by Reed Karaim
“I talked to Senator Daschle earlier today,” Crane said. “He told me to wait. He doesn’t think I have a chance in hell.”
He had the kind of voice in which the inflections were all modest and reasonable, the kind of voice that could announce “I am the greatest” and have it sound like an apology. But it was tinged now with a vague peevishness, as if this calculation imposed some unfair burden. Blendin & Duprey had handled his last Senate race, and Duprey remembered how much he hated to disappoint anyone.
“I gotta be straight with you, Senator,” Blendin said. “The nomination is going to be tough enough. It’s a real steep hill. Name recognition, money, it’s a real fucking steep hill.”
They contemplated his starched white shirt as he stared quietly into the darkness. Now is the time, Duprey thought, to recognize how far you have to go. Now is the time to tell us you’ll wait four years.
“I’ve been getting a lot of calls from home, from people who think this is the time,” Crane said. “I’ve spoken to Mayor Daley and he’s with me. He says there’s money waiting in Chicago.”
“There better be a lot,” Blendin said.
“There isn’t,” Angela said.
Crane smiled at his wife through his reflection in the window.
“Win and there’s always money. A lawyer ought to know that.”
Angela looked up at her husband with dark, twinkling eyes, and Duprey knew he was only watching familiar patterns of respect and affection play themselves out.
“I’m only providing due diligence, Tom. The husband of a lawyer ought to know that.”
The helicopter rose like a hummingbird on the other side of the park and flitted over the house, the light flashing briefly against the glass in a nervous stutter. Crane set his wine on the windowsill and pushed his hair back with long pale fingers. When in private, he had a habit of playing with his face, pulling his ear, tugging at his chin, as though he was surprised to find them there.
“I think the experts are wrong about everything,” he said. “I think the president’s like a piñata. Whack him and all the votes are going to come tumbling out. I think it’s going to be a really good year to be somebody new, somebody people’ve never heard of before. I think there’s going to be a new president next November, and if we wait we might be waiting eight years.”
Blendin sat up in his chair, his permanently wrinkled forehead corrugating like tin siding. “Hell, Senator, they’re always ready for something different. The question is what?”
They waited for him to explain. But Thomas Crane only held his hand lightly against the window, as if he could feel the pulse of light in the glass.
“So why’s he running?” my editor asked four months later. We were in the Cannon Newspapers bureau on the ninth floor of the National Press Building, and I was standing beside her desk. I didn’t know yet about the evening in his townhouse, not that it would have explained anything.
“He says the economy, health care, children, etc., etc.”
She nodded impatiently.
“So why’s he running?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out.”
In her businesslike fashion, she had been typing while she spoke, but now she pushed a chestnut hair salted with silver out of her eyes and contemplated my hopeful face with sympathy.
“I don’t suppose it matters. He’ll last through Iowa and New Hampshire, probably South Dakota. You’ll get a couple of months on the road. Do good work and next time we’ll give you a contender.”
My father had been a small-town newspaper editor for forty years and the closest he’d ever gotten to a presidential candidate was watching John Kennedy from the end of a runway when he flew through Montana in 1960. My career had started in the same state. I’d made my way east after more nights spent covering county commissions and state boards than I care to remember, arriving at Cannon Newspapers’ Washington bureau with my western pedigree and my degree from the University of Minnesota only to discover I was working for a chain enamored of bored twenty-five-year-olds from the Ivy League. I was thirty-three years old, I’d been a reporter for twelve years, and this was my first presidential campaign. No one said so, but I understood Thomas Crane’s candidacy was my shot at proving I could overcome the disadvantage of my origins.
I’ve always taken my work seriously. I am, by nature, too serious a person, too serious and too solitary. I was told the latter by the person I lived with before she left, and it was a fair criticism, even if none of the rest were, even if there might have been reasons. I told myself I would draw on my flaws when covering Crane. I would concentrate as I never had before and make more of this candidacy than others thought possible.
But life on the road was not what I had expected. There is an offhand feeling about the start of a campaign. Things are informal, without the Secret Service and all the clanking apparatus of a Prussian army that comes later. Crane traveled in his van with Starke and, usually, Duprey, though Blendin sometimes appeared, ranting, trying to generate heat by rubbing enough words together. The handful of us assigned to cover Crane trailed him in a haphazard caravan of rental cars. We listened to the same speech until we had it memorized. We watched him shake hands and lift babies into the air. We cringed when he did that stunt you may remember where he folded the dollar bill in sections as he explained where your tax dollars went. At night we ate together and drank together and told stories of indignities suffered from editors, hotel clerks and waiters, who were all considered of the same class.
Every morning I called my editor. Then I went where Crane went and watched what he did, and at the end of the day I called her back and we discussed what had happened and the various stories the bureau had under way. We’d worked together for three years and our conversations had the clipped, distant intimacy of an old married couple.
Days went by when I didn’t have to write at all, and I drifted along feeling wonderfully anonymous and free of obligation. Secluded in strange hotels in strange cities, the world narrowed to the intimate circle of a bedside lamp, I read late into the night, mostly histories, the last of Catton’s three-volume history of the Civil War, Morris’s life of Theodore Roosevelt. I’ve always loved history for its sense of larger possibilities. If I couldn’t sleep, I turned the lamp back on and read a while longer, sliding back into other lives, grander purposes. Like Crane, I imagine, I felt time slipping away with no sense of how to make it gain significance.
