This review is taken from the December 2006/January 2007
issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to the
monthly print edition, click here.
Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength From Friends and
Strangers
by Elizabeth Edwards
(Broadway Books, 340 pages, $24.95)
YOU REMEMBER ELIZABETH EDWARDS. She ran for Second Lady in 2004 and
may run for First Lady in 2008 if her husband, former Sen. John
Edwards, is nominated by the Democrats. Whether or not he becomes
president is purely academic because Elizabeth has what it takes to
become America’s First Lady on her own. She doesn’t need the White
House; her memoir of bereavement and invalidism pulsates with so
much lugubrious hysteria that she’s a shoo-in to become the Great
White Oprah.
She had the best possible training for political wifehood. She
was a Navy brat, accustomed to moving here and there and
everywhere, meeting loads of people, and then moving again and
meeting loads more. Her girlhood was dominated by the dreaded
“Fitness Report,” which all officers get when they come up for
promotion. The conduct of a man’s family could make or break him.
“Everything we did was watched and recorded,” she writes; “nobody
talked about it, but everyone knew it. We all had as our first
allegiance the professional reputations of our fathers.” A wife who
drank, or a pregnant daughter “meant a ruined career, a shortened
tour of duty, a life spoiled by an indiscretion.”
She met John Edwards while they were both law students at the
University of North Carolina and married him in 1977 when she was
28 and he was 24. Settling down in Raleigh, they had two children,
Wade born in 1980 and Cate in 1982. In 1996, while en route to meet
up with his parents at their beach house, Wade was killed in a
weather-related auto accident and Elizabeth fell apart.
Her morbid excesses began with the sign she posted on the door
of her son’s room ordering the cleaning woman not to vacuum or
change the sheets: “I wanted the room to smell like Wade as long as
it would.” The wake had hardly begun before her brother came with a
video camera and interviewed the assembled neighbors and classmates
about the dead boy. For months afterwards, TV and music were banned
from the Edwards home as they gathered with friends each evening in
the dark, quiet family room to talk about Wade.
It sounds as if all of Raleigh was involved in the grieving
process, including perfect strangers that Elizabeth drafted into
service: “If, in a restaurant, I felt Wade about to overtake me, I
would go to the restroom and take out his picture. If someone,
anyone, was there, I showed them the picture and told them about my
boy.” Sometimes she drew a whole crowd of sympathizers. One day at
the supermarket she happened to see a display of Wade’s favorite
soft drink and fell into what sounds like a fit: “…he came
crashing in on me, and I was literally thrown to the floor. I sat
sprawled in the soda aisle at the grocery store and cried
uncontrollably… flattened by Cherry Coke.”
She even roped in the gravediggers, giving the cemetery grounds
staff presents on Wade’s birthday. She visited his grave every day
and read the Bible aloud “to the place on the ground.” She also
read him the letters that his friends had written about him, and
when his SAT scores arrived posthumously she read him those, too.
She enjoyed tending his grave because it reminded her of cleaning
up his room, but it wasn’t enough, so she started tending other
graves of children who had died years and decades earlier, talking
to them all the while, because they had no mothers to clean for
them. One day she washed some dead child’s muddy cross.
She went what can only be called berserk the day Wade’s grave
was violated. The site contained a huge metal angel, and someone
had tried unsuccessfully to drag it away. She began screaming and
called the police, demanding that they come out and dust the angel
for fingerprints. As she waited, it began to rain, so she fetched
umbrellas and old quilts from her trunk to cover the angel to
preserve the prints. When the police got there, they told her that
prints could not be lifted from the statue’s surface. She was
inconsolable: “He was in my every thought, in my empty arms, in my
weary, beaten heart.”
He was also in her computer. The only modern touch in this
neo-Victorian threnody is the enormous correspondence she conducted
with other bereaved parents at various grief.com sites. She is the
consummate online junkie who Googles every subject that pops into
her head, so this may be where she read up on how to get pregnant
at the age of 48.
