I WAS HALF asleep in my hideaway pondering in a hazy—and unproductive—reverie Winston Churchill’s wise comment that Democracy is a bad way to run a government until one considers the alternatives. Someone knocked at the door, against the rules I had imposed on my staff. Maybe it was Hat McCoy. I opened the door. It was Robbie with the top two buttons on her blouse open.
Well, it had to come sometime. The question I told myself was how I would react.
She walked in and closed the door. I leaned against the desk, trying to recoup my resources. She unbuttoned the blouse down to her skirt, her sumptuous breasts constrained tightly in a lacy bra. She looked at me shyly, fragile, vulnerable, as open to my pleasure as if she were my slave. A sense of sweet opportunity, the beginning of a wonderful experience fell on me like a cloak of golden gauze. Why not? There would be no costs. I could enjoy her, make her happy for a little while and then be free. It was only an interlude, joy and bliss with no serious repercussions. Wasn’t it? Mary Margaret need never know.
I prepared to seize the gift she was offering me, a gift of herself in all her youthful glory, a chance I might never have again.
Instead I buttoned up her blouse.
“You shouldn’t be here, Robbie,” I said as gently as I could. “Don’t come back here again.”
The light went out of her face, her shoulders slumped. I had crushed her.
“I appreciate the gift you offer me,” I stumbled on, “but it is
a gift I cannot accept. I’m a married man and I love my wife. Please try to understand.”
She turned and quickly fled the little office. I heard her sob as she closed the door.
I fell back into my chair, spent, shaken, unclean.
Had I really turned her down? How could I have done that? I had broken her poor confused heart.
That’s not what the script had called upon me to do.
I was a fool.
Maybe it was all my fault. Maybe I had led her on. Thank God my brother would never find out.
The next morning I went over to the set of “Fast Pitching,” a rough and tumble interview program. I had met the anchor at a party which seemed to be mostly loud, contentious, and interesting Irish Catholics. He begged me to come on the program. Like an idiot I agreed. Chris and Manny said it would be a tough interview. I said it would be fun. It was both. I brought a copy of the tape back to the office, so we could excerpt it for our Web page.
INTERVIEWER: Don’t you think, Senator, that you have an obligation to the Democratic party to announce your candidacy for the presidency?
MORAN: I’m not running for the presidency. I haven’t even made up my mind to run for reelection to the Senate.
INTERVIEWER: Are you waiting for the convention to draft you?
MORAN: If the angel Gabriel came down from heaven and recommended me, the convention wouldn’t draft me. Should they do that I’d turn them down.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the Democrats will lose again this time? Are you waiting four more years?
MORAN: I am convinced that the Democrats will win easily.
INTERVIEWER: Then you’d be eight years older before you get your chance. You’d no longer be one of the bright young Democratic faces.
MORAN: I’m not sure that my face is so bright or young even now.
INTERVIEWER: If the Democrats win and you’re reelected, you
could have your choice of either Armed Services Committee or Judiciary, wouldn’t you? Have you decided which one you would take?
MORAN: I haven’t thought about it. Should that develop it would be up to the leadership to decide.
INTERVIEWER: Aren’t you part of the leadership?
MORAN: Assistant Minority Whip. Back in Chicago that plus two dollars would get me a ride on Mayor Rich’s subway.
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you a hypothetical. If you found yourself running for President would you continue your policies of no negative campaigning and no personal fund-raising?
MORAN: Certainly.
INTERVIEWER: Your presumed opponent in Illinois is already running attack ads, isn’t he?
MORAN: So I am told. He has been running them since the last election.
INTERVIEWER: Have you seen any of them?
MORAN: I don’t watch them. They’re bad for my digestion.
INTERVIEWER: How will you run against them?
MORAN: I think it would be pretty hard to overcome six years of a negative campaign.
INTERVIEWER: I hear that your presumed opponent has already spent forty million dollars on these ads. Where does get his money?
MORAN: I have no idea.
INTERVIEWER: Some people say that most of it comes from Bobby Bill Roads, the oil tycoon.
MORAN: Oil tycoons have a lot of extra money lying around these days.
INTERVIEWER: Well, good luck to you, Senator Moran. I still think you’d make a very good President. MORAN: You and my daughters.
With Maryro at Georgetown, Maran, a junior at Gonzaga, was the designated weekly luncheon partner in the Senate dining room. Some of my senatorial colleagues, especially the Southerners who fantasy themselves courtly, always paid homage to the daughter with a polite bow.
