Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  THE NEXT DAY was open house at Isaac and Adele’s. Sarah and I arrived at three in the afternoon. Mrs. Davis was working that day and she’d gotten her skinny, wild-eyed daughter Lucille to help her out. It was not a large party; the Greens liked to retain an aura of selectivity. The partners from the law firm were there, but none of the junior lawyers. I was meant to feel immensely encouraged to be invited and I did. I was the only law student, though the preening, argumentative Wasps who were my teachers were there in abundance. Senator Percy came for a few minutes—two cheese puffs, a cup of punch, a few Nixon jokes, and out: he probably had twenty parties at which he needed to appear that day. Senator Stevenson was in the Caribbean—Isaac and many of the others referred to him as Adlai’s boy, as in, “I suppose Adlai’s boy is getting sunburned on that boat of his.” It seemed to make them feel comfortable to miniaturize him.

  Sarah had met the Greens before. Isaac had once taken us to dinner in New York and when Sarah and I first came to Chicago Isaac and Adele had us over twice. It was not, as they say, a good mix. Despite their having lived in Chicago for forty years and mucking about in Chicago politics for most of that time, Isaac and Adele still thought of Catholic girls as tough little numbers in knee socks and green blazers and that Sarah was from the south made their approach to her all the more anthropological. “What was it that Robert Penn Warren once said?” wondered Adele, and it had pretty much gone in a lockstep down from there. They would never have been so crude as to suggest Sarah wasn’t a suitable match for a boy of my potential, but it was clear that was how they felt—and Sarah knew it, too. It didn’t embitter her toward them; she accepted their judgment and, really, had not even the faintest desire to be the sort of woman who’d make a good wife for a would-be politician. The image of the little woman with a handbag that matched the shoes sitting next to the podium was as close to her emotional style as being a farmer’s wife rolling out the dough and canning the zucchini, or a professor’s wife serving tea and arrowroot cookies to the great man’s newest nubile disciple. Sarah’s view of marriage: I’d rather have a wife than be one.

  I was drinking club soda and lime, feeling toweringly tense and virtuous and Sarah, in a gesture of transitional solidarity, was also teetotaling. She wore black silk trousers and a light blue shirt; her hair was dark brown, shiny, twisted into a complex French braid. This was not a party for beautiful women and she looked odd and vulnerable amongst the others of her gender done up in boxy brocaded dresses, with their stiff, immovable hairdos and their faces pink, shiny, and hard. These were brilliant, plotting, vivacious behind-the-scenes women, women who seemed to have sublimated all of their personal ambitions and half their sexuality in order to help their husbands along. Sarah felt shy. She kept close to me and said, “Don’t work the room, Fielding, just stay with me.” It seemed like a lousy time to get even for all the times she’d ignored me in church basements or let me languish at the table while no one’s holy eyes engaged me. I decided to be big about it.

  There was a little fellow named Oswald Ellis who taught economics at the University of Chicago and he and Sarah got into an argument about the new government in Chile. The generals who deposed Allende were, for a series of odd reasons, highly influenced by the University of Chicago’s department of economics, which, under the influence of free-marketeer Milton Friedman, had somehow thrust itself into the vanguard of Chilean reaction. And so, as it happened, Oswald Ellis, with his little shoulders no larger than buttermilk biscuits and his bow tie hovering against his throat like a monarch butterfly, was not only expert about matters Chilean but also passionately engaged. He was regaling Sarah with torrents of statistics, and as he described it, Allende and his socialist henchmen were to the halls of commerce what a gang of psychotic teenagers would be to the Art Institute. “Don’t you talk to me about human rights,” he snapped at Sarah, “don’t you dare talk to me about that. It is not a human right to hand a perfectly stable and democratic nation over to the forces of chaos. Nor is it a human right to turn a viable economy into a laboratory for a bunch of old-hat, disproved Marxist ideas.” Sarah, for her part, didn’t know half of what Ellis did about Chile but the force of her convictions kept her in there, slugging it out with him. She had learned by heart the names of dozens upon dozens of Chileans who’d been tortured or slaughtered by the junta, and so when Ellis would recite figures about tin mines and anchovy harvests, Sarah could counter with, “What about Jorge Guzman? What about María Sandro?” And Ellis would throw up his hands in an Ach! This woman is impossible! gesture. I didn’t want to let their argument get any louder or more unfriendly and so I stayed at Sarah’s side.

