And she could feel Gary’s sense of power growing, the unease slipping off him. He’d made the grade, with Prescott, with his friends, with her, with her friends ... and now, he was looking onward. He would not stop. She knew that about him, without talking. So much had changed: the stars of Prescott’s circle moved on in time, Dale Tuttle, Don Conway, Tom Boyd ... and now, quietly, with unstated authority, Gary was the leader. Now he was president of the junior class, and he didn’t even run—not really. His friends put him up ... and he accepted. Now he’d moved in from The Barracks; he was a counselor in a campus dorm. There were younger men now, who’d come to his room, to listen to the talks there about the Great Questions. That was the spring Gary got a car—Carl had a Buick he let Gary take to school ... and then, they weren’t scrambling for double dates. They could go where they wanted ... together.
And he stood again, that spring, for president of the student council. Talmadge’s term was ending, and this time, there was almost no contest. Friends put Gary’s name up, and he won. People knew him, see, and admired him. And she was pleased she’d had something to do with that, with his own growing ease ... so he could be himself. He’d told her—this meant a lot to Oletha—with her, he could be himself.
That was the wonderful thing.
And so, in the spring, at the Junior-Senior Banquet (it was always banquets for the Nazarenes, as eating was the only licit sensual event), when Gary was emcee, as president of the junior class, he stood up at the head table and read his announcement, to Bethany and the world, that he and Oletha were engaged to be married ... and there was no surprise in that room, just great applause and joy.
Oletha always remembered that last year as a busy time, not especially romantic. She and Gary had moved beyond the point of decision. Now they were making plans.
Big plans: Gary had applied, almost on a flier (at least that’s how he talked about it) to Yale, to the finest divinity school in the country. It was eastern, urban, Ivy League, it was the big time.
He pushed on that door ... and it swung open. Just as he’d imagined, just like they talked about. And there was quite a bit to talk about. They’d be married, that summer, after graduation. (S.T. Ludwig would give the graduation speech.) Then, a short honeymoon, and they’d drive east. Yale would offer Gary financial help ... but it wasn’t going to be easy. They wanted to get to New Haven in time for Oletha to find a job.
But first things first—there was a wedding, her wedding! A big church wedding—First Church, Kansas City—and five bridesmaids, and her sister, Martha, would be maid of honor. (Dale Tuttle, Bethany’s leading actor, would serve as Gary’s best man.) Meanwhile, she was a senior, and she had her solo drama recital, and there were parties, and the banquet, of course, and graduation ... well, she was awfully busy.
As for Gary, he would remember that year as a quiet time. Perhaps it was his first and most languorous moment of attainment, of pause, looking to the next hill.
He was going to Yale, with the best of the best. Would he make the grade?
Bethany ... well, he had that licked. He had a pretty sweet deal that last year. His position as student body president afforded him tuition. His room and board were free, as a resident counselor in a campus dorm. He even had a job as campus mailman—that earned him pocket money. He had the Buick, he had his girl ... not just a girl, the campus queen.
He felt he’d come to some peace with that campus—or at least an understanding. The deans didn’t look at him like a bomb-thrower anymore. They knew he was serious, maybe even fair-minded. And if he liked, from time to time, to poke the powers with some uneasy questions, well ... at that point, it was mostly for fun. In his own mind, he had moved on. That was his way with attainments.
Gary and Oletha wrote their own wedding vows (which raised a few eyebrows in 1958).
Then there was a week in the Ozarks, and off to New Haven, where Oletha did find a job—at the Yale registrar’s office. It gave her a window into their new school.
And it was awfully exciting, the new school, new city, the new world. She even got a new name with her new job: they just couldn’t handle Oletha, so they called her Lee—and somehow that fit. Everything was new, see ...
Lee saw her first movie, Walt Disney’s White Wilderness. And she had her first glass of wine, and got her first pair of earrings: faux pearls surrounded by tiny paste diamonds. It was the first time she could wear jewelry ... that is, if they had someplace to go.
