No Safe Place Read Free Page A

himself.
    It had first struck Clayton at the end of a long day in New Hampshire. Kerry was speaking to a small gathering at a seniorcenter. His voice was hoarse, his form a little off; realizing this, he had cut himself short and asked for questions from his audience. This feeling of contact, Clayton knew, made Kerry come alive.
    An old woman stood, her legs like sticks, so thin that Clayton found it painful to look at her. She was poor, she said, voice quavering with shame and desperation. At the end of every month, she had to choose between food and medicine.
    Her voice broke and she began sobbing, unable to continue. The only sound in the deadly silence was her keening, muffled by the hands over her face.
    An attendant started coming for her. But Kerry had stepped from behind the podium. He put his arms around the old woman, his own eyes shut now, seemingly oblivious to those around them, whispering words no one could hear. He did not appear to know or care that his speech was at an end.
    Afterward, Kerry had declined to repeat what he had said to her. It was the old woman who had told CBS. “I won’t let that happen to you,” Kerry had murmured. “I promise.”
    It was instinct, Clayton was sure—somehow Kerry had learned at forty-two to reach into his past, the fears of his own childhood, until he could feel what it was to be someone else. But the promise he made was almost breathtaking in its assurance; the clip of Kerry comforting an old woman ran on all three networks …
    “Kilcannon’s barely unspoken message,” Clayton heard the CNN reporter summarize, “is that Dick Mason is too weak, too compromised, too mortgaged to special interests to improve the lives of those who need it most. Not even yesterday’s slip of the tongue, in which Senator Kilcannon opined that an unborn fetus was a ‘life,’ seems to have affected his support among Oregon women …”
    Kerry leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes.
    He had been tired, he knew. Yesterday was one of those mornings, ever more frequent now, when his bones ached and a kind of sickening fatigue seized his entire body. His right hand was scratched and swollen from the grasping of a thousand other hands. Shaking hands along the rope line, Kerry had felt himself wince.
    Cornered by a pro-life activist in a local TV audience, Kerry had told the truth as he knew it: As a matter of policy, he was emphatically pro-choice. But it was also his personal belief, as a Roman Catholic, that a fetus was the beginning of life, and that to claim that life did not exist until three months, or six months, was splitting moral hairs.
    Watching the television, Frank Wells murmured, “You just can’t say that. Women are too frightened.”
    Kerry opened his eyes. For an unguarded moment, the sight of Frank annoyed him. With his smooth gray hair, his diplomat’s face and manner, Frank sometimes seemed to have slipped into the campaign from a drawing room in Georgetown. But he had done inspired work for virtually every prominent Democrat in the last twenty years, including James Kilcannon. Kerry felt Clayton watching him.
    “I was tired,” he said mildly. “Telling the truth is my own funny way of diverting Dick’s attention.”
    Kit Pace leaned forward, all blunt-cut hair and snub features, her stocky frame radiating the intensity of her concern. “Most of it wasn’t so bad, Kerry. But, please, eliminate the word ‘life’ from your vocabulary, so we can keep this thing a one-day story. The idea that women are taking a ‘life’ will inflame the hard-core pro-choicers and arouse the press—as you damned well know. Especially with that Boston thing this morning.”
    Slowly, Kerry nodded. “Insane,” he murmured. “Three dead people, their families. Who would do that?”
    “God knows.” Kit paused, signaling her transition to the professional. “I got out a statement right away—sympathy for the families, the appropriate measure of outrage and disbelief. That