Prologue
I'm the fifth Hush McGillen named after the Sweet Hush apple, but the only one who has thrown a rotten Sweet Hush at the First Lady of these United States. In my own defense, I have to tell you the First Lady threw a rotten Sweet Hush at me, too. The exchange, apples notwithstanding, was sad and deadly serious.
"You've ruined my daughter. I want her back," she said.
"I'll trade you for my son," I answered. "And for Nick Jakobek's soul."
After all, the fight wasn't really about her or me, but about our sorely linked destinies and our respective children and our respective men and our view of what we were put in the world to accomplish with other people watching. Whether those people were a whole country or a single, stubborn family. There's a fine line between public fame and private shame. For those of us who have something to hide, holding that line takes more of our natural energy than we want to admit.
So, standing in the White House that day with liquid, festering apple flesh on my hands like blood, I realized a basic truth: The world isn't kept in order by politics, money, armies, or religion, but by the single-minded ability of ordinary souls to defend all we hold dear and secret about our personal legends, armed with the fruit of our life's work. In my case, apples.
I walked wearily down one of the White House corridors we've all seen in magazines and documentaries. For the record, the mansion is smaller than it looks on television, but the effect is more potent in person. My heels clicked too loudly. My skin felt the weight of important air. History whispered to me, Hush, go home and lick your wounds and start over with your hands and your tears in the good, solid earth. I followed a manicured sidewalk outside into the winter sunshine, and then to the public streets. The guard at the gate by the south lawn said, "Can I help you, Mrs. Thackery?" as if I'd strolled by a thousand times. Fame, no matter how indirect or unwanted, has its benefits.
"I could use a tissue, please." I only wanted to wipe a few bits of rotten apple off my jeans and red blazer, but he gave me a whole pack. Hush McGillen Thackery of Chocinaw County, Georgia, rated a whole pack of tissues at the White House guard gate. I should have been impressed.
I put my mountaineer fingers between my lips and whistled up a cab. I took that cab to the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland where in the 1950's President Eisenhower's doctors hid his heart trouble and in the 1980's President Reagan's doctors hid the fact that our old-gentleman leader had gone funny. It was a safe place to keep family troubles close to the soul and away from the rest of the country. I slipped in past a crowd of reporters with the help of the Secret Service, who hadn't yet heard I'd splattered you-know-who with an apple.
I went to the private room where Nick Jakobek lay recuperating somewhere below the shore of normal sleep, his stomach and chest bound with bandages that hid long rows of stitches, his arm fitted with a slow drip of soothing narcotics, which he would sure as hell jerk from his vein when he woke up. I sat down beside Jakobek's bed and cupped one of his big hands in mine.
People had sworn he was the kind of man who could do me no good outside of bed. A suspect stranger, not a Good Old Boy or a swank southern businessman, not One of Us. A man who had never tilled the soil for a living or sold a bushel of newly picked apples to an apple-hungry world or sat around a campfire drinking bourbon under a hunter's moon. A man who knew more about ways to die than ways to live. A man so cloaked in rumors and mysteries that even the President couldn't protect his reputation. Without a doubt, people said, Hush McGillen Thackery would never stoop to love that kind of man, after loving such a fine man as her husband.
I'm here to tell you I did, he wasn't, I wasn't supposed to, but I do.
"This was never about you and me," I whispered to Jakobek. "People just have to grow where they're planted. That's the last apple analogy I'll offer you until you decide to ask for more. If and when. Just remember. Just believe me. You have earned your blessings." I kissed him and cried a little. His mouth eased, but he couldn't wake up.
"I hear that you and my wife had an unhappy meeting," someone said. I turned and found the President gazing at me from the room's doorway.
"I hit her with a rotten apple." Not something you really like to tell a man who has his own army.
But the President only nodded. "She deserved it."
I tucked a small crucifix of apple wood inside Nick's unfurled hand, bent my forehead to his for a long, hard moment then left the room. It was time to go home to the fertile, wild mountains of Georgia, where I and everyone I loved--except Nick Jakobek and his Presidential relatives--belonged.
We all make ourselves up as we go along, until the tall tales of our lives grow around our weaknesses and humiliations like the tough bark of an apple tree. Call it public relations for the country's good or call it making the best of a bad situation in a family or a marriage or a love affair, but either way, we root our lives in other people's ideas of who we are, both public and private, both great and small.
But an apple, of course, never really falls far from its tree.
)
