Act of Darkness(12)

If Stephanie had had a chance to grow up, this is the kind of place I’d have wanted to send her to school, Janet thought—and then she shut it down, shut it down fast, because even after all this time thinking about Stephanie made her come apart.

Sister Mary James was looking at her curiously, worriedly, as if the panorama of her confusion had been playing unhindered across her face. Janet made herself straighten her shoulders and smile.

“It’s been a long day,” she said. “And now I have to go to a cocktail party.”

“I went to a cocktail party once,” Sister Mary James said. “Cardinal Jacoby gave it, back in 1962. There were forty nuns in the room, all in full habit, each of them clutching a single glass of sherry and scared to death it was going to get her drunk. Except Sister Mary Ambrose, of course. Sister Mary Ambrose could drink like a horse and never show it, even before Vatican Two.”

Janet laughed. “Well, Sister, tonight I’m going to stand around clutching one glass of Perrier water and trying to be polite to the reporter from the Post, who’s going to get drunk enough to ask me—well, never mind what he’s going to ask me. You can guess. I wish I could stay here instead.”

“Maybe you can, after the recess. We let people do that sometimes, come in and have a kind of pajama party with the children. Lights on late and pizza sent in, if you know what I mean.”

“It must get to be quite a zoo.”

“Of course it does. Children are always zoolike when they’re allowed to stay up late. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” Janet said.

“I just don’t want you fainting in the cab back to Foggy Bottom. You have to take care of your health.”

Janet took the comb out of her hair, picked up one of the long, needle-pointed antique Victorian hairpins she had left on the desk, and began to reconstruct her topknot. One of the pins stuck her finger as she was putting it in place, and made her bleed. I hate Dan Chester, she thought.

She sucked at the drop of blood on her finger and then rucked her comb back into her purse, snapped the purse shut, and stood up. She was going to be late for that cocktail party. Stephen would be livid, and Dan Chester would be impossible. She slung the purse over her shoulder and said, “I had to take Mary Alyse up to medical this afternoon because of a scrape. It’s way up on her left knee, under her uniform. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but she very much wanted a Tylenol and Sister Margarita wasn’t in—”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Fox. A Tylenol won’t hurt her.”

“I’m sure it won’t. She may want one later, though. I gave her the last one at three o’clock. Oh, and one other thing. The restricted medicine cabinet was unlocked again.”

“I’ll remember that,” Sister Mary James said. “Now go home and take care of yourself. Get some rest. Skip that cocktail party, if you have to.”

“I wish I could,” Janet said, and she meant it. She wished she could skip all the cocktail parties, all the dinners, all the dances, all the seminars that stretched in front of her like a term in Purgatory, that chess match in fancy dress that substituted for friendship in official Washington. Sometimes she wondered what would have happened to her if she had listened to her mother’s advice all those years ago and thrown over Stephen for the son of the then-chairman of the board of Columbia Pictures. Sometimes she wondered what would happen to her if she were dead.

Most of all, she wondered what would happen to her tonight, with Dan already in a lather about a future in the White House and Stephen already in a lather about Patchen Rawls.





[7]


FOR STEPHEN FOX, COCKTAIL parties were a torture, the ultimate dangerous situation in a world that seemed to him to be made of nothing else. Their dangers had been impressed on him a hundred times by his good friend Dan Chester and made real by experience. Dinner parties, seminars, even press conferences could be orchestrated. On the Senate floor, he was protected by Senate rules. In his office, he was protected by his staff. At home, he was protected by his servants. At more formal gatherings, he was protected by Dan Chester. At cocktail parties, the only protection he had was Janet—and Janet, this evening, wasn’t in the mood to protect him at all.

It was two minutes before eight o’clock, and the party was in full swing. The air-conditioning was cranked into high gear. The food table was surrounded by reporters who were behaving as if they hadn’t had a meal in a week. The long dark cherry-wood bar was crowded with lobbyists who seemed bent on getting absolutely blotto, but were probably drinking mineral water. The middle of the living room had been commandeered by Victoria Harte and the terrace by Patchen Rawls. Stephen knew he should have commandeered a corner for himself, with Janet at his side, but that had not been possible. Janet was putting her foot down.