The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  Balfour doesn’t like to think about Bryce’s final ordeal. A kindly doctor once told her that her son probably didn’t suffer a great deal, and she clings to this resolutely. In her mind, Bryce died unafraid, surrounded by consoling angels. The deity Balfour believes in loves us unconditionally and takes a direct hand in our lives; this delivers comfort, but also doubt.

  “When I was sixteen in high school,” she says, “I was date-raped. I had an abortion. I never told anyone, not my friends and not my mother. As the abortion was happening, I prayed to God and asked Him to take the baby back, and give him back to me when I could take care of him.”

  So… ?

  “So, I do wonder, sometimes…”

  Balfour wipes a tear.

  “. . . It’s there in the back of my mind, that what happened to me is punishment from God. I killed a child, and then I had one ripped away from me at the peak of my happiness.”

  On the floor, Braiden is entranced by an Elmo doll.

  “Sometimes,” Balfour says, “I wish I had died in childbirth with him…”

  She’s weeping now. For the moment, there’s no soldier left.

  “. . . that way, Jarrett could have Braiden, and I could be with Bryce.”

  MILES HARRISON IS in a Leesburg Starbucks, seated next to the condiment station, pulling napkin after napkin to dry his eyes.

  “I hurt my wife so much,” he says, “and by the grace of whatever wonderful quality is within her, she has forgiven me. And that makes me feel even worse. Because I can’t forgive me.”

  In the months after he was acquitted in the death of his son, Harrison’s public agony continued. His mug shot was back in the newspapers after the Russian Foreign Ministry officially protested his acquittal and threatened to halt the country’s adoption program with Americans. It was something of an international incident.

  For months, Harrison declined to speak for this article, but in early February, he said he was ready.

  “I pray for forgiveness from the Russian people,” he said. “There are good people in this country who deserve children, and there are children in Russia who need parents. Please don’t punish everyone for my mistake.”

  Harrison is a Roman Catholic. Weeks after Chase’s death, he returned to his local church, where priest and parishioners left him to grieve in solitude. Afterward, the priest embraced him and whispered in his ear: “I will always be here for you.”

  The church is St. Francis de Sales in Purcellville. The priest was Father Michael Kelly. On New Year’s Eve, on a windswept road after a heavy rain, as Father Michael stopped to move a tree that had fallen across the road, he was struck by another falling tree and killed.

  Harrison doesn’t know what to make of this; nothing entirely holds together anymore, except, to his astonishment, his marriage.

  In their home, Carol and Miles Harrison have kept Chase’s nursery exactly as it was, and the child’s photos are all over. “Sometimes we’ll look at a picture together,” Harrison says, “and I will see Carol cry. She tries not to let me see, but I see, and I feel such guilt and hurt.”

  Harrison says he knows it is unlikely he and Carol will be allowed to adopt again.

  He leans forward, his voice breaking into a sobbing falsetto, as it did in the courtroom at his worst moment of shame.

  “I have cheated her out of being a mother.”

  In Starbucks, heads turn.

  “She would be the best mother in the world.”

  THE FIRST TIME, someone answers the phone but doesn’t say anything. There is just the sound of a TV turned up way too loud, and after a little while, the phone clicks dead. A few days later, he answers, but the TV is not lowered. Call back later, he says. On the third day, he takes the call.

  Are you doing okay?

  “I don’t even know. Tryin’ to take it day by day.”

  Andrew Culpepper’s voice is a flat monotone, like a man in a trance. His sentences are short and truncated. This is the sanitation department electrician in Portsmouth, the lucky one. He was the man who wasn’t criminally charged when Miles Harrison was. He never had to legally defend himself.

  Are you alone now?

  “Yeah.”

  She left you?

  “Yeah. She’s hurt and stuff. Dealing with it her way, I guess.”

  Are you thankful you weren’t prosecuted?

  No answer.

  Andrew?

  “Not for myself, for my parents. Doesn’t matter what they do to me. Nothing I don’t do to myself every day.”

