Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  I don’t have a chance to talk to Bobby about it until we are in the lunchroom, a place where the din is so great no conversation can ever be overheard. I tell him what I’ve done. He looks troubled but agrees to talk to my cousin.

  On the way out I ask him if I shouldn’t have meddled. He shakes his head. “No, no,” he says. “It’s just I can go for whole hours at a time not thinking about it all…”

  I nod as if I understand, though I probably do not. How do you understand a sixteen-year-old’s getting cancer?

  My cousin calls promptly at four. I hand him over to Bobby and offer to leave the room. He either doesn’t hear me or chooses not to respond. He answers a few questions, gives the name of his doctor, and says it’s okay if Eliot calls him himself. Mostly, he listens. After about ten minutes he thanks my cousin very much and gets off the phone. His face is deeply flushed.

  “He says if he were me, he would not do the radiation treatments.”

  “Why not?”

  “He says they have good results on thyroid cancer with just surgery. If I were fifty, he says he would recommend I have the radiation, too. But at my age, no one knows what the long-term effects of radiation will be. He says it’s a gamble either way, having it or not having it, but if my doctor’s pretty confident the surgery was successful he would choose not to have the radiation himself. If he were in my shoes. But it’s my decision.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” His face is beginning to return to its normal color. He looks out the window for a while. “I guess my first reaction is I want to live a long life. And if I can’t, maybe I should live a short one.”

  “No radiation, then?” I look at him, trying to understand what it would be like to make that kind of decision.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He talked to his mother, but she only said to do “what the doctors said was best.” Having already lost their father, his sister was too scared of this topic to say anything. I wondered if having a father who had not had a long life helped him decide what to do. Because in the end, he did not have the radiation. I have always wondered since then if looking at mortality and making that kind of choice so early in life doesn’t shape who you are. Whatever else it would do, it would teach you all at once about things that most people go through life learning in little bits and pieces, if they learn them at all: self-reliance and living with uncertainty and taking risks. And about choosing to do something, or not do something, when everything is at stake. I have always thought when you are young, death is what you see looking the wrong way through a telescope, the tiniest speck, far, far off. Bobby, though, had to look through the telescope the right way, and then still find a way to go on.

  And, I suppose, this is why I have the belief all these years later that whatever decision Bobby makes about running will be a good one.

  ✳

  When I arrive at the Parrishes' for dinner, Laura is deep in a thorny discussion with Jimmy about his wish to make a documentary film of the campaign over the coming summer for a communications class. Laura is arguing in favor of a job or of summer school, and Jimmy is replying that he can combine school, work, and family all in one creative venture. Laura says with real heat in her voice that their family privacy is being invaded more than enough as it is. Wanting to keep clear of this discussion, I nod at them and head for the living room. No one is there. I find Bobby back in the tiny room he calls his office. He is gazing absently out the window, his chin resting on one hand. He glances at me and then back out the window.

  “What did Rick have to say?”

  “How did you know I went to see him?”

  “You can’t walk through the capitol and all the way to the special prosecutor’s office without someone seeing you. Word gets around.” He points to a chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Jeannie wanted me to tell you about it. She’s too ashamed to tell you herself.”

  “Jeannie? Holy shit. Jeannie?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “About what?” He takes a big breath and says in a lowered voice, “It must be pretty damned bad.”

  “It is pretty bad. Remember the siting committee on the interstate bypass?” He nods. “The one Jeannie testified in front of?” He nods again.

  “What did she do?” he asks softly.

  “She owned some land that was taken by eminent domain by the state. Right in the route the committee finally decided on. She made some money on it.”

  “How much?”

  “About half a million dollars.”

  He leans back in his chair, blinks, and his lips part. His voice grows deadly quiet. “What in the fuck did she think she was doing?”

  “Trying to help Brendan and Andrew. She didn’t think you were going to run. Her health was scaring her.”

  His arms drop to his sides. “Well, I’d say that just about tears it.”

  I tell him in detail about my discussion with Erickson Bruce. He listens closely, his initial disbelief slowly fading. At the end he slumps in his chair and looks defeated. Then he sits up, his anger returning.

  “You know what?” he says. “She could have had her assistant testify and read from a script she wrote herself. Exact same words, just a different mouth saying them. But no, she testified in person in front of the committee. Why? She wanted to make sure they heard the lieutenant governor’s sister.”

  Before I can say anything, he gets up from his chair, his face going from pale to red, and he begins to do something I haven’t seen him do in a very long time. Veins in his forehead thicken and become visible, and he begins to rage, to curse, to pound his desk. Sweat breaks out on his face. Veins and ligaments stand out in cords in his neck. He kicks his wastebasket, rakes things off his desk, slams the wall with his fist. His face a mask of fury, he rants on and on, not always coherently, until, finally, he seems physically spent.

  He drops into his chair, his hands balled into fists, breathing hard. He looks at his scraped and bloody knuckles.

