If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  We were silent, left breathless by this casual assertion of the material world.

  A skater slid out from under the trestle, a slanted shadow suspended above skates winking in the dark. He floated past and toward the bridge, his blades scissoring the ice with a chill sound in the dark.

  “I would like to do this again,” I said.

  The skater’s back was a suspended patch of gray. The sound of his skates came down the river like a series of faint, painful incisions. And I knew I had gone too far.

  Robin shivered and gathered herself, lifting her chin, straightening her back. A hand came up and tucked her hair behind her ear.

  “We have to get back,” she said. “They might be waiting for me.”

  “All right.”

  “It was a nice walk. Thank you.”

  She turned and walked quickly back up the path, the castle leering at us over the top of the evergreens.

  I dreamt that night of Robin skating on the rink beside the Natural History Museum. It was the place she went to remember home the first winter we spent in Washington, the winter we knew no one and she could not find a job. In my dream I sat on a bench beside the green, wrought-iron pavilion and watched as she glided around the ice and slowly disappeared, her legs fading first, then her waist, then her shoulders, growing fainter with each circuit until all that was left was her bobbing hair and the flash of her skates.

  I woke up and it was a long moment before I remembered I was in a hotel in Boston and the muffled throb I heard was early morning traffic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, and I stood at the window, watching the city take shape in the quartered light of dawn, and thought about how Thomas Crane never hesitated, never hesitated, and I remembered my visit to Berthold and knew why Robin’s words bothered me.

  VI.

  I HAD VISITED Crane’s hometown for the first time on a Saturday afternoon in January. I drove down from Springfield through rolling farm country, came over a hill no different than the last hill and saw Berthold on the left side of the highway a half mile ahead.

  The town hung low in the gray winter light like a raft barely afloat. The road behind me was deserted. I stopped and stood by my car, leaning against the door. I could see the backs of two brick buildings, a red house between skeletal trees, a ramshackle grain elevator clinging to the sky, a cemetery on a hill. The town was no larger than it had to be to survive; any smaller and it would disappear in the first heavy snow.

  I thought of the prairie towns that had flared up suddenly in the darkness when I rode the train across North Dakota on my way home from college, the way they filled me with a feeling that God sat crouched over the world, contemplating each pale yellow farm light.

  I had spoken to Crane’s sister, who lived in California, by phone before my trip, and I hoped to visit with his brother, who still lived in the old family house. But I’d been told to start with his cousin, Eddie, who would show me the town. I was here to find out about his life, but I had already begun my investigation and the beginnings glimmered in my mind.

  I knew he had been born without a name at three in the morning on a sultry night in August. His sister remembered sweating at her mother’s bedside while they waited for the doctor to come from Springfield, forty miles away. He just made it before the baby, the youngest in a family of three children, came squalling into the world with a full shock of black hair and a healthy set of lungs. His sister remembered Tom Crane and his mother dozing on an old iron bed that night, while through the open window the cornfield swished with the sound of a woman softly brushing her hair.

  I knew he was born in a small house on the edge of Berthold, a simple square white cottage with a front porch sagging like a pair of old shoulders and a tile roof the color of moss. He was born with a dying father who would take years to die. His father’s hacking cough, the rattle of lungs burned by coal dust, carried easily through the walls at night, and his sister remembered that you heard the cough, then his mother toss in bed, then a strange creak that sounded as if someone was coming up the cellar steps. In the winter the house smelled of the menthol rub his father kneaded into his chest.

  He was not given a name his first four months. No one remembered why. He came six years after the last child, and his sister thought her parents may simply have been out of ideas; his brother told me later they couldn’t agree. Without a name, the parish priest would not baptize him, and his sister remembered being deeply ashamed to have a child crawling about who would be confined forever to Purgatory if something terrible should happen, where he would never, ever see the face of God. She watched him as if he were made of glass, never letting him get near anything that might scratch his cheeks or bruise his hands. He was coddled and anonymous, a perfect every-baby, which is how they thought of him: the embodiment of precious infancy without further identity. She thought her mother might have liked it that way.

  When they finally gave him a name it was a serious one. Thomas Hart Crane.

  Eddie was standing beside his pickup outside the town bar, a short, broad man with thick wrists and heavy hands that hung open at his side. He wore a ski jacket, blue jeans, square-heeled boots.

  “So you’re the reporter.” His speech was clipped, the consonants hard and unfriendly on the teeth, unlike any Illinois accent I had heard.

  “I am that man.” I shook his hand.

  “Cannon Newspapers,” he said slowly. “Don’t believe I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s a chain. About forty newspapers around the country. The biggest is in San Diego.”

  “So that’s where you’re from then?”

  “No. I work in Washington. The company has a bureau there.”

  He spat and rubbed his neck thoughtfully. His face was heavily seamed and the only hint I could see of his famous cousin was in the squareness of the jaw and the amiable way the skin crinkled around his eyes.

  “That where you were born?”

