The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  “You didn’t ask him in?” said my mother.

  The house was quiet. I could hear the game playing behind the closed door of the den. Once in a while Joey or Johnny gave a half-strangled shout at a touchdown. My mother barely used the den since my dad’s death. It had been his room, the only room in the house besides the garage where he could do just as he liked. I think one of the reasons my dad loved my mother was that deep down, my mother knew she was a bit much and that any man would have needed to get away from her once in a while to save his sanity. She never barged in on him in the den, and she never interrupted him when he had his head poked inside a car. In some ways, my mother was an extremely wise woman.

  In some ways.

  “Here it is, a holiday, and he’s far from his family, and you don’t invite him in for coffee and a little more pie?”

  “Ma, he’s English. They don’t even have Thanksgiving, remember?”

  “He didn’t look good, Nicky. Is he eating? He didn’t eat much.”

  “How’s he supposed to eat when all of you are watching him like he’s a zoo panda in heat?”

  “I think you’re being a little hard-hearted. The man is clearly distraught.”

  It was no use fighting. Instead, I put my arm around her and walked her down the hallway to the kitchen. I said, “Ma, let’s talk about you for a change. Tell me about your date, about this wonderful Ira.”

  In the kitchen we found Louise drying the good wine goblets with a felt cloth. We made a big pot of tea and my mother and Louise discussed the virtues of Ira Stern, a former estate planner who now only took on a few favored clients, but who was very witty on the intricacies of the tax code and the inheritance penalty. According to my mother, he danced beautifully but not too showily, he played rummy but not canasta, and he’d voted a straight Democratic ticket since Truman beat Dewey. According to Louise, he’d been a good family man, was a loving grandfather of three, and couldn’t wait, he’d said to Louise during her post-date check-in call, to see my mother again.

  “I think he’s under an illusion about me. I think Louise made me sound too good to be true,” said my mother, who’d never been given a compliment without wanting to disown it.

  “I’m a very honest person,” said Louise, “so I told him you were wonderful.”

  They smiled at each other. I was glad my mother had Louise. Sometimes, affection between aunt and niece is easier than affection between mother and daughter. If it made me a little jealous, a little regretful, it also relieved me of the burden of being the sole repository of my mother’s feminine hopes. If it seemed my marriage prospects were so dim that I’d need to use a walker by the time I made it down the aisle, my mother could always dream of Louise being married sometime soon in a hokey tiara veil and an eight-foot train.

  I’d seen the magazines on my mother’s night table, testaments to a faltering hope: Today’s Bride, Washington Bride, and, lately, Older Bride. I could picture her leafing through the glossy pages with her drugstore reading glasses on, wondering if she’d ever get to wear a tasteful georgette mother-of-the-bride dress, or weigh in with her opinion on pale pink orchids versus tiger lilies, salmon versus chicken, a limo versus my uncle Bill’s Lincoln Town Car, and a thousand other mouthwatering details.

  As I watched Ma debating outfits with Louise for her date tomorrow night, putting away more than her body weight in semi-frozen cheesecake, I was filled with fondness. I was lucky to have such a mother, even when she made me want to shriek with irritation. How many people in the world had someone who cared about them enough to feed them, bully them, and deceive them for their own good?

  The doorbell rang. Thinking that it might be Jeremy returning, I ran to answer it, beating my mother by a nose. I didn’t want her to get to him first this time. I wouldn’t put it past her to offer him my old room.

  But it wasn’t Jeremy. Instead, standing a diffident three feet back from the door as if fearful of his welcome, was a slight man of sixty-odd, with wildly curly gray-and-silver hair and an air of being not quite sure whose house he’d planned to visit.

  “Ira!” said my mother, pushing past me. She’d forgotten what she’d used to teach me, which was that you always kept a man waiting a few minutes in the living room before you made your entrance.

  Somehow I’d imagined someone genial and self-assured. Someone … bigger. My dad had been six foot two. In his high school pictures he’d looked gangly, and he’d always stooped a little as if in memory of the days when his height was new to him. My dad had large hands with long fingers, and big feet; he took a twelve in shoes. In the brief space of time that I’d been aware of his existence, I’d been picturing Ira as being like my father in physical type, but he couldn’t have topped my five-seven by much. He was slim but not insubstantial-looking, as so many of Louise’s male clients were. The hand that shook mine had a good firm grip. He wore very hip steel-rimmed spectacles and carried a huge box of chocolates.

  “You shouldn’t have,” said my mother, clutching the candy to her chest. My father was not one to bring presents home. They didn’t have much money for most of their marriage, and my mother was not a good receiver even on the biggest occasions. You could always tell when a gift disappointed her, and most gifts did, as her tastes were picky and exact. She would utter a die-away “Oooohhhhh,” the essence of lukewarmness, and set aside the box in which the ill-chosen item was wrapped with a palpaple air of marking it down for a “return to store” errand.

  Ira’s chocolates, though, were a big hit, and so, clearly, was Ira himself. She whisked him into the living room, plied him with coffee and brandy, and offered him the first chocolate out of the box before selecting one herself with the deliberation of a five-year-old girl.

