“So you’re willing to spend, what, tens of thousands of bucks to put a film crew in Tuscola full-time, just on the off chance that he will recover fully, choose to continue a career in politics, and choose to hire you as his media consultant.”
“What can I say,” Ogle said. “I’m an optimist.”
Ogle was up to something. That was no surprise. Mary Catherine wasn’t a professional politician but she wasn’t a complete moron either and she had known from the beginning that Ogle must have some kind of agenda.
Her first reaction was not to trust him, not to get herself entangled in anything. To play it safe, in other words. She had been noncommittal when Ogle had suggested that Dad might want to continue his career in politics. The fact was, of course, that Dad very much did want to continue it. She had something of a duty to help him. Not to close off any options that he might want kept open. And if she failed to accept Ogle’s suggestion, she’d be blowing an opportunity. Being the overprotective daughter.
Besides, she still wasn’t committing the Cozzanos to anything. There couldn’t be any harm in letting some people hang around and film Dad. Later, when he had recovered more fully, then he’d be able to make the command decision. If he didn’t like Ogle, those people would be out on their asses.
Mel wasn’t crazy about this. But he had changed his tactics. He no longer challenged Mary Catherine on every little point, just grumbled and simmered a lot in the background. Just to give him something to do, she had him deal with Ogle’s lawyers. They drew up an agreement that gave the Cozzanos absolute, permanent, unequivocal control over any films, videotapes, audiotapes, or other media that Ogle’s people created on Cozzano property. Mel was good, Mel knew how to make the agreement airtight, and by the time Myron Morris and his two assistants pulled into Tuscola in their four-wheel-drive Suburban, Mel was as satisfied as he could ever be that this thing was above board. There was no way they could pull anything sneaky.
Mary Catherine was astonished the first time she saw the crew in action. Myron Morris himself wasn’t there; he had hung around quite a bit for the first day or two, then excused himself. That left the cameraman and the sound woman. The sound woman was carrying some heavy-duty gear: a big reel-to-reel machine slung over a shoulder strap, with an assortment of microphones. But the cameraman was packing a cheap piece of junk: a home-style VHS camcorder not much different from the one that was rusting away in the Cozzanos’ garage.
“Why are you using a home camcorder?” Mary Catherine asked him, when he wasn’t actively filming Dad.
He shrugged. “That’s what Myron said to use. I don’t get it either.”
“Where’s Myron?”
“Scouting.”
“Scouting?”
“Locations. He’s looking around the area.”
“Why? Is he planning on producing a movie in Tuscola?”
The cameraman shrugged. “I’m just repeating his words.”
She found him outside of town, at the old Cozzano farm. His giant Suburban was parked along the shoulder of the country road, looking as if it might roll over into the ditch. Morris had jumped a fence into a cornfield and was walking down one of the freshly plowed rows, his shoes sinking into the soft black earth. Every few paces he would stop walking and turn toward the farmhouse, which had been rebuilt by Dad and his cousins after the tornado destroyed it in the early fifties. He would lift a short, stubby black telescope to one eye and peer through it for a few seconds. Two or three of these devices were hung on ropes around his neck, clacking into one another as he walked.
Mary Catherine parked behind his Suburban, jumped the ditch, and vaulted the fence. Fence-vaulting was something she had known how to do, expertly, since an early age; in the extended Cozzano family, kids who couldn’t vault fences got left behind and never had any fun. In her fancy grown-up clothes it was slightly more complicated, but nowadays she had the advantage of height. Half a mile away she could see her second cousin Tim out plowing the field on one of the old tractors.
Myron Morris noticed her approaching. He stopped, waved, and stood there for a few moments, hands in pockets, watching her approach. Then he picked up one of the short stubby telescopes and used it to peer at her. He dropped that one and looked at her through another. Then another.
“What are those things?” she asked as she got closer.
“They simulate what I would see looking through the viewfinder of a camera with a particular lens on it. It’s just a visual device that makes it easier to frame one’s shots, figure out where to put the camera.”
“I’ve been following you around town,” she said. “People said they’ve seen you out at the park, the high-school playing field, the old train station.”
“I don’t get out to Tuscola very often,” he said. “So as long as I’m here I thought I’d get to know the place.”
“Don’t you think you’re getting ahead of the game? Dad’s staying at home.”
“I won’t bullshit you,” he said. “Cy Ogle wants to work for your dad. This is important stuff to him. If anything happens, we’ll need to know where are the best places to shoot. And that’s what I’m finding out. Is that okay?”
Mary Catherine nodded at the little telescopes. “Do any of those things work with a video camcorder?”
“Nah. These are all for professional film cameras.”
“I’m confused,” she said. “In some ways, you guys are taking this thing way too seriously. In other ways, you’re goofing off.”
“You want to know why we’re using that Kmart special to videotape the Governor.”
“Yeah.”
“The whole point here is that these things are supposed to be home movies. If the Governor chooses not to use our services, then you end up with home movies in a format you can use. But if he does hire us, we can make them into ads.”
