The Shepherd's Calculus

by C. S. Farrelly

  By the time he walked across campus back to his car, he’d already queued up Google on his phone to search for Kevin Garrity in Wisconsin.

  CHAPTER 7

  The office housing President Arthur Wyncott’s reelection campaign was a frantic scene most days. An ever-expanding population of volunteers, full-time consultants, and staffers had long outgrown the original space. By either fate or design, overflow offices were scattered in other parts of the city. Milton Casey was apt to be at one of three places at any given time, and strict protocol governed who knew where he was and when. “Don’t worry about finding him,” Ally’s manager, Mark Weintraub, had told her when she started. “Someone can always get in touch with him, but that someone is not you. Not yet.” On her first day of work, Mark gave her a list of dos and don’ts when it came to dealing with Milton Casey, compiled by staffers who’d been there far longer.

  Its two pages ranged from the truly informative (“Do read every newspaper, magazine, or blog you can before you get to work”) to the banal (“Do NOT take the last Diet Orange Crush in the refrigerator, no matter how thirsty you are”). Other rules repeated Wyncott’s stance on various issues with a reminder to espouse them at all times: “Do promote strong moral messaging in innovative ways.” Ally smirked, imagining the list as Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses tacked to the front doors of the Capitol, the words marching across the page in strong Latin script. Ne abdūcite ultimum Diet Orange Crush nītrum.

  Those first few days, she noticed the office was a bit like a high school Advanced Placement class. There were the staffers who did most of the talking, tripping (sometimes trampling) over each other to get as much attention as possible. Then there were the quiet ones who kept their heads down and plowed through, choosing to let their written memos and research reports speak for them instead. In between was a sampling of the sharp, the witty, and occasionally the dumb but well connected. The office was swimming in piles of paper. Casey did not want to receive e-mails related to sensitive campaign matters (number seven on the “don’t” list), which had led to an explosion of folders and files in a limited space. Anything he was expected to read needed to be hard copy only. “If you’ve got something so brilliant or sensitive to say,” Casey bellowed at the room after a tech-savvy staffer suggested his refusal to use e-mail made him seem out of touch, “you can damn well say it in person. I’m not suggesting we never use technology. But I don’t understand y’all.” He waved an arm around the room. “You sit fifteen feet from one another and you send e-mail. Get up and have a conversation, for Chris’sakes. E-mail’s a bigger pain in the ass than it’s worth.”

  Due to Wyncott’s status as incumbent president, communication with various members of his team in the White House was almost constant. In nearly a year and a half with the campaign, Ally hadn’t been assigned to a specific division or task. She wasn’t so low on the rungs that she didn’t get to work on interesting projects. It was just clear that she was a floater—meant to pitch in with whatever was needed.

  When staffers left for the day, anywhere between 9:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m., all effort to keep their workstations clean had typically fallen by the wayside, leaving an impressive trail of paper carnage behind. A few days after her presentation on Thomas Archer, Ally was one of the only people left in the entire building at 2:30 a.m. and the sole one in her immediate office. She knew she wouldn’t be for long. If her transition to life in DC had been rocky thus far—she hadn’t yet found a core group of friends and felt out of place as a conservative Catholic—she admired the work ethic many other young Washingtonians exhibited. She possessed a nervous energy that spurred her to get up and work on random projects at random times and always had. In high school, she would sometimes rise at 3:00 a.m. to clean her room, certain she couldn’t possibly focus on an upcoming trigonometry exam until she’d accomplished something like rearranging the bookshelves or long-forgotten stuffed animals piled in the corner.

