And I suppose like most wives-or husbands-in my position, I wanted to believe his involvement with this woman had been as little as possible. A single night, another opportunity, but that was it and he had wanted away from her. He reminded me that he had begged my brother to come on the announcement tour. Jay reminded me, too. Jay, like I, had loved this man for over three decades. I spoke to him, Jay said. He asked me to come because he did not want her around him, but that she had insisted that she was coming even if Jay came; she was not letting go. Working behind the scenes, a friend of hers in the campaign made sure she was on the trip. Jay convinced me that John had no choice; she was going to come. He was as afraid, I suppose, as I was.
I hung on to whatever I could. I was, in nearly every sense, Tecmessa or the wife of any soldier or warrior who comes back from a campaign changed: I wanted my old life back with the man I knew and loved. I looked at his face and heard his voice, and it seemed possible, didn"t it, that nothing had really changed. The man I married couldn"t have done this. No matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, like those women, I had to accept that the man who had come home to me was different and that our story would be different because of that. But knowing that and letting go of my expectations were two quite different things.
I spent months learning to live with a single incidence of infidelity. And I would like to say that a single incidence is easy to overcome, but it is not. I am who I am. I am imperfect in a million ways, but I always thought I was the kind of woman, the kind of wife to whom a husband would be faithful. I had asked for fidelity, begged for it, really, when we married. I never need flowers or jewelry, I don"t care about vacations or a nice car. But I need you to be faithful. Leave me, if you must, but be faithful to me if you are with me.
It wasn"t a premonition. I was talking about my own history. I had read my mother"s journals, found them buried beneath a mattress in a guest room-I have no idea what provoked me, at thirteen, to look under a mattress and no idea why I felt compelled to read them, all of them, but I did. Notebook after notebook, getting to know a mother who seemed before that time to be in total control of her life. And reading, I discovered that my mother believed my father had been unfaithful to her when I was a baby. I will say clearly that I do not know if that is true. I only know what she suspected. She was serially pregnant in the late 1940s and early 1950s: My brother was born thirteen months after I was, my sister was born twelve months later. And my mother believed, rightly or wrongly, that my father had found other companionship while she was buried in babies. She even thought she knew where-the Willard Hotel in Washington-the place I had my senior prom, which must have been a bitter pill for her, although I had a suitably terrible time because, unbeknownst to her, I knew what that hotel meant to her.
My mother was beautiful. She had high cheekbones and brown hair that was red where it caught the light. When she met her first husband, who died in World War II shortly after their marriage, she had been horseback riding. Her hair was in braids. She wore jodhpurs, boots, and a white cotton blouse, the sweat from the Texas heat forming in the V-neck of the blouse. He was completely taken. My father saw her first when she was in layers of organza at a wedding rehearsal dinner. She had long legs, which are still shapely at eighty-five. She had the narrowest of waists and what was delicately called an ample breast. But she was more than that. She was witty and brilliant and compet.i.tive about everything except my father. When it came to my father, she was always on his side. In a series of houses to which we moved as a Navy family, she made each a home, decorating in a way that looks odd now in photographs but that I remember being the height of style then. She won flower-arranging contests, made knockout meals, edited the base newsletter, taught Sunday school, played golf, and started a charity antique thrift shop. She was the perfect wife of a naval officer. There was hardly a thing-except sing-that she couldn"t do as well as or better than most around her. My father was blessed to have won her. And yet she believed that he may have cheated on her.
What believing that did to my mother I will never forget. I read about it perhaps a dozen years after it happened and it was still as raw, maybe even more so, as when she wrote of it. It undid the beautiful face and the ferocious intelligence; it mocked the family dinners and the charity work. She could be replaced in the most intimate of her relations by a face, likely a face not as pretty as her own, by a physique also not likely to have matched my mother"s. She believed that whatever gifts of charm or generosity or intelligence she brought to their marriage, it had not been enough to compensate for baby diapers and dishes to wash. Someone without those responsibilities could laugh and fawn. And could take her place. As a Navy wife, she gave up all that she might be-which for her was considerable-to be with my father, to travel where he was a.s.signed, to live where he was quartered, to raise their children to reflect well on him.
