Exchange Program
Susan Schwartz
After reading this, I will never look at politics or opera in the same way, provided that I can tell them apart.
A headache the size of her healthcare plan—no, better make that the size of the national deficit—was turning Hillary Rodham Clinton’s skull into the local percussion section. One moment, she and her staff sat reviewing policy notes as the Washington/New York Metroliner rattled along. There’d been some grouching that ice had grounded Air Force One, but the benefit at the Metropolitan Opera couldn’t very well be called on account of weather.
Her gown was hanging up, ready for her to put on about the time the train reached Trenton; and her hairdresser was heating the rollers in what was probably another futile attempt to soften her image, if not her chin line. It wasn’t as if she cared, mind you, but she had enough troubles without adding yet another Media Bad Hair Day to them. So far, so good. But, in the next moment, a WHAM that had to nave shattered every noise-pollution ordinance in the country and probably every bone in her body jolted the club car off the tracks.
In one horrible moment, she had time to review all the crazies who might want her out of the picture. Someone who probably wasn’t Secret Service snatched her up. If I see Rush Limbaugh’s puffy face, I’ll know I’m in hell. On that encouraging note, she blacked out.
“Do you think she needs something to drink?” Unmistakably, the voice was female, concerned, very young, and with a lilt in it that reminded her of the president of Iceland.
“Let her wake up first, why don’t you?”
“Why’d you have to bring her? You’re going to get us all in trouble again!”
“No one put you in charge, so there!”
“Stop pinching, or—”
“You can’t draw that in here!”
Sounds of a scuffle followed. Hillary suppressed an undignified groan—no one from Marilyn Quayle to Empress Michiko should see her at a loss, thank you very much—and opened her eyes in time to get a face full of water, dribbled onto her by a girl hardly older than Chelsea.
Thank god it was an opera, not a ballet Hillary had been scheduled to attend at the Met, or Chelsea, ballet-mad, would have pleaded to come along, and Bill would probably have leaned on her to allow it. Her eyes filled with relief. At least Chelsea was safe. She struggled to sit up. Even a whole White House staff wouldn’t be able to keep the worst of the stories of the accident away from her daughter. Chelsea would need her. Maybe she hadn’t been hurt that badly.
“Lie still,” said the first voice.
Hillary’s vision cleared. Now she would watch the scuffle—no, the scrum. She hadn’t seen that many husky, fair-haired young women . . . very young women . . . fighting since Wellesley and intramural field hockey. The undergraduates had worn short, pleated skirts and hacked violently at a ball with wooden sticks. These women, just as painfully energetic and noisy, had swords, not hockey sticks. And what was that that the youngest girly had on? A bronze training bra?
There might be some dignity in being kidnapped by terrorists, Hillary Rodham Clinton decided. But she was damned if she’d be kidnapped by the Society for Creative Anachronism. She remembered them from Wellesley: even longer hair than hers, a fondness for garish costumes, and not a sensible pre-law major in the bunch.
“Stop that! Can’t you see she’s awake?”
What had to be the weirdest field hockey team she had ever seen amused itself with a few last shoves and some nervous laughter. Having had Quite Enough of this, Hillary fixed them with the Look she had developed, perfected on her husband those painful years when he tiptoed late into the Governor’s Mansion, and used to advantage on Congress. As she expected, they subsided into whispering attention, waiting for her to speak.
She sat up. Thank you very much, she was not about to perpetrate the cliché of “Where am I?” She found her back resting against a pine tree; and wouldn’t that just snag hell out of her pink St. John jacket? The countryside reminded her of her visit with Chelsea to the Olympics. How had she gotten from the Washington corridor to Scandinavia?
Horsehooves stomped the snow-covered ground. A gust of wind, laden with salt, made her raise her head. She was near the sea, was she? Not too far away, rocks jutted out into great cliffs. She could not see the water of the sea, or the fjord, or whatever, for the giant rainbow that dominated the horizon.
She remembered the medievalist from Maine in her dorm, senior year. The woman’s notion of student activism had stopped at the Children’s Crusade, and she read a lot of Tolkien, but she had made junior Phi Bete and could spin a fine yarn when everyone was already giddy from pulling all-nighters. She had even conned Hillary into going to Boston Symphony Hall to hear that improbable woman with a face like Hillary’s own heroine Eleanor Roosevelt and a voice like nothing on earth.
If the met that the Met was going to put on Wagner—Das Rheingold, her itinerary had said—had sunk in, she’d have thought three times about going to this damned benefit. She could just see having to explain this to the FBI. “I’m not making this up, you know!” she’d tell them. That is, if she got the chance; and a terrible chill in her stomach made her realize that she wouldn’t.
