The Governor's Lady (16 page)

Cooper felt herself close to tears. “Daddy,” she said softly, “I love you. Nothing could ever change that.”

It took him awhile to compose himself before he turned back. “For your sake, Cooper, for your and Mickey’s sake, give it a chance. Give
her
a chance. For me.”

He waited, but she couldn’t answer. Finally, he said, “It’s getting hot. Let’s pack it in.”

They wrapped the lines around the poles, retrieved the fish they had caught, and put them in the bucket. Cleve engaged the electric motor and guided the boat back to its spot on the bank. Cooper rose and turned toward the stern to see that Cleve was still sitting there, looking at her.

“I’m still gonna build that pond,” he said. “Senators like to fish, too.”

Give it a chance
. But she couldn’t make the overture, didn’t know how. Instead, Mickey did.

It was two weeks after the fishing trip. She was gathering her things for an eight o’clock class when she heard a knock at the apartment door. She opened it to find Mickey in the hallway looking rumpled and nervous, hair not quite so perfectly in place, dress slightly askew, mouth set in a thin line, almost a grimace. Cooper squinted, looked Mickey
up and down. All she could think to say was, “You’ve got on one brown shoe and one blue one.”

Mickey looked at her feet. “It was dark.” She made a slight move toward the open doorway.

“I’ve got a class,” Cooper said, but then she stepped aside and Mickey entered, crossed to the middle of the room, and stood there with her back to the door while Cooper closed it. She didn’t turn around until Cooper said, “When did you get here?”

“I left home about four.” She hesitated, then said, “I’m on the way to the capital.”

“This isn’t on the way to the capital.”

“Yes, it is,” Mickey insisted.

“Well, okay.” Cooper picked up her books and bag. “You want to wait here?”

“Skip your class,” Mickey said.

“I’ve got an exam.”

“Skip it.” Her voice had that imperious ring to it that Cooper hated. But then Mickey said, “Please.”

Cooper couldn’t recall ever hearing Mickey use that word. So she put down the books and bag and gestured to the sofa. Mickey sat and Cooper took the chair, so they could look directly at one another.
Okay, whatever this is, give it a chance
.

“I wanted to ask you,” Mickey started, then hung back for a moment. “How would you feel about Woodrow working in the campaign?”

Whatever Cooper might have expected, it wasn’t this. Or was it? An oblique approach to an issue both different and the same. That seemed typically Mickey. She took her time. “Woodrow can do what he wants. He’s a big boy.”

She could see Mickey’s wheels turning—brow furrowing, mouth making little side-to-side gestures. This was wholly new, Mickey asking. Mickey didn’t ask, she told.

“Mother,” Cooper said after a moment, “I don’t want to talk about my relationship with Woodrow, but he doesn’t need my permission to work in anybody’s political campaign.”

“He wants it.”

“You’ve discussed this with Woodrow?”

Mickey spread her hands. “I talked to Woodrow about the campaign. We didn’t discuss your relationship, so don’t get your back up.”

“So why are you here asking me if Woodrow can do it?”

“That’s not what I said. I asked how you feel about it.”

“What’s the difference, Mother? Sorry, but I’m missing the subtleties here. What is this?”

Mickey gave an angry toss of her head. “I told him it wouldn’t work.”

Cooper understood instantly that she meant Cleve, not Woodrow.
Give it a chance. For me
. He had no doubt said the same thing to Mickey. And it was Mickey who was making the effort, not Cooper.

She took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s start over.”

Mickey looked at her lap, where her hands were intertwined so tightly it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. She loosened them, picked a piece of lint from her dress, dropped it on the floor, then looked up. “We’d better try while we can,” she said.

“Woodrow loves politics, and he’s good at it,” Cooper said. “I can either deal with that or not. I’m wrestling with it. What I can’t do is stand in his way.”

Mickey nodded. “He wants you to be part of it.” She held up her hands quickly. “I’m not meddling, Cooper. I’m not going behind your back, not trying to be an intermediary. But I know Woodrow Bannister loves you, maybe even enough to give up all the rest.”

Cooper sighed. “He couldn’t. You know what Daddy always says about finding your passion. Daddy found his, and it’s the same as yours. I understand that better now.”

“And you’ve always been odd man out,” Mickey said quietly.

“I always thought you stole people from me. Daddy …” And then she stopped. She couldn’t bring herself to say the other name, the one she hadn’t spoken aloud in years because it gave her such pain. Cooper shook her head. “I’m trying to figure out a lot of things. I’m trying to figure out you and Daddy and Woodrow, but mainly myself. I need some time.” And then it was her turn: “Please.”

Mickey tried but couldn’t quite manage a smile. She rose, then reached for Cooper, pulled her to her feet, and hugged her. It took Cooper completely by surprise. It was a brief hug, not enough to span all those years. But Cooper accepted, gave back, felt something in herself ease a bit.

At the door, Mickey asked, “Where did the time go?” There was a wistfulness to it, as if Cooper had gone missing and then turned up unexpectedly, grown in the meantime into her own person and something of a stranger.

“You’ve been busy,” Cooper said.

“I’ll try not to be so busy.”

“You’ve got a campaign to run.”

“As I said, I’ll try not to be so busy.”

And thus a truce flag was raised. Cooper decided to accept it for what it was, accept Cleve and Mickey for who they were, and set the baggage aside. It was part of the moving on, the growing up.

