PART IV

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

TODAY, AS ON all mornings when we’re in Washington, the phone on Charlie’s side of the bed rings at a quarter to six. After answering it, he rises and walks to his bathroom (I’m half aware of this through the fog of my own sleep), and then he opens the door between our bedroom and the corridor, where a valet is waiting to pass him the newspapers. It’s like at a hotel, except that instead of just the papers, you get a live person as well; heaven forbid the president of the United States should bend or reach.

Charlie carries them to my side of the bed: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. He whistles as he approaches—he’s whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”—and when I prop myself up, I see that he is holding the newspapers out of my reach. He says, “You’re only allowed to read them if you don’t give me shit about Mr. Sympathy.”

Mr. Sympathy is Charlie’s nickname for Edgar Franklin, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army and the father of a soldier who was killed two years ago, at the age of twenty-one, by a roadside bomb. As of this morning, Colonel Franklin has spent one night sleeping in a tent on the Ellipse, the park directly south of the White House and north of the Washington Monument, and four more nights sleeping in the same tent on a two-hundred-square-foot lawn on Fourth Street SE, just beyond the Capitol and about three miles from the White House; he has been spending his days there, too, in the hope of talking to Charlie. It is the first week of June, and it was ninety-six degrees yesterday, the air thick with Washington’s swampy humidity. I’d bet that outside, even this early, the temperature has passed eighty.

I extend both arms to take the newspapers, and Charlie shakes his head. “I didn’t hear a promise.”

“Are there new developments?”

He makes an expression of disgust. “Guy’s a pawn of the Democrats. I guarantee he’s on the payroll of some lefty kooks.”

“I don’t think he’s being paid,” I say.

“Give your word—no lobbying.”

“I give my word,” I say, and Charlie tosses the newspapers onto the duvet; they land with a thud. As he returns to the bathroom, he says over his shoulder, “Look in the business section, because I heard a rumor that General Electric and Alitalia are merging.”

“Very funny.” This is a joke I have heard so many times that the punch line—And they’re calling it Genitalia!—can go unspoken. Charlie’s second favorite joke on passing off the papers is stock-related: Did you hear that Northern tissue touched a new bottom yesterday? Thousands were wiped clean.

My usual pattern is to first scan the front page and then the editorial and op-ed pages of each paper, starting with the Times, and if there are no particularly alarming news articles, I go to the Times’s arts section, which I read in full. On the cover of today’s Times, the headlines are about a helicopter crash yesterday afternoon that killed six marines; about the visits Charlie’s Supreme Court nominee, Ingrid Sanchez, will make this afternoon to various senators in advance of her confirmation hearings; about Congress’s vote on the new energy bill; about the damage caused by flash flooding in South Dakota; about Edgar Franklin; and finally, also on the front page, there’s a feature on the increasingly popular cosmetic surgery procedure known as vaginal rejuvenation. After reading the Edgar Franklin piece, I skip to the arts: a profile of a nineteeen-year-old hip-hop artist named Shaneece, no surname; a review of a biography about Mary Cassatt; reviews of an opera in San Francisco, two plays in New York, and a ceramics exhibit in Santa Fe. When I’m finished with that section, I return to the hard news, which I also read thoroughly, at least in the Times; in the Post, I fully read only the articles pertaining to Charlie’s administration and the style section, including, I admit it, “The Reliable Source.”

Charlie and I sleep in what is technically the president’s bedroom—many first couples have used separate rooms, and the adjacent first lady’s bedroom is larger than the president’s, with its own sitting room and bathroom, which I do use. (In the sitting room, I keep both my papier-mâché Giving Tree and the Nefertiti bust I inherited from my grandmother; Charlie decreed the bust too creepy for the room we share.) While I read, Charlie showers, shaves, and brushes his teeth as Mozart plays on a Bose stereo in a recessed section of his bathroom wall. Though he hasn’t learned to distinguish baroque from romantic and isn’t interested in which composer wrote what, classical music is something Charlie acquired a taste for during his governorship, when we attended symphonies at Madison’s Oscar Mayer Theatre. I have mixed emotions about his late-in-life musical appreciation—I am glad that he enjoys it, but I can’t help suspecting his enjoyment is tied directly to the hectic pace of his life, all the demands placed on him. He likes classical music, I’m almost certain, for what it doesn’t contain, which is words or requests or criticism. It is only melody and mood, and so long as the mood doesn’t become too somber, it soothes him.

When Edgar Franklin first staked his tent on the Ellipse, the Times buried the articles about him—they put them on A16 or A19—and the early pieces were less than a sixth of a page. Today’s article, following two separate op-ed columns yesterday, is the most prominent yet: He has no plans to move, and he has been joined by supporters numbering in the hundreds, who stay overnight with friends or strangers in row houses or apartments all over the city, in hotels and motels, in tents of their own on campgrounds as far away as Millersville, Maryland, or Lake Fairfax Park in Virginia, then return each morning to Capitol Hill. Colonel Franklin has also received dozens of bouquets of flowers, hundreds of pounds of food, thousands of dollars in donations, and he has been joined by a Manhattan publicist who took leave of his job to work for free. In response, the Times quotes a White House spokes-woman, Margaret Carpeni (Maggie is thirty-one, an athletic young woman who has run two marathons and who just broke up with her boyfriend, a medical resident, though none of us is sure why) who said on Sunday, “The president continues to pray for our fallen soldiers and the loved ones they’ve left behind, recognizing the ultimate sacrifice these individuals have made to protect freedom and liberty in the United States and around the world.”

He is a trim African-American man, Edgar Franklin, fifty-six years old, and for the last five days, he has worn not his army uniform—if he did, it would make me side more with Charlie, distrusting the staginess of it—but rather, khaki trousers and blue or white short-sleeved shirts, his sleeveless undershirts visible beneath them. He looks remarkably pulled together for having spent nights in a tent, although I assume he is showering each morning at the house belonging to the couple on whose lawn he sleeps. After originally setting up camp on the Ellipse, he was forced to move. Despite grounds for arrest, he was let off with a fine (he has told reporters he will pay it), and this was when a sympathetic couple in their late thirties who live on Capitol Hill offered to let him stay in their front yard. Whether Colonel Franklin is still in violation of an ordinance against camping is a question the advisory neighborhood commission, which is overwhelmingly liberal, appears uninterested in pursuing.

What Edgar Franklin wants is this: to meet with my husband in order to share his thoughts about why the war is futile and the United States ought to bring home the troops. It was in the spring of 2005 that Edgar Franklin’s only child, Nathaniel “Nate” Franklin, was killed by a roadside bomb in a northern province. Already, Edgar was a widower, his wife, Wanda, having died of colon cancer in 1996. Edgar himself served in Vietnam—he was drafted at the age of nineteen—and he remained in the army for thirty years, ultimately being deployed to six combat zones and becoming an officer. In print and television interviews, of which there have been more with each passing day, he doesn’t casually trash my husband. He isn’t loquacious, or sloppy with words. He says, “I did not in good conscience feel that I could remain silent.” Naturally, he has been censured by several former military colleagues.

His plaintiveness, his trim build and fastidious dress and terse commentary—they are haunting me. I asked one of my aides to find out if Colonel Franklin is, as his son was, an only child, and I was greatly relieved to learn he isn’t. Raised in Valdosta, Georgia, Colonel Franklin is the second of five siblings, all the others sisters: Deborah, now fifty-eight, still in Valdosta and running a day care from her home; Pamela, who would be fifty-three but is deceased (she suffered from diabetes); Cynthia, fifty, a homemaker in Dallas; and Cheryl, forty-seven, a paralegal in Atlanta. Cynthia is also a military parent—her son is a Special Forces soldier serving overseas—and disavowed her brother’s actions on Thursday in The Dallas Morning News, then refused to make further public comment; according to the article in today’s Times, Cheryl joined Colonel Franklin yesterday in Washington.

When the story broke last Wednesday, Charlie told me, “You can’t let the opposition dictate the terms of the conversation,” and later that day, when Hank Ucker and I passed in the hallway outside the Map Room—Hank is now Charlie’s chief of staff—he said, “The president tells me the Franklin fellow has gotten under your skin, but trust me, Alice, capitulating to his demands would set a dangerous precedent. You can’t let the opposition dictate the terms of the conversation.” There is no doubt in my mind which of them borrowed the phrasing from the other; we all have known one another far too long.

Charlie emerges from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, his torso bare. Although the presidency has aged him, as it has aged all the men who’ve held it—his hair is grayer now, his face more lined—he is still extraordinarily fit and handsome. He comes over and kisses me on the nose. “How’d I mess up the world today?”

“There’s a Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie that got a great review,” I say.

“What are they saying about Ingrid?”

In what I intend to be a neutral tone, I say, “They’re mostly trying to gauge her stance on abortion.” Ingrid Sanchez, Charlie’s Supreme Court nominee, was a U.S. attorney in Michigan and then a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She is a practicing Catholic and a lay ecclesial minister of her local church, and though she has made no official statement on the subject, she is widely assumed to be pro-life. She also appears to have an impeccable record, and the fact that she’s female makes protesting her nomination trickier for women’s groups, which isn’t to say they’re staying quiet. Charlie’s last appointee, the new chief justice whose confirmation occurred in September 2006, is conservative as well, though his views on abortion, even after his first term, remain ambiguous. If Ingrid Sanchez is confirmed, it is possible that the Court will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. While this makes me uncomfortable, the matter is not in my hands, and it’s scarcely as if Charlie doesn’t know my views; the whole country knows my views. Shortly before Charlie’s first inauguration, the anchor of a national morning news show asked if I thought abortion should be legal, and I said, “Yes.” Asked by the same anchor in 2004 whether I had changed my mind, I said, “No.” Though I didn’t expand on the topic in either instance, both times the question was one I had agreed in advance to answer.

“Typical of the Times,” Charlie says, and his nostrils flare in irritation. “Here Ingrid’s got nearly three decades of legal and judicial experience, and they’ve got to reduce it to one issue.”

“Sweetheart, I think that’s to be expected. The Republicans are as curious as the Democrats.” While Charlie reads no newspaper on a regular basis, relying instead on briefings from his staff, his contempt for The New York Times is particularly intense. This is ironic, given that in the eighties, when we were in Halcyon in the summers, he and Arthur would drive an hour and twenty-five minutes to Green Bay to buy the Times Sunday edition; they would call ahead to a grocery store to reserve their copy.

I push off the sheet and duvet and stand, wrapping my arms around Charlie and inhaling the scent of his neck and shoulders. “You smell very clean,” I say. I reach for the slim leather folder on his nightstand and open it. These folders—an identical one is on my nightstand—contain our schedules for the day. Before we go to bed, we each receive both our own and each other’s.

On his plate today: intelligence and FBI briefings, a late-morning speech at a conference for small-business leaders in Columbus, Ohio, a fund-raising luncheon in Buffalo, and a meeting with his economic advisers back in the Oval Office this afternoon, before and after which he’ll make calls on Ingrid Sanchez’s behalf. Tonight at eight o’clock there is a White House gala titled “Students and Teachers Salute Alice Blackwell,” which I find quite embarrassing. As Hank reminded me when he got me to agree to it in April, Charlie’s approval ratings have dipped to 32 percent, while mine rest at 83 percent; I am allegedly the second most admired woman in the United States, just behind Oprah Winfrey. (Ridiculous as it is, this ranking is hardly the most ridiculous aspect of my life.) “Reminding Americans how much they love you reminds them they love the president,” Hank told me. “You’ll be taking one for the team, and all you have to do is show up and pretend you have an ego like the rest of us.”

Charlie glances at his schedule, then pulls mine from beneath it. “You’re not traveling today, are you?”

I shake my head. “The breast-cancer panel is in Arlington.”

“A titty summit, huh?” Charlie grins. “Need any help performing a self-exam?”

“Get dressed.” I push him away and turn to make our bed, a habit I’ve been told the maids find hilarious, but one I can’t suppress. Prior to our arrival over six years ago, the sheets in the residence were changed daily, but I requested, so as not to waste water, that they be changed no more than once a week, even for Charlie and me.

He reappears a few minutes later in a white oxford shirt, a charcoal suit, and a red tie marked with tiny yellow dots. “You look nice,” I say.

“You excited to be the belle of the ball tonight?”

Dryly, I say, “I’m beside myself.”

“You’re not dreading it, are you? Lindy, you deserve to be recognized. People have no idea how much you’ve done not just for the administration but for the country.”

This is a way of talking I don’t care for, talking as you’d hope others might talk about you, believing your press, or what you wish were your press. Though in public, I try to graciously accept both compliments and criticism, in the privacy of my head, I avoid giving myself credit for vague achievements tied to my position—for being a role model, for showing leadership—and at the same time, I don’t blame myself for the broad general failures for which I am held responsible by my detractors. To others, I am a symbol; to myself, I have only ever been me.

I set my hands on Charlie’s shoulders, and we lean in and give each other a minty, toothpastey kiss. “Ella gets in around four, and I have to give a tour to a third-grade choir after that, but otherwise, I hope she and I will get to relax,” I say. (That our daughter is coming home for tonight’s gala is, in my opinion, its main benefit; though I try not to crowd her, I adore when she visits.) “If you want us to come and say hi, if you have a spare minute, have Michael call up.”

“Wyatt’s not coming with her?” Wyatt is Ella’s boyfriend of a year and a half. They both work as investment analysts at Goldman Sachs in Manhattan, and Charlie likes to play tennis with Wyatt because Wyatt is good enough to be challenging but not so good that Charlie can’t have the pleasure of beating a man half his age.

I say, “Well, Ella leaves again tomorrow, so it’s such a short visit. Will you have a good day today and be careful?” I say this to Charlie every morning. You would think—I would have thought—there would be an entirely different vocabulary that a president and a first lady would use, one that encompassed the constant possibility of national or international disaster, the weight of a country. And there’s White House jargon—FLOTUS and pool spray and “the football”—but it turns out that for the most part, we make do with the same words we’ve always used.

“I love you, Lindy,” Charlie says. It is six-twenty, and from here, he will go for breakfast in the Family Dining Room, where Hank and Debbie Bell, a senior adviser, will be waiting for him; they meet daily and call themselves the Oatmealers. From the dining room, Charlie will move on to the Oval Office for his briefings and then go directly to the South Lawn for the short ride on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base and the longer plane flight to Columbus. (Punctuality has been a major point of pride with Charlie during both his administrations.)

He always reminds me in this early-morning moment of an actor going onstage, an insurance salesman, or perhaps the owner of the hardware store who landed the starring role in the community-theater production of The Music Man. Oh, how I want to protect him! Oh, the outlandishness of our lives, familiar now and routine, but still so deeply strange. “I love you, too,” I say.