Mostly, their life was constrained by the limits of her salary ($199 a month) and by Gary’s work. He worked hard (though within months he was not too sure he ever wanted to teach), and thought hard, and read constantly, working through the Great Questions. So much was new, even to him—the Divinity School was peopled with all stripes of seeker: Protestants, Catholics, foreigners! ... When they’d get together, it was pig heaven for Gary, who wanted to know ... everything.
It was hard for Lee, those discussions—the boys arguing and one-upping each other like philosophic toreadors. (So, I said to him, “Well, if you countenance teleology ...” Haw!) Like any graduate students, or med students, or other bores, their world was The World ... they were in thrall to its tiny fascinations.
And the funny thing was, it was because of how hard she’d thought about the way she was ... she wouldn’t play her old social games—those little ruses, what were they for? Gary was always reminding her, when she’d say something stupid, like about how somebody looked, or dressed: “Now, Lee,” he’d say, or, “Lee-ee ... we don’t need any of that.” But it was hard to have a new way to play, just like that. And the way Gary’s conversations flew, with those jousting boys ... well, she really didn’t feel she had the background. (She’d only taken one philosophy course, and she thought she’d only got through because Gary was grading the papers.) And anyway, she wasn’t reading all day, she was working, and working hard.
So a lot of times, she wouldn’t talk. It was fine, she’d say. She’d just listen. ... But somehow, even listening was hard. It was easy to get lost, and she did not want to ask anything dumb—not then. So, mostly, she was quiet. And she’d say, if she did speak, that it wasn’t just her—Gary always said ...
And often, it was something Gary had said about what she did, or the funny way she acted. That was always the safest thing, some funny self-deprecation. She really did remember everything he said, and she’d think about it, too, whenever the same thing came up.
She only wished he’d say more—he got so wrapped up in thought. Like she wasn’t even there! After that first year at Yale, they were driving back to the Midwest—two cars, the Hartpences and the Boyds. That was Tom Boyd, and his wife, Beverly, friends from Bethany who’d also moved on to Yale. And somewhere beyond the Appalachians, they stopped at a station, Gary hit the men’s room, and Lee came up to the Boyds’ car to chat ... but not idly. Lee wanted to know:
“Let me ask you something. Do you two talk?”
They stared at her, murmured: “Well, yeah ... sure.”
“Well, what do you talk about?”
It was hard to say, exactly.
Lee said: “We haven’t said a word. We just sit there. I don’t know how to talk.”
Sometimes, Gary wondered why Oletha, why Lee, did not have that ease that was her accustomed grace ... but he didn’t say anything. Not to her.
One day, at lunch in the Divinity School basement, he said to his friend Tom Boyd:
“It’s so strange ... you go to the school you’re supposed to, and you date the kind of person you’re supposed to marry, you get married. ... And you wake up six months later, and you say, ‘What am I doing?’ ...”
But Tom knew (he was an old hand at marriage—three years!—he’d gone through the same thing), it wasn’t that Gary didn’t love Lee, it was just ... he was questioning everything.
To Gary, it was just ... everything was different: it was Bethany that now seemed another world, a smaller world, a narrow place. Gary and Lee went a couple of times to t
he Nazarene Church in New Haven, but it was ... well, it was nothing: it was no more sophisticated than the church on Seventh Street in Ottawa!
It was almost funny, for Gary to look back ... at that church, his little college ... it was so strange, how they shrank, as he moved outward ... it would be funny—if it weren’t tragic.
Years later, he would still be startled—shocked—when confronted again with the power of those places, the grip they had on some people’s lives ... even when they tried to wriggle free.
Don Conway, God bless him, killed himself while he was doing graduate study at Berkeley, in 1967. ... Then, Dale Tuttle, Gary’s best man, killed himself in 1971. ... They were brilliant, both, the best of the best. Dale was likely gay. He suffered with it terribly. Don ... well, who could know? But whatever it was, they could not turn away from the dark battle with their imperfect selves, their failures, their humanness. That was the Bethany disease: that morose, myopic self-investigation that never ended, never stopped cutting away inside. ... And here was the horrible cosmic joke: it happened to the best! ... Well, it would not happen to Gary.
