But even after a month of it, the furor hadn't died down. And all the principal tabloids were still running stories about her on their covers. The tabloid TV shows had interviewed everyone except the janitor in jail, and Grace felt it was time to come forward and say something. Grace and Charles spent an entire day talking to Charles's campaign manager, and they finally agreed to let her do a press conference. Maybe that would stop it.
“It won't, you know,” Charles said. But maybe if it was handled well, it wouldn't do any harm either.
The conference was set for the week before her birthday on an important interview show, on a major network. It was heavily advertised, and television news cameras started appearing outside their house the day before. It was agony for their children. They hated having anyone over now, or going anywhere, or even talking to friends. Grace understood it only too well. Every time she went to the grocery store, someone came over to her and started a seemingly innocuous conversation that would end up in Q&A about her life in prison. It didn't matter if they opened with melons or cars, somehow they always wound up in the same place, asking if her father had really raped her, or how traumatic had it been to kill him, and were there really a lot of lesbians in prison.
“Are you kidding?” Charles said in disbelief. It happened to her the most when she was alone or with the children. Grace complained to Charles about it constantly. A woman had walked up to her that day at the gas station, and out of the blue shouted “Bang, ya got him, didn't you, Grace?” “I feel like Bonnie and Clyde.” She had to laugh at it sometimes. It really was absurd, and although people mentioned it to him sometimes too, they never seemed to ask as much or as viciously as they did of Grace. It was as though they wanted to torment her. She had even gotten a highly irritated letter from Cheryl Swanson in Chicago, saying that she was retired now, and she and Bob were divorced, no surprise to Grace, but she couldn't understand why Grace had never told her she'd been in prison.
“Because she wouldn't have hired me,” she said to Charles as she tossed the letter at him to show him. There were lots of letters like that now, and crank calls, and one blank page smeared with blood spelling out the word “Murderess,” which they'd turned over to the police. But she'd had a nice letter from Winnie, in Philadelphia, offering her love and support, and another from Father Tim, who was in Florida, as the chaplain of a retirement community. He sent her his love and prayers, and reminded her that she was God's child, and He loved her.
She reminded herself of it constandy the day of the interview. It had all been carefully staged, and Charles's P.R. people had reviewed the questions, or so they thought. Mysteriously, the questions they'd approved for the interview had disappeared, and Grace found herself asked, first off, what it had meant to her to have sex with her father.
“Meant to me?” She looked at her interviewer in amazement. “Meant to me? Have you ever worked with victims of abuse? Have you ever seen what child abusers do to children? They rape them, they mutilate them … they kill them … they torture them, they put cigarettes out on their little arms and faces … they fry them on radiators … they do a lot of very ugly things … have you ever asked any of them what it meant to them to have boiling water poured on their face, or their arm nearly ripped out of its socket? It means a lot to children when people do things like that to them. It means that no one loves them, that they're in constant danger … it means living with terror every moment of the day. That's what it means … that's what it meant to me.” It was a powerful statement, and the interviewer looked taken aback as Grace fell silent.
“Actually I … we … I'm sure that all your supporters have been wondering how you feel about your prison record being revealed to the public.”
“Sad … sorry … I was the victim of some terrible crimes, committed within the sanctity of the family. And I in turn did a terrible thing, killing my father. But I had paid for it before, and I paid for it after. I think revealing it, in this way, scandalizing it, sensationalizing the agony that our family went through, and tormenting my children and my husband now, serves no purpose. It's done in such a way as to embarrass us, and not to inform the public.” She talked then about the people giving interviews, claiming to know her, whom she had never even seen before, and the lies they told to make themselves important. She didn't mention the tabloid by name, but she said that one of them had told shocking lies in all of their headlines. And the interviewer smiled at that.
“You can't expect people to believe what they read in tabloids, Mrs. Mackenzie.”
“Then why print it?” Grace said firmly.
The interviewer asked a thousand unfortunate questions, but eventually she asked Grace to tell them about “Help Kids!” and her work with the victims of child abuse. She told them about St. Mary's and Saint Andrew's, and “Help Kids!” She made a plea for children everywhere that they never had to go through what she had gone through. Despite their probing and the lack of sympathy with which they had handled much of it, and the spuriousness, she had turned it into a deeply moving and very sympathetic interview, and everyone congratulated her afterwards. Charles was particularly proud of her, and they spent a quiet evening after the cameras had left, and talked about all that had happened. It had been a terrible time for Grace, but at least she had said her piece now.
They spent her birthday at home, and Abigail had friends over that night. But only because her parents had insisted. It was her birthday too. And Grace was very quiet as she sat at the pool with Charles. She was still feeling shaken and withdrawn, and she hated going anywhere. People were still harassing her, even in bank lines and public rest rooms. She was happier at home, behind her walls, and she dreaded going out, even with Charles. In spite of his campaign, it was a very quiet summer.
But by August, finally, everything seemed to be back to normal. There were no more photographers camped outside, and she hadn't been on the cover of the tabloids in weeks.
“I guess you're just not popular anymore,” Charles teased. He actually managed to take a week off to be with her, and he was glad he had. Her asthma had gotten bad again, for the first time in years, and she was feeling ill. He was sure it was stress, but this time she suspected what it was before he did. She was pregnant.
“In the middle of all this furor? How did you manage that?” He was shocked at first, but he was happy too. Their children were what brought them the most joy in all their years together. He worried about her during the campaign though. The baby was due in March, and she was two months pregnant, which meant that she'd be campaigning all through the early months. She'd be five months pregnant at the election. He wanted her to take it easy, and try not to wear herself out too much, or get too upset over the press when they went back to Washington. And then he groaned as he thought of it. “I'll be fifty-nine years old when this baby is born, I'll be eighty when he or she graduates from college. Oh my God, Grace.” He smiled ruefully, and she scolded him.