He ambled away, seeming suspiciously untroubled by losing this round. For a moment I was puzzled about what he meant by “group.” Doug was not the personality type that shared its questions and failings in therapy. Then I remembered how he’d spent his spare time on that project in Oklahoma. He contra danced. Contra dancing, it seemed, was something like square dancing, only, as Doug had informed me once, when I’d confused the two, much more complicated. The figures of the dance were called out as in square dancing, but they were infinitely more intricate, according to Doug. There seemed to be a certain snobbism, in contra dance circles, about how well one could follow the figures and how many one knew.
Doug, of course, knew them all, and deeply resented the times when he was paired, or accidentally paired himself, with a partner not his equal in skill. This was puzzling, because, early in our acquaintance when we didn’t hate each other yet, Doug had freely confided to me that he had taken up this hobby to meet women. I didn’t see how he’d make any big conquests with this approach. Critiquing her dancing is not the best way to a woman’s heart. Back in those early days in Oklahoma—ignoring the considerable demands of his work—Doug would often sally out to contra dances of an evening, only to tell me the next day that the women were not up to his standards in their dancing abilities, that he had spotted such-and-such a one but then been disappointed by her clumsiness on the floor.
After one of these post-contra reports, I had said to him, “Doug, does it matter so much how she dances if she’s nice? If you think she’s cute?”
He had given me a despairing look that implied he couldn’t possibly explain to an ignorant novice.
“No, honestly, Doug. Is dancing all that important in the grand scheme of life? Unless you’re a Shaker?”
“I happen to enjoy it. You don’t know how annoying it is to be paired with an awkward partner who has no business trying figures at that level.”
“Maybe she’s hoping you’ll teach her. Maybe she’s hoping to meet some nice guy.”
“If she wants to learn she can take a class. That’s what I did.”
Such attitudes did much to explain why Doug was still single eight years after his divorce. I doubted if even Louise’s unblockingyour path-to-love course would have worked with Doug. His main pleasure in the ostensible search for the woman of his dreams seemed to be the enjoyment of turning down hypothetical candidates for the job.
Doug’s unruffled good mood seemed sinister to me. After all, the man had a direct line to Jerry Goreman, who’d love to see us all fall on our faces. I resolved not to escalate hostilities if I could help it. Despite my childish wish to aggravate Doug, I didn’t want to cause trouble for Weingould or Tony or Clare. I’d try to be nicer. I’d pretend that Hamner was a mosquito who’d landed on my arm to be flicked away, a cockroach running along a kitchen baseboard that I could zap with one blast of bug spray. I had bigger problems than Hamner, whose revenges were always petty and whose nastiness was limited by his lack of imagination. Maybe he wouldn’t bother us much. Maybe he’d be off dancing.
All day long the nurses came through the strike office, making picket signs, stuffing envelopes for a mailing to other St. Francis employees asking for their support, pooling information about regional hospitals with temporary shifts available. All day long I could hear people murmuring in groups of two or three, saying, “Something could come through before midnight,” and “Clare might still pull this off.” I heard a few asking Kate about her friend Eileen, the one she’d told me about at dinner the night before. Apparently Eileen was scheduled for a full-body CAT scan that day. Kate never flagged in the many tasks she’d set herself, but her narrow little face was tight with worry.
I’d been curious as to why Tony did not sit in on the very last bargaining session, until Kate informed me that there were still some hard feelings from the previous session, in which Tony had publicly referred to Louanne Reilly, the director of nursing, as being “dumb as dirt,” a comment unfortunately picked up by the Providence Journal.
“If Tony could just remember to shut up once in a while,” said Kate. “Not that it really made any difference. Management doesn’t have any personal animus against us. We’re in the way of their business plan, that’s all. In fact, you should see Winslow flirt with Clare.”
“With Clare?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s the kind of guy who yearns after calm, motherly women. Of course, his wife is one of those blond, liposuctioned types without enough body fat to survive two days on a desert island.”
“How’s your friend Eileen?”
