Beauty Queen

photographs. Worse, they showed her in the infidel stage, with her short bob and a too-stylish dress.
    "I'll have to change those photographs," she thought. "They are pretty scandalous."
    Inside, the office was brightly lit, but several of the desks were bare. Since her departure from politics a year ago, she had kept only a skeleton staff here. Gertrude Utley, her secretary and chief aide, was clicking away at her IBM Selectric, typing a few letters replying to ex-constituents who still wrote her about bills and issues. Gertrude was forty-seven, a Baptist of course, a slender wiry woman who favored little knit dresses and coral pins, and had visited the Holy Land three times.
    "Good morning, Jeannie," said Gertrude, getting up to brush a kiss on Jeannie's cheek. She gripped Jeannie's shoulders, looked at her searchingly, and smiled. "You're looking good."
    Jeannie grinned. "I'm feeling good," she said simply. "I'm going to run for governor."
    Gertrude let out a strangled little cry of joy. "Oh, thank God. Thank Jesus. Oh Jeannie, I've prayed so hard for you, I've prayed every way I knew how. When did you decide?"
    "Yesterday," said Jeannie. "When I opened up the Times and saw all that infidel nonsense about the homosexual bill."
    "Oh yes," said Gertrude. "Frightening and distressing, isn't it? I'm certainly glad I'm not raising children, the way the city is today. There are so many homosexuals around."
    "Of course," said Jeannie, "I'm not going to announce that I'm in the race yet. I'll do that later, after we dunk that bill in a little fire and brimstone."
    Gertrude clapped her hands like a child.
    "Oh my," she said, "the place will come to life again. It'll be nice."
    Jeannie put her briefcase down on Gertrude's desk and looked around.
    The office was crammed with file cabinets—somber dark-green classic files, battered, of every make and size. Those files were the heart of her political career. From the very beginning, as a freshman in Albany she had made her mark by introducing strong reform bills. And any success her bills had was owed to the in-depth research her people did. She had flooded the legislature with bills—pornography, court reform, prostitution, plea bargaining, drug abuse, conservation, you name it— boldly inviting no one to co-sponsor with her, earning the hostility of incumbent Governor Dulles, who resented the popular power she gained. In New York State, the governor held an autocratic power that few other states dared to give their highest office, able to govern by decree and veto. But Jeannie stirred up such popular support for some of her bills that the governor did not dare to veto them.
    Other files had yet to be transformed into bills. They waited, their folders close-packed with clippings, chapters from books, surveys, polls, interviews. She had a file there on the budget crisis in New York City, another on corruption in the Port Authority, another on wife-beating. And, of course, her homosexual file, which was about three years old. She had ordered that file begun after she learned that several states and cities had passed prohomosexual laws.
    "Well," she told Gertrude, "the first thing I'm going to do this morning is call up all the old troops and see who is available. I haven't talked to some of them for months. Wonder if Tom Winkler is even speaking to me."
    "You'll be wanting to enlarge the staff?"
    "Yes. We'll probably get volunteers right away. Meanwhile, could you—who was working on the homosexual file, anyway?"
    "Marge Lomo," said Gertrude. "I haven't heard from her in weeks."
    "Well, I'll call her and see if she wants to come back. I need a summary out of that file in a few days. I want to know who those people are, where they are, how visible they are."
    Almost breathless with haste, Jeannie signed one important letter to Speaker of the House Patton. She and Gertrude discussed and decided a few other things. Then she was off again, hailing a taxi, asking to go to her father's building on East 69th Street.
    She wondered how much money her father could be conned into putting in the campaign treasury.
    Up in her father's penthouse garden, Jeannie strode through the dappled shade of the cherry trees to the table, and kissed him resoundingly on the cheek. In one hand, she was dragging the telephone with its 100-foot cord that usually sat on an end table in the living room.
    "Good morning," he said, grinning, kissing her back. "You're in a big hurry this morning."
    "I am,"