by Jim Lynch
His vision reels—too much champagne and coffee, too little sleep—as he enters the stadium and heads for the stage where the governor, the senator, the mayor and other bulky, suited men are checking wristwatches and chortling at each other’s shoulder-clutching jokes. Everything has a clumsy small-town feel to it. The stage is too far away, making the speakers look like midgets. And the crowd is mousy, polite at best. Politicians drone through the scratchy PA. Unable to make out half the words, the audience fidgets, waiting to hear Kennedy himself.
Finally, Roger theatrically wheels his arm and points at the jumbo countdown clock, which has been ticking toward this moment for a year now. When it hits all zeros, an ancient Swedish cannon thumps the air with a half pound of gunpowder followed by a twenty-one-gun salute. Then an old steam whistle sounds and ten thundering F-102 fighter jets shred the sky, joined by sirens, church bells, fireworks, car horns and just about every other noisemaker within a mile.
Once the pandemonium subsides, the president’s nasal voice crackles through the speakers. “May we open an era of peace and understanding among all mankind,” he says by phone from a Florida getaway. Amazingly, it takes him just a dozen words to say what everybody’s thinking but nobody’s saying, that it’s a wee bit ironic to be throwing a party about the world’s rosy future in a city that’s building battleships, bombers and bunkers as fast as it can.
“Let the fair begin!” Kennedy commands. The Space Needle carillon clangs 538 bells, and two thousand See you in Seattle balloons rise into the clearing sky. Then the freak show really begins. Water-skiers in tutus slalom and flip in the huge oval moat around the field as Circus Berlin motorcyclists accelerate up a cable strung between the stadium roof and the Needle. He hears the crowd’s hesitancy, its collective disappointment. Is this all there is?
Roger floats out of the ceremonies with the exiting mob, his gut twitching over either the lackluster turnout or Kennedy’s words. From his vantage, the president just raised the stakes. The fair must not only entertain the world but save it. If this thing flops, Roger realizes, his knack for talking people into things will have backfired in the grandest fashion imaginable, and he’ll be the fall guy who brought ridicule and doom upon the city he loves.
As the sun blasts through wispy clouds, he drifts past hundreds of pink begonias that the Belgians brought and watches men in dark suits and brown wingtips snapping pictures of their smiling wives in feathered hats while their kids cavort around the fountain with plumes of cotton candy bigger than their heads. Maybe the fair will help people step outside their lives, he tells himself. He looks up at the blazing newness of the Needle, and then at the Science Pavilion and the Coliseum too, everything stunningly new. He suddenly notices his face is wet. How long has he been crying? It’s gotta be the lack of sleep. Even a nap would help, but not yet. Go, go, go!
A breathless assistant miraculously finds him in the mumbling horde and explains that one of the fighter jets that flew over the stadium crashed in a north Seattle neighborhood. He takes this omen in stride, as if expecting it, then jogs toward headquarters, sending iridescent pigeons into the balloon-freckled sky.
Chapter Two
APRIL 2001
SHE WHEELED onto the shoulder, hopped out and broke into an exasperated jog, passing four lanes of idling vehicles, including two TV vans, as she approached the span, hoping like hell her photographer was already there to capture the bridge shrouded in this morning funk of fog and light rain that seeped into your bones no matter what anybody said or how well you slept or how much espresso you swallowed. Once she got to the orange cones, she saw cops pacing in the lane closest to this lanky young woman standing soldierly atop the narrow concrete railing, steady as a gymnast in black Levi’s and thick-heeled work boots.
A quick scan of the crowd turned up a half dozen breathless reporters and photographers. God, she hated these gangbangs, everyone’s IQ halved in the frenzy to get the story, a story, any story. There was no getting out of this one, though. She was the closest reporter to the bridge when the “potential jumper” crackled across the newsroom scanner. So once again she was assigned to a story she wasn’t hired to do, though that increasingly seemed to be the paper’s MO, with younger reporters filling the news holes while veterans averted eyes, intimidated editors or feigned industry while playing computer solitaire or outlining novels about divorced journalists finding true love again. During the past few weeks, Helen had been yanked off her five-part epic on the inexplicable rise and spectacular collapse of groceriesnow.com so often that the project had been postponed indefinitely. The latest edict from above was for her to produce enterprising retrospectives on the 1962 World’s Fair. She’d waded just deep enough into the clip files to realize it was the worst assignment imaginable.
