FLEMING,” it read. She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift back in time to the day when all of this had begun.
She remembered the boyish face of Clay Randall, drawing her into the lonely dunes of East Beach on Chappaquiddick. The sand had blown with such fierceness that she had suggested turning back, but he had led her into a lee with a view of the Atlantic, and she had relented. Then the blanket came out, and the bags of red grapes and cheese. After that came the poetry and the kissing and the hands that had disregarded the boundaries of her bikini, causing her to squirm and protest, then to slap him in the face. She had nearly escaped. But nearly was not enough. Afterward, through a veil of tears, she had whispered: “Why?” Clay had looked her up and down and sneered: “You know you wanted it.” Ten days later she had summoned the courage to tell her father. She could still hear his words if she listened closely enough: “It sounds like the two of you had a misunderstanding. I think it’s best that you forget about it and go on with your life.”
The next forty minutes in the hearing room passed in a blur—the noisy admission of the media; the assembling of the photographers; the arrival of the other panelists, including Frieda Caraway, aglitter with diamonds; the dance of congressional aides and security officials; the entry of Senator Hartman, followed by a steady trickle of other members; the sudden appearance of Jack Fleming with his senior aides a few minutes after two o’clock; and, finally, Hartman’s long-winded introduction. Zoe endured all of it with a deliberate composure that belied her nervousness. Even the confident smile she gave her father was a fleeting thing.
As the chairman concluded his remarks, Zoe blinked away the glare of the lights and glanced at Frieda Caraway beside her. The actress was seated primly, her posture erect and her face impassive despite the cameras trained on her. For a moment, Zoe imagined her mother sitting there, and asked the question again: How would you handle this?
Suddenly, Zoe heard her name.
“Ms. Fleming,” Senator Hartman said, “the committee is grateful for your excellent article in the New Yorker and for your deep personal commitment to the poor and vulnerable around the world. We welcome your remarks.”
Zoe hesitated for a moment, her mind distracted by the cameras. Then the words came to her without thought. “Senator Hartman, members of the committee, I’m honored to be here with you today. My mother, Catherine Sorenson-Fleming—whom many of you knew—dedicated her life to the proposition on the seal behind you. ‘E Pluribus Unum’—’Out of many, one.’ She saw America and the globalizing world as a melting pot united by more than the sum of what divides us. But she was not a utopian. She understood the power—and to some extent the inevitability—of the age-old distinctions in human society. She didn’t believe that the world should become homogeneous, but she did believe passionately in two notions—justice and generosity.”
Zoe looked at the senators around the dais. “I could speak to you today about justice—economic justice between the rich world and the poor world, about the moral obligations created by centuries of slavery, colonialism, and avarice. But if I took that approach I would disparage my mother’s legacy. I would rather talk to you about generosity. Unlike justice, generosity isn’t hard to define. When confronted by the one who has not, the one who has either offers a helping hand or walks by. We all know the kindness of the Good Samaritan and the parsimony of the priest and the Levite who preceded him. The difference could not be starker.”
Zoe took a breath. “When I was six years old, my mother took me to Africa for the first time. We stayed with a diplomat in Nairobi who lived in a bungalow built by the British. My first memories of the continent came from the lush gardens in his backyard. Then we went into Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slum communities, and I met children who had nothing. Actually, they had less than nothing—they had disease, dead parents, polluted water, nutrition-depleted food. I didn’t know what I could do to change their circumstances. But I knew one thing instinctively—the only thing separating me from them was the accident of birth.”