Spoken from the Heart (18 page)

Campaigning in West Texas is an exercise in retail politics, shaking every hand, knocking on every door. Many mornings, we'd head off to small farm towns where a friend would host a coffee to meet the candidate and invite all of his or her neighbors. We'd arrive, the coffeepots would be set out, along with plates of one hundred home-baked chocolate chip cookies. The morning would pass, and just three or four people in pickup trucks would drop by. George and I would smile and eat through the mounds of cookies as fast as we could.

The Nineteenth Congressional District was a traditionally Democratic district, even if its voters had chosen Republicans for president for the last twenty-five years. Eisenhower and Nixon may have carried Midland, but Congressman Mahon was a Democrat, our governors and our state representatives were Democrats. Across the graphlike lines of its square-grid counties, the sheriffs, the county commissioners, the mayors, every local officeholder was a Democrat. Most people, including my parents, were registered Democrats, and the Democratic primary usually mattered more than the general election. As George H. W. Bush used to joke when he started the Republican Party in Midland in the 1950s, only three people voted in the Republican primary, Barbara Bush, himself, and a drunk Democrat who had wandered into the wrong side of the polling place.

George knew all of this. He has an amazing intuitive grasp of politics, not just the people aspect of it but the numbers, the vote totals that a candidate needed in each part of the district to win. He understood the science of politics in a way that was quite sophisticated for a candidate in 1978. But he had been working in politics for years. Beyond his dad's races, he'd handled Gerald Ford's presidential run in Midland County in 1976, and he had worked for candidates in Florida and Alabama. From the start, George knew that the numbers were stacked against him, but he also knew that the Nineteenth was a conservative district with an open seat. The election could be very close. It was a "what the heck, why not" run for George. We both knew that we could just as easily live in a Midland ranch house for the rest of our lives as we could move to a Georgetown town house, the kind of place where I imagined that all bright young congressmen and senators resided.

But first we had to make it through the primary.

Because the district was large and sparse, candidates went out to meet the people, and all five of the candidates, the two Democrats, Kent Hance and Morris Sheets, and the three Republicans--George, Jim Reece, and Joe Hickox--would cross paths almost every week. Most of the time it was at local forums, held on the lawns of the county courthouses, the same courthouses that teenage boys and girls would cruise past in endless circles on a Saturday night.

It was in one of these towns, Levelland, Texas, where the land lay every bit as flat as the name, that I gave my first speech, a few months after George's famous pledge to me that I would never have to give a speech. Not ever. It was the only promise he made to me that he ever broke.

George couldn't be at this particular candidate forum, so I went in his place and sat in a folding chair with all the other candidates in front of the courthouse. A local official introduced me, and I got up to give my speech. I planted myself behind the podium, grateful for the heavy, thick wood because my legs were shaking. And then I looked up. Everyone in the audience and even the other candidates were nodding their heads, encouraging me the entire time. When I finished speaking, I wasn't particularly eager to do it again, but it also wasn't nearly as bad as I had anticipated. In fact, it wasn't much different from reading a story to my students. People have an image of a librarian as someone who says, "Shh," but a children's librarian talks all the time and is constantly trying to engage students by reading and telling stories. Suddenly, all my old story hours had a very different use. Out on the campaign trail, I discovered that politics is really about people, and even though I was more reserved than George, I liked meeting the oilmen, the farmers, the moms, and the store owners. I wanted to be with them and listen to their stories.

During the long months before the primary, we got to know Kent Hance, the Democratic front-runner, who was funny and smart and understood in his bones that this was a rural district. Then George won his primary, and Kent won his. And the real hard-nosed politicking began. Kent launched an ad that said, "In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High School in the Nineteenth Congressional District, his opponent, George W. Bush, was attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts. In 1965, when Kent Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And when Kent Hance graduated from the University of Texas Law School, his opponent--get this, folks--was attending Harvard. We don't need someone from the Northeast telling us what the problems are." Never mind that George had spent nearly half his life in Midland, he couldn't combat the ad. It was devastatingly effective.

On election night, George won 77 percent of the vote in Midland County. He also won Ector and Andrews, the two other oil-producing counties in the district, but he lost in the cotton-farming sections. George knew he'd lost the race when the Lubbock vote came in. He had not won enough votes in that county. Overall, he lost to Kent Hance by some 6,600 ballots, or about 6 percent of all the votes cast. We were sad but not particularly disappointed. Whatever plans we'd made in our minds, we'd simply have to make new ones. It's a bit, I suppose, like breaking up with a boyfriend. When you are together, you map out your future with that person in your life. When you separate, every plan for that future is changed. But George and I still had each other. We were living in a town where nearly every voter had voted for George, where our friends were, and where my parents lived.

George went back to being a landman in the oil business, going to an office every day, and I began to set up our new home. It was 1979, my thirty-fourth year, and I had no strollers or baby buggies to park in our garage. I was hoping now, with the campaign behind us, all that would change.

