Part 6 (1/2)

We left Midland, but never truly left it behind. And it invariably found us. After George was elected governor, he chose as his official desk an old oak piece that had belonged to his father. He was sure it had been his dad's congressional desk, and George had a bra.s.s plaque made identifying it as the desk of Rep. George H. W. Bush. The desk was installed at the Texas Capitol, and when his father first saw it, he laughed. That desk had never been to Congress. A young oilman named George H. W. Bush had bought it for a hundred dollars, secondhand, on a sidewalk in downtown Midland.

I arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton a day early and headed for the vice president's residence, to spend one night before I was to move us into a town house that George and I had bought near American University. My good friend Lynn Munn flew up to help me move in. Lynn is the sort of person who makes sure every box is unpacked and every picture is hung before anyone goes to bed that first night. We were up at 6:00 a.m. I went to the bathroom to put in my contacts and promptly washed one down the drain. I shut off the water immediately and knew that the contact was probably caught in the trap. We called the Navy stewards who manage the vice president's residence. They said perhaps they could call a plumber or someone else to help later in the morning. Gampy heard all the commotion and, still in his bathrobe, went downstairs, got a wrench, came back up to the bathroom, and proceeded to take off the trap and rescue my contact. Lynn later said that any man who would take a sink trap off for his daughter-in-law at six in the morning without a word of complaint deserved to be president.

We moved into our town house, and George began working on the campaign.

After his father lost the Iowa primary, George flew into D.C. exhausted and, dropping his bag in the hall, said, ”Well, we may be going home soon. But just where is home?”

Gampy won New Hamps.h.i.+re, and we stayed. But we stayed on a bit like squatters, aware that every day was temporary, that November would come, and soon after, win or lose, we would return to Texas. We were tourists that year, visiting the Lincoln Memorial in the Friday night dark, heading across the Potomac to George Was.h.i.+ngton's Mount Vernon home on Sat.u.r.days. We ice-skated downtown with the girls, watching them spin and fall in the now vanished rink near the old Willard Hotel. Once Jenna spun and crashed into a wall in front of a reporter for The Dallas Morning News The Dallas Morning News.

The girls were five years old when we arrived, and I enrolled them in the local public school, Horace Mann Elementary, where their teacher was Ms. Davis, an AfricanAmerican woman from Midland, Texas. We walked to school each morning, past the cherry blossoms and the dogwoods and the flowering trees that leafed out each spring.

Many of our Texas friends came to visit and brought their children, and George and I would chauffeur them around for weekend tours, until we knew the monuments and memorials and the Mount Vernon gardens almost as well as the cross streets in Midland.

Because Gampy, as vice president, was also president of the Senate, we regularly toured the Capitol and ate in the Senate Dining Room, where prices seemed to have frozen circa 1962 and where my father, during a visit, gladly reached for the check. We even got that coveted state dinner invitation to an evening in honor of President Chaim Herzog of Israel. But what was more unexpected for George and me was the relations.h.i.+p we formed with his parents amid the whirling chaos of a presidential campaign.

When I married George, I had thought that I would be embraced by his mother every bit as much as he was embraced by mine. I had planned on being more a daughter than a daughter-in-law, but Barbara Bush had five children of her own. She was their defender first. What I came to see ultimately as our bond was that we both loved George, and the depth of our love was what we had in common. Beyond that, we had little contact. I saw her during those harried Maine vacations, when the onslaught of adult children, their spouses and companions, and then their children often drove her to distraction--she is only partially kidding when she says that, when all else fails, follow the directions on the aspirin bottle: take two and keep away from children. I look back now through alb.u.m photographs, at everyone grouped together, smiling gamely for the camera, and someone always looks as if he or she is about to cry. In a number of photos, the person on the verge of tears is Bar.

