Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “I tell everyone,” I said, “that I was born rich and later when they find out I was raised in five rooms in Brooklyn they wonder what I’m talking about. But the people in this room know what I’m talking about because most of you know what my brother and sister and I have been given. Something indefinable, nothing you could put into a safety deposit box.” I paused for a moment; I’d had no idea I was going to be so rhapsodic, to swing for the fences like that. “I know for myself, when I become a lawyer, I will nail my various diplomas and certifications of worthiness on the wall. But the credentials will be … incomplete if I do not place above them a picture of my father. Because most of what I know about justice I learned at his knee and the drive that sent me into law school—and Caroline into painting, and Danny into publishing—comes also from our father. You know, even in a perfect democracy, there is not a perfect democracy of spirit, and tonight we are saluting one of the great aristocrats of the spirit.” Oh yes, I could have run for mayor that night. I did go on some. And at a certain point, I realized I’d been at it for five minutes and risked losing them all. So I ended with a quick, self-deflating joke: “OK, Pa? Is this what you wanted me to tell them?” And the laughter was quick, generous …

  “What a beautiful speech, Fielding,” Mom said, linking her arm through mine. She had a highball, a lit cigarette. Her eyes looked wild and her fancy hairdo was coming apart. “You really had them in the palm of your hand. You could’ve had them doing anything you wanted. God, it was beautiful.” She walked me around the perimeter of the hall; her legs looked dark and skinny in her tinted stockings. “And did you see Corvino listening to you?” She glanced over her shoulder and then took a sudden right turn, yanking me along. “The poor man was green. He looked like someone just ran over his pussycat.”

  We had made our way around the room and now she led me to the bar. I hadn’t jinxed my stopping drinking by telling anyone about it. All the bartender was serving was cold beers and ice; the whiskey was in bottles on the tables. Dad was there at the bar with Southworth from the Typographical Union, each of them fetching a paper bucket of hollow ice cubes. Southworth was trying to talk Dad into spending a few days with Southworth’s son, who taught sociology at Queens College and was putting together an oral history of the New York City trade union movement. I could see Dad didn’t like the idea, thinking it would turn him into an old-timer, droning on about the old days. “I don’t care a hell of a lot about what’s already happened,” he said. “The best is yet to come, right?”

  Mom got some ice for her table and put her arm around Dad’s waist. “It’s a crying shame Sarah isn’t here,” she said to us.

  “Wait wait wait,” said Dad. “Think of the expense.” He was lightning fast in explaining away possible slights: he couldn’t bear to feel overlooked.

  “She’s away,” I said. “Otherwise she would have come.”

  “Away?” asked Mom, narrowing her eyes a little. She tended to believe that when something was irregular it was amiss and, as unattractive as this was as a way of thinking, life had a way of proving her right.

  “She had to go home. Her father’s feeling poorly.” I hated fake sickness excuses, thinking they were very bad luck, but Mr. Williams was a jerk and I didn’t mind the risk.

  “Well well,” said Dad. “To hear her go on about it, she wouldn’t spit on her father if he was on fire. See? Middle-classers patch it up once they get older.”

  “You think that’s what it is?”

  “Sure. He’s an executive, right?Think she wants to get cut out of his will? Believe me, your mom and I have seen it happen a million times.”

  “I think his will’s probably worth a hell of a lot less than your union pension,” I said.

  Dad laughed, as if he’d just unexpectedly won something.

  “Look at these goddamned ice cubes they give us,” Mom said, peering into the bucket. “They’re melting already. I better get back to my table with them.”

  “I’ll be right along, Mary,” Dad said. “I just want to talk to Fielding for a second.”

  We watched in silence for a moment while Mom made her way back to their table and then Dad put his arm around my shoulders and we walked to the side of the hall. The trio was playing an airport cocktail lounge version of “Age of Aquarius” and now people were juiced enough to make idiots of themselves on the dance floor.

  “That was a nice speech,” he said to me, his voice cool, analytical, intimate only in its assumptions. “The way you delivered it. The pauses. The eye contact. But can I tell you something? And I’m only saying this because you’re so good and if you’re that good, why not be better. OK? First of all, you made it seem like I raised you myself and all the stuff I gave you, like your mother had nothing to do with it. If you were running for office not a woman in the room would have voted for you. And the other dung is maybe you get a little too personal. It’s OK with family and all, but if you’re going to be a leader you have to get used to the idea that no one ever knows you, not really knows you. You think if people really knew Kennedy they would have gone out and voted for him? A gangster’s son who used the White House like a … a cat house, who thought he was a thousand times better than the common man? You got to be just like a clean white sheet and people can color it in with what they want to believe. That’s why the Eisenhowers win and the Stevensons lose. You just have to—” And here he squeezed me close to him. We were exactly the same height but there was a hardness to his body that mine lacked, a steel spring tension, a stubbornness. “You just have to be real strong,” he said. “So strong you’ll want to blow your brains out, but you won’t. So strong that people can call you a dirty cowardly lying sonofabitch right to your face and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference.”