My father is of Italian descent, and it was family lore that he had a hot Latin temper. And there were plenty of screaming arguments as we grew up. But looking back I wonder that she didn"t bait him, didn"t needle him, accuse him in her soft southern accent until he did explode. She needed to be mad at him for something. The something she really needed to be mad about-a possible tryst at the Willard-was always unsaid, so the arguments were always about something else. Or the anger would turn onto one of us. We didn"t understand it. Nothing seemed consequential enough for the level of anger. So we blamed a gla.s.s-or two-of Ballantine or a barmaid who had flirted with Dad or even a lieutenant who had flirted with my mother. It was all interior, all behind the walls of our quarters, never where it could be noticed or reported. We didn"t talk about it to anyone; we didn"t even talk about it to each other. To the rest of the world we were still the happy Anania family.
Mother kept looking for where she had fallen short. And the looking took its toll. She would swing from it being a failure of hers-she wasn"t pretty enough; she wasn"t as carefree as he; his mother never accepted her because she was a widowed Protestant, not a virgin Catholic, when they married; a hundred things it clearly was not-to its being a failure of his-how could he do this, he wasn"t the man she thought he was, didn"t his family mean anything to him, didn"t his career matter. There was never a satisfactory place to settle, so she lived all those decades still loving him, but with something deep inside her that would always be restless, even after he died. "The trust was supposed to be deep. The smiles were supposed to last forever." Don"t ever put me in that position, I begged John when we were newlyweds. Leave me, if you must, but do not be unfaithful.
My father, innocent or guilty, did what he could to make her feel that she was and would always be the center of his world. My father finally died in March of 2008, and for his funeral I gathered photographs of him to hand out, to decorate the reception. I am the repository for our family"s pictures, and I can a.s.sure you there are at least ten thousand, likely much more. I went through each one. It was hard to find pictures of my father, for he, like I, was the photographer of his family. What I did find, though, was thousands of pictures of my mother, of the camera loving my sleeping mother or my mother reading the paper, or my mother looking wistfully from a train window or moving a treasured tansu she had found in a j.a.panese antiques shop. What I found was my father loving my mother. She had surgery to remove cysts from her chin. It is recorded with the kind of love necessary for scars. She is in the middle of cooking Thanksgiving dinner, a kerchief on her head, an ap.r.o.n halfway around her, a spoon stirring some large pot of unidentifiable delight. He adored her. He sang silly songs for her, wrote poems on the greeting cards, left notes on the refrigerator to his beloved Liz, or Diz. Whether that helped the self-loathing I don"t know. Whether he ever really betrayed her, or whether he told her if he had, I don"t know. But I saw them grow old together. And I saw him die and leave her here alone. For all the pain his real or imagined imperfections had caused her, she is to this day and will be until she dies unable to accept that she has to live a day without him.
When my pain hit, it hit me hard. It threw me to the floor in a way I thought, after the death of Wade, impossible. And the death of Wade made it even more difficult for me. I had said so many times that I cannot count them that after Wade"s death I did not want John to have a single moment of unhappiness. And when Wade died, John had been beside me. We had felt the same things, needed the same things, leaned into each other in the deepest of ways. Every argument we had ever had evaporated in the face of this overwhelming sense of our-it seems strange now to say-oneness. For about six months we were never even able to be out of each other"s presence, so essential were we to each other. When he had an appendectomy the summer after Wade died, Bonnie and Dan McLamb came to the hospital to sit with me, for I had not been without him since April. When he came out of surgery, I slept beside him in the hospital room.
I remember one day in the late summer of 1996 when he said to me that he did not want to go to the cemetery that day. "I know you need to go every day," he said, "and so I have gone with you, but I went not because I needed to go to Wade"s grave. I need him, but I don"t need to see his grave every day," he said. "I need to be with you." For months he had gone to the cemetery when it was hard for him to face that grave every day, and he had done it because he loved and needed me. What had happened between then and now? That man who gave me that gift could not be the man before me now.
