Truth Like the Sun (3 page)

She spent most of the next hour repeating and affirming what she’d just heard and seen, the editors debating whether “Just jump, bitch” was too inflammatory, and if there was actually a story here at all or just a
brief
, seeing how bridge jumps were fairly common. Those arguments were discarded, though, once KING-5 led with the jump-bitch quote on its noon broadcast. By then it was also clear the jumper had amazingly survived, which opened other doors. The lede for a story on road rage? Ultimately it was deemed a punchy daily
with a follow-up for the social services reporter, who’d been looking for a peg for a story about the city’s suicidal tendencies.

Still, Helen scrambled to make her twelve column inches breathe. The Aurora Bridge was second only to the Golden Gate in suicide leaps. She looked up
aurora
, and found a Roman myth about
the goddess of dawn
. Is that who the jumper was, or why she survived? She considered checking weather patterns for the last ten jumps to see if anyone ever did it on sunny days. No, she told herself, keep it simple and get back to those insufferable World’s Fair archives.

Her editor, Shrontz, called her assignment an honor, explaining in vague if glowing terms how the fair was the coming-out party that launched modern Seattle. What a perfect little project, he told her,
for an enterprising reporter who can really write
. The newsroom was still getting used to Helen. She wrote fast yet colorfully, her stories often reading like news-feature hybrids that confused the copy desk. With the fortieth anniversary looming, the
Times
was gonna be
all over the fair
, Shrontz kept telling her. She was hating him again. Liked him, then hated him, respected him, then resented him for confronting her about Elias, as if she’d lied during the interview by not mentioning that she had a son.

She reloaded on espresso, then camped out in the
P-I
library, skimming books, magazines and newspaper clippings, reassuring herself that they’d let her return to her dot-com drama if she delivered a few nostalgic gems about the fair. What a long shot to beat out New York and land the first American expo in decades, back when world fairs were must-see spectacles and Seattle was a sleepy Boeing bunkhouse without a freeway. Yet from what she could tell, the fair was an artifact of the corniest of American times and, worse yet, a local sacred cow with fawning coverage shamelessly regurgitated through the ten-, twenty- and thirty-year remembrances. By now it was a myth, and with that realization she felt a rebellious desire to expose the truth about the fair.

Starting cautiously, she prepared a story about it being an unreliable crystal ball, given how the official program predicted we’d be sleeping in rotating houses, commuting in flying cars and eating
scrambled eggs out of aerosol cans by now. She noticed, however, that the fair’s president, Roger Morgan, had the foresight to add this qualifier for the next generation: “If we’re accurate, we will have amazed you. If not, we hopefully will have amused you.”

She needed to talk to Morgan but kept putting it off, knowing she’d get only one chance to catch
the silver-tongued P. R. Hercules—
as one reporter gushed—off-guard with her questions. People still called him
the father of the fair
or
Mr. Seattle
or, more often, just
Roger
, as if there were only one.
Ask Roger. Call Roger
. Everyone deferring to his memory.

Reworking her questions now, she was surprised to find his number in the white pages, but hung up mid-dial. Maybe she should start with Ted Severson or one of the other surviving notables, though they’d given bland quotes nine years ago and no doubt would encourage her to talk to the man himself. She dialed again, and a young woman casually informed her that he was at a funeral. “Although you might be able to visit with him tonight, at his party.”

“His party?”

“Well, you know he’s turning seventy, right?”

Helen made the mistake of mentioning this to Shrontz, who lit up and insisted she cover it—not as a daily piece, but to gather fresh material for a Roger Morgan profile.

All three of her unreliable babysitters were unavailable, as usual, so she dragged Elias along. He looked like he’d been force-fed sugar at preschool again, talking too fast, his pupils dilated. She tried to listen, but it was hard. Some bully named Cameron Falkenberg—he called every kid by his full name—wouldn’t play with him, and Miss Cantrell was blowing her nose all day, and there was some elaborate conflict on the playground that didn’t make any sense. Her eyes panned the glistening skyline as a cruise ship peeled away from the waterfront like an entire city block calving into the bay. Now he was talking about Buzz and Woody and the rest of the
Toy Story
cast as if they were close friends. She parked illegally near Ivar’s, the only fast food he’d eat lately, and stepped onto the waterfront boardwalk amid the daily flotsam of tourists, rummies and shrieking seagulls.

