by Mike Miller
Atop it all, supremely incongruous, stands bland Billy Penn, that stout, reformed delinquent, twenty-seven tons of immortalized Quaker equability. Unmistakable against the pallid sky, poised directly over Lawyerland with one hand pointing, perhaps, to his home estate at Pennsbury, or maybe to the Shakamaxon site of his peace treaty with the Lenni-Lenape, or maybe, as occasionally posited, to a certain whorehouse in Chinatown.
City Council meets on the fourth floor, secured behind black wrought iron gates displaying the immensity and imposing design you’d expect to find protecting a crusader fortress or a Hollywood mogul’s estate, except that Council’s are purportedly always open. Then on through etched-glass double saloon doors into Room 400, into a confined but elegant interior not unlike the inside of a tarnished antique jewelry box, gilded and lined in red, its inside lid an ornate coffered ceiling studded with marvelous hexagonal light fixtures.
Plain wooden visitor chairs line a rail of polished brass; small desks crafted from elaborately configured wood and intricate metalwork angle in close to each other out on the floor, each with its small microphone and padded leather chair. The carpet shrieks for attention with a blood-red pattern over vibrant crimson, although it’s been years since we’ve had literal fisticuffs up here. Walls are covered in alternate sections of pale gray marble and blue-green panels of painted cloth, preparation for murals that never happened. And up front there’s the President’s chair, a virtual throne of marble and Tiffany glass and mother-of-pearl, properly flanked by the city and American flags, reminders of democratic grandiosity, an implied threat. So much ostentation, yet the chamber retains an undeserved nobility, demanding veneration for the democratic process despite the dubious record of this particular room and its serenely unreformed occupants.
Be rude enough to stare a little harder and you notice the brown burn marks on the light shades, the tarnished spots on the rail, the overall encroaching dinginess.
This was the first regular session following Council’s frankly outrageous three-month summer break, and everything material in the room remained embalmed in the torpor of late summer, but I wasn’t much surprised to find most of the visitor chairs filled with unusually alert faces.
Many of them belonging to self-respecting citizens present for legitimate purposes: small businessmen, educators dripping with certainty, parents on some mission with those firm parental jaws. Experienced functionaries from hospitals or high schools or whatever overbearing institution, that unimaginative company of serious thin men in everyday suits and overweight women in polyester slacks a tad too short. An elderly Asian gentleman sat to my right, berry-faced and pleased with everything, while a clutch of self-conscious, overdressed teenagers held the seats immediately to my left.
Usually those smaller groups up to something specific, the ones with the family holiday glow about them, drift in early for a round of official handshakes and introductions by the relevant councilperson’s aide. Otherwise it’s generally quiet at first, just a few familiar faces with laptops. And then as ten o’clock moves on towards ten-thirty, and some self-satisfied activist is placing a small reminder gift on everyone’s desk, and aides are delivering manila envelopes, and coffee mugs are being positioned just so, then during those few anticipatory minutes the murmurs swell into genuine noise and members magically manifest behind their desks as if they’d been there all along.
That particular day offered another bit of novel excitement, sufficient to momentarily eclipse even the fascinating matter of Thom’s public demeanor. An unlikely figure came pushing himself down my row, hands to the rail, absorbing everyone’s astonished attention just as the session was at last opening. A pathetic and brutal cliché, obscenely gross; he finally settled himself two chairs from me, his embarrassingly uncontained personal girth overflowing the seat, loose and visibly perspiring. All this overt pathology virtually sucked the air out of the immediate atmosphere; you breathed instead the enormous resentment seeping out of his pores.
This guy was still a kid, in his early twenties at most, sitting there as if scolded with his eyes straight ahead, holding himself perfectly still, flabby hands folded together atop the mountain of his lap. Naturally a pitiable spectacle until gradually you registered the accumulated aggression at the core, and then the thoughtfulness, as of someone carefully considering a multitude of unpleasant scenarios, all of it adding up to a serious potential for violence. When suddenly you decided to take him seriously and sat back to distance yourself. He was wearing a simple navy sports jacket and had thick dark hair long enough to rub against his collar combed straight back from a clear enough forehead. His surface persona evinced bored obedience and also some disgust, but primarily a simple determination to get through the morning.
