Worthy Of This Great City

by Mike Miller

  Marlene moved to dominate the woman’s vision and spoke to her very clearly. “This is my great-aunt Lina. Aunt Lina, this is Ruth Askew from the radio!”

  The eyes located and grasped us, her head and body following along reluctantly; a serious undertaking, this shifting of so much unwieldy flesh and liquid. She set about examining Ruth up and down, her mind sluggishly processing this apparition, until eventually there came a visible, almost electric start of recognition, the papery cheeks divided into something resembling a smile, and Lina reverted into an obedient hostess: straightening her back and neck, insistently indicating the plastic visitor’s chair until Ruth gave in and sat herself down, me loitering superfluously behind her, increasingly annoyed.

  “Very pretty.” Lina made this outrageous if kindly pronouncement from between scary dentures, then struggled for something else to say while we all grew increasingly uncomfortable. Finally: “I like your husband.”

  “Yes, all the women like my husband.”

  That elicited a splutter of wet laughter. Then Lina set about extracting a wad of tissue from some hiding place and pressed it against her lips, and that took a while.

  “Unfortunately he’s a very busy husband lately.” In fact City Council was prominent on the local news that day: just yesterday the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board had set a date for public hearings on the slots license to be held not in Harrisburg but right downtown at the Convention Center, although Council had yet to decide on development at the Landing.

  Lina answered forcefully and to the point, demonstrating an unexpected awareness “Gambling is not good. It’s a sin.” The narrow voice invested the final word with unexpectedly crude venom, but she immediately, almost comically reverted to her harmless, kindly aspect. “I like you because you say anything, always crazy.”

  “Well, that doesn’t seem like much of a compliment!”

  “And now you come to say hello to me.” She managed to shift her cocoon and I noticed a supermarket tabloid behind her on the thin hospital blanket. “I know about you! I hear your program.” A finger wag; Lina clearly knew what was expected of her. “You care about people in here.” Marlene was in a chair over on the window side, her ankles demurely crossed, her eyes avid; meanwhile I kept to the doorway, still hoping to expedite a getaway.

  “I never do anything important myself; I just talk about it.”

  This was outright rejected. “No, no, no! Don’t tell me, I know!”

  But Ruth rose, stretching her arms rather lazily, radiating unconcern. “I sometimes fantasize about really being of service, providing material things, you know? Shelter, food, medical treatment. Or else jobs, education, legal aid, so everyone’s as lucky as me. But for that you have to start at the bottom and put in the time. You have to be dedicated. Charity’s very competitive, you know, and very clubby; it’s tough to break in. Me, I’m just a poseur, a hanger-on pretending to be a professional. And I’m incredibly impatient. Sometimes I’m deliberately obstructive just because I resent the people who do matter, the real people.”

  The real people.

  “But I’ll tell you what, nobody should be so sure of themselves. I mean, suppose you do save a life, stop a war, feed the people, cure a disease, but you’ve inadvertently rescued the person or created the situation that results in a suitcase bomb. If Germany had won World War One, would there have been a Holocaust? If there hadn’t been a plague, would there have been breathing room for the Renaissance? I mean, history’s nothing but irony?”

  Then she shook her head, scanning our carefully neutral expressions. “But at least I know I’m ignorant. That’s the main thing. At least I don’t take myself so seriously I can’t see anything or anyone except my own importance.”

  I heard the resentment under that one, so once extricated from the Manetti connections and again crossing the bright lobby I proffered a sympathetic cue: “How’s it going, anyway, working with Mimi?”

  “Oh, I was just being petty.” That said with a self-deprecating little shrug. We pushed out to a breezy city-lit evening, excited young voices just offstage, the air cool enough to stimulate but not chill. “It’s just, you really can’t imagine how incompetently the whole thing is run. Mimi says so herself; it’s not like it’s some kind of secret.” We stood there letting taxis pass while we waited for Ruth to formulate whatever it was she intended to spill.

