Bob’s time in Vietnam ended a few weeks after the deadly raid, when on a subsequent mission, he took enemy fire. Bob’s leg had been amputated midcalf as a result of an exploding grenade. He wore a prosthetic, which he was known to joke about, but it also gave him a lot of pain—irritation where the stump met the prosthetic and phantom pain. He didn’t talk about the pain. One day we took a drive along Rock Creek Parkway, which runs north-south through the city and ends at the Potomac River.
I had picked up Bob from the Capitol, midafternoon, as I had on other occasions, and I always felt like I was driving the getaway car from a jailbreak. Usually we ended up at a restaurant or a bar, but this time he asked if we could find a drugstore. I could tell something was bothering him because he wasn’t his usual cheerful self. When he came out, I finally pressed him to tell me what was wrong, and he said the prosthetic was irritating his skin and he needed some sort of ointment or bandage—I can’t remember which. He didn’t want sympathy, and I let it go.
What the war had done to him at his core was hard to measure, especially because I met him so many years after he went to Vietnam; I don’t know who he was before he served. But there was a toughness, a grittiness that was obscured by the passage of time and by what his present life required of him. Magazine articles focused on his quirkiness—the usual “this is not your average politician” anecdotes, and also on his sensitive side—his love of literature and poetry. The profiles usually mentioned that he liked to work out his frustrations and confusion in the weird collages he made for the various people in his life, including me. Though he was a gentle person and a loyal friend, I sensed he also had a calcified place in his soul, a secret refuge that people who have witnessed or even taken part in the worst that humanity has to offer keep hidden from plain sight.
Twenty years later, I got a retrospective glimpse into that secret place. A student of mine, a combat veteran who had served two tours in Afghanistan, in addition to being a talented journalist, was also a gifted fiction writer. He asked me to read a short story he had written and drafts went back and forth between us as he worked on it. It was about a young man who goes off to war and ultimately shoots and kills a young boy who reaches for a rifle and the effect it has on his soul. I thought the story was better if the main character didn’t have to explicitly justify the shoot because any reasonable reader would know that while it was tragic, it was also justifiable. Other readers thought he should justify the shoot.
I became invested in the story, particularly in how he would ultimately end it. I could see he was wondering why a female with no ties to combat was having such a personal reaction to his story. I told him the story of the birds in my house and how Bob Kerrey had handled the situation.
My story, like my student’s, was a good shoot/bad shoot thing. It dawned on me then that the Hitchcock scene at the Maryland house had been a cosmic test, and I failed. Who are we as readers—as people—to judge a situation we’ve never been in? By being more compassionate to my student’s main character, I was trying to give myself a second chance. Crazy, I know, but that’s what fiction gives us, second chances.
I muddled on, same as before, trying to help Bob find the truest thread of his story. But without knowing what happened on that night in 1969, it was hard; he had alluded to something dark, but I didn’t push, and he didn’t offer. A passage from my diary at the time:
BK came out to Centreville today. We drove out first to Conquest Beach, and beyond. I told him he needs to concentrate less on the story of his family and more on his interior story.
He told me some story—a short story? A movie?—about a guy losing a finger and never running his hands across the water, swimming, fishing—with grace—that was the key—he had lost the grace.
That was I guess what BK feels he lost when he lost his leg, he feels like he lost physical grace? The other moment—true moment of the day was when he said he could never go home at the end of the day and kick off his shoes.
I said he must have found a different way and he said yes.
And I said but it wasn’t the same and he agreed.
I have to help him tell the truth but it’s not fair to force him to do something he’s not inclined to do . . . But if he doesn’t tell the truth then it’s just another war book.
Though that passage makes it clear I sensed that something awful was eating at him, it wasn’t my place to push too hard. Ghostwriters, book doctors, and editors often talk about feeling as though they are practicing psychotherapy or even sitting in moral judgment, a judge and jury who puts a person’s past on trial. But we don’t have a license to practice medicine or law.
I don’t know whether Bob and his men broke the rules of war or morality—or even whether there is a difference between those two. And I don’t know what I would do in a situation like that. What I do know is that Bob cared about the people of his state and of his country. He took every vote seriously, and he agonized over many of them.
In the same way he agonized over his Senate work, he agonized over his book, wanting to get it just right, not only the quality of the writing but the memoirist’s balancing act between privacy and truth telling. The process of this sort of calibration was valuable to observe, for my work as both a literary midwife and as a writer myself.
Now, having contributed in various capacities to several high-profile books, I felt ready for a new challenge. What came next proved to be a challenge—but not the sort I imagined.
Seven
Ghost in the Machine
Did you know Japanese ghosts have feet? They find it so strange that ours don’t.
—E-mail from a friend on a fellowship in Japan
Ten years earlier, when I was still in my twenties, I found myself standing on the side of the road in Lee, Massachusetts, a former mill town now billed as the “gateway” to the Berkshires.
