“I’ll take your questions now,” he says.
I look at Scott Bayer to get his reading of how Bobby has done. He, too, permits himself a smile, but it is a tight one. The reporters’ questions lie ahead. I say to him, “Don’t worry.”
The questions include ones about polls: Bobby reveals that his polls say he’s pulled virtually even, which is why he expects the campaign to get dirty, if it hasn’t gotten that way already. A reporter points out that Bobby said it was hard going straight on to school, yet at the same time he said it was over four months after he left Vietnam before he enrolled; Bobby explains he went straight from the VA hospital to school. Another reporter wants to know why he didn’t see a VA psychologist or psychiatrist. Bobby explains that the college health service was free and much more convenient, nothing more. Did he require drugs, hospitalization? No, neither, next question. He said he hasn’t required therapy since—but has he had any? Bobby smiles, says, “I have not sought, not needed, not had, nor been in therapy of any kind, formal or informal, personal, marital, group, or familial.” The audience, including the reporters, chuckle.
When the questions begin to get repetitive, Bobby, who knows most of the reporters by name, displays no traces of temper and even begins to joke. “Bill, if you ask Sandra that question, she can give you the answer from her notes from when I answered it five minutes ago.” He is patient, good-humored, thorough, and in control even when the questions are intrusive or stupid: “Will you permit yourself to be examined by a board of psychologists and psychiatrists?” “You mean this press conference isn’t enough?” When the laughter subsides, Bobby says the pressures of the campaign will prove his soundness, and toward that end he would like to call for a series of three debates, one on statewide issues, one on national issues, and one on foreign policy.
After more than half an hour passes and a reporter asks him for the fourth time about his present mental health, Bobby reveals his mystery guests. Later that afternoon, his internist, Dr. Robert McKay, and the actual psychiatrist he saw at the Yale Student Health Department, Dr. Alan Novick, will have a joint news conference to answer any medical questions the reporters might have. That takes the wind out of their sails. The news conference begins to wind down on its own. Then a hand is raised in the back.
It belongs to a bespectacled journalist from a religious weekly. He asks Bobby if he has ever smoked marijuana or taken other drugs. Bobby reminds the reporter that he answered that question four years ago when he ran for lieutenant governor, and that the answer is still yes, he smoked marijuana—and inhaled it, too—when he was in the army. But he has not done so since. And he can ask his children about his attitudes toward drugs now. Bobby nods, Annie stands up, walks to the podium, and says, “Dad hates drugs.” Laura gets up, strokes Annie’s arm, leans to the microphone, and says, smiling, “Unless they’re prescribed by a physician.” This episode is on the evening news on every station, including the laughter and applause that follow.
That evening Scott Bayer, while taking stock of the day, claims if Bobby gets away with his confessions, he can thank his wife and daughter. Their moment, he claims, was the best moment of the day.
Bobby is about to signal to Cindy to close out the news conference when the same journalist from the religious weekly asks if Bobby is willing to join Representative Wheatley in submitting to a urine test. Bobby pauses, says, “I knew the congressman used to support Star Wars, but this is the first I’ve heard of his support for jar wars.” Even the old hard-case reporters laugh at this one, and finally the conference ends. Staffers and aides fan out among the reporters, each a spin doctor ready with lines determined this morning. This clears the air and shows Bobby’s self-mastery under pressure. In the long run it’s probably a plus for the campaign.
This last claim is whistling in the dark, but overnight tracking polls are supposed to get an early answer.
Then comes Doctors McKay and Novick’s press conference. The internist, McKay, a rather dry and serious man, not only makes clear Bobby’s excellent health, but explains why no health summary would ever customarily contain reference to six months of psychotherapy a patient had over twenty years ago. In fact, he says, no physician taking a conventional medical history would even pose the question, nor has any life insurance or job-screening questionnaire he has ever seen. Novick, the psychiatrist, is more colorful.
With the faint remaining accent of his having spent a boyhood in England, Novick says he remembers Bobby very well, though he hasn’t seen him since 1969. But it is, he says, hard to forget Bobby’s accounts of what happened in Vietnam, and it is easy to remember the courageous young man who gave them. He makes clear he had one brief phone call from Bobby in the last forty-eight hours and can make no professional assessment of his present condition. But he can say this: “The sequelae to what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder depend on the state of the premorbid personality.” He smiles at the reporters, knowing he’s lost them. “Or, to put it in plain English, someone who is reasonably healthy going into a traumatic situation will, with proper treatment, be reasonably healthy going out. In my opinion as a psychiatrist, Mr. Parrish was an extremely healthy twenty-year-old male who had seen and experienced some extraordinarily difficult things. If there were going to be any of the expected problems from PTSD, they almost always have to do with the inability to hold jobs or to form and sustain intimate relationships. It’s my impression that the lieutenant governor has been stably employed”—this gets a laugh—“and his attractive family and eighteen years of marriage suggest he has done far better than the national average with intimacy. Better than I, for that matter, since I’m divorced. Questions?”
