If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “Susan Peldrona, tall, dark hair. Beverly Kees, blond, wears glasses, met her last year,” Crane said with an amused glance at Starke. “Let’s go meet the nurses.”

  Myra and I fell back as we crossed the lobby.

  “I get snarled at. You get complimented,” she said. “Obviously, he doesn’t realize who we work for.”

  Two hours later Crane was in a hotel suite preparing for the debate and we were left to kill time in the lobby. The other candidates had arrived with their own entourages, and I saw reporters I knew from Washington, including those from my own bureau assigned to people with a realistic chance. We greeted each other with that combination of enthusiasm and hesitancy, a confusion of solidarity and independence, that comes over Americans when they bump into each other in a foreign locale. Night fell outside the plate-glass window as the lobby filled up, and I had a sense of Washington transported, as if half the city had been rolled in on wheels. David Broder strolled by, looking as cheerful and enthusiastic as ever. Sam Donaldson held court with stentorian authority by the men’s room for half an hour. The significance of the event settled on me with a chill. The Media, in all its generalized, capitalized, reviled and secretly revered splendor, was about to clear its throat and pronounce.

  Stuart shifted in his chair and, with a discontented rustle, set down the newspaper, with which he had been hiding from the world.

  “What did you think about the story in the Inquirer?”

  Nathan had been busy picking a loose thread from the sleeve of his silk jacket with a look of mild dismay. He glanced at the headline.

  “That they’re canceling the ad buy, saving everything for the last week?”

  “Yes.”

  “Makes sense. I asked Duprey and he wouldn’t say a word.”

  Stuart watched a bellboy dressed as a Hessian soldier tote a pair of bags past the giant cuckoo clock on the landing.

  “I say New Hampshire and we go home.”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “Through South Dakota at least.”

  “Ten bucks.”

  Nathan smiled. “Fifteen.”

  Suddenly I couldn’t listen to them any longer. I surrendered my seat on the couch and wandered down the hallway toward the ballroom. I was standing by its closed doors, staring absently through the glass wall at the parking lot, when a young woman appeared beside me.

  “They’re going to be marching out there in an hour.”

  I couldn’t see anyone in the gloom. “Who?”

  “Some group supporting the homeless. They drove up from Boston.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “God knows. The new housing act, is that still around? Socialized medicine, maybe. All I know is that I’ve got orders to shoot them if they show up.”

  She squinted into the darkness, a prematurely world-weary expression on the face of a cheerleader. Television producers are usually young, sustained by frantic energy behind which perpetual exhaustion hangs like a cynical, leering ghost.

  “So I’ll end up doing my job as artfully as I can,” she said, “and they’ll look like a lot bigger deal than they were, and if nothing else happens, we’ll run it, and they’ll have gotten what they want.”

  A bleak sense of my own profession gathered around my heart.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s that kind of business.”

  “There probably won’t be more than a dozen of them,” she said. “But I can work with that. We’ll make it look like the Super Bowl.”

  She tossed back her blunt-cut bangs and excused herself to go to work. Five minutes later she stuck her head out the door.

  “Hey, can you come in here for a second?”

  Chandeliers hung like swollen mushrooms across the ballroom ceiling. Rows of red vinyl chairs marched backward from a temporary stage. A dozen technicians were working around the elevated, half-moon desk, unrolling cables, moving monitors into position.

  “We need to do a color balance,” she said. “Could you go sit up on the stage for a minute?”

  “Let me guess. You chose me because I look like a born leader?”

  “You have a blue jacket and a white shirt on. That’s what they all wear.”

  So I climbed onto the stage and sat down. From the floor the desk was a gleaming crescent in red, white and blue, but up close you could see it had been cobbled together out of plywood and indoor-outdoor carpet. The television monitors were placed on both sides at angles so the candidates would be able to see themselves. I looked at the empty hall and tried to imagine what it would be like when it was full, when the lights were on. My face rolled up on the monitors and there I was, too pale, too somber, too young. What must it be like to make the basic transaction, to face a nation and reveal yourself in the fashion modern politics demands, to trade the intimate details of your life for anonymous affection, to engage in the calculated bargain of the talk show?

