If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  A few moments later an aide stuck his head through the door. “Five minutes. Five minutes.”

  There were the regular groans and protests that the schedule said an hour at this location. I looked at the half-completed story on my screen: an analysis of Crane’s revamped strategy, which was to hold a tier of eastern states presumed more liberal and tolerant than the rest of the nation and then pursue the West Coast. The words seemed to be in some sort of Cyrillic bureaucratese, the dead verbiage of government that infects political coverage: “analysts say . . . indications are . . . reports from local officials suggest . . . grave concerns . . . questions raised . . .”

  A modest woman appears on television, says a couple of hundred words, and suddenly everything else is bullshit.

  My editor picked up her phone on the first ring.

  “We’re pulling out early,” I said. “I’ll get this to you at the next stop.”

  I could hear voices arguing in the background, phones ringing. Ellen sounded tired.

  “Don’t worry about it. The story’s being bumped back.”

  “How are things back there?”

  “Crazy. You saw the interview? The phones have been ringing off the hook. I’ve got to go to a war council here in a minute.”

  “Is there anything you want me to do?”

  “No. We’re handling it here. Nolan’s writing.”

  “I’ve got react—”

  “It’s already on the wire.”

  We paused awkwardly. I could hear the news editor calling her name in the background.

  “Cliff, listen. It was a good story.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll talk later. I’ve got to go.”

  Nathan was watching me eagerly from across the table as I hung up the phone.

  “Trouble?”

  You could see the mud-spattered blue of a Peter Pan bus through the window. People were packing up around us. I folded my laptop shut.

  “Sooner or later,” I said.

  Crane went to the Baptist convention that night. They were buzzing about Maureen’s television appearance, and he might have seized the moment by confessing his sins and begging forgiveness. It was the right audience for that. But he didn’t speak about himself at all. He spoke about what was wrong with the country and what he would try to do about it if elected. He was unrepentant, clinical, a scourged passion ringing through every word. It was the best speech he had given in a long time, but it was not the speech they wanted to hear. He took questions for almost an hour afterward, facing insults, anger, and disappointment with a terribly clear light in his eyes. He looked like someone who has decided very carefully and with grave deliberation that he may have to commit murder.

  I don’t remember where we were planning to go next. A month earlier a security guard in Miami had accidentally shot twelve-year-old Mayrelle Brown of Liberty City and the city had simmered since on the edge of an explosion. Crane had stayed away, heeding the counsel of Blendin and others who saw nothing but potential disaster in an appearance.

  Then, at four-thirty in the afternoon of the day he appeared before the Baptists, a jury decided not to convict guard Harold Williams of manslaughter, and while Crane was speaking, Liberty City and Overtown burned. We arrived at four o’clock the next day, fires still smoldering, oily smoke spreading above the rooftops, a sour yellow sun poking through the haze.

  A kid trailing along beside us smiled from beneath his baseball cap.

  “Tire fires. Burn forever, man.”

  Stuart nodded, an overwhelmed look fogging his eyes. We’d flown here without warning, hustled on buses that careened across town in a race to beat sundown.

  Myra’s earrings, stringers of silver fish, tinkled as she walked. “This is a little nuts. That Thomas Crane—one wild and crazy guy.”

  Nathan loped alongside her in a T-shirt and a pair of gray UNC sweat-pants. His clothes had been lost for the second time in the last week.

  “Let’s hope it’s just him.”

  We passed a corner store with an ad for the Florida Lottery in the grated window, an auto-body shop, rusted fenders in a pile along the curb, a block of houses with small sagging porches. I thought of the Crane family home in Berthold. People emerged from behind barred doors as we passed, eyes appearing in a crack first, then the door swinging open in disbelief. Children broke loose from their mothers and ran beside us. A skinny boy in a candy-cane shirt skipped next to Crane, waving his arms at the television cameras.

  Crane led us on, the Reverend Lucas Wain at his side, hurrying as if he saw something waiting at the end of the street that escaped the rest of us. He pulled people down off their porches into his wake and the crowd swelled behind him. When he saw a frail woman in a polka-dot dress hesitate on her front step, he stopped, climbed up, took her hand, and led her into his entourage.

  Three young men watched from the next porch with eyes hard as polished coal. Crane took two long strides and was standing in front of them before they could blink.

  “Come on. Come see what’s happening.”

  The stucco of the Baptist church was water-stained, blackened. The minister waited in a black suit, standing in the middle of a small crowd on the steps, mostly women in flowered dresses and antique hats. They looked dazed. They’d been up all night, smothering embers blowing into the church from the apartment building across the street, now a charred shell with soot streaking up from its windows in an expression of alarm.

  The Secret Service spread out on both sides of us as we reached the church. Four cars of police wearing plainclothes followed Crane’s car, which trailed our procession like a tame dog. There would be a shouting match between the head of the security detail and Blendin that night in the hotel, leaked stories the next day about the recklessness of the whole trip.

  The minister came down the stairs to shake Crane’s hand. I noticed an agent looking backward. The street behind us was filling in, people spilling into the space around the limousine, cutting it off. We’d come without an hour’s worth of planning. There were no volunteers with orange rope, no police moving people around in mindless exercises of authority, no preplanned corridors of escape.

