The Governor of the Northern Province (18 page)

Faye gave City Hall cut-eye as she drove past it, feeling that, from her perfect teeth through her new widow status and beyond, she was capable of better than this. She had decided that nothing less than the algae green grandeur of Parliament Hill was to be hers—that is, once she revved through the pending federal election.

Her victory had been all but assured by the other mainline candidates dropping out when they heard about her plans to run. The story arc of the dead husband was enough for the established right- and left-wing party candidates to cancel their races and not have to make public their respective platforms, which were little more than bric-abrac borrowings from Nordic dandies (on the left) and K Street juggernauts (on the right), some
u
's added to words here and there to suggest the native origins of their respective political positions. The presumptive competitors had been happy to avoid the predictable returns and instead come off as valiantly sacrificial in allowing Faye and her party, the PRI of the North, that bald-treaded spare tire of the comfy frumpy Canadian middle, to slouch on triumphant. (The incumbent for the seat, of the same party, had decided not to run for re-election after some decimal point confusions were noticed in his discretionary budget. He was immediately named ambassador to a non-extradition country.)

Faye scaled her driveway before anyone else got home, which meant she had a little more time to herself before the latest stack of Tupperware comfort was opened up. But not wanting to go into the house alone, she finally read the pink sheet that had been shoved into her grieving windshield. She had hoped, cheaply, that the colour was a coincidence, that this was just another ad for discount duct or dry cleaning. But no. It was what she expected, and Faye accepted now that she definitely would have competition for the riding seat, from the young woman who had once run against her husband for city council and whom Faye had mentored, no less, if briefly. She further noticed that Glenn the Engine Hollerwatty's dealership was sponsoring the Little Caitlin Creek Cleanup that candidate Thickson, running as an independent, was organizing for the Sunday that happened to fall before election day. This coming campaign wasn't going to be a widow's cakewalk.

But Faye was glad, on further reflection, that they'd done this, Jennifer and Glenn and whoever had put the papers on everyone's cars, because now she could justifiably put off the real matter of what she had wanted to self-confess on the drive home—how she'd lied and implied and hinted during her eulogy that George had been planning to make a run at the federal seat before his heart attack struck him down and that now, in loving memory, the town should make it hers.

She could skip any further spiritual housecleaning and instead go righteous and persecuted at the ugliness of her competitor's campaign. In fact, to be true to George's memory and win the race he never ran, Faye had to forget her Jesuitical play with George's unspoken ambitions and instead concentrate on the matter at hand: making sure the people of town would rather Be Not Afraid than Think Pink. She recalled the joke George had made back at the dealership, just before she'd driven off in her new gift, about the prospect of what a spurned Hollerwatty could do to his incumbency. He had dismissed the worry. After all, George reminded his wife, it wouldn't be the first time he'd have a raging bull on his hands who was angry because they weren't buying American. At least this one wouldn't be twirling ponytails and talking about LBJ all the time.

She smiled at that, recalling it in the driveway. Later, she cried in her bed, her now big and empty bed, after the others had hugged her just one last time and then gone home in their pairs and after her own children and their entourages made do with old sleeping bags and twin mattresses. She cried not so much from the shock of realizing, once more, how cold the sheets were and how far, out of habit and in vain, she could spread her legs in search of his hard shin bones and hairy veiny calves and
God will you cut those toenails already?
, but because the riding seat, the mourning balm she had chosen for losing George—which, she had no doubt, he would want for her because it was the chance finally to be something more than a supportive and devoted and admiring Em Are Ess—was imperilled by the rising power of that bullish young woman she'd first met over sparkling wine and Shakespeare ten summers before.

II.

Faye's voice ran up yet another scale, this time across an “Okay then,” to signal that their conversation had reached a reasonable end. She was standing in front of her Mercury wagon with Miss Jennifer Ursula Thickson, the two having been introduced by an intermediary during the intermission of the Community Playhouse's summer Shakespeare offering,
The Tempest
. They were together because one was interested in politics and the other was married to it. At least that was how Faye put it to Jennifer, at first, in the mock-confidential tone she used with identifiably lesser women to make them feel comfortable in her orbit. But it hadn't provided the polite fiction of equilibrium as usual, Faye noticed, because this girl didn't seem so curious about what it was like to make coffee and buy new socks for power. She had wanted to hear more about politics itself. Period.

