Chapter Four -- The Councilman

 “A senator, Bill.”

“Stop it, Lucille. I barely won re-election to the board. I’m honored to be a commissioner.”  But Bill Wolf’s smile quivered about him like a happy puppy.

“Senator.” Lucille sighed the word more than said it. “Bill, listen to how this sounds, ‘Senator William A. Wolf.’ Wouldn’t you want to be senator?”

“It was lieutenant governor a mere hour ago,” he told his wife, fighting the smile threatening to engulf him. They were the exact words in his head. Plus, the governor tapped him before Harrison, that little prick. Thinking of Harrison successfully tamped the puppy quivering. “A primary against Harrison wouldn’t be much fun,” Wolf said. And now he sounded as he wished, brusque, annoyed.

Lucille smiled. “You can wipe the floor up with Harrison,” she said. She cocked her head in what had become their connubial code.

Lucille Temple Prentiss Wolf had a good face. William Wolf’s grandmother, a Haden County girl, had told him that after he’d brought Lucille and Shelby to Thanksgiving dinner. “She’ll age well,” his grandmother had said, “if she stays busy.”

He smiled now at his wife, looking a decade younger than forty-three with that geometric face that William Wolf found attractive and knew others did as well, but which was not actually pretty, perhaps cute, but a bit too extreme for cute.  Lucille’s face was triangular with high cheekbones and round eyes almost too large, like in the waif paintings his first wife had found endearing. There had been two staring him down in the bedroom. He would see them over her shoulder when she was on top, rearing back her head and shaking her red mane and acutely boring him. The night after the impossibly long day following the accident he had taken them from the wall and slipping them conscientiously from their frames broke them into halves then quarters as he walked through the house and out to the garbage pails behind the garage.

Lucille kept her hair cropped short. It was so black it reflected blue in strong moonlight. She kept it clipped raggedly about her face like Liza Minnelli but neater. Much neater. He had grasped the meaning of the word ‘coiffed’ when overhearing one of the councilwomen describing his wife’s hairstyle to another woman. “It caps her perfectly,” Lydia Prince had said, “a precisely coiffed ragamuffin.”

 Lucille was lean and nearly as tall as William Wolf, the fair-haired and proverbial prodigal son of Haden County. He had been aware from the moment the pursuit began that she had targeted him for marriage. He had enjoyed every moment of the pursuit and, well into a second decade later,  still enjoyed the fruits of this power balance.

 All of these thoughts – though not examined, never made cogent  – flooded William Wolf when he saw desire come into his wife. She was game for yet another race despite the exhaustive campaign they’d just concluded. His grandmother had been right about her in so many ways.

“You nailed her PawMaw,” he had told his grandmother the night he lost the senate seat. “I’ll have Grandpop’s seat back on the council in two years. You watch.” Old Helen Wolf had died before that winning election but not without knowing her grandson would hold it. If that had been said once at the quad-county wake it had been said a hundred times. The election ten days after her death  made truth of it.

Lucille had both known that Bill was aware of her intentions and also that without that absolute constant gurantee from her that she was absolutely there for him he would not remarry. There had been no children. He wouldn’t have had to. He could have made a fine political career for himself as his grandmother’s fair-haired boy. A wife would be helpful. Very helpful. But only the right wife. Lucille knew this. William Wolf knew this.

She approached William Wolf more than sixteen years ago and worked side by side with him on his first campaign; his failed senatorial bid against the same Republican incumbent who still holds the seat.  John Johnson had not faced an opponent since, not in five election cycles.

Maybe he was vulnerable now. This was what crossed repeatedly through the Wolfs’ thoughts. Maybe the state party was right.

“What if it’s Thompson they want you to run against?” Lucille asked. “He’s going to go see Harrison too, right? The governor?”

“Run against Thompson? Don’t be crazy. Stanley Thorne is going to run again. I’m not challenging Thorne in a primary. And certainly not for an unwinnable seat.”

“And Johnson’s is more winnable?”

