Creamy White Thighs

There’s a photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession in New York City, in April 1865, that shows two young boys watching the event through a second-story window of a building above the throngs. The boys’ faces are mere splotches of light in the image, but the location of the home and other factors have been used, by some, to argue that one of the splotches is future president Theodore Roosevelt, whose grandfather owned the building and who would have been seven years old at the time. Or not, others say. Possibility isn’t proof, skeptics have noted: It could have been one of any number of other children who lived in or around the building sticking his small head out that window. The splotches don’t settle the question one way or the other, so it’s ultimately an interesting theory versus one that isn’t.

Of less debate is that the man rolling by the building in the horse-drawn hearse was embarking on one of the most restless deaths of all time. Lincoln’s funeral procession, having already proceeded through Washington, Baltimore, Harrisburg and Philadelphia, then through the streets of New York, proceeded from there through Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus and Indianapolis, in a meandering two-week trek Illinois-ward. The funeral train was mobbed at each stop, mourners lining up for miles to file somberly by his body at each public viewing. By Chicago, Lincoln’s embalmers were beginning to lose their battle with the early summer warmth. But it was an era when death was a more familiar guest than it would be to those at the cusp of the Millennium, so the throngs continued filing slowly by, kerchiefs discreetly clamped over their mouths and noses.

Lincoln’s arrival at Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery didn’t end his post-mortem wandering. He was housed in a temporary tomb while a massive permanent one was built. It took almost a decade to build it and then it turned out not to be as permanent as it should have been, with shifting ground and repair projects making it necessary to move Lincoln, repeatedly, while his former Springfield neighbors, and then their descendants, struggled to keep a roof over his head. A gang of thieves from Chicago tried to steal his body from one of its various Springfield resting places, in 1876, with the intention of holding it for ransom. They were surprised by detectives who were tipped off to the plot and were hiding within the tomb. Years of macabre paranoia followed, with the Springfieldians moving their martyred neighbor’s body to various secret hiding places in and around the tomb, again and again, with each rumor of real or imagined plots to try to steal him—seventeen distinct disinterments and re-burials, by one account. It was Lincoln’s one surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who finally insisted that his father be encased in a steel cage and buried in concrete ten feet below the tomb, beyond reach of grave robbers and poor construction. At his last reburial, in 1901, witnesses said his trademark beard still was evident. The finally-permanent tomb was a towering spire, fringed by statues of Lincoln and Civil War battle scenes. In the gold leaf-and-granite burial chamber under which Lincoln lay in cement, the wall was engraved with the words of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, uttered at Lincoln’s bedside in the moments after he died: Now He Belongs To The Ages. Though some who were there thought he said angels.

Alice looked up at the words from her spot on the floor, behind the engraved granite obelisk. The lower portion of her back rested on her blouse, spread out like a blanket under her. Her bare upper back and shoulders rested on bone-hard marble, slick now with her perspiration. Her grandmother frequently said: “Ladies don’t sweat, they perspire,” a distinction that, like so many other fussy linguistic distinctions, seemed important to her grandmother, and through the osmosis of upbringing had become somewhat important to Alice—at least judging by the way her mind kept pushing away the word “sweat.” Whatever it was, it was practically pooling on the marble floor.

Alice, still eying the words on the wall over her head, said: “How do they know he really said that?” Her voice was the sheerest of whispers, yet still bounced around the polished burial chamber like a handball.

“They don’t,” whispered Garrick, lying mostly naked next to her on the slick wet marble. “Some heard it as `angels’ instead of `ages.’ ”

“I mean, how do they have any idea at all of what he said?” said Alice. “There weren’t tape recorders. I can’t image anyone in the room was writing.” It came out wraa-ting.

Garrick, considering: “I never thought about it. Maybe some reporter made the whole thing up. Newspapers did it all the time back then.”

Alice, her bottom jaw now jutting out mischievously: “Just `back then,’ huh?”

Garrick lightly slapped her bare thigh in playful retaliation, barely making contact, but enough contact to send another frantic echo bouncing around the chamber. They both froze, wide-eyed amid the whispering granite, listening for any reaction from the darkened adjacent halls.

After the hearing early that day, Garrick had filed his report, again reaching Whitman, on the copydesk, who this time treated The Story with the unquestioned validation it merited. Garrick had been on page one every day since the first story about the traffic stop, an unbroken string of banner headlines parading daily across the news stand under the marble stairs: Tipple Fled Police!, Was Tipple Drunk?, Lawmakers Seek Tipple Impeachment!, Jamison to Defend Tipple! Garrick’s editors no longer asked him each morning if he would have something for the page, but rather they just asked how much space he needed. Everything had changed outside the Post newsroom as well. In the hallways of the Capitol, Garrick, all but invisible for most of his tenure here, now found himself stopped at every turn by a Senator or an aide or a legislative liaison. They would stop him as he crossed the rotunda, or match his steps, and ask what he’d heard, or tell him what they’d heard, or congratulate him on that day’s story. One Representative told him how he made copies of his stories to show to the constituents at town hall meetings back home, to convey how serious a matter this Tipple scandal really was. Garrick had smiled at the realization that, to his knowledge, the only person who’d ever before cut out his stories was his grandmother. Twice now, official males who were in the company of females had stopped him and bantered showily, lavishing on Garrick more familiarity than their relationship merited, putting an arm around him in one case, making clear to the watching companion that they were part of his inner circle, someone to whom Garrick Martin would reveal the latest scoop before he let the rest of the world in on it. It was perhaps the greatest validation of all: He’d become someone who men talked to in order to impress women.

Alice had appeared in his doorway as he hung up with Whitman. They shared a long, knowing stare, during which her thin black eyebrows conveyed all the validation he needed. Feeling the now-familiar warmth building, he asked: “Should we continue your tour of Springfield?” Alice, her smile rising on one side: “Let’s.”

The tomb, like the roof, like the Senate press gallery, was Garrick’s idea. Now, as before, it was not so much a plan as a series of paths of least resistance that landed them naked in a place where people usually weren’t. The greatest of that resistance—his hesitance to take her to his apartment—had grown lately, to the point that it wasn’t even a consideration to him anymore. He hated even walking in there himself. Mrs. Janovik’s silent door felt more like a tomb to him now than did this tomb. Alice hadn’t offered her own place, seeming instead to assume that he had more interesting plans. It was an assumption he’d now validated several times, and he wondered if he’d set a standard he might have trouble continuing to live up to. Just how many hallowed and somber public places were there in Springfield, he wondered, where one might safely bed down with a beautiful blonde colleague after the staff and tourists were gone? How long before one of the army of Springfield’s uniformed night watch-people at these various hallowed sites would, for once, earn his or her public salary and interrupt them? Jesus, he thought suddenly: What would the headline say?

