The alarm clock called precisely at seven. A man awoke from his rest and began his day in earnest. His morning routine was rigid and unwavering. He threw back his blanket, swung his feet to the floor and took several deep breaths, holding each one for a few seconds before releasing it. The man then stood and remade his bed, straightening the sheet and blanket and replacing the pillows in their proper position.
A set of light calisthenics followed. The man moved to the middle of the room, placed his feet exactly eighteen inches apart and extended his arms out from his sides so that both of his hands were at shoulder height. He bent forward at the waist, bringing his right hand down in a sweeping arch to touch his left foot and returning smoothly to an upright position. He then performed the same action from the opposite side, touching his left hand to his right foot, straightened up again, and repeated the entire sequence thirty times.
The man then lay chest-down on the carpet. He set his toes firmly in position and placed his palms flat beneath his shoulders. He pushed himself up from the floor, keeping his knees perfectly straight and his head level, his eyes fixed straight ahead toward the far wall. He did not grunt or groan, but kept his mouth closed as he raised himself upward. He exhaled forcefully at the top of his motion while his arms were fully extended beneath him. He held this position for only an instant, just long enough to empty his lungs of air. He then relaxed his triceps slightly and allowed gravity to pull him back easily to the floor, inhaling quickly on the way down. This exercise was also repeated thirty times without variation.
The man then turned himself over and lay on his back. He brought his knees to a right angle, keeping his feet flat on the carpet, and drew his arms across his chest. He breathed in through his nose until his lungs had reached half of their capacity and then contracted his abdominal muscles. His upper torso rose from the floor until his forearms pressed against his thighs and his spine was perfectly vertical. He then allowed his upper body to return slowly to the floor, exhaling as he descended. This procedure too was repeated thirty times.
The man then stood and performed a second series of deep breaths. Afterward he relaxed his body for several moments, allowing his heart and his lungs to regain their normal rhythms and savoring the invigorating sensation of freshly respired blood being pumped throughout his body. He then turned toward the door and strode briskly to the bathroom.
His Christian name was Calvin Bedford Farrell, but most of those who knew him, whether professionally or socially, simply called him The Mayor. Indeed, he had been the mayor of Bazelton for the greater portion of the lives of most of the town's residents, including his own. He was sixty-six years old, and the coming January would mark his thirty-fourth year as mayor. During his third of a century at the top of the municipal government, the Mayor had become in many ways the de facto monarch of the town. A council of seven elected citizens served as the legislative body for the community, but their authority on matters of any importance was little more than a constitutional formality, for no bill which the Mayor supported had ever failed to pass a council vote in the past twenty years, nor had any initiative which the Mayor opposed ever gained the support of the council during the same period of time. He had been mayor more than twice as long as any of the council members had occupied their seats, and he was largely responsible, through fund-raising activities and organizational assistance and his own personal endorsements, for the election of each member of the council. From time to time over the years a few council members, no doubt concerned by the growing civic power invested in a single person, dared to publicly oppose the Mayor on one matter or another, or worked to support a competing candidate in a mayoral election. None of those council members, however, presently remained in their elected positions, as they themselves were each handily defeated in their subsequent bids for reelection, a fact in no way lost on the remaining members of the council.
Not one particle of the Mayor's impressive political success, he was proud to say, could be shown in any way to be corrupt or underhanded. Hoping to find otherwise, however, several opponents had insisted upon public investigations or hired their own private investigators to scrutinize the Mayor's activities. These inquiries invariably probed into his dealings with the town's business leaders, its labor unions and its municipal employees at all levels. They investigated the granting of contracts and the issuance of construction permits and the approval of business licenses. They reviewed his fundraising activities, attempting to correlate large donations from wealthy individuals and corporations with significant line items in the municipal budget or advantageous changes in municipal law or regulations. They even looked for possible connections to organized crime.
