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 Esquire—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, when 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 adoption 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.”
“A hundred and four, still living at home in Chicago, and taken care of by an aide named Norene Davis.” Hank rolls his eyes. “They weren’t exactly trying to cover their tracks—hoping for some attention is more like it. I just got off the phone with Gladys, and I swear I’m not being arrogant when I say that receiving a call from evil incarnate might have been the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to the old crone.”
“You spoke to her directly?”
Hank nods. “She’s feisty for a centenarian, I’ll give her that. She says you had the procedure under the name Alice Warren.”
“Isn’t this a violation of patient confidentiality or the Hippocratic Oath?”
“Funny you should ask.” I know from Hank’s glib tone that I’ll be unlikely to see the humor in what he’s about to say. “As a matter of fact, it’s abortion that’s a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Granted, it advocates confidentiality, too, but you know what? When you’re a hundred and four years old, you do what you damn well please.”
I think then of Gladys Wycomb’s white cat’s-eye glasses, her heavy-set build, her chauffeur and her fancy apartment and the gold fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper in the hall outside it, the hall where, over four decades ago, I vomited into the Christmas vase. Slowly, I say, “And what she wants from me is to publicly malign Ingrid Sanchez?”
“Yeah, no biggie—just that, and while you’re at it, you can remind American show enthusiastically you support a woman’s right to choose.”
“Does Dr. Wycomb know I have said I’m pro-choice?”
“Not for three years, and apparently, your brevity both times was unsatisfying. I get the feeling this gal knows she’s about to kick the bucket, she’s spending a little too much time watching C-SPAN, and she’s had an eleventh-hour vision that she should intervene. She’s framing it as a matter of conscience.”
“By blackmailing me.”
“Again, let me emphasize: She’s a hundred and four, and she probably figures she’ll croak before she sees any legal repercussions. She doesn’t give a”—Hank pauses—“a hoot.” (A perk of being first lady: I’ve never been crazy about swearing, and now the only ones who feel comfortable doing it in my presence are Charlie and Ella.)
“Isn’t she putting Norene Davis at risk of imprisonment, too?” I say.
“The bottom line is you had an abortion. I’m not judging you, Alice, but the American people will. If Norene Davis goes to the clink, she’ll serve a few years, and then think of the media exposure, the book deals. She gets heralded as a champion of women’s rights, and the conservative base is cleaning up the mess for years to come.”
“So instead what? I deny the charge and call Dr. Wycomb a liar?”
“You don’t have to be the one to do it.” He turns to Jessica. “Can you help me out here?”
“What are our other options?” Jessica asks. Jessica is tall and lean, wearing black pants and a yellow silk sleeveless blouse. There is a good deal I admire about my chief of staff, but perhaps most of all her combination of unflappability and warmth; I’ve often found calmness and professionalism to go with an emotional remoteness, but this is not the case with her.
Hank says, “I’m not wild about this idea, and I don’t think the president will be, either, but we can schedule an interview where, in the most oblique w
ay, you go ahead and criticize Ingrid Sanchez. We’ll set it up like it was an unexpected tough question, and if we go this route, woman-to-woman will work best—you’re showing Diane Sawyer how beautiful the Rose Garden is this time of year, she surprises you by asking what you think of the Supreme Court nominee, and you blurt out that you wish Sanchez showed clearer signs of supporting a woman’s right to—”
Jessica is shaking her head. “And what if that’s not enough for Gladys Wycomb? That’ll be the worst of both worlds, if we’ve capitulated and she still talks.”
“I want to go see her.” I stand; the idea has come to me abruptly, but I am certain. “If I leave immediately, I’ll be back in time to do the tour for the children’s choir. I’d like to talk to Dr. Wycomb in person. She was—” I break off. “She was my grandmother’s dear friend.”
“Her loyalty to your family is touching.” Hank looks at his watch. “If there’s nothing you need to do before you leave, the plane’s ready when you are.”
“You already scheduled it?”
