Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  But I was doing more than coating my nerves with carbohydrates; I was trying to chart my course through these swift, shallow waters. I was at once an outsider and the center of attention. Tony Dayton sat on my left, smoking a Winston which he held with four fingers and which he ashed into his food. He had dark injured eyes. He wore a flashy houndstooth jacket, a pin on the lapel that said JAZZ!! He glanced over at me and saw something worried in my face. “Don’t let it get you down, old buddy. I’m your new best friend.”

  From the outset, Isaac controlled the conversation. He talked about my qualifications, my strengths, my possible weaknesses, as if I weren’t in the room. “We’ve got a fresh young face,” Isaac was saying and no one but Lucille Jackson even glanced my way.

  Lucille Jackson was the only black at the meeting. She and her husband owned a few funeral homes in the ghetto; they were old-fashioned Negroes, with processed hair and Cadillacs. Lucille regarded me with her arms folded over her enormous bosom. She had an extravagant frown, like a sumo wrestler. Her crucifix rested in her cleavage, sinking into a sea of hot fudge. Lucille’s reputation was that she could deliver 100,000 black votes but as my eyes met hers I suddenly didn’t believe it. She was just like most of the others, a part of a process she barely understood, and this hocus-pocus about votes delivered was just like a witchdoctor clapping his hands before a thunderstorm and then convincing everyone that his hands caused the rain. I may not have had the friends I ought to have had west of Cottage Grove but I knew enough about what was going on there—the average age, the unemployment rate, the cost of a bag of heroin—and I could campaign there with or without her.

  Tony Dayton was going to manage the campaign and his great concern was how much money the Party was giving us. “We got to at least make this look like a campaign and not some dance down by the union hall,” he said.

  And then Rich Mulligan, who was thick with the civil servants and had control over the precinct workers and the loudspeaker trucks, went nostalgic. “Ten years ago,” he said, looking at his fingernails, “we could run a decent campaign for ten thousand bucks. Now it takes a goddamned million.”

  “This is the reality of the modern world,” said Shamansky, and his voice was so sonorous you wanted to argue with everything he uttered.

  “I don’t get it,” said Sonny Marchi. He combed his oily hair forward; he had the keen eyes of a poacher. I couldn’t figure how a well-off girl like the governor’s daughter could have married him. She must have been kind of tragic herself. “We got the votes, right? I mean, hell, vote early and vote often. Am I right?”

  There was an uneasy silence as the knights of the round table decided who would do battle with the hedgehog.

  “There’s already so many ruffled feathers,” said Mulligan, “I think what we need to do is coast and the way you coast is you stay in neutral. And in terms of the bucks, we can get enough ink for free. Reporters got nothing to do this time of year. Am I right, Kathy?”

  I looked across the table at Kathy Courtney and felt a quick intestinal tug: I saw Sarah’s face superimposed over her own for a moment and even when sanity erased the vision, the moment left a trace of itself. Kathy Courtney had short red hair, a strong, stubborn face. She wore a blue silk blouse, a prim string of pearls. Her voice was husky. “You’re right about that, Rich,” she said. “The newspapers and the TV boys are ready to run with anything we give them. And I wanted to mention something else here. And that’s that we can count on Jerry Carmichael’s full cooperation. I don’t know if we want to have him actively involved but he is willing to do whatever he can for the good of the ticket.”

  “That’s very good of him, Kathy,” said Henry Shamansky, nodding sagely.

  “It’s what I would expect from him,” said Congressman Kurowsky in his pious, aggressive drone. He put his hand over his heart, a gesture that seemed to mean not so much that a solemn oath was being taken but that something snaky was being said and that his heart was being shielded from it, much in the way you cover a child’s ears to prevent him from hearing something confusing or frightening.

  “Jerry always tried to do what was right,” said Kathy Courtney, her voice coloring with feeling.

  It was at that moment I realized this meeting could easily go to its conclusion without my opening my mouth. I was letting them turn me into a tag-along and it struck me that this had gone on just long enough to lull the lot of them into a false sense of superiority.

