From This Day Forward (34 page)

 

SR: That was, without a doubt, the worst day of my life.

 

CR: In cases like your dad, people always say, “Well, he lived a long and full life and he died without being disabled.” And all of that is true. But it doesn't help. That's the part that people never understand. It's still very painful. Would you prefer for him not to be disabled? Of course. Or would you prefer for him to have lived to eighty instead of fifty-eight? Of course. Does it make it any easier? Of course not. It's a cliché, but it's a cliché because it's true. In your parents' eyes, you become an adult when you have children. In your own
eyes, I think you fully become an adult and fully aware of your own mortality when you lose a parent.

 

SR: Even now I expect to hear from him when I've done some television show or written something that he would enjoy. It was so much a part of me to know that he was there and cheering me on.

 

CR: This was May of 1997, and both kids were about to get married, Lee in June and Becca in August. He would have loved that so much, watching Becca walk down that aisle. That's all I could think of the minute I heard the news. He missed seeing it. He didn't miss much. He did see his children and grandchildren grow up and know they were well launched. But, boy, he would've loved those weddings.

 

SR: When my father talked about my mother he would say, “You know, separately we're very flawed people, but together we make a good team.” Over fifty-seven years they were like two trees holding each other up, or vines that were so intertwined it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

 

CR: Some women, even when they've had wonderful marriages, blossom somewhat when they're given a sense of freedom. But it's been very very tough for your mother.

 

SR: There's a hole in the center of her life that will never be filled. It is the price you pay for a long, happy marriage—when one partner dies, the survivor is very lonely. In my view, it's a bargain worth making, but my father would openly muse about this in the last year or two of his life. He'd say to my mother, “Wouldn't it be fitting if we could go together?” And my mother would reply, “Will, just give me enough notice so I'll have time to pack.” But he gave her no time, no warning at all.

As Cokie mentioned, my dad died just weeks before our summer of weddings. We only had two kids and they decided to get married eight weeks apart. Great planning.

 

CR: Lee and Liza met when they were teenagers; they were both pages at the Capitol and they had a sweet puppy-love summer.

 

SR: I remembered Liza vividly. One evening she and Lee and Cokie drove home together from the Capitol and found a note in the kitchen from Rosie, the kids' old baby-sitter, who had been there to feed the dog. It read simply, “There's a bat in the living room.” Lee and Cokie were ready to run right out of there; Liza grabbed a broom and drove the creature out—a take-charge woman even at sixteen.

 

CR: Liza lived in California, so it was not easy to keep up a relationship once the school year started. They wrote each other for a while. But then they lost touch. They went to colleges in different parts of the country and didn't get back together until they were grown.

 

SR: After graduation she was working on Wall Street and he was in law school. She had a business meeting here in Washington and called him up out of the blue. Obviously, there was a spark between them that had never quite gone out, and when they saw each other again it heated up instantly.

 

CR: Liza went on to journalism school at Columbia and then moved to Washington. Lee would bring her over for Sunday-night dinner and we became great friends. She even worked for me as a research assistant during the 1994 campaign. I kept hoping Lee would do the smart thing and ask her to marry him, then one day he invited to me to lunch, and I sensed something was up. In the middle of this stuffy dining room, he solemnly said, “I need your advice about diamonds.” I wanted
to whoop and hug him and make a big hoopla, but he would have killed me. I didn't know anything about diamonds, but told him where we could go to learn, and then we had to sit through this insufferable food service. Finally, lunch ended and I was able to grab him. Then we went jewelry shopping.

 

SR: It was supposed to be this big secret. That night, when I asked Cokie what she talked to Lee about, she got this strange look and mumbled, “Nothing much.” So immediately I guessed what was up. No one in the family believes I can keep a secret, but I kept that one.

