Waking the Dead (31 page)
We’d gotten the invitation weeks in advance. This enormous lead time was my father’s idea. He imagined people’s social schedules as somehow very dense and complex and felt you could not invite someone without at least two months’ notice. Sarah and I had been planning to go but now she was in Chile and I was reluctant to leave Chicago, lest she return and find me gone. But the party was on a Friday, eleven days after her departure, and since she said she would be gone for two weeks, I took the chance and flew east for it.
The Hotel St. George was in Brooklyn Heights, not really our kind of neighborhood. It seemed a mixture of well-off widows and young gays. But it was awfully pretty, even in the old snow. The hotel was cavernous and, though later it would be turned into apartments for successful people, the people living in it then were old, many of them on public assistance, most of them with failing health.
Dad’s party was in a reception room on the ground floor, a salmon and blue ballroom with an art deco chandelier and an old mauve carpet that had been delicately patterned by the ten million footsteps that had gone over it through the years. Dozens of tables had been set up and each had a bottle of Canadian Club on it. The
New York Times
had chipped in for a trio and they were set up at the front of the room, a piano, bass, and drums: dapper men in tuxedos, with white hair and sly bachelor airs about them. (Later in the party, Eric McDonald played with them: he looked like an African prince standing before the trio, playing with a sweet, full vibrato out of respect to my father and the guests, though Eric’s usual saxophone style was slashing, atonal. He paced back and forth, his stiff tusk of beard looking windblown and a touch Satanic as he played “Strangers in the Night” and then “Solidarity Forever.” Dad was delighted: it made him feel a part of the twenty-first century to be serenaded by a black relative. Malik was just barely walking. Rudy danced with Mom.)
The party had begun at six and by nine people were going up to the microphone to deliver speeches in Dad’s honor. Mr. Glass, the owner of Pinetop Printers, where Dad worked before the
Times,
spoke of Dad’s professionalism, called him the Lou Gehrig of Lower Manhattan because Dad was never sick, but he couldn’t say anything about the work Dad did because Glass had inherited the company and knew nothing about it. Danny spoke and said Dad taught him about effort and he also taught him that if you don’t look after yourself no one else would. “He gave me the guts to take chances and the guts to say what I’m going to say right now—Dad, I love you.” We all cheered, though it seemed a little crazy to make such noise after something so private. Caroline wouldn’t speak. “Oh, he knows what I think,” she said. “Anyhow, I always embarrass him.” But a guy named Dave Southworth, who was an international vice-president of the Typographical Union, spoke and he detailed Dad’s long years of service to the union. “It’s rank-and-filers like Ed Pierce that make the labor movement strong,” Southworth said. He was a big, sleek man, with his black hair combed straight back, and I couldn’t help noting how careful he was to designate my father’s status as rank-and-file, knowing, I suppose, that quite a few of us there felt Dad could have run that union a lot better than its officers. I got up and said something, too. Mom’s old boss, Corvino, had appointed himself master of ceremonies and when he called me up he put his hand on the back of my neck and announced, “Now he’s a lawyer, huh? Remember this one with his shorts hanging down and the mouth full of beans?” I could feel Corvino’s Cornell class ring at the base of my skull; I looked down and his little hooflike feet were in black patent leather pumps, such as Gene Kelly might have worn.
“I tell everyone,” I said, “that I was born rich and later when they find out I was raised in five rooms in Brooklyn they wonder what I’m talking about. But the people in this room know what I’m talking about because most of you know what my brother and sister and I have been given. Something indefinable, nothing you could put into a safety deposit box.” I paused for a moment; I’d had no idea I was going to be so rhapsodic, to swing for the fences like that. “I know for myself, when I become a lawyer, I will nail my various diplomas and certifications of worthiness on the wall. But the credentials will be … incomplete if I do not place above them a picture of my father. Because most of what I know about justice I learned at his knee and the drive that sent me into law school—and Caroline into painting, and Danny into publishing—comes also from our father. You know, even in a perfect democracy, there is not a perfect democracy of spirit, and tonight we are saluting one of the great
aristocrats
of the spirit.” Oh yes, I could have run for mayor that night. I did go on some. And at a certain point, I realized I’d been at it for five minutes and risked losing them all. So I ended with a quick, self-deflating joke: “OK, Pa? Is this what you wanted me to tell them?” And the laughter was quick, generous …
“What a beautiful speech, Fielding,” Mom said, linking her arm through mine. She had a highball, a lit cigarette. Her eyes looked wild and her fancy hairdo was coming apart. “You really had them in the palm of your hand. You could’ve had them doing anything you wanted. God, it was beautiful.” She walked me around the perimeter of the hall; her legs looked dark and skinny in her tinted stockings. “And did you see Corvino listening to you?” She glanced over her shoulder and then took a sudden right turn, yanking me along. “The poor man was
green.
