The Governor's Lady (12 page)

“You got your hand on the wheel,” she said the first time he did it.

“Well, not much,” he said. “It’s a matter of degree.”

They took it real slow, and after a little nervousness at the start from all that slipping and sliding on top of the books, she began to enjoy herself.

“I guess Mama and Papa won’t mind,” she said.

“Oh, no. It’s just a short trip. We’ll be back home before you know it. Before they know it. And remember, this is just between us, okay?”

“Okay. This iddn’t hard.”

“Automatic and power steering. Anybody can drive one of these things.”

“I think I’m getting pretty good.”

“You’re doing fine.”

He looked down at Ginger and put a hand on her forehead. “I think Ginger’s okay. A little fever, but not too much. Has she ever been in a car before?”

“With Mama.”

“Riding with your mama, that doesn’t count. But now she’s riding with you. That counts.”

Jesse reached in his shirt pocket and took out a cigarette and lit it with the push-in lighter on the dashboard. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette before. It wasn’t one of those neat, round white sticks like Cleve smoked, it was kind of mushed up and crooked, like somebody had sat on it. And it didn’t smell like Cleve’s cigarettes either.

“Mama’s gonna get you for that.”

“Um-hmm.” He took a long drag, held it awhile, then let it go.

The smoke made her eyes water. “Can we roll down the windows?”

“Buttons are right there on the door.”

Jesse held the wheel for a moment while she played with the controls, zipping the windows up and down, front and back, one at a time and then all at once. She finally just left them down to allow July in and the smoke out. It was a nice day to be out for a drive. Jesse pulled on the cigarette and worked the pedals and sang softly to himself—something about walking to New Orleans, over and over, as if he had gotten lost in the song and couldn’t find his way out.

A car passed going in the other direction. A man was behind the wheel, and he waved with a little flip of the hand, and Cooper took one of her hands off the steering wheel and stuck it out the window and waved back. Then she saw the man’s eyes go wide as the car went by. He stared at her and said something to himself.

“Uh-oh,” Jesse said.

“What?”

Jesse was looking in the rearview mirror. “He turned around.”

After a moment, they heard a honk behind them.

“What’s the matter?”

“Just keep going. Nice and easy.”

Several more cars passed, and some of them turned around, too. After a while, Jesse said, “We’ve got a little procession going here.” She liked that word,
procession
. It sounded like the Easter pageant at church. Jesse waved his arm out the window, motioning them to stay back, and she supposed they did, but she couldn’t see the rearview mirror, and
she didn’t want to turn and look back for fear she might fall off the sack of sunflower seed, which jiggled and rattled under her every time she shifted her weight.

They were in town now. “We’re gonna make a right-hand turn here,” Jesse said.

They were at the courthouse, where Cleve sometimes brought her when he came to walk the halls and shake hands and talk to the fellows about the weather and crops and voting and so forth. Next to the courthouse was the squat yellow Sheriff’s Office, where Cleve sometimes got into a pinochle game with Joe Banks, the sheriff, while Cooper sat in a big chair in Joe’s office and drank an RC Cola from a tall bottle and listened to Joe’s deputies talking to each other on the radio.

Two deputies were there now, leaning against the side of a patrol car in the parking lot and talking. One of them glanced at Cooper’s car as it pulled into the lot, followed by all the others. Then he raised himself up and pointed and started shouting something. And then all of a sudden they were stopped and the deputies and the people from the cars behind them were running, surrounding the car, all yelling at once.

“What’s the matter?” Cooper asked Jesse.

“They’re just amazed, that’s all,” he said calmly.

She sat in Sheriff Banks’s big chair, cradling Ginger in her lap, while someone sent for Mickey. Jesse sat in a chair across the room with his hands folded across his chest and his legs splayed in front, staring at his feet. Every once in a while, Sheriff Banks came in and said something like, “Boy, that was the dumbest damn-fool thing I’ve ever seen a person do. What on earth were you
thinking
?” Jesse would look up at him without changing a muscle in his face, and Sheriff Banks would throw up his hands and walk out.

They heard Mickey before they saw her, raging down the hallway, voice rattling the air. She burst into the room with Sheriff Banks right behind her, raising her pocketbook as she headed toward Jesse and belting him right on the side of the head. He fell out of the chair onto the floor and stayed there a few moments, crumpled in a heap with his knees drawn up to his chest and his hands covering his head.

“Get up!”

He flinched, but that was all. Mickey raised her pocketbook again. “Leave him alone!” Cooper screamed. “It wadn’t him driving the car, it was me!”

“Shut up!” Mickey commanded.

Cooper started sobbing.

“You want me to take her down the hall?” Sheriff Banks asked.

“No. I want her to stay right here. Give her your handkerchief.” To Jesse again, her voice a little lower now but flat and deadly: “Get up.”

He pulled himself up from the floor and into the chair, bent at the waist while Mickey towered over him, glaring down at the back of his head.

“Do you realize …?” Then a disgusted shake of her head. “Of course you don’t. You don’t realize a goddamn thing. Your father trying to run a campaign, everybody picking apart every little thing he does and says, scrambling around trying to find some dirt … And
you
.” She whirled on Sheriff Banks. “What are you going to do?”

