No Safe Place (42 page)

An hour later, they were flying north in a small private jet, alone in a rear cabin that shuddered with the fearful grinding of the engine. Unknotting his tie, Kerry grinned. “‘Free at last.’”

He seemed lighthearted, Lara thought, caught up in a great carelessness that made him look even younger than he was—the school rebel, cutting religion class to go to a Yankees game. “So you’re dropping out,” she asked, “like Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
?”

He laughed. “The Costello women have this thing about movies, don’t they?” He settled back in his seat, sipping from a bottle of cranberry juice. “You know where I was scheduled to go for lunch? A party for delegates given by a tobacco company, on John Wayne’s old yacht. Am I missing something here, or didn’t the Duke die of lung cancer? It certainly wasn’t hostile fire.”

Lara smiled. “Freed up his yacht, though.”

“Yup. The problem with the tobacco folks is they have no sense of irony. And now they’re selling to kids and the third world to make up for the fact that their clientele is, quite literally, dying off. ‘Death—our most inconvenient by-product.’” Smile fading, he added softly, “That way they can afford a few more politicians. Campaigns are expensive, so we don’t come cheap.”

His mordant comment, the sudden change of mood, seemed the hallmark of some unspoken thought. But Lara no longer found this disconcerting. Together, they gazed out the oval windows at the low mountains of coastal California, golden brown in summer. “So,” she asked after a time, “why
are
you doing this?”

He continued to inspect the terrain, a silent landscape beneath the snarl of the engine. “There’s been so little idealism,” he said at last. “The nineties are light-years away from the days of Cesar Chavez, when farmworkers were a romantic cause. People want grapes, people eat them.

“The farmworkers are struggling. Agribusiness still exploits them, and the canning industry whipsaws factory workers by
threatening to move across the border. Just as you wrote in your articles.”

“You read them?”

“Nexus is a wonderful thing, isn’t it.” Kerry turned to her. “They were good—accurate too. Four years later, conditions are hardly better. But so few of us seem to care.”

Lara felt surprise mingle with skepticism. She was used to politicians—males, particularly—saying fulsome things about her astuteness. But if Kerry was trying to flatter her, he was going to extraordinary lengths.

“You know what some people will write,” she told him. “That you’re preparing for a run at Mason in the California primary. Trying to build some sort of minority coalition.”

Kerry sighed audibly. “And others will say I’m reckless. The problem with being in politics is that you’re not entitled to be believed, even if you have beliefs.” He turned to her again. “Is that what
you’re
writing, Lara?”

She looked at him levelly. “I’m keeping an open mind.”

He studied her for a moment. His eyes, Lara realized, were his most arresting feature; they seemed to take her in, though Lara was not sure what she read there. “Oh, well,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter.”

“Then why did you ask me to come?”

Kerry hesitated and then smiled. “If I hadn’t,” he asked, “would the
Times
have covered this?”

Or you,
Lara thought. But she was no longer confident that his motives were so transparent, or even simple—his invitation had seemed as impulsive as the trip. “Maybe not,” she answered.

He gave a curt nod and began staring out the window again.

“About the President thing,” he said after a while. “First more Latinos have to vote. They haven’t been, enough.”

The plane began slipping downward, its motor slowly quieting. Until they landed, neither spoke.

The rally took place in a barren patch of field near Watsonville—dusty and arid, reminding Lara of a Steinbeck novel—with fields of strawberries in the distance, the pickers in white shirts barely visible in the shimmer of hot sunlight. The crowd was light, only a few thousand workers and young people braving
the searing heat which beat down on Lara, making her regret that she was wearing a dress and panty hose instead of jeans. But in her compassion for the farmworkers, and her interest in Kerry Kilcannon, she felt gratified to have escaped the air-conditioned cavern of the convention—the well-fed delegates, the innocuous soft-pop music on the PA system, the endless jockeying for advantage.

Perhaps, she thought, this was how Kerry felt. Standing in shirtsleeves with the union leaders, he looked curiously at home, with none of the awkwardness of a politician visiting foreign territory. Though his presence had drawn more local media, he was careful to cede center stage to the union leader, Raul Guerrero. When it became Kerry’s time to speak, his words were simple.

