Leigh

by Lyn Cote

  The ache inside her was relentless, an all-consuming vacuum. “Will I ever feel normal again?” The words flowed out from deep inside Leigh before she’d realized she was ready to speak.

  Grandma Chloe kept walking, but glanced at Leigh. “I ask myself the same thing every morning. I grieve over losing Roarke. I grieve over Bette losing Ted and your losing Dane. All our griefs are multiplied.”

  “Sometimes I find it hard to breathe,” Leigh admitted.

  Chloe nodded. “When your grandfather was under the oxygen tent, I kept having trouble breathing along with him.”

  Leigh wanted to say, “It’s not fair. You had forty years together.” But, of course, she couldn’t. What did it matter? Would she have loved Dane more if they’d had more years? That didn’t seem possible. “How could we lose them all at once? I keep thinking of how many fathers, husbands, and sweethearts are dying over in Viet Nam, and yet we lost all three of them here in peace. What sense does that make?”

  Chloe reached over and patted Leigh’s arm. “I don’t know how, but we will heal. No one can avoid mourning, but somehow it does end at last. It’s best just to accept that the sorrow will work its way through us like a horrible virus that must run its course.”

  “What do we do until then?” Leigh lowered the basket from her arm, swinging it near her knees. What would take away this raw sorrow?

  “We go on living—keep busy and comfort one another. That is what losing my first love and my parents and the Depression taught me. That’s the only way. And God is here to comfort us.”

  Leigh glanced at her grandmother. “I don’t have your faith. I believe in God, but…”

  “Just remember, He believes in you.” Chloe gave Leigh a gentle smile. “He loves us just as we are, with all our frailties and failings. He’s always just waiting for us to turn to Him, to lay down our pride that insists we can do this life without His forgiveness. When we let Him, He takes us just as we are, and we must do the same for each other and even ourselves. Don’t forget that, dearest Leigh. If you never remember anything else I’ve ever said to you, don’t forget that.”

  Leigh absorbed the words deeply and felt a solemnity in that moment that seemed at odds with their mundane errand, a walk down a country road, listening to robins and cardinals calling their mates. “I won’t forget, Grandma,” she murmured. She didn’t understand what this really meant, but her grandmother’s earnestness touched her.

  Chloe turned and gave her another of her sweet, loving smiles that warmed Leigh from her head to her toes. “I love you, dearest.”

  “I love you, too, Grandma.” I do. I always will You are the dearest of all to me. “I wish…”

  “What do you wish?”

  “I wish I could be closer to my mother.” Leigh sighed. “I wish she and I could talk like this.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  Leigh stared down at her sandals. “She won’t let me. She always keeps busy telling me what to do, not listening to me, not seeing me and what’s going on in the world. Why is she like that?”

  Chloe walked along, gazing down. Finally, she glanced at Leigh. “Your mother is a strong woman, and she suffered greatly with your father. She doesn’t want you to make the same mistakes she made.”

  “What mistakes? All I know is that my father died after the war. Is there more—more I’ve never been told?”

  “There is always more, dear.” Chloe smiled sadly.

  “What, then?” Why wouldn’t Grandma tell her the truth?

  Chloe shook her head. “I try not to let myself get in between you two. I love both of you, and this is up to both of you to deal with, not me.”

  Leigh heated with frustration. “Tell that to my mother. Whenever I try to talk to her, all I get is a lecture. She never listens.”

  “Do you listen to her?”

  “Yes, but she never gets it. This isn’t 1942. It’s 1972. The world’s different, but it’s like she can’t see that at all.”

  Chloe nodded with a wry grin. “You always remind me of Theran Black, your mother’s real father and your real grandfather, the husband I lost in 1917. He was just like you.” Chloe suddenly gave Leigh a dazzling smile. “He was so dashing—he intended to go to France and bring the Kaiser to his knees single-handedly.” Chloe shook her head. “That’s you, dear. You’re going to grab the world and teach it how to behave. I love that about you, but it scares your mother to death. She knows it will put you on the front lines, just as it did in Chicago.”

