The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  Margaret provided me with the name of the nearest union printer, plus a file with the phone numbers of the local’s executive board and strike captains so that I could bother them at any time, day or night. She had researched alternative hotels and their rates, in case I didn’t find the White Hart to my satisfaction. She’d even typed out a selection of picket line chants for spontaneous use.

  “ ‘Two, four, six, eight, patients before profit rates,’ ” I read.

  “We want to make sure the chants stay appropriate,” Margaret said. “Doug’s been concerned about that.”

  Margaret’s strawberry-blond hair, which could have been luxuriant and shiny, was cropped in a practical pixie cut. She was dressed for action in carpool-driving clothes: a cotton turtleneck with a pattern of tiny frogs, crew-necked navy blue sweater, jeans, and jogging shoes.

  She said, “I think we should have a system for monitoring production. I can keep on top of the printer for you, and I’ve identified three of our members with vans who can help deliver finished jobs if the printer’s lollygagging.”

  “I prefer to deal with the printer directly, but I really appreciate your having the foresight to think of that, Margaret. And those vans could sure come in handy.”

  For hauling the rest of us off to the loony bin after you’ve driven us all crazy, I thought to myself, but I infused warmth into my voice. I bet Margaret’s parents had rarely praised her. She wouldn’t be like this if they had.

  A boy came up and tugged Margaret’s elbow, none too gently.

  “The Coke machine is broken,” he said.

  “This is Eric,” said Margaret. “His mom, Mary Grunewald, is one of our members.”

  Mary was the one Tony had mentioned. A family of five and a landscaper husband. And Eric, if I remembered right, was the tyke who had inked the pornographic messages on my desk.

  “It took seventy-five cents of mine,” said the polite child, wiping his rabbitty nose on the cuff of a much-stained flannel shirt. You got used to members’ kids being underfoot at union offices, but this was one of the most unappealing children I’d ever seen.

  Margaret bustled off to attend to the errant Coke machine, a light of battle in her eye.

  “You have Bozo hair,” he said, turning his attention to me.

  “Haven’t you seen red hair before?”

  “I like blond hair. I would do something about your hair if I were you.”

  “Mine’s clean at least.”

  It’s not that I forget children aren’t grown-ups when I talk to them, it’s that I forget I’m not a child still, being taunted by other children who are mean little beasts.

  “You catch pneumonia if you wash your hair all the time,” said the scruffy child.

  If regular washing predisposed a person to lung problems, this kid was clearly in no danger of an early demise. Eric, whose age I guessed at ten or eleven, had in his brief life achieved a level of dirtiness and seediness beyond the wildest dreams of child anarchy.

  His face was grayish with smudges that must date back a day or two. On his plaid flannel shirt I could discern egg yolk, crusty ketchup, chalk dust, and on the cuffs a slug trail of dried snot. He was skinny, with thin wrists poking out of his sleeves, though by the end of the day I had seen that he was forever eating or demanding to eat. His eyes were narrowed and watery, his nose dripped, and his mouth gaped open a little. Adenoids, maybe, or perhaps he assumed that vacant expression just to annoy adults.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” I said.

  “I got suspended.”

  “Who’d have thought it.”

  “Eric,” said Kate, who had spotted our little tête-á-tête with that sixth sense of hers, which seemed to operate even when she appeared to be absorbed in one of her many tasks, “I thought I told you to clean up that mess you made in the storage room. What did you spill in there, a milk shake?”

  “I was rearranging things better.”

  “Arrange it back.”

  “I have a plan. It’s a good plan.”

  “You heard me. Now.”

  He disappeared, but I had a grim suspicion that we’d be seeing a lot of him.

  “What a devil,” I said to Kate. “I’m getting my tubes tied.”

  “I think he actually liked you,” said Kate. “Normally he torments newcomers unmercifully. We had a nurse in here the other day who’s only been on the job six months and is just getting involved. She was helping Margaret make name tags for a meeting, and she asked Eric to take his outdoor hat, which is an incredibly filthy Bruins cap, off the table so she could spread out. He said, ‘That hat was the last thing my father gave me before he died,’ and burst into tears. Well, Gina reproached herself for a week. She lost sleep over it. Then she accidentally saw him with his dad in the grocery store and asked me if that poor little boy had a stepfather now.”

  I wended my way back to my chair, feeling, between Doug, Margaret, and Eric, that it had been an obstacle course.

  “These came for you,” said Tony, dropping two faxes on my desk.

  “Thank you for doing first aid back at the diner,” I said. “Especially the ice bucket.”

  “Forget it,” he said curtly. “By the way, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tie up the fax machine too much.”

  “Hey, if you don’t want me on the phone all the time, you’ll have to put up with the occasional business fax.”

  “Yeah, business,” Tony said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but while I’m thinking of it I should tell you that Doug and Clare and I met about a press release for tonight. They said you were tied up.”

  “Good of you to look out for me,” he said sarcastically, and walked off. I saw him approach Hamner and say a few short words, then go into Clare’s office and shut the door. Hamner turned around slowly and stared at me, an ill-wishing stare.