  Isaac came over to us with a slender, dark, very attractive but withdrawn young woman, who was wearing a formal-looking red dress that left her opaque olive shoulders bare. “I want you to meet my niece, Juliet Beck,” Isaac announced. “Darling,” he said to her, “this is—oh, you’ve met Oswald already. Well, this is Fielding Pierce and this is Sarah Wilson—”

  “Williams,” said Sarah, pleasantly enough.

  “What’s that you’re drinking?” I asked Juliet, who would one day remind me those were my first words to her, though she could never recall having met Sarah.

  “This?” she asked. She looked at her glass. “Sweet vermouth and soda.”

  “Great color,” I said. “It looks like one of those drinks people used to order in movies. They always, I don’t know … made me want to drink.” I laughed and Juliet’s attention touched me lightly, the way one might touch something in a store while browsing to kill a little time.

  Sarah and I stayed at the open house until the evening. The apartment was thick with what people generally call the dull roar of ego but I was as sorry to go as Sarah was anxious. Still, I didn’t begrudge it; we’d be home in half an hour and perhaps then we’d go straight to bed. The thought of entering her created an odd, voluptuous tension in me, like a suppressed yawn. There was a noise at the back of her throat when I put myself into her, a clicking sound, as if a lock were being tripped, a lever allowing me access to a deeper layer of being.

  It was eight below zero yet snowing nevertheless when we left the Greens’ apartment house, with its gaslit canopy and liveried doorman—the old fellow saluted us good night, on the assumption that if we were guests of any tenant we were by definition his social superiors. Sarah and I had left our car at home—it had no heater. The tires were bald. We had to take a bus home to the South Side and as it happened one appeared right away. It looked like a movable green gelatin capsule hovering in the slaty, snowy night. It would take us just a block from our apartment house but it was a long ride and, on that New Year’s night, a creepy one.

  The dozen or so passengers we shared the ride with each seemed cast onto the bus by dint of some personal tragedy or character flaw. I tried to see them all with Sarah’s eyes, tried to believe that each of those lives was at least as valuable and dramatic as our own, that each of those souls held within it the iridescent, weightless seeds of saintliness, that who we were cast amongst were not only God’s children but possibly God himself. We all ran the risk of the Roman soldiers who had no idea whose flesh they tore on Calvary. How could we say that that man with the cast on his foot and the corona of dark stubble over his face was not Christ?

  It offended Sarah’s sense of tact and her vanity to ask you what you were thinking but my thoughts left their mark on my face and I could see by the way she gazed at me that she was wondering. She took my hand and then put her hand and mine in her lap. She was wearing an old fur coat she got years ago at a St. Vincent de Paul’s; it was strictly a college girl’s idea of campy elegance but it was the warmest thing she owned. Her face looked lined in the steady polluted light of the bus. It was all right; she was not the sort of woman whose beauty depends on her freshness or any trick intimations of innocence. Maybe five years before she could have gotten away with sleeping thirty hours a week but now she couldn’t. Her eyes looked stricken, trembling on the cusp bet
ween darkness and light, prophecy and sleep, and Sarah herself described the half moons beneath her eyes as papal purple. I realized now I had presented to my mentor and his clique a woman on the edge and I knew enough of how they thought, the sort of emotional accountancy and odds-making they came to as automatically as breathing to know that all of them had made the following mental note: If he goes up, he’ll do it without her.

  “Your friends are all a little tougher than they look,” Sarah said.

