PART FIVE
Daughters
1993–2008
JANUARY 20, 1993
First they’d sat in traffic leaving DC, then they’d sat in traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and now, six hours after Tim Swisher had picked up David, they were finally in Queens. The drive should have taken four hours. They’d left at five thirty, when it was still dark, and now it was approaching noon. It had been Tim’s idea to take his car, and for David to wear a baseball hat; that way, David wouldn’t be recognized. Not that anyone was thinking about him today. He hadn’t shaved in two weeks, and that would help too, just in case.
The capital had been a zoo the past two days, one million people on the National Mall, Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan, Tony Bennett, Bill Cosby, American entertainment royalty, presidential pomp and circumstance. David couldn’t wait to get out of DC, but now that he was in Queens, he didn’t want to be there either. He didn’t want to be anywhere except home in Philadelphia, where he wasn’t welcome.
Tim, driving slowly through Jackson Heights, the elevated train passing above them, looked at the address he’d written on the piece of paper on his lap. Tim Swisher, no longer David’s body man, but still willing to do this. Maybe he felt responsible; he had to have known. David had told him that none of this was his fault. He had been David’s keeper, politically speaking, but not his keeper otherwise. Now that he didn’t work for David, he offered his opinions about personal matters, sometimes unsolicited. Which was why they were here.
She had gotten in touch with Tim—David wouldn’t have any contact with her—to say that David’s daughter, their daughter, was five months old, and no matter what else was happening in his life, he should see her. Tim took a chance and brought it up with David.
“I won’t see that woman.”
“I know, but David—”
“I’m trying to move forward.”
“She’s just a baby.”
“She’s not just a baby.”
“With all due respect,” Tim said, “the baby didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’ll make sure she’s taken care of.”
“David, you should see her.”
“Danielle’s not doing well,” David said.
“I understand,” Tim said. “I won’t bring it up again.”
But as the inauguration approached, David couldn’t stand the thought of being in DC, so he called Tim and asked him to arrange things. He would see the baby, and Danielle wouldn’t have to know—they were separated, after all. The only condition, he told Tim, was that he wouldn’t have to see her.
Tim knew who David meant, and exactly how to arrange things, and here they were.
“This is the address,” Tim said.
But before Tim parked the car, David said, “Not here. Park at the end of the street.”
“She said she’d leave.”
“I won’t have any interaction with her,” David said. “None.”
Tim circled around the block and parked at the other end of the street, outside a bodega. “I’ll be back in a few,” he said.
David could hear a train arriving at the Roosevelt Avenue station around the corner. He pulled down the passenger side’s sun visor and looked into its mirror. There was more gray in his beard than on his head. If only he could turn gray overnight, turn old, turn sick, take it from Danielle, he would. He lowered his hat so that it cast a shadow over his face. He should have brought sunglasses.
He was far enough away that she wouldn’t be able to see him, but he could see her come out of the building—a brick row home that looked almost identical to those around it. She sat on the stoop. Then he saw Tim walk down the steps, past her, and back to the car.
David rolled down the window. “Make her leave.”
“She’s pretty emotional right now.”
“I don’t care. Make her go somewhere.”
“She said it’s her apartment, she lives there. I reminded her what we agreed to, and she said she’d wait on the stoop.”
“I’ll leave right now,” David said. “Turn around and head back to DC.”
“How long should I tell her to be gone?”
“Twenty minutes.”
David watched Tim speak to her. She stood as if to leave, but sat down again; she covered her face with her hands.
Tim sat beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. He was good at reasoning with people; he had a calming voice. He’d make a good politician, David thought, if only he weren’t so honest.
After a few minutes, she stood and walked away.
Tim signaled to David, who got out of the car and walked to the building. From the stoop he could see her standing on the corner without a coat and—she had to be kidding—barefoot. She was pacing and walking in circles—to keep warm or, David guessed, to give the impression of being cold. It was January, but forty degrees. She wouldn’t get frostbite.
The stairs up to the third floor were creaky; the hallways were dark. The apartment door, ajar, opened onto a small living room, behind that a kitchenette. Wood alphabet blocks, plastic rattles and rings, and stuffed animals were in neat piles on the rug and inside a playpen. The TV was on, its volume low. Reverend Billy Graham was praying for President Bush, who would be president for ten more minutes, and for President-Elect Clinton, who sat beside his wife and daughter. David was surprised to find the apartment so tidy, even though she—he would not think her name—had been one of the cleanest women he’d ever known. Her body never smelled; she never had morning breath; he’d never seen a hair under her arms or felt stubble on her legs; her fingernail and toenail polish was never chipped. Emotionally, she could be messy; physically, not.
