by Reed Karaim
“You need to turn on CNN,” Ellen said flatly.
By the time the screen came to life, Maureen and Kara were fleeing their home, hurrying out the door into the desert sun of the television lights. An elderly woman helping them tried to block the descending circle of reporters, but the camera lunged closer in that jagged rush that has become the American perspective on shame. Kara stared directly into the lens. She had long dark hair and wide eyes in a round face. Then she was gone and the pathetic apple tree on the front lawn stood incongruously front and center, abashed and lonely in the light.
“I guess they’ve had enough of us,” Ellen said.
“Where are they going?”
“Undisclosed location.”
I used the remote control to mute the volume. The picture cut to videotape of Crane’s press conference. I recognized the room at the Washington Hilton instantly. It was all smaller on the screen, smaller and more pathetic and destined to be played over and over again from now until the end of time.
“Cliff? Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Turn it off, Cliff, and go to sleep.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. Thanks.”
But of course I did not turn it off. I watched it happen all over again, and soon I was there, back against the wall, trying not to be seen, watching Thomas Crane’s death march, the way the room took in its breath when he stepped out of the door and crossed the stage to the microphones, his gaze fixed on the far side of the stage, a scrap of paper clutched in his left hand so it bent in two, the staccato of the cameras rising in a wave that lent his movement the slow-motion grace of someone drowning in light.
On television it was all smaller, more tawdry and less tragic. He moved like a marionette and squinted when he turned to face the cameras. But in the room that night he appeared and reappeared between the silhouetted heads and shoulders of the crowd as if struggling through an impossible landscape. I felt Myra leaning against me as she stood on her tiptoes, the dampness of her shoulder in the overheated room. Someone else brushed up against my other shoulder, the person behind me pressed forward. It was so hot the air seemed to shimmer and bend.
The press conference had been called with only an hour’s notice and there were rumors of a screaming match between his advisors in a suite above us, but no one knew what side Crane had been on, whether he wanted to be here or not. I wanted to believe he had made the final choice to appear, but watching him I couldn’t tell. He stood in front of us and he placed one hand in a jacket pocket and on his face was a small, screwed-up ironical smile, a faint ghost of the old charm, the old distance he once seemed effortlessly capable of maintaining from the surreal carnival.
He was wearing a blue suit. His tie was silver. He had allowed them to put on television makeup and they had gotten too much rouge on his cheeks, a strangely cheery shine that made him seem both boyish and false.
“I’d like to begin by . . .” He stared at the shimmering rectangle of white in his hand. “I’d like to . . .”
He glanced helplessly toward the side of the stage where Angela was standing. She stared through him with a shell-shocked grin.
“Eighteen years ago when I was twenty five . . .” He blinked at the cameras as if they were something he did not recognize. “Eighteen years ago when I was twenty five, long before I entered public life, I became the father of a baby girl . . .”
The tension broke in a shuffle and a gasp and the feeling of the crowd moving, despite itself, toward the stage. “Jeesuss,” Myra whispered, scribbling so her arm dug into my side.
The television cameramen were swearing and sweating. They’d been set up too far back. The campaign press corps and the media stars from Washington were jammed up front. The bodies around me were flushed with the heat and the feverish anticipation of catastrophe that sets reporters glowing like banked fires.
“. . . Neither her mother nor I was ready for marriage. Nor did we believe we were particularly well suited to each other. It was the wishes of my daughter’s mother, reached after many hard painful hours of conversation between the two of us, that she raise our daughter privately. I have honored that wish since then. It has not always been easy. But I have always felt I had to respect the wishes of her mother. I have provided regular financial support for my daughter since her birth, and I have been in regular contact with her mother since then, making sure her needs were seen to. Within the very limited role agreed on, I have tried to be responsible and faithful to my obligations as Kara’s father . . .”
His voice had fallen into a strained singsong. It wasn’t the voice we had known, but it seemed to gain strength. I thought he was going to make it to the end.
“The matter is, finally, a private one between Kara’s mother and myself. No one else can understand or judge the choices we have made. No one else can know what either of us has felt over the years. No one else can say if we have done the right thing. You all know how I feel about this story. A child has had her privacy destroyed, her life changed and perhaps ruined for nothing she has done. This is your responsibility. You in the press. One you will have to live with . . .”
They were standing on the edge of the stage, Duprey, Blendin, Angela, as if watching someone teetering on a ledge, afraid an indiscreet breath would send him tumbling. You could see by the way they strained motionlessly toward him they thought he might make it, that there would come a moment when they could reach out and take him in.
“. . . I know that I have dealt as well as I could with a very difficult decision and very personal decision made when I was very young. I believe the American public will understand that, and I hope we will soon be able to return to what really matters, the issues of this campaign.”
He released his grip on the paper and placed it on the podium beneath the microphones and lifted his eyes as if waking from a dream. A separate child, Latrelle once said, peering up at me. There was an awkward silence, and for a moment I thought Crane was going to turn on his heel and leave us while he could. The first question came from Randall Craig.
“Senator, you told the American public you would never lie to them. On the same night, during the debate, you said, ‘I haven’t been lucky enough to have any children.’ Was that the truth?”
