If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  Crane stood up and walked out the door, his Secret Service agents shrugging themselves awake and following him. “We’re going for a walk,” he said, and when they started to object, he ignored them and continued moving toward the elevator. It was nearly five a.m. and Manhattan was a mausoleum of twentieth-century desire. He walked until he came to the Disney Store, where he stood in his shirt sleeves, his jacket left behind in the hotel, staring at cartoon cells of Mickey and Pluto, shaking his head when one of the agents offered him his coat. He walked on, peering through glass at the Gucci store, the Bill Blass collection, diamonds and rubies, electric trains and bright pastel furniture that looked as if it had been fashioned from beach balls. He pondered televisions small enough to fit in your hand and a telephone inside a pen.

  He came, finally, to a wall of televisions, a video display on which a giant bird flapped across all the screens, a thousand different images inside the wings, people, automobiles, fires, riots, basketball games, ballet, buildings, streets, the images changing in a fluid ripple as the wing beat up and down, moving across the screens in one giant image that was the sum of all its parts and much more. He watched it quietly for several minutes, a wrecking ball, a neon sign, a crowd, a church spire, Einstein, Madonna, Hemingway, a broken step, a stained-glass window, a sunrise, a moon, a child dancing in a shower from a broken hydrant.

  He stood in front of the window while the agents waited behind him in the pearly light of dawn. Much later they would remember the way he leaned into his reflection on the shimmering glass. “Listen to me,” he said.

  The next morning Starke stood on a chair in the hotel lobby.

  “The visit to the school is off. We’re going to a children’s hospital.”

  The room was surgically bright, early sunlight flooding every corner. We had been struggling to shake ourselves free of the previous night, but now a brittle stillness descended on everyone.

  “I’ve got the name here somewhere.” Starke fumbled through a handful of crumpled papers. “Oh, of course. The Brooklyn Children’s Hospital.” He read on in an uninflected voice: “The senator hopes to demonstrate his concern for children suffering from America’s healthcare shortage. As you know it’s always been a top concern of his and Angela’s.”

  Someone laughed out loud. Myra stood in front of Starke’s chair, squinting at him in disbelief. “Jesus, John.”

  Starke had been battered until his waxed-fruit good health had collapsed into the sheen of a worn seat cushion. But he had become more important to the campaign than ever, his blindness to irony now an irreplaceable asset.

  “We’ll be visiting with several patients, including a child whose mother is deceased and who suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. I believe we’ll also be stopping by another ward later.” He coughed and read on. “The problems of America’s children are close to the heart of this campaign, and this is a chance for Thomas Crane to talk about the solutions to those problems . . . We’ll be leaving in just a couple of minutes.”

  When he was gone, Myra stood next to Nathan and sipped her coffee, watching steam curl above the cup in a thin ashen wreath.

  “This is it,” she said. “The thirteenth circle of hell. A photo-op with dying children.”

  The hospital hallway smelled of the antiseptic cleanser used to cover the odors of blood and urine. The walls were a pale yellow, scarred by gurneys and carts in rubbery black streaks. The dull chant from outside was no more than a murmur. Still, the hospital administrator twitched at the sound, his newly pressed lab coat swishing against his legs.

  “Yes, that is correct,” the administrator said. “The cost will be well over a million dollars and the family can’t pay for any of it.”

  Crane stood in the middle of the hallway with the cameras running and all of us in a mob behind him. He was the same man whose appearance had been burned into our retinas, the shock of dark hair, the long forehead, the soft, slightly-too-full mouth. He wore the same beautifully cut suits and held his hands together in front of his belt buckle in a way we could all mimic in our sleep. He was the same and yet not the same at all. His neck hung loose in his collar. His knees were awkwardly locked. He seemed to be having trouble concentrating.

  “And the aunt and uncle who are caring for her,” he said. “I understand they had insurance, but it was canceled when the cost of her care became clear.”

  “That is correct.” The administrator’s long face hung heavy with discomfort.

  Crane nodded. His gaze wandered down the hall and then swept back over our heads, lingering on the bright yellow frosted glass of the entrance.

  “And the uncle has had to . . . quit his job,” he said, “so the family would become eligible for Medicaid benefits.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A situation created by an antiquated healthcare system that . . .”

  His left hand moved minutely against his leg, tapping out the rhythm of the muffled chant. Murderer murderer.

  “. . . that doesn’t allow families to . . .”

  His gaze came down from above our heads and he looked at us as if we were some imponderable embarrassment.

  “Maybe you could show us to the girl’s room now,” he said.

  The administrator spun gratefully and led the way down the corridor. Two nurses, who had been standing invisibly against the wall, fell in line. Starke faced the rest of us. “We go to the door of the room and then it’s tight pool inside.”

  The doors to all the rooms were closed, but at each hallway intersection, people waited for a glimpse of Crane—nurses, doctors, children in wheelchairs, patients in shapeless blue smocks. He strode past them and their greetings as if he could not afford a moment’s hesitation. The administrator broke into a trot at his side. Boom mikes bobbed like giraffes above their heads as the sound men struggled to keep up. The rest of us trailed in a rush, jostling and clanking along in the narrow space.

