Miranda's War (21 page)

Archer spread his arms around the boys and guided them out the doorway. Asa looked back at his mother momentarily as she ran her fingers over the brushed aluminum, hoping not to feel a dent. The computer was unscathed. She took it up to their bedroom and slammed the door. She sent email inquiries to divorce lawyers and clicked on and off the town ordinance about the residency requirements for members of boards and commissions. Of course they had to reside in town. She contemplated the absurdity of reigning over the Conservation Commission from an apartment in the Back Bay.

She called Julia and asked if she could come over. Very quietly, she left the house with her laptop and drove to Julia's over the unlit winding roads. Julia looked as distressed as she was, her softly serious face leaning in for a close look.

“Archer is coming down on me like a ton of bricks,” she said when they were in the living room.

“We all know you two have problems. There have been rumors he's divorcing you since the town meeting.”

“Does anyone know why? I don't.”

“Of course you do! Archer is Lincoln, and Lincoln is Archer. I've never met the man but I can tell you he respects your intellect and is repelled by your tactics. So are we all.”

“Lincoln seemed to approve of me then.”

“He wasn't there. And if that vote were taken now …”

Her sentence was completed by a raised eyebrow and a frown.

“How can I turn it back?”

“Win, Miranda. Just get it done in the next few weeks. And then keep your head down.”

At 6:30 a.m., Archer's wake-up time, she went into his auxiliary bedroom. He was already doing push-ups in his shorts.

“I've been up most of the night. I don't want you to think I don't care,” she said.

“Good, I don't want another scene like that—ever.”

“What will it take to save our marriage?”

“We go back to where we were before you decided to do what you've been doing to the exclusion of everything else. Wasn't I clear about that?”

“You want me to resign from the Commission?”

“If you want to stay on, then do your job and stop everything else. You're not going to change us.”

She sat on the edge of the bed near him on the floor and touched his face, recalling the moment they came home from the hospital with each of their boys.

“You know, when you look outside at this beautiful property,” she said, walking over to a window facing the modern sculptures on the marble obelisks, “the problems of the world seem so far away.”

“That's why we're here.”

“Did you know that the day we moved into this house was one of the happiest days of my life? I didn't realize it then. Moving is so traumatic. But this was where we both wanted to be. There was no better place.”

“You wanted to live in Weston.”

“I love it here. I really do.”

“But you aren't at peace here. What do you want? Just tell me in one simple sentence what you want.”

“I thought you would let me find it, love.”

He stared into her eyes, and when she began to cry, she grabbed his hand and helped him up off the floor.

“I need a few days to process this. I'm not going to do anything more until then.”

“Well, take a few days then,” he said, putting a decided emphasis on the word “few” and went into the bathroom.

Chapter Forty-Four

Jerry McCarthy did not want to answer the question the Governor had asked. He was ready to minimize the boycott with an offhand remark about how hard it was to govern as an independent administration. There were always disgruntled groups hurling threats. He wanted to give Save Our Towns the back of his hand and watch as it fulminated and then dissipated as the market stabilized. He knew the bond market well, having headed the Boston office of a major brokerage firm for fourteen years. He also had a degree in economics and knew cartels were exceedingly difficult to manage.

“Sir, I cannot say categorically that the boycott will fail and not cost us money. I could go on at length if you'd like to know how difficult this will be to pull off, but they seem to be having an impact already.”

“Proceed.”

“Let's start with market power. As far as I can see, this group doesn't have the major buyers.”

“I'm not asking you to speculate, Jerry.”

“If a significant number of buyers refuse to buy our bonds, then demand falls and we have to raise the interest rate we pay. Yes, that would cost us money.”

“And it's starting to bite?”

“Yes, it is. And I would expect it to—for a few days, maybe a week. I'm raising the rate on our Mass. Turnpike 2019 issues by a few basis points. And we'll get the buyers.”

“Of course you will,” said the Governor. “And maybe the bitch can't keep it up. And her people will start peeling off. And maybe they won't. I don't understand these people very well. They pay a lot of taxes. But we give them lots of stuff in return, funding for their towns. At least that was what I thought we were doing.”

“We aren't hitting them as hard as we could be on the tax side. I'd love to phase out deductions for high-income earners. We just haven't pushed that agenda. On land use, my understanding is that we're pressuring the wealthy towns to let in Section 8 housing. And we're tying strings to local aid so they do more. I want those towns to do more on affordable housing, no question.”

“Of course you do,” said the Governor. “Affordable housing in Lincoln and Dover and Wellesley sounds like fairness. It's making them do their fair share. Whatever you want to call it. We're not walking away from that. People in this state want it.”

“So what do I do, Governor?”

“I'm willing to sit down with Steve Rokeby, because he's a reasonable guy trying to extricate himself from a horrible situation, and say I'll support a bill that will set some type of limit on what the state can make those towns do.”

“What kind of limit?”

“I'm not sure. I need you to tell me how this would work. He doesn't care about a few units of section 8 housing. He's an investment banker. He wants to know how much this will cost his people. Right now there's no limit. So let's give him some number, a high number, erring on our side. But he needs a number. And then I can cut her out of the loop.”

For the next fifteen minutes McCarthy tried to dissuade the Governor from meeting Rokeby: he was desperate, politically naïve, too young to make the final exit his father did and, according to McCarthy's sources, disgusted with Miranda. The Governor ordered a meeting for the next morning. He wanted a “pragmatic solution,” as he did for every other problem.

Stephen accepted the invitation, strong though the wording was, right away. The meeting was set for 7:30 the next morning. He was to meet an aide to the Governor a block from the State House and be taken in through a side entrance.