Crane leaned toward the cameras. He had been prepared for this question, and in his answer, you saw a glimmer of the old confidence.
“I said Angela and I haven’t been lucky enough to have children. That is the truth. I have never denied Kara was my daughter because I’ve never been asked. As I said, this was a private matter, as was my concern for my daughter’s welfare. A privacy I believe should have been respected.”
His chin came up as he finished and even this modest sign of triumph seemed to confuse us. The room rustled with reporters shifting their weight, scribbling in their notebooks to cover uncertainty. Stuart Abercrombie’s voice broke the silence.
“Senator, have you ever met her—your daughter?”
“No, I’ve spoken to her mother . . .”
“Then how do you know what she wanted?”
Walk away, I thought. Now.
Crane wavered behind the microphones.
“Pardon?”
“How do you know she wants this privacy you talk about if you’ve never spoken to her? How do you know she wouldn’t like to meet her father?”
“Her mother wanted her to have a normal life . . .”
“But, sir, how do you know what she wanted?”
His hair was damp on his forehead. He reached toward it absently. The room was so hot the air seemed ready to ignite.
“I think I’ve explained . . .”
Nathan spoke quickly. “Senator, have you ever sent your daughter a Christmas gift?”
Crane’s angular face went soft, as if the bones had dissolved. His left hand fumbled out of his pocket and he grabbed hold of the podium with both hands.
“No.”
“Ha
ve you ever sent her a birthday gift?”
“No.”
“A birthday card.”
“No.”
“Do you think those things are part of fatherhood?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve talked a lot about character in this campaign, Senator. What kind of father have you been?”
Crane’s mouth opened and closed. The room was so quiet you could hear the klieg lights hum. He tried to smile and his mouth opened and closed again and he stumbled back a step from the microphones. Blendin crossed the stage in three wide strides and ended the press conference and then came the deluge, the questions shouted about birth control and abortion, and the woman in back who began screaming, I know him, I know him, and the fight that broke out between the two photographers who had been jockeying for position from the beginning. At the edge of the stage Crane reached blindly for Angela, who stood as still as a winter morning.
A knee clipped me in the shin as the press rushed toward the door to file, Myra squeezing my arm once before she disappeared. I waited in the back of the room until they were all gone, and then waited until they were down the hall, and then waited until the lights had all been taken down and then waited.
But none of that was on the television. On television Crane was frozen in close-up at the end, sweat rolling out of his hair, smile struggling and forever failing to be born. On television the press conference ended with his expression at the moment he heard the last question, the moment before he fled, the expression of a child walking into a new school and realizing that all the friends he has known his whole life are gone.
I sat in the dark and watched it all unspool again on the screen and I thought, This. This you have done.
II.
THE FIRST person I saw when I returned to the campaign was a radio reporter who had crippled legs and moved along on metal crutches. He was standing underneath the plane’s wing in the rain while a mechanic hammered at something inside one of the landing-gear bays. A half-dozen other reporters huddled beneath the other wing, smoking, faces lost in the drizzle. The radio reporter noticed me and came swinging my way. Everyone liked him because he had to work harder than the rest of us to keep up, and he did it with unfailing good cheer, but we had never been close, and I stopped in surprise, touched and a little uncertain.
“Cliff,” he said, panting. “Do you have time for an interview?”
Then I understood the way he had been staring at me. It was the way a surgeon might contemplate a discolored pancreas. I was now a news object, a part of the story.
“Let me get settled in first. Maybe we can talk at the first stop.”
He nodded in disappointment and swung his legs back toward the plane. I showed the Secret Service agent my tags and carried my bags up the stairs, assaulted by the smells I knew so well, the sweat, the old food, the odor of dirty bags full of dirty laundry. I stared down the narrow cylinder at the defaced luggage bins, the crowded seats, the aisle milling with staff and reporters, and the world swung on a gimbal. The sense of return was vertiginous. This was home.
I threw my garment bag into the netted storage space in the back. One of the CBS cameramen was flicking Styrofoam peanuts across the aisle. He aimed at my head and then stopped when he recognized me, the peanut poised on his thumb.
I was in my seat before other reporters gathered around. They crowded into the aisle and the rows in front and back of mine, people I had lived with for months, suddenly tentative and awkward.
“They let you come back,” Nathan said.
“They did.”
There were a few half-hearted welcomes. Stuart stood with his thin arms folded, peering down his nose at me.
“It might have been more merciful just to leave our boy alone from here on in.”
The plane shuddered. You could hear the dull thump of a hammer beneath our feet. A campaign drains everyone; they all had looked tired when I left, but then the exhaustion had been tinged with euphoria. Now they looked battered.
The Associated Press reporter leaned across Myra to shake my hand.
“Good story. You lucky bastard,” he said.
Randall Craig smiled at me from across the aisle. “Ruthless. And I always thought you were a softie.”
“No, he’s the quiet assassin,” someone said.
A CBS producer, a small Asian woman, leaned against Craig’s seat. “He’s a killer. I’m just wondering, do you know how that poor little girl felt when she found out who her father was?”
