Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (17 page)

At 2:00
A.M.,
the staff called my doctor, who arrived within the hour. I asked her if it was time to call Jim.

“Yes, I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “I think we’ll have a baby soon.”

I called Jim and told him to come to the hospital right away.

Meanwhile Dr. Ayers was nervously eyeing the data from the fetal monitor about the baby’s heart rate. The heart rate
had
dropped down a couple of times, and she was concerned, but so far each time the rate had climbed back up to normal again. “We’re just going to watch it for now,” she said.

When Jim came in, I told him I was nervous and scared.

“It’s going to be fine,” he said. “Soon we’ll have a beautiful little girl.”

The doctor wasn’t up for uninformed optimism. “If the heart rate drops again,” she explained, “we’re going to have to do a C-section.”

I was praying that it wouldn’t happen. I wanted to have a natural birth. “What’s the point of being in labor for hours if I’m only going to end up having a C-section?”

She said, “I know how you feel, but let’s just wait and see,” then added firmly, “I’m not going to compromise this baby’s health.”

So we waited. Jim took off his trousers, tossed them over the back of a chair, and curled up in his boxer shorts on the window seat a few feet from my bed. Soon he was dozing. All my concentration was focused on managing labor, so I wasn’t really paying attention to what Jim was doing, but in hindsight, while I attribute some of Jim’s apparent complacency to the fact that he didn’t readily panic, I found his behavior oddly detached, and I’ve since wondered why. Both his public life—as governor-elect and father-to-be—and his secret love affair with Golan Cipel were at the boiling point, and I imagine he was exhausted and in need of sleep. I do know he wasn’t sleeping deeply, though. Every few minutes, he’d wake and ask me how I was doing.

I told him I was doing OK, which was the truth. Labor was painful but bearable. It wasn’t severe. At about 5:30
A.M.
, the doctor walked into the room. She had been at the nurses’ station watching the fetal monitor, and she didn’t like what she saw. There were just too many decelerations. “This is it,” she said. “We’re taking you into the operating room. We have to do a C-section.”

She went up to Jim, who was half asleep, and said, “Come on, Governor, time to put on your pants. We’re going to do a C-section.”

I was close to tears.

“I know,” said Jim. “It’s a bummer.”

“Are you sure we have to do this?” I asked the doctor.

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “There’s no other alternative. Many babies have the cord around their necks in utero, but it doesn’t always interfere with the heart rate during birth. In her case, with the way the cord is around her neck, she might not survive a vaginal birth.”

Jim held my hand and said, “It’s going to be fine. I’ll be in there with you.” I felt calmed by his confidence.

Within minutes, I’d been wheeled into the operating room and was surrounded by nurses, the doctor, and a resident. They administered an epidural injection and waited a brief time. Jim sat next to my head and held my hand.

“I’m scared,” I told him. “And I’m having difficulty breathing.”

“Just take deep breaths,” he assured me. “It’ll be over soon, and we’ll have our beautiful daughter.” I could hear everything in the room. I knew they were cutting me open, and it was a strange sensation.

And then our daughter announced her presence in the world with a cry.

It was 6:13
A.M.
, December 7, 2001. “Here she is,” the doctor said. They held her up for us to see right away. Then they weighed and measured her. “Four pounds, five ounces, sixteen and a half inches.”

I wanted to hold her, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to. The doctor had prepared me for the fact that since she was five weeks early, they would immediately transport her to the NICU in an incubator as a precaution.

Jim rushed to the incubator as they were putting our baby in, then came back and said, “She’s beautiful. And she has all her fingers and toes!” He’d counted them. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

“I’m going along with them to take the baby,” he said. He wasn’t going to let her out of his sight, and I was glad.

Back in the recovery room it was time to settle on a name. While Jim had been given his uncle’s name, my mother had selected “Dina” for me simply because she had liked it. Since the only Dina she had known was a girl she had beaten up in grammar school, the choice wasn’t sentimental! I wanted something fresh for my daughter, a name that would really belong to her, so I had been browsing baby-name books for months for something suitable. We had whittled our selection down to two—Caitlin or Jacqueline. I’ve since been asked whether I chose “Jacqueline” with Jacqueline Kennedy in mind, and the answer is that I didn’t. I just liked the name.