It was Labor Day weekend, and I was with a friend and her boyfriend heading back to D.C. from her family’s farm in Vermont. The clutch had blown in their car, and they were bickering about whose fault it was. Seeing as I’m naturally conflict averse and had nothing to add to the conversation, I drifted away, unnoticed, toward an old Victorian house with a sign promising junk & antiques. Mercifully, it was open, and I decided to go in.
I wasn’t in the market for a silver snuffbox, an antique compass, or any number of ship salvage pieces, such as a mermaid masthead, which would be a cool though hardly practical acquisition. But vintage jewelry always got my attention, and soon enough I spotted a glass case containing cameos, lockets, and other trinkets.
As I took it all in, my gaze stopped on a tiny clothbound book with the word Diary embossed on its faded dark green cover. I asked the woman behind the counter if I could take a look, and she gingerly pulled it out for me.
The diary chronicled the year of 1872 in the life of a teenage girl named Elizabeth Morley. “Libbie,” as she referred to herself, had lived in Lee, and she had siblings, parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, all of whom she referred to in passing. Most of the entries were one or two sentences and were written in a delicate cursive with violet ink. The shopkeeper said she’d sell it to me for a dollar so I bought it, got change for the Coke machine outside, and found myself a shady tree to sit under and let myself be transported back in time.
While my friends were busy resolving our twentieth-century problem, I got lost in the nineteenth century. At first I was disappointed because so many of the entries were mundane observations, focusing on the weather (without central air-conditioning or heat, that was understandable) and various medical ailments of hers and those in her immediate circle (toothaches, headaches, and colds). But eventually a more compelling narrative began to emerge: I noticed that Libbie took pains to note every encounter she had with the family’s pastor. A close reading of the diary revealed a fixation on him, and on her Christian faith as a means to connect with him.
I closed the diary when my friends came to say they had tracked down a mechanic who said
he could replace the clutch the next day if he could get his hands on the right parts. So with no other viable options, we spent the night at a nearby motel.
The following afternoon we left the town of Lee behind us, but Libbie stayed with me. She occupied a place in my imagination as I wondered what happened to her in the years following the one she had chronicled. A year or two later, again on Labor Day weekend, the same friend and I stopped in Lee on our way back from Vermont and found Libbie’s grave site in the town cemetery, high on a hill with a panoramic view of the town. I had found out that Lee was once a paper mill town, and it supplied newsprint for the New York Times. It was also known for its marble quarries.
The more I learned about the town and what life was like for a young girl in that era, the more I yearned to know what had become of Libbie. Some years later, I returned to Lee so I could spend time in the town hall records office, the same building where folk singer Arlo Guthrie appeared before a blind judge and his seeing-eye dog for a littering charge, an incident made famous in the song “Alice’s Restaurant” and the movie that followed.
I would learn through death records that Libbie became a “carpet weaver” and that what she had written in her diary about one of her cousins was confirmed in the death records: the cousin had died because she was an “opium eater.” There was a bleakness to her diary entries, both in what she said and what she didn’t say. And that absence of information—what she chose to withhold—fueled my imagination with a certain velocity.
I created my own story of a girl, inspired by Libbie and sharing her name, who, after an inappropriate encounter with her pastor, seeks spiritual comfort in a non-Christian faith, the rising movement of spiritualism—a precursor to the women’s movement. Spiritualism was often a young woman’s ticket to freedom, a socially acceptable reason to leave home and travel to other towns, participating in séances that facilitated reunions with departed relatives. I set the story ten years earlier than the real Libbie’s so that my narrative would coincide with the Civil War.
And this is where it gets weird: my fictional character Libbie ended up in the Lincoln White House, facilitating a séance for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who, in her grief-stricken state over the recent death of her young son Willie, was desperate to commune with him.
I wrote that scene a few years before I would end up in the White House under circumstances oddly reminiscent of that.
Everything seems to start with a phone call, and this one was from an editorial assistant who told me to hang on. A moment later, Alice Mayhew came on the line. “We’ve got a very interesting project in Washington that needs a writer.” She paused as though she were choosing her words carefully. “Very interesting. But I can’t say who it is.”
My heart beat faster. Alice wasn’t prone to drama. If she said something was very interesting, that meant it was very interesting.
“I’m available,” I blurted out, as though I had to respond quickly or I could lose to a higher bidder. My mind was a blur: Am I really available? I was still working on Bob Kerrey’s war book, but that was part-time and piecemeal. I could work around that.
“Good, good,” she said, sounding, as she always did, as though she were in a hurry, probably because she always was. “It’s a very prominent woman. That’s all I can share right now.” My curiosity was increasing by the second. “Her people will contact you,” Alice continued. “Is this the best number to reach you?”
Her people. She had “people.” That meant she was big. Or at least not small. Since the project was based in Washington, it was likely someone in politics, government, or media. My mind was spinning as I thought about the women I had met during the Marjorie project. A representative or senator? Interesting, but I didn’t think Alice would think they were very interesting. Sandra Day O’Connor? Ruth Bader Ginsburg? No, it wasn’t likely that a sitting justice would write a book, at least not about the inner workings of the Supreme Court. Tipper Gore? Very interesting? Meh.
