What are we talking about in 2006? TSA; Steve Irwin; “SexyBack”; the Duke lacrosse case; Dick Cheney’s shooting accident; Miranda Priestly; AIG and Tyco; the subprime-mortgage crisis; TRX; The Osbournes; Ben Bernanke; “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”; Suri Cruise; Tom DeLay; Eat Pray Love; Meredith Grey and Dr. McDreamy.
The reality of serving in the House of Representatives is as follows: You spend one year getting things done and one year campaigning so you will be reelected so you can get more things done.
Who originally came up with a two-year term? One of the Framers of the Constitution who was terrified of imperial rule, possibly someone with a personal vendetta against King George III. Jake understands protection from the power hungry, but he personally thinks a three-year term in the House would be more productive.
Ursula is thinking more like a six-year term.
After she finds out that she’s running unopposed in her second reelection bid, she tells Jake she wants to run for the Senate in 2008.
“Tom’s term is up and he’s slipping in the polls,” she says. “Now is the time, I think. I know I’m still the new kid on the block, but…”
But…have you seen the news? Ursula de Gournsey is a media darling. The Washington correspondent for Newsweek noted the monogram on her attaché case as she ascended the steps of the Capitol Building in her four-inch stilettos and started referring to her as UDG, a trend that quickly caught on. UDG has become a very hot commodity in American politics.
First of all, she’s a young, beautiful, stylish woman. And how does Ursula handle being described as such? Jake only too vividly recalls their college days. Tell me I’m smart. Tell me I’m strong. Is it not insulting to have the press clamoring for the names of her designers, for the shade of her lipstick? (It’s Cherries in the Snow by Revlon, which she purchased for the first time at age fifteen from L. S. Ayres with money she made selling programs at Notre Dame games. True to her roots, she has stuck with the lipstick.) Jake would have said all the attention to Ursula’s physical traits rather than her intellectual gifts would have caused her to show her fangs, but he’s wrong. Ursula is happy to get attention any way she can. If it takes Cherries in the Snow to spotlight the welfare-reform bill that she wrote with Rhode Island senator Vincent Stengel, so be it. Ursula is style plus substance, as many people have pointed out. The complete package.
Ursula was built for politics, but Jake has no stomach for it. He has firm views on the issues—and some of his views differ from Ursula’s—but he loathes the wheeling and dealing, the bargaining chips, the side deals. He tries to stay out of it; he appears only at wholesome family-friendly events—Toys for Tots drives at the Grape Street mall, polka dancing on Dyngus Day—and he always has Bess in tow. Bess is in kindergarten at McKinley Elementary. Jake walks her to school every morning and picks her up every afternoon. They still have their nanny, Prue, in Washington, but here in South Bend, Jake handles all things Bess-related, and if he’s traveling for work, then Ursula’s mother, Lynette, covers. Bess visits with Jake’s parents every Sunday. They are surprisingly hands-on, taking Bess to the Potawatomi Zoo or to the ice-skating rink, the same rink where Jake met Ursula so many years ago.
They eat a lot of pizza from Barnaby’s.
Jake would like a second child. He would like a third, a fourth, even a fifth. But Ursula barely sees Bess as it is now. She’s supposed to handle school pickup on Wednesdays and take Bess to her ballet class, but last Wednesday, Ursula had a meeting with workers from the ethanol plant and the week before she was at a first-responders event and when Jake asked her if she wanted to change “her” day, she snapped at him.
I’m doing all this for her, Ursula said.
She’s too young to understand that, Jake said. She needs her mother.
You’re not too young to understand it, Ursula said. Bess is fine. I read to her at night. We cuddle. I took her to the library last week. The person who has a problem is you.
Ursula is right; he does have a problem. He isn’t happy. Every day he thinks about asking for a divorce. He thinks about Mallory, about taking Bess and moving to Nantucket, about marrying Mallory and having a child of their own.
“Are you sure you want to run for senator?” Jake says.
“Yes,” Ursula says. “Good night.”
How are things going for Jake at work? Well, that’s the good news: He loves his job. Jake is executive vice president of development for the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation, which means he asks individuals and companies for money. Some people—most people, in fact—hate the mere idea of asking for money, but it turns out, Jake has a knack for it. It helps that he’s passionate about the cause, that he can make statistics sound anecdotal, and that he understands the medical advances in CF research. If the medicine of 2006 had been available back in 1980, Jessica could have lived an extra decade, maybe even two.
