Spoken from the Heart (25 page)

Governor Pease had to cart in his own furniture to fill the place, and his wife, who had lived in Connecticut during the construction, lamented how the sun and heat had parched the grass to brown and killed the corn planted in their new garden. But governors lived there from then on, as the city of Austin grew up around them. Inside, Sam Houston, who had fought so hard to make Texas part of the United States, all but wore grooves in the wide plank floors, pacing at night over his decision to resign the governorship rather than sign an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, as Texas's state legislature had decreed. Along the grand, sweeping staircase leading to the second floor, the banister is covered with nail holes, from the successful efforts of another governor, James Stephen Hogg, to prevent his four children from sliding down the great, slick stair rail. Those children also kept a menagerie of dogs, cats, squirrels, raccoons, and exotic birds in and out of the mansion.

By the time George and I arrived, most of the rooms in the house were unalterable. The only place where we might choose the colors or furnishings was the small family quarters upstairs. The downstairs public rooms, which some 24,000 tourists walked through on tours each year, were set in mustard and blue and red, with heavy drapes and a priceless collection of early American antiques, many of them collected by Governor Bill and Rita Clements and their friends in Dallas. The rules of the Friends of the Governor's Mansion decree that nothing can be changed. In fact, far less can be done to alter the Texas governor's home decor than to modify the rooms in the White House.

I set about making our upstairs rooms into a home as I listened to the buzz and tramp of the tourists below, and people craned their necks to see if we were indeed there. Once, when Barbara was home sick from school, a tour group paused in the garden right below her window. The guide pointed out our cat, Cowboy, and then mentioned our dog, Spot, but couldn't remember the name of Barbara's cat, and I knew she wanted to call out her window, "My cat's name is India." In our own space, I painted the walls a soft gray.

Three months after the inauguration, the Texas State Capitol was rededicated after a lengthy restoration. I was tasked to be master of ceremonies for the event, held outside on the soaring front steps. Former governor Ann Richards was seated next to me, and as George was speaking, she told me that she had always wanted to add closets to the apartments and proceeded to draw a blueprint of her closet design for me on the back of a speakers' program. I did build the closets, although not exactly as she had specified. We had a tiny kitchen upstairs and only a small space to eat. We ate most of our meals in the family dining room on the first floor, with a chef to cook for us. It was probably a relief to George and the girls. When I was the cook, I could make it through about four nights of dinners. By the fifth, we had to eat out.

We were not totally unprepared for gubernatorial life, and not simply because George's dad had reached the presidency. Every newly elected governor and his spouse are invited to attend something called "governors' school," held by the National Governors Association before inauguration. We got a tutorial in the basics of state life. Our school was in West Virginia, and the most candid comments invariably came from the sitting governors' wives. One told us, "If your state troopers will drive you, be sure to let them. If you get into a fender bender," she added, "it will be front-page news. If your trooper does, it will be a note in the metro news section."

Twelve days after George was sworn in, we were back at the White House, for our first official National Governors Association meeting and a black-tie evening hosted by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Stepping into the gleaming hallways, we had a sense of nostalgia for the four years there, as well as the comfort of seeing ushers and butlers who had always been so welcoming. There were reminders too of the awkward intricacies of larger political life. That first year, at the White House luncheon for the governors' spouses, I was seated next to Rhea Chiles, wife of the Florida governor, Lawton Chiles, who had narrowly defeated Jeb Bush in a very tough race the previous fall. Whether the seating was intentional or accidental, Rhea and I were forced to make polite conversation as elegant china plates were silently placed and then, after many minutes, briskly whisked away.

Ann Richards was not married when she was governor, so there had been no first spouse in Texas for four years. I had a small office in the new underground space behind the Capitol building, which was across the street from the governor's residence. My space was a collection of three rooms with tan walls: first, a small, boxy office with my desk; second, a narrow sitting area, where I placed a couch from our Dallas den that hadn't fit in the governor's residence; and finally a workspace for the only person on my staff, Andi Ball. Xerox machines hummed down the hall, and staffers strode past carrying paper stacks, meeting agendas, and binders stuffed with the business of Texas. But what was my business? First ladies have innumerable events to attend--luncheons, dinners, occasions to make remarks for worthy causes--but small talk has never been my forte. Rita Clements, the state's most recent first lady, had a long list of accomplishments in her chosen causes: volunteerism, education, historic preservation, and tourism. Where would my mark be made?

Some of my duties were prescribed, like the annual Texas Historical Commission's Main Street Program, for which I traveled to small towns with Jan Bullock, wife of the lieutenant governor; she had taken over some of the ceremonial responsibilities during Governor Richards's term. Jan and I would walk past the solemn courthouses and along the newly restored Main Streets, where the 1940s and '50s false fronts had been pulled down and the old glass-front shops had been restored. On the streets, we could almost hear the clomp of horses' hooves or the sputter of Model T's or even the soft hum of brightly waxed tail fins passing down the street. Here, life before the interstate was preserved.

But others were causes that I could make my own. I started with art, collecting posters from major Texas museums and displaying them, framed, in an adjacent state office building so the corridors could have Robert Rauschenbergs, Georgia O'Keeffes, Richard Avedons, and other works to enhance their sparse monochromatic walls. I held exhibitions of Texas artists near my office in the new section of the Capitol, painters and sculptors, abstract and representational, women and men. And Nelda Laney, wife of Pete Laney, the Speaker of the Texas House, Jan Bullock, and I searched for historic Texas art that we could add to the Capitol.

