The Side of the Angels (17 page)

“In school I did sculptural stuff mostly. I liked to play with forms built up mainly out of old mud flaps from sixteen-wheelers, especially ones with lewd images that I'd pick up off the side of the road, plus a variety of clays and resins. But I'm currently experimenting with rendering common household objects in a compound of plaster of Paris and shredded feminine napkins. A sort of Judy Chicago-meets-Dada thing.”

She nodded thoughtfully.

“Just kidding,” I said.

“Nicky. She likes to tease,” Tony said to Suzanne.

“More coffee?” said the waitress.

As I held my mug up for a refill, the shopping-bound old ladies began bustling toward the door. One of them jostled the waitress's elbow, spilling coffee over my left hand and wrist.

When they offer you fresh coffee at Yancy's, they mean fresh. At first the burn felt like cold water, and a second later the pain was intense. In a moment, Tony was kneeling by my side of the booth, scooping ice out of my water glass and applying it ineffectively to my hand, from which it immediately slipped off. Suzanne, with a cooler head, was soaking napkins and trying to open a butter packet.

“Butter's not really good for burns,” the waitress said.

“For God's sake,” said Tony. “Get a bucket of ice.”

“Do you need to put your head between your knees?” asked Suzanne.

Through a haze I could see the elderly ladies in the parking lot, placidly consulting a map. The waitress came back with an aluminum basin full of crushed ice, and Tony plunged my hand into it.

“I'm fine,” I said to Tony. “Honest.”

“Shut up and lean back,” he said, using his hand as a lever to keep my elbow up and my hand and wrist in the ice bucket.

We sat there for a few minutes, Tony crouched by my side, Suzanne and the waitress discussing potential remedies. It was humiliating.

In the end, they smeared my left hand with some Pond's cold cream the waitress had in her purse, and wrapped it in an Ace bandage that had last been used for the busboy's sprained ankle.

“Ace bandages aren't for burns,” I said, as Tony wrapped my hand up, pretty deftly and surprisingly gently.

“It'll keep this gluck on until you can ice it back at the inn.”

“I'm not going back to the inn.”

“You are so frigging stubborn.”

“Let her decide,” said Suzanne. “Can you drive yourself, Nicky?”

“She's a lousy driver when her hand
isn't
burned,” said Tony.

“I'm not the one who made a U-turn in the middle of the Stockton Street Tunnel at rush hour,” I said, remembering an exploit from one of Tony's past assignments out west. He'd sworn over the ticket, then put it in a drawer as if he expected it to disappear.

“Who had two accidents in the same parking lot in a year, Nicky? A parking lot!”

Suzanne was considering us with her head tilted to one side and her heavy eyelids especially sleepy. Her expression did not bode well for our working relationship.

“I'm perfectly fit to drive,” I said. “Perfectly. And you don't have to keep holding my arm up, for God's sake, Tony.”

He dropped my elbow with a thump.

“Excuse me for not wanting you to faint all over the booth.”

“I fainted once, Tony. Once in the whole time you've known me, and that was after a flu shot.”

He was being kind to me. Nothing is more galling, when you once had the power to move someone's heart to its depths, to endure disinterested kindness from him. His whole impervious attitude was an insult, a diminishing of what had been between us.

I was rooting for my keys when Suzanne's cell phone rang. It was the smallest cell phone I'd ever seen, looking more like a hip piece of jewelry on its leather cord than an actual communication device.

“He's right here,” she said. “It's Kate. She said negotiations broke off twenty minutes ago.”

Tony grabbed the phone. Suzanne looked from one of us to the other.

“So this means …” she said.

I could hear what Tony was saying now.

“It means Clare's made up her mind,” I said. “As of midnight tonight, we're out on strike.”

As we left Yancy's, I couldn't help but notice that while Suzanne was naturally slender with no hips to speak of, her butt was decidedly flat. Not attractive.

Tony had once told me I had “an award-winning ass.”

I felt better.

