by Selina Meyer
The rest of the night was a glorious, heavenly blur. It seemed to me that the air had never smelled sweeter, Lester Lanin’s music had never been gayer, and the Grand Hotel ballroom had never looked more like a prince’s palace where I, for one night at least, was Cinderella. We must have danced twenty dances together, first the waltz and fox-trot, but then, as the party got looser, a mambo and a tango, and we even joined an exuberant conga line. The last five songs were all rock ’n’ roll standards, and Daddy and I twisted the night away until the lights came up and, as the rising sun slowly brightened the east, it was time to go.
It was the greatest night of my life, and nothing before or since has matched it nor could anything mar it—even the next morning when Carlton was found lying in the bushes outside the hotel face down in a puddle of frozen vomit with his pants around his ankles, dead of exposure.
* Honestly, I can’t believe I have to explain all this, but my publisher tells me that the kind of readers I can expect to buy this book or, God forbid, take it out of the library, will most definitely not be the sort of people who really know what a deb ball is—so disappointing.
CHAPTER FOUR
Of Age I Come
From the time I was born, it was a virtual certainty—a foregone conclusion, if you will—that I would attend Smith College, as my mother had and her mother had before her. A private, all-female liberal arts college founded in 1871, Smith was nestled comfortably in the bucolic hamlet of Northampton, Massachusetts, where it had remained largely unbuffeted by the tribulations of the tumultuous ’60s.
I arrived, a dewy-eyed freshman, in the fall of 1985. Daddy had driven me up in his beloved but temperamental Citroen, and we had been forced to stop overnight at the house of a college friend of his, a charming divorcee or maybe a widow or maybe an old friend whose husband was away on business, by the name of Mrs. Loomis, who lived in a large comfortable farmhouse in rural New Jersey. We got a late start the next day and by the time we arrived at Hubbard House on Green Street, I found my roommates already in residence.
To my delight, I saw that one of them was a familiar face or, at least, a face that looked familiar. It was Wendy Booth, whose sister Libby had been a counselor at Tee-Mo-Too-Ket, the equestrian summer camp I had attended for six years. I could see by her carefully chosen, tasteful outfit and her comfortably sporty hairstyle that she and I were birds of a feather and would be friends for life.* It quickly emerged that our mothers had been friends during their time at Smith and had actually dated twins at one point. Wendy and I flipped a coin to see who would have which bunk. I lost and had to take the upper bunk, but Wendy graciously offered to take it instead. That was the kind of person she was.
Slouched on the room’s only single bed, which she had already claimed for herself by virtue of having arrived first (she lived pretty much around the corner), was our third roommate, Barbara Maldonado, and she, unfortunately, was a very different sort of person. I’m not saying Barbara was a bad person, exactly, just that her background had not perhaps prepared her to fully appreciate the myriad little courtesies that, put together, constitute a gracious mode of living and, indeed, behaving.
Although Barbara had clearly chosen her outfit with care, the individual garments themselves were just, well, cheap. Her flowered T-shirt seemed better suited to an evening alone on the sofa while the rest of her laundry was in the wash and the jeans she was wearing were of a brand hitherto unknown to me. Without visible embarrassment, she explained that she was first person in her family to attend college. Her father owned the local Shell station in Northampton and her mom worked as a secretary in a doctor’s office.
Hmm-hmmm. So.
Both Wendy and I had perked up at the mention of a mother who worked in a doctor’s office, hoping that, if he were a dermatologist, we might be able to get facials or, when necessary, cystic acne treatments for free or, at least, at a steep discount. As a second choice, we were hoping for an obstetrician-gynecologist who, of course, could be helpful in the event of yeast infections, crab lice, or, God forbid, an unwanted pregnancy.
So you can imagine our disappointment when we learned that her mother was a secretary for a pediatrician, the most useless kind of doctor of all. And while Wendy and I had both been promised Volkswagen Rabbit convertibles at the start of our sophomore years (another coincidence!), neither of us had cars as yet and thus were unable to take any sort of advantage of Mr. Maldonado’s presumed auto-mechanical skills.
But the bigger problem with Barbara was that, as someone from a public school background, she lacked the polish that comes when one’s rough edges are burnished through exposure to what is unfashionably referred to as “society.” Barbara had never been to a formal dance other than a very tragic-looking high school prom that she insisted on showing us pictures of while Wendy and I struggled to stifle our laughter. She had not attended camp, being too busy working as a lifeguard at the town beach (although she really did not have the figure for lifeguarding work, in my view), and her social life seemed to consist mostly of, as she called it in her broad New England accent, “passing the puck” around on a frozen lake with her four older brothers. It was this supposed ability to “pass the puck” that had led to Barbara’s being admitted to Smith in the first place, since the school was in the midst of one of those big “equality” crazes to which liberal colleges are chronically prone, and it was attempting to start a girls’ ice hockey team, as if anyone would want to watch that.
