Waking the Dead (3 page)
To get into the church, I had to make my way past a surprising number of reporters and photographers, not only from our own press but from papers around the world. In the car my parents had been trying to prepare me for the questions—the answers to which they feared would be tied to the tail of my own political future like a string of tin cans—but I could scarcely respond to their promptings. As we got close to the church my body began to sweat like mad and I felt so faint that I lay my head back and the sun came through the back window of the taxi and struck my forehead and eyes like a hot yellow maul. When we pulled next to the curb and into the fractured chaotic shade of a tall magnolia tree, the press clustered around the car. Some of them made a decent attempt to appear respectful, though others were too disassociated, too ambitious to care. “OK, here we go,” said Dad, and I realized that in ways he could not quite know or control he was glad for the commotion: he had always wanted to help make history, the way some men forever embrace the ambition to write a novel or paint a great mural, and here at last we were, we lowly four, with the ear of the world cocked in our direction and its great glassy eye blinking at us every hundredth of a second.
“Mr. Pierce … ”
“Hey Fielding. Fielding … ”
“One second, one second … ”
Across St. Charles Avenue, opposite the church, a small knot of people holding placards stood vigil. The signs read
SARAH WILLIAMS— VICTIM OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
, and
STOP SUPPORTING CHILEAN NAZIS
. Someone had managed to enlarge a picture of Sarah, and this picket sign, outlined in black, was at the front of the group. Someone with a deep, sonorous voice called out, “
Compañera
Sarah Williams,” and the others responded: “
Presente.
”Then the deep voice said, “
Ahora,
” and the others said “Y
siempre
.” Sarah Williams. Here with us. Now. And forever.
I had been following Danny’s lead through the reporters and into the church, but the chanting across the street had stopped me cold. I had expected the heroin to cancel, or at least slow, my mental processes, but in fact my thoughts were coming fast and loose—yet encased in a kind of dark, soft silk, rendered more or less harmless. It occurred to me that those people across the street were trying to steal Sarah’s death away from me and then it occurred to me that that was perfectly all right. If they wanted it so badly, they could have it.
One of the TV reporters took advantage of my slowing down and stuck a microphone under my nose. He was an open-faced young fellow with thinning sandy hair, freckles, a seersucker suit, a classy drawl.
“Who do you hold responsible for Sarah’s death, Fielding?” he asked me.
I took a deep breath and everyone then knew I was going to answer the question: they had that radar working. Other microphones craned in my direction. I felt Danny’s fierce, bony fingers on my wrist and Dad’s hand on the small of my back. I was dimly aware that here was the spot where I was expected to blame the U.S. government for the whole thing, but I couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to I couldn’t do it. Anyhow, it was all so much more complicated than that. “Me,” I finally said. “Myself.”
And with that, fifty more questions came hurtling toward me but Danny pulled me hard and Dad kept his hand at my back, steering me through the reporters, who felt nothing about blocking our way with their shoulders, elbows, even their cameras. I thought I heard Dad murmur something to me, something on the order of That’s the way it’s done, boy, but I wasn’t sure. I was feeling the heat.
We were walking up the stairs to the church door now. The reporters had for some reason agreed not to follow that far. I guess it looked bad on film to see them chasing people straight into church, their wires spread out behind them like cracks in the earth.
My family and I sat toward the back of the church. We stumbled over the feet of some people who looked to me as if they came from Sarah’s mother’s side of the family: I could place those broad, milky faces, those flexible, slightly frowning mouths, the thick wrists, the meaty calves. I sat between Caroline and my mother and they each took my hand. I nodded my head a few times, trying to give them the feeling I was all right, that I was going to make it through this somehow and they ought not worry. My skin seemed suddenly to come hideously alive but I refused to disgrace us by clawing away at myself. I heard a low moan, a strangled bit of weeping, and I leaned forward for a moment and looked at my father, whose face, though uncovered, was contorted in pain. I felt a lurch of anger, even contempt: if I was going to sit through this, then he sure as hell could, too.
