Pike's Folly (9 page)

3

Who's Christa McAuliffe? Allison wondered at the sign over the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, a quarter mile from the Marriott Courtyard outside downtown Concord. The planetarium was the first thing that she'd noticed after getting off the highway, and she took it as a good omen. In Concord, they named buildings after women, not men. This Christa McAuliffe must be some kind of scientist, or an inventor. Whatever the case, Allison pictured herself in the heart of downtown Concord, fraternizing with dozens of independent-minded women, women who'd made the same mistakes that she had and who'd now emerged as better people, better women.

Pulling into the Marriott Courtyard parking lot, she upped the volume on her Tori Amos tape and sang along in a gritty, grainy voice. She felt like a badass.

The hotel lobby was crowded, and a sign listed the conferences taking place in the complex's seven meeting rooms. With an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth, Allison plunked down her gold card for a room on the second floor. The desk attendant was a lanky young man with a fuzzy mustache and a stringy ponytail tucked under the neck of his red vest. Signing the charge slip, Allison asked, “How late's the bar open?”

“Till one a.m.”

She thanked him and took the stairs to the second floor. Her room was near the landing, at the head of a long, red-carpeted hall. She opened the door with a digitally encoded key card, set down her bag and lay across the king-sized bed. The bed radiated coolness against her arms and back. When she sat up, she ran her hands across the comforter, the pillows, the shellacked nightstand. This was the first time she'd stayed in a hotel by herself. Everything inside the room was the result of her own decisions: money she'd spent, miles she'd driven.

A half hour later, she went down to the lounge, having changed into jeans and a sweater-coat she'd packed to go hiking in. A group of professional-looking men in their thirties and forties were at the bar, and one of them asked her for a smoke. “You go to Pierce?” he asked.

Trying not to do the obvious thing and blow him off, she invited him to sit down. “No way, man,” she said. “I'm out of school. I don't dig that shit.” She had no idea why she was saying this, but it sounded cool. “What's Pierce?”

“Franklin Pierce Law Center. We're having a departmental Christmas party. Would you like to join us?”

Allison shrugged but soon found herself sitting with her back to the bar, surrounded by guys in gray and blue suits, all law professors, all terribly interested in her opinion about every little thing.

Within twenty minutes, the one who'd asked for the cigarette was telling her about the Christmas Eve demonstration, which, as it concerned the law, interested him as well. “Whoever Pike's lawyer is,” he said, “sure knows what he's doing. Just the other day, we had a call about Pike from the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. They own a lot of the land that the for-profits usually pass over. They're not too happy with Pike, as you can imagine. You should swing by their office on Portsmouth Street. Alice Shepperton's the big wheel down there. Also”—he paused to let her catch up in her note taking—“Cathy Diego at the New Hampshire Public Interest Research Group. They're on North Main. She'll put you to work.”

“Thanks.” Allison handed back his pen. Warmed by her second glass of white wine, she thought to ask him another question. She made him wait while she took a long drag on her cigarette, then said, “Hey, who's Christa McElroy?”

He tilted his head. “Christa McElroy?”

“The name, you know, on the planetarium.” Casting down her eyes, she pretended to pick a strand of tobacco from her tongue.

The man looked disoriented. “Christa
McAuliffe
?”

Allison nodded impatiently, as if getting the name wrong didn't matter, and that he was being a square for pointing it out to her.

He chuckled. “Christa McAuliffe? The
Challenger
? The space shuttle?”

Allison sat perfectly still, afraid that anything she said would bring gales of derisive laughter from all corners of the room.

The man's smile broadened, and he asked, “How old are you?”

She didn't answer, although she couldn't think of a good reason not to just say,
I'm twenty-one.
Better stick to strategy rather than risk the dull, hard truth of it all. “How old are
you
?” she asked. The question sounded exactly wrong to her—coy and stupid, when all she'd wanted was to brush him back.

