The Man Who Would Not Run

He was, perfectly, himself. The chartered planes were fueled and ready to take the governor of New York to New Hampshire when, bruised and weary, citing his obligation to solve his state's fiscal crisis, the man many regarded as the last best hope of the Democratic Party said no. "I wish I could see it another way," he said. "This is not a comfortable analysis for me, to be honest with you—and I can make a case for about anything. I tried to make myself come out better on this. I just didn't succeed."

There it was—I can make a case for about anything. I just didn't succeed—the hint of self-mockery, the self-effacement so closely braided with self-assertiveness that it is sometimes hard to tell them apart. He spoke, in his hour of renunciation, with eloquence for "the big steelworker with the thick fingers," for the "disoriented, disadvantaged, disaffected, the poor," whom he has always seemed to understand, having come from their ranks, better than other men in public life. He spoke with the vivid wit, the passion and parrying that have been for him a double-edged sword. His eloquence had purchased the love of idealists and the admiration of pragmatists. It had brought him to this place of eminence from which he spoke, with frankness uncharacteristic of a politician, of his failure to solve New York's problems and of his stern decision not to run away to seek "a still higher perch. You fail at that level—OK, you failed."

"If I had stayed ... I keep thinking that if I had stayed in baseball.... I wonder if I'd have made money." It was an odd moment. He was musing aloud, almost as if he were in an empty room. "What you need," he said, "is a message. There are plenty of messages out there to deliver. What you need is someone who can deliver the good message. They have at least six good potential ... messengers."

Between the word potential and the word messengers there was a long pause—I counted eight seconds—as he appeared to be gazing inwardly, perhaps regarding the qualities of the "messengers," disregarding the audience whose pulse he usually takes so expertly. I was reminded of the time he told a reporter that life would be much easier if one could, like Saint Paul, who brought the Gospel to the gentiles, be visited blindingly by God and set on his path.

A reporter asked him a question unlikely to be put to a politician of another stripe: What did you read last night to help you make your decision? A little bit of Saint Francis de Sales, he said, and Teilhard de Chardin, and a book of quotes and Grolier's Encyclopedia—"which I recommend to you if you're tired of the Britannica, if you don't like the British spelling, if you don't like small print, if you don't like exotic birds, and you want to get closer to the heart of the matter."

The greatest fear of Saint Francis de Sales was that he would be misunderstood. "Do not wish to be anything but what you are—but be that perfectly," he wrote.

I wondered what, in particular, Cuomo had read from Teilhard de Chardin, his spiritual mentor, a Jesuit who was also a scientist, a paleontologist who loved the world. I settled on this passage from The Divine Milieu:

The task assigned to us is to climb toward the light.... That which is good, sanctifying and spiritual for my brother below or beside me on the mountainside can be material, misleading or bad for me. What I rightly allowed myself yesterday, I must perhaps deny myself today.... In other words, the soul can only rejoin God after having traversed a specific path through matter.... Each one of us has his Jacob's ladder.

Among members of the press, the search for meaning beyond the apparent and evident meaning of the governor's words goes on and on. I believe what he says, and I believe he felt that Friday that he was on the rung of the ladder where duty and responsibility had obliged him to stop.

All in all, on a day that brought me no joy, he exercised what Teilhard calls "that precise concentrated particularity which makes up so much of the warm charm of human persons."

•

That charm was much in evidence when I met him several months before his announcement on Black Friday.

He was thinking aloud about Sophia Loren. The governor of New York—in whom asceticism and love of the sensible world, ceremoniousness and sarcasm, are nicely wedded—is sitting behind his desk in the state capitol. The spatulate fingers of his enormous, well-groomed baseball player's hands are splayed out on the desk that used to belong to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is putting a problem to a visiting photographer. Why is it, Mario Cuomo wants to know, that a woman whose features are almost disfiguringly large—"her nose is too big, her mouth is too big, she has a man's hands"—looks perfect in photographs, and is in fact so beautiful. Taken separately, her features don't work. Together they add up to something remarkable. He might almost have been holding the mirror to himself.

Cuomo's own gestures are large. His nose is large and his mouth is large and his deep-set, large, dark, baggy eyes are dramatically hooded. The defining lines of his fleshy 60-year-old face are so deeply etched one feels one could read him like braille. He owns a whole lot of oversized character and personality traits that ought to cancel one another out, but that alchemized together in him are something remarkable.

He is the most formidable and the most glamourous man I have ever met.

It would almost certainly surprise him to be described in this way. He says women like his face "because I'm safe. I was the perfect guy to marry. Yes sir. I look like somebody's uncle. Maybe everybody has a good face but me. I have a good hook shot. Forget about it."

It surprises me to be describing an elected official in this way. I am not alone in finding it impossible to be in Mario Cuomo's company without actively desiring his approval. He inspires a desire to know him and to be known by him, which may be one of the reasons members of the press act personally aggrieved when they think the governor is less than forthcoming. "The single best rule for the intelligent conduct of life and society is love," he once wrote. The conviction that this politician actually lives by this dictum is irresistible—you can't help wanting a piece of it.