About Cleve, she had a clearer perspective. She could separate the father from the politician, could understand he could be both without having to be judged on a scale of perfection.

And now she would consider Woodrow in the same light, but with a good deal more at stake, because it was her future, not what had gone before. Woodrow was the most thorough of political animals. He would
go far, and a price would be paid for that—by him and everyone around him. How might the two of them, if they chose to do it together, handle the conflict? She was convinced Woodrow was as genuine a man as he was a politician. He loved her, she knew beyond doubt. She loved that
about
him. But did she love him, enough to take the risk?

It was something she couldn’t figure out from a distance.

She was waiting for him in front of the psychology building when he emerged from class, bounding down the steps with an armload of books, neat in khakis and knit shirt, everything in place, a look of earnest concentration on his face, a purposeful young man on his way. Then he saw her and stopped in his tracks and stared, and everything about him seemed to ease and soften. They stood there several yards apart, searching each other, and then he crossed quickly to her.

He started to speak, but nothing came out. Finally, he said, “You’re too thin.”

“Probably.”

He reached for her hand, enveloped it in his. “Can you deal with me?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see.”

NINE

The Psychology Department picnic was a staid affair at a tree-shaded park alongside the river that ran near the campus—beer keg and hot dogs, faculty members’ kids clambering over playground equipment while their parents held court among clusters of graduate students pretending to pay rapt attention. Most of the grad students, Cooper suspected, wished they were someplace where they could get truly drunk without having to worry that they might say something stupid and jeopardize their theses and dissertations.

The exception was Woodrow, who moved confidently from cluster to cluster, staying with each long enough to make sure the faculty member noticed and acknowledged his presence. A knowing smile here, a respectful question there. Woodrow, of a mind that a graduate degree in psychology would be helpful to his political career, was politicking the
department and learning the secrets to parsing voters’ minds.

Cooper followed Woodrow for a while and then, bored, wandered to a bench near the playground equipment. She sat finishing her beer and watching kids dangling from monkey bars and doing belly flops on the sliding board. And she watched Woodrow.

“He could politick a convention of the deaf, dumb, and blind,” she had once said to Mickey. Mickey had both agreed and approved. She and Woodrow were quite at home with the use of
politick
as a verb. It helped define who they were and what they did, a combination of instincts and skills that included the ability to size up a crowd, figure out who was worth courting and who wasn’t, and then give both worthy and unworthy a moment of look-’em-in-the-eye connection that made them remember.

In Woodrow’s case, it was deep in his marrow. He was compelled to politick. He couldn’t
not
do it. He had nothing phony or plastic about him. Sure, when he politicked you, there was no escaping the raw heat of his ambition. He made no attempt to hide it. But he also made you feel, with his firm handshake and knowing smile, that you were, for at least that moment, truly important to him.

Woodrow knew who he was, and he was honest about it. For example, he told Cooper early in their courtship that it was pretty much impossible for him to pass up a funeral. If he was driving past a church and saw a gathering of cars and a hearse out front, he would stop, go in, and quietly take a seat. He would follow the procession to graveside and, when the departed was finally lowered, work the crowd. Woodrow’s family went way back in state history, and he was legitimately kin, at least distantly, to a great number of people. But legitimacy didn’t matter. He would labor tirelessly until he found some way to make a personal connection with every soul he could lay hands on—kinship, school ties, a long-ago acquaintance at some summer camp. If all else failed, he would make something up. He never left empty-handed.

“Make something up?” she asked.

“Stretch a connection,” he said. “Maybe that’s a better way of putting it.”

“But that’s not honest.”

“A white lie,” he admitted. “But look at it this way. Can’t a white lie serve a good purpose? You meet somebody, look ’em in the eye, and work hard at finding common ground. Make ’em feel good. And what’s wrong with making somebody feel good?”

“Do you ever get caught?”

He smiled. “I’m nimble.”

Cooper at first thought of Woodrow’s funeral-going as a game, a particularly Southern game that might be called “Who Are Your People?” But it was much more; it was part and parcel of Woodrow.

The more she understood him, the less she knew with any conviction about the big questions of their relationship. They were often apart for days at a time. He was up to his eyeballs in Cleve’s campaign for the Senate. She didn’t know exactly what he was doing, didn’t really want to know. When they were together, he made only vague references to his work. He was juggling all that with the demands of graduate school, doggedly staying with the seminars and papers and all the rest. At times, he looked near exhaustion. Meanwhile, she waited on her heart, took stock of her life, and watched Woodrow, hoping that if she looked closely enough she might find some clues to help answer her questions.

Just now, he had cut a fellow graduate student loose from a herd and was working him—one hand shaking, the other elbow-cupping, head slightly cocked to one side, brow furrowed, listening intently. Connecting. Woodrow could startle with his come-on, and his present prey looked taken aback. But Woodrow was boring in with his big, agreeable I-know-just-what-you-mean smile. He might be startling, but he was also careful not to overdo it. He was habitually careful, his radar always finely tuned.

For example, his cup of beer, which he had set aside on a picnic table while he worked the grad student. He had a half-beer rule. He would drink enough to appear sociable, one of the gang, but not enough that the cup would appear to be nearly empty and someone might thrust a fresh one on him.