Sanders gets quickly out and heads for the front porch of the apartment on the left, passing the grim kids as if they weren’t there, while Thabault, the alderman, a trim, mild-looking man in his mid-30s in shirtsleeves and carrying a clipboard and pad, hurries to catch up. The mayor is all business, knocking brusquely at the screened door. He’s a tall man, well over six feet, but slightly stooped, not so much bent by the burdens of life as poised in careful preparation to spring, like a tennis player waiting for the serve. His tangled, prematurely gray hair is unfashionably long and looks permanently uncombed. He wears thick glasses of the plastic horn-rimmed variety preferred by serious graduate students in the 1950s, a striped short-sleeved shirt with the tail flapping over the baggy seat of dark brown corduroy trousers. His shoes are the kind of orange, moccasin-toed work shoes made in Taiwan and sold at K-Mart. On the basis of appearance alone, Alderman Thabault looks more like the mayor than the mayor, while the mayor looks like a maverick in an eastern-university philosophy department who persists in embarrassing his colleagues, making them wish they’d never tenured him.

Emerging from the darkness of the rooms beyond, a young woman suddenly appears at the door and says to Sanders, “Oh, hi!” as if to an old friend dropping by for a beer. She has the same pale, almost pink, blond hair as the kids on the sidewalk, and she’s extremely pregnant.

In a spluttering burst of words with a pace and curl that are distinctly Brooklyn, Sanders announces that he’s the mayor and this is Alderman Thabault here and they’re out tonight visiting the people in Ward Five just to talk to the folks and see how things are. “We’re here to listen to complaints. But we also want to hear about the good things, too,” he adds, passing her a thin smile. Abruptly, he stops smiling and waits for the woman’s response.

“I recognized you from TV,” she says, and she visors her eyes against the setting sun with her hand and takes a step back, as if to get a better look.

Sanders says, “So we’re just here to find out if everything’s okay, if, you know, there’s anything in particular you want to talk about with us.” He pauses. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” she says. She turns around and hollers to a figure in the kitchen behind her, a shirtless man at the table. “It’s Bernie Sanders! The mayor!” The shirtless man doesn’t answer or move.

“So ... everything’s okay?” Sanders repeats.

“Yeah, sure, Bernie.”

He takes a step away, points to Thabault, says, “This here’s your alderman, so get in touch with him if you need anything, or else call me down at city hall, okay?” Then he retreats, almost falling over the yellow plastic tricycle at the bottom of the steps. The young woman at the screened door waves slowly at him. Still smiling, she says, “‘Bye, Bernie,” then orders her two kids in for supper and retreats to the kitchen.