“I guess we could say that’s vaguely optimistic.”
Christine considered the point. “It is if you’re a dinosaur.”
Michelle was poking her finger against the glass case. “That one!”
Mother and daughter made their way to the Little Red School House, where Christine kissed Michelle goodbye at the front door. She continued on to Carmine Street and Café Jamal for her morning cappuccino. Her own one-of-a-million. This time of year, the morning sun angled sharply through the café’s window. Christine closed her eyes and drank in its comforting warmth. Now that Michelle was safely off to school, Christine could turn her attention to… herself. It seemed that this particular morning, there was a lot to go over.
Andy had phoned Christine from D.C. the night before to tell her that Chris Wyeth had canceled their standing tennis date. The reason for the cancellation was that Wyeth was meeting in the evening with President Hyland to discuss the flak concerning the vice president’s conduct back in his state government days. The meeting was strictly hush-hush. Andy had gone on to tell her of Hyland’s directive, channeled through Andy’s aide-de-camp, Jim Fergus, about Andy keeping his distance from the embattled VP, at least for the time being. On the face of it, the directive was completely absurd. Andy and Chris Wyeth had a long professional history together, as well as a long-running personal friendship. Wyeth had attended Andy and Christine’s wedding, offering up the day’s most eloquent and heartfelt toast. During his own stint in Albany — some ten-plus years after her own father’s administration — Wyeth had been no small factor in assisting Andy in his bruising fight to hold on to the Senate seat he had inherited, as it happened, from Wyeth. Round and round it went. Andy and Chris Wyeth were inexorably linked. It seemed childish to order the two to keep away from each other.
Christine lost herself in the shimmering triangles of sunlight that played about her table. The nearby door opened and closed as customers passed in and out of the café. The occasional breeze caressed her skin. A ladybug appeared on Christine’s spoon. It, too, seemed to be taking a long moment to do absolutely nothing. Christine picked up a slender red straw and poked at the froth of her cappuccino. She drew little designs in the foam. A couple sitting a few tables away were locked in a highly charged but whispered argument, and Christine settled onto the face of the young woman, trying to name to herself each of the woman’s passing expressions. Eventually the couple paid their bill and left, and Christine finally called her focus back from its wanderings. It wasn’t really her preference — she enjoyed these sorts of mental time-outs — but she knew she could only indulge in being nowhere for just so long.
She was troubled.
In their phone conversation, Christine and Andy had only nibbled around the very edges of the matter of the vice presidency. As absurd as it seemed, Christine did not know what Andy’s innermost thoughts were should Chris Wyeth be forced to step down. Even when Andy’s name had been floated as a possible second on John Hyland’s ticket, he and Christine had not fully confronted the matter. Andy had great respect for Hyland, she knew this, and he had eventually played a strong part in helping to deliver votes to him, in particular the votes of the wary upstaters. But with Chris Wyeth being tapped to run for vice president, the question for Andy and Christine had remained abstract. On top of which, it had been anticipated that after the current governor of the state stepped down — now rumored to be at the conclusion of his current term — Andy would be throwing his hat into the ring for a trip to Albany. Christine already harbored great ambivalence about the déjà vu of a return to life in the governorship’s fishbowl. So very been there. So very done that. It was also certainly not something she was anxious to wish on her own daughter. But as with many facets of her husband’s career — too many — this was something Christine preferred not to think about if she didn’t have to. So long as most of the matters remained abstractions — which up to now they had — there was actually nothing to think about.
Up to now.
Christine finished her cappuccino. As she headed toward the subway, her eye caught the cover of the Post. Someone had leaked the story of Vice President Wyeth’s evening meeting with President Hyland. The front page of the tabloid showed a large photograph of Hyland looking irritated and one of the vice president in an uncommon expression of contriteness. The 72-point headline ran:
OKAY, LET’S
HEAR IT
Christine dug two quarters from her purse and swapped them for the paper. She folded it lengthwise and continued on to the subway, beating the paper gently against her open palm as she went.
