Miranda's War (19 page)

“Now you're going to run to win this damn thing. You can be a Congressman if you play your cards right.”

“What do I do about this zoning thing?”

“You get the best campaign manager you can tonight. Don't look back. Not another speech about zoning.”

“I never gave a speech about it. We just put it in a commercial on my website.”

“Even better. You just start giving speeches about everything else.”

“My opponent in the general will be looking back, every second.”

“But you just said there were no speeches.”

“So just pretend it didn't happen?”

“That's right. Pretend.”

He thought of dropping the party label altogether, just being an independent like the Governor. The state seemed to like the arrogance of politicians who thought they were above the parties.

“Now you're talking,” Harold reassured him. “You make the most of what you've got. I did that. I didn't make partner at Diggs Harmon. So I went into the U.S. Attorneys' office and told them I didn't like the politics of a big law firm.”

“They bought it?”

“I got hired. Did I know I wasn't as good as some of the other guys in my class, that I couldn't take first chair in a big federal case? Sure, I knew it. But I could second-chair one.”

“Samuelson doesn't know what to do with me.”

“Then don't lose your mystery. Use what you've won today.”

They reached the Old Sherborn Inn, its small parking lot filled to capacity, a TV news crew within sight and people walking towards it from both directions on the narrow road with no street lights, some illuminating the path with cell phone flashlights. He had never seen such activity in Sherborn. He had, for all intents and purposes, outed his neighbors. Sherborn was now in the spotlight as much as he was: the big houses on gated estates, the private roads, the private schools, the horses, the countrified air. Nobody wanted it publicized.

Inside, his supporters wandered about the stately room with drinks and looks of shock and dismay.

“You won,” said Alicia in a flat tone. “We can just take it minute by minute. We'll figure out a way to get through this.”

He grabbed her hand and they circulated, shaking hands, thanking everyone for their efforts and assuring them the publicity would end soon.

“I'm sorry,” he confessed to his Carlisle coordinator and his wife, “it wasn't supposed to work out this way.”

“How the hell did this happen?” they responded.

“Cronin-Reynolds' people just didn't vote in big numbers.”

“Why not?”

“She didn't give them a reason to?”

“There's another TV crew,” said his wife, peering out the windows across the room. “Is CNN going to be next? Are we going to be national news?”

“No!” Alicia shot back. “They have real news to cover. This is a little local race that nobody will remember in a few days.”

“You did it, sport,” said John Tharp, a friend from Sherborn. “Now how do we get you out of this thing?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Well, congrats anyway. And try and keep my name out of it.”

He and his wife clinked their glasses and moved on, clearly uneasy in his presence.

“Bravo!” said his Weston coordinator. “And what do we do tomorrow?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? I got you 2,858 votes today. They want to know if you're going to keep this up.”

“Can't we just enjoy this win?”

“There's no joy in Mudville. Everyone's afraid the other shoe is about to drop. Are we going to be on the front page of the
Globe
tomorrow? I can just see pictures of our houses. Bad things happen after that. We get robbed, audited. This was supposed to be under the radar.”

“What do you want me to say, I'm dropping out?”

“That would help.”

“I'm not.”

He walked away to a different group. Alicia was gaping in disbelief as TV crews drew near. They were the documentary guys who had been following him on and off since the town meeting.

“Do we have to let them in?” she asked.

People moved instinctively away from the camera, toward the walls, and glanced about nervously.

“Not here,” he told the crew. “We want privacy.”

“American campaigns are public events, right? Why no cheering?” asked the incredulous French woman in charge of the group.

“We are in our own way.”

“It looks like the Cronin-Reynolds event we just came from—quiet, humbled, defeat on people's faces.”

“I won. What else would you like to know?”

“How you feel.”

“Surprised. I'm adjusting to the reality that I'm the nominee.”

“What do you have to say to the Third District?”

He froze, catching sight of the image of his face in a small screen on the side of the camera, perspiring, unemotional, undignified. Then he stepped away from the camera.

“I'm not going to let this situation go on,” he said to everyone. “Thank you all for your work.”

They applauded and the tension eased. People congregated at the bar and watched the flat-screen TVs tuned to the local newscasters discussing the primaries around the state. Suddenly they cut to Ann Cronin-Reynolds making a speech from her headquarters.

“Quiet, everyone,” said Stephen. “I think she's going to concede. She never did call me.”

She talked about how much her volunteers had done, how they had “spread her message,” but that it was not enough.

“A chill wind blew through some of our towns today. Mr. Rokeby took up their cause, exclusionary zoning, even though it isn't a federal issue. The vast majority of the people in the Third District don't live in towns like that and have never heard of this anti-snob zoning bill. But those who did had a candidate, and his supporters outnumbered us.”

Her supporters booed and her eyes filled with tears.

“We've had the tea party, but this was high tea, with lobster bisque, and all I can say is it will be fascinating to see how Stephen Rokeby goes forward with his zoning message. Good luck to him.”

Everyone turned to him and he struggled for the right words to express the mixture of dread and joy he felt.

“I've made my point, I won the primary thanks to you all, and from here I can talk to the rest of the district. I'm passing the baton, the zoning fight to you, the town leaders.”

“Where's Miranda?” asked Rebecca Dalton, surrounded by three of her Back Bay friends. “Did she tell you to pass the baton a minute after you win?”

“Who are you?”

“One of your fans. I live in Boston and couldn't vote for you, but I'm from Wellesley, the old Wellesley. My family lived on Meadow Lane, five acres with horses.”

“I know the area.”

“Then you know it's gone.”

“The street is still there. There are some older houses.”

“Not mine. My father sold it in '58 and the buyer turned around and sold it to a developer. The house was demolished in '61 and subdivided into quarter-acre lots. Ghastly.”

