Sully tried to probe beyond the words, beyond the brave phrases. Perhaps he was searching for something in his son that had long been snuffed out by indifference or despair or ignorance. Yet his son's truthfulness, the complete absence of guilt filled him with a sense of filial pride. _My son is a truthful man,_ he thought. _A better man than me_.
"I've been trying for two days to confess," Sully said after he finished his drink and signaled for another. "It's uncanny. Yesterday I started looking for a priest, and I was mugged. Can you imagine that?"
"Are you okay?" Timmy said with concern.
"I don't know if I'm okay, son," he said thoughtfully. "I've been trying to work that out since it happened. I do know that I'm different than I was. I don't see anything at all the way I saw it before. It's as if I changed glasses. My thoughts have been bouncing around in my head, and even the people I have talked with appear different to me."
"Am _I_ different, Dad?"
"Yes, Timmy, I'm finding that I'm looking at you differently."
"Like I'm not a homosexual." Sully could see that Timmy was annoyed with himself for saying it.
"It's quite irrelevant to me, son."
"Well, it certainly wasn't always that way."
"No, it wasn't. But that's the point I'm trying to make. The things that mattered no longer matter. Maybe it's the need for expiation or confession that is pushing me. I don't know. I only know that I have had this overwhelming need to be with you."
"Dad, no matter how you slice it, it's still confession, and I say to you there's no need for it. I have no bitterness toward you. You did not sin against me. It simply was beyond your comprehension, beyond your background and genes to understand what I was all about. Mother understood it better. That's because she's a woman. How can you possibly have understood?"
What was it he was going to confess? Sully suddenly thought. What was the burden that had begun to oppress him so powerfully? Was he guilty about the way he had treated his son, those years of indifference without love or understanding? Yes, he was guilty about that. That and so much more. _God, I am guilty,_ he cried to himself.
He ordered another drink. He finished his last and watched the bartender pour, contemplating the amber fluid as it flowed into the glass.
"Christ, Timmy," he said suddenly, "didn't the damned indifference trouble you? I mean, I let you down. I was a lousy father. Don't you see that?" Why was he having so much trouble getting feedback from him? Perhaps he was expressing himself badly, although, he knew, he had never suffered from underarticulation.
"No, Dad. I must say it. It never troubled me."
"Jeezus," Sully said aloud, again searching his son's face, noting for the first time the subtle makeup, the carefully plucked eyebrows. He recalled Timmy as a little boy and summoned images of him crawling into bed between him and Jean, morning cuddlings, the feeling of a little hand in his. But that was surely another person. He was having trouble identifying the little Timmy with the big Timmy. There was, however, that unmistakable, barely visible cleft in the chin, which had come down from his father to him to Timmy. Suddenly it occurred to him that Timmy's aberration would make him the last of the Sullivan line, the end of the breed that began God knows where, tried to take root in this foreign land, and would now die here.
"I just built my own life from the beginning, I guess," Timmy said.
_God, I loved my father,_ Sully thought. _Why couldn't my son love me like that?_ He felt big tears well in his eyes and turned awayut Timmy was looking somewhere else, staring into space, gathering his own thoughts.
"I didn't really need you, Dad," Timmy continued. "I hope to hell it doesn't trouble you now. But I didn't really need you. And I hope now that I'm not being cruel. Maybe that's part of the way it is, being the way I am, but I welcomed your indifference. I'm sorry to tell you that, Dad, especially now."
Sully was silent for a long time. He became conscious of the men at
the other end of the bar talking in low voices punctuated by an occasional curse or raucous laugh. Leary's was an empty place and a depressing place. He felt chilled, and quickly drank the remains of his drink. "Anyway," he said, squeezing Timmy's arm again, "it's great seeing you again."
"And it's great seeing you again, Dad."
They paused, awkward again, looking at each other.
"You'll make out, Dad," Timmy said. "I know you will. Hell, a man of your abilities. It's not the end of the world, you know."
"Of course it's not." But it was the beginning of the end of the world, and he knew that. "One for the road, Timmy."
"One for the road, Dad."
The bartender, responding to Sully's snapping-finger signal, grudgingly left the conversation of his customers and waddled toward them to refill their drinks. Sully picked up the shot glass, his fingers shaking slightly. He pointed it toward Timmy. "What shall we drink to?"
"I don't know, Dad."
"Well, then … let's drink to nothing." Sully downed the drink in a single gulp, swallowing hard, feeling the scotch go burning down his gullet.
Outside, they shook hands, and he watched Timmy, straight and tall, walk confidently down the garbage-strewn street toward the subway station. He supposed he should be crying, he thought, but he couldn't summon up the tears.