  Her door was half-open and you could see the girl sitting up in bed, her head shaved, her mouth protruding from sunken cheeks. The cameramen shot forward and Crane approached not only the door but the faint circular reflections of himself in their lenses.

  He could have gone in. There is no floor in the cellar of American politics, and we could have fallen straight through the election, slid down and down and down, and no one would have caught us, and this day would have been forgotten in others worse. But he stopped at the doorway.

  The girl smiled at him, but she is forever off camera, and there is only his own smile back as his eyes settled on hers and filled with gratitude.

  “We’re not going to do this,” he said.

  The administrator halted at the doorway. Starke tried to speak.

  “We’re not going to do this,” Crane said again, more loudly, as if hearing his own voice for the first time. “Not with cameras. Not as a dog-and-pony show.” He faced us. “You can wait out here or you can go back to the buses. Nobody is coming inside with me. I’m sorry. We . . . I . . . made a mistake.” His old smile appeared like a flame burning through paper. “It’s possible it’s not my first.”

  Someone, I believe it was Stuart, started to ask a question and Crane stepped closer, passing in front of a small crowd in an adjoining hall. I remember the caged metal lights above his head, the graying tile beneath his feet, the stained and scarred walls that spoke of parsimonious maintenance budgets eked out month after month.

  The woman was waiting at the junction. How she got past security I don’t know, but we were in a public hospital with a dozen entrances and the campaign had traveled amid chaos for a long time. She wore a faded print dress with a blue sweater draped over her shoulders. Her hair was stringy, lopped off in featureless bangs that met her eyebrows. She looked like the exhausted mother of a sick child, and when she stepped forward with her right hand extended it took the Secret Service a precious second to realize her left hand held something beneath the sweater.

  The agent nearest her tried to block the jar after she threw it, b
ut he only sent it tumbling through the air. Crane watched it turn in slow motion beneath the lights, a glinting mustard brown satellite with a darker heart. He tried, almost absently, to catch it when it was a foot from his chest, but it slipped through his hand. He grabbed once more as it fell, so he was bent over when it shattered on the floor. The preserving fluid spattered him across the chest and along his right cheek.

  The fetus emerged as a small, pale thing with discolored veins in its head.

  The next moment is lost in a blur, agents pulling him against the wall, the woman’s screams cut short by an arm around her throat, guns everywhere, the crowd falling back and then surging forward eagerly, the police, the cameramen stumbling over each other, the random shouts for order.

  Crane stood up, lifting the hand of an agent off his shoulder. He stared at the fetus as the puddle leaked toward his feet. He watched it near his shoes; then with a hard, abrupt shake of his head, he stepped over it into the hallway.

  “Get someone to take care of that. Handle it decently.” He looked at the woman held face-down on the floor by three agents and a policeman. “Be gentle with her.”

  The hospital administrator had flattened himself against the wall and still stood there as if chained. Crane glanced at him and turned to one of the nurses.

  “We’ll continue here in five minutes and then we’ll go on to the other ward. I need a bathroom to clean up first. What was the child’s name, Sally? Please tell Sally I’m sorry but I’ll be late.”

  They were dragging the woman down the hallway behind him. She twisted her mouth free and shouted, “Murderer!” but he never looked back. He stood in front of us, wiping his hands on a towel a nurse handed him. He dropped the towel in Starke’s arms.

  “Send everybody back to the buses. They have their story for today.”

  The mayor was late that night to a reception at the Helmsley Palace and Crane waited in a room just off the lobby. The press had been shipped off to our hotel for the night, except for the pool. Nathan hung on the outside edge of Crane’s circle. The campaign had delayed canceling a visit to the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta out of wistfulness about old possibilities. Now it was only two days away and Duprey thought they should travel to the West Coast instead.

  “The young Dems at the University of Oregon would love to have us,” said Anne Paxton. “The hall is available and they’ll handle everything else.”

  “They’ve got a great old hall there,” Starke said. “Three balconies, brings the crowd in close, great atmosphere.”

  Crane slumped in a Queen Anne chair, sipping Diet Coke, and he hardly seemed to be listening. Through the doorway, he could see people passing unaware across the lobby, and he watched them intently, as if they held some great secret.

  “Well. If they’ve got three balconies,” he said, “then we should certainly fly all the way across the country.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “We’re going to the Baptist convention,” Crane said. “If they’ll still have us.”

  “Oh, Christ, they’ll have us all right,” Duprey said. “For breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

  Crane crumpled the Coke can between his palms.

  “Fine. Let them gnaw on my bones.”

  He stood up, wavering slightly, picked up his jacket, fumbled with his tie, jerking it into place.

  “You’re not going to change any minds by showing up,” Duprey said. “And it’s going to look like shit on television.”

  “Any worse than it has, Steven? Any worse than it’s looked for weeks?”

  He started suddenly toward the lobby, Duprey loping at his side.

