Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “You know what,” Dad said, leaning back in his chair, glancing up at the ceiling, “sometimes we are sort of rough on each other.”

  “Oh-oh,” said Caroline.

  “No, I mean it,” said Dad. “I didn’t mean to really say that Danny had crazy ideas. But we like to give each other the needle.”

  “Notice there’s no remorse about saying I should be a better mother,” announced Caroline.

  “OK, OK, that’s baby stuff, Caroline,” said Dad.

  “Love has no pride,” she said with a shrug.

  “I think what Dad’s trying to say,” Mom said, “is this family has got a lot to be proud of. And whatever we’ve been doing—I mean Eddie and me—well, it seems to have had a pretty nice result.”

  “I feel sorry for those parents who can’t even stand to think of their kids,” Dad added. “I mean, Jesus Christ, do you know what tomorrow means? Fielding’s going to be sworn into the U.S. Congress. It’s like a dream. And it gives meaning to everything we’ve all been doing.”

  “I didn’t realize it lacked meaning before,” said Danny, winking at Caroline.

  “Well, this is the dream come true, the dream we all had,” said Dad, oblivious. “I’m not saying you haven’t done well for yourself, Danny. But it’s not as if running a book company was what you wanted and we wanted from the time you were a kid. You see the difference, don’t you?The whole publishing company thing just sort of happened. You and Caroline just sort of took life as it came, and that’s OK. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s different from having a plan and seeing it through.”

  “Now you tell me,” said Caroline. “I was always trying to figure out what you wanted from me, what you would have called success in my life. And now it seems all I had to do was make a plan and carry it through.”

  “You know, Caroline,” said Mom, “when you’re sarcastic like that, he doesn’t even hear it. You just annoy yourself.”

  “How’s Kim?” I asked Danny.

  “We don’t talk about that,” said Danny.

  “But is she OK?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Who’s Kim?” asked Dad.

  “A Korean massage parlor attendant,” said Danny, “and a real swell gal.”

  “Is he kidding?” Dad asked me.

  “Of course he is,” said Caroline. “God.”

  The waiter came with our drinks, calling each one of them off as he set them in front of us.

  “I’ll make the toast,” I said, raising my glass. “First of all, to Caroline, for coming to Chicago and helping me get through the campaign. For Caroline—well, you know, service above and beyond the call of duty. And to Mom and Dad, for doing whatever it is they had to do to get me this far.” I stopped. I had a sudden convulsive desire to simply stand up and walk away from the table, but I forced myself to let it pass.

  “Ah, look at the destiny in those eyes,” said Danny. “You lucky dog. You’ve got a career that you think is a cause. And now you can do anything—anything—for yourself and kid yourself into believing that it isn’t really for you, that it’s for what you stand for.”

  Just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned in my seat and there was a stocky black man with a handlebar mustache and a graying Afro. He had deep furrows in his brow, a wide gap between his front teeth.

  “Hello, Fielding Pierce,” he said. “I noticed you coming in and I just wanted to say hello.” He had a deep voice, a slight stammer. “I’m Buddy Preston.” He waited for me to recognize his name and then stepped back a little. “From the Seventh Congressional District?”

  “Oh yes, yes,” I said. “Hello.” He was a Chicago congressman, in his fifth term. He was good at winning elections, though I couldn’t remember what else he had done with his career. Isaac had once mentioned that Buddy Preston had the richest war chest of any of the Chicago politicians, with contributions coming in from milk companies, cement manufacturers, meat packers, the National Rifle Association—a crazy quilt of unrelated interest groups that he somehow stitched together with his own perseverance and charm.

  “I don’t want to bother you folks,” he said. “I just wanted to welcome Fielding here to our delegation.”

  “Well, that’s very nice of you, Mr. Preston,” said my father.

  “You all set for tomorrow?” he asked me.

  “What happens in one of these?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, it’s no big thing, but it’s nice,” Preston said. “All the Democrats from the Illinois delegation walk up with him to the Speaker’s chair and he’s sworn in. You know. No big thing.”