The escalating indignation on the bridge sounded oddly misplaced in a city that was always bragging about its manners. As honks and shouts rose in the anonymous gloom, it sounded more like a hostile rush hour in Philly, D.C. or New York.
“Come on!”
Helen started collecting details so she’d have word pictures if the woman actually jumped and generated some news. Yellow caution tape. Dimpled water winking through the steambath. Three waddling cops: one twirling his flashlight like a baton, one on the radio, one small-talking the jumper in a gentle mumble.
Then, during the longest lull yet, someone about ten cars back howled, “Just jump, bitch!”
Whether the woman heard the taunt or not, she jumped or, rather, stepped.
The falling body didn’t look like a full-grown woman, more like a shrinking child wheeling its arms, trying to regain balance, as if reconsidering the whole ordeal several times before audibly slapping the gray canal, her splash as curiously discreet as an Olympic dive.
Helen tried to find the heckler but got only sheepish headshakes before the flashlight cop shooed her off the bridge. She phoned the newsroom, trotted back to her car, then rolled off into heavier rain. Her defroster was no match for all this moisture, so she rubbed the windshield with her forearm; and when she cracked the window, rain pelted her face. Stopping at a blurry red, she watched commuters on bikes. There were joggers, too, and a man in a suit on a skateboard being pulled by a black Lab. Even pedestrians glided by without hats or umbrellas in fleece jackets and ultralight hiking boots, as if they might scale Rainier that afternoon if the weather cleared. Back East, exercise junkies had the decency to do it behind health-club walls. Out here everybody was an exhibitionist, though she did marvel at their rain Zen, striding into it, not away from or out of it. Her own disarray swung back into focus. A cereal bowl on the dash. Newspapers, folders, notebooks and pens strewn across the coffee-stained passenger seat. Chipped mugs on the floor next to a toy dump truck and the cheapest of her violins.
At times, she forgot that moving out here was her idea. The original plan was to write for a feisty daily in one of America’s last competitive newspaper markets as far away from D.C. as possible. They flew her out and seduced her with all the ass-kicking stories they couldn’t wait to assign to someone with her talents. The day she’d interviewed, a local billionaire christened a new rock ’n’ roll museum by smashing a glass guitar in a rebellious spasm that seemed to say, Look, even our establishment is radical! The job, the newspaper, the city, it all seemed irresistible, especially at vivid twilight with a congratulatory cocktail and all these skyscrapers jockeying for views of this freakishly scenic place.
But like most of her dates, it quickly fell short of expectations. The Post-Intelligencer was in worse straits than anyone admitted, and not even a bona fide daily. There was no Sunday stage for her work. How had she glossed over that? And even the city turned out to be a two-faced tease, a chilling rain pissing on her by the time she returned with Elias to hunt for an apartment. Yet it was the pretension that annoyed her, not the weather. She’d never seen a city this full of itself. The most livable! The most literary! The best place to locate a business or raise a kid or have a dog or get can
cer! The capital of the new world economy! And the locals swallowed all these national rankings and blather, even during this current dot-com hangover. Just look! they told her, as if the views alone justified the hype. Seattle reminded her of men she’d known who’d been told too many times how handsome they were.
She spent most of the next hour repeating and affirming what she’d just heard and seen, the editors debating whether “Just jump, bitch” was too inflammatory, and if there was actually a story here at all or just a brief, seeing how bridge jumps were fairly common. Those arguments were discarded, though, once KING-5 led with the jump-bitch quote on its noon broadcast. By then it was also clear the jumper had amazingly survived, which opened other doors. The lede for a story on road rage? Ultimately it was deemed a punchy daily with a follow-up for the social services reporter, who’d been looking for a peg for a story about the city’s suicidal tendencies.
Still, Helen scrambled to make her twelve column inches breathe. The Aurora Bridge was second only to the Golden Gate in suicide leaps. She looked up aurora, and found a Roman myth about the goddess of dawn. Is that who the jumper was, or why she survived? She considered checking weather patterns for the last ten jumps to see if anyone ever did it on sunny days. No, she told herself, keep it simple and get back to those insufferable World’s Fair archives.
