by Gail Sheehy
She looked for a long time at the sandstone carvings of apsaras. I tried to convey, through Margie, that Angkor Wat had not been touched by the Khmer Rouge. I’d read that only one of the hundreds of apsaras had been damaged over the centuries.
Mohm breathed. In Khmer, she said, “Oh, God, so good.”
She excused herself and went into her bedroom. Was she sulking? We waited. Presently, she emerged in a green silk sarong with gold ornamentation, given to her by Madame Kamel. Her hair was wound up in a formal topknot, her feet bare with bracelets around the ankles. She switched on a tape player and we heard the endless loop of classical Cambodian ballet music.
Slowly, gently, her body slipped out of its bones. She began to undulate like the long stems of lotus blossoms that sway underwater in harmony with the currents, even during fierce storms, and never break. Her fingers turned into flocks of birds. Her hips rolled. Her face was serene. She was as beautiful as an apsara. Clay was besotted.
AROUND THE SAME TIME, we were given an opportunity to bring political awareness to the plight of refugee women and children around the world. One of my best friends, Catherine O’Neill, a tireless political activist, worked for the United Nations. She was appalled to learn that women and children displaced by war were left invisible, without livelihoods or health care, and easily victimized.
“Did you know that four out of five of the forty million refugees in the world are women and children?” she demanded of me and other of her friends. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t. Catherine’s novel idea was to rally activist professional women to make fact-finding field missions to countries ravaged by war. We traveled on our own nickel but quickly buddied up into a bulwark of determination.
Maura joined me on our first trip, to the border of Cambodia. It was too dangerous to take Mohm back; the country’s new leader was a former Khmer Rouge and vowed to recover children who had fled. Our delegation learned firsthand what the women and girls most needed and wrote our notes on the plane ride home. “Did you finish yet?” Catherine prodded. She had already secured a congressional hearing. We were barely off the plane before we were testifying on the need for new policies that would improve the safety and offer basic services to refugee women and unaccompanied children, like Mohm. No one turned Catherine down—she was that savvy and bold. She could call up Charlie Rose and say, “You better put us on your show tomorrow, because we have up-to-the-minute news on what is happening in Cambodia,” or, later, Bosnia or Afghanistan. The advocacy group we created, the Women’s Refugee Commission, eventually became a legal arm of the world-renowned International Rescue Committee and to this day rallies the UN to engage women worldwide in conflict prevention and mediation.
THE WORK OF HEALING MOHM proceeded organically in the many hundreds of hours we spent together reading about Cambodia’s history and mythology, playing its music, considering its religious mysteries and magic, and mostly talking heart to heart. I read to her from The Diary of Anne Frank. It touched her, as did Siddhartha about the spiritual journey of the prince who became venerated as the Buddha.
By the middle of her second year, the barrier of ice around Mohm’s heart began to melt. “I wasn’t welcome anyplace,” she said. “That’s why I had to forget about family and love and caring and just be, you know, how I was in the beginning, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I could never wish. I could not have a dream. I have so much angry inside of me, remember, Mom?”
“Yes, I remember. You could not cry.”
“Whole first year. Could not.” She moved closer. “But now I can talk about the past with you,” she said. “So many things I lost, so many mistakes I make . . .” Tears began to tremble on the edges of her lower lids.
“Let your tears come, Mohm.” Hot tears streamed forth. She let me draw her into my arms, her head on my chest. She cried softly, not for long. She sat up.
“First time. Because now I believe I have a new life.”
By spring, Mohm was warming to the idea of using her travails to help identify the plight of refugee children. She would work even harder to learn English so she could testify, too. One day I asked her, “What would you think if I wrote a book about the people who came out of Cambodia and used your experiences to show what a survivor is?”
“I can help you with that, I think,” she said.
Smiling at her understatement, I asked if she knew the meaning of the word survivor. When she hesitated, I explained it.
“Oh, that’s an easy one. I have good veseana.”
