The Prodigal Daughter (59 page)

Later that
night, Florentyna held a rally in Manchester which over three thousand people
attended. When Janet told her that tomorrow she would be about one fiftieth of
the way through the campaign, Florentyna replied, “Or already finished.” She
went to her motel room a little after midnight followed by the camera crews of
CBS, NBC, ABC and Cable News and four agents of the Secret Service, all of whom
were convinced she was going to win.

The voters of
New Hampshire woke up to drifting snow and icy winds.

Florentyna spent
the day driving from polling place to polling place thanking the party faithful
until the last poll closed. At eleven minutes past nine, CBS was the first to
tell the national audience that the turnout was estimated at fortyseven
percent, which Dan Rather considered high in view of the weather conditions.
The early voting pattern showed that the pollsters had proved right: Florentyna
and Pete Parkin were running neck and neck, each taking over the lead during
the night but never by more than a couple of percentage points. Florentyna sat
in her motel room with Edward, Janet, her closest staffers and two Secret
Service agents, watching the final results come in.

“The outcome
couldn’t have been closer if they had planned it,” said Jessica Savitch, who
announced the result first for NBC. “Senator Kane thirty point five, Vice
President Parkin thirty point two, Senator Bill Bradley sixteen point four
peycent and the rest of the votes scattered among five others who in my opii
ion,” added Savitch, “needn’t bother to book a hotel room to- the next
primary.”

“If tie re6ult
of the New Hampshire primary turns out to be satisfiictorv Florentyna left for
Massachusetts with 6 delegates committed to hen. Pete Parkin had 5. The
national press declared no winner but five losers. Only three candidates were
seen in Massachusetts, and Florentyna seemed to have buried the bogey that as a
woman she couldn’t be a serious contender.

In Massachusetts
she had fourteen days to capture as many of
the I
I I
delegates as possible, and here her work pattern hardly varied. Each day she
would carry out the s chedule that Edward had organized for her, a program
which ensured that the candidate saw as many voters as possible and found some
way to get onto the morning or evening news.

Florentyna posed
with babies, union leaders and Italian restaurateurs; she ate scallops,
linguine, Portuguese sweet bread and cranberries; she rode the MTA, the
Nantucket ferry and the Alameda bus line the length of the Mass Pike; she
jogged on beaches, hiked in the gerkshires and shopped in Boston’s Quincy
Market, all in an effort to prove she had the stamina of any man. Nursing her
aching body in a hot tub, she came to the conclusion that had her father
remained in Russia, her route to the Presidency of the USSR couldn’t have been
any harder.

In
Massachusetts, Florentyna held off Pete Parkin for a second time, taking 47
delegates to the Vice President’s 39. The same day in Vermont, she captured 8
of the state’s 12 delegates. Because of the upsets already achieved by
Florentyna, the political pollsters were saying that more people were answering
“Yes” when asked “Could a woman win the Presidential election?” But even she
was amused when she read that 5 percent of the voters had not realized that
Senator Kane was a woman. The press was quick to point out that her next big
test would be in the South, where the Florida, Georgia and Alabama primaries
all fell on the same day. If she could hold on there she had
a
rcal chance, because the Democratic race had become a private battle between
herself and the Vice President. Bill Bradley, having secured only I I percent
of the votes in Massachusetts, had dropped out because of lack of funds,
although his name remained on the ballot in several states and no one doubted
he would be a serious candidate sometime in the future. Bradley had been
Florentyna’s first choice as running mate, and she already had the New Jersey
senator on her short list for consideration for Vice President.

When the Florida
ballots were counted, it came as no surprise that the Vice President had taken
62 of the 100 delegates, and he repeated the trend in Georgia by winning 40 to
23,, followed by Alabama, where he captured 28 of the 45 voters, but Pete
Parkin was not, as he had promised the press, “trouncing the little lady when
she puts her elegant toes in the South.-

Parkin was
increasingly trying to outdo Florentyna as a champion of the military, but his
choice of legislation setting up the so-called “Fort Gringo Line” along the
Mexican-American border was beginning to rebound.
on
him in the Southwest, where he had imagined he was unbeatable.