  Leigh pondered her grandmother’s words, and in her mind, she heard Dane again: “ You’re Joan of Arc. The crusader who wants to change the world.”Tears slipped down her cheeks. She tried to hide them, not wishing to trigger more weeping in her grandmother. Dane, I didn’t want to save the world. I just wanted us to have a life together. Where do I go from here? When will this awful emptiness be filled?

  Later, when they returned to Ivy Manor, Aunt Kitty met them at the backdoor. From the look on her face, Leigh felt a tingle of dread. “What’s happened?”

  “It just came on the news.”

  “Not another assassination?” Chloe asked, dropping the empty baskets in the back hall.

  Kitty shook her head. “Well, it would have been if the man had succeeded. George Wallace has been shot during a rally at Laurel, Maryland. They think he’s paralyzed.”

  “Well,” Chloe said, wiping her muddy shoes on the rough mat. “I hated his politics, but that doesn’t mean I wanted someone to shoot him. When will this end?”

  Leigh felt the same shock. In the years from 1963 through 1972, JFK, his brother Robert, Dr. King—all had been cut down by lesser men. How many politicians had to be killed before this terrible scourge stopped?

  “Leigh, you got a phone call while you were out.” Kitty handed her a slip of paper.

  “From whom?” Leigh looked down at the phone number and name.

  “From someone in the Maryland Democratic Party. She asked you to please call her back. It’s important, she said.”

  Washington, D.C., June 1972

  Leigh sat in a row of maroon, banquet-style chairs in the back of a meeting in the McGovern for President headquarters in a Democratic pre-1972-convention meeting. People milled around in the aisles. She’d been asked to take the place of the original woman delegate, who’d died suddenly in an auto accident. They’d needed a woman to fill Maryland’s quota of women delegates, and she had been remembered from 1968. Grief made it hard to sit in her chair and not get up and pace. But she was afraid that if she got up, she’d leave. And it had been hard enough to make herself come.

  When she looked toward the front of the room, she realized that the man who was chairing the meeting appeared to be gazing at her steadily. Avoiding his eyes, she scanned the large room. In the weeks at Ivy Manor after Dane’s death, she’d been asking the universe for something strong enough to make her want to get up in the morning and change out of her nightgown. And then the day George Wallace had been wounded, she’d been asked to serve as a Maryland Democratic Party delegate and go to Miami in August. She’d also been invited to visit both the Humphrey and McGovern campaign centers. Perhaps this was her answer.

  This wasn’t anything like the closed and secretive sessions she’d heard of in previous election years. She glanced at the front once more and found the man still looking in her direction, although he was speaking to a large, gray-haired matron on his right. Who was he?

  Then the chairman stopped his conversation and faced the microphone, asking for volunteers for a subcommittee on the pro-peace plan.

  Leigh lacked the energy to raise her hand. Wasn’t it enough that she was here? She felt like an imposter. She expected someone to walk up to her at any moment and demand, “Who let you in?”

  A young woman sat next to her, a brunette with long, straight hair who wore bell-bottom jeans and a jersey-knit blouse in a wild yellow-and-green print. She leaned forward to read Leigh’s identifying badge. “You’re from Maryland?”
r />   “Yes,” Leigh replied uneasily.

  “I’m Nancy Hollister.” The woman offered Leigh her hand. “I’m a delegate from New York.”

  Leigh returned the handshake, glad to have someone cheerful to talk to.

  “It’s unbelievable being here, isn’t it?” Nancy asked.

  “Yes.” At last someone else who felt a little like Leigh did. This was an exciting opportunity, but still grieving, she just couldn’t generate any strong emotion. “I had forgotten that in Chicago the way delegates are chosen has been changed, that they had voted to set up quotas for all the different groups—youth, women, minorities.”

  Nancy snorted. “With everything that happened in ’68, who noticed? But when they called me and asked me to put my name in to be a delegate, I didn’t hesitate. I was a precinct worker in ’68. That was my first election.”