Heading down the steps at the Christopher Street station, Christine recognized a familiar tightness in her stomach. She had experienced a similar feeling — a low-level dread — the morning she had walked down the steps at her father’s Greenwich house on the morning of her marriage to Andy. It wasn’t Andy; she loved her husband deeply, and she had loved him well before they’d tied the knot. The spasm of dread on the morning of her wedding had come more from the full realization that in committing herself to this man, she was unwittingly following in her mother’s footsteps: marrying the very possibly future governor of the state of New York. She had found herself assailed by the famous Santayana quotation about those who ignore history, and she had prayed she was doing the right thing. This was different, she’d told herself. Andy was not Whitney. She was not Lillian. Let irony have its day, and then move on.
As Christine descended into the station, the aroma of stale air rose to meet her. The rolled-up newspaper was beating harder now against her leg, like a steady drumbeat. Down, down, down she went.
She got off the subway at Columbus Circle and angled toward Central Park. The air was crisp, more like an autumn day than the middle of April, and the temperature dropped noticeably once she entered the park. Bicyclists were scattered along Park Drive, with their little ant-head helmets and their hard-pumping legs.
Christine crossed the drive at Tavern on the Green and headed east across Sheep Meadow. A handful of people dotted the vast green space. Some were reading; a few appeared to be meditating. There were some sleepers. The inevitable cell-phone yabberers.
When she reached the Promenade, Christine pulled out her camera. The wide walkway that ran north toward the Pond was one of her favorite parts of the park. There was something so stately and serene about the Promenade. Something timeless. The rows of black statues stationed on either side of the walkway. The high canopy of trees filtering out the sunshine. Christine always felt as if she were traveling a corridor that had been lifted in full from another era and very deliberately and subversively inserted into the park at these exact time and space coordinates. She had taken hundreds of photographs here. Her huge collage of the walkway in autumn greeted visitors and employees getting off the elevator at the fifth floor of the Ford Foundation headquarters, just a mile to the south. Another image of the Promenade she had captured, the trees and statues heavily frosted with silvery snow, had been blown up and mounted in an ice blue frame and hung in a place of honor in Placido Domingo’s villa in Rialto, on the wall next to the tenor’s gleaming Steinway grand piano. He had phoned Christine personally soon after the photograph’s installation to tell her how “transporting” the image was.
Christine snapped away as she walked along the pathway. She could tell that her eye was a little off this morning. She wasn’t transporting a damn thing. In the plaza, in front of the band shell, two teenage boys on midgety-looking bicycles were perfecting the stunt of heaving the rear of their bikes into the air and balancing both bike and rider on the stubby front tire. A lot of hop, hop, hop, fall. Christine shot a quick series. She thought maybe she might be able to do something with some of the shots of the boys as they bailed out. Bodies momentarily in flight. She’d have to see. The balancing part she just wasn’t capturing.
The knot in her stomach had dissolved away. The park always did this for her. It leveled things off. Christine knew that the word oasis wa
s always being dragged out whenever a person wanted to describe the key function of the park, but she had yet to locate a better one. It was an oasis, especially so during the week and the low tourist months. When she was fresh out of college, during the year in which Christine made her play to push back against the powerful gravitational pull of her relationship with Andy, she had entered into a brief and delicious affair with a dishy older man she had met at the Belvedere Castle. The man owned a Saint Bernard he’d named Frederick Law Olmsted, after one of the visionary designers of Central Park, and for a month and a half Christine had been convinced that the extremely sexy man and his heavenly beast of a dog were a fairy tale that she had tumbled into. Too good to be true. Which of course turned out to be the case. When the not-yet-ready-to-cut-the-cord ex-wife began leaving her scent here and there, the fairy-tale man had turned disappointingly real. Big-faced Frederick Law Olmsted had still maintained his charm, but there could be no splitting of the package. The bubble had burst, and Christine’s rebel year concluded back in Andy’s capable arms.
