“Nathaniel!” I yell, along with many others. “Nat!” Only now he wakes. He reaches the ball a step ahead of an agile sprite named Molly, whose ponytail flows behind her baseball cap. Nat grabs it, whirls, and wings it in a single motion. The ball travels in a tremendous arc back toward the infield and lands with a dead thump between shortstop and third, just as Rocky lopes across the plate. Following the local etiquette, I alone may scold my son, and so I stroll along the foul line, clapping my hands. “Wake up! Wake up out there.” For Nat, I hold no fear. He shrugs, throws up his gloved hand, and displays the full range of his gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern smile, his new ragged-edged teeth still looking a little like candles stuck into a cake.
“Dad, I just lost it,” he yells, “I really did.” The pack of fathers on the side join me in sudden laughter. We all repeat the remark among ourselves. He lost it. Cliff Nudelman pats me on the back. At least the boy has learned the lingo.
Did other men, as boys, dream about their sons? I looked twenty years ahead with passion and with hope. As I always saw him, my son was a gentle, obedient soul. He was good; he was full of virtue and skill.
Nat is not like that. He is not a bad boy. That’s a song around our house. Barbara and I have been telling each other that since he was two. Nat is not, we say, actually, we say, a bad boy. And I believe that. Fervently. And with a heart engorged with love. He is sensitive. He is kind. And he is wild and distracted. He has been on his own schedule since the time of his birth. When I read to him, he flips the pages in my hand to see what lies just ahead. He does not listen, or at least does not seem to care to. In school, he has always been a problem.
He is saved by his insouciant charm and his physical gifts. My son is beautiful. I am talking about more than the usual child-beauty, the soft features, the floral glow of being new. This boy has dark, acute eyes, a prepossessing look. These fine, regular features do not come from me. I am larger and squat. I have a bulky nose; a kind of Neanderthal ridge over the eyes. Barbara’s people are all smaller and good-looking, and it is to them we routinely give the credit. Privately, however, I have often thought at moments, with discomfort, about my father and his piercing, somber, Slavic handsomeness. Perhaps because I suspect that source, I pray all the time, at my own inner altar, that this blessing should not lead Nat astray, into arrogance, or even cruelty—traits the beautiful people I have encountered have sometimes seemed to regard in themselves as natural afflictions, or worse, a sign of right.
With the end of the ball game, we disperse in pairs toward the herd of station wagons corraled in the gravel parking lot. In May, when the time changes and the weather mellows, the team will stay after the games to picnic. Sometimes a pizza delivery will be arranged. The fathers will rotate the weekly responsibility of bringing beer. After dinner, the boys and girls will renew their baseball game, and the dads will recline in the grass, talking casually about our lives. I look forward to these outings. Amid this group of men I do not know well, there seems a gentle compact, something like the way worshippers must feel about one another as they leave church. Fathers with their kids, beyond the weekly preoccupations of professional life, or even the pleasures and responsibilities of marriage. Fathers mildly lit on Friday nights, at ease with these immeasurable obligations.
In this cooler, darker season, I have promised Barbara that we will meet for a quick dinner at a local pancake house. She is waiting on the red vinyl bench when we arrive, and even while she is kissing Nat and receiving a report on the Stingers’ near-triumph, she gazes beyond him to greet me with a look of cold reproof. We are in the midst of a dismal period. Barbara’s fury with me for my role in the investigation of Carolyn’s murder has not abated, and tonight I perceive at once that there is some new edge to her displeasure. My first thought is that we must be very late, but when I check the restaurant clock I find we are even a minute early. I can only guess at what I have done to provoke her.
For Barbara, though, it has become so easy over the years to disappear into the black forests of her moods. The elements of the outside world that might have once detained her by now have been relegated to the past. Six years of teaching in the North End struck at her faith in social reform. When Nat was born, she gave up being other-seeking. Suburban life, with its tight boundaries and peculiar values, has quieted her and exaggerated her willingness to be alone. Her father’s death, three years ago, was taken as an act of desertion, part of his lifelong pattern of ignoring Barbara’s and her mother’s needs, and whetted her sense of deprivation. And our soulless moments of marital disconnection have robbed her of the outright gaiety that once counterpointed these darker spells. During these periods, her disappointments with virtually everyone are often worn so openly that at instants I believe the taste would be bitter if I were to grasp her hand and lick her skin.
