After I'm Gone (10 page)

But Sandy was not that kind of a guy. He didn’t talk to photos or even to himself. When he wasn’t working, he might go a day or two without speaking to anyone at all. And that suited him just fine.

Thrill
Me

November 2, 1980

W
e never got the bounce,” Greg said, staring at the television, numb. “We should have gotten such a
bounce
.”

Norman agreed. “We deserved a bounce. We
deserved
a motherfucking bounce.”

Linda nodded, the third member in this mourning party of three. Greg and Norman had seemed old to her a month ago, even two hours ago, but she realized now that they were young, too. Young and preppy and rumpled, men whose clothes were no longer tended by mothers and not yet under the auspices of wives or girlfriends.

“How did we not get a bounce?” Greg asked.

“We never got a bounce,” Norman said.

They were a little drunk and this couplet, which they had been reciting in variation since the polls closed almost five hours ago, was coming more quickly now, abetted by drink and shock.

And although this was not a party per se—John B. Anderson’s small cadre of Baltimore believers was not that deluded—the volunteers had expected a slightly cheerier ending to this chapter in their lives when they planned the gathering at the Brass Elephant. But it was one thing to tilt at a windmill, another to feel as if you were pinned beneath it, arms and legs squirming comically.

The bartender, Victor, who had come to know them quite well over the last two months, had allowed them to bring a small black-and-white television and prop it up on the bar. It had been fun in the first hour or so, just because they were
done;
they had seen a hard thing through, unlike several other volunteers who had fled the sinking ship. No, they were jovial at first, not thinking about the big picture. About reality.

They muted the television when the networks began calling the election for Reagan. And now it was 1:00
A.M.
and the enormity of the result had left them all a little numb. They hadn’t expected Carter to win, they hadn’t
wanted
Carter to win, and yet—and yet. The Reagan landslide felt literal to Linda, as if she were caked in mud, as petrified as a citizen of Pompeii.

“At least they can’t blame us,” she said, a variation on what
she
had been saying all night.

“Not in Maryland,” said Norman. “Still reliably Democratic, thank God, and the average Republican pol here is more Mathias than Agnew.”

“They can’t blame us anywhere,” Greg said. “When everything is said and done, there won’t be a single state where Anderson siphoned off enough votes to hurt Carter. Anderson wasn’t the problem.”

“I thought he was supposed to be the solution,” Linda said.

But this was too naïve, even for her fellow travelers in idealism, who usually gave Linda extra leeway because of her youth. They had celebrated her twentieth birthday in this same bar, just two months ago.

They had returned three weeks later, the night of the debate, right here in Baltimore, when Carter had refused to appear and Anderson had debated Reagan one-on-one. He had done so well.
That
night, the young volunteers had come here in a haze of giddy possibility. It was happening. They were going to make history. Maryland’s best-known connection to third-party presidential politics would no longer be the assassination attempt on George Wallace, but the glorious ascension of this practical, reasonable man, a man who embodied the word “avuncular” in Linda’s mind.

“Are you going to make book on whether he lives or dies?” Uncle Bert, in their kitchen, joking to her father about the Wallace shooting only hours after it had happened.

Her father didn’t think it was funny. “If he dies, he becomes a martyr. That’s no good.”

Bert, quietly: “He’s not wrong about some things.”

Her father, fiercely: “He’s wrong about everything.”

Why was she thinking about this now? Anderson, third-party candidate, Wallace. Avuncular—uncle, Uncle Bert. Her father. Her father. How she wished she could talk to him tonight. Would he have been surprised by the result? His business had relied on him not being surprised about anything that involved numbers, always knowing the odds. Oh, he was apolitical because no candidate would ever support
him,
not publicly, although they all took his money, one way or another. But he claimed politics was just another game, its outcome shaped by probabilities.

Victor knew her father, it turned out. He spoke to Linda of him that very first night, after checking her ID.

