Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [84]
I’d like to think that the negative advertising failed. I’d like to think that John’s refusal to take the bait, that his running a positive campaign, worked. But the truth is, I don’t know why John won. I only know he should have won and did. The excitement of that evening, sitting in the hotel room of the Hilton where the post-election festivities were planned, was unlike anything I had ever experienced. We sat on the two beds, baby Emma Claire propped in the middle of one, surrounded by our dearest friends, and watched as John’s picture flashed up on the networks. Winner. And then it was a flurry. We were taken on the kind of circuitous route to the ballroom victory party that you see in the movies, and which seemed hardly necessary. Down service hallways, through the hotel kitchen, along the corridor to the laundry. Finally we emerged into a room that sounded like it was full of people, but the lights were so bright in our faces that I couldn’t see a single one. John spoke, and we finally got to hug all those young people who had worked so hard.
The next day John was headed to television interviews, and Kym Spell, the press secretary, knew that some of the younger staff were eating at IHOP. So John stopped there on his way to the interviews to thank them. The real thank-yous came that night when we gathered at the P.R., the Players Retreat, a Raleigh institution, if a pool hall and bar can be an institution, and John sat with a group—David Ginsberg, Christina Reynolds, Brad Anderson, John Dervin, Jessica Wintringham, and Josh Stein, who had probably been the youngest statewide campaign manager in the country that year—none of whom was over thirty. Toward the end of the night, a customer from across the room offered to buy John a beer, and John said, “Thanks, but we should probably go.” “We’ve got a sitter,” I told him, “and you only win your first election to the Senate once; I think we can stay a little longer.” We talked on, and one of the young people at the table—who had talked to John for months as they traveled the state—said, “It is so weird to be sitting here talking like this to a United States senator.”
“No weirder than being one,” John replied.
CHAPTER 9
WASHINGTON
The Senate
WHEN CATE GRADUATED from high school, she gave her six closest friends blankets embroidered with all of their names and the years they graduated together from Root Elementary School, from Daniels Middle School, and finally from Broughton High School. The blankets marked a span of their history together that easily could have been broken when John was elected to the United States Senate and—during Cate’s junior year in high school—his job moved from Raleigh to Washington, D.C.
Except for one thing. I myself had moved to Washington, or more precisely to Alexandria, Virginia, for my senior year of high school. All the activities that had made up the tapestry of my high school experience, all the friends I had known, who had known me as I was becoming me, were gone, and—with the exception of my brother and sister and one friend, Barbara Bradford—I’d had to make a start from scratch. Of course I couldn’t run for class office, though I had been class president at Zama. I couldn’t be a cheerleader again; the Hammond cheerleaders had been chosen the year before. I wasn’t going to be editor of the yearbook as I had planned, either, for that position had also been long decided. I managed, of course. I joined the debate team—that was still open—but my senior year of high school should have been more than that. And I wasn’t going to let it happen to Cate. She had lived in the same house since she was born and had the same neighbors and the same friends for her whole life.
We had talked about Cate leaving Raleigh for high school, going to a school where she wouldn’t place out of all the math classes sophomore year, where she would be challenged in a way that our public schools—as good as they were—were not equipped to do. But that proposed move, which didn’t happen after Wade died, would have been a move for her and