by Peter Manus
Good evenin,’ Councilman. We all been hearing a lot of talk about the inadequate rail system going on some thirty years now. Any truth to the story that the next mayor of Boston going to make something happen?
The audience laughs appreciatively, eager to pounce upon the implication that Wilkie might be Boston’s next mayor—the city’s first black mayor, in fact. Wilkie studiously ignores the compliment and launches an earnest seven-minute discussion of light rail and the ignominy of past promises about public transportation. He uses words like “ignominy” frequently. He uses “solipsism” and “cogent” and “anodyne” and “longueurs.” He likes words, likes building his vocabulary and using it. Yet people still think of him as a real guy—he just happens to be a smart one. Wilkie is from Dorchester, and his history is well known. That has been his motto and the key to his success: hide nothing, and people will accept you as you are. At thirty-nine, he is the next big thing in Boston’s black community. He never acknowledges his political momentum, even in private with his advisors. But it is true. People talk about him as a viable candidate for the state senate, the federal congress, the governorship. It all seems attainable.
He uses up his time. People are starting to slip up the aisles and out side exits. He himself could use a drink, a shower, some grub. Naturally, all that changes if Veronica Dahl takes him up on his offer. An image flutters in the back of his mind—her ass in the electric blue silk dress when she bent over to fuss with the sound system. Who could resist such a woman?
I am the last to arrive at the microphone—the people behind me are politely but firmly informed that there is no more time and that they must return to their seats. Wilkie observes that I am white and wearing a blouse with some scalloped bibbing down its front. He sees how my plaid skirt ends a half-inch shy of knee-length. My hair is white-blonde and teased so as to form a smooth, rounded curve, and my lipstick is a pale baby-pink. I could be, it occurs to him, a career backup singer from Nashville. My question is jotted in a plastic-coated stationery shop organizer, and I pause to raise my glasses, which have a subtle cats-eye cast to them. Wilkie knows what is coming. It is because of my question, which he anticipated well before laying eyes on me, that he remains assiduously solemn in all his public appearances. Is it due to this impending question that he will never speculate openly about his future.
I speak. My voice is untrained but my tone assured. I keep my eyes on the pad in front of me. I say: “Mr. Councilman, eight years ago you were one of the Dorchester Five. I have heard you answer many questions…”
I hesitate as soft hisses emanate from around the auditorium. His devotees are mightily sick of this topic, and why the hell should they not be, as they have heard it addressed countless times by an endless march of sanctimonious right-wingers. I glance quickly over my shoulder, as if suddenly nervous to be standing there, in this crowd of mostly black people, who might at any time rise up and do the unspeakable.
Wilkie speaks. “Come, come,” he says to the room, his words loud yet nevertheless delivered with an air of quietude. “Each of us has a right to voice his concerns, here as in any public forum. It’s the very root of egality, isn’t it? I would like to hear the lady out.”
The hisses fade but the room remains charged. I dip my head and adjust my glasses.
“Thank you, Councilman. I…I have heard you answer many questions about the Dorchester Five incident, mostly about whether you can expect the public to trust you with that incident in your background.” Awkward pause to clear throat. “But what I have never heard you discuss is how you have learned to trust the public after having been through the incident, and I…I think it is important that we know that those who represent us respect and trust us. And…and as a follow-up…if there is time, of course…do you think that you were singled out in the mob that day…the day of the incident…because you are a powerfully built black man?”
In the moments it takes them to digest my words, the crowd’s perspective changes. Some of the women begin to fan themselves audibly with their programs. They consider me a snooty bitch. Most of the men move about a bit in an effort to get a glimpse of me. They consider my legs. I lower my glasses and stand, lips pursed, waiting.