“Ads that look like shitty home movies.”
“A-ha!” Myron Morris said, holding up one finger. “You were expecting something a little slicker.”
“If there’s one adjective that’s most commonly used in connection with Cy Ogle, it is slick,” Mary Catherine said.
“Which is why we want to go with the opposite of slick.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Imagine it. A television ad showing big moments in the life of William Anthony Cozzano. We see him horsing around this very farm as a child. Scoring a touchdown in the Rose Bowl. We see him in Vietnam. We see him playing for the Bears. Raising his kids. All of this is going to be trashy, grainy, antiquated film stock. Home-movie stuff. And then we see his recovery from the stroke—some private moments at home—and all of a sudden it looks slick. It’s shot on 35-millimeter film stock, the lighting is perfect, he’s wearing makeup, all of a sudden it looks like goddamn Lawrence of Arabia. You think people aren’t going to notice that?”
Mary Catherine didn’t have an answer for that one.
“Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they’ll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they’ll crucify you. Which is why, when we shoot home movies of your father, we use exactly the same machine that Joe Sixpack uses when he sends a tape of his dancing Dalmatian to America’s Funniest Home Videos. And to tell you the truth, we may actually have to go through and process that videotape and make it look worse than it does now.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Reagan did it in ’80. I believe he made out okay.”
“But everyone will know that Ogle’s working for Dad.”
Myron shook his head dismissively. “That’s a verbal thing. Nobody gives a shit about that, as long as the ads don’t look slick. Believe me, as long as we stick with half-inch videotape, and as long as we avoid releasing any images of you
r Dad standing with one arm around Cy Ogle, nobody who matters will think that he’s ever been near a slick media man.”
twenty-eight
AS MARY Catherine trudged back across the field to where she had parked her car behind Morris’s Suburban, a third car cruised up the road and pulled onto the shoulder behind hers. It was Mel’s Mercedes.
Mel set the hand brake, climbed out, waved to her, and then ambled around on the shoulder for a minute or two, squinting off into the distance, taking in the vista. Views in this part of Illinois were not exciting, but they were vast, and a person like Mel, who spent much time pent up in a city, could come out here and stare at the horizon in the same way that a vacationer in New York or L.A. might go to the ocean and gaze off into emptiness.
Mel had given up cigarettes by the trick of switching to cigars, which were so noxious that, like nuclear weapons, they could not be used except in remote, desolate environments. He did not smoke them in his Mercedes for fear of imparting an eternal reek to the leather and the carpets. Now that he was out on the road, he fished the extinct butt of a fat stogie from the pocket of his trench coat and stoked it into life with a wooden safety match. Bubbles of silver smoke blew out from the corners of his mouth, elongated in the wind, and whipped off across the prairie, picking up almost palpable momentum as they headed for the Indiana border.
After a minute or so, Mel’s gaze settled on the farmhouse, which he had helped to rebuild. The concept of a Jew learning to use a claw hammer had been considered revolutionary by both the Meyers and the Cozzanos, and had met with some resistance from both groups. But the young Mel enjoyed his trips out of town and had insisted on riding the train down at least once a week during the summers to pound nails. Three volumes of the library of Cozzano family photo albums were devoted to the reconstruction of the house, and Mel showed up in a number of pictures, pale, skinny, and bent as a peeled banana, kneeling on the bare plywood of the new roof among burly, copper-hued Cozzanos, nailing down the shingles one strip at a time.
Since then, Mel had always felt a proprietary interest in the Cozzano farmhouse. He had only a distant relationship with the Cozzanos who lived there now, but he liked to drive out from time to time and look at it, as he was doing now. Mary Catherine did not know whether he did this from pure nostalgia or from curiosity about the durability of his handiwork or both. She did know that photographs of the completed farmhouse had circulated widely among the Meyer family, as far away as Israel, as evidence of the wonders that a Meyer could achieve if he was not afraid to brave unknown fields of endeavor.
“When I was pounding in all those damn nails, whack whack whack, day after day, I had this terrible fear that I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Mel said, as Mary Catherine was vaulting the fence again. “I would have nightmares that all of the nails I had pounded in to that house would suddenly pop loose and all of Willy’s nails would hold fast, and everyone would blame me for the house falling down.”
“Well, it’s still standing,” Mary Catherine said.
“That it is,” Mel said with satisfaction and finality, as if his sole purpose in driving down from Chicago had been to make sure that the house was still there.
“Have you seen Dad?”
“Yeah, Willy and I saw each other,” Mel said. “So the social aspect of today’s visit has been consummated.”
“Oh. You don’t want to socialize with me?”
Mel looked around them. A farm truck blasted down the road, kicking up dust and rocks with its windblast, inflating Mel’s trench coat and Mary Catherine’s hair for a moment. The red coal on the end of Mel’s cigar flared bright orange and caught his eye. He stared into it as though mesmerized. “This is no place,” he said, “to socialize with a lady.”