Edward and his
team were now working several primaries ahead as they criss-crossed the country
back and forth; Florentyna thanked heaven for her ample campaign funds as the
Learjet touched down in state after state. Her energy remained boundless and if
anything it was the Vice President who began to stammer and sound tired and
hoarse at the end of each day. Both candidates had to fit in trips to San Juan,
and when Puerto Rico held its primary in mid-March, 25 of the 41 delegates
favored Florentyna. Two days later, she arrived back in her home state for the
Illinois primary, trailing Parkin 164 to 194.

The Windy City
came to a standstill as its inhabitants welcomed their favorite daughter,
giving her every one of the 179 Illinois delegates so that she went back into
the lead with 343 committed delegates. However, when they moved on to New York,
Connecticut, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Vice President eroded the lead
until he arrived in Texas trailing by only 591 to Florentyna’s 655.

No one was
surprised when Pete Parkin took 100 percent of the delegates in his home state;
they hadn’t had a President since Lyndon Baines Johnson and the male half of
Texas believed that while J. R. Ewing might have had his faults, he had been
right about a woman’s place being in the home. The Vice President left his
ranch outside Houston with a lead of 743 to Florentyna’s’655.

Traveling around
the country under such tremendous daily pressure, both candidates found an
off-the-cuff remark or an unwary comment could easily turn out to be tomorrow’s
headline. Pete Parkin was the first to make a gaffe when he got Peru mixed up
with Paraguay, and the photographers went wild when he rode through Flint in a
chauffeured Mercedes on one of his motorcades. Nor was Florentyna without her
mishaps. In Alabama, when asked if she would consider a black running mate as
Vice President, she replied, “Of course, I’ve already considered the idea.” It
took repeated statements to persuade the press that she had not already invited
one of America’s black leaders to join her ticket.

Her biggest
mistake, however, was in Virginia. She addressed the University
of
Virginia Law School on the parole system and the changes
she would like to make if she became President. The speech had been written and
researched for her by one of the staffers in Washington who had been with Flo-

362 THE PRomAL
DAUGHTM rentyna in her days as a congresswoman. She read the text through
carefully the night before, making only a few minor changes, admiring the way
the piece had been put together, and delivered the speech to a crowded hall of
law students who received it enthusiastically. When she left for an evening
meeting of the Charlottesville Rotary Club to talk on the problems facing
cattle farmers, she dismissed all thought of the earlier speech until site mad
the local paper the next morning during breakfast at the Boar’s Head Inn.

The Richmond
News-Leader came out with a story that all the national pitpers picked up
immediately. A local journalist covering the biggest scoop of his life
suggested that Florentyna’s speech was outstanding because it had been written
by one of Senatot Kane’s most trusted staff members, Allen Clar ence, who was
an ex-convict himself, having been given a sixmonth jail sentence with a year’s
probation before going to work for Florentyna. Few of the papers pointed out
that the offense had been
drunken
driving without a
license and that Clarence had been released on appeal after three months. When
questioned by the press on what she intended to do about Clarence, she said,
“Nothing.”

Edward told her
that she must fire him immediately, however unfair it might seem, because those
sections of the press who were against her-not to mention Pete Parkin-were
having a field day repeating that one of her most trusted staff members was an
ex-con. “Can you imagine who will be running the jails in this country if that
woman is elected?” became Parkin’s hourly off-the-cuff remark. Eventually, Allen
Clarence voluntarily resigned, but by then the damage had been done. By the
time the two candidates reached California, Pete Parkin had increased his lead,
with 991 delegates to Florentyna’s 883.

