No Safe Place (3 page)

“Dick Mason has been Vice President for eight years, Kil-cannon hammers home in speech after speech, and in that time their party has ‘lost its majority, then its identity, and finally its soul …’”

“So we should lose the White House too?” Kit murmured.

On the television, Kerry heard a new voice, the anchorman’s. “What can we expect in California, Kate?”

“Seven more days with no holds barred,” the newswoman answered. “So far, Kerry Kilcannon hasn’t missed a single opportunity. You’ll remember just last week, when it was revealed that Dick Mason worked behind the scenes to amend last year’s budget bill to protect tobacco growers from his home state of Connecticut. Within hours Senator Kilcannon countered with a proposal for a new tobacco tax for programs to ‘help our children read instead of die.’”

Frank Wells laughed aloud. “I still wish
I’d
thought of that,” he said—the new member of the team, flattering the candidate.

Feeling Frank’s need, Kerry smiled a little. “I hope it was succinct enough.”

“The base which Kerry Kilcannon has assembled,” the reporter went on, “has elements of the party’s old coalition—particularly minorities—as well as a clear majority among women attracted by his proposals on education, day care, job training, and crime …”

No, Clayton thought to himself. It was far more than that.

Standing to Kerry’s right, he watched him in the dim light of the television. After their fifteen years of friendship, Kerry’s profile was as familiar to Clayton as the profiles of his wife and his daughters, as the painful memory of the younger son Clayton and Carlie had lost. Kerry’s thin Irish face, at once boyish and angular, reminded Clayton of the young lawyer he had first met, scarcely more than an impulsive kid. The wavy ginger hair was also much the same and, as always, Kerry’s blue-green eyes reflected the quicksilver surfaces of his moods—sometimes cold, at other times remote and almost absent, at still others deeply empathic or crinkled in amusement or outright laughter. But the man who had emerged from the cross-country gauntlet of primaries was changing as Clayton watched.

Kerry’s hypercompetitiveness was the least surprising: his astonishing ability to get up every morning in a strange town; to give the same speech six or seven times, making it seem fresh, until falling into bed again; to give dozens of important local politicians private time in his limousine; to fight the fatigue of mind and body and spirit that running for President imposed; to set aside all doubt that he could beat Dick Mason. Clayton had seen elements of this molten single-mindedness—sometimes ruthless and close to angry—since Kerry had prosecuted his first big case. To Clayton, it was still the least attractive, most troubling, and now perhaps most necessary aspect of his friend’s persona.

No, the key was that Kerry could touch people in ways Clayton had never seen—not from anyone else or even, before this, from Kerry himself.

It had first struck Clayton at the end of a long day in New Hampshire. Kerry was speaking to a small gathering at a senior
center. His voice was hoarse, his form a little off; realizing this, he had cut himself short and asked for questions from his audience. This feeling of contact, Clayton knew, made Kerry come alive.

An old woman stood, her legs like sticks, so thin that Clayton found it painful to look at her. She was poor, she said, voice quavering with shame and desperation. At the end of every month, she had to choose between food and medicine.

Her voice broke and she began sobbing, unable to continue. The only sound in the deadly silence was her keening, muffled by the hands over her face.

An attendant started coming for her. But Kerry had stepped from behind the podium. He put his arms around the old woman, his own eyes shut now, seemingly oblivious to those around them, whispering words no one could hear. He did not appear to know or care that his speech was at an end.

Afterward, Kerry had declined to repeat what he had said to her. It was the old woman who had told CBS. “I won’t let that happen to you,” Kerry had murmured. “I promise.”

It was instinct, Clayton was sure—somehow Kerry had learned at forty-two to reach into his past, the fears of his own childhood, until he could feel what it was to be someone else. But the promise he made was almost breathtaking in its assurance; the clip of Kerry comforting an old woman ran on all three networks …

“Kilcannon’s barely unspoken message,” Clayton heard the CNN reporter summarize, “is that Dick Mason is too weak, too compromised, too mortgaged to special interests to improve the lives of those who need it most. Not even yesterday’s slip of the tongue, in which Senator Kilcannon opined that an unborn fetus was a ‘life,’ seems to have affected his support among Oregon women …”

Kerry leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes.

