The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  “Many very nice people live in Gaithersburg.”

  “Many nice people live in Moscow, too, but that doesn’t mean we want Johnny to be dragged there. I have a bad feeling about her, Louise. I just can’t help thinking that all elementary school teachers have a little too much of the bully in them. I mean, one of these days she’s going to tell Johnny he has to raise his hand before he goes to the bathroom.”

  Louise ignored me.

  “How did you do, seeing Tony again?”

  I had filled her in during a brief phone call while packing.

  “Horribly. I don’t want to talk about it. It’ll just depress me. Tell me what you’ve been up to the last few days.”

  “Actually, I went with Betsey to see about the wedding flowers. Johnny’s bugged me and bugged me to do something chummy with her, so finally I did that. It didn’t go too well, to tell the truth.”

  Floral wrangles seemed to be the theme of my night. It transpired that Betsey was so enamored of natural simplicity that she intended to carry a bouquet of dried lavender and baby’s breath in her tiny, doll-like hands. Apparently the fragility of dried lavender presented a real challenge, and the florist had doubted Betsey’s chosen arrangement would make it through the ceremony intact. I could see her, shedding dead blossoms all the way down the aisle.

  “She’s such a pill, Louise. There’s a reason why roses are the flower of choice. Is she cheap or something?”

  “No, I think her parents are footing the bill and they’re quite well off. She just has very specific tastes. It’s her big day. I can’t blame her.”

  Louise was being charitable. I knew her opinions on weddings: the gaudier the better. Louise’s wedding, whenever it occurred, was sure to be as flaky as they came, populated by Quakers, Scientologists, palm readers, anti-vivisectionists, and tree spikers—guests from every cause or sect Louise had ever stepped foot in. But whatever her bridal excesses, you wouldn’t catch her in a wilted linen dress like the one Betsey had chosen, or foisting carrot cake on her unsuspecting guests, as it appeared Betsey was planning to do.

  “Betsey asked me if I thought Johnny would agree to get a professional manicure the day before the wedding. I told her I didn’t think he’d be amenable to that idea.”

  Tactful Louise. I’d have laughed out loud. If you marry a mechanic, you’d sure better be okay with grimy fingernails. My father and brothers had always relied on an excellent snot-colored, oil-based concoction by the trade name of Glop, but no matter what you used, there’d be traces of engine oil and dirt that would never come out. It was ingrained in the skin.

  “Louise, don’t you see? It’s happening already. Who does she think she’s marrying here?”

  “Nicky, in my work I’ve seen that it’s not so uncommon for one partner to try to change the other partner at first. Many couples grow out of that.”

  “But we’re not talking about her making an alteration in his table manners. We’re talking about his work, his work that he loves. She’s going to make him feel like a grease monkey.”

  “She must make him feel good about himself somehow, because he’s marrying her.”

  “Her, not me” were the words she didn’t say.

  “Are you speaking to Johnny again? He told me you’d had a fight.”

  “It was nothing. I was a little emotional that night. Hormones.”

  “It’s nowhere near your period.”

  “Work stress.”

  She said she was tired a moment later. After we’d hung up, I ran a bath in the clawfoot tub and lay there thinking about Louise and Johnny, and what could be done to engineer the happy ending they both so richly deserved.

  Betsey was like the murder victims in my Agatha Christie novels. She was like selfish, spoiled Linnet Doyle in Death on the Nile or vain, cheating Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun. Not as attractive or underhanded, of course—just, as they were, overpoweringly in the way. She had to be gotten rid of, but how? Louise was no match for her. Louise would keep kidding herself with men so odd and needy that their very oddness and neediness was a distraction from the fact that she didn’t love them. All the while, Johnny was being frogmarched to the altar.

  When I returned home for Thanksgiving, I vowed, something had to give. Don’t interfere, Ma had said. But I wasn’t so much interfering as inviting fate to use me as an instrument to set things right. Who could say that wasn’t noble?

