Rebels in White Gloves (47 page)

Though in the last difficult years of her life in the White House Hillary Clinton has relied ever more fiercely on her Methodist faith, the First Lady has also dipped into the New Age. In Arkansas, she and her female aides called themselves “the Valkyries” in reference to the wise maidens of Norse mythology who selected warriors fit to die. With “sacred psychologist” Jean Houston, Hillary has explored the ancient Greeks and mythology; she and the President both read Houston’s
Manual for the Peacemaker: An Iroquois Legend to Heal Self and Society
. Houston was even an overnight visitor at the White House several times: It no doubt cheered Hillary to hear from Houston that she was single-handedly “reversing thousands of years of expectation, and was there up front, more than virtually any woman in human history apart from Joan of Arc.”

In the American past, spiritualism outside the mainstream church has frequently sustained outspoken or rebellious women. The suffragist Grimke sisters attended Quaker meetings, one of the few public places a woman was permitted to speak freely. Other first-wave feminists found in the more radical sects of the nineteenth century whole bundles of liberties, including free love, as well as a faith in private illumination and spiritual healing that allowed them to circumvent the patriarchal church and paternalistic physicians. For women otherwise excluded from sacral authority, the role of prophet or trance speaker or séance medium was a rare opportunity to have a public voice, a voice powerfully authorized from the other side. Even today, most “channelers” are female, though most of the spirits they transmit are male.

It is baffling nonetheless that Hillary and her classmates can find
some of these New Age testaments compelling. Much of this literature seems a kind of spiritual cotton candy, weightless and overly sweet, with no sense of the terrifying grandeur of the sublime or the wrenching rigors demanded of the pilgrim, and with none of the subtle, paradoxical poetry of the original cosmologies on which it draws. Most troubling is its exaltation of women, a reverence that is, as always, double-edged. The rise of women’s power, says Houston, “is the most important event of the last five thousand years.” The “male principle is one of order and mastery; the female is not systematic but systemic.” Cultures in which the feminine archetype prevails, Houston claims, are nonheroic; they “emphasize being rather than … achieving.” Unsystematic in their thinking, indifferent to achievement: Houston’s language resurrects some of the most regressive certainties about women.

And yet it is clear that Dorothy Devine and Alison Swain and numerous others in the class have found in their spiritual wanderings a kind of peace they had found nowhere else. These newly told stories of female transformation and heroism perhaps can, as Marina Warner has written, “sew and weave and knit different patterns into the social fabric.” Even if they are merely fairy tales (and the archaeological evidence for many of the claims is scant), they still perhaps offer a kind of “useful wishful thinking,” stirring the imagination to new possibilities. If the language used by some of the Wellesley graduates to describe their spiritual journey is thin, the experience, it seems, is not.

CHAPTER TEN
 
 
In Search of Self

T
wenty years later, when people were saying that she shouldn’t be a mother to her sons any longer, Nancy Wanderer would remember what it was like to be denied the chance to ever hold her second child.

Thomas had been in Vietnam seven months when Nancy gave birth to their first child, a son she named Andrew. From the day Thomas shipped out, Nancy had been home with her parents waiting, passing the hours with
That Girl
and
Mary Tyler Moore
. Just twenty-two years old, she looks like a child herself in a picture taken late in her pregnancy, her small, sweet face framed by pixie hair and a princess collar. “I was so innocent. The first night I was home from the hospital with the baby, my mother said, ‘You should go and check him,’ and I said, ‘Check him for what?’ I was afraid to tell my parents I was going to breast-feed. My mother had not, though I learned later she would have liked to but was strongly discouraged from it. With Thomas away and in danger, I felt this incredible responsibility to keep this child safe for the father who had never seen him. When he was still just tiny, Andrew had to have surgery for a hernia, and I dreamt of being in our VW bus circled by wild animals.”

Thomas came home from Vietnam in April 1971 and began graduate school at Harvard that fall; Nancy spent her days at home caring for Andrew. In just over a year she was pregnant again, and on the Saturday after Thanksgiving 1973 their second son, David, was born. Thomas had missed Andrew’s birth, hadn’t even seen him until the boy was already a year old, so Nancy was thrilled that her husband would be there when this baby arrived. She wanted Thomas to be the first to hold their son. When the nurses brought David on a brief visit from the nursery (these
were the days before babies were left on their mother’s breast), Nancy asked them to place him in Thomas’s arms instead of her own.

There was no second visit. That night at midnight, the lights in Nancy’s room suddenly went on and she woke to find her doctor standing just outside the room. “He was throwing words at me about David having trouble breathing and a heart defect and moving him to Boston. I said, ‘Will you bring him in before he goes?’ By that time he was in an incubator, so all I could do was look at him. I still had never touched him. They moved him to a hospital a half hour away. I was twenty-six and not sophisticated enough to demand to be moved also. The doctor who delivered him never even came past the doorframe. He didn’t examine me. He couldn’t deal with what had happened. He just ordered a sedative and dumped me. They left me in the maternity ward with a roommate and her newborn. I lay there listening to that baby nurse and coo and cry.

“The next day I was putting on my cheerful self, entertaining visitors, trying to put everyone else at ease, telling myself that things in my life had always turned out right. But by that night I knew somehow he was not going to make it. He died the next night. I had never held him. I had barely laid eyes on him. Thomas and I didn’t talk about it. He wanted him cremated and the ashes spread. I knew I had to know where David was; I’d been so out of touch with him in his brief life.” They agreed to have the baby’s organs donated and to bury him in Thomas’s family plot. Nancy asked her mother to take Andrew to the Museum of Science. She went to the funeral home and picked up the small brown wrapped package, which she carried in her lap to the grave.