He had been tired, he knew. Yesterday was one of those mornings, ever more frequent now, when his bones ached and a kind of sickening fatigue seized his entire body. His right hand was scratched and swollen from the grasping of a thousand other hands. Shaking hands along the rope line, Kerry had felt himself wince.

Cornered by a pro-life activist in a local TV audience, Kerry had told the truth as he knew it: As a matter of policy, he was emphatically pro-choice. But it was also his personal belief, as a Roman Catholic, that a fetus was the beginning of life, and that to claim that life did not exist until three months, or six months, was splitting moral hairs.

Watching the television, Frank Wells murmured, “You just can’t say that. Women are too frightened.”

Kerry opened his eyes. For an unguarded moment, the sight of Frank annoyed him. With his smooth gray hair, his diplomat’s face and manner, Frank sometimes seemed to have slipped into the campaign from a drawing room in Georgetown. But he had done inspired work for virtually every prominent Democrat in the last twenty years, including James Kilcannon. Kerry felt Clayton watching him.

“I was tired,” he said mildly. “Telling the truth is my own funny way of diverting Dick’s attention.”

Kit Pace leaned forward, all blunt-cut hair and snub features, her stocky frame radiating the intensity of her concern. “Most of it wasn’t so bad, Kerry. But, please, eliminate the word ‘life’ from your vocabulary, so we can keep this thing a one-day story. The idea that women are taking a ‘life’ will inflame the hard-core pro-choicers and arouse the press—as you damned well know. Especially with that Boston thing this morning.”

Slowly, Kerry nodded. “Insane,” he murmured. “Three dead people, their families. Who would do that?”

“God knows.” Kit paused, signaling her transition to the professional. “I got out a statement right away—sympathy for the families, the appropriate measure of outrage and disbelief. That should help a little.” Her tone became dry. “You were quite eloquent, in fact.”

Kerry gave her a quizzical smile. “Did I use the word ‘life’?” he asked, and then Dick Mason appeared on the screen.

The Vice President was flanked by Jeannie Mason and their three children—a girl and two boys, all young adults, their faces as clean and unthreatening as their father’s. But the children lacked Dick Mason’s shrewdness or his actor’s gifts. Their faces were contorted in smiles so spurious they seemed like open wounds, while Mason’s smile for the crowd was
broad,
his chin tilted at a Rooseveltian angle of confidence and challenge. Imagining the emptiness in Dick Mason’s stomach, the terrible, almost inconceivable prospect that a lifetime of striving might come to nothing, Kerry saw in his opponent’s smile an act of will that was close to bravery. He wondered if what helped sustain Dick Mason was lingering disbelief …

“You can’t win,” the President had said to Kerry. “Dick won’t let you.”

It had been less than five months ago, a bitter-cold December day. The President had kept him waiting in the reception area of the West Wing. Idly, Kerry had studied the oil paintings of historic scenes, a gilt-framed clock, an ornate brass chandelier. He was being made to hang out with the donors and the lobbyists, Kerry thought with humor, and commenced watching the children of a pudgy man who must have contributed money to the President or Dick wheedle boxes of presidential M&M’s from the somewhat starchy receptionist. That no one seemed to recognize Kerry only heightened his amusement.

At length, the President’s assistant, Georgia Heckler, appeared and led Kerry to the Oval Office.

The President looked gaunt, more tired than Kerry had seen him, his graying hair more sparse than even the month before. Wondering if the rumors about the President’s health were true, Kerry imagined Dick Mason watching this man for signs. A lonely job, they always said.

Georgia shut the door behind them.

The President gave Kerry a thin smile. “So you think you want this chair,” he said without preface.

Kerry appreciated the opening; the President knew how much Kerry despised the political politesse that the President himself called “the dance of the cranes and the swallows.”

“I plan to run,” Kerry answered with equal directness. “I know you support Dick. But I hope you’ll withhold a formal endorsement until we see how the primaries shake out.”

