The Side of the Angels (18 page)

“My cousin Louise collects Depression glass. The cranberry color.”

Doug cast an impatient glance at me. I handed the cup to Clare, who was now turning it in her hand.

“This one's Victorian. See the mark on the bottom? That tells us the manufacturer and country of origin. It was required on British exports after a certain date. I found this at a church bazaar for two dollars.”

Her eyes went dreamy with a treasure hunter's remembered delight. I began to like her better. A minute went by. Doug went from
clicking his pen to doing a complicated baton twirl with it in his right hand and pulling on his mustache with his left hand until I wanted to yank it right off his face. Clare put the cup down and said, “You want to try a draft on this press release, Nicky? I work better when I have something tangible to start with.”

“Sure. And feel free to edit me. I'm used to it.”

“We will,” said Doug.

“I'm not worried,” said Clare. “I know your work is good. Tony showed me some samples.”

Tony still had samples of my old campaign lit? What a thing to keep. Of course, I still had a box of rock candy he'd once bought me on a trip through Paw Paw, West Virginia.

I left Doug in Clare's office, sketching out a diagram he had for the strike website. He envisioned a special section for reporters, listing research resources on health care policy issues. Most of them would ignore it completely, overworked as they were. They wanted easily digestible, verifiable facts, and we'd supply them, slanted our way.

It would keep Doug busy, though, and out of my hair. As I headed back to my shadowy, inconvenient corner, my left hand began to throb again, and my stomach to ache from the combination of tension and Yancy's pancakes. I was intercepted by a woman whose name I didn't yet know, but whose type was legion.

“I put a new stapler and pencil sharpener on your desk,” she said. “I'm Margaret, by the way. I'm one of the stewards, and I'll be giving you a hand with logistics.”

I have encountered many Margarets in my time. Every union, every church, every association, every Girl Scout troop, requires its Margaret. A Margaret was the glue of any collective endeavor. She would be the one who would still be full of practical solutions to knotty problems at the end of a four-hour committee meeting. She'd be the one who nagged people into volunteering for phone banks and who made sure the account books were in order. The one who kept the office in coffee and typewriter ribbons, and made sure the fire insurance was renewed. She was a scourge and a necessity.

Margaret provided me with the name of the nearest union printer, plus a file with the phone numbers of the local's executive board and
strike captains so that I could bother them at any time, day or night. She had researched alternative hotels and their rates, in case I didn't find the White Hart to my satisfaction. She'd even typed out a selection of picket line chants for spontaneous use.

“ ‘Two, four, six, eight, patients before profit rates,' ” I read.

“We want to make sure the chants stay appropriate,” Margaret said. “Doug's been concerned about that.”

Margaret's strawberry-blond hair, which could have been luxuriant and shiny, was cropped in a practical pixie cut. She was dressed for action in carpool-driving clothes: a cotton turtleneck with a pattern of tiny frogs, crew-necked navy blue sweater, jeans, and jogging shoes.

She said, “I think we should have a system for monitoring production. I can keep on top of the printer for you, and I've identified three of our members with vans who can help deliver finished jobs if the printer's lollygagging.”

“I prefer to deal with the printer directly, but I
really
appreciate your having the foresight to think of that, Margaret. And those vans could sure come in handy.”

For hauling the rest of us off to the loony bin after you've driven us all crazy, I thought to myself, but I infused warmth into my voice. I bet Margaret's parents had rarely praised her. She wouldn't be like this if they had.

A boy came up and tugged Margaret's elbow, none too gently.

“The Coke machine is broken,” he said.

“This is Eric,” said Margaret. “His mom, Mary Grunewald, is one of our members.”

Mary was the one Tony had mentioned. A family of five and a landscaper husband. And Eric, if I remembered right, was the tyke who had inked the pornographic messages on my desk.

“It took seventy-five cents of mine,” said the polite child, wiping his rabbitty nose on the cuff of a much-stained flannel shirt. You got used to members' kids being underfoot at union offices, but this was one of the most unappealing children I'd ever seen.

Margaret bustled off to attend to the errant Coke machine, a light of battle in her eye.

“You have Bozo hair,” he said, turning his attention to me.

“Haven't you seen red hair before?”

“I like blond hair. I would do something about your hair if I were you.”

“Mine's clean at least.”

It's not that I forget children aren't grown-ups when I talk to them, it's that I forget
I'm
not a child still, being taunted by other children who are mean little beasts.

“You catch pneumonia if you wash your hair all the time,” said the scruffy child.

If regular washing predisposed a person to lung problems, this kid was clearly in no danger of an early demise. Eric, whose age I guessed at ten or eleven, had in his brief life achieved a level of dirtiness and seediness beyond the wildest dreams of child anarchy.

His face was grayish with smudges that must date back a day or two. On his plaid flannel shirt I could discern egg yolk, crusty ketchup, chalk dust, and on the cuffs a slug trail of dried snot. He was skinny, with thin wrists poking out of his sleeves, though by the end of the day I had seen that he was forever eating or demanding to eat. His eyes were narrowed and watery, his nose dripped, and his mouth gaped open a little. Adenoids, maybe, or perhaps he assumed that vacant expression just to annoy adults.

“Shouldn't you be in school?” I said.

“I got suspended.”

“Who'd have thought it.”

“Eric,” said Kate, who had spotted our little tête-á-tête with that sixth sense of hers, which seemed to operate even when she appeared to be absorbed in one of her many tasks, “I thought I told you to clean up that mess you made in the storage room. What did you spill in there, a milk shake?”