He was not going to turn that diamond bit on himself. He was faced determinedly outward, to the wider world. He would not stop now—would not stop ever—to peer into, to pick apart the layers of his life. That was morbid. It was obsessive. It was not what his life was about!
And Bethany—well, he would not soon go back. (Not even when Lee did, in 1984.) And he would not look back. He would not concede it any hold on him. Not for years, anyway ... not even to recognize the comic twist, the cosmic joke that God and Bethany played on him: he fell in love with Oletha Ludwig for her queenly ease, never knowing—how could he know?—that past Bethany she would so seldom find it again.
23
Family Values
IT WAS AT DINNER, two nights before announcement, that Dick made them all sign. There was a form he had to fill out for the Federal Election Commission—a notice that he was seeking the office of President. But instead of just signing, he brought it to dinner, passed it around. He wanted Jane to sign, and each of his three kids ... Dick called it their “bond.”
This bit of family hardball was mostly aimed at Matt. Already, Gephardt had worked it around to where Matt asked him to run. But this sealed the deal. It was like cosponsors in the House. (What do you mean, you don’t know? Your name’s on the bill!) Dick was so sure: Matt would learn a lot, it would take his mind off things. ... Wasn’t it exciting already?
Everyone was flying into St. Louis: from Long Island, brother Don and his wife, Nancy, and their kids, and Cassells from all over, and Gephardts—cousins no one had seen for years ... and old friends, guys from Northwestern, and law school at Michigan ... and from Washington, a whole planeload took off, despite a killer snowstorm. The chartered DC-9 would cost the young campaign something like thirty thousand dollars, but on the big day, Monday, February 23, there would be twenty-one Congressmen standing behind Dick. That was backing from all over the country, entrée into a score of states. And why not? Dick Gephardt was one of their own, a man of the House, a guy who would play ball, to make the system work.
Anyway, the money would be there: that was obvious now. The campaign had scheduled a fund-raiser dinner for the night of announcement at the Adam’s Mark Hotel, sent out invitations ... and money poured in. They banked a quarter-million in two weeks! (There were some years Gephardt hadn’t raised a quarter-million.) They had a hundred takers on the predinner cocktails-with-Dick ... at a thousand dollars a pop! By the weekend before announcement, there was more than a half-million committed. No one had ever bled St. Louis like that. The campaign reserved a second banquet room with TV monitors, so people could watch Dick’s thank-you speech. And still, Loreen was working the phones, calling the members of Third Baptist Church, and the Cub Scout moms, to make sure they were coming—how about the dinner? (“If there’s one empty seat,” Loreen explained, “that’s what the cameras will show.” Dick’s mom was a woman of faith—not naïveté.)
And that was just part of the hubbub: there was Meet the Press the Sunday before, and Today and Good Morning America on announcement day, and a segment on MacNeil/Lehrer, not to mention the St. Louis shows. And Sunday night, the bunting went up in Union Station, and the high school bands came out for practice, and there were volunteers hanging signs in the rafters, crawling over the stage, taping wires, mult-boxes, and microphones. The volunteers were coming out of the woodwork at Joyce Aboussie, who was the honcho of announcement day. She’d expected twenty-five—if they got lucky—and by that last weekend she was trying to find work for a hundred. And these were not high school kids. She had $300-an-hour lawyers driving Ford sedans around town, seeing to the fruit baskets in the Presidential Suite, or on call for last-minute shopping.
They all had the feeling this was big—once in a lifetime. They could make history. Hell, look at the Sunday papers! Nothing on the front page but Iran-contra, the Reagan revolution falling apart. Dick could make it! And they wanted to be a part, to be inside. They had to help Dick! This was their chance to show the guy they were for him. And there were more than a few who brought along ideas—campaign themes and issues, lists of names for Dick to call, zingers for speeches, slogans for ads ... hell, they had whole ad campaigns ... (just for him to look at, you know—maybe at the house, they’d stop by his house ... they’d give them to Dick, when they sat down to talk).
