Please Do Not Elect This Man

Chapter One: The Last Defender of Decorum

Bertram Dietz did his best thinking in the basement, where the light was poor and the company was excellent, because the company was himself.

He was thirty-nine years old, he weighed three hundred pounds, and he believed himself the last defender of decorum in the Western Hemisphere. He had not been formally appointed to the position. Nobody else had applied.

The basement lay beneath his sister's rowhouse on a narrow street in East Baltimore, three blocks from the harbor and four blocks from the nearest person who agreed with him about anything. It held a cot that groaned like a ship in a storm, a card table, a portable typewriter with a sticky letter E, two crates of Latin textbooks, a coal furnace that had not been fed since April, and a small window high on the front wall. Through that window Bertram could see the ankles of East Baltimore walking past. He judged them harshly. In his opinion the ankles of the neighborhood had declined steadily since the Truman administration.

It was the third week of July, 1962, and the city was cooking. The air outside was thick enough to spread on bread. Even in the basement, the coolest room in the house, Bertram sat in his undershirt with his bow tie neatly knotted at his bare neck. He tied the bow tie every morning, though he rarely went anywhere. A man, he said, did not abandon standards simply because no one was watching. A man abandoned standards only when someone was watching and offered him a good reason, and no one ever had.

He rolled a fresh sheet into the typewriter and began.

"To the Editor of the Morning Courier," he typed. "Sir: I write once again to alert your readers, if any of them can read, to the moral collapse of this city."

This was his four hundred and twelfth letter to the Morning Courier. The newspaper had printed none of them. Bertram kept the carbon copies in a series of shoe boxes under the cot, labeled by year. He considered them a private archive for future historians, who would study them to understand how a great civilization had fallen while one man stood alone in a basement shouting warnings into a typewriter.

He had once been employed. This was a matter of record. For seven weeks in the spring of 1959, he had worked as a substitute teacher at St. Hedwig's parochial school, covering Latin for a teacher who had gone to Ocean City to recover from his nerves. In those seven weeks, Bertram gave a comprehensive examination to every student in the school, from the fourth grade up, along with the two nuns who taught alongside him, Sister Mary Fidelis and Sister Mary Gertrude, whom he had invited to sit the test as a gesture of professional respect. Everyone failed. The nuns failed worst. Sister Mary Gertrude had confused the ablative case with the dative case in a manner Bertram described in his report as "spiritually alarming."

He was dismissed the following Monday. The principal, Monsignor Wisniewski, told him that St. Hedwig's was a school and not a firing squad. Bertram told the monsignor that the two were not so different, if properly run. He considered this his finest hour. He still had the gradebook. He took it out sometimes, on difficult evenings, and looked at the long column of red marks the way other men looked at photographs of their children.

"Bertie!" His sister's voice came down the stairs. "Supper!"

Bertram finished his sentence, which described the modern city councilman as "a sort of hat with a mouth beneath it," then rose from his chair. The chair sighed with relief. He climbed the stairs slowly. He did not believe in hurrying. Hurrying, in his view, was the first symptom of a man who had no inner life.

The kitchen was hot and bright and smelled of cabbage and kielbasa. His sister, Irene Dudek, stood at the stove in a housedress spotted with paint. Irene was forty-two, small and quick, with a pencil stuck through the knot of her hair and a smear of sky blue on one cheek. She painted window screens for half the neighborhood. In the rowhouses of East Baltimore, a painted screen was a sensible thing to own: from the street, people saw a pretty picture, and from inside, you could see out while nobody could see in. Irene painted red-roofed cottages, white swans on blue ponds, little mills beside little streams, and a mountain that she had copied from a calendar and that did not exist anywhere in Maryland. She charged four dollars a screen, five with swans.

Her screens were the only reason the household ate.

"Sit," she said. "And don't start."

"I never start," said Bertram, lowering himself onto the reinforced chair his brother-in-law had built for him. "I only continue."

