“Just one last thing,” said Mulligan. “It turns out that was a good idea you had about a luncheon thing for all the precinct captains—”
“Yeah,” I said, cutting him short. “And let’s spend some money on that. Where are we having it?”
“Hyde Park Hilton,” Mulligan said. He kept his words to a minimum as a form of resistance.
I closed my eyes for a moment, as if to think it over. “OK. What are they going to serve?”
Mulligan and Dayton glanced at each other, little commiserating bats of the eye. “I don’t know,” said Mulligan. “One of the girls’ll take care of it.”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve got an hour to help fifty precinct captains feel good about humping their asses off to send me to Washington and if we invite them to lunch and serve them slop, what good will it do? Have them prepare cornish hens. One for every plate. It doesn’t cost any more than chicken but it looks like a big deal. And have them stuffed. Say, chestnut stuffing. And rice pilaf. And a fresh salad. They make a dressing there, their own kind of Thousand Island dressing. It’s good. Make sure they serve the salad with that.”
I checked their faces to make certain they were sufficiently repulsed by my attention to detail and then I quickly submerged myself in the bath. The water exerted a pleasant, firm pressure against my eardrums and when I sat up again my hair was plastered over my forehead. “Hand me a towel, will you?” I asked and then completed the night’s work by stepping out of the tub and coming toward them stark naked, my hand extended, waiting for the towel.
THE NEXT MORNING, Tony Dayton was over for breakfast. Juliet had left early to see a damaged Ingres drawing in Evanston and to bid on its restoration and Caroline was already at the campaign headquarters on Woodlawn. Tony was over to show me yet another product of his propaganda mill, this one a leaflet with the suddenly familiar slogan: Fielding Pierce Democrat Working for You. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls which Tony himself had brought over in a paper bag. Tony was palpably nervous as he gave me the leaflet to look over.
“You know what you’ve got?” he said. “A great name. It’s actually kind of black. And of course it’s white. It’s hip without going high-hat and it has a swinging kind of honesty to it.”
Below the slogan was a line of stars, meant to suggest patriotism. And then came my vital statistics. My schooling, my military service, my time in Isaac’s firm, and my years as a lawyer in the Cook County prosecutor’s office. It all looked just fine. And in fact it looked familiar, to the edge of déjà vu, since this was the way I’d written it out mentally a thousand times before.
Below my resume, there was another line of stars. And then, below those, in bold type, the words My Credo. And then, in quotation marks, a paragraph from some automaton purporting to be the candidate himself.
“A lot of what I’d like to say about what I believe can be put into four very simple words: I am a Democrat. I see myself in the tradition of FDR, Truman, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I believe in the greatness of America and the greatness of this, the 28th CD of Illinois. The people of this District deserve a strong and vigilant voice in Washington. The people of the District need someone to speak up about their concerns. 1. A fairer share of the federal pie. Right now, we are getting only nine cents back out of every dollar we pay in to the federal government. There’s much to do in our neighborhoods and we need the funding to get the job done. 2. A strong America and a safer world. We must pursue the spirit of Camp David throughout the world. 3. My experience as a prosecutor has taught me that violent crime is truly the plague of our times. We need an Omnibus Crime Bill to rid the streets of violent crime. 4. Bringing down those interest rates. I will work with those in Congress who are fighting to bring inflation under control. Inflation is the cruelest tax of them all. 5. An open mind and an open door. Above all, I will make myself available to the people of this District and be guided by their wisdom. A leader who does not listen is not really a leader.”
I put the page down and Tony’s eyes were waiting for me. “So? What do you think?” he asked. He shifted in his seat.
“I’ve got problems with it, Tony,” I said. I saw the disappointment in his face and I tried to soften my remarks. “I mean, a lot of it’s fine. Some of it’s awfully good. But there’s problems.”
“But you basically liked it?” he said. “I mean, on the whole?”