B
ACK AT THE OFFICE
, there was the feeling of determined preparation that you see when people are boarding up in the path of a tornado. Picketing shift schedules had been tacked on the wall, and Kate was running off a phone tree list. Sky-blue-and-white buttons in the colors of the local had appeared from somewhere. They read, “On strike for safer patient care,” and felt flimsy in my hand. Not bad for a rush job, but if we lasted more than a week out there, maybe I could talk Tony into something nicer.

Clare was still taking her coat off when we arrived. It was the same sensible navy blue coat I'd seen her wearing in the video Weingould had shown us, a workhorse of a coat that fell in one stiff sheet from shoulder to midcalf.

“Good to see you,” she said. “What happened to your hand?”

“Nothing serious. It's not my writing hand. And it looks worse than it is.”

I peeled off the disgustingly oily Ace bandage and tossed it in a nearby wastebasket. Under it my wrist and palm showed pink but unblistered.

“Margaret can help you type if you have any problem,” said Clare.

“Is it possible to get a press release out in the next hour or two? I'm already getting calls.”

“It won't take me long at all, if you can go over the main points with me.”

“Doug thought that the three of us could sit down and outline a few.”

“With Tony?”

“Tony's rounding up his strike captains.”

“Won't he want to be in on this meeting? It's pretty important, what message we lead with.”

“Let's just see what we come up with first. Doug has a very good sense of what we're trying to do here.”

I didn't like the looks of this, remembering what Kate had said about Doug using his blandishments on Clare.

What troubled me about Clare—what might make her vulnerable to Doug's machinations—was that from all accounts she had faced crises with such composure that the people around her probably forgot she needed shoring up occasionally. With his Iago-like sense of where people's weak points lay, Doug would be quick to spot Clare's need for understated flattery, eloquent silent sympathy, respectful appreciation.

Clare wore a thick smoke-blue cardigan and a straight, knee-length skirt with low heels. Her hair was clipped back from her face by a tortoiseshell barrette, her lipstick was minimal, and her only jewelry was a watch with a plain black band. She looked in every way to be the grown-up version of the kind of exemplary Catholic girl my mother had hoped I'd be. I could picture her face inside a veil and wimple with no problem. That was worrying. Inside every good Catholic girl who
remains
a good Catholic girl is a hopeful, obedient child working her damnedest for approval. Ideal prey for a plausible flatterer like Hamner.

Doug came sidling up. There was a trace of powdered sugar on his tie. He'd been at the doughnuts. Hamner's well-known greed for sweet things was one of the few likable qualities he possessed.

“Nicky thinks we might want to wait for Tony for this meeting, Doug.”

“Oh, we can handle this, you and me,” Doug said. “And Nicky, of course.”

“Okay, then, we'll meet in my office,” said Clare. “Ten minutes.”

After she'd walked away, Hamner glared at me and said, “What is your problem, Nicky?”

“My problem is that you seem to be making an end run around Tony. Is that smart, Doug?”

“I know what I'm doing. I've worked a lot of organizing campaigns, in case you don't remember.”

Yeah, who could forget that one last spring where he'd gotten
those valet-parking attendants in Atlantic City a whopping ten-centan-hour raise. Phyllis, the receptionist at the Toilers, had kept me filled in on Doug in the two years since I'd had the nonpleasure of working with him. Phyllis resented Doug because, when he was in residence at the national office, he frequently ordered her to call him a taxi home in the evenings, even though there was a hotel with a taxi stand twenty feet from the entrance to the Toilers' building.

“Don't second-guess me in front of Clare,” he said, breathing heavily. He was rifling through his pockets for something. He took out his asthma inhaler and put four pumps up each nostril.

“You're going to burn out your nasal cavity, Doug,” I said.

“Your concern for my health is touching. Listen, you should be aware that I don't need to consult Tony every time I turn around. Obviously you don't know how things stand around here.”

“Are you saying Tony's not in charge on this campaign? Because maybe I got something wrong. He didn't tell me anything about you replacing him on the big decisions.”

He ground his little rodent molars.

“The Toilers are your client, if you recall, and I'm a national staff rep. Don't you think I'm entitled to a certain amount of respect?”

