Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  “Hi, Ben!”

  I lean down and give her a quick squeeze and a peck on the forehead. She glances quickly around.

  “Sorry, Pie,” I say. “I forgot.”

  She raises her shoulders and drops them, rolls her eyes. “Well…”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “Right.”

  “So. This must be pretty boring.”

  She looks in Alex’s direction for a moment. “I’ve seen worse,” she says, and then laughs. “Cindy has to stay for a while, don’t you, Cindy?”

  “Afraid I do, pumpkin.”

  “So you’d like a ride home from me.” She nods, though with exaggerated slowness, as if this is a game of charades and I’m getting warm. “And you’d like to drive?” She beams and her head bobs up and down. “Sure,” I say. “But I’ve got to talk to your father for a few minutes first.”

  Cindy glances at her watch. “Another five minutes or so for the questions. Then I’ll break it off. Can’t let ’em go on too long. Rule one at question-answer periods: never leave the candidate standing around with his bare face hanging out.”

  I listen in while he emphasizes his newest theme, the need to recreate a sense of responsibility, involvement, and community in the country. And I see he’s done it again—got the audience in the palm of his hand. When Cindy intervenes and says the lieutenant governor has to go, there is a murmur of disappointment. Finally, he’s given a prolonged and enthusiastic ovation, the crest of the noise making his cheeks flush. He waves farewell, all the while nodding, smiling, and mouthing the words “Thank you, thank you.” He looks like a real candidate.

  As he approaches us, he greets twenty or thirty folks by name, asking half of them about their parents or children or work in a way that shows their name is not the only thing about them he remembers. He is obviously enjoying himself.

  “Good work,” I tell him when he gets to us.

  “It’s all in the details,” he says. “What brings you here?” His brows pinch together. “Is everything all right?”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “I hear you’ve got a radio interview show this afternoon, and starting tomorrow after the medical report is released, you are going to be a bit busy for the foreseeable future.”

  “No more than usual. It depends on how soon they drop the other shoe. Then I’ll be busy.”

  “Right.” I slow my step to lag us behind Cindy on our way to the parking lot. “I just had a talk with Laura.”

  He looks at me. “And?”

  “And I have the feeling that everything is not all right.”

  He blows out a breath. “I know. I miss her. I miss myself, for God’s sake.”

  “And with all this stuff that’s going to go on soon enough, she’s going to feel even more cut off.”

  “Yes.” We walk a few more steps in silence and he says, “You made a special trip here to tell me this?”

  “Yes, actually I did. I didn’t know till just now that things had gotten so…bad.”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re that bad. Campaigns are always black holes for the personal life.”

  I look at my old friend, and the wish to blurt out the whole truth bubbles up in me. I’m thinking about thewording—

  “Your wife just hit on me” or “Laura made a pass”—when I see spreading over his face an expression I know well. I saw it hundreds of times in classes in high school while teachers labored to explain a difficult problem. While not yet boredom, it is boredom’s precursor, fingers drumming on a table. The expression says, “I get it. I know what’s going on.” Well, this time he doesn’t get it. The bubbling settles, stops. I am worried about Laura and Bobby, yes. But I am also worried about Laura and me. I am not made of concrete. “Bobby,” I say. “I’m telling you. This goes way beyond her discomfort about your running for senator.”

  He looks at me, turns his palms upward. “My plate is pretty damned full right now. What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think you should underestimate the problem.”

  He grumbles, “Lot of help you are.”

  “Look, at least try asking her what to do. Spend some time on it.”

  “What time?”

  “If I were you, I’d make some.”

  “Okay. I’ll do what I can. And I really appreciate your coming out here to see me. But I can tell you right now that I’ve got a hunch that no matter what happens, real time is gonna have to wait until after the first Tuesday in November.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.” I hold up my hands and then let them drop.