How could this happen? What was I supposed to do? I had my mother"s example of bitter acceptance, but what was I to do with that? Did she believe hers, like mine, was a single night? I found myself getting angry about other things, particularly in front of the children, just as my mother had done. And, with considerable self-loathing, I saw myself get short with them, too. Was I repeating my mother"s story? She knew that if she left him, his career would suffer, as I knew. Was that why she stayed? I didn"t think so, just as I didn"t believe that John"s career was why I stayed. We each had stayed because we loved the man we married. But was I destined to repeat a life of bitter acceptance? The possibility of my father"s infidelity ate at Mother, I knew, but she stayed there, stayed with him and loved him, and after his stroke when he was nearly seventy she cared for him for nearly two decades with a selflessness that is almost unimaginable. Was that what I was supposed to do? And I was the one who would need the care. Although we did not know yet at the beginning of 2007 that the cancer had metastasized, we did know since 2005 that the cancer had spread at least to my lymph nodes, that there was some possibility of metastasis. I was the one who would need the selfless partner.
I often take respite in music, the old songs usually of the 1940s and of Broadway. I could listen to Dinah Washington or Lena Horne for hours. I compiled a book of lyrics so I could sit and sing the old songs, teach them to my children. But now they were hard; the love song I thought accompanied our marriage, accompanied our love affair, well, it hardly fit anymore. It had been Irving Berlin"s "Always": so lucky to be loving you so lucky to be loving you. I would walk around the house singing it and dozens of others like it. It was never John"s taste, but it was the soundtrack that I wanted, that I chose for my life.
But now it was Stephen Sondheim"s "No One Is Alone" to which I turned, hearing Mandy Patinkin"s voice in my head. "Mother isn"t here now. Who knows what she"d say. Nothing"s quite so clear now." It was true, I knew. My mother had only shown me that staying and fighting for a marriage was possible-at a time when nothing seemed possible. I was bouncing from feeling sorry for myself-where I spent an embarra.s.sing amount of time-to what might seem unachievable-feeling sorry for him. He was so clearly full of pain that what he had done had come to light. He was so full of pain and guilt and shame, it was hard not to want to reach out. And hard not to want him to reach back. Some gesture grand enough to wipe it all away. Some sweep of his arms that put us back together. A thousand photographs. Sondheim again in my head: "People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes.... Everybody makes one another"s terrible mistakes."
If it had been possible to view it all from some alt.i.tude, it might have seemed so easy to see how we came together and pushed each other away ... for days, for weeks, for months. But I had no alt.i.tude at all. It was quite the opposite. I was too low to have any perspective at all. All I wanted was my life back. I didn"t like this new life story; I wanted my old one. It felt so much like after Wade died-I wanted to turn back time so we could avoid the wind, avoid the woman, avoid the pain. Open a drawer and find my life again. But I would open a drawer and find my new reality instead. Everything I tried to do to allow me to go to some safe place turned out to be filled with the same pain. I would look at a happy family picture and break down. I tried to write and could not. Even now it is hard to put it into words.
When I die, my place in the lives of others will be filled by other people. I know this. It is true for all of us. Someone else will have your job; someone else will mow your lawn; someone else will kiss the cheeks of those you love. I worry about it, actually. One of the reasons that I spend time labeling baskets and organizing Christmas ornaments is that I have tried to create a world for my family that will last longer than the years I now have left. I am so in love with my family, so protective, that-odd as it may sound-long before I was sick, I would tell John whom he should marry should I suddenly die. Ann, then when Ann married, it was Kristen. Women I knew I could entrust with taking the same care I had taken. And now I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me. It almost goes without saying, for I would never have, could not have, stood on a sidewalk in the hopes that some clumsy come-on line might work on a married man. But it wasn"t just that; this woman was different from me in nearly every way. Not Ann, not Kristen, and not me.
It may not matter whether the hot glue goes back in the glue basket or whether the snow globes are placed together on the shelf at Christmas or whether the birthday-present gift cards are in the same drawer, but if these inconsequential things might change, what of the things that have really mattered to me? At this moment I saw my death not simply as a transition for my family but as my complete erasure from my family"s life and a complete erasure of the life I hoped they would have. I was afraid of what John might do when cancer finally wins, but he has been as a.s.suring as I could have hoped. I am now at ease that John would not make the same choice in the daylight that he made in the dark, but for some time that thought dogged me, kept me awake at night, stoked my anger and my pain.
