Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [39]
There was another problem. Wade’s blood and mine were not compatible. It was a problem each baby I had would suffer. And his liver was having problems because of it. For days he was under a lamp, his eyes covered with patches, his bare bottom high above his tucked legs. And during those days, we tried to find a boy’s name. Catharine Wade Edwards would not do. If only we had listened to the Korean garage attendant. Each day the nurse would come in and ask, Does he have a name yet? Not yet. He needs a name. Yes, we know. Finally, when he was four days old, we settled on Lucius Wade Edwards, Wade from John’s mother’s maiden name and a family name on my side of the family, and his first name from a nearly forgotten Lucius from my mother’s Mississippi roots. Wade he would be. And although spelling Lucius was a trial for him at first, it was a name he liked. Even when substitute teachers called him Lucius, he liked it. When his friends said it, or changed it to Bubblucius, he recognized it as affectionate teasing. It is a strong and gentle name, a Southern name without any foolishness about it.
Those three years in Nashville are, for me, a collection of unrelated remembrances, I suppose because I was learning to become a lawyer and, more importantly, learning to become a mother, and there wasn’t much room for anything else. I remember that the hardest part of leaving Nashville was taking Wade away from Shirley Mayberry, who worked at the child care center Wade attended in a big old home on a park-like lot near our house. We never went by when Wade wasn’t in her lap or on her arm. And I remember the Anti-Swan Ball that Paul Sloan, with whom I practiced law, held in the woods of his family’s farm on the night of the high-society Swan Ball at the Belle Meade Country Club. I remember feeling out of place at the victory celebration at the Opryland Hotel when Lamar Alexander, from John’s law firm, was elected the Republican governor. And I recall buying furniture at the fairgrounds flea market and at an auction in Lebanon, and refinishing it in the backyard with John, as his mother had taught us.
And I remember the sad day we were driving to watch the U.S. Open on television at George’s house. We were trying to turn left in a residential neighborhood, but there was a car stopped, blocking the lane ahead. I could see a man in the car holding a woman around the neck with his right arm and slugging her in the face with his left fist. I jumped out of the car and pulled open her door. As I pulled her out of the car, he swung open his door and headed for us both. It occurred to me then that I had always inserted myself into these situations on the premise that a man wouldn’t hit a woman, and that premise clearly didn’t apply here. But as he stepped toward us, John was standing there. Calm down, man, John said. He walked the man back along the road, talking to him, almost whispering to him, as I took the woman across the street, into someone’s yard under a tree and went to the house to get help. Her face was covered in blood. The police came, but the woman wouldn’t press charges. The police would not arrest him based on what I saw without her complaint, and so we all got back in our cars and drove away.
I saw them both about a year later at the grocery store, an old yellow bruise on her cheek. I suppose I had always thought that even strangers could intervene and make things right, if only they would, and this was a hard lesson that it wasn’t always going to be that easy. You couldn’t always fix everything.
CHAPTER 6
RALEIGH
I’ve now come to a chapter that I knew I would have to write. By an unspeakably vast margin there is no part of my life, or any life, that speaks more to what this book is about. I found a community that stood by me in the worst of times and allowed me to emerge, eventually, from a place of profound pain. I will try to write from a repose that should come with the