Truth Like the Sun

by Jim Lynch

“Helen. Helen Gu-la-nos.”

  She smiled. “It’s so nice to visit with one of Roger’s friends. But if Sara does come in again, please do stand up. Out of respect, my dear. I can’t, of course, but you should.”

  Helen sat up taller. “Ma’am, I’m not a friend of your son. As the nurse tried to explain, I’m a newspaper reporter. That’s why I’m taking notes.” She held up her notebook. “I’m working on an article about your son because he’s running for mayor.”

  Mrs. Morgan’s rapid blinks resumed. “Of course,” she said, her voice suddenly officious. “Now do leave your name and phone number on the dresser before you go.”

  “Certainly.” Helen wrote it out, very large, and ripped out the page.

  When she looked up, Mrs. Morgan was smiling again. “Roger has always had a lot of newspaper friends. You people love him, don’t you? If it’s no great inconvenience, would you please send Sara back with some black tea, dear? Not to rush you, but I am tiring from all this talking. You mustn’t let me go on like this. And make sure it’s piping hot, if you would. Sara knows full well that I will send it back if it’s not piping hot.”

  Helen took in the room one last time, saw a thick hardback in the nightstand and moved close enough to read the title: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “Do you have grandchildren you read to?”

  “Pardon me? Grandchildren? Oh heavens.” She grinned. “How old do you think I am?”

  HIS NECK WAS BOWED, chin low, ears jutting like funnels, as he pulled questions out of the students.

  “It felt like reading my obit,” he said of today’s article. “I just kept picturing people saying to themselves, ‘Isn’t he dead already?’ ”

  A student nervously asked if he had a gambling problem.

  He smiled. “My problem is I don’t win as often as I’d like, but I do enjoy a good game of poker on occasion with the right company—Elvis Presley, for example.”

  “Before or after he died?” asked another student.

  As the questions dwindled, he strained to sustain their interest by recalling how students used to smoke pot on the grassy knoll behind Kane Hall and taunt the cops who weren’t allowed on campus. “I remember driving out to a rock concert on the Eastside back then. And before the bands started up there was this piano drop out in the field. That’s right. They dropped a piano from a helicopter just to hear what it would sound like. Everyone was on drugs, of course.”

  “Were you?” asked a girl who looked too young to be in college yet. “Did you smoke pot?”

  “Experimented,” he clarified, raising an index finger, “but I never exhaled.”

  The laughter attracted more students. He realized it was nearing the top of the hour and said, “Look, it’s time for me to do something good for this city. I need your help, obviously, but more importantly, the city needs it.”

  Someone shouted, “Vote for the old guy!” A disjointed cheer rose and fell.

  The crowd had dispersed by the time Helen Gulanos jogged into the square and found the intern Shrontz had dispatched to interview students about Morgan.

  “What’d he say?” she demanded.

  “Lots of stuff.” He flipped anxiously through scribbled pages. “People really liked him.”

  “Forget your notes. Just talk to me.”

  He smiled awkwardly. “Well, he kind of said he smoked pot with Elvis.”

  “What?”

  He riffled through his notes again. “Gambled with him for sure, I think. Experimented with pot. ‘Never exhaled.’ Elvis was at the fair, right?”

  “Never exhaled or inhaled?”

  “Think he said exhaled, but—”

  “You recorded it, right?”

  “No, I, uh, just wrote it out … and not that well, apparently.”

  Helen took a breath. “These kinds of scenes aren’t easy. Any other reporters here?”

  “I only saw one. Works for The Daily. I know her.”

  “If she recorded, get her to loan it to you, okay? Where’d Morgan go?”

  HE WAS REGALING volunteers and students with stories about Seattle goofballs, including a man who claimed he’d climbed Mount Rainier barefoot. “When a photo of him shoeless on the summit didn’t satisfy people, he put on demonstrations around town, standing on blocks of ice until his bare feet melted through to the concrete.” He noticed her midway into his next story about a perennial mayoral candidate who always wore a suit and top hat when he jumped into Elliott Bay after every defeat.