Christine came out of the park just south of the Metropolitan Museum and headed up the steps. A large blue and gold banner hanging over the entrance advertised the current van Eyck show.
In the Temple of Dendur, Christine walked a slow circle around the sandstone relic, then sat down on the low wall that rimmed the installation’s large black pool. Dimes, nickels, quarters, pennies shimmered in the shallow water. In a too-rational world, people still toss coins into water. They still hold out for some magic. Christine loved that. She leaned sideways and let her fingers slip into the water. Mild ripples radiated out from her hand, disturbing the flat black surface. The clenching in her stomach had sneaked back up on her and she wanted to ignore it, but she couldn’t. She knew it was going to remain until this thing with Andy resolved itself. The future was making a rush at her, and she was resisting. Futile, as they say. Christine wiggled her fingers, creating a small splash. Wishing for things to remain exactly as they were was folly. Christine’s personal wishes for stasis were simply not under consideration. She could unload a thousand coins into the water, and it was not going to make a single bit of difference.
“Hey. You can’t do that.”
Christine jerked her head. A security guard was standing quite close, looming over her. A large man. The ceiling of the vast room floated several hundred feet above his head. Christine pulled her fingers from the water.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
The guard’s face intrigued her. His head had the roundness of a perfect pumpkin, and he looked as if he had a light source buried within his skull, illuminating the cornflower-blue eyes from within. The expression on his face — not quite blank — was discomforting.
“Don’t do that,” he grunted again.
Before Christine could respond, the guard turned and started away. Strange bird. Christine grabbed her camera and fired off a few discreet shots of the receding figure as he headed off in the direction of the adjoining gallery. The image in her viewfinder sent chills through her. He moved like a man dragging a trail of heavy chains.
Senator Andrew Foster (Democrat, New York) leaned into the microphone and pointed his finger across the moat of photographers to the witness seated at the long table. If the finger had been a pistol, the shot would have taken the witness at the bridge of his nose.
“Do you mean to tell me that you authorized a bonus of ten thousand dollars to be paid to Miss” — he stirred a few sheets of paper in front of him, then lowered the accusing finger to jab it forcefully against one of the sheets — “Miss Hammond? You paid this Miss Hammond, on top of her six-figure salary, a bonus for being the employee who, you will have to excuse my language, Mr. Sprague and Mr. Chairman, but I think in this case it is formidably accurate, who screwed more of your company’s customers out of receiving necessary medical attention and treatment than any other employee? Is that what you are telling this committee?”
The witness glared back at the senator from behind his thick horn-rimmed glasses. His expression made him look as if he was sucking on an extremely tart lemon drop.
“Miss Hammond achieved a notable benchmark, Senator. We believe in—”
The senator cut him off. “Benchmark? Could you elaborate on that, Mr. Sprague? What we’re talking about here is denial of benefits. Plain and simple, sir. Denial of lifesaving benefits. Did this Miss Hammond receive a bottle of champagne along with her ten grand? Perhaps a plaque?”
“Senator, it’s not—”
“Is her picture up on the wall in the employees’ lunchroom? Killer of the Year?”
The witness punched the table with his fist. “Senator, that is unfair!”
Senator Foster allowed the words to dissolve in their own sweet time. If he was a shade too theatrical in massaging the pause, so be it. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the knowing grin of the committee chairman.
“Mr. Sprague. I stand ready to apologize to the fortunate Miss Hammond for my characterization of her as a killer. I’m sure she is a lovely person, and she’s just doing her job. It was a harsh thing to say.” His eyes drifted to the gallery, then lowered again to the man at the table. “Perhaps, Mr. Sprague, you can show me how it’s done.”
The witness was confused. “I’m sorry, Senator. How what is done?”
“Apologizing, Mr. Sprague. Ross Foley’s widow and two of her three children are seated in the front row of the gallery. If you turn around, you can see them. Go ahead, sir. Have a look. They’re right there.”
Sprague knew he had no choice. Reluctantly, he twisted in his chair and peered up into the gallery.