If place and people reminded her of Scandinavia, her old classmate, and hearing Anna Russell retell the Ring Cycle, these noisy girls had brought her to Valhalla; and that was strictly a one-way ride.
Maybe Bill could win a second term on a sympathy vote. While that was nice, the idea of not getting to see Chelsea grow up hurt worse than the train crash that put her into this mess; and the possibility that he might set some smoking bimbo in her place really ticked her off.
Give me a minute, she wished at the seated Valkyries, who looked as if they were in their early teens. It isn’t every day that you wake up dead.
“Those noisy girls,” Anna Russell had described the Valkyries. But they weren’t noisy now. They watched her with what she identified as apprehension. Chelsea had looked that way when she’d made her pitch to keep Socks after her dog had been hit by a car, even though Chelsea knew that she and Bill were both allergic. Hillary was a sucker for kids in trouble, and these kids looked as if they’d bought themselves plenty.
How? By rescuing her? She’d be glad to go back; she had policy to push through. But there was no way she wanted to go back if it meant reconstruction in Walter Reed, or a sheet pulled over her face.
Hillary Rodham Clinton stood up, pulling the cloak on which they had placed her up around her shoulders. With the ease of years in public life, she smiled and gave each of them a handshake—firm enough, but careful of her fingers, which had to last the whole campaign.
“I thought your choices had to be strictly single sex,” she remarked, to put them off-balance and see how they’d react. As she recalled, Valhalla bore a remarkable resemblance to Dartmouth Winter Carnival.
The girls looked down at their booted feet. One or two fiddled with her weapons. One kicked at the snow.
The soprano chorus erupted again.
“It s happened before,” one of them said.
“Brunnhilde . . . she brought in . . .”
“Oh, do you remember how she could sing?”
“They could both sing. . . .” The youngest girl was crying.
“She looked nice, that Sieglinde. I liked her.”
“She was going to have a baby, and Brunnhilde took pity on her. Even if she was supposed to bring in her brother instead.”
“Wasn’t he our brother too?”
“Quiet. He’ll put you in a ring of fire too if you talk about that!”
“What does it matter, anyhow? It’s been years since spring anyway. The hall’s crowded, and do you see how Loki grins?”
Hillary almost raised a hand for quiet, but the chorus was winding up dismay loud enough to reach the highest rows of an opera house.
“If Allfather punished Brunnhilde, and she was his favorite . . .”
Hillary couldn’t quite remember what happened next. She’d been too busy laughing at Anna Russell’s words. But there was nothing funny about the tears in the youngest Valkyrie’s eyes.
Hillary put her arms about the girl. Why, for all her primitive militaristic trappings, she was scarcely older than Chelsea.
“It’s all right, honey,” she said, glad that her time in Arkansas had softened the flatness of her Midwestern birthspeech into something more like comfort. “You just cry it out, you can tell me, I have a daughter, too. Maybe I can help.”
The girl gulped and looked up. “Oh, could you?” Hillary removed the child’s absurd helmet (at least it didn’t have those preposterous phallic horns on it) and smoothed the tumbled blonde hair, even thicker and untidier than Chelsea’s after a soccer game.
Bad enough she’d found herself in an eternal version of the Ring, not Peter Pan; and she was the last person on Earth (only she wasn’t on Earth now, was she?) to play Wendy to a bunch of lost boys. But these were lost girls, and she really rather thought that the Valkyries had saved her in defiance of orders—of unjust, sexist orders—to stand in for Brunnhilde, their exiled sister.
She promised herself that she would do her best. After all, how much harder could the Father of the Norse gods be to deal with than a Republican Congress?
Heimdall wound [? I don’t know what this means. What is “wound his horn”?] his horn, and Bifrost glittered as Hillary Rodham Clinton marched into Valhalla. Her borrowed cape trailed behind her, and her Ferragamo pumps squished on the floor. Skillful questioning of her adolescent witnesses and memories of her college classmate had produced more information. Valhalla was a ong hall, wrought of wood, its beams intricately carved with beasts gripping and biting each other. Feasting boards running the length of the building were crammed now with hungry blond men. They ate with an appetite that positively made Bill look picky. Despite all the meat they were washing down with ale, they hadn’t started to acquire the gut her husband was getting on him, and it didn’t seem to hurt their arteries any. Maybe it had something to do with a warrior hero’s metabolic level, or you didn’t have to worry about cholesterol once you were dead. She had never given the matter much thought, and she didn’t think Colin Powell had, either. At least they had stacked their weapons outside. One or two slammed horns down on the board.
“Uh oh,” said the oldest remaining Valkyrie. “It was my turn to serve. See you.”