Alice, apparently following the same line of thought, whispered: “You know, if we’re caught here, it’s not just a night in jail. It’s slinking out of the profession and probably the state.” She said it without an ounce of gravity, and without moving to dress herself.

“You never really fit in in this state anyway, Daisy,” Garrick whispered back.

He had started calling her “Daisy”—as in Duke, as in that old show about fast cars and slow accents in a small southern town—not long after she’d divulged the secret of her legacy. It became their joint secret, along with the sex, all fodder for knowing smiles across the press room coffee machine or during press conferences in the Blue Room. She’d made clear early on, calmly but unequivocally, that he was to divulge neither the legacy nor the sex, to anyone. He’d been left with the clear impression that the legacy was the more imperative secret.

Alice, looking around at the granite, said: “It’s ironic, isn’t it? All this, for a simple country lawyer?”

“He wasn’t that,” said Garrick, his eyes half closed.

Alice: “I mean, before he was president.”

“He wasn’t that before he was president, either.”

Alice tilted her head to look at him, as if waiting for a punchline. She said: “Okay, you mean he always had the potential.” It came out pah-tayn-shal.

Garrick, still looking at nothing: “No, I mean he was a corporate attorney. Or what they would call a corporate attorney today. Y’know—a hired gun. Worked for the railroads, the banks.”

After a moment, feeling the stillness, turned his head and found himself staring at a woman who was staring back for signs that she was being had.

Garrick, insistently: “He was one of the richest men in Springfield.” Then, after more skeptical silence: “He lived in a big house over on Eighth Street.” Then, with an edge of a smile: “They give tours. Maybe we should `inaugurate’ it.”

Alice didn’t look ready to inaugurate anything. She demanded: “What about all that `log cabin’ stuff?” Her thin black eyebrows where pinched close together, awaiting explanation.

“That was campaign bullshit,” said Garrick. Then, spilling into a grin: “You didn’t think Clinton invented that, right?”

His smile dropped off as he watched her look of inquiry rise into one of quiet anger. She said, evenly: “No, I didn’t think that.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean—I mean—”

“I’m not stupid, Garrick.”

“I know that.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.” She absently pulled her crumpled blouse up over her chest.

Garrick, wide-eyed, said: “I’m sorry.” Then, regrouping: “Lots of people think that stuff about him. Most do. There’s nothing stupid about thinking it.”

Alice, lying back and looking at the granite, said: “Okay.”

“I was just saying—I mean—it was politics, that’s all.”

“Okay.” And they lay silently, Garrick wondering what it was that he’d said, Alice wondering what she would say to the Ukrainian woman.

He looked down to the mostly empty press box: There was the smart-alecky black guy from public radio, along with a white reporter Flynn didn't recognize and a bored-looking cameraman. Not exactly Meet the Press down there, Flynn thought. That figured. Most of them had been too busy down in the committee hearings lately, humping Tom Jamison’s leg, to give a little attention to a story that actually mattered. Flynn tried to catch Julian Marcus’ attention, waving, tilting his head, waving some more, then waving with both hands. He thought he saw Julian make eye contact with him, but then Julian’s gaze was suddenly directed down at his notebook and now seemed glued there.

The House secretary, a middle-aged woman who looked like a school teacher, read the bill title into the record: “House Bill Forty-Seven, an act in relation to firearms.” Representative Homer, the bill sponsor, stood up, outlined the bill’s provisions into his skinny microphone, then concluded: “Ladies and gentlemen of the House, the time has come for us to stop standing in the way of the God-given right of Illinoisans to protect themselves as the founding fathers intended: with their wits, and with their guns. I ask for your `aye’ vote. Thank you.”

Flynn stood, planning to clap—no one else in the chamber appeared to be planning it, but to hell with them, this was history in the making—but he stopped as the secretary again leaned into her microphone, and said: “We have Floor Amendment One, offered by Representative Weinberg.”

Flynn looked to Homer, and found Homer was looking around behind himself, clearly surprised. Flynn watched, breathing out audibly, as Representative Stuart Weinberg—all hundred-and-seventy years of him, or however the fuck the old he was—rose from his desk with all the speed and urgency of a sprouting blade of grass. Representative Homer was glaring, and Flynn was glaring, and wondering how the hell Homer had let this happen. Weinberg, that fossil! That liberal old fart! Flynn had never met him and didn’t have to. He knew well who he was. Who didn’t know? Hang around the Capitol making bad law for a couple centuries and of course people will know who you are. He was Stu Weinberg, one of the original Mayor Daley’s guys, liberal lion of the House, and he was on the wrong damned side of every issue that came down the pike!

Representative Homer said, into his microphone: “Madam Secretary, I wasn’t aware of this floor amendment. In any case, the supporters of this bill like it just the way it is. Perhaps if the gentleman from Cook would be good enough to withdraw this amendment, I’d be willing to work with him separately on whatever his issue is—” Flynn watched the secretary make eye contact with Representative Weinberg. He watched Weinberg’s eyelids drop halfway down, watched a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head, a subtle but unmistakable directive to the secretary. Weinberg had a look in his eye that reminded Flynn of the still, glassy look that a hunter gets just before pulling the trigger. Watching the exchange, Flynn’s extremities felt cold.

The secretary said: “I’m sorry, Representative Homer, the floor amendment is in order. Representative Weinberg, you may proceed.”

Weinberg: “Thank you, Madam Secretary.

Homer: “But Madam Secretary, we haven’t even seen—!”

Weinberg talking loudly over him: “Ladies and gentlemen of the House. As you know, I am fundamentally opposed to the dangerous idea of letting any fool in the state of Illinois walk around with a loaded gun tucked in his belt. However—and maybe this is just me getting mellow in my old age—I’ve been touched by the heartfelt fervor of the bill’s supporters, and I’ve decided not to stand in their way.”

Flynn looked hopefully at Homer. Homer didn’t look hopeful at all. He looked like prey resigned to its fate.

Weinberg said: “In fact, I’d like to offer a provision which, I hope, will make the bill better, by improving an area of our statutes which, like Mr. Homer’s love of guns, is part of our state’s character and legacy.” A maddening pause. Then: “Madam Secretary, Floor Amendment One to House Bill Forty-Seven would designate the ratite as the official state bird of Illinois.”

Flynn struggled to make sense of what he’d heard—Red tights? He was aware of a rising chorus of chuckles from the House floor. He looked down to the press box. The two reporters were chuckling as well as they wrote in their notebooks.

“Ratites,” repeated Representative Homer, not chuckling in the slightest. Then, with something like exhaustion: “Representative Weinberg, are you talking about ostriches?”

“I believe ostriches are part of the ratite order of birds, yes, Representative,” said Weinberg, above a new round of chuckles. “And, I might add, an important part of Illinois’ agricultural economy.”

Homer, his voice confidential, said into his microphone: “Stu, what are you doing? We can’t make the ostrich the state bird of Illinois.”