Andy pulled the microphone closer. “Mrs. Foley. I don’t believe Mr. Sprague has any idea what you look like. Could you please help him out?”
A frail-looking black woman seated in the front of the gallery lifted her hand. She spoke some words, but they failed to travel down to the floor. A pair of preteens sat sullenly on either side of her.
Sprague turned back to the committee and waited for the senator from New York to complete the disemboweling. Andy Foster was only too happy to comply.
“If you’ll apologize to Mrs. Foley and her children for the unnecessary death of the late Mr. Foley, I will beg the forgiveness of your… your Benchmark Achiever of the Year, Miss Hammond. Do we have a deal, Mr. Sprague?”
Back in his office, Andy hung up his jacket and loosened his tie. Jim Fergus, the senator’s aide-de-camp, was already seated in his usual chair, fidgeting with a pencil. Grabbing a tissue from the box on his desk, Andy dabbed gingerly at the wound on his head. The stitches had come out that morning, and he had been warned of the possibility of slight oozing. The tissue came away dry.
Fergus asked, “Did you enjoy that? Beating up on the good Mr. Sprague?”
Andy moved behind his desk and dropped into his chair. “Did you?”
“If Frank Capra were alive, I’m sure he would have enjoyed it. Either that or started making plans to sue your ass.”
Andy laughed. “The man is holding a one-way ticket to hell, Jim. He is literally in the business of killing sick people. Under the guise of providing insurance. It’s seriously nuts. We’re in the realm of outright lunacy now. Ass over teakettle or whatever the hell the phrase is. Our clueless Mr. Sprague and the rest of his kind are steering a perverse course for this planet.”
Fergus gave a maybe-yes-maybe-no shrug. “Hey. Senator. The cameras are off. There’s no need to convince me. I say give the man a pair of cement boots and let’s move on.”
The office door opened and a young woman wearing a blue blazer and pleated skirt entered carrying a cup of coffee and a file folder. She brought them both to the senator’s desk, placing the cup down daintily. Andy cocked an eyebrow.
“What did you think, Lindsay? Did I beat up on poor Mr. Sprague too harshly?”
The intern blushed. “No, Senator. I mean, it’s like you said. It’s… To reward someone for refusing a person’s medical benefits…” She trail
ed off. Her slight Buffalo accent remained in the air.
“Well it is Miss Hammond’s job,” Andy said, sliding the coffee mug closer to him. “Correct? She was doing precisely what she was paid to do.”
The young woman looked uncertain. “But it’s… No. I mean, it’s not right.”
“But my browbeating. That’s what I’m asking. Was that right?”
Lindsay glanced at Jim Fergus, but he was no help. The intern attempted again to respond. “I don’t think you… you had to be… I mean. What he’s doing isn’t right. You… I don’t think you did anything wrong.”
Fergus could not hold back his laughter. “Let her go, Andy. For Christ’s sake, you’re browbeating your own intern on the topic of browbeating.”
Lindsay continued to blush. “I just finished, um, going over your Earth Day speech, Senator.” She set the file folder down on the desk. “It’s really something. It’s very inspiring, sir.”
“Thank you,” Andy said. “We’ll see how the greenies feel about it next week.”
Fergus made a point of clearing his throat. “Ah… Lindsay? The senator and I need to talk.”
“Oh. Of course. I’m sorry.” The intern beat a hasty retreat.
“Cute,” Fergus said as soon as the door had clicked closed.
Andy was wincing at the taste of the coffee. “Lindsay? Yes. Nice girl. I’m not really sure how much use she’s actually going to be around here.”
“She dresses the place up nicely.”
“I was talking about the scared rabbit part.”
“You’re intimidating, Mr. Senator.”
“Oh, come on. That girl could have landed in a lot more intimidating offices than this one.”
“It’s your animal charm.”
“I’m moved.”
“By the way, I heard she has the clap.”
“What!” Andy nearly spilled his coffee.
House of Secrets - v4 Page 8