“About the money,” she was now saying, “I don’t care—this is capitalism, right? Boom and bust, bubble and pop. But in the matters of the heart I should have imitated you and Mom. I should have held out for my generation’s equivalent of Duke Johnston, instead of the foolish choices I did make.”
Annie started the car again, meeting her father’s eyes anew as they gave each other a warm, exhausted smile.
Then Duke turned away, looking out the window at the dreary suburban sprawl of south Charlotte. Most of it developed now, what used to be fields. Only briefly would a vacant farm lot appear, fallow acres filled with weeds, a FOR SALE sign, some distant trees not yet subject to the axe.
* * *
Her name was Miranda Mabry.
He had been re-elected for the third time to the city council of Charlotte in 1983. People were beginning to talk about his taking on one of Charlotte’s congressional seats … that is, if he didn’t want to make a run for mayor, and from there, governor. A fellow city councilman who was going back to his law practice, Bud Shackleford, approached Duke about this shining star in his office, this bright, capable, lovely young woman named Miranda Mabry, who had crafted three legendary resolutions that overhauled the city finances, the means of school board funding, and parks and recreation respectively. Charlotte was a largely black, largely Democratic city, a city of trucking and freight and salvage, mill workers and farm folk, and if the Republicans could hold their own outside of Myers Park it was because of the party’s populist-but-reasonable, frugal-but-progressive reform agenda, and Miranda was its mastermind. She was certainly going places but maybe the first place she ought to go is Duke’s office so they could find an issue to catapult him into greater prominence and maybe the mayor’s chair. She’s a looker, said Bud. Just about sank my marriage over that girl, he confided.
“Bud, now really,” Duke said at the time, smiling. “I hope Thelma didn’t get wind of it.”
“Wasn’t even a proper affair, Duke.” Bud put his hand behind his head, a nervous gesture, as if he were wiping his neck. “Just blowing off some steam at the suite at the Hilton. I’ll never know for sure if Thelma found out or if she didn’t, but it doesn’t matter now because I’m leaving City Hall. I’m just warning you. You’d be a fool not to take her but find wherever they installed your libido switch and turn it to ‘off.’ No man is safe around that girl.”
That proved true. Superbly dressed each and every day, just the right amount of flirty and sultry with the men, in that patented Southern-belle-getting-her-way model. Miranda seemed to have no life outside of the furtherance of Duke Johnston’s political fortunes; she was there before the day began and she was the last one out of the office … which sometimes led to an end-of-a-project drink at O’Donnell’s, where the city government and staff went to wind down and network each other. She had fine light brown hair that fell in tresses to her shoulders. It could go up in a bun which sensuously disassembled itself throughout the afternoon, stray hairs coming loose to be swept aside with her pale, delicate hand. And that mane smelled always of spice and herbs, some pricey salon shampoo that mingled with her perfume.
“Hm, I believe,” Jerene said, one evening, lying beside him reading in bed, “that that’s Fabergé’s Babe. How long has your affair, with a woman undoubtedly in her twenties, been going on?”
Duke kidded about it at the time, claiming assignations at Byerley’s Travel Court, Route 73, on the shores of Lake Norman—an established joke when they needed to refer to a place that was the bottom of the barrel. “Alas, darling, it is merely Miranda’s perfume and she lives in my office, forcing me to sign papers and read things.”
“And you thought the city council job would involve ‘no work at all.’ Best-laid plans.”
Miranda would sit across from Duke’s desk and talk about what it would take to be mayor of Charlotte. But good as that was, her true long-term interest was in going with him to Raleigh. Jim Martin was a Republican who actually stood a chance of winning the state house, if Reagan’s landslide materialized. But any Republican who had any prayer of dislodging the state Democratic machine had to have intrinsic real-folks appeal but mixed with some polish, like President Reagan … and who was more like Reagan in North Carolina than Duke Johnston? The gridiron associations, a charmer, a storyteller, witty, well spoken, and a wife with style, plus the bonus of his heroic Civil War associations. Day in, day out, Duke allowed himself to listen to his own sterling Reaganesque qualities, his own inevitable greatness. Miranda made him believe it.
