If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  The press is reductionist by nature, sooner or later simplifying everything to a matter of stark contrasts. If one candidate is salt, the other must be pepper. So it came to be the conventional wisdom that Wilson was the more conservative of the two and would do better in the South, which was now without its own candidate. Political momentum rides on gossamer wings and there were more than enough delegates at stake to crush the faint brush of the new that had carried Crane this far.

  From my seat in the front of the plane’s press section, two rows from the galley, I could see the first-class seats where Crane and his staff were sequestered. At night when the galley emptied, I could see the back of Crane’s head as he sat in his seat by the window. Sometimes I would think he was sleeping and then he would turn. I could just make out the tilt of that dark shock of hair and long forehead as he stared out the window and I used to wonder what he was thinking.

  I now know there were certain things that occupied him. One was the continuing bargain to be struck with his profession and the tenor of our times. Thus, it was one of those nights, after even I was asleep, that Blendin perched on the arm of the seat next to Crane.

  “Three days in five markets,” Blendin growled. “Five fucking markets and we can stop this.” He waved a crumpled piece of paper filled with dimly printed numbers, the edges bent and crumpled with sweat.

  The campaign’s first attack ad was ready to go: a thirty-second spot in which an actress with a voice one could associate with the Virgin Mary told the story of the Christmas crèche that Wilson ordered out of the Capitol Building in Harrisburg after the American Civil Liberties Union objected.

  “We’ve begged, stolen and borrowed and we’ve got the fucking money for three days,” Blendin said. “Have you looked at this, Senator? You’re down ten percent with people who strongly identify themselves as Christians. You started out as a nice guy who didn’t owe anybody anything, and now you’re a godless northern liberal and Wilson is Saint Fucking Francis of Assisi.”

  Crane rubbed his eyes. “Plus I want to kill millions of unborn babies.”

  “Plus you want to kill babies.”

  The protesters were showing up in the back of the rallies by then, kept a safe distance away by the crowds, by his popularity, but at quiet moments you could hear the muzzy rhythm of their chant, and if you looked, you could see their signs, each with a bright red splotch in the middle like a curled-up comma.

  “Tim. We’ve gotten this far saying we don’t play by the old rules,” Crane said.

  Blendin held up the sheet of polling data. “That’s exactly right. We’ve gotten this far.”

  Blendin could say things to Crane no one else could. I think he recognized Blendin provided something he lacked. Crane almost lost his first campaign for re-election to the House when his opponent attacked him savagely in the final days and he was left groping for ways to respond. Since then, he had hired consultants who liked to get dirt under their fingernails. No one survives long in politics in innocence, and he may have kept his hands clean, but he was not innocent.

  Crane tugged at his ear and looked out the window at the stray lights passing below.

  “When I was a kid I used to watch jets like this flying by at night. You’d see them way up there, like another star. I used to wonder if there was somebody looking down right then, out the window like this, and if he was wondering if anyone was down there looking up at him.”

  “Everybody’s done that,” Blendin said impatiently.

  Crane smiled as if his consultant had missed the point.

  “No, Tim, I thought it was an epiphany. The thing is, it seemed like an unbelievable life to me, to be up there in that plane. I used to think about flying, how I would have to take trips like this someday. You know what? I worried that I’d be airsick. That I wouldn’t like it.”

  He ran his fingers along the side of his jaw.

  “Let me ask you something. Why do we do this? Why do get off and on this plane eight times a day? Why do we eat bad pizza at eleven o’clock at night? Why do we stay away from our families for days on end? Why do we do all this?”

  Blendin shook his head in irritation. “I can only speak personally, Senator. But I’m hoping this leads to a career on MSNBC spouting whatever bullshit I want for three hundred thousand dollars a year.”

  “We do this because it’s what people expect. It’s what they expect of a candidate. You know the other thing they expect of a candidate? They expect he’ll finally descend to their worst expectations.”

  “And there’s a reason it happens. Because it works.”

  “Until it’s not what they expect.”

  “You should look at these numbers.”

  “I look at the numbers all the time, Tim. I see the numbers in my sleep.”

  “Three days, Senator. In four markets.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ahh fuck.” Blendin crumpled the poll and tossed it toward a sleeping Starke two rows ahead.

  The plane thrummed along, the rest of Crane’s traveling staff sprawled asleep across seats, the cabin dark, the press on the other side of the galley quiet, the night passing, Blendin sitting on the armrest gloomily wondering how much of the fishing season in Minnesota he would catch when this campaign was over and Thomas Crane was back in Washington with his sanctimonious notions about the American electorate safely tucked away where they could do no more harm. Then he glanced down to see his candidate watching him with a merciless eye.

  “Don’t worry, Tim,” Crane said. “I will do what’s necessary. But this is the wrong move.”

  “What then, Senator?”

  Crane looked out the window, and I wonder what he saw, how much he imagined, how much he really understood.

  “You remember the spot we ran in Colorado on the environment? Take the money and get that on in the university towns. Run the radio spots on the campus stations. We’ll be okay.”

