A Prayer for the City (26 page)

And now what the hell was going on in Washington with the mayor and Cohen, and why the hell hadn’t he known about it until Earwig had lorded it over him? He had even seen Cohen the night before, at a funeral, and Cohen had obliquely mentioned that he and the mayor were going to be in Washington and were going to drop in on McEntee. But because of the casual way he had mentioned it, Davis naturally assumed it was a courtesy call on a national union leader, not a private negotiating session. But he was now convinced that the mayor and Cohen had been in McEntee’s office not to pay a courtesy call but behind the back of Davis, behind the backs of the rest of the negotiating team, to work out a contract devoid of all the non-economic ingredients that were so essential. He called Cohen on the car phone, and he confirmed that he and the mayor had met with McEntee. “Here we go again,” Davis said to himself, and regardless of whatever attempts Cohen made to mollify him and minimize the meeting, Davis didn’t believe them. In fact, as much as it irked him, he was more inclined to believe Earwig than David Cohen.

Over his lifetime, Davis had watched the city that had spawned and formed him move steadily downward, the flesh and bone and stone of the neighborhood he had grown up in decalcify and putrefy until it had become what is commonly described as a bomb zone. Over his lifetime, he had watched the creeping hand of politics and self-interest spread its fingers over the city. And based on his personal experience in government, he had adopted a certain credo to help him stomach the reason things worked the way they did over and over again:
disillusionment is reality
.

He had watched the city retrench, and he had watched the shift of its labor pool from the country’s most diverse to what he now described as an audience pool struggling to resurrect itself on the basis of tourism and culture.
Over his lifetime, he had watched the city move from a series of urban-redevelopment projects that were risky and spectacular—the rebuilding of a city slum into Society Hill, the rebuilding of Center City—to a series of projects that were reminiscent of that scene in
The Third Man
in which Orson Welles notes that Switzerland’s only lasting contribution was the cuckoo clock. As far as Davis could tell, the city’s cuckoo clock was its convention center, not just the one here but those in dozens of cities that were hoping to reconstitute and remarket themselves on the basis of shiny, new block-long buildings dedicated to the preservation of free space for Shriners and software vendors and medical suppliers. A hundred years from now, would that be the city’s most enduring contribution to urban culture, its lasting legacy? The convention center?

Despite such pessimism, Davis knew that in Rendell and Cohen lay the best hope for reversal or, if not reversal, maybe just a refreshing blip from the time line of decline. All new administrations in a government brought along a surge of hope. It was perhaps the most valuable feature of the modern political structure—the excitement of rebirth that came from a new leader regardless of qualifications or expertise—and this administration had also brought along something else just as powerful—a sense of crisis.

For all Davis knew, he was overreacting. But maybe not, for Cohen’s notes of the Washington meeting, taken in a small and tidy shorthand, revealed much discussion of wages and health and welfare benefits and virtually no discussion of the non-economic issues. And then something equally remarkable happened. According to Davis, the mayor apologized and reaffirmed his commitment not simply to the economic issues that would solve the city’s problems in the short term but to the non-economic ones that if successfully won in the negotiations, would have lasting and enduring impact.

Davis later likened the whole episode to the mayor’s having a major automobile accident in which miraculously no one had been killed. Davis thought the mayor realized that he would not be so lucky the next time he tried such a stunt, that he was fully aware now that next time on the windshield would be not only his blood and entrails, but the blood and entrails of the city as well.

In early August, a powerful group of national labor leaders descended on Philadelphia to meet privately with the mayor. They came to help and to make peace. That at least was the purpose of the meeting as it was conveyed to the media. But the labor leaders were really there to apply pressure once again, to warn the mayor of the repercussions if he continued to hold firm and fire away at the quality of the workforce in the hopes of moving public sentiment to his side. Given their collective might, they were hoping the mayor would succumb to the crack of their knuckles as they flexed their power. Spread comfortably around the table in the mayor’s Cabinet Room, they talked in a way that oozed with affability, self-assurance, and just the slightest trace of condescension, as if to suggest that the mayor, a neophyte without any track record in the trenches, whose sum total of experience was exactly seven months, had no idea of what he was doing and had better learn quickly if he planned on having a political future beyond the backwater of some dying city that could lay claim in no particular order to Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Rocky, and the cheese steak.

By the time Rendell met with the labor leaders, in midafternoon, he looked drained and spent, as if the usual ruddiness of his features had been surgically sucked from him. In most instances in which he was clearly outnumbered, Rendell went right to his knees, disarming hair triggers of temper with charm, asking those gathered round him whether they wanted a soft drink and then running back himself to the little private alcove in between the Cabinet Room and his office to get it. The psychological impact of that was so enormous that people afterward, even if the meeting had gone totally contrary to what they wanted to hear, always remembered the graciousness of that glass of diet Coke.

But the mayor was in no mood for soft drinks.

