Close Relations

by Susan Isaacs

  Such a face.

  The crowd pressured us, growing, taking up space. The cops set up wooden barriers and began herding everyone behind them.

  It was an unnaturally warm February day. Several people, coats hanging open, faces damp, glanced around, perhaps fearful of being seduced by Gresham into forgetting their dentist’s appointments. But most stayed and more joined them, attracted by the tumult, by the blast of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “East Side, West Side” booming from the huge round speakers atop the cab of the truck.

  “You know,” said Jerry, “I once tap-danced to ‘East Side, West Side’ in the fifth grade, in the school talent show.”

  “You? Really? You tap-danced?”

  “Yeah. My mother made me take all these lessons. She thought I’d be the male Shirley Temple. But I lost to this redheaded kid, Paul Rooney, who sang Anchors Aweigh.’ Little bastard wore a sailor suit.”

  Gresham’s advance team was putting on the pressure, whipping up the crowd. “In just a brief moment or two, ladies and gentlemen, Governor Jim Gresham will appear right here….”

  The crowd waited. They wanted to see their governor. It was more than the hoopla, more than curiosity. They loved him. Gresham was perfect for New York: an aristocrat with dirty hands. He played sea chanteys on his harmonica. His doctoral dissertation at Princeton had concerned his great grandfather’s diplomatic missions during World War I. He had given up an assistant professorship at Columbia to live in East Harlem, where he had instituted a successful consumer mathematics program. And he was good-looking, with great Paul Bunyan shoulders and a thick blond lumberjack mustache.

  “They have a great ad campaign,” said Jerry, a little bitterly. “No slogans, no copy at all, just pictures of Gresham at work. All candid shots: at his desk, talking to people on the subway, having dinner. There’s this picture of him sitting down with an Italian family. He’s got this monster loaf of bread in his hands and he’s tearing off a piece and you see ten smiling Dago faces around the table. He’s the only one with a blond mustache.”

  “Jerry, be quiet.”

  Gresham was so much the aristocrat that he was beyond class, so secure in his position that he could comprehend the needs of all the people. He was Gresham the Good, Gresham the Invincible. Paterno, who probably began coveting the governorship the day he learned the office existed, had, after a few perfunctory conversations with supporters, decided that challenging Jim Gresham in a primary was faster suicide than a revolver to the temple. He took Jerry’s advice, which was that if Gresham, in his second term, decided to try for the Presidency, he would rather bestow the governorship on a man who would not embarrass him, like Paterno. The current lieutenant governor, Lawrence Parker, né Piatagowski, had been one of Gresham’s few public mistakes.

  “Okay, get back, everyone,” a cop ordered, stretching out his arms to herd the last few strays behind the barricade. On the platform of the flatbed truck, Paterno sat stiffly on a gray metal folding chair, three seats away from where Gresham would be.

  “He’s sweating,” I commented. “Why is he so nervous?” Paterno’s high, furrowed forehead was shiny with perspiration. With his sallow complexion, it gave him a sickly look. “Do you think it’s because he’s with Gresham, that he feels so much is riding on their relationship?” Paterno’s dark eyes darted about the crowd, as if he were searching for someone who loved him. He was a small man, about five feet six inches, and beside the mayor, the borough president, and the city comptroller, he looked quite fragile. The only things big about Paterno were his eyes, huge and a little protuberant, his great forehead, and his stomach. He had a huge appetite, and all the food he ate seemed to settle in his belly, as if the rest of his small body was not equipped to assimilate it. If a frog who’d been kissed by a princess turned into a man, he would look like Paterno and not like the prince in fairy tales.

  “Sure he’s sweating,” Jerry conceded. “He’s wearing long johns.”

  “Why? It’s warm today, for God’s sake.”

  The sound equipment shrieked a wild, high-pitched cry and then calmed down, emitting only intermittent crackles, random pops. “And seated next to the Mayor of this great City, ladies and gentlemen, the President of the great Borough of Queens!” The reflexive booing of the mayor subsided, and the crowd, responding a little to the manic joy in the advance man’s voice, applauded lightly.

