The Governor's Lady (3 page)

“Mrs. Dinkins, make coffee,” Cooper said, “lots of it. And some food, whatever you can rustle up. That mob out there looks wretched. Maybe if we feed them, they’ll calm down.”

“Mrs. Dinkins believes they
are
wretched, ma’am.” Mrs. Dinkins always spoke of herself in the third person. In her early sixties, she was orderly and organized, brisk and energetic and plain-spoken. She had years ago carved up an abusive husband and stored his body parts in Saran Wrap in her freezer until relatives, beginning to suspect he wasn’t really on an extended fishing trip, called the sheriff. She had begun at the mansion the first day of Pickett’s term eight years ago, and she and Cooper had straight off learned to accommodate each other. Each had her own turf and stuck to it.

“We’ll probably have a houseful before long,” Cooper said. “Governor Pickett and his people.”

“Pastries, sandwiches, tea, and coffee.” Mrs. Dinkins lingered a moment. “Mrs. Dinkins wants you to know,” she said formally, “that we are pleased by your accomplishment and hope that we will be able to continue—”

“Mrs. Dinkins,” Cooper interrupted with a smile, “this building is in mortal danger of falling in on itself. If you and your staff were not here, a vacuum would bring it crashing down around our heads. So yes,
indeed, you shall continue. You are the one indispensable person here, and that includes my husband.”

Mrs. Dinkins gave a quick nod and trotted off.

Cooper went to a front window and looked out. She saw a flurry of movement on the street—trucks firing up, antennas folding, crews dashing about. And then they pulled away in a rush of diesel, leaving the premises littered with Styrofoam cups and Krispy Kreme boxes.

Pickett was coming.

TWO

Cooper watched the airport news conference from the upstairs den. A mass of cameras and people were crammed into a terminal conference room because of the cold. It had the look of a spontaneous affair. But with Pickett, nothing was hastily arranged, including his person. He stood cool and elegant behind a podium—dark suit, light blue shirt, maroon tie—gazing over the mass of reporters and photographers elbowing each other for floor space. To one side of Pickett was Plato Underwood, a fussy little man, bald and bow-tied, pinch-faced and humorless—Pickett’s political alter ego, chief of staff during his two terms as governor, now national campaign manager. She caught a glimpse of Carter, their son, squeezed between two newspaper photographers along a side wall, looking on raptly.

Pickett was jousting with Wheeler Kincaid, who covered state government for the capital newspaper, the
Dispatch
.

“When, Governor?” Kincaid asked. “You’ve had people in the Governor’s Office working on your presidential campaign for months.” Kincaid
had a dog-gnawing-a-bone expression on his face. He was in his early seventies—tall, big-boned, intense, a great shock of unruly white hair matched by riotous eyebrows, a shower of dandruff on the shoulders of his sagging corduroy jacket. He had been covering the Capitol for decades. Politicians tried to curry favor with him, learned quickly they couldn’t, and settled for being anything from wary to terrified.

“That’s right, Wheeler,” Pickett said, “and every time you’ve asked me about it, I’ve said the state is being reimbursed for their time.”

“And every time I’ve asked you about it, you’ve promised to release the records. Are there any, Governor?”

“Of course. We keep meticulous records.” He turned to Plato. “Don’t we?”

Plato nodded.

Kincaid ignored him. “So here we are on the last half-day of your administration, and those records people have had a right to see for months are still nowhere in sight.” His eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t it time, Governor, to fish or cut bait?”

Pickett stared at Kincaid for just a moment. As the camera bore in close, Pickett was smiling, but Cooper saw the almost imperceptible twitch of his ear. He was annoyed, maybe worse, but he wasn’t about to let anybody see it. He might blister the paint off the mansion walls, especially about Wheeler Kincaid, but in public he was the most obsessively self-controlled of men.

He turned again to Plato. “Plato, let’s get those records in Mr. Kincaid’s hands by noon today.”

Plato nodded again. Plato was a man of few words.

The press contingent was by this time buzzing with impatience over what it no doubt saw as a pedestrian local matter. Kincaid, apparently satisfied, sat down.

A dozen reporters began shouting questions all at once.

A young woman Cooper recognized from the
Today
show broke
through the babble. “Governor Lanier, we’re hearing that you’re strapped for cash and having to cut back on staff.”

Pickett turned his most radiant smile on her. “Sara, I can’t imagine where you heard that, or from whom. Fundraising is always a challenge, especially this early, but we feel good about where we are. We’re raising money, being careful how we spend it. We’re solvent, and we’re going to stay that way.”

The woman tried to follow up, but this time the roar of the pack overwhelmed her. She gave up with a shrug and sat down.

Pickett, of course, had not answered the question. He was a master at that. The artful dodger, the alchemist turning obfuscation into the appearance of forthrightness. Carter, watching his father bob and weave, had not long ago said with a grin, “Dad can make cow shit smell like honeysuckle.” Cooper understood he meant it as a compliment.

“When do we get to talk to your wife?” one of the reporters shouted.

“You’re speaking of the governor-elect, Cooper Lanier,” Pickett said with a touch of solemnity. “When she decides to meet the news media will be up to her.”

“Have you been coaching her?”

“Look,” Pickett said with a grin, “you know my wife better than that. I’ll be lucky if she lets me wind the clock and put out the cat.” It produced a round of laughter.

“When will she announce her cabinet?”

Pickett, serious now: “Most of the cabinet in place has agreed to stay on, at least temporarily, to make the transition as smooth as possible. Governor Lanier will make some appointments, I suspect, within the next little while. Whenever she’s ready.”

