“SO EXPLAIN TO me why it is you’re going to see your wacko former friend who you haven’t laid eyes on in thirty years when it turns out she had nothing to do with this shit,” Charlie says over the phone. In the Gulfstream, we are flying above the Illinois-Wisconsin border, and Charlie is en route to a remote park along the Potomac for an afternoon bike ride; in other words, three vehicles containing him, his mountain bike, assorted agents and their bikes, and even a physician are making their way south.

I say, “It turns out Dena’s still dating Pete Imhof, so this is really about seeing both of them. I guess I just feel the need.” Belinda in my office confirmed to Jessica that Dena and Pete do live together, though Belinda said Dena was uncertain whether Pete would be present when I arrived.

“I thought you and Ella were planning on a girls’ afternoon,” Charlie says.

“Well, I’m excited to see her tonight, and I hope she’s not offended by my change of plans. I’ll be back an hour before the gala. Did you ask Ella if she wanted to bike with you?”

“She said it’s too hot.”

I hesitate, and then I say, “I’m worried about how she’ll react to this abortion story. Hank has gotten Dr. Wycomb to promise not to come forward before tomorrow—I think he must be pretending there’s still a chance I’ll speak out against Ingrid Sanchez—so I’m planning to tell Ella tonight in person. After I do, will you make sure you’re around? I have a feeling she’ll need someone to talk to, but she’ll be angry with me.”

“Is that why you’re avoiding coming home?”

“Honey, I’m not avoiding anything. Seeing Dena is a chance to tie up loose ends.”

“Well, Ella’s a tough cookie,” Charlie says. “She’ll be fine.”

“But from a religious standpoint—”

“You think any Christian worth their salt can’t get their head around the idea of sinning? So you messed up forty years ago—that doesn’t mean you never walked with God again.”

I knew he’d say this, even though surely he’s aware I don’t consider abortion a sin (unfortunate, yes, but immoral, no), just as he’s aware that I do not share his Christian convictions. Our unspoken deal regarding religion is similar to our deal about politics: I don’t object when he talks about God, and he doesn’t insist that I proclaim myself a believer. I have spoken of my agnosticism to as few people as I’ve spoken of my abortion, so I understand the widespread assumption, among both friends and strangers, of my faith.

As for the Christian right, the traditional-values advocates—whatever name you call them by, they are the ones who believe Charlie is a Messianic figure. So untenable a hypothesis is this to me that I can only squelch in my mind any consideration of it. That Charlie, encouraged by his advisers, Hank foremost among them, has promoted this preposterous notion is an act of either such cynicism or such bottomless hubris that it would be impossible to say which is worse. My suspicion is that for Charlie, the vision of himself as messiah-like is sincere (how else to explain his rise from floundering alcoholic to president?), and for Hank, it is insincere, though I do not doubt the sincerity of Hank’s belief in Charlie. I might say that I don’t understand that belief, since Hank is clearly the more intellectual and ambitious of the two men, except that I do understand: Hank recognized early on that Charlie could be his charismatic proxy. And didn’t I, too, hitch my life to Charlie’s, allowing myself to be guided and defined by him? So why wouldn’t I understand the impulse in someone else?

Charlie sounds upbeat when he says, “Once the mudslinging starts, remember that I’m never running for anything again, so you don’t need to feel guilty on my account.”

I look out the window; the captain’s chair I am seated in faces sideways, perpendicular to the walled-off cockpit, so I can see the blue sky outside. This jet, which I prefer to the Boeing 757s I must use when accompanied by larger groups, seats sixteen, and the fabric covering all the chairs is white leather, the carpet cream; the decor has always reminded me a bit of a tacky person’s idea of heaven. I say, “Sweetheart, I appreciate your support, but before we start calling my abortion a sin—doesn’t that imply you wish I hadn’t had it? And we’d never have married, would we, if I were the mother of a thirteen-year-old when we met?” He’s quiet, and I say, “It’s not uncomplicated. That’s all I’m trying to point out. And I hope this is a story that blows over, but my fear is that Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination will keep it in the news.”

“You’re not suggesting I give her the boot?”

“No, but I wouldn’t underestimate how much the press will relish the irony.”

“What really chaps my ass,” Charlie says, “is the idea of this bitter witch doctor deciding she’s going to expose you, and everyone rolls over and plays dead. Could there be a clearer case of blackmail?”

“She’s a hundred and four, Charlie.”

“Yeah, so everyone keeps saying. Kept alive by good old-fashioned liberal rage, huh?” He chuckles. “Hey, if that’s all it takes, you might outlast me yet.”

We both are silent; outside the cabin of the plane, the engines hum. Jessica sits a few feet away in her own white leather seat, eating a sandwich prepared for her by one of the two flight attendants; Cal and José are chatting in the plane’s rear while Walter reads a thriller. I try to keep my voice low as I say, “I don’t agree with Dr. Wycomb’s methods, but you do remember that I’m pro-choice, don’t you?”

“See, that’s what makes America great—room for all kinds of opposing viewpoints.” I can tell Charlie’s grinning, then I hear an unmistakable noise, a bubbly blurt of sound, and I know he’s just broken wind. Though I’ve told him it’s inconsiderate, I think he does it as much as possible in front of his agents. He’ll say, “They think it’s hilarious when the leader of the free world toots his own horn!”

“I heard that,” I say.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Before ending the call, he adds, “Give my regards to the divorcée.”

IF A REPORTER or stranger asks what in my life I never imagined I’d find myself doing, I say, “Giving speeches!” Invariably, it’s an answer that elicits laughter. If friends ask, I say, “Having a cat.” That was Hank’s doing—a poll he commissioned in the early nineties revealed that the voters of Wisconsin would have a more favorable idea of our family if we owned a pet, ideally a dog. I protested because of Ella’s allergies, and this is how we came to own Snowflake, our allegedly hypoallergenic Russian Blue.

That our cat is standoffish is, as far as I’m concerned, all the better; I have shed no tears over her apparent aversion to sitting on our laps or even anywhere near us. Charlie sometimes lifts her up and smashes his face against her ribs, rubbing his nose in her fur, saying, “You’re the only one who really loves me, aren’t you, Snowflake? Yes, you are, you good Republican cat.” Maids feed Snowflake and change her litter box, and a vet makes house calls for her annual checkup; if she has her way with birds or mice on the White House grounds, I’m not privy to it. My dislike of cats, cemented when I was scratched on the cheek by one as a five-year-old, isn’t public (with something like seventy million cat owners in this country, Charlie joked, I could have sabotaged the election with that admission alone), but the fact that it isn’t public is why, when I am called upon by friends to share some morsel of my private life, I can trot it out. It is, of course, a fake revelation, a pseudo-intimacy, which is a trick I’ve learned from White House press secretaries; on a regular basis, they dispense pieces of information about us that are true but absurdly trivial, that masquerade as sharing—these are humanizing, they tell us. Charlie Blackwell loves the movie Anchorman. Alice Blackwell gave the president a digital camera and a biking jersey for Christmas. Ella Blackwell’s favorite food is fajitas.

The real answer to the question of what in my life I never imagined I’d find myself doing is this: having a face-lift. And though there has been plenty of media speculation on the topic, it will never be confirmed either by me or by any staff members, in part because few of them know for certain. Charlie had decided as early as 1997, before his gubernatorial reelection, that he’d run for president in 2000. In 1998, at a Super Bowl party we were hosting at the governor’s mansion for staff and close friends, I was standing with Debbie Bell; Hank’s wife, Brenda; and Kathleen Hicken. Debbie, who was at that point Charlie’s director of communications, said, “Between us girls, have any of you ever considered plastic surgery? I was in Ann Taylor the other day, and those dressing-room mirrors are not forgiving.”

“Debbie, you’re young still!” I said. She was about a decade behind Charlie and me—this would have meant she was then in her early forties—so I wanted to think this.

“See, but I keep hearing how easy the procedures are these days,” Debbie said. “I’m not talking about, you know, implants or a nose job, just—” She held her hands up on either side of her face and pulled back. “Eliminate a few wrinkles,” she said. She turned to me. “Would you do it?” (I should have known—oh, I was a terrible dupe, but I didn’t get it.)

“Doesn’t a face-lift take months to recover from?” Kathleen said.

Debbie shook her head. “Maybe it used to be like that, but doctors have made a ton of advances. If I schedule an appointment, Alice, will you come with me for moral support?” This struck me as an odd request, because I wasn’t close to Debbie. We knew each other well, she was part of Charlie’s inner circle, but she and I never spent time together one-on-one.

“I think I’ll pass, but I’ll be curious to hear what the doctor tells you,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything he turns you away for being far too youthful.”

That, it turned out, was Phase One. Phase Two was Jadey calling and saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Hank wants you to get a face-lift, so I’m supposed to suggest we go to Florida and get them together, like it’s my own idea, but then I thought about it, and I’m kind of intrigued.”

“Hank wants me to get a face-lift?”

“I know it’s real manipulative—”

“And he called you?”

“Debbie called me.”

“I’ll call you back in a second,” I said, and when I’d hung up, I dialed the direct line to Charlie’s office. His secretary Marsha answered, saying, “He’s meeting with the Board of Regents right now, but I’d be happy to—”

“Please tell him it’s urgent,” I said.

When Charlie picked up, he said in a breathless voice, “Ella—” and I said, “No, she’s fine, nothing bad happened, except apparently, Hank is going around telling people I need a face-lift.”

“I warned him you wouldn’t like this.”

“You knew?”

“It’s for TV, Lindy, that’s all. You know I think you’re beautiful, but he has the idea that when we’re on more of a national stage—”

“Are you planning to have a face-lift?”

“I don’t have to tell you there’s a double standard. Listen, they should have been more straightforward with you—”

“They?”

“We—we should have. Hank’s logic is that if you want to do it, do it now. You can’t have that kind of surgery in the middle of a campaign.”

“Where is this coming from? Did Hank run a poll on my appearance?”

Charlie hesitated, and I said, “Is he there with you now?”

“He’s in with the Regents, which is where I should be. It’s your decision, Lindy. I’m sorry if you’re offended. You’re still the prettiest of all my wives.”

“This is incredibly insulting.”

“When I get home tonight, I’ll show you how attractive I find you. Now I’ve gotta go before I get a woody just thinking about it.”

I suppose I was offended not only because the thought of Charlie’s staff discussing my appearance—and finding it lacking—was humiliating but also because the suggestion reinforced my own self-doubt. Although I’d never been insecure about my looks, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the lines at the corners of my mouth and across my forehead were deeper, that the skin on my neck was not as smooth as it had once been, and that when I appeared on television, these flaws were more obvious than in person. Still, I hadn’t thought the situation required more than some experimenting with makeup.

For three days I fumed, on the fourth day I had my assistant Cheryl go buy a book about plastic surgery, and on the fifth day I went to see a doctor. He was not the one who performed the procedure; a month later, Jadey and I did go to a clinic in Naples, Florida, to a surgeon reputed to be the best in the field, and afterward, we stayed for two weeks at a secluded house overlooking a canal. Unfortunately, the setting was wasted on us because we weren’t supposed to swim or expose ourselves to the sun; Cheryl, who was thirty, had accompanied us, and we encouraged her to drive to the beach and even snorkel one afternoon. Meanwhile, Jadey and I lay around reading, watching television, complaining, and making fun of ourselves. We’d been instructed to keep our heads elevated—Jadey was more bandaged than I was, though we were both simultaneously numb and tender, and my face became quite puffy—and six days after the procedure, we went to have the stitches removed from the incisions at our hairlines (before the operation, a nurse had complimented me on how beautifully my haircut would hide any mild scarring). Jadey and I made a pact to never tell anyone—our husbands knew, and Cheryl, but we’d say nothing to our other sisters-in-law or to Priscilla or our children. It was thinking of Ella, actually, that gave me pause: What a negative role model I would be if she knew, how vain and unaccepting of the aging process. Conveniently, however, she was away at Princeton, and the story we told everyone else in Madison and Milwaukee was that we were taking a painting class, an intensive study of watercolor. (“What do we do when they ask to see our work?” I said, and Jadey said, “We say it’s being shipped back.” As it turned out, no one ever asked.)

Especially in the first few days after our twin surgeries, Jadey and I looked so banged up that we questioned, out loud and at regular intervals, whether we’d made a mistake, and it crossed my mind (this part I did not express aloud) that we were like characters in a fairy tale, narcissistic hags grasping at our lost youth. But we weren’t, in the end, punished for overreaching; even a week after the surgery, the bruising had faded, the swelling had shrunk, and on the night before our return to Wisconsin, we joined Cheryl for dinner at a wonderful and very festive Mexican restaurant; we weren’t supposed to drink, but Jadey sneaked a few sips of Cheryl’s margarita. Upon our arrival home, we kept calling each other to compare notes on how many compliments we’d received, how rested people said we looked from the fresh sea air. Of all the unfortunate facts about plastic surgery, perhaps the hardest to accept is this: If it’s done well, it works. Once you’ve had it, you realize how many other people must have also, and while there are plenty of inept examples where the surgery is obvious, there are many more women and men, especially in the public eye, about whom we haven’t a clue, even as we admire their healthy and youthful glow.

