fancy restaurants (their main form of recreation besides working out, which they both do avidly), and while the exposure doesn’t please me and I admit to being a bit thrown by the idea of my daughter spending more on a bottle of wine than I used to pay for a month’s rent in my twenties, I never worry that Ella will be caught behaving inappropriately. She is our miracle, smart and level-headed and joyful, inheritor of an improbable combination of my calmness and Charlie’s mischief. Perhaps most extraordinary to me is her apparent lack of resentment toward either of us. Mundane bickering and disagreements have always arisen with us, as with any family, but even those scuffles, which peaked when she was in high school (over atypical issues such as the ubiquity of her security detail, and more mundane ones such as the lengths of her skirts, the hour of her curfew, and the urgent necessity of there being two piercings rather than one in her left ear), have all faded. While I doubt she would have chosen this path for our family—she was in eighth grade when we told her Charlie was going to run for governor of Wisconsin, which prompted her to accuse her father of trying to ruin her life—it would appear she has forgiven us.
In June 2001, she graduated from Princeton, an event where Charlie’s appearance created a bit of a ruckus on campus; knowing we’d force all the other families to walk through metal detectors, among other inconveniences, we’d considered skipping the ceremony, but neither Charlie nor I could bear to do it. (Sitting in the front row, facing Nassau Hall, I did think uncomfortably of Joe Thayer, who, over ten years earlier, had married a younger, gentle- seeming music teacher at Biddle Academy with whom he has had two more children. In a pleasant turn of events, his once-troubled daughter Megan is also married and living in Maronee with two young children.) Ella again followed in Charlie’s footsteps by attending Wharton, though, as Charlie quipped in the commencement address he delivered two years ago, the school has become so competitive that if he’d been applying when Ella did, he wouldn’t have gotten in.
At this point, Ella is neither in thrall to nor disdainful of politics: When she was younger, we shielded her, never allowing her to speak to the press, and although she attended both of Charlie’s inaugurations, the first time she participated in any campaigning was when she held a
BLACKWELL/PROUHET
sign on a street corner in Manchester, New Hampshire, in January 2004. She still has never granted an interview, and while she would prefer, as I think most twenty-eight-year-old women living in Manhattan would, to spend more time with her friends and her boyfriend than with her parents, she always comes home for holidays and surprised me on my sixtieth birthday last year. I can’t imagine she herself will ever run for elected office, but once I couldn’t have imagined that I would be the wife of our country’s president.
“Seriously,” Ella says, “the dude must be roasting out there.”
“I know, ladybug, but the situation isn’t as simple as it looks.”
“Mom, believe me, it’s not that I agree with him about withdrawing the troops.” At Princeton, Ella majored in public and international affairs, and she was a vocal supporter of the war from the beginning. “A regime change is the only way to eliminate the Islamic jihadists,” she’d say, and I would be awed by her intelligence and confidence. What would my own father have made of such an educated, opinionated young woman? Expounding on the Middle East, no less! (For that matter, what would my father have made of Charlie’s presidency? He was such an uncynical man, patriotic in the most old-fashioned sense, and I like to think he’d have respected Charlie and been proud of me by extension. But perhaps it is for the best that my father didn’t live to see this part of our lives. In light of his belief about fools’ names and fools’ faces, I can only guess at his reaction to an article
—a magazine my father subscribed to—made waves with last month: “Ten Reasons Why Charlie Blackwell Is a Shit-Eating Bastard.” Whereas my father, when referring to the presidents of my youth, called them Mr. Truman or Mr. Eisenhower; he even called the janitor at the bank Mr. White.)
“It just makes Dad seem heartless,” Ella is saying. “I hate giving ammunition to his critics. How will it look when this old man has a heatstroke?”
“Sweetie, Edgar Franklin is younger than your father or me.”
“You know what I mean. Anyway, you guys aren’t spending the day in the sun. Hey, you’re wearing sexy heels tonight, right?” In the late nineties, Ella converted me, at least for formal events, from what she calls “blocky heels” to “sexy heels.” She said, “They’re slimming,” and while, thanks to being prodded and encouraged by two personal trainers, I now weigh less than I have since I turned thirty, the camera adding twenty pounds is no myth; I accept whatever help I can get.
“Signs point to yes,” I say. This is when Hank appears outside my office; through the open door, I can see him talking to Jessica Sutton, my chief of staff. If Ella finds out I had an abortion,
she finds out, how will she react? On the one hand, I like to think she’s an essentially compassionate person; she is also, presumably, sexually active herself. On the other hand, like Charlie, Ella considers herself a born-again Christian, and as an adolescent, she stuck a bumper sticker to her dressing table mirror that read,
IT’S NOT A CHOICE, IT’S A CHILD
; she’d acquired the sticker from the leader of her youth group. When I noticed it, I said, “I don’t think any woman wants to have an abortion, honey, but some of them feel that it’s more responsible than giving birth to a baby they aren’t prepared to take care of.” Ella looked at me in horror and said, “That’s what
is for.” More recently, after the two times I stated my stance on abortion on the morning news shows, Ella made no mention of either, though I don’t think she was unaware of them.
Jessica knocks gently on my open door, and when our eyes meet, she says, “Hank has an update.” She takes a step toward me, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Are you okay?” I called Jessica from the car to tell her what’s going on, and asked her not to mention it to anyone else yet. Although I have an excellent staff, Jessica is the person I trust most—given that I’ve known her for her entire life, perhaps this is not surprising.
“I’d better go, sweetie,” I say into the phone. “Will you call me from the airport?” To Jessica, I say, “Send him in, but stay.”
When they reenter my office, Hank closes the door behind him, meaning the Secret Service agents are on its other side. “So far the trail doesn’t lead to your friend Dena,” he says. “Do you recall a doctor named Gladys Wycomb?”
I stare at him. Gladys Wycomb? Dr. Wycomb, my grandmother’s paramour? “But wouldn’t she have—” I try to pull together my disparate thoughts. “She must be a hundred years old.”
