The Governor's Lady (15 page)

Cooper had arrived late in the night from school this March weekend and expected to awake this morning to the sound of heavy equipment in the pasture, but it was quiet and empty. At breakfast in the dining room, she heard only the clink of silverware and china, desultory small talk.

And then Mickey said, “We’re thinking about the Senate.”

Cooper froze. She stared at Mickey, then at Cleve.

“Fincham’s sick,” he said after a moment. “They’ve kept it hushed up, but word’s beginning to leak out.” Clifford Fincham was a venerable fixture in the United States Senate—seven terms. Even in his early eighties, he was unbeatable. “The election’s not until next year, of course, but we have to think ahead.”

Cooper turned away, unable to look at either of them. She felt herself give way to a great, frustrated sadness.
It’s her doing. He would build his fishpond, be a farmer
.

“It’s an opportunity,” Cleve said.

She glanced at Mickey, who remained silent. “For another office,” Cooper said.

“To do some good, I hope,” Cleve said. “Fincham hasn’t sponsored a piece of legislation for years, just keeps the folks back home happy by hanging on, taking up space. The state needs somebody—”

“Like you,” Cooper said.

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

She rose, pushing her chair back, folded her napkin, placed it carefully under the edge of her plate. “I’ve got to get back to school. Midterms are coming up.”

She went upstairs, packed the few items she had brought, and took her duffel to her car. Mickey was standing next to it. She watched without
speaking as Cooper opened the passenger door, tossed the duffel onto the seat, and walked around to the other side. Mickey’s hand was on the door handle.

“You just couldn’t stand it, could you?” Cooper said.

“You think I’ve dragged him kicking and screaming into everything we’ve done?”

“Something like that.”

Mickey shrugged and backed away from the car. Cooper opened the door and slipped behind the wheel.

“Grow up, Cooper,” Mickey said. “Stop deceiving yourself. Live in the real world.”

Cooper pulled the door shut, started the engine, and drove away without another look.

She wrestled with it through the long drive downstate to the university—the disappointment, and then the puzzle of how Cleve and Mickey fit together. Cleve ran for office and won and served well, and Mickey helped him get there. Cooper thought it was like poker to Mickey—knowing when to get into the game, how much to risk, playing her hand adroitly, understanding when to raise, when to bluff, when to fold, when to call. She almost always won and walked away with the pot. But who needed what from the game? They were joined hip and soul, but exactly how, she could not fathom.

She was miles down the road when it came to her that she could never really know. She knew only that she had felt very much outside their world for as long as she could remember. She had always felt, and always would, a lingering hurt and disappointment, a sense of loss, a sense of things and people being taken from her, kept from her, a sense of defeat from being unable to understand why.

But she also understood that she had for a long time been beating herself up with her losses. And she had to somehow move on from that, accept what she couldn’t know and especially couldn’t change. She
would be graduating from college, moving into the wider world. Not their world, but hers.
I can’t forget it, but I can get over it
.

As much as it pained her to admit it, Mickey was right about one thing: It was time to grow up.

She slept in on Monday, missing two classes. The phone rang several times, but she ignored it. Woodrow, no doubt. She didn’t want to talk to him just now.

When she finally awoke around one, she made coffee, showered, ate a bagel, opened books, and started boning up for a media law exam.

Woodrow came around five with beer and sandwiches from the deli down the street. They sat at the kitchen table.

“I heard about the Senate,” he said.

“What did you hear? Where?”

“The jungle telegraph. Fincham’s dying, your dad’s running.”

“He told me this weekend, but it didn’t sound quite that final.”

“Sounds like it’s pretty well set in stone. Somebody’s putting the word out about Cleve, and that will scare off some people who might be thinking about it.”

“I honestly thought he might retire.”

He laughed. “You’re kidding.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he can’t. Or at least Mother can’t.”

“Both, I imagine. They’re like two firehouse dogs. When the bell rings, they’re up on the seat of the truck.”

“She’s the one who rings the bell.”

Woodrow gave her a close look. “You’ve seen him campaign, Cooper.”

She thought back through the jumble of years. “Not a lot. He didn’t take me along.”

“Any idea why?”

”I think he was trying to protect me from all that—the bright lights, the people trying to use him, the bullshit.”

“About ninety percent of politicking is bullshit,” he said. “And about seventy-five percent after you win and take office.”

“So ninety percent of what
you
do is bullshit.”

“Sure.”

“And is that what my father does?”

“Better than anyone I’ve ever seen. He’s a helluva campaigner, Cooper. It’s an art form with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s like …” He thought for a moment. “A golfer, a really good golfer. He makes this long, easy, flowing swing—you think it’s got nothing on it—and when the club meets the ball, it takes off like it was launched from Canaveral. And you think,
Jeez, the guy barely swung the club, and look what happened! How did he do that
? That’s the way Cleve Spainhour is. It looks absolutely natural, effortless, whether he’s doing the bullshit part or the stuff that matters.”

“He’s not a phony,” she said.

“Anything but. He’s that rarest of all things political—he’s genuine. He understands the game and all the rules and what the stakes are and what the prize can be. Not winning, but doing what really matters.”

“But still, there’s the bullshit. And it gets all over people,” she said. “Me.”

