The phrase “idle gossip” does not apply in Yonkers. Gossip is not idle here, it is purposeful and serious, aggressive and active. For years, the explosive force of gossip was enough to bring hundreds of people to City Hall. Someone would hear that something was happening, and they would phone people who would phone more people until a crowd had gathered, seemingly out of nowhere.
Now, in the spring of 1991, gossip sent many of those same people into their cars to cruise the Yonkers streets. Rumor was that ground would be broken at any moment on the new housing, though the developer, anticipating protests, was not saying exactly when. There would be no announcement, and there certainly would not be a groundbreaking ceremony. The only way to know—to be one of the first to know—was to go out and look.
Mary’s surveillance method was one of regular detours. She never set out to check on the housing, but whenever she was in the car for another reason she was likely to swing past one or more of the sites for a quick peek. Day after day, the square of land at Central Park Avenue and Clark Street looked exactly the same, a barricaded asphalt parking lot, one that used to be part of the Yonkers Raceway, with small, sweet homes all around, much like Mary’s own home a few blocks away. Night after night, nothing changed at the School 4 building, either. It was still a solid, seemingly unmovable building, standing between Trenchard Street and Gaffney Place, where it had been for 107 years.
Nick’s visits to the sites were more purposeful. The housing was not a side trip for him, but a destination. Wandering the city had long been a hobby of his. Back when he was mayor, he kept a police scanner at home, and if word came of something exciting, he would strap on his ankle holster and be out the door, usually taking Nay along for the ride. They went to fires at two o’clock in the morning and auto accidents in the middle of dinner. They saw broken water mains, flooded streets, and downed power lines. After visiting a scene, they would rarely head home, but would drive the streets for a while, exploring.
When Nick left office, the police scanner disappeared, but the drives became more frequent. He would take the wheel almost every night after dinner, and, because he had agreed not to smoke his stogies in the house, he called the trips “cigar runs.” Driving and puffing, he unwound on the side streets that he had come to know by heart. Sometimes he went with Nay, or with a friend, but often he went on his own. As rumors of the groundbreaking grew louder, the cigar runs were no longer aimless. He set out each night wondering if it would be the night, if all the years of talk would finally take tangible form. For weeks, there was nothing. The empty lot on Helena Avenue was still an empty lot, surrounded by modest homes. The giant boulders remained undisturbed on Midland Avenue, across the street from a condominium complex and around the corner from Sarah Lawrence College. The ducks continued to swim in the pond across from Shoreview Drive.
Then, early on the morning of April 12, 1991, the construction began. Once it did, it seemed absurd to have thought that anyone would have had to search for it. With a grinding roar, the housing announced its presence on Clark Street, as workers ground the asphalt parking lot into dirt. One of the bulldozers had a set of menacing shark jaws painted on the front. Word spread with its usual speed, and soon a crowd of onlookers had gathered to watch.
“It’s a dark day for Yonkers,” Mayor Spallone said. “I really do think it’s a tragedy.”
Naturally, there were protests. Two hundred demonstrators gathered at the site on Saturday, as they would every Saturday for the next few months. They spent ninety minutes marching in front of the towering heaps of dirt that filled the battered parking lot. Passing cars blared their horns in support. The marchers carried effigies of Judge Sand, of NAACP lawyer Michael Sussman, and of the U.S. secretary of housing, Jack Kemp. They treated those stuffed symbols much as the bulldozers had treated the asphalt. One woman kicked the Sussman effigy in the leg. Another woman jabbed an American flag into it.
The marches did nothing to stop the construction. Deluxe Homes, Inc. was run by Don Meske, a man whose hobby was big game hunting, and whose wall trophies included a Canadian mountain lion and an African horned white rhino. The protests, he said, were an annoyance, not a threat. “When you’re facing an elephant that weighs twelve thousand pounds,” he said, “then you’ve got something to be scared of.”
Mary did not join any of the weekly marches. They were organized by Save Yonkers, the group she had been part of until it turned its back on Hank Spallone, and she felt awkward and unwanted among her former friends. She did follow the marches from the sidelines, however, reading the newspaper and glimpsing the action up close as she happened to drive past. Viewed through her new lens, the protests looked different than they had from the inside. She did not see warriors committed to a cause. She saw foot soldiers flailing away at the air, at the nothingness, not realizing that this was a fight they could not win. Had things changed, she wondered, or had they always looked that way?
At one of the protests, a Save Yonkers member said: “We have to show we’re still organized. Right now it doesn’t look too good, but you got to fight down to the wire. It’s never too late.”
