From This Day Forward (29 page)

 

SR: I think that's changing, now that so many mothers are working.

 

CR: Maybe, but I doubt it's changed enough. When summertime rolled around and the kids went to day camp, I'd have to try to figure out how to get them home in the afternoons. At the beginning of a session I'd get up all my nerve to ask the other mothers for help. I'm so bad at this, I can't even ask a good friend for a ride home, but I'd plead with these other mothers, “I'll drive your children every single solitary morning for the rest of their lives if you, you, you, you, and you will drive my children home in the afternoons.” Living in the suburbs and working downtown, dealing with the logistics of getting children from school to camp to piano lessons to theater lessons is worthy of the most well-staged military campaigns. The ideal, of course, is having enough money to hire a nanny who drives, but we didn't have that. In fact, we gave our baby-sitter driving lessons and her first day out she wrecked a car.

 

SR: At one point you actually hired a cab.

 

CR: I hired a cab to take Rebecca and another little girl whose mother worked to piano lessons. We had the same driver every week. That worked out quite well. But with all the stress of balancing work and family, one incident made
me feel better. I went to Becca's school one day to talk to the kids about the coming election. I tried to bring a few things along to make it more interesting, so I had my tape recorder with me and my press credentials, and I happened to be wearing a navy-blue suit. Halloween came soon after that visit, and I wanted to see this fabulous parade where the whole elementary school marched around the neighborhood in their costumes. I was at the Capitol and I went tearing out to Bethesda to see the parade in the middle of the day. Flabbergasted, Becca demanded, “What are you doing here? I don't care about you coming to see the parade.” And I said, “Well, I care.” It was her last one, her last year in that school. Then, as I looked at the parade, there were all these sixth-grade girls in blue suits with tape recorders! They were dressing up as reporters!

 

SR: Our own kids were less enthusiastic about journalism. They were used to my writing about them but they never really liked it. At one point, not long after we moved back from Greece, there was an oil crisis and the
New York Times
travel section assigned me to write about taking a family trip without using a car. Good idea. So we took a train to Philadelphia and went to all the historical sites. We were walking along and Becca, who was probably about seven or eight, said something cute. I pulled out my notebook to write it down when she turned on me and pronounced, “That's off-the-record, Dad!” I take some satisfaction in the fact that she is now a reporter herself!

But, as for so many people, family life was a constant juggling act. People often ask us, “How did you do it?” And the answer is pretty simple. Our first priority was always trying to be with the kids. We didn't make every important event but we made most of them—at least after I missed Lee's first birthday—because that's what we wanted to do. Sometimes it was quite a feat. One night I was at the Capitol and Lee
was singing in a concert at junior high school; I was eager to go but the Congress was staying late.

 

CR: The members have that habit.

 

SR: The newspaper's rule was that if you were covering the Congress, you had to stay as late as the session lasted, no matter what. And this was one of the few times I broke that rule. I filed my story for the first edition, got in the car, drove thirty minutes to the school, heard the concert, and raced back to the Capitol, praying all the time, “Please, God, let nothing have happened.”

 

CR: Which is a pretty safe bet.

 

SR: I got away with it. My desk never knew. I didn't do it very often. It was just so important that we try to make those events, and that one was memorable. The kids were singing songs from
Fiddler on the Roof,
and one of the soloists turned up sick, and at the last minute Lee took over all of his parts. That happened once. If I'd missed it, no second chances.

Lee traded singing for debating when he went to high school, but Becca loved performing, and one year she had the lead in the production of
Bye Bye Birdie
. The second act starts with the character that Becca was playing somewhat undressed. The character's just broken up with her boyfriend and she sings this torch song about how I'm a free woman now as she's getting dressed to go out on the town.

 

CR: This is a big high-school auditorium.

 

SR: With a thousand kids. The curtain went up and there stood my darling daughter in her underwear singing this torch song!

 

CR: It was modest underwear!

 

SR: All of these teenage boys were hooting and hollering and there sat poor Dad in the audience. I was within seconds of leaping to my feet and screaming, “I know what you're thinking!” The dangers of having children who perform in public.

 

CR: We also learned something else that proved useful—it wasn't necessary, contrary to popular belief, to participate in Washington social life. There's a theory that in order to get the story and make the contacts, a reporter has to be out every night, but it's not true. Now, we were fortunate because we both worked for national news organizations members of Congress cared about, so they would usually return our calls. But we learned we didn't have to abandon the family to get the story.

 

SR: I've always remembered a story Scotty Reston used to tell, about his early days in town, after the war, when he and Sally were going out practically every night to a different embassy reception or dinner party. One night one of his three boys was watching him get dressed and complaining that he wasn't going to be home. And Scotty had a conversion. He told himself, this doesn't make sense. And that was a story I never forgot.

 

CR: We also thought it mattered to be involved in the kids' education, and we had a serious problem—the county was trying to close down our little neighborhood elementary school. I was on the committee to keep the school open, which involved a great deal of work and time spent together as a committee. That produced one of those funny Washington situations outsiders don't ever understand. One of the other committee parents was a staff member on the Hill who later went to work for the White House, which made him a great source for stories I was covering. Nobody could ever understand where I was getting my information and no one would've ever been able to track it. He would take my calls
because of the time we spent together and the friendship we formed working to keep the school open. Much more effective than trying to schmooze someone at a crowded cocktail party!

 

SR: There's a lot about Washington that has nothing at all to do with politics. It's a town like any other, with all of the usual activities. One of my favorites was basketball, which I played with a group of guys on Sunday mornings. Several of our kids decided to join a basketball league, but they needed a coach and I agreed to help. But most of the kids were terrible and so were the coaches. The team included a number of foreign kids, and basketball was not their first sport. This little kid from Bolivia was about three feet tall. A demon soccer player but he didn't know the first thing about basketball.

