Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  I was standing at the window, looking down at Lake Michigan, which in its frozen state looked like a broken mirror. There was one of those winter storm watches on. The TV stations had all day been featuring those soft-faced fellows standing in front of their weather maps, excitedly drawing concentric circles, vectors, their eyes bright with this vision of some impending meteorological doom—which they themselves barely understood, according to an exposé I’d read a few weeks before, which revealed these guys were no more qualified to explain the weather than you or me. But they were believed—so much so that they even apologized for bad weather. A lot of the office buildings in downtown Chicago had knocked off early; traffic was thick below. Yet even at this kingly remove—I was fifty-five stories up—I could hear the morons below hitting their hooters and the sound of all those horns rising up in a hornet’s hum of frustration.

  It was getting dark fast and now my reflection in the glass was more distinct than anything beyond it. I was dressed in my prosecutorial best, fresh from a day in the law library—gray suit, white shirt, red and blue tie. My hair had gotten a little long. It’s harder to look threatening and imposing when your hair is curling over your collar. I needed a shave, too. I was starting to look like the defense. Also, I looked like I needed a rest—a week on a beach, a look at another world, palm trees, frozen cocktails without the liquor, a chameleon’s-eye view of all those rich pampered waxed and tanned legs gliding over the white sand. I must have been feeling a little sorry for myself, feeling older than I was.

  “You still with us, Fielding?” asked Governor Kinosis.

  “I’m thinking,” I said, keeping my back to them. “Look at all these people scrambling to get out of town because of a little snow. Makes you wonder what it would be like if we had a guided missile coming toward us.”

  “Look, that’s not what I came all the way over here to talk about,” the governor said.

  Oh God, what a moron.

  I had to concentrate on what was being offered. I had to pay attention not to the Greek but to the gift. I was thirty-four years old, the son of a printer and a typist in what was now becoming an upscale wedge of Brooklyn but which was, in my day, a neighborhood for workers and civil servants. Ambition was seen there as a kind of girlish vanity, but unbeknownst to our hardworking, friendly neighbors, chez Pierce was a hothouse of it. We listened to the news at least three times a day and read the early edition of the newspaper Dad brought home at the end of his shift, doling out sections as if it were the staff of life, and we even had a family constitution, drawn up by me and ratified, after a week of debates, by a three-to-two vote, split by gender. The odd thing was that my parents were on the whole pleased with themselves: this drive came from sheer energy, not self-hatred. Dad was good at his work and active in his union and respected as a porch-stoop raconteur and philosopher.

  Mom’s job was with Earl Corvino, the infamous Brooklyn pol, too senile now to bother prosecuting, and though he ran her ragged it gave her a sense of belonging and engendered in her an absurd sort of loyalty to Brooklyn, as if it were a misunderstood nation. But once the mere business of their lives was taken care of, they still had a lot of pep left over and that psychic heat was turned on us. With their guidance and encouragement I eventually found my way to Harvard. Danny’s energy and genius didn’t need the validation of a fancy degree, so he settled on New York University, where he lasted less man a year, and Caroline, after two years at the Boston Museum School, ran away from all of us and went to Europe.

  After college I went into the Coast Guard and it was then I met Sarah and for a while it seemed as if my life might change its course. But then Sarah died and I continued with law school, and from there I went to work for a man named Isaac Green—who was sitting right next to the governor now, and whose sky-high apartment this was. Isaac had done his best to adopt me, figuring I was a bit of a stray dog—by which he meant my own father could not provide me with the connections Isaac could. Isaac Green’s wrenching disappointment was that his own son, Jeremy (a classmate of mine in college), had a horror of his father’s world and professed some complicated Sufiesque contempt for Anglo-American law and was now in La Jolla customizing Yamahas. I knew what was happening. It was completely obvious. And after giving the matter some thought, I decided to take advantage of the situation. I came to love Isaac, and it did him good to know there was someone who wanted everything he had to give, who would read every book, shake every hand.

