“I never quite understood what people saw in him,” she remarked when Bobby drove her to the airport for the flight home to Santa Barbara. The Potomac glistened in the morning sun as they passed the Jefferson Memorial and started across the bridge. “I’m not sure I liked her any better,” she added as she reached in her purse for her dark glasses. “You wonder what goes on in private between people like that.” A smile full of puzzled affection broke suddenly across her face. “I suppose there are people who wonder that about us, aren’t there? Wonder what we’re really like-whether we make love or you just give speeches.”
Bobby kept his eyes on the road, but she could see-he wanted her to see-the teasing sparkle in his eyes.
“Did I speak too much last night?”
“I like it when you speak like that,” she said in the silky voice that he never tired of hearing. “You can speak like that every night to me.”
When they reached the airport, he parked at the curb and got her suitcase out of the car. She put her arms around his neck and laughed softly into his ear.
“Come home, to Santa Barbara; we’ll talk some more.”
He stood on the sidewalk and watched her walk away, and then, when she was safe inside the terminal and he could not see her anymore, he got back in the car and drove off and felt the sudden aching emptiness and wished she had not gone. It was now, at times like this, that he realized not just how much he loved her but how, through his own unthinking ambition, he had come so close to losing her. The doctors and psychologists might say that she suffered from depression, but, so far as he was concerned, the madness had been his. The choice between spending all his time with the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, holding hands on a beach in Santa Barbara and making love in a moonlit bedroom with a long view of the sea, or wrangling with a pack of penny politicians over cuts in someone’s budget was not a choice at all, except to someone quite demented.
The three days away from her seemed like three years, and what he had learned at the president’s funeral made the separation even worse. The secret he had been told by Hillary Constable, the secret about the president’s death, was something he was going to have to share. This was of a different order, a different magnitude, than the things he had in the past thought best to keep to himself. It was a secret that he had known immediately would change not just his life, but the lives of a great many others. He had to tell her, if not for her, than for himself: he always had a better sense of things after he talked with her.
It was a bright, clear, windless afternoon when he drove home from the airport, the kind of lush summer day that made him wonder, not just what kind of fool would want to fly back and forth to Washington, but what it must have been like, back in the Twenties, when Los Angeles was still new and exotic and Santa Barbara was a long way away from everything and the house that Laura loved was a good half mile from its closest neighbor. Perhaps because his own life, the life he had with Laura, had involved so much heartache and tragedy, he had always had a certain fondness for the past. It was the great secret, the one no one talked about. The great American dream was not about the future, it was about what might have been but wasn’t.
He made the last turn on the winding, narrow road. The gleaming white Spanish-style house, buried in the sunburst colors of clinging bougainvillea, was just ahead. He passed through the open gate, parked the car, and went inside.
“Laura,” he called, but there was no answer.
He put his suitcase down on the cool tile floor and went into the kitchen. An empty coffee cup with a trace of lipstick had been left on the table next to the morning paper. The paper had been folded back to the third page where the story of the president’s funeral had been continued next to a picture of a somber-looking “Senator Robert Hart of California, entering the National Cathedral.” Bobby smiled to himself, imagining for a moment the look in Laura’s eyes when she turned the page and found the picture of him. He glanced at it again and felt a little the hypocrite for having, like the others, played the mourner for someone he would not miss.
He found Laura in the backyard, the other side of the pool at the far edge of the lawn, cutting roses in her usual methodical way, each one exactly the same length, then laid side by side in the woven wicker basket held on her arm. She treated them like children, speaking soft words of encouragement as she carefully selected the ones she thought were ready. Standing in the shadows of the back patio, Bobby watched with growing amusement as she danced from one rose bush to the next.
“Bobby!” she cried, half-embarrassed when he finally started toward her.
She stamped her foot, pretending petulance that he had not let her know he was home. She put the basket of roses on the ground, unfastened the straw hat she was wearing, and let her hair flow free. Wiping her dusty hands on the sides of her blue summer dress, she laughed self-consciously.
“I didn’t expect you until this evening. I thought I’d fill all the vases with flowers and have everything nice.”
He was right in front of her. She touched the side of his face and her hand felt warm against his skin. He put his arm around her and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“Let’s go inside. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
They sat in a room just off the kitchen, a small second living room where they often spent their evenings, Laura curled up in a corner of the sofa, Bobby in an easy chair, watching as the sun slipped down the western sky and set fire to the Pacific.
“What is it, Bobby? I read all about the funeral; I watched a little of the television coverage. Why do you seem so worried? Is it whether Russell can do the job?”
“Russell? I’d almost forgotten. Strange. Well, maybe not so strange: if there was ever anyone easy to forget, it’s Irwin Russell. And now he’s president, though that shouldn’t last very long-a year from November to be precise.”
“He won’t run, he won’t try to get elected on his own?”
“That was the reason Constable picked him, the reason he dropped Jamison from the ticket.”
“He put Jamison on the Supreme Court. Isn’t that what Jamison wanted?”
Bobby arched an eyebrow. He shook his head as if to tell her that nothing that happened in Washington was ever quite what it seemed to be.
“Jamison wouldn’t have agreed to become vice president, wouldn’t have agreed to be on the same ticket with Constable, someone he didn’t think was half as qualified as he was to be president, if he had thought there was any chance he would not be there at the end of eight years, next in line for the office, with a clear path to the nomination. The first time he ever thought of being on the Court was when Constable told him that he was not going to be on the ticket again, when he told him that he could either fill the vacancy that was about to occur on the Court, or go back home and try to run for governor again.”
“But why, what did he think Irwin Russell would bring to the ticket that Tom Jamison couldn’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing in the way of any political advantage, but then Constable did not need any help to get reelected. Russell was supposed to be someone who could help him in Congress. He had been there damn near thirty years, was chairman of the Finance Committee, had a solid reputation, members on both sides of the aisle liked him. But he is colorless, dull as dust, slow, plodding, the moment he starts to speak you start checking your watch. In other words, he was the perfect combination: someone who would not cause any trouble and was smart enough to know that the vice presidency was as far as he could go.”
Laura folded her arms and frowned. She still did not understand.
“I don’t know this for sure,” confided Bobby. “No one ever came out and said it, but the rumor was that Constable wanted to stay in office, and that he had a way to do it, or at least that he thought he did. He could not run again, he could not serve more than two terms in office, but what difference did that make, if his wife could take his place.”