, an involuntary grin painfully stretches one side of my face.

  “You’re tough.’’

  “Damned right. How do you think I got where I am today?”

  “I do think we have to tell Bobby what’s going on.’’

  Her humorous expression vanishes. “Now? Why?”

  “Because now that we have word the matter is being investigated, he’s not required to report it. There’s no reason to withhold the story anymore.”

  She sighs. “Oh, man. That will be harder than an indictment.’’

  “I’ll do it, if you want.’’

  “Would you?” I nod. “I’ll talk to him afterwards. When the storm blows over,” she adds. “When are you going to do it?”

  “Tonight.”

  She touches her hand nervously to her brow. “That soon.’’

  “I’m supposed to go to dinner there.”

  “He’s going to be royally pissed off, isn’t he?”

  “More shocked, I think.”

  She shakes her head. “Bobby doesn’t do shocked. Well, I have to face the music sometime, right?” She doesn’t look at me for a response. “Laura asked you to dinner. She was upset big-time when she heard about your drinking. You ready for a temperance lecture?”

  “Grapevine’s been busy. Well, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “She also wants you to meet Cindy Tucker.”

  “Cindy Tucker?”

  “Bobby’s communications director. She used to cover the statehouse for The Register. Smart cookie. Divorced. Cute.”

  “So Laura is still trying to rescue the world.”

  “Well, you, anyway. Somebody’s got to try.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Sleep on, Rip Van Winkle.”

  “I have some other news for Bobby.”

  “What?”

  “I saw Freddie McMasters and Clive Sanford putting their heads together in a small, out-of-the-way bar.”

  “Clive Sanford? That sleaze-monger? Well, Bobby was already pretty sure Freddie couldn’t be trusted. But it does go to show one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You can find out a lot if you ever go someplace besides your house and your office. It sure would be great if you did some work on Bobby’s campaign. He’s going to need you, assuming he stays in. And you need to do it.” I think she is the second person to tell me this in recent days.

  “Why do I need to do it?”

  “You just do. You’re in a rut.”

  “Thanks to you, I’ve been to an excellent exhibition and inside the scenic capitol just within the last few days.”

  “See. You owe me.” She struggles to her feet, ignoring my extended hand. She shifts her cane from one hand to the other and says, “Thanks for the help. And thanks for quoting me. I always figured you weren’t paying attention.”

  She turns and limps out the door.

  ✳

  As I try to return to my work, I wonder how serious Jeannie was about suicide. I also wonder if Bobby will decide to withdraw from the race when he hears what Jeannie has done. Once it comes to light, no way around it, he will look very bad. The cynical folks will think the whole deal was corruptly rigged from the start, the skeptical that Bobby was shortsighted, naive, or plain stupid. He made the mistake of believing his sister was above reproach. And if that is a mistake that could have been made by everyone who knows her, not everyone is lieutenant governor.

  Bobby is fiercely competitive, not without ambition, and he wants to have the chance to influence public policy. Fundamental election reform, the power of lobbyists, and the influence of special-interest money are close to obsessions of his, while those topics are nowhere on Congressman Wheatley’s agenda. But he also knows public policy is very hard to influence even as a US senator, whereas his wife and daughter are going to be very much affected by what he does, or doesn’t do. And Jeannie’s story could make an already difficult election very much harder.

  I think about the first time I met Bobby, and remember how good he was, even then, at making hard calls.

  ✳

  It is the third week of school. I am in my tenth-grade chemistry class and a new boy arrives. I don’t pay much attention to him. I notice he is wearing clothes so well-worn that they must be hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs. (The sixties are still young, so this is a not-yet-fashionable appearance.) The boy is lean and looks as if he has done a great deal of work outdoors. Most startling of all is the angry-looking scar on his lower throat. The bandages must have just come off. He is given a seat near me at the back of the room. We have a substitute teacher today. He mutters the name of our new classmate and goes back to the demonstration of how to make silver sulfate.

  “All you do,” he says, “is take this match—any match will work—strike it, and apply it to a silver spoon.” He does so. For the first time all day, we all pay very close attention. Striking a match in school is a forbidden act, and it is exciting to watch the rule actually being broken before our eyes. The substitute then goes on to explain how you can do many spoons simply by lighting a candle and applying its flame to the silver surface.

