Saving Graces (3 page)

But as soon as our plane touched down at a small airstrip in Boston, I could see that the mood had changed. Someone was there to meet us with a car, and they instructed us to leave our luggage and hurry. I was driven immediately to the hotel, where more satellite interviews had been scheduled. I would do mine and some that John Kerry—who had already spent hours in the remote chair—had been scheduled to do. Ted Koppel, the ABC news anchor, was leaving the makeshift studio in the hotel when I walked in, and we talked a minute while they readied the hookup for the first interview. I was told the first one would be with a station in Hawaii.

“Hawaii?” I asked, incredulous, but not too much so, since Ted Koppel was still within earshot. Hawaii was supposed to be a comfortable win.

I got back in the satellite chair at the hotel and put in my best effort until finally, at about 9:45
P.M
., I was asked to do an interview with a local station in New Mexico. “When do the polls close there?” I asked.

“In fifteen minutes,” someone answered.

“What in the world do you want me to say? Wherever you are, run as quickly as possible to the polls and hope you get there before they lock the door.” It was the only time I didn’t do what I was asked to do. Instead, I took out my earpiece and went downstairs to my room. Cate and Emma Claire and Jack were there with my brother, Jay, my sister, Nancy, and their families, who had come to Boston to be with us for election night. The children talked excitedly about their trip to the New England Aquarium that day and laid out the souvenirs they had collected. After they left to get ready for bed, I told Cate, and then my brother and my sister, what I suspected would be confirmed by needle biopsy the next day. We sat together quietly for a while, overlooking the crowd in Copley Square, the television pundits calling states behind us.

Finally, around 10:00
P.M
., John called. He had spent a long day in Florida and had just gotten to Boston. “It doesn’t look good,” I told him as he headed to our hotel. He’d had the same experience I had. When he left Florida, it appeared that their ticket had won, so he joked with the staff and the traveling press corps on the plane and slept lightly but easily, preparing for the night’s celebrations. When he got to Boston, it was another story.

John arrived at the hotel, and we had only a minute to ourselves before his staff—mostly people who had been with us for years—gathered in our suite. With a backdrop of music from Copley Square, John sat down with the pollster he respected and was told that it was going to come down to Ohio, and though we were down now, there was still a long shot. We wouldn’t know anything tonight. John called John Kerry, and I left him to talk while I got ready for bed. Although I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. John came in around 1
A.M
. and told me the campaign had heard that George Bush was preparing to declare victory. They wanted John to go out and speak to the crowd in Copley Square—and the television audience—before Bush went on the air.

“Just you?” I asked.

“Just me,” he said. Senator Kerry was at his Boston home. He had also spent the day thinking he had won, and the night had been hard on him. John agreed to do it. Hundreds, maybe thousands of supporters still stood outside in Copley Square, where it was cold and raining, and they deserved to hear from the ticket.

Finally, around 2
A.M
. Peter Scher and John’s other closest advisors came to our room with the speech someone in the campaign had written and the invisible “they” in some other room wanted John to deliver. I heard them in the next room. He couldn’t give that speech, John said. It was too close to a concession, making it easier, not harder, for George Bush to declare victory while there were votes yet to be counted in Ohio. I listened from my bed as they tried to rearrange the existing words into something accurate and strong. Finally, unencumbered by the suggested speech they were trying to edit, I yelled out from the bedroom: “We’ve waited this long. We can wait a little bit longer.”

John scribbled a note to himself, pulled up his tie, and headed out. I heard the roar from Copley Square as he came onstage ten floors below me. “We’ve waited this long,” he told the somber crowd. “We can wait a little bit longer.”

I woke up early the next morning. John and Cate and I had a few minutes alone to talk about all that had happened the night before and what would happen later that day, when we would all meet the Boston doctor who would later be my surgeon. I went to dress as John’s staff and other members of my family started trickling in. I showered, and as I put on pants and a sweater I listened to John in the other room, arguing into a speakerphone that we could not concede until the votes were counted. “We promised,” he said. “We told these people that if they stood in line and fought for their right to vote, we would fight to have them counted. We promised.”

