“I’ll be home in five minutes,” I say. “Will you wait for me to get there before you become wound up?”
“See, I always forget this about you,” he says, and even now, long after we first lost our privacy, I can’t help wondering who’s overhearing him. “Every decade, you like to pin me to the ground, pull open my mouth, and take a shit right into it.”
I ONCE THOUGHT, when I was thirty-one and Charlie was running for Congress, that with practice I might learn to hold a novel in my purse and read it during his speeches, but I was wrong; reporters and audience members often glance at a candidate’s wife while he speaks, gauging her reaction. Also around this time, which was when Charlie and I were falling in love, I thought that I could support him not as a politician but as a person, and I told him this, and he thought it, too. “I can assure you I’ll never tell anyone if I disagree with you,” I said to him. “That’s no one’s business but ours.”
____
THE GALA IN my honor, attended by more than three hundred guests, is pleasant and crowded and a bit over-the-top. Charlie and I sit side by side in the front row, and after the third-graders sing “God Bless America” and a tiny twelve-year-old boy in a wheelchair is pushed onstage by his mother to lead us all in the Pledge of Allegiance, there are speeches by a principal at a public high school in Anacostia, a fifth-grader at a school in Bethesda, Maryland, and a Democratic senator known for his sponsorship of education-related bills (though he and I have gotten along well over the years, it’s no secret he despises Charlie; however, he’s hoping for support for his housing-voucher program). There is then a baton-twirling routine performed to R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” by a trio of nine-year-olds in leotards, a scene from the play The Miracle Worker in which two respected Broadway actresses play the parts of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and a reading of the Langston Hughes poem “Theme for English B” by a high school senior, an African-American girl who is probably fifty pounds overweight, quite pretty, and in possession of undeniable stage presence.
At this point, three teachers receive awards: chrome apples affixed to wooden tablets, each presented by the student who nominated the teacher. The evening culminates with the reappearance onstage of all the earlier performers, two of whom unfurl a banner that has to be forty feet long and says THANK YOU FOR BEING OUR ADVOCATE MRS. BLACKWELL. During the teacher awards, I slipped backstage, and as planned, I walk out from the wings, smiling and waving. At the podium, two ninth-graders present me with my own chrome apple that’s a foot in diameter (if my apple were life-size, as the teachers’ apples are, it wouldn’t provide the requisite photo op, and the flashbulbs are indeed blinding in this moment). I don’t give a real speech but simply say, “Thank you very much, and thank you all for coming tonight. This has been an extraordinary evening, and I’m honored to be in the presence of so much talent. I hope each one of you will remember that wherever you want to go in life, education is the ticket. And now, in light of the fact that it’s a school night, I recommend that you all go home, make sure your homework is finished, and get a good night’s sleep.” (Not a speech, but still—even these aren’t words I wrote.) While normally, I’d be embarrassed at having such a fuss made over me, after all the drama of today, these proceedings are a giddy distraction. Onstage, I pose for photos with the students and teachers; several students not waiting in line have formed a circle around one of the “God Bless America” third-graders, who is vigorously break-dancing. Charlie is gone, I note. We have acted our parts tonight, sitting next to each other with pleasant expressions, Charlie smiling gamely whenever someone onstage said something kind about me, but he gave me no nonmandatory attention, no whisper or hand squeeze or knee pat.
After I returned to the White House from my conversation with Edgar Franklin, there wasn’t time for me to find Charlie—as he had predicted, there wasn’t even time for me to change clothes, but I did hurry to the residence to use my own bathroom and saw Ella. We hugged, and I said, “We should head down there now,” and she said, “Aren’t you going to refresh your makeup?”
“Honey, we’re running late.”
She smirked. “You think they’ll start without you?” Although Mirel, a lovely young woman who acts as my makeup artist, and Kim, who does my hair, were waiting in the beauty salon (a room installed by Pat Nixon), it was Ella who, using Mirel’s supplies, dabbed gloss onto my lips, rubbed the brush over my cheeks, said, “Look up,” and ran the mascara wand through my eyelashes. “Now look down.” I obeyed, and she said, “Now blink.” Then she said, “Mom, I’m glad you talked to the Franklin dude, but if the troops were withdrawn right away, there’d be a domino effect of lawlessness across the Middle East.”