Mirabile dictu, it worked. She had not only one baby,
but two, becoming the Fertility Queen of the 2004 election, the
55-year-old mother of six-year-old Emma Claire and four-year-old
Jack. How did she do it?Do not look for the answer in this book.
Considering how garrulous she is on the subject of bereavement, I
expected an Ovariad on the subject of fertility treatments, but all
she says is: “Tests, appointments, procedures, failures. It was not
until the week of Wade’s eighteenth birthday [January 1998] that
the shots and medications and good fortune were translated into a
pregnancy.”
Then she makes a mistake no lawyer should make, the bane of the
witness under cross-examination: qui s’excuse s’accuse.
She turns defensive and starts to overexplain: “I speak less of
this not because it was unimportant,” she avers, but for the sake
of those women still undergoing fertility treatments, “women who
had tried and failed to get pregnant, or women who had gotten
pregnant but were unable to carry the pregnancy to term…. False
hope is a bitter poison… I could not encourage it.”
She must have Googled her husband’s Wikipedia entry that claims
she used surrogate mothers for both births. I disregarded this in
view of Wikipedia’s way with errors, but the Slate article
by Suz Redfearn claiming that she used donor eggs is carefully
researched and well-reasoned. One thing is certain: the questions
are not going to stop. If the Democrats hope to lure voters away
from the Religious Right they will insist on knowing if Edwards has
any leftover embryonic stem cells in his closet.
Presuming they conceived in the good old-fashioned way, another
question arises: How did they manage with their daughter sleeping
in their bedroom? When her brother was killed, 14-year-old Cate
lapsed into a frightening regressive state and refused to be alone
in her room. The author is vague on dates, but she says that Cate
slept with them for two years — the same time span of the two
conceptions. Even more intriguing is how John, who was representing
the bereaved parents whose daughter was swallowed by a swimming
pool drain, managed to get into begetting mode while caught up in
the family man’s garden of voluptuous delights: coaching soccer,
playing Santa Claus, running charities, volunteering at Cate’s
school, and performing community service. Mentor me, baby. Gimme
some P…T…A!
INASMUCH AS ANY PART OF THIS BOOK could be called a fun read, it’s
the section on Campaign 2004. Elizabeth the outgoing Navy brat was
in her element, but continental Teresa Heinz Kerry most definitely
was not. It’s obvious that the two women couldn’t stand each other,
and small wonder: they were Mata Hari and Mary Poppins; Garbo and
Charo. They also have very different views of children, being
Martinet and Permissive; Elizabeth’s tortuous assurance that she
didn’t mind it a bit when Teresa yanked little Jack’s thumb out of
his mouth is one of the most determinedly agreeable passages ever
penned.
Two weeks before the end of the campaign, she found a lump in
her breast that turned out to be malignant. Whether it was caused
by the massive doses of female hormones she took is not known, and
she wouldn’t admit it if it were, but some of her passing comments
betray a desperate need to convince herself that there is no
connection between her fertility treatments and her cancer. What
she hates about wearing a lymph-node drain: “the children had to
keep more distance than they were used to.” Why she created a
special outfit for her radiation treatments so she doesn’t need to
don a lab gown: “the changing time might eat into my
get-back-to-the-children time.” Her law career: “My main job for
years to come will be — until I am nearly too old for it —
raising children.”
She also gives herself away by denying in advance what she
doesn’t want people to think, thereby planting the forbidden idea
in their heads, as when she brings up Pat Conroy’s novel, The
Great Santini. They’re not all like that, she insists. Her
father was “as far from Bull Meecham as any military man can be.
Oh, sometimes he would wake us up with a bugle — because he
thought it was funny. Sometimes he would ‘inspect’ our rooms — but
I never remember anything awful happening.”
FITNESS REPORT: This book is a maudlin, lachrymose orgy of
sentiment by an author who makes Niobe look like Betty Hutton.
Recommendation: Bust her father to cabin boy.