  “I have suffered through an unhappy love affair,” I said into the camera. “But I have survived.”

  “I HAVE SUFFERED THROUGH AN UNHAPPY LOVE AFFAIR BUT I HAVE SURVIVED,” rasped from speakers in every corner.

  Heads turned slowly my way.

  “Mike check,” I said. “Did someone want a mike check?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Not yet.”

  “Great.”

  An hour later the television lights came on with an audible pop and the crowd filing in picked up its step as if awash in a phosphorescent fountain of youth. On the tube political debates are sterile things, but in person they have the visceral feeling of a prize fight. Well-dressed men preened like Vegas sharpies as they took their seats, hailing each other with voices a little too loud. The Democratic Party’s heavyweights gathered in front of the stage, chests thrown out, squeezing each other’s shoulders and grinning until their faces glowed as if they’d all been nipping from a bottle around a campfire. A woman in a red dress, diamonds glittering across her bosom, blond hair launched in a reinforced cone toward the heavens, paraded by on her way to the czar’s last ball.

  Myra slid into the seat I was saving for her.

  “Stick and move,” she said. “Stick and move. That’s what my daddy used to say.”

  The candidates were introduced one by one as they strolled across the stage and took their seats: Wilson, with his professor’s rimless spectacles and the mincing way he pursed his lips; Brill, with the pasted-on slab of black hair and the almost audible grinding of gears when he moved; Harrington, with the hollow heartiness of the aging beach bum. Crane scratched his cheek absently as he settled in his chair.

  The moderator, a former governor of New Jersey, a gentle, white-haired, ice-cream scoop of a man with pink cheeks and a thin, wavery voice stared intently at the camera in front of him until the red light came on.

  “I’d like to open this evening’s deba—”

  From the center of the crowd came a shrill, giddy whoop. I turned and saw people rising, clenched fists leading their way into the air. Someone was shouting, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The lights were down and a camera obstructed my view, so he came together in pieces, a raised arm, scarecrow shoulders, a brown suit, a goatee trimmed like the fluted point of a hunting arrow.

  His voice was high and sharp. “. . . Governor, I say again, why is the Democratic Party shutting itself off to one of its candidates? I am on the ballot in seventeen states already, Governor. I have raised nearly a million dollars. Governor, how can this party call itself Democratic if it shuts out the voice of the people?”

  The governor, the pink spreading from his cheeks, squinted into the audience. “I’m sorry. This is out of order. I’ll begin again by introducing—”

  There was a clamor around him as the man with the goatee slashed the air. “Out of order? Out of order! I’ve been out of your order my whole life—”

  “Oh Christ,” Myra said. “It’s the Reverend.”

  And it was, the Reverend Lucas Wain, the storefront preacher t
urned presidential candidate whose message of black self-reliance and white injustice had found an audience across much of inner-city America. Somehow he and more than a dozen of his supporters were standing in the middle of an invitation-only crowd of well-heeled doctors and party faithful.

  “I have more than a hundred thousand signatures on ballot petitions across this country!” The Reverend’s chin stabbed the air with each word. “Why am I denied?”

  Awareness of who was speaking rippled back through the ballroom and then bounced forward in a groan of discontent.

  The governor’s voice wavered like a badly played cello. “We had a selection process for candidates here agreed on by . . .”

  “Why am I not to be considered?”

  “The Democratic Party and the organizers of the conference agreed—”

  “The Democratic Party? Aren’t these people around me part of the Democratic Party?” The Reverend’s finger stabbed in time to his chin. “Is there some reason my supporters are not part of your party?”