  “OK,” I said, “let me cut in here before things get too far along.” I rubbed my hands together to tell them this was something I was looking forward to. “First of all, I want to thank you for giving up your Sundays and coming here on such short notice. I really do appreciate it.” That seemed to cover the point I most wanted to make: they were here for me. Next, I wanted them to know that even if they didn’t know me, I knew them. “It’s very encouraging to a rookie like me,” I said, letting them see my smile, which I knew they knew was manufactured, but that was part of the deal, “to know that someone like Rich Mulligan will be helping to get out the vote. I’ve always thought that when the history of ward politics is written, Rich’ll have a chapter all to himself.” I looked around the table. They were all paying attention and it made me want to laugh. There’s a wonderful kind of terror in learning how easy it is to control people.

  “And it’s good to see Henry Shamansky here and know that the Independent Voters of Illinois will be behind my candidacy. I realize Henry’s been having his own problems with the internal workings of the Hyde Park I.V.I, and I especially appreciate your being here in what must be a difficult time.” I moved my eyes away from him because I didn’t want to see his face fall. It would blow it all if I gloated.

  “And of course, it’s good to see Congressman Kurowsky and I welcome his support, too, though I have to say I’m a little surprised. But who knows, right? Maybe Roman’s coming around and we’ll be voting together against senseless weapons systems and for a federal jobs corps.”

  “Don’t go holding your breath waiting for it, sonny,” he said. And I laughed at this before anyone could, so it would be my joke—not his. I owned the meeting. I looked over at Isaac; he was sitting back in his chair with his steepled hands tucked beneath his chin and when he felt my gaze he nodded.

  “And of course,” I went on, “I’m very glad to see Lucille Jackson, especially because this election’s going to be won in the black neighborhoods of this district. And not because we have registered Democrats there but because I intend to offer programs and a commitment to the poor and discriminated-against people of the district that will make sense and give them a real reason to support me.” I paused. “Mrs. Jackson,” I said, “I remember what you said to a reporter from the Defender three years ago. You said, ‘Politicians who make promises and then walk away are like muggers.’ Well, I’ve spent a while throwing crooks into jail and I don’t intend to become one myself.

  “I’m glad to have Tony Dayton working with me. I’ve followed quite a few of your campaigns, Tony, and I think we’ll find a way to work together that will be good for both of us.

  “Which brings me to the point I most wanted to make right here. And that’s the idea of coasting into this election in neutral. I realize we’ve only got a short while and two weeks isn’t time to raise a lot of complex issues. But I don’t intend to sneak into Congress. I want the people who vote for me to know who they’re voting for. I don’t think we should be all over the map, cranking out position papers like a bunch of amateurs, but I want to pick one or two issues, and hit them hard.”

  I could feel hate vibrations in the room but I couldn’t quite locate their source. It was probably Kurowsky, who could undoubtedly diffuse and project his feelings like a ventriloquist can make his voice come out of the sugar bowl.

  “How are we supposed to agree on what issues in the time we’ve got left?” asked Tony Dayton.

  “We won’t have to agree on them,” I said. I shrugged as if nothing could be simpler. A
nd then I said in a perfectly friendly voice, as if I was merely taking on an extra responsibility so the others would not have to work so hard, “it’ll just be up to me.”

  LIKE A MAN who’s put on a pair of artificial wings and then accidentally catches a wind, I felt the familiar world growing distant beneath me, and the azure into which I was heading, now that it was reachable, seemed utterly cold, even hideous. Everyone around me was a stranger and the strangest of them all was this man running for Congress, this grinning fake with a sudden clutch of underlings, this new self that seemed to survive only by eating in large bites all of the selves that had preceded it.