  When Isaac had been the proper age to think about a career in politics, it was nearly impossible to elect a Jew in Chicago. The best you could do was stay usefully behind the scenes or get yourself appointed to the bench. But it was dull behind the scenes and, worse, when you sent those dummkopf actors out onto the stage the lights got into their eyes and as often as not they flubbed their lines. A judgeship had a certain staid grandeur to it, but there wasn’t enough excitement, nor enough money. Isaac had the tastes and self-image of a peerage. He should have been one of those exquisitely comfortable yet compassionate Englishmen talking socialism with Beatrice and Sidney Webb sixty years ago. He needed his season tickets and his eighty-dollar cognacs, but he wanted to do the right thing, too. He wanted his hand on the lever of history, but he wanted it sticking out of the sleeve of a custom-tailored suit.

  I was Isaac’s political career. He oversaw my passage through law school and then took me into his firm, where I was given more responsibility than I deserved and maybe even a little more than I could handle. While I had been with Sarah, he couldn’t quite trot me out at his dinners and cocktail parties as much as he would have liked, but after she was gone he kept my dance card filled, and I got to know some of the unindicted criminals, parochial school snitches, black businessmen, and cement and meat millionaires that make up political life in my adopted city. Then, one day, I was informed by Isaac that the state senator from my neighborhood was retiring (off to Key Biscayne with about three million of the people’s dollars) and Isaac somehow could arrange it that I would stand for the vacant seat.

  I was meant to jump for it, but a career or even an episode in state government had never been a part of my plans. I was young enough to be grateful for whatever faint power was being offered me, and I didn’t want just to say no flat out. To be honest, I didn’t have much of an idea what state senators did, and so Isaac arranged for my going down to Springfield, to look around and meet the governor. I sat in on a session. The heated debate was about whether to remove the cardinal from its honorary post as Illinois state bird. The representative from Waukegan was reading in a monotone from a paper, prepared by a “leading ornithologist,” in which the cardinal was described as a cowardly bird and then there were statistics about the dwindling cardinal population in Illinois. When that was finally over, someone else wanted to reintroduce a motion to rename a bridge near Moline after a local boy who’d been killed in Da-Nang. And blah blah blah. I was so bored, I seemed to be drowning in it. And there didn’t seem one person down on the floor remotely destined for a career in national politics.

  I stayed the weekend, hacking around, wasting time. Sunday, I was invited to the governor’s house for brunch. Kinosis’s idea of keeping the common touch was inviting state legislators over for buffet breakfast at the state house, where he’d serve big cakey pancakes tricked up with strawberry preserves, and little rib-eye steaks, and Greek salads with black olives, feta cheese, and Pepperidge Farm croutons. Kinosis’s daughter Dawn, a sallow, sleepy-eyed girl of ten with lint all over her blue skirt, made name tags for us out of colored construction paper and glitter. “Hi, my name is Fielding Pierce,” mine said, and even the governor wore one, being a family man and having, as well, an occupational fondness for anything bearing his own name. (Dawn was the last child left at home; her siblings were already slurping from the public trough up in Chicago.)

  Kinosis had little to say to me; he ran through the familiar story of his humble beginnings, how his father ran a business involving buying animal fat from t
hose old Back of the Yards slaughterhouses and selling it to cosmetics companies, who used it for making lipstick. And I told him my father worked as a typesetter and my mother—and this is something I probably should have not said—worked for a pol who reminded me a lot of him. I hadn’t realized it before I said it, but old Earl Corvino and Kinosis were definitely a part of the same subspecies. They had the same cold intelligent eyes, the same neon smiles, the same maddening habit of eating off other people’s plates. I think I won the humbler-than-thou contest, but as far as Kinosis was concerned I was still an egghead, a snob. He knew I was hooked into Isaac Green and the district I would represent included the U. of C., as well as some of the most awful slums in the city, the sort of ghetto they show pictures of in Communist countries to prove how terrible capitalism is. Kinosis didn’t run well with the University people, who found him crude and corrupt, nor did he find many supporters among the blacks, who despite the urgings of their ward bosses, could not vote for a man who, when he was in high school, had had a fistfight with a black kid and killed him with a punch to the forehead.

