The Dearly Departed

Confined to the stage, Margaret’s mild airs and new self-esteem were bearable, even lovable. Sunny knew what play was running on which nights and how to stay out of the refracted limelight. She would baby-sit costars’ kids; would paint scenery and post flyers on two dozen bulletin boards around town. But she refused to act—refused to answer even the desperate call for teenage daughters in Fiddler on the Roof and Cheaper by the Dozen. She studied, she caddied at the golf course that was her backyard, fished golf balls out of the brook that divided the eighth and ninth fairways and sold them back to the original owners at half price. Her mother allowed her to golf as long as she wore culottes and an ironed blouse and didn’t look like one of the ragamuffins who had preceded them in the peeling gray house. Margaret frowned on her daughter’s carrying other people’s golf bags—like a bellhop, she said; like beggars who dived off Acapulco cliffs for coins. Sunny helped her own cause by describing the nice doctors and lawyers, owners of the big houses on Baldwin Avenue, who let her play through and admired her swing.

Too many male caddies were impatient and contemptuous of the ladies’ league, but its members finally had an alternative. Sunny took them seriously. She knew the course, and dispensed tips that she’d picked up on loops with the assistant pro. When their husbands surprised them with new clubs for Christmas, the ladies offered their perfectly good woods and irons to Sunny.

It was a small town, but big enough for the theater fanatic and her mildly mortified daughter to coexist until Margaret played the president’s wife in Of Thee I Sing and came away with an idea for a moonlighting job: impersonating first ladies at private parties, trade shows, or ribbon-cuttings. Since the cameo sideline began, she had dressed as Mmes. Carter, Reagan, and Bush; had added Sandra Day O’Connor and Queen Elizabeth as the occasion warranted. Her appearance at an event injected a guessing game into the dull photo opportunity—this faux-pearled and eagle-brooched character was which woman in Margaret Batten’s repertoire?

“Please don’t do it,” Sunny would plead. “Please don’t let them put your picture in the Bulletin again.”

“But that’s exactly why they hire me—so someone reading about the event will say, ‘Oh my goodness. Look! A famous person came to the ground-breaking of the new branch. Isn’t that Barbara, hon?’”

“It doesn’t fool anyone. It’s not being an actress. It’s a sight gag. And then you leave and go to the supermarket, and my friends say, ‘I saw your mother yesterday at Foodland in a gray wig.’ Or, ‘She was wearing a necklace of shellacked peanuts. Must have been Rosalyn’s turn,’ with this look that says, Is she mental?”

“It’s theater,” her mother would say, “an acting job that pays—which makes me a professional. It’s your college fund. Besides, you of all people know I don’t care what the neighbors think.”

Sunny wrote to the long-absent John Batten every few months, and he wrote back. “Sincerely, John,” he signed his dull, typed letters on the firm’s letterhead. Neither correspondent invoked the terms father or daughter; Sunny did not accuse him of abandoning or failing her, because she understood without being told that there were complications that no one liked to discuss. Sunny studied her mother’s wedding pictures and puzzled over the groom’s dominant brown eyes and dark wavy hair, his short arms and thick neck. Artificial insemination, she guessed after reading a cover story on the subject in Time.

John’s wife and office manager, Bonnie, added a banal postscript to every letter—“8 straight days of temps over 100!” or “driving to San Diego to see the pandas,” which Sunny interpreted to mean: John and I have no secrets. I know whenever he writes to you. I protect him. Mostly, Sunny and John corresponded about golf, which he’d taken up in the Sun Belt. He hoped she was taking lessons, and Sunny told him no, but that she took illustrated books by Sam Snead and Ben Hogan out of the library and closely watched the best players at the club. He advised her which hand-me-down clubs, which compounds of steel and new alloys, she should keep and which she should put on consignment. He told her not to ignore her short game. She wrote back and said she was trying to spend an hour a day on the putting green. Was that, in his opinion, enough? “If you’re sinking those three-foot white-knucklers with some consistency, it is,” he answered. He never asked about Margaret, and Sunny didn’t ask about his wife. He didn’t call or send gifts or ask for custodial visits. “I never really knew him,” she’d explain to friends who asked about a father. Or, to close the subject: “He died before I was born.”

