Dog Bites Man (10 page)

O
ne of Mayor Hoagland's campaign proposals had been to find ways and means of increasing tourism in New York City. Money exacted from tourists was an effective and efficient way of pumping up the local economy, he had argued: increasing revenues through the sales and hotel taxes, enhancing the city's status as a cultural hub for the world, promoting employment among less privileged citizens—actors and artists, busboys and bartenders.

Some residents, strolling in midtown, wondered if the promotional efforts that Hoagland intensified had gone too far, confronted as they were with regiments of foreigners marching five across. But Eldon persisted and his persistence had paid off in healthy increases in the revenues attributable to the tourist trade.

His Office of Tourism had sponsored a poll to find out just who was coming to visit and spend. The results were hardly surprising: Europeans and Asians and Latin Americans, of course, but newly prosperous residents of the Third World as well. Domestically, Southerners and Midwesterners dominated, with Californians, presumably content with the Disneyland they called home, lagging far behind.

There was one strange incongruity—residents of upstate New York tended to avoid the metropolis. Reviewing the results with Esther Henriques, his commissioner of tourism, Eldon theorized that the upstaters had been brainwashed by the Sodom-and-
Gomorrah rhetoric of their parochial legislators. And he urged Ms. Henriques to find ways to correct the anomaly.

Having given this command, he was hardly in a position to object when Esther informed him that she had arranged for a "New York City Day" at the annual State Fair in Syracuse, just before Labor Day. She had half-promised an appearance by the mayor and he felt, albeit reluctantly, that he could not refuse.

Edna declined to accompany him. She had recently volunteered what spare time she had as a dermatologist at a Bronx AIDS clinic, where she quietly and without publicity undertook the unpleasing but necessary task of treating the raging skin eruptions of HIV patients. Eldon could hardly argue that this work was less important than an excursion to Syracuse.

The mayor asked Commissioner Henriques to accompany him, along with Jack Gullighy. The latter was not overjoyed at the prospect—he claimed he broke out in a rash once more than 25 miles outside the city limits—but as usual he acceded to the mayor's wishes.

The mayor was not encouraged by the hour's delay on his commercial flight.

"Would have been faster to go by the Erie Canal," he muttered.

He was not comforted by the briefing sheet on Syracuse that Esther handed him once they were in the air: industry leaving, population falling, family income well below the national average.

"You sure the citizens aren't rioting in the streets?" he asked.

"No, Eldon. Be calm," Gullighy said.

"We go directly to the fairgrounds. For three hours. That's it," Henriques added.

At the fair, the mayor was greeted by a band from a Queens high
school. He pronounced the band members' performance "magnificent" though he knew it wasn't. (He'd played the clarinet in a school band back in Minnesota that was the pride of the state. We played Sousa, for Christ's sake, he thought to himself, not this simple do-re-mi stuff.)

After the ruffles and flourishes there was a tour of the fair exhibits and a picnic lunch with the local mayor—a Democrat, Eldon was pleased to note, though the area was known to be very Republican.

Then came the event that memorialized the visit. On the way back to his car, the mayor's party walked through the tents where prize cattle were on show.

"Can you milk a cow, Eldon?" Jack Gullighy asked casually.

"Of course I can. I'm a farm boy from Minnesota, remember?"

"Bet you can't."

"Dammit, I'll prove it."

It was late afternoon and the cows' udders were full. Jack, to call his friend's bluff, told a young farmer watching the visiting celebrity pass that the mayor wanted to milk a cow. Magically a stool and a pail materialized and Jack pointed to the docile Holstein in front of them.

"Watch now. I'll show you!" Eldon said. He sat down on the stool and, to the wonderment of the crowd, began stroking the cow's teats and, mirabile dictu, produced milk.

This unusual event did not go unrecorded. A photographer snapped a beautiful shot of the mayor, hard at work but smiling. The photo even showed the milk dribbling into the pail.

"See?" Eldon said to Jack, getting up. "Some things you never forget."

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Describing it to Edna, he somehow forgot to mention his prowess in dairy land. So the next morning she let out a shriek from the dining room that Eldon could hear upstairs while he was shaving. He rushed down, half dressed, to see what had set her off.

There, in living color on the front page of
The Times,
was the picture of Eldon, seated at the side of the cow, who was apparently named Florence. The same picture even made
The Post-News,
though on an inside page. The City Hall clipping service later found out that the picture had appeared in papers across the country, and the following Monday it was on the "People" page of
Time.

The Times
ran a somewhat facetious editorial but concluded that "Mayor Hoagland, with this one gesture, probably did more to humanize the face of the city to upstaters than any local politician in memory."
The Post-News
called it "grandstanding" and wondered how Eldon had been able to "spare a day away from his duties for this publicity junket."

The mayor's e-mail about the picture was heavy. City dwellers loved it—"You sure showed those apple-knockers, Mr. Mayor!"—though there was also a negative response or two. "New York City milking the upstaters once again," one dissenter grumped.

Edna had the last word. "Good grief, Eldon, do you realize you would have been the laughingstock of the country if Florence hadn't cooperated?"

.    .    .

A week after the triumph in Syracuse, the Hoaglands held a small private dinner party at the mansion for several friends. They tried to do this at least once a month, though it was not easy, given the pub
lic demands on the mayor's time. At this particular event, the guests were Senator George McTavish and his current girlfriend, Leaky and Carol Swansea and Eldon's corporation counsel, Noel Miller.

The evening opened, as it always did, with drinks from a self-service bar in the downstairs living room, the self-service part being another of Eldon's small economies. (He had pointed out to his wife that Amber could perfectly well serve as a bartender on these occasions, but Edna had vetoed the idea; still suspicious that Amber was gathering material for a book, she didn't want her overhearing the cocktail hour conversation.)