Her tone was reminiscent of when she was a teenager, explaining to me something she thought I ought to already know—diplomatic enough not to offend me but confident that logic was on her side. (Obviously she should be able to stay out until two in the morning because she was extremely responsible, because none of her classmates had a midnight curfew, and because it wasn’t like she drank.) In a strange way, I was caught off guard and touched by Ella’s directness, her willingness to talk about the war itself rather than about how to fix my supposed slip of the tongue. This, I knew already, would be the approach of everyone else. Just in the time it had taken Jessica and me to get back to the White House, Jessica’s two phones had rung six times (and those were only the rings I heard—there were probably many more beeps for calls interrupting the calls she was in the middle of), and apparently, Hank had spoken to several reporters. I’m not sure if he’d have skipped the gala anyway, but this was what he did, no doubt to continue setting the record straight. When Jessica, Ella, and I met Charlie in the Family Dining Room, Debbie Bell and Hank were both with him, perhaps to serve as a buffer between Charlie and me, perhaps at Charlie’s request, and so were Charlie’s personal aide, Michael, and my personal aide, Ashley, and Charlie didn’t kiss me hello but instead embraced Ella and more or less ignored me; I also could tell that Debbie was fuming. The eight of us walked together through Cross Hall, and just before we entered the East Room, Hank peeled off, and Charlie took my hand and forced a grin onto his face. Subtext: Nothing is wrong, and no one at the White House is concerned about the first lady going off-message.
When I’ve shaken hands and been photographed with everyone onstage who’s lined up, Ella, Jessica, and I are ushered out by Cal—Ashley squirts Purell for me—and we head toward the residence without speaking to the few dozen journalists in attendance at the gala; they are kept at bay by the press secretaries. “Here’s Hank’s plan,” Jessica says in a low voice as we walk to the elevator. “No interviews for several weeks, and you don’t take questions from the media at public events. Then we see where things stand and ease back in.”
I nod. This doesn’t seem so bad; silence on my part is far preferable to the sort of verbal acrobatics I’d need to engage in if I were trying not to either reinforce or undermine what I’d told Edgar Franklin. Not that I’ll be off the hook altogether, obviously—whenever I am interviewed again, I’ll be asked about my comments (which Edgar repeated immediately to the assembled reporters, which I knew he would), but I plan to be terse.
Though she rides the elevator upstairs with us, Jessica doesn’t step out; instead, the elevator attendant, a spry senior citizen named Nicholas, holds open the door as Jessica bids Ella and me farewell, acting as if she’s going home herself, though I’m fairly sure she’s planning to return to the East Wing to keep working. “Thank you for everything,” I say to Jessica. “You deserve a medal for today.”
“You deserve a gigantic apple plaque,” Ella says. Ella is merely making a joke; she thinks I went to see my mother this afternoon and doesn’t know about Gladys Wycomb’s threat, doesn’t know what a long day it’s been. In any case, I’ve already lost track of the chrome apple. I believe Jessica’s assistant Belinda carried it away.
Jessica says to me, “Take it easy tonight, okay?” She looks at
Ella. “Make her relax.”
“The same to you,” I say.
“I’m not the one in the eye of the storm,” Jessica says. Abruptly, she jumps out of the elevator and hugs me, and as she does, she whispers in my ear so Ella can’t hear, “You did the right thing.”
Ella and I sit in the Family Kitchen, and Ella pulls cheese, hummus, and baby carrots out of the refrigerator. She isn’t a fan of the food here—even though downstairs the chefs will fix anything we want exactly to our specifications—so I always make sure we’re stocked in the residence when she visits. I call down to ask for a Cobb salad for myself, and Ella and I analyze the evening for a while, discussing the impressive delivery of the girl who recited “Theme for English B,” the vaguely and uncomfortably sexual overtones of the baton-twirling fourth-graders, and Ella says, “Did you talk to Senator Zimon tonight? I think he’s had hair implants.” She adds, “Does Jessica ever annoy you because she’s so perfect?”
