Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

The gallery door opened, and Duane’s parents, Dr. Rodney and Dr. Pat, hurried in. Luisa sprang to her feet to greet them. Duane stayed with the cookies and drinks. His nose disappeared in a styrofoam cup. Rodney kissed Luisa. Pat hugged Luisa. Probst blamed them. Luisa handed Pat coffee and stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her hair back at regular intervals. When had she learned to act so at ease?

Jammu had proceeded without Probst to the last of the pictures. “You know,” he said, joining her, “I’m not really doing anything later on—”

“Tonight?” Jammu looked at her watch. “I have a visit to pay at Barnes Hospital. You’re welcome to come along, of course, but if you’ll be here a while, I should drop in again. I live just around the corner anyway. We could have a drink or something. You’re here alone?”

“Yes. My wife’s out of town.”

Rodney and Pat had taken center stage between Luisa and Joanne, forcing Duane to come to them. Luisa turned and looked through Probst.

“I’ll come along,” he told Jammu.

She left him standing on the second floor of Barnes while she consulted at the information desk. The Wishing Well, the hospital gift shop, was fully lit, but the security portcullis had been lowered. In the lobby carpeting a flesh color predominated, a background for abstract organs of pale blue and ochre and pale yellow connected by mazes of red arteries and deep blue veins.

Jammu was autographing a page of a notebook for a high-school-aged boy. Probst heard the boy thank her. He hoped that sometime, once, before he retired, someone would approach him for an autograph.

“We only have a few minutes,” Jammu told him.

The room was on the fourth floor. In the bed nearer the door, amid potted mums and a small forest of Norfolk pines, lay the officer. Bandages circled his head, winding from his ears on up. He had no pillow. His whiskers had been growing for at least a week. A white sheet was draped across his chest and legs too neatly, the even lines of the hems on either side of the bed testifying to an inability to move. From the IV tube rising from his hand his arm seemed to have contracted a terminal slenderness.

Probst hung in the doorway while Jammu moved along the side of the bed until she could look straight down into the officer’s open eyes. The head rolled a few degrees towards her.

“How’s it going, Morris?” she said levelly.

“Awr,” said the officer.

Probst read the clipboard. PHELPS, Morris K.

“You’re looking good,” Jammu said. With a tiny fierce movement of her head she forced Probst to join her at the bedside. “I was at your home today. I spoke with your wife. I understand she’s been spending almost all her time here with you.”

Probst looked down and felt paralyzed. The eyes were on him but in a line perpendicular to that of his own. No meeting was possible. He didn’t dare turn his head sideways to meet the eyes for fear of seeming to condescend. “Sheerft,” the mouth said. “Nadir.”

“I understand,” Jammu said. “But she seems to be holding up very well. You have some great kids.”

A nurse appeared behind them in the doorway and raised a monitory finger. She didn’t leave. It was still fifteen minutes before 9:00. Probst wished it was one minute before 9:00.

“This is Martin Probst.”

Phelps released a breath. “Huh.”

Probst felt himself imploding around the lack of words to speak. “Hello,” he attempted. Why had she taken him here? Or not warned him not to come? He wanted to hit her. The nurse came a step closer to them.

“Adit ove,” Phelps said. “Dunsim.”

“I know you would have. You’re a good man, Morris. They’ll have you up and around in no time.”

The nurse put an end to it. In the hall, Probst asked what the prognosis was.

“Probably full-time care for the rest of his life,” Jammu said. “From the neck down he has the muscles of an ox. But one little bullet in the head…”

They were crossing the lobby downstairs, heading for the street, when Probst veered into the men’s room.

Earlier that evening, before he’d driven to the gallery, he’d read an editorial in the Post-Dispatch .

…The public has not been well served by the discussion thus far. Jammu’s case for a merger would be far stronger if she were willing to discuss the referendum’s impact on the county. We believe the facts will show a moderately negative impact far outweighed by the benefits to the region’s truly needy, its collective economic health, and its deteriorating infrastructure. Jammu has no reason to fear the facts.

We can only speculate why Probst, while correct in pointing up the need for careful study, has steadfastly refused to enter into a responsible discussion with Jammu. An attempt to deny legitimacy to the pro-merger forces is surely beneath him.

Probst claims that the proposed debate would focus too heavily on personalities. The claim has merit. But with the public starving for input, he must be faulted for overfastidiousness. He is hiding behind his scruples. Must the present confusion persist merely because one man refuses to lower his sights a little?

Let Jammu acknowledge the need for study. Let Probst come down to earth. Let the final month of the campaign be a model of spirited, informed discourse.

The piece had delighted him, and not just because he enjoyed ignoring the advice of editors. It was another example of the magical capacity of public life to magnify his person faithfully. Vote No ran a clean campaign. It stuck to the facts. If he had any doubts about whether he was a stickler when it came to ethics, he only had to open the newspaper. There they said it: Martin Probst is a stickler when it comes to ethics.

He and Jammu went straight from the hospital to the Palm Beach Café, a restaurant peopled by the generation of St. Louisans halfway behind Probst and Barbara’s. They ordered drinks, and after a very awkward silence Jammu looked up at him.

“Why don’t you tell me in one sentence,” she said, making no effort to clear the hoarseness from her throat, “what you have against the merger. We can debate in private, can’t we? Our personalities aren’t swaying anyone here.”

“One sentence,” Probst said. “Given that I and the rest of Municipal Growth used to advocate city-county consolidation ourselves.” He thought a moment, looking for other bases to cover. “Given that the referendum was drafted in response to the county’s own fear of missing the boat. Given that the context is a free political market and the question is whether the market will bear a merger—”

“You haven’t touched on any of this in your statements.”

“Didn’t need to, with you hammering away at it. I’m simply trying to show you I’ve mastered your arguments. And what it comes down to, then, is that my intuitive distrust of this referendum — since everything indicates that I should favor it — my intuitive distrust means a lot.”

Jammu’s eyes widened. “That’s your argument?”

“And to articulate this, then,” he said, “the first thing is the knee-jerk quality of what’s been going on. The voters can’t vote intelligently, and you have to be afraid of drastic change, an unregulated marketplace of ideas, just like you have to be afraid of new toys that could maybe hurt children. Now, I trust you— ” He tried to engage Jammu visually, but she was playing with her drink. “And I’d like to mention that that’s what I’ve been telling Municipal Growth all along. But in the case of Urban Hope, it’s as if Municipal Growth had suddenly begun to make policy recommendations based purely on the profit motives of its member chief executives. Rolf Ripley wants it to pass for trickle-down welfare, supply-side progress, which is what I myself practice at work, except that I’m employing men while Ripley is making real-estate killings. Plus the fact that he’s allied himself with populist public-sector Democrats like the mayor! Somewhere, somebody isn’t telling the real story.”