From Pennsylvania, Miles Finn continued to pay taxes on his New Hampshire property, an unheated Depression-era cottage with three dark rooms and outdoor plumbing. It was on a minor lake so ordinary and unscenic that one would wonder what inspired him to travel six hours to swim in black water and pee into a fetid hole. The crawl space housed an ancient canoe and an antique archery set; inside, there were moldy jigsaw puzzles, scratchy wool blankets, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed canvas chairs, mouse droppings, the occasional bat, and the empty gin and beer bottles frequently found in near-forsaken cabins.

Margaret aired out the place every spring, defrosted the shoebox-sized freezer as needed, kept clean linens on the bigger bed. If it was a quick trip to close a window before rain or to leave a welcome casserole, Sunny would wait in the car. The cottage, Margaret explained, belonged to friends from Philadelphia—“Finn,” according to slapdash strokes of white paint on a slat—who’d been coming to King George forever.

“Do they have any kids?” Sunny asked hopefully.

“It’s just one person,” Margaret said. “An attorney. I worked for him before you were born.”

It sounded right to Sunny that her mother would bring casseroles to an old, childless man who could afford nothing better than vacations at Boot Lake. Over the years, as Margaret headed off alone with her pail and sponges and a flush particular to this mission, Sunny adjusted her view of Mr. Finn. She sensed that the former boss had become a boyfriend—so typically charitable of her mother. Not that sex was involved, Sunny thought. Sex didn’t fit Margaret. It had to be a crush, durable yes, but no more fertile or reciprocated than the ones Sunny herself had on teachers at King George Regional or on golfers on TV.

Miles called it his retreat, and if any woman—first his wife, then subsequent girlfriends—voiced suspicions about his treks to Boot Lake, he would say, “If only you could see the camp. I don’t even bathe when I’m there. No woman would set foot in this dump. Of course I love it, but that’s a childhood thing. No one else will go near the place.”

He made the romantic terms clear to Margaret, semi-annually. He was married, with everything to lose personally and professionally. He wasn’t inviting love affairs or headlines.

He didn’t volunteer personal details unless she inquired: Yes, there’d been a separation. Yes, in fact, a divorce. Yes, he was dating in Philadelphia, but only when necessary; only when he needed presentable companions for black-tie events. They had sex quickly on her fabric softener-scented sheets during her lunch hour, and didn’t speak again until he called six months later with a jangle of quarters from a phone booth. “Guess who?” he’d say each time, and always she’d have a clever answer ready: An old boss? A charming dinner companion from Philly? Tomorrow’s lunch date?

For a long time, she thought she had no right to mind. Twice-yearly dates didn’t make her his girlfriend or his confidante. She wasn’t above this flimsy attention—she who’d broken her marriage vows and several Commandments. But eventually she joined the Players, and was lauded in print for her understated ardor. Now when he called from the road, Margaret was not being coy when she hesitated before answering his “Guess who?”

“Is someone there with you?” he asked.

“Miles? Oh, sorry. I wasn’t sure. How are you? Where are you?”

“I’m about twenty-five minutes from there, and you know how I am.” He dropped his voice. “Ready, willing, and able.”

She began to ask, as she sat on the edge of the bed, rolling her panty hose back up, if they could go out, if he could pick her up, if they couldn’t have something approximating a date. “I know what you’ve always said: ‘No calls, no letters between visits, no paper trail.’ But we never get a chance to talk. We could drive to Vermont, to an inn, then stay the night. Sunny can stay with a friend. We’re both divorced. There wouldn’t be a scandal even if we were caught.” She didn’t say, “You lost the election sixteen years ago. You’re a private citizen. No one knows who Miles Finn is anymore.”

He always answered the same way: Communication didn’t always have to be spoken, did it? Wasn’t what they had special and unconventional? Did she prefer a restaurant dinner to a passionate lunch?

If he asked about Sunny, it was from the polite distance of a man who had no reason and no desire to meet his occasional paramour’s child. On these trips—fish all morning, fuck Margaret at lunch without any wining or dining or conversation; nap, read, drink, sleep—he didn’t want to think about anyone but himself. His son, Fletcher, was a teenager, the same age as the girl. These visits wouldn’t last forever: Fletcher was asking questions, and Margaret was asking for proper dates. She’d even used the words “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea anymore.” Margaret, he gathered, had other men calling her among the locals. And soon a devoted, alternate-weekend father like himself, claiming to be tying flies and frying trout alone in New Hampshire, would have to invite his kid along.