I had learned in the book I’d read that the benefits of a rhytidectomy, as it is formally called, tend to last for five to ten years, at which point a repeat performance is recommended. That means that even by the most optimistic calculation, my face-lift has expired. I don’t plan to have another, not because my vanity has disappeared but because now Jadey and I prefer Botox treatments, an option that didn’t exist in the late nineties. Every three months, she flies to Washington, and Charlie’s private physician, Dr. Subramanium, performs the treatments on us in the privacy of his White House office; the procedure takes ten minutes and involves no anesthesia. I would like to think that part of the reason I stick so assiduously to this routine is that it’s a source of bonding for Jadey and me, a way for us to maintain our closeness, but this is only partly true. I also do it because I don’t want bloggers and late-night talk-show hosts to make fun of the way I look. That I routinely submit to having poisonous bacterium injected into my face is flabbergasting to me, but no more flabbergasting than my marriage to the president of the United States, my residence in the White House, my ridiculous title of first lady. As far as I know, Debbie Bell has never had plastic surgery of any kind.

Back in 1998, after I returned to Madison from Naples, Ella came home for spring break a few weeks later, and I went to pick her up at the airport; though I had security detail as Wisconsin’s first lady, I still occasionally drove. Ella’s spring break was two weeks long, and she and a bunch of friends had spent the first half in Turks and Caicos, at the vacation home of a classmate named Alessandra Caterina Laroche de Fournier (she went by Alex). The trip had become a little boring by the end, Ella said; she’d felt self-indulgent, and this week, she wanted to drop by the soup kitchen where she had volunteered during high school. I’d cleared my schedule in anticipation of her being home, and I told her that if she wanted to see any movies, or if she needed to shop for clothes, especially for her upcoming summer internship at Microsoft, I was flexible. In a neutral tone, she said, “Yeah, maybe.”

We were back at the mansion, and I’d parked when she said, “Mom, by the way?”

I turned to look at her.

“Nice face-lift,” she said.

THEY LIVE ON the first floor of a house on Adelphia Street. With my heart thudding against my chest, I climb the porch steps and knock on the door, though knocking is a bit of a formality given that both their apartment and the one above it, accessed through a door next to theirs, have already been inspected by the Secret Service agents. An airconditioned coolness, infused with cigarette smoke, comes out to meet me from inside when Dena appears behind her screen door. She is a lean woman with a stringy neck and thin lips, her face lined, her once light brown hair now blondish-gray and dry-looking, still wavy but clipped just beneath her ears. She is old, Dena’s old, but she’s also unmistakably herself, and I begin to cry. She opens the door, an amused look creeping onto her face, and she says, “Well, you don’t need to be a drama queen about it.” When we embrace, I cling to her.

We step into the living room, which holds a black leather couch and matching chair as well as a low coffee table, all facing an entertainment system—a triptych of shelves whose centerpiece is an enormous television set, flanked on one side by a stereo, speakers, and CD and DVD cases, and on the other side by several rows of propped-up collector plates featuring either horses (they gallop against the backdrop of western landscapes, their bodies at sharp sideways angles, their manes and tails blown fiercely by the wind) or else American Indians (a chieftain gripping a tomahawk with an eagle perched on his shoulder, a woman in long black braids and a fringed leather dress kneeling devotedly over a papoose). Has Dena’s taste changed, has mine, or have the times? Perhaps some combination. The walls of the living room are covered in wood paneling, the carpet is mauve, and a doorway leads to an overcast narrow hall at the end of which another doorway opens onto, from my vantage point, a strip of a sunny room with a black-and-white checker-board floor—the kitchen, I assume. The television is on, set to Dr. Phil.

“You thirsty?” Dena asks. “I’d offer you a real drink, but we quit years ago, so about the most interesting thing we have is Diet Coke.”

“That sounds perfect.” When she starts down the hall, I look around for tissue—there’s a box on an end table—and blow my nose. On the coffee table is a bowl of rose potpourri, an issue of People magazine, and a pack of Merit cigarettes. From the kitchen, I hear water running, and as Dena returns to the living room, she talks to someone in one of the rooms along the way, but I can’t make out the words over the television. It must be Pete; I know from my agents that I am now sitting in the same apartment as Pete Imhof. Outside, through the front window, I see José, one of the agents, standing on the porch with his arms folded, surveying the street.

Dena carries two glasses, one with dark, fizzy liquid in it and one with water; she passes the Diet Coke to me, turns off the TV, sits in the chair, and gestures for me to sit on the couch. “I’ve gotta say, when the girl from your office called to announce you were on your way, I thought someone was playing a joke.” Dena’s tone is neither cold nor fawning but simply normal; for the second time today, I am not Alice Blackwell but Alice Lindgren. Or I am both, because she says, “So what’s it like being married to the president?”

In what I hope is a light voice, I say, “It depends on the day.”

Dena crosses one leg over the other. She’s wearing jeans and a sleeveless black V-necked shirt that shows her cleavage to such flattering effect, I can’t help wondering if she’s either wearing a padded bra or has had implants. She also wears dangly silver earrings, a silver chain necklace, and two silver rings, neither on the ring finger of her left hand: One, with a moonstone affixed to it, is on her left middle finger, and the other, a band imprinted with tiny peace signs, is on her right thumb. The peace signs give an extra weight to what she says next, or maybe it’s my imagination. She says, “I never knew you were a Republican.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yeah?” She smiles. “How’s that worked out?”

We are quiet, and I say, “I’ve thought of you a lot over the years, Dena. I wish—” I wish our friendship hadn’t imploded, I wish it hadn’t been three decades since we last spoke.

But she says, “I know. I wish it, too.” She laughs a little. “I’d say I’ve thought of you, but it’s more like I’ve seen you. That cashmere coat you wore at Charlie’s inauguration, at the second one, that was gorgeous. I thought, When I knew Alice, she was such a penny-pincher about clothes, but that must have cost a fortune. I was glad to see you’d loosened up.” Charlie’s inauguration—this is how the public refers to him, as Charlie, or more sarcastically, as Chuck or Chuckie B. In Washington, I am the only person who directly interacts with him who could get away with such informality. “That’s a nice suit, too. What designer is it?” Dena nods toward my increasingly wrinkled red linen jacket and skirt, which I donned for the breast cancer summit this morning—a lifetime ago. When I’m in the residence, I dress casually, much the way Dena’s dressed, albeit in more modest shirts.

“It’s de la Renta,” I say.

She nods approvingly. “I was gonna guess him or Carolina Herrera.” She gestures out the window at the agent on the porch. “Do those guys listen when you pee?”

I laugh. “They don’t go into the bathroom with me, no. They wait outside. A few of them are female—no one who’s traveling with us today but some of the others—so if there’s a situation where it might be awkward to have a man present, a woman can step in.”

Dena shakes her head. “Better you than me.”

“It’s a strange life.” I pause. “Dena, Pete’s here, isn’t he?”

“And I thought I was the main attraction.”

“No, you are, but if it’s possible, I’d like to talk to both of you at the same time.”

She turns her head toward the hall and calls out, “Babe, she wants to see you, too!” Looking back at me, she says, “He thinks you don’t like him. I told him you wouldn’t make a personal trip here just to scold us, the first lady has bigger fish to fry, but you know Pete.”

Not really, of course—I don’t know Pete Imhof anymore, if I ever did.

Again, more impatiently, she yells, “Babe!”

After another minute, he materializes: He, too, wears jeans, and a gray Badgers T-shirt and brown leather flip-flops. (The dark hair on his toes! With a jolt, I remember it from when I was seventeen. How strange that I once, briefly, was well acquainted with Pete Imhof’s body.) When I last saw him, after that infuriating pyramid scheme, he had gained a good deal of weight, and he has gained a good deal since then. He’s not enormous, but he’s more than big, and both his hair and beard are silver. He’s actually a handsome man in an earthily sexual sort of way. I stand, and we exchange a clumsy handshake; I don’t mean to be cruel when I say that the clumsiness is his, that his discomfort is clear. God knows I have many shortcomings, but at this point, managing a handshake isn’t one of them. “You sure surprised Dena today,” he says as he steps backward so he’s next to her chair. He perches in a not particularly comfortable-looking way on an arm of it while I sit back down on the couch.

“Babe, get a chair from the kitchen,” Dena says, and he does, setting it close to hers.

“I hope I didn’t pull the two of you away from other obligations,” I say when Pete has sat. I know, through Belinda telling Jessica, what their jobs are—Pete is a night security guard at White River Dairy, and Dena is a part-time massage therapist at a chiropractor’s office.

Wryly, Dena says, “We managed to make time for you.”

“I bet you both are wondering why I dropped in out of the blue.”

Neither of them replies, and then Dena says, “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Well, first, I wanted to see you—I wanted to know what had become of you, Dena. But also, a news story is about to break that’s indirectly related to you, Pete. I’m not sure whether it will be a television program or a newspaper that will report it first, but in the next day or so, it’ll become public that I—that in 1963, I had an abortion. And I’m telling you because, although the media won’t have any idea of this part, Pete, it was you I’d gotten pregnant by. I don’t know if Dena ever mentioned—”

“He knows.” Dena says this matter-of-factly, and when I glance at Pete, he does not contradict her; he watches me with little emotion. (Would Andrew have become so heavyset as he aged? I doubt it, because they had different builds.)

“If I had it to do over again, obviously, it would have been more respectful to have told you at the time,” I say.

“Who’s spilling the beans?” Dena says. “Someone you know?”

“It’s—” There are several ways to describe Gladys Wycomb, but I decide to leave my grandmother out of it. “It’s the doctor who performed the procedure,” I say. “She’s very old now, and she’s doing it to protest—I don’t know if you two have been following the Supreme Court nomination of Ingrid Sanchez, but that’s what the doctor is protesting.” I look at Pete. “I hope this isn’t a news story that will have legs, but it’s possible some reporters will get it into their mind to try to figure out who I was involved with at the time, and I don’t think they’ll be able to except through one of us. But I wanted to warn you. I’d prefer that you don’t talk to reporters if you hear from them, but it’s your decision, and if you’d like, someone in my office can connect you with a media coach.” Lest this sound condescending, I add, “Although I’ve had loads of coaching, and I still haven’t learned all the tricks.”

Dena and Pete exchange a look, and Dena says, “Yep, we hear from your friends at the tabloids on a regular basis. Well, not just the tabloids—babe, where was that guy calling from a few weeks ago, was it Croatia? It was a country I wouldn’t be able to find on the map, I’ll tell you that much.”

This should not surprise me—exposés and tell-alls about Charlie’s administration or his family or his early years are published on a weekly basis, both articles and books, in tabloids and reputable magazines alike, and during the 2000 campaign, when the first reporter discovered the accident that killed Andrew Imhof, that was big news that I addressed by giving an interview to a USA Today reporter. I said, “It was incredibly sad. I know it was very hard for his family and our classmates and really the whole community, including me.” In all the times I’ve been asked about it since, I have repeated these comments without expanding on them. To pad out the various books and articles, therefore, the writers must find more loquacious subjects, so they talk to anyone we ever so much as passed on the sidewalk. I know of at least one biography of me that identifies Dena as my childhood best friend, which must be how other journalists know to track her down. The biographer’s source for this information was our old classmate Mary Petschel née Hafliger, she of the hairy forearms, she who kicked me off Spirit Club after Andrew’s death, and she whom Ella and I ran into when I fled to Riley in 1988; since that encounter, I haven’t seen Mary.

And I realize in this moment that neither Dena nor Pete has ever spoken about me to the media. For so long, I was so sure Dena would that it felt like she already had. Even earlier today, she was the first person I thought of when Hank came to tell me the abortion story was going to break, but she’d had nothing to do with it. That Dena and Pete have stayed quiet even though they’ve been together all these years, even though they’ve each had separate reasons for wishing me ill, and even though surely they could have reinforced each other’s antipathy, justifying their right to get back at me—I haven’t been sufficiently grateful, it occurs to me, I have never properly appreciated a thing that hasn’t happened. I haven’t thought of them as having opportunities they declined when clearly that’s been the case, clearly the opportunities have been plentiful.

I say, “So when the journalists call and you say no—why do you?”

“Are you kidding? You think we’d talk about you to some sleazy reporter?” Dena scoffs. “We were raised better than that, and hell, we didn’t even vote for your husband!” She leans forward, extracting a cigarette from the pack, and after she’s lit it and taken a puff, she says, “At least I sure didn’t. Pete here just doesn’t vote.”

Pete smiles the way Charlie does when he’s broken wind particularly loudly, as if he’s half sheepish and half pleased with himself. Fleetingly—I don’t want to think this—I wonder if Pete is brain-damaged. Not that any single terrible event necessarily happened, but it could be that alcohol and perhaps drugs have had a cumulative effect.

“Hey, why won’t Charlie talk to that black guy?” Dena says. “You tell him old Dena thinks he should.” She means Edgar Franklin, I’m pretty sure, though unlike Gladys Wycomb, Dena does not use an accusatory tone; instead, she sounds self-effacing, as if she doesn’t really believe her opinion could matter. Or maybe it’s that, having once been married herself, she knows regulating one’s husband’s behavior is no small feat, so she doesn’t hold me accountable for Charlie’s decisions. She lifts a clear glass ashtray from a shelf beneath the coffee table and taps her cigarette into it. “Now, am I allowed to get a picture, Alice, or will your goons freak out?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Otherwise my sisters will never believe me you were here.” She stands.

“How are your sisters doing?”

“They’re plugging along. Marjorie’s oldest son’s over in the first of the 158th Infantry, so that’s hard.” Again, there is a notable lack of blame in Dena’s voice. How is it that she’s forgiven me for both the past and the present? “Peggy’s living in Mom and Dad’s old house, which you couldn’t pay me enough to do. The place is falling down around her, not to mention she’s due to have hip surgery, so I don’t know how she plans to get to the second floor.”

