The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  He collected himself for a moment, caught my stare and said, “Look, Jack. I’m telling you this as a favor. I’m telling you this as someone who’s had a pretty successful run in this business, as someone who tried to hire you before. Your newspaper is a relic. It’s a dinosaur. It’s gray and it’s old and you haven’t updated it to fit the times.”

  The waiter came back with my ginger ale and pointedly ignored Campbell. I shook my head but he kept speaking, growing more animated. “People don’t care about politics anymore, and that’s what you guys cover. People don’t have the time to read the fifteen-hundred word stories you put on the front page about wars in places they’ll never go. They don’t have any interest in reading your five-part series on mayors taking kickbacks or the FDA approving drugs a year ahead of time”—two projects, I’ll point out, for which we won Pulitzer Prizes.

  He took another sip of his drink, which was mostly melted ice by now. He continued, “People want quick and easy. They want nice graphics that explain in a few seconds what stories can’t relate in ten minutes. They want pretty pictures. They want short, crisp stories that don’t jump to other sections of the newspaper. They want the box scores to last night’s baseball games and the five-day weather reports for where they live and wherever their vacation houses might be. That’s what they want. That’s what we give them. And that’s why we’re better, more successful, and more profitable than you.

  “You people keep running theRecord the way you’re running it and you’re not going to have aRecord to run for much longer. You’re going to drive the thing right out of business. You sell it to me, you preserve it for another century, the Cutter-Ellises make a nice profit, you make a nice profit, and Boston remains a two-newspaper town, just like it should.”

  He was done. I had the first inkling of a headache. A cloud must have floated by outside because the street became darker than it had been, making the lounge darker still. Two more shades and it might match my mood.

  I looked down at my drink and the table beneath it. I thought about the small army of consultants we’d had through our executive offices and the newsroom, the ones who said too much of what Terry Campbell was saying today—shorter stories, cleaner graphics, more consumer reporting, news you can use. Light, tight, and bright.

  Paul didn’t like them, but he listened to them. And the paper went out and modernized itself. We were among the first to buy color presses. We started a consumer beat. We created a commuting beat. We hired more lifestyle reporters. And in general, we tried to shorten the length of our stories, usually, but not always. But we didn’t stray from our core mission, not then, not now, not ever. When I was going toe to toe with the president of the United States a couple of years ago, nobody said to me, “Hey, Jack, forget about politics. We need you to do something on rising cable rates.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said, pausing to collect my thoughts.

  “When the banks in Boston implement a secret policy of not giving mortgages to working black families in urban neighborhoods, who’s going to report on that? Who’s going to challenge that?”

  TheRecord, I left unstated, already had.

  “When the president of the United States tells a life-defining lie, who’s going to report on that? When building inspectors look the other way from life-threatening code violations, when auto dealerships fuck with odometers, when cops sodomize drunk driving suspects, who’s going to let the public know about that?”

  I paused to collect myself and catch my breath. I thought of Mongillo working police headquarters every morning, chatting up sources, racing out in the dark of the night to murder scenes, approaching cop cars with flailing lights in dimly lit alleys in the worst neighborhoods of town.

  I thought of Paul Ellis, poring over the financials in the teeth of the last recession, watching our stock price plunge, seeing his own net worth cut in half, telling his staff, his paper, to keep our eye on what mattered most, and that was producing the bestBoston Record, day in, day out, that we possibly could. If we did that, he said, things would be fine. Well, we did, and things were.

  I thought of my own father, his ink-stained green apron spread over his lanky frame, proudly working in theRecord pressroom until his legs gave way from disease and he had to be carried out by two of his best friends—also lifelong pressmen.

  Campbell was about to intrude on the silence, on my thoughts, so I cut him off.

  “Not you,” I said, the volume of my voice, the strain of my tone surprising even me. “Not you. Because you’re out there publishing stories about how SUVs are fun and safe and how barbecue cooking is a nice way to spend time with the whole family, all in two hundred and fifty words or less, while splashing polls on people’s favorite primetime comedies on the front page.”

