The New City

by Stephen Amidon

“But your last report card wasn’t all that great. I mean, B’s are all right, but they aren’t college.”

  “I’ll handle college.”

  “No one’s saying you won’t. Look, son—”

  “This is ‘Cause she’s white, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Wooten said, too quickly.

  “It is, though.”

  livin’ just enough

  Wooten took a breath.

  “We’d have the same position on this if she were colored or Chinese or—”

  “You’re scared.”

  Wooten could feel the anger rising in him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re afraid of white women.”

  “Where do you … that’s not true.”

  “What do you mean it isn’t true? What would’ve happened if you’d stepped out with somebody like Susan back in the day?”

  “This ain’t then.”

  “You think it is. You see me with her and you’re all buggin’ out.”

  “That’s not what it is at all.”

  Joel looked away and shook his head.

  “Well, I know what this is,” he said finally. “Even if you don’t.”

  Wooten stood, swallowing his anger. He didn’t want a fight with his boy. Once this week was enough.

  “You’re wrong, Joel. I don’t mind that she’s white. I mind that …”

  “What?”

  Wooten realized he didn’t know what to say.

  “So what’s going to happen?” Joel asked.

  “Happen?”

  “Are you banning me from seeing her or what?”

  “Look, I just wanted to talk. To ask you maybe to go a bit easy.”

  Joel looked away, his jaw set.

  “I can handle it.”

  The song continued to play. The same line, over and over: livin’ just enough. Wooten stared helplessly at his son for a few more bars, then stepped back out of the room.

  The abortive discussion with Joel played through his mind as he waited for Ardelia in the front yard. The boy was wrong. Dead wrong. He wasn’t afraid of white women. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. He just wanted Joel to know that the things he was feeling might not be as simple as he thought. But there was no telling him that. He had it bad for the girl.

  Wooten stared up at his house, wishing he could make Joel see that all he wanted was what was best for him. All you had to do was look at this house to realize that. The sturdiest in the city. A no-frills Federal that Wooten had designed himself. Barnaby had offered to draw it for him but Wooten declined, indulging the dream that had buoyed him through three decades of overtime. His whole life he’d heard folks who couldn’t even hold a hammer talk about how they’d built their house. Well, he’d built his own home, drawing up the blueprints on his nights off, overseeing its construction whenever he could grab a moment. Tearing down the first frame when he found it had been made of warped pine; sending back the roofing tiles when they turned out to be sub par. It felt good, allowing himself to be a pain-in-the-ass client rather than a put-upon contractor. And the result was fine. No gimmicks in the facade, nothing quaint in the yard. Twin gables. Hipped roof. Painted a green that blended perfectly with the surrounding foliage. There was nothing in it to suggest the life Wooten had left behind. No cracked bricks or broken-backed roofs or slamming screen doors. The large painted shutters would never have to close; the gently sloping lawn and circular drive opened wide to welcome visitors. Why was it so hard for Joel to understand that this was all for him?

  He consoled himself with thoughts of the party to come. He couldn’t wait until Austin saw his present. Each birthday, the two friends tried to outdo each other with gifts. It was a tradition that began during their first year of working together, when Swope had half jokingly given Wooten an elaborate dashboard compass for finding his way around the unmapped city. Wooten had responded two months later with the hand-tooled cherry-wood nameplate currently hanging on a hitching post beside Swope’s front door. This April, Austin had summoned him to his office to give him a top-of-the-line Shakespeare rod—he knew how eager Wooten was to take up fishing again once Lake Newton was stocked.

  “Wouldn’t mind trying this baby out now,” Wooten said, testing its heft in Swope’s office.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “In here?”

  “No,” Swope answered. “Out where it counts.”

  Their eyes held for a moment. Both smiling. Realizing that this was their city. They could do anything they wanted.

  “You know, I think I just might, counselor,” Wooten answered.