  “Nobody was born in Washington. I grew up in Montana. A little city called Havre, up near Canada, about halfway across the state.”

  His eyes softened a little. He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and shrugged.

  “I’ll take you around this burg if you want. Not that there’s that much to see.”

  He drove me up and down Berthold that afternoon, stopping every few feet to tell me another story. I heard first about the coal mine, the shuttered remains of which crouched in a cluster of trees a half mile away. The mine had provided work for most of the men in the town for the first half of the century. I heard how they worked on their hands and knees in the narrowest tunnels, earning seventy-five cents for every ton mined, burning the mine out of their heads at the same time they burned up their paycheck in the half-dozen bars that once lined Main Street.

  They were all gone but one. There was a post office and a single bar on the block that qualified as Main Street. The town was no more than a couple dozen houses scattered among vacant lots and the tumbled-down remains of old sheds and cars with weeds sprouting through glassless windows. The gravel streets ran in a simple square, the one stray branch climbing the hill to the cemetery.

  Eddie and I retired to the bar and I heard how Thomas Crane’s family had been one of the poorest in a town where almost everyone was poor once the mine started to wind down. Still, the town knew he was something special before he was twelve—when he was already playing baseball with the high school boys, racing around the bases in a skinny-legged, pell-mell blur that left you feeling he would surely come apart. For the next three days I listened to Eddie and others, and I soaked up the entire Thomas Crane iconography, the story that would become so familiar to all of us, even if it turned out to be no more true than any legend. I heard how he had gotten into the private Catholic school in Springfield because some of the wealthiest farmers in the area had gotten together and agreed to pay his tuition, how he headed out every morning that first year before dawn, standing on the highway and waiting to hitch a ride into Springfield. I
heard how he succeeded at St. Thomas Aquinas High School beyond the town’s hopes, becoming class president and the school’s best athlete. I heard about the scholarship to Princeton and the two years in the army in Europe. I heard how he came back home when his mother died unexpectedly, flying all night from a post-army trip through Italy to make the funeral and then staying to arrange his father’s medical care, proving he hadn’t gotten too big for his hometown or his family, no matter how far he’d come.

  For three days I drove back to Berthold every morning, circled its gravel streets, talked to anyone who remembered Crane, and absorbed the story I would later help to sell to the public as a small model of our national aspirations, our best sense of what is possible for someone who has a particularly American combination of athletic grace, faith, and keenness of desire that we persist in idealizing, despite all jaded protestations otherwise.

  I admired it too, but there was something else that I never got into print, because I was writing for Cannon Newspapers and we publish our stories in black-and-white. As I put the man I had seen on the road together with his past, Thomas Crane came to seem the embodiment of a certain midwestern kind of ambition, no less determined for being cloaked in the self-effacing manners of the region. I heard stories of charm, but I saw striving, striving, striving. Private school. Princeton. The army. Graduate school. And then, so quickly, his first congressional race.

  On my last night in Berthold, I drove into the country with Eddie to visit one of Crane’s early patrons. Roger Amb was finishing his chores and we sat in his pickup truck when he was done, listening to the bump and swish of cattle milling in the twilight by the barn. Amb pulled off a glove and ran a dry and cracked hand through the high widow’s peak of his gray hair. His face was narrow and sharp like a bird’s.

  “I guess I’ve been one of his biggest supporters since he first ran,” he said. “That’s true.”

  “You’ve given to every campaign?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “How much?”

  “Well, the maximum, I guess. What is that now?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’ve known him since the beginning. I heard you helped him go to high school at St. Thomas Aquinas.”

  He stared absently out the window at the darkness swallowing up his barn.

  “A few of us helped him out. That wasn’t anything, really. He was a smart kid and his family was poor. I hope you won’t put that in your story.”

  I stopped writing. I could write it down later.

  “What I really wanted to talk to you about is why you’ve supported him the way you have.”

  Amb pulled a crumpled pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and held it in his lap.

  “Oh, I don’t know. He’s a good man. I’ve been a Democrat for years, and I just thought, from the first time I heard him speak, Tom Crane is going places. I agree with almost all his positions and those I don’t, well, I tell him.”

  “You helped organize the rally on the Capitol steps that kicked off his presidential campaign?”

  “Yeah, he called and wondered if I could help set things up. No big deal. I was glad to help.”

  “Why do all that for him? Because he’s a hometown boy?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe that’s part of it—we got a little pride here, you know. But he’s a good man like I said, a smart man. He came from a poor family and look at him now, not only is he a senator, he’s made a lot of money, handled his investments well. I don’t think he needs any money. He’s smart and he believes in the things he says. We could do worse in the White House, I’ll tell you that.”

  “It seems like he’s had a pretty charmed life here politically,” I said, “almost foreordained.”

  Amb lit a cigarette, rolling the window down an inch and watching the smoke curl into the darkness.

