Innocent Spouse (36 page)

One weekday morning, as I walked along the C&O Canal from a breakfast meeting to Nathans, my cell phone rang. It was Spencer. I could tell from the tone of his voice that I should brace myself. “Mom, I’m in big trouble. Some of us were caught smoking dope.” My heart sank. This was a definite strike. I called the school. The boys were caught smoking marijuana in a dorm room and had been suspended. Spencer would be sent home immediately. He returned home to a very grumpy mother. I gave him a strong lecture about his crime and why it was wrong and not okay with me, and I handed out his punishment—a week of helping out at Nathans and at a friend’s lunch shop downtown. I couldn’t help but point out that most kids, when they smoke dope, don’t do it in a dorm room. “Most kids go into the woods, and you guys decide to do it in the dorm! Were you out of your minds?”

“We had a vaporizer,” he said, as if that made any sense.

“You realize you are a freshman and you already have one strike?”

“I do, Mom, I do. I’ve learned my lesson.” I told him about his father’s experience at Choate: He got kicked out for drinking, and that was that. “You don’t want to lose this opportunity,” I said.

“I know, Mom. I won’t.”

The next school year started well, and when he returned to Hogwarts after the winter break I eased up on the worrying. Boarding school was working out. His grades were good, his teachers were pleased, he was maturing. I’d made the right decision, after all. It was time for me to stop focusing so much on him and begin to focus on myself, perhaps test the waters out there. Gosh, maybe even get involved with a man. The house seemed bigger and emptier without Spencer there. I missed him every day, but I also enjoyed being on my own for the first time since I met Howard.

Spencer was back at school only a few days into the second semester when I got the call. It was Friday afternoon. I was working at my desk at home. “Mom, I’ve been kicked out of school. I copied from Wikipedia. Two strikes. I have to leave the campus now.” I saw no point in yelling into the phone. His shaky voice made clear he was scared. The next voice on the line was his housemaster, who was kind but said there was nothing that could be done. Two strikes meant two strikes and no reconsidering. I asked the housemaster if he could please help get him to the train station.

“Of course,” he said.

It was late at night when Spencer walked out of Union Station to the car. He got in, kissed me, and said nothing during the fifteen-minute drive to the house. He quickly ran upstairs to his room, threw himself on his bed, and cried for a very long time. Finally, I knocked, stepped in, and sat on the edge of his bed. “I know it hurts,” I said, rubbing his back. “It hurts a lot. Some things are just not meant to be, and I guess boarding school was one of them.”

The following Monday we returned to New Jersey to clean out his room. As we departed through the gates of the school I called the admissions office of Georgetown Day School. If I had to beg on my knees, if I had to grovel, I would, because I planned—finally—to follow the recommendations I’d ignored before, that GDS was the right school for him. There was a long admissions process. Not knowing if he would get in, I took him to the public school to try it out. That was a wake-up call. Before I left, the head of the school said, “You should give your mother your jacket and untuck your shirt,” which Spencer did. Then the man said, “Here are the rules: No drugs, no guns, no knives, no other weapons, no leaving the school grounds between classes. Otherwise, you’re on your own.” He was a long, long way from Hogwarts. Dealing with me was no walk in the park, but he realized he’d done it to himself, and that I could help him only so much. That was ultimately a good thing.

When the good news came from GDS, we were elated. GDS is a famously down-to-earth school, open-minded, progressive, geared toward letting young men and women be responsible and accountable for their behavior. It was the first private school in Washington to integrate, in the 1940s; it celebrated diversity and emphasized academics
over athletics while still promoting a good sports program. Spencer was like a duck finding water. In the spring I popped my head in the office of principal Kevin Barr. “I haven’t heard from you,” I said. “I’m not used to going through a week without getting some kind of troubling report about my darling boy, and here it’s been a few months. What gives?”

He looked up with a smile. “There’s nothing to report. If there were anything we would call you. He’s doing great.”

