by Susan Isaacs
“Now that Parker’s in,” Jerry said, referring to Gresham’s lieutenant governor, who had risen to the number-one position on a bite of knish, “you can’t just sit back and be Catholic. You’re going to have to woo a lot of people you don’t particularly like.”
“I know, I know,” Paterno declared. His mouth grew tight, giving him a grim expression. “What kind of support do I really have up there?” he asked Jerry.
“You really want to go through this again?” Jerry gave Paterno a cool, blue, patient stare.
“I want to go through it again.”
“Mother of God,” Eileen whispered.
“What? What did you say, Eileen?” Paterno demanded.
“I said, ‘Mother of God,’ “she responded forcefully.
“Oh.” As usual, Paterno backed down. He even offered her a small, conciliatory smile. Eileen was convinced that Paterno put up with her because of her legal expertise and because he secretly, passionately desired her. She was as romantic as a Victorian maiden. Professionally she may have fought with frigid logic and cold sarcasm, but privately she placed monogrammed packets of sachet in each drawer and interpreted men’s glances according to their degree of significance. Paterno’s bulgy eyes gave him an almost perpetually significant look. I agreed that he admired her—no one knew New York election law better than she—but thought his glances quite insignificant.
Politicians have a reputation as insatiable studs, continually tumescent. They are rumored to go through aides and secretaries like an electric drill through a wooden plank. But many of them aren’t sexual at all. Their energies and interests are focused on personalities, on plots, on simply recollecting the name of the district leader’s spouse. Some grow weary because they work hard. Paterno’s appetites were huge, but they were not sexual. Not that he behaved like a castrato. He appeared to be a normal man. He had had two children, and his late wife, Terri, had seemed reasonably content; at least she never had a hungry, crazed, Anna Magnani look. But I never saw him breathe hard for any woman. Paterno was solicitous of Eileen because he valued her expertise. Also, he probably had visions of feminist hellions who would spring to her defense and tear his limbs off if he fired her.
But Paterno’s gentility could go only so far. He was less patient with Jerry. “What the hell do you know about anything?” he’d often snap, or “Who’s feeding you your information, Morrissey? Boss Tweed?” Jerry, in turn, treated Paterno as though he were not completely compos mentis, explaining political maneuvers in a maddeningly slow, simplistic fashion or giving Paterno a list of phone calls to make, people to cajole or soothe on some particular issue. “Now don’t forget, Bill,” he’d say, “if they’re not there, leave word you called.”
They seemed like opposites: tall/short, handsome/homely, calculating/emotional, and in many ways they were. But, at work, the opposites attracted and merged, forming a complete political being.
“All right,” Jerry said, uncrossing his legs, leaning forward toward Paterno’s desk. “I’ll go through the names again, the county leaders, assemblymen, and senators who owe you. Some owe you from years ago, when you were up in Albany. Those are—” and he reeled off a list of six or seven names. Paterno, who had lifted up a pen as Jerry began to speak, put it back on his desk after the third name. “Now, the next group are people who owe you from when you were chairman of the constitutional convention. Are you ready?” Paterno nodded seriously, then looked annoyed. This time Jerry whizzed through a dozen names, five of whom I had never even heard of. I was tempted to ask who they were but didn’t want to embarrass Jerry by making his list sound less than the definitive one of New York State Movers and Doers. “Anything else?” he asked Paterno.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the matter, Bill?”
“How solid are they?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. How solid? Can we really rely on these guys?”
“I’ve spoken to them all within the last week. They’re with you. They just need a signal that you’re going to run. Look, you’re popular and they think you’ve got a good shot at beating whoever the Republicans put up. But you have to get through the primary before you can go after Republicans.” Paterno nodded his head up and down, very slowly, as if he were suddenly privy to a long-kept secret. “They know and we know that Parker is such a jerk it takes all his concentration to hit the urinal, but he has one thing you don’t.”
“He’s governor now,” Paterno said mechanically.
“Right. And in any political contest, there’s an automatic prejudice in favor of the incumbent.”
