American Wife

“Can you think of any reason Ms. Davis would make that claim?” Hank asks, and his tone is deliberately empty. No one else in the car reacts, not Cal, who sits in the front passenger seat, nor the other Secret Service agent, Walter, who’s driving. (Cal, who is currently my lead agent, played football at ASU; Walter is the father of twins—because they know far too much about us, both Charlie and I have made an effort to get to know our agents, and Charlie has personally shown the Oval Office to many of their family members.) I can see only the back of Walter’s head and some of Cal’s profile, but I’m confident both that they’re listening and that they’ll say nothing during this car ride, nothing when we’re back at the White House; they almost never speak first unless it’s an issue of safety. In crowds, I sometimes hear one beside me, having floated up without my noticing, murmuring, “Veer left,” or “Hold up, ma’am.” For men generally weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, they are remarkably graceful.

To Hank, I say, “Are you sure this woman’s name is Norene Davis?”

Hank removes a BlackBerry from the inner pocket of his blazer and reads from the screen. “Age thirty-six, current address 5147 Manchester Street in Cicero, Illinois, although we have reason to believe she’s no longer living there. Divorced, no kids, employed as a home health aide by a rinky-dink-sounding organization called Glenview Health Service.”

“Is it possible she used to go by a different name?”

“Anything’s possible. My impression is she’s fronting for someone, but the question is who. While our tireless investigators figure that out, I wanted to check with you. Now, here’s where the plot thickens: This gal isn’t interested in blackmail, at least not in the conventional sense. Instead, she’s threatening to go public unless you speak out against Ingrid Sanchez as a Supreme Court nominee.”

Confused, I repeat, “Unless I—” But even before I finish the question, I understand. The brevity of the two answers I gave about my stance on abortion on the morning news show in 2000 and 2004 did not pacify pro-choice activists; in fact, it seems they might have preferred a pro-life first lady—a clear adversary—to one who quietly believes in reproductive freedom. As I said, the interview question was essentially staged both times, Charlie had given his blessings, which meant Hank had, which meant it served the administration, which it did because many Republicans are, after all, pro-choice themselves. The anchor had agreed in advance to ask no follow-up questions, and that first time, the next thing he said was “Now, on a less heavy topic, there’s one member of the Blackwell family known to be even more press-shy than you. Can you tell viewers a bit about the elusive Snowflake?” After that television program aired, Jeanette Werden in Madison, who had so annoyed me all those years ago at the cookout where I’d met Charlie by prattling on about her marriage and children, and who had been pregnant at the time with her third child, wrote me a letter saying she’d terminated an earlier pregnancy at the age of twenty-eight—she had given birth to Katie, their daughter, just six months before, and was struggling with what today would be called postpartum depression. When Jeanette wrote about how glad she was I’d spoken out, I longed to call and tell her the rest. I didn’t, though; I couldn’t.

During Charlie’s first gubernatorial campaign, one of Hank’s minions interviewed me extensively; he had me walk him through every stage of my life, trawling for secrets or controversy. We spoke extensively about Andrew Imhof—it was a tabloid that first broke that story a few years later, in 2000, and I had the campaign press secretary confirm its accuracy as quickly as possible—and I answered every question the minion asked. But I did not volunteer extra information. Charlie and I had discussed it the night before, and he had said it was fine with him if I didn’t mention my abortion. If it never came out, then there would have been no need, and if it did come out, it could be dealt with then. But to preemptively divulge it—the minion’s questions were designed to elicit just such bombshells—seemed to me the surest way, through one person in the campaign confiding in another and another and eventually in a journalist, of making it public.

In this moment in the SUV, however, the

then

of

it could be dealt with then

has arrived—the

then

is now, it is today. I say to Hank, “Isn’t this kind of threat illegal?”

Hank actually smiles. “We’ll take down Norene Davis easy, don’t worry, but what I’m curious about is why you think she’d level this particular charge.”

What Hank isn’t saying—he can’t because I’m first lady—is that he either suspects or knows the charge is true. (Sometimes the etiquette with which he must comply cruelly amuses me, the fact that he has to call Charlie Mr. President, or stand when I enter the room.

You made us,

I think,

and now you must worship at our feet.

) If Hank didn’t find the charge credible, he wouldn’t be here; after all, the White House receives dozens of letters, e-mails, and calls a day from delusional individuals: “Tell Alice Blackwell to quit sending my dog messages through the TV!” Or “I’m the president’s secret half brother from his father’s affair in 1950, but for two million dollars, I promise to keep quiet.” These accusations, like the threats to our lives, are constant, yet we learn the specifics of very few.

“Charlie knows what’s going on?” I ask.

Hank nods. “He said I should come to you directly.” Did Charlie tell Hank the charge is true? I doubt he said it outright, but he may have hinted.

I look out the window; we’re heading east on Arlington Boulevard, the other cars on their way to Washington pulled over as we whiz past.

“Listen,” Hank says. “This is a solvable problem. If Norene Davis is operating on her own, she’s in way over her head. The likelihood that she’ll back down with a little intimidation is high. Now let’s say for the sake of argument that she’s worked herself up and decides she’ll go to jail before she’ll be silenced, so she goes ahead and talks to a reporter, or let’s say she does shut her trap, but oops, wait a second, she’s already told her sister, she’s told her boyfriend, whoever it is—either way, the allegation is out there. In that case, I’m thinking

Larry King.

Not an immediate booking, we don’t want to go on the defensive right away. We wait ten days or two weeks, we fold it into another appearance—literacy, breast cancer, you pick the topic—and we let him ask you point-blank. You categorically deny it.” There is a question mark implied in this scenario, and I allow the question to hang there in the air.

I say, “And when the press corps asks Maggie or Doug about it?”

“ ‘While we’d normally consider it beneath us to acknowledge such outrageous and false accusations, Mrs. Blackwell’s respect for this sensitive and controversial issue blah blah blah . . . ’ Then, you know, lather, rinse, repeat.”

“Just don’t say ‘sanctity of life.’ ”

“This isn’t the time to fly your pro-choice flag, Alice.”

“You’ve told me yourself the public accepts—”

Unusually, Hank interrupts me; he has turned in his seat so we’re face-to-face. “The public accepts a first lady who supports the right to choose. Don’t kid yourself that that’s the same as accepting a first lady who had an abortion.”

So he believes the allegation; he should, and I already knew he did, but there’s a bitter satisfaction in forcing him to say it aloud. In the front seat, Walter and Cal are as alert and impassive as sphinxes.

I look Hank in the eye. “I’m not sure who Norene Davis is, but the person behind this is a former friend of mine named Dena Janaszewski. I haven’t spoken to her in thirty years, and I haven’t heard anything about her in probably fifteen, but she—she and maybe her boyfriend—are the only ones besides Charlie who’ve ever known about my abortion.”

“Can you spell her last name?” Hank has his BlackBerry out again; if he’s shocked by my admission, he has the restraint not to show it, and no one else says anything, either.

I say, “I’m not sure what name she goes by now, but she’s much older than thirty-six—she’s my age. She was married, and her name was Cimino, and then she was divorced, and she might be remarried, possibly to—” I pause. “Back in the late eighties, she was dating a man named Pete Imhof, so they might have broken up, or they might still be together. He’s the brother of Andrew, the boy who—”

“Right.” Hank nods.

“And also he—Pete—he’s the one I got pregnant by, but he never knew.”

“Dena would have told him.” Hank isn’t asking; he’s making a statement.

The SUV is quiet except for the sirens of the police motorcycles escorting us, though even those sound distant because of the Doppler effect.

“Please have the investigators who talk to Dena be careful,” I say to Hank. “I wish she weren’t doing this, but I don’t want her life to be ruined, and I don’t want her going to prison.”

“The pregnancy was before or after Andrew’s death?” Hank is, I can see, imagining how to spin this, wondering if somehow the death can cancel out the abortion. I could spare him the trouble and tell him it can’t.

“After,” I say.

For a moment, Hank is silent, absorbing the information, and then he says, “Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us.” (On second thought, perhaps he doesn’t worship at our feet at all. That he is eating this up, luxuriating in the sordidness, is undeniable—it is not so much that Hank loves nothing more than a crisis but that he loves nothing more than his own indispensability to my husband in the face of one; there is a reason Charlie’s nickname for Hank is Shit Storm.)

“Don’t let the investigators physically threaten Dena,” I say. “Do you hear me, Hank? I want them to be respectful.”

“Alice, she’s trying to thwart a Supreme Court nomination and lead a smear campaign against the president and the first lady of the United States.”

I frown at him. “Don’t be melodramatic.” Before turning again to look out the window, I say, “She was once a close friend.”

THE WAY FAME

works is that people start to see your name in the news, whether on television or in the paper or a magazine. Something has just occurred (your husband has, with seven other men, bought a baseball team) or something is about to occur (your husband is on the verge of announcing he’ll run for governor of Wisconsin, or he’s on the verge of being elected), and people you know, though not necessarily well, contact you. People from the country club, whose house you have never been inside, who have never been inside yours—they call and leave joking messages, saying, “Don’t forget us little people.” Or “I saw you on Channel Four, and I had to get in touch while you still remember that you know me.” Whatever the thing is that has just occurred or is about to occur, it’s time-consuming; your life has never been more hectic, nor have there ever been more people contacting you for essentially pointless reasons, yet you feel compelled to respond, lest they think the attention has gone to your head. You hear from your dentist, your daughter’s high school math teacher, people from your past: childhood friends, old classmates, former coworkers. They are surprisingly skilled at tracking you down. Sometimes they merely want acknowledgment, but increasingly, they want favors, and then strangers want favors, too. They ask you to speak at events, to be an honorary host, to be a member of their board of trustees, to auction off an evening with yourself; they want tickets to baseball games, tickets to the World Series, permission to get married on the baseball field, tickets to tour the governor’s mansion; then they want you to help them gain access or entry to places to which you have no connection whatsoever, a fancy restaurant in New York, a golf course in North Carolina; they want you to help their nephew obtain a summer internship at a talent agency in Los Angeles. Before your fame extends beyond the state, they are already sure that it does. It would be impossible to say yes to all of these requests, though again, saying no increases the likelihood that you’ll be viewed as rude; almost every person who asks a favor appears unaware of the existence of every other person doing the same. You realize that anyone can create an obligation for you just by wanting something; they write you a letter or an e-mail, they leave you a phone message, and while not granting their wish is bad enough, to ignore them would be unforgivable. In this way, they determine your schedule and duties; you have become public property.

Gradually, your fame settles on you, it’s like a new coat or a new car that you become used to, but it continues to provoke odd and awkward behavior in others. At your public events, people you

never

knew, friends of friends of friends, your college boyfriend’s aunt, the neighbor of your plumber—they, too, claim you, reciting the few degrees of separation between you and them. At private events unrelated to you or the reason you’ve become famous, the weddings or cocktail parties or school fund-raisers you still attend to try to convince yourself you remain a regular person, other people eye you heavily. You try to be modest by not assuming anyone recognizes or is looking at you; if you’re meeting a person for the first time, you introduce yourself, you remark on the flowers or the food or the weather. But really, all they want to talk about is you: how they are connected to you (the more tenuous the connection, the more they insist on establishing it), or where they were when they saw an article or television segment featuring you, or what they overheard people on the street saying about you. They want to talk to you about how strange it must be, being famous; they don’t realize they are even now creating the strangeness.

And then you become truly famous—not locally or regionally famous, but famous famous—and of all things, your burden lightens. Steadily, your entourage has been growing, and now it is large enough and professional enough that there is a buffer between you and the rest of the world. In public, you’re flanked by aides; either visibly or invisibly, you’re accompanied by a security detail. You can’t just be approached, and the situations in which you can be approached are controlled and systematic. This is why it’s harder to be moderately famous than very famous; when you’re moderately famous, you still go to the grocery store, you still do the things you did before, while at any moment, you might be noticed and accosted. When you’re very famous, you don’t go to the grocery store unless it’s for a photo op, and you know that wherever you do go, you’ll be recognized at once. Any environment you set foot in will be altered, your presence will mean that everyone must start talking about you, taking your picture with their cell phones. This is why, during Charlie’s presidency, we have hardly eaten at restaurants in Washington except during events organized around our attendance; we’ve been criticized for being aloof when the reality is that I feel it’s unfair to all the other diners. They’ve gone out, perhaps to celebrate a job promotion or a birthday; they are buttering their bread and we appear, unsettling the equilibrium of the room. If this was to be the dinner where you celebrated your promotion, it has become instead the dinner where the president and the first lady showed up. It is selfish, really; we take up more than our fair share of oxygen.

Early on, at moments when I felt most overwhelmed by my new role as first lady, I’d tell myself that I was surely the most famous person in the country, and probably in the world, who had not sought her fame. This was a lie. Who did not

want

her fame would have been more accurate. I sought fame with a reluctant heart, with great reservations, yet I granted interviews and posed for photographs and rode with Charlie on buses and planes, I gave speeches of my own and cheered for his, I visited churches and hospitals and fish fries. Like every famous person, I was complicit in my fame. Yes, a few times a year, a handful of ordinary citizens become the focus of a media frenzy—a victim of a particularly grisly crime, or the kid who reaches over the stands to catch a home-run ball in a play-off game—but that fame passes. The true enduring kind must be constantly burnished and enhanced. It never happens by chance.

Perhaps it started back in 1977, with Charlie’s first congressional campaign, or perhaps well before that, when Harold Blackwell ran for attorney general of Wisconsin in 1954. We threw ourselves at people—there are more savory ways to say it, but really, that’s what we did. We searched them out, we left leaflets at the front doors of their houses and under the windshields of their cars, we spoke to them through ads on television, we went to their schools and town halls and farmers’ markets. We begged them to listen, we bombarded them with promises and plans, but all along we were selling ourselves—selling him.

We did everything we could to get as many people as possible to pay attention to us, and it worked, and now we complain.

Leave us alone,

we say.

Just like you, we’re entitled to privacy.

BEFORE DELIVERING HIS

speech in Columbus, Charlie calls to say that he thinks Dena is a credibility-lacking piece of trailer trash. “Go easy,” I say. I am, as much as possible, trying to suspend panic. This scandal, if a scandal is what it will be, is in such an early stage; I need to better know the shape of it before allotting my anxious energy.

My personal aide, Ashley, and I are walking from the South Lawn into the Diplomatic Reception Room when Nicole Hethcote, another aide, says, “Mrs. Blackwell, your daughter’s on the phone. Are you available?”

“I’ll get it at my desk,” I say. In my office in the East Wing, as soon as the phone rings, I pick it up.

“Can you please make Dad go talk to that Franklin guy?” Ella says. “Just for five minutes?”

“Honey, you can’t let the opposition dictate the terms of the conversation.”

“You sound like Uncle Hank.”

Ah, my Ella. She is twenty-eight now, and her schedule at Goldman Sachs is worse than Charlie’s, ninety hours a week on a regular basis. Magazines sometimes run pictures of Ella and her boyfriend, Wyatt, entering or leaving fancy restaurants (their main form of recreation besides working out, which they both do avidly), and while the exposure doesn’t please me and I admit to being a bit thrown by the idea of my daughter spending more on a bottle of wine than I used to pay for a month’s rent in my twenties, I never worry that Ella will be caught behaving inappropriately. She is our miracle, smart and level-headed and joyful, inheritor of an improbable combination of my calmness and Charlie’s mischief. Perhaps most extraordinary to me is her apparent lack of resentment toward either of us. Mundane bickering and disagreements have always arisen with us, as with any family, but even those scuffles, which peaked when she was in high school (over atypical issues such as the ubiquity of her security detail, and more mundane ones such as the lengths of her skirts, the hour of her curfew, and the urgent necessity of there being two piercings rather than one in her left ear), have all faded. While I doubt she would have chosen this path for our family—she was in eighth grade when we told her Charlie was going to run for governor of Wisconsin, which prompted her to accuse her father of trying to ruin her life—it would appear she has forgiven us.

In June 2001, she graduated from Princeton, an event where Charlie’s appearance created a bit of a ruckus on campus; knowing we’d force all the other families to walk through metal detectors, among other inconveniences, we’d considered skipping the ceremony, but neither Charlie nor I could bear to do it. (Sitting in the front row, facing Nassau Hall, I did think uncomfortably of Joe Thayer, who, over ten years earlier, had married a younger, gentle-seeming music teacher at Biddle Academy with whom he has had two more children. In a pleasant turn of events, his once-troubled daughter Megan is also married and living in Maronee with two young children.) Ella again followed in Charlie’s footsteps by attending Wharton, though, as Charlie quipped in the commencement address he delivered two years ago, the school has become so competitive that if he’d been applying when Ella did, he wouldn’t have gotten in.

At this point, Ella is neither in thrall to nor disdainful of politics: When she was younger, we shielded her, never allowing her to speak to the press, and although she attended both of Charlie’s inaugurations, the first time she participated in any campaigning was when she held a

BLACKWELL/PROUHET

sign on a street corner in Manchester, New Hampshire, in January 2004. She still has never granted an interview, and while she would prefer, as I think most twenty-eight-year-old women living in Manhattan would, to spend more time with her friends and her boyfriend than with her parents, she always comes home for holidays and surprised me on my sixtieth birthday last year. I can’t imagine she herself will ever run for elected office, but once I couldn’t have imagined that I would be the wife of our country’s president.

“Seriously,” Ella says, “the dude must be roasting out there.”

“I know, ladybug, but the situation isn’t as simple as it looks.”

“Mom, believe me, it’s not that I agree with him about withdrawing the troops.” At Princeton, Ella majored in public and international affairs, and she was a vocal supporter of the war from the beginning. “A regime change is the only way to eliminate the Islamic jihadists,” she’d say, and I would be awed by her intelligence and confidence. What would my own father have made of such an educated, opinionated young woman? Expounding on the Middle East, no less! (For that matter, what would my father have made of Charlie’s presidency? He was such an uncynical man, patriotic in the most old-fashioned sense, and I like to think he’d have respected Charlie and been proud of me by extension. But perhaps it is for the best that my father didn’t live to see this part of our lives. In light of his belief about fools’ names and fools’ faces, I can only guess at his reaction to an article

Esquire

—a magazine my father subscribed to—made waves with last month: “Ten Reasons Why Charlie Blackwell Is a Shit-Eating Bastard.” Whereas my father, when referring to the presidents of my youth, called them Mr. Truman or Mr. Eisenhower; he even called the janitor at the bank Mr. White.)

“It just makes Dad seem heartless,” Ella is saying. “I hate giving ammunition to his critics. How will it look when this old man has a heatstroke?”

“Sweetie, Edgar Franklin is younger than your father or me.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, you guys aren’t spending the day in the sun. Hey, you’re wearing sexy heels tonight, right?” In the late nineties, Ella converted me, at least for formal events, from what she calls “blocky heels” to “sexy heels.” She said, “They’re slimming,” and while, thanks to being prodded and encouraged by two personal trainers, I now weigh less than I have since I turned thirty, the camera adding twenty pounds is no myth; I accept whatever help I can get.