He was giving no room, but I could see that he was losing this argument to unnamed voices on the other end of the line. Someone would recite the latest numbers from Ohio, and John would counter. But he was alone, and the fight was lost. John’s staff sat silently, glumly, at the table around him. Jay and Cate were eating breakfast, watching the muted television and listening to the phone conversation behind them. I kissed Cate, then John, and I wandered out into the hall, still barefoot. I checked on the children, who were happily eating breakfast in their room and watching cartoons on television, then I headed back to the hallway.

The hotel was strangely silent. “Do you know where my staff has gathered?” I asked the Secret Service agent guarding our room. He pointed to the room of Lori Denham, my chief of staff. Inside, Ryan, Hargrave, Kathleen, and all the others who formed our little family were gathered. The campaign had originally budgeted the vice presidential candidate’s spouse for no staff whatsoever, and I had always considered them the miracle staff. The team had been pulled together on a moment’s notice, staffed with people who’d thought they would sit this one out or wouldn’t be tapped for the campaign. Like many an accidental family, we had lashed ourselves to one another so we couldn’t and wouldn’t be torn apart. These women—except for Ryan, they were all women—had had more contact with me in the last months than I did with my own family, and now here they sat, spread out on the beds and floor of Lori’s room, around the telephone. Mary Beth Cahill, the Kerry-Edwards campaign manager, was already on the speakerphone. She had organized a conference call to tell everyone that the election was over and we were conceding.

Mary Beth’s voice broke as she trailed to a close, and Kathleen reached over and hung up the phone. There were tears, but no one said a word. I broke the silence.

I told them that they had my admiration, my appreciation, and my affection. No one had a staff smarter, or more dedicated, or harder-working than I did. They had given up their lives and jobs and families at the drop of a hat to join this staff, but they were more than that—they had become like family. “And, like family, I want to tell you something first that I will talk about publicly later.” I explained that I had found the lump in Kenosha, that it was almost certainly breast cancer, and that immediately following Kerry’s speech at Faneuil Hall I was going to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to meet with a surgeon for a biopsy and, if it was positive, as I suspected it would be, to decide on a strategy for treatment.

The room immediately dissolved once more, and although I had managed to hold it together since Des Moines, I could feel my eyes fill up again. I didn’t know how much these young people knew before I talked to them, but for the last four months they had fed me and briefed me and planned for me and awakened with me and slept only after I slept, and I felt terrible for them. This time yesterday, we’d been winning the election and I’d been healthy. Today, we had lost and I had breast cancer. Someone had yanked a giant brake somewhere, and their lives had come to a jolting stop. I couldn’t diminish the importance of the loss; I had no way to make it better, so I simply went to each of them and hugged each one tightly. And though these women were all a group and in some sense I was at the center of it, I was also the absent center. They had functioned together without the physical me among them for months, and I knew that without me now they would still be a complete cloth because of their bonds with one another, whatever happened to me. So after a little bit I left them to be together and went back to my room.

As I walked to my room, I wiped away my tears. There would be plenty of times in the days and months to come when I would need John; now it was his time to need me, and I couldn’t be in tears.

Even though I was afraid of what breast cancer would mean to my family, and even though I didn’t want my parents or my children to have to hear that I had cancer, I really was at peace about the disease. I have sometimes talked about the strange gift that comes with the awful tragedy of losing a child. I had already been through the worst, I believed; we all had, and I had the gift of knowing that nothing will ever be as bad as that. The worst day of my life had already come. And I knew too that I had a chance to beat this, a chance my son never had, a chance we never had to save him. Wade was dead by the time an EMT came to the side of his car to help him just seconds after his accident, and there was nothing I could have done in that moment to save him, no matter how many nights I had spent begging God for the opportunity to go back and give us the chance to try. But this was different. I had a chance. I was resolved, not defeated.