They probed into his personal affairs as well. They searched for evidence of sexual indiscretions, drug or alcohol abuse, gambling habits, or any other vices that the Mayor or any member of his family might be trying to hide. They audited his tax returns, scrutinized his volunteer activities, reviewed his charitable donations and examined his public medical records. The Mayor's life had been pried open and inspected from every angle imaginable and, to each of his opponents' great and continued disappointment, rather than revealing the cache of illicit activities which they had hoped to discover, their efforts instead found only a model for clean and wholesome living in every regard. In all their inquiries, the Mayor's opponents failed to uncover even the slimmest evidence of untoward behavior on the part of the man who had become their sovereign. Through the repeated failures of these assaults upon his character, the Mayor eventually acquired a reputation of such strength and integrity that further inquiries into his background were rebuffed by the citizenry almost as soon as they commenced. People who poked around asking the wrong kinds of questions about the Mayor were flatly ignored, and, if they persisted, were told in no uncertain terms, and occasionally with a finger pointed directly in their faces, to put an end to such nosiness and leave the man be.
The Mayor, for his part, was proud of the service which he had been allowed to provide for his community during his long tenure in office and greatly pleased with the power that the citizens had entrusted to him. The town of Bazelton, he firmly believed, was in large measure a place of his own creation. The modest little hamlet into which he had been born during the depths of the Great Depression had grown into a thriving, well-governed municipality under his watchful eye.
He could recall fondly his earliest memories of the town—the days of his boyhood when all of the town's citizens, each and every one known to his family by name, reflected the shared values of their yeoman ancestry. They were the joint product of the civic elements upon which the town was founded: an agricultural economy, a Christian theology, a vocational ethic and a Samaritan good will. Its people were drawn from hardy, robust stock, and they felt a palpable sense of community, even among those who were newcomers to the town. The townspeople had been cultivated from good seed sown in fertile ground.
The town survived with little government in those earlier days. A police force of two officers and one clerk comprised the town's entire full-time employment roster. All other public servants, including the mayor, the town selectmen, a single judge, a tax collector, and a small number of clerks and assistants, were employed strictly on a part-time basis. These semi-public employees each derived only a minor portion of their incomes from their public duties. Each devoted the majority of his or her weekly work hours to other, more commercial, pursuits. The one-day-per-week judge was a four-day-per-week lawyer who spent his days drawing up wills and contracts and overseeing real estate transactions, few of which ever had reason to see the inside of a courtroom. The tax collector likewise passed most of his week as a public accountant. The selectmen included two farmers, a carpenter, a grocer, a doctor and a baker. Many services which were now considered central to the ameliorating role of a modern central government, including provisions for food and shelter for the indigent, schooling for the young, and medical care for the elderly, were in those days provided autonomously by the community through churches and other charitable means. Soup kitchens fed the poor. Priests and nuns instructed the children. Church volunteers looked after the elderly, often in their own homes. Physicians donated their services free of charge or extended generous lines of credit to those who could not afford to pay. And the people helped each other when necessary. The unemployed carpenter would help to patch the roof of the unemployed mechanic next door, who in return would help to fix the car or paint the house or baby-sit the children of his neighbor.
Throughout his life the Mayor had watched, and in many ways had controlled, the town's development into a more mature metropolis. The local government had risen in its influence over the town's affairs as it enveloped the traditional roles of teacher and physician, moralist and sociologist, rule maker and rule enforcer. It assumed these higher functions primarily through control of the public finances. As the sole authority for the collection and dispensation of public monies, the once-modest government grew and developed its power to decide between right and wrong, between just and unjust. Those initiatives deemed to be in the public's interest were blessed through the municipal budget and were thus supported, indirectly, by every member of the community. Other initiatives deemed unworthy of the public's support were left to finance themselves by other means, if any such means could be found. Most of these unfunded efforts, however, lacking the assistance of the civic hand, died quickly and silently. Thus the local government came to be in many ways the collective heart and brain of the community.