“Stay right here, young lady!” commanded the First Lady. Only women were serving, and she was certain that the trays they carried exceeded OSHA weight regulations. Besides, the Valkyries were clearly under-age—or, being immortals, were they? She noticed that the men did not harass the girls. That, at least, was something.
Valhalla’s central firepit cast its flame up into a kind of atrium (okay, so that was Roman, not Norse, but she was a lawyer, not some SCA weirdo). Nevertheless, the hall still reeked from fatty foods and secondhand smoke.
At the opposite end of the hall from the entrance where she stood, Wotan Allfather, ravens on his shoulders, slumped on his throne. Well, thank goodness, they were ravens, not spotted owls. Still, Hillary wondered if he had a permit to own wildlife. Leaning near him sat a man or god or whatever with red hair. He grinned and winked at her in a way that made Hillary wonder if he’d heard the latest Foster jokes.
Hillary handed her cloak to the youngest Valkyrie and strode forward. With no Chief of Protocol around, she’d have to wing it. She remembered how Jacqueline Kennedy had curtseyed to Prince Philip after JFK’s assassination. What was the protocol for greeting gods if you were the wife of a head of state?
Seeing a grown woman who wasn’t a Valkyrie and underage and who wasn’t a goddess, one of the warriors reached out and made a grab at her. Hillary grabbed up a drinking horn and brought it down firmly on the man’s blond head. Pity he had nothing between the ears but testosterone poisoning. He was rather a hunk, otherwise, and she had a definite yen for light-haired men.
“Straighten up, soldier?” she snapped, relishing the unfamiliar speech. “You think you’re at Tailhook? This is Valhalla, not the Las Vegas Hilton!”
The man shook his head Too many blows on the skull, Hillary decided, and too much ale or mead or whatever had made him punchy. She walked toward Allfather, nodded formally, then advanced with her best candidate’s-wife smile and handshake. The girls clustered in behind her. How sad that they were afraid of their father. Hillary only wished that she were able to see her own father again, now that she had apparently Crossed Over. She made a tart mental memo to add, in her prayers, that this was hardly her idea of heaven.
“I am Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States of America,” she announced.
“Fine. You’re not supposed to be here, but grab a pitcher and give the girls a hand,” said Loki. “After dinner, we can discuss what to do with you. I’ve got some ideas,” He leered.
The man was worse than Clarence Thomas. Hillary flared her nostrils in disgust.
“Sir, I want to talk to you about your daughters,” she said firmly. “The President and I believe that children are our most precious gift. I am very concerned about your daughters’ welfare. Where is their mother?”
“Erda?” Under the hat he had not removed in the hall, Wotan focused a bleary eye—he only had the one—upon her. “Oh, here and there. Mostly underground.”
“Are you divorced?’’
Somehow, Hillary couldn’t see Wotan having married an activist. Ever.
She stood and waited to be offered a seat. When no such offer was forthcoming, she waited Wotan out.
“Their mother . . . yes . . . we never quite got around to making things legal. But I just talked to her before the Fimbulwinter started. More bad news. She always was a downer.”
“Is there a stepmother?”
Wotan grimaced. “Not so loud, lady, please! Or we’ll have another fight on our hands. Nag nag nag. The goddess’s always right! I tell you, it’s enough to make a god pray for Ragnarok.”
Asgard trembled underfoot. Hillary heard the lashing of branches as the World-Ash creaked. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall; and down will come Asgard, Wotan and all.
“I didn’t mean it!” Wotan shouted. “Everybody eat, drink, whatever. I didn’t mean it!”
The feasting warriors pounded on the boards, waiting for the gins at Hillary’s heels to serve them. Hillary turned and shouted at them.
“Gentlemen, you’re not homeless, and this isn’t a soup kitchen. Help yourselves or take turns serving.”
The ravens squawked at her. “Oh, nevermore to you, too,” she retorted.
Behind her, a Valkyrie giggled. Wotan merely blinked.
“Siddown, lady,” said Wotan. “Loki, get up and give the lady your seat.”
“She can sit on my lap.”
“Like hell she will,” said Wotan. “You want me to call my sister?”
Loki got up fast and disappeared from the hall.
“He’s probably going to run straight to the Frost Giants and tell them I’m losing it.”
“Foreign policy isn’t my strong suit, sir,” said the First Lady. “But it might be possible to send Secretary of State Christopher out here—wherever here is—or establish diplomatic relations. Maybe NATO . . .” She was out of her depths, she knew it. However squalid this Allfather was, he was a god, the god here, and therefore her only chance to return to her world.
Again, a Valkyrie giggled. Launching itself into the smoky air, one of the ravens pecked the girl on the face, returned to Wotan’s shoulder (his cloak was white with traces of the bird’s tenancy), and began to preen its ruffled feathers. The young Valkyrie cried out as much in anger and shock as in pain.
