by Mike Miller
This fascinating matter referencing Penn’s Landing, that highly-contested stretch of real estate bordering the steely and businesslike Delaware River. The scene, a century after the glad arrival of Mr. Penn, of a flourishing commercial port giving access to the most successful city in America, later gradually reduced to the abandoned terminus of a 20th-century slum. And currently - what? The tantalizing appendage of a stretch of landmark urban redevelopment, an underutilized although hardly neglected public gathering place? Without question the centerpiece of a truly wonderful series of financial fiascos.
A site weirdly cursed despite the moderate popularity of the current facilities: the Great Plaza amphitheatre and the World Sculpture Garden and the ships and the Seaport Museum and the rest of it, all integral to our every municipal holiday, all barely nice enough and moderately utilized but never quite enough to revitalize the Landing in any satisfactory fashion, isolated as it was on the other side of I-95, insistently decomposing amidst a swirl of frustration and scandal. Every now and then there came another grand plan, generally from some out-of-town investor with an exciting proposal and no local expertise, these projects invariably doomed for who knows what stubborn underlying reasons. But we determinedly rise again to our self-imposed challenge, neurotically deaf to experience, and meantime the surrounding areas developed the way they wanted, by fitful yet successful inches.
Now here was our novice mayor’s bill, and what this mayor wanted was a slots parlor, yet another casino on the Delaware but this one right downtown, easily accessible to the public transit crowd. He’d made his agenda more than clear, citing among other things the benefits to minority employment and revitalization spurred by a genuine destination attraction, the factual bases for his statements remaining obscure, and anyway the whole mess was so politically divisive it was being ignored by almost everyone outside the administration whenever possible for as long as possible. This all concerned one of two gaming licenses awarded Philadelphia and initially intended for South Philly, except that plan was blocked by this new mayor with his downtown plan. So then the license was supposed to be an old department store building right on Market Street, but community activists and the owners objected, the developers were fined for failing to submit designs and financials, two new backers appeared and disappeared, and Council attempted to halt development altogether through zoning control, overriding the mayor’s veto and voting to put the issue straight on the ballot until the State Supreme Court nixed that idea. So ultimately the Gaming Control Board revoked the license, and now here it was up for grabs all over again.
“The bill will be referred to the appropriate committee.” So we leaned back and stood down and everything droned along just as if nothing had happened, if in fact it had.
“What do you think?”
Eyebrows shooting way up, the better to sight along a familiar road. He shrugged. “My faith instructs me to believe in miracles.” In truth Thom was a preacher’s kid and took his faith seriously even while mocking the faithful, an intellectual embarrassed by simple believers.
“The next order of business is reports from committees.” Bills on Appropriations considered and returned to Council with favorable recommendations. Rules suspended to allow an immediate first reading. The bills just read placed on today’s First Reading Calendar. “The next order of business being a consideration of the Calendar; I note the bill just reported from committee with a suspension of the rules deemed to have had a first reading, it will be placed on our Second Reading and Final Passage Calendar for our next Council session.” The high school contingent openly stirred in its chairs, anxious to make this a proud memory. Thom was leaning over the cartoon page of a battered copy of Newsweek. Somewhere there was the click and flash of a camera.
I looked round again. Mealy was laughing silently at something with his immediate intimates. June appeared frozen into a fastidious curve, both hands flat on her desk, head lowered. She might have been praying; I wouldn’t put it past her.
I sighed and leaned directly over to Thom. “Well, how are you, anyway?”
“Second reading - rules - suspended - Consent agenda to consider the following bills - all in favor - anyone objecting to a bill on the Consent Agenda may object.” The Chief Clerk read out the bills in the necessary excruciating detail, keeping her tone calm but brisk to demonstrate her professionalism. When so instructed, proceeding to read the roll. “Aye on all bills.”
“I’m quite well, actually. And yourself, Con? Still trying to be a real boy?” Looking shrewd out loud, angry but delighted with himself. Thom can be a total prick.
On to the regular Second Calendar and Final Passage Calendar. “This bill having been read on two different days, the question now is shall the bill pass finally.” The roll droned round again. “The ayes are seventeen; the nays are zero.”
“Are there speeches on the part of the minority?” There are not; the Republications are holding their peace for the time being. “Are there speeches on the part of the majority?”
There was one. “The Chair recognizes Councilman Cevallos.”
“Thank you, Mister President.” Now here was a solemn presence, dignified and trustworthy; we rather impatiently watched him delve into his own balanced psyche, garnering the required words of wisdom, meanwhile arranging himself in his chair and letting his practiced orator’s eye measure us against his message. I know David well enough to know he’s an artist in his soul, and that means he essentially evades my judgment. Once a dedicated educator, he’s practiced at this kind of painful public introspection. Crystal is creeped out by him for reasons she refuses to examine, but I suspect she senses his unfavorable judgment, like God’s. I do think David holds her in mild contempt and I resent his appropriating my prerogative. He’s hardly attractive but even grotesque, his features coarse and asymmetrical, but he carries himself with a suave, old-fashioned Latin courtesy, and spends extravagantly on his elegant wardrobe.