  When I go back to look for Annie, I can’t find her. I finally walk toward the small brick building with the restrooms in it and see the front of a Bulls hat covering the back of a head. Alex has Annie pressed against a tree, one hand underneath the side of her blouse, his face glued on hers. My first instinct is to shove him off and report him for molesting a child. Then, even at ten yards’ distance, I hear an appreciative “mmm” come from Annie. And I remember. She is sixteen years old. I step back and go over to a nearby picnic bench to wait. I cannot see them from where I sit.

  Sixteen is probably about what twenty used to be.

  She emerges a few minutes later, her face and neck flushed.

  “There you are,” she says, as if she’s been looking all over for me. “Thanks, but I won’t need to trouble you. I’m going to ride with Alex.”

  “It’d have been no trouble,” I say. “Where you guys headed?”

  “Alex has to follow Dad to his next spot.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you showing an interest in the campaign.”

  She grins. “Yeah, right.” She lowers her voice, shakes her head ruefully, and gestures with her index finger, doing an excellent imitation of her father: “‘So unpredictable. You just never know what’s going to happen during a campaign.’”

  Feeling vaguely disloyal to Annie, I nonetheless call to tell Laura about what I’ve seen. She gives a long sigh at the news.

  One day after Bobby’s doctor releases his health summary, Clive Sanford begins to point out to reporters that there is no mention of psychiatric counseling. Some of the reporters reply that there is no mention of brain surgery or liver cancer, either, because you don’t mention things you don’t have. Clive raises an eyebrow and brandishes a copy of Congressman Wheatley’s health report in which there is a claim that he has had no history of mental problems.

  Just two days after Clive’s game of show-and-sneer, there is a report in the state’s largest newspaper by an ambitious young political reporter, one Jeremy Taylor, claiming that Lieutenant Governor Parrish omitted from his health statement a history of psychiatric care he required when he was in college.

  Bobby is ready. By making himself unavailable to the press for the rest of the day after the story breaks, he builds up suspense. He lets Richard Wheatley and Clive Sanford and Gerry Dolan appear on television and sanctimoniously call for full disclosure and piously invoke the people’s right to know. In the meantime, Cindy Tucker fields the calls, letting it be known all questions will be answered tomorrow.

  Annie is pulled out of school to sit with her mother and Jimmy behind the lectern for the noontime news conference. And it is clear Cindy Tucker and Scott Bayer have done their homework, too. They have picked a large hall, appointed it with handsome but restrained red-and-blue banners, sober but upbeat, put the necessary flag in the right place, tested the place for sound, favorable lighting, color backdrop, sighted the best camera angles, and then made sure friends and supporters are there for applause lines—filling the front few rows so Bobby can see them. And finally Cindy has ensured full media coverage by explaining that any reporters who missed this conference are going to be in deep shit with their editors, and that any assignment editors who didn’t give this event three bells are going to be in deep shit with
their bosses.

  The place is packed. Bobby and Laura have both asked me please to be there, so I am. I count six TV station crews, four of whom are covering it live for noon telecasts, seven radio stations, political reporters of every stripe from every daily in the state, and Alexander Stafford, who is bobbing up and down from behind his movie lens. Over loud protests, Scott Bayer has limited photographers to a bare minimum, allowing no flashes and roping them off far enough away so their shutters will not be audible over the clutch of microphones at the lectern. (Bayer insists the best chance to control and shape the impression given the public is on television. If the photographers want to scream bloody murder, he says that’s all right with him.) I step over several messes of black spaghetti—wires for sound, lights, and cameras—and stand next to Scott as he surveys his handiwork. Just before I get there, I hear one reporter say to another, “I hear he’s pulling out.” The other replies, “No, no, man! I hear he’s got a bombshell to drop on Wheatley.” A third says it’s news of his sister’s indictment by the special prosecutor.

  “It’s getting gladiatorial out there,” I say to Scott.

  He glances at me, nods in recognition, and, surveying the crowd, says to me, “It’s a good scene. Now we just need to find out if the candidate is a Christian or a lion. He’s going to take questions for as long as they have them, you know. He’s going to try to outlast the bastards.”

  I shrug. “Probably a good approach. He’ll have a chance of getting it behind him that much faster.”

