The Glory Hand (4 page)

'Obscene
.' Cassie laughed and pulled the dress on over her head. The filmy cloth stretched taut across her hips and breasts, accentuating them.

'Now into your Sunday School dress before your mother has a cow.'

'Cassie
?' from downstairs.

'Take off your shoes,' Cassie said.

'What?'

Cassie pulled off Robin's high-heeled white sandals and slipped them on. She unclasped the barrette that held a bun neatly on her head and shook out her long chestnut hair,

letting it
cascade
around her shoulders. With a flick of a finger, she adjusted a wave seductively over one eye. 'Your mother's going to
shit,'
Robin said.

Chapter 3

Cassie strained against the seat belt for a last glimpse of the island out of the porthole: Nantucket lay on the ocean a thousand feet below, soft and warm in the sunlight, like a puppy asleep on a porch. Woods Hole would be cold and dank, she brooded, gray with the thick fog that hugged the south coast of Cape Cod until the beginning of summer. The riveted steel walls of the helicopter confined her like a prison, and she wished she could turn on a blast of air, the way she could on a jet. But Navy helicopters had no such luxuries, she knew from the tedious journeys she'd taken on them with her father. They weren't designed for comfort -just to get you there.

If she and her mother really
had
to go, they should have taken the ferry across Nantucket Sound - it would have been a lot easier on her stomach. But of course her mother never would have agreed to that. Cassie glanced over at her: judging from her tense squint, her drawn lips, even a thousand feet high was too close to the sea for comfort.

Ann's left hand rested on Cassie's, as cold as the silver ring on her finger. It seemed she was staring out a private window only she could see through, as if today the Chill arose from a place closer than the sea, from inside her. It didn't make sense - she hadn't noticed the dress Cassie had
^w
°rn, or Robin's high-heeled sandals . . . not even the lipstick and rouge. Nothing seemed to get a rise out of her, and that troubled Cassie. It was as though the familiar part of her mother, the part that she thought she understood, had gone numb.

Ann seemed just as oblivious to her own appearance. Her makeup, usually meticulous, understated, when she was to appear in public beside her husband, had been carelessly applied: the mascara was smeared below her eyes, the rouge on her cheeks streaked. And though she wore a beige-linen Givenchy suit from the 'right' boutique in Georgetown (with opaque stockings to hide the scars on her legs) she had forgotten to wear the simple gold necklace and diamond-stud earrings, the orchid-patterned Gucci silk scarf, accessories that the media man on the Senator's staff had recommended 'to project the right image.' It seemed the only thing she
hadn't
forgotten was the antique silver ring in the shape of a hand, the ring Cassie hated.

Maybe she's freaking out. Maybe she's played the role of Senator's wife once too often, and it's finally gotten to her.

Cassie knew her mother had only endured the Washington luncheon circuit, the vapid Senator's wives, out of love for Clay. She had often wondered if Ann Cunningham had known what she was getting into when she'd gone to Cliffs Edge after graduating from college and had fallen in love with a Nantucket 'lifer,' a man she had once thought of as the kid who repainted her father's boat every summer. The Cunninghams had disowned her - until Clay had started to 'make it.' The rest was crazy, Cassie thought: the more Clay Broyles' political career had taken him away from the island, the more her mother had wanted to spend time there.

Which made her decision to leave Cliff's Edge today all the more puzzling.

Ann was squeezing her left hand into a fist, clenching it so tightly that the ring's pointed silver fingers must be hurting her, Cassie thought. Yet the way Ann continued to stare straight ahead, her eyes dulled, it was as if the discomfort were insignificant compared to some deep, unspoken pain.

'Mother?'

Ann turned to Cassie, her eyes slowly focusing, as if the dark meanderings of her thoughts had led her back to a single concern. 'Your hair . . . We've got to do something about your hair, Cassie.' She fumbled under the seat, but before Cassie could protest, Ann's voice faded: 'I must have left my purse back at the house . . .' She retreated again into herself, the matter apparently forgotten. Cassie stared into her eyes for an explanation - they were the gunmetal gray of the ocean sky that looked as though it could shift violently to a storm at any moment.

