THE DEBATE on the Pension Protection Bill droned on. The Senators who were hoping to catch an early plane back home for their long weekend with family and/or constituency were becoming irritable. The debate might go into the small hours of the morning. We had decided to live in the Beltway to keep the family together. Maybe we had made a mistake. Mary Margaret and I still had little time for one another. How much would we have had if I had to change reservations and wait on standby for a flight to Chicago early on Friday morning? Would our relationship have been any different? Senatorial life messes up family relationships no matter where you live. We had drifted apart not because of quarrels but because there was no time for love.
“Hat” McCoy and I had counted our votes at the beginning of the debate. We both thought we had the votes, unless there was some double cross. He had counted three more votes than I had. “You shunuff one pessimistic Irishman,” he said with his mountain accent which was partially political and partially authentic. Hat’s real first name was Bartlett, but hailing from “Bloody Harlan” County in Kentucky he claimed to be an heir to both families in the feud. He also claimed to be a “Christian” but a “laid-back” Christian. He went to the Christian prayer breakfast, but “not all the time.” He also told me that he was a “laid-back” Republican. That meant that on some occasions he could work with Democrats, especially as the White House’s power over Congress waned. A slender handsome man, only an inch or so taller than I was, with thick black hair parted in the middle, and an easy grin, he and I were friends and on occasions allies. Even at a time when the Senate was more polarized
than it had been since the end of Reconstruction, he and I got along “just fine, bein’ as how we both Irishmen.”
“Except you kick with the left foot,” I had said.
He thought that was very funny.
I sat uneasily on the edge of my chair. Lobbyists were swarming in the cloakrooms (where cloaks were rarely hung) and in the corridors in search of exemptions for their firms or industries.
The legislation had two major provisions. All pension funds should be “fully funded” which means that the money had to have been set aside for payment to retirees and not based on hope and expectation. This had been the law for some time, but there were loopholes which enabled companies to create the illusion of adequate funding when in fact it did not exist. The second requirement was that existing pension funds could not be used by companies as hostage in bankruptcy court or in labor negotiations.
Hat and I agreed that this was legislation that the people of the United States wanted and that it would be very difficult to vote against it if we could ever get it to the floor of the Senate. It was also legislation we wanted our names on. The “McCoy-Moran Act,” he said. “Sounds like some left-foot kicking, Bible-thumping preacher man.” We had labored for ten months to get it on the floor and we would have an “up or down” vote on it before this session ended. We needed a big vote, strong enough to overcome a veto and strong enough that the Senate leadership could not appoint opponents to the conference committee which would work out differences between our bill and the House bill—if the House ever passed a bill.
We knew the bill would pass, though I was pretty sure it would never become the law of the land until we had at least one Democratic chamber in Congress and a Democratic President.
We had agreed that Hat would fight off amendments exempting automobile companies from the legislation and I would fight against the airlines. He had done an effective job describing the “Neesaan” factory in his home state that made cars that did not break down and also made money and didn’t have to demand “give backs” from their workers.
We beat that amendment down with three votes.
The airline amendment might be even closer.
I paid little attention to the debate. My big brother was still hassling me. And I was worrying about him. All my life I had sought his approval in everything I did. He was five years older, a “natural leader,” who took care of me against the bullies in grammar school and instructed me how to cope with Fenwick High School. He was truly my “big” brother, a good half-a-foot taller, and a superb athlete while I made a fool out of myself whenever I engaged in competitive sport. Our parents, high-school teachers who married late in life, were often indifferent figures, loving but caught up in their own relationship. Big brother took care of me. I adored him.
The major disagreement in our life was about Mary Margaret. While we had “hung around” together with our respective gangs in high school, we had become an “item” in our senior year and then as freshmen at Loyola. Tony did not approve of her when he came home from his first summer at the Clementine seminary. She reacted in kind.
“You should get rid of her, bro. She’s trouble. She flaunts herself.”
My wife was nothing if not a modest woman. There were strict limits on our affection, much like the old days.
“She’s part of the O’Malley family. You know what kind of people they are. Her father takes pornographic pictures of women.”
Ambassador O’Malley is an internationally famed photo artist, who in some Catholic circles is thought to be a man who “takes dirty pictures.” The spirituality Tony was picking up at the seminary—where according to some priests the Vatican Council never happened—was very negative about “smut.”
Mary Margaret insisted that he didn’t like her because he was afraid of women with strong opinions—which she had at least once every hour—and because she would break his domination over me. Maybe she was right. I also suspected that he might have resented the fact that I had found such a glorious woman and he couldn’t have her. But that’s the way my mind works when I feel cynical. She does radiate powerful sexuality, even when we are estranged as we implicitly were the day of his visit. That might frighten a man who was fighting strongly to keep his celibate promises.
It was downhill after that. My wife worked on appellate
court cases and I did public defender work after we left law school. She made a lot more money than I did, which bothered me not at all. But it offended my brother. He tried to talk her into giving up her career when she became pregnant with Mary Rose. She laughed at him and said he was a male chauvinist living in the wrong century. He stormed out of our apartment. Later he spoke to me on the phone and ordered me to exercise my spousal authority over her. I told him that I didn’t have any.
He blamed her for the article I wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. It was her fault that I decided to run for the Senate. She was responsible for the strong appeal we made for the votes of Mexican Americans. She was guilty of leading me astray on such issues as abortion, rights of homosexuals, and stem cell research. She was leading me out of the church.
I listened to his complaints and then made my own decisions. Mary Margaret supported me but the decisions were mine. Tony could never accept that. I really wasn’t tough enough or big enough to make my own decisions.
“He’s lost his control over you,” she would say, “but he’ll never stop trying.”
I suppose she was right, but I still hoped that I could win him over.
A page handed me a note from the cloakroom.
“Airline lobbyists in news conference in the corridor. Robbie.”
My good friend Senator Evergreen was babbling about the strength of American capitalism. I slipped across the aisle and showed the note to Hat. He rolled his eyes and nodded. This would be the big fight on the next vote.
My heart pounded as I walked out to the cloakroom. Robbie made my heart pound and my hands perspire. I was not in love with her, but, as President Jimmy Carter once famously—and improbably—had said, I had lust in my heart for her. She was a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, a fresh young beauty with blond hair, full figure, keen mind, and an aura of shy fragility. She had a crush on me and had hinted, so subtly that one hardly noticed it, that I could have her if I wished.
Monica Lewinsky she was not.
But I wasn’t Bill Clinton either. I was a pushover for vulnerable women, though none such had ever hit on me. I knew I should brush her off, but she would burst into tears if I did and I didn’t want to hurt her.
As my brother would have said I was being tempted. I was in fact putting myself in an occasion of sin.
I did not think I could ever be unfaithful to Mary Margaret. I still thought that I would not. But I was not as sure as I used to be.
My wife, as I have said, is a very modest woman. On the other hand she is also a very intense woman. If we do something, she would lecture me and the daughters, we must do it well. Therefore she made up her mind that she would be a sexually attractive wife and bent all her efforts in that direction with considerable success. The blend of modesty and intensity was what made her sexy. I think. What do I know?
Tall, slender, with a flawless complexion and flaming red hair, trim with a moderately voluptuous figure, she had dazzled me as far back as I can remember. I will never forget the dance at the parish high club when we were both freshmen. She walked up to me, considered me quizzically, took me into her arms for a dance—my resistance melted immediately—and whispered in my ear, “You’re cute Tommy Moran, I think I like you.”