“Signs point to yes,” I say. This is when Hank appears outside my office; through the open door, I can see him talking to Jessica Sutton, my chief of staff. If Ella finds out I had an abortion,

when

she finds out, how will she react? On the one hand, I like to think she’s an essentially compassionate person; she is also, presumably, sexually active herself. On the other hand, like Charlie, Ella considers herself a born-again Christian, and as an adolescent, she stuck a bumper sticker to her dressing table mirror that read,

IT’S NOT A CHOICE, IT’S A CHILD

; she’d acquired the sticker from the leader of her youth group. When I noticed it, I said, “I don’t think any woman wants to have an abortion, honey, but some of them feel that it’s more responsible than giving birth to a baby they aren’t prepared to take care of.” Ella looked at me in horror and said, “That’s what

adoption

is for.” More recently, after the two times I stated my stance on abortion on the morning news shows, Ella made no mention of either, though I don’t think she was unaware of them.

Jessica knocks gently on my open door, and when our eyes meet, she says, “Hank has an update.” She takes a step toward me, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Are you okay?” I called Jessica from the car to tell her what’s going on, and asked her not to mention it to anyone else yet. Although I have an excellent staff, Jessica is the person I trust most—given that I’ve known her for her entire life, perhaps this is not surprising.

“I’d better go, sweetie,” I say into the phone. “Will you call me from the airport?” To Jessica, I say, “Send him in, but stay.”

When they reenter my office, Hank closes the door behind him, meaning the Secret Service agents are on its other side. “So far the trail doesn’t lead to your friend Dena,” he says. “Do you recall a doctor named Gladys Wycomb?”

I stare at him. Gladys Wycomb? Dr. Wycomb, my grandmother’s paramour? “But wouldn’t she have—” I try to pull together my disparate thoughts. “She must be a hundred years old.”

“A hundred and four, still living at home in Chicago, and taken care of by an aide named Norene Davis.” Hank rolls his eyes. “They weren’t exactly trying to cover their tracks—hoping for some attention is more like it. I just got off the phone with Gladys, and I swear I’m not being arrogant when I say that receiving a call from evil incarnate might have been the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to the old crone.”

“You spoke to her directly?”

Hank nods. “She’s feisty for a centenarian, I’ll give her that. She says you had the procedure under the name Alice Warren.”

“Isn’t this a violation of patient confidentiality or the Hippocratic Oath?”

“Funny you should ask.” I know from Hank’s glib tone that I’ll be unlikely to see the humor in what he’s about to say. “As a matter of fact, it’s abortion that’s a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Granted, it advocates confidentiality, too, but you know what? When you’re a hundred and four years old, you do what you damn well please.”

I think then of Gladys Wycomb’s white cat’s-eye glasses, her heavy-set build, her chauffeur and her fancy apartment and the gold fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper in the hall outside it, the hall where, over four decades ago, I vomited into the Christmas vase. Slowly, I say, “And what she wants from me is to publicly malign Ingrid Sanchez?”

“Yeah, no biggie—just that, and while you’re at it, you can remind American show enthusiastically you support a woman’s right to choose.”

“Does Dr. Wycomb know I

have

said I’m pro-choice?”

“Not for three years, and apparently, your brevity both times was unsatisfying. I get the feeling this gal knows she’s about to kick the bucket, she’s spending a little too much time watching C-SPAN, and she’s had an eleventh-hour vision that she should intervene. She’s framing it as a matter of conscience.”

“By blackmailing me.”

“Again, let me emphasize: She’s a hundred and four, and she probably figures she’ll croak before she sees any legal repercussions. She doesn’t give a”—Hank pauses—“a hoot.” (A perk of being first lady: I’ve never been crazy about swearing, and now the only ones who feel comfortable doing it in my presence are Charlie and Ella.)

“Isn’t she putting Norene Davis at risk of imprisonment, too?” I say.

“The bottom line is you had an abortion. I’m not judging you, Alice, but the American people will. If Norene Davis goes to the clink, she’ll serve a few years, and then think of the media exposure, the book deals. She gets heralded as a champion of women’s rights, and the conservative base is cleaning up the mess for years to come.”

“So instead what? I deny the charge and call Dr. Wycomb a liar?”

“You don’t have to be the one to do it.” He turns to Jessica. “Can you help me out here?”

“What are our other options?” Jessica asks. Jessica is tall and lean, wearing black pants and a yellow silk sleeveless blouse. There is a good deal I admire about my chief of staff, but perhaps most of all her combination of unflappability and warmth; I’ve often found calmness and professionalism to go with an emotional remoteness, but this is not the case with her.

Hank says, “I’m not wild about this idea, and I don’t think the president will be, either, but we can schedule an interview where, in the most oblique way, you go ahead and criticize Ingrid Sanchez. We’ll set it up like it was an unexpected tough question, and if we go this route, woman-to-woman will work best—you’re showing Diane Sawyer how beautiful the Rose Garden is this time of year, she surprises you by asking what you think of the Supreme Court nominee, and you blurt out that you wish Sanchez showed clearer signs of supporting a woman’s right to—”

Jessica is shaking her head. “And what if that’s not enough for Gladys Wycomb? That’ll be the worst of both worlds, if we’ve capitulated and she still talks.”

“I want to go see her.” I stand; the idea has come to me abruptly, but I am certain. “If I leave immediately, I’ll be back in time to do the tour for the children’s choir. I’d like to talk to Dr. Wycomb in person. She was—” I break off. “She was my grandmother’s dear friend.”

“Her loyalty to your family is touching.” Hank looks at his watch. “If there’s nothing you need to do before you leave, the plane’s ready when you are.”

“You already scheduled it?”

Hank smiles. He delights in knowing what a person will want even before the person herself. “For obvious reasons, it’s got to be a baseball cap trip, and we’ll put the word out here that you went to see your mom.”

Baseball cap

is our term for trips that are off-the-record—OTR—or at least ahead of time, and that involve as few people as possible. The phrase has its origins in the way Charlie has traveled twice to the war zones overseas: In the dark of night, he left once from the White House and once from Camp David and rode to Andrews Air Force Base in a single tinted SUV, no motorcade, sitting in the back wearing a baseball cap, accompanied by his secretary of state and just two Secret Service agents; even the tiny press pool who joined him aboard

Air Force One

wasn’t told where they were going until midflight. “Jessica, I’m thinking you’re the only one who accompanies her, plus whoever Cal thinks is necessary securitywise,” Hank says. He turns back toward me. “If anyone can sweet-talk this woman out of coming forward, I’m sure it’s you. You go out to Chicago, trade on your personal relationship, flatter her, and ooze sincerity. The disadvantage is if she can’t be sweet-talked, you may have given her credibility by paying a visit, but we can spin that into her being an Alzheimer’s-addled crackpot: She’s right that she saw you, but she invented this abortion business.”

“Hank.” I wait until he’s looking at me directly. “I don’t ooze sincerity. I

am

sincere.”

Hank’s smirk is slow and closed-lipped. “It’s your Achilles’ heel,” he says.

____

THE PART ABOUT

being famous that nobody who hasn’t been famous can understand is the criticism. Sure, sticks and stones and all of that, but the fact is that many people have probably wished at least once or twice that someone would be completely honest with them. How does this dress or this haircut really look? What do you truly think of my wife or my son, the house I built, the memo I wrote, the cake I baked?

In reality, they don’t want to know. What they want is to be complimented and for the compliments to be completely honest; they want all-encompassing affirmation that’s also true. That isn’t how unvarnished opinions work. People’s unvarnished opinions are devastating, or they are at first. As one of my predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote, “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”

There are two ways of being criticized: neutrally and intentionally. The neutral criticism comes, for example, in an ostensibly objective article, in a throwaway line:

Mrs. Blackwell, who has never been known for her fashion acumen

. . .

Asked about her husband’s low approval ratings, Alice Blackwell stiffens and becomes defensive

. . .

Though insiders claim she has a sense of humor, Alice Blackwell rarely shows it in public . . . Unlike the first couple before them, who were warm and frequent hosts . . .

You have spent an hour in the presence of a reporter, you were guarded, especially at first, but you got along perfectly well and shared a few laughs (yes, laughs, in spite of your alleged humorlessness), you thought the interview went well, and then—this? The neutral criticisms sting more because of how casual they are; although they aren’t necessarily the truth, they feel like it, like the reporter isn’t

trying

to be mean but is simply stating facts.

And then there are the outright attacks, which appear mostly on cable television or blogs; in the case of blogs, they are vehement in ways that evoke spittle and flushed faces and the pounding of keyboards:

What a traitor to feminism . . . How much Valium do you think she has to take to forget she’s married to the Antichrist? . . . OH MY GOD she’s SUCH a Stepford wife!!!

Once or twice a year, I type my name into an Internet search engine—I don’t want to be overly sheltered from what’s out there—and skimming the results makes me feel as if someone is turning a doorknob inside my stomach; each time I’ve done it, I’ve thought afterward that it was a mistake, and then enough time has passed that I’ve forgotten. To be lambasted by strangers is not only painful but so pronounced a reversal of the usual social code that it’s also quite astonishing. Unfamous people imagine that famous people are endlessly pleased with themselves and their exposure, and I suppose some are, but far from all. These online rants also feel, in a different way, deceptively like the truth, unguarded and without the filters of the main-stream media. Although my critics are in the minority, how can I listen to praise when the faultfinders are so aggressive, so aggrieved, and so certain?

In addition, there are vast quantities of distorted or flat-out wrong information, motives or emotions that are incorrectly ascribed: about Andrew Imhof’s death (

Isn’t it lucky Alice Blackwell was white and rich and didn’t have to go to prison after murdering her boyfriend?

), about my supposed Christian evangelism (a cartoon ran in many newspapers of me reading the Bible to a group of Muslim children, saying, “Now, now, boys and girls, if you just pray to Jesus Christ, everything will be all right”), about my supposed intellectual superiority in comparison to Charlie (another cartoon: Charlie and I are lying in bed at night, and I am absorbed in

War and Peace,

while he pages through

The Cat in the Hat

). One year Jadey sent me a birthday card—apparently, a popular one—which had a smiling photo of me in which I wore a navy suit and an eagle pin. (I was never very fond of that pin, but it had been given to me by the wife of Charlie’s secretary of defense, and I felt obligated to wear it a few times.) On the front of the card, it said,

Some things are worse than another birthday . . .

and inside, it said,

You could be married to HIM

. Underneath, Jadey had scrawled,

Don’t be offended, also don’t show c!

Some of the misinformation out there about us, about me, is more factual and insignificant—how old I was when Charlie and I got married, the spelling of my childhood neighbor Mrs. Falke’s last name—but no matter the tone or type of error, it is very rarely worth it to have my press secretary request a correction. I also must accept that some errors have been propagated by Charlie’s inner circle, specifically by Hank: that I am the daughter of a postal carrier was a widespread one during the first presidential campaign. (It is a great irony that my middle-class roots have proved, from a political standpoint, to be my most valuable asset. The whiffs of East Coast Ivy League dynastic privilege that cling to Charlie—I dispel them with my humble Wisconsin authenticity.)

Even as my approval ratings have remained high, a public idea of me has formed that has little relationship to who I am, what I think, or even how I spend my time. Hank once commissioned a poll that found the majority of Americans believe I’m a devout Christian who has never held a paying job. Perhaps this is

why

my approval ratings have remained high.

I don’t imagine any person could remain entirely impervious to her own public distortion, and I won’t claim it doesn’t bother me, but I made a decision in Charlie’s first gubernatorial campaign not to devote my energy to correcting misinterpretations. A press secretary had arranged for a reporter from the

Sentinel

to come for tea with me at home (how I hated having reporters in our house, knowing they were scrutinizing our family pictures, our magazines and knickknacks and refrigerator magnets, when we’d never meant for them to be scrutinized, we’d only acquired them in the course of living—it was easier after we moved to the governor’s mansion and then to the White House, because I always knew that if the reporters were interlopers, so were we). During this

Sentinel

interview, the reporter asked me about gardening, baking, and children’s books; I provided my tips for growing delphiniums, my recipe for molasses cookies, and a list of my favorite titles, starting with

The Giving Tree.

Despite the family she married into, Alice Blackwell is avowedly apolitical,

the article began.

Social security and health care? No thanks, she’d rather talk about how she gets her molasses cookies so darn chewy . . .

I was mortified; Charlie thought it was hilarious; and Hank was thrilled by the article, in large part because Charlie’s Democratic opponent, the incumbent, had recently divorced his wife of thirty-three years, married a suspiciously attractive and much younger lobbyist, and couldn’t hope to compete with our sugary domesticity. For a twenty-four-hour period after the article ran, I was tense and jumpy, continuously composing letters to the editor in my head. I had gone for a walk alone—we no longer belonged to the Maronee Country Club, Charlie had had to resign given the awkward fact of the club having no black members, and so now, if I wasn’t with Jadey, I walked along our street—and all at once, a notion lodged itself in my head, a notion I’ve come back to again and again in the years since: Although Charlie was running for office, I was not. The fact that I was represented in an article in a particular way made it neither true nor untrue; the way I lived my life, the way I conducted myself, wasn’t just the only truth but also the only reality I could control. I wouldn’t stretch or stoop to accommodate the media, I decided. I would be accountable to myself, and I would always know whether I’d met or fallen short of my own expectations. How much distress I’d avoid this way, how much calmer I would feel. Since that afternoon, I have always tried to be polite with members of the media, though I realize I haven’t always been forthcoming in the way they’d like. I attempt to express myself as simply as possible, I respond to what they ask rather than promoting my own particular interests, I don’t share personal details or vulnerabilities. When I met Charlie, I fell for him, I say, because he was fun; when Andrew Imhof died, I say, it was incredibly sad; and when I think about the troops, I say, I am concerned for them and admire their bravery and sacrifice. I don’t bend over backward to convince reporters that everything I say is heartfelt (after all, they don’t determine whether it’s heartfelt) or to proffer clever sound bites; I don’t disparage Charlie’s opponents. That I’m not particularly quotable and am often a bit dull, optimistically dull, I consider a minor victory.

When Ella was in college, she was in an eating club—not the one Charlie belonged to but a different one, Ivy—and this was the bulk of what the public knew about her: that she attended Princeton, that she belonged to an exclusive club whose members drank often and zealously. As it happened, she also was a volunteer in an on-campus Christian organization that on the weekends organized soccer and basketball tournaments for children from low-income neighborhoods in Trenton, and the White House press secretary, at that time a fellow named Travis Sykes, tried hard to persuade me to allow an article about Ella’s participation in the organization. I declined. I know that some people feel that if it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen, but I disagree. It is not a camera, or a reporter, that makes something real and genuine; more often, a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

It’s no secret that in many individuals, attention tends to create an appetite for more of the same. Because of this phenomenon, I consider myself lucky never to have felt the hunger. If you don’t want attention but must put up with it nevertheless, it’s a nuisance. But if you do want it, no amount will sate you; I’ve observed this truth over and over in both Wisconsin and Washington. I sometimes wish I could talk openly about this subject to Oprah, the one woman in the country more visible than I am, and even more a canvas onto which Americans project their dreams, wishes, and fears; really, what a burden being Oprah must be, though she handles it graciously. While I’ve appeared on her program twice, I’m sure that a tête-à-tête won’t happen because I suspect she’s a Democrat who doesn’t approve of my husband.

In any case: Dispatches and warnings from this side of the fame fence tend to go ignored, dismissed as either whining or false modesty; if they weren’t ignored, if people listened, no one would ever again seek attention. But they always do, they strive and strive, hoping one day they, too, will have the luxury of lamenting their high profile.

It will make me content at last,

they think, and only if they successfully achieve the celebrity they were pursuing will they realize they were mistaken.

Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps most people would be like Charlie—they’d enjoy fame’s perks without feeling unduly burdened by its costs and responsibilities.

GLADYS WYCOMB LIVES

in a different apartment, a different building; this one is a few blocks from the one where I stayed during the last days of 1962 and the first days of 1963, equally fancy but smaller. Upon being led into Dr. Wycomb’s living room by Norene Davis (it seems increasingly clear that Ms. Davis is more an employee than a co-conspirator), I remember some of Dr. Wycomb’s paintings from all those years ago, though now I recognize their provenance: They are by New York School artists, and I’m almost sure one is a de Kooning. By this point, I have been inside countless lavish houses and hotels, I live in a museum, for heaven’s sake, but it strikes me that Dr. Wycomb’s was the first elegant home I ever visited, and that it had something money alone couldn’t buy—it had style. No wonder my grandmother was so taken with her.

Dr. Wycomb herself sits in a parlor chair upholstered in olive-colored velvet and though it is warm in her apartment, a blanket covers her lower half. She wears unfashionably large plastic glasses (not cat’s-eye) and a silk muumuu, though she is no longer a large woman; she probably weighs half of what she did when I last saw her. Her face is extremely wrinkled, her hair short and gray, and her eyes behind their glasses are alert. A walker is positioned next to her, between her chair and a revolving walnut bookcase, and there’s a small black-and-white television of perhaps thirteen inches (I haven’t seen a black-and-white television in years), which rests on a marble-top round table a few feet in front of her. Though she reached forward to turn down the volume knob as I walked in, the TV is, as Hank predicted, turned to C-SPAN.

She didn’t stand when Norene Davis announced my arrival—I had the impression it would be a good deal of trouble for her, but she also may have been making a point—and I approach her now, bending. “Dr. Wycomb, it’s been a long time,” I say in an overly loud and cheery way. I extend my hand, and when she doesn’t extend hers, I pat her forearm. “Your apartment is lovely.”

The hint of a smile crosses her lips. In a slow and quiet but perfectly audible voice, she says, “Alice, not all of us who are old are also deaf.”

Immediately, I feel a relieved recognition. With people who knew you before you were famous, you can tell within the first few seconds who you are to them now—whether they understand that you’re still you and that they can treat you as such, or whether you have been transformed in their eyes, requiring toadying and deference. I suppose it’s not surprising, given how much all humans are primed and influenced by one another, that these two types of behavior tend to be self-fulfilling. When old friends or acquaintances act as if I’m worthy of great respect, I tend to pull back (I’m uncomfortable, but no doubt it comes across as aloofness), which seems to reinforce their sense that they dare not relax around me the way they once did; but if they are relaxed from the start, I am, too. It’s obvious that to Gladys Wycomb, I am less the first lady of the United States than the granddaughter of Emilie Lindgren.

I gesture to a gold-leaf armchair. “May I sit?”

“I’m glad we finally got through to you,” Dr. Wycomb says. “Norene attempted to reach someone in your office repeatedly, but she kept being rebuffed. That’s when I thought for her to try Mr. Ucker.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Just how many people did Norene talk to? I wonder. And what did she say?

Again, that faint smile. “Mr. Ucker was quite interested once his people realized we weren’t batty.” She pauses. “Norene and I think Mr. Ucker resembles a troll.”

Hank is the most visible member of the administration besides Charlie and the vice president, and he therefore has both a cult following and legions of detractors. Seen by the public as a Svengali, Hank is credited with Charlie’s election and reelection, as well as with many of his most conservative policies. Knowing Hank as I do makes him less intriguing and mysterious than he must seem from a distance, but I don’t disagree with the view that Charlie probably wouldn’t be president if Hank hadn’t urged him to run for governor and engineered the subsequent campaigns. (Hank was delighted when Charlie became managing partner of the Brewers because at last Charlie had an identity apart from his family, a track record he could point to when voters in Wisconsin asked what he’d done for the state. The difference between Hank and Charlie was that Hank saw the job as an ideal stepping-stone, whereas Charlie saw it as an ideal job; without Hank’s prodding and ego pumping, I think Charlie would not have minded remaining in the role indefinitely.)

“Now, where did your henchmen go?” Dr. Wycomb asks. “Would they like a beverage?”