  9

  TONY ORDERED EGGS over easy, a disgusting dish I’d always hated watching him eat, the egg whites runny and almost translucent. I ordered blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon. Here we were, eating breakfast again together as we had so many times. Lovely.

  Trying to appear not to be trying, I’d gone for a wholesome effect that morning—or as wholesome as I ever get. I wore a boat-necked sweater of dark gray fleece, and a pair of slim-cut charcoal-gray flannel trousers with a silk lining that felt like heaven against my legs. My only jewelry was a tiny dog tag on a pewter chain. Louise had given it to me. If you looked closely, you could see that the dog tag read, “goddess.” Louise has a gift for giving presents that become talismans.

  The morning light wasn’t kind to Tony. Sitting across from him, I could see that the last five years, doing the work he did, had taken a toll. There were faint bags under his eyes that hadn’t been there when I knew him, and lines around his mouth I didn’t remember. He seemed not so much older as exhausted. Part of me was dismayed, but part of me was smug. I’d told him to slow down. Now look at him.

  The morning light wasn’t kind to this town, either. I had forgotten what it’s like in places like this, where the ghosts of more prosperous decades seem to hang in the air around you. On my way to Yancy’s, I’d driven past a hillside graveyard with an elaborate scrolled iron gate and hulking Victorian monuments. Winsack’s rich had once counted on winding up here, side by side with people they wouldn’t object to knowing in the afterlife. Now, except for one plain, modest marker on which someone had placed a vase of red plastic roses and an American flag, the weeds and keeled-over stones made it clear no one ever visited.

  Down the street from Yancy’s, rising four stories high (which was high for Winsack), was one of those old hotels for businessmen with the words “Prospect House: Clean Lodging, One Dollar a Night” still visible on the side of the building. The building was now a center for troubled youth. You could see that the five-and-ten, with its Egyptian-style Deco storefront, had once been a dazzling emporium, complete with a soda fountain sparkling with chrome. Now only the display of potted plants on the sidewalk revealed that the place was still in operation.

  Aside from these shipwrecked remains, the business district consisted of small outfits whose dusty facades made you wonder how they kept going. For example, who patronized the “Topline Tuxedos” shop with its flyblown windows bearing the gold-stenciled motto “Serving Winsack Society Since 1963”? I felt, for a very short moment, sorry for Bennett Winslow with his elaborate black marble fountain in the hospital lobby. His dreams of grandeur were about fifty years too late for this town.

  Yancy’s was quiet at this hour on a Saturday. It was the kind of classic, uncompromising diner that all right-thinking people enjoy. Nothing had been jazzed up or spoiled. There was a luminous greasy film on the tabletop jukeboxes, and you could search the menu until your eyes ached and not find anything healthier than cling peaches in heavy syrup with a scoop of cottage cheese.

  We sat in a big corner booth. At the counter was what looked like a delivery guy on a quick break, and a few booths down were two old ladies who were rather loudly planning a day of shopping at the new mall in Providence. No place in the world makes tougher old ladies than New England does, and these two were prime examples: flinty, soberly dressed, composed and unself-conscious as statues or thoroughbreds, speaking loudly not because they were ill-bred but because, it became clear, they were rather deaf.

  “How’s your bed-and-breakfast?” Tony asked with derision in his tone. Any lodging
but a cheap motel made him feel inferior, reminding him that he came from a coal town where the only restaurants were a pizza parlor and the bowling alley snack bar.

  “It’s gorgeous,” I said, although even this early in my stay I was getting sick of the bright pink moire bedspread and the matching hangings that were reflected, their color shrieking at my hair, in every one of the five gilded mirrors in the room. The mattress was deep and soft, though. I knew I looked fresh this morning, and better for our five years’ separation than Tony did. Take that! I thought, stabbing a stray blueberry.

  “I’ll never understand why you’d stay at a place like that when you could have something with all the modern conveniences.”

  “For the same reason you like those revolting eggs and I like a breakfast that doesn’t include the exciting possibility of salmonella poisoning.”

  He mopped up a last streak of egg yolk and pushed his plate aside.