If this could happen, and it had, was I even someone with the ability to define a family or the outlines of a family"s life? I must be less than that. I know what the books say: In an otherwise secure and loving marriage, such indiscretions have nothing to do with me. But I doubt there is a person to whom this has happened who did not, for some time, beat themselves with self-doubt and self-loathing. What did I do? How had I failed as a wife? Self-doubt wasn"t that long a journey for me, frankly. The reason I was compulsive about learning whatever I needed to know on the campaign trail was that I was certain I would be humiliated if I was caught not knowing what everyone else in the room knew. So I learned four times the facts I would ever need, and I kept staff up nights finding answers to the questions I feared I might be asked. All the work to avoid being embarra.s.sed was wasted; I now felt thoroughly and publicly humiliated.
Wade had written a short story when he was sixteen. Wade had gone on an Outward Bound Colorado climbing trip when he was fifteen, and he used his experience-he was, according to his own report, the least athletic and, according to others, the most thoughtful boy on the trip-for a short story he had to write the next year. "Summits" is about a boy on a mountain-climbing trip who is forced by circ.u.mstances to be a Good Samaritan first by carrying the gear of an injured camper and then by giving up the summit altogether. As he begins taking care of the injured boy the narrator confesses, "My only two thoughts were how bad I felt, and how hard it would be to pack two people"s stuff and not hold the group up. (Truthfully, the only reason I didn"t want to hold the group up was so that I wouldn"t be embarra.s.sed.) This was exactly the situation I had been trying to avoid for the past two weeks (and, really, my whole life)." Wade had been trying to seem more athletic than he was in front of people he knew were watching him to see if he failed; I was trying to seem more self-confident, more appealing than I felt in front of my own larger audience. Like mother, like son.
And even before learning of a single night, I felt vulnerable to humiliation. Because of the fish-eye lens through which we all see someone in the news-the lens that makes some traits seem bigger and some seem smaller-people had too high an opinion of me, and I knew I had no chance of meeting their expectations. I have been described as self-effacing; that is true, but I should be described as "appropriately self-effacing." I, and I do so hope this is like most people, am certain I will be found out as not as smart or as generous or as thoughtful as I should be. And now this had happened. John knew. Perhaps this woman suspected. Was I to be found out like this? The possibility of public humiliation was a multiplier of my already numbing pain.
How to write on a few pages what that time was like? Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. It didn"t seem to stop, and I could not see when it might. Just the opposite of James Joyce, I said no, no, no, please, no. So I did what I always do: I turned to others for support and love. I don"t know what I would have done without my brother"s voice. He let me cry when I needed to, and he made me laugh when I needed that. Another friend who had stood where I stood either honestly told me that my reactions were typical or generously lied that they were. I wasn"t alone, but so much of the time I felt alone because I felt separated from the one person on whom I had so long relied.
I wanted to tell my sister Nancy, but I could not. Nancy had been married. She moved to Florida where they were going to retire to a home they bought together, and when she did, her former husband had brought another woman into their Ohio home. One of the things that has upset me is that I feel like my past is perhaps not what I thought it was and my future is certainly not what I dreamed. For Nancy, you could add to that that the actual pieces of her life were picked apart. Her clothes and jewelry from her Ohio home were put in garbage bags by this woman-some were missing when she finally retrieved them. Her furniture was rearranged, her children"s rooms taken over by the other woman"s children, her credit cards reissued to the intruder as if she were the wife. My life was figuratively injured; hers was literally dismantled. And Nancy, like Jay, loved John, loved how he had been so good to me, how he had cared for me through the cancer, loved what we represented: a marriage of equals built on love and respect. For the longest time, I could not take that away from her, could not compare my battle with her war. I could not tell her. I was wrong; when I did tell her, she was generous and honest. I needed both.
