Spoken From The Heart Part 6

We left Midland, but never truly left it behind. And it invariably found us. After George was elected governor, he chose as his official desk an old oak piece that had belonged to his father. He was sure it had been his dad's congressional desk, and George had a bra.s.s plaque made identifying it as the desk of Rep. George H. W. Bush. The desk was installed at the Texas Capitol, and when his father first saw it, he laughed. That desk had never been to Congress. A young oilman named George H. W. Bush had bought it for a hundred dollars, secondhand, on a sidewalk in downtown Midland.

I arrived in Washington a day early and headed for the vice president's residence, to spend one night before I was to move us into a town house that George and I had bought near American University. My good friend Lynn Munn flew up to help me move in. Lynn is the sort of person who makes sure every box is unpacked and every picture is hung before anyone goes to bed that first night. We were up at 6:00 a.m. I went to the bathroom to put in my contacts and promptly washed one down the drain. I shut off the water immediately and knew that the contact was probably caught in the trap. We called the Navy stewards who manage the vice president's residence. They said perhaps they could call a plumber or someone else to help later in the morning. Gampy heard all the commotion and, still in his bathrobe, went downstairs, got a wrench, came back up to the bathroom, and proceeded to take off the trap and rescue my contact. Lynn later said that any man who would take a sink trap off for his daughter-in-law at six in the morning without a word of complaint deserved to be president.

We moved into our town house, and George began working on the campaign.

After his father lost the Iowa primary, George flew into D.C. exhausted and, dropping his bag in the hall, said, "Well, we may be going home soon. But just where is home?"

Gampy won New Hampshire, and we stayed. But we stayed on a bit like squatters, aware that every day was temporary, that November would come, and soon after, win or lose, we would return to Texas. We were tourists that year, visiting the Lincoln Memorial in the Friday night dark, heading across the Potomac to George Washington's Mount Vernon home on Sat.u.r.days. We ice-skated downtown with the girls, watching them spin and fall in the now vanished rink near the old Willard Hotel. Once Jenna spun and crashed into a wall in front of a reporter for The Dallas Morning News The Dallas Morning News.

The girls were five years old when we arrived, and I enrolled them in the local public school, Horace Mann Elementary, where their teacher was Ms. Davis, an AfricanAmerican woman from Midland, Texas. We walked to school each morning, past the cherry blossoms and the dogwoods and the flowering trees that leafed out each spring.

Many of our Texas friends came to visit and brought their children, and George and I would chauffeur them around for weekend tours, until we knew the monuments and memorials and the Mount Vernon gardens almost as well as the cross streets in Midland.

Because Gampy, as vice president, was also president of the Senate, we regularly toured the Capitol and ate in the Senate Dining Room, where prices seemed to have frozen circa 1962 and where my father, during a visit, gladly reached for the check. We even got that coveted state dinner invitation to an evening in honor of President Chaim Herzog of Israel. But what was more unexpected for George and me was the relationship we formed with his parents amid the whirling chaos of a presidential campaign.

When I married George, I had thought that I would be embraced by his mother every bit as much as he was embraced by mine. I had planned on being more a daughter than a daughter-in-law, but Barbara Bush had five children of her own. She was their defender first. What I came to see ultimately as our bond was that we both loved George, and the depth of our love was what we had in common. Beyond that, we had little contact. I saw her during those harried Maine vacations, when the onslaught of adult children, their spouses and companions, and then their children often drove her to distraction--she is only partially kidding when she says that, when all else fails, follow the directions on the aspirin bottle: take two and keep away from children. I look back now through alb.u.m photographs, at everyone grouped together, smiling gamely for the camera, and someone always looks as if he or she is about to cry. In a number of photos, the person on the verge of tears is Bar.

But from the start, she was also ferociously tart-tongued. She's never shied away from saying what she thinks, right up through Gampy's jump out of an airplane on his eighty-fifth birthday, in June of 2009. He was set to land on the lawn next to St. Ann's Church in Kennebunkport, and Bar said, "If the jump doesn't go well, it will be convenient. We can wheel him straight into his eternal resting place." I was with Bar in the mid-1990s when people would come up to us in a store or a restaurant in Kennebunkport and say, "I know you," thinking they'd met her somewhere, and her response was "No, you don't. You don't know me." She's even managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment. Once, one of them, Lois Betts, called her on it, and Bar was truly chagrined.