But from the start, she was also ferociously tart-tongued. She's never s.h.i.+ed away from saying what she thinks, right up through Gampy's jump out of an airplane on his eighty-fifth birthday, in June of 2009. He was set to land on the lawn next to St. Ann's Church in Kennebunkport, and Bar said, ”If the jump doesn't go well, it will be convenient. We can wheel him straight into his eternal resting place.” I was with Bar in the mid-1990s when people would come up to us in a store or a restaurant in Kennebunkport and say, ”I know you,” thinking they'd met her somewhere, and her response was ”No, you don't. You don't know me.” She's even managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment. Once, one of them, Lois Betts, called her on it, and Bar was truly chagrined.

After our wedding had pa.s.sed, I barely heard from Bar, until 6:30 one weekday morning a few weeks after George's losing campaign. His brother Neil had moved to Midland to help out on the race and, when the election ended, had returned to Houston, leaving most of his belongings behind. Now Neil was off to graduate school, and Bar wanted me to collect Neil's things, box them up, and s.h.i.+p them to Houston. With that, she was off the phone. I had my marching orders, and I was fuming as I drove around locating Neil's things in the places he had stayed, as well as rounding up big boxes from the supermarket. There were no pack-and-s.h.i.+p stores back then. I gathered, folded, and boxed everything, and carted it all to the bus station, irritation was.h.i.+ng over me. Of course, here I was, the girl who had longed for brothers and sisters, who had always vowed that I would never be like my friends and complain about a sibling, and now I was doing precisely that.

So I was a bit apprehensive about moving to Was.h.i.+ngton, where we would be living within walking distance of the senior Bushes and George would effectively be working for his dad.

But a decade after my marriage, Bar Bush and I finally got to know each other.

We both loved reading and shared our favorite books. One morning, just as I had finished reading a review of a new art exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, my phone rang. It was Bar, who had just read the same review and wanted to rush down and see it. By 9:00 a.m., we were out the door, en route to the gallery. And Sundays became our family days. No matter how frenzied the campaign trail, both Bushes made sure that they were home together in the vice president's residence each Sunday afternoon. George and the girls and I would walk over for Sunday lunch. After years apart, George's parents got to know their son as an adult, and we had a window of time for us to be a small family, two people from each generation. The girls got to know their

grandparents not as flickering images on a TV screen but as people who loved them.

Gampy pushed them in a wooden swing hung from a tree on the grounds, and on rare nights off, he and Bar volunteered to babysit. At last, I saw Bar for who she is, a funny, warm woman and a mother who is devoted to her husband and her children. Away from that overflowing Maine summer house and the conventions and inaugurations, those high-profile, high-pitched events where Gampy's political career was on the line, Bar and I came to know and love each other.

We still had plenty of high-profile events to come. The entire family gathered for the Republican convention in New Orleans, where Jenna and Barbara had the most fun swimming in the big hotel pool and watching Ghostbusters Ghostbusters on the hotel television. That on the hotel television. That fall, we all hit the campaign trail. The girls and I joined Gampy for one trip on Halloween. In between plane stops, the crew cued scary music over the loudspeaker, and Barbara was dressed as a vampire, Jenna as a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. They trick-ortreated down the aisles among the unprepared press corps, who dug into their pockets to hand out pennies, pieces of gum, and a stray Life Saver or Cert for their sacks.

After eight years of Reagan-Bush, it was now George H. W. Bush at the top alone. Gampy won his election. I remember Jeb Bush saying a year or two later, ”How great is this country, that it could elect a man as fine as our dad to be its president?”

For George and me, it was time to find a new place to call home.

