by Reed Karaim
She looked at me through her owl-rim glasses. “It’s a shame you have to tell people,” she said. “Franklin did so much. He was too many things to be remembered as a suicide.”
Too many things. The bus jounced up the gravel road. We were on a curve and I could see the whole unlikely caravan strung out ahead, police lights, headlights, tail lights. We were the entire illuminated world. The windows in Crane’s bus had a faint opaque pumpkin light, a reading lamp on inside, perhaps.
I listened to laughter in the front of our bus, a soft voice telling a story I could not make out, a story that seemed, as I listened, to be the story of a life, a midnight confessional rolling on and on in somber, then hushed, then buoyant tones, punctuated now and again by a companion’s gentle laughter. Too many things. We are all too many things and most of us are lucky enough to die without an epitaph. We are all too many things and who was I to decide what mattered and what didn’t? We are all too many things and I couldn’t put the world inside my own heart in order.
The bus turned onto pavement with a rocking motion like a boat, and then we picked up speed and the voice in front was lost in the sound of the pavement thrumming beneath us.
VII.
SPECULATION about the debate grew all week until it reached the kind of frenzy that only the American press, careening downhill like an out-of-control circus train, can manage. The two candidates traveled toward Detroit in a narrowing circle of opinion that flickered across channels, through newsprint and back into the airwaves until it swallowed its own tail of argument and prophecy. So the conventional wisdom was established: Thomas Crane was young and what was there, really, in his record to justify his popularity? Surely, the president would take apart that record and then proceed, with all the gravity of his office and his years in public service, to shred the magic carpet upon which Crane sailed. After all, the president had the history with the public, and if there was a strangely unsettled sense in the land of things gone wrong, the plain facts were that it was not that bad. He deserved more credit than he was getting. The president, the conventional wisdom proclaimed, simply had to remind the public of his record.
Thomas Crane had to prove he belonged on the stage.
I arrived at the Ford Auditorium to find Myra eying a half-dozen members of the White House press corps, who had settled around Duprey with the lazy disdain of ladies-in-waiting commandeering a scullery maid.
“Just kill me if I ever get like that,” she said.
“With pleasure.”
She was wearing at least seven metal bracelets on her left arm, charms dangling in a hysterical tinkle: toy spaceships, Christmas ornaments, silver poodles, Mickey Mouse ears, a peppermint-striped Eiffel Tower, crucifixes, stars, Elvis, a half-dozen Thomas Crane buttons. I was transfixed.
“What did you do? Hold up a five-and-dime store?”
She held her arm out in front of her
“You know how Nathan is always locking his briefcase when he leaves the press room? You know how incredibly anal that is?”
“I hadn’t noticed actually.”
“Well, he does, cowboy, and it is. Except . . .”
She fingered two small keys on the third bracelet.
“Not anymore,” she said.
“What if it’s already locked shut?”
“Oh, don’t tease me.”
The president’s press secretary stepped into the room. The floor tilted and all kinds of things slid his way, reporters, cameras, microphones. Myra and I held onto the edge of a table as they tumbled past. The flood trickled to a close with those who had been enjoying the free buffet in another room. They struggled by holding half-eaten sandwiches, chewing frantically as they fumbled for tape recorders and notebooks. At that moment, the televisions lined up across the front of the room came to life with a clap, and an empty stage with a flag hanging above two glass podiums was repeated in shimmering perfection on screen after screen.
“God,” Myra said.
“Yes.”
Two men face each other on a stage. A nation is watching. They stand fifteen feet apart but it looks like more on television. One of the men is tall and slender and, although he has aged in the last six months, could be said to look youthful. The other is shorter but carries himself with a solemnity that lends substance to his appearance. His hair is a fine silvery white and his long face has attractive lines like a well-broken-in bookbinding. He has a reedy voice, but very narrow, very blue eyes that have held him in good stead through the years with the voters.
There is a sign and an American flag behind the two of them. There is a panel of three reporters at the far left of the stage. The floor has been polished and shines with a moonlike gleam. The curtain is blue. The audience is out there behind the lights, never seen, but heard often and felt at every moment But really there is only these two men all alone, two men and the light and the silence that is the held breath of a nation, two men and their words.
The president speaks with the confidence of one who has done enough to know what more awaits him. He speaks with the dignified anger of one who does not feel he should have to remind the nation of what he has tried to do. He turns to his opponent with the look of the circling hawk who is waiting for movement in the snowy field below.
Thomas Crane seems oddly off balance, his smile a bit too bright, the measured clarity of that midwestern voice suddenly too thin, without deeper chords of authority and experience. He answers the first questions about the economy and foreign affairs with words he has used a dozen times and, for the first time, they seem too pat. He stands with his hands folded slightly below his waist and it strikes one how thin he has become, how the campaign is paring him down. His blue suit hangs square from his shoulders. He reaches up now and places a hand on the glass podium, the fingers long and thin.