Nancy did not want her old life back. I did. I put on my earphones and dreamed. "Hard to see the light now. Just don"t let it go. Things will work out right now. Ask me how I know." I thought I could fix it; I think John thought he could, too. But we were not living in our house, working on fixing it. We were separated. He was on the campaign trail. At first I could not, would not go. What would I say? I had said, in the months before, how this man had been my rock, and he had been, but I couldn"t say that now. When I finally did campaign, I was pointed, so pointed I thought someone might suspect: We elect a vision and a person capable of making that vision become reality. If we yield to what we find appealing or engaging, if we yield to personality or appearance, we yield to an easy and false path. I could say that easily. It was, in fact, easier than I thought it would be. In a field of caution by the candidates, John had real vision. This is where we haven"t been riven apart. We shared the honest discussion of our responsibility to our communities; we shared a pa.s.sion for eliminating poverty and providing health care for those sitting outside the clinic doors. Whatever separated us, this did not. And I needed that, needed to feel that some part of my life with this man I had loved so long was intact. John had the most progressive policies and I could say that. I could do this, and in doing it, I could feel as if I were standing closer to the core of who he was and is than when I let his indiscretion capture my thoughts. I was with him in a sense. And in a sense, of course, I was not.
It turned out that a single time was not all it was. More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed someone else into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone. I tried to get him to explain, but he did not know himself why he had allowed it to happen. In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a subst.i.tute for me. It was more like his relationship with a former staff member. Most members of campaign staffs are young people who believe in the candidate or in his or her vision. There are a rare few who are obsessed with the candidate. A young campaign staffer in one state became fixated on me. He would make special arrangements for me and plan to be close to me when I was in his state; when he was fired, he continued to show up at town halls, staying in the same hotels I did. John had several like him, but one in particular whom I thought he let into our lives for much the same reason he had let this woman. There is no reason to name the young man in the other state who followed me, and there is no reason to name John"s obsessed fan. I will call him Jim.
Jim had first volunteered in the Senate campaign in 1998, working in fundraising. Julianna Smoot, who ran the finances, found him overbearing and did not want him even as a volunteer. What harm could he do, I remember saying then and regretting since. Jim volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable. He would drive John wherever he needed to go. Did John need something dry-cleaned overnight? Did he need his car washed? There was no job too menial for Jim. When you are busy campaigning, as John was, it seemed harmless, even helpful. When John went to the Senate, many of the campaign workers either went to Washington or stayed and ran the North Carolina office. Jim stayed in North Carolina, but he was openly jealous of everyone who went to Washington. He wanted to continue to drive John, and did when John came to North Carolina. Jim would drive across the state just to pick John up at the airport and deposit him at a meeting and then return him to the airport. When we were in North Carolina, he had his wife-who worked night shift-leave McDonald"s breakfasts for us outside our door before she went home. (I saw her one morning, and I told her to stop.) Could he help John"s parents? How about his sister, what could he do for her? I now remember him telling me that my family didn"t call on him often enough. A friend who worked in the North Carolina Senate office warned me about him: He is too possessive, he knows no limits, no boundaries. John was Jim"s ticket, the friend said, and he was not going to let anyone get between him and John. That included me.
I complained about Jim. John had gotten used to Jim"s unbridled loyalty, his willingness to do anything John wanted, and his obvious adoration of John. John and I would argue. Why are you so hard on Jim, he would say. I stood back for a while, but after Jim lied to us, I finally had the reason I needed to ban him from the house. It meant he could not drive John, that someone else would. He tried to find ways around it, to keep in contact, to keep as much of John"s life as his own as he could. He bought cars like the ones we drove. He wanted to vacation where we vacationed. He had birthday parties for himself and invited all our friends. He sent daily e-mails to almost everyone we knew. And he became close with the videographer, who also did not understand boundaries. It was some time, but John finally saw what I saw.
In truth, the existence of a Jim made it easier to accept the existence of this woman. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some want to take something away for themselves. They fatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. I wanted to be less stern with the young fellow who followed me around than the staff thought necessary; to me he was simply sweet and wrong-headed, not dangerous. But too many are dangerous. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.
It took me some time to realize that I was lucky, really. I did not need to intrude into someone else"s life to have happiness. Seeing these people as pursuing something they cannot or will not build for themselves, that they are unlikely to ever have, made me feel a little sorry for them. Their focus on achieving a style of life deprived them of any opportunity to achieve a purpose in life. They hurt me, and it still hurts, but whatever momentary pleasure they got, they didn"t get what they wanted, and that must hurt, too. My life, at some level, is tragic. Theirs is worse; theirs is pathetic. I was still upset with John for allowing either of them into our lives, for being vulnerable to obsequiousness, for not kicking them out the door when they refused to leave. It makes it easier, too, that John is upset with himself in both cases for not doing just that. It has made it easier to forgive him that he cannot forgive himself.
