Furthermore, Poppas v. Ridenbaugh still lingered in the minds of a substantial number of Californians. It was a sig nificant issue that they felt went right to the heart of Robert’s character. Randy knew they would be able to capitalize on that during their campaign against the grandfatherly incumbent. He also knew that, if they were forced to wait until the next Senate seat was contested, Pappas v. Ridenbaugh would be past history, and useless to them.
“Get Mary Catherine out here—tomorrow, if possible,” Robert was saying, “and let’s start the wheels in motion.”
“Yes, sir,” Randy replied, jotting the congressman’s trusted administrative assistant’s name down in his notebook.
Robert turned to the woman sitting beside him, holding the sleeping child. “So tell us, Mrs. Willmont,” he mimicked the pretty young reporter, “how would you like to be the wife of a United States senator?”
Elizabeth had been paying only marginal attention to the conversation, yet she forced a weary smile.
“Step two,” she murmured obediently, but her words lacked enthusiasm.
As far as she was concerned, the birth of her son was the crowning achievement of her life, and it had taken a great deal out of her. It was her fourth pregnancy, the other three having ended in miscarriages. The doctors had warned her that not only were the chances of her being able to carry a baby to term slim to none, but the risk to her health was considerable, and they had embellished their dire predictions with a lot of multisyllabic words she couldn’t pronounce and didn’t understand. Elizabeth thanked them politely, paid their exorbitant fees, and proceeded to ignore their advice.
Robert was then in his first term in the United States House of Representatives. He was busy and excited and each moment brought him new challenges. Elizabeth was able to share in his glory, but not in his day-to-day involvement. Once the fervor of the campaign and the election were over, her life seemed to lose its focus.
“I know something you can do,” Robert told her when he came home one night a week after the election. “You can find us the right place to live.”
“To rent or to buy?” she asked.
“To buy,” he replied with a confident grin. “I think you can count on us being in Washington for a while.”
Elizabeth spent a month searching for the perfect house, finding it finally on a graceful wooded acre in Rock Creek Park, and she spent another three months having it redone. At last, this was the home that would truly be just hers and Robert’s. She put all her energy into the redecorating, supervising the entire project herself, thinking and then rethinking even the smallest detail, personally selecting each fabric, approving every paint sample, shopping endlessly for exactly the right pieces of furniture.
The result was gracious and comfortable and spoke softly of good taste and breeding. Those who were fortunate enough to be invited into it were charmed.
It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be as enchanted with the lovely Mrs. Willmont as San Francisco had been a decade earlier. Soon her style was being imitated by other Washington wives, and her advice on fashion, always a step ahead of vogue, was being sought by women from Capitol Hill to Embassy Row.
“They know class when they see it,” Robert observed to Randy when, only a few months into his first term of office, Elizabeth was asked to join the planning committee of one of the capital’s most prestigious annual balls.
But once the Rock Creek Park house was completed, Elizabeth again found herself without focus. Her charity work, while certainly worthy, no longer gave her the satisfaction it once had, and the various luncheons and teas she chose to attend each week filled time but not the growing emptiness inside. She knew only one solution to that particular problem. So, at the ripe old age of thirty-four, she made one last stab at motherhood.
“Why would you want to go and do that?” Robert asked in dismay when she told him she was pregnant.
“Because I heard my biological clock ticking,” she replied. “Very loudly.”
“Do you think it was wise, under the circumstances?”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking wise, I was thinking baby.”
“Sweetheart, you don’t have to do this, you know,” he assured her. “Not for me.”
“I’m not doing it for you,” she replied.
“But children aren’t essential for us anymore. I mean, we’re doing fine just the way we are.”
“No, you’re doing fine, Robert,” she told him. “I’m doing carpeting and fund-raising.”
“What about the doctors—did they say it was all right to try again? I mean, the risk?”
“I don’t care about the doctors,” she declared. “I want to have a baby.”
“Don’t you think maybe we’re a little old to be starting a family now?” he persisted.
Elizabeth shrugged. “Apparently not.”
“But won’t it look, well, a little strange to people? I mean, at our age?”
“If you mean people here in Washington, who cares?” she retorted. “If you mean people back home, I rather think that voters like having a family man in office—young or old.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she confirmed. “I certainly do, at any rate. I automatically assume that politicians with children are … well… more stable than ones without.”
“I’d have to see some polls on that,” he retorted.
But by the time Adam Drayton Willmont was born, ten days before 1980, Robert no longer cared about polls. His wife had made it through the delivery, and he had an heir.
Almost from the start, Elizabeth had problems with the pregnancy, but she was determined not to lose this baby. She curtailed her charitable activities, accepted very few social invitations, and managed to keep up a brave front for her husband, which wasn’t too difficult because he was so preoccupied with his work that he often left for Capitol Hill well before she awoke in the morning and came home long after she was asleep.
