by Jayne Lind
Beth was silent for a moment before she replied. “Oh, I wish I could tell you he’s the wonderful man the public thinks he is. That makes it even harder, you know? To see the hypocrisy that is given out to the public when those around him know better. Politics is such a horrible game! I’ve known some fine people along the way, but I’ve also known many who were fine people when they started out and then soon became jaded and lost their ‘fineness’ if that’s a word.”
“Was your husband one of those fine people, in the beginning?” Taylor asked, becoming more and more interested in this man, her client’s husband, who happened to be the President of the United States.
Beth shook her head slightly, “No, in all honesty, he wasn’t. He wanted to get right here, where we are, from the time he was a little boy evidently, and every move he’s made has been calculated.”
Taylor waited for her to go on, but she was silent, looking down at her hands. So she asked, “Marrying you? Was that calculated?”
Beth gazed at her steadily. “I didn’t think so at the time, but now…now I do.”
Taylor felt an inner shiver. Calculation means there is no emotion, or if there is, it’s submerged for the larger goal. “What did he gain? Toward his goal, I mean, by marrying you?”
Beth sighed deeply, “I think he thought I was submissive, I think he thought I was so dazzled by his wealth and by what he could buy for me that I would bend to his will.”
Taylor studied her face, trying to read her emotions. “And did you?”
“Yes, at first. It wasn’t the fact that he could buy me expensive presents, actually, I told him not to do this, it made me uneasy.” She smiled wistfully, “Like any young woman, I loved clothes, and I’d never been able to buy whatever I wanted. On my birthday, the first birthday we were together, he took me to Neiman-Marcus in New York City and told me he would sit in the chair and read the newspaper. I remember he said, ‘There’s only one rule, I don’t want you to look at any price tags. Take as long as you want.”
“So what did you buy?”
“Oh, not as much as he expected me to, I’m sure now, now that I know him so well, but I did buy a beautiful chiffon dress to wear to a party we were going to the next week and a tailored suit with all the accessories, and….I think that’s all.”
“It was seductive…”
Beth nodded. “Very. And of course, I didn’t obey his injunction; I did look at all the price tags. They were ridiculous, astronomical, you know, but at the same time, it was fun. It seemed to make him happy—it made him happy that he made me happy, that’s what I thought at the time.” She paused, then said, “But now, looking back, I realize it was part of the web, part of the plan to bend to me to his will.”
The web. An apt term for what Taylor was learning about this marriage and also an apt term for this place, this big white house that wasn’t all that white on the inside. A spider weaves a web and then waits for a victim to become trapped. “And when did you stop bending to his will?” she asked.
Beth looked pensive for a moment. “I guess when I grew up, when I began to see that he wasn’t the man who was portrayed in all the news, when I began to be able to differentiate between the public face and the man who was my husband.” She was carefully rubbing one fingernail against another. “When I began to be afraid of him.”
Taylor hoped she showed no emotion as Beth said these last words. Violence? Could there be domestic violence in the White House? No wonder there was so much secrecy about her being brought here. The silence in the room was so palpable Taylor felt hardly able to breathe. What had she stumbled into? In real life, if she was told of domestic violence, she was bound to report it, but she knew she couldn’t report this. Was Beth in danger?
Beth was leaning over with her face buried in her hands. When she took her hands away from her face Taylor saw a look of anguish. “It’s so frightening to tell someone about this, to actually say the words. It’s all been bottled up inside of me for so long….” Her voice trailed off as she rose from her chair and went over to the window. Without turning back to look at Taylor, she said, in a voice so low it was a strain to hear her. “I’m not talking about physical violence.”
Taylor took a deep breath of relief, both physically and metaphorically. However, she’d had enough experience with psychological, emotional abuse, to know that it could be more frightening. More frightening because it wasn’t done in a rage, after an argument, or after someone had been drinking too much. Psychological abuse was like the drip, drip of cold, icy, water torture.
“It began with little things,” Beth went on, “such as his always insisting he do the driving. I gave in on that one easily, although on a long trip, it could have broken the monotony to drive for an hour and would have given him a break. “
“Were you married when it began?” Taylor asked, hoping the tenseness she was feeling wasn’t apparent in her voice.
Beth came back and sat down, her face composed now. I used to think so, but now, I realize it crept up gradually, bit by bit. Even when we were dating, he always wanted to know where I was at any given time. When I objected, he would say it was because he cared about me, that he was so much in love with me he wanted to know where I was. He said he thought about me all the time and he liked to picture me wherever I was.”
“And you were flattered.”
“Um, yes,” Beth said, nodding her head. “No one had ever expressed that much interest in me before. He was so glib, you know? I don’t know how much of that comes across on television, but in person, he is very charming, and he was very good looking, and he had money, and he said he wanted to take care of me for the rest of my life. I didn’t realize until later what taking care of me meant.”
Taylor was beginning to think she knew what it meant. The picture of a personality disorder was emerging, which one, she wasn’t sure, but it was clear that they weren’t dealing with just a marital problem. “Go on,” she prompted.