The Mayor himself had overseen a great deal of this change. It was not the case, as some of his early critics had supposed, that the Mayor disapproved of the ways in which the community managed itself in its infancy. On the contrary, he approved wholeheartedly of the efforts of those earlier townfolk, whether they received a public stipend or not. But eventually such efforts must be controlled, lest they be insufficient or misguided. A community as good and noble as Bazelton must have standards. Every citizen ought to have the satisfaction of measuring his contribution to the public welfare and to know the sum total of that welfare and in which forms and in what quantities it was dispensed. In prior times, the benevolent citizen might drop a dollar into the cup of a homeless beggar, or donate a loaf of bread to the soup kitchen, or give an extra coat or blanket to the shelter, or perhaps lend a book to a curious child, never to receive a tangible receipt greater than an evanescent expression of thanks from the receiver, however deeply or sincerely felt it may have been. Although these were unquestionably good and Christian acts which touched the hearts of those who received and blessed the souls of those who gave, how much the better it was today for the needy to proceed directly to the government office to collect their just due. For the efficiency of modern ways had made the process so much less burdensome. The needy now had their allotments counted for them and dispersed at regular intervals without fail. No longer would they feel shameful in their need or have to hang their heads as they accepted their provisions. And the taxpayer was relieved as well of the burden of constantly giving bills and bread and blankets and books, as their requisite and equitable share was now deducted in rote installments from their pay checks without a second thought.
The Mayor had overseen and approved of all of these improvements. He was a man of government and a government of man. And when the day arrived, some thirty-three years onward from the day on which he had begun his public service, when the Mayor had appropriated every significant process and activity within the civic domain of the town of Bazelton, what subsequent step remained? Clearly there was only one, as he himself had seen. And so, at the beginning of the year, with much fanfare and enthusiasm, the Mayor had commenced his candidacy for the governorship of the state. In a divided race, he was one of four candidates who were considered by the pollsters to have a reasonable chance of claiming the office, and the pundits had been predicting a close contest right through to election day, which was now a mere seven weeks away.
* * *
The Mayor emerged from his bathroom freshly showered and shaved, with a healthy glow of energy on his skin and a gleam of purpose in his eye. He dressed quickly, donning a navy blue pinstripe suit over a starched white cotton shirt and an eye-catching tie with a burgundy base and a smattering of gold stars. A pair of black leather shoes, a gold watch, a pair of onyx studded cufflinks and a thin gold wedding ring completed his attire. He paused briefly to inspect his image in the full-length mirror in the corner of the bedroom. Definitely governorship material, he told himself. Too bad the state didn't post pictures of the candidates next to their names on the ballot, he thought. He would win in a landslide.
The Mayor picked up his briefcase and descended the stairs to the first floor. He set the briefcase down gently on the floor at the foot of the stairs and stepped quietly down a short hallway to a closed door on one side. Carefully he turned the knob, trying to make as little noise as possible, and pushed the door open.
The room he entered was small and contained only a bare minimum of furniture: a single twin-sized bed, a short three-drawer dresser with several framed photographs on top, and a small table under the window, upon which stood a single red rose in a narrow glass vase. Along both sides of the bed ran a row of aluminum bars. They reached horizontally from the headboard to the foot of the mattress, designed to prevent the occupant of the bed from accidentally rolling off onto the floor. The blinds over the windows were tightly closed, and even though it was well after dawn, the room remained in a state of near-darkness.
The Mayor moved silently to the side of the bed and looked down at the sleeping figure who lay upon it. The woman slept peacefully on her back, her head turned partially to one side on her pillow, her eyelids draped closed and her lips slightly parted. The Mayor reached down and took hold of the top of the blanket from its jumbled position at the woman's waist and pulled it up over her arms and shoulders. He then stood quietly over her, listening to the sound of her soft, rhythmic breathing as she slept. He closed his eyes momentarily and took a small measure of solace in her peacefulness. Then, not wanting to disturb her rest, he turned back toward the door, blew her a kiss from a distance and left the room.
The Mayor went back up the hallway, fetched his briefcase from the place where he had left it, and proceeded toward the other end of the house. From a closet near the front door he retrieved a full-length overcoat and folded it over one arm, then he turned and entered the kitchen. A middle-aged woman of Hispanic descent stood at the counter, removing items from a grocery bag.
