“A man disrupted an Ash Wednesday church service in Philadelphia today,” the newsman spoke. “Police detained the man, identified as Anthony Moscone, after he stormed the altar during the mass and began screaming that congressman and presidential hopeful Leonard Pilcher was a murderer, insisting he was an eyewitness to this supposed murder…reportedly in Sweden...during the Second World War. According to witnesses, Mr. Moscone made no mention of who the alleged victim might be during his tirade. Several people, including the priest conducting the mass, were injured during the attempt to subdue the deranged man, none seriously. A police spokesman was quoted as saying that the police are familiar with Mr. Moscone, a veteran known to have suffered psychological trauma during the war and, to quote the spokesman, ‘was not right in the head.’”
The newsman paused—a brief but dramatic lull—and removed his dark-rimmed eyeglasses. Then he locked the camera in his omniscient gaze one last time and offered a spontaneous editorial comment. “A sad reminder, ladies and gentlemen, of the terrible price many of our gallant veterans paid to keep this great nation of ours free…And that’s the way it is.”
As soon as the director signaled Clear, the newsman stormed off the set and accosted his producer. “This crap doesn’t belong on the news, Sid!” he shouted, waving the copy for that last piece in the producer’s scowling face. “Since when do we do reports from the loony bin?”
In his best soothing tones, the producer said, “You know, Wally, this is exactly the type stuff that keeps people tuning in.”
“Since when?” the newsman exploded. “This is a news organization! We don’t do tabloid pieces.”
“So you’re convinced this man’s claim is untrue?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care! Don’t ever hand something like this to me again, Sid. Is that clear?”
The producer paused for a moment, the smile on his face masking the lie he was about to speak. “Anything you say, Wally.”
But Sid’s true thoughts were something quite different. He did not get to where he was by yielding to every ultimatum of some self-important, smooth-voiced news reader. Even one with serious, unimpeachable credentials as a journalist, like Wally. Every now and then, Sid thought, one of these legends of the airwaves has to get all puffed-up and take a stand for journalistic excellence or some such shit.
That may have worked with the fossils that used to run broadcasting. But there’s a new breed now. I’m part of that new breed…one that recognizes that news isn’t a public service or a public trust. It’s show business, with business underlined. The bottom line, expressed in dollars, is all that matters. The more people who watch, the more the sponsors open their wallets. Tell them the lies they want to hear…and they won’t touch that dial. Wally will get over his little tantrum…and read whatever the hell he’s told to read.
Chapter Thirty-One
Joe Gelardi stepped from the chilly Saturday morning into the warm, chlorine-tainted air of the MIT pool house. An hour ago, he had dropped Diane off here—the site of her team’s swim meet—and retreated to his office for a few administrative tasks which were only supposed to take a few minutes. But those tasks had taken far too long. As he clambered up the wooden bleachers, half-filled with eager parents, chattering friends, and bored-almost-to-tears siblings of the swimmers and divers, Joe hoped that he was not too late for his daughter’s events.
He spotted Diane doing warm-up exercises on the other side of the pool with her teammates; their turn in the water would come shortly. He was not too late, after all. She spotted him, too, offering a brief, clandestine wave of hello that could have been mistaken for just a conversational hand gesture by the others in attendance. Joe smiled and sat down on the hard wooden bench. He would settle for that little wave of hello. A young teenage girl would simply die if she was caught affectionately acknowledging a parent in public. He had heard the asides of Oh, disgust! that Diane and her friends issued whenever such a transgression was observed. But he knew full well how upset Diane would have been if he had missed her swimming.
The boys’ diving events were still in full swing. Joe watched as the young competitors queued at the bottom of the ladder for the high diving platform. Their muscular yet slim, glistening bodies looked like perfect sculptures, smoothly chiseled in flesh-colored stone. One by one they scaled the ladder, paused in stillness and total concentration at the edge of the platform, then plummeted downward in a brief aerial ballet that hopefully ended with the minimal splash of a perfectly executed water entry.
As Joe watched, the diving display took on a very different and sinister appearance. Despite the divers’ artistry, the aerial ballet had transformed itself into a horrific montage of boys falling—over and over—just like David Linker had fallen from that building in Malmö all those years ago. To his death. Murdered by Leonard Pilcher.
Joe’s head began to spin. He could feel himself growing nauseous. He had to get outside to cool, fresh air. He hoped his daughter would not notice this hasty, anxious exit. His feet stumbled down the bleachers, not quite sure of their next landing despite the predictable symmetry of the wooden steps.
Outside the pool house, seated with head thrown back, eyes closed, on a bench he had never noticed before, Joe gulped the healing air and struggled to clear the sights and sounds of David Linker’s death from his mind. He noticed something odd, something changed now, in that awful memory: Pola’s face was just a blur. No longer distinguishable—just a hazy oval in a halo of white-blonde hair. His mind, scrambling to protect itself from further distress, had switched its focus to the newly discovered bench on which he sat. Strange…How long has this been here? Why would anyone put a bench right outside the pool house, so far from the street and the bus stop? What need did it serve?