“Well, I don’t know. I have kind of a hard time with …” I looked down at the page. “You know, with saying I believe in the greatness of the people of the Twenty-eighth CD of Illinois.”
“You have to say that, Fielding,” Tony said, very quickly. “That’s just a point of departure. Like, do you think Charlie Parker wanted to play ‘How High the Moon’? Of course not. But there were interesting chords for him to solo off of and it was nice to play something the audience recognized, so they could see how he was changing it.”
“Do you know Eric McDonald?”
“Not personally. But I think he’s a talent. Very postbop, but not crazy atonal. Why?”
“My sister Caroline married him.”
“You’re kidding me.” Dayton’s small, blunt fingers went into his dark little beard, that obsidian arrowhead.
“No. Anyhow, they’re divorced.”
“Well, how’s that for getting the worst of both worlds, right?The racists will hate her for marrying a black and the blacks will hate her for not making it work. In other words, less said the better. So tell me, babe. What else do you want to say about the leaflet? I’d like to get fifty thousand of them run off by tomorrow. Rich Mulligan tells me he can get a couple dozen precinct workers out and we’ll have them in every mailbox in the district.”
“Well, I have a hard time with this credo. I mean the whole thing. Or maybe it’s just the idea of it, Tony. Usually, you know, one writes one’s own credo.”
“Not if one doesn’t have the time, jazzbo. I didn’t think I put anything in it that you couldn’t live with.”
“Well, how about this belief in the people of the Twenty-eighth CD. That’s embarrassing.”
“It’s just bullshit. No one pays attention, I mean, if someone sneezes, you say God bless you. No one stops the show to figure out if you really meant it.”
“Did anyone else see this?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Who?”
“The whole shebang.” And then, suddenly, Dayton’s affability vanished. He took a Salem out of his shirt pocket and held it with four fingers, making no move to light it. He leaned forward. “Everyone’s seen it and everyone likes it, Fielding. You want to hang this up over a few words? Well, I can’t let you. Please. You got to be reasonable, jazzbo. If something screws up—I take the heat.”
“What’s my schedule for today, Tony?”
“We got you at the Hyde Park Synagogue at eleven to talk to the golden oldies, then Lucille Jackson’s introducing you to a few of the black precinct captains. Then we’re supposed to get in touch with Kathy Courtney. She’s got a dinner lined up for you with some reporters. Maybe even get Royko in on it.”
“Good,” I said, “my schedule’s not so bad today. I’ve got a little time to take a whack at this credo thing on my own. How would that be? I’ll poke around with it for an hour or so and see if I can come up with anything.”
“You mean do the whole thing over?” asked Dayton, as if he were Michelangelo and I’d just told him I wanted track lighting for the Sistine Chapel.
“No, no, of course not. Not the whole thing.”
“You mean just a word here or there?”
“Look,” I said, suddenly irate, “it’s my credo. I think I ought to write it myself.”
Well, it was ridiculous, it was a time waster, it was miles beside the point, but Dayton could only relinquish. He left at nine in the morning, saying he’d meet me at the synagogue at ten forty-five. “Don’t be late,” he said. “You know how punctual the Jews are.”
�
�That’s a new one on me,” I said, seeing him to the door. He was zippered back up in his down jacket. He’d slipped rubbers on over his tasseled loafers. He looked like a very lonely man.
After he was gone, I sat at my desk with the leaflet.Then I got out a legal pad and a nice Mont Blanc fountain pen Danny had given me a couple of Christmases before. I wrote at the top My Credo and then immediately began drawing crazy little faces, the same ugly, long-nosed, beetle-browed profiles I’d been drawing since I was in second grade and which had, for a few weeks, seemed the harbinger of artistic talent but which quickly atrophied into an annoying compulsive doodle.