  After having given it some thought, I told Isaac a week later that I would rather not run for the state assembly. He was disappointed but not very surprised. I explained to him I wanted to move in a different direction and soon after that I left his firm and started working in the county prosecutor’s office. Isaac helped with that, and it had also fallen to him to explain to Kinosis that I wouldn’t be coming down to Springfield. According to Isaac, Kinosis had taken my refusal as a personal affront and I had what Mom later called my “first political enemy.”

  But now, Kinosis was sitting in a wing chair, right next to my benefactor, in Isaac’s reproduction old English study, with its smells of leather, roses, and the smoke from the fire flashing in the hearth. Just as the weather folk promised, snow was starting to fall. We saw it first up here, like insiders seeing a preview of a new movie. I followed its descent and watched it change colors as it drifted past the Christmas lights below.

  “What the hell you looking at out there?” Kinosis asked the back of my head. He didn’t sound quite so menacing off his own turf. There was a snag of petulance in his voice.

  “He’s thinking, Ed,” Isaac said. “You don’t want a snap decision, do you?”

  “Well, I don’t want to spend half the night sitting here, either.”

  “Let me get you another drink, Ed,” Isaac said. I heard him get up and saw his reflection in the window, floating over mine. He was wearing a burgundy smoking jacket and an ascot; his thin white hair was perfectly combed. It was getting rather embarrassing standing with my back to them. I suddenly realized I’d been carrying this too far and now it was appearing as if I were having some kind of nervous episode, which I was not.

  Kinosis had called this secret meeting to tell me he was willing to make me a U.S. congressman, if I had eyes for the job. Of course, those poky old nitpickers who framed the Constitution blocked the governor from exercising his God-given right to appoint whomever he wanted to fill a vacant congressional seat. The best Kinosis could offer me was a quick special election in my district and my name in the Democratic column—that’s what he could control. And it was a lot. If your name appeared in the Democratic column in a special election, chances were you wouldn’t even have an opponent. The Republicans had given up the district as a lost cause a long time ago, and any local pols from the Democratic side, no matter how slighted they felt that Kinosis hadn’t chosen them to take over the vacant seat, would probably swallow what I will loosely call their pride and wait for other opportunities. Kinosis ran the party like a marching band and if you there with your little glockenspiel fell out of step, you’d have the guy behind you with the trombone walking up your back.

  So a seat was mine if I had eyes for it. And I did. But what took the spin off the whole deal was that the seat I was being offered had just been vacated by a man who’d been forced to resign. Jerry Carmichael. He wasn’t much of a congressman, but he’d gotten himself elected five times. He was a cheerful, innocuous sort of fellow, a hell of a lot more inoffensive than a politician ought to be but no more so than they really are. He was a congressman from Chicago; he’d gone quail hunting with Dick Daley. He knew his way around. But his connections had now run out on him, or maybe he’d crossed someone, perhaps screwed some construction firm who’d been counting on a new ramp to the Skyway and the zillion tons of cement it would entail, or maybe he’d gotten drunk and told someone what he really thought of them. It doesn’t pay to wonder. But something must have gone wrong, because one afternoon there was a picture on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times and the next morning the same photo ran in the Trib and this picture showed a blond, good-looking young guy with enough panic and self-interest in his eyes to show up through the linotype.

  The guy’s name was Ted Simon and I suppose those who follow politics with the statistical obsessiveness with which little boys follow baseball knew Simon was Jerry Carmichael’s $48,000-per-year legislative aide. At least that’s what he was before the picture ran: now he’d been reduced to Carmichael’s catamite, though Simon was no page, but a burly guy in his thirties. It never was clear why he came out and told the world that he and the congressman were lovers. Maybe Jerry broke a promise; maybe Simon was nuts. But if what he wanted to do was stop Carmichael’s congressional career, then I suppose he was a happy man.