And then the weather breaks. In the past it always has. Although this disruption, caused by my infidelity, is naturally the most prolonged one of our married life, I still maintain some expectation of improvement. Even now Barbara does not speak of lawyers and divorce, as she did in late November. She is here. Set out so plainly, this fact inspires some calm. I am like a shipwrecked survivor holding fast to the debris, awaiting the arrival of the scheduled liner. Sooner or later, I believe, I will see a woman of good humor, of blazing intelligence, full of quirky insight and sly wit, who is keenly interested in me. That is the person I still think of as my wife.
Now that same woman wears a look of diamond hardness as we wait in line to be seated. Nat has slipped away and gazes adoringly into the candy counter. His baseball pants have drooped almost to his shoe tops, and he stands with one knee and both hands against the glass case, staring with fixed appreciation at the forbidden rows of sugared gum and chocolate bars. He jiggles a bit, of course—the object in motion. As ever, Barbara and I both watch him.
“So?” she suddenly asks me. This is a challenge. I am supposed to entertain her.
“‘So’ what?”
“So how’s work? The big investigation still going gangbusters?”
“No leads,” I tell her, “and no results. It’s mass confusion. Frankly, the whole place is sagging. It’s like they let the air out of a balloon. You know—now that Bolcarro has come out for Delay.”
With the mention of this event, Barbara winces, then once more turns an acid eye on me. At last, I recognize my latest outrage. Yesterday I came home very late and stayed downstairs, thinking she was asleep. Barbara descended in her nightgown. From the staircase she asked what I was doing. When I told her I was working on my resume, she turned directly and went back up.
“Raymond didn’t mention making you a judge today?” she asks.
I wince myself, lanced with regret at the foolish vanity that led me to mention this prospect. My chances now are dim. Bolcarro showed two days ago how concerned he is about making Raymond Horgan happy.
“What do you want me to do, Barbara?”
“I don’t want you to do anything, Rusty. I’ve stopped wanting you to do anything. Isn’t that what you prefer?”
“Barbara, he did a good job.”
“And what did he do for you? You’re thirty-nine years old. You have a family. And now you’re looking forward to unemployment compensation. He let you carry his bags and solve his problems, and when he should have quit, he took you with him down the drain.”
“We did good things.”
“He used you. People have always used you. And you don’t just let them do it. You like it. You actually like it. You’d rather be abused than pay attention to the people who have tried to care about you.”
“Is that supposed to mean you?”
“Me. Your mother. Nat. It’s a lifelong pattern. It’s hopeless.”
Not Nat, I nearly answer, but a sense of diplomacy or self-preservation intervenes. The restaurant hostess, a tiny younger woman with the trimmed-up figure of the health-club set, leads us to our table. Barbara negotiates his meal with Nat. French fries yes, but milk,
not Coke. And he must eat some salad. Nat whines and flops around. I cuff him gently and recommend sitting up straight. Barbara remains aloof behind the barrier of her menu.
Was she happier when I met her? That must have been the case, although I have no clear recollection. She tutored me when I connived—insanely—to beat the university science requirement by taking calculus. She never got the chance to collect her fee. She fell for me; I fell for her. I loved her ferocious intellect, her teen-queen beauty, her suburban clothes, the fact that she was a doctor’s daughter, and thus, I thought, someone ‘normal.’ I even loved the rocky currents of her personality, her ability to express so many things which, to me, remained remote. Most of all, I loved her omnivorous passion for me. No one in my life had been so openly desirous of my company, so alight with manifest appreciation of every angle of my being. I met half a dozen men who coveted Barbara. She wanted only me, pursued me, in fact, with an ardor that I at first found embarrassing. I supposed it was the spirit of the era that made her want to soothe this awkward boy, dark and full of secret woe, whom she knew her parents would regard as less than she deserved.
