The Side of the Angels
Page 16
Tony did stints on the picket line, too, but never when I was there. He’d review drafts of my flyers and strike newsletters and leave his changes in writing on my desk. Sometimes I’d see him joking with Suzanne, who seemed to me to be always underfoot. Didn’t they need her at her big consulting firm in Boston? Every morning I had to steel myself to look unconcerned when I saw Suzanne consulting Tony about his daily whereabouts, barely pretending that she needed to know for reasons of business. Every afternoon she’d be perched on the edge of his desk for the duration of any short break he could spare, calmly appropriating his time, her low laugh sometimes audible through the din of the strike office.
It’s not that I wanted Tony, I told myself. I just wanted to … even the score. When you meet an old lover, you should be on top of the world. At your goal weight, better dressed than in the days you were with him, more sure of your direction, and nourished by some hidden sustenance. Another man, perhaps, or great professional success, or the simple knowledge that you are lucky as hell to be quit of him.
Instead I was tired and overworked, limping with disillusionment over Jeremy’s betrayal, living out of a suitcase. Suzanne was living out of a suitcase, too, of course, but it must have been a different sort of suitcase than mine. She remained beautifully groomed, with a varied wardrobe that it must have taken six bellboys to haul up to her hotel room.
If I’d been an objective observer, I’d have admitted that Suzanne and Tony made a good-looking pair. Suzanne stood about five foot five, and had those finely drawn features, that effortless slimness. She made Tony’s stocky build and blunt nose and chin look rugged and muscular.
He’d never been so nicely set off when next to me. I was too tall to gaze up at him admiringly, as Suzanne did. And while I was no Brunhilde, I was definitely too sturdy to lay my hand on his arm very, very lightly when asking a question, as if it were a rose leaf that had just drifted there.
I’d have liked to tell Suzanne that Tony might seem like Secret Agent Man now, but she should see him when he had a cold. A sniveling baby, that’s what he was, lying on the couch and sipping ginger ale through a curly glass child’s straw. His wandering life might look glamorous and daredevil now, but wait until she had a family christening to attend and Tony was off in Gadsden, Alabama, busy searching through trash bins for the employee list of some chicken processing plant so that he and his crew could start approaching them on their off hours about joining the union.
One day Kate sent me to find the industrial-size staple remover, which Tony kept locked away because Eric had been caught with it too many times, inflicting damage on carpeting and furniture.
“I can’t just go into his desk drawer,” I said as Kate handed me the key.
“We have three thousand petitions here in these cartons, we need to get at them, and I’m not ruining Margaret’s scissors to pry them open. She’d kill me.”
When I opened the drawer where Tony hid the staple remover, a photo slipped from the space between the drawer and the desk frame and landed at my feet. It was a photo of Tony and Suzanne. Some kindly passerby had evidently snapped them arm in arm at a roadside produce stand, bushels of apples and corn at their feet. Suzanne was holding a makeshift bundle of wildflowers. They were laughing into the sun, which struck gold lights in Suzanne’s hair. Suzanne was wearing trousers that resembled riding breeches (though I had never heard that she rode and doubted that she did), and a soft tweed jacket with a nipped-in waist. She had jazzed it up with a large silver horseshoe pin in the lapel, which on anyone else would have appeared hopelessly dowagerish, but on Suzanne looked whimsical.
Tony’s coat I knew well, a dark green corduroy with patches at the elbows. I remembered walking in Rock Creek Park with him one chilly autumn day and his insisting on lending me this jacket because I had only a sweater. He’d said I’d looked better in that jacket than he ever did. He’d said I was beautiful.
I turned the photo over. On the back was a note in angular, precise handwriting: “Tony, a memento of our afternoon, not that I’ll forget it.”
I don’t know how long I stood there, but Kate was at my elbow before I could cover for myself.
“What have you got?” she said. She read the inscription.
“Oh,” she said.
“I wasn’t spying. It fell out.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were. Are you okay?”
I grabbed the staple remover and slammed the drawer shut.
“It doesn’t matter a bit to me who Tony’s porking.”
“Nicky.”
“It doesn’t.”
“He’s just passing time with her, Nicky. She would never fit into his life, and he would never fit into hers.”
“Who does fit into his life? No one ever could, not the life he leads, so it might as well be Suzanne. I’m just temporarily bitter, I guess. It’s not fair. It’s not. Tony’s romping around with Holly Golightly here draped all over his arm and I’m facing Christmas and New Year’s Eve solo.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions about how well Tony’s doing. I have more hope for you than I do for Tony, romance-wise,” said Kate.
“What in the world would lead you to feel like that? Not the photo we just saw. Not my love life, God knows.”
“I have more hope for you because you want the real thing. Lots of women would have taken this Jeremy of yours back by now. You’re not satisfied with that, which means you’ll find better than that.”
“While Tony doesn’t know his happiness is shallow and fleeting. Poor, poor Tony.”
“Tony’s gotten lazy. You just have to look at him to tell. He’s not trying with Suzanne. He’s letting her care about him. I’d guess that for the last few years, that’s been his attitude toward women, and it’s starting to show. Pretty soon it will be obvious to Suzanne, too.”