Naturally, Barbara had never made a debut. Wendy had come out the previous winter, as I had. In her case, she had made her debut at the International Debutante Ball in New York, which my mother always regarded as a bit showy and tacky, but I guess, though I loved her, Wendy always had a bit of that side of her, as well. When we tried to explain the significance of being a debutante to Barbara it was like talking to someone who spoke a completely different language or was a deaf-mute. She just didn’t get it! I mean, she understood the basic idea of dancing in a hotel ballroom to Lester Lanin while wearing formalwear, but the whole notion of formally establishing one’s eligibility to be courted by young gentlemen of a similar social station seemed to her to be bizarre and, as she put it, “old-fashioned.” Ah, well, some things just can’t be explained to some people, if you know what I mean.
My freshman year proceeded in what I guess was the normal manner for the time. I took basic courses in English, European history, French literature, and art history and joined a modern dance group. (Decades later, my daughter, Catherine, would join a modern dance group at Smith, as well, but hers was just idiotic hopping around.) I went to football games and fraternity parties at Amherst and, occasionally, Williams. Like all freshwomen, I was photographed in the nude by the renowned scientists William Herbert Sheldon and Earnest Albert Thomas as part of the prestigious Ivy League Posture Study. Both professors complimented me on my excellent posture and said that I was a perfect illustration of their theory that the higher one was on the social hierarchy the better one’s posture. To this day, my daughter’s slouching still offends me. I find it so unnecessary.
I read recently with some sadness that most of the photos of nude Ivy League college freshmen and Seven Sisters freshwomen had been destroyed by the Smithsonian. I know for a fact that I must have looked pretty darned good in my picture, especially compared with a lot of the other girls, and I am very sorry that my pictures no longer exist. In the years since, as I rose higher and higher in office, I have always voted against funding for the Smithsonian for this very reason College was, for me, a time of learning, to be sure. But it was also a time of love. It was at Smith that I met the first three great loves of my life. Three-and-a half, I guess, if you count my ex-husband, Andrew. If frank talk about human sexuality offends you, well, read no further.
Howard Biddle III was the son of an ambassador and the grandson of a governor. His family businesses, Biddle Petroleum and Biddle Mining along with Biddle Shipping and Biddle’s Department Stores, controlled a significant po
rtion of the U.S. economy. Tall, handsome, and immensely popular, a junior political science major and a varsity letterman in both lacrosse and water polo, I first caught sight of him across the room at a “Pimps and Hos” party at the Chi Psi house at Amherst. Resplendent in a mauve pimp outfit, complete with wide-brimmed hat and two-tone shoes, Howard was the cynosure of all eyes, including my own. What a perfect pair we would make, I thought. Him, rising steadily through the world of business or diplomacy, maybe even becoming president. And me, right there at his side—like Jackie O but with a better sense of personal style.
Of course, I was not the only Smith girl with a sneaker for Howard Biddle, although I was probably the only freshman with the courage to have a crush on him. And there were other girls at other colleges, miserable whorehouses like Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, who were always circling, their beady eyes on the man that was rightfully mine.
I resolved that I would win the heart of Howard Biddle, no matter how steep the odds, and, in order to do so, I would devise a clever multi-stage plan. This was my first attempt at a campaign of any sort, and the experience that I was to gain through it would serve me in good stead during the many campaigns to come.
Job One was to determine Howard’s schedule so that I could be wherever he was. This was obvious, and I could expect my rivals to have come up with the same plan. The process of spending as much time as possible in his vicinity in the hope of a serendipitous encounter was made more difficult by the simple fact that Amherst and Smith, though nearby, are different colleges, and a woman by herself tended to stand out on the Amherst campus except during home games when there was so much hustle and bustle that it was possible to move around unnoticed. The obvious solution, of course, was to dress as a man and enroll at Amherst under an assumed name, the “Yentl strategy,” if you will. But after a weekend of experimenting with wardrobe and hairstyling with the assistance of the estimable Wendy, I had to concede failure. I was simply too much a woman, too feminine and womanly, too shapely, and too graceful to ever pass as a man. Curse the fate that brought Howard Biddle into my ken and then kept us cruelly apart!
After months of attending water polo matches and lacrosse games, not to mention parties at Chi Psi, I was still no closer to my goal. We had made eye contact, sure, mostly me contacting the corner of his eye with all of my eyes. But I could still not swear that Howard, my love and my life, knew me from any other nubile young beauty. What was worse, my diligent efforts to meet Howard were consuming most of my waking hours, and as a result my grades were slipping and I was in danger of flunking out. An ignominious unscheduled return to Maryland would put my love almost impossibly out of reach.
I had chosen political science as my major in order that, in the event that Howard and I were ever to meet, we would have something to talk about. I ventured to imagine that the very fact that I was a poli sci major might give us occasion to meet, since it might make me seem interesting to him and like someone with whom he shared interests. I had coerced Wendy, who, though very sweet, had a weak personality and was easily led (as evinced by her joining of a religious cult in later life), into doing much of my schoolwork for me in exchange for borrowing rights to my entire sweater collection. This freed up some but not all of my time for searching for Howard.