Into the silence they both thought back sixteen years. They hadn’t at the time any idea at all just how young they’d been.

“You’d slaughter Harrison in a primary,” Lucille finally said. There was no doubt in her mind.

Nor William Wolf’s.

                             

Chapter 3 – The State’s Attorney

“Now what in the hell do you think Snakes wants with that poor Bill Wolf?”

Kyle and his father exchanged familiar smiles as Patsy Harrison Grosen revved up the diatribe against her cousin. Cousin once or twice removed , or something like that. Kyle didn’t know how the relationship wove exactly. But he’d been weaned on stories about Snakes, known more widely as Powell H. Paulie, governor of the Great State of Illinois.

Snakes had not gained  this familial nickname for the most obvious sounding reasons but because he’d carried a pair of dice upon his first visit to the far-removed relations in the south. He had been five, maybe not quite that, and knew how to shake the dice in his right hand and say “I want snakes, I want snakes,” as he rattled them.

Kyle didn’t misunderstand the unimportance of the connection to the man who rose from congressman to governor. “He doesn’t remember us, Honeybun,” Patsy had told her only child when he’d asked why her cousin never came to family reunions. He’d perhaps been ten when Powell Paulie began making big enough news that local talk about him revived. “At best Snakes remembers there were some distant relatives in a diminished past living down south.” In Kyle’s memory it was the first grown-up thing his mother had said to him, despite his equally strong memory of his chin in her hand as she told him this.

He’d grown to recognize, but not understand, how importance and unimportance were like two ends of a telescope. While the governor had little or no memory of his downstate connections, since running off to marry a Chicago man, Patsy Harrison’s grandmother’s sister had never fully dropped from the conversational circuits in Harrison or Haden counties. When the increasingly convoluted and risqué liaisons, marriages, divorces and elopements ultimately produced a governor, well how could the story help but grow?

“He doesn’t care shit from shineola about us,” Kyle told Shelby when she’d first confided in him that the governor was coming to her house.

“Well,” Shelby had said, annoyed that Kyle would – as usual – downplay the whole significance of it all. Act like he was something because he was related. “So what? So what that he doesn’t remember being five years old in good ole Harrison County. Would you want to remember getting dumped for the summer in a farm full of these inbred brats?” Shelby paused but couldn’t hold the pause for long before adding, “Present direct relations excluded, of course.”

“It has something to do with something,” Kyle had tried to explain the strange reverse telescope-thing. It was not the first time he had tried to engage her in conversations about how importance worked. He stopped when he realized she was becoming angrier.

“So what, Kyle? So what? The governor of the entire state is coming to my house to ask my dad to be lieutenant governor. Only you would want to ruin that for me.”

“And that is great for your dad,” Kyle said, knowing already that in his household that would not be the twist. “It’s just strange how that works. How he doesn’t even know about us and we know all about him. It’s symbolic or something.”

“Symbolism will get you nowhere in life,” Shelby snapped.

“Fact,” Kyle  conceded.

Chapter Two - The Governor's Aide

“You can’t carry Downstate, Governor.”

“It’s not the electoral college, Buddy. It’s a simple majority. Votes. It is about the number of votes. I don’t need to carry it. Downstate just has to hold Engleson below sixty percent.

“Well you’ve got forty percent. You’ve maybe got fifty.  You’ve given these farmers everything they’ve asked for.  You don’t need to go courting these gee-gaws down here for forty percent.”

“You’re wrong Buddy. I need every gee-gaw I can get.  I need their vote and their wives’ votes and brothers and their dear old moms. So who can carry more gee-gaws? Wolf or Harrison?”

“Wolf,” Bud Nowak said without hesitation. “Haden is the biggest county of the quad, it has the four-year college and Wolf is easier to deal with than Harrison.”

“And he’ll show?”

“Yeah. Wolf will show better than Harrison.”

“So it’s decided. Wolf becomes the lamb.”