Swansea was the first to arrive and made himself a stiff martini. His wife, Carol, had come in especially for the mayor's dinner. Otherwise she would have been in Southampton working on her tennis. At the moment she was brown as a berry, suntanned to the point where her skin had cracked, as if she'd had a face-lift that had been pulled too tight. For all of that she was the healthiest-looking person in the room.

"Glad to see you're still serving decent gin," Leaky told the mayor. "Schoolchildren may not be getting their hot lunches, but there's a good gin supply at Gracie Mansion."

"I pay for it myself, thank you," Eldon said. "And what do you know about good gin, anyway? I remember the industrial-grade alcohol you used to drink at Princeton."

"Oh God, Princeton. You're not going to sing that awful song for us, are you?" Carol asked.

"Shut up, my dear. What do you want to drink?" Leaky asked her.

A Kir was the answer, but there was not any cassis with which to make it.

"Sorry, we gave the cassis money to the school lunch program," Eldon explained, so Carol settled for a simple glass of white wine.
(Eldon was grateful that there was no such thing as New York City wine, since he would then have had to serve it. It tickled him that Governor Foote was stuck with a wine cellar limited to the New York State product.)

Noel Miller and Senator McTavish and his latest friend arrived at the same time. Noel looked the part of a prominent and successful Wall Street lawyer, which he had been before taking the city job at Eldon's urging, if not insistence. Fair-haired and in his late fifties, he was even taller than the mayor. Many thought he looked down on the world both literally and figuratively, but he was really an open and democratic sort.

Noel had been worried that the strange world of municipal law might overwhelm him, but he came to the job of the city's top lawyer from a tough mergers and acquisitions practice and, thus trained to expend boundless time and energy on his work, was able to keep ahead of the game. Being called a workaholic would have surprised him; he just did what he had to do and if that took every night and weekend, that's the way it was. Besides, there had never been a Mrs. Miller to occupy his time or attention.

The senator's "new" find (she had been in residence in his Watergate apartment for three months) was the object of close scrutiny. She had been described in the gossip columns as a "budding actress"; up close she looked more like a buxom waitress in a not too upscale restaurant. She was introduced as "Casey," though later it turned out she spelled her name "KC." Her first question to Edna was whether she could smoke. Edna looked sympathetic and nodded her head. "Don't ask, don't tell," she told KC, producing an ashtray from inside a cupboard.

Obviously briefed, KC said she understood that Edna was a dermatologist.

"That's right."

"Then you could clear up Ricky Martin's acne scars," KC said.

"Perhaps," Edna replied noncommittally, not knowing who Ricky Martin was.

(As they had conferred about the evening's guest list, Edna and Eldon had laughed about their senior senator's way with the ladies. There was always one in residence, but they changed as often as two or three times a year. The Hoaglands reflected on "how times have changed."

"Remember Adlai Stevenson in nineteen fifty-two?" Edna asked her husband. "He had to apologize because he went to church one Sunday wearing a blazer, not a suit!"

"Yes, and the divorce business really hurt him. And can you imagine the uproar if he'd been living with someone?"

"George would have been in hot water all the time back then. Probably driven out of office," Edna added. "Assuming he ever got there in the first place.")

The senator, a bourbon in hand, congratulated Eldon on his "brilliant" performance upstate. "You did in one day what I've been trying to do for twenty years—get the yokels to trust me. I'm up there six or seven days a month; thought about getting one of those SUVs, with a gun rack on the back, and driving around in that, but it's too out of character for me. So I just walk around in my shirtsleeves, shake hands with everybody, take the maple syrup and cheddar cheese they give me and hope for the best. Thank God it's worked for me, but I got worried every time I ran."

The guests moved on to the dining room for Julio's paella. Edna realized that most of the guests present had had the dish before, but it seemed to be the one concoction he could not destroy, so here it was again.

Over the dinner table, conversation about the cow milking continued. The senator, sitting next to Edna, shouted down to Eldon at the other end that he'd heard the governor was furious. " 'He's invading my territory,' she's been telling people."

"
Me
invading her territory!" Eldon snorted. "Have you heard what she's done to me?" He recounted to his incredulous guests Randy Randy's demand for access to the Governor's Rooms.

"You know, it's terrible, but I understand the Democrats up in Albany have started the rumor that Randy Randy's really a man," Senator McTavish said.

"That's funny!" KC commented. It was to be her last remark of the evening.

The mayor called a halt. "Look, I know I'm among friends, but I'm not going to comment on what George said. I'd be likely to say something so outrageous that you'd all be tempted to repeat it. I have enough problems with Randilynn already. So please, let's move on to something pleasant."

Edna came to the rescue, asking McTavish who would run for his seat two years hence.

"Well, you know the usual suspects, Edna. The comptroller, Congressman Canale or Rosie Malloy, Westchester's gift to the Legislature."

"Out in Southampton they're talking about a local lawyer named David Bowen," Carol Swansea said.

"Oh, yeah, forgot him," McTavish added. "He's been a hard worker for the party out there. Don't know much about him as a lawyer, though. Do you, Noel?"

"Never dealt with him. He has a one-man office in Riverhead as I understand it. Probably handles dog-bite cases."

Edna for an instant looked as if she had been struck, then recov
ered when she realized that the Incident was not involved. Eldon had much the same reaction.

"Speaking of dog bites," Leaky Swansea said, after downing the last of the second martini he had quickly made for himself in the living room. "I'm getting damn sick of those crazy cold calls you get every night—selling you stocks, magazine subscriptions and every other goddam thing."