"Good morning, Rosalynn," the Mayor greeted her. "How are you today?" He spoke softly to keep his voice from traveling down the hallway.
"Oh, good morning, sir," the woman replied in a thick accent. "I am fine. How are you?"
"Fine, Rosalynn. Just fine."
"And how is Mrs. Farrell this morning?"
"She's still sleeping; I just checked on her," the Mayor said. "If she doesn't wake up by nine, just let her sleep. Her breakfast can wait until she's up."
"Oh, yes, sir," the woman said obediently. "I never wake her before she is ready. I will be very quiet. I have some oranges and some eggs for her breakfast, and I have bread to make toast, but I wait for her. You will have a busy day today?"
"Yes," the Mayor said, as he slipped his arms into his overcoat and buttoned it up the front. "All of my days are busy now."
"So you will be home late tonight?" Rosalynn asked. "It is no problem. I can stay longer if I must."
The Mayor thought for a moment. "No," he said finally. "No, I'll be home by six-thirty. You should be home with your family at a decent hour, as should I."
A grateful smile brightened the woman's face. "Thank you, sir," she said politely. "I will see you at six-thirty then."
"You have everything you need?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I went to the grocery this morning. I have everything here."
"All right, then," the Mayor said as he turned toward the door. "I'll see you this evening. Call me if anything happens."
"Yes, sir. I will call if I must. Good day, sir."
The Mayor left by the back door at the end of the kitchen, which led into the two-car garage on the side of the house. He settled himself into the driver's seat of his car and pushed the button on the remote control to engage the automatic garage door opener, and as he waited for the door to rise, in his thoughts he bid farewell to his wife for another workday. He felt a familiar pang of guilt as he pulled his car out of the garage—a portion of his conscience nagging at him, telling him that he ought not leave her side like this, even for a few hours. But she would be in good hands until he returned, he reminded himself, and there was important work to be done. At the end of the day, the task of caring for her would once again be his. He knew that she would not have wanted it any other way.
Louise, his wife of forty-two years, had been his closest companion and most tireless supporter since they had married right out of college. Standing beside him through every stage of his long career, she had been in many ways the ideal political spouse. Not strongly opinionated on matters of public policy, she was nevertheless unshakably loyal to her husband, and she had endeared herself to the community through her volunteer work and her commitment to public service. She was a veteran of countless political fundraisers and church picnics and community socials over the years. She had served as a dispatcher for the local volunteer fire company and first aid squad, had been chairwoman of the PTA and a member of the school board, and had worked as a substitute teacher. Her work to establish a municipal animal shelter had been recognized by the town council when they voted to name the facility after her. Never had her own needs impeded the good work that she and her husband were doing for the city. She would not allow them to. To the present day she remained a model of devotion to her husband and her community, even though she had recently slipped so far away from them.
The change started coming over her about six years earlier. Brief episodes of confusion and forgetfulness had become sufficiently worrisome for the Mayor to have her examined by a physician, who diagnosed the preliminary onset of Alzheimer's disease. The condition had gradually worsened over time to the point where she could no longer accompany her husband on social outings. But she had continued, in her lucid moments, to encourage him to go. You don't need me there, she would say, but you need to be there. Go without me.
Her condition was common knowledge throughout the community. The Mayor would, at each event which he attended alone, receive a single polite inquiry concerning his wife's condition and then no more, as everyone knew that the disease would not reverse itself and that the Mayor would never be able to give an uplifting answer to the question. She was watched during the day by Rosalynn, a caretaker who assisted her with her personal needs in addition to doing laundry and cooking meals and cleaning the house—tasks which Louise had insisted on doing herself for a long while, since they were her duties as wife and homemaker, but which in recent months had grown beyond her diminishing capacities. In the evenings, Rosalynn would return to her own home and the Mayor himself would look after his wife, it being his duty as husband to do so.
