For a moment the President could say nothing. Clayton had been right from the beginning—Kerry was now caught in a web of his own design, the personal and political so hopelessly intertwined that he could never disentangle them, or even parse his own motives. And for that moment, he envied Senator Fasano his detachment.
But, in the end, there was only one answer.
"No," he told Fasano.
* * *
Lara gripped the telephone. "Mary," she said quietly, "if we take the money on those terms, our settlement will seem like an apology. Or worse."
"Worse?"
"A sellout. In either case, the votes to uphold Kerry's veto will begin to melt away."
Speaking from her efficiency apartment in San Francisco, Mary sounded wan. "Did I hear you say 'we,' Lara?"
At once, Lara realized her blunder. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was thinking of our family."
"That's good," Mary answered. "Because it's different for me than you. It seems like from the moment I was born you were already this great success."
The myths of families, Lara thought sadly. "I was in second grade, Mary—a seven-year-old who was scared to death of our own father. Now I'm a woman who, like you, has lost the rest of her family but for a sister."
"A woman," Mary repeated in a tone Lara heard as both stubborn and defensive, "who's also married to the President and made millions with NBC. Coming from you, 'we' sounds false."
Stop, Lara thought. "Do you think the SSA's eight million dollars," she shot back, "will make you a 'success'? It's like selling our own mother to these people." Abruptly, Lara heard herself. "I apologize, Mary—really. Like you, I'm frayed. I understand that I've been lucky, that our lives are nothing alike. But this offer's just appalling."
On the other end, Mary was silent, perhaps stunned by the harshness of their conflict. "Lara," she said in a trembling voice, "I'm not selling our mother—or Joanie and Marie. If I were, I wouldn't have called Sarah. That's as good as calling you."
Not only was that true, Lara saw, but Mary's thrust was a fresh reminder of her intrusion into Mary's suit. "I apologize," Lara said in a mollifying tone. "I understand the difference between having money or not . . ."
"Well, I don't understand the difference, Lara. I've never had the chance."
Once again, Lara heard the justice in her sister's words, felt the yawning gulf in their perceptions. With an anxiety close to desperation, she promised, "I can help you, Mary. If it still matters, I can even help get you a contract for that book on our family you mentioned. Whatever I can do."
"What if I take this settlement?"
Lara paused to speak deliberately. "It would be hard to imagine a book, Mary, with that as its ending."
Her sister began to cry.
* * *
As soon as Clayton entered the office, Kerry knew from his friend's expression that he was troubled.
"What's up, pal?" the President inquired. "It's been a long day."
"Slezak wants a meeting."
"And here I thought there were no surprises left. He must have heard about Jeannie Griswold."
"He already knew you'd do that," Clayton demurred, and sat wearily in front of Kerry's desk. "He says it's a private matter—'extremely sensitive'—which can't wait another day. And that no one should know he's coming."
Abruptly, Kerry felt the pulse of Clayton's instinct, the first glimmer that Slezak's insolence made a certain awful sense. With a fair show of calm, he answered, "Doesn't sound like an apology, does it? You'd better tell him to come tonight."
THREE
With deep foreboding, Kerry received Jack Slezak in the President's private office.
Slezak hunched in a wing chair, ankles crossed, hands clasped, his thick body held slightly forward. But for the brightness in his light green eyes, betraying a hint of superiority, he had the somber look of a worshiper at Mass, bent before the imponderable will of God. Even his voice was hushed.
"I'm sorry, Mr. President. I had no choice but to come in person."
Briefly, Slezak averted his gaze in what Kerry saw as feigned embarrassment. Increasingly certain of Slezak's purpose, the President spoke in a voice drained of welcome or encouragement. "Concerning what?"
Though still bent forward, Slezak gave the President a swift, keen glance which lifted the red eyebrows beneath the broad plane of his forehead. "I received a call. The man told the receptionist he was the president of the AFL-CIO. That's a call I've got to take." As he watched Kerry from behind his mask of reluctance, his voice became harsher. "Turned out it was a man I didn't know, saying he had a message for you.
"I was so pissed I nearly hung up on him. Then I thought"—here Slezak interrupted himself with a helpless shrug—"you know, that it might involve some threat against your life."
The tacit reference to Jamie's murder, and Kerry's own near death, made Slezak's pretense of humanity more offensive. With a faint cold smile, Kerry said softly, "But, of course, it wasn't."
The disbelief implicit in Kerry's remark caused Slezak to look at him sharply. "No. It was about the First Lady."
To Kerry, his own smile felt as though it could crack glass. "Only Lara?"
"No." Slezak studied his clasped hands. "He said that the two of you were involved when you were still married to your former wife."
Though prepared for this, a thickness in his throat forced Kerry to pause before mustering a tone of irony. " 'Involved'? Was your caller all that delicate?"
Plainly annoyed, Slezak looked straight at Kerry. "He said you'd made her pregnant, and that she'd gotten an abortion."
With veiled contempt, Kerry murmured, "At last."
