The Side of the Angels (28 page)

“Well, that
really
doesn't sound like Tony. I've seen the man eat barbecue, and Roger Moore he's not.”

“Hey, I'm happy for him. I'm glad he's found someone who'll think it's sexy and appealing when he rushes off in the middle of her birthday dinner to take a phone call from a disgruntled street cleaner in Toilers Local 102073.”

“This Suzanne sounds so scripted. So phony.”

“Tony doesn't think so. You know how flattering it can be when someone who's not your type suddenly goes after you.”

“Not that you're jealous,” said Louise.

“Tony could make mad passionate love to her on the conference table for all I care. He could ravish her on my desk. I would just pull my blotter out from under them so they wouldn't mess it up.”

“Sure,” said Louise. “I believe you. But just in case, be a little nicer to him and see what happens.”

Ira stayed an hour, and when he left my mother stood on the porch waving him off. She'd never waved me off that way. Usually she'd shut the front door before my car pulled out of the driveway.

“He's nice,” I said, and she shrugged.

“We'll see. It's early days.”

Early days for what? I wanted to ask, but it seemed callous and cruel to spoil the fragility of new love with intrusive questions. If it
was
new love. If it was anything but two widowed people getting together for companionship. Who was I kidding? My mother was glowing. She'd never glowed for my dad like that.

She looked so elated that I didn't even get irritated at her when she said, “Were you pleasant to Jeremy at least, even if you didn't have the common courtesy to bring him in from the rain?”

I gave her a hug and said, “Ma, thanks for interfering.”

“So it did go well?”

“Not really,” I said. “But thanks for interfering anyway, Ma.”

She squinted at me, thinking that I was being sarcastic. Then she grinned, the wicked grin so like Joey's but so rare in her that I forgot that's where Joey gets it, and said, “Any time, my Dominica. Any time.”

R
ON HAD SAID
, untypically, he didn't need to see me before I went back to Winsack. Suspecting I didn't know what, I came by the office before catching an afternoon flight to Providence. I knew he'd be there. No one at Advocacy, Inc. took the day after Thanksgiving off. The weeks before Christmas were too crowded and hectic.

He'd instructed our secretary, Myrlene, to tell me he was too swamped to “take a meeting” with me, so I simply strolled in and sat on his desk, planting my butt on the stack of client proposals and contracts he was going through.

“Did Weingould approve the PR budget for St. Francis for December, Ron?”

“He's still dickering over it.”

“He's had that budget on his desk for over a week.”

Ron said, “We heard this morning that the hospital has Finchley and Crouse on board.”

Bad news. Finchley and Crouse was the granddaddy of the union-busting law firms. They could shut down an organizing drive or scuttle a strike faster than you could say “unfair labor practice.” Finchley and Crouse specialized in nastiness.

Who could forget the union organizing drive a few years ago at Humstock Canning, where F & C had come in quite late in the day? The union's vote was assessed at 80 percent of the unit, and the guys from Finchley had taken the whole thing apart by starting a rumor that if the union won, Humstock was going to close its operation in Wisconsin and set up shop in Mexico. They also started a rumor that the local union president was sleeping with his wife's sister
and
his seventeen-year-old baby-sitter. They bugged the employee break
room. They even circulated a phony copy of the cannery's supposed agreement with the Mexican concern. A load of malarkey, but these were people who'd staked their lives on working for this company until the day they retired, and once Finchley started in to scare them, the fear spread like brushfire.

The union lost by only fifty votes, a real heartbreaker. They could have challenged the election results, but a runoff would only have given Finchley and Crouse time to get even more creative, so the organizers folded their tents and planned to return another day. Five years later, the patriarch of the Humstock family died of a heart attack while in bed with the Humstock mailboy. In the chaos of transition, and with a much more liberal son of the family in charge, the union tried again and won.

Humstock was a rare happy ending for a case in which F & C had figured. To stand a chance, we'd have to come back at these guys with all the firepower we had.

