House Divided

Lucy shook her head. As she did so, Susan could see the effect that slight movement had on the woman’s body. It seemed like her entire frame followed along with the head shake, then continued for another second or more. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. And that was almost certainly while on medications that worked to control the tremors.

Susan sighed. Life. It went like that. Money was very, very nice to have, but health was true wealth.

“Susan, I just want to share with you what we’re doing, and see if there’s any point of intersection where we may be able to benefit each other.”

“Lucy, you may or may not realize that I’m in the midst of an international crisis right now.”

Lucy nodded. “And I think you’re handling it beautifully. I watched your remarks on the TV news a little while ago. I was struck as always by your ability to inject powerful emotions into your connection with the people. But like all crises, this one will pass. And our domestic problems will still be there. International crises don’t make domestic problems go away.”

“Or vice versa,” Stephen Lief offered, somewhat awkwardly.

“Exactly,” Lucy said.

Susan almost smiled. This could very nearly be a skit on a late night comedy show.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

Lucy launched into it.

“Susan, times have changed since when you, and especially I, were young women. You may not think about this on a daily basis because it doesn’t seem pressing to you, but we are sitting on a demographic and cultural time bomb. In each successive generation, white women of what we’ll call child-bearing age continue to delay the decision to have children. Women of the so-called Generation X represented a radical break with the past – one out of every six chose not to have children at all. This would be a remarkable development in itself, if it had been temporary. But so-called Millennial women are on pace to double that figure, and are even delaying marriage itself. It gets worse the further down we go. Young girls in high school, when polled about their desire to have children, place it very low on their list of priorities. Marriage is at the bottom of that list.”

Susan stared into the TV screen.

“We are not replacing ourselves, Susan. A society dwindles and dies when it doesn’t replace itself. Much more preferable is if a society continues to grow. A growing economy needs people to feed it. And continued leadership in all areas needs – ”

Susan held up a hand. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Lucy. But as far as I can tell, our population grows in leaps and bounds each year. We’ve got well more than three hundred twenty million people, projected to reach three hundred fifty million by…” Susan trailed off for a moment. “Kat, do you happen to have the numbers on that?”

Kat shook her head. “No, not off the top of my head, but I’m sure we can get them.”

Lucy was shaking her head sadly. “Immigrants,” she said. “And the children of immigrants. The only reason this country is still growing is because we are importing people from elsewhere. It is not a good way to grow a population. The Roman Empire found that out, much to their dismay.”

Susan stared blankly at the screen. She searched for a response, and didn’t find one. She didn’t enjoy being left speechless.

“I’m pretty sure we’ve always done it this way,” Susan said, finding her voice. She wasn’t sure where this was heading, but she already suspected that she didn’t like it. “Even the Mayflower came from elsewhere, as I recall it. You remember the Statue of Liberty, don’t you? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free… Does any of that ring a bell with you?”

Lucy was shaking her head again, emphatically this time, setting off a chain reaction throughout her thin body that Susan could not look away from.

“We’re not against immigrants, Susan, if that’s what you’re worried about. What we’re against is cultural dislocation. We’re against losing sight of what it means to be an American. We want to preserve that. And so we feel that our job is to encourage young American women to have more children, and to help create an environment conducive for them to do so.”

“I think young women might be more interested in exploring the other options available to them right now,” Susan said. “I think that, at the moment, options for women may be the best they’ve ever been.”

Now Lucy raised a hand. “There’s a grain of truth to that,” she said. “But only a grain. Modern women are getting caught up in the rat race, and it’s a trap. Not everyone gets to win that race, Susan. Not every woman gets to be a high-priced fashion model, a Senator, and then President of the United States. Not everyone marries one of the richest men on Earth.”

Lucy stared into the screen. Next to her, Stephen Lief’s owl eyes went deer-in-the-headlights wide. Suddenly, he looked like this meeting was not such a hot idea, like he might even prefer to be somewhere else.

He needn’t have worried. The day after meeting his friend’s corpse in Texas, he was going to be in Cincinnati, surrounded by TV cameras and well-wishers, with a bib around his neck, eating hot beef and tomato gruel off the top of a frankfurter.

“Women can easily waste their youth chasing a mirage, when they could have spent that time getting married, creating a home, and building a family. You and I can help them by developing new incentives like tax credits for in-home child care, expansion of food programs to help with grocery bills, even one-time federal payments per childbirth.”

Lucy was putting forward a strange mix of right wing and left wing ideas. She wanted white women to get married and have more babies, and she wanted the federal government to pay for it. Susan wondered if in Lucy’s mind, that sort of largesse would be extended to women of color.

Susan was on the verge of asking that question, but shook her head instead. “I’m not the Appropriations Committee, Lucy. I don’t make the budget, I just sign it. You know how these things are done.”

“If you championed this cause, you don’t think people would sit up and take notice?”

Susan half-nodded. If she suddenly began to champion the cause of women staying home, pumping out babies, and making dinner for their husbands, people would definitely notice. Mostly, this was because it would go against everything she had ever stood for. It was time to cut this off.

Susan had never become accustomed to lobbyists and their over-the-top pitches during her time in the Senate. When she was Vice President, she was widely seen as powerless, so the lobbyists left her alone. And as President, she mostly kept them at arm’s length. If she ever needed a reminder why, this conversation would serve.

“Lucy, I can promise you we’re going to do everything we can.”

Lucy was an old hand at this. She must have caught the tone in Susan’s voice. “I hope so, Susan. I hope so. Thank you for listening. I’d love to buy you lunch one day.”

Susan smiled. “I’d love it, too. I’m a big admirer of yours. I always have been. We’ll do it just as soon as I’m out of office.”

Lucy nodded. “Okay.”

Kat went to the monitor and turned the device off. She let out a long exhale and looked at Susan. She raised her eyebrows. The rest of her dark, pretty face was carefully neutral. She pursed her lips, but didn’t crack a smile.

“I got a text from Kurt during that. People are assembling in the Situation Room in half an hour. He needs you there. There’s been new intelligence about the plane crash.”

The air went out of Susan like a tire with a knife plunged into its side. “Okay. But before I do that, we need to talk about Stephen Lief’s schedule for the next few weeks. I’ve got something important I need him to do.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

2:55 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

The gathering was much smaller this time.

Haley Lawrence, the Secretary of Defense, was there, with two aides seated behind him. General Frank Loomis of JSOC was there again. Luke Stone was there, this time sitting in a leather chair at the conference table. Half a dozen others were there, along with a few aides and assistants sitting along the walls behind them.