So when he died, different people had different reactions. Some people lost a colleague. Some people lost a TV personality they watched every Sunday morning. Some people lost a guy they had a relationship with. I lost a damn good friend. I was grieving profoundly. By Monday afternoon, we’d done Meet the Press. I’d done some other interviews about his death. We’d been to the funeral at Tim’s church in Georgetown. And afterward came this big see-and-be-seen event at the Kennedy Center, which I think would have amused Tim, the spectacle of it all.
Mary and I left early. We’d just had enough. We didn’t feel like seeing or being seen that day. What we really felt like was getting the hell away from everybody else and wallowing in our misery for a while. So we left. I honestly don’t even remember where we went. Even now, it’s all kind of a blur.
MARY
THE REST OF THAT SUMMER was a blur too—an inferno blur of heat and humidity while we were settling in. Our dogs were very happy to have us home. And my safe zone expanded. Each week, we walked farther into our neighborhood, exploring more. Everywhere I looked, there was something mind-blowing to study. My senses were still in heightened doggie mode. My sound library was building up. In addition to the mellifluous around-the-clock tolling church bells, there were jungle insect sounds—buzzing, crackling, chirping—and the low clackity-clack of the streetcars on St. Charles Avenue at the end of our block, plus the random but frequent outbreaks of indigenous local music.
People drove down the street in broad daylight with an entire musical ensemble playing away, right in the back of their pickups. In the middle of Audubon Park, a few blocks from us, there was an old guy on oxygen, a senior citizen attached to some kind of portable breathing device, playing the violin every afternoon.
Like in all of New Orleans, there are countless places of worship in our neighborhood. We have a synagogue on one corner, a Catholic church next door to that, Presbyterian or Episcopalian churches across the street. Along with the inescapable bells, you can’t fail to feel a sense of the sacred and other invisible realms around you. Even before I was officially religious, before I had a concrete framework or an easier way to discuss it, living in New Orleans made me acutely aware of our connectivity to something beyond the limiting boundaries of the material world. Of stuff. Of self. I could feel a natural, timeless order to the world, even if it was unrevealed.
James started running in Audubon Park every afternoon. It was just down the street, really, across from Loyola and Tulane. By midsummer I had started walking there, usually alone with the dogs. The land was purchased for a city park in 1871, became a site for the World’s Fair in 1884, and was blasted to the ground by the hurricane of 1915. It was rebuilt following a design drafted by John Charles Olmsted, one of the brothers in the revered family firm that created Central Park in Manhattan. It was laid to waste yet again by Katrina, but it is quickly regaining its timeless glory. So it’s gorgeous, a bit mysterious—the way all great parks are. It isn’t like D.C. and Alexandria’s Old Town were without amazing natural beauty of their own, but I rarely had time to slow down, let alone just stop and be absorbed in it.
Many of the giant live oaks there didn’t survive Katrina, but the new plantings were taking off like Jack’s beanstalk. New Orleans is a paradise for vegetation. After a rain, everything explodes. You can almost hear it, the sound of growth; a day or two later the trees are another foot taller.
The first time I went to the park alone, I noticed the nesting trees near the alligator pond. Egrets would swoop in at dusk, when you could see the diffused light of the setting sun through the Spanish moss. I made a nightly vigil to watch them—hundreds of these magical primordial birds—and studied their varying plumage and tried to discern their pecking order. Their cackling was loud, deafening. And then, suddenly, they’d all grow quiet at the same time.
Very few of the other park walkers and runners paid much attention to this airborne circus. The nesting trees were no big deal to them—just another everyday New Orleans occurrence. But the dogs and I would stand and stare, watching the egrets swoop in with their long legs hanging behind them as they immediately went to their predestined hierarchical positions.
Later on, I realized that the ones on the top of the tree had the greatest plumage, and the little birds with less plumage were on the bottom. Here, I thought, was one piece of the natural, timeless order revealed. What would come next?
JAMES
MY WIFE WAS HAPPY IN NEW ORLEANS. I mean, truly, deeply, instantly happy. More than I could have imagined when we first cooked up the idea of moving back to Louisiana.
Although she’s from Chicago and spent nearly three decades in Washington, almost everything about New Orleans fits her personality, from the food to the religion. After all, she insisted on getting married here in 1993. This was always one of her favorite places even before we met.
In part, I think she’s drawn toward tradition. She likes subtle noises and the smell of magnolias and jasmine. She likes the tolling of old church bells, the rumbling of the streetcar clapping its way along St. Charles Ave, the sound of a distant gospel choir. She loves spiritual, mystical, ancient things, and New Orleans is all of the above. If you’re that kind of person, you’re really going to like it down here.
If you’re the kind of person who’s into modern things, and you don’t like bugs and you prefer low humidity, this ain’t the place for you. It’s not Phoenix. It’s not Denver. There’s weird stuff that goes on here. There’s voodoo and screwed-up streets and rickety old houses and second-line jazz funerals and the eternal threat of hurricanes and floods.