“How do, Miss Maryro, nice to see you again.”
“Maryro aw gone. Me Maran.”
Our middle child, besides being a witch, was also the comedian of the bunch.
“Do you smell any bad things here today?” I asked.
Her nostrils twitched as though she were scanning the dining room.
“No really bad smells. Just the ordinary ones.”
“Does your boyfriend know you’re a witch?”
“Jimmy?” she dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “He’s such a nerd. He keeps wanting me to do something like that dweeb Buffy does on television.”
“Are there any vampires in the dining room, Maran?”
She glanced around.
“I’m not sure that I really do vampires, Daddy, but I don’t see any, just Senators.”
“You can tell the difference?”
“Oh, sure … Now about next August …”
She and her siblings had decided that it would be “nice” if we went to Paris and Vienna and studied Napoleon and the Hapsburgs. We couldn’t do anything the following August recess because we’d be singing in the campaign.
Even my children presumed I’d run again. Which meant that my wife did too. I was in a trap that I’d better escape before it was too late.
“Do your friends at school know where you eat lunch once a week?”
“Sure! They want to come along. They think you’re totally cool.”
Kids that age didn’t recognize a burnt-out case when they saw one.
“We’ll have to do that some time.”
“Bitchin’!”
She pecked at my cheek in front of my office and dashed off to her BORING afternoon classes.
Why did the young have to possess so much more energy than their parents?
Robbie was not at her usual desk in the bullpen. I would have been surprised if she were.
I gave the tape to Manny.
“How did it go?”
“He nominated me for President. I thanked him but declined.”
She giggled.
A couple of letters waited on my desk for real as opposed to robotic personalization. I signed them.
Chris came into the office with a sheaf of work for me.
“Robbie Becker resigned this morning and left, never to come back I assume.”
“I noticed that she wasn’t here.”
“She hit on you real hard and you turned her down?”
“Something like that.”
“Good for you.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m surprised it lasted this long … She’s not so much a predator as a groupie who is an incorrigible romantic. She was so much in love with you that she could not believe that you didn’t love her in return. She told one of her friends that you have a heart of stone.”
“Did I encourage her?”
“No one in the office thinks so. You were pleasant to her as you are to everyone. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“She knocked on the door of the hideaway and came in with two buttons on her blouse open. She opened the rest of them. I told her that was against the rules, buttoned her blouse, and said thanks but no thanks and I loved my wife. She left sobbing.”
Chris nodded.
“Not many Senators would have done that.”
I shrugged.
“Chris, I knew it would happen. I keep asking myself what I could have done to discourage her.”
“Nothing, Tommy, absolutely nothing, except firing her and that would have been a mistake.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“She had two friends in the office to whom she whispered her love and her frustration. She even confided to them this morning what happened. Pretty much as you described it.”
“Will there be trouble?”
“There’s always a chance, but I don’t think she could admit to herself that she had been rejected. Both the women have
given me an affidavit. I will type out one for you and I’ll witness it and put it in a file”
I sighed and agreed.
“I don’t need this aggravation right now.”
“You’re not over that flu yet.”
I was in fact over the flu. I was sick of the United States Senate. Maybe my brother was right. I didn’t belong here.
Joe McDermott called from Chicago.
“Some interesting rumors going around, Tommy. The feds have started an investigation of your good friend Bobby Bill.”
“That surprises me.”
“There’s a new federal prosecutor down there, out to make a name for himself.”
“I think I just published a book about that kind of person.”
“Bobby Bill is very popular down there. He’s given money to lots of folks, especially to Christian churches and schools. The feds better have the goods on him before they make any charges. I hope it takes them a long time.”
“Oh?”
“So the news will break during the election campaign.”
“We won’t be able to use it.”
“We won’t have to … By the way, you were very good on ‘Fast Pitching.’”
“They got the tape to you already?”
“Very efficient staff. That forty million figure that he had is the same one we have.”
I found myself hoping that if there had been violations down there in Tulsa, they would break soon. It would get Lee Schlenk off my back.
I was thinking like I would be running for reelection. I must avoid those kinds of thoughts or I would be dragged into a race which everyone but me seemed to want.
I walked over to the chapel at Georgetown after I had delivered my two younger daughters home.