But you’re not organized, Mary thought. And it is too late.
Kenneth Jenkins, NAACP branch president, responded to the protests, saying: “I understand fighting, but the patient’s dead. Quite frankly, I think the people of Yonkers are tired of this.”
Mary realized that she was tired of it. Bone tired.
Weeks passed, and concrete foundations emerged at four of the sites: twenty-four at Clark Street, twenty-eight at Midland Avenue, fourteen at Helena Avenue, forty-eight at Shoreview Drive. While they were being poured, workers quietly removed the asbestos from inside School 4. When that messy job was finished, a messier one began—a bulldozer with a battering ram plowed into the two-story brick building and began tearing it apart. The demolition started with the auditorium, and soon hundreds of seats were piled in the school parking lot. The dozer’s steel jaws continued to devour the massive structure, ripping out the walls, the roof, the innards and depositing the tangle of brick, metal, and wood onto the weed-filled former playground. The growl of the machine was joined by the hiss of water hoses, which sprayed constantly to keep down the clouds of dust.
Again a crowd gathered, and again there was talk of continuing the fight. When Mary drove to the shell of the school, however, she didn’t see anything left to fight for. All she saw was the final casualty of a lost cause, a sight so painful that her first reaction was to close her eyes. She quickly opened them again, then started at the rubble for a long time, thinking of all the reasons she opposed what was happening and all that she had done in the futile attempt to stop it.
When she finally walked back to her car, it was with the mixture of regret and resignation. The fight was over—she was as certain of that fact as she was sorry about it. It had suffused her world, and now it was gone. Mary Dorman was no longer fighting the housing.
Doreen James heard the swish of the envelope as it was slipped under her door. That is how messages from Municipal Housing are delivered at Schlobohm, door-to-door, not by mailman. The only letters that seemed to come in the mail were “letters in demand,” when back rent was owed, or warnings that the marshal was coming to carry out an eviction order. Doreen assumed the process was designed to save the cost of several hundred stamps every time Municipal Housing had something to say. But there was an eerie quality to the system. In her two years at Schlobohm, she had never actually seen whoever it was that distributed the mail.
This piece of paper was sent to inform all interested tenants that candidates were being sought for the tenant council. Because she had spent so many mornings with Sadie Young Jefferson, Doreen knew about the council. More specifically, she knew that Sadie was frustrated with it.
The group had been founded in 1971, during a point in the history of public-housing policy when the idea of self-governance was very much in vogue. The influence of that approach has waxed and waned in the years since. Proponents, like Sadie, see it as democracy in its purest form. Critics say it is foolish to take people who have made a mess of their lives and allow them to manage other people’s lives too.
In Yonkers in 1991, the tenant council consisted of three representatives from each housing site who met once a month at the housing office on Central Avenue. Sadie had told Doreen that, on paper, the council had broad power, with the authority to allocate certain funds and request and approve certain categories of policy changes. But in practice, Sadie explained, the council worked against the needs of the young, single, African-American and Hispanic women who were the overwhelming majority of public-housing residents.
The problem, Doreen learned, was that there were more public-housing sites for senior citizens (seven) than there were public-housing sites for families (five). The size of the site did not affect the number of delegates to the council, so the senior citizens, most of whom were white, had a de facto majority of 21 to 15. Add to that the fact that the senior citizens, with more extra time, perhaps, or more interest, were more vocal and involved, while the family housing delegates tended to be less committed or insistent.
READY could not change the number of delegates, but it could change the clout of those delegates by selecting and training candidates to the council. Which is why Doreen carefully read, then reread, the letter. For months, Sadie had been telling her that she was “ready to fly,” to become a leader in her chosen home. Doreen inhaled the praise like a new kind of drug, but away from Sadie she had her doubts.
That night, Sheila came to visit Doreen, armed to persuade.
“You give me all that talk about being independent and being in charge,” she said, holding the self-nomination form out toward her sister. “Here. Be in charge.”
Doreen waited several days before signing her name. Even after she dropped the paper in the designated box at the Municipal Housing office, she was not certain that this was an election she wanted to win.
Every major turn in Nick Wasicsko’s adult life had been linked in time with politics. He lost his father to leukemia shortly before he was first elected to the City Council. He was sworn in as a lawyer during his first campaign for mayor. He met Nay Noe because he ran for mayor, and he fell in love with her during the months of political siege. He bought his first house as he fought to remain the mayor, and he proposed to Nay in that house shortly after his losing to Hank Spallone. Even his proposal carried political overtones. “You’re the only one who’s really stood by me,” he said.
