by Reed Karaim
“History,” Crane said. “We always end up talking about history.”
I knew something had slipped away, something I should pursue, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I had only a few seconds left and there was one more question I had to ask.
“There’s one other piece of history. A friend of yours, Roger Amb, mentioned that you were a little hesitant to run for both the House and the Senate. That you took a few days to think about it and came back to Berthold each time.”
He stared out the window and I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“I don’t remember that.”
“He said he bumped into you outside of town the second time. I’ve never read anything about those decisions and I just wondered if you could remember what was going through your mind. Why you came home.”
“It was a long time ago. I went to see my brother. I wanted to talk to him about the decision. You know better than anyone we’ve always been close.”
We turned into the parking lot and a man in a red down jacket, bundled up like the Michelin man, stepped in front of the van waving his sign back and forth like a flag. You could hear them cheering. Crane straightened his coat and reached for the door. He stopped and turned in his seat so that we were looking at each other. I expected him to unshutter that crooked smile I had seen blind so many, but what I got was something softer, less certain.
“You know I always enjoy talking to you, Cliff. Maybe next time we can forget Crane and talk about Catton.”
He stepped out and entered the crowd, shaking hands, moving toward the doors of the high school. The driver turned to me, his young face still full of horror.
“I didn’t see that deer,” he said. “He just came out of nowhere.”
“Hey,” I said. “You got us here in one piece. Somebody who was half a second slower than you and it would have been a mess.”
He leaned back in his seat, placed both hands on the wheel and, slowly, he grinned. “That’s right, man. Mario fucking Andretti.”
Starke was waiting for me outside, his waxen cheeks pulled tight in the cold. He frowned.
“We should have put this off, you know. He needed to be thinking about this stop on the drive.”
“John, I appreciate it. I really do.”
“What happened up there? We all saw the deer.”
“Nothing. It just jumped out of the trees. The kid did a good job.”
He shook his head, offended that nature refused to follow the morning’s preprinted schedule.
“You going in?” he said.
“In a minute. I’ve got to organize my stuff”
I walked to the rental car I was sharing with Myra, who was already inside the auditorium, and settled in the backseat. I checked my tape to make sure it had recorded. The recording was hollow, full of wind noise, but I could make out his voice. I marked the tape and tucked it in my briefcase. Then there was no escape. I leaned against the seat, closed my eyes and remembered, as well as I could, my visit with Thomas Crane’s brother during my trip to Berthold.
I didn’t see a doorbell so I knocked and waited on the sagging porch of the old cottage. I’d been told to wait patiently for several minutes, then if he didn’t come, jump up and down on the porch. Sometimes he doesn’t hear a knock, they said, but he always feels the floorboards vibrate in his wheels. I waited instead.
He opened the door slowly, rolling his chair back with one hand. He was wearing a red plaid shirt and faded blue jeans. He had tightly cropped gray hair and a gray mustache shaved neatly at the edges of his mouth. His neck and his shoulders were as thick as a bull’s. His legs ended a few inches below his knees.
He stared up at me silently. I introduced myself and told him why I was there.
“Well, I knew you’d start coming by sooner or later,” Bill Crane said, the deep creases in his face bending into a smile. “Follow the rambling wreck.”
He took me into the living room. There was a picture on the wall in which he sat astride an old Harley. He saw me looking at his two good legs in the photograph and nodded.
“Used to have long hair, a beard, and two feet. I was a regular wild man back in the sixties. Had a hog, drove the damn thing everywhere. Never had a thing happen. And then I’m driving a four-door Ford and a damn grain truck sideswipes me down an embankment and this is what happens. I wrote Harley-Davidson I’d do an ad for them, swear that the bike ended up being the safest thing I ever drove, but they weren’t interested. Can’t figure out why.”
He winked. When I smiled he reached up and punched me lightly in the arm. He had the face of a Prussian officer, but when he smiled everything bent into a confidential grin, as if he was sharing a naughty but harmless joke.
“But I bet you’d like to see the old pictures of Tom.”
“Sure.”
Opening a cabinet, he bent double in his chair to rummage in the bottom shelf. He pulled out an album covered in brown vinyl and sat up with a sigh. I knelt beside him.
“Don’t have a whole lot. But here they are.”
The photographs were black-and-white, the ancient kind with serrated edges. They started with other members of the family. I saw the gaunt profile of their father, his awkwardly cut hair protruding like a thundercloud over his forehead, his shirt hanging loose around his consumptive chest. Crane’s sister, wearing a loose dress in a print of oversize roses, was almost pretty. Bill was barrel-chested with short, stocky legs. Their mother was tall, big-boned. She wore her hair up and she might once have been beautiful, but central Illinois had burnt and creased her skin, stolen her waist, and swelled her ankles. Still, she stood with chin high, eyes fierce, mouth set provocatively.
Thomas Crane first appeared as a small boy, balanced on his father’s bony lap, toddling down the sidewalk in patched pants, peering from beneath the hood of an oversize parka, sitting on the edge of the porch, a flop-eared dog at his feet. He was skinny and his smile had the nervous brightness of someone who wants too badly to believe in his own happiness.