At home, Jerene was more discouraging and practical. She didn’t know if she was up for all the glad-handing, the parties, the public appearances, the constant scrutiny—there were family matters that bore absolutely NO scrutiny, as he was well aware. What of the children? Their ups and downs might be fodder for the newspapers. And she would have to leave Charlotte for Raleigh, which she didn’t fancy much, where she didn’t know anyone, and it would all mean time away from the Jarvis Trust and the Mint Museum. But of course, if this was his destiny, then she would stand beside him and be an ornament.
Was that all it was? Jerene was her busy, practical, unexcitable self, while Miranda believed in a dream in which he starred, adored him, looked at him the way the young women who visited Arcadia used to look at him, with admiration for his present as well as his future. He felt it again, the heady ambition, the foretaste of great things close at hand.
Duke did not think, looking back, that his most disloyal moment was actually sleeping with Miranda. It felt wrong and went wrong and both of them knew it, sensed the mismatch of it immediately. Of course, no wife would see it that way—the act of adultery was always the most objectionable, disloyal thing. But his real treachery was to, however briefly, envision a future with Miranda by his side, two political animals, two shrewd operators seeing how far up the political ladder they might go. After the governorship … who knew?
What heady, empty talk it all was. Miranda would close the office door and sit on the arm of his chair. She would lean into him and dial a number of a potential backer. After he had shaken down the latest donor, Miranda would hug him, kiss his cheek, congratulate him for inching them one step closer to their mutual dream.
But all of his memories of politics led to 1984 and the one unforgettable memory, which he had cause to replay almost daily in his mind. Miranda had arranged a night at an uptown steakhouse, a private room where Duke and the little lady could be inspected by the men who would invest in a Republican mayor with an eye on the governor’s mansion. It was a big boozy affair, open bar, a short, handsome Mexican bartender working the small drinks table in the corner of the conference room, and a leggy blonde ferrying the drinks back and forth to the real estate and trucking tycoons, who reached out for a pinch or a pat. While Jerene entertained one banker, and Miranda laughed uproariously at another one’s jokes, Duke leaned into Paco (it said that on his name tag) and said, “It’s all a little ridiculous, isn’t it? Politics.”
Paco, not understanding him, just smiled.
“Make it a double bourbon,” Duke said. “I have to tell my wife some very bad news tonight.”
Somehow, three sheets to the wind, they got back home safely.
Jerene was suitably gay from the champagne; she untypically left a mess for Alma, kicking off her shoes in the foyer, flinging her coat toward the living room, musically laughing, now shedding her suit jacket on a banister … “So that’s what it’s like, having an evening with the moneymen, hm?” She dropped herself into a plush padded chair in the living room. Duke remembered following in, marching to his grimmest task ever. “I hope there’s many more of them. For one, I adored the absence of trophy wives, decorative molls, boring ‘better halves’ that I would be forced to converse with—”
“Jerene.”
“We haven’t even won the mayorship yet and here they are talking what you’ll do when you get sworn in at Raleigh! Martin gets eight years and then you’re there to succeed him—wh
at would that be, 1992? Good heavens, they can’t really plan that far ahead, can they?”
“Jerene.”
“You’ll have to decide just how corrupt you will be, of course, and stick to it. I’m not so naïve to think—”
“Jerene, darling, please.”
She focused on him, and her smile faded to match his own expression. She knew something bad was about to come.
“We can’t go any further without my telling you something.”
Duke remembered his last cowardice, that he virtually had her guessing it, hinting at it, hoping she would say it aloud first, but she wouldn’t. “You’ll have to tell me, Joseph,” she said, now crossing her arms, finding the living room chill. “If you’ve done something to disqualify you from political life, let’s have it.”