The next morning I left the house early to teach hockey stops and bunny hops to the tiny-tot skating class. Afterward I skipped my own workout, hurrying home to check my answering machine. But when I got home, the light wasn’t blinking. I made myself a sandwich and sat down to eat it, staring out at the marsh. The silence, broken only by the clock over the mantel, became more than I could bear. I thought I might go mad waiting for Mystery Woman’s “people” to call. I went outside and spent some time doing yard work even though it was still winter. I left the door slightly ajar so I could hear the phone, and finally it rang.
A young woman identified herself and said she was calling from the White House.
THE WHITE HOUSE!
She wanted to know if I was available later that day for an interview with the First Lady. And could I bring some writing samples and a résumé? I mumbled something that resembled an affirmative answer. Then I came to my senses and explained I was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and would need several hours. She suggested a time, and I agreed, scribbling down which security gate I was to report to.
To say I wasn’t dressed properly at the moment to have a meeting with Hillary Clinton was an understatement: I was wearing jeans with holes in the knees and literally had garden soil under my fingernails. But I rallied, transforming myself into a presentable professional. I printed out my résumé, rifled through my files, and gathered some bylines from the Post, throwing it all in a folder.
I jumped in my car, praying I had enough gas in the tank and that I wouldn’t hit bridge traffic. I couldn’t believe it. I had a chance to work with the First Lady of the United States.
That was a big deal, and if I got the gig, it would launch me into a whole other stratosphere professionally. But I also admired her, everything that she had done on behalf of families and children, and it would be an honor to work on her book.
A few hours later I was standing at the White House gate, feeling like an imposter when the guard asked me if I had an appointment. I replied, “The First Lady,” my voice shaking a little. He looked at his clipboard and peered at a screen inside his little glass-encased booth. It appeared he couldn’t find my name on the list and I was sure he was about to say I must be mistaken. And maybe I was. Maybe I had imagined it all.
But I also knew that people often misheard “Simon” for “Feinman” so I spelled my name slowly and loudly, over the sound of nearby protesters in Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue. His face registered recognition and he waved me in, the iron gate clicking open, the kingdom beckoning.
A young staffer met me at the door where the guard had indicated I should approach, and soon enough I was walking through the halls of the People’s House, simultaneously trying to affect an air of nonchalance while taking in every single detail I could possibly register. I had been there before many times to cover state dinners for the Style section, and once for the meeting with Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, but I had never been to the first family’s residence, which is where my guide told me we were heading.
A few minutes later I found myself face-to-face with Hillary Clinton in a cozy sitting room, drinking coffee served by a White House usher. Though I had been ancillary to the interview Marjorie and I had conducted, at least I had a sense of what to expect; this time I couldn’t get away with mostly just listening, however.
I had included in my writing samples a long essay I had done for the Style section that was really a love letter to the sport of figure skating. Mrs. Clinton had been a figure skater in her youth, and I saw her pull out that clip and her eyes light up. That led to an easy conversation that moved from skating to writing and the process of book writing.
My nerves calmed down after the first few minutes, and Mrs. Clinton was cordial and had a way about her that made you feel like she was really listening. In part it was her habit of nodding, which was oddly comforting. She looked at my résumé, really just a list of the various books I had contributed to, and we talked briefly about Marjorie’s book.
We
ended the meeting with her telling me they would be in touch with the people at Simon & Schuster once she made a decision. Her people would call their people who would call my people (my agent).
I waited and ruminated and brooded. Would I get the job? Who else was in the running? I couldn’t possibly get the job. I would die if I didn’t get the job. I wanted the job so much. Until I got the job.
A few days later Flip called to say that Simon & Schuster called, and that Mrs. Clinton had chosen me. I got the impression she hadn’t interviewed a lot of people. That made sense; the more people you told, the more likely the news of the book deal would leak prematurely. Alice recommended me and that carried a lot of weight, Flip explained.
As Flip was giving me the good news, all of a sudden I began to wonder if I really wanted to become involved in such a scandal-ridden administration. It was early 1995, and during the two years that Bill Clinton had been president, the press had swung from one Clinton scandal or PR disaster to the next like a kid on monkey bars: Travelgate, Filegate, Vince Foster, and Whitewater. Everyone who worked in the White House those days seemed to end up getting served a subpoena.
The president had put Hillary in charge of overhauling the nation’s health-care system, and the whole thing had been a debacle, ending in defeat in September 1994. This had left Mrs. Clinton tarnished, and whatever this book project was purportedly about, it was really about her refashioning her image. People in Washington rarely write books because the writing muse visits them; rather, they have a campaign to win, a cause to lobby for, a scandal to overcome, or an image to fix.
It’s not enough money, I said to Flip. I can’t remember what the first offer was. She went back to them, and they came back with a higher offer. She was negotiating with the publishing house because the money would be paid out directly from them to me, rather than the usual arrangement where the advance goes to the author and the author then pays the ghost. The First Lady would not be paid an advance, and any royalties would be donated to charity.
Pretend I'm Not Here Page 13