Changing the Past (34 page)

What he sought for himself by way of female friend was a woman remote as possible from the milieu in which he made a living—and a very good living it was indeed, for every month new stations signed on somewhere across the country, and despite constantly rising rates, the advertisers obsequiously waited in queues to place commercials on Dr. Kellog's program. With such success came a certain celebrity, not of the sort experienced by movie actors or television personalities, but of a more comfortable kind. One could attend to the business of life unobtrusively, serenely eat meals in public, attend sporting events or go to the theater without fear of being accosted, perhaps even attacked, by importunate fans. Yet privileges could be claimed: a radio psychologist with a transcontinental audience could obtain hard-to-get tickets to almost any spectacle, well-placed tables in fashionable restaurants, seats on fully booked flights, and the best suites in major hotels.

Kellog was also the recipient of many proposals to write works of popular psychology, and sent complimentary copies of most of the books written by others in this area: it was by means of the latter that he continued to educate himself in the field into which he had strayed by accident. As to producing a book of his own, or even the articles he was asked to do for mass-circulation Sunday supplements and supermarket-checkout magazines, he cautiously abstained. Nor for a long time would he appear on TV talk shows, though invited to do so after a prominent news magazine had taken note of the latest phenomenon of American culture, therapists of the microphone, and identified him as being preeminent amongst the practitioners thereof. For many years he remained in awe of the fate that had directed him into a trade for which he had had no training whatever, but practiced so easily, with such a generous reward.

All he required now for a balanced existence was someone with whom to share that time when he was off the air, but not only was he determined for reasons of personal pride never to have another failed marriage: as America's adviser on relations between the sexes, he could not afford to make a mistake in his choice of spouse, for it would be widely and derisively publicized. It was a matter for careful procedure—but neither could he delay to the degree that the audience would begin to question how effectual he was in his own life while being so glib about the lives of others.

It took a while to find her, but his third wife was perfection: a lawyer, whom he had met when his second spouse, about to remarry, had her attorney seek his cooperation in legitimizing their Mexican divorce. As it happened, Anna-belle had never listened to his show; she had never even heard of it. But Kellog found her ignorance in that regard a challenge. Immediately attracted to her, he welcomed the opportunity to win her attention when starting out from scratch as simply another client. Annabelle was herself unmarried at thirty-five. For a while he worried about her sexuality, for she seemed to persist in overlooking his attempts to be personal. But when he finally came out and asked her to dinner, she accepted with a sudden and unprecedented display of warmth.

Afterwards, at her apartment, now aware of his profession, Annabelle told him of her doomed love affair with a prominent judge, a man married to a hopeless invalid, a woman who had lived on interminably after suffering the stroke that left her a vegetable. When she finally died, her husband followed her to the grave within two months. By this time Kellog had listened to so many sad stories that while he had not become callous, he had, like physicians, cops, priests, developed a means of distancing himself from such catastrophes lest he be drawn vicariously into them and so be rendered as helpless as the victims. But he could not keep himself aloof from Annabelle's trouble—and that was strange, for it would not have come about without her passion for another man, indeed a man who was her senior by three decades, father of two children who were her contemporaries.

Kellog's feeling for Annabelle was such that he felt only kinship with and never jealousy for the man she had so worshiped. He was reluctant to call this feeling love, associating that word as he did with the emotion that had claimed him each time he had previously got married, though with the first wife it had not been very passionate and with the second it had been little else. Not to mention that his callers overused the word as an all-purpose term for anything but outright hatred, even professing “basically” to love those who had betrayed them, blighted their lives, destroyed everything they held dear. No doubt this reflected the social-betterment agenda of the makers of TV and movies, in which not only those related by blood or law but also persons whose connections were only casual embraced one another regularly while assuring Mom or Son or Anonymous Passerby that he or she was loved.

But he cherished her, and apparently he in turn was of some value to Annabelle. They had much to share at the end of each working day, trading stories from two vivid areas of human conflict, over dinner in one of their many favorite restaurants. On weekends they retreated to their country house, which over the years had become more luxurious as the address was changed to successively more fashionable areas, as their friends and neighbors became more powerful and in some cases even famous. In the early years of their marriage the only time they used a home kitchen was for a pickup lunch on Saturdays and at Sunday supper, and the weekends were also the time for a moderate sort of sex.

Annabelle was almost forty when they decided they simply must make a place in their lives for children, but given her age and the demands of her profession—she had by now expanded her practice, in a feminist era, to include any legal action a woman might take against men, specializing in the catch-all that had come to be known as sexual harassment—they adopted an infant and named him, for Annabelle's late father, Neil. Now the weekends became their time with the baby, and though their privacy was compromised by so doing, they hired a kindly Hispanic nursemaid to deal with feeding, diapers, and wails in the night. They soon became so devoted to the idea of a family that in the following year they acquired an adopted daughter whom they called Phoebe.

Annabelle had become well known in her field, and when eventually she told Kellog she had decided to try her hand at politics, he asked her why she had waited so long. He could not have admired her more; she had proved to be the perfect partner. He was not reluctant to admit that she was his superior in intellect and ambition. Why not, then, in her situation in life as well?

As a member of Congress belonging to the party in power and furthermore to a sex with whom the Chief Executive wished to ingratiate himself strategically, she took Kellog to several social functions at the White House during her first two years. She was easily reelected but before her term was over the president called her to the cabinet as attorney general, a controversial appointment in view of her little experience in government but one very popular with women, for she proceeded to specialize, as she had in private legal practice, in matters of peculiar concern to them.

