My first faux pas as a would-be first spouse occurred on a Sunday morning one January a few years ago, at an outdoor table under an ultramarine sky. My husband and I had flown first class to an alluring campus as part of a presidential search. He was the finalist under scrutiny, I thought.
Over brunch that morning the conversation turned, innocuously enough, to the fashions of today's college women: the bare midriffs, sausage-tight clothing, and vampish heels. Where were the baggy farmer overalls of my own college years?, I asked.
A new name had even been coined for today's immodest look, I said, and as the vulgar term escaped my lips, there was no taking it back. Silence enveloped that august group, as in prayer, and I wondered whether my husband's dream job had just vaporized.
I did not wish to skunk my mate's quest for a college presidency. Then again, I did not wish to become a college president's spouse. I had seen those fusty presidential homes, with their coiffed lawns that I had once trampled as a protesting student. Becoming the spouse inside -- strand of pearls, Donna Reed disposition, devotion to husband's world -- seemed the end to me: death by hostessing.
For one, I lacked that hostess gene. Ballroom-dance lessons at age 12 had taught me the foxtrot but hadn't brought grace under pressure. In my galumph through life, I had tipped wine glasses, smashed candlesticks, and stumbled across stages. As a waitress, I once flipped a tray of 12 tuna platters.
Then, too, as a dedicated introvert, I tend to flatten out in public. I can be a renegade -- but usually as a journalist and writer on a printed page, not as a public person. My temperament is more suited to forestry or in-flight satellite repair. First spouse? The role felt like being trapped inside a Playtex girdle.
Still, there was the matter of the (extroverted) man I loved, and so for our grand finale on that buttoned-down campus, I gussied up in pearls and an unimpeachable suit, the better to offset my gutter vocabulary.
As we zipped round-robin from table to table at a dinner in our honor, I tried hard to converse meaningfully with about 100 people. One cordial woman in colorful dress, an art collector, leaned toward me to ask how we spent our weekends.
The right answer, no doubt, had to do with community service, daring adventure travel, or first-rate entertaining. Instead I explained that we both have careers and a young child, and are older parents, and generally on weekends like to loll in our robes until midafternoon. Charming, her pained smile seemed to say, yet so sadly un-first-spouse-ish.
I wanted that college presidency for my mate but not me and no wonder. In 1638, the wife of the founding schoolmaster at Harvard College, Nathaniel Eaton, cooked and cleaned for its first dozen students. From the mid- to late 1800s forward, presidential spouses acted as chief cooks and bottle washers, in part to save the institution money.
Those early domestic roles evolved into the more modern presidential spouse, who, by the 1970s, was still usually a female. She was a bow on the presidential package -- expected to sacrifice family, friendship, career, identity, and self in service to the institution. Yet there was no job description, much less payment.
Paid or not -- and it is progress that roughly 20 percent of presidential spouses in academe today receive a salary, anywhere from $5,000 to $75,000 -- I still balked. The notion of standing by my man, whether as trophy spouse or presidential adjunct, felt demeaning. I did not know how to plan menus, greet dignitaries, host teas, or look after a manse -- while acting at all times pleased. Teach me, pay me six figures, and I would still feel tiny and annoyed.
And the role had to be changing, didn't it? After all, women today lead Brown and Princeton Universities, Kenyon College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania. Harvard just named its first female chief executive. Women fill 23 percent of college presidencies, and Hillary Clinton is running for president. Isn't that enough to smash the first-lady stereotype?
In our case, my worries dissipated after bad news made its way from that sunny college a few days after our return home. My husband was disappointed, and I felt his pain mixed with my own relief and guilt. Both of us wondered, quietly at first, had I been his undoing?
Several years passed, and another presidency came along with yet another three-day blitz to which, on the third evening, I wore the (jinxed?) suit and pearls. By then we seemed wiser. I held my tongue. Drew University offered my husband the job, he accepted, I freaked, and we waded in together.
Soon enough, I sought out other flesh-and-blood first mates -- most recently at a president's conference that offered a program for spouses. Staggering in late to a session, wearing jeans and sneakers, I found myself glancing at a bound manual, "Presidential Spouse 101: My Spouse Is a College President, Now What Do I Do?!?" A companion manual asked, "What Do You Mean, the Trustees Have Spouses and I'm Responsible For Them?"
I perused the first manual and found a diagram of a place setting, instructions for serving, copies of formal invitations, and photos of prepared food. There were sample menus. Looking around the room, I saw mostly women, most of them white, dressed in suits or business-casual clothing -- from ages 30 on up -- and fewer than six men.