“They’re fine,” I say. Cal, my lead agent, insisted that three of them come to Chicago and that three more local agents meet us here; on our arrival at Dr. Wycomb’s building, Walter and the third fellow from Washington, José, did a walk-through before I entered. Now José and Cal are stationed in the hall, Walter is back by the Town Car at the curb ( Jessica sits inside the car), and the three local agents are patrolling the outside of the building.

I say, “Dr. Wycomb, when my grandmother and I came and stayed with you, it was the first time I’d been to a big city, and ever since then, I’ve had a place in my heart for Chicago.” As I say it, I have the unsettling realization that I must now be the age Dr. Wycomb was during that visit.

“I never thought of living anywhere else,” she says.

I hesitate, then I say, “Obviously, we both know why I’m here. I understand your concerns, I really do, and I want to make it clear that I respect your opinion. But for you to talk about my medical procedure with members of the media would be a serious mistake. I won’t pretend that it wouldn’t be damaging to me, but I strongly suspect it would be damaging to you, too.”

“If it’s damage you’re worried about, Alice, look around you.” Dr. Wycomb’s tone is abruptly different than it was when we were making small talk. “Your husband and the vice president should be tried as war criminals.” I’m about to respond when she continues, “I suppose the president’s excuse is that he was born a fool, but I’ve wondered for the last six years what yours is. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

It’s not that I’m unaware people think this, but the sentiments are rarely expressed at such close range. Also, they don’t emerge from the mouths of people I know, or people so old.

I say, “Aren’t we both lucky to live in a country that allows the expression of this kind of criticism? Dr. Wycomb, it’s your right to disagree with any or all of the president’s choices, but please remember that his administration is a different entity from me personally.”

“How convenient.” She is looking straight ahead. “But the personal is political, or did you miss the women’s movement?” She turns her head so our eyes meet. “Many times, I’ve had the notion to write you a letter, and I’ve told myself, Gladys, it won’t make it to her. She’ll never see it. But I still thought you’d intervene. I kept waiting for evidence that you were reining him in and speaking as a voice of reason.”

“Not every conversation I have is public, Dr. Wycomb.”

“Are you telling me that you have confronted your husband?”

“I answer to my own conscience. That’s as much as I want to say.”

“And I answer to mine,” she says. “Lest you think I have misgivings about sharing your secret, my only regret is that I didn’t speak out years ago.”

We both are quiet, and I can hear another television—a soap opera, it sounds like—somewhere else in the apartment. Norene Davis, I saw when she let me in, has black hair pulled back in a low ponytail and is wearing scrubs with teddy bears.

“Who do you think will be hurt by overturning

Roe

?” Dr. Wycomb says. “Not women we know—they’ll go to their doctors like you came to me, very hush-hush but perfectly clean and professional. But the poor women, where do they go? Every doctor knows outlawing abortion doesn’t make it less common, it just makes it less safe. Before ’73, I had patients who found me after botched procedures. They’d show up with cases of sepsis and bacteremia that would give you nightmares, and these were the lucky ones—the others died before they could get help. I should stand by and say nothing as our country returns to that?” She is shaking, a mild tremble throughout her body. “What I can no longer abide with this administration is the attitude that if it doesn’t affect them personally, it doesn’t matter.

I

was never going to need an abortion, was I? Now I’m so old that come what may, I won’t be around to see it. But that doesn’t mean I say, ‘To hell with the rest of you, and so long.’ ”

“Dr. Wycomb, it’s important to remember that the American people elected President Blackwell. Even if you don’t agree with him, a lot of citizens do. It’s impossible to satisfy everyone.”

“Those elections were fixed.” Her thin lips are drawn together; she is furious with me, truly furious.

I say, “I’m sympathetic to your frustrations, but—”

“You’re a puppet. Even the words you use, it sounds like a speech-writer told you to say them.”

This isn’t the way people talk to the first lady—no one does, except for a protestor at a speech, and if that happens, he is quickly quarantined. Dr. Wycomb’s comments are insulting and irritating, they are patronizing, but there also is something pure and true in her anger, like a winter wind. It’s almost refreshing, almost a relief, to be berated face-to-face.

Although I already know the answer, I say, “I trust that you’re aware I’ve said in two separate interviews that I’m pro-choice?”

“The times you gave one-word answers?”

“I’d like for us to come to a mutually agreeable resolution,” I say. “Do you think we can?”

“Keep Judge Sanchez off the Supreme Court.”

“That isn’t an area where I have any control.”

“For crying out loud, you’re married to the president of the United States! Who does he listen to if not you?”

Could

I convince Charlie to retract Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination—or, as protocol would have it, convince Charlie to convince Ingrid Sanchez to withdraw herself as a nominee? Even if it were possible, it seems so sleazy, a way of sparing myself public humiliation rather than a real political stand. It’s not that I wouldn’t strongly prefer for abortion to remain legal, not that I don’t understand that with Judge Sanchez’s confirmation, it might not. Nor is it that I don’t see how I come across as a hypocrite here, although I would disagree with the characterization; I actually haven’t said one thing and done another. It’s that I honestly don’t believe it’s my responsibility or even my right to try to legislate. No matter how many times I say it, people are unwilling to accept the fact that

I

was not elected. Have I tried to encourage Charlie in certain directions? Of course. A program on early education, increased funding for the arts, a literacy initiative—issues that inspire little controversy, issues on which he

seeks

my input.

I say, “Dr. Wycomb, I admit that I don’t know yet if what you’re proposing is blackmail, but it certainly comes close, and Norene Davis is implicated. Please know I’m not threatening you when I say that striking a deal could only end badly for all of us. I can’t try to bar a Supreme Court nominee to protect myself—that’s not something I’m willing to do, and I don’t think I’m capable of it anyway. That puts the decision back in your hands in terms of how you want to go forward, but for you to tell a reporter about a medical procedure you performed on me seems a clear violation of patient confidentiality.”

“The word is

abortion.

” Again, she is not looking at me. “And you didn’t mind breaking the law when it suited you. For you people, it’s only a crime if someone else commits it.”

She’s really going to do it, I realize—she’s fearless. She doesn’t care what the consequences are, even, apparently, for Norene. Her life of over a century has been distilled to this: She hates Charlie, she hates everything she thinks he represents, and possibly she hates me more. And she doesn’t just hate me by proxy—no, she thinks I am worse than he is. She subscribes to the belief, widespread among Democrats and shared by some Republicans, that he’s a moron, an evil moron, and to a certain extent, that lets him off the hook. But I—I should know better.

Unexpectedly, I think,

Okay. Okay, announce that I had an abortion; let the world know, let them hear about it in Missouri and Utah and Louisiana, in Ireland and Egypt and El Salvador.

It’s not inaccurate; I did have one. I will be judged, I will be criticized, I will be dissected on talk shows, joked about on late-night TV, excoriated or defended (though mostly excoriated) in op-eds. The Sunday after the news breaks, in

The New York Times

’s “Week in Review,” three separate articles about me will make variations on the same point. Even those who are pro-choice will denounce me as a dissembler; women’s groups will use me as proof of something, or as a cautionary tale about something else. In every interview from now until the end of my life, I’ll be asked to explain why I had an abortion and why I was silent for so long afterward, asked to reconcile the inconsistencies between my private experience and my husband’s policies and legislation. Anything I say in reply will boil down to this:

I did not contradict myself; I live a life that contains contradictions. Don’t you?

Pete Imhof will know, if Dena hasn’t already told him. My mother will know, my poor mother, if, in her present state of senility, she is cognizant enough to absorb the news. The silver lining, such as it is, is that other women who have had abortions might feel—what?—less alone? Less guilty? But that’s to assume they feel alone and guilty now, which I generally doubt. Personally, I’ve never regretted having an abortion; I’ve regretted the circumstances that led to its necessity, but I maintain that it

was

a necessity, that it was, however cowardly Dr. Wycomb thinks I am to lean on the phrase, a medical procedure. Would I feel more uncomfortable if it had occurred in the twelfth week or the sixteenth instead of what was likely the fifth or sixth? Yes, I would. But the debate about when life begins seems to me misguided; I made a private, personal decision related to my own health.

When it becomes public, it’s difficult to know how adversely the news will affect Charlie. His administration has proved resilient at weathering scandals, but he is a lame duck at this point, obstructed by Democrats in the majority in both the House and Senate—the ’06 elections were when Hank’s supposed political sorcery faltered at last—and Charlie’s focus has returned after all these years to his legacy, the topic that so used to rankle me. I suppose the preoccupation is more justified now, but I still silently resist it. Viewing a legacy as a few grand acts seems reductive. Isn’t your legacy not the one or two exceptional gestures of your life but the way you conducted yourself every day, year after year? Either way, Charlie personally will forgive me, I feel confident. To lobby him to withdraw Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination would be a betrayal in his eyes; to be outed as the first lady who had an abortion would merely make me a victim. In order to placate his conservative Christian base, it’s likely he’ll want me to grant an interview in which I condemn my behavior, to say,

I am a sinner,

but when I decline, he won’t push me. This is our implicit agreement, that we can suggest or recommend but that we never force, never make ultimatums; it’s why we don’t resent each other.

And perhaps in some secluded part of my conscience, I even welcome the disclosure, just as I welcome the scolding from Gladys Wycomb. The Lutherans I was raised among believed less in a vengeful God than a disciplining one: If we had faith in Jesus, we’d find eternal salvation, but in the meantime, here on earth, we might encounter obstacles or tests intended to help us grow. Many years have passed since I’ve had faith in Jesus, but it is undeniable that the framework of our upbringing stays with us, and it’s entirely plausible to me I’m now being “disciplined” for past transgressions: not for Andrew (in that case, the mistake and the punishment were one and the same) but for the life I’ve lived in spite of that terrible early error. It all could have unraveled for me, couldn’t it? But it didn’t, and I became lucky—I was allowed the felicities of marriage and motherhood, the comforts of wealth, and ultimately, the exorbitant privileges available at the highest level of politics. Since Charlie entered public office, I have felt an amplified version of what I used to feel at the Maronee Country Club, the fear that we were like the Californians who live in beautiful houses overhanging cliffs.

In my expectation that good fortune will lead inextricably to its reversal, I should note that I don’t think I’m less deserving of happiness than anyone else; it is that in an unequal world, nobody deserves the privileges I enjoy. I’ve thought often since Charlie became governor that it isn’t a surprise so many famous people seem mentally unstable. As their celebrity grows and they’re increasingly deferred to and accommodated, they can believe one of two things: either that they’re deserving, in which case they will become unreasonable and insufferable; or that they’re not deserving, in which case they will be wracked with doubt, plagued by a sense of themselves as imposters. I suppose this is why I’ve tried mightily to lead a “regular” life—why I still make our bed, why I stay at Jadey and Arthur’s house instead of at a hotel when I’m traveling in Wisconsin without Charlie, why I read the newspaper instead of relying on briefings, why I shop myself, albeit with agents, at Hallmark, where I pick out birthday or anniversary cards (never ones featuring us) because how can you rely on an aide to know what kind of birthday card to get for your own friend or brother-in-law? If I can remain a normal person, I hope to share my normalcy with Charlie; I realize my attempts are inadequate, but they are better than nothing.

In Dr. Wycomb’s living room, I say, “It doesn’t seem as if either of us will be able to persuade the other to come around, does it?”

“All those women who’ll have to have back-alley abortions—you’ll be able to live with that?” She still is shaking.

“Dr. Wycomb, I know you feel passionately—”

“You have the power to change history, and you don’t care. Reproductive rights don’t strike your fancy? Well, how about gay marriage? I can think of at least one reason that ought to be close to your heart. How about the environment, how about civil liberties, how about this godforsaken war, or do the two of you plan to sit there with your blinders on until he’s out of office and his successor can clean up the mess?”

“You’ve made your point.” I stand; I have had enough. “I’m going to leave, Dr. Wycomb. I wish you well.” I can’t imagine touching her in goodbye, I can’t imagine she’d want it. I begin walking toward the foyer.

I’ve reached the threshold when Dr. Wycomb says, “Your grandmother would be so disappointed in you.” The part that stings most is that her voice in this moment is less angry than wonderingly sad.

I turn, and though I remind myself that Gladys Wycomb is no different from a journalist who writes an article about me, that her saying something doesn’t make it true, I can’t help responding. “I don’t agree,” I say.

“Emilie may not have been a political person, but she knew right from wrong.”

“

You

disappointed her,” I reply, and I can hear in my own voice an unattractive note of ferocity. “She told me herself that you tried to make her choose between you and us, and she chose us. That’s all I need to know—she chose us.”

“You and your parents practically held her prisoner in that dumpy little house. And the way you all tried to whitewash her sexuality, I shouldn’t be surprised by what kind of person you’ve become.”

Is this accurate? Either way, is it what my grandmother believed, what she told Dr. Wycomb, or is it what Dr. Wycomb decided on her own?

“I loved my grandmother, and my grandmother loved me.” Before continuing into the foyer and out the door of the apartment, I say, “You can’t poison that.”

ONE SATURDAY EVENING

in October 1994, by the time it was clear Charlie was likely to win the gubernatorial election in Wisconsin, our old friend Howard from Madison drove to Maronee for an overnight visit with his wife, Petal. (Howard and Petal had gotten back together, and married, over a decade after I’d met her on the Mendota Terrace as a pretty young college graduate.) This was an exhausting time for our family—on many nights, Ella slept at Arthur and Jadey’s while Charlie and I and Hank and other members of the campaign staff wound our way among the tiny towns up in the northern part of the state, Cornucopia and Moose Junction and Manitowish; if we stayed in a Holiday Inn as opposed to a no-name motel, it seemed like a luxury. (Early in the campaign, Charlie had started traveling with his own down pillow, which I folded in half each morning and set in my canvas bag.) Given our schedule, the opportunity to visit with friends was rare, and I felt that it would be restorative for all of us and especially for Charlie. I’d noticed that the more days in a row he spent campaigning, the more impatient and cranky he became—that morning at a power plant in New Richmond when a single mother of three asked him why she should believe he knew anything about working families, he’d snapped, “If you don’t think I do, then maybe you shouldn’t vote for me”—but even just a short break could do him a world of good. That Saturday afternoon, we’d flown back to Milwaukee from Eau Claire on an eight-seat prop plane. Though initially I’d had grand plans of making a real meal, all I had the energy for was spaghetti, but the evening turned out to be great fun, Howard and Petal and Charlie and Ella and I sitting in the kitchen instead of the dining room, talking and laughing.

Ella was in the middle of reading

The Odyssey

for English, and I was rereading it myself—I took it with me as we campaigned, and I’d made a copy of her syllabus so that I could read the same pages each night that she did and we could discuss them on the phone if I wasn’t there (I had always loved

The Odyssey

). It turned out that when Howard had read it in ninth grade, he’d been required to memorize the first five lines in Greek and still remembered them:

Andra moy ennepay moosa / polutropon hos mala polla . . .

Then they announced that Petal was thirteen weeks pregnant—they’d been trying for years—and we were, they said, the only ones they’d told besides their families; they didn’t know yet if it was a boy or girl, so we debated names for both. Ella suggested Ella, Charlie suggested Charles, and when I didn’t suggest Alice, Howard said, “Why so bashful, Al? Can’t you keep up with these egomaniacs?” After dinner, we went into the den to play hearts, and Ella shot the moon; the night had taken on the festive air of a slumber party. Charlie was the first to turn in—ever since he’d started jogging in the morning, he went to bed by ten if he could—and when he was asleep, Petal and Ella and I went to the attic so I could find my old maternity clothes to give Petal. Most were hopelessly outdated.

The next morning, Howard went running with Charlie, and then Howard and Petal took off for Madison around the same time we left for church. Not for the first time, there turned out to be a local news camera waiting for us after the service at Heavenly Rose—this was in October—and Charlie stopped and spoke to the reporter for a few minutes while Ella and I waited in the car. That evening, Charlie was giving a speech in Green Bay, and I was staying in Milwaukee but meeting up with him Monday in Sheboygan, where six hundred area Republicans had paid a hundred dollars each to attend a luncheon with us. It was following the lunch, over twenty-four hours after it had happened, that Charlie told me: During their Sunday-morning run, Howard had said it would be a huge favor if he could set up a meeting between Charlie and his brother, Dave, who was the CEO of a large engineering firm hoping to win a contract with the state. Between the two of them, Howard said, Dave’s firm was vastly more qualified than any of the ones currently doing business with Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation. “You think that’s why they came to see us?” Charlie asked.

“I’m sure it’s not,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. Charlie and I were sitting in the first row of the conversion van, headed to the town of Little Chute, where Charlie was to give a speech to a bunch of dairy farmers, and I told myself that no one else in the van was listening to us. At that moment, our driver, Kenny, was in the front seat; a speech-writer named Sean O’Fallon was in the back row, wearing headphones and typing on his laptop; and Hank and Debbie Bell, a strategist, were in the second row, having a noisy and impassioned debate about whether the Garth Brooks song “Friends in Low Places,” which had just come on the radio, would be a good one to play before Charlie’s rallies. With the song’s reference to places “where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away,” it seemed clear to me that using it would be a disastrous idea, which was the argument Hank was making—he said it was practically baiting the media to uncover Charlie’s 1988 DUI, then still a secret—while Debbie was insisting that it was such a beloved song and so perfectly captured Charlie’s unpretentious personality, as well as the Wisconsin way of life, that the alcohol references didn’t matter; plenty of voters liked Charlie better because of his struggles.

Sitting next to me, ignoring the Garth Brooks argument, Charlie seemed melancholy rather than irritated when he said, “I guess this is how it works now, huh? We ask everyone we know for money, and everyone we know asks us for favors.” He chuckled, though not happily. “I’m a high-class hooker.”

“If that’s how you see yourself, I don’t know why you’re running,” I said. “A governor can be a great force for good, and anyway,

high-class hooker

is an oxymoron.”

“Now, hold on just a second.” Charlie grinned, this time for real. “Who’re you calling an oxymoron?”

“Seriously,” I said, “if you get elected, and it looks like you will”—this was not simply optimism on my part; his polling numbers were in the high fifties—“you’ll have the opportunity to improve the lives of lots of people. Isn’t that why you’re running?”

All these years later, I see the question of why Charlie ran for governor, or for president, as moot—our lives have become what they’ve become—but at the time, it mattered to me, it felt like an important puzzle that could be solved if I examined it thoroughly. I suppose I believed that if I understood Charlie’s impetus, I might agree that running for election was a good idea. “Because he feels called to lead,” Hank would tell reporters. Charlie himself, refusing to be serious, would say to me, “For the same reason a dog licks his balls—because I can.” Because he wanted to prove that he was as smart and ambitious as his brothers, journalists speculated, or because he wanted to avenge his father’s own humiliating presidential run in 1968, and while neither of these possibilities reflected particularly well on Charlie, they were more flattering than my own theory, which I shared with no one: because of his fear of the dark. Because if he were governor, and then president, he’d be guarded by state troopers and later by agents, he’d never be far from people specifically assigned to watch out for him; he might be assassinated, but he wouldn’t have to walk down a shadowy hallway by himself. (Indeed it seems clear that I fear Charlie’s assassination more than he does. Before he officially entered the presidential race the first time, I felt compelled to tell him about my peculiar, guilt-ridden relief when Kennedy was shot. Wouldn’t it be a perfectly symmetrical kind of punishment for having had such thoughts, I said, if my own husband became president and was killed similarly? To which Charlie replied, without a second’s hesitation, “You know that’s bullshit, right? That’s hocus-pocus teenage-girl thinking.”)

