Shattered Dreams
by
Charlotte Fedders and Laura Elliott

When Charlotte O'Donnell, a doctor's daughter and a good Catholic girl,
met jJohn Fedders in 1965, he was a law student at Catholic
University--6-foot-ten, handsome, athletic, smart, and very
ambitious.

She fell head over heels in love, and when she married him soon after,
she could hardly believe her good fortune in making such a catch.  Over
the next sixteen years, John worked his way up to become--at only
39--the chief enforcement officer at the Securitys and Exchange
Commission, a powerful post in which he earned a reputation for his
professional acumen and integrity.

But at home, a different side of the powerful executive emerged: he
became moody and critical, obsessed with order and discipline.

Charlotte, who had never really wanted more than to be a good wife and
mother, continued to love him, until finally she found the courage and
strength to help herself.  In 1985, the marriage ended in divorce
court, where the violence became public and Fedders resigned his
post.

Charlotte has begun the road to recovery and self-esteem; her triumph
is truly inspirational.

Shattered Dreams tells an intimate and shocking story; reading it one
understands how a woman like Charlotte Fedders can become myered in a
pattern of abuse for as long as she was, and why it requires such
extraordinary courage to break the pattern and begin again.

PROLOGUE On February 4, 1985, Charlotte O'Donnell Fedders sat in the
witness stand in a Montgomery County circuit court in Rockville,
Maryland, waiting to testify how her storybook marriage had fallen
apart.  A softspoken, tall blonde, given to looking at her hands when
nervous, Charlotte now clenched her fingers together, locked as tight
as the weave of a new basket.  She worried that everyone there could
see how her entire body was trembling.  Her hazel eyes filmed with
tears.  She blinked to clear them.

She wet her lips, and felt moisture from her palms slowly seep into the
Kleenex held there.

She nervously realized she would have to lean forward, out of her
bolted-down chair, to speak into the microphone.  "My God," she
thought, "a microphone."  She shakily reached out to touch it and
recoiled when she heard a stereophonic pop resound through the
chamber.

What was she doing here anyway?  Her presence in a divorce court
signaled, at age forty-one, the end of something she had always wanted
to be: a wife, pure and simple.  But she felt she had no choice.

That her husband had allowed her no choice if she and her five boys
wanted to survive emotionally and financially.

Charlotte wore a modest wool plaid skirt with a gray blouse, turquoise
sweater, and rose-colored blazer, and no discernible jewelry other than
a necklace with a tiny gold charm representing an infant.

She had purchased it after her fourth baby died and she never took it
off.

The baby was, in fact, her advocate with God, the angel she invoked
when she called upon heaven for help, ever the simple, good

Catholic.  She had prayed the night before to her son to help her
fall asleep and finally, finally she had.

Why was she so afraid?  Divorce had become so common that attorneys and
judges could almost conduct proceedings in their sleep.

To look at her, she was nothing that unusual, just another
upper-middle-class, unhappy, suburban housewife, outgrown by her
aspiring husband, and trying to piece together a new way of life by
fighting for her estranged husband's help with it.  A woman accustomed
to belonging to a country club, sending her sons to private schools,
attending formal parties with renowned VIPs, and living in a
prestigious neighborhood in a five-bedroom house, to which a cleaning
lady came weekly.

But Charlotte was different.  Behind the comfortable possessions, the
enviable lifestyle, lay a secret.  A shocking secret.

Across the modern, earth-colored courtroom sat her husband, John M.

Fedders.  John was a powerful and respected Washington attorney, the
chief of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of
the most sensitive law-enforcement jobs in the federal government.

He had also been a partner in one of the city's preeminent law firms
before joining the SEC in 1981.  He was an intellectually imposing man,
indeed.

He was also physically intimidating, since he stretched to
six-foot-teninches tall.

John, too, seemed a prototypical Washington character--a smart boy who
had built his success on his own, driven by ambition and desire for
money.  He grew into a man preoccupied with climbing into the city's
power circles, a man who neglected his family while doggedly fashioning
his career, and thereby lost the purpose of his dreams in their
pursuit.  It was a common enough familial travesty.

But what made John different from other fast-rising lawyers was his
living dangerously beyond his means, his seeming obsession with order
and control, his chronic black moods, and his sometimes violent
temper.

