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 Charli
e 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 re
lationship 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?”
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