The chuckles on the floor were springing into full-blown laughter now. Flynn was on his feet, glaring. This was Weinberg’s poison pill? The state bird? Who cared? Why was Homer fighting him on this?

Homer, his fury rising amid the rising laughter, said: “Madam Secretary, this amendment is clearly a poison pill, designed to kill this important legislation, and it’s not germane to the topic, and I demand that it be removed from the bill!—”

Flynn heard himself say, quietly: “Who cares? Pass the bill.” Then he said it again, louder.

Weinberg, reading from his notes, nearly lost in the waves of laughter from the floor now: “The ratite is a proud, industrious, and, yes, spunky bird. It’s also the tallest bird, befitting the grand stature of our state—”

Homer, heat rising in his voice: “Representative Weinberg, we cannot make the ostrich the state bird of Illinois! We’ll be the laughingstock of the country!”

Flynn, bellowing from the gallery now through cupped hands: “Who cares? Pass the bill!”

Weinberg said: “Representative Homer, I understand that you may have a few pig farmers in your district. And I know that, given the sorry state of pig-ostrich relations in Illinois lately”—the laughter was now at top volume, all but drowning out the principle debaters—“they might not necessarily embrace this important amendment. However—”

Homer, livid: “I have a few thousand pig farmers in my district, and you know that, Representative, and I am not making the ostrich the state bird of Illinois!”

Flynn was yelling now, frantic and throaty, his voice echoing off the sculptured ceiling, as two uniformed doormen lurched their way through the maze of empty seats to reach him: “Pass the bill! Pass the bill! Pass the goddamned bill!—”

Slavic Succubus Pleads For Son

It would be almost another one-hundred years before the wide green sweep of the mansion’s lawn would again host a serious presidential aspirant: Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, who in the early 1950s would conduct summer news conferences with sweating, fedora-clad reporters from around the country, sitting on wooden chairs under the elms, drinking vodka-lemonades, the mansion’s grand portico framing the scene behind them for the photographers. The nation’s media liked Stevenson, more than the nation’s voters did, as it turned out. Then there was Governor Thomas “Big Tom” Jamison, whose seemingly endless flirtation with a national run regularly drew the nation’s media back to the portico at Fifth and Jackson streets. The fedoras had fallen out of fashion by then but the drinks hadn’t. The nation’s media came away from Springfield each time well-fed and lubricated but without a new candidate in tow. If they resented Jamison’s quadrennial tease-fest, the resentment didn’t show up in their stories, which were always infused with well-researched references to Lincoln and poetic descriptions of the mansion’s grand portico. Had the reporters bothered looking back after they’d left, they might have noticed how much their stories about Jamison not running for president elevated him at the polls each time he ran for governor.

Now state Representative Jeremy Rock, also known as The Inmate, stood at the grand portico, his eyes fixed on the eyes of the young white guard at the door, daring him to look away. Rock had forgotten his invitation to the luncheon, or so he told the guard. He had, fact, left the invitation on his desk back at the Capitol, deliberately. Layered invitations with archaic type stamped deeply into the thick paper under an artist’s rendering of the Executive Mansion were among those things that Rock categorized as veneer: glossy slick surface coverings designed to obscure the reality of who the oppressed were and how they were to be treated, to give both oppressed and oppressor permission to set aside their roles and pretend they were unaffected by a reality that in fact defined them both. Rock’s life had been full of veneer since arriving in the Legislature a decade earlier: the richly appointed office in the Capitol, the wide polished desk on the House floor, equal to the inch with the other one-hundred-seventeen desks, the formal deference from staff and colleagues and lobbyists and media, the staid and color-blind title—The Honorable State Representative Jeremy Rock, Democrat, Seventh Legislative District—all of it designed to give the oppressors around him permission to step outside the rigid rules they themselves had created, to treat him as something other than a menacing black man, and then to pat themselves on the back for their evolution. He didn’t like giving them that pass, nor taking it for himself. It was the reason he eschewed the colorful neckties that were then in style, in favor of plain black bow ties: to show respect for his office without obediently wearing their veneer. For a decade Rock had listened to the thick white clerk of the House introduce him regally in floor debate as The Gentleman From Cook, and for a decade Rock had amused himself by imagining what different titles the clerk would certainly assign to him were he looking at him across a deserted parking garage instead of the velvet and mahogany of the House floor. Cover him in the veneer—the House floor desk and the title and the invitation with his name stamped into it—and he’s The Gentleman From Cook. Remove that veneer, and they stop him at the door. As the young guard was hesitantly doing now.

“I’m sorry, sir. If you could just run back to the Capitol and get the invitation—” said the guard. He spoke quietly and pleadingly.

“I don’t believe this,” said Rock.

The guard: “I’m just doing my job.”

“Your job is to harass an elected representative of the people?”

“Sir, I can’t let anyone in without an invitation.”

“There’s three-hundred people in there. You’re telling me every single one of them has his invitation with him?”

“Um—yes sir.” The guard withered under Rock’s glare, then added: “I mean, if you at least had some kind of identification—”

Rock: “I told you, I left my wallet.” A long pause. Then, confidentially: “What’s really going on here, man?”

The guard, panic rising in his eyes: “ `Going on’? I’m sorry?”

“Let me rephrase: You don’t think I know what’s going on here? You think it’s just a coincidence that of all these people, the only one who has any problem getting in here is—well, you know.” Then, a cold, closed smile.

The guard, paling: “Sir, I assure you—it’s just, the invitation—I mean, technically, I don’t even know who you are—”

“I am Illinois State Representative Jeremy Rock, Democrat, Seventh Legislative District.”

The guard, breathing raggedly, eyes wide, nodded and repeated: “ . . . Seventh District—”

“I have served five consecutive terms. I’m assistant majority leader. I’m chairman of the Urban Affairs Committee.”

The guard nodded again, then said, again: “Seventh District.” In his numb panic, he seemed fixated on that information, as if it was the district that was at issue: Well, as long as he’s not from the Eighth . . .

Rock, with finality: “The Governor is expecting me in there. I can either walk in and shake his hand, or I can turn around and walk back to my office and call him and ask him just what kind of show he’s running here.” Then: “What’s it going to be?”

The guard stared at him as if waiting for a third choice. Then he looked off toward the Capitol dome, wistfully, thinking how near yet how far was an engraved piece of paper that would solve everything. Then he looked over his shoulder inside the mansion, to the colorful neckties and dress skirts standing in small groups and murmuring meaninglessly amid the strains of a recorded string quartet.

Then, as if turning back time and restarting the conversation from the moment Rock had approached the portico, the young guard stepped aside and said: “Good afternoon, Representative. Go right in.”

