Public Appearances
Part 1
The Governor's wife thought the Governor was looking especially well this evening. As she stood before the mirror in the hotel suite bedroom, fastening her pearls, he appeared next to her in the gilt frame. The force of his presence, more than the width of his shoulders, shifted her into the lower corner of the composition. She became a detail.
"How do I look, do you think?" the Governor asked his wife.
"You're looking especially well this evening," she said.
The Governor nodded into the mirror.
The Governor's wife had taken particular pains with her own appearance. She knew this was an important occasion, although she could not remember precisely what or why. Something to do with the Governor's campaign--kickoff, victory--she had trouble keeping them straight. One campaign bled into another, like the lines in madras cloth. Odd, she thought, that nobody else seemed to notice this.
"They cut my hair too short," the Governor muttered.
"Oh, no," she said. He needed her before major public appearances. "It's just right," she said.
"It doesn't look plastic?" His hair had turned silver, although he was still young. It called attention to the boyishness of his face.
"Plastic? Not a bit. It's perfect." The Governor's wife smiled at her husband, trying to reassure him. The mirror served as intermediary for their eyes.
"I was afraid of that. I hate it when my hair looks perfect."
She moved further into her bevelled corner. "I didn't mean it that way. I only meant it looks just . . . right."
The Governor sighed, squinted at his image and carefully disarranged the front of his hair. "Better?"
"Just . . . fine," she said. He needed her.
The Governor's wife slipped out of the frame. She felt worried. It seemed to her, now, that she had not taken enough trouble with her own appearance: she was a disappointment. Downstairs the great banquet hall would already be filling with people who wanted a look at her. There would be photographers. She had read somewhere that certain tribes of Indians never permitted themselves to be photographed, convinced that the camera captured the spirit and bore it off. The Governor's wife understood this belief. She frequently stared at the imprecise gray and black images of herself in the morning paper and felt horrified at her own lifelessness. Her husband, she thought, must be of a different tribe. The flashes and shutters enlivened and enlarged him. He acquired a natural glossiness in public.
She edged back into the mirror to glance at her hair. Because the occasion was important to her husband, she had gone to a beauty salon, her own hair a responsibility she couldn't manage. The dryer, a fierce metal helmet, was lowered on her for forty minutes; it gave her a headache and burned her ears. When they were finished with her, she thought her head looked lopsided and oversized, as if she had borrowed it. Her husband preferred her hair, unlike his own, to look perfect. It did not.
Still worried, the Governor's wife turned her attention to her dress. She wished the mirror allowed her skirt to be seen, but the frame cut her off at the waist. Although she was wearing the best dress she had, she suspected it wasn't good enough. She turned and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her without a sound.
It was bad luck, worse than walking under a ladder, to see herself in fluorescent lighting before important occasions. The uncompromising illumination was a bad omen, a hex on her morale. But the full-length mirror on the bathroom door persuaded her to risk exposure to the unlucky light. She turned to face her reflection and inspect her dress.
It was finer than any dress she had ever owned, not counting her wedding gown. It was made of real silk, the color of winter wheat, and it had cost more than a hundred dollars. She had gone to New York to buy it, so that her husband and his constituents would be unlikely to learn the details of her extravagance. It was the one and only time she had crossed state lines to commit an indiscretion. The money she spent was her own, a birthday check from her parents. But that didn't excuse her. She told her husband the dress was a bargain. He said, very nice. The first time she wore it, an important occasion last year, the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles had burned a hole in her skirt with his cigar while she was dancing with him.
The Governor's wife had mourned her dress for a full year, keeping it in a scented garment bag in the back of her closet. It was a shameful secret, the small charred perforation like an evil eye on her lap. She wore the dress in her dreams, which admitted no flaws or superstitions. She danced in it. Awake, she grieved irreparably.
Finally, two weeks ago, she had taken the ruined dress to a seamstress who was said to be a wizard. The old Hungarian woman, Magda Bogner, had consoled the Governor's wife with her shiny pins and deft hands. "I make like new," she promised. "Nobody even guess." Her throaty voice and thick accent suggested the unassailable authority of a fortune-teller to the Governor's wife, who rather believed in magic. It was a belief her parents had encouraged in her as a child. She had learned in adulthood to call it by other names and, eventually, not to mention it. But the belief itself was intact.
