Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (12 page)

“Why don’t we switch shoes,” I challenged, “and let’s see who can’t keep up with whom.”

In the four years that I had known Jim, I had yearned for this kind of extended time alone with him. And it turned out to be everything I’d hoped for. We returned home after a spectacular ten days. I took it as a good start to an excellent marriage, a positive sign of our happy future together. In truth, I’d never been happier. I had just married a man I loved dearly, a man I believed would love and respect me, a man I would build a life with, could grow old with. Who knew that the honeymoon would be over so soon?

7. NEW LIFE

EVERYONE SAYS THAT THE
first year of marriage is particularly hard—a period of adjustment—but it just didn’t feel that way to me. I came back from my honeymoon feeling closer to Jim than I ever had, and I quickly grew comfortable living with him. We enjoyed having each other to discuss the news with in the morning and the day’s events, good or bad, at night. If either one of us had had a hard day, we could see it on the other’s face rather than having to sense a tone of voice on the phone. Also, because most of Jim’s premarital meals had consisted of tepid soup eaten on the go, I wanted him to come back in the evenings to a home-cooked dinner. Sometimes it was just the two of us, other times he arrived with two or three staffers, and on the nights he worked late—which were many—I had a dinner ready to heat up for him.

I began to know him in the small, intimate ways you can only know someone you live with: Jim talked in his sleep; he always wore a T-shirt under his shirt; he never wore the same shirt twice but he might wear the same tie three days in a row. He left the cap off the toothpaste and the milk out of the refrigerator. Jim didn’t really care what the house looked like—the carpet had stains; his walls were in need of a paint job; and his television was twenty years old, which was good enough for his favorite program—
The West Wing
—and for watching tapes and the news.

But we were too busy for home improvements. Jim was campaigning more than ever, and now that I was his wife, I was not only more visible in his campaign but often his surrogate, representing him on the campaign trail. I felt that the people I met campaigning welcomed me warmly, almost as if they were members of a new and vast extended family I’d married into. In fact, the campaign really
was
a large family—Jim’s parents worked hard on his behalf, and I even brought my nieces into it. At one meet-and-greet, my niece Meagan parked herself on a chair near the door, where she proceeded to distribute flyers. “Everybody vote!” she told passersby. “Vote for my Uncle Jimmy!”

One night, Jim came in and told me that he’d been offered $50,000 by a law firm. They would put his name on their letterhead, which would add to their prestige, and in return all he’d have to do was show up once or twice a month.

“What do you think?” he asked me. “Should I accept it?”

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” I said. “People will criticize you, and the press will be down your throat.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It would sure buy lots of trips to Greece,” referring to a vacation we’d recently discussed.

In the end, he turned the job down, as I knew he would. Jim was almost completely indifferent to money. As mayor of Woodbridge, he hadn’t taken a raise in salary for five or six years, and when he became governor, he wouldn’t claim the entire salary he was entitled to either. He was permitted $175,000 but took only $156,000 because the state’s finances were precarious and he wanted to do his part in cutting costs. I thought it was admirable.

Meanwhile Jim and I were in full campaign mode, and it wasn’t going to let up until the day after the election. That meant two or three evenings a week and most of the weekend. Weekends we were out of the house by 7:00
A.M.
, going up and down the state, often driving a couple of hundred miles. Often we weren’t home until 10:00 or midnight.

When we were first back from our honeymoon, everyone, friends and strangers alike, asked to see my wedding ring. Not long after that, another question emerged. Everywhere we went, people wanted to know, “When are you going to have a baby?”

“It’s a little too soon,” I’d respond.

“Oh, but it would be so nice to have a baby around.”

“Are you going to baby-sit?” I asked more than once.

Jim and I had taken the approach that a child would come whenever it came. He was forty-three, and I had turned thirty-four a month after our marriage. Given the demands of the campaign, and given my age, I didn’t think I would get pregnant all that quickly. However, one morning early in April 2001, I opened the refrigerator in our kitchen and was blasted by the overpowering smell of eggs and broccoli. I’d never even noticed that either one
had
a smell. I knew a change in the sense of smell was a sign of pregnancy. Could I be pregnant? My period wasn’t even late.