“I went over and told her we were about to go out. She said to win one for the Gipper. That’s the kind of sense of humor she has.”
“And the CAT scan?”
“They didn’t tell her why, specifically. But you know they don’t do those to see if you swallowed a safety pin when you were a baby.”
“Maybe the strike won’t last too long, Kate.”
“Keep dreaming. If I were you, I’d get someone back home to ship you another box of winter clothes.”
We got terrific coverage that night. All the network affiliates included us in their top story lineup, and Rhode Island Public Television convened a discussion panel about the St. Francis strike within the larger context of national health care reform on their 10 P.M. show, “Questions in Public Policy.”
We arranged for three prominent doctors on the hospital staff, including their most renowned cardiac specialists, to release a statement saying they sympathized with the nurses’ concerns. A female state senator who had once been a nurse was featured on the late news denouncing mandatory overtime for nurses as “a return to the fourteen hour factory day”—a reference that resonated here in the mill towns of the Blackstone River Valley. Mae Caroll of the Gray Panthers gave a wonderful interview in which she actually uttered the words, “Shame on them! Shame!” The reporter lauded her as “a veteran crusader for social justice.” So much for Doug’s predictions that Mae would be seen as an aged hoodlum.
One station narrated the day’s events over background footage of Clare at the opening of a nursing home two years earlier, holding the hand of a trembling Parkinson’s patient in a wheelchair. After this came a nicely contrasting shot of Winslow leaving the hospital that evening, getting into his Cadillac accompanied by his attorneys, both of whom were plump, very well dressed, and sneering. It’s funny how on television shows, lawyers are always attractive. In real life, the odds are more like one in fifteen. Washington is full of lawyers and yet it is definitely not a town of beautiful men.
The positive press buoyed all of us, but for the most part, we were just geographically lucky. Had we been pitching this strike to the media in Jackson, Mississippi, or Houston, Texas, we’d have gotten nowhere. Here in Winsack, supporting labor was like being Catholic. People didn’t necessarily believe in the cause with the fervor they once did, but it was still what they came from, the venerable if frequently disregarded faith in which they’d been raised.
The next morning’s Winsack Eagle-Gazette made no pretense at neutrality. Their lead editorial was titled “Why we’re rooting for our nurses.” I was dismayed, though, to see a full-page ad taken out by the “Winsack Concerned Citizens for Quality Care.” The ad showed a photo of a nurse, in a cap and uniform-dress of the kind nurses hadn’t worn in years, bending tenderly over the bedside of a wizened old man in an oxygen mask. The headline beneath the picture asked, in seventy two-point type, “Who will be there for him now?” It went on to bemoan the fact that the nurses of St. Francis, “misled by higher-ups at union headquarters,” had deserted their patients to tell experienced hospital administrators how to do their jobs.
The Concerned Citizens were a front group for the hospital. It wasn’t an uncommon trick in labor disputes for the employer to invent a phony community group to feature in ads and direct mail, but how many other people would know that? The ad played up the one point on which we were vulnerable, and we had yet to get more than a r
eserved mention on the Boston stations. Still, it was a decent beginning.
“Great job so far, Nicky,” Ron said when he called me at 6 A.M. “Weingould’s hearing about our initial coverage and he’s very happy.”
“I’m glad he’s happy, Ron, but a little local hostility isn’t going to faze Coventry. They want to make an example of our crowd for the other facilities in their chain.”
“Always so doom and gloom.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“You haven’t asked about the Campsters.”
“Damn. How could I forget them? You know what deep meaning that assignment has for me.”
“Well, you’ll be glad to know that Wendy’s really dazzling Janet. They’re best girlfriends all of a sudden.”
I was sure Wendy made that clear to Ron several times a day.
“Janet’s even having Wendy dog-sit when she goes to Bermuda next month.”