He looked like someone just ran over his pussycat.”
We had made our way around the room and now she led me to the bar. I hadn’t jinxed my stopping drinking by telling anyone about it. All the bartender was serving was cold beers and ice; the whiskey was in bottles on the tables. Dad was there at the bar with Southworth from the Typographical Union, each of them fetching a paper bucket of hollow ice cubes. Southworth was trying to talk Dad into spending a few days with Southworth’s son, who taught sociology at Queens College and was putting together an oral history of the New York City trade union movement. I could see Dad didn’t like the idea, thinking it would turn him into an old-timer, droning on about the old days. “I don’t care a hell of a lot about what’s already happened,” he said. “The best is yet to come, right?”
Mom got some ice for her table and put her arm around Dad’s waist. “It’s a crying shame Sarah isn’t here,” she said to us.
“Wait wait wait,” said Dad. “Think of the expense.” He was lightning fast in explaining away possible slights: he couldn’t bear to feel overlooked.
“She’s away,” I said. “Otherwise she would have come.”
“Away?” asked Mom, narrowing her eyes a little. She tended to believe that when something was irregular it was amiss and, as unattractive as this was as a way of thinking, life had a way of proving her right.
“She had to go home. Her father’s feeling poorly.” I hated fake sickness excuses, thinking they were very bad luck, but Mr. Williams was a jerk and I didn’t mind the risk.
“Well well,” said Dad. “To hear her go on about it, she wouldn’t spit on her father if he was on fire. See? Middle-classers patch it up once they get older.”
“You think that’s what it is?”
“Sure. He’s an executive, right?Think she wants to get cut out of his will? Believe me, your mom and I have seen it happen a million times.”
“I think his will’s probably worth a hell of a lot less than your union pension,” I said.
Dad laughed, as if he’d just unexpectedly won something.
“Look at these goddamned ice cubes they give us,” Mom said, peering into the bucket. “They’re melting already. I better get back to my table with them.”
“I’ll be right along, Mary,” Dad said. “I just want to talk to Fielding for a second.”
We watched in silence for a moment while Mom made her way back to their table and then Dad put his arm around my shoulders and we walked to the side of the hall. The trio was playing an airport cocktail lounge version of “Age of Aquarius” and now people were juiced enough to make idiots of themselves on the dance floor.
“That was a nice speech,” he said to me, his voice cool, analytical, intimate only in its assumptions. “The way you delivered it. The pauses. The eye contact. But can I tell you something? And I’m only saying this because you’re so good and if you’re that good, why not be better. OK? First of all, you made it seem like I raised you myself and all the stuff I gave you, like your mother had nothing to do with it. If you were running for office not a woman in the room would have voted for you. And the other dung is maybe you get a little too personal. It’s OK with family and all, but if you’re going to be a leader you have to get used to the idea that no one ever knows you, not really knows you. You think if people really knew Kennedy they would have gone out and voted for him? A gangster’s son who used the White House like a … a cat house, who thought he was a thousand times better than the common man? You got to be just like a clean white sheet and people can color it in with what they want to believe. That’s why the Eisenhowers win and the Stevensons lose. You just have to—” And here he squeezed me close to him. We were exactly the same height but there was a hardness to his body that mine lacked, a steel spring tension, a stubbornness. “You just have to be real strong,” he said. “So strong you’ll want to blow your brains out, but you won’t. So strong that people can call you a dirty cowardly lying sonofabitch right to your face and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference.”
