Waking the Dead (32 page)

Just then, my district was falling under the influence of a slight, hunchbacked, demagogic Baptist named Ebenezer B. Andrews. The Reverend Andrews’s church was always jammed and from the pulpit he railed against abortion, describing it not only as a sin against God but as the state’s attempt to further oppress the blacks, by keeping their numbers in check.

The Republicans and Bertelli were hip enough to know about Andrews and clever enough to strike a bargain with him—and with no previously existing alliances in the community, they were free to do so. And Bertelli, that old goaty libertine, in whose pretentious little bistro a thousand and one abortions had been decided upon (or “opted for” as they said in coffeehouseland), anoints himself as a defender of Chicago’s fetuses and with that sneaky little hop and a skip he catapults himself into an alliance with the most vocal and well-organized subgroup in the ghetto. It was absolutely astonishing! I had already lost the gays; now I was in danger of losing the blacks.

I needed to paste together a base of support quickly, but without an incumbent to run against I found myself casting about for an issue and coming up empty each time. I had a speech I’d been practicing since high school but it was, I realized now, inappropriate for the office I was seeking. I would have to wait for a crack at the White House before trotting out my rhapsodic rhetoric about a better world, a braver people, the rebirth of human decency. I needed to scale things down: after all, you don’t get a job as a lab assistant by promising you can cure leukemia. My advisers weren’t having an easier time than I was. My exiled predecessor had won his terms simply by being a Democrat and by staying friendly with some of the real estate interests. The Party was willing to throw a little weight in my direction, but whomever else Carmichael had cut deals with had yet to come looking for me. For the time being, it seemed, the democratic process was outpacing corruption and I was all alone.

I didn’t know what people wanted to hear and that would have been just fine—but I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say, either. All I could come up with was this: I am fairly smart; I am more honest than dishonest; I didn’t go into politics to line my own pockets; I promise to work 365 days a year to do what’s best not only for the district but the country, not only for the world but the universe. But I wasn’t drunk enough on my own sudden fortune to dare suggest this as a line of attack to the moral misers who were running my campaign. It would have seemed like sheer preppy vanity. They would not have known what to do with it—or me. And since the election was only days away and I had no support of my own, I was beholden to them.

I spent a day working with Lucille Jackson, driving around in her husband’s stiff-mobile, with its overwhelming nightmare scent of roses and embalming fluids. I spoke in an ornate living room to a ladies’ civic club, to a bunch of retired then at the Joe Louis Social Club. I strolled the stark icy streets beneath the rotten latticework of the 63rd Street El and I pressed the flesh in taverns (while the impulse to join the voters in a drink went through me like electric current through a white rat). The best thing that came of the day was meeting Albert Monroe, whom I began to cultivate with the hopes he could end up doing me a lot more good in the ghetto than Lucille Jackson.

Monroe was twenty-two, an ex-Blackstone Ranger, poor, fast, sharp, with sure political instincts. He liked me and wanted to work in my campaign; he kept pace with me all day, cueing me in when I needed it, enduring Lucille’s hysterical glowering eyes, because she knew he was cutting in on her harvest, and enduring, as well, the bitter cold January day, because his coat was thin and beneath his red and white Nikes his feet were bare. If I won, I planned to bring Albert on staff.

I didn’t get home until nine in the evening. Juliet and Caroline had had dinner together in the kitchen and since they had little to say to each other, no two women had ever looked happier to see me when I finally arrived. I ate quickly and then went to take a bath, hoping to relax and take the pain out of my legs so I’d be able to put in a night’s work.

As I soaked, I closed my eyes and dreamed of Sarah. With Caroline around, I could talk about her from time to time and it seemed that by speaking her name I had interrupted the magic that had been bringing her to me unbeckoned. Now I had to conjure her. I remembered her in the tub in her house on Staten Island, sitting in three inches of tepid water because there was a drought alert and she was crazily scrupulous about obeying that kind of civic-virtue law. She dipped a fat brown sponge in the water and squeezed it over her back, but the soap clung to her skin anyhow …

There was a knock on the door. I sat up in the water. “Yes?”

It was Juliet. “Tony Dayton and Mulligan are here to see you?”