  The new boy’s hand goes up. He asks how a candle ca
n make sulfate, since only the matches have sulphur. The teacher wipes off the spoon he has held over the candle, looks at it, and reddens. He congratulates the new boy for catching his mistake—the only person in four classes to have done so. After a brief exchange of glances, the rest of the class turns to give this new boy a second look. The girls look a little longer if more covertly than the boys, doubtlessly thinking, good-looking and not a dummy.

  As we are filing out of class, the new boy asks me where Miss Voinivich’s Spanish class is. I tell him that’s my class, too, and he falls into step with me.

  I ask him where he’s from. He mentions Oshiola, a small farming town about thirty miles away.

  “D’you move?” I ask.

  He says he and his mom and his sister have just moved in with his aunt and uncle nearby.

  “How come?” I ask.

  He looks at me for a second, sizing up the nature of my interest. “My father died,” he says finally. “We had to sell our farm.” Years later I find out his father, because of shifting government and bank policies, was under a lot of stress, physical and financial, and didn’t, or couldn’t, keep up his life insurance payments. So after he had his fatal heart attack, there was nothing left for the family to do.

  I tell him I’m sorry about the death. I am ready to ask about the scar, too, but I figure I have asked enough for the time being. I would have welcomed him to the school, but I didn’t speak for anybody but myself. For all I knew, between his clothes and his speaking up in class and his rural twang, “the school” might treat him like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  As we are walking down the hall, someone passes us and says, “Look, Ichabod and the Horseless Headman!” This is pretty good for high school wit, so I explain it to the new boy.

  “Why horseless?” he asks, not smiling.

  I gesture at his clothes. “Farm clothes, I guess.”

  He thinks some more, nods, then smiles. “My cousin thinks they’re city clothes.”

  I shrug, my thoughts on the vast subject of fashion exhausted.

  In Spanish class he is quiet until, toward the end of the period, the teacher calls on him to answer a question about whether he has ever been to Mexico. He responds in excellent Spanish that he has not, but he says he used to work every summer with migrant workers. The teacher smiles and asks him if he is from the Southwest. He says he has spent his whole life in Oshiola, adding that migrant workers came to the Midwest by the thousands every year. The class turns to look at him. Migrant workers in the Midwest? Was he making this up to get some attention? On the other hand, some of us notice he speaks awfully good Spanish, not the Spanish of the perpetual present tense most of us speak, and that lends him an air of authority. The teacher looks at him skeptically though, and, taking her cue, so do we.

  Two weeks later, the local TV station does a story on the appalling conditions migrant Hispanic workers live in when they come by the thousands to the Midwest for the annual onion-picking season. The reporter stands by a dozen windowless ramshackle cabins that sit out in the middle of nowhere. There, with no toilets or running water and often no electricity, migrants live seven or eight to a cabin. The next day, someone asks Miss Voinivich if she saw the report. She says yes and smiles at the new boy. By the time this report is broadcast, though, the new boy has already gotten the attention of most people in the school. With his old clothes and angry scar and quiet way of challenging teachers who are inattentive, how could he not?

  A peculiar thing begins to happen to me. With most folks concentrating on the new boy, I find I can get away with really trying in my classes, a path that used to lead to mockery and harassment. When I do try, I discover I am in steady competition in every single subject with this new boy, Robert Parrish, for the highest grades. I also find I am less interested in getting the highest grade than in beating the new boy. It’s fun, and it annoys him in a comic way. Whenever I beat him, after class he punches me on the arm or yells or growls at me, responses I find very satisfying. When I bring home my first report card after his arrival, I am startled by my parents’ response. My father, who has named me after his own strict and revered late father, has made it clear over the years that I am pretty much a disappointment to him. My mother, who feels it is disloyal not to see things the way my father does, is disappointed less in me than that I have made my father feel disappointed—though she also confides that my father never lived up to Grandpa Benjamin’s wish that he be a rabbinical scholar. He became a businessman instead. But my new report card suddenly launches me into intoxicatingly high regard at home, and even at school.

  In the process of trying to compete with Bobby, I get my first glimpse of his ability to concentrate—an ability so complete, it is as if nothing outside the exam he takes or the studying he does exists. He is the only person in the school who, regularly and without a flicker, does complicated homework assignments in the middle of our roaring cafeteria.

