The Side of the Angels (19 page)

“Give it time,” Ma said. “You'll get over it.”

“I don't think I
can
get over this. I can't trust him. Where am I then?”

“Trust is overrated,” said my mother. “All this talk these days about honesty in relationships. Honesty this, communication that. It's nothing but trouble.”

“You know, Ma, I don't want to be the heavy. I don't want to be some prison warden, or some wronged wife all noble and forgiving, like Norma Shearer in
The Women
.”

“She gets him back in the end, doesn't she? You know, there are plenty of other women out there for Jeremy if you close the door in his face. With those looks, he won't be left alone long.”

The clear implication being that I, less endowed with attractions, could look forward to a winter of chicken pot pies for one.

*      *      *

Tony had his back to me. He was on the phone, pacing the length of the cord, the way he always did. He turned and met my eye, and turned again, deliberately away from me. How was I going to work with him when he couldn't even stand to look at me? Thanks for the fax, Ma, I thought. You're always looking out for your darling daughter, your only daughter, the apple of your eye.

The second fax was from Ron. It was in memo form and was titled “Preliminary Thoughts on Detroit Breast Campaign.”

A few months before, Ron and I had landed an account with the Coalition for Women's Health, a group that focused on breast cancer prevention and treatment. CWH was launching a pilot program in Detroit in which a doctor-staffed van would provide free mammograms at community centers in the city's poorest neighborhoods. The coalition had called us in to assist them with strategies to get the word out about the “mammo-van” and to encourage women to use the free service.

Ron had faxed me his idea for a bus stop ad. According to the memo, it would feature a stylized breast with a red-and-black bull's eye painted on it, and the tag line, “Breast cancer will hit one in eight women in their lifetimes. Catch this deadly disease before it targets you.”

I couldn't leave him alone for a second. How was it that sometimes he could be so brilliant, and other times so obtuse, so offtrack? He would never think of advertising a prostate cancer prevention campaign with posters of a giant limp penis and the headline “It could happen to you. See a doctor or kiss Mr. Willy good-bye.”

Tony reappeared.

“I'll need that press release draft by one,” he said. He grabbed a legal pad from a shelf over my head and stalked off to the food counter, where he stood jotting notes to himself and eating black olives. He'd gotten as far away from me as he could get without leaving the building.

T
HE PRESS RELEASE
was easy to whip out. The issues were clear, and the two sides so far apart that even a six o'clock news anchor could lay out their differences in a few sentences. In the last hours of bargaining, the hospital had refused to budge an inch on the deal breakers: safer staffing, no forced overtime, proper training of all nursing personnel before they were floated to other departments, and a 2 percent raise. Not outrageous demands, but the hospital continued to react to them as if the nurses had asked to turn the morgue into their own private underground squash court.

As I wrote, I could feel my blood stirring. I liked clients who were up against real stinkers. I liked the almost-hopeless cases, the stubborn fighters who wouldn't recognize a useless frill even if they could afford one. In my work life there were too many clients like Jantsy and her summer camp, or the outraged homeowners of Mallard Gardens. Too many clients whose causes seemed feeble and inconsequential, whose connection to those causes seemed a matter of leisure and choice.

For all Jantsy's noble hype, I doubted that being granted the privilege of stepping in cow manure on some brisk August morning in Vermont could possibly make a difference in the life of a child who had never had any other privileges at all. I doubted that if Mallard Pond became landfill, our fragile ecosystem or the glorious history of the War of Northern Aggression would truly be the poorer for it. But it made some sort of small, undeniable, concrete difference, what happened on this strike. And so it was beginning to make a difference to me that I was here for it, awful as it was to see Tony, awful as it would be to tolerate Doug and Suzanne and Eric.