And I sensed that I had a few people who would be pulling for me, maybe speaking to God for me. Those women I had just left, who had stood with me in the last months, I thought they would be there—and they were. The people I had met as I campaigned, people who had told me they counted on me, I thought I could count on them, too—and it turned out I could. Those two spirited women in Cincinnati who asked if I was a survivor. I knew I wasn’t walking alone.

I went back to my room. John and Cate were waiting to meet me, to tackle all that still lay ahead of us that day. I pulled on what Hargrave called my Courage Jacket, and we went out to Faneuil Hall.

CHAPTER 2

JACKSONVILLE

M
ANY PEOPLE GROW
up in one house, and there they learn the stories of most of their neighbors and of their town. Their home phone number is one they will have for twenty years or sometimes much longer than that. Decades later they take their children back to their old neighborhood and point out the places that marked the events of their lives. I always wanted that, but, like every child who grew up in a military family, it was not to be. For me, it’s not one place. Sure, I could drive through Alexandria, Virginia, and show my children where the Topps Drive-In once stood, where its aging posts with mounted menus touting Sirloiners have been replaced by a shiny Lexus dealership. I could circle Hemming Park in Jacksonville, Florida, and ride past the old May Cohen windows that had delighted me at Christmas when I was seven. There I could show my children the Morrison’s Cafeteria where we ate after Sunday school, beckoned by the enveloping intonations of James, the doorman, whose warm, “Come on in, no waiting in the Carriage Room” drifted across the park and invited us in. I could, and did, fill my children with the stories of Pistol Pete Maravich when we passed by his high school on the way to basketball at the YMCA in Raleigh, how he’d averaged thirty-two points a game and no one could stop him.

But the truth is, I was in those places, but they weren’t in me, not like a hometown is. I didn’t watch them change as I grew, and I cannot measure the changes in my life by the evolution of a place. When I date an event, I don’t ask, “Was the new high school built then?” but rather, “Where were we stationed?” Things happened in a place, but eventually I moved away, and one place was replaced by another and then another. James in front of Morrison’s was replaced by the wooden backstop at Bandy Field in Atsugi, Japan, which was replaced by the red metal roof of the Topps Drive-In. My life is measured by which air station, which town, which country I lived in. And the cast of characters changed with each move. I don’t have a house that was always home or neighbors I have known all my life. My only constant is my family. And for me, describing them is like describing my hometown: it’s where I come from.

My father spent his career as a pilot in the U.S. Navy. It was a dream for my dad and his family. Although Dad was born in America, his parents had both been born in Italy. The Navy meant that you were really part of this country, the credential of a real American that no one could dispute. But it didn’t come easily.

The one-hundred-year-old, three-story home in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in which my father grew up might have been grand had it not also been the factory where his father, Flores, made and sold his potions and ointments and where his mother, Mary, made soaps in the kitchen. The neighborhood was all that way: family homes and family businesses under one roof. Next door the Silvers ran a dry-goods and novelties business from their house. All the houses are gone now, lost to the cloverleaf for the Lane-Bane Bridge that solved a lot of traffic problems in Brownsville but took histories, and my family’s history, with it. Still, that house on Market Street, from which he could look down on the Monongahela River, was probably the grandest house my father ever lived in, even if the upper floors were rented to roomers. It was there that my grandfather, Dr. Flores Anania, supported his growing family as a pharmacist and chemist, and from there, in 1931, he left to be sworn in as an American citizen.

At Brownsville High School, my father was as dapper as his father, but taller. Sports consumed the time left over after he helped his father or worked the several jobs he had in high school. When I look at the pictures of my father from those days, I can imagine him serving dinner in a supper club he had once described, where his wealthiest customer tipped only on the dinner but never on the drinks that kept my father running to the bar throughout the evening. In photographs, I see him dressed in a double-breasted suit, with thick wavy hair and an open handsome face, and I can imagine the girls swooning over him, as two lovely eighty-year-old twins told me they had, sixty-plus years before, when I met them on a campaign visit to Brownsville in 2004.