  “I can see where that would be something to see, though,” said Mom. There was something suddenly docile in her voice as she spoke to him, as if he were a cop, or someone who might be able to do her an important favor. Chances were, Preston was so used to that tone of voice, he couldn’t hear it.

  “Well, the Illinois delegation is just about the friendliest in the Congress,” Preston said. “We really try to help each other out. And that’s a good thing. We even try to socialize a little. The important thing is to keep talking and work together.”

  Preston chatted amiably for a few moments and then, his obligation fulfilled, went on. I watched him make his way toward his table, where a thin, exotic-looking woman with scores of bracelets on her bare arms sat waiting for him.

  “You didn’t even introduce us, Fielding,” my father said, as soon as Preston was out of earshot. “What kind of way is that?”

  “There’s something I think I should tell you. Everyone.” I picked up my glass of club soda; it felt as if it were made of stone. I heard droning, nightmarish music, melting voices, and then dimly realized it was a record piped in through the restaurant’s speakers. I took a deep breath but it seemed to stop at the back of my throat. I placed the glass down again but not flatly and it tipped over: the carbonated water hissed and trembled on the white tablecloth. No one moved to sop it up. “I’m not feeling very well,” I said. “I haven’t been for some time now. I’m … I’m just not feeling very well.”

  “We can see that, Fielding,” said my mother softly. She glanced at Dad, cueing him to say something.

  “We didn’t think it was our part to say anything,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I want to be honest about this. Something has happened to me. And it won’t stop. It keeps coming on and coming on.” I made a terrible, broken laugh. “This is very embarrassing, but you may as well hear it. Something inside me has jumped track. I’m very confused. I’m not sleeping right and I’m not thinking right and I really don’t want you to think I’m complaining here or asking for help, because there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s just something that’s happened and that’s all there is to it. But I don’t know what I’m going to say from one minute to the next and I don’t even really know what I’m going to do.” My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see their faces. I didn’t want to. “And I think the best thing—I don’t know. Maybe the only hope I’ve got right now. I know it’s coming at a bad time. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just very tired and I don’t see things the way I’m used to seeing them. Everything is very strange and it all seems out of control. I feel very … I don’t know. Frightened. But I don’t think you should be frightened. It’s not as if I was going to hurt anyone. Jesus. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that I know I’m not normal now and the best thing for me, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a little help … what I think is, I better see someone. A doctor. I know I’m spoiling everything, but if I don’t say it now, I may never say it. Tomorrow, it might be too late, because it’s going very, very, very fast. And tomorrow I may be too crazy to even know how crazy I am. I think the best thing is for me to go to a hospital tonight. And get some help. Some treatment. Because something happened to me and I’m very lost and it won’t get better. I just get worse and worse and there is nothing that can stop it.”

  THE MORNING IN Congress was taken with the tail end of a debate over farm subsidies.
I sat in the rotunda and listened to the congressman from South Dakota drone on and on, with barely an inflection in his voice. He was just putting it on the record; there weren’t ten people in that chamber listening to him.

  At one point, the Speaker of the House came in and took his place. He was massive, eternal; his hair was as white as fresh Irish linen and his skin looked as if it had been scrubbed with a brush. He sat down and rested his face in his hands for a moment, looking at the congressman from South Dakota with what seemed like enormous pity; then the Speaker looked at some papers, glanced at his watch, and suddenly rapped his gavel against the table. He asked the congressman if he was near the end of his presentation and whether or not the matter could be brought to a vote. The congressman said he needed just ten more minutes to complete his statement and the Speaker nodded gratefully. A few pages left the chamber and in every office and in the corridors lights went on, informing the Congress that it was time to cast their votes. As the fellow from South Dakota continued to read his remarks into the Congressional Record, hundreds of representatives filed in through the doors, laughing, coughing, talking, taking their spots on either side of the great center aisle.