  “You’d think so, but you know, we had a hell of a time getting him to run the first time. The House seat was just sitting there, waiting for him, and so a group of us went and talked to him. He’d been active in the party since he came back and people were already buzzing, but it took him a week to make up his mind. He and his new wife were living in Springfield then. He didn’t tell us, but he came back here for a couple days before he told us he’d give it a shot. Same thing when the time came to make the Senate run. He took his time and wouldn’t say yes right away. He was in Washington then, and he came back here before he made up his mind. It took him another week.”

  I jotted down words absently. “Came back here?”

  “I saw him on the highway south of town. He disappeared and we had to keep after him for a week,” Amb said. “So I guess maybe he’s not quite as driven as you people all think.”

  The Illinois countryside felt close inside the pickup, the stolid shuffle of the cattle, the sweet and sour smells of hay and manure, the trees creaking in the cold.

  “He’s running for president,” I said. “You don’t usually do that by accident.”

  I thought nothing more about it at the time. There are unaccountable moments, odd hesitations in everyone’s life. But standing by the window in Boston, watching dawn move in a hammered copper sheet across the Prudential Building, I wondered. Thomas Crane pausing irresolute on the ladder of his destiny, disappearing while he vacillated—it was a little thing, but it failed to fit with the man I knew, and as the day spread to the streets below, I found myself coming back to it again and again, like a sensitive tooth you can’t keep from touching.

  VII.

  THE DEER jumped out of the morning fog, an arc of brown and white crashing onto the damp highway in front of us, and our driver hit the brakes and the van slid and came to a teetering halt sideways on the road.

  Crane was sitting in the front passenger seat and I had been leaning forward between the seats to do my interview. I had asked him about his mother’s death and he had hesitated and said something about how hard it was and then the deer slid on its rear hooves into the middle of the highway. I don’t think there was any real danger; we never left the road and we never felt close to tipping over, but we were slammed forward and knocked off balance before the van stopped. I ended up sprawled over the transmission hump.

  “Jesus Christ!” said the driver, a pale, crew-cut college student. “Christ, I’m sorry. He came out of nowhere . . . Man!”

  He turned and looked at Crane for understanding, and Crane was staring out his window. The deer was staring back, inches away on the other side of the glass, frozen with fear, the long brown petals of its ears stiff, nostrils distended, brown eyes damp and wide and very alive. Crane looked at those eyes and a shadowy recognition filled his face.

  The deer reared back suddenly with a strange little hop, white chest flashing high, before it turned and sprang into the trees along the road, rear hooves disappearing in midair as they punched a hole in the fog.

  We sat silently askew in the middle of the highway as Crane stared through an empty window until his eyes changed focus and he saw himself in the glass.

  “Is everyone okay?” he asked.

  “God, I’m sorry,” the driver said again, voice half an octave too high. “I never saw him, Senator. Honest.”

  Crane’s hand rose absently and squeezed the driver’s shoulder. “It’s all right. There wasn’t anything you could do. Let’s get back on the road.”

  He looked out the window again, as if he could see some faint trail hanging in the air. Then he remembered where he was and I watched him fashion a rueful, abashed grin to be presented to me in the rearview mirror.

  “Six more inches and there went the animal rights vote.”

  I’d gathered myself back into my seat and was trying to ignore the runaway train pounding inside my chest. “Not to mention everyone who saw Bambi.”

  The driver straightened out the van and headed down the road, creeping along at fifty-five miles an hour, his wrists corded with tension. I glanced behind us and saw the staff car on our tail and t
he first car full of reporters behind it. They’d all be wondering what the hell had happened.

  “All right,” Crane said briskly. “What was I saying?”

  “We were talking about your mother. When she died.”

  “Yes.” The smile was swallowed up in a word. He looked out the window. We were coming into the outskirts of Manchester and he watched a Texaco sign slide by. It was the morning after the debate, a morning for exhilaration. They had been waiting for him outside the hotel, waving signs as if his campaign had started the night before. We had three camera crews with us and the advance staff said a giddy crowd was waiting at the high school.

  “My mother. She was a complicated woman, had a lot of expectations for us. But she held our family together. She was really the glue, as they say. Have you ever lost anyone close to you like that, Cliff? A parent?”

  “My father.”

  “Well. Then you know.”

  We had brushed up against another intimacy. I glanced down at my notebook.

  “You came back home then,” I said.

  “I came back home.”

  “But you didn’t stay.”

  “That’s right.” He pursed his lips as if I was inferring something unfair. “You have to make choices.”

  Our driver came to a stop sign and inched us around the corner.

  “You have to make choices,” Crane said more firmly. “You have to decide what you’re going to do. I had to decide if I was going to stay in Berthold and take care of my father. I had to decide what my life was going to be about. It was that kind of moment . . .”

  He stopped and looked down the street at the approaching high school. The day was so clear a bead of winter light sparkled along the edge of everything. You could see signs waving in the parking lot, red, white and blue.

  “Oh man,” the driver said. “Look at them out there.”