Slezak stared at him. In their silence, the pale light of two standing lamps, Kerry began absorbing the calamity, long deferred, which now would fall on Lara and on him, pervading every corner—public and private—of their lives. Then Slezak added bluntly, "There's more."
"I thought there would be."
Without the pretense of any encouragement from the President, Slezak finished in a toneless voice. "He said they have the counselor's notes from the abortion clinic your wife went to, and that the notes confirm you were the father."
Despite Slezak's presence, Kerry was helpless to fight the current of memory—the emotional wreckage which Lara had become, his own pleas to have their child. "An interesting story," Kerry observed coldly. "Rich in detail. Did your source explain why he was sharing it with you?"
Slezak's eyes narrowed in shrewd appraisal. "Not exactly. Only that you'd know that it was true. And that once I told you, so would I."
The tacit statement of Slezak's leverage triggered, in Kerry, a mute fury at his own impotence. Standing, he said dismissively, "So now you know whatever you assume to know."
Slezak stood as well, seemingly propelled from his chair by a banked antagonism of his own. "That's not the end," he said curtly. "The guy said if you veto the Civil Justice Reform Act, all of America will know."
And Charles Dane already knew. To Kerry, the pattern was now crystalline. The SSA had the memo, and had promised Slezak cover if he defied the President. Slezak felt impervious: his charade was Dane's message to Kerry, the final piece of a three-pronged effort—preceded by Dane's settlement offer to Lenihan and Fasano's offer to Kerry—to assure the President's quiescence. Perhaps Fasano knew; perhaps he, too, was a pawn. But of one thing Kerry was quite certain: though he could not prove it, Jack Slezak was a liar, a knowing party to blackmail.
"Why do you suppose," Kerry asked quietly, "that they picked you?"
Left unspecified was who "they" were. In the same flat tone, Slezak answered, "Because they knew I would deliver the message."
"No doubt," Kerry told him, nodding toward the door. "So now you can leave. Lara and I don't get much time, and I don't like being late for dinner."
* * *
They sat on their bed as Kerry told her.
Her reaction was more devastating than he could have imagined. Nothing but the
tears on her stricken face.
Kerry took her hands. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "Sorry that my becoming President has brought so much harm to us."
Her eyes were black pools of horror and grief. "They're using 'us,' " she said with quiet wonder, "to erase the public memory of my family." She grazed her cheekbones with the fingertips of one hand, as though to wipe them clean of dampness. "And you, Kerry. Nothing about what I did was ever fair to you."
Quiet, Kerry sorted through the tangle of his thoughts: that Lara did not deserve this; that those who had believed in him—indeed the country—did not deserve it either; that his ambition to be President had outrun his reason; that he was President, and could not let love, or even fear for their future, obscure the iron fact of his political dilemma, the harsh choices he must make. It was pointless to wish that they had never faced this moment.
"I love you," he said.
With a shiver of emotion, she rested her forehead against the hollow of his neck. "You would have loved our child."
Kerry simply held her. At length, she murmured wearily, "We've got no time for this."
The pitiless accuracy of this statement moved her husband to protest. "We've got time."
"Not now." Leaning back from him, she said, "You are President. And I've got Mary to think of."
To his own shame, Kerry realized that he had not considered Mary. Even if he did not yield to blackmail, a President crippled by scandal might not be able to sustain a veto which, even now, rested on a onevote margin. Whatever their decision, Mary would have to know. "I suppose that's the good part," Lara added softly. "Never again will Mary envy me my perfection."
Silent, Kerry considered the toxic consequences he had thrust on Lara, the fruits of his decision to wound the SSA through Mary's lawsuit. From first to last, he had been poison to Lara's family.
I'll do whatever you want, he almost said, and then realized he could not promise even that. "We both know the playbook of our times," she told him with quiet bitterness. "I do the media calvary, the stations of the cross, dragging my sins from network to network. A few days of that will transform disgust to pity."
Kerry imagined her enduring this ritual of self-flagellation, the humiliating mix of theater with a remorse too personal to dramatize. Equally embittering was his regret that Lara must be so clear-eyed.
"I'd resign," he said simply, "before I'd watch that happen."
Her lips parted, as if to argue, and then she absorbed how literally he meant that. "And I won't watch you protect me at any cost. To you, or to me."
Feeling their impasse, the conflict of love and politics, Kerry absorbed anew the consequences of whatever they chose to do, their inability—now—to consider only the personal costs of dealing with a long-ago private act.
"We'll need advice," he said at last. "We can't decide this on our own."
Once more, tears filled Lara's eyes. "I know," she answered.
FOUR
Pensive, Clayton stared at the carpet.
It was a little past one a.m. Even in an administration staffed by driven and dedicated people, the West Wing was silent, allowing Clayton to slip into the Oval Office unnoticed. At length Clayton said softly, "They'll use it."
Kerry was quiet. "When I called," he inquired at length, "what did Carlie say?"
"That you keep strange hours." Still leaning forward, Clayton peered up at him, the wisp of a smile vanishing in an instant. "She still doesn't know about you and Lara. In twenty-seven years, it's the only secret I've ever kept from her."