Starke appeared from the galley. He hesitated on the edge of the group and then slid by, never looking at me, never saying a word, a trembling flush on his full cheeks.
The heart went out of the party after that. When everyone had drifted back to their seats, Myra lifted her Bugs Bunny sunglasses and considered me in a parody of wide-eyed amazement.
“It’s Mr. Popularity. Back from television.”
“Just get me up to speed.”
She laughed. “Speed? There is no speed. You’re the angel of death and this is a slow-motion train wreck. You done killed him, boss. What more do you want to know?”
“What’s happening with the party?”
“Oh that.” She shrugged. “The central committee met and it looks like he’s going to survive. There’s just not time to find another candidate. Besides, how do you do it? Recall the convention? He hasn’t committed a crime. He didn’t commit treason. He just had a kid and somehow forgot to tell the whole world. It’s going to be close, but what’re they gonna do?”
I didn’t say anything.
“One thing, Cliff?”
“Yeah.”
“A lot of fools on this plane, and I don’t mean up in front, believed in this campaign. I recommend extreme caution, cowboy, from here on out.”
The hammering stopped. The engines roared. I felt my heart straining to take wing, to return to the solace of flight, the false significance of travel. I felt my blood pulse in the rhythm of constant motion it knew so well.
In the front cabin Crane came out of the pilot’s door. As he moved toward his seat he looked up and saw me. There were hollows around his eyes and a stain on his shirt sleeve. His skin had an exhausted, moonlit pallor. He raised his chin, almost as though he was about to nod, the way he used to when he recognized me at the edge of a crowd, and a surprisingly abstract curiosity seemed to linger in his expression, and for a moment I thought it might be all right somehow, that there was an explanation I could make if given the chance. But the question, if it was ever there, faded from his interest. His eyes, which seemed to have grown in prominence, went flat and he looked away.
Starke appeared at the entrance to the cabin and ripped the curtain shut.
“Welcome home,” Myra said.
He spoke that night in an arena with a bad sound system, his voice muffled and flat as it bounced off the walls and girders. The crowds had become sullen while I was gone. The first reaction to scandal is often sympathy. The second is not. It had taken a few days for a sense of betrayal to settle in across the country, and it had taken a while for his opponents to organize their fury. But both sentiments flowered that night. I remember how motionless he was behind the podium, his jacket off, a thin man in a white shirt in a circle of light, while out in the darkness, the crowd moved restlessly and then broke into the chant we would come to know so well. Crane Crane what’s her name? Then the schoolyard taunt of Liar Liar Liar starting in back and filling the audience briefly with sour glee before it broke up into catcalls. He turned pages with a lifeless hand and spoke in dull reverberating sounds and walked slowly at the end to the back of the stage, where he disappeared in three steps, legs, shoulders, head, without a backward glance.
He reappeared the next morning in reverse, climbing onto the stage at the last possible moment and reading his speech while a sleepy, sullen crowd gathered its bile. He escaped before they had time to jeer and then we didn’t see him again until the afternoon. The curtain in the plane was pulled shut all the tim
e now and it was only secondhand, in the vacant murmurings of stunned staff, that we heard he was sitting alone at his table between stops, reading a worn black book with orders that he not be disturbed. It was only through rumors that we heard he was sitting up at night, that he had stopped sleeping, and that he had given orders that no one ride with him in the back of the limousine or speak to him for ten minutes before he climbed up on each stage. There was talk he was drinking and I didn’t believe it. There was talk Angela had started staying in another room and I didn’t want to believe it. There was endless speculation about the book and I thought I knew the answer. I had handed it back to him one night on the primary trail when he had been trying to explain a time in his past, a remembrance that had been based on lies.
I wondered what he thought he could find in Grant’s Memoirs, written by a far different politician trying to recover from disgrace. I sat in my seat and stared at the curtain pulled tightly closed and it was hard to shake the vision of Thomas Crane bent over that book in the middle of the night, turning worn pages in a search for explanation, consolation, redemption. It was hard to shake but it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t told the lie that sent him scuttling toward a greater man’s life for solace. I hadn’t built a ruined kingdom around a false promise. I hadn’t made the cardinal mistake. The only mistake I had made was taking so long to see the truth.
A long trip through the Bible Belt had been planned back when all things seemed possible. It should have been changed, but the schedule seemed to have gained a life of its own. At our first stop in Memphis, Crane spoke for only fifteen minutes before skipping to the last paragraph and finishing in a rush, his good-bye buried in a taunting chant. That night Timothy Blendin screamed at the travel staff, “I don’t care. Don’t put him out in another field like that where half the fucking lunatics in this fucking lunatic country can get at him. Change the venue! Get the party to hold a party event where we can control the crowd! Do you understand? Don’t leave him out there like that in the open!” They stared at him with the bewildered, terrified expression of sheep caught in a thunderstorm, but it was too late to make the changes and the next morning’s rally was at a landing strip where, for the first time, the audience waved dime-store baby dolls with frozen pouts and wide wanting eyes, held aloft like a children’s crusade marshaled to expose his hypocrisy.