That leaves, unfortunately, the long process of rebuilding trust. He violated a trust and then he lied. And even when he told the truth, he left most of the truth out. My mother"s mother used to say that the intent to deceive is the same as a lie. We have spent much too long in that purgatory, so long it feels like h.e.l.l. If he lied for a year and told another lie for another year, does that mean it takes two years to re-earn trust? It is not as easy or formulaic. Our life now is a mixture of living each day as a family, making dinners, packing school lunches, basketball games and Girl Scouts, chorus and Cub Scout sleepovers. The stuff of real life, and here John has been all that it is possible to be. When I am sick or distracted, he is the caregiver I need, tender and attentive. John is not the photographer my father was, but these are his photographs, gifts of love. Like my mother unattractive in hair curlers, I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my spa.r.s.e hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters.
The harder part of the mixture is sorting out the truths and the diversions. Just as I don"t want cancer to take over my life, I don"t want this indiscretion, however long in duration, to take over my life either. But I need to deal with both; I need to find peace with both. It is hard for John, I can see, because it is something about which he is ashamed. But his willingness to open up is a statement that he trusts me, too. For quite a long time, I used whatever he admitted in the next argument and he was hesitant to say anything. That is, gratefully, behind us. There is still a great deal of sorting through to do-the lies went on for some time. And we both understand that there are no guarantees, but the road ahead looks clear enough, although from here it looks long. It helps that there are rest stops-building Legos with Jack, reading with Emma Claire, planning Cate"s new house, hanging pictures of thirty years of memories-that remind us why we are together.
Forgiveness, I have been told, is the gift I give to him; trust he has to earn by himself. I am not going to suggest that that process is over. It is long from being over. I am still adjusting my sails to the new wind that has blown through my life. Nothing will be quite as I want it, but sometimes we eat the toast that is burned on one side anyway, don"t we?
I also had the job of rebuilding myself. For so long I moved to a cadence set by someone else. While growing up, it had been my father"s changes in duty stations. What was happening in my life really didn"t, couldn"t, matter. I moved for my senior year of high school, because that was his rotation schedule. When I married we both practiced law, but soon his career was on a rocket and he, not I, set the family cadence. It was fine with me. But now I needed a me. I needed the music in my head to be something for me. "Gray skies are going to clear up. Put on a happy face." The self-doubt that had fueled a need to overprepare had exploded with the recent revelations. I was overwhelmed and lost. There had to be places where I felt that I had value. The children might have seemed a natural place, but that was complicated-they were part of the family that I feared had not been enough. I gave speeches, but I was still afraid that people heard what they expected to hear. If they expected exceptional, they heard exceptional, even when I thought I was mediocre. I overprepared some more, writing new speeches for every group before whom I spoke. I still felt mediocre. Unlike when I was grieving Wade"s death and could not eat, in this grief I ate too much, which was followed by immense disappointment in myself.
I wanted something that was mine. If I spoke publicly, I was asked about John. If I was asked to be on a board, it was because they had come to know me through John. I needed to be independent of him, maybe because he had been independent of me. Whatever the reason, I was on a search. And I found something that not only was mine but that I honestly wanted to do. I went to High Point one late-summer day with B. A. Farrell, my friend and the architect of our new home. We talked, as we did, of a thousand things, and he told me of buying a whole showroom of furniture at an enviable discount. He had doled it out to his various customers, but, he said, if you had a store, we could do so much more. By the time of the trip home, a plan was born: I would open a furniture store. I cannot say I had not thought about this before. I love the craftspeople and salespeople in High Point. I am guessing that it has something to do with creating a home, the function at which I am pretty sure I managed to succeed. I had talked about a store plenty, but always in the abstract. During the campaign it was just a dream, but now I was on a search for retail s.p.a.ce in Chapel Hill. Hargrave McElroy"s son Will helped me close on a small s.p.a.ce; Lane Davis, who built our house in Chapel Hill, did the upfit, and I finally started buying furniture for my store.
