Christmas Bells (20 page)

She filed the story, barely making deadline, and stayed two hours late to clean up other people's messes before finally storming home, nearly the last to leave the office. “Rough day?” her father inquired when she dragged herself across the threshold.

She refused to complain. “No worse than most,” she replied lightly, climbing the stairs with a spring in her step, keeping her chin up until she was safely out of sight in her own bedroom. There she sank blissfully into a hot bath, silently cursing the copyeditor, taking great satisfaction in imagining him going home to a dim, one-room flat half the size of her bedroom and munching a cold bacon and cheese sandwich on stale bread for supper, while an excellent four-course meal with her family awaited her downstairs in her parents' elegantly appointed dining room as soon as she dressed and descended. If those arrogant men only knew who she was—but no, she didn't want that. She wanted to earn their respect through her own merits, not because of her surname.

The next day she arrived at work with the usual double box of doughnuts only to discover the bullpen in disorder, puzzlement intermingled with consternation and amusement in her coworkers' expressions. “Mr. Myers is on a rampage,” the senior typist warned her, and only then did Camille remember the article.

“Who rewrote my piece?” Myers thundered, waving the early edition over his head as he stormed through the newsroom. “It cleared editorial. Who changed it afterward?”

Camille's heart plummeted as she envisioned her short-lived newspaper career fluttering out the window on wings of ink-stained newsprint. “I did,” she announced clearly. Why not own up to it? They would find out sooner or later, and she was no coward.

“You?” Myers gaped at her. “The coffee girl?”

“I also pick up doughnuts and dry cleaning.”

Someone guffawed, but Myers strode over to her, cheeks florid, cigarette clenched in his teeth so tightly she expected it to snap in half. He halted only inches away, but she was taller and he had to tilt his head to glare up at her. “Who do you think you are, Brenda Starr? Lois Lane?”

“Your article was too long and too imprecise,” she replied coolly. “I did you a favor by cleaning it up before it went out into the world with your name attached to it.”

She heard a hoot of laughter and a low whistle. Myers spluttered an angry rebuttal, but Camille did not flinch. She scarcely listened. She was too busy silently berating herself for losing the first, and probably only, job she would ever have in the newspaper business.

“The girl's right.”

Everyone turned at the sound of the low, gravelly voice of the editor in chief. Just outside the doorway to his office, he stood puffing on his cigar as he compared Myers's handwritten draft to the printed article above the fold on the front page of the finance section.

Camille held her breath. The room was silent. Everyone watched as the editor finished reading. “You should thank her, Myers. Buy her lunch or send her flowers. You've never sounded better.” He shot a pointed look around the room. “Now, get back to work. We've got another issue coming out tomorrow.”

Everyone leapt to obey, except for Camille, who stood frozen in place as it dawned on her that she had not been fired. Myers shook a finger in her face before storming off to his desk.

“I admire your nerve,” the senior typist murmured as she hurried past with an armful of mimeographs. Camille managed a weak smile in reply, sensing, or hoping she sensed, a seismic shift in the newsroom.

She was wrong. She spent the rest of that day typing advertising copy and fetching sandwiches, and the next few weeks brought more of the same drudgery. Then, just as she had convinced herself she had let her best opportunity for advancement slip through her fingers, the features editor asked for a volunteer to cover a local flower show. She shot her hand in the air and told him he would have three hundred words by deadline. “Make it two hundred,” he replied, and ducked back into his office without asking her name. She gave the editor two hundred fifty words, swallowed her protests when he cut it down to an even hundred, and glowed with triumph the next day when it appeared at the bottom of the last page of the features section, sans byline.

That evening, over a pre-dinner cocktail, Asher presented her with a clip of the piece, beautifully matted and framed. Their father smiled, but their mother cast her gaze to the heavens and sighed. Camille flung her arms around her brother and kissed him on the cheek, and as soon as supper was over she hurried upstairs and gave the memento pride of place on her bedside table.