She slept in a separate room on the first floor now, on her doctor's advice, which allowed her to sleep late each morning without disturbance when her husband awoke for work, and which precluded her from having to negotiate the stairs. In addition, the doctor had said, she needed a room of her own—a private place in which she could feel secure within her ever-narrowing world. The day was coming, he warned, when she would not even recognize the Mayor as her husband, and that difficult day would be made slightly easier for them both if she already had a bedroom to call her own.
The two lived alone now after having raised a daughter, the only child of their long marriage. The girl had always possessed a most independent spirit, and in her later years had become quite rebellious toward the tenets of her upbringing in general, and toward her father in particular. The Mayor often found his daughter's behavior bothersome and difficult to understand. Perhaps it was the difference in their ages—she was just twenty-five now, and still within the grip of her youthful insolence. Perhaps it was her mother's constant doting on her when she was a child, a practice of which the Mayor always disapproved and which he attempted to mitigate through his own paternal influence. Or perhaps it was simply that untouchable individuality which is engrained in each child and which leads them to become the person they become, regardless of parental guidance. Whatever the cause may have been, the Mayor's daughter was not to be counted among his cadre of admiring citizens, much less the loving little girl that she had been for the first ten years of her life. After struggling and fighting her way through her adolescence, she had departed for college without a word of thanks for her parents, and had rarely set foot in their house in the seven years since.
The Mayor had been insulted by his daughter's rebellious nature toward him, and that insult eclipsed all other feelings that he held for her, feelings which were not evident to most. Those other feelings lived deep within him, down in the most remote depths of his heart, down where the dearest emotions of the human soul took refuge when they were rebuffed by a painful reality. The Mayor had a thick skin, toughened through his many years in the public eye—an implacable resolve which he would instinctively reveal in the face of any adversity. Thus his daughter's rebellion had no outwardly noticeable effect on him. But his wife was different in this regard, and what pained him most acutely about his daughter's behavior was the sadness that he had learned to expect in his wife's voice whenever she spoke of her. Her love for her one and only child was a powerful thing. It seemed to flow through her like oxygen, like something that kept her alive. It touched every part of her, seen and unseen, and she could not have hidden it from even the most passing acquaintance any more than she could have hidden the color of her eyes. The Mayor knew his wife, and he knew how much love she carried in her heart for their daughter, and he knew the reason for the persistence of that love, even through all of their family trials.
When they had gotten married they had promised each other that they would have a large family. His wife had been working as a bookkeeper at the time, and she continued to work for a while after they were married. He had initially frowned on the idea, preferring instead that she remain at home in the traditional role of wife and mother. But she prevailed upon him that it would be better for her to keep working for just a little while longer, just until their first child was born. They could use the extra money, she had said, to pay for the baby's things and to allow them to afford the larger house that they would undoubtedly need as their family grew. It was an argument he could not refute.
And so his wife stayed on at her job for a year. They bought a four-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood, with a large lawned yard in front and room on the side for a garden and, perhaps, a swing set. When after that first year his wife had not yet become pregnant, she agreed to give up her job. He was doing well in his contracting business, they reasoned, and they had already purchased their home, so there was no need for her to continue working. Besides, perhaps being relieved of the long hours at the office would make it a bit easier for her to conceive.
She spent that second year redecorating all four bedrooms in the house. She wallpapered one of the spare bedrooms in blue and another in pink. She painted white clouds over a pale blue background on the ceilings, and handsome bejeweled unicorns alongside, and chubby cherubs with wings and trumpets, and planets and stars and crescent moons, and rocket ships sailing off towards them. Her projects kept her very busy, and the year passed as uneventfully as the first.
In the third year of their marriage, she devoted her efforts to the outside of their home. She planted rose bushes along the front of the house, and later that year she extended them along both sides. In the fourth year she started the garden that she had always talked about having. She planted flowers on one side of the large patch and vegetables on the other, never quite able to decide which type of garden she desired most. She and her husband ate what they could of the garden's bounty that summer and fall, and she canned what remained for use throughout the long winter.
By the following spring, they knew that something was wrong.