And although I never met my grandfather, I can picture him as the Italian father in control. He died before my parents even met, but I’ve heard the stories all my life. How he would sell one of his formulas to a company, make a small fortune, and spend it on fancy clothes, or an automobile. It may even explain that grand house on Market Street. Then times would be lean again, and my grandmother—Nana, we called her—would be in the basement making soap in a dress that had been custom-ordered from France. One of our favorite stories, told enough times that it might even be true, concerns a new automobile he purchased when my father was about sixteen. He took the family to New York City in the car to see his brother Joseph, who lived on Long Island and broadcast a radio show from Radio City Music Hall. While negotiating the streets in New York, my grandfather’s new car stalled in the middle of an intersection. Traffic was being directed by a large barrel-chested Irish policeman who ordered that he move the car. My grandfather tried to start the engine and failed, the policeman bellowed, and the scene repeated itself. Finally, my grandfather, exasperated and unused to being yelled at, told my father to take “the women”—that is, his mother and sisters—to the sidewalk nearby. When he turned back around at the curb, my father saw this short, well-dressed Italian man, his own father, opening the hand of the policeman who towered over him, slamming the keys into his hand, and stomping off, yelling over his shoulder, “You move it. It’s your car now.”

After a year at the University of Pittsburgh, my father got the long-sought-after appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. At six feet three inches, he had broad shoulders accentuated by the navy blue uniform, and with his mother’s thick black hair and his father’s soft eyes, he was a model of a robust young American. He stayed that way even when he started losing enough hair that his classmates called him Baldie. When I was in seventh grade and living at the Naval Academy, I went to the library and looked up my father’s placement in his graduating class. I was disappointed that it wasn’t high. But that was just his academic placement; he was made a commander in his company when he was a first-classman, which is a senior; he was a more than reliable football player and an All-American lacrosse player in a world where athletic success was valued at least as much as academic success; and he was—and remains to this day—beloved by those men who graduated above and those few who graduated below him in the Class of 1945, which because of World War II graduated in three years, in 1944.

When he graduated from the Naval Academy, his orders came to report immediately to the USS
Quincy,
a heavy cruiser, “the biggest ship you could ever imagine seeing,” as he wrote home. On January 23, 1945, when the
Quincy
and my father set sail from Newport News, Virginia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself was aboard, destined for the Black Sea in the Soviet Crimea, where Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin at what became known as the Yalta Conference.

In early March 1945, after the President had been returned home, the
Quincy
and my father sailed for the Pacific theater, to fight the war with Japan. The
Quincy
took part in the first bombardments of the Japanese mainland at Kamaishi, north of Tokyo, and survived a severe typhoon that flooded my father’s bunkroom and swept, he complained, his gray worsted trousers out to sea. His letters home were censored, of course, so after the
Quincy
bombed a factory in Hamamatsu, he wrote about how thrilled he was to hear that his older sister had finally become serious with a boy. “Hope she will be leaving home soon,” he wrote. “At last, more room for me. Besides, she always stayed in the bathroom too long.” After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he wrote his mother that “life out here is still wonderful. Thanks for the brownies. They were very good, though a little hard by the time they reached us. One boy asked if they were left over from my high school graduation party.” World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, he was in those places, but he always talked as he did in his censored letters home, keeping everything cheery. He lived through a terrible great war, and two more to follow, but you would never know it from talking to him.

In October 1945, after Germany was defeated and Japan had surrendered, my father returned home. He went to Navy flight school, where he spent his nights in a classroom and his days in a cockpit. My father loved flying and swore he’d never get out of a plane. He never minded the danger, but he did mind the unrelenting heat of Corpus Christi and the intense schedule. “I still have a lot to learn,” he told his mother as his training program came to a close. “We have to know everything about this plane except how to make it talk.” That left little time, he complained, for the more important things, like football and girls. But all that was about to change.