John also had hit his wife.  Charlotte was afraid sitting in that
courtroom because she had always been afraid of her husband.

Almost two years earlier, Charlotte had finally found the courage to
force John to leave the house after he slammed his fist into her
glasses, giving her a black eye.  It was not the first black eye he had
inflicted, but it was going to be the last.  She couldn't stand it
anymore, not the slaps, not his control over her and the children, not
his compulsive cleanliness, not his stringent household rules, which
included her helping him dress in the morning, or his moody silences,
which could stretch for weeks.

After he left their home, however, John continued to make his mark at
the SEC, recognized and profiled by the press for his crackdown on
insider trading and corporate fraud.  He hoped to be remembered, he
would tell the judge during his testimony, "as one of the deans of the
securities bar."  And Charlotte recalls that John fantasized of
climbing even higher politically.  He had several good friends in the
Reagan White House and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Attorney
General Edwin Meese was considering naming him to be associate attorney
general, the Justice Department's third-ranking job.

John was well on his way to long-lasting stardom in the nation's
capital.  There was nothing in his way; no one really knew about the
alarming private side of this increasingly public man.

Meanwhile, as he soared, John did pay the mortgage and utilities on the
family home he had left, but refused to give his wife more than $1,000
a month to support herself and their five sons, aged two to fourteen.

John claimed that was all he could afford to send her on his $72,300
government salary.  She countered that if that was the case, he should
return to private practice, where he had once made more than

$162,000 a year.

After all, he had promised Charlotte when he joined the SEC that he
planned to use Washington's revolving-door tradition and to leave the
commission after only a few years, for a high-paying, private-industry
job.

But John would not negotiate a compromise on alimony or child support,
say Charlotte and her attorney, and so ended up in a court of law, in a
public arena.

It would mean the end of his political dreams.

Sitting in the cushioned theater seats of the courtroom was Brooks
Jackson, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that
had a particular interest in John and his work at the SEC and had
written about John before.  The reporter quietly scribbled notes as

Charlotte testified that she had been a victim in her own home, growing
more and more fearful and insecure--how, among other things, John had
once almost pushed her over a banister as he beat her, had belittled
her in front of friends and relatives, had refused to talk to her, had
criticized her as being overweight and stupid, and had forced their
family to not wear shoes in the house so they wouldn't hurt the
expensive carpeting.

The next day, February 5, John was called to the stand.  His voice
cracked as he admitted under oath to having beaten his wife on several
occasions.  His testimony included: "I am ambitious.  . .

. I don't demand anything of anybody that I don't demand of myself.

.

. .

There was no justification whatsoever [for having struck Charlotte].

.

. I am forever remorseful about it.  . . . Yes, I demeaned her.

I did a lot of stupid things.

We bred on each other.  . . I used to say this about our marriage--we
had the capacity of building the Eiffel Tower in a day together, but we
also had the capability of destroying it in ten minutes together."

Three weeks later, on February 25, the day their divorce hearing was
supposed to reconvene, and, ironically, the date that twenty years
before John and Charlotte had met, the Wall Street Journal ran a
front-page article about their marriage and its shattered hopes.

It chronicled the events of the trial, John's and Charlotte's
testimony, and the pressures of John's trying to live like an affluent
attorney on a bureaucrat's comparatively meager pay.  It also quoted
their eldest son, who had witnessed one of John's more brutal physical
attacks on Charlotte.

Readers were shocked.  In John Fedders, the city's overachievers
discovered a disturbing allegory of themselves.  He was a Washington
Everyman, somehow gone berserk.

Wasn't domestic violence a heinous oxymoron, anyway?  How could an
educated, an otherwise honorable man, a man entrusted by the federal
government to enforce a set of laws beat his wife?  Did the very
qualities that made him so successful at work, qualities so praised in
the upwardly mobile American male, push him to be domineering and cruel
at home?

The city, and ultimately the nation, wondered, as John and Charlotte's
distressing passion play was picked up in newspapers and news
broadcasts across the country.

The day after the story broke, John handed in his resignation at the
SEC.

In a daze, Charlotte listened to the conflicting public opining on her
very personal agony, and to reporters' questions: Why didn't you leave
him?  You must have liked it; how else could you, would you, have
stayed?

Didn't you have the self-respect, the sense to get out?