Like me, like Nat, she was an only child, and she felt oppressed by her upbringing. Her parents’ attentions had been suffocating and, she felt, in some ways false. She claimed to have been directed, used at all times as an instrument of their wishes, not her own. She told me often that I was the only person she had met who was like her—not just lonely, but always, previously, alone. Is it the sad reciprocity of love that you always want what you think you are giving? Barbara hoped I would be like some fairy-tale prince, a toad she had transformed with her caresses, who could enter the gloomy woods where she was held captive and lead her away from the encircling demons. Over the years I have so often failed in that assignment.
The atomized life of the restaurant spins on about us. At separate tables, couples talk; the late-shift workers dine alone; the waitresses pour coffee. And here sits Rusty Sabich, thirty-nine years old, full of lifelong burdens and workaday fatigue. I tell my son to drink his milk. I nibble at my burger. Three feet away is the woman whom I have said I’ve loved for nearly twenty years, making her best efforts to ignore me. I understand that at moments she feels disappointed. I understand at times she is bereft. I understand. I understand. That is my gift. But I have no ability to do anything about it. It is not simply the routines of adult life which sap my strength. In me, some human commodity is lacking. And we can only be who we can be. I have my own history; memories; the unsolved maze of my own self, where I am so often lost. I hear Barbara’s inner clamor; I understand her need. But I can answer only with stillness and lament. Too much of me—too much!—must be preserved for the monumental task of being Rusty.
15
Election Day the weather is bright. Last night, when I sat in Raymond’s office, with Mike Duke and Larren and Horgan, they thought that good weather would help. Now that the party belongs to Della Guardia, Raymond needs the voters who are inspired by their candidate rather than the precinct captain’s wishes. The last week has been an odd lesson. Every time there’s a negative development, you say it’s hopeless. Then you look ahead. In Raymond’s office last night, they were still talking about winning. The last poll, sponsored again by the paper and Channel 3, was taken the day of Bolcarro’s endorsement and showed Raymond only five points back. Duke said that he believes things have improved since then, that Raymond seems to have gained some of his old momentum by being the underdog. We sat there, four grown men, acting as if it could be true.
At work, as ever, Election Day brings a loose feeling, all at ends. The employees of the prosecuting attorney’s office, once a group of wardheelers and hacks, have been discouraged throughout Raymond’s tenure from active political involvement. Gone are the days of deputies selling tickets in the courtrooms to the P.A.’s campaign outings; in twelve years, Raymond Horgan has never solicited a dime in donations, or even a minute of campaign help, from the members of his staff. Nonetheless, many of the administrative employees who came on before Raymond was elected have continuing political obligations to the party sponsors who secured employment for them. As part of the uneasy compact struck a decade ago with Bolcarro, Raymond agreed to give most of the P.A.’s staff Election Day off. That way the party types can do the party thing: knock on doors, distribute leaflets, drive the elderly, watch the polls. This year they will be doing that for Nico Della Guardia.
For the rest of us, there are no established obligations. I am in the office most of the day, first mate at the helm of this sinking ship. A few others are around, mostly lawyers working on briefs or trials, or clearing up their desks. About two dozen younger deputies have been delegated to work with the U.S. Attorney’s office on a vote-fraud patrol. This generally involves responding to junk complaints: a voting machine won’t work; someone’s got a gun in the polling place; an election judge is wearing a campaign button, or overcounseling elderly voters. I receive occasional updates by phone and answer press calls in which I dutifully report that there is no sign of tampering with the democratic process.
Around 4:30, I get a call from Lipranzer. Somebody’s propped up a TV set in the hallway, right outside my door, but there is nothing to report. The polls won’t close for another hour and a half. The early news is just happy-talk stuff about the heavy turnout.
“He lost,” Lip tells me. “My guy at Channel 3 saw their exit polls. He says Nico’s gonna win by eight, ten points, if the pattern holds.”
