Resilience (2 page)

Judas Iscariot has remained infamous through the centuries for his betrayal of Jesus. Yet I am betting there is another biblical character, someone
once almost as notorious as Judas, who is now much less widely known. Just as the words
traitor
and
Judas
became synonymous, there was a time when
Ananias
and
liar
were near synonyms, too. In the Acts of the Apostles, Ananias lied to Jesus about his money so he would not have to give as much to the church. The story was once so renowned that, not so long ago, when someone wanted to brand President Theodore Roosevelt as a liar, he simply said he was a member of the Ananias Club.

Few today, except those who fill in Will Shortz's crossword puzzles, would know that
Ananias
is still a common clue for the four-letter entry
liar.
(Since my maiden name is Anania, I do not consider this an entirely unfortunate lapse in our national attention span. My father appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in 1958, and South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers asked him, since his last name was Anania, if his word was to be trusted.) But the ebb and flow of celebrity constantly remind me that whatever fortunes and calamities have blessed or befallen me, and however they have given me some notoriety, that notoriety will be—if I am lucky—fleeting.

For those who know me well, I suppose you can
skip forward, but for the rest of you, I am Elizabeth and I have lived an extraordinary life in nearly every sense of the word.

I was born in 1949, the daughter of a Navy pilot and his wife, who was also the daughter of a Navy pilot. My brother and my sister were born in 1950 and 1951, and the troop of us crossed the globe a half-dozen times following my father so he could fly and spy and fight in wars. I watched my friends bury their pilot fathers; I came perilously close to burying my own father; I watched some of my friends march off to wars in which they would die. I grew up largely without American television or the emergence of the shopping mall, and I listened, on Armed Forces Radio, more to Rosemary Clooney and Jeri Southern than to Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley, all because I spent most of my growing-up years in Japan.

Maybe it is because I remember those days with Nat King Cole in the background as so idyllic that I had a notion that a magical life was built around music that sounded like Armed Forces Radio. At ten, I could paint a fantasy life—and I did—based on the music to which I listened and on the books I read. And at sixteen, I did the same thing. The
books changed, but the music did not. My internal world was set to song.

I lived beside a war, the Vietnam War, but even then I romanticized the soldiers, their girls back home, and I had the music of World War I and World War II from which to choose. I lived in Japan at the time and Armed Forces Radio didn't play any antiwar songs. On my radio it was “I'll Be Seeing You” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “It's Been a Long, Long Time.” They all turned out the same:
Never thought that you would be standing here so close to me. There's so many things that I should say, but words can wait until some other day. Just kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time
.

And I thought I was living that magical life when I went to college at the end of an era when young men in suits picked up their dates at the train station and carried their suitcase to an approved house of a matronly hostess in charge, presumably, of the girl's chastity for the weekend, where witty men and clever women sat in smoky jazz bars and talked only of important things, where no one washed dishes alone or ate alone, where people sang around a piano at Christmas. I was living a life I
had heard and read of, with Benny Goodman in the background, where handsome men caressed pretty women with a passion that must be reserved for those who did not know if they would ever kiss again. The fact that it never was a reality did not mean it wasn't my chosen reality. I wanted that old-fashioned world of private passion and unadorned beauty and a life constructed around things of purity and purpose. I wanted it in college and in law school and for most of my growing-up years. I hadn't grown up in a world in which these romantic images were corrupted in any way. Until they were. Even when I had to accept that the soldiers were not coming home to pigtailed sweethearts on country lanes, that the color of your skin gave you a whole different, less hospitable country, that there was real hardship and pain everywhere, I still wanted to escape to that fantasy when I could. My expectations for life were based on that fantasy.

When I was faced with a less pleasant reality, as when I read Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
at sixteen, I simply concluded it was an aberration, the ugliness of criminal minds imposed on the beauty of the idyllic home. John Updike's people, falling apart from lack of character, were a curiosity. My
people belonged to Henry James, and they fell away from joy or grace because of the splendor of their characters. I thought in song. When I couldn't think in song, I could pull out the lyrics book I had been constructing since college. First a hundred songs, then a thousand, now five thousand, and there I could find the soundtrack I preferred for my life. In song, as in Henry James's novels, faults all turned out to be virtues, as if written by Sammy Cahn:
I'm irresponsibly mad for you.
I had, I have to say, a long, long way to fall when the fall finally came.

I married my law school sweetheart, John, on a hot summer day in North Carolina, and we walked through life in a carefree way. We really did have the two children, a picturesque two-story white frame house, the golden retriever, and the station wagon. My husband made a name for himself as a lawyer; I slipped back into a hybrid life of being the lawyer I was supposed to be and the mother I needed to be. When things were not right, well, we just fixed them, in our lives, in the lives of others. Sometimes money could fix a problem; sometimes it was simply a matter of being wise enough to know which string to pull. But we always fixed what needed to be fixed and our ride together had its own
music. Our house became the place where life happened; there were young people gathered in the kitchen; there was a basketball game on the cement court behind the house. It seemed that whatever we had done, we had done right.

