Spoken from the Heart (23 page)

Yet while we lived a very regular day-to-day life in Dallas, our eyes were never far from George's dad in Washington. George was assigned a Secret Service detail; we spent Christmas in the woods of Camp David, and our names were now on the guest lists for lofty state occasions. But for the family of a president, there is another side. In August of 1990, the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. George's dad had suddenly become a wartime president. We agonized for him. I can remember standing clammy and afraid in my kitchen, cooking dinner as the television showed President Bush announcing that he was sending troops to Saudi Arabia in response to the Iraqi invasion. We saw his lined and weary face at Christmas. Not long after, the media reported that the U.S. military was shipping tens of thousands of body bags to the Middle East. Even the quick victory and the Iraqi army's capitulation in Kuwait did not dim the private agonies he had faced sending young men and women into combat in harsh, unforgiving sands halfway across the world.

After the Gulf War, Gampy was wildly popular. But the conflict had taken a toll. That spring, like Bar before him, he would develop Graves' disease, a thyroid condition. They both wondered if it was caused by some contaminant at the aging vice president's house. Gampy's mother was in faltering health, and he had a primary challenger in Pat Buchanan. The Democrats nominated the young Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton. But that was not the only opposition. The Texas billionaire Ross Perot joined the race as an independent. The epicenter of his campaign was Dallas. Perot opened a campaign office in an empty savings and loan building on a corner of Northwest Highway, directly in the line of sight from George's office. George would look out his window and see people we knew, people who were our friends and his dad's friends, walking into Ross Perot's building. He watched them walk in and essentially abandon his dad.

Day after day, we saw George's father mocked and mischaracterized until we couldn't recognize the man we knew. Even the ballpark was not immune. It had always been the one place that was not political. But during the fall campaign, when we came to sit in the front row by the batter's box, someone on the other side of the field dropped a painted sheet over the infield wall with nasty comments about President Bush. An usher removed it, but the damage had been done. That moment was a harbinger of other, larger things.

With the vote split three ways, in November 1992, Bill Clinton was elected the forty-second president of the United States.

We had our last Christmas at the White House. Aside from a quick trip to visit George's brother Marvin or his sister, Doro, I did not expect to see Washington again. George signed up for the January 24 Houston Marathon. As the District of Columbia swept up after the Clinton inaugural revels, he was one of five thousand runners looping around Houston. When the marathon was over, a new thought began to jell in his mind: the Texas governor's race. The election was more than twenty months away. He announced his candidacy in November of that same year, 1993. It was almost a mirror of his father's race. Ann Richards, the incumbent governor, was extremely popular. George was something of a known name but a political unknown. But he believed she was vulnerable. He based his campaign on education. I listened, and I believed in him. From the moment he raised it with me, I never doubted that he would win.

As painful as it was for his family, George H. W. Bush's loss had finally freed his own children to say what they thought and to go after their own objectives. George's brother Jeb was running to be governor of Florida. Both brothers had uphill battles in their election races, but both believed deeply in the responsibility of public service and were also fascinated with politics and public policy. And both were going into the family business. They were interested in politics because they so admired their father, and politics had been his vocation. Just as some sons follow their dads into medicine or carpentry or business, they were following their father into his main profession, public service and political office.

Now, in addition to Rangers home games, our lives were fixed on the lodestar of the Southwest Airlines flight schedule, from the first breakneck race of wheels along the tarmac toward takeoff in the morning to the last screech of rubber and reverse thrust at night. George was campaigning all over Texas, but because many of the events were in the day and so much of the travel involved flying, he was usually home for dinner, lending a refreshing bit of normalcy to our lives. To reach the smaller towns, he flew on a twin-engine King Air plane with four seats, one of which was a bench. The final seat in the back doubled as the plane's toilet, and after George received the nomination, that was where staffers or Texas state troopers had to sit on the cramped flights that leapt and dove amid the frequent turbulence. I did events as well, speaking to women's groups all around Dallas and sometimes joining George on the statewide hops. And when I wasn't his surrogate, I was the mother of two eleven-year-old girls, with their myriad of activities, friends, and preadolescent dramas. All the while, back in Midland, my father was slowly dying.

In the winter of 1974, Johnny's Bar-B-Q had developed a leak in the roof. Daddy climbed up a rickety ladder to see if Johnny could pour a concrete roof, and when he stepped back on the ladder to come down, it gave way. Daddy fell and broke his ankle so badly that the doctor on call at the Midland hospital told him he would heal faster if the foot and ankle were amputated because the ankle is such a low circulation point and difficult to mend. Daddy kept the foot, and it did heal, but his leg was never the same. Seven years later, he had the lung surgery, and a few years after that, the doctors found a second spot on his other lobe, so he had another operation, although this time they didn't need to remove so much lung. He quit smoking then, but I can still remember the day when he waited in the car while Mother, Jenna, Barbara, and I went to do an errand at a shopping center in Dallas. We came out and found him dozing, and as he slept, his fingers had drifted up to his shirt pocket and were trying to lift out an imaginary cigarette. He was dreaming of his tobacco and of the feel of the paper roll poised at the edge of his hand.