•

Da-da-da-da-da-da-dum-dum. Cuomo is humming a jingle. "What's that?" he says. "Mary Noble, Backstage Wife or Helen Trent? Dida-ling-ding-ding-ding. Who was that? Just Plain Bill or Lorenzo Jones and His Wife Belle? 'Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.' Who drove the car for the Shadow? Who was his girlfriend? Margot. Lamont Cranston and Margot. I'm an expert on the radio soaps. Jack Armstrong. The a-a-a-l-l-American boy. 'Have you tried Wheaties?' " A kid in Queens, he was listening to The Shadow when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

•

I grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The governor grew up in Jamaica, Queens. I am Italian. He is Italian. I read his gestures with enormous pleasure. They are the language of my childhood, the language my father spoke, the language my brother speaks. Cuomo's appetite for religious meaning and tradition speak to me, too: God doesn't appear in dinner conversations very often. Later it will be suggested that he manipulated me, making much of my Italianness, his Italianness. I don't think so (in any case, it takes two to play this game). I think his charm is intuitive, not calculated. I don't feel manipulated. After all, it's a nice human instinct to meet a person on grounds where you think you stand the greatest chance of connecting. He touches you at that point where you will feel individually acknowledged and enriched. He addresses himself to what is unique in you.

•

As a writer, he is admirably precise. His speeches, at once lofty and colloquial, are models of lucidity and immediacy that speak to the heart and to the viscera as well as to the cultivated mind. His published diaries are used as textbooks in urban-affairs classes. He wrote his own television commercials during the gubernatorial campaign. But he is singularly easy to misquote because his words owe everything to context. Cuomo often talks in semantic arabesques—if you don't actually see the commas and the quotation marks that indicate he has set up a dialog with an imaginary Other for your edification, it's easy to distort his meaning or to hang him with his own words. His voice, a beautiful, expressive instrument, often contradicts his words, as an actor's will, to make a point. This can be confounding if you're not paying close attention. His razzle-dazzle speaking style and his verbal ellipses are jam for the press. But he retreats, when you least expect it, into sudden reticence. An iron curtain of introversion shuts over his personality; like many people who talk a lot, he is less accessible than his manner suggests. A very private public man, he is contemplative and meditative, as often high on silence as he is on gab.

He prides himself on being prudent in action, judicious. He is also combative and—his detractors say—prickly and impatient. He is clothed in power, yet he says he has always been an outsider, a man who "takes power too seriously to be totally comfortable with it ... always feels out of place ... just a little incongruous: a baseball player, professor, campaigner, politician, father, husband—always a little too round for a square opening, or a little too square."

He once said, "I don't enjoy waving at strangers—I feel as though I'm presuming on them." Try to imagine another politician saying that.

•

"Madonna? What do I think of Madonna? She's nice if you like Madonna. Me, I like Merle Oberon. Robert Mapplethorpe, who's Mapplethorpe, what am I supposed to think of him? That's what I think." He shrugs and scratches the underside of his chin and extends his palm in an Italian gesture both economic and symphonic, usually accompanied by a sound that is half-grunt, half-sigh: "Do me a favor. People think I'm cursing when I do that. 'I saw you on television. You did that to curse someone.'

"Tell them"—his press aide, Tom Conroy, and a photographer, Harry Benson—"what it means." Untranslatable, it means (roughly) So what? Do I care?

"What does this mean?" He makes a gesture with his forefinger and little finger extended. I think it signifies the evil eye. "No. No. Cornuto. Now you're gonna learn something, now you're gonna thank me; after all this is over, you're gonna say, 'One thing this guy did for me, he taught me something I never knew and I should have known because I was from Bensonhurst. This is cornuto, horns. You are the horned one, you are the goat, you are the cuckolded one, you have been made a fool of.'

"The men's movement, what's that? There's a men's movement? As in male/female? Hey, Tom, did you know there was a men's movement? What the hell is a men's movement? Ask me another question. How the hell did I miss the men's movement?" He looks pleased as punch to have missed it.

"What century would I like to have lived in? The Nineteenth. Why? Because it's the only one I know. You (continued on page 132)Mario Cuomo(continued from page 114) want to hang around and play nice games, I'll play games, I'll talk about the Eighteenth Century: 'That seemed great to me, I'll go back there.' Forget about it. How would you brush your teeth? 'The Renaissance seemed perfect to me.' You kidding? No bathrooms. I'm not a great historian, but I've lived half a hundred years now and I've read a whole lot. I don't think times are terribly different. I think the basic things in life don't change a lot. The insecurity is always there, the little bits of joy are always there, the confusion is always there, the tendency to despair is always there and always will be there. When we grow ailerons and superintelligence, we may diminish some of these aspects. But until we leave the category human—which is what Teilhard says is what is meant to happen when we all become perfect and the whole universe grows up into heaven—until then, we're going to be what we are, what we've always been. People are always the same. What's an aileron? I don't know." The governor puts a fist on either side of his forehead and wriggles both forefingers to suggest the flying green creatures that have ailerons.

"My son Christopher likes the Fifties. The Fifties were great, the suits, the music, nice, a gentler time. I liked it. But I like this time, too. What do you like more about the Fifties? That you were young? That's different. You have to give some things up, too, you know. Too soon old and too late smart. What did you know when you were young? You wasted all those years."

Well, he doesn't seem prickly to me. But I am suddenly aware of the fact that the man with whom I am joshing, this volatile man who indulges me when I play games, may someday change the course of human affairs. ("Volatile? Me? No. Mercurial. Volatile could explode. Not me. I'm easy. Mercurial, you move all the time, you're tough to pick up, fast, you go through changes and phases. Volatile is Sicilian—like Matilda [his wife]. Volatile is Calabrese—like your people. Me, I'm Neapolitan. That's where the music comes from. All those songs you hear in all the cantinas of the world—Neapolitan." He sings: "Oí Mari, Oí Mari, quanta suonne agge perso pé te ... Vicino o' Mare." In dialect, he sings.)

I apologize for playing games: "You don't really like playing games, do you?" I say.