  She looked older in this context, like a distraught young mother instead of a kid reporter, her messy mound of hair bouncing along like tumbleweed on a pogo stick. He briefly hoped she hadn’t spotted him, but it was obvious she had. He glanced back at the students crowding his table in the food court. “Give me a few minutes here, please.” They turned in unison to see her closing in, jean jacket swung wide, sweat glistening, her neck scar gleaming like a strand of pearls.

  “What a coincidence,” he said as the kids scattered.

  Catching her breath, she slid her satchel off her shoulder and sat down. “Sorry to interrupt, but I know you’re upset about the story,” she began, her chest heaving, “and I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “Teddy’s upset,” he said.

  She took a moment to digest that. “Your attorney’s asking for corrections.”

  “That’s true.” This had been Roger’s idea. Let Teddy vent and Sully threaten while he stayed cordial. The catch was that Teddy didn’t have to fake anything. He was furious.

  “So are you asking for corrections?” she asked, setting a tape recorder on the table that was already recording.

  He shrugged. Teddy had made him promise to duck any more interviews with her.

  “You consider the story accurate?”

  “Not particularly, but that’s the nature of being written about, isn’t it? You work with what you have, and I’m certainly not an easy study. So given all that, I thought it was … amusing.”

  She exhaled. “Mr. Severson says you never represented any Republican campaigns.”

  “He’s technically right,” he said finally. “I never was paid during their election cycles, but I did offer advice, as I indicated, and I’ve done other things for them.”

  “And your gambling comment?”

  “Blown out of proportion, in my opinion, but that’s the way these things go.”

  “What about the Space Needle restaurant? They say—”

  “Again, you’re both right. What you wrote isn’t false, but the insinuation isn’t fair.”

  She took off her jacket, slid one sleeve up to her elbow and moved closer. “I’m sorry I missed your campus talk, but did you just tell the students you gambled and smoked pot with Elvis?”

  “See?” He chuckled. “Jokes and asides rarely survive translation.”

  “So you were joking?”

  “Ms. Gulanos, do you have anything substantive you’d like to discuss before I have to go to my next song and dance?”

  She looked away, then swung back at him, knowing it was best to ask delicate questions as directly as possible. “Did you change your name when you were eighteen from Dawkins to Morgan?”

  His head jerked as if he’d caught himself dozing. “How do you even come up with something like that?”

  “I visited your mother today.”

  His eyes widened. “Now, that surprises me.” The tightening of his jaw made him look like a ventriloquist when he said, “I mistook you for a … Didn’t I specifically ask you not to bother her?”

  “Sorry to agitate you, Mr. Morgan, but you’re not in charge of me.” Her voice dipped into an almost sympathetic tone. “You can’t tell me who I can talk to.”

  He stared at her for a few breaths. “You don’t understand. She doesn’t have a firm handle. You can’t just take what she says and—”

  “I might not quote her at all, but I have to ask you about some things she said.”

  “No, you certainly do not.” He kept staring
. “She used to invent stories to pass the time, to put me to sleep. Understand? I don’t know when the lines blurred, but by now they’re gone. I asked you, plain as day, not to bother her.”

  “Okay,” Helen said gently. “We’ve already discussed that. I’m asking you now, on the record, did you legally change your name? And, if so, why?”

  “What I did,” he began sharply, then stopped and reconsidered, “is nobody’s business and of no interest to anyone.”

  “I disagree,” she said. “I think people would want to know why.”

  “Let them wonder.”

  “That’s your choice, but people might find it odd that someone who’s waged such a candid campaign won’t talk about something as basic as his name. I mean, I imagine you’d agree that it’s one thing if you changed your name because you’re running from something, and another if you did it for a stage career or whatever.”

  He looked away. “You intend to write a story about this.”

  “I don’t know what this is yet.”

  “But you’ll write about it.”

  “If we think it’s relevant, yes, we’ll probably mention it.”

  “Does a sense of fairness ever play into your thinking?”

  “I’m here right now out of fairness.” Her voice rose. “This whole discussion is out of a sense of fairness.”

  Her defiance surprised him. He didn’t know whether to get up and leave or not. Perhaps if he calmed himself he could talk his way out of this. “My grandfather Morgan was a professor here.”