____

THIS IS THE part everyone already knows: that in the year 2000, Charlie won the presidential election by a narrower margin than any other candidate in U.S. history, that in fact his opponent received more popular votes while Charlie received more electoral ones; that the final decision was made by the Supreme Court, who voted 5–4 in Charlie’s favor; that at his inauguration in January 2001, he made a pledge to work in an inclusive, bipartisan fashion, a pledge I believe he intended to keep; that eight months later, terrorist attacks occurred in New York and Washington, D.C., killing close to three thousand Americans; that, first in October 2001 and again in March 2003, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force against countries thought to be harboring terrorist leaders and weapons of mass destruction; that Charlie’s advisers and Charlie himself told the American people the war would be swift, that even as soon as six weeks after the March 2003 invasion, they assumed major combat operations were complete, as Charlie famously declared in a speech aboard a navy supercarrier, but that now, four years in, it is more bloody and chaotic than ever. Over three thousand American troops have died, the same number killed in the terrorist attacks, and close to twenty-five thousand have been wounded. As for foreign civilians, estimates range from seventy thousand deaths to ten times that. Every day, there are car bombs and suicide bombs, gun-men shooting police officers, mortar strikes on homes and schools, sniper fire outside mosques, decapitations at checkpoints. These days, Charlie and his defenders speak of freedom, of reshaping a region and shifting an ideology, of finishing what they started instead of cutting and running; his critics speak of quagmires and civil war. Some of those who were once his defenders have become his critics.

When we went to sleep at four A.M. on November 8, 2000, I didn’t think Charlie had won the election, and I was both sorry for him and relieved for us, for our family. I hadn’t wanted him to run for governor of Wisconsin in 1994, and I hadn’t wanted him to run for president. What we’d mostly lost already—the option of shopping at the grocery store, quietly eating dinner at a restaurant, going for a walk alone or with a friend, or just spending a Saturday reading and cleaning the house, without obligations—I knew we’d lose completely if Charlie became president. I did not want the exposure, the forfeiture of our privacy and our last ties to ordinary life.

When the election wasn’t decided for over a month, we laid low in the governor’s mansion in Madison; I read, went to friends’ houses for lunch, and attended a few gatherings for groups I’d become involved with as first lady of Wisconsin, while Charlie and Hank Ucker and various advisers and lawyers and relatives held urgent, secretive meetings and avoided the media. When, on December 12, after recounts and lawsuits, Charlie was declared president, I thought, We will ride it out. There would be risks, but we’d ride out the presidency as we’d ride out a tornado watch: Keep your head down, cross your arms over the crown of your skull. Not literally, of course—literally, what I’d do would be to comply with all that was public and obligatory, to show up when I was expected to show up—but that was how I’d think of it. For at least four years and likely for eight, I’d hold my breath, waiting for it to pass, and eventually, it would. A tornado is disruptive, but it never lasts.

But I hadn’t considered—how could I not have?—the circumstances under which Charlie and I had gotten engaged. In the middle of a storm, he had left his apartment and climbed into his car and driven through the lightning and hail, he had swooped down the basement steps of the house I lived in and proposed marriage. He’d defied the tornado that day, not run from it. And look—it had worked. Here we were, still happily married all these years later.

What I had projected onto Charlie at the beginning of his presidency was my own wish not to cause a stir, not to attract undue attention or assert myself, when Charlie enjoyed asserting himself. I know there are those who suggest he, or some shadow entity of his administration, planned the terrorist attacks, and I consider such an idea ludicrous, unworthy of discussion. But it is indisputable that he responded; he took on the challenge. Did he conflate the terrorist attacks with the separate and lesser threats coming from the country we invaded in March 2003, when the attacks and the threats were then unconnected, and did he encourage the public to conflate them as well? Was the invasion only for oil, Charlie’s vows to spread democracy mere lip service? Was he quicker to enter a war than he would have been if he’d had military experience himself instead of having spent the late sixties and early seventies working as a ski instructor? These are accusations his opponents level at him, and while they are fair questions, what I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity. I didn’t know in the days leading up to the March 2003 invasion whether I thought invading was right or wrong, I didn’t know if I agreed with the hawks or the protestors holding candlelight vigils. As in college, when I had neither supported nor condemned the Vietnam War, my inactivity stemmed from uncertainty rather than indifference. But not knowing what I thought, I did not try to influence my husband. There were plenty of people advising him, men and women (though mostly men) who’d spent decades as foreign policy experts, who in earlier times had traveled to this very country, met with this very dictator.

Now over four years have passed since the invasion. That a war once supported by 70 percent of Americans has become divisive and unpopular has served only to make Charlie more resolute; in the circular fashion of such things, it is about being resolute that he is most resolute of all. The average American doesn’t have access to the intelligence Charlie does, he points out; the average American has become coddled and forgetful, unaccustomed to bloodshed or sacrifice. Think of the Revolutionary War, Charlie says, think of the Civil War, think of World War II. There is a price we must pay for democracy, and it has always been so. Nine months ago, in September 2006, Charlie said at a press conference, “To withdraw right now would be to surrender, and I wouldn’t surrender even if Alice and Snowflake were the only ones left supporting me.” (Snowflake is, of course, our cat; he was also my “co-author” on First Pet: What I’ve Seen from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, an indignity either increased or lessened, I’ve never been sure which, by the fact that though we shared credit and all proceeds went to a national literacy program, I wrote no more of the book than Snowflake did.)

Since Charlie’s inauguration, I have made endless calculations: We are 10 percent finished with his time in office. We have 394 weeks left. We have five and a half years. From the beginning, I assumed his reelection not because I wanted it but the opposite. It is what we most desire that we’re afraid to count on; it’s always so much easier to believe in an eventuality you’d rather avoid.

The speeches Charlie gives, and my own as well, the fund-raisers and the funerals, the state visits and the balls, the ribbon cuttings and the receiving lines and the hundreds of letters that I write and receive every week—I am always checking them off a great list, counting down. It’s not that I don’t enjoy any of the responsibilities I bear as first lady. I do, and I feel grateful. I’ve met legends of art and literature, kings and queens and chieftains and an emperor, I’ve visited sixty-four countries, sampled beluga blinis on a ship on the Neva River, ridden a camel at the pyramids of Giza, waded in the waters of Pangkor Laut (I didn’t swim, because I didn’t wish to appear in a bathing suit before the cameras). At the airport in Asmara, Eritrea, where I had traveled without Charlie, local women threw popcorn at me as a welcoming gesture; at an orphanage in Bangalore, I donned a sari and read The Giving Tree to the children, accompanied by a Kannada translator; and in Helsinki, after a marvelous evening of conversation and a feast of crayfish, reindeer meat, and cloudberry layer cake, I committed a faux pas I could blame only on jet lag by saying, in a public toast to Finland’s president, that I would always remember the kindness of the Swedish people. I have had the surreal experience of holding the Bible upon which my husband was sworn in as president (I was very moved, and at the same time, inappropriately, the line from the old folk song “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” which Ella had learned as a child, kept replaying in my head: “Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, I wouldn’t marry the president . . . ”), and I have had the equally surreal experience of returning to Theodora Liess Elementary School, where I’d worked in Madison, for the school’s rededication as the Alice Blackwell School. (I hoped that Theodora, the nineteenth-century daughter of a director of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad and herself an outspoken advocate of educating Ojibwe girls, would forgive me; to decline the school’s honor seemed impolite.)

I have often felt a pang at not being able to share the more colorful of my experiences with my grandmother; what a hoot she would find my life, how she’d relish the gossipy details. But Charlie and I have included many of our relatives and longtime friends in the pleasures of our unexpected circumstances: For the eightieth birthday of my Madison friend Rita Alwin, I flew her to Washington and had her stay in the Lincoln Bedroom (on the plane out, she wore my mother’s garnet brooch, which touched me). One Christmas Day, Charlie, Ella, my mother, Jadey, Arthur, their two grown children, and I spent a delightfully raucous afternoon in the White House bowling alley (we don’t travel for the actual holiday to Wisconsin because we don’t want our Secret Service agents to be away from their families). And, among other political appointees, Charlie made our friend Cliff Hicken—a steadfast campaign fund-raiser—ambassador of France, so I’ve ended up having several wonderful visits in Paris with Kathleen, the two of us jaunting around to restaurants and museums and fashionable shops.

If the life Charlie and I share is prescribed and demanding, it is also privileged and fascinating. We are now and will always be members of a tiny club. And really, my own pleasure in or aversion to our status is irrelevant; it exists and cannot be unmade. We are famous, and when Charlie leaves office, we’ll be famous emeritus.

Today will, no doubt, be a day of drama and obligations, but it will be a day like any other; all our days now are days of drama and obligations. Three miles away, Edgar Franklin waits—futilely, I fear—to talk to Charlie; also nearby, Ingrid Sanchez prepares to visit senators; aboard Air Force One, en route to Columbus, Charlie might be vetoing a bill, deciding to increase or decrease spending or taxes by billions of dollars, conferring on the phone with the prime minister of the U.K. Later this morning, at the breast-cancer panel in a hotel ballroom in Arlington, Virginia, I’ll wear a red linen suit and encourage women to quit smoking, exercise regularly, and schedule yearly mammograms after the age of forty. This afternoon, I will visit with my daughter and give a tour of the White House to a group of forty third-graders who in turn will perform “God Bless America” at tonight’s gala in my honor. I wasn’t born to stand before crowds, to dispense advice or exhort, and after much coaching, I’d say I am only slightly better than adequate as a public speaker. Nevertheless, I attempt to rise to the occasion—I am the wife of the president of the United States, and I try to be a good one.

Charlie will be in office for nineteen more months.

IT IS AT the end of the breast-cancer panel, during the part when the panelists and audience members have their picture taken with me—I greet the individual, we pose in front of a flag, the photographer’s flash goes off, and we’re on to the next person, all within a matter of seconds—that I see Hank Ucker leaning against the wall near the stage. I feel a flare-up of the fear that accompanies me everywhere, a fear whose omnipresence I recognize by the ease with which it sparks. Just once, in September 2001, was the fear truly justified, and even now I quickly realize that whatever is wrong, whatever has made Hank Ucker show up at a ballroom in Arlington, can’t be life-threatening to Charlie. If it were, I’d be whisked away immediately, shuttled to a bunker, outfitted in a bulletproof vest. (I’ve worn them more than once; above all, they are heavy.)

I glance at the line of people waiting to have their picture taken and try to count how many remain—more than forty—and I gesture to Ashley Obernauer, who is my personal aide. (Ashley is twenty-five and dazzlingly competent.) When she leans in, I say, “Ask Hank why he’s here.”

She soon returns. “He says he wants to chat—his word—with you on the ride back. He didn’t say about what.”

“Your husband is doing such a wonderful job,” a short woman in white polyester slacks, with wavy gray hair, says as we shake hands. “We pray for both of you every night.”

“Thank you.” I turn toward the camera, nudging her a bit as I do, so she’s facing forward, too.

“I’m so honored to—” she starts to say but is cut off by an advance person moving her along.

“Thank you for coming,” I call after her.

Another older woman is next (perhaps a nursing home was bused in?), and she says, “You tell President Blackwell that Mrs. Mabel Fulford says don’t back down one inch from the terrorists.”

“Will do,” I say, and the flash goes off, and I am on to the next person, a woman closer to my own age who says, “I skipped work to hear you today.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” I say. There can be a Potemkin feel to these events, the contrast between the enthusiasm and warmth of the people we meet and the overwhelmingly negative coverage from the media of anything having to do with Charlie’s administration. Many constituents also hold a negative view, of course, but they tend not to come to such events unless it’s to protest, and the precautions taken to keep them out are ever more elaborate. For safety reasons, I entered this hotel through the service entrance in the back, but as we drove in, I still glimpsed today’s protestors standing across the street, holding signs and chanting. Usually, they’re chanting antiwar slogans, but I believe that today there were also some placards opposing Ingrid Sanchez’s Supreme Court nomination.

The next woman says, “When is Ella going to marry that boyfriend of hers?”

I laugh. “I’ll let you know when I do.” Camera flash, camera flash, camera flash, and finally, we’re at the end of the line. The event organizers are thanking me profusely, bestowing on me a gift bag that Ashley accepts, and we all are headed out the back doors to the motorcade—Ashley; a deputy press secretary named Sandy; Bill Rawson, who is one of the official White House photographers; a woman named Zinia who is a health policy expert; and six Secret Service agents (more agents wait outside). As we walk, Ashley says, “Alice?” and I holdout my palms; she squirts Purell on them, and I rub my hands together.

Hank has materialized beside me. He says, “America does love its first lady.” My dislike of the term first lady is well established (though I use it sometimes myself for lack of an alternative, I find it fussy and antiquated), and everyone within the White House calls me simply Alice or Mrs. Blackwell. I give Hank a tight smile. Outside, the June heat assaults us even on the ten-foot walk from the service entrance to the motorcade; a Secret Service agent named Cal holds open the rear door in the third SUV for me. (I avoid motorcades when possible, preferring a few Town Cars, but the breast-cancer summit was a highly publicized event. Before September 2001, I used three cars and six agents for public events; now, in addition to the police escorts, I use five cars and nine agents, an extravagance that no longer seems bizarre. Also after September 2001, my motorcade was granted “intersection control” in Washington, meaning we need not stop at lights.) Hank climbs in after me, and Ashley is about to follow him when Hank says to her, “Ride behind us, will you, Ash? We’ll all powwow back in the East Wing.”

Ashley glances at me, and I think of objecting, but something in Hank’s tone stops me. Fastening my seat belt, I say, “Hank, I thought you’d gone to Ohio.”

“Change of plans.”

“I assume Charlie’s all right?”

“The president’s fine.” Visibly, Hank roots with the tip of his tongue in a molar; above all, he likes to appear unruffled, so his studied casualness in this moment means that something must be wrong. Sure enough, he says, “I got a call this morning. Does the name Norene Davis ring a bell?”

I shuffle through my memory, though the problem is that I no longer know everyone I know. I often feel that I do nothing except meet people; it is fully possible I spoke to someone for fifteen minutes at an event, that I even sat next to him or her for the duration of a meal and we had a pleasant conversation, and that I have no recollection of it. At functions, a person might say, “I treasure the picture I had taken with you at our annual banquet last spring” or “My wife and I often talk about meeting you at the Republican Convention in ’96,” and I nod in a friendly fashion. Sometimes these hints prod my brain—I have seen this person before—but I never would have made the realization on my own, and I could sooner levitate right there on the spot than tell you his or her name. I say, “I don’t remember a Norene Davis, but it’s possible.”

Hank clears his throat. “She’s alleging you had an abortion in October of ’63.”

I gasp; I hear the intake of breath before I realize it was mine. Expect the unexpected is an apt if clichéd guideline for life in the White House, but I did not expect this. I half expected it once, back when Charlie first ran for governor, and then again when he ran for president, and I worried about the damage it would do to Charlie’s candidacy more than the violation of my own privacy, though I would not have relished either. But what could have happened didn’t, and it seemed that the revelation’s potency could only dwindle. If I was going to be exposed—if Dena Janaszewski, or whatever name she went by now, was going to sell me out—it would have happened already. Thus I shelved this particular worry; there are always more than enough to choose from.