  “What if I don’t want to be like that, Dad?” I asked.

  “Then you’ll be making a big mistake. You’ll be ending up like me.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “It ain’t enough. You’ll be tearing your hair out when you read the newspapers or watch the evening news because the world’ll be run by people not half as smart as you are and you let them have it. And these people, Fielding, they’re not only dummies, not only a bunch of Little Lord Fauntleroys, guys you and your brother would have eaten for breakfast back in the neighborhood—but they’re bad people, too. They think that working people are dogshit.They take all the decency out of everything. They’d sell the moon and the stars and all the little planets in between.” He patted my lapels and leaned back to get a better look at me. “Look good, boy. Strong. You’re doing it for all of us.”

  “I’m doing the best I can, Dad.”

  “That’s right,” he said, nodding with sudden enthusiasm. “And that’s all it takes.”

  I felt at that moment a sudden tremor of unease, the sort of inner weather that usually obscures more than it reveals. I felt Sarah near me, not in this room but in my life. She was reachable again and I only wanted to speak to her, to hear her voice.

  I made some mumble of an excuse and went out to the hotel lobby, where I found a phone booth. It stank of urine when I closed the door. I called our number in Chicago, making the call collect. By now, I was in a frenzy of anticipation. I knew if she didn’t answer then I would have to find Father Stanton and from there I’d be on my way to Chile. Like a man awakening from a long, disorganizing illness, I wondered suddenly how I could have been so stupid, so weak, so easily swayed as to let her go on this mission. The phone rang once, twice, three times. And then, just when it felt as if my nerves could not be tightened another notch, she picked up the phone. I could tell from her voice, even as she said hello, that she was crying.

  “I have a collect call for anyone from Fielding Pierce,” said the operator, who’d probably heard worse than mere crying on the phone. “Will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sarah!” I shouted. “You’re back.”

  “Oh God, Fielding. Where are you?”

&n
bsp; “I’m in Brooklyn. It’s my father’s retirement party.”

  There was a silence and then she began to sob. I stood there and I didn’t know what to say.

  “Sarah?” Softly.

  “I thought you’d left for good.”

  “I’m on my way home, Sarah. If I leave right now I can get the last plane out.”

  “Oh, Fielding. I’m so scared.”

  “Are you all right? Did anything happen?”

  “I’m OK. Are you really coming back?”

  “Yes. Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right. It all went well.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Can you wait up for me?”

  There was a silence of sorts; I listened to the watery electronic shhh of the long distance cables. Then Sarah said: “If I can’t wait up, I’ll pin your instructions to the blanket.”

  11

  THIS WAS JUST the time when it was beginning to get tough running as a Democrat. There were a couple of hundred unshaven Americans held hostage in Iran, the Russians were running their war games in Afghanistan, and the president was appearing on TV direct from the White House wearing a woolen cardigan because oil prices were too high to turn up the heat in the Oval Office.

  Bertelli was trying to make this work in his own favor, talking about getting America back on track and acting as if I were the incumbent, just because my party happened to be in power. Chicago, thank God, was feeling the disillusion with the Dems less than most places—we still ate our kielbasa, rooted for the Sox, and voted the straight ticket. There were, according to Isaac, about two hundred thousand registered Democrats in Chicago who were either dead or had not yet had the privilege of being born. You could count on their ectoplasmic loyalty. In my district, however, with its large numbers of University types, the vote was less predictable: you never knew what those goddamned chrome domes were going to do. They read the columnists and subscribed to the fine-print magazines and had those old leather-bound books from which they could draw horrifying historical parallels.

  The non-chrome-domian parts of my district were poor and black. And though the old Democratic organization still operated out in Woodlawn and under the El tracks on 63rd Street and up and down Stony Island and out toward Cottage Grove, it was getting harder and harder to bring out the vote. Not many jobs, lots of freaky crime, hopelessness glowing like radiation out through the window grates— it was awfully difficult to get someone in the ghetto to pin on a campaign button.

  Just then, my district was falling under the influence of a slight, hunchbacked, demagogic Baptist named Ebenezer B. Andrews. The Reverend Andrews’s church was always jammed and from the pulpit he railed against abortion, describing it not only as a sin against God but as the state’s attempt to further oppress the blacks, by keeping their numbers in check.

  The Republicans and Bertelli were hip enough to know about Andrews and clever enough to strike a bargain with him—and with no previously existing alliances in the community, they were free to do so. And Bertelli, that old goaty libertine, in whose pretentious little bistro a thousand and one abortions had been decided upon (or “opted for” as they said in coffeehouseland), anoints himself as a defender of Chicago’s fetuses and with that sneaky little hop and a skip he catapults himself into an alliance with the most vocal and well-organized subgroup in the ghetto. It was absolutely astonishing! I had already lost the gays; now I was in danger of losing the blacks.