I dashed off a dozen of these profiles and for a moment they looked like an arc of devils floating over the sappy headline. I started to write. Democracy is a fight that is never fully won. The enemies of democracy thrive on complacency. Big fucking deal. All right. Is America fated to become the pitiful, helpless giant? No, no, no. That’s what you say when you’re in SDS and you’re bellowing through a bullhorn at a bunch of your middle-class pals on the steps of the Humanities Building. America is a dream that each dreamer must dream anew. Yes, well that ought to bring out the boys in the white jackets and butterfly nets. How about a few specifics, jazzbo? OK, no more pitiful giants, no more democratic dreamers. I’m not doing an evening with Walt Whitman; I’m supposed to be running for what we call political power. So let’s strut our stuff, yes? A critical choice faces the people of the 28th Congressional District. No. It’s the other way around. The people of the 28th Congressional District face a critical choice. OK. A fresh piece of paper. Forget the heading: too intimidating. No more ghouls in profile. Let’s just get it down in blue and yellow. One. I believe … but what?That for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows? Yes. Exactly. Another sheet of paper. After years of abuse by people in office, in which government has seemed for sale to the highest bidder, the American people have now become disengaged not only from their so-called leaders but from the very idea of politics. Hey, wait a minute. I actually believe this. OK, let’s keep it going. Robert F. Kennedy, in his last campaign, said that he wanted to make politics an honorable profession again. For my generation in particular, the idea of politics and political office has fallen into disfavor. It is considered dishonest, futile, and even passé. Yet there is a growing awareness that if we do not serve, if we do not struggle for progress and fairness in the political arena, then the most critical decisions of our time will be left for others—the then and women, who truly are self-seeking and cynical and who fill the void left by decent people’s retreat from politics. I read this over and then read it over again. The rhetoric was goddamned irresistible. Then suddenly, the phone chimed, like a sane voice, and I grabbed for it immediately. It was Caroline, calling from headquarters.
“Hey, guess what,” she said, “we just got ten thousand buttons. Blue and white buttons with your name on them. Isn’t it weird?”
“Let’s at least try to feel professional about this, Caroline,” I said. “Anyway, listen to this. I just wrote it and I want to get it over to Tony Dayton. Got the time right now?”
“I’m working for you, sweetie.”
I read her my credo and after I was through she was quiet enough for me to hear someone open the door on her side of the line.
“I’ll tell you something, Fielding,” Caroline finally said. “I’ve gotten to know Tony in the past few days, and he is not going to go for it.”
“Caroline,” I said, standing up so quickly I almost pulled the phone off my desk, “when you tell me you’ve gotten to know Dayton pretty well you are deliberately creating the impression that you’ve fucked him.”
“I’m going to write that last remark off to high stress, Fielding. I like the credo but I don’t think it’s what you need for your campaign right now.”
“What do you mean?” I asked in a very thin voice—one I could slip like a note beneath the great slamming door of my rage.
“I think it’s very nice. And it really does remind me of you. I mean, I can really hear you saying it. And I think that’s important.”
“But.”
“But what’s it got to do with the price of potatoes? You’re the one who first told me about this district. You’ve got old people eating dog-food and fifth graders copping skag and little blue-haired widows afraid to go outside and I don’t know if they want to hear about whether politics is an honorable profession or not.”
“I know what they want,” I said. “They want someone to promise he can make it all better—but I can’t. I can’t do it and I can’t promise it.”
“You can promise to try, though. This credo sounds more like an argument you’d have with Danny. Or with …” She let her voice trail off—nothing strategic about it. She just realized what she was about to say and she kicked the plug out of the wall.
“Or with who?” I asked, but knowing.
“With Sarah.”
“OK,” I said quickly. “I’ll forget it. Wait’ll you read what your boyfriend’s hacked out for me. It’ll make mine sound like Kennedy in Berlin.”
“If you refer to Tony Dayton like that again, I will have to comb your face with my fingernails.”
“Caroline, can I tell you something?”
“What?”
“I’m awfully glad you’re here. I knew I needed you but I didn’t know how much.”
“That’s nice of you, sweetie.”