  I wait for a full minute to see if he is done. From the living room, I can hear Jimmy or Annie has cranked up the stereo loud enough to have missed the pyrotechnics. Once his breathing is more regular, I say, “I can tell you she feels horrible about it. That’s why she couldn’t bring herself to tell you. This afternoon she even mentioned killing herself.” His head jerks up. “I think she was speaking on impulse, but it tells you how deep her feeling about it runs. If you can bring yourself to, it would be good if you called her.”

  “I’d scream at her,” he says hoarsely.

  “I think she would handle that better than silence.”

  His face tightens. “Maybe she deserves some silence.”

  We sit in our own silence for a while. “I have something else to tell you, for what it’s worth.” It feels a bit like piling on the bad news, but I know he should have the information: I mention seeing Clive Sanford and Freddie McMasters together. He sighs, but I can see it is too far from his present concerns to stir anything beyond a flicker of acknowledgment.

  Laura comes in to tell us dinner is almost ready.

  “Didn’t I hear a lot of noise in here?”

  I look at Bobby.

  Bobby says nothing. He goes to a nearby cabinet and pours himself a drink. His back turned, he offers me one. I say no.

  Laura looks unhappily at Bobby’s back for a moment and opens her mouth as if to say something. After a small rueful shake of the head, she turns to me. “How are you?” she asks. “Gene Tyler tells me you had a l-lost weekend right before you got sick.”

  Because her father was an alcoholic, I feel suddenly transparent, embarrassed. Why, I don’t know. Unlike him, I am not an addict, I just have lapses. “I had a few drinks.”

  “Why don’t you call us next time? Or call me. We’re here.”

  “Thanks. So, what’s for di
nner?” I ask, pretending hunger but thinking I’m going to have to remind good old Gene Tyler of the sacred confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship.

  Before we go into the dining room, Laura pulls me aside and tells me I’m in denial about my drinking. She’s seen it a thousand times.

  I deny this, tell her I admit I’ve got a problem, but I’m working on it. Really.

  “You going to meetings? Have you got a sponsor? Started therapy?”

  “I’m handling it,” I say, in a subject-closed voice. She says some other things, but I am congratulating myself that no picture of the drunk in Dr. Tyler’s office is coming to mind.

  Jimmy and Annie argue over dinner about what should be done to reduce crime. Bobby is pale and withdrawn, and it falls to Laura to keep conversation going, though she keeps giving her husband uneasy glances. Cindy Tucker, the campaign’s communications director, calls to say she won’t be able to make it over for dessert, since one of her kids is running a fever. Laura gives her some pediatric counsel, thanks her for calling, and tries to arrange another time. I wonder how much longer Ms. Tucker will have a job.

  A week later, Bobby has not formally dropped out of the race, though his inaction in fund-raising and scheduling campaign appearances suggests he is preparing to do so. No one knows for sure what he’s thinking. He has refused to talk to Jeannie and he is not confiding in Laura, whom I suspect he resents in a different way.

  I am talking on the phone with Jeannie about his silence, and trying to reassure her that he will talk to her again someday, when she tells me to be quiet. Someone in her office has told her that an all-white jury in the capital has just acquitted two white police officers in the fatal beating of a black man. She says, “The city is going to blow. Somebody should tell Bobby. He’s at home today.”

  I urge her to call him and break the silence between them, and she does call, only to find he has already headed to the capital, having already come to the same conclusion as his sister. He spends the next four days and nights in the black and Hispanic south side of the city trying to keep the lid on, visiting churches and community centers and schoolyards, employing his still-fluent Spanish, and using his many contacts among black south-side leaders. And while there is some scattered looting and arson and two overturned police cars, there are no deaths and the incidents are fewer and more isolated than they might have been had Bobby chosen to stay at home.

  I don’t know when in those days Bobby decided he would run for senator, but I think Richard Wheatley’s saying the riots were a legacy of the sixties, of welfare dependence, and of the phony expectations created by affirmative action, followed by his inaccurate claims that local rioters attacked police and fire personnel, might have been something of an inducement. I knew myself that Bobby was running when I saw him on the local news in jeans and shirtsleeves, looking like he hadn’t slept much, saying that we were dealing with a delicate and highly inflammatory situation that Mr. Wheatley was making very much worse with his misrepresentations. But, of course, Bobby concluded, while it’s easy to sound off from Washington, it’s also very hard to sit in Washington and know the real truth about what’s going on here at home.

  A short time later I get the uncomfortable feeling that Laura may have learned of Bobby’s decision the same way I did.

  5

  Laura invites me over for dinner while Bobby is spending what he reports will be his last day and night in the capital’s south-side section. She says that Cindy Tucker and her two children are coming for dinner, too.

  I look out my office window across the street at the huge unblinking clock face that stares from the tower of the university’s administration building. “Thanks, Laura, but I’m awfully busy. It’s stacking up like a late night for me here.”

  “Would it still be a late night for you if Cindy weren’t coming?”

  “What do you mean?’’