“Miz Mickey, we can’t ignore something like this. We’ve cut Jesse a lot of slack in the past—helped out where we could, you know, at least until the thing with the alcohol and all. Had to take his license for that. But this time …” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

“What are you going to do?” she demanded again.

Sheriff Banks straightened and hooked his thumbs in his gun belt. “I’m gonna have to charge Jesse with reckless endangerment. There’s too many people knows about this. It’s all over town now.”

“What about the marijuana?”

“Nobody knows but me. I found it in his shirt pocket after we got him inside.”

“Good God,” Mickey said. “Can you imagine what the papers would do with that?”

“No reason for ’em to know,” Sheriff Banks said.

“Make sure they don’t.”

Cooper snuffled into the handkerchief Sheriff Banks had handed her.

“Hush, Cooper,” Mickey commanded. “You ought to have better sense. Him”—she jabbed a finger at Jesse—“he doesn’t.”

A long silence rode on top of the hum of the air-conditioning unit at the window. Cooper buried her face in the sheriff’s handkerchief, which smelled of old boogers and tobacco juice. Her stomach lurched, and then she threw up all over Ginger and started sobbing again.

When they got back from cleaning up her and Ginger in the bathroom, a jail trusty with a mop and bucket was working on the mess. Jesse didn’t appear to have moved an inch.

“I want you to lock him up for the night,” Mickey said to Sheriff Banks. “Let me think about what on earth we’re going to do with him.”

“The military might could straighten him out, but he’s only seventeen.”

Mickey stood there for a moment thinking, and then she said, “We can fix that.”

She heard them arguing that night in the upstairs bedroom down the hall—or Mickey arguing and Cleve mostly listening, from the sound of it.

And then Jesse was gone.

She saw him only once before he left for Vietnam. That was during
a picture-taking of the four of them on the steps of the Capitol with a lot of reporters and photographers present. Cleve had just won the lieutenant governorship. Jesse was in a dress blue uniform with red piping, Mickey and Cleve on either side of him. Jesse smiled when prompted, the same old sad, sleepy smile, but something else was there now, maybe something the Marine Corps had given him, or done to him, something Cooper couldn’t fathom.

Then he was gone again, and what was shipped home from Vietnam was only bits and pieces.

SEVEN

The four years Cleve spent as lieutenant governor were largely consumed with positioning himself for a race for the state’s top job, and then with the campaign itself. He lived a good bit of the time in a capital-city apartment and spent nights and weekends campaigning. No civic club was too small, no barbecue cookoff too inconsequential. Mickey orchestrated things from the Big House, keeping his schedule, making and working connections, expanding his base into a sprawling political network that reached into every corner of the state. She had an instinct for when to ask and what to ask for, when to wheedle, when to browbeat. To her instinct she added knowledge, a vast catalog of things both important and trivial. She came to know everybody and everything worth knowing.

Except her own daughter.

It was a time of aching loneliness for Cooper, of growing dread and
resentment: Jesse dead and gone, Cleve away constantly, Mickey obsessed with his political life.

She made a few friends through school, but even that was not easy. She was the daughter of the lieutenant governor, living in the white-columned Big House miles from town. She experienced, inevitably, a certain amount of jealousy, and with it the petty but painful cruelties of elementary school. She learned to keep her own counsel, to mostly ignore the slights, to find a precious few, boys and girls, who seemed not to give a rip about her baggage. She rebelled against Mickey in small ways she knew were mostly ineffective, but at least she had a sense of trying. Mickey insisted on having the man who tended the grounds drive her back and forth to school. That led to a terrible row. Cooper stalked out of the house and got on the school bus. Mickey threw up her hands and went back to her Rolodex.

And then Cleve won the governorship, and they moved to the beastly, old Executive Mansion in the capital, and she lost all she had gained. It was that awkward time, the beginning of adolescence, when fitting in, not being different, became everything. But she
was
different. The daughter of the governor, starting all over with baggage infinitely more burdensome, the loneliness and sense of isolation compounded by the mansion with its cavernous rooms, house staff bustling about, strange people coming and going. It was an alien, public place. Cleve made a point of including her in some of the many social events. But after acknowledging her with inane pleasantries, most people lapsed into the same old thing that had come to infuriate her: politics.

She focused her anger and frustration on Mickey. Cleve, she reasoned, was an important and busy man. His job, as in the past, took him away a great deal and left him surrounded with people who waited on him and others who wanted things from him. But Mickey … Okay, she had helped Cleve get the job he wanted, and that had consumed a huge amount of her time and energy. Now, could she try being a mother
for a change? It seemed she was so absorbed in political life that she had forgotten how—if she ever knew. Their relationship was awkward at best and increasingly in open conflict. They recoiled from each other, Mickey baffled by the mere fact of a child moving beyond childhood, Cooper with her smoldering resentment. Mickey retreated into her political world, which began to expand beyond the borders of the state. She became, in the larger world of Southern politics, a player.

And thus it was that Cooper was taken completely off-guard in 1972.

It was May, the weather warming, the mansion grounds in bloom. School just out, time stretching infinitely before her. Lethargy, sloth, her room a wreck, the house staff forbidden to enter. She fled outside, found a shaded, cool spot in a corner of the backyard that had a fountain and a bench. A refuge where she went with books. Mickey found her there, a book in her own hand. Cooper ignored her, then finally looked up.