“Maybe she can have one of those chairs put in like my grandmother had,” I say, and Dena chortles, though I wasn’t kidding. It is sobering to think of Peggy Janaszewski needing hip surgery when, as little girls, she and Marjorie were our students the times that Dena and I played school and pretended to be teachers named Miss Clougherty.

Dena disappears down the hall, to find her camera, presumably, and Pete and I are left alone. The room is silent except for the whir of the air conditioner, and then Pete says, “A lot of water under the bridge, isn’t there?”

“There sure is.” We both start to speak at the same time, and I say, “Go ahead.”

“When I look back, I don’t feel real good about everything,” he says. “That was a tough time.”

Is he referring to after Andrew’s death or to the pyramid scheme?

“And the papers, they can’t leave it be. Every time it goes away, someone brings it up again, but they don’t care what he was like—they act like he didn’t do anything his whole life but get in the car and drive to that intersection.”

“I hope you know that I still think of him,” I say. “I still wish I could change what happened.”

But Pete does not seem angry. He says, “I always knew you were a nice person. I probably didn’t show it, but I knew.”

Unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears; they are close to the surface, I suppose, given that I sobbed immediately upon my arrival. I swallow, keeping the tears at bay, and say, “I had no idea how to act back then, and I bet you didn’t, either.”

“He had a real big crush on you,” Pete says. “You could probably tell. I remember the time we saw you downtown, and you two were flirting like crazy.” (That afternoon just before my senior year of high school, when I’d been buying ground beef for my mother—the sunlight and Andrew’s eyelashes and Pete in the driver’s seat of the mint-green Thunderbird.) “If I’d found out you were pregnant,” Pete is saying, “I like to think I’d have done the right thing and married you, but it was probably for the best I didn’t know. I was too immature.”

Married me? I can truly say the thought never crossed my mind; it is far likelier I’d have had the baby and given it up for adoption—I couldn’t have kept it, the disgrace would have been too great for my family—but the circumstances under which I’d have married Pete Imhof are unimaginable.

He says, “What if we let Andrew be the father instead of me? That seems more like what it was supposed to be—revisionist history, isn’t that what they call it?”

Except that if Andrew had been the father, I wouldn’t have had an abortion, at least not if I’d learned I was pregnant after his death. And Andrew wouldn’t have been the father anyway, because we wouldn’t have had that rash, impulsive sex. But Pete Imhof is trying to offer me a kindness, so all I do is smile sadly at him.

From the pocket of his jeans, Pete withdraws his own pack of cigarettes; they are Camels. He pulls one from the pack but doesn’t light it. He says, “I would never have gotten my shit together without Dena. I kept showing up at the steak house where she was working until she finally took me home with her and saved me from myself, you know?” He leans in and adds, “Don’t tell her I told you, but I did vote for your husband. I like how he’s tough on terror.” Pete winks. “Dena has no idea.” As he lights his cigarette (it no longer seems like he’s brain-damaged), he says, “You want something to eat? Did she offer you anything?”

“I’m fine,” I say, and I hear Dena approaching from the hall. She says, “It won’t go on,” and when she’s in the living room, she hands a digital camera to Pete. “What am I doing wrong?” He fiddles with it, and the camera makes a zooming sound, the lens emerging.

Pete says, “You two stand together,” and I join Dena in front of the shelf of decorative plates. The lighting would be better outside, obviously, but I say nothing. Dena sets her arm around me, a gesture I am moved by, and I do the same for her.

After Pete has taken several shots, Dena says, “Now you guys.” Pete and I stand side by side, smiling and not touching; this isn’t a photo I ever imagined posing for. After the pictures are taken, they look at the tiny versions on the screen. “Isn’t technology today amazing?” Dena says.

“I’m sorry to rush out, but I have an obligation back in Washington,” I say. “It was very good to see both of you, and let’s stay in touch as things unfold. Did you keep Belinda’s number?”

“It’s in the kitchen,” Dena says.

“Call if anything comes up, or if you have questions.”

Dena lightly punches my upper arm. She says, “Don’t look so grim, First Lady. We’ll be fine, and so will you.”

“Hold on, Alice,” Pete says. “I have something for you.” He lumbers into the hall, and when he’s gone, I say to Dena, “I’m here visiting my mother every couple months, so maybe we could have lunch next time.”

“That’d be a kick,” she says. “You just say the word.” Then she adds, “You know it was me that gave Ella the tiara that time, don’t you? I thought you’d come over and say hi.”

“I wish I had.” Charlie and I are currently having a house built in Maronee, the place we’ll live when we leave Washington. Is it possible, back in relative proximity to Dena, that she and I might become friends again, real friends? Are our situations too different? It is such a comfort to see her, to be linked to a life all but lost to me now.

When Pete returns, he passes me an envelope.

“What is it?” Dena asks, but he shakes his head. In a not entirely joking tone, she says, “It better not be a love letter.” She turns back to me, her expression mischievous. “If anyone was ever watching you and me, they’d have thought there were only three men to date in the whole world, and we just kept trading them back and forth.” I laugh, and Dena links her arm through Pete’s. She says, “But it looks like we both ended up with the ones who were right for us all along.”

AMONG THE PEOPLE whom I’m aware have been quoted on television or in print on the subject of Charlie and me are about a third of my classmates from elementary school, junior high, and high school, including Mary Hafliger Petschel and my junior-year prom date, Larry Nagel; the daughter of the former owner of Tatty’s (Tatty’s itself no longer exists); Marvin Benheimer, my New Year’s Eve date in 1962, when I had to dash from the restaurant as soon as the food came in order to vomit, a fact that has not stopped Marvin from appearing on a recurring basis on CNN, always identified as “Childhood Friend of Alice Blackwell”; several of my sorority sisters in Kappa Alpha Theta, a few of my aged professors, and many university classmates whom I never met; my thesis adviser from library school; Lydia Bianchi, the principal at Liess Elementary, and my colleague Maggie Stenta, a first-grade teacher; Nadine Patora, the Madison realtor from whom I didn’t buy a house in 1977; Ja-hoon Choi, the Ph.D. candidate who lived downstairs from me in my apartment on Sproule Street; and two men with whom I went on blind dates in, respectively, 1969 and 1974, whom I truly have no recollection of, though I believe that the dates occurred. “She was pretty but seemed like a prude” was one fellow’s assessment, and the other’s was “She wasn’t interested in current events—she mostly just wanted to talk about her students.” These remarks at least had brevity on their side and were nothing compared to the entire memoir published by Simon Törnkvist, I Knew Her When: My Love Affair with Alice Blackwell Before She Became First Lady. With the help of a ghostwriter, Simon chronicled our long-ago relationship: my alleged desperation to get married and have children, and his extensive reservations about me that apparently stemmed from what he recognized even then as my conservative leanings. Here she was, living in a vibrant and liberal college town, but she led an incredibly staid, sheltered life, he wrote. It was obvious she was afraid of talking to me about my experiences in ’Nam, and she avoided any confrontation. I knew from the get-go she was aiming for the white-picket-fence, 2.5 kids lifestyle, and if it wasn’t happening with me, she’d make it happen with someone else. When I heard that she’d married one of Governor Blackwell’s draft-dodging sons, I knew her wildest dreams must have come true. Also, humiliatingly, there was this: She was very vanilla when it came to sex. The thing I never understood was that it was easier for her to climax when she was on top, but she preferred missionary-style. I had been skimming the book for about half an hour when I got to those lines; I snapped it shut, gave it to my personal aide, Ashley, and told her to get rid of it as she saw fit. I felt particularly offended, as I actually had had indirect contact with Simon since we’d run into each other at the Brewers’ game in 1988; in 1995, he’d requested six VIP tickets for himself, his wife, his two children, and his parents to take a Christmas-lights tour of the governor’s mansion. The request had come through my office, and while I hadn’t spoken to Simon, I had been the one who signed off on the dispensation of the tickets. He never thanked me or anybody else—I had only two aides then, and I asked them—and the next I heard of him was when my White House press secretary alerted me to the existence of his book a few months in advance of publication. “I always had a hunch that Parsley, Sage was a low-rent hippie” was Charlie’s take on the matter.

Generally, there tends to be an inverse correlation between how well someone knew you and his or her willingness to talk; there also seems to be a link between discretion and class, or so I’ve always thought until seeing Dena and Pete. The people we know, or knew, in Maronee, the people from the country club, have been the most tight-lipped. The notable exception was that early in Charlie’s first administration, Carolyn Thayer (she has not remarried and still has the same surname) sat for an interview with 60 Minutes for a segment they were doing about Charlie’s past struggles with alcohol. “We all knew, everyone talked about it,” she said. “It was common knowledge when he got the DUI, and more than a year before that, at a Christmas party, I saw him fall flat on his face. I said to him, ‘Do you need help?’ but he just laughed it off.” It must have been the Hickens’ party, I thought, because I remembered Charlie cheerfully walking toward me with tissue stuffed in both his nostrils, and when I asked why, he said he’d gotten a nose-bleed. I didn’t watch the 60 Minutes episode when it ran, but after it aired, I heard from several of our old friends about how appalled they were, what a breach of etiquette they considered Carolyn’s behavior, so I had an aide obtain a copy. Because Carolyn had moved from Maronee to Chicago ten years before, it wasn’t as if she could be shunned from the community, and for this, I was glad. I’d have preferred that she hadn’t spoken to the program, but the fact was, she hadn’t said anything untrue. Regardless, Carolyn was the exception who proved the rule—she is the only person from Maronee who has spoken on the record and without our blessings to a media outlet, and very few people have spoken anonymously, either. I suspect the ones who have are people we hardly knew.

Simon’s was not the only tell-all memoir—there was also the one written by my first cousin on my mother’s side, Patty Lazechko, who is the daughter of my Uncle Herman, and I’m under the impression that the gist of her tale was that marrying up runs in my blood, that after meeting my father, my mother turned her back on her own siblings and parents. When the book was published two years ago, I hadn’t seen Patty since childhood, and I confess I bypassed that one; there are too many accounts, and they are too demoralizing to keep up with. Of late, there have been a few contributions to the exposé library from people who have worked for Charlie and me, campaign consultants and a fellow who was a deputy White House press secretary in the first administration, and while it’s always disappointing to feel that a person you trusted has violated that trust, such transgressions are standard in politics and have occurred to a lesser extent under Charlie than they did under his predecessor.

Charlie has become inured; he has never been interested in what his critics have to say except insofar as Hank can strategically deflect it. Obviously, I’m not as impervious, but I almost never try to have anything refuted, and a quote or observation in a newspaper article that once would have bothered me for days now bothers me for ten minutes, or for two. The last time I was particularly ruffled was over a year ago, when I opened the Times one morning in May to find an op-ed by Thea Dengler, the owner of the bookstore in Mequon that I used to love. Thea’s bookstore still exists at a time when fewer and fewer independents can make a go of it, and for people who follow such things, Thea has risen to greater prominence and is regularly quoted in articles about the bookselling industry. But that was not the topic of her op-ed; the topic was me, and the headline was DO SOMETHING, ALICE BLACKWELL! It began, Those of us who knew Alice Blackwell in Wisconsin have been doing an awful lot of head-scratching during the past five years. As a frequent customer at my bookstore throughout the eighties and early nineties, Mrs. Blackwell was inquisitive, compassionate, and open-minded. How, then, can she be—or so it seems—happily married to a man hell-bent on weakening civil liberties? Although Mrs. Blackwell is sometimes made out to be nothing but the First Lady Who Lunches, she’s a former librarian who knows just how crucial privacy and intellectual freedom are to a democracy.

Sitting in bed reading this, I had felt a rise of the sort of anger that I experience infrequently. It wasn’t the sentiment Thea was expressing, which I had heard often enough, but the source—unlike Carolyn Thayer, or my cousin Patty, or even Simon Törnkvist, Thea was a person with whom I’d once felt great kinship. And why couldn’t she give me the benefit of the doubt, why couldn’t she assume I was doing the best I could under the circumstances? Who was Thea to decide the exact quantity or nature of what I ought to say, and to whom, and how? I reminded myself of the decision I’d made years before, walking alone on Maronee Drive after the ridiculous Milwaukee Sentinel article about my molasses cookies—that I could not be defined by others from the outside, and that the fact of something being printed didn’t make it true. Still, this was Thea and the Times.

They think they’ll sway you, but they do the opposite—the more people there are exerting pressure, the more they are part of a pattern. There is also the fact of each individual who lobbies you having a pet issue—Thea objected specifically to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act—and how even in their national concerns, people are driven by a sort of altruistic self-interest. This is what I have done most wrong, this is how I have fallen short. While the criticism I receive can be discouraging, the variations on it negate one another. Whatever I have accomplished that was positive, it wasn’t enough. What’s important is what I’ve overlooked or ignored. (And again: I’m popular, my approval ratings are twice Charlie’s. It doesn’t surprise me that he ignores his critics altogether.)

These are my “issues”: breast-cancer awareness and detection; historic preservation of art and buildings; pediatric AIDS prevention here and abroad, especially in Africa; and literacy. If the issues on which I’ve focused are noncontroversial, I believe they’re legitimately worthy. What has been most wrenching as first lady, however, is that the old sense of obligation, guilt, and sadness I used to get when I read the newspaper in Milwaukee has been dramatically compounded. Though I resist the notion shared by Gladys Wycomb, Thea Dengler, and many others that I ought to lobby my husband, it’s true that if I visit an organization or invite its members to the White House—a veterinary clinic that spays pets for people who can’t afford it, a program that tries to decrease gang violence, an orphanage for homeless children in Addis Ababa—that organization will receive an influx of donations, a shower of publicity. I can change people’s lives, and many times, although it is cowardly, I have wished I didn’t have that ability. The pressure is too great, and the hardest part is not that what I do is insufficient in others’ eyes but that it’s insufficient in my own. I stay busy, I travel, I try with my visits—with my actions, that is, more than my words—to support other people’s good work, but I don’t doubt that I’d have felt better about my contributions to the world if my power were more modest. If I had remained a single woman, a teacher, I have the idea that I might have begun, at the age of forty or so, to take in foster children, and not necessarily white ones; I’d compost, and perhaps by now I’d have purchased a Prius, though I still don’t think I’d have affixed an antiwar bumper sticker to it. In whatever way such things are measured, I probably would have done less, but I wouldn’t have had to face the reality that I could have done far more.