But he is expansive: "Not necessarily. Remember spin the bottle? Do you remember spin the bottle, Tom? Did they have that game when you were a kid? The Irish, they'll lie to you, you know. They're not like us."

Us. Tom is Irish. The governor and he grin at each other.

•

The governor's values were honed in the bosom of his family. So were his anecdotes:

"Talking like this is your idea of working? Forget it. This is an Italian's idea. The Milanese comes down from the north—hardworking, sixty, sixty-five years old—comes down to Napoli. And there, middle of the afternoon, is a guy sitting by the water—a young man, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two—and he's fishing. The Milanese says, 'Hey, what're you doing there?'

" 'I'm fishing.'

"The Milanese says, 'You gotta work, you gotta work hard, you gotta get yourself a job and then you gotta get the money and save the money, then you retire, nice, you move around, maybe then you go fishing.'

"The man says, 'Nice, but that's what I'm doin' now.' "

His father, Andrea, came to America from the Provincia di Salerno. His mother, Immaculata (Macula), lived in a 400-year-old mountain building that was once a monastery, a house with a dirt floor, no electricity and no indoor plumbing.

When Andrea and Macula came to America, they had no skills, no money, no English. Andrea couldn't read or write. One of the reasons the governor believes New York City will make it—AIDS, crime and drugs notwithstanding—is that it remains the city where people come to find their lives and their success. New immigrants, unlike those who came during the grand immigration from southern Europe, come with skills and money. "They can buy brownstones in Brooklyn immediately, Korean fruit stores immediately," he says. Whereas his father labored as a ditchdigger in Jersey City (one can imagine the iron necessity that drove people from beautiful Naples to grimy Jersey City); he dug trenches for sewer pipes.

The Cuomos moved to South Jamaica and opened a grocery store. Mario Cuomo's belief in the durability of the American dream, as well as his feeling that he is a permanent outsider, can be traced to this time. "We had no bilingual education in South Jamaica. I didn't speak English well when I was young. In speech class, I refused to give speeches. And it wasn't an Italian community. At Saint Monica's Church, we didn't even have an Italian priest.

"You were born in South Jamaica? You probably owed my father money. Everybody owed us money. I still have the book. You'd come to the grocery store and we'd put your name in the book. If they got up to forty dollars and you didn't see them for a few days, that meant they had moved to Newark."

Jamaica is part of the Borough of Queens. "You never saw a movie about Queens. In all the movies, they lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was the only place with ethnics, Brooklyn was the only place with neighborhoods. Brooklyn made it into the movies, Queens got nothing but disrespect. When you landed at LaGuardia Airport—which is in Queens, in the city of New York—all the signs said To the City, like Queens didn't belong to the city. I never left Queens." He says this good-naturedly, self-mockingly. Success doesn't altogether obliterate past hurts. And those past hurts, the wounds of an ethnic outsider, guarantee his identification with Americans who have not managed to grab their share of the spoils—his larger "family."

•

We are talking about middle-class discontent. "I know middle-class discontent, irritation, anger, better than you do," he says.

"Why?"

"Because I'm older than you, I've been middle-class longer than you."

"Not by a lot."

"Hey. Am I older than you? I'm older than you. I'm older than you chronologically. I'm older than you physically. I look older than you and I feel older than you."

While I am trying to absorb this, he segues into a story:

"My father and my godfather, Rosario, worked together. When my godfather quit the fish store and my father quit the grocery store because he had a heart attack, there was nothing they could do with themselves and they were irritated. So they came to me and said, 'We'd like to build a house; we want to go in the housebuilding business.' My father can't read or write, but never mind about reading plans. Rosario, my godfather, was a bricklayer, he had a real skill. I was a young lawyer, so we got together. I bought a piece of land for two thousand dollars. We went to the old contractors that my (continued on page 151)Mario Cuomo(continued from page 132) father used to make sandwiches for in the grocery store. We made a house. We lost twenty-eight hundred dollars. Then we made another house. We broke even. Then they made three houses. They made a four-thousand-dollar profit, and now they're going crazy. Then they made six houses and they really made money, and they wanted to build an apartment house and I stopped them. So they went back to the houses that they'd built and hired themselves out as patio builders.

"But they had these terrific arguments all the time—red brick, gray brick, what kind of design—they fought all the time. And in the end they always resolved the problem the same way, with my father conceding. And he always conceded in the same language: 'I'm gonna do it your way, Rosario, because you're older than I am. I do this out of respect.' Rosario was two years older. I do this out of respect because you're older. Perfect. It saved face for my father and it got the thing resolved without anybody admitting he was wrong."

•

One of three children, Cuomo was the only one to go to college, where, he says, he would have been "an odds-on favorite to be voted least likely to become a public person. Asocial. I was not a natural for public life. I was a good lawyer and reasonably successful. I never had a client in the house in twenty years. I never brought anyone home. Are you kidding? In my house? Forget it. My house is for my family. Friends sometimes. But never a client or a partner.

"Matilda is perfect at the public life. She goes to Italy, Spain, Japan, you put her anywhere, anytime—with the Rockefellers, with the Whitneys—she goes to the track at Saratoga and takes the governor's box; I went once and I didn't like it. They took my picture and put it with a horse.

"I don't like giving up my privacy. Opening yourself to the world is not an easy thing to do."

Mario Cuomo and Matilda Raffa met in the cafeteria of St. John's University in Queens. She was studying to be a teacher and he was thinking law school. He signed up to play baseball with the Pittsburgh Pirates. And she said, "Oh, I'd never marry a baseball player."

