Protect and Defend (5 page)

The familiarity of this complaint made Chad smile again. “The hell with your coiffure,” he said. “You’re living with a man certified by
George
magazine as the decade’s sexiest senator.”

“That was the
last
decade. But at least you’re not resting on your laurels.” Turning, Allie kissed him on the cheek. “Need help with your tie?”

“As usual. I’ve given up on the damned thing.”

Crossing the room, Allie fished a clip-on tuxedo tie from the bureau and slipped it around the collar of Chad’s shirt. With great concentration, she arranged it into perfect position. This moment, too, echoed in Chad’s mind: when he had returned to her, altered in body and spirit, she had accepted this with a simple kindness that belied how much, in ways they dimly understood, the two years of his captivity had changed her as well.

The woman Chad had met was eighteen, a freshman at Colorado College with no ambition other than to become a wife and mother; the man Allie had met was a senior at the Air Force Academy, the cocky product of an all-male society, whose goal was to fly the newest fighter planes as far and fast as they could go. They had fallen in love—or what Chad believed was love—and married with more optimism than insight. And for the next seven years Chad had continued to be who he was: high-spirited; prone to whiskey and when at liberty, the seemingly endless number of women who desired him; serious only about excelling as a pilot. Then, Chad’s regret had not been what the nomadic career of an air force officer had done to their marriage, but that he had missed Vietnam. Allie’s weary resignation, her quiet dislike of their
existence—the constant moves; Chad’s nights spent drinking at the officers clubs; his casual philandering from California to Thailand—were, to him, unimportant when compared to the convenience of dropping in and out of her life.

Until he could not reach her, and only the thought of Allie kept him alive.

One night in Beirut, filled with scotch, Chad had been snatched off the street by three men speaking Arabic. His journey ended he knew not where, in darkness, a cell. For the first time—endless, minuteless hours and days—Allie was the center of his thoughts, her memory more precious than her presence had been, the hope of seeing her again all that kept him, amidst torture, from wishing to die. Though not— and this still astonished him—enough to make him tell his captors what they wished to know.

And then he was free.

When Chad Palmer came home, more in love than he had thought possible, he found a wife who did not conform to his memories.

Their daughter, Kyle, slept surrounded by his photographs. But Allie had thought him dead. Now she did not seem to need him: for two years Allie had managed her own life.

“You’re not the same,” she told him. “Neither am I. I’ll never be that girl again.”

Her distance hurt him. Finally, he said, “I don’t think you missed me like I missed you.”

She appraised him with a level gaze he had never seen before. “Maybe there was less to miss,” she answered.

In some ways, Chad came to realize, he was more lost than he had been in prison. He had returned with a sense of seriousness unforeseeable in him, and rare in any man, to a wife transformed by his disappearance, and a daughter he did not know. The central purpose of his life—to fly—was gone: though his body healed well in time, he could no longer do certain things required to qualify as a fighter pilot. Nor did he know the man he had become by accident: a public figure hailed as a “hero” by the media, the air force, and more politicians than he had ever known existed.

Slowly, from the ashes of his career, Chad constructed a new purpose for his life. Solitude had impelled him to reach conclusions about himself, and the society in which he lived.
That was a gift, and so was every day thereafter. And if he did not see himself as a “hero,” he was wise enough to know that heroism had its uses and that, in politics, modesty would enhance this all the more. Both parties wanted to use him; he chose the Republicans out of a genuine congruence of beliefs. What he did not tell them, and what they learned only gradually, and to their sorrow, was that Chad was no conformist. He had learned in prison who he was.

Together, he and Allie found a way to reconstruct their marriage. They moved to northern Ohio, where Chad had grown up, and he ventured into politics. He was an image-maker’s dream—plainspoken yet appealing, handsome as a film star. After, as Chad sardonically put it, “ten hard months spent proving my fitness for national leadership,” he declared himself for senator, and undertook the itinerant life of a candidate for office.

If not enthused, Allie was tolerant. Perhaps it was because she now had a place of her own, and a daughter to love. Perhaps Kyle’s problems, appearing in her teens, consumed her. And, Chad thought ruefully, perhaps she still loved him enough to know—and appreciate—that whatever his faults and ambitions, Chad Palmer now loved her far too much to touch another woman.