As for those who hate me because they hate Charlie, hate me by extension, I am curious of this: At what point, in their opinion, should I have done something, and what should that something have been? Should I not have married him? Should I not have discouraged his drinking? (“Jim Beam and me, have us both”—is that what I ought to have said?) When he told me that he wanted to run for governor and I told him I’d prefer he didn’t (though I foolishly thought at least it was better than congressman or senator, at least it would keep us in Wisconsin)—when he decided that in spite of my stated preference, he was indeed going to run, should I have left him? Should I have stayed with him but not campaigned for him? Should I have stated explicitly to the public when my views differed from his? Should I have left him when he decided, also against my wishes, to run for president? Anyone who has been married, and especially anyone married for several decades, knows the union is a series of compromises; to judge the compromises I have made is, I take it, easy to do from far away.

If I am diffident, then my diffidence stems in part from my aversion to arriving hastily at decisions. During the lead-up to the war, I sincerely didn’t know what I thought the right course of action was; I read articles for both sides, and I found convincing arguments in each. Because the stakes were so high, I did have an uneasy feeling during the early months of 2003, but Charlie and I talked about the situation less than one might imagine, or I should say we talked logistically more than we discussed the philosophical or historical implications. He’d call from the Oval Office and say, “I’ve got to go to a meeting in the Sit Room, so how about if we watch that movie tomorrow night instead?” Or, as he once put it about the secretary of state, “We’ve been pumping up Stanley for his talk to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, and I think he’s really gonna hit this one out of the park.”

These days, it is common for people in both political parties, for people who don’t consider themselves members of any party at all, to say Charlie’s administration bungled the war and we should bring the troops home. And Charlie’s administration did underestimate how neglected the country’s infrastructure was, how likely an insurgency would be, and how many weapons the insurgents had. All of that is now clear; the question is how to proceed. For America, it would be advantageous to leave, but what about them, the country we invaded?

When Ella was in Montessori at Biddle Academy, the classroom activities included building blocks, wooden puzzles, and, to Charlie’s great amusement, a sink filled with plastic cups and dishes (“So she can learn to be a scullery maid,” he’d joke). The guiding principles of the classroom activities were these: Finish one task before you start another, and clean up after yourself. In the midst of our war in a hot, sandy country over six thousand miles away, a country whose art and culture and language and science stretch back to the beginning of human civilization, I keep returning to these ideas, that it is our responsibility to clean up the mess we made. For the last four years, I’ve wondered if we’ll make things worse by withdrawing, and I’ve remained confused about whether it was right to invade in the first place. If we invaded as a democracy unseating a dictator, does the fact that there were more deaths than Americans expected mean invading was wrong? If we were right to invade but it was sloppily executed, does that make it wrong?

When I see political pundits on television, or meet the Republican ones at events in or outside the White House, what strikes me most is their certainty. Is it exaggerated for the cameras, and do they in the privacy of their homes, at the end of the day, remove it along with their socks or stockings? Or are they always so bombastic and assured? I envy them as I envy the deeply religious, including my husband, but I have felt incapable of joining their ranks. I’ve never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad. Historic preservation will allow future generations to understand what life used to be like and in so doing will help Americans chart a path forward. The issues and decisions that are more complex I have left to others, to those confident of their own rightness. I have imagined that I’ll know what I think of this war when Charlie is long out of office, but that I don’t know now—it is a novel I haven’t reached the end of.

Or so I have often told myself.

And yet if Andrew Imhof’s death was the singular tragedy of my life, if in some ways I have lived since then trying to compensate for my error, trying to be worthy of having survived—if his death was the worst thing I could have imagined, then what words are there, what space in my imagination, for the deaths of thousands of American troops and foreign civilians? If my critics are right that I share responsibility for Charlie’s administrative policies, including the decision to go to war, then Andrew Imhof’s death is the least of what I have caused; it is nothing, and utterly insignificant. What if I believed the consequences of the war were also my fault? The twenty-nine-year-old former high school athlete from Hot Springs, Arkansas, killed by small-arms fire while searching a house in a southern neighborhood of the capital city; the twenty-five-year-old sergeant from Ogden, Utah, killed on his third tour of duty a month after his daughter was born, who didn’t want to reenlist but needed the twenty-four-thousand-dollar bonus for a down payment on a house; the nineteen-year-old from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who joined the army on his eighteenth birthday and was killed in a marketplace explosion; and the tens of thousands, or likelier hundreds of thousands, of civilians, a member of a local city council, a shopkeeper and his wife and three daughters, journalists and cameramen and translators working with the American military or the media, a bride and her new mother-in-law and twelve of the guests celebrating a wedding attended by a suicide bomber—killed and killed and killed and killed. If the blood of these people were on my hands, if there were something I personally could have done to prevent such carnage, the loss of so many adults and teenagers and children who presumably wanted, just as I always have, to live an ordinary life—if I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?

____

“OKAY, THOSE THIRD-GRADERS are terrors,” Ella is saying. “Can we just establish that you’re eternally in my debt?”

“Belinda says you did a fabulous job,” I say. “She told Jessica you had them spellbound.”

“Seriously, this one boy tried to climb over the rope in the Red Room, and then this other kid pushed a girl into the wall in the Vermeil Room. You’d think they’d have some reverence for this place, but they were like animals. I can’t wait to see what they do onstage tonight.”

It is just past six on the East Coast, and I’m back on the jet, above the cloud cover; we’re half an hour from Washington, meaning that after the motorcade ride back to the residence, I’ll have an hour to dress for the gala. “Thank you for standing in for me,” I say. “You did your good deed for the day. Ladybug, there’s something I want to talk to you about tonight when I get home.”

Immediately, accusingly, she says, “Do you have breast cancer?”

“What on earth—No, honey, I don’t have cancer.”

“You just sounded so serious. Okay, so I picked out which shoes you should wear tonight—are you ready?”

Jessica passes me a note: Hank on hold, says urgent.

“Mom?” Ella says.

“Let me call you back in a minute.” When I’ve pressed the “end” button on one phone, Jessica passes me another, and I cover the mouth-piece. “He won’t say what it’s about?”

“He wants to talk to you directly,” Jessica says.

I hold the phone to my ear. “This is Alice.”

“Ding dong, the witch is dead.” Hank’s voice is unmistakably gleeful. “Gladys Wycomb bought the ranch an hour ago.”

“What are you talking about?”

Jessica mouths, “What?” I hold up a finger.

Hank says, “The old ticker gave out, and no, I didn’t have her offed, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Did you?” A wave of horror passes over me. I’m not a conspiracy buff, but I’m quite sure things take place in any presidency that would shock most voters; I’ve never dwelled on what those things might be in Charlie’s case, because I am conflicted enough about the controversies that are known and legal.

“Alice, I swear to you I had nothing to do with it, and neither did anyone else except Mother Nature. Now, tell me this isn’t the best news you’ve heard since Van Halen announced their reunion tour.”

“But her helper, Norene—”

“Not a chance. Turns out in the mid-nineties, she was the go-to girl for dime bags in Cicero, Illinois, and she’s got a police record longer than your arm. The geriatric feminist avenger had nothing to lose, but Norene has plenty.”

“You’re telling me that Dr. Wycomb died of completely natural causes?”

Jessica is still standing in front of me, and her jaw drops. “Gladys Wycomb died?” she whispers, and I nod.

“She was a hundred and four, Alice,” Hank is saying. “There doesn’t need to be foul play—unless it was you who slipped a wee thimbleful of arsenic in her afternoon tea.”

“I don’t find that funny.”

“In all seriousness, blackmailing you was probably physically draining. I’ve got to hand it to her that she went out with a bang and not a whimper, but the good news for us is it’s over—the abortion story is off the table. You ready to come home and be saluted by students and teachers?”

“How can you be sure she didn’t tell anyone besides Norene?”

“So what if she did? It’ll be hearsay, nothing but another urban legend. You’ve got a former physician claiming she performed the abortion, the press is going to sit up and take notice. You’ve got a friend of a friend of an aide of a dead lady, and if you seriously think that’ll fly, well, then wait till you hear the one about Richard Gere and the gerbil.”

“I’m assuming you’ve told Charlie?” I say.

“He said to tell you congratulations.”

When I’ve hung up, Jessica says jokingly, “What, he took out a hit on her?”

“I know. Maybe she sensed the end was near and that’s what made her act, but it’s awfully unsettling. Hank is dancing a jig because he thinks this gets me off the hook.”

Jessica is quiet, musing, and then she says, “It probably does.”

WHEN I CONSIDER the trajectory of Charlie’s presidency, when I try to pinpoint the moment its tone and direction were established irrevocably, I keep revisiting his choice of vice president. In the summer of 2000, the decision had to be made in time for the Republican National Convention, and it came down to two candidates: Arnold Prouhet and Frank Logan. Frank was two years younger than Charlie, a Colorado senator who was serving his third term, came from a wealthy Baptist family, was a father of eight, and was a vocal critic of homosexuality and abortion. (I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention to subjects they profess to find repugnant.) I was opposed to Charlie selecting Frank as his running mate, and I also didn’t relish the idea of spending time with Frank’s wife, Donna Sue, who had self-published several books proffering tips on raising a traditional Christian family.

Meanwhile, Arnold Prouhet had been a congressman from Nevada in the seventies and early eighties who subsequently served under two presidents as a security adviser. As far as I knew, Arnold was more a fiscal conservative than a social one, he was eleven years Charlie’s senior, and on the few occasions I’d met him, he’d seemed serious and taciturn; I imagined these would be qualities that might help balance Charlie’s playfulness. (While Charlie had, under Hank’s tutelage, become a disciplined student of policy and government, I knew, and I think everyone knew, that he was in it for the power and adventure and human connection and not because of any wonkish devotion to or interest in the issues. The problem that has ensued is that wonkish devotion cannot be faked. The fever isn’t in Charlie’s blood, as it is in Hank’s—Charlie would never read a book about the First Amendment for pleasure—and this is why so often in the years since, when there has been a deviation from the public script or when, as at a debate or a press conference, there isn’t a script, Charlie falters. Being president is for him like taking a ninth-grade English test on The Odyssey, and he’s the kid who did most of the reading, he studied for an hour the night before, but he’s not one of the people who loved the book. Besides, he’d always rather crack a funny joke in class than offer a genuine insight.)

Hank objected to the selection of Arnold Prouhet, saying that where Frank Logan shared Charlie’s youthful energy, Arnold seemed old and dour. Arnold also could make Charlie appear insecure, as if he were seeking a father figure. But Arnold’s foreign policy expertise was significant, I countered when I was asked to weigh in (which was never by Hank and occasionally by Charlie, though usually he wanted to vent more than he wanted input). I also worried that Frank Logan’s own ambitions might hinder his work with Charlie; if he became vice president, he’d probably run for president afterward, whereas if Charlie served two terms, Arnold Prouhet would be seventy-three when they left office, and unlikely to embark on a presidential campaign. Charlie’s advisers besides Hank—among them Debbie Bell, a consultant named Bruce Kettman, and a frighteningly smart twenty-six-year-old protégé of Hank named Scott Taico whom Charlie called “Taco”—had mixed opinions, and I felt fairly sure Charlie would pick Frank Logan, but he didn’t. He picked Arnold. The night before he made the announcement in July 2000, he said to me, “I think you might be right about Logan, that he’s too focused on peering into people’s bedrooms and not enough of a visionary.”

Again, then, I find myself wondering if I am partly to blame for what has happened since. Would Frank Logan in fact have been a better vice president, would there have been less bloodshed under his watch? More homophobia, a sharper curtailing of reproductive rights, but not the unilateral use of military force, the defiant enthusiasm for preemptive war? It is indisputable that Charlie has been greatly influenced by Arnold Prouhet, and indeed it seems to be because Arnold has been so influential that Charlie insists as relentlessly as he does that he believes in the war, that he won’t back down. How embarrassing it would be not only to rely on the guidance of one’s hierarchical inferior but to rely on the wrong guidance—how unsophisticated Charlie would seem to himself and everyone else. And so rather than consider this possibility, he forces it to be untrue, he continues down the path he chose.

Years ago, shortly after Charlie and I moved to Milwaukee and joined the country club in the late seventies, we went there for dinner one night, to the main dining room on the first floor, and I excused myself from the table to use the ladies’ room. There was a lounge-like anteroom, a pretty area with couches and a dressing table and walk-in closets for hanging coats, a place where, sometimes at large parties, you’d find women chatting or applying their makeup. This was the first time I’d ever been in it, and once you entered the anteroom, you saw two more gold-handled doors: one directly across from the one you’d just come through and one to your left. I was trying to find the toilet stalls, and rather than asking one of the three older women then sitting on the couches—I say older, though they were no doubt younger than I am now, and stylishly dressed—I took a guess and walked forward to the door that was farther away. When I opened it and stepped through, I found myself back in the dining room where Charlie and I had been eating. I immediately realized there were two separate ladies’-room entrances; obviously, the toilets were behind the door I hadn’t tried. The logical thing at that point would have been to turn around, but I felt self-conscious. I was unaccustomed to country clubs, I imagined the women in the anteroom would notice and think me silly, and so, with a full bladder, I rejoined Charlie and didn’t urinate until we arrived home over an hour later. What I mean to say is that a part of me understands Charlie’s behavior. I understand it because I love him, because I am predisposed to sympathize, but I also think that, unlike many in government or the media, I don’t ascribe to people’s loftier motives just because they’re in a loftier place.