When Florentyna
arrived in San Francisco, Bella was there to meet her at the airport. She might
have put on thirty years, but she still hadn’t lost any pounds.
By her side stood Claude, one enormous son and one skinny daughter.
Bella ran toward Florentyna the moment she saw her, only to be blocked by burly
Secret Service agents. She was rescued by a hug from the candidate. “I’ve never
seen anything like her,” said one of the Secret Service men. “She could
kickstart a Jumbo.” Hundreds of people stood at the perimeter of the tarmac
chanting “President Kane” and Florentyna, accompanied by Bella, walked straight
over to them. Hands flew in Florentyna’s direction, a reaction that never
failed to lift her spirits. The placards mad Califomia for Kane” and for the
fnst time the majority of the crowd was made up of men. When she turned to
leave them and go into the terminal she saw scrawled all over the side of a
wall in red, “Do you want a Polack bitch for President?” and underneath, in
white, “Yes.”

Bella, now the
headmistress of one of the largest schools in Califomia, had also, after
Florentyna had won a seat in the Senate, become the city’s Democmtic committee
chairwoman.

“I always knew
you would run for President, so I thought I had better make certain of San
Francisco.”

Bella did make
certain, with her 1,000 so-called volunteers banging on every door.
California’s split personality --- con servative in the south, liberal in the
north-made it difficult to be the kind of centrist candidate Florentyna wanted
to be.

But her
efficiency, compassion and intelligence converted even some of the most
hardened Marin County left-wingers and Orange County Birchers. San Francisco’s
turnout was second only to Chicago’s. Florentyna wished she had fifty-one
Bellas because the vote in San Francisco was enough to give her 69 percent of
the state. It had been Bella who had made it possible for Florentyna to look
forward to arriving in Detroit for the convention with 128 more delegates than
Parkin.

Over a
celebration dinner, Bella wamed Florentyna that the biggest problem she was
facing was not “I’ll never vote for a woman” but “She has too much money.”

“Not that old
chestnut. I can’t do any more about that,” said Florentyna.

“I’ve already
put my own Baron stock into the foundation.”

“That’s the
point-no one knows what the foundation does. I realize it helps children in
some way, but how many children, and how much money is involved?”

“The trust last
year spent over three million dollars on three thousand one hundred and twelve
immigrants from underprivileged backgrounds. Added to that, four hundred and
two gifted children won Remagen scholarships to American universities and one
went on to be the foundation’s first Rhodes Scholar and will soon
be
on his way to Oxford.”

“I wasn’t aware
of that,” said Bella, “but I’m continually reminded that Pete Parkin built a
feeble little library for the University of Texas at Austin. And he’s made sure
the building is as well known as the Widener Library at Harvard.”

“So what (to you
feel Florentyna should be doing?” asked Edward.

“Why don”t you
let Professor Ferpozzi hold his own press conference? He’s a man the public
will take notice of. After that everyone will know that Florentyna Kane cares
about other people and spends her own money on them to prove it.”

The next day,
Edward worked on placing articles in selected publications and organized a
press conference. They resulted in a small piece in most journals and
newspapers, but People magazine did a cover picture of Florentyna with Albert
Schmidt, -the Remagen Rhodes Scholar. When it was discovered that Albert was a
German immigrant whose grandparents had fled from Europe after escaping from a
prisoner-of-war camp, David Hartman interviewed Albert the next day on “Good
Morning, America.” After that he seemed to be getting more publicity than
Florentyna.

On her way back
to Washington that weekend, Florentyna heard that the governor of Colorado,
whom she had never particularly considered a friend or political ally, had
endorsed her without advance warning at a solar-energy symposium in Boulder.
Her approach to industry and conservation, he told the convention, offered the
resource-rich western states their best hope for the future.

That day ended
on an even brighter note when Reuters tapped out the news right across America
that the Welfare Department had delivered its first major report since the
implementation of the Kane Act. For the first time since Florentyna’s overhaul
of the social service system, the welfare recipients leaving the register in a
given year had surpassed the number of new applicants coming on.