Waking the Dead (23 page)

“These are animals, you know that, don’t you?” Isaac said to me, leaning forward in his club chair and patting me on the knee. He was giving me a little rebriefing about the people we’d be meeting today.

“Me too,” I said.

“No. These are different kinds of animals. The kind that push over garbage cans for their meal.”

“Those are called raccoons, Isaac. Raccoons are cute.”

“Don’t quibble, Fielding. I’m trying to help you through this.”

“Well, I guess it’s the least you can do. Right?”

He looked at me queerly. Isaac gave me a lot of leash, but he didn’t like to take any nonsense. He believed in contracts, both written and unwritten, and ours stated that he would train me, guide me, give me access and acceleration, whereas I would continue to listen to him, respect him, carry the torch he was handing over to me.

“I never do the least for you, Fielding,” he said. “I do only the maximum.”

“I realize that,” I said, sitting deep in the chair, stretching my legs out before me. I checked my shoes. I’d stepped in a bit of snow between our front door and the driveway and my black shoes were stained near the sole by a pale lacy fringe of ice and salt. “But,” I said, with a sigh, “I can’t help wondering what Kinosis owes you. He doesn’t really know
me
and it doesn’t seem he much likes me.”

“Granted,” said Isaac, cutting in, trying, I suppose, to bring me back to my senses.

“So what’s the deal?” I asked. “I think I better know, don’t you?” I wanted to grill him on this one; I wanted to stand up and poke my finger against his chest.

“If that was my thinking, I would have said so,” replied Isaac, with one of those old-fashioned wan smiles.

“I’m under a lot of pressure here, Isaac. I have to get things straight.”

“What kind of pressure, Fielding?” he asked, three perfect wrinkles appearing in his forehead, like a trio of gulls. We’d long ago taken that extra twist and turn to where it was impossible to distinguish his paternal concern for me from his ambitions.

“Internal pressure.”

“Trouble with the New York family?”

As if that wasn’t the only family I had.

“No, no. None. They’re thrilled for me.”

He shrugged, as if doing me the courtesy of not puncturing the fantasy. It was really so incredibly disagreeable of him, but it wasn’t as if he could help himself. “Then what sort of pressure? Everything OK with you and Jule?”

“Hey, we’re getting pretty man-to-man, aren’t we?” I said, with a bright smile that he was smart enough to know meant Watch It.

“I’m trying to help you through what I fully realize is a difficult period of transition. First you want to talk and then you don’t.”

“I want to talk about why Kinosis is putting me on the ticket.”

“It’s a very complex debt, Fielding. It’s an accumulation. The primary reason I haven’t gone into a great deal of detail about it is that frankly it would take me hours, weeks, to unravel the whole thing. As you know, the governor is not a brilliant mind. But he listens and it’s better than having a Republican down there. A Democrat is simply beholden to a more cosmopolitan constituency and has to answer to a greater variety of people. Kinosis comes to me from time to time for advice. Asks me to look things over. I tickle his vanity, if you want to know. He appreciates it. And since you’re probing, I may as well tell you it is an
exhausting
task. Nothing takes its toll like emotional labor.”

“That’s what my father used to say.”

“Oh?” said Isaac, raising his eyebrows—flat, furless little creatures that looked like white makeup painted over his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, pretending I could not decipher the message in Isaac’s eyes, which were cloudy but bright, like pieces of quartz dipped into icy water. “My father always said he’d rather lug trays of type than answer a question from the boss.”

“What was he afraid his employer was going to ask?” inquired Isaac.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “Emotional labor. That’s what we’re talking about.” Something directed my attention toward the window, a change of light, as if a hand had suddenly passed in front of the sun. The window darkened, giving me a shaky, out-of-control sensation in the pit of my stomach. The darkness seemed to hover there like a curious bird, and then it lifted and the sharp winter light was back.

Isaac rubbed his palms together, his signal that it was time to proceed with matters. “All right,” he said, “let me tell you who’ll be here. It’s a mixed bag, to be sure.” Isaac reached into the inside pocket of his suit and withdrew a discreet leather notebook. In the past year, his memory was, as he put it, “starting to go on the fritz,” but his response to this was completely practical, straightforward. He simply began writing everything down and he did so without drama or effort—just like quickly rinsing the cup after finishing your tea. He opened the notebook and pursed his lips.