The man grinned at one of his associates, who'd come by with a drink for himself and one for Allison. “I pity our nation's undergraduates,” the first man said to the other, then inclined his head toward Allison.

She turned away, wondering how to make herself seem more impressive, but everything that came to mind sounded either petulant or humorless in that awful, militant-feminist sort of way. The only thing would be to leave, or else sleep with one of them. She left.

The next morning, she drove downtown to the New Hampshire Public Interest Research Group. Cathy Diego's office was on the third floor, and the window behind her desk framed the dome of the Statehouse. Cathy was a squat, hefty woman in her early forties. Her light-brown hair was cut short, highlighted in blonds and reds. On her finger was an ostentatious wedding ring that seemed to lead her hand around like a marionette string whenever she reached for the phone, which rang incessantly during Allison's visit. Her ears were similarly bedecked with diamonds—although these, Allison could tell, were fakes. Even her glasses looked like jewelry—big and snazzy, with angular, rose-tinted lenses. Through the lenses, Allison could just barely see her eyes, which were blue and heavily made-up. A green ribbon was pinned to the lapel of her wool blazer: AIDS or breast cancer or gay rights—Allison could never tell which one was which.

“Uh!” Cathy groaned as the phone rang for the
n
th time. “Don't even . . .”

Allison let her eyes drift to the window as the woman took her call, speaking rudely to whomever was on the line:

“What now? Oh, give me a frickin' break . . . I DON'T CARE! . . . That's not coming out of
my
department . . . Now don't bother me, I
told
you.” Once off the phone, she held her head in her hands and—just barely keeping it together—blindly reached for a thermos of coffee. “I am
so
over it,” she muttered, making a perfunctory show of smiling at her guest.

“You guys are really busy around here,” Allison said in what she'd meant to be a sympathetic voice.

Cathy snorted. “Don't even. This is nonprofit, hon. Get used to it.”

In the interval between phone calls, Allison explained what she was doing in Concord. Little of what she said came as a surprise to Cathy, except for the part about the parking lot, which she didn't seem to believe. After so much anti-Pike sentiment had been unleashed, it was hard for people to accept that his intentions were relatively benign. There had to be a catch.

“If Reese wants to get in bed with that lunatic,” Cathy snapped, “that's his choice. Henry Savage always tries to play the money card, and this time it's not going to work.”

Allison wrinkled her forehead. “What do you mean, the money card?” She still hadn't made her mind up about Cathy Diego, but at the very least she hoped to learn something. Maybe she'd get a job in nonprofit someday. She could see herself snapping at underlings on the telephone, saying things like “Don't even.”

“Savage runs his office like it's a business,” Cathy explained. “He knows that most conservation groups like the SPNHF can't afford to bid against a tycoon like Pike. He doesn't care! All he cares about is money. Technically, he's not even supposed to sell to the private sector without holding a public hearing first.”

“So how did he—?”

Cathy rubbed two fingers together, the universal sign for
Pay
Up.
“And this state in particular is extremely volatile when it comes to bribes and backroom deals. Now, why is that, you might ask.”

Allison scolded herself for
not
asking, for not even really understanding what the woman was talking about.

“Because,” Cathy continued, “if you remember, every four years, this is where the first presidential primaries take place. So when you're dealing with politics in New Hampshire, you're dealing with the fact that everyone in the state's trying to kiss the federal government's ass, and vice versa. Right now, we're in the middle of a Republican cycle. And let me tell you—” She laughed. “There ain't a hell of a lot of Republicans in this building.” Interrupting herself, she scowled at an office boy who'd stopped by with a box of flyers. At the sight of the box, she screeched, “Don't even. Don't
even
!” and the boy went away.

Such talk of money and bribes was making Allison nervous. It all seemed to implicate her father. She most often associated bribery with the mayor of Providence, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, who'd recently been indicted for swapping bribes with, it seemed, every cop and garbage collector in the city. Many in Rhode Island, Allison's father included, considered him a gangster, probably because he was Italian and looked like a typical wiseguy. Was Gregg Reese, like the mayor, a person who gave and took bribes? Did being from a rich family also imply being a crook?