“Can you think of any reason Ms. Davis would make that claim?” Hank asks, and his tone is deliberately empty. No one else in the car reacts, not Cal, who sits in the front passenger seat, nor the other Secret Service agent, Walter, who’s driving. (Cal, who is currently my lead agent, played football at ASU; Walter is the father of twins—because they know far too much about us, both Charlie and I have made an effort to get to know our agents, and Charlie has personally shown the Oval Office to many of their family members.) I can see only the back of Walter’s head and some of Cal’s profile, but I’m confident both that they’re listening and that they’ll say nothing during this car ride, nothing when we’re back at the White House; they almost never speak first unless it’s an issue of safety. In crowds, I sometimes hear one beside me, having floated up without my noticing, murmuring, “Veer left,” or “Hold up, ma’am.” For men generally weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, they are remarkably graceful.

To Hank, I say, “Are you sure this woman’s name is Norene Davis?”

Hank removes a BlackBerry from the inner pocket of his blazer and reads from the screen. “Age thirty-six, current address 5147 Manchester Street in Cicero, Illinois, although we have reason to believe she’s no longer living there. Divorced, no kids, employed as a home health aide by a rinky-dink-sounding organization called Glenview Health Service.”

“Is it possible she used to go by a different name?”

“Anything’s possible. My impression is she’s fronting for someone, but the question is who. While our tireless investigators figure that out, I wanted to check with you. Now, here’s where the plot thickens: This gal isn’t interested in blackmail, at least not in the conventional sense. Instead, she’s threatening to go public unless you speak out against Ingrid Sanchez as a Supreme Court nominee.”

Confused, I repeat, “Unless I—” But even before I finish the question, I understand. The brevity of the two answers I gave about my stance on abortion on the morning news show in 2000 and 2004 did not pacify pro-choice activists; in fact, it seems they might have preferred a pro-life first lady—a clear adversary—to one who quietly believes in reproductive freedom. As I said, the interview question was essentially staged both times, Charlie had given his blessings, which meant Hank had, which meant it served the administration, which it did because many Republicans are, after all, pro-choice themselves. The anchor had agreed in advance to ask no follow-up questions, and that first time, the next thing he said was “Now, on a less heavy topic, there’s one member of the Blackwell family known to be even more press-shy than you. Can you tell viewers a bit about the elusive Snowflake?” After that television program aired, Jeanette Werden in Madison, who had so annoyed me all those years ago at the cookout where I’d met Charlie by prattling on about her marriage and children, and who had been pregnant at the time with her third child, wrote me a letter saying she’d terminated an earlier pregnancy at the age of twenty-eight—she had given birth to Katie, their daughter, just six months before, and was struggling with what today would be called postpartum depression. When Jeanette wrote about how glad she was I’d spoken out, I longed to call and tell her the rest. I didn’t, though; I couldn’t.

During Charlie’s first gubernatorial campaign, one of Hank’s minions interviewed me extensively; he had me walk him through every stage of my life, trawling for secrets or controversy. We spoke extensively about Andrew Imhof—it was a tabloid that first broke that story a few years later, in 2000, and I had the campaign press secretary confirm its accuracy as quickly as possible—and I answered every question the minion asked. But I did not volunteer extra information. Charlie and I had discussed it the night before, and he had said it was fine with him if I didn’t mention my abortion. If it never came out, then there would have been no need, and if it did come out, it could be dealt with then. But to preemptively divulge it—the minion’s questions were designed to elicit just such bombshells—seemed to me the surest way, through one person in the campaign confiding in another and another and eventually in a journalist, of making it public.

In this moment in the SUV, however, the then of it could be dealt with then has arrived—the then is now, it is today. I say to Hank, “Isn’t this kind of threat illegal?”

Hank actually smiles. “We’ll take down Norene Davis easy, don’t worry, but what I’m curious about is why you think she’d level this particular charge.”

What Hank isn’t saying—he can’t because I’m first lady—is that he either suspects or knows the charge is true. (Sometimes the etiquette with which he must comply cruelly amuses me, the fact that he has to call Charlie Mr. President, or stand when I enter the room. You made us, I think, and now you must worship at our feet.) If Hank didn’t find the charge credible, he wouldn’t be here; after all, the White House receives dozens of letters, e-mails, and calls a day from delusional individuals: “Tell Alice Blackwell to quit sending my dog messages through the TV!” Or “I’m the president’s secret half brother from his father’s affair in 1950, but for two million dollars, I promise to keep quiet.” These accusations, like the threats to our lives, are constant, yet we learn the specifics of very few.

“Charlie knows what’s going on?” I ask.

Hank nods. “He said I should come to you directly.” Did Charlie tell Hank the charge is true? I doubt he said it outright, but he may have hinted.

I look out the window; we’re heading east on Arlington Boulevard, the other cars on their way to Washington pulled over as we whiz past.

“Listen,” Hank says. “This is a solvable problem. If Norene Davis is operating on her own, she’s in way over her head. The likelihood that she’ll back down with a little intimidation is high. Now let’s say for the sake of argument that she’s worked herself up and decides she’ll go to jail before she’ll be silenced, so she goes ahead and talks to a reporter, or let’s say she does shut her trap, but oops, wait a second, she’s already told her sister, she’s told her boyfriend, whoever it is—either way, the allegation is out there. In that case, I’m thinking Larry King. Not an immediate booking, we don’t want to go on the defensive right away. We wait ten days or two weeks, we fold it into another appearance—literacy, breast cancer, you pick the topic—and we let him ask you point-blank. You categorically deny it.” There is a question mark implied in this scenario, and I allow the question to hang there in the air.

I say, “And when the press corps asks Maggie or Doug about it?”

“ ‘While we’d normally consider it beneath us to acknowledge such outrageous and false accusations, Mrs. Blackwell’s respect for this sensitive and controversial issue blah blah blah . . . ’ Then, you know, lather, rinse, repeat.”

“Just don’t say ‘sanctity of life.’ ”

“This isn’t the time to fly your pro-choice flag, Alice.”

“You’ve told me yourself the public accepts—”

Unusually, Hank interrupts me; he has turned in his seat so we’re face-to-face. “The public accepts a first lady who supports the right to choose. Don’t kid yourself that that’s the same as accepting a first lady who had an abortion.”

So he believes the allegation; he should, and I already knew he did, but there’s a bitter satisfaction in forcing him to say it aloud. In the front seat, Walter and Cal are as alert and impassive as sphinxes.

I look Hank in the eye. “I’m not sure who Norene Davis is, but the person behind this is a former friend of mine named Dena Janaszewski. I haven’t spoken to her in thirty years, and I haven’t heard anything about her in probably fifteen, but she—she and maybe her boyfriend—are the only ones besides Charlie who’ve ever known about my abortion.”

“Can you spell her last name?” Hank has his BlackBerry out again; if he’s shocked by my admission, he has the restraint not to show it, and no one else says anything, either.

I say, “I’m not sure what name she goes by now, but she’s much older than thirty-six—she’s my age. She was married, and her name was Cimino, and then she was divorced, and she might be remarried, possibly to—” I pause. “Back in the late eighties, she was dating a man named Pete Imhof, so they might have broken up, or they might still be together. He’s the brother of Andrew, the boy who—”

“Right.” Hank nods.

“And also he—Pete—he’s the one I got pregnant by, but he never knew.”

“Dena would have told him.” Hank isn’t asking; he’s making a statement.

The SUV is quiet except for the sirens of the police motorcycles escorting us, though even those sound distant because of the Doppler effect.

“Please have the investigators who talk to Dena be careful,” I say to Hank. “I wish she weren’t doing this, but I don’t want her life to be ruined, and I don’t want her going to prison.”

“The pregnancy was before or after Andrew’s death?” Hank is, I can see, imagining how to spin this, wondering if somehow the death can cancel out the abortion. I could spare him the trouble and tell him it can’t.

“After,” I say.

For a moment, Hank is silent, absorbing the information, and then he says, “Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us.” (On second thought, perhaps he doesn’t worship at our feet at all. That he is eating this up, luxuriating in the sordidness, is undeniable—it is not so much that Hank loves nothing more than a crisis but that he loves nothing more than his own indispensability to my husband in the face of one; there is a reason Charlie’s nickname for Hank is Shit Storm.)

“Don’t let the investigators physically threaten Dena,” I say. “Do you hear me, Hank? I want them to be respectful.”

“Alice, she’s trying to thwart a Supreme Court nomination and lead a smear campaign against the president and the first lady of the United States.”

I frown at him. “Don’t be melodramatic.” Before turning again to look out the window, I say, “She was once a close friend.”

THE WAY FAME works is that people start to see your name in the news, whether on television or in the paper or a magazine. Something has just occurred (your husband has, with seven other men, bought a baseball team) or something is about to occur (your husband is on the verge of announcing he’ll run for governor of Wisconsin, or he’s on the verge of being elected), and people you know, though not necessarily well, contact you. People from the country club, whose house you have never been inside, who have never been inside yours—they call and leave joking messages, saying, “Don’t forget us little people.” Or “I saw you on Channel Four, and I had to get in touch while you still remember that you know me.” Whatever the thing is that has just occurred or is about to occur, it’s time-consuming; your life has never been more hectic, nor have there ever been more people contacting you for essentially pointless reasons, yet you feel compelled to respond, lest they think the attention has gone to your head. You hear from your dentist, your daughter’s high school math teacher, people from your past: childhood friends, old classmates, former coworkers. They are surprisingly skilled at tracking you down. Sometimes they merely want acknowledgment, but increasingly, they want favors, and then strangers want favors, too. They ask you to speak at events, to be an honorary host, to be a member of their board of trustees, to auction off an evening with yourself; they want tickets to baseball games, tickets to the World Series, permission to get married on the baseball field, tickets to tour the governor’s mansion; then they want you to help them gain access or entry to places to which you have no connection whatsoever, a fancy restaurant in New York, a golf course in North Carolina; they want you to help their nephew obtain a summer internship at a talent agency in Los Angeles. Before your fame extends beyond the state, they are already sure that it does. It would be impossible to say yes to all of these requests, though again, saying no increases the likelihood that you’ll be viewed as rude; almost every person who asks a favor appears unaware of the existence of every other person doing the same. You realize that anyone can create an obligation for you just by wanting something; they write you a letter or an e-mail, they leave you a phone message, and while not granting their wish is bad enough, to ignore them would be unforgivable. In this way, they determine your schedule and duties; you have become public property.

Gradually, your fame settles on you, it’s like a new coat or a new car that you become used to, but it continues to provoke odd and awkward behavior in others. At your public events, people you never knew, friends of friends of friends, your college boyfriend’s aunt, the neighbor of your plumber—they, too, claim you, reciting the few degrees of separation between you and them. At private events unrelated to you or the reason you’ve become famous, the weddings or cocktail parties or school fund-raisers you still attend to try to convince yourself you remain a regular person, other people eye you heavily. You try to be modest by not assuming anyone recognizes or is looking at you; if you’re meeting a person for the first time, you introduce yourself, you remark on the flowers or the food or the weather. But really, all they want to talk about is you: how they are connected to you (the more tenuous the connection, the more they insist on establishing it), or where they were when they saw an article or television segment featuring you, or what they overheard people on the street saying about you. They want to talk to you about how strange it must be, being famous; they don’t realize they are even now creating the strangeness.

And then you become truly famous—not locally or regionally famous, but famous famous—and of all things, your burden lightens. Steadily, your entourage has been growing, and now it is large enough and professional enough that there is a buffer between you and the rest of the world. In public, you’re flanked by aides; either visibly or invisibly, you’re accompanied by a security detail. You can’t just be approached, and the situations in which you can be approached are controlled and systematic. This is why it’s harder to be moderately famous than very famous; when you’re moderately famous, you still go to the grocery store, you still do the things you did before, while at any moment, you might be noticed and accosted. When you’re very famous, you don’t go to the grocery store unless it’s for a photo op, and you know that wherever you do go, you’ll be recognized at once. Any environment you set foot in will be altered, your presence will mean that everyone must start talking about you, taking your picture with their cell phones. This is why, during Charlie’s presidency, we have hardly eaten at restaurants in Washington except during events organized around our attendance; we’ve been criticized for being aloof when the reality is that I feel it’s unfair to all the other diners. They’ve gone out, perhaps to celebrate a job promotion or a birthday; they are buttering their bread and we appear, unsettling the equilibrium of the room. If this was to be the dinner where you celebrated your promotion, it has become instead the dinner where the president and the first lady showed up. It is selfish, really; we take up more than our fair share of oxygen.

Early on, at moments when I felt most overwhelmed by my new role as first lady, I’d tell myself that I was surely the most famous person in the country, and probably in the world, who had not sought her fame. This was a lie. Who did not want her fame would have been more accurate. I sought fame with a reluctant heart, with great reservations, yet I granted interviews and posed for photographs and rode with Charlie on buses and planes, I gave speeches of my own and cheered for his, I visited churches and hospitals and fish fries. Like every famous person, I was complicit in my fame. Yes, a few times a year, a handful of ordinary citizens become the focus of a media frenzy—a victim of a particularly grisly crime, or the kid who reaches over the stands to catch a home-run ball in a play-off game—but that fame passes. The true enduring kind must be constantly burnished and enhanced. It never happens by chance.

Perhaps it started back in 1977, with Charlie’s first congressional campaign, or perhaps well before that, when Harold Blackwell ran for attorney general of Wisconsin in 1954. We threw ourselves at people—there are more savory ways to say it, but really, that’s what we did. We searched them out, we left leaflets at the front doors of their houses and under the windshields of their cars, we spoke to them through ads on television, we went to their schools and town halls and farmers’ markets. We begged them to listen, we bombarded them with promises and plans, but all along we were selling ourselves—selling him.

We did everything we could to get as many people as possible to pay attention to us, and it worked, and now we complain. Leave us alone, we say. Just like you, we’re entitled to privacy.

BEFORE DELIVERING HIS speech in Columbus, Charlie calls to say that he thinks Dena is a credibility-lacking piece of trailer trash. “Go easy,” I say. I am, as much as possible, trying to suspend panic. This scandal, if a scandal is what it will be, is in such an early stage; I need to better know the shape of it before allotting my anxious energy.

My personal aide, Ashley, and I are walking from the South Lawn into the Diplomatic Reception Room when Nicole Hethcote, another aide, says, “Mrs. Blackwell, your daughter’s on the phone. Are you available?”

“I’ll get it at my desk,” I say. In my office in the East Wing, as soon as the phone rings, I pick it up.

“Can you please make Dad go talk to that Franklin guy?” Ella says. “Just for five minutes?”

“Honey, you can’t let the opposition dictate the terms of the conversation.”

“You sound like Uncle Hank.”

Ah, my Ella. She is twenty-eight now, and her schedule at Goldman Sachs is worse than Charlie’s, ninety hours a week on a regular basis. Magazines sometimes run pictures of Ella and her boyfriend, Wyatt, entering or leaving fancy restaurants (their main form of recreation besides working out, which they both do avidly), and while the exposure doesn’t please me and I admit to being a bit thrown by the idea of my daughter spending more on a bottle of wine than I used to pay for a month’s rent in my twenties, I never worry that Ella will be caught behaving inappropriately. She is our miracle, smart and level-headed and joyful, inheritor of an improbable combination of my calmness and Charlie’s mischief. Perhaps most extraordinary to me is her apparent lack of resentment toward either of us. Mundane bickering and disagreements have always arisen with us, as with any family, but even those scuffles, which peaked when she was in high school (over atypical issues such as the ubiquity of her security detail, and more mundane ones such as the lengths of her skirts, the hour of her curfew, and the urgent necessity of there being two piercings rather than one in her left ear), have all faded. While I doubt she would have chosen this path for our family—she was in eighth grade when we told her Charlie was going to run for governor of Wisconsin, which prompted her to accuse her father of trying to ruin her life—it would appear she has forgiven us.

