Langenbacher had suggested, but I later discovered Hank Ucker had), and I became genuinely invested in the team’s wins and losses. Construction on the new stadium was completed in 1992, built on the same grounds as the old one, which was demolished; the new one has, among other features, luxury boxes and a retractable roof. I cannot say the fact that both stadiums turned out to be in Ed Blackwell’s congressional district surprised me. Because the new stadium was publicly financed, a degree of controversy accompanied it, and I honestly believe that Charlie confronted the challenges with restraint and reason. He’d never worked harder in his life than he did during those years, and at the opening game in the new stadium, I was very proud of him.
It was in 1993 that Charlie made the decision to run for governor—at Hank Ucker’s urging, needless to say— and he was elected in 1994. That, too, was a great turning point in our lives, though eventually dwarfed by the turning point that occurred in 2000.
We couldn’t have guessed then what an asset Charlie’s religiosity would turn out to be. Best of all was his sincerity. This, I suspect, has been a large part of Charlie’s appeal to voters—if he can be petulant or sophomoric, he is never less than sincere. Even when called upon to act stately, he demonstrates, sincerely, that he’s acting: He winks, he makes faces or at least conveys that he wishes he could. Often during his first presidential campaign, he’d say on the trail, when trying to contrast himself with the outgoing president, who was widely viewed as a slick panderer, “What you see is what you get.” He’d grin impishly. I sometimes long to remind voters of this now; neither to them nor to me did Charlie ever conceal who he is.
Back before his gubernatorial bid, before our already not exactly average lives became as far-fetched as a fairy tale, his family thought it a hoot that he’d been born again. If Arthur said over dinner, about a recent Packers game, “It was a goddamm rout,” Charlie might say, with jovial sternness, “You know I don’t care for that kind of language,” and Arthur would reply, “Jesus fucking Christ, Chas, get off your high horse.” Or perhaps “Holy shit, you’ve lost your sense of humor!” (In fact, Charlie still enjoyed secular bawdiness and cursing—it was only people taking the Lord’s name in vain that bothered him.) He also stopped purchasing pornography, which pleased me, though because I had a hunch he’d miss it, I bought him an artsy coffee table book of black-and-white photos of female nudes. Presumably, it was a poor substitute.
Charlie had joined a men’s prayer group that met once a week, sometimes in our living room. Reverend Randy—now that he is director of the Multifaith Council, the public knows him as Randall Kniss—became a fixture in our lives. We never missed a Sunday at Heavenly Rose, we said grace before all meals (Charlie even said it at restaurants or dinner parties, which I found a tad ostentatious, but I bit my tongue), and Charlie read the Bible every night before bed.
That summer of 1988, we didn’t end up spending much time in Halcyon, driving up just for a few weekends, both because Charlie was busy with the Brewers and because he feared that being around his brothers, particularly Arthur, would make it harder not to drink. Once, about a month after I’d returned from Riley, I awakened past midnight and found that Charlie was not beside me, though we’d gone to bed together almost two hours before. Thinking I heard voices downstairs, I walked into the hall and stood at the top of the steps; there definitely were people talking—chanting, it sounded like—in the den. It wasn’t until I’d gone downstairs that I could hear clearly what they were saying, that I knew who it was, though I stopped short of entering the room. Through the doorway, I saw my husband and beefy, ruddy Reverend Randy on their knees, side by side, holding hands, their eyes shut, and Charlie weeping; over and over, they were reciting the sinner’s prayer. I backed away.
He’d felt tempted to have a glass of whiskey, Charlie told me the next morning, so tempted he’d been unable to sleep. He had called Reverend Randy because Randy understood these desires, and they’d prayed together, and the urge had passed; Satan had gone elsewhere to do his bidding. This happened again, Reverend Randy’s late-night appearances, but I never got out of bed for another one. I’m not proud to say that what I saw that night, looking into the den—it bothered me. It wasn’t Reverend Randy as a person so much as the prayer as an experience, the fervor I would never share. Charlie had traveled outside my reach to a place I couldn’t follow.
But I should note, for all my resistance to organized religion, that I don’t believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to explain that behavior, both past and present, to himself. Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose—what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?—and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.
It wasn’t until years later, until quite recently, in fact, that I learned exactly how Miss Ruby had managed to introduce Charlie and Reverend Randy: She had found the reverend by looking in the Yellow Pages under churches. Herself a faithful parishioner at Lord’s Baptist in Harambee, Miss Ruby sensed that Charlie would benefit from spiritual uplift, and when she’d reached Reverend Randy on the phone, she’d requested that he make a house call. Jessica Sutton was the one who told me this, and I said, “But why didn’t Miss Ruby ask her own minister to talk to Charlie?”
Jessica is thirty-one now, a tall, poised, whip-smart woman, a graduate of Yale and the Kennedy School at Harvard, and my chief of staff; during Charlie’s first term in the White House, she was my deputy chief of staff, and at the start of his second term, when her predecessor left, I promoted her. I’m almost sure that Jessica is also a Democrat, though there are certain topics we do not broach. She laughed at my question, and though her words were damning, her tone was warm, as if she were teasing. She said, “Grandma thought he’d never listen to a black man.”
PART IV
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
T
ODAY, AS ON
all mornings when we’re in Washington, the phone on Charlie’s side of the bed rings at a quarter to six. After answering it, he rises and walks to his bathroom (I’m half aware of this through the fog of my own sleep), and then he opens the door between our bedroom and the corridor, where a valet is waiting to pass him the newspapers. It’s like at a hotel, except that instead of just the papers, you get a live person as well; heaven forbid the president of the United States should bend or reach.
Charlie carries them to my side of the bed:
He whistles as he approaches—he’s whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”—and when I prop myself up, I see that he is holding the newspapers out of my reach. He says, “You’re only allowed to read them if you don’t give me shit about Mr. Sympathy.”
Mr. Sympathy is Charlie’s nickname for Edgar Franklin, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army and the father of a soldier who was killed two years ago, at the age of twenty-one, by a roadside bomb. As of this morning, Colonel Franklin has spent one night sleeping in a tent on the Ellipse, the park directly south of the White House and north of the Washington Monument, and four more nights sleeping in the same tent on a two-hundred-square-foot lawn on Fourth Street SE, just beyond the Capitol and about three miles from the White House; he has been spending his days there, too, in the hope of talking to Charlie. It is the first week of June, and it was ninety-six degrees