I remember one time when John and I lived in Nashville, Tennessee. The living room and dining room were painted a pale green that was too close to a color that the military had used in every set of quarters in which I lived growing up. I wanted to paint, and we talked of it and talked of it, but it never seemed to happen. One day we bought a quart of paint and painted a big "X" on the living room wall. Now we would have to paint. That"s what I was doing when Cate and I went to High Point one day and I bought a whole showroom of Italian furniture. There were nineteen mosaic tables; I would need a store in which to sell them.
In this world, I am not John"s wife. My name is not in a tabloid. I am Elizabeth buying for a small store in Chapel Hill. John likes going with me to High Point, where everyone knows my name. He helped me buy a used truck. Vincent helps me move the furniture from High Point to storage to the store. Vincent is his own story of resilience. He worked for Lane, the contractor who built our house, and still does when Lane needs him. Vincent struggled with alcoholism and couldn"t be counted on to show up when he was needed. About the time our house was finished, Vincent hit bottom, but he decided not to stay there. As I write, he has been clean for a year and a half, he has gotten his own apartment and a driver"s license, and he is the most reliable, hardworking man I know. But more than that, he has great joy. He loves his life. The past is not what he wishes it was, but that does not mean he cannot create for himself the future he wants. Working with Vincent has been an inspiration to me, especially in the last months. And having a business that is just mine, that rises or falls on what I do or fail to do, makes me feel more like I have a place. So many people have said that I should advertise that it is my store, using my name and the celebrity or notoriety that my name carries. I don"t argue, but I cannot do that. I am just Elizabeth buying for a small store in Chapel Hill. My husband helps me out there now and again.
CHAPTER 9.
In the End.
-n the end the way to view all that has happened is that I did my very best. I felt with every part of me. I loved with the whole of me. I ached in a way that reminded me that there had to be a corollary somewhere of incredible joy to balance the universe. And if I had loved less or doubted more or avoided the pains, I might not be a.s.sured as I am today that I have done in every circ.u.mstance what I would hope to do. Not every circ.u.mstance, surely. I have been angry beyond reason. I have been lost and unsure. But in every way I might have expected of myself, I have been true to that sense of what was true and right and clean. Maybe others had a better time, more intimacies, more skin pressed against skin, but this life is mine, these children are mine, this home is mine, and this imperfect man is like me. I am his and he is mine.
And in the end, what we want from life is too dear for words, for paper. Maybe that is why in every culture there is music that takes us places words cannot. So I sit here, the keyboard with letters in front of me, wondering how to say why I am able to breathe, why others I watch, whose breathing seems even more impossible, smile and laugh and live. And why I believe that I will smile and laugh and live. In the background I listen to Andrea Marcovicci sing "All the Things You Are." You are the angel glow that lights a star. The dearest things I know are what you are. Someday my happy arms will hold you and someday I"ll know that moment divine when all the things you are are mine You are the angel glow that lights a star. The dearest things I know are what you are. Someday my happy arms will hold you and someday I"ll know that moment divine when all the things you are are mine. And then the tempo steps up and wraps around me like a long chiffon scarf at the end of Andrea"s long arms. What cannot be possible. Someday.
But there comes a point when the music ends. The trick is to have someplace to go when it does. Not to sink back into the hole in which the music found you, from where it lifted you. The trick is to go someplace that belongs to you, that was the perfect medicine for what you needed.
I measure my pains just as I measured my joys. When Wade died, I was lost, more lost than I have ever felt. Will Henderson and Matt Nowell had sat in our house after a Carolina basketball game a few weeks before Wade died. "Wade," one of them said, "in thirty years we can sit in your parents" seats at the games." "No way," I interjected, "when I am seventy-five Wade and I will be sitting there together." I did not just expect to raise him; I expected him to be my friend and companion every day of my life. He was supposed to enjoy all the pleasures of life, and I was supposed to be able to see him marry and have children. I won"t see those things happen, but I did get to see Crystal from the Wade Edwards Learning Lab apply to college, I did get to see Elise put together a Web page for herself, I did get to see Philip grow into a fine young man, a fireman he told me.