I looked around the church, careful not to take in the altar, behind which I knew was Sarah’s coffin. Off toward the door to another, smaller chapel, sat Sarah’s friend Father Mileski, along with Father Stanton and Sister Anne—they’d all worked together at Resurrection House with Sarah in Chicago. Mileski was pulling at his dark coarse Russian beard and weeping openly. I wondered how a priest could weep so at a funeral; I wondered if he’d lost all faith. Stanton, twenty years older than Mileski, frail, white-haired, with sunken cheeks and mild blue eyes, sat bolt upright and stared at the altar, with a look on his face as if some piece of clerical gaucherie were being committed. Sister Anne’s eyes were averted; she seemed to be in prayer, with her lips moving rapidly, silently.
Across the aisle were some people who I guessed were from Eugene’s side: mournful ectomorphs with dark angry eyebrows and long tapered fingers.
Bobby Charbonnet was there with his pert, efficient-looking wife. Bobby had lived across the street from Sarah when she was growing up. She had focused all the excoriating heat of her emerging sexuality on him—rapturous mash notes, nighttime unveilings in her bedroom, whose little windows faced his. Bobby had been terrified and it wasn’t until he was safely away at the University of North Carolina that he had dared to respond to her—but then, of course, it was too late. His delayed response had provided the emotional balance, and gave Sarah a chance to move away from him. From then on they were friends. He and Sarah had once taken me on a black music tour of New Orleans. We heard the Meters in one bar, Professional Longhair in another, and then visited an old piano player named Tuts Washington in his tiny, redolent house, where we sat with Tuts and watched TV—Vice President Agnew was resigning his office on all the channels.
I looked at Bobby and he finally noticed me: he brought his pale, delicate hand up to his throat and shook his head, and then Nina, his wife, made a gesture to me that I took to mean we would talk later on—though when I thought about it later I realized it could not possibly have meant that. We scarcely knew each other and now it was too late to begin. Sarah’s death had sealed her old life off from me once and for all.
At last, I looked toward the front row. Sarah’s parents and her sisters were sitting there with the backs of their heads toward me. Sarah’s mother wore a dark gray hat with a black veil pinned to her auburn hair. Eugene’s bald spot was shimmering with perspiration. Carrie was there with her husband, Jack. A tough-looking duo, they ran a couple of oyster bars in the French Quarter. They’d never had much use for me or for Sarah, really; they’d treated us as if we were not quite welcome customers, with that mixture of courtesy and disdain that can be so painful. Sarah’s other older sister, Tammy, was there, finally separated from her awful husband. She turned around. Her heavy face was swollen and blotchy, as if she’d been attacked by hornets. When she saw I was looking at her she put up her hand in a gesture of greeting and sympathy and I raised my hand—how incredibly heavy it suddenly felt—as if to touch her.
From somewhere, organ music was playing: tepid, faintly religious, like spiritual Muzak. I tried to lower myself into the well of my feelings but I seemed to be stuck, frozen in some indeterminate darkness within. It was the drug and I felt a rip of shame, a revulsion with myself. It seemed crummy to have come to her funeral in a narcotic haze. If this was the time to say our last good-byes, then I ought to have kept myself open to whatever grueling chaos of feeling the day had in store. I tried to move away from the drug, which seemed now to fill me like a wheelbarrow of sand, but I could tell without really trying very hard that it was simply impossible. The music was playing on and on and then it suddenly stopped and I heard snuffling. From beyond the church door, across the street, the demonstrators were still chanting and in that brief churchy silence we heard them, too:
Compañera
Sarah Williams—
presente—ahora—y siempre
.
Shut up and go home, I thought, but without hatred or conviction. I shifted in my seat, settling in for whatever was next. I already had had the first inkling that time was moving on—hideously empty but beginning to pick up new color and weight: those distant voices, the people in this church, my own slow, doped-up heart. I had
already
survived. This loss would forever embrace my life but it would not stop it, and if I look back honestly at those last few moments in church before Father Laroque grasped the pulpit with his angry white hand and began his torrent of clichés, I realized now what I could not quite know or admit then—that I had already begun to adjust to life without her. I was not going to blow my brains out or slit my throat. It seemed clear there was only one reasonable thing to do and that was press on and continue to build my life as I’d been putting it together step by step since I’d been eight years old—the age I’d been when I realized that what I wanted to be was not left fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers but president of the United States.