Going in meant traversing an Antebellum architectural maze: past the grand foyer, up the oval staircase, through the formal sitting room, past a dining table longer than the entirety of some homes—you had to walk along the whole thing, all fifty or so feet of it—then down a side-hall, past a small roped-off study, and into a ballroom with several dozen round linen-covered tables packed in tightly. Garrick Martin had walked into the mansion, not routinely but often enough that he couldn’t have said how many times he’d been there, and the it was the walking that always affected him. There was something cinematic about the whole long, twisting process of walking in. He always felt like there should be credits rolling as he walked.

Walking past the study affected him most, a picture-postcard of a study, with its dark polished wood, a fireplace that was never lit, high leather chairs that were never sat in, high straight rows of books that were never opened. An ivory-white bust of Lincoln stood on a pedestal near the bookcase, where it would have been an obstruction to anyone who might, in theory, attempt to pull down one of the books. A burgundy velvet rope spanned the width of the open doorway, confirming the sense that this wasn’t so much a study as a museum exhibit of a study. Garrick understood, in a vaguely instinctive way, that the grandeur of official government settings like this one—which came in various architectural styles but always whispered Ancient Greece—had a point, beyond hubris: that rich wood and polished brass and luminous marble and rows and rows of thick serious books lent an air of permanence and civilization and elevated thought to the institution of government, an inspiring standard for a public that was too often subjected to leaders who were less than inspiring. Of course, modern governmental leaders no longer did their actual governing from polished, archaic studies like this one. They lived and worked in the modern world like everyone else, florescent lights overhead and vinyl under their feet and computers increasingly within reach at every turn. What modern leader had time to sink into a big leather chair in front of a fireplace tucked away in some dark woody room, book in hand, thinking big thoughts? The dark woody rooms were kept polished and displayed, doors propped open, a nod to those inspiring old standards of permanence and civilization and so forth. But the velvet rope across the doorway—universal symbol for: This is just to look at—obliterated whatever remaining pretense there might have been about the purpose of the room. The leaders weren’t even pretending anymore that this was the kind of place where they went to think and govern and lead, their decisions infused with ancient Grecian wisdom. Which made Garrick wonder if it might not be a better idea, inspiration-wise, to just close the doors.

Past the study, in the ballroom, Garrick and the other guests were packed in around the linen-covered tables, talking softly, cowed by the grandeur of the place and the exclusivity of the event. It was the Governor’s Annual Media Luncheon, as specified on the thick stamped paper invitations, and more media guests of honor were on hand than anyone could remember from years past—newspaper reporters, television reporters, camera-people and radio people and people whose media weren’t altogether clear, the Internet blurring the lines as it increasingly did these days. There were scores of them, journalists and quasi-journalists. Anyone who didn’t know what was going on down the street, under the silver Capitol mushroom cloud in the distance, might wonder how it was that so many media people from all over Illinois had the time and desire to travel to the middle of the state to gather with a governor who didn’t like them, to eat scant portions of dry lemon chicken with rubbery broccoli and ice tea without a thimbleful of alcohol in evidence anywhere. In fact, they hadn’t come merely from all over the state and they hadn’t come for the lemon chicken. They came, from all over America, to let America see justice meted out to the man who had caused so many Americans to gasp and shake their heads and pull their kids close while watching that now-infamous video clip. The imagery of the weeping Baby John reaching for his frantic mother as he was pulled into the green van had flickered all over America and beyond. The crime now had a genuine villain, facing a trial, of sorts. Chief Judge James D. Tipple’s dour face and acidic demeanor seemed to have been sent right down from central casting. Put together, it all provided the chance to see what television drama viewers got to see all the time but that news consumers usually didn’t: justice.

Of course, not all media outlets could afford to park a reporter in Springfield, Illinois, for however long it would take to see justice—news-gathering budgets everywhere were shriveling like prunes—but those that could, did. While they were here, they had to eat, not an enviable task in Springfield, they quickly learned. An invitation to eat in a governor’s mansion, any governor’s mansion, still appealed to even the more jaded journalists among them. It was one of perks of the profession that most of them coveted more than they would readily acknowledge—not eating the food per se, but opening the thick layered invitations, walking the elm-shaded winding brick path up to the portico, climbing the oval staircase, scooting up to the linen and silver and dinner plates adorned with the official state seal, their cameo backed by delicate music. The veneer. A few of the more seasoned of them looked around at the polished wood and the linen and the rest and remembered traveling here before, some years back, to write about Big Tom Jamison not running for president—memories that triggered oddly sudden twinges of hunger. Some of them recalled in this staid setting a few memorably lively parties. Though this clearly wasn’t one of them.

Worm, glumly, picking at his lemon chicken, said: “Jamison used to grill steaks.”

Larry “Shiny” O’Shaughnessey, ever the optimist, said: “The chicken isn’t bad. If you squeeze the lemon over it first—”

Zack Carson, looking off: “Hey, don’t look, but that New York Times guy is here.” The reporters in attendance immediately twisted and looked—Garrick, Shiny, even Claire, who’d been as silent and distracted as Garrick had ever seen her—except Worm, who obstinately looked in the exact opposite direction, which happened to be toward the wall. Worm, to the wall, echoing nasally: “ `That New York Times guy is here.’ ” Then: “You two want to be alone, Zack?” Most of them took it as something of a compliment that the national media had descended upon Springfield for the impeachment hearings, but to Worm it was an invasion. His crabbiness at having his beat invaded was exacerbated by the lemon chicken, a tepid dry mockery of the juicy hot steak a la Jamison that Worm recalled, dreamily, each time he looked around at the polished wood of the banquet room, full now of unfamiliar reporters from all over the country and a few from other countries. Governor John Bell sat at the head table, staff and lawmakers around him, looking like an agreeable imposter of himself. The trademark scowl that Bell usually wore in the presence of the reporters was missing, and in fact he looked more pleased than Garrick had thought it possible for him to look. Garrick studied the pleased look and pondered, with something like amazement, whether Bell actually thought that he was the reason all these national reporters were here.

The New York Times guy, Cobble, was at another of the tables, across the room. Garrick had last seen him the morning Baby John was taken. He had tried that day to imagine Cobble’s life, but it came easier to him now—what with Garrick himself having experienced lately what it was like to be the reporter that all the other reporters were talking about. That wasn’t the same as working for The New York Times, he supposed, but then, Cobble didn’t break the story of Tipple’s arrest, did he? Now, as then, Garrick noticed that Cobble was dressed less like a reporter than a politician, or a businessman. His suit was a suit—slacks and a jacket of the exact same material, a serious-looking tie that accented that material, shoes that reflected light—rather than a loose confederacy of different types of clothing trying to appear suit-like but not fooling anyone. Garrick wondered if Cobble and his colleagues were required to dress that well—if there was, like, a rule about it (It has to be an actual suit, not just khakis from one place and an off-the-rack jacket from another, and no black gym shoes!)—or if the same traits that caused a person to rise to the pinnacle of journalism also caused that person to want to dress in a real suit. Despite Garrick’s best efforts to remain unimpressed, he found Cobble’s suit—or at least the fact that it was a suit—impressive.