“Ron, we've got to get Weingould to approve that budget and maintain the overall level of funding. We have to turn up the heat. Those nurses can't stay out forever.”

“The hospital said it might be willing to call in a federal mediator.”

“You know as well as I do that that's a classic Finchley tactic. They'll tell management to go into mediation and offer something completely unacceptable, and then, when our side turns it down, the hospital will announce that the nurses aren't open to reaching an agreement. Why is Weingould sitting on this money?”

“Weingould's got a case of cold feet. He had a bad November. Now he's nitpicking everything I show him. He nixed the billboard, by the way.”

“But he loved the billboard.”

It had been Kate's idea: a large billboard she'd noticed a quarter mile from the hospital was currently blank. She'd hunted around and found out we could get it cheap. It would feature only a black-and-white photo of a young nurse cradling a newborn with absorbed protectiveness and the slogan: “For our patients. For our community. For our future. St. Francis nurses.” No number to call, no mention of the strike. Just a reminder of who our nurses were and why they were out there.

“Weingould's getting pressure from Goreman to scale back financial support,” Ron said. “Goreman's getting some sort of inside information on the strike, from that waste of space Hamner, I'm sure, and Goreman's not pleased with our progress. And then there was the recent unpleasantness.”

“What unpleasantness?”

“I thought you'd have heard through Boltanski.”

“We're not exactly close, Ron.”

“Well, last week, Goreman's executive assistant, you know, that little prick who wears the different suspenders every day, caught some of Weingould's staff in the lunchroom with that cardboard life-size figure of Goreman.”

“The one people had their pictures taken with at the Honolulu convention for a dollar, to benefit the political action fund.”

It had been Ron's idea, an unexpected success.

“What happened was, Weingould's guys had this figure propped up in a corner of the lunchroom and were throwing food at it for fun, and one of them came up with this song, to the tune of the
Hawaii Five-O
theme.”

“Sing it for me. I could use a laugh.”

Ron cleared his throat and sang in the agreeable bass that had won him the role of Judd in
Oklahoma!
the spring of his senior year of high school:

I snickered. Goreman was nicknamed “Grief” because of his habit of showing up to speak at members' funerals and then forgetting the name of the deceased.

“So,” said Ron, “after Goreman heard the story from his little stool pigeon, he hightailed it down to Weingould's office and they had a big blowout, yelling and doors slamming and everything. And now Goreman is trying to make Weingould's life as miserable as possible.”

“They've had dust-ups before, right? They always go back to their armed truce.”

“Eventually. But in the meantime, Weingould doesn't want to go out on a limb for anybody.”

“Are you saying that the national is no longer willing to give this strike its full backing?”

“Let's just say they're taking a wait-and-see approach.”

“Are you going to push for us, Ron?”

“It's not my role to tell the client what to do,” said Ron sanctimoniously. “You tell clients what to do all the time. If anyone can stiffen Weingould's resolve, it's you, Ron. He actually listens to you.”

“Nicky, I've pointed out before, you tend to get too emotionally involved in these campaigns.”

“Listen. This Christmas season, while you're attending Kennedy Center benefits, I'm going to be up there in Depressionville, Rhode Island, freezing my tail off for what happens, incidentally, to be a very good cause. You owe me. You owe me big.”

“What can I do, Nicky? It's out of my hands.”

“Point out to Weingould that every union in the country that organizes nurses, every health care conglomerate, every hospital CEO, is watching this strike. We made the front page of the
Boston Globe
yesterday, remember?”

“Holidays are always slow news days.”

“Ron, if Weingould cuts us off now, every hospital the Toilers go after in the future will be able to shut down the organizing drive with one flyer about how we hung the St. Francis nurses out to dry.”

I could hear the soft “tucka-tucka” noise Ron's tongue makes on his teeth when he's mulling over a decision. I wanted to slap him.

“Ron! If this thing fizzles, you know who Weingould's going to blame, no matter what he's done or not done himself.”