And Hillary lost it. “This is no fit place to bring up innocent girls,” she said. “Child labor, an awful environment for their self-esteem, and too much alcohol consumed while their father abuses them and has already driven their eldest sister away.”
“That’s not all,” whispered the youngest Valkyrie. She scratched at the rim of her bronze training bra.
“If I were their mother’s lawyer, I’d advise her to sue you for custody.”
The raven uttered a shrill cry. Was it Huginn or Muninn, thought or memory—and how had Hillary remembered that? Wotan leaned forward, setting down his drinking horn.
“You’re a lawspeaker? You?”
“Yale Law,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I taught at the University of Arkansas. And I was a partner in the Rose Law Firm, Little Rock, Arkansas.”
“I can use a good lawspeaker,” said the Allfather.
Hillary thought of mentioning her hourly rate, then wondered if the Arkansas Bar had reciprocity with Asgard.
“Girls,” Wotan spoke to the Valkyries who had huddled behind Hillary for protection, “I think we can overlook this little oversight on your part. In fact, here!”
From the depths of his dark cloak and garments, he produced rings and bracelets that he tossed, one to each girl. They squealed in gratitude, then oohed and aahed over each other’s trinkets.
“You’re buying those girls’ affection!” Hillary accused Wotan. “They need your care, not trinkets!”
“Woman, don’t you ever shut up? The last woman with a mouth like yours, I married, and I’ve been sorry ever since.”
Inappropriate words slipped from Hillary’s mouth. “Life’s a bitch, and then you marry one.” She flushed, appalled at herself.
But Wotan roared with appreciation. “Here’s to you, lady! You can teach the girls some of your spunk. Oh, they’re good enough on a battlefield, but can any of them tell a saga or unlock the wordhoard and produce a well-wrought verse? Not a bit of it.”
He detached the gold torque from about his neck and tossed it to her. “Consider this as your retainer.”
Hillary caught the torque, hefted it, considered the current price of gold, and set it down. She’d only have to account for it anyhow, and Al D’Amato was enough of a pain as is. Still, she nodded thanks. No point in being rude. Or, she thought, with the beginning of inspiration, ruder. If she couldn’t think of a way out of here, she was stuck for good; and judging from Wotan’s comments about Frost Giants, an endless winter, and the twilight of the gods, goodness had nothing to do with it.
Wotan toasted her with his drinking horn and motioned one of his daughters to fill one for her. Fastidiously, she sipped.
“Good, isn’t it? Ah, it’s not the mead of knowledge, but good, strong brown ale. . . .”
An idea blossomed in her head. The Valkyries pressed closely around her, basking in their father’s approval and in their success in acquiring Hillary to tend them. Well, they would just have to learn otherwise. She’d bet that this Wotan wouldn’t even file his 1099s, let alone the forms that a U.S. citizen with foreign income must file; and she was in enough trouble without being on either side of a Nannygate scam. They seemed like nice enough girls. But she didn’t want to be their mother. She wanted to be Chelsea’s mother. And Bill’s wife. And a policy honcho and a law partner and all the other things that made her the person she hoped to be.
To her horror, her eyes filled. She wanted to be home, or at least at Camp David!
The Valkyries, bright in their new ornaments, took over the job of serving in the hall. One plied her with beef and lamb, with never a bit of broccoli; another filled her drinking horn, and Hillary forebore to ask for mineral water or decaffeinated iced tea.
Temporarily, at least, she was at a standstill. Time to regroup, she thought, and thank goodness she’d sat in on the military briefings that his staff had insisted Bill attend. What a useful, sneaky way of thinking. Almost like being a politician.
“Tell me about your daughters, Wotan,” she purred with the smile that had won her applause when, in this very suit, she had testified on Capitol Hill. “They seem like such healthy, pretty girls. One of them’s away, you said . . .”
“Brunnhilde.” Wotan leaned his chin on his hand. His one eye drooped, but not before Hillary saw the sorrow in it. “She . . . disobeyed me. Brought a woman here, too. But it was a family matter, and we’re keeping it in the family.”
Hillary decided to table that for the moment.
“Now, you mention that the younger girls cannot write poetry. Considering that you yourself are a poet . . .” no, what was the worcl? A skald. “. . . What arrangements have you made for their education?”
