Interface (73 page)

From the balcony of her hotel suite along Congress Plaza
overlooking the heart of Grant Park, Mary Catherine could see the
barbecue developing through most of the day. Around five
p.m.,
when the afternoon heat was starting to subside, the smoke rising
up from all of those barbecue pits began to look appetizing, and so
she put on a sundress. It was rather prim by the standards of an
urban beach on a hot summer day, but racy by the standards of
candidates' wives and daughters. Furthermore, it was light and
loose enough that she could play Softball in it, though sliding into
base would be out of the question. Since her display of place-hitting acumen in Tuscola on the Fourth of July, being spunky and athletic
had become part of her job description.

She took the elevator down to the street and strolled through the
park. Mary Catherine could now stroll anywhere in Chicago,
wearing any clothing she wanted, at any time of the day or night,
because she was always followed by Secret Service agents. She had
decided that armed guards were a great thing and that every girl
should have a few.

The barbecue couldn't just be a plain old barbecue. It had to be
built around some kind of a central media concept. In this case, the
concept was that all of the various regions of the United States were
competing to see where the best barbecuing was done. Mary
Catherine strolled among the smoking beef pits, from Texas, North
Carolina, Kansas City, and decided that, beyond providing her
with a quick take-out dinner, comparative barbecue was not very
interesting to her.

Flocks of black birds, just like the ones Mel had raved about,
swirled around the grassy areas scavenging the ends of french fries.
One of Dad's favorite sixties rock bands was playing in the
bandshell to the north, but she found their songs just one step above
Muzak. To the south, on Hutchinson Field, a number of
impromptu games were underway: touch football, frisbee, softball,
volleyball. She didn't feel like getting sweaty just yet, and stayed
close to the footpaths, which were lined with double rows of shade
trees.

Across Lakeshore Drive, along the border of the yacht basin,
things were much quieter and several degrees cooler. The basin was
dotted with numbered white-and-blue buoys where recreational
boats could tie up. There was no beach here, just a stone seawall with one or two depressed platforms where boats could take on or
discharge passengers. A couple of big tour boats were circulating
between these sites and the open lake, taking people on free rides
so that they could appreciate the splendour of the Loop as seen
from Lake Michigan. That looked cool and relaxing, so Mary Catherine climbed on board one of the boats, sat down in a deck
chair, and took her freshly barbecued hamburger out of its wrapper. She and her Secret Service agents were the last persons to cross the
gangplank; within a few moments the boat was motoring out
through a broad avenue between the white buoys, headed for a gap
in the breakwater.

As she was polishing off the last of her hamburger, a woman
separated herself from the crowd of people standing along the railing of the boat and approached her. She was black, nicely
dressed, probably in her forties but capable of looking younger. She
" moved with unusual confidence through the loose picket fence of
Secret Service agents, giving each of the guards a knowing smile
and a nod. She had a nice face and a nice smile. "Hello," she said,
gesturing to an empty deck chair next to Mary Catherine. "Is this
taken?"

"Go ahead," Mary Catherine said. "You're not from around
here, are you?"

The woman laughed. "Eleanor Richmond. It's nice to meet
you, Ms. Cozzano," she said, extending her hand.

"Nice to meet you," Mary Catherine said, shaking it. "I'm sorry
I didn't recognize you right away - I've seen you several times on
TV."

"Several times. Well, you are one attentive TV watcher. I
haven't been on that many times."

"I watch Dr. Lawrence's program pretty regularly," Mary
Catherine said, "and he seemed to like you."

"He hates me," Eleanor said, "but I do wonders for his ratings. And, I suspect, for his fantasy life."

"I was so sorry to hear about Senator Marshall," Mary Catherine
said.

"Thank you," Eleanor said graciously.

Caleb Roosevelt Marshall had gone back to his ranch in south
eastern Colorado "to clear some brush" in the third week of July. The doctors, aides, and bodyguards who traveled with him all the
time had arisen early one morning to find his bed empty.
Eventually they had found him on the top of a mesa. He had ridden
up there before dawn, watched the sun rise over the prairie, and then blown his heart out with a double-barrelled shotgun.

He left letters addressed to several people: his staff, various senate
colleagues, old friends, old enemies, and the President. Most of the
contents of these letters were never revealed, partly because they
were private and partly because many of them were unprintable.
The President read his letter - two lines scrawled over a piece of
senate stationery - threw it into the fire, and ordered a double
Scotch from the White House bar.

Eleanor's note said, "You know what to do - Caleb. P.S. Watch
your back."

They flew his body back to the Rotunda, where it lay in state for
twenty-four hours, and then they flew him back to Colorado,
where he was cremated and his ashes spread over his ranch. As per
Marshall's written instructions, Eleanor ran the office for the next
two weeks, while the Governor of Colorado debated whom to
appoint to replace Marshall.

He ended up appointing himself. The polls indicated that many
Coloradans took a dim view of this, seeing it as naked opportunism.
But his first official act was to fire Eleanor Richmond. That
announcement sent his approval rating sky-high.