  I don’t know what I would have thought if I had known about that conversation then. I had ambivalent feelings enough when, two days before the vote, I caught a cab from the Omni Hotel in Atlanta to the Buckhead neighborhood. Latrelle Gregory was waiting for me at a table when I came into Bones. He sat with the stolid concentration of a middle-aged burgher considering the huge menu propped before him on the table, a glass of scotch perched inches from his left hand.

  “You are buying, am I correct?” he said in his fussy Georgia accent when I sat down.

  “That drink and everything after.”

  Gregory smiled. He had thinning hair and a round, pink face with a thin mustache that lent him an air of pleasant dissolution. He had been slim when I knew him two years earlier in Washington, but now there was a comfortable thickness about the middle.

  “You look as if you’re settling in nicely down here,” I said.

  “I am home, Clifford. That is a comfort.”

  “And how is the governor?”

  “The governor is a man of vision and perspicacity. A gentle, yet firm and clear-eyed soul. The governor is one of the great leaders of the New South and quite possibly our nation. The governor is, I tell you confidentially, quite possibly a genius. The governor is, above all, the man who signs my checks.”

  I pointed to Gregory’s scotch and held up two fingers. A waiter nodded and slid gracefully into the shadows.

  “Washington misses you, Latrelle,” I said. “No one has used the word perspicacity since you left.”

  He folded the menu and placed it carefully on the tablecloth, as if it were delicate and to be cherished.

  “But I do not miss Washington. At least not more than a little.” He smiled, reminding me briefly of a Teutonic Buddha. “And how about you, Clifford? When I left you were covering those eternal hearings we held on the Farm Credit Act, and now look at you.”

  My scotch arrived and settled as if by levitation in my hand. “To quote one of your region’s fine senators,” I said, “Howell Heflin, I believe it was, ‘Even a blind pig can find an ac
orn now and then.’”

  “Thomas Crane is no acorn.”

  I raised my glass in a toast.

  “Well, it didn’t make any sense when Heflin said it either. To the old days.”

  He sipped and smiled into the glass.

  “And what is it you want to know, Clifford?”

  I hefted the menu and pretended to study it for a moment.

  “You were with Crane in the beginning, right? When he first came to Washington?”

  “Yes. Somebody in the Speaker’s office suggested me to him. He needed a few veteran hands sprinkled throughout the happy, corn-fed children, just to keep the office running.” His smile slid up both cheeks. “Ask me what I think of him and I’ll tell you what I’ve told everyone. I think he was a good legislator and I think he’ll make a darn fine president.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. You stayed with him through his first year in the Senate?”

  He nodded and waited, enjoying himself.

  “But you left after that. Why?”

  “A difference in styles, Clifford. Nothing more. You know how you people from the North are: you shave in the shower because it saves time and you count your change every time the waiter sets it on the table. I wished for a certain latitude.”

  I set the menu down with the vague impression the plains of Texas were being depopulated to provision this one restaurant.

  “Actually, I have nothing to ask you on the record,” I said. “I don’t even have anything to ask you for use without attribution. I just have something that’s been bothering me, and I was hoping you could help clear it up.” And I told him about the two unaccounted-for trips by Crane.

  Gregory sipped his scotch.

  “You ask me something unexpected.”

  He was wearing an old tweed jacket with a vest the color of dying pumpkin beneath it. He reached down and slid a thumb absently along the buttons on the jacket.

  “How much do you know about his past?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  He nodded. “Everybody does these days. You can’t open a newspaper without a story about the poor boy from Berthold who made good. My favorite are the ones that start with young Thomas Crane standing on that highway, hitching rides into Springfield in the dead of winter so he can go to that Catholic school.”

  “Aquinas.”

  “Yes. Saint Thomas Crane going to Saint Thomas Aquinas. I love those.” He lifted his drink and looked meditatively into the glass. “What is that line from Hemingway? ‘I distrust all frank and simple men, particularly when their stories hold together.’ You all love that story too much, my friend.”

  “I always thought you’d be a Faulkner man.”

  “You like it because it fits into sixty seconds or four paragraphs. Because it has a recognizable form. Because it’s part of an accepted myth that doesn’t require you to think. Its utility blinds you. No road, Clifford, is that magical.”

  He was working up to something, so I waited.

  “Here is a story no one has ever heard,” Gregory said. “When I was first with him in the House there was a simple protocol—if his door was closed, you left him alone. If the door was ajar, you knocked and entered. I don’t remember what it was I had in my hands, but it was something I was reading, and when I came to his door, I pushed and, since it was ajar, entered without remembering to knock. He was on the phone. We had those absolutely dreadful offices on top of Rayburn then and he had his chair swiveled so he could see the little patch of the city you could glimpse through a corner of the window . . .”

  Gregory took a slow drink. His Adam’s apple bobbed and he went on, avoiding my eyes.

  “Anyway, he was on the phone and I heard him say, ‘I want to send you a check.’ The person on the other side said something. Then Crane said, ‘I know I don’t have to, but it lets me sleep better at night, do you understand?”’ Gregory’s eyes grew clouded. “Something like that. I think those were the words. Anyway. I am sometimes foolish, but I try never to be stupid. I knew I had made an unfortunate error walking through that door without knocking. I took half a step backward and dragged my feet as if I’d just come in.