Jake doesn’t say this, however. He has refrained from marching out his dead sister in order to pry donations out of people. The closest he comes to mentioning her is this: When people ask why he’s so passionate about research for cystic fibrosis—not cancer, not ALS, not heart disease—he says he lost someone close to him to CF and leaves it at that.
Jake doesn’t attend every CFRF fund-raiser across the country—that would be impossible—but he does appear at the major ones, such as the benefit held in Phoenix in May. The philanthropic set don their tuxes and gowns, drink a few flutes of champagne, eat canapés, find their place cards, admire the tablescapes, listen to an inspiring speaker, eat some kind of sauced chicken, and raise their paddles.
The Phoenix event, held at the JW Marriott in Desert Ridge, has one thousand forty-four attractive and well-dressed people attending. The chairwoman’s name is Carla Frick. Jake has met a lot of chairpeople and Carla is the best. She organizes everything down to the minute, she’s prepared for any one of a hundred snafus, and she has put together a committee of sixteen women who are just as unflappable, detail-oriented, and gracious as Carla is.
When Jake sees these women in action in Phoenix, he wonders how it is that men have historically been in charge of the world. Women should be running everything everywhere—and Jake’s not just saying that because he’s married to Ursula de Gournsey.
Jake is talking to Dave Van Andel from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who came to Phoenix specifically for this event (and to drive his Porsche 911 on the flat, straight desert roads) when Carla appears at Jake’s elbow. They are still in the cocktails-and-canapés portion of the evening. There’s a big band with a Frank Sinatra look-alike crooning standards. The affair is elegant; the drinks are strong; the bite-size arepas with hot-pepper jelly are delicious. Phoenix does things right. Why doesn’t everyone live in Phoenix?
Carla smiles at Dave. “I need to borrow Jake for a minute.”
Carla leads Jake out of the ballroom and into the hallway. She’s wearing a black jumpsuit with rhinestone straps and a diamond cross around her neck. When she fingers the cross, Jake sees something new in Carla: a crack in her façade.
“Sydney has been taken to Banner,” she says.
“What?” Jake says. Banner is the Phoenix hospital and Sydney Speer is a twenty-nine-year-old local news anchor from Scottsdale who has CF. She’s one of the best ambassadors Jake has. The foundation has flown Sydney all over the country—to Dallas, to Miami, to Kansas City—because when people hear the daunting odds Sydney overcame to appear on television each night, they double whatever amount they had planned to donate. “What happened?”
“She has an infection,” Carla says. “Her oxygen level dropped dangerously low and Rick didn’t want to mess around. Sydney wanted to do her talk first, then go.” Carla’s eyes brighten with tears. “Because that’s the kind of warrior Syd is.” A single silver tear rolls through Carla’s perfect makeup. “Plus, you know, she loves this party.”
Jake pulls his phone out and texts Sydney’s husband, Rick. Sending you guys my love. Keep us posted. Then it’s on to a much smaller problem but a problem nonetheless. “Who’s going to speak?”
Carla says, “I have contingencies for every emergency but I don’t have a backup speaker. I didn’t think we’d need one. I saw Sydney on Sunday at the PCC playing golf.” Carla scans the ballroom. “The Gwinnetts lost their son, they have firsthand experience with the disease and I know Joanne is comfortable talking about it, but I’m not going to throw her up in front of a thousand people without any warning.”
“Obviously not,” Jake says. He sighs. “I’ll do it.”
“You’ll ask Joanne?” Carla says.
“No,” Jake says. “I’ll be the one to speak.” He clears his throat. “I lost my twin sister to CF when we were thirteen.”
(Carla Frick feels her mouth drop open in a way she is sure is unattractive. She scrambles for something to say. “Did I know this, Jake? I didn’t know this.” Carla is halfway madly in love with Jake McCloud. He’s so handsome, so upright, so good…and so unavailable, married to a stylish congresswoman back in Indiana. Carla has recently gotten divorced from a man who, although handsome, is not upright and not good, and Carla has vowed that the next man she becomes involved with will be like Jake. This news about his sister, while unexpected and out of the blue, explains a lot. Jake is outstanding at his job, vested beyond just showing up to work, and now Carla knows why. She didn’t think her feelings for him could get any more intense, but they just have.)