In keeping with that life pattern, politics was everywhere in the spring of 1991 as the preparations for his wedding melded with preparations for his possible run for City Hall. He was certain that he wanted to marry Nay. He was less certain about whether he wanted to enter the race for mayor. To do so would mean a tough primary against Terence M. Zaleski, a Democratic state assembly-man with much the same constituency as Nick, but none of the historical baggage. If he lost the primary to Zaleski, or to the other Democratic candidate, restaurateur James J. Mannion, would that seal his political fate? Would two losses complete the agonizing transformation from twenty-eight-year-old prodigy to thirty-two-year-old has-been?
The doubts and second-guessing were new to Nick, confining him like an ill-fitting suit that chafed and bound. In each of his three other races, even the last, disastrous one against Hank Spallone, he was positive that running was what he should do, what he wanted to do. Polls, gossip, conventional wisdom, none of those had stopped him before. Now they had him paralyzed.
Some days he talked of the strong mayor job as rightfully his, a place in local history for which he had already paid with anguish and sweat. Other days he fumed that the timing was all wrong, that the wounds were too fresh and his city was not yet in a forgiving mood. He wrestled with these pros and cons while also wrestling with the wording on the formal wedding invitations, the location of the ceremony and reception, the style of the two pristine gold bands. Finally, fitfully, all of the talking turned itself into a plan. He had learned that he was one of four finalists for the 1991 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. A prestigious honor, one accompanied by a $25,000 check, it is given every year to a public official “noted for taking a principled stand on an issue in the face of political and public opposition.” Although that was not what many in Yonkers seemed to think he had done, it was what Nick himself thought he had done, and he seized upon the nomination as some sort of sign. If he won, he decided, he would run for mayor, and he would make his announcement on the heels of receiving the award. A year earlier, Jackie Kennedy Onassis herself presented the coveted statuette to the winner. What more could Yonkers want from him than that?
Nay wanted him to run for mayor, and she supported the Profile in Courage game plan. Nick began spreading the word that he would enter the race, and started to search around for a campaign team. One of the first people he called was Jim Surdoval, who had launched his political consulting career as an adviser to Nick, and who was now an entrenched Yonkers “player.” Nick assumed Jim would welcome his news.
“I’m sorry,” Jim said. “I’m committed to Terry Zaleski.”
Not only was he supporting Zaleski, he told Nick, but he and a group of other Democrats had actively recruited Terry Zaleski and encouraged him to run.
“He’s the highest-ranking Democrat in Yonkers,” Jim explained. “He has an east side district, so he can carry the east side. He’s procompliance on housing, but he’s not identified with it, like you are; he doesn’t have that negative.”
“He’s not identified with it,” Nick snapped, “because he hid up in Albany in ’88. He stayed as far away from the housing as he could.”
“Right,” agreed Jim. “So now he doesn’t have that negative. He’s a clean slate. It’s the first strong mayor. We need the Democrat with the best shot.”
Nick, dizzy with surprise, tried to focus, to find some way to bring his former adviser back around to his side.
“It doesn’t have to be a negative,” he said. “I took a courageous stand, and I was a hero. I was the only one in the goddamn city who did the right thing.”
Jim sighed before he answered. “‘Courage’ isn’t the kind of word you use to describe yourself, Nick, even if we both know it’s true. That only works if other people are saying it.
“Don’t try to make a comeback as mayor,” Jim continued, giving the advice he knew would most help Zaleski. “They’re not ready for you as mayor. Run for council, instead. We’ll support you in that.”
Soon after his talk with Jim Surdoval, Nick learned that the Profile in Courage Award, the linchpin in his plan, would be presented to someone else. His mind, his emotions, his life were all in chaos. The two subjects, the wedding and the mayoral race, became ever more enmeshed at 175 Yonkers Avenue—hors d’oeuvres and nominating petitions, table settings and campaign slogans, the beginning of their life together and the crossroads in Nick’s political life. Nick and Nay squabbled and talked past each other, two people who were in love but also in turmoil. Nay admitted to Nick her relief that he did not win the award, because it would be presented during their honeymoon. What Nick heard was that she had not wanted him to win.
In the end, Nick decided to run for mayor anyway, more out of confusion than resolve. He scheduled his announcement for May 1 because it was National Law Day and he had, above all, complied with the law.