Again my heart plunges, my gut constricts. Funny, but this time I really believe it. I look out the window toward the columns of the courthouse, the flat tarred roofs of the other downtown buildings, the rippled black waters of the river, which turns, like an elbow, two blocks away. My office has been on the same side of this building for almost seven years now, yet the sight does not quite seem familiar.
“All right,” I finally announce solemnly. “What else?”
“Nothing,” Lip says. “Just thought I’d let you know.” He waits. “We still workin on Polhemus?”
“You have something better to do?”
“No,” he says, “no. They come down here today to get all my reports. For Morano.” The police chief. “He wants to look em over.”
“So?”
“Struck me strange. You know. His mother-in-law got stuck up at gunpoint three years ago, I don’t think he looked at the reports.”
“You’d understand that,” I say, “if you had a mother-in-law.” Lip takes my humor as intended: an offering, an apology for my impatience a moment before. “They’re just trying to make sure Nico’s briefed. Which is a joke,” I say. “Molto’s probably been getting copies of the police reports from the steno pool.”
“Probably. I don’t know. Somethin didn’t sit right. Schmidt come in here himself. Real serious. You know. Like someone shot the President.”
“They just want to look good.”
“I guess. I’m goin over to the North Branch courthouse to finish up on those court files,” Lip says, referring to the records we have been looking for since my visit to the 32nd District. “They promised they’d have the microfilm from the warehouse before five. I want to get there before they send it back. Where are you tonight in case I come up with somethin?”
I tell him I’ll be around Raymond’s party, somewhere in the hotel. It’s beside the point by now to rush back with investigative results, but Lip says he’ll be stopping in anyway, more or less to pay his respects.
“The Irish,” Lip says, “always run a real fine wake.”
Lipranzer’s estimate proves accurate. The band plays loud. The young girls who are always here are still full of that soft glow of eventfulness, with banners across their chests and campaign boaters balanced neatly on their hairdos. HORGAN! everything says in lime-green Gaelic script. In the front, at either side of the unoccupied speakers’ platform, two ten-foot enlargements of The Picture stand. I drift around the ballroom, spearing meatballs and feeling bad.
Around 7:30, I go up to Raymond’s suite on the fifth floor. Various people from the campaign are moving through the rooms. There are three trays of cold cuts and some liquor bottles on one of the dressers, but I decline the invitation to consume. There must be ten phones in these three rooms, all of them ringing.
All three local TV stations have projected Della Guardia the winner by now. Larren—Judge Lyttle—comes by with a tumbler of bourbon in his hand, grumbling about the exit polls.
“First time,” he says, “I’ve seen a body pronounced dead before it hit the floor.”
Raymond, however, is sanguine. He is seated in one of the interior bedrooms, watching television and talking on the phone. When he sees me he puts the phone down and comes to hug me. “,” he says, my given name. I know that this gesture has probably been repeated with a dozen other people this evening, but I find myself deeply grateful and stirred to be included in the grieving family.
I sit by Raymond on the footstool of the easy chair he is occupying. An open bottle of Jack Daniel’s is on the candle table at the chair side, as well as a half-eaten sandwich. Raymond goes on taking phone calls, conferring with Larren and Mike and Joe Reilly. I do not move. I recall the nights I used to sit beside my father while he watched a ball game on TV or listened to the radio. I always asked his permission before taking a place next to him on the divan. They were the warmest moments that we had. As I became older, my father would drink his beer and occasionally pass the bottle to me. At moments he would even make a remark aloud about the game.
Eventually the conversation begins to turn to the protocol of concession. Does Raymond communicate with Della Guardia first, or does he go downstairs to address the faithful? Della Guardia, they decide. Mike says Raymond should call him. Joe says send a telegram.
“Screw that,” Raymond says, “the man’s across the street. I’m going over there to shake his hand.” He asks Larren to make arrangements. He’ll see Nico, make his speech, then come back up here to do one-on-one interviews with print and media reporters. No point in spite with them. He tells Mac she should start scheduling those meetings about 9:30. He’ll go live at 10:00 with Rosenberg. I have not noticed Mac until now, and when she turns her chair around she says one word to me: “Sad.”