“Mostly Party regulars,” he said. “People we’ve discussed over the years.”

“You mean hacks,” I said, smiling.

“Yesterday they were hacks, Fielding. Today, they are dear friends. OK?”

“OK. Let’s hear it.”

“Rich Mulligan.”

“The bloodsucker.”

“Please. No comments. Let’s just get this done. Tony Dayton. He’ll be helping run the campaign. Roman Kurowsky.”

“No.”

“Yes. He’s a congressman, a Democrat, his district abuts ours.”

“He’s an insane pig.”

“Fine. OK. Lucille Jackson. Dr. Henry Shamansky—”

“Wait a minute.
Doctor
Henry Shamansky. I know this guy, Isaac. He’s a sociology professor, for Christ’s sake. He runs the Independent Voters of Illinois. He wears corduroy suits and has muttonchop sideburns. I am not calling him ‘Doctor’ Shamansky.”

“Call him whatever you like, Fielding.” He squinted at his notebook. “Goodness. I can’t even read my own writing. Yes. Oh yes. Sonny Marchi.”

“You’ve got me on that one. Never heard of him.”

“A real live wire. Criminal face. He’s married to the governor’s daughter Cynthia.”

“Yes.That’s right. I remember your telling me about him. You said he was a baboon.”

“Yes. Well, Kinosis can’t simply give us a gift. He’d put a string on his dime before dropping it into a pay phone, if he could.”

“This kind of stinks, doesn’t it, Isaac?”

“Not at all. What we have here is something completely marvelous. You are going to Washington. This is what we wanted, remember? This is what
you
wanted. And for all those lovely reasons.”

“I still feel that way,” I said, with a twinge of defensiveness. Did he think I’d forgotten? What Sarah despised in political ambition was its habit of becoming a tautology: I want to win because I want to have power; I want power because you’re nothing without it.

“Then be realistic,” said Isaac, as if this was enough to settle the issue.

I nodded. And it did make sense. Then and now. If I could actually house the homeless, say, then the person who climbed into that warm bed would not care if Congressman Pierce had to smile when he felt like snarling in order to put that bed in place. No, my abused scruples would not be the pea beneath the mattress. “Who else’ll be here?” I asked.

“A woman named Kathy Courtney.”

“Don’t know her.”

“She was Carmichael’s press aide for the past four years.” He paused, let me digest. “Very capable. Comes from New York.”

“Very loyal of her to be working with me.”

“I don’t think loyalty has much to do with it, one way or the other. Carmichael had seventeen people working for him. Five here in the district, twelve in D.C. What do you think they’re doing? They’re working on their résumés, that’s what. And if you keep any of them on, they’ll continue to work on their résumés and be on the phone and having lunch with anyone who can help them find the next position.”

“Then I won’t keep any of them on.”

“That’s one solution. Of course, you’ll be spending most of your time interviewing people for staff positions …”

“OK. Go on. Kathy Courtney.”

“She knows the press. Here and in Washington. She’s organized. Energetic. Celibate.”

“Celibate?”

“An observation,” Isaac said, shrugging.

“What does she want to do for me?”

“She wants to be your press aide. She wants to stay on. And in the meanwhile, she can keep you keyed in to Carmichael’s unfinished business. All the people waiting to hear from him who might not know he just got caught with his trousers down.”

Congressmen with their pants at their knees, celibate press aides. All of this was pretty raunchy material for Isaac. The excitement was really getting to him.

“Shall we?” he said, rising. He had my father’s vanity upon getting up from his seat—
never
push off on the arms,
never
grunt.

The brunch. Adele served food she normally wouldn’t think of putting on her table: strawberry-flavored pancakes; rasher upon rasher of curly, glistening bacon; pitchers of orange juice made from concentrate; a baked ham with pineapple rings impaled on it. Isaac claimed to be on a diet and stuck to coffee and Coffee Rich. Adele had long before perfected a way of appearing to eat without actually letting food pass her lips. I, of course, succumbed to the siren song of Free Food and ate heartily—so much so that at one point Juliet put her hand on my wrist, in what might have appeared to be an affectionate gesture but which was really one of those subtle, firm signals, such as an expert trainer can give a mad, snarling dog. I grinned at her and put down my fork and then began slugging down orange juice. It occurred to me that two weeks on the campaign trail ought to have me looking like Taft.

