“I would like to have the nominees stand as they are announced,” Andrei went on. “Please hold your response until they all have been named. Oh—and I should also tell you these candidates have been approved by the National Advisory Committee, the office of the national adviser, and your own area senators and representatives to the National Congress.”
When he read the first four names, the only one Amanda recognized was William Smith, the governor of Missouri and a none-too-popular one at that. The others must have been local PPP types in their own regions, Amanda thought. None of them got a particularly noteworthy introduction, until Andrei got around to the final nominee.
“Now, last but not least,” Andrei was saying, “I give you a brilliant local leader, one of the rising stars of the Heartland…”
He paused for dramatic effect. The crowd’s interest was piqued, because Andrei had already lavished more praise and enthusiasm in that simple preface than he had on all of the others combined.
“…my good friend, the county administrator of Milford County, Nebraska, Mr. Peter Bradford.” Amanda spun around, shocked. Peter avoided her eyes as he stood and turned to Andrei, who timed his own applause with Peter’s rising. Marion Andrews, seated at the next table, stood and applauded, and within seconds the entire room was standing, applauding. Amanda watched in disbelief as her husband, stiff and uncertain at first, began to warm to the ovation, beginning to grin and to wave back at the crowd as if the applause were intended solely for him—and indeed it seemed as if it were. Peter held out his hand to Amanda and she realized to her horror that she was expected to join him. Dazed, she stood up and forced a smile as the cheers washed over them.
She looked up at Peter in profile, an arm’s length from him but feeling a million miles away. To Amanda, he had never looked more handsome or self-confident. Looking around at the faces in the warmly applauding crowd, she knew in one awful instant that her honest, decent husband had never been more fulfilled in his life.
He looked like a politician.
Amanda wanted to cry.
Chapter 5
Amanda awoke early from a brief and troubled sleep. She looked over at Peter sleeping peacefully, his tranquil face illuminated by the Sight of their digital clock on the nightstand.
The ride back from Omaha had been a nightmare. Her mind returned to the conversation they had in the car. Peter had started out incredibly happy, intoxicated by the ovation and all the attention, seemingly unaware of her concerns. Halfway back to Milford she found that she could contain her anger no longer.
“You knew,” she said evenly.
“Not really. I’d been told there was a possibility. I didn’t want to raise false hopes.”
“You didn’t trust me. The rest of us are involved, you know.” Her anger bit into the tension between them. “What if we don’t want to move to Chicago—or Kansas City—or wherever it would be? What if we don’t like the idea of collaborating with the Soviets?”
Peter didn’t answer. She watched him stiffen, seething silently for a moment, before he could trust himself to answer. Finally he said, “You think I’m a collaborator.”
“I—no—I don’t know. I know I don’t want you to be. It just gets confusing. Trying to hold on to values you believe in—not being sure what the difference is. Am I collaborating just because I go along with things and try to survive?”
“There’s no choice,” he said coldly.
“Isn’t there? Maybe there are little things. You know the other morning, a child was in the yard—foraging, like an animal. Cold and hungry. Her mother grabbed her away when I offered her something; she grabbed her away because of who I was. She realized I was the wife of the county administrator, and that made me a threat—an enemy.”
Peter sighed. “That’s nonsense. They just know there’s a regulation against loitering in town.” He looked at Amanda. “They get government relief.” Amanda wasn’t listening. “Do you know, I have never even been out there. I don’t even know what it’s like out there.”
“There’s a limit to what anyone can do. They’re a mixture of people—some college professors, some criminals. It’s hard to deal with them as a group. That’s why there’s the blanket policy of as little fraternization as possible. They have their own council to solve their own problems internally.”
“You make it sound so neat, so logical.”
“It is logical,” he said, watching Amanda’s face tighten. “That doesn’t mean it’s ideal.” He reached out to her, resting his right hand on her knee. “Am, I think there are a lot of things I can do something about as governor-general. There’s no place to hide. Things change; whether you want them to or not. All you can do is to see if you can influence the change, make it something better. I think I have a better chance of doing that if I’m in a position of power.” He smiled, a kind of sad, small smile. “Somebody has to be governor-general. Maybe if that somebody is me, I can figure out a way to keep our little town pretty.”
Now, lying in bed next to the man she had built a life with, she thought of Devin and what would have been if, so many years ago, she had felt and known all that was pressing on her heart tonight.
She’d known Devin Milford all her life. He and Peter had been inseparable from the first grade on. Although they’d always been friendly to her, there came a time, when she was fourteen or so—a gangly tomboy with budding breasts that she tried to ignore—when they admitted her to their world. When kids started dating, she quite naturally paired off with Peter. He was popular, a star athlete, a leader. Devin, even then, was different. He and Peter had been co-captains of the Milford Wildcats football team their senior year. But Devin kept to himself much more than Peter did. Even though others looked to him for leadership, he remained somehow aloof. He read a lot more than anyone else and had ideas that seemed strange to seniors in high school. Amanda was drawn to Devin, but there was something unsettling about him. He was always finding something wrong, something to attack. Amanda had never been critical; she liked things the way they were. She never felt uneasy at the thought of living in Milford, where she’d been born and had grown up, for the rest of her life.
Devin had been attractive, of course, lean and hard, with those dark, watchful eyes and that wide, sexy mouth. A lot of the girls were afraid of him. He had a worldly swagger to him, as though he’d formed opinions of things no one else even knew about, and that was unsettling to “nice” girls like Amanda, still a virgin when she started college after two years of going steady with Peter.
They’d all gone to the University of Nebraska. Amanda pledged Chi Omega and proudly wore Peter’s Kappa Sig pin; Devin, typically, rejected the fraternity system and took an apartment off campus. Amanda and Peter went to one party there but left early when some of Devin’s long-haired and bell-bottomed friends started smoking marijuana. Even then, Amanda realized that Devin represented a world not beyond her ken, but beyond her nerve—a world of Charlie Parker albums, vodka punch, rude but vivid talk. She was attracted by Devin’s moody isolation, his vast self-sufficiency, but they’d drifted apart in college, with different interests and different circles.
Then, the summer after her freshman year, Peter had gone off to work in the oil fields. Boys who worked double shifts were saving as much as four hundred dollars a week. Amanda had been home that summer, working in her father’s hardware store, and Devin had been home, too, shingling the barns at his father’s farm.
They talked at the Fourth of July parade and she invited him to drop by her house. He did, and the next Saturday he asked if she wanted to go fishing. There was a little lake about two miles west of the Milford farm where nobody went much, and they walked there and fished, not too seriously, and talked and joked. He told her he was thinking about enlisting in the marines, which made no sense to her at all, with so many people being killed in Vietnam. Devin said he was sick of all the controversy, from people who’d never even been there, and he thought he’d go see for himself.