Spoken from the Heart (24 page)

The campaign's pace accelerated as we neared the big televised debate, which most observers thought that George had won. As Election Day drew near, I found myself barnstorming around the state with Bar and Nolan Ryan, one of the great pitchers for the Rangers. We'd bounce from small town to small town in that cramped King Air plane, landing on tiny asphalt strips. Nolan finally leaned over and said, "Barbara, you've got on two different earrings." Bar pulled them off her ears, gave them a glance, said, "They sure are," then stuck them back on and wore them for the rest of the day.

On Election Day, George donned his lucky tie, and we headed off to vote at Hillcrest High School in Dallas. He had his Department of Public Safety detail and an army of photographers and cameramen trailing him. He had everything but his wallet, with his voter registration card and driver's license; it was sitting on the bureau in our bedroom. He hustled back to retrieve his wallet, and then the officials waved him into the booth. And standing there as we entered the polling place was Kim Hammond, the boy who had been a pallbearer for Mike Douglas and then had nominated me for the Rebelee Court in Midland, and who had also played Little League baseball with George. I went over and hugged him. He was now a Dallas police corporal.

That night in Austin, George won his race, while his brother Jeb lost a hard-fought vote in Florida to the incumbent governor, Lawton Chiles. Six years after we had arrived in Dallas, we were packing to move into the Governor's Mansion, one of the oldest homes in all of Texas. The house was a grand antebellum design, but our actual private living space was a modest upstairs apartment, small enough that I had to leave many of our things behind; the den furniture would fit, but not the pieces from our living room. The cost of storing our possessions for four years was more than they were worth, so I gave away books to the Dallas Public Library, just as I had done in Midland. I gave away furniture and clothes. Barbara's room in the new house had once been a sleeping porch and had enough space only for a narrow daybed. We managed to squeeze a double bed in Jenna's room but little else.

After the election, Rita Clements, whose husband had served as governor before Ann Richards, invited me to lunch in Dallas. We sat at our quiet table in Cafe Pacific, amid the starched linens and solicitous waiters, and she gave me a tutorial on the Governor's Mansion, which had been built even before Sam Houston was the governor of the state of Texas. She reviewed the house, the staff, and the things I would need to know as first lady of Texas, including her advice not to accept any invitations to events where I would not be the speaker. At the end of our lunch, as the coffee cooled in our cups, she withdrew a small piece of paper from her purse. On it, she had written a single name, and she held it up, saying simply, "I do not recommend this person as an employee in the Governor's Mansion." She never spoke the person's name, and as soon as I had read the paper, she crumpled it up and tucked it away in her bag. I was struck by her exceptional discretion, but fortunately for me, by the time George and I arrived in the Governor's Mansion, the employee in question had retired.

I suddenly had to buy clothes, inaugural clothes and first lady of Texas clothes. I have never been much of a clothes fanatic. The closest things I have to a uniform are jeans or slacks, a cotton shirt, and flats. But I was no longer going to be on the political stage as a daughter-in-law, the smallest possible bit of background scenery for my father-in-law. I would be standing next to George, and I wanted to dress my best. I went to a Dallas designer, Michael Faircloth, to make a red suit for the inauguration. As I recall now, there were at least thirty other red suits in attendance that January day, including several worn by my Dallas friends.

But before the inauguration, before we moved our reluctant, newly turned thirteen-year-old seventh graders to Austin and to an entirely new school, we went home to Midland for Thanksgiving with Mother and Daddy. By this point, it was very difficult for Daddy even to leave the house. Mother and Daddy's world rarely extended beyond those few rooms on Humble Avenue that Daddy had built just over thirty years before. Mother was back in the kitchen, amid the Formica counters. We were sitting in the living room, with its familiar green upholstery and the glass-top coffee table, when Daddy turned to me and said, "Who's that?" I looked over to where his head was pointing, took a breath, and replied, "That's my husband, Daddy. That's George Bush." And Daddy turned to me and said in an incredulous voice, "You married George Bush?" "Yes." Then he laughed, his big, deep-throated laugh, and said, "I think I'll ask him for a loan."

Inauguration Day was cool and damp. George's family was all there, but Mother had come alone. We didn't know how we could ever get Daddy safely around the Capitol, or how she would manage when I was up on the platform with George. Then, when I arrived, amid the crowd gathered at the Capitol, I saw a wheelchair at the edge of the family and dignitary section. Sitting in the chair was an elderly man, the close and dear relative who had raised Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock from the time he was a little boy. The Bullock family had gotten him there and had hired someone to push the chair, and my heart sank. We had not thought to do the same for Daddy, so that this boy from Lubbock might see his only daughter and his son-in-law become the first lady and governor of Texas. We had left him home, with a helper and the television. When Mother returned, he told her, "You're so lucky. You're so lucky that you got to go."

Three months later, in late April, George and I were standing on the grounds of the Alamo as part of the historic site's annual pilgrimage, a pilgrimage they've held since 1925, in which, after a muted procession, a floral wreath is laid and the names of the Alamo's defenders are solemnly read from inside the mission's stone walls. My new chief of staff, Andi Ball, came running up with the news that my father had collapsed and been rushed to the hospital. Mother had called the Governor's Mansion, which had located someone on my Department of Public Safety security detail, who had called Andi. I raced to the airport and boarded the next Southwest Airlines flight to Midland.

