Waking the Dead (48 page)

And then the introductions were over and Bertelli slowly rose from his chair to the sound of what seemed to me alarmingly generous applause. He smiled, acknowledging the audience, and leaned forward, supporting his weight with his hands on the table. The wooden legs began to tremble and he stepped back—just in time.

“Thank you very much, Dr. Brewer, ladies and gentlemen. And the Greater Hyde Park Citizens’ Forum. As you can all see, I lost the flip of the coin over who speaks first.” He smiled, shrugged, showed his empty, guileless hands. Amazingly, there was quite a bit of generous laughter. “But with that loss out of the way, let me come right out and say that tomorrow evening, when all the votes have been counted, that I and all the people who’ve been working to make my campaign happen will be drinking champagne and making toasts. Because I know this district and I know the people in it. And I know that we are going to win this election tomorrow.” What seemed like a spontaneous wave of applause washed up toward the stage and Bertelli took a deep breath, as if he were on the shore inhaling the renewing scent of the sea. “You see, Hyde Parkers they are a funny race. We don’t like our elections to be foregone conclusions. We don’t like the governor appointing our representatives. We have a habit around here. A habit that hacks down in Springfield and over Back of the Yards would like us to break. It’s a habit called Thinking for Ourselves. When I first decided to … well”—he touched his mane of thick silver hair—“throw my beret in the ring, I believed what the so-called experts said. Enrico, you don’t have a chance. Enrico, the fix is in. Enrico, the machine’s got it all sewn up. But I love this neighborhood and the people in it. And I wanted them to have—you know the old saying: a choice not an echo. I thought, and, yes, think, the people of this district deserved something different than a freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped candidate sent to us by the fixers. And you know who the fixers are—the same snake-oil salesmen who gave us the crime rate, the war in Afghanistan, the shame of Iran, record interest rates, record inflation, and an economy that is slowing down to the tune of five percent every three months. The people of this district know me. Many of you have been friends and customers for years.This is my home. I’m not a newcomer. I’m not some fellow from New York City passing through and deciding to pluck himself a little seat in the House like it was some flower growing at the side of the road. I’ve made my whole life here and I think I understand what this district is all about. But what is more important—I’m willing to listen. I’m not part of some deal. I’m part of you and when I ask you to send me to Washington, what I’m really saying is, Let’s all go there together. And get the job done. Thank you.” Bertelli flipped the back of his jacket up as he sat, as if he were wearing a morning coat. The applause was fast and loud; it formed a bright undulating wall.

Then Brewer announced me. I didn’t want to torpedo my confidence completely by noticing how much applause I got, but as I stood it did seem that just as much noise was being made for me as for Bertelli. My table had been placed unluckily. I was directly in line with one of the footlights and now that I was standing its intense beam was shining right into my eyes. I felt a wave of panic, as if it were a naked bulb in a police interrogation room. I forgot my control for a moment and put my hand in front of my face, but then I regained my wits and moved slightly to the left. The light rushed past me, over my shoulder, like a spray of bullets I’d managed to elude. And for a moment I could make out faces in the audience—but they were the faces of strangers. Middle-aged faces, a tapestry of furrowed brows. What kind of people trudged out into the bitterness of a winter night to listen to a debate like this?