“Are you going Biblical on me, Gov?” Most of Governor Powell Paulie’s staff thought Bud Nowak’s use of such a nickname was pretentious and used to make clear his lifelong status in the governor’s life. But the name “Gov” was given decades ago to his friend Paul  – as the governor had been known since birth to Powell Paulie the third and his father’s ambitious third wife, Annabelle – when the two teenagers attended the Illinois State Student Government Convention the year the fourth Powell Paulie was voted governor.

“We’re asking a man to accept a sacrificial seat,” Paulie said to Nowak and turned to look at the short almost gnomish looking man who had been sitting next to him, informing him for a lifetime.

“Not necessarily.”  

Both men knew Bud Nowak had meant, ‘not necessarily sacrificial’ even though both men knew perfectly well the sacrificial seat they planned for William Wolf to seek. Nowak had not meant to say ‘not necessarily asking’ even though both men heard this in the comment as well. That was true. Both men knew that they certainly weren’t asking.  

“How long does he have left in his seat now?” Governor Powell Paulie asked.

“He just won re-election. It was close. But it’s always close. He’s a Downstate Democrat.”

“Why don’t they stagger their terms?” the governor asked.

“I think they do.”

“So we’re asking him to give up his seat and take yet another hit for a party that is all but in exile in his home town.

“No. There’s nothing in the county code that demands he give up his seat while running for another office,” Nowak said.

Both men were silent at this partial truth. Once a man lost an election it was easier to lose the next one.  But Nowak forged onward as was his job.

“That is no way to go into it, Paul,” he said, leaning in toward the governor from his traditional spot in the limousine that was so thoroughly his there was a slump in the seat .  “John Johnson isn’t as strong as he used to be. He’s getting old. This would be good exposure for Wolf.  This guy has some genuine attributes.”

“Genuine attributes,” Paulie repeated and turned to smile at perhaps his only friend.  “Is that what I have, Buddy? Do I have genuine attributes?”

“You have sex appeal and Cook County,” Nowak said.

“Ah yes,” the governor sighed and closing his eyes leaned back into his seat. Keeping his eyes shut he said, “Those are the stronger attributes, aren’t they.”

“And maybe this guy could make some inroads. Wolf is a decent enough guy. Hard campaigner. It sure in the hell wouldn’t hurt Springfield any to have a couple more Democrats representing Dixieland.”

“I’ve told you about that,” the governor snapped at Nowak, his eyes opened but he didn’t turn. To his aide’s well-tuned ear, convivial conversation was closed.

 The governor considered himself a liberal. “A practical liberal,” he said. He demanded his chauffeurs be black. The Dixieland  reference might have provoked a grimacing smile from Paulie in another venue, but not within sight of the chauffeur. It didn’t matter, Nowak knew, that there was no way the driver could hear them.

A black chauffeur played well in Chicago and it played well Downstate. “Not many good deeds get you points the full length of this great state,” Paulie would say during his not infrequent arguments with Sandra Craleck on this demand. Sandra ran  interference between personnel and a great deal of other agencies and the governor’s office. Paulie was exacting .

Sometimes the governor’s mood would go darker even than cynicism and he would add to his good deed quips,  “But we’re not really in the good deed business any more, are we Buddy?”

“Yes you are, Governor,” Buddy Nowak always replied. “You’re doing good every day.”

Buddy Nowak believed that, and believed it as ardently as when the conviction was born in junior high when Class President Powell Paulie knocked nearly senseless in a single blow to the chin  the class vice president who had called Nowak Paulie’s “ grubby little Polack friend.”

“You don’t deserve elected office in a democracy if you believe that,” Paul had said to the vice president whom he had immediately bent over and extended a hand to help to his feet. “That isn’t how things get done.”

Chapter One - The Governor

The air is clearer, thinks Kyle, clearer now than at any other time of year.

“HAPPNING NOW!” Shelby texted and nearly immediately followed, “RITE NOW!!!”

He already knew. Her father was being interviewed by the governor. Shelby too, in a way. They all were.

