A Fighting Chance (8 page)

When Mother and Daddy came to visit at Thanksgiving, I thought they would be pleased to see the famous Harvard, but they didn’t seem all that interested. At dinner the first night, Mother looked around the table and asked, “When will we see Amelia?”

I had already told them both that Amelia would be home from college in a couple of days. Daddy said, “Wednesday.”

The conversation picked up again, and about a minute later, Mother asked, “When will we see Amelia?”

Daddy said, “Wednesday,” as if he had never heard the question before.

When she asked a third time a few minutes later, Daddy answered pleasantly, “Wednesday.” But his head was bowed, and when he looked up, the pain was unmistakable.

When Daddy and I made a run to the hardware store the next day, I asked him about Mother. He said she was just tired, that we all get forgetful when we’re tired. But it began to hit home that my mother and daddy—now eighty and eighty-one—wouldn’t be with me forever. I felt like I was living on borrowed time.

Late in the school year, Harvard offered me a tenured job, but there wasn’t a place for Bruce. I wasn’t interested in living in two cities again, so I said no thanks. On the last day of classes, my students gave me a golden retriever puppy. They named her Good Faith and asked me to come back.

Two days after we took Faith home, Trover died of sudden liver failure. I called Daddy, crying so hard that he couldn’t make out what I was saying. So he went through this list: Are you hurt? Is it Alex? Amelia? Bruce? When he named Trover, I managed to choke out a yes, and he started to cry, too. What can I say? Dogs are part of our family. Twenty years later, Bruce still has Trover’s picture on his desk.

After Bruce and I went back to Penn, the Harvard dean would call every now and then. They were keeping the offer open. Perhaps I’d like to reconsider?

No, not really. We had a good life in Philadelphia. Amelia was nearby, Aunt Bee and Bonnie were back from Oklahoma and living upstairs, and Alex was still in school. After so many moves over the past dozen years, it felt good to know that we were finally settled in.

Harvard Again

But maybe I wasn’t so settled after all. Bruce’s question—“What are you going to do about it?”—kept tugging at me. I began working longer hours. I expanded my research. I wrote more articles, worked on my next book, and made plans for the one after that. I gave speeches, trying to tell anyone who would listen to me about the importance of bankruptcy protection and the families who needed it.

A year or so after we moved back to Philadelphia, Bruce and I were driving somewhere one spring day when an interview with a bank spokesman came on the radio. The guy was railing about deadbeats who took advantage of everyone else by filing for bankruptcy. I was furious. After the interview ended, I railed right back, rebutting everything the spokesman had said. The farther we drove, the more I argued into the empty air.

I was glaring out the window when Bruce glanced over from his driving. His voice was firm. “Take the Harvard job.”

Bruce doesn’t catch me by surprise very often. I’m usually the one with the wild schemes, and he’s usually the voice of reason, calmly explaining why it isn’t a great idea to paint the ceiling dark purple or rip all those unknown vines out of the overgrown flower bed by hand. (The purple ceiling worked out great, but I paid dearly for the gardening mistake—the vines were poison ivy and I found out that I’m wildly allergic.)

But Bruce usually thought very carefully about things before he said them, and he had been thinking about the Harvard offer for a while. Penn was a terrific school, but Bruce argued that if I wanted people to listen to my ideas, I might as well shout from the highest mountain I could find. He thought working at Harvard might improve my chances of making a difference.

By now, our lives had changed again. I wasn’t a Working Mother anymore; I was a forty-five-year-old professor, and our kids had grown up. Alex was in college, and Amelia was getting her MBA. At ninety-three, Aunt Bee didn’t get out much, and she was lonesome with no one at home all day. She said she didn’t want to hurt our feelings, but she and Bonnie the cocker spaniel wanted to go back to Oklahoma City, so we started working to set her up in a tidy little apartment in the middle of the sprawling Baptist Retirement Center. Now that we were pretty much on our own, Bruce declared that he and I and Faith could manage a two-city life. And a move to Massachusetts would mean that we would see a lot more of Bruce’s parents, his brother and sister, his niece and nephew. We would be close to family again.