  Are you sure you’re okay?

  “I try to take my mind off it. When I start thinking about it, I get like…”

  Like what?

  A long silence.

  “Like this.”

  AS PART OF her plan to simplify her life, Lyn Balfour has quit her job. It’s going to get a little more complicated soon, because she’s pregnant again: The insemination that she had on that day in October was successful. The baby is due in July.

  Balfour’s lawyers petitioned the court to get the record of her prosecution expunged. Such a request is usually unopposed after an acquittal, in recognition that a legally innocent person has a right to start again with a legally clean slate. But in this case, Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman challenged it and, unusually, argued the relatively small legal battle himself.

  Outside the courthouse, Chapman explained: “It’s very rare to oppose expungement. But we are, because of the enormity of this case, because it is the sole public record of the death of a completely defenseless and helpless infant.”

  After a half-day hearing, the judge ruled for the Commonwealth, saying Balfour had failed to prove that she would suffer a “manifest injustice” if the court records remained unsealed.

  Afterward, Balfour calmly answered questions from the news media, as always. She was unemotional, unapologetic, on message. She will consider an appeal. She will continue to speak out for greater public awareness of the dangers of leaving children alone in cars. She sounded, as always, just a little bit cold.

  Jarrett Balfour finally made it home, after eighteen months in Iraq, where his job was to analyze seized explosive devices made by insurgents and try to identify their technology and trace their origin. He extended his tour of duty twice, as the legal bills kept mounting.

  Jarrett is thirty. He’s tall, lanky, and strikingly handsome, with sandy hair brushed straight back. He looks like a man leaning into a strong wind.

  Initially after he got home, Jarrett says, things were awkward, with “hiccups” in communication. He would make an innocuous statement about something Braiden was doing, and Lyn would overreact, as if he were second-guessing her parenting skills. It’s getting better, he says.

  Braiden is nine and a half months old, exactly the age Bryce was when he died. Lyn has been having nightmares again.

  Just before the tragedy, she had two dreams that seem to her, in retrospect, like foreboding. In one, she accidentally drowned Bryce; in the other, it was death by fire. Balfour believes these dreams were sent by God to help prepare her for what she was about to endure.

  Recently, she dreamed she lost control of Braiden’s stroller, and it rolled out into traffic. No, she doesn’t think it’s the same thing happening again.

  “I couldn’t take it again,” Jarrett says quietly.

  So, there are tensions. They are working it out. Both of them say they are confident this marriage will last.

  After Jarrett leaves for work, Lyn talks about how much the presence of Braiden has helped them heal. She considers her family blessed because they’ve been able to have other children: “Can you imagine losing your only child and not having a hope of having another? Can you imagine that despair?”

  That’s why, she says, she’s made a decision. She’s checked it out, and it would be legal. There would be no way for any authority to stop it because it would fall into the class of a private adoption. She’d need a sperm donor and an egg donor, because she wouldn’t want t
o use her own egg. That would make it too personal.

  What is she saying, exactly?

  Miles and Carol Harrison deserve another child, Balfour explains. They would be wonderful parents.

  This is the woman you either like or don’t like, right away. She is brassy and strong-willed and, depending on your viewpoint, refreshingly open or abrasively forward. Above all, she is decisive.

  Balfour says she’s made up her mind. If Miles and Carol Harrison are denied another adoption, if they exhaust all their options and are still without a baby, she will offer to carry one for them, as a gift.

  An Honorable Affair

  Monica Lewinsky should have lied.

  I believed that at the time. Still do. She should have said that she’d made it all up, that it had all been some childish fantasy she’d giggled out to a girlfriend, not knowing she was being recorded, not realizing her little self-aggrandizing lie would become such a big deal.

  Everyone would have suspected, of course. The feds might have tried to nail her for perjury. She would have gone through hell, but she’d have also transformed herself into a romantic heroine for the ages.