It seems to me that after the terrorist attacks in 2001, Charlie panicked. And Arnold, who had a professional history with these countries, who had already sparred a decade before with the dictator of one, swiftly stepped in with recommendations. He was hawkish, he believed in America protecting its superpower status, and he was confident of victory. He convinced Charlie, or Charlie convinced himself—establishing democracy in the Middle East, what a legacy that would be—and the rest has followed. The part that caught me by surprise was how the American people and the American media egged him on, how complicit they were in Charlie’s cultivation of a war-president persona. The terrorist attacks have given President Blackwell a heretofore undemonstrated seriousness of purpose, averred Time. Or, as The Washington Post put it, If there is a silver lining to these tragic events, it’s that President Blackwell has risen to the occasion as a leader . . . In the Times, an unsigned editorial was titled simply “Blackwell’s Finest Hour.” Had none of these people ever taken Psychology 101? Did they honestly believe Charlie, or anybody, changed in a matter of days? Did they think because, amid the rubble in lower Manhattan, he climbed atop a fire truck and spoke into a megaphone with resolve and sympathy, he was a new man? Charlie had always had the capacity for resolve and sympathy, which had nothing to do with whether invading other countries was a good idea.

I don’t mean to minimize how frightening the terrorist attacks were, how confused everything seemed in their aftermath. We all thought, of course, that the fourth plane was headed for the White House that day, and so they hurried me and Arnold Prouhet to Camp David on helicopters (Charlie was giving a speech in Ohio to a real estate association, a speech he famously declined to interrupt, and I didn’t see him until that night; when we hugged, when I had him in my arms, it was the first time since learning of the attacks that I wept). Even after we returned to the White House, we were evacuated several more times during the next few days, and once, in the middle of the night, we were rushed by agents from our bedroom to the Emergency Operations Center, an underground bunker beneath the White House. Then there were anthrax spores being sent through the mail, the threat of smallpox bombs. Charlie and I visited Pentagon burn victims, and later we met family members of men and women killed in New York, among them young children, and every morning I read the Times’s “Portraits of Grief ”—I read them all, and they were devastating. So it was a strange, difficult time, and we were in the thick of it. I don’t doubt that both Arnold and Charlie had to harden in certain ways during this period, that their toughness wasn’t just masculine bluster; it was interior as well, and for the benefit of others.

Nevertheless, I feel a growing suspicion that Charlie continues to fight this war for much the same reason I couldn’t bring myself to reenter the ladies’ room at the Maronee Country Club, and he even has my compassion, except for this—that night at the club, when I needed to urinate and hadn’t, the only one who suffered for my foolishness was me.

RIGHT BEFORE OUR plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, I said to Jessica, “I have one more stop for us before going home. I’d like to go talk to Edgar Franklin.”

Jessica’s eyes widened. “Now?”

“I promise this’ll be it.”

“It’s just that, I don’t know how long you’d envision talking to him, but the gala starts an hour and a half from now. As it is, you’ll have to get dressed at warp speed.”

“Are you trying to tell me you think going to see him is a bad idea?”

“No—no, I—” She broke off. The two of us were sitting with our seat belts fastened for landing. “Hank will kill me for saying this, but I think it’s a great idea. I just think tomorrow is better than today.”

“He’s spent five nights out there. That’s long enough.”

Jessica looked at me for several seconds, and then she said, “Okay.”

“Only tell the agents. I don’t want to try getting Charlie’s blessing, or Hank’s, because we both know they’ll try to talk me out of it.”

And this is how we’ve found ourselves racing up Suitland Parkway in our caravan of armored limousines. (Although I prefer the SUVs to the limos because they seem slightly less ostentatious, limos are what the White House sent; that I could have gone to Edgar Franklin in a Town Car was, I knew, out of the question, far too great a security risk.) The flickering lights and blasting sirens create the usual mortifying theatricality, but I don’t see another option. I would not be authorized on my own to invite Edgar Franklin to the White House, and if I suggested it, even if I could convince Charlie and his advisers that it was the right thing, it would have to be elaborately choreographed.

I got off easy—that’s what it feels like. That Gladys Wycomb’s threat was a false alarm has left me relieved but also disappointed. I wouldn’t say that I’m compelled to go see Colonel Franklin because of a need to exchange one revelation for another—so the American public can learn today not about my abortion but instead about my sympathies for an antiwar activist—but being forced to consider Gladys Wycomb’s threat made the threat less ominous than it would have appeared in the abstract; it made it almost enticing. I have felt so strongly since Charlie entered public office that my foremost duty is to take care of him, to be the one person he sees on a daily basis who’s not paid to agree or disagree with him, who really is just a friend. Is it startling, then, that I wasn’t altogether displeased by an event that would draw attention to my disagreement with his stance on a particular issue without my being the one who’d revealed our conflicting views? Could that have been the best of both worlds, that I could publicly and even privately lament Dr. Wycomb’s indiscretion while feeling a silent gratitude?

Such circuitous conjecture! If, for example, Ella came to me explaining herself in this way, wouldn’t I say to her, “For heaven’s sake, you’re allowed to hold opinions.” Wouldn’t I say, “A relationship for which you suppress and censor your beliefs is no relationship at all.” Wouldn’t I say, “There are perfectly ladylike and respectable ways of expressing yourself, no matter the subject, no matter the context, and though in some cases, biting your tongue is the most dignified course, if it’s a matter of conscience, then to speak out is not just optional but necessary”—wouldn’t this be what I thought if the person in question were someone other than me?

The motorcade pauses when we’re still over two blocks from the yard on Fourth Street SE, and via earpieces, there is much conferring among the agents in our limousine, the agents in the others, and the police escorts; I can hear the word Banjo, which is their code name for me (Charlie’s is Brass, Ella’s Braid—the Secret Service gave us the letter, and we picked our own names, though I let Ella pick mine). In our car, it’s still Cal and Walter who are with us in the back, plus José and another agent in the front seat. Both Jessica’s phones ring at once—she has already called to tell her assistant Belinda to put out the word that we’re running late but on our way—and then I glimpse, even from this distance, the television news vans, their satellite uplinks reaching high above the roofs of the row houses. Cars are parked tightly on either side of the street, and up ahead, I see that the sidewalks are dense with people, some of them holding signs.

Cal says, “Ma’am, we can’t recommend going farther. There’s too much congestion. With your approval, we’d like to return to the residence.”

Jessica and I look at each other.

“Isn’t there any way—” I begin, and Jessica says to Cal, “What about inviting Edgar Franklin into the car?”

Speaking in a low voice into his lapel, Cal says, “We’re turning onto D Street.”

“What about Jessica’s idea?” I ask.

“The risk of a mob is too great,” Cal says, and we’re already on D Street, the police sirens still blaring.

I say, “No, stop. Cal, I insist. We can park on another block, and you can barricade the whole street, but if he’d consider coming to the car, I want to try.”

Somehow I hadn’t realized what a circus it would be—it doesn’t look as crowded on television, or maybe more supporters have arrived today. In my fantasy, it was the two of us, Edgar Franklin and me, strolling down the sidewalk, which was delusional in any case, because for years, I have rarely strolled down a sidewalk unless it has been cordoned off, sniffed for bombs by German shepherds.

Jessica is the one who climbs from the limousine to issue the invitation; agents from the other cars flank her as she walks the two blocks to the yard where Edgar Franklin has pitched his tent. Brave Jessica Sutton, the little girl who played with Barbies on the kitchen floor at Harold and Priscilla’s house, who read Harlequin romances when she was in sixth grade, who went on to graduate second in her class at Biddle Academy and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, who has traveled with me to Israel and South Africa, who is my most steadfast colleague, my truest friend. She retrieves Edgar Franklin, and she brings him back to me; then, as he is patted down by Walter before climbing through the limo door, Jessica says, “I’ll be right over there,” and gestures to the limousine behind mine.

He sits perpendicular to me, our knees only inches apart, the soupy outside heat emanating from him. At the far end of the limousine, facing us with his back to the front seat, Cal watches. It would surely be too much to hope that this conversation could go entirely unobserved.

I say, “Colonel Franklin, I’m Alice Blackwell.”

“Edgar Franklin.”

We extend our hands and shake.

“I wanted to come out and talk to you, but unfortunately, that wasn’t going to work,” I say.

With a vaguely amused look, he surveys the interior of the limousine and says, “This isn’t so bad.” (I again wish it were an SUV.)

“Would you like some water?” I lift an unopened bottle from the holder beside me, and he accepts it. “Colonel Franklin, I’m not authorized to speak on behalf of President Blackwell’s administration, I need to make that clear. I’m here only as myself. But I want you to know that I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I’m aware that your son—that Nate was an only child. I’m also the parent of an only child, and I can’t begin to guess how difficult it must be for you.”

Matter-of-factly, not snidely, he says, “No, ma’am, I don’t imagine that you can.”

“He was twenty-one?”

Edgar Franklin nods. “Planning to be a pharmacy technician after his tour.”

“My grandfather worked in a pharmacy,” I say. “I never knew him, unfortunately, but this was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I understand that you’re from Georgia?”

“We moved around when Nate was growing up, including a couple years each in Germany and Panama, but he went to high school in Columbus, Georgia. I’m retired now and live in Decatur.” Edgar Franklin clears his throat. “Mrs. Blackwell, I’m a quiet man. It was never my plan to draw attention to myself, but this war is the worst mistake I’ve seen the United States make in my lifetime.”

“Obviously, it’s caused a great deal of controversy.”

“Why are we fighting, Mrs. Blackwell? What is it we’re fighting for?”

“Again, I don’t speak for the administration, but if you asked my husband, I think he’d say for democracy.”

“Is that what you’d say?”

I swallow. “I’m not a military analyst, but—Yes. I’d say the same thing.”

“They don’t want us in their country any more than we want to be there.” He speaks calmly. “They don’t think we make them more secure, they don’t say we’ve improved their lives. They see us as occupiers. I’ve been in battle, Mrs. Blackwell, and I know it’s messy, but that’s not the problem here. Our troops are caught in the middle of tribal factions, in a place they have no business fighting. The president says the way to honor the memory of the fallen is to complete the mission, but if the war was wrong to begin with, it won’t become right by going forward in the same direction.”

What can I say in reply, what is there for me to tell him? I can maintain eye contact; I can show him that I’m listening.

He says, “President Blackwell won’t be out of office for nineteen months”—I know, I want to tell him. Believe me, I know exactly—“and how many soldiers will die in that time? Two thousand, three thousand? I think we honor the memory of the fallen by preventing more senseless deaths.”

I say, “Our country is so indebted to you and families like yours, and I know there’s no way to repay Nate’s sacrifice. But the situation is extremely complicated, and if the United States were to—”

“Mrs. Blackwell!” His interruption surprises both of us, it seems. He gives the impression of a very polite person straining against the confines, the straitjacket, of his own politeness; he is saying more than he thinks he should, in a sharper tone (I am, after all, the first lady, and he is, after all, sitting in my armored limousine), but less than what he actually feels (I am, after all, the first lady, and he is, after all, sitting in my armored limousine). He says, “I beg your pardon, but you can repay my sacrifice. You can’t bring back Nate, no, but there are a hundred and forty-five thousand American troops still over there, and all of them have people who love them, who worry and pray every day for their safety. You can tell your husband, ‘These people have families.’ ”

What was it I said to Gladys Wycomb earlier today? My husband’s administration is different from me. Also: He is the one the American people elected.

“I saw you interviewed a few months back,” Edgar Franklin says. “The lady who talked to you, she said, ‘How do you and your husband spend your quiet time?’ And you said, ‘We read, we play Scrabble, the president watches sports.’ Mrs. Blackwell, that’s all anyone wants.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m very sorry.”

“Nate’s mother passed on in 1996,” Edgar Franklin says. “She was a wonderful cook, and she never had to follow a recipe. Meat loaf, black-eyed peas, macaroni and cheese, everything she made was delicious. Well, after she was gone, it was just Nate and me, and he was still a youngster. I hired a lady to help take care of him and make our meals during the week, and come the weekend, Nate and I had spaghetti with sauce and called it a bachelor dinner. We’d say if we turned on the stove, it counted as cooking.” We exchange a wry smile; Edgar Franklin does not hate me, at least not the way Gladys Wycomb did.

“Now, after I retired,” he continues, “a few years passed, and I thought, It’s about time I learn to cook. I bought cookbooks, and I read through them, and at first there were only a few recipes I could try—there were words I didn’t even know the meaning of, parboil and braise and what have you. But I improved. I had some humble moments that no one but me ever needs to hear about, but I improved. I had a plan that when Nate got back, I would make him a full dinner, and wouldn’t he be surprised: pork tenderloin with mushrooms and olives, a fresh salad, some homemade bread. I’d ordered a breadmaker from the Internet—people are very impressed by homemade bread if they don’t know all you do is put in the ingredients and press a button. I tried the different kinds to find the best one, because Nate didn’t care for raisins, but you could do herb bread or sourdough or any number of them.” I know what Edgar Franklin will say next, and I’m not wrong, though the way he says it is more restrained, less maudlin, than it could be. He says, “I never did make that dinner for my son.”

