A Prayer for the City Read Free Page A

the dining car with his eyes sweetly closed and his head gently drooped to the side, he looked like a little boy who suddenly, midsentence, had just run out of steam, and were it not for the gentle rousings of the conductor when the train reached the Thirtieth Street Station, the mayor of Philadelphia might well have ended up in Newark.
    He knew not to believe his clippings on those days when so much of his time seemed taken up not by what was good for the city but by the push and pull of what black politicians wanted and what white politicians wanted and what black politicians would do to make life a living hell for the mayor if they didn’t get what they wanted and what white politicians would do to make life a living hell for the mayor if they didn’t get what they wanted—the cycle of threat and extortion that had become the purest extract of modern politics, prompting him to blurt out to a political colleague, “Everything that goes on is a power struggle between black politicians and white politicians, and it isn’t because of what’s for the good of the citizens. It’s about who controls what project. I’m so fed up with this blackmail stuff that goes on I could just scream. I could just take a machine gun and shoot ’em all.” Or as he put it on another occasion, offering his own twenty-five-words-or-less job description, “A good portion of my job is spent on my knees, sucking people off to keep them happy.”
    He knew it on the day the private line in his office began to ring repeatedly with emphatic and complicated complaints from citizens, which didn’t make any sense until he discovered that the number had inadvertently been published in one of the local phone books. Or the time his vigorous effort to lobby members of the city council on behalf of a vote crucial to the future funding of the city’s beleaguered school system was curtailed in midstream when one of them gasped in shock at the sight of a mouse running along one of the walls of his office. For most politicians, the presence of mice in the office might have been disconcerting. For Rendell, the rodents seemed to offer a certain comfort, symbolic of what it islike to be the mayor of an American city. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They almost never come out to the center of the room.”
    He knew not to believe his clippings the time he agreed to go up in a cherry picker with a rabbi to light a giant-sized menorah only to realize, as the cherry picker lifted them higher and higher, that the rabbi was wobbly, somewhat older than he had looked on the ground, and was wielding the blowtorch in such a way that it was becoming increasingly hard to ascertain just what was going to burst aglow with the spirit of Hanukkah, the mayor or the menorah. “The rabbi was sort of shaking a little bit. I was afraid he was going to slip, turn around, and set me on fire. Somewhere about sixty feet above, I said to myself, ‘I have to stop doing this.’ ”
    But most of all, he had known it on November nights such as this one—a silent race through the city where nothing he did could make any difference. Up until the shots rang out, the night had had a sweet placidity. His round of appearances—a reception for Red Bell beer over at the Katmandu down on the Delaware, a series of painless speeches before the American Red Cross and at the annual Stephen Girard Award dinner, a quick stop at the Legg Mason open-house celebration high atop the shiny gleam of a downtown skyscraper—meant that he might actually get home before the usual witching hour of 10:00 P.M.
    But then, just around 6:00 P.M. , came the crackle of gunfire on a West Philadelphia street and reports that two Philadelphia narcotics officers had been shot during an undercover drug deal. One of the officers had suffered a relatively minor graze wound in the hand. But the other, a three-year veteran of the force named Dathan Enoch, had been shot in the left side of the chest and rushed to Lankenau