“Really?” There was such unconcealed relief on his face that I laughed.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “of course. It’s not what I ever imagined, but I’ve thought about this, too.”
“The things you care about, children’s rights and women’s rights—you could do a world of good as first lady of Arkansas and practice law at the same time. You could be a whole new kind of first lady.”
I laughed again. “You’re already governor now? I thought Congress or attorney general was first.”
But Bill was serious as he said, “I wouldn’t be showing you respect if I didn’t think about this in the long term.”
“If you were governor, do you really think people there would accept a first lady who worked?”
“It wouldn’t be their choice. And you’d be such a role model.”
“The thing about if you ran for Congress is that, couldn’t we both live in Washington and you’d go back and forth?”
“It’s absolutely a possibility, but that race in the Third District—I’d be the underdog. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.”
How surreal this was, that we’d been a couple for only two months, and talking about where we’d live next felt responsible rather than rash; it felt headily grown-up.
“I want to be a good man,” Bill said. “It probably sounds corny, but I want to be honorable. I want to be an honorable elected official, an honorable father, and an honorable husband.”
“I’m sure you will be.”
“I know I’m far from perfect. Sometimes I really can hear the angel and the devil arguing on my shoulders.”
I reached up and tapped my fingers against his left shoulder. “Which one is on this side?”
He gripped my hand in his. He said, “I don’t want to lose you.”
* * *
—
I realized only when it didn’t happen that I’d imagined Gwen and I would discuss Bill right away, as soon as I got in her car, and then I realized only when it also didn’t happen that I’d imagined she’d be as effusive about him as he’d been about her. Instead, Gwen and I talked in detail about the conference in Hartford, the focus of which was children who weren’t attending school because of disabilities or, as we called them then, handicaps. One of Gwen’s goals in the next year was to collect statistics on how many such children there were in the state of Connecticut.
We were past Wallingford by the time I said, “Bill really enjoyed meeting you last night.”
Warmly, she said, “Isn’t he something?” But I knew her well enough that I immediately wondered if—it seemed almost impossible—she hadn’t liked him.
“He thought your family was great,” I said.
“I certainly learned a lot about Arkansas,” she replied, and her odd tone—I couldn’t ignore it.
I said, “Did you not like him?” The only time I could remember disagreeing with Gwen about anything was when I’d said my favorite Supremes song was “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and she’d said their best song was “Someday We’ll Be Together.”
In the car, she said, “Richard thinks he’s brilliant. He just talked so much. This is what he did on Joe Duffey’s campaign and this is what he’s doing for McGovern and he’ll serve in Arkansas where he’s most needed and at some point I thought, You could let someone else get a word in edgewise.”
“He does like to talk,” I said. “That’s true. But I’ve also found him to be a great listener.”
“What I think of him matters a lot less than what you think.”
“Maybe he was trying to impress you because he knows how much I look up to you.”
She was quiet before saying, “Some people who run for office want to create change, and some want everyone to fall in love with them.”
“Bill wants to create change,” I said, and I didn’t like the thin, defensive sound of my own voice. “I’m certain of it.”
* * *
—
The following afternoon, Bill met me outside the clinic and as we cut across campus, I said, “Katherine told me Pan Am is having a sale on flights to San Francisco, and I’d love for you to come visit me this summer. I’ll split the price of the ticket with you.”
“How am I supposed to survive being apart from you for a whole goddamn summer?” Bill sounded genuinely unhappy.
“That’s very flattering, but you did a respectable job of making it through the first twenty-four years of your life without me.”
“It might have been less respectable than I’ve led you to believe.” But he grinned. “Fuck McGovern. I’m coming with you.”
I glanced at him. “To Oakland? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“There’ll be other campaigns,” he said. “But there’s only one Hillary Rodham.”
“I’ll be back in three months.”
“What if your feelings about me change? What if a hippie in Haight-Ashbury with a daisy in his hair sweeps you off your feet?”
“That doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Then what if it’s a needle-nose law clerk?”
We were passing a dorm outside of which two undergrads were tossing a football as I said, “I wonder if there’s a campaign you could work on out there.”
“Or I can take a sabbatical. I have some money saved. I could read and explore.”
“But you’ll make a lot of valuable connections working for McGovern.”
“You think I’m teasing,” he said. “But there really is only one Hillary Rodham.”
“I can’t imagine anything more fun than spending the summer together, but I don’t think it’s fair to ask that of you.”
“You’re not asking.”
“I mean that I don’t think it’s in your long-term best interest.”
A silence arose between us, filled with the hum of the campus, which was, like that of Wellesley, absurdly beautiful: A nearby dogwood tree filled the air with a sweet spring scent. Bill’s voice was serious when he spoke again. He said, “I really don’t think you understand. All this time, I needed you. I needed you, and I was looking for you, and now I never want to let you go.”
* * *
—
The day of my Corporate Tax exam, I took my seat in the auditorium, set my satchel down at my feet, then reached into it to remove a pencil. I saw the scrap of paper then, torn from a lined notebook. Just three words were written on it, in blue ink: I cherish you. It was nine-twenty in the morning, and the exam would last for three hours and consist of three essay questions.