O
NE THING
I
’VE
learned through life is the amazing ability of human beings to transfer to one object, animate or inanimate, the emotions felt for another. What I had to face eventually, especially as Spencer became a teenager and young man, was that sometimes my anger toward him was actually the anger I felt toward his father. That came out especially when Spencer lied. It’s understandable for a parent to get upset when teenagers fudge the truth, but my anger was grounded in fear that Howard had somehow genetically transferred his lying to his son. When the cheating incident happened at Hogwarts, I forgave him, but my gut ached with fear. Another time, when he told me he’d spent the night at one friend’s but I later learned he was at another friend’s, I threw the book at him. “Don’t come home,” I told him. “I can’t live with a liar.” I had a revelation at that moment: This is my anger, transferred from my dead husband to our son. I felt terrible. Spencer was a normal teenage boy, telling the normal fibs that teenagers tell their parents. I was the woman, the mother, at the end of her rope, who had her own unresolved issues. When I recognized what I was doing, it was as if I’d released the last pressure point, and I began the journey toward closure.

I did want him to learn to see his behavior through the eyes of others. Fair or not, he had to understand how he might be perceived if he lied, or misbehaved in the extreme. “You know, you have to deal with this,” I told him. “Because people are going to judge you differently. Heck, they judge me differently. With you, if you lie, they are going to think, ‘Well, his father lied to his mother about taxes and so, you know, like father like son.’ You can’t play to that. You
cannot
let that happen.”

“Mom,” he said, “I know I lie sometimes, and I’m working on it. I
don’t like it, but I do it because I think sometimes that if I tell you the truth you will get mad at me and I don’t want to get in trouble.” These were the same words I had heard from his father after so many little stupid lies over the years—fibs that were so minor I can’t recall even one, except my response would always be the same, and it was exactly what I’d say to Spencer: “Maybe the truth would make me mad, but the lie makes me furious.”

E
VERYTHING ABOUT RAISING
a child alone requires creative thinking. I found my surrogate “co-parent” in many forms.
Sex and the City
would be my teacher’s aid on the matter of male-female relations. Mother and son, side by side on the sofa, watched every episode. The plots and characters gave us a way to talk about sex in a less threatening, more comfortable way, whether the subject was condoms, multiple partners, or STDs. We’d be in the car on the way to school and I’d ask, “What do you think of the women on the show? Who would you date?”

“Well, Carrie’s okay. Miranda is gay and Samantha is a slut. I think I’d date Charlotte.”

We shared
The Sopranos
, too. It was a tutorial in business. “In a way, this is like Mommy’s business but without the guns.”

Without our shared sense of humor, Spencer and I wouldn’t have survived. A good laugh was what got us through just about every adversity, and we laughed about some of the darkest parts of our life together, especially when I’d get frustrated with some of his behavior and demand, “Stop channeling your father!” Or I’d look to the heavens: “Howard, leave his body, now!” Usually Howard would. It was the least he could do. Quite often Spencer asked me to back off, to trust him more, to give him space. Fair enough. Just as trying as it was for me to have to be both good cop and bad cop, I know for him, as for all children with only one parent, it had to be equally tough to have no court of appeals, no other parent to run to for understanding when one parent was laying down the law. There’s a reason for the cliché “Life’s not fair.” It’s not, and solo parents and children with only one parent know this lesson better than most.

When Spencer hit bumps in the road, I wanted to be a fair guide,
adviser, and advocate, and not an out-and-out paranoid, wagging my finger while snarling, “You’re just like your father.” The similar patterns were eerie, though. Both were smart and talented but capable of pulling a stunt or telling a fib that sabotaged what was precious to him.

Is Spencer his father?
No
. He’s entirely his own person. But during those teenage years, when he got in trouble for seriously bad decisions, I worried that the apple had fallen too close to the tree.

Most of the time, however, he was
not
in trouble; he did well—sometimes very well—impressed teachers and others, and even had an eighteen-month devoted high school relationship with one girlfriend, which I thought showed stability and maturity. Invariably, adults who met him pulled me aside to talk about his smarts, humor, and good manners. They’d say, “You’ve done such a good job.” I was grateful, but I didn’t take it for granted. Honestly, a mother’s work is never done.

