Dog Bites Man (2 page)

T
he new mayor's inauguration, scheduled for the steps of City Hall, was moved to the council chamber inside when a sudden and violent snowstorm hit the metropolitan area. The crowd was cheerful despite the weather and warmly applauded Eldon's succinct acceptance speech, which echoed the "Great City" theme Jack Gullighy had devised for the campaign.

At the reception that followed, several spectators, for want of anything else to say, fatuously told Edna Hoagland that her husband "looked like a mayor." She good-naturedly agreed, as she thought the observation correct: Eldon was tall and thin and, despite a receding silver-to-white hairline and some small lines in his face, looked younger than his 67 years.

That night the Halsteads were hosts at a celebration at their apartment. Several of the guests from the original groundswell dinner were present, along with a sprinkling of the more significant contributors Ralph had tapped.

Chef Murffay outdid himself that night, dressing up New Jersey foie gras with pomegranates and mangoes. As the goose innards disappeared, there was much triumphalist banter.

"Edna, Edna, did Eldon ever barf on the campaign trail? All that dim sum, and fried calamari, and huevos rancheros? And junk stuff we've never even heard of?" one asked, giggling.

"No, he never did," the new municipal first lady replied, with a small smile. "But I was busy writing Prilosec prescriptions."

Boyd, the most exultant of the group, proposed a toast to "El Don" as the man who had "courageously" visited an IRA gunrun
ner in detention; boycotted a reception for the aging Yasser Arafat; supported the canonization of Pope John XXIII (a cause dubiously requiring the endorsement of a Swedish-American Lutheran); applauded a proposal for a statue of Golda Meir in Central Park; sung "Santa Lucia" in Italian at a Queens rally (he'd learned the words in Italy on a trip as a graduate student); and come out foursquare for Taiwanese independence. The editor, of course, neglected to say that none of these courageous stances had anything to do with the governance of New York City.

In fairness, Eldon had proposed in his campaign sensible, innovative, incremental programs for enriching education, creating jobs and jump-starting the city's economy. Recently converted to the wonders of the computer and the Internet, his pride and joy was a proposal to create a development zone in the city to attract the increasing number of companies striving to profit from the Internet revolution. He envisioned a zone, backed with tax incentives, that would rival California's Silicon Valley and be the 21st-century version of New York's Radio City of an earlier day. It would have not only space for corporate offices and plants but a school and a City College branch to educate the workforce needed by the participating businesses.

Jack Gullighy, who was present, was also toasted, for his discovery of the Selma photograph and for cobbling together statistics that demonstrated that Otis Townsend's law-and-order program would have led to the detention of one in five New Yorkers.

Eldon responded modestly and soberly, thanking his backers for their support, assuring them he would do his best and that his energies would be directed to improving the city's economic prospects and making it a place where educating a child was possible,
where tax dollars would be wisely spent and where those present, and all New Yorkers for that matter, would be happy to live.

"Mr. President! Mr. President!" one tiddly reveler shouted out.

"Please, please. That's crazy talk. All I want is a very, very tranquil and peaceful four years in office. Trying to make this a better city . . ." His voice trailed off as he resisted repeating the Great City speech, his mind awash with the ethnic variations—
grande,
magnifica, maravilhosa, città, cidade, ciudad, Stadt, ville,
though he had on one occasion excised Gullighy's citation of St. Matthew's "city on a hill." (And he shuddered as he thought of an appearance at a Queens mosque, where he had stood in his stocking feet and choked on the phonetic
aazeem madeena
written on his cue card.)

.    .    .

Now, a year and a half later, he had weathered a threatened New Year's transit strike; a police slowdown after his attempt (thwarted by the City Council) to name an Asian-American police commissioner ("'No Irish need apply' was discredited fifty years ago," the police union president had thundered); Italo-American outcries after he had attended the opening of
Padrone,
the latest Mafia movie (produced by one of his larger financial backers); a gay/Planned Parenthood rebellion after he had taken an "under study" stance to a proposal for condom machines in subway stations; a picket line of militant Catholics at City Hall protesting that same "under study" cop-out; and hundreds of messages, ranging from the chiding to the psychotic and only occasionally positive, on the Web site he had instituted at Gullighy's urging, www.hoaglandmayor.com.

There had been some triumphs. The State Legislature, in Albany, had been remarkably passive when picking at appropriations
benefiting the city, in part because Governor Foote's description of that august body as "hack heaven" had leaked to the press and canceled any effectiveness she might have had in leading an anti-city assault. And the metropolitan press (with the exception of
The
Post-News
), led by Boyd and
The Surveyor,
gave the new mayor a free pass. Discreetly manipulated by Gullighy, they bought the line that the new mayor was a class act and that the city was the beneficiary of a sort of meritocratic noblesse oblige, with one of its most prominent intellectuals unselfishly serving them in public office.

.    .    .

The world, or at least the metropolis, assumed that all Eldon's problems and cares involved matters of high policy. They did not know about Amber Sweetwater, a political groupie who had offered her services as a scullery maid in exchange for a meager salary and a bed in the tiny serving pantry alongside the kitchen at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence. She performed valuable services as a dishwasher, recycling sorter and vegetable dicer for the marginally competent
chef de cuisine
(a semi-hysterical Hispanic gay—two points on the affirmative action scale) the mayor's staff had located.

The chef, Julio, had barely kept his job after preparing something he called "puerco festivo" for a mansion dinner for a group of rabbis from Brooklyn whom Eldon hoped to mollify in their noisy crusade to get public school funding for their yeshiva. That evening had been saved by Amber, who, once Edna discovered pork on Julio's menu, hastily chopped up and assembled a vegetable plate of broccoli rabe, boiled cabbage, canned corn and beet salad. The rabbis were puzzled at the fare but nonetheless ex
pressed satisfaction at having been invited to dine at the mayor's house (while not giving one inch on their money demands).