  Scott folds his arms across his chest. “We’ll see. This is new territory. First, some of these reporters are pretty thick. And then some of them won’t be listening the first time, or the second, or the third time he gives the same answer. And of course some of them will just want to make Bobby squirm. You watch. Give them enough time and they’re going to ask the same damned question over and over and over.”

  “The TV folks’ll tire fast.”

  “Right. But there’ll always be one or two cameramen told to keep it going right to the end, just in case. Bobby’s not just going to have to be good and to stay cool as a cucumber, he’s going to have to have stamina. He does have a little surprise that may help him out a bit.”

  “What surprise?”

  “Can’t talk about it here. Let’s call it some mystery guests.”

  I muse on that for a few moments, but another question I’ve been mulling takes precedence. “What about this Jeremy Taylor guy?”

  “What about him?”

  “Which one is he? Is he a Wheatley flack?”

  “Good question. Fourth row, second from the aisle. That’s him.”

  I look to find him. Expensive big-city brush-back power haircut, navy flannel blazer, thin burgundy-framed glasses, more a hot new investment banker than a boy on the bus. He is examining the scene closely, almost avidly, getting ready for the games to begin. He spots Scott and me looking at him.

  Scott smiles at him and softly says to me right through his smile, “Cindy and I have put him on to Wheatley’s family fertilizer manufacturing business. They bought some newly released federal land up near Northrock and are storing some potentially toxic chemicals on it. We let Jeremy know he’s not the only one with an in on the story—which ought to get his competitive juices flowing and speed him up a bit. We showed him a few photos of old drums that are sitting there. And now we’ll see what he’s made of. If Wheatley cleans the place up before the story breaks, we go to his boss and claim Jeremy leaked it. And he’ll be covering nothing but county sheriff’s races from now to November.” He renews his smile at the reporter, and Jeremy, who hasn’t a clue what he’s saying, tilts his head cordially.

  “Sounds like a juicy story,” I say.

  “Oh, it is. ‘Wheatley Poisons Bambi’ is how we hope it’ll run.” I laugh. “At the very least, we get to point out that Wheatley personally favored releasing federally protected land for development. Land that he’s now converted from a family picnic area to a toxic-waste dump.”

  “That’ll sting.”

  “And show ’em they aren’t the only ones who can play hardball.”

  “How long have you been sitting on this story?”

  “Since the evening after Taylor wrote his piece. Fred McMasters gave it to us.”

  “What?” I say, too loud. A few nearby reporters look at us. “Freddie?” I repeat in a lower voice.

  Scott shrugs. “He says he wants back in on the campaign, wants to help. Says he was furious about Wheatley’s tactics.”

  I think about his pulling Clive Sanford off me when I was a boy and wonder if his sense of fair play has survived, lo these many years. Stranger things have happened. Still, I say, “I hope this story isn’t a Trojan horse.”

  “If it is, it’ll be up to our friend Jeremy to find it out. We haven’t made any public accusations.” He makes his voice treacly and overripe. “The media is our friend…” He checks his watch, excuses himself, and tells me he’s off to have a few final words with Bobby.

  Bobby strides to the podium. Lights go on. Shutters snap. Full-size cameras, medium ones, and Minicams whir. My stomach flutters with sympathetic anxiety. Supporters applaud. Laura and the two children, already seated, smile nervously at various people in the audience. The mood, though, is resolutely upbeat. It is four minutes after the hour of twelve. Behind me, television reporters are straightening their ties or checking their lipstick while cuing their directors at the studio, preparing to go live. Bobby surveys the crowd, trying, I think, to take its measure, and giving the electronic media time to do their introductions. He is wearing a dark tailored suit and red striped tie. His hair is meticulously barbered and brushed. Smiling faintly and nodding cordially at several different people, he looks spirited, his cheeks enjoying the pleasantly high color of anticipation, though as I peer closer at him, I wonder if the color might not be courtesy of makeup.