William A. Wolf was actually her step-father. But “he’d brought her up,” which was how the official relationship was always stated. It was more that Kyle and Shelby had brought each other up, using their mothers and their fathers as guides, but not actual participants. That’s how it seemed to Kyle.

Shelby had no idea what he was talking about when he said this. That’s what she always said when he tried to make this particular point.

He had seen the caravan make the corner, still out of sight of Shelby’s upstairs bedroom window and was receiving her text after he’d seen them pull up at the Wolfs’ house. Kyle watched, irritated with himself for not bringing the binoculars. He now saw how childish  his earlier notion had been, that someone would spot him, report him if he’d stood across the park and watched her house. He nearly flinched again, thinking what his father would say at receiving such a report.

She was texting again.

“Living.”

There had been a debate which room to host the governor in, the living room or the downstairs third of the split level, the area Shelby called the “basement” only so she could  correct herself in her mother’s drawl, “oh- I-do- mean-den-slash-rumpus-room.”

Kyle knew this because Shelby had laughed at her mother’s setting up food and drinks in both rooms. “It’s imperative to be ready for anything,” Shelby quoted in her mother’s drawl, but as frequently in respect as mockery – although in this case she had proven correct. “The governor is not going to traipse through her outdated split-level. He’s going to see if we have three heads, probably kick back a shot of bourbon, compliment her on her outdated split-level and split himself.”

Kyle pictured the governor sitting in the Wolf’s living room, on the sofa where he and Shelby had once made-out, the sacredness of the off-limit-ness of this  pastel living room more thrilling than the tumbling which, while also exciting, was more familiar.

It was, explained Shelby, finally an edge of danger, finally the threat of getting caught.

They’d had free rein in both their houses their whole lives. By middle school the notion that any of the four parents would be home before dinner time – if then -- was so unlikely as to never be thought. Their parents and their various grandparents and another few dozen other family names were the committee members that ran Haden County, a wealthy agricultural district marbled thick and deep with successful thoroughbred  stock. Some years their wealth alone could give Downstate voters the edge they needed to carry the long state.

“Every great politician has this need,” Shelby told him that day on the sofa. “This  need to be caught out and even to be admonished, beaten down, it’s like fuel, the proving you can  come back. Winning is thrilling,” she said, and Kyle knew even this first time she said it she was quoting Mr. Wolf, “but coming back has that sweet, sweet taste of cold revenge.”

“So it’s like power,” Kyle had said.

“What is?”

“Revenge. If it tastes so sweet you’re willing to endure humiliation just to get it must be as aphrodisiacal as power.” Kyle could remember saying this. How she looked and how she nodded. He thinks it might be the only time she granted him superior political knowledge.

For a long while this bothered him. And worse, Shelby knew it. But that was before Carlene Deluccio. Carlene Deluccio who thought she could win a seat on the county council because she was Victor Deluccio’s widow. Kyle laughed like his father. It had always been said he laughed like his father, even as a child. “Imagine, Matthew Grosen said, she cried when the reporter asked about Deluccio’s payoffs at the tracks. What did she think? Women just can’t take it. Just can’t take it.”

Kyle’s mother would cut her eyes at his father, but she agreed. “Shouldn’t have wasted her time,” was how Kyle’s mother saw the ill-fated candidacy of Carlene, whom she liked and played bridge with but who clearly didn’t get it. Not simple, bright enough, but unsophisticated, guileless. That is what Kyle’s mother said about her. “She should have gathered up that money and bought a couple of those sons-of-a-bitches struggling office buildings and started squeezing them a little. Four years of that and I would say that seat could have been hers.”

At that his father would roll his eyes. They had worked together, his parents, when his father had been in private practice. She was a club woman now. That’s what she called it. “I’m a club-woman now, Kyle,” she’d retorted when he’d asked her if she missed being out in the thick of things.  “I am swimming in the midst of those things your father spends his days trying to sort out. Swimming is much more fun than working, dear. More effective, too.”