After our wedding had pa.s.sed, I barely heard from Bar, until 6:30 one weekday morning a few weeks after George's losing campaign. His brother Neil had moved to Midland to help out on the race and, when the election ended, had returned to Houston, leaving most of his belongings behind. Now Neil was off to graduate school, and Bar wanted me to collect Neil's things, box them up, and ship them to Houston. With that, she was off the phone. I had my marching orders, and I was fuming as I drove around locating Neil's things in the places he had stayed, as well as rounding up big boxes from the supermarket. There were no pack-and-ship stores back then. I gathered, folded, and boxed everything, and carted it all to the bus station, irritation washing over me. Of course, here I was, the girl who had longed for brothers and sisters, who had always vowed that I would never be like my friends and complain about a sibling, and now I was doing precisely that.

So I was a bit apprehensive about moving to Washington, where we would be living within walking distance of the senior Bushes and George would effectively be working for his dad.

But a decade after my marriage, Bar Bush and I finally got to know each other.

We both loved reading and shared our favorite books. One morning, just as I had finished reading a review of a new art exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, my phone rang. It was Bar, who had just read the same review and wanted to rush down and see it. By 9:00 a.m., we were out the door, en route to the gallery. And Sundays became our family days. No matter how frenzied the campaign trail, both Bushes made sure that they were home together in the vice president's residence each Sunday afternoon. George and the girls and I would walk over for Sunday lunch. After years apart, George's parents got to know their son as an adult, and we had a window of time for us to be a small family, two people from each generation. The girls got to know their

grandparents not as flickering images on a TV screen but as people who loved them.

Gampy pushed them in a wooden swing hung from a tree on the grounds, and on rare nights off, he and Bar volunteered to babysit. At last, I saw Bar for who she is, a funny, warm woman and a mother who is devoted to her husband and her children. Away from that overflowing Maine summer house and the conventions and inaugurations, those high-profile, high-pitched events where Gampy's political career was on the line, Bar and I came to know and love each other.

We still had plenty of high-profile events to come. The entire family gathered for the Republican convention in New Orleans, where Jenna and Barbara had the most fun swimming in the big hotel pool and watching Ghostbusters Ghostbusters on the hotel television. That on the hotel television. That fall, we all hit the campaign trail. The girls and I joined Gampy for one trip on Halloween. In between plane stops, the crew cued scary music over the loudspeaker, and Barbara was dressed as a vampire, Jenna as a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. They trick-ortreated down the aisles among the unprepared press corps, who dug into their pockets to hand out pennies, pieces of gum, and a stray Life Saver or Cert for their sacks.

After eight years of Reagan-Bush, it was now George H. W. Bush at the top alone. Gampy won his election. I remember Jeb Bush saying a year or two later, "How great is this country, that it could elect a man as fine as our dad to be its president?"

For George and me, it was time to find a new place to call home.

When we married, George could recite the lineup from leading major-league baseball teams circa 1950. He can still do it today. His great-uncle had been a part owner of the Mets, and while George worked in oil, he had dreamed in baseball. One of his favorite movies was Brewster McCloud, Brewster McCloud, simply because the lead character lived in an simply because the lead character lived in an apartment in the walls of the Houston Astrodome. One evening, he burst into our house in Midland and announced that the Astros were for sale for $17 million. But George couldn't trade oil leases for the Astros the way he had for furniture, and what he had to trade wouldn't have gotten us much beyond a couple of pairs of season tickets. His baseball dreams were lived over the airwaves, and the Astros tortured us from the sidelines. When they made the playoffs, George would race home from work and we'd sit on our bed and watch the Astros raise our hopes and then dash them, inning after inning, game by game. Growing up in Midland, I did not follow baseball all that much; my father had bet on football, and for years, Texas didn't have its own baseball teams. People rooted for Chicago or St. Louis, franchises in other places. But my dad did take me to watch the Lee High School team when it made the state championships in Austin, and baseball games were a kind of background music to our life in Midland. In the sweltering summer heat, there was always a radio humming in a corner with the game. But it was with George that I learned to love the intricacies of baseball.

