Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (37 page)

Perhaps to preserve what he thought of as my imperiled social standing, Jim had taken it upon himself to schedule an appointment with a real estate agent who was going to show me apartments for rent. Having nothing better to do and no house that was as yet mine, I went along for the ride. It was October 7, the day we might otherwise have been celebrating our fourth anniversary. But instead we were looking at apartments where Jacqueline and I might start living our lives apart from Jim. Jimmy Kennedy had suggested we go to dinner that evening. So, after looking at a number of apartments, we met them for dinner. It was so awkward. There was no mention of our anniversary, because we were hardly talking to each other. In bed that evening, I cried.

The next day, I had my first meeting with my divorce attorney. After interviewing several lawyers a few days earlier, I’d decided that I wanted to be represented by John Post, a decent man and a competent man. I was ready to take the first step toward divorce, but I just couldn’t make myself take it on October 7, the anniversary of my wedding. Meanwhile, November 15 was only five and a half weeks away, and I still didn’t have a place to live.

It was the night of the first debate between John Kerry and George Bush. Presidential debates were always engrossing to me, and this one was no exception. But it was also especially painful, steeped in so many feelings and memories. Less than three months earlier, Jim, Jacqueline, and I had been in Boston at the Democratic National Convention, where Jacqueline had charmed and amused delegates in our midst with her announcement that she was going to be voting for Kerry. Tonight I didn’t even know where Jim was, and I knew that we would never watch an election debate together again.

I had tentatively planned to watch the debates with the Kennedys and another friend, but when Lori called me, I was looking at furniture for a home I didn’t have, after having come from a lawyer who would help me end a marriage I didn’t have and maybe had never had. I was having such a bad day that I said to Lori, jokingly, “I want to be put out of my misery. Now!”

“Who’s with you?” she asked. “Which trooper?”

“Kevin, why?”

“Well, just tell him to shoot you. That should take care of it.”

I turned to Kevin. “Why don’t you just give me your gun so I can shoot myself?”

Kevin, who had obviously not been following the conversation, was momentarily startled and turned around to look at me. When he saw I was kidding, he relaxed. “Sorry, I can’t do that,” he said, smiling.

Not only were my days with Jim numbered, but so were my days with the troopers who had accompanied me everywhere for the past two and a half years. In a month’s time, I would once again be grumbling about gas prices, bad drivers, and traffic jams—and would no longer be able to make a fast getaway by turning on the flashing lights and sirens. My brother Paul, who had always taken care of me in a way Jim never had, was facilitating my reentry by bringing home with him a car for me to test-drive.

The car was parked in front of his home when I arrived. I drove it around the block twice. It was fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to make a decision that was such a big acknowledgment of the new life that lay ahead. I’d be in the driver’s seat in ways I didn’t think I was ready for. Besides, I didn’t even have a driveway to park it in.

Later, watching the first Kerry-Bush debate with friends, I invited Kevin to come in and watch with us. I always felt bad keeping the troopers waiting for hours, sometimes sitting outside in a car, so I often invited them to join me, especially if I was spending time with my family and friends. He accepted the invitation, and we watched the debate.

The following day, I was inducted as a Lady of the Order of Santiago, an ancient and now-ceremonial Roman Catholic military order, the Spanish equivalent of the Ladies of the Knights of Malta. It should have been a very joyful and proud day, but it was a very sad one. I wasn’t in the mood to celebrate, so I didn’t invite anyone to the induction. Only Nina and Tom, my trooper-driver for the day, accompanied me. It was a long but beautiful mass, and as I watched the other inductees with their spouses or significant others, I grew even sadder.

THE NEXT DAY, IT
was announced that Jim would join Ray Lesniak’s law firm. I’d known it would happen, because Ray had told me himself. But the only reason I knew it
had
happened was that I read about it in the papers.

After that, the days remaining at Drumthwacket sped by. Right after I retained my divorce lawyer, I finally closed on my house and hired contractors, who quickly began to work on it. I had hoped to pull off a miracle that would enable me to move in on November 15, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. Instead I was going to have to move back into my parents’ house temporarily.