New Orleans definitely isn’t for everyone; I’d be the first to admit that. But if it’s for you, it’s really for you.
For our girls, those first days and weeks were daunting; it must have seemed like a different country to them altogether. To them, it must have seemed like an utterly strange land, like when Dorothy arrives in Oz and everything about it seems foreign and foreboding.
They were so young. Washington was the only life they’d really ever known. They were the new kids in school, and everything about the move was a huge adjustment.
I’ve always been a creature of Louisiana. I’m a brown-blooded American—cut into me, and my blood comes out the color of the river. When we got down here, Mary and the girls were still red-blooded creatures of Washington. But I hoped it would only be a matter of time before their veins started to turn brown too.
MARY
ONE DAY THAT FIRST SUMMER, I took the girls outside and I said, “Come explore the neighborhood with me.” So we walked down the block to Audubon Park, which was becoming central to their father’s physical and their mother’s spiritual daily life in our new home. As soon as we got to the first grove of live oaks, it started to rain.
Except it didn’t just rain—it was a full-fledged, hurricane–velocity, gusting storm replete with nonstop lightning and thunder. Ba-boom! Ba-boom! The dogs were freaking out and pretty soon the girls and I were freaking out. You really don’t want to be in Audubon Park when a summer storm hits. The lightning began striking closer and closer; the thunder was deafening. There were sheets and sheets of sideways-blasting rain, a real tsunami deluge. Even if we could have seen more than a foot in front of ourselves, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. We were stranded in the park, drenched, freezing, huddling together. We didn’t have a phone. And nobody knew where we were.
But I had faith. Not the God kind. The Carville kind . . . not that I am making any comparisons whatsoever. I just instinctively knew James would find us. I didn’t know where he was . . . heck, I didn’t know where we were by then. But when he got back from wherever he was, even though he had no idea where we could be, I knew he would figure out precisely where we were, realize it was a dangerous storm, and he would find us.
James is like a homing pigeon for his family, especially in danger. It’s a good thing too, because somebody did g
et hit by lightning that day.
I said to the girls, “Let’s just stay right here and Daddy will come find us.”
And he did.
JAMES
AFTER WE MOVED HERE, my children said to me one day, “Dad, would you give us a ride to Pinkberry?”
I said, “Pinkberry, what the hell is that?”
They said, “It’s a yogurt place.”
So I told them, “We do not eat frozen yogurt in this family. We have snowballs, goddamn it. I don’t want any yogurt in my house.”
They were like: “Geez, we just asked the man for some yogurt.” They didn’t realize it was blasphemy. So I took them down to Hansen’s Sno-Bliz to help them understand the majesty of a good snowball.
Hansen’s doesn’t look like much. It operates out of a little old shack off Tchoupitoulas Street, where it’s been for seventy years. But it is an institution. The high cathedral of snowballs in New Orleans. The Taj Mahal. The duomo. You can get damn near any flavor, from coconut to cream of peach. I usually go with satsuma, which is a little citrus fruit similar to a mandarin.
A few years back, there were like three places in the country with a 29 rating in Zagat. One of them was a restaurant in suburban Chicago. I think another was the French Laundry out in California. The third was Hansen’s.
Now my kids know. They don’t ask for rides to Pinkberry anymore.
MARY
OF THE MANY WACKY things about James that the girls and I love—or are at least amused by—is his fanaticism over his many rigid epicurean dictates. Like Hansen’s snowballs or Domilise’s poor boys or Leidenheimer’s bread or roadside creole tomatoes or Antoine’s oysters or Manale’s shrimp, to name just a few. God forbid you get caught sneaking a frozen yogurt or fast-food sandwich. And, truly, anyone who eats a store-ripened tomato is damned to eternity.
JAMES
FOR ME, moving back to New Orleans was like taking an old bike out of the garage after twenty-five years. You haven’t been on it in a while, but you never forget how to ride it, so you just hop on and go. I knew the culture. I knew the streets. I knew a lot of people, and most of my family lived right up the road. The heat didn’t bother me. I loved the sports teams and the food. I slipped right back into Louisiana life.
In Louisiana, I know everybody and everybody knows me. One of my favorite stories—and this shows you the difference between Washington and New Orleans—is about going to get my driver’s license after we moved.
In Washington, if you’re a public figure, you have to be awfully careful about throwing your weight around. I’ve always been cautious about relying on fame or celebrity for any kind of special treatment.
So, right after we moved down, I went to the DMV to get a new license. I take a number and sit down with a stack of newspapers, prepared for a long wait. All of a sudden, the lady working the counter says, “Mr. Carville, come on up.”
And I’m like: “Oh, no, no, I’m sitting here with everybody.”
And the people in line start saying, “Man, go on up there. This man ain’t got time to fool around. Go on up!” The crowd was almost shoving me toward the front of the line.
In Washington, you have to say no to something like that. Somebody will snap a picture and post it on a blog. It will end up in Reliable Sources in the Washington Post.