One of George's partners in the oil business was a man named Bill DeWitt, whose family had owned the Cincinnati Reds back when owning a baseball team was more of a mom-and-pop business. When George and Bill got together, they would spin a world in which they owned a baseball team and could sit in the stands to cheer for it. Like Kevin Costner in the middle of those rows of Iowa corn, they had their own little field of dreams.

When the Texas Rangers came up for sale in the late fall of 1988, Bill DeWitt was on the phone.

Suddenly, he and George were putting together a group to buy the team, and we were moving to Dallas. It wasn't politics; it was sports and a game we now both loved.

The first thing I put in my desk calendar each year was a list of the Texas Rangers' home games, and we sat in the stands for nearly every one.

There is a loveliness to baseball that is only found in a stadium, that never quite conveys across the coaxial cables and pixels of a television screen. In a world of hyperspeeds, the game is long and slow and methodical until some explosive hit sends the players on the field into utter pandemonium and brings the crowd to its feet. And baseball was one of the few activities that could draw us outside in the summer. Dallas summers are woven out of crushing heat, weeks of one-hundred-plus-degree days that begin cooking the concrete the first minute after sunrise. Except for those brave or robust enough to work outside, most of the city moves among air-conditioned homes, cars, and office buildings, where the climate is always a preset seventy-two degrees. Baseball forces a person to confront the elements and the weather; it forced us into nature. And at night, under the floodlights, sometimes a brief touch of cool would descend, and the innings would drift past us as we sat behind the batter's box. I could talk to George, talk to the people sitting around us, and watch the game. In the stands, we cemented rich friendships with our partners, Rusty and Deedie Rose, Tom and Susanne Schieffer, Roland and Lois Betts, Tom and Andi Bernstein, and our cousins Craig and Debbie Stapleton. In the summers, I loved to take the girls. Often, by the seventh inning, they would retreat to an unsold suite above, and when the sounds of "Cotton-Eyed Joe" came over the loudspeaker for the seventh-inning stretch, I would turn and look up at them, holding hands and dancing the two-step in that empty box.

Those nights were like prolonged exhalations, as we looked out on the gra.s.s and the mound and the sandy baselines.

George was pa.s.sionate about getting more fans to the games. He spent the offseasons traveling to small Texas towns to talk to local chambers of commerce and Rotary clubs, to make the Rangers their home team. The Rangers put George's face on a baseball card, and little boys asked him to sign their cards, and George would always say, "Where are you from?" waiting to hear Plano or Corsicana, or Waco, or Texarkana, but they almost always answered "Texas." They were just Texans.

I settled into Dallas life, decorating our three-bedroom ranch house with a little converted garage for guests in the back. My days were filled with the girls and their friends and activities. I devoted hours to Preston Hollow Elementary School, which Barbara and Jenna attended, signing up for the PTA and driving car pool with other moms on the surrounding streets. The parents of our daughters' friends became our good friends as well. We spent our Sunday mornings worshiping at Highland Park United Methodist Church, at the edge of the SMU campus and where I had once taught a Sunday school cla.s.s during college. I volunteered to help my friend Nancy Brinker with fundraising for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. For several years, I chaired the invitation committee for her annual luncheon gala in Dallas, which was probably the easiest job in the organization because attendance at the lunch was so coveted that people RSVPed for it long before we mailed any invitations. I was also invited to serve on the Dallas Zoological Society and Aquarium board and the Friends of the Dallas Public Library.

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 a.s.signed 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 inc.u.mbent 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 acc.u.mulate 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 a.s.sisted 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 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.

The campaign's pace accelerated as we neared the big televised debate, which most observers thought that George had won. As Election Day drew near, I found myself barnstorming around the state with Bar and Nolan Ryan, one of the great pitchers for the Rangers. We'd bounce from small town to small town in that cramped King Air plane, landing on tiny asphalt strips. Nolan finally leaned over and said, "Barbara, you've got on two different earrings." Bar pulled them off her ears, gave them a glance, said, "They sure are," then stuck them back on and wore them for the rest of the day.

