Eyes of the Innocent Read online

  “No,” she said.

  Of course not.

  “If I came back in the morning, do you think you could talk with me?”

  “You can try.”

  The emphasis was on the “try,” which was not particularly encouraging. And, sure, I could try. But it would probably just delay the inevitable. I decided if this woman was meant to talk to me, it was going to happen now. I just had to push a little harder.

  “Ma’am, I’m working on a story about Akilah Harris,” I hollered. “I understand you’re—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, I heared movement inside—it sounded like a chair slamming into linoleum—followed by a strangled cry.

  “Go away!” she wailed. “I don’t want to hear that name! Don’t you say that name to me! Go away!”

  She kept yelling, but her voice had gone something beyond hysterical, so it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Between the shredded vocal cords and the uncontrolled crying, it was pretty clear the name Akilah Harris had been enough to put Mrs. Harris into distress.

  And I wasn’t the only one aware of it. From downstairs, I could hear footsteps coming my way. A matronly black woman in slippers and a faded floral print housedress huffed up the stairs, froze me with a look of pure disgust, and brushed past.

  “I just wanted to talk to her,” I said defensively. “I didn’t mean to—”

  But she was not there to hear my excuses. She entered Mrs. Harris’s apartment without bothering to knock. The door had been unlocked all along.

  An open door. In the projects. Who knew?

  From within the apartment, I heard the new woman comforting Mrs. Harris, whom she called “Bertie.” For a while, Bertie kept crying and moaning unintelligibly. After enough shushing, she calmed down. There was dialogue between the women, though it was too muffled to hear.

  And, for whatever reason, I just kept standing in that hallway of that hellhole housing project, hoping a big reset button would descend from the ceiling so I could press it and get a do-over on this whole encounter. Why had I pushed her so hard? Clearly the woman was agitated. No one in that state is going to suddenly settle down and cooperate with a reporter. In the morning, when she was calm, she might have talked to me.

  As I cursed my lack of patience, the woman in the housedress reappeared.

  “What are you still doing here?” she said, spitting out the word “you” like it burned her mouth.

  “I just—”

  “She don’t want to talk none,” the woman assured me.

  “I know, but I—”

  “She don’t want to talk.”

  “I just wanted to apol—”

  “And I’m telling you, she don’t want to talk.”

  The woman crossed her arms and glowered at me, daring me to lob up another feeble rejoinder so she could smash it back in my face. It was Olympic verbal volleyball. But while she was Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, I was the lightly regarded team from Liechtenstein.

  “So what you’re saying is, she don’t want to … doesn’t want to talk?” I said.

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “You best be moving on now.”

  “Okay, I get it,” I said, then reached into my pocket for a business card. “Could you please just tell her I’m sorry I upset her so much? It was never my intention.”

  The woman accepted my business card without comment, and I took that as my opportunity to leave with at least some shred of dignity intact.

  * * *

  I arrived back in the newsroom in time for a treat: a copy editor catfight.

  Newspapers are full of strange animals, but the copy editors just might be the oddest of all the birds. A lot of them work a 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. shift, so they’re nocturnal. They are sometimes awkward socially, which is why they didn’t become reporters. And nearly all of them claim to be expert grammarians—and are not afraid to get into the occasional scrap over language or usage.

  This one appeared to feature Marjorie, a tall, storkish woman with a voice like a foghorn against Gary, a small, nervous man with a somewhat legendary standing among his fellow copy editors. Gary was reputed to have memorized every word of the paper’s style manual, our Bible governing everything from capitalization to punctuation to spelling. Most of the copy jocks didn’t test him—except, apparently, Marjorie.

  “… not the point,” Marjorie was booming as I entered. “I’m sure that’s what the style manual says. I’m saying, in this case, we shouldn’t apply the style manual.”

