Any Place I Hang My Hat

by Susan Isaacs

  “Why didn’t you tell me anything about this?”

  “Because it’s the type of sleaze we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole or anything else.”

  “Isn’t that for me to decide?”

  “Trust me.”

  “No, I trust myself.”

  “Are you the Potter Stewart of sleaze, Bob? You know it when you see it?” True, this was not the polite way of resolving an issue between an associate editor and the editor-in-chief. I realized that I ought to make some move that could be construed as an apology for my big mouth. Except Happy Bob was one of those people in journalism who overvalued guts, probably from having seen All the President’s Men too often and envisioning himself as the Golden Mean between Jason Robards Jr. and Robert Redford.

  Since I couldn’t apologize without being seen as a wimp, I kept talking. “Bob, I’d always taken you at your word. During Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, I let you be my guide. I learned a lot. Just as Greg”—the reporter who covered the Republicans and the right—“learned from you during the Gingrich and Livingston brouhahas. At this magazine, as you run it, there has always been clear lines between what’s news, what’s analysis, and what’s crap.” He tilted his head to the side for an instant, his ’tweren’t-anything gesture. So I added: “And you’re the one who drew those lines the staff doesn’t cross over.”

  He swiveled back and forth in his chair. “Next time,” he said, poking his index finger at me, “if anything like this comes up, I want to hear about it.”

  “Absolutely.” True, he’d been pissed, but part of what he was saying was also I want to hear the gossip. It always amazed me how so many high-level newspaper and magazine editors, far from the street and their old sources, retain a mean-spirited cub reporter’s insatiable appetite for dish, the nastier the better. “So,” I began with a smile, “who from the Bowles campaign subtly designated someone not in the Bowles campaign to complain to you about me?”

  A bigger smile, a display of more teeth, even a crinkling of eyes. You’d expect a smile like that from an editor at one of Rupert Murdoch’s lesser tabloids. “Forget about it, kid,” he said. “Get back to work.”

  “Are you busy?” I asked Gloria Howard. It was an unfair question, because it was Tuesday, the day articles were due to be edited and copyedited by Wednesday. No one was not busy. She swiveled from her monitor around to me and adjusted the clasp of her seed-pearl necklace so it was in perfect alignment with her cervical vertebra. The jacket of her dark green suit hung on the back of her chair. She wore a pink silk blouse and looked ready for a Junior League luncheon or an interview with the Dutch prime minister. In all the years I’d known her, in and out of the office, she had never dressed as if she were expecting a minor moment.

  “Yes. I’m busy. I’m trying to explain in detail as well as in depth how Germany and France are trying to pound a silver stake into the U.S.’s heart. It’s going slowly. My article, not the stake.” Because she was a senior editor, Gloria had an actual office, not just a cubicle. Except for a bust of Cardinal Richelieu she’d picked up at a flea market, she had not embellished the room. The furniture, a blond wood desk and two chairs, along with a red ceramic lamp that looked like a fat derriére in too-tight slacks, appeared to be of the Danish modern school and probably came from one of our Revered Founder’s later marriages. I always wondered if after accomplishing a successful coup de rédaction and becoming executive editor, Gloria would redecorate Happy Bob’s ex-office.

  “Can you give me two minutes?” I asked. “That probably means no more than five.”

  “Come in. Have a seat.”

  “It’s Happy Bob,” I told her. “Someone not in the Bowles campaign was told by someone very much in the Bowles campaign to give Happy Bob a message: that I was getting too friendly with that kid who’s claiming that Bowles is his father. Too friendly in the ethical sense, not in the sexual. So I did my Come on, Bob, get serious song and dance and I think calmed him down a little. But he really, really never liked me and now he has more fuel for his fire. I’d even say he hates me if I thought him capable of any interesting emotion.”

  “And your question is ...” Gloria asked.

  “What should I do?”

  “About ... ?”

  “Give me a break, Gloria. You’re using up my minutes with—whatever the hell this is. Socratic dialogue. What should I do to get Happy Bob to loathe me less?”