  Swope commandeered a rowboat from the wizened old-timer who rented them on the first of the lake’s three piers. A small crowd began to gather on the plaza as the two men stepped aboard. Wooten knew EarthWorkers would be watching from the opaque windows above them as well. But he didn’t care. It was his birthday and he wanted to try out his new rod. He strung the line as Swope rowed them toward the middle of the lake. For a weight he used one of the keys from the fat ring he carried.

  “Ready?” Swope asked when they were well free of the shore.

  “Oh, yes,” Wooten answered.

  He began to cast. It was hard at first—most of his fishing had been done when he was a Mississippi River rat, his poles custom-made from green branches that would snap back at him like a father’s angry hand. The Shakespeare’s fiberglass was infinitely more supple, bending toward the water like a divining rod and then switching unhurriedly back. His first few attempts were grossly overcast, the key slapping the water just a few feet from the aluminum hull.

  “Ah, so the idea is to creep up on the fish and knock them unconscious,” a smiling Swope chided. He’d loosened his tie and was leaning back in the bow, enjoying the warm spring sun and the rare sight of an awkward Earl Wooten.

  On shore, people continued to watch, astonished by the sight of the city’s two most powerful men fishing an empty lake in the middle of a working day.

  “Just give me a minute,” Wooten said.

  And that’s all he needed before he was sending his key soaring. It caught the sun as it arced, flashing for a moment and then landing gently on the tenantless water.

  “Yessir,” Wooten said, reeling in. “This is one fine rod.”

  They spent the next half hour on the lake, talking business and then family as Wooten perfected his cast. It was one of those rare moments when Swope really opened up about his life, spending a good half hour describing his past disappointments and future hopes. The main topic was Teddy. Wooten always knew the man doted on his son, though it wasn’t until that day that he fully understood how important the boy was to him. Teddy’s life was going to be the one Swope had been denied. He would never have to scrape and struggle, never have to be his own parent or best friend. No doors would ever be closed on him—even if Swope had to kick them in himself. Although Wooten knew that his partner had been brought up in an unhappy working-class home, he’d never known just how hungry that childhood had left him for security and success. It became even clearer when the subject turned to Sally. In a voice so hushed that Wooten had to lean forward to hear it, Swope explained how, in the early years of their marriage, he’d constantly felt like he was letting down the woman who’d rejected a life of monied comfort back in Grosse Pointe to be with him. For the better part of a decade she’d had to stand on the sidelines, watching the well-connected Ivy Leaguers snag the best jobs and club memberships while her husband broke his back in real estate. Only recently had he begun to think that he was providing her with the sort of life that was her due. Wooten listened without interruption, knowing that was all he had to do. He’d never seen this side of Swope before. The insecurity. The tenderness underlying that steely ambition. As he spoke, the crowd on the plaza eventually dispersed. By the time Swope gently rowed them back to shore there was nobody watching except the old man.

  “Catch anything?” the geezer asked sarcastically as they stepped onto the pier.

&
nbsp; “We threw it back,” Swope answered coolly, his level stare indicating that the boatman had overstepped.

  After he scampered off, the two friends began to laugh, and their laughter carried them all the way back to their offices and their responsibilities and the city they had yet to finish building.

  “So how’d it go?”

  Ardelia stood in the doorway, looking as beautiful as ever in the twilight. Just the sort of woman who should be walking out of a house like this on a fine summer’s night. Five-foot-nine, those olive eyes sparkling, her caramel skin glowing. Her long hair held aloft by a system of pins and clamps more ingenious than the Pavilion’s roof; her body still shapely, the ten pounds she’d gained with the twins perfectly distributed.

  “Oh, do you look fine.”

  “You too,” she said. “A little too Bing Crosby for my liking but there you are.”

  “When in Rome.”