The reality of why Charlie ran, I imagine, was a combination of factors, including ego: He did feel some sense of public service, as he defined it; he did feel some sense of “why not?”; he did want to prove himself to his family and to prove his family to the world; he did want the perks. Such motives, inglorious as they are, do not offend me; they never persuaded me that Charlie’s entry into politics was wise, but I wonder if anyone else’s motives are nobler.

For his first presidential campaign, in 2000, Charlie ran as a “tolerant traditionalist,” a bit of alliteration that was Debbie Bell’s brain-child. Ironically, Charlie’s avowals of sympathy for the marginalized and the underclasses, and his credibility with more left-leaning voters, were bolstered not only by his centrist record as a governor but also, predating his public life by over a decade, by his consistent history of donating to organizations such as food pantries, after-school centers, shelters for women and children affected by domestic violence, and AIDS clinics. These were, of course, the modest donations I had made surreptitiously; when our financial records were first vetted and this bit of duplicity emerged, Charlie and Hank were both thrilled. “God bless your sneaky liberal ways!” Charlie exclaimed.

Another irony when it came to Charlie’s tolerant traditionalism was that the tolerance did not seem to extend to sexual orientation, yet I had never doubted that Debbie Bell was a lesbian. I didn’t know whether she had romantic involvements—she never referred to any and hadn’t been married—but she had a certain comradely air with men and a more flirtatious way with women. She was tall, with short blond hair, and even when she wasn’t wearing a pantsuit, she carried herself as if she were; in everything about her, her voice and posture and opinions, there was a briskly athletic confidence that unfortunately you rarely see in heterosexual women. It was on the infrequent occasions when she’d remark on a man’s handsomeness, or lament her unmarried status, that she seemed most obviously gay to me—the comments came off as forced and unpersuasive. I discussed my view with Jadey and later with Jessica, both of whom agreed, but I never mentioned it to Charlie because I thought he’d be distracted by it, he might start acting strange around Debbie, teasing her outright or making jokes behind her back. I was surprised Charlie didn’t pick up anyway on her mysterious sexuality, but I think he was so gratified by Debbie’s unswerving devotion to him that he may not have wanted to analyze it for fear of finding something psychologically iffy. And in fact, I suspect Debbie has spent her interior reservoirs of love, the ones most people save for a partner or children, on Charlie. (Many times, I’ve longed to pull her aside and whisper,

You deserve better than a mere surrogate; you, too, are entitled to the real thing and not just scraps from my husband.

Needless to say, I have bitten my tongue and hoped she leads a private life about which we know nothing.)

Debbie had worked as a publicist for the Brewers—she was as passionate a baseball fan as Charlie, herself a former softball star at UW, and she also, with Charlie’s encouragement, had joined Heavenly Rose Church and been born again in 1990 —and when Charlie had left the Brewers, she’d gone with him. In those early days of Charlie’s political climb, I was sometimes surprised by how willingly and even ardently people followed him. Because he did not, as I had learned over time, inspire much confidence among his own parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, it was hard for me not to see him as a bit of an underdog. But particularly during and after his stint with the Brewers, others saw an idealized version, as if Charlie were the star of a movie about his own life: a handsome, funny, good-natured guy who’d graduated from prestigious schools, had a prominent and successful career (was he the son of privilege? Sure, but with baseball, he’d gone in a different direction, and within a minute of meeting him, you could tell how unaffected he was—he preferred burger joints to fancy restaurants, he’d joke around with your kid, he was impishly self-effacing). He was confident and fit and religious, with a marriage that bore no trace of scandal, and a close relationship to his only child. In this narrative, he was the kind of guy whom men wanted to be friends with and women wished their husbands were more like. While my proximity to Charlie is undoubtedly part of the reason for my own less worshipful perspective, I can say sincerely that the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people. Even in our cynical age, the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true—it’s staggering. In a way, it’s also touching; it makes me feel protective. (To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you’re not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?)

I had assumed everyone and particularly political insiders harbored the same private skepticism that I did, especially about the discrepancy between an individual’s words and actions, and that decorum made all of us conceal this skepticism; I was evidently wrong. I love Charlie as much as—or, I should hope, more than—someone like Debbie, but I love him differently, with a sharper understanding of his faults. If I believe he ran for president because it was a way of allaying his fear of the dark, then I am able, on my most generous days, to see this motive as endearing. Debbie, on the other hand, believes Charlie ran for president because God summoned him, and she sees him as heroic.

As I sat in the van next to Charlie, heading toward Little Chute, what came on the radio after “Friends in Low Places” was “Achy Breaky Heart,” a song that had become a joke during that campaign because no one would admit to liking it, yet we all knew all the words, and we ended up hearing it on the radio everywhere we went, particularly in the staticky backwaters. Hank called to Kenny in the front seat to turn up the volume, and Hank and Debbie sang jubilantly, their Garth Brooks argument suspended. Next to me, quietly and seriously, Charlie said, “You think I’m up to the task of being governor, don’t you?”

“I think you’ll be wonderful.” I wasn’t lying. When Charlie had decided to run over a year earlier, he’d known little about our state that hadn’t been filtered through family lore or his own experience as a congressional candidate in ’78, but he had diligently immersed himself in the history and politics of Wisconsin. Hank had arranged for experts in economics and education and health care to come in and brief him, usually confidentially, and Charlie had worked on memorizing facts and statistics until he could recite them fluently.

Hank tapped my shoulder. “Why aren’t you two singing? ‘You can tell your ma I moved to Arkansas / You can tell your dog to bite my leg . . .’ ”

I flashed him a smile. “Looks like you’ve got this verse covered, Hank.” When he had leaned back again, I said softly to Charlie, “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of challenges, but if you stay focused on what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll be great.”

“You know what I realized today?” Charlie said. “Shaking hands with people at lunch, I thought, I’ll never make another friend. Assuming I’m elected, I mean—from here on out, it’ll only be people wanting favors and access.”

I couldn’t disagree. “You’re lucky, though, that you already have so many friends,” I said. “We’re both lucky.”

“But that’s the thing.” He was very reflective in this moment, especially in contrast to Hank and Debbie hamming it up behind us. “After Howard asked me about the engineering contracts, I’m not faulting him, but I better always be ready for that from now on. I shouldn’t let down my guard and assume any get-together is just fun and games when even people we know—heck, Arthur or John or Ed—a lot of them will have an agenda. When I think of it this way, I nagged Ed about the baseball stadium.”

“You should talk to him about this, or your dad. I bet they’d have good insights.” Ed was still a congressman, and though there had been discussion of his running for Senate in the ’92 election, he hadn’t, and I wasn’t sure why.

“You know the one person who’ll never use me?” Charlie pointed at me.

“Sweetheart, I’m sure I’m not the only one. It might be a transition for some of our friends, but I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

“People get funny, though. I’d forgotten about this until earlier today, but when my dad was governor, there was an old friend of the family who ran afoul of the law, I think for embezzling, and he wanted Dad to intervene. When Dad refused, this guy’s kids—fellows I knew well from the country club—they quit speaking to me. The man didn’t end up going to prison, either, so I don’t know what the family had to be so sour about.”

From the seat behind us, Hank leaned forward again—the song was nearing the end, with the chorus repeating several times—and called, “Last chance. Chuckles, you’re lucky you chose politics, because you’d never have made it in a traveling minstrel show.” (Chuckles was Hank’s nickname for Charlie, payback for Shit Storm. Of course, while Charlie is now Mr. President, the Shit Storm moniker has endured.)

Agreeably, Charlie joined in: “ ‘Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart . . . ’ ”

I took his hand, lacing my fingers through his, and I leaned in so my mouth was by his ear. “I love you very much,” I whispered.

IN THE TOWN

car, Jessica is on the phone with Hank. “She’d prefer not to,” Jessica keeps saying in a level tone—she has impeccable manners—and I can hear fragments of Hank’s voice, wheedling but insistent; he wants to talk to me directly. “No, she wasn’t,” Jessica says. “She doesn’t think Gladys Wycomb is concerned about that. No. No. All right. I’ll call you from the plane.” She presses the red “end” button on her cell phone, folds it shut, and immediately reaches for her Black-Berry and starts typing with her thumbs.

We are two miles from Midway Airport, Jessica and Cal and I in this car, which is driven by a local agent. I say, “I’d like to make a stop in Wisconsin before we return to Washington.”

Jessica raises her eyebrows. “Your mother?”

My mother outlasted her second husband, too (Lars, who was perhaps the only person in either Charlie’s or my family to take unequivocal delight in Charlie’s political rise, died of acute renal failure in 1996), and my mother now resides in an assisted-living facility in an area outside Riley that was a pasture when I was growing up. She has Alzheimer’s, but the blessing is that she remains both good-natured and seemingly happy; given how many of the people who have neurodegenerative diseases are depressed or violent, I am grateful. However, even as we’re using my mother as the pretext for my traveling today, she isn’t the one I wish to see.

This morning, when I assumed that it was Dena Janaszewski who had contacted Hank’s office, it made a sort of sense—there was unfinished business between Dena and me, and this would be a reckoning. Learning, then, that the blackmail threat had nothing to do with her was almost a disappointment. I’ve often recalled that afternoon in Riley when she gave Ella the tiara—the more time has passed, the surer I have become that it was Dena and not her mother who did it, and that the gesture was a peace offering as opposed to a taunt—and I’ve regretted that I didn’t reciprocate in some way. But that happened during such a topsy-turvy episode in my life, when every relationship other than the one I had with Charlie felt peripheral. All these years later, I am afraid I missed an opportunity, and I’m increasingly aware that if I don’t initiate it, I might not have another. Like most people, I’ve always been able to reassure myself, on entering a new decade, that I’m still not old, that my previous sense of this age, thirty or forty or fifty, was skewed by my own youth. I even managed this feat of self-persuasion after turning sixty—sixty-year-olds bungee jump and swim the English Channel!—but at this point, I’ve reached the age when, if something happened to me, it would be sad but not tragic. I would be slightly young, but only slightly. In the same vein, if I were to hear someday that Dena had died—it’s hard to know how the news would make its way to me, with my mother in her condition and both Dena’s parents deceased, but surely I’d find out eventually—I could not be shocked. Other peers have passed on, Rose Trommler from Madison died of breast cancer in 2003, and last year my high school classmate Betty Bridges Scannell’s husband had a brain aneurysm while they were on a cruise in the Caribbean. The sadness of these deaths clung to me for several days after I received word of them, but it would be remorse, a deep remorse, rather than mere sorrow I’d feel about Dena. For the first three decades of my life—for half of it—I didn’t have a closer friend. Sure, she had her shortcomings, but who doesn’t? She was lively and funny, she was much more daring than I was, and we knew each other so well; friendships have survived on far less.

It is strange to realize that at this point, my closest friend is probably Jessica. Jadey and I still speak once a week, and she visits us in Washington, sometimes with Arthur and sometimes without him, several times a year. Having her in the White House is always a tremendous breath of fresh air—she’ll say to Charlie, “I’m only calling you Mr. President if you call me Dame Jadey,” and she complains that visiting us makes her constipated because she can’t comfortably go to the bathroom in such a historic setting—but there is an unspoken wedge between us that has grown over time. Although she’s a Republican, she took it hard when Charlie supported the amendment to ban gay marriage; she remains tight with her interior-decorator friend Billy Torks, whom I always got a kick out of but haven’t seen for years. While that was a passing tension, I think this is the ongoing problem for Jadey and me: Once our lives were alike, and now they’re not. She still attends Garden Club meetings, she’s joined the board of the Milwaukee Art Museum, she fund-raises for Biddle even though both Drew and Winnie graduated years ago, and all these activities are parts of her life I envy, I feel a great pull of sentimentality when she mentions them, but she has made it clear that she thinks I must find it boring and provincial when she tells stories about Maronee. Despite my repeated efforts to convince her otherwise, she refuses to believe I’d far prefer discussing her life to mine. She says, “No, no, tell me what the king and queen of Spain were like.”

It feels unseemly to complain to my extended family or to friends from Wisconsin, so I don’t. Early on in Charlie’s political career, I once mentioned to another of my sisters-in-law, Ginger, that I was worried about the floral arrangements for a ball we were hosting in Madison, and she said, “I think it takes real nerve for you to complain about anything like that when Ed deserved to be governor a lot more than Chas.” I found this to be a breathtaking comment not least because of Ginger’s usual meekness, but perhaps even more surprising than the shift in Ginger was the one in Priscilla, who was the last person I’d have expected to be swayed by our fame: Shortly after Charlie was elected governor, she confided in me that I had always been her favorite daughter-in-law; she’d long believed we shared a similar sensibility. When Charlie was elected president, she began telling not just me but our relatives and also the media that I was her favorite

person.

As for the other women I knew in Maronee or Madison, my friends from Garden Club or the mothers of Ella’s classmates, so colorful and distracting is the pageantry of my life now that I think they have trouble remembering I am still myself, that my concerns are often mundane—my favorite shampoo has been discontinued, my husband snores, I struggle to find time to exercise—and that when my concerns aren’t mundane, when I’m worried about war or terrorism, the grandiosity of my anxiety doesn’t vault it into another category of emotion unimaginable to them; they’d be able to imagine it just fine if they could stop being impressed.

These all are reasons I so value Jessica, though I recognize that because I am her employer, ours is not a pure friendship. But the fact that we aren’t peers makes things easier, I think; unlike Jadey, she is not comparing herself to me or her husband to mine. (In 2002, Jessica married a lovely man named Keith who works for the World Bank; Charlie and I attended the wedding at the Washington Club on Dupont Circle, and at the reception, Charlie danced with Miss Ruby, now retired and in her eighties but still energetically grumpy, and I danced with Jessica’s younger brother, Antoine, then a six-foot-tall freshman at Biddle Academy.) Jessica and I have formed a two-woman book club; we switch off picking titles, and though there are no official rules other than that the books must be fiction, we tend to read translations of ones by authors from countries we’ve either just visited or are about to visit. In general, it’s not that I can explain to Jessica my first-lady angst—it’s that I don’t have to. She is part of everything that happens, she knows exactly how scripted and confined and luxurious my life is, how the strangest parts are what the public

doesn’t

see: that when Ella and I traveled to Peru, the hotel pool was drained as a safety precaution and filled with bottled water so we could swim in it; that I am called on by the White House’s chief usher to start preparing for Christmas—the parties and cards and decorations—every April.

“I’ll visit my mother on the next trip,” I say to Jessica. “It’s Dena Janaszewski I’d like to see, if we could arrange it.”

If Jessica is caught off guard, she doesn’t show it, a mark of her professionalism being that she expresses surprise only over minor matters and never over significant ones. I had an abortion? She simply nods. But I’m wearing magenta high heels? “Whoa!” she’ll exclaim. “Hey there, Mrs. Fashionista!”

She looks at her watch and says in an even tone, “It’s now one-twenty Central time, meaning two-twenty in D.C. Assuming it takes us an hour and forty minutes to fly back and then twenty minutes to get to the residence, that puts us at four-twenty without the stop in Riley, and the choir tour is scheduled for five-fifteen. Would you like me to delay the tour, cancel it, or find a substitute?”

The punctuality Charlie’s administration is known for is not something his own family was stringent about when he was growing up, but it’s another of the ways he sought to impose discipline on himself after he quit drinking. Following his example, I, too, strive to be on time; to do otherwise seems a form of arrogance. Furthermore, while it rarely bothers me to decline requests or invitations, it weighs on me when I make a commitment and am unable to honor it, and it weighs most heavily when that commitment involves children. And yet I want to see Dena today; I want to see her, and I want to see Pete, too, if they’re still together.

When the abortion story comes out, Dena and perhaps Pete will be the only people who can confirm its veracity. But I don’t hope to silence them. Rather, I see a visit as an opportunity to clear the air after far too long. In theory, I could go to Riley another day, I drop in every six weeks to check on my mother, but if I wait, won’t the moment have passed? Won’t I lose my nerve if I don’t do it now?

“Let’s find a substitute for the tour,” I say, and then, inspired, “Ella! Children love Ella!”

“Will she be offended if I get a docent to accompany her?”

“She’ll be relieved. Oh, if she’ll agree to it, this could be perfect.” It occurs to me that this could be the last favor I ask Ella for a long while. Once she learns of my abortion, I expect she might distance herself from me. As Jessica types on her BlackBerry, I say, “I think Hank’s office at least started tracking Dena down this morning, but her surname could also be Cimino and maybe Imhof, although I don’t know if they stayed together. If she’s gotten married to someone else, then I have no idea. But her date of birth is 6/16/46.” This, I suppose, is a sign of childhood friends, that you never forget their birthdays, whereas for the friends you make in adulthood, you never quite remember; I like to send birthday cards, but if I didn’t mark my personal calendar, I’d miss them.

Jessica says, “Are you envisioning that Dena comes to the plane, you go to her house, or you meet at a public place?” The airfield we land on in Riley is tiny, used only by private planes and the fleet for White River Dairy.

“I’ll go to her house,” I say. I experience a vestigial impulse to add that I don’t want to inconvenience Dena, that we should find out first if she’s free today, but inconveniencing people is beside the point. From one perspective, I have for the last six years been nothing but an inconvenience, causing traffic to be stopped and streets closed, buildings locked, manhole covers sealed; from another perspective, many Americans and many people in the world, even now, wouldn’t mind having their day turned upside down for the “privilege” of meeting me.

Jessica says, “While the office finds Dena, would you like to ask Ella or shall I?”

“I’ll do it.”

Jessica reaches into her pocketbook for a second cell phone, opens it, and dials. “It’s Jessica. Hold for your mother?” Jessica is silent, then says, “In how long?” Again, a pause. “Perfect. We’ll look forward to it.” When she hangs up, she says, “Ella will call back in five minutes.” Oh, thank heavens for Ella Blackwell, the only person who habitually rebuffs the president and first lady of the United States. I mean it not facetiously but sincerely when I say, what would we do without her to keep us humble?

Using her first cell phone, the one she was on earlier, Jessica presses a single button and, after a few seconds, says, “Belinda, I’ve sent messages to you and Ashley, but I need a home address and phone number for an individual in Riley. This is high priority.” Jessica relays the information about Dena that I’ve provided then suggests Belinda try Lori in Hank’s office, and when she hangs up again, she says to me, “So that I know when to schedule wheels up from Riley, how long do you anticipate meeting with Dena?”

“Half an hour? But let’s not leave Chicago until we confirm that she’s available. For all I know, she doesn’t live in Riley anymore—I can imagine her having moved to someplace like New Mexico.”

“If it’s impossible to arrange the visit in time to be back for the gala, I’m certain we can find her phone number and you can still talk to her tonight. But we’ll see if we can’t set up an in-person meeting. You want to listen to the radio while I hop back on the phone?” Jessica’s tone and expression are sympathetic; I haven’t told her the details of my conversation with Gladys Wycomb, only the end result, but I think she can tell I feel fragile.

“Sure,” I say. As it happens, we left on such short notice that I didn’t bring a book.

Jessica says, “Cal, will you turn on NPR?”

I recognize the show that becomes audible as

Day to Day

before I recognize the subject of the current interview: It is Edgar Franklin, the man camped out on Capitol Hill, the father of the dead soldier. Jessica realizes who it is at the same time I do, even though she’s already talking to someone else on the phone. To that person, she says, “Hang on,” holds her palm over the mouth area of her cell, and says to me, “Want him to change it?”