“Class of 1960,” he said, handing her license back. “Just in under the buzzer.” The drinking age was going up to twenty-one, a year at a time, but she was grandfathered in. She would be the only Brewer girl who could drink before the age of twenty-one. Linda didn’t care about drinking so much. She just wanted to hang out with the other volunteers, who had claimed this place as their own.

The bar at the Brass Elephant was a little pricey for a group of unpaid volunteers, even those subsidized by their parents, but it was near Norman’s apartment on Read Street, and the converted town house’s muted elegance gave them a lift at day’s end. Plus, Linda enjoyed the cachet of Victor remembering not only her father, but her as well. He used to wait on them at the Emerson Hotel. Shirley Temples, with extra cherries. Linda was not yet eight, Rachel only six, and the hotel was far from its glory days, but the sisters had no yardstick for decline back then, had not yet observed firsthand how quickly elegance can erode. They certainly did not know of the Hattie Carroll incident, or even Bob Dylan, not in 1968. Linda had known only how much she and Rachel loved being with their father, dueling with plastic swords loaded with cherries, while men came and went, crouching next to Felix, whispering in his ear, then disappearing.

“Do you still drink Shirley Temples?” Victor had asked her after establishing she was one of
those
Brewers.

Linda had blushed, then blurted out an order for the most sophisticated drink she could imagine, which happened to be her mother’s drink, a vodka and tonic. The joke was on her. She hated vodka tonics. But she stuck to her original order that night and every night after. She’d rather sip slowly and grimly than admit she had been bluffing.

At least she never got drunk, which was a good thing, as she had to drive all the way out to Pikesville, where she was living with her mother and her baby sister, Michelle. Rachel had left for college just a few weeks ago, and it surprised Linda how keenly she felt her absence in the house. Had Linda been missed the same way during her year and a half at Duke? She thought not, somehow. Rachel was the family confidante, the keeper of all secrets, even their mother’s. Linda could be trusted to keep secrets, too, but she was bossy, determined to solve problems that no one else wanted solved.
Put Daddy’s photos away if they make you feel sad. Don’t spend money you don’t have. If you must have the latest clothes, get a job at a shop where you can buy them at a discount.
At least her mother had heeded the last bit of advice.

Tonight, as Greg and Norman drank themselves into deeper and deeper glooms, Linda found the nerve to turn her vodka tonic back to Victor and say: “Maybe a glass of wine?”

He didn’t tease or shame her. He didn’t even charge her for the half-drunk vodka tonic she pushed back to him. And she was pretty sure that the white wine he poured was not the house brand. It was far better than any glass of white wine she had tasted before. He poured her a glass of ice water, too, then made a quick call. Within fifteen minutes, he was putting appetizers and sides in front of the famished volunteers.

“My contribution to the cause,” he said, when Greg stammered that they couldn’t afford any food. Greg and Norman fell on the
mozzarella en carrozza
like dogs.

“Do you really remember my father?” Linda asked.

“Of course,” Victor said. “We talked about him the first time you came in here.”

“I mean—not just as a customer, or—what he became.” She never said “fugitive,” not out loud. It wasn’t really the right word. “Exile,” her mother said, when she was feeling magnanimous. “Coward,” when she was not. But never fugitive. “Did you have a sense of him?”

“He was a good guy,” Victor said. “And you know what? He would have preferred Anderson, too.”

“Really?” Linda was doubtful. Her father was so pragmatic. He was not one to pretend that lost causes were anything but lost causes. Wasn’t that why he had run? He couldn’t win, so he didn’t stay around to lose.

“I moved to the Lord Baltimore during the 70s, but your dad still came in, talked politics. He disliked Carter. Not so much the positions, but the man. He was talking up Udall right up—” He stopped, clearly not wanting to say:
Right up until he left.
“He thought Carter was small-time.”

“Really?” If small-time meant not cheating on your wife, then Linda wouldn’t have minded a small-time father.

“That’s how I remember it.”

“What else do you remember?”

“I remember how pretty you girls all were, the three of you.”

“The three of us?” Michelle hadn’t been born.

“You, the little one, your older sister.”

