American Wife

“Call if anything comes up, or if you have questions.”

Dena lightly punches my upper arm. She says, “Don’t look so grim, First Lady. We’ll be fine, and so will you.”

“Hold on, Alice,” Pete says. “I have something for you.” He lumbers into the hall, and when he’s gone, I say to Dena, “I’m here visiting my mother every couple months, so maybe we could have lunch next time.”

“That’d be a kick,” she says. “You just say the word.” Then she adds, “You know it was me that gave Ella the tiara that time, don’t you? I thought you’d come over and say hi.”

“I wish I had.” Charlie and I are currently having a house built in Maronee, the place we’ll live when we leave Washington. Is it possible, back in relative proximity to Dena, that she and I might become friends again, real friends? Are our situations too different? It is such a comfort to see her, to be linked to a life all but lost to me now.

When Pete returns, he passes me an envelope.

“What is it?” Dena asks, but he shakes his head. In a not entirely joking tone, she says, “It better not be a love letter.” She turns back to me, her expression mischievous. “If anyone was ever watching you and me, they’d have thought there were only three men to date in the whole world, and we just kept trading them back and forth.” I laugh, and Dena links her arm through Pete’s. She says, “But it looks like we both ended up with the ones who were right for us all along.”

AMONG THE PEOPLE whom I’m aware have been quoted on television or in print on the subject of Charlie and me are about a third of my classmates from elementary school, junior high, and high school, including Mary Hafliger Petschel and my junior-year prom date, Larry Nagel; the daughter of the former owner of Tatty’s (Tatty’s itself no longer exists); Marvin Benheimer, my New Year’s Eve date in 1962, when I had to dash from the restaurant as soon as the food came in order to vomit, a fact that has not stopped Marvin from appearing on a recurring basis on CNN, always identified as “Childhood Friend of Alice Blackwell”; several of my sorority sisters in Kappa Alpha Theta, a few of my aged professors, and many university classmates whom I never met; my thesis adviser from library school; Lydia Bianchi, the principal at Liess Elementary, and my colleague Maggie Stenta, a first-grade teacher; Nadine Patora, the Madison realtor from whom I didn’t buy a house in 1977; Ja-hoon Choi, the Ph.D. candidate who lived downstairs from me in my apartment on Sproule Street; and two men with whom I went on blind dates in, respectively, 1969 and 1974, whom I truly have no recollection of, though I believe that the dates occurred. “She was pretty but seemed like a prude” was one fellow’s assessment, and the other’s was “She wasn’t interested in current events—she mostly just wanted to talk about her students.” These remarks at least had brevity on their side and were nothing compared to the entire memoir published by Simon Tornkvist, I Knew Her When: My Love Affair with Alice Blackwell Before She Became First Lady. With the help of a ghostwriter, Simon chronicled our long-ago relationship: my alleged desperation to get married and have children, and his extensive reservations about me that apparently stemmed from what he recognized even then as my conservative leanings. Here she was, living in a vibrant and liberal college town, but she led an incredibly staid, sheltered life, he wrote. It was obvious she was afraid of talking to me about my experiences in ’Nam, and she avoided any confrontation. I knew from the get-go she was aiming for the white- picket-fence, 2.5 kids lifestyle, and if it wasn’t happening with me, she’d make it happen with someone else. When I heard that she’d married one of Governor Blackwell’s draft-dodging sons, I knew her wildest dreams must have come true. Also, humiliatingly, there was this: She was very vanilla when it came to sex. The thing I never understood was that it was easier for her to climax when she was on top, but she preferred missionary-style. I had been skimming the book for about half an hour when I got to those lines; I snapped it shut, gave it to my personal aide, Ashley, and told her to get rid of it as she saw fit. I felt particularly offended, as I actually had had indirect contact with Simon since we’d run into each other at the Brewers’ game in 1988; in 1995, he’d requested six VIP tickets for himself, his wife, his two children, and his parents to take a Christmas-lights tour of the governor’s mansion. The request had come through my office, and while I hadn’t spoken to Simon, I had been the one who signed off on the dispensation of the tickets. He never thanked me or anybody else—I had only two aides then, and I asked them—and the next I heard of him was when my White House press secretary alerted me to the existence of his book a few months in advance of publication. “I always had a hunch that Parsley, Sage was a low-rent hippie” was Charlie’s take on the matter.

Generally, there tends to be an inverse correlation between how well someone knew you and his or her willingness to talk; there also seems to be a link between discretion and class, or so I’ve always thought until seeing Dena and Pete. The people we know, or knew, in Maronee, the people from the country club, have been the most tight-lipped. The notable exception was that early in Charlie’s first administration, Carolyn Thayer (she has not remarried and still has the same surname) sat for an interview with 60 Minutes for a segment they were doing about Charlie’s past struggles with alcohol. “We all knew, everyone talked about it,” she said. “It was common knowledge when he got the DUI, and more than a year before that, at a Christmas party, I saw him fall flat on his face. I said to him, ‘Do you need help?’ but he just laughed it off.” It must have been the Hickens’ party, I thought, because I remembered Charlie cheerfully walking toward me with tissue stuffed in both his nostrils, and when I asked why, he said he’d gotten a nose-bleed. I didn’t watch the 60 Minutes episode when it ran, but after it aired, I heard from several of our old friends about how appalled they were, what a breach of etiquette they considered Carolyn’s behavior, so I had an aide obtain a copy. Because Carolyn had moved from Maronee to Chicago ten years before, it wasn’t as if she could be shunned from the community, and for this, I was glad. I’d have preferred that she hadn’t spoken to the program, but the fact was, she hadn’t said anything untrue. Regardless, Carolyn was the exception who proved the rule—she is the only person from Maronee who has spoken on the record and without our blessings to a media outlet, and very few people have spoken anonymously, either. I suspect the ones who have are people we hardly knew.

Simon’s was not the only tell-all memoir—there was also the one written by my first cousin on my mother’s side, Patty Lazechko, who is the daughter of my Uncle Herman, and I’m under the impression that the gist of her tale was that marrying up runs in my blood, that after meeting my father, my mother turned her back on her own siblings and parents. When the book was published two years ago, I hadn’t seen Patty since childhood, and I confess I bypassed that one; there are too many accounts, and they are too demoralizing to keep up with. Of late, there have been a few contributions to the expose library from people who have worked for Charlie and me, campaign consultants and a fellow who was a deputy White House press secretary in the first administration, and while it’s always disappointing to feel that a person you trusted has violated that trust, such transgressions are standard in politics and have occurred to a lesser extent under Charlie than they did under his predecessor.

Charlie has become inured; he has never been interested in what his critics have to say except insofar as Hank can strategically deflect it. Obviously, I’m not as impervious, but I almost never try to have anything refuted, and a quote or observation in a newspaper article that once would have bothered me for days now bothers me for ten minutes, or for two. The last time I was particularly ruffled was over a year ago, when I opened the Times one morning in May to find an op-ed by Thea Dengler, the owner of the bookstore in Mequon that I used to love. Thea’s bookstore still exists at a time when fewer and fewer independents can make a go of it, and for people who follow such things, Thea has risen to greater prominence and is regularly quoted in articles about the bookselling industry. But that was not the topic of her op-ed; the topic was me, and the headline was DO SOMETHING, ALICE BLACKWELL! It began, Those of us who knew Alice Blackwell in Wisconsin have been doing an awful lot of head-scratching during the past five years. As a frequent customer at my bookstore throughout the eighties and early nineties, Mrs. Blackwell was inquisitive, compassionate, and open-minded. How, then, can she be—or so it seems—happily married to a man hell-bent on weakening civil liberties? Although Mrs.