  “You can’t argue with the style manual,” Gary countered. “It’s not called the ‘suggested’ manual or the ‘do this if you feel like it’ manual. A lot of thought was put into every entry and it’s not up to us to change it on the fly because it suits our needs.”

  “It’s not about my needs,” Marjorie said. “It’s about the readers’.”

  I walked over to another copy editor, a younger guy named Evan, and asked him for a translation.

  “We’ve got a Buster Hays special: the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Battle of Sunda Strait, told through the eyes of some fossil from Linden who claims to have been a pilot,” Evan said in a hushed voice.

  Buster Hays was himself a fossil: a cranky, crusty contrarian who should have retired eons ago, except he loved to stick around and remind the younger generations how much better things used to be. Among his specialties were World War II anniversary stories, which he did with special zeal. So, unlike most papers—which dutifully did the fives and zeros of the big ones, like D-day and Pearl Harbor—we did the threes, sixes, and sevens of just about every significant (and insignificant) military encounter of the time period. It was fairly useless from a journalistic standpoint, unless you happen to think there’s news value in the fast-fading memories of old guys rambling about details they were probably getting mixed up in the first place.

  But, much as I hate to admit it, readers loved the stuff. Buster had at least a four-year backlog of future anniversary stories, all generated from reader letters he received in response to previous anniversary stories.

  “So what’s the dispute?” I asked, keeping my voice down so as not to interrupt Gary and Marjorie’s blowup.

  “Buster wrote the guy from Linden served in the Air Force,” Evan told me. “I don’t think they called it the Air Force back then.”

  “That’s right! They didn’t!” Gary said, somehow picking up on our whispers over Marjorie’s booming. “From July 2, 1926, to June 20, 1941, it was known as the Army Air Corps. Then on June 20, 1941, it was renamed the Army Air Forces and it stayed under that name during the battle in question. It did not become the U.S. Air Force until September 18, 1947!”

  “I’m not disputing that,” Marjorie interjected. “I’m saying if we put in the paper this guy from Linden was part of the Army Air Corps—”

  “Army Air Forces,” Gary interrupted.

  “Fine, whatever,” Marjorie said. “As I was saying, if we write he was in the Army Air Whatever, the Army part is going to confuse the vast majority of our readers who came of consciousness well after the aforementioned name change was made.”

  I always wondered if readers knew how much we fought for their supposed interests. Many an impassioned argument in the newsroom was based on what was best for “the readers.” It was ironic in at least two ways: one, most people in the newspaper business have at least some disdain for readers, because the ones we hear from with the greatest frequency are confused octogenarians calling in to complain we weren’t giving enough ink to President Truman’s new jobs proposal; and two, most of the readers whose rights were being so highly cherished were going to take that day’s paper, briefly check the weather and the Yankees box score, then use it to potty train their puppy.

  “So we should be factually incorrect to make it easier on the readers?” Gary said. “I don’t know if I’m ready to bend to the lowest common denominator that way.”

  “Well, aren’t you just standing at the gates of Western Civil
ization, holding back the Huns,” Marjorie countered. “We’re a daily newspaper. We’re supposed to be written at a level eighth graders can understand. You think an eighth grader is going to care about alterations in military nomenclature made before their parents were born?”

  “It’s in the style manual,” Gary replied.

  “I don’t care about the style manual,” Marjorie shot back.

  The air suddenly left the room. Gary looked stricken. At least three copy editors blanched. I expected one of them might need smelling salts.

  “Don’t … don’t care?” Gary said.

  Marjorie looked to her left and right, saw she had lost all support, and started backpedaling like Galileo at a Vatican wine party.

  “Well,” she said. “I suppose we might get calls from military historians if we just wrote ‘Air Force.’ So I … I guess we’ll do it your way.”

  The other copy editors exhaled. Gary straightened slightly, making himself a fraction taller in victory.

  “Very good,” he said.

  The catfight over, I was just about to walk away when Evan stopped me.

  “Carter, you got a second for a small question on your story?”