Faye had been pulled in by such attention from a younger, weaker admirer, like a ladybird Sam Rayburn. It was so unlike the standard fawning she received from the Hoarfrost women. Who, after the encore applause smattered out at the end of
The Tempest
, brushed grass and cracker bits from their frowsy finery and spoke, to no one in particular, of course, but in showy loud tones, of recent arts and letters gossip. This was in permanent hope that Faye would cock an interested ear at one of them and accept a private dinner invitation to hear more or even extend the offer to that lucky lonely old girl to share her bon mots with Husband Alderman George.

Having all read the same column in a recent issue of the town newspaper, they compared rumours that Robertson Davies—himself!— might take in a performance of
The Tempest
in Centennial Park before the set was struck. He was a great fan of the Bard, of course, one woman observed; he had tread the boards himself at the Old Vic, a second casually noted; he was probably curious about whether we Canuck Calibans could ever prosper at playing Prospero, a third smartly trilled off her tongue. All for naught. Faye was already walking away with Jennifer.

She had ignored all of the women so straining for her approval with the Davies dish because she had been taken, instead, with Jennifer's insistence on hearing—from her—about politics. Not about being married to it, Faye sensed, but about the thing itself, as if Jennifer had divined that there was more to Alderman Gallagher's wife than an MRS with specializations in canapés and hugging the elderly. And so she had liked it, this notion of a young woman to teach, to mould, to remake in her own image, even if Faye was a little put off by how hard-charging the girl had been when she first came at her, at the play's intermission, leaning in and down and pawing what's her name out of the way. And then afterwards, back again to ask about the pending municipal campaign and whether any help was needed.

Faye agreed to allow young Miss Thickson to be her shadow during her husband George's coming re-election campaign for alderman. Her own daughters, too busy stealing foundation from her makeup drawer to hide fresh hickies every Saturday morning, never looked for anything of this sort from their mother, and so she accepted Jennifer as her protegé in spite of obvious limitations of breeding. In spite of her uninsured teeth and the shoes she'd chosen for a summer picnic. Faye liked the idea of a willing second, of this recognition that she had a little political smarts of her own. Because George had only ever wanted her to bake before, to wave after and to nod during his stump speeches. It was agreed that before Miss Thickson went off to study human resource management the following month, she could join the campaign for a couple of weeks. The girl had nodded and promised, unbidden, to present herself in Alderman Gallagher's office the next morning ready to learn and to help and to shadow. Then she marched off, leaving Faye to writhe and blunder through her purse for sunglasses against the late afternoon glare of eastern Ontario summer sunlight which, until then, the young woman had been blocking, had in fact blotted out.

After feeling as if a waterlogged sleeping bag kept wrapping itself around her during the early days of the campaign, Faye praised Jennifer's self-starting energy and took the executive decision to let her canvass on her own. The phone calls started a few days later.

George went apoplectic and Jennifer was invited to leave the team,
your enthusiasm for campaigning being frankly too American for these polite parts even if, as you've told us all many times, the cajoling and coaxing and plain intimidation worked for President Johnson. But as we tried reminding you more than once, this isn't Texas, Jennifer, it's not even Alberta, and so a little more humanity is needed in our politics, which is why we will no longer require your services, appreciated though they were.
As explained in a note mailed to the Thickson house. Jennifer didn't reply, not immediately.

George was re-elected nonetheless, and guffawed during the victory party, and with Faye obviously close enough to hear, that he'd done it all in spite of his wife's political smarts and staff picks. Which had cut. Six years later, Faye gave up the supportive smiles to become George's icy-veined campaign manager, something she had insisted on when news came that Jennifer had declared for vengeance, for his seat.

