The Side of the Angels (15 page)

His tone implied that he was surprised that there were enough
idiots, even in the idiot-crowded town of Washington, to keep Ron and me employed at our sketchy endeavors.

“This is a busy time of year.”

He should have remembered that from our days together, though he'd never managed to be there in person to cheer me through the dreaded holiday season with its dozens of social galas on behalf of what Jantsy always called “those less fortunate.” Tony had spent our first December together in Alaska, trying to organize employees of a large bookstore in Anchorage. Some big muckety-muck at the national union had thought bookstore chains might be an easy target. He'd been wrong, but at least Tony had been inside for that assignment, meeting people in coffee shops and hotel lounges. I would never forget the campaign to unionize South Dakota highway maintenance workers the following February. He'd almost lost a toe to frostbite, riding with the snowplow drivers.

I took up the brown paper list. A drop of egg yolk adorned it.

“ ‘Declare strike,'” I read aloud. “Okay, good start.”

“Read silently,” said Tony.

I read, “ ‘Assign picketing shifts. Meet with state senators. Meet with any possible U.S. senators and congressional rep., or staff. Strike newsletter daily, one page front and back. Pressure on hosp. board. Press outreach.'”

Next to “press outreach” he had put my name in parentheses. He had spelled it Nikki. He knew I hated that spelling.

“ ‘Radio PSA possible on questions patients should ask during any hospital stay? Flyers for picket line handout. Letter to editor, for Providence papers. Kennedy?' ”

“Good idea, Tony. Patrick Kennedy is excellent on labor issues.”

“Yeah, but actually I meant Ted. He helped settle that hospital strike in western Mass not too long ago, and the nurses won hands down. This isn't his turf, but you never know.”

Tony's list continued: “ ‘Dirt on Jet-a-Nurse.' ”

“What's Jet-a-Nurse?” I asked.

“Scab nurses,” said Tony. “This company Jet-a-Nurse flies them in on really short notice from Nevada, pays them around sixteen hundred a week. The replacement nurses keep the hospital going, not at
full census, of course, but enough for them to claim to the public that there's nothing to worry about—come on in for that thyroid operation or whatever.”

“Are they good nurses?”

“Some. Some actually think they're rescuing patients by filling in. On the other hand, some of them just do it for the money and are really lousy. Jet-a-Nurse already has a couple of patient deaths on its hands from other strikes.”

“We can make that record known. Where are we on testimonials from members and community leaders? Is there a Portuguese community here? Latinos? Any Asians? And we need a few mothers with babies or toddlers.”

“Mary Grunewald has five kids under twelve,” Tony said. “Husband's a landscaper, so they'll have it rough this time of year.”

“She would be great. We'll take her picture with all the kids and run it on the front of an eight-by-eleven cardboard postcard with copy on back saying something like, ‘Mary Grunewald listened to her conscience and went on strike. Now Mary's six kids—'”

“Five kids.”

“ ‘Now her five kids may get nothing for Christmas.' We send it to key opinion makers, business leaders, legislators. No vitriol against the hospital. Just regular nurses and their children suffering on behalf of their ideals.”

“This makes me want to retch, all this Clara Barton shit,” said Tony.

“We don't have a choice, Tony. We have to take the high road.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” he said, and signaled for more coffee.

“How many of your people do you think will cross the line, Tony?”

“Not many at first. Eventually, maybe twenty percent. We already have a strike loan program in place. And we're putting together a list of area hospitals that want per diem nurses, for people who need to pick up work. The other problem will be guilt, of course.”

“Yeah. I saw Louanne Reilly on the late news last night.”

“Old Louanne really laid on the schmaltz,” said Tony gloomily.

Louanne Reilly was the St. Francis director of nursing, who'd appeared on the Channel 8 news to say that any nurse “who chose to
honor her professional commitments” would be more than welcome to remain at her post. She was gotten up as a Mrs. Santa Claus type, wearing a nubbly Kmart-ish sweater embroidered with daisies, and drugstore reading glasses on a chain. According to Kate, the woman owned Chanel shoes and Louis Vuitton luggage and did all her shopping at designer boutiques on Newbury Street in Boston.