As trivial as it was, the article marked a breakthrough. Other assignments to cover similarly banal events followed, but Camille imagined her mother and her mother's friends as her audience, and infused the stories with the detached humor and inner-circle asides they would appreciate. Readers actually wrote in to praise the work of the anonymous new reporter, and before long Camille found herself a regular reporter for the society page, deserving of a byline.

“McAllister, huh?” the copyeditor mused when he finally noticed her last name. “The guy who owns this paper is named McAllister.”

“No kidding,” Camille remarked, typing away at one hundred words a minute. “People might think we're related.”

The copyeditor barked out a laugh. “You wouldn't be working here if you were.”

“It would make a great story, though, wouldn't it? Rebellious debutante toiling away anonymously at her father's paper, determined to prove herself and earn her own accolades.”

“No one would ever believe it,” he said, shaking a cigarette from a pack, shaking his head too. “The problem with fiction is that it has to be plausible.”

“Then I'll stick with reporting the facts,” said Camille, nodding to the story emerging from her typewriter.

By the time the team of crack reporters who were her coworkers figured out her identity, two years had passed and she had accumulated enough clips to land a staff reporter job at the larger, more prestigious newspaper in Hartford. At first there too she was relegated to the social and sentiment stories she and her few female colleagues disparaged as the “pink ghetto,” but eventually she wised up. She could wait forever for an editor to discover her talent and assign her a plum story, or she could pursue her own leads, discovering the most important stories of the day before her editors could assign them to someone else.

Year by year she worked at her craft, honing her skills, establishing contacts, garnering acclaim and the occasional promotion. Her mother attended her friends' children's weddings and bemoaned Camille's unmarried state, while her father critiqued her clips and offered her more prestigious, lucrative positions he insisted she had earned. Camille refused to lament her lack of a husband and declined her father's well-intended offers to propel her career forward more rapidly than he would have any other
reporter not named McAllister. She had become fiercely protective of her independence, all the while ruefully aware that her sizable trust fund emboldened her to take risks that her less affluent colleagues could ill afford.

Ten years out of college, she was happily single, increasingly well regarded in her chosen profession, and firmly ensconced in the political and national news sections of Connecticut's most respected newspaper, with her articles frequently picked up by papers all across the country. Her days of describing society teas and flower shows were well behind her.

Her work kept her on the move, from New York to London, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, and, more often than not, Washington. When colleagues and the occasional envious rival declared she would run the McAllister News Group someday, Camille laughingly dismissed the idea. “I'll leave running the corporation to my businessman brother,” she would say. “I just want to write.”

Nevertheless, she faithfully kept her filial commitments to the McAllister Foundation. One snowy mid-December evening in Washington, she was attending a charity gala at the Smithsonian when her attention was drawn by the sound of a piano prelude by Claude Debussy, flawlessly and beautifully executed, though the six-piece band had taken a break. Curious, champagne flute in hand, Camille traced the sound to the piano, where she found a dashing, dark-haired man playing for a small group of admirers. She needed only a moment to recognize the three-term congressman from Boston, Paul Barrett. They had never met, but he was known for his idealism and uncanny ability to walk away from negotiations with everything he wanted and yet leaving his opponents with the satisfied sense that they had triumphed.

More than a year before, it had been almost impossible to open a newspaper or turn on the television without glimpsing Paul Barrett striding from office to car to apartment in a fruitless
attempt to avoid the media circus—haggard, angry and miserable, not relaxed and happy as he was when she saw him, his fingers dancing with effortless grace upon the piano keys. His recent ex-wife had been caught in a tawdry affair with a governor whose presidential ambitions had been quashed, along with both of their marriages when the sordid details came out. At the time, Camille had found the whole matter pathetic and had refused to write about it.

“You play wonderfully,” she told the congressman when the band returned and he relinquished the piano with a grin and a joke about keeping his day job.