  “You made it home,” said Ira, smiling at me. I felt hulking sitting on the couch next to my mother and him, like a big Raggedy Ann doll on a shelf with a china shepherd and shepherdess. I’d never noticed before just how much my mother had to crook her neck to talk to my dad, to dance with him. Next to Ira, she finally seemed to be in the proper scale. This made me uncomfortable somehow.

  “I made it home, but I’m going back tomorrow.” My mother hadn’t known about my imminent redeparture, but she barely blinked.

  “Well, you’re fighting the good fight up there, I hear,” he said, with the mildness of someone who didn’t need to tout his political opinions. A rarity in this town.

  “So you still believe in the good old cause of labor?” I said. “A lot of people get in my face when they hear I work for unions.”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “My mother almost named me Eugene, after Eugene Debs. My sister is Emma, after Emma Goldman.”

  “My second-grade diorama depicted the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti,” I said proudly. “Right down to the little electric chairs.”

  “She was awfully morbid as a child,” my mother said, giving me a look that I didn’t at first recognize. And then I realized that it was the same look I used to give her when she’d hang around the living room making polite chat when I had a date. I retreated to the kitchen, a little dazed.

  Louise was in there nursing her tea and listening to a tape of Hub’s last concert.

  “His music never ceases to amaze me,” she said. “It’s so fresh, so completely original.”

  That it was music, I had to take on faith. I am not a big admirer of the school of vocal artists that includes Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but I will admit that at its best, it signifies something, even if I don’t understand precisely what. Hub’s stuff was a feeble imitation of those guys, his vocals reedy and thin, almost lost in the feeble, folksy guitar chords. No matter how nasty the words of Hub’s songs were, his voice just ambled plaintively on, like a cat mewling persistently outside a bedroom window at three in the morning.

  The storm blows on

  And I’m out your door

  Leaving you there

  Like a cast-off whore

  Like a broken doll

  In a sewer dra
in

  Like a squirrel crushed on asphalt

  In the rain.

  The squirrel song was followed by one called “Nuclear Winter,” a departure from Hub’s usual style, which consisted solely of his instrument making an effect like a tortured sitar.

  “He has a real talent,” I said to Louise. I did not say what I felt the real talent was for, so I wasn’t lying.

  “He’ll never sell out, either. They wanted one of his early songs for a commercial for children’s vitamins, but he wouldn’t do it.”

  I reflected silently that it is easy not to sell out when you know where your next forty years of meals are coming from.

  “You think he’s a spoiled rich kid,” said Louise. “I know Johnny does too.”

  “Rich doesn’t mean spoiled,” I said. “Not always.”

  But the truth was, I much preferred someone who’d had to scheme and compromise to make it, like Ron, to a stickler like Hub, who had pristine artistic values paid for with someone else’s money. I knew that Ron was a fast-talking sleazeball who would be distracted by a waterfront real estate opportunity on his way to save a drowning man. It didn’t matter. Whatever marginal virtue Ron possessed, he’d earned every scrap of it.

  “And you and Tony?” said Louise, as the last song on Hub’s tape skidded to a close. “How’s that going?”

  “Me and Tony, nothing.” I told her about Suzanne.

  “She sounds kind of coy and disingenuous. Tony was never coy. He may be too chicken to bring up the past with you, but he’s not coy.”

  “The past is the past. He’s moved on to a more sophisticated type.”

  “Well, that really doesn’t sound like Tony. I’ve seen the man eat barbecue, and Roger Moore he’s not.”

  “Hey, I’m happy for him. I’m glad he’s found someone who’ll think it’s sexy and appealing when he rushes off in the middle of her birthday dinner to take a phone call from a disgruntled street cleaner in Toilers Local 102073.”

  “This Suzanne sounds so scripted. So phony.”

  “Tony doesn’t think so. You know how flattering it can be when someone who’s not your type suddenly goes after you.”

  “Not that you’re jealous,” said Louise.

  “Tony could make mad passionate love to her on the conference table for all I care. He could ravish her on my desk. I would just pull my blotter out from under them so they wouldn’t mess it up.”

  “Sure,” said Louise. “I believe you. But just in case, be a little nicer to him and see what happens.”

  Ira stayed an hour, and when he left my mother stood on the porch waving him off. She’d never waved me off that way. Usually she’d shut the front door before my car pulled out of the driveway.

  “He’s nice,” I said, and she shrugged.

  “We’ll see. It’s early days.”

  Early days for what? I wanted to ask, but it seemed callous and cruel to spoil the fragility of new love with intrusive questions. If it was new love. If it was anything but two widowed people getting together for companionship. Who was I kidding? My mother was glowing. She’d never glowed for my dad like that.

  She looked so elated that I didn’t even get irritated at her when she said, “Were you pleasant to Jeremy at least, even if you didn’t have the common courtesy to bring him in from the rain?”

  I gave her a hug and said, “Ma, thanks for interfering.”

  “So it did go well?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But thanks for interfering anyway, Ma.”