“I’m here,” he began, “because it is right to be here.

“Farmworkers need better wages. They need more water in the fields, proper sanitation. They need medical care, and retirement, and the simple right to bargain. The things which give work dignity.

“Their children need schooling. They need proper health facilities, and the hope of a better life. The things which make their parents’ work worth doing.”

Pausing, Kerry scanned the crowd. “For too long, we’ve allowed the exploitation of immigrants—legal or otherwise—by businesses in search of profits and politicians in search of votes. But if our history proves anything, it’s that those who speak to the best in us defeat those who speak to the worst in us.

“Those who’ve come here today already know that. If we
each
do what we’re able to do—organize, boycott, send money, call our leaders to account—there’ll be more of us tomorrow, and next month we’ll be that much closer …”

When his speech was over, Kerry slipped into the crowd, not merely shaking hands now but listening and talking, alternating English with awkward Spanish. To Lara, he seemed liberated, free from the politician’s tyranny of schedule and repetition. But there was also this, Lara thought again: if he was ever to run against Mason, he would need to turn out minority voters, the people Mason did not seem to reach. And nowhere was this more true than in California.

It was not until five-thirty that Kerry found her again. “Come
on,” he said, smiling. “I’ve got another speech to give. In San Diego.”

Four hours later, at nine-thirty, Kerry Kilcannon walked to the podium.

It was half past midnight in the East; the network television coverage had ceased hours before. Watching from the press section with Nate Cutler and Lee McAlpine, Lara could see that the delegates were tired. But no one knew what Kilcannon would say, and his surprise visit to the UFW rally seemed to have stirred emotions deadened by a litany of platitudes so numbing that, as Lee had remarked, “you can hear television sets clicking off all over America.” By setting himself apart, Lara sensed, Kerry symbolized what many delegates were craving—daring, conviction, spontaneity. What was harder for her to grasp was how much of this was calculated.

“Ker-ry …”

It began as a ragged chant from the New Jersey delegation, slowly spreading.

“Ker-ry …”

More rose to their feet now. With a diffident smile, Kerry held up his hand, signaling the crowd to stop.

“Ker-ry, Ker-ry, Ker-ry …”

“Please,” he called out. “People are trying to sleep …”

There was a wave of laughter. From where Lara sat, Kerry was a distant figure, but his smile flashed brighter on the screen above her. “Seriously,” he added, “I’d like to thank you for staying up with me …”

More laughter. Next to Lara, Lee McAlpine smiled. “Maybe he should thank Dick Mason,” she murmured.

Kerry held up his hand again. “I’ve got ten minutes,” he said wryly, “and then they turn off the lights. So I’ll try to be succinct.

“I’m here to support the President and Vice President. They deserve all the commitment we can offer. And I will do everything in my power to help ensure their reelection.”

Waiting, Kerry let the applause build, the sense of reassurance, and then said crisply, “But I also want to talk about the future.”

“Well,” Lara said, “so much for fervent praise.”

Kerry’s face was intent now. “There is a terrible disconnect in this country. People don’t trust their leaders. They believe we manipulate their emotions and lie about their problems.

“Too often, they’re right.”

The crowd was still now—surprised, Lara thought, and engaged.

“The
other
party’s great lie,” Kerry said sardonically, “is that if you cut taxes, welfare, foreign aid, and the National Endowment for the Arts, you’ll have a balanced budget and a better life. And if that doesn’t work, you just tighten the screws on immigrants.

“
Our
time-honored deception has been that you can save Medicare and Social Security without any cost to anyone else.

“More and more people realize that those things aren’t so. But they don’t believe we have a program for change. They’re no longer sure what we stand for.”

Nate whistled softly. The delegates from Connecticut—Mason’s people—seemed suddenly restive. But Lara could feel the feedback growing, Kerry touching his audience.

“If this party deserves to lead,” Kerry went on, “we must embrace certain truths which separate a compassionate society from one that is selfish and complacent:

“That racial discrimination still exists, and that we need the courage to challenge it, and to end it.