I found my voice again. “But the incumbent is excruciatingly stupid. I mean, Parker is publicly dumb.”
“As long as he keeps his clothes on and speaks something that people believe is English, the incumbent has an advantage,” Jerry said, still eyeing Paterno. His voice was strong, sure, without a single doubt. “But we’re not dealing with unsophisticated idiots. These upstate guys are not a bunch of dumb farmers.” Paterno was peering at Jerry, intrigued with this notion. “They know that Parker has an excellent chance of making an ass of himself in a general election. And they would very much like a strong candidate. Therefore, they will go to the man“—Jerry’s eyes moved to me and Eileen for a second, and he exhaled loudly—“or the woman who shows some strength and popularity. They know your clout here in the city. They know all about your—uh, sterling character and abilities. But they’re sophisticated enough to know that you’re not a known factor upstate. They want someone who will appeal to the dairy industry, the winegrowers, the apple farmers.”
“My grandfather was a farmer,” Paterno muttered.
“What did he grow?” Jerry demanded.
“I don’t know. Olives, I think.”
“What the hell good is your grandfather if you don’t know what kind of farming he did? And do you think it’s going to impress some megafarmer with fifty thousand cows that your grandfather grew a fig tree outside of Palermo?”
“We didn’t come from Palermo. We came from a little town—”
“Bill, save it for the Sons of Sicily breakfast. Look, they like you, but they want some assurance you’re in this thing seriously. They’re not going to put their asses on the line for you without a real commitment on your part. They don’t like Parker, they certainly won’t go for the rest of those cabbageheads. You’ve got to declare, though, go up there and make some sort of impact before they’ll risk offending the incumbent. And we’ve got to get a petition drive going if you want to get more than three signatures in Herkimer County.”
“I know,” Paterno said. He picked up a ball-point pen and rolled it between his palms. “But are you sure?” He seemed to be riding Jerry harder than usual. I glanced at Jerry: his eyes had narrowed, but he seemed more irritated than angry or defensive. I felt a little uneasy, though, because in trying times Paterno usually abandoned his normal querulousness; he would hang on every word Jerry uttered with the fervor of a young animal clinging to its mother. “Morrissey, I was just thinking that if—”
“Jesus H. Particular Christ,” Jerry snapped. “I’m telling you, Bill, you can’t sit around playing Hamlet. You’ve got to build an effective organization upstate.”
“Okay,” Paterno said, pointing the pen at Jerry, as though it were a long metal finger. “Let’s get into that.”
“Into what?” Jerry’s voice sounded cool, but his face began to flush.
“Into an organization. Who do we have?”
“Where? What do you mean? Upstate?”
“Anywhere.” Paterno’s voice had grown cooler than Jerry’s.
“All right. Down here, we have Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and probably Manhattan. The Bronx is iffy because Bob Aponte keeps thinking he’s emperor instead of county chairman, but voter turnout has been so low for the last two years that it probably—”
“I’m not talking about backing. I know who’s supporting me, f
or Christ’s sake. I’m talking about staff.”
“Staff?”
“Staff.” Paterno and Jerry were now into their high-gear, man-to-man politician dialogue. This happened frequently. Eileen and I were useful for specific functions, for legal counsel, for writing, but deep down I don’t think either man trusted our general judgment. They would ask us to meetings, consult us, listen to us, but when the conversation ranged a few inches beyond the specific, they behaved as though we had faded away. They could only hear each other.
“Okay,” said Jerry cautiously. “We’ve been through this—what, ten, twenty times? But we’ll make it twenty-one. You have me. Joe Cole for blacks. Mary LaRosa for petitions. Carl Obst and Linda Freeman for fund-raising. Eileen here for counsel. Marcia for speeches. Consuelo Fuentes for Hispanics and women. Eileen can also help out on women if necessary—”
“Think, goddamn it. Will you think? Who have you got, Morrissey?”
“I’ve got a fucking good group of people for you, that’s who I’ve got, and if you don’t stop these guessing games, you can take them all and ram them up your Italian ass because I’m not going to take this crap.”