  “I know it’s warm today,” said Jerry, sounding peeved. “But it’s February. And you know Bill. If it’s February it’s winter and if it’s winter it’s cold and if it’s cold he needs long underwear, so he won’t get the chills and die.” Even in frigid weather, politicians do not like to be seen in overcoats. They feel it makes them look weak, vulnerable, old.

  We watched Paterno lift the back of his hand to his face, ostensibly to massage the tip of his nose. He wiped some perspiration off his upper lip.

  “And, ladies and gentlemen,” the advance man continued, his voice soaring to new heights of ecstasy, “the President of City Council, the man from this wonderful Borough of Queens who almost single-handedly settled the police strike and the great garbage strike, ladies and gentlemen, the son of immigrant parents who rose to become a great New Yorker, a truly great American, William Paterno!”

  Shoving my handbag under my right arm, I applauded furiously, accidentally poking the woman next to me with my left elbow. Reflexively, she started clapping, a gold crucifix bopping rhythmically each time her upper arms crashed into her huge balloon breasts. Jerry, on my right, stuck two fingers between his lips and gave a piercing, practiced whistle. It was not the sort of sound people anticipate from an adult. Several glanced around, looking for the acne-ridden fifteen-year-old responsible; unsuccessful, they applauded anyway, not without enthusiasm.

  “Hear that?” Jerry demanded, his eyes moist, sparkling. “They love him.”

  “They like Bill. They love Gresham.”

  “Marcia, you’re wrong. They just know Gresham better. He’s been more visible, that’s all. If Bill had as much coverage …”

  “If he had as much coverage, he’d be better known, period. He’s not the sort to inspire love. Respect, sure. But he can’t—”

  “Bullshit,” Jerry snapped. “You’re talking defeatist bullshit. No wonder …”

  A woman stood on the other side of Jerry, an ordinary, upwardly mobile Puerto Rican woman in a subdued beige coat. She was in no way remarkable except that she was staring at Jerry, her eyes traveling the circuit, her jaw drooping, so that I, on his left, could peer past him and look inside her mouth, where a reservoir of saliva had accumulated around her bottom teeth. She did not, of course, notice me, even when I rubbed against him familiarly.

  Jerry sensed her glance and turned his head to look at her. Most women, upon being discovered, would have averted their heads or pretended to be searching for a friend just past Jerry. That always happened on the subways and at parties. But this one kept staring, examining him unselfconsciously, as though he existed in another sphere and could not sense her presence.

  He leaned down and whispered into my ear, “Weird lady,” and grasped my arm, maneuvering me a few feet closer to the flatbed truck.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the advance man said, his tone growing calmer, almost reverential, “the man who needs no introduction. Ladies and gentlemen of Queens, Governor James d’Avonne Gresham!”

  From where he had been secluded, Jim Gresham strode around the side of the truck and leaped up onto the stage. The crowd bellowed its delight, the roar bouncing off the storefronts on Queens Boulevard and returning to the parking lot, refueling the excitement. Whistles, screams, squeaks, sighs, and gulps of suppressed desire, surreptitious peeks at the bulge, probably visible at ten yards, under the fly of the gubernatorial jeans. This brave new man, this radiant leader, this easy, self-assured great guy beside whom all other politicians seemed as attractive as Quasimodo, sauntered up to the microphone.

  “Hey,” Gresham began, “I’m
glad to be here. But I’ve got to tell you something. I didn’t come here because I was in the mood for a drive through Queens. You know why I’m here.” Pause. Grin. Swivel head slowly. “Pretty soon I’ll be asking you for another four years.”

  The blast of noise was even stronger than that following his introduction. Shouts and applause, the thunder of approval, indicated that another four years were his, no need to ask. “Thanks.” Pause. “Thanks a lot.” Another grin. Wait until noise dies down. “I’d like to tell you a few of my ideas.”

  “Listen,” I said to Jerry, “do you think Bill could inspire that sort of reaction? That exuberance? That love?”

  “No.” Jerry ran his fingers through the gray part of his hair. “But that sort of love isn’t necessary. It’s too volatile. It can’t last.”

  Jab a finger at audience. “The rights of the middle class have to be protected,” Gresham was explaining, “because if the majority cannot live in peace, there will be no peace for rich or poor.” The majority seemed to agree, because the tumult began again.

