The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  Some of the picket signs were already finished. As I watched, a brisk-looking woman began to ink in the same slogans on sign after sign: “Local 507 nurses speak out for patients!” and “Keep St. Francis safe. Support striking nurses.” I had no problem with those, but other stacks, already completed, seemed to have been lettered by a Bolshevik with heartburn. They read “St. Francis: bad for nurses, deadly for patients,” and “Stop killer overtime before people get killed.”

  “Tony,” I said, pointing. “You can’t use those.”

  “You’re here five minutes and you’re telling me what slogans we can use?”

  “Tony, people like nurses. They trust nurses. But they don’t want to see nurses with their fists in the air like some bad imitation of Che Guevara.”

  “What are they supposed to do, sit in a circle singing Peter, Paul and Mary songs? Lie down in front of the Coventry lawyers’ limo to make the ride softer for the fat cats?” said Tony. “We need to show some righteous anger here.”

  “Anger is okay, but it has to be grieved anger, principled anger, like the image people have of Florence Nightingale fighting for medical supplies for wounded soldiers in the Crimea. Motherly. Steadfast, calm, and caring. That’s the way to go, don’t you think?”

  Tony made a gagging motion with his finger.

  “Cut it out. I told you I was right, Tony,” said the woman who was inking in signs. She had a funny little face, a strangely archetypal face that seemed oddly familiar. When I thought about it later, I realized it was the sort of face you see in a Colonial portrait. It was oblong with clearly delineated but sized-down features, and the small constant hint of a smile, severely restrained. She had light brown hair cut in a straight bob, capable hands with short nails, and a firm jaw and chin. I guessed her age at thirty-eight or so.

  “This is Kate Kenney,” said Tony. “Kate, this is Nicky, our PR flack.”

  “Hello. Good call about the signs. We’ve been fighting about this. And don’t get all prissy and displeased with me, Tony,” said Kate, shaking my hand in a parenthetical way. “Those slogans are way too inflammatory. We should get rid of them. There’s plenty of cardboard.”

  “I wrote them out myself,” said Tony. “It took me two hours.”

  “You get an A-plus for printing well and staying in the lines,” said Kate. “I’ll bring you in a gold foil star tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” said Tony. “Fine. We’ll be up until two A.M. the next three nights making more, but fine.”

  “We’ll be up until two anyway,” she said, turning back to her work.

  “This is my desk,” said Tony. He gestured toward a beat-up oak battleship from the 1940s. It looked like a stage prop from His Girl Friday, and it was inches from mine. I wouldn’t be able to cough or whisper without him hearing me.

  Do not react, I said to myself. He’s trying to spook you. He wants you to bolt for Providence and hop on the next train you can find with a name like The Carolina Mockingbird, and not get off until you’re well over the Mason-Dixon line.

  He made a show of moving a stack of Inside Labor magazines off the top of my desk so that I could set down my portable computer.

  “I’ve been writing the strike newsletter myself,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll come up with some improvements.”

  “That’s what you pay me for. But it doesn’t look half bad.”

  Weingould had given me copies.

  “Who’s doing layout for you on the newsletter right now? Did you learn a desktop program?”

  “Margaret. You’ll meet her. She does a lot around here.”

  Oh God. I knew the type.

  “And how’s Ron?” said Tony. “Still profiting off the suffering of others?”

  “Someone has to,” I said. “This strike alone should buy him a new dining room set.”

  “I’m glad we could be of use to you two,” Tony said in a flat, phony business voice. His voice—his real, relaxed voice—was one of the things I’d always found most attractive about him. There’s no way to describe it except that it was a “light” voice. Not a tenor, because that conjures up images of musical comedy. Just a grainy, scratchy voice, a voice that lay lightly on the ears. It was infinitely persuasive and casual, with that odd Pennsylvania inflection at the ends of his sentences that made his questions sound like statements.

  “Ron likes to say, ‘Causes pay bills.’ Who knows, he may find some time to come up here and help us out, how about that?”