He sat there a long time, not saying anything, taking an occasional sip from his beer, looking out the window. Finally, he turned back to her. “I know you wrestle with all that. And I think it has a great deal to do with you and me, with what we might be.” He looked away again.

“Yes, it does,” she said.

He finished his beer, crumpled the paper wrapping from his sandwich, took the beer bottle to the sink, and tossed the paper into the trash. She watched him, saw the troubled look on his face.

He sat down again across from her, reached for her hand. “There’s just this,” he said. “I love you. Desperately. But I am who I am.”

The weather warmed, the earth greened. Welcome heat radiated from the sidewalks. Convertibles had their tops down. Shirtless boys tossed Frisbees on the campus quadrangle while groundskeepers tended beds of shrubs and flowers. Dogwood trees showed their first blooms.

She didn’t see Woodrow for days. She understood he was giving her time, that they had come to a place in their relationship where all its dimensions had to be considered—who they were, where each was going, whether it might be possible that they belonged together.

Then Cleve called: “Let’s go fishing.”

They went to their familiar place, as was part of the ritual—the small pond on Fate Wilmer’s neighboring farm. Wilmer had for years been Cleve’s doctor, but also much more: friend and confidant, a man who valued Cleve for his private, not his public, self.

Wilmer drove them in his rusting pickup along a rutted path to the pond on the secluded backside of the property, where a small aluminum boat was tethered to a tree on the bank. He hooked up the electric trolling motor and left with a promise to be back in a couple of hours.

They had brought the usual simple gear—two cane poles, a cardboard container of crickets, a plastic tackle box with hooks, weights, floats, and spare monofilament line, a bucket for the fish, a small cooler. Cooper at the bow, Cleve steering as they slipped easily through the water to the far side of the pond. They anchored several yards from where low-hanging bushes shaded the shallows.

Dawn mist had lifted from the pond, and a slight breeze nibbled at the surface. But mostly quiet and stillness, the feeling of a place in waiting to see what the day might reveal. Cooper got the poles
ready—small weights a few inches above the hooks, red and white plastic floats adjusted to the depth they wanted to fish, depending on water, weather, time of day. He had taught her when she was six years old how to bait a hook with a worm or cricket, had observed without comment that she wasn’t a bit squeamish about it. In those early days, Cooper had been full of chatter, eager to share her small life with her father in the rare moments when she had him all to herself. But in time, she had also learned to treasure silence.

The fish weren’t much interested today. An hour produced two bream for Cooper, a smallmouth bass for Cleve, strung on a line and left in the water at the side of the boat. She heard Cleve stir behind her, fumbling in the cooler, the sucking pop of a can being opened. She turned to see him holding out a beer to her, gave him an arched-eyebrow look.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t drink beer.”

She smiled and took the beer. It was exquisitely cold.

“By the time I was a senior in college,” Cleve said, “I had drunk enough to float the
Queen Mary
.”

“Did you ever do anything stupid?”

He snorted. “Still do. It doesn’t take liquor to make you do stupid things.”

“Like?”

His gaze never left her. “Not being honest with you.”

So now here it was. She had tried in the days since Cleve’s phone call not to anticipate too much, to leave her heart and mind open to possibility. He looked away, opened his own beer, took a long slug, set the can beside him on the narrow seat, went back to his fishing. Several minutes went by.

“You really love it, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes, I do love it—the laying on of hands, the give and take, the winning, the serving. But I wish …” He paused, searching for words. “I
realized the morning at breakfast when I brought up the Senate that I haven’t talked to you about what I am and what I do, not enough. When you left, I felt something was unfinished. You’re grown up now, and I have to think of you that way. And be honest.”

They were quiet for a long time. A few nibbles at their bait, not even much of that. It was midmorning, heat beginning to settle over the pond.

“The Senate,” he said.

“I hoped you were through.”

“I might have been, except for this thing with Fincham. It’s an opportunity.”

“For you … and Mother.”

His eyes left her. He stared for a long time at his float bobbing in the water before he turned back. “Cooper, make no mistake: It’s my doing. I’m the one you should blame.”

“I don’t
blame
anybody.”

“Of course you do.”

“She seems so …
obsessed
with all of it.”

He shrugged. “She loves it, too, but it’s different for her. I’m the fellow out front, she’s busy in the back room, doing all the gritty stuff—raising money, twisting arms, making connections. That’s the part she loves. But when the running and winning are done, I’m the guy who gets to stand gloriously in the spotlight. She’s stuck in the back room. People look at her as slightly grubby, hard edges, hands soiled. The Dragon Lady.”

“And isn’t she?” Cooper insisted.

Cleve shook his head impatiently. “Ask
her
. Talk to her, Cooper. Talk it out. She wants that. She wants to be understood. You want to be understood.”

“Daddy, I’ve wanted to be understood for a long time. But what I’ve been, what I’ve felt, is just … left out.”

Cleve laid his pole aside. Another minute, then: “That’s the other thing I regret. I didn’t listen enough. I didn’t take
time
to listen. If I had, I’d have known how you felt—about me, especially about your mother. And maybe I could have helped, or at least known I had to do things differently. But I didn’t listen.” He paused, and his voice broke. “I am profoundly sorry for that, partly because I didn’t listen, but mainly because it may be too late. You’re a grown woman, and there’s so much that can’t be undone.” He turned away, put his head in his hands.