They went to see a doctor to determine if there was some medical problem. They both submitted themselves to extensive physical examinations, and the latest tests that the medical science of the day could offer were run. The tests came back a week later with results that were at once both disappointing and encouraging: there seemed to be nothing wrong with either one of them.
They returned home from the doctor's office that day perplexed and saddened. Their house suddenly seemed too large for them, but they could not bring themselves to consider selling it. For the next few years their lives were sustained by little more than their love for one another and their faith in God. In the end, they put their fate into His hands. He would bless them with as many children as He, in His wisdom, deemed best. They did not know why they were being asked to wait, but they knew that He knew why, and there was no other explanation to be sought.
In all other respects, their lives blossomed over the subsequent years. In his early thirties he sold his business for a handsome sum to a large corporation, and with the proceeds tucked safely away in the bank, he decided to enter politics. After serving a single two-year term on the town council, he ran for mayor against an incumbent forty years his senior, and won easily when the elderly man died suddenly of a heart attack two weeks before the election.
Louise, in the meantime, threw herself into a variety of social and charitable works. Being the wife of the mayor, she found that virtually every organization was interested in having her involved in their efforts. She was kept constantly busy by the causes that she supported, and she never complained in the least. The work was, in addition to its social good, an indispensable therapy for her. Her days were less empty for all of the matronly tasks to which she attended.
Then, at the age of thirty-eight, just as she and her husband had reconciled themselves to the sad prospect of a childless marriage, Louise had discovered that she was pregnant, and the two of them found the long lost capstone of joy which completed their union so perfectly. The day they brought their newborn baby daughter home from the hospital was, quite possibly, the happiest day of their lives. God, they were certain, had smiled upon them that day, and the memory made the Mayor smile even now. It was no wonder that Louise loved her so, he thought. She was the miracle child that they almost never had.
How sad, then, now seemed that precious child's denial of them. And how heartbreaking the thought that his wife was now once again childless in her infirmity, her fragile memory unable to retain its hold on those things which were no longer present in her life. It was, the Mayor thought—and the thought caused the smile to drain away from his face—as if the two women had never even known each other at all.
* * *
The Mayor drove himself to his office. He enjoyed his daily commute across town because it gave him an opportunity to experience the community. He was a man of the people, he liked to remind himself, and he loved the feeling of connection he felt with those who supported him. Although he lived less than five miles from his office, he often spent more than an hour in transit. Each morning without fail, the Mayor made a point of dropping in on one or two of the businesses in town, both the large and the small, to talk with the owners and employees and to shake hands with a few of the customers. Many merchants knew, and were proud of the fact, that they could expect a personal visit from the Mayor several times each year. During many visits the Mayor might be offered a complimentary sample of the establishment's wares—a cup of coffee, a doughnut, a free dry cleaning or car washing or a small bouquet of flowers for the wife—all of which he was happy to accept, but for which he always insisted on paying the full price. To do otherwise, he would say with the utmost sincerity, would not be right.
The Mayor thought about the people of the town as he drove to work. They were very special to him, and he would miss seeing them on a daily basis if he were elected governor, the state capital being nearly a hundred miles away. He had known many members of the community since childhood, and, indeed, many felt like family to him, and he to them. He would be invited to numerous weddings and birthday parties and holiday gatherings each year, all of which he would make every effort to attend. He had been the keynote speaker at each of the last twenty-four graduation ceremonies at Bazelton High. He had been present to share in the celebrations as children were born, and to mourn in sympathy when parents and grandparents passed away.
He was born to be a politician, his friends would tell him. He was trusted and admired and well liked by everyone who knew him, they would say. You've done so much for this town over the years, Mister Mayor. So much. Can't imagine what this town would be like without you. Such compliments would be met with only a humble smile from the Mayor, who would politely deny any laurels for himself and give all credit for any noble accomplishments which he may have helped to achieve to his Maker.