But I was doing more than coating my nerves with carbohydrates; I was trying to chart my course through these swift, shallow waters. I was at once an outsider and the center of attention. Tony Dayton sat on my left, smoking a Winston which he held with four fingers and which he ashed into his food. He had dark injured eyes. He wore a flashy houndstooth jacket, a pin on the lapel that said JAZZ!! He glanced over at me and saw something worried in my face. “Don’t let it get you down, old buddy. I’m your new best friend.”

From the outset, Isaac controlled the conversation. He talked about my qualifications, my strengths, my possible weaknesses, as if I weren’t in the room. “We’ve got a fresh young face,” Isaac was saying and no one but Lucille Jackson even glanced my way.

Lucille Jackson was the only black at the meeting. She and her husband owned a few funeral homes in the ghetto; they were old-fashioned Negroes, with processed hair and Cadillacs. Lucille regarded me with her arms folded over her enormous bosom. She had an extravagant frown, like a sumo wrestler. Her crucifix rested in her cleavage, sinking into a sea of hot fudge. Lucille’s reputation was that she could deliver 100,000 black votes but as my eyes met hers I suddenly didn’t believe it. She was just like most of the others, a part of a process she barely understood, and this hocus-pocus about votes delivered was just like a witchdoctor clapping his hands before a thunderstorm and then convincing everyone that his hands caused the rain. I may not have had the friends I ought to have had west of Cottage Grove but I knew enough about what was going on there—the average age, the unemployment rate, the cost of a bag of heroin—and I could campaign there with or without her.

Tony Dayton was going to manage the campaign and his great concern was how much money the Party was giving us. “We got to at least make this look like a campaign and not some dance down by the union hall,” he said.

And then Rich Mulligan, who was thick with the civil servants and had control over the precinct workers and the loudspeaker trucks, went nostalgic. “Ten years ago,” he said, looking at his fingernails, “we could run a decent campaign for ten thousand bucks. Now it takes a goddamned million.”

“This is the reality of the modern world,” said Shamansky, and his voice was so sonorous you wanted to argue with everything he uttered.

“I don’t get it,” said Sonny Marchi. He combed his oily hair forward; he had the keen eyes of a poacher. I couldn’t figure how a well-off girl like the governor’s daughter could have married him. She must have been kind of tragic herself. “We got the votes, right? I mean, hell, vote early and vote often. Am I right?”

There was an uneasy silence as the knights of the round table decided who would do battle with the hedgehog.

“There’s already so many ruffled feathers,” said Mulligan, “I think what we need to do is coast and the way you coast is you stay in neutral. And in terms of the bucks, we can get enough ink for free. Reporters got nothing to do this time of year. Am I right, Kathy?”

I looked across the table at Kathy Courtney and felt a quick intestinal tug: I saw Sarah’s face superimposed over her own for a moment and even when sanity erased the vision, the moment left a trace of itself. Kathy Courtney had short red hair, a strong, stubborn face. She wore a blue silk blouse, a prim string of pearls. Her voice was husky. “You’re right about that, Rich,” she said. “The newspapers and the TV boys are ready to run with anything we give them. And I wanted to mention something else here. And that’s that we can count on Jerry Carmichael’s full cooperation. I don’t know if we want to have him actively involved but he is willing to do whatever he can for the good of the ticket.”

“That’s very good of him, Kathy,” said Henry Shamansky, nodding sagely.

“It’s what I would expect from him,” said Congressman Kurowsky in his pious, aggressive drone. He put his hand over his heart, a gesture that seemed to mean not so much that a solemn oath was being taken but that something snaky was being said and that his heart was being shielded from it, much in the way you cover a child’s ears to prevent him from hearing something confusing or frightening.

“Jerry always tried to do what was right,” said Kathy Courtney, her voice coloring with feeling.

It was at that moment I realized this meeting could easily go to its conclusion without my opening my mouth. I was letting them turn me into a tag-along and it struck me that this had gone on just long enough to lull the lot of them into a false sense of superiority.