This was Vinnie Scarpone, or as he preferred Vinnie the Shoe for various nasty but I understand mostly fictitious reasons. I recognized him from news video and newspaper photos from about a year ago dealing with a court case not relevant here. Vinnie was the needy minor appendage of a mob relict, just someone’s unfortunate nephew. An automatic glance around told me the boy was probably on his own, so maybe on some personal, legitimate business.
“At this time, the Chair recognizes Councilwoman Margery Haskell, who will present a resolution declaring September American Heart Association Month. Will Mrs. Kovacs and her companions please join Councilwoman Haskell at the podium.”
Margery rose, expanding upward with her whole forceful soul, fully occupying even that miniscule moment in the spotlight. Reddish-brown hair cropped close to a round skull, a glowing halo of scintillating embers capturing the light; large gold hoops brushing her cocoa complexion. A person invariably adorned in something square, typically a suit in a darker shade; Margery’s not exactly overweight but muscular and sturdy, a type you’d associate with a policewoman or someone in the military, straight up and down. She does nothing to hide it. That day it was a charcoal suit with tasteful gold jewelry. Those virtual uniforms are probably a complex defense against envy or attack, because for all the proud determination there’s something damaged and still hurting about Margery, something fundamentally at odds with the highly intelligent, capable woman she presents. It’s in those mildly belligerent postures, that chronically suspicious soul, the pugnacious expression in her slightly protuberant eyes. Well, overall she’s remarkable if intimidating, and highly insightful although in my opinion a little paranoid.
And an unthinking progressive, one of those unquestioning types who know what it means to do right by the people and woe to you if you’re of the opposition because here’s a woman all too inclined to speak decisively as a matter of policy, without reference to any other point of view. On some level she equates Republicans with the Holocaust. A generous woman, generally willing to help you help yourself if you’re sufficiently serious and intelligent and disciplined but the hell with you if you’re not because she draws a hard line on where your responsibility begins. She mentors from a judicious distance, issuing insights from her comfortable seat on God’s lap. Margery holds a doctorate in something like organizational psychology of government management but training hasn’t mitigated some elemental need, and when she does revert there’s that always a slight shock where you realize she’s been operating under a separate agenda all along.
The teenagers were getting to their feet, blessedly unaware of any larger considerations, not giving a damn about Thom if they even knew who he was. But glancing around I caught kindly concern in the wide, pitted countenance of David Cevallos, and from Jack Murphy greedy curiosity behind a shabby charade of compassion. Murphy was a lanky individual with thinning grayish hair and a good smile, and he had some laudable charity work to his credit, but if you saw him across a room you’d instinctively shout: “Snake!” As for Jimmy Spivak, that small, square bulldog, he alternated between peering over at us in sharp, preternatural suspicion and this equally hilarious imitation of political acuity, hand on fist, eyes straight ahead. I saw him feel my notice and immediately frow
n down at his desk, turning something over.
In a back row and so closer to me, the oleaginous Donny Mealy was as usual maintaining a virtual court, even in this severely regimented space. Or that was the impression he gave, and meant to give, lounging there with his legs arrogantly extended, repeatedly running his hand through that lustrous head of sable hair in an automatic tic. I was certain he, too, had been staring at us, but when I looked over he dropped his hand and proceeded to examine his manicure with absorption and apparently some small puzzlement. Sparing a quick glance over to where his nearest neighbor, old Wilmer van Zandt, was half dozing, and then back to those fascinating hands.