“I don’t tell very many people,” Jake says. He lays a hand on Carla’s forearm, then quickly lifts it. Carla is newly divorced and they’ve been out in the hallway for too long, probably. He’s sure that people in Phoenix gossip just like they do everywhere else. “I’ll speak.”
Jake is good with people—but his strength is one-on-one or small-group conversations. His strength is not public speaking.
He jots down a couple of notes on a cocktail napkin, but they’re disjointed, so he throws the napkin away. He’s seen enough speakers at enough benefit dinners to know that all he needs to do is tell his story.
Still, his stomach churns and he feels uncomfortably warm and prickly in his tuxedo. He can’t eat anything, and he certainly can’t drink anything; even with half a Jim Beam and Coke in him, he’s worried he’s going to make a complete idiot of himself. What is he doing?
The lights go down and people find their tables, which are now bathed in candlelight with the salad course plated. They pass rolls, then scalloped pats of butter. They pour wine. The lights go up on the stage, the band plays some background music, and Carla strides over to the podium, the pants of her jumpsuit billowing, and takes the microphone. There’s cheering. This crowd is friendly, Jake thinks. They’ll forgive him if he’s awful.
“I’ve spoken to Rick Speer and told him we are all sending Sydney our prayers tonight,” Carla says after explaining the situation. “And I’m happy to tell you that in Sydney’s absence, Jake McCloud, executive vice president of the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation, has bravely agreed to share his own story publicly for the very first time. So please, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm Phoenix welcome to Jake McCloud.”
Applause. Jake can’t tell if it’s half-hearted—these people paid to hear Sydney—because of the blood rushing in his ears. Imagining them in their underwear isn’t going to work. Jake is nervous—not about the speaking itself but about what he’s about to say. He has told the story of Jessica to so few people. Who? He didn’t have to tell Ursula because Ursula lived through it with him. Bess is still too young to understand. He’ll tell her when she gets older.
Mallory, Jake thinks.
He told the story to Mallory.
So when Jake replaces Carla at the podium, he isn’t looking out at one thousand forty-four people. Instead, he’s looking at one person: Mallory. It’s 1993; she’s twenty-four years old. She’s lying on the old blanket on the beach in her T-shirt and her cutoffs; her hair is spread out behind her as she gazes up at the night sky. When Jake starts to tell her about Jessica, she rolls onto her side, props herself up on her elbow. Her eyes are green tonight and they’re fastened on him.
She’s listening.
“When does memory start?” Jake says. “Age four? Age five? Sometime within that year, a child’s synapses connect, creating lasting memory. And it was at around this age that I realized there was something different about my twin sister, Jessica—coughing fits, hospital visits.” Jake pauses. “It was probably a year or two later that my parents explained that she had cystic fibrosis.” The room is absolutely silent. “And, yes, I did say my twin sister. We were—obviously—fraternal twins, though people would ask once in a while if we were identical.” There are a few laughs, probably from parents of twins or people who were twins themselves. “Because we were fraternal twins, our DNA was only as similar as any other two siblings’. In our case, Jessica had the CF genes and I didn’t.” Jake pauses again. “You can probably all imagine how that made me feel. If I had been able, I would have…happily, gratefully…taken the burden of the disease from her and carried it myself.” Jake’s eyes fill; the audience is blurry, but he’s in control. “That wasn’t possible, of course. But that’s why I have worked for the past seven years raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation. I do it so no other children like me have to lose a sibling at the age of thirteen and so no other parents like my parents—who I think felt all the more helpless because they are both doctors—have to lose a child.” Jake stops to take a breath. “I’m standing before you asking for your support because my twin sister can’t.”
Jake McCloud receives a standing ovation. The CFRF dinner in Phoenix raises one and a half million dollars—over four hundred thousand dollars more than the year before.
Jake is through security at the Phoenix airport the next day when his boss, Starr Andrews, calls. Starr is seventy years old; she has been heading up the CFRF since its inception and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. She’s the best boss Jake could ask for, primarily because she gives him autonomy and lets him do his thing.
“I heard you talked about Jessica last night,” she says.