In the days—this being eternity, time was flexible—to come, she pushed Wotan as hard as she could, but Allfather resisted admirably. The Valkyries’ stepmother must have more brass about her than her breastplates; most men caved in long before this under the sort of pressure that Hillary could bring to bear. But he agreed that she could spend time with the Valkyries. They grew more and more assertive, laughing when the warriors they had rescued protested at KP. Hillary had to mediate one minor crisis when Rossweise called the goddess of love and beauty a bimbo—and then defined the word. (Memo to self: Speak somewhat more discreetly.) Just because Hillary said she looked like Gennifer Flowers, only with real blonde hair. Egil sneered, wanting to know how Hillary knew Ms. Flowers was a real blonde, so Hillary had to threaten a slander action. She’d had hopes of that, but Wotan only laughed.
Still, no one would tell her about Brunnhilde. Hillary started to rack her brains. What had happened to the eldest Valkyrie? Damn, she wished she had listened to that medievalist her senior year; but who would have thought Old Norse would have proved at all relevant? Wotan said something about a family problem. That could cover a lot of things, including child abuse—which in this family wouldn’t surprise her one single bit.
The Valkyries coaxed her out of her knitwear into a gown. Nothing could be done about her hair, and she hoped to be gone before it grew. God in heaven, haw long have I been here? She would wake in the darkness before Bifrost’s glow shone down on Middle Earth and worry about that. Maybe weeks here were but the twinkling of an eye back in her world. The idea made her break into a cold sweat and work even harder for a way back.
Gradually, she got the Valkyries to exchange their kirtles and wholly unsuitable metal bustiers for the homespun equivalent of jeans. Now they looked more like teenagers than some fascist soccer team. Maybe, if they worked out a trade agreement (Norway might have turned down European Economic Union, but Hillary knew there would turn out to be more reasons why GATT was a godsend), she’d be able to get the girls running shoes. Those greaves had to be uncomfortable. She didn’t anticipate much trouble on the trade front: Vikings seemed to have specialized in free trade, didn’t they?
Give her a couple weeks, and she’d present Wotan with a plan for task forces on the Fimbulwinter. Weather mapping might give NASA something to do, and Asgard clearly had enough gold to pay for some satellites. That looked hopeful: NASA would drive a hard bargain, but if Wotan sent her, she would use what influence she had. . . .
Medicine didn’t look hopeful at all as a grounds for getting home. The Swedes had superb socialized medicine, and Hillary rather thought Wotan was a skilled healer himself; Damn.
She anticipated a little more success as the Valkyries grew more and more assertive. Egil, in the apron they insisted he wear to protect his chainmail, made her choke on her ale. To her horror, she realized she was beginning to enjoy its taste. By contrast, Rutger—the hero with the gray eyes, the cheekbones, and the buns she had covertly admired—had taken a certain amount of pride in cooking the stag he had slain, then carving it. She rather thought Rossweise had brought him in. Now, the two of them spent a lot of time nudging each other and whispering; and Hillary kept her eyes on both of them. If this went on, she a have to get the Surgeon General to talk with them. Must be the Asgard air. Exercise had never made Bill look that good.
She had her elbows on the table, leaning over a draft of a plan on how to postpone Ragnarok by means of shuttle diplomacy, reviewing the plan with Wotan, when thunder pealed.
“After all,” she told Wotan, “there is simply no reason for Sleipnir just to lounge around on his eight legs eating his fool head off when someone like Heimdall could ride him across Bifrost and talk with the Frost Giants. It’s not as if he requires an inordinate amount of fuel, not like Air Force One.” (If only she had waited for a flight, rather than taken Amtrak! She wouldn’t be here. She’d be home and alive. Better not think of that.)
“Now, I’d suggest,” she said, “Heimdall to go speak the Frost Giants. I take it that Loki . . .”
“He’s likelier to betray me, if he hasn’t already,” said Wotan.
“For Niflheim,” she went on, “I’d suggest sending me. I think I could work very effectively with Hela. I gather that she represents a sovereign state?”
In the next moment, Hillary realized how stupid she had been. Hela probably ran a theocracy. Religious zealots: oh joy.
Wotan rubbed beneath his eye patch as if his scar hurt. Then he turned and looked up. His gaze traveled to his daughters, then to Hillary.
At that moment, Heimdall blasted his great horn. At least it wasn’t a saxophone. The warriors feasting in the hall set down horns, knives, and flagons, then looked up at Wotan. Was this the summons to mortal combat they had been brought here to await? Where were the Geneva observers? That was what Hillary wanted to know. She had no desire to participate in a Dark Age Bosnia (which, come to think of it, was redundant) and she was damned if she’d let Wotan’s daughters fight either. After all, she was pretty sure that the Army still didn’t allow women in infantry or cavalry positions, and she didn’t think the Valkyries’ horses qualified as fighter planes.
A rapid pounding made the doors of the halls shake. Thunder pealed out again, then subsided. As Hillary grew more apprehensive, the warriors grinned. Even Wotan’s face brightened, which took considerable doing when you realized that he considered himself and his whole cosmology to be living on borrowed time.