After two weeks I visited Crane’s hometown of Berthold. When I returned, the campaign was in New York for a fund-raiser and a meeting with the city’s senior congressman, a gaunt, acerbic Brooklynite fond of quoting the classics and himself. I had nothing to write but a brief summary of their meeting and an even briefer update on Crane’s fund-raising, which was going poorly. I finished, clicked a phone line into the back of my laptop, waited with the slight apprehension I could never shake until it signaled the story had been sent, and called my editor. She told me to check back in an hour for questions. I knew there wouldn’t be any. I glanced at my watch and felt a sudden, pervasive satisfaction that it was only six o’clock and I was in New York City and done for the day.
The bar was on the top floor of the hotel and Midtown glittered through the glass wall. The jumbled towers of commerce were a formal composition in the dark, the crown of the Chrysler Building visible in a space between buildings, a soaring pinnacle of automotive silver hung in its frame, an exaggerated notion of all the exuberance that once lit the American Century. I felt like raising a toast.
Myra Barnes waved from a table. She was seated with Stuart Abercrombie, the pale southern gentlemen from the New York Times I’d met my first day on the road, and Nathan Zimmer, who twisted in his seat to flag down a waiter.
“The representative of Cannon Newspapers. You in?”
“Of course.”
“Pull up a seat. We’ll get you a drink.”
Myra sat in a pool of blue light, her feet on another chair. She wore a denim skirt with
the outline of clowns on it and bright red cowboy boots, the stitching fluorescing in the light. Her hair was short and businesslike, flecked with gray. The crescent moon of one silver earring dangled near her collar like a dime-store charm. She smiled and kicked the chair under her feet my way.
“I’ve been saving it just for you.”
“You’re such a pal.”
“Your den mother of the road.”
“My den mother never wore boots like that.”
“Can you be sure?”
Nathan twisted back in his chair to face Stuart, returning to their conversation. “Did you see how he looked when Crane’s hand came down on his shoulder?”
Stuart laughed. “It looked like his scrotum was curling up. My friends, he is a pompous clown.”
After meeting privately, Crane and the congressman from New York had strolled down a hallway together for the cameras, a rolling grip and grin. At the end, Crane leaned a bit too close, whispering as his hand settled intimately on the older lawmaker’s shoulder. There was something proprietary and assertive about the gesture and the congressman stiffened, manufacturing a smile that would have seemed false at Madame Tussaud’s.
“Now, now,” Myra said to Stuart. “He’s one of your congressmen.”
Stuart pushed his lank hair back and, as he moved, the hollows of his gaunt face filled with shadow. He was a compulsive runner and had that look of strained tolerance for the slovenly world around him that runners sometimes have.
“He is that,” he said. “I’m afraid I know the esteemed gentleman better than anyone. Did I tell you I once quoted him quoting Cicero in a story? He called me at two a.m. the night it came out—he’d had somebody read it to him when it hit the street—to say I’d gotten the quote wrong. I’d written, ‘The good of the people is the first law.’ The line is ‘The good of the people is the chief law.’ He demanded a correction.”
“Well,” Myra said. “I hope you ran a correction.”
Stuart scowled. “It’s the New York Times. We did run a correction.”
Myra winked at me. “It’s the New York Times.”
Our waiter arrived. I ordered a scotch and soda and he nodded seriously without speaking. Stuart began describing an elaborate concoction of crème de menthe, vermouth and assorted other liquors, but seeing the waiter’s eyes go blank, he stopped and in a childlike drawl asked for a bourbon and water.
Nathan sat with one leg folded beneath his body, rocking as if a small electric current was being pumped through his spine.
“The thing is,” he said, “our guy got the photo he wanted. The two of them together. Pals.”
“They can all get that shot,” Stuart said.
“Yeah, but there’s something he doesn’t like about our guy.”
“What is that?” Myra asked.
“Maybe it’s all that damn good cheer,” Stuart said.
“Maybe they agree on too much,” I said.
“There you go,” Nathan said. “The old liberal lion feels threatened by the cub.”
“Please,” Stuart said. “Centrists. Haven’t you been listening?”
A blonde strolled by in a second skin of spandex that halted startlingly at midthigh. Nathan tugged one starched cuff the proper half-inch out of his jacket. He was always fastidiously dressed, today in a three-button camel’s-hair sportcoat the buttery color of fine leather, a light blue shirt and a dark blue silk tie. He was forever tucking and adjusting things to hold the presentation together, and I had a brief vision of him ironing socks at three a.m.
Myra watched the blonde. “New York, New York,” she said.
There was a moment of silence. The city winked at us through the glass wall. I realized the bar was slowly revolving.
“You know,” Nathan said. “He looked good today.”
Stuart looked down his nose. “And so what?”
“Well, it is still early.”
“It’s way too early for him,” Stuart said.
“Maybe.”
“Come on.”