A woman was in the apartment, holding the baby. She was older than David but not old enough to be the child’s grandmother, so David assumed she was a nanny or a sitter. She said hello but not her name. David didn’t ask who she was; his attention was focused on the baby. The truth was, he could now admit, he did want to see her. Not out of love—he didn’t know how to love this child—but out of disbelief. He knew he was the father, there was no question of that now, he’d taken a paternity test, but he wanted to see for himself, and yes, those were his eyes, and now the nanny—if that was who she was—handed him the baby and he felt the weight of a baby for the first time since the campaign, but no, it didn’t bring him back to that, fuck the campaign, it reminded him of holding Nick, and then Betsy, and God if he could go back in time, never speak to that woman, never call her, throw away the note. Except that would mean this baby would not exist; it would be like killing her. A terrible thought, but he couldn’t help it. If only, God forgive him, he could exchange this child for Nick, this one he never wanted for the one he lost. It was impossible to look into this child’s eyes, which were his, and not associate them with his son’s death. He would never be able to separate Nick from this, and this from Danielle; it was all one cancer that had started to grow in 1984.
Tim was waiting in the bedroom, and the nanny was in the kitchenette. David moved his face close to the baby and smelled her breath, and the baby smiled. He held her up high and looked at her from that angle—she was wearing white pajamas—but he could see in his peripheral vision Clinton taking off his overcoat, and now he was standing between his wife and daughter. David got up and turned off the TV.
But as soon as the screen went dark, he changed his mind; he wanted to see. He turned the TV back on. Clinton laid his left hand on a Bible his wife held open for him; he raised his right hand. He repeated what Chief Justice Rehnquist said, and just like that, with the words So help me God, William Jefferson Clinton was president of the United States and George Herbert Walker Bush was not.
David turned the TV off again.
The baby was starting to fuss in his arms. She touched his beard, looked confused, touched it again, then started to cry. He was out of practice making a baby stop crying. He sat on the couch and held the baby on his lap and said her name, Avery, that was
fine, it was all right to say it, but she kept crying.
The nanny brought David a bottle, and he held it to Avery’s mouth.
“There you go,” the nanny said. “All better now. You wanted your mommy’s milk, didn’t you?”
David dropped the bottle, as if it were poison, and this startled the baby; she started to cry again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The nanny picked up the bottle and brought it to the sink to wash the nipple.
When she brought the bottle back to David, he said, “I have to go.”
He passed her the baby, and he knew then that he would never see this child again.
When David left, she was sitting on the stoop, shivering. He and Tim Swisher walked past her and down the street to the car, and then they started the long drive back to Washington.
MARCH 14, 1993
Everyone was buried; at least Danielle wasn’t the only one.
Even God had declared a snow day. Danielle heard it on the radio: Catholics in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had been granted dispensation from attending Mass.
And Danielle had granted Betsy dispensation from her duties as caretaker for her mother—no longer chemo-sick, just cancer-sick. She had encouraged Betsy to get away—had insisted—and finally Betsy relented and went to visit a friend in San Francisco. She, for one, was not being buried; she had escaped all this, but who knew when she would be able to fly home.
Danielle looked out her bedroom window: everything was white. A blizzard one week before spring. It had snowed all day yesterday and hadn’t stopped yet, and today the snow was so deep that most neighbors, she could see, had given up on shoveling. She had slept late, and now lunchtime had passed—she had eaten only half of a banana—and the blizzard made it feel okay to get back into bed. She wasn’t in too much pain—the morphine lollipop helped—but the medicine made her dizzy and it was increasingly difficult to walk or stand or read. Still, she tried to read; she wouldn’t give that up.
Mostly what she felt was tired. She’d been sleeping off and on day and night, a few hours awake, a few hours asleep. Her favorite hour, she’d discovered, was 4:00 AM, before most others were awake—waiting for and then seeing the first glow of a new day’s light. Her least favorite was one hour earlier, 3:00 AM, that noman’s-land between night and morning, which was just plain lonely. So lonely that with Betsy away, Danielle had been tempted to call David, had wished that he might call her. He had called regularly the first weeks after their separation to see how she was feeling, but she tended not to answer, instead listening to his voice as he left a message. Their answering machine’s greeting used to be David’s voice, but a week after he moved out, Danielle recorded a new one. She kept it simple: “We’re not here, please leave a message.” Callers could figure out for themselves whom we now included and did not. Some nights, during her least favorite hour, she would play back David’s messages on low volume so that Betsy wouldn’t hear.
She loved the old David enough to hate the new David all the more. “What did you do to my husband?” she wanted to scream at him, as if they were two separate people, when really they were both inside him—the two Davids. There were more than two, of course: the David she had married, David the father, David the lawyer, David who had lost his son, David the senator, David the presidential candidate, and the David she didn’t know, David between August and December 1991—four months during which, she tried to believe, an imposter had taken over her husband’s body.
Now: Sad David. David the penitent. David who didn’t live here anymore.
And who was she now? She was separated from her husband. She was sometimes humiliated—even though she had done nothing wrong. She was no longer a professor. In another six to eight months, best guess, she would no longer be a cancer patient. In another six to eight months, best guess, she would no longer be a mother. Would no longer be anything. But today, right now, she was a fifty-four-year-old woman in her pajamas and robe, getting back into bed at 2:00 PM after having sucked on a morphine lollipop.
