Sounding the Waters Read online

  Praise for Sounding the Waters

  “The detailed descriptions and memorable characters make this promising first novel worth adding to all collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “Glickman is excellent at creating fully rounded characters and his portrayal of the ludicrous and dehumanizing quality of politics in the media age is letter-perfect. His eye for telling detail—whether emotional or political—is as clear and unblinking as a camera.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “[James Glickman’s] fine first novel…is highly absorbing and entertaining. The tensions between [the] characters are well drawn and dramatic. I cared about the outcome of the election and the future of the characters….It was a pleasure to root for them.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Riveting.…A masterful study of the personal cost of running for national office…a great tale for the election year.”

  —Yale Alumni Magazine

  “Suspenseful…masterly…marvelous. This beautifully engaging work—with its deft turns of phrase and its agile narrator—resonates with a well-told tale. It has tough dialogue when necessary, pastoral description when warranted, urban sophistication when needed. Sounding the Waters creates a riptide of excitement.”

  —Providence Journal

  “One of the few excellent novels about politics and political campaigns since Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, this novel…helps define an important part of being an American.”

  —North Carolina Journal

  “James Glickman is a gifted storyteller, and his prose is sweet: fresh water from a crackling brook. The narrative moves forward compulsively, irresistibly. Not since All the King’s Men has a novel about politics so entranced me. Sounding the Waters is a grand, riveting performance by a novelist whose career is one to watch closely.”

  —Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and

  John Steinbeck: A Biography

  “In this gripping morality play of modern America, James Glickman peels away the cynical layers of modern politics. It is a tale where the frailties of real people confront a system honed almost perfectly to identify small blemishes and turn them into mortal wounds. If Sounding the Waters is hard to put down, it is because the protagonists are so like ourselves…wanting to do the right thing but always in danger of being swept under. Sounding the Waters tests the character of America in a story that will leave the reader fulfilled and longing for the next James Glickman novel.”

  —Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense

  “This is the novel Primary Colors promised to be, but Glickman takes the high road, turning his back on cheap gossip and making fictional politicians seem quite real. Dramatizing the complicated process of running for office and contrasting it against the starkness of human motives and desires, he’s produced a cliff-hanger of a novel, right down to the final speeches of the final debate of the closing days of the campaign.”

  —Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio:

  “A political novel that restores one’s sense of the human depth, the psychological pressures, and the moral questions that go with the territory.…A richly rewarding novel with complex, believable characters who develop in the course of engaging in vividly and intelligently rendered experiences.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  This is a Genuine Vireo Book

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 by James Glickman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Minion Pro

  epub isbn: 9781947856134

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Glickman, James, author.

  Title: Sounding the waters / James Glickman.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Edition | A Genuine Vireo Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572449

  Subjects: LCSH Political campaigns—Fiction. | Politicians—Fiction. | Elections—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Political fiction. | Legal stories. | BISAC FICTION / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.L53 S6 2017 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  For Lisa

  To Vic

  In memory of Robert Penn Warren

  The worst of absence is return,

  Already not becoming what you once

  Almost already were

  “The Revenant,” James Lasdun

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Jeannie comes in my door leaning heavily on her new cane and carrying the smell of the cold spring evening in the folds of her dark blue suit. When she got her first cane a year ago, a light and collapsible aluminum stick with a crook at the top, she raised it up for me to look at and said, “Call me Bo Peep.” There is no humor, or hint of humor, this visit. Her face, without makeup, is drawn and pale. She labors her way to the sofa, sits, and pushes off her shoes. Using both hands, she lifts one leg and then the other to rest on the coffee table. Her light brown hair, though cut short, is disheveled, and there are dark semicircles under her brown eyes.

  “Another flare-up?” I ask. Jeannie nods. It has been eighteen months since her diagnosis. She slumps down on the sofa. “Something to drink?” She shakes her head. I sit down in a chair across from her. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m going to have to resign from Bobby’s campaign.”

  Bobby is Jeannie’s brother and my oldest friend. I saw her less than a week ago at the hotel ballroom celebration for Bobby’s narrow primary win. She seemed surprised and even a bit subdued about his victory. He had run against a popular, well-funded, and attractive congresswoman who had once bounced three small checks at the House bank. But the congresswoman had also won widespread support among the party faithful for her stance on the issues and her insistence that it was time for some major changes in the Senate. Bobby, the state’s lieutenant governor, and a Vietnam veteran, reminded too many people of the past at a time when they were looking for a new kind of future. While I didn’t follow these things as closely as I once did, I had assumed that the congresswoman would beat Bobby, not because of any great deficiencies on his part, but because many people seemed heartily sick of male politicians of any stripe. Maybe that’s what she thought, too. Though if she did, she joined the short list of people who made the mistake of underestimating Bobby.