“Well, it was heady stuff. It felt good for him to be so attentive. He phoned me in the morning before I went to work and he wanted me to phone him on my lunch break, but sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t have time to eat something and relax a minute, so I wouldn’t phone him and he would chide me about it later, when I spoke to him afterward. I thought it was sweet, you know? I was so naïve. He would say how much he missed me and how much he looked forward to talking to me in the middle of his day.”
“So early on, what you are talking about is control.” Taylor let the word drop softly. She interpreted Sam’s behavior as control from the get-go, but was waiting for Beth to say the word. Impatient, she had gone ahead and said it. Not good therapy, Taylor, she told herself.
Beth nodded. “Yes, control. That’s what it feels like. He controlled me for years and years. And now, in this cage, I’m completely controlled. I know it was the same for the others, the other wives before me, but I can’t talk to them, you see? And they’re all still married to their husbands, so I suppose they’re content, if not totally happy, with their life.”
“What you’re saying is that you could put up with how guarded and watched you are in this cage, as you put it, if you were happily married, if you hadn’t been being controlled all along?”
“I think so. I mean when we moved in, of course, we didn’t know how long we’d be here and it wasn’t so bad at first. The staff really do everything they can to make you feel this is your home. But it’s not real. It’s like living on stage. It’s not real life and I hate it, I hate it!”
Her voice had risen with each ‘I hate it.’ Taylor was silent for a moment before she said, “Your marriage isn’t a partnership in that you can’t talk to him about your feelings. And you said you don’t cry in front of him.”
Beth sighed and shook her head. “Not any more. I used to in the beginning, I used to, but it made him so angry, that I began to stop myself if I wanted to cr
y.”
“And stopping yourself meant you kept all that sadness and anger inside.”
“Yes, I guess so. But it was safer, you see. I began to learn to do anything and everything to keep him from getting angry.” Gentle tears were wetting her cheeks. She dabbed at them as they both sat silent again.
Beth had submerged herself, her identity, her very being, into this man. To make him happy? No, just to avoid his anger. Taylor had heard that many times in her office. The difference being that Beth had no one to turn to, either for advice or for comfort. “It is so evident to me why you’re depressed, having to keep all this in all these years, not only because you were afraid of his anger, but knowing his ambitions, trying to protect him from any scandal as well.”
Beth nodded and looked up, the depth of her suffering showing in her face. “I didn’t think I could trust anyone. All these memoirs that come out about people, servants, or former members of Congress. For many years I felt I would be betraying him, that as his wife I was supposed to support him, but as it’s, as he has become worse, I guess I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.”
“I asked you last session if you had ever felt suicidal and you said yes. How were you thinking of doing it?” Taylor knew from experience that clients were usually relieved to be able to talk about it.
Beth looked very sad as she replied, “Pills, of course. I wouldn’t have the courage to do it any other way. There are many times when it just seems so wonderful to think of lying down in my bed and never waking up.”
“To be out of the pain…”
“Yes, that’s it. How did you know?” Beth looked up at her, “Silly question, I guess you’ve heard this many times before.”
“Yes, I have. When one specializes in depression, as I do, it is inevitable, but on the other hand, each person is different, each person’s pain is different.” She stopped herself from giving a mini-seminar on depression. “And so you asked for help. You said you wouldn’t do it because of your children, but you can then understand why some people who are desperate do take their own life, can’t you?”
“Oh, yes! In that moment, you just want to get out of the situation, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, you begin to think, irrationally, that it is the only way out.”
“But you didn’t. I said it before Beth, but I’ll say it again, you are a very courageous woman.”
She looked at Taylor wide-eyed and said, “Is there hope? Will I ever be out of this? Will I ever be happy?”
Chapter Seven
As she walked back to her room, Beth’s words ‘will I ever be happy’ reverberated through Taylor’s mind. Have I ever been happy, she asked herself? She had never been depressed, at least clinically depressed, as Beth very obviously was. But happiness? She sometimes wondered if happiness was something unachievable, not to be sustained, at any rate, and she hadn’t had a very good start—her childhood had been anything but happy.
The cover story Josh gave her to tell her mother was that she was going to Darfur to help refugees, to train their mental health professionals in the latest techniques of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, so that they could then train lay counselors. Therefore, it would be difficult to reach her by telephone. Her mother took the news of this special assignment with about as much interest as she took in anything to do with her daughter. She didn’t seem impressed. She didn’t seem worried. “Will I be able to reach you if I need to?” was her only question.
“Yes, Mother, you will,” Taylor reassured her. And will I be able to reach you if I need to? She never had been able to reach her mother. Mrs. Leigh lived in her own little narcissistic world where she was the only one who mattered. As a child, Taylor thought there must be something wrong with her. If there wasn’t, wouldn’t her mother pay more attention to her? Wouldn’t she hug her, talk to her, wouldn’t she care? Mothers were supposed to care and hers obviously didn’t. She ignored Taylor. And when she lost her adolescent awkwardness and began to fill out, her mother became jealous, because one after another of her boyfriends tried to pay more attention to her daughter than to her.