In a letter home to his mother, my father slipped in the name of my mother—and his plan to marry her—between the notice that he had taken $135 from his bank account and a reminder that his Plymouth was due for a free checkup. “Believe me,” he wrote, “this is it. She is tall, shapely, light brown hair—fairly attractive. Hope you will like her.”

My mother was born Mary Elizabeth Thweatt, the daughter of a Navy pilot and a Mississippi farm girl. Her father, Troy, had courted my grandmother Mary in letters from the front as part of the first Navy Air Corps during World War I. While in France, he wrote her a sweet letter about how much he adored and missed her. He always started his letters “Dearest Girl,” and that is how this one started. On the outside of the letter he wrote that if the letter wasn’t welcome, she needn’t keep it. She could send it back, and he would send it to another girl. My grandmother wrote back that she liked the letter fine and believed she would keep it, but she would always wonder who had gotten it before she did. He knew then he had to marry her.

My mother never knew a hometown any more than I did. There was land in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, that her mother’s family owned, land she and her siblings still own today, but it was no more home to her than my grandparents’ houses in Pittsburgh or Pensacola were to me. She too had grown up on naval bases around the country, moving every few years, with her elementary school days in Norfolk, her junior prom at California’s famous Hotel Del Coronado, and graduation from high school at Punaho in Hawaii, as if in a prequel to my own life.

After Pearl Harbor, Liz, as my mother was known, left college to work at the air station in Kingsville, Texas, where her father was stationed, and there, through a friend, she met a young pilot from Illinois, Carl Hallen. When he was transferred to Hanford, Washington, she traveled by train—with a wedding dress and veil—to marry him under crossed swords, surrounded by near-strangers, since neither her family nor her friends could afford to travel in wartime. She moved to San Diego when his squadron moved and went home to her family—then in Pensacola, Florida—when the squadron was deployed to the Pacific theater.

It was there that she was living when she got a telegram that Carl’s plane had lost its positioning and flown nose-down into the Pacific. No body was recovered; there was no funeral to attend. Mother accepted the news with the same silent strength she had seen women draw on to accept similar news her whole life; her grief would be private. Mother simply went back to college, this time to Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee. This time as Mary Elizabeth Hallen, widow.

I suppose every little girl grows up thinking her mother is beautiful. When I was eight I drew a picture of a woman’s face with X’s at the corners of the mouth—my mother had just had surgery to remove cysts on her chin—and I labeled it “Beautiful Woman,” so I was no exception to the rule. But as I look back at photographs of my mother, I can see now that she really was a great beauty, long-legged and lean—she had been named “Best-Placed Protoplasm” in high school, a title my brother and sister and I found hilarious. She had soft brown curls and clear blue eyes above Rita Hayworth cheekbones. She said Carl Hallen fell for her when he saw her in jodhpurs and boots, with beads of sweat running down her cotton blouse, after she’d been out horseback riding in Kingsville. My father fell for her when he saw her dressed in layers of organdy. I’ve seen pictures of her in Esther Williams-style bathing suits, in short shorts, in gowns, and in suits; I’ve seen pictures of her with her hair in pigtails and in long curls and in bobs. It never mattered: she was always the most splendid girl in the crowd. Of course my father fell for her, as had a long line of young men before him.

They met at a wedding rehearsal dinner. My grandfather, a great sports fan, had spotted my father, whom he recognized as that terrific end on the flight school football team, and he cornered him to talk football. On the ride home, my grandfather asked Mother if she’d met Vince Anania. No, she said, who was he? The tall, dark-haired young man at dinner. No, she didn’t remember him. Granddaddy went on so excitedly that at the wedding Mother did seek him out. Well, he was tall, dark, and pretty good-looking, she thought. When she turned him down for a date a few weeks later because of a planned family trip to Mobile, my grandfather was beside himself. From that point on, her family could not have been more helpful to the courtship.