Saving Graces (22 page)

During the impeachment trial—which lasted for months—it honestly did not feel like John was away. We talked several times a day, as we had our entire marriage, except when he and Wade were on Mt. Kilimanjaro. We watched him every day at his Senate chamber desk. I’d watch after the proceedings to see if he would talk to reporters at the Ohio Clock, a place the media sets up cameras after sessions to interview senators. He would never stop; the best I could hope for was to see him walk behind the senators who were being interviewed. I guessed that after years of trying cases, he just couldn’t imagine the jurors talking, midtrial, to the media.

But eventually the trial was over, and John went from being a juror to being a senator. It took a little time for John to get his office just right, but he did. Josh Stein, who had run the campaign, came to Washington for a while, until we unfortunately lost him to the attorney general’s office in North Carolina. Finally, Miles Lackey, a North Carolina native who had worked in Washington for a number of years, took over the Senate office, and he is still part of our extended family. Another North Carolinian, Will Austin, managed John’s schedule, saying no to some requests in just the same nice Southern way John would have. Before the real bonds were formed, everyone reached for easy connections. And the easiest connection was our Southernness. Victoria Bassetti, who was John’s first legislative director, and whose family was from Louisiana, would charmingly explain at length her Southern roots. Laura Godwin, Emma Claire’s first babysitter during the campaign, finally had her first paid job with John, and she stayed in the Senate office until the end, becoming more invaluable every day. Lisa Zeidner and Jessica Wintringham from the campaign came too. Cory Menees, whom John had coached in soccer on Wade’s team, worked in the office. David Sherlin, the older brother of one of Wade’s good friends, stayed until he went to law school. Ann Berry, Elizabeth Nicholas, Justin Fairfax, Mike Briggs, Lesley Pittman. And then, as John’s reputation and responsibilities grew, so did his staff. Stephanie Jones, Robert Gordon, Derek Chollet, Carlos Monje, James Kvaal.

There are a hundred names, maybe more, and it is hard to skip even one, because they were—and are—so close to John, and even to me. They would humor me when I would call with whatever I had heard on the radio or on C-SPAN or the news. Miles still teases me about an early-morning phone call. He always says I called at 5:30
A.M
., but my mother taught me the wait-until-after-9-
A.M
. rule, and I (almost) always follow it. He picked up the phone and heard me say, with no hello first: “Plywood. We have to do something about plywood.” I had just heard about shortages in hurricane-devastated areas because the military had bought so much plywood for Iraq that there wasn’t enough for what was needed at home, and the price had skyrocketed. Couldn’t they do something about it? Could he call me back later on this, he asked—like when he was awake? I know I will never get the real truth from any of them about whether they liked my calling with my ideas or peeves of the day or whether it was its own joke. I do know that with me or without me the office had a warm feeling like they were all on the same big boat, each with their own jobs to keep it afloat, but watching each other’s backs, too. A giant green plush rabbit got passed around from office to office—if you were gone for a day, you could be sure that the rabbit would show up on your desk. It was clear these people were genuinely fond of one another, happy being where they were, and happy doing what they were doing. The affection was authentic then, and it is authentic today. And the last time I saw that green rabbit, someone had deposited it in our garage.

Back in Raleigh, as Cate’s senior year started, she was beginning to grow anxious about losing her friends when everyone moved on to college. I had convinced her to apply for early decision somewhere, and she had narrowed the choice to between Princeton and Duke—in my view, the school she really wanted and the school where she would be closer to her friends. She finally applied to Princeton, and then she complained to me for months that I had made her apply there, away from her friends. It was endless, and as the end of school approached, it was constant. When, just before graduation, Cate’s eighth-grade English teacher returned letters to the students that they had written to themselves four years before concerning their ambitions for high school, I was vindicated. Cate had written that she wanted to finish calculus by her sophomore year, which she did, that she wanted to play varsity softball all four years, which she did, and that she wanted to go to Princeton. Princeton! Right there in her eighth-grade handwriting, before I had mentioned colleges to her! Rarely does a mother get a break like that.

But I understood what was behind Cate’s complaints. She had only known one place, one group of friends, and although she was not afraid to face a new place—she had gone to lots of camps and the TIP program at Duke, places where she knew no one—she was afraid to lose the place, and the friends she knew best. I told her she wouldn’t lose them, she’d add to them, that it’s like when you have a child and think you couldn’t love any more than you do, and then you have a second child, and it turns out you can love twice as much. No sale. It is like Jesus and the fishes and loaves, I tried again—there is always enough for the people you know and for the people farther up the beach whom you haven’t come to yet. Again, no sale. Time, of course, has proved to her what her mother could not convince her of: that her lifetime friends would always be her lifetime friends. They have part of you, part of your life, in them, so you don’t want to lose them. But you don’t lose them because you also have part of them in you. It changes. But it doesn’t evaporate. I knew this to be true, even for relationships that hadn’t incubated over eighteen years, for my life was scattered across an entire country of people with whom I had shared it and about whom I still cared. When I moved to Washington, I went to the Jacob Lawrence exhibit at the Phillips Collection with Martha Hartmann, and it was like the thirty-four years (thirty-four years!) since we had been friends in Atsugi, Japan, had slid silently away. I had lunch with Maggie Ketchum this winter, thirty-two years after we were in graduate school together; I still love her.