  “What story?” I asked.

  “The one about the mom in the fire.”

  “That story isn’t running.”

  “Sure it is,” Evan said. “It’s going A1, above the fold.”

  “Oh, crap,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re about to strip a lie across the top of our newspaper.”

  * * *

  I charged toward Szanto’s office, knowing full well he’d still be there. It was after eight, the time by which he assured the future ex–Mrs. Szanto he’d depart. But I’m sure she knew that to be a meaningless promise. Newspaper spouses eventually learn to act as if they live on Central Time while their partners are Eastern Standard: Szanto’s 8 o’clock really meant 9.

  The moment Szanto saw me steaming toward him, pained expression No. 42—which starts as a tight grimace around the eyes and spreads—washed across his face.

  “What the hell?” I demanded.

  “What?” he said, though he knew full well what.

  “I thought you killed the story.”

  “I did.”

  “So why is it—”

  “It wasn’t my call,” he said, spreading his hands as if to absolve himself of responsibility.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Brodie saw ‘space heater’ high up in the story and his Willie started throbbing,” Szanto said.

  It was long-standing Eagle-Examiner tradition that when Brodie liked a story, he was described as having a hard-on for it—or an erection, or a woody, or any number of the infinite variations to describe male sexual arousal. Why this usage evolved was lost to history. But the resulting imagery was seldom pleasant.

  “I don’t care if he printed it out and dry-humped it on the conference room table so everyone could watch,” I replied. “How can we run that story knowing what we know?”

  “Brodie said we could just take out the part about Akilah being an orphan. He said it was probably a misunderstanding that could be easily explained, and it was no reason to kill a story about the very important subject of space heater malfunction.”

  “But I didn’t get a quote from the mortgage company,” I said. “What about getting the other side of the story and all that happy hooey?”

  Szanto looked at me through tired eyes.

  “We didn’t mention the name of the mortgage company anyway,” he rationalized. “So it’s not like you’ve maligned its reputation.”

  I stared at Szanto as he fingered the cigarette he planned to light just as soon as he could run to the back stairwell where he—and untold scores of others—illegally smoked during the wintertime.

  “So you agree with him?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Szanto said. “I said it was his call. Look, you wanna argue with Brodie’s stiffie, you go ahead. Me? I don’t want to get poked in the eye.”

  Neither did I. Brodie was a basically pleasant old man, but his management style did not involve toleration of open dissent. If he hadn’t made up his mind about something, he would stay quiet and listen to the discussion that ensued among lesser editors. But his decisions, once made, were notoriously final. I could storm into his office and make all kinds of noise, but it wasn’t likely to do any good. I’d have better luck trying to turn the ocean tides with a teaspoon.

  “Fine,” I huffed. “But when we have to run a correction, it better not say ‘due to a reporter’s error.’ This isn’t on me.”

  Szanto didn’t answer, choosing to end the conversation by turning his attention back to his computer screen and grumbling something too consonant-heavy to be understood.

  That left me stuck in a curious spot. On the one hand, I was off the hook. I told my editors I had deep misgivings about a story. They ignored me. Woe to them.

  But that was small comfort. I took a great deal of pride in getting a story right, or at least trying my damnedest at it. It went straight to the core of perhaps my deepest journalistic value: that the truth exists, and that it’s my job as a reporter to find it.

  I realize that flies in the face of the moral relativism that has become so popular on campuses and in highfalutin big-think magazines, where the professors and editors will have you believe there is no such thing as the truth, only stories told from different perspectives. They’ll spin that marvelous bit of postmodern logic that says there are no absolutes and therefore we cannot possibly judge anyone else’s beliefs. And they’ll tell you journalists are hopelessly flawed creatures incapable of escaping their own innate biases long enough to ever approach anything resembling impartiality.

  To which I reply: fiddle-faddle.

