Saving Graces (32 page)

And then I didn’t want to rest. There were, at the beginning of my schedule, lots of rest days. But when I had those rest days at home, I was restless not resting. So, at the end of September I said,
I’m not going home again until this is over.
The children would join John or me or both of us on the road on weekends and for rallies, too, if they wanted, and they were the only reason to go home. And when I stayed out, so did our little team.

Where we stayed, the Secret Service stayed, and what we ate, the Secret Service ate. So when I wanted meatloaf instead of something more highfalutin, they ate it, too. But they were trained not to complain. They were trained to be nearly invisible. One of the agents told me that the way to find out if you are Secret Service material is to put on your best suit and stand completely still in your backyard for eight hours. I knew I was going to like the agents. They may have been less sure about me. Soon after the announcement I met the lead agents who were assigned to protect me. We met in our D.C. living room. I sat on one love seat; Kevin Pain, who did the talking, sat opposite me on the other.

“We’re going to be around all the time,” he said. “I know.”

“We are here to protect you, so we can’t carry your luggage or your purse; we’re not being rude.” “I know.”

“Our offices will open all your mail; do you know all the people who send you letters and packages?” “No, I get a lot from eBay sellers, packages from all over.” “We heard that,” he said. I thought,
Geez, they heard that?

“The other agents on the detail are not being rude when they don’t talk to you. The lead agent will initiate all conversations with you.” “Fine.”

“And everything we see and hear is confidential.” Okay.

The conversation was formal and fast. To me, Kevin Pain is just a stitch, even then at his most regimented, clicking through a checklist. He is such a straight arrow. He talks as if he’s reading a movie script for a Secret Service agent. He talks about “the roommate,” that’s his wife. On intense questioning, I could get him to talk about the house he and the roommate were building in Texas or about hunting with his son, but he was pretty much a look-straight-ahead guy, and he ran a very tight ship. Having grown up in the military, I knew him before I knew him. And I honestly liked him. I suspect I got more smiles from Kevin Pain than any protectee—that’s what we are called—ever had.

I had grown up around formal and disciplined. I had grown up with men standing straight-backed for hours watching everything around them. For some protectees it was hard to get used to having someone always there. One kept insisting, wrongly, that the Secret Service had set up cameras in his bedroom. Others balked, got irritable under the constant watch, even yelled at the agents. Shoot, I was going to spend just as much time with them as with Hargrave and Ryan and Karen—although the Secret Service agents did rotate, so maybe not quite as much time—and I figured that the better we got along, the better the experience. The rotation allowed the agents, who had been pulled from all over the country, to go back to their home bases, get home for a while and have dinner with the roommate, for during their two- or three-week shifts they only went where I went. Sometimes we would skirt their hometowns. It’s how I met Bob Rolin’s family and Bill Cousin’s son. Bob was as easy a smile as Kevin was difficult. He was a cheerful, happy man, and it honestly made me feel good just to be around him. Bill was a sweetheart, and he had a sweetheart. We teased him about Mary, the pretty woman who would show up at Michigan events now and again, and then, after he asked her to marry him when his shift was off right before the election, we got him a card and teased him some more. Don Cox, the fourth lead agent, was a student of history and culture. His being in the Secret Service made him a witness to the history he loved, a part of events that mattered. And the man knew everything. Lani Breda, though blonde, was more like me than the others—a sensible-shoes sort of woman. The other women could all play Secret Service agents in the movies: gorgeous Sonyia Rouel with her Ralph Lauren ponytail; Joanne Moses, who would have played the intellectual but surprisingly athletic agent; Lindsey Taylor—whom we eventually lost to Jack and Emma Claire’s detail—was the homecoming queen turned Secret Service agent; and Laura Hughes, well—Laura actually was in a television documentary about the Secret Service that was shown while we were on the road. I can only imagine the ribbing she took. Each of them, Michael, Bart, Patrick, and the list goes on, three dozen, I’d guess, names and faces and stories. It’s hard to leave any of them out.

We didn’t leave them out of any of the fun. I didn’t get them to play Boggle on the plane, but when it was time to sing, I would hand out the songbooks I had refurbished for the general election and ask them to pick a song. I would do it only when we were in the private plane we eventually squeezed out of the campaign, because that was a controlled environment where they could have something in their hands and on their mind other than watching out for me. Kevin would never sing, of course, but nearly everyone else did, and even I caught Kevin flipping through the songbook once or twice.

As the end of the campaign approached, the shifts were having their last days as part of our little team. A few days before each shift left for the last time, we had a goodbye party. The first was in Reno. Hargrave and Karen’s room was on one side of a common room, and mine was on the other, and in between we laid out a feast. Cake, piles of fruit, nachos, and things to drink. Actually, when I write it, it sounds terrible, but it wasn’t. And even if it had been, it would have been terrific, because the agents there—and later for the next crew at the party in Kenosha—were so unbelievably appreciative. One said that in twenty years with the Secret Service, covering all kinds of people, never had anybody done this, ever. He turned to the younger agents. “So don’t expect this again. People,” he said, “don’t even say thank you.” Honestly, that broke my heart. They were supposed to act like furniture, but that didn’t mean we should treat them like furniture.