  “They’re not really my friends,” I said, too quickly. “I don’t even know most of them.”

  “Isaac and Adele?” she asked.

  “Most of them,” I said. “I don’t know most of them.”

  She shrugged. Outside, the buildings dropped away and we were riding past the railway yards; the snow blew past the red warning lights. “It’s your world,” she said. “It’s where you’re going.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” I said.

  “It’s just a fact,” said Sarah. “You had this all mapped out long before you met me and nothing’s going to change it.”

  “Do we want to change it?”

  “Let’s face it,” she said. “We’re both tyrants and we’d love to change each other.”

  “I don’t want to change you,” I said, but even I could hear my voice was not convincing.

  “Of course you do, silly,” she said. She chucked me under the chin and said, in a voice you’d use on a baby St. Bernard, “you big silly.”

  “Come on, Sarah, cut it out.”

  “You are the incarnation of your family’s ambitions and I’m the incarnation of my family’s fears,” said Sarah. Now her voice went into a clear, soft alto, as she turned definitive.

  I thought for a moment and then said, “So what?”

  “Well, it’s tough when one’s die has been cast. Your father’s name is Ed and your Mom’s name is Mary and they called you Fielding. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know. I accept I was meant to succeed. I accept the torch that was passed to me.”

  “Yes. But can you hold onto it and me, too?”

  “I’ve got an answer for that one,” I said. “Yes. I can. I will.”

  We were silent then. There was a weird element of fun in all of this, as if we were pretending our friendship had reached an impasse and this is what we’d be saying .if it had. But we were, as Sarah once put it, walking on thin water and the sense of indestructibility that lovers live with had passed some time ago—this little psychodrama was cutting a little too close to the bone. It was one thing to pretend that we were at a crossroads and that Sarah was getting ready to say good-bye, and it was quite another thing altogether suddenly to realize it was half true and getting truer. Neither of us had ever admitted that the path the other was on was real. Perhaps we’d secretly and stupidly believed we were suddenly going to change, the way you do when you’re very young, when you’re Elvis one week and Gandhi the next, not knowing that as you grow older the horse goes slower and the plow cuts deeper.

  I TOOK AN examination in contract law and then went out drinking with Victor Tomczak and another vaguely up-from-under comrade, a woman named Gloria Busterman, whose father was a fisherman on Long Island. We each felt like little soldiers crouched within the Trojan horse of our public selves and it thrilled us to be getting away with it. I took leave of my resolve to be sober but limited myself to drinks I didn’t enjoy—in this case, beer. We were all awfully happy, but we were quiet about it. We were drinking at a University hangout called Jimmy’s and it was afternoon; most of the other drinkers were people with rather little to celebrate and we didn’t want to rub their noses in it. We toasted each other with conspiratorial clicks of the glasses—a dull atonal ping because the mugs were thick.

  After, I walked home, six blocks in the snow, and walked up the stairs to our apartment with eggshell care because there was an inch of snow in my hair and I didn’t want any of it to fall off. I looked like a gingerbread man whose head had been dipped into a bowl of stiff whipped cream and I didn’t want Sarah to miss how incredibly adorable I looked. I held onto the banister and took careful little steps. A small clump of snow fell off as I fished for my keys but I stooped down, picked it up, and stuck it back on. Then I zombied into the apartment, toward the light in the bedroom.

  And there I was with a headful of snow, looking at Sarah, who was just out of the shower, her face red and blotchy from hot water and scrubbing, wearing a yellow terry cloth robe, with her hair wrapped in a towel, leaning over the bed while she packed her big blue and tan suitcase.

  “Where have you been?” she said, looking up at me, her eyes flashing messages of anger, concern, secretiveness.

  “With Victor and Gloria. Where are you going?”

  She picked up three neatly folded turtleneck shirts from the bed and placed them into the suitcase, next to a black dress with red piping. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but I’m going to tell you,” she said. “We’re going to Chile.”