Conversation at the table focused on the coming testimony of the police officer who had pulled Tipple over. Garrick asked Claire: “Are you going to be there?” Something about the way she’d checked out of the conversation made him ask. Claire, looking around the table as if having just woken her up, said: “No. I’m going down to Tamms tonight.” Then: “I’m covering the execution.” She took a moment to assess their soundless reactions, which were roughly equivalent to how they might have reacted had she told them she planned on rocketing into space later that day. Zack Carson and Larry O’Shaughnessey stared neutrally, trying to process. Worm had a confrontational but confused expression on his face, as if he was sure there was something here to argue about but he hadn’t worked it out yet. Garrick's expression was shock with a hint of revelation, and Claire found herself wishing right then that she’d not told him about Anna.

Lately Anna had become, to Claire, a ghost. Not some metaphorical version of the word, but the real thing: an actual figure that she saw, or thought she saw, strolling up ahead in the crowded hallways off the Capitol rotunda, or in the reflections of windows in committee rooms, then transforming instantly into staffers or colleagues or tourists when Claire turned to look. Anna, who had exited Claire’s life so long ago, now seemed to be always on the edge of her sight. The rational part of Claire’s mind told her that the approaching execution of the murderous albino Bard Connor and her decision to witness it—death death death—had merely pushed memories of Anna to the forefront. The less-rational parts of her mind entertained other theories, which she quickly learned to push out of her thought process, as they tended to come at night. Claire reminded herself that she wasn’t a flake—that whatever the exact opposite of a flake was, that’s what she was—and that imagining your dead sister peeking around corners or hanging out at the office coffee machine was, by definition, flaky. She had willed herself to ignore some pretty startling Anna appearances in the previous days, to stare them down until they morphed into bureaucrats or Democrats or, in one case, a tall potted fern adorning the House minority leader’s front lobby. In those rare tired wee-hour moments when Claire let herself engage in a little flakiness, she wondered if Anna wanted her to see Connor die, or was telling her she shouldn’t. Even as Claire went quietly about arranging the thing, she was uncomfortable with her desire to watch a life end. It felt pornographic, the only word she could think of.

Worm, finally finding his voice, now laced with disapproval, demanded of Claire: “You’re skipping out on the biggest political story of the year? To go watch them fry some dirtbag?”

Shiny offered, helpfully: “Actually, they use lethal injection.”

Worm: “Jesus, Claire, where are your priorities?” The heat of his diatribe dissipated harmlessly, everyone at the table understanding that Worm’s problem wasn’t that Claire was covering the execution, but that Worm hadn’t thought to get in on it himself.

It was then that state Representative Jeremy “The Inmate” Rock appeared before the table, blank-faced, silently waiting for a lull in the conversation. The lull came at once. To the reporters, as to Rock’s legislative colleagues, Rock was inscrutable and vaguely menacing, though he’d never to anyone’s knowledge done anything in his post-incarceration life to merit the menace. It wasn’t his race—or at least not entirely his race. There were plenty of black lawmakers who presented the reporters with no more mystery or menace than any other baby-kissing politician. Julian Marcus never appeared any more comfortable around Rock than were any of his white fellow reporters. It was, more than anything, Rock’s demeanor that caused the lull, a common response around the Capitol to the Democrat from the Seventh Legislative District. Rock carried with him an air of judgment, not toward any particular person but toward the very Springfield culture in which they all stewed together like some bland broth. For the politicians and reporters and the rest, navigating Springfield was, at base, an art of self-deception—about the reality of who they were, about the importance of what they did—and Rock had a disquieting way of thwarting self-deception with little more than a stoic pause.

Rock said, to the group: “Good afternoon.” Then, to Garrick: “Mr. Martin. May I have a word?”

Now Garrick the Giant-Killer rose from his chair—more slowly and showily than he really had to, it seemed to Worm—to walk off confidentially with yet another politician. Worm had watched variations of the process around committee hearings and in the rotunda in the previous week: Garrick Martin, of all people, getting pulled into this corner or that by some lawmaker or staffer. The officials would murmur importantly to him, looking as if they were earnestly selling something. Garrick would nod without commitment, looking off while considering their presentation. Amazing, Worm had marveled lately, how quickly Garrick had gone from a second-stringer like most of them (maybe a little further back on the bench than most of them, truth be told), to the guy who gets called into the game at every play. It was Harvey-like; it was Claire-like. To Worm, it was deeply annoying. He looked at Claire, wondering if at least she was feeling even more insulted by the slight than the rest of them—she who, at any given table of reporters, would usually be the one expected to get pulled aside and whispered to. If Claire was bothered by the demotion, it didn’t show. She was staring off for no apparent reason at a tall thin bookcase in a far corner of the room, staring at it with an intensity that Worm found oddly creepy.

Garrick followed Rock to the adjacent hallway. Rock stopped, randomly, in front of the doorway to the dark wood study, its burgundy velvet rope framing the scene inside like a still-life portrait. Garrick glanced in and pondered the bone-white bust of Lincoln as Rock produced a small bundle of papers from inside his coat jacket. Rock said: “This is the arrest report. From the night they pulled over the judge.”

Garrick stared skeptically at the papers. “I thought there was no arrest report,” he said.

“That’s what the police chief told reporters,” said Rock. “He was a more forthcoming with those of us who have subpoena power.” He looked down at the papers in his hand as if they were some exotic animal. “Only the impeachment committee members have seen it.”

Garrick reached for the papers. Rock pulled them away, and produced with his other hand a second folded bundle. “This is the auditor’s report on public housing in Illinois,” he said. “It shows that the state has been systematically underfunding the people who need help the most. You may have heard about it?” Garrick had. He remembered a stack of auditor’s public housing reports sitting on the press room lobby counter the previous week. He remembered noticing the stack didn’t get any shorter for the day or two it was there.

Rock said: “It’s a story no one is telling.”

Garrick: That’s because it’s boring. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Rock: “Page one.”

Garrick studied Rock’s face, trying to make sure he understood what he was hearing. Not only was The Inmate offering a hot story in blatant exchange for getting a cold one into print—the kind of deal-making that, in truth, went on all the time between reporters and politicians, though generally with a more comfortable buffer of subtlety than this—but he also was demanding a guarantee of how it would be played. Garrick said: “I don’t have any say over where the stories go, Representative.”

Rock said, mildly: “Bullshit.”

“I don’t. The editors place the stories.”

“And you yank the editors’ chains, just like we used to yank the guards’ chains in lockup. So yank ’em. Tell them how all your competitors are working on the public housing story and you’ll look bad if you don’t jump on it.”

“But no one is working on the public housing story.”

