“It was hard to tell, you know, I'm no doctor,” he said shyly, “but she didn't have any clothes on.”
“She was naked?” The interviewer looked straight into the camera, shocked, and the policeman nodded.
“Yeah, but I don't think the doctors at the hospital said she'd been raped. They just said she'd had sex with her boyfriend or something. Maybe her father walked in on them.”
“Thank you, Sergeant Johnson.”
And then came the pièce de résistance on yet another channel. A moment with Frank Wills, who looked even worse and sleazier than he had twenty years before, if that was possible, and he said bluntly that Grace had always been a strange kid and had always been after her father's money.
“What? He got everything there was, and God knows it wasn't much,” she shouted at Charles, and then laid her head back in despair again.
“Grace, you have to stop going crazy over everything they say. You know they're not going to tell the truth. Why should they?” Where were David Glass and Molly? Why wasn't someone saying anything decent about her? Why didn't anybody love her? Why hadn't they? Why had Molly died, and David disappeared? Where the hell were they now?
“I can't stand this,” she said hysterically. There was no getting away from it, and it was unbearable. There was no relief and in this case, there was no reward for this kind of pain and torture.
“You have to stand it,” Charles said matter-of-factiy. “It's not going to disappear overnight.” Charles knew better than anyone that it could take a long time to die down once the flames had grown to such major proportions.
“Why do I have to stand this?” she asked, crying again.
“Because people love this garbage. They eat it up. When I was married to Michelle, the tabloids crawled all over her constantly, they told lies, they snuck stories, they did everything they could to torture her. You just have to accept that. That's the way it is.”
“I can't. She was a movie star, she wanted the attention. She must have wanted what went with it.” Grace was refusing to see the similarity in their lives.
“And the presumption is that I do too, because I'm a politician.”
She sat in the den with him for an hour and cried, and then she went upstairs and tried to talk to Abby. But Abby didn't want to hear any of it from her. She had been flipping the dial, and hearing all the same things in her mother's bedroom.
“How could you do those things?” Abby sobbed as Grace looked at her in anguish.
“I didn't,” Grace said through tears. “I was miserable, I was alone, I was scared. I was terrified of him … he beat me … he raped me for four years … and I couldn't help it. I don't even know if I meant to kill him. I just did. I was like a wounded animal. I struck out any way I could to save myself from him. I had no choice, Abby.” She was sobbing as Abby watched her, crying too. “But most of the other things they said on TV aren't true.” Grace hated them for what they were doing to her daughter. “None of those things was true. I don't even know those people, except the man who was my father's partner, and what he said wasn't true either. He took alt my father's money. I hardly got anything, and what I got I gave to charity. I've spent my life trying to give back to people like me, to help them survive too. I never forgot what I went through. And oh God, Abby,” she put her arms around her, “I love you so much, I don't ever want you to suffer because of me. It breaks my heart to see you so unhappy. Abby, I had a miserable life as a kid. No one was ever decent to me until I met your father. He gave me a life, he gave me love and all of you. He's one of the few human beings who's ever been kind to me … Abby,” she was sobbing uncontrollably, and her daughter was hugging her, “I'm so sorry, and I love you so much … please forgive me …”
“I'm sorry I was so mean to you … I'm sorry, Mommy …”
“It's okay, it's okay… I love you …”
Charles was watching them from the doorway with tears running down his face, and he tiptoed away to call the lawyers again. But when one of them came to see them that afternoon, he didn't have good news. Public figures, like politicians and movie stars, had no rights of privacy whatsoever. People could say anything they wanted to about them without having the burden of proving whether it was true. And if celebrities wanted to sue, they had to prove that what was being said about them were lies, which was often impossible to do, and they also had to prove that they'd suffered a loss of income as a result, or the impaired ability to make a living, and they had to prove yet again that what had been said had been said in actual malice. And the wives or husbands of politicians, particularly if they had either campaigned, or appeared in public with them, as she obviously had, had the same lack of rights as the politicians. In fact, Grace had no rights at all now.
“What that means,” the attorney who'd come to see them explained, “is that you can't do anything against most of what people are saying. If they claim that you killed your father and you didn't, that's a different story, although they have a right to say you were convicted of it, but if they say you were in a gang in prison, you have to prove that you were not, and how are you going to do that, Mrs. Mackenzie? Get affidavits from the inmates who were there at the time? You have to prove that these things have been said intentionally to hurt you, and that they have affected negatively your ability to make a living,”
“In other words, they can do anything they want to me, and unless I can prove they're lying, and everything else you mentioned, I can't do a damn thing about it. Is that it?”
“Exactly. It's not a happy situation. But everyone in the public eye is in the same boat you are. And unfortunately these are tabloid times we live in. The common belief of the media is that the public wants not only dirt, but blood. They want to make people and destroy people, they want to tear people apart, and feed them to the public bit by bit. It's not personal, it's economic. They make money off your corpse. They're vultures. They pay up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a story, and then treat it as news. And unreliable sources who're being paid that kind of money will say anything to keep the spodight on them, and the money coming. They'll say you danced naked on your father's grave and they saw you do it, if it gets them on TV, and makes them a buck. That's reality. And the so-called legitimate press behave the same way these days. There's no such thing anymore. It's disgusting. And they take innocent people like you, and your family, and trash them, for the hell of it. It's the most malicious game there is, and yet ‘actual malice’ is the hardest thing of all to prove. It isn't even malice anymore, it's greed, and indifference to the human condition.
