She wanted to run to the phone and call Steve, to go to him and hold him and cry with joy that he was alive and share what must have been his overwhelming sorrow for Mike. She picked up the receiver beside her chair—and dropped it back in its cradle. Her gut said a call from her would add to his burden. He had his own heartache now; he didn’t need to be reminded of hers.
When Kathy arrived at her office in Hugh Green’s suite, there was no message from Steve, and he hadn’t called since. She tried to work, but it was wasted effort. So she stared out the window at nothing in particular while her imagination directed something like an old Movietone newsreel showing Mike McGill dying in a drugstore shoot-out while Lowell Thomas’s voice gravely intoned the Chronicle headlines. Over and over.
She heard a soft knock and whirled in her chair, hoping to see Steve. Instead, she locked eyes with the elegant junior United States senator from Massachusetts.
“Oh, Hugh,” she said, sagging back. “I… I’m sorry. You’re here for those reports on the summer interns, aren’t you? I’ll have them ready by three, I promise.”
Green was shaking his head, his razor-cut brown hair staying perfectly in place, a little long over the ears, graying ever so slightly at the temples. It was a casual, boyish style at odds with his Senate uniform: a medium-weight charcoal-gray wool suit with subtle chalk striping.
“No reports,” he said. “I came to talk. If you want to.” He pushed himself away from the doorjamb and took a step into the office. He was carrying a double-folded copy of the Chronicle’s front section and held it up to leave no doubt about the topic he had in mind.
Without warning, Kathy began to cry, something she was doing often lately, although it was out of character for her under normal circumstances. She could be brought to her emotional knees by tragic movies, sentimental songs, and warm, fuzzy television commercials; real life was something she generally faced with endless stoic reserve. It was a trait inherited from her father, who had an amazing capacity to roll with life’s blind-siders. She’d asked him once about that ability, and he’d told her he learned it in law school when he realized that, unlike his well-connected classmates, he would not be invited to join any of Boston’s prestigious law firms.
Instead, Joseph McGovern had opened his own office and done well enough as a trial attorney to make a home for his family in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Wellesley. But he wanted more and saw his opportunity when his brother John asked for legal and financial help to open a restaurant called Milano, near Quincy Market. Joseph backed it himself in return for a one-third share. He never thought he was risking his $250,000; he said he knew the restaurant would succeed. In fact, with John hovering over the operation day and night, Milano thrived, and within five years, Joseph’s initial investment was worth more than a million.
Using the gambler’s rule about riding a winning streak, Joseph McGovern borrowed against his equity in Milano to back other enterprises, which he chose well. His law practice evolved into a highly successful venture-capital operation, and he became a billionaire at the age of forty-one after realizing a tenfold profit on an investment in an old downtown office building. But instead of celebrating by popping Champagne corks in a cushy Boston nightspot, Joseph had a quiet dinner with his wife Anne and their four children, Joseph Jr., fourteen, Kelly Anne, eleven, Jonathan, eight, and Kathleen, three. Later that night, Joseph and Anne made love, and he whispered to her, “We made a lot of money today.” “Did we make it honestly?” she asked. “Always,” he replied.
Three weeks later they bought one of the magnificent old brownstone homes on River Street in the Back Bay area, half a block from Beacon Street and the Boston Common. It was the only home Kathy remembered, and the only public acknowledgment Joseph McGovern ever made of his wealth. If his money made him happy, Kathy never could tell. If occasional setbacks cracked his self-confidence, she could not tell that, either. Not even during the two worst setbacks of his life.
The first had come when Kathy was seven. She had a vivid memory of two policemen knocking on the front door, rattling the antique etched-glass panels, and her mother collapsing a few minutes later. The officers brought word that Joey, then eighteen and a freshman at Harvard, had been killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking to his dorm with some friends after a late movie.
The loss of her older son left Anne McGovern helpless for a year. But Kathy remembered her father’s strength. They mourned Joey and buried him, and when it was over, Joseph put his wife to bed and gathered his remaining children around him. He told them something Kathy never forgot: “You have lost a brother, and your mother and I have lost a son. We all loved Joey very much. None of us will ever forget him, nor should we. But his life is over. Ours are not. There is a time to stop and grieve, and there is a time to live and move on. I believe our time has come to move on.”
The second tragedy struck eight years later, when Joseph and Anne were sailing with friends off Race Point on Cape Cod and were caught in a thunderstorm. Although they were all expert sailors aboard a craft that could easily weather such squalls, lightning struck the mainmast, breaking off a two-and-a-half-foot section that struck Anne McGovern in the back of the neck. She lived for three days in a coma before losing the battle for her life. Again there was a period of mourning, and again Kathy watched her father pick up the pieces of a shattered life and move on.
With Kelly going to graduate school at the University of Virginia and Jonathan about to become a junior at Harvard, Kathy’s goal that summer had been to convince her father she could run the household and steer her life. It devastated her when he told her in mid-August she must enroll at St. Martin’s Academy for Girls in Stockbridge.
When she challenged him, Joseph assured her he wasn’t acting out of a lack of confidence, but because of enormous confidence that she could handle the separation. His business affairs were thriving in Europe and the Middle East, necessitating his being out of the country for long periods. He said he had no qualms about leaving her on her own for a few days, but weeks and months at a time was a different matter. The family housekeeper could look after her material needs, but her emotional and spiritual needs demanded professional oversight.
When she started to cry, her father told her to take control, to exact maximum benefit from her environment, to grow, to learn, to gain perspective and insight, to set firm goals and pursue them with single-minded purpose.
With gentle counseling from the nuns, who had been warned of the situation, Kathy got through the first year, unhappy but with grudging acceptance. Her father called at least once a week, no matter where he was in the world, and she always projected the strong stoicism she knew he expected. In spring, Joseph took her back to the Boston house, and they shared a wonderful summer. He made arrangements to stay in the city most of the time, and on those occasions when he had to leave for a few days, he underscored his faith in Kathy by leaving her in charge of herself while the housekeeper kept track of the more mundane things, like groceries. By the end of August, when the time came to return to Stockbridge, Kathy had developed a taste for independence, and the discipline endemic to a Catholic girls’ school was anathema to her.
She would always remember her three years at St. Martin’s as the most patronizing of her life and, in a way, the most valuable. She’d entered the school already possessing self-reliance. Three years in the smothering bosom of the Church taught her patience and diplomacy, the skills she prized most highly as she became committed to politics.