“I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words regarding the bill introduced this morning by Councilman Spivak regarding a zoning adjustment in the area alongside the river.” His magnified voice traveled the room, David himself following closely to monitor our reception. He has a beautiful speaking voice with a melodious cadence that floats out to seduce you. “All of us here understand the very serious considerations involved; we’re talking about the first steps to bringing gambling to Penn’s Landing, traditionally a family venue.”
I could see he was going to have to be very severe with us despite his obvious distress at the necessity.
“I would remind Council that this legislation is inappropriate in that we all understand the Planning Commission has yet to complete their hearings on proposals regarding what’s going to happen at that site. In addition, the Gaming Control Board has yet to approve any such proposal. Two separate issues.”
“Well.” Uttered as if he’d just that moment thought it through, putting one thick palm flat on his desk the better to gesture with the loose hand: a middle-aged, crude Hispanic tough dressed for church. Inspiring Thom to chew his knuckle and Margery to look irritated and June to consciously project intelligence with a puckered forehead and narrowed eyes and Harry to pretend to extreme boredom. “I have myself been out there on the sidewalks during much of this whole past year, I have been in the high school auditoriums and firehouses and in corporate conference rooms, putting together community forums, talking to experts, meeting with the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation.”
“And out of all this invaluable input we have carefully established principles for the development of this area, and these principles or guidelines are about what the people of this city actually want to see in that location. So you see these guidelines have to be, absolutely must be honored and fully incorporated into whatever ultimate design we support.”
Kindly if ponderously expounded as if to intelligent children, with the deliberate certainty of an arithmetical conclusion that left no room for question or c
onfusion. Or possibly he was clarifying something for his own benefit and didn’t get the universal insult.
“So we will consider this bill in Committee as is proper.” This was stated sternly, no doubt reflecting his experience of this particular legislative body. “But I - and now also some of my colleagues on the Committee - we will not be rushed to judgment, and the mayor of this city and those who support his declared preferences in this matter need to recognize that this is a highly complex affair, that there is much to say against this particular bill, and that’s not even considering the fact that it’s clearly, it seems to me, too early to bring this bill.”
Then he stopped short and stared straight at me, and everyone was staring at me in a kind of shock. I looked wildly down at myself to see if I was on fire or bleeding, then back at David. What?
It was Vinnie they were staring at. Vinnie two seats over from me and halfway on his feet, how could I have missed seeing his monumental torso tilted far forward and his tiny features constricted into a frightening grimace? At first I thought he was having some kind of attack but then he was up and moving rapidly, a sloppy avalanche rolling right past me.
He was through the gate and on the floor by the time I adjusted my facts again: it was old van Zandt who was sick, that’s what was happening. Those ancient features showing a rather mild contortion of still attention, his spine rigid and pressed hard against the back of his chair, and Vinnie was heading straight towards him, and everyone’s attention was bouncing between the two of them.
With a kind of natural inevitability, as if he’d been patiently awaiting our notice, van Zandt went lax, slumping down and to the side. And Vinnie stopped dead, staring at the old man’s bulk and furiously engage his brain. Then he reversed course and made decisively for the exit.
I turned back to find Margery hovering uselessly as Thom and David moved aside chairs; they took hold of an Zandt, Thom at his shoulders and David holding his legs, and laid him flat on the garish carpet. Two stolid guards were motioning everyone back but those at the scene remained close, tethered by a combination of concern and fascination and jealous opportunism.
I slipped out to the hallway in time to glimpse Vinnie vanish into a truncated corridor, so I followed along the mottled blue and gray linoleum, past all the glass cases displaying civic-minded art. He was on his phone, standing tight to a wall covered in amber tiles so luminous and intricate they pleaded to be housed in a museum. So I walked on a prudent distance, affecting a brisk, purposive stride, a reporter carrying the news. On past someone’s dark portrait hanging above a long wooden table, on to a window looking out to yet another symbolic frieze. At which point I backtracked to discover the side recess vacant.
Shit. Decaying Wilmer van Zandt of all conventionally venial people. I stood in place and flapped my hands to think.
My colleagues were out in the hall to note my return with questioning faces, but I shrugged. Of course everybody there had noted Vinnie’s aborted approach, including my opposite from our tabloid daily who was eyeing me curiously. People were drifting around talking excitedly to each other or their phones; somebody jostled me cutting across to the Caucus Room. But this was no ongoing drama, and soon enough members and aides started moving off to their respective offices here or a floor above, Thom sending me a parting nod. A stern female marshaled the impressed students and other exhilarated visitors down towards the elevators. I saw Margery and Mealy with their heads together, he babbling, her with her lips pressed tight. David stood staring inside himself; June hugged her own slim frame, shivering in repressed horror and compassion. I heard sirens, but there are always sirens around City Hall just as there’s always some degree of melodrama.
At Jefferson a practiced spokesperson said basically nothing so I went home to catch exclusive video of the shattered wife being escorted in through a parking garage, slept, and at dawn watched a well-endowed morning newsreader in a low-cut cocktail dress turn to address her handsome if aging colleague. “I telephoned the hospital this morning and they informed me that they suspect Councilman van Zandt suffered a massive stroke. He was eighty-one years old and suffered from various health issues.” That was it, no substantial biography let alone any expression of public sorrow, nothing to inspire significant city veneration.
