Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “Lou Conway, Al,” said Isaac. “He’s dead now.”

  “He is. Well, what a shame.” Kinosis’s face took on a horrifyingly efficient look of sadness—years of practice of laughing and joking in the back of his car and then, when the driver pulled in front of the funeral parlor, getting out with a look of mourning. “Yeah, Lou Conway. Well,” he said, his face changing to threatening as easy as turning the page of a magazine, “if you disgrace me down there you can always become the next Lou Conway.”

  “You mean dead?” I asked. I felt pride stirring in me, like a patient starting to come out of the ether in the middle of the operation.

  “OK, now look,” the governor said, putting his drink down on the little bowlegged table next to his chair. He glanced at his gold-encrusted wristwatch, the kind of watch you find on a nattily dressed murder victim stuffed into the trunk of an LTD. He checked the time and scowled. He thought acting as if you were late for your next appointment meant you were a big shot, whereas Isaac had taught me long ago that truly important people went at their own pace and didn’t worry who was waiting for them. “I’m handing you something men work their whole lives for,” Kinosis said. “And now you’ve got to give me something, too.”

  “Ah,” I said, raising a finger, “the part I’ve been waiting for.”

  The governor took a deep breath and looked over at Isaac, who was at that moment wincing delicately. That wince bothered me, made me think I was maybe playing it a little too fast and loose. “A comedian,” said Kinosis.

  “He’s excited,” Isaac said. “Thrilled. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “How’d you get a name like that?” Kinosis said, leaning forward in his chair, acting as if he’d just skewered me. “Politics ain’t for people with fifty-dollar names.”

  “How many people named Dwight do you know?” I said. “Or Franklin or Lyndon or Woodrow?”

  “His father’s a typesetter,” Isaac said. “He was setting type for an article about Henry Fielding, the novelist—you know, the chap who wrote Tom Jones.You remember Tom Jones, don’t you, Ed?They made a marvelous film of it.”

  “Yeah, I remember, I remember,” the governor said, with a bit of sulkiness. “Look here,” he said to me, “I don’t need to make a career knowing about you. Just tell me if there’s anything about you I don’t know or maybe even your pal here doesn’t know—and maybe we ought to.”

  “I don’t know how to answer that question,” I said.

  “Hey, look here,” said Kinosis, “I don’t like your goddamned tone. In politics you got to like people. That’s something you better learn and learn quick. Politics is people, pure and simple. And if you’re in this business and you don’t like people it’s like being a plumber and you’re afraid of a little water.”

  “Come, come,” said Isaac, “this is nonsense. There’s nothing about Fielding you don’t already know. He’s a good kid. And clean as a whistle. Good parents, father’s a working man, union boy. That sort of thing. And his mother worked for Corvino. Do you know him?”

  “No,” said the governor.

  “A Democrat.”

  “What’d she do for him?”

  “She shlepped,” said Isaac with a comic shrug. While Kinosis laughed (at my mother’s expense), Isaac quickly added, “He’s got a brother with maybe some business problems and a sister who’s got a marriage that maybe isn’t the best that ever was—but this day and age no one holds that against anyone. Look at our president and his crazy brother Billy.”

  “All right,” said Kinosis, standing up. He smoothed his jacket down and felt the front of it; he seemed disappointed to find a big fat belly beneath it. “I’m not going to make myself sick over this. I’ll send you to Washington and by the time you figure out how to find your ass without using both hands it’ll be time for a new election and if we ain’t friends by then that’ll be that.” He came up to me. I had five or six inches on him but he knew how to use his shortness in a threatening way, like those little dogs that can get under a Great Dane’s stomach and chew it out. He patted me ceremoniously on the shoulders and then turned to Isaac, who had risen from his chair when the governor did.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Isaac said to him.

  Kinosis shook Isaac’s hand and gave him a long searching look as he did. “Is tonight Hanukkah, Isaac?” he said.

  “That’s over already, Ed.”

  “Well, I hope you had a goody.”