The issue of education was a logical choice. I convened a summit on early childhood development and brain research, inviting top experts from around the nation to discuss the importance of reading from infancy and family literacy as ways to prepare students for learning years before they were enrolled in school. We discussed the latest brain science, unlocking the pathways for how small children learn, the connections their eager minds can make between sounds and symbols. We explored the ways that their physical environment--what they eat, how they play, what they do with the adults around them--molds their school years and their lifelong learning. I remembered my kids all those years ago at Longfellow and John F. Kennedy and Dawson and wondered how their lives might have been different if they had come through the school doors ahead rather than behind. This was my contribution to George's sweeping education reforms, which he enacted with Bob Bullock and Pete Laney. The summit helped convince legislators to create reading readiness programs for preschoolers and, for the first time, to add to the federal Head Start program.

I had, I suppose, an affinity for difficult causes. I made Texas's Department of Family and Protective Services one of my issues, working to support the caseworkers who investigate child abuse and neglect, who rise at 2:00 a.m. to answer a police phone call telling them a child or a family of children must be removed from their home. I had begun working with CPS when we lived in Dallas, helping with the Adopt-A-Caseworker program through an organization called Community Partners, which was started by several of my friends. Caseworkers would literally have children in their arms as they tried to find clothing, food, medicine, diapers, anything that a child removed from a house might need. Many of the caseworkers, who earned meager salaries, were spending their own money to buy these necessities. In Dallas, we started a Rainbow Room, a true haven inside the CPS building, where caseworkers could find anything from clothing to car seats, coloring books, and crayons, whatever they needed to assist families in dire financial straits and children who had been left dirty, hungry, and horribly neglected. The room was a welcoming place, furnished by the Dallas-based Container Store, which put up bright Elfa shelves and bins.

In Austin, I helped establish Rainbow Rooms statewide. I remember meeting one caseworker in Jefferson County, a woman named Dana Stamps, who had removed an abused boy from his home on his sixth birthday. Toys from the Rainbow Room became his only gifts, pajamas, underwear, and a set of clothes his only clean things to wear.

Some months after George became governor, an El Paso writer named Robert Skimin made an appointment to see me in my office. He told me that he had attended a state book festival in Kentucky and that he had always wanted Texas to have its own book festival, adding, "You would be the perfect person to start it, since you were a librarian." I was intrigued, and I called my friend Regan Gammon to ask her what she thought. She loved the idea and immediately had a suggestion about who should help organize it, Mary Margaret Farabee. I started making calls. We gathered a committee of book lovers and authors. We asked to hold the book festival inside the Capitol, where only legislative business was allowed, and we got permission. To sell our authors' books, we erected enormous tents on the streets outside, with authors signing their books and cashiers ringing up whatever was sold. Any monies we raised were to be donated to Texas public libraries. And authors wanted to come. Larry McMurtry, of
Lonesome Dove
fame, told a story about how his hometown of Archer City, Texas, did not have a public library, until he helped start one with some of his book profits. The playwright Larry L. King said that when he was growing up poor in Midland, the public library had saved him. His childhood forays into the works of Mark Twain had led him to dream of telling stories rather than roughnecking it in the oil fields.

But even after all the authors said yes, I was anxious. Weeks before the event, I lay awake at night and worried: what if the weather turned bad, what if the encampment of white tents blew over? The same weekend, Austin was hosting a beer festival and a gun and knife show. One newspaper article quoted an "unnamed" author as saying, "Great. Everyone'll be drunk and armed." I was worried that no one would come.

We hosted a reception for the festival's black-tie gala at the mansion, with all the writers, including Kinky Friedman, who came in his big black hat and big black coat, and chewed on a matted cigar. The next morning, television crews arrived at daybreak to start broadcasting promotional interviews for the festival, and when George walked downstairs, Kinky was there again, wearing his same undertakeresque attire, even with the same cigar clenched between his teeth, talking to the camera. George was convinced that Kinky had spent the night stretched over the silk-upholstered settee in the living room.

The festival opened in the House Chamber, and then the authors fanned out to read in various committee rooms around the Capitol. Outside the House Chamber, as the events were getting under way, a jackhammer was ripping up the ground. I flagged down someone to tell the construction crew to stop, but then I began to worry about all the other things we had forgotten. My head started to pound, and I slipped back across the street to the Governor's Mansion and got into bed. I was sure the whole festival was going to be a bust and people would leave as soon as they had arrived. Regan and another friend of mine, Pam Nelson, came over to the house and found me. They excitedly told me, "The festival is going great. Come back." So I got up, redressed, and raced back across to the Capitol. It was standing room only to listen to the authors in the committee rooms, and there were long lines in the tents. I bought the books of the authors who weren't selling many copies and walked around. Over the weekend, nearly fifteen thousand people came to the first annual Texas Book Festival. In its first fourteen seasons, the festival has given over $2.3 million to Texas libraries.

The next year, the University of Texas Humanities Research Center loaned the book festival its priceless copy of the Gutenberg Bible to be displayed under special glass inside the Capitol's Seal Court. Late on Sunday afternoon, as the festival was drawing to a close, I was walking through a balcony above. For an instant, I looked down. Three uniformed Texas DPS officers were clustered around the display, bent over the Gutenberg's pages. In the middle of Texas, they could gaze upon the first book to be printed on a printing press in Europe, the book that took reading out of the finely articulated, hand-copied vellum of high-walled monasteries and began to make it a democratic pleasure.