In June 2001, she graduated from Princeton, an event where Charlie’s appearance created a bit of a ruckus on campus; knowing we’d force all the other families to walk through metal detectors, among other inconveniences, we’d considered skipping the ceremony, but neither Charlie nor I could bear to do it. (Sitting in the front row, facing Nassau Hall, I did think uncomfortably of Joe Thayer, who, over ten years earlier, had married a younger, gentle-seeming music teacher at Biddle Academy with whom he has had two more children. In a pleasant turn of events, his once-troubled daughter Megan is also married and living in Maronee with two young children.) Ella again followed in Charlie’s footsteps by attending Wharton, though, as Charlie quipped in the commencement address he delivered two years ago, the school has become so competitive that if he’d been applying when Ella did, he wouldn’t have gotten in.

At this point, Ella is neither in thrall to nor disdainful of politics: When she was younger, we shielded her, never allowing her to speak to the press, and although she attended both of Charlie’s inaugurations, the first time she participated in any campaigning was when she held a BLACKWELL/PROUHET sign on a street corner in Manchester, New Hampshire, in January 2004. She still has never granted an interview, and while she would prefer, as I think most twenty-eight-year-old women living in Manhattan would, to spend more time with her friends and her boyfriend than with her parents, she always comes home for holidays and surprised me on my sixtieth birthday last year. I can’t imagine she herself will ever run for elected office, but once I couldn’t have imagined that I would be the wife of our country’s president.

“Seriously,” Ella says, “the dude must be roasting out there.”

“I know, ladybug, but the situation isn’t as simple as it looks.”

“Mom, believe me, it’s not that I agree with him about withdrawing the troops.” At Princeton, Ella majored in public and international affairs, and she was a vocal supporter of the war from the beginning. “A regime change is the only way to eliminate the Islamic jihadists,” she’d say, and I would be awed by her intelligence and confidence. What would my own father have made of such an educated, opinionated young woman? Expounding on the Middle East, no less! (For that matter, what would my father have made of Charlie’s presidency? He was such an uncynical man, patriotic in the most old-fashioned sense, and I like to think he’d have respected Charlie and been proud of me by extension. But perhaps it is for the best that my father didn’t live to see this part of our lives. In light of his belief about fools’ names and fools’ faces, I can only guess at his reaction to an article Esquire—a magazine my father subscribed to—made waves with last month: “Ten Reasons Why Charlie Blackwell Is a Shit-Eating Bastard.” Whereas my father, when referring to the presidents of my youth, called them Mr. Truman or Mr. Eisenhower; he even called the janitor at the bank Mr. White.)

“It just makes Dad seem heartless,” Ella is saying. “I hate giving ammunition to his critics. How will it look when this old man has a heatstroke?”

“Sweetie, Edgar Franklin is younger than your father or me.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, you guys aren’t spending the day in the sun. Hey, you’re wearing sexy heels tonight, right?” In the late nineties, Ella converted me, at least for formal events, from what she calls “blocky heels” to “sexy heels.” She said, “They’re slimming,” and while, thanks to being prodded and encouraged by two personal trainers, I now weigh less than I have since I turned thirty, the camera adding twenty pounds is no myth; I accept whatever help I can get.

“Signs point to yes,” I say. This is when Hank appears outside my office; through the open door, I can see him talking to Jessica Sutton, my chief of staff. If Ella finds out I had an abortion, when she finds out, how will she react? On the one hand, I like to think she’s an essentially compassionate person; she is also, presumably, sexually active herself. On the other hand, like Charlie, Ella considers herself a born-again Christian, and as an adolescent, she stuck a bumper sticker to her dressing table mirror that read, IT’S NOT A CHOICE, IT’S A CHILD; she’d acquired the sticker from the leader of her youth group. When I noticed it, I said, “I don’t think any woman wants to have an abortion, honey, but some of them feel that it’s more responsible than giving birth to a baby they aren’t prepared to take care of.” Ella looked at me in horror and said, “That’s what adoption is for.” More recently, after the two times I stated my stance on abortion on the morning news shows, Ella made no mention of either, though I don’t think she was unaware of them.

Jessica knocks gently on my open door, and when our eyes meet, she says, “Hank has an update.” She takes a step toward me, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Are you okay?” I called Jessica from the car to tell her what’s going on, and asked her not to mention it to anyone else yet. Although I have an excellent staff, Jessica is the person I trust most—given that I’ve known her for her entire life, perhaps this is not surprising.

“I’d better go, sweetie,” I say into the phone. “Will you call me from the airport?” To Jessica, I say, “Send him in, but stay.”

When they reenter my office, Hank closes the door behind him, meaning the Secret Service agents are on its other side. “So far the trail doesn’t lead to your friend Dena,” he says. “Do you recall a doctor named Gladys Wycomb?”

I stare at him. Gladys Wycomb? Dr. Wycomb, my grandmother’s paramour? “But wouldn’t she have—” I try to pull together my disparate thoughts. “She must be a hundred years old.”

“A hundred and four, still living at home in Chicago, and taken care of by an aide named Norene Davis.” Hank rolls his eyes. “They weren’t exactly trying to cover their tracks—hoping for some attention is more like it. I just got off the phone with Gladys, and I swear I’m not being arrogant when I say that receiving a call from evil incarnate might have been the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to the old crone.”

“You spoke to her directly?”

Hank nods. “She’s feisty for a centenarian, I’ll give her that. She says you had the procedure under the name Alice Warren.”

“Isn’t this a violation of patient confidentiality or the Hippocratic Oath?”

“Funny you should ask.” I know from Hank’s glib tone that I’ll be unlikely to see the humor in what he’s about to say. “As a matter of fact, it’s abortion that’s a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Granted, it advocates confidentiality, too, but you know what? When you’re a hundred and four years old, you do what you damn well please.”

I think then of Gladys Wycomb’s white cat’s-eye glasses, her heavy-set build, her chauffeur and her fancy apartment and the gold fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper in the hall outside it, the hall where, over four decades ago, I vomited into the Christmas vase. Slowly, I say, “And what she wants from me is to publicly malign Ingrid Sanchez?”

“Yeah, no biggie—just that, and while you’re at it, you can remind American show enthusiastically you support a woman’s right to choose.”

“Does Dr. Wycomb know I have said I’m pro-choice?”

“Not for three years, and apparently, your brevity both times was unsatisfying. I get the feeling this gal knows she’s about to kick the bucket, she’s spending a little too much time watching C-SPAN, and she’s had an eleventh-hour vision that she should intervene. She’s framing it as a matter of conscience.”

“By blackmailing me.”

“Again, let me emphasize: She’s a hundred and four, and she probably figures she’ll croak before she sees any legal repercussions. She doesn’t give a”—Hank pauses—“a hoot.” (A perk of being first lady: I’ve never been crazy about swearing, and now the only ones who feel comfortable doing it in my presence are Charlie and Ella.)

“Isn’t she putting Norene Davis at risk of imprisonment, too?” I say.

“The bottom line is you had an abortion. I’m not judging you, Alice, but the American people will. If Norene Davis goes to the clink, she’ll serve a few years, and then think of the media exposure, the book deals. She gets heralded as a champion of women’s rights, and the conservative base is cleaning up the mess for years to come.”

“So instead what? I deny the charge and call Dr. Wycomb a liar?”

“You don’t have to be the one to do it.” He turns to Jessica. “Can you help me out here?”

“What are our other options?” Jessica asks. Jessica is tall and lean, wearing black pants and a yellow silk sleeveless blouse. There is a good deal I admire about my chief of staff, but perhaps most of all her combination of unflappability and warmth; I’ve often found calmness and professionalism to go with an emotional remoteness, but this is not the case with her.

Hank says, “I’m not wild about this idea, and I don’t think the president will be, either, but we can schedule an interview where, in the most oblique way, you go ahead and criticize Ingrid Sanchez. We’ll set it up like it was an unexpected tough question, and if we go this route, woman-to-woman will work best—you’re showing Diane Sawyer how beautiful the Rose Garden is this time of year, she surprises you by asking what you think of the Supreme Court nominee, and you blurt out that you wish Sanchez showed clearer signs of supporting a woman’s right to—”

Jessica is shaking her head. “And what if that’s not enough for Gladys Wycomb? That’ll be the worst of both worlds, if we’ve capitulated and she still talks.”

“I want to go see her.” I stand; the idea has come to me abruptly, but I am certain. “If I leave immediately, I’ll be back in time to do the tour for the children’s choir. I’d like to talk to Dr. Wycomb in person. She was—” I break off. “She was my grandmother’s dear friend.”

“Her loyalty to your family is touching.” Hank looks at his watch. “If there’s nothing you need to do before you leave, the plane’s ready when you are.”

“You already scheduled it?”

Hank smiles. He delights in knowing what a person will want even before the person herself. “For obvious reasons, it’s got to be a baseball cap trip, and we’ll put the word out here that you went to see your mom.” Baseball cap is our term for trips that are off-the-record—OTR—or at least ahead of time, and that involve as few people as possible. The phrase has its origins in the way Charlie has traveled twice to the war zones overseas: In the dark of night, he left once from the White House and once from Camp David and rode to Andrews Air Force Base in a single tinted SUV, no motorcade, sitting in the back wearing a baseball cap, accompanied by his secretary of state and just two Secret Service agents; even the tiny press pool who joined him aboard Air Force One wasn’t told where they were going until midflight. “Jessica, I’m thinking you’re the only one who accompanies her, plus whoever Cal thinks is necessary securitywise,” Hank says. He turns back toward me. “If anyone can sweet-talk this woman out of coming forward, I’m sure it’s you. You go out to Chicago, trade on your personal relationship, flatter her, and ooze sincerity. The disadvantage is if she can’t be sweet-talked, you may have given her credibility by paying a visit, but we can spin that into her being an Alzheimer’s-addled crackpot: She’s right that she saw you, but she invented this abortion business.”

“Hank.” I wait until he’s looking at me directly. “I don’t ooze sincerity. I am sincere.”

Hank’s smirk is slow and closed-lipped. “It’s your Achilles’ heel,” he says.

____

THE PART ABOUT being famous that nobody who hasn’t been famous can understand is the criticism. Sure, sticks and stones and all of that, but the fact is that many people have probably wished at least once or twice that someone would be completely honest with them. How does this dress or this haircut really look? What do you truly think of my wife or my son, the house I built, the memo I wrote, the cake I baked?

In reality, they don’t want to know. What they want is to be complimented and for the compliments to be completely honest; they want all-encompassing affirmation that’s also true. That isn’t how unvarnished opinions work. People’s unvarnished opinions are devastating, or they are at first. As one of my predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote, “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”

There are two ways of being criticized: neutrally and intentionally. The neutral criticism comes, for example, in an ostensibly objective article, in a throwaway line: Mrs. Blackwell, who has never been known for her fashion acumen . . . Asked about her husband’s low approval ratings, Alice Blackwell stiffens and becomes defensive . . . Though insiders claim she has a sense of humor, Alice Blackwell rarely shows it in public . . . Unlike the first couple before them, who were warm and frequent hosts . . . You have spent an hour in the presence of a reporter, you were guarded, especially at first, but you got along perfectly well and shared a few laughs (yes, laughs, in spite of your alleged humorlessness), you thought the interview went well, and then—this? The neutral criticisms sting more because of how casual they are; although they aren’t necessarily the truth, they feel like it, like the reporter isn’t trying to be mean but is simply stating facts.

And then there are the outright attacks, which appear mostly on cable television or blogs; in the case of blogs, they are vehement in ways that evoke spittle and flushed faces and the pounding of keyboards: What a traitor to feminism . . . How much Valium do you think she has to take to forget she’s married to the Antichrist? . . . OH MY GOD she’s SUCH a Stepford wife!!! Once or twice a year, I type my name into an Internet search engine—I don’t want to be overly sheltered from what’s out there—and skimming the results makes me feel as if someone is turning a doorknob inside my stomach; each time I’ve done it, I’ve thought afterward that it was a mistake, and then enough time has passed that I’ve forgotten. To be lambasted by strangers is not only painful but so pronounced a reversal of the usual social code that it’s also quite astonishing. Unfamous people imagine that famous people are endlessly pleased with themselves and their exposure, and I suppose some are, but far from all. These online rants also feel, in a different way, deceptively like the truth, unguarded and without the filters of the main-stream media. Although my critics are in the minority, how can I listen to praise when the faultfinders are so aggressive, so aggrieved, and so certain?

In addition, there are vast quantities of distorted or flat-out wrong information, motives or emotions that are incorrectly ascribed: about Andrew Imhof’s death (Isn’t it lucky Alice Blackwell was white and rich and didn’t have to go to prison after murdering her boyfriend?), about my supposed Christian evangelism (a cartoon ran in many newspapers of me reading the Bible to a group of Muslim children, saying, “Now, now, boys and girls, if you just pray to Jesus Christ, everything will be all right”), about my supposed intellectual superiority in comparison to Charlie (another cartoon: Charlie and I are lying in bed at night, and I am absorbed in War and Peace, while he pages through The Cat in the Hat). One year Jadey sent me a birthday card—apparently, a popular one—which had a smiling photo of me in which I wore a navy suit and an eagle pin. (I was never very fond of that pin, but it had been given to me by the wife of Charlie’s secretary of defense, and I felt obligated to wear it a few times.) On the front of the card, it said, Some things are worse than another birthday . . . and inside, it said, You could be married to HIM. Underneath, Jadey had scrawled, Don’t be offended, also don’t show c!

Some of the misinformation out there about us, about me, is more factual and insignificant—how old I was when Charlie and I got married, the spelling of my childhood neighbor Mrs. Falke’s last name—but no matter the tone or type of error, it is very rarely worth it to have my press secretary request a correction. I also must accept that some errors have been propagated by Charlie’s inner circle, specifically by Hank: that I am the daughter of a postal carrier was a widespread one during the first presidential campaign. (It is a great irony that my middle-class roots have proved, from a political standpoint, to be my most valuable asset. The whiffs of East Coast Ivy League dynastic privilege that cling to Charlie—I dispel them with my humble Wisconsin authenticity.)

Even as my approval ratings have remained high, a public idea of me has formed that has little relationship to who I am, what I think, or even how I spend my time. Hank once commissioned a poll that found the majority of Americans believe I’m a devout Christian who has never held a paying job. Perhaps this is why my approval ratings have remained high.