  “If it were I, I would do nothing.” What I liked about Gloria was that she kept talking and didn’t make you say, Oh, tell me what you mean, Great Oracle. “Why bother? No matter what you’d do to get him on your good side, he would view it as weakness, which would only confirm whatever negative view he already has—if in fact that’s the case. You don’t have to worry. He is well aware that you have what this magazine needs: a talent for writing in an incisive and interesting manner.”

  “Are you sure I shouldn’t do anything?” I demanded.

  “When have you known me to be in doubt? I’m not claiming certitude is my finest quality, but there you have it. If you want the total truth, Amy, and I’m assuming you do, it’s that you are too sensitive. You want to be liked. Fine. Lovely. You’re gifted at being likeable. But if someone doesn’t like you, you don’t necessarily have to do anything about it. Just keep a respectful distance and do your work.”

  I looked at my nails, an excuse not to see Gloria’s inevitably self-assured countenance. When I finally did look up, I asked: “Not do anything at all?”

  “Right. I don’t think there’s anybody on the staff who hasn’t thought Happy Bob hates me at some point. When I first got here, I was convinced he hated me because I was black. That was somewhat pedestrian, but I couldn’t think of any other reason why he wouldn’t like me. Then, when he began to smile upon me, make me his protégé, as it were, I was convinced he was doing it because somewhere in the past he’d had an episode—don’t ask me what—and therefore needed to appear Afrophilic.”

  “But now you know he genuinely likes you,” I said.

  “No, I know he likes my work. He likes my directness. I have no idea if he likes me personally, and what’s more, I don’t care. Neither should you. He hires and promotes on the basis of merit, that much I’ve learned.”

  “Thank you.”

  I got up, took a few steps, and was halfway out when she said, “I can’t believe you’re walking out! For God’s sake, sit back down and tell me about the kid and Bowles. In depth, Amy.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS GENERATED such huge amounts of e-mail that even during the buildup to the primaries, you could sense cyberspace vibrating from overload. This did not mean the fax machine was obsolete. If you were on a candidate’s media list, any press release was also faxed, reflecting the belief of press assistants that reporters ignored e-mail that did not have VERY URGENT as its subject line (URGENT by itself having taken on the new meaning of BARELY WORTH NOTICING). Thus, the four colleagues and I who shared a fax replenished the paper reluctantly because we knew the machine would spend hours spewing out all the outdated releases its tiny mind had retained.

  Still, no matter how hard a journalist might try, there was close to zero chance for anyone covering a campaign not to be aware of an imminent MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT. Unless a member of the media was lying in bed dead drunk, or on a candidate’s shit list, or had lost computer, cell phone, and beeper, he or she could not avoid knowing when something big was about to happen.

  In my case, it was the shit list. I learned Thom Bowles had scheduled what his press secretary, the lovely Moira, was billing as The most important press conference of his career when I saw some of my colleagues suddenly staring at their pagers or talking on cell phones seconds before a Chat with Dick Gephardt Informally! event. On one side of me was an L.A. Times guy with wavy Romeo hair and on the other a woman from USA Today. I asked her what was going on because he struck me as one of those newspaper types with a His Girl Friday/The Front Page getting-the-sc
oop mentality who had never learned to share.

  “Bowles is going to talk about that paternity thing,” she said.

  I flipped open my cell phone and gave its minuscule screen the evil eye. “Damn. It didn’t come through. Can you tell me where and when?”

  Two hours later, at three in the afternoon—so the announcement could be shown on all the early evening news shows—I was standing outside the Pan American Press Club with just about everyone who had been at the Gephardt event plus an astounding number of nonpolitical reporters whose media embraced the sleaze as much as In Depth embraced the ponderous.

