“Yessir,” she said.
Will sighed and fell fast asleep.
He was jolted awake as the van struck the curb.
“We’re here,” Mary Ann said. “It’s the Kiwanis Club meeting, in the basement of the town hall, right there.” She pointed. “I’ll leave the engine running.”
Will struggled out of the van. There was a man waiting at the front door of the hall to take him inside. Will peeled off his light topcoat and stamped the snow off his feet, leaving a puddle behind him. He was shown to the head table, shaking hands all the way, and a bowl of hot soup was put in front of him. He got that down gratefully, then started on the fried chicken, which wasn’t bad. By the time he was ready to speak he was warm, if damp, and very sleepy. His missed his first cue, then hopped up and went to the microphone. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
A man stood up and tapped the microphone, which was on.
Will tried again, and this time he managed a squeaking noise. He had no voice whatever. He grabbed a notebook from his pocket, scribbled something on it, and handed it to the man at his left. The man read it, stood up, and leaned into the microphone.
“It says, ‘My name is Will Lee, and I’m running for president, and I’ve just lost my voice.’” The crowd roared with laughter.
As Will was making his way out of the hall, mutely shaking hands, he found his way blocked by a large man.
“What size shoe do you wear?” the man asked.
Puzzled, Will tried to speak, then got out his pad and wrote down 10D.
The man looked at the pad, nodded, and stepped away. Will was back in the van before he realized that the man who wanted to know his shoe size was the same man whose car his van had struck earlier.
It was after ten o’clock before Will got back to the depressing motel the campaign had booked him into. Kitty Conroy was waiting for him. “How’d it go?” she asked.
Will tried to speak and couldn’t.
“Oh, my God!” Kitty said, helping him off with his coat. “You’ve got laryngitis?”
Will nodded wearily and headed for the bed.
Kitty stopped him. “Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “Not in those clothes.” She began stripping them off him, aided by Mary Ann. The Secret Service agent stood by the door, watching morosely.
“We’ll get you home first thing tomorrow,” Kitty said. “You’re no good to yourself, if you can’t talk.”
Will shook his head. “Not yet,” he mouthed.
“All right, we’ll see if you can talk tomorrow, then we’ll decide. There’s only one more day to go, anyway.”
The door to the room opened, and another Secret Service agent walked in, carrying a large parcel. “This was just delivered,” he said. “I’ve already checked it out.”
Puzzled, Will opened the box and found a thick winter parka with a fur collar, a pair of snow boots, and a hunter’s woolen cap with earflaps. There was a note in an envelope, and Will opened it. The letterhead said, “Harry’s Menswear.”
“Dear Senator Lee,” it read. “We don’t like to have our candidates die on us in New Hampshire, so please accept the enclosed with my compliments. You’ll not only live, but you’ll fit right in.”
It was signed “Harry Hoskins, the fellow whose car you bumped into earlier this evening.”
Will fell into bed, already asleep. The next morning, still unable to speak, he wore his new winter clothes to the airport.
23
The anchorman gazed into the camera, rustled the useless papers in his hand, and read from the TelePrompTer to the national television audience of the primary-night special.
“The polls will be closing shortly in New Hampshire, and when they do, we’ll tell you what our exit polls are showing. The weather was unexpectedly good today, and the turnout has been heavy. While there are half a dozen names on the ballot, three are expected to take the lion’s share of the vote. Senate Minority Leader George Kiel is expected to win outright, with something more than fifty percent of the vote. Then Senator Mark Haynes, the firebrand liberal from Nebraska, and Senator Will Lee, the moderate from Georgia, appear to be running about neck and neck for second place and are expected to take in the region of eighteen percent each. That could change in Senator Haynes’s favor, because Senator Lee had to fly back to Washington with a galloping case of the flu four days ago, so he couldn’t be around for the home stretch. Let’s go to Lisa Helford in Manchester for an update.”
A young woman in fashionable ski clothes appeared on screen. “Thanks, Bob,” she said. Immediately the screen was filled with shots of people lining up at the polls, and she continued, voice-over. “The unexpectedly heavy turnout was certainly due to the blue skies and warmer temperatures in New Hampshire, after weeks of weather that would be considered really filthy by anyone not from New Hampshire. The candidates braved it as best they could, and one, Senator Will Lee of Georgia, fell by the wayside, done in by the New Hampshire winter. An amateur cameraman caught him at a Kiwanis Club meeting five days ago, at the moment when his health failed him.” The shaky screen and tinny sound of a home video camera showed Will approaching the dais, trying to speak, then scribbling something on a notepad. When the club’s president read what Will had written, the room erupted in laughter.
“We caught a glimpse of Senator Lee at the local airport the following morning as he beat his retreat, and he seemed a lot better prepared for the weather, after a sympathetic Kiwanian who owns a men’s store got him kitted out.” An image of Will in his brand-new winter clothes filled the screen as he trudged across a snowy ramp to his airplane, turned and waved, only his eyes visible between his parka’s fur collar and his cap, the earflaps of which were tied under his chin.
When the camera returned to the reporter, she was laughing. “That’s it from New Hampshire, Bob,” she said. “Back to you.”
Bob Blakely, the anchorman, was laughing, too, when he came back on. “Thanks, Lisa. Now let’s go to our commentator, Bill Varner, who has been talking to New Hampshire voters for days. Bill, was that the height of fashion in New Hampshire last week?”
The camera panned to a desk where Varner sat. “Bob, that’s the way you have to look up there if you want to survive the primary. Actually, Will Lee’s early departure from campaigning may have hurt him badly. His campaign tried to make up for it by buying extra television time, but the pros I’ve talked to said it wasn’t enough, that New Hampshire folks are used to seeing their candidates up close, and that television just doesn’t do it. Also, everybody in the state saw that television report from the Kiwanis Club meeting and had a good laugh about it, and folks up here tend to look askance at candidates who can’t get through a few weeks of winter without folding. What I’m predicting now is that Will Lee is going to lose at least five or six points out of this, and most of those votes are going to go to George Kiel, who will fatten his majority in the state. This could actually have the effect of derailing the Lee campaign, since the New Hampshire primary has been, for so long, a harbinger of things to come at the convention later in the year. So, if Mark Haynes does a little better than expected, we might very well see Will Lee withdrawing from the race — after he gets his voice back.”
The camera went back to the anchorman. “If that happens, Bill, what’s the overall effect on the race going to be?”
“Well, Bob, unless some dark horse appears from nowhere and turns Democratic voters on, George Kiel is going to be the out-and-out front-runner for the nomination. Kiel is a more conservative Democrat than Will Lee, though hardly a right-winger, and Hayes is so liberal that nobody gives him much of a chance for the nomination. The most he could hope for is a shot at vice president when he gets to the convention.”