Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [131]
We had gone out to the stage the night before, just so we would know what to expect. There would be TelePrompTers to our left and right on which the words we had written would scroll out as we spoke, and best of all, there was a big-screen TelePrompTer straight ahead of us, just behind the seated delegates, which, they neglected to mention, would be entirely blocked when the delegates stood or hoisted signs, which was all the time. Cate spoke before me, eloquent, poised, and lovely—how had she learned that, speaking only to college groups of forty and fifty? But I remembered her composure at Wade’s funeral, and I wasn’t surprised. Whatever fears I had had about walking out there were mostly banished: if Cate could do it, so could I. Any remaining fears left when I stepped out and, instead of seeing a sea of strangers, I saw the faces I had seen over the past two years. The Iowa delegation was immediately in front, and Mike Fitzgerald, Ro Foege, and Susan Salter were smiling at me like they had dozens of times before. The North Carolina delegation was to my right—I knew every face. In each state, in each delegation, hands I had shaken, people I had hugged. I spotted Kathy Sullivan and Carole Appel, and there was Patsy Madrid, Virgie Rollins, Donsia Strong Hill. Everywhere, faces of friends, Joe Maxwell, Mari Culver, and their faces opened memories. I remembered the day Paul Shomshor had signed on to the campaign and my first event with Chris Redfern. I look back at the pictures from that night, pictures in which I am smiling or pointing or waving. There is no doubt that they put me at ease. I wasn’t talking to millions of people who didn’t know me. I was talking to them, and they did know me.
I left the stage to John, to the speech I had heard him give twenty times in our room at the house, and yet it wasn’t the same, because now it was punctuated by explosions of applause, and now when he promised that Hope is on the way, those words echoed throughout the Fleet Center. At the end, our family, less Wade, was on stage together. When John took Emma Claire in his arms and walked to the far side of the stage, the cameras followed him, and I blew Wade a kiss.
John Kerry spoke the next night. We watched the beginnings of John Kerry’s speech from the family box, but then we moved to the hold room, where we recombed hair, retied shoes, checked lipstick. We listened to the end of the acceptance speech huddled in a four-by-four space behind the backdrop, the adults in front and a collection of children of all ages on the stairs behind us. And when it ended and the convention center erupted, first John, then Teresa, then I went out, followed soon by the children and the balloons, then friends and politicians and party leaders until the stage was full, and all the while, I was watching to make sure the children—intent on keeping the falling balloons afloat—didn’t fall off the stage. Nothing should take away from this night for John Kerry.
The evening was capped off by a concert by the Boston Pops with James Taylor. Once when my dad was head of the NROTC unit at Chapel Hill, he decided that we should take a space-available free military flight to Puerto Rico for Christmas. My mother packed a miniature tree in one suitcase and we went. We went to San Juan, of course, and across through the rain forest and down to Ponce. It was an extraordinary trip, but Jay was angry the whole time. He hadn’t wanted to come. He didn’t want a miniature tree. And then, as the final blow, when we returned to Chapel Hill we were told by our neighbors that we’d missed joining in the caroling…with Chapel Hill native James Taylor. That was the early 1970s, and my brother is still angry about it. When