I looked down and saw I had an erection; the head of my penis peered out of the water like a periscope. I slid down until I was below the waterline.

“Send them in,” I said. I felt it would strengthen my command if I had them come in and speak to me in my bathroom.

Tony and Mulligan came in. Tony had a poster rolled up and tucked under his arm. Rich carried a manila envelope, upon which someone had penciled a column of numbers.

“Your posters came off press an hour ago,” Dayton said. “You wanted to see them right away?”

“Unfurl it, Tony.” I felt beneath the water; I was soft again and so I could sit up a little straighter.

Tony rolled out the poster and held it up for me to see. The whole thing was bordered in a bright, upbeat blue. The top lines read
FIELDING PIERCE DEMOCRAT WORKING FOR
YOU
. Beneath that was a picture taken of me a couple of days before during an I.V.I, meeting. I had taken off my suit jacket and rolled up my sleeves and was pointing toward someone in the audience, as if acknowledging a question. (In fact, I’d been asking the fellow to stop interrupting me; it had been a heckler from the Hyde Park Gay Activists Alliance, asking me about my part in the Carmichael affair.) In the photo, I looked open to the tough questions, confident, available, vigorous, et cetera. There was even a smoky haze over the image, suggestive of a healing apparition rising from the battlefield. It was a shock to my underfed physical vanity that the Democrats were trying to make an asset of my appearance.

“Like it?” asked Tony, happily, certain I would.

“Do you?” I asked Rich Mulligan.

“Sure. It came out good,” he said, with a shrug that seemed to mean he couldn’t have cared less.

“How many did we run off?” I asked.

“Three thousand,” said Tony.

I waited, let them try to guess what I was drinking. Then I sunk deep into my bath again and said, “Then we’ll go with them.” The truth was, I was thrilled beyond decency to see the poster; it was beyond what I had hoped for.

“Just one last thing,” said Mulligan. “It turns out that was a good idea you had about a luncheon thing for all the precinct captains—”

“Yeah,” I said, cutting him short. “And let’s spend some money on that. Where are we having it?”

“Hyde Park Hilton,” Mulligan said. He kept his words to a minimum as a form of resistance.

I closed my eyes for a moment, as if to think it over. “OK. What are they going to serve?”

Mulligan and Dayton glanced at each other, little commiserating bats of the eye. “I don’t know,” said Mulligan. “One of the girls’ll take care of it.”

“Look,” I said. “I’ve got an hour to help fifty precinct captains feel good about humping their asses off to send me to Washington and if we invite them to lunch and serve them slop, what good will it do? Have them prepare cornish hens. One for every plate. It doesn’t cost any more than chicken but it looks like a big deal. And have them stuffed. Say, chestnut stuffing. And rice pilaf. And a fresh salad. They make a dressing there, their own kind of Thousand Island dressing. It’s good. Make sure they serve the salad with that.”

I checked their faces to make certain they were sufficiently repulsed by my attention to detail and then I quickly submerged myself in the bath. The water exerted a pleasant, firm pressure against my eardrums and when I sat up again my hair was plastered over my forehead. “Hand me a towel, will you?” I asked and then completed the night’s work by stepping out of the tub and coming toward them stark naked, my hand extended, waiting for the towel.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Tony Dayton was over for breakfast. Juliet had left early to see a damaged Ingres drawing in Evanston and to bid on its restoration and Caroline was already at the campaign headquarters on Woodlawn. Tony was over to show me yet another product of his propaganda mill, this one a leaflet with the suddenly familiar slogan:
Fielding Pierce Democrat Working for You
. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls which Tony himself had brought over in a paper bag. Tony was palpably nervous as he gave me the leaflet to look over.

“You know what you’ve got?” he said. “A great name. It’s actually kind of black. And of course it’s white. It’s hip without going high-hat and it has a swinging kind of honesty to it.”

Below the slogan was a line of stars, meant to suggest patriotism. And then came my vital statistics. My schooling, my military service, my time in Isaac’s firm, and my years as a lawyer in the Cook County prosecutor’s office. It all looked just fine. And in fact it looked familiar, to the edge of déjà vu, since this was the way I’d written it out mentally a thousand times before.