  It was a noisy and crowded gathering, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jeannie for very long, what with noisy and crowded gatherings not being her or my favorite kind of place. She said to me through the crowd’s babble, a strained smile on her face, “Who’d have thunk it?”

  I leaned closer to where she sat. “Thunk what?”

  “That Bobby would pull it off.”

  “Not me,” I said.


  “You going to work with him on the campaign?” she asked.

  I gave her a look. She knew the answer to that question.

  She shrugged. “Can’t shoot a person for asking.”

  “He’s got you,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure I’m going to be that helpful this time.”

  This struck me as odd even then. Jeannie was probably one of the shrewdest political minds in the state. She was about the only person Bobby sought advice from and he always heeded carefully what she said. And she was certainly not given to false modesty. “Why not?” I asked.

  She opened her mouth to say something but was interrupted by a surge of cheering in the room about something being broadcast on the local television news. A rainbow of confetti rained down around us. As the band began to play “Happy Days Are Here Again” for the dozenth time, some people came up to congratulate her and yell about what a great night it was, so I never got an answer. At least not until now.

  “You have to resign?” I repeat.

  “I just don’t think I can handle it.” She gestures helplessly at her legs.

  Right after they told her she had multiple sclerosis, she read up on the latest developments, contacted experts, changed her diet to reduce long-chain fatty acids, avoided stress, got on a waiting list for experimental new medication, ran regional fund-raisers for combatting the disease, and joined a support group. Until now, she seemed to have had a slow and indolent variety of the illness. But with each exacerbation, the myelin sheath of her nerves deteriorates like insulation fraying on a wire. The process is irreversible.

  “No partial schedule? No cutback?” I think she will miss the involvement as much as Bobby will miss her counsel. Maybe more.

  “You know what campaigns are like. You can’t run one part-time.”

  I nod. I had always thought she thrived on the whirl and flux of political activity. But I suppose intensity, even if you love it, is a kind of stress. I ask if she will continue as director of her Midwest public-interest research group. She says she’s going to try.

  “Well,” I say, “I’m sorry to hear this. Bobby’s sure going to miss you. Anything I can do?”

  Her eyes lock on mine. “Yes.”

  Muscles from my throat to my knees begin to tense. I feel a favor coming. A big one, I fear.

  “From time to time,” she says, “I’m going to need someone to talk to Bobby for me. In person.”

  “Not on the phone?”

  “You know how paranoid he gets about phones. So do I.”

  “Campaign stuff.”

  “That’s it.”

  This seems too easy. “You just want me to pass messages from time to time?’’

  “That’s all. He’ll listen to you.”

  “What about Laura?”

  “Bobby and Laura aren’t doing too well around this issue right now. And Laura’s plate’s pretty full right now, anyway. Her usual workload, and she’s run into some shit with Annie.”

  “Tough way for him to begin a campaign,” I say.

  “Hey. I told him not to run.”

  “True enough. And now you want me to deliver some more advice for him to ignore.”

  She smiles wanly. “Exactly.”

  I look at her for a moment in silence. If I didn’t know her better, I would be waiting for another shoe to drop. But she’s always been a straight shooter, so I dismiss the thought. I ask about her husband, Brendan, and son, Andrew. “Fine, fine, fine,” she says crisply, and for the first time ever she asks me to help her to the car. Once she’s settled in the driver’s seat and ready to go, I tell her I’ll do what I can. She pats my hand and says thanks.

  Her press conference is sparsely attended and very brief. While her resignation is second-page news in the local paper, it is just a small scribble in the late editions of bigger-city journals.

  I pull up in front of Bobby and Laura’s old Victorian house and look at it for a moment in the last graying light of day. The leaves on all the trees have been slow to open this unseasonably cold April, and with the great dome of a Midwestern sky stretching out all around, the white house with its spired roof looks like an old ship drifting in the harbor amid a dotting of others like it. Their street was once canopied by old elms, but they all died years ago, and though the houses themselves were built early in the century for agronomy professors at the nearby state university, the open-skied landscape has a peculiarly new quality. If the cold lets up, the wide fawn-colored lawn will green and need mowing in a couple of weeks, a task Bobby likes to do himself.