Wheeler Kincaid again: “What about Plato?”

Plato gave him a disdainful look.

“Will he stay with your campaign?”

“Absolutely,” Pickett said. “Roger Tankersley has agreed to be my wife’s chief of staff.”

“What?” Cooper burst out. She grabbed the remote, punched its off button, and tossed it in the general direction of the TV, where it landed with a clatter.

For God’s sake, Roger Tankersley. Well, we’ll see about that.

She ate breakfast alone at one end of the mahogany dining-room table that seemed to stretch forever beneath a blazing chandelier. The table would seat twenty-six—and often did when she and Pickett entertained legislators, lobbyists, delegations of pleaders, staff, hangers-on, business people from corporations the state was trying to recruit. But a great many times, it had been just Cooper and the children. And lately, as they drifted away—Allison to art school in Atlanta, Carter to college and now to his semester off to help Pickett—only Cooper. She could have dined in the small breakfast room just off the back patio, but something about the big table held her—perhaps something that had begun during her childhood in this house. She had often eaten alone at this table back then, too, when her parents were busy and distracted—Cooper the child didn’t know why and really didn’t care. What she did care about was their absence, her aloneness, which became the most familiar part of her life. In the moments of aloneness at this table as a teenager, she had begun to reconcile herself to their absence, had begun to consider who
she
might be.

She ate in silence now, picking absent-mindedly at the omelet and fresh fruit, listening to the house, alive now with the discreet bustle of Mrs. Dinkins and the cooks in the kitchen, a vacuum cleaner going upstairs.

She thought about this day, and about who she had become in arriving at it. As a child, she had come to despise politics, the way it took people from her, the ones she cared about the most, the ones she should have been able to depend on. Plenty of people were around to take care
of her daily needs, but she never felt she had Cleve and Mickey’s undivided attention, especially during adolescence. Cleve had tried hard to protect her from the most harshly public aspects of politics, and had mostly succeeded. He never allowed her to be exploited. But still, the world outside owned much of him. And Mickey … well, Mickey just didn’t seem to know what to do with her. They clashed, often and bitterly. At some point, they both stopped trying.

Along the way, Cooper had reconciled herself to things she couldn’t change and had become fierce about being her own self, about having a life beyond the grasping, all-consuming world of politics. She had rejected Woodrow Bannister, who desperately wanted to marry her, simply because he was a politician to his core.

But then she had spent a lifetime at it after all. She had been Pickett Lanier’s lady as he went from the easygoing professor she married to the man who now single-mindedly sought the presidency. And now here she was, the long-ago refugee from politics, a politician herself.

She gave a tiny, mirthless laugh and then pushed her plate aside and went upstairs to wait for the next round of chaos.

It wasn’t long in coming. She heard them—Pickett and the bunch Cooper called “the Posse.” A buzz of voices downstairs.

Carter reached her first. She heard him bounding up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time, the way he had since his first day in the house. He burst through the open doorway of her office, where she was going over her speech. “Hi, Mom!” As she turned to him, he pulled her out of the chair and enveloped her in a hug, then held her at arm’s length, his face a huge, radiant smile. “What a day! Excited?”

She held him for a few moments, felt the familiar hum of energy that was so much his essence. “Yes, I am,” she said. “I’m excited.”

She released him, and he flopped into a chair next to the desk. “This is history, Mom. Awesome. How’s the speech?”

She picked up the two handwritten pages.

“Can I see?”

“No,” she said, smiling, keeping them beyond his reach. “It’ll be a surprise.”

His eyes widened. “Are you gonna drop a bombshell or something?”

“Would I do something like that?”

He grinned. “You have before.”

“Well, not today. It’s nothing special—pretty tame stuff, no flaming rhetoric. It’s all just me.”

“You wrote it?”

“Of course. I know how to write. Remember, I used to be a newswoman. You and the rest of the world can hear it when I say it.”

“Cool,” he said.

“So, how about you, out there on the campaign trail? You know, I hate that phrase,
campaign trail
. Makes it sound like a cowboy roundup.”

“Well, it is. Rope ’em and haul ’em in. Get ’em to market. Get more of ’em than the other guys.”

“Are you having fun?”

“I’ve got a real job now.”

“What’s that?”

“Dad put me in charge of organizing Young Voters for Lanier in New Hampshire. They gave me a car and expense money, and I’ve been all over the state—colleges, bars, shopping malls, church youth groups. They don’t even have to be voting age, just kids who’ll get out and work. We’re gonna do a big door-to-door thing in Nashua, see how it goes, and then cover every town in the state. It’s all up to me.”

She touched his cheek. “You’re one of the boys now.”

“I guess,” he laughed. “Yeah, I am.”

“It sounds like hard work.”

“Not so hard if you know what you’re doing.”

“And you do.”

“Sure. Just about anybody my age does. You don’t have to track down every single kid. You pick out a few, get ’em a couple of minutes with Dad, get ’em psyched, and then they start working cell phones and social media. It’s crazy how fast it spreads. A friend tells a friend tells a friend, and all of a sudden you’ve got this mass of people.”

“The Posse, they must be impressed.”

“A lot of ’em don’t get it, Mom. Plato and those guys, they’re trying to run a campaign for president like they did the ones back home. A nineties thing. Rallies, civic clubs, handshaking at plant gates, TV and radio, media events, pre-Internet stuff. They think if you’ve got a website, you’re rad. But it’s nowhere near enough anymore, not if you want young people involved.”