  “It’s lasted three years,” I said.

  “What?” Jerry yelled over the applause. “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said it’s lasted three years!” I stood on tiptoe, my hands forming a megaphone around my mouth, aiming my voice at Jerry’s ear. “They’re as wild about him now as they were during his last campaign.”

  “Horse shit!” The crowd’s excitement had wanted somewhat, so Jerry’s “horse shit” was heard by quite a few people standing near us. Even a cop turned, eyed Jerry suspiciously for an instant, and then, assured that he was not dealing with a potential rat-faced assassin, an Oswald or a Ray, turned away.

  “Not horse shit,” I murmured. “Look.”

  Gresham bent over, reaching out to a woman in the crowd who had maneuvered near the edge of the flatbed truck. She offered him something. He took it and held it aloft. It was a pale brown square, a knish, half wrapped in a rectangle of flimsy white paper.

  “This is why I like campaigning in Queens,” Gresham enthused. “A knish. Real food!” The crowd beamed as the Ultimate WASP, their Beloved Non-Ethnic, smiled and inhaled, seeming to savor the greatness of the knish. The dignitaries seated behind him put smiles on their faces, showing they too were enjoying this moment. Paterno’s eyes were wide open; he was probably hungry and, could he have gotten away with it, would have grabbed the knish from Gresham’s hand and stuffed it into his mouth. “Fantastic!” Gresham took a large bite. Too large, his nanny would have said. The clapping began again, the crowd expressing its pleasure at the communion of candidate and knish.

  The applause ebbed, and then it ceased.

  Gresham’s face turned red, then purple. His grin contorted into a grimace. His long, muscular arms flailed about, as if he were doing some crazy boogie for the folks.

  “Je-sus,” said Jerry.

  Paterno was up first, reaching Gresham at the same time as his advance man and his state trooper bodyguard. The governor’s mouth had dropped open, his tongue flopped out, and he would have fallen if the state trooper hadn’t grabbed him around the waist and held him up. But Gresham was too big for one man, and the trooper would have keeled over had not Paterno and the advance man propped him up. Within seconds, two cops were on the stage, followed by a News Alert cameraman.

  “My God,” said a wizened little man standing near us. “Something is wrong up there.”

  One of the cops, a huge black man who looked like a defensive blocker for a successful team, moved behind Gresham and instituted the Heimlich maneuver. He held his hands under Gresham’s diaphragm and squeezed, attempting to push the air up and out of the governor and, with it, the offending glob of knish that was choking him.

  But the giant bite of knish did not fly out of Gresham’s mouth. Paterno grabbed the microphone that had fallen to the floor and yelled into it, “Is there a doctor? Is there a doctor anywhere?”

  Seconds later, a man pushed past us. “I’m a doctor,” he kept calling, all the way up to the truck. Later reports in the Post indicated that he was Steven H. Greenlick, a dermatologist.

  I heard whimpering around me, fearful bleats, moans of “God” repeated over and over. Gresham could be held up no longer. He pitched forward and crashed to the floor. The police, politicians, state troopers, and Dr. Greenlick pushed and shoved each other as they moved around, trying to save the governor.

  I swallowed guiltily, great gulps of saliva. The air felt colder and seemed to solidify around me, pierced only by the crazed, atonal moan of an ambulance that must have been summoned. It screamed up Queens Boulevard, racing toward Gresham.

  “Why can’t they do anything?” I whispered.

  Jerry shrugged and continued to stare at the truck. I closed my eyes. “Marcia,” he said a moment later, poking my arm. “Look.”

  I opened my eyes, half expecting to see Gresham leap off the floor and wave. But he lay there still, and the police and troopers and pols and Greenlick backed away.

  “Christ,” Jerry muttered.

  A Daily News photographer scooted around the stage and stopped in front of Paterno; she focused on him and began shooting. He had begun crying as she approached.

  A cop pushed back against the crowd saying, “Get back. Get back.” It wasn’t necessary. Everyone remained motionless, even after the ambulance arrived, even after Gresham’s once-powerful six-foot-six-inch body was squished onto a stretcher made for lesser men. The crowd started to shuffle only as the ambulance drove out of sight.