  Better to stand outside the Pan Am Press Club than a lot of places, I decided. It was one of those double-width town houses that had probably gone from being a rich family’s home to an embassy to its present incarnation, as headquarters of some tax-exempt, let’s-get-democracy-throughout-the-western-hemisphere-and-all-be-friends group. When a political campaign rented its double-width ballroom/auditorium, it was usually well funded enough that it could pay extra for coffee and non-rubbery muffins, or even a pile of half-sandwiches. Having missed lunch, I was simultaneously thinking about roast beef on rye and recognizing there was a reason I had not heard about the big-time Bowles announcement.

  Someone yelled out: “What the fuck is holding up this fucking thing?” Someone else closer to the door said, “They’re really checking ID.” I asked myself if all this meticulousness, beyond the usual security measures, was because the Pan Am required it or because Moira was nervous about having to deal with so many nonpolitical journalists, photographers, and camera operators.

  As I got closer to the door, I noticed hired security guards checking ID. One of Moira’s assistants was standing behind them, her head bobbing up and down as the final authority: Okay, let them in. She was a kid who spent too much time trying to be Little Moira, mostly by being discourteous and loudmouthed.

  “You can’t go in,” she told me when I got to the door.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  Not only did I have limited patience for asinine behavior, I also wasn’t about to miss whatever Bowles was going to say. I glanced behind me. A fair number of people were still waiting. Ergo, I had about thirty witnesses.

  “Why don’t you want me to hear what Bowles has to say about this paternity business?” I demanded. My voice, after all, had been trained to be heard over many square blocks of the Lower East Side.

  “Shut up,” the Moira-ette told me. “Do you think screaming your goddamn head off is gonna get you anyplace?”

  “If I don’t get in, this isn’t going to be your story anymore,” I told her quietly. “I’ll turn around, start talking about my friend Freddy Carrasco, and bingo, all the cameras will be on me.”

  “Don’t even think of trying to play hardball with me,” she said.

  “Your choice.” I turned about halfway toward the rest of the reporters on line, but then looked back at her, as if she were an afterthought. “What are you putting on here,” I asked, “amateur hour? You’re barring a journalist whose magazine is unlikely to publish anything about this press conference. Do you think I’m going to shop my story around somewhere else?” I gave her my best exclusive-girls-boarding-school-plus-Harvard look of contempt—which didn’t amount to much more than slightly raised eyebrows, probably much like my Where is the ladies’ room? look. “I’m on the staff of In Depth. There is a difference between staffers and freelancers. You ought to get that clear.”

  Her eyes moved as far to the right as they could go. She was searching for Moira, but didn’t want to be obvious. Still, it was just she and two security guards between me and the press conference. Before she could call for backup or simply say no on her own, I was inside. As I whooshed past her, I murmured: “Smart decision. Thanks.”

  The ever-lovely Moira Fitzgerald, looking like a Holstein in a green turtleneck, lumbered over to the podium and in her usual mellifluous tones bellowed, “Shut up and sit down.” The TV and print media people in their early twenties chuckled, happy to be witness to such an unforgettable character, the archetypal tough dame—loud and rude. Those of us over twenty-five muttered some variant of Fuck off, Moira and took our seats in the velvet-covered chairs. Not folding chairs. I hid myself as best I could between the bulk of a hunky guy from the E! Network and a nonhunky Brit from Sky News who had the contours of a hot-air balloon.

  The Pan Am Press Club did not have a formal stage, but rather a bandstand on which a small orchestra might have played for some early-twentieth-century debutante. So instead of glancing offstage, Moira waited until a door opened and someone signaled her by sticking out his head and nodding.

  “Everybody,” she said, “I am happy to introduce Jennifer and Thomas Bowles.”

  They walked out holding hands. Jen Bowles was yet another American wife standing by her politician/athlete/clergyman/performing artist as he acknowledged an extramarital affair, siring an out-of-wedlock child, or stealing from the poor to make himself rich. She was perfectly dressed for the sweet-and-loyal-yet-no-schmendrick part in an American version of a Chanel suit, sky blue with red trim and brass buttons. She wore low-heeled black patent leather pumps so she would not dwarf the man she was standing by.