  “I know,” she said, “you already told me.”

  “I’m telling you again.” He then patiently described the little man, his bowlegged walk, his missing thumbnail, his ever-present odor of rum-cured pipe tobacco.

  Helen noticed that his posture had improved and how carefully he was selecting his words, as if his grandfather had just sat down at the table behind them.

  “He was very comfortable with silence,” he said, “but nobody could talk much better. He had more wisdom than the next ten men combined and a voice like an airline pilot.”

  Helen waited for him to reach some relevant point, but he seemed to be finished. “And what about your father?” she asked. “You grew up with him?”

  Roger hesitated. “Till I was thirteen.”

  “You two get along?”

  He reached toward his sports coat. “We’re not gonna do this.”

  “Sorry, but I have to ask the questions. It’s up to you whether you respond.”

  “My feelings about him are mine.”

  “But if you changed your name—”

  “To honor my grandpa, which is why I just described him to you.”

  “Thank you for that, but how did you feel about your father? Perhaps you don’t even have any clear memories of him.”

  He shook his head and leaned forward. “He wore cuffed pants and rolled his shirtsleeves midway up his biceps and had a gold bracelet he’d twirl when he was nervous and a mole right here on the left side of his chin that went from brown to black when he got angry. And he always sang off-key, but he didn’t care. He had a whole lot of personality. That’s what people said about him: What a charming man. He had no problem getting sales jobs, but couldn’t hold them. So we kept moving every few months. He smelled like Listerine in the morning and aftershave at night. I hated the smell of Aqua Velva because it meant he was going out. More? He was a jokester. He could wiggle his ears, fart on command and convincingly turn his head all the way around like an owl. He’d bring home used toys from Goodwill, and he’d call my mother Sweetie right before he started insulting her. When he really yelled at her, I felt like a coward because I didn’t try to stop him. My grandfather was there, finally, for one of those, and he rose up on those bowed legs and spoke real calmly, as if he had a gun in his hand. ‘Pack it up, Robert.’ ”

  Roger paused and looked up. “We through?”

  Helen cleared her throat. “Your mother says,” she whispered, “that he died shortly after getting out of prison.”

  He blushed. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “What?”

  “She makes things up.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Helen said, “what our research librarians find.”

  “No, please don’t, though that probably won’t stop you.”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What they find.”

  He stood up and grabbed his coat, then leaned over the table. “I do have one question for you.”

  She smelled beer on his breath. His smile was unconvincing but not menacing, his voice level, his eyes aglitter.

  “Why would any sane person run for anything?”

  She stared up at him, all eight pints of her blood racing.

  “Well?” he prodded. “Cat got your tongue?”

  She didn’t speak at first, just held on to the table. “I’m gonna need to talk to you again soon, Mr. Morgan, about a variety of things, including your finances.”

  She waited for the moment to pass, but he hadn’t budged, still close enough to slap her.

  Five minutes later, he was on the phone with Teddy, his voice shaking slightly. “She talked to my mother!… What?… Yes! What?… Yes, it was on the record.… Uh-huh. She had a tape recorder going.… Calm down!”

  INSTEAD OF HEADING back to the newsroom, Helen stayed on campus and dropped down into the special-collections reading room in the bomb-shelter-like basement of the Allen Library. She remembered Bill Steele telling her about this fussy place as she relinquished her jacket, purse, book bag and cell phone before being admitted through a locked door with nothing more than a pencil and a yellow pad.

  She requested boxes of various World’s Fair files, then watched a silent eight-millimeter home movie shot by some Texan whose wife kept popping her big head into the frame. It started, camera jostling, with her buying tickets for the monorail, then showed them gliding toward the burnt-orange Space Needle. Everything looked amazingly new and clean, the bone-white arches of the Science Pavilion, the gold-and-silver roof of the arena, the yellow elevators climbing like ladybugs up the Needle’s white stem. Out on the fairgrounds, every woman was wearing a dress, nylons and heels. Even most of the kids were formally dressed, with short hair and thick, black eyeglasses.