  He shook his head in disgust, muttering, “You’ll never get it.”

  I pounded the table with my right fist, causing some of the nuts to splash out of their bowl. Truth is, I was throwing a full-out nutty, the likes of which I hadn’t thrown in a long, long time. Maybe things like death and deception were starting to catch up to me. Maybe it was the sight of Elizabeth with Travers. Or maybe I really cared about my paper.

  What’s the worst that could happen, that I’m barred for life from the Street Bar at the Ritz? All right, that is pretty bad, but fortunately I didn’t consider that possibility as I continued my rant.

  “No, you’ll never get it,” I seethed. “You’ll never get why owning a newspaper is different from owning a widget company. You’ll never get that we’re not given First Amendment rights just so we can print stories about rock stars in drug rehab. You’ll never understand that sometimes, the bottom line isn’t the bottom line.”

  He stood up. “You’re useless,” he told me. Yeah, I’m useless. I’m fucking useless.

  He grabbed the sheet of paper back with all that money that I could sure as hell use but didn’t particularly need.

  “Fuck off,” I told him. “Fuck the hell off.” All right, it’s not eloquent, but it made the point. Just to be sure, I added, “And it’s not going to look good when we run a story in the next couple of days saying that you’re a major contributor to militant groups pushing fringe causes.”

  He stood glaring at me, and I was glaring back at him. I caught the waiter out of the corner of my eye looking on in horror. Their idea of conflict in here is people politely fighting over the bar check.

  “I’m going to take you down, Jack,” he seethed.

  “Like you took the MIT researcher down?”

  His face quickly changed from fury to curiosity, almost as if I’d flicked a switch. He asked, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You know full well what I’m talking about. And so will the rest of the country when we run a story about it.”

  When he spoke again, even his tone had changed. “Jack, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean?”

  I shook my head and derisively said, “Fight for Life. It’s a Massachusetts group. You gave them money—thirty large. They used it to bomb a stem cell lab in Cambridge. You’re screwed.”

  He grew angry again. “I don’t know about any stem cell group and I don’t know about any Cambridge professor. I do know this. I’m going to own you. Own you!”

  “You don’t have it in you. And if I find you trying to put your grubby fucking hands on my newspaper again, I’ll break them.”

  “That’s not what the company president says.” Then he started across the lounge. Just a few paces away, he whirled around and walked back toward me until we were chest to chest, as if we were a baseball manager and a home plate umpire arguing over a called third strike.

  “By the way,” he said, his voice tight as a rope but strangely calm, “I eat assholes like you for lunch.”

  “That would explain your bad breath,” I replied. Not bad, considering the circumstances.

  He fixed a look of hatred upon me the likes of which I hadn’t seen in a long, long time—o
r maybe I had, on the basketball court the other night and in the Florida swamp soon after.

  He said through gritted teeth, his jaw barely moving as he spoke, “People who fuck with me don’t come out of it real well. Let’s be real clear on that.”

  With that, he stalked off without ever saying good-bye, probably because he knew, because I knew, this wasn’t the last we’d see of each other. I ended up picking up the check. The man, I tell you, had no class.

  Twenty-Three

  WE WERE AT A FAIRone night, Elizabeth and me, at one of those traveling summer carnivals with the Round-Up and the Twister that comes through the town in Maine where we rented a beachside cottage for a couple of weeks in August.

  It wasn’t late, maybe 8:30 or nine, but the sun had set and the sky was dark and the blinking, flashing fluorescent lights from the rides and the games and the fried dough stands gave me the sense that we had drifted far into the night, deep into another world, one, that I wasn’t so sure I liked. I don’t like carnivals in much the same way that I don’t like clowns, because even as an overly analytical kid, I always suspected that the heavy makeup and the painted smiles and the bulbous noses hid something that was interminably sad, something that needed to be concealed. The reporter in me always wanted to get behind the façade.