Rock, without levity, said: “When did you become so concerned with the truth, Mr. Martin?”

Garrick again studied Rock’s face, again trying to confirm what he’d just heard. The blatant horse-trading was now being offered with a side of point-blank insult. Rock’s demeanor made it clear how he felt about Garrick’s story, The Story—that for all its sound and fury, it was meaningless garbage, nowhere near the importance of the unnoticed public housing audit—and he wasn’t making even a gesture of respect toward it. He wanted his all-important public housing story in print, and he was willing to offer Garrick more garbage in exchange for it, but he wasn’t willing to dress up what he was doing or how he felt about it. It was a strangely principled approach to bribery, an approach Garrick found both admirable and aggravating. He debated turning and stalking back into the ballroom without another word—he actually felt his feet starting to pivot—but then his eyes dropped again to the arrest report in Rock’s hand. He pictured dialing Helen Heston’s number, hearing her pick up, saying to her, casually: Guess what I’ve got? . . .

Garrick said: “Fine, I’ll get the housing story in, and I’ll see what I can do about page one.”

He again reached for the arrest report. Rock again pulled it back, and said: “With graphics.”

Garrick, exasperated: “I can’t promise graphics!”

Rock considered it a moment, then handed Garrick both bundles of papers. Then he turned without another word and walked away, leaving Garrick frantically flipping through the arrest report, the housing audit tucked under his arm, the bust of Lincoln looking on.
An hour later, a young Illinois state computer technician named Amanda Rose sat before The Ad-Hoc Joint Judicial Impeachment Committee of the Illinois House and Senate in Room One-Twelve, trying to stop her foot from bouncing. It was an involuntary response that her body exhibited in times of stress. She couldn’t readily recall a more stressful time than the current one in her twenty-three years of life, sitting before several dozen legislators and several hundred spectators. A large white display screen was set up nearby, the glowing outline of a computer screen projected onto it, cursor blinking. The computer keyboard sat in front of Rose. Former Illinois Governor Thomas R. Jamison towered before her. “Ms. Rose,” he said, “you are the technician who discovered the alleged pornography in Justice Tipple’s state computer?”

Rose, tensely: “Yes.”

“You’re pretty familiar with the Internet?”

Rose, warming: “Oh yes. I do most of my work through the web, I socialize there, I shop there. I guess you could say I live my life on the Internet.”

In the audience, Julian Marcus leaned over to Kyle “Spock” Harpinger and whispered: “Fun date.” Spock nodded absently without looking up from the device in his palm.

Jamison said: “Ms. Rose, is it safe to say that for people of a certain age—say, the age of Justice Tipple and me—the `information highway’ is a strange and confusing place?”

Rose, gravely: “I’m sad to say that’s probably true.”

“It would be pretty easy for people like Justice Tipple and me to get a complicated web address slightly wrong, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m sure that happens.”

“And what happens if you get that address wrong?”

Rose, as if she’d just been asked which direction was up, said: “Well—it sends you to the wrong web page.”

“And it loads a page on your computer that you hadn’t intended?”

Rose, after pausing a moment to consider whether she was being asked a trick question: “Yes.”

“Even if it’s just a couple letters that are wrong, out of dozens of them?”

“Yes.”

Jamison stepped back to his table, picked up a piece of paper, and handed it to Rose. “Ms. Rose,” he said, “could you type this address onto the screen for us?”

On the screen, a website showing a photograph of a law book slowly assembled itself, under the bold white words: Law on the Web. Other headlines began appearing under it: Modern Issues of Probate, Examining the Long-Term Implications of Tort Reform, and Divorce and Precedent.

Jamison, looking at the screen, read aloud: “ ` Examining the Long-Term Implications of Tort Reform.’ ” A casual swivel toward the audience, a dramatic pause. Then: “Pretty hot stuff!”

Jamison walked back toward Rose as laughter rippled through the audience. He said: “Is this pornography, Ms. Rose?”

Rose, lightly: “Not even close.” She’d been loosened by the audience’s laughter and now an echo of it bounced through the room.

Jamison: “Ms. Rose, what are the sixth and seventh letters on this web address?”

Rose, reading from the projected screen after pausing to count: “ `A’ and `J’. “

“Would you please invert those letters—make it `J,’ and then `A’—and then reload the page?”

Rose stared at him, a stare that said: Seriously? Her brow was pinched in what Julian Marcus immediately recognized as dawning revelation. Julian wasn’t getting any revelation himself—he had no idea why Jamison was ordering the re-jumbling of the jumbled letters on the web address—but Kyle “Spock” Harpinger, too, wore the look of someone to whom it all suddenly made sense. Spock whispered through an uncharacteristically animated grin: “No way!”

Julian watched as the technician did as she was told and inverted the letters, the keyboard clacking briefly. Jamison didn’t watch the screen, but turned his back to it and stepped away from it, standing a few feet from Julian and Spock and looking out over the audience with a small, knowing smile on his face. Julian had heard it said that a good lawyer never asked a question to which he didn’t already know the answer, and it was clear to him now that Jamison knew what the clacking would bring to the screen before it did. What it brought to the screen—slowly, line by line, like a curtain languidly opening—was a photograph of a mostly naked woman, dressed in high heels and leather straps, holding some kind of vaguely medieval implement of war in her hand and glaring menacingly into the camera. Words superimposed above her spelled out: Heather’s House of Discipline. A collective gasp rose from the audience, joined by almost all except the reporters, who were writing, and Jamison, who was still standing with his back to the screen, surveying the crowd with the same small, knowing smile on his lips. After a moment, he turned the smile onto Julian and Spock and nodded slightly and whispered: “Gentlemen.” Then, to their stunned stares: “Are we seeing creamy white thighs?”

A click, and then her hollow voice: “Helen Heston.”

Garrick, savoring, said: “Guess what I’ve got?” He reveled in the now-familiar thrill running through his body, that cat-like twitching, as he told Helen about the arrest report. The dynamic between him and Helen had shifted along with the rest of the universe since The Story had started. She no longer treated him like a child who had failed to live up to the parent’s ambition. She seldom fluttered at him anymore. Now, even to Helen, he was Garrick the Giant-Killer. She listened in respectful silence as he outlined what he had. Then she said: “Excellent. How’d you get it?”

Garrick, importantly: “A source close to the committee. That’s all we can say.”

“Excellent.”

Garrick paused and then, as casually as he could, said: “There’s something else. A state auditor’s report. About how Illinois has been shortchanging public housing.”

Helen paused in confused silence. Then: “Wait—how is this tied into Tipple?”

“It isn’t. It’s just a good story I came across. I can whip it up by tomorrow without too much—”

Helen, interrupting, edge in her voice, said: “Garrick, we need you to stay on the Tipple thing, not breaking off on some food-stamp story.”

“Public housing.”