  Her analysis of Thomas Archer’s religious narrative had come to her in much the same way—as a burst of energy flashing early in the morning as she stared at the ceiling from the comfort of her Ikea bed. She’d been living in the DC area for just under two years now and, unlike most of her colleagues in the office, she did not live in a fashionable part of town. Her basement apartment in Takoma Park, Maryland, was a thirty-minute walk to the Metro in a no-man’s-land between the nicer part of Takoma and a grubbier corner of Silver Spring’s easternmost border. Many if not all of her immediate neighbors were new arrivals to the United States. Bodegas at the end of Maple Avenue sold strange foods—pigs’ feet in brine and vegetables she didn’t recognize. On weekends, her neighbors played soccer in the park near her apartment, their families turning out to cheer them on.

  For Ally, who felt far from her own family back in Michigan, this was one of the things she liked most about living there: the ability to soak up the family atmosphere even as an interloper. But she hadn’t yet learned how to interpret the puzzled reaction she got when she told people where she lived. “That’s an ethnic part of town, isn’t it?” was something she heard often. It was a phrase she found confusing in Washington, a city with people from every corner of the world. What they meant, of course, was that many of the families around her were from Mexico and Guatemala.

  Her fluency in Spanish came as a shock to many as well, but learning the language in high school and college had been a natural and practical choice. As the granddaughter of a soybean farmer, she knew how much her family’s business and those of her neighbors relied on migrant labor. Learning Spanish wasn’t required or expected of her, but the idea of seeing people every day all summer long and not speaking with them seemed inhospitable and unnecessarily rude.

  This ambition to speak with people she didn’t know was a change for her. As a small child, she had been shy. Every Sunday at Mass with her family she shrank in fear and anxiety during the exchange of greetings prior to the Eucharist. The entire tenor of the service changed when the ritual began. Total strangers stuck their total strangers’ hands in her face, murmuring in a weird, offbeat cacophony. “Peace be with you,” they said, the words melding in a hushed mumble that grew to a roar when fifty people uttered it at once. It was, by far, her least favorite part of attending Sunday services. It wasn’t until junior high that, at her mother’s urging, she chose to see Mass as an opportunity to learn how to be more outgoing, swallowed her fears, and overcame the anxiety. But even now, an inescapable discomfort erupted in her whenever she heard people murmuring in close proximity to each other. She much preferred political rallies, where people shouted.

  Talking to the seasonal workers who appeared each spring was a similar opportunity to face something that intimidated her, to connect with strangers speaking and displaying emotion she could sense, but whose words she could not comprehend. She went to the language lab after school to listen to Spanish language CDs. When she tried to speak to the workers, faltering at first, she got a thrill from the way they smiled and nodded at her attempts. Their tempo, too fast for her to follow at first, soon became familiar. She was able to practice her language skills outside the classroom, and by the time she left for college at Marquette University in Wisconsin, she tested into an advanced Spanish literature class.

  Both the extent of her fluency and the history behind it baffled many around her and occasionally impressed them. But that was the nature of Ally Larkin’s experience in education and life in general. She defied tidy categories without trying to and possessed an analytical thought process, which most people, Milton Casey included, seemed to overlook. Ideas formed constantly in her head the way one had formed on this night, keeping her in the office after hours. Since lunchtime she’d been tracking down research on voting patterns in midwestern states with fast-growing immigrant populations. The information was all out there, just not in the same place. And she didn’t always know what to do with it once she found it. With a sigh, she turned on one of the many televisions in the bullpen and flick
ed through the channels until she landed on Univision. On-screen, a man in a suit rattled on in Spanish. She repeated his words out loud to follow along and keep her listening skills sharp.

  A rustling from Casey’s office stopped her midsentence. He poked his head around the door and blinked, the light from her upturned desk lamp causing him to squint. “I didn’t know anyone was still here,” she started, poking frantically at the remote control to turn down the volume. While a few of the more prized staff generally spent time in his office, she wasn’t considered one of them and had never seen the plush brown couch he’d been napping on. In fact, up until the meeting where she distributed the analysis of Archer’s familiarity with South and Central America, she wasn’t sure Milton Casey even knew she existed.

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?” Casey’s voice interrupted her thoughts.

  “Oh yes. I just wanted to—I’m trying to cross-check information from a Pew Trust analysis of migration patterns in Wyoming and Utah.”

