Cy Ogle had a big leather La-Z-Boy set up in the living room and spent much of mid-November lying in it "like a sack of shit," as he put it, recovering from a cold, watching TV, and enjoying his first chance to relax in the better part of a year. It was a wonderful time for him. He had devastated not only the opposition candidates, but also his competitors in the election business. Even the fearsome Jeremiah Freel was in jail. And besides, he was a sucker for Christmas.
After Election Day, Ogle, as leader of the transition team, declared a three-week moratorium on all official activities for the President-elect. Eleanor Richmond likewise stuck close to home - her Alexandria apartment - attending a couple of T.C. Williams football games (Harmon, Jr., had become a star punter) and shopping for inaugural clothes with her daughter, Clarice.
At the beginning of December, Ogle issued a press release listing the members of the Cozzano transition team. Ogle claimed, of course, that he had hand-picked these men, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Whoever had chosen them had done an excellent job: they were professional, experienced, nonpartisan, and classy in a nonintimidating way. They had impeccable credentials and were universally regarded as ethical and trustworthy. It was claimed that these people had spent the last year behind the scenes, working on position papers for the Cozzano campaign. This was patently untrue, but Ogle had to admit that it sounded great. All the serious press agreed, and praised the skills of the Cozzano team. The rest of the media was content with photo-ops of Cozzano and his family and entourage shoveling snow in Tuscola.
Ogle knew that the people, whose consciousness he had pummeled and abused so relentlessly for the previous year, needed a rest. They needed to concentrate on the NFL, sitcoms, and Christmas. They needed to recharge their batteries because what was to come in the Cozzano administration would be tough. A quick glance at the aforementioned position papers proved that much. The waffling and pathetic efforts of the previous administration were to be replaced by calm, cool decisiveness. No one knew what the plan was, beyond the endless evocation of the return to values, and its fiscal corollaries: cut the deficit, pay back every penny on the debt.
Ogle knew that his role in this operation would end as of January 20. He had two major tasks left to organize, and this was the kind of thing he liked best - public displays without elections. Spectacles. On December 1 he gathered his staff together to launch the final push on the Cozzano Family Christmas Special. The buildup for the special would run until December 21. He would drop names out in the media like lures for hungry trout. Names for potential cabinet officers, names for White House staff. Names for possible judicial appointments. The idea was partly to show what fine people would be working for Cozzano, partly to build up suspense for the Christmas Special, and partly to avoid the tedious and demeaning sight of wannabes trudging back and forth between the Champaign-Urbana airport and Tuscola.
Instead he had a parade of foreign dignitaries make the same trip. It looked more impressive, and the sight of Brazilians and Saudis making snowmen on the front lawn was great television. Ogle toyed endlessly with the sequence of their arrivals. He also found ways to make use of the soaring stock market, inspired by the Cozzano victory, the knowledge that the debt would not be forgiven, and all of the feel-good symbolism that was radiating from Tuscola like heat from an old-fashioned wood stove.
Starting on the twenty-first he would begin to throw more logs on the fire. Mary Catherine had taken a job at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and Dad was giving her a cozy brownstone apartment to move into; while its exact location was not mentioned, Today show viewers were given a video tour of the place, complete with blazing fires, oriental rugs, and antique furniture.
On the twenty-second an affirmation of Cozzano's strength would be made: he would do a guest shot on a special live edition of a popular woodworking show. The pipe-smoking, suspender-wearing host would interview Cozzano working in his shop, steam coming out of his mouth, as the President-elect fixed a busted chest of drawers.
Scheduled for the twenty-third was the official launch of James Cozzano's new book, Kingmakers. The Inside Stories of Ogle, Zorn, and Lefkowitz and How They Created a President. The publisher was throwing a launch party at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the park from the White House. Rich and powerful people would be present. So would TV cameras. The rave reviews had already been written.
The twenty-fourth would feature the Cozzanos at midnight mass. And the twenty-fifth would make the country feel good. Real good.
The seven weeks after the election were glorious for Mary Catherine. No more travel. Minimum of interviews, speeches and other campaign hassles. Maximum of time with Dad. Most of the time was strictly business, though. As she had been doing for the last six months, she spent several hours a day putting him through therapeutic exercises, mostly concentrating on the left hand.
She had a lot of free time. Part of it she spent hanging around with her old high-school friends and driving up to Champaign or over to Decatur for Christmas shopping. She also took up a new hobby: electronics.
She had purchased a book on the subject months ago in Boston and had been reading it in free moments, learning about all the mysterious hieroglyphs that made up a circuit diagram: resistors, capacitors, and inductors. She didn't reckon she could design her own circuits now, but she could certainly put one together from a diagram.
The week before Christmas she made a stop at the Tuscola Radio shack, which doubled as an Ace Hardware store. She picked up a set of gloves and some tools for her father, and then she went into the little nook where all of the resistors, capacitors, and inductors hung in bubble packs. Reading part numbers from a wrinkled sheet of paper she'd taken from her wallet, she selected a couple of do/en items and paid for everything in cash.
Her father already had a soldering iron, of course; he had every tool known to the industrialized world. Mary Catherine let it be known that she was going into Dad's workshop to assemble a secret Christmas present and that her privacy had better not be disturbed. She locked the door, pulled down the windowshades, and cranked up the cast-iron stove that Dad used to heat the place up. When it was warm enough that her fingers worked again, she plugged in the soldering iron and went to work, soldering the little bits and pieces from Radio Shack on to a breadboard - a slab of plastic with holes punched through it. When it was finished the whole thing fit into a black plastic box about the size of a paperback book. A toggle switch and a red light protruded from one end.
President-elect Cozzano himself seemed to blossom under the period of rest and relaxation. Aside from receiving his daily CIA briefing and eyes-only presidential briefing, he was basically on vacation. He evinced no desire to have a hand in collecting names for his cabinet, being content to work with the same corps of advisers that had brought him here. Football season blended into basketball season at Tuscola High School, and periodically Cozzano would slip out to the football field or into the gym to watch the town's young student-athletes compete.
Cozzano had developed a new passion in the last months of the campaign: Scrabble. It had been his idea that they start playing the game, but Mary Catherine encouraged it because (as she explained to her father's curious handlers) it was a great form of therapy. Because it was a word game, it helped to exercise the parts of Cozzano's brain that handled verbal communication. But because no speech was involved, it bypassed the speech centers of his brain - which were now partly silicon. Mary Catherine insisted that Cozzano play it with his left hand. At first, Cozzano had found it surprisingly difficult to persuade his left hand to spell words; the necessary neural connections had been severed by the stroke.