Shelby’s smarts would only get her so far, Kyle had eventually reckoned. Certainly far enough, farther than most girls. But he was a man and he knew he had the edge whether Shelby admitted it or not. And whether she admitted it or not, she knew it too. If there had been any doubt that was cleared up the day her father had asked him to step in for a foursome at the club.

Kyle had gloated and they’d had one of the colossal fights that got both their mothers praying  for a permanent break-up. “But don’t you have a gold medal or something up there in that soccer shrine that might make you  feel better?”

Shelby had been perfect in high school. Perfect in grade school and even middle school. She played the right sports and was good at them. She made almost straight As, not enough to tar her as unapproachable. But enough to nab a scholarship to – perfect – “go East for University,” as her mother took to saying. “to one of the sister schools,” Lucille announced frequently at bridge.

“More like a southern finishing school,” Shelby complained to Kyle. “But it’s all women, which is what I want. It’s the only way to be school president. Its history department is good.”

Shelby had decided in grade school she would become a history major. Political science was “too political to look good on a resume” while “history has a classical look to it.” While her explanations became more sophisticated, the reasoning remained the same. “And I could stand a look at some of the folks in the East without being in the thick of them. I'd look like a hayseed.”

There was nothing Shelby feared more than looking like a hick. She’d inherited that honestly from her mother and understood just that fear was the source of Lucille's elaborations and grandiose elocutions.

Her step-father would slightly raise his eyebrows, including Shelby in his amusement at the bragging by Lucille, he gave off a slightly embarrassed but bemused air of forgiveness when her mother overstated things. He would lean over and pat his wife's arm or sometimes lift the drink out of her hand. That was how Shelby learned the concept of a faux pas which she'd subsequently tried to explain  to her mother who refused to consider either its meaning or pronunciation. Shelby feared this meant Lucille would in the future mispronounce and misuse the phrase .

 “She’s my step-daughter,” William Wolf was saying to the governor, opening his arm to invite Shelby into the room. She knew he had to say that. On a lot of documents she had a different last name. And not just any last name. Prentiss. Not merely had her mother eloped with a Prentiss, she'd naturally gone with the rightfully tarred black sheep of the entire clan. Just like that, Shelby admired the man she called "my real father," he comes clean with the governor, who of course would have already known.

“Baggage is baggage,” Kyle said, “but money is money.”

Kyle also said, “Everyone’s got baggage.” Shelby knew he was quoting both of his parents when he said that.

Her "real" father had actually never formally adopted her, although he encouraged Shelby to answer to Miss Wolf and allowed her introduction as Shelby Wolf from virtually the moment he had married Lucille. She had been two at the wedding.

By middle school she’d learned you could change your name by simply beginning to use another. "As long as you aren't doing it for nefarious purposes," she'd explain to her parents, "it's perfectly legal."

"It certainly is," William Wolf had smiled and patted her mother's arm in genial amusement and relief at the ease with which Shelby was growing up. It wasn't much of a big deal. Her mother had been doing just that for years. Her biological father, Phillip Prentiss, had never paid attention to her so it occurred to no one to mention the change to him.

Shelby was shaking hands with the governor and thinking he was as good looking in person as on television. He really was good looking. She turned to catch her mother's eye and saw Lucille's jaw slack with the same realization. Her mother was usually much more careful than that. Caught herself, Shelby saw Lucille pull her neck taut as she began to talk. Then Shelby was being somehow moved back into the doorway and now even her mother was standing too close to her and pushing her through.

“The governor and Daddy need to talk in private, now" her mother was saying."You just scoot along, dear. Oh, and me too?. I’ll just see about some refreshments, Governor,” her mother was calling back and Shelby could see how annoyed she was at being expected to leave the room as well.

Shelby knew her mother would be back in that room soon. Quite soon, Shelby was willing to wager. But she herself wasn’t interested in the talking details, she’d seen the governor and he had been in her living room. That was enough for her right now. She returned to her room.

“Talking now,” she texted. “Gov = Gorgeous.”

“Shit,” Kyle texted back.