  “You’ll be in town for Christmas?” Isaac inquired.

  “Nah. Me and Irene are going to Crete. We know a great little place there that we’re never going to tell anyone about. … ”

  They went on for a few more minutes. Isaac was patronizing him, but so subtly the governor didn’t know it. It was hard for me to listen. I turned away and went back to the window. The entire city had disappeared. It was just entirely gone and in its place was a thick white curtain of snow.

  ISAAC HAD BOTH hands on my shoulders and was looking at me with a smile so sweet and tender that it made me feel fatherhood was a matter of feeling rather than blood. His blue eyes were ablaze with mischief and triumph. “This is a great day, Fielding,” he said, in his lively tenor, a voice that had traveled from the West Side of Chicago, through the University of Wisconsin, and now, after four decades of assimilation, seemed to be plunging through the veneer of the American idiom and becoming suddenly British in its inflections—a bit of fanciness for which people sometimes poked fun at him, though I never saw the harm in it. The empire with all of its pompous privileges was just about dead and if he wanted to ape the accent it seemed harmless.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this was going to happen?” I said.

  “It wasn’t feasible.”

  “That’s not much of an answer,” I said.

  Isaac pretended to think about it. “No,” he said, cocking his head and furrowing his eyebrows until he looked like a brilliant Jewish leprechaun, “it isn’t much of an answer, is it. The governor wanted to tell you himself. He wanted your reaction.”

  “You still could have told me. You brief me for dinner parties, for God’s sake.”

  “What are we worrying about here?” Isaac asked. He tugged at my arm to lead me to where Adele was waiting for us. “Come on,”he said. “You’ll join us for an early supper and then we’ll send you on your way. I’m sure you want to go home and tell Juliet.”

  Juliet was Juliet Beck. She was Isaac’s niece and, for the past two years, my quasi-fiancée. Our relationship had the eerie comfort of an arranged marriage.

  We walked out of Isaac’s study into the next room, which was the library, a dark green room lined with books. The walls were covered with pictures of Isaac’s old friends—Adlai Stevenson, Herblock, Max Lerner, John Kennedy, Golda Meir, Sidney Hook, Fritz Reiner, Paul Douglas, Earl Warren, Sam Dash, Archibald MacLeish, Saul Bellow, Sidney Yates. The books ranged wide, not just the usual expensively bound rubbish you find on lawyers’ shelves, but collections of Chekhov, O. Henry, Whitman, Twain, Jewish history, Freud. The library’s windows faced northeast and I saw the curve of the lake, outlined in street lamps. The street lamps were fading, obscured by the snow.

  “It wouldn’t be safe to travel now,” Isaac said, noticing the storm for the first time.

  We left the library and crossed a long, narrow hall. Now we were in the dining room, with its pink and gray wallpaper, blue tiled fireplace, Chinese rug, and huge rosewood table. Adele was leaning across the table lighting the candles with a long wooden match. The warm yellow-orange light shined up into her face, softened her. Adele was the skeleton in Isaac’s closet. She had a powerful intelligence, great beauty, wit, energy, and high spirits, yet whatever she’d been capable of had been left undone and her life had been devoted to Isaac—looking after him, buttoning his cardigans on the coldest days, listening to him, correcting him, making him strong. Hers was the sort of life that made feminists fume and it was no accident that Adele herself was devastating in her critiques of these Ne
w Women—she called them the Atomic Girls, and said they wished they were still in boarding school, where they wouldn’t have to muss with contraception or worry about the rough play of boys.

  “Did the governor leave?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you see him out?” asked Isaac.

  “No. I was in the kitchen helping Mrs. Davis.”

  “Oh-oh,” I said. “Let’s organize a search. He’s probably hiding somewhere in the apartment.” I was at Adele’s side and she lifted her face for me to kiss. Her cheeks were warm from the candlelight.

  “It all went perfectly,” Isaac announced. “As so few things in life do.”