The stage creaks as Wilkie moves forward so as to lend my question the personal touch it warrants. He answers at some length—his phrases only partially canned. Taking my follow-up question first, he points out that three of the five men who were arrested that day in Dorchester were white. One was a local fellow Wilkie had known personally, another a college student doing community service in the neighborhood that summer, and the third white man arrested was a seminarian training for the priesthood. For this reason alone, he states, it is difficult to conclude that his own arrest was racially motivated. All told, it was a disconsonant group of defendants, and a very thorny group, from a political perspective, making it tough for him to believe that either the police or prosecutor’s office could have chosen them based on a desire for quick or easy convictions.
As for his ability to trust the public—here he pauses to study the air above the audience for a stretched-out moment while I watch the light shift and reflect off his eyes—he admits that he has never received this particular question before. Indeed, he admits he has never consciously considered whether he might trust—and had I also used the term “respect”?—the public less than he would otherwise, due to his experience in that mob and subsequent to it. He was and remains daunted by the power exhibited by the mob that day, awed in both positive and negative ways, but only in retrospect, as he himself had been virtually unaware of the mob when he was up against that car. He himself had not been influenced by the shouts and jeers, because he had heard none of it. Indeed, he had been astounded at the size of the mob and the power of its rage, when viewing the video of the event at a later date. He attacked that car, Wilkie states to the audience and not just to me, out of anger. Righteous fury. Yes, he lost control of his reason, and he found in himself the physical strength to turn an automobile on its side, and he did it.
He lets this sink in for some moments before continuing. Even those who have heard him talk about Dorchester before are mute and attentive. Their creaks and coughs hang in the air. When Wilkie begins again, his voice is quieter, but his tone remains bold and penitent. He says that he has often been asked whether the public can trust him to maintain his composure in crisis—quite fairly asked that question, he must make clear—and all he is able to advise people is that they look into their hearts and decide that for themselves as individuals whether a man who did as Wilkie did on that day in Dorchester is a man they can trust. As for the question of how he can trust the public after the incident—the arrests, the media coverage, the trial—he rejects any implication that the public or the media or even the legal system was somehow to blame for his actions or the trial that followed. A young man was seriously and permanently injured. Wilkie had played a role in causing those injuries. There is no rationalization that he will ever offer publically, tempting as my invitation to indulge in such casuistry may be.
He finishes, and the hall is silent. After a long moment, he hears tentative steps behind him as Veronica Dahl approaches, preparing to shut down the evening. I remain at the microphone, my eyes trained not on him, but vaguely ahead of me at around stage level. Tentatively, warily, I reach out to fourrage in his mind. There is something that holds me back, but when I risk it, I am fairly certain I infiltrate his thoughts. He worries, I think, that I feel I have been chastised.
Somewhere in the auditorium, a pair of hands begins to applaud, and then another, but he raises his arm for silence, then quietly thanks people for attending. Disregarding his signal, the room breaks into prolonged applause, drowning out Veronica Dahl’s words of thanks and appreciation. Wilkie, feeling for his handkerchief, stands alone at the front of the stage. He watches as I turn and walk up the aisle and am swallowed by the crowd that converges from both sides. He wants me to look, to give him a backward glimpse. He will
s me to turn, in fact, and as I approach the double doors he sends a deafening mental order for me to turn NOW. Although he is not sure why, he needs another look at my face.
I drain from the hall with the rest of the audience, not thinking about the man who just spoke to me with such raw, honest, politically inexpedient words. Or so he believes.
As I leave, Wilkie feels several fingers slide tentatively onto the material of his suit jacket sleeve, where they press gently. He smells freesia…maybe Turkish rose…he senses more than hears her warm congratulatory words. He turns to envelop her fine-boned hand in yet another heartfelt squeeze. Veronica Dahl would indeed like to discuss the future of the arts program. Somewhere quiet, though, and private—the past week has been so hectic.