The wedding was in Southern California, Lisa's home. A priest was presiding, but Lee wanted to do what we had done, have part of the ceremony recognize his Jewish heritage, and he asked me to perform the role of tribal elder that Justice Goldberg had for us. As the wedding approached, and I was thinking of what to say, out of the blue one day we received a letter from Arthur Goldberg's son Bobby. He had been going over his father's papers, and found the original handwritten notes the justice had used at our wedding. In fact, they were written on little pieces of notepaper…

 

CR:…it was a telephone pad…

 

SR:…from the Waldorf-Astoria, where the UN ambassador has a residence. The symbolism was perfect. I was able to use Goldberg's words as the text for my own remarks, almost thirty-one years later. And I made sure to repeat my favorite phrase, “Never cause a woman to weep, because God counts her tears.” The priest got so caught in the ecumenical spirit of things that he expressed the hope, off the cuff, that Lee would read the same words at the marriages of
his
children.

 

CR: Meanwhile, Becca was living in Philadelphia and dating Dan Hartman, a young man who grew up in Tennessee and was working for a financial consulting firm.

 

SR: I hold only one thing against Dan—I root avidly for the Duke basketball team and he went to the University of North Carolina, their arch rivals. But I knew Dan would make a good son-in-law one day when he left me a phone message: “Dan Hartman here. Just in case you missed it on the news, North Carolina beat Duke last night by one point in the last six seconds. I knew you'd want to know.” Click. The guy had guts, and a sense of humor, a pretty good combination. But it took at least another year after that call before he phoned to set up an appointment.

 

CR: Oh, that was funny because Steve didn't catch on.

 

SR: Yes, I did.

 

CR: No, you didn't, but I didn't either at first. I told you one night when you came home, “Dan's looking for you. He's left a message.” Then suddenly I realized, why did he have to talk to you and not me? “Oh, my goodness, he's probably calling to ask for your blessing to marry Rebecca.” Then you wouldn't call him back.

 

SR: I did the next day, but I needed time to collect my thoughts. On my way down to the office, I was rehearsing my lines in my head. I only had one daughter, and this was only going to happen once in my life. When I reached him, and he said that he wanted to come talk to me, I replied, “Dan, I think I know what this is about. It's very honorable of you to want to come see me, but if you're busy, we can do this on the phone.” And he said, “No, no, no, there's only one proper way to do this and that's in person.” A well-brought-up young man. So we agreed that he would come down on the train from Philadelphia and I would meet him in a restaurant at the train station for a drink, and then Cokie would join us for dinner. Now, Dan's consulting firm does a lot of work with the D.C. government, and when we walked
into the restaurant, sitting at the next table was half of his office, having dinner with several city officials. Poor Dan; his face turned white! When he told me what was going on, I asked if he wanted to go somewhere else, but when he said no, I suggested, “Well, before we start talking, why don't you go over there and say hello and then you won't feel uncomfortable.” Which he did.

 

CR: Of course all his office buddies knew what was going on, or figured it out pretty quickly.

 

SR: He was so dear, he didn't have the ring with him…

 

CR:…it was being made…

 

SR:…but he had a photograph that he brought to show us.

 

CR: Becca didn't know he was coming, she was still in the dark, but we knew what day he was going to propose, so we stayed by the phone waiting for a call.

 

SR: When she did call, her voice just sparkled with excitement. “I'm getting married,” she said, and I don't think there are three happier words in the language. People kept asking me whether I felt sad about “losing” my daughter, but that question never made any sense to me. First of all, I wasn't “losing” her, I was gaining a football-watching buddy. More importantly, if you've been lucky enough to have a good marriage, isn't that what you want for your own children? How could you possibly have any regrets? After the wedding one friend said to me, “I've seen beaming brides before, but I never saw a father of the bride beam so much.”

 

CR: From the time she was born, Becca knew she wanted to get married at home. In fact, she often joked that she could
only pick out two things for her wedding, the groom and the dress. But actually there were many choices to make, and she was determined that everybody be seated at a table for dinner, a logistical nightmare with seven hundred guests. I didn't know what we were going to do if the weather turned bad. I had tents ordered to cover the entire yard if I needed them, but they only protect against drizzle, not a blowing, whipping wind. I kept fretting, “What am I going to do if a hurricane comes?” I finally decided that there was only one thing I could do—move the entire event to the gym of my old high school, Stone Ridge. It's not far away, people could get there, we could still use the caterer. I called the headmistress, a nun who is a good friend of mine, and informed her, “If there's a hurricane, I need the gym.” I love the school and I've been quite involved with it, but the headmistress had a problem with my plan: the annual book fair was going on in the gym the same day. I was so panic-stricken that I shamelessly pressured her: “Well, then, that's a good reason to pray really hard that there's no hurricane.”