Meanwhile, those bankruptcy numbers kept climbing, in good times and bad. More than eight hundred thousand families—husbands, wives, children—were going bankrupt every year. Across the country, another person declared bankruptcy every twenty-six seconds—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The numbers were staggering.

Something was terribly wrong in America, and it seemed to be getting worse. I was worried—worried, angry, and ready to fight for every one of these families. I didn’t have an organized plan, but I knew that fighting meant throwing everything I had into the battle. I was going to take the best shot I could.

So I called the Harvard dean and said I was coming.

2 | The Bankruptcy Wars

F
AIR WARNING: THIS
story doesn’t have a happy ending. It’s a David versus Goliath story, but this time David gets his slingshot shoved down his throat—sideways. It’s also the story of my long and painful baptism into national politics.

How I got into this fight takes a little explanation. It started when I said no.

In 1995, Congress launched a blue-ribbon commission to review the bankruptcy laws. President Bill Clinton appointed former Oklahoma congressman Mike Synar to head a nine-person nonpartisan commission. The commission would spend two years completing its review and then deliver a report to Congress. Now the congressman was on the phone, calling me. Would I join him in working on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission?

In one of those little twists that makes me wonder about divine intervention, Mike and I had crossed paths when we were teenagers. Mike had been a high school debater from Muskogee when I was debating for my Oklahoma City high school. We hadn’t seen each other in the intervening decades, but fourteen-year-old boys seem to remember fifteen-year-old girls who once beat them in tournament play.

I told him no. I was deep in my research, and I thought the way I could make a difference was by writing books and doing more research about who was filing for bankruptcy and what had gone wrong in their lives. I didn’t know anything about Washington, but the bits I picked up from the press made it sound pretty awful.

So Mike asked me to come to DC for lunch. Just lunch.

It was fun to see him. Mike had been a political wunderkind. He had been elected to Congress at twenty-eight, in the wake of a report that mentioned that his opponent slept in a heart-shaped water bed, a revelation that didn’t sit well with a lot of folks back in Oklahoma. While in Congress, Mike had battled Big Tobacco and the National Rifle Association. But after sixteen years in the House, he had just lost his seat.

Mike still looked boyish, with dark hair and bright eyes and a sort of goofy smile that reminded me of Opie on the old
Andy Griffith Show
. He was always in a hurry, the kind of guy who waves his hands a lot and interrupts—cheerfully, of course. We met in Mike’s Washington office, but he quickly gathered up a few young staffers and we all walked over to a noisy restaurant nearby.

Over lunch, we mostly swapped stories about our high school debate days. Mike talked about beer and poker. I talked about the kid who got left behind at the Turner Turnpike rest stop. He told stories about the times we had debated each other, regaling the young staffers with comic blow-by-blow descriptions of our early meetings.

We didn’t talk much about the commission at lunch. Mike knew why I was skeptical. Sure, the commission was supposed to be neutral, but I’d heard that the banks had already started lobbying to cut back on bankruptcy protection. I didn’t want any part of a process that would probably just make life harder for people who were already struggling to get by.

Besides, Mike and I weren’t exactly friends. I’d barely known him back in high school, and we hadn’t stayed in touch. Before our lunch, I’d checked him out, and each person I called had suggested that during his time in Congress, Mike had a pretty friendly relationship with some of the big banks.

When I stood up to leave, Mike walked me out of the restaurant. Once we were alone, he turned serious. He’d read one of my books, and he knew where I stood. Then Mike made his pitch: Think about the families the new commission would affect, the people who file for bankruptcy every year. Here’s an opportunity for you to make a real difference.

Then Mike offered me a deal. If I would work with him to come up with three good changes—changes in the law that could help the folks who were struggling with debt—then he would work hard to get them turned into law. The way he saw it, I would develop the ideas about how to change the bankruptcy law, and he would use his political savvy to try to get those changes enacted.

