Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twenty-nine

The news that I would be accepting the fellowship and leaving for Stanford in the fall of 1980 was greeted with a mixture of pride and sadness by my parents. Despite the fact that the Stanford fellowship was for only one year, Daddy sensed that I would never return to Denver, and that made him very sad.

It was also a time of uncertainty in my father’s life. While Daddy was increasingly active and well regarded as a community leader, things were changing at the university. Chancellor Mitchell, who’d been Daddy’s strong mentor and friend, had retired in the spring of 1978, and the new chancellor was not particularly close to my father. For the first time in my memory, Daddy felt professionally vulnerable. He sought out other employment opportunities, but no one wanted to hire a man in his late fifties.

Daddy’s health was also a growing concern. Like many former athletes, my father had very bad knees, and as he got older he stopped exercising and gained weight. At the age of fifty-four he was diagnosed with both high blood pressure and diabetes. His father had died of a heart attack. Yet Daddy simply couldn’t muster the willpower to lose weight. The two of us clashed regularly about his eating habits, but he just couldn’t give up the fried food—pork chops, in particular—of his Southern upbringing.

Nonetheless, we both knew that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to go to Stanford. I decided to defer until the winter quarter, however. I took a part-time job in Denver in order to make a little more money before I left for the fellowship. I also wanted to give my parents—and, frankly, myself—a little more time to get used to the idea of a departure that might be permanent.

I called Stanford to tell the director of the arms control program, John Lewis, that I would come in January. John said that it would be no problem to defer but invited me out to Palo Alto for a November conference so that I could get acquainted with everyone.

When I arrived at Stanford, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and unnerved by its reputation. Stanford’s 8,180 acres, set against the foothills of northern California, were once the farm of Senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford. In 1885, the Stanfords donated the land for a university that would honor their only child, who’d died of typhoid fever at sixteen. The university is thus colloquially called “the Farm.” It was a good regional university until the mid-1950s, when its reputation skyrocketed, particularly in the sciences and engineering. By 1980 it was an elite university whose only real peers resided in the Ivy League.

That first morning I walked from the Faculty Club, where I was staying, to Galvez House, where the arms control program was located. As I made my way along the long colonnade flanked with sandstone columns, I felt a level of insecurity that I’d never felt before and have never felt since. I’d been slowly climbing out of the obscurity of the University of Denver, but I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to become a doctoral fellow at Stanford. A part of me wondered if the university had made a mistake.

Galvez House was a dumpy one-story sandstone building that had once been a dormitory for university laborers. The other fellows, including three women, greeted me. It seems that the Stanford arms control program had never had a woman fellow before 1980. Now it had four: Janne Nolan, Gloria Duffy, Cynthia Roberts, and me. There was a subtle competitiveness between us but also a sense of shared sisterhood as we talked about building careers in the male-dominated field of national security policy. Together with the assistant director, Chip Blacker, we’d form a tight bond. I knew that when I returned in the winter, I’d feel right at home.

The time until my departure for Palo Alto went by swiftly. I continued to work on my dissertation, trying to finish as much as I could before departing. There were also a lot of farewells to my friends. But as January approached, I could hardly wait to go.

Two days after the New Year, I came home one day to find Mother lying on the sofa, clearly in distress from horrendous stomach pains. She went up to bed, but in the middle of the night, my father came into my room and said that Mother’s temperature had spiked to 103 degrees. He was going to take her to the emergency room. I didn’t want to delay them and said that I’d meet him at the hospital.

Sitting in the waiting room, my father and I prayed. My mother was a cancer survivor, and both of us immediately worried that this illness might somehow be related. Those fears were reinforced when my mother’s physician, Dr. Hamilton, came out to say that the imaging showed a large unidentifiable mass in her abdomen. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but I’m going to get it out. Now!”

“Dr. Hamilton, could it be related to her cancer?” I asked.

“I just don’t know,” he replied, and rushed off down the hall to prep my mom for surgery.

Waiting rooms outside of surgical units are, to my mind, the most unpleasant places on earth. You sit and read magazines, the substance of which you care nothing about and of which you remember nothing. My father and I sat together watching the hands move glacially on the black-rimmed clock on the wall.

Finally Dr. Hamilton came out. I could see the relief on his face immediately. Mother had suffered a burst appendix several days before. He explained that this was causing toxins to spread through her system, setting off a raging infection and thus the high temperature. The appendix had actually broken into two parts, resulting in the weird image that he’d seen on the ultrasound. “She’ll be fine, but she is going to be pretty sick for a while,” he said.

I was scheduled to leave for Palo Alto a few days later. Mother, still weak and very frail, insisted that I go. When I boarded the plane, she was out of intensive care but still very sick. It wasn’t the way that I wanted to start my new life in Palo Alto. But each time I called, she sounded better. I was relieved when she was finally home, and I resolved to go back to Denver within a couple of months—just to see for myself.