I smile. “Does that mean Jessica annoys you because she’s perfect?”
“Not at all!” Ella grins her father’s grin. “No, I’m totally not threatened by this woman who’s close to my own age, who you spend all your time with and like better than me. Not one little bit!”
“I think the world of Jessica, but I only have one daughter, and there’s no one I love more. Would you like to sit on my lap?” I am mostly teasing, as Ella is, too, but she rises, turns, and lowers her rear end onto my thighs for a second. I run my palm down her back, over her still-long caramel-colored hair. Then she stands, reaching forward for a carrot that she dips in the hummus. She bites into it and says over one shoulder, with her mouth full, “What I’m really hungry for right now is a poop sandwich.”
“You’re a class act,” I say. This is an old joke between us, a requirement whenever eating a meal together after time apart. (Needless to say, I never make the joke, but Ella can be counted on.)
“Are you and Dad in a huge fight?” Ella asks.
“Why would you think that?”
“There has to be some fallout from your heart-to-heart with that Franklin guy.”
“Don’t worry about Dad and me. We’ll be just fine.”
“So what’s the thing you wanted to tell me?”
“Oh—” Should I do it? I no longer need to, now that I’ve been spared by Gladys Wycomb’s death, but I still could. What is the difference between giving voice to an overdue truth and being a parent who indulgently unburdens herself? Telling Ella wouldn’t be fair to her, I realize, it would be unsettling—not just because of her religious convictions but also because (I know Ella, and I, too, was an only child) it will make her think she could have had a brother or sister. I say, “It was nothing.”
Ella leans over and kisses my cheek. “Then I’m going to go call Wyatt. Tell Dad when he gets up here that I have something hilarious to show him on YouTube.”
I lightly swat her rear end. “Put your plate in the sink.”
When Ella is gone, I move to the West Sitting Hall, which has a beautiful lunette window overlooking the Old Executive Office Building, the Rose Garden, and the West Wing. I take a seat on a sofa and remain there for an hour and a half, reading. The book I left here yesterday, Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, has been waiting for me for twenty-four hours—all night last night and all day today, while I hopped from Arlington to Chicago to Riley. I enter it, and it welcomes me back.
Just before eleven, I set down the book and stand, and when I do, I remember Pete Imhof’s envelope, folded into the pocket of my linen jacket. I lift it out, and before I reach inside—the envelope is not sealed but already torn open—I see that on the back, in my own seventeen-year-old handwriting, it says, Mr. and Mrs. Imhof. Right away, I know exactly what it is, and with the tip of my thumb, I press against the envelope’s uneven bump, confirming its outline. (It’s so small! Not over half an inch at its widest point.) I pull out the note.
I will never be able to express to you how sorry I am, my seventeen-year-old self explains in blue ink. I know that I have caused you great pain. If there was anything in the world I could do to change what happened, I would. This pendant is something of mine Andrew once told me he liked, so I thought it might comfort you to have it. My pulse is racing as I withdraw the pendant, and it is very tarnished—I will never polish it—and I look at it in my palm: my silver heart. This is what Andrew leaned in to touch that afternoon before he went to football practice, the gift my grandmother gave me for my sixteenth birthday. (Oh, the past, the past—how the memories of the people I loved sear me.)
I’m not sure what I’ll do with the pendant; it’s obviously an inexpensive piece of jewelry, not particularly suitable for a sixty-one-year-old woman and even less so for the first lady, but maybe I can wear it on such a long cord that it won’t be visible beneath my shirts. No object in the world could be dearer to me, and I marvel at the strangeness of its source. Perhaps, though I didn’t yet know I had it, this is what nudged me to go talk to Edgar Franklin—that Pete Imhof had given me back my heart.