Even with all that heavenly intervention, with about two weeks to go, my degree of terror hit fever pitch. At some point I was going to have to make decisions, not keep everything on hold. So I became best friends with the long-term weather forecaster for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. His name was Ed Olenic, and after a while he didn't bother to wait for my call. He was so sweet about it. He would call me first thing in the morning and tell me the forecast. But he could never voice the only words I wanted to hear, which were, “There's absolutely no chance of rain.” Of course he couldn't say that. He had to hedge his bets, telling me there was a statistical chance of precipitation. But it didn't rain. It was a beautiful night, a little warm, but nice.

 

SR: We did run into one problem because our son-in-law is six feet six, and at the rehearsal, he couldn't fit under the
chuppah
. We had to raise it with bricks in order to fit Dan under it.

 

CR: Becca wanted a colorful wedding, nothing pale or prissy, and the
chuppah
was covered with flowers and vegetables.

 

SR: I remember most the huge yellow sunflowers. On the day of the wedding, the woman who was decorating the
chuppah
noticed my vegetable garden, part of which is right out by the road. And she told me to pick something that could hang right in the center of the canopy. Immediately, I knew what I wanted, and picked the two reddest, hottest peppers I could find. In all the pictures you can see the peppers right over their heads as they're getting married! I thought that was a pretty good symbol.

 

CR: I had thrown a lot of parties and I thought I knew what I was getting into. The tent guy's number is in my Rolodex, so are some band numbers…

 

SR:…the hooks to hold up the tent have been in the walls of the house since our wedding…

 

CR: But this was different. Fortunately, I had the best in the business helping me: my sister-in-law Barbara, who is a professional events planner, and her best friend Susie Hoskins, who is a caterer. They knew what to do and bossed me around to make sure I followed orders. In fact, Becca couldn't get over it. Along with my sister, the two of them had been bossing me around since I was born, so I automatically did what they said, which was wise.

 

SR: Since Dan's a Protestant, Becca's wedding was even more complicated than ours. Both a priest and a minister officiated. The priest had been a great friend of Cokie's sister and had
married our nephew a year or two before, and he repeated a line that has become a favorite of mine: “Marriage is our last best hope for growing up.” He also noted, with engaging modesty, that before he performed his first wedding, his mother had told him bluntly, “You're a celibate priest, you don't know the first thing about marriage!”

Like Lee, Becca wanted a Jewish element to her wedding, but she wanted the tribal elder to be a woman. So she asked our friend Millie Harmon Meyers, who's known Becca since birth. In Jewish ritual, the groom breaks a glass right at the end of the ceremony, and after Millie placed the glass in front of Dan, she was about to launch into an explanation of the custom. Dan thought it was his cue, so he immediately mashed the glass and everybody yelled out “Mazel tov,” cutting off Millie's speech. To this day she stands ready to give the rest of it with the slightest encouragement. Later, at the reception, Dan's great-aunt approached me to tell me why her husband and his brother, Dan's grandfather, had left Germany together in the mid-thirties. They were actually one-quarter Jewish, she confided, and while they were not raised Jewish, they were considered Jewish under Nazi law, and their father encouraged them to leave and start a new life in America. (No wonder Dan was so good at breaking the glass!) On their way to America, the two young German brothers stopped over for a while in England. On the night they finally set sail, they stayed out late drinking with friends and had to make a mad dash for the boat train. On the platform, a very proper English couple was saying good-bye to their daughters, who were taking the same ship for a holiday. As the Germans came barreling down the platform, the parents warned the girls, “Stay away from those boys, they're up to no good.” So of course one of them married one of the boys. That was Dan's grandmother. She had died before Becca and Dan met, but Grandfather Frank was there, at age ninety-four. He's one of the few men I didn't enlist to help me hold
up Dan on a chair while the wedding guests danced the hora, the traditional Jewish dance. From the moment I realized he and Becca were serious, I started worrying about how we would ever hold this big guy up above our heads!