My last hurrah went on for almost two weeks. It began with a Halloween party at the beach house, with all the guests in costumes. I’d like to say that I came dressed as First Lady, since that was soon going to be little more than a costume, but I didn’t really. I came dressed as a flapper—or, as my daughter proudly told everyone, “a showgirl.” My thirty-eighth birthday was a few days later, on November 5, and I planned a big party for myself to take place on the twelfth, three days before moving day. When I told Jim about the party, he suggested that I turn it into a sort of thank-you party for everyone I’d worked with as First Lady. “My First Lady days are over,” I said. “This party is about my family and friends.” And on that day, dozens of friends and relatives came to celebrate with me at Drumthwacket.

For many it was a first visit, and for all it was the last. Ring out the old, ring in the new. It was as sad and as celebratory as the closing shots of a Fellini movie. Everyone who mattered to me was there, except for my mother. She said life at Drumthwacket with Jim had made me too sad, and so it made her sad too. She said she just couldn’t bring herself to come to Drumthwacket or be under the same roof as my husband. I told her I understood. In the meantime, the husband in question took it upon himself to make a birthday speech on my behalf, thanking everyone for coming.

During my final three days, I tried to ready myself to move on without Jim, my mind crowded with one image after another of every scary and overwhelming moment that might lie ahead. Most of all, I feared that I would be hounded and surrounded by the press, unable to protect myself or Jacqueline. Beyond the walls of Fortress Drumthwacket, there would be no place to run, no place to hide. Already, they knew where to find us. One day soon after my birthday, my mom had called to tell me she’d stopped by my new house and found three television crews parked outside my home, close enough to leave tire tracks on my front lawn. “How can you move into that house alone with the baby with those people out there?” she’d asked. A few days later I went by the house myself. While I was inside, a reporter posing as an advertising salesperson walked in, perhaps to get a glimpse of me. I hid in another room, signaling the trooper with me to get rid of her.

Three days from now, there wouldn’t be a trooper. Jim would have a transition budget, as all departing governors do, but I would not, and therefore I couldn’t think about hiring bodyguards, not even temporarily. To see what options I had, I set up a meeting with Rick Fuentes, the state police superintendent in charge of all state troopers, to talk about my fears. A compassionate man, he vowed to do whatever he could to help keep me and Jacqueline safe, including speaking to the chief of police in the town I was moving to and giving me all his own contact information, so I could get in touch with him twenty-four hours a day. I felt better knowing that in an emergency I could reach him.

Most devastating for me was thinking how this cataclysm would affect Jacqueline. She had already registered the stresses around her, hard as we’d tried to muffle them in order to protect her. Enormous changes lay ahead, and yet there was no way I could prepare her. Even with the few weeks’ semi-reprieve while we waited at my parents’ house for our new home to be ready, the shock to her system would be enormous. Her father would no longer be part of her daily life, and neither would the troopers and household staff whom she thought of as extended family. They would of course remain at Drumthwacket, as would almost all the furnishings she’d known her whole life. All that was coming with us to our new home was Jacqueline’s bed and dresser, and our dishes, utensils, and two couches.

About a week before we left Drumthwacket, I had enacted a rite of passage that I knew would be the most difficult of all. When Jim moved out of Drumthwacket, he still wore his wedding band. I had put it on his finger myself four years earlier to seal my promise to love and honor him for the rest of my life. I had kept my vow to him, and so the ring on his finger still reflected the truth of my vows.

I remembered back to just over four years earlier when Jim slipped a ring onto my finger as I looked into his eyes, while he made a commitment to love and honor me for the rest of our days. He hadn’t. And so the ring on my hand did not reflect the truth, only his mouthing of a vow that he knew, even as he said the words, to be a hoax. Amid trembling and tears, and with a tinge of panic, I slid the ring off my finger.

21. MOVING ON

EVEN THAT LAST NIGHT,
Jim and I shared a bed, although by then my body was as blind to his as to a stranger’s on an elevator. Since August, we had become increasingly estranged—never fighting but barely speaking. Some marriages die in fire, some in ice. Ours died in ice.