  Her silence would have been an eloquent declaration that some things are, and must remain, private—beyond the reach of politics, the media, and sometimes even the law. Above all, she would have saved us from the vulgar, endless spectacle that played out in front of a mortified nation.

  It was at the height of the whole sordid affair that I learned about the story of Mary Hulbert, the woman who had held her tongue. I don’t usually write historical pieces, but this prim, Victorian melodrama seemed positively tailored for the time.

  April 18, 1999

  IT WAS TO be a simple bribe. Dollars for dirt.

  As the lady recalled it many years later, the stranger at the door said his name was Wilson, but soon amended this to Smith. He said he was a patriot, on a mission of national urgency. Gallantly, he inquired after her health. Solicitously, he wondered if her wardrobe was adequate for the winter months. Mightn’t she be more comfortable in furs? With gentle disapproval, he surveyed her modest Manhattan hotel room, tut-tutting that a woman of her breeding should surely be able to afford a full suite, with a proper parlor and sitting room.

  She was quite comfortable, she assured him.

  Still, he said, an extra $250,000 would make a difference in her life.

  She arched an eyebrow. Two hundred and fifty thousand was indeed a great deal of money, she agreed.

  Or $300,000, he said. Money was no object to the men he represented.

  I see, she said.

  And she did see. They wanted the letters.

  She inclined her head encouragingly. She knew how to keep a gentleman talking. Once, she had been a society hostess to the mighty and the witty, holding forth from beneath great feathered hats, scandalizing genteel society by smoking cigarettes openly and without apology. She traced her ancestry to Colonial New England, in 1636.

  On this day in 1916, she was still handsome, but well past the blush of youth. She was fifty-two, already widowed and divorced. Her soft Victorian features had tautened, her coquettish manner replaced by an appealing, mischievous cynicism. Time and troubles had taken their toll. In the moving pictures, she could have played the careworn, rawboned farm family matriarch, ringing the chow bell and mopping her hands on her apron; indeed, she would soon be reduced to auditioning for just such bit roles in Hollywood. The fact is, at the moment she was strapped for cash.

  Her mysterious visitor continued: He represented the Republican Party, an emissary for men who had only the best interests of the nation at heart. If she cooperated, he admitted, she might well discover that America would become temporarily inhospitable to her. But he and his friends could see to it that she was well provided for in Europe.

  All to what end, she asked. To bring to justice the cad who had used and then jilted her. To bring about, the visitor said, the impeachment of the president of the United States.

  The president was Woodrow Wilson. He was, of course, never impeached or even publicly accused of misconduct. His presidency was never imperiled. This first, feeble effort to unseat a president for sexual improprieties never got off the ground. But there are lessons in this tale that are germane to our times.

  For Americans sickened by the ongoing national spectacle of presidential sex conducted as sport, of casual gropings and casual betrayal, of stunning indiscretions and ludicrously loose lips, of private matters played out as public pornography, the story of Woodrow Wilson and his alleged lover, Mary Allen Hulbert, provides a charming respite. Theirs may have been the most proper and dignified and discreet and downright honorable illicit affair in history.

  Hulbert, the woman in the hotel room, was said to have possessed compromising letters that attested to a lengthy extramarital dalliance between her and Wilson. There had long been rumors to that effect. Hulbert and Wilson had long denied them. But now there was, apparently, an offer on the table. And talk—however reckless—of impeachment.

  That a nation headed for war would have jettisoned a popular president because of an alleged romantic entanglement is highly unlikely. That a serious sex scandal would have been devastating to Wilson’s presidency, and eroded his moral authority at a critical time in history, cannot be doubted. In any case, nothing ever came of it.

  Having extracted all she could from her visitor, Mary Hulbert regarded him with contempt. Any letters that might exist, she said icily, would only redound to Mr. Wilson’s credit and further burnish his good name.

  Furthermore, she said, “I am not that sort of a woman,” and asked him to leave.