———— *18* WHEN they arrived back at the apartment, Mrs. Margolies had to be helped into bed. Aram watched Sandra as she came out of the bedroom. She seemed tired, with darkening circles under her eyes. The strain of the campaign was getting to all of them. He felt unsure of what to do next. He had a nagging presentiment that they were overkilling their opponent. And now that Sullivan was flesh and blood, it seemed all the more wrong. And that drunken Fitzgerald. He wondered what happened to him after he fell. Had he been hurt?
"Should we call to find out what happened to that man?" he blurted out. By now they were in a cab and on the way to Alby's town house. Neither Alby nor Sandra responded. They looked directly ahead.
"He could be injured." Aram shrugged, paused, waited for a response. When none came, he said, "They could sue us."
"For crying out loud," Sandra said at last. "The man would have killed us if he had the chance."
"I don't think …" Aram said.
"Stop thinking," Alby said. "Sandra, please tell him to stop thinking."
The cab dropped them in front of the house. Alby paid the driver, and they silently walked up the steps to the second-floor library. In one corner of the room a group of women were busy stuffing envelopes. Norman came to greet them.
"We're nearly finished with the last broadside," he said, smiling his always-cool smile and showing the piece to Alby. "Looks pretty good." It carried endorsements by all the prominent Democrats in the state.
"Great," Alby said, hardly looking at it. The glum procession followed him through the door to a private sitting room.
"What the hell is going on?" Norman asked.
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Alby said. He told Norman what had occurred in flat chronological terms, cutting out all the human dynamics involved in the situation, leaving him to surmise the rest.
"That wasn't very bright," Norman said, his fingers probing for a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.
"That fellow … Perlmutter. He's no dummy. He'll find a way to use it. Yomarian's mother-in-law, queen of the slum-lords." There was the rattle hysteria in Sandra's voice.
"No," Alby said, with some degree of finality, slapping his thighs in
a decisive way. "They're obviously holding back. Not following the usual norms. Besides, in our great sewer of a district, how would you communicate it? No way. Perhaps if it was a liberal-chic district, a potpourri of the lily-white, educated pseudointellectuals, it could work
— but not in this area." "Alby, I don't give a crap about that district," Sandra said. "The fact is that sooner or later it will get out."
"Then get rid of the properties. Tell her to get rid of them."
Aram felt a g
rowing agitation. He looked at them with obvious disgust. "You can't walk in shit and expect none of it to get on your shoes," he said calmly.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sandra snapped.
"That nobody escapes. No one gets off scot-free." It was time she knew she was in it up to her ass, Aram thought, and his mother-in-law too. _Goddammit,_ he thought, _I'm not in it alone_.
Norman looked at Alby. "And now for the good news," he said cheerfully. He reached into his inside coat pocket and brought out an envelope, ceremoniously removing its contents, holding it up, and shaking it open with a flick of his wrist. "I give you the poll results. Yomarian, two to fucking one." Alby took it from him and looked at it.
"It's too small a sample."
"In the Eighth there are nothing but small samples. The vote will be minimal. But it does indicate that our Mr. Sullivan is a gone goose."
Aram watched the paper changing hands. Alby thrust it in front of him. He didn't look at it.
"If you say so," he said, conscious of his own petulance. He sat silently for a moment. "All right," he said. "I do want to win, but dammit, I do feel sorry for those people."
"You are a total ass," Sandra said.
Alby got up from the couch and began to pace the floor. Sandra had lit a cigarette and was sucking deeply and blowing the smoke out in gusts through her nostrils. He could feel her anger emanating outward, like heat from red coals.
"There is no mercy in the act of winning," he said. "If you don't think of yourself as a predator, you will not be a predator. A predator eats his prey, and you, friend Aram, must learn to eat yours."
"I guess I just don't have your indifference, Alby," Aram said sarcastically.
"There is nothing worse than a politician with a conscience," Alby said.
"I guess it came with the genes."
"Then stamp on the damn thing," Alby said. "It'll do you no good in political life. Do you need a ton of bricks to fall on you to understand what the game is all about? This is a game that has one single goal: to get elected, then to get reelected, then to get reelected again. You go up the ladder and head for the highest office you can get to. That's the long and short of it. There is simply nothing more to it. If you have compassion for your opponent, then be compassionate after you win."
"I've held my end up pretty good," Aram said. _Hell, without me what would they have?_ Hadn't he followed directions to the letter? More than that he couldn't do.
"I feel like quitting," he said.
"You can't quit," Alby said. "It's too damned late."
"I'm tired," he said. "I've got to take the day off, get some sleep or something."
"He's got the campaign shits," Norman said, and Alby laughed in his strained high-pitched way.
The tension subsided a bit then, and no one spoke for a while. They each had their own special motives, Aram thought. To Alby it was an intellectual exercise, an experiment to validate a theory. Norman's motives had racial overtones not yet fully realized, although Aram felt
that he hated them all for their whiteness. And Sandra's liberal political activism was beginning to take quantum leaps. But in the end they all needed each other. And as Norman had put it more than once, Aram was the point man. He, Aram Yomarian, had only to bide his time.