“You paid a price for what you did. You suffered enough. You were seventeen. You shouldn't have to go through all this, nor should your husband and your children. But there's very littie I can do to help you. We'll keep an eye on it, and if anything turns up we can sue for, we will. But you have to be prepared for the fallout from that too. Lawsuits only encourage the feeding frenzy more. The sharks love blood in the water.”
“You're not very encouraging, Mr. Goldsmith,” Charles said, looking depressed.
“No, I'm not,” he smiled ruefully. He liked Charles, and he felt sorry for Grace. But the laws were not made to protect people like them. The laws had been made to turn them into victims.
The feeding frenzy, as he had called it, went on for weeks. The children went back to school, reluctantly. Fortunately, they got out for summer vacation after a week, and the family moved to Connecticut for the summer. But it was more of the same there. More tabloids, more press, more photographers. More interviews on television with people who claimed to be her best friends, but whom she had never heard of. The only good thing that came of it, was that David Glass emerged from the mists. He had called, and was living in Van Nuys, and had four children. He was desperately sorry to see what was happening to her. It broke his heart, knowing how much pain it caused her to go through it. But no one could do anything to stop the press, or the lies, or the gossip. And he knew as well as she did that even if
he talked to the press on her behalf, everything he said would be distorted. He was happy to know that other than the current uproar in the press, she was happily married, and had children. He apologized for staying out of touch for so long. He was now the senior partner of his late father-in-law's law firm. And then he admitted sheepishly that Tracy, his wife, had been fiercely jealous of Grace when they first moved to California. It was why he had eventually stopped writing. But he was happy to hear her now, he had felt compelled to call, and Grace was happy he'd called her. They both agreed that the press didn't want the facts. They wanted scandal and filth. They wanted to hear that she'd been giving blow jobs to guards, or sleeping with women in chains in prison. They didn't want to know how vulnerable she'd been, how terrorized, how traumatized, how scared, how young, how decent. They only wanted the ugly stuff. Both David and Charles agreed that the best thing was to step back and let them wear themselves out, and offer no comment.
But even after a month of it, the furor hadn't died down. And all the principal tabloids were still running stories about her on their covers. The tabloid TV shows had interviewed everyone except the janitor in jail, and Grace felt it was time to come forward and say something. Grace and Charles spent an entire day talking to Charles's campaign manager, and they finally agreed to let her do a press conference. Maybe that would stop it.
“It won't, you know,” Charles said. But maybe if it was handled well, it wouldn't do any harm either.
The conference was set for the week before her birthday on an important interview show, on a major network. It was heavily advertised, and television news cameras started appearing outside their house the day before. It was agony for their children. They hated having anyone over now, or going anywhere, or even talking to friends. Grace understood it only too well. Every time she went to the grocery store, someone came over to her and started a seemingly innocuous conversation that would end up in Q&A about her life in prison. It didn't matter if they opened with melons or cars, somehow they always wound up in the same place, asking if her father had really raped her, or how traumatic had it been to kill him, and were there really a lot of lesbians in prison.
“Are you kidding?” Charles said in disbelief. It happened to her the most when she was alone or with the children. Grace complained to Charles about it constantly. A woman had walked up to her that day at the gas station, and out of the blue shouted “Bang, ya got him, didn't you, Grace?” “I feel like Bonnie and Clyde.” She had to laugh at it sometimes. It really was absurd, and although people mentioned it to him sometimes too, they never seemed to ask as much or as viciously as they did of Grace. It was as though they wanted to torment her. She had even gotten a highly irritated letter from Cheryl Swanson in Chicago, saying that she was retired now, and she and Bob were divorced, no surprise to Grace, but she couldn't understand why Grace had never told her she'd been in prison.
“Because she wouldn't have hired me,” she said to Charles as she tossed the letter at him to show him. There were lots of letters like that now, and crank calls, and one blank page smeared with blood spelling out the word “Murderess,” which they'd turned over to the police. But she'd had a nice letter from Winnie, in Philadelphia, offering her love and support, and another from Father Tim, who was in Florida, as the chaplain of a retirement community. He sent her his love and prayers, and reminded her that she was God's child, and He loved her.
She reminded herself of it constandy the day of the interview. It had all been carefully staged, and Charles's P.R. people had reviewed the questions, or so they thought. Mysteriously, the questions they'd approved for the interview had disappeared, and Grace found herself asked, first off, what it had meant to her to have sex with her father.