So much of my life was spent in conference rooms and restaurants, at purposeless meetings and diplomatic parlays and staged nonevents. To get up in the morning, you had to feel that along with the 90 percent of your life that was long-windedness and strategy and boredom and formula—the 90 percent of your life that was making a living—that there was a 10 percent that was something else. Something that made you feel you had, from time to time, been one of those who fought on the side of the angels.

That had been one of the qualities that had attracted me to Tony. He understood the kick I got from the desperate cases, because he was the same sort of sucker for the underdog that I was, and spent a much larger portion of his life at it. No wonder he looked tired.

Still, I couldn't think of any job that would suit him better. Union organizers were a funny breed. Tony lived from election to election, contract fight to contract fight. Weingould had offered him a management job at the national office, six times over. But Tony had often confided to me his fear that once he was trapped behind a desk, he'd be dead of cancer or a heart attack in five years. He'd seen it happen to enough friends of his, guys who left the road to take it easy at long last, and then found too late that the road was what had kept them going. These days, when Tony got together with his organizer buddies, it was usually at a funeral.

Hamner strolled up to my desk with his own four-page version of my press release in his hand and a placid smile. He'd make me acknowledge that I worked for him yet, that smile implied.

“It needed major changes but you had the seed there,” he said.

“I guess you'd better talk to Clare, then.”

I handed him the copy Kate had just brought over, with “Perfect! Set to go,” across the top in Clare's copperplate handwriting.

“As you can see, all she altered were a few commas here and there. And Tony signed off too.”

Tony had tossed the draft at me and said, “Fine. Get it out of here.”

“We can revisit the whole thing if you like, though,” I said to Doug. “Let's get everyone together.”

I beamed up at him, innocently helpful.

Doug folded up his stapled pages and put them in his vest pocket.

“Nope. No problem,” he said. “If Clare is happy, I can be happy. And I found a great group here. If I don't have to fix this now, I'll have time to give them a call.”

He ambled away, seeming suspiciously untroubled by losing this round. For a moment I was puzzled about what he meant by “group.” Doug was not the personality type that shared its questions and failings in therapy. Then I remembered how he'd spent his spare time on that project in Oklahoma. He contra danced. Contra dancing, it seemed, was something like square dancing, only, as Doug had informed me once, when I'd confused the two, much more complicated. The figures of the dance were called out as in square dancing, but they were infinitely more intricate, according to Doug. There seemed to be a certain snobbism, in contra dance circles, about how well one could follow the figures and how many one knew.

Doug, of course, knew them all, and deeply resented the times when he was paired, or accidentally paired himself, with a partner not his equal in skill. This was puzzling, because, early in our acquaintance when we didn't hate each other yet, Doug had freely confided to me that he had taken up this hobby to meet women. I didn't see how he'd make any big conquests with this approach. Critiquing her dancing is not the best way to a woman's heart. Back in those early days in Oklahoma—ignoring the considerable demands of his work—Doug would often sally out to contra dances of an evening, only to tell me the next day that the women were not up to his standards in their dancing abilities, that he had spotted such-and-such a one but then been disappointed by her clumsiness on the floor.

After one of these post-contra reports, I had said to him, “Doug, does it matter so much how she dances if she's nice? If you think she's cute?”

He had given me a despairing look that implied he couldn't possibly explain to an ignorant novice.

“No, honestly, Doug. Is dancing all that important in the grand scheme of life? Unless you're a Shaker?”

“I happen to enjoy it. You don't know how annoying it is to be
paired with an awkward partner who has no business trying figures at that level.”

“Maybe she's hoping you'll teach her. Maybe she's hoping to meet some nice guy.”

“If she wants to learn she can take a class. That's what I did.”

Such attitudes did much to explain why Doug was still single eight years after his divorce. I doubted if even Louise's unblockingyour path-to-love course would have worked with Doug. His main pleasure in the ostensible search for the woman of his dreams seemed to be the enjoyment of turning down hypothetical candidates for the job.