I don’t imagine any person could remain entirely impervious to her own public distortion, and I won’t claim it doesn’t bother me, but I made a decision in Charlie’s first gubernatorial campaign not to devote my energy to correcting misinterpretations. A press secretary had arranged for a reporter from the Sentinel to come for tea with me at home (how I hated having reporters in our house, knowing they were scrutinizing our family pictures, our magazines and knickknacks and refrigerator magnets, when we’d never meant for them to be scrutinized, we’d only acquired them in the course of living—it was easier after we moved to the governor’s mansion and then to the White House, because I always knew that if the reporters were interlopers, so were we). During this Sentinel interview, the reporter asked me about gardening, baking, and children’s books; I provided my tips for growing delphiniums, my recipe for molasses cookies, and a list of my favorite titles, starting with The Giving Tree.

Despite the family she married into, Alice Blackwell is avowedly apolitical, the article began. Social security and health care? No thanks, she’d rather talk about how she gets her molasses cookies so darn chewy . . .

I was mortified; Charlie thought it was hilarious; and Hank was thrilled by the article, in large part because Charlie’s Democratic opponent, the incumbent, had recently divorced his wife of thirty-three years, married a suspiciously attractive and much younger lobbyist, and couldn’t hope to compete with our sugary domesticity. For a twenty-four-hour period after the article ran, I was tense and jumpy, continuously composing letters to the editor in my head. I had gone for a walk alone—we no longer belonged to the Maronee Country Club, Charlie had had to resign given the awkward fact of the club having no black members, and so now, if I wasn’t with Jadey, I walked along our street—and all at once, a notion lodged itself in my head, a notion I’ve come back to again and again in the years since: Although Charlie was running for office, I was not. The fact that I was represented in an article in a particular way made it neither true nor untrue; the way I lived my life, the way I conducted myself, wasn’t just the only truth but also the only reality I could control. I wouldn’t stretch or stoop to accommodate the media, I decided. I would be accountable to myself, and I would always know whether I’d met or fallen short of my own expectations. How much distress I’d avoid this way, how much calmer I would feel. Since that afternoon, I have always tried to be polite with members of the media, though I realize I haven’t always been forthcoming in the way they’d like. I attempt to express myself as simply as possible, I respond to what they ask rather than promoting my own particular interests, I don’t share personal details or vulnerabilities. When I met Charlie, I fell for him, I say, because he was fun; when Andrew Imhof died, I say, it was incredibly sad; and when I think about the troops, I say, I am concerned for them and admire their bravery and sacrifice. I don’t bend over backward to convince reporters that everything I say is heartfelt (after all, they don’t determine whether it’s heartfelt) or to proffer clever sound bites; I don’t disparage Charlie’s opponents. That I’m not particularly quotable and am often a bit dull, optimistically dull, I consider a minor victory.

When Ella was in college, she was in an eating club—not the one Charlie belonged to but a different one, Ivy—and this was the bulk of what the public knew about her: that she attended Princeton, that she belonged to an exclusive club whose members drank often and zealously. As it happened, she also was a volunteer in an on-campus Christian organization that on the weekends organized soccer and basketball tournaments for children from low-income neighborhoods in Trenton, and the White House press secretary, at that time a fellow named Travis Sykes, tried hard to persuade me to allow an article about Ella’s participation in the organization. I declined. I know that some people feel that if it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen, but I disagree. It is not a camera, or a reporter, that makes something real and genuine; more often, a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

It’s no secret that in many individuals, attention tends to create an appetite for more of the same. Because of this phenomenon, I consider myself lucky never to have felt the hunger. If you don’t want attention but must put up with it nevertheless, it’s a nuisance. But if you do want it, no amount will sate you; I’ve observed this truth over and over in both Wisconsin and Washington. I sometimes wish I could talk openly about this subject to Oprah, the one woman in the country more visible than I am, and even more a canvas onto which Americans project their dreams, wishes, and fears; really, what a burden being Oprah must be, though she handles it graciously. While I’ve appeared on her program twice, I’m sure that a tête-à-tête won’t happen because I suspect she’s a Democrat who doesn’t approve of my husband.

In any case: Dispatches and warnings from this side of the fame fence tend to go ignored, dismissed as either whining or false modesty; if they weren’t ignored, if people listened, no one would ever again seek attention. But they always do, they strive and strive, hoping one day they, too, will have the luxury of lamenting their high profile. It will make me content at last, they think, and only if they successfully achieve the celebrity they were pursuing will they realize they were mistaken.

Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps most people would be like Charlie—they’d enjoy fame’s perks without feeling unduly burdened by its costs and responsibilities.

GLADYS WYCOMB LIVES in a different apartment, a different building; this one is a few blocks from the one where I stayed during the last days of 1962 and the first days of 1963, equally fancy but smaller. Upon being led into Dr. Wycomb’s living room by Norene Davis (it seems increasingly clear that Ms. Davis is more an employee than a co-conspirator), I remember some of Dr. Wycomb’s paintings from all those years ago, though now I recognize their provenance: They are by New York School artists, and I’m almost sure one is a de Kooning. By this point, I have been inside countless lavish houses and hotels, I live in a museum, for heaven’s sake, but it strikes me that Dr. Wycomb’s was the first elegant home I ever visited, and that it had something money alone couldn’t buy—it had style. No wonder my grandmother was so taken with her.

Dr. Wycomb herself sits in a parlor chair upholstered in olive-colored velvet and though it is warm in her apartment, a blanket covers her lower half. She wears unfashionably large plastic glasses (not cat’s-eye) and a silk muumuu, though she is no longer a large woman; she probably weighs half of what she did when I last saw her. Her face is extremely wrinkled, her hair short and gray, and her eyes behind their glasses are alert. A walker is positioned next to her, between her chair and a revolving walnut bookcase, and there’s a small black-and-white television of perhaps thirteen inches (I haven’t seen a black-and-white television in years), which rests on a marble-top round table a few feet in front of her. Though she reached forward to turn down the volume knob as I walked in, the TV is, as Hank predicted, turned to C-SPAN.

She didn’t stand when Norene Davis announced my arrival—I had the impression it would be a good deal of trouble for her, but she also may have been making a point—and I approach her now, bending. “Dr. Wycomb, it’s been a long time,” I say in an overly loud and cheery way. I extend my hand, and when she doesn’t extend hers, I pat her forearm. “Your apartment is lovely.”

The hint of a smile crosses her lips. In a slow and quiet but perfectly audible voice, she says, “Alice, not all of us who are old are also deaf.”

Immediately, I feel a relieved recognition. With people who knew you before you were famous, you can tell within the first few seconds who you are to them now—whether they understand that you’re still you and that they can treat you as such, or whether you have been transformed in their eyes, requiring toadying and deference. I suppose it’s not surprising, given how much all humans are primed and influenced by one another, that these two types of behavior tend to be self-fulfilling. When old friends or acquaintances act as if I’m worthy of great respect, I tend to pull back (I’m uncomfortable, but no doubt it comes across as aloofness), which seems to reinforce their sense that they dare not relax around me the way they once did; but if they are relaxed from the start, I am, too. It’s obvious that to Gladys Wycomb, I am less the first lady of the United States than the granddaughter of Emilie Lindgren.

I gesture to a gold-leaf armchair. “May I sit?”

“I’m glad we finally got through to you,” Dr. Wycomb says. “Norene attempted to reach someone in your office repeatedly, but she kept being rebuffed. That’s when I thought for her to try Mr. Ucker.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Just how many people did Norene talk to? I wonder. And what did she say?

Again, that faint smile. “Mr. Ucker was quite interested once his people realized we weren’t batty.” She pauses. “Norene and I think Mr. Ucker resembles a troll.”

Hank is the most visible member of the administration besides Charlie and the vice president, and he therefore has both a cult following and legions of detractors. Seen by the public as a Svengali, Hank is credited with Charlie’s election and reelection, as well as with many of his most conservative policies. Knowing Hank as I do makes him less intriguing and mysterious than he must seem from a distance, but I don’t disagree with the view that Charlie probably wouldn’t be president if Hank hadn’t urged him to run for governor and engineered the subsequent campaigns. (Hank was delighted when Charlie became managing partner of the Brewers because at last Charlie had an identity apart from his family, a track record he could point to when voters in Wisconsin asked what he’d done for the state. The difference between Hank and Charlie was that Hank saw the job as an ideal stepping-stone, whereas Charlie saw it as an ideal job; without Hank’s prodding and ego pumping, I think Charlie would not have minded remaining in the role indefinitely.)

“Now, where did your henchmen go?” Dr. Wycomb asks. “Would they like a beverage?”

“They’re fine,” I say. Cal, my lead agent, insisted that three of them come to Chicago and that three more local agents meet us here; on our arrival at Dr. Wycomb’s building, Walter and the third fellow from Washington, José, did a walk-through before I entered. Now José and Cal are stationed in the hall, Walter is back by the Town Car at the curb ( Jessica sits inside the car), and the three local agents are patrolling the outside of the building.

I say, “Dr. Wycomb, when my grandmother and I came and stayed with you, it was the first time I’d been to a big city, and ever since then, I’ve had a place in my heart for Chicago.” As I say it, I have the unsettling realization that I must now be the age Dr. Wycomb was during that visit.

“I never thought of living anywhere else,” she says.

I hesitate, then I say, “Obviously, we both know why I’m here. I understand your concerns, I really do, and I want to make it clear that I respect your opinion. But for you to talk about my medical procedure with members of the media would be a serious mistake. I won’t pretend that it wouldn’t be damaging to me, but I strongly suspect it would be damaging to you, too.”

“If it’s damage you’re worried about, Alice, look around you.” Dr. Wycomb’s tone is abruptly different than it was when we were making small talk. “Your husband and the vice president should be tried as war criminals.” I’m about to respond when she continues, “I suppose the president’s excuse is that he was born a fool, but I’ve wondered for the last six years what yours is. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

It’s not that I’m unaware people think this, but the sentiments are rarely expressed at such close range. Also, they don’t emerge from the mouths of people I know, or people so old.

I say, “Aren’t we both lucky to live in a country that allows the expression of this kind of criticism? Dr. Wycomb, it’s your right to disagree with any or all of the president’s choices, but please remember that his administration is a different entity from me personally.”

“How convenient.” She is looking straight ahead. “But the personal is political, or did you miss the women’s movement?” She turns her head so our eyes meet. “Many times, I’ve had the notion to write you a letter, and I’ve told myself, Gladys, it won’t make it to her. She’ll never see it. But I still thought you’d intervene. I kept waiting for evidence that you were reining him in and speaking as a voice of reason.”

“Not every conversation I have is public, Dr. Wycomb.”

“Are you telling me that you have confronted your husband?”

“I answer to my own conscience. That’s as much as I want to say.”

“And I answer to mine,” she says. “Lest you think I have misgivings about sharing your secret, my only regret is that I didn’t speak out years ago.”

We both are quiet, and I can hear another television—a soap opera, it sounds like—somewhere else in the apartment. Norene Davis, I saw when she let me in, has black hair pulled back in a low ponytail and is wearing scrubs with teddy bears.

“Who do you think will be hurt by overturning Roe?” Dr. Wycomb says. “Not women we know—they’ll go to their doctors like you came to me, very hush-hush but perfectly clean and professional. But the poor women, where do they go? Every doctor knows outlawing abortion doesn’t make it less common, it just makes it less safe. Before ’73, I had patients who found me after botched procedures. They’d show up with cases of sepsis and bacteremia that would give you nightmares, and these were the lucky ones—the others died before they could get help. I should stand by and say nothing as our country returns to that?” She is shaking, a mild tremble throughout her body. “What I can no longer abide with this administration is the attitude that if it doesn’t affect them personally, it doesn’t matter. I was never going to need an abortion, was I? Now I’m so old that come what may, I won’t be around to see it. But that doesn’t mean I say, ‘To hell with the rest of you, and so long.’ ”

“Dr. Wycomb, it’s important to remember that the American people elected President Blackwell. Even if you don’t agree with him, a lot of citizens do. It’s impossible to satisfy everyone.”

“Those elections were fixed.” Her thin lips are drawn together; she is furious with me, truly furious.

I say, “I’m sympathetic to your frustrations, but—”

“You’re a puppet. Even the words you use, it sounds like a speech-writer told you to say them.”

This isn’t the way people talk to the first lady—no one does, except for a protestor at a speech, and if that happens, he is quickly quarantined. Dr. Wycomb’s comments are insulting and irritating, they are patronizing, but there also is something pure and true in her anger, like a winter wind. It’s almost refreshing, almost a relief, to be berated face-to-face.

Although I already know the answer, I say, “I trust that you’re aware I’ve said in two separate interviews that I’m pro-choice?”

“The times you gave one-word answers?”

“I’d like for us to come to a mutually agreeable resolution,” I say. “Do you think we can?”

“Keep Judge Sanchez off the Supreme Court.”

“That isn’t an area where I have any control.”

“For crying out loud, you’re married to the president of the United States! Who does he listen to if not you?”

Could I convince Charlie to retract Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination—or, as protocol would have it, convince Charlie to convince Ingrid Sanchez to withdraw herself as a nominee? Even if it were possible, it seems so sleazy, a way of sparing myself public humiliation rather than a real political stand. It’s not that I wouldn’t strongly prefer for abortion to remain legal, not that I don’t understand that with Judge Sanchez’s confirmation, it might not. Nor is it that I don’t see how I come across as a hypocrite here, although I would disagree with the characterization; I actually haven’t said one thing and done another. It’s that I honestly don’t believe it’s my responsibility or even my right to try to legislate. No matter how many times I say it, people are unwilling to accept the fact that I was not elected. Have I tried to encourage Charlie in certain directions? Of course. A program on early education, increased funding for the arts, a literacy initiative—issues that inspire little controversy, issues on which he seeks my input.

I say, “Dr. Wycomb, I admit that I don’t know yet if what you’re proposing is blackmail, but it certainly comes close, and Norene Davis is implicated. Please know I’m not threatening you when I say that striking a deal could only end badly for all of us. I can’t try to bar a Supreme Court nominee to protect myself—that’s not something I’m willing to do, and I don’t think I’m capable of it anyway. That puts the decision back in your hands in terms of how you want to go forward, but for you to tell a reporter about a medical procedure you performed on me seems a clear violation of patient confidentiality.”

“The word is abortion.” Again, she is not looking at me. “And you didn’t mind breaking the law when it suited you. For you people, it’s only a crime if someone else commits it.”

She’s really going to do it, I realize—she’s fearless. She doesn’t care what the consequences are, even, apparently, for Norene. Her life of over a century has been distilled to this: She hates Charlie, she hates everything she thinks he represents, and possibly she hates me more. And she doesn’t just hate me by proxy—no, she thinks I am worse than he is. She subscribes to the belief, widespread among Democrats and shared by some Republicans, that he’s a moron, an evil moron, and to a certain extent, that lets him off the hook. But I—I should know better.

Unexpectedly, I think, Okay. Okay, announce that I had an abortion; let the world know, let them hear about it in Missouri and Utah and Louisiana, in Ireland and Egypt and El Salvador. It’s not inaccurate; I did have one. I will be judged, I will be criticized, I will be dissected on talk shows, joked about on late-night TV, excoriated or defended (though mostly excoriated) in op-eds. The Sunday after the news breaks, in The New York Times’s “Week in Review,” three separate articles about me will make variations on the same point. Even those who are pro-choice will denounce me as a dissembler; women’s groups will use me as proof of something, or as a cautionary tale about something else. In every interview from now until the end of my life, I’ll be asked to explain why I had an abortion and why I was silent for so long afterward, asked to reconcile the inconsistencies between my private experience and my husband’s policies and legislation. Anything I say in reply will boil down to this: I did not contradict myself; I live a life that contains contradictions. Don’t you?