  Not only did he say that he was Carmichael’s boyfriend but it went further—it always does, like when you call the police or contest a will. Because soon Simon was saying he did next to no work, that he knew nothing about the issues or Congress, and hadn’t gotten past the tenth grade back in Live Oak, Florida, his old mossy hometown. He stopped short of saying he couldn’t read or tie his own shoes, but he made it pretty clear his only real job in the Rayburn Building down in Washington was dunking of interesting things he and Jerry could do once the workday was over.

  Carmichael more or less sat tight and I remember thinking that was the right thing to do. He issued a statement that was a little terse, saying Ted Simon was a valuable, respected aide with many friends on the Hill (a brilliant touch, that), who, perhaps from overwork, was having a nervous breakdown. Maybe if it all had stopped there, Carmichael could have survived, but Simon, once unleashed, would not shut up. Next thing anyone knew, he was on Good Morning America, seven fifteen in the morning, sobbing into his big freckled hands right there in front of David Hartman and several million American early-birds, saying he wanted to make a clean sweep of it, that he loved his country and hated his life, and so forth. The press, used to trapping their victims, didn’t know what to make of Simon’s wild, insistent surrender. After all, who asked this guy about his personal life? And why couldn’t he shut up about it? Maybe he was one of those haunted crazies who enjoy confessing to imaginary crimes. And really, was it such a crime? America was getting to be a big boy now, and surely we could understand a little hanky-panky. After all, it’s lonely over there in the corridors of power, what with the bomb shelters in the basement and the echo of Florsheim heels everywhere you turn.

  So for a while it looked as if the press and everyone else might just be a little reluctant to believe Simon’s story, or at least reluctant to act upon it, when suddenly Carmichael emerged from his seclusion and announced he was resigning his office for family reasons, and if that was true he must have had a pretty impatient crew in his family because the resignation was effective immediately. It was a rather pointless Congress anyhow—this was heading toward the last year of Carter, with the country knowing he’d be back to peanut farming and to meticulously blue-penciling his memoirs—but still the quickness of Carmichael’s resignation took everyone by surprise. The seat had been open for ten days now and everyone was curious whom Kinosis would “recommend” for the special election; I had been wondering too, without ever entertaining the thought it would somehow be me. And now the offer was made and I felt obliged to take it—obliged, that is, to a lifelong ambition
that I’d been carrying along with me like an idiot brother whom nobody likes but who now, at last, was going to come into his own. I still knew what a shitty deal Carmichael had been given and that if people were half as good as they liked to think they were, then none of this would be happening.

  I turned around and locked eyes with Kinosis. The governor has a formidable stare, uncivilized, voracious. His eyes barely fit in with his smooth, careful face. They looked feral beneath the canopy of his black, carefully arranged hair, which showed the tracks of his comb like a well-tilled field.

  “Can I get something straight here?” I said. “Are you asking me if I’d like the job or are you offering it to me?”

  The governor looked like he’d never heard such impoliteness in all his life. Isaac stepped in.

  “You’re his choice, Fielding,” he said. “It’s all been discussed.”

  “Jerry Carmichael’s got thirteen months left to his term,” Kinosis said, yanking his tie loose and popping the top button of his lemon yellow shirt. “I’m going to set the date for the special election, make it January 22, if that’s a Tuesday. You can get sworn in the next week.You got any idea what it’s like to be a freshman congressman down there in that zoo? They’ll yes you to fucking death but no one’ll listen to a word you say. Half your staff’s going to spend their day working on their resumes because they’re looking for a job, knowing you probably won’t make it back next term. But Isaac tells me you know the ropes and play the game fair and square, so who knows? Maybe you’ll stick. If not, at least you’ll be able to tell the world you were a U.S. congressman for a few months. Who was that guy, Isaac? That creep from LaGrange who got himself elected to Congress in ’56 and got his ass kicked the next time out, and he’s been trying to make a living on it ever since? He opened the House of Representatives Bar and Grill and when that belly-upped he tried Congressional Putt Putt PeeWee Golf Park, the first hole you shot the ball through the doors of a little plaster Capitol building. What was that moron’s name?”