His mental meanderings were interrupted by a female voice. “Doctor Gelardi? Are you okay?”
It was Meredith Salinger, with an armload of books and a very worried expression on her face. Joe straightened up and tried to regain the requisite professorial look. Meredith plopped down next to him on the bench.
“Yes. I’m fine,” he replied.
“Are you sure? You’re all flushed…I thought you were having a stroke or something.”
“No. I’m fine, Miss Salinger…Really.”
Meredith did not bother to mask her disbelief. It would have been courteous—perhaps proper—to simply smile, move on, and leave the good professor alone. But she was genuinely worried. Joe Gelardi was her favorite teacher, ever. While she had had crushes on older men before—they had so much more gravity than boys my age—he had the distinction of being her one and only teacher crush. At 18, she was more than old enough now to act out the physical fantasy of Meredith and the Professor, and she did so without shyness or shame when alone in her room. Doctor Gelardi was as wonderful an imaginary lover as he was a real teacher. To this point in her young, scholarly life, her imagination had been the only source of lovers.
She placed her formidable pile of books on the bench, heady works on Physics, Boolean Algebra, and the oddly discordant novel, Tropic of Cancer, partially concealed in the middle of the stack. She put her hand against his forehead. Now I can be his nurse, too! This must be what it’s like to be a character in a Hemingway story, she thought. Love, lust, and compassion combining to take you soaring beyond ordinary life!
Joe found her gentle touch consoling, sweet, and a bit melodramatic. But he humored her attempt to play Florence Nightingale.
“I thought so. You’re a bit warm,” Meredith said. “You look flushed.”
“I’m fine, Miss Salinger…Meredith. Really, I am. I’ll bet I just got a little winded climbing the bleachers inside.”
Meredith pulled her hand away. She still did not look convinced. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “What are you doing around here, anyway, Doctor Gelardi? It’s Saturday. Don’t you see enough of this place during the week?”
“The swim meet. My daughter is competing.”
&nbs
p; “Oh! Is your wife here, too?”
“Miss Salinger, I’m a widower. My wife died almost seven years ago.”
“Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry, Professor. I just assumed…”
For a brief moment, Meredith Salinger felt ashamed and foolish: The poor man! And here I am, pretending like I’m some little hussy, schtupping his brains out on a regular basis! But her feeling of shame vanished, as if she had accidentally opened the wrong door and quickly slammed it shut. She slid closer to him on the bench—just an offer of comfort to someone in distress—but knocked her stack of books to the ground in the process.
She could not help but nervously laugh at her own awkwardness. “I’m such a klutz,” she said.
Joe helped her pick up the books. Tropic of Cancer ended up in his hands.
“Where did you get this one?” he asked.
“A friend…She picked it up in Europe last summer.”
Joe thought of the last time he had seen that title. It had been on the bookshelf in that apartment in Malmö where he and Pola had spent so many nights in lovemaking every bit as turgid as Henry Miller’s prose. They would thumb through the sexual passages and exult that they had plumbed the depths of their sexuality as thoroughly, if not more so, than Miller’s characters. For a delicious moment, he was back in 1944, in the surreal refuge that tiny flat provided in a world otherwise at war, the feel of Pola’s warm body nestled against his, the look of serenity on her face.
Her face! I can see Pola’s face again!
“Have you read it yet?” he asked Meredith.
“Some,” she said. A teenager’s nervous shyness was still in her voice. Now, Meredith’s face was flushed, too.
The bending to the ground to collect the books had unsettled Joe’s head once again. He slumped back onto the bench, grabbing it for support with trembling hands.
“Miss Salinger, I don’t…feel so good.”
Meredith Salinger drove slowly off the MIT campus, onto the streets of Cambridge. She had not driven a car since Christmas break, back home in California. Joe Gelardi’s Ford sedan was not proving very difficult to master, however.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to a hospital, Doctor Gelardi?” Meredith asked.
“No, Miss Salinger. No hospital. Just take me home. I’ll be fine.”
Diane Gelardi seemed as skeptical as Meredith Salinger of her father’s assurances. She leaned forward from the back seat and placed her arms around his shoulders. Her forehead rested on the nape of Joe’s neck. “I’m really worried about you, Daddy.”
“I’m okay, pumpkin. Everything’s going to be all right. I just got a little woozy back there.”
From the corner of her eye, Meredith saw how Diane’s embrace of her father had tightened, how her head was pressing tightly against his neck.
“Easy, Diane…let him breathe,” Meredith said.
For a brief moment, Diane deeply resented Meredith’s—this stranger’s—intrusion. But she stopped herself. This nice young lady was going well out of her way to help her and her father. She deserved to be treated kindly for that alone. And she’s a girl going to MIT!
Meredith Salinger was the walking, talking realization of Diane Gelardi’s personal dream: being an MIT co-ed. But this girl, this student of her father’s who she had not even met until a short while ago, was somebody Diane desperately wanted to know better. She lightened up on her father’s neck.
“Oops! Sorry, Daddy,” Diane said.
“Do I turn here?” Meredith asked.