  The movie skipped abruptly to the stadium, where water-skiers flew off jumps. It must have been opening day, and Helen felt oddly exhilarated. Suddenly, the wife was on top of the Space Needle staring south over the city, and the Smith Tower was the only building Helen recognized. Everything else looked small and plain. A blimp floated nearby, and that must have been a novelty given all the footage of it. Now it was getting dark, the fountains shooting orange, gold and purple geysers, the girlie shows beckoning with neon, the amusement rides lighting up the sky in the distance. The wife leaned her head into the camera with a tired smile and a thumbs-up before the movie abruptly ended.

  One of the whispering librarians rolled up a cartload of boxes, and Helen instantly felt embarrassed that she’d taken this long to mine these archives. She spent an hour reading schedules, itineraries and testimonials, then found an envelope stuffed with photos of Morgan and Severson—usually with drinks in their hands—alongside other happy men in suits. She asked for paper copies of every photo that included Morgan, then found a recording of an interview with him at the beginning of the fair. He sounded like himself—but so young! It struck her that he was just about exactly her age at the time. She was almost excited for him, to hear him explain how the fair came about and what it took to build the Needle so quickly. “It was a desperate race against time, and none of us were sure we could get it done.” He chuckled. Helen smiled. “Guess you could say,” he added, “it was a day when the dreamers prevailed.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  SEPTEMBER 1962

  THE CROWDS should dwindle once school starts, but the spectacle snowballs and the city continues to light up and cash out like a friendly s
lot machine. Frederick & Nelson, I. Magnin and the Bon Marché are all smashing monthly sales records. A luxury liner docked along the waterfront to offer more lodging options also sells out. And beyond Seattle, the entire region overflows with travelers discovering the Great Northwest as capacity crowds tour the sandstone capitol building and visit the Olympia brewery, which triples its staff to slake the thirst, and weekend traffic jams stretch from Oregon to Canada as fairground admissions exceed 100,000 people a day.

  At some juncture that Roger can’t pinpoint, his expo has turned into a pilgrimage. A shaggy eighty-year-old calling himself Old Iron Legs walks there all the way from San Francisco. A sixteen-year-old pedals from Kansas without telling his parents. Newlyweds paddle down from Alaska in kayaks. Dozens of deaf and blind kids arrive from Great Falls, and hundreds of beret-wearing members of the Caravan Club park their trailers on the outskirts of town. Thousands more arrive by jet, including Koreans, Brits, Germans, Scandinavians and Japanese, who can’t stop exclaiming that the green landscape reminds them of home. It occurs to Roger that the more dangerous the world feels—A U.S. senator has just claimed there is ample evidence of Soviet missile installations in Cuba—the more popular the fair becomes.

  He watches the workers get high on this crescendo, catching their second, fourth or eighth wind amid the mounting sensation that there’s something unforgettable, perhaps even honorable, in play here, that through alchemy, timing or luck this fair is transcending its predecessors, and if not actually saving the world, at the very least distracting it. At night after closing, workers from a dozen countries form conga lines and dance through the grounds. The fair never truly sleeps anymore. And beyond its gates, downtown is more awake than ever too. The grander the fair the bigger the vice. Card rooms, pinball halls and bordellos bubble into the streets as if the whole city were pulling an all-nighter, careening toward nirvana or a crash, whichever comes first, everything about it exhilarating and unsustainable, like accelerating your car until the steering wheel vibrates, then flooring it.

  Roger and Teddy are increasingly mentioned as potential favorites for Congress or the governor’s mansion. Columnists speculate that Teddy would run as a Republican, while Roger’s politics remain a mystery. His perceived lack of bias, as well as his burgeoning reputation as a PR-savant, has turned him into an oracle. Chamber boys, port commissioners, city councilmen, zoning officials, labor bosses, gadflies and monkey-wrenchers line up to run ideas past him. His asides, quips and advice, he notices, increasingly pop up in ads and campaigns and speeches. Aware of his growing public image, he tries to limit his late-night forays to drive-bys and walk-throughs and fielding phone calls in the small hours from Charlie McDaniel.