Matilda Cuomo never refers to her husband by name or honorific; he is always "my husband." She still wears the modest diamond engagement ring he gave her when he received his bonus from the Pirates. For a combination of reasons—including, one supposes, Matilda's disapproval and his father's—Cuomo's baseball career was short-lived, especially after he was hit in the head and crashed into what Matilda calls the back fence of the ballpark.

Her family was comfortably well-off. But she earned the money that saw him through his first year of law school. And if he applied for help, it was to his family, not to hers. He kept the conventional contract.

When first married, they lived in a furnished apartment. The only new thing they had, the governor says, was a newly upholstered green sofa, given to them because "the landlady fell in love with Matilda. And the only thing we had in the place that was our own was a mattress, because my mother wouldn't let me sleep on someone else's mattress.

"We moved to a third-floor walk-up. I hadn't finished school. Matilda was pregnant with our second child. I said, 'Pop, Matilda can't work anymore'—she was teaching—'you gotta put me in your house.'

"Pop didn't even have a bedroom. So we slept for about a year on a sofa in the living room—we hung a blanket on an arch for privacy. When we walked in carrying our few possessions, my father said [presumably because the Cuomos took seriously the Church's command against artificial contraception], 'You and that Pope—I knew you were going to get me into trouble.' He wasn't the world's most religious man. And then the walk-up. You had to carry a baby carriage up three flights of stairs; and every time you had a baby, you had to worry about how you were gonna make it, how you were gonna pay for this kid. We had a good life. But it was hard in those years. Especially for Matilda." Finally, they moved to a $24,000 Cape Cod house. Mario finished the basement and the attic and added rooms—and they raised five kids there, with no outside help. It wasn't, by anyone's account, easy.

Cuomo came to prominence in New York City chiefly on the strength of his pro bono intervention on behalf of people in Corona who were fighting the city bureaucracy to keep their schools and homes from the bulldozer. Thereafter, Mayor John Lindsay asked him to mediate between the prosperous Jews of Forest Hills, Queens, and the city, which was planning to build housing for low-income and welfare families in Forest Hills. He achieved a successful compromise. And he was paid, in Corona, with jars of tomato sauce.

In his diaries, Cuomo writes of Matilda's being "understandably unhappy with the fact that I haven't been able to provide her with the things her friends have."

The Cuomos have two sons, Andrew and Christopher, and three daughters, Margaret, a radiologist; Maria, an entrepreneur; Madeline, a lawyer. They also have three grandchildren.

Maria is married to shoe designer Kenneth Cole. When the governor told his mother that Maria was going to marry Cole, he said, with some trepidation, "Ma, the first thing is, he's Jewish."

His mother said, "Jewish? That's nothing, they'll work that out. But why did she have to marry a shoemaker?"

When Ethel Kennedy, whose daughter Kerry is married to Cuomo's older son, Andrew, met the governor's mother, she said, "What an extraordinary woman, so poised."

"No, not poised, Ethel," the governor said. "What you mean is that she didn't fall down when she met a Kennedy."

Cuomo men mature early. Andrew is 34; he's been working for his father for 17 years. He started by putting up posters "and tearing down the other guy's. He had a couple of real big fist fights—it was terrible." By most accounts, Andrew's is the political voice the governor most closely heeds. His son was running the Bronx mayoralty headquarters in 1977 when he was only 19. The governor likes to tell stories about him:

"When he was thirteen, fourteen, he went into business cutting people's grass. He's tremendous with his hands—automobiles, engines of any kind. Took old lawnmowers, rebuilt them, used them. He went into business with Frankie Vitale, Pete-the-cop's son from next door. Their slogan was 'We Clip You Good.' He never took a penny from me to go to school. Went to Fordham—political science—and never took a penny. He worked on AAA emergency trucks all night every night. He'd sleep on the floor in the den next to the phone, with his grease-monkey outfit on, and if it rang, he'd get up, jump into a truck, go out on a call, come back. If he needed four hundred or five hundred dollars more, he'd go out, buy an old car and work on it for a week or two, and then sell it and make a couple hundred. Never came to us for a penny."

Andrew builds transitional, affordable housing for the homeless and the working poor, with construction grants from public sources. His nonprofit organization, HELP, also provides what he calls "a continuum of care"—day care, recreation, counseling, health care and other on-site services. The program has been called a model of its kind.

Christopher, the Cuomos' younger son, was only four years old when his father entered public life: "We went through all these experiences as a family, and that was beautiful. But Chris was locked out—he was too young."

Christopher greets his mother in the gubernatorial mansion she has had refurbished with money from the private sector. (It is difficult to imagine the restless governor sitting in designer Mark Hampton's tame, chintzy dining room, and equally difficult to imagine him denigrating Matilda's taste.) The good-looking young man is as sweet and loving and respectful as any parent could wish. He's just finished reading his father's diaries: "Man," he told his father, "you had a lot of guilt, always worrying about not doing enough for us." It's guilt that the 6'2", 211-pound Yale senior doesn't think his father earned. Christopher is captain of the rugby team. He's thinking about law school and already struggles with the inequities of the legal system. His fair brow is creased with concern.

In the renovated, blue-and-white-tiled kitchen of the mansion, Matilda keeps neat books labeled "Summer Recipes," "Winter Recipes." She cooks her husband's favorite foods on the weekends—lamb shanks baked till the meat falls off the bone, crisp potatoes.