  “For example, she’ll hire someone for administrative work, then literally just throw them behind a desk and totally ignore them, but when they screw up and don’t get to their calls or log things in right they’re just let go. And then it repeats. In the last year there’s been something like five assistants. Mimi says their accountant, the guy who’s treasurer, keeps screaming at her about the books, but she just says she’s not about the money, the people are her priority.” Turning to me so I could see her intelligent concern. “She pushes away reasonable solutions like using college volunteers. Says we can’t manage them yet even though we need the help and they could do time-consuming things like shopping and transportation. I don’t know, maybe this is a normal part of setting up this kind of organization, all this creative chaos. Or maybe my evil suspicions are right and it’s all about her ego and everything she does is so important there’s no place for criticism or even help.”

  “Maybe.” Or maybe Ruth was exploiting an actual issue to win some pathetic little contest, bolster her own humanitarian ego.

  According to its website, PhillyCares was a registered 501(c)(3) with a touching and praiseworthy if somewhat short history and three board members: Mimi Norton as president, Tim Baylor, and another man whose name I didn’t recognize as the concerned treasurer.

  I considered the Baylors personable but otherwise very typical of successful people anywhere, that is to say, tediously exceptional and lacking any unexpected quirk or deficit. He was a hefty football-player type with a tidy mustache who reminded me of the long-suffering middle-class father on any sitcom. I knew him to be an accountant as well as an attorney. His relationship with the mayor went back to Temple Law and continued through their big firm experience and that transitional period when the mayor first entered local politics and Baylor was establishing his private practice. Lane Baylor struck me as upright, brilliant, and self-respecting, nothing more. Both stood up to scrutiny, presenting as an effective partnership with credible adolescent offspring and decent real estate holdings that included a small apartment building, a beach house in Margate, and a tract mansion in a gated Bucks County development. Their connection to Mimi Norton was obscure although there seemed to be some long-standing family relationship involved, and I found that very vagueness more credible than a ready explanation. Like so many married couples the Baylors displayed a similar public attitude: considerate but slightly authoritarian, resonant of deep community connections and long-term political pull. Both advocated for high-profile good works involving the more obvious variety of social benefit, the kind espoused by complacent schoolchildren: food and houses and jobs for all.

  PhillyCares occupied modest enough offices in an undistinguished rowhouse in Fairmount, a regulation narrow brick structure smack in the middle of a slightly gentrified street of identical buildings. I was met there by a well-groomed and stylishly clad young Asian woman who permitted me to enter and sat me opposite her desk in the tiny front room, probably a converted porch. I thought about Ruth’s summary and wondered about the girl’s job security. This receptionist or whatever tactfully refrained from commenting on my lack of appointment, merely seating me on a vinyl couch under a photo of our esteemed mayor. But Mimi herself, when she emerged some twenty minutes later, evinced barely-suppressed irritation and openly consulted her watch. “You’re a big Askew supporter, a personal friend, right?”

  “I think it would be presumptuous of me to claim friendship. And I never discuss my personal politics.” I handed her some additional spiel and she led me into a smallish conference room, obviously a refitted dining room, with one narrow window givin
g on a back drive and little decoration beyond a tasteless arrangement of silk flowers: pink, orange, and yellow roses in a green glass bowl sitting beneath one of those bland inspirational posters with an eagle soaring through an expanse of cerulean sky.

  She pulled out a chair and motioned me into another across the table, setting down a plastic accordion file and a mug of tea with the tag hanging over the side. The cup handle and rim were deeply grimy, so I excused her not offering me refreshment. By contrast the table was clean and polished, and the chairs, part of an ordinary Mediterranean dining room set, were aligned to rigid perfection. In fact now I looked even the corners of the carpet, the windowsills, and the curtains were spotless, punished by a definite aroma of disinfectant or insecticide or both. Nothing was casual or welcoming, there was none of the friendly, overburdened clutter of most small non-profits. In fact, this was not a nice place; it was more the refuge of a woman who expected censure because that was how the world always treated her. Take me for example.