  OF ALL THE presidents, few seem as unlikely a candidate for sexual scandal as Woodrow Wilson, son of a puritanical Presbyterian minister. Proper, prudish, punctilious, famously repressed, Wilson is said to have remained a virgin until his first marriage at twenty-eight. His long, dour face and prim pince-nez spectacles gave him a look of impenetrable rectitude, and the high starched collars and stovepipe hat in which he was frequently photographed suggested Edwardian formality. Striding the world stage beside the dapper, diminutive Lloyd George and the walrus-mustached Clemenceau, Wilson seemed more modern but also more aloof and unapproachable. When rumors of an affair initially surfaced during Wilson’s first presidential campaign in 1912, his opponent, Teddy Roosevelt, peremptorily dismissed them: “You can’t cast a man as a Romeo when he looks and acts so much like an apothecary’s clerk.”

  Throughout Wilson’s eventful eight-year presidency, the gossip about Mary Hulbert—then known by her married name, Mary Peck—persisted. To the wags of the day, Wilson was “Peck’s bad boy.” But for a half-century, historians gave the talk little credence. In his 1959 Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Arthur Walworth made it clear he considered the rumors of an affair to be calumny: Wilson and Mary Hulbert, he suggested, were merely fast friends.

  And that would have remained the official verdict, but for certain events.

  After the death in 1962 of Edith Bolling Wilson, the president’s second wife, tens of thousands of his personal papers became available for publication by the Library of Congress. Under the guidance of renowned Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link, a team of historians began the arduous task of copying and cataloguing them. The collection included papers that Hulbert had sold to an official biographer, long after Wilson’s death, as well as voluminous correspondence between Woodrow and Edith. Over the years, as researchers descended on the Wilson Papers and focused on the matter of Mary Hulbert, a new story line began to emerge.

  One of the first biographers to look at the years 1907–1915 was Frances W. Saunders, who was writing a book about Wilson’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who died during his first term. Poring through the papers in 1975, Saunders found intriguing letters. Curiously intimate letters. More than two hundred of them.

  The letters.

  “Woodrow Wilson was not,” Saunders says today, “the old dried-up prune that people portray him to be.”<
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  The precise nature of the relationship between Wilson and Hulbert remains an enduring mystery, debated robustly by historians. Scholars have taken turns combing the same trove of lush correspondence, parsing it for revealing nuance or hidden metaphor. Both Wilson and Hulbert write with elegance and clarity, but the letters are very much a product of their time. Matters of the heart are discussed only obliquely, with Victorian propriety. Certain things must be understood by inference.

  What these new documents made clear to Saunders and others is that the president and the society lady were, for a time at least, passionately in love. Also, that this relationship was liberating to Wilson at a critical time in his political life, and may even have affected the course of history.

  What is not clear, to put it bluntly, is whether they ever had sex.

  “I go back and forth on it,” says David Wayne Hirst, Prince-ton historian and senior associate editor of the Wilson Papers. “So did Arthur.” He means Arthur Link, who died last year, certain about most things related to Wilson, but uncertain of this.

  Hulbert and Wilson met in 1907 in midwinter on the island of Bermuda. She was forty-four and temporarily alone, on her yearly escape from a loveless marriage in Massachusetts. Wilson was fifty, then president of Princeton University, also vacationing alone, decompressing from a grueling fight with university trustees and a popular dean over the disposition of private endowments to the graduate school. Wilson’s wife, Ellen, was back in New Jersey, ailing, beset by a depression that strained their marriage. In Bermuda, the bougainvillea was in bloom.

  “The setting for an affair,” says Saunders, “was perfect.”

  Hulbert owned Shoreby, a huge, windswept estate on the island. She entertained governors and captains of industry and luminaries like Mark Twain. She was vivacious, free of spirit, fun-loving—everything the high-buttoned Princeton president was not. One day, Wilson noticed her hurrying across a hotel lobby, a trim, elegant woman aflutter in silken shawls. He wangled an invitation for dinner, and a friendship developed.