When we married, George could recite the lineup from leading major-league baseball teams circa 1950. He can still do it today. His great-uncle had been a part owner of the Mets, and while George worked in oil, he had dreamed in baseball. One of his favorite movies was Brewster McCloud, Brewster McCloud, simply because the lead character lived in an simply because the lead character lived in an apartment in the walls of the Houston Astrodome. One evening, he burst into our house in Midland and announced that the Astros were for sale for $17 million. But George couldn't trade oil leases for the Astros the way he had for furniture, and what he had to trade wouldn't have gotten us much beyond a couple of pairs of season tickets. His baseball dreams were lived over the airwaves, and the Astros tortured us from the sidelines. When they made the playoffs, George would race home from work and we'd sit on our bed and watch the Astros raise our hopes and then dash them, inning after inning, game by game. Growing up in Midland, I did not follow baseball all that much; my father had bet on football, and for years, Texas didn't have its own baseball teams. People rooted for Chicago or St. Louis, franchises in other places. But my dad did take me to watch the Lee High School team when it made the state champions.h.i.+ps in Austin, and baseball games were a kind of background music to our life in Midland. In the sweltering summer heat, there was always a radio humming in a corner with the game. But it was with George that I learned to love the intricacies of baseball.

One of George's partners in the oil business was a man named Bill DeWitt, whose family had owned the Cincinnati Reds back when owning a baseball team was more of a mom-and-pop business. When George and Bill got together, they would spin a world in which they owned a baseball team and could sit in the stands to cheer for it. Like Kevin Costner in the middle of those rows of Iowa corn, they had their own little field of dreams.

When the Texas Rangers came up for sale in the late fall of 1988, Bill DeWitt was on the phone.

Suddenly, he and George were putting together a group to buy the team, and we were moving to Dallas. It wasn't politics; it was sports and a game we now both loved.

The first thing I put in my desk calendar each year was a list of the Texas Rangers' home games, and we sat in the stands for nearly every one.

There is a loveliness to baseball that is only found in a stadium, that never quite conveys across the coaxial cables and pixels of a television screen. In a world of hyperspeeds, the game is long and slow and methodical until some explosive hit sends the players on the field into utter pandemonium and brings the crowd to its feet. And baseball was one of the few activities that could draw us outside in the summer. Dallas summers are woven out of crus.h.i.+ng heat, weeks of one-hundred-plus-degree days that begin cooking the concrete the first minute after sunrise. Except for those brave or robust enough to work outside, most of the city moves among air-conditioned homes, cars, and office buildings, where the climate is always a preset seventy-two degrees. Baseball forces a person to confront the elements and the weather; it forced us into nature. And at night, under the floodlights, sometimes a brief touch of cool would descend, and the innings would drift past us as we sat behind the batter's box. I could talk to George, talk to the people sitting around us, and watch the game. In the stands, we cemented rich friends.h.i.+ps with our partners, Rusty and Deedie Rose, Tom and Susanne Schieffer, Roland and Lois Betts, Tom and Andi Bernstein, and our cousins Craig and Debbie Stapleton. In the summers, I loved to take the girls. Often, by the seventh inning, they would retreat to an unsold suite above, and when the sounds of ”Cotton-Eyed Joe” came over the loudspeaker for the seventh-inning stretch, I would turn and look up at them, holding hands and dancing the two-step in that empty box.

Those nights were like prolonged exhalations, as we looked out on the gra.s.s and the mound and the sandy baselines.

George was pa.s.sionate about getting more fans to the games. He spent the offseasons traveling to small Texas towns to talk to local chambers of commerce and Rotary clubs, to make the Rangers their home team. The Rangers put George's face on a baseball card, and little boys asked him to sign their cards, and George would always say, ”Where are you from?” waiting to hear Plano or Corsicana, or Waco, or Texarkana, but they almost always answered ”Texas.” They were just Texans.

I settled into Dallas life, decorating our three-bedroom ranch house with a little converted garage for guests in the back. My days were filled with the girls and their friends and activities. I devoted hours to Preston Hollow Elementary School, which Barbara and Jenna attended, signing up for the PTA and driving car pool with other moms on the surrounding streets. The parents of our daughters' friends became our good friends as well. We spent our Sunday mornings wors.h.i.+ping at Highland Park United Methodist Church, at the edge of the SMU campus and where I had once taught a Sunday school cla.s.s during college. I volunteered to help my friend Nancy Brinker with fundraising for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. For several years, I chaired the invitation committee for her annual luncheon gala in Dallas, which was probably the easiest job in the organization because attendance at the lunch was so coveted that people RSVPed for it long before we mailed any invitations. I was also invited to serve on the Dallas Zoological Society and Aquarium board and the Friends of the Dallas Public Library.