 

CR: At one point our kids marched off the court chanting, “We're number ten! We're number ten!” And it was only a nine-team league.

 

SR: The kids appreciated the time I would spend separately with each of them, and sports was a great way to do that. When we first came back to Washington, Lee figured he could pass as a native if he fanatically rooted for the Redskins, along with all the other crazed football fans. He dressed himself in every piece of Redskins paraphernalia available—sweatshirt, hat, socks. And the vicissitudes of another couple's marriage gave us the chance to go to some games, which was almost impossible because season tickets had sold out in the 1960s. This couple, good friends of ours, had bought season tickets when they were available, then later moved to New York. They kept their Redskins tickets and bought New York Giants tickets as well. Their divorce settlement gave the wife custody of the Washington tickets and the guy the New
York tickets. Every year, as a great act of generosity, our friend would give me at least two sets of tickets as birthday presents for the kids. I'd take each kid separately to a game. We loved having a whole afternoon just to ourselves, though they always joked that it was embarrassing to go with me because I would cheer so loudly. At certain ages, as all families know, kids are not exactly proud of their parents. In fact, in this period, I got one of the best birthday cards ever from Becca. It had this sweet, simpering front that read, “Dear Daddy, on your special day, I want to tell you three little words that I don't tell you often enough.” Then inside in bold letters: “Don't embarrass me!”

 

CR: We tried to spend as much free time as possible with the kids, but as they got older we had to adjust more and more to their schedules and their sensitivities, and we didn't always get it right.

 

SR: During this period, I did have one memorable experience with Lee. He decided for his thirteenth birthday that he wanted to go to a rock concert with a bunch of his friends.

 

CR: There was no way on earth I was going to do this.

 

SR: So I took the kids to the concert. The group was called Foreigner, and the six of them were probably the youngest people in the building and I was probably the oldest. We were the oddest group there. It also happened to be the first game of the World Series that night, the Yankees were playing the Dodgers, and I went to the concert with a headphone radio so I could listen to the game.

 

CR: The kids were actually pretty tolerant of us. We went regularly to the theater and the movies together until they outgrew us and started going out with their friends instead.
And they usually attended church with me every Sunday. Steven didn't go to weekly services but we always made it to Jewish High Holy Day services; we found a comfortable, low-key congregation that met in a Korean church. And we continued to follow all of the rituals at home. When Becca was in high school, the church I usually attended asked for volunteers to sing in a little folk choir at the noon Mass. The two of us joined up and enjoyed singing together, especially since Becca taught me most of the music. It also meant she learned the Gospels, the Epistles, and the liturgical cycle. Later she took courses in college and is now quite knowledgeable about religion. Lee spent two years at a Jesuit high school, so he had plenty of exposure as well.

 

SR: We did a little freelancing with the rituals—one of Cokie's innovations was the children's Seder.

 

CR: I actually had two children's Seders, one for little bitty kids and another for those who were just beginning to read. Once they started reading, they graduated to the grown-ups' table.

 

SR: The copies of the Haggadah Cokie had put together back in California became increasingly dog-eared and splattered with wine over the years, so from time to time we'd Xerox new versions, wine stains and all, and they became great family heirlooms. For our twenty-fifth annual Seder one friend, who was trying to do something nice, put the Haggadah on a computer and printed out fresh copies. Everybody was distressed! Where were the wine stains?

 

CR: But when we updated the Haggadah we did make it gender neutral, a definite improvement. The God of Abraham and Isaac became the God of Sarah and Rebecca as well. But the complicated rabbis' names are still there, and every year without fail some non-Jewish first-timer gets that section
to read! At our other holiday dinners, we set up tables all over the house, but for a Seder everyone needs to be in the same room, to follow the service. Eventually, our crowd outgrew the dining room and our only solution was to move to the porch, take out all the furniture, and rent tables. Despite all my efforts with linens and flowers, it still has the air of a banquet in a VFW hall. Our maximum capacity is thirty-six, and last year the guests ranged in age from three weeks to eighty. A bit larger than the “cheesecake” Seder back in Greece.

 

SR: When we came back to America we added an annual Hanukkah party to the calendar, a wonderful event that is still important to us, even if our own kids are well past playing the dreidel game. A dreidel is a small four-sided top, and which side it lands on tells you whether you've won or lost. When we started our annual party, little kids covered the floor spinning dreidels, and then one year I looked up and saw four teenage girls in black cocktail dresses and thought, “Goodness, something has changed.”

We invite a lot of mixed religious families to Hanukkah, just as we do at Passover, and one year I looked around and commented that of the eleven couples there, in only two cases were both partners Jewish. A gay friend, who was there with his partner, quickly raised his hand and said, “Three.” We all laughed, but he was right. You have to adapt ancient rituals to modern times.

 

CR: The only time in our married life where there was a real potential for discord over religion came when Lee wanted to change schools. He hated the big impersonal public high school he went to in ninth grade. He was lost and he wanted out.

 

SR: One thing we learned during this period is how crucial a parent's role is during the teenage years. It's natural to think
kids need Mom and Dad most when they're small, but they need parents even more during adolescence. And there's no way to make appointments for soul-searching conversations. The trick is to be around enough so that when they want to talk, at whatever hour and in whatever place, they have a parent available. I interviewed the mother of two teenage girls recently and she said her biggest job was “hanging out” with them long enough so that they felt free to confide in her.