  It was then, however, Monday, the day after the brunch at the Greens’, that Caroline called from O’Hare Airport, to announce she had arrived and where the hell was I. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten she was coming to Chicago, but the fact had been lying at a distance from me, like a tool you need but cannot reach. I was home alone when the call came, sitting around in a pair of brown and gold pajamas, eating emperor grapes and reading yesterday’s papers. I was sinking into self-reproach and my confidence was shot. The election was in two more weeks and there were a lot of things I ought to have been doing that were perhaps a touch more pressing than wearing pajamas and eating grapes, but that was all I could manage just then. Like most self-invented people, I’d always felt I was a two-destiny guy, the one being the life I’d been born to and the other being the life I desired. Now, with my heart feeling so defeated, there seemed nothing to do but slowly sink back into the vague and insufficient fate most organically deserved. But hearing Caroline’s pissed-off voice snapped me to.

  “Do you want me to take a taxi down to you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so. God, Caroline. I’m sorry. I have it written right down here in front of me,” I lied, pointing at nothing. “And I have you coming in at four o’clock.”

  “OK, OK, thanks for the lie. I’ll be there when I get there.”And with that, she hung up the phone.

  I hung up the phone. Idly, I picked up the Hyde Park Herald, our neighborhood weekly. I paged through it looking for something about the campaign, but it was all book fairs and bicycle thefts. I finally got to the classifieds at the back of the paper and started to read them. I never read the classified ads and I didn’t stop to wonder why I was reading them now. But under the personals, I saw the following notice:

  F.—Can’t stop the music. S.

  Very calmly, I stood up and found a scissors. I cut the ad out and placed it in my wallet. I felt a burst of insane joy, but then it was gone. Don’t think about it now, I told myself, but I was on fire with it, like a lover with his first real secret.

  I got cleaned up, dressed. It wouldn’t be fair to Caroline to appear much less than full of energy and purpose. It was, after all, with the hope of somehow being galvanized by my current that she’d made the trip; if what she wanted was bruised fruit and an unmade bed, she could have stayed home.

  Generally, it had been Danny to whom we turned when we needed to feel the acceleration of risk, the reach of great expectations—Danny with his schemes, his palatial, unaffordable apartments, his Japanese and European friends with tongue-twister names and exotic tastes. And before Danny, it had been Caroline who’d been our avant-garde—with her boyfriends on BMWs, her far-flung continental tour, her cryptic letters home written in calligraphy on salmon-colored paper, her dreams of immortality on the walls of cool museums, her marriage to Eric McDonald, the screaming, terrifying miracles of her sons’ breech births. Now it was my turn; Caroline’s boys were in Africa with Eric, her own ambitions had been beaten down to the root by the stampede of necessity—the necessity of motherhood, the necessity of loneliness, and above all, the necessity of material want; it’s hard to be a genius when you’re holding three jobs.

  A battered taxi pulled in front of the house and I yanked my window up to shout hello. Caroline got out of the cab wearing a full-length black nylon and down coat and black earmuffs. She had a travel bag hoisted onto her shoulder and a plaid suitcase heavy enough to need both hands to hold it. She leaned back into the cab to say goodbye to three people who were sitting in the backseat and then the taxi pulled away, sending up two fans of dirty street snow.

  “I’ll be right down,” I called out to her.

  “I got it, that’s all right,” she yelled back.

  I stood up straight; a buzz of emotion went through me. Hearing my voice calling out and then hearing hers—it was the sound of the past, those yells and signals, those deliriously impatient calls that fluttered like birds in the high, airy cage of childhood. I ran to the front door and headed down the stairs. I made it to the locked, beveled glass door before Caroline made it up the porch steps and I opened the door for her. The wind blew straight in at me, parting around her body like white water around a stone.

  “Hurry, I’m freezing,” I said.

  “What a town,” she said, with a last effort. She let go of the handle as I took her suitcase from her. I dropped it on the welcome that and put my arms around her. The outside of her coat felt like dry ice against my shirt.

  “Mmmm, you smell so good, Fielding. I guess you’re not using that Old Spice after-shave anymore.” She rubbed her hand up and down my back. It seemed rather a nervous gesture; perhaps I was holding her too tightly.