Paterno’s voice went soft. “Morrissey, where are all these people from?”
“I told you, I’m not going to play guessing games.”
“They come from New York!”
“So what? Who doesn’t?”
“I mean, they come from here, the city. Not one person is from upstate. You haven’t got a single goddamned Protestant in that whole crew.”
“I think Joe Cole is Protestant.”
“He’s black as midnight.”
“So?”
“So are you going to trot Joe Cole up to Plattsburg to have tea with the Lutheran minister’s wife?”
Jerry swiveled his head slightly, just enough to glimpse Eileen and me, the audience on the couch. When he turned back to Paterno—the entire movement took less than a second—the flush had spread to his ears. I felt his embarrassment. “I have got,” he said in a monotone, “a good campaign staff lined up. If you want to take advantage of it, that’s just dandy. If you’re not pleased with what I’ve been doing, you can find someone else.”
“Look, I’m not criticizing you, Jerry.” Paterno’s tone was controlled and sincere as Nixon’s.
“Bullshit.”
“No. I mean it. I think you have the makings of a great staff. I was only wondering if maybe we need someone with some upstate experience.”
“I have upstate experience,” said Jerry. “If you remember, I’ve only been working for you for eight years. I had a life before that.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t.”
Jerry had had a nice life: Special Assistant to Bernard Merkin, Attorney General for the State of New York. Bernard Merkin, the Mafia’s nemesis, the consumer’s champion, the—who knows?—maybe the first Jewish candidate for Vice-President of these United States. Gerald Michael Morrissey had a good life. How would he know that his employer, his friend, his creation, his Merkin would take up with one Floria Garcia, a twenty-one-year-old summer intern, and that Mrs. Bernard Merkin, the previously loving Bernice, would object, especially when September came and went and Bernard’s infatuation with the young Floria did not die? And not even so close a friend of the Merkins as Jerry Morrissey, a friend who came to dinner every single Thursday night, would dream that sweet Bernice, Bernice of a thousand fund-raisers, would bundle up a tote bag full of family papers and trot down to Foley Square in Manhattan and share with the Chief of the Criminal Division of the United States Attorney’s Office the secret that had been hers and Bernard’s—that for five years the Attorney General of the State of New York had forgotten to report his outside income, which amounted to about $100,000 per annum. And even an ace forecaster like Jerry Morrissey couldn’t have predicted that, eleven months later, Bernard’s attorneys would be working on his appeal from conviction while Bernice got her divorce in Mexico and Floria went to law school in Brooklyn.
And Jerry Morrissey was out of a job.
“Well.” Jerry confronted Paterno. “Just what are you saying?”
“Why are you so angry? I’m not trying to undercut you or anything. But you haven’t had recent upstate experience.”
Jerry was not out of a job for long. As Merkin began his trip down the tubes, Jerry waved him a saddened bon voyage and cast about for a new politician. After just a few weeks of floundering, he joined Paterno, recognizing in him two key qualities: promise and need.
William Paterno, on the verge of running for the Presidency of New York’s City Council, had great potential. He was bright, ambitious, and popular. He was also in trouble because, until he hired Jerry, his advisers’ vision did not extend beyond his assembly district in Little Neck, Queens. His lawyer pals and his clubhouse cronies knew Bill had the stuff, but they didn’t know how to package and transport it over the 59th Street Bridge to Manhattan.
But Jerry Morrissey knew. For years he had lived behind his blazing blue eyes, observing, calculating, registering the moves of the wrinkled, the pockmarked and birthmarked, the plain; watching as they schemed and sneaked and screamed and whispered. Jerry had grown from a mere employee, a paid adviser, into an artist, a creator. He knew, and he stepped in, taking William Paterno’s life and shaping it, giving it form and a purposeful design.