Councilwoman June Dupre was accompanying Margery and her guests to the podium, presenting her usual anxious appearance: her classic golden-brown bob borne like an uncomfortable accessory, her silk suit impaired by an habitual depressed slouch, her makeup modest but still noticeable. Everything worried June, but perhaps that was inevitable for a woman of her accomplishments, her exquisite taste and remarkable erudition. Such gifts distinguish a natural leader and therefore imply a duty to lead. I figured she was doing okay for a neighborhood schlep, an ambitious daughter of the crass lower middle.
Thom was rather speculatively studying our young monster neighbor, fist over grin, while Vinnie himself seemed to be observing nothing whatsoever but simply physically existing. I caught Thom’s eye and he shrugged back my own bemusement.
“I see that the Councilwoman is being joined by Councilwoman Dupre and Councilman James Spivak.” Thus prompted, Spivak rose and joined his colleagues.
“Publicity happens,” I said.
Fist and grin. ”I feel like I’ve finally arrived. My existence has been validated.”
Beth Ann Green, Harry’s longtime Chief Clerk and nothing more intimate so far as I know, was seated in front of a laptop at a plain table against the wall off to the right side of the podium, a comfortable, efficient vision in purple and black with shocking pink plastic nails, her jet black hair pinned into a tight bun. For once Harry himself seemed to be fully alert and deeply pondering, sucking in his weasel cheeks, his head back so that his heavy eyelids appeared open and aware. Action might be required, his expression seemed to say, but it would be imprudent to plot precipitously. Throwbacks, both of them, their days past for all they refused to acknowledge that fact, hanging on like limpets. When it comes to those two I’m describing a scene that wasn’t really there and hadn’t been for many years. But the long established municipal racial and ethnic power shift to today’s contemporary venality is irrelevant for my current purposes, while Harry and his ilk, for some mysterious reason, remain pertinent.
And Harry was a survival for sure, having managed to enjoy forty-odd years of ghost payrolls, blatant influence pedaling, and ex officio sexual indiscretions while consistently maintaining not only his prominence but also his unique sense of personal honor. It was everyone else’s ethics that mutated, bowing under the pressure of an increasingly indiscriminate tolerance, until Harry eventually harvested respect even from his former enemies.
I caught the distantly polite smile of someone’s aide edging past me, his contemptuous shoulder to those virgin visitors who were present only because of their personal concern for Thom, identifying a bit too closely with a minor celebrity in kindly or vicious fashion and much too involved with their own emotions to appreciate the acute, primitive fascination beneath all the routine process, the trace of something a little dangerous patiently waiting. But it was affecting some of the other visitors, the sporadic but regular enough spectators and participants, the ones with those neighborhood faces you always think you should recognize. In fact I’m sure everyone familiar with that room displayed a vaguely distracted air that morning.
And all this suspense because Thom Askew was as integral to the municipal scene as City Hall itself, as much a political fixture. This universally admired personage who had for Christ’s sake always been honest about his sins, who instinctively shunned the dark.
A volatile but entertaining political presence right out of Penn, where he adroitly avoided posing as a scholar despite obvious academic brilliance, flaunting instead his talent as a compact and devious tight end. Openly, innocently cunning, you understand? A proud and amused iconoclast, an erudite and dangerous public wit eager to exploit anything unacceptably hypocritical or tediously pretentious or even marginally dense. Master of an almost miraculous ability to stroke the establishment even while tweaking it, and that was the real secret behind his value as a public commodity, behind so much of his exceptional social success: that ability to be an inoffensive although blatant climber, facilely at home anywhere with anyone, although as a saving grace attracted to the humble as much as to the elite. For Philadelphians he was forever the pattern of a perfect gentleman despite the open calculation and assumed spontaneity and famished ego and rampant vanity because such deficiencies just never mattered, his faults seemed to us weirdly admirable. And somehow his unremarkable sandy hair and irregular features only added to his appeal, making anything regularly pretty appear plastic and, ironically enough, false.
So an accommodating legend, making us all proud of ourselves, the wonder pet of the limitlessly indulgent local media, a constant ideal of our friends’ parents. Also an erstwhile flagrant womanizer, but all that predated the Ruth era; afterwards it was all romantic knightly devotion and never so much as a whiff of rumor to the contrary, two posers guarding each other’s backs without at all realizing it, assuming themselves in love.