The governor uses the family as a model for governing. This image ignites passions; it antagonizes some people who are in unconventional living arrangements. "I'm not talking about a paterfamilias, a mother figure, a father figure," he says. "I use the analogy in a slightly different way. The essence of the family is to share blessings and burdens. Families were organized in primitive times to protect against the beast, against alien forces. That notion of community, that notion of serving one another's needs, as simple as it is, is the essential notion. It's what we've been missing in our national government the past ten years, when we've had the period of the individual instead of the period of the community: 'God helps those whom God has helped. If He left you out, don't ask us to make the adjustment. If you're not making it, it must be that you did something wrong. All that the government will do for you is not get in your way and protect you against foreign enemies. For the rest, you're on your own. And if you're homeless, you probably need to be. And if you're poor, it's probably because you're lazy. We're not going to knock ourselves out helping you, you're supposed to help yourself. It's a government for the fit and the fortunate, and those not fit and less fortunate aren't our concern.' That kind of individualism they dressed up—you know, the pioneer heroes and frontier macho, the whole image was the individual who did it by himself. 'I don't need you and I don't need government.' Well, that's nice. Except the world isn't like that.

"I have these five beautiful kids, five great kids. Now if I had taken Andrew when he was two years old and emptied him out into South Jamaica as it is now, with people fornicating on the streets—I took the state police to visit there—three o'clock in the afternoon, on the damn street in the middle of the afternoon. Now, you put a kid out there where he learns to become familiar with the sound of gunfire before he ever hears an orchestra, and you tell me he's going to grow up to be Andrew who houses the homeless, who's charming, who marries Kerry Kennedy? If Margaret's mother had men over every night and was living on welfare, do you think Margaret was going to get to be a doctor? What is the chance that they're going to wind up that way? The difference between my kids and their kids is the accident of the environment. That kid you empty out into the street, he's going to need something, he can't do it on his own. And that's my emotional family, sharing my blessings and my burdens."

The man who might have been President says his private life "would probably be regarded as so drab, so boring, so one-dimensional, it would surprise people. Public life is a strain. Mayor David Dinkins is naturally public. He enjoys it so much, he'll make three, four, five stops a night, go to parties and stuff everywhere. At gunpoint, I might go to a party in Manhattan. Not because I don't like the people. But to put on a tuxedo and sit for an hour and a half at a table—you want me to make small talk? No."

This naturally brings us to a question he couches in somewhat different terms than I would: Should you judge an individual by his or her private life? "I think this is an easy question. I don't think it's a question of should. I think it's a question of, Do people judge that way? The answer is yes. So many do that it becomes a reality and must be dealt with by the public figure.

"If your private life proves to be an embarrassment to you in your public life, then that's it—you've asked for it. Gary Hart, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank. Can I make the argument that it should be irrelevant? Sure I can. I can make the argument that whatever the priest says from the pulpit, if it is beautiful and soaring and inspirational, that's what's important—not the fact that the priest is a good person. But if you discover that the priest is not a good person, it's going to affect the way you judge the sermon, whether it should or it shouldn't. Therefore, that becomes an operative fact. All the rest is academic talk."

He has been talking in a lawyerly way. But his dryness yields to vexation: "Now that you mention it, it's something of a pet peeve of mine. I don't want to hear that Abraham Lincoln had constipation, that he drank purple fluid—some stuff that they gave him, who knows what. Maybe his form of grappa, I don't care what it was. Abraham Lincoln is larger to me than Abraham Lincoln the grubby individual with dirt under his nails. Abraham Lincoln is an idea, political poetry, heroism, courage. I don't want to hear that Sir Thomas More was not a great man, that he had debilitating faults. I have plenty of reality in my life. What I want is the symbolism of him, the inspiration. Don't tell me about Joe DiMaggio and his personal life. Joe DiMaggio is the ultimate in grace and skill and beauty in a ballpark, and that's what counts. I don't want to hear that he was a cheapskate—which he might have been. So don't bother me with that.

"Now, all this is anti-intellectual. Well, so what? Who said the intellect is everything? Doesn't emotion count? Do you have to be purely intellectual? What a terrible way that would be. Imagine. Would you cry? Would you laugh?"

His face is the face of a man who's laughed and cried a lot.

Not long ago, he was asked whether he would make revelations about his personal life if he ran for office. He answered that he would—as soon as Bush did and to the extent that Bush did.

"Bush? Oh, Bush is a good man. He's American. He's honorable. He's sacrificing now to be President. I think his intent is good. I think he's probably a very civil kind of person, a man of civility. You say I'm describing a WASP? Could be. It's a definition that conforms to lots of things. He has to take abuse, he has to make terribly difficult judgments, he has to sacrifice his peace of mind, his family, he has to make his children vulnerable. If his son had been the son of an oil dealer, it's one thing. It's another thing if the son of the President is involved in the S&L scandal. He has to live with his conscience. He has to give instructions to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Why should I assume that wouldn't bother him as much as it would me? I assume it would." This is quintessential Cuomo: the compassion and the irony like a gleaming dagger.

•

His official plane, which is taking the governor and aides to a meeting of community leaders in Westchester, has been forced down 16 times because of mechanical problems. This is not reassuring. "The helicopter's worse," he says. What would happen if the plane crashed? "From this height?" the governor asks. "Splash. Splat. Listen—the worst you can do is get killed. The ultimate vindication comes after the plane goes down. Am I scared? I used to be concerned that if—God forbid—anything should happen, it would be bad for my family. They would still miss me a little bit, but it wouldn't be as bad as when they were very young. Couldn't hurt, really. It happens to so many people." Death, he means. "You're going to live forever? See, in my case, I have the exquisite-timing problem. If I wait too long, Matilda won't be able to marry again; and that's not fair, either."

Chit-chat on a stuttering plane.

