The Last Debate Page 9

  Nobody ever disagreed with Mike Howley.

  They had their first look at what would later be described as either the scene of a historic triumph or the scene of a historic crime. On that pre-debate Saturday night it was still only a compact auditorium with 450 theater-type seats and a small stage.

  Barbara had been in a few television studios, and every time the big surprise was the difference between what they looked like in real life and what came across on the television screen. Big-time talk shows that appeared to be coming from elaborate rooms were actually done in grubby little places not much larger than closets. What looked like thousands of people sitting in bleachers around Phil and Oprah and Maury were really about a hundred or so.

  Here it was happening again. Somehow in her mind she had seen a huge hall about the size of Madison Square Garden or a football stadium. After all, this was a presidential debate, by God. No expense, no nothing, would be spared. Huge, it would be. Everything about it would be huge.

  Instead it was small. Disappointingly so. Two podiums at angles on either side of a stage for the candidates. For her and the panelists a long table in front with four chairs facing the the candidates. Everything was decorated in red, white, and blue. There was an old-fashioned sign in the shape of an eagle above and behind everyone and everything. It was gold—and it was huge. Yes, it was huge and impressive. But that was about it. Everything else seemed so small, so out of scale with the magnitude of what was going to happen on this stage tomorrow night—in less than twenty-four hours.

  Barbara Manning was having these thoughts before she even knew what the real magnitude of the magnitude would be.

  Nancy Dewey asked them to sit in their assigned chairs on the stage. And speak into their microphones. She pointed toward the various cameras—there were six in all—that would be shooting the event. She told them never to worry about where the cameras were or which one was actually on at any given moment. “That’s our job,” she said.

  The exception to that, of course, was Howley. He was shown where he should look to deliver his opening and closing copy. A stage manager off to the left would cue him with a hand signal. They rehearsed it twice to make sure Howley and the stage manager understood each other.

  Howley put on the earpiece he would wear during the debate. An audio man checked it out to make sure it worked and that the volume was right for Howley. “I’ll be in your ear with time cues and other things like that,” said Nancy Dewey. “I will be the only one who will be in your ear.”

  She explained and they rehearsed the signal lighting system that would be used to tell the candidates their time was up for any given answer. As long as the green light was on, they were fine. When the yellow one came on, they had thirty seconds. When it started flashing, fifteen seconds. When the flashing stopped, time was up. The candidates’ lights would be on the cameras in front of them. On the desk in front of Mike Howley were three Christmas tree lights on a small metal board that replicated what the candidates would see. Barbara vaguely remembered a problem with lights like these in one of the previous debates. In 1988, she thought. Yes, the first Dukakis-Bush debate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The TV guy who was the moderator couldn’t see the lights properly and he cut Bush off on an answer before the time was up.

  Several local print reporters and television correspondents with their crews were around the auditorium doing predebate prep stories. The big-time national reporters like me were off doing other things. Other things that in the final analysis really did not matter that much. I sorely wish I had been in that auditorium with the four panelists.

  Henry Ramirez was asked if he was nervous about tomorrow. “As a cat on one of those roofs,” he said, and he was proud of himself for having said it.

  Joan Naylor was asked the difference between doing a presidential debate and anchoring a nightly news program. “Like that between a light shower and a thunderstorm,” she said, and she was also rather proud of herself and her quote.

  A black male reporter from a station in Norfolk asked Barbara if she felt a special burden because of her race. “Should I?” she replied, annoyed at being asked, annoyed at not knowing what to say. The reporter, who looked about fifteen years old to Barbara, smiled a hi-there-Uncle-Tomasina kind of smile and said nothing while the camera rolled.

  Nancy Dewey, joined by Chuck Hammond, gave them a complete tour of the setup. She showed them the rooms where the various networks had set up their anchor stations, where the candidates would wait and be made up, where the spin doctors would do their spinning after the debate.

  The largest ballroom in the Lodge, the Virginia Room, was being outfitted with hundreds of tables, television monitors, telephones, and TV lighting spots for the spinning. Howley and Joan had both played in that league before, wading through bodies of reporters and candidates’ varied “representatives” right after a debate getting reactions to what had just happened. More reporters and more spinners than ever were expected here tomorrow night. “It’s going to be a madhouse, I am sorry to say,” said Hammond. “But we all know how ‘they’ all are.”

  They, meaning Us, of course, thought Joan, thought Barbara. Henry didn’t pick up on the crack. It’s a pretty good bet Howley did and probably thought, Yes, Mr. Hammond, we all know exactly how we all are.

  Chuck Hammond and Nancy Dewey wished them luck and a good night’s rest, and Howley, Joan, Henry, and Barbara walked the hundred yards across a street and through a couple of parking lots to the Inn.

  Tomorrow night they would be driven in a limousine back the other way to their appointment with destiny on that small stage under the TV lights of history.

  Henry asked Barbara if she would like to have a drink at one of the old taverns around Colonial Williamsburg. There were several of them, according to the information Hammond had given them. They had Williamsburg-sounding names like King’s Arms, Christiana Campbell’s, and Josiah Chowning’s.