The whole idea was deliciously subversive—and not what I expected. Here was the guy a lot of people thought would carry water for the industry, and instead he was trying to figure out how to expand bankruptcy protection for families who needed it. Wow.

Even so, I hesitated. I believed Mike’s intentions were good, but I wasn’t sure he could deliver. Besides, I’d never worked in a political setting before. Heck, I’d never done anything more political than voting. But he had sunk the hook. If we worked together, we might be able to help some of those families that were going bankrupt every single day. Just think of the difference we could make with three good changes in the law. Here was a chance to
do
something about all those people getting hurt.

And that’s what I thought about, all the way home. My office was stacked with piles of questionnaires from people in bankruptcy, and many of them told personal stories about what had gone wrong in their lives and described the sense of defeat that they carried to the bankruptcy court. I thought about the family that finally got a shot at their lifelong dream to launch a new restaurant—and it went belly-up. The young and very tired woman who described how she finally managed to leave her abusive ex-husband, but now she was alone with a pack of small children and a pile of bills. The elderly couple who had cashed out everything they owned and then went into debt to bail out their son and put him through rehab again and again.

Two days later, I called Mike and said yes.

The job with the commission was part-time, so I kept teaching at Harvard and started flying down to Washington for a day or two at a time. I was the commission’s senior advisor, and it was my responsibility to make proposals, manage the research, and write first drafts of the recommendations for the commissioners to approve.

Over the next few months, I began digging in. I met with the other commissioners. I went about gathering research and hiring good people, setting up a schedule, and organizing our agenda. Mike started pulling in people to talk about our plans. It was exciting—like drawing up blueprints and beginning to build something new. But the best part was lying in bed at night thinking about the three good changes. It felt better than Christmas. Three changes that could make a difference for working families. Three wishes.

Two Funerals

And then it all broke apart. Before the commission could really get under way, before we had even agreed on those three good ideas, Mike was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He stopped working and hunkered down for radiation therapy. The last time I saw him, Mike was bony and bald and his hands shook. Just talking seemed to exhaust him.

On January 9, 1996, Mike died. He was forty-five.

The day of his memorial service was cold and rainy. We gathered at historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. President Clinton spoke, along with then-congressman Dick Durbin. It was a huge affair, packed with the politically powerful. There were lots of handshakes and hugs, but I kept pretty much to myself. I’d never met these people.

I left the church believing that I was leaving Washington for the last time. Mike and I had a deal. Now Mike was gone, and I wasn’t coming back.

Mike’s funeral was the second in six months. The first was a much harder good-bye, smaller and more personal.

Daddy had called in the summer of 1995 to say that Mother needed to have an operation—a cancerous polyp, but nothing serious. The doctors had promised a noninvasive surgery. She’d need to be in the hospital for a few days.

Nothing serious, Daddy insisted, but he seemed rattled. Bruce and I decided to go back to Oklahoma City for a little family gathering. We wanted to be there when Mother went into the hospital.

I’d been home only a few hours when my brother David took me aside to say that not long ago he had found Mother wandering near their house, apparently lost. I tried to ask Daddy about it, but he said she was just tired or a little confused by the odd layout of the nearby streets.

Daddy held Mother’s hand whenever there were people around. He talked more now, and he would start nearly every sentence with “Polly, you remember…” and then fill in the story or the name of whoever was in the room.

After the operation, the doctors told us it had gone well, and Mother seemed to be recovering just fine. The day after her surgery, we gathered in her room, telling stories and laughing. Mercy Hospital was pretty relaxed, and they let some of my teenage and twenty-something nieces and nephews take Mother on wheelchair races up and down the hallways. Everyone laughed, and we ate cookies and drank juice from the nurses’ station.

Mother was due to go home the next morning, and Daddy thought we were tiring her out. So on her last night in the hospital, Daddy sent us all home and sat quietly holding her hand.