  “Which one?”

  “The new one—from the Pew’s Hispanic Trends Project.”

  He nodded. “I’ve heard that’s an excellent resource.”

  “You haven’t seen their research?” She meant it as a genuine question but was aware how snide it sounded almost as soon as she said it.

  “As a matter of fact, Ms. Larkin, I have not. That’s what I have you for.” He said the words kindly, but not without an edge. “Where do you live? Woodley Park? Tenleytown?”

  Ally prepared to answer. This was usually the part where she’d have to smile nicely in response to the description of her neighborhood as “ethnic.”

  “No, sir. In Takoma Park.”

  Casey laughed. “Takoma Park? What the hell are you doing all the way out there? Are you a lesbian?” He bellowed the question, a reference to Takoma Park’s reputation for being a liberal community where diverse families were more the norm than the anomaly.

  “Not a problem if you are,” he went on. “Hell, I’d trot you out in front of the cameras if you were.”

  “Uh, no, sir. I don’t actually live in that part of town. I’m more on the outskirts.”

  “Why aren’t you closer to downtown?”

  Ally wasn’t all that surprised by the question and its unspoken assumption: that someone well connected enough to work for Casey could naturally afford to live in a trendy neighborhood. She’d grown accustomed to the inescapable connection between wealth and opportunity in Washington, DC. Never before had she seen young people so educated, working for such low wages, yet managing to live in opulent apartments. That many of them were subsidized by their parents or their trust funds or a combination of the two shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. Still, in moments like this, she puzzled at how people in politics—whose livelihoods depended on understanding the realities of their constituents—could be oblivious to them. Mark had given her an answer when she asked him about it a few weeks after she started. “Because they can be,” he said simply. “Once they’re here, they’re here. Actually understanding the realities versus just appearing to understand them is a zero-sum game.” There was a good chance Mark had learned that explanation from working in Casey’s office.

  She shrugged. “It’s affordable,” she told Casey. “And I like the community. People talk to each other there.”

  “It’s full of hippies, isn’t it?”

  “Well, is it full of lesbians or hippies, sir?”

  The question shocked her. She’d been thinking it, of course, the words bubbling to the top of her internal cauldron of simmering class resentment. But that her mouth formed the words and her vocal cords pushed out the sounds necessary to say them aloud—to her boss of all people, a man who had barely spoken six words to her before now—astounded her. She felt her cheeks flush. Casey regarded her, narrowing his eyes as though he were going to deliver a rebuke, and then burst into laughter, a mighty guffaw that took her off guard.

  “Well, I guess they could be lesbian hippies, now couldn’t they?”

  “Yes. Yes, they could.”

  “Don’t suppose you could talk a few of them into voting for Wyncott, could you? That would be an absolute gold mine,” he said.

  “I’m not sure I—uh, I don’t really know.” She could just imagine it. Sitting at dinner with her neighbors Carol and Sadie, eating a meal prepared with vegetables from their garden and meat from the local co-op, talking about education reform. At just what point, she wondered, would it be appropriate to casually mention they might consider a vote for Arthur Wyncott? To throw their backing to a man who didn’t consider their twenty years together raising a son to be a valid relationship or acceptable parenting, while he himself was on his second marriage with a daughter addicted to Oxycontin?

  Casey had spun the discovery of the addiction deftly. “Don’t think of this as a weakness,” Casey told the staffers when CNN ran an interview with the dealer who supplied Wyncott’s daughter. “This doesn’t make Arthur Wyncott an inferior candidate. This makes him just like you and me.” Within hours, Ally watched as pundits on Wyncott’s side applauded his courage in tackling the important issue of addiction in America and noted his intimate familiarity with the troubles faced by the American people. It was one of many lessons she would learn during her time with Casey’s office.