  We young minorities must stick together, he said to her.

  Sure, why not, she replied.

  A drink of solidarity was really all he had in mind. Yes, he was aware from looking that Barbara Manning was one very attractive woman, and he was aware from listening that she was also pretty smart. A lot smarter than he thought when they met for the first time at five o’clock in Longsworth D. He thought even as he was asking her for the drink that he could not remember a case from high school or college or radio news where a Hispanic dated a black, in any combination of male or female. None he knew or heard about, at least. Now, wasn’t that interesting? he thought. There was a lot of mixing of all kinds with whites and blacks, browns and whites, but no blacks and browns. His mother had always said that black and brown blood mixed together came out as mud.

  Barbara accepted Henry’s invitation without thinking about it at all. She had noticed, of course, that Henry Ramirez was a good-looking man. She had also been impressed as the evening wore on with his smarts. But he was also clearly not her type. And that was that.

  They sat at a very small table in one of several dining and drinking rooms in the King’s Arms Tavern. It was on the pedestrians-only main street in the historic area. From the back of the menu Henry read aloud to Barbara that there were a lot of King’s Arms taverns in the Colonies before the Revolution. But all of them changed their names after 1776, this particular one to Mrs. Vobe’s Tavern and eventually to Eagle Tavern.

  “It says the big guns in the Revolution—Jefferson, Washington, all of them—came in here to drink and talk about independence,” Henry said.

  “Terrific,” Barbara said. “It’s for sure none of them looked like you or me.”

  “There weren’t any of my people anywhere around here,” Henry said.

  “There were plenty of mine,” Barbara said. “They were slaves—in the kitchen, out back breaking their backs.”

  Henry said: “So here you are and that’s called progress.”

  Both ordered small draft beers. They had walked by several old
reconstructed houses and shops to get there. The waiters and waitresses and everyone else who worked at the tavern were dressed as if they were George or Martha Washington. Even the black employees, whose eighteenth-century ancestors really were slaves. Barbara still had problems with being waited on at hotels and restaurants by black people who were older than she. It was particularly bad at places like this where they wore costumes. She always heard a choir from an A.M.E. church humming chords from “Old Black Joe” in the background, and it made her feel like a disrespectful, disloyal little twit.

  “You ever had peanut soup?” Henry asked. He was still reading the menu.

  “Nope.”

  “Wonder what it tastes like.”

  “Probably like peanuts.”

  Barbara did not want to talk to this guy about what peanut soup tasted like!

  Henry decided he would get serious. He would ask Barbara about blacks dating Hispanics. She seemed smart and mature enough to handle such a smart and mature conversation.

  “Who in the hell knows?” she said. “Is this your way of coming on to me? If it is, go away. I am here to deal with asking questions of two white boys running for president of the United States before two or three or so billion people, including every Sunday-school teacher and preacher I have ever had, every boyfriend I have ever had, every aunt and uncle, brother and sister, momma and daddy and Gramma Maude I have ever had. Including a lot of redneck whites and jealous other kinds who will be pulling for me to fall right square on my African American face. I am not in the mood or spirit to think about sex with anybody, much less with some Mexican who wants to have a sociological discussion about why we and them don’t do it more.”

  That really made Henry mad. All he wanted to do was to have a serious conversation, to prove to himself and to her that he was serious. All he wanted to do was be a serious person. Jesus!

  “You have it all wrong,” Henry said, trying his best to be pleasant, to avoid showing how really pissed he was at this smart-mouth girl. “I was only doing my best to come up with something to talk about that mattered. Sorry. Seen any good movies, been to any great rock concerts, read any keen stories in People lately?”

  Barbara realized that she had been a fool. She had only accepted his invitation to be nice. Now she was being just the opposite. She said to him: “Henry, I am sorry. I really am. All of this is too much for my nerves. I may not be quite ready for this, the big time.”

  “Not ready? No way. We are ready.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “I am.”

  Each took a long swallow of beer.

  “Are you worried about your questions?” Henry asked.

  “You are damned right I am,” Barbara replied.

  “I have plenty of questions. Good, tough questions. I will loan you some. How many do you want?”

  Barbara was concentrating on emptying her beer glass as fast as she could.

  Henry continued: “Just name the categories you want questions in. I have them on everything. On foreign affairs I have several on Mexico, of course. There could be a revolution coming down there in my ancestral home. But I also have a great one on Cuba I could let you have. I have a terrific medical one about strokes and some experiments being done at NIH with squirrels when they hibernate. I have some zinger personal ones, particularly for Meredith. That newfound religion thing of his scares people. I have some questions about the Bible. He says he follows the Bible. Well, depending on how he reads it, that could mean trouble for a lot of people in this country. People don’t read the Bible all the same way. I am Catholic. Let’s say you aren’t. Well, when we sit down to read the Bible, the same sentence can mean different things to each of us.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” Barbara said, trying to keep from screaming at this Mexican guy at the top of her lungs, I know about the Bible! I know people read it differently! I know! I know! So shut up!

  And within minutes both of their beer glasses were empty and they were on their way back to the Inn.

