Resilience (13 page)

And the next day John and I spoke. He wasn't coy, but it turned out he wasn't forthright either. A single night and since then remorse, was what he said. There were other opportunities, he admitted, but on only one night had he violated his vows to me. Some time after he got out of the race for the nomination, he admitted to more than that, but at first and for a year, it was a single time. So much has happened that it is sometimes hard for me to gather my feelings from that moment. I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away. I wanted him to drop out of the race, protect our family from this woman, from his act. It would only raise questions, he said, he had just gotten in the race; the most pointed questions would come if he dropped out days after he had gotten in the race. And I knew that was right, but I was afraid of her. And now he knows I was right to be afraid, that once he had made this dreadful mistake, he should not have run. But just then he was doing, I believe, what I was trying to do: hold on to our lives despite this awful error in judgment. Wade's death, the cancer, this indiscretion, each time our lives changed and each time we resisted the change, tried to make ourselves believe that our lives could go on and if we pressed hard enough, this new awful reality would not control our story. After everything we had been through we should have known, but knowing it on some intellectual level and actually doing it are two quite different things. We pressed ahead.

In 1972, my father was stationed with NATO in Naples. Driving in Naples is a challenge, or it was in the early 1970s. When the lanes headed south around the Bay of Naples were jammed, the frustrated drivers would simply take over one of the northbound lanes. The park at the bottom of the Posillipo where we lived was never a good place to walk, because the wide sidewalks could accommodate tiny Fiat Cinquecentos eager for a shortcut. At the intersection known as Crazy Corners, a stoplight was immaterial. The way to cross the broad intersection was to look straight ahead and press the gas pedal. Out of the corner of your eye, you could see an approaching, challenging vehicle, but as long as that driver could not be sure that you saw him, you could move ahead. He was looking at you, not the other way around, so you had the upper hand. And that is what I did on December 30. I drove ahead.

My husband, I suppose like every person in this position, had assumed that I would never find out, that the life he had built and cherished would not be at risk by an indiscretion. I spoke one time later to a media executive who said it was unlikely I knew everything. He was in a position to say that because he had stood once where my husband had stood. But, again I assume like most in this position, my husband did not want to risk the life he had built even after it was discovered, so he told me as little as he thought he could, as little as he must, with the hope that I would not leave him. I am certain he wished what he said were all true. I am sure, after all these months, he wishes that it had not even been one night, that when she said “You are so hot,” he had turned and run. And I believe that he doesn't really understand why he did not.

And I suppose like most wives—or husbands—in my position, I wanted to believe his involvement with this woman had been as little as possible. A single night, another opportunity, but that was it and he had wanted away from her. He reminded me that he had begged my brother to come on the announcement tour. Jay reminded me, too. Jay, like I, had loved this man for over three decades. I spoke to him, Jay said. He asked me to come because he did not want her around him, but that she had insisted that she was coming even if Jay came; she was not letting go. Working behind the scenes, a friend of hers in the campaign made sure she was on the trip. Jay convinced me that John had no choice; she was going to come. He was as afraid, I suppose, as I was.

I hung on to whatever I could. I was, in nearly every sense, Tecmessa or the wife of any soldier or warrior who comes back from a campaign changed: I wanted my old life back with the man I knew and loved. I looked at his face and heard his voice, and it seemed possible, didn't it, that nothing had really changed. The man I married couldn't have done this. No matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, like those women, I had to accept that the man who had come home to me was different and that our story would be different because of that. But knowing that and letting go of my expectations were two quite different things.

I spent months learning to live with a single incidence of infidelity. And I would like to say that a single incidence is easy to overcome, but it is not. I am who I am. I am imperfect in a million ways, but I always thought I was the kind of woman, the kind of wife to whom a husband would be faithful. I had asked for fidelity, begged for it, really, when we married. I never need flowers or jewelry, I don't care about vacations or a nice car. But I need you to be faithful. Leave me, if you must, but be faithful to me if you are with me.

It wasn't a premonition. I was talking about my own history. I had read my mother's journals, found them buried beneath a mattress in a guest room—I have no idea what provoked me, at thirteen, to look under a mattress and no idea why I felt compelled to read them, all of them, but I did. Notebook after notebook, getting to know a mother who seemed before that time to be in total control of her life. And reading, I discovered that my mother believed my father had been unfaithful to her when I was a baby. I will say clearly that I do not know if that is true. I only know what she suspected. She was serially pregnant in the late 1940s and early 1950s: My brother was born thirteen months after I was, my sister was born twelve months later. And my mother believed, rightly or wrongly, that my father had found other companionship while she was buried in babies. She even thought she knew where—the Willard Hotel in Washington—the place I had my senior prom, which must have been a bitter pill for her, although I had a suitably terrible time because, unbeknownst to her, I knew what that hotel meant to her.

My mother was beautiful. She had high cheekbones and brown hair that was red where it caught the light. When she met her first husband, who died in World War II shortly after their marriage, she had been horseback riding. Her hair was in braids. She wore jodhpurs, boots, and a white cotton blouse, the sweat from the Texas heat forming in the V-neck of the blouse. He was completely taken. My father saw her first when she was in layers of organza at a wedding rehearsal dinner. She had long legs, which are still shapely at eighty-five. She had the narrowest of waists and what was delicately called an ample breast. But she was more than that. She was witty and brilliant and competitive about everything except my father. When it came to my father, she was always on his side. In a series of houses to which we moved as a Navy family, she made each a home, decorating in a way that looks odd now in photographs but that I remember being the height of style then. She won flower-arranging contests, made knockout meals, edited the base newsletter, taught Sunday school, played golf, and started a charity antique thrift shop. She was the perfect wife of a naval officer. There was hardly a thing—except sing—that she couldn't do as well as or better than most around her. My father was blessed to have won her. And yet she believed that he may have cheated on her.