  The people gathered around him roared. Someone in the back of the ballroom shouted Sit down! to a smattering of applause. Two policemen had made their way to the Reverend’s row and now they slid between the chairs. There was a sudden tussle, the cameras swinging around and flooding the scene with confused crosscurrents of light. I saw a shoulder thrown into a chest, a fist swinging wildly, bodies turning in a whirl, the Reverend standing in the middle of it all like a lighthouse.

  On stage the governor looked helplessly to the other men behind the desk. Wilson stared back, his eyes dead fish in the aquarium of his spectacles, his mouth as tight as a bottle cap, waiting disdainfully for the governor to regain control. Brill was as still as a wax dummy, his gaze fixed on a far corner of the room. Harrington shrugged.

  “Why don’t we invite the Reverend up?”

  It took the crowd a while to realize someone had spoken from the stage. There was a camera slightly to my right and, through the monitor, I saw Crane in close-up. He stood framed by the blue backdrop, the strong lines and planes of his face softened by the hint of melancholy in his eyes. The lens transformed it into something more ambiguous, a kind of knowing compassion.

  But that was only part of the alchemy. There is an indescribable something some people have when lights and television cameras are on them, something they have without saying a word. It comes together in a hundred details, the tilt of the head, the way the hand is placed in the pocket, the set of the mouth, the way the weight rests on one carefully placed foot. He always had it, I think, the ability to impress from the proper distance. We are in an age of false intimacy and he had the precious gift of looking at ease in the arenas of our illusion.

  Now he smiled and his chin dipped toward the center of the audience.

  “It’s hard to see up here, but I believe that’s the Reverend Wain, am I right?”

  Crane seemed to be looking at the Reverend, but with the light in his face, it had to be an act of blind faith.

  “He’s got a point. He’s got a right to be heard.” He glanced at the New Jersey governor frozen behind the moderator’s desk. “I know it bends the rules a little, but a single vote hasn’t been cast yet.”

  He paused, as if he wanted everyone to have time to ponder this.

  “Why don’t we stop yelling and try listening for a change?” Thomas Crane said. “We’ve got nothing to be afraid of from each other.”

  There is a moment of which every politician must dream, when the public’s sentiment is captured in a phrase, articulated in words they have been groping for themselves. Anger has always been an engine in American politics, but so has unexpected reconciliation. There were those who said it was the Reverend himself who started the applause, but I think it began in the back. First, no more than a hollow clip-clop, then sweeping forward, swelling until it was the sound of a thunderstorm on a tin roof, and the whole crowd stood with the dazed look of a family that has just learned an ancestral fortune has been reclaimed.

  “Jesus!” Myra said, looking around us.

  Crane was the first candidate into the press room afterward and they thronged around him. The debate had been his from the moment he stood; he had been quicker to the point, more forceful and at the same time more reasoned than the others. I caught a glimpse of his crooked, confident smile before he disappeared behind a forest of cameras, boom mikes and microcassette recorders, and I thought I saw a quick wink tossed my way, but I told myself it was only my imagination.

  One of the last questions came from Myra.

  “Senator, were you surprised by the Reverend’s appearance tonight?”

  He cocked his head and waited until they were all grinning in anticipation, but when he spoke his voice was quiet.

  “I think we were all surprised, Myra. But needless to say, I’m glad he found a way in.”

  I found a seat in the back and got to work. Stuart and Nathan settled around me and we were all silently busy but for the plastic click of our laptops, Nathan bent like a praying mantis over the keys, Stuart sitting erect, occasionally staring at the ceiling like an Episcopalian bishop waiting for the word from on high. None of us spoke until Nathan rocked back from his computer.

  “Well, what do you think now?”

  Abercrombie pursed his mouth. “So his momma taught him how to act when poor relations come knocking. So what?”

  “Come on,” Nathan said. “You’ve just witnessed the birth of a campaign and you know it.”