“What will be obvious?”
“That Tony just takes whatever comes over his desk. So to speak. Now come pry open these boxes with me. It’ll relieve your feelings.”
Tony ignored me with chilling completeness, but thanks to the kinder, gentler approach Ron had asked me to adopt, Doug hounded my steps with lamebrained ideas: a sit-in at the state house that would stall government operations for days and land us on the evening news as heroes in the great New England civil disobedience tradition of Henry Thoreau. A sing-along in front of the mayor’s office, even though the mayor already supported us. A virus-laced e-mail chain letter that would flood Winslow’s in-box and paralyze his hard drive.
I began to regret my efforts to be nice to Doug. He was learning the tin whistle and afflicted Kate and me with squealing rehearsals of “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowing in the Wind” for performance at some future strike rally. He had somewhere acquired a button-making machine and was convinced that we no longer needed to order buttons from our supplier, since it would take a mere two thousand man-hours to produce our own. He talked to reporters freely any time I was out of the office, improvising quotes that predicted, variously: an immediate end to the strike, a winter-long strike, or a strike stretching out past the millennium, depending on his mood that day.
To Hamner, I was a not-very-respected but convenient sounding board, a carping but graciously tolerated nag who preferred talking points to creative spontaneity. To Tony, I was simply a noise that would go away if he covered his ears and hummed. Tony made an art of avoiding me. When I crossed his line of vision, his eyes slid over me. When I drew near his desk to ask a question, he immediately picked up the phone. If I entered the break room for a cup of coffee, he left it as if summoned by telegram.
A week into the strike, I finally caught up with him as he was rushing out of the office, on his way to a meeting with one of the Department of Public Health officials who were setting up a monitoring office at the hospital. Tony was supposedly going to clue in the public health officer about the potential dangers to the remaining St. Francis patients from sloppy replacement nurses. We were getting this opportunity only because the guy was
one of Clare’s third cousins, and I wanted to make the most of it. But Tony wasn’t really up to snuff on the subject. How could he be? He hadn’t studied up on the material I’d given him, or even opened the folder full of damning research on Jet-a-Nurse that I’d left on his desk. I’d offered to prepare him a fact sheet, and he’d said, “I know what I’m doing, Nicky. Don’t bug me.”
Tony was in a foul mood that day. He’d been on his feet all morning, talking with his strike captains, revving them up, answering their questions, easing their anxiety as well as he could without being dishonest. At the end of the meeting, Hamner had insisted in trotting out a list of do’s and don’ts for the picket line, including an objection to Lester’s sign and attire. He remarked that Lester did not “reflect the dignity of this union.” This comment was met with a hostile silence, and Tony had had to prolong the meeting another half hour to get his people back to the level of energy and optimism at which he needed to leave them.
“Nice work, Doug,” he’d said after everyone had left.
“We have to be conscious of how we’re coming off in the media,” Hamner replied. “Those shots of that Lester guy in his deerstalker cap on the news last night were ridiculous.”
“Guess what, Doug? Folks up here like that sort of thing. It’s real. As opposed to you, in a suit, pulling out some Ross Perot flow chart.”
The day before, Doug had taken an interview with the Channel 8 evening news against my specific instructions, and had waxed eloquent and incomprehensible on the economics of the U.S. health care system. I was out of the office making our case at an editorial board meeting in a neighboring town, or I would have tackled Hamner to the ground before letting him act as spokesman. Most unfortunate was the way that his mustache seemed to acquire a life of its own on camera, twitching out of sync with his words in a manner that recalled Japanese animation.
“There are people back at the national watching this strike,” said Hamner. “We have a professional image to maintain.”
“I guess we’d disagree about what’s professional, Doug,” said Tony. “Lester is out there every day when you’re in here adding special scrolling banners to the website.”
Hamner flushed purplish.
“Lester is ridiculous. He’s an accident waiting to happen.”
“At least he’s walking the walk.”
“I hope you realize that this isn’t a lone hand you’re playing, Tony. Or you either,” he added angrily, as he saw me cracking up out of the corner of his eye.
“Come on, Doug,” I said. “You sound like an outtake from High Plains Drifter. Lighten up. We’re on the same side here.”
“If we’re on the same side, why are we stalled at local coverage? Why aren’t you getting us national press?”
“We got the Boston Globe. We haven’t been out long enough to rate national coverage. Give it some time.”
“How much time? We should be thinking of something we can do to make the news. Where’s our celebrity rally? We need an attention grabber.”
“Charlton Heston said he’d clear his calendar if we were real nice. He might even lend us a few AK 47s for next time Winslow pokes his head out of the building.”
“Be that way,” said Doug, gathering his meeting notes together. Doug always spoke from notes at meetings, as if he were Henry Kissinger. “You, too, Boltanski. I’m only trying to keep you from making some big mistakes.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” said Tony. Hamner flounced away. Few men can flounce, but Hamner did.