The limousine is quiet—outside, agents stand on all four sides—and after a minute, I say, “I’ve been close to people who died young, and I know it’s terrible in a way that’s different from other deaths. It feels like it’s unendurable, but you endure it because you don’t have a choice.” I pause. “If there were anything I could do to bring back your son, to change what happened, I would.”

“It’d be rough no matter how he was taken, that much I know,” Edgar Franklin says. “But it wasn’t a cause worth dying for. Weapons of mass destruction that were never found? Access to oil fields? Politicians playing cowboys and Indians? I guess those sound like good reasons when it’s not your son.”

Edgar Franklin is wearing khaki pants and a white short-sleeved button-down shirt beneath which I see the shadow of a sleeveless undershirt. He also wears a watch with a black leather strap, a plain gold wedding band on his left hand, and brown leather loafers with tassels. The tassels are what do it; they break my heart. I look directly at him and say, “I think you’re right. It’s time for us to end the war and bring home the troops.”

ON NOVEMBER 7, 2000, which was Election Day, we voted when the polls opened in Madison; Charlie and I voted at the same time, and outside the curtained booths at the elementary school near the governor’s mansion, we joined hands and, with our free outer arms, waved to the assembled journalists, photographers, cameramen, and well-wishers. We then boarded a plane and traveled to our final campaign stops, a rally in Portland, Oregon—Oregon was known to be a close race—and another in Minneapolis before we flew back to Wisconsin and rode to the hotel, where we were planning to watch the election returns in a suite with various staff members and relatives, including Arnold Prouhet and his wife and family, and all the Blackwells. Our nephews Harry and Drew had been campaigning full-time on Charlie’s behalf since the beginning, and Harold and Ed had also done extensive fund-raising. That night, in addition to Ella, Harold, and Priscilla, every single one of Charlie’s brothers, their wives, and their children, most of them married with children of their own, had come into town, and this all-hands-on-deck representation was quite touching to both Charlie and me. Someone had ordered dozens of pizzas, and the suite was a chaos of nerves and excitement; the only calm moment, which I appreciated, was when Reverend Randy led us in prayer before we ate. That the election would be tight was no secret, but Hank was confident Charlie would win, and Charlie was confident, too. Not because of anything we ever said to each other but due more to our exchanged glances, due to what we didn’t say, I was pretty sure that my father-in-law and I were the only ones who had serious doubts about Charlie’s victory. Harold was retired, or “actively retired,” as he liked to say, but he still had many close ties inside the Republican National Committee, and his seeming skepticism struck me as informed, whereas mine was based more on intuition. Whether I wanted Charlie to win felt beside the point by then. Sure I did, and of course I didn’t. I wanted him to win the way you want your hometown baseball team to win, or your daughter’s high school soccer team. I wanted that in-the-moment triumph, wanted our emotions to build to celebration rather than sink into disappointment, which was not the same as wanting the triumph’s long-term consequences. I wanted Charlie to win the election, but I didn’t want him to be president. For eighteen months, we’d been caught up, both of us, in a great tumult of chanting crowds holding red and blue signs, of strategizing advisers and pollsters and reporters, of waving flags, brass bands, planes and airports and hotels, schools and county fairs and nursing homes. It had been fun sometimes and exhausting more often, and now it was almost finished. The hotel ballroom was reserved for the victory party, and one of the reasons I still knew that I wasn’t cut out for politics was the built-in mortification of a victory party when there was a perfectly good chance there wouldn’t be a victory.

As the hours passed, it became clear that the entire election came down to the state of Florida—it reminded me of baseball games, how all nine innings could somehow shrink to one final pitch—and just before seven our time, eight on the East Coast, the networks announced that Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes would go to Charlie’s opponent. The suite became quiet except for our niece Liza’s three-month-old son, Parker, who was wailing inconsolably. Everyone looked at Charlie, or they tried not to look at him—he was sitting on a sofa near the large television, Ella on one side and Hank on the other—and I wasn’t surprised when, within a few minutes, Ella whispered in my ear, “Dad wants to leave.”

Harold, Priscilla, Hank, and Debbie Bell accompanied us back to the governor’s mansion, but everyone else stayed behind. As we walked through the lobby and climbed in the SUVs that would take us home, none of us spoke to the hordes of media who called out, though I smiled at a few of them; there were many we knew well by this point. It wasn’t as if they’d need encouragement—they were following us back to the mansion no matter what, and the reality was that we’d have to let them inside, Charlie would have to talk to them, before the end of the night.

At the mansion, we congregated in the second-floor living room, and I was tempted to suggest a game of Scrabble or euchre, but I don’t think anything could have distracted us. Everyone’s personalities seemed in this moment both reduced and magnified, distilled to some essential quality: Debbie Bell was angry, Hank was insisting that Florida couldn’t have gone to Charlie’s opponent and there must have been an error, Harold was stoic, Priscilla was disdainful of Charlie’s opponent and the fools who would elect him, Ella was sweetly protective of her father, I was quiet, and Charlie was wounded—boyishly so, it seemed. He was speaking less than anyone else, and Priscilla was speaking the most. “That smug, sanctimonious tree-hugger,” she’d say when images of Charlie’s opponent flashed on-screen. “If that’s the man the American people want for president, then they deserve him.” I think election nights were particularly evocative and fraught for Priscilla and Harold—we were, of course, sitting in the governor’s mansion they had occupied for eight years, where Charlie himself had spent most of his adolescence.

I had a maid bring out some peanuts and popcorn, and two televisions were playing—the one in the wooden cabinet, and another that had been brought in so we could watch more than one channel simultaneously, though we turned off the sound on both—and Charlie was preparing to call his opponent and concede the race when his and Hank’s and Debbie’s and Harold’s cell phones all started ringing at once, and less than three minutes later, the networks reported that they were placing Florida back in the undecided category. By one-thirty A.M., Charlie was leading in Florida with a hundred thousand votes, and by three-thirty A.M., he was leading with fewer than two thousand, with most of the votes in the uncounted precincts expected to go to his opponent. When we went to bed just after four, it was impossible to know what to think; the only consensus by then was that the results would be so close there’d have to be a recount, and it might be several days before anyone knew the outcome. I wouldn’t have believed my fatigue could be so overwhelming on such a nerve-racking night, but the last few days of campaigning had been especially wearying, and I felt that my body was begging me to lie down. Equally surprising was that Charlie seemed to feel the same. As the night had worn on, we’d been rejoined by several family members, we’d been paid a visit by a group of television and newspaper reporters and their attendant cameramen and photographers, and I’d noticed that increasingly, Charlie stuck close to me. Once, when I stood up to use the powder room, he asked where I was going. “And you’re coming right back?” he said. I nodded. At close to four, when I said, “Will you forgive me if I turn in?” he said, “As a matter of fact, I’ll join you.” The thirty or so people in the living room applauded as Charlie walked out, and he looked sheepish when he paused and grinned.

In bed, after we’d brushed our teeth and turned out the light, he set his head sideways on my chest, and I ran my fingers through his hair. He said, “So what’s gonna happen?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t know any more than anyone else.”

“But what’s your hunch?”

“Honestly, sweetheart, I don’t—”

He interrupted me. He said, “I’ve been thinking what I should do is be baseball commissioner. I’d be perfect, right?”

It was the first I’d heard of this idea, but it sounded plausible enough. I said, “Okay.”

“It’d be fun—challenging but not a total pain in the ass, and a good way to utilize all the skills I’ve acquired. But this state-government shit, the three-hour meetings about groundwater or labor relations or some dairy law from 1850, I’ve had my fill.”

“Is the baseball-commissioner position going to open soon? It’s Wynne Smith now, isn’t it?”

“I’ll put out a few feelers. Smith’s pushing seventy, so I’ll bet they’re ready for new blood.”

“Just don’t forget you have two years left of being governor.”

Charlie was quiet, and then he said, “If I resigned, would you think that was terrible? Monty is up to the challenge, no question.” Monty was Ralph Montanetti, the lieutenant governor.

“You wouldn’t want to see this term through to the end?” I said.

“This campaign has been brutal—I don’t have to tell you that, but between the two of us, I’m starting to feel like the thrill is gone. I already know Hank’s gonna be gunning for ’04, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. The idea of winning a presidential election, lately, it’s been reminding me of—What’s that line about making partner at a law firm? You’ve won a pie-eating contest, and your prize is more pie.”

“Will you do me a favor?” I said. “Will you try to remember that whatever happens, we’ll be okay? If you want to stay in politics, if you want to get out and go back to baseball, if you just want to relax—” Charlie was fifty-four by then, and it wouldn’t be embarrassing if he no longer worked; he could take early retirement, we could travel, we could even buy our own second home somewhere other than Halcyon, in Minnesota or Michigan, and he could fish and I could read. “You’re lucky that you have so many options, and so many supporters and admirers,” I said. “That’s what’s important.”

Charlie lifted his head and turned it so that, in the dark, we were face-to-face. From the far side of the second floor, we could hear the televisions and the people still awake in the living room. He said, “When they announced I hadn’t gotten Florida, that pissed me off. We’ve been down there, what, fifteen times in the last year? And I’ll bet you right now everyone in the liberal media is shitting their pants with excitement—they get to say I lost, then they say, ‘No, wait, you didn’t,’ and then they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, you did.’ Twice the fun, right? Over at the hotel, that wasn’t my idea of a good time, to have to smile like a gracious loser while everyone I’ve ever known sits around staring at me. But then I thought, If everything happens for a reason, God must know what He’s doing. What kind of believer would I be if I only trusted in Him when life goes my way?”

“There’s still the possibility that you won,” I said. “The election’s not over yet.”

He shook his head. “You know I lost, and I do, too. I feel it in my bones. But Lindy, I’m at peace.” He kissed my lips and said, “This might sound crazy, but I’m already starting to think I dodged a bullet.”

____

I THOUGHT WE’D ride back to the White House in the cars we were in—I was looking forward to a moment alone, or alone with three agents, to absorb what just took place—but the minute Edgar Franklin leaves my car, Jessica reappears, climbing in as she holds out a phone. “It’s the president.”

If it were anyone other than Charlie, even Ella, even my mother, I’d refuse. But I raise the phone to my ear, and when I say hello, Charlie says, “When did aliens kidnap my wife and replace her with you?”

He sounds boisterous, and he also sounds like he’s walking somewhere—possibly toward the residence elevator to change for the gala, which is in a rather alarming twenty minutes.

“Charlie, I didn’t intend to catch you off guard, but I couldn’t let another—”

“No, it was brilliant. Hank is only pissed he didn’t think of it himself. One parent to another, that was definitely the way to go.”

“You’re not upset?”

“I just hope Mr. Sympathy appreciated how generous it was of you to make time for him, especially since the word on the street is that now you won’t have a chance to freshen up. But don’t worry, I promise not to tell the students and teachers saluting you that you’re wearing stinky underpants.”

Uneasily, I realize he thinks I spoke to Edgar Franklin in his stead, less as myself than as a presidential surrogate, the way I sometimes attend funerals of foreign leaders. I say, “Charlie, I told Edgar Franklin I support ending the war and bringing home the troops.”

For ten seconds, Charlie is silent, and then, in a bewildered voice, he says, “You support ending the war and bringing home the troops?”

“I made it clear I don’t speak for the administration, I don’t speak for you, and it’s not as if he and I had an elaborate discussion about foreign policy. It was mostly him expressing his views and me listening.”

“I’m sorry, but I think our connection must be messed up. It sounded like you just said that you told an antiwar activist surrounded by TV cameras that you side with him over me.” I am quiet, and Charlie says, “Good God, Lindy.”

“Sweetheart, you and I can have differing opinions. The abortion issue—”

“Is that what this is about? You were determined to cause a huge controversy today, so after the witch doctor croaked, you cooked up another one?”

I feel a great urge to be in the same physical place he is, to set my hand on his cheek, to embrace him—to show him that though I’ve done something uncharacteristic, I’m still his loyal wife.

“I’m walking toward a TV right now,” he says, and then, to someone else, he says, “Yeah, while she was just talking to him.” To me, he says, “Yep, it’s on every station. Way to go, baby. You want to torpedo my immigration bill while you’re at it? Sabotage Social Security reform?”

It’s already on every station? Edgar Franklin climbed from my car minutes ago. But the newscasters must have figured it out while he was still in the limousine, they must be reporting live in their urgently speculative way.

“I’ll be home in five minutes,” I say. “Will you wait for me to get there before you become wound up?”

“See, I always forget this about you,” he says, and even now, long after we first lost our privacy, I can’t help wondering who’s overhearing him. “Every decade, you like to pin me to the ground, pull open my mouth, and take a shit right into it.”

I ONCE THOUGHT, when I was thirty-one and Charlie was running for Congress, that with practice I might learn to hold a novel in my purse and read it during his speeches, but I was wrong; reporters and audience members often glance at a candidate’s wife while he speaks, gauging her reaction. Also around this time, which was when Charlie and I were falling in love, I thought that I could support him not as a politician but as a person, and I told him this, and he thought it, too. “I can assure you I’ll never tell anyone if I disagree with you,” I said to him. “That’s no one’s business but ours.”

