No Safe Place (43 page)

“
Maybe
he’s running,” she told her colleagues. “But I’m not sure he’ll know more than a minute before we do.”

For the next two days, Kerry was back in rhythm again, doing a steady stream of appearances and interviews, while Lara waited her turn. Reading the press reports, she saw that he had developed a mantra: “I have no plans to run for President four years from now. My speech was about policies, not personalities, and I expect to help the President and Vice President have a successful second term.” Which was what he told Lara Thursday night, with a palpable air of weariness and boredom.

They were in a pressroom off the convention hall. The President and Mason had just given their acceptance speeches, carefully crafted to minimize risk, and the conventioneers were straggling from the hall in an atmosphere of anticlimax, like air leaking from a balloon. “Really?” Lara answered. “You damned near stole the convention.”

He gave a reticent shrug, as if tired of talking about himself. “Then that’s a sad commentary, isn’t it.”

“But suppose you
do
decide to run,” she persisted. “Later on. If you have to raise millions of dollars, won’t that create a credibility problem? And won’t all the special-interest money go to Mason now, for sure?”

Kerry gave her a sideways look. “What makes you think I care?”

“Because you have to. You didn’t win New Jersey twice because you’re a virgin. What about all the donations from the trial lawyers and the teachers unions?”

Kerry’s eyes flashed. “I guess that defines me, doesn’t it?” He paused, then told her in a flat voice, “The press is such a safe
place. You sit on the sidelines, where everything we do is
cynical and self-serving, and the only risk is believing anything we say.” He stood abruptly, hands shoved in his pockets, looking down at her. “You were right a few years ago, Lara. Write about ‘real people,’ not us. That way
you
can be real, too.”

Stung, Lara felt an anger of her own. “If you don’t want to answer questions tonight, just say so.”

Kerry stared at her intently, and then his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t fair.”

Lara’s anger subsided; in its place she felt exposed, disconcerted by the hurt his words had caused, puzzled that they bothered her at all.

“Just walk with me awhile,” he asked her. “Okay?”

Without waiting for an answer, Kerry left the room; Lara hesitated, then followed.

Silent, they passed the hospitality suites on the mezzanine, walking among the last wave of lobbyists and delegates and politicians. Briefly, an aging, bespectacled congressman from Pennsylvania took Kerry aside. Lara watched Kerry listen intently, studying the congressman’s face, then touching him on the shoulder.

“What was that?” Lara asked when he returned.

Kerry shrugged. “He wants my help this fall. He’s in trouble in his district, and he’s scared. You can always see it in their eyes.” His voice held both compassion and puzzlement, Lara thought; there were worse things than losing office, it suggested, and Kerry had seen some of them.

Leaving the hall, they stepped into the balmy subtropic air. Beneath the full moon, a clump of anti-abortion demonstrators stood sentinel, holding signs with pictures of aborted babies, blurred mercifully by the semidarkness.

“I can’t imagine it,” Kerry murmured.

“Abortion?”

“It would be so hard, I think. Knowing that
my
child …”

His voice trailed off. Lara turned to him. “It wouldn’t be just you, though.”

He did not answer. They walked among the great hotels, grids of light in a cloud-streaked sky. After some time, they found a bench on the wooden pier, in the shadows of chartered yachts. Kerry gazed across the harbor, a pool of ink, listening as the sounds of the last parties mingled with the lapping water.

“If you really care to know,” he said at length, “I’ll tell you what I think I’m doing. Off the record.”

Lara nodded.

“Mason’s a tactical politician,” Kerry went on. “He reacts to pressure, not to core beliefs. If I reach people he’s not reaching, maybe he’ll begin taking campaign reform and the inner cities more seriously, just to head me off. I’ll have moved the party without ever having to run.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Perhaps.” Kerry’s gaze remained fixed on some middle distance. “The problem with confrontation is picking the right issues. Or else I’m just a nasty little Irishman who likes a fight. I don’t want that.”

There was a hint of self-doubt in his voice, Lara thought—perhaps the worry that he liked a fight too much. “But you think campaign reform’s a ‘right issue.’”