But she couldn’t hide from her doctors. They saw her weekly, changed her diet, pumped her full of vitamins, and performed endless tests to monitor fetal progress. Her first miscarriage had occurred early in the pregnancy, her second in the fifth month, her third in the fourth. The day she entered her sixth month and felt the baby kick for the first time, Elizabeth cried with relief.
“Don’t get your hopes up yet,” the doctors cautioned, knowing that a sixth-month abort or even a still birth, with her history, was a very real possibility. “You have a long way to
go.”
“I’m going to make it,” she told them fiercely. “We’re both going to make it.”
She began to bleed two days later.
“What do I do?” she begged the doctors. “Tell me what to do.”
“Nothing,” they replied. “Absolutely nothing.”
They meant exactly that. Elizabeth spent the last four months of her pregnancy in bed, and she almost didn’t survive the eighteen-hour labor, but Adam was perfect.
The doctors called it a miracle.
Even after two years, Elizabeth was still struggling to regain her strength, and the long flight from Washington had taken its toll. She yearned for her bed, although it was barely the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t that she was no longer interested in her husband’s political ambitions, it was more that she had just so much energy to expend, and she chose to expend it on her son.
Adam was her life now. Her charitable activities, her social commitments and her congressional obligations became peripheral. When Robert was at home, he was included in what she thought of as her heart circle. When he was not, she rarely thought about him at all. Her days were full of Adam—his first words, first steps, first lessons. Her nights were filled with planning—for his education, his future, his happiness.
Robert wanted to employ a nanny. Elizabeth refused
“I have no intention of letting a stranger raise my son,” she declared.
“You’re the wife of a congressman,” he retorted, “a
nd a Drayton. You have obligations.”
“I’ll maintain an association with one or two worthy char
ities and I’ll attend every social and political function that you feel is necessary to your advancement,” she said firmly. “But my only obligation is to Adam.”
Although it was often beyond her endurance, she forced herself to accompany Robert to as many as three social events a week without complaint, charming even the crustiest of statesmen with her sweet smile and well-bred manners.
It was the little pink pills that got her through. Her doctors prescribed them when she complained of lethargy. One per day, they said, would fix her right up. By the end of six months, she was taking as many as three a day, sometimes four if she were facing an especially late evening.
Elizabeth had been looking forward to the Christmas break, and was delighted when Robert told her they would have an extra two weeks away from Washington. Even the thought of Amanda’s grousing hadn’t dimmed her anticipation of the quiet month ahead. But what she had just half-heard had.
If Robert intended to announce his candidacy for the Senate during the holiday, there would be no rest. Instead, there would be a nonstop round of press conferences, photo sessions, and interviews, with people underfoot every moment, and she would be expected to participate. She sighed deeply and made a mental note to have her prescription refilled.
Robert settled back against the leather cushions. It was going to happen just as he had dreamed it, and one day very soon he would have it all. The endless schooling, the long apprenticeship at Sutton Wells, the confining proper marriage, the petty congressional duties he performed, the tiresome committees on which he was obliged to serve—each was merely a rung up his ladder to the White House. When he looked at it like that, he knew it was worth it.
The limousine pulled up in front of the house on Jackson Street. Robert took Adam, Randy helped Elizabeth, and the four of them went up the steps.
“I want to spend a few minutes with Mother,” Robert told his wife, handing the boy over. “And then Randy and I have some people to see.”
Elizabeth hardly heard him.
“Where are we headed?” Randy asked half an hour later as the two men climbed back into the limousine.
“I don’t know where you’re headed, old man,” replied the congressman with a sly wink. “But I’m on my way to give an interview.”
Randy grinned on the outside but cringed on the inside. It wasn’t that he was a prude. In fact, he wasn’t in the least. But, after three years, he knew that Robert’s sexual appetites sometimes got the better of his good sense—and boffing a news reporter on the eve of announcing for the United States Senate was certainly not what Randy considered using good sense.
two
The jumbo jet sped steadily toward the sunset. Mary Catherine O’Malley sipped her champagne, nibbled at her smoked-salmon appetizer, and contemplated the strategy session that would begin almost the moment the plane touched down—the announcement that would result from that session, and the impact it would have on the rest of her life.
She had been working for Robert Willmont for a scant three years now and he was considered damn lucky to have her, because Mary Catherine was regarded by many to be the best administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. She had earned that reputation over almost thirty years of shepherding congressmen through the political quagmire.
For a girl from the wrong side of the Winston-Salem railroad tracks, with only a high school education to her name, who had started her career as a temporary filing clerk, that wasn’t half bad.
She did her share of stumbling in the beginning, but she was a quick learner and it took her hardly any time at all to realize that she was smarter than most of the duly elected world-beaters with their multiple degrees who moved in and out for a few years at a time.
