“But now things have changed,” said Finnegan. “Dull and uninspiring as he may be, Irwin Russell is president, with every right, if he wants to, to run on his own.” Finnegan began to pace, his eyes moving quickly from one thing to another. “Everything has changed.” He stopped abruptly, wheeled around, and looked straight at Bobby Hart, who had turned at an angle in his chair as Finnegan had moved away. “Think about the difference it makes whether you’ve become president because your predecessor died of something as common as a heart attack, or your predecessor was killed in office, struck down by an assassin. It’s the difference between, in the one case, filling in the time, and, in the other, having the chance to pull the country together, take charge, and unleash the full power of the government in the hunt for whoever had the temerity to murder an American president. If he does that, he becomes unbeatable. If he doesn’t do that, if something happens and he does not have the chance, then, assuming she is still interested, Hillary Constable can claim that she should be allowed to continue the work her husband was not allowed to finish.”
There was a brief knock on the door and then David Allen stuck his head in.
“Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a call I thought you’d want to take. Hillary Constable is on the line.”
Chapter Twelve
The house was all lit up, that was the first thing that struck Bobby Hart when he got out of his car. It seemed oddly out of place, jarring in a way, that the house where little more than a week ago Hillary Constable had stood in a receiving line to accept condolences on the death of her husband should now look so alive. When he knocked on the white lacquered door he half expected to be welcomed into another crowded reception, not to mourn a death, but to celebrate a completely different kind of occasion: a birthday, an anniversary, or, because this was Washington after all, the election returns in a race the outcome of which had been decided long before the polls had closed.
He was not far wrong. The house was full of people, dozens of them, some busy arranging stacks of files, organizing them into the right categories, others busy on the telephones that had been set up on two long tables in the same living room where Hart had watched Hillary Constable go through her widow’s ritual. At yet another table, six young women sorted through the contents of several canvas mail bags, cards sent by people from across the country and around the world expressing their sorrow on the death of the president. There were thousands of them and every one of them was going to be answered with a short note, a few words, and then signed by a machine, but no one who received them would ever know they had been signed that way. They would have instead the double pleasure of believing that the president’s widow had not only read what they had sent, but had been so moved-that was the phrase that had been chosen after consultation with several of her advisors-that though she could not answer all of the wonderful cards and letters she had received, she had to answer theirs. It was what in an older political tradition might have been called a boiler room for grief.
Watching it, Hart marveled at the slow precision of the work, the methodical organization, the way each name to whom a response was addressed was made part of a list, a list that, from what Hart had been told, the Constables had started back when they were still in college, a list that had expanded with the years, people whom if they had only met them once, or even if they had never met them in person at all, would receive a card every Christmas and a request for money at the start of every campaign. By the time Robert Constable ran for a second term there were literally millions of people to whom he could write that one of his greatest satisfactions was knowing that he had such a good friend on whom he could always count when things were difficult and he needed help. And they believed it, the grateful eager recipients of those yearly smiling photographs of “Bob and Hillary” standing in front of another White House Christmas tree. Robert Constable might be dead, but the list that he and his wife had built up with such enterprise and effort was still growing, part of the inheritance, if you will, left to his wife.
“Hello Bobby, thank you for coming.”
Hillary Constable was suddenly standing right next to him. She was dressed casually in a blouse and skirt. A soft blue cashmere cardigan that brought out the color of her eyes was thrown over her shoulders. Her ash blonde hair was pulled back and she had on her reading glasses. It might have given her a shy, reserved, and bookish look, a woman who taught literature in the shade tree environment of a small liberal arts college, but her eyes were too immediate, too much in the present, the eyes of a woman on the verge of impatience, a woman who was used to being the standard, the only standard, for what was important.
“Don’t mind all this,” she remarked, nodding toward the organized chaos. “We always had a rule that anyone who wrote to us got answered.”
She said this without nostalgia, as if she were simply reporting a principle of modern management, one of those learned from a book of sound practices, a proven method of achieving success. Her eyes made a quick circuit of the room. It would have been easy to miss the brief, decisive nod, the closed judgment on what she observed. Hart had the feeling that she did this fairly often, come to see whether in her absence everyone was still hard at work. She started to turn her attention back to him when she noticed something that was not quite right. A stack of envelopes, addressed and ready to be mailed, was too tall and had begun to lean. Dividing it in half, she carefully set the two shorter stacks next to one another. Without a word, just a look, but a look that behind its apparent kindness suggested consequences for failure, she let the young woman sitting at the table know that even the smallest things had to be done right.
“It’s amazing how much time I’ve had to waste teaching people the obvious,” she remarked as she took Hart by the arm. She looked back over her shoulder and flashed a smile of encouragement at the young woman she had just corrected. “Everything is important,” she explained to Hart. “That’s what no one seems to understand: everything. Now, let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”
She led him through the living room, past the marble pillar where he had stood talking to Austin Pearce, the marble pillar that curiously had reminded him of her, across the hallway toward a door that, as he now realized, was the entrance to the elevator that went to the private suite of rooms directly overhead.
“Scotch all right?” she asked, as she walked over to the mahogany shelves crowded with books seldom opened and never read.
Handing Hart a glass, she took a drink, seemed to enjoy it, and took another. She invited Hart to sit down, but she continued to stand next to the desk and the photographs of what had been her private life. There was an odd, pensive expression on her face as if she were in some doubt about how to begin.
“You said it was important,” Hart reminded her. “You said you had to see me right away.”
It was almost indistinguishable, the way the muscles around her jaw tightened, and then swallowed without taking a drink. She seemed to have to force herself to look right at him and not to look away.
“What have you found out?” she asked finally.
Hart had the feeling that she did not really want to know, that for some reason she was almost afraid of the answer. But then why, suddenly, had she wanted to see him, insisted that it had to be right now, tonight? Or did that explain it: the fear that had been building up inside her had become intolerable and she could not wait to hear what she was not sure she wanted to learn? Or was it something else, something that Hart had not quite been able to put his finger on, but that was palpable, real, somewhere below the surface that he had not yet been able to penetrate?