____

THE GALA IN my honor, attended by more than three hundred guests, is pleasant and crowded and a bit over-the-top. Charlie and I sit side by side in the front row, and after the third-graders sing “God Bless America” and a tiny twelve-year-old boy in a wheelchair is pushed onstage by his mother to lead us all in the Pledge of Allegiance, there are speeches by a principal at a public high school in Anacostia, a fifth-grader at a school in Bethesda, Maryland, and a Democratic senator known for his sponsorship of education-related bills (though he and I have gotten along well over the years, it’s no secret he despises Charlie; however, he’s hoping for support for his housing-voucher program). There is then a baton-twirling routine performed to R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” by a trio of nine-year-olds in leotards, a scene from the play The Miracle Worker in which two respected Broadway actresses play the parts of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and a reading of the Langston Hughes poem “Theme for English B” by a high school senior, an African-American girl who is probably fifty pounds overweight, quite pretty, and in possession of undeniable stage presence.

At this point, three teachers receive awards: chrome apples affixed to wooden tablets, each presented by the student who nominated the teacher. The evening culminates with the reappearance onstage of all the earlier performers, two of whom unfurl a banner that has to be forty feet long and says THANK YOU FOR BEING OUR ADVOCATE MRS. BLACKWELL. During the teacher awards, I slipped backstage, and as planned, I walk out from the wings, smiling and waving. At the podium, two ninth-graders present me with my own chrome apple that’s a foot in diameter (if my apple were life-size, as the teachers’ apples are, it wouldn’t provide the requisite photo op, and the flashbulbs are indeed blinding in this moment). I don’t give a real speech but simply say, “Thank you very much, and thank you all for coming tonight. This has been an extraordinary evening, and I’m honored to be in the presence of so much talent. I hope each one of you will remember that wherever you want to go in life, education is the ticket. And now, in light of the fact that it’s a school night, I recommend that you all go home, make sure your homework is finished, and get a good night’s sleep.” (Not a speech, but still—even these aren’t words I wrote.) While normally, I’d be embarrassed at having such a fuss made over me, after all the drama of today, these proceedings are a giddy distraction. Onstage, I pose for photos with the students and teachers; several students not waiting in line have formed a circle around one of the “God Bless America” third-graders, who is vigorously break-dancing. Charlie is gone, I note. We have acted our parts tonight, sitting next to each other with pleasant expressions, Charlie smiling gamely whenever someone onstage said something kind about me, but he gave me no nonmandatory attention, no whisper or hand squeeze or knee pat.

After I returned to the White House from my conversation with Edgar Franklin, there wasn’t time for me to find Charlie—as he had predicted, there wasn’t even time for me to change clothes, but I did hurry to the residence to use my own bathroom and saw Ella. We hugged, and I said, “We should head down there now,” and she said, “Aren’t you going to refresh your makeup?”

“Honey, we’re running late.”

She smirked. “You think they’ll start without you?” Although Mirel, a lovely young woman who acts as my makeup artist, and Kim, who does my hair, were waiting in the beauty salon (a room installed by Pat Nixon), it was Ella who, using Mirel’s supplies, dabbed gloss onto my lips, rubbed the brush over my cheeks, said, “Look up,” and ran the mascara wand through my eyelashes. “Now look down.” I obeyed, and she said, “Now blink.” Then she said, “Mom, I’m glad you talked to the Franklin dude, but if the troops were withdrawn right away, there’d be a domino effect of lawlessness across the Middle East.”

Her tone was reminiscent of when she was a teenager, explaining to me something she thought I ought to already know—diplomatic enough not to offend me but confident that logic was on her side. (Obviously she should be able to stay out until two in the morning because she was extremely responsible, because none of her classmates had a midnight curfew, and because it wasn’t like she drank.) In a strange way, I was caught off guard and touched by Ella’s directness, her willingness to talk about the war itself rather than about how to fix my supposed slip of the tongue. This, I knew already, would be the approach of everyone else. Just in the time it had taken Jessica and me to get back to the White House, Jessica’s two phones had rung six times (and those were only the rings I heard—there were probably many more beeps for calls interrupting the calls she was in the middle of), and apparently, Hank had spoken to several reporters. I’m not sure if he’d have skipped the gala anyway, but this was what he did, no doubt to continue setting the record straight. When Jessica, Ella, and I met Charlie in the Family Dining Room, Debbie Bell and Hank were both with him, perhaps to serve as a buffer between Charlie and me, perhaps at Charlie’s request, and so were Charlie’s personal aide, Michael, and my personal aide, Ashley, and Charlie didn’t kiss me hello but instead embraced Ella and more or less ignored me; I also could tell that Debbie was fuming. The eight of us walked together through Cross Hall, and just before we entered the East Room, Hank peeled off, and Charlie took my hand and forced a grin onto his face. Subtext: Nothing is wrong, and no one at the White House is concerned about the first lady going off-message.

When I’ve shaken hands and been photographed with everyone onstage who’s lined up, Ella, Jessica, and I are ushered out by Cal—Ashley squirts Purell for me—and we head toward the residence without speaking to the few dozen journalists in attendance at the gala; they are kept at bay by the press secretaries. “Here’s Hank’s plan,” Jessica says in a low voice as we walk to the elevator. “No interviews for several weeks, and you don’t take questions from the media at public events. Then we see where things stand and ease back in.”

I nod. This doesn’t seem so bad; silence on my part is far preferable to the sort of verbal acrobatics I’d need to engage in if I were trying not to either reinforce or undermine what I’d told Edgar Franklin. Not that I’ll be off the hook altogether, obviously—whenever I am interviewed again, I’ll be asked about my comments (which Edgar repeated immediately to the assembled reporters, which I knew he would), but I plan to be terse.

Though she rides the elevator upstairs with us, Jessica doesn’t step out; instead, the elevator attendant, a spry senior citizen named Nicholas, holds open the door as Jessica bids Ella and me farewell, acting as if she’s going home herself, though I’m fairly sure she’s planning to return to the East Wing to keep working. “Thank you for everything,” I say to Jessica. “You deserve a medal for today.”

“You deserve a gigantic apple plaque,” Ella says. Ella is merely making a joke; she thinks I went to see my mother this afternoon and doesn’t know about Gladys Wycomb’s threat, doesn’t know what a long day it’s been. In any case, I’ve already lost track of the chrome apple. I believe Jessica’s assistant Belinda carried it away.

Jessica says to me, “Take it easy tonight, okay?” She looks at Ella. “Make her relax.”

“The same to you,” I say.

“I’m not the one in the eye of the storm,” Jessica says. Abruptly, she jumps out of the elevator and hugs me, and as she does, she whispers in my ear so Ella can’t hear, “You did the right thing.”

Ella and I sit in the Family Kitchen, and Ella pulls cheese, hummus, and baby carrots out of the refrigerator. She isn’t a fan of the food here—even though downstairs the chefs will fix anything we want exactly to our specifications—so I always make sure we’re stocked in the residence when she visits. I call down to ask for a Cobb salad for myself, and Ella and I analyze the evening for a while, discussing the impressive delivery of the girl who recited “Theme for English B,” the vaguely and uncomfortably sexual overtones of the baton-twirling fourth-graders, and Ella says, “Did you talk to Senator Zimon tonight? I think he’s had hair implants.” She adds, “Does Jessica ever annoy you because she’s so perfect?”

I smile. “Does that mean Jessica annoys you because she’s perfect?”

“Not at all!” Ella grins her father’s grin. “No, I’m totally not threatened by this woman who’s close to my own age, who you spend all your time with and like better than me. Not one little bit!”

“I think the world of Jessica, but I only have one daughter, and there’s no one I love more. Would you like to sit on my lap?” I am mostly teasing, as Ella is, too, but she rises, turns, and lowers her rear end onto my thighs for a second. I run my palm down her back, over her still-long caramel-colored hair. Then she stands, reaching forward for a carrot that she dips in the hummus. She bites into it and says over one shoulder, with her mouth full, “What I’m really hungry for right now is a poop sandwich.”

“You’re a class act,” I say. This is an old joke between us, a requirement whenever eating a meal together after time apart. (Needless to say, I never make the joke, but Ella can be counted on.)

“Are you and Dad in a huge fight?” Ella asks.

“Why would you think that?”

“There has to be some fallout from your heart-to-heart with that Franklin guy.”

“Don’t worry about Dad and me. We’ll be just fine.”

“So what’s the thing you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh—” Should I do it? I no longer need to, now that I’ve been spared by Gladys Wycomb’s death, but I still could. What is the difference between giving voice to an overdue truth and being a parent who indulgently unburdens herself? Telling Ella wouldn’t be fair to her, I realize, it would be unsettling—not just because of her religious convictions but also because (I know Ella, and I, too, was an only child) it will make her think she could have had a brother or sister. I say, “It was nothing.”

Ella leans over and kisses my cheek. “Then I’m going to go call Wyatt. Tell Dad when he gets up here that I have something hilarious to show him on YouTube.”

I lightly swat her rear end. “Put your plate in the sink.”

When Ella is gone, I move to the West Sitting Hall, which has a beautiful lunette window overlooking the Old Executive Office Building, the Rose Garden, and the West Wing. I take a seat on a sofa and remain there for an hour and a half, reading. The book I left here yesterday, Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, has been waiting for me for twenty-four hours—all night last night and all day today, while I hopped from Arlington to Chicago to Riley. I enter it, and it welcomes me back.

Just before eleven, I set down the book and stand, and when I do, I remember Pete Imhof’s envelope, folded into the pocket of my linen jacket. I lift it out, and before I reach inside—the envelope is not sealed but already torn open—I see that on the back, in my own seventeen-year-old handwriting, it says, Mr. and Mrs. Imhof. Right away, I know exactly what it is, and with the tip of my thumb, I press against the envelope’s uneven bump, confirming its outline. (It’s so small! Not over half an inch at its widest point.) I pull out the note.

I will never be able to express to you how sorry I am, my seventeen-year-old self explains in blue ink. I know that I have caused you great pain. If there was anything in the world I could do to change what happened, I would. This pendant is something of mine Andrew once told me he liked, so I thought it might comfort you to have it. My pulse is racing as I withdraw the pendant, and it is very tarnished—I will never polish it—and I look at it in my palm: my silver heart. This is what Andrew leaned in to touch that afternoon before he went to football practice, the gift my grandmother gave me for my sixteenth birthday. (Oh, the past, the past—how the memories of the people I loved sear me.)

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the pendant; it’s obviously an inexpensive piece of jewelry, not particularly suitable for a sixty-one-year-old woman and even less so for the first lady, but maybe I can wear it on such a long cord that it won’t be visible beneath my shirts. No object in the world could be dearer to me, and I marvel at the strangeness of its source. Perhaps, though I didn’t yet know I had it, this is what nudged me to go talk to Edgar Franklin—that Pete Imhof had given me back my heart.

I MEET CHARLIE in the hall outside our bedroom. He is walking from the opposite direction, and I can tell that he’s trying to decide how friendly or unfriendly to be—after we make eye contact, he immediately looks away, then seems to realize how absurd it would be to pretend not to see me when it’s only the two of us, or only the two of us and Snowflake, who scampers off as soon as he notices me. A valet hovers outside our bedroom and opens the door as we approach, nodding once at Charlie. “Good night, Mr. President,” and then to me, “Good night, ma’am.”

“’Night, Roger,” Charlie says as we walk by, and I smile without speaking.

When the door closes behind us, I say, “Please don’t give me the silent treatment. If you’re angry, let’s talk about it.”

“If I’m angry? Lindy, how the fuck could you blindside me like this? You know how it looks if there’s not even unified support for the war in my own marriage? I’m the laughingstock of the world tonight, and I have to sit there clapping for baton twirlers.”

“Sweetheart, I think you’re overreacting. What I said to Edgar Franklin wasn’t a political statement.”

“What planet are you living on? When the first lady of the United States talks, it’s always political!” Between our bed and the flat-screen television above the fireplace is a sitting area: two wingback chairs, a sofa, and a wooden table off which Charlie grabs the remote control. “Hmm, I wonder what they’re saying on TV. I’m sure this isn’t all over the networks, because obviously, it was just you speaking as a private citizen, it wasn’t a political statement, and the media fully understands those subtle distinctions.” When the screen comes to life—it’s Fox News—there’s a clip of Charlie’s press secretary, Maggie Carpeni, saying this evening, “Listen, we all want to bring the troops home, every person in America does. The question isn’t if, it’s when, but the first lady knows as well as anyone else that a precipitous withdrawal would have disastrous consequences. She and the president stand united in their certainty that victory will come when stability and freedom have been achieved.”

“I don’t think that makes you look like a laughingstock at all,” I say. That Maggie is misrepresenting my own remarks doesn’t particularly bother me—first because of my belief that the fact of someone saying something about me, even when the someone is in my husband’s inner circle, cannot make it true or untrue, but also because I didn’t realistically imagine that the White House would leave my statements to Edgar Franklin untouched. That I said them once, in earshot of only Colonel Franklin and my agent Cal, has to be enough, at least for now—if I ever expect to reaffirm or expand on them, or to reassert my pro-choice stance, I will have to do so with great care. And Maggie or Hank can minimize what I said, but they can’t erase it. It exists. While I often have been surprised by the trusting nature of the American public, people clearly have become more wary during Charlie’s presidency, and so I can hope that at least some of them will assume the truth: that Edgar Franklin quoted me accurately, and that I meant exactly what it sounded like. Whether my words will have any positive effect, including on my husband, remains to be seen.

Charlie clicks to CNN, where the caption at the bottom of the screen says ANTIWAR FATHER RETURNS TO GEORGIA. Edgar Franklin stands before an electronic bouquet of no fewer than a dozen microphones; beside him is a plump woman identified as his sister Cheryl. It is still light out, which means the press conference must have been filmed several hours ago. “I believe that I’ve gotten as close as I will to the president,” he says. “Today I spoke from the heart to Mrs. Blackwell, and I choose to think she heard me and will act as a conduit to her husband. Whether he will listen is up to him. Although I’m going home tonight, I know that for as long as the war continues, it’s my responsibility to protest it.”

