His cardiologists would no longer allow him to sail a small boat alone, but he went out often on his yacht, the Margery, both to sail and to fish. He liked to conduct business meetings aboard the boat, and didn’t care if the colleagues who attended got seasick. He felt more lucid on the water, more free of the fetters of dry land.
Judd Campbell was a self-made man, and liked people to know it. He came from an impoverished Scotch-Irish background and had made his mark on the business world as a textile manufacturer and importer before he was thirty. His patchwork empire of factories grew into a conglomerate that included everything from hotels to telephone companies. Though not a modern man by temperament, Judd saw the computer revolution coming in the 1980s and invested millions in the PC and software markets. By age fifty-five he was an institution in American business.
But he was hardly a household name. And now that age and chronic heart trouble had forced him to retire, he knew he never would be.
It was Susan who brought him the glass of dark ale. She and Michael were having dinner here tonight. Susan had arrived first, an hour ago, and was helping Ingrid in the kitchen. Michael was due before the meal was served.
‘Ah, here’s a face I can live with,’ said Judd. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’
‘Ingrid is still muttering about your ration.’ Susan smiled.
‘Let her mutter. Come here, look at your husband.’ Judd gestured to the TV screen on which Michael’s handsome face was shown.
‘I’ve seen him before.’ Susan patted her father-in-law’s shoulder. ‘Have to get back to work. How many times have you watched that thing?’
‘Never mind.’ Judd went back to his TV as Susan left the room.
Judd Campbell did not try to disguise the special feeling he had for Michael. Even as a toddler Michael had shown a kind of energy and strength that his two older siblings lacked. Judd had taken the child to his heart, teaching him to excel in everything he did. When Michael was learning to swim, to ride a bike, to throw a ball and swing a bat, Judd had repeated familiar anthems in his little ear.
‘Excellence without victory is like frosting without a cake.’
‘The man who finishes second is not a man. He is only a footnote.’
And of course the legendary Vince Lombardi maxim. Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. Judd took this as holy writ, and made sure his son heard it often.
When the boy was very small he did not seem to understand these injunctions. But as he grew older, their deeper effect made itself felt. He attained success in everything he did. Though slight of build he was a natural and graceful athlete, a student to whom high grades seemed to come naturally, a handsome young boy to whom popularity came without being sought.
When Michael became a national hero at the tender age of twenty-three for his courageous performance in the Olympics, Judd knew that the door of opportunity was open for the Campbells. Michael had all the equipment needed to make a mark on the world in a way his father had not. Michael had intelligence, ambition, guts, and – the one quality Judd lacked – charm.
For a dozen years Judd had supported his favorite son in his political career with money, contacts, and advice. They made a strong combination. Michael’s political rise had been meteoric. Unlike Judd, though, Michael did not need to make the pursuit of success a grim crusade. He had no chip on his shoulder, like the one Judd had inherited from his impoverished immigrant childhood. Instead he had a talent for diplomacy that made him many friends among political men, including those who opposed his party and his views.
It was this talent that allowed him to take in his father’s overbearing demands without being offended by them. He seemed to understand the vicarious commitment of Judd, a profoundly unsatisfied man, to Michael’s own career. He went from achievement to achievement easily, almost tenderly, as though he wanted to give his father a gift he knew Judd needed with all his heart.
Michael was the only Campbell child to possess this instinctive ability to ‘handle’ Judd. Stewart, his older brother, had attained a life of his own only at the price of leaving the family and cutting off all contact with his father. Temperamentally unsuited to the world of ambition that Judd lived for, Stewart had locked horns with Judd as a teenager. After his mother’s death their conflict had escalated into open war. Stewart stayed away after college, paid his own way through graduate school, and got a doctorate in history. Today he was a professor at Johns Hopkins. Though he lived only forty miles from Judd, he had not visited in fifteen years.
Ingrid, less willful, had remained at home, renouncing a husband and children of her own in order to care for Judd in his waning years. She was Judd’s emotional slave, though she affected the role of stern caregiver as she rationed his intake of alcohol and fought against his addiction to cigars. She also devoted herself to Michael and to Susan, whom she treated like an adored younger sister.
Judd had been ruthless as a businessman, walking over those who stood in his way and browbeating even his most loyal employees. His great downfall had been his tendency to do the same in his family. It had lost him Stewart’s love, and had reduced Ingrid to a shadow of what she might have become. But somehow Michael had survived and even flourished under his father’s stern aegis.
The only untoward incident in Michael’s otherwise normal childhood was the spinal curvature that began to afflict him in his mid-teens, a severe scoliosis that threatened more than his youthful athletic career – it actually threatened his ability to lead a normal life.
But it was precisely this challenge that brought out the killer instinct in Michael, making him into an all-American swimmer and then an Olympic champion. As an additional silver lining, it was during his convalescence after the second surgery that he began courting Susan Bellinger, a heartbreakingly pretty Wellesley freshman who came from a broken home and was working her way through college as a model.
Susan helped him recover from the surgery and watched in wonder as he went back to swimming and slowly, relentlessly pushed himself back into Olympic form. She fell in love with Michael as a weak, pain-ridden young stranger about whom she knew next to nothing. Three years later she was married to him as a celebrity. And she herself, as his attractive young wife, soon became a celebrity too.
A brilliant law student, Michael became editor of the Law Review and joined a prestigious Baltimore law firm upon his graduation. He ran for the House of Representatives four years later, and was elected to the US Senate before he reached the age of thirty. The leaders of his party quickly identified him as a rising star and even a potential standard bearer. Michael’s future looked every bit as stellar as his past.
Judd Campbell got up from his chair and stood before the TV with the remote in his hand. Judd was tall, at least six three in his stockinged feet. His hair was thinning now, with only a few touches of the old russet among the gray. His emerging forehead, high and strong, made him look as vibrant as ever. Not a few friends and colleagues had remarked over the years on his resemblance to the actor Clint Eastwood. He was a handsome man. Chronic heart disease had done nothing to dim his sex appeal.
He froze the image of Michael long enough to call into the kitchen, ‘Susie, would you bring me a bowl of peanuts?’ Susan appeared at the doorway. ‘What, Dad?’
‘Peanuts,’ Judd repeated. ‘Unsalted peanuts, for an old man.’
‘Coming up.’ She moved away along the hall. Judd’s smile lingered as he heard her light steps.
Judd loved Susan more than any woman except his late wife. When Michael had first brought her home to him – Michael still on crutches at that time, and Susan more a confidante than a love – Judd had