A Nation of Amor

by Christopher McConnell

  Like Montagues and Capulets assembled at the wedding that never was, the two factions of this cocktail party are self-consciously avoiding integration. The bar should be more centrally placed. Alderman Matos’s cadre of precinct captains, community leaders, political appointees, and local businessmen are defensively massed in the dining room. Father’s legion of party hacks, developers, bankers, and lawyers juggle briefcases and drinks in the drawing room. Father, painfully aware of Jim Crow’s ominous presence, steps across no man’s land to join the alderman. Unobtrusively, the respective aides-de-camp accompany their generals, I join my father, a young mustachioed lackey presents himself at the alderman’s side.

  “Alderman Matos,” my father gushes, “you must meet my son Thomas, our host.”

  Surprised, Alderman Matos looks up from his near empty tumbler of scotch. For a pol he is slow on the draw, the glad hand creakingly forthcoming while he formulates a response.

  “You? You’re the one workin’ for Rey. Right?”

  “I also have the unenviable task of teaching Flaco his geometry,” I offer.

  Father quickly veers the conversation back to business.

  “Alderman Matos is playing hardball, Thomas. He’s being very cagey about declaring his intentions for the vacated congressional seat,” says father as he tries to nudge a grin out the lackey. “Is your boss waiting until we get the mayor to beg at his feet?”

  The lackey nods and guffaws, vague visions of Georgetown dance in his head. As father zigs, the alderman zags.

  “So that is Flaco hanging around somewhere,” the Alderman says.

  “What a kid!” I declare. “My right-hand man during the renovations. Earned a bit of money for college too.”

  “I see … And my brother? Is Rey coming tonight?”

  “He mentioned dropping by later,” I answer.

  The alderman winks at me and says, “Thanks.”

  Over one Matos shoulder a brotherly back emerges into view, Rey’s dark, uncombed curls above the turned-up collar of his black leather trench coat. Animated as usual, Rey is heatedly extracting an explanation of Flaco’s presence, from Flaco. With marked dissatisfaction, Rey quits Flaco and stomps into the drawing room, where he unexpectedly finds himself in a room of familiar Puerto Rican faces. The beckoning waves and relieved smiles of a dozen flagging conversants demand his immediate attention. With unaccustomed control he sails past his brother, ignores his host, and cautiously joins a number of compatriots at the bar.

  Fortunately, revelers on the tide of a second cocktail are abandoning pretense. Rey endures an introduction from the President of the Banco de Los Caballeros de San Juan to the Executive Secretary of the Goose Island Development Corporation. Momentarily impotent, Rey blinkingly peruses a confusing scene of heretic bonhomie.

  The expansive rooms fill, clusters of people back to back, elbow to elbow, forming a network for information to flow from one link to the next. And yet, all eyes keep note of the alderman and my father. The alderman’s acceptance of his second drink catalyzes mental reactions: A community worker calculates funding, a Democratic party committee-man shortlists replacement aldermanic candidates, a bank executive finalizes his board presentation, a Puerto Rican plumbing contractor considers how many brothers-in-law the new work will allow him to employ. Father’s bellowing laugh lances adrenal-like through the din of commerce, conversations ebb, introductions flow, business cards are palmed swiftly and discreetly.

  The final character arrives, escorted on-stage by Flaco; David Loomis is clothed by an inner layer of Brooks Brothers, an outer layer of Burberry. Relieved of his trench coat, David extends his hand. Flaco fetches him a drink.

  “Any chance my car will last the duration, Tom?” he quips.

  “With this clientele …” and I wave my palm through the air, drawing his attention to my guests,” … you could have left the keys in the ignition.”

  “Good,” David says. “Business first. The head of admissions is keen, have no doubts. But the university’s once burned on this front. Something years ago, so no publicity. He trusts you and me to quietly pilot the initiative. My ends, your means.”

  Yes David, my means. I wonder what your reaction will be when you discover that my means included a forged GED diploma for Sara? Or if you knew how easily such a diploma can be obtained?