“Meant to me?” She looked at her interviewer in amazement. “Meant to me? Have you ever worked with victims of abuse? Have you ever seen what child abusers do to children? They rape them, they mutilate them … they kill them … they torture them, they put cigarettes out on their little arms and faces … they fry them on radiators … they do a lot of very ugly things … have you ever asked any of them what it meant to them to have boiling water poured on their face, or their arm nearly ripped out of its socket? It means a lot to children when people do things like that to them. It means that no one loves them, that they're in constant danger … it means living with terror every moment of the day. That's what it means … that's what it meant to me.” It was a powerful statement, and the interviewer looked taken aback as Grace fell silent.
“Actually I … we … I'm sure that all your supporters have been wondering how you feel about your prison record being revealed to the public.”
“Sad … sorry … I was the victim of some terrible crimes, committed within the sanctity of the family. And I in turn did a terrible thing, killing my father. But I had paid for it before, and I paid for it after. I think revealing it, in this way, scandalizing it, sensationalizing the agony that our family went through, and tormenting my children and my husband now, serves no purpose. It's done in such a way as to embarrass us, and not to inform the public.” She talked then about the people giving interviews, claiming to know her, whom she had never even seen before, and the lies they told to make themselves important. She didn't mention the tabloid by name, but she said that one of them had told shocking lies in all of their headlines. And the interviewer smiled at that.
“You can't expect people to believe what they read in tabloids, Mrs. Mackenzie.”
“Then why print it?” Grace said firmly.
The interviewer asked a thousand unfortunate questions, but eventually she asked Grace to tell them about “Help Kids!” and her work with the victims of child abuse. She told them about St. Mary's and Saint Andrew's, and “Help Kids!” She made a plea for children everywhere that they never had to go through what she had gone through. Despite their probing and the lack of sympathy with which they had handled much of it, and the spuriousness, she had turned it into a deeply moving and very sympathetic interview, and everyone congratulated her afterwards. Charles was particularly proud of her, and they spent a quiet evening after the cameras had left, and talked about all that had happened. It had been a terrible time for Grace, but at least she had said her piece now.
They spent her birthday at home, and Abigail had friends over that night. But only because her parents had insisted. It was her birthday too. And Grace was very quiet as she sat at the pool with Charles. She was still feeling shaken and withdrawn, and she hated going anywhere. People were still harassing her, even in bank lines and public rest rooms. She was happier at home, behind her walls, and she dreaded going out, even with Charles. In spite of his campaign, it was a very quiet summer.
But by August, finally, everything seemed to be back to normal. There were no more photographers camped outside, and she hadn't been on the cover of the tabloids in weeks.
“I guess you're just not popular anymore,” Charles teased. He actually managed to take a week off to be with her, and he was glad he had. Her asthma had gotten bad again, for the first time in years, and she was feeling ill. He was sure it was stress, but this time she suspected what it was before he did. She was pregnant.
“In the middle of all this furor? How did you manage that?” He was shocked at first, but he was happy too. Their children were what brought them the most joy in all their years together. He worried about her during the campaign though. The baby was due in March, and she was two months pregnant, which meant that she'd be campaigning all through the early months. She'd be five months pregnant at the election. He wanted her to take it easy, and try not to wear herself out too much, or get too upset over the press when they went back to Washington. And then he groaned as he thought of it. “I'll be fifty-nine years old when this baby is born, I'll be eighty when he or she graduates from college. Oh my God, Grace.” He smiled ruefully, and she scolded him.
“Oh shut up. I'm starting to look like the older woman in your life, so don't complain to me. You look like you're thi
rty.” He nearly did too. Not thirty, but forty easily. He had barely been touched by the hands of time, but at thirty-nine she didn't look bad either.
In September, they moved back to Washington. In spite of his campaign, they had had a quiet summer. They had only gone out with close friends in Greenwich, and because of the furor she'd caused in June, and her early pregnancy, he had done all of his campaigning without her.
Abigail started high school that year. Andrew went into his second year, and he had a new girlfriend, her father was the French ambassador. And Matt started third grade with all the usual commotion of new backpacks, school supplies, whether to have hot lunch or bring his own. For Matt, every day was still a big adventure.
They hadn't told them about the baby yet, Grace thought it was too soon. She was just three months pregnant, and they had decided to wait until after Matt's birthday in September. Grace had planned a party for him. And little by little, she started going out with Charles again. It was hard being seen again, knowing that her ugly past had become part of everyone's dinner conversation. But there hadn't been anything written about her in weeks, and she was feeling guilty about not campaigning with her husband.
It was a hot September Saturday afternoon, the day before Matthew's party, and Grace was buying some things they needed at Sutton Place Gourmet, like ice cream and plastic knives and forks and sodas. And as she stood at the checkout stand, waiting to pay, she almost fainted when she saw it. The latest edition of the tabloid Thrill had just been set out, and Charles hadn't been warned this time. There was a photograph of her nude, with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, right on the cover. There were two black boxes covering her breasts and her pubic area, and other than that, the photograph left nothing to the imagination. Her legs were spread wide, and she looked like she was in the throes of passion. The headline read “Senator's Wife Did Porno in Chicago.” She thought she was going to throw up as she gathered them up, and held a hundred-dollar bill out with a trembling hand. For a moment she didn't know what she was doing.
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