Outwardly, he neither cared nor quailed about it, declaring that the twenty-five-year-old who lived with her parents on a rural route outside town posed less of a threat as a competitor than she had as a supporter the last time. But still, there was something in the girl that made both George and Faye nervous. Like being stuck in a cottage bathroom with a deer fly. But this was where Faye found motive. Dealing with this challenge was precisely what she wanted. She demanded to be named campaign manager, and with Blaise in his first round of chemo anyway, George okayed it and Faye hit upon the idea of using the death of the family dog as the centrepiece of the campaign. Having taken from Jennifer, unacknowledged, a lesson about how Lyndon Baines Johnson had so easily won the 1964 U.S. presidential election, Faye understood that sudden, tragic loss was a sure guarantee of electoral gains.

The Gallagher family dog, Melville, had had to be put down out of compassion shortly before the municipal election. Extreme diabetes. The dog had consumed summer upon summer's worth of squishy chocolate bars dropped during the frenzy of Capture the Flag games that the younger children played once all the day's tennis balls had been roofed and jawbreakers cracked and spitting contests concluded. Among the older set that the dog trailed—cranberry-cheeked boys who stole the family Sears catalogues for the ladies' intimates section and nub-chested girls willing to experiment with lip gloss and cigarettes and hickies—it also ate what sweets were forgotten during the giggles and fumbling of Truth or Dare.

And so, as the centrepiece of the Gallagher campaign, the alderman went on a speaking and listening tour to local elementary schools. The sombre topic was pet diabetes and preventative measures. Faye sent children home to their parents with candidate information pamphlets that featured a warming montage of photos: Melville as
so cute puppy
, Melville reclining lion regal with the family in their snowflake sweaters for the annual holiday card, Melville
about to take the big plunge!
on the floating dock up at the cottage. These pamphlets also provided what had to be regarded as a fair and balanced account of the alderman's challenger, though there was a little chicanery involved here. A freelance graphic designer from Cornwall had been commissioned to airbrush crumpled chocolate bar wrappers into a funeral wreath for inclusion in the pamphlet. It was intended to be received as a socially responsible, artistic flourish. But due to an oversight or perhaps a minor miscommunication, the wreath happened to appear around the inset box that featured information on “My Opponent.” This was only discovered after the pamphlets had been widely dispersed. The implications for the alderman's youngish and heavy-set challenger were many and unfortunate. She had had no choice but to withdraw from the race. During his acceptance speech, Alderman Gallagher publicly apologized for the printer's error, which had produced such unsubstantiated allegations regarding Miss Thickson. He applauded her gracious decision to remove herself from contention nonetheless, and he was sure that she loved animals and chocolates as responsibly as any other child in town. Even the most partisan of supporters had thought this portion of Gallagher's otherwise gracious remarks a little too harsh. Damn near cruelty to animals, others snorted.

And now Faye had the prospect of facing Jennifer herself, in a federal election, no less, since the semi-annual pageant rite of a minority government fall in Ottawa had coincided with her husband's passing. Her opportunity to do more with the remainder of her days than ward off divorced bankers while on senior singles' cruises through Alaska. Only first she had to get past this pink-charging opponent armed with car dealer dollars and drainage security bills and drowned-pigtail tales and also that smiling slinky African that she'd been coiling and uncoiling around town all that spring and summer.

III.

He was breathing hard, frustrated, dismayed, nearing disgust with the campaign in its closing days, or at least with its leader's lack of imagination, vision, awareness of the talent so near at hand and so ready, aching to do what he could to bring this off, to send them both, finally, to the capital city. But Bokarie was also wincing at the very real pain these feelings were causing. High autumn in the Ottawa Valley was a new season for him, and its gunmetal-cold air shot up his nostrils and across his forehead with every angry intake, and he wanted it to stop, this sharp crack across the skull, like a long swallow direct from the Slushie machine. No longer suspicious of Canadian sunlight, he was confronted now with still another season, the third so far since he had arrived. And before he could even come to terms with the slow death it brought to the trees and the grass, there was chatter already of a fourth en route which was even harsher. This was according to countertop chuckles from his customers at the convenience store about what weather he had coming to him next in his new country.