The hospital was getting good advice from someone. Reilly's tone of sorrowful regret was the right note to hit.

“I'll keep the strike newsletter,” Tony said. “Clare can record a new hotline update every day. You ghost a few op eds or letters to the editor from state senators and she'll get them in their hands for approval.”

“I can do the newsletter, too, if a quick and dirty layout is okay,” I said. “You're busy enough. And the testimonial flyers. We'll start simple, just one person, an older nurse, I think.”

“Ruth Morgeski,” said Tony. “She'll have them crying in the aisles. Two months ago her charge nurse interrupted her while she was assisting at last rites for a patient. She said Ruth was needed on the floor. Ruth is still fuming about it.”

Tony talked to everybody. He remembered their units and their stories and their family situations, and what was more, he knew where everyone was in their commitment to the union. He knew who had the guts to wear a union button on his or her uniform, what unit was pissed off enough to sign a petition down to a woman (as ICU had been), which units had the worst charge nurses, and which had charge nurses who were sympathetic to our side.

Tony had no desire to be the guy who ran things from his desk at strike headquarters, waving to the troops from a distance. He would work round the clock on this strike, but he'd still be out there picketing with the rest some portion of every day. It was a job for two or three people and he wasn't twenty-five anymore, full of youth and the kind of full-throttle youthful energy you don't pay for later.

“Ruth wears a Miraculous Medal,” said Tony. “Make sure it shows in her picture for the testimonial. We gotta play our end of the Catholic thing big time.”

He was so involved in our propaganda planning that he seemed to
have forgotten who I was: the woman who done him wrong. It was strange that when everything between us lay in ruins that were no longer even smoking, we still had this, the easy rhythm of our work together.

But then we had always had that. It was what we began with.

I met Tony in New York City. I'd been detailed to one of his campaigns by Swinton McClaine. Swinton was working at the time with a loose consortium of interests who wanted to prevent the expansion of a large, prestigious college—whose name I shouldn't mention—into six surrounding neighborhoods. This consortium, which consisted of businesses, brownstone owners, and community groups, was disturbed that the college was gobbling up real estate and failing to provide adequate security patrols. The college was polluting, too, and its students were loud and inconsiderate in Zabar's. It was getting out of paying city taxes. It was a bad neighbor.

Swinton was brought into the picture to assist these civic leaders in sticking it to this respected institution of higher learning any way they could. Our first opportunity lay in fanning the flames of a messy scandal-in-the-making: the way the college treated its clerical staff, whose contract was in the process of being renegotiated. These women were paid so little that many of them qualified for food stamps. They had bare-bones insurance coverage. They were cheated out of overtime by supervisors who instructed them to lie on their time sheets or find another job.

By the time I arrived on the scene that fall, negotiations had been stalled for weeks by a corporate type high up in the administration, a guy bent on chiseling the secretaries down to a 2 percent raise in order to demonstrate to his boss that he could play hardball. Some snotty Wharton Business School graduate.

It should have been a dream campaign for me. The administration fat cats on one side, women with children to feed on the other. A few Hollywood alumni already interested. A contact at
The Village Voice
who was fired up about the story. And, as frosting on the cake, support from the gay community, because the union's local
president was a lesbian activist. I was assigned to help with leaflets, speeches, publicity gimmicks, and whatever else we could think of to make the college look like a worse employer than the California grape industry.

There was only one snag: I wasn't wanted. Tony Boltanski, the Toilers' national rep who was chief negotiator for this pink-collar unit, liked to play a lone hand.

“I really don't have much for you to do here” were his first words to me.

“I'll go shopping, then,” I said.

“No offense, but I'm used to handling these situations by myself.”