“I did,” Jake says. Another person Jake told about Jessica was Starr Andrews—at his initial interview, when he explained why he wanted the job. He’d also told Starr he would prefer to keep his personal history with the disease private. He wonders if Starr is calling to remind him of this.
“I’m proud of you,” Starr says. “You stepped out of your comfort zone. You opened up to strangers about something very personal. And you made a hell of a lot of money. So here’s my question: Would you be willing to do it again?”
Jake speaks in Cleveland and Raleigh in May. He speaks in Minneapolis and Omaha in June. He speaks in La Jolla, Jackson Hole, and Easthampton in July.
Event-based donations to CFRF are up more than 30 percent.
Does Jake brag about this to Ursula? Yes, a little bit. She’s the superstar of the couple, no one is disputing that. But Jake has come a long way from watching Montel Williams in his boxer shorts.
Before Congress adjourns for the summer, Ursula and Vincent Stengel get their welfare-reform bill passed in the House and in the Senate, a tremendous coup. The bill is a brilliant one. It manages to empower single working mothers while also saving the government a hundred and sixty million dollars.
Ursula is riding high. She and Jake rent a house on Lake Michigan, and Ursula relaxes a little. They grill on the sand; they take Bess on the dune buggies and to the water park; they attend the blueberry festival in South Haven and eat ice cream at Sherman’s.
In the middle of August, Ursula gets a phone call from Vincent Stengel. He invites her and Jake to Newport over Labor Day weekend. There’s a potential donor, a major donor, who would write checks not only to Vincent but to Ursula as well. This guy—Bayer Burkhart is his name—liked what he saw with the welfare-reform bill. He sees potential for an emerging centrist position, a perfect cocktail of the Left and the Right that he wants to foster. He wants to have a conversation, or a series of conversations, over the course of the long weekend. And in addition to all this, he has a 110-foot yacht with three staterooms, a pool, a gym, and a movie theater.
“This could be big for me,” Ursula says. “Plus it seems like fun, right? A long weekend away? You like New England.”
Jake knows he should only be surprised this hasn’t happened earlier. “Sounds great,” he says, thinking, Keep it light! Keep it light! “But Labor Day weekend doesn’t work for me.”
“Tell the CFRF to find someone else to speak, Jake, please,” Ursula says. She gives him an imploring look. “I know you’re good at it and I’m proud of you. But take a pass this once, for me?”
She thinks his conflict is work. He has been going to Nantucket every year for thirteen years and Ursula never remembers. Jake knows he should be grateful it’s not on her emotional calendar. Could he get away with telling Ursula that it is a work thing? No—he’ll be caught. “It’s not work,” he says. “It’s my trip to Nantucket.”
“Nantucket?” Ursula says. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You can skip Nantucket, Jake, come on.”
“Sorry, darling,” Jake says. “Any other weekend works, just not that one.”
“We were the ones who were invited, Jake,” Ursula says. “With Vince, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where I would eventually like to earn a seat. This guy Burkhart has billions. I need to cultivate him.”
“No one is stopping you from cultivating him,” Jake says. “But I can’t go.”
“You’re being unreasonable,” Ursula says. “Why don’t you ask Coop to switch weekends?”
“I don’t want to ask Coop,” Jake says. “I want to go to Nantucket like I always do.”
“What if I call Coop?” Ursula says.
Jake takes a breath. Is she bluffing? “Go ahead,” Jake says. “Please be the one to explain that your political career takes precedence over a tradition that I’ve maintained for thirteen years. You show Coop just how compromise in a marriage works.”
“You going to Nantucket a different weekend is a compromise,” Ursula says. “What you’re offering is…nothing.”
“I’m sorry, Ursula,” Jake says. They lock eyes and he feels certain the truth is there, written on his face: there’s another woman.
“I hope you’re happy with yourself,” Ursula says. “Robbing me of this opportunity. Robbing me of the money that could launch me to certain victory.”
“It might be better if you went alone,” Jake says. “Maybe this Bayer Burkhart is single with a penchant for powerful women.”
“He’s happily married,” Ursula says. “To a woman named Dee Dee, whose father was the political mastermind behind Buddy…” Jake tunes her out. He doesn’t care how rich and connected these people are. “Anyway,” she finishes, “I won’t go alone.”
But you will, Jake thinks.
And she does.