"Would I read my kid's diary if he left it around? My answer to you is no," he says, leaving no room for doubt that the real answer is yes. "How could you resist it? What, are you crazy? If he's still in the house? If he's eighteen, nineteen, even twenty? What would drive you to read it would be sick curiosity. Or healthy curiosity. What you would provide as a rationale is: 'I have to know whether this kid is on drugs. Is he in trouble? I have an obligation to read it.' What happens when you find out he's got a girlfriend?

"Here's a true story that shows you how silly parents can be. Andrew is maybe seventeen years old, maybe sixteen. Of course, he's a very attractive kid and he has a lot of friends—and I don't like to think about that. I've never had a discussion with any of my kids about sex. Why? Number one: They know more than I do about it, it's an embarrassment. I don't like to have a discussion with them where they have the advantage. Secondly, parents are not the best place to get it from. So we don't get into things like that. But I know he has girlfriends and that's fine. I get up very early in the morning, it's still dark. And I forgot to put my stuff out the night before, so I have to feel around in my drawer for my briefs. The damn thing is empty, no briefs. Where could my briefs be? Uh-huh! I go upstairs to Andrew's bedroom. Andrew's sleeping. I go to the built-in drawers where I know he keeps his underwear, and I reach in and I feel around and I pull out what I think are a pair of my briefs. I go into the hall, close the door to his bedroom, and turn on the light to see what briefs I've come away with.

"Here are a pair of bikini briefs. With zebra stripes.

"I go crazy. What is this? This is terrible. I open his door. Matilda! Look at what your son is doing!"

The roar of the plane and his own laughter interrupt the governor's reminiscences. But not for long.

"Maria kept bringing home these boys. 'Dad,' she said, 'I don't ask you for a lot, can I ask you for one thing? Will you stop making those faces at the guys when they pick me up?'

" 'What faces?'

" 'Those terrible faces. Your face gets hard and cranky as soon as you meet them.'

"I was taken aback. I said, 'Have I ever said anything to any of them?'

" 'No,' she said, 'you don't have to. Just, "I'll be here when you get back." '

"They make you feel so foolish. What parenthood drives you to is really pathetic.

"I'm reluctant to give my own kids advice. I always start the same way, by apologizing. Let's face it. Who are we? Who are we to teach them about love when they heard us arguing in the bedroom? Who are we to teach them about making a better world when we gave them two wars? Who are we to teach them how to connect to God when we have failed so many times ourselves? Who are we to tell them not to worry about life when we're still scared to death about them? And I'll tell you something: When they get married, we'll be worried. When they have kids, we'll be worried. We'll never be confident that they can do it right. So let's abandon the notion of giving them any advice."

What he wants the kids to hear is: "We love you. Forgive us. We worry about you all the time. We make dumb mistakes. We're clumsy about it. But that's the way we are, and probably that's the way you're going to be. When does your obligation to your family end? Never. Not when you die. Never."

•

"I'll tell you a story. My mother is now eighty-nine. When she was well, she used to take a pregnant woman and say, 'I'm gonna tell you what the baby's gonna be, you wanna know?'

" 'Yes, Macula.'

"And she'd put a circle of salt on the floor and she'd say, 'Now I want you to sit in the middle of the circle. Now I want you to get up, but get up slowly.' So the woman would raise herself with her right hand or her left hand. And my mother would write on a card and put it in a jewelry box and lock the box. She says, 'When the baby comes, we'll open the box.' And they'd ask her, 'Macu, what's the important thing? Whether you used the right hand or the left hand?' When the woman had the baby, at the appropriate time she'd open the box. She was never wrong. Twenty times, twenty-five times, she was never wrong. But once my older brother—only my older brother would have had the nerve—said, 'But Ma, how do we know that you don't go back and change the cards? I'm not going to accuse you of that, we would never do that. I want to hear you tell me you don't do that.' She says, 'Shut up.'

"She didn't lie. There's cleverness in their wonderful superstition. A lot of it was a high form of cuteness."

Some people would say that a high form of cuteness is a lot of what Mario Cuomo is about. He doesn't lie.

"I never tell a lie," a 17th Century monk, Sarpi, said. "I never tell a lie, but the truth not to everybody."

•

Cuomo strikes one as a penitential kind of person. Almost everyone who has spent any time with him remarks on this. Maybe it's just a finely honed sense of that inner dislocation and universal alienation we call original sin. Maybe. There are clues in the Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo, but it would take a hound of God to unravel their elliptical meaning:

Has anything ever been so useless as the momentary acclaim of a world that does not know you, no matter how 'public'? Glory? The fear of shame and rejection is much more powerful a force than the desire for glory.... How you are troubled to think that even being troubled is cause for guilt. Because it's selfish.... As long as you are selfish ... you are doomed to frustration. 'Me' is a bottomless pit which cannot be filled, no matter how much achievement, glory or acclaim you try shoveling into it. If only we were good enough to do perfectly what we know would work perfectly. But we can't.... Because being required to love denies me too many of the delights of being loved or applauded or smiled upon. And if that is the case, then aren't you silly—as Matilda would say—because you know those delights don't last. You've tried them. You've had them. They don't work.... For God's sake, you know the truth! The truth is that the only way to make anything of your life is to be what you know you're supposed to be, to fight the good fight. To finish the race, to keep the faith.... I've not—truly enough—kept the faith. I've hurt people by bad example, even ... my own family.... That is the truth and it is part of the pain in my chest.... The desire for the transitory.... I have never had as much to undo as I do now and I have never had as much to compensate for as I do now.