Fries in hand, they rolled south on Alaskan Way with Elias pointing out the port’s huge cranes—“Orange dinosaurs!”—and Helen trying to recall which east-west street wasn’t a luge run. Locals climbed these comically steep sidewalks like brainless mountain goats, as if there was nothing ludicrous about building a city on cliffs. She guessed wrong on Spring and smoked the clutch on the lip of Third, waiting for the light, before speeding to University and then up to Sixth, where she parked in a loading zone and jaywalked, Elias clinging to her hand and jogging to keep up as they slipped past bellmen dressed like third-world dictators onto the white marble floors of the Olympic Hotel.

Shrontz guessed the location.
Where else would Roger Morgan party?
Shiny new escalators aside, the brick and terra-cotta hotel was a time capsule, exuding the 1920s, with an elegant balcony surrounding the massive lobby. Holding hands again, Helen and Elias scampered up marble stairs to the Spanish Ballroom, where tall double doors opened to a noisy banquet hall the size of a basketball court with bejeweled chandeliers, paisley carpet and more than thirty tables surrounded by dapper seniors.

Helen couldn’t recall seeing so many old people in one place before, and just about everyone was laughing, their delighted cackles bouncing off the high ceiling. A commanding amplified voice rose above the ruckus, followed by more life-threatening laughter.

She hand-combed Elias’s hair and led him to the only empty table in the back as the short, bald speaker clutched the microphone as if to steady himself on the little stage. “Will you
look
at him,” he said wistfully. She saw where he was pointing now and matched Roger Morgan’s silver hair and still-bright smile with his clippings. “Ahhh,” the speaker said, “to be seventy again. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Helen slowed her eyes and noticed all the pearls, diamonds, shawls and elbow-length gloves, all the pinstripes and tiepins and cuff links. She wished she had a photographer and a guest list of all these fading doctors, lawyers, tycoons and their wives. She tried to take it all in at once. The black bunting skirting the stage. The mirrored wall seemingly doubling the crowd size. Twenty-foot arched
windows framed by columns carved with winged horses. Almost any crescendo of detail absorbed and soothed her. No need to
tell
the readers much. Just be their eyes.

The speaker was now rattling off a story about Morgan that didn’t track. People looked distracted, laughed out, older. She watched a tiny woman pop pills, then lean across the table to wipe her husband’s cheek. When Helen turned back, Elias had vanished. Rising, she spotted him stomping stiff-legged and unnoticed across the floor. When she caught up, he shifted into high whine. He wanted to leave. She fished a deck of cards from her purse and told him to sit
still
until he found all four aces.

Parched and sweaty, she released her ponytail and threw her head around like a horse, her thick locks springing free and settling wider than her shoulders like the roots of a toppled oak. When she looked up again, she saw bug-eyed grandpas staring at her as if she’d just exposed her breasts.

Another old man hobbled to the microphone, this one tall and angular with the raspy voice of a smoker. “I’m gonna keep this short because there isn’t much to say about this fella other than that he’s been a better friend than I deserve going on forty-two years now.” Helen assumed this must be Ted Severson, though he didn’t look anything like his fair photos. “Roger is so beloved people often overlook the fact that I’m a surly bastard.” People were chuckling and engaged again. “He’s got such a relentlessly good disposition that even I can’t tell when he’s bent out of shape. But making him happy, that’s easy: just ask him about anything that’s ever happened in this city. As you know, Roger suffers from an attention
surplus
disorder. Nothing escapes his interest, including the welfare of old coots like us. And that’s all I’ve got to say about this SOB other than to state the obvious, which is that he’s still the finest civic man this city has to offer and has been for four decades now.”