The helicopter shuddered in a downdraft, and Cassie's stomach turned over. Her mother's depression - if that was what it was - Cassie couldn't help but hold herself responsible and wonder whether what had happened last night had pushed her over the edge. If she hadn't snuck out with Todd ... if she had come home for dinner with her mother . . . would that have made the difference?

The helicopter plummeted into a maze of armor plate and barbed wire. The Woods Hole Naval Shipyard seemed to Cassie like a confusion of sharp steel edges at war with each other, like her feelings. Even from a hundred feet in the air, one rumpled figure stood out among the immaculate white uniforms, and the sight came as an enormous relief.

God, I don't get enough of him.

She had inherited Clay Broyles' stubbornness - 'pig-headedness' his opponents in the Senate had called it - but thank God, he had always joked, she hadn't inherited his looks: the pugnacious, out-thrust jaw that dared an adversary to land the first punch, the saddle-nose that had been broken three times when he had boxed in the Navy. He was heavy and thick-boned where her mother's features were fragile, aristocratic, and he still looked like a fighter, Cassie thought, though judging from the paunch he'd acquired over the years in Washington, a fighter who'd broken training. With her mother suddenly a stranger to her, Cassie longed for the directness of his flag-blue eyes.

Buffeted by a stiff breeze, the helicopter settled to earth
^w
ith what seemed to Cassie an agonizing slowness. Below, her father shifted from one foot to the other on the cement, and turned up the collar of his tweed jacket against the gale from the chopper blades, his red hair flecked with gray blowing wildly. The rough edges that made him look and act like a Washington outsider had worked to his advantage, Cassie knew. An upstart lawyer in Nantucket, then

District Attorney in Boston, he had defeated the slick four-term Senate incumbent in a groundswell of anti-Washington sentiment. Now, even after almost two terms, he still didn't
look
like the Washington politician. Cassie smiled: his pants were too baggy, his shoes scuffed. He tugged at his unfashionably wide necktie to straighten it, but only succeeded in pulling it more askew. Before the rotor blades stopped spinning, he was running over to the helicopter, surprisingly light on his feet for a man who was a good twenty-five pounds over what he called 'fighting weight.'

God, I don't get enough of him.

The hatch of the helicopter swung open, and to Cassie's surprise, her mother rushed down the aisle ahead of her into his arms. Ann had always been reluctant to show affection in public, yet despite the TV cameras focusing on them, she held him tightly, her eyes closed as if to shut out everything but the feeling of his body against hers. His bear-hug seemed to revive her smile, bring the color back to her cheeks. It must have been Clay - or the lack of him -Cassie thought, that had troubled her mother so.

When he held Ann at arm's length his smile faded. 'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine.'

'But... I wasn't expecting you.'

'Surprise,' she said with a brittle laugh.

It did nothing to erase the puzzled look on his face. Despite the camera lenses targeted on them, he spoke with his usual bluntness: 'Ann, what the hell's going on?'

When her reply was an unconvincing smile, he turned to Cassie and swept her up in his arms: 'Cassandra!' He stood back to get a good look at her, raising an eyebrow at the skimpy dress, the makeup. She felt ashamed of her appearance, ashamed to have embarrassed him in public. But he didn't mention it. 'What in God's name ever got you off the island? Did Todd run off with Robin, or what?'

Cassie glanced towards her mother.

He took Ann's hand as if he understood her neediness, if not the reason for the sudden visit. 'Come on,' he whispered as he led Cassie and her mother past the honor guard standing at attention on the asphalt apron. 'Let's get this damn thing over with.'