No, she hadn't, Charlotte thought.  But what would they have had her
do, shove away all her dreams of happiness at the first hint of
trouble, give up on the man she loved?  She had tried for so long
because she adored him, and she thought marriage was sacred.  She also
had been convinced that somehow his actions were her fault, and that if
she changed, he would too.

And, when times were good with John, they were fairytale wonderful.

Charlotte tearfully stated to the judge, when asked why she had
remained with John for sixteen years: "He was just my life.  I felt
privileged to be married to a man of his stature.  I felt I couldn't
live without him."

On the outside, John was the knight that she and her affluent, Catholic
school girlfriends had been taught to want--the handsome, ambitious
breadwinner, through whom they could vicariously be successes.

Charlotte also grew up believing, however, that she wasn't worthy of
such a man; that she wasn't, well, thin enough, pretty enough, smart
enough to attract him.  So she had known that, if by some God-given
fluke, she did catch him, she was going to do anything to make him
happy.

"When I met John Fedders," says Charlotte, "I knew he was the one love
of my life."
PART ONE GROWING UP PROPER

We are not the first Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.

Cordella, King Lear.

CHAPTER ONE

Charlotte Louise O'Donnell was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on August
14, 1943, to Charles O'Donnell, an
ambitious medical student, and Helen Smith, a nurse who had given up
her work and converted to Catholicism when they married in 1940.

Charlotte was the first of five daughters, little girls who were to be
pampered and protected as their father had never been.

Charles, in fact, had had a difficult childhood, one that steeled him
against hard knocks, taught him to ignore the rules, and pushed him to
want success as only a totally self-made man can want it.  He was
driven, smart, and aggressive.

He grew up poor in Long Island, during the Depression, the eldest of
seven siblings.  When he was sixteen, his father died, leaving Charles
the head of a young, hungry household.  He dropped out of high school
and moved to Baltimore to live with relatives and to work in a can
company.  He also learned the machinist and lithography trades, yet
never gave up on his dream of practicing medicine.

In 1937, after passing a high school equivalency test, Charles started
working on a degree in chemical engineering at Johns Hopkins
University.

Halfway through that curriculum, he walked into the University of
Maryland's medical school and announced that he wanted to attend.

The dean told him that he had only half the necessary credits and to
come back in two years when he had them.  Charles asked if he came back
in a year with them all if he could be admitted.  The dean jokingly
agreed.

Charles O'Donnell came back to the dean's office the next fall.

With the help of his wife, his mother, and his aunts, he had managed to
pass a crushing overload of courses and had the credits.

The dean honored his promise and O'Donnell's career was launched.

It's a story Charlotte and her sisters recited with relish and pride,
just as they recounted all of the doctor's accomplishments - which
became many.

Charles received his medical degree in 1944 and opened his general
practice a year later in Towson, a suburb on the northern fringe of

Baltimore.  To enhance his finances, he also became a county medical
examiner, the medical director of the county jail and a juvenile
facility, and physician to a hospice and nursing home.  Those duties
plus his house calls kept him working on weekends and late into the
night.

By 1950, when he was thirty-three and Charlotte was seven years old,
the doctor had built an imposing brick Colonial home on York Road,
Towson's main thoroughfare, in which he also had his office.  He gained
status around town, and was afforded privileges such as parking on the
fire lane of Immaculate Conception Church, so that he wouldn't have to
wait with the rest of the congregation to get out of the parking lot
following Sunday Mass.

But even with his monetary success and growing celebrity, Charles
wanted more power, prestige, and influence than simply being a good
diagnostician in Baltimore County could bring.

He strode into Maryland medical politics armed with his Long Island
street savvy and knack for snowballing.  His climb was swift and
consummate.  Within six years of his graduating from medical school,
his colleagues voted him president of the Maryland Academy of General
Practice.  In 1952, he became the youngest president of the Baltimore
County Medical Association.  His honors would eventually include
chairmanships in organizations affecting medical policies across the
country--the Southern Medical Association, the American Medical
Association, and the American Academy of General Practice.

Not bad for a poor boy who technically finished neither high school nor
college.

Helen was terribly proud of him, proud to be his wife, proud to succeed
through him, despite the fact she had advanced to head nurse at
Baltimore's Sinai Hospital before quitting her career.  Her own
upbringing in a tiny North Carolina town had been poor, and the promise
of stability and opportunities for their children meant a great deal to
her.