“I mean it. I really do love you. And I’m … I’m just glad you’re here.” Oh my God, I thought, what am I doing? I felt emotion welling up.
I dressed and made my way to the Hyde Park Synagogue, where I was introduced by Rabbi Einhorn, a tall, stocky man in a luxurious Italian suit. Einhorn had rich silver hair, blue eyes, and an adulterer’s smooth voice. “Our old people are most anxious to hear your views, Mr. Pierce,” he said, right in front of them. We were in a rather small room; there were perhaps twenty retired congregation members, part of the temple’s Senior Citizen program. I hadn’t developed a standard speech yet. I figured retired people would be upset about inflation so I talked about inflation. I figured they’d be worried about crime in the street and so I was very tough on crime in the street. In no way was I conscious of creating feelings within myself so as to make myself more attractive to others. It was merely a matter of what to highlight—or so I told myself.
Dayton was in fairly high spirits; he was pleased with my performance. We stopped for lunch at a businessmen’s joint on Stony Island called Flickers, where Tony played King Pleasure singing “Moody’s Mood for Love” several times on the jukebox. From there, we made an impromptu stop at a CYO neighborhood playground, where I ran that old liberal ploy of playing basketball with a couple of black kids. They had shoveled and swept the asphalt court but a light dusting of snow had fallen over it and as I dribbled the big butterscotch ball it made grainy indentations in the new snow. (I thought of Father Mileski playing one-on-one with that kid for the wager of his immortal soul and I remembered Sarah’s immemorial fingers linked through the cyclone fence, as she watched the game.) I passed out campaign buttons and Dayton and I moved on, driving his white Cutlass over to the University of Chicago bookstore to ask the manager personally to hang my campaign poster in the window. The manager refused and then changed his mind when I told him my brother was the publisher of Willow Books. (There was a display of Shamanism and Science near the cash register.) The manager said he’d do it as a professional courtesy and on the way out of the store Dayton laid his hand out for me to slap, as if we’d just pulled off an incredible coup.
From the bookstore, Tony brought me to a small shopping center called Harper Court where we just strolled around in the blowing, stinging snow and Dayton mindlessly collared passersby and brought them over to meet me. It was awfully half-assed, but it still took its toll. Figuring the average handshake exerts forty pounds of pressure, then I pressed flesh to the tune of eight thousand pounds.
At the end of the day Tony was to deliver me to Kath
y Courtney, my press aide. Although she worked on the South Side she lived north and we took the Outer Drive up toward her apartment. We passed a playground next to the lake. Cadmium lamps lit the empty space; the wind blew the swings back and forth. I closed my eyes and drifted off and I wouldn’t even bother to say I dreamed of Sarah except that as I jolted awake again, for the first time I realized I hadn’t had a night’s sleep in two weeks during which she hadn’t come to me in a dream. And that, oddly enough, with Tony beside me and a night of more campaigning before me, was when I finally became certain that she was alive. I felt the truth of it as firmly as an embrace. And it was real, at least as real as that red light throbbing somewhere out there over the lake, out toward Indiana, at least as real as the shadow Dayton’s car cast of itself on the roadway, that shadow that kept pace with us but never quite caught up.
We turned off the Outer Drive and headed toward Michigan Avenue, where Kathy lived in one of the posh new high rises. A freezing rain pebbled against the roof and you could hear the tire treads running their pattern, turning around and around like the drum of a mimeograph machine. Tony lit a Salem and savored the first drag as if it was to be enjoyed like the finest wine.
“You did good today, Fielding,” he said.
“We’re going to have to talk about scheduling,” I said. “There was too much time between things and too much of it seemed aimless.”
“We had cancellations. These things can’t be helped.”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“I think we’ll get sixty percent,” he said.
“Well, good.”
He took another voluptuous drag of his Salem. And then: “How do you find working with me?”
“I like it fine, Tony. I always know you’ll be there, at least.”
“Good,” he said. “Will you do me a favor then? Don’t keep it a secret.”
Waking the Dead Page 26