I didn’t envy Wendy that. I had met Jantsy’s three German shepherds—Conrad, Heinrich, and Wolly by name—one ill-fated day when Janet had me drop by her miniature English manor in Potomac with a program layout for a benefit concert for Appalachian folk musicians. I like dogs, but these were big enough to saddle and ride, with expressions so ill-tempered that you wondered if they’d been trained with kicks and blows to hate every representative of the human species. Jantsy did not seem particularly fond of her slobbering pets. Perhaps she kept them on the assumption that they’d protect her from thieves and rapists who might somehow make it out of the city on the bus, coming straight for her house from the T9 stop down the street in order to attack her in her cozy kitchen, which had the approximate square footage of a major pharmaceutical lab.
I didn’t want to compete with Wendy for Ron’s approval. I didn’t respect Ron enough for his approval to be anything but a matter of moral concern should I win it. So I said airily, “Wendy never lets us down. Did you get my message about the mammogram ad concept?”
“Yes, and you’re overreacting. People understand that advertising is exaggerated.”
“Ron, have you seen any of those TV ads about male impotence? They’re as soft and evasive as feminine hygiene commercials.”
“Sometimes you have to shock people into listening to you.”
“If you’re talking about gun control or drunk driving. Not if you want them to do something that’s already scary.”
“If you don’t scare them, they won’t show up for the, er, physicals.”
“Mammograms, Ron. You were at the focus group. When the facilitator listed possible reasons for not participating in the program, what was it that three-quarters of the women there said they agreed with?”
“I can’t remember. You know how many focus groups I go to in a month?”
“It was ‘fear of finding out I have cancer,’ Ron. So why would you think the best approach is to slap that fear six feet high on the side of their local bus stop shelter?”
“The graphic was great. Really eye-catching, with the red and black.”
“Use it for something else. You and I both know it was clip-art you had someone doctor up. And Helvetica Bold isn’t a typeface, it’s an anachronism. Why do you always ask for Helvetica Bold?”
“It’s a nice clean typeface. I like it.”
“Like it on some other campaign.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh.
“Fine, Nicky. I guess I was phoning it in a little. We’re up to our necks in work here.”
“What’s the deadline?”
“We have a little time to play with. They liked our initial proposal. Thanks for that, by the way.”
By the way. I’d given up three weekends for that proposal, just because I thought the project had such merit.
“Let me come up with another concept.”
“How are you going to do that, Nicky? You’ll be lucky to get five hours’ sleep a night as it is.”
“I want to do this. And no offense, but I get this one better than you do, Ron. Who’s the woman here? Who has to stand in the shower feeling herself up every four weeks?”
“Okay, okay,” he said hurriedly. When push came to shove, I could always embarrass Ron into capitulating. He pretended to be such a smooth, sophisticated operator, but underneath he had the shrinking sensibilities of a Tennyson heroine.
I told Ron that the construction trades and the Teamsters had pledged their guys to turn out. The firefighters were all lined up—and the public likes firemen almost as much as they like nurses. Tony had mentioned, in a brief moment of cordiality to me, that most of the lab techs, secretaries, and accountants on the hospital staff would likely come picket with us on their lunch hours. They knew that if nurses were being targeted today, it would be their turn tomorrow.
“Couldn’t be going better,” said Ron.
“Don’t get Weingould too excited yet. This is not going to be a walkover.”
“Did I say I’d promise him an easy victory? He knows what we’re up against. But any good news will calm him down.”
I could picture Weingould pacing his office, barking incoherent questions to Ron and wiping his forehead. He had reason to sweat. If this strike failed, Jerry Goreman would be the first to point out that St. Francis was the sort of expensive disaster that the union could expect if it persisted in the risky venture of hospital organizing. And with Hamner on site feeding Goreman all the dirty details, there was no chance that any mistakes on our end would be missed.
“The scab nurses are going to be arriving any second. Tell Wendy I’m going to need more background on Jet-a-Nurse. Anything and everything she can find. Tell her to try that strike in Seattle three years ago. There was something about a scab there giving a triple dose of morphine after an appendectomy.”
“You’ve got it. By the way, how are you and Boltanski making out?”
“Only slightly better than expected.”