When I got breast cancer, it was just another hurdle. It was high and I skinned myself time and again as I battled over it. But it wasn"t as tough as Wade"s death, so I could do it. Then the breast cancer has spread to my bones, and after staying contained for more than a year, now it is growing again. I will do whatever the doctors tell me to do. I will take my medicines and get my chemotherapy infusions; I will avoid the foods I should not eat; and I will not do activities that could break my bones. Although I know that cancer now has the upper hand, it won"t own me until it finally takes me. Until then, I will live as fully as I am able-absent horseback riding and skiing-and I will spend part of the time I have attacking cancer in a different way, by fighting for research dollars and an expansion of treatment to those like whispering Sheila who want to but cannot afford to fight the cancer in them.
We live not far from the country church in which John and I were married. I promised to love him for richer or poorer. We had nothing then. Really nothing, except debt from college loans. It is more than thirty-one years later, and we have more than we will need. I promised to love him in sickness and in health, and I have. And he has tended me in sickness; he has held me and fed me and taken care of me. I promised to love him for better or for worse. It has been, I have to admit, mostly for better. But there has been worse, and that worse has been tough on me. I turn sixty this year, and since I was fifty-seven, I have lived with that worse. But I choose to look forward, to the extent I am able, to make a place for myself and to make room for him to earn the trust he squandered.
A book of lists, the top ten, the worst scenarios. We seem bent on ranking all of our experiences. I have lost one child, but Gordon has lost two. I had Stage 2 cancer, but Sarah had Stage 4. I face whatever I must with a roof over my head and food on my table, and there are mothers and wives with nothing at all except my same griefs. The fact that I see someone surviving with a condition that sounds worse than my own or with fewer resources than I, well, it means I can survive, too, doesn"t it? But what do I do with the lists in those moments when I don"t feel like surviving, when the fight has left me? Have we failed, too, even at holding the short straw? I cannot even do this right? Gordon stands in the midst of the storm with his eyes so firmly on the horizon, and I cannot manage to lift my head.
When I looked at Gordon or Sarah, at any of those strong and miraculous survivors, I always looked for the tricks, the ways they managed to outwit the pain. They have to be there, don"t they? It was hard to imagine, but I do accept that some people have looked at me the same way: What is the lesson that you know that I do not, the trick that I am somehow missing, the one that will take me through this experience?
I know now that I was always looking for the wrong thing. In the first place, Gordon and Sarah cannot have the answers for me. Just as I cannot have the answers for you. There are millions of tricks, as many tricks as there are fingerprints, each one belonging to just us. The answer wasn"t in their lives; it was in mine. It is like going to the grave of a loved one: It is exactly right for some people and exactly wrong for others. In the second place, I kept looking for others to help me find the trick. G.o.d would make it right, would turn back time. The doctors would have the next medicine; maybe this one was a cure. John would say the right thing and make it all not so. Others could help me, so many have, but it was always in me-in me not just to find the answer but to make the changes I had the power to make.
Finally, it is not a book of lists, it is not a top ten. In a compet.i.tive world it is too easy to rank yourself against others. Gordon had to live through the deaths of his two sons; it is unimaginable. But the magnitude of his misery does not mean that I should have been able to handle more easily than I did the death of one son. The only contest we have is with ourselves. Wade wrote once, in an essay for a Latin exam, "The modern hero is a person who does something everyone thinks they could do if they were a little stronger, a little faster, a little smarter, or a little more generous. Heroes in ancient time were the link between man and perfect beings, G.o.ds. Heroes in modern times are the link between man as he is and man as he could be." That is our test. The man-or woman-we are and the man-or woman-we could be. I cannot be as resilient as Gordon Livingston or Rose Kennedy, both of whom buried too many of their children. I cannot be as strong and healthy as Lance Armstrong, who pushed his body over mountains after cancer. I cannot be as beautiful as Christie Brinkley, who faced her husband"s indiscretions, too. I can only be what I am capable of being.
I have said before that I do not know what the most important lesson is that I will ever teach my children, Cate and Emma Claire and Jack. I do know that when they are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way-and it surely has not-she adjusted her sails.