“I was rearranging things better.”

“Arrange it back.”

“I have a plan. It's a good plan.”

“You heard me. Now.”

He disappeared, but I had a grim suspicion that we'd be seeing a lot of him.

“What a devil,” I said to Kate. “I'm getting my tubes tied.”

“I think he actually liked you,” said Kate. “Normally he torments newcomers unmercifully. We had a nurse in here the other day who's only been on the job six months and is just getting involved. She was helping Margaret make name tags for a meeting, and she asked Eric to take his outdoor hat, which is an incredibly filthy Bruins cap, off the table so she could spread out. He said, ‘That hat was the last thing my father gave me before he died,' and burst into tears. Well, Gina reproached herself for a week. She lost
sleep
over it. Then she accidentally saw him with his dad in the grocery store and asked me if that poor little boy had a stepfather now.”

I wended my way back to my chair, feeling, between Doug, Margaret, and Eric, that it had been an obstacle course.

“These came for you,” said Tony, dropping two faxes on my desk.

“Thank you for doing first aid back at the diner,” I said. “Especially the ice bucket.”

“Forget it,” he said curtly. “By the way, I'd appreciate it if you didn't tie up the fax machine too much.”

“Hey, if you don't want me on the phone all the time, you'll have to put up with the occasional business fax.”

“Yeah,
business
,” Tony said.

“I don't know what you're talking about, but while I'm thinking of it I should tell you that Doug and Clare and I met about a press release for tonight. They said you were tied up.”

“Good of you to look out for me,” he said sarcastically, and walked off. I saw him approach Hamner and say a few short words, then go into Clare's office and shut the door. Hamner turned around slowly and stared at me, an ill-wishing stare.

The first of my two faxes was a missive from my mother, received at 9
A.M.
that morning. It had been sent by the Advocacy, Inc. office manager, Myrlene. My mother must have dictated it to her over the phone. The nerve of the woman! I'd told Myrlene not to give way to her on such requests, but Ma had coopted our secretary long ago, using a mother's love as her lever, and now could rely on Myrlene as an efficient guilt conductor.

In a moment I saw what had put Tony in such a foul mood with me. The fax read:

I gnashed my teeth over this epistle, which Tony must have read. It's impossible to resist reading something once you've seen your name mentioned in it. I'd have done the same thing in his place.

My mother had never liked Tony, though Louise had been won over immediately. Tony was too blunt for Ma's comfort, and unlike her own sons, he was not charmed by her or cowed by her. From him, she could never expect the courtly deference that she felt was a motherin law's due. And she suspected him (quite mistakenly) of being a member of the Communist party—an impression he may have deliberately given just to make trouble.

Jeremy, on the other hand, played up to my mother from the
beginning. He'd paid her muted, thoughtful compliments on her cooking and her home. He'd notice the care with which she arranged a bunch of tulips on the hallway table, or how the new yellow-and-white striped curtains in the kitchen “brought light into the room.” To give him credit, he was quite sincere in these observations, and he could get away with them because the sensitivities my mother would find suspect in an American male—an eye for interior design, or a talent for choosing a pricey necktie—were just part of his classy Englishness.

What my mother liked most about him was that he was a professional. Not just any old businessman, either, but a
professor
. In my mother's imagination, Jeremy had entrée to a world where people discussed Jane Austen over Madeira, surrounded by eighteenth-century portraits, hunting dogs, and family silver.

She determinedly ignored the uncomfortable facts: that Jeremy was the son of a Methodist schoolteacher and a train conductor, that he'd been raised in proverbially sooty Newcastle, and that he had taken both his degrees not at Oxford or Cambridge, but the University of West Anglia, one of the undistinguished government-funded universities that flourished in the years after World War II. All my mother saw was that he was ravishingly well-spoken, handsome in a style guaranteed to be distinguished in later years, interestingly melancholy, and, above all, respectful and appreciative.

I could have told her that Jeremy had been making good use of this caricature of an impoverished English peer since he first cleared customs at Kennedy Airport, but I didn't want to burst her bubble. A real estate mogul who longed to drape me in ermine could not have been more welcome in my mother's home than Jeremy was.

“What did he do?” my mother had said when I came over to announce I'd shown him the door. Her first action had been to make a pot of tea and put out some of her rock-hard shortbread. My mother is indeed a terrible cook.
Her
mother could make a veal scallopini that melted in your mouth and a tiramisu in which the rum and chocolate positively crooned to each other, but Ma specialized in overdone roasts, underdone chicken, watery stews, and singed, saggy cakes from mixes.

“He screwed around on me,” I'd said, not giving the details because she'd have had the whole story from Louise already.

“A lot of men run around a little.”

“Thanks for your sympathy.”

“All I'm saying is that there's a difference between a man who slips up once and a man who makes a habit of it. Men are more physical than we are.”

“Ma, this wasn't the same as getting plastered at some convention and winding up in bed with someone else. That I would understand, wouldn't even want to know about. It was five months of creative, repeated lying.”

“Are you going to dump a successful, considerate, educated man like Jeremy in the trash can because of one mistake? A mistake he's very, very sorry for?”

“That's easy for you to say. You had Dad. He never even looked at another woman.”

“He knew that if he ever messed around on me, he'd have to face your grandmother,” said Ma placidly. Such a threat would keep any man in line. No afternoon of illicit passion could be worth risking the wrath of an infuriated Neapolitan matriarch with a meat cleaver in one hand and a rosary in the other.