“Ole Ster” was a perennial candidate in the area around Sunshine and Kishwaukee counties, seeking membership on county boards, the State Chamber of Deputies, the State Senate, and even for Congress in primaries which he invariably lost to a pop u lar veteran of World War II who was a natural on television and both smart and shrewd, claims that could never be made for poor “Ster.” In 1984, however, the incumbent died two weeks before “Ster” was swept into Congress from which the wiseacres in that part of Illinois said he would be routed only by the same grim reaper who defeated his predecessor. Sterling Silver Stafford was just the congressman his constituents wanted, he looked like a senator, talked like a senator, and didn’t say much.
He voted to impeach Clinton and, perhaps unwisely, gave a strong speech about morality and family values during the debate. Those who knew him both in the district and in Rockford and were aware of his constant and serial pursuit of attractive women—“don’t matter none their age or sex”—thought he was skating on very thin ice and expressed the fear or the hope that the ice would sink beneath him. His reputation as a Don Juan made him attractive to a certain kind of woman who was desperate enough for one reason or another to take a chance.
His strongest opposition politically came from Oakdale Township, despite his home on the river inside the township and his membership in the Oakdale Country Club. His voting residence, however, was over in Sunshine in a palatial “family home” he had built on his vast farmland. It was an Oakdale member of the Oakdale Democratic Club (whose president was and still is one Maria Sabattini Connors) and a professor of English literature at DeKalb who finally defeated him with almost 60% of the vote in the 2006 election.
“Ole Ster,” it was said, had not kept up with the times. Chicago was spreading into the prairies beyond the Fox River and Illinois was becoming a persistent “blue” state. The Iraq war, for which Congressman Stafford had voted enthusiastically, had turned sour. President Bush, whom he worshipped, had lost much of his popularity. Students from DeKalb picketed his office in Rockford every weekend. Local soccer moms were fed up with the rumors of his romantic affairs. Ordinary folk (i.e. white Protestants) didn’t like the suggestions in Chicago papers that he might be indicted immediately after the election. As usual “Ole Ster’s” campaign was perfunctory. Unwisely he wept at his concession speech as he said, “Ah reckon that eleven terms is a long time for any one man to live in a pressure cooker.”
To the media after the concession, he denied any plans to run for the Senate.
“I reckon I could have beaten that African fella, if I had enough time to prepare a primary run. I was too busy doing a good job on my agricultural committee.”
The editorial in the Oakdale Demo crat suggested that “Ole Ster’s” seat had been a lazy monopoly one term too long.
I have tried, Dermot, to keep my Democratic biases and my Irish sense of irony out of this memo. To sum up, Sterling Silver Stafford is a political dinosaur, albeit a relatively harmless one. He does not have a character that is capable of great good or great evil. He is probably too lazy to organize a major conspiracy, but he is a very bad loser.
I closed the file as my limo eased past the exurbs of Chicago, across the Fox River and beyond into more or less open farm country, brown, flat, and dull under the slanting rays of a sun moving ever farther away from us. The sky was cloudless blue and the temperature was in the mid forties. A nice early winter day, the kind that said, “Enjoy me because you will not see my like again for a long time.”
Soon the fields would turn white, though that would not improve their appearance. Would it be a white Christmas this year? I hoped not. We would have to attend the Christmas Eve kids’ Eucharist at St. Josephat’s and the Christmas Mass at Old St. Patrick’s where my wife sang in the choir, which, by definition could not do “O Holy Night” without her. Then we would double back to the cathedral to sing at the noon Mass—where she would sing solo “for all the furriners” and pay our respects to Cardinal Sean, Archbishop Blackie, and my brother Father George who was now the pastor of the cathedral so that Blackie would have more freedom to play his coadjutor role. Then we would venture on to the Congress Expressway for the final step in our pilgrimage to River Forest and the Coyne home, where my siblings and their numerous progeny (all of whose names Nuala would remember but I would not) would gather. Noisily. My “small ones” would yield second place to no one in their exuberance. My wife was, of course, one of the kids. I would sit on the sidelines and wonder where that quintet had come from and why, when the other brats began to whine, my bunch simply fell asleep, their mother included.
If it were a white Christmas, however, she would have to lead the whole pack outside for fun in the snow. On arrival in our Republic, Nuala announced that she didn’t think she’d like snow all that much.
“Don’t we do without it most of the time up in Connemara? I can’t see why you Yanks insist on it.”
When the blizzards came, however, you’d think she invented it. Wasn’t it a wonderful time to play with your husband? And the doggies, and the small ones when they came along? Frolicking in the snow was not an option, a conviction enthusiastically embraced by her offspring, leaving poor Da to mutter that he needed a jar of mulled wine or a small cup of hot chocolate.
After fun in the River Forest snow we had to drive up and down the streets and admire the madcap decorations with which our neighbors—truth to tell, especially the Italianate neighbors—had created to celebrate the joyous season of the birth of Baby Jesus, as he was familiarly known to my kids. Dermot drove the Navigator on the trip, because as me wife announced, “You hardly had a drop to drink.” Under normal circumstances she would drive “because everyone says I’m a better driver than you are, Dermot love.”