I shake my head.

On the radio, the interviewer, who is male, says, “It seems you plan to stay here indefinitely—is that correct?”

“I plan to stay here until the president will see me,” Edgar Franklin says.

“And if that doesn’t happen?”

“I plan to stay here until the president will see me,” Edgar Franklin repeats. His voice is firm but not belligerent—he speaks more quietly than the reporter, and he has a mild southern accent.

“Do you really believe you can convince President Blackwell to start bringing home the troops, or would you view a conversation as a symbolic act?”

“Too many young men and women have lost their lives, and I don’t believe the president has ever been able to justify our presence there,” Edgar Franklin says. “My impression is he hears selective intelligence, and it makes it hard for him to understand the personal toll this is taking.”

“Although you yourself haven’t had the opportunity to meet with the president, the White House has made a point in the last several days of mentioning his frequent visits with family members of the fallen, including two weeks ago in southern California. What do you hope to tell him that he wouldn’t have heard from others whose situations are painfully similar to yours?”

“After your son dies this way, you look for a reason his death meant something. You hope he made a sacrifice he believed in, and that’s why it’s tempting to accept”—Edgar Franklin hesitates—“the rhetoric of war, is I guess how to put it. If I thought Nate’s death was a waste, wouldn’t that be disloyal to my son and my country? It would mean I wasn’t patriotic, is what I thought at first, but I’ve come to see it that bringing our troops home would be the patriotic thing. A lot of families just now going through what I experienced two years ago, just starting to grieve, maybe they’re not thinking about the political side yet.”

“What do you make of the outpouring of support you’ve received since your arrival in Washington last Wednesday?”

“The tide has turned. Americans know it’s time for an honest conversation.”

“Colonel Edgar Franklin, thank you for speaking with me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re listening to member-supported WBEZ,” a female voice says as our police-escorted Town Car is waved through the gates leading to the private section of the airport. We cross the tarmac, and in the overcast heat of the Midwest, a glare bounces off the Gulfstream parked two hundred feet away; the steps are already pulled down, awaiting us.

CHARLIE USED TO

have a line he’d tease me with before dinners on the rubber-chicken circuit; he’d say, “Don’t forget that

fund-raiser

starts with

fun.

” He said this because he knew I loathed them—the repetition, the forced greetings and stilted conversations, the endless photo ops, and above all, the uncomfortably transactional feeling that people were literally buying us. I’ve always found the thousand-dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand-dollar ones—if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it’s clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it’s apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn’t well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us.

We’re not worth it!

I want to say.

You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild’s college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks.

Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.

But there was one fund-raiser that, to my own surprise, I did find fun. This was a million-dollar dinner held at a former plantation in Mobile, Alabama, in July 2000. Charlie and I always ate at separate tables, and that night I was assigned to be with the wife of the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, two well-dressed middle-aged couples who looked like variations of the people we knew in Maronee, and a father-and-son duo. Before an event, an aide provides a paragraph or two describing each of the bigwigs who will be in attendance, and that evening, the original plan had been that I’d be sitting between a man named Beau Phillips, who owned a regional chain of fast-food restaurants, and a man named Leon Tasket, who was the CFO of the largest producer of industrial machinery in Alabama. As it turned out, Leon Tasket’s wife had come down with the flu, and in her stead—it’s hard to imagine this last-minute switch happening now or at any point after Charlie became president—Mr. Tasket had brought his adult son Dale, a tall, heavy, mentally disabled fellow. Though I suspect Dale had the intellectual aptitude of a nine-or ten-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed this if I’d been observing him from any distance—his features weren’t irregular, except perhaps that he looked friendlier than most other guests. When it was time to sit for dinner, the men at the table remained standing while I and the other wives found our places, and Dale, to whom I had been briefly introduced a minute before, plopped next to me in the seat that had a place card for his father; Mrs. Tasket’s place card was one more over. “Oh, no, you don’t,” Leon Tasket said immediately. Mr. Tasket was shorter and wirier than his son, with a well-trimmed white beard and mustache and a three-piece suit. “Boy, if Miss Alice Blackwell saw the way you ate, she’d be scared half to death.”

I smiled, shaking my head. “It’s fine with me if he stays there—if it’s all right with you, that is.”

“That’s an awful brave lady who doesn’t mind sitting in the vicinity of a black bear, isn’t it, Dale? You think we should call her bluff?”

On the stage just above our heads, a man in a flag tie was tapping the microphone, saying, “If you’ll all take your seats . . . ” At another table, Charlie sat between the governor and the state’s Republican Party chair.

“Really,” I said. “It’s fine.”

As waiters brought our salads, Beau Phillips, the fast-food honcho on my right, said, “Your husband is on a sure path to victory,” and simultaneously, on my left, Dale said, “My favorite actress is Drew Barrymore, do you know who Drew Barrymore is?” Both men had endearingly thick southern accents, though only one of them—Dale—was talking with his mouth full; he had torn into his salad with gusto. To Mr. Phillips, I said, “Thank you,” and then I turned toward Dale. “I do know who she is.”

“The liberal elite has lost touch with real American values,” Mr. Phillips said. ”We need someone to stand up to those activist judges pushing for the homosexual agenda. That lifestyle might cut it in the Northeast, but I’ll tell you what, it sure doesn’t fly down here.”

Mildly, I said, “I know Charlie likes to focus on what we as Americans have in common.”

“Did you see her in

The Wedding Singer

?” Dale was asking.

I turned back. “I didn’t, but I’ve heard of it.”

“She’s the most pretty and talented actress there is,” Dale said, and his father, who’d been talking to the chairman’s wife on his other side, chuckled and said, “If I were a bettin’ man, I’d say we must be discussin’ Drew Barrymore.”

“I saw her when she was a little girl in

E.T.,

” I said. “Oh, and you know what, Dale—my daughter and I recently watched a movie she was in called

Never Been Kissed.

Have you seen that?”

It was Mr. Tasket who said, “Have we seen

Never Been Kissed

? Only three times a week do we see

Never Been Kissed

at our house. I’ve watched that little movie more times than I’ve watched the evenin’ news.”

“Mr. Coulson thinks Josie’s a student, but when he finds out she works for the newspaper, they can fall in love,” Dale said.

“I remember that part,” I said.

“Drew’s birthday is February twenty-second, 1975,” Dale said. “That means she’s twenty-five and seven months and three days, and she’s a Pisces, and I’m a Gemini, but I’m older than her because I’m forty.”

Dale’s father had faded again from the conversation, but on my right, Mr. Phillips said, “This election will be a real comeuppance for the Democrats. You mark my words, we’ll have payback after eight years of them running roughshod.”

“Charlie and I are as curious about what will happen as you are,” I said. To Dale, I said, “If you’re a Gemini, that must mean you were born in May or June.”

“I was born on June third, 1960. What are your hobbies?” Dale had a dab of salad dressing on the outer corner of his lips. “Mine are Nintendo, stamps, and the zoo.”

I couldn’t resist. I said, “It sounds like Drew Barrymore is a hobby of yours, too.”

Dale smiled slyly and said, “A girl can’t be a hobby!” Then he said, “When you come to our house, I’ll show you my Classic American Aircraft stamps. I have all of them, but the best is the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing.”

“Mrs. Blackwell, are you and your husband in the area for long?” This came from a wife across the table, but Dale preempted my response by saying, “And the Thunderbolt is real cool, too.”

I said to the woman (I already couldn’t remember her name), “Unfortunately, we fly out tonight, and I’m sorry, because it would be fun to explore. I was just reading about the Bellingrath Gardens.”

“When you’re next here, you ought to go over to the Eastern Shore. We all have places there”—she gestured to the other couples at the table—“and it’s a wonderful place to relax, very quiet. Campaigning must be tiring.”

They were polite, all of them, and they also were clearly irritated that Dale was monopolizing my attention, and that his father and I were allowing it. And I was fully complicit—what could have been more delightful than to sit beside someone brimming with his own interests and enthusiasms, none of which was political, a person who neither knew nor cared who I was beyond the fact that I’d heard of Drew Barrymore and was willing to talk about her? No one else at the table could compete with Dale’s volubility, his lusty and fearless ingestion of the food on his plate, his ingenuous questions and announcements; I was enchanted. The others at the table soon gave up on me, and several times after I’d been left to conspire with Dale, I noticed his father glancing with amusement at us, and I wondered if he hadn’t brought his son as a sort of joke, an antidote to the stuffiness rampant at these fund-raisers. There was something fearless about Mr. Tasket, too; despite his earlier demurrals when Dale had sat by me, he seemed unapologetic about having brought his mentally disabled adult son to a fancy dinner.

When our entrées came, I wasn’t particularly hungry and ended up offering my sirloin to Dale, which he accepted with great pleasure. He said, “Are you sure?” He ate my dessert, too, a strawberry shortcake.

It was about ten minutes into Charlie’s speech when Dale patted my arm and said, “Miss Alice, do you like tic-tac-toe?” He was speaking in a normal volume, not whispering, and at our table and the tables near ours, people looked at him. Leon Tasket, appearing not particularly perturbed, leaned in from Dale’s other side and murmured something to his son. Dale’s expression became big-eyed and chastened, and he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his substantial belly.

I reached into my purse and found a paper napkin and a blue ball-point pen. I drew a crosshatch, placed an X in the upper-right square, and nudged the napkin toward Dale. His face lit up, and when it seemed he might speak again, I brought my finger to my lips. Onstage, Charlie was saying, “As I travel around this great land of ours, I hear a consistent refrain:

Bring integrity back to the White House.

” As always, on each word, he pounded the podium once, and as always, loud applause followed. Dale drew an O in the center square. “

Bring integrity back to the White House,

” Charlie repeated. “Now, everyone here knows what that means, but I’d like to illustrate the principle by telling y’all a story.” I drew an X in the lower-right square, and Dale blocked me by placing an O between my two X’s. “Not long ago, I visited a school in Ocala, Florida. A fifth-grade boy, a little guy named Timmy Murphy, raised his hand and said to me, ‘Governor Blackwell, isn’t the president of the United States supposed to be a hero? But my parents say the man currently occupying the Oval Office isn’t heroic at all.’ ” Again, sustained applause. I drew an X in the middle of the right column, and Dale made a frustrated exhalation; this time, I’d blocked him. I especially detested this part of Charlie’s stump speech both because of how self-aggrandizing it was and because it was so improbable that a fifth-grader would use the words

currently

or

occupying.

“Well, Timmy,” Charlie said, and Dale drew an O in the top box of the center column, “I’m not Superman, and I’m not Spider-Man, but if your mom and dad vote for me, I promise you that courage and morality will reign again in Washington, D.C.” Here, the applause was thunderous. Our game had ended in a stalemate, and Dale quickly drew another crosshatch. The next game also ended in a stalemate, as did the three after that—by this point, Charlie was deep into talking about being a tolerant traditionalist—and then Dale beat me, four more stalemates occurred, and I beat him; the paper napkin was by then more blue than white, and our crosshatches had shrunk with each round to fit in the limited space. Charlie was finished speaking, and the local party chair was emphasizing the importance of supporting all Republicans in this year’s tight races. A standing ovation concluded the speeches, and as it tapered off, Dale said, “You should give me your address, and I’ll write you letters.”

“Miss Alice is a busy lady,” Leon Tasket protested, and I said, “I’d love it if you wrote to me.”

I printed my first and last name and the address for the governor’s mansion in Madison on the back of one of Mr. Tasket’s business cards. Just before I was pulled away for photos, Dale hugged me. He said, “After you and your daughter rent

The Wedding Singer,

then you need to rent

Poison Ivy.

Drew is only seventeen in that, but it’s a real good one. You have pretty blue eyes, Miss Alice.”

“Why, thank you,” I said.

I did indeed receive a letter from Dale after two weeks, written on lined paper from a spiral notebook, the fringy edge still attached. Despite being punctuation-free and erratically capitalized, it was perfectly comprehensible:

Only three Months until Charlie’s Angels Movie comes out are you Excited cause I am you should Come Back to Alabama you could go Alligator Hunting with Me and Dad . . .

I wrote a reply by hand the next day, on the stationery that had my name embossed at the top; I mentioned that I had been traveling with my husband, that we had most recently visited Ohio and Pennsylvania, that I was reading a biography of former first lady Abigail Adams, and that although I hadn’t had an opportunity to rent

The Wedding Singer,

I was looking forward to seeing it. After returning from Mobile, I’d told my staff in Madison to watch for any correspondence from Dale and to make sure I personally saw it rather than it being answered with the standard letter and a black-and-white photo of Snowflake and me. Because I’d made a point of explaining to my aides who Dale was, when no follow-up letter from him arrived, I had to conclude that it was less likely it had been lost than that he’d never written it. I was disappointed, and I have since wondered several times how he’s doing; whenever I see that Drew Barrymore has a new movie out, I think of him.

That evening in Mobile, in the van headed to the airport, Hank, who’d been sitting at the table adjacent to ours, said, “The retard took a real shine to you, huh, Alice?”

“What retard?” Charlie asked.

A few weeks later, Leon Tasket made a donation of eight hundred thousand dollars to the RNC, but rather than feeling triumphant about this development, I was a little sad—it was as if my delight in Mr. Tasket’s son had, like so much else in politics, merely been for show. That I had played tic-tac-toe with a fellow audience member during my husband’s stump speech was written up in

Time

magazine and has been repeated in many articles since, a little nugget about me that, in the absence of more substantive disclosures, is assumed to reveal something meaningful about my personality.

“SO EXPLAIN TO me why it is you’re going to see your wacko former friend who you haven’t laid eyes on in thirty years when it turns out she had nothing to do with this shit,” Charlie says over the phone. In the Gulfstream, we are flying above the Illinois-Wisconsin border, and Charlie is en route to a remote park along the Potomac for an afternoon bike ride; in other words, three vehicles containing him, his mountain bike, assorted agents and their bikes, and even a physician are making their way south.

I say, “It turns out Dena’s still dating Pete Imhof, so this is really about seeing both of them. I guess I just feel the need.” Belinda in my office confirmed to Jessica that Dena and Pete do live together, though Belinda said Dena was uncertain whether Pete would be present when I arrived.

“I thought you and Ella were planning on a girls’ afternoon,” Charlie says.

“Well, I’m excited to see her tonight, and I hope she’s not offended by my change of plans. I’ll be back an hour before the gala. Did you ask Ella if she wanted to bike with you?”

“She said it’s too hot.”

I hesitate, and then I say, “I’m worried about how she’ll react to this abortion story. Hank has gotten Dr. Wycomb to promise not to come forward before tomorrow—I think he must be pretending there’s still a chance I’ll speak out against Ingrid Sanchez—so I’m planning to tell Ella tonight in person. After I do, will you make sure you’re around? I have a feeling she’ll need someone to talk to, but she’ll be angry with me.”

“Is that why you’re avoiding coming home?”

“Honey, I’m not avoiding anything. Seeing Dena is a chance to tie up loose ends.”

“Well, Ella’s a tough cookie,” Charlie says. “She’ll be fine.”

“But from a religious standpoint—”

“You think any Christian worth their salt can’t get their head around the idea of sinning? So you messed up forty years ago—that doesn’t mean you never walked with God again.”

I knew he’d say this, even though surely he’s aware I don’t consider abortion a sin (unfortunate, yes, but immoral, no), just as he’s aware that I do not share his Christian convictions. Our unspoken deal regarding religion is similar to our deal about politics: I don’t object when he talks about God, and he doesn’t insist that I proclaim myself a believer. I have spoken of my agnosticism to as few people as I’ve spoken of my abortion, so I understand the widespread assumption, among both friends and strangers, of my faith.

As for the Christian right, the traditional-values advocates—whatever name you call them by, they are the ones who believe Charlie is a Messianic figure. So untenable a hypothesis is this to me that I can only squelch in my mind any consideration of it. That Charlie, encouraged by his advisers, Hank foremost among them, has promoted this preposterous notion is an act of either such cynicism or such bottomless hubris that it would be impossible to say which is worse. My suspicion is that for Charlie, the vision of himself as messiah-like is sincere (how else to explain his rise from floundering alcoholic to president?), and for Hank, it is insincere, though I do not doubt the sincerity of Hank’s belief in Charlie. I might say that I don’t understand that belief, since Hank is clearly the more intellectual and ambitious of the two men, except that I do understand: Hank recognized early on that Charlie could be his charismatic proxy. And didn’t I, too, hitch my life to Charlie’s, allowing myself to be guided and defined by him? So why wouldn’t I understand the impulse in someone else?

Charlie sounds upbeat when he says, “Once the mudslinging starts, remember that I’m never running for anything again, so you don’t need to feel guilty on my account.”

I look out the window; the captain’s chair I am seated in faces sideways, perpendicular to the walled-off cockpit, so I can see the blue sky outside. This jet, which I prefer to the Boeing 757s I must use when accompanied by larger groups, seats sixteen, and the fabric covering all the chairs is white leather, the carpet cream; the decor has always reminded me a bit of a tacky person’s idea of heaven. I say, “Sweetheart, I appreciate your support, but before we start calling my abortion a sin—doesn’t that imply you wish I hadn’t had it? And we’d never have married, would we, if I were the mother of a thirteen-year-old when we met?” He’s quiet, and I say, “It’s not uncomplicated. That’s all I’m trying to point out. And I hope this is a story that blows over, but my fear is that Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination will keep it in the news.”

“You’re not suggesting I give her the boot?”

“No, but I wouldn’t underestimate how much the press will relish the irony.”

“What really chaps my ass,” Charlie says, “is the idea of this bitter witch doctor deciding she’s going to expose you, and everyone rolls over and plays dead. Could there be a clearer case of blackmail?”

“She’s a hundred and four, Charlie.”

“Yeah, so everyone keeps saying. Kept alive by good old-fashioned liberal rage, huh?” He chuckles. “Hey, if that’s all it takes, you might outlast me yet.”

We both are silent; outside the cabin of the plane, the engines hum. Jessica sits a few feet away in her own white leather seat, eating a sandwich prepared for her by one of the two flight attendants; Cal and José are chatting in the plane’s rear while Walter reads a thriller. I try to keep my voice low as I say, “I don’t agree with Dr. Wycomb’s methods, but you do remember that I’m pro-choice, don’t you?”

“See, that’s what makes America great—room for all kinds of opposing viewpoints.” I can tell Charlie’s grinning, then I hear an unmistakable noise, a bubbly blurt of sound, and I know he’s just broken wind. Though I’ve told him it’s inconsiderate, I think he does it as much as possible in front of his agents. He’ll say, “They think it’s hilarious when the leader of the free world toots his own horn!”

“I heard that,” I say.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Before ending the call, he adds, “Give my regards to the divorcée.”

IF A REPORTER or stranger asks what in my life I never imagined I’d find myself doing, I say, “Giving speeches!” Invariably, it’s an answer that elicits laughter. If friends ask, I say, “Having a cat.” That was Hank’s doing—a poll he commissioned in the early nineties revealed that the voters of Wisconsin would have a more favorable idea of our family if we owned a pet, ideally a dog. I protested because of Ella’s allergies, and this is how we came to own Snowflake, our allegedly hypoallergenic Russian Blue.