On the way back from NICU, Jim had been polling the hospital staff. He even polled our families when they came in soon after. “Jacqueline or Caitlin?” he asked. “Which one sounds better?” My niece Meagan, then four, said we ought to wait and let the baby pick her own name when she got older. Luckily, naming a child isn’t a democratic process, and I don’t think Jim ever bothered to tally the responses, including those from underage voters. Eventually we settled on Jacqueline Matos McGreevey. It had a classic ring to it.

After Jacqueline was whisked away, I was kept in the recovery room—imprisoned—for hours, which felt like months. I longed to hold her. I hadn’t felt so much as a finger or a lock of her hair, and I hadn’t yet smelled her new-baby smell. I had heard her cry, but I hadn’t looked into her eyes.

Jim came back into the recovery room, elated. He was exhausted, but there was lilt enough in his step for both of us. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “Just beautiful and just perfect.” He gazed at me tenderly, smoothing my hair back from my brow.

“You must be exhausted,” he said, “but you really did a great job. She’s beautiful,” he repeated. “Just beautiful and perfect.”

I begged him for more details, urgently interested despite my fatigue. “Who does she look like? How many inches is she? Can she cry? Can she cry really loud? Is she moving? Is she kicking?”

“I’m not sure who she looks like,” he said, “but she has your big eyes, and I think they’re going to be brown. She’s sixteen and a half inches, but she’s bigger than just about every other baby in that room. And louder.”

“I have to know. . . . Does she have big feet?” The ultrasound had revealed a child with rather sizable feet, not quite Bigfoot, but the doctor had asked, carefully, whether anyone in our family had particularly big feet.

“Big feet? Well, they’re tiny, tiny feet,” he said, chuckling. “But I guess you’d have to say they’re big in relation to her body.”

I couldn’t wait anymore. I desperately wanted to see those feet and kiss each toe. “Get me out of here, please! I need to see her. Can you talk to the nurse?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” A few minutes later, after checking my vital signs, two nurses, with Jim’s help, got me out of the bed and into a wheelchair for my journey to Jacqueline. My anesthesia was beginning to wear off, and I could have used another shot, but I kept it to myself. I couldn’t stand any further delays.

There she was, and, thank God, she
was
perfect. I reached into the incubator. Her hand was palm down, and I placed my hand, palm up, under hers. It was soft and pink and almost weightless.

“I want to hold her,” I said. “When can I hold her?”

Our tiny baby had wires connected to small patches on the backs of her hands, on her arms, on her chest, on her belly and legs—enough for a small marionette. But I wasn’t alarmed. I had worked in a hospital for a dozen years and knew all the heavy equipment they could have brought in. Its relative absence told me that Jacqueline was breathing on her own, which meant that her lungs were sufficiently developed despite her prematurity. There was no feeding tube either, which meant that her sucking reflex was developed, also a good sign. Still, all in all, it seemed an awfully brutal welcome to the world.

Once the nurse had checked Jacqueline’s vital signs, she swaddled the baby in a blanket and gently lifted her out. The nurse’s palm alone, not large as palms go, was big enough to amply cradle Jacqueline’s head, while her other palm could support the rest of her body. The nurse handed my baby to me. “She’s so light,” I said to Jim, in awe. He murmured yes and nodded, as he had first held her moments after her birth. And so the three of us sat there, enjoying our first moments as a family. It had been quite a journey.

WITHIN HOURS OF JACQUELINE’S
birth, every television network and local radio and cable television station had reported her arrival. Congratulatory notes, phone calls, and even more floral arrangements poured in from all over—from the newly elected New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and from Governors Gray Davis of California, George Pataki of New York, and Ruth Ann Minner of Delaware, as well as Acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco of New Jersey (Christie Whitman had resigned to head the EPA in George W. Bush’s administration), who now welcomed Jim as one of their own. New Jersey’s senators, Jon Corzine and Robert Torricelli, also sent their congratulations, as did a dozen New Jersey state legislators. All told, there were about one hundred greetings from politicians, both Democratic and Republican, welcoming our child.