“Yes. These people plan to win by not running on anything. That creates an agenda vacuum, and what flows into political vacuums tends to be scandal—in this case, the way they’re raising money.” Kerry smiled. “By this time next year, with a little help from friends like me, Dick’s going to be a dedicated reformer. Especially if you folks do your job.”

It was a much cooler analysis than Lara had expected. “But a constitutional amendment …”

“Is like pushing a boulder uphill, and tomorrow all the law professors will be screaming bloody murder. But if nothing else happens,
it
could. So let’s see what the President and Dick come up with, and whether—if they do—the Supreme Court finds it constitutional.” His tone became ironic. “Those justices may pretend to be virgins too, but they read the papers like anyone else. The threat of an amendment might prod them a little.”

Lara watched his profile, reflective and quite still. “What if Mason doesn’t respond?” she asked.

“He has to have
some
sort of record. Otherwise what’s his rationale for running—‘It’s
my
turn’?” Kerry faced her. “The world’s full of former statesmen who used to be unbeatable. Dick’s people are getting lazy in office—smug, slow to act, protective of their own turf. I’m not sure how they’d do against a grassroots campaign run by community activists, plugged into their own states, who believe in what they’re
doing.”

Lara met his eyes. “And in what
you’d
be saying. It would have to be you, wouldn’t it? There isn’t anyone else.”

Turning, Kerry gazed at the dock, eyes hooded. In his quiet, Lara heard the ocean swirl beneath them, splashing the wooden legs of the pier. “By then there may be others, Lara. In four years, who knows what happens to any of us.” His tone was pensive. “Becoming President was Jamie’s dream. It doesn’t have to be mine.”

Once more, Lara thought, she heard the echo of self-doubt and wondered, in spite of his denials, whether the line between his brother’s life and Kerry’s own was quite so clear to him. Feeling his reflectiveness, she nerved herself to pose the other question that remained.

“What about your wife, Kerry? Does she figure in here?”

Kerry gave her a level look. She sensed him preparing his stock answer: that like many couples of their generation, they had their own careers and their own lives. And then he turned away. “Oh,” he said softly, “if I’m inaugurated, I expect she’ll come.”

Two months later, Liam Dunn died, the victim, as Kerry’s father had been, of a sudden, massive heart attack.

He had risen early, Kerry’s mother told him, for his usual walk around Vailsburg, surveying the parks and the conditions of the streets, the empty houses or those that were declining, along, perhaps, with the families who lived there. As on every day, the walk had ended at Sacred Heart, where Liam asked God for the wisdom to be a decent man in a complex world. And then Liam had driven downtown, to party headquarters, and died at his desk.

“What better way?” his mother asked simply.

“No better,” Kerry answered. But when he put down the telephone, he asked that his calls be held, and he sat alone in his office in the Senate, his brother’s before him, the place Liam Dunn had secured.

You understand politics well enough, Kerry. I raised you to. But you’ve never understood just how much you can do.

Slowly, Kerry Kilcannon shook his head, feeling the hole in his heart …

Something seemed to move in Liam’s eyes. “Your mother …”

Kerry could not look at him. He felt Liam’s large hand on his shoulder. “If you want to fight, Kerry, then you need to learn how …”

For a moment, vivid as yesterday, Kerry was a boy again, afraid of his father, fearing for his mother, as lonely as Senator Kerry Kilcannon felt now.

Ah, Liam. When was the last time I picked up the phone to call you? Three weeks ago?

Tears filled Kerry’s eyes.

You had sons of your own, so I could never say how much I loved you. Did you know that? Do you know it now?

Resting his forehead on clasped hands, Kerry closed his eyes. The world around him vanished.

When his intercom rang, he started. Angry, he grabbed the telephone.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” his receptionist said. “But Ms. Costello’s here. She’ll only take a moment, she says.”

Kerry was still.

“Kerry?”

“Yes. Send her in.”

He composed himself, staring at the door. When Lara entered, she took a few steps forward and then stopped, fingers resting on the back of a chair. Her eyes were grave, he saw; she made no move to sit.

“What is it?” he asked.

She drew a breath. “I saw the news come over the wire. About your friend Liam Dunn.” Her tone was neither impersonal nor presumptuous. “I was coming to the Hill, and I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

He was not prepared, Kerry realized. Not even for the simple words, or the look on Lara’s face—compassionate, all sense of probing gone.