On Election Day, George donned his lucky tie, and we headed off to vote at Hillcrest High School in Dallas. He had his Department of Public Safety detail and an army of photographers and cameramen trailing him. He had everything but his wallet, with his voter registration card and driver's license; it was sitting on the bureau in our bedroom. He hustled back to retrieve his wallet, and then the officials waved him into the booth. And standing there as we entered the polling place was Kim Hammond, the boy who had been a pallbearer for Mike Douglas and then had nominated me for the Rebelee Court in Midland, and who had also played Little League baseball with George. I went over and hugged him. He was now a Dallas police corporal.

That night in Austin, George won his race, while his brother Jeb lost a hardfought vote in Florida to the inc.u.mbent governor, Lawton Chiles. Six years after we had arrived in Dallas, we were packing to move into the Governor's Mansion, one of the oldest homes in all of Texas. The house was a grand antebellum design, but our actual private living s.p.a.ce was a modest upstairs apartment, small enough that I had to leave many of our things behind; the den furniture would fit, but not the pieces from our living room. The cost of storing our possessions for four years was more than they were worth, so I gave away books to the Dallas Public Library, just as I had done in Midland. I gave away furniture and clothes. Barbara's room in the new house had once been a sleeping porch and had enough s.p.a.ce only for a narrow daybed. We managed to squeeze a double bed in Jenna's room but little else.

After the election, Rita Clements, whose husband had served as governor before Ann Richards, invited me to lunch in Dallas. We sat at our quiet table in Cafe Pacific, amid the starched linens and solicitous waiters, and she gave me a tutorial on the Governor's Mansion, which had been built even before Sam Houston was the governor of the state of Texas. She reviewed the house, the staff, and the things I would need to know as first lady of Texas, including her advice not to accept any invitations to events where I would not be the speaker. At the end of our lunch, as the coffee cooled in our cups, she withdrew a small piece of paper from her purse. On it, she had written a single name, and she held it up, saying simply, "I do not recommend this person as an employee in the Governor's Mansion." She never spoke the person's name, and as soon as I had read the paper, she crumpled it up and tucked it away in her bag. I was struck by her exceptional discretion, but fortunately for me, by the time George and I arrived in the Governor's Mansion, the employee in question had retired.

I suddenly had to buy clothes, inaugural clothes and first lady of Texas clothes. I have never been much of a clothes fanatic. The closest things I have to a uniform are jeans or slacks, a cotton shirt, and flats. But I was no longer going to be on the political stage as a daughter-in-law, the smallest possible bit of background scenery for my fatherin-law. I would be standing next to George, and I wanted to dress my best. I went to a Dallas designer, Michael Faircloth, to make a red suit for the inauguration. As I recall now, there were at least thirty other red suits in attendance that January day, including several worn by my Dallas friends.

But before the inauguration, before we moved our reluctant, newly turned thirteen-year-old seventh graders to Austin and to an entirely new school, we went home to Midland for Thanksgiving with Mother and Daddy. By this point, it was very difficult for Daddy even to leave the house. Mother and Daddy's world rarely extended beyond those few rooms on Humble Avenue that Daddy had built just over thirty years before.

Mother was back in the kitchen, amid the Formica counters. We were sitting in the living room, with its familiar green upholstery and the gla.s.s-top coffee table, when Daddy turned to me and said, "Who's that?" I looked over to where his head was pointing, took a breath, and replied, "That's my husband, Daddy. That's George Bush." And Daddy turned to me and said in an incredulous voice, "You married George Bush?" "Yes." Then he laughed, his big, deep-throated laugh, and said, "I think I'll ask him for a loan."

Inauguration Day was cool and damp. George's family was all there, but Mother had come alone. We didn't know how we could ever get Daddy safely around the Capitol, or how she would manage when I was up on the platform with George. Then, when I arrived, amid the crowd gathered at the Capitol, I saw a wheelchair at the edge of the family and dignitary section. Sitting in the chair was an elderly man, the close and dear relative who had raised Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock from the time he was a little boy. The Bullock family had gotten him there and had hired someone to push the chair, and my heart sank. We had not thought to do the same for Daddy, so that this boy from Lubbock might see his only daughter and his son-in-law become the first lady and governor of Texas. We had left him home, with a helper and the television. When Mother returned, he told her, "You're so lucky. You're so lucky that you got to go."