  Crane stood on the steps, his blue shirt dark with sweat.

  “Come on up. Come on up, everybody. I’m only going to ask you to listen to me for a few minutes and then I’ll listen to you.”

  He waited as the crowd drifted forward and the Secret Service backed up in a collapsing circle. “Come up.” His voice was hoarse and the veins in his temples stood out below his hair, which needed a trim. “I told you I’m here to listen and I am, so I’ll keep this short. The only thing I really want to say to the people of Liberty City is that there is nothing anyone can do to help you if you burn down your own homes . . .”

  Somewhere a police siren wailed. I saw the Reverend Wain holding his fear on a tight leash. He’d lived off the anger in places like this for a long time, and he knew it better than anyone.

  “I can’t stop this,” Crane said. “Only you can stop this.” The siren blotted out his words, but you could see him straining to be heard, straining so hard his audience strained right back to hear him. The siren faded and Crane was still speaking. “. . . and how do we start? How do we start?”

  He was skinny, sweating, pale, as white as any man who’d ever stood on this street. He opened his mouth to continue but his eyes were focused on something at the back of the crowd. He stopped and marched down the steps and through the audience to a young man who stood with his arms crossed, staring through his sunglasses at black cords of smoke coiling into the sky.

  “I guess I’m boring you,” Crane said.

  The young man held his stare, pretending Crane wasn’t there.

  “You’ve been looking over there since I started. I don’t want to waste your time,” Crane said. “I just wondered, is there anything you’d like to ask me? Anything you want to know? Anything you want to talk about?”

  Arms crossed, leaning back on his
hips so his spine curved in his T-shirt back to his shoulders, the young man was silent. Crane stood in front of him, shirt wrinkled, tie askew, and, unexpectedly, he smiled as if he understood.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said.

  The polished chin moved.

  “I understand. It’s hard with all these people and cameras around. But you don’t have to worry about them. You’re not scared, are you?”

  The glance came down from the sky.

  “Don’t be scared,” Crane said. “You can talk to me.”

  “I’m . . . not . . . scared,” the young man said. But then, of course, he was. He tried to regroup behind his sunglasses.

  Crane glanced at the smoke in the distance and shrugged. “Should we let it burn?”

  “What?”

  “Should we just let it burn? Let the whole thing go down, bring in bulldozers and knock it down and start from scratch. Is that what we should do?”

  The young man pulled his sunglasses down. His eyes were very young.

  “No, man. People got their homes here.”

  “But they’re just trash, aren’t they? They’re not worth anything.”

  “No, man, they everything they got.”

  “Then we should try to save them?”

  A helicopter diced the air, racing low across the rooftops.

  “No, man. Make ’em better.”

  Crane rocked forward as if he wanted to snatch the words out of the air and pull them to his chest. “All right. That’s what I want to do. I need you to tell me how. But first I need one thing.”

  The young man stared at him over his sunglasses.

  “I need you to listen to me for a few minutes. All right?”

  A hesitation in young eyes, then a nod and, in the sweating faces gathered too closely around them, relief washing outward in circles, transformed as it spread into an unexpected sense of triumph, one small fire put out.

  Crane only spoke for fifteen more minutes, but he had them wrapped around every word. He listened, and when he agreed he told them and when he didn’t he argued and a few of them walked away, but others stayed. They talked and the sun began to set and sirens sobbed in the distance and he listened, descending the church steps to be closer to those who were speaking. The stains under his arms spread down the side of his shirt and his voice got worse until it was a ravaged squawk coming from deep in his chest, and I think he would have stayed there all night if the Secret Service hadn’t finally convinced Duprey to cut it off.

  They drove his car through the crowd to pick him up, and I remember Crane standing by the door, contemplating the people watching him leave, the same light in his eyes that had been there at the Baptist convention, that light that said anything, no matter how hard and how terrible, was possible. I saw that in the right place it held the power of more than his own redemption. He examined the faces watching him very carefully and then nodded and got into the car.

  We stayed that night along Biscayne Bay, a mottled black in the moonlight, boats sliding out of the harbor visible by their mast lights, stars that drifted up and over the horizon to join the constellations. The campaign I had known was disappearing like that, slipping over the edge of the known world. Thomas Crane in Liberty City. Who would have guessed?

  Robin would have guessed. She saw it in him from the beginning.

  I couldn’t let myself think about that. It was time to face the future. I ordered a pair of double scotches from room service and turned on the television. The interview on Dateline had just started. Maureen, alone this time, sitting on the couch across from Couric.

  “In the thirty-eight years I’ve known him,” Maureen said, “I’ve never known him to break his word or to lie. It’s time people took another look at how he cared for his brother after the accident, what kind of son he was to his father—”

  “But what people want to know is, what kind of father was he to his daughter?” Couric asked.

  Maureen had a cup of coffee in front of her and she lifted it carefully with both hands. I remembered the glass of water she held for me in her living room.