I wanted to be a mom. I just wasn’t sure that I wanted to be on the way to motherhood right this minute. I knew women who had severe morning sickness, and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to that. Morning sickness, especially if it extended into the afternoon, wouldn’t go over well at a church picnic. By the end of the campaign, I’d be waddling, with thousands of strangers patting my stomach as if I were a character at Disney World.

But I wanted a baby, and Jim did too. I knew that on a very deep level he was still anguished about the fact that his daughter, Morag, had been ripped from his life. More than once, in the middle of the night, Jim had bolted out of bed, still asleep. “Where’s the baby?! Where’s the baby!?” he’d yell in a voice flooded with panic, as he rushed into the bedroom that had been Morag’s. It was a recurring nightmare, a night terror. The anxiety in his voice broke my heart. I’d have to guide him gently back to bed, and in the morning he’d have no recollection that it had happened.

He didn’t have that panic in his voice during his waking life, but I’d seen his reaction when the subject of his daughter came up. One time, we’d been at an event in Woodbridge when one of his constituents approached him.

“Hi there, Jim, how are you doing, and how’s Morag? She must be getting big.”

“Yes, she
is
getting big,” Jim said, attempting to exude a cheer that, to me, barely concealed his sadness. You could
see
the sadness. The subject of Morag wasn’t one he wanted to talk about.

Nevertheless, Jim was also looking forward to our having our own family. Now and then, when we fantasized about what life would be like if Jim won the election, we thought about how wonderful it would be to someday have a toddler of our own running around the governor’s mansion in Princeton.

These thoughts and others milled around in my mind as later that day I went to do our weekly shopping on my way back from work—and added a home pregnancy test to the list. I did the test the minute I arrived home, even before I faced opening the refrigerator to put the groceries away. The result was unmistakable. Sky blue! We were going to have a baby! I was thrilled. But the campaign. Back and forth, my feelings ping-ponged. In the end—no doubt about it—my happiness won out.

I debated whether to tell Jim, who would be arriving home very late after a full day of campaigning, and chose not to say anything that day. By now it was April 4, and in three days—the Saturday ahead—we would be married for six months. I bit my tongue and decided that I would wait those three days because it would be a terrific “semi-anniversary” present.

April 7 was a full day on the campaign trail. We didn’t have a single moment alone until we were back home. Jim was already in bed by the time I climbed in with a greeting card in my hand that made note of our six months of marriage and how happy I’d been during these months. At the bottom of the card, as a way of easing into the news, I’d written some words about “new beginnings and a new life.” Jim read the card, kissed me, and said, “Thank you.”

“So what do you think of what I wrote?” I asked.

He looked a bit puzzled. “It’s very nice and thoughtful.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Am I supposed to say something else?”

“Well, does it make you want to ask any questions?” I said. This wasn’t going quite the way I’d imagined.

“What kind of questions?” I didn’t expect him to guess that I was pregnant, but I thought he might ask what my words meant.

“Well, I guess I’m going to have to tell you straight out.”

Jim had had a long, exhausting day. “Tell me what?” He sounded a little frustrated.

“I’m pregnant!”

“Now?” he said weakly. “This isn’t exactly great timing.”

I felt something in me sink, and my excitement evaporated. “I thought you would be happy!” I said. I wasn’t prepared for this response. I thought he’d be even more excited than I was at the prospect of having a child in the house again. I was deeply stung.

He must have seen the look on my face, because he immediately reached over to touch me. “I am happy, Dina. It’s just that it’s going to be tough during the campaign.”

“I know it is, but what can we do?”

He was silent a few seconds. “Are you sure you’re pregnant?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said, telling him about my newly acute sense of smell, as well as the results of the pregnancy test.