That our cat is standoffish is, as far as I’m concerned, all the better; I have shed no tears over her apparent aversion to sitting on our laps or even anywhere near us. Charlie sometimes lifts her up and smashes his face against her ribs, rubbing his nose in her fur, saying, “You’re the only one who really loves me, aren’t you, Snowflake? Yes, you are, you good Republican cat.” Maids feed Snowflake and change her litter box, and a vet makes house calls for her annual checkup; if she has her way with birds or mice on the White House grounds, I’m not privy to it. My dislike of cats, cemented when I was scratched on the cheek by one as a five-year-old, isn’t public (with something like seventy million cat owners in this country, Charlie joked, I could have sabotaged the election with that admission alone), but the fact that it isn’t public is why, when I am called upon by friends to share some morsel of my private life, I can trot it out. It is, of course, a fake revelation, a pseudo-intimacy, which is a trick I’ve learned from White House press secretaries; on a regular basis, they dispense pieces of information about us that are true but absurdly trivial, that masquerade as sharing—these are humanizing, they tell us. Charlie Blackwell loves the movie Anchorman. Alice Blackwell gave the president a digital camera and a biking jersey for Christmas. Ella Blackwell’s favorite food is fajitas.

The real answer to the question of what in my life I never imagined I’d find myself doing is this: having a face-lift. And though there has been plenty of media speculation on the topic, it will never be confirmed either by me or by any staff members, in part because few of them know for certain. Charlie had decided as early as 1997, before his gubernatorial reelection, that he’d run for president in 2000. In 1998, at a Super Bowl party we were hosting at the governor’s mansion for staff and close friends, I was standing with Debbie Bell; Hank’s wife, Brenda; and Kathleen Hicken. Debbie, who was at that point Charlie’s director of communications, said, “Between us girls, have any of you ever considered plastic surgery? I was in Ann Taylor the other day, and those dressing-room mirrors are not forgiving.”

“Debbie, you’re young still!” I said. She was about a decade behind Charlie and me—this would have meant she was then in her early forties—so I wanted to think this.

“See, but I keep hearing how easy the procedures are these days,” Debbie said. “I’m not talking about, you know, implants or a nose job, just—” She held her hands up on either side of her face and pulled back. “Eliminate a few wrinkles,” she said. She turned to me. “Would you do it?” (I should have known—oh, I was a terrible dupe, but I didn’t get it.)

“Doesn’t a face-lift take months to recover from?” Kathleen said.

Debbie shook her head. “Maybe it used to be like that, but doctors have made a ton of advances. If I schedule an appointment, Alice, will you come with me for moral support?” This struck me as an odd request, because I wasn’t close to Debbie. We knew each other well, she was part of Charlie’s inner circle, but she and I never spent time together one-on-one.

“I think I’ll pass, but I’ll be curious to hear what the doctor tells you,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything he turns you away for being far too youthful.”

That, it turned out, was Phase One. Phase Two was Jadey calling and saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Hank wants you to get a face-lift, so I’m supposed to suggest we go to Florida and get them together, like it’s my own idea, but then I thought about it, and I’m kind of intrigued.”

“Hank wants me to get a face-lift?”

“I know it’s real manipulative—”

“And he called you?”

“Debbie called me.”

“I’ll call you back in a second,” I said, and when I’d hung up, I dialed the direct line to Charlie’s office. His secretary Marsha answered, saying, “He’s meeting with the Board of Regents right now, but I’d be happy to—”

“Please tell him it’s urgent,” I said.

When Charlie picked up, he said in a breathless voice, “Ella—” and I said, “No, she’s fine, nothing bad happened, except apparently, Hank is going around telling people I need a face-lift.”

“I warned him you wouldn’t like this.”

“You knew?”

“It’s for TV, Lindy, that’s all. You know I think you’re beautiful, but he has the idea that when we’re on more of a national stage—”

“Are you planning to have a face-lift?”

“I don’t have to tell you there’s a double standard. Listen, they should have been more straightforward with you—”

“They?”

“We—we should have. Hank’s logic is that if you want to do it, do it now. You can’t have that kind of surgery in the middle of a campaign.”

“Where is this coming from? Did Hank run a poll on my appearance?”

Charlie hesitated, and I said, “Is he there with you now?”

“He’s in with the Regents, which is where I should be. It’s your decision, Lindy. I’m sorry if you’re offended. You’re still the prettiest of all my wives.”

“This is incredibly insulting.”

“When I get home tonight, I’ll show you how attractive I find you. Now I’ve gotta go before I get a woody just thinking about it.”

I suppose I was offended not only because the thought of Charlie’s staff discussing my appearance—and finding it lacking—was humiliating but also because the suggestion reinforced my own self-doubt. Although I’d never been insecure about my looks, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the lines at the corners of my mouth and across my forehead were deeper, that the skin on my neck was not as smooth as it had once been, and that when I appeared on television, these flaws were more obvious than in person. Still, I hadn’t thought the situation required more than some experimenting with makeup.

For three days I fumed, on the fourth day I had my assistant Cheryl go buy a book about plastic surgery, and on the fifth day I went to see a doctor. He was not the one who performed the procedure; a month later, Jadey and I did go to a clinic in Naples, Florida, to a surgeon reputed to be the best in the field, and afterward, we stayed for two weeks at a secluded house overlooking a canal. Unfortunately, the setting was wasted on us because we weren’t supposed to swim or expose ourselves to the sun; Cheryl, who was thirty, had accompanied us, and we encouraged her to drive to the beach and even snorkel one afternoon. Meanwhile, Jadey and I lay around reading, watching television, complaining, and making fun of ourselves. We’d been instructed to keep our heads elevated—Jadey was more bandaged than I was, though we were both simultaneously numb and tender, and my face became quite puffy—and six days after the procedure, we went to have the stitches removed from the incisions at our hairlines (before the operation, a nurse had complimented me on how beautifully my haircut would hide any mild scarring). Jadey and I made a pact to never tell anyone—our husbands knew, and Cheryl, but we’d say nothing to our other sisters-in-law or to Priscilla or our children. It was thinking of Ella, actually, that gave me pause: What a negative role model I would be if she knew, how vain and unaccepting of the aging process. Conveniently, however, she was away at Princeton, and the story we told everyone else in Madison and Milwaukee was that we were taking a painting class, an intensive study of watercolor. (“What do we do when they ask to see our work?” I said, and Jadey said, “We say it’s being shipped back.” As it turned out, no one ever asked.)

Especially in the first few days after our twin surgeries, Jadey and I looked so banged up that we questioned, out loud and at regular intervals, whether we’d made a mistake, and it crossed my mind (this part I did not express aloud) that we were like characters in a fairy tale, narcissistic hags grasping at our lost youth. But we weren’t, in the end, punished for overreaching; even a week after the surgery, the bruising had faded, the swelling had shrunk, and on the night before our return to Wisconsin, we joined Cheryl for dinner at a wonderful and very festive Mexican restaurant; we weren’t supposed to drink, but Jadey sneaked a few sips of Cheryl’s margarita. Upon our arrival home, we kept calling each other to compare notes on how many compliments we’d received, how rested people said we looked from the fresh sea air. Of all the unfortunate facts about plastic surgery, perhaps the hardest to accept is this: If it’s done well, it works. Once you’ve had it, you realize how many other people must have also, and while there are plenty of inept examples where the surgery is obvious, there are many more women and men, especially in the public eye, about whom we haven’t a clue, even as we admire their healthy and youthful glow.

I had learned in the book I’d read that the benefits of a rhytidectomy, as it is formally called, tend to last for five to ten years, at which point a repeat performance is recommended. That means that even by the most optimistic calculation, my face-lift has expired. I don’t plan to have another, not because my vanity has disappeared but because now Jadey and I prefer Botox treatments, an option that didn’t exist in the late nineties. Every three months, she flies to Washington, and Charlie’s private physician, Dr. Subramanium, performs the treatments on us in the privacy of his White House office; the procedure takes ten minutes and involves no anesthesia. I would like to think that part of the reason I stick so assiduously to this routine is that it’s a source of bonding for Jadey and me, a way for us to maintain our closeness, but this is only partly true. I also do it because I don’t want bloggers and late-night talk-show hosts to make fun of the way I look. That I routinely submit to having poisonous bacterium injected into my face is flabbergasting to me, but no more flabbergasting than my marriage to the president of the United States, my residence in the White House, my ridiculous title of first lady. As far as I know, Debbie Bell has never had plastic surgery of any kind.

Back in 1998, after I returned to Madison from Naples, Ella came home for spring break a few weeks later, and I went to pick her up at the airport; though I had security detail as Wisconsin’s first lady, I still occasionally drove. Ella’s spring break was two weeks long, and she and a bunch of friends had spent the first half in Turks and Caicos, at the vacation home of a classmate named Alessandra Caterina Laroche de Fournier (she went by Alex). The trip had become a little boring by the end, Ella said; she’d felt self-indulgent, and this week, she wanted to drop by the soup kitchen where she had volunteered during high school. I’d cleared my schedule in anticipation of her being home, and I told her that if she wanted to see any movies, or if she needed to shop for clothes, especially for her upcoming summer internship at Microsoft, I was flexible. In a neutral tone, she said, “Yeah, maybe.”

We were back at the mansion, and I’d parked when she said, “Mom, by the way?”

I turned to look at her.

“Nice face-lift,” she said.

THEY LIVE ON the first floor of a house on Adelphia Street. With my heart thudding against my chest, I climb the porch steps and knock on the door, though knocking is a bit of a formality given that both their apartment and the one above it, accessed through a door next to theirs, have already been inspected by the Secret Service agents. An airconditioned coolness, infused with cigarette smoke, comes out to meet me from inside when Dena appears behind her screen door. She is a lean woman with a stringy neck and thin lips, her face lined, her once light brown hair now blondish-gray and dry-looking, still wavy but clipped just beneath her ears. She is old, Dena’s old, but she’s also unmistakably herself, and I begin to cry. She opens the door, an amused look creeping onto her face, and she says, “Well, you don’t need to be a drama queen about it.” When we embrace, I cling to her.

We step into the living room, which holds a black leather couch and matching chair as well as a low coffee table, all facing an entertainment system—a triptych of shelves whose centerpiece is an enormous television set, flanked on one side by a stereo, speakers, and CD and DVD cases, and on the other side by several rows of propped-up collector plates featuring either horses (they gallop against the backdrop of western landscapes, their bodies at sharp sideways angles, their manes and tails blown fiercely by the wind) or else American Indians (a chieftain gripping a tomahawk with an eagle perched on his shoulder, a woman in long black braids and a fringed leather dress kneeling devotedly over a papoose). Has Dena’s taste changed, has mine, or have the times? Perhaps some combination. The walls of the living room are covered in wood paneling, the carpet is mauve, and a doorway leads to an overcast narrow hall at the end of which another doorway opens onto, from my vantage point, a strip of a sunny room with a black-and-white checker-board floor—the kitchen, I assume. The television is on, set to Dr. Phil.

“You thirsty?” Dena asks. “I’d offer you a real drink, but we quit years ago, so about the most interesting thing we have is Diet Coke.”

“That sounds perfect.” When she starts down the hall, I look around for tissue—there’s a box on an end table—and blow my nose. On the coffee table is a bowl of rose potpourri, an issue of People magazine, and a pack of Merit cigarettes. From the kitchen, I hear water running, and as Dena returns to the living room, she talks to someone in one of the rooms along the way, but I can’t make out the words over the television. It must be Pete; I know from my agents that I am now sitting in the same apartment as Pete Imhof. Outside, through the front window, I see José, one of the agents, standing on the porch with his arms folded, surveying the street.

Dena carries two glasses, one with dark, fizzy liquid in it and one with water; she passes the Diet Coke to me, turns off the TV, sits in the chair, and gestures for me to sit on the couch. “I’ve gotta say, when the girl from your office called to announce you were on your way, I thought someone was playing a joke.” Dena’s tone is neither cold nor fawning but simply normal; for the second time today, I am not Alice Blackwell but Alice Lindgren. Or I am both, because she says, “So what’s it like being married to the president?”

In what I hope is a light voice, I say, “It depends on the day.”

Dena crosses one leg over the other. She’s wearing jeans and a sleeveless black V-necked shirt that shows her cleavage to such flattering effect, I can’t help wondering if she’s either wearing a padded bra or has had implants. She also wears dangly silver earrings, a silver chain necklace, and two silver rings, neither on the ring finger of her left hand: One, with a moonstone affixed to it, is on her left middle finger, and the other, a band imprinted with tiny peace signs, is on her right thumb. The peace signs give an extra weight to what she says next, or maybe it’s my imagination. She says, “I never knew you were a Republican.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yeah?” She smiles. “How’s that worked out?”

We are quiet, and I say, “I’ve thought of you a lot over the years, Dena. I wish—” I wish our friendship hadn’t imploded, I wish it hadn’t been three decades since we last spoke.

But she says, “I know. I wish it, too.” She laughs a little. “I’d say I’ve thought of you, but it’s more like I’ve seen you. That cashmere coat you wore at Charlie’s inauguration, at the second one, that was gorgeous. I thought, When I knew Alice, she was such a penny-pincher about clothes, but that must have cost a fortune. I was glad to see you’d loosened up.” Charlie’s inauguration—this is how the public refers to him, as Charlie, or more sarcastically, as Chuck or Chuckie B. In Washington, I am the only person who directly interacts with him who could get away with such informality. “That’s a nice suit, too. What designer is it?” Dena nods toward my increasingly wrinkled red linen jacket and skirt, which I donned for the breast cancer summit this morning—a lifetime ago. When I’m in the residence, I dress casually, much the way Dena’s dressed, albeit in more modest shirts.

“It’s de la Renta,” I say.

She nods approvingly. “I was gonna guess him or Carolina Herrera.” She gestures out the window at the agent on the porch. “Do those guys listen when you pee?”

I laugh. “They don’t go into the bathroom with me, no. They wait outside. A few of them are female—no one who’s traveling with us today but some of the others—so if there’s a situation where it might be awkward to have a man present, a woman can step in.”

Dena shakes her head. “Better you than me.”

“It’s a strange life.” I pause. “Dena, Pete’s here, isn’t he?”

“And I thought I was the main attraction.”

“No, you are, but if it’s possible, I’d like to talk to both of you at the same time.”

She turns her head toward the hall and calls out, “Babe, she wants to see you, too!” Looking back at me, she says, “He thinks you don’t like him. I told him you wouldn’t make a personal trip here just to scold us, the first lady has bigger fish to fry, but you know Pete.”

Not really, of course—I don’t know Pete Imhof anymore, if I ever did.

Again, more impatiently, she yells, “Babe!”

After another minute, he materializes: He, too, wears jeans, and a gray Badgers T-shirt and brown leather flip-flops. (The dark hair on his toes! With a jolt, I remember it from when I was seventeen. How strange that I once, briefly, was well acquainted with Pete Imhof’s body.) When I last saw him, after that infuriating pyramid scheme, he had gained a good deal of weight, and he has gained a good deal since then. He’s not enormous, but he’s more than big, and both his hair and beard are silver. He’s actually a handsome man in an earthily sexual sort of way. I stand, and we exchange a clumsy handshake; I don’t mean to be cruel when I say that the clumsiness is his, that his discomfort is clear. God knows I have many shortcomings, but at this point, managing a handshake isn’t one of them. “You sure surprised Dena today,” he says as he steps backward so he’s next to her chair. He perches in a not particularly comfortable-looking way on an arm of it while I sit back down on the couch.

“Babe, get a chair from the kitchen,” Dena says, and he does, setting it close to hers.

“I hope I didn’t pull the two of you away from other obligations,” I say when Pete has sat. I know, through Belinda telling Jessica, what their jobs are—Pete is a night security guard at White River Dairy, and Dena is a part-time massage therapist at a chiropractor’s office.

Wryly, Dena says, “We managed to make time for you.”

“I bet you both are wondering why I dropped in out of the blue.”

Neither of them replies, and then Dena says, “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Well, first, I wanted to see you—I wanted to know what had become of you, Dena. But also, a news story is about to break that’s indirectly related to you, Pete. I’m not sure whether it will be a television program or a newspaper that will report it first, but in the next day or so, it’ll become public that I—that in 1963, I had an abortion. And I’m telling you because, although the media won’t have any idea of this part, Pete, it was you I’d gotten pregnant by. I don’t know if Dena ever mentioned—”

“He knows.” Dena says this matter-of-factly, and when I glance at Pete, he does not contradict her; he watches me with little emotion. (Would Andrew have become so heavyset as he aged? I doubt it, because they had different builds.)

“If I had it to do over again, obviously, it would have been more respectful to have told you at the time,” I say.

“Who’s spilling the beans?” Dena says. “Someone you know?”

“It’s—” There are several ways to describe Gladys Wycomb, but I decide to leave my grandmother out of it. “It’s the doctor who performed the procedure,” I say. “She’s very old now, and she’s doing it to protest—I don’t know if you two have been following the Supreme Court nomination of Ingrid Sanchez, but that’s what the doctor is protesting.” I look at Pete. “I hope this isn’t a news story that will have legs, but it’s possible some reporters will get it into their mind to try to figure out who I was involved with at the time, and I don’t think they’ll be able to except through one of us. But I wanted to warn you. I’d prefer that you don’t talk to reporters if you hear from them, but it’s your decision, and if you’d like, someone in my office can connect you with a media coach.” Lest this sound condescending, I add, “Although I’ve had loads of coaching, and I still haven’t learned all the tricks.”

Dena and Pete exchange a look, and Dena says, “Yep, we hear from your friends at the tabloids on a regular basis. Well, not just the tabloids—babe, where was that guy calling from a few weeks ago, was it Croatia? It was a country I wouldn’t be able to find on the map, I’ll tell you that much.”

This should not surprise me—exposés and tell-alls about Charlie’s administration or his family or his early years are published on a weekly basis, both articles and books, in tabloids and reputable magazines alike, and during the 2000 campaign, when the first reporter discovered the accident that killed Andrew Imhof, that was big news that I addressed by giving an interview to a USA Today reporter. I said, “It was incredibly sad. I know it was very hard for his family and our classmates and really the whole community, including me.” In all the times I’ve been asked about it since, I have repeated these comments without expanding on them. To pad out the various books and articles, therefore, the writers must find more loquacious subjects, so they talk to anyone we ever so much as passed on the sidewalk. I know of at least one biography of me that identifies Dena as my childhood best friend, which must be how other journalists know to track her down. The biographer’s source for this information was our old classmate Mary Petschel née Hafliger, she of the hairy forearms, she who kicked me off Spirit Club after Andrew’s death, and she whom Ella and I ran into when I fled to Riley in 1988; since that encounter, I haven’t seen Mary.

And I realize in this moment that neither Dena nor Pete has ever spoken about me to the media. For so long, I was so sure Dena would that it felt like she already had. Even earlier today, she was the first person I thought of when Hank came to tell me the abortion story was going to break, but she’d had nothing to do with it. That Dena and Pete have stayed quiet even though they’ve been together all these years, even though they’ve each had separate reasons for wishing me ill, and even though surely they could have reinforced each other’s antipathy, justifying their right to get back at me—I haven’t been sufficiently grateful, it occurs to me, I have never properly appreciated a thing that hasn’t happened. I haven’t thought of them as having opportunities they declined when clearly that’s been the case, clearly the opportunities have been plentiful.

I say, “So when the journalists call and you say no—why do you?”