  They began to head along Merlin’s Way, the tree-shrouded, tightly winding road that connected their house to Swope’s cul-de-sac, Prospero’s Parade. Mystic Hills was never better than at this hour, when light and shadow mingled in the trees. This was the best bit of real estate in Newton, five hundred acres of forest to the southeast of the lake, its big wooded lots arranged discreetly over a system of small hills. The houses here had distinct styles, unlike the neat rows of aluminum-clad clones in the other villages. Cape Cods. Monticellos. Post-and-beams. Colonials. Cedar shakes and mansard roofs. Redwood decks overlooking clusters of oak. They were occupied by upper-echelon EarthWorkers and the handful of Washington lawyers Swope had lured out here. Vine had chafed at the neighborhood’s unplanned inclination toward exclusivity but Swope and Wooten had quietly defied him. After all, this was their families they were talking about.

  “Well?” Ardelia asked.

  “He seems to think I’m afraid of white women.”

  “Are you?”

  Wooten scowled at her.

  “I thought this whole conversation was your idea,” he said.

  “That doesn’t mean you might not have ulterior motives.”

  “Ulterior … woman, I’ve never had an ulterior motive in my life.”

  She hummed musically for a moment.

  “I am aware of the difficulties a black boy may have stepping out with a white girl, yes,” he said. “Even in these times and this place. But I would never tell Joel he couldn’t see her because of that. Never.”

  “I believe you, sugar.”

  They walked for a moment.

  “All right. I’ll talk to him again.”

  “Good,” she said, speaking as she might to a recalcitrant student.

  Wooten decided that the time had come to tell her about the trip.

  “I’m going to Chicago on Thursday,” he said as casually as possible. “I think Savage is going to offer me a new job.”

  The play went out of her eyes.

  “Oh? Where?”

  “Maybe here.”

  “Doing what?”

  “City manager.”

  She stopped and looked him in the eye.

  “So Holmes was right?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “But that’s Austin’s job. I mean, what does he say about this?”

  “They asked me not to tell him about the trip.”

  “Now let me get this straight. You’re secretly traveling to Chicago to talk to them about taking Austin’s job?”

  “Don’t put it like that.”

  “Then how should I put it?”

  “First of all, the secrecy isn’t about Austin. It’s just how they do things. And the only way they’d be offering me city manager is if they had something better for him.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Come on, Ardelia. I’d never keep a secret from Austin unless it was for his good as well as mine. I’m not like that. You know me.”

  The words sickened him even as he spoke them. Though this was different. The other thing was what it was. Besides, that deception was over.

  “Well, I still don’t see why you can’t tell Austin something is in the offing.”

  “How would it look to Savage if I go disobeying his orders just as he’s about to offer me a big new job?”

  “It would probably look like you were the same as every other man they got over in that snake pit.”

  “Well, I can’t afford to be like every other man. You know that. It’s all just … politics. You know how it works.”

  They walked wordlessly for a while, their good shoes ringing on the fresh asphalt. As they moved through the wavering twilight Wooten could sense a change in his wife’s attitude.

  “City manager,” she said softly. “It would be nice.”

  “Wouldn’t it?”

  “We could stay here.”

  They let themselves travel through the fantasy for a while.

  “And you’re sure Austin will be all right about this? He’s been talking about that job for five years now.”

  “Ardelia, once they offer him a choice job in Chicago, I guarantee you he’ll forget about Newton. If this is what I think it is, Austin will come out best of all.”

  As if on command, Swope’s house came into view. Unlike Wooten, he had let Vine design it, and the result was stunning. Situated at the bottom of a short cul-de-sac, it looked, from the front, like it was only one story, though at the back it fanned out into three floors. There were two parallel sloping roofs, each interrupted by a half dozen dormer windows that lifted from the wood like the just-opened eyes of lazing reptiles. The front door was encased in a twenty-foot-high wall of glass. An acre of freshly cut lawn buffered the front of the house, tiered by railroad ties and wood-chip oases. Out back there was a two-level deck and a couple more acres of lawn, centered around a gazebo with a purple-ring bug zapper that crackled throughout the summer nights. The entire property was surrounded by box elders and thick oaks that had been there for generations, just waiting for so perfect a house to shade. Cars already lined Prospero’s Parade; music wafted from behind the house. Ardelia and Earl Wooten paused.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  Wooten nodded grimly.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  9

