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he was with Martha, who seemed more agitated by the moment.
    Six years ago, on the evening they first met, Pat had felt sorry for Martha. It was just after John’s law firm had merged with Dick’s and his wife was feeling slighted at some University Club function in New York. Pat remembered talking to her softly, as the man from Mississippi was doing now. Martha, responding well that night, had called her “Patty,” something she alone in the world continued to do. Like most drunks and flamboyant people, Martha was actually, secretly, shy, whereas Pat knew herself—however unlikely it seemed—to be naturally an extrovert. She held her real self in with discipline, the same way Martha unleashed a false one with drink.
    But she had long since lost patience with Martha. It was all too much now, the late-night and early-morning calls—five a.m. tirades to Connie about one thing or another—and the
stupid
comments to the press: how Fulbright needed to be “crucified” and all the rest.
    And now Martha was coming straight toward her; the man from Mississippi helpless to stop it. “I’m going to stand beside Patty when Mr. Mitchell speaks!” Martha brayed. “That is, if he can tear himself away from one more hush-hush little huddle back there!”
    Oh, no, you’re not, thought Pat. Taking Connie by the elbow, she swerved away, as unnoticeably as she could. Together they made their way to a punch bowl. (Better to be photographed with a little crystal cup—
schoolteacher’s night out
—than that tumbler of scotch Martha had in her hand.) Martha now looked furious, well and truly snubbed. Still, she would have no choice but to keep silent, at least for a few minutes, since her husband had begun addressing the crowd of contributors.
    You be president; I’ll be secretary of state
. She remembered hearing Dick say this to John, just after the election: evidence of his esteem for Mitchell and a poignant indicator of his own real interests. But right now John looked too exhausted to be even a justice of the peace. He was probably more loaded than Martha, and he was making it through his remarks with the help of a microphone, talking about all the millions of dollars they’d taken in, as if the campaign were for cancer research or the Heart Fund, a money-raising operation that would go on forever. Back in 1960 no one had ever spoken this way. The money was handled by one or two men and went mostly undiscussed even in the press, let alone polite conversation.
    It was Reagan’s turn now. He had mounted a little box beside the poolside crowd, his skin as smooth and brown as Mitchell’s was blotchy. He was making a joke about how he wouldn’t be governor today if Lew Wasserman had done a better job getting him parts in movies. Pat threw back her head and laughed and wondered again where all the young men from the campaign kept disappearing to. Martha was right: they’d been scurrying around, nervous and gloomy, all evening. What was going on? What news had they had from Washington? Mitchell himself had once more gone back to the house after finishing his remarks, and the absence of male attention—even the man from Mississippi had vanished—was giving his wife fits.
    As Reagan went on talking, Pat wondered how Dick had spent his evening in the Bahamas, at the Abplanalps’. Probably watching a movie. The time difference made it too late to call, but she knew how the conversation would go in any case. She’d mention that Schreiber’s house was in Bel Air, and Dick’s file-card memory would pop out a recollection of their own brief time here, in ’61, between the two defeats. He’dask if she recalled the day the big fire swept through the neighborhood and he and the fellow helping him write
Six Crises
had gotten up on the roof of their rented house to hose the place down. As he told her this, he’d be silently remembering how by that point he’d already decided to run for governor in ’62, something he’d been