Three months later, in late April, George and I were standing on the grounds of the Alamo as part of the historic site's annual pilgrimage, a pilgrimage they've held since 1925, in which, after a muted procession, a floral wreath is laid and the names of the Alamo's defenders are solemnly read from inside the mission's stone walls. My new chief of staff, Andi Ball, came running up with the news that my father had collapsed and been rushed to the hospital. Mother had called the Governor's Mansion, which had located someone on my Department of Public Safety security detail, who had called Andi. I raced to the airport and boarded the next Southwest Airlines flight to Midland.

Daddy had already been under the care of hospice, which provided tremendous comfort to my mother and to him. My dear friend Elaine Magruder, a fifth-generation rancher, had brought hospice to Midland in 1980 with members of her Episcopal church and later helped start hospice in Vietnam. But on that afternoon, the hospice nurse had already come and gone. Mother was getting something in the kitchen, and Daddy's aide was feeding him some soup when suddenly she shrieked. Mother came running to find that Daddy had collapsed. Hospice was closed; the aide was overwrought, and Mother later said that she panicked and dialed 911. The paramedics came, with their tackle boxes of syringes and oxygen, and resuscitated him. He had a pulse, but by the time the ambulance reached the hospital, his veins had collapsed. They couldn't get an IV into his arm. He was unconscious, and his eyes did not open again. He lived five more days before starvation and dehydration took him, early in the morning on April 29, 1995. I spent those days with Mother in his hospital room. We held his hand, we talked to him, we planned his funeral and wrote his obituary, the words never coming close to capturing the man. George and the girls flew in to tell him good-bye. Mother said later that she would never have forgiven herself for dialing 911 if they had brought Daddy back and he had lingered in pain. He had a living will. But he seemed not to be suffering until the last breath departed from his lungs.

Mother had borne the burden of caring for Daddy, but even she did not realize what a burden it had been. The constant vigilance of caregiving had left her feeling almost physically ill. It took a full year for the sense of weight to be lifted from her shoulders, for her own well-being to return. Then she set about tenderly caring for the house Daddy had built for her, painting, reupholstering the chairs, replacing the drapes and the cracked kitchen counters, fixing the myriad of things that had gone unrepaired because it was just too much disruption to have a painter or a handyman come into the house while Daddy was in decline.

Looking back now, I see other things I wish we had done. Daddy always loved music. As a boy, he had taken violin lessons, and he used to be teased as he rode his bicycle through Lubbock with his violin tucked under his arm. Daddy would get off his bicycle, fight whoever had mocked him, and then go on to his lesson. He loved Glenn Miller, Glen Campbell, and Jerry Jeff Walker's "London Homesick Blues," and I wish we had played more music for him during those last few years. Brain researchers say that songs are imprinted in our memories longer than many other things.

Alzheimer's and dementia more broadly are called "the long good-bye," but to my mind, they are the sad good-bye. So often, as with our family, we don't say good-bye when we can. We don't recognize that moment when the person we love still knows enough, still comprehends enough to hear our words and to answer them. We miss that moment, and it never comes again. My mother has said that just as a person's joints grow old, so does the brain. And today, my conversations with my mother have changed. Now they are reduced to simple talk about the present moment; I cannot ask her what happened an hour ago or this morning. A recent MRI of her brain shows that the temporal lobe has shrunk; there is only a gray pall where the bright fluorescents that delineate a healthy mind should be on the diagnostic screen. The image reads like the results of an X-ray for a broken arm, except that this is broken irrevocably. Her brain cells have

literally died first.

When I heard those results, a deep grief washed over me. Her mind will never heal. It is too late for it ever to be again as it was. Too late for both of us.

Daddy's funeral was on a Monday. Later that week, I was back in Austin. My days were crowded; I did not have too much time to dwell on memories until Christmas, when we played our home movies of the girls as babies and Daddy's face and arms flashed across the frames.

And for years afterward, even now, I would dream of Daddy. And in my dreams, he is well.