  An hour later I was standing, stretching the kinks out of my back, when a hand touched me on the arm in an unmistakable way. She always placed two fingers just below the shoulder, gently but firmly turning you toward her.

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” I said.

  “We fly back to Iowa tomorrow.”

  “Rural issues.”

  “That’s right. Rural issues.”

  Robin tucked a stray lock of tangled hair behind an ear. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Stuart trying not to stare. Nathan stared.

  “It’s been quite a night,” she said. “I need some fresh air. You want to go for a walk?”

  The snow was eggshell under our shoes. The hotel loomed out of the dark like some madly lit castle, gap-toothed battlements oversize in silhouette. We walked across the parking lot and found a path descending into a promenade of evergreens. Robin walked with her hands in her pockets, elbows out like a skinny kid, taking deep delighted breaths.

  “I just needed to burn off some energy. I’m so wound up. This is all still really new to me.”

  “Yeah. Well, those who know tell me it only gets crazier.”

  A joyous smile bobbed to the surface. She stopped to look me in the eyes.

  “He was great in there tonight, wasn’t he?”

  “He was pretty good.”

  Her head went back and she laughed.

  “Good? Pretty good? You fucking reporter. He was great!”

  “I believe the words I used were ‘appeared to be in command.’”

  “‘Appeared to be in command.’ Yeah, right. Like fucking Napoleon.”

  “Now there’s an interesting analogy.”

  “Naah, too tall. No short-man complex.”

  “Probably wouldn’t fire cannons into the mob, either.”

  “I don’t think he could hurt a fly.”

  “He tagged Wilson pretty good a couple of times.”

  “You know what I mean. I don’t think he’d do anything to hurt people.”

  She said the last words with a genuine fondness for the truth she felt within them.

  “You know his life, right?” she said.

  “I spent four days in downstate Illinois talking to everyone I could find.”

  “I think he was born to this. It’s so natural to him. He’s the kind who’s always been chosen first, who’s been class president in every class. I know his family was poor, but it all seems to come to him, and he sort of expects it. When the time comes, he never hesitates .
. .”

  Those last words were sad, or that she ever said them was sad, because they started the train of thought that would bring us all down. Would I have worked it out anyway? Would someone else? I don’t know. But those words started it all.

  Standing that night in the gentle curve between the trees, I only knew that her words bothered me in some indistinct way, struck a false note that I pushed aside. I looked at Robin and a thousand ghosts arose unbidden. A first kiss, snow slanting through a streetlight, eyes closed, her face upturned, her mouth a luminescent heart melting as it reached me. Walking in the wintry park in Billings, red mittens in the dark, her breath against my neck, sliding on the river ice, the sound of her laughter in the frozen air. All those moments I had buried climbing out of the grave and taking their first breath of life in so long.

  Robin looked back at the hotel towering above the trees. Her hair hung over her collar, buttered the palest yellow by a brush of moonlight

  “You know, I always wanted this . . . A chance to be part of something that mattered. When we first came to Washington together, it was never there and you were struggling in your job and I was so scared of failure. I wanted to do well, really well. It didn’t seem like we were going anywhere . . . And you were impossible then, you really were.”

  Staring at the stars, back arched like a swan, she spun slowly on her heel.

  “But now it’s turned out good for both of us. I mean, not together. But this, here we are.”

  She kissed me lightly on the cheek, a whisper of a kiss.

  “Anyway, I’m glad for both of us.”

  I told myself it was nothing but the romance of the night, an absolution granted through the acts of others. But it was still a surprising breath of warmth amid the cold bosom of the snow gathered beneath the firs. How I wish now it had all stopped there. With forgiveness.

  We followed the path deeper into the trees, descending in a curve, breathing the hushed air, the evergreens dark and sheltering, until we came out and stopped. A silver-plated river appeared beneath a footbridge and hurried toward a distant railroad trestle. Sheltered from light by the crossed beams beneath the trestle, the morning star watched us with the knowing eye of a great, sad beauty.