Instead, he came into the meeting with that certain look on his face that he sometimes got, where the eyes were hard and slightly squinty and the teeth were gritted in between the lips. His body language lurched and jerked, the shift in his chair at the head of the table like the sudden capsizing of a ship, as if some internal war inside his body was being waged between Good Ed and Bad Ed, and he was trying very, very hard not to take everyone and everything in that room and fling it all out the window into the City Hall courtyard—the bodies, the little dumb mementos in the glass case, the coffee cups, the phone, every
goddamn motherfucking thing
. In the
medical terminology of his office staff, who saw him in a way that no one else saw him, he was right on the border of what they generally diagnosed as a wig out. Wig outs had clear preliminary symptoms, usually accompanied by such statements as “
I am not an atom! I cannot split in two!
” when Marge Staton, his saintly secretary, called to tell him that his 3:00
P.M.
and his 3:30
P.M.
appointments were still in the waiting room even though it was now 4:00
P.M.
But since wig outs were common and lasted for only a few minutes or so, no particular thought was given to either sedative or straitjacket, and they were treated in much the same vein as sudden changes in the weather.

The meeting began with one of the union leaders quietly asking the mayor whether Tom Cronin, the local head of the city’s white-collar union, could sit in.

“
This is just fucking outrageous
.”

Lynn Williams, the president of the United Steelworkers of America, who did most of the talking for the union delegation, asked the mayor to use his political contacts to get the state supreme court to hold off on rendering a decision about the legality of the fact-finding in return for a promise by the local unions to do some hard and earnest bargaining. Several weeks earlier, as a way of breaking the blockade, the city had filed an appeal with the supreme court to declare the fact-finding invalid. The supreme court had not yet ruled on the appeal, but the justices had agreed to hear the case, and that clearly was a bad omen for the unions.

“
To be honest, I don’t think the court will rule against us, and I won’t take away one of our best weapons
.”

“You guys really don’t want this thing to blow up, do you?” asked Williams.

“
We don’t want it, but we want a fair contract
.”

“Can’t you think of some way of lightening this atmosphere?” asked Williams.

“
I don’t want to be a shit, and I don’t want to be antilabor, but I can’t grow hair, and I can’t grow money
.”

Thomas Donahue, the national secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, said the tenor of the city’s propaganda offensive had made it clear to city workers that they were “not worth what [they’re] getting.”

“
It’s a fact of life
.”

To counter the claim that he was being too hard on the unions, he produced a copy of a recent District Council 33 newsletter and read aloud the quote that president Jim Sutton had given at the rally in June: “
I say to Ed
Rendell, if you think that L.A. had a bad time, mess with District Council Thirty-three
.”

“Sticks and stones,” Jay Mazur, president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, mimicked at the table in a singsong taunt, as if it were hard to believe that Rendell could be so thin-skinned over a silly little quote in which a local union leader had threatened a race riot.

Rendell made it clear, clearer than he had ever before made it publicly or privately, why he needed the concessions he was seeking from the unions, why raising taxes was the equivalent of placing a gun barrel flush against the city’s forehead and pressing the trigger.

“We are losing our middle class, our working class, to other places. We have to increase our tax base, or we are finished. The city will become Detroit without the automobiles. I will suggest to you gentlemen that with the automobiles, Detroit is not a very pleasant place. Without the automobiles, it would be terrifying.”

He also made it clear, clearer than he had ever before made it, that he would do what he thought he had to do regardless of the political consequences, regardless of the considerable clout the men surrounding him wielded in the Democratic party.

“I’m Jewish, so I don’t have the slightest chance of national office. If I walk out of here voted out, I walk with my head held high because I’ve done the right thing.”

Outside in the gloomy corridors of City Hall, the media lingered en masse, wanting to know whether some kind of conflagration had taken place. Rendell diplomatically called the meeting “helpful,” then trudged back to his office. In private, without the need to posture and prance, he wasn’t ashamed to admit to the toll that it all took sometimes. If the meeting with the national union leaders was all that had taken place this day, it would have been more than enough. But the whole day had been like that, an endless cycle in which every decision, regardless of the good faith in which he made it, carried threats that there would be hell to pay.

He was so exhausted that he seemed genuinely dispirited, showing perhaps the only emotion in his quiver of myriad emotions that he almost never displayed. “I make no judgments about my weeks,” he told someone over the phone, the cheerful staccato turned hoarse and watery. “None of them are close enough to being good. I got threatened by six different sources today.”

Several days earlier, in a moment of relief from the meetings stampede, he had mused about a new painting of the art museum that had been hung
on the back wall of his office across from his desk. He knew that his wife, Midge, liked the picture, and because of his difficulties appreciating art (during a walking tour of a Picasso exhibit at the art museum, he was so loud that a patron, not knowing who he was and utterly frustrated by his banter, hissed at him to shut up), her seal of approval was seemingly enough for him. But the more he looked at the painting, the more unsure he felt about it. He definitely liked the frame, he was confident of that much, but he was clearly ambivalent about the clouds that had been painted in the foreground. He thought they gave the picture a drab look, and given his eternal optimism about the future of the city, not to mention the fact that he was the one who had to look at the picture all the time, he wished it had been painted to portray a sunny day. He asked the others in the room for advice, and the more he mused and talked about it and stared at it to make sure he hadn’t missed something, the more perplexed and conflicted he became.

“Fuck it,” the mayor finally said. “What do I know?”