“I’m glad you asked that,” he says and it sounds too eager. “I disagree with the president,” he says and it sounds self-conscious. “The problem is not as complicated as you make it sound,” he says and, for the first time, one wonders.
The press is in the balcony, scribbling on their knees. Myra is seated two seats down from me. She leans across two annoyed reporters and whispers, “Pretty boy needs to land a punch.”
Crane is being asked about welfare reform. He listens with one elbow resting in the palm of his other hand, with his finger absently running across his lip. Standing as he is, he seems all angles, a good-looking suit hung on a wire hanger. He smiles and, despite the gray seeping into his temples, despite the melancholy in the back of his eyes, he looks a little too much like an honor student who knows he has the answer.
“As you know, Peter,” he says to the television anchorman on the panel, “I have a detailed proposal that will turn America’s welfare program into a job training program . . .” And he is off for five minutes into a monologue sprinkled with facts and numbers.
When Crane finishes the president is staring at the glass of his podium. He waits several seconds, letting precious time elapse; when he looks up a thin smile gleams like a razor and his eyes are narrow and filled with the light of the hunt.
“It’s nice to hear that Senator Crane has another plan,” he says. “As near as I can tell Senator Crane has a plan for everything, including the common cold.” He turns his head then, considering Crane the way a wise old sailor might consider somebody fumbling with the canvas in a stiff breeze. “I listen to you, Tom, and I keep remembering that story about the train trying to go up the hill, I think I can, I think I can.” After the crowd stops tittering, he continues: “It’s nice to have plans, but it’s better to have accomplishments. Let me tell you what this administration has already done and what we’re going to do over the next four years . . .”
Crane blinks and for a moment I remember the deer staring at us through the window. Myra leans across the seats, ignoring the protests. “He looks like Bambi after they shot his mother,” she says as if she can read my mind.
The debate moves on to the direct exch
ange. You can feel the crowd’s anticipation. On stage the president waits with the impatience of a boxer who knows the last round ended with his opponent’s knees buckling. The lines around his eyes are gathered. He leans forward slightly at the podium, impatient to be done with this intrusion upon greater matters. He brushes aside Crane’s first thrust on foreign affairs with a plainspoken lecture on the situation in Eastern Europe that leaves his challenger’s platitudes about human rights sounding like the musings of an eighth-grade class president. They move on to economics and the president’s narrowly aristocratic lips cannot help themselves, they curl into a grimly satisfied smile as he recounts his personal negotiations at the last economic summit and how they led to an agreement lowering trade barriers throughout much of the industrialized world. The lights on stage are so bright it is a world without shadows, a world with no room for hesitation.
Crane stares at his podium, as if he has lost something there, his dark eyebrows arched in mildly bewildered surprise. He seems young, unfocused, uncertain.
“I’d like to turn to the child healthcare bill that died last year in the Senate,” he says. “As you know, the bill would have guaranteed that no American child would be without healthcare, regardless of how poor, or how rich—”
The president nods. One finger taps impatiently at the edge of the glass. “We had hoped that bill could be passed,” he says. “It wasn’t perfect—there were concerns about cost—but it was unfortunate that the committee voted it down.”
“You had hoped the bill could be passed . . .” Crane’s voice trails off.
“That’s right.” The president’s voice has an edge to it. “There were those who said the bill was a budget buster, and we were worried about that. But nothing is more important than our nation’s children. It wasn’t perfect. But we knew something needed to be done. We were working on a version that could be passed in committee and make it through Congress.”
The president turns, so he is no longer looking at Crane but into the crowd; his lean face softens, his cropped gray hair transformed by the light into a grandfatherly haze. I imagine families across America leaning forward on their couches.
“I have seven grandchildren myself,” he says. “And although they’ve been lucky enough to grow up in families where they’re well taken care of, I know some of their friends haven’t been as fortunate.” He smiles. “You know, children don’t care if their friends are rich or poor. They just know who they really like. In that way, they treat everybody equally. Those of us who are older could learn something from them. As adults, those of us who have been lucky in life shouldn’t forget those children who haven’t.”
He steps back from the podium with the auditorium, and maybe the country, in the palm of his hand. Crane is motionless, his head hanging on his chest so he appears to be lost in thought. A world spun of silver words and threads of faith until it took shape complete with continents, oceans and mountain ranges is tumbling like a broken web in his silence. The camera is on him, and I wonder what it looks like in close-up, this collapse of a beautiful, hypnotizing shell.
“There are eleven million children in the country without any kind of healthcare,” Crane says absently, as if unable to veer from a prepared text. “The legislation would have guaranteed coverage to all of them in the case of serious illness. Catastrophic care, they call it, I guess.”
The president is considering him with pity. You can feel the crowd shifting nervously and out there in a million living rooms you can imagine the fallen chin and downturned eyes trapped tightly in the merciless box. When he looks up it is a surprise.
“Angela and I haven’t been lucky enough to have any children,” Crane says, “but I guess children do know a lot of things. One of the things we expect them to know is the difference between right and wrong, the difference between the truth and a lie—”
“Hold it—” the president says.