Pete Imhof will know, if Dena hasn’t already told him. My mother will know, my poor mother, if, in her present state of senility, she is cognizant enough to absorb the news. The silver lining, such as it is, is that other women who have had abortions might feel—what?—less alone? Less guilty? But that’s to assume they feel alone and guilty now, which I generally doubt. Personally, I’ve never regretted having an abortion; I’ve regretted the circumstances that led to its necessity, but I maintain that it was a necessity, that it was, however cowardly Dr. Wycomb thinks I am to lean on the phrase, a medical procedure. Would I feel more uncomfortable if it had occurred in the twelfth week or the sixteenth instead of what was likely the fifth or sixth? Yes, I would. But the debate about when life begins seems to me misguided; I made a private, personal decision related to my own health.

When it becomes public, it’s difficult to know how adversely the news will affect Charlie. His administration has proved resilient at weathering scandals, but he is a lame duck at this point, obstructed by Democrats in the majority in both the House and Senate—the ’06 elections were when Hank’s supposed political sorcery faltered at last—and Charlie’s focus has returned after all these years to his legacy, the topic that so used to rankle me. I suppose the preoccupation is more justified now, but I still silently resist it. Viewing a legacy as a few grand acts seems reductive. Isn’t your legacy not the one or two exceptional gestures of your life but the way you conducted yourself every day, year after year? Either way, Charlie personally will forgive me, I feel confident. To lobby him to withdraw Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination would be a betrayal in his eyes; to be outed as the first lady who had an abortion would merely make me a victim. In order to placate his conservative Christian base, it’s likely he’ll want me to grant an interview in which I condemn my behavior, to say, I am a sinner, but when I decline, he won’t push me. This is our implicit agreement, that we can suggest or recommend but that we never force, never make ultimatums; it’s why we don’t resent each other.

And perhaps in some secluded part of my conscience, I even welcome the disclosure, just as I welcome the scolding from Gladys Wycomb. The Lutherans I was raised among believed less in a vengeful God than a disciplining one: If we had faith in Jesus, we’d find eternal salvation, but in the meantime, here on earth, we might encounter obstacles or tests intended to help us grow. Many years have passed since I’ve had faith in Jesus, but it is undeniable that the framework of our upbringing stays with us, and it’s entirely plausible to me I’m now being “disciplined” for past transgressions: not for Andrew (in that case, the mistake and the punishment were one and the same) but for the life I’ve lived in spite of that terrible early error. It all could have unraveled for me, couldn’t it? But it didn’t, and I became lucky—I was allowed the felicities of marriage and motherhood, the comforts of wealth, and ultimately, the exorbitant privileges available at the highest level of politics. Since Charlie entered public office, I have felt an amplified version of what I used to feel at the Maronee Country Club, the fear that we were like the Californians who live in beautiful houses overhanging cliffs.

In my expectation that good fortune will lead inextricably to its reversal, I should note that I don’t think I’m less deserving of happiness than anyone else; it is that in an unequal world, nobody deserves the privileges I enjoy. I’ve thought often since Charlie became governor that it isn’t a surprise so many famous people seem mentally unstable. As their celebrity grows and they’re increasingly deferred to and accommodated, they can believe one of two things: either that they’re deserving, in which case they will become unreasonable and insufferable; or that they’re not deserving, in which case they will be wracked with doubt, plagued by a sense of themselves as imposters. I suppose this is why I’ve tried mightily to lead a “regular” life—why I still make our bed, why I stay at Jadey and Arthur’s house instead of at a hotel when I’m traveling in Wisconsin without Charlie, why I read the newspaper instead of relying on briefings, why I shop myself, albeit with agents, at Hallmark, where I pick out birthday or anniversary cards (never ones featuring us) because how can you rely on an aide to know what kind of birthday card to get for your own friend or brother-in-law? If I can remain a normal person, I hope to share my normalcy with Charlie; I realize my attempts are inadequate, but they are better than nothing.

In Dr. Wycomb’s living room, I say, “It doesn’t seem as if either of us will be able to persuade the other to come around, does it?”

“All those women who’ll have to have back-alley abortions—you’ll be able to live with that?” She still is shaking.

“Dr. Wycomb, I know you feel passionately—”

“You have the power to change history, and you don’t care. Reproductive rights don’t strike your fancy? Well, how about gay marriage? I can think of at least one reason that ought to be close to your heart. How about the environment, how about civil liberties, how about this godforsaken war, or do the two of you plan to sit there with your blinders on until he’s out of office and his successor can clean up the mess?”

“You’ve made your point.” I stand; I have had enough. “I’m going to leave, Dr. Wycomb. I wish you well.” I can’t imagine touching her in goodbye, I can’t imagine she’d want it. I begin walking toward the foyer.

I’ve reached the threshold when Dr. Wycomb says, “Your grandmother would be so disappointed in you.” The part that stings most is that her voice in this moment is less angry than wonderingly sad.

I turn, and though I remind myself that Gladys Wycomb is no different from a journalist who writes an article about me, that her saying something doesn’t make it true, I can’t help responding. “I don’t agree,” I say.

“Emilie may not have been a political person, but she knew right from wrong.”

“You disappointed her,” I reply, and I can hear in my own voice an unattractive note of ferocity. “She told me herself that you tried to make her choose between you and us, and she chose us. That’s all I need to know—she chose us.”

“You and your parents practically held her prisoner in that dumpy little house. And the way you all tried to whitewash her sexuality, I shouldn’t be surprised by what kind of person you’ve become.”

Is this accurate? Either way, is it what my grandmother believed, what she told Dr. Wycomb, or is it what Dr. Wycomb decided on her own?

“I loved my grandmother, and my grandmother loved me.” Before continuing into the foyer and out the door of the apartment, I say, “You can’t poison that.”

ONE SATURDAY EVENING in October 1994, by the time it was clear Charlie was likely to win the gubernatorial election in Wisconsin, our old friend Howard from Madison drove to Maronee for an overnight visit with his wife, Petal. (Howard and Petal had gotten back together, and married, over a decade after I’d met her on the Mendota Terrace as a pretty young college graduate.) This was an exhausting time for our family—on many nights, Ella slept at Arthur and Jadey’s while Charlie and I and Hank and other members of the campaign staff wound our way among the tiny towns up in the northern part of the state, Cornucopia and Moose Junction and Manitowish; if we stayed in a Holiday Inn as opposed to a no-name motel, it seemed like a luxury. (Early in the campaign, Charlie had started traveling with his own down pillow, which I folded in half each morning and set in my canvas bag.) Given our schedule, the opportunity to visit with friends was rare, and I felt that it would be restorative for all of us and especially for Charlie. I’d noticed that the more days in a row he spent campaigning, the more impatient and cranky he became—that morning at a power plant in New Richmond when a single mother of three asked him why she should believe he knew anything about working families, he’d snapped, “If you don’t think I do, then maybe you shouldn’t vote for me”—but even just a short break could do him a world of good. That Saturday afternoon, we’d flown back to Milwaukee from Eau Claire on an eight-seat prop plane. Though initially I’d had grand plans of making a real meal, all I had the energy for was spaghetti, but the evening turned out to be great fun, Howard and Petal and Charlie and Ella and I sitting in the kitchen instead of the dining room, talking and laughing.

Ella was in the middle of reading The Odyssey for English, and I was rereading it myself—I took it with me as we campaigned, and I’d made a copy of her syllabus so that I could read the same pages each night that she did and we could discuss them on the phone if I wasn’t there (I had always loved The Odyssey). It turned out that when Howard had read it in ninth grade, he’d been required to memorize the first five lines in Greek and still remembered them: Andra moy ennepay moosa / polutropon hos mala polla . . . Then they announced that Petal was thirteen weeks pregnant—they’d been trying for years—and we were, they said, the only ones they’d told besides their families; they didn’t know yet if it was a boy or girl, so we debated names for both. Ella suggested Ella, Charlie suggested Charles, and when I didn’t suggest Alice, Howard said, “Why so bashful, Al? Can’t you keep up with these egomaniacs?” After dinner, we went into the den to play hearts, and Ella shot the moon; the night had taken on the festive air of a slumber party. Charlie was the first to turn in—ever since he’d started jogging in the morning, he went to bed by ten if he could—and when he was asleep, Petal and Ella and I went to the attic so I could find my old maternity clothes to give Petal. Most were hopelessly outdated.

The next morning, Howard went running with Charlie, and then Howard and Petal took off for Madison around the same time we left for church. Not for the first time, there turned out to be a local news camera waiting for us after the service at Heavenly Rose—this was in October—and Charlie stopped and spoke to the reporter for a few minutes while Ella and I waited in the car. That evening, Charlie was giving a speech in Green Bay, and I was staying in Milwaukee but meeting up with him Monday in Sheboygan, where six hundred area Republicans had paid a hundred dollars each to attend a luncheon with us. It was following the lunch, over twenty-four hours after it had happened, that Charlie told me: During their Sunday-morning run, Howard had said it would be a huge favor if he could set up a meeting between Charlie and his brother, Dave, who was the CEO of a large engineering firm hoping to win a contract with the state. Between the two of them, Howard said, Dave’s firm was vastly more qualified than any of the ones currently doing business with Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation. “You think that’s why they came to see us?” Charlie asked.

“I’m sure it’s not,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. Charlie and I were sitting in the first row of the conversion van, headed to the town of Little Chute, where Charlie was to give a speech to a bunch of dairy farmers, and I told myself that no one else in the van was listening to us. At that moment, our driver, Kenny, was in the front seat; a speech-writer named Sean O’Fallon was in the back row, wearing headphones and typing on his laptop; and Hank and Debbie Bell, a strategist, were in the second row, having a noisy and impassioned debate about whether the Garth Brooks song “Friends in Low Places,” which had just come on the radio, would be a good one to play before Charlie’s rallies. With the song’s reference to places “where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away,” it seemed clear to me that using it would be a disastrous idea, which was the argument Hank was making—he said it was practically baiting the media to uncover Charlie’s 1988 DUI, then still a secret—while Debbie was insisting that it was such a beloved song and so perfectly captured Charlie’s unpretentious personality, as well as the Wisconsin way of life, that the alcohol references didn’t matter; plenty of voters liked Charlie better because of his struggles.

Sitting next to me, ignoring the Garth Brooks argument, Charlie seemed melancholy rather than irritated when he said, “I guess this is how it works now, huh? We ask everyone we know for money, and everyone we know asks us for favors.” He chuckled, though not happily. “I’m a high-class hooker.”

“If that’s how you see yourself, I don’t know why you’re running,” I said. “A governor can be a great force for good, and anyway, high-class hooker is an oxymoron.”

“Now, hold on just a second.” Charlie grinned, this time for real. “Who’re you calling an oxymoron?”

“Seriously,” I said, “if you get elected, and it looks like you will”—this was not simply optimism on my part; his polling numbers were in the high fifties—“you’ll have the opportunity to improve the lives of lots of people. Isn’t that why you’re running?”

All these years later, I see the question of why Charlie ran for governor, or for president, as moot—our lives have become what they’ve become—but at the time, it mattered to me, it felt like an important puzzle that could be solved if I examined it thoroughly. I suppose I believed that if I understood Charlie’s impetus, I might agree that running for election was a good idea. “Because he feels called to lead,” Hank would tell reporters. Charlie himself, refusing to be serious, would say to me, “For the same reason a dog licks his balls—because I can.” Because he wanted to prove that he was as smart and ambitious as his brothers, journalists speculated, or because he wanted to avenge his father’s own humiliating presidential run in 1968, and while neither of these possibilities reflected particularly well on Charlie, they were more flattering than my own theory, which I shared with no one: because of his fear of the dark. Because if he were governor, and then president, he’d be guarded by state troopers and later by agents, he’d never be far from people specifically assigned to watch out for him; he might be assassinated, but he wouldn’t have to walk down a shadowy hallway by himself. (Indeed it seems clear that I fear Charlie’s assassination more than he does. Before he officially entered the presidential race the first time, I felt compelled to tell him about my peculiar, guilt-ridden relief when Kennedy was shot. Wouldn’t it be a perfectly symmetrical kind of punishment for having had such thoughts, I said, if my own husband became president and was killed similarly? To which Charlie replied, without a second’s hesitation, “You know that’s bullshit, right? That’s hocus-pocus teenage-girl thinking.”)

The reality of why Charlie ran, I imagine, was a combination of factors, including ego: He did feel some sense of public service, as he defined it; he did feel some sense of “why not?”; he did want to prove himself to his family and to prove his family to the world; he did want the perks. Such motives, inglorious as they are, do not offend me; they never persuaded me that Charlie’s entry into politics was wise, but I wonder if anyone else’s motives are nobler.

For his first presidential campaign, in 2000, Charlie ran as a “tolerant traditionalist,” a bit of alliteration that was Debbie Bell’s brain-child. Ironically, Charlie’s avowals of sympathy for the marginalized and the underclasses, and his credibility with more left-leaning voters, were bolstered not only by his centrist record as a governor but also, predating his public life by over a decade, by his consistent history of donating to organizations such as food pantries, after-school centers, shelters for women and children affected by domestic violence, and AIDS clinics. These were, of course, the modest donations I had made surreptitiously; when our financial records were first vetted and this bit of duplicity emerged, Charlie and Hank were both thrilled. “God bless your sneaky liberal ways!” Charlie exclaimed.

Another irony when it came to Charlie’s tolerant traditionalism was that the tolerance did not seem to extend to sexual orientation, yet I had never doubted that Debbie Bell was a lesbian. I didn’t know whether she had romantic involvements—she never referred to any and hadn’t been married—but she had a certain comradely air with men and a more flirtatious way with women. She was tall, with short blond hair, and even when she wasn’t wearing a pantsuit, she carried herself as if she were; in everything about her, her voice and posture and opinions, there was a briskly athletic confidence that unfortunately you rarely see in heterosexual women. It was on the infrequent occasions when she’d remark on a man’s handsomeness, or lament her unmarried status, that she seemed most obviously gay to me—the comments came off as forced and unpersuasive. I discussed my view with Jadey and later with Jessica, both of whom agreed, but I never mentioned it to Charlie because I thought he’d be distracted by it, he might start acting strange around Debbie, teasing her outright or making jokes behind her back. I was surprised Charlie didn’t pick up anyway on her mysterious sexuality, but I think he was so gratified by Debbie’s unswerving devotion to him that he may not have wanted to analyze it for fear of finding something psychologically iffy. And in fact, I suspect Debbie has spent her interior reservoirs of love, the ones most people save for a partner or children, on Charlie. (Many times, I’ve longed to pull her aside and whisper, You deserve better than a mere surrogate; you, too, are entitled to the real thing and not just scraps from my husband. Needless to say, I have bitten my tongue and hoped she leads a private life about which we know nothing.)