“As an attorney,” I began, and to my immense relief my voice sounded smooth, level, “whose job it was to make certain those who violated the rights of the people were punished, I often found myself having to confront defense attorneys whose only loyalty was to their fee. Attorneys like these—and I’m sorry to say there were many of them—felt no hesitation at shading facts so they became untrue, of manipulating the emotions. And I developed the habit of keeping a note pad at my table and writing down all the points made by the other side that needed refutation if I was to make my case. And then I would take those points and do my best to knock them down, one at a time. Well, I am not an experienced debater, so tonight I thought I would try to use that same method and as I listened to Enrico Bertelli’s remarks, I kept a pad and pen with me so I could write down whatever he said that needed some reply from me.” I paused and took a deep breath. The auditorium was silent and suddenly this silence seemed a wildly hopeful sign. I reached down and took my pad off the table and turned it toward the audience. “Blank,” I said. “I could find nothing in his remarks that needed to be refuted. Nothing I care to argue. If he thinks ‘a choice not an echo’ is an
old saying
, when all of us know it is a slogan of the new radical right, then—well, it doesn’t really matter. And if he thinks that his having lived in this district for more years than I have gives him some special claim—well, I don’t think he would want that dangerous kind of thinking
really
to apply because then people might end up saying that candidates whose family’s origins are strictly American are better qualified than those of us who find our roots overseas. Perhaps all those years selling coffee have led my opponent to believe the whole world operates like advertising. New ideas. Let’s all go to Congress. Rah rah rah. But through it all there is an awful consistency. Not tonight, nor at any time during this campaign, has my opponent bothered to tell us what these new ideas
are
or what he would like us to
do
when we
all
troop off to Washington together. Either he has no ideas or he holds the people of this district in such utter contempt that he feels we don’t really care.”

I glanced down because I could feel my eyes were much too intense right now and in the wrong light they could look like the eyes of a madman. When you drive the nail in too hard, you excite sympathy for your opponent. I knew this. It was something I believed. But it was somehow relaxing to stop presenting myself as a reasonable person, as a gentleman; it felt good to—well, I wasn’t really breaking the rules, but I wasn’t sticking to them all that closely, either. It’s awfully hard to speak honestly when there is a hope of somehow
winning
in the back of your mind. Winning calls for tactics, for a certain subtle and instinctual dissembling. But suddenly it didn’t matter very much to me whether or not I won tomorrow. And that thought was like the tap of a little silver mallet triggering my keenest, most characteristic reflex: as soon as I let go of the idea that it mattered much if I won or lost, I felt a jolt of sheer, avid certainty that it was precisely
this
kind of attitude that would make victory more likely.

“I don’t know how you run a campaign based on vague slogans and meaningless hints about having new ideas. I’ve tried to make my own positions clear. Human rights at home and abroad. A concerted effort to rebuild our cities. Massive job retraining for workers who are being displaced by technology and shifting world centers of supply and demand. Stiffer corporate taxes. A three-tiered simplified tax code, with a radical reduction of write-offs and the end of all tax shelters. A thorough reappraisal of the seemingly endless drift toward more and more expenditures for defense. Scrapping the B-l bomber, scrapping the MX missile, the Trident submarine. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me.” I paused and smiled. “At least not right
now
.” It didn’t get a laugh but I didn’t wait for one. “But I don’t understand how you run for Congress and don’t come forward on these issues—one side or the other.” A lone pair of hands began to clap—three or four leathery bursts of applause and then silence. “Thanks, Dad,” I said, “but I’m not quite finished.” And now there really was laughter. I furrowed my brow in a way that indicated I had meant to cause this reaction. “I very much welcome this opportunity to answer any questions anyone has.”

And so the questions began. The whole thing was chaotic and annoying. The Forum wasn’t used to meetings of this size and no provisions had been made for microphones, or any other orderly way of posing the questions to us. In the beginning, the lights were kept dimmed in the auditorium and we on the stage had no way of knowing who if anyone was raising a hand, asking for the floor. A few self-actualized souls stood up and asked their questions (or made their remarks) without our calling on them and then it was like responding to an articulate but anonymous phone call—though, in fact, some of the questions were the political equivalents to heavy breathing: How about a Bill of Rights for the Unborn? Do you believe it should be against the law for homos to work for the government?

Finally, I demonstrated my leadership abilities by suggesting we kill the footlights and bring up the houselights. “I think the audience has seen enough of us. I’d like to take a look at you.” There was a round of applause at this—it was probably the most winning thing I’d said all evening. After a small delay in which someone from the Forum looked for a maintenance man and Bertelli punctured the hull of his own ship by crudely implying that the maintenance man was not worth his salary, the lights came on—thirty or forty flame-shaped bulbs along the east and west walls—and the faces of the audience came into view like an image swimming up from the surface of photographic paper.