When I’d first visited the NICU after being hospitalized in early November, I had noticed a little girl named Stacy who was so tiny I could have held her in one hand. Now, more than a month later, Stacy was still there—right next to Jacqueline. When I came in, her mother, a tall, tired woman of about forty, with short blond hair and dark circles under her eyes, was softly humming “Rock-a-Bye Baby” to her little girl, through one of the incubator’s openings. I learned later from Stacy’s grandmother that Stacy had suffered cardiac arrest more than once, and each time she’d been jolted and pounded back to life. “Your baby’s huge,” Stacy’s mother told me. I could hear the longing in her voice. She knew she and Stacy’s father were facing months, and perhaps a lifetime, of caring for their very vulnerable child. That’s if they were lucky.

The health of children had been important to me ever since
I
was a child trying to help my family figure out what was wrong with my brother’s leg, but now my own experience—a preemie myself and the mother of a preemie—gave me a special interest in premature babies. As First Lady, I got involved with the March of Dimes, which had been founded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938 to combat polio. Following the development of the polio vaccine, the March of Dimes had to change its focus, and in 1958, the organization announced that it would begin to devote itself to a mission of preventing premature birth, birth defects, and infant mortality. In 2003, the March of Dimes launched a National Prematurity Awareness Campaign, and invited me to become a spokesperson, a role I gladly took on and continue to play.

Holding Jacqueline for the very first time, joyful and grateful to have her safe here in my arms, I tried to imagine what life might have in store for her. As a child who would take her first steps in a governor’s mansion she called home, she would, in all likelihood, be exposed to a remarkable array of interesting people, have an orchestra seat to the workings of government and the media, come of age with a heightened sense of service, and eventually attend the college of her choice. But grateful as I was for the opportunities that might await her, I was delighted to welcome her into our new family, as well as into our extended families. I hoped and believed we would be parents who loved her and one another deeply, who would offer her a solid foundation based on love, faith, and social values on which she could build a gratifying and meaningful life. Of all the pain that Jim has caused our family, the pain he’s brought to Jacqueline is the most difficult for me to live with or forgive. Before her third birthday, this little girl, so precocious and yet so vulnerable, would have to contend with an utter upheaval that permeated every area of her life. In a touch of excruciating irony, just as her father suffered recurring nightmares because someone else had made the choice to remove his daughter from his daily life, so too has his daughter suffered recurring nightmares because her father made the choice to remove himself from her daily life and forced her to leave nearly all the faces and places that were familiar to her in her short existence.

Looking back on it, I wanted Jacqueline’s arrival to bring about some changes in Jim. Now that he had finally been elected governor, and with the heady days of campaigning behind us, I hoped he would not only make more time for us but also pay more attention to us. I was hoping that we could draw him away from the spotlight and all its seductions. But on the day after Jacqueline’s birth, Jim was already lobbying for me to hold a press conference—the first of many orchestrated public displays of his “perfect family.”

I didn’t want to do it. I’d just had a C-section. My stitches were so raw that even a hiccup was painful, and I was so weak after six weeks in bed that my arms and legs felt like they had weights attached to them. I couldn’t even shower.

“Let’s hold off a few days,” I said to Jim. “I can barely move.”

“I promise it won’t be a long press conference, and you won’t have to exert yourself,” Jim said. “It’s just that people are really concerned about you and the baby.”

I sighed. I knew he was eager to share his happiness. I also knew that when Jim was intent on something, it was really hard to say no to him.

I don’t even answer the door in my bathrobe, so I wasn’t wild about appearing before millions not only in my bathrobe but in a wheelchair. I realized, though, that despite the fact that I was not the elected official, as long as Jim was a public figure, my own privacy was going to be in short supply. I’d long since understood that the essence of the news was telegraphed through carefully selected texts and images, and I also understood, as Jim must have, that hospital scenes could play well in the press. I remembered back to the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life and how his press office made sure to tell reporters right away the joke Reagan was said to have cracked (“I hope you’re a Republican”) as he met his surgeon in the operating room. I also remembered the photos released of him three days later. Bathrobe, yes, but he was standing on his own two feet. Still, I wasn’t the president, and I hadn’t been shot.