  Buddy Preston took the seat next to mine. All twenty-four of the Illinois congressmen were here for the vote, fourteen of them on the Democratic side of the aisle. Sitting next to me a guy just a few years older than me, smelling as if he’d just splashed a half bottle of Brut on before coming to vote. He was Emil Z. Nichols from the Third District. He had gotten his power directly from Mayor Daley, but now with a new administration he was vulnerable and word was that the pressure of a possible defeat next election was making him unpredictable, like a man who’s just been diagnosed with an incurable disease. The Third was a tough district to keep: half suburban, half urban, with some blacks and plenty of Poles, Germans, Swedes, and Lithuanians who had moved to get away from blacks. It was one of those places where people went as a way of proclaiming they were leaving the working class and then were besieged by lack of money, lack of decent housing, lack of safety—all of the things they had insisted would never happen to them again. It was a resentful district and Nichols had gotten three terms out of it only because the mayor had twisted enough arms.

  “Hello, Fielding,” he said, in an unusually slippery, dishonest voice, reaching over and shaking my hand. “Emil Nichols. Welcome to the zoo.”

  Buddy Preston put his hand lightly on my shoulder, as if warning me away from an evil influence. “We’ll be bringing you up for the swearing in right after this vote,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Nichols, “you’re lucky you don’t have to vote. It’s a ball breaker—especially for someone like you.”

  “How do you mean that?” I said.

  Nichols laughed through his teeth, as if my question was a there tactic. “Yeah, right,” he said. “As if the governor didn’t have you in his pocket. But try voting with the farmers and see what happens to you when you go back to your district.”

  Further into the aisle sat an old, loose-limbed, bald man wearing a brown suit and a red and white bow tie. It was Paul Germain, an old newspaperman turned politician whom I’d met at Isaac’s a couple of years back. Germain was from East St. Louis—a burnt, scarred, smoking place, at once abandoned and frantic with the half-life of crime that reigns after the neutron of commerce dies. Germain was one of the few downstate Democrats; he had known Truman, Stevenson; he had a shattered leg from a parachute jump into Cologne in 1944. As he leaned forward, the light from the upper windows exploded in his glasses and his skin was so thin you could almost see the skull beneath it. “We’ll talk,” he said, and then leaned back, his narrow profile disappearing behind the human hedge.

  The vote was taken. The measure was passed, but it didn’t make any difference because it was assured of defeat in the Senate. Above us, in the visitors’ gallery, clumps of school kids were brought in to look down at us over the high railing, like a Sunday school class brought to a fissure in the earth where they could see the souls in Purgatory. It was not yet the time when Congress would be virtually closed to casual visitors, but security was still tight. You did not feel the invitation toward discourse as you walked those institutional green corridors. There were coolers of bubbling bottled water just like in any large office and bored-looking receptionists growing their rubber plants beneath fluorescent light.

  In the committee rooms were round wall clocks like in old-fashioned classrooms and built into the faces of each of these clocks was a system of small electric lights—one to signal a quorum call, another to signal that a roll call was about to be taken, and yet another to announce a nuclear war had just begun and that it was time for the legislators to take cover. I didn’t know yet where we were supposed to hide. All I really knew was where my offices were. After Carmichael’s resignation, there had been a scramble for his rather well-placed, well-maintained, and spacious offices and as everyone who wanted a change of quarters had already shifted, the dankest, least convenient space in the Rayburn Building was left for me—a little ghetto up a back staircase, on its own half floor which it shared with the maintenance supervisor and a freshman congressman from Mississippi.

  As the vote was taken, I sat with my arms folded over my chest and looked around. I was, on the whole, grateful my family hadn’t listened to me last night and that I hadn’t been taken to some hospital, shot full of tranquilizers, given a pair of paper slippers, humiliated. What I hadn’t understood was that it wouldn’t get much worse: in order to feel any crazier, I would need an entirely new mind to lose. I had topped off at the current level of sorrow and derangement. And if it would not get worse then perhaps, sometime, it would be better. I really had no clear idea anymore why I was sitting in the Capitol, why I had wanted this for so many years, or what exactly I had done to deserve it. But I had to trust that at some time in the past, when I had notched the arrow of my life onto fate’s taut bow, I had known something that in my misery and hunger and utter apprehension I was forgetting now. The only thing to do was hold on—and hope that until I was myself again I could get away with the impersonation. My face would be a mask, my eyes opaque.