  “Mine, too.”

  Nancy chuckled. “And here we are four years later, dele gates to the national convention. Power to the people in action.”

  Leigh smiled, but the radical phrase still brought back unhappy memories of the violence she’d been caught up in outside the Conrad Hilton, the very day she’d met Dane.

  “Some men still don’t like women having access to power. They call our influence the ’Nylon Revolution.’” Nancy snorted again. “Personally, I’m not going to wear pantyhose to any party meeting or function. I think pantyhose—or worse, girdles and garter belts—should be relegated to the past along with corsets.”

  Leigh, who was wearing pantyhose under her lemon-yellow miniskirt, was in the minority. She’d already noticed most everyone, male and female, was wearing jeans or polyester slacks. Pantsuits for women had revolutionized fashion. She looked down at her legs. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Hey,” Nancy conceded as if she’d just noticed Leigh’s pantyhose, “if you like skirts, do your own thing. If I had legs like yours, maybe I’d wear skirts, too.”

  This made Leigh almost grin, just as the chairman asked one last time for volunteers for the pro-peace committee.

  Then Nancy surprised her. She raised her own hand and at the same time lifted Leigh’s. “Hey, we might as well jump in with both feet!” she exclaimed.

  Leigh lacked the will even to object.

  Their hands were acknowledged, and Leigh let Nancy draw her to the back of the room to meet the other delegates on the committee. The man who’d been watching her from the front of the room left the platform and walked toward them, his eyes on Leigh.

  *

  Later, after buying lunch at the campaign headquarters, Leigh, along with the other delegates and volunteers, walked outside the McGovern headquarters in Washington, D.C., and paused at the corner of 19th and K. The campaign workers were all picnicking on a grassy slope nearby.

  “So what do you think of McGovern’s idea of giving everyone in America a thousand dollars?” Trent Kinnard, the man who’d been staring at her earlier, asked Leigh. Trent was older than she and did not wear denim or polyester bell-bottoms but a crisp, summer-weight suit in light tan. His wide tie was salmon pink, and his black hair had just a touch of gray at the temples and was just long enough to give him a raffish air. Altogether he was a polished, expensive package.

  Holding a white-plastic plate of quiche in one hand and a green bottle of Coke in the other, Leigh concentrated on finding a place to sit. She’d purposefully not replied to anything Trent had said to her or in her direction so far. She wasn’t in the mood to be charmed.

  “Still not talking?” He grinned at her. “You know, you’re the most beautiful Democrat at the meetings—does that mean you can’t be bothered talking to the hoipolloi?”

  She gave him a sharp glance. “I’m always wary of men who are as suave as you are.”

  “I’m crushed. My hopes dashed,” he teased.

  She grimaced, knowing she was being borderline rude. Still, she couldn’t drop into easy conversation. Silently she walked to a place on the grass and sat down modestly in her miniskirt.

  “I don’t remember seeing you,” he proceeded undaunted, “at any of the Democratic fundraisers or McGovern rallies.”

  “I’ve been busy with family business this year.”

  “Then how did you become a delegate?” he asked, sounding sincere for the first time.

  “I’m a replacement.” She closed her eyes for a moment, wishing him away. She didn’t want to feel attractive, desirable.

  “I see. Have you heard about the breakin a few days ago?

  “What breakin?” she asked automatically.

  “It happened on the eighteenth. Five people broke into the Watergate Hotel—into the Democratic National Committee suite.”

  “Some radical group?” Memories of what had happened to her stepfather and Dane when they’d investigated one of these groups stole what appetite she had.

  “Three Cubans, a Miami businessman, and a former CIA security specialist.”

  “What a strange group.” She put her fork down and sipped her cold Coke.

  “They’ve all been charged with breaking and entering. Some people think they were acting for the Republican Party.”

  “I have a hard time believing that.”

  Trent shrugged. “All’s fair in love, war, and politics. What are you doing tonight?”