In Austin, I no longer drove. My nearly brand-new minivan stayed parked in a downtown garage for over a year until I sold it--the grounds of the Governor's Mansion hadn't been designed to include a parking spot. For security reasons, car-pool duties now belonged to the DPS agents who ferried the girls to school. They heard the banter and the secrets that were traded in the backseat mornings and afternoons. I was relegated to a wave good-bye.

When I first went to look at the Governor's Mansion and saw the two small rooms for the girls, my heart sank, and I said, "Oh, I don't know what they'll do when they have friends spend the night." The house manager smiled and said, "The Sam Houston Bedroom!" The bedroom, with its ma.s.sive four-poster mahogany bed that Houston had ordered when he became governor of Texas, back in 1859, would be perfect for a group of teenage girls. And that was where their friends stayed. I never did tell the girls that Houston's five-year-old son had locked members of the legislature in their chambers and hid the key. Governor Houston threatened him with a whipping, but still no key appeared.

Only when he promised to have him arrested did Andrew Jackson Houston deliver the key to free the legislators, and his father was later overheard to say that his son had bested him at controlling the legislature. I figured we didn't want to try to top that.

The Texas Governor's Mansion is the fourth oldest continuously occupied governor's home in the nation and the oldest gubernatorial residence west of the Mississippi River. Even its dust seemed to be laced with history. The house itself is a large Greek Revival structure, built of buff-colored bricks fired from a clay pit on the Colorado River. The governor who chose the design was Elisha M. Pease, who had grown up in Hartford, Connecticut. The house's facade had elaborate scroll columns rising two stories, but it was also in some ways a thoroughly Texas house, with wide hallways running front to back to catch a bit of a breeze in the brutal summers--Austin sits between Dallas and Houston. Like my grandparents' old orange house, this house was a foursquare design, two rooms off each side of the central hall. But here the ceilings were high, sixteen feet downstairs and thirteen upstairs, with the kitchen and a set of what were once called servants' quarters built at the rear.

Governor Pease had to cart in his own furniture to fill the place, and his wife, who had lived in Connecticut during the construction, lamented how the sun and heat had parched the gra.s.s to brown and killed the corn planted in their new garden. But governors lived there from then on, as the city of Austin grew up around them. Inside, Sam Houston, who had fought so hard to make Texas part of the United States, all but wore grooves in the wide plank floors, pacing at night over his decision to resign the governorship rather than sign an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, as Texas's state legislature had decreed. Along the grand, sweeping staircase leading to the second floor, the banister is covered with nail holes, from the successful efforts of another governor, James Stephen Hogg, to prevent his four children from sliding down the great, slick stair rail. Those children also kept a menagerie of dogs, cats, squirrels, racc.o.o.ns, and exotic birds in and out of the mansion.

By the time George and I arrived, most of the rooms in the house were unalterable. The only place where we might choose the colors or furnishings was the small family quarters upstairs. The downstairs public rooms, which some 24,000 tourists walked through on tours each year, were set in mustard and blue and red, with heavy drapes and a priceless collection of early American antiques, many of them collected by Governor Bill and Rita Clements and their friends in Dallas. The rules of the Friends of the Governor's Mansion decree that nothing can be changed. In fact, far less can be done to alter the Texas governor's home decor than to modify the rooms in the White House.

I set about making our upstairs rooms into a home as I listened to the buzz and tramp of the tourists below, and people craned their necks to see if we were indeed there.

Once, when Barbara was home sick from school, a tour group paused in the garden right below her window. The guide pointed out our cat, Cowboy, and then mentioned our dog, Spot, but couldn't remember the name of Barbara's cat, and I knew she wanted to call out her window, "My cat's name is India." In our own s.p.a.ce, I painted the walls a soft gray.

Three months after the inauguration, the Texas State Capitol was rededicated after a lengthy restoration. I was tasked to be master of ceremonies for the event, held outside on the soaring front steps. Former governor Ann Richards was seated next to me, and as George was speaking, she told me that she had always wanted to add closets to the apartments and proceeded to draw a blueprint of her closet design for me on the back of a speakers' program. I did build the closets, although not exactly as she had specified. We had a tiny kitchen upstairs and only a small s.p.a.ce to eat. We ate most of our meals in the family dining room on the first floor, with a chef to cook for us. It was probably a relief to George and the girls. When I was the cook, I could make it through about four nights of dinners. By the fifth, we had to eat out.

