The Governor's Lady (19 page)

“Yes. Of course.”

She went to Mickey’s room, dark except for slivers of morning plucking at the edges of the shades. She turned on the bedside lamp. Mickey was burrowed under the covers, the top of her head barely showing.

Cooper stood over her. “Mother,” she said, “we’ve got to talk.”

It took a minute, but Mickey finally rolled over, pushed the covers back to just below her chin, and peered bleary-eyed up at Cooper. Her
voice was so small and fragile it seemed like porcelain. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I know. It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry.”

Cooper took a deep breath. “I’ll check everything with you.”

“No need,” Mickey said. “Willis can help, but you decide. Whatever you decide, it’ll be fine.”

Willis, hollow-eyed from fatigue and his own private agonies, proved a font of information—history, protocol, necessities, proprieties. He suggested, she decided, and then Willis and Woodrow worked the phones. By the end of the day, the arrangements were virtually complete.

Late in the afternoon, she heard the faint rumble of machinery that became a groan of diesel when she opened the window next to Cleve’s bed. She sat next to him and touched his shoulder. “Daddy. You hear that?”

His eyes fluttered open. “Is it …?”

“Of course. I called them yesterday and told them to get busy.”

He lay there a long time, eyes open. His hand, frail and thin, found hers. His grip was surprisingly strong. They sat quietly, listening to the distant growl of the bulldozer out in the pasture.

“Cooper …”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Sometimes, I think we’re the sum of our regrets.”

She waited for him to go on.

“I could have stopped it. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I stopped it.”

She knew, of course, what he meant. She sat mutely, stung again by the ancient grief.

“We talked about it,” he said. “Jesse was a mess, in trouble and headed for more, maybe something serious.”

“Daddy, we don’t have to talk about this, not now.”

“We don’t, but I do.”

She waited, then finally gave his hand a squeeze.

“Mickey said maybe the military would do him some good. I think she got the idea from the sheriff. We thought about the air force.” He paused, brow furrowed, remembering. “I wanted him to say no, he wouldn’t go. But he didn’t. He just said, ‘Okay, but if I’m gonna do it, I want the marines.’ ”

“Why?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I don’t have any idea where he got the notion. But we said, ‘All right, if that’s what you want.’ He was almost eighteen. We waited until his birthday.” His head was almost off the pillow now, straining toward her, his face rigid with the effort. But then he sagged back, closed his eyes, his breath coming in small, ragged gasps. Then a long, agonized sigh. “I am so sorry.”

Cooper sat stunned, clutching his hand, trying to get her mind around it. She knew he spoke the absolute truth—he had no time for anything but truth—and it contradicted almost everything she thought she knew about the loss of Jesse. She yearned to reach out, find Jesse somewhere out there, grab him by the collar, cry out,
Why, Jesse? Why?

She let go of Cleve’s hand and moved to the window. She stood there battered by the words, the knowledge. But after a moment, she felt her heart turn away from her own need to that of her dying father. She could not give him absolution—no earthly soul could do that—but she could tell him she understood and shared the pain. Most of all, she could tell him with all the fierceness she could muster that he, they, must never let themselves be the sum of their regrets.

She was at the window for no more than a minute. But when she turned back, he was gone.

ELEVEN

His body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda for twenty-four hours—noon to noon—draped with an American flag and flanked by an honor guard of state troopers and National Guard soldiers. Had Cleve had any say in the matter, he would have agreed to that, but only reluctantly, as with the honorary degree from the university. He had a deep respect for the office he had held, if not for all who aspired to it or served in it.

The people came, an endless line stretching out the massive doors and down the steps to the edge of Capital Avenue.

It was seven o’clock on the morning of the second day. At midday, the honor guard would bear the casket down the marble steps to the waiting hearse, and they would begin the long journey home, pausing at First Presbyterian for a service. Cooper had come early, an hour before the doors would open and people would start filing in. She sat in a chair
behind the casket, out of view, lost in thought. Hearing the scraping of another chair, she looked up to see Mickey dragging it across the floor of the rotunda, and then a trooper scurrying to help her with it.

Mickey settled next to Cooper. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

“It’ll be a long day. Are you all right?”

“Yes, Mother. I’m fine. Are you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think this part would be so hard. The giving up, that’s what I thought would be the hard part, and the rest would be going through the motions.”

They sat for a while, not speaking. The troopers and soldiers had discreetly withdrawn, leaving them alone in the hollow stillness.

Cooper spoke up finally: “I think we should bury Daddy by the fishpond.”

“Can we do that?”

“I checked with the Health Department. Since a family plot is already on the property, they’ll just call it an extension of that.”

“You want to finish the pond.”

“Of course.”

Mickey hesitated. “I’ve never given any credence to the notion of the dead hanging around, spirits and hauntings and all that. When I’m gone, you can plant what’s left just about any place you want. But I understand about the fishpond.”

“Maybe it’s more for me.”

“That’s all right. You did love to fish together.”

