The Governor's Lady (14 page)

They flew home the next day on the state plane, the two of them, leaving Mickey—still fuming, punishing Cooper with icy silence—to attend mop-up committee meetings.

When they got off the plane at the capital airport, Cooper said to her father, “I hate politics.”

He gave her a long look, his face gentle, and said, “I don’t blame you.”

EIGHT

College, she was determined, would be different. But it wasn’t easy.

They arrived on campus as she insisted, Cleve, Mickey, and Cooper in a plain brown Chevrolet, the trunk packed with her things. Cleve, now in his second term as governor, drove, his first time behind the wheel in a good while. No security detail tagged along. She wanted no fuss. But then she saw the TV news crew and a newspaper photographer waiting on the steps of the administration building when they pulled up in front, Cleve insisting they pay a courtesy call on the university president. Cooper was furious. Who had tipped them off? Why? She refused at first to get out of the car. They all sat there for a moment.

“Cooper,” Mickey said from the backseat, “would you just once stop being bull-headed? You’re the governor’s daughter. Live with it.”

“Not here,” she snapped. “If it’s gonna be this way, just turn around and take me back home. I’ll go to college in Oregon if I have to.”

Cleve stared out through the windshield, then finally turned to her.
“Honey, I’m sorry. I think somebody in my office is responsible. Just put on your best smile and get it over with. Do it for me?”

“All right,” she said with a sigh. “But this is it, Daddy. After this, I want the rest of the damn prying world to leave me alone.”

“I’ll do my best to make sure that happens,” he said.

By late afternoon, Cleve and Mickey were gone and she was settling into the dormitory room she would share with a girl from downstate who had a big, breezy laugh and a great collection of Rolling Stones music and cussed like a field hand. “I don’t give a fuck who you are,” she said with a smile, flipping her cigarette out the open window.

“Then,” Cooper said, returning the smile, “we’ll get along just fucking fine.”

She was a curiosity, she knew that. She picked her way carefully, sensing who cared about her status and who took her just for who she was. She made a few friends, gravitating toward the slightly off-beat. She avoided sorority rush her freshman year but then found a group—not among the upper tier—who suited her when she was a sophomore. They were boisterous, irreverent, slightly bohemian. Mickey was appalled, and that cemented the deal for Cooper.

She arrived with no settled idea of what she wanted to study, plodding through a menu of introductory courses the first semester. And then she found the campus newspaper. She knew she liked to write, and when, at the urging of a friend, she applied for a staff job and began to get assignments, she discovered she had that combination of persistence and curiosity that made a journalist. Her first byline produced an adrenaline rush unlike anything she had ever known. She was hooked.

By her junior year, she was the assistant editor, and when the editor came down with mononucleosis early in the second semester, she took the top job. And she began to make waves. She took on the university administration, assigning reporters to dig into the use of student fees to support the athletic program, the cozy relationship with the company that
had the food service contract, the bungling management of the student health center. She wrote pithy editorials. She was getting a reputation for feistiness. She knew that, and she liked it. She locked horns with the paper’s faculty advisor, one of her journalism professors. He was catching flak from the President’s Office. The football coach was pissed; the vice president for business affairs had his back bowed over the food service contract story. Could she walk a bit more softly, carry a slightly smaller stick? “You’re going to make a fine journalist,” the advisor said, “but Cooper, you’ve got to curb your inclination to take on everybody. Criticize too much and you’ll just be a whiner. Pick your fights.”

But no, she would speak her mind. And she could. Student sit-ins in the mid-seventies had won some concessions from the administration, including a hands-off policy toward the student newspaper.

Then came the condom controversy. The paper’s advertising manager walked into her office one evening with a request for ad space from a prophylactic manufacturer. Cooper looked over the copy. It was tastefully done. She handed it back. “Okay.”

The ad manager’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“Can you think of a good reason we should turn it down?”

“Well …”

“Do you think there is any condom usage on our campus?”

He grinned.

“So they’re an item of interest to our fellow students.”

“Yeah.”

“Are condoms illegal?”

“No.”

“Do we need ad revenue?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, back to my first question: Any reason we should turn down the ad?”

“Because if we run it, all hell’s gonna break loose.”

“I’ll deal with it. Run the ad.”

Instead, he took the ad to the faculty advisor, who took it to the President’s Office, to which Cooper was quickly summoned.

When she was ushered into the inner sanctum, the president wasn’t there. Mickey was. She was standing at a window behind the massive desk, her back to the door, looking out across the campus. Neither spoke for a long time.

Finally, Mickey turned to her. “Drop it,” she said.

“No,” Cooper replied.

“Yes, and I’ll tell you why: because you are causing a shitstorm of embarrassment to your father. It’s easy for you to sit up here in your comfortable little academic playhouse”—she bit off the words—“and make your pious pronouncements about this issue or that.”

“I’m—”

“Listen to me! You have no earthly idea how things really work, Cooper. You don’t
want
to know, because you’re pissed at me, pissed at the world, pissed at politics.”

“Goddamn right!”