"I hope you get a good job," Mary Catherine said, "you deserve
one."

"Thanks," Eleanor said. "I've had some feelers. Don't worry
about me."

"You know, as a person who was raised Catholic, I have to take
a dim view of suicide," Mary Catherine said, "but I think that what
the Senator did was incredibly noble. It's hard to imagine any
Washington person having that much backbone."

Eleanor smiled. "Caleb felt the same way. And apparently he said
so in some of the notes he left behind."

Mary Catherine threw back her head and laughed. "Are you kidding? He taunted people-

"-for not having the guts to commit suicide," Eleanor said,
"which would be the only decent way out for some people in
D.C."

"Are you here as an observer," Mary Catherine said, "or are you
a participant?"

"This whole thing is so slick I'm not sure there's a difference,"
Eleanor said.

"I hear you," Mary Catherine said.

"But to answer your question, I was invited here for the debate."

"Debate?"

"Yes. Thursday night. After
The Simpsons
and before
L.A. Law.
All of the potential running mates are going to fight it out."

"He's considering you as a running mate?" Mary Catherine
asked. She was embarrassed to have been so surprised. Eleanor was
looking at her knowingly and indulgently. "I mean, don't get me
wrong, you'd be great," Mary Catherine said. "You'd be fantastic.
But I hadn't heard any of this."

"Honey, remember how this works," Eleanor said. "Neither
your dad nor any other candidate is going to pick a black woman
as a running mate anytime soon - and if they did, they'd never pick
me. But he does get some brownie points - as it were - for putting
one in the final four. And that's why I'm invited."

"Well, I'll definitely look forward to the debate."

"How about you? What's your role in all this?" Eleanor said, sweeping her hand across the smoking panorama of the barbecue.

Mary Catherine looked at the view and considered this question.
She knew now why she had chosen to go on the boat ride: to get
away, to stand back from things, to look at her life from a distance.
The same impulse had probably struck most of the people on the
boat. This conversation with Eleanor was just what she had been looking for.

She trusted Eleanor instinctively and wanted to tell her the truth:
that something was wrong with her father. That during the last
couple of months she had watched his every move, listened to his
every utterance, used every scrap of her neurological training to piece
together the puzzle of what was happening inside his brain. That she
was spending a couple of hours a day with him in intensive, private
therapy, trying to bring him back. And that the further she got into this thing, the lonelier she got, the more scared she became.

But she couldn't quite say that yet. So she had to play the
airhead. "Who the hell knows?" she said.

Eleanor put one hand over her mouth, in a gesture that was
incongruous and cute in a tough middle-aged woman, and
laughed.

Mary Catherine continued, "My role is to be pretty, but not too pretty; smart, but not too; athletic, but not too. I think what they
really wanted was a nice college girl. You know, the kind of girl
who could go to college campuses in jeans and a sweater and sit
cross-legged on the floor in dorm loungers and rap with her peers.
They got a neurologist instead. And there's only so many AIDS
babies I can kiss before that gets kind of old. So my life is on hold
for a while until things settle down."

"Well, we all go through transitions," Eleanor said. "This sort of
thing - a big campaign - is a kind of upheaval that can be useful."

"Useful how?"

"It shakes everything up. Everything's in flux for a moment, you
have the chance to go off in new directions, fix old problems in
your life. Believe me on this."

Mary Catherine smiled. "I believe you," she said.

Ever since the beginning of William A. Cozzano's National Town
Meeting, the high-tech wristwatch strapped to Floyd Wayne
Vishniak's arm had been flaring into action several times a day,
confronting him with live coverage of the events that were taking
place only a couple of hundred miles away. He welcomed the free
entertainment, which took his mind off the stupid work he was
doing.

He had lived for quite some time now on a meager unemployment check, and had long since given up trying to find himself a
job. But now, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, by virtue of the PIPER
watch on his arm, had become, in effect, a personal adviser to
Governor Cozzano. It was a weighty responsibility. He was not
going to sit around in his trailer drinking beer and acting like some
kind of a buffoon. He was going to educate himself. He was going
to start paying attention to the presidential campaign and learn
about all of the candidates and the issues.

A week or two after he had first donned the PIPER watch, back
in June, Vishniak had been in downtown Davenport to take care of
a bit of business, and he had seen a cluster of newspaper machines
on a street corner. In addition to the Quad Cities paper and
The Des
Moines Register,
these included the
Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The
New York Times,
and
The Wall Street Journal.
As it happened, his
pockets were heavy with quarters, and so he brought a copy of
each, blowing two and a half dollars. He took them all back to his
trailer and read them. There was some interesting stuff in there.

Since then it had become a habit. Two and a half bucks a day,
six days a week, added up to fifteen bucks, plus an additional five
bucks on Sunday made twenty bucks a week. Eighty dollars a
month. On Floyd Wayne Vishniak's budget it was a lot of money.
He had cut back on his beer consumption, and, as the summer
wore on and the tassels began to sprout from the corn, he had taken
a job detasseling.