“Are you kidding? You think we’d talk about you to some sleazy reporter?” Dena scoffs. “We were raised better than that, and hell, we didn’t even vote for your husband!” She leans forward, extracting a cigarette from the pack, and after she’s lit it and taken a puff, she says, “At least I sure didn’t. Pete here just doesn’t vote.”

Pete smiles the way Charlie does when he’s broken wind particularly loudly, as if he’s half sheepish and half pleased with himself. Fleetingly—I don’t want to think this—I wonder if Pete is brain-damaged. Not that any single terrible event necessarily happened, but it could be that alcohol and perhaps drugs have had a cumulative effect.

“Hey, why won’t Charlie talk to that black guy?” Dena says. “You tell him old Dena thinks he should.” She means Edgar Franklin, I’m pretty sure, though unlike Gladys Wycomb, Dena does not use an accusatory tone; instead, she sounds self-effacing, as if she doesn’t really believe her opinion could matter. Or maybe it’s that, having once been married herself, she knows regulating one’s husband’s behavior is no small feat, so she doesn’t hold me accountable for Charlie’s decisions. She lifts a clear glass ashtray from a shelf beneath the coffee table and taps her cigarette into it. “Now, am I allowed to get a picture, Alice, or will your goons freak out?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Otherwise my sisters will never believe me you were here.” She stands.

“How are your sisters doing?”

“They’re plugging along. Marjorie’s oldest son’s over in the first of the 158th Infantry, so that’s hard.” Again, there is a notable lack of blame in Dena’s voice. How is it that she’s forgiven me for both the past and the present? “Peggy’s living in Mom and Dad’s old house, which you couldn’t pay me enough to do. The place is falling down around her, not to mention she’s due to have hip surgery, so I don’t know how she plans to get to the second floor.”

“Maybe she can have one of those chairs put in like my grandmother had,” I say, and Dena chortles, though I wasn’t kidding. It is sobering to think of Peggy Janaszewski needing hip surgery when, as little girls, she and Marjorie were our students the times that Dena and I played school and pretended to be teachers named Miss Clougherty.

Dena disappears down the hall, to find her camera, presumably, and Pete and I are left alone. The room is silent except for the whir of the air conditioner, and then Pete says, “A lot of water under the bridge, isn’t there?”

“There sure is.” We both start to speak at the same time, and I say, “Go ahead.”

“When I look back, I don’t feel real good about everything,” he says. “That was a tough time.”

Is he referring to after Andrew’s death or to the pyramid scheme?

“And the papers, they can’t leave it be. Every time it goes away, someone brings it up again, but they don’t care what he was like—they act like he didn’t do anything his whole life but get in the car and drive to that intersection.”

“I hope you know that I still think of him,” I say. “I still wish I could change what happened.”

But Pete does not seem angry. He says, “I always knew you were a nice person. I probably didn’t show it, but I knew.”

Unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears; they are close to the surface, I suppose, given that I sobbed immediately upon my arrival. I swallow, keeping the tears at bay, and say, “I had no idea how to act back then, and I bet you didn’t, either.”

“He had a real big crush on you,” Pete says. “You could probably tell. I remember the time we saw you downtown, and you two were flirting like crazy.” (That afternoon just before my senior year of high school, when I’d been buying ground beef for my mother—the sunlight and Andrew’s eyelashes and Pete in the driver’s seat of the mint-green Thunderbird.) “If I’d found out you were pregnant,” Pete is saying, “I like to think I’d have done the right thing and married you, but it was probably for the best I didn’t know. I was too immature.”

Married me? I can truly say the thought never crossed my mind; it is far likelier I’d have had the baby and given it up for adoption—I couldn’t have kept it, the disgrace would have been too great for my family—but the circumstances under which I’d have married Pete Imhof are unimaginable.

He says, “What if we let Andrew be the father instead of me? That seems more like what it was supposed to be—revisionist history, isn’t that what they call it?”

Except that if Andrew had been the father, I wouldn’t have had an abortion, at least not if I’d learned I was pregnant after his death. And Andrew wouldn’t have been the father anyway, because we wouldn’t have had that rash, impulsive sex. But Pete Imhof is trying to offer me a kindness, so all I do is smile sadly at him.

From the pocket of his jeans, Pete withdraws his own pack of cigarettes; they are Camels. He pulls one from the pack but doesn’t light it. He says, “I would never have gotten my shit together without Dena. I kept showing up at the steak house where she was working until she finally took me home with her and saved me from myself, you know?” He leans in and adds, “Don’t tell her I told you, but I did vote for your husband. I like how he’s tough on terror.” Pete winks. “Dena has no idea.” As he lights his cigarette (it no longer seems like he’s brain-damaged), he says, “You want something to eat? Did she offer you anything?”

“I’m fine,” I say, and I hear Dena approaching from the hall. She says, “It won’t go on,” and when she’s in the living room, she hands a digital camera to Pete. “What am I doing wrong?” He fiddles with it, and the camera makes a zooming sound, the lens emerging.

Pete says, “You two stand together,” and I join Dena in front of the shelf of decorative plates. The lighting would be better outside, obviously, but I say nothing. Dena sets her arm around me, a gesture I am moved by, and I do the same for her.

After Pete has taken several shots, Dena says, “Now you guys.” Pete and I stand side by side, smiling and not touching; this isn’t a photo I ever imagined posing for. After the pictures are taken, they look at the tiny versions on the screen. “Isn’t technology today amazing?” Dena says.

“I’m sorry to rush out, but I have an obligation back in Washington,” I say. “It was very good to see both of you, and let’s stay in touch as things unfold. Did you keep Belinda’s number?”

“It’s in the kitchen,” Dena says.

“Call if anything comes up, or if you have questions.”

Dena lightly punches my upper arm. She says, “Don’t look so grim, First Lady. We’ll be fine, and so will you.”

“Hold on, Alice,” Pete says. “I have something for you.” He lumbers into the hall, and when he’s gone, I say to Dena, “I’m here visiting my mother every couple months, so maybe we could have lunch next time.”

“That’d be a kick,” she says. “You just say the word.” Then she adds, “You know it was me that gave Ella the tiara that time, don’t you? I thought you’d come over and say hi.”

“I wish I had.” Charlie and I are currently having a house built in Maronee, the place we’ll live when we leave Washington. Is it possible, back in relative proximity to Dena, that she and I might become friends again, real friends? Are our situations too different? It is such a comfort to see her, to be linked to a life all but lost to me now.

When Pete returns, he passes me an envelope.

“What is it?” Dena asks, but he shakes his head. In a not entirely joking tone, she says, “It better not be a love letter.” She turns back to me, her expression mischievous. “If anyone was ever watching you and me, they’d have thought there were only three men to date in the whole world, and we just kept trading them back and forth.” I laugh, and Dena links her arm through Pete’s. She says, “But it looks like we both ended up with the ones who were right for us all along.”

AMONG THE PEOPLE whom I’m aware have been quoted on television or in print on the subject of Charlie and me are about a third of my classmates from elementary school, junior high, and high school, including Mary Hafliger Petschel and my junior-year prom date, Larry Nagel; the daughter of the former owner of Tatty’s (Tatty’s itself no longer exists); Marvin Benheimer, my New Year’s Eve date in 1962, when I had to dash from the restaurant as soon as the food came in order to vomit, a fact that has not stopped Marvin from appearing on a recurring basis on CNN, always identified as “Childhood Friend of Alice Blackwell”; several of my sorority sisters in Kappa Alpha Theta, a few of my aged professors, and many university classmates whom I never met; my thesis adviser from library school; Lydia Bianchi, the principal at Liess Elementary, and my colleague Maggie Stenta, a first-grade teacher; Nadine Patora, the Madison realtor from whom I didn’t buy a house in 1977; Ja-hoon Choi, the Ph.D. candidate who lived downstairs from me in my apartment on Sproule Street; and two men with whom I went on blind dates in, respectively, 1969 and 1974, whom I truly have no recollection of, though I believe that the dates occurred. “She was pretty but seemed like a prude” was one fellow’s assessment, and the other’s was “She wasn’t interested in current events—she mostly just wanted to talk about her students.” These remarks at least had brevity on their side and were nothing compared to the entire memoir published by Simon Törnkvist, I Knew Her When: My Love Affair with Alice Blackwell Before She Became First Lady. With the help of a ghostwriter, Simon chronicled our long-ago relationship: my alleged desperation to get married and have children, and his extensive reservations about me that apparently stemmed from what he recognized even then as my conservative leanings. Here she was, living in a vibrant and liberal college town, but she led an incredibly staid, sheltered life, he wrote. It was obvious she was afraid of talking to me about my experiences in ’Nam, and she avoided any confrontation. I knew from the get-go she was aiming for the white-picket-fence, 2.5 kids lifestyle, and if it wasn’t happening with me, she’d make it happen with someone else. When I heard that she’d married one of Governor Blackwell’s draft-dodging sons, I knew her wildest dreams must have come true. Also, humiliatingly, there was this: She was very vanilla when it came to sex. The thing I never understood was that it was easier for her to climax when she was on top, but she preferred missionary-style. I had been skimming the book for about half an hour when I got to those lines; I snapped it shut, gave it to my personal aide, Ashley, and told her to get rid of it as she saw fit. I felt particularly offended, as I actually had had indirect contact with Simon since we’d run into each other at the Brewers’ game in 1988; in 1995, he’d requested six VIP tickets for himself, his wife, his two children, and his parents to take a Christmas-lights tour of the governor’s mansion. The request had come through my office, and while I hadn’t spoken to Simon, I had been the one who signed off on the dispensation of the tickets. He never thanked me or anybody else—I had only two aides then, and I asked them—and the next I heard of him was when my White House press secretary alerted me to the existence of his book a few months in advance of publication. “I always had a hunch that Parsley, Sage was a low-rent hippie” was Charlie’s take on the matter.

Generally, there tends to be an inverse correlation between how well someone knew you and his or her willingness to talk; there also seems to be a link between discretion and class, or so I’ve always thought until seeing Dena and Pete. The people we know, or knew, in Maronee, the people from the country club, have been the most tight-lipped. The notable exception was that early in Charlie’s first administration, Carolyn Thayer (she has not remarried and still has the same surname) sat for an interview with 60 Minutes for a segment they were doing about Charlie’s past struggles with alcohol. “We all knew, everyone talked about it,” she said. “It was common knowledge when he got the DUI, and more than a year before that, at a Christmas party, I saw him fall flat on his face. I said to him, ‘Do you need help?’ but he just laughed it off.” It must have been the Hickens’ party, I thought, because I remembered Charlie cheerfully walking toward me with tissue stuffed in both his nostrils, and when I asked why, he said he’d gotten a nose-bleed. I didn’t watch the 60 Minutes episode when it ran, but after it aired, I heard from several of our old friends about how appalled they were, what a breach of etiquette they considered Carolyn’s behavior, so I had an aide obtain a copy. Because Carolyn had moved from Maronee to Chicago ten years before, it wasn’t as if she could be shunned from the community, and for this, I was glad. I’d have preferred that she hadn’t spoken to the program, but the fact was, she hadn’t said anything untrue. Regardless, Carolyn was the exception who proved the rule—she is the only person from Maronee who has spoken on the record and without our blessings to a media outlet, and very few people have spoken anonymously, either. I suspect the ones who have are people we hardly knew.

Simon’s was not the only tell-all memoir—there was also the one written by my first cousin on my mother’s side, Patty Lazechko, who is the daughter of my Uncle Herman, and I’m under the impression that the gist of her tale was that marrying up runs in my blood, that after meeting my father, my mother turned her back on her own siblings and parents. When the book was published two years ago, I hadn’t seen Patty since childhood, and I confess I bypassed that one; there are too many accounts, and they are too demoralizing to keep up with. Of late, there have been a few contributions to the exposé library from people who have worked for Charlie and me, campaign consultants and a fellow who was a deputy White House press secretary in the first administration, and while it’s always disappointing to feel that a person you trusted has violated that trust, such transgressions are standard in politics and have occurred to a lesser extent under Charlie than they did under his predecessor.

Charlie has become inured; he has never been interested in what his critics have to say except insofar as Hank can strategically deflect it. Obviously, I’m not as impervious, but I almost never try to have anything refuted, and a quote or observation in a newspaper article that once would have bothered me for days now bothers me for ten minutes, or for two. The last time I was particularly ruffled was over a year ago, when I opened the Times one morning in May to find an op-ed by Thea Dengler, the owner of the bookstore in Mequon that I used to love. Thea’s bookstore still exists at a time when fewer and fewer independents can make a go of it, and for people who follow such things, Thea has risen to greater prominence and is regularly quoted in articles about the bookselling industry. But that was not the topic of her op-ed; the topic was me, and the headline was DO SOMETHING, ALICE BLACKWELL! It began, Those of us who knew Alice Blackwell in Wisconsin have been doing an awful lot of head-scratching during the past five years. As a frequent customer at my bookstore throughout the eighties and early nineties, Mrs. Blackwell was inquisitive, compassionate, and open-minded. How, then, can she be—or so it seems—happily married to a man hell-bent on weakening civil liberties? Although Mrs. Blackwell is sometimes made out to be nothing but the First Lady Who Lunches, she’s a former librarian who knows just how crucial privacy and intellectual freedom are to a democracy.

Sitting in bed reading this, I had felt a rise of the sort of anger that I experience infrequently. It wasn’t the sentiment Thea was expressing, which I had heard often enough, but the source—unlike Carolyn Thayer, or my cousin Patty, or even Simon Törnkvist, Thea was a person with whom I’d once felt great kinship. And why couldn’t she give me the benefit of the doubt, why couldn’t she assume I was doing the best I could under the circumstances? Who was Thea to decide the exact quantity or nature of what I ought to say, and to whom, and how? I reminded myself of the decision I’d made years before, walking alone on Maronee Drive after the ridiculous Milwaukee Sentinel article about my molasses cookies—that I could not be defined by others from the outside, and that the fact of something being printed didn’t make it true. Still, this was Thea and the Times.

They think they’ll sway you, but they do the opposite—the more people there are exerting pressure, the more they are part of a pattern. There is also the fact of each individual who lobbies you having a pet issue—Thea objected specifically to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act—and how even in their national concerns, people are driven by a sort of altruistic self-interest. This is what I have done most wrong, this is how I have fallen short. While the criticism I receive can be discouraging, the variations on it negate one another. Whatever I have accomplished that was positive, it wasn’t enough. What’s important is what I’ve overlooked or ignored. (And again: I’m popular, my approval ratings are twice Charlie’s. It doesn’t surprise me that he ignores his critics altogether.)

These are my “issues”: breast-cancer awareness and detection; historic preservation of art and buildings; pediatric AIDS prevention here and abroad, especially in Africa; and literacy. If the issues on which I’ve focused are noncontroversial, I believe they’re legitimately worthy. What has been most wrenching as first lady, however, is that the old sense of obligation, guilt, and sadness I used to get when I read the newspaper in Milwaukee has been dramatically compounded. Though I resist the notion shared by Gladys Wycomb, Thea Dengler, and many others that I ought to lobby my husband, it’s true that if I visit an organization or invite its members to the White House—a veterinary clinic that spays pets for people who can’t afford it, a program that tries to decrease gang violence, an orphanage for homeless children in Addis Ababa—that organization will receive an influx of donations, a shower of publicity. I can change people’s lives, and many times, although it is cowardly, I have wished I didn’t have that ability. The pressure is too great, and the hardest part is not that what I do is insufficient in others’ eyes but that it’s insufficient in my own. I stay busy, I travel, I try with my visits—with my actions, that is, more than my words—to support other people’s good work, but I don’t doubt that I’d have felt better about my contributions to the world if my power were more modest. If I had remained a single woman, a teacher, I have the idea that I might have begun, at the age of forty or so, to take in foster children, and not necessarily white ones; I’d compost, and perhaps by now I’d have purchased a Prius, though I still don’t think I’d have affixed an antiwar bumper sticker to it. In whatever way such things are measured, I probably would have done less, but I wouldn’t have had to face the reality that I could have done far more.

As for those who hate me because they hate Charlie, hate me by extension, I am curious of this: At what point, in their opinion, should I have done something, and what should that something have been? Should I not have married him? Should I not have discouraged his drinking? (“Jim Beam and me, have us both”—is that what I ought to have said?) When he told me that he wanted to run for governor and I told him I’d prefer he didn’t (though I foolishly thought at least it was better than congressman or senator, at least it would keep us in Wisconsin)—when he decided that in spite of my stated preference, he was indeed going to run, should I have left him? Should I have stayed with him but not campaigned for him? Should I have stated explicitly to the public when my views differed from his? Should I have left him when he decided, also against my wishes, to run for president? Anyone who has been married, and especially anyone married for several decades, knows the union is a series of compromises; to judge the compromises I have made is, I take it, easy to do from far away.

If I am diffident, then my diffidence stems in part from my aversion to arriving hastily at decisions. During the lead-up to the war, I sincerely didn’t know what I thought the right course of action was; I read articles for both sides, and I found convincing arguments in each. Because the stakes were so high, I did have an uneasy feeling during the early months of 2003, but Charlie and I talked about the situation less than one might imagine, or I should say we talked logistically more than we discussed the philosophical or historical implications. He’d call from the Oval Office and say, “I’ve got to go to a meeting in the Sit Room, so how about if we watch that movie tomorrow night instead?” Or, as he once put it about the secretary of state, “We’ve been pumping up Stanley for his talk to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, and I think he’s really gonna hit this one out of the park.”

These days, it is common for people in both political parties, for people who don’t consider themselves members of any party at all, to say Charlie’s administration bungled the war and we should bring the troops home. And Charlie’s administration did underestimate how neglected the country’s infrastructure was, how likely an insurgency would be, and how many weapons the insurgents had. All of that is now clear; the question is how to proceed. For America, it would be advantageous to leave, but what about them, the country we invaded?

When Ella was in Montessori at Biddle Academy, the classroom activities included building blocks, wooden puzzles, and, to Charlie’s great amusement, a sink filled with plastic cups and dishes (“So she can learn to be a scullery maid,” he’d joke). The guiding principles of the classroom activities were these: Finish one task before you start another, and clean up after yourself. In the midst of our war in a hot, sandy country over six thousand miles away, a country whose art and culture and language and science stretch back to the beginning of human civilization, I keep returning to these ideas, that it is our responsibility to clean up the mess we made. For the last four years, I’ve wondered if we’ll make things worse by withdrawing, and I’ve remained confused about whether it was right to invade in the first place. If we invaded as a democracy unseating a dictator, does the fact that there were more deaths than Americans expected mean invading was wrong? If we were right to invade but it was sloppily executed, does that make it wrong?

When I see political pundits on television, or meet the Republican ones at events in or outside the White House, what strikes me most is their certainty. Is it exaggerated for the cameras, and do they in the privacy of their homes, at the end of the day, remove it along with their socks or stockings? Or are they always so bombastic and assured? I envy them as I envy the deeply religious, including my husband, but I have felt incapable of joining their ranks. I’ve never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad. Historic preservation will allow future generations to understand what life used to be like and in so doing will help Americans chart a path forward. The issues and decisions that are more complex I have left to others, to those confident of their own rightness. I have imagined that I’ll know what I think of this war when Charlie is long out of office, but that I don’t know now—it is a novel I haven’t reached the end of.

Or so I have often told myself.