In mid-October we piled into the Secret Service SUV as we always did, heading out from the airport to a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado. On a bench outside the airport gates sat a man, perhaps in his sixties, his hair thinning, the color of his faded jacket and the color of his weathered skin nearly the same, and on his lap he held a handmade sign, maybe twelve by eighteen inches, and on the sign a single word, plainly printed: FATSO. I watched him, there was nothing else to watch, only a parking lot behind him and the road ahead. And as we drove, he watched us too, watched the tinted windows of the line of SUVs. When we passed, I looked back and saw the man get up. He was walking to his car. The sign, I realized, was meant for me. It was a thrust of ugliness and meanness, meant to throw me off. This man had made the sign, driven to the airport, parked and sat on that bench for who knows how long, waiting for me to come by so I would read his sign, so I would see that someone, a plain old man, called me Fatso. When I saw him get up, I turned to the others in the car—there were three Secret Service agents and my little team, more than the usual load. “Did you see that guy?” I could tell two things from the way the Secret Service responded: they had hoped that I hadn’t seen it, and they were mad. Well, the Secret Service is not there to protect me from meanness, but if you could have seen their faces and particularly the faces of the younger agents, who had seen him from the cars in front of us and behind us. When they rejoined us at the town hall site, it was as if each of them wanted to find a reason to give this fellow the once-over. It was their job to protect me, and I now knew that they actually wanted to protect me. I wish I could have told that nasty man that although he was trying to hurt me, he had given me a very nice gift.

John and I had been to the 2000 Democratic convention. John, like most of the junior senators, had a five-minute speaking slot in the early evening. When he spoke, the audience was mostly the loyal North Carolina delegation. I sat with the North Carolina delegation and the Overseas Democrats delegation—each group had equally terrible seats—when Hadassah introduced Joe Lieberman. In 2000, John was a footnote to a footnote to a footnote, the dismissive slotting of the almost chosen. The experience of the 2004 convention was entirely different. In the first place, I didn’t see much of Boston. I spoke at breakfasts at hotels to which I was delivered by the Secret Service SUV. At the convention hall, I was shuttled from one network booth to another. Thank goodness for Peter Jennings, who told the NBC makeup girl, my third makeup girl in an hour, that I looked just fine, quit fooling with me. I would go up to our family box to see my family, Jay and Jackie and their boys Ty and Louis, my sister, Nancy, and her daughter Laura, and to see my friends—they were all there. And John’s family, his parents and his sister, Kathy, and friends who had become supporters and supporters who had become friends after two-plus years of working together. Then back to the hotel room to work on our speeches.

When Cate and I came back into the room, John pulled out a T-shirt someone had given him, boasting that he’d been told it was the highest-grossing T-shirt in Boston. The shirt, made by a group of Harvard women, had a line drawing of John and the words “John Edwards is hot.”

Cate took one look and said, “Dad, that’s disgusting. Do you want to burn that or do you want me to?” “Oh, yeah,” he answered, “I think it’s weird.” Then he showed it to the next three people who walked into the room. Cate said, “Dad, you are so proud of that.” “No, I do think it’s weird.” “Okay then,” she answered, “stop showing it to people.” John never had to worry about getting too full of himself with Cate around. Bless her.

The night we were to speak, John and Cate and I were each in our own worlds, going over our speeches one last time, pulling at our clothes, watching the convention coverage from any one of the seven flat-screen televisions in the absurdly plush suite the campaign had chosen. In another room, Heather North was dressing the children, and they traveled separately from us to the convention center. Although I had bought their outfits, I had never seen them in them. So when they walked into the hold room under the convention stage that night, I had my first glimpse. Emma Claire, who usually wears her hair in a ponytail, had her long blonde curls down, and she looked like the lovely, serene child that she is. And Jack, I took one look at him and said, “With him in that seersucker suit, the rest of us could go out there naked and no one would notice.”

We had gone out to the stage the night before, just so we would know what to expect. There would be TelePrompTers to our left and right on which the words we had written would scroll out as we spoke, and best of all, there was a big-screen TelePrompTer straight ahead of us, just behind the seated delegates, which, they neglected to mention, would be entirely blocked when the delegates stood or hoisted signs, which was all the time. Cate spoke before me, eloquent, poised, and lovely—how had she learned that, speaking only to college groups of forty and fifty? But I remembered her composure at Wade’s funeral, and I wasn’t surprised. Whatever fears I had had about walking out there were mostly banished: if Cate could do it, so could I. Any remaining fears left when I stepped out and, instead of seeing a sea of strangers, I saw the faces I had seen over the past two years. The Iowa delegation was immediately in front, and Mike Fitzgerald, Ro Foege, and Susan Salter were smiling at me like they had dozens of times before. The North Carolina delegation was to my right—I knew every face. In each state, in each delegation, hands I had shaken, people I had hugged. I spotted Kathy Sullivan and Carole Appel, and there was Patsy Madrid, Virgie Rollins, Donsia Strong Hill. Everywhere, faces of friends, Joe Maxwell, Mari Culver, and their faces opened memories. I remembered the day Paul Shomshor had signed on to the campaign and my first event with Chris Redfern. I look back at the pictures from that night, pictures in which I am smiling or pointing or waving. There is no doubt that they put me at ease. I wasn’t talking to millions of people who didn’t know me. I was talking to them, and they did know me.

I left the stage to John, to the speech I had heard him give twenty times in our room at the house, and yet it wasn’t the same, because now it was punctuated by explosions of applause, and now when he promised that
Hope is on the way
, those words echoed throughout the Fleet Center. At the end, our family, less Wade, was on stage together. When John took Emma Claire in his arms and walked to the far side of the stage, the cameras followed him, and I blew Wade a kiss.

John Kerry spoke the next night. We watched the beginnings of John Kerry’s speech from the family box, but then we moved to the hold room, where we recombed hair, retied shoes, checked lipstick. We listened to the end of the acceptance speech huddled in a four-by-four space behind the backdrop, the adults in front and a collection of children of all ages on the stairs behind us. And when it ended and the convention center erupted, first John, then Teresa, then I went out, followed soon by the children and the balloons, then friends and politicians and party leaders until the stage was full, and all the while, I was watching to make sure the children—intent on keeping the falling balloons afloat—didn’t fall off the stage. Nothing should take away from this night for John Kerry.