By that election night eight years before, Paterno was no longer viewed as just another shrewd pol. He was special. Jerry had exploited Paterno’s extraordinary capacity for work, giving him position papers, reports, articles to study, until Paterno became the city’s greatest expert on sewage conversion, expense budgeting, and public education. Jerry had manipulated Paterno’s instinctive, politically dangerous tendency to say whatever was on his mind into a reputation for amazing honesty: in East Harlem, they called Paterno “el honorable.” And Jerry had channeled Paterno’s huffy self-righteousness into a career as a labor negotiator: no one could talk down the municipal unions on behalf of the city as well as a puffed-up Paterno.
“Don’t jerk me off, Bill. I mean it.”
“I’m not.” Paterno thrust out his lower lip, offended.
“All right. Then just what do you want?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Good.”
“I was just wondering. You know. Whether if we picked up a little extra help, if it would help any.”
“Help helps, Bill.”
“Yes. Right. I mean, maybe one of Gresham’s people. I mean, they know upstate like—well, like you know the Bronx. I mean, some of them have really been way up there, visited those people. Do you know they make cheddar cheese up there?”
“Who did you have in mind?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know.”
Jerry leaned back in his chair, forcing himself to look casual, putting too much weight on his weak lower back. “Just any old Gresham aide? You don’t have anyone in mind?”
“Maybe—urn”—Paterno gazed up at the ceiling, trying to appear thoughtful—“maybe someone like Lyle LoBello.”
My fists clenched in protest. Eileen, beside me, took in a fast gulp of air. Paterno looked at Jerry and attempted an ingenuous smile. He failed, managing only to display a lot of teeth.
“Someone like Lyle LoBello,” Jerry said. “Tell me, Bill, who is like LoBello?”
Lyle LoBello was unique, at least in Gresham’s organization. He had been the governor’s appointments officer, his closest adviser, dearest pal, big-ass buddy, and, thus, the second most powerful man in New York State. He and the guv had even double-dated, and it was rumored that they frequently switched girls mid-evening. “What do you mean?” Paterno said. “No one is like LoBello. He knows upstate and—”
“Where does he come from? Syracuse? Watertown?” Jerry demanded, letting his chair return to all four legs.
“Brooklyn,” Paterno mumbled. “Red Hook, I think.”
“Red Hook,” said Jerry. “Perfect. Go get him, Bill. He’s just what you ne
ed—an upstate Protestant who just happens to look and act and sound like a Neapolitan pimp and who comes from Red Hook. Really a shrewd political move, Bill. Ace.”
“Are you nuts, Morrissey? Jesus, I’ve never seen anyone so touchy. All I did was mention LoBello and—”
“Where are you going to put him in a campaign? On the mimeograph machine? Collating petitions? Or are you going to stick him in as something like—well, like campaign manager when I step out for a second to take a leak?”
“Of course not!”
“Do you think he’d take a secondary role? I mean, old Lyle’s used to being a mover.”
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s out of a job.”
“And he needs the money?”
“No. It isn’t that. But—I mean, he offered to help. It was really nice of him, especially since he’s so down in the dumps about Gresham. It was just decency on his part.”
“For which he expects nothing in return.”
“All right. I’ll call him. Right now.” Paterno’s hand stretched for the intercom box, to jingle one of his secretaries. “I’ll tell him no thanks, that you feel you can handle upstate and that we don’t need him. Is that what you want?”
“That’s what I want,” Jerry answered.
Paterno pulled his glance away from Jerry’s glare and looked toward the sofa. “Excuse me, ladies,” he muttered. Eileen and I shuffled our feet, unsure whether we had received a courtesy or a dismissal.
Jerry interpreted for us. “Out,” he said, never taking his eyes off Paterno.
And that night, he would not take them off the ceiling. “Jerry, talk to me.”
“What?” he mumbled, trying to will me far away, where he would not have to listen to my analyses of Paterno’s motives.
Lying beside him on the bed, I propped myself up and leaned over, putting my face near his, interrupting his examination of the ceiling. “You’d be happier if you talked about it.”
“No, you’d be happier. Come on, Marcia. I need some quiet.”
“Jerry,” I murmured and leaned over to kiss his one flaw, a chicken-pox scar right below his eyebrow.