  “I know Jeannie told you I’m trying some matchmaking, which I’m not. So I thought you might be ducking.”

  “No,” I say. “I’ve just gotten a little behind here.”

  “I really wanted to have a chance to get your thoughts about Bobby. And Cindy could use some, too. She has to work with him. I have to live with him. And neither of us is doing very well at our jobs right now.”

  “Looks like he’s running, doesn’t it?”

  “It does look like it. But he hasn’t told Annie and me word one, and he hasn’t asked Cindy to plan any specific campaign activities. And he still isn’t talking to Jeannie.”

  “I’m not sure I have any thoughts. It looks like he’s playing Lone Ranger.”

  “If he thinks I’m Tonto, he’s pretty t-tonto himself.”

  Tonto is Spanish for stupid, I recall. I am wondering if the fact she can be witty means she isn’t deeply angry. “My guess is—and it’s just a guess—that he’s feeling betrayed by his wife and his sister. So he’s pulling his horns in.”

  “Betrayed by me?”

  “Right or wrong, he probably expects your support on a decision to run.”

  “Well, he’s wrong. And you do have some thoughts. Are you sure you can’t come over? If you could, I’d appreciate it.”

  Laura is one of the few people in the world whose requests I find difficult to deflect. “I don’t know if you’re going to want to hear what few thoughts I do have.”

  “I see. Well, now you’ve got to come over.”

  By the time I arrive after work, the children, including Annie, have eaten their meals and are in the basement getting ready to watch a videotape.

  Amid her dinner preparations in the kitchen, Laura and I talk about the racial unrest, about Jeannie, and about her own work at the hospital. There is a brief pause in her stirring of a pot on the stove. Taking the freedom our long friendship confers, I ask bluntly, “Are you two going to make it through this?”

  She looks over at me. “That’s a good question. He is not making it very easy.”

  “The campaign will only run a few months,” I offer.

  “It has already been running for almost a year. First the party convention, then the preprimary run-up, and then the primary itself. About which I prefer not to be r-reminded. When he’s here, he’s on the phone or writing thank-you notes or a new speech or going over past precinct voter returns. But mostly he’s not here.”

  “If he wins, he won’t have to run again for six years.”

  She shakes her head. “Are you kidding? Office-holding these days requires a perpetual campaign. If he wins, in a month he’ll start the whole thing all over again.” She purses her lips for a moment. “But you’re on his side on this, aren’t you? Well, good,” she says before I have a chance to contradict her. “Since he can’t be bothered to do it, you give me his perspective.”

  “I don’t know what Bobby’s thinking, and I’m far from being on anybody’s side. But you’ll forgive me for wondering why any of this comes as a surprise to you. I mean, you knew from the start that Bobby was going to be involved in politics.”

  “Yes. And he knew I was going to be a pediatrician. So he didn’t complain when I got calls in the middle of the night to treat a sick kid. I didn’t complain about the meetings and the travel and the fund-raisers. And I didn’t complain when it looked as if he were going to follow everyone’s advice and run for governor at the end of the next term. But the Senate is different.”

  “Different how?”

  “He’ll have to be in Washington for at least half the year. I have a medical practice and a clinical professorship I can’t just give up. Annie doesn’t want to leave her friends and her school. So what are we supposed to do? See him once a month? And then when he’s home during a congressional recess, what will he be doing? Giving speeches and traveling the state and raising money for the n-next election.”

  “Have you talked about all this with him?”

  “A
dozen different times. But it’s like trying to hit a moving target. He says we’ll handle it if and when it comes.”

  I remember from high school how Bobby used to develop tunnel vision when he got passionately interested in something—a science project, a rival football team’s game movie, a book—and little outside that interest seemed to exist for days or even weeks at a time. By college the tunnel widened a bit, and it has widened still more in the years since. But it must feel lonely to lie outside his vision day after day, if that is where Laura is. Or where she believes she is.

  “You think he’s taking you for granted,” I say.

  “It feels deeper than that.”

  “He must think you’re breaking your contract. And you know him. He likes to handle problems once they’re real, not hypothetical.”

  “I see. I’ve got to file for divorce to get his attention.”

  “I think he’d be surprised even to hear you say the word.”

  Her mouth tightens. “Maybe I should say it, then.”

  “You’re really prepared to split up over this?”

  “If he keeps leaving me out? Why not?”

  “So it’s not that he’s running for the Senate, it’s that he’s not letting you in on his decisions.”

  “No, it’s both. Both.”

  “Then he’s screwed no matter what he does. Unless he backs down and does it your way and withdraws. Or am I missing something?”

  She snorts out an unhappy laugh and shakes her head. “You sound just like him. But you are missing something. I don’t mean just his leaving me out of decisions, I mean abandoning me.”

  A woman I take to be Cindy Tucker comes into the kitchen. I want to continue the conversation but keep silent. I don’t know to what degree Laura is friendly with Bobby’s new communications director nor how open she is willing to be in her presence.