If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “How can you say that, when you’ve just asked me that question?”

  She spread her fingers against the wall and pushed herself erect.

  “I’ve made so many mistakes,” she said.

  “Wait—”

  “No, listen. I’m not that good with people. I know that. I expect too much from them. I’m too hard on them. I’m too hard on them when they let me down. I know this, Cliff. I know it.” Her hair snapped across her eyes. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I made a mistake when I left you for the first time. I made a mistake with Danny. Do you know how scared I am of making another mistake? I can’t screw up again. I have to be careful. I have to be smart. When you started to push, I needed time. I needed to take it one step at a time.”

  I began to say something and she stopped me by placing a hand against my chest.

  “I shouldn’t have said it in the car that night. Not then. I was scared to death. I wanted you to stop and think. Think about him. Think about what you were doing. Think about us. I did. It’s true. I hoped it would help you see.”

  She touched my cheek with the back of her hand.

  “But I never loved anyone like I did you. When I said it I meant it. That’s me too, you know. That’s the good part of me. You should have known that.”

  She held her hand against my cheek, looking away when it fell so I couldn’t see her eyes. She walked back down the hall to the room where she had been working, passing in broken reflection along the bronze mirrors. I watched her until she shut the door and then I was standing alone in a ballroom, a sea of empty chairs sweeping out to an empty podium, my own reflection the only crowd left.

  We made our way east that day, all the way to Buffalo for the American Legion convention, where they listened to Crane, a fellow veteran, with surprising respect. Afterward we turned around and flew back toward Madison, Wisconsin, leaving long after midnight. We were making a short bus trip through the Midwest and then heading toward California and who knew where after that. I wouldn’t be along to find out. I had one more plane trip out west and that was it.

  It didn’t matter. All the things that mattered were finished. I sat in my seat against the bulkhead and tried to pretend it was already over, but I found myself taking everything in. The pennants and cartoons and bad drawings taped up and down the plane. The smell of old food and socks and damp luggage. The peculiar sound of strained voices and tape recorders screeching backward and keyboards clicking like madly chattering clocks, time always running out. I could see Randall Craig in the galley flirting with one of the stewardesses, running his hand through his silver-and-black mane. Nathan was sitting backward in his seat, talking to Kathy Stanton of the Dallas Morning News, who leaned against the next row, drinking a beer. Myra had her feet up against the bulkhead in front of her, intently focused on a magazine. I heard a cork pop and Duprey appeared in the doorway of the galley, holding three bottles of wine in each hand.

  “Courtesy of the Crane for President campaign,” he announced. “Celebrating yet another day in which every thrown object failed to find its mark.”

  Cheap plastic wineglasses made their way backward. The delirium of the last few days took hold. A paper fight raged in back among the photographers. A correspondent for ABC News moved through the jammed aisle with his camcorder pressed against his eye, taping testimonials to John Starke’s sense of humor. “I have heard he finds the antics of small furry animals amusing,” someone said. They were trying to sing in harmony in one row, but could hardly be heard. The noise rose everywhere until the plane rang like a cocktail lounge. Stuart stood in the front of the aisle.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen, damnit. It’s come to me.”

  He rose in his seat, bottle in hand, speaking in measured cadences, waving the bottle like a conductor’s baton.

  “A hard time we had of it,

  “At the end we preferred to travel all night,

  “Sleeping in snatches,

  “With the voices singing in our ears, saying

  “That this was folly.”

  They pelted him with napkins. Nathan watched in wonderment. “What was that?”

  “Eliot.” Stuart swigged from the bottle. “And Stuart Abercrombie.”

  “Really. Eliot. He writes for the Examiner, right?”

  All this, all this I found myself pressing into the pages of my mind, trying to hold on to it a little longer.

  More than an hour later, most of the plane was asleep when Steven Duprey wandered back and knelt beside my seat, the face behind the beard expressionless.

  “He’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  “What?”

  “He’d like to talk to you. You’re a reporter and he is the candidate you are covering and he would like to talk to you.”

  Crane stood by his seat. He had nicked himself shaving and a spot of dried blood clung to the side of his chin. His eyes were bruised with exhaustion, like my own, but he seemed wide awake. Duprey walked down the aisle to leave us alone. Everyone else was asleep.

  “My people are treating you all right?”

  The simple courtesy of the question seemed impossible to navigate. I felt like a prisoner who’s been in solitary confinement suddenly hauled blinking into the light.

  “It’s been very professional.”

  Crane glanced awkwardly at a scratched-out copy of a speech on the table in front of his seat and then into the back of the plane.

  “I told them to make sure you were treated properly.”

  “Thank you.”

  He nodded formally, a deracinated, empty gesture, one it once would have been impossible to imagine without a playful glint in his eyes.

  “My brother said you visited him again.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you have a question, maybe you’d like to ask me?”

  This was over for me. It didn’t matter anymore. I just wanted it to end.

  “I have a thousand questions. I don’t have one.”

  Crane nodded again and we stood there.

  “There is one thing I would like to tell you,” he said. “Off the record.”