The doors burst open. Wotan’s ravens cawed in welcome, and the god himself jumped up, knocking over a bench that a serving woman was entirely too quick to replace. In walked a one-man parade of a man, bigger and blonder than any opera heldentenor would even dream of becoming. The newcomer wore a red silk tunic that would have drawn wolf whistles on Christopher Street, until the whistlers had seen the cold gray eyes above his jolly, just-one-of-theguys grin. Even as he marched in, he flexed his muscles unconsciously, making Rutger look like a wimp. A huge, phallic-looking hammer hung at his side. Carrying a thing like that on a belt would have pulled anyone else sideways. Thor wore it as easily as Chelsea would have hung a Swiss army knife at her belt, assuming Hillary and Bill would have let her have one, which they wouldn’t.
“Thor!” bellowed Wotan. “My son!” Hillary narrowed her eyes at the disgusting display of family favoritism as father and son tried to crack each other’s ribs in the most macho hug she’d ever seen, and Thor’s sisters scurried to bring him enough food and drink to have fed an entire homeless family for a week. It was positively archaic, especially after she’d shown them better.
To her annoyance, she found that she too had gotten to her feet, drawn, she told herself, by the desire to examine the torque, wristlets, and belt buckle that Thor wore and that were obviously not museum replicas.
He detached his hammer from his belt and laid it on the table.
“I thought they were supposed to stack all weapons except eating knives outside,” Hillary allowed herself to be heard to remark.
Thor glared at her. Oho. She had seen that before, on the Marine recruiter who had preferred not to answer her questions on the judge advocacy program in the Marine Corps in favor of giving her the bozo treatment, letting his eyes scan her from glasses to heels, then fill with contempt. What? Do you think I’d actually let a girl into the Corps? Do you think I’d even be civil?
She’d told the story at a Wellesley reunion, and a classics professor had snickered and said something rude about the Sacred Band of Thebes. As homophobic as the remark was, Hillary’s own ox had been gored (oops—better not say that around Tipper, assuming Hillary got lucky enough ever to get back to D.C.) sufficiently that she had snickered back.
Hillary allowed herself to examine Thor the way the Marine Corps recruiter had eyed her. Obviously, she decided, he was a parody of a hero, overcompensating for a lost or distant mother by deeds of heroism and hostility to women.
As Wotan watched him fondly, Thor drained his drinking horn, saw it refilled, then leaned massive elbows on the table.
“What in Niflheim is going on here?” he demanded politely of his father. “I’d been practicing throwing my hammer at the Midgard Serpent when I ran into Loki, who looked as cheerful as if he’d gotten soused on my grave-ale. He laughed and said he didn’t need to go to Jotunheim to start trouble; you already had more of it here than you could get out of, this side of Ragnarok.”
The earth shook at mention of the fatal word. Thor brandished his fist at the offending Middle Earthquake. “Stop that!” he yelled. “It’s not Ragnarok until we say it is.”
He glared at his father. “I have a mind to try pest control on that Nidhogg. If it keeps on gnawing the World-Ash, that tree’s going to die.”
“That’s the point,” Wotan said.
Hillary pursed her lips. As she recollected, wasn’t there just one Midgard Serpent? Then this overage, hypermasculine juvenile delinquent was persecuting the last member of an endangered species.
Allfather passed a hand over his bearded lips, forestalling her next protest. “Fru Clinton here is attending,” he said with suspicious mildness, “to your sisters’ education.”
“You got those brats a nanny?” Thor sounded as if he wanted to spit up all the ale he had already drunk. Hillary braced herself. Alcohol abusers frequently turned to family violence, and this one didn’t look as if he needed much encouragement.
“They already know how to ride and choose and fight, if they have to, and to serve at table. What do Valkyries need with more knowledge, unless you give ‘em a good hiding so they know how to obey? Look at Brunnhilde. You actually talked to her and taught her to read, and what happened? She started trying to use her judgment—that’s a laugh, and wound up asleep on a mountaintop surrounded by fire and waiting for the first hero with the balls to come and claim her.”
Hillary suppressed a hiss of pure rage (after listening to Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, and the other Neanderthals, you got good at that) because of an exultation that suddenly washed through her, making her feel taller and stronger than Thor.
Buddy boy, she thought, I think you just gave me my ticket home.
“You just pass me that gavel, mister,” she demanded suddenly. “You’re not chairing this meeting. Your father delegated it to me.”
She pointed assertively at Thor’s hammer. The girls watched, eyes round, appalled, but somehow hopeful.
“Now!”