There is then a jump away from Edgar Franklin and back to the commentators in the studio—now the caption across the bottom reads ET TU, ALICE?—and one of the pundits, a man in a bow tie, says, “I’m sure all our viewers remember President Blackwell’s claim that he wouldn’t withdraw the troops even if Alice and Snowflake are the only ones left who support him—well, Mr. President, you may want to keep a very close watch on the first cat!” (This is yet another strangeness of being a famous person—that sometimes, on television or a website or in an article, a person addresses you directly but rhetorically directly, seemingly never imagining that you might see or read what they’re saying.)

The four commentators sit at a long, narrow triangle of a table, and they all chuckle at the bow-tied fellow’s quip. The show’s host says, “The big question now is whether the Dems will see this as an opportunity to kick Blackwell while he’s down vis-à-vis his Supreme Court nominee, Ingrid Sanchez.”

“Do you really want to watch this?” I ask. Charlie usually stays away from television news, believing the vast majority of producers and reporters have a liberal bias. Fox, obviously, gives him the most favorable coverage, but even with them, he gets fidgety after a couple minutes.

“Just don’t act like your betrayal isn’t the topic on everyone’s lips tonight.” Charlie raises the remote control and clicks off the TV. “If you think that, you’re kidding yourself.”

“Aren’t you at least happy that Edgar Franklin has gone home?”

“You mean because you sold me out and gave him what he’d come for?”

I sit on the brocade-covered bench at the end of our bed (the bed frame is French walnut, acquired by Theodore and Edith Roosevelt; the mattress is a custom-fitted Simmons Beautyrest World Class with memory foam and pillow top). Charlie is still standing behind one of the wingback chairs eight or nine feet away from me.

“I love you,” I say.

“Maybe you should sleep in the other room.”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“You want us to kiss and make up, and then what will you do tomorrow, join Greenpeace? I still don’t know what the hell got into you.”

“Charlie, talking to Colonel Franklin wasn’t out of character for me. He’s a father, and his son died, and the fact that the White House was ignoring him made me very uncomfortable.”

“Then you should have said something to me, or to Hank, or to—”

“I did say something to you! Or I tried to, but you might recall that as recently as this morning, when you brought over the newspapers, you’d only give them to me if I didn’t mention him.”

“So I left you with no choice but to slam my foreign policy?” His expression is skeptical. He is wearing the charcoal suit, white shirt, and red tie from earlier—neither of us, it turns out, changed for the gala, though by now he has unbuttoned the top button of the shirt and loosened the tie. Perhaps I’m a pushover, but I’ve always found this to be an endearing style in any man and especially in my husband. He says, “You ever think the time has come for you to forgive me for being elected president?”

We watch each other, and I say nothing. Then—a lump has formed in my throat—I say, “The reason I didn’t want you to be president is that I was afraid it would turn out like this.”

“Like what? You mean you and me?”

I shake my head. “Not us. Just the—the responsibility. How much is at stake when you decide something.” This is a way we never talk, Charlie and I. We speak of when he is giving a speech where, when he is traveling where, or when I am. We discuss in small, momentary ways how the State of the Union went, whether an airplane flight was bumpy, if his cold is any better. It would be crushing, I think, for us to analyze the enormity of our lives now, their meaning and repercussions, yet surely it is this very reticence, our workaday manner of communicating, one foot in front of the other, that has landed us in a place we wouldn’t thinkingly have gone. This has been Charlie’s presidency: episodes of experience, choices he’s made based on the input of advisers reluctant to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear; he has prayed, but I’ve often worried that the voice of guidance he’s heard has been not God’s but Hank’s, or possibly Charlie’s own, echoing back at him.

But he doesn’t see it this way. He looks incredulous as he says, “Do you think I’m not aware of the responsibility of being leader of the free world every minute of every day? Lindy, if at this point it’s news to you that the president is under tremendous pressure, then I don’t know where you’ve been for the last six and a half years.”

“But aren’t you—” I pause, start again. “Don’t you feel guilty?”

He stares at me. “For what?”

“A lot of the soldiers who are dying are younger than Ella. They’re younger, but some are married, they have kids of their own. Or they come back, and what if you’re twenty-six years old and both your legs were blown off and you never had a college education? We met a fellow like that at Walter Reed, remember? What’s he supposed to do now?”

Charlie’s nostrils flare even more than usual. He is—it’s unmistakable—disgusted. “Did you attend some peacenik workshop in Chicago today? Lindy, grow up. Freedom has a price, and you know what? A lot of people consider it an honor to pay it.”

“Sweetheart, I’m not trying to bait you—I’m not a journalist at a press conference. Can’t we talk sincerely?”

“About what?” His face is scrunched up in a sneer, his eyes squinty. “I don’t know where this is coming from, but frankly, I don’t need it from you, of all people.”

Isn’t he right in a way, that it’s far too late to change the rules? Our predecessors—Democrats—were known for being a team of sorts. “Two for the price of one” was a campaign slogan, and the first lady had an accomplished law career behind her. But he was adulterous, and she was ultimately a divisive figure among both men and women (Jadey professed to hate her, though I secretly always admired her), and when Charlie ran largely in contrast to that administration, the differences between me and her were not a political creation; they were real. I moved the first lady’s office back from the West Wing to the East Wing, I have until today avoided controversy, I have not tried to convince my husband of much of anything. Isn’t it indeed unfair, then, to start confronting Charlie with my opinions and criticisms? And isn’t it cowardly, aren’t the consequences too serious, not to?

I say, “One time, this was probably twenty years ago, I was with Jadey at the country club, and I was reading an article in the paper about a man who was sick with hepatitis C and cirrhosis and couldn’t afford his medication. The article was just incredibly sad. I looked up from reading it, and people were, you know, splashing in the pool, Jadey and I were lying on those recliners, and I asked her if she ever felt like she should be leading an entirely different life.”

Almost imperceptibly, Charlie’s face softens; his nostrils shrink, they are no longer at full flare.

“I guess I wonder if I should have been an entirely different first lady,” I say. “Yes, I realize it’s been six years, but I finally feel like, Oh, this is how it works. When I was a librarian, every time I read a new book to the children, it was only after the class was finished that I knew how I should have led the discussion, what the activities should have been. It was as if I knew how to do it right in the future from having done it wrong.”

“Lindy—” He folds his arms across his chest. “You’re a great first lady. Your approval ratings are sky-high.”

“Those numbers don’t mean anything.”

He shrugs. “You’re preaching to the choir on that front, but come on—America loves you. The applause you got tonight—”

“You don’t have to tell me how great I am,” I say.

“Really? Because I’d be thrilled if you’d do that for me.” For the first time since we entered our bedroom, he grins—not a thousand-watt grin, but still a real one.

I glance at the fireplace, where porcelain vases that once belonged to Dolly Madison flank the TV, then I look again at my husband. “On the plane today, I was thinking about how, after Andrew Imhof died, from then on, anything in my life that wasn’t bad felt like a pardon. Especially meeting you, marrying you—I wasn’t sure if I deserved to be so lucky. And when you wanted to run for governor and president, even though I had such doubts, I didn’t put my foot down because I thought it wasn’t my right. Who am I to tell other people, including you, how to live? I’m not such a paragon of perfection.” I pause; I have gotten to the part that’s harder to say, where I incriminate not just myself but him as well. Slowly, I say, “But if you’ve made certain choices and I’ve stood by, aren’t I responsible, too, indirectly? If you look at it like that, then the car accident pales in comparison to the deaths since the war started. I almost couldn’t survive the guilt of killing one person and now how many thousands—and not just Americans but—”

“This is crazy talk!” Charlie strides toward me, he pulls me up from the bench, and he places his palms on either side of my head, gazing at me intently. He seems fierce, fiercely determined, but not hostile. “You’re being nuts, do you hear me? There are casualties under every president, every single one without exception. You’re so good-hearted that you feel personally responsible, but Lindy, it has nothing to do with you. When it comes to spreading democracy, yeah, there’s some collateral damage, and that might sound callous, but the casualties so far, no matter how you tally them, it’s nowhere close to Vietnam or World War II—this doesn’t hold a candle. And believe me, those wars had their critics, too, but no one looks back and thinks, Yeah, we really should have let Hitler go ahead and rule Europe. You’re in the thick of things, and that’s why it’s hard to maintain perspective—I struggle, too—but future generations will thank us. They will, Lindy. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Did I bare my soul to him of all people—not to Jessica or Jadey or even to my father-in-law—precisely so that he could comfort me with passionate disagreement? Who would be more assured of, more invested in, my blamelessness than Charlie? In a similar fashion, I once allowed him to convince me that dating him against Dena’s wishes was no big deal.

He says, “They got to you today, didn’t they? The witch doctor and Mr. Sympathy, they gave you hell because you’re too nice to put them in their place. But just because they talk a good game doesn’t mean they’re right.”

Oh, Charlie. Oh, my dear and cherished husband in your white shirt and your loosened red tie, standing before me warm and fervent and familiar, my husband whose every expression and gesture and inch of skin are known to me, my partner in the strange circumstances of our lives, the man whom I have endlessly wished to make happy, endlessly been amused by, endlessly loved—do you not imagine I know all too well that just because people talk a good game doesn’t mean they’re right?

I have often felt, observing the world, like a solitary person in a small cottage looking out a window at a vast dark forest. Since I was a little girl, I have lived inside this cottage, sheltered by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgment to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name. In my twenties, when I was a teacher and a librarian working with children from poor families, I thought it was the beginning, that my contributions to society would increase and continue, but in fact that was my deepest involvement; in the years since, I have only extended myself from higher and higher perches, in increasingly perfunctory ways, with more cameras to chronicle my virtue.

I could have lived a different life, but I lived this one. And perhaps it is not a coincidence that I married a man who would neither fault me nor even be aware of my failings. I married a man to whom I would compare favorably because if I have done little, he has done less, or perhaps more; if I have caused harm accidentally and indirectly, he has done so with qualmless intent and total confidence.

The tears that have been welling in my eyes over the course of the conversation spill out at last, and Charlie wipes them with the pads of his thumbs. He leans in and kisses my right eyebrow. He murmurs, “Come on, baby.” If he hasn’t yet forgiven me completely, then it’s only a matter of time; he will forgive me so long as my behavior today remains an anomaly. He says, “Lindy, both of us—we’re instruments of God’s will.”

HAVE I MADE terrible mistakes?

In bed beside me, my husband sleeps, his breathing deep and steady. Before I awakened, I was dreaming of Andrew Imhof, the old dream: the two of us standing in different places, with different groups of people, in a large and badly lit room, my constant awareness of him. But in tonight’s dream, there was a startling change: After decades of elusion, we find each other. What happiness! We both are shy, we both are young, we make our way toward each other awkwardly but with a shared understanding, a certainty. He is strong and sweet and golden, and I am wearing a red dress that I never in reality owned. We don’t say much because it’s not necessary. And then—a miracle—we kiss, we are kissing. This is all I ever wanted, to come back to you, to be held by you, for what existed between us not to be cut short, and especially not at my hand. Your lips are soft and tentative, without the pushy sureness of a husband’s tongue. It is enough, just this—your hand at the small of my back, the heat of your chest beneath your shirt, our faces close together, and a cloak of privacy surrounding us. Could I have been your wife after all, might we have made a life together on your parents’ farm or one of our own? Once, on that extended visit back to Riley, I decided not, but now that we’re together, our compatibility makes me think of course we could have. We can talk to each other, we make each other laugh, there is between us a common sensibility, a wordless affection whose subtext is a single question: What took us so long?

And then I awakened, a sixty-one-year-old woman in a big, grand, shadowy bedroom in Washington, D.C., the wife of the president of the United States. Can Charlie and I not also talk to each other, do we not make each other laugh, is there not between us a common sensibility? It isn’t necessary for me to insist to myself that I love Charlie; I know that I do. But that dewy certainty I felt for Andrew, the lightness of our lives then—it is long gone. I have never experienced it with anyone else.

I didn’t vote for Charlie for president. I did vote for him both times for governor, but when he ran for president, I didn’t want the upheaval or the burdens, and I also believed sincerely that his opponent would do a better job. He had more experience, a more nuanced view of the issues; he was a lifelong public servant rather than an intermittent dabbler. I wondered, exiting the voting booth in 2000 and again in 2004, if my expression might give away my actions, but my vote was apparently so inevitable that no one ever asked me about it, no reporter or campaign staffer. I suppose it would have been disrespectful. In the photo taken of us that morning in 2000, Charlie and I pause outside the curtained booths at the elementary school in Madison, simultaneously holding hands and waving. What does the photo show, I’ve wondered since—my treachery or his? During the periods when I’ve been the most frustrated by our lives, or by what is happening in this country, I’ve looked outside at the cars and pedestrians our motorcades pass, and I’ve thought, All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power. At other times, I have felt both a sense of regret for deceiving him and an oppressive awareness of my complicity in his elections.

Did I betray Charlie, or did I act on principle? Has he betrayed the American people, or has he acted on principle? Perhaps the answer is all of the above. If the many novels I’ve read are an accurate indicator, I have to assume there are betrayals in most marriages. The goal, I suppose, is not to allow any that are larger than the strength of the partnership.

While I don’t imagine that I’ll ever be able to reveal to Charlie this particular betrayal, the future is difficult to predict, and perhaps there will come a time when even having voted for his opponent might seem an amusing anecdote. I doubt it, but it’s possible. For now I will say nothing; amid the glaring exposure, there must remain secrets that are mine alone.