  “Of course we have scads of Hispanic students,” David foams, “but few are from the city, none were dropouts. It may seem arbitrary, but the head of admissions will only waive the college boards for GED scores above 275. We must maintain a modicum of standards. Thank you,” and David accepts a glass of champagne from Flaco.

  “Tell David your last pretest score Flaco.”

  “2–8–4,” answers Flaco while shoving an outstretched hand at David.

  David beams at Flaco, his pale eyes absorbing every detail in an attempt to distinguish flaw from potential. Remarkably, Flaco assumes an almost comfortable stance, but his edged, insistent voice undermines a formidable effort to contain his nervous energy.

  “I’m Flaco,” he barks, “I wanna go to your college.”

  David is amused by Flaco’s assuredness.

  “What would you intend to do at our university?”

  “Business. Then get a job for the work experience, go back for my MBA. Teach and me—I mean, Tom and I talk a lot about my future and stuff.”

  “I suppose ‘Teach’ here has told you about our new program, the undergraduate college of commerce.”

  “Dave,” Flaco intones, “I won’t bullshit you, man. Teach turned me on to the game. I’m your man, I can do it. I think the tough part will be calculus. I’m good in math, but no way will I have any calculus before next year. But I’m not worried.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No Dave. I got drive. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “Yeah. You see, this could be my only big chance. I can’t blow it. Others, maybe they got options, not me. Right? Like, if I need some extra help, I go get it. Anything, but I’ll do the job. I just need the chance.”

  Hours earlier Flaco rehearsed my scripted litany of his academic career, fumbling pathetically through the well-planned explanations. Obviously a born improviser, without the prompting I was certain he would require, Flaco snaps out his own lines with an unforetold dose of youthful aplomb. An automaton could have recited my lines, possibly the same way that David and I have sputtered through life spouting the established credos of our ilk, never wavering from the set dialogue of intelligent, affluent, trustworthy young leaders. Flaco mined my script for its essence, then formed his own words into a cunning punch of desire, deference, and confidence.

  “Lemme get you another drink Dave—sorry, Mr. Loomis?”

  David submits with a compliant shrug, then hurriedly empties his flute.

  “Thank you, ahh …”

  “Flaco. Drink up, it’s on the house.”

  With an anxious laugh, Flaco quits us and winds his way back toward the crowded bar. David turns to me. “Young man has the world by the tail. Eh Tom?”

  “If that kid had gone to any high school besides Roberto Clemente, you’d be chasing him with an affirmative action scholarship.”

  David blinks. “Good, good. So you think he’ll stick?”

  “Like Wrigley’s to your wing tip,” I retort. “I’ve got twenty students but I’m only sending you the two certainties.”

  David folds his arms across his chest and stares at me. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I have a product, you have a market.”

  “Hmmm. Yes, but what I’m trying to do is equate the little freshman I once knew, the aesthete who dreamt of reading Yeats on Torcello, with, with …”

  “A nursemaid to a bunch of beaners?” I offer. But David is offended by my crudeness.

  “Tom, I—”

  “Listen:

  ‘Those masterful images because complete

  Grew in pure mind, but out what began?

&nbs
p; A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

  Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

  Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

  Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,

  I must lie down where all the ladders start

  In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’

  That’s Yeats.”

  Amused, David laughs and shakes his head. “You haven’t changed. Have you?”

  But before I can refute, Sara receives her cue from Flaco and approaches us. Although her part requires the guile and nuance of a proven, resolute deceiver, her inexperience is amply compensated by her body’s innate ability to erode David’s faculties of discernment. Slicing through the crowd, every preoccupied guest pauses midsentence to note her progress. Increasingly aware that he himself is her destination, David lapses into silent, pregnant introspection.

  “My other star pupil,” I lie, “Sara Figueroa.”

  Presently, David’s constipated expression of benign care is an uncracked professional facade. But the more his face hardens, the more I imagine a reckless and haphazard riffle through the files of his conscience as he searches for that statute which will ensure the incarceration of his libido.