  Adele gripped my hand and squeezed it hard. Her strength was unsettling; it was like being touched under the table. “So tell me,” she said. “Now how do you feel?” Her accent was traveling in a different direction from Isaac’s—back to Russia, to sunsets, to the linden-drunk breeze combing the wheat.

  “Lucky,” I said.

  “No. Luck has nothing to do with it. Luck is for Mah-Jongg. This is something you deserve.”

  Isaac picked up the heavy cut-glass decanter and poured red wine into two glasses and water into mine.

  “The only way this makes sense to me,” I said, “is to figure Kinosis tagged me because every other possible replacement offended someone powerful and I don’t stick in anyone’s throat, being an unknown.”

  “It’s true, Fielding Pierce is not a household word,” Adele said. Every now and then, she would come forth with some piece of current lingo and it always surprised me. I wanted to tell her: You don’t need to talk that way, Adele.

  “We come from a long tradition, Fielding,” Isaac said. “And what’s at stake here is nothing less than civilized values. This is an age of mediocrity. Synthetic suits and those enormous portable radios. Barbarism. It’s all around us, everywhere. Someone told me they make bathroom paper printed up to look like the flag now. Can you imagine? Who can even count how many illegal guns there are in this city alone? Three hundred thousand, at least. This is a desperate time and a marvelous opportunity. You’11 shine amongst them, Fielding. Shine. Your honesty. Your toughness. Your respect for decency and enduring values.”

  Isaac handed me a wine glass filled with water. He kept an eye on me, see. I waited for him to give Adele her glass and then the three of us stood at the end of the table, our glasses aloft.

  “To Congressman Pierce,” said Adele.

  “Hear, hear,” said Isaac.

  “Everything I’ve been able to accomplish, I owe to you two,” I said, and then we drank. The door swung open. The Greens’ cook, a small, arthritic woman named Cordelia Davis, whom the Greens called Mrs. Davis and who called the Greens by their first names, and with whom they had once traveled down to Selma for Dr. King’s civil rights march, only to be horrified by the rowdiness of their comrades, came slowly in, her face a cheerful mask, holding tonight’s rack of baby lamb on its gleaming silver platter.

  3

  I HAD SIX cases pending at the county prosecutor’s, and now that I was leaving I had to put everything in order. I’d believed from the beginning that sooner or later I’d be leaving the CP’s office, but now that my time was up I felt unexpectedly nostalgic, almost regretful. I was not a great lawyer but I was good and what I lacked in thoroughness and subtlety I made up for in vigor. I was one of the great browbeaters; I loved to make a rich crook sweat. I had in two short years bagged an alderman, a construction contractor, a refuse-removing syndicate who were dumping their garbage on remote curves of the lakeshore, and a health care clinic that had been taking blood out of poor patients’ arms and selling it to a county hospital a few blocks away. There are some cases I had to prosecute that I would have just as soon walked away from, but I let myself do my job even when I didn’t exactly relish it, with the proviso that I would not make things worse for myself by pretending that what I was doing wasn’t a little off.

  But now, suddenly, it would all be behind me. I had a lot of squaring away to do and that meant working late. It was three days after my meeting with the governor and my third night in a row of working late. I called my apartment and Juliet answered.

  “I’m late again,” I said.

  “The phone’s been ringing all evening,” she said. “I feel like your assistant.”

  “Take it off the hook, then,” I said. “Or just don’t answer.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said. “There’s too much going on now.”

  “I’m just finishing up. I’ll be right home. Have you eaten?”

  She said she had, but you never could tell. I didn’t count those cottage cheese and scallion snacks as food. I locked my desk up for the night and shoved what was on top of it into my briefcase. I heard the thud of the charwoman’s bucket outside my office, the rattle of the icy wind against my dark windows. A moment of almost rapturous loneliness struck in me like a pipe-organ chord. I walked out leaving the lights on. They’d been pasting those Save a Watt stickers near the light switches and they annoyed the hell out of me. I’d be glad to save a watt but first I wanted the Justice Department to haul the oil companies into court for price fixing, creating artificial shortages, cutting secret deals with foreign governments.