He leaned back in the two-thousand-dollar executive swivel chair
Dana had gotten him for his last birthday, his eyes closed, doing his usual reptilian weighing of his own self-interest. You couldn't even call it a thought process.

“I'll see what I can do,” said Ron. “You have to remember, Wein-gould is in a very delicate position right now. If he pushes Goreman too far, there'll be a pitched political battle and Weingould could wind up losing. Not just this issue. Losing his job. His job is everything to him. Where's he going to go at his age?”

“I sympathize, Ron, believe me. But there are two hundred people in Winsack with a lot fewer options than Weingould has, counting on their union to stand in back of them.”

I gazed at him soulfully, trying to convey that only his big, strong shoulders stood between the Mexican army and the women and children in the Alamo.

“I'll think about it,” said Ron. “And now leave me alone. I have two proposals to write. Someone has to make us money while you're off being noble. I barely have time for lunch anymore.”

He didn't look like he was starving to me. Ron always put on eight pounds over the holidays, then had them bullied off by Dana and a trainer in January.

“Aren't you going to fill me in on what you and Wendy have been up to with my other accounts?”

“Another time,” he said, shuffling through his papers.

Was it possible his conscience was troubling him, that I'd roused it to a flicker of life? Yeah, right. That'd be the day. And my mother was at home right now feeling guilty about all the times she'd been too hard on me.

On my way out, I looked for Wendy. Her office was empty, though I saw she had acquired a new desk. A desk that was larger than mine, actually. A desk made of polished blond wood. My desk was constructed of low-grade, office-furniture steel with shallow, barely useful drawers. Wendy had also lugged in a tiny potted Christmas tree and hung it with white fairy lights and blown-glass globes. I thought of the two brownish sticks that passed for plant life in my office, and wondered why I could never achieve the sort of work environment I'd seen other women put together, those homey, welcoming sanctuaries
with family photos, framed art, and wall calendars from museum shops.

I finally spotted my assistant rushing down the hallway, leafing through her executive-style folder as she walked, like some television-character rendition of a high-powered businesswoman. As befit the season, she had switched her panty hose from a summer sheer beige to a winter taupe. The taupe looked mauve and middle-aged. No woman has legs that color, so why wear it?

She seemed reluctant to stop.

“Wendy, you haven't seen my face in three weeks. Come talk to me for a second.”

“I'd love to, Nicky, but I'm lunching with Janet.”

Lunching? She sounded like a bridge-playing matron.

“Speaking of which, how's the Campsters thing going? Ron says you're getting along like wildfire with Janet.”

She grew more forthcoming.

“We just thought of one more thing for the entertainment. We thought we'd have a table of potential campers, like we do every year, and before the speeches they could get up and sing a few songs. Something sort of woodsy and patriotic, like ‘This Land Is Your Land.'”

“Is every table sold?”

“And then some. We're going to crowd the banquet room at the Shoreham, but I think the whole effect will be so festive no one will mind the squeeze.”

She rushed off, leaving me with a twinge of foreboding as I tried to imagine how the little campers, some of them already accomplished junior thugs, would react to Wendy, in her Ann Taylor shifts and Pappagallo flats, leading them through “Don't Fence Me In.” But Janet was happy with Wendy, that was the main thing. Face it, Janet was happier with Wendy than she'd ever been with me, and vice versa.

Wendy's efficiency inspired me to sketch out an idea for Betsey's shower invitations during the short flight to Providence. For the front of the invitation, I'd use a ragged-edged square of hot press watercolor
paper glued onto heavy card stock, with a wash of pale green watercolor across it, and, in the center, a heart shape made of tiny, glued-on seashells. We could purchase envelopes with a gold foil lining to match, and a tissue insert to protect the shells and prevent them from falling off and rattling around like lentils. Inside, we could keep it simple, something like “Join us as we gather together to wish Betsey a joyous life of love and laughter.” Something goopy. I knew a stationery store in Winsack that would carry the envelopes and card stock.