Doug's unruffled good mood seemed sinister to me. After all, the man had a direct line to Jerry Goreman, who'd love to see us all fall on our faces. I resolved not to escalate hostilities if I could help it. Despite my childish wish to aggravate Doug, I didn't want to cause trouble for Weingould or Tony or Clare. I'd try to be nicer. I'd pretend that Hamner was a mosquito who'd landed on my arm to be flicked away, a cockroach running along a kitchen baseboard that I could zap with one blast of bug spray. I had bigger problems than Hamner, whose revenges were always petty and whose nastiness was limited by his lack of imagination. Maybe he wouldn't bother us much. Maybe he'd be off dancing.

All day long the nurses came through the strike office, making picket signs, stuffing envelopes for a mailing to other St. Francis employees asking for their support, pooling information about regional hospitals with temporary shifts available. All day long I could hear people murmuring in groups of two or three, saying, “Something could come through before midnight,” and “Clare might still pull this off.” I heard a few asking Kate about her friend Eileen, the one she'd told me about at dinner the night before. Apparently Eileen was scheduled for a full-body CAT scan that day. Kate never flagged in the many tasks she'd set herself, but her narrow little face was tight with worry.

I'd been curious as to why Tony did not sit in on the very last bargaining session, until Kate informed me that there were still some
hard feelings from the previous session, in which Tony had publicly referred to Louanne Reilly, the director of nursing, as being “dumb as dirt,” a comment unfortunately picked up by the
Providence Journal.

“If Tony could just remember to shut up once in a while,” said Kate. “Not that it really made any difference. Management doesn't have any personal animus against us. We're in the way of their business plan, that's all. In fact, you should see Winslow flirt with Clare.”

“With Clare?”

“Oh, yeah. He's the kind of guy who yearns after calm, motherly women. Of course, his wife is one of those blond, liposuctioned types without enough body fat to survive two days on a desert island.”

“How's your friend Eileen?”

“I went over and told her we were about to go out. She said to win one for the Gipper. That's the kind of sense of humor she has.”

“And the CAT scan?”

“They didn't tell her why, specifically. But you know they don't do those to see if you swallowed a safety pin when you were a baby.”

“Maybe the strike won't last too long, Kate.”

“Keep dreaming. If I were you, I'd get someone back home to ship you another box of winter clothes.”

We got terrific coverage that night. All the network affiliates included us in their top story lineup, and Rhode Island Public Television convened a discussion panel about the St. Francis strike within the larger context of national health care reform on their 10
P.M.
show, “Questions in Public Policy.”

We arranged for three prominent doctors on the hospital staff, including their most renowned cardiac specialists, to release a statement saying they sympathized with the nurses' concerns. A female state senator who had once been a nurse was featured on the late news denouncing mandatory overtime for nurses as “a return to the fourteen hour factory day”—a reference that resonated here in the mill towns of the Blackstone River Valley. Mae Caroll of the Gray Panthers gave a wonderful interview in which she actually uttered the words, “Shame on them! Shame!” The reporter lauded her as “a veteran
crusader for social justice.” So much for Doug's predictions that Mae would be seen as an aged hoodlum.

One station narrated the day's events over background footage of Clare at the opening of a nursing home two years earlier, holding the hand of a trembling Parkinson's patient in a wheelchair. After this came a nicely contrasting shot of Winslow leaving the hospital that evening, getting into his Cadillac accompanied by his attorneys, both of whom were plump, very well dressed, and sneering. It's funny how on television shows, lawyers are always attractive. In real life, the odds are more like one in fifteen. Washington is full of lawyers and yet it is definitely not a town of beautiful men.

The positive press buoyed all of us, but for the most part, we were just geographically lucky. Had we been pitching this strike to the media in Jackson, Mississippi, or Houston, Texas, we'd have gotten nowhere. Here in Winsack, supporting labor was like being Catholic. People didn't necessarily believe in the cause with the fervor they once did, but it was still what they came from, the venerable if frequently disregarded faith in which they'd been raised.