The part of this that I’m struck by now, decades later, is that I felt so flush with Bill’s love, so ensconced in our relationship, so confident of its durability, that the note didn’t seem significant. Earlier that very semester, I had been uncertain I’d ever meet a man I could truly love and be loved by, and already Bill was such a fixture of my days that being showered with his affection was sweet but unremarkable. Did I imagine that my life would be full of such emotional extravagance? I must have, because to save the note did not occur to me.
CHAPTER 2
1971
BILL WAS DOING IT—INSTEAD OF working for the McGovern campaign for the summer, he was going with me to California, and we were driving there in his orange Opel station wagon. On our final night in New Haven, he slept at my apartment and rose at six in the morning to go back to Milford and pick up his duffel bag and books, with the plan of returning to me by 8:00 A.M. so we could get on the road. In fact, he returned to my apartment closer to noon. Though he didn’t come out and say it, it became clear he hadn’t begun packing until that morning, but how could I be irritated with him? He was giving up so much for me.
It would be a fifteen-hour drive from New Haven to Park Ridge, Illinois, where we were stopping to visit my family: through the southern parts of Connecticut and New York then across the entirety of Pennsylva
nia, northern Ohio and Indiana, and around the tip of Lake Michigan. Because of our late start, we decided to spend the first night in a Howard Johnson’s outside Akron; it occurred to us that the clerk at the front desk might not rent a room to an unmarried man and woman, so I waited in the car while Bill entered the lobby to pay the twenty dollars. The May sky darkened as I sat in the passenger seat.
After Bill had the key, which was attached to an orange-and-blue plastic tag, we drove forty feet to park facing the room’s exterior door. The room itself was Spartan, with a sink outside the bathroom proper. We both used the toilet, after which I washed my face as well as my hands, and I thought we’d get dinner right away, but as I was drying my hands, Bill approached me from behind, placed his palms on my shoulders and began kissing the side of my neck. It still was astonishing to see our reflection in the mirror, to see what we looked like together—his bent head, his taller body behind mine, his beard against the skin on my neck. Would it always be astonishing or would I become accustomed to it? I turned around so we could kiss on the lips, and he tugged me toward the bed and very quickly we were lying down, entangled and unclothed. We ate dinner afterward in the adjacent diner—meatloaf for Bill and a tuna sandwich for me—and by the time we finished, it was nearly eleven.
In the morning, we drove for six hours, and suddenly we were just minutes from my childhood home, at the intersection where my friend Maureen’s brother had once thrown a rock at a car, then passing the house where I had taken piano lessons from a woman named Mrs. Cacchione. I was the one driving, turning onto Wisner Street, approaching the yellow-hued brick house where we’d moved in 1950, and my heart was beating quickly. The self I was with Bill felt both true and aspirational, the self I most wished to be: worldly and beloved. Whereas the self I was with my family was less mature and more contradictory, pulled between the tensions of my mother believing me capable of anything and my father expressing little support or interest. When Life magazine had excerpted my Wellesley commencement address and sent a photographer to my family’s house to take my picture, his sole comment was “If they’re printing your words, they should pay you.” And when I’d called to tell my parents I’d chosen Yale, he said with confidence, “Yale is the Ivy League school where the homosexuals go.” In my youth, I had respected my father’s intelligence, not recognizing how much sharper my mother’s was because hers was concealed by being pleasant and female. In the last six years, I’d undergone a slow but nearly complete shift from taking his opinions seriously to disregarding them, which had had the strange effect of making me more deferential. I no longer saw arguing with him as worth the effort.
I parked on the street in front of the house, and as I turned off the ignition, I looked over at Bill and forced a smile. “Ready?”
“What a beautiful neighborhood,” Bill said. On this sunny afternoon in mid-May, I agreed—Wisner was an avenue of large houses, tall trees, and well-tended lawns. He set his fingers on my right knee and said, “Don’t be nervous, baby. I’ll love them because they’re your family, and I love you.” I said nothing, and he added, “Do you love me?”
“Oh, God,” I said. “So much.”
We walked up the flagstone path to the arched front door, and though I owned a key, I had no idea where it was. After I’d rung the bell, I could hear my brother Tony yelling, and then my mother opened the door and was in front of us in a pale-blue sleeveless blouse and a pleated black skirt and she was hugging me then hugging Bill and my father was behind her in khaki pants and a brown button-down, saying, “Nice of you to stop by while you were in the neighborhood.” When we’d stepped inside, I hugged my father, and Bill shook his hand, and Tony, who was sixteen, materialized in the front hall and also shook Bill’s hand and embraced me. My other brother, Hughie, was twenty then and still finishing his junior year at Penn State, which was where our father had gone.
Bill’s tallness in my childhood home, Bill’s Southern accent, Bill’s warmth and charisma—it was profoundly strange. In the kitchen, my mother gave us each a glass of water, and Tony said to me, “Did you hear the Cubs had a walk-off win last night?” Bill was complimenting my mother on our home. My mother seemed to regard him with a hopeful and slightly amused curiosity, and my father seemed to regard him with a slightly amused suspicion.