The following day, Wilkie spots me in another crowd. This time, it is at a food festival on Boston’s City Plaza, a daring venture for mid-October when the forecast can vary from hour to hour. The wind is lively, causing trouble and even some comic moments. Occasional rain splatters and blows about, so sudden and sparse that it drives away very few. Volunteers and staffers work good-naturedly to stow tablecloths and lash down signage with rope. Food trucks are driven right onto the plaza to serve as semi-protected staging areas for the various displays. Natives and tourists mingle, fingering the usual bric-a-brac—ceramic bean pots, stuffed lobsters, Fenway Park snow globes—and scarfing down regional hors d’oeuvres, all while not quite listening to the upbeat rattle of the sound system as it pumps out speeches delivered by officials hailing from state offices with superficial appeal—urban initiative, small business partnership, renewable energy incentivization. Wilkie is not working the crowd. In fact, he is taking a break from a day-long symposium on vermin control in public housing, a more politically fraught topic than one might imagine. He is feeling frayed, but in that pleasurable way a man feels after having slept with a particularly desirable woman.
He is thinking about this as he spots me. I am in a pepper-and-salt boiled wool suit and grey-tinted pantyhose, and he recognizes me easily in spite of the white-rimmed bug-eye sunglasses that cover much of my face. Indeed, he has been looking for me, although the idea makes no sense to him. I am throwing a gauzy white scarf over my head and wrapping the long tail round my neck as he trains an eye on me across the plaza. He feels energized, all of a sudden, and a little playful. It could be the batty breeze, the tinny music, the aromas plucking at him from here and there while his stomach groans. It could also be me. He cuts across the plaza.
“Enjoying the chowder?” he says. He has a distinctive voice—unaffected and gravelly.
I turn, unsmiling. In one hand I hold a large Styrofoam cup containing a viscous substance with small colorless cubes and less well-defined wet chunks suspended in it; in the other I hold a plastic spoon, unused. “I am not, actually,” I say. “I have never understood its appeal.” I prod the stuff in my cup with the spoon, as if searching for an answer.
“So tell me,” Wilkie says. “If you know you dislike chowder, why take a cup?”
“I tease myself,” I say. “It is a thing I do, to challenge my presumptions. I dislike some food, so I order it.”
“You expect a canned answer, so you ask a question.”
I look up at him through my sunglasses as if surprised. “Yes, like that.”
I spot a trash receptacle and step in that direction, and for a moment he wonders if I will continue walking. But I turn back, and I pause to observe him. He is a bit taller than anyone around him, dressed a bit better. He is wearing a double-breasted jacket, as only a barrel-bodied man can do without looking pompous. His suit is a deep navy, his tie silver and blue stripes against a bold orange shirt, reminding me that there is a stylish wife in the picture. I have seen pictures of him sporting a plain, crushed fedora and a rumpled raincoat—they are part of his trademark—but he has come out today looking rather dapper. Yet still, somehow, he blends. Maybe he is, in fact, the people’s pol. Or would have been, but for me.
“You chucked the chowder without tasting it,” he chides me.
“I observed it. I smelled it.”
“And knew for certain that it was foul.”
“There was no doubt at all.”
“It’s hard to change your mind, isn’t it? Even when you give yourself the opportunity.”
“This is true, yes,” I say.
“And what you learned last night is what you already knew too.”
I eye him through the shields of my sunglasses. “What is it that I already knew?”
“That I’m just another bullshitting pol,” he clarifies pleasantly. “That the stuff?”
He does not quite break a smile, although he means to be friendly.
I move as if to take off my sunglasses, but my hand hesitates. “You did not waffle. The crowd was impressed. I freely hand you all of that.”
“I needed to answer directly,” he says. I continue to look up at him. “Your question portrayed me as a victim. I didn’t want to leave that impression.”
“Yes, I can see why. Bad for the image.” I taunt him a bit.
“Not the reason. I didn’t want to leave the impression that I was the victim because it is simply untrue,” he says. “I wasn’t the victim that day.”
“And so this is why my casuistry did not tempt you,” I taunt again.
He nods, then relents with a wink. “Ain’t good for the image either.”
I smile. He smiles, and it sinks a dimple in one of his cheeks. “It’s tougher to answer questions in a public forum than it is to ask them,” he says frankly. “I think that true journalists acknowledge that fact.”