I’d had so many good intentions. In our most recent conversations, I’d asked Doug about the vacation cabin he was building in Tahoe, his views on reforming Social Security, and even his advice on whom to pick for our first testimonial. But it was no use trying to be nice to Doug. The second he felt threatened, he went for the jugular. He’d hit home, the little worm, with his comments about national press. I hadn’t come through in a big way, not yet. But just yesterday I’d had a promise from one of the news-hour shows that they’d take a meeting with us if their schedule unjammed a little.
“A minute of your time, Tony,” I said.
“Do you have to antagonize him, Nicky? I can fight my own bat-tles.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Hamner is on the phone to headquarters eight times a day complaining about how you’re running this strike, and he’s in that office with Clare the rest of the time telling her just how much he admires her, even if you don’t always appreciate her leadership and vision. Or else he and Suzanne are baby-sitting each other, holed up at Yancy’s, with Doug telling her how he rode the Freedom Bus back in 1964, even though he was only ten years old then.”
“I know all that. Suzanne and Clare can see through him, I’m sure. And so can Weingould.”
“But Goreman?”
“Let me worry about Goreman. And about Hamner. Don’t declare World War III on the guy in public.”
“Fine, as far as you’re concerned, Tony. But don’t think for a minute I’m going to let him take shots at me. How noble do you think I am?”
“Believe me, I don’t think you’re noble. Did you want something? Because I have this health department guy and then the firefighters, and I’m late already.”
“I’ll walk you out and tell you. By the way, if you’re going to the firefighters, see if you can get five or six of them for a half-page Gazette ad I had in mind. I thought we’d get some of the teachers, some of the firefighters, some of the seniors, some of the moms, and do a big group photo with a head like ‘We trust our nurses to tell us the truth about our community’s care. Don’t let them be silenced.’ Can you float that idea and see if we can get some volunteers for the photo? See if you can include a few Irish-Italian hunks with blue eyes and black hair and broad shoulders. That sort of look.”
“Fireman fantasies? I think you’ve been watching the late-night cable channel at your hotel a little too much.”
“It’s a bed-and-breakfast, as you know, and she doesn’t have cable.
Unlike some of us, I don’t stay awake until three A.M. watching USA Up All Night on the off chance they’ll flash some side boob.”
“Was there something else?”
He was stuffing a fistful of papers into the weathered leather briefcase he’d picked up at the Goodwill when he first started as a union rep. Back then, he’d reassure his members by striding into grievance hearings and pulling “exhibit” after exhibit out of the bottomless case. Over the years, the briefcase had acquired tiny rips and frays at the seams, as if rats had been gnawing at it. The lock had broken long ago, and the leather handle hung by one hinge. But Tony still lugged it around.
“I have some new stuff for you on Jet-a-Nurse, Tony. You should use it at this meeting. A wrongful death suit in a strike in Pittsburgh, plus my assistant got a line on four doctors from two separate strikes who are willing to talk about how crummy the Jet-a-Nurse replacements were.”
“Later, Nicky.” He didn’t even congratulate us on the doctor find, a miracle of determination on Wendy’s part.
“Tony, at least show the public health guy this clip.”
I waved the newspaper clipping in his face. It had a photo of an infant’s scrunched-up face in grainy black-and-white. The headline read, “Striker replacement blamed in baby’s death.”
“See? A Jet-a-Nurse in a strike in Portland, Oregon, a few years back fails to properly monitor a newborn with breathing difficulties. She sends the concerned mother home with the infant, tells her that the child will ‘perk up’ after a week or so. The baby, who actually needs a complicated lung surgery, goes and dies two days later.”
“Do you have to sound so gloating about it, Nicky?”
“Don’t try that on me. Remember that grievance in Tennessee with the state employee who had the heart attack while his boss was yelling at him? You had the guy gasping and wheezing in front of the hearing officer until he got awarded double back pay on the spot.”
“I have limits at least.”
“Have you heard of libel, Nicky?”
“Have Weingould’s lawyer check it out if you want to wait on the press end, but open your mouth in this meeting or I’m coming with you. You haven’t even looked at the file. We’ve got plenty to support a public warning about Jet-a-Nurse.”
I shoved the folder Wendy had overnighted me into his hand.
“You know, Tony, I’ve been asking you to review this information for three days now.”
“Doug says it’s too negative, and he may have a point.”
“Oh, boy. You’re taking Hamner’s advice now?”
“Clare thinks it may be alarmist, too.”
“What a surprise. I wonder where she imbibed that opinion.”
“You were the one who kept talking about how we have to take the high road, Nicky.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t raise valid, substantiated concerns about the track records of the people taking care of our patients. Ham-ner has Clare so hypersensitive about a clean campaign that you have to wonder if he’s trying to muzzle her.”
“I wish I could muzzle someone,” said Tony.
“This is good stuff, Tony, and you know it.”
“If I agree to bring a few of these things up with the health department guy, will you leave me alone?”
“My pleasure. And bring that file back. It’s my only copy.” “Yeah, yeah.”
As he walked away, I saw that the backs of his lace-ups were scuffed thin, but the heels were in excellent condition. I remembered why. Instead of buying new shoes, he just had the heels replaced repeatedly. Tony had a good union pension and a fat savings account, but he was so scared that the Great Depression would return that he never opened his wallet for a luxury like proper footwear.