Hank smiles. He delights in knowing what a person will want even before the person herself. “For obvious reasons, it’s got to be a baseball cap trip, and we’ll put the word out here that you went to see your mom.” Baseball cap is our term for trips that are off-the-record—OTR—or at least ahead of time, and that involve as few people as possible. The phrase has its origins in the way Charlie has traveled twice to the war zones overseas: In the dark of night, he left once from the White House and once from Camp David and rode to Andrews Air Force Base in a single tinted SUV, no motorcade, sitting in the back wearing a baseball cap, accompanied by his secretary of state and just two Secret Service agents; even the tiny press pool who joined him aboard Air Force One wasn’t told where they were going until midflight. “Jessica, I’m thinking you’re the only one who accompanies her, plus whoever Cal thinks is necessary securitywise,” Hank says. He turns back toward me. “If anyone can sweet-talk this woman out of coming forward, I’m sure it’s you. You go out to Chicago, trade on your personal relationship, flatter her, and ooze sincerity. The disadvantage is if she can’t be sweet-talked, you may have given her credibility by paying a visit, but we can spin that into her being an Alzheimer’s-addled crackpot: She’s right that she saw you, but she invented this abortion business.”
“Hank.” I wait until he’s looking at me directly. “I don’t ooze sincerity. I am sincere.”
Hank’s smirk is slow and closed-lipped. “It’s your Achilles’ heel,” he says.
____
THE PART ABOUT being famous that nobody who hasn’t been famous can understand is the criticism. Sure, sticks and stones and all of that, but the fact is that many people have probably wished at least once or twice that someone would be completely honest with them. How does this dress or this haircut really look? What do you truly think of my wife or my son, the house I built, the memo I wrote, the cake I baked?
In reality, they don’t want to know. What they want is to be complimented and for the compliments to be completely honest; they want all-encompassing affirmation that’s also true. That isn’t how unvarnished opinions work. People’s unvarnished opinions are devastating, or they are at first. As one of my predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote, “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”
There are two ways of being criticized: neutrally and intentionally. The neutral criticism comes, for example, in an ostensibly objective article, in a throwaway line: Mrs. Blackwell, who has never been known for her fashion acumen . . . Asked about her husband’s low approval ratings, Alice Blackwell stiffens and becomes defensive . . . Though insiders claim she has a sense of humor, Alice Blackwell rarely shows it in public . . . Unlike the first couple before them, who were warm and frequent hosts . . . You have spent an hour in the presence of a reporter, you were guarded, especially at first, but you got along perfectly well and shared a few laughs (yes, laughs, in spite of your alleged humorlessness), you thought the interview went well, and then—this? The neutral criticisms sting more because of how casual they are; although they aren’t necessarily the truth, they feel like it, like the reporter isn’t trying to be mean but is simply stating facts.
And then there are the outright attacks, which appear mostly on cable television or blogs; in the case of blogs, they are vehement in ways that evoke spittle and flushed faces and the pounding of keyboards: What a traitor to feminism . . . How much Valium do you think she has to take to forget she’s married to the Antichrist? . . . OH MY GOD she’s SUCH a Stepford wife!!! Once or twice a year, I type my name into an Internet search engine—I don’t want to be overly sheltered from what’s out there—and skimming the results makes me feel as if someone is turning a doorknob inside my stomach; each time I’ve done it, I’ve thought afterward that it was a mistake, and then enough time has passed that I’ve forgotten. To be lambasted by strangers is not only painful but so pronounced a reversal of the usual social code that it’s also quite astonishing. Unfamous people imagine that famous people are endlessly pleased with themselves and their exposure, and I suppose some are, but far from all. These online rants also feel, in a different way, deceptively like the truth, unguarded and without the filters of the main-stream media. Although my critics are in the minority, how can I listen to praise when the faultfinders are so aggressive, so aggrieved, and so certain?
In addition, there are vast quantities of distorted or flat-out wrong information, motives or emotions that are incorrectly ascribed: about Andrew Imhof’s death (Isn’t it lucky Alice Blackwell was white and rich and didn’t have to go to prison after murdering her boyfriend?), about my supposed Christian evangelism (a cartoon ran in many newspapers of me reading the Bible to a group of Muslim children, saying, “Now, now, boys and girls, if you just pray to Jesus Christ, everything will be all right”), about my supposed intellectual superiority in comparison to Charlie (another cartoon: Charlie and I are lying in bed at night, and I am absorbed in War and Peace, while he pages through The Cat in the Hat). One year Jadey sent me a birthday card—apparently, a popular one—which had a smiling photo of me in which I wore a navy suit and an eagle pin. (I was never very fond of that pin, but it had been given to me by the wife of Charlie’s secretary of defense, and I felt obligated to wear it a few times.) On the front of the card, it said, Some things are worse than another birthday . . . and inside, it said, You could be married to HIM. Underneath, Jadey had scrawled, Don’t be offended, also don’t show c!
