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 exposé 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. Blackwell is sometimes made out to be nothing but the First Lady Who Lunches, she’s a former librarian who knows just how crucial privacy and intellectual freedom are to a democracy.
Sitting in bed reading this, I had felt a rise of the sort of anger that I experience infrequently. It wasn’t the sentiment Thea was expressing, which I had heard often enough, but the source—unlike Carolyn Thayer, or my cousin Patty, or even Simon Törnkvist, Thea was a person with whom I’d once felt great kinship. And why couldn’t she give me the benefit of the doubt, why couldn’t she assume I was doing the best I could under the circumstances? Who was Thea to decide the exact quantity or nature of what I ought to say, and to whom, and how? I reminded myself of the decision I’d made years before, walking alone on Maronee Drive after the ridiculous Milwaukee Sentinel article about my molasses cookies—that I could not be defined by others from the outside, and that the fact of something being printed didn’t make it true. Still, this was Thea and the Times.
They think they’ll sway you, but they do the opposite—the more people there are exerting pressure, the more they are part of a pattern. There is also the fact of each individual who lobbies you having a pet issue—Thea objected specifically to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act—and how even in their national concerns, people are driven by a sort of altruistic self-interest. This is what I have done most wrong, this is how I have fallen short. While the criticism I receive can be discouraging, the variations on it negate one another. Whatever I have accomplished that was positive, it wasn’t enough. What’s important is what I’ve overlooked or ignored. (And again: I’m popular, my approval ratings are twice Charlie’s. It doesn’t surprise me that he ignores his critics altogether.)
These are my “issues”: breast-cancer awareness and detection; historic preservation of art and buildings; pediatric AIDS prevention here and abroad, especially in Africa; and literacy. If the issues on which I’ve focused are noncontroversial, I believe they’re legitimately worthy. What has been most wrenching as first lady, however, is that the old sense of obligation, guilt, and sadness I used to get when I read the newspaper in Milwaukee has been dramatically compounded. Though I resist the notion shared by Gladys Wycomb, Thea Dengler, and many others that I ought to lobby my husband, it’s true that if I visit an organization or invite its members to the White House—a veterinary clinic that spays pets for people who can’t afford it, a program that tries to decrease gang violence, an orphanage for homeless children in Addis Ababa—that organization will receive an influx of donations, a shower of publicity. I can change people’s lives, and many times, although it is cowardly, I have wished I didn’t have that ability. The pressure is too great, and the hardest part is not that what I do is insufficient in others’ eyes but that it’s insufficient in my own. I stay busy, I travel, I try with my visits—with my actions, that is, more than my words—to support other people’s good work, but I don’t doubt that I’d have felt better about my contributions to the world if my power were more modest. If I had remained a single woman, a teacher, I have the idea that I might have begun, at the age of forty or so, to take in foster children, and not necessarily white ones; I’d compost, and perhaps by now I’d have purchased a Prius, though I still don’t think I’d have affixed an antiwar bumper sticker to it. In whatever way such things are measured, I probably would have done less, but I wouldn’t have had to face the reality that I could have done far more.
As for those who hate me because they hate Charlie, hate me by extension, I am curious of this: At what point, in their opinion, should I have done something, and what should that something have been? Should I not have married him? Should I not have discouraged his drinking? (“Jim Beam and me, have us both”—is that what I ought to have said?) When he told me that he wanted to run for governor and I told him I’d prefer he didn’t (though I foolishly thought at least it was better than congressman or senator, at least it would keep us in Wisconsin)—when he decided that in spite of my stated preference, he was indeed going to run, should I have left him? Should I have stayed with him but not campaigned for him? Should I have stated explicitly to the public when my views differed from his? Should I have left him when he decided, also against my wishes, to run for presid
ent? Anyone who has been married, and especially anyone married for several decades, knows the union is a series of compromises; to judge the compromises I have made is, I take it, easy to do from far away.
If I am diffident, then my diffidence stems in part from my aversion to arriving hastily at decisions. During the lead-up to the war, I sincerely didn’t know what I thought the right course of action was; I read articles for both sides, and I found convincing arguments in each. Because the stakes were so high, I did have an uneasy feeling during the early months of 2003, but Charlie and I talked about the situation less than one might imagine, or I should say we talked logistically more than we discussed the philosophical or historical implications. He’d call from the Oval Office and say, “I’ve got to go to a meeting in the Sit Room, so how about if we watch that movie tomorrow night instead?” Or, as he once put it about the secretary of state, “We’ve been pumping up Stanley for his talk to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, and I think he’s really gonna hit this one out of the park.”
These days, it is common for people in both political parties, for people who don’t consider themselves members of any party at all, to say Charlie’s administration bungled the war and we should bring the troops home. And Charlie’s administration did underestimate how neglected the country’s infrastructure was, how likely an insurgency would be, and how many weapons the insurgents had. All of that is now clear; the question is how to proceed. For America, it would be advantageous to leave, but what about them, the country we invaded?
When Ella was in Montessori at Biddle Academy, the classroom activities included building blocks, wooden puzzles, and, to Charlie’s great amusement, a sink filled with plastic cups and dishes (“So she can learn to be a scullery maid,” he’d joke). The guiding principles of the classroom activities were these: Finish one task before you start another, and clean up after yourself. In the midst of our war in a hot, sandy country over six thousand miles away, a country whose art and culture and language and science stretch back to the beginning of human civilization, I keep returning to these ideas, that it is our responsibility to clean up the mess we made. For the last four years, I’ve wondered if we’ll make things worse by withdrawing, and I’ve remained confused about whether it was right to invade in the first place. If we invaded as a democracy unseating a dictator, does the fact that there were more deaths than Americans expected mean invading was wrong? If we were right to invade but it was sloppily executed, does that make it wrong?