I remove my sunglasses, needing to see him better. I am having a peculiar experience with this man. I have been attempting to fourrage and suggère, as with my prior conquests, but without success. I feel I am shooting blanks. He is meant to see me as the conservative schoolmarm—prim, self-satisfied, undoubtedly racist—a woman who (if you will excuse my crudité) could benefit from a rough fuck. Instead, apparently, I am a journalist. “You presume I have disdain for you, Councilman,” I manage. “This is, in actuality, not the truth.”
“Oh, I got the truth. See, I made you last night.”
He gives my eyes a good long look, and for a moment I misinterpret his words. So he recognizes me! I back off a step, my heels unsteady on the plaza bricks. He is indeed the type to remember faces. “What do you mean?” I sound frightened and force a laugh to mask it.
He doesn’t laugh. His eyes remain on mine. “Your question was a little too nuanced last night,” he says. “And your poise—the heartland threads didn’t hide it.”
I laugh nervously once again. “I’m flattered and insulted all at once.”
“You’re some sort of investigative reporter? Maybe with a web platform?”
Not quite following, I murmur something about freelancing.
He looks puzzled, then chuckles loudly, his teeth showing. His smile makes his face quite pleasant. “I think this is where you go for broke, my good woman,” he says.
I hesitate, then look at him directly. “Would you allow me to write your story?”
“Not sure I want it written,” he says easily. “Not at this point, anyway. I’m thirty-nine, and I don’t think of myself as having a ‘story,’ such as it were, just yet.”
“Ah, but it will be written, and soon, whether you like it or not,” I point out. I am quite correct, of course, although to Wilkie it sounds like part of my pitch. “You are a man in the public eye. This will only increase in the very near future. I can promise that with certainty.”
He holds back his kneejerk response. “Maybe so.” He checks his watch. “Unfortunately, you just reminded me that I have a meeting that’s about to resume.”
I smile, unbothered. “Until we meet again, then?” I have confidence.
He is about to agree and leave, but stops. “Look it, I get a sense about you. Can’t put my finger on what it is, but I got some idea barking in my head that I’m supposed to
let you chase me down. How about we meet? After we talk, I’ll consider letting you interview me.”
I tilt my head to the side. “An audition to an interview?”
“Sure, if you like. We’ll set some ground rules—and, yes, I do mean both of us—and decide whether we want to go ahead. But I’ll tell you here and now that I’m after an objective story, not a puff piece or an ambush.”
“I am after just the same. I would give you my card, but…” I open my hands.
“Write your number on the back of one of mine,” he says, forking one over along with a small, gilded pen. I hesitate—do I dare identify myself? He is sharp, this one. If I utter the word “Nightingale,” perhaps it all falls into place for him. I write and hand it across to him. He glances at it. “J. Moreau.” He looks up at me. “J for Jeanne, like the actress?”
I have my sunglasses back in place, so he cannot perceive my surprise. He even uses the French pronunciation. Quickly I shake my head. “I am Julie,” I say. I decide to suggère to him that he should not think about my name any further, but something scares me off from even that, so I refrain. “Julie Moreau,” I say, extending my hand.
He takes my hand, but at the same time gives me a penetrating look. For the second moment this afternoon, I am certain that he knows everything. His eyes say he knows. “But you must be related to Jeanne Moreau,” he says. “You’re so like her it’s uncanny.”
My hand remains captive in his. “Thank you,” I say, sounding slightly defensive.
He waits, expecting more, but does not push for it. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Julie Moreau.” He pronounces “Julie” in the French manner, just as he did “Jeanne.”
“You will call me? I am terribly grateful.”
“Count on it.” Wilkie walks back towards City Hall.
Like a coward who lashes out from behind, I suggère at him quickly, telling him that he wants to turn and wave a final time. He does not do it. I suggère again, more insistently. TURN AND WAVE OR SHE WILL NOT FUCK WITH YOU! I scream in his head.