  Swope surveyed his backyard from the deck’s upper level, thinking how much it looked like some sort of medieval encampment. A large striped marquee had been erected near the vine-encrusted gazebo, its inverse crenellations fluttering in a negligible breeze. Twenty feet to the right of the tent a line of cooking drums smoldered, attended by two chefs whose knives flashed like swords as they sliced pork and beheaded shrimp. Torch poles were planted at regular intervals around the yard’s perimeter, spewing noxious black smoke into the surrounding woods. The deck where he stood had been transformed as well, its furniture carted off to make room for the guests. A bartender from the Cross Keys Inn was laying out an array of maraschino cherries, miniature sabers, cocktail napkins and plastic cups on the banquet table catty-cornered to the sliding-glass doors. On the deck behind him stood a row of gallon plastic bottles of Gordon’s and Smirnoff and Johnny Walker. There was wine, a case of Italian red and one of Spanish white, as well as a big steel tub of iced Löwenbräu. The bartender was the only black working tonight. A dozen of Swope’s guests would be black and he’d seen how touchy that sort of thing could get, especially when something got spilled. So he’d asked around, eventually finding a caterer who employed Filipinos. Word was they could move through a crowd with the stealth of jungle guerrillas. And nobody seemed too exercised about the dignity of Filipinos.

  Swope checked his watch. Almost seven. People would be arriving soon. He ran through a quick checklist to make sure everything was ready. Food, drinks, help. Music—Teddy had positioned speakers around the deck that were connected to the Panasonic in the den, where he’d be playing records from the stack Swope edited. Switched-on Bach. Hot August Night. Herb Alpert. Dionne Warwick. Maybe some Ray Stevens if people wanted to rock. Just n
othing too Teddy.

  Teddy, though. That gift. What a kid. What a damned kid.

  Satisfied that everything was ready, Swope lit a Tiparillo, flicking the spent match into the raked pebbles below. He was satisfied, though hardly excited. His birthday was turning into a truly lousy day, a series of annoyances leading up to that afternoon’s bombshell. His annual session that morning at Bethesda Country Club—eighteen celebratory holes and a Bloody Mary brunch—had turned out to be torture. There were three foursomes in all, mostly his former partners at Barger, Green, Applemans and Webb. They’d teed off just after seven. The talk was all Nixon. The consensus was that the man was done. You could stick a fork in him. Six months was the smart money, a year at the outside. Swope listened in silence, thinking what a bunch of losers his former partners had become. Semi-insiders who’d never get the White House calls or the Congressional memberships. His contempt affected his game—he’d played like shit, carding a shameful ninety-six, the second-worst score of the whole bunch. The half-hearted roasts at brunch had a nasty edge to them, his former colleagues now jealous of Swope’s decision to take the EarthWorks job.

  He’d driven home in a foul mood, unable to conjure any of the usual commercials to bolster his fading disposition. The house was in chaos, Filipinos everywhere, Sally bossing them around like some suburban MacArthur. He gladly went to pick up the booze from Fogwood Village Center. It was there that the day took its second nasty turn when he came back to his Town Car to find that its side mirror had been busted, dangling like the wing of a poorly carved chicken. Yet another instance of the vandalism that was becoming the norm in a city where such things were supposedly unthinkable.

  The day had brightened considerably when Teddy ambled into his office an hour later to give him his gift. And it was perfect. A Newton’s cradle. They set it going straight away. Father and son sat there in companionable silence, their eyes following the clicking steel balls as they proved, time and again, the immutable laws of motion. Three to the left, three to the right. Four to the right, four to the left. Not many other kids would have put that much thought into their dad’s gift. Swope knew he was a lucky man to have such a son.