“Thanks.” Congressman Barrett eyed her warily, and for a fleeting moment she felt chagrined, as if she should apologize on behalf of journalists everywhere for all he had endured at their hands. “You're putting on a great party tonight.”

Camille waved a hand dismissively, not surprised that he knew who she was. “I agree it's a lovely event, but I didn't have any part in the planning. All the credit goes to my brother and his wife.”

“I see. Are you covering the event, then?”

“I'm not working tonight, so you needn't censor yourself.” Camille sipped the last of her champagne and placed the empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter. “I'm here to support the family's charitable endeavors, and to enjoy myself.”

Before the congressman could reply, the band began to play. Couples returned to the dance floor, and after a moment's hesitation, and probably more out of politeness rather than anything else, he asked her to dance.

She had not expected to like him. She despised the cloying sense of neediness and excessive, false bonhomie that enveloped most politicians, but she quickly learned that Paul was not of that sort. He was funny and smart, with a self-deprecating sense of humor that could have been annoying but was refreshing and
charming instead. To her pleasant surprise, they spent most of the evening together, dancing and talking and wryly commenting on the not-entirely-accidental meetings and barely clandestine deal making going on all around them, until an aide appeared and apologetically whisked Paul off to meet some important potential donor or another.

The next day, a lovely bouquet of flowers was delivered to her office, along with Paul's card and an invitation to call if she would like to continue the conversation his aide had interrupted. After a day of weighing the possible consequences, both personal and professional, Camille called.

When they began appearing in public together, Camille found herself uncomfortably thrust into the role of subject rather than reporter. When they announced their engagement two years later, concerns over the appearance of a conflict of interest compelled her to resign from the paper, wistfully, and not without regret. Some society observers looked askance at their twelve-year age difference and murmured that the marriage would never last. Several of Camille's professional acquaintances accused her of crossing inviolable professional boundaries, while others seemed to regard her engagement as a betrayal, as if she had defected to the enemy. Political opponents and even a few cynical members of his own party publicly speculated that the congressman was only interested in the young heiress for her money and her father's influence. Muffy, despite her relief that Camille was finally marrying, was sorely disappointed in her choice of husband—a politician of no particular family or fortune, and a mere congressman at that—and Graham took to proclaiming, adamantly and often, that his future son-in-law should expect no special dispensations from the rigorous scrutiny of the McAllister News Group. There were many awkward, uncomfortable, and chilly encounters with Ella and Grace, her stepdaughters-to-be, until they got to know one another better.

But Camille loved Paul deeply, and despite everything, she was eager to face the challenges of her new role as political wife. She was inspired by Paul's noble ambitions and lofty goals, and she resolved to do all she could to help him achieve them.

To Muffy's satisfaction, Paul did not remain “merely a congressman” for long. They were still newlyweds when he narrowly won election to the Senate; every six years after that, he was reelected by ever wider margins. There were days Camille missed journalism, the thrill of discovering a cover-up, the satisfaction of putting words on paper and sharing ideas with thousands of readers, but she found great fulfillment in being Paul's partner, in love and in politics, and she was pleasantly surprised to discover that all of her education and experience up to that point—even the lessons she had unwillingly absorbed at the Muffy McAllister School of Deportment—had prepared her well for her second career.

Music played an important role in their marriage, as it had in their meeting and their courtship. Camille first realized she was in love with Paul late one winter night in his Washington apartment, while she sat on the sofa wrapped in blankets and sipping mulled wine while he serenaded her with Gershwin tunes on an electric keyboard. As a boy Paul had sung in the church choir, and when he had begun lingering after rehearsals to pick out melodies on the ancient upright piano, a nun had taken notice and had offered to give him weekly lessons. When he had learned all Sister Winifred could teach him, she had arranged for a parishioner, a pianist and professor at the Berklee College of Music, to take him on as a pupil, pro bono. Although Paul played for sheer enjoyment and had never intended to become a professional musician, he had attended Boston College on a music scholarship, and had paid his way through law school with loans and regular gigs at piano bars.