That had happened while Kathy was at Boston College and had become immersed in the first Senate campaign of thirty-four-year-old Hugh Green. She joined his staff in mid-July, and a month later showed such promise as an organizer that she was put in charge of the Green Machine, the young people willing to do anything to elect their man, even taking on such unappreciated jobs as door-to-door canvassing and election-day transportation to the polls for the elderly. Green was an easy winner in November, and after the victory party on election night, the senator-elect invited her to seek him out in Washington when she graduated.
She took him up on it, and he needed her. She had a knack for constituent service, and the staff Green put together to do that vital work was in disarray. She took the job with relish and had remarkably quick success. Six years later, when she was a legislative assistant, she took an unpaid leave from Green’s Washington office to serve as deputy chairman of his successful reelection campaign. A year later she became his administrative assistant, the number-one staff assignment. She chaired his next reelection effort, and he gained a larger plurality than he’d had in the first two races. That he was headed for the White House in six years—earlier if President Cordell Hollander’s current administration didn’t shape up—appeared inevitable. That Kathy McGovern would help put him there and gain an office and a stature of her own, appeared inevitable as well.
Joseph McGovern, now seventy-three, still lived in the same house on River Street. At sixty-five, he met and married Jennifer Wheaton, the widow of a Boston investment counselor. Joseph still kept up an incredible business and social pace. He said he had no intention of retiring or dying until he’d amassed a fortune vast enough to ensure the future of at least a dozen grandchildren, preferably two dozen. Although he surely had done that years before, he repeated the vow each time his own children suggested he think about slowing down.
Kelly had married an English import-export broker. They maintained homes in London and New York, and Joseph saw his two grandsons by that marriage several times a year. At forty-two, it was unlikely that Kelly was thinking about bearing more children. Jonathan was—had been—the chief economist for the Chicago brokerage firm of Lane, Ross & McReedy. His wife Betsy was the hostess of a local television talk show. They had one daughter, with another child on the way, and they had assured Joseph constantly that they wanted a big family. Had Jonny lived, they might have kept that promise. Although he was forty, Betsy was thirty-three and could have had three or four more children had she wanted to. Now, of course, there would be no more.
Kathy had never married, and at the age of thirty-seven in Washington, D.C., a city where it was said single women outnumber single men six to one, her chances were not getting better. She’d had several relationships, one of which was especially promising. The end of that affair three years earlier left her in emotional shambles, but even her closest friends saw only glimpses of her pain. Within a week, Kathy had pulled herself together and refocused on the future. The thought of never marrying occurred to her occasionally. It bothered her only when she imagined being alone during old age, and then it bothered her a lot. But no one knew.
In truth, she’d been happy over the years with the status quo. She had a great career with an unlimited future. Her father’s formula worked for her.
Until Steven Pace changed all the equations.
He divided her loyalties, diverted her attention. He became more compelling for her than her work, more important than her professional future. She always had been able to do as her father taught her, but the formula failed when she and Steve became involved. Without realizing it, she had pushed the relationship aside. Now she was having new doubts as her feelings for Steve grew again. And she was far from over Jonathan’s death. Her emotions were a jumble. She felt she was losing her focus, and she was not handling well that loss of singular purpose.
It was for that loss and her inability to deal with it that Kathy cried.
Green closed the door and sat in one of the two chairs facing Kathy’s desk, after first clearing away a stack of Armed Services Committee hearing transcripts. He did not offer words of comfort or his handkerchief. He had the correct instinct that words would have done little good and a handkerchief, while chivalrous, was rendered unnecessary by the box of Kleenex on her desk. He’d learned in almost twenty-five years of marriage to his wife Gretchen, who also did not cry easily, the best thing to do was to wait out the storm and be there when the clouds cleared. It proved a short wait.
Kathy plucked a tissue from its box and blew her nose and laughed in the self-conscious way people do when they’re embarrassed.
“All I’m doing is apologizing to you this morning, Hugh, but I’m sorry again,” she said. “This isn’t like me.”
“No apologies necessary,” Green said sincerely. “You’ve been on a rocky ride. It wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t feel overwhelmed. Did the newspaper trigger this?”
She nodded. “I don’t think I could exaggerate how much Mike McGill meant to Steve. I feel miserable about it, and coming on top of Jonathan—”
“You and Steve together again, huh?” Green guessed.
“That’s an overstatement. But he’s been there for me through all this, and a lot of old emotions are coming to the surface.”
“When did you find out about this?” he asked, holding up the newspaper again.
“This morning, when I read it.”
“Steve didn’t call you last night when it happened?”
Kathy shook her head. “The last I heard from him was sometime after seven when he called to say he was going to dinner with Mike and Avery Schaeffer. He said he wanted to see me, but it would have to wait until tonight, if that was okay…” Her voice trailed off.
“His story is intriguing as hell,” Green said. “It’s like he’s trying to say something without actually saying it. Do you know any more about it, if I may be so bold as to ask?”
Because she trusted Green implicitly, she told him of her conversations with Pace about the accident. They had been brief, but Steve had mentioned once that he was troubled by Harold Marshall’s actions—had Steve called it interference?—relating to the NTSB investigation. Steve hadn’t gone into any details, and she had been too emotionally distracted to ask for any.
Green listened intently, his expression disclosing nothing about his thoughts. As Kathy had seen him do many times during intense Armed Services Committee testimony, he sat with his elbows on the arms of the chair, his fingers steepled in front of his chin. When something struck him as especially important or interesting, six of the steepled fingers went down, leaving only raised forefingers that he ran up and down in the gutter of flesh between his nose and his upper lip.
When Kathy finished, Green pushed himself more erect in the chair.
“I’m happy you and Steve are seeing each other again,” he said. “Gretchen and I both like him. Fact is, when you broke it off, I had to stop Gretchen from coming down here and acting like a yenta.” He cleared his throat. “On another level, the comment about Harold Marshall fascinates me. On the basest of all possible levels, I’d like to know what Cobra’s role is in this.” He used the nickname Democrats favored for the senior Ohio Republican but never dared use to his face.
“Nothing if not partisan, are we?” Kathy asked, smiling for the first time that day.
“We are partisan, indeed, but it isn’t politics that turns me off Marshall. He’s such a disagreeable sort.”