He passed it over, so reluctant to have her touch it that you’d have thought it was Lorena Bobbitt’s knife—or what it cut.
Wotan shrugged his shoulders. “She’s good with the girls,” he admitted. “They like her.”
Hillary leaned forward, planting small fists on either side of Thor’s hammer. “You bet they like me. I’m the only one around here who listens to them. Maybe you can tell me what happened to their oldest sister. They just cry. You didn’t even let them grieve.”
Thor glared at Hillary. “Gods don’t grieve,” he said.
Hillary glared back. “Tell it to the Marines,” she suggested.
“Ask him,” he grunted.
“Him is hardly a polite way to refer to your father and Allfather, I believe he’s called,” she informed him. “The girls . . . I mean, your sisters . . . told me that Brunnhilde was your father’s favorite. Never quite forgiven her for that, have you? And that she disobeyed him and brought a woman into Valhalla. So what? I’m here, aren’t I?” And I wish I were home! Dammit, if she kept that lament up, she was going to sound like E.T.
“It wasn’t just any woman, woman,” Thor snarled. “It was Sieglinde.”
Hillary waited him out. “I wouldn’t know Sieglinde from Jessye Norman,” she told him. Since she knew very little about Jessye Norman and Thor knew nothing at all, the score in this particular game of one-upmanship was tied.
“She ran away from her husband Hunding. Honestly, I don’t know what Middle Earth’s coming to,” Thor grumbled.
“Did Hunding abuse her? If he did, I think your sisters did a very brave thing in giving her refuge.” Hillary might not know how to embroider, but she certainly knew how to needle.
“You just don’t get it, do you, woman? She ran off with her own brother Siegmund Walse’s son, whom she hadn’t seen for years. Hunding followed them and killed him. Very properly.”
“That poor woman. And you stood for this?” She flashed a Look at Wotan with both eyes, and he deflected it with his one. Then, to her astonishment, he looked down, ashamed and saddened.
“My wife insisted. Uh . . .”
Hillary hadn’t led her class at Wellesley for nothing. “Ah,” she said. “You go in for a spot of wandering around among mortals from time to time, do you? And maybe under an assumed name like Walse? In the name of god, Wotan, how could you allow your children to suffer like that?”
“It gets worse,” Rossweise put in from the dubious shelter of Rutger’s arm. “Sieglinde was going to have a baby.”
“You get away from him!” Thor bellowed. “Just because your sister’s lying out on the hill for the first comer—” Hillary managed not to laugh in a way that might have distracted him “—doesn’t mean you’re not still a virgin goddess. Does it, missy?” He strode over to the Valkyrie and her chosen hero. The two of them, standing together, were enough to face up to him. Barely.
Adultery, two generations of it. Incest. Murder. This wasn’t an afterlife, Hillary decided, it was a Scandinavian soap opera! And it had just gotten Worse: Brunnhilde abandoned on a hill until some rapist in chainmail decided to step through a fire and grab her; Rossweise and all the others forbidden education, autonomy, control even of their own bodies, just because some men decided for them what they should do about them.
“This didn’t have to happen,” she said with a tone that even to herself sounded nauseatingly self-righteous, “if you had decent birth-control centers for women to go to.
“You!” she flared up at Wotan. “You stuck your eldest daughter on a rock because she disobeyed you to protect her own half-sister. You’re keeping these poor girls ignorant, violent, and noisy. You encouraged your son to become an arrogant, bullying brute, and you even feast with a man you know is going to betray you. Call yourself a god, let alone the father of the gods here. You’re a poor excuse for it. I’ve got a good mind to start Ragnarok just to give this place a good cleaning.”
Where, oh where, was Newt Gingrich when she needed him? Let him get his teeth into a scandal like this, and he’d never have time for the White House.
“Woman, you go too far!” Thor bellowed.
“I haven’t gone far enough!” Hillary shouted back. “Now, you’re out of order.”
Whereupon she picked up the hammer and brought it down sharply on the table for order. That is, she would have brought it down sharply on the table if the thing hadn’t been so heavy it weighed her shoulder down and she dropped it.
Boom! The earthquakes that accompanied each mention of Ragnarok were nothing to the crashes that followed as the hammer broke the table, broke through the floor, and probably the sound barrier, as it emerged outside the hall. Thunder pealed again, and from the rain and lightning that lashed down outside, you’d have thought Hurricane Andrew had come again. Most likely, a couple branches broke loose from the World-Ash.
Do you suppose Wotan budgeted enough for disaster relief? I’m sorry! But all I want to do is get out of here.
Thor whistled and raised his hand. The hammer flew back to him, and he brandished it at her.
But Hillary was drunk on adrenaline. “Go ahead,” she challenged him. “Make my day.”