As that day approached, however, he started receiving telephone calls from people he assumed would support him. “I thought you should know,” they said, “I’m behind Terry Zaleski.” They explained, as Jim Surdoval had, that Zaleski had a better chance because he was a “clean slate.” They even used many of the same phrases that Surdoval had used. The only thing they didn’t say was something Nick quickly figured out—that Surdoval had asked all of them to call.
At the last moment, Nick abruptly changed his announcement to May 13, his thirty-second birthday, giving him some more time to think. He asked Jim to set up a “face-to-face” with Terry Zaleski, and he spent much of that weekend at Zaleski’s house, listening as Zaleski tried to talk him out of the race. Nay came, too, and while Nick listened to Terry in the living room, Nay heard most of the same things from Terry’s wife, Lynn, out in the kitchen.
“You don’t want this now,” the Zaleskis said. “You’re getting married, you don’t need this.” There was much talk of a divided primary that would give Mannion the nomination and Spallone the election. There was mention of Nick being appointed deputy mayor once Zaleski was elected.
Nick had asked his fiancée to come along because he had come to rely on her sense of people. Over the years he had realized that what he first saw as shyness was really insight. Nay would stand quietly to one side at a political event, seemingly overwhelmed, but later, when they would dish the dirt after the party, she would have noticed things that had gone right past Nick. He also asked her to come with him to the Zaleskis’ because he feared Terry would have some of his political advisers there, Jim Surdoval in particular, and Nick wanted to bring a team along, too. But the harsh reality was, he didn’t have a team. Nay was the only person who was completely on his side.
When they left the marathon meeting, Nay was full of advice. “He’s a weasel,” she said, of Zaleski. She did not buy Terry’s arguments or believe his promises. “Where was he while you were being crucified over the housing? He was up in Albany, and he didn’t even pick up the phone once to tell you to hang in there.”
Having asked Nay’s advice on the eve of their wedding, he rejected it. He held his press conference as scheduled on May 13, but it was a very different event than the one he had originally planned. He and Terry Zaleski stood side by side in the driveway of Nick’s house as Nick announced that he would not run for mayor, but would give his support to Zaleski, instead.
It was a political and personal sacrifice, Nick said, made for the good of the party.
“This was not an easy decision for me,” he said. “I was torn between what I felt I was entitled to do and what was helpful. I’ve been agonizing for months that this split could weaken the general effort. The thing that matters is getting Spallone and the Republicans out of government.”
The knot of reporters in the driveway didn’t really believe those were his reasons, and neither did Nay. She spent the next few days arranging their rehearsal dinner and arguing politics with him. “He’ll never make you deputy,” she said. “If he really thought you weren’t a threat, why did he work so hard to get you out? If you’re afraid of another race in this town, then admit it. Don’t pretend you’re doing this for the party.”
On May 15, Nick made another announcement. He would run for the City Council seat from the Second District, the one that had been held by Peter Chema, who would be giving it up to face Hank Spallone and Angelo Martinelli in the Republican primary.
“I want to see Terry elected,” he said, “but I also want to see him effective, and nobody knows better than I that an obstructionist City Council can detract from a mayor’s effectiveness.”
Three days later, at noon, Nick Wasicsko married Nay Noe at the church where his own parents had wed. Nick had promised his bride that this would not be a political event, but that was not the way his life worked, and it was not a promise he could keep. An article in the Herald Statesman mentioned that the “wedding ceremony is open to the public at the church, 239 Nepperhan Ave.” A Cablevision crew came to cover the event, a fact that made Nay more nervous than the idea of actually getting married. Neither Terry Zaleski nor Hank Spallone was invited, but Nay noticed them seated in the pews as she walked down the aisle. The reception, at a country club in the nearby village of New Rochelle, included a sit-down dinner for 150.
Three days after that party, the Wasicskos left for a two-week honeymoon in Spain and Morocco, where they discussed politics much of the time. While they were gone, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston announced that Nicholas C. Wasicsko was one of three runners-up out of one thousand nominees for the Profile in Courage Award. The winner was Charles Longstreet Weltner, a former Georgia congressman who was recognized for refusing to run for reelection in 1966 on the same ticket as an advocate of racial segregation.
In a statement accompanying the announcement, the foundation said of Nick:
“Although he came to the office of mayor with only two years’ experience as an elected official, Wasicsko distinguished himself as a man of conscience under fire. He summoned the courage to uphold the rule of law and demonstrated extraordinary leadership for the people of his divided city.”
Someone else had finally said it about him.
