Custody (7 page)

“Hello.” Eleanor lasered her calculating eyes on short, voluptuous Donna.

“Donna’s an attorney with Dunlap and Reed, where I worked.”

Eleanor’s smile deepened. “We
are
pleased to meet you. We can’t tell you how exciting it is for an old hen like me to see you lovely young chicks working right alongside the big boys.”

“It’s pretty exciting for us, as well,” Donna replied.

“Mrs. Marks.”

When her personal secretary tapped her arm, Eleanor turned on a dime. Frowning, she listened to the message, then flashed Kelly and Donna a smile.

“We must take a call. We’ll be in touch, Kelly. So glad to meet you, Donna.”

She whirled away.

“Where does she get her energy?” Donna murmured. “And what’s with the royal
we
?”

Kelly snatched two mimosas in frosted flutes from a passing tray and handed one to
Donna. “You can dis her, but you’ve got to remember her age. She’s eighty-one.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“That explains the high heels and stiff hair.”

“And the face-lift and the jewelry, yes, but still, she’s been fighting for women’s issues since before we were born. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a pair of jeans in her closet—”

“I would be.”

“—but no matter what she looks like, her values are solid. Her heart’s in the right place. If she’d been born forty years later, she’d be the one running for office, and not the state seat, either.”

Donna scanned the room. “This is an impressive crowd. All right. You’ve sold me. Although I find it hard to like anyone with this much money. And I hate parties like this with only women.”

“That’s because you’re indoctrinated to think that a group of only women is a second-rate assembly. The only thing women get together for is to talk about cosmetics or Tupperware, right? Just think of all the power conferences in smoky rooms men and only men have taken part in over the past few decades—hell, centuries. This is just the female version, and about time.”

Something like a loud bronze gong sounded, followed by the staccato of a knife tapped on glass. The loud chatter in the room dimmed to a buzz as everyone turned to face the raised platform where Eleanor Marks stood in front of a microphone.

“Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. I’m Eleanor Marks, by the way, your hostess, and I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see so many friends gathered here together.

“I’ve just received a phone call from our guest of honor, Anne Madison. Her assistant, Rebecca Prentiss, scheduled her for two meetings in this time slot—we all know how easily that can happen, don’t we? Most of us know Anne already, and are eager to help her win this election, but I’d like her campaign manager, Lillian Doolittle, to speak just a few moments, just to remind us why we need to support Anne Madison.”

Applause fluttered lightly over the room as Lillian Doolittle stepped up to the microphone. Lillian was as chubby as Eleanor was thin, but she radiated the same kind of optimistic vitality. Unlike Eleanor, Lillian wore trousers, a loose tunic that hid her bulk, and no jewelry. Her shoes were flat-heeled and her hair a short, dry thatch. But her eyes gleamed, and energy glowed from her.

“First, I want to thank Eleanor for hosting this little get-together. If you look around the
room, you’ll see that we’ve got a powerhouse of political possibility gathered here. Just stop and think for a moment: if everyone here joined forces, who could possibly stop us?”

Again, scattered applause broke out over the room.

Lillian continued. “Let me tell you about the woman you came here to meet. As you can see from the brochures we’ve left on just about every table here—Please take one. Take several and hand them out!—Anne Madison is the people’s candidate. All her life, Anne has fought for women’s rights and for the rights of the poor, the endangered, and the ill.

“Anne grew up in Concord and Nantucket, attended Concord Academy, Wellesley, and B.U., where she received her R.N. Her father was a surgeon, and Anne always knew she wanted to work in the health field. She worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital before marrying and deciding to stay home full-time to take care of her daughter, Tessa, who is now twelve. Anne remained active in the health care field, as a lobbyist, volunteer, and activist. She organized research into the home health field, initiated a program for the public schools to teach students about contraception, AIDS, STDs, and drugs. She’s currently working as an activist to make insurance companies and HMOs more responsible and more personal. She’s on the board of the commission for Better Care for the Elderly. She’s been elected to School Committee twice and has served as a delegate to the Democratic State Convention in ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-six, and ninety-eight.”

Lillian paused for a sip of water. “We’re here today to ask you to help Anne Madison win the Democratic primary election for the state senate this fall. You are all influential women, and we ask you to use your power in spreading the word about Anne. She’s running against—I can say it right out in this room—a ‘good old boy’ who will be hard to beat because he’s so well known. We implore you for any financial assistance you might be able to give. Television and radio spots and newspaper ads are expensive, and we want to blitz the region. We want to be sure Anne gets elected by a landslide. So please, help us. We’re here, if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments.”

After another round of applause, the questions started.

“They didn’t say anything about her husband,” Donna remarked.

“Why should they?” Kelly asked. “Is he relevant?” She looked at her watch. “Let’s go.”

“So soon?”

Kelly put her flute on a nearby table. “Anne Madison sounds great to me. I’ve heard all I need to, and I don’t want to be here when they discuss fund-raising.”

“Already avoiding the appearance of impropriety?”

“You bet your ass. Besides, I have a ton of things to do.”

They pressed through the crowd, around a bronze statue of what appeared to be a giant Slinky, and out the door.

“Are you seeing Jason today?”

“We’re going Rollerblading. Want to join us?”

Donna groaned. “No, thanks. Will you be in the office tomorrow?”