For, indeed, the Mayor was a religious man. He was a lifelong member of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and a steadfast patron of the local parish. He was a regular attendee of the nine o'clock Sunday mass at Saint Michael's church, and had been such for as long as anyone in town could remember. Seven priests had come and gone as head of the local parish in the years since he had been baptized in Saint Michael's as an infant and had attended his first mass there with his parents. His parish and his community were now, in many ways, his extended family.
The Mayor took time for breakfast during the work week only when it was afforded to him by his morning visits in town, but he needed neither caffeine nor carbohydrates to energize himself for the day ahead. He drew his energy from the rightness of his purpose, and nothing more was required. He was a man on a mission, and that mission had become all the more ambitious in recent months. The things he had accomplished for the town of Bazelton would pale in comparison to the goals he had set for himself as governor. The potential gains were greater by a hundred-fold—no, a thousand-fold—at the governor's level. They expanded geographically, demographically, financially and, most importantly for the Mayor, statutorily. For as important as the mayor's office was to the workings of the town of Bazelton, there were some aspects of public life, some areas of social jurisprudence, which were reserved to the control of the state, and which the governor and the legislature dictated as uniform mandates across all of its cities and towns. Government, like anything else created by God or man, was a hierarchy. The span of control at any level only reached so far, and all things beyond that boundary were controlled by a higher authority. In the town of Bazelton, the Mayor had achieved control over all that was within his reach, but he was not one to believe that matters ended there. The next step—the only possible step—was to expand that reach by ascending to the next level in the hierarchy.
The Mayor thought about his opponents in the ongoing campaign, deconstructing their apparent strategies for winning the race. He was not impressed. Each of them did little more than spray a worn and worthless rhetoric in scattershot fashion at any and every segment of the electorate which would cast the ballots. One candidate played to the geographic diversity of the state, claiming to be every bit as concerned about the low level of milk price supports for the rural dairy farmer as he was appalled by the high retail price of milk for the suburban mother. Another candidate touted his appeal to the sundry ethnic populations, proclaiming his rock-solid support for affirmative action, his unwavering opposition to quota laws, and his fervent hope that someday all races would live in harmony and statistical equality. A third candidate pointed to his financial acumen, promising increased funding for every social program currently on the books, decreased tax payments from the citizenry, and a simultaneous reduction of the state's fiscal deficit.
The Mayor would have none of it. He would not join the parade of political chameleons, donning one plastic mask today to address this audience and a different one tomorrow to address another. He would stand above the petty fray of nickels and dimes, the tawdry business of mothering to the stubbed toes and scraped knees of each interest group. His would be a candidacy of larger issues rather than a set of self-contradictory appeasements to the competing factions. He would appeal to the people's fundamental sense of right and wrong. The voter should not be so concerned, he would tell them, with whether this subsidy will be increased or that tax will be decreased. Their obligation, rather, shall be to scrutinize the candidates on their values—to determine which candidate best embodies their morals, their basic sense of decency, their belief in a common faith which the governor, as the people's tribune, should support and protect. A candidate who knows right from wrong, so his campaign slogan said, will always do right by them.
His approach had thus far proven rather effective, given the fractured nature of the race. No candidate commanded a clear majority in the polls, and the consensus opinion had become that a plurality of as little as forty percent for any one candidate might prove victorious. The Mayor had consistently achieved thirty to thirty-five percent support in the polls for the past few months, but two other candidates were managing to poll equally well. Sound as he felt his message to be, he knew that he would need something more. He needed to find a heavy issue, an anvil for his hammer—a iron-hard block upon which he could forge the dialogue of the debate into his own preferred shape, and in the process carve off another five or ten percent of the wavering electorate for himself.
The Mayor did not have to search very far to find the issue that he was looking for; he drove past it every day on his way to work, and he was asked about it constantly by his constituents. What about that awful ruckus downtown? What is to be done about it? My business is off twenty percent since they started up with each other. How much longer do we have to put up with this?
Patience, the Mayor counseled. There was a process by which the ugliness would end. Judges could put an end to it; and governors appointed judges; and the people elected governors, and their day to do so was only a few weeks away. If you will do your duty, he told them, then I will do mine.