At the table sat his nephew, Bobby Dudek, sixteen, thin as a coat hanger, with his hair combed into a careful wave and a pencil behind each ear. Bobby wanted to work in television advertising. He watched commercials the way Bertram read Tacitus, with total attention and frequent note-taking. He was humming something.

"What is that noise?" said Bertram.

"It's a jingle," said Bobby. "For a margarine. I made it up. Listen. 'Spread a little sunshine, spread a little cheer, the margarine that's golden all throughout the year.'"

"I've heard dogs being stepped on with more poetry in them."

"You don't know anything about the market," said Bobby.

"I know that if you ever sell a word of that, I'll have to report you to the authorities."

"Which authorities?"

"Cicero," said Bertram. "Posthumously."

The front door opened and closed, and Stanley Dudek came down the hall into the kitchen with his necktie loosened and his briefcase dragging at the end of his arm like a dead animal. Stanley was a big, soft, worried man with a salesman's smile that turned off the instant he stepped inside his own house. He sold Dura-Rok.

Dura-Rok was a facing material, a mixture of cement and dye and something the company described as "natural aggregate," that could be molded and stuck onto the front of a brick rowhouse to make it look as if it were built of stone. The stone did not look like real stone. It looked like a gray rash. But it was modern, and it required no painting, and men like Stanley had been going door to door all over Baltimore for three years now, explaining to homeowners that their old red brick was dated and that their neighbors were already modernizing. Whole streets had gone gray. Some blocks had gone half gray, which was worse, like a mouth with every other tooth missing.

Bertram regarded Dura-Rok as the single greatest moral catastrophe since the fall of Rome. He said so at every supper.

"Evening," said Stanley.

"The barbarians are at the gates," said Bertram. "Hello, Stanley."

"Bertie," said Irene.

"I merely greeted him."

Stanley set the briefcase down and opened it to get out his order book. A small gray sample tile fell out and clattered on the linoleum. Everyone looked at it. Bertram looked at it the way a priest might look at a dead rat in the baptismal font.

"Is that," he said, "in this house?"

"It's a sample, Bertie."

"A sample of what? Despair? Do you carry little samples of the plague, too, in case anybody wants to try a sniff?"

Stanley picked up the tile and put it back in the briefcase. He did not argue. He used to argue, years ago, when Bertram first moved into the basement after their mother died, but the arguments had taught him that Bertram could talk for longer than any human being could listen. Now Stanley simply sat down, accepted a plate of kielbasa and cabbage, and ate without tasting it.

Irene watched him. "Bad day?"

"Fine day," said Stanley. "Little slow."

"How many this week?"

"Couple." He smiled his salesman's smile, then seemed to remember he was home and let it fall. "Mr. Brenner's got a new quota for the end of the month. It's ambitious."

"Ambition," said Bertram, buttering a roll, "is the vice of small men with large catalogs."

"Bertie, eat your supper."

"I am eating it. I am capable of eating and instructing at once. Rome's greatest orators could digest a whole peacock while denouncing a consul."

"We don't have a peacock," said Irene.

"That," said Bertram, "is the tragedy of the age."

They ate. Outside, a radio played the Orioles game through somebody's open window, and children shrieked in the street around an open fire hydrant, and the ice cream truck went by playing a song that Bertram believed should be made illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Stanley pushed his cabbage around his plate. A drop of sweat ran down from his hairline, though the fan on the windowsill was pointed straight at him. Irene saw it and said nothing. Bobby wrote "margarine — needs more sun?" on a napkin.

Bertram took a third helping and lectured, in a general way, on the decline of the Byzantine Empire. Nobody interrupted him. This was not because they were listening. It was because, in the Dudek household, Bertram's voice had long since become a kind of weather. You didn't argue with it. You just waited for it to pass.

If anyone had told him that within a few months half the city would be listening to that voice, Bertram would not have been surprised. He would only have asked what had taken them so long.