  It was ridiculously long past the time to argue about degrees of candor between the two of us. It was over. I wanted this to be as painless as possible.

  “Sure.”

  “I would like to have known Kara. My daughter. I would like to have known her.”

  He sipped from his Diet Coke and his face was tired and worn, the cheeks hollow at the end of one long day and the start of another, but he was composed. There seemed to be no anger, but when he looked at me again I saw a sadness I wanted to believe I finally understood.

  “I would like to have known her. I made Maureen send me pictures. I asked about her. She seemed like a nice girl.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. A nice girl. A pretty girl in a blue dress in a silver frame. A pretty girl with your eyes.

  “I don’t owe you an explanation, Cliff. I’m not sure I owe one to anybody. Maybe. Maybe I owe the whole country one. But not about her. I don’t owe anyone an explanation of how I felt about my daughter. But you’re the only one here who has met her, and I thought once we understood each other a little bit. So I wanted you to know.”

  “I’m sorry. I never really met her. I bumped into her in the doorway once. I only spoke to her mother.”

  Crane set the Coke can down on the table and stared out the window, as if I had disappointed him.

  “That’s right. I knew that. All right. Thank you.”

  I started toward the back of the plane and then I thought of one small mystery that hadn’t been answered, and I thought somehow it might make things better if I asked.

  “I have one question. Off the record.”

  He waited.

  “The third time you went to see Maureen, what was that for?”

  For a moment I thought he was going to dismiss me, wave me to the back of the plane.

  “Off the record,” he said.

  “Yes
.”

  “That was after Angela and I found out we couldn’t have children.”

  I didn’t understand and he could tell.

  “I wanted to see my daughter. I wanted a chance to look at her, even if it was in the dark, just for one minute. She was the only child I was ever going to have.”

  The engines thrummed under our feet. The plane flying through the night, streaking above a sleeping country, racing toward the end.

  “Now you can, you know,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Now you can get to know her. There’s nothing stopping you anymore.”

  That caught him by surprise. His world had been one way for so long that even when it was broken apart, I guess he assumed it could only be reassembled in its old shape. He blinked, and his hand felt the side of his cheek absently until his eyes settled on mine.

  “Maybe. But I would like to have made that decision for myself. Good night, Cliff.”

  Nathan was awake in the seat next to mine. He felt compelled by some sense of delicacy to wait at least ten seconds after I sat down.

  “My God, what was that about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jesus, Cliff. Come on!”

  “Nothing. Really. He wanted to know if the staff was treating me all right.”

  He squirmed. “Cliff, really. Come on. Crane wanted to talk to you. You were up there for ten minutes.”

  I leaned against the bulkhead. The senseless rush of air on the other side was reassuring.

  “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t being mistreated.”

  Nathan seemed about to argue and then he slumped in his seat.

  “You’re a lying bastard. But I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “No. I don’t suppose it does.”

  When Nathan was snoring quietly I sat up. I could see the back of Crane’s head through the galley. It was impossible to tell if he was asleep. There was only that dark crown of hair turned toward the window. The scene was so familiar. I had seen him like this so many nights, so many nights I had pondered his thoughts, pondered his life, until I thought I could step inside his memories, his dreams, his fears. But they were always my own. They were mine all along.

  IX.

  WE DROVE south from Madison, looping into Iowa before turning north. The chill of winter came early that fall, a dreary taste of afternoon light shut down by clouds, a wind rising in the evenings that howled backward out of December, the skittering of leaves, a spattering of rain, a taste of ice upon the tongue. We rode west and north and the people waited for us in small towns where we arrived with the weather.

  Thomas Crane wore his collar up and stood on makeshift stages among hay bales and American flags and shouted into the wind, and the people huddled deep in their down jackets, chins tucked into the collars, staring up at him through their eyebrows, their gathered breath rising like the steam of a locomotive.

  Watching part of his army weep when forced to retreat at Fredricksburg, Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war be so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” I thought of that in Blue Earth, Minnesota, where they lit torches among glacial rocks erupting from the frozen earth. The flames turned the crowd a fiery red, and when Crane spoke they seemed ready to march with him to the ends of the earth.

  Myra, who was doing pool duty, remembers he took a particular joy in all the familiar gestures of campaigning that night, the T-shirts handed him, the pictures, the notes, the mothers who held up babies bundled up like logs in their snowsuits.

  “If they don’t elect me president,” he whispered to her, “I’m going to come back here and run for county commissioner.”

  And I think now that is too simplistic an image, another mistake, a romantic one, as bad in its own way as the others. In Springfield that week they were planning a series of ads questioning the president’s honesty. They were working on a strategy to force another debate. They were talking about how to raise and spend millions of dollars through loopholes in the campaign-financing laws. They were back and they were fighting and it was as clouded and murky a route as it always is. Nonetheless, he was out there, facing the country’s restless, always shifting desire. He was trying and he was happy again.

  I saw Myra when we were waiting to get back on the buses. She wandered up holding a cup of coffee in both hands.

  “You never told me where you went that night,” she said.