Below my resume, there was another line of stars. And then, below those, in bold type, the words
My Credo
. And then, in quotation marks, a paragraph from some automaton purporting to be the candidate himself.

“A lot of what I’d like to say about what I believe can be put into four very simple words: I am a Democrat. I see myself in the tradition of FDR, Truman, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I believe in the greatness of America and the greatness of this, the 28th CD of Illinois. The people of this District deserve a strong and vigilant voice in Washington. The people of the District need someone to speak up about their concerns. 1. A fairer share of the federal pie. Right now, we are getting only nine cents back out of every dollar we pay in to the federal government. There’s much to do in our neighborhoods and we need the funding to get the job done. 2. A strong America and a safer world. We must pursue the spirit of Camp David throughout the world. 3. My experience as a prosecutor has taught me that violent crime is truly the plague of our times. We need an Omnibus Crime Bill to rid the streets of violent crime. 4. Bringing down those interest rates. I will work with those in Congress who are fighting to bring inflation under control. Inflation is the cruelest tax of them all. 5. An open mind and an open door. Above all, I will make myself available to the people of this District and be guided by their wisdom. A leader who does not
listen
is not really a leader.”

I put the page down and Tony’s eyes were waiting for me. “So? What do you think?” he asked. He shifted in his seat.

“I’ve got problems with it, Tony,” I said. I saw the disappointment in his face and I tried to soften my remarks. “I mean, a lot of it’s fine. Some of it’s awfully good. But there’s problems.”

“But you basically liked it?” he said. “I mean, on the whole?”

“Well, I don’t know. I have kind of a hard time with …” I looked down at the page. “You know, with saying I believe in the greatness of the people of the Twenty-eighth CD of Illinois.”

“You
have
to say that, Fielding,” Tony said, very quickly. “That’s just a point of departure. Like, do you think Charlie Parker wanted to play ‘How High the Moon’? Of course not. But there were interesting chords for him to solo off of and it was nice to play something the audience recognized, so they could see how he was changing it.”

“Do you know Eric McDonald?”

“Not personally. But I think he’s a talent. Very postbop, but not crazy atonal. Why?”

“My sister Caroline married him.”

“You’re kidding me.” Dayton’s small, blunt fingers went into his dark little beard, that obsidian arrowhead.

“No. Anyhow, they’re divorced.”

“Well, how’s that for getting the worst of both worlds, right?The racists will hate her for marrying a black and the blacks will hate her for not making it work. In other words, less said the better. So tell me, babe. What else do you want to say about the leaflet? I’d like to get fifty thousand of them run off by tomorrow. Rich Mulligan tells me he can get a couple dozen precinct workers out and we’ll have them in every mailbox in the district.”

“Well, I have a hard time with this credo. I mean the whole thing. Or maybe it’s just the idea of it, Tony. Usually, you know, one writes one’s own credo.”

“Not if one doesn’t have the time, jazzbo. I didn’t think I put anything in it that you couldn’t live with.”

“Well, how about this belief in the people of the Twenty-eighth CD. That’s embarrassing.”

“It’s just bullshit. No one pays attention, I mean, if someone sneezes, you say God bless you. No one stops the show to figure out if you really meant it.”

“Did anyone else see this?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Who?”

“The whole shebang.” And then, suddenly, Dayton’s affability vanished. He took a Salem out of his shirt pocket and held it with four fingers, making no move to light it. He leaned forward. “Everyone’s seen it and everyone likes it, Fielding. You want to hang this up over a few words? Well, I can’t let you. Please. You got to be reasonable, jazzbo. If something screws up—I take the heat.”

“What’s my schedule for today, Tony?”

“We got you at the Hyde Park Synagogue at eleven to talk to the golden oldies, then Lucille Jackson’s introducing you to a few of the black precinct captains. Then we’re supposed to get in touch with Kathy Courtney. She’s got a dinner lined up for you with some reporters. Maybe even get Royko in on it.”

“Good,” I said, “my schedule’s not so bad today. I’ve got a little time to take a whack at this credo thing on my own. How would that be? I’ll poke around with it for an hour or so and see if I can come up with anything.”