Yet while we lived a very regular day-to-day life in Dallas, our eyes were never far from George's dad in Was.h.i.+ngton. George was a.s.signed a Secret Service detail; we spent Christmas in the woods of Camp David, and our names were now on the guest lists for lofty state occasions. But for the family of a president, there is another side. In August of 1990, the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. George's dad had suddenly become a wartime president. We agonized for him. I can remember standing clammy and afraid in my kitchen, cooking dinner as the television showed President Bush announcing that he was sending troops to Saudi Arabia in response to the Iraqi invasion. We saw his lined and weary face at Christmas. Not long after, the media reported that the U.S. military was s.h.i.+pping tens of thousands of body bags to the Middle East. Even the quick victory and the Iraqi army's capitulation in Kuwait did not dim the private agonies he had faced sending young men and women into combat in harsh, unforgiving sands halfway across the world.

After the Gulf War, Gampy was wildly popular. But the conflict had taken a toll.

That spring, like Bar before him, he would develop Graves' disease, a thyroid condition.

They both wondered if it was caused by some contaminant at the aging vice president's house. Gampy's mother was in faltering health, and he had a primary challenger in Pat Buchanan. The Democrats nominated the young Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton. But that was not the only opposition. The Texas billionaire Ross Perot joined the race as an independent. The epicenter of his campaign was Dallas. Perot opened a campaign office in an empty savings and loan building on a corner of Northwest Highway, directly in the line of sight from George's office. George would look out his window and see people we knew, people who were our friends and his dad's friends, walking into Ross Perot's building. He watched them walk in and essentially abandon his dad.

Day after day, we saw George's father mocked and mischaracterized until we couldn't recognize the man we knew. Even the ballpark was not immune. It had always been the one place that was not political. But during the fall campaign, when we came to sit in the front row by the batter's box, someone on the other side of the field dropped a painted sheet over the infield wall with nasty comments about President Bush. An usher removed it, but the damage had been done. That moment was a harbinger of other, larger things.

With the vote split three ways, in November 1992, Bill Clinton was elected the forty-second president of the United States.

We had our last Christmas at the White House. Aside from a quick trip to visit George's brother Marvin or his sister, Doro, I did not expect to see Was.h.i.+ngton again.

George signed up for the January 24 Houston Marathon. As the District of Columbia swept up after the Clinton inaugural revels, he was one of five thousand runners looping around Houston. When the marathon was over, a new thought began to jell in his mind: the Texas governor's race. The election was more than twenty months away. He announced his candidacy in November of that same year, 1993. It was almost a mirror of his father's race. Ann Richards, the inc.u.mbent governor, was extremely popular. George was something of a known name but a political unknown. But he believed she was vulnerable. He based his campaign on education. I listened, and I believed in him. From the moment he raised it with me, I never doubted that he would win.

As painful as it was for his family, George H. W. Bush's loss had finally freed his own children to say what they thought and to go after their own objectives. George's brother Jeb was running to be governor of Florida. Both brothers had uphill battles in

their election races, but both believed deeply in the responsibility of public service and were also fascinated with politics and public policy. And both were going into the family business. They were interested in politics because they so admired their father, and politics had been his vocation. Just as some sons follow their dads into medicine or carpentry or business, they were following their father into his main profession, public service and political office.

