“Eventually my mother’s slurred speech gave her away. In the days before the wives of public figures had the courage to admit their problems with alcohol and other substances, this had the capacity to be a major scandal. For a man of my father’s strict standards and boundless ambitions, the situation was horrifying. Not because my mother had a problem, but because she had given him a problem. She couldn’t be allowed to embarrass him and compromise his image. The first thing he did was search the house and find every bottle that she had hidden. The second thing he did was hire someone whose sole responsibility was to make sure that my mother didn’t get near alcohol. The tactics worked, but they didn’t achieve what my father intended. My mother didn’t return to her former ways and strive to match his image of perfection. Instead, with no escape, feeling even more repressed, my mother had a nervous breakdown.
“This was equally horrifying to my father. If the diplomatic community discovered that his wife was emotionally and mentally unstable, he feared that he would be tainted. He worried that his colleagues would feel he was too distracted to perform his duties to the maximum. His career would be ruined. After my mother managed to break out of the house and caused what my father called a drunken scene at a nearby tavern, he decided to remove her from Washington.
“In those days, there wasn’t any such thing as the Betty Ford Clinic, of course, or its equivalent-places where a problem could be dealt with openly and thoroughly. But there were clinics of a different sort, where problems that the wealthy had were treated with utmost discretion. My mother’s alcoholism, the instability caused by her nervous breakdown, these were addressed through drug therapy-sedatives. It was felt that my mother needed a rest, you see. Fatigue had to be the cause of her problems. After all, no woman with my mother’s advantages of wealth and prestige could possibly be unhappy. For three months, as a consequence of the sedatives, she was in a stupor, little better than a sleepwalker. She needed help to go to the bathroom. She didn’t recognize me when I came to visit. When the clinic decided that the alcohol was fully out of her system, gradually the sedatives were taken away. She came home. She seemed to be more satisfied.
“Then one day she disappeared. After a frantic search, the servants found my mother drunk, collapsed, mumbling next to the furnace in the basement. After that, my father’s attitude became quite different. The excuse he’d given Washington society for my mother’s three-month absence, her stay in the clinic, was that she had been visiting relatives in Europe. Now he concocted a different excuse. This was during July of 1953. He rented a summer estate on Cape Hatteras. He sent away all the servants. He bought my mother several cases of vodka. To this day, I vividly remember the sneering tone with which he told her, ‘You want to avoid responsibilities? You want to have a drink now and then? Here. You’re on vacation.’
“He poured her a drink, poured her another, and another. When the supply of vodka diminished, he bought more. He made sure that her glass was always full. If she appeared to be losing her taste for it, he would berate and humiliate her until she again felt the urge to drink. Sometimes in the night, I would hear noises and sneak from my room, to discover that my mother was sprawled in the bathroom, where she had vomited. My father would be kneeling beside her, calling her disgusting names, pouring vodka down her throat. When my father realized that I was noticing too much, he arranged for me to visit his parents at their summer estate on Martha’s Vineyard. I hated to be near him, but I was afraid for my mother, and I begged not to go.”
Mrs. Page had been staring toward a violently colored Abstract Expressionist painting across from her all the while she spoke in a monotone, her flat, bleak voice communicating no hint of the intense turmoil that her eyes indicated she was feeling. Now she paused, her normally rigid shoulders drooping as she turned her attention to Pittman and Jill. “I never saw my mother again. She was dead by the end of the summer. I was told that the medical examiner’s explanation for the cause of death was alcohol poisoning. My father talked to me in detail about what had happened. He tried to make me interpret what I had seen in such a way that his behavior was understandable. ‘Your mother had a greater problem than you can imagine,’ he said. ‘I encouraged her habit because I hoped that if she got sick enough, she would stop drinking. I made her drink after she’d vomited in the hopes that she would associate nausea with alcohol.’ My father hired an expert on alcoholism who claimed to have advised my father to try this approach.”
The room became silent.
Pittman spoke softly. “I’m very sorry.”
Mrs. Page didn’t reply.
“But there’s something I don’t understand,” Pittman said.
“And what is that?”
“If your father was afraid of scandal because of your mother’s alcoholism, if he tried to hide it initially, why did he suddenly change his attitude and cause her death, especially in that particular way? That certainly would have attracted attention and caused a scandal.”
“My father is an immensely devious man. He came to realize that if he made himself appear the victim, he would gain his colleagues’ sympathy. He told them that the problem had been going on for quite a while, that he had done everything possible for her, that his life had been a nightmare. He pretended to be inconsolable, distraught from the effort of having tried to control her all summer. He’d done everything possible, he kept insisting. And the diplomatic community believed him. Then, in his greatest piece of hypocrisy, he created the impression that with great pain he was overcoming his grief to devote himself to his profession. Each day his colleagues admired him for his strength. His reputation grew. He became ambassador to Great Britain, and after that, ambassador to the Soviet Union, and eventually, of course, secretary of state. But I know him for what he is. He killed my mother, and I’ll never forgive him.”
“Because we both hated him, Vivian and I joined forces,” Denning said. “In an effort to help her, I managed to obtain a copy of the medical examiner’s report. Vivian’s father had lied to her. The cause of death was alcohol poisoning in tandem with the use of Seconal.”
“Seconal?” Jill straightened. “But that’s a tranquilizer.”
Mrs. Page nodded. “The type of sedative that my mother was given while she was away for three months in the clinic.”
“Wait a minute,” Pittman said. “Are you suggesting that your mother wasn’t dying fast enough to suit your father, so he helped her along by adding sleeping pills to the vodka?”
“That is correct.” Mrs. Page tightened her lips.
“Either way, it’s murder,” Jill said. “But the second way, using the sleeping pills might be easier to prove.”
Mrs. Page shook her head. “My father somehow discovered that I’d read the medical examiner’s report. He anticipated my accusation and confessed that there was a secret he hadn’t been able to bring himself to tell me. He said that when my mother was in the clinic, she had apparently stolen a container of the tranquilizers that she was being given. The container-with a label that indicated where she had obtained them-was discovered after her death. The night she died, she had swallowed so many of the Seconal capsules that he had no other choice except to conclude she had committed suicide.”
Pittman’s stomach soured.
“You believe he was lying,” Jill said.
“What I believe makes no difference. Proof is what matters. And there is no way to discount my father’s story. I want to destroy him, not throw my own integrity into question. Unless I have indisputable evidence, he will simply use the reports from the mental hospital and the medical examiner to disparage my claims. Any further accusations I make won’t be treated seriously. I will have only one chance. For most of my life, I have struggled to find a way to punish him for what he did to my mother, with no success. And now, as other grand counselors”-she said the words with contempt-“have died, I am forced to consider the possibility that my father is old enough that he, too, might die before I succeed in punishing him.”