Close Relations Read Free

with the same gray as Grandma’s herring. As for the blond hair, every humid New York summer it contracts from a smooth yellow cap into a crazed kink. And I am short, so overall I look like a stunted Scandinavian. But I’m pretty enough for politics, where women routinely look intense and blotchy, like the “before” picture in a magazine makeover.
    But Jerry was objectively, truly, and irrevocably handsome. His looks were so classically lovely they were dazzling. They startled people who met him for the first time, for such looks do not normally appear in mundane contexts. They seem to demand at least a tuxedo and a microphone, not a rumpled blue suit and the I.R.T. subway.
    Jerry, at the height of middle age, was a joy, a treat. His chin was still rugged, magnificently, squarely carved and then, miraculously, cleft dead center, giving the glorious strength of his jaw just a quarter inch of vulnerability.
    And the thick, straight, soft black hair, now shot with sparks of silver at the temples. It called out to fingers for a run-through. It curled into teeny o’s at the nape of his neck.
    The nose? It goes without saying. Perfect and straight. None of that Boston Irish thickness around the nostrils or that crude County Limerick pug. It was a nose to make the chief of plastic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital eat his heart out.
    But the eyes were the best, the Oscar winner in a face of nominees. Blue. Real blue, not drained by gray like mine. Not flecked with brown or pushed around by the threat of green. Jerry’s eyes were true blue, deep and so soft that you wished you could stroke their color, lick them.
    Such a face.
    The crowd pressured us, growing, taking up space. The cops set up wooden barriers and began herding everyone behind them.
    It was an unnaturally warm February day. Several people, coats hanging open, faces damp, glanced around, perhaps fearful of being seduced by Gresham into forgetting their dentist’s appointments. But most stayed and more joined them, attracted by the tumult, by the blast of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “East Side, West Side” booming from the huge round speakers atop the cab of the truck.
    “You know,” said Jerry, “I once tap-danced to ‘East Side, West Side’ in the fifth grade, in the school talent show.”
    “You? Really? You tap-danced?”
    “Yeah. My mother made me take all these lessons. She thought I’d be the male Shirley Temple. But I lost to this redheaded kid, Paul Rooney, who sang Anchors Aweigh.’ Little bastard wore a sailor suit.”
    Gresham’s advance team was putting on the pressure, whipping up the crowd. “In just a brief moment or two, ladies and gentlemen, Governor Jim Gresham will appear right here….”
    The crowd waited. They wanted to see their governor. It was more than the hoopla, more than curiosity. They loved him. Gresham was perfect for New York: an aristocrat with dirty hands. He played sea chanteys on his harmonica. His doctoral dissertation at Princeton had concerned his great grandfather’s diplomatic missions during World War I. He had given up an assistant professorship at Columbia to live in East Harlem, where he had instituted a successful consumer mathematics program. And he was good-looking, with great Paul Bunyan shoulders and a thick blond lumberjack mustache.
    “They have a great ad campaign,” said Jerry, a little bitterly. “No slogans, no copy at all, just pictures of Gresham at work. All candid shots: at his desk, talking to people on the subway, having dinner. There’s this picture of him sitting down with an Italian family. He’s got this monster loaf of bread in his hands and he’s tearing off a piece and you see ten smiling Dago faces around the table. He’s the only one with a blond mustache.”
    “Jerry, be quiet.”
    Gresham was so much the aristocrat that he was beyond class, so secure in his position that he could comprehend the needs of all the people. He was Gresham the Good, Gresham the