“Yeah…make a left on Vassar Street,” Diane answered. She had beaten her father to the punch; he was left with a finger in the air, vaguely pointing left, and feeling suddenly irrelevant.
Meredith downshifted, slowed, and gingerly guided the car through the turn. As the steering wheel spun back to the straight-ahead position, she applied the accelerator with newfound confidence.
“You know, until now, I’ve never driven anything bigger than a Volkswagen,” Meredith said. “That’s my brother’s car. My dad never lets me drive his big Mercury.”
“It looks like you’re doing just fine to me,” Joe said. “You know, Meredith, Diane plans to study math at the Institute, just like you.”
“Yup. In five more years,” Diane added.
The atmosphere in the car changed at that moment. It was no longer one of dread, of a horrific event unfolding in slow motion before your eyes. The future—and by association, the present—suddenly looked bright and very assured. They all felt it.
Diane reached into her bag of swim gear and pulled out a medal on a bright red ribbon. She thrust it in her outstretched hand to the front seat.
“Daddy, I almost forgot! You didn’t see it, did you? We won our event…The 400 meter!”
Joe held the medal in his hand and admired it. “Good job, pumpkin,” he said with genuine pride. Meredith gave the medal a quick, approving glance, too.
“Hey, Meredith,” Diane said, “when we get to our house, do you want to listen to some Elvis Presley records?”
“Sure! I’m crazy about Elvis!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The business day was only half over and her feet were already killing her. Why had she worn those shiny new pumps? Sure, they looked spectacular and had cost a small fortune. For the moment they sat, empty, under her desk. In a few minutes, the brief respite would be over, and she would have to slip them back on, trek down the hall to the story line-up meeting—that daily competition that determined the course of a television news writer’s career—and argue for the placement of her pieces in the evening’s network newscast. Then, it was back to her desk to pound out the chosen story assignment, a mere 100 words that must somehow condense and encapsulate some event of towering importance to be read on the air by “the most trusted man in America.”
She wondered, Who am I trying to impress with these damn shoes, anyway? After all, she was still an attractive woman, honey-blonde, tall, shapely, and in her mid-thirties, the age when a woman’s beauty transcends well-sculpted body parts and attains an aura of grace and ripened sexuality. But it was not about attracting men. There had never been a man in the news division Allegra Wise would consider taking to bed, much less marrying. Besides, office romances always ended badly, strewn with emotional baggage and leaving another enemy stalking the place who knew too much about you. She had seen it happen to too many other women over her 10 years at the network. And it was all so pointless. This was broadcast news. Sleeping around might get a girl ahead in some businesses, but here it just assured you a perpetual seat in the back row. Allegra Wise certainly wanted to move up, but that staircase remained impossible to find if you were unfortunate enough to be a woman. No matter how clever your analysis or brilliant your writing. A pair of stylish shoes was certainly not going to help. This was an old boys’ club, plain and simple. Women were to be subjugated, penetrated, and ignored. Never respected.
Still, a voice called out from deep within her: But it never hurts to look good, does it? Outside this office there were still plenty of men, if she only had the time.
If there was a “most trusted man in America” riding the airwaves, why could there not be a “most trusted woman in America?” Allegra Wise craved that title more than anything on God’s green earth. It was easy enough for a woman to be a journalist and toil on the back pages of some newspaper all her days. She had done that for a while, fresh out of Hunter College and back in her native Pittsburgh as World War II came to a close. But the seductive quality of voices—calm, authoritative—spilling into living rooms across a city, across a nation, could not be denied. Those voices had spoken to anxious families huddled around their radios each night, telling them of the world at war, spreading joy when the news was good and comfort when it was bad. Edward R. Murrow, Gabriel Heatter, H.V. Kaltenborn, Eric Sevareid—men such as these were her first idols; there were no women from which to choose.
She had campaigned for—and won—the police beat at that Pittsburgh paper, an
unlikely place for a woman. But she did not shirk from the challenge; as her boss had said, “She did real good…for a woman.” She almost married a cop, too—a detective—but the erratic hours their respective careers demanded kept them apart more often than not. Despite its fiery promise, the unnourished relationship withered and died.
Her unwieldy name—Allegra Wyznicki, the product of a Polish father and an overly romantic Italian mother—posed no obstacle in the print medium. But when she was given a shot to write for a local radio station and then a network station in New York City, her name proved incompatible with on-air aspirations. Allegra Wyznicki was a mouthful to spit out on the air and even harder for listeners to comprehend. Allegra Wise was born.
She grimaced as she eased her size 11 feet back into the gleaming black pumps, thinking patent leather takes forever to break in, too! She stood, smoothing the skirt of her Chanel suit, picked up her notebook, and headed down the hall. She ignored the complaints of her sore, blistered feet. It was time for business.
The news staff shuffled through the piles of photographs on the conference table, searching for their lead story. Most of the photos had to do with Cuba. Fidel Castro continued to nationalize American-owned businesses on the island nation; President Eisenhower’s response to the nationalizations, a great reduction in the amount of Cuban sugar purchased, was looking more ineffective and counterproductive by the day. The Russians had been more than delighted to buy up the difference.
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