“—You know David Yates, a reporter for the Washington Post, Mr. President? You once called him one of the best, most reliable reporters in Washington. Yates is writing a book about the battle over children’s healthcare and in that book, which is due to be finished in a month or two, he got Senator D’Amato to speak about what happened.”
The auditorium is silent. The president leans toward Crane, bent at the waist as if preparing to take a blow to the stomach, his mouth half-open. In the infinite space of this moment, Crane glances at the papers in front of him.
“Let me just read to you what Senator D’Amato told Mr. Yates: ‘It came down to my vote, and I thought the bill was flawed, but I might support it. The White House let me know they needed it killed quietly. It was a tough vote and I decided I wasn’t going to give it away. We needed their support for a half a billion dollars worth of work on the thrustate freeway and I thought, If I’m going to do this, I’m going to get their support for the damn highway. So that’s what it came down to. They wanted the bill held up in committee, and I wanted the highway, and we worked out a deal—’ ”
“Now wait a minute—”
“—Let me read you just a little more: ‘They’—he means you, Mr. President—‘thought the bill would wreck their budget plan, but the White House wanted it both ways, kids and bankers.’ ”
He says the last word without disdain but with a wistful sadness at the absurdity of the comparison. I have seen him so many times under so many circumstances that when he looks up finally to consider the president, I can picture how he must appear on the screen, this tall man with something lonely in the too-perfect planes of his face, facing an older, less honest man, without anger, but also without sympathy.
“Maybe we can learn something from children,” Crane says. “And it starts with the truth.”
The word breaks a dam. I hear Myra whoop beside me. The auditorium rustles and hums. The president coughs once, violently.
“Bullshii—nonsense! How dare you question my integrity? We supported the bill and we will support it when it comes back next session. I haven’t seen the book you’re discussing and I don’t believe a—”
“I have the pages right here,” Crane says. “I’m happy to share them.”
He leaves his podium, walks slowly across the stage, calmly breaking all convention, and places a piece of paper on the president’s podium. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger and it flaps gently in his hand as he crosses the space between them. When he lets it go, the paper settles with a swanlike swoop on the glass. Speechless, the president watches it fall.
After the handlers had lined up to spin us all in the front of the press room, after all our deadlines had passed, we piled into the buses and headed out across Detroit, a mad babble of voices bouncing off the walls as we tried to unwind. “I thought he was sunk, man, who knew . . .” “President Thomas Crane, never in a hundred years . . .” “The difference between right and wrong, the difference between a truth and a lie, Christ . . .” “I tell you, the president is going to see that paper falling in his dreams.” “Dreams? Hell, we’re all going to see that paper falling on the tube every day until the election.”
Nathan rocked back and forth on his knees as he addressed me and Stuart in the seat behind him. “I think . . . he may . . . have done it.”
A crowd was waiting in the parking lot when we reached the hotel. It spilled out into the street and down the block. Crane had already stepped up onto the hood of his limousine to address them. His coat was off, his shirt a ghostly white below the mystery of his face. He raised his voice to cut through the clamor, pulling the words up out of his stomach. “As you know, we’ve just come from the debate. The press has yet to render their verdict, but I think I did all right.” Laughter. “I think we found out something about the president tonight.”
The sound that swept through the crowd was a cross between a growl and a mutter of sad recognition. I leaned against the bus and looked at all their faces, sweating, dazed, expectant, a sea of faith reaching back into the darkness. Robin stepped in front of me.
“I leave for Illinois in five minutes,” she said. “The car’s waiting.”
I nodded. Her cheeks were flushed and she radiated the triumphant heat all Crane’s staff had in the press room.
“But I’ll be back in five days.”
She stepped closer and I could feel her rapid breath against my neck.
“I can see you then.”
“Then,” I said.
She stepped back and pushed her hair nervously out of her eyes.
“Yes. Then. I want to. Then. Doesn’t that matter?”
The crowd around us was laughing, faces antic with joy. The sound echoed, rolled back inside my head, settled into a sibilant hiss of derision.
“Of course.”
She searched my face hopefully and I saw her push through confusion and frustration to settle on a careful suspension of judgment. “All right,” she said and turned to leave.
“I may have to write a tough story soon,” I said.
I watched her thin back and the way her weight stopped on her forward heel and the graceful way she swung my way.
“You’ve written tough stories before.”
“I mean a harmful story.”
Suddenly I was a distant figure moving across a foreign landscape.
“Your car’s waiting,” I said.
Her hand ran up into her hair and tangled itself.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She started to speak and then stopped and backed up along the buses, watching me as if I was about to disappear before her eyes. A horn honked and she turned and ran another bus length before spinning around.
“Call me! Cliff! Call me first!”
When she was gone I looked up and Crane was still speaking, shouting to be heard without a microphone, his exhausted voice rasping harshly near the end, sealing the covenant with every word. “I may make mistakes. I may not always succeed. But I can promise you one thing. I will never lie to you. I will always let you know where I stand. I will always let you know who I am!”