Is guilt a form of narcissism, a perverse form of self-admiration? "No," he says. "Narcissism is seeing yourself as more beautiful than you are. Guilt may well be seeing yourself as uglier than you are. Excessive guilt can be as disgusting as narcissism and as self-indulgent as narcissism, but I don't think they're the same."

"What makes you happy?"

"That's a hard one," he says.

"Would you rather be amused or be amusing?"

An uncharacteristically long pause. "I guess I would rather be amusing so I could amuse those I love and make them happy—which would make me happy. And that's a perfect answer to both questions—if it's true."

•

We have come from a community meeting in Pleasantville—an affluent Westchester suburb—to see, the governor says with a certain lack of tact, "what the rich people are complaining about." He has charmed and mollified them. And now he is a guest on a talk show. "The whole country's going down the sewer," he says. If there's one thing Americans think they understand, it's why the country is going down the sewer. A fellow named Chris calls in, surly, disaffected. The host threatens to cut him off. But Cuomo wants to pursue his line of reasoning:

Chris: This state used to be called the Empire State. What a joke.

Cuomo: What do you do, Chris?

Chris: I drive a school bus.

Cuomo: OK, are you driving today? No? Good, because you're all aggravated. God forbid you get behind a wheel.

(Chris sounds apoplectic, increasingly incoherent with rage.)

Cuomo: Nice and quiet, calma, calma, Chris. Go ahead.

Chris: We're seeing an insane crime wave in the time that you've been governor.

Cuomo: Hold it a second, Chris. Hold it! Where does this state stand compared to other states?

Chris: This state is the disaster of the United States.

Cuomo: Hey, Chris, can I tell you something? You don't know what you're talking about. We're about ninth on the FBI list. We have built more prisons, we have the best correction system in the United States. We don't have a single federal violation. I built twenty-seven thousand cells. Nobody even came close to us. What would you suggest, Chris?

Chris: Get the chair back in Sing Sing, that's all you have to do. It will cut the crime rate in half in six months.

Cuomo: Hey, relax, Chris, you need a doctor. Listen to me, Chris. What do you think the crime rate was when we had the chair? Higher or lower?

Chris: The crime rate is ten times higher without the chair.

Cuomo: Are you sure you drive a school bus? What do you do, take pills? Do you take Valium? How do you do it?

(Chris curses the governor and calls him a hypocrite. The governor asks Chris if he's thin-skinned.)

Chris: You're a Judas Iscariot. You disgrace the Catholic Church!

Cuomo: This is good, this is good. Chris, you're for the death penalty? The Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is wrong.

Chris: No they don't. They approve.

The governor is having a good time.

•

The governor is a religious man. It makes Americans nervous when their elected officials act as if their actions might be governed by their relationship with the Almighty. Presidents are supposed to go decorously to church once a week and invoke God's name in times of war or natural disasters.

Bigotry—which Cuomo equates with stupidity—is far from dead. A lot of people are scared by the prospect of a Catholic in the White House. The rabid Know-Nothing anti-Catholicism of the 19th Century has virtually died. "Kennedy had something to do with it," says Cuomo. "But I'll tell you what had a lot to do with it: the abortion argument in recent days. It's clear now that you can be a Catholic and not feel compelled to do everything that every bishop would instruct you to do. The ultimate norm of right conduct is living in conformity with a well-prepared conscience."

The governor has evoked the ire of New York's Cardinal O'Connor for his stand on abortion, just as he has felt the wrath of proponents of the death penalty for his opposition to capital punishment. Some of his critics have seen an inconsistency in his supporting Roe vs. Wade while opposing the death penalty. I had trouble understanding why he cited "lack of consensus and an absence of a plurality of opinion" as factors contributing to his not opposing abortion. After all, there is no evident plurality of opinion against the death penalty, either. He doesn't see it that way: "I do not say that for a Catholic it would be wrong to kill. In self-defense—to protect Matilda—I probably, under exactly the right circumstances, would feel justified in killing to protect another life. You might even make the case that you were required to defend your own life, which really belongs to God, even to the extent of killing someone.

"But I believe the death penalty as a civic response to murder is demeaning, debasing, degenerate, unavailing. It probably makes things worse instead of better. It does not deter, but, rather, encourages further violence because it is an instruction in violence. It's the whole government saying, 'This is the best we can do when confronted with the ultimate violence.' It is unfair because, in our particular kind of democracy it almost always will be applied to madmen and madwomen who volunteer for it, or to people who can't afford the best lawyers. It is used to eclipse more intelligent responses to crime, and I am passionately against it.

"The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is wrong. The Church teaches now that life begins at conception. I pause to remind you that this has not always been the teaching. But I accept it to be a Catholic tenet now, because I'm living now.

"When we had children, we lived by that rule. That's fine. But that's nobody's business. That's my business, Matilda's business, maybe my confessor's business. I happen to share it with you now, and I shared it with the public in a speech at Notre Dame to make a point.

"Now comes an entirely different question: What is and should be the law for this pluralist democratic society? The democracy has created a law, through the Supreme Court, that says a woman under certain circumstances will have the right to an abortion. Are you permitted to live by the law if you are the governor? Are you permitted to say 'I will protect your rights under Roe vs. Wade'? Of course you are. As a matter of fact, you are obliged to do that as governor. The oath you take as governor is to support the constitutional law. Does the Church allow you to do that? The answer is yes. The Church has always said that you must act prudentially, on the civic side, as your conscience instructs.