So what if Vinnie Scarpone noticed an old man in trouble? Except I knew better, plus there was the sudden about-face and phone call and his being there in the first place monitoring that fragile, irresponsible husk, which was almost certainly what he was doing there.
Well, it wasn’t like any of this was extraordinary; it was probably just more of the usual sordid crap. And in that disgusted appraisal I was absolutely correct. It’s just that I always underestimate stupidity even though I know it rules the world.
CHAPTER THREE
“I see the river.” Sophie at fifteen was able to converse intelligently some of the time; I found her companionable but reserved. Maybe that’s for the best, maybe you don’t want to know too much about your adolescent daughter but no danger there, she kept her own counsel. Even as a small child she seemed a complete, self-contained individual. I advocated for her name for sheer love of wisdom and naturally to reflect her heritage, and now there are Sophias all over the place and her brilliant, unique father is considered just another undistinguished sheep. It makes me crazy. Fortunately teenagers are great conformists so she perversely considers her name a kind of social confirmation.
She was giving me a minor lip pout over the usual determination; she doesn’t love concept games but she’s intensely competitive. When I looked at her she turned to stare out at the traffic on the expressway, which was moving decently for a change.
“And I repeat, how do you know?”
For much of her early childhood Sophie and her mother lived in Biloxi, but she’s a very eastern type despite occasional lapses into a kind of resentful passivity; she has a sharp if quiet mind and an instinctive preference for reality, so I never thought Mississippi a compatible locale for her, however reputedly cosmopolitan these days. The air is too insidiously soft, the atmosphere implicitly devious. The one time I visited her there I found her a round little ball of a child, brown and complacent, sitting on the beach of that beautiful, placid gulf. Grasping her little yellow plastic spade with both chubby hands, happily digging for nothing. I pulled her up into my arms and lifted her above my head. “Sophie, look! Look around! Everything is alive, the sky is alive! Even the ocean is alive!” She burst out bawling, her baby feet kicking out at my face, the tears cutting runnels into her sandy cheeks.
Anyway I was meanly delighted when a second divorce sent her mother running back to her parents’ protection. It’s easy enough to denigrate conceited, ambitious suburbia, but even the protective enclave of Doylestown, Pennsylvania has a rudimentary attachment to the living earth: winters that are truly bitter and traumatic, foolishly ambitious autumns, summers with that exquisite gray perfume of hose water evaporating off cement. And then you can always run down the tacky Jersey shore if you miss the ocean. I’m more comfortable having Sophie in this environment.
I had an apartment near Washington Square, right off Pine Street in a renovated corner building, four large old rooms with thick walls and decent light. There was a liquor store on the opposite corner with a homeless alcoholic to decorate its window; a pair of local cops bought him new sneakers every so often as a reward for being where he was supposed to be, which warmed the heart.
My furniture was comfortably contemporary, soft neutral fabrics and uncomplicated lines flattered by the best carpets I could afford, brilliant islands of soft garnet and cream on a dark polished sea – I’m the kind of asshole who insists you take your shoes off. I had some decent paintings displayed on plain off-white walls because I happen to be into pure beauty. This surprises people, which is interesting given my reputation for unvarnished truth and how everyone accepts that truth is beauty, which it is if you can take it. When people comment on my taste, not even bothering to
hide their astonishment that I’m not some sort of bitter puritan or indifferent slob, I explain that I’m a journalist and therefore beauty is my business. And then they look ashamed because they secretly consider me physically ugly but think I don’t know.
There’d once been a men’s shop on the ground floor; Mason’s Haberdashery was engraved in the marble lintel over the entrance. I notice it occasionally, and wonder about that era, the strictures and expectations reflected in gentlemanly hat and vest and spats. The gulf between then and today is impossibly wide: it’s important to remember that it isn’t true that things change, the truth is that everything changes together. No one can ever adequately resurrect the past because there’s no stable place to stand while doing it.
Now there’s a Realtor in that space, and twice every day I passed a display of miniscule photographs of desirable properties pinned up against a dun-colored board. When Sophie was with me we’d stop and analyze listings, comparing their amenities. Tending towards modesty, we rejected and sometimes outright mocked the spa bathrooms and gourmet kitchens required these days. Being acutely conscious of the situation in the wider world, we felt ourselves almost too fortunate already. I constantly worried about Sophie succumbing to cultural slavery, adopting somebody else’s cheap dreams. Her mother’s, for instance. I desperately wanted her to remain free in mind and taste and soul, but how likely is that?
Barring her birthday list suggestions on music and books and so on I can barely guess at her actual preferences. I don’t want to fool myself about that ignorance, either. She’s reticent on the big stuff and expresses no particular aspirations or passions to me, but I think she’s waiting for something. A signal from the universe, I guess. I hear there are teens who confide in their fathers but as I’ve explained, I’m a scary guy, so it doesn’t matter what I do, or how many long hours of her infancy I held her endlessly at my chest as if I could literally nurse her.