Allie finished with his tie. “There,” she said. “You look handsome enough for your
own
inauguration, God help us.”

Chad kissed her forehead.
“And you
,” he said lightly, “look hot enough to create a scandal.”

“Tonight all eyes will be on Lara. I wonder how it feels to be thirty-one, and have the
Post
calling you ‘either the most beautiful about to be First Lady since Jackie Kennedy, or the most scintillating presidential girlfriend since Marilyn Monroe.’”

Chad smiled. “I don’t know how
she
feels. But Kerry told me a couple of weeks ago it’s like being two teenagers with two hundred seventy million parents.”

Allie eyed him curiously. “Do you think he’ll really marry her?”

“I don’t know—Kerry’s not big on revealing himself, especially to someone who may run against him four years from
now. But I wonder more if
she’ll
marry
him
. Sometimes I think there’s stuff going on there I don’t quite understand.”

“Something personal? Or does she just not want the life?”

“Not sure. The life’s hard, as we all know.”

Allie looked up into his face. “
Will
you run next time?”

“I wanted to run
this
time, Allie. You know that. So you know what it depends on, and that you’re part of it.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “I do know, Chad. I’m sorry.”

“And I understand.”

After a moment, Allie turned. “Zip me?”

“Sure.” The zipper was no problem, Chad thought—it was the damned eye-hook. “Is Kyle coming?” he asked.

Allie shook her head. “It was sweet of Kerry to ask— especially with all he’s got on his mind. But she says she wouldn’t know what to say, or who to bring.”

Was there anything more crippling, Chad wondered, than lack of self-regard? Or more mysterious in origin? It would ease his conscience, he supposed, to think that Kyle was born this way. But then Chad had too seldom been there for her. Whatever the causes, the Palmers had a twenty-year-old daughter as fragile as she was lovely, and the lingering worry for her shadowed Allie’s face as she turned to him again.

“What did Mac Gage want?” she asked.

Chad grimaced. “Supreme Court politics. The Chief’s not dead three hours, and Mac’s trying to position me. Either I use the committee to put the screws to Kerry’s nominee— whoever he is—or Mac may try to cause me trouble.”

Allie considered this. “When,” she inquired, “have you ever avoided trouble?”

Once more, Chad’s thoughts circled back to Kyle. “Maybe,” he promised her mother, “it’s not too late to learn.”

“W
HAT WOULD
you
do?” Sarah asked.

“Me? Run like a thief, of course.” Turning from the stove, the Honorable Caroline Clark Masters gave her former clerk an ironic glance. “The case you’re imagining is a nightmare— legally, politically, and professionally.”

They sat in the open kitchen of Caroline’s penthouse on Telegraph Hill, spacious and tastefully furnished, with floor-to-ceiling windows which afforded a panoramic view of the San Francisco skyline. Each detail, from the modern art and wire sculpture to the flavorful Chassagne-Montrachet the two women sipped as Caroline cooked, reflected Caroline’s tastes, as elegant as the woman, and yet, like the woman, un-revealing. The one personal touch was a photograph of a beautiful young woman with olive skin who, when asked, Caroline had identified as her niece. But Caroline said little else about her: despite her relative celebrity, unusual for a jurist, Caroline remained persistently, sometimes maddeningly, elusive.

The woman herself was striking—tall, erect, graceful, with sculpted features, a long aquiline nose, wide-set brown eyes, a high forehead, and glossy black hair which began with a widow’s peak. She looked and sounded like what she was, the daughter of a patrician New England family, except for a touch of the exotic—the darkness, olive skin, a somewhat sardonic smile—which suggested her mother, a French Jewish woman whose parents had died in the Holocaust. Combined with near-flawless diction and a natural air of command, her vivid looks had helped imprint her on the public mind several years before when, as a state court judge, she had presided over the televised trial of Mary Carelli, a famous
television journalist accused of murder. By the time Carelli had gone free, after a trial watched by millions, Caroline was almost as well known.