“Thank you,” he managed to say. “It’s hard, I’m finding.”

Lara nodded. “I’ve never lost anyone. Not that way.”

She must mean her father, Kerry realized. Perhaps, too, she was thinking of Jamie.

She tilted her head, studying him, plainly hesitant. “Well,” she said, “I guess I should go.”

Belatedly, Kerry stood. “I appreciate it. Really.”

She gave him a first faint smile. “I understand.”

The door closed softly behind her.

He had needed her to leave, Kerry thought. But the office was too quiet now, and he felt lonelier than before.

Palms on the desk, he stared down at the green desk blotter.

There was much to do, he told himself. Call Liam’s widow, then his oldest son. Find out the funeral arrangements and what help they needed. And then, of course, tell Meg he was coming home.

Kerry did those things. Then he sat at his desk and, after many cross-outs and erasures, drafted a brief statement—the words a senator should say on the death of a party leader.

When they held the service for Liam Dunn, Lara went with the local
Times
reporter. Liam Dunn had been an important man in New Jersey politics, and Kerry Kilcannon’s mentor; surely, the
Times
believed, there was a story in his passing and, perhaps, the passing of an era.

Sacred Heart was overflowing as it had not been for years. There were floral displays from friends and local merchants, even one from a tavern in County Roscommon. The mayor and the governor sat in the first pew, as did several congressmen. Next to Liam’s family was Senator Kerry Kilcannon, with a gaunt, handsome woman Lara recognized as his mother and a pert, pretty one with auburn hair—his wife, Lara assumed. Meg did not seem to speak, Lara noticed, nor did she turn to console her husband.

The priest’s tribute was warm, as were the eulogies given by Kerry and by Liam’s oldest son, a bluff, graying Irishman
whose part it was to speak of Liam the husband and father. When Kerry rose, it was to recall the public man.

“In Vailsburg,” Kerry said with a smile, “we all counted on Liam Dunn to do the best for us. And in
my
case, he outdid himself.”

There was a ripple of laughter, an appreciation of Irish self-deprecation and, more than that, the common memory of what Liam had meant to them all. Kerry’s face turned serious. “But he left me—and us—far more than a legacy of kindness: the belief, in spite of all we hear and read, that politics could be ‘an honorable adventure.’

“‘Telling the truth when it’s hard,’ he once said to me, ‘is what political capital is for.’”

There was more laughter, softer now. “Liam knew,” Kerry went on, “that in politics courage and practicality need not be enemies, and that without the other, either one is insufficient. Just as Liam—the practical man, and the courageous one—knew and said that blacks and whites
must
not be enemies.”

The church was quiet, mourners of both races nodding. “We are lucky,” Kerry told them, “when a leader’s courage and practicality is informed by simple decency. That was Liam Dunn.” His voice became a gentle replica of an Irish lilt. “‘Do the right thing, Kerry, and things tend to come out right in the end. But the first is the only part you control. And sometimes going to bed square with yourself is a day-to-day kind of thing …’”

Lara saw tears forming in the eyes around her; to her surprise, she felt the loss of a man she had never known. There was brilliance in what Kerry was doing, she thought. By summoning Liam back to life, Kerry gave those who remembered him a second chance to honor what some had not acknowledged—that Liam had reached across the racial divide.

As Kerry’s gaze swept the church, their eyes met.

He looked incalculably sad. In that moment, Lara thought she understood him better: that who he tried to be, and what he tried to live up to, involved far more than a murdered brother. And, believing that, she felt for Kerry; there was so much left inside him that he could not say to others.

“‘Day to day,’” Kerry finished quietly, “Liam was the best of us.”

The mourners came to the two-story wooden home Liam had never left. Reporters were welcome, Liam’s son Denis assured her; his father respected the press, knew they had a job to do. “Some of you,” Denis said wryly, “he even liked.” And so Lara found herself there, late into the night, nursing an Irish whisky, talking to neighbors and old local politicians, listening to an Irish band, and hearing how Newark and Vailsburg had been when the two Senators Kilcannon were boys. “That Jamie,” an old woman told her, “could run like the wind and charm the birds out of trees. And what a smile he had, like a film star.”