I remembered that in the Buddhist belief system, a person may be born with good veseana as a consequence of good actions in a previous life, but it’s also a projection of a person’s life force. Did Mohm have it?
“Of course I have good veseana!” Mohm looked at me almost incredulously. “Why was I not kill and all my family die?”
I suddenly grasped that survivors with her beliefs have a rationale with which to answer that awful spiritual question: “Why me?” I asked Mohm if she felt guilty for surviving. She told me it had pained her terribly in the first year.
“But if I’m the only one in the family alive, probably God have some purpose I am saved for.”
“Then let’s concentrate on survivor merit instead of survivor guilt,” I said.
A month later, Mohm asked me, “Did you write that book yet?”
“It’s not such an easy one for me.” I laughed. “Shall we do it together?”
“If what I go through can give people a different idea, maybe it’s not for nothing,” she said. “So I think it’s good.”
Over several years, we pieced together the shattered story line of Mohm’s past. The work of healing and the writing of the book became indistinguishable. The result was published in 1986, as Spirit of Survival.
CHAPTER 29
A Passage for Keeps
IT WAS A SHOCK to walk into Clay’s apartment at the end of a happy summer in the country we shared with Maura and Mohm. The place was an excavation pit. A wall in the upstairs hall was missing. Plastic sheeting hung everywhere. His bedroom was blocked off. The carved four-poster in the guest bedroom was hung all around with his ties. They looked like flags hung from the balconies of Siena when we traveled there to watch the Palio horse race.
“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.
“I hope so.” He mumbled something about making a new bedroom, closets, a family dining area.
“Family?”
“We’ll see.”
The summer must have stirred Clay’s glacial emotions into movement, I thought, but I resisted nudging him. There was no win in pressing Clay on any personal question; he would only withdraw. That was the irony of Clay as an editor. On the most important matters in life, he was at a loss for words. He was a man of action.
Two months later he took me to London, ostensibly for a long theater weekend and to celebrate his birthday on October 2, 1984. Mohm had been invited to stay with Peter Pond’s family of a half-dozen Cambodian refugees. They were going to meet the Dalai Lama.
I loved going to London with Clay. We always stayed at the Stafford, hidden in the heart of St. James on a quiet cobblestone mews. In a rare gesture of frugality, Clay would book one of the “cozy rooms” in the Carriage House, former stables. After a few days in a one-horse stall, he inevitably broke down and booked an adjoining room. The hotel backed up on Green Park, which allowed us to jog outdoors. Clay, jog? friends asked in disbelief. Okay, I jogged. He fast-walked for a mile or two, then gladly destroyed the results by lunching at Overton’s on creamed shrimp on toast and a pudding studded with candied fruit.
We couldn’t miss Peter Nichols’s Passion Play, “a scorching depiction of modern marriage as an irresistible invitation to sexual infidelity.” That resurrected our mutual fears of marriage. Clay took me for after-theater omelets and champagne at the Garrick Club and recounted a joke about Moses coming down from Sinai with the tablets and announcing: “First the good n
ews—I got ’em down to ten. Now the bad news—adultery’s still in.”
On our final day Clay and I drove to Oxford and cozied up for an intimate lunch in a classic pub, the Carving Board. His behavior became even more comically incoherent. With the prickle of Buck’s Fizz in our noses and the unctuousness of Stilton cheese on our tongues, we grew mellow. Dusk settled. Our faces were lit by an amethyst-and-gold stained-glass window. Only then did Clay make mention of the date.
“We should probably set the date before we go any further,” he said.
“The date?”
“Not too close to Christmas.”
“Definitely not too close to Christmas,” I teased.
“The living room is big enough, don’t you think?”
“It depends on what you’re using it for.” Was it my imagination or did he look uncomfortable?
“Would you like another Buck’s Fizz?” Yes, he was uncomfortable.
“Darling, is there something else you want to ask me?”
“Is that really necessary?”