  I needed to paste together a base of support quickly, but without an incumbent to run against I found myself casting about for an issue and coming up empty each time. I had a speech I’d been practicing since high school but it was, I realized now, inappropriate for the office I was seeking. I would have to wait for a crack at the White House before trotting out my rhapsodic rhetoric about a better world, a braver people, the rebirth of human decency. I needed to scale things down: after all, you don’t get a job as a lab assistant by promising you can cure leukemia. My advisers weren’t having an easier time than I was. My exiled predecessor had won his terms simply by being a Democrat and by staying friendly with some of the real estate interests. The Party was willing to throw a little weight in my direction, but whomever else Carmichael had cut deals with had yet to come looking for me. For the time being, it seemed, the democratic process was outpacing corruption and I was all alone.

  I didn’t know what people wanted to hear and that would have been just fine—but I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say, either. All I could come up with was this: I am fairly smart; I am more honest than dishonest; I didn’t go into politics to line my own pockets; I promise to work 365 days a year to do what’s best not only for the district but the country, not only for the world but the universe. But I wasn’t drunk enough on my own sudden fortune to dare suggest this as a line of attack to the moral misers who were running my campaign. It would have seemed like sheer preppy vanity. They would not have known what to do with it—or me. And since the election was only days away and I had no support of my own, I was beholden to them.

  I spent a day working with Lucille Jackson, driving around in her husband’s stiff-mobile, with its overwhelming nightmare scent of roses and embalming fluids. I spoke in an ornate living room to a ladies’ civic club, to a bunch of retired then at the Joe Louis Social Club. I strolled the stark icy streets beneath the rotten latticework of the 63rd Street El and I pressed the flesh in taverns (while the impulse to join the voters in a drink went through me like electric current through a white rat). The best thing that came of the day was meeting Albert Monroe, whom I began to cultivate with the hopes he could end up doing me a lot more good in the ghetto than Lucille Jackson.

  Monroe was twenty-two, an ex-Blackstone Ranger, poor, fast, sharp, with sure political instincts. He liked me and wanted to work in my campaign; he kept pace with me all day, cueing me in when I needed it, enduring Lucille’s hysterical glowering eyes, because she knew he was cutting in on her harvest, and enduring, as well, the bitter cold January day, because his coat was thin and beneath his red and white Nikes his feet were bare. If I won, I planned to bring Albert on staff.

  I didn’t get home until nine in the evening. Juliet and Caroline had had dinner together in the kitchen and since they had little to say to each other, no two women had ever looked happier to see me when I finally arrived. I ate quickly and then went to take a bath, hoping to relax and take the pain out of my legs so I’d be able to put in a night’s work.

  As I soaked, I closed my eyes and dreamed of Sarah. With Caroline around, I could talk about her from time to time and it seemed that by speaking her name I had interrupted the magic that had been bringing her to me unbeckoned. Now I had to conjure her. I remembered her in the tub in her house on Staten Island, sitting in three inches of tepid water because there was a drought alert and she was crazily scrupulous about obeying that kind of civic-virtue law. She dipped a fat brown sponge in the water and squeezed it over her back, but the soap clung to her skin anyhow …

  There was a knock on the door. I sat up in the water. “Yes?”

  It was Juliet. “Tony Dayton and Mulligan are here to see you?”

  I looked down and saw I had an erection; the head of my penis peered out of the water like a periscope. I slid down until I was below the waterline.

  “Send them in,” I said. I felt it would strengthen my command if I had them come in and speak to me in my bathroom.

  Tony and Mulligan came in. Tony had a poster rolled up and tucked under his arm. Rich carried a manila envelope, upon which someone had penciled a column of numbers.

  “Your posters came off press an hour ago,” Dayton said. “You wanted to see them right away?”

  “Unfurl it, Tony.” I felt beneath the water; I was soft again and so I could sit up a little straighter.

  Tony rolled out the poster and held it up for me to see. The whole thing was bordered in a bright, upbeat blue. The top lines read FIELDING PIERCE DEMOCRAT WORKI
NG FOR YOU. Beneath that was a picture taken of me a couple of days before during an I.V.I, meeting. I had taken off my suit jacket and rolled up my sleeves and was pointing toward someone in the audience, as if acknowledging a question. (In fact, I’d been asking the fellow to stop interrupting me; it had been a heckler from the Hyde Park Gay Activists Alliance, asking me about my part in the Carmichael affair.) In the photo, I looked open to the tough questions, confident, available, vigorous, et cetera. There was even a smoky haze over the image, suggestive of a healing apparition rising from the battlefield. It was a shock to my underfed physical vanity that the Democrats were trying to make an asset of my appearance.

  “Like it?” asked Tony, happily, certain I would.

  “Do you?” I asked Rich Mulligan.

  “Sure. It came out good,” he said, with a shrug that seemed to mean he couldn’t have cared less.

  “How many did we run off?” I asked.

  “Three thousand,” said Tony.

  I waited, let them try to guess what I was drinking. Then I sunk deep into my bath again and said, “Then we’ll go with them.” The truth was, I was thrilled beyond decency to see the poster; it was beyond what I had hoped for.