“Sweetheart, I’m sure I’m not the only one. It might be a transition for some of our friends, but I wouldn’t underestimate them.”
“People get funny, though. I’d forgotten about this until earlier today, but when my dad was governor, there was an old friend of the family who ran afoul of the law, I think for embezzling, and he wanted Dad to intervene. When Dad refused, this guy’s kids—fellows I knew well from the country club—they quit speaking to me. The man didn’t end up going to prison, either, so I don’t know what the family had to be so sour about.”
From the seat behind us, Hank leaned forward again—the song was nearing the end, with the chorus repeating several times—and called, “Last chance. Chuckles, you’re lucky you chose politics, because you’d never have made it in a traveling minstrel show.” (Chuckles was Hank’s nickname for Charlie, payback for Shit Storm. Of course, while Charlie is now Mr. President, the Shit Storm moniker has endured.)
Agreeably, Charlie joined in: “ ‘Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart . . . ’ ”
I took his hand, lacing my fingers through his, and I leaned in so my mouth was by his ear. “I love you very much,” I whispered.
IN THE TOWN
car, Jessica is on the phone with Hank. “She’d prefer not to,” Jessica keeps saying in a level tone—she has impeccable manners—and I can hear fragments of Hank’s voice, wheedling but insistent; he wants to talk to me directly. “No, she wasn’t,” Jessica says. “She doesn’t think Gladys Wycomb is concerned about that. No. No. All right. I’ll call you from the plane.” She presses the red “end” button on her cell phone, folds it shut, and immediately reaches for her Black-Berry and starts typing with her thumbs.
We are two miles from Midway Airport, Jessica and Cal and I in this car, which is driven by a local agent. I say, “I’d like to make a stop in Wisconsin before we return to Washington.”
Jessica raises her eyebrows. “Your mother?”
My mother outlasted her second husband, too (Lars, who was perhaps the only person in either Charlie’s or my family to take unequivocal delight in Charlie’s political rise, died of acute renal failure in 1996), and my mother now resides in an assisted-living facility in an area outside Riley that was a pasture when I was growing up. She has Alzheimer’s, but the blessing is that she remains both good-natured and seemingly happy; given how many of the people who have neurodegenerative diseases are depressed or violent, I am grateful. However, even as we’re using my mother as the pretext for my traveling today, she isn’t the one I wish to see.
This morning, when I assumed that it was Dena Janaszewski who had contacted Hank’s office, it made a sort of sense—there was unfinished business between Dena and me, and this would be a reckoning. Learning, then, that the blackmail threat had nothing to do with her was almost a disappointment. I’ve often recalled that afternoon in Riley when she gave Ella the tiara—the more time has passed, the surer I have become that it was Dena and not her mother who did it, and that the gesture was a peace offering as opposed to a taunt—and I’ve regretted that I didn’t reciprocate in some way. But that happened during such a topsy-turvy episode in my life, when every relationship other than the one I had with Charlie felt peripheral. All these years later, I am afraid I missed an opportunity, and I’m increasingly aware that if I don’t initiate it, I might not have another. Like most people, I’ve always been able to reassure myself, on entering a new decade, that I’m still not old, that my previous sense of this age, thirty or forty or fifty, was skewed by my own youth. I even managed this feat of self-persuasion after turning sixty—sixty-year-olds bungee jump and swim the English Channel!—but at this point, I’ve reached the age when, if something happened to me, it would be sad but not tragic. I would be slightly young, but only slightly. In the same vein, if I were to hear someday that Dena had died—it’s hard to know how the news would make its way to me, with my mother in her condition and both Dena’s parents deceased, but surely I’d find out eventually—I could not be shocked. Other peers have passed on, Rose Trommler from Madison died of breast cancer in 2003, and last year my high school classmate Betty Bridges Scannell’s husband had a brain aneurysm while they were on a cruise in the Caribbean. The sadness of these deaths clung to me for several days after I received word of them, but it would be remorse, a deep remorse, rather than mere sorrow I’d feel about Dena. For the first three decades of my life—for half of it—I didn’t have a closer friend. Sure, she had her shortcomings, but who doesn’t? She was lively and funny, she was much more daring than I was, and we knew each other so well; friendships have survived on far less.
It is strange to realize that at this point, my closest friend is probably Jessica. Jadey and I still speak once a week, and she visits us in Washington, sometimes with Arthur and sometimes without him, several times a year. Having her in the White House is always a tremendous breath of fresh air—she’ll say to Charlie, “I’m only calling you Mr. President if you call me Dame Jadey,” and she complains that visiting us makes her constipated because she can’t comfortably go to the bathroom in such a historic setting—but there is an unspoken wedge between us that has grown over time. Although she’s a Republican, she took it hard when Charlie supported the amendment to ban gay marriage; she remains tight with her interior-decorator friend Billy Torks, whom I always got a kick out of but haven’t seen for years. While that was a passing tension, I think this is the ongoing problem for Jadey and me: Once our lives were alike, and now they’re not. She still attends Garden Club meetings, she’s joined the board of the Milwaukee Art Museum, she fund-raises for Biddle even though both Drew and Winnie graduated years ago, and all these activities are parts of her life I envy, I feel a great pull of sentimentality when she mentions them, but she has made it clear that she thinks I must find it boring and provincial when she tells stories about Maronee. Despite my repeated efforts to convince her otherwise, she refuses to believe I’d far prefer discussing her life to mine. She says, “No, no, tell me what the king and queen of Spain were like.”
It feels unseemly to complain to my extended family or to friends from Wisconsin, so I don’t. Early on in Charlie’s political career, I once mentioned to another of my sisters-in-law, Ginger, that I was worried about the floral arrangements for a ball we were hosting in Madison, and she said, “I think it takes real nerve for you to complain about anything like that when Ed deserved to be governor a lot more than Chas.” I found this to be a breathtaking comment not least because of Ginger’s usual meekness, but perhaps even more surprising than the shift in Ginger was the one in Priscilla, who was the last person I’d have expected to be swayed by our fame: Shortly after Charlie was elected governor, she confided in me that I had always been her favorite daughter-in-law; she’d long believed we shared a similar sensibility. When Charlie was elected president, she began telling not just me but our relatives and also the media that I was her favorite
As for the other women I knew in Maronee or Madison, my friends from Garden Club or the mothers of Ella’s classmates, so colorful and distracting is the pageantry of my life now that I think they have trouble remembering I am still myself, that my concerns are often mundane—my favorite shampoo has been discontinued, my husband snores, I struggle to find time to exercise—and that when my concerns aren’t mundane, when I’m worried about war or terrorism, the grandiosity of my anxiety doesn’t vault it into another category of emotion unimaginable to them; they’d be able to imagine it just fine if they could stop being impressed.
These all are reasons I so value Jessica, though I recognize that because I am her employer, ours is not a pure friendship. But the fact that we aren’t peers makes things easier, I think; unlike Jadey, she is not comparing herself to me or her husband to mine. (In 2002, Jessica married a lovely man named Keith who works for the World Bank; Charlie and I attended the wedding at the Washington Club on Dupont Circle, and at the reception, Charlie danced with Miss Ruby, now retired and in her eighties but still energetically grumpy, and I danced with Jessica’s younger brother, Antoine, then a six-foot-tall freshman at Biddle Academy.) Jessica and I have formed a two-woman book