“Whatever. We don’t have time for it right now. Put it in a drawer, write it when the Tipple thing is over.” The edge in her voice made clear that pushing it further might ignite a flutter.

Garrick shrugged inwardly, thinking: I tried. It wouldn’t be the first time a crass political bargain had been broken because one of the parties hadn’t stayed bought. Representative Rock would be angry, but what was he going to do, complain to the paper that Garrick had failed to plant a story according to a politician’s demands? Garrick simply had nothing vested in Rock’s public housing story, other than a promise to try to get it into print. He’d tried.

But then he realized, to his surprise, that he actually did have something vested: his pride. Yank their chains, Rock had told him, and only now did Garrick understand that the directive was a randy little compliment, built upon the assumption that Garrick could reach through his phone line up to the Peoria news room and bend his editors to his will. And why not? He was Garrick the Giant-Killer, the political reporter who had written the story that the whole state and a good portion of the nation’s media was following, a political reporter to be reckoned with. Yank their chains. It was what prompted Garrick to press ahead with the effort: He could live with Rock’s anger, but he wasn’t keen on the idea of allowing Rock to believe that Garrick didn’t have the political muscle to yank their chains.

Garrick said into the phone: “Okay. I’m sure the Herald won’t go with it too soon.” A calculated pause. Then: “Well, pretty sure.”

Helen, suddenly interested, said: “The Herald? What about them?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“Garrick. What.”

“It’s just that I overheard Harvey telling his desk about the public housing audit. Sounded like a pretty involved discussion, like they might be playing it up.” Garrick studied her intrigued silence, weighing the moment like a poker player weighing the bet. Then, going all in: “I heard Harvey say something about graphics.”

Helen, after another beat of intrigued silence, said: “Can we get graphics?”

“I thought we were putting it in a drawer.”

“Public housing is an important issue, Garrick. When can you have something on it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’ll push for page one.”
* * *
`Baby John’ Judge Wasn’t Drunk

By Larry O’Shaughnessey

UNI Springfield Bureau

SPRINGFIELD, Ill.—The historic impeachment case against Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice James Tipple hit a snag for the second straight day Wednesday, as a police officer admitted on the stand that Tipple’s blood-alcohol level after his arrest was a mere .01 percent—far below the legal limit of .08.

In testimony before The Ad-Hoc Joint Judicial Impeachment Committee of the Illinois House and Senate, Pekin, Ill., patrolman Eric Wiss admitted that after arresting Tipple on suspicion of driving under the influence, his blood-alcohol reading came back as about the equivalent of taking a teaspoon of cough syrup.

“Could you say that louder please?” asked Tipple’s attorney, former Gov. Thomas R. Jamison, after Wiss quietly responded to the question about Tipple’s blood-alcohol level.

“Point-zero-one,” Wiss said, louder, prompting audible gasps from the audience in the committee hearing room.

Under intense questioning from Jamison, Wiss also acknowledged that he’s unsure Tipple was attempting to flee during the traffic stop in Pekin in January, one of the key allegations against him.

Wiss said Tipple was “belligerent and angry” during the stop. “He kept saying, `You are hassling me,’ ” Wiss said from the witness stand.

At that point, Jamison nodded and thanked Wiss for his time. When Wiss started to leave the stand, Jamison demanded to know where he was going.

“You said I could go,” Wiss said.

“I said no such thing,” Jamison responded. “I just thanked you.” Jamison then asked if it was possible that such a misunderstanding is what led to allegations that Tipple had attempted to flee.

“I suppose it’s possible,” Wiss answered, prompting a second round of audible gasps in the hearing room . . .

Harvey, without introduction: “Your source told me Tipple was drunk!”

McGruder’s voice: “Calm down—”

“You calm down! I could be looking at a libel suit here, McGruder!”

“Don’t say my name!” Then: “He wasn’t drunk?”

Harvey, calming with effort: “It just came out in the hearing. He blew a zero-one on the breathalyzer.”

McGruder: “Zero-one?” Then: “Wait—so that’s . . . how much?”

“Cough-drop territory! Jesus! The guy was dry and now I’m fucked!” Harvey moved to shove the bulky beige computer off his desk as he said it, then was seized just in time with a girding thought of its expense, so he shoved off that day’s Chicago Herald instead. It fluttered benignly to the floor.

“Harvey, just calm down—”

“You tell me to calm down one more time and I’ll kill you with a pencil!” He kicked wildly at the dissembled newspaper on the floor. It floated apart like a dispersing dandelion. “What the fuck, McGruder! Do you have any idea—”

“Don’t say my name!”

“—what kind of scrutiny I’m under?” Then, nearly bellowing: “Do you know who I am?!”

McGruder’s voice, defensive and panicked: “Everyone said he was soused! Maybe there was something wrong with the machine—”

Harvey, incredulous: “ `Something wrong with the machine’? I’m supposed to go with that? Christ, McGruder!”

“Don’t say my name!”

Harvey, wide-eyed and furious, shrieked into the mouthpiece: “McGruder! McGruder! McGruder!”

Harvey stood looking at the dead phone, considering whether to throw it. Instead he slammed it home to the cradle. A moment later, as if in protest, it rang. He stared, knowing. Then he picked up the receiver and raised it to his head as if it was loaded. He said: “Herald, Rathbone.”

Marilyn’s voice, on fire: “Tipple wasn’t drunk?!”

“Marilyn—I’m still trying to figure out what happened.”

“We said he was drunk and now the wires are saying he wasn’t, that’s what happened! What the fuck, Harvey?!”

“It’s still unclear.”

“What’s unclear?”

Harvey, considering—then plunging in: “I’ve got a source who says there was something wrong with the machine . . .”

The state Capitol was the first thing Alice could see of Springfield on the horizon as she drove in from the north, its silver dome hovering in the dusk like an antique sunset. She’d been with Garrick there, in that bell-shaped dome. Been with, slept with, had him, pick your euphemism. She was her grandmother’s girl—modest, demure, civilized—so the blunter, more accurate verbs weren’t ever going to work. But they hadn’t made love, either, so that particular euphemism was out. Been with would have to suffice to tell a story that, she understood now, was over.

There was no anger in the conclusion, no regret, no sadness. Just conclusion. Garrick Martin had been a quirky little mystery, and then the moment had come when the mystery was solved. And her focus had turned to a new story: the story of a gaunt, teary mother whose words she could barely decipher.

The Ukrainian woman’s face had looked as anguished as any Alice had ever seen, so much so that she wondered initially if she misunderstood the story. This was, after all, the winner in the tug-of-war over a little boy: his biological mother, who’d given him up quietly in a hospital at birth and three years later took him back publicly with the world watching. True, she’d been excoriated in the global media as a heartless Slavic succubus, allowing her baby to sink into a life better than the one she could offer him, then yanking him from it just as he was old enough to feel the loss of what he’d briefly had. Still, she’d won. Her prize sat near her on the burgundy couch, calmly playing with his toys. She’d won. So why did her face hold terror so stark that it was burned into Alice’s retinas now like the afterglow of a flashbulb?