  Traffic was slow as I drove south toward home. Out over the lake, the weather was chaos. New snow clouds were winging in, yet there must have been something warm in the air, too, because pale stems of winter lightning shot down toward the gray, broken surface of the water, followed by long groans of thunder. Alternating sprays of sleet and snow whipped against my windshield and the wipers left chalky smears that caught the streetlights.

  It had become rather a terrible habit of mine to phone Juliet before heading home if my schedule was irregular. Last year I’d arrived a day early from a trip to New York and barged in while Juliet was in bed with a guy named Ted Olden, who had been our doctor. Olden had been dead asleep and Juliet had been propped up with pillows behind her, reading The World of Our Fathers. She was naked; I looked at her warm breasts, the book, and the look of absolute horror on her face. I think I said “Glad?” and switched on another lamp, a gray pottery lamp with a big black shade that stood on the rococo chest of drawers with its intimations of Europe, culture, and exile that we had inherited from Juliet’s mother. The lamp cast its light onto the chair containing Olden’s baggy gabardine suit, the boxer shorts nesting inside the trousers. Juliet tried to shake Olden back to our side of the great divide, but he was resisting her efforts. Speechless, I watched her jiggle his arm, and then, her panic rising nicely, smacking her fingers against his cheek, and then, really cooking now, shouting, “Theodore, for God’s sake, get up!” Theodore? I asked myself. Why so formal? We’d always called him Ted. Ted won’t renew my dex prescription. Ted’s coming for dinner. Did you see Ted’s postcard from Glasgow? Olden sat straight up in bed, waking with a little of that old med school snappiness. What happened next is too mundane and disappointing and humiliating to go into. I said nothing I care to remember and the only act of violence I committed turned absurd: I picked up the gray pottery lamp and flung it toward the wall, but the cord was plugged in and the lamp stopped with a jerk in midair and plunged to the floor. I don’t know if Olden ever confessed the sordid little adventure to anyone; Juliet and I never mentioned it to a soul. Yet it lived between us and perversely raised the stakes of passion between us for a while. Infidelity has a way of heightening and cheapening desire.

  We lived in a bay-windowed brownstone on Hyde Park Boulevard. I pulled into the driveway next to our house and saw Juliet’s old green Volvo. There was light coming from our windows on the third floor. I let myself in and stomped up the stairs to our apartment.

  Juliet was petite and in perfect proportion. She was certainly the smallest woman I’d ever been with, although the only time I really noticed her tininess was when I kissed her from head to foot and realized how soon it was over. She was beautiful, with black hair and white skin and a blush that looked like windburn
in her cheeks. She worked as a restorer at the Oriental Institute and ran a little business of her own on the side called European Restorations. Every once in a while she got to work on a piece from a genuine master—a tattered Holbein, a Whistler watercolor upon which a child had laid a Creamsicle. She loved old things; she revered the distant past and mourned for it like an exile will long for the land of her birth.

  She was the daughter of two elderly academicians and she seemed to have been born knowing all the things I had to strain to keep track of—the prices of things, the hidden histories of objects, of gestures and phrases, the proper way of organizing the various tiers of acquaintanceship—whom you send a note to, whom you send flowers, who gets invited to parties of ten, who comes to parties of fifty. I had no confidence in mastering that sort of thing, and now with Juliet to look after them I just let it go altogether.

  She had come to Chicago from Paris, by way of Bucks County and Palo Alto, and she had come as an orphan. Isaac did his best to look after her but she was an enigma to him. Really, she was an enigma to everyone and I think she was half a stranger to herself. She seemed to believe her emotional makeup was different from other people’s and she perceived herself as a mixture of unnatural tenderness and utter indifference. She was kind to other people but jokey about herself; she treated her own heart as if it were a cartoon character or, at best, as if it were reciting something it had read in a book. Luckily, she had inherited the family keenness for politics and they at least had that point of contact. Juliet knew her stuff from Metternich to ward politics.