  The first of my two faxes was a missive from my mother, received at 9 A.M. that morning. It had been sent by the Advocacy, Inc. office manager, Myrlene. My mother must have dictated it to her over the phone. The nerve of the woman! I’d told Myrlene not to give way to her on such requests, but Ma had coopted our secretary long ago, using a mother’s love as her lever, and now could rely on Myrlene as an efficient guilt conductor.

  In a moment I saw what had put Tony in such a foul mood with me. The fax read:

  Dear Nicky,

  I hope your strike is going well. I will pray that you and the nurses come out the winners.

  As you will be alone in your hotel room at night with nothing to do, just wanted to remind you that we need to come up with something for Betsey’s shower invitations by the end of the week. I know you will think of a pretty and appropriate design.

  Jeremy happened to stop by the other day. He isn’t looking well. He must have lost ten pounds at least since you left him. Of course he asked after you, and was a little upset that you were up there working with that Tony. I told him he had nothing to worry about on that score, and that, thankfully, you had finished with Tony years ago, and wanted absolutely nothing more to do with him and had been very displeased at getting this assignment.

  He asked for your number up there and I gave it to him. I didn’t think that would do any harm. He seems serious this time, so the least you could do is speak with him.

  Just wanted to let you know I had seen him. You can overnight the shower design to me. I am home most mornings.

  Affectionately,

  Mother

  I gnashed my teeth over this epistle, which Tony must have read. It’s impossible to resist reading something once you’ve seen your name mentioned in it. I’d have done the same thing in his place.

  My mother had never liked Tony, though Louise had been won over immediately. Tony was too blunt for Ma’s comfort, and unlike her own sons, he was not charmed by her or cowed by her. From him, she could never expect the courtly deference that she felt was a motherin law’s due. And she suspected him (quite mistakenly) of being a member of the
Communist party—an impression he may have deliberately given just to make trouble.

  Jeremy, on the other hand, played up to my mother from the beginning. He’d paid her muted, thoughtful compliments on her cooking and her home. He’d notice the care with which she arranged a bunch of tulips on the hallway table, or how the new yellow-and-white striped curtains in the kitchen “brought light into the room.” To give him credit, he was quite sincere in these observations, and he could get away with them because the sensitivities my mother would find suspect in an American male—an eye for interior design, or a talent for choosing a pricey necktie—were just part of his classy Englishness.

  What my mother liked most about him was that he was a professional. Not just any old businessman, either, but a professor. In my mother’s imagination, Jeremy had entrée to a world where people discussed Jane Austen over Madeira, surrounded by eighteenth-century portraits, hunting dogs, and family silver.

  She determinedly ignored the uncomfortable facts: that Jeremy was the son of a Methodist schoolteacher and a train conductor, that he’d been raised in proverbially sooty Newcastle, and that he had taken both his degrees not at Oxford or Cambridge, but the University of West Anglia, one of the undistinguished government-funded universities that flourished in the years after World War II. All my mother saw was that he was ravishingly well-spoken, handsome in a style guaranteed to be distinguished in later years, interestingly melancholy, and, above all, respectful and appreciative.

  I could have told her that Jeremy had been making good use of this caricature of an impoverished English peer since he first cleared customs at Kennedy Airport, but I didn’t want to burst her bubble. A real estate mogul who longed to drape me in ermine could not have been more welcome in my mother’s home than Jeremy was.

  “What did he do?” my mother had said when I came over to announce I’d shown him the door. Her first action had been to make a pot of tea and put out some of her rock-hard shortbread. My mother is indeed a terrible cook. Her mother could make a veal scallopini that melted in your mouth and a tiramisu in which the rum and chocolate positively crooned to each other, but Ma specialized in overdone roasts, underdone chicken, watery stews, and singed, saggy cakes from mixes.

  “He screwed around on me,” I’d said, not giving the details because she’d have had the whole story from Louise already.

  “A lot of men run around a little.”

  “Thanks for your sympathy.”

  “All I’m saying is that there’s a difference between a man who slips up once and a man who makes a habit of it. Men are more physical than we are.”

  “Ma, this wasn’t the same as getting plastered at some convention and winding up in bed with someone else. That I would understand, wouldn’t even want to know about. It was five months of creative, repeated lying.”

  “Are you going to dump a successful, considerate, educated man like Jeremy in the trash can because of one mistake? A mistake he’s very, very sorry for?”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You had Dad. He never even looked at another woman.”

  “He knew that if he ever messed around on me, he’d have to face your grandmother,” said Ma placidly. Such a threat would keep any man in line. No afternoon of illicit passion could be worth risking the wrath of an infuriated Neapolitan matriarch with a meat cleaver in one hand and a rosary in the other.

  “Give it time,” Ma said. “You’ll get over it.”

  “I don’t think I can get over this. I can’t trust him. Where am I then?”

  “Trust is overrated,” said my mother. “All this talk these days about honesty in relationships. Honesty this, communication that. It’s nothing but trouble.”

  “You know, Ma, I don’t want to be the heavy. I don’t want to be some prison warden, or some wronged wife all noble and forgiving, like Norma Shearer in The Women.”

  “She gets him back in the end, doesn’t she? You know, there are plenty of other women out there for Jeremy if you close the door in his face. With those looks, he won’t be left alone long.”