  He and Laura have lived here since before their child, Annie, was born. Even after Bobby became lieutenant governor and Laura’s well-established pediatrics practice provided them with enough money to move someplace grander, they stayed put. While close to Laura’s hospital, the house is far enough away from the sprawling university campus to avoid the crush of Saturday traffic during home football games. They are also an hour northeast of the town where Bobby and I went to high school together, a place his mother still lives, and forty minutes from the gold-domed capitol building where Bobby works.

  As I usually do, I knock on their unlocked front door and step inside. I am about to call hello when I hear the sound of arguing. Laura is telling Bobby that Jeannie didn’t want him to run, either. Bobby knows I am coming over. I close the door behind me loudly to let them know I am here. They scarcely pause.

  “So why did you agree before the primary to my running?” Bobby demands.

  “I never agreed. You just did it.”

  “We talked about it for weeks.”

  “Y-you talked about it for weeks,” Laura says. “You explained why. I told you about the problems I have with it. And then I read in the newspaper that you’ve filed for the race. When did I agree?”

  “You never said don’t run.”

  “Oh, I see. If I don’t say flat out n-no, then I agree. Let me try that on you a few times and see how you like it.”

  I have not heard Laura stutter in a long time.

  “So what do you want me to do?” he asks. “Quit?’’

  “I want you to stop putting me in a box where my only choice is to do it your way.”

  “Why didn’t I hear a word about this during the primary?”

  “Do you want to know the truth? Because I thought you were going to lose. I didn’t want to make it any harder.”

  “And now you want to. You and my sister.”

  Her voice grows subdued, the way it does only when she is very angry. “Not everything is about you, Bobby. This is about me.”

  “But it’s not just about you. It’s about your reaction to what I’m doing. I can’t change your reaction, can I? So I’m asking if you want me to change what I’m doing.”

  I take off my coat and hang it on the coat tree in the hall. I cough. This is not the first dispute of theirs I have heard; in fact, my experience has been that witnesses usually make them contaminate their arguing with pitches to the audience, and in the end, worsen the disagreement. Their arguments are not especially frequent, but they can run for weeks at a time, sometimes finally getting resolved and sometimes just slowly subsiding like monsoon season.

  I step from the hall into the kitchen. The two of them look at me. “Should I come back later?”

  Laura shakes her head, touches my arm, gives me a grim smile, and walks out.

  Bobby groans. “Can’t win for losing,” he says. “Maybe I ought to just hang it up. When your wife and your own sister both jump ship, what’re you going to do? Campaign hasn’t even goddamn begun yet.”

  There is a brief pause, a vacuum, where early on in our long friendship I would have stepped in and said, “Don’t quit,” or even offered some other advice. I don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Bobby’s opponent in November for the open Senate seat is Congressman Richard Wheatley, a man wh
o has six times before been elected over attractive and able opponents. Folksy, shrewd, and a lawyer by training, he is careful to be home from Washington nearly every weekend to spend at least a couple of hours on his old green John Deere tractor riding the fields of the farm he bought back when land prices sagged. From time to time, except when his vote would actually influence the fate of a bill, he will vote against his party on some contentious financial or agricultural matter, letting him cultivate outside of Washington the image of an independent thinker, while also being seen inside as a loyal team-player. This shell game does not prevent some papers around the state from calling him The Conscience of His Party.

  People who know the congressman personally say he is a genuinely friendly man, generous and thoughtful to friends and family. People who have run against him report that he will say and do almost anything to be elected, and underneath his rural twang, noticeable mostly when he arrives in his home state, he is unadulterated ruthlessness. Some people who’ve seen him in the papers and on local television over the years think he’s been a farmer since birth. Actually, his grandfather was a banker and his father a stockbroker, and if his constituents ever closed their eyes and listened to him on C-SPAN, they might wonder what city in, say, Pennsylvania he was from.

  The sophisticated farmer is a tremendously popular image in our state, even if the farming population is a fragment of what it once was. Bobby, who is the son of a farmer, is far closer to that reality than the image Representative Wheatley has confected, though he will have a hard time persuading the voters of this.

  Bobby offers me a drink. I shake my head.

  He ushers me back to the cubicle off the living room he uses as an office. “So what the hell is going on with Jeannie?”

  “What do you mean?’’

  “I mean why did she call a press conference to announce her resignation?”

  “No idea. She didn’t clear it with you?”

  “Hell no. She knows the way to handle it would have been for me to announce the name of a new director at the same time. Now the story is ‘Parrish Resigns from the Parrish Campaign.’ Looks like I’m in trouble before I’ve even started.”