Her editor, Shrontz, called her assignment an honor, explaining in vague if glowing terms how the fair was the coming-out party that launched modern Seattle. What a perfect little project, he told her, for an enterprising reporter who can really write. The newsroom was still getting used to Helen. She wrote fast yet colorfully, her stories often reading like news-feature hybrids that confused the copy desk. With the fortieth anniversary looming, the Times was gonna be all over the fair, Shrontz kept telling her. She was hating him again. Liked him, then hated him, respected him, then resented him for confronting her about Elias, as if she’d lied during the interview by not mentioning that she had a son.
She reloaded on espresso, then camped out in the P-I library, skimming books, magazines and newspaper clippings, reassuring herself that they’d let her return to her dot-com drama if she delivered a few nostalgic gems about the fair. What a long shot to beat out New York and land the first American expo in decades, back when world fairs were must-see spectacles and Seattle was a sleepy Boeing bunkhouse without a freeway. Yet from what she could tell, the fair was an artifact of the corniest of American times and, worse yet, a local sacred cow with fawning coverage shamelessly regurgitated through the ten-, twenty- and thirty-year remembrances. By now it was a myth, and with that realization she felt a rebellious desire to expose the truth about the fair.
Starting cautiously, she prepared a story about it being an unreliable crystal ball, given how the official program predicted we’d be sleeping in rotating houses, commuting in flying cars and eating scrambled eggs out of aerosol cans by now. She noticed, however, that the fair’s president, Roger Morgan, had the foresight to add this qualifier for the next generation: “If we’re accurate, we will have amazed you. If not, we hopefully will have amused you.”
She needed to talk to Morgan but kept putting it off, knowing she’d get only one chance to catch the silver-tongued P. R. Hercules—as one reporter gushed—off-guard with her questions. People still called him the father of the fair or Mr. Seattle or, more often, just Roger, as if there were only one. Ask Roger. Call Roger. Everyone deferring to his memory.
Reworking her questions now, she was surprised to find his number in the white pages, but hung up mid-dial. Maybe she should start with Ted Severson or one of the other surviving notables, though they’d given bland quotes nine years ago and no doubt would encourage her to talk to the man himself. She dialed again, and a young woman casually informed her that he was at a funeral. “Although you might be able to visit with him tonight, at his party.”
“His party?”
“Well, you know he’s turning seventy, right?”
Helen made the mistake of mentioning this to Shrontz, who lit up and insisted she cover it—not as a daily piece, but to gather fresh material for a Roger Morgan profile.
All three of her unreliable babysitters were unavailable, as usual, so she dragged Elias along. He looked like he’d been force-fed sugar at preschool again, talking too fast, his pupils dilated. She tried to listen, but it was hard. Some bully named Cameron Falkenberg—he called every kid by his full name—wouldn’t play with him, and Miss Cantrell was blowing her nose all day, and there was some elaborate conflict on the playground that didn’t make any sense. Her eyes panned the glistening skyline as a cruise ship peeled away from the waterfront like an entire city block calving into the bay. Now he was talking about Buzz and Woody and the rest of the Toy Story cast as if they were close friends. She parked illegally near Ivar’s, the only fast food he’d eat lately, and stepped onto the waterfront boardwalk amid the daily flotsam of tourists, rummies and shrieking seagulls.
Fries in hand, they rolled south on Alaskan Way with Elias pointing out the port’s huge cranes—“Orange dinosaurs!”—and Helen trying to recall which east-west street wasn’t a luge run. Locals climbed these comically steep sidewalks like brainless mountain goats, as if there was nothing ludicrous about building a city on cliffs. She guessed wrong on Spring and smoked the clutch on the lip of Third, waiting for the light, before speeding to University and then up to Sixth, where she parked in a loading zone and jaywalked, Elias clinging to her hand and jogging to keep up as they slipped past bellmen dressed like third-world dictators onto the white marble floors of the Olympic Hotel.