  “Let’s get down to specifics,” he said.

  “I’m not finished with my food yet.”

  He looked pointedly at his watch, then glared out the window while I speared one small piece of pancake after another, chewing with a ladylike delicacy entirely foreign to me.

  Finally, I wiped my mouth daintily with a paper napkin and said, “Okay, I’m ready. Where’s Clare, by the way? I’m not kidding about needing to speak to her today. The sooner the better.”

  “She was in negotiations all night. Still going on as of her last phone call. You’ll see her soon enough, either way. If talks break off this time, we’re going out as of midnight tonight.”

  “Why aren’t you in negotiations?”

  “No big reason,” he said. “A squabble with someone on the other side’s team, that’s all.”

  I’d have to ask Kate for details.

  He took out a list written in pencil on brown mailing paper. Wendy would have found Tony sadly unprofessional.

  “Here’s what we can get going with, for now,” he said. “I marked your part.”

  “I’m not doing any of Hamner’s make-work, I can tell you right now. I have other clients to juggle and I don’t have time for his shenanigans.”

  “You and Ron are that booked up?”

  His tone implied that he was surprised that there were enough idiots, even in the idiot-crowded town of Washington, to keep Ron and me employed at our sketchy endeavors.

  “This is a busy time of year.”

  He should have remembered that from our days together, though he’d never managed to be there in person to cheer me through the dreaded holiday season with its dozens of social galas on behalf of what Jantsy always called “those less fortunate.” Tony had spent our first December together in Alaska, trying to organize employees of a large bookstore in Anchorage. Some big muckety-muck at the national union had thought bookstore chains might be an easy target. He’d been wrong, but at least Tony had been inside for that assignment, meeting people in coffee shops and hotel lounges. I would never forget the campaign to unionize South Dakota highway maintenance workers the following February. He’d almost lost a toe to frostbite, riding with the snowplow drivers.

  I took up the brown paper list. A drop of egg yolk adorned it.

  “ ‘Declare strike,’” I read aloud. “Okay, good start.”

  “Read silently,” said Tony.

  I read, “ ‘Assign picketing shifts. Meet with state senators. Meet with any possible U.S. senators and congressional rep., or staff. Strike newsletter daily, one page front and back. Pressure on hosp. board. Press outreach.’”

  Next to “press outreach” he had put my name in parentheses. He had spelled it Nikki. He knew I hated that spelling.

  “ ‘Radio PSA possible on questions patients should ask during any hospital stay? Flyers for picket line handout. Letter to editor, for Providence papers. Kennedy?’ ”

  “Good idea, Tony. Patrick Kennedy is excellent on labor issues.”

  “Yeah, but actually I meant Ted. He helped settle that hospital strike in western Mass not too long ago, and the nurses won hands down. This isn’t his turf, but you never know.”

  Tony’s list continued: “ ‘Dirt on Jet-a-Nurse.’ ”

  “What’s Jet-a-Nurse?” I asked.

  “Scab nurses,” said Tony. “This company Jet-a-Nurse flies them in on really short notice from Nevada, pays them around sixteen hundred a week. The replacement nurses keep the hospital going, not at full census, of course, but enough for them to claim to the public that there’s nothing to worry about—come on in for that thyroid operation or whatever.”

  “Are they good nurses?”

  “Some. Some actually think they’re rescuing patients by filling in. On the other hand, some of them just do it for the money and are really lousy. Jet-a-Nurse already has a couple of patient deaths on its hands from other strikes.”

  “We can make that record known. Where are we on testimonials from members and community leaders? Is there a Portuguese community here? Latinos? Any Asians? And we need a few mothers with babies or toddlers.”

  “Mary Grunewald has five kids under twelve,” Tony said. “Husband’s a landscaper, so they’ll have it rough this time of year.”

  “She would be great. We’ll take her picture with all the kids and run it on the front of an eight-by-eleven cardboard postcard with copy on back saying something like, ‘Mary Grunewald listened to her conscience and went on strike. Now Mary’s six kids—’”

  “Five kids.”