  I stepped back and closed the door behind her. “That’s right,” I said. “I haven’t since you sent me that French after-shave cream that comes in a tube. You spoiled me.”

  “But you wouldn’t touch it,” she said.

  “It hung around and finally I tried it.”

  “Ah,” she said, pinching at my stomach, “you fancy little devil.”

  We made our way up the stairs. It was odd how heavy her suitcase was. “What do you have in here, anyhow?” I asked.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve gone anywhere, I’ve forgotten how to pack. So I just put everything I own into it.”

  “God.”

  “Afraid I’m going to stay too long?”

  “Don’t be funny. If you knew how much I needed you here, you wouldn’t … ” Wouldn’t what? I didn’t know. Believe it? Stay? I lost the thread. When I glanced back at Caroline, she was looking at me a little strangely.

  “You’re OK, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yes, I’m OK.”

  “Good. I’ve been getting enough craziness from Danny. I need a rest.”

  Caroline dumped her stuff in my study, where she’d be sleeping on the convertible sofa. I looked at the room through her eyes: it seemed to hover uncertainly between sterility and disarray. The bookshelves were neat, dust-free; the Chinese rug from Marshall Field was perfectly square, a cheerful blue and gold with a Chinese character woven into the center—though who knew what the ideogram meant? Perhaps it was a Mandarin obscenity. My desk, however, seemed to be emblematic of a mind gone mad. There were caved-in stacks of papers and journals, little scraps of paper with phone numbers, unread magazines, empty coffee cups, cuticle scissors, my leather-bound journal opened up with two pens stuck in it, a Sony tape recorder and a clutter of cassettes, a handout from the Jehovah’s Witnesses which I was too superstitious to throw away. And beneath the desk were the papers that had already been shed, scraps and notebooks and court transcripts that had been forced to the ground by the newer arrivals. The desk was the way station between my crisp public self and the inner self that was slowly caving in.

  “Do you realize that if you become a world-renowned statesman, this desk, just as it is, will be worth a fortune?” Caroline said. She was opening her suitcase and unpacking a couple of her dresses before they wrinkled further.

  “Then let’s wrap it up and ship it off,” I said. I was watching her as she fumbled with the hangers. I’d never known her to seem so nervous.

  “Are we going to go over to your campaign office?” she asked.

  “If you want. It’s just getting started.”

  “I want to. I really want to make that the focus.”<
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  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “No. I’d like to start right away. If you get beaten, I don’t want Mom blaming me.”

  “Ha ha?”

  “Yes, ha ha,” assured Caroline. “But I would like to get going. I don’t even know what you want me to do. But I need to be busy. Anyhow, I’m excited. Aren’t you?” She sat down suddenly and put her arms up on the back of the sofa. She smiled and held her head at an angle, as if she were going to be photographed.

  “You’re so pretty,” I said.

  “I’m thirty-six years old next month,” she said.

  “Go into politics,” I said. “Fifty is considered young.”

  “Well, it doesn’t work that way in my business, which is being a struggling artist living in a slum. For that, you’re supposed to be twenty.”

  “When I’m in Congress, I’ll see what I can do about getting you a grant,” I said.

  “I know you will. But for now, how about feeding me?”

  We went to the kitchen and for the first time since her arrival, Caroline mentioned Juliet.

  “Juliet still living on cottage cheese and scallions?”

  “She’s branched out a little. She likes turkey breast now.”

  “How lusty of her,” said Caroline. She was standing next to me, peering into the refrigerator. There was bottled water, freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, a bottle of honey and vinegar salad dressing from Maine, a pound of turkey breast wrapped in cellophane, little jars of Scottish jam, a wedge of butter from a kosher dairy store, a tub of Breakstone low-fat cottage cheese. “You’ve got yourself a fancy girl, Fielding,” Caroline said. “Looks like Danny’s icebox.”