  “I went looking for Thomas Hart Crane.”

  She stared with me into the crowd, tossed her coffee cup toward a trash can and plunged her hands deep in her pockets, glancing up at the gray clouds with a sour look of distaste.

  “You know how everybody has their favorite Elvis? Some like the skinny Elvis, some like the Blue Hawaii Elvis, some like the TV special Elvis. Well, I always liked the early Vegas Elvis best. You know, before he turned into a blimp, but when he was already wearing the white leather jumpsuits with the fringe. That, to me, is Elvis.”

  I looked at her.

  “The thing is, they’re all Elvis, every one of them,” Myra said. “They’re all him. You just pick the picture you put up in your head.”

  It took a while but I smiled. Myra looked at the rocks.

  “This is kind of a beautiful place actually. We have seen some country.”

  We had seen some country. I thought of my father and his train searching for the coast. I had been there and back a dozen times and if there was nothing else, there would always be that.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Myra grimaced. “For what? Being dumb enough to stand here with you in the cold? I’ve got to get to work.”

  She turned on a chunky black heel and marched toward the buses. I noticed the row of Betty Boop eyes running down the back of her stockings, each startled separate lash clearly outlined on white cotton.

  We drove on to Minneapolis and I remember Nathan chattering in the back of the bus. “No, really, he’s moved back up here by five.”

  “So what?” a voice said. “If any state in the Union goes Democratic it would be Minnesota.”

  “Yeah, but he’s closing across the East. He’s even in Illinois and Michigan and he’s up in New York by a point.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He’s gaining on the West Coast too. I tell you he’s only down three in Washington—”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, listen—”

  I sat up that night until the sky turned slate gray, and I thought about Robin and the first days in the snow in New Hampshire and the long glorious ride through the primaries and balloons falling from the ceiling in Manhattan and the night she came to my room in the neon light risen from Times Square and a road that seemed to wrap itself around every bend in the country, course through every city and on into nights lit by a glow along the horizon. I thought about the possibility for happiness I had held in my hands without understanding, and then I couldn’t think about it anymore, and I watched the buildings step out of the darkness and straighten themselves against a gray sky.

  We rode downtown to the Target Center that morning. The bus clattered to a halt and Myra stood up in the row behind me and grabbed her bag from the overhead bin. She started to reach for mine, saw I wasn’t moving, and stopped.

  “Aren’t you going out?”

  “No, I think I’ll let this one pass. I’m feeling a little under the weather.”

  She stood in the aisle looking at me, but the doors were creaking open and the reporters behind her were pressing forward.

  “I’ll keep an eye on things,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  Bodies filing past, cameras and hips jostling the seat. Then it was me and the driver. He glanced at me in the mirror above his head, and I saw his dark brown eyes floating in a rectangle. Snow fell on the other side of the window. I slid down in my seat, placed my head against a fresh part of the glass. I could feel ice melting against my cheek. When I closed my eyes I heard the idling diesel, a sound like something stirring i
n the earth.

  The bus moved and I opened my eyes. The driver was pulling farther up the curb. The speech was over. The crowd had filled the plaza on both sides of the street, touching Crane’s shoulders, reaching for his hands. I thought I saw Robin in the knot of staffers trailing him.

  I staggered into the aisle and out the door. The cold hit my face and I took a deep breath. Crane moved slowly, snow falling around him, falling in his hair, his eyelashes. He was smiling. I saw a skinny blond woman again, briefly, and I started to push my way along the sidewalk, grabbing strangers by the shoulder, shoving them aside. It was hard to move, but Crane was going so slowly I was catching up. I saw Robin looking absently into the crowd, holding her hair back against the wind.

  Crane stepped into the street, standing in the open, waving. In the confusion the rope line along the other curb had come down and the crowd spilled toward him, calling his name. He turned, and in five long strides he was there, reaching out as if hurrying to an embrace. I never heard the shots. There are some reporters who claim they did, others who say the sound was muffled in the snow and the noise of the crowd. But I know I never heard them. I only saw him stumble backward and saw the Secret Service swing forward like a gate, then the crowd turning, reaching for something black that floated across the collage of bodies for one blurred instant. I saw Thomas Crane stumble. The snow blew sideways and he fell forward, one hand coming up to his chest as if he had just remembered he left something in his breast pocket, a look of mild surprise and then sadness, as if someone had let him down terribly. He fell in a graceful arc, the Secret Service falling toward him to cover his body, so there was this feeling of a house of cards tumbling in on itself, or maybe of a forest all crashing to the same spot. He fell and for a moment he was clear, hanging in the air and you could see his hand on his chest, a half-formed word on his lips, and behind him, his wife, frozen in horror, her hands clenched by her side so hard that later she would be treated for the nail cuts in each palm. He fell past an outflung arm and a bending knee and then he was gone, hidden beneath the body of an agent and the collapsing swirl of other agents crouching, turning, pulling out submachine guns, and the crowd descending on the gunman, the poor, sad man who prayed to God before he pulled the trigger, prayed to God to give him the strength to save us from this Godless man.