There are questions, and Novick has a gift for reformulating them into something succinct. “What are the risks for the longer term?” becomes “Will he crack up? The answer is, not bloody likely. In fact, in my opinion, he’s far less likely to than the average man or woman. Ernest Hemingway said people can get strong at the broken places, and in Mr. Parrish’s case, I think that’s what’s happened.” “Was there a problem that made him vulnerable to this stress disorder?” becomes “Is it normal to react as Robert Parrish did? Absolutely. It’s almost predictable. Very few people can be exposed to overwhelming threat, whether through surviving a plane crash, being physically or sexually abused as children, or being a young man who went through what Bob Parrish did, without having some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some people’s symptoms will be mild and transient, others severe and persistent. His were mild, presented themselves quickly, and were responsive to therapy, all excellent signs.” And the last question, “Have you had many patients with this problem?” becomes “Do I know what I’m talking about? For the last eight years, I’ve been a consultant to the Department of Veterans Affairs on identifying and treating this disorder.”
Bobby huddles with Scott Bayer and Cindy Tucker after the two press conferences and decides not to cancel his scheduled speech that night before the state chapter of the NAACP. Blacks make up only 6 percent of the state’s population, this is only a monthly chapter meeting, and under the circumstances he could duck out without much harm to his standing among black voters, but it’s decided that conducting business as usual, and being seen to conduct business as usual, is essential for the rest of the day. Tomorrow morning, however, starting at seven sharp he will be appearing on as many local TV stations as care to interview him. Cindy has also scheduled mid-morning and mid-afternoon meetings with the editorial boards of the two largest daily newspapers. And the week following, Scott Bayer has arranged through his contacts with producers to fly to New York and make appearances on MacNeil/Lehrer and Nightline. Meanwhile, at home: spin, damage control, staying ahead of the news curve. Scott Bayer is earning his fee. And Bobby, fighting for his political life, is trying to appear calm, relaxed, good-humored, and sane.
One city paper headlines the story that evening, Parrish Reveals Mental Trea
tments, Calls For Debate. You have to read to the end of the article to understand he didn’t call for a debate on his “mental treatments.” Other than that, he does very well in all the statewide media. I call to congratulate him on a day that, given its difficult contents, would be hard to improve on. He agrees and tells me his plans. To my surprise, he sounds calm, relaxed, good-humored, and sane. I ask if there is anything I can do to help, anything at all. He asks me to check on Laura and Annie while he’s gone. Certainly, I say. Though I find myself wishing he asked me to do something else.
Wheatley appears on a couple of news shows in order to appear serious, sympathetic, and say he has no comment to make on this matter, except to wish Bobby his very best and say it is time to get back to the issues. When pressed, he says the people of our state are a kind and generous sort, and he frankly doesn’t believe they will hold this matter against the lieutenant governor. Looking at his innocent expression, I think of a motorist who has just caused a multicar accident saying, “No one hurt? Well. Got a dinner engagement, have to dash.”
In the meantime, Scott Bayer plans to poll every single day to see if Bobby’s support holds, wavers, or collapses.
I take a deep breath and call Laura the next day, as Bobby has asked, to see how things are.
“Fine,” she says. “Though they could be better.”
“Yes,” I say. “I tried talking to Bobby, you know.”
“I do know. He told me you went all the way out to the Rotary picnic.”
“I don’t like seeing the two of you having trouble.”
“As far as I can tell, only one of us is having the trouble.”
“And the other is running for office. But I’m sure after the election you can work this all out. Both of you.”
“I w-wish I had your confidence.”
Perhaps it is the renewed stutter or perhaps it is our shared past, but I have the impulse to comfort Laura. “Hang in there. And let me know if there is anything I can do.”
“There is,” she says. “Keep in touch. It’s nice to talk to you.”
“Ah-All right,” I say, flustered enough to find I have a stutter of my own.
10
For a few days, things seem to go reasonably well for Bobby. All is quiet even at the special prosecutor’s office. The press is restrained, and some editorialists are openly sympathetic about Bobby’s “mental health treatments.”
But then some peculiar things begin to happen. When Bobby appears for a fund-raiser at a large hotel in the capital, a hundred and fifty pizzas from three pizza parlors are ordered to be delivered to the ballroom where a one-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner is already being catered. There is even someone at an internal administrative office phone of the hotel who has confirmed the order. When they find which phone, they discover the office is dark, locked, and empty. Bobby is left with the choice of paying nearly a thousand dollars for undesired pizzas or injuring and alienating the owner-managers of the pizza parlors. The campaign pays two-thirds of the cost and gets Cindy on the phone to area shelters and food banks to see if they can use the food. An hour later, after giving pizza away to everyone she can think of, there are still eighty-four pizzas left. Finally, a pig farmer from outside of town comes in with his truck and picks up the whole lot.