  He lives two miles from me in an apartment in the old part of town. He rides past my house on his bicycle to get there. One day, not long after he has arrived, he sees me shooting baskets. I invite him to join me. We play Horse and Twenty-One. He beats me effortlessly, swishing shots through from all over the court. Then he heads home. The next day we play again. My younger sister, who has shown no detectable interest in sports other than desultory rooting for Ernie Banks and the Chicago Cubs, suddenly joins about half a dozen neighborhood kids in watching us play—actually, in watching Bobby shoot. Somebody, a little kid from down the block, asks Bobby if he played football for Oshiola Regional. He sinks an eighteen-foot jump shot and nods. The little kid asks if he was the quarterback on the freshman team. Bobby nods again and the little boy’s eyes grow round.

  “Remember last year’s game?’’ he says to the surrounding group. A few of us do. Our high school team is among the top ten in the state almost every year, ditto for the freshman team. Last year, though, we lost by two touchdowns to little Oshiola Regional. They had a quarterback who completed twenty-seven out of thirty-five passes. Bobby was the perpetrator.

  “Why not go out for the team?” I ask.

  “Maybe next year,” he says. He looks at his watch. He has to go. He works six days a week for his uncle unloading railroad cars.

  The next day he doesn’t come by after school. A few disappointed kids trail by looking for him. I beat a couple of them in Horse, reassuring myself that all my practice hasn’t been totally useless. About twenty minutes before he is due to work for his uncle, I see him pedaling up the street. He stops but doesn’t dismount from his bike.

  “Competition too much for you?” I say.

  “Did you tell Mullen I played football?”

  Mr. Mullen is our football coach. “Me? No. Is it a secret?”

  “Well, somebody told him. And I’ve just spent the last forty minutes getting told I have no school spirit.”

  “So why don’t you join and shut him up?”

  “I can’t spend my afternoons at football practice. I’ve got to earn some money.”

  I shrug. “Coach’ll get you out of seventh period and get someone to drive you to the railroad yard.”

  “That’s just what he said.”

  “And?”

  “And when I told him next year, he said it doesn’t work that way. He says I can’t just waltz in and take someone’s position who’s been working his butt off for two years. When I said I didn’t really have a choice, I got the school-spirit lecture.”

  When Coach Mullen gets wound up, as all of us have heard him do, he can talk about school spirit and its relationship to good citizenship, good character, the American spirit, commitment, devotion, moral fiber, future personal success, and patriotic ardor for the shank of an afternoon. “How’d you shut him up?”

  He shifts on his seat and looks uncomfortable. “Told him the truth.” He opens his shirt collar to expose his scar. “I just
had my thyroid removed.”

  We studied the human body last month in biology, so I have a vague idea what a thyroid gland is. “Why?”

  He assesses me for a moment before he answers. Finally he says, “Cancer.”

  I am completely stunned. “Cancer?”

  “They want to give me radiation soon. And I take these pills every day to make up for the missing hormones.”

  I am having trouble getting all this to soak in. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “They think so. Do me a big favor, though. Don’t tell anybody about this. I don’t want people feeling sorry for me. Far as I can tell, there may be nothing to feel sorry about. Doctor says I should be well enough by winter to go out for basketball.”

  “Good,” I say.

  He looks at his watch. “Gotta go.”

  “Hey. What’d Mullen say when you told him?”

  “Said nothing for about thirty seconds. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said I had spirit.” He laughs.

  “Wait’ll he sees your jump shot.”

  “Damned right, pal.” He waves and rides off.

  That night I keep thinking about what Bobby has told me. Finally, I decide to call my cousin. He is just finishing his last year of residency at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City. He barely knows who I am, and I barely know who he is except as someone everyone in the family refers to with admiration that borders on awe. New York is far away and so is he, and I will have to come up with a story when the phone bill arrives. I am very nervous about talking to this important stranger whom I met once when I was seven years old, but it seems like the best thing to do. Our town has some good doctors, but I think Bobby should get advice from some great doctors. I go in the den, shut the door, and have the operator put me through to the hospital. The woman at the switchboard asks me what service he is on and I realize I don’t know. Fortunately he is the only Eliot Leavitt on their staff, and even more fortunately he happens to be at work.

  I tell him who I am and, after a moment or two, he makes a few vague sounds of recognition. I take a deep breath and tell him about Robert Parrish. He gives a few uh-huhs to let me know he’s listening. Then I ask him if he has any advice. He pauses for a bit and says he might, but first he’d like to consult an oncologist who specializes in endocrinology—two words I have never heard or read before—and he would get back to me. I ask him for one more favor: to call at four when Bobby can be here.