CLOAK/2.7

Senator Isaye Addresses the Behead the First Lady Club (with excerpts)

Senator Que Isaye is invited to deliver a luncheon address to the members of the Behead the First Lady Club. Recently, after many years of membership, and somewhat more of service (she cleaned the premises for hire), his mother was made presiding secretary—and the invitation obliges her somewhat more than it rewards her only son.
Founded near the outset of the Lincoln presidency, when the subject of ransoming the freedom of five thousand slaves provoked an otherwise unrecorded schism within the local abolitionist societies, the Behead the First Lady Club is a private social organization for women. In the ground and first-floor archives of its immaculate brick bow-fronted quarters, decades of petitions, painstakingly drafted for presentation to each Congress in turn, battle for space with bound volumes of minutes and clipping files. The Club's second-floor dining room overlooks a back garden filled with budding trees; framed, along its bright walls, hang the most noteworthy of the capital's infrequent replies to the annual petitions—here and there a presidential scrawl.
The Club has proposed since its founding to set an eight-year term for the presidency, and at the end of the seventh year, at the time of the first snowfall in Washington, DC, to behead the First Lady.
Her duties, for the first seven years, shall be the dedication of public parks, the encouragement of industry in the home, the upkeep of correspondence, and the refusal of introductions. Very little travel abroad—as stated in the 1998 petition:
Flashy scandal-plagued leaders accompanied by heavily armed guards dashing through the cordoned streets of one metropolis after another disregarding every traffic regulation known to humankind—nothing new here. The question is, will we capitulate to what prevails, or set our course upon a more idealistic path?
Her function—finally—bureaucracy's transcendence.
Her execution buys the freedom of five thousand prisoners, on whose behalf petitioners—family members, lovers, friends, believers—have made successful pleas for this attention to a private charitable women's club—this Club itself, in fact, chrysalis-unbound—whose members pay a rather hefty fee for the privilege of voting, regularly, upon the candidates for pardon (the still-controversial petition of 1906 describes this as "all the suffrage we shall require"). In every state, officers of the Club are to be responsible for all the paperwork and local meeting schedules; while committees of volunteers will conduct the balloting in every neighborhood. The First Lady herself, as honorary Club president, will only vote in the event of ties.
Luncheon having concluded (dry fish, bleached green stuff, struggling in a cheesy sauce until their timely rescue by the apple crisp), the Senator's mother calls the meeting to order. It opens with brief report from the Behead the Former First Lady sub-committee:
Mamie Eisenhower never got out of bed—since then it's all pills, pills, pills.
Tough room: the atmosphere's uneasy; from the side that wants the web site, there's been a call for new blood on the Board. Membership has climbed from the usual few dozen to three hundred—nearly four, this season—new money, much of it from computers. The Newcomers' Committee reports:
As re-designed for the new world economy, the First Lady's execution could buy passage for political prisoners, her sacrifice move high courts and parliaments in other lands; used wisely, how unerring her intercession on behalf of hostages. And how buttressing to national security the ceremony's diplomatic application of mystique—capable of this, we could be capable of anything.
The Planning Committee perfects the vision of the Rose Garden ceremony. An orchestra of strings and woodwinds will play Bernstein's First Lady Concerto (a private wartime commission). The burlapped rosebushes will be mounded with fresh snow, and fresh evergreen boughs line the path up to the platform around which the leading ladies of the Club are to be seated; at their backs will hang banners—brown and gold and gray—heavy with brocaded figures of the eagle, bear, and mountain lion.
The Senator's address is well-received; and he keeps his promise to his mother, not to raise the single most perplexing question of his youth, the one she must have puzzled over during many hours of polishing and scrubbing, while her son did his homework dowm among the archives at a special little desk the ladies let him use—she always said Of Course Not but he thinks she's never known the answer—whether she'll have to pull the lever, too.