  “Another candidate for our college of commerce?” he asks Sara.

  “Hardly Mr. Loomis!” She responds. “I want—”

  “Call me David.”

  “Oh. Okay, David. I’m interested in art and design. But I’m not exactly sure where …”

  David finishes her sentence for her. “Where the greatest of your many talents may lie? Take our foundation course,” he sagely advises. “Identify, then focus. Don’t fret! A university is not for realizing prepackaged plans, but for discovery and development of one’s self.”

  Sara emits a prepackaged sigh, lays a palm to her chest, and digs the toe of one pump into the floorboard in mock self-admonishment. Acting skittish and slightly unsure, she angles her lips to his ear as if to share a secret. For emphasis, she gently transfers the palm from her chest and rests it on his forearm. “You don’t know how glad I am you said that. For real, I’m not sure what I’ll be.”

  “You don’t have to be sure.”

  “But I am sure that I want to go to St. Francis.”

  David cannot suppress his gratified leer.

  “I’ve dreamed of going there ever since I was little,” Sara pushes. “How could anything nasty happen at a place called St. Francis? You know, kindness to animals and all that.”

  David is too enthralled to gag on this comment. With nauseous sincerity, David says, “We have a very nurturing institution.”

  Exiting stage left, I quit Sara and David to fade anonymously into the ripples of talking heads, confident that every cue has been acknowledged, step executed, line uttered. The party has evolved into its own being, neither actors’ blunders nor technical mishaps could divert its successful, predestined conclusion.

  Father, flushed and inebriated, sniffs the stench of victory, an odd aroma borne of these rarely mixed bodies, champagne, and the dank, steam heat of cast-iron radiators. The vapor of talk has fogged the windows to above the highest head; steamy plots incubate from embryo to fetus, one day to emerge as healthy, well-formed infants. After tonight, Westtown will be renewed.

  Soon, soon, when the Russian baths on Division Street again greet gargantuan bodies of pink bursting flesh, when the street corner delicatessen windows hang full with lurid smoked skeins of ground pork and sage, when gleaming brass knockers replace room buzzer indexes on the stripped and varnished front doors of Western Boulevard, no more pasteles, no more coquís, no more Kings.

  Father will awake tomorrow with a sense of self-deprecating bewilderment. All those moot years passed in tactical and theoretical preparation; and father couldn’t allow himself to grasp that the price for Westtown wouldn’t be determined on human terms but was dictated by a geography bartered for with the contemporary equivalent of glass beads, shotguns, and liquor.

  Father, even though he tutored me, misunderstood the dictum of Chicago; dragging me as a child through the war zone of this neighborhood to make me aware of my heritage, acknowledge the remains of this decrepit shell, note the resultant decay which struck after the all-encompassing “THEY” forced us away. Father stammered unconvincingly in an attempt to portray himself as enlightened and unprejudiced, answering my naively pointed questions with muddled sociological anecdotes, unaware that his ten-year-old son understood perfectly what at forty seemed so complex: Then, the neighborhood was ours and beautiful, now, it is no longer ours and ugly.

  In ten years Alderman Matos may own father’s house in the suburbs, where I will take my children one day, and the cycle will continue, inexplicable but for the fact that this is a city planned on a grid, territory clearly marked by the longitude and latitude of its byways, a patchwork manifestation of the cultural, racial and ethnic chauvinism toted by the minions of the world in their cardboard luggage to this former swamp on the banks of Lake Michigan.

  The alderman, though rooted to a conspicuous spot near the fireplace, has by now aligned with the entire galaxy of financiers, lawyers, and land developers rotating discreetly into and out of his orbit. His stoic countenance belies mind-numbing years hunched over card tables chairing ragtag committee meetings for collections of local malcontents, sipping from endless Styrofoam cups of stale, artificially creamed coffee, a lifetime’s worth of patience wasted on the insincere transfixion of his eyes from one potential vote to yet another in an infinite succession of potential votes. Behind the congenial stare, his infantryman’s mind calculated not another community initiative, but a tiny hole punched on a ballot next to his name. How ironic. First hundreds, then thousands of holes, little areas absent of matter, that when combined, produce power.