Nathan shifted in his seat. His standing as a cynic was at stake, but he couldn’t help himself. “All right, all right. But let’s just say he wins Iowa or finishes second, because he’s a small-town boy from a neighboring state. I know the caucuses aren’t that important this year, but just say it happens. Say he rides that into a second place in New Hampshire behind Wilson. Then he’s back in farm country with South Dakota, and farmers seem to like him. Say he wins there—”
Stuart’s laugh was like the dry snuffle of a horse. “Say say say.”
“—he’d be in the race. That’s all I’m saying.”
“The race. When Wilson starts spending money, there isn’t going to be a race.”
Theodore Wilson, the dyspeptic governor of Pennsylvania, was the favorite among the press then, largely because they respected his bitter outlook on life. He had amassed a healthy war chest, largely donated out of fear, which he was hoarding like the skinflint Yankee traders of his ancestry.
“He doesn’t have the money or the name recognition. And there’s something else.” Stuart stared across the room, a green light behind the bar emphasizing the sallowness of his skin. “I don’t know that he has what it takes . . . I think he’s the type that blushes at harsh language, do you know what I mean? I think you could make his knees shake with what they used to call a saucy story.”
“Let’s think of a saucy story to test him with,” Myra suggested. She worked for the Chicago Tribune and had watched Crane longer than the rest of us.
“What if . . .” Nathan said, searching for a further argument.
Myra patted the edge of the table in a riff.
“Nathan, Nathan. What if? What if he turns out to be the king of Siam? What if he turns out to be a woman dressed as a man? What if he gets drunk and they throw him in the can?”
Nathan smiled slowly and surrendered. “What if an ex-wife shows up dead? What if he kisses someone on both cheeks and a horse’s head winds up inside their bed?”
Myra clapped. “What if he comes out against school prayer? What if— listen to this—what if that’s not really his hair?”
I sat back in my chair. The winter night on the other side of the glass felt archaically gentle. The chittering firefly of a helicopter sailed across the rooftops. A carnival flood of traffic drifted far below. I saw that this was how it came together, the consensus that someone should be taken seriously, that someone else is finished. Thomas Crane was sinking and he hadn’t even set sail.
Through the glass wall I could see windows in other buildings. Dashes of yellow like the windows in the train that ran west through Havre, Montana, when I was a child: The Empire Builder, a chain of silver cars passing in the night, windows elongated as it picked up speed on the edge of town. When I was young I sometimes kept my father company while he pasted up his newspaper and it would be late when we left the shop and The Empire Builder would be rattling along the tracks in the distance, and he would stop and watch it disappear, the same look of wonder and mystery always in his eyes. The train was the train of his childhood, of an infinite world unfolding out of reach in the dark.
“Cliff, you know where that train’s going?” he would say.
“Sure.”
“Over the mountains and on to the sea. All the way to the sea.”
I was very young and I imagined the train traveling right to the water’s edge, silver cars on a moonlit beach, the round light in the nose of the squat engine searching the waves for passage.
The art-deco lighthouse of the Chrysler Building slipped into focus, brightly reassuring, a succession of gleaming arrows aimed heavenward. I took a sip of scotch, warm and tasting of oak. I felt suddenly how good it was to be out here, where all the questions would be answered. How good it was to be sitting at a bar in New York City, sipping a fine scotch someone else was paying for, contemplating the future of a man who hoped to rule the country, and knowing, as long as the odds were, that I would be there to see his chance u
nfold. How good it was to be talking to these people around this table about these things with the satisfying prospect of an evening in the city ahead of us.
It had been four hard years since my father’s death, but I felt some cumbrous thing lifting and passing into the glow of the sky. A deep and foreign satisfaction settled inside me, a sense of having managed somehow to arrive at exactly the right place at the right time. I’ve got nothing to lose, I thought. Thomas Crane goes as far as he goes and every day is another one I gain.
I realized I was happy. Happier than I had been in a long time. The feeling would last all of three days, but I remember it so clearly, this brief sense of clarity and peace, this awareness of both ordination and duty.
We were all quiet in the bar, perhaps the others taking their own renewed measure of Crane. Myra shifted restlessly in her seat.
“What are you looking so smug about?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
She pinged her empty glass with a frosted fingernail.
“Well, even if he goes under in a week,” she said, “he got us to Manhattan on expense account on a Friday evening. Dinner anyone?”
IV.
THREE DAYS later a woman hiked across Daley Plaza in Chicago on an afternoon as bright as cut glass. She came steadily my way, ignoring the enigma of the gangly metal Picasso, crossing the stone with the measured steps of someone certain where she is going. An old man in rags and a pith helmet approached her and she reached into a pocket and handed him change without breaking stride. Her blond hair fell to her collar. Almond eyes stared out of a round face. The day was unseasonably warm and her jacket was open. She was wearing baggy jeans, as she often did, over her long legs. Her sweatshirt was several sizes too large, as it always was. I saw CRANE FOR PRESIDENT stenciled above the breast and my heart skipped.
She stopped a few feet from my bench, considered me dispassionately, then managed a smile. She still had a silly Cupid’s bow of a mouth.
