He didn’t tease or shame her. He didn’t even charge her for the half-drunk vodka tonic she pushed back to him. And she was pretty sure that the white wine he poured was not the house brand. It was far better than any glass of white wine she had tasted before. He poured her a glass of ice water, too, then made a quick call. Within fifteen minutes, he was putting appetizers and sides in front of the famished volunteers.
“My contribution to the cause,” he said, when Greg stammered that they couldn’t afford any food. Greg and Norman fell on the mozzarella en carrozza like dogs.
“Do you really remember my father?” Linda asked.
“Of course,” Victor said. “We talked about him the first time you came in here.”
“I mean-not just as a customer, or-what he became.” She never said “fugitive,” not out loud. It wasn’t really the right word. “Exile,” her mother said, when she was feeling magnanimous. “Coward,” when she was not. But never fugitive. “Did you have a sense of him?”
“He was a good guy,” Victor said. “And you know what? He would have preferred Anderson, too.”
“Really?” Linda was doubtful. Her father was so pragmatic. He was not one to pretend that lost causes were anything but lost causes. Wasn’t that why he had run? He couldn’t win, so he didn’t stay around to lose.
“I moved to the Lord Baltimore during the 70s, but your dad still came in, talked politics. He disliked Carter. Not so much the positions, but the man. He was talking up Udall right up-” He stopped, clearly not wanting to say: Right up until he left. “He thought Carter was small-time.”
“Really?” If small-time meant not cheating on your wife, then Linda wouldn’t have minded a small-time father.
“That’s how I remember it.”
“What else do you remember?”
“I remember how pretty you girls all were, the three of you.”
“The three of us?” Michelle hadn’t been born.
“You, the little one, your older sister.”
Linda, blunt within her family, was polite in the world at large, so she did not embarrass him by saying: I don’t have an older sister. And her mother, beautiful as she was, would never pass for Felix’s daughter.
But Julie Saxony might.
“He was a good man,” Victor said.
“Thank you,” she said. It often happened this way. With strangers, friends, even her mother and Rachel. She started down the road toward a memory, toward a vision of her father that she thought would bring her pleasure. Then she would stumble over something unexpected and ugly.
Now her memory was playing with her again, throwing something else in her path. Five-one-five. Five-one-five.
“We’re going to say it was a mix-up,” her father told Bert. “Five shots on the fifteenth. Five-one-five. Someone got confused, put out the wrong number. And we’ll substitute out five-oh-five, say it was a typo.”
“People will get pissed. You could have a fucking riot on your hands.”
“They can play the state lottery if they don’t like how I run my game. Five-one-five will ruin us.”
I was sitting at the dining-room table, doing my homework. I would have been eleven, at the end of fifth grade. No, sixth, because Mama sneaked me into school early, the fall I turned four. She wanted Rachel and me to be three grades apart, not two, and with Rachel’s spring birthday, she needed to either hold her back or push me forward, and everyone saw even then that there would be no holding Rachel back. Mama had this weird theory that we would be better friends if we had more distance at school. And we are very close, which is wonderful. But we might have been close anyway. I didn’t understand for years what happened, that Daddy changed the number because too many people had played it and they couldn’t cover the payout.
So her father’s game was rigged, too.
Rachel may have been the family intellect, but Linda was no slouch. She had gotten into Duke on scholarship, only to find herself profoundly homesick. She had thought she wanted a new start, but found it wearying, trying to create a history that didn’t invite questions. She transferred to Goucher in the middle of her sophomore year. Bambi had been upset about that, far more upset than Linda could understand, given how much money was saved. Linda was happier at Goucher, too, where people knew just enough not to ask too many questions. Her only problem was that life as a commuter student at an all-girl school didn’t make for the best dating life. She volunteered for the Anderson campaign because some girl said it would be a good way to meet men.
She had met a lot of men, many of them keen to date the pretty new volunteer, some of them even suitable, if not Greg and Norman. But Linda, who had come looking for dates, ended up caring only about the candidate. Not that she ever got to speak to him or spend time with him. She met him only once, the night of the debate, when he was introduced to all the local volunteers. She was not invited to the dinner afterward, nor did she expect to be. But she was thrilled to wake up the next morning and discover that the received wisdom was that JBA had won the debate. A giddy day or two had followed before she realized how meaningless that victory was.
She had been so naïve about politics. Lord, she hadn’t even understood how the Electoral College worked, and it still made her angry to see the election called with less than 100 percent of the vote in. She had thought a presidential race was one in which two men-three in this case-came before a nation and explained their positions and then the best man would win. The game was rigged. How could a man like John Anderson not get more votes? Her mother had said Linda was throwing both her vote and her time away, but Linda didn’t feel that way. In fact, she had believed so profoundly in the importance of her vote that she had committed a felony this morning in order to cast it.
It happened like this. Linda, usually the most organized of the Brewer girls, had registered to vote in North Carolina when she enrolled there in 1977. She had gone to a school meeting in the fall of her freshman year, in which it was explained that the town-and-gown tension in Durham could be improved if more students registered to vote, demonstrated a commitment to the community. So she meant to register there. When she moved back home a year and a half later, it hadn’t been an election year so there was no urgency to register at all. Caught up in the Anderson campaign this summer, she had quite forgotten that she had never registered in her home state. Yes, she saw the irony in forgetting to register when she had been sitting at a card table at the mall, signing up other people.
Embarrassed, she didn’t dare confide in anyone on the campaign. Instead she had asked her uncle Bert, who told her that all she had to do was swear on a form that she was a registered voter at her mother’s address, that she had sent in the application earlier this fall.
“It is a felony,” he said. “But it’s not like there’s going to be a recount that forces them to go over all the ballots.”
“It might be closer than you think,” she told Bert. He laughed and ruffled her hair, as if she were still eleven or twelve.
But this morning, only eighteen hours ago, Linda still believed that anything was possible, that improbable victories could be pulled out in the final moment of any contest. During the Nixon years, people had spoken of a Silent Majority. Reagan had invoked the term during this election. But the true silent majority, in Linda’s mind, were young people like herself. Oh, they made a lot of noise, but they forgot to follow through with the actions that really counted. It almost didn’t seem right for people over the age of sixty-five to vote. They had so little time left. Shouldn’t the policies affecting the future be set by candidates chosen by those who had to live in the world longer? If you were going to weight the importance of certain states, why not weight individual votes? When Linda was eleven, a film called Wild in the Streets had shown up on a second-run bill at the Pikes Theater and it centered on the nation’s first twenty-two-year-old president, made possible when the voting age was lowered to fourteen. Linda had gone to see it three times. (The lead actor was very handsome.) Crazy, yes-but it made more sense to her than the Electoral College. She wanted to pound her fists on the bar, say It’s so unfair.