Many, it turned out, had landed in tiny, bucolic towns to become overnight public figures. The loss of privacy was difficult, yet many also felt isolated. They spoke of their surprise at the demands of their roles.
"I'd like to be invisible," said one older woman who sat at my table at a later session and whose husband presides over a small college in New York. "But it's not an option. I guess you'd call me a reluctant spouse." Still, over many years of practice, she said, she had found activities that matter to her, friends she trusts, and ways to parse her smiles so she won't feel, by the end of a public event, as if she has lockjaw.
Another tablemate, a first-year spouse living in the rural Northwest, left her high-powered, 12-hour-a-day job to embrace presidential spousehood -- only to find it barely demanded enough time to fill her mornings. Now what?, she wondered.
At a question-and-answer session based on written submissions someone asked: "Can I ever find a friend on the campus?" The answer welled spontaneously from the room: "No!"
"I have to be a steel trap," one experienced presidential spouse said. "You really can't trust anyone in the community. I pay a therapist." Another woman cautioned that her therapist was an alumna of the college, which had led to complications. "Go to a therapist that's not in your town," she advised.
Meeting other presidential spouses had been humbling. My aversion, on the one hand, seemed more than justified. Place settings? Phooey. My fellow first spouses had also confirmed the role's potential to cause alienation, especially when landing in a remote town. Fortunately for me, we had remained in our home (and school district) in a town easily accessible to the campus and New York City.
Still, I had to admire the older women who had embraced the job and survived -- with real grace, it appeared. As I considered my own performance so far as Drew's first spouse, I saw avoidance mixed with ineptitude. Gloria Steinem meets Lucille Ball.
Oh, I have enjoyed the occasional dinners with the trustees, especially if the event required new shoes. My very first such evening had taken place during my husband's three-day candidate visit to Drew, when I became locked in conversation with a trustee, John Crawford, a tall, elegant financier and ordained minister who writes poetry in his spare time. We had a charming conversation; luckily I had no idea he was chair of the search committee.
I soon learned that the most interesting and philanthropic people sit at the head table, now my table. One engaging donor, Dorothy Young, a perfectly dressed woman with a sly twinkle in her eye, tells tales of her days as Harry Houdini's assistant; a trustee's spouse curates a museum devoted to the work of Bruce Springsteen and deconstructs his songs like lyric poetry; another distinguished and generous woman is an expert on Willa Cather, and has donated her large and growing Cather collection to the library.
With the pleasures, however, have come the gaffes. For a black-tie gala to raise money for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which is on Drew's campus, I had to dig deep into my closet for an appropriate get-up. When my husband and I were introduced and asked to stand, I managed to step onto the hem of my floor-length skirt, which tugged the garment down from my waist, which required me to crouch, smile, and wave in a strangely osteoporotic stance.
Since then I have received loads of advice. Buy a St. John suit, two of my first advisers told me independently; they're very expensive but last a lifetime. But new threads would not remedy my malaise.
Other first spouses manage to attend more than 50 events a year, often alone. That I could not do. If only Drew had known that, its admissions officer would never have asked me to speak to 100 guidance counselors.
I wrote and read every word of my speech except for my opening line, "Thank you very much, Mary Beth." After the talk and the applause, I needed only to find the exit. With a newly received bouquet in hand, I wobbled across a dance floor, made it to a door, and pushed through. But like a game-show contestant, I had chosen the wrong door. The meeting was being held in a country club, and I had walked into the ladies' locker room.
Still, just as my mantra had become "never ever again," a friend inadvertently inspired the tiniest internal shift within me. In passing, he likened my dual life to that of a comic-book hero -- presidential spouse by night, literary avenger of injustice by day.
Here was my revelation: First spouse was another role, not an erasure of identity. Addition, not subtraction. I had strenuously rejected it, yet now that I had it, I could decide -- mostly -- when to head for the phone booth.
Recently the college's head librarian, a friend, asked whether I might serve as honorary chairwoman of a black-tie, fund-raising event. I weakly agreed; my friends guffawed. My duties, he promised, would be nearly nil. Only later did he ask that I prepare remarks to introduce the evening's lecturer, Daniel Mendelsohn. Mercy.
So I read his recently released book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and found myself enraptured. Here was a vast, moving, completely engaging work of narrative nonfiction, of which I am an avid student.
It was time, finally, to get over myself. I squeezed into my black dress and shoes, made my way to center stage, and, with a warbling voice, introduced that astonishing writer. The weight of the work overpowered this first spouse's bout of nerves. Then, too, the phone booth awaited.