  Both say when they said good night in the lobby of the Williamsburg Inn it was essentially forever, except for the business of the debate still to come. Neither was the least bit interested in the other. Neither was the least bit curious about the other. Neither had the least bit of a thought about sex with the other.

  Neither had the least bit of a thought about anything with the other.

  Joan Naylor went directly to her room in the Inn and spent the evening there alone. She read up even more on the issues of the presidential campaign and watched television without the sound. No-sound television was a practice she and her husband Jeff had developed. It began quite innocently when Jeff discovered silence was the best way to enjoy Monday Night Football. While millions of others were out there being annoyed once a week by Howard Cosell, it was Frank Gifford, a perfectly nice and mild-mannered ex-football player, who did it to Jeff. Gifford seemed to be off in another world from where Jeff found himself on Monday nights. So to avoid going wherever that was with Gifford he turned off the sound.

  From Monday Night Football Jeff found that all sports events, particularly the big ones like the World Series and the Super Bowl, were much more enjoyable to simply watch, not hear. Jeff and Joan then began watching an occasional old movie that way once they realized they already knew the story and the pictures brought enough of it back to make it make sense. The worst discovery was that some documentary and newsmagazine programming could also be understood and appreciated without the sound. In other words, you didn’t always have to hear Mike Wallace to know what he was saying. Even parts of most nightly news broadcasts were that way. Much of the news on television, world and national as well as local, was mostly predictable and readily identifiable by eye. A shot of a car and a body being pulled from the Potomac River says all that needs to be known. A shot of a secretary of state standing at a microphone with King Hussein of Jordan does the same. As does the scene at the table in the Rose Garden at the White House, the pictures of civilians running from sniper fire or army tear gas or dying of starvation in Armenia, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Beirut, Rwanda, Haiti, Tibet, Burma, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or other places along the road to the New World Order.

  The major asset of soundless television was that it was less stimulating to the blood and emotions and less occupying of the mind. That made it possible to do other things that required less than a full-blooded emotion or a full mind’s attention.

  Like doing what she was doing now, which was talking to Jeff and the twins on the telephone. It was a conversation that Joan Naylor herself admits may have played some role—mostly unconscious—in drawing her toward Sunday’s fateful decision.

  It began innocently enough.

  “I haven’t done anything much yet, honey,” she said to Rachel, or at least she thought it was Rachel. She and Regina not only looked alike, they also sounded exactly the same. They were twelve years old, identically blond, tall, bright, athletic, and full of guilt-inducing, straight-for-the-jugular questions for their famous mother.

  “Then maybe they didn’t need you to go down until in the morning,” said Rachel. Yes. Joan was now certain it was Rachel. Regina had come on another line.

  “The movie was terrific,” Regina said. “You would have loved it. Except for the arm-sex parts. Dad made us close our eyes when they came on, so don’t worry.”

  “But we didn’t,” Rachel said.

  And they both laughed.

  Arm sex?

  “Did Dad tell you about the telegrams and the faxes?” Regina said, getting down to the serious business.

  “I haven’t talked to Dad yet,” Joan said. “You answered the phone, Rachel, remember?”

  “Every kook and kooky outfit there is has sent you questions to ask tomorrow night,” Rachel said.

  “Some of them are really off the wall,” Regina said.

  “You have really got to stick it to Meredith, Mom,” Rachel said.

  “You really do, Mom,” Regina said.

&n
bsp; And in alternating sentences, they said to their mother:

  “I know how you are about not taking sides, but this is different.”

  “He’s evil, Mom, I really do think so. So does everybody else.”

  “Everybody.”

  “Evil like the devil is evil.”

  “This is different.”

  “You can’t let him be president, Mom.”

  “You really can’t.”

  “We talked about it this afternoon with Dad and he agrees.”

  “Dad says Meredith will turn race against race …”

  “Rich against poor …”

  “Baptists against Catholics …”

  “Quakers against Jews …”

  Joan said she had to resist an interrupting laugh. Regina and Rachel went to Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school in Washington known for its famous parents and smart faculty, tough academic and public-service requirements. The well-worn Washington joke that came to her mind was the one about Sidwell being the only place in America where Jews taught Episcopalians how to be Quakers.

  “Gays against straights …”

  “Cops against firemen …”

  Joan could not let that one go. “Cops against firemen? Come on now, girls.”

  “All right, maybe not that,” Rachel said. Joan was sure it was Rachel.

  “You know I can’t do anything about this,” Joan said. “I am but a simple journalist. Put your father on.”

  “Good night, Mom,” Regina said. “Good luck.”

  “Good night, Mom,” Rachel said. “Good luck.”

  And then Jeff was on the phone.

  “How is my own personal Joan of Arc tonight?” he said.

  “No comment,” she said. “What is this about arm sex?”

  “No comment.”

  “It’s bad enough that everybody else in the world is on my case about Meredith,” she said to Jeff after a few minutes of light and catch-up chitchat. “My daughters are doing it, too.”

  “Sorry about that,” Jeff said. “I should have waved them off. I should have given them the old Momma-is-a-journalist-not-a-god line. I could have quoted some stuff from Mulvane.…”