Shrontz guessed the location. Where else would Roger Morgan party? Shiny new escalators aside, the brick and terra-cotta hotel was a time capsule, exuding the 1920s, with an elegant balcony surrounding the massive lobby. Holding hands again, Helen and Elias scampered up marble stairs to the Spanish Ballroom, where tall double doors opened to a noisy banquet hall the size of a basketball court with bejeweled chandeliers, paisley carpet and more than thirty tables surrounded by dapper seniors.
Helen couldn’t recall seeing so many old people in one place before, and just about everyone was laughing, their delighted cackles bouncing off the high ceiling. A commanding amplified voice rose above the ruckus, followed by more life-threatening laughter.
She hand-combed Elias’s hair and led him to the only empty table in the back as the short, bald speaker clutched the microphone as if to steady himself on the little stage. “Will you look at him,” he said wistfully. She saw where he was pointing now and matched Roger Morgan’s silver hair and still-bright smile with his clippings. “Ahhh,” the speaker said, “to be seventy again. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Helen slowed her eyes and noticed all the pearls, diamonds, shawls and elbow-length gloves, all the pinstripes and tiepins and cuff links. She wished she had a photographer and a guest list of all these fading doctors, lawyers, tycoons and their wives. She tried to take it all in at once. The black bunting skirting the stage. The mirrored wall seemingly doubling the crowd size. Twenty-foot arched windows framed by columns carved with winged horses. Almost any crescendo of detail absorbed and soothed her. No need to tell the readers much. Just be their eyes.
The speaker was now rattling off a story about Morgan that didn’t track. People looked distracted, laughed out, older. She watched a tiny woman pop pills, then lean across the table to wipe her husband’s cheek. When Helen turned back, Elias had vanished. Rising, she spotted him stomping stiff-legged and unnoticed across the floor. When she caught up, he shifted into high whine. He wanted to leave. She fished a deck of cards from her purse and told him to sit still until he found all four aces.
Parched and sweaty, she released her ponytail and threw her head around like a horse, her thick locks springing free and settling wider than her shoulders like the roots of a toppled oak. When she looked up again, she saw bug-eyed grandpas staring at her as if she’d just exposed her breasts.
Another old man hobbled to the
microphone, this one tall and angular with the raspy voice of a smoker. “I’m gonna keep this short because there isn’t much to say about this fella other than that he’s been a better friend than I deserve going on forty-two years now.” Helen assumed this must be Ted Severson, though he didn’t look anything like his fair photos. “Roger is so beloved people often overlook the fact that I’m a surly bastard.” People were chuckling and engaged again. “He’s got such a relentlessly good disposition that even I can’t tell when he’s bent out of shape. But making him happy, that’s easy: just ask him about anything that’s ever happened in this city. As you know, Roger suffers from an attention surplus disorder. Nothing escapes his interest, including the welfare of old coots like us. And that’s all I’ve got to say about this SOB other than to state the obvious, which is that he’s still the finest civic man this city has to offer and has been for four decades now.”
She watched Morgan mosey toward the podium until Elias waved four aces in front of her nose. She grabbed him and the cards and speed-walked around the tables for a closer look, oddly exhilarated that the man she’d been studying in the abstract of 1962 was actually about to speak in public tonight, right now. She watched him shake hands, everybody reaching for him, swinging his arm to give the point of contact a slight pop the way younger men do, his left hand working shoulders, forearms, necks. He was more dashing than she’d expected, a blue handkerchief angling from his breast pocket, silver cuff links peeking from his suit sleeves. He looked built to last and too young for this crowd, with smile lines that suggested the good life and teeth too white to be natural but not so bright as to look fake.
Elias vied for her attention by chewing on the ace of clubs. She pried it from his mouth and collected more details. A wife shouting at her husband to turn up his hearing aid. A couple in their eighties with identical blue-black hair dye. A palsied woman near the stage pulling a plastic neck brace out of her purse, hurrying to tighten the strap until it stopped her head from trembling. Helen glanced at Morgan and at the other tables, trying not to miss anything, but she couldn’t resist watching this neck-braced woman reaching in her purse now for Altoids, the can rattling hopelessly in her hand. Helen glanced back to Morgan, who was closing in on the stage. Somehow the woman popped the lid, bounced a mint into her mouth and dropped the tin into her purse just as he arrived at her table. “Wonderful to see you, Blanche,” he said, bending down to kiss her steady forehead before stepping up to the podium.