“You might get lucky and I’ll say no.”
“Gail, why do you think I’ve been turning my apartment upside down?”
“You want a family?”
“I have a family—you and Maura and Mohm—my three angels. You’re my family and I can’t stand it anymore—we have to live together!”
I could not resist. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
He grinned at hearing himself. Reaching across the table, he clasped my hands and drew them toward him and leaned in for a kiss. From his pocket he drew a jewelry box from James Robinson and opened it to reveal an heirloom circlet of diamonds and rubies. It was the prettiest engagement ring I had ever seen. With a shy smile, he punched out the headline: “Clay Felker asks Gail Sheehy to be his wife.”
I LATER LEARNED THAT MAURA had been a catalyst. She was then working as an intern at Adweek, where Clay was consulting, and the two of them were able to have long, soulful talks. Clay’s old housekeeper, Iris Mendoza, had come back from Argentina to replace the infamous Angeles, and Iris knew Clay well enough to whisper in his ear before he got out of bed, “Mr. Felker, it’s time you get married to Miss Gail.” He didn’t stand a chance.
Once we became serious about marriage, we became very, very serious. We applied to formally adopt Mohm. We sought out the Reverend Carol Anderson, one of the first women to be ordained into the Episcopal priesthood. Carol had broken the stained-glass ceiling at a tall-steeple church, All Angels parish, not by being a militant feminist, but because she was a passionate evangelist and a very down-to-earth woman. Carol agreed to marry us on the condition that we take instruction with her on the meaning and obligations of the sacrament of marriage. We agreed. Those sessions were humbling. We were chagrined that we had hesitated so long, separated so often. Marrying would allow us to be dependable as parents and consistent as friends. We would hardly have anything left to fight about.
We decided to be married at home in a candlelight ceremony. Clay’s living room was easily converted into a chapel. Lighted wreaths hung at the huge windows turned the room into a cathedral. The stone fireplace served as the altar, banked with lilies. After the ceremony, the room would be turned into a banquet hall with long red-clothed tables.
The sixteenth of December 1984 was as warm as spring, summer even. We had to break out iced tea along with the Kir Royale. My girlfriends kept trying to hurry me to get dressed. I had found a vintage gown by Elsa Schiaparelli, left over from the late 1920s, a slither of ecru satin cut on the bias to give a moving awareness of the body beneath. But I couldn’t resist sneaking out onto the upper balcony of the duplex and peeking through the railing to watch the guests enter below.
Lesley Stahl and Aaron Latham were first to arrive, bringing their strawberry-blond daughter, Taylor, to be our ring bearer. Clay took pride in helping to godfather the conception of this beautiful child. As only the second TV anchorwoman in the history of the male-dominated CBS News (the first one, Sally Quinn, having been fired), Lesley thought her career would be finished if she dared remind her bosses she was female by taking maternity leave. Once Clay’s love of Mohm made him an enthusiastic convert to fatherhood, he proselytized the unmarried couple over dinner one night with the fervor of a Mormon missionary. Less than a week later, the couple conceived. Aaron liked to say, “That advice gave our lives a new focus and meaning for the years to come.”
Gilt banquet chairs had been set in a semicircle facing the fireplace altar. We had invited only fifty guests. Given our age and our capricious courtship, we needed to stand before our most cherished friends and seek their endorsement of our commitment. This was the whole purpose of having the wedding at home. The ceremony would mark our passage into the mystery and vulnerability of marriage.
The New York family took up most of the seats. Walter and Bina Bernard brought their daughter, Sarah, a talented writer of the next generation to carry on at New York magazine. Byron and Elizabeth Dobell took seats near my literary agent Lynn Nesbit. Tom Wolfe came decked out in his white suit, blue-and-white cravat, and white spats, with his attractive wife, the art director Sheila Berger, at his side.