Alice had fidgeted on the couch during the whole interview, feeling like a child herself, which was fitting, because the couch reminded her of her childhood: Sheathed in deep burgundy velvet, faded and splotchy now, its former grandeur turned quaint with age. Alice could barely understand the woman, so thick was her accent, accented doubly by the tears that lingered around the edge of her voice. It was like listening to jibberish underwater. The big lighted camera—or perhaps her big cameraman, Carl—intimidated the woman to the point that she almost couldn’t stop looking at them. Her English was so tentative that she repeatedly gave up on direct communication with Alice, opting instead to convey her tortured thoughts to her heavyset husband in cement-like Ukrainian, with the husband then re-conveying to the attorney in broken English, and the attorney passing it on to Alice in deadly-flat Midwestern. Alice was reminded of that grade school communications game in which a message is whispered at one end of a line and re-whispered again and again until the last person receives it, mangled beyond recognition.

The message here, though, was clear even through the liquid-voiced language barrier: “My son!” The woman said it, urgently, at several points, stopping to put a hand on the boy’s head as he played on the velvet couch next to her: “My son!”

Alice knew well the answer to that entreaty, and had come to the interview ready to ask it: Then why did you give him up in the first place? she didn’t ask. And: Why did you only come back into his life when he had already started his life somewhere else?, she also didn’t ask. And: If you love him, why did you put him through that trauma that we all watched? she completely failed to ask. They were the right questions, the questions that were the whole point of the interview, yet each time she started to ask them, she would look into the woman’s wet terrified eyes and the questions would lodge in her throat like a reluctant sneeze that she couldn’t bring out. Instead, she just let the woman talk, with no challenge or guidance or structure—an unforgivable journalistic lapse anyway, and more so when the woman doing the unfettered talking was for the most part incomprehensible. Alice wondered whether there was any possibility at all that WDNC-TV of Decatur, Ill., had anyone on staff who could decipher Ukrain-glish, so they could at least offer subtitles to the viewers.

The woman excused herself at one point, waiting for Alice to assent before leaving, and then edging out of the room almost facing her, as if leaving a royal court in which turning one’s back was not allowed. Alice’s thin black eyebrows scrunched in confusion at that. It was, literally, the strangest way she’d ever seen anyone exit a room. She looked to the lawyer with the open question on her face, and he shrugged and said: “She’s afraid.”

Alice: “Of me?” He nodded. Alice: “Why?”

“She’s not convinced that the court’s decision is final. She’s afraid you’ll have him removed.”

“But I have nothing to do with—”

“I’ve tried to explain that to her,” said the lawyer, nodding. “It’s different where she’s from. The media is a branch of the government. It’s the reason she insisted on talking to you—so you’ll let him stay.”

The woman reappeared, carrying an armload of newspapers. She laid them out on the coffee table in front of Alice like a sacrificial offering—Chicago Heralds mostly, with a few Chicago Sun-Timeses and Springfield Register-Journals and USA Todays and one New York Times thrown in. All displayed breathless page-one stories revolving around the little boy who was currently pushing a green plastic tractor along the smooth velvet surface of the couch and making a tractor-noise with his lips. Some of the front pages carried the now-iconic photo of Baby John reaching for his adoptive mother as the police pulled them apart. The headlines were variations of a fairytale nightmare: Crying Baby Dragged to his Doom, they all might as well have said. Alice wondered whether the woman could read English.

The woman said, urgently: “Dees stries don tellin trufe!”

The lawyer, translating: “ ‘These stories aren’t true.’ ”

Alice didn’t point out that the stories said that the boy was removed from the only home he’d ever known, and that that was undeniably true. She understood that it wasn’t the facts of the event to which the woman was objecting, but the implication of villainy on the part of the boy’s biological parents. The woman said, with as much desperation as Alice thought she’d ever heard: “Ayme loove on my son!”

The lawyer: “ `I love my son.’ ”

The woman, her hand on the boy’s head, her wet eyes boring in on Alice: “My son!”

The Capitol dome loomed closer now, like one of those surreally large African sunsets that Alice would see in the National Geographic magazines that her grandmother kept stacked neatly in the cubby next to the stairwell in the house in Mississippi. Her grandmother, who had worried that all her painstaking lessons to Alice about living in a civilized manner in this uncivilized world might be undone by the uncivilized profession her granddaughter had chosen. There’d been some conflict about it then. Not loud or even direct conflict—that wasn’t their way—but conflict nonetheless. It was in fact the closest thing they'd ever had to a fight: a fight of silence, the only kind of fight it would have been conceivable for them to have. Her grandmother had never said it plainly but the message was clear, offered around the edges of a dozen conversations. Watching a White House news conference on television, she'd say: “It is so rude the way they shout at the President. Ah don't especially like th' man, but he is the President.” Reading newspapers, she'd say: “Whah is it anyone's business what that Senatah does on his vacation?” Alice meekly conjured up a few half-hearted arguments about the watchdog function of the media, the vanguard of democracy, but each time they turned on the television, the journalists' behavior didn't help her case. Vanguard of democracy or not, it was rude, her grandmother clearly believed; it was vulgar. Once, in what appeared to be a case of gamely trying to meet her halfway, her grandmother suggested she be one of those pretty TV women who give the weather. She grinned widely and said excitedly, as if it was a shared epiphany: “Weather-people don't hurt anyone!”

Toward the end of college, when Alice announced that she had in fact settled once and for all on a choice of career—television journalist, and no, not the ones who give the weather—her grandmother had said: “Are you sure? It seems so—” She hadn’t said base, but that was the next word, the college-aged Alice was certain. Alice deliberately didn’t call her for three weeks after that, and when she finally did, her grandmother gingerly asked about her grades and about her holiday availability, avoiding altogether the uncomfortable issue of her base career choice. Alice said: “I got a job at the TV station in Jackson,” flinging down the words like a gauntlet. In response, her grandmother issued an obligatory congratulation, and asked some obligatory questions about the job, and then told her, with no hint of obligation, that she missed her. God how she loved her.

“Ayme loove on my son!” the woman said, crying the words as much as speaking them.

Alice was aware of a tingling below her stomach during the whole exchange, intensifying when the lawyer confirmed that the woman was terrified of her. It wasn’t merely nerves, she realized now, and it wasn’t anything so noble as sympathy. She looked again at the looming Capitol dome and cleared her throat and tried to banish the feeling from her body. The tingling had a warm, red, almost-sexual edge to it. She felt powerful, an unaccountable feeling to arise from another’s terror. In hindsight, it troubled Alice deeply—not just the woman’s terror, but her own reaction to it. It wasn’t something she ever wanted to feel again.