  I’m not saying it’s simple to find and tell the truth. It takes a great deal of hard work, intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, and a willingness to keep listening to people even when your gut is telling you they’re full of it. Then it involves drilling through the layers of one’s cultural assumptions and prejudgments, all the way down to the mushy middle of all of us, where I believe there’s a basic humanity that tells us what’s right and what’s wrong. If we as writers apply that code—without the anchors of agenda or ideology—we can lift our prose to something that can be called the truth. It’s the very best of what journalism can and should be.

  So to have a story running under my byline that I knew was suspect? It made my guts twist. I never wanted to be one of those writers who skimped on the facts simply because they got in the way of a good story. And it pissed me off, that’s what I was going to look like if Akilah’s story blew up in our faces—all because of Brodie and his space heater vendetta.

  I went back to my desk, pondered what I might do with what remained of my evening, but couldn’t bat down my ire at the executive editor. Really, the man had left me only one option: go to McGovern’s and get drunk enough to start making bad decisions.

  * * *

  McGovern’s was your basic, beloved dive bar, from the ancient laminate floor tiles all the way up to the prehistoric corkboard ceiling. As an Irish bar that somehow survived white flight, it was legendary in Newark generally and among Newark newspapermen in particular. Many a generation of our trade had made it their first (and often last) stop after work to soothe the edges of a hard day on deadline with a few (and often more than a few) adult elixirs.

  Long before it was our hangout, the guys from the Newark Evening News—the afternoon paper that once dominated the state, before its demise in the early seventies—used to hang out there, too. And somehow I hoped that if and when the Eagle-Examiner was ever replaced by some other news-gathering media, which looked increasingly likely given the dire shape of newspaper advertising revenues, those future journalists (or content providers, or information aggregators, or whatever they’d call themselves) would gather at McGovern’s as well.

  By the time I arr
ived, the tables at the far side of the bar were filled by a few pitchers of Coors Light—why do kids drink that panther piss?—and a handful of Eagle-Examiner interns. The only one I knew that well was Tommy Hernandez, who was now in his second year as an intern with us. Only twenty-three, Tommy was one of the best natural reporters we had, a guy who knew how to hit the streets and find a story. He was still technically an intern—it’s how we got away with continuing to underpay him—but he had been given a promotion recently and was now our second reporter on Newark City Hall, a great gig for someone his age.

  Tommy was the only son of the world’s strictest Cuban immigrant parents and he still lived at home, which made it all the more amusing his folks didn’t have the slightest clue he’s gay as Elton John’s eyewear collection. They just thought he had a lot of male friends who dance well.

  “There you are!” Tommy sang out when he saw me. “Someone was loooooking for you.”

  “Oh, yeah, who’s that?” I said, sitting down and fumbling with a salt shaker so I could pretend I didn’t care who or what he was talking about.

  “Oh, you know who,” Tommy said, then switched into his best Sweet Thang impersonation: “Oh, my goodness, don’t you think Carter is such a good writer? Isn’t he just amaaaazing? Isn’t he sweeeeet?”

  “Oh, stop,” I said.

  “Oh, I will. She won’t,” Tommy said. “That girl has a bad case of Carter Ross Fever.”

  I turned to the other intern sitting with Tommy, a young Korean woman named Mi-Ryong Kim who, in our brief interactions, always acted like she was afraid of me.

  “The problem, Mi-Ryong, is that Tommy thinks he’s cute when he exaggerates. And he’s not.”

  Mi-Ryong giggled at me.

  “She has a crush on yooouuuu,” Tommy taunted.

  Ignoring Tommy, I kept talking to Mi-Ryong: “How much has he been drinking?” I asked. “He’s blitzed, right?”

  She giggled some more.

  “Sweet Thang wants to have your baaabies,” Tommy continued.

  “Do you think we should get him a cab?” I said. “I mean, he’s so plastered he’s delusional.”

  Mi-Ryong, though still giggling, was starting to look uncomfortable, so I turned to Tommy.