“I’ll call Cliff Lacy tomorrow to ask who he thinks is the best ob-gyn.” Clifton Lacy was the medical director at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and would become the commissioner of the Department of Health in Jim’s administration. Jim knew him well and trusted him to give him a good recommendation. That was fine by me. Having moved from Elizabeth to Woodbridge, I was in the market for a new physician anyhow.

“How are you feeling?” Jim asked when we got up the next morning.

“I feel fine,” I said.

“You have to make sure you take care of yourself,” he said.

“I am,” I said, pleased at his interest.

“You have to make sure you’re eating right and getting enough sleep and taking the right vitamins. . . .”

This was Jim through and through. When presented with any new piece of information, he invariably framed it as a problem (even if it wasn’t) and went in search of a solution. Once he had the solution, he’d faithfully follow it, never looking back. Jim frequently quoted his father on this approach to life: “Have a plan to follow and then follow the plan.” But racing from Problem to Solution, Jim rarely took the time to Proceed Through Feeling. Oh, how I wish he had.

I reflected on this a few years later when, not more than a week or two after Jim’s national confession and long before the dust had settled, I found some sheets of paper on the kitchen table that looked to me like evidence that Jim was planning to write a book. In them, he’d written that he’d married me not for love but for “political reasons.” Even now, I’m not sure that’s true, but I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on this and to wish that he’d just once taken into account his deepest feelings—all of them, no matter how contrary and contradictory they were—before settling on his plan for his life. It would have spared me great pain, and it would have spared him pain too.

But if Jim and I agree on anything, it’s that the best part of our marriage, our best gift to one another and to ourselves, was our daughter, Jacqueline, and so when it came to managing my pregnancy, our “plan” was the same: to do everything in our power to ensure a healthy baby. As someone who worked in a hospital setting and wrote newsletters for pregnant women in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, I already had a trilingual understanding of how a pregnant woman should take care of herself. I was eating healthily, exercising as frequently as my schedule allowed, and, in the biggest concession of all, had given up my half dozen cups of coffee a day.

Meanwhile, with the help of Cliff Lacy, I soon had an appointment with Dr. Charletta Ayers, an ob-gyn practicing in New Brunswick. I liked her right away. She was a woman in her forties, with two young children, one of whom had been premature. I found her to be no-nonsense and direct, traits I’ve always been comfortable with. I knew that many ob-gyns got out of obstetrics as soon as they could, because the hours are grueling, but Dr. Ayers was passionate about her work, day and night. Before I saw Dr. Ayers, the nurse took my history—date of last menstruation and so on. At this point, I hadn’t yet missed a period, so the nurse asked why I thought I was pregnant. When I told her about my home pregnancy test, she was dismissive. “Oh, it’s too early for you to test positive on that.” She looked at me sympathetically, sure that in front of her sat a woman in her mid-thirties so desperate to be pregnant that small delusions might be possible. She came back within a few minutes to tell me that I’d been right after all. Unscientific though this theory is, it has occurred to me that my unusually early awareness that I was pregnant with Jacqueline suggests that her forcefulness was there in her DNA all the way back to her early days as a blastocyte. She has turned out to be a powerful personality, to say the least.

Now that my pregnancy was duly noted in a medical chart, it was official, and that’s what I told Jim. By now, he had grown more comfortable with the idea of our having a child, and he was happy. And now that he was happy, I knew he would want to tell everyone. I didn’t want him to say anything to anybody, at least until the end of the first trimester, but Jim couldn’t keep a secret—at least not
that
secret.

I had another reason for trying to keep it between the two of us, and it was that I wanted my mother and father to be the next to know. They were on vacation in Portugal, and I didn’t want to tell them over the phone. I wanted to see the reaction on their faces when I told them. Besides, whenever my mother calls me from Portugal, which she does daily when she’s there, it’s as if she thinks her voice has to carry across the Atlantic by the sheer force of her lung power. And so she shouts. I didn’t think I could manage a full-volume conversation about gestation.