We were not totally unprepared for gubernatorial life, and not simply because George's dad had reached the presidency. Every newly elected governor and his spouse are invited to attend something called "governors' school," held by the National Governors a.s.sociation before inauguration. We got a tutorial in the basics of state life.

Our school was in West Virginia, and the most candid comments invariably came from the sitting governors' wives. One told us, "If your state troopers will drive you, be sure to let them. If you get into a fender bender," she added, "it will be front-page news. If your trooper does, it will be a note in the metro news section."

Twelve days after George was sworn in, we were back at the White House, for our first official National Governors a.s.sociation meeting and a black-tie evening hosted by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Stepping into the gleaming hallways, we had a sense of nostalgia for the four years there, as well as the comfort of seeing ushers and butlers who had always been so welcoming. There were reminders too of the awkward intricacies of larger political life. That first year, at the White House luncheon for the governors'

spouses, I was seated next to Rhea Chiles, wife of the Florida governor, Lawton Chiles, who had narrowly defeated Jeb Bush in a very tough race the previous fall. Whether the seating was intentional or accidental, Rhea and I were forced to make polite conversation as elegant china plates were silently placed and then, after many minutes, briskly whisked away.

Ann Richards was not married when she was governor, so there had been no first spouse in Texas for four years. I had a small office in the new underground s.p.a.ce behind the Capitol building, which was across the street from the governor's residence. My s.p.a.ce was a collection of three rooms with tan walls: first, a small, boxy office with my desk; second, a narrow sitting area, where I placed a couch from our Dallas den that hadn't fit in the governor's residence; and finally a works.p.a.ce for the only person on my staff, Andi Ball. Xerox machines hummed down the hall, and staffers strode past carrying paper stacks, meeting agendas, and binders stuffed with the business of Texas. But what was my business? First ladies have innumerable events to attend--luncheons, dinners, occasions to make remarks for worthy causes--but small talk has never been my forte.

Rita Clements, the state's most recent first lady, had a long list of accomplishments in her chosen causes: volunteerism, education, historic preservation, and tourism. Where would my mark be made?

Some of my duties were prescribed, like the annual Texas Historical Commission's Main Street Program, for which I traveled to small towns with Jan Bullock, wife of the lieutenant governor; she had taken over some of the ceremonial responsibilities during Governor Richards's term. Jan and I would walk past the solemn courthouses and along the newly restored Main Streets, where the 1940s and '50s false fronts had been pulled down and the old gla.s.s-front shops had been restored. On the streets, we could almost hear the clomp of horses' hooves or the sputter of Model T's or even the soft hum of brightly waxed tail fins pa.s.sing down the street. Here, life before the interstate was preserved.

But others were causes that I could make my own. I started with art, collecting posters from major Texas museums and displaying them, framed, in an adjacent state office building so the corridors could have Robert Rauschenbergs, Georgia O'Keeffes, Richard Avedons, and other works to enhance their spa.r.s.e monochromatic walls. I held exhibitions of Texas artists near my office in the new section of the Capitol, painters and sculptors, abstract and representational, women and men. And Nelda Laney, wife of Pete Laney, the Speaker of the Texas House, Jan Bullock, and I searched for historic Texas art that we could add to the Capitol.

The issue of education was a logical choice. I convened a summit on early childhood development and brain research, inviting top experts from around the nation to discuss the importance of reading from infancy and family literacy as ways to prepare students for learning years before they were enrolled in school. We discussed the latest brain science, unlocking the pathways for how small children learn, the connections their eager minds can make between sounds and symbols. We explored the ways that their physical environment--what they eat, how they play, what they do with the adults around them--molds their school years and their lifelong learning. I remembered my kids all those years ago at Longfellow and John F. Kennedy and Dawson and wondered how their lives might have been different if they had come through the school doors ahead rather than behind. This was my contribution to George's sweeping education reforms, which he enacted with Bob Bullock and Pete Laney. The summit helped convince legislators to create reading readiness programs for preschoolers and, for the first time, to add to the

federal Head Start program.