  I nodded, as if this made sense. The heat of that apartment got to my snowy crown and as I nodded it slipped off me and hit the floor in a mass. I unbuttoned my overcoat and I felt something that surprised me: an acute, burning sense of embarrassment.

  “We’ll be gone about two weeks,” she said.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “We’re going to help get some friends out of there,” she said.

  “How are you going to do that?” I felt my nerves go taut and the arrow of my anger notched in.

  “It’s all planned. It’s not difficult and it’s not at all dangerous.” She folded in a pair of white trousers and then placed her blue and yellow sandals along the side of the valise. She smiled at me, but she was suddenly a shadow behind dark glass. I was barely seeing at all. I thought as a child and ached as a child and wanted to scream bloody fucking murder as a child. Control yourself, I thought to myself. I could taste the drink I wanted in the back of my throat; could just about hear the lucky chatter of the ice.

  “When’s all this supposed to go down?” I asked.

  “Tonight. We’re flying down to Miami and from there we’re taking Lan Chile straight to Santiago.” She walked into my arms; I held her and she pressed herself against me. I knew she was doing it to be kind, to cool me out. She had as much interest in embracing me as she had in reading a magazine; I could feel her heart pounding and it wasn’t passion for me that accelerated that guileless muscle. She was on a mission, she was living up to her fondest vision of herself.

  “If I thought you’d change your mind if I asked you to, then I would ask you to,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want you to go. Because it is dangerous. There’s enough danger and horror in the world. You don’t have to buy a plane ticket to go out looking for it.”

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  “Who are you going with?”

  “Steven. And a nun from California called Sister Angela.”

  “What’s your cover? What will the generals think you’re doing down there?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Even to me?”

  “I just can’t.”

  “Well, that draws the line, doesn’t it? You think I’m on the wrong side of this or something? Christ, Sarah.”

  “I promised, that’s all. It’s all very complicated. We’re on Church business. There are people inside the country who know what we’re up to and they’ll be covering for us.”

  A few minutes later, Steven Mileski arrived, with Father Stanton. Mileski was wearing one of those Russian caps and he looked like a massive, good-natured Rasputin. He wore his beard outside his black overcoat. Stanton seemed nervous, unstable. “The horror never stops,” he said, more than a few times. He was muttering and his fear pushed me toward my own. Mileski was feeling expansive, curious about the trip, looking forward to the sun.

  “If anyone comes snooping around,” Mil
eski said to me, putting his arm around me, making me feel like the team shrimp being coached to go up to the plate and hope for a base on balls, “you’ll want to dodge all of their questions. Good thing is you’ve got a talent for that—you know, the verbal tap dancing.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Steven,” I said. “It’s really helpful.”

  He smiled at me, winked. He seemed to want to indicate that he knew how I was feeling and that if mere were more time he would have been more man glad to talk it through with me. We were in our living room. Sarah’s suitcase was next to the door; her fur coat was draped over it like a big friendly animal.The phone rang. It was Danny in New York saying he was being sued by a printer in from Pennsylvania and Willow’s lawyer wouldn’t give any more advice until Danny paid his legal bills. I said I’d get back to him a little later and when I turned around Sarah was embracing Father Stanton and Stanton was patting her on the back. His hand looked so terribly gentle and frightened against her red sweater.

  “We have to go,” said Mileski and now for the first time I sensed the uneasiness beneath his cheerfulness.

  “The plane doesn’t leave until seven o’clock,” I said.

  Mileski and Stanton glanced at Sarah, as if my knowing the time of their flight constituted a break in security.

  “There’ll be a lot of traffic on the Dan Ryan,” said Stanton.

  I don’t know why it made me smile. There was something so American about talking about highways and traffic jams. Stanton noticed my smile and smiled back.

  “Not to mention the storm,” said Mileski. “God’s come through for us and given us a lot to put our shoulder against.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s such a help.”