He drove through the heart of the downtown area every day on his way to work, and he usually passed by the front of the medical center just as the two groups of demonstrators were beginning to assemble for the day. If any of them ever took notice of his car, or recognized the man at the wheel, they never gave any indication. In the months since the clinic opened, the Mayor had not once been accosted or harassed by any of the people who caused so much trouble for others, even though his car sometimes came to a halt in traffic right in front of them. Perhaps he had just been lucky, he thought, but that was likely to change soon enough. Unbeknownst to the marchers, they had laid in place for him what he believed to be the stepping stone to victory in the governor's race. They had taken an issue which almost nobody seemed to care much about at the beginning of the year and they had turned it into something that everyone seemed to care about now—care, that is, in the sense that they wanted something done about it, although agreement on what that something should be seemed an impossible notion.
And that was precisely where he saw his opportunity. He didn't need agreement to win; division served him much better under the present circumstances. He only needed another ten percent, and thus a vision came into his mind wherein the core values upon which he had based his entire campaign transmuted themselves into raw numbers. His thinking ran as follows: the issue split the electorate roughly in half; and half of each half would cast their votes primarily on the basis of that one issue; and half of that half could be persuaded to vote for him, directly as a result of the stand that he was about to take. The rest of the vote that ran against him on the issue would be divided three ways, and was thus irrelevant. He could do the arithmetic easily in his head. One-half of one-half of one-half was . . . victory.
With these thoughts in mind, he had two weeks earlier conceived the end-game strategy for his campaign and had commenced its implementation. The town council, as always, had been most cooperative in unanimously passing his new regulation. The opposition, such as it was, within the community had no recourse but to follow his orders for the time being. Yes, a small band had decried the political nature of the action. They threatened lawsuits and launched a failed publicity campaign to get the regulation overturned. Not only had he expected this type of reaction to his plan, but in accord with his political calculus, he had positively welcomed it. It brought press coverage and editorials and rancorous debate among the voters. It would eventually force the other candidates to respond to his initiative, effectively pushing them to the periphery of the discussion and placing himself at the center. Some voters would be repelled, no doubt, by the aggressiveness of his actions, but the decisive few, he calculated—the one-half of one-half of one-half of them that he needed—would be impressed by his boldness and the strength of his convictions. The whole episode would underscore his reputation as a catalyst for change and a wielder of political power. It would place him a step above every other candidate in the race.
Such was the goal that he had set for himself for the coming few weeks until election day. There was a governorship out there to be won, and he had committed himself to winning it. That was what mattered most to him now, and he was prepared to throw all of his energies in that direction.
He whistled confidently to himself and tapped his fingers rhythmically on the steering wheel as his car idled not far from the opposing groups of demonstrators who gathered on the sidewalk in front of the clinic. And before the light at the end of the block discharged the traffic forward, the Mayor took his daily opportunity to silently thank them all for the great good fortune which the timeliness of their antagonism had brought to him.
* * *
A few minutes before nine the Mayor drove into the parking lot behind the Bazelton municipal building and pulled his car into the space near the entrance marked RESERVED—MAYOR. He entered the building through the rear door and exchanged greetings with some of the employees as he headed for the elevator which would take him to his office on the fifth floor. Before entering his office, he stopped at the receptionist's desk to pick up his telephone messages and his mail. He leafed quickly through the yellow slips of paper and then through the envelopes, looking for some sort of correspondence from the Heritage County Medical Center or from their lawyer's office.
He found none.
Still considering their response, he guessed, as a brief smile crossed his lips.
He entered his office, set his briefcase on the floor beside his desk and sat down in the oversized leather chair. He flipped again through his mail without stopping to read any of it and tossed it aside. It could all wait until later in the day. There were greater priorities that needed to be addressed first. He opened the lower drawer of his desk and removed a white-paged telephone directory. He found the listing for Saint Michael's Catholic Church of Bazelton and dialed the number. Step two of the plan would be a mere formality, he thought, as he listened to the phone ringing on the other end of the line. He was sure that Father O'Malley could be recruited into the role which had been written for him.