“What if I don’t want to be like that, Dad?” I asked.
“Then you’ll be making a big mistake. You’ll be ending up like me.”
“Is that so bad?”
“It ain’t enough. You’ll be tearing your hair out when you read the newspapers or watch the evening news because the world’ll be run by people not half as smart as you are and you let them have it. And these people, Fielding, they’re not only dummies, not only a bunch of Little Lord Fauntleroys, guys you and your brother would have eaten for breakfast back in the neighborhood—but they’re
bad
people, too. They think that working people are dogshit.They take all the decency out of everything. They’d sell the moon and the stars and all the little planets in between.” He patted my lapels and leaned back to get a better look at me. “Look good, boy. Strong. You’re doing it for all of us.”
“I’m doing the best I can, Dad.”
“That’s right,” he said, nodding with sudden enthusiasm. “And that’s all it takes.”
I felt at that moment a sudden tremor of unease, the sort of inner weather that usually obscures more than it reveals. I felt Sarah near me, not in this room but in my life. She was reachable again and I only wanted to speak to her, to hear her voice.
I made some mumble of an excuse and went out to the hotel lobby, where I found a phone booth. It stank of urine when I closed the door. I called our number in Chicago, making the call collect. By now, I was in a frenzy of anticipation. I knew if she didn’t answer then I would have to find Father Stanton and from there I’d be on my way to Chile. Like a man awakening from a long, disorganizing illness, I wondered suddenly how I could have been so stupid, so weak, so easily swayed as to let her go on this mission. The phone rang once, twice, three times. And then, just when it felt as if my nerves could not be tightened another notch, she picked up the phone. I could tell from her voice, even as she said hello, that she was crying.
“I have a collect call for anyone from Fielding Pierce,” said the operator, who’d probably heard worse than mere crying on the phone. “Will you accept the charges?”
“Yes.”
“Sarah!” I shouted. “You’re back.”
“Oh God, Fielding. Where are you?”
“I’m in Brooklyn. It’s my father’s retirement party.”
There was a silence and then she began to sob. I stood there and I didn’t know what to say.
“Sarah?” Softly.
“I thought you’d left for good.”
“I’m on my way home, Sarah. If I leave right now I can get the last plane out.”
“Oh, Fielding. I’m so scared.”
“Are you all right? Did anything happen?”
“I’m OK. Are you really coming back?”
“Yes. Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. It all went well.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m here.”
“Can you wait up for me?”
There was a silence of sorts; I listened to the watery electronic
shhh
of the long distance cables. Then Sarah said: “If I can’t wait up, I’ll pin your instructions to the blanket.”
T
HIS WAS JUST
the time when it was beginning to get tough running as a Democrat. There were a couple of hundred unshaven Americans held hostage in Iran, the Russians were running their war games in Afghanistan, and the president was appearing on TV direct from the White House wearing a woolen cardigan because oil prices were too high to turn up the heat in the Oval Office.
Bertelli was trying to make this work in his own favor, talking about getting America back on track and acting as if I were the incumbent, just because my party happened to be in power. Chicago, thank God, was feeling the disillusion with the Dems less than most places—we still ate our kielbasa, rooted for the Sox, and voted the straight ticket. There were, according to Isaac, about two hundred thousand registered Democrats in Chicago who were either dead or had not yet had the privilege of being born. You could count on their ectoplasmic loyalty. In my district, however, with its large numbers of University types, the vote was less predictable: you never knew what those goddamned chrome domes were going to do. They read the columnists and subscribed to the fine-print magazines and had those old leather-bound books from which they could draw horrifying historical parallels.
The non-chrome-domian parts of my district were poor and black. And though the old Democratic organization still operated out in Woodlawn and under the El tracks on 63rd Street and up and down Stony Island and out toward Cottage Grove, it was getting harder and harder to bring out the vote. Not many jobs, lots of freaky crime, hopelessness glowing like radiation out through the window grates— it was awfully difficult to get someone in the ghetto to pin on a campaign button.