"Take birth control, a better example than abortion because it's clearer. Are you telling me that all the cardinals and bishops who vote for politicians ardently in favor of birth control are committing sins? Are you telling me that all the cardinals and bishops and monsignors who are ignoring their chances in the pulpit on Sunday to condemn birth control are doing something wrong? What is it that allows the Church to acquiesce in your use of birth control—notwithstanding that they teach that it is a violation of natural law? It is called prudential judgment. Allowing people to live by their consciences and by the law in a democratic society—that doesn't violate anything I believe as a Catholic.

"In this country there is no law that says abortion is wrong. If it becomes the law, then you have to live by that law. If the law says it's murder, it is murder by the civic law."

•

We are back on the airplane. He says he is distrutto—destroyed—operatic Italian for tired. He hasn't eaten all day. The kitchen, under Matilda's supervision, has provided bagged turkey sandwiches. We all eat; he doesn't. He is sitting across from an aide, a good-looking woman. He flirts with her with no lack of propriety—just enough to satisfy the demands of chivalry.

"What would you say if the plane went down, Governor?"

"Good-bye. Depends on whether you're an eschatologist. If you're an eschatologist, you say, 'See you later. Ciao. See you in a little while.'

"Mangia, Grizzuti—eat. What are you afraid of? What's the matter with you? You're going to embarrass us. Come on, this is nice, calm." The plane bumps along; he sings a Neapolitan song to distract me.

He anticipates a question I have in mind. (He's being awfully generous, considering he's distrutto.)

"How did you know?" I ask.

"How did I know? I know you.

"How do I know you? I've been married to you. I was a son of yours. I was a father of yours. I was a brother of yours. How do I know you? Ask the question."

The question has entirely slipped my mind.

The plane rackets to a landing, and he says: "See? We're home, we're safe—and you gave us credit for nothing, you shamed us as Italians. I'm going to start telling people you're Norwegian. Harrison, what's that? I don't want to know."

•

It is abundantly clear that our shared ease is contingent in part upon my not asking the governor whether he will run for higher office. When he announced his decision not to run, he was asked if he'd change his mind if the budget problems were resolved by mid-January: "It could happen that within ten days the legislature will come to their senses," he said. And, although his answer was hardly an answer at all, one could feel the spirits in the room lift. He does that, he is immensely seductive. As for 1996? "It's an aeon away, an aeon and a half. Between now and then," he said, quoting an Italian proverb, "a pope will be born."

He's irascible, people said; he'd make a fabulous President but a lousy campaigner. When he was playing minorleague ball in Florida, he punched a catcher in the face—the catcher was wearing a mask at the time. It was youthful irascibility; he hasn't punched anybody lately. But he doesn't suffer fools (like Senator Al D'Amato) gladly: For a while it looked as if he might punch him. One might just as easily point to his compassion as to his irascibility. At a meeting in a church basement, he answers the rambling question of a drunk who wanders in from the Bowery. Everybody else is trying to shut the drunk up. Cuomo addresses him with kindness untainted by condescension.

Is he coy? It is possible that my affection perverts my judgment; I didn't perceive him this way. His coyness could, with generosity, be read as prudence: You might say that he flirted with us, teased us with possibilities. You could also say that he weighed and balanced his husbandly and fatherly obligations, his obligation to the State of New York and the contribution he might make to the Union, and believed in conscience that the moment was not his to grasp. ("The heart of God is boundless," Teilhard wrote, "and yet in all that immensity there is only one possible place for each one of us at any given moment, the one we are led to by unflagging fidelity to the natural and supernatural duties of life.")

It's true, but frivolous, to say that he hates to sleep in any but his own bed. When he made a trip to Japan, he asked if it all, including speeches and travel, could be done in three days. The idea of spending 50 days in Iowa does not make his heart glad. But Cuomo is also a man who steels himself to the course if he sees the path straight before him.

There is no evidence to indicate that Cuomo is afraid of Mafia connections being unearthed. The governor even jokes about it: "I have a nightmare. I'm in Brooklyn, and some clown says, 'Hey, Mario, let me take a picture.' Sure, I say, and there's John Gotti standing next to me." It's not his bogeyman.

To say that the scent of failure is an intoxicant to him would not explain why he didn't run in 1988. To say that he's morbidly afraid of failure wouldn't explain why he ran for governor when pollsters gave him no chance to win against New York City mayor Ed Koch.

Maybe he is good. Maybe we have forgotten how to recognize goodness. Maybe he is dutiful. Maybe he's a sublime pragmatist. Maybe he will "jettison the form which his labor or art or thought first took, and go in search of new forms." (That's Teilhard again.) Maybe "over again he must go beyond himself, tear himself away from himself, leaving behind him his most cherished beginnings."

How I wish he had run! For the pure fun—the absolute joy of it.

•

He is on the basketball court, playing with Christopher and with members of the staff. Naked to the waist, stripped of his elegant tailored suit, he is fit and fast. He has that strange, intense look—both alert and inward-looking—that men have only in the sports arena and in bed. "Play the game," he calls out.

"Life is motion, not joy," he says. You can't demand joy or be reasonably sure you create it or grab a piece of it: "The one thing you must insist on and you can control is motion: You move, you function, you work, you don't run away, you don't despair, you don't quit, you don't die, you don't sit in a corner with your thumb in your mouth chanting your mantra, you don't slip into your bed and pull the comforter over your head so they can't find you.

"How will I know that I'm justified? How will I know that I've done the right thing? There's only one rule that you can use with perfect assurance to measure yourself, and that is: I have to be sure I tried.

"The game is lost only when we stop trying."

" 'Volatile is Sicilian. Volatile is Calabrese. Me, I'm Neapolitan. Where the music comes from.' "