Though there are two more similar incidents, in the end this sort of thing is an expensive nuisance. Worse, though, are the wild and phony diatribes against Wheatley written on a piece of Bobby’s campaign stationery and photocopied to be put under windshield wipers at area grocery stores and mall parking lots. This makes it appear Bobby is running an uncontrolled and scurrilous campaign. He has to counter-leaflet to explain that it is someone else’s dirty trick, and an already unhappy and turned-off electorate grows unhappier and more turned off, something that will ultimately serve to lower the voter turnout and thereby favor Wheatley. (Wheatley’s core support comes from this year’s angriest voters, and he knows nothing is going to keep them from the polls this November.)
And then there are the well-organized demonstrations that pop up at sites that Bobby has not even himself settled on visiting until the morning of the day they occur. When there are picketers targeting him outside the board of directors’ noontime meeting of a farm implements manufacturing consortium he has been privately invited to attend only two hours before, he knows he has some serious trouble.
There is a leak, or leaks, somewhere high up in his campaign. How else can the opposition know what he is going to do almost before he knows it himself?
I am reviewing the papers I am going to file this morning contesting Tom Vinster’s last will and testament. He died of Alzheimer’s at the relatively young age of sixty-four, but not before he left everything to his second wife and completely cut out his three children and five grandchildren. Margie, my secretary, buzzes to tell me that Gail Berenger is on the line. For a long moment I wonder about the health of my own hippocampus, the name Gail Berenger spearing up not a single faint association out of the mud of my memory. I get on the phone, wondering if I am going to get the first piece of evidence that my own gray cells are clumping into aluminiumized knots.
“Hello,” I say. “Benjamin Shamas.”
“Hello, Benjamin Shamas.”
I note with some relief that it is my ex-wife. “So you’re married. Felicitations to you, and to Mr. Berenger. But wait a second. You didn’t keep your name?”
“It was a tough decision, but Peter felt really strongly about it.”
“You’re not even hyphenated? No Gail Benson-Berenger?”
“At work I am, yes. I’m not going to bewilder my clients.”
“I see. Just your former husband.”
“Changing is sort of nice, actually. It’s like getting a new life to go with your…new life.”
That would be nice. A new life. I think of her pregnancy. “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty well, thank God.”
I remember during what we sometimes called “our pregnancy” almost twelve years ago, she had morning sickness morning, noon, and night, every day, for three months. The sight of food made her nauseated. She would have to sit in another room while I ate my meals, and we had entire conversations without laying eyes on each other. I look at the clock on my desk. I have to file these papers within the hour. “So, is there something I can help you with?”
“I don’t know. Possibly. You see, Peter has some information that might be helpful to Bobby. At least if it was leaked, it would be. Have you decided to get involved in the campaign?”
“A little.”
“I’m glad,” she says. “I think it’ll be good for Bobby.”
“That remains to be seen. But what has Peter got?”
“Did you know that Richard Wheatley has some federally de-accessed parkland he’s planning to use?”
“Yes, I’ve heard something about it. Some reporters are supposed to be looking into it now. We hear he may be storing some toxic chemicals on it.”
“I don’t know about that, but Peter has some information that makes it pretty clear what he’s got in mind. We’ve talked about it, and he doesn’t want to do the leaking himself. DEM’s rules are pretty strict, and he could get in hot water if even a rumor got out he was responsible.”
“I see. What does he have?”
“An application from Wheatley’s corporation to assess the land for development.”
“To develop what?”
“Multiple-unit dwellings.”
“Apartments and condos? You’re kidding.”
“It’s right here, black and white.”
“Let me think this one through. Has Peter’s department acted on it?”
“They’re in the process now.”
“How soon will they be done?”
“Another few weeks, I think. And then it’s opened to public comment.”
“Does Peter have any control over the process?”
“He runs it. And he’s getting a lot of pressure to make it fast.”
“Will the thing be approved?”
“They have to run some more tests about runoff and reexamine the wildlife habitat. But Peter says now that it’s not parkland anymore, it ought to clear.”
No fertilizer manufacturing here. “What the hell has Wheatley got in mind? Selling the property off? He’s no builder.”
“Sorry. Can’t help on that one.”
“Well, no matter. This is very helpful. A congressman making money on what used to be federally owned land doesn’t look pretty. And it will keep Bobby from putting his foot in it. Try to get a copy of the application to me, and I’ll be the leaker. Peter’ll be out of the whole business. And listen, thank you, and thank Peter. I know Bobby’ll appreciate it a great deal.”
Wheatley seems to want to drop his hot potato before his fingers are burned.
Sounding the Waters Page 18