Ms. Sweetwater had written Eldon soon after he was elected, seeking the job she had thought up herself. He was intrigued by her initiative and after an interview hired her, thus giving himself an anecdotal example of the kind of thrift he hoped to impose on local government. He had not consulted Edna before making his decision. A mistake. Her husband, coming from the university, was not bothered by Amber's small silver nose ring or the astrological tattoo on her left arm; Edna was. She was also suspicious: surely the girl's motive was to gather material for a book or perhaps to make a pass at her husband. And even though the new kitchen helper had averted the crisis with the rabbis, Edna had a complaint about her almost every day, which had the effect of turning Eldon into her defender. Having cut back on her medical practice, as planned, Dr. Hoagland was often in close quarters with Amber at the mansion, and the result was not salutary.

This particular June morning Edna had groused at breakfast that Amber, enjoying the summer rays of sunshine the day before, had stretched out topless on the mansion lawn, "where everybody going by on the East River Drive could see her."

"So what?" Eldon had replied, telling his wife that she really ought not to waste his time with such petty matters. He left the breakfast table in a foul mood, soon exacerbated by what he felt to be unusually inane and irrelevant questions at his weekly press conference.

"What is your policy on serving hormone-treated beef in school cafeterias?" a petite journalism intern from one of the honor high schools asked.

"That's a fine question, young lady"—be gentle with the young—"but I'll leave that one to the health commissioner and the schools chancellor to work out."

"Do you agree that the
Art of the Phallus
show at the Guggenheim is pornographic?" This from a wire service hack often observed in the City Hall pressroom, feet up, perusing
Hustler
and its sister publications.

"Haven't seen it."

"Are you going to?"

"Probably not."

Gullighy, although standing behind the mayor in the Blue Room, nonetheless could tell that his boss's tolerance level was rapidly approaching, and declared the session finished.

"I said when I took over that I'd have a weekly press conference," Hoagland grumbled to his aide as they parted at his office door. "In the interest of promoting openness. Not as a work opportunity for the feebleminded."

.    .    .

Once alone, Eldon called his old Princeton roommate Milford Swansea on his private line, to confirm their plan for dinner together that night.

Swansea was known to one and all as Leaky, the result of an unfortunate bladder accident in the excitement of a spelling bee at St. Paul's School when he was nine years old. He had hoped desperately to shed the moniker when he entered Princeton, but it followed him then and had ever since, not least because "Milford" was a given name one could not do much with in the nickname department. (His mishap had occurred when he was asked to spell
"farinaceous" and only he and one other student remained in contention.)

Leaky and Eldon had been freshman roommates: Leaky the worldly Easterner in the lower berth of a bunk bed, which he had claimed after arriving early, and Eldon in the upper. They were an unlikely pair, the only obvious common bond being their tall, gangly physiques. The preppy Leaky came from old New York money, a trading and shipping fortune going back several generations; Eldon was a hick from Minnesota, son of the assistant foreman at the local Fosston grain elevator, and a scholarship student.

To the great surprise of both, they hit it off and began a lifelong friendship, in contrast to many if not most of their classmates, who spent their upperclass years avoiding and disassociating themselves from the freshman roommates they had been arbitrarily assigned by the campus housing office.

Both boys were intelligent and curious, and intellectually brave (or perhaps arrogant) enough to argue about and discuss the prime academic interests of the other—politics and history in Eldon's case, classics in Leaky's. They were also strangely compatible politically, Eldon the Midwestern populist and Leaky a liberal with a patrician WASP's social conscience. Together they closely followed the burgeoning civil rights movement, including the Supreme Court's monumental desegregation decision, handed down the year they graduated. They did so abstractly, since in the Princeton of their day there was nary a black to talk to and argue with about the subject; the only concrete arguments came from the good ole boys too much in evidence among their contemporaries, who assured them of the invincible truths that "nigrahs" were inherently inferior and, unless wrongly egged on by Red agi
tators, perfectly content with their lot. Eldon and Leaky's shared interest led them to spend a year together in the South after graduation, demonstrating, marching and persuading blacks to register and vote.

Intellectual and political compatibilities to one side, their other shared interest was mild carousing. Not at the expense of their studies, but as a self-giving reward for hard academic work. Eldon, no stranger to robust drinking (mostly beer) back in Minnesota, had his taste refined by Leaky, who introduced him to the glories of a properly prepared martini.

In their routine, Thursday night was for relaxing, sometimes in their room, more often at whatever local bar was willing to wink at the 21-year-old minimum drinking age; they anticipated by almost half a century the urban careerist yuppies' routine of blasting off on Thursday night, then coasting and resting through Friday in anticipation of the weekend. By the time they were juniors, they had learned to arrange their schedules so that they did not have Friday classes.

Leaky and Eldon went their separate ways after Princeton and their year in the South, Eldon to his academic career, Leaky to a life as a "private investor," husbanding the family money and reading and rereading the classics. But they stayed in contact, with a wet evening here and there in Cambridge when Eldon was studying for his Ph.D at Harvard, or later in the Twin Cities, and then in New York.

Eldon had earlier determined that Leaky was free that night. His wife, Carol, was in the Hamptons to confer with her gardener so they had agreed to meet at Leaky's apartment.

The day's bombardment of pettiness was getting to the mayor and he looked forward to meeting his old roommate. By the time
of his last appointment for the day, receiving a delegation of Bangladesh nuns in town to learn about the newest vaccination techniques, his tongue was figuratively if not literally hanging out as he anticipated his first double shot of Dewar's. It was going to be a good evening.