“I don't see a contract yet. Your boss said a writer would come in handy.”

“You can stuff some envelopes,” he said. “That's about it.”

After that reception I didn't find him at all attractive. I generally preferred tall men—Tony topped me by only a few inches. I tended toward bookish types—Tony's idea of great literature was
The Science of Hitting
by Ted Williams. I favored dark men with dark eyes. Tony's light brown hair was coarse and curly and receded a little from his forehead, giving him what I felt was a completely undeserved look of intelligence.

I spent a week running the copying machine and drafting press releases that Tony vetoed. He eventually condescended to ask me to “glance at” a flyer he'd prepared, a flyer inviting students to a Rally for Fairness to Employees, to be staged at the university gates on the day a prominent human rights advocate was due as guest speaker in a lecture series entitled “Ethics in the Postmodern Age.”

The union must be somewhat desperate, I concluded, or Tony and Sheila, the local president, wouldn't have taken the contract fight so public. Not that Tony had asked me to sit in on their meetings or begged me for ideas or anything like that.

The hall in which the lecture series would be held happened to be the site of one of the largest industrial accidents in the city's history. Presently the chemistry building, it had once been a trouser factory whose snow-laden roof had caved in one February night in 1916, killing forty-two seamstresses, some as young as fourteen years old.

Tony's rally flyer had a graphic photo of the Octagon Trouser Factory disaster and the headline, “Women suffered here then and they're suffering now. Don't let the bosses get away with it!”

“Can I make a few changes and get back to you?” I asked him.

Two hours later he was standing in front of my desk, glowering.

“What the hell did you do to this flyer?”

Using my handy computer layout program, I had changed the photo to one of Wilma Stevens, who worked in the library, handing a book to a student and smiling warmly. An inset displayed a chart comparing clerical salaries with the average cost of living in the outer boroughs. The headline now read, “The people who make this college run are only asking for a fair deal.”

The copy ran:
We find that library book you're looking for … we make sure your financial aid comes through … we're there whenever you need us, in the cafeteria, the bookstore, and the health clinic. We're the clerical workers of _____ College, and we're hoping for your support.

A caption under the salary chart added,
At _____ College, you can work full-time and still qualify for food stamps. That's just not right.

“What is this bullshit?” Tony repeated, in case I didn't pick up on his opinion of my handiwork.

“Look, Tony, the kids who go to school here aren't going to remember the Octagon tragedy. If they come out for you on Tuesday, it's going to be for that nice lady at the dining hall salad bar, not to fight for the female underclass in the male patriarchal hegemony. Where do you think we're running this thing, Brown University?”

“This is the most namby-pamby piece of garbage I've ever seen,” Tony said. “My committee's going to hate this.”

“Sheila already showed it to them. They loved it. Because everyone loves Wilma, that's why.”

I brought the flyer up on the screen and added a few words under Wilma's picture:
Wilma Stevens is sixty-two and has worked here for nearly forty years. But she's too poor to afford new dentures. Surely our college has too proud a tradition to treat its employees this way. Tell this administration, it's time for decency again!

“Wilma doesn't wear dentures,” Tony snarled.

I deleted “dentures” and typed in “eyeglasses.” He stomped away.

“Let's print it in some really sweet color,” I called after him. “How about pale pink?”

“This isn't getting printed,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Decency, my ass.”

I left the paste-up on his chair.

The next morning, stacked on the floor by my desk, were a thousand copies of my version of the flyer, printed by our members in the college print shop on pale blue paper and ready for distribution by our people in the mailroom. The pale blue was an even bigger concession from Tony than the copy itself, I knew. Pink would have been total surrender.

On the top copy in the stack Tony had scrawled, “We'll try it your way.” I didn't know if it was a challenge or an apology. But we got five hundred students at that rally, and the visiting human rights activist asked some questions that were very, very embarrassing for the stuffed shirts who ran the place. He asked them again, a week later, in a letter to the
Times
.