To Sarah, Caroline’s every step since—acceptance of a partnership in Kenyon & Walker, then a high federal judgeship—served an ultimate aim so lofty Sarah dared not mention it. Now, though the sound was low, the small television beside the stove was tuned to a replay of the Kilcannon inaugural—as much, Sarah guessed, for its sudden, startling implications for the Supreme Court as for the accession of a new president. In Sarah’s mind, no ambition Caroline held could be too great: her year as Caroline’s clerk had impressed on her the older woman’s integrity and intellectual rigor. Were Sarah asked whom she wished to emulate, her answer would be Caroline Masters.

Why Caroline maintained their friendship seemed less clear. Yet she exhibited an older-sisterly, almost maternal, interest in Sarah’s career and life. Perhaps, Sarah had concluded, it was because Caroline had no children of her own, and seemed to regard her only sibling—the niece’s mother— with detachment. Whatever the reasons, Sarah was pleased to benefit.

“‘Run like a thief’?” Sarah repeated. “Why? Because of the firm?”

“That’s
one
reason.” Caroline smiled again. “My old partners at Kenyon & Walker may snatch this poisoned cup from your lips before you take a swallow. For once I can hardly blame them. They want to be known as the West Coast’s leading corporate firm, not its leading proponent of abortion rights. Any lawsuit to invalidate the Protection of Life Act would be bitter, and the issues are thorny and emotional.” Caroline’s tone took on its familiar combination of irony and tough-mindedness. “If you have any illusion that this is merely an open and shut case of legalizing ‘infanticide,’ wait until advocates for the disabled accuse you of wanting to abort fetuses just because they’re unsatisfactory—by
your
standards, whatever they may be. You’d better have an answer.”

The issue, Sarah realized, had not occurred to her. Taking a sip of her wine, Caroline spoke more softly. “All that I’m asking is that you ponder this with care. The people on both sides of this one, including politicians and activists, have
deep convictions and very long memories. Some days I’m very glad to have never ruled on an abortion case.”

Or for that matter, Sarah realized, offered her personal opinion about abortion at all—perhaps because Caroline believed that, for a judge, idle chatter about volatile topics was impolitic. And her analysis was depressingly acute: for someone with judicial ambitions, even as nascent as Sarah’s, entanglement with issues as inflammatory as parental consent and late-term abortion could be as lethal as denouncing the death penalty. “I keep thinking about the clinic,” she answered. “The Christian Commitment nearly shut us down. Now the pro-lifers say they’re appropriating the bodies of teenage girls in their best interests, through a ‘protective’ new law, when what some of them really want is to punish them.

“It’s hard not to respect many of the pro-lifers I meet; they’re sincere, and their concerns aren’t trivial. But the Christian Commitment tries to have it both ways—substantive in public, and scary at the margins. This guy who confronted Mary Ann seemed like a lot of them—marginal, a loner, and resentful of women. I’m sure it’s psychosexual: they’re so afraid that women will compete with them—or even, God help them, expect an orgasm during sex—that making us have babies is their last line of defense. It would be pathetic if it weren’t so scary.”

Caroline’s faint smile quickly vanished. “It’s a mistake to satirize your opponents,” she admonished. “Or to be confused about what drives them. Maybe
this
man today couldn’t get a prom date. But Martin Tierney is a philosopher.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve seen him, in debates.” Turning, Caroline eyed the sea bass she was preparing, and commenced to stir the sauce. “His beliefs—moral and religious—are consistent, well developed, and intellectually compelling. However much you think you’ve considered the issues, he’s considered them more. Add the fact that he
is
this girl’s father, and squaring off with him in court would
not
be easy. I know I wouldn’t relish it.”

It was a benign way of reminding Sarah of her own inexperience: at forty-nine, Caroline Masters had spent twenty more years in the law—beginning as a public defender—and was known as a brilliant trial lawyer. But Sarah felt pride, and stubbornness, overcome her. “In civil trials,” she rejoined,
“experience is overrated. What you need most is ability and preparation, to make sure the other side doesn’t surprise you.”

Caroline considered her, wineglass touching her lips. “Actually, I agree with you—at twenty-nine, I was defending indigents accused of rape or murder. The difference is that no one hated me for it, except the survivors. If any.” Sipping her wine, Caroline finished, “The times when a judge can duck a case are few and far between. That’s not true of a lawyer. For you, I think the standard should be, ‘Do I, as a matter of moral choice, absolutely
have
to take this case?’”