  He took his place behind the podium while she took hers about three feet off to the side. “Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate your coming on such short notice,” the senator said. He paused long enough to prove to me it was a technique some speech coach had taught him. “I know many of you heard about an incident that took place during a fund-raiser here in New York. It was widely reported that a young man, uninvited, came to this event and announced”—he coughed quietly into his fist—”that I was his father. Well, he was packed off by security, not too roughly, but packed off all the same. I had my campaign organization issue a denial saying I had no connection with this young man.”

  He took a deep-enough breath that the shoulder pads of his charcoal gray suit rose, then fell. He glanced over at Jen and, yes, she smiled at him, no doubt to give him the will to go on. “I do not take family lightly. I am more than lucky in that regard. I am blessed with a wonderful wife and two fine daughters.”

  The choreography worked: April and Brooke, or possibly Brooke and April, walked out onto the stage and took their place on the other side of their father. The blond one was wearing a plaid skirt, short-sleeved sweater, and ballet flats, the kind of style girls in Oregon wear or, more likely, the style an older person in Oregon would think a girl should wear. She was either calm or sedated. The dark-haired Bowles daughter, who had grown considerably heavier than her sister with just a few weeks of campaign food, wore camel-colored slacks and a bright blue sweater with yellow suns and moons, the aggressively cheerful garment of someone who does not want to appear self-conscious about her weight.

  “Obviously,” Thom Bowles continued, “I’m not here to tell you that I love my family, even though I do. I want to talk to you about someone not in my family, someone who is no longer with us. Nina Carrasco.” Either he had a fine ear for language or a Spanish tutor, because he said her name perfectly. “Nina was a first-generation American, an enormously bright, hardworking woman. Actually, she worked for my father. I met her when I was going to college and I can’t tell you how much I admired her. It didn’t take long before I fell in love with her.”

  He spread out his hand sideways. Jen took one hand and the blond daughter gave him her right hand while at the same time reaching for her sister’s with her left. After what was presumably a supportive squeeze along the chain of Bowleses, he let go of the hands.

  “Even though Nina and I were in love, it couldn’t last. Those were the days before many Americans considered diversity the gift that it is. Both our families put pressure on us. It did not make for a happy time, and neither Nina nor I had the strength to defy some of the people we loved the most.

  “About a month and a half later, Nina called me. She was pregnant. I never asked, but she told me straigh
t out—right away—that she would not consider abortion. I asked her about marriage, and she said no. I told her that I was proud to be her child’s father and that I would take care of him or her and be the best father I could. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.”

  Bowles wiped his hands along the sides of his slacks. I couldn’t tell if they were sweaty or if he was playing nervous. He looked around the audience of reporters, took another deep breath, and continued—without notes or teleprompter. “Nina did not believe that a marriage between us could work. As she so wisely put it, You and I are too strong for that, Thom! It cannot work when it’s forced. She thought it was better that I be out of her life and out of our child’s life. She was firm about the child not being pulled between two cultures that, at the time, had limited understanding of each other.

  “If I had been more self-possessed at that stage of my life, I would have argued with her. As it was, although I was of legal age, I was a kid. I offered to pay child support. She asked me instead for a lump-sum payment, the better for us to keep our distance from each other. I borrowed money from my father and gave it to her. I asked her to let me know when she had the baby.”

  He tried to keep talking, but seemed to be choked up and lifted his index finger to say, Give me a minute. His gaze was now above the reporters’ heads, as if checking out the plaster garland that was part of the room’s ornate molding. I was too far back to see if there were actual tears or if he was trying to get the light bouncing off the ceiling to make his eyes look misty. “Months later I received a call from a friend of hers, someone I didn’t know, who told me she’d had a son. He would not give me the boy’s name. I could not see the boy. This is what Nina wanted.”

  I knew what would happen next. Thom Bowles would talk about Freddy, saying Fernando with a flawless R and A. He would explain that he moved to Oregon because he couldn’t bear to stay in New York and not be able to see his child. He would offer some two-sentence version of how he grew from a boy into a man in the west, so I figured he must be somewhat confident about the New York primary.