In July, the first of the townhouses arrived in Yonkers. It was driven to Clark Street on the back of a flatbed truck, and it had the eerie disembodied look that all prefabricated buildings have when they are still in transit.
Oscar Newman had never considered using anything but prefab units for what were, in so many ways, his townhouses. Not only were they less expensive, but, equally important given their history in Yonkers, their creation was less public. Only the brick veneer would be laid at the site, meaning there would be less cause for protest and fewer targets for vandalism. Nearly everything would be done three hours away, in the working-class town of Berwick, Pennsylvania. Once coal-mining country, the region had adapted to its own inevitable realities by becoming the hub of modular home construction in the northeast.
The two huge dusty factory buildings that housed Deluxe Homes, Inc. were once part of a railroad car manufacturing plant that had closed its doors thirty years earlier. The Yonkers townhouses began in those buildings, as steel coils were transformed, amid a grinding shower of sparks, into the wall studs and trusses that would support the buildings. These beams were then sent next door and placed on a 1,200-foot assembly line, the length of four football fields.
There, welders molded the studs and trusses, creating wall, floor, ceiling, and roof frames. The frames were placed in the carts that ran along the vestigial railroad tracks, and the carts continued on their way, from one work station to the next. Plumbing, gas, electric, and drainage lines were added. Window frames were installed. Plywood floors and plasterboard walls and ceilings were glued and bolted on. A complete bathroom, made in another part of the building, was loaded in.
Eventually the frames, each one a separate room, were attached to form a larger, single-story box. A roof was attached. Insulation was installed, along with windows, doors, lighting, bathroom fixtures, kitchen cabinets and counters, doorknobs, and floor tiles. Near the end of the line, workers on stilts taped and spackled seams in the ceilings and walls. Finally, each half of the two-piece duplex was wrapped in plastic and hoisted onto a trailer for the trip to Yonkers. Every townhouse arrived as a done deal, a fait accompli. Not only were the units made out of sight, they were installed quickly. The one that arrived at Clark Street on July 9 was bolted onto its foundation that same day. After that, the completion rate was two or three a day. Within a week, the outline of a nascent neighborhood was clearly drawn on Clark Street. Although Oscar Newman’s hard-won brick veneer, cream-colored paint, and higher-quality landscaping would not be added until later, the peaked roofs and bay windows were already visible, and the neighbors grudgingly agreed that the housing looked “pretty good.”
There were a few attempts to rekindle the old fight. Someone—mischievous kids, the FBI decided—painted “No Nigger” and “KKK” on one of the newly installed buildings, and broke the windows of two others. Around the same time, the City Council tried its own form of vandalism, briefly threatening to withhold a sewer permit for the Clark Street site. HUD presented its own last-minute roadblocks, skirmishing with Oscar Newman about everything from the gauge of the tubing on the backyard fences to the location of the outdoor trash cans.
He lost the fight over the fences. He had envisioned a wrought-iron look to separate the individual yards, but HUD would not pay for even the faux version of wrought iron, so he was forced to settle for galvanized iron chain-link instead. He had more success with the trash cans. The agency wanted communal trash cans—a big Dumpster shared by several families. It was the least expensive type of container, and the kind that had always been used at housing projects. Newman wanted each townhouse to have its own inground trash can, which fit in a metal sheath set next to the walk leading up to each home. It would make tenants take responsibility for their garbage, he argued, if they could not pile it on an anonymous heap somewhere. In the end, Peter Smith took Newman’s side and cleared the way for the individual containers, but he did so with a look that said, “It’s on your head if this doesn’t work.”
The nearer the housing came to completion, the more often Newman heard that message: these townhouses were his idea; their failure would be his, as well. There is nothing more nerve-wracking than being inches from a lifelong goal. Everything Newman had learned over thirty years was built into the housing. So it was with a mix of pride and jitters that Newman took Judge Sand to visit the sites one dreary, chilly afternoon.
Sand said some complimentary things, but mostly he was quiet. Newman could not decide if the judge was displeased, or simply overwhelmed by the physical embodiment of more than a decade of work. But when they walked into the backyards and Sand stared disapprovingly at the chain-link fencing, Newman did not have to wonder what the Judge was thinking.
“They look like pigsties,” Sand said. “Is it really necessary to have the fencing?”
Newman took a deep breath and explained how fencing, even the ugliest fencing, was better than none at all. “The rear yards will take on a very different character once they’re occupied,” he said. And without the fencing, he continued, there would be “no sense of ownership, no feeling of responsibility.” The area would become one huge yard, he said, that everyone would neglect and, eventually, no one would use.