  I whispered, “My God.” The air grew icy, numbing me. Then I sensed, more than felt, Jerry wrapping his arm around my shoulder. “It’s awful,” I added, realizing that the strange feeling on my face was the frosty path made by tears running along my cold skin. I sniffled. “It’s like a nightmare, Jerry.”

  “Well, it’s going to put quite a crimp into the knish business,” he observed.

  Two

  My uncle, Julius Lindenbaum, furrier and family man, yanked open the door a second after my pressing the lighted button that set off a four-note chime. “Marcia honey,” he boomed. “Did you hear about it?”

  “You mean about the governor?” I mumbled the last two syllables into his blue alligator as he gave me one of his specialties, a crushing hug, squeezing my arms to my sides and squashing my face against his shirt.

  “Terrible,” he said, leading me into the house. “Ever wonder how come it’s Democrats who always die?”

  My mother’s sister, Aunt Estelle, and her husband, my Uncle Julius, lived in Jamaica Estates in the borough of Queens, one of those upper-middle-class areas of New York City so greenly landscaped, so secure with its oak doors and brass knockers, that if you clapped your hands over your ears and refused to listen to the residents’ accents, you could imagine yourself in Shaker Heights or Bellaire.

  Their house was a colonial, red-brick, two-story, with a large central hall. On the left of the hall was a beige living room; my aunt had determined that monotones were quietly rich-looking. On the right was the dining room, filled with brilliantly waxed dark furniture: table and chairs, of course, and a huge breakfront displaying the Lindenbaum Collection of Extremely Fine China, and a buffet—with a marble top for serving and long thin drawers underneath—for holding Aunt Estelle’s sizable stock of ecru tablecloths.

  “Hello, Marcia.” As I walked into the living room, I saw my mother.

  “Hi, Mom.” Observing her sister’s dictum on monotones, my mother wore a brown dress. However, since she was the poor relation, she looked fittingly ill-clothed. The dress clung to her everywhere except the waist, like a late-fifties chemise with static. “How are you?” I asked.

  “All right,” she answered. “I saw your employer on the news. Did he say anything to you about having seen …?”

  “I was there.” I said it simply, knowing I had scored so many points with those three little words that I could afford to toss them off. My Uncle Julius even waved his hairy arm graciously, offering me
a seat anywhere on their couch.

  “Oh?” she murmured.

  “I’ll tell Aunt Estelle you’re here,” Uncle Julius said. “She’s in the kitchen, but don’t say anything till she comes, so it’s still fresh in your mind.” He lumbered out of the living room, anxious to find my aunt and, I think, relieved to get away from my mother and me. Uncle Julius did not seem comfortable with people who could not afford fur.

  “Well,” my mother said, “you picked an exciting career.” Her voice was thin, weary. It sounded about five minutes from dead.

  She spoke a little like she looked. My mother is plain-looking, short—like me—and dried out like a parched, neglected houseplant. It’s as if the routine of living—pouring orange juice, applying deodorant—sapped her strength. Even when I was a child thirty years ago she was the same, sighing after tying each shoelace, silently serving me peanut butter sandwiches which she never had enough energy to cut into halves. Nothing I did, knock-knock jokes, making perfect hospital corners on my bed, graduating number six in my high school class, made her perk up.

  As a young woman, she must have possessed some élan, an aspiration or two, because as a child I heard stories about Hilda saving up to buy a Packard, Hilda keeping company with a Columbia boy and making plans to go to Hunter College, Hilda forgoing the movies so she could buy fresh flowers every day to pin on her lapel.

  But after high school she spent four years typing up tax returns for an accountant with offices on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. Then she met my father, Victor Green, certified public accountant, when he was hired to fill the opening left by another accountant, who had suffered a paralytic stroke during tax season.

  My father was not a Columbia boy. He had five years of night school at Brooklyn College and, from their wedding picture, appears as pale and ordinary looking as I remember him. Definitely not the Ivory League type, as my Grandma Yetta would have said. So Hilda Shochet Green traded her dream of a Packard for the reality of a Toastmaster. They moved to a tiny apartment on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. Instead of buying a sprig of sweet lilacs, she bought waxed apples and bananas for the green glass bowl on their dinette table.