Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

The first had come when Kathy was seven. She had a vivid memory of two policemen knocking on the front door, rattling the antique etched-glass panels, and her mother collapsing a few minutes later. The officers brought word that Joey, then eighteen and a freshman at Harvard, had been killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking to his dorm with some friends after a late movie.

The loss of her older son left Anne McGovern helpless for a year. But Kathy remembered her father’s strength. They mourned Joey and buried him, and when it was over, Joseph put his wife to bed and gathered his remaining children around him. He told them something Kathy never forgot: “You have lost a brother, and your mother and I have lost a son. We all loved Joey very much. None of us will ever forget him, nor should we. But his life is over. Ours are not. There is a time to stop and grieve, and there is a time to live and move on. I believe our time has come to move on.”

The second tragedy struck eight years later, when Joseph and Anne were sailing with friends off Race Point on Cape Cod and were caught in a thunderstorm. Although they were all expert sailors aboard a craft that could easily weather such squalls, lightning struck the mainmast, breaking off a two-and-a-half-foot section that struck Anne McGovern in the back of the neck. She lived for three days in a coma before losing the battle for her life. Again there was a period of mourning, and again Kathy watched her father pick up the pieces of a shattered life and move on.

With Kelly going to graduate school at the University of Virginia and Jonathan about to become a junior at Harvard, Kathy’s goal that summer had been to convince her father she could run the household and steer her life. It devastated her when he told her in mid-August she must enroll at St. Martin’s Academy for Girls in Stockbridge.

When she challenged him, Joseph assured her he wasn’t acting out of a lack of confidence, but because of enormous confidence that she could handle the separation. His business affairs were thriving in Europe and the Middle East, necessitating his being out of the country for long periods. He said he had no qualms about leaving her on her own for a few days, but weeks and months at a time was a different matter. The family housekeeper could look after her material needs, but her emotional and spiritual needs demanded professional oversight.

When she started to cry, her father told her to take control, to exact maximum benefit from her environment, to grow, to learn, to gain perspective and insight, to set firm goals and pursue them with single-minded purpose.

With gentle counseling from the nuns, who had been warned of the situation, Kathy got through the first year, unhappy but with grudging acceptance. Her father called at least once a week, no matter where he was in the world, and she always projected the strong stoicism she knew he expected. In spring, Joseph took her back to the Boston house, and they shared a wonderful summer. He made arrangements to stay in the city most of the time, and on those occasions when he had to leave for a few days, he underscored his faith in Kathy by leaving her in charge of herself while the housekeeper kept track of the more mundane things, like groceries. By the end of August, when the time came to return to Stockbridge, Kathy had developed a taste for independence, and the discipline endemic to a Catholic girls’ school was anathema to her.

She would always remember her three years at St. Martin’s as the most patronizing of her life and, in a way, the most valuable. She’d entered the school already possessing self-reliance. Three years in the smothering bosom of the Church taught her patience and diplomacy, the skills she prized most highly as she became committed to politics.

That had happened while Kathy was at Boston College and had become immersed in the first Senate campaign of thirty-four-year-old Hugh Green. She joined his staff in mid-July, and a month later showed such promise as an organizer that she was put in charge of the Green Machine, the young people willing to do anything to elect their man, even taking on such unappreciated jobs as door-to-door canvassing and election-day transportation to the polls for the elderly. Green was an easy winner in November, and after the victory party on election night, the senator-elect invited her to seek him out in Washington when she graduated.

She took him up on it, and he needed her. She had a knack for constituent service, and the staff Green put together to do that vital work was in disarray. She took the job with relish and had remarkably quick success. Six years later, when she was a legislative assistant, she took an unpaid leave from Green’s Washington office to serve as deputy chairman of his successful reelection campaign. A year later she became his administrative assistant, the number-one staff assignment. She chaired his next reelection effort, and he gained a larger plurality than he’d had in the first two races. That he was headed for the White House in six years—earlier if President Cordell Hollander’s current administration didn’t shape up—appeared inevitable. That Kathy McGovern would help put him there and gain an office and a stature of her own, appeared inevitable as well.

Joseph McGovern, now seventy-three, still lived in the same house on River Street. At sixty-five, he met and married Jennifer Wheaton, the widow of a Boston investment counselor. Joseph still kept up an incredible business and social pace. He said he had no intention of retiring or dying until he’d amassed a fortune vast enough to ensure the future of at least a dozen grandchildren, preferably two dozen. Although he surely had done that years before, he repeated the vow each time his own children suggested he think about slowing down.

Kelly had married an English import-export broker. They maintained homes in London and New York, and Joseph saw his two grandsons by that marriage several times a year. At forty-two, it was unlikely that Kelly was thinking about bearing more children. Jonathan was—had been—the chief economist for the Chicago brokerage firm of Lane, Ross & McReedy. His wife Betsy was the hostess of a local television talk show. They had one daughter, with another child on the way, and they had assured Joseph constantly that they wanted a big family. Had Jonny lived, they might have kept that promise. Although he was forty, Betsy was thirty-three and could have had three or four more children had she wanted to. Now, of course, there would be no more.

Kathy had never married, and at the age of thirty-seven in Washington, D.C., a city where it was said single women outnumber single men six to one, her chances were not getting better. She’d had several relationships, one of which was especially promising. The end of that affair three years earlier left her in emotional shambles, but even her closest friends saw only glimpses of her pain. Within a week, Kathy had pulled herself together and refocused on the future. The thought of never marrying occurred to her occasionally. It bothered her only when she imagined being alone during old age, and then it bothered her a lot. But no one knew.

In truth, she’d been happy over the years with the status quo. She had a great career with an unlimited future. Her father’s formula worked for her.

Until Steven Pace changed all the equations.

He divided her loyalties, diverted her attention. He became more compelling for her than her work, more important than her professional future. She always had been able to do as her father taught her, but the formula failed when she and Steve became involved. Without realizing it, she had pushed the relationship aside. Now she was having new doubts as her feelings for Steve grew again. And she was far from over Jonathan’s death. Her emotions were a jumble. She felt she was losing her focus, and she was not handling well that loss of singular purpose.