“You always know how to make everything right,” he said glumly, sitting on the edge of the sofa, not feeling entitled to any real comfort. “But you can’t make this right. Since it was against you, that the…”
She waited for it, lips drawn tight.
“I had a fling which is over now—the chance of it repeating, I mean. But the consequences persist.”
Jerene didn’t flinch. No doubt, she had figured it out from all his approximations and stalls. “Some woman has had a child by you, or is pregnant?”
“No, nothing like that. It was a drunken evening, everyone celebrating Reagan and Martin getting in with such big margins. You left the party, you’ll recall, early.”
She never let him out of her titanium gaze. “Apparently I should have stayed behind to prevent you from screwing somebody and sacrificing your political career to a drunken moment.”
“I wish you had.” He took a deep breath. “I went up to my office to find some aspirin, since I’d surely had too much, and I collided with my chief of staff, Miranda. In our excited state, we … we kissed.” Duke shrugged, hoping the rest could be implied.
“You wouldn’t be confessing to something as pointless and forgivable as a kiss.”
“No. Then we fell onto my sofa and rolled around a bit.”
“And?”
“There was just one other time. We never said anything, both pretended it didn’t happen, and then one afternoon…” He wanted to offer up a number of small expiations. The talk of his political future with so many Republican bigwigs and moneymen, the lunches and cocktail parties of being taken around and shown off like a prize bull, the steady mantra of Miranda’s praise and predictions, something like a dictator could expect in Stalinist times, forward with Duke, our man of the people, General Johnston may have surrendered to Sherman, but Duke Johnston will reign victorious as he takes the battlefield for North Carolinians fighting for the American Dream, this sudden head-turning world of worship and fawning, the crass sloganeering … all of it wrong, all of it heaped upon someone so unworthy. Sleeping with Miranda was an exercise, yes, in ego—yes, he was flattered and megalomaniacal in the light of Miranda’s attentions—but there was a flip side to it. It was the act of a man who knew he was a fraud before he began, a weak vessel. This was his way of shattering the tablets. But none of that could be said or should be said. There was no acceptable excuse even if there was an excuse.
“One afternoon?”
“One afternoon we got it out of our systems. The tension had grown to take up the entire office, every breath of air in the room was charged and we, as if besotted, went to a hotel and tore each other’s clothes off. It was terrible, of course, darling.”
“Mmm. The sex was terrible, was it? I’m so sorry for you. You should have had Miranda buzz me and I could have given her some pointers.”
“I didn’t mean that, although the sex was truly awful. Some part of me, some notion of myself and who I was, what I represented … well, it died. I would have said before that afternoon, I was a more or less good person, the proof being my home, my family, the love of simply the finest woman I’ve ever met, and now I was worthy of none of it.” He was feeling unsteady, so now he did, at last, slip deep into the sofa, seeming to shrink down into himself. “If I am to lose all of it, the political career I care so little for, the home and good opinion of my family, the marriage that sustains me … I can’t even feel sorry for myself, because that’s what I deserve.”
Jerene finally looked away from him. “I know who you are, Joseph Johnston. You forget how long we’ve known each other. Back at university when we were dating, there were a few stray women, a few sneaking one-last-times. Your patterns, and libido, are known to me. I’m not wholly surprised. Miranda is beautiful and smart—at least, you don’t insult me with some bar girl.” She looked at her hands. You would never know she had been given devastating news. After a moment, she looked up. “You said consequences.”
“Well. Whereas I lay there utterly in despair, wondering how soon it would be appropriate to give that speech of ships-passing-in-the-night, just one of those things but we can’t do it again, maybe she should find work in another office—all of those speeches. I was rehearsing them even then. But she had other plans. She wanted to be a ‘power couple.’ Bob and, um, the Transportation lady—what’s her name?—from up the road in Salisbury.”
“Bob and Liddy Dole.”
“Yes, some big political power couple. She had a plan.”
“I’d like to hear this plan.”