Mrs. Bogner had detached the skirt from the bodice, excised a narrow strip from it, and reassembled the garment with tiny stitches. When the Governor's wife returned for her dress, the burn was gone, like magic. She and the old seamstress had embraced in mutual delight at the fitting. For the first time in a year, the Governor's wife felt like dancing. The older woman considered her own dexterity commonplace. But the Governor's wife was sure there were rhapsodies and gypsy spells in the clever aged fingers. Impulsively, she touched them with her own, and the seamstress smiled at her, as if confirming a suspicion.
No money changed hands. Mrs. Bogner would not hear of it. "My honor," she said, "to do for you. I tell my grandchildren--I sew for wife of Governor. Maybe someday President." For a moment, the Governor's wife turned pale. When she recovered herself, she planned how she'd invite the needlewoman to the Executive Mansion for tea. Sometime when the Governor was out of town.
Now, the Governor's wife stared into the hotel bathroom mirror and reexamined the dress. It was fine, a perfect fit. The gypsy fortune held up under scrutiny: no one would ever guess. But the dress was not like new. The rustle of silk when she moved was not quite as gay or generous as it once had been. Magic no longer clung to her skirt. The Governor's wife switched off the harsh overhead light and returned to the bedroom.
The Governor had remained in front of the mirror, but now he was looking over the notes for his speech. They were typed in capital letters on buff-colored index cards. He looked up as his wife reentered the room, and she smiled at him hopefully.
"You're sure I look all right?" he asked.
They went downstairs a half-hour later than they were expected. Impact, he said, was largely a matter of timing.
There were twelve hundred people in the convention center banquet hall. Or so the Governor's press secretary had told the Governor's wife, who had cultivated the sensible habit of accepting the word of staff members on such matters. Nevertheless, tonight, as she was plunged into the crowd, she found herself wondering how many people were really there--exactly how many. Twelve hundred and six, perhaps? Or maybe less than a thousand? She couldn't guess. She would never know.
There were certain things the Governor's wife had come to accept. Never knowing was one. Entering banquet halls by way of service elevators and institutional kitchens was another. She had learned to anticipate sudden explosions of light and sound when she followed her husband over thresholds. Experience had taught her not to wear rings on her right hand and to carry small purses with shoulder straps when she was placed in receiving lines. She willed herself to develop tolerance for embraces and personal questions from total strangers. She had a whole bag of tricks for remembering names and faces. She had her smile down to a science.
The Governor's wife frequently went out in public holding hands with younger men, something the Governor himself had suggested and even arranged. His wife was not "a natural," not even "a quick study." During his first campaign, staff members had tactfully brought it to his attention that his wife, who was small and rather timid, had an unfortunate proclivity for getting lost. Or looking lost, which was worse. The matter was discussed frankly--the Governor believed in treating staff like family. Eventually, it was decided that an aide should be assigned to the Governor's wife in crowds. The solution proved sensible. It was good training for the junior assistants. And the crowds, looking at the Governor, never seemed to notice the succession of pin-striped young men to whose hands the Governor's wife clung in public. Over the years, the handholding and her own determination not to slow her husband down had helped her to mask her misplaced look. In fact, she had acquired a small following of her own. Underdogs, particularly, looked up to her.
Now, flanked by aides, the Governor was moving briskly into the packed hall. The crowd parted for him, but closed quickly over his wake so that the young man holding the Governor's wife's hand had to fight to make a path for her. As always, the first moment of entering a crowd made the Governor's wife feel she was drowning. Hands grasped at her husband. Some of them, missing him, closed around her, as if she might be a rung by which to reach him. Yearning for air, she smiled and tightened her grip on the only familiar fingers she could reach.
"Kevin?" She said the boy's name to calm herself, as a stocky man shouldered his way between them.
"We won't lose him," the young aide reassured her grimly. His face was creased by the pressure of responsibility. He was twenty-three years old, and this was his first job. The Governor's wife wanted to tell him it would be all right.
"You are so skinny!" a lady in purple chiffon exclaimed, filling a momentary gap in the crowd. She pressed the Governor's wife to her bosom, where yards of violet fabric struggled against moist flesh. "I wish I looked like you. I'm going to send you a coffee cake."
The Governor's wife moved her lips graciously, knowing her voice was useless in the noisy room.
The woman turned to throw herself on the Governor. "Your wife needs to put some meat on her bones."
"She works too hard," he said, pulling his wife forward and circling her with his arm as he smiled into a bank of cameras. She lost her balance for a moment, and leaned against him.
"One more picture, Governor . . . this way. . . ." Her husband was pulled away and Kevin stepped smartly into the intervening space, providing equilibrium.
(Continued in Part 2)