“Stay neutral, you mean? Just as you did when the press was falsely accusing me of destroying a long-dead marriage, and Dick stepped forward to defend me.” The President folded his hands, tone softening. “In a very real way, Kerry, you’ll be running against me. To run against Dick, you’ll have to.
And Dick’s been loyal
and
effective.”

Kerry watched his face. “Loyal, I’ll accept. Do you want the price of loyalty to be a Republican Congress
and
President?”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s as bad as all that.” Above his smile, the President’s eyes were keen. “You’ve got the virus, don’t you. You looked around and decided you were better than anyone in sight. Including Dick and me.”

Kerry shrugged and smiled, waiting him out; as a child, he had learned the gift of watchful silence.

“That’s only the first step,” the President said at length. “The easiest and the most deluded. Later you find out that the demands of a presidential campaign are much greater than you imagined, that the fishbowl you’ve entered is far more degrading, that the sheer enormity of what it takes to run for President—let alone the chance that you might win—threatens to overwhelm you.

“The few men who become President refuse to acknowledge any of the realities that would stop anyone else: that they’re giving up all hope of privacy; that their life is run by strangers and semifriends who want what only a President can give them; that they’re probably
not
qualified—by temperament or intellect or sheer strength of will—to be President after all.” The President paused, then finished softly. “It’s not enough that Jamie wanted it. For the first time in your career, Kerry, it all has to come from you.”

Kerry felt himself flush with anger. “Maybe I can borrow it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

The President raised a hand. “That wasn’t meant as an insult. What I’m saying is that you’ve yet to face the total humiliation of starting an underdog campaign from scratch. It’s not just begging people you loathe for money and trying to look happy doing it. It’s things like the afternoon I wasted in New Hampshire hunting for a fucking ceramic poodle because a woman I wanted to be a delegate in Iowa collected them and she was torn between me and three other guys who were leading me in the polls.”

Kerry made himself smile at this, though his voice retained a hint of challenge. “You’ve just given me a slogan, Mr. President. ‘No fucking ceramic dogs.’”

The President did not smile back. “Dick Mason understands, because he’s been Vice President for eight years. You don’t.
Because
you can’t. And Dick’s the only one of you that’s been through the moral X ray our media friends reserve for someone on the national ticket, and survived it. You join this club at your peril, Kerry.” He paused again, moderating his tone. “You asked for my neutrality, not my advice. But advice is all I can offer you, Senator. That and the old saw ‘Beware of what you wish for …’”

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, with perfect timing, the President had endorsed Dick Mason.

It had cost Kerry the primary. Underfunded and understaffed, his campaign verged on collapse.

But Kerry and Clayton would not give up. And then the surprises started—narrow losses in the South, a startling breakthrough in Florida, a split in Illinois and Ohio, an outpouring of small contributions in response to Kerry’s new pledge not to take more than two hundred dollars from anyone. Then came wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and now Oregon. Aided by a series of events beyond Dick Mason’s control, they had fought the opposition—a sitting Vice President, an incumbent President, the countless party leaders who gorged on the flattery and favors and just plain pork that only the President and Dick could provide—to a draw.

Dick Mason had always meant California, their final stop, to be his firewall. He had visited the state thirty-three times in less than four years; Kerry could not seem to read his newspaper clippings from California without encountering a photo of Dick Mason dispensing computers to schoolkids, or funds for earthquake relief. Now California would decide things; in the latest poll, Dick Mason still led by three percent.

But there was one historic fact that Dick could not avoid and no one else would ever forget: Kerry’s brother had died there.

Ah, Jamie,
Kerry thought to himself. He was certain that James Kilcannon would have savored this irony, one far richer than Dick Mason could ever know. But then Jamie no longer laughed, or awakened at night from dreams.

Buttoning his shirt, Kerry watched Dick Mason quiet his supporters.

“When you see Dick Mason,” Kerry asked Clayton, “do you
think President?”

Still watching the screen, Clayton studied Mason with his accustomed look of keen intelligence. “When I see Dick,” he answered at length, “I think android. But
Dick
thinks President—he never thinks about anything else, and no one’s ever wanted it more. Don’t start underrating him
now
, when he’s cornered.”