“Some of the town, the Hills, has one-acre zoning,” he said. “That's where I did well. It put me over the top.”

“Our neighborhood used to be like that. It's a tragedy. Now what? You're not looking happy.”

“My supporters don't want me to keep it in the news. It makes people very nervous.”

“And they're right, but you're supposed to keep on fighting this bill behind the scenes, with brio and panache. Bill Weld wouldn't have said, ‘Thanks, and now you're on your own.'”

“He once dove into the Charles River to prove it was safe.”

“You're damn right,” she said and laughed as she recalled it. “You need the right touch. He had it.”

“I think it's time to stop investing in state bonds.”

“Oh I love it,” she said.” A good old-fashioned boycott? Wasn't it Lenin who said the capitalists would sell the rope to hang themselves?”

“You are?”

He waited for her name.

“My name is for my friends.”

“Everyone in this room wants to win this fight and nobody wants to be seen doing it,” Stephen replied.

“Then a boycott is perfect. Go on the tube right now and announce it.”

He hesitated and then shook her hand.

“Thanks for your support. I'll keep it in mind going forward.”

“Terminally witless!” she said to her friends after he'd moved on. “His father was the same way, a smart man who couldn't turn a phrase if his life depended on it.”

He went back to Alicia and she gave him their departure signal. It was 10:10 and he had absolutely no idea what tomorrow would bring. All he knew was that he couldn't tolerate another moment of this victory party, which was neither.

Chapter Forty

Rebecca's friends drove back to the Back Bay. She drove herself to Lincoln and knocked on her son's front door at 10:40. She saw Archer's shadow through the curtains as he reached the foyer, looked through the peephole and then swung the massive front door open.

“Ma, what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to Miranda.”

He was wearing a silk burgundy robe, cordovan bedroom slippers and looked as if he'd been awoken.

“Why?”

“Haven't you heard? Stephen Rokeby won. I want to know where she is.”

“I think they had a falling-out. She won't tell me much, and frankly, it's the best news I've had in weeks.”

She took off her raincoat, handed it to him and went to Miranda's study.

She was in the midst of a multi-party conversation on speaker while scrolling down columns of numbers on her computer screen. It was as if she were still in charge of the campaign. She glanced at Rebecca and motioned her in.

“Let me get back to you in the morning. My mother-in-law is here.”

“Your boy won, my dear, and why aren't you there?”

“We had a fight over his victory statement. I wanted it to sound like a victory statement. He didn't. He's nervous and insecure and has an impossible wife.”

“It didn't feel like a celebration over there. Everyone's afraid. This has to be done delicately. And he's got a great idea, a bond boycott.”

“You mean municipals? That is a great idea.”

She thought of how it could complicate the state's ability to borrow money.

“He's in that business. It's absolutely brilliant, if handled right.”

“He's an attractive man, and pretty damn sharp. And the two of you pulled off a huge upset. Now I want you to patch things up.”

“Archer thinks I've got a Joan of Arc complex. He doesn't want me doing any of this.”

“He doesn't want you offending people, which you do over and over. There's a right way to do everything, even this. You aren't handling this Commission the right way. You're Miranda Dalton, and that's a good thing to be. But not Joan of Arc. The more you try and lead everyone, the less they like you. Let Mr. Rokeby do the talking.”

Miranda sat back in her chair and all the oxygen seemed to escape from her for the first time in months.

“If you'd grown up here, you wouldn't be so brazen,” Rebecca continued. “You'd understand that we need to be invisible.”

“We can't do this and be invisible.”

“Then we won't do it.”

“Isn't that why you lost the Back Bay?”

“That's why we lost the Back Bay. Nobody would go to public meetings and fight Boston University over Bay State Road. We fought as far as we could. We sued, our lawyers drew lines in the sand. And when we lost in the courts, we ended it. Nobody was willing to start a boycott, to stand out there with signs like the hippies.”

“Why not?”

“Because that's worse than losing, my dear. Death before dishonor. Take my advice and you have a chance. Keep up what you've been doing and my son will cut you off at the knees—and rightly so.”

Rebecca let that sink in and changed the subject to her grandsons. When she had learned about Asa's computer camp, she left the study and followed the trail of lights down the hallway to the kitchen. Archer was sitting at the table sipping tea from a mug.

“I think I've gotten through to her,” she told Archer.

“I can't.”

“It's better that you don't. She's the only woman you ever knew who's your intellectual equal.”

“She actually surpasses me.”

“She's a handful; she takes you places you wouldn't otherwise want to go in life.”

“She's mentally unsound. She lives on danger.”

“Channeled, it's right.”

“I can't control her.”

“Yes you can,” she said with a smile. “Aren't you the paymaster?”

Chapter Forty-One

At 8:00 a.m. the Rokeby campaign issued a statement thanking the “people of the Third District for their vote of confidence. I want to reach a resolution of the zoning bill and move on to all the other issues that people care about.”

After the winner of the Democratic primary, Tracy Shilihan, called his victory “class warfare” and promised to expose it for the rest of the campaign, the Governor returned Stephen's call.

“What do you want, Stephen?” he demanded.

“We want to be left alone.”

“That's what everyone wants—until something goes wrong. Then all we hear is, ‘Where's the state?'”

“We pay a lot of taxes, Governor. Aren't we entitled to what we've earned?”

“Of course, of course. This bill you're worried about, it's not going anywhere. I think you're sophisticated enough to know that.”

“It's a symbol of the unfairness we have to put up with to live.”

“Symbols are very powerful things in politics. I'm an independent. That's a symbol. I'm not really independent. I'm a politician, and I have views. But I choose not to join either party. So I'm free to make alliances as I see them from issue to issue.”