As I started down the spiral staircase, the warmth of the room and perfume of the lilies melted my nervousness. And there was Clay, standing still for once, facing me with what felt like open arms. He was the other cover on the book of our life. How could we have waited so long to bring our story together?
The Reverend Anderson spoke simply. She finished by laying a satin sash over our clasped hands and pronouncing us man and wife. Clay bent to kiss me and nearly lifted me off my feet. He whispered in my ear, “Promise you will never leave me again.” I put my lips to his ear. “Never.”
Later, friends would compete for giving the most comical toast about our many breakups. “Thank God we don’t have to keep updating our Rolodex,” someone quipped. Amid hearty laughter at David Frost’s jokes, I noticed women long divorced retreat into their private thoughts and weep a little, women who, like me, for so long had feared to take a second chance; I felt for them. But the fact that we had finally seen what all our friends had seen—that we were meant for each other—satisfied everyone that they had contributed to a story with a happy ending.
It was Milton Glaser who presided as the family rabbi to give a homily on marriage. The thrust of his message has stayed with me. He asked the guests to consider their own marriages, to dismiss their grievances and renew their own vows. “Let’s see new hope in this marriage,” he said. “And let’s give it our full approval. That, as much as a religious blessing, will seal the vows of Clay and Gail, in the presence of their two daughters.”
I could hardly keep my eyes off the two girls who stood to make their own poignant toasts about what this marriage meant to them. One from the West with her pearly skin and fiery Irish red hair, one from the East with her amber skin and demure lowered eyes—they were the angels who had brought us together. They were the meaning in this day. Seeing Maura and Mohm side by side, I felt a shiver of ecstasy. This was the family for which I had longed for so many years. This was the happiest moment of my life.
CHAPTER 30
Finding a New Voice at Vanity Fair
FORTY-SEVEN. A POPULAR AGE for a midlife crisis. Not for me. I had been there and done that back in my midthirties, when the violence of Bloody Sunday plunged me into a premature mortality crisis. By the time I turned forty-seven, I was ready to dare to reach for new life in every dimension. Finding the courage to marry the love of my life and create a new family was the culmination of a long passage through the fear of intimacy. From the start, our marriage brought me happiness beyond my imagination. But that very same year, 1984, when I turned forty-seven, I was also offered an open door to a brand-new career direction.
The catalyst was Tina Brown. She was only thirty, an ambitious English editor with one magazine success behind her. Condé Nast had turned to her in desperation to revive one of its most storied publ
ications, Vanity Fair, a romantic title from the 1930s. Two other editors had tried and failed; circulation and advertising were virtually nil. Newly arrived in New York in January with all the arrogance of youth, Brown thought she could give Vanity Fair new life by analyzing American culture through its class divisions. But this was not Britain. Americans don’t like to acknowledge our class divisions.
To revive Vanity Fair was a much more daunting project than Brown had thought. She asked to have lunch with Walter Anderson, a protégé of Clay’s. The hard-driving marine was transforming the Sunday magazine supplement Parade into a hot property for Condé Nast, bringing in serious writers like David Halberstam and Norman Mailer. I was lucky to be one of his writers. Anderson told Brown she needed a hard-nosed reporter with a name who could write about politics.
“I don’t want the pedestrian political stuff that you see in Metro sections,” she told Anderson. He recommended me as the kind of literary journalist she needed. Brown was familiar with my writing but only in connection with Passages. “Would she be interested in writing politics?”
“If you really want human-interest stuff in politics, Gail’s your girl,” she remembers being advised. Such is the power of networking.
Brown called me out of the blue on March 12, 1984. I had written a sum total of three political profiles thus far in my career: the Bobby Kennedy story for New York, Anwar Sadat for Esquire, and a profile for Parade of Cory Aquino, the shy wife of an assassinated candidate for the presidency of the Philippines. I had followed her as she stunned the country by leading a revolution and ascending as the first woman to the presidency. Brown would be taking as big a chance on me as I would be in writing for a magazine that hadn’t found its legs.