To her astonishment, she heard footsteps, felt the support of the Valkyries at her back. Post-feminism be damned, she thought. Sisterhood was powerful.
“I told you before,” she said to Wotan, “you have fine daughters, and you don’t deserve to have custody of them.”
“Enough!” Thor roared, “You get her out of here, Allfather, or so help me, when Naglfar sets sail and Ragnarok begins, you’re going to be fighting without your chief of staff.”
Unmistakably, Wotan’s eye closed at Hillary in a wink. She thought of her own father, of his pride in her. She thought of how she and Bill went rushing to Chelsea’s defense in anything from a gang of reporters tormenting Socks to Saturday Night Live making jokes about her. And here was Wotan, facing up to his own mistakes as he faced up to the end of his world. It was too late for Brunnhilde, Just as it had been too late for Sieglinde and probably a host of other women he had lost. But these girls might yet have their chance.
“Are you going to let your generals boss around the commander in chief?” Hillary demanded. “Truman fired MacArthur when he tried that.”
“Get her out of here! Out! Out!”
“He sounds like the Fenris-wolf, yelping,” whispered Rossweise. She giggled. Thor turned the red of imminent apoplexy.
Wotan stood up. He swirled his cloak back from shoulders that, despite his age, were still massive. Unerringly, he reached behind him for his spear and banged upon the floor for attention and order. The ravens mantled, then subsided.
“Where shall I send her?” Wotan asked his son. “The girls brought her here, and you know what that means.”
“Send her to Niflheim for all I care.”
“You know I can’t do that to Hela, son. And have you thought what might happen if the two of them liked each other?”
“Then send her back.”
“You know that breaks the pattern. And anything that breaks the pattern . . .”
“. . . brings Twilight closer.”
The fires sank in the central firepit of Valhalla. Outside, the light seemed to diminish as if the Twilight of the Gods advanced like sunset in December. A wind blew about the great hall’s eaves, picking up volume until it rose into a howl.
“That’s right,” said Wotan. “If I send her back, it brings . . . it just so much closer. I’ll need my best warriors with me then. In that case, are you with me, or are you going to go off again and sulk?”
“Get her out of here,” Thor pleaded, “and I’ll do anything you say.”
“Your daughters too.” Well, she and Bill had always wanted more than one child. Hillary caught Wotan’s eye and held it. Their last chance, old man. For once in your life, make the right choice. In the name of God.
“Well, girls?” Thor raised his hands in holy horror as Wotan actually asked the Valkyries their opinion.
“Get them all out of here!” he wailed.
“I’ll make sure someone grooms the horses,” Wotan promised his daughters. Then he banged his spear thrice upon the floor of Valhalla.
Smoke swirled up, then clouds, then more smoke.
And before Hillary or the Valkyries could sing “hoiotoho” (which Hillary couldn’t, not even on her good-voice days), she found herself lying beside a buckled railroad track somewhere between Wilmington and Philadelphia.
She had the mother of all headaches, especially with those ambulances shrieking like the winds of Ragnarok in her ears. But her heart sang, even if she couldn’t. She had survived. She had made it back home. She’d be able to hug Chelsea again. She would even pet Socks, no matter if he made her sneeze or not.
Secret Service and aides clustered about her, barely letting the doctors through.
“There are others in the train,” Hillary murmured. “Young, innocent girls.” And a tear that Peggy Noonan would have envied slid down her face. Someone raced down the track and into a car, then emerged to shout in a voice that that wretched Thor would have envied, that the Scandinavian tourist group was just fine, and so was everyone else.
She thought, before she allowed herself to yield to the painkiller, that that made even better news than “I, William Jefferson Clinton, do solemnly swear . . .”
Hillary never did get to hear Das Rheingold. She had talked under influence of the painkillers, and her near-death experience and some truly godawful photographs filled the tabloids and prompted a whole rash of “I saw an angel” stories. It even had the Christian Coalition inviting her to testify at prayer breakfasts. The White House had to hire more staff just to handle the cards and letters; and bulletin board service providers suffered temporary crashes as people started flame wars about what really happened.
Here is what is known for certain. The picture of the First Lady, bravely leaning on an aide’s shoulder and asking about the health of the Norwegian exchange students as a doctor tended to her chased all other pictures from page one of the leading papers. Even the Washington Times carried a human interest story dealing with how often she visited the students, how she invited them to the White House to meet her daughter, and how she made herself responsible for their education.
Here is what else is known for pretty certain. The soccer and field hockey coaches at Sidwell Friends and Wellesley College are ecstatic, and the First Lady’s approval ratings have never been higher,
the end
This story is for Trent Telenko, who has only himself to blame for giving me the idea of writing it