  “The congressman looked up and this is why I have remembered this all these years, Clifford. He looked so young those days, you remember?” He waved a hand. “I forget you were still feeding at your dear mother’s breast. He always looked young then, but that day it was like there was someone else, a separate child, staring at me. Like some scared child peering out from inside a costume who knows he’s on stage and can’t remember his lines.”

  “What happened?”

  “It only lasted a second, and then it was Thomas Crane again, and he asked me if I could come back in ten minutes. I believe I made sure the door clicked when I left.”

  Gregory settled back in his chair and his full cheeks glowed in the candlelight.

  “It’s a more complicated story, isn’t it? How poor boys get rich and who they owe when they’re finished. He had debts back home, Clifford. They all do.”

  “Do you know who was on the other end of the phone?”

  He shook his head. “We could talk about that all night, but it would be idle speculation. This is what I can tell you: There were people who helped him, helped him get into school, helped him when he left for Princeton, helped him later. Debts come with obligations. You let me know when you find out more and we can talk again.”

  He was finished, at least for a while. We were both quiet.

  “But you like him,” I said.

  He smiled like a child with a bug on a pin. “Of course I like him, Clifford. The man fired me, but I have nothing but admiration for him to this day.” He hefted the menu again and stared into its silken depths. “We must order. I’m sure you have a long day ahead of you tomorrow. What are you going to have?”

  “I’m not sure. You?”

  “The largest tenderloin they have, I believe. Rare.”

  “Rare?”

  Gregory’s gaze rolled up the menu. “I am a southern boy, Clifford. We like our meat the way we like our politics. Raw.”

  We flew from Atlanta to the Carolinas, stopping at Duke and the University of North Carolina and the Charleston harbor, where the Old Fort floated like a desert citadel in a glimmering sea-sky. We flew to Florida and touched down in Orlando and then Sarasota, where the Chicago White Sox were in spring training. We tumbled out of the hot and diesel-smelling bus and squinted through the sunlight at a world of primal green and blue.

  Crane stepped out of his limousine wearing a White Sox cap. He stood blinking in the sunlight and then turned to the gate held open by a wizened security guard who seemed about to doff his cap.

  The woman stepping down in front of me was a twenty-three-year-old television reporter from a local station, blond with a powdered face, a bright pink mouth and a canary yellow suit ready to take wing. When you travel around the country, you find that an amazing number of local television reporters are former Miss something or others, and the woman stepping off the bus had the determined good cheer of a beauty contestant. She waited for her cameraman to join her.

  “This is an odd stop,” she said.

  Myra was beside me, wearing a pair of baggy khaki shorts, a Stub’s Bar and Grill T-shirt and a checkered blue bandanna.

  “Come on, it’s baseball,” Myra said. “America. Apple pie. All the eternal verities. Who doesn’t want to be tied to baseball?”

  Crane stood by the batting cage, his tie gone, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up his slender forearms. A small circle of players and coaches gathered around him, and outside them, a wider circle of madly clicking photographers.

  “Where are we exactly?” I asked.

  “Sarasota,” the television reporter said as if I had hurt her feelings.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Myra said. “Tonight we’ll be back in Charlotte. You remember Charlotte? You like Charlotte.”

  The grass felt luxuriant beneath my feet. Laughter rose and fell in a loping
rhythm from the outfield. Crane gripped a bat and waggled. He was talking to the cameras, but seemed to be addressing a tall wide-shouldered player with a round, boyish face: Frank Thomas, the all-star first baseman.

  “I played in high school and a year in college before I got too busy with other things,” Crane said. “But I don’t think I was ever much of a threat to your career.”

  The players laughed politely.

  “How’s it look this year?” Crane asked.

  An old man scratched the salt-and-pepper bramble of his hair. “If some of our young pitchers come around we’ll be in good shape.”

  Crane smiled at the cliché, straight out of baseball eternal.

  “I followed every game the Sox played when I was a kid,” he said. “I used to stay over at my cousin’s whenever I could because he had a radio and we’d pretend to go to bed and then lie in the dark and listen to the games. Nellie Fox was my hero.”

  The players listened dutifully. He was talking about a time before they had been born.

  A photographer yelled from the back. “Take a few swings, Senator!”

  Crane looked at the bat in his hands.

  “I can toss you a few,” said a small squarely built player.

  “Who’s that?” Myra asked.

  A photographer glanced up. “Martino Benitez. Their ace.”

  “Come on, Senator, just a couple!”

  Crane waggled the bat and then glanced at the photographer who had issued the challenge. The wounded look surfaced in his eyes, and his expression steeled into a resolve I took to be a reflection of the quiet arrogance beneath it all, an arrogance that touched off admiration despite myself. He stepped into the batting cage, pulled his White Sox cap low on his brow, and took an upright stance. Benitez trotted behind the wire screen that protects pitchers during batting practice. The rest of us formed a V that bottomed around the batting cage and fanned out along the foul lines.

  The bat was cocked behind Crane’s ear, the barrel moving in a small nervous circle. His hands couldn’t keep still on the handle.