She watched Morgan mosey toward the podium until Elias waved four aces in front of her nose. She grabbed him and the cards and speed-walked around the tables for a closer look, oddly exhilarated that the man she’d been studying in the abstract of 1962 was actually about to speak in public tonight, right
now
. She watched him shake
hands, everybody reaching for him, swinging his arm to give the point of contact a slight pop the way younger men do, his left hand working shoulders, forearms, necks. He was more dashing than she’d expected, a blue handkerchief angling from his breast pocket, silver cuff links peeking from his suit sleeves. He looked built to last and too young for this crowd, with smile lines that suggested the good life and teeth too white to be natural but not so bright as to look fake.

Elias vied for her attention by chewing on the ace of clubs. She pried it from his mouth and collected more details. A wife shouting at her husband to turn up his hearing aid. A couple in their eighties with identical blue-black hair dye. A palsied woman near the stage pulling a plastic neck brace out of her purse, hurrying to tighten the strap until it stopped her head from trembling. Helen glanced at Morgan and at the other tables, trying not to miss anything, but she couldn’t resist watching this neck-braced woman reaching in her purse now for Altoids, the can rattling hopelessly in her hand. Helen glanced back to Morgan, who was closing in on the stage. Somehow the woman popped the lid, bounced a mint into her mouth and dropped the tin into her purse just as he arrived at her table. “Wonderful to see you, Blanche,” he said, bending down to kiss her steady forehead before stepping up to the podium.

“Thanks to Teddy and Evan for still lying about me after all these years,” Morgan began. “By now, I really can’t tell if they forget how many times I’ve ticked them off or if they’re just getting nostalgic for all the aggravation I’ve inflicted.” He let the room settle. “There was a time—and I remember it better than I recall last week—when all of us together in this room could constitute a revolution.” He grinned through laughter. “Anyone remember my seven a.m.
working
breakfasts?” Groans mixed with chortles. “Well, it pains me to think that us gathering here tonight doesn’t give a governor, or even a mayor, any indigestion. Hell, in the day, six of us could meet for a drink and change the course of history.”

He let them revel in that. “But we’re not running this city anymore. And, for the most part, that’s a good thing.
But
,” he said, tapping his fingertips as if praying, “that doesn’t mean we’re done yet, does it?”

His stridency startled people, though not the prior speaker, whom Helen saw nodding and smiling, tapping a box of cigarettes against his palm.

“When we see this city going off the rails we still feel the call, don’t we? Well, old friends, this city is off its rails.”

The hubbub rose as Morgan rambled on, the responses increasingly out of proportion to what was actually being said. Gunshot laughter where there should have been chuckles. Affirmative groans where there should have been silence. Helen wrote what she saw and heard, her pen gliding across the page without her looking at it, trying to pinpoint the man’s unusual tone.

“This has never
ever
been a city where people encourage a suicidal woman to jump off a bridge rather than hold up rush hour any longer. But that’s what happened this morning, if you didn’t hear. Luckily, the young lady survived, but the point is, this used to be a place where people
helped
each other. And I’m personally tired of all the inconsiderates, people who leave briefcases in the seats next to them on buses and don’t acknowledge the presence of an elderly woman. We’ve accomplished remarkable things here with people of all ages and backgrounds working together and embracing newcomers and fresh ideas. Yet here we are coming off yet another boom with little to show for it other than more insensitivity and hostility.
Am I wrong?
”

The resounding “No!” carried more oomph than Helen had figured this crowd could summon. Morgan didn’t sound quite like any politician she’d heard before. A more intimate voice, it sounded like your favorite truth-telling uncle after he’d had a few beers. She found the prior speaker’s face again—Ted Severson, she was now certain, with an unlit cigarette dangling from his grinning lips.

“I tell you one thing: I’m sick and tired of city hall being a place where great ideas go to die,” Roger said softly now. “This city needs vision again.” The ballroom stirred with murmurs. “For many years many of you used to call me
the real mayor
. And I admit I enjoyed it, but I haven’t heard that in a while. And I’ve been thinking that now just might be the right time to run while I’ve still got the energy and most of my original joints and organs.” Severson started to rise, fell
back into his chair, then tried again. More people rose, confusion careening toward excitement.

“All I will need,” he said, suddenly defiant, “is one term.” He let the words linger as disjointed cheers and clapping spread and more people struggled to stand up. “That’s right,” he said, louder still. “I’m asking for your help once again.” He smiled and took a breath.
“Are you with me?”