George’s office would be taken over by his first Harvard patron, Zbigniew Brzezinski. (He wondered fleetingly if he hadn’t choosen the wrong horse.)
Cathy was secretly delighted at the turn of events, since she hated her native city. And she was jealous of her husband’s mistress, politics.
After his initial disappointment, George started looking for a new career. He rejected invitations from several universities to teach government and several publishing houses to write a book about his White House experiences. As far as he was concerned, they were by no means over.
Instead, he opted to become an international trade consultant to the powerful New York investment firm of Pierson Hancock. The potential remuneration was beyond his wildest dreams.
As he joked to Cathy, “Now I’m worse than a capitalist. I’m a plutocrat.”
She smiled and thought, wouldn’t it be nice if you became a parent, too. And with maternity in mind, she convinced her husband that they should live in the country.
George at last acceded and they bought a Tudor house in Darien, Connecticut. It meant a lot of commuting for him each day, but at least he got to read the papers thoroughly before arriving at his office. To discover what was happening in the world that he no longer helped to run.
Two years after moving up from Washington, he had more money than he knew what to do with. And his wife had the same plethora of empty time.
Despite George’s urging, she did not take the New York Bar exam and seek a job with a metropolitan law firm. Instead, she qualified in Connecticut and took a one-day-a-week lectureship at nearby Bridgeport University law school.
George pretended to ignore the significance of her desire to remain at home. And Cathy’s sadness was compounded by a growing bitterness that he didn’t trust her enough to believe she was taking The Pill. Such lack of confidence is hardly conducive to a good marriage. And indeed, theirs was fast becoming a very unhappy one.
George sensed her increasing discontent and, instead of confronting it, deliberately fashioned a lifestyle that managed to avoid the issue. He began to work later and later — and come home drunker and drunker.
The New Haven Railroad may have been falling to pieces, but the scotch in its club cars still held many a commuter together. Or at least gave George that illusion.
Suburbia without children was stultifying. All of Cathy’s contemporaries were busily involved in the activities of their offsprings’ lives, and at lunch discussed little else. Thus, she felt like a double outcast. An alien among mothers, and a stranger to her own husband.
“Are you happy, George?” she asked one evening, as she was ferrying him from the train station.
“What kind of question is that?” he asked, slurring his words slightly.
“I mean, aren’t you sick of pretending that everything’s okay between us? Don’t you hate having to travel all the way out here just for boring old me?”
“Not at all. Get a lot of work done on the train.…”
“Come on, George, you’re not that drunk. Why don’t we discuss our so-called marriage?”
“What’s there to discuss? You want a divorce? You can have a divorce. You’re still a good-looking girl. Find a brand-new husband in no time.”
Cathy felt too upset to be angry. She pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center, so that she could concentrate on this crucial conversation without crashing into a tree.
She then turned and asked him straight out, “So that’s it, then — it’s over?”
He looked at her and, in one of his rare expressions of true feelings, said, “You know I really don’t want to make you unhappy.”
“I thought it was I who was making you miserable.”
“No, Cathy. No. No. No.”
“Then what is it, George? What’s come between us?”
He stared straight ahead for a moment, then half-buried his face in his hands and said softly, “My life is shit.”
“In what way?” she asked quietly.
“In every way. I’m taking it out on you because I’m miserable doing what I’m doing. It’s like running on a treadmill. I’m going nowhere. I’m forty-two years old and already a burned-out case.”
“That’s not true, George,” she said sincerely. “You’re brilliant. Your best years are still ahead.”
He shook his head. “No, you can’t make me believe that. Somewhere along the line I missed my chance. Things are never going to be much different than they are right now.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “George, what we need isn’t a divorce, it’s a second honeymoon.”
He gazed at her, and consciously reaffirmed what he had always known subliminally. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
“Do you think we have a chance?”
“As you boys say on Wall Street, George,” she smiled, “I’m still bullish about our future. All you need is a little ‘sabbatical’ to give you a chance to get a second wind.”
“A sabbatical — from what?”
“From your unquenchable and temporarily frustrated ambition, my love.”
The Kellers’ grand tour of Europe was not quite the total holiday that Cathy had wanted. But it was enough to rekindle hope for the future of their relationship.
To begin with, she taught George his first lesson in how to enjoy life. To take satisfaction from what he had already accomplished.
For in every country they visited, high government officials welcomed them in royal fashion. And it bolstered George’s ego to see himself still respected, even though he was out of office.
In fact, his political antennae proved to be shrewder than ever. In London, he and Cathy dined with Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, M. P., who would be leading the Conservative Party in the next general election. She complimented George’s views on geopolitics, and Cathy’s hat.
The same was true in Germany and in France, where the newly installed foreign minister, Jean Francois- Poncet, entertained them in his home — a Gallic rarity.
Their final stop was Brussels. While Cathy was out doing some last-minute shopping, George had lunch with his old colleague from the NSC days, Alexander Haig, now Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. With his usual candor, the general pronounced his judgment on the current White House occupant.
“Carter’s really messing up. His foreign policy is a disaster. It’s an experiment in obsequiousness. We’ve got to behave like the superpower we are. That’s the only way to make the Soviets respect us. I tell you, George, Carter’ll be a sitting duck in 1980.”
“Who do you think we’ll run against him?”
Haig replied with a sly grin, “Well, I’ve been thinking of giving it a shot.”
“That’s great,” George responded with shining enthusiasm. “I’ll help you any way I can.”
“Thanks. And I’ll tell you something — if I make it, my Secretary of State is sitting right here at this table.”
“I’m very flattered.”
“Come on, Keller,” said Haig, “can you name anyone more qualified?”
“No, frankly,” George responded mischievously.
He could have flown home without a plane.
If in the 1960s Danny Rossi had become a household name, in the late 1970s he became a household face. His charismatic visage was now beamed regularly into millions of homes, thanks to an enormously successful — and prizewinning — series of musical documentaries made for Public Television.
First there was a baker’s dozen of programs on the instruments of the orchestra. This was followed by a