Annabelle's party took a whipping in the next national elections, and she returned briefly to private life only to run for the Senate next time a seat was contestable. Her victory over an old incumbent was narrow, but once in power she became quite popular with her constituents. She succeeded usually in identifying herself with forward-looking legislation while managing to avoid being labeled as one of the big spenders by consistently demanding that the fat be ruthlessly trimmed even from her favorite programs and that the administrators thereof be carefully policed. Thus the bureaucrats were not overly fond of her and sometimes vengefully arranged for damaging news leaks regarding program failures which they had arranged—making common cause, and not for the first time, with the reactionaries who opposed her on every matter without noticing that her rhetoric, generally of the liberal-pietistic sort well received by the press, was often not matched by her votes: e.g., judged only by her votes on military projects that brought jobs to her state, she might justifiedly have been called a warmonger.

Meanwhile Kellog remained at his weekday microphone in New York. Once the children were old enough for boarding school, off they went. It became his regular practice to have as mistress his current secretary, usually a divorced woman in her early-to-middle thirties, efficient, quietly attractive, and emotionally balanced. These persons remained with him only a year or two before going on to better things: one even to Washington to work as legislative assistant to his wife, a post for which he had recommended her. He was as ready to see them depart when the time came as they were to go.

Over the years Annabelle became an ever more commanding presence. Though fine-boned and of no more than average height, and of course slender, she was one of the first to be identified at a distance amongst a crowd of political and show-business notables. Her once raven hair had turned a premature white that was even more striking. Her eyes and chin projected that combination of strength and compassion that distinguished successful male statesmen from the herd, while her full mouth represented elements of both sensuality and, yes, the maternal, sororal, uxorial loving-kindness so prized by men in the most dynamic of women, so little resented by fellow females. She was once named Mother of the Year after a twelvemonth in which she had seen her own children only on the major holidays, but her voting record on child care and related issues was seen by the honoring organization as worthy of reward. No hint of scandal had been associated with her since the death of the married judge in what, for a politician, was her earliest youth, and throughout the years in the Senate she became, as befitted a woman of her age, more bluenosed as to sexual issues, if possible quietly avoiding taking provocative positions on homosexual issues but conspicuously attacking printed and videoed smut, obscene rock lyrics, and the peep shows at which men masturbated while female performers writhed behind a window of plate glass. Thus she found herself for the first time the recipient of praise from the religious Right.

Kellog himself took a comparably conservative turn as to sex, much of which was not hypocritical. He had by now had his fill of the deviates to whom he had listened sympathetically in earlier times. While some were no doubt pitiful, many were simply self-indulgent, and those who called radio psychologists were too often tiresome exhibitionists. Eventually he asked his producer not to put through to him any caller with a sexual problem. If one did penetrate the screen, he was forestalled, by the seven-second delay, from reaching the air.

Kellog had made good money over the years and invested it wisely, with the help of his colleague Seymour Channing, the popular adviser on monetary matters whose radio show came, in a mercenary era, to outdraw his own. Annabelle, with her senator's salary and earnings from speaking engagements, was self-supporting. It was he who had always paid the rents and borne the expense of the children, with their governesses and special schools and, at a very early date in each case, psychiatrists. Neil was an addict for almost a year before Kellog knew about it and, having spent on his insatiable habit a large allowance plus a fortune in extra sums given him by a generous father for a car, a trip to Europe, a new wardrobe, he turned to crime as a source of funds, stealing and selling a power boat, burglarizing the home of a friend's parents, and eventually becoming a dealer in the substances to which he was enslaved. Kellog was successful in keeping these matters out of the news, no small achievement in view of the public recognition enjoyed by himself and his wife. Fortunately, Neil's criminal activities while a juvenile had been pursued in small-town venues in and around the schools he attended, where underpaid law-enforcement officials could be discreetly corrupted.

How early in life Phoebe began to have sexual experiences, and with whom, Kellog never wanted to know, but her first abortion came when she was scarcely fourteen. A story of rape by an unknown invader of her school dormitory was accepted by all concerned, even the press, who concealed her identity as a minor, though some law-and-order elements were responsible for vague leaks to the effect that a family member of a soft-on-crime senator had been the victim of one of the animals that she would coddle. Phoebe herself, at various moments of high self-centered emotion, identified, for her friends and father, a succession of partners—the janitor, the man who serviced the school's Coke machine, a black townie younger than she—and once even spoke of artificial insemination by an old Frankenstein sort of scientist who had taken her in hand. She had run away from school several times throughout the years and when recaptured had committed violence towards property, which had always been interpreted as childish revenge. But when now without provocation she attacked her roommate with a scissors, it was no longer practicable to continue to ignore the symptoms of mental illness she had displayed so consistently and for so long. A canvass of her schoolmates revealed that some incidents had gone unreported. She was institutionalized, but again not even the gutter press made the fact known to any oublie, despite her parents' celebrity.

Annabelle had long since gone well beyond the so-called women's issues. By her third term she was a member of several of the most powerful committees dealing with the most fundamental concerns of government, the defense of the nation and the economy, and known for her eloquent statements of position, which were strong, sometimes even ringing. Even the other side had to admit she could legitimately qualify as a statesman. In her own party she had come to be admired even by the most mossbacked male elements, who were not necessarily the oldest in years. There was still, however, some resistance against nominating her as presidential candidate over a popular wonder-boy governor who had revitalized a major state in decay when he had taken office, and she did not prevail at the convention until the third ballot. When the governor loyally agreed to run for the vice-presidency, they had a ticket that electrified first the party and then, were the polls to be believed, the country.