Of course, they never did talk with Dick. Never even saw Dick, except on stage that Monday. By the time Gephardt flew in Sunday afternoon, the bubble was in place to receive him. He couldn’t stay in his St. Louis home (where Loreen lived full-time, amid pictures of Dick and Jane). Didn’t see any friends. Talked mostly to anchormen. His professional Advance team whisked him from the airport to the Presidential Suite of the station hotel. He had a schedule to keep, and a run-through—the speech!
It was eighteen hours till announcement when Gephardt saw the speech for the first time, in his hotel suite, on a TelePrompTer flown in from California. See, Shrummy was a genius, and the speech wasn’t done until Saturday. And by the time Dick got there, and got a look—well, delivery was the thing. He had to work on the timing: Look out at the crowd when you talk about St. Louis ... slow up, there ... don’t step on that next line!
“Okay, good ... let’s do it again,” Dick said. He was better each time he read it through. Everybody said his problem was he looked wooden, like he didn’t care. So Dick was working on emotion—that’s when he’d hammer the podium, to show how deeply he felt, about that last applause line.
The speech had lots of applause lines. The theme was Make America First Again ... and it worked great, with his trade amendment, his farm bill, and his line about wiping out illiteracy by the year 2000. There were plenty of Dick’s ideas in the speech, because he and Shrum had had a breakfast—three hours—and Shrum, as Dick knew, was big-time, the guy who wrote for Ted Kennedy! So Dick didn’t have any problem with the speech itself—for instance, what was in it.
He just had to hit the lines, one by one—loud and clear. He had to look at the crowd, look at the prompter, remember where the cameras were, where he was in the speech, and just ... keep it together. As it turned out, that was hard enough, when he finally did get introduced, and the bands were playing and the crowd was cheering, and he got up there on the station stage and kissed his mom, and she whispered to him: “I wish your father could see you now.” And he looked out over that concourse, with the skylight streaks shining down on the crowd, and everyone was there—friends from school ... kids from camp ... lawyers from his firm ... fellow Aldermen ... fellow Cub Scouts! ... And the cheering wound down, and he was supposed to start, but it was like his life was there, assembled for him, in support of him, and for a moment, he felt he couldn’t talk.
But he did. He delivered the speech word for word, didn’t change a line. And everyone said it was great. He hit the gong for his trade bill, and then education, then the zingers on Iran and contra aid
... and with each, he slowed, and stopped, and just like they’d planned, the crowd filled the air with cheers. And that was great TV, in the packed station hall, with the camera angles just right, and the cutaway shot from behind Dick to show the hometown crowd approving, urging, like the Cardinals had a rally in the ninth. ... It was beautiful, it was professional. Not one foul-up, not a hair out of place! (How could anything fall awry? Once she got the hall set up, Joyce never let it out of her sight. Sunday night, she brought a pillow and slept on stage.)
Dick couldn’t tell how it looked on TV, but he knew he was exactly where he wanted to be. He was so happy that day. There were so many friends, and his fellow House members—even they thought this was a hell of a show—and the family, all together. ... That’s what made it so special, when he got to the end of the speech, the part about his family, Lou and Loreen and the brick bungalow on Reber Place. ...
It was all about family values, see. And Shrummy wrote that beautiful ending about how Dick and brother Don would sit with their parents, summer nights, on the front porch, listening to their lessons of hard work and high aims:
“The air was hot and muggy,” Dick said, “but it was full of dreams.”
And Dick read out, with evident emotion, how Lou’s dreams were shattered when the Gephardt farm was lost in the Great Depression. But still, Lou worked and saved to make sure his sons would have the college training he never had.
And it didn’t matter that Lou wasn’t much for inspirational speeches on the front porch (the Cardinals game was the more likely soundtrack), or that Lou’s farm was not lost in the Depression (in fact, Lou left that farm at a trot, but there were Gephardts, still, on that land today), or that Lou was never quite convinced about the value of college for the boys (“I made it without college!” he used to grouse to Loreen).
The point was family values, see ... and Dick was so eager to do this thing right ...
What It Takes Page 53