“First, I am to win re-election on the city council up through 1987, then immediately announce for mayor. I am to divorce you after the mayoral campaign. Then after a respectable interval, marry her in time for the ’94 race for governor. She had given some thought already to what causes she might promote as North Carolina’s First Lady.” Jerene shook her head and smiled faintly; Duke wasn’t capable of seeing the humor yet in anything. “So, the Monday after the hotel romp, I gave all those speeches I had been rehearsing. Maybe she should find another office, our little fling was a mistake, and so on.”
“She didn’t agree, I take it.”
“No. She said she had well-placed journalistic sources whom she would leak information about the affair to. I suppose it could be proven—hotel receipts, closed-circuit security cameras and all that. She would make it so I had to get a divorce. I refused and told her to do her worst, since—”
Jerene was ahead of him. “Since she craves power and could hardly stand to be in the paper as some politician’s floozy, some other woman.”
“Yes. Then she said she would go away and work in Raleigh with a state senator she had her eye on but such a move would require some funds. She named a five-figure sum. As I temporized, the sum increased. And now she seems willing to make good on all threats at once. We’re up to six figures. I thought about … Jerene?”
She had stood and was walking to the phone table. As he had seen her do a thousand times, she took off one big earring.
“Who are you calling?”
With one hand she held the phone, as the other riffled the address book. She punched in a number.
“Hello?”
A pause.
“Hello, Miranda Mabry? This is Jerene Johnston, Duke’s wife. You remember me from the re-election party and a few hundred phone messages you have been good enough to take.”
Another pause.
“Yes, well, you can save the laughing anecdotes. I know about the little affair. My husband will not be leaving me. And I understand there is a sum of money you require to keep quiet.”
Duke felt his head go light. But this was, at some level, what he yearned for. Jerene handling it.
“That seems a bit steep. I think you know what city councilmen make.”
She listened.
“You overestimate our vast estate, my dear. And if we don’t meet your sum?”
More listening, though Jerene stared at herself in the mirror, rearranging a strand of hair.
“That would be the whole of our savings.”
A final pause before the return fire.
“Well, I hope that you will now listen to me. You may know that before D
uke was a city councilman he was with a law firm, Munford, Mehta, Rankin. Duke was made the youngest partner in the firm’s history at just thirty-two years old, and for a season it was Munford, Mehta, Johnston and Rankin. Jon Munford works now for the state attorney’s office. Patrick Mehta’s son, Clarke, is the assistant attorney general for the state of North Carolina. You are a blackmailer and we have ample acquaintances and close friends who will happily prosecute you for it. Indeed, this conversation has been recorded. Some years back, in Duke’s first term, we were getting someone making death threats and we added a recording device to this line. Which I am using now. The SBI will enjoy your quoting me those exorbitant figures.”
Jerene listened impatiently.
“No, you are mistaken. We have nothing to lose. You will be in jail, or in any event disgraced and blackballed from your intended life as a political operative if not a politician yourself one day—you seem to have the mettle for it. Duke will not lose his marriage—I assure you I am going nowhere—and he will not be running for re-election, and so there is no political consequence to your threats.”
Whatever Miranda said, Jerene interrupted her:
“You find me in a civil mood, Ms. Mabry. Future encounters with the full force of the law on our side will strike you, I promise, as less pleasant. You will resign your position by mail and your severance, I’m sure Duke will oversee, will be in keeping with what is expected. Any more contact with me, my husband or this family, or any hint of any sordidness appearing in the local papers, and this tape will be in the SBI’s hands by nightfall. Have I made myself clear?”
Jerene’s level expression suggested that Miranda enjoyed a state of perfect clarity.
“Then this concludes our business. Good night, Ms. Mabry.”
Duke now felt he could breathe normally. Clutching the armrest, he tried to get up but found his leg strength had deserted him, as if his circulation had been on hold. But Jerene set the phone down and then pulled off her other earring, standing in the doorway to the living room. She had dealt with the impertinent Ms. Mabry and now she would deal with him.
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