I
PERSISTED FOR
five years, taking little ceremonial Japanese steps toward my goal, when suddenly the hook of fate caught onto my belt loop and lifted me up by my pants. I was finished with law school and had passed through a couple of years’ seasoning in a top law firm and now was in harness with the Cook County prosecutor’s office. I kept my conscience from slashing my ambition to ribbons by now and again trying to patch one of those selective holes in the net of justice through which the slimiest, best-connected crooks traditionally passed. But now I was being offered a rather dirty deal myself and I was going through all the motions of thinking about it, though I knew in an instant I was going to say yes.
I was standing at the window, looking down at Lake Michigan, which in its frozen state looked like a broken mirror. There was one of those winter storm watches on. The TV stations had all day been featuring those soft-faced fellows standing in front of their weather maps, excitedly drawing concentric circles, vectors, their eyes bright with this vision of some impending meteorological doom—which they themselves barely understood, according to an exposé I’d read a few weeks before, which revealed these guys were no more qualified to explain the weather than you or me. But they were believed—so much so that they even
apologized
for bad weather. A lot of the office buildings in downtown Chicago had knocked off early; traffic was thick below. Yet even at this kingly remove—I was fifty-five stories up—I could hear the morons below hitting their hooters and the sound of all those horns rising up in a hornet’s hum of frustration.
It was getting dark fast and now my reflection in the glass was more distinct than anything beyond it. I was dressed in my prosecutorial best, fresh from a day in the law library—gray suit, white shirt, red and blue tie. My hair had gotten a little long. It’s harder to look threatening and imposing when your hair is curling over your collar. I needed a shave, too. I was starting to look like the defense. Also, I looked like I needed a rest—a week on a beach, a look at another world, palm trees, frozen cocktails without the liquor, a chameleon’s-eye view of all those rich pampered waxed and tanned legs gliding over the white sand. I must have been feeling a little sorry for myself, feeling older than I was.
“You still with us, Fielding?” asked Governor Kinosis.
“I’m thinking,” I said, keeping my back to them. “Look at all these people scrambling to get out of town because of a little snow. Makes you wonder what it would be like if we had a guided missile coming toward us.”
“Look, that’s not what I came all the way over here to talk about,” the governor said.
Oh God, what a moron.
I had to concentrate on what was being offered. I had to pay attention not to the Greek but to the gift. I was thirty-four years old, the son of a printer and a typist in what was now becoming an upscale wedge of Brooklyn but which was, in my day, a neighborhood for workers and civil servants. Ambition was seen there as a kind of girlish vanity, but unbeknownst to our hardworking, friendly neighbors, chez Pierce was a hothouse of it. We listened to the news at least three times a day and read the early edition of the newspaper Dad brought home at the end of his shift, doling out sections as if it were the staff of life, and we even had a family constitution, drawn up by me and ratified, after a week of debates, by a three-to-two vote, split by gender. The odd thing was that my parents were on the whole
pleased
with themselves: this drive came from sheer energy, not self-hatred. Dad was good at his work and active in his union and respected as a porch-stoop raconteur and philosopher.
Mom’s job was with Earl Corvino, the infamous Brooklyn pol, too senile now to bother prosecuting, and though he ran her ragged it gave her a sense of belonging and engendered in her an absurd sort of loyalty to Brooklyn, as if it were a misunderstood nation. But once the mere business of their lives was taken care of, they still had a lot of pep left over and that psychic heat was turned on us. With their guidance and encouragement I eventually found my way to Harvard. Danny’s energy and genius didn’t need the validation of a fancy degree, so he settled on New York University, where he lasted less man a year, and Caroline, after two years at the Boston Museum School, ran away from all of us and went to Europe.
After college I went into the Coast Guard and it was then I met Sarah and for a while it seemed as if my life might change its course. But then Sarah died and I continued with law school, and from there I went to work for a man named Isaac Green—who was sitting right next to the governor now, and whose sky-high apartment this was. Isaac had done his best to adopt me, figuring I was a bit of a stray dog—by which he meant my own father could not provide me with the connections Isaac could. Isaac Green’s wrenching disappointment was that his own son, Jeremy (a classmate of mine in college), had a horror of his father’s world and professed some complicated Sufiesque contempt for Anglo-American law and was now in La Jolla customizing Yamahas. I knew what was happening. It was completely obvious. And after giving the matter some thought, I decided to take advantage of the situation. I came to love Isaac, and it did him good to know there was someone who wanted everything he had to give, who would read every book, shake every hand.