“I won't be in the news today,” he told Alicia as she was getting out of bed.

“Are we spending the day in the house?”

“I'm seeing the Governor and it's ultra-secret.”

She grabbed him, and for the first time since he'd started the campaign, it felt real.

“It's her website that did it, the boycott,” he said.

“I don't care what did it.”

“You think I'm going to walk into his office and he's going to make me some deal on zoning just like that?”

“He called, didn't he?”

“I'll go in there and listen, but he won't close a deal with me that fast. He manipulates people. He's an independent, remember?”

She looked at him so uneasily that he walked over to the big leaded windows and stared out at the coach house.

“I hate this life too. I never should have run. I'm not a politician.”

He turned around and went to his closet for his olive drab suit, the one that contrasted with his fair coloring and added a necessary decade to his appearance, according to his ex-consultants.

“There is no instant way out of this,” he said. “I'm not going to come home today and be able to tell you we reached a deal. And what if I do tomorrow or next week? I'm still the candidate. I've got to finish the campaign.”

When Stephen finally was brought to the Governor's office, through basement tunnels and service elevators, aides were scattered around his desk, apparently dealing with something more important. It was ten minutes before they were dispatched, and Samuelson gave him a momentary signal that he was aware of his presence. He picked up the phone, uttered a few words, put it down and made a note on one of his pads.

“So, Stephen, I could ask you how things are going, but I know how things are going. It must be rough.”

“It's an adventure, Governor. Each day is different.”

“I ran for office as an independent, so I know how that is.”

“I'm basically doing the same thing.”

“No, you're running as a protest candidate.”

“Call it what you want. I'm running to protest, to get relief for my constituency, on a single issue. You did it, saying the parties had failed us, that only an independent could get things done. It worked.”

“Except that I cast my net wide.”

“We're just another constituency you need to deal with. An independent administration should be able to do that. I mean if you're really independent.”

The Governor was intrigued and didn't interject with an idiom or wise aside for the first time since the political struggle had begun.

“Go on,” he said with a nod.

“Get rid of this mindset of us as the enemy.”

“My friend, you and your mentor are my most aggrieved constituents. Why didn't you come to me with a peace offering before the bond boycott?”

“You didn't make us an offer. How long do you think we're going to wait? Miranda is very motivated.”

The Governor stepped out of his chair and asked Stephen to join him for coffee in a “more conversational, less stiff” place. He opened a side door, painted so inconspicuously in the color of the wall that Stephen had not even noticed it, and they went down a narrow hallway.

Chapter Forty-Five

“He's offering to create a board to basically tell the towns what they can and cannot do,” Stephen told Alicia the next morning. “He spent fifteen minutes explaining to me how it would work, and the bottom line is, it does almost nothing to help us.”

She looked out the kitchen window at the security guard Stephen had hired and the coach house, now vacated by tenants fleeing all the attention.

“God, I hate this! I hate you for having done this to us.”

“So how can I say yes to that?”

“You can't.”

“Thank you.”

She turned around and faced him.

“It's basic game theory, right? If he won't give you anything better now, then you need to keep up the boycott.”

He hugged her and then stepped back.

“I don't know if it's that easy. So many things can go wrong. The party guys are flying up from Washington today to pressure me to drop out. He probably knows that. Miranda can say I'm selling out on Save Our Towns.

“What are you going to say to her?”

“Does it matter? Hasn't she hacked into my servers at the campaign office? She knows everything. And if she's not clear about something, she'll find an expert to tell her what she needs to know so she sounds like she knows.”

“She won't let you sell out.”

“If she thinks I did, she'll try and ruin me.”

“Then you need to bring her in the loop somehow.”

“I'm afraid of her, of what she is capable of. And so is Samuelson. And so is her husband, and her colleagues in Lincoln. The more they see of her, the less they want her to be in charge.”

“Do the people, our people, want to keep up the boycott?”

“I think so. It's private. Nobody's names are out there in public.”

“Then you've got to own it. Forget about the election. Win this and we'll all be proud of what you've done, your father included. You can go right ahead and drop out of the election as soon as it's done.”

He hugged her passionately.

“I can live with that—easily.”

Chapter Forty-Six

Miranda looked at Tony as she approached his office admiring the authoritative aura that surrounded him, the way his associates listened to him with that mix of fear and inquisitiveness and how nobody interrupted his directions. He was, as always, beautifully tailored, and his purple tie, which might look foppish on a lesser man, simply added a layer of modernity to his persona. He waved her in.

“I'm very busy, but not too busy to see you,” he said and gave her a kiss on the cheek. He closed the door, and they engaged in some banter about the $14.5 million Pierce House contract, which was finally signed after the appraisal had come in at $13.2 million and Tony agreed to an essentially unenforceable limit of twenty cars per day. Miranda had won “concert and special events” waivers from the limit, which the Commission was free to issue whenever it wanted.

“What brings you here today? You're not on my schedule.”

“I had it out with Archer. My marriage is over.”

“Sit down, you're upset.”

She felt an empathy that no other man had ever shown her. He listened to every word, studied her body language and thought before he responded.

“Are you sure? Couples have fights.”

“It‘s been over since I became Chairman. Everything I've done violates his code. I'm an embarrassment.”

“You're Chairman of the Commission, for God's sake.”

“All he sees is how I got it, and now Save Our Towns. It's one controversy after another.”

“Has he ever said he was proud of you?”

“Of course not. He didn't come to the town meeting.”

“That's treason, not even going.”

“He said it was a glorified power trip.”