Debbie had worked as a publicist for the Brewers—she was as passionate a baseball fan as Charlie, herself a former softball star at UW, and she also, with Charlie’s encouragement, had joined Heavenly Rose Church and been born again in 1990 —and when Charlie had left the Brewers, she’d gone with him. In those early days of Charlie’s political climb, I was sometimes surprised by how willingly and even ardently people followed him. Because he did not, as I had learned over time, inspire much confidence among his own parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, it was hard for me not to see him as a bit of an underdog. But particularly during and after his stint with the Brewers, others saw an idealized version, as if Charlie were the star of a movie about his own life: a handsome, funny, good-natured guy who’d graduated from prestigious schools, had a prominent and successful career (was he the son of privilege? Sure, but with baseball, he’d gone in a different direction, and within a minute of meeting him, you could tell how unaffected he was—he preferred burger joints to fancy restaurants, he’d joke around with your kid, he was impishly self-effacing). He was confident and fit and religious, with a marriage that bore no trace of scandal, and a close relationship to his only child. In this narrative, he was the kind of guy whom men wanted to be friends with and women wished their husbands were more like. While my proximity to Charlie is undoubtedly part of the reason for my own less worshipful perspective, I can say sincerely that the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people. Even in our cynical age, the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true—it’s staggering. In a way, it’s also touching; it makes me feel protective. (To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you’re not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?)

I had assumed everyone and particularly political insiders harbored the same private skepticism that I did, especially about the discrepancy between an individual’s words and actions, and that decorum made all of us conceal this skepticism; I was evidently wrong. I love Charlie as much as—or, I should hope, more than—someone like Debbie, but I love him differently, with a sharper understanding of his faults. If I believe he ran for president because it was a way of allaying his fear of the dark, then I am able, on my most generous days, to see this motive as endearing. Debbie, on the other hand, believes Charlie ran for president because God summoned him, and she sees him as heroic.

As I sat in the van next to Charlie, heading toward Little Chute, what came on the radio after “Friends in Low Places” was “Achy Breaky Heart,” a song that had become a joke during that campaign because no one would admit to liking it, yet we all knew all the words, and we ended up hearing it on the radio everywhere we went, particularly in the staticky backwaters. Hank called to Kenny in the front seat to turn up the volume, and Hank and Debbie sang jubilantly, their Garth Brooks argument suspended. Next to me, quietly and seriously, Charlie said, “You think I’m up to the task of being governor, don’t you?”

“I think you’ll be wonderful.” I wasn’t lying. When Charlie had decided to run over a year earlier, he’d known little about our state that hadn’t been filtered through family lore or his own experience as a congressional candidate in ’78, but he had diligently immersed himself in the history and politics of Wisconsin. Hank had arranged for experts in economics and education and health care to come in and brief him, usually confidentially, and Charlie had worked on memorizing facts and statistics until he could recite them fluently.

Hank tapped my shoulder. “Why aren’t you two singing? ‘You can tell your ma I moved to Arkansas / You can tell your dog to bite my leg . . .’ ”

I flashed him a smile. “Looks like you’ve got this verse covered, Hank.” When he had leaned back again, I said softly to Charlie, “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of challenges, but if you stay focused on what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll be great.”

“You know what I realized today?” Charlie said. “Shaking hands with people at lunch, I thought, I’ll never make another friend. Assuming I’m elected, I mean—from here on out, it’ll only be people wanting favors and access.”

I couldn’t disagree. “You’re lucky, though, that you already have so many friends,” I said. “We’re both lucky.”

“But that’s the thing.” He was very reflective in this moment, especially in contrast to Hank and Debbie hamming it up behind us. “After Howard asked me about the engineering contracts, I’m not faulting him, but I better always be ready for that from now on. I shouldn’t let down my guard and assume any get-together is just fun and games when even people we know—heck, Arthur or John or Ed—a lot of them will have an agenda. When I think of it this way, I nagged Ed about the baseball stadium.”

“You should talk to him about this, or your dad. I bet they’d have good insights.” Ed was still a congressman, and though there had been discussion of his running for Senate in the ’92 election, he hadn’t, and I wasn’t sure why.

“You know the one person who’ll never use me?” Charlie pointed at me.

“Sweetheart, I’m sure I’m not the only one. It might be a transition for some of our friends, but I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

“People get funny, though. I’d forgotten about this until earlier today, but when my dad was governor, there was an old friend of the family who ran afoul of the law, I think for embezzling, and he wanted Dad to intervene. When Dad refused, this guy’s kids—fellows I knew well from the country club—they quit speaking to me. The man didn’t end up going to prison, either, so I don’t know what the family had to be so sour about.”

From the seat behind us, Hank leaned forward again—the song was nearing the end, with the chorus repeating several times—and called, “Last chance. Chuckles, you’re lucky you chose politics, because you’d never have made it in a traveling minstrel show.” (Chuckles was Hank’s nickname for Charlie, payback for Shit Storm. Of course, while Charlie is now Mr. President, the Shit Storm moniker has endured.)

Agreeably, Charlie joined in: “ ‘Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart . . . ’ ”

I took his hand, lacing my fingers through his, and I leaned in so my mouth was by his ear. “I love you very much,” I whispered.

IN THE TOWN car, Jessica is on the phone with Hank. “She’d prefer not to,” Jessica keeps saying in a level tone—she has impeccable manners—and I can hear fragments of Hank’s voice, wheedling but insistent; he wants to talk to me directly. “No, she wasn’t,” Jessica says. “She doesn’t think Gladys Wycomb is concerned about that. No. No. All right. I’ll call you from the plane.” She presses the red “end” button on her cell phone, folds it shut, and immediately reaches for her Black-Berry and starts typing with her thumbs.

We are two miles from Midway Airport, Jessica and Cal and I in this car, which is driven by a local agent. I say, “I’d like to make a stop in Wisconsin before we return to Washington.”

Jessica raises her eyebrows. “Your mother?”

My mother outlasted her second husband, too (Lars, who was perhaps the only person in either Charlie’s or my family to take unequivocal delight in Charlie’s political rise, died of acute renal failure in 1996), and my mother now resides in an assisted-living facility in an area outside Riley that was a pasture when I was growing up. She has Alzheimer’s, but the blessing is that she remains both good-natured and seemingly happy; given how many of the people who have neurodegenerative diseases are depressed or violent, I am grateful. However, even as we’re using my mother as the pretext for my traveling today, she isn’t the one I wish to see.

This morning, when I assumed that it was Dena Janaszewski who had contacted Hank’s office, it made a sort of sense—there was unfinished business between Dena and me, and this would be a reckoning. Learning, then, that the blackmail threat had nothing to do with her was almost a disappointment. I’ve often recalled that afternoon in Riley when she gave Ella the tiara—the more time has passed, the surer I have become that it was Dena and not her mother who did it, and that the gesture was a peace offering as opposed to a taunt—and I’ve regretted that I didn’t reciprocate in some way. But that happened during such a topsy-turvy episode in my life, when every relationship other than the one I had with Charlie felt peripheral. All these years later, I am afraid I missed an opportunity, and I’m increasingly aware that if I don’t initiate it, I might not have another. Like most people, I’ve always been able to reassure myself, on entering a new decade, that I’m still not old, that my previous sense of this age, thirty or forty or fifty, was skewed by my own youth. I even managed this feat of self-persuasion after turning sixty—sixty-year-olds bungee jump and swim the English Channel!—but at this point, I’ve reached the age when, if something happened to me, it would be sad but not tragic. I would be slightly young, but only slightly. In the same vein, if I were to hear someday that Dena had died—it’s hard to know how the news would make its way to me, with my mother in her condition and both Dena’s parents deceased, but surely I’d find out eventually—I could not be shocked. Other peers have passed on, Rose Trommler from Madison died of breast cancer in 2003, and last year my high school classmate Betty Bridges Scannell’s husband had a brain aneurysm while they were on a cruise in the Caribbean. The sadness of these deaths clung to me for several days after I received word of them, but it would be remorse, a deep remorse, rather than mere sorrow I’d feel about Dena. For the first three decades of my life—for half of it—I didn’t have a closer friend. Sure, she had her shortcomings, but who doesn’t? She was lively and funny, she was much more daring than I was, and we knew each other so well; friendships have survived on far less.

It is strange to realize that at this point, my closest friend is probably Jessica. Jadey and I still speak once a week, and she visits us in Washington, sometimes with Arthur and sometimes without him, several times a year. Having her in the White House is always a tremendous breath of fresh air—she’ll say to Charlie, “I’m only calling you Mr. President if you call me Dame Jadey,” and she complains that visiting us makes her constipated because she can’t comfortably go to the bathroom in such a historic setting—but there is an unspoken wedge between us that has grown over time. Although she’s a Republican, she took it hard when Charlie supported the amendment to ban gay marriage; she remains tight with her interior-decorator friend Billy Torks, whom I always got a kick out of but haven’t seen for years. While that was a passing tension, I think this is the ongoing problem for Jadey and me: Once our lives were alike, and now they’re not. She still attends Garden Club meetings, she’s joined the board of the Milwaukee Art Museum, she fund-raises for Biddle even though both Drew and Winnie graduated years ago, and all these activities are parts of her life I envy, I feel a great pull of sentimentality when she mentions them, but she has made it clear that she thinks I must find it boring and provincial when she tells stories about Maronee. Despite my repeated efforts to convince her otherwise, she refuses to believe I’d far prefer discussing her life to mine. She says, “No, no, tell me what the king and queen of Spain were like.”

It feels unseemly to complain to my extended family or to friends from Wisconsin, so I don’t. Early on in Charlie’s political career, I once mentioned to another of my sisters-in-law, Ginger, that I was worried about the floral arrangements for a ball we were hosting in Madison, and she said, “I think it takes real nerve for you to complain about anything like that when Ed deserved to be governor a lot more than Chas.” I found this to be a breathtaking comment not least because of Ginger’s usual meekness, but perhaps even more surprising than the shift in Ginger was the one in Priscilla, who was the last person I’d have expected to be swayed by our fame: Shortly after Charlie was elected governor, she confided in me that I had always been her favorite daughter-in-law; she’d long believed we shared a similar sensibility. When Charlie was elected president, she began telling not just me but our relatives and also the media that I was her favorite person.

As for the other women I knew in Maronee or Madison, my friends from Garden Club or the mothers of Ella’s classmates, so colorful and distracting is the pageantry of my life now that I think they have trouble remembering I am still myself, that my concerns are often mundane—my favorite shampoo has been discontinued, my husband snores, I struggle to find time to exercise—and that when my concerns aren’t mundane, when I’m worried about war or terrorism, the grandiosity of my anxiety doesn’t vault it into another category of emotion unimaginable to them; they’d be able to imagine it just fine if they could stop being impressed.

These all are reasons I so value Jessica, though I recognize that because I am her employer, ours is not a pure friendship. But the fact that we aren’t peers makes things easier, I think; unlike Jadey, she is not comparing herself to me or her husband to mine. (In 2002, Jessica married a lovely man named Keith who works for the World Bank; Charlie and I attended the wedding at the Washington Club on Dupont Circle, and at the reception, Charlie danced with Miss Ruby, now retired and in her eighties but still energetically grumpy, and I danced with Jessica’s younger brother, Antoine, then a six-foot-tall freshman at Biddle Academy.) Jessica and I have formed a two-woman book club; we switch off picking titles, and though there are no official rules other than that the books must be fiction, we tend to read translations of ones by authors from countries we’ve either just visited or are about to visit. In general, it’s not that I can explain to Jessica my first-lady angst—it’s that I don’t have to. She is part of everything that happens, she knows exactly how scripted and confined and luxurious my life is, how the strangest parts are what the public doesn’t see: that when Ella and I traveled to Peru, the hotel pool was drained as a safety precaution and filled with bottled water so we could swim in it; that I am called on by the White House’s chief usher to start preparing for Christmas—the parties and cards and decorations—every April.

“I’ll visit my mother on the next trip,” I say to Jessica. “It’s Dena Janaszewski I’d like to see, if we could arrange it.”

If Jessica is caught off guard, she doesn’t show it, a mark of her professionalism being that she expresses surprise only over minor matters and never over significant ones. I had an abortion? She simply nods. But I’m wearing magenta high heels? “Whoa!” she’ll exclaim. “Hey there, Mrs. Fashionista!”

She looks at her watch and says in an even tone, “It’s now one-twenty Central time, meaning two-twenty in D.C. Assuming it takes us an hour and forty minutes to fly back and then twenty minutes to get to the residence, that puts us at four-twenty without the stop in Riley, and the choir tour is scheduled for five-fifteen. Would you like me to delay the tour, cancel it, or find a substitute?”

The punctuality Charlie’s administration is known for is not something his own family was stringent about when he was growing up, but it’s another of the ways he sought to impose discipline on himself after he quit drinking. Following his example, I, too, strive to be on time; to do otherwise seems a form of arrogance. Furthermore, while it rarely bothers me to decline requests or invitations, it weighs on me when I make a commitment and am unable to honor it, and it weighs most heavily when that commitment involves children. And yet I want to see Dena today; I want to see her, and I want to see Pete, too, if they’re still together.

When the abortion story comes out, Dena and perhaps Pete will be the only people who can confirm its veracity. But I don’t hope to silence them. Rather, I see a visit as an opportunity to clear the air after far too long. In theory, I could go to Riley another day, I drop in every six weeks to check on my mother, but if I wait, won’t the moment have passed? Won’t I lose my nerve if I don’t do it now?

“Let’s find a substitute for the tour,” I say, and then, inspired, “Ella! Children love Ella!”

“Will she be offended if I get a docent to accompany her?”

“She’ll be relieved. Oh, if she’ll agree to it, this could be perfect.” It occurs to me that this could be the last favor I ask Ella for a long while. Once she learns of my abortion, I expect she might distance herself from me. As Jessica types on her BlackBerry, I say, “I think Hank’s office at least started tracking Dena down this morning, but her surname could also be Cimino and maybe Imhof, although I don’t know if they stayed together. If she’s gotten married to someone else, then I have no idea. But her date of birth is 6/16/46.” This, I suppose, is a sign of childhood friends, that you never forget their birthdays, whereas for the friends you make in adulthood, you never quite remember; I like to send birthday cards, but if I didn’t mark my personal calendar, I’d miss them.

Jessica says, “Are you envisioning that Dena comes to the plane, you go to her house, or you meet at a public place?” The airfield we land on in Riley is tiny, used only by private planes and the fleet for White River Dairy.

“I’ll go to her house,” I say. I experience a vestigial impulse to add that I don’t want to inconvenience Dena, that we should find out first if she’s free today, but inconveniencing people is beside the point. From one perspective, I have for the last six years been nothing but an inconvenience, causing traffic to be stopped and streets closed, buildings locked, manhole covers sealed; from another perspective, many Americans and many people in the world, even now, wouldn’t mind having their day turned upside down for the “privilege” of meeting me.

Jessica says, “While the office finds Dena, would you like to ask Ella or shall I?”

“I’ll do it.”

