Miranda's War (11 page)

2) That Commissioner Mrs. Archer (Miranda) Dalton be removed from the Conservation Commission for proposing to sell the Pierce Estate and other malfeasance in derogation of the Commission's mission statement and charter.

She poured herself a glass of 2007 Bordeaux and wondered if Archer would try to drag her back to Ted tomorrow. He came home early and quietly walked back to his study without a word. He just sat there for a good five minutes without producing so much as a tap on his keyboard or a shuffle of papers. She wandered over to the doorway and leaned across it diagonally, her head on one side and her legs crossed in a semi-seductive way that he used to like at faculty cocktail parties after they'd had a few Manhattans.

“Well, have you heard the news from Karl?” she began tentatively.

“You mean the emergency town meeting, or has there been something in the last few hours?”

“If people in this town don't want me, they can kick me out on my rear end on the 7th. Then my public career is over, very quickly. Maybe this is a good thing.”

“I'm afraid I don't see the upside.”

“I just told you, love. Then you've got what you want, a clearly marked exit.”

“I don't even know how to react to that. I've never been so ashamed in my life.”

“Shame?”

“Yes, shame, Hutch. This is worse than your little episodes at Longwood with the people who crossed swords with you. This is an emergency town meeting. Karl Anderson feels you're a threat to this town, and he's doing something that hasn't been done in years to get rid of you. I hate this!”

“He's wrong. I haven't done anything illegal or even improper. Even Ted conceded that.”

“I know, but it's your manner, you threaten him. You're plotting a coup. Why?”

“It needs to be done.”

“I've given you this,” and he held out his hands. “Behold the home in Lincoln. And you look upon it and need to have it professionally landscaped by the firm that worked for the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. Then you need to serve on the Conservation Commission to remake the town in your image. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I'm Miranda Kedzie Dalton, the woman you fell in love with and married. No more and no less. And if I lose, you have every right to kick me out of this house and this town and your life. I never promised not to embarrass us. I guess if I had, this marriage would have ended years ago. It's who I am. It's why you fell in love with me. I bring danger into your placid life that you need.”

Chapter Twenty

The next morning Miranda saw her psychologist in Waltham and confided her overwhelming desire to harm Blair Hull, Karl and Archer, articulating her grievances against each one in detail.

“I'd go right now and slash Blair's tires at Harvard, but there's no way he wouldn't suspect me. So I won't. I'm making progress.”

“You are,” said the psychologist, a close-cropped woman of fifty-two in a striped business suit. Leading with her professional monotone, she prompted Miranda to elaborate.

Talking things through in this way made it clear to Miranda that the emergency town meeting would be the perfect opportunity to demonstrate her superior intellect to the town. Leaving the session with a prescription for two weeks of fluvoxamine, she felt a growing sense of excitement. She was going to devastate three men in one evening.

On she went to the campus of Boston University, a string of mostly ugly buildings along Commonwealth Avenue just west of the Back Bay, to meet Mike Dann, a gifted film student. She waited at the appointed place, just inside the student union, while reading
The New Yorker
on her iPad. She recognized him a few minutes later, a wiry black man in his mid-twenties wearing black-on-black graduate student garb.As he approached, she saw tattoos on both forearms, worked-out muscles and a streetwise confidence in the way he carried himself.

“Mike, very nice to meet you.”

“OK, Mrs. D, I think I know what you're looking for. Let's sit down and kick this around.”

He took her to a long couch in a quiet corner of the floor and she started to tell him about Karl.

“Yeah, yeah, uptight Harvard law prick, former federal judge, probably wouldn't know what a roach looks like and never heard the word. I saw the pics. You got any recordings of his voice?”

She slipped him a CD labeled “K.A-.I”

“And this librarian chick who sits next to you, what's her story?”

“What do you want, Julia's voice, writing, images of her home, husband?”

“What's she all about?”

“She's trying to do the right thing. She's unsure.”

He punched notes into his tablet.

“I need to come out to Lincoln for a couple of hours. Get the feel out there.”

“Take the train. Walk around the town center. You can even rent a bike and ride around the conservation land. It's beautiful. But I need this in ten days. That means I want a rough cut a week from today. Where will we watch it?”

“I'll get one of the editing rooms for a half hour, Mrs. D. That's five hundred bucks.”

“I'm giving you five thousand now and the other five plus your costs when it's done. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said and held out his hand.

She tore a check out of her checkbook, for the account in her own name that Archer did not know about, and slipped it to him.

“I'm counting on you. What are the four words we discussed?”

“Biting satire, brutal honesty.”

She gave him a thumb drive and left. By the next morning he'd put together a montage of a strip mall running for what seemed like miles, then it evolved into the center of a suburb with cookie-cutter houses spreading in all directions. The bigger lots with large houses were split up and replaced by more of the small houses until the entire area was a grid of dozens of streets lined with such houses, many with tiny aboveground swimming pools, as far as the eye could see.

“Nice,” she texted him, “but we don't have aboveground swimming pools in Lincoln, at least not now.”

“You want max gross-out, right?”

“Yes.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Stephen called the Governor's appointments secretary and told her it was “rude” not to return his calls for the last few weeks. Within an hour she returned his call and explained patiently that given his candidacy, a meeting would appear to take sides. Governor Samuelson would be happy to set up a call for later in the week if he wanted to discuss business affairs. But the agenda for the call had to be cleared and it could not exceed ten minutes.

“Here's the agenda, I'm very unhappy about H.B. 7662, known as the anti-snob zoning bill. I'd like the Governor to know how much this could hurt the state's finances.”

She promised to take up the matter with Governor Samuelson and “be in touch.” An hour later a legislative aide to the Governor called and told him they had not seen the bill and needed time to study it.