“I heard Hamner is on the scene, too. Are you controlling yourself?”
“For now, but if he gives me any trouble, don’t count on me not to rip him a new one.”
“I wouldn’t blame you, but try not to give him and Goreman any ammunition.”
“They won’t need me for that. Doug’s probably on the phone right now, making St. Francis sound like potentially the biggest labor disaster since the Haymarket Massacre.”
“You’re a pro, Nicky. I know you can handle this.”
Ron was happy with me. For now. Of course, if this strike didn’t end in a blaze of glory, he’d blame me for everything in a mournful, I-expected-better-of-you voice.
12
THE FIRST DAYS of a strike are always exhilarating. There are lots of people on the picket line chanting and shouting, and it seems the whole town has come out to support you. For the people on the ground, who’ve put in months of waiting, it’s exciting to be taking action of any kind, at last.
I went down to picket every noontime, to do my bit and soak up motivation for what promised to be a long haul. The bright bobbing signs and camera lights gave the place a carnival atmosphere. There was a constant invigorating din of beeping cars past the hospital entrance, since a union member named Lester Sinclair had insisted on standing on the traffic island just opposite with a large fluorescent-green sign that read, “Honk LOUD if you support the striking nurses.” The resulting cacophony was cheering, although Kate questioned the wisdom of letting Lester stand where he could startle drivers.
Lester’s strike uniform was a brown corduroy coat, a hat of Russian fur that made it seem as if a chipmunk were nestled on his head, trousers in electric-blue polyester, and work boots that looked as close to hobnailed boots as any modern footwear I’ve ever seen. Someone—his mother?—had appliquéd “Proud to be union” in gold satin letters on the back of his jacket. He was a fearful sight.
That first week everyone came: the Gray Panthers, the St. Jude’s choir, the firefighters and police unions, the faculty of Winsack Community College, and dozens of public school teachers, some of whom rem
embered the big teachers strike of 1978 when it was their jobs on the line and the nurses pitched in. Whole families came. While the sunny dry weather held, we had babies on every shift. Margaret decorated their strollers with huge helium balloons in blue and white.
A police cruiser and an officer or two were there every day, but they didn’t interfere, even when a Mrs. Margot Lemura complained to the Eagle-Gazette that her elderly mother couldn’t sleep in her hospital room because of the noise. A day later the Gazette discovered that her mother was in for a face-lift, which shut that story down fast. The cops stood by casually, leaning against the cruiser and telling jokes, warming their hands on the coffee we brought them and eating more than their share of muffins.
The other representative of the law was the hospital’s daytime security guard, a big, jovial fellow named Bill Fitzgerald, who hung around on the periphery of the picket line with his guard dog, a husky named Punch. Punch’s companion husky, Judy, sometimes appeared with him, but most days Punch was solo. Apparently Judy was a bit of a diva who left the grunt work to her long-suffering mate.
We all liked Bill, who was visibly sympathetic, and Punch was a big favorite too. He was lavished with our best scraps and amenable to petting. Only not in front of Mr. Winslow, Bill requested, since it might have perturbed Winslow to see Punch frisking around our team, trading his virtue for dog biscuits and tummy rubs. The only striker to whom Punch took an aversion was the demon-child Eric. Eric teased the dog endlessly, trying to “coochee-coo” Punch under the chin, attempting to make Punch beg for snacks or learn to play dead. By the third day the poor animal would turn skittish and growly at the very sight of Eric.
Winslow entered and exited the hospital through a side entrance, though sometimes he nodded at the picketers as if to say, “I’m pained that I cannot acknowledge you, but I remain the cordial, mannerly fellow you’ve all come to know.” Other Coventry suits came and went, shadowy figures behind the tinted windows of airport limos. The replacement nurses arrived en masse the day after the strike was announced. With frightened faces, they scuttled out of vans and eventually reappeared in the windows of the hospital, peering out from behind the curtains of patients’ rooms as if they expected rocks to be thrown at them.
The Side of the Angels Page 15