Jessica reaches into her pocketbook for a second cell phone, opens it, and dials. “It’s Jessica. Hold for your mother?” Jessica is silent, then says, “In how long?” Again, a pause. “Perfect. We’ll look forward to it.” When she hangs up, she says, “Ella will call back in five minutes.” Oh, thank heavens for Ella Blackwell, the only person who habitually rebuffs the president and first lady of the United States. I mean it not facetiously but sincerely when I say, what would we do without her to keep us humble?

Using her first cell phone, the one she was on earlier, Jessica presses a single button and, after a few seconds, says, “Belinda, I’ve sent messages to you and Ashley, but I need a home address and phone number for an individual in Riley. This is high priority.” Jessica relays the information about Dena that I’ve provided then suggests Belinda try Lori in Hank’s office, and when she hangs up again, she says to me, “So that I know when to schedule wheels up from Riley, how long do you anticipate meeting with Dena?”

“Half an hour? But let’s not leave Chicago until we confirm that she’s available. For all I know, she doesn’t live in Riley anymore—I can imagine her having moved to someplace like New Mexico.”

“If it’s impossible to arrange the visit in time to be back for the gala, I’m certain we can find her phone number and you can still talk to her tonight. But we’ll see if we can’t set up an in-person meeting. You want to listen to the radio while I hop back on the phone?” Jessica’s tone and expression are sympathetic; I haven’t told her the details of my conversation with Gladys Wycomb, only the end result, but I think she can tell I feel fragile.

“Sure,” I say. As it happens, we left on such short notice that I didn’t bring a book.

Jessica says, “Cal, will you turn on NPR?”

I recognize the show that becomes audible as Day to Day before I recognize the subject of the current interview: It is Edgar Franklin, the man camped out on Capitol Hill, the father of the dead soldier. Jessica realizes who it is at the same time I do, even though she’s already talking to someone else on the phone. To that person, she says, “Hang on,” holds her palm over the mouth area of her cell, and says to me, “Want him to change it?”

I shake my head.

On the radio, the interviewer, who is male, says, “It seems you plan to stay here indefinitely—is that correct?”

“I plan to stay here until the president will see me,” Edgar Franklin says.

“And if that doesn’t happen?”

“I plan to stay here until the president will see me,” Edgar Franklin repeats. His voice is firm but not belligerent—he speaks more quietly than the reporter, and he has a mild southern accent.

“Do you really believe you can convince President Blackwell to start bringing home the troops, or would you view a conversation as a symbolic act?”

“Too many young men and women have lost their lives, and I don’t believe the president has ever been able to justify our presence there,” Edgar Franklin says. “My impression is he hears selective intelligence, and it makes it hard for him to understand the personal toll this is taking.”

“Although you yourself haven’t had the opportunity to meet with the president, the White House has made a point in the last several days of mentioning his frequent visits with family members of the fallen, including two weeks ago in southern California. What do you hope to tell him that he wouldn’t have heard from others whose situations are painfully similar to yours?”

“After your son dies this way, you look for a reason his death meant something. You hope he made a sacrifice he believed in, and that’s why it’s tempting to accept”—Edgar Franklin hesitates—“the rhetoric of war, is I guess how to put it. If I thought Nate’s death was a waste, wouldn’t that be disloyal to my son and my country? It would mean I wasn’t patriotic, is what I thought at first, but I’ve come to see it that bringing our troops home would be the patriotic thing. A lot of families just now going through what I experienced two years ago, just starting to grieve, maybe they’re not thinking about the political side yet.”

“What do you make of the outpouring of support you’ve received since your arrival in Washington last Wednesday?”

“The tide has turned. Americans know it’s time for an honest conversation.”

“Colonel Edgar Franklin, thank you for speaking with me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re listening to member-supported WBEZ,” a female voice says as our police-escorted Town Car is waved through the gates leading to the private section of the airport. We cross the tarmac, and in the overcast heat of the Midwest, a glare bounces off the Gulfstream parked two hundred feet away; the steps are already pulled down, awaiting us.

CHARLIE USED TO have a line he’d tease me with before dinners on the rubber-chicken circuit; he’d say, “Don’t forget that fund-raiser starts with fun.” He said this because he knew I loathed them—the repetition, the forced greetings and stilted conversations, the endless photo ops, and above all, the uncomfortably transactional feeling that people were literally buying us. I’ve always found the thousand-dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand-dollar ones—if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it’s clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it’s apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn’t well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us. We’re not worth it! I want to say. You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild’s college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks. Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.

But there was one fund-raiser that, to my own surprise, I did find fun. This was a million-dollar dinner held at a former plantation in Mobile, Alabama, in July 2000. Charlie and I always ate at separate tables, and that night I was assigned to be with the wife of the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, two well-dressed middle-aged couples who looked like variations of the people we knew in Maronee, and a father-and-son duo. Before an event, an aide provides a paragraph or two describing each of the bigwigs who will be in attendance, and that evening, the original plan had been that I’d be sitting between a man named Beau Phillips, who owned a regional chain of fast-food restaurants, and a man named Leon Tasket, who was the CFO of the largest producer of industrial machinery in Alabama. As it turned out, Leon Tasket’s wife had come down with the flu, and in her stead—it’s hard to imagine this last-minute switch happening now or at any point after Charlie became president—Mr. Tasket had brought his adult son Dale, a tall, heavy, mentally disabled fellow. Though I suspect Dale had the intellectual aptitude of a nine-or ten-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed this if I’d been observing him from any distance—his features weren’t irregular, except perhaps that he looked friendlier than most other guests. When it was time to sit for dinner, the men at the table remained standing while I and the other wives found our places, and Dale, to whom I had been briefly introduced a minute before, plopped next to me in the seat that had a place card for his father; Mrs. Tasket’s place card was one more over. “Oh, no, you don’t,” Leon Tasket said immediately. Mr. Tasket was shorter and wirier than his son, with a well-trimmed white beard and mustache and a three-piece suit. “Boy, if Miss Alice Blackwell saw the way you ate, she’d be scared half to death.”

I smiled, shaking my head. “It’s fine with me if he stays there—if it’s all right with you, that is.”

“That’s an awful brave lady who doesn’t mind sitting in the vicinity of a black bear, isn’t it, Dale? You think we should call her bluff?”

On the stage just above our heads, a man in a flag tie was tapping the microphone, saying, “If you’ll all take your seats . . . ” At another table, Charlie sat between the governor and the state’s Republican Party chair.

“Really,” I said. “It’s fine.”

As waiters brought our salads, Beau Phillips, the fast-food honcho on my right, said, “Your husband is on a sure path to victory,” and simultaneously, on my left, Dale said, “My favorite actress is Drew Barrymore, do you know who Drew Barrymore is?” Both men had endearingly thick southern accents, though only one of them—Dale—was talking with his mouth full; he had torn into his salad with gusto. To Mr. Phillips, I said, “Thank you,” and then I turned toward Dale. “I do know who she is.”

“The liberal elite has lost touch with real American values,” Mr. Phillips said. ”We need someone to stand up to those activist judges pushing for the homosexual agenda. That lifestyle might cut it in the Northeast, but I’ll tell you what, it sure doesn’t fly down here.”

Mildly, I said, “I know Charlie likes to focus on what we as Americans have in common.”

“Did you see her in The Wedding Singer?” Dale was asking.

I turned back. “I didn’t, but I’ve heard of it.”

“She’s the most pretty and talented actress there is,” Dale said, and his father, who’d been talking to the chairman’s wife on his other side, chuckled and said, “If I were a bettin’ man, I’d say we must be discussin’ Drew Barrymore.”

“I saw her when she was a little girl in E.T.,” I said. “Oh, and you know what, Dale—my daughter and I recently watched a movie she was in called Never Been Kissed. Have you seen that?”

It was Mr. Tasket who said, “Have we seen Never Been Kissed? Only three times a week do we see Never Been Kissed at our house. I’ve watched that little movie more times than I’ve watched the evenin’ news.”

“Mr. Coulson thinks Josie’s a student, but when he finds out she works for the newspaper, they can fall in love,” Dale said.

“I remember that part,” I said.

“Drew’s birthday is February twenty-second, 1975,” Dale said. “That means she’s twenty-five and seven months and three days, and she’s a Pisces, and I’m a Gemini, but I’m older than her because I’m forty.”

Dale’s father had faded again from the conversation, but on my right, Mr. Phillips said, “This election will be a real comeuppance for the Democrats. You mark my words, we’ll have payback after eight years of them running roughshod.”

“Charlie and I are as curious about what will happen as you are,” I said. To Dale, I said, “If you’re a Gemini, that must mean you were born in May or June.”

“I was born on June third, 1960. What are your hobbies?” Dale had a dab of salad dressing on the outer corner of his lips. “Mine are Nintendo, stamps, and the zoo.”

I couldn’t resist. I said, “It sounds like Drew Barrymore is a hobby of yours, too.”

Dale smiled slyly and said, “A girl can’t be a hobby!” Then he said, “When you come to our house, I’ll show you my Classic American Aircraft stamps. I have all of them, but the best is the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing.”

“Mrs. Blackwell, are you and your husband in the area for long?” This came from a wife across the table, but Dale preempted my response by saying, “And the Thunderbolt is real cool, too.”

I said to the woman (I already couldn’t remember her name), “Unfortunately, we fly out tonight, and I’m sorry, because it would be fun to explore. I was just reading about the Bellingrath Gardens.”

“When you’re next here, you ought to go over to the Eastern Shore. We all have places there”—she gestured to the other couples at the table—“and it’s a wonderful place to relax, very quiet. Campaigning must be tiring.”

They were polite, all of them, and they also were clearly irritated that Dale was monopolizing my attention, and that his father and I were allowing it. And I was fully complicit—what could have been more delightful than to sit beside someone brimming with his own interests and enthusiasms, none of which was political, a person who neither knew nor cared who I was beyond the fact that I’d heard of Drew Barrymore and was willing to talk about her? No one else at the table could compete with Dale’s volubility, his lusty and fearless ingestion of the food on his plate, his ingenuous questions and announcements; I was enchanted. The others at the table soon gave up on me, and several times after I’d been left to conspire with Dale, I noticed his father glancing with amusement at us, and I wondered if he hadn’t brought his son as a sort of joke, an antidote to the stuffiness rampant at these fund-raisers. There was something fearless about Mr. Tasket, too; despite his earlier demurrals when Dale had sat by me, he seemed unapologetic about having brought his mentally disabled adult son to a fancy dinner.

When our entrées came, I wasn’t particularly hungry and ended up offering my sirloin to Dale, which he accepted with great pleasure. He said, “Are you sure?” He ate my dessert, too, a strawberry shortcake.

It was about ten minutes into Charlie’s speech when Dale patted my arm and said, “Miss Alice, do you like tic-tac-toe?” He was speaking in a normal volume, not whispering, and at our table and the tables near ours, people looked at him. Leon Tasket, appearing not particularly perturbed, leaned in from Dale’s other side and murmured something to his son. Dale’s expression became big-eyed and chastened, and he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his substantial belly.

I reached into my purse and found a paper napkin and a blue ball-point pen. I drew a crosshatch, placed an X in the upper-right square, and nudged the napkin toward Dale. His face lit up, and when it seemed he might speak again, I brought my finger to my lips. Onstage, Charlie was saying, “As I travel around this great land of ours, I hear a consistent refrain: Bring integrity back to the White House.” As always, on each word, he pounded the podium once, and as always, loud applause followed. Dale drew an O in the center square. “Bring integrity back to the White House,” Charlie repeated. “Now, everyone here knows what that means, but I’d like to illustrate the principle by telling y’all a story.” I drew an X in the lower-right square, and Dale blocked me by placing an O between my two X’s. “Not long ago, I visited a school in Ocala, Florida. A fifth-grade boy, a little guy named Timmy Murphy, raised his hand and said to me, ‘Governor Blackwell, isn’t the president of the United States supposed to be a hero? But my parents say the man currently occupying the Oval Office isn’t heroic at all.’ ” Again, sustained applause. I drew an X in the middle of the right column, and Dale made a frustrated exhalation; this time, I’d blocked him. I especially detested this part of Charlie’s stump speech both because of how self-aggrandizing it was and because it was so improbable that a fifth-grader would use the words currently or occupying. “Well, Timmy,” Charlie said, and Dale drew an O in the top box of the center column, “I’m not Superman, and I’m not Spider-Man, but if your mom and dad vote for me, I promise you that courage and morality will reign again in Washington, D.C.” Here, the applause was thunderous. Our game had ended in a stalemate, and Dale quickly drew another crosshatch. The next game also ended in a stalemate, as did the three after that—by this point, Charlie was deep into talking about being a tolerant traditionalist—and then Dale beat me, four more stalemates occurred, and I beat him; the paper napkin was by then more blue than white, and our crosshatches had shrunk with each round to fit in the limited space. Charlie was finished speaking, and the local party chair was emphasizing the importance of supporting all Republicans in this year’s tight races. A standing ovation concluded the speeches, and as it tapered off, Dale said, “You should give me your address, and I’ll write you letters.”

“Miss Alice is a busy lady,” Leon Tasket protested, and I said, “I’d love it if you wrote to me.”

I printed my first and last name and the address for the governor’s mansion in Madison on the back of one of Mr. Tasket’s business cards. Just before I was pulled away for photos, Dale hugged me. He said, “After you and your daughter rent The Wedding Singer, then you need to rent Poison Ivy. Drew is only seventeen in that, but it’s a real good one. You have pretty blue eyes, Miss Alice.”

“Why, thank you,” I said.

I did indeed receive a letter from Dale after two weeks, written on lined paper from a spiral notebook, the fringy edge still attached. Despite being punctuation-free and erratically capitalized, it was perfectly comprehensible: Only three Months until Charlie’s Angels Movie comes out are you Excited cause I am you should Come Back to Alabama you could go Alligator Hunting with Me and Dad . . . I wrote a reply by hand the next day, on the stationery that had my name embossed at the top; I mentioned that I had been traveling with my husband, that we had most recently visited Ohio and Pennsylvania, that I was reading a biography of former first lady Abigail Adams, and that although I hadn’t had an opportunity to rent The Wedding Singer, I was looking forward to seeing it. After returning from Mobile, I’d told my staff in Madison to watch for any correspondence from Dale and to make sure I personally saw it rather than it being answered with the standard letter and a black-and-white photo of Snowflake and me. Because I’d made a point of explaining to my aides who Dale was, when no follow-up letter from him arrived, I had to conclude that it was less likely it had been lost than that he’d never written it. I was disappointed, and I have since wondered several times how he’s doing; whenever I see that Drew Barrymore has a new movie out, I think of him.

That evening in Mobile, in the van headed to the airport, Hank, who’d been sitting at the table adjacent to ours, said, “The retard took a real shine to you, huh, Alice?”

“What retard?” Charlie asked.

A few weeks later, Leon Tasket made a donation of eight hundred thousand dollars to the RNC, but rather than feeling triumphant about this development, I was a little sad—it was as if my delight in Mr. Tasket’s son had, like so much else in politics, merely been for show. That I had played tic-tac-toe with a fellow audience member during my husband’s stump speech was written up in Time magazine and has been repeated in many articles since, a little nugget about me that, in the absence of more substantive disclosures, is assumed to reveal something meaningful about my personality.