What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer Read Free Book Online Page B

was so good about sharing, making sure everyone was included. For a while, Dottie and the housekeeper, Antonina, called him Have-half, because once, when he got a new wagon, he turned to a friend and offered: “Have half? ...” Of course, he had the most little friends. When Pres would come home on the train from New York and find a house taken over by children at play, he’d sigh and inquire of his wife: “Dottie, do they all have to be here?” But even when Pres was home, and didn’t want a bunch of wild Indians in the halls, Dottie would sneak the boys’ friends up the back stairs so they could play. After supper, when Pres was closeted with important telephone calls, Dottie, daughter Nan, and all the boys, were likely in the living room, locked in a vicious tiddlywinks match: so serious, involving, so do-or-die , that it wasn’t uncommon for a child to leave the room in tears, after being “shot out.”
    Withal, Dottie brought something new to the religion: a certain refinement, a polish, the product of one more generation under the buffer of good society. In Dottie’s house there was all the Walker competition, but none of the loudness about it. She did not abide bragging. Her boys were not to come crashing into the dining room, to announce: “I mopped up the court with Gerry.” God forbid! They could not even announce: “I won.” In the Bush household, young people were expected not only to win, but to be good winners. The proper way was to wait, to be asked:
    “Didn’t you have a match today?”
    “Uh huh, with Gerry.”
    “Oh, lovely! How’d you do?”
    And then, the proper answer was to offer some excuse for Gerry, avoiding the first-person pronoun altogether, or at most, to say, quietly: “I was lucky.”
    It was all right if a brother or sister did a bit of bragging for you: “Oh, Poppy was great! He had three hits ...”
    But if one of the Bush boys was asked about his game, and he blurted: “I had a home run!” Dottie’s voice would take on a hint of edge: “That’s lovely, dear. How’d the team do?” Sometimes, that edge could cut to the bone. When Poppy, age twelve, was asked about his tennis match and alibied, “I was off my game,” his mother snapped: “You don’t have a game! Get out and work harder and maybe, someday, you will.”
    Of course, he worked harder. He was always sensitive to the ethic around him. And he so much wanted her cooing praise. There was something special between the two of them, the way he’d make her giggle, even in church. Pres would turn and stare down the pew severely, but Dottie couldn’t stop. Poppy was too much fun! And he adored her, admired her. He wrote, in 1985, in a Mother’s Day tribute in The Greenwich Times:
    “Physically she is a small woman, but she is made of mighty stuff. Nine months into her first pregnancy, she played baseball. Her last time up, she hit a home run, and without missing a base, continued right off the field to the hospital, to deliver Pres.”
    Yes, Pressie was the first—Prescott, Jr.—but he was different, a big boy, jovial and generous, not quite in the Walker mold. Pressie was a bruiser, a good football player, a lineman who loved to hit. But from birth, he had a problem with one eye that lent him, unjustly, the appearance of slowness. Then, playing football, he blew out a knee, and he was not so good at games anymore. It was her second boy, the one she named with her own father’s names, George Herbert Walker, who had her gifts—the slender, supple form, the quickness, the charm. And she showed him in a thousand ways: he was The One. He was meant to win.
    If she saved for him the bulk of that old Walker religion, he took it all, he grabbed for it. On Court One, again age twelve, with the family in attendance upon him, he played for the children’s championship of the River Club. Early in the match, he turned to glower at the grandstand, and ordered his Aunt Mary, Uncle Herbie’s wife, out of the stands.