Act of Darkness(2)
“Janet,” he said, “has great concern for retarded children. She’s personally committed to making sure that this country does something to alleviate—”
“Let’s just hope she’s personally committed to becoming First Lady. Did you check the schedule I sent you? You’ve got a lot to do today.”
The shift in emotional climate was abrupt, but like a sudden shower after long dead weeks of oppressive heat, it was welcome. It was especially welcome because Stephen had checked the schedule for today. He was on top of things for once. He wheeled his chair to the desk and went through the papers on the blotter until he found it. It had been produced on an IBM PC-190, fed through the most sophisticated software package in existence, and emerged, complete with graphics, looking printed. There was even an American bald eagle made of red-white-and-blue stars and bars in the upper left-hand corner. It could have been a stockholder’s report.
“Boy Scouts,” Stephen said, “League of Women Voters, the oil guy from Oklahoma, briefing conference, cocktail party—”
“That’s the one,” Dan said. “Do anything else you want today, but don’t miss the cocktail party.”
“Is it a fund-raiser?”
“Everything is a fund-raiser. I sold the invitations at twenty-five hundred a pop. Don’t miss your coaching session, either. I don’t like the way you’ve been looking on television lately. Your rough edges are coming back.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“What’s-her-name with the tits is going to be at the cocktail party. She absolutely insisted and I didn’t want to create a situation.”
The emotional climate had shifted back. It had a tang to it that it hadn’t had before, a knife-blade edge of malice. Stephen felt himself freezing up.
“And?” he said.
Dan Chester smiled. “Look at it this way,” he told Stephen. “Never, never, never forget what happened to Gary Hart.”
[2]
FOR CLARE MARKEY, BEING a lobbyist was a job like any other job, almost. It had a few things going for it. It paid well enough for her to dress in Ralph Lauren and off-the-rack Christian Dior. It got her invited to a lot of parties. It gave her an excuse to have an office the size of a high-school basketball court decorated in mauves and grays. It had a few things going against it, too. One of the reasons her office was so large was that there were so many phones in it: twenty-six lines in all, and nine separate instruments. There were days when all the lines lit up at once and Clare found herself wanting to hide in a closet with a Nancy Drew book, the way she had when she was eight. Then there were the posters, gigantic black-and-white blowups of meretricious photographs, ragged starving children with flyaway hair sitting on sagging porches or next to garbage cans in urban-jungle alleys. Printed at the bottom of each of these posters were the words THE EMPOWERMENT PROJECT: A National Coalition of Citizens Concerned about Children. Clare Markey was an honest woman, and an honest liberal, too. She believed there ought to be a national coalition of citizens concerned about children, especially “exceptional” children, who always seemed to get stuck with the leftovers of life. If the money to help them didn’t come from the government, where would it come from? The kids didn’t have it and never would. Their parents didn’t have it, either. On her own, with a couple of glasses of Scotch under her belt, she saw visions: a vast network of special schools, a vaster network of home-visitor workers, job training, skills training, halfway houses, adult self-sufficiency, perfection. Unfortunately, she was too clearheaded to make herself believe that the Empowerment Project was going to do anything to make these visions real. They called themselves a “coalition of citizens concerned,” but after four years of working for them, Clare knew what they really were: an undeclared union of child-care workers and staff people at state facilities for the mentally retarded. Clare also knew what they were really concerned about: their paychecks, their benefits, and their pensions. At the moment, all three were relatively small. If Stephen Fox’s Act in Aid of Exceptional Children managed to get through Congress and past the president’s desk—and if Clare did her job right—all three would be much larger. Whether any exceptional children would be helped in the process was moot.
Clare caught herself jamming a pencil into the chignon folds of her dark hair—it had been blond originally, but blond women weren’t taken seriously; she had dyed it within a month of moving to Washington after college—and made herself stop. For the last half hour, she had had her left ear glued to the handset of her red phone, and her ear was beginning to go to sleep. Her mind had gone to sleep ages ago. It always did when Harvey Gort got on his favorite soapbox. Harvey Gort was the chairman of the Empowerment Project and her employer.