As a quarry, Howard also posed particular challenges. He showed a shocking lack of curiosity about the source of the dozens of small gifts and anonymous letters that I sent to him or left in places where he was likely to find them. And he seemed immune to the extraordinary efforts I went to to dress in a manner that he might find pleasing in the event that we were to meet. It seemed a no-brainer to me that a person with Howard’s background would appreciate a woman who dressed well—but also with a hint of sex appeal—and who wore a clean, light scent with citrus overtones such as Fracas or Bois d’Hadrien.
Through careful sleuthing, I had figured out his course schedule in a matter of weeks and had posted a large map of the Amherst campus on my wall with colored pushpins indicating where he would be and when. Howard proved more difficult to track during his recreational or study hours, however, because his habits, other than attending athletic practice, were not regular. During this time, my body was covered with scratches and bruises thanks to the many nights spent scrambling through bushes and up and down fire escapes at various Amherst dorms and frat houses trying to catch a glimpse of my beloved. I regarded these nighttime forays as no more than diligent fieldwork of the sort a scientist might do to study an exotic animal in the hope of not alarming it when he (or she! though female scientists were less common back then) finally attempted to capture it. There were more than a few times when I had to send an investigating policeman or security guard after some invented Peeping Tom whom I had just spotted in the neighborhood heading in this, that, or the other direction.
The spring semester ended and summer vacation began without my having exchanged a single word with Howard Biddle other than during phone calls when I declined to identify myself. The summer passed in a tearful and forlorn blur as I paged listlessly through my mother’s fashion magazines and imagined our life together as Mr. and Mrs. Howard Biddle. Here we were water-skiing on the French Riviera, then riding in the Queen’s carriage at Royal Ascot; one week a formal dinner party at our Park Avenue apartment with some of Howard’s important business friends, the next an impromptu clambake in the dunes at Southampton. Our children, Gabriel, the little towheaded boy, and Samantha, the raven-haired beauty who was the very spitting image of her mother, would open presents ’round the tree on Christmas morning: a radio-controlled model airplane for Gabe, a new doll for Sammy, an antique pipe rack for Howard, and, for me, an atomizer of some more mature scent than the youthful Fracas which, as a wife and mother, I had outgrown—perhaps Chanel No. 5 or Joy by Jean Patou.
But it was not to be! It could never be, unless somehow I could find a way to meet my future husband. We were meant to be together. I knew it in the very marrow of my bones, and yet a whole year had passed and I had nothing to show for it other than a few of his pubic hairs that I had taken from a bar of soap in the men’s locker room at the swimming pool late one night following water polo practice.*
Howard would be a senior that fall. I had just nine months remaining in which to act. I had to splash some cold water on my face, toss those fashion magazines in the trash, and stop feeling sorry for myself. I had to get serious about making Howard Biddle my boyfriend and eventual husband and stop pussy-footing around. No more sneaking around in the bushes, hiding in men’s bathroom stalls, and putting masking tape over door bolts to keep them from locking automatically behind me. Selina the Sophomore was going to take the direct approach.
And so it was that I returned to Smith and Hubbard House that fall with a newfound sense of purpose. Wendy and I were now sharing a double room, since Barbara had opted not to return to college.*
No sooner had I returned to campus than I received a blow that sent me reeling. Howard Biddle had a girlfriend. Let that sink in. Howard. Biddle. Had. A. Girlfriend. The word had spread through Northampton like wildfire. Howard was going steady with Sarah Monroe, a senior at Smith and the captain of the tennis team. Sarah was tall, she was beautiful, she was rich, she was nice. I think I cried for a week when I heard the news. My thoughts raced: What could I possibly do to make Howard fall out of love with Sarah and fall in love with me instead? I bet he wouldn’t love her so much if she were in a wheelchair! But what if he did? And I had crippled her for nothing??
I couldn’t think clearly. In addition to doing my homework for me, Wendy now had to attend my classes in addition to her own in order to keep up with my course load. I wandered aimlessly. Days and nights passed. Weeks, maybe. My future, the beautiful future I had planned in such painstaking detail, had vanished right before my eyes just as, I was certain, it was finally within my grasp, with just a teeny tiny bit more surveillance of Howard.
This is a dangerous thing for a politician to admit, but I have never been much of
a prayer. Yes, I am a spiritual person. But, like most normal people, I find religious people super-annoying. But I was desperate. And so, I prayed.
And, one night, my prayers were answered.
It was late. I was sitting on a bench outside Comstock House, where Sarah Monroe lived, and I was thinking. Just thinking. Yes, I had some knitting needles and a small hammer with me, but those could have just been for knitting. Maybe I dozed off. I had often spent the night on that bench. It had a particularly secluded location and there was a hedge nearby—but not too nearby—where I could relieve myself when nature called. I was awakened by the sound of an argument coming from what I knew to be the window of Sarah’s bedroom. A man and a woman were whispering with the sort of intensity that indicates that the parties are in the midst of a heated disagreement.
“You’re drunk!” the woman was saying. “I’ve told you how unattractive you are when you’re drunk.”
“Come on, Annabelle, don’t be like that!” the man responded in a pleading tone.
“Annabelle?! Who the f-ck is Annabelle? You know what? Get the f-ck out of here! I always thought you were kind of gross anyway.”
“I love you! I love you!” And then the man began weeping.