Sand shook his head in answer.
“I hope you know what you’re doing” was all he said.
Henry Spallone never made it onto the strong mayor ballot. His primary campaign was a study in confusion, with a $38,000 debt that he temporarily repaid with a personal loan. Peter Chema won the Republican primary, leading Angelo Martinelli by one hundred votes. Spallone was a distant third. In a bizarre turn, Judge Leonard Sand, a lifelong Democrat, received one write-in vote.
Rejected by the Republicans, Spallone tried to run as an independent, but Chema challenged his designating petitions. Fifteen hundred signatures were necessary to qualify for the independent line. A total of 2,150 people had signed Spallone’s petitions, but Chema proved that 675 of those were invalid under the state’s complex and arcane election law, leaving Spallone twenty-five signatures short of a second chance. Spallone appealed the decision of the Board of Elections, and proved to the State Supreme Court that some of the disallowed signatures were actually valid, but there were not enough of those to qualify.
Mary Dorman was in the courtroom when Spallone, the fight gone out of him, accepted the decision. It was over, he said, he would not appeal. She was furious that he was walking away from a fight—he who had taught her how to fight in the first place. And she was embarrassed for him. Here was a man whose career was based on his defiance of a court order. Now that same career was ended by compliance with a court order.
Outside the courthouse, Spallone vowed that this was the end of his campaign, not the end of his career. He would be back, he said. But hadn’t he also promised that he would never permit low-income housing in Mary’s neighborhood? When ground was broken on the townhouses, she had stopped believing in the fight, not the man. With this withdrawal from the race, she could no longer believe in the man, either. Politics was now a habit for her, and there would be unfillable hours if it was gone, so she spent the remaining month of the campaign halfheartedly working for Angelo Martinelli, who had not been disqualified from the independent ballot. She did not really believe in Martinelli, but for the moment that didn’t matter. Working for him distracted her from the fact that she would now need something new to believe in.
Terry Zaleski received only 36 percent of the vote on Election Day, but that was enough to become the first strong mayor of Yonkers. As usual, the election results showed a divided city, with five of six precincts on the west side voting for Zaleski, the candidate with the most moderate position on desegregation, and five of six precincts on the east side voting for Chema, the strongest desegregation opponent in the race. Also as usual, more voters went to the polls on the east side than on the west side. The only reason Zaleski won was because Martinelli took a crucial east side district from Peter Chema.
Despite the slim margin, despite the lasting divisions, Zaleski declared victory with the same confidence that every politician feels on election night. “This has truly been a campaign for the future of the city of Yonkers,” he declared just after 11:00 P.M.
While Zaleski was celebrating, Nick Wasicsko was home, stunned at the direction his own Second District race was taking. Because he had won the Democratic primary by a 3-to-1 margin, and because this was a heavily Democratic district, Nick had expected a fairly easy win in the general election. Instead, the early results showed him losing to his opponent, Edward Magilton, a political first-timer whose day job was as an operations specialist in the city Department of Public Works. At 10:30 P.M., Magilton led Wasicsko by 150 votes. Over the next hour or so, the race began to tighten, and with 97 percent of the votes counted, Magilton’s lead was down to 40 votes. At midnight, Nick obtained a court order to impound the voting machines for a recount. He went to bed at 2:30 in the morning, wondering whether he should have conceded the race when there was no one awake to hear him.
Morning brought the news that more of the votes had been counted, and in one precinct he led 137 to 60, enough to move him from 40 votes behind to 30 votes ahead. By the time he dressed and left the house, all the remaining precincts had been counted, and he was trailing again—by two votes.
It was several days before the recount, and he spent that time becoming increasingly certain that his political career was over. “I blew it,” he said. “What am I going to do now?”
He was despondent. He spent hours sitting by the phone. There were some calls telling him to “hang in there” or “it will all work out,” but there were not as many as he thought there should be and, more important, not one was from Terry Zaleski. “I sacrificed it all for that guy,” he said. “He can’t pick up the phone?” Eventually, Zaleski did call. What Nick never knew was that Nay, frightened by her husband’s growing depression, had contacted Jim Surdoval, demanding that Zaleski talk to Nick.
The recount of all the voting machines gave Nick a sixteen-vote lead. Another few days passed while the absentee ballots were tallied. Nick gained another ten votes. The final count was 3,006 for Wasicsko and 2,980 for Magilton. Nick was a City Council member again, by a margin of twenty-six votes.