“Try it on some poor, scared twenty-two-year-old PR assistant, Doug. Not on me.”

Clare's office had been a large broom closet when the local had leased the strike headquarters. A steel door in the far wall gave access to an area out back where the office garbage bins stood. Another local president might have grabbed the midsize room off the large central work area for her office, but Clare had given that room over to files, supplies, a coffee machine, and a capacious easy chair.

Her broom closet was barely big enough for her desk, some folding chairs, a small pine bookcase, and a very small sofa on which I was forced to sit uncomfortably close to Hamner during our meeting about the press release. He kept pinching his nostrils between his hands as if he'd just inhaled snuff—the effects of overusing that inhaler, I guessed—and clicking and unclicking his ballpoint pen. He directed
most of his comments at Clare, occasionally asking me if I'd taken down some point of information, as if to convey that I was present at this meeting only by virtue of my shorthand skills.

“In the press release we should cite the recent Morehouse study on staffing ratios as a variable in cardiac outcomes,” he began. “While the influence of staffing has to be teased out from the data, I think it makes our case well enough.”

I said, “I think we should play to their common sense. We can provide the Morehouse data as backup. Maybe Doug could do a three-paragraph summary we could attach. But for our press contacts, we should simply give some dramatic examples about the reality in human terms of Coventry's move to fewer nurses and more patients. Does it mean that patients are ringing their call bells for half an hour? Does it mean a recovering stroke victim could fall in the shower in his hospital room and break a leg?”

“We don't call patients ‘victims,'” Doug said prissily.

I decided to keep my eyes on the task at hand, tempting as it would be to snipe at him. Doug was such an easy target. He had so little self-awareness that he just stuck out all over with handles for mockery. I wasn't sure I liked the corner of myself that delighted in that fact.

“Tell me this, then. When there aren't enough nurses to care for patients, what happens here? For example, I would hate the idea of being in a hospital and not having someone there to help me to the bathroom and then soiling the bed and being found like that.”

“That's disgusting,” said Doug.

“I got that from the ICU petition, Doug. Right here at St. Francis.”

Doug's pen clicks reached a cricketlike franticness.

“You'll have to meet Mae Carroll from the Gray Panthers,” Clare said. “Mae's fielded a lot of complaints from her members in the past several months about what's going on at St. Francis, and she'll have some stories you can use. Plus, she'll gladly talk to the press, and so will her people.”

“Mae is a little bit too outspoken, perhaps,” said Doug. “She's not what people expect from a senior citizen.”

“What exactly are people supposed to expect from a senior citizen?” said Clare mildly.

She seemed to find Doug amusing, as if his crotchets and pettiness were kind of cute. It's true that, for every nine women who find a man insufferable, there's a tenth to willingly indulge him. Thus it is that even the most unattractive men find mates without half trying. Not fair, really, when women too often prune and tweak at even our most minor faults in order to qualify for love and acceptance.

“Not a prison record, at any rate,” said Doug.

I looked at Clare.

“Mae was arrested in draft protests during Vietnam, and then again in a sitdown demonstration over that toxic waste dump in Foster ten years ago,” said Clare. “She was never convicted of anything, obviously. You're being silly, Doug.”

“It would look bad if it came out,” Doug added in a voice full of regret, as if Clare had been harboring a felon.

I wished I could deal with Clare without his poisonous presence. At random, I picked up a tiny cup that was sitting on her desk, clearly a favored ornament since it was in a grouping with the picture of Clare's border collies and a small figurine of Saint Anthony holding the Baby Jesus.

The cup was blue and white, light on my palm as a freshly baked meringue. The blue porcelain had a wavery, wet-inky look, and depicted two birds flying past a miniature gazebo. I turned it round gingerly, since it was clearly old. Yet it was without a chip, a small miracle of survival. There were several plates and cups of a similar blue and white china on the rickety shelf behind Clare.

“It's willow ware,” said Clare. “I collect it. Not for value primarily. I have a lot of chipped and cracked stuff.”