It was only when they had left the helicopter pad that Cassie realized the gray structures towering over them weren't buildings, but warships, as gigantic and as cold as icebergs. The searing yellow flames of acetylene torches were welding steel into cruisers and destroyers in dry docks ten stories high. Ahead of them, poised on a launching ramp and draped with red, white and blue bunting, was a submarine as sleek as a shark. An audience of Navy men faced it in reverent silence, like a congregation before an altar in church.

To reach the reviewing stand, they had to walk along the breakwater, so close to the water's edge that Cassie could taste the salt spray. Her mother must have been desperate to be with Clay, she thought, to risk the Chill that surely lay in wait for her here. She glanced over at her: Ann had slipped on her best wife-of-the-Senator smile for the cameras.

An Admiral with bushy white eyebrows and a stoop shook Clay's hand, and when introduced to Cassie and Ann, gave the expected
what a lovely family
response before seating them on folding chairs beside the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gripping the podium like a pulpit, the Admiral lauded the 'Space Age' submarine behind them, thanking Cassie's father, Massachusetts' 'favorite son,' who had pushed through its funding (over $600 million), and patting himself on the back for seeing the project through. Cassie scanned the audience that sat stiffly before them. They were the same faces she had seen at other such tedious rituals; 'filler,' she called the bureaucrats and military men who got paid as much for suffering through these meaningless speeches as for
doing
anything.

She read the name on the prow of the submarine: USS WILL ROGERS. Hadn't Will Rogers said, 7
never met a man I didn't like
'? It was her father's favorite quote. To name a ship designed to
kill
people after the man who had said that was
sick.

g.h.-b

The Admiral droned on, and Cassie tuned out. Her mother could make her sit here, but she couldn't make her listen. Her eyes were drawn to the ocean, and she strained to see Nantucket across the sound, but the sea and the sky had clamped together, an identical battleship gray, welded into a seam at the horizon.

I could have been out with Todd on his boat right now, and . . .

The odor of 'Old Spice' brought Cassie back to the reviewing stand. Wayne Runtledge, her father's new 'assistant,' smiled ingratiatingly and sat down beside her. She avoided his gaze. Runtledge had first been introduced to her at a speech her father had given at the Rotarians' convention two weeks before in Boston (she had only agreed to go along because it was a chance to visit Robin at boarding school nearby). Though Robin had thought Runtledge was sexy, Cassie hated him immediately, because she was sure he wasn't really one of her father's assistants at all. The truth was painfully obvious: the other members of the Senatorial staff were smooth Ivy Leaguers who wore muted pinstripes and carried hand-sewn leather attache cases, but Runtledge had a crewcut so short his scalp showed through, a Marine tattoo on his wrist . . . and a telltale bulge under the left armpit of his rumpled sharkskin suit. Cassie wondered if her father's closed-door Senate hearings into organized crime had put him in some kind of danger, or if it was just his sudden prominence as a Presidential hopeful that explained why he had been assigned a bodyguard. In either case, she resented the way Runtledge intruded on what few private moments with her father she had left. For revenge, she had branded him 'Runt.' The label stuck -even her father had started calling -him that behind his back.

Runt squirmed in his chair and she folded her arms tightly over her chest to keep him from getting a look down her dress.

Polite applause told her that the Admiral had ended his speech, and when her father stood up and walked to the podium, Cassie joined in the standing ovation.

But Ann wasn't clapping.

As soon as Clay left their side, Cassie saw dread creep into her mother's eyes. Her lips were drawn tight, her body stiff and tense . . . Cassie wondered whether her mother was listening to the same shrill voices in her mind that had clashed last night.

She was grateful when her father cut his remarks short, and began following the Admiral up the wooden steps of the scaffolding to a wind-whipped platform that extended out over the waves, facing the prow of the submarine. The Navy band struck up 'Anchors Aweigh,' and Cassie winced. Band music was just noise, she and her mother had decided at another, equally tedious patriotic event (was it at Newport News? Annapolis?) - the only real music was what you could dance to. She turned to her mother to exchange the undercover grimace they'd perfected to elude the eyes of the cameras.