Mure turned toward the other twin bed. Sadie was already in it, the covers drawn up to her chin. “Hurry, darling,” she said.
Mure stripped off the rest of his clothes and crawled in beside her. As Mure’s hands touched her, Sadie thought what she always thought, that as a substitute husband, Fred was a little untutored, but he made up for that with enthusiasm. And then she stopped thinking altogether.
11
They let Donald Cubbin sleep the next morning, which was a Friday. And while Cubbin slept, his enemies and friends alike were up and at work, doing whatever they thought must be done either to reelect him to office or to assure his defeat.
In Chicago on the tenth floor of the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, in room 1037, Charles Guyan, the public relations man, sat before the writing table that came with the room and stared at a blank sheet of paper that he had rolled into his Lettera 32 portable. He had been staring at it for an hour, four cups of coffee ago. For fifteen minutes of that hour he had thought about how he should compose his letter of resignation. For the remaining forty-five minutes he had thought, and thought hard, about what kind of a campaign he could put together for Donald Cubbin. After scratching some figures on a sheet of paper, he began to type a memorandum that read:
FROM: GUYAN
TO: CUBBIN
SUBJECT: HOW TO WIN YOUR ELECTION FOR ONLY $1.01 PER MEMBER OR A MERE ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
A million dollars was the lowest figure that Guyan could come up with. If we spend that much, he thought, he might make it. If we don’t, then it will be ex-President Cubbin.
In room 942 of the same hotel, Oscar Imber was on a long-distance call to a man in Philadelphia whose letterhead claimed that he was “The Keystone State’s Largest Ford Dealer.” Cubbin’s union leased nearly a hundred Ford Galaxies from the dealer, turning them in when their speedometers reached the 5,000-mile mark. It was a profitable arrangement for the dealer and Oscar Imber was calling to remind him that if Cubbin was defeated, the arrangement would come to an end, and how much did the dealer feel he could spare for Don’s campaign?
“Well, Christ, Oscar, I don’t know anything about union politics, but I consider Don my friend and I’d like to do something to help him out.”
“Well, you can help him out about five thousand bucks’ worth.”
“Jesus!”
“I was just talking to Don yesterday about this leasing contract we have with you,” Imber lied. “It’s on a year-to-year basis, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Year-to-year.”
“Well, Don and I were thinking that after the election’s over it might be advantageous to put it on a five-year basis. That would be after the election, of course.”
“Yeah,” the Ford dealer said. “That would be real fine. Well, what do you want me to do, send a check?”
“We’d like it in cash, Sam. We’ll send somebody around to pick it up. Would tomorrow morning be okay?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose so. You wouldn’t want to send me a letter or memo or something about the five-year deal, would you?”
“No, I don’t think I want to do that, Sam.”
“Well, hell, can I at least get a receipt?”
“Sure,” Imber said, “you’ll get a receipt.”
After he hung up the phone, Oscar Imber added up a column of figures. Thus far that morning he had raised $19,000 for Cubbin’s campaign and he was down to those whom he considered to be the nickel-and-dimers, the small suppliers who were willing to contribute a little money, but only a little, to the campaign because the union was a valuable customer and if Cubbin was reelected, it would continue to be so. Weeks before Imber had tapped what he considered to be the flushbottoms, the ones who dealt in some way with the union’s sizable financial resources. He had raised money from them, large chunks of it in a few places, but in each instance he felt, or even knew, that Sammy Hanks had been there first, throwing his weight around as secretary-treasurer of the union. Imber knew that the flushbottoms were contributing to both sides, hedging their bets, but he also had the feeling that they were contributing more to Hanks’s campaign than they were to Cubbin’s. They can smell a loser, Imber thought, just like they can smell money.
He sighed and started to direct-dial another number in Washington, this time the president of an office-supply company who might be willing to part with a couple of thousand. One thousand’s more like it, Imber thought as he listened to the phone ring in Washington. And that’ll be more than he ever gave anyone else in his life.
In Washington that morning, in his two-story red brick home in Cleveland Park three blocks west of Connecticut Avenue, Sammy Hanks was listening on the telephone while someone in Chicago read him a transcript of Cubbin’s appearance on “Jake’s Night.”
“He said that, huh?” Hanks would say from time to time and smile delightedly. His five-year-old daughter, Marylin, came into the living room and stood watching her father gravely. “Come here, honey,” Hanks said and the little girl moved over to him, climbed into his lap, and put her arms around his neck.
“No, I wasn’t talking to you, Johnnie, I was talking to my kid. Keep on reading. You were where Cubbin says that he didn’t resign from the club because he could work from within or some such shit. Yeah. That’s it.”
Hanks went on listening to the reading of the transcript, holding the phone away from his mouth so that he could use it to make funny faces at his daughter who laughed and squealed and sometimes hid her eyes behind her hands. Marylin didn’t think her father was at all ugly.
Finally, Hanks said, “Well, hell, that’s nearly perfect, isn’t it? I mean it couldn’t have been any better unless old Don had taken a pratfall or something. And you say you’ve already got it run off?”
He listened for a moment, made another funny face at his daughter, and said, “Okay, now I want that to go out to every local special delivery. Yeah, I know special delivery’s not any faster than regular mail anymore, but it’s still more impressive so let’s do it. Okay?... Okay. Now I want you or somebody else in Chicago to write the letter that goes with it. I don’t want it to come from me. I don’t give a fuck what it sounds like or whether the grammar’s any good as long as it sounds hurt, you got me? Now whoever writes it is all sad and hurt because Cubbin didn’t help that black out and because he’s sucking up to the bosses, you know what I mean? Fine. You guys are really on the ball up there. I’m surprised... Well, hell, Johnnie, I’m not that surprised. You did a good job and thanks for calling... Yeah, I’ll talk to you later.”
Hanks hung up the phone and made another face at his daughter. “You’re funny, Daddy,” she said and giggled when he made another one.
“Didn’t you know, honey? I’m the funniest man in the world.”
It was not quite 9 A.M. in Cleveland, but A. Richard Gammage was already at his desk on the twenty-seventh floor of the Gammage Building which had a view of Lake Erie and downtown Cleveland and Gammage sometimes wondered which was the more depressing, the dying city or the dying lake.
He was the third A. Richard Gammage to head his company and he sometimes felt that his major contribution had been to change the firm’s name from The Gammage Manufacturing Company to Gammage International.
Gammage International manufactured various home and industrial equipment and A. Richard Gammage had little faith in any of it and even less interest. He felt that his products were no better or worse than those manufactured by his competitors and that they would all wear out at approximately the same time. He was always faintly surprised whenever Consumer Reports gave any of his household products an acceptable rating.