  I looked up at the visitors’ gallery, telling myself I was just trying to see if Danny and Caroline and my parents were in view. If I had taken this odd, compromising, confusing, and sad journey only to do my part in the greater magic, to sing the notes assigned to me as a part of the spell that would wake the dead, then perhaps she was here at this moment: as aura, as idea, or even as flesh. It suddenly made practically no difference: memory, when it is real, can well take the place of that jumble of conflicting impressions we call the present. Surely I loved her more than, say, Juliet, more, surely, than I could love myself: then in what real sense was she dead? Because she could not love me in return?

  When the vote was over, the Speaker announced that the Ninety-sixth Congress would now welcome a new member to its ranks. He made no mention of Congressman Carmichael but instead confined himself to a bit of partisan joshing—professing relief that the new member was a Democrat, that sort of thing. Next thing I knew, Emil Nichols slapped his knees and stood up with a resentful groan and then on the other side of me Buddy Preston was also on his feet, tugging at my sleeve, smiling, saying, Up you go, Pierce. Down the aisle and into the history books. And after that, all the Democratic members of the Illinois delegation were up and we were going down the carpeted aisle toward the Speaker’s chair and I heard the sound of static, as if the nerves in my inner ear were frying out, but then I realized it was applause, they were applauding for me, the entire House of Representatives, not because they liked me or knew anything about what I believed or hoped to accomplish, but because I had made it that far, like a fellow salmon who had made it through the torrents to this breeding ground where we could in relative tranquility spawn more and more two-year terms. I had won. And they were applauding me and, of course, applauding themselves as well, because each of these men and women had beaten someone else out f
or this job, had made smart deals, said the right thing, known when to hang back and when to pounce, had convinced thousands of strangers that they truly cared about them, had grabbed hold of history’s drag-ass tail and ridden it to Washington, had seen the crack in the door and worked it open until the light poured out and was golden.

  And now I was a member of the club, too, and as I made my way toward Speaker O’Neill I saw Sarah’s face among the dozens of faces in the gallery, looking down, and then I looked straight ahead and let myself be taken with the flow toward the podium where I swore to defend the Constitution and was duly admitted to the Congress of the United States of America.

  AFTER THE DAYS adjournment, the Illinois Democrats had a cocktail party for me in Congressman Germain’s office. He was our senior member and he had the largest, most comfortable offices: the Congress was definitely a place with good and bad neighborhoods—Germain was living on the Gold Coast while I had been given, say, an abandoned loft building to renovate, a dark little place huddling in the shadows of the El. Germain glanced at me from time to time, promising, I thought, to be a friend. I seized upon the possibility because except for him I felt astonishingly distant from my delegation. This was like the first day on the job and feeling the only way you’ll possibly survive is if you keep absolutely secret the truth of your identity—an identity that was, till that moment, a matter of sublime indifference to you but which seemed to have bloomed beneath the alien fluorescent lights into a terrible secret. With the other congressmen were some of their staff, a couple of wives, my family, a small redheaded guy from the Washington Post who wanted to do a story about my first month in the House, a woman from the AP who had done well on the Carmichael story, and a lobbyist from the pharmaceuticals industry who had been talking to Congressman Furillo, a guy from the West Side who called himself Cookie Furillo and who looked like a teen crooner twenty years later playing the oldies-but-goodies circuit. Furillo was a junior member of the Consumer Protection Committee and he was constantly besieged by lobbyists. Furillo was so small-time in his corruption that he actually gave the various and often handsome gifts he accepted to his sister, who sold them to the public in her What-Not Shoppe on West Cicero Avenue. Soon enough, Danny commandeered the pharmaceuticals lobbyist and the two of them retired into a corner, where my clever brother astonished the lobbyist with his encyclopedic knowledge of pills, spansules, powders, solutions, and ampules. “You’ve got to look at it from the point of view of the goddamned consumer,” I heard Danny say at one point.