Stephen was a moment from ending the call when the aide asked, “Why are you even interested in this?” changing tone to an off-the-record aside.

“A lot of people in my district are asking me about it.”

“Why?”

“People are worried that it would make these small towns with one- and two-acre zoning change their rules. It's like a dagger pointed right at them.”

“It's not on our radar.”

“These are very wealthy towns, and I know the Governor doesn't want anything that would stir up class warfare. So I'd like your assurance he'll stop it before it gets too public.”

Samuelson was the only non-partisan, independent Governor in the country. He'd been elected two years ago to clean up the state's finances. A former chemist, he had a technical, non-emotional manner and tried to extinguish conflicts as quickly as possible. Stephen had dealt with his Secretary of Finance, and occasionally the Governor, on at least twenty municipal bond deals. They liked dealing with his firm, and he liked dealing with them. When his campaign was over and he returned to the firm, he hoped to continue the relationship. They would hear him out, and he might be able to put the whole zoning threat to rest and out of the campaign.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“We need to try and settle this,” said Julia.

“I hope you don't mind, I've got you on speaker,” said Miranda. “I'm looking at my son's attempt at a paper on a documentary about baseball. It's Ken Burns so it went on for hour after hour, which should be easy to critique. But his approach is so obtuse.”

“I need you to pick up the goddamn phone!”

“OK I'm here. Now find your backbone!”

“My husband is furious about this. How's yours?”

“Archer wants and expects me to win the town meeting. Does he like this? Of course not. But it is what it is, Julia. We've got an inflexible old Tyrannosaurus rex of a chairman. And if this is the way he wants to go out, this is how he's going to go out.”

“Bob thinks we're toast.”

“We're surrounded by wusses. I can't believe their grandparents amassed such fortunes. Where did that moxie go?”

“I want a way out of this—a settlement.”

“How would that work?”

“Let's meet at 3:30 at Town Hall.”

“Just the two of us?”

“Let's start with just us. I want to put together a joint statement of our position, something so the good people of Lincoln don't think we're off our collective nut.”

“I like that, sort of a manifesto.”

“That's another of your fighting words, Miranda.”

Miranda wanted to tell her how pathetic she sounded on the eve of battle, to quote one of her favorite passages from Richard the Lionheart on the eve of his departure for Jerusalem, or Henry V. But she couldn't be herself with Julia. Every thought had to be nuanced, every impulse examined for shock potential. So the movie was strictly confidential. Julia could not know until the last possible minute.

She showed up at Town Hall wearing the expression of impending disaster that Julia needed to see. She touched Julia's shoulder and sighed as they walked into the building together. She listened to every sound Julia emanated and didn't lose eye contact.

“Remember,” Miranda said, “this is directed at me, not you. I'm the one who gets impeached if this passes.”

“But I voted with you.”

“Reluctantly. If I go, you'll repair your relationship with Karl. You can always chalk it up to a temporary lapse in judgment and move on.”

This was Karl's great error in judgment, Miranda thought. He personalized the conflict and would look vindictive at town meeting. If he had sought removal of Julia and Nate as well, they would have reversed themselves on the sale and it would be over. Clearly he hadn't read
The Art of War
or Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, even though he'd been a federal judge and presided over thousands of cases, each of which was a mini war.

Julia was always reassured by Miranda's endless stream of largely invented statistics. When they were seated in the office and were sipping cups of pomegranate tea, Miranda told her about the sociology of uncertainty, that people fear an uncertain outcome more than the actual defeat.

“I can't tell you there is a 90% likelihood the resolutions will be defeated. But I can tell you you're not really afraid of losing that vote. You're afraid of what happens the next day, what your husband will say, what you'll have to say to explain it to your friends. And I've freed myself of that. What will I say to people? I'll say I was impeached from the Conservation Commission for trying to sell our museum for $14 million. Period. End of answer. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?”

She took a big sip and looked up at the ceiling.

“My father started with nothing and fought his way up the corporate ladder by seizing every opportunity to show up his superiors,” Miranda continued. “The board of Fairbanks Scales noticed very soon he was superior.”

“Who's going to take the lead in explaining this at the town meeting?”

“Me.”

“What are you going to say?”

“That Mr. Anderson is too timid. Words to that effect. People want their leaders to be leaders. Action is preferable to inaction. Studies confirm that.”

“No ‘I'm sorry for driving out of my lane'? No contrition?”

“No. Here's the deal I put together for the town, and this is why it's a good deal. I understand Lincoln is uneasy about capitalism. They think it's crass, it's kitsch, it's Donald Trump. And people like my father aren't here. We would rather have 125 units of subsidized housing than one Emmett Kedzie. And my job, excuse me, our job, is to give capitalism a handsome, refined face. This deal does that.”

Julia smiled.

“I like that. Now I understand what you're doing.”

Then Karl walked into the room.

“Mrs. Dalton, I hope you don't mind the intrusion. I'm not eavesdropping; I'd like to speak to you alone for a few minutes.”

“I can step out,” said Julia.

“No, let's go into the meeting room,” said Karl. “It's empty.”

She looked at Julia and wondered, “Is he going to make a citizen's arrest?”

“I want you to listen to him,” she said.

They took their seats in the meeting room.

“You shouldn't put the town through this,” he said. “If I were still on the bench, you'd be held in contempt for your lack of respect. Everyone can see it.”

“You're putting us through it,” Miranda said from her place at the opposite end of the table. “You called this emergency town meeting.”

“Have you actually listened to people in this town rather than talk at them?”

“You and I are talking to different folks. The ones I talk to are receptive. They want to know the facts.”

“I'm offering you the chance to resign now and avoid the opprobrium that's sure to follow.”