Then finally home to Sheffield Avenue where the sleeping small ones had to be guided to their beds and the weary hounds had to be rewarded with several treats because, sure, isn’t it Christmas Day?
Beginning last year weren’t we up bright and early on Boxing Day (St. Stephen’s Day as the devout Nelliecoyne would insist) to pack for a quick Christmas trip to her ma and pa. Wouldn’t it be brilliant altogether for them to see the small ones this time of the year? It would indeed especially since Patjo was so adorable and himself named after me great-uncle. Thus had begun what my brother Prester George would have called an immemorial custom. Interminable, I thought. We would escape from one mad round of parties with family and friends in Chicago to a similar frantic rush in Carraroe.
Last year there had been an excessively white Christmas which clogged O’Hare and gave me family (herself included) a brilliant opportunity to prove that they could be as ill-tempered international travelers as anyone else and worse than most. Poor Da was the only one who had to keep smiling.
Even without the snow, this year’s proof that you too can go home again would be difficult. Life was catching up with me good wife, the struggle over her Christmas special, the growing family, the Donlan case, the now almost legendary battle of Lake Shore Drive, the Donlan girls and their new mom—there was no upper limit to the responsibilities that me Celtic Tiger had collected. And she’d weep halfway across the Atlantic at the plight of the “poor doggies” who would not come with us this time and were not consoled by her promise that “won’t you be able to come home with us in the summer?”
The doggies were farmed out to the Murphys down the street.
“My polecats are goin’ ta think they a dyin’ and a goin’ to heaven.”
We had “minded” the Murphy kids while their parents had spent time in the Cayman Islands. So they owed us and we picked up their marker.
Nuala protested that this wasn’t fair—four kids for two. But she didn’t protest too loudly.
She needed a vacation—away from the kids, from Mike Casey, from the Donlans, and even from Blackie Ryan. From everyone but me. I wasn’t sure she’d agree and less sure that she’d relax.
When does a good husband try to draw the line?
What does he do about an Irish tiger? A fragile Irish tiger?
My worrying ended when I saw a sign shaped like a large oak tree which informed me that I was “Welcome to Oakdale—Where Past and Future Meet!”
Maria Angelica’s theme.
She must love Jackie Donlan a lot to shift her dwelling to Chicago, though she probably could cope with both worlds.
The town lived up to its theme. New restaurants and motels, mixed with restored homes and stores in a blend that was either miraculous or ingenious. It was not quite ready for national landmark status yet, but it was well on its way. No wonder that faculty from NIU were moving in. The newer homes may have been the first hint to Maria that there was a market for something like Elegant Homes.
The latest report on both the Donlans was that they were recovering “better than could be expected.” The latest report from the forces of law and order was that they had all the perpetrators but none of them seemed to know who the contact man was other than “someone from out of town.” My friend Dom reported that the friends of his friends reported that the guilty party was some “wiseguy” from Vegas who was “out of line.” A message from one of the most important of the friends of Dom’s friends warned him that he was so far out of line his misbehavior would be reported to the “Council” and that didn’t mean the one in Rome either.
Apparently he was a person of such importance that the people on the West Side (many of whom live in places like Oak Brook or River Forest) would not consider putting him down without national authorization, unless they decided that they would lose all respect if they didn’t.
This was high-level stuff. I asked Mike Casey about it.
“Your guy out there,” he said, “was the one that warned you about the put-down on Maria?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He has some friends who are friends to some people who are very important.”
“Probably live right down the street . . . Dom is clean?”
“He’s connected, but not involved in anything. . . . He thinks he owes me some favors.”
“I don’t like dealing with those people,” he said with a sigh. “But sometimes it doesn’t hurt to listen to them. They know we do some work for herself?”
“How would they not?”
“Yeah, so they figure you’ll tell me. That’s the way their convoluted Sicilian minds work.”
“Our bunch has perfected indirection to its highest point in human history and we’ve done it without even trying.”
Mike thought that was very funny and did not dispute the point. How could he?
“This is a neat little town,” my driver, a young cop working for Mike on his day off, commented. “I bet it didn’t happen by accident.”
“No, Colm, it didn’t.”
“A smart woman with good taste?”
“You gonna go detective when you get out of law school?”
“I’ll leave that stuff to your wife. I want to be a trial lawyer.”
No one thought I did anything on me wife’s little puzzles. That was grand with me. Grand altogether.
He was clearly from the South Side. He had two of the four characteristics required for trial lawyers in Chicago—he was short and gregarious. He had yet to put on weight and drink too much beer.
We pulled up at the congressman’s “lodge,” a sprawling brick house on the Kishwaukee River which despite its marvelous Native American name was a lazy and meandering creek.
“I’ll wait outside,” Colm told me. “Yell if you need me.”
“I sure will.”
I didn’t expect any trouble, not from someone mulling the possibility that he could defeat Senator Obama, in the event that charismatic Chicagoan did not win a presidential election.
A security heavy with dark eyes and a high forehead met me at the door.
“Mike McDermot to see the congressman.”
“He’s expecting you, Mike. Have a seat in there in the trophy room.”