  His casual, unexpected question ripped her wide open. Hurting, she looked away and acted as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She scrambled, trying to come up with something to distract him. “Do you think any of this will do any good?” She waved her hand at the other delegates all eating al fresco on the grassy slope.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Meetings. Platform committees. Politics. After the last convention…,” her voice trailed off.

  “We do this sort of thing every four years as the Constitution says we must.”

  His glib reply grated on her nerves. All she wanted to do was get away from this easy-talking man, away from this sunny slope overlooking Lafayette Park. So she did just that. With a mumbled excuse to the others around her, she escaped Trent and fled back to the Willard where she was staying. When she picked up her key, the desk clerk gave her a letter that had been forwarded to her. It was from Cherise.

  She entered the elevator and opened it as she began to rise. After reading the first paragraph, she found herself leaning against the back wall of the compartment, tears again streaming down her face.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Maryland, July 1972

  After doing her part on the Democratic Platform meetings, Leigh had been asked to campaign for McGovern in a series of town hall meetings as an example of the new woman Democrat. On this night, Leigh had come to participate in one in an auditorium in a suburb of Baltimore. She’d never appeared in a public panel before and now she knew why. She didn’t have butterflies in her stomach, she had elephants. And they were all doing the cha-cha. She sat at a long institutional table and resisted the urge to fidget.

  At first, she’d put off deciding about whether to participate or not. She’d made no bones about her lack of enthusiasm for all three presidential candidates—Humphrey versus McGovern, and both of them versus Nixon. But the party still wanted her to take part in these meetings. So she’d given in and agreed. It was something to do, something that might, at least, help others decide who to vote for. And maybe, somehow, by taking part she’d begin to feel alive again.

  Everyone stood as the national anthem was played by a young bugler. Then, at one of the platform microphones, Trent Kinnard—well-dressed and groomed as usual—welcomed everyone to the meeting. She wondered if Trent followed the progress of the Democratic campaign as doggedly as he pursued her. It made her nervous. Now, after his few opening comments, he invited people to stand and move to speak into the microphone in the middle aisle.

  Immediately, a burly retirement-aged man rose and shouldered his way to the mike. “I want to know what in the heck McGovern thinks he
’s going to do with our military. As far as I’m concerned, when I hear what he said about Viet Nam, I think he’s nuts and abetting the enemy while Nixon’s trying to get peace in Paris.”

  Leigh frowned. After receiving Cherise’s letter in June, she had come to dread the whole topic of Viet Nam. Why had Frank requested another tour of duty there? Wasn’t putting himself in harm’s way twice enough?

  “Is that a question?” Trent asked smoothly. “It sounds more like a speech.”

  The man wasn’t put off. “What would McGovern do to end the war with honor?” he shot back, jabbing a forefinger in the air. “And how would he defend the U.S. with the military cuts he’s said he’d make? I don’t ever want America to be as unprepared for war as we were in 1941.”

  Leigh leaned into her microphone, suddenly unable to remain silent. The topic of Viet Nam stirred her. “We’re all concerned about the war. One of my dearest friends is a career military man, and he’s in Nam for his third tour of duty. Stateside, his wife is expecting their second child.” Leigh suppressed a tremor that went through her. “I would say that Mr. McGovern is merely saying what he thinks, and I don’t find that treasonous.”

  “Are you one of those woman-libbers?” the man blustered, looking at her with narrowed eyes.

  “What has that got to do with anything?” Trent took over. “I think Miss Sinclair has given you an honest opinion. No one likes the war in Viet Nam. Why did we get into this war in the first place? Is the American taxpayer supposed to bear the burden of policing the world against Communism? McGovern says no.”

  Others stood up to add to this discussion. Leigh tried to look interested, but she was too shaken to take part. She kept thinking about her friends. Cherise and Frank already had a little boy, named James. Frank had said three Franks were enough. Cherise tried to sound brave in her letters, but it was obvious that she feared Frank might never live to see their second child. Leigh couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that Cherise might be right.