  “That’ll be the day,” said Tony. “Can he even travel without a special suitcase for his mousse and manicure kit and cosmetics?”

  “Face lotion is not a cosmetic, Tony. His skin gets dry in the winter.”

  “How does his skin get dry? Washington is a frigging swamp.”

  The outside door opened. There was a string of bells attached to it, and when the door was pushed the bells jangled like beauty shop bells.

  “Margaret put those up,” said Tony.

  “What for?”

  “To make the place homey, she said. She does a lot of that.”

  Through the door stepped one of the last people I expected to see here, and he was sauntering toward us with an air of welcome that did not deceive me.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said to Tony under my breath.

  “Goreman sent him.”

  If Doug Hamner had stepped foot within a hundred miles of one of Tony’s campaigns, it could only be in the empty title of second in command. Had Hamner been forced on Tony in any other capacity, Tony would have quit. The antagonism between them was long-standing. The antagonism between Doug and me was pretty venerable too.

  I unwillingly shook Doug’s offered hand, which was moist, no larger than mine, and far too soft. I noticed that he was wearing his fanny pack, a zippered pouch that hung from his belt and held God knew what. He always wore it in front—like a colostomy bag, Tony had once said. It went oddly with his suit and tie.

  “Are you ready to be put to work?” said Hamner. “I have a lot for you to do.”

  “Oh? You’re helping Tony out, then?” I knew that would irritate him.

  Hamner was nicknamed “the Hamster” by his fellow organizers, due to his slight overbite and his small, quickly gesturing hands. He’d hurriedly been brought on board at the national by the Toilers’ new president, Jerry Goreman, when that old warhorse Frank De Rosa died. Doug was only one of the many yes-men from Goreman’s Chicago local who rushed off to buy standby seats from O’Hare to Dulles while the last strains of “Solidarity Forever” were still echoing down K Street from De Rosa’s funeral extravaganza at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

  Doug was shoehorned into the organizing department, not because he had the faintest idea of how to run an organizing campaign, but because Goreman needed a spy on the ground in Weingould’s territory. Weingould tried to neutralize Doug by assigning him to small races that were already in the bag, where he couldn’t do much damage. Doug got very puffed up at these illusory successes, speaking frequently of his “win record” at Toilers staff meetings. One of the more venerable reps had commented to Doug once, on extreme provocation, “You know, sonny, it’s easy to hit a home run when the pitcher hangs one over the plate.” But since the only sport Doug followed was bicycle racing, it was feared that he had missed the point.

  He’d gotten puffed up in other ways, I saw now. He’d gained about twenty pounds since I’d last seen him, and it wasn’t flattering to his Germanic countenance or his age, which must be close to forty-five now. You wouldn’t call him heavy yet, but the extra weight transformed what had once been a pretty-boy handsomeness to a curdled attractiveness on the verge of running to fat. So rosy-cheeked was he, so yellow-brown of hair and droopy mustache, that if you’d put a beer stein in his hand and stuffed him into a pair of lederhosen, he could have walked into any Oktoberfest in Bavaria and been taken for a native.

  “Now that you’re here,” said Doug, “there are a few meeting notices Margaret hasn’t been able to get to, a
nd some ad copy for the Knights of Columbus banquet program which is due tomorrow. I think you’d better do the meeting notices first; we can hit the night shift with those.”

  “Actually, Weingould’s hired me for some pretty specific writing and PR assistance, Doug, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to limit ad hoc favors like that. But if you like, I can look over anything you’ve written and give you some ideas.”

  His florid complexion, so unbecoming in a man, grew a shade redder. You can’t win with a guy like Doug. Assertive females threaten him, and docile women earn only contempt for their pains.

  I gazed at him blandly. He looked from me to Tony, but Tony’s face was wooden. Doug laughed. He gave Tony a playful punch on the arm.

  “Tell her to give me a hand, since she says you’re the boss.”