“I will. I’ve got to clean out my desk and instruct Clara on my cases … she’ll be taking over most of them.”

“I’m going to miss you like crazy,” Donna said.

“We’ll still see each other. Just not every day.”

“Are you excited?”

Kelly smiled. “I can’t wait.”

Tessa’s private phone rang. Even through her headphones, she heard it, and dived for it.

“Princess,” her father said.

“Dad!” Her spirits soared, while a violin string of guilt thrummed inside her heart. Her mother hated her father calling her Princess, insisting that it perpetuated the image of the young female as lazy, helpless, spoiled, and useless.

“What are you doing on this bright sunny day?”

“Well … we went to church.”

“And this afternoon?”

“…  Mom’s being videotaped. I don’t know about later.”

“Want to drive out to see Grandpops with me?”

“Yes!” The word jumped out of her mouth before she could think.

“I’ll be by in fifteen minutes.”

“Cool.”

With trembling hands, Tessa plaited her hair into two braids, just in case Dad let her ride one of Grandpops’ horses.

Randall leaned on the split-rail fence, watching his daughter and father ride off across the pasture. The horses pranced and shook their manes, happy to be out beneath the sun on a fine hot day. Tessa looked tiny on Blue Boy’s enormous back—this sight would terrify Anne—but Blue Boy, although larger than Frisk, was easygoing, a big, softhearted, lazy baby who wouldn’t know how to run away with anyone.

His father looked good on Frisk, looked almost like the man he used to be, before his seventy-seven years and a knock-out punch of grief started dulling his mind.

Today Randall and Tessa arrived to find Montgomery Madison clean-shaven and pretty much dressed, except that he’d forgotten to take off his pajama top and wore it like a striped shirt tucked into his trousers, which happened to be corduroy … perhaps, Randall thought, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because he felt cold. A lot of older people did feel cold all the time.

Randall couldn’t tell whether or not Tessa realized her grandfather was wearing his pajama top. She ran into his arms happily, hugging him, and when he proposed going for a ride, Tessa probably wouldn’t have cared if her grandfather had been wearing a swimming suit and parka.

Randall wished he could be with them, but over the years his father had had to sell off some horses, or not replace them when they died. He really couldn’t take care of more than these two. Randall had had his daughter’s company during the drive out and would have it on the way back, so he let the two of them go off together. When they went over the hill, he turned back to inspect his father’s house.

Right now this house held more memories of the past than dreams of the future, Randall thought.

He’d grown up here, luckier than probably any one human being on the planet had a right to be, the son of a physician father and an artistic mother, baby brother to his adoring and fascinating older sister Evangeline. He’d learned to ride a horse before he learned to ride a bike, he’d swung from a rope into the pond at the foot of the meadow, he’d had friends spend the night in his room when he was six, in the barn loft when he was ten, and in sleeping bags out in the woods when he was twelve, all of them involved in fantasy adventure games, pretending to be Lewis and Clark discovering the Northwest Passage.

When Tessa was born, Randall had envisioned her spending long weekends and summer days at her grandparents’, riding, swimming, reading mysteries on rainy days. But Anne found just about everything about the farm too dangerous for a little girl: disease-carrying ticks could hide in the tall grass, not to mention snakes, and horses threw people, breaking their necks, and
God knew what lurked in the black mud at the bottom of the murky pond.

And these days, Anne wouldn’t let Tessa spend any time alone with Randall’s father. He was too forgetful, she insisted, and she was right. Some days Mont Madison’s mind was as clear as a bell, but other days it seemed fogged over, scratched deep.

Randall studied the outside of the house. White clapboard with dark green trim, it was in pretty good shape; Randall had seen to that. He paid a carpenter to keep the gutters, roof, storm windows, and stone steps in good repair.

Now he entered the house, as everyone did, through the mudroom leading into the kitchen. When his mother had been alive, this room had been green with potted African violets and scented with geraniums growing in both windows, but after Madeline died two months ago, Mont kept forgetting to water the plants, so Randall had had to throw them out. That had been oddly difficult, as painful as burying a beloved pet, for the geraniums were ancient, huge twisted survivors with fragrant fuzzy leaves and stems thicker than his thumbs.

Dog leashes had hung here, too, and were here no longer. When Rover died, Mont had refused to get a new dog, no matter how Randall persisted in his suggestions. There was a cat, which they simply called The Cat, a permanently exasperated creature who deigned to enter the kitchen for food and warmth on the coldest winter days but preferred to sleep in the barn or slink around outside waiting for moles or mice.

The kitchen, Randall saw with relief, was basically clean. He had a standing arrangement with Dorothy Olson, one of the women from the nearby town, to keep the kitchen and the bathrooms acceptably hygienic. Now and then when Mont let her, she ran the vacuum through the rest of the house, but that wasn’t often. As Mont grew older, he’d accumulated more stuff, mostly paper, newspaper articles about medicine, and medical journals, of course, and books of crossword puzzles and word games, and he had always kept his beloved
National Geographics
. Recently he’d begun to pull files from the cabinets holding all the old information on patients in his medical practice, and now the files leaned in manila-colored towers on top of the television, on the back of the toilet tank, in the middle of the dining room table, on the front stairs. When Randall asked his father about it, Mont told him he was thinking of writing a book.