It’s a different world. Part of that is that they simply revere older people in this culture. If you get old and retire in Washington, they’ll just run you over at the DMV or anywhere else. It’s just the way it is. If you think that people will say, “Oh, that guy was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager,” and then open a door for you, no way. That’s relevant for some time, but it has a shelf life.
Obviously the transition wasn’t quite so smooth for everyone else that first year, especially the girls. I knew Matty and Emma felt apprehensive about settling into a new school in a new city. Who wouldn’t be at their age? Matty was going into eighth grade, and Emerson was starting fifth grade. But they were wrestling with more than just the usual challenges and anxieties of being the new kid in class. There was a real tightness among the kids who had lived there during Katrina and endured the storm. They had been through the fire together; they had a bond. It was hard at times to break through and make friends if you didn’t have that shared experience.
On top of all that, New Orleans is a hard city to explain to someone who’s never lived there. Socially, ethnically, racially—it’s a very complicated place that’s not given to simple explanations. So we spent a lot of time talking with them about why things were the way they were.
It definitely could have been tougher. If your daddy is a gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps, he might be shipped off to Afghanistan for a year, and then you might get stationed in North Carolina or Okinawa or any number of places. You’re always the new kid on the block. The girls weren’t totally surrounded by strangers. They had their aunts and uncles and cousins all around. We had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and people threw parties welcoming us to the city.
Still, I know it wasn’t easy. I suspect they shared more about their struggles with their mother than with me. But as a father, you just know. You notice every detail—how many friends they have over or don’t have over, their daily demeanor, everything. It’s not like they were out-and-out miserable. But I could tell it took a while to find their footing. At the same time, I think on some level they understood it was important that we were there, that part of the reason for coming back was to help rebuild the city. I think they also recognized that they were in a unique place.
But me? It was just a matter of dusting off the bike and going for a ride.
MARY
I AM FORBIDDEN TO SPEAK, write, discuss or even think about the girls with anyone without their prior approval, which is harder to obtain than the top security clearance I used to have at the White House. So when I write about our family’s transition to New Orleans and what those first days and weeks and months were like, I am writing entirely about me.
For my sake—and possibly your own—assume we are talking about an entirely hypothetical and fictional universe, one in which two middle school girls are ripped from the only home they have ever known and flung blindly into another middle school in a distant galaxy by already certifiably crazy parents.
And imagine this hypothetical middle school girl having no lifeline or anything like a real or imaginary friend, except her sister—with whom she may or may not be speaking at any given time. And without the comfort of her posse of friends back in Old Town Alexandria who’d been with her since preschool, and without the reliable protection of an Iron Man suit of armor—or even Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility—I guess we can all agree that this would be a daunting experience.
And it was.
But not for any of the reasons I’d anticipated.
My first mistake was presuming these two girls, who have wildly divergent personalities and worldviews, would react in lockstep to their new universe.
Emerson—if I may call the youngest daughter that, although it bears no resemblance to her real name—had a super-close, high-octane, barrel-of-monkeys cast of characters back in Virginia. Now deprived of them, she tried valiantly not to complain about having moved to a place where everybody in town knew everybody else, and each other’s cousins and ancient ancestors to boot. Compounding her discomfort, she was at the stage of hyper self-consciousness, which you wouldn’t think would be so tortuous, as she had a closet right out of The Devil Wears Prada and is blessed with a long sumptuous mane of straight, silky, shiny, dark auburn hair and a flawless face. But apparently none of those, or her many other blessings, counted. Still, she did not complain. Nor did she complain about being three feet taller than the other students in her class, except she did confess to me—under duress—that she was singled out at her new school as “freakishly tall.” And I will say, in the defense of the mean-spirited child
who described the beautiful Emerson this way, that she did stand literally head and shoulders above her classmates.
“Embrace your height, honey!” It sounded like a mother’s cheerleading, but I meant it. “Everyone would kill for legs to the ceiling—and glossy auburn hair to the waist. You are beyond beautiful!”
But the mother’s and the daughter’s perceptions don’t always line up, particularly when one of them is in fifth grade. Still, not once did Emerson complain. But mothers don’t listen so much to what their kids say as watch what they do, and I was tracking her like a Reagan National air traffic controller at rush hour.
Emerson was tough and poised to the casual witness, but to her mother it was heartbreakingly clear this previously gregarious, fun-loving, witty girl was withdrawing due to her removal from her “true place.”
Being a mother is often similar to being a manager (or a wife, I guess): to get your people to do their best, you have to know how they process information and tackle problems. The trick in being effective at this, according to the great and wise Carville, is to “think like they think.”
But I have never been great at thinking like anyone other than myself. And my process does not work for everyone. (Behind my back, on campaigns, I was often referred to as a “ballbuster,” which I am not sure was meant as a compliment. My foxhole buddy on the campaign cycle, Bill Canary, once presented me with a little trophy of a winged angel on a marble pedestal that was inscribed, SHREW BITCH FROM HELL.)
But Emerson is no shrew bitch. She is thoughtful, contemplative and resists confrontation, preferring instead to consider carefully thought-out corrective options.
Love & War Page 3