  “I’m my own boss,” I said. “And I don’t want to promise away my time on insignificant tasks until I get a sense of what’s on the front burner. In fact, Tony, I need to be brought up to speed, which means I need to meet with Clare. Any idea when that can be arranged?”

  “Clare’s still at the CLC,” Doug said. “She wanted me to tell you, Tony, that Peter Arseneault from Channel Eight is going to be interviewing Bennett Winslow in front of the hospital in twenty minutes, and you should be there to get our two cents in for the eleven o’clock news.”

  Winslow was the president of St. Francis Hospital and Coventry’s mouthpiece in all this. He’d been doing an adroit job with the press so far. I was curious to see him.

  “Damn,” said Tony. “You could have told me sooner.”

  “I was overwhelmed with joy at seeing Nicky,” Doug said nastily.

  “Your reunion brought tears to my eyes,” said Tony. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Want to tell me where the hospital is?” I said.

  “Skip this,” said Tony. “I can get back in an hour and fill you in.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “I said you don’t have to, Nicky.”

  “And I said I’m coming. Where is it?”

  I was furious at him. He hadn’t said a word during the exchange with Doug, just stood by and let me duke it out for myself. Not that I needed any Sir Lancelot sticking up for me, but Tony and I both knew that if Tony was silent when Doug baited me, Doug would see it as a green light for his feeble attempts to throw his weight around.

  “Kate can take you,” Tony said. Kate had come over in the last minute and was contemplating Doug with frustrated revulsion, as if he were a giant palmetto bug who had crawled in through the hot water pipes yet again, even though the exterminator had been and gone.

  “Yes, I’ll take her, since you paragons of chivalry haven’t offered,” said Kate. “And then afterward we’re going to get something to eat. She’s been traveling all day and you guys didn’t even fetch her a cup of coffee. Where were you raised, in a barn?”

  She handed me a large chocolate chip cookie and a carton of milk, took my briefcase from me, and shoved an extremely unbecoming brown-and-blue-striped wool cap over her ears and forehead. It reminded me of the ones my aunt Deedee used to knit and inflict on us as Christmas gifts. The last thing I saw before the swing door closed behind us with another beauty-shop jangle were Doug’s and Tony’s faces still turned in our direction. Tony was scowling, his face scrunched up like a rebellious schoolboy’s. Doug was frowning petulantly, a frown of balked entitlement, as if he’d just arrived at the theater and someone else was sitting in his seat.

  Outside the wind was ten degrees colder than it had been when I arrived. When I took a chilled breath, I realized that early November meant true winter here, winter fully arrived and final. Back home, the scent of loam and falling leaves and damp earth was still in the air. Here the leaves were all off the trees and if the air smelled of anything at all, it was of wet stone and car exhaust.

  Ahead of me lay weeks of this same cold. I was going to miss the last of Washington’s southern autumn, with its gentle blues and muted golds. I wasn’t going to be able to dawdle along Skyline Drive with Louise as we’d planned, getting our last sight of the Blue Ridge before snow closed the mountain passes. I wouldn’t be there for those warm Indian summer days when I could walk by the river with only a sweater and throw sticks down the rapids to see how far and fast they floated.

  When I miss a season because I’m traveling on business, some small, barely noticed part of me feels wrong and off-kilter until the year rolls round again to that same season and I recoup the lost time. Someday, I wanted to settle down someplace where I could sit on my own porch and drink lemonade or mulled cider, depending on the weather, and plant an amateur rose garden, and stay still enough to watch four seasons scroll by me in beautiful, detailed entirety. Where this porch and rose garden would be, and how I would live this life of soulful leisure while still earning enough to keep myself in lemonade and cider and the occasional glossy magazine, I didn’t know.

  “Eat,” said Kate. “You’re going to need better gloves.”

  Her kindly hectoring reminded me so forcibly of Louise that I felt doubly homesick. I would call Louise when I got to the bed-and-breakfast, I decided. Then I would take a hot bath and finish Murder on the Orient Express, which I had left off reading just at the point where Hercule Poirot is amused to find the mysterious scarlet kimono stashed in his own luggage. I would feel better in an hour or two, or a day or two, or a week or two.