What believing that did to my mother I will never forget. I read about it perhaps a dozen years after it happened and it was still as raw, maybe even more so, as when she wrote of it. It undid the beautiful face and the ferocious intelligence; it mocked the family dinners and the charity work. She could be replaced in the most intimate of her relations by a face, likely a face not as pretty as her own, by a physique also not likely to have matched my mother's. She believed that whatever gifts of charm or generosity or intelligence she brought to their marriage, it had not been enough to compensate for baby diapers and dishes to wash. Someone without those responsibilities could laugh and fawn. And could take her place. As a Navy wife, she gave up all that she might be—which for her was considerable—to be with my father, to travel where he was assigned, to live where he was quartered, to raise their children to reflect well on him.

My father is of Italian descent, and it was family lore that he had a hot Latin temper. And there were plenty of screaming arguments as we grew up. But looking back I wonder that she didn't bait him, didn't needle him, accuse him in her soft southern accent until he did explode. She needed to be mad at him for something. The something she really needed to be mad about—a possible tryst at the Willard—was always unsaid, so the arguments were always about something else. Or the anger would turn onto one of us. We didn't understand it. Nothing seemed consequential enough for the level of anger. So we blamed a glass—or two—of Ballantine or a barmaid who had flirted with Dad or even a lieutenant who had flirted with my mother. It was all interior, all behind the walls of our quarters, never where it could be noticed or reported. We didn't talk about it to anyone; we didn't even talk about it to each other. To the rest of the world we were still the happy Anania family.

Mother kept looking for where she had fallen short. And the looking took its toll. She would swing from it being a failure of hers—she wasn't pretty enough; she wasn't as carefree as he; his mother never accepted her because she was a widowed Protestant, not a virgin Catholic, when they married; a hundred things it clearly was not—to its being a failure of his—how could he do this, he wasn't the man she thought he was, didn't his family mean anything to him, didn't his career matter. There was never a satisfactory place to settle, so she lived all those decades still loving him, but with something deep inside her that would always be restless, even after he died. “The trust was supposed to be deep. The smiles were supposed to last forever.” Don't ever put me in that position, I begged John when we were newlyweds. Leave me, if you must, but do not be unfaithful.

My father, innocent or guilty, did what he could to make her feel that she was and would always be the center of his world. My father finally died in March of 2008, and for his funeral I gathered photographs of him to hand out, to decorate the reception. I am the repository for our family's pictures, and I can assure you there are at least ten thousand, likely much more. I went through each one. It was hard to find pictures of my father, for he, like I, was the photographer of his family. What I did find, though, was thousands of pictures of my mother, of the camera loving my sleeping mother or my mother reading the paper, or my mother looking wistfully from a train window or moving a treasured tansu she had found in a Japanese antiques shop. What I found was my father loving my mother. She had surgery to remove cysts from her chin. It is recorded with the kind of love necessary for scars. She is in the middle of cooking Thanksgiving dinner, a kerchief on her head, an apron halfway around her, a spoon stirring some large pot of unidentifiable delight. He adored her. He sang silly songs for her, wrote poems on the greeting cards, left notes on the refrigerator to his beloved Liz, or Diz. Whether that helped the self-loathing I don't know. Whether he ever really betrayed her, or whether he told her if he had, I don't know. But I saw them grow old together. And I saw him die and leave her here alone. For all the pain his real or imagined imperfections had caused her, she is to this day and will be until she dies unable to accept that she has to live a day without him.

When my pain hit, it hit me hard. It threw me to the floor in a way I thought, after the death of Wade, impossible. And the death of Wade made it even more difficult for me. I had said so many times that I cannot count them that after Wade's death I did not want John to have a single moment of unhappiness. And when Wade died, John had been beside me. We had felt the same things, needed the same things, leaned into each other in the deepest of ways. Every argument we had ever had evaporated in the face of this overwhelming sense of our—it seems strange now to say—oneness. For about six months we were never even able to be out of each other's presence, so essential were we to each other. When he had an appendectomy the summer after Wade died, Bonnie and Dan McLamb came to the hospital to sit with me, for I had not been without him since April. When he came out of surgery, I slept beside him in the hospital room.

I remember one day in the late summer of 1996 when he said to me that he did not want to go to the cemetery that day. “I know you need to go every day,” he said, “and so I have gone with you, but I went not because I needed to go to Wade's grave. I need him, but I don't need to see his grave every day,” he said. “I need to be with you.” For months he had gone to the cemetery when it was hard for him to face that grave every day, and he had done it because he loved and needed me. What had happened between then and now? That man who gave me that gift could not be the man before me now.

How could this happen? What was I supposed to do? I had my mother's example of bitter acceptance, but what was I to do with that? Did she believe hers, like mine, was a single night? I found myself getting angry about other things, particularly in front of the children, just as my mother had done. And, with considerable self-loathing, I saw myself get short with them, too. Was I repeating my mother's story? She knew that if she left him, his career would suffer, as I knew. Was that why she stayed? I didn't think so, just as I didn't believe that John's career was why I stayed. We each had stayed because we loved the man we married. But was I destined to repeat a life of bitter acceptance? The possibility of my father's infidelity ate at Mother, I knew, but she stayed there, stayed with him and loved him, and after his stroke when he was nearly seventy she cared for him for nearly two decades with a selflessness that is almost unimaginable. Was that what I was supposed to do? And I was the one who would need the care. Although we did not know yet at the beginning of 2007 that the cancer had metastasized, we did know since 2005 that the cancer had spread at least to my lymph nodes, that there was some possibility of metastasis. I was the one who would need the selfless partner.