W
HEN
I
REFLECT
on my career in journalism it becomes apparent that I was a skyrocket. It wasn’t clear to me then, but most young people aren’t reporting for a national news organization at age eighteen or writing the network news at twenty-two. It made sense to me. It was logical. I was determined, driven, and capable. It didn’t occur to me that I might be young for my line of work. Journalism was a cause as much as a profession. While I was honored to be in their company, or on their staffs, it never struck me as odd that I would be working alongside journalists of such note as Walter Cronkite, Merriman Smith, Helen Thomas, Hugh Sidey, David Brinkley, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose, and Larry King. Yes, mostly men, but that’s the way it was.

Of them all, Walter was the one who was both mentor and friend, and his death in July 2009 was a painful loss for Spencer and me. Walter and I had an easy, comfortable, and appropriate way with each other that endured for forty years, starting with the day we met in 1970 at the
Apollo 13
launch and he bought me a Coke. I was there to write a story for UPI on the network-news coverage of the launch. Before heading to the Cape, I’d sent Cronkite a fan letter, mentioning that, like him, I was starting my career at UPI. Remarkably, he answered and said, “If we’re ever in the same place at the same time, let me know.”
When I mentioned this to the CBS News publicist at the launch he thought I was out of my mind, but when that same publicist told Walter I was outside the CBS launch-pad facility, Cronkite put down what he was doing and asked, “Where is she?”

We met, we had that Coke, and we became friends, kept in touch, and eventually he hired me to write for him. Working with Walter was the best of what popular culture now calls
broadcast news
. CBS was the Tiffany network when I was there—the news division was the network’s jewel in the crown—and Walter Cronkite was a living, breathing, walking legend. He was my journalism hero.

Being in the top tier of Walter Cronkite’s staff in the mid-’70s was not unlike being an associate of God. I took a holiday in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the local paper put my picture on the front page with the headline
WALTER CRONKITE’S WRITER VACATIONS IN NAGS HEAD
. When I needed to catch a flight back to Washington for President Richard Nixon’s resignation, the airline held a passenger jet for me. Not because of me, but because I was Walter Cronkite’s writer. One day, walking with Walter back from lunch, a school bus stopped beside us on 57th Street. Suddenly, all the windows came down and dozens of young heads popped out. “Look, it’s Walter Cronkite!” they shouted. “Walter! Hi, Walter! Walter!” He stopped, smiled, waved and then we walked on.

Walter Cronkite’s role in journalism and American cultural history has been and will be written about and analyzed for years. He is a legend, but he wasn’t a God, and he’d be the first to say so. Like most talented and successful humans, he had a complicated personality with a fierce ambition. Most people liked him. Some didn’t, and some feared him. I can write only about my own experience with him, and it was good. There were many aspects to our friendship. Journalism, of course. But we shared a love of sailing, too. We could sit and talk about boats, charts, sails, and anchorages for hours.

Over the years, and especially after I left the show, I worked to maintain my friendship with Walter and his wife, Betsy, and the Cronkites became friends with Howard. The four of us met socially in New York or Washington. We attended their annual Christmas parties. In Annapolis they took us sailing. Howard and I were in the studio for one of Walter’s last
CBS Evening News
broadcasts.

After Howard died, each Christmas morning—no matter where he was or where we were—Walter would phone to check on Spencer and me, to make sure we weren’t alone, that we had plans, that Christmas would be good for us. Walter and Betsy, or Walter alone, would meet us for lunch whenever we were in New York. It was a delight to introduce Walter to my other good friends and Spencer’s godparents, Harry Shearer and his wife, Judith Owen. Walter was amused by Harry’s very good impression of him and other news notables, particularly those of whom Walter was not particularly fond.

It was after Betsy died that Harry and Judith invited Walter, Spencer, and me to a Museum of Modern Art event that honored Spinal Tap, the mock-rock band in which Harry performed as bassist Derek Smalls. At the loud, crowded dinner afterward, Walter, sitting beside me, leaned in close. “Now listen, this is what I want to do,” he said above the din. “I want to marry you. I want you to marry me, if you will, and I want to adopt Spencer and take care of you two.” I didn’t know what to say. I looked closely to see whether there was a twinkle in his eye, or if a punch line was coming, like a “gotcha.” But, no. He was serious, and he hadn’t been drinking anything more than a glass of wine.