  Specifically, I didn’t like this particular carnival because of the line of smiling, stuffed cats that were mocking my every throw, which didn’t come cheap at three for $2. You knock two down, you win a prize. Knock three down, win a massive stuffed animal, the kind your wife or girlfriend carries around in a show of pride for her man, the hunter, if only as a goof. I wanted one, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I hadn’t hit a single goddamned cat, each of my throws bristling through what seemed like their excessively furry trunks. My pockets were already twenty dollars lighter for my failure.

  “I thought you told me you pitched a no hitter in Little League. Isn’t that supposed to mean you have good aim.” That was Elizabeth, forgetting her role as the fawning girlfriend, at least in public.

  I glared at her. She was standing beside me pulling fistfuls of pale blue cotton candy off a long pole. Her face, especially her nose, was tan from the sun. Her hair, air-dried after a day at the beach, was kinky and somewhat disheveled, meaning sexy. She had on my favorite jeans, which I found completely, sometimes embarrassingly irresistible.

  “The fucking game is rigged.”

  The barker heard me and exclaimed in mock shock, “My boy, these carnival games are more tightly regulated than the International Olympics. Have the lady take a throw.”

  Elizabeth casually picked up a baseball and flung it toward the cats, wildly by my analysis, but not by theirs. She hit one smack in the face, causing it to tumble backward.

  “This is hard,” she said, looking at me sidelong.

  The barker handed her another ball. Another throw, another cat.

  “You throw like a girl,” I said, even though she didn’t.

  “You throw like a moron.”

  Behind me, a kid began wailing, and when I spun around, I saw his taffy apple fall from his small hand and onto the matted grass. He was crying so hard he barely noticed that he wasn’t holding it anymore.

  Elizabeth took aim and fired. Three throws, three cats. The laughing, the sobbing, the triumph, the despair. I don’t know if a man’s life could get much worse than that very moment.

  She strutted back and forth in front of the stand looking for just the right stuffed animal, her fingers on her beautiful lips and those world famous jeans making her ass look like it sprouted from somewhere up around her shoulders. The kid behind us kept crying, and I began gazing around for his parents or brothers and sisters, but no one came forward.

  Finally, I knelt down beside him and said in a voice similar to the way I talk to Baker, “Are you okay.”

  He was about five, I’ll guess, a towhead with a bowl haircut and big brown eyes that were filled with tears. He was crying so frantically that he could barely speak, so he looked at me desperately and said only, “Grampy.”

  “Grampy. Your grandfather?”

  He nodded, his crying slowing down slightly.

  “Are you looking for him?”

  He nodded again.

  “We’ll find him,” I said. “What’s your name.”

  “Jack,” he said.

  “No it’s not. That’s my name.”

  Out of nowhere, he smiled at me, a shy little smile, but a smile nonetheless. He said, going along with the gag in that way little kids do, “No it’s not.”

  “Honest.” I was about to show him my license, but then didn’t know if he could read.

  Elizabeth returned with an enormous purple dinosaur under her arm, no doubt the most ridiculous animal she could find because she fully expected me to lug it around.

  “He’s lost,” I said, nodding down at him.

  She knelt in front of him, brushed the tears off his cheeks, and said, “Everyone who’s lost even for a moment gets a free stuffed dinosaur.”

  He looked at the dinosaur, then at me, rolled his eyes and said, “No sir, but I’ll take it.” And he did.

  I put him up on my shoulders, on Elizabeth’s advice, and he scouted around for his grandfather, even calling out, “Grampy, Grampy.”

  From behind us, someone frantically yelled, “Jack!” Instinctively, I whirled around and found myself staring at an old man in a Red Sox cap, a flannel shirt, and a pair of loose jeans, Wranglers, I think. Never seen him before, but the kid on my shoulders had. He kicked and yelled, “Grampy,” and I pried him off and placed him back on the ground.