It was November 15, 2004: a Monday, and my mother’s birthday. By the time I woke up that day—our last at Drumthwacket—Jim was out of bed and getting dressed. I had determined that I was going to try to make this day as normal as possible for myself, though nothing at all about it was normal, so I switched on
Good Morning America
for a few minutes. Then I got up and headed for the kitchen. The movers had already arrived. I could hear them a few rooms away. The electric drip coffeemaker I’d used every morning for the past two years was still on the counter (it would be staying), so I started to make myself a strong cup of coffee.

Waiting for the coffee to brew, I absentmindedly began to clean out my junk drawer, scooping up a few handfuls of pens, batteries, and rubber bands and dumping them into a Ziploc bag. I lingered for a moment over a small silver-plated picture frame, an extra left from those we’d given to our wedding guests. Meanwhile Jim breezed by, getting ready to go as if this were just another morning. I’m sure the magnitude of the day was obvious to him as well, but his easy demeanor, however forced, was nevertheless quite a feat.

“I’m going now,” Jim said offhandedly, and barely pausing. “I’ll talk to you later.”

He didn’t tell me where he was going, though I knew it wasn’t to the statehouse, since I’d read that Richard Codey, Democratic leader of the state senate, had been sworn in the night before and was eager to get going. Later I read that Jim spent the day in Manhattan conferring with an editor, even though he’d told me he wasn’t going to write a book. I watched him go through the door, and then he was gone.

I thought I was beyond being shocked by Jim, but I was shocked all the same. That was it? No farewell acknowledgment of the day, no I’m-sorry-it’s-come-to-this?
Never mind
, I told myself as I poured myself a mug of coffee.
Concentrate on today. Your job is to get through today. You are not going to break down. Not an option.

Jim had made his farewell speech to the people of New Jersey the previous week, giving them more of a farewell than he’d given me, actually. I only knew about it because among the newspaper clippings that were still coming through on my office fax every morning there was one about this speech. A few weeks earlier, Jim had alluded to the speech he would be making and said, vaguely, maybe I should be there, maybe I should say something. He didn’t bring it up again. The night before Jim left office, his cabinet members had come to Drumthwacket for a farewell dinner in the official dining room downstairs. I could hear the merriment below, but Jim didn’t ask me to come down, and I didn’t offer to.

My role as First Lady would end that night at midnight, and I needed to say my own good-byes. Two weeks earlier, I’d sat down at the computer and begun jotting some notes. Originally the
New York Times
had wanted an exclusive, but after they read it, they declined to run it at all. I guess it wasn’t juicy enough. Instead I gave it to the
Star-Ledger
. It was my only public statement following Jim’s resignation, and I’d said nothing publicly since.

“Tomorrow is my last day as New Jersey’s First Lady,” I’d written for the article to be published November 14. “It is a bittersweet moment in my life—one that I greet with sadness, but also a sense of fulfillment. It has been a great honor and a great joy to serve my fellow New Jerseyans, and, simply stated, I will miss all of you.” I went on to mention the issues, mostly affecting women and children, that I had championed and said I would continue to champion—prematurity; literacy; children’s health care, including obesity; and women’s health care, especially cancer and heart disease. My charity work had helped me through the last months and would, I assumed, helped me through the months ahead. Like many wounded helpers the world over, my work on behalf of people in pain would help me soothe my own.

Jim was gone, and the moving van was outside waiting to move everything I owned. So, coffee in hand, I walked through the rooms of our residence, trying to muster my energy for the day. It didn’t look like a home anymore, and in fact it had been shedding everything that had made it our home for quite a while. Jim had moved his personal furniture a week or two earlier, even the two pink porcelain lamps from his grandmother I’d noticed that first time at his town house.

Jacqueline was now at my parents’, where I would join her later in the day. I was glad that she wasn’t here to see the further stripping-away of her life. The first day the movers went to work on our home, she had been terribly upset when they removed from the walls every milestone moment in our lives—me in my wedding gown, the three of us at Jacqueline’s baptism, a portrait of the three of us hanging in the hallway that separated Jacqueline’s bedroom from ours.