Our lives in Midland moved along at much the same pace as our parents' had; men worked, women largely stayed home, and there were dinners out on Friday nights and dinner parties on Saturdays with our circle of friends, Susie and Don Evans, Jan and Joey O'Neill, and Penny and L. E. Sawyer, who had gone to Andover with George and had come to Midland to work in the oil industry. There were times, at first, when I missed campaigning, the thrill of setting off, just the two of us. When George came home and dropped his wet towels on the furniture, I had to remind myself of how terrific he'd been when he gave speeches. I came to overlook the fact that he also wasn't a great handyman around the house. With his usual single-minded focus, George set out to build his small oil business. He had gone from trading land leases to starting an exploration company of his own. But to drill wells, he needed capital, so as much as we were at home in Midland, we were also traveling to other parts of Texas, to New York, even to Scotland, so George could line up investors. And in just a few months, we were back to politics. George Herbert Walker Bush was running for president.

This time, though, I was on the periphery. George left to do some surrogate speaking, but once Ronald Reagan wrapped up the nomination, we returned to our lives in Midland. We didn't even bother to go to Detroit for the Republican convention. Instead, we were in New York. It was a weeknight, and George and I were having dinner with some investors at the "21" Club, waiting like everyone else for the official announcement that Ronald Reagan had selected former president Gerald Ford to be his vice president. Suddenly a couple of white-jacketed waiters muscled a television over to the corner where our group was sitting. The dial was turned to CBS. Correspondent Leslie Stahl reported that George H. W. Bush was Reagan's vice presidential pick. George leapt up from the table to call his dad, and then we raced back to the hotel and left at the crack of dawn the next morning to fly to Detroit. There wasn't a hotel room to be found; we slept on a rollaway in one of George's brothers' rooms. And suddenly, we were back on the campaign trail, this time stumping for Reagan and Bush.

Election night was November 4, my birthday, and we gathered in Houston. I went out to lunch with friends and then went to the Bushes' house on Indian Trail before the family drove to a big hotel ballroom for the results. Reagan-Bush won in a landslide. Days before, many commentators had predicted a second term for Jimmy Carter.

George and I and Regan and Billy and Donnie and Susie flew up to Washington for the inauguration. We sat on the inaugural platform at the back of the Capitol, gazing out at the Washington Monument in the distance as the oaths of office were recited. When the ceremony ended, we were ushered inside to a lunch amid the gleaming marble columns of Statuary Hall. Suddenly, I heard the U.S. Army Strings begin to play, their haunting violins unexpectedly surrounding us, and I gasped. Years later, at my own White House dinners, I would glance around to watch the enthralled expressions of our guests as a procession of strings magically appeared in the State Dining Room.

George and I now existed in that particularly strange netherworld of celebrity by association. In Midland, cars drove slowly past our house as locals pointed out "this is where Vice President Bush's son lives" to their out-of-town guests. We were vaguely "someone," the children of the famous, while I had the quiet ache of having no children of my own.

For some years now, the wedding invitations that had once crowded the mailbox had been replaced by shower invites and pink- or blue-beribboned baby announcements. I bought onesies and rattles, wrapped them in yellow paper, and delivered them to friends. I had done it with a happy wistfulness, believing that someday my time, my baby, would come. George and I had hoped that I would be pregnant by the end of his congressional run. Then we hoped it would be by the time his own father announced his presidential run, then by the presidential primaries, the convention, the general election. But each milestone came and went. The calendar advanced, and there was no baby.

The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child, or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful, some not. Still, we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only "I am sorry for your loss." But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?

In the fall of 1980, as the white-hot presidential race was drawing to a close, George and I decided to apply to the Gladney Home in Fort Worth to adopt a baby. We had friends from Midland who had been Gladney babies and other friends who had already adopted their own children from there. Janet and Fred Heyne's daughter and son were Gladney babies. In later years, Susie and Donnie Evans, Jan and Joey O'Neill, and then George's brother Marvin and his wife, Margaret, would all adopt one or more of their children from Gladney.

What became the Gladney Home began in 1887, when a trainload of abandoned children from the northeastern United States arrived in Fort Worth on what was called the "orphan train." Over 150,000 children rode those trains from the East Coast to the Southwest until 1929. Now we were hoping that someone else's child might find a place to be loved in our home. We filled out the paperwork. Mother snapped a photo of us along the fence line of our backyard, George in a brown corduroy jacket, me in a red sweater and pleated pants, our smiles strained but hopeful. Every time I come across that photo, it seems to say, "Please give this couple a baby."

At the same time as we were driving to Fort Worth for our Gladney interview and tour, I started to see Dr. Robert Franklin in Houston, Texas, for hormone treatments. In April of 1981, just as we were waiting for our home visit from Gladney, I discovered that I was pregnant.

I was anxious the entire time that I was pregnant. The memories of Mother's late miscarriages hung over me. And I was thirty-four years old, which in 1981 was considered old for a first-time mother. We had so longed for children and I was so superstitious about this pregnancy that I even avoided the baby aisle of the grocery store. The days and then the weeks passed, but I remained afraid to hope.