There was no ceremony. “We didn’t know what to do. I put the urn in the hole, saw some acorns on the ground, and put those in as well. We drove back to town in silence. Thomas wrote a letter to Andrew, put it in a safe deposit box, and never spoke of it again. I went home and put the crib and the clothes away. I was so numb, one of Thomas’s relatives thought I was heavily sedated. I couldn’t talk to my mother about it; she was in so much pain. It brought up her own brother’s death when he was sixteen. I was sparing everybody, not wanting to look too miserable. But for a year I couldn’t clear my throat. It was the only thing important about me: I was a woman whose baby had died. That was my identity. For months after he died I would get calls from diaper services or photography
services wanting to take my new baby’s picture. The only time I fell apart was when I had to go for my checkup six weeks after delivering and sit among the newborns and the nurse asked me, “How’s the baby?” I kept feeling pregnant, kicking feelings. Thomas is an atheist, and I’m not. I would go to a Unitarian church, sit in the front row, and cry whenever the music was loud enough that no one could hear me. I used to go to the grave by myself, take a pumpkin at Halloween or Christmas holly. I kept telling the story to a friend, over and over, telling her what I thought he looked like. Every time she listened as if she’d never heard the story before.”

Only many years later did Nancy get some measure of respite from her grief, through the performance of a public rite. While taking a psychology course toward a master’s in counseling, she was asked to reenact a painful episode in her life. She stalled until everyone else had taken their turn. “Then I re-created the whole thing—the hospital room, the doctor. The teacher said, ‘Would you like to hold your baby now?’ and I said yes, and she handed me a bundled-up sweater and I cradled it in my arms. I’d never held him. I hadn’t been there when he was hurting, when he was sick and dying. I needed to tell him that I did care, that he had a mother, that I really was his mother. It hurts now to feel like David will be with Thomas’s family. I’m not going to be buried there. I won’t be able to check on him in that way.”

At her fifth reunion at Wellesley, in the spring of 1974, Nancy discovered she was pregnant again. Like Andrew, Peter required surgery for a hernia soon after he was born; before the operation the doctor insisted that Nancy wean him. “They simply didn’t want to deal with me in the hospital. I don’t know why I was so deferential, but again I was compliant in things that were wrong. Here my baby was in the same hospital where David died, my breasts were full of milk, and I couldn’t feed him. My breasts got so large and hard I could put a cocktail glass on them and it would stay. When he finally came home, I couldn’t figure out how to be a mother. The only way I knew to quiet a baby was breast-feeding.” Two years later, when a missed period fooled her into thinking she was pregnant again, Thomas suggested she think about an abortion. She couldn’t. “I am so pro-choice, but after a baby dying, I couldn’t have faced it.”

Thomas had spent those years completing his doctorate. He wasn’t
home much, and Nancy bristled at being treated by his Radcliffe students as “the little woman” with nothing to say. It didn’t much matter; she was busy with her babies and content in her marriage. There followed three unhappy years in Washington, D.C., where Thomas got his first teaching job and also worked on Capitol Hill and was away from home day and night. Nancy was lonely and bored; to ease her unhappiness, Thomas finally accepted a job at a small college in Maine. “I thought we’d get back to that woodsy, natural way of his I’d been drawn to originally. And we did find a whole new world in Maine. I had a garden; the kids were flourishing. Peter was a sunny little boy, so happy with everything. We felt settled at last. I felt, this is the right thing. Here are my house and my sons and my smart, strong, important husband.”

Nancy’s optimism sang through her letter to her classmates for their tenth reunion. “The first five years out of college I concerned myself almost exclusively with my sons and with Thomas, his survival in Vietnam, his success in grad school, his satisfaction in his job. I barely had time to think about where my life was heading. These past five years I have earned a master’s in education and started my first honest-to-goodness job. I feel we’re finally where we wanted to be, physically and psychologically. Thomas and I share all child care and household responsibilities equally thanks to flexible work arrangements and we truly love our new fully liberated lifestyle.” In her classmates’ eyes, she was the model mother; when Hillary Rodham went to Maine with her husband for a governors’ conference soon after Chelsea was born, she called Nancy for motherly advice on such matters as how to find the best teachers in her daughter’s school.

After a few years teaching at a “scruffy little” college and earning a second master’s, in 1982 Nancy joined Thomas at his college as associate director of career counseling. Over the course of the next several years, she became increasingly active in campus feminism, becoming co-chair of the women’s studies program and chair of the affirmative action committee; she wrote the college’s sexual harassment policy and acted as advocate for the first woman to bring a case. Accustomed to persuading herself of her own contentment, she did not at first reflect on what in her own life might be impelling her to take a young woman’s side against a faculty member. “Because I was married to the star professor, I had respectability and could push against the edges without as much trouble as
other women. It was one of those times it helped to look so wholesome and all-American. I had a nice cover behind which to be radical.”

In 1984, Thomas took a sabbatical at the Brookings Institution and began spending every other week in D.C. It was, for Nancy, a transformative year. “I’d never in my whole life been on my own. I discovered I loved it. I was master of my time, which had always belonged to him. For the first time ever, I had complete freedom. I found out I wasn’t content with my allotted domain, the homemaking and gardening and work that always came second to Thomas’s. I wasn’t content with being cast as the less intelligent and important one—a role I’d cast myself in; I can’t blame Thomas for that.

“Thomas had always been home a lot doing child care and cooking, and saw himself as an enlightened feminist husband. But as I became more involved in feminism, he treated that as a hobby, as if I’d been playing bridge, as if it didn’t affect him. It did affect him, because I was changing, but he caught on too late. The kids were keeping pace; they came along to meetings and films and understood that this was central to me. But Thomas didn’t take my feminism seriously, which means he didn’t take me seriously.”