  I worry that he won’t have any great sound bites. Good sentences, great paragraphs, certainly. But after this conference is over, television news and the public who watch will rarely be interested in anything beyond home runs, dropped balls, and final scores. Fifteen to twenty seconds, tops.

  Bobby takes a breath, blinks. “Good afternoon,” he begins. “Thank you all for coming.” There are some ironic laughs and murmurs among the reporters, not quite loud enough to be audible to the home audiences.

  “There have been some stories in the last day,” he says, “about the state of my mental health.” I expect him to look amused. Instead, his eyes grow sorrowful and his voice slows. “We are in the middle of a campaign dealing with some of the great questions facing our state and facing our nation in the last years of the twentieth century. Problems of poverty and education and drugs, of the health of our environment and the health of our citizens,

  of the unresponsiveness of our national government, of the survival of the family farm, of global competitiveness and economic strength, of the way the world will evolve after the Cold War.” The audience of reporters accepts even this brief bit of political boilerplate with thinning patience. Bobby, who happens to believe what he is saying, pushes on. “In addition to weighing these issues, naturally the citizens of this state want to know what kind of United States Senator they’re voting for. And they should know. In order to give them every piece of information that may help them come to a judgment, several days ago I released my complete medical records.

  “And now there are reports that over twenty years ago I sought psychiatric counseling, and that I purposely chose not to provide this information in my medical report.”

  He looks squarely at the central camera, pauses for a moment, and says, “Both of these reports are true.” Cameras chatter and whir. There is a quick murmur of surprise, then silence. He has his first sound bite, and it’s a doozy. Pencils stop moving, laptops grow still, all the reporters look up. Everyone is focused on the candidate. Bobb
y pauses again and continues to speak, as before, without notes.

  “In nineteen sixty-eight, after my release from the San Francisco Veterans Administration hospital, where I had spent four and a half months recovering from wounds I’d received during my tour of duty in Vietnam, I returned to college. I soon found I was having difficulty concentrating on my studies. Like many veterans, during the war I had friends and acquaintances get killed, some of them right next to me. It was difficult for me to go from one world of warfare and violent death straight into the peacetime world of classes and textbooks and midterm exams. Like many veterans, I needed physical therapy for my wounds, something I continued for over a year and a half after my discharge from the army. At school my grades began to slip, and, also like many veterans, I discovered I needed psychological help as well. For a period of six months, I saw a staff psychiatrist at the Student Health Department. I began to feel better. My ability to concentrate on my schoolwork improved. I began to accept the grief and the anger over the death of my friends and fellow soldiers, though I must tell you here and now, I will never forgot those friends and fellow soldiers, any of them.” From where I stand, I can see his eyes glisten with the start of tears. The friend in me is touched; the political spectator in me thinks: another sound bite.

  Bobby pauses, looks down, and collects himself. His throat cleared and his voice rising, he says, “I discontinued therapy at the end of the six months and have not required it since. Two years later, I graduated from college with high honors.” There is a burst of applause from his supporters. They have been waiting for something, anything, to clap their hands about, and this is their first opportunity. Bobby blushes. He loathes talking about any of his own personal honors and achievements, and to be applauded for doing so is plainly humiliating. He holds up a hand and the applause promptly stops.

  “So why didn’t I release this information, why did I choose not to provide it in my medical report? For the same reason I didn’t itemize the wounds I received or mention the physical therapy I had. I simply did not think they were relevant to my current condition. The wounds, emotional and physical, happened over twenty years ago. They were treated by appropriate medical professionals, and my recovery was complete.” He raises his eyebrows, opens his hands to the ceiling, and a note of his usual good humor returns to his voice. “Perhaps I’m mistaken in thinking these are matters that do not have anything to do with my fitness to be United States Senator. Perhaps I’m wrong in believing people are more interested in the issues facing us now. Perhaps I’m wrong in believing they are more interested in the questions that will shape our future as a state and a nation than they are in my struggles in growing up a generation ago. But that is exactly why I am making all of this personal medical information public today. We’ll let the voters decide if it is relevant or not.” There is another burst of applause. Bobby permits himself a smile.