Taylor was born in Southern California near the Mexican border, in a little town called Escondido, hovering on the map in an unbroken line of traffic between Los Angeles and San Diego. Escondido, a Spanish name, a town lined with eucalyptus trees, a town filled with more people of Spanish descent than of any other blended white types. Taylor couldn’t wait to leave home and made sure she earned top grades so she could get a scholarship to a university. She was offered several and chose the one farthest away—in Massachusetts. When she left home, she felt free for the first time in her life. Free from criticism, free from feeling something was wrong with her, free from the men who managed to get her alone on one pretext or another, free from their hands.
Taylor knew that the reason she wanted to become a psychologist was because of her unhappy home life. She remembered once reading a column in a women’s magazine written by a psychiatrist. The letter writer said he had such a happy childhood that he wanted to help others who didn’t have that. The psychiatrist answered by telling him to not go anywhere near the mental health field, that he would not be suited at all. Well, Taylor certainly qualified.
She logged onto the Internet to see if Josh had written.
Hi there T: You asked what motivates me. My motives have changed over the years. At first, I was after the adventure. I thought I would be in this kind of work for a few years and then get out. We do retire earlier than people do in other jobs because of the wear and tear on our bodies and because we can’t put other people in danger by not being up to some physical task. But the more I learned about what goes on in the world, what the underbelly of governments and life in general are like, the more I began to feel a need to do something important, to contribute. Not that I will ever get credit for anything, you understand. Just like you—when you are done and your client is well once again, she will be the only one who knows what you did. Other than a few of us, that is. So it’s a job that makes me feel good. If I die in the line of duty, I won’t have wasted my life. And if I don’t and I retire and become a grumpy old man who sits by the fire and reads the newspaper all day long, I think I will feel proud inside. Do you know what I mean? You must. In some ways what you do is the same. Except for a good reputation (which is one reason you were chosen) only your clients know exactly how much you helped them. Cheers, J.
He said he would retire early. That at least was hopeful. Would they ever see each other again? Would they ever sit across the table from one another and have champagne and talk face to face?
Susan contacted Taylor early the next day, saying that if she was interested it was all clear to tour the White House. Taylor certainly was interested. It seemed strange being sequestered on the third floor yet not having ever seen the rest of the place.
With Susan leading the way, they walked down a back stairway to the first floor. As they stepped into the Red Room, she said, “This series of rooms is used for diplomatic receptions, meetings with various people, or say, if the First Lady has a small group she is speaking to, she might ask that it be in a room like this.”
It was obvious why it was called the Red Room. The wallpaper was red, the chairs were upholstered in a red fabric, and there was a red rug on the floor. A portrait of Dolly Madison hung above one of the doors. Next, they entered the Blue Room and then the Green Room. “Not much imagination in naming and decorating,” Taylor muttered irreverently.
Susan heard her and laughed. “You’re right, but I suppose there had to be some way of identifying the rooms.” She led her quickly into the State Dining room, where a table extended almost the full length of the long, rectangular room. Massive chandeliers hung over the mahogany table, which was polished to a mirror, reflecting the twinkling lights above. It was very grand and Taylor could picture impressive banquets being held here.
The East room was next. “This is th
e largest room in the White House and is used for all sorts of things, entertainments mostly, but weddings and funerals have been held here.” The room was now empty except for a grand piano. A full length portrait of George Washington drew Taylor’s attention, but they didn’t linger. With her usual quickness, Susan rushed her on, through the China room lined with cabinets displaying the different patterns of china used in the White House over the years, then to the library, probably used as such in years past, but seeming very small compared to the massive libraries in grand houses in Britain. The Diplomatic Reception Room was beautiful, as were all the rooms, but this differed in that it was oval. Taylor gathered it was used for what its name described.
The Vermeil Room interested Taylor most of all and she was finally able to slow Susan down. A full-length portrait of Lady Bird Johnson hung over the fireplace and portraits of other past first ladies adorned the walls. Taylor lingered over these portraits, wondering what their experience of living here and what their reaction to being first lady had been. They were all very different types of women and their experiences must have been as diverse as their personalities. Eleanor Roosevelt’s painting was interesting in that the artist portrayed several different views of her face and hands. She was shown gesturing, then holding a pair of eyeglasses and then knitting. Knitting! Mrs. Roosevelt wasn’t remembered for her knitting; she was really the first to establish a meaningful role as an ambassador of good will. And Pat Nixon, now, she was someone who dealt with depression. Her husband certainly was depressed, but did she suffer from it as well, Taylor wondered? She searched these portraits, especially the more recent First Ladies, for some clue to their personalities. As she stood in front of the portrait of Michelle Obama, the first African-American First Lady, Taylor thought that she appeared to have relished her time in the White House and had been well liked by the public.