Some of the misinformation out there about us, about me, is more factual and insignificant—how old I was when Charlie and I got married, the spelling of my childhood neighbor Mrs. Falke’s last name—but no matter the tone or type of error, it is very rarely worth it to have my press secretary request a correction. I also must accept that some errors have been propagated by Charlie’s inner circle, specifically by Hank: that I am the daughter of a postal carrier was a widespread one during the first presidential campaign. (It is a great irony that my middle-class roots have proved, from a political standpoint, to be my most valuable asset. The whiffs of East Coast Ivy League dynastic privilege that cling to Charlie—I dispel them with my humble Wisconsin authenticity.)
Even as my approval ratings have remained high, a public idea of me has formed that has little relationship to who I am, what I think, or even how I spend my time. Hank once commissioned a poll that found the majority of Americans believe I’m a devout Christian who has never held a paying job. Perhaps this is why my approval ratings have remained high.
I don’t imagine any person could remain entirely impervious to her own public distortion, and I won’t claim it doesn’t bother me, but I made a decision in Charlie’s first gubernatorial campaign not to devote my energy to correcting misinterpretations. A press secretary had arranged for a reporter from the Sentinel to come for tea with me at home (how I hated having reporters in our house, knowing they were scrutinizing our family pictures, our magazines and knickknacks an
d refrigerator magnets, when we’d never meant for them to be scrutinized, we’d only acquired them in the course of living—it was easier after we moved to the governor’s mansion and then to the White House, because I always knew that if the reporters were interlopers, so were we). During this Sentinel interview, the reporter asked me about gardening, baking, and children’s books; I provided my tips for growing delphiniums, my recipe for molasses cookies, and a list of my favorite titles, starting with The Giving Tree.
Despite the family she married into, Alice Blackwell is avowedly apolitical, the article began. Social security and health care? No thanks, she’d rather talk about how she gets her molasses cookies so darn chewy . . .
I was mortified; Charlie thought it was hilarious; and Hank was thrilled by the article, in large part because Charlie’s Democratic opponent, the incumbent, had recently divorced his wife of thirty-three years, married a suspiciously attractive and much younger lobbyist, and couldn’t hope to compete with our sugary domesticity. For a twenty-four-hour period after the article ran, I was tense and jumpy, continuously composing letters to the editor in my head. I had gone for a walk alone—we no longer belonged to the Maronee Country Club, Charlie had had to resign given the awkward fact of the club having no black members, and so now, if I wasn’t with Jadey, I walked along our street—and all at once, a notion lodged itself in my head, a notion I’ve come back to again and again in the years since: Although Charlie was running for office, I was not. The fact that I was represented in an article in a particular way made it neither true nor untrue; the way I lived my life, the way I conducted myself, wasn’t just the only truth but also the only reality I could control. I wouldn’t stretch or stoop to accommodate the media, I decided. I would be accountable to myself, and I would always know whether I’d met or fallen short of my own expectations. How much distress I’d avoid this way, how much calmer I would feel. Since that afternoon, I have always tried to be polite with members of the media, though I realize I haven’t always been forthcoming in the way they’d like. I attempt to express myself as simply as possible, I respond to what they ask rather than promoting my own particular interests, I don’t share personal details or vulnerabilities. When I met Charlie, I fell for him, I say, because he was fun; when Andrew Imhof died, I say, it was incredibly sad; and when I think about the troops, I say, I am concerned for them and admire their bravery and sacrifice. I don’t bend over backward to convince reporters that everything I say is heartfelt (after all, they don’t determine whether it’s heartfelt) or to proffer clever sound bites; I don’t disparage Charlie’s opponents. That I’m not particularly quotable and am often a bit dull, optimistically dull, I consider a minor victory.
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