You got me into this, I told God. I can’t believe that you want me to stay here. I survived yesterday. But I do not have the temperament for this kind of life. Maybe it was the way I was raised. Maybe it’s my problem with my brother. But I don’t have the energy or the motivation to keep this pace up. All right, I got some decent legislation through. Maybe that’s
all you expect me to do. Isn’t it enough? Do you have any signs in mind to make it clear to me what I ought to do next? Otherwise maybe I should go back to being a public defender with a rich wife.
There were no answers. There never are.
Or maybe there was.
That night we went to a reception and a dinner, the former for the American Civil Liberties Union, the latter for the Latino-American Alliance. I was a hero with both of them. Hence they would pressure me to run for President.
“These are nice people,” Mary Margaret said with a sigh as we dressed, “but I’d just as soon stay home and watch college football.”
“You look scrumptious, Mom,” Maryro looked up from a history book in the parlor which she was reading while a football game went on in silence on the TV. “You too, Dad … Come home early. You both look tired.”
“No date?” I asked as we got in our car, the Chevy van which had replaced the one that Bobby Bill had blown up.
“Daniel’s parents are in town. She’s having supper with them tomorrow night.”
“Is it that serious?”
“A lot less than we were at the same age, counselor.”
I wished we were that age again. I would have done a lot of things differently.
There was enthusiasm for the two of us at both affairs. Mary Margaret had won another gender case at the court five-four. And my performance on “Fast Pitching” had made me a presidential candidate. It did me little good to protest that I had no intention of running.
Then that night I was seduced. By my wife, a lot more polished and ingenious a seducer than poor Robbie Becker. Anger, frustration, disappointment, passion suppressed too long, desperate need—all made our romp wild, demanding, implacable. We grasped recklessly for pleasure and then achieved it in a final explosion of love.
Then something strange happened. As we both relaxed in the floating sensation that comes often at the end of satisfying sex, something else invaded our bedroom. Or, to be honest, someone else. Or even more honest, Someone else.
The room seemed to fill with light, luminosity that flowed from us and then bathed us in a tidal surge of joy and peace and love. We knelt on the bed in a terrified but happy embrace, crying and laughing, caught up in a pleasure so intense that we felt that if it increased even a little we would be torn apart, not that we would have minded.
The Transcendent had invaded our marriage bed and joined in our game.
That’s a reflection we had afterwards. At the moment itself—maybe a half minute and maybe an hour, it didn’t matter, we only knew that we had temporarily left time and space behind and had been caught up in a demanding power that held us and did not want to let us go, a power that loved us and was consuming us with the fire of its love. His love. Her love. Whatever.
Then slowly it seemed it released us, but not without the promise that we three would meet again.
OK, Tommy Moran, you wanted a sign. Was that enough?
We collapse into prone positions. Mary Margaret, always the modest matron, pulled the sheets over us.
“Who was that?” I gasped. “What did he want?”
“She.”
“OK … What was it all about?”
“She wanted us.”
“No right to invade the privacy of our love-making.”
“She owns us, Tommy love. Delights in us. Created us to enjoy one another and then decided to join the fun.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“What else could it have been? God delighted in us.”
“Why?”
“Ask her!”
I buried my head against her breasts. She caressed my head with her fingers.
“Will it ever happen again?”
“The afterglow will always be with us, Tommy.”
“All your fault for attacking me!”
She laughed.
“I thought I was pretty good at it … then the Transcendent taught us both how to do it.”
Then we both said together, “I’m sorry.”
Then we argued about who was to blame for the loss of passion in our lives, each of us claiming responsibility, each of us promising that we would never let it happen again.
Then we went to sleep, peaceful sleep, sleep which was a grace of all the goodness in the world.
We slept till ten o’clock Saturday morning. The daughters had made brunch for us, at the suggestion of Maran, who had decided at lunch in the Senate Dining Room that I looked like I needed a good night’s sleep.
Did they realize that we had made love together? Who knows what such smart and perceptive young women might guess. However, they would never know the half of it.
They went out shopping together. My wife and I, still in robes, retreated to the library, not to talk about our menage à trois from the previous night, but merely to talk to one another.
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad we got that out of the way.”
“It’s only the beginning, woman,” I replied. “I have plans for you for every night of the week.”
She blushed.
“I realized I was risking something like that.”
“In fact,” I said, closing and locking the library door, “I have plans for you right now!”
I pulled away her robe and peeled off the gown she had donned when we got out of bed.
“Tommy,” she protested weakly, as I pinned her on the couch.