The heavy looked me over and decided that he’d have no trouble taking care of me. He was wrong, but my glowing face and curly blond hair fool a lot of people.
The trophy room was patently, as Archbishop Blackie would say, the place where Maria Angelica had threatened to remove the congressman’s genitalia with a shotgun blast, after she had knocked him daffy by throwing a camcorder so that it collided with his handsome, if out-sized, head.
Good on you, Maria.
Sterling Silver Stafford appeared in the room with a certain flourish, clad in chinos, a brown corduroy jacket, and a bright red scarf wrapped around his neck. His large, classical head with its flowing white hair might well have been detached from his body and affixed to the wall where it would have fit in with the heads of somewhat lesser animals. Homo sapiens as king of the forest. However, he seemed relaxed and self-confident, quite the opposite of the grey and wounded veteran who had conceded victory to Mrs. Hallinan in the early morning after the election—not Ms. Hallinan, much less Dr. Hallinan.
“Good to meet you, Mike,” he said with the usual friendly grin that had characterized his TV appearances and had created the impression that this nice man was probably a smart man too. “I don’t see enough of your work, but I’ve been impressed by it.”
The Herald had run a political commentary of mine once a month or so to confirm that I really was an investigative journalist. They even offered me a permanent job. I declined with thanks “for the present.”
“Thank you, Congressman.”
“Just Ster, Mike. Only judges, governors, and ambassadors get to keep their title after they step down.”
“Some senators are trying to claim it for themselves.”
“They’ll never get away with it. . . .” He reclined in the very chair in which he had cowered when the shotgun was pointed at him. “I’ve asked for some coffee to be brought in and I thought we could talk till noon and then go over to the country club for a bite of lunch. Or are you a good Irishman, Mike, and drink tea?”
“I drink tea, Ster, though I’m not a good Irishman because I don’t pollute it with milk.”
A man who was either a Native American or an Asian, who had been hovering at the doorway, scurried away.
I noted a camcorder on one of the occasional shelves of books which provided décor for the room—the owner was not only a hunter but a student of primitive countries.
“Do you play golf, Mike?” he asked. “I’ve given up hunting for golf and would like to give all these heads away. They embarrass me.”
“I swing a club occasionally,” I said. “When I have the time. I don’t exactly burn up the fairways.”
There was a certain false modesty in that statement. My handicap at Butterfield is one and at Oak Park two. In the County Galway, I’m known colloquially as “that focking Yank who shoots even and wouldn’t be permitted on the course if his wife weren’t from Carraroe.” I am very proud of that allegation.
“A hunter has to fight another animal, one that’s inferior to him and doomed to probable defeat. A golfer, given certain minimal skills must face the worst possible enemy—himself, even one as good as Tiger Woods. . . . I suppose you want to know my view of the recent election?
“I am told that you said the other night that the election was neither a victory for liberals nor a defeat for conservatives.”
“That’s what I said and that’s what I meant. The American people are in substantial part Christians and conservatives hence the Republicans should win almost every election. This time we were defeated by this damnable war. If the president had fired that fool Rumsfeld two weeks before he did I’d still be chair of my committee.”
His face turned red in anger for a moment and then relaxed.
“I thought that you supported the war, Ster,” I said as I nodded my head at the somber servant who had poured my tea. He looked like photos of Chief Sitting Bull (another head for Ster’s gallery). I was willing to bet there was a gallery somewhere in his house commemorating all his sexual conquests too.
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br /> The tea was as black as midnight on a moonless night. So was the house man’s stare.
“Like every good American I was proud to see our country hitting back at the evil murderers who slaughtered so many of our fellow citizens. I felt we had to reestablish our self-respect and our power in the world, the only surviving superpower. Unfortunately we made some intolerable mistakes. The military leaders wanted us to go in with four hundred thousand men. That fool Rumsfeld thought he could do it with thirty-five thousand men plus special forces, air power, and Iraqi allies that the CIA had won to our side. I personally think that he was right about that. Such a quick strike force could have toppled Saddam Hussein easily. As a compromise he agreed to a little over a hundred thousand—too many for a military victory, too few for an occupation that could pacify the countryside. Now, when it’s probably too late, we’re arguing about twenty thousand more. . . .”
“What some people would call too little and too late.”
“Not the words I would choose, Mike. . . . And I don’t want to be quoted in that notebook of yours. . . .”
I inclined my head at his request for confidentiality.
“. . . But materially correct. . . If we’re going to go to war, we should go to war with all the power we have and to win as quickly as possible. That’s common sense. . . .”
“It’s what they called the Powell Doctrine, isn’t it?”
“I don’t particularly admire the former secretary, but any soldier with common sense knows that. Yet in Korea and Vietnam we did just the opposite for fear of offending the people with the casualties. Better to have heavy casualities for a few months than to dribble away your resources and the people’s goodwill over four years. I thought that from the beginning. I admit that I should have spoken out. I was being a loyal team player. I’ll never excuse myself for that. It would have been hard to dissent a couple of years ago. I guess I lacked the courage to go after the defense secretary. . . . and all those Jewish intellectuals he had around him.”
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