Now, in addition to Rangers home games, our lives were fixed on the lodestar of the Southwest Airlines flight schedule, from the first breakneck race of wheels along the tarmac toward takeoff in the morning to the last screech of rubber and reverse thrust at night. George was campaigning all over Texas, but because many of the events were in the day and so much of the travel involved flying, he was usually home for dinner, lending a refres.h.i.+ng bit of normalcy to our lives. To reach the smaller towns, he flew on a twin-engine King Air plane with four seats, one of which was a bench. The final seat in the back doubled as the plane's toilet, and after George received the nomination, that was where staffers or Texas state troopers had to sit on the cramped flights that leapt and dove amid the frequent turbulence. I did events as well, speaking to women's groups all around Dallas and sometimes joining George on the statewide hops. And when I wasn't his surrogate, I was the mother of two eleven-year-old girls, with their myriad of activities, friends, and preadolescent dramas. All the while, back in Midland, my father was slowly dying.

In the winter of 1974, Johnny's Bar-B-Q had developed a leak in the roof. Daddy climbed up a rickety ladder to see if Johnny could pour a concrete roof, and when he stepped back on the ladder to come down, it gave way. Daddy fell and broke his ankle so badly that the doctor on call at the Midland hospital told him he would heal faster if the foot and ankle were amputated because the ankle is such a low circulation point and difficult to mend. Daddy kept the foot, and it did heal, but his leg was never the same.

Seven years later, he had the lung surgery, and a few years after that, the doctors found a second spot on his other lobe, so he had another operation, although this time they didn't need to remove so much lung. He quit smoking then, but I can still remember the day when he waited in the car while Mother, Jenna, Barbara, and I went to do an errand at a shopping center in Dallas. We came out and found him dozing, and as he slept, his fingers had drifted up to his s.h.i.+rt pocket and were trying to lift out an imaginary cigarette.

He was dreaming of his tobacco and of the feel of the paper roll poised at the edge of his hand.

Mother and Daddy still came to see us all those years. They flew up to Was.h.i.+ngton or over to Dallas, where they stayed in our little guesthouse out back. On one of their last visits, I was standing at my kitchen sink, where the window gazed across our square of fenced backyard, and I saw them slowly making their way in from the guesthouse. I watched as, at the exact same moment, both of their faces lifted toward the sky. Grinning, laughing, they turned to each other, eyes catching, and then they looked up again. They were happy. No sadness ever unraveled their happiness. In the tiniest thing, they could find joy. That morning it was our cat, Cowboy, who had climbed up on our roof. And they entered the kitchen smiling.

What Mother noticed first was that Daddy could no longer fill out the bank deposit slips. He got all kinds of small checks--$1.50 royalties from an interest in some

West Texas well, a rent check from a bus station that he had built in Odessa--stacks of checks for minuscule amounts, which were of great comfort to a man from the Depression. And he had always enjoyed going to the bank and depositing them, until the paperwork became unmanageable. He would stare at the lines on the forms, a look of confusion was.h.i.+ng over his face. Mother began to make the deposits for him. Then, one day, Daddy walked in the house, set his car keys on the table, and announced that he was not going to drive again. He quit forever that afternoon. For years his greatest fear had been that he would hit someone else's child. He would not risk that for a few more outings behind the wheel. But now, all the driving fell to my mother. If she did not take him out, he would not leave the house. She resigned from her ladies' bridge club, which met in the afternoons, and began to ferry my father around, just as he had done with her on all those Sunday drives and the expeditions to watch birds, her binoculars in her hands. She drove him to Midland's indoor mall, where they could walk undisturbed. She drove him to Johnny's to see his friends. And then he began to fall.

He would get up and start to walk, but it was no longer a walk, it was a rickety shuffle, as if the electrical impulses in his brain had begun to misfire. He would move a few steps, and then, instead of going forward, he would start to back up. Then he would topple back onto the ground. He was a large man and Mother was tiny, and she had a very hard time getting him up. Sometimes, she would call her neighbor across the street, and Trey would come, wrap his arms around Daddy's torso, and pull him off the floor.