“Well,” Mickey said, lowering her voice until it was flat and hard, “here’s how things work. Your father is trying to get something done he’s always wanted: free textbooks for every runny-nosed school child in this state. Can you imagine what that would mean? Every child, no matter if his daddy is a tycoon or a sharecropper, has his own book, instead of having to look over somebody’s shoulder, or worse, do without. He learns. He has a chance to do something with himself. Little kids, Cooper. Little kids who, unlike you, don’t have a pot to pee in. But you know, textbooks aren’t really free. They cost money. So to make sure those little kids get textbooks, somebody’s gotta pay. And that means a
tax hike
. A nickel on cigarettes, a nickel on alcohol, one percent on utility bills. Do you think Cleve Spainhour just waves a magic wand and the legislature passes something like that? It’s almost impossible,
but he’s getting it done, or was. Until you started playing Miss High-and-Mighty with your little rag of a newspaper. Every asshole who gives money to the Athletic Department is on his neck. People who do business with the university are up in arms. And now, fucking rubbers! My God! Are you out of your mind?”

Cooper felt the floor dropping out from under her. She sat heavily in one of the leather armchairs in front of the president’s desk.

Mickey moved toward her, leaning over the desk, bracing herself on her hands, staring Cooper in the face. “Your father,” she said, “has enemies. Powerful enemies. They will do whatever they can to keep him from accomplishing anything, especially if it might take a few precious dollars out of their wallets. And they will use any excuse, any issue, to undercut and distract and derail. He is exhausted and despondent. What you are doing here is cutting the legs out from under him.” Mickey straightened, arms folded across her chest. “So think about it, Cooper. You’re hurting your father. And think about those little school kids.”

Without another word, she walked out.

Cooper was devastated. Everything was crashing down about her—the life she had staked out that she thought was her very own. She felt trapped between herself and the world Cleve and Mickey inhabited, all of it pressing in on her, taking from her, as it had from the beginning.

She stumbled in a daze back to the newspaper office and killed the condom ad.

But what about all the rest—the editorship, her voice in the paper? No, she wouldn’t quit. She had worked too hard at being her own person to give it up. But she decided—what choice did she have?—that she would lower the volume, at least for a while. She loved her father, even if he had sent Mickey to do his pleading. She would not hurt him.

She finished her editorship at the end of the semester and walked away from the newspaper. She stayed on campus for summer school,
then moved from her sorority house into an apartment for her senior year. She felt herself withdrawing, pulling protective covers around her. She ached with disappointment.

And then there was Woodrow Bannister, just at the moment when she felt most wounded and vulnerable. Woodrow cared, truly cared, and that meant a great deal.

They dated throughout her senior year, from just after the summer day he showed up on Mickey’s doorstep, hat figuratively in hand, to be examined and vetted. Cooper knew him, of course. He had gotten himself elected president of the student body during the year of her editorship, and their paths crossed occasionally. He was in graduate school now, in psychology, when he called just after his visit with Mickey to ask Cooper for a date. Mickey had said, “You might like him. He’s a nice young man. He has PP.”

“What?”

“Political potential. He has the touch.”

“I would have to overlook that,” Cooper said.

“He’s still a nice young man.”

At some point, it became a relationship. Woodrow courted as ardently and as single-mindedly as he pursued his political ambitions. When they first made love, he was so exquisitely careful that she felt like a finely tuned glass instrument.
Am I being politicked
? she asked herself.
Or is politics itself a sort of love affair
?

That marked an interlude in Cooper’s life when she and Mickey arrived at a sort of standoff. Cleve was finishing his second term as
governor, celebrating the successful passage of his free textbook program. Mickey was resting on her laurels, sizing up the next crop. She and Cooper eased sideways around their differences. Cooper tried not to think much about Jesse and made an honest, if halting, effort in dealing with Mickey. She tried to separate Mickey the person from Mickey the political manipulator.

But there came a time when she was assaulted by doubt so fierce it ripped open the wound, gave rise to the old poisons, and made her question everything anew.

It began at home, at the breakfast table. It was March, two months after Cleve had left the governorship. A warming spell, the promise of spring. Through the dining-room window, she could see the broad dent in the earth that ran the length of the far pasture, the line of trees along the shaded creek that trickled through it. For years, Cleve had talked about damming the creek and forming a pond. “After all this is over,” he said. Cooper had understood him to mean all the running and serving and being at other people’s beck and call. And now it was time.

A month earlier, she and Cleve, bundled in heavy coats and stocking caps, had walked the land. He had shown her where the earthen dam would go, the five acres or more that would be flooded. It would become a still, quiet place, the pond’s raw edges healed with grass and shrubs and trees—redbud, willow, mimosa, dogwood, birch, his favorites. He would stock it with bream and bass, and they would fish from the bank or a rowboat. Even in the starkness of February, she could see it.

“When?” she asked.

“As soon as I can get the work started. Fellow’s coming to see what needs to be done.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“I wish I’d done it sooner.”

She wondered what he meant by that—built the pond sooner, or stepped aside from politics sooner? Maybe both. She saw the gentleness
in his face, the comforting stubble of whiskers of a man who no longer was compelled to shave every day. She felt a great rush of joy for him, and also for herself. She took his hand and gave it a squeeze.