  The embarrassed grandfather mentioned something about a Port-a-Potty and a disobedient kid, thanked us profusely and was on his way, his hand tightly wrapped around young Jack’s.

  Later, on the way out of the carnival, the noise and the rainbow of lights behind us and the serene dark of the parking lot ahead, Elizabeth locked her arm inside mine and put her head on my shoulder in that way she does when she’s descending from a sugar high. The girl eats like your typical adolescent boy and has the body of a supermodel to disprove it. Other women hate her for it. Not me. Anyway, she’s leaning on me hard as we walked, looking straight ahead, and she asked, “Hey, Pedro Martinez, do you want to have a kid?”

  She knew the answer to that already. She knew about my trip to the hospital, all my expectations, all my dreams, left in the morgue on what will always be the worst day of my life, the shadows of which will linger forever.

  I replied, “In time.”

  “Would now be ‘In time?’”

  I pulled away, stopped walking, and stared at her front-on. I placed a hand on each of her shoulders and asked, “Isnow the time?”

  She didn’t immediately reply.

  I felt a lump in my throat. I felt my eyes start to well up. She stared back at me, serious, her hair all wispy and the perfect curves of her face drawn tight around her mouth. She nodded and said, “It might be. I’m late.”

  “I love you.”

  “Are you ready? We’re not even married yet. We both said we wanted to hold off for another year or two.”

  I embraced her in the parking lot of the Goose Rocks Civic Association Carnival, the lights and the noise pulsing in the distance, and she folded perfectly into my arms like she had a hundred times before.

  Maybe this is exactly what I needed to step out from my own past—a wife, a baby, a family of my own. Never for a single second would Katherine ever leave my mind, but she’d understand, she’d know, that at some point in my life, I had to move on.

  Then I picked Elizabeth up for no real reason, calling out, almost singing out, “We’re going to have a baby,” as I cradled her in my arms. “A baby, right here, ours, always.” And I nudged her stomach with my nose.

  She smiled, finally, and seconds after, the smile turned into a full throttle laugh, despite the sugar hangover.

  I put her down and she embraced me, her long, slender arms fol
ding over my shoulders. She stood on the tips of her toes so she was eye to eye and pressed her mouth hard against mine, passionately, pulled it back a wafer and said, “I love you too.”

  She pressed her lips against mine yet again and mumbled while we kissed, “Never means never, right?”

  Four days later, I sat at work arguing with Vinny Mongillo about whether Geraldo Rivera now counted as a mainstream journalist (Mongillo said yes; I believed no). The phone rang. It was Elizabeth on the other end.

  “Well, reprieve,” she said, trying to sound upbeat, but her voice tinged with some disappointment.

  “Oh,” I replied, unable to hide my own regret.

  There was silence between us, until I said, “How about we meet at home in an hour to try and make one?”

  She laughed, but it was shallow, almost—and I hate to say this—polite. “Now would decidedly not be the time for that,” she said.

  A month later, our relationship, for all practical and impractical purposes, was over.

  I bring all this up because I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time over the last few months wondering what would have happened if she had been pregnant and not just late, what would have become of us if we had an adorable baby girl some eight months after that carnival, and not just continued in a relationship where the past overwhelmed any prospects for the future.

  I honestly don’t know, but I do know this. I know that she wouldn’t have shot out at me—and I don’t throw around that word loosely anymore—as she did that April day, quite literally grabbing my arm as I walked out of the Ritz-Carlton from my meeting with Terry Campbell. She wouldn’t have had to.

  “Jack,” she said, her hands on my wrist and an ambitious spring breeze blowing through her brown hair, “I need you for about five minutes. This is business, and this is something you’re going to want to know.”

  The cops, I noticed, made absolutely no move to help me. They were my bodyguards. For my mental health, I was apparently on my own.