  Tonight the alderman exchanges a laborious decade of hole accumulation for the opportunity to move his name from an aldermanic line on the ballot card to a congressional line. Ink lines, boxes, compartments, all maps for the battlefield of empty holes. Congress will greet him with the passive disinterest of Lake Michigan accepting droplets from a summer’s cloudburst. Cut glass decanters and leather upholstery will supplant the Styrofoam cups and folding chairs, aircraft, the hand-me-down BMW, tailored suits, the off-the-rack sales specials from Carson Pirie Scott & Co. In time, only the summer junket to his constituency will teach him the final irony of all his tiny punched holes—that the migratory cycle of peoples dictates the migratory cycle of power—and the alderman will finally learn the lesson that maybe only the Latin Kings could have taught him, that true power lies in ownership, in territory: turf.

  Come taste my Amontillado! Follow your appetite alderman. Yet, even a clown must instinctively sense danger along a dark subterranean path? The alderman simply yearns too strongly for the wine. However renowned as a hero, he will be appointed to boards, committees, panels, and trusteeships, sup with those still eager for a taste of Amontillado, but the conscience to warn his brethren will remain chained.

  Too much champagne, Thomas!

  An observant waitress refills my flute, carefully depositing the fluid until it rises above my fingerprints to the impressions of my lips. Must be a rented glass for it bears no trace of Sara. Unlike my own, which over the past four months I have been unable to drink from without confronting a shade of her lipstick.

  David, how unbecomingly you suppress that spark of lasciviousness in your eye. One would presume you and Sara to be engaged in an engrossing conversation, but I liken this tête-à-tête to that of human and insect, you, a captured ant upon Sara’s flattened palm, she flicking you back to the center of her domain whenever you venture toward the edge.

  And from whom could Flaco have possibly inherited those green eyes? The alderman’s patience and Rey’s insolence radiate from Flaco’s dissatisfied gaze, but wires are crossed, for Flaco is insolent with his own people and patient with mine. Clumsy and inappropriately dressed, Flaco fidgets at the fringe of t
he crowd like the nouveau riche merchant who has been invited to the manor house for the evening. I feel certain that it is Flaco who understands, only too well, the archaic social ritual enacted before him. As the peasant come entrepreneur, Flaco is truly the wealthiest man among us this evening, he alone possesses no trepidation at the prospect of selling the cherry orchard. It’s business. The cherry orchard should have been sold long ago, isn’t that right, Flaco? Moral dithering has no place in the effective management of assets and debts. But the others can’t see, perennially viewing the future through the past, and in years to come both Flaco’s uncles will meander confusedly through the rows upon rows of commuter dachas bemoaning their treasured, squandered Westtown, their cherry orchard.

  Detaching himself from two ostensibly unimpressed Puerto Ricans, Reynaldo storms toward me, a gravid thunderhead of pocked black leather. Collar up, eyes ablaze, mouth steely, he could be an enraged Clifford Odets who arrived expecting a revival of Awake and Sing, only to find a tribute to Noel Coward. Surprisingly discreet, Rey establishes an eavesdrop-proof proximity before launching into the unavoidable diatribe.

  “Why is my nephew parking cars?” he snaps.

  “Glad you could make it, Rey. Take your coat?”

  “Answer me!”

  I finish the dregs in my glass and raise an eyebrow in the direction of a waitress. “Flaco is not parking cars,” I inform him. “Flaco wisely offered to reserve some curb space for the guests. It’s a hospitable tradition, a variation on the theme of two kitchen chairs and a broom.”

  “That doesn’t explain why Flaco’s here,” he states.

  “Explain what? My father and I organized a fundraising party for your brother. I invited you and Flaco out of courtesy. I even invited Mano. Next time I ask you over shall I forward a copy of the guest list?”

  But he’s not satisfied. “What are you trying to prove to that kid by inviting him to this ass-kissing festival?”