  “People have no idea how it was when we first found out I was pregnant,” she said. “The midnight telephone calls, the panic. We talked about it for hours and hours before we reached the decision we did.”

  “You didn’t want to get married?” Couric asked. “When you first found out?”

  Maureen’s smile was rueful, the smile of someone who has made peace with her worst memories. “I was only twenty-two, but I was old enough to know it wouldn’t work. I wanted a simple life. My daughter, a house, a husband who came home at night. I couldn’t see myself in a place like Washington. Everyone knew that was where Tom was headed.”

  “Were you in love?”

  “Oh God, Katie, we were young. We were kind to each other. I’m sure we thought we were in love.”

  “Did he—”

  She raised a hand. “We weren’t meant for each other. The world had plans for him and they weren’t my plans. Are you going to ask me if he proposed? I think he might have tried once. I’m not sure. I don’t know what I would have said if he’d pressed me. I was confused. But I knew it wasn’t right. He didn’t leave me at the altar. He didn’t jilt me. He’s helped me out with money for eighteen years. I like him. But she’s my daughter. Not his. Mine.”

  “What did he say when he came back that first time to tell you he was running for the House?”

  Her face went soft. “He showed up without calling. It was right after I’d put Kara to bed. God, he was nervous. We talked for an hour. He couldn’t stop looking at the pictures of her on the wall. I knew he wanted to ask me if he could go in and look at her, but he didn’t. I don’t remember what he said. Something about how he had been given a chance ‘that could lead to a great deal of personal publicity.’”

  Maureen looked down into her cup.

  “He never asked me to lie. He asked me if I was comfortable with our arrangement. He asked me if this is how I wanted it to continue—her not knowing. But he never asked me to lie.”

  “The Senate?”

  “He was more relaxed. He called first. He brought Kara some clothes. They were all too small, but it was a nice thought. He brought me flowers. He told me he had a chance to run for the Senate and he knew he wanted to take it, but he needed to be sure I still felt the same way. I remember how confident he sounded. I think he knew he didn’t have anything to worry about, but he knew he should ask.”

  They cut to Couric wearing an expression of sympathy and admiration.

  “In his article,” she continued, “Clint O’Connell says there was a third visit.”

  Maureen leaned back on the couch and shook her head with irritation. “Tom was on his way through and he just wanted to talk a little bit, about life, about the way things had turned out for both of us. That’s all. Nothing special.”

  “Did he call you before he ran for president?”

  “He didn’t have to. He knew what the answer would be.”

  “What did you think this year when you saw him on television, in all the magazines and all the newspapers?”

  “I used to read all the stories and laugh. You made it sound so wonderful. Poor boy makes good. The star athlete, the good school. Walking into Springfield. Oh God, what crap. You know what I remember about Thomas Crane? I remember the way his voice shook in grade school if he didn’t know the answer. I remember how he threw up all day before leaving for Saint Aquinas. You know what he wanted to be when he was in grade school? Not president. A teacher. They had the best life he could imagine.”

  She set down her coffee cup and her dry voice grew passionate.

  “When we . . . when I got pregnant, I felt sorry for him. I thought he had less freedom than anyone I’d ever known. That sorry little town had pinned too much on him. You know what the best thing anybody could have done for Tom Crane would have been? Send him back to Europe and tell him not to come back for five years. I was so glad when he found out he
actually liked politics. And when he turned out to be good at it. I thought it was the least he deserved. Now all that’s gone. Because I had his daughter. Because he gave me the best thing I have in my life. Is that fair—”

  I turned the television off and walked to the window. The moon had fallen behind a cloud. A cruise ship moved along the edge of the bay, decks piled up like the layers of a wedding cake, a Fitzgeraldian air of permanent celebration clinging to its slanted smokestacks. I blinked and looked away. We had all traveled like that once. Crane, Robin, all of us. Now we pulled toward shore in an open boat. Now we had only desperate bargains struck with ourselves and others when there was no other choice. Now we felt everything.

  VI.

  THE NEXT morning Crane was up with the dawn, shaking hands on the street and in the coffee shops of Little Havana before the rest of us were out of bed. There weren’t many people on foot, and the befogged members of the pool remember him striding restlessly down the block past windows bright with Spanish advertising outlined in red and blue and orange. His face was palely shaven and stiff as parchment in the early morning, and he spoke in a rasping whisper to the old men in guayabera shirts who took his hand formally, often with a small, unconscious bow, sometimes placing their other hand on his shoulder as they smiled with the comradeship of old soldiers at this man who came of age long after they had lost their country. Their grace seemed to calm him and, after a while, he stopped trying to say much more than his name, nodding to each man, solemnly clasping and holding each weathered palm in his own.

  He stopped for breakfast at a greasy spoon and, after working his way through the kitchen to meet the cook and dishwasher and two children busy sweeping and stacking cans even at this hour, he slid into a booth, and the press watched him tuck into a plate of eggs and Cuban pork with an appetite the likes of which they had never seen, sopping up the yolk with a tostada while he stopped every second bite to greet those who had heard he was inside, and who waited patiently in a line that grew until it reached through the open door.