To get away from the phone, Cathy brought Allison out of the office and into a larger room where a half dozen volunteers, all elderly women, were seated around a table stuffing flyers into envelopes. Allison spotted Celia Shriver among them; she was immediately recognizable in her moth-eaten cardigan and Megadeth T-shirt. She had long been an ardent supporter of Gregg Reese's; in fact, her enthusiasm often exceeded his own, and she'd been known to call him at home, even past ten at night, indignant over some organizational snafu. Allison particularly admired eccentric old women like Celia: women in their sixties who signed up for continuing education classes and listened to seventies-era New York punk and generally acted cool.

“Well,
Allison Reese,
” Celia said, “this is a surprise. Keeny told me that you and your father were spending the week with Nathaniel Pike. How nice.” Hearing Allison's name, the other ladies looked up from their work as Celia scooted her chair to make room at the table. “Have you been dispatched by your pa
pah
or did you come on your own?”

Allison glanced from face to face and saw that the women were not smiling. She tried to think of something witty to say, but Celia didn't give her a chance. “It's one thing if your father wants to leave us in the lurch at the last minute,” she said, “even though some of us have been stuffing these envelopes since last Thursday.”

The other women muttered their own tales of overwork and underappreciation. “We'll make do,” Cathy said, “but I'd counted on more support from Mr. Reese. We've been keeping an eye on this Pike character ever since he built that crazy house in Rhode Island.”

Celia put her hand on Allison's shoulder. “It's good that you're here, though. We're going to need lots of help recruiting volunteers from New England College. That's in Henniker, where I'm staying. You should come back with us tonight. Alice Shepperton has a farm near Henniker. We're using it as a staging area for the rally on Thursday. How old are you—nineteen?”

“I'm twenty-one,” Allison said.

“Oh, well—good enough.”

All afternoon, Allison did her best to help stuff the envelopes, believing that the harder she worked, the more forgiving Celia and Cathy would feel toward her father. She'd never had a real job before, short of running errands for the Reese Foundation. Watching the other women—Celia in particular—she imagined doing the same work and leading the same lifestyle. Women like Cathy and Celia were rare in that they'd remained politically active at an age when most people generally lost their edge. Celia may have been in her sixties, but she still cared about the environment, questioned the news media, attended pickets and rallies, actually gave a damn about things. Life hadn't worn her down, just made her more focused, more committed, more impressive to Allison.

Just before five o'clock, Cathy finally announced, “That's enough, ladies. Let's go home. My daughter's got tap dancing in twenty minutes.”

Cathy had taken Celia in to work that morning, so when the group split up, Allison gave her a ride—first to the hotel to collect her things, then to the small town of Henniker, fifteen miles west of Concord. En route, Celia said, “How's the new stud?”

It took Allison a moment to realize that she was asking about Heath. “Oh, he's good. He's still up in North Conway with my father.”

“He's a filmmaker?”

“Yes.” A few hundred yards of state highway went by before she added, “At least he'd like to be. I think he wants to make a documentary. It's hard to tell.”

“Do you
need
him?” Celia asked.

Surprised, Allison looked over at her. Celia had taken off her baseball cap and was working her fingers through her gray, shoulder-length hair. What bothered Allison was how completely obvious the answer should've been. She didn't need Heath, any more than she needed any man. But why wasn't it obvious to Celia? So far as Allison knew, she had been married only briefly, and that was a long time ago. With Celia, there didn't seem to be any question of need; she was clearly selfsufficient. Only Allison had to justify herself, because she was young and well-off and reasonably attractive. “It's not a matter of need, I guess,” she said. “It's just nice to have the physical thing every now and then. I like to be assertive, you know? And Heath's cool, because he's not macho. But he also doesn't always let me get what I want. So there's some give and take.” She finished her explanation with the awareness of having meant nothing of what she'd said.