When I see political pundits on television, or meet the Republican ones at events in or outside the White House, what strikes me most is their certainty. Is it exaggerated for the cameras, and do they in the privacy of their homes, at the end of the day, remove it along with their socks or stockings? Or are they always so bombastic and assured? I envy them as I envy the deeply religious, including my husband, but I have felt incapable of joining their ranks. I’ve never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad. Historic preservation will allow future generations to understand what life used to be like and in so doing will help Americans chart a path forward. The issues and decisions that are more complex I have left to others, to those confident of their own rightness. I have imagined that I’ll know what I think of this war when Charlie is long out of office, but that I don’t know now—it is a novel I haven’t reached the end of.
Or so I have often told myself.
And yet if Andrew Imhof’s death was the singular tragedy of my life, if in some ways I have lived since then trying to compensate for my error, trying to be worthy of having survived—if his death was the worst thing I could have imagined, then what words are there, what space in my imagination, for the deaths of thousands of American troops and foreign civilians? If my critics are right that I share responsibility for Charlie’s administrative policies, including the decision to go to war, then Andrew Imhof’s death is the least of what I have caused; it is nothing, and utterly insignificant. What if I believed the consequences of the war were also my fault? The twenty-nine-year-old former high school athlete from Hot Springs, Arkansas, killed by small-arms fire while searching a house in a southern neighborhood of the capital city; the twenty-five-year-old sergeant from Ogden, Utah, killed on his third tour of duty a month after his daughter was born, who didn’t want to reenlist but needed the twenty-four-thousand-dollar bonus for a down payment on a house; the nineteen-year-old from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who joined the army on his eighteenth birthday and was killed in a marketplace explosion; and the tens of thousands, or likelier hundreds of thousands, of civilians, a member of a local city council, a shopkeeper and his wife and three daughters, journalists and cameramen and translators working with the American military or the media, a bride and her new mother-in-law and twelve of the guests celebrating a wedding attended by a suicide bomber—killed and killed and killed and killed. If the blood of these people were on my hands, if there were something I personally could have done to prevent such carnage, the loss of so many adults and teenagers and children who presumably wanted, just as I always have, to live an ordinary life—if I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?
____
“OKAY, THOSE THIRD-GRADERS are terrors,” Ella is saying. “Can we just establish that you’re eternally in my debt?”
“Belinda says you did a fabulous job,” I say. “She told Jessica you had them spellbound.”
“Seriously, this one boy tried to climb over the rope in the Red Room, and then this other kid pushed a girl into the wall in the Vermeil Room. You’d think they’d have some reverence for this place, but they were like animals. I can’t wait to see what they do onstage tonight.”
It is just past six on the East Coast, and I’m back on the jet, above the cloud cover; we’re half an hour from Washington, meaning that after the motorcade ride back to the residence, I’ll have an hour to dress for the gala. “Thank you for standing in for me,” I say. “You did your good deed for the day. Ladybug, there’s something I want to talk to you about tonight when I get home.”
Immediately, accusingly, she says, “Do you have breast cancer?”
“What on earth—No, honey, I don’t have cancer.”
“You just sounded so serious. Okay, so I picked out which shoes you should wear tonight—are you ready?”
Jessica passes me a note: Hank on hold, says urgent.
“Mom?” Ella says.
“Let me call you back in a minute.” When I’ve pressed the “end” button on one phone, Jessica passes me another, and I cover the mouth-piece. “He won’t say what it’s about?”
“He wants to talk to you directly,” Jessica says.
I hold the phone to my ear. “This is Alice.”
“Ding dong, the witch is dead.” Hank’s voice is unmistakably gleeful. “Gladys Wycomb bought the ranch an hour ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jessica mouths, “What?” I hold up a finger.
Hank says, “The old ticker gave out, and no, I didn’t have her offed, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Did you?” A wave of horror passes over me. I’m not a conspiracy buff, but I’m quite sure things take place in any presidency that would shock most voters; I’ve never dwelled on what those things might be in Charlie’s case, because I am conflicted enough about the controversies that are known and legal.
“Alice, I swear to you I had nothing to do with it, and neither did anyone else except Mother Nature. Now, tell me this isn’t the best news you’ve heard since Van Halen announced their reunion tour.”
“But her helper, Norene—”
“Not a chance. Turns out in the mid-nineties, she was the go-to girl for dime bags in Cicero, Illinois, and she’s got a police record longer than your arm. The geriatric feminist avenger had nothing to lose, but Norene has plenty.”
“You’re telling me that Dr. Wycomb died of completely natural causes?”
Jessica is still standing in front of me, and her jaw drops. “Gladys Wycomb died?” she whispers, and I nod.
“She was a hundred and four, Alice,” Hank is saying. “There doesn’t need to be foul play—unless it was you who slipped a wee thimbleful of arsenic in her afternoon tea.”
“I don’t find that funny.”
“In all seriousness, blackmailing you was probably physically draining. I’ve got to hand it to her that she went out with a bang and not a whimper, but the good news for us is it’s over—the abortion story is off the table. You ready to come home and be saluted by students and teachers?”
“How can you be sure she didn’t tell anyone besides Norene?”
“So what if she did? It’ll be hearsay, nothing but another urban legend. You’ve got a former physician claiming she performed the abortion, the press is going to sit up and take notice. You’ve got a friend of a friend of an aide of a dead lady, and if you seriously think that’ll fly, well, then wait till you hear the one about Richard Gere and the gerbil.”
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