Linda, blunt within her family, was polite in the world at large, so she did not embarrass him by saying:
I don’t have an older sister.
And her mother, beautiful as she was, would never pass for Felix’s daughter.

But Julie Saxony might
.

“He was a good man,” Victor said.

“Thank you,” she said. It often happened this way. With strangers, friends, even her mother and Rachel. She started down the road toward a memory, toward a vision of her father that she thought would bring her pleasure. Then she would stumble over something unexpected and ugly.

Now her memory was playing with her again, throwing something else in her path. Five-one-five. Five-one-five.

“We’re going to say it was a mix-up,” her father told Bert. “Five shots on the fifteenth. Five-one-five. Someone got confused, put out the wrong number. And we’ll substitute out five-oh-five, say it was a typo.”

“People will get pissed. You could have a fucking riot on your hands.”

“They can play the state lottery if they don’t like how I run my game. Five-one-five will ruin us.”

I was sitting at the dining-room table, doing my homework. I would have been eleven, at the end of fifth grade. No, sixth, because Mama sneaked me into school early, the fall I turned four. She wanted Rachel and me to be three grades apart, not two, and with Rachel’s spring birthday, she needed to either hold her back or push me forward, and everyone saw even then that there would be no holding Rachel back. Mama had this weird theory that we would be better friends if we had more distance at school. And we are very close, which is wonderful. But we might have been close anyway. I didn’t understand for years what happened, that Daddy changed the number because too many people had played it and they couldn’t cover the payout.

So her father’s game was rigged, too.

Rachel may have been the family intellect, but Linda was no slouch. She had gotten into Duke on scholarship, only to find herself profoundly homesick. She had thought she wanted a new start, but found it wearying, trying to create a history that didn’t invite questions. She transferred to Goucher in the middle of her sophomore year. Bambi had been upset about that, far more upset than Linda could understand, given how much money was saved. Linda was happier at Goucher, too, where people knew just enough not to ask too many questions. Her only problem was that life as a commuter student at an all-girl school didn’t make for the best dating life. She volunteered for the Anderson campaign because some girl said it would be a good way to meet men.

She had met a lot of men, many of them keen to date the pretty new volunteer, some of them even suitable, if not Greg and Norman. But Linda, who had come looking for dates, ended up caring only about the candidate. Not that she ever got to speak to him or spend time with him. She met him only once, the night of the debate, when he was introduced to all the local volunteers. She was not invited to the dinner afterward, nor did she expect to be. But she was thrilled to wake up the next morning and discover that the received wisdom was that JBA had won the debate. A giddy day or two had followed before she realized how meaningless that victory was.

She had been so naïve about politics. Lord, she hadn’t even understood how the Electoral College worked, and it still made her angry to see the election called with less than 100 percent of the vote in. She had thought a presidential race was one in which two men—three in this case—came before a nation and explained their positions and then the best man would win.
The game was rigged
. How could a man like John Anderson not get more votes? Her mother had said Linda was throwing both her vote and her time away, but Linda didn’t feel that way. In fact, she had believed so profoundly in the importance of her vote that she had committed a felony this morning in order to cast it.

It happened like this. Linda, usually the most organized of the Brewer girls, had registered to vote in North Carolina when she enrolled there in 1977. She had gone to a school meeting in the fall of her freshman year, in which it was explained that the town-and-gown tension in Durham could be improved if more students registered to vote, demonstrated a commitment to the community. So she meant to register there. When she moved back home a year and a half later, it hadn’t been an election year so there was no urgency to register at all. Caught up in the Anderson campaign this summer, she had quite forgotten that she had never registered in her home state. Yes, she saw the irony in forgetting to register when she had been sitting at a card table at the mall, signing up other people.

Embarrassed, she didn’t dare confide in anyone on the campaign. Instead she had asked her uncle Bert, who told her that all she had to do was swear on a form that she was a registered voter at her mother’s address, that she had sent in the application earlier this fall.

“It is a felony,” he said. “But it’s not like there’s going to be a recount that forces them to go over all the ballots.”