“That gay men and women are not on a crusade to change the behavior of others, and that protecting them from violence and discrimination is moral, not immoral.”

The delegates were rapt, gazing up at Kerry. Around Lara, the reporters had fallen silent.

Kerry’s voice became staccato. “That guns are too available, and kill far too many people.

“That too many children are denied proper medical care and a proper education.

“That too many of their parents are trapped in dead-end jobs.

“That too many lives are warped by violence, inside and outside our families.

“That too much of our prosperity is built on low wages and shattered dreams.

“That, in the end,
we
are a family, charged by decency and self-interest to care about every American.”

Though he spoke to thousands, Kerry’s tone became direct, intimate. To Lara, his cadence gave no sense of a speaker waiting for applause. “No issue,” he continued, “is more bitterly divisive than abortion. Yet it seems to me that this is a prime example of the narrowing of our minds and the hardening of our hearts.

“To our opponents, who have made their position a litmus test of decency, and yet would cut programs for our poorest children and our most endangered adults, I quote Joseph Cardinal Bernardin: ‘Those who would defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in defending the quality of life of the powerless among us, the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.’

“And for those of us who defend all women’s right to choose, I say this: we must also give women the choice of having children who, because we care, will have a lifetime of choices.

“Maybe,” Kerry went on, “if we not only say these things, but act on them, we will regain the trust we’ve lost. But we will never be free to act on them unless we face one more fact—that the way we raise campaign money is hopelessly corrupt.”

Pausing, Kerry gazed up at the skyboxes and luxury suites, and then his voice cracked like a whip. “How can we inspire trust,” he demanded, “when the best we can say for ourselves is that the other party’s worse? No wonder people are so fed up.”

The audience was silent—startled, Lara thought, by his bluntness, the implicit demand that the President and Mason take the lead. Kerry stood straighter, scanning the convention floor. “Half of our citizens have already stopped voting.” Now
Kerry’s voice became cutting, angry. “What else do they need to tell us? How much more clearly can they spell out their despair?

“It’s about
freedom
, the special interests say. But how many of
you
are ‘free’ to spend ten thousand dollars to influence a political party?

“This is the freedom to corrupt, and it is slowly destroying our democracy.”

“Well,” Lee murmured. “He’s off the reservation now.”

“Ending it,” Kerry went on, “is a moral imperative. And the beginning of the end is a constitutional amendment which says, ‘Nothing in the Constitution shall prohibit Congress from passing laws to regulate the funding of campaigns for federal office.’

“Pass this amendment, and the lobbyists and politicians will have no place to hide, no excuse to offer. And if they oppose it, we have the right to know what reforms they offer in its place.”

The proposal was another surprise, at least to Lara, and a gamble; to many, amending the Constitution would seem too radical and too difficult. But on the screen, she saw a black woman in the Illinois delegation mouthing the word “yes.”

Kerry’s tone became passionate, imploring. “In our party’s past,” he said, “there is much to be proud of. But we can only be proud of our future if we give Americans back their government.

“I ask all of you to join me in that effort …”

There was a moment’s silence, and then the applause began, echoing to the rafters, delegates clapping, stomping their feet, standing on chairs to acclaim a party leader who—for at least this moment, long after most Americans were sleeping—had transformed their convention. After several minutes, it showed no sign of ending.

“Impressive,” Lee McAlpine said. “And it was actually about something.”

Nate looked at his watch, timing the applause. “He’d better enjoy it now,” he remarked. “Mason will cut his throat, if he can. And if Kilcannon wants to run, where’s the money coming from?”

Lee turned to him. “Of course he’s running, and he’ll find the money somewhere. He’s got the name, after all.”

It was more than the name, Lara thought. As she remembered him, James Kilcannon had been handsome, elegant, cautious. Kerry was the passionate one, the dangerous one, the Kil-cannon who might change the party and challenge the system, perhaps destroying himself in the process. If he decided to run for President, she had begun to think, he would be driven as much by his emotions as by cool cerebration. Watching him, a slight figure in a maelstrom of his own creation, Lara felt a new and puzzling emotion of her own—fear for Kerry Kilcannon.