  “ ‘Now her five kids may get nothing for Christmas.’ We send it to key opinion makers, business leaders, legislators. No vitriol against the hospital. Just regular nurses and their children suffering on behalf of their ideals.”

  “This makes me want to retch, all this Clara Barton shit,” said Tony.

  “We don’t have a choice, Tony. We have to take the high road.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” he said, and signaled for more coffee.

  “How many of your people do you think will cross the line, Tony?”

  “Not many at first. Eventually, maybe twenty percent. We already have a strike loan program in place. And we’re putting together a list of area hospitals that want per diem nurses, for people who need to pick up work. The other problem will be guilt, of course.”

  “Yeah. I saw Louanne Reilly on the late news last night.”

  “Old Louanne really laid on the schmaltz,” said Tony gloomily.

  Louanne Reilly was the St. Francis director of nursing, who’d appeared on the Channel 8 news to say that any nurse “who chose to honor her professional commitments” would be more than welcome to remain at her post. She was gotten up as a Mrs. Santa Claus type, wearing a nubbly Kmart-ish sweater embroidered with daisies, and drugstore reading glasses on a chain. According to Kate, the woman owned Chanel shoes and Louis Vuitton luggage and did all her shopping at designer boutiques on Newbury Street in Boston.

  The hospital was getting good advice from someone. Reilly’s tone of sorrowful regret was the right note to hit.

  “I’ll keep the strike newsletter,” Tony said. “Clare can record a new hotline update every day. You ghost a few op eds or letters to the editor from state senators and she’ll get them in their hands for approval.”

  “I can do the newsletter, too, if a quick and dirty layout is okay,” I said. “You’re busy enough. And the testimonial flyers. We’ll start simple, just one person, an older nurse, I think.”

  “Ruth Morgeski,” said Tony. “She’ll have them crying in the aisles. Two months ago her charge nurse interrupted her while she was assisting at last rites for a patient. She said Ruth was needed on the floor. Ruth is still fuming about it.”

  Tony talked to everybody. He remembered their units and their stories and their family situations, and what was more, he knew where everyone was in their commitment to the union. He knew who had the guts to wear a union button on his or her uniform, what unit was pissed off enough to sign a petition down to a woman (as ICU had been), which units had the wors
t charge nurses, and which had charge nurses who were sympathetic to our side.

  Tony had no desire to be the guy who ran things from his desk at strike headquarters, waving to the troops from a distance. He would work round the clock on this strike, but he’d still be out there picketing with the rest some portion of every day. It was a job for two or three people and he wasn’t twenty-five anymore, full of youth and the kind of full-throttle youthful energy you don’t pay for later.

  “Ruth wears a Miraculous Medal,” said Tony. “Make sure it shows in her picture for the testimonial. We gotta play our end of the Catholic thing big time.”

  He was so involved in our propaganda planning that he seemed to have forgotten who I was: the woman who done him wrong. It was strange that when everything between us lay in ruins that were no longer even smoking, we still had this, the easy rhythm of our work together.

  But then we had always had that. It was what we began with.

  I met Tony in New York City. I’d been detailed to one of his campaigns by Swinton McClaine. Swinton was working at the time with a loose consortium of interests who wanted to prevent the expansion of a large, prestigious college—whose name I shouldn’t mention—into six surrounding neighborhoods. This consortium, which consisted of businesses, brownstone owners, and community groups, was disturbed that the college was gobbling up real estate and failing to provide adequate security patrols. The college was polluting, too, and its students were loud and inconsiderate in Zabar’s. It was getting out of paying city taxes. It was a bad neighbor.

  Swinton was brought into the picture to assist these civic leaders in sticking it to this respected institution of higher learning any way they could. Our first opportunity lay in fanning the flames of a messy scandal-in-the-making: the way the college treated its clerical staff, whose contract was in the process of being renegotiated. These women were paid so little that many of them qualified for food stamps. They had bare-bones insurance coverage. They were cheated out of overtime by supervisors who instructed them to lie on their time sheets or find another job.