Well, ultimately you had to take him into account just to do business in this city, so immense was the hold he had over our worshipping souls. Moving inviolate among responsible politicos who measured their success largely by how grievously they could curtail the aims of this impudent golden boy and so attain some slight degree of equality with him, their ingratiating enemy who somehow found time to know the names of every nearby falafel or Chinese food or fruit salad vendor and was invariably delighted to sample their wares with all due, outrageous trepidation. Although for his own lunch he preferred a quiet corner booth in a convenient gastropub if with friends, but otherwise a deli sandwich or salad to devour voraciously in his office, without tasting it.
“Thank you, Mister President. A resolution declaring September American Heart Association Month. Whereas,” Margery read, and stepped back so that the three of them could take the rest of it in turns, Harry meanwhile looking down from his perch directly over the podium like a Greek god observing the goings-on at Troy.
I contemplated them, these three well-known figures gathered at the front of the room. Spivak bored me. June saddened me. And Margery made me angry.
I saw movement and caught van Zandt coming fully awake, rheumy gray eyes reorienting; he snorted and then smiled without embarrassment. Just fully returned to action after some kind of medical crisis over the summer, clearly frail, now more than ever he absolved himself from life with senile recalcitrance, upholding inexplicable prejudices in a very screw you kind of way: “I don’t know why, but that just happens to be what I think.” And then that saccharine smile; it was as if he’d become modern. Meanwhile his body, untouched by this anomalous spirit, had degenerated into a rather stately hollow hulk crowned with notably thick white hair, a veritable caricature of a statesman with narrow, observant eyes, concave porcelain cheeks, and the necessary generous hooked nose to bestow a fitting Roman profile even in repose. He was one of our few Republicans, visibly seeping down into local history. Consider him the symbol of a fading generation, a compendium of its trite, familiar moral and physical options; so far as I knew he’d never evinced any unexpected or original insight or behavior from vigorous youth through to current decrepitude. These days you addressed him with labored courtesy while surreptitiously checking that his fly was zipped.
“Resolved further, that an engrossed copy of this resolution be presented to the students of Northeast High School in appreciation of their dedicated efforts to increase awareness o
f this insidious disease and how to go about preventing it.
“Bee-you-ti-ful,” Harry said. And then Mrs. Kovacs spoke, and then the students spoke individually, and sometime after that it was Councilman Murphy at the podium, to be joined there by David Cevallos and several additional upstanding citizens. “A resolution recognizing the excellent efforts of Philadelphia’s Table to redistribute uneaten food to the needy.”
It’s always this exciting. From behind me I picked up the aroma of a menthol cough drop; Thom was thoughtfully twirling an unopened package of those toxic-orange peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers. Harry forged ahead to Communications, the Sergeant-at-Arms was requested to deliver the messages to the Chief Clerk. The mayor, it developed, had signed various bills, was forwarding to Council a recommendation of the City Planning Commission, and was transmitting ordinances for consideration regarding open-air cafes and lead-based paint coating on jewelry.
“The next order of business is the introduction of bills and resolutions.”
That one traveling the room, everyone taking a turn or passing: recreation field maintenance, congratulations to some charter school, amendments to varied titles of the City Code, resolutions duly seconded and resolved, and bills forwarded to the appropriate committee.
That initial tension was dissipating under the massage of routine.
Mr. Spivak: “An ordinance to amend the Philadelphia Zoning Maps by changing the zoning designations in certain areas of land located within an area bounded by Columbus Avenue, Locust Street, and Vine Street.”
A gentle susurration: nothing dramatic, just a barely perceptible communal intake of breath prior to the commencement of a process that, once set in motion, might eventually require thought or risk or even prove significant unlikely as that was, all things considered. And not even today; today was about officially confirming issues already settled elsewhere.