“We have to make up for lost time.”
“There’s that!”
Our love-making was very gentle and sweet, despite my pose as an attacker. She was right in her prediction there was a distinctive afterglow from our night visitor.
We went to our bedroom, dressed in jeans and Loyola sweatshirts, returned to the library, and poured ourselves some champagne.
“I suppose,” she said toasting me, “I can be available most nights of next week, especially since I’m taking a temporary leave from the firm.”
It was none of my business, but I still asked, “Why?”
“I’m going to work in your office as a volunteer for a while anyway.”
She spoke as though this was just a minor change in my fortress prison.
“Chris knows?”
“Of COURSE! She and Manny said they needed me around there to deal with the increase of press attention and Illinois politics … Unless of course, you object?”
“You will be a substantial distraction in my work, but I’ll love the distraction.”
“I figured you would,” she said complacently.
“How long have you women been planning this coup d’état?”
“We had lunch two weeks ago at the Monocle. I had to rearrange some of my work at the firm. I’ll have to plead a couple of cases in the spring, but that won’t restrict much my volunteering.”
So before the Robbie matter had occurred. A scheme to prevent it?
What did I know?
Our daughters returned, laden with purchases.
“How come the champagne?” Marytre asked.
“Celebrating that I’m going to work in Daddy’s office!”
“Finally told him, huh?” Marytre said. “He couldn’t say no anyway.”
“It had nothing to do with Robbie,” Chris told me on Monday.
“We just felt it would be useful to have her around. She’s terribly bright and everyone likes her and her presence always cheers you up.”
“Lately I’ve been in need of cheer,” I admitted.
“I know that the conventional wisdom is that a wife shouldn’t be anywhere near the office … no mom and pop stores as you once said. But this is a different kind of wife.”
“Tell me about it.”
What Ambassador O’Malley calls, misquoting John Knox, the “Monstrous Regiment of Women” had taken over. The Senate job had hammered the poor little Senator’s morale into the ground. So they would take steps to salvage the poor dear man.
Saturday night Mary Margaret and I, both a little tired from our activities of the past twenty-four hours, were watching NFL on TV, my excuse being that the Senate was for all practical
purposes quiescent till the election in the first week in November when a third of its members were compelled to submit themselves to reelection.
Maryro bounced into our media room in high dudgeon.
“Daniel is a dweeb, a nerd, a flake,” she announced as she sat in the easy chair.
“You broke up with him in front of his parents?” I asked. I would never have dared break up with my teenage date in front of her parents.
“He didn’t tell them my name until he introduced me to them at dinner, like I was a brand-new pet puppy.”
“Irish wolfhound bitch?”
“Don’t be gross! He tells them that I’m Mary Rose Moran …”
“Your real name!”
“They take one look at my hair and they know who I am. So all we talk about all evening is my parents, whom they, you know, totally adore! BORING! I have to tell them what you’re like …”
“And what did you tell them?” Mary Margaret asked.
“I said that my father was born with the gift of wit and my mother with the gift of laughter which made a great combination, except that he worked at the Senate where laughter wasn’t permitted and she at the Supreme Court where the only wit was dry legal jokes that were not very funny.”
“You had prepared that beforehand,” Mary Margaret observed.
“Of COURSE, I did. I knew what would happen. Mrs. Leary said that I clearly had inherited from both sides of the family. And Daniel there beaming proudly at his prize bitch.”
“I assume they’re Democrats,” I said.
“Worse even than you … Now they want to have dinner with you the next time they’re here in D.C., like I’m going to permit that.”
“We’d be happy to meet them, dear.”
“Not yet,” she said firmly.
“You’re not breaking up with Daniel, are you?”
“Just because he’s a dweeb? I’m not THAT dumb! … And their grandparents knew your grandmother, Mom, back in St. Gabe’s during prohibition, whatever that was.”
“Were they sure?”
“April May Cronin is not a name you’d forget … She must have been quite a woman … I told them how you found her dead in her bedroom and said a decade of the Rosary and were even younger than I am and Mrs. Leary started to cry, like I’m doing now.”
She rushed up stairs to finish her crying in privacy.
“A lot of heavy emotion in the family this weekend,” I remarked, only to discover that my wife was weeping too, silently.
“The little brat had us down cold, didn’t she, Tommy?”
“Even if she prepared it beforehand … Am I correct in assuming that dinner with the Learys went well?”
“Certainly. Rather better than she had expected.”