  The clear implication being that I, less endowed with attractions, could look forward to a winter of chicken pot pies for one.

  * * *

  Tony had his back to me. He was on the phone, pacing the length of the cord, the way he always did. He turned and met my eye, and turned again, deliberately away from me. How was I going to work with him when he couldn’t even stand to look at me? Thanks for the fax, Ma, I thought. You’re always looking out for your darling daughter, your only daughter, the apple of your eye.

  The second fax was from Ron. It was in memo form and was titled “Preliminary Thoughts on Detroit Breast Campaign.”

  A few months before, Ron and I had landed an account with the Coalition for Women’s Health, a group that focused on breast cancer prevention and treatment. CWH was launching a pilot program in Detroit in which a doctor-staffed van would provide free mammograms at community centers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The coalition had called us in to assist them with strategies to get the word out about the “mammo-van” and to encourage women to use the free service.

  Ron had faxed me his idea for a bus stop ad. According to the memo, it would feature a stylized breast with a red-and-black bull’s eye painted on it, and the tag line, “Breast cancer will hit one in eight women in their lifetimes. Catch this deadly disease before it targets you.”

  I couldn’t leave him alone for a second. How was it that sometimes he could be so brilliant, and other times so obtuse, so offtrack? He would never think of advertising a prostate cancer prevention campaign with posters of a giant limp penis and the headline “It could happen to you. See a doctor or kiss Mr. Willy good-bye.”

  Tony reappeared.

  “I’ll need that press release draft by one,” he said. He grabbed a legal pad from a shelf over my head and stalked off to the food counter, where he stood jotting notes to himself and eating black olives. He’d gotten as far away from me as he could get without leaving the building.

  11

  THE PRESS RELEASE was easy to whip out. The issues were clear, and the two sides so far apart that even a six o’clock news anchor could lay out their differences in a few sentences. In the last hours of bargaining, the hospital had refused to budge an inch on the deal breakers: safer staffing, no forced overtime, proper training of all nursing personnel before they were floated to other departments, and a 2 percent raise. Not outrageous demands, but the hospital continued to react to them as if the nurses had asked to turn the morgue into their own private underground squash court.

  As I wrote, I could feel my blood stirring. I liked clients who were up against real stinkers. I liked the almost-hopeless cases, the stubborn fighters who wouldn’t recognize a useless frill even if they could afford one. In my work life there were too many clients like Jantsy and her summer camp, or the outraged homeowners of Mallard Gardens. Too many clients whose causes seemed feeble and inconsequential, whose connection to those causes seemed a matter of leisure and choice.

  For all Jantsy’s noble hype, I doubted that being granted the privilege of stepping in cow manure on some brisk August morning in Vermont could possibly make a difference in the life of a child who had never had any other privileges at all. I doubted that if Mallard Pond became landfill, our fragile ecosystem or the glorious history of the War of Northern Aggression would truly be the poorer for it. But it made some sort of small, undeniable, concrete difference, what happened on this strike. And so it was beginning to make a difference to me that I was here for it, awful as it was to see Tony, awful as it would be to tolerate Doug and Suzanne and Eric.

  So much of my life was spent in conference rooms and restaurants, at purposeless meetings and diplomatic parlays and staged nonevents. To get up in the morning, you had to feel that along with the 90 percent of your life that was long-windedness and strategy and boredom and formula—the 90 percent of your life that was making a living—that there was a 10 percent that was something e
lse. Something that made you feel you had, from time to time, been one of those who fought on the side of the angels.

  That had been one of the qualities that had attracted me to Tony. He understood the kick I got from the desperate cases, because he was the same sort of sucker for the underdog that I was, and spent a much larger portion of his life at it. No wonder he looked tired.

  Still, I couldn’t think of any job that would suit him better. Union organizers were a funny breed. Tony lived from election to election, contract fight to contract fight. Weingould had offered him a management job at the national office, six times over. But Tony had often confided to me his fear that once he was trapped behind a desk, he’d be dead of cancer or a heart attack in five years. He’d seen it happen to enough friends of his, guys who left the road to take it easy at long last, and then found too late that the road was what had kept them going. These days, when Tony got together with his organizer buddies, it was usually at a funeral.

  Hamner strolled up to my desk with his own four-page version of my press release in his hand and a placid smile. He’d make me acknowledge that I worked for him yet, that smile implied.

  “It needed major changes but you had the seed there,” he said.

  “I guess you’d better talk to Clare, then.”

  I handed him the copy Kate had just brought over, with “Perfect! Set to go,” across the top in Clare’s copperplate handwriting.

  “As you can see, all she altered were a few commas here and there. And Tony signed off too.”

  Tony had tossed the draft at me and said, “Fine. Get it out of here.”

  “We can revisit the whole thing if you like, though,” I said to Doug. “Let’s get everyone together.”

  I beamed up at him, innocently helpful.

  Doug folded up his stapled pages and put them in his vest pocket.

  “Nope. No problem,” he said. “If Clare is happy, I can be happy. And I found a great group here. If I don’t have to fix this now, I’ll have time to give them a call.”