“He looks a little tired,” I said.
“He had a hard time sleeping when he was a kid.”
Bill handed me another album. Thomas Crane was older in these photographs, staring into the lens with budding confidence. He was still slim but had a lanky grace. He bent over the open hood of an ancient Model A with a friend; he posed in his baseball uniform, leaning on a bat like a cane; he wore a blue sport coat while holding the arm of a girl in a pink dress, a corsage pinned modestly above her right breast. She was pretty with a Donna Reed hairdo and plucked, quizzical eyebrows.
“An old girlfriend?”
Bill considered the picture and shrugged. “Believe it or not, he was kind of shy with girls, but I think he had a crush on that one . . . Maureen something. Took her to a couple big dances.”
“Really? She still live around here?”
“Somewhere south, I think.”
He flipped to the last page in the book.
“This one was always my favorite.”
The picture was of the two of them, the Crane boys, on a hillside. The photograph had been taken from slightly above, looking down. Ragged clouds and the town floated indistinctly in the background. Their arms were around each other and they were wearing suits. I lifted the page so the glare fell from the plastic. The face I had seen so often stared at me in a clarified version of itself, as if everything since had been no more than the inessential embroidery of time, as if everything that mattered was already there.
“We don’t have many of us together,” Bill said. “That was when our mother died. He was about twenty-five, I think.”
It’s funny how you don’t see things when you’re not looking for them. There were pallid stones tilting in the grass. They were holding on to each other in a graveyard.
“You two still spend a lot of time together?”
Bill rolled his chair back from the cabinet into a square of yellow light falling from the window. His profile looked like the marble bust of an old soldier.
/> “He doesn’t get back here much. But he calls. He called me when he was thinking about running for the Senate and when he was thinking about this whole show. We talk about things.” A faint blush creeped up his thick neck. “He’s just checking up on me, really. He’s a good brother.”
I opened my eyes in a high school parking lot in Manchester, New Hampshire. He called me. He didn’t visit. He called when he was thinking about running for the Senate. I thought of something else and rummaged in my bag for the manila folder that held the clips and notes I used for reference. It was a story in the Miami Herald by Mary Voboril, one of their best writers. I found the paragraph: “The strange succession of tragedies that befell the Crane family continued that March when Bill Crane was injured in an automobile accident. Both legs of the former high school football player were amputated slightly below the knee and he spent two months in a Springfield hospital recovering.”
March. Fourteen years ago. The same month Thomas Crane was considering whether to make his first run for the House. He couldn’t have gone back to Berthold to visit his brother then. His brother wasn’t there; no one was living in the Crane home in Berthold at that time. He had lied to me.
The parking lot was full, chrome glittering in the sun. The snow was freshly fallen from the night before, the sky a flawless blue. He had lied to me and I couldn’t imagine why. I ran through it again in my head and got nowhere. I didn’t even know enough to guess. It could be anything, nothing, a mistake, a conspiracy, a forgivable vanity, the key to his existence. I closed my eyes again and tried to remember exactly how he had looked as he told me he had visited his brother, but I couldn’t bring the moment into focus. All I could see was the odd twinning in the window of his eyes and those of a terrified animal, both damp, brown and filled with a profound sense of dislocation.
I sat in the car and fought a sense of betrayal that made me angry because of its naiveté. I had been a reporter for ten years and I knew the first mistake you can make is to think you are friends. You are never friends. Then you know, he said and I had wanted to believe it was true. I wanted to believe we shared the feeling of losing the person you have always measured yourself against. But did that have to be false because something else was? Or because something else might be false? I didn’t want to think so.
I put the folder in my bag and left it on the floor when I locked the car. The auditorium doors were open to let the heat escape and, as I climbed the steps, I heard a raucous high school cheer. He was crossing the stage as I slid inside, a sheepish look on his face as he listened to the noise. He stood at the podium and I noticed he had loosened his tie and his hair was slightly mussed. He tugged his ear, head cocked; his gaze swept across the tiered seats sweeping up into the shadow of a roped-off balcony. A look of displeasure crossed his face and then a swift, elusive calculation, before he smiled, as if truly engaged for the first time, and raised a hand for silence.
“I’m going to talk to you about a bunch of things,” he said in his flat heartland accent, which I realized was the voice of a thousand television actors. “But before I do, there’s something I’ve noticed waiting up here. I noticed you’ve segregated yourself. We’ve got the African American students sitting over here”—He pointed to the seats in the top left corner of the auditorium—“and we’ve got the kids with long hair there against the door, and then we’ve got everybody else here.”
He pushed a hand through his hair and eyes turned mischievous. “In the words of Robert Kennedy, this is crap. I’d been told this school had the most diverse student body in Manchester. In New Hampshire. But it doesn’t matter much if you keep yourself separate, does it? Let’s mix things up a little bit.”
His chin pointed into a dim corner. “Some of you guys, come on down here where there’s some seats. You laid-back types by the door. Over there. The rest of you spread out. Take some of the open seats.”
They shuffled their feet and looked uncertainly at each other. Crane strolled around the lectern. He pointed at the camera crews set up in the aisles.