  “So what is it you want here?” This is how she welcomed the press? She lapsed into interior thought for a brief minute, then emerged suspiciously. “I don’t know what you know about us?”

  A lot more than I’d known even fifteen minutes ago. I examined her, the ordinary business attire, cherry red plastic nails and clumped mascara. Up close, in her native habitat, she was a recognizable type: a woman with a decent enough but commonplace brain who’d been afforded sufficient opportunity to advance her native abilities, who’d found success because she fit the rules and now basked in her own triumphs while constantly looking over her shoulder for the police or God or whatever. A fervent acolyte of the system in a designer business suit one size too small.

  I summarized Ruth’s comments without identifying the source, and she nodded, not grudgingly but as one on familiar terrain. “Okay. We’re not perfect. I’m assuming you know I’m the first to admit there’s a lot that needs to be fixed on the administrative end. The point is, we’re fixing it. We’re doing that. But let me tell you something.” Here she leaned forward, deliberately pinning me in my chair with this satisfied certainty. “We fill a need. Little things, you’ll say, but they count. That someone is there caring, that counts. We hold hands and ease burdens other people don’t think about or realize matter, things like money for carfare or hotels or television, minor things we can afford and arrange. Help with laundry and providing the right kind of nutrition and just buying stamps to pay bills and getting the mail out. You ask at Penn and Jefferson and Temple and all the other hospitals and hospices and rehabs, they all know about us.”

  Another quick inward glance, as if for consultation, as if on a deep sigh of the soul, her troubled but compassionate posture indicating a Christian desire to count even me on the side of the angels. Allowing me to glimpse the vulnerability beneath the regrettable belligerence. “You have to understand the need, the pain we see every day. There’s an immense hunger for these personal services many people either can’t afford, or if they can they always need more. Sometimes just having to take the bus can make things that much more difficult if not impossible.” She shifted her comfortably round bottom in her chair the better to scrutinize me.

  I nodded gravely. “Sure. I did note that some of your services overlap already available programs. Wigs for cancer patients, for example, and transportation. But I admit I don’t have a good enough grasp of how all this works with insurance coverage and so on. I suppose there are gaps and that’s where you come in?”

  “You suppose correctly, but it differs widely. You may explore all that at your leisure. If you really are interested in writing about us, then I’m perfectly willing to show you what we’re all about, every day. And it’s an important story, it should be told in depth. But this is difficult work, not an exercise in self-aggrandizement or an opportunity to gain personal recognition. Do you understand what I’m saying here?”

  Well, it was explicit enough. I examined her obdurate if polite expression. She had the tight mouth and determined chin of an exhausted crusader, and wary hazel eyes behind purple-tinted glasses fastened to a thin gold chain. Her earrings and necklace were studded with colored glass, more of that purple accented with jade and pink. I would never have trusted her with anyone I cared about, not even for five minutes.

  I gave her the old tilted head with inquisitive glance, and waited.

  “We do have a real need to get our message out to the public and that is obviously why I agreed to see you today. We have achieved some degree of name recognition but that does not necessarily equate to increased financial support. We want money, Mr. Manos. We want more small donors and naturally we want more large corporate and individual donations as well. That said, I have no intention of allowing this organization, which I have personally created and nurtured, to be undermined by anybody’s ambitious grandstanding. I don’t care who they think they are.”

  Back in my own blessedly straightforward cubicle I considered the animus and opportunism binding Ruth and Mimi Norton. Then I thought briefly about Marlene Angeli with her notorious uncle and her ancient great-aunt and her demure disguise. Disparate situations with a similarly shoddy, deceptive feel to them, but after a moment’s thought I dismissed Marlene as irrelevant to anything I was interested in, and I still maintain that opinion although you may disagree. PhillyCares was a different story, and there were political implications, so I focused there. I did some superficial research, accessing what I could online and checking with a few beneficiaries, but everything seemed kosher, and why not?