She smiled. Mel was old enough, and good enough, to talk this way without seeming stilted or weird. “You didn’t come down to socialize with me anyway.”
Mel took one last draw on his cigar and then examined it regretfully. He pinched it carefully between the ball of his thumb and the nail of his arched forefinger, straightened his arm, aimed it into the ditch, and snapped the butt into a swampy patch. It died with a quick sizzling burst. Mel stood still for a moment, staring at it, and then expelled the last of the smoke from his mouth.
“Get in,” he said. “Let’s go get some coffee at the Dixie Truckers’ Home.”
She grinned. The Dixie Truckers’ Home was right out on I-57. Mel had driven by it a million times but never been there; for him it was an object of morbid, sick fascination. Mary Catherine opened the passenger door and climbed in. Normally Mel would have gone all the way around the car and opened the door for her, but his mind was elsewhere today. As he had implied, this was business, not a social visit, and he wasn’t thinking about the niceties.
The Mercedes was perfect for two, crowded for anyone else. It was ideal for Mel, who was unmarried and childless and presumed by many to be gay. He started up the engine and pulled out onto the road and gave the car a tremendous long burst of acceleration that took it all the way up past a hundred.
Mary Catherine’s heart melted. Mel had always enjoyed thrilling her and James with the power of his fancy European cars, ever since they had been children. She knew that when he put the pedal down and squealed the tires on this country road, he was evoking a memory, for his own benefit as much as for Mary Catherine’s.
“You know that the relationship between our families has been strong and will continue to be,” Mel said, “even though, over time, it has gone through a lot of different shapes.”
“What’s going on?” she said.
Mel slowed the car down and looked sideways at Mary Catherine for a moment. He seemed a little surprised by her impatience.
“Just take it easy,” he said, “this is hard for me.”
“Okay,” she said. Her vision got a little blurry and her nose started to run. She drew a deep silent breath and got the impulse under control.
“The reason our families have gotten along together is that the leaders—the patriarchs—have always been wise men who took the long view of things. And who were willing to do what made sense in the long run. Other people have looked at the strategies of the Cozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did.”
“What are we doing now?” Mary Catherine said.
“Willy doesn’t know this, because I didn’t want to stress him out,” Mel said, “but the shit is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February.”
“What shit? What fan?”
Mel cocked his head back and forth from side to side, weighing his thoughts. “Well, you know that we could have just hauled Willy down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thing would have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fashioned approach. Like when FDR was in a wheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that fact because his media coverage was manipulated so well.”
“We concealed the extent of his illness,” Mary Catherine said.
“Right. We let his organization run the state government for a while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz, the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do.” Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone of voice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fine print, a mere debater’s point. “Well, it might be possible to make the claim that what we did—what I did—was not, strictly speaking, ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this was bound to come out.”
“Let me ask you something,” Mary Catherine said. “Did you know, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?”
Mel was pained. “Of course I knew it, girl! But it’s like dragging a man out of a burning car. You have to act, you can’t think about the possibility that he’ll later sue you for spraining his shoulder. I did what I had to do. I did it well.” Mel turned and looked at her, a dry grin coming to his lips. “I was awesome,
frankly.”
“Well, what are you getting at?”
“You know who Markene Caldicott is?”
“Of course I do!” She was surprised that Mel would even ask this question.
“Oh, that’s right. You’re probably the type who listens to RNA all the time.”
Mary Catherine grinned and shook her head. Most people considered Radio North America to be the height of journalistic sophistication, but Mel still had it lumped together with MTV and Arena Football. He got his radio news via shortwave, from the BBC.
“What about Markene Caldicott?” she said.
“Well, apparently she’s some hotshot reporter,” Mel said skeptically.
“You could say that.”
“She’s after my ass. And I don’t mean that in the sexual sense,” Mel said. “She’s called every single person I’ve ever worked with. I can read this woman’s mind like a fucking cereal box.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She’d really like to shoot down your father,” Mel said, “but she can’t, because Willy is without flaw, and was incapacitated for the last couple of months besides. So instead, she is going to do a big exposé where she makes me out to be this sort of Richelieu with a yarmulke. The shadowy power who pulled the strings while Cozzano drooled down his chin. You know the kind of thing.”
“Your basic overinflated election-year scandal.”
“Yeah. She probably figures that Willy is going to get into the race and she wants to be the first to take shots at him. So I’m going to head her off at the pass.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m going to drive back up to Daley,” Mel said. He and Mary Catherine had both fallen into the habit of using Cozzano’s poststroke jargon. “And have dinner with Mark McCabe. A political reporter from the Trib. And I’m going to spill my guts. Going to lay the whole thing out.”
Mary Catherine was shocked. “You’re going to tell him everything?”
Mel looked at her with an expression that was somewhere between fatherly disappointment and pity. “Are you nuts? Of course I’m not going to tell him everything. I’m just going to make it look like I’m telling him everything.”