Daddy had already been under the care of hospice, which provided tremendous comfort to my mother and to him. My dear friend Elaine Magruder, a fifth-generation rancher, had brought hospice to Midland in 1980 with members of her Episcopal church and later helped start hospice in Vietnam. But on that afternoon, the hospice nurse had already come and gone. Mother was getting something in the kitchen, and Daddy's aide was feeding him some soup when suddenly she shrieked. Mother came running to find that Daddy had collapsed. Hospice was closed; the aide was overwrought, and Mother later said that she panicked and dialed 911. The paramedics came, with their tackle boxes of syringes and oxygen, and resuscitated him. He had a pulse, but by the time the ambulance reached the hospital, his veins had collapsed. They couldn't get an IV into his arm. He was unconscious, and his eyes did not open again. He lived five more days before starvation and dehydration took him, early in the morning on April 29, 1995. I spent those days with Mother in his hospital room. We held his hand, we talked to him, we planned his funeral and wrote his obituary, the words never coming close to capturing the man. George and the girls flew in to tell him good-bye. Mother said later that she would never have forgiven herself for dialing 911 if they had brought Daddy back and he had lingered in pain. He had a living will. But he seemed not to be suffering until the last breath departed from his lungs.

Mother had borne the burden of caring for Daddy, but even she did not realize what a burden it had been. The constant vigilance of caregiving had left her feeling almost physically ill. It took a full year for the sense of weight to be lifted from her shoulders, for her own well-being to return. Then she set about tenderly caring for the house Daddy had built for her, painting, reupholstering the chairs, replacing the drapes and the cracked kitchen counters, fixing the myriad of things that had gone unrepaired because it was just too much disruption to have a painter or a handyman come into the house while Daddy was in decline.

Looking back now, I see other things I wish we had done. Daddy always loved music. As a boy, he had taken violin lessons, and he used to be teased as he rode his bicycle through Lubbock with his violin tucked under his arm. Daddy would get off his bicycle, fight whoever had mocked him, and then go on to his lesson. He loved Glenn Miller, Glen Campbell, and Jerry Jeff Walker's "London Homesick Blues," and I wish we had played more music for him during those last few years. Brain researchers say that songs are imprinted in our memories longer than many other things.

Alzheimer's and dementia more broadly are called "the long good-bye," but to my mind, they are the sad good-bye. So often, as with our family, we don't say good-bye when we can. We don't recognize that moment when the person we love still knows enough, still comprehends enough to hear our words and to answer them. We miss that moment, and it never comes again. My mother has said that just as a person's joints grow old, so does the brain. And today, my conversations with my mother have changed. Now they are reduced to simple talk about the present moment; I cannot ask her what happened an hour ago or this morning. A recent MRI of her brain shows that the temporal lobe has shrunk; there is only a gray pall where the bright fluorescents that delineate a healthy mind should be on the diagnostic screen. The image reads like the results of an X-ray for a broken arm, except that this is broken irrevocably. Her brain cells have literally died first.

When I heard those results, a deep grief washed over me. Her mind will never heal. It is too late for it ever to be again as it was. Too late for both of us.

Daddy's funeral was on a Monday. Later that week, I was back in Austin. My days were crowded; I did not have too much time to dwell on memories until Christmas, when we played our home movies of the girls as babies and Daddy's face and arms flashed across the frames.

And for years afterward, even now, I would dream of Daddy. And in my dreams, he is well.

In Austin, I no longer drove. My nearly brand-new minivan stayed parked in a downtown garage for over a year until I sold it--the grounds of the Governor's Mansion hadn't been designed to include a parking spot. For security reasons, car-pool duties now belonged to the DPS agents who ferried the girls to school. They heard the banter and the secrets that were traded in the backseat mornings and afternoons. I was relegated to a wave good-bye.

When I first went to look at the Governor's Mansion and saw the two small rooms for the girls, my heart sank, and I said, "Oh, I don't know what they'll do when they have friends spend the night." The house manager smiled and said, "The Sam Houston Bedroom!" The bedroom, with its massive four-poster mahogany bed that Houston had ordered when he became governor of Texas, back in 1859, would be perfect for a group of teenage girls. And that was where their friends stayed. I never did tell the girls that Houston's five-year-old son had locked members of the legislature in their chambers and hid the key. Governor Houston threatened him with a whipping, but still no key appeared. Only when he promised to have him arrested did Andrew Jackson Houston deliver the key to free the legislators, and his father was later overheard to say that his son had bested him at controlling the legislature. I figured we didn't want to try to top that.

The Texas Governor's Mansion is the fourth oldest continuously occupied governor's home in the nation and the oldest gubernatorial residence west of the Mississippi River. Even its dust seemed to be laced with history. The house itself is a large Greek Revival structure, built of buff-colored bricks fired from a clay pit on the Colorado River. The governor who chose the design was Elisha M. Pease, who had grown up in Hartford, Connecticut. The house's facade had elaborate scroll columns rising two stories, but it was also in some ways a thoroughly Texas house, with wide hallways running front to back to catch a bit of a breeze in the brutal summers--Austin sits between Dallas and Houston. Like my grandparents' old orange house, this house was a foursquare design, two rooms off each side of the central hall. But here the ceilings were high, sixteen feet downstairs and thirteen upstairs, with the kitchen and a set of what were once called servants' quarters built at the rear.