Tony Dayton had his legs tightly crossed and he was leaning over, whispering something into my sister’s ear, the same ear into which I had for years hotly confessed to what I then took as secrets but which I now, knew were merely dreams—preening, impossible dreams which, to my immense misfortune, I had now brought within my grasp. Caroline nodded and shifted slightly in her seat—away from him. I knew this pattern well: she felt him starting to fall in love with her and she was wisely back-pedaling.

Isaac was a few seats in, near the center of the row. His eyes were closed and he was the very picture of despair. I had failed him; I had cracked beneath the pressure. He thought, I suppose, about the futility of turning a workhorse into a racehorse, an oaf into a true officer. He took this campaign as a rather easy test of character and it broke his heart to see how wildly I had failed that test, and it broke his heart even more irreparably to witness how the heat of these past couple of weeks had served to reveal an ugliness and, well, I suppose,
craziness
in me that he had not allowed himself to see before. He was, I felt, as angry with himself as with me, and what was more he was embarrassed.

Sitting next to Isaac was Henry Shamansky and next to him was Sonny Marchi and one seat over sat my father, right on the edge of his seat, his eyes fixed on me in a huge and undisguised stare. He felt my gaze touch his and he slowly shook his head and gave me a smile of such sly pleasure and such wonderful complicity that I felt at once elated and destroyed. I was pleasing him in some way but for the life of me I didn’t know how. Was I winning? Or was I somehow exposing the emptiness of the game? It seemed all my life I had been dropping bones at my father’s feet and now here I was doing more of the same, somehow able to concoct a magic that brought back spoils even from an unsuccessful hunt. I was sinking, sinking, and he was nodding and pursing his lips as if I were knocking the world on its ass and he and I were sharing a marvelous, ineffable secret: the secret of my destiny; the secret of
his
destiny made manifest by me. This wasn’t love. This wasn’t even something as wholesome as ambition.This was fatherhood as fever dream, relationship as hallucination.

Bertelli was speaking now, something about how I had failed to address the central issue, which was that my candidacy was a part of a
deal
. I could barely hear him. My eyes went up one row and down the other, first east to west and then north to south. I had decided that if Sarah was out there I would simply step off the stage and go to her. I continued to look, deeper and deeper into the auditorium now, and the faces were smaller, less distinct, undulating behind a haze of human heat.

Dr. Brewer interrupted Bertelli, saying, “I think as a way of keeping some order here and, one hopes, encouraging a dialogue, it would be best if we gave Mr. Pierce a chance to respond to these questions now, Mr. Bertelli.”

I turned quickly. Bertelli was making a little As You Wish bow in Brewer’s direction and I was not so far gone that I didn’t realize it was now up to me to say something. I cleared my throat and waited for a moment, hoping that perhaps I had been listening all along and all I needed was a beat to recall what had just been said and what my reply ought to be. But the silence brought nothing but the faint hum of itself.

“Mr. Pierce?” said Brewer, and at that moment his voice sounded patient, infinitely kind.

“Tomorrow is the election,” I said, in a soft voice, and as I heard those words I realized I was simply speaking with no idea what I would say, no idea whatsoever. “And I am very aware of the presumption involved in my asking you to send me to Washington to represent you. I’ve been campaigning for this office, trying to make myself known, trying to listen to and understand the people of this district … and now tonight. The end of a short, but intense time. And it strikes me now that there are certain questions I never answer, certain questions I think we’ve pretty much forgotten how to
ask
. I worry about what sort of people we are becoming. Me. You. All of us. Why don’t our marriages last? Why can’t we educate our children? Why does public life become more and more uncivil? Why are the streets empty at night?”

I heard my voice as something coming from a long distance and the faces before me had sunk into a swirl, drowning in the turbulence of my own vision. Yet suddenly I did see a familiar face. Father Stanton was sitting about twelve rows from the stage and he smiled as my gaze touched his. I felt a rush of heat go through me and a stabbing, passionate pressure behind my eyes.