"Well," Norman sa, pausing to study the schedule, "the afternoon has marginal shoe-leathering." He looked at his watch.
"Ah, the hell with it," Aram said. "I'm ready. The damned campaign will be over in three days anyway. I'll hold out. Just don't pay any attention to me."
Alby and Norman quickly left the room. Sandra sat silently, still puffing deeply on her cigarette.
"That business about quitting," she said. "It was stupid."
"I admit it. It was stupid."
"They're working their asses off for you — for us. The trouble with you, Aram," Sandra said, standing up and pacing the floor like a caged animal, "is that you're so damned non-ideological. That's what Alby has been trying to tell you. You don't burn inside. You're not visceral. You're not juicy about issues. You don't feel injustice…."
"The name of the game is to get elected. Isn't that what Alby said?"
"Yes, Aram, that is indeed the name of the game. And I'm perfectly willing to play it that way. But there's more. Beyond election."
"More?"
"Aram, we are a civilization coming apart. We are suffering from a kind of sickness. Greed and injustice and indecency. Nothing is working anymore."
"Come on, Sandra. Off the soapbox. That part about greed is a bit overworked. I don't see you rejecting any of that trust-fund money. I don't have to remind you where most of it comes from."
"I don't see you turning any of it down, either."
"No, I don't. But my eyes are open to where it comes from. And frankly, who cares?"
"Well, I care." She had hissed out the words venemously, as if they had a different meaning. _Poor Sandra_, he thought. She was destined to carry her wealth like a weight, a cumbersome burden.
"I want to do things. I want to help people," She cried suddenly, like some primordial cry of an ancient bird. "I have too much feeling," she said, a big tear crawling out of the corner of her eye. "That's why I want you to win, to be there in the thick of the decision-making process. I want us to count … to help."
"Sure," he said, patting her back and feeling, for the first time since he had met her, that he was the ascendant figure. He liked the feeling, he realized.
———— *19* WHEN he had lost sight of Timmy, Sully began to walk the streets again, searching the faces of houses and stores for old landmarks, trying to piece together the paths he had taken with his father more than fifty years before. Sometimes an old house stuck somewhere between apartment buildings would light a flicker of recognition. He remembered the women carrying patent-leather shopping bags and plodding from store to store, vendors displaying their wares along streets, men in peaked caps and dirty work shoes or wearing bowler hats and flowers in their lapels, horse-drawn wagons and high-backed cars and trolley cars open at the sides.
Sully sniffed deeply, closing his eyes and wishing he could summon up the rich, potent smell of horsepie that had, somehow, enhanced all the other gamy effluvia — the fruits and vegetables and beer — and all the sweaty smells that were peculiar to that moment.
He passed a telephone booth, and it occurred to him that he should call Jean, if only to tell her that he had just seen and talked with the only tangible result of their marriage. Or was it only that, only his meeting with Timmy, that suggested the call? The memory of early good moments with Jean was also lodged within him somewhere.
The phone in the booth still worked, miraculously. He poked in his wallet for the number of the Washington boutique his wife ran and gave it to the operator with his credit card number.
"Tell her her husband is calling from New York," he told the girl who answered.
He waited, tapping on the metal of the telephone box and watching the cars rattle past. His eye caught the glint of the metal roof of one of the three-story walk-ups that stood directly across the street. Suddenly the image of a rooftop pigeon coop took forin his memory, and he remembered his father looking up and pointing, a brief momentary gesture casually made but burned into some permanent place in the mind of a nine-year-old.
"Look at the pigeons up there, John, me boy." And the nine-year-old had looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun, and had seen the pigeons circling over the tin rooftop coop. A man standing there waved as he saw the father and son looking up. _My God,_ Sully thought. The memory of it rushed back with such vividness that he was briefly disjointed in his sense of time.
"I see them, Dad," he said. "What's he doing with them pigeons?"
"Raises 'em."
But Jean's voice now intruded.
"Pigeons? What pigeons?" she said.
"Did I say 'pigeons'?" he stammered.
"Yes."
"Must have been a crossed wire."
"Are you okay, Sul
ly?" Jean asked. He ignored the question.
"I just saw Timmy," he said. "We had a drink together. He looks great, Jean, really great." He knew she was wondering why he had just seen Timmy but would not ask him. Nevertheless, he knew, too, that she would be pleased that they had somehow come together. To Jean it was important that traditional relationships existed, even if they only appeared to. Fathers and sons were supposed to see each other, talk things over, be close to each other.
"That's great, Sully. I'm glad." He could hear voices in the background. A woman's laugh.
Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Page 21