I was trying to coax one child to decide on colleges while changing diapers for a second and trying to bring yet another child into our lives. I was still trying to get pregnant again. It was looking more and more like the end of the mothering road—then in August we learned I was pregnant again. We were overjoyed. The Senate was on August break, so John shared in the excitement of the news face-to-face, and he went with me to my appointments, even just to get my blood tested. One of the blood tests sounded an alarm. My estriol levels were supposed to keep going up, at least doubling each day that I was pregnant, only one day they didn’t, and the doctors feared that meant that I had lost the pregnancy. We went in for another pregnancy test. John and I sat in the doctor’s office, hand in hand, waiting for the results. The doctor came in, holding a little plastic square with a negative sign across it, and said he was sorry. He left us alone, and although we were unhappy, we knew how lucky we were to have Emma Claire. We resigned ourselves to the great gifts we had in our daughters, and we’d started to get up to leave when the doctor ran back in. In his hand was the little plastic square, but perpendicular to the negative sign another line was forming. It was impossible to say who was most excited. And when we left happily, the doctor chased us out to our car; we’d forgotten the little plastic square with the perpendicular lines; he was sure we’d want that for the baby book. Those perpendicular lines would soon be our son Jack. There were, however, a few intervening events.

Cate’s life was in overdrive—she had the senior year she deserved. And we finally did some things we needed to do at our house. The family room had always been the center of our activities, or at least our activities outside the kitchen. We had so many memories of Wade coming home to that room, bounding through the front door, spotting us, sitting next to John, on top of him, really, pressing himself into whatever space John was in, and John would push him and tease him. When Wade was seven, it was there we watched Wade’s favorite team, the Denver Broncos, lose the Super Bowl. Wade had taken an orange football helmet and taped on the side a drawing he had made of the Broncos’ trademark horse. He sat in that family room, his chin in his hands, that enormous helmet atop his head, and tears streamed down his face as the Broncos were unable to stop the New York Giants. We had thirteen Christmases in that room. It is where we watched Tar Heel basketball games, political conventions, and approaching hurricanes. It is where we read whatever was assigned in English class, cuddled under a blanket my mother bought during my father’s last tour of duty in Italy. And it was now a room we did not want to enter, a place so filled with happy memories that it made us too sad to be there. Finally in 1999 we decided to make a change, and so the rooms changed places—the dining room, the living room, and the family room played a kind of musical chairs that disrupted the house through Cate’s entire senior year and through my last pregnancy. And through even more.

After Al Gore secured the Democratic nomination for president in the spring of 2000, Warren Christopher, perhaps as a courtesy, visited all the Democratic senators in an attempt to help Gore find a running mate. The famous Christopher reserve we had seen on television was, according to John, exactly what you got in person. He asked John about other senators, and John spoke highly of each one. All in all, an interesting experience. And Christopher certainly hadn’t tipped his hand to John, so with the rest of the country we waited for the names on Gore’s list. I admit that we weren’t on pins and needles. We had a growing two-year-old, and all of Cate’s end-of-senior-year events, assemblies, and parties were crowding the schedule. We were glad to be looking forward to them rather than dreading them, as we had three years earlier when Wade’s class graduated.

And I was very pregnant. If Trent Lott, then the majority leader in the Senate, agreed that there would be no votes that day, Jack would be delivered on May 19th. Honestly, we waited to schedule Jack’s birth until after Senator Lott agreed that there would be no votes. The doctors had been adamant that at my age, and after three previous cesarean section deliveries, Jack would be delivered by cesarean section a few days earlier than the due date. On John’s request, with Senator Tom Daschle’s help, Lott agreed, and May 19th it was. Cate and John and I went over to Chapel Hill in the early morning. Jack—John Atticus Edwards—was delivered before 9
A.M
. He looked just like his father, in every wonderful way but in an odd way, too. His hair looked almost combed, and in his father’s hair style, when they first showed him to me in the delivery room. I thought it was a joke Valerie Parisi, my obstetrician, was playing on me, but it wasn’t, that’s just the way he came out—coiffed. His hair hasn’t been as neat since. Like Emma Claire, and Cate and Wade, he had complications from ABO blood incompatibility with me, but in a day or two we were all home, trying to find places for Jack to sleep out of earshot of the ill-timed remodeling.

And that was the scene—Cate’s graduation paraphernalia spread across the kitchen, invitations, awards, robe; Sam and Charlie putting in a new ceiling in the once-dining-room-now-family-room; Emma Claire under constant watch so that she didn’t get harmed by the construction and so that she didn’t, at two, overreach with her new brother; Jack, mostly trying to sleep; company coming by to meet him and to say goodbye because we were moving to Washington a week after graduation; boxes and suitcases open in the hallways so that whenever we had a minute to spare we could pack something; me at the computer scanning my favorite photographs so we could take copies with us to Washington.

It was the Friday afternoon a week before Cate’s graduation, two weeks before the move, and John was due home from Washington anytime. The phone rang, and a very proper elderly man with a whisper of a voice asked for John. Could John call him back when he got home? Andrew Young was picking John up at the airport, so I called Andrew, who relayed the message that Warren Christopher had called, but John, seeing no urgency—he assumed Christopher had another question about another senator—waited to call when he got home.

Over a hungry baby, a toddler trying to get her returning father’s attention, banging hammers, and adult chatter in the next room, John could not quite make out what Christopher was whispering; he could understand about every other word. John was apparently in a final group of potential running mates, and Christopher wanted to know if John would submit to a vetting. When John got off the phone, I asked what he had said. “Well,” said John, “I can tell you what I think he said. I couldn’t hear him.” Had he said John was in a final group? That he was pretty sure of. How many others were in that group? No idea. What did vetting entail? No idea. The one thing he had heard clearly was that this was a secret and we could tell no one. So we told no one.