“Come on. This is the first real attention I’ve gotten this campaign. You gonna make me look bad on television? They’ll never come back.” He waited, one hand stroking his chin, a conspiracy born in the light-hearted glint of his smile.
“You’ve got nothing to be afraid of from each other,” he said.
We learn our cues so quickly these days. A kid in a red flannel shirt stood and then a girl and soon they were all sliding back and forth with the sheepish reluctance of teenagers since time immemorial. Crane watched from the front of the stage.
“Careful, now, no talking to each other. We don’t want to go crazy.”
A bright, summery wash of laughter rose from teenagers too pleased with themselves to feign indifference. They were part of a brand-new show and they knew it was a hit. They moved in a jostle of baggy pants, flannel shirts, backward caps, hockey jerseys and unlaced baseball shoes, punching each other in the arm, exchanging low-fives and embarrassed grins, all the while stealing glances at the figure watching from the stage, sipping from the age-old communion between audience and star.
Stuart was going to lose his bet. We were going to be around after Iowa and New Hampshire.
Myra was standing beside a camera crew.
“Can you believe this?” she said. “Television. It’s the hand of God.”
VIII.
HE WON the Iowa caucuses on a night when the moon hung over Des Moines like a new silver dollar encased in velvet. He won the New Hampshire primary a week later with snow falling across Manchester and a lightning storm of camera flashes in the hotel ballroom when he stepped on stage. The last two weeks had been a haze of shopping malls, five-hundred-watt radio stations, Holiday Inns, weekly newspapers. And then, of course, there had been the endless variety of the American midway: the girl who brought him a model of the White House made completely out of twist ties; the man pushing a wooden cross in a wheelbarrow across America who paused to offer his blessing; the ice fisherman who asked Crane to hold the line while he ducked behind the cabin to take a leak; the mechanic who wanted to arm wrestle for his vote.
He traveled trailing a phosphorescent glow, for television was falling in love with Thomas Crane. It is a wondrous thing to see a man reborn through the lens, to watch his life refocused and broken into primary colors. He emerged in brilliant fragments: his angular frame, crooked smile, the perfect miniature of his wife, his midwestern gift for clarity, the gentle irony with which he often seemed to observe his circumstances (fulfilling television’s theological precept that the principal virtues are simplicity and an irreverent sense of self). There was the uncomplicated melodrama of his youth: Berthold made the perfect backdrop for poor-boy-made-good stories, and I glimpsed the town so many times on the screen, floating forlorn between ruined hills and metallic sky, that TV’s distant perspective began to superimpose itself on my memory.
The Times, the Post, the Atlantic and other publications cleared their throats and wrote the usual articles raising the usual questions about his experience, proposals, political substance. The Washington press corps resents anyone it has not had the chance to dismiss. But the cynicism that passes for wisdom was momentarily swept aside by features on everything from his addiction to Diet Coke to his passion for history, and by the image of a boy on a blue road at dawn, taking slow but steady steps toward his future.
So in Manchester balloons bounced through the strobe-lit air and Crane hugged Angela and waited for the crowd to cheer itself out. When it was making no more noise than a fraternity on a Saturday night, he leaned into the microphone.
“They said we didn’t have enough experience. They said we didn’t have enough name recognition. They said we didn’t have enough money”—he paused—“we still don’t have enough money.” Laughter, whoops of delight. “They said we didn’t have a chance. But we had two things they didn’t understand . . . We had a message and we had the people!”
He stepped back and let t
hem go at it for a while. He was wearing a dark suit that in the stuttering light seemed like a tailored scrap of night; his smile was modest, and the melancholy in his eyes was buried in a glittering attentiveness, as if he would not let the farthest corners of the celebration escape his memory. I was standing near the back and I felt my own heart pound and my own breath quicken. He pushed a hand through the hair above his ear and stepped back to the microphone.
“Before I go any further, there are some people I want to thank. And I want to start with the most important. Always the most important. My wife, Angela.”
He turned to her and she leaned forward, one leg kicking back like a sixteen-year-old, kissed him and whispered something in his ear, and he laughed and lifted her off her feet before swinging her back into place. She pretended to be dizzy and the crowd loved it. His hand came up in a half salute stolen from some old war movie; he let the photographers have his profile for a last battering of flashes. Those of us flying out with him threw our stuff together and scrambled after him as the cheers swept us down a hall, out a side entrance and onto a street where snow crunched startlingly beneath our feet.
Steven Duprey stopped on the sidewalk.
“Where’s the car?”
“Where’s the car?” Starke said to a campaign volunteer. “We need the car.”
The volunteer turned to an eighteen-year-old holding open the door.
“Where’s the car?”
Nathan spread calfskin-gloved hands in dismay. “They don’t even have a car waiting for him. How can we be expected to take this campaign seriously?”
Myra buried her nose in her collar. “It’s just a car, Nathan. It’s not like they’re recounting the ballots.”
“Just a car? You want to turn the nation over to people who can’t even find the service entrance to a hotel?”
“I don’t want to turn the country over to anybody. But it’s just a damn car.”
Stuart stood behind them, hugging his birdlike shoulders through a tweed coat. “Would you two quit bickering?”