  “It’s going to look like hell, Senator.”

  “I suppose. Your job is to make it look as good as possible.”

  Duprey stroked his beard and then he started to laugh. They left him behind, standing there with a wild, renewed light in his eyes.

  Crane entered the main lobby, crossing the wading pool of pink-and-blue carpet, heading toward the first person he saw, a young woman in a business suit standing with a small leather bag nuzzling her ankle. He approached like an arrow, and she took a step backward before she recognized him. He held out his hand.

  “I’m Thomas Crane,” he said. “I’m running for president.”

  He grabbed an overweight businessman next and then a couple who had wandered out of the reception. He stopped a tourist and her daughters and trapped two bellboys. He worked his way across the room with an exhausted, obsessive focus on each hand, each face, each word uttered. When he finished he turned toward the hotel entrance.

  “Has anyone seen the mayor yet?”

  Starke had been on the cell phone. “He’s still five minutes away.”

  Crane took a deep breath. “Let’s go out on the street.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s work the street. Right now.”

  And they went outside. I was ten blocks away in another hotel, watching the rain fall against my window, but I imagine the scene with a particular clarity. A touch of frost in the air. Taxis splashing down Madison Avenue. Pedestrians hurrying past in their blind, end-of-the-day march. A slender man in a gray topcoat steps in front of them, and they glance up reluctantly to see the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. Some greet him warmly. Some turn away. He doesn’t seem to notice. He moves on to the next person. Now the rain begins to fall more heavily. The night fills with the hiss of tires and the bleat of traffic. Umbrellas mushroom black and red and yellow. Crane steps back under the hotel marquee, soaking wet, and he is laughing. Water runs down his face, falls off his chin. He stands next to the door and, as people dart in out of the rain, holds out his hand, holds out a politician’s hand.

  V.

  I WAS WORKING on a story and at first I didn’t recognize her voice, barely audible through the usual cacophony of keyboards and phones and chatter. When she said my name it took a moment to sift up through my thoughts. I saw myself standing on the other side of a screen door in the sunlight. I saw her considering me like a monster as she shut the door.

  The television was in the back of the press room. I had to push my way through a small crowd to get a look. She was sitting on the couch in the studio of the Today Show, her daughter at her side. They were both wearing blue dresses with high collars, Kara’s a girlish pastel, perched with their knees primly together. They looked as if they had just come from church and would be off after the interview to serve Sunday dinner to the less fortunate.

  I didn’t hear the question, but Maureen said my name again. “No, I told Mr. O’Connell at the time, I never felt mistreated or ignored.”

  She spoke in the midwestern accent I remembered and which, I now realized, sounded much like his. She looked her interviewer square in the eye, leaning forward slightly, as if sincerity was a steel bar welding them together.

  “You have to understand,” she said. “This was as much my choice as his.”

  Katie Couric asked the essential television question.

  “And how do you feel about what’s happened to you in this campaign?”

  “I don’t think it’s right the way our privacy has been violated. We didn’t ask for a hundred reporters on our lawn. We didn’t ask to have to move someplace where we could get some peace. We didn’t commit a crime. We didn’t do anything wrong. We haven’t hurt anybody—”

  “But now you’ve voluntarily come forward,” Couric said. “Why?”

  Maureen looked into the lens. Her plain, handsome face with its honestly earned lines and its thin, proud mouth had never looked better.

  “Because what’s being done to Tom is worse. I’m not going to let the man who gave me a daughter I love, and who’s done everything since that I’ve asked, face this alone. He’s too good a man . . .”

  Cheers erupted in a corner of the room and I turned to see staff gathered around a portable television, slapping each other on the back, stunned, staggering, laughing.

  “. . . I want
people to understand that I don’t feel Tom Crane did anything wrong. I don’t feel he lied or misled anyone except to protect me and my daughter. I want people to know I’m proud he’s Kara’s father . . .”

  Reporters flew toward tape recorders, notebooks. I walked back to my spot at the table and sat down in front of my computer.

  “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

  John Starke’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes had a mad, midnight glow. The room dropped into astonished silence. He climbed onto a table.

  “Transcripts of the Today Show interview will be available for anyone who wants them in half an hour. As you heard, the complete interview will appear on Dateline tomorrow night. For now, we have this to say, quoting me, not the senator: ‘We’re glad to see that Maureen Barstow has reaffirmed what we believe the voters already know. Thomas Crane’s personal integrity has never been an issue with anyone who knows him well, and it should not be an issue in this campaign.”

  “What does the senator have to say?” Nathan asked. “Does he have any reaction to this appearance by his daughter and her mother?”

  “Thomas Crane is busy with the things that have concerned him this entire campaign. The issues important to American voters, the state of the economy, the condition of our cit—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, John,” Myra said. “Come on.”

  Starke looked down at her. He raised his thumb to his nose, stuck out his tongue, spun on a heel like a drunken soldier and hopped off the table, skipping once when he landed. The last thing we heard as he disappeared was a high-pitched keening that was widely considered, after some debate, to be the sound of John Starke laughing.