But Sandy was not that kind of a guy. He didn’t talk to photos or even to himself. When he wasn’t working, he might go a day or two without speaking to anyone at all. And that suited him just fine.
Thrill Me
November 2, 1980
We never got the bounce,” Greg said, staring at the television, numb. “We should have gotten such a bounce.”
Norman agreed. “We deserved a bounce. We deserved a motherfucking bounce.”
Linda nodded, the third member in this mourning party of three. Greg and Norman had seemed old to her a month ago, even two hours ago, but she realized now that they were young, too. Young and preppy and rumpled, men whose clothes were no longer tended by mothers and not yet under the auspices of wives or girlfriends.
“How did we not get a bounce?” Greg asked.
“We never got a bounce,” Norman said.
They were a little drunk and this couplet, which they had been reciting in variation since the polls closed almost five hours ago, was coming more quickly now, abetted by drink and shock.
And although this was not a party per se-John B. Anderson’s small cadre of Baltimore believers was not that deluded-the volunteers had expected a slightly cheerier ending to this chapter in their lives when they planned the gathering at the Brass Elephant. But it was one thing to tilt at a windmill, another to feel as if you were pinned beneath it, arms and legs squirming comically.
The bartender, Victor, who had come to know them quite well over the last two months, had allowed them to bring a small black-and-white television and prop it up on the bar. It had been fun in the first hour or so, just because they were done; they had seen a hard thing through, unlike several other volunteers who had fled the sinking ship. No, they were jovial at first, not thinking about the big picture. About reality.
They muted the television when the networks began calling the election for Reagan. And now it was 1:00 A.M. and the enormity of the result had left them all a little numb. They hadn’t expected Carter to win, they hadn’t wanted Carter to win, and yet-and yet. The Reagan landslide felt literal to Linda, as if she were caked in mud, as petrified as a citizen of Pompeii.
“At least they can’t blame us,” she said, a variation on what she had been saying all night.
“Not in Maryland,” said Norman. “Still reliably Democratic, thank God, and the average Republican pol here is more Mathias than Agnew.”
“They can’t blame us anywhere,” Greg said. “When everything is said and done, there won’t be a single state where Anderson siphoned off enough votes to hurt Carter. Anderson wasn’t the problem.”
“I thought he was supposed to be the solution,” Linda said.
But this was too naïve, even for her fellow travelers in idealism, who usually gave Linda extra leeway because of her youth. They had celebrated her twentieth birthday in this same bar, just two months ago.
They had returned three weeks later, the night of the debate, right here in Baltimore, when Carter had refused to appear and Anderson had debated Reagan one-on-one. He had done so well. That night, the young volunteers had come here in a haze of giddy possibility. It was happening. They were going to make history. Maryland’s best-known connection to third-party presidential politics would no longer be the assassination attempt on George Wallace, but the glorious ascension of this practical, reasonable man, a man who embodied the word “avuncular” in Linda’s mind.
“Are you going to make book on whether he lives or dies?” Uncle Bert, in their kitchen, joking to her father about the Wallace shooting only hours after it had happened.
Her father didn’t think it was funny. “If he dies, he becomes a martyr. That’s no good.”
Bert, quietly: “He’s not wrong about some things.”
Her father, fiercely: “He’s wrong about everything.”
Why was she thinking about this now? Anderson, third-party candidate, Wallace. Avuncular-uncle, Uncle Bert. Her father. Her father. How she wished she could talk to him tonight. Would he have been surprised by the result? His business had relied on him not being surprised about anything that involved numbers, always knowing the odds. Oh, he was apolitical because no candidate would ever support him, not publicly, although they all took his money, one way or another. But he claimed politics was just another game, its outcome shaped by probabilities.
Victor knew her father, it turned out. He spoke to Linda of him that very first night, after checking her ID.
“Class of 1960,” he said, handing her license back. “Just in under the buzzer.” The drinking age was going up to twenty-one, a year at a time, but she was grandfathered in. She would be the only Brewer girl who could drink before the age of twenty-one. Linda didn’t care about drinking so much. She just wanted to hang out with the other volunteers, who had claimed this place as their own.
The bar at the Brass Elephant was a little pricey for a group of unpaid volunteers, even those subsidized by their parents, but it was near Norman’s apartment on Read Street, and the converted town house’s muted elegance gave them a lift at day’s end. Plus, Linda enjoyed the cachet of Victor remembering not only her father, but her as well. He used to wait on them at the Emerson Hotel. Shirley Temples, with extra cherries. Linda was not yet eight, Rachel only six, and the hotel was far from its glory days, but the sisters had no yardstick for decline back then, had not yet observed firsthand how quickly elegance can erode. They certainly did not know of the Hattie Carroll incident, or even Bob Dylan, not in 1968. Linda had known only how much she and Rachel loved being with their father, dueling with plastic swords loaded with cherries, while men came and went, crouching next to Felix, whispering in his ear, then disappearing.
“Do you still drink Shirley Temples?” Victor had asked her after establishing she was one of those Brewers.
Linda had blushed, then blurted out an order for the most sophisticated drink she could imagine, which happened to be her mother’s drink, a vodka and tonic. The joke was on her. She hated vodka tonics. But she stuck to her original order that night and every night after. She’d rather sip slowly and grimly than admit she had been bluffing.
At least she never got drunk, which was a good thing, as she had to drive all the way out to Pikesville, where she was living with her mother and her baby sister, Michelle. Rachel had left for college just a few weeks ago, and it surprised Linda how keenly she felt her absence in the house. Had Linda been missed the same way during her year and a half at Duke? She thought not, somehow. Rachel was the family confidante, the keeper of all secrets, even their mother’s. Linda could be trusted to keep secrets, too, but she was bossy, determined to solve problems that no one else wanted solved. Put Daddy’s photos away if they make you feel sad. Don’t spend money you don’t have. If you must have the latest clothes, get a job at a shop where you can buy them at a discount. At least her mother had heeded the last bit of advice.
Tonight, as Greg and Norman drank themselves into deeper and deeper glooms, Linda found the nerve to turn her vodka tonic back to Victor and say: “Maybe a glass of wine?”