Treasure Box

"Really, Tin, where will we live? Your stuff is in Virginia, and mine is still packed, my family can ship it wherever we decide to live. Have you finished your business there? Are you ready to move on?"

"I don't know," said Quentin. "I mean, that wasn't exactly a career. It was more of a pastime. I was marking time till I met you. So now... I don't know."

"It was a wonderful pastime," said Mad. "Making other people's dreams come true."

"Helping them make their own dreams come true, you mean."

"What I mean is, Tin, why stop?"

"Well, for one thing, too many of them have succeeded."

"What does that mean?"

"When I talked to my lawyer about revising my will to include you, he had me get my accountant to provide me with a complete inventory of my assets. Some of my partnerships are now worth more than the fortune I started with. My point is that I'm now rich on a whole different scale. Maybe it's time to help somebody with a truly extravagant dream."

"Who?"

"You."

She looked at him as if he were crazy. "You're my dream, and here you are."

"No, that's not what you told me. There in the garden. Under the cherry tree."

"En château de la grande dame."

"Remember? You coveted power, you said. To pick your candidates and help them get started. What you didn't have was money."

"But what do you care about politics?"

"That's why it's a partnership. You pick the candidates, I fund them."

"It doesn't work that way. There are election laws. Limitations on contributions, that sort of thing."

"We'll form PACs. Foundations. We'll contribute to local party organizations and encourage them to support the candidates we favor. Mad, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that when you have enough money the law is a reed that will always bend your way."

"You make it sound possible."

"Not only possible, but completely legal. And if we can't contribute directly, so much the better. The goal wasn't to have candidates beholden to us, was it? The idea was they should be independent and wise and sane and—telegenic, wasn't that part of it?"

"Do you mean it?" she said.

"As I said, I have co

"If only it weren't too late to choose a candidate for president."

"President schmesident," said Quentin. "We could probably make more difference if we concentrated on state legislatures."

"You're right, Tin. What I care about is finding good people and getting them started. And it might very well be state legislatures. County commissions! City councils! School boards!"

"We have our work cut out for us."

They fell back on the bed, laughing. "We sound like a silly old movie," said Quentin. "Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. 'We can put on our own election.' "

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Madeleine.

"You've never seen an Andy Hardy movie?" asked Quentin. "You can't be serious. You're—you're not even an American!"

"No, I'm just not an elderly American. You really did grow up in a time warp!"

It was only later, as she slept beside him on the plane, that it occurred to him that Wayne Read had accused him of living in a time warp, and he had never told her about that conversation. Had he?

He must say a lot of things without realizing what he was saying. Because he had never told her that "Tin" was Lizzy's nickname for him. He wasn't stupid—when she first called him that it was in the garden, under the cherry tree, and the last thing he had wanted at that moment was to get prickly and say, Don't call me that, it was my dead sister's nickname for me. And later, he didn't want her to change, it felt right having her call him that, so why would he have told her that Lizzy used that name for him? When would he ever have told her? And yet she knew. Before Mom explained, she knew.

Maybe she just put things together. Picked up clues, reached a conclusion, and then thought he had said it outright. So she was observant. He couldn't hide things from her. It was a good thing he intended to be a faithful husband.

Their new political career wasn't as easy as they had thought. Oh, their initial plan worked very well. A man of Quentin's wealth and a woman of Madeleine's beauty and grace had no trouble at all being admitted to the highest circles of political activity in either party, in any city. The trouble was that in those circles they never met anyone that fit Mad's criteria for a good candidate. That was the basic contradiction of their plan: If the ruling cliques already knew a person, he or she was already too "inside" to qualify.

They needed to find people who weren't politically aware, or at least not politically self-aware. So through the autumn of 1995 they widened their net. They established their credentials with the insiders, yes, but they also went to service organizations, to activist groups, to charities and churches; they took newspaper reporters and city bureaucrats to di

It was exhilarating work, and Quentin could see why Mad loved it, even though it wasn't something he would ever have chosen to do on his own. And watching her do it, that was almost miraculous. His money opened political doors and made campaigns possible, yes, but she was the one who persuaded these reluctant candidates, who kindled the ambition that had lain dormant within them, or had been turned outward to some cause. You can make a difference. If you don't run, who will? Instead of fighting city hall, you can be city hall—and you won't be beholden to anyone. You'll have the courage and strength that come from not caring—because you don't care whether you get reelected, do you? So you won't always have your eye on the polls—you'll be free to follow your heart and mind. And if you lose—well, you tried, didn't you, and you'll only have made more co

They bought it. They absolutely bought into her dream and made it their own and after a while the only thing that continued to surprise Quentin was how little it cost. National politics might cost millions, but local politics could still be paid for out of pocket change, as long as you had willing volunteers—and Madeleine had the knack of finding people who really could inspire others to spend hundreds of hours stuffing envelopes or knocking on doors or ma

"Mad," Quentin said to her, as they drove from the airport to his parents' house for Christmas. "Mad, this politics thing isn't working."

"Are you kidding?" she said. "I think it's going great!"

"Oh, sure, for you it's going great. But it was supposed to help me get rid of all this money, and we're just not spending it fast enough."

"That's because you're in the wrong country," said Mad. "America isn't corrupt enough yet. There are some Latin American countries where you have to compete with drug lords when you want to buy an election, and you can soak through a hundred million in no time."

"Well, I'm going to have to start another hobby. Something really expensive. Donating to universities, for instance—I hear that's a bottomless hole."