  She squinted at me, thinking that I was being sarcastic. Then she grinned, the wicked grin so like Joey’s but so rare in her that I forgot that’s where Joey gets it, and said, “Any time, my Dominica. Any time.”

  16

  RON HAD SAID, untypically, he didn’t need to see me before I went back to Winsack. Suspecting I didn’t know what, I came by the office before catching an afternoon flight to Providence. I knew he’d be there. No one at Advocacy, Inc. took the day after Thanksgiving off. The weeks before Christmas were too crowded and hectic.

  He’d instructed our secretary, Myrlene, to tell me he was too swamped to “take a meeting” with me, so I simply strolled in and sat on his desk, planting my butt on the stack of client proposals and contracts he was going through.

  “Did Weingould approve the PR budget for St. Francis for December, Ron?”

  “He’s still dickering over it.”

  “He’s had that budget on his desk for over a week.”

  Ron said, “We heard this morning that the hospital has Finchley and Crouse on board.”

  Bad news. Finchley and Crouse was the granddaddy of the union-busting law firms. They could shut down an organizing drive or scuttle a strike faster than you could say “unfair labor practice.” Finchley and Crouse specialized in nastiness.

  Who could forget the union organizing drive a few years ago at Humstock Canning, where F & C had come in quite late in the day? The union’s vote was assessed at 80 percent of the unit, and the guys from Finchley had taken the whole thing apart by starting a rumor that if the union won, Humstock was going to close its operation in Wisconsin and set up shop in Mexico. They also started a rumor that the local union president was sleeping with his wife’s sister and his seventeen-year-old baby-sitter. They bugged the employee break room. They even circulated a phony copy of the cannery’s supposed agreement with the Mexican concern. A load of malarkey, but these were people who’d staked their lives on working for this company until the day they retired, and once Finchley started in to scare them, the fear spread like brushfire.

  The union lost by only fifty votes, a real heartbreaker. They could have challenged the election results, but a runoff would only have given Finchley and Crouse time to get even more creative, so the organizers folded their tents and planned to return another day. Five years later, the patriarch of the Humstock family died of a heart attack while in bed with the Humstock mailboy. In the chaos of transition, and with a much more liberal son of the family in charge, the union tried again and won.

  Humstock was a rare happy ending for a case in which F & C had figured. To stand a chance, we’d have to come back at these guys with all the firepower we had.

  “Ron, we’ve got to get Weingould to approve that budget and maintain the overall level of funding. We have to turn up the heat. Those nurses can’t stay out forever.”

  “The hospital said it might be willing to call in a federal mediator.”

  “You know as well as I do that that’s a classic Finchley tactic. They’ll tell management to go into mediation and offer something completely unacceptable, and then, when our side turns it down, the hospital will announce that the nurses aren’t open to reaching an agreement. Why is Weingould sitting on this money?”

  “Weingould’s got a case of cold feet. He had a bad November. Now he’s nitpicking everything I show him. He nixed the billboard, by the way.”

  “But he loved the billboard.”

  It had been Kate’s idea: a large billboard she’d noticed a quarter mile from the hospital was currently blank. She’d hunted around and found out we could get it cheap. It would feature only a black-and-white photo of a young nurse cradling a newborn with absorbed protectiveness and the slogan: “For our patients. For our community. For our future. St. Francis nurses.” No number to call, no mention of the strike. Just a reminder of who our nurses were and why they were out there.

  “Weingould’s getting pressure from Goreman to scale back financial support,” Ron said. “Goreman’s getting some sort of inside information on the strike, from that waste of space Hamner, I’m sure, and Goreman’s not pleased with our progress. And then there was the recent unpleasantness.”

  “What unpleasantness?”

  “I thought you’d have heard through Boltanski.”

  “We’re not exactly close, Ron.”

  “Well, last week, Goreman’s executive assistant, you know, that little prick who wears the different suspenders every day, caught som
e of Weingould’s staff in the lunchroom with that cardboard life-size figure of Goreman.”

  “The one people had their pictures taken with at the Honolulu convention for a dollar, to benefit the political action fund.”

  It had been Ron’s idea, an unexpected success.

  “What happened was, Weingould’s guys had this figure propped up in a corner of the lunchroom and were throwing food at it for fun, and one of them came up with this song, to the tune of the Hawaii Five-O theme.”

  “Sing it for me. I could use a laugh.”

  Ron cleared his throat and sang in the agreeable bass that had won him the role of Judd in Oklahoma! the spring of his senior year of high school:

  His name is Jerry Goreman

  He’s a union man

  Fighting for the memmmmm-bers

  He does the best he can

  THROWS crumbs to the oppressed and poor

  FROM his penthouse on the ninth floor

  That’s Grief Goreman

  That’s our union man.

  I snickered. Goreman was nicknamed “Grief” because of his habit of showing up to speak at members’ funerals and then forgetting the name of the deceased.

  “So,” said Ron, “after Goreman heard the story from his little stool pigeon, he hightailed it down to Weingould’s office and they had a big blowout, yelling and doors slamming and everything. And now Goreman is trying to make Weingould’s life as miserable as possible.”

  “They’ve had dust-ups before, right? They always go back to their armed truce.”