CHAPTER 3 You Should Run (#ulink_b1b8c453-1cfd-584c-878b-657cd21c7211)

Fletcher knew that managing Emily Ann Grandjean’s congressional campaign would mean fourteen months of spinning, baby-sitting, and chauffeuring, followed by a loss of the most humiliating kind—a landslide victory for an incumbent who didn’t have to shake one hand.

And then there was Emily Ann herself. In an exploratory meeting, she demonstrated one of her most annoying tics: constant sips from a large bottle of brand-name water, then the ceremonial screwing of its cap back on once, twice, full-body twists as if volatile and poisonous gases would escape without her intervention.

They met in a conference room at Big John, Inc., the family business, founded by Emily Ann’s grandfather after he took credit for discovering exercise in the form of a stationary bike. Subsequent generations invented a rowing machine with a flywheel and, most recently and profitably, a stroller for joggers. Emily Ann’s three older brothers, whose tanned and photogenic faces anchored the annual report, went happily into the booming family business. But the baby sister made a fuss about striking out on her own—like those Kennedy cousins who went into journalism or the Osmond siblings who didn’t sing. Emily Ann went to law school, dropped out, went back, and at her graduation heard Congressman Tommy d’Apuzzo—beloved, honest, monogamous; a man for whom a district’s worth of highways and middle schools were named—urge the new lawyers to consider careers as public servants. “Where are the dreamers?” he cried, waving his arms. “Where are all the little boys and girls who wanted to grow up to be president? Are you all heading for Wall Street? To white-shoe law firms in New York skyscrapers? We need your energy and your idealism. Run against me! Challenge me! Provoke me! Defeat me!”

Only Emily Ann thought he meant it; only she thought a seat in the House of Representatives was attainable to a member of the Class of ’96. When she returned from her graduation grand tour (London, Paris, Venice, and the Greek Isles) she took a bar-review course by day. By night she found a campaign to work for. Conspicuously wearing outfits of Republican red and Betsy Ross blue, she volunteered for an earnest young firebrand running for the city council. She stood in for him at a Republican kaffeeklatsch after practicing answers and sharing aphorisms with a voice-activated pocket recorder.

“You should run,” said an elderly man by the dessert table as his wife dusted confectioner’s sugar off one of his veiny cheeks.

“Maybe one day,” said Emily Ann.

“Don’t wait too long or I might not be able to vote for you,” he said, chuckling.

“This evening,” she reminded him nobly, “is about Greg Chandler-Brown and his race, and about the bond rating of a dying city.”

“I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

“Emily Ann Grandjean.”

“Mrs. or Miss?” he asked.

“I’m not married.”

“Have a piece of fudge cake,” he said. “You could use a little meat on your bones.”

A year later, Mr. Grandjean was sliding a Big John catalog across the conference table to Fletcher, who had managed the last candidate to lose to d’Apuzzo, under budget and with dignity. “You look like you work out. Is there anything in here that appeals to you?”

Its glossy cover displayed the rowing machine that was the Rolls-Royce of Fletcher’s health club. Through some trick of digital photography, it appeared to be gliding past pyramids on the Suez Canal. Fletcher didn’t open the catalog; didn’t even touch it.

“No obligation. Absolutely none,” said Mr. Grandjean. “A thank-you for your time and attention today, no matter what you decide. And, please. It’s nothing to us. This is what we do. We assemble parts and turn a few screws and—presto—we have a bike.”

Fletcher turned the catalog facedown. Equally compelling was the back cover—a computerized stationary bike, titanium, featuring a built-in CD player and a Tour de France winner perched on its fertility-friendly seat.

“She can win the primary,” continued Mr. Grandjean. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

“When you run unopposed, you win,” said Fletcher. “But I’m not interested in being the campaign manager for a sacrificial lamb.”

Emily Ann snapped, “You’ve never heard of upsets? DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN?”

Fletcher folded his hands in front of him on the hammered-copper conference table. “Let me paint a picture for you: Yesterday, in the village center of a very staid Republican suburb, in a chic café named Repasts, I ate a sandwich called The d’Apuzzo. Not a sandwich meant to be an insult, like baloney or marshmallow fluff, but one named out of affection and respect and because it was what Representative d’Apuzzo ordered on his last whistle-stop there.”

“What kind of sandwich?” asked Emily Ann.

“Tuna club. Traditional yet popular. No negative symbolism there.”

“Your point being that a man who has sandwiches named in his honor is unbeatable?” she asked.

“When he’s a Democrat and it’s on a Republican menu? Yes.”