“We’re going to Vandy’s tonight,” Tony said and wiggled his eyebrows in a way I understood to be a reference to how expensive Vandy’s was; it was a steakhouse where we’d been just a handful of times in my life.
“Because heaven forbid a Rhodes scholar eat Hamburger Helper,” my father said.
Cheerfully, Bill said, “As I’m sure you can tell by looking at me, I’m happy as a clam eating absolutely anything, including Hamburger Helper. For that matter, including clams.”
“Our reservation is at six,” my mother said. “Is that all right? Bill, do you like steak?”
“I love steak!” Bill said. “That sounds terrific.”
“Your beard,” my father said to him. “Do you find that it makes people wonder if you’re a communist?”
Bill grinned. “Not usually.”
* * *
—
We spent the afternoon walking around the neighborhood, then I took Bill on a driving tour of Park Ridge, including my elementary, middle, and high schools. At five, we met my friend Maureen for ice-cream cones at Benzer’s, and Bill got two scoops. Maureen was a nurse at Baptist Hospital and lived with her parents, which she said was making her crazy. The three of us sat on Benzer’s rickety chairs at a tiny white marble table.
Bill said to Maureen, “Do I get to hear what Hillary was like before she was the amazing woman she is now?”
“Hillary was always amazing,” Maureen said. “In grade school, she was already raising money for United Way.”
“That wasn’t until junior high,” I said, and both Maureen and Bill laughed. Maureen leaned forward and squeezed my hand. “Also, she’s always been opinionated for a girl.”
“That’s what I love about her,” Bill said.
My eyes met Maureen’s, and she set one hand over her heart.
When Bill stood to get a napkin, Maureen mouthed to me, He’s so good-looking. Then, either for emphasis or for our amusement, she fanned herself.
* * *
—
Opening the menu at Vandy’s and seeing that the osso buco cost six dollars and the filet mignon eight dollars made me nervous; surely my stingy father wouldn’t let us enjoy such a meal without some form of punishment.
After a waitress whose name tag read ANGELA had taken our drink orders—bourbon for my father, scotch for my mother, beer for Bill and me, Coke for Tony—Bill cheerfully said, “Mr. Rodham, please tell me everything I don’t know about the drapery business.”
“I assume you know nothing about it,” my father said.
“Bill, what led you to Yale?” my mother asked.
“It wasn’t an easy decision. At one point I joined the ROTC and signed up to attend law school at the University of Arkansas, but I reconsidered and entered the draft again. I still have mixed feelings about getting a high draft number. On the other hand, in college, I was a clerk for the Foreign Relations Committee, and I was privy to papers that a lot of Americans don’t even know exist, with information that muddies the water even more about our involvement.”
My father made a snorting noise. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he’d joined the navy and served in Illinois, at Naval Station Great Lakes. When he and I had argued about the Vietnam War in the past—I thought it was imperialist, he thought it would stanch communism—I’d never had the nerve to say that I thought not having seen action undermined his credibility.
Quickly, before the conversation could get derailed, my mother said to Bill, “Did you grow up in Little Rock?”
“In Hot Springs,” Bill said. “I’ve been telling Hillary what a fantastic p
lace it is.”
As the waitress set down our drinks, he detailed its charms—Hernando de Soto, the Ouachita Mountains, watermelons—and I thought about how it wasn’t that Bill wouldn’t let someone else dominate the conversation, more that he couldn’t. Yes, he retained a boyishness that made him deferential around, say, a particularly august professor. But you could always feel Bill’s impending, increasing charisma, how if he wasn’t the smartest and most charming man in a room, he would be soon. I was looking at the menu when I heard my father summon the waitress back and say, “Angela, there’s a problem.”
I glanced up and saw a peculiar sight: My father had inserted a thermometer into his glass of ice water. The bulb was pointed down, the mercury rising to less than midway up the capillary. He then removed the thermometer, peered at it in a theatrical way, and said, “This says that my water is forty-eight degrees, but the ideal temperature for hydration is between fifty-five and seventy degrees.”
With evident confusion, the waitress said, “Would you—would you like me to replace it?”
“Yes, with water between fifty-five and seventy degrees.”
“I’ll replace it right away, sir.”
As the waitress carried away his glass and the thermometer dripped on the tablecloth, Tony was snickering; my mother looked irritated in a way that mirrored my own irritation; and Bill observed the proceedings with an open smile, as if my father was making an intelligent observation about a worthy subject. Oh, how I wished Bill and I were back on the road, on the highway at dusk, just us and a staticky radio.
The most striking parts of my father’s performance were how apparently premeditated it was and how not funny it was. Taking the temperature of water in a restaurant wasn’t some sort of shtick with him, and I’d never seen him do it. But the general impulse to destabilize a group, to reclaim attention and make life mildly unpleasant for everyone—these were tendencies I knew well.
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