“I don’t remember you ever going with us. Why?”

“Once, when you were small, I went along. I even caught a fish. But that was the only time.”

Cooper looked away. “I thought you didn’t care.”

“I thought it was your time, yours and his.”

Mickey moved to the head of the casket and stood there, smoothing
the flag over and over while Cooper watched. Mickey seemed more at ease now, gathered and braced for the day, if not so much for what lay beyond.

She looked up and pointed at a space across the rotunda next to a statue of Jefferson Davis. “It was right there where we met,” she said. “I was a lowly clerk in the House Speaker’s Office. Cleve spent most of his time on the Senate side. He’d come over once in a while, and he was pleasant, said hello to everybody, but I was at a desk over in a back corner of the office, and I don’t think he ever gave me a moment’s notice. Until the Fairfax County bill.”

Cooper waited, watching a slow smile spread across Mickey’s face.

“Lovey Andrews was the representative from Fairfax. Cleve and the speaker wanted him to support a bill, I don’t remember exactly what, except that it was something the governor wanted badly, and they were the governor’s people in the legislature. They worked on Lovey for weeks. He was a stubborn, ornery sonofabitch, and he’d been around for something like thirty years. Head of the Finance Committee, and he refused to bring the bill up for a hearing. The speaker was just beside himself. So … I fixed him.”

“What do you mean, you fixed him?”

“I was working late, typing up the final draft of a budget bill. Page after page of boring crap. And then I got an idea about how I could help the speaker put some heat on Lovey. I wrote up a paragraph and buried it in some stuff about road funding, abolishing Lovey’s county.”

“Abolishing?”

“Wiping the place off the map. Just leaving this big, blank hole where Fairfax County used to be.”

“Good God.”

“I didn’t tell a soul. The next day, the bill came up for a vote, and it passed unanimously.”

“With Lovey’s support.”

Mickey laughed. “The old fart voted to abolish his own county.”

“Did you tell anybody you’d done it?”

“Not for a couple of days. Then I went to see the speaker. ‘Look, Mr. Speaker, I just noticed this thing that slipped into the budget bill.’ He stared at it, and then at me, and I thought,
Oh, my God, he’s going to fire me right here on the spot
. But then he said, absolutely deadpan, ‘Thanks for bringing this to my attention.’ ”

“What happened to Lovey?”

“The speaker collared him and showed him what he’d voted for. He panicked. He fell all over himself saying he’d back the bill Cleve and the speaker wanted. And they sneaked something into another piece of legislation reestablishing Fairfax County. Nobody ever knew a thing about it but Cleve and the speaker and Lovey. And me. And I’ve never told a single other soul until you.”

Cooper hesitated before asking, “Why me?”

Mickey’s face went soft. “I was crossing the rotunda a couple of days later when Cleve stopped me. ‘Miss, I need a word with you,’ he said, and he gave me this long, serious look, and I thought,
I’m about to be chewed out
. But he put a hand on my arm and gave me this sly grin and said, ‘Nice work.’ And then he walked off. And the next day, he called and asked for a date. And all that led to you.”

Cooper gave Mickey’s hand a squeeze. “Thank you.” And then: “How did it occur to you to do that to Lovey Andrews?”

“I had the instincts. Even back then, I had the instincts.”

At midmorning, she felt a light pressure on her sleeve and turned to see Woodrow standing there, slack-jawed and red-eyed with weariness. He had hardly slept for a week. He had been constantly at Willis Tuttle’s side, helping with the details, first at the house, then at Cleve’s
campaign office in the capital. Cooper had seen him only once, briefly, when he met her and Mickey at their hotel.

“You look like hell,” she said with a smile.

“I love you, too. Are you okay? Anything I can do?”

“Be here.”

“I am.”

Woodrow took up a post in a corner of the rotunda for the rest of the morning while the crowd moved through. He kept to himself, speaking only when someone approached him, unobtrusive in his dark suit. She didn’t see him again until the church service was over and she and Mickey were moving through the crowd toward the car that would follow the hearse back home.

Woodrow caught up with them at curbside. “My car’s here. I’ll follow you.”

“No, Woodrow. From here on, it’s just us.”

As the car pulled away, she glanced through the rear window to see Woodrow standing there at the curb, hands loosely at his sides, watching them. And then he turned and stuck out his hand to a woman standing next to him, reaching for her elbow with the other hand. Cooper settled back in the seat, closed her eyes, and gave way to exhaustion.

Two days later, Cooper and Mickey gathered with Cleve’s old friends—Fate Wilmer and the like. The casket had been lowered the day before, the grave covered, only a stretch of green artificial turf covering the freshly dug earth. The great mounds of flowered wreaths had been left behind in the capital. What would soon be the pond was now a raw wound in red clay where the bulldozer had been at work. But when it was filled with water from the creek behind the earthen dam, the grave would be a few yards from the bank, sheltered by an ancient,
venerable maple that Cleve had insisted years ago be given a chance to recover after a lightning strike.