By the time Mary Catherine attended her sixth congres sional swearing-in ceremony and her third Presidential inaugural, she was on a first-name basis with just about everyone in Washington who counted. She was invited to most of the parties that mattered, the press courted her, insiders sought her advice, and politicians trusted her. Over the years she discovered where all the bodies were buried, where all the skeletons lurked, and which pairs of shoes hid Achilles’ heels, and she accomplished it all without ever having to take off her clothes.
Mary Catherine was barely five feet tall, but people rarely realized that. They noticed instead that, at the age of forty-eight, she still displayed a classic hourglass figure, an abundance of glossy brown hair, and brown eyes that were faintly reminiscent of Bambi.
She managed her staff with the patience of Penelope and the determination of a drill sergeant, she managed the public with humor and impartiality, and she managed her congressmen with the utmost tact and discretion.
Robert had inherited her from his predecessor, and two months into his first term, he had actually written that conservative gentleman a note of appreciation.
“If you don’t know what to do or how to do it,” he was soon telling everyone, “ask Mary Catherine.”
Born seventh in a family of nine to a schoolteacher mother and an alcoholic father, Mary Catherine had learned the wisdom of knowing the right answers and keeping a low profile by the age of six. Her gentle North Carolina drawl camouflaged an exceptional mind and her soft Southern ways managed to convince many a man that he was really the one in charge.
When she was twenty-nine years old, a White House aide asked her to marry him. He was reasonably handsome and fun and even quite bright, and by that time, they had been enjoying each other’s close company for some months.
“What will you do after your Administration is out of office?” she asked him.
“Oh, we have five years before we have to worry about that,” he said and laughed.
“But then what?” she persisted.
“Go back to Boston, I guess,” he replied. “It’s too hard to tell your friends from your enemies in this town.”
But after all it had taken to get herself established, Mary Catherine had no intention of leaving Washington, in five years or ever. She refused his proposal with sincere regret. While the two of them vowed to remain intimate friends, less than a year later, when the Administration he worked for ended so abruptly, so tragically, the aide said good-bye and faded into memory.
Robert Willmont was Mary Catherine’s third congressman from California. With her ability and experience, she could easily have had her pick of the biennial crop, but she liked Califor-nians. They had a style that other members of the House often lacked. Women seemed to sit up straighter in their presence, men tended to order wine instead of bourbon.
This one, however, had a lot more than style. He had looks and he had brains and he had an ambition that wasn’t going to quit with a third-floor office on the House side of the Capitol Building. This one was on his way up, as they said, and he was the one Mary Catherine had been waiting for.
Like almost everyone else who came with purpose to the nation’s capital, the soft-spoken North Carolinian dreamed of ending her career in the White House. For decades, she had studied the mostly indistinguishable features of those who took up residence in the Senate and the House, looking for just the right combination of qualities that she could help hone into a presidential great. In the part of her gut where her most trusted instincts lay, Mary Catherine knew that Robert Drayton Willmont was the one.
The prestigious law firm of Sutton, Wells, Willmont and Spaulding, while officially neutral when it came to politics, was nonetheless pleased to provide the congressman, and former partner, with a suite of offices on the twelfth floor of its Front Street building.
Five days after Mary Catherine hit San Francisco, she had leased an apartment on Telegraph Hill for herself and anyone else from out of town who might need it, outfitted the Front Street headquarters, hired two secretaries and a clerk from a local temporary agency, and called in two assistants from Washington to help set up operations.
; At two o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, December 17, perfectly timed to take advantage of the evening newscasts, she stood beside Randy Neuburg, just outside the glare of the television lights, as Robert Willmont announced to the press and the people of California his intention to be a candidate for the United States Senate.
Mary Catherine approved of Randy. He was smart and realistic, and under her tutelage was developing into one of the most savvy aides in Washington. To the congressman’s right was his lovely wife, holding their cherubic little boy Adam in her arms. A nice touch, the shrewd administrative assistant conceded. Mary Catherine approved of Elizabeth Willmont, too. Not only was she beautiful and fashionable, she had the kind of grace and charm that was considered an enormous asset in Washington and which would play very well in the media.
From the corner of her eye, the assistant scanned the local newspeople she would get to know again in the eleven months to come. In the front row sat a pretty young blonde with brown eyes, a short tight skirt, one leg thrown ever so casually over the other, and an insolent little smile on her face. She was the only member of the group who wasn’t taking notes. Mary Catherine frowned. She had seen that same smile on a number of other pretty young faces over the past three years and it always triggered an alarm bell in her head. A slight sigh beside her told her that Randy was noticing, too.
“I think it went well,” Robert observed once the lights had been turned off and the reporters had rushed away with their stories.
“It’ll play in Pasadena,” Randy agreed.
“So long as the conservative voters of our good state continue to focus on my sound fiscal policies and the liberal voters concentrate on my progressive social programs,” the candidate summed up, “I think we’ve got it made.”
He stretched broadly and made a point of glancing at his wristwatch. “See that Elizabeth and the boy get back to Jackson Street, will you?” he directed his aide. “I’m late for an appointment.”
Guilt by Association Page 29
