It seemed like he was a thousand miles away from her. Not a human being, but an electronic figment conjured up from the computers of a media laboratory. Ronald Reagan had been an actor. At times, William A. Cozzano had begun to seem like a special effect.
Then the blizzard of confetti cleared and he was just standing there, letting the waves of sound roll over him, and he turned towards her, his eye searching through the faces, the smoke, the streamers and balloons, and he found her, caught her eye, and smiled a smile that was for her and for her alone.
She smiled back. She knew that both of them were thinking about Mom.
She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do. She didn't even know what was going on, really. But she wanted to be with Dad, and so she walked across the podium and climbed the steps to the raised lectern. He caught her up with one arm around her waist as she reached the top step and crushed her to his side. The noise level went up by another few decibels, if that was possible, and she did what she was supposed to do: she looked not at her father, but out on to the crowd, into the battery of lenses, and waved. She felt terrified and forlorn, but with Dad holding her up she knew she'd get through it. It was so good to have him back.
A huge banner had unfurled from the top of the bleachers and it said, COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT. This was not the first time that Mary Catherine had seen those words, but when she saw them up there, ten feet high, on the Tuscola High School bleachers, she knew it was for real. And she finally realized what had touched off all of this tumult: Dad had done it. He had announced. He was running for president.
The rest of the day was completely out of control. It was like being stuck in the middle of a riot in which no one got hurt. It was like the biggest, rowdiest, most drunken wedding of all time, to the tenth power; and instead of a single photographer telling everyone what to do, there was an army of photographers. So many flashes went off in Mary Catherine's eyes that she began to see things that weren't there, as if the electronic flash was a gateway to a hidden dimension. The rally developed into an open-air hugging, kissing, handshaking, and sweating festival and, assisted by shuttle buses, gradually migrated across town to the Tuscola City Park, where half of the pigs in the Midwest were revolving on spits inside giant, rusted, smoking, portable barbecue pits. Green fiberglass portable toilets were lined up in ranks at one end of the park, like ceremonial guards at a coronation. A linear mile of picnic tables had been set up with red-white-and-blue tablecloths and loaded up with lemonade, iced tea, punch, water, coffee, and beer.
Mary Catherine made her way through all of this one step at a time, stooping every yard or so to greet someone new. After the first thousand or so people, she completely lost her ability to remember faces. A nice lady came up and shook her hand and chatted with her for a while; Mary Catherine had her pegged as her old Sunday School teacher until she realized that this woman was, in fact, the wife of a Supreme Court justice. She said hello to Althea Coover, DeWayne Coover's granddaughter and an old college mate of hers. As the hours went on, she saw a great many people whom she recognized, but oddly enough they were people she had never met before. They were movie stars, professional athletes, senators, and musicians. She knew their faces as well as she knew the faces of her own aunts and uncles, and so it didn't seem strange at all to see them wandering around Tuscola, to see the Senator from Wyoming swapping jokes with the coach of the Bulls.
At one point she even ran into Cy Ogle and had the presence of mind to tell him that she wanted to talk to him when he got a chance. He couldn't talk to her right away because he was addressing the two squads of cheerleaders, Tuscola and Rantoul, who had all gotten a chance to take showers and get pretty. He was confessing his total inability to choose which squad had done better, and promising to buy new uniforms for both squads. Consequently he didn't talk to Mary Catherine until about an hour later, when he finally tracked her down on the edge of the festival.
She was standing at home plate on the softball diamond. She had hung her blazer up on a nail sticking out of the wooden backstop. She had an aluminium bat in her hands and she was knocking fly balls and grounders to half a dozen preadolescent boys, arrayed throughout the infield and outfield, playing a game called five hundred. In honor of her high birth, superior muscles, and pinpoint place-hitting ability, they had named her All-Time Batter. She punched the balls out. They caught them, keeping track of their own scores, and threw them back. By hitting the balls in the right places, she was able to keep their scores pretty closely bunched together. After a while, a Japanese TV crew showed up and began to film her. She didn't mind.
"I detect some bias here," someone drawled, just after she hit an easy grounder to a small boy who had just entered the game.
She turned around. It was Ogle, watching her through the backstop. "How long have you been watching?" she said.
"Couple minutes. I was going to come out and catch for you. But that'd spoil the visual," he said, nodding toward the Japanese video crew. She could not tell, from the way he said this, whether he was serious or making fun of himself.
"They've got their visual," she said. "Why don't you come out and catch before I break a nail and spoil that visual."
"Okay, kids!" Ogle shouted, emerging from behind the backstop, "Now y'all got an all-time catcher too! First one who bops me in the head gets two hundred points!"
A ball came sailing from left field, directly toward Ogle's head.
He pretended not to notice until it was nearly there, then suddenly held up his hands and grabbed it inches away from his face. "Wow!" he said, looking frightened and shaking his head in astonishment. The kids went nuts.
Ogle underhanded the ball gently to Mary Catherine. She one-handed it, then turned to survey the field. All the kids jumped up and down and punched their gloves. Little Peter Domenici was currently trailing the field, so she tossed the ball lightly up in the air and punched a pop fly to him. He didn't even have to move in order to catch it, but he dropped it anyway.
"We need to talk about a couple of things," she said.
"I'm all ears," Ogle said, pulling on his ears ridiculously. They were prominent ears at the best of times. A hard pitch from Peter Domenici was sailing directly toward his right temple and at the last minute he let go of his ear and clawed the ball out of the air. A moan of disappointment went up from the fielders.
"This whole thing is so vast that I don't know where to begin," she said. "I have so many questions."
"There's no way you can understand everything," Ogle said, tossing the ball to her. "That's my job. Why don't you just tell me your main concerns."
Mary Catherine knocked a difficult grounder out to one of her Tuscola cousins. "Whose idea was it to have Dad jog from the helicopter to the podium?"
Ogle squinted into the sun, thinking that one over. "I'd be hard put to remember who came up with that one first. But your dad enjoyed doing it. And I didn't try to discourage him."
"Do you think it's advisable, given his medical problems?"
"Well, he's been jogging three miles a day."
"Yeah, but wearing a suit, under all that stress, and in front of all those cameras - what if he had some kind of a problem? Even healthy people like Bush and Carter have had problems while jogging."
"Exactly," Ogle said "that's exactly why it works."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know and I know, and your dad knows, that it's perfectly okay for him to run that short distance. My god, the man is like a human steam locomotive. But most people don't know that. All they know is that Cozzano is supposed to have been sick. They have developed this image of him as a frail, faltering invalid. When they see him jog across that football field, they see vivid evidence that this is a wrong impression, and they watch very carefully, because there's an element of danger."