For eighteen of those years, Clayton had been his closest friend. Gazing at Clayton's round, familiar face, Kerry thought again that he could not have hoped for a better one. He knew how deeply—almost superstitiously—averse Clayton was to keeping anything from his wife. "Does anyone else know?"
"Only Kit."
Clayton nodded. During the campaign, when a national magazine had been close to uncovering the story, they had agreed that it was necessary to prepare Kit for the worst. "But not about Slezak?"
"Not yet." Kerry stood, hands thrust in his pockets. "I want Kit's advice on this."
Clayton puffed his cheeks, silently expelling air. "I can already tell you, Kerry. She'll say that you have to get this story out yourself."
"Maybe. But I need another point of view. I'm not going to kick this one around with our political people—let alone convene a group of wise men to cogitate on Lara's abortion as if it were the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even if I could imagine that, which I can't, can you imagine the stories if it leaked?" Kerry paused. "A few weeks ago, I might have talked to Chad. But not now."
Clayton gazed at him as though absorbing the dimensions of Kerry's solitude. "Do you want me to bring Kit in now?"
"Please. This one won't wait."
* * *
At a little past two a.m., Lara waited with Kerry in his private office, their chairs pulled close together—Lara dressed in a blouse and blue jeans, Kerry in khakis and a pullover sweater. When Kit and Clayton entered, Clayton rested a hand on Lara's shoulder. Without looking up, she covered Clayton's hand with hers. Then he joined Kit on a sofa facing the President and First Lady.
Kit's round features had assumed a sober professionalism which could not mask her worry. "Slezak's story is bullshit."
Kerry nodded. "We're all agreed on that."
"If you could implicate the SSA," Kit continued, "you'd have all sorts of choices—including moral outrage. With no one to blame, your options narrow."
"I'm afraid that's where we are. Short of tearing out Slezak's fingernails until he implicates Charles Dane."
Kit glanced at Lara, and then spoke to Kerry again. "Maybe we're so used to being afraid of this that we've forgotten what all of us know. Millions of women face this choice. To them, for you to be blackmailed over it would be grotesque, something from the Jerry Springer Show. There's more sympathy out there than the SSA may think. And potentially a lot more anger."
"Sympathy?" Lara cut in. "Not from the media. I'm imagining The O'Reilly Factor amplified by a thousand right-wing talk shows. Unless I tell the truth—that Kerry never wanted an abortion—we'll be portrayed as a ruthless and ambitious couple who'd do anything to claw our way to power." Briefly, her eyes clouded. "They'll say that we've exploited the murder of my own family for cheap sympathy, but didn't hesitate to murder our own child. That we lied our way into office. That we're morally unfit to stay here. That no child in America can see us as fit role models for private conduct or public integrity."
"Even," Kit ventured quietly, "if you did tell the truth about Kerry?"
Lara glanced at her husband. "I'm more than willing to do that. But perhaps Kerry's right that they'd accuse me of trying to pin a rose on an adulterer by lying for him. And accuse him of using me to hide behind.
"But you're right about the anger. The country will become an endless echo chamber of attacks and recriminations, until Kerry and I can never go anywhere without everyone else's thought bubble being about abortion." Her voice grew husky. "I know that his marriage failed because Meg didn't want children, and that he'd have given all this up to have our child. But public life is not a place to look for sym pathy. The hard-line social conservatives will be demanding that people like Fasano prove their devotion to family values by making Kerry a moral object lesson. They'll use me to ruin his Presidency, any way they can."
Lara felt depressed, exhausted by the weight of her own guilt. Both Kit and Clayton gazed at their laps. At length, Kit said, "I grant you that abortion's an incendiary topic. Coupled with the gun issue, the right will use it to rip open the whole culture gap—'the Kilcannons don't share our values.' But it only gets as bad as you've imagined if we let the SSA control the means and timing of disclosure."
"What 'means of disclosure,' " Kerry asked, "do you suggest? Because Lara and I are not going on Barbara Walters."
"Put this in the hands of the New York Times," Kit urged him. "Or, better, the Post: given that Lara covered yo
u for the Times when you first became involved, they might be a little touchy about her ethics. We could grant the Post an exclusive interview with strict ground rules—no asking Pat Robertson for his reaction; print the entire transcript verbatim . . ."
"What reason do we give for this confessional? 'We just thought that you should know'? If that were true, we'd have said so during the campaign."
"And cost yourself the election? Or the Masters nomination? You didn't owe anyone that." Kit spoke slowly, balancing entreaty with firmness. "The two of you are married now, and you've both suffered too much already. The American public is far more compassionate—and sensible—than the extremists on either side would have them be. They'll understand if someone is trying to blackmail you and that you have to divulge on principle that which, in principle, you believe too private to disclose." Pausing, Kit finished flatly, "That's the other thing, Mr. President. If you don't expose this, you're arguably complicit in your own blackmail."
Balance of Power Page 62