  “You’re the first person I haven’t pissed off today,” I said as we waited for the windshield to defrost.

  “Hey, when I saw how angry you made Doug, I knew I’d like you,” she said. “Finish that cookie, will you? This could take a while, and I don’t want you fainting on me. It would look lousy for the news crew.”

  I finished the cookie, guzzled some milk, buckled up, and off we went.

  7

  KATE WAS A GOOD driver, rather fast but careful. I hate driving with people who don’t know how to handle a car and compensate by whipping around corners and changing lanes in a slapdash, bravura fashion.

  “Hamner is clearly delighted you’re on board,” she said. “I haven’t seen him looking that upset since his first day here, when Tony wouldn’t let him sit in on negotiations.”

  “I go way back with Doug.”

  “And it’s clearly been a wonderful association.”

  “He’s a snake.”

  “Tell me how you really feel.”

  In my first months with Ron, I’d been assigned to work with Doug on a school board campaign in Minnesota, in a district where the Toilers were joining the teachers’ association in backing a pro-union slate in hopes of a better contract for their cafeteria workers and school bus drivers. During the course of the campaign, Doug blamed me for a printing error, an expensive error. It was a headline in a four-color flyer that read, “John Knutsen supports the best for our pubic schools.” Pubic schools. Luckily, we caught it before it went out the door to the voters. But not before we’d racked up a hefty print bill that someone had to be blamed for.

  That headline was an easy enough mistake to make when you’d been working round the clock. My only fault had been that when I’d asked Doug if he’d had the blue-line proofed by two people besides me, I’d believed him when he said yes. We’d run twenty thousand copies. Fixing it was not cheap.

  Doug had asserted, with an air of injured innocence, that I’d told him the piece was ready to go. Advocacy ate the cost of the reprint, because Ron wanted to keep the Toilers’ business. I’d have forgiven Doug for letting me take the fall if that printing fiasco hadn’t been merely one of the ways in which he showed his mean streak over the course of that campaign. He was the kind of person who bullies the hired help just to feel important.

  “How’s Doug going over, anyway?” I asked Kate.

  “He hasn’t endeared himself to most of us. He’ll never sit and stuff envelopes even when everyone else is pitching in. He never makes a pot of coffee or refills the paper tray in the copying machine. He asks
us to fax things for him. Well, he tried to. That didn’t last long.”

  “How’s he doing with Clare?”

  “He’s buttering Clare up for everything he’s worth, and she’s a little off her game right now, so she doesn’t see through it.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Doug’s MO was notorious: he hid his incompetence by assiduously currying favor with local leadership, until he became a New Best Friend. Doug did not care for hammering in those home truths and unpleasant realities that local pols needed to be reminded of when the chips are down. “Don’t worry,” said Kate. “Tony and I are keeping an eye on him.”

  We parked in a staff lot and walked up the circular drive to the hospital’s visitors entrance, where the nurses would picket if a strike occurred. Like the rest of Winsack, the hospital had clearly seen better days. Its small but hulking main building had been erected somewhere around the time President McKinley was shot, in purplish-red brick with white wooden trim. It boasted an oddly Moorish cupola surmounted by a brass weathervane in the shape of a tall-masted ship. In its day, this edifice was probably the last word in forward-thinking modern architecture, but now the place had an air of having been the scene of involuntary commitments, lobotomies, and deaths in childbirth. Clumsily attached to the main building were three or four wings from the fifties and sixties, executed in glass and steel interspersed with those hideous aqua panels that were in fashion then.

  In a bare, floodlit courtyard between the old and newer buildings stood a solitary statue of Saint Francis preaching to the birds and squirrels, an elongated bronze figure with a countenance oddly gaunt and Scandinavian for an Italian saint. I walked closer and saw that the statue was labeled with a plaque on which ran the lines of the saint’s famous prayer asking God to let him be a “channel of Thy peace.” There wouldn’t be too much peace around here for a while.