  Ally herself had no objection to Carol and Sadie or the life they had built together. But as a lifelong Catholic, she did believe that a marriage in her church had to be in accordance with its teachings—whether that meant she couldn’t marry a man who wasn’t Catholic, or couldn’t marry a woman. If Carol and Sadie wanted to marry in another faith that held a different opinion on the subject then that, in Ally’s mind, was a decision for that faith, not her. This position put her apart from many around her. Caught between those who believed she was wrong to deny marriage in any instance and those who said she was condoning a grave sin by not condemning Carol and Sadie, Ally chafed at the lack of flexibility. She learned not to express her opinions about it at all, a defense mechanism that guaranteed her peace in the passionately political climate of DC, but also made her feel all the more isolated.

  Casey went on. “Well, it would certainly be a coup if we could get a lesbian couple up there to say they supported Wyncott. It wouldn’t hurt our numbers at all.” Ally smirked. “I’ll keep an eye out for one, sir.”

  “It’s Milt. You’re not checking me into a hotel, for Chris’ sakes.”

  Ally laughed in spite of herself. “Okay then, Milt, I don’t think I’ll have much luck finding many lesbians who want to vote for Wyncott, but I’ll try.”

  “Take them to brunch and talk it over with them. They love brunch, don’t they?”

  She cocked her head and gave him a confused smile, unsure whether he was truly that obtuse or just being funny. A quick wink gave her the answer.

  “But in all seriousness”—his expression grew focused—“you’ve got some good ideas. And you’re fluent in Spanish?” He nodded at the television behind her, where the mustached anchor was now reviewing soccer scores.

  Ally nodded. “Yes. It was on my resume. At the bottom.”

  Casey waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t pay much attention to resumes, darlin’. Half of what people put on ’em is horseshit. They spend six hours volunteering at a community garden and by the time it gets to my desk, they’ve saved the Brazilian rain forest.” He darted back into his office and returned with a packet of materials in hand.

  “I’d like to see you get involved with this.” He handed her a folder labeled “Faith-based Initiatives.” “John Mulcahy said you’ve done a lot of work with religious organizations.”

  “Cardinal Mulcahy?” She didn’t mean it as a correction. She was just unaccustomed to hearing him called by his casual name.

  Casey rolled his eyes in exaggerated embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah. I forgot. Cardinal.”

  She tried to recover by moving on. “In Boston. The summer I worked for him. He put me on a team working
with Catholic schools.”

  “How do you feel about Philadelphia?”

  “As the US capital of type-two diabetes?” She’d just finished a research project for Wyncott’s childhood-obesity prevention team.

  He laughed. “Ah, now, I think Memphis has Philly beat there. But keep that opinion—both of ’em—to yourself. We’re already on thin ice with Philly voters as it is. I mean what do you think of it as somewhere we need to test the waters with voters?”

  She gave him a raised eyebrow. “What kind of voters? We’re already on the ground there.”

  “Voters with a particular interest in Archer because of the very things you’ve already identified—faith and immigration.” He nodded at the TVs. “I assume you watched his rally in Fairhill a few weeks ago?”

  Ally nodded. It was a brilliant PR maneuver from Archer’s camp that hit its mark perfectly and infuriated Casey, sending him on a rampage through the office. Early on in the campaign, Archer had decided to tackle the question of his religion head on and make it a focal point. Instead of wasting time trying to downplay it, Archer put it front and center, explaining it as the source of his commitment to building strong communities and serving the American people with justice and compassion. Tucked away in northeast Philadelphia, Fairhill was Philadelphia’s dominant Hispanic neighborhood, colloquially known as El Centro de Oro, with 70 percent of the community hailing from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia.

  Fairhill was an ideal location to launch Archer’s message. Several months beforehand, Philadelphia voters had elected a Democrat named Milo Garcia as mayor. The grandson of immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, Garcia was the first Hispanic mayor of a major northeastern city and signaled a change in the traditional power structure, not just for the Boston-to-DC corridor, but for critical swing states like Pennsylvania.