Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [86]
And then Cate and Emma Claire and I went back to North Carolina so Cate could finish her junior year of high school.
While we were in Raleigh, John lived in a little apartment in Alexandria and came home every weekend. When he was home we’d sometimes lose him to meetings with constituents, a trip to Fort Bragg, a rally, or an opening now and again, but the truth was I had grown up this way, and Cate and I, and Wade in those days, had lived this way before, when John would try cases for weeks on end and come home Friday in time to coach a soccer practice. In those days, he would come home for the weekend, but he would work on Saturday, except for coaching the games, and on Sunday he would prepare for trial the next week and then he’d be gone again, for another week. We accepted it then, because we knew how important the work he was doing was to the people he was representing, usually parents who cared for a brain-injured child. Who could complain? Who would? And this wasn’t that much different. He was off doing what needed to be done, and we would see him when he wasn’t needed there.
The truth was that with a “family-friendly” Senate schedule—that’s what they actually called it—we saw him more often than we had when he’d been practicing law. I had been warned by Bubby Smith, who went to high school with me in Japan and was then a lobbyist in Washington, that a senator’s schedule was very hard on wives and on marriages. This is going to be very different, he said. I told him, and it turned out to be true, that I didn’t think it would be any harder than the life we were leaving. In fact, I think military wives and trial lawyers’ wives might be the best-prepared wives in the Senate. And when John was gone to the Senate, it was in some ways better than it had been before. During trials, on our nightly phone call, I’d get the five-minute version of what had happened during his eight-hour day. He wanted to talk about the family and what we’d done, not the trial. But now we had C-SPAN2.
I had watched C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 for years, watched the empty Senate floor while a single senator gave an impassioned speech to just the clerks and the presiding officer, watched the well fill up with loitering senators as votes took place. I used to watch the way they moved in relation to one another, who turned his head away as he passed a colleague, who spoke intimately and wrapped an arm around a confederate. To a family of huggers and touchers, it said a lot. But now we weren’t watching for that, we were just watching for Daddy. And now there were no empty seats, no impassioned speeches, no votes. There were no committee meetings, no time for constituent visits. John stepped into the Senate and was immediately sworn in as a juror in the impeachment trial of the President of the United States.
In the wide shots from the gallery, we could pick John out, leaning over his desk, his chin in his hands, watching the proceedings below him, and watching, frankly, in some horror. The founding fathers had not anticipated that Congress, once filled with orators and writers and thinkers, would be filled with politicians with no skill whatever in making a clear point or in eliciting a pertinent piece of evidence in a proceeding that resembled a trial. John and I did not talk, and