  The phone rang, and I heard the matronly voice of one of my reliable City Hall sources sounding sorry for herself, which is how she always sounds. We agreed life was nothing but unappreciated drudgery and she got to the point: “Something happened with the FBI.”

  I rearranged it: “You mean the FBI is investigating something at City Hall? Or someone in the administration?” She’d be more likely to know if it involved the administration.

  I’d insulted her, and she was pissed at me. “Like I said, they were right up here. What else is that supposed to mean?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ruth gestured to the fragile young trees lining Market Street, waist level in their huge stone planters but currently despoiled by ugly plastic stars and twinkling yellow-white lights so cheap and garish I cringed for my city. “There’s immense significance behind the myth. Something radical and enormous actually happened.”

  Christianity at Christmastime from the ultimate insider’s viewpoint, delivered effusively and with absolute assurance. She was genuinely aglow, as if the tacky decorations made her legitimately beautiful, as if the season itself temporarily synchronized her soul to the celebration. Ruth was joining in the Black Friday frenzy as tradition required, tasting the holiday, out shopping for her personal Christmas miracle the way normal people shop for sweaters or toys. Joyfully inhaling the reasonable chilliness of the city, the clarity of the cement and the emptiness of the air. The Philadelphia season, as usual lately, lacked the cruel impact of real winter, bringing more of an absence, as if the turning of the year created a beneficent interval before the advent of bitter cold.

  Confiding in me, eagerly rehashing an earlier search for something she was already sure existed, that same surety of Michelangelo and the forms already present in his block of marble waiting to be revealed. That’s a singular creative certainty, an almost physical faith. Couple it with an unfaltering ability to succeed right from childhood, the intelligence and character to easily achieve whatever you try for and you have the unconscious, visceral basis for belief in God.

  So being Ruth, she was filling me in on her unique state of grace. Because once she’d accorded me sole legitimate authority over her public reputation, mine was the only last judgment that really counted.

  Philadelphia gives bad Christmas these days; it’s just a half-hearted imitation of what was once truly both magical and festive. Now it’s a lot like those deadly nostalgic rituals families ins
ist on even when they’re reduced to a few doddering remainders who probably couldn’t stand each other to begin with. If you’re officially a good person you can’t avoid the command to rejoice.

  But why try, if your purpose is to reinvest the old naïve celebration, cutting through Macy’s main floor with its dimly lit rococo brass and marble excess and the scents of cologne and leather. A feminine quest, with the seeker inexorably drawn to our one legitimate downtown department store, its extravagant displays and luxurious visions of an ideal future. With above you the same old adorably quaint lights and fountains playing to children sprawled on the floor by the old Wanamaker’s eagle statue, that retail totem long ago captured by the enemy. Lifting your shopping bags past toddlers on laps and more sophisticated children leaning back on their palms obediently imitating awe at the trite images of locomotive and Santa and Christmas trees punctuated by ancient tunes and the truly embarrassing narration of the light and fountain show. Updated recently, I know, but not enough.

  Ruth meandered critically through these retail marvels, aping enchantment, graciously scanning the colorful counters, the silks and jewelry cases, the palace ballroom décor, crystal on pink cushioning, oversized red and green wreaths, silver and gold trees. She was honoring her outsider adolescent self, or maybe trying to find her: the young Ruth who absorbed this season with the sharpened appreciation of the excluded, who through this encounter with universal rejoicing first discovered her own value. One holy, exquisite Christmastime in a Center City even then past its time, no longer given to marvelous articulated windows but still a place of unexpected solemnity, pregnant with the potential of the New Year. Catholicism was only a romantic mystery to her then, Christ a great if increasingly urgent possibility, and she had no words, merely the inchoate emotions incident to being just thirteen with your private world in chaos. And then you suddenly discover that you’re integral to this extraordinary, eternally unfolding promise, with everywhere songs celebrating your own extraordinary life yet to be.