It would have been easy for life to have played itself out from that kitchen, and I don't know that, if it had, it would have occurred to me that I had never taken in the fullest breath I could. It had been diaphragmatic breathing, matching my inhaling and exhaling to some rhythm I wanted, some song that fit my life at the time, or I thought did. I had never had to find my own rhythm, never needed to search for my own cadence. If the music's cadence was drowned out, it was usually by John's or the children's, and I walked to that. When I needed my own, I would fall back into Jerome Kern. For all of the times that followed those carefree days in my kitchen, for all of the pain I endured, at least I learned in the years that followed what it meant to breathe for myself, and I learned, too, what it meant to scream.

Wade, my firstborn, died on April 4, 1996. An April wind crossed the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina and pushed the car of which he was so very proud from the road. He was sixteen, and
maybe it would not have mattered how old he was, but he did not know how to get it back on the road without flipping it. So it flipped. And flipped, and flipped, until all of the life of the boy was pressed from him. And from me.

I move on now, but I will be back. I always come back to Wade. But I cannot tell the rest of the story if I let myself fall into him now.

Our surviving family held together, or rather we were held together by an extraordinary fourteen-year-old girl, our daughter Cate, who managed to be what we needed and to allow us to look for new paths, paths that she knew would further upset her life, but she kept saying yes. Yes, go back to work, Dad. Yes, try to have another child. Yes, run for the U.S. Senate if that is what you want. It wasn't perfect; she was a teenage girl who had been feeling her budding wings. But given the loss of Wade, she knew it wasn't the time, so she placed her own dreams in a box and put them away for a time.

So we had that one new child, Emma Claire, and then another, Jack, and John did win the Senate seat, so soon it was sounds other than those of teenage boys in our Raleigh kitchen. Life was changing quickly. Wade died in 1996. John won the Senate
seat in 1998, the year Emma Claire was born. Cate graduated from high school three weeks after Jack was born in 2000. By the fall of 2000, that kitchen in Raleigh was empty. Cate was off to college and to a life blessedly away from all the pain that had been—and from the turmoil that was to come. The remaining four of us were in a spacious home in Washington. Since I had lived a life of being uprooted, I should have been used to it enough to move to Washington without a look back. But this time I was leaving the house in which I had expected to die, and I was leaving Wade's grave to live 250 miles away. And it wasn't so often our kitchen in Raleigh anymore in which we gathered but a more empty kitchen in Washington. We slept in the Raleigh house less and less often, and sometimes saw our dear friends back there only at Christmas. I had to make special trips to change the plantings at Wade's grave. It took me some time to get my bearings.

The younger children, the picture of resilience, grew and thrived in a series of homes in Washington, D.C., and then, when my husband decided to run for the nomination for president and then as the nominee for vice president, in a series of hotel rooms and in the homes of generous strangers.

And except for missing Wade and regretting what he had lost, life had a good cadence again, an odd public cadence but a rhythm we all learned.

If you really did not know me then, you would need to know only that I was moderately well-liked by the press for being unscripted (and unscriptable, if that can be bastardized into a word) and candid. I was reasonably well-liked by the Democrats for being well-informed and accessible, an actual mother and not a mother figure. I was even a favorite of opposing extremists because I was chubby enough to be made fun of and unschooled enough politically to say something now and again that they could take out of context and use as fodder. Then the election of 2004 ended, the Democrats, John Kerry and my husband, who should have won given all the issues, in fact lost, and on the very next day I confirmed a diagnosis I had suspected in the weeks before the election: I had breast cancer. Even the opposition laid down their arms.

The treatment was not easy, but, honestly, after Wade's death, I could do it. There were days when it was hard, but I could fight and that was all I needed. It is what I hadn't had with Wade: a chance to fight. I remember telling my father, his right
hand clinched perpetually half-open, that if Wade was alive he would fight. I told myself the same thing, and everything after that was easier. John sat with me in chemotherapies, often reading as I slept or calling people to thank them for their help in the election. And he would bring me dinner in bed when I didn't want to climb the steps of our four-story Washington house again. And by the end of my treatments we had moved back to North Carolina, first to the house that had been Wade's home, and then to a rental house in Chapel Hill from which we watched our new home being built. Finally, we moved into that new family home on an old tobacco farm outside Chapel Hill, idyllic and peaceful with promises of a long life as an old couple with children who were still impossibly young.

That was the story from my side. John thought still about running for president again. He traveled, giving speeches, talking of poverty, about which he and I care deeply, raising money for efforts to increase the minimum wage and start antipoverty programs. I stayed home and wrote a book about the journey on which we had found ourselves over the previous decade. The children started public school. And, without my knowing, a woman who
spotted my husband one afternoon in the restaurant bar of the hotel in which he was staying hung around outside the hotel for a couple of hours until he returned from a dinner and introduced herself by saying, “You are so hot.”

There is a Dorothy Parker poem of which I am fond that captures the flow of my life.

y father was wearing his greens, a foresty olive uniform with a sewn-down belt on the jacket. Like the music I loved, it was a throwback. In the Navy, only aviators wore the uniform. I loved the feel of it, and because it didn't wrinkle or stain like his dress whites, I could hug him hard and feel him. And this day, an early-fall day in 1965, I needed to touch him. I was sixteen years old and he was going to Vietnam. On the day he was to leave, he stood near the end of the low bleachers on the visitors' side of the Chofu High School football field, watching me cheer in my first game as a cheerleader.