I MEET CHARLIE in the hall outside our bedroom. He is walking from the opposite direction, and I can tell that he’s trying to decide how friendly or unfriendly to be—after we make eye contact, he immediately looks away, then seems to realize how absurd it would be to pretend not to see me when it’s only the two of us, or only the two of us and Snowflake, who scampers off as soon as he notices me. A valet hovers outside our bedroom and opens the door as we approach, nodding once at Charlie. “Good night, Mr. President,” and then to me, “Good night, ma’am.”
“’Night, Roger,” Charlie says as we walk by, and I smile without speaking.
When the door closes behind us, I say, “Please don’t give me the silent treatment. If you’re angry, let’s talk about it.”
“If I’m angry? Lindy, how the fuck could you blindside me like this? You know how it looks if there’s not even unified support for the war in my own marriage? I’m the laughingstock of the world tonight, and I have to sit there clapping for baton twirlers.”
“Sweetheart, I think you’re overreacting. What I said to Edgar Franklin wasn’t a political statement.”
“What planet are you living on? When the first lady of the United States talks, it’s always political!” Between our bed and the flat-screen television above the fireplace is a sitting area: two wingback chairs, a sofa, and a wooden table off which Charlie grabs the remote control. “Hmm, I wonder what they’re saying on TV. I’m sure this isn’t all over the networks, because obviously, it was just you speaking as a private citizen, it wasn’t a political statement, and the media fully understands those subtle distinctions.” When the screen comes to life—it’s Fox News—there’s a clip of Charlie’s press secretary, Maggie Carpeni, saying this evening, “Listen, we all want to bring the troops home, every person in America does. The question isn’t if, it’s when, but the first lady knows as well as anyone else that a precipitous withdrawal would have disastrous consequences. She and the president stand united in their certainty that victory will come when stability and freedom have been achieved.”
“I don’t think that makes you look like a laughingstock at all,” I say. That Maggie is misrepresenting my own remarks doesn’t particularly bother me—first because of my belief that the fact of someone saying something about me, even when the someone is in my husband’s inner circle, cannot make it true or untrue, but also because I didn’t realistically imagine that the White House would leave my statements to Edgar Franklin untouched. That I said them once, in earshot of only Colonel Franklin and my agent Cal, has to be enough, at least for now—if I ever expect to reaffirm or expand on them, or to reassert my pro-choice stance, I will have to do so with great care. And Maggie or Hank can minimize what I said, but they can’t erase it. It exists. While I often have been surprised by the trusting nature of the American public, people clearly have become more wary during Charlie’s presidency, and so I can hope that at least some of them will assume the truth: that Ed
gar Franklin quoted me accurately, and that I meant exactly what it sounded like. Whether my words will have any positive effect, including on my husband, remains to be seen.
Charlie clicks to CNN, where the caption at the bottom of the screen says ANTIWAR FATHER RETURNS TO GEORGIA. Edgar Franklin stands before an electronic bouquet of no fewer than a dozen microphones; beside him is a plump woman identified as his sister Cheryl. It is still light out, which means the press conference must have been filmed several hours ago. “I believe that I’ve gotten as close as I will to the president,” he says. “Today I spoke from the heart to Mrs. Blackwell, and I choose to think she heard me and will act as a conduit to her husband. Whether he will listen is up to him. Although I’m going home tonight, I know that for as long as the war continues, it’s my responsibility to protest it.”
There is then a jump away from Edgar Franklin and back to the commentators in the studio—now the caption across the bottom reads ET TU, ALICE?—and one of the pundits, a man in a bow tie, says, “I’m sure all our viewers remember President Blackwell’s claim that he wouldn’t withdraw the troops even if Alice and Snowflake are the only ones left who support him—well, Mr. President, you may want to keep a very close watch on the first cat!” (This is yet another strangeness of being a famous person—that sometimes, on television or a website or in an article, a person addresses you directly but rhetorically directly, seemingly never imagining that you might see or read what they’re saying.)
The four commentators sit at a long, narrow triangle of a table, and they all chuckle at the bow-tied fellow’s quip. The show’s host says, “The big question now is whether the Dems will see this as an opportunity to kick Blackwell while he’s down vis-à-vis his Supreme Court nominee, Ingrid Sanchez.”
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