She could no longer get through full plays—dizziness, blurred vision—and so she had stacked a dozen or so of her favorites on her bedside table and read passages from each, and it seemed to her now, as she dipped into Sophocles and Shakespeare and O’Neill and Miller and Williams and Mamet, that they were all one long, strange play, and that her life itself—maybe it was the morphine that made her feel his way—was a play, and that she was in its final act, and the rooms of this house were its set. Act whatever, in which our protagonist can’t get through more than a few sentences at a time, in which our protagonist opens book after book and for only the second time in her life—the first was after her son died—doesn’t care much for reading about made-up people in made-up dramas, an activity that once brought so much meaning to her life. A blizzard was burying her, and beautiful words couldn’t change much.
I should have written a play, she thought. The play I will never have time now to write. If this were the final act of the play, she thought, it wouldn’t be very interesting—a sick woman in bed as another afternoon slips away. The protagonist must do something.
She got out of bed, unsteady on her feet, and went looking for props. A good scene needed props. She walked down the hallway to David’s office, opened the door, but did not go in. His desk, still there. His chair. A cup of pens on the desk. A legal pad. A phone. Some of his books remained, but most shelves were empty. Some of his clothes still hung in his bedroom closet, but no suits and absolutely no ties—nothing that might remind her. He’d left behind some polo shirts and sweaters and sweatshirts, and she hadn’t said: “Take them too. Take everything.” He’d left behind a toothbrush, a razor, shaving cream, deodorant (from time to time, she smelled it), but she had put his toiletries into a box. That he’d left behind anything, that she’d let him, was maybe a sign of hope that they could fix this. She did hope—at first. Until the final blow—the baby. Some things you could not fix, could not make go away.
She stepped into David’s office, what had been his, and stood there a moment. On the other side of the window behind David’s desk the world was white and more white. She walked to the desk and sat. She took a pen from the pen cup. On the legal pad she wrote the date. Then what? Dear David? Dear Betsy? Dear Living? She tried to focus her vision. No, she would never write a note or a play or a memoir—her version of the story. Books would be written about David, she was sure. Even she, the one whose name she tried not to think, might write a book. It wasn’t fair, Danielle thought, that she would get to live, her life would go on, while Danielle—
She picked up the phone and dialed information. When asked what city, she said, “Jackson Heights, New York.” When asked what listing, she brought herself to say the name.
“Please hold for the number.”
A computerized voice recited the number, but Danielle did not write it down, she did not want to see it, wanted no record of it. Instead, she pressed the button on the phone to be connected, and then suddenly the phone was ringing—somewhere in Queens—and Danielle still wasn’t sure what she would say. It felt better to be angry with her, to make her the only villain. That way, she and David could be on the same team again.
Hello, this is Danielle Christie. I need to say a few things to you.
She could hang up on Danielle. Then what?
This is Danielle Christie. I may not be alive much longer, but I want to make sure you hear this from me.
Of course she would hang up.
Danielle had waited five rings now, and she expected to hear her voice on an answering machine. Yes, then she could say everything she wanted.
What you did was immoral, and what you did after—talking to tabloids instead of just going away and leaving us alone—was just as terrible. You are a sick person. You will never know the pain you have caused my family. You will never know.
But the phone kept ringing, it was up to a dozen now, still no answering machine—and then a loud crack, what sound
ed like a cannon fired. It frightened Danielle so much that she dropped the receiver.
She went to the window, but nothing seemed to be different: children built snowmen and threw snowballs at each other and at lampposts and trees.
Then she heard a low but growing rumble and realized what it was.
Thunder during a blizzard. She knew that was possible but had never heard it before. She picked up the receiver but heard nothing. She put it in its cradle, then picked it up again. Still nothing. She tried a lamp, then another; the power had gone out.
She was tired and wanted to get back into bed, but the sun was out—during a blizzard—and she needed to see this, not just through a window. She gathered enough energy to put on boots—she didn’t bother to tie the laces—and a winter coat, and she walked slowly down the stairs and out onto the stoop. Watching the children play, she remembered Nick and Betsy playing on this same street ten years earlier, during another huge snowstorm. The cars were buried in snow, and there was nothing that seemed to set the two days apart in time—except Danielle’s age.
She looked up at the snow falling. A strange miracle, snow. Even explainable things could be miraculous.
She couldn’t read much anymore, she wasn’t even that interested in reading, she was too tired, and that was how she knew, how she really knew, that what the doctors had told her was true: she was not long for this world.
That phrase—not long for this world—was beautiful, she felt, as she looked up into the swirling snow. It meant: I won’t be in this world for long. But she heard something closer to: I long for this world. But what she longed for was a world already gone—when Nick was here, and her children were children, and David was the David she knew and trusted. If she didn’t look down at how bony her hands had become, and if she didn’t reach up to touch her face, too thin, or her hair, too brittle, and if she didn’t touch her lips, too dry, she might be able to believe today was years ago. That, she decided, would be a kind of heaven—to be able to go back in time and relive just one day, before anything went wrong, before they even imagined that it could.
The Senator's Children Page 13