Mother and Daddy still came to see us all those years. They flew up to Washington or over to Dallas, where they stayed in our little guesthouse out back. On one of their last visits, I was standing at my kitchen sink, where the window gazed across our square of fenced backyard, and I saw them slowly making their way in from the guesthouse. I watched as, at the exact same moment, both of their faces lifted toward the sky. Grinning, laughing, they turned to each other, eyes catching, and then they looked up again. They were happy. No sadness ever unraveled their happiness. In the tiniest thing, they could find joy. That morning it was our cat, Cowboy, who had climbed up on our roof. And they entered the kitchen smiling.

What Mother noticed first was that Daddy could no longer fill out the bank deposit slips. He got all kinds of small checks--$1.50 royalties from an interest in some West Texas well, a rent check from a bus station that he had built in Odessa--stacks of checks for minuscule amounts, which were of great comfort to a man from the Depression. And he had always enjoyed going to the bank and depositing them, until the paperwork became unmanageable. He would stare at the lines on the forms, a look of confusion washing over his face. Mother began to make the deposits for him. Then, one day, Daddy walked in the house, set his car keys on the table, and announced that he was not going to drive again. He quit forever that afternoon. For years his greatest fear had been that he would hit someone else's child. He would not risk that for a few more outings behind the wheel. But now, all the driving fell to my mother. If she did not take him out, he would not leave the house. She resigned from her ladies' bridge club, which met in the afternoons, and began to ferry my father around, just as he had done with her on all those Sunday drives and the expeditions to watch birds, her binoculars in her hands. She drove him to Midland's indoor mall, where they could walk undisturbed. She drove him to Johnny's to see his friends. And then he began to fall.

He would get up and start to walk, but it was no longer a walk, it was a rickety shuffle, as if the electrical impulses in his brain had begun to misfire. He would move a few steps, and then, instead of going forward, he would start to back up. Then he would topple back onto the ground. He was a large man and Mother was tiny, and she had a very hard time getting him up. Sometimes, she would call her neighbor across the street, and Trey would come, wrap his arms around Daddy's torso, and pull him off the floor. Gradually, he began falling so often that she had to call the local fire station at the very end of the street and ask the firemen to come to lift him up. And she was afraid to take him places because she was scared that he would fall. Their world shrank as Daddy became more and more housebound. Friends visited. They came to Daddy when he could no longer come to them. That is one of the luxuries of living a long time in a small town.

We never got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a specific form of cognitive failing. But we saw his mind erode. Once, he asked Barbara to get him some "B & Bs." He meant M&Ms, but he kept saying "B & Bs." In her ten-year-old way, she understood him and came out with the brown bag of bright candy just the same. He also started sleeping a lot, getting up to have his coffee and his breakfast, now minus the cigarette, and then heading back to bed. But he never gave up his drink at night.

When my mother took Daddy to the doctor, one of the questions on the cognition test was "Who is the president?" And my father, who had been a Democrat for years, answered, "Some joker from Arkansas." The doctor looked at Mother with a small smile and then asked, "Who was the last president?" And Daddy had no idea, even though it was George H. W. Bush, my father-in-law. I thought then, months before George announced that he was running for governor of Texas, how fleeting all of this is--our memories, our moments--how four years in the White House and the millions of still photos and tens of thousands of hours of videotape that accumulate from the highest levels of a political career can just vanish amid the death of brain cells. George H. W. Bush was one of the most recognized men on the planet in the year 1990, and now, three years later, my own father forgets my father-in-law.

My mother was fortunate that she was able to hire help. Friends and acquaintances would call with the name of someone who had assisted one of their relatives, and so she found a man to come in each morning to help Daddy bathe and dress and then had other people who came through during the day, especially to help her if he fell. Barbara and Jenna went out to visit that last summer. In the past, they had gone individually for a week at a time, to get to be the only granddaughter, and the one who stayed home was, ever so briefly, our only child. But this time they went together. Daddy still knew who they were, but so many other things had slipped out of his grasp.

In the middle of that same summer, after we'd packed Barbara and Jenna off to Camp Longhorn, George and I ducked out to a lunchtime matinee movie,
Forrest Gump
. Just as we were pulling into the parking lot of the theater, the phone rang in the car--it seems almost quaint to recall those big car phones now, when most of us walk around with BlackBerries hooked to our hips. One of the campaign staffers was on the line telling George that Ann Richards had just called him a jerk. "Some jerk" were her exact words at a rally in Texarkana. George rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and we went in to watch Tom Hanks on the big screen. Although it was shocking at the time, and it didn't help Governor Richards, I look back now and find it pretty tame mud that she slung.