And yet if Andrew Imhof’s death was the singular tragedy of my life, if in some ways I have lived since then trying to compensate for my error, trying to be worthy of having survived—if his death was the worst thing I could have imagined, then what words are there, what space in my imagination, for the deaths of thousands of American troops and foreign civilians? If my critics are right that I share responsibility for Charlie’s administrative policies, including the decision to go to war, then Andrew Imhof’s death is the least of what I have caused; it is nothing, and utterly insignificant. What if I believed the consequences of the war were also my fault? The twenty-nine-year-old former high school athlete from Hot Springs, Arkansas, killed by small-arms fire while searching a house in a southern neighborhood of the capital city; the twenty-five-year-old sergeant from Ogden, Utah, killed on his third tour of duty a month after his daughter was born, who didn’t want to reenlist but needed the twenty-four-thousand-dollar bonus for a down payment on a house; the nineteen-year-old from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who joined the army on his eighteenth birthday and was killed in a marketplace explosion; and the tens of thousands, or likelier hundreds of thousands, of civilians, a member of a local city council, a shopkeeper and his wife and three daughters, journalists and cameramen and translators working with the American military or the media, a bride and her new mother-in-law and twelve of the guests celebrating a wedding attended by a suicide bomber—killed and killed and killed and killed. If the blood of these people were on my hands, if there were something I personally could have done to prevent such carnage, the loss of so many adults and teenagers and children who presumably wanted, just as I always have, to live an ordinary life—if I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?

____

“OKAY, THOSE THIRD-GRADERS are terrors,” Ella is saying. “Can we just establish that you’re eternally in my debt?”

“Belinda says you did a fabulous job,” I say. “She told Jessica you had them spellbound.”

“Seriously, this one boy tried to climb over the rope in the Red Room, and then this other kid pushed a girl into the wall in the Vermeil Room. You’d think they’d have some reverence for this place, but they were like animals. I can’t wait to see what they do onstage tonight.”

It is just past six on the East Coast, and I’m back on the jet, above the cloud cover; we’re half an hour from Washington, meaning that after the motorcade ride back to the residence, I’ll have an hour to dress for the gala. “Thank you for standing in for me,” I say. “You did your good deed for the day. Ladybug, there’s something I want to talk to you about tonight when I get home.”

Immediately, accusingly, she says, “Do you have breast cancer?”

“What on earth—No, honey, I don’t have cancer.”

“You just sounded so serious. Okay, so I picked out which shoes you should wear tonight—are you ready?”

Jessica passes me a note: Hank on hold, says urgent.

“Mom?” Ella says.

“Let me call you back in a minute.” When I’ve pressed the “end” button on one phone, Jessica passes me another, and I cover the mouth-piece. “He won’t say what it’s about?”

“He wants to talk to you directly,” Jessica says.

I hold the phone to my ear. “This is Alice.”

“Ding dong, the witch is dead.” Hank’s voice is unmistakably gleeful. “Gladys Wycomb bought the ranch an hour ago.”

“What are you talking about?”

Jessica mouths, “What?” I hold up a finger.

Hank says, “The old ticker gave out, and no, I didn’t have her offed, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Did you?” A wave of horror passes over me. I’m not a conspiracy buff, but I’m quite sure things take place in any presidency that would shock most voters; I’ve never dwelled on what those things might be in Charlie’s case, because I am conflicted enough about the controversies that are known and legal.

“Alice, I swear to you I had nothing to do with it, and neither did anyone else except Mother Nature. Now, tell me this isn’t the best news you’ve heard since Van Halen announced their reunion tour.”

“But her helper, Norene—”

“Not a chance. Turns out in the mid-nineties, she was the go-to girl for dime bags in Cicero, Illinois, and she’s got a police record longer than your arm. The geriatric feminist avenger had nothing to lose, but Norene has plenty.”

“You’re telling me that Dr. Wycomb died of completely natural causes?”

Jessica is still standing in front of me, and her jaw drops. “Gladys Wycomb died?” she whispers, and I nod.

“She was a hundred and four, Alice,” Hank is saying. “There doesn’t need to be foul play—unless it was you who slipped a wee thimbleful of arsenic in her afternoon tea.”

“I don’t find that funny.”

“In all seriousness, blackmailing you was probably physically draining. I’ve got to hand it to her that she went out with a bang and not a whimper, but the good news for us is it’s over—the abortion story is off the table. You ready to come home and be saluted by students and teachers?”

“How can you be sure she didn’t tell anyone besides Norene?”

“So what if she did? It’ll be hearsay, nothing but another urban legend. You’ve got a former physician claiming she performed the abortion, the press is going to sit up and take notice. You’ve got a friend of a friend of an aide of a dead lady, and if you seriously think that’ll fly, well, then wait till you hear the one about Richard Gere and the gerbil.”

“I’m assuming you’ve told Charlie?” I say.

“He said to tell you congratulations.”

When I’ve hung up, Jessica says jokingly, “What, he took out a hit on her?”

“I know. Maybe she sensed the end was near and that’s what made her act, but it’s awfully unsettling. Hank is dancing a jig because he thinks this gets me off the hook.”

Jessica is quiet, musing, and then she says, “It probably does.”

WHEN I CONSIDER the trajectory of Charlie’s presidency, when I try to pinpoint the moment its tone and direction were established irrevocably, I keep revisiting his choice of vice president. In the summer of 2000, the decision had to be made in time for the Republican National Convention, and it came down to two candidates: Arnold Prouhet and Frank Logan. Frank was two years younger than Charlie, a Colorado senator who was serving his third term, came from a wealthy Baptist family, was a father of eight, and was a vocal critic of homosexuality and abortion. (I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention to subjects they profess to find repugnant.) I was opposed to Charlie selecting Frank as his running mate, and I also didn’t relish the idea of spending time with Frank’s wife, Donna Sue, who had self-published several books proffering tips on raising a traditional Christian family.

Meanwhile, Arnold Prouhet had been a congressman from Nevada in the seventies and early eighties who subsequently served under two presidents as a security adviser. As far as I knew, Arnold was more a fiscal conservative than a social one, he was eleven years Charlie’s senior, and on the few occasions I’d met him, he’d seemed serious and taciturn; I imagined these would be qualities that might help balance Charlie’s playfulness. (While Charlie had, under Hank’s tutelage, become a disciplined student of policy and government, I knew, and I think everyone knew, that he was in it for the power and adventure and human connection and not because of any wonkish devotion to or interest in the issues. The problem that has ensued is that wonkish devotion cannot be faked. The fever isn’t in Charlie’s blood, as it is in Hank’s—Charlie would never read a book about the First Amendment for pleasure—and this is why so often in the years since, when there has been a deviation from the public script or when, as at a debate or a press conference, there isn’t a script, Charlie falters. Being president is for him like taking a ninth-grade English test on The Odyssey, and he’s the kid who did most of the reading, he studied for an hour the night before, but he’s not one of the people who loved the book. Besides, he’d always rather crack a funny joke in class than offer a genuine insight.)

Hank objected to the selection of Arnold Prouhet, saying that where Frank Logan shared Charlie’s youthful energy, Arnold seemed old and dour. Arnold also could make Charlie appear insecure, as if he were seeking a father figure. But Arnold’s foreign policy expertise was significant, I countered when I was asked to weigh in (which was never by Hank and occasionally by Charlie, though usually he wanted to vent more than he wanted input). I also worried that Frank Logan’s own ambitions might hinder his work with Charlie; if he became vice president, he’d probably run for president afterward, whereas if Charlie served two terms, Arnold Prouhet would be seventy-three when they left office, and unlikely to embark on a presidential campaign. Charlie’s advisers besides Hank—among them Debbie Bell, a consultant named Bruce Kettman, and a frighteningly smart twenty-six-year-old protégé of Hank named Scott Taico whom Charlie called “Taco”—had mixed opinions, and I felt fairly sure Charlie would pick Frank Logan, but he didn’t. He picked Arnold. The night before he made the announcement in July 2000, he said to me, “I think you might be right about Logan, that he’s too focused on peering into people’s bedrooms and not enough of a visionary.”

Again, then, I find myself wondering if I am partly to blame for what has happened since. Would Frank Logan in fact have been a better vice president, would there have been less bloodshed under his watch? More homophobia, a sharper curtailing of reproductive rights, but not the unilateral use of military force, the defiant enthusiasm for preemptive war? It is indisputable that Charlie has been greatly influenced by Arnold Prouhet, and indeed it seems to be because Arnold has been so influential that Charlie insists as relentlessly as he does that he believes in the war, that he won’t back down. How embarrassing it would be not only to rely on the guidance of one’s hierarchical inferior but to rely on the wrong guidance—how unsophisticated Charlie would seem to himself and everyone else. And so rather than consider this possibility, he forces it to be untrue, he continues down the path he chose.

Years ago, shortly after Charlie and I moved to Milwaukee and joined the country club in the late seventies, we went there for dinner one night, to the main dining room on the first floor, and I excused myself from the table to use the ladies’ room. There was a lounge-like anteroom, a pretty area with couches and a dressing table and walk-in closets for hanging coats, a place where, sometimes at large parties, you’d find women chatting or applying their makeup. This was the first time I’d ever been in it, and once you entered the anteroom, you saw two more gold-handled doors: one directly across from the one you’d just come through and one to your left. I was trying to find the toilet stalls, and rather than asking one of the three older women then sitting on the couches—I say older, though they were no doubt younger than I am now, and stylishly dressed—I took a guess and walked forward to the door that was farther away. When I opened it and stepped through, I found myself back in the dining room where Charlie and I had been eating. I immediately realized there were two separate ladies’-room entrances; obviously, the toilets were behind the door I hadn’t tried. The logical thing at that point would have been to turn around, but I felt self-conscious. I was unaccustomed to country clubs, I imagined the women in the anteroom would notice and think me silly, and so, with a full bladder, I rejoined Charlie and didn’t urinate until we arrived home over an hour later. What I mean to say is that a part of me understands Charlie’s behavior. I understand it because I love him, because I am predisposed to sympathize, but I also think that, unlike many in government or the media, I don’t ascribe to people’s loftier motives just because they’re in a loftier place.

It seems to me that after the terrorist attacks in 2001, Charlie panicked. And Arnold, who had a professional history with these countries, who had already sparred a decade before with the dictator of one, swiftly stepped in with recommendations. He was hawkish, he believed in America protecting its superpower status, and he was confident of victory. He convinced Charlie, or Charlie convinced himself—establishing democracy in the Middle East, what a legacy that would be—and the rest has followed. The part that caught me by surprise was how the American people and the American media egged him on, how complicit they were in Charlie’s cultivation of a war-president persona. The terrorist attacks have given President Blackwell a heretofore undemonstrated seriousness of purpose, averred Time. Or, as The Washington Post put it, If there is a silver lining to these tragic events, it’s that President Blackwell has risen to the occasion as a leader . . . In the Times, an unsigned editorial was titled simply “Blackwell’s Finest Hour.” Had none of these people ever taken Psychology 101? Did they honestly believe Charlie, or anybody, changed in a matter of days? Did they think because, amid the rubble in lower Manhattan, he climbed atop a fire truck and spoke into a megaphone with resolve and sympathy, he was a new man? Charlie had always had the capacity for resolve and sympathy, which had nothing to do with whether invading other countries was a good idea.

I don’t mean to minimize how frightening the terrorist attacks were, how confused everything seemed in their aftermath. We all thought, of course, that the fourth plane was headed for the White House that day, and so they hurried me and Arnold Prouhet to Camp David on helicopters (Charlie was giving a speech in Ohio to a real estate association, a speech he famously declined to interrupt, and I didn’t see him until that night; when we hugged, when I had him in my arms, it was the first time since learning of the attacks that I wept). Even after we returned to the White House, we were evacuated several more times during the next few days, and once, in the middle of the night, we were rushed by agents from our bedroom to the Emergency Operations Center, an underground bunker beneath the White House. Then there were anthrax spores being sent through the mail, the threat of smallpox bombs. Charlie and I visited Pentagon burn victims, and later we met family members of men and women killed in New York, among them young children, and every morning I read the Times’s “Portraits of Grief ”—I read them all, and they were devastating. So it was a strange, difficult time, and we were in the thick of it. I don’t doubt that both Arnold and Charlie had to harden in certain ways during this period, that their toughness wasn’t just masculine bluster; it was interior as well, and for the benefit of others.

Nevertheless, I feel a growing suspicion that Charlie continues to fight this war for much the same reason I couldn’t bring myself to reenter the ladies’ room at the Maronee Country Club, and he even has my compassion, except for this—that night at the club, when I needed to urinate and hadn’t, the only one who suffered for my foolishness was me.

RIGHT BEFORE OUR plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, I said to Jessica, “I have one more stop for us before going home. I’d like to go talk to Edgar Franklin.”

Jessica’s eyes widened. “Now?”

“I promise this’ll be it.”

“It’s just that, I don’t know how long you’d envision talking to him, but the gala starts an hour and a half from now. As it is, you’ll have to get dressed at warp speed.”

“Are you trying to tell me you think going to see him is a bad idea?”

“No—no, I—” She broke off. The two of us were sitting with our seat belts fastened for landing. “Hank will kill me for saying this, but I think it’s a great idea. I just think tomorrow is better than today.”

“He’s spent five nights out there. That’s long enough.”

Jessica looked at me for several seconds, and then she said, “Okay.”

“Only tell the agents. I don’t want to try getting Charlie’s blessing, or Hank’s, because we both know they’ll try to talk me out of it.”

And this is how we’ve found ourselves racing up Suitland Parkway in our caravan of armored limousines. (Although I prefer the SUVs to the limos because they seem slightly less ostentatious, limos are what the White House sent; that I could have gone to Edgar Franklin in a Town Car was, I knew, out of the question, far too great a security risk.) The flickering lights and blasting sirens create the usual mortifying theatricality, but I don’t see another option. I would not be authorized on my own to invite Edgar Franklin to the White House, and if I suggested it, even if I could convince Charlie and his advisers that it was the right thing, it would have to be elaborately choreographed.

I got off easy—that’s what it feels like. That Gladys Wycomb’s threat was a false alarm has left me relieved but also disappointed. I wouldn’t say that I’m compelled to go see Colonel Franklin because of a need to exchange one revelation for another—so the American public can learn today not about my abortion but instead about my sympathies for an antiwar activist—but being forced to consider Gladys Wycomb’s threat made the threat less ominous than it would have appeared in the abstract; it made it almost enticing. I have felt so strongly since Charlie entered public office that my foremost duty is to take care of him, to be the one person he sees on a daily basis who’s not paid to agree or disagree with him, who really is just a friend. Is it startling, then, that I wasn’t altogether displeased by an event that would draw attention to my disagreement with his stance on a particular issue without my being the one who’d revealed our conflicting views? Could that have been the best of both worlds, that I could publicly and even privately lament Dr. Wycomb’s indiscretion while feeling a silent gratitude?

Such circuitous conjecture! If, for example, Ella came to me explaining herself in this way, wouldn’t I say to her, “For heaven’s sake, you’re allowed to hold opinions.” Wouldn’t I say, “A relationship for which you suppress and censor your beliefs is no relationship at all.” Wouldn’t I say, “There are perfectly ladylike and respectable ways of expressing yourself, no matter the subject, no matter the context, and though in some cases, biting your tongue is the most dignified course, if it’s a matter of conscience, then to speak out is not just optional but necessary”—wouldn’t this be what I thought if the person in question were someone other than me?

The motorcade pauses when we’re still over two blocks from the yard on Fourth Street SE, and via earpieces, there is much conferring among the agents in our limousine, the agents in the others, and the police escorts; I can hear the word Banjo, which is their code name for me (Charlie’s is Brass, Ella’s Braid—the Secret Service gave us the letter, and we picked our own names, though I let Ella pick mine). In our car, it’s still Cal and Walter who are with us in the back, plus José and another agent in the front seat. Both Jessica’s phones ring at once—she has already called to tell her assistant Belinda to put out the word that we’re running late but on our way—and then I glimpse, even from this distance, the television news vans, their satellite uplinks reaching high above the roofs of the row houses. Cars are parked tightly on either side of the street, and up ahead, I see that the sidewalks are dense with people, some of them holding signs.

Cal says, “Ma’am, we can’t recommend going farther. There’s too much congestion. With your approval, we’d like to return to the residence.”

Jessica and I look at each other.

“Isn’t there any way—” I begin, and Jessica says to Cal, “What about inviting Edgar Franklin into the car?”

Speaking in a low voice into his lapel, Cal says, “We’re turning onto D Street.”

“What about Jessica’s idea?” I ask.

“The risk of a mob is too great,” Cal says, and we’re already on D Street, the police sirens still blaring.

I say, “No, stop. Cal, I insist. We can park on another block, and you can barricade the whole street, but if he’d consider coming to the car, I want to try.”

Somehow I hadn’t realized what a circus it would be—it doesn’t look as crowded on television, or maybe more supporters have arrived today. In my fantasy, it was the two of us, Edgar Franklin and me, strolling down the sidewalk, which was delusional in any case, because for years, I have rarely strolled down a sidewalk unless it has been cordoned off, sniffed for bombs by German shepherds.

Jessica is the one who climbs from the limousine to issue the invitation; agents from the other cars flank her as she walks the two blocks to the yard where Edgar Franklin has pitched his tent. Brave Jessica Sutton, the little girl who played with Barbies on the kitchen floor at Harold and Priscilla’s house, who read Harlequin romances when she was in sixth grade, who went on to graduate second in her class at Biddle Academy and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, who has traveled with me to Israel and South Africa, who is my most steadfast colleague, my truest friend. She retrieves Edgar Franklin, and she brings him back to me; then, as he is patted down by Walter before climbing through the limo door, Jessica says, “I’ll be right over there,” and gestures to the limousine behind mine.

He sits perpendicular to me, our knees only inches apart, the soupy outside heat emanating from him. At the far end of the limousine, facing us with his back to the front seat, Cal watches. It would surely be too much to hope that this conversation could go entirely unobserved.

I say, “Colonel Franklin, I’m Alice Blackwell.”

“Edgar Franklin.”

We extend our hands and shake.

“I wanted to come out and talk to you, but unfortunately, that wasn’t going to work,” I say.

With a vaguely amused look, he surveys the interior of the limousine and says, “This isn’t so bad.” (I again wish it were an SUV.)

“Would you like some water?” I lift an unopened bottle from the holder beside me, and he accepts it. “Colonel Franklin, I’m not authorized to speak on behalf of President Blackwell’s administration, I need to make that clear. I’m here only as myself. But I want you to know that I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I’m aware that your son—that Nate was an only child. I’m also the parent of an only child, and I can’t begin to guess how difficult it must be for you.”

Matter-of-factly, not snidely, he says, “No, ma’am, I don’t imagine that you can.”

“He was twenty-one?”

Edgar Franklin nods. “Planning to be a pharmacy technician after his tour.”

“My grandfather worked in a pharmacy,” I say. “I never knew him, unfortunately, but this was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I understand that you’re from Georgia?”

“We moved around when Nate was growing up, including a couple years each in Germany and Panama, but he went to high school in Columbus, Georgia. I’m retired now and live in Decatur.” Edgar Franklin clears his throat. “Mrs. Blackwell, I’m a quiet man. It was never my plan to draw attention to myself, but this war is the worst mistake I’ve seen the United States make in my lifetime.”

“Obviously, it’s caused a great deal of controversy.”

“Why are we fighting, Mrs. Blackwell? What is it we’re fighting for?”

“Again, I don’t speak for the administration, but if you asked my husband, I think he’d say for democracy.”