She repaid him by being where he wanted her, when he wanted her, the
perfect, patient, obedient wife.

Each night, when Charlotte was a toddler, her mother bathed and dressed
her in a clean, frilled dress and took her to the bus stop to meet
Daddy.  He was their hero, their linchpin, their definition.

They were his cheering squad, his sparkling accoutrements, his
responsibilities.

The dynamics of the O'Donnell family didn't change as more daughters
came.  It remained a pretty mobile, with its pieces moving only
slightly independently, always anchored tightly to their
center--Charles.

That probably was a reality of most American families of the time, but
somehow the hierarchy in the O'Donnell clan was even more pronounced,
their deification of him eventually more constricting for his
children.

Because his office was in the basement, the family's daily routine and
meals circled around his schedule.  Helen often had to juggle answering
the office phone, which also rang in the kitchen, as she prepared
dinner.

Once a month, Charlotte and her sisters helped her mother write the
doctor's bills and stuff them into envelopes for mailing.

Generally, their table conversation was what the doctor wanted to talk
about.  And he expressed his views in a confident tone.

His opinion became family doctrine.  The O'Donnell girls remember that
they hesitated to express their own sentiments largely because their
eager-to-please mother rarely challenged him.  They emulated her and
showed their father extraordinary, sometimes fearful, deference, which
kept him at a distance.

"I probably saw more of my father than most children with a
nine-to-five father," remembers Charlotte, "but he was always doing
something else.  He ate lunch with us, for instance, but he was always
on the phone.

When you set the table, you put out the napkins, the silverware, the
glasses, and the phone with several lines.

"We were always aware of the patients downstairs.  When I jumped on the
middle step, my mother would warn: 'There are patients in the
office."

And she'd say: "Don't do that, it will upset your father."

I don't think she was passing the buck.  I think she was being
honest.

I never saw them argue, but I think she used to buffer things for us.

"So we tried never to upset him.  We never argued with him.  He would
sit at the dinner table and give a political monologue basically.

He hated Communists and used to tell us to be nurses rather than
teachers because if Communists took over they'd have their own
teachers, but they'd still need nurses.  He also always told us to
register Democrat but to vote Republican in the elections.  He did that
because the Democrats had more exciting primaries than the Republicans
and he loved the fun of politics.

"I never questioned anything he said.  Sometimes I might doubt what he
told us to do, but only to myself.  I would think, "He's my father,
he's a man, he must be right."  The only time I did question him was to
argue about abortion.  He was for it in some cases because of his
medical training.  I was totally against it at the time because of what
the nuns were teaching us at school, but I lost that one fast.

He could just make you feel very silly in what you were arguing.

"I don't know why I was so nervous around him, because I can remember
being spanked only twice.  Once was with a belt and once was with a
forsythia branch I had had to cut myself when I was probably eight or
nine years old.  I remember thinking I deserved it because I had
embarrassed him in church by giggling or something.

Un-ladylike, UnGodly behavior would embarrass him because everyone knew
us.

"He was never really violent or threatened us with it; we just felt
that kind of punishment was possible.  I never saw him yell at my
mother.  It had more to do with the tone of his voice.  I just knew
that I never wanted to make a mistake around him.  I was always trying
to please my father because I was afraid that if I did something wrong,
he would stop loving me.

More than anything else, the O'Donnell daughters remember their
father's quick temper, made more intimidating because of their
unfamiliarity with him.  Perhaps Dr. O'Donnell was victim to the
tragedy of many motivated, overachieving parents; perhaps his
professional persona was so ingrained that he couldn't easily shed it
when he was with his children.  In Dr. O'Donnell's case, he needed to
be hard-nosed to survive medical politics.  He probably had no idea how
his vindictiveness toward an adversary could frighten his daughters.

"I just didn't know Daddy that well," remembers Charlotte's younger
sister Martha O'Donnell.  "I wasn't scared of him like, 'Oh, my God,
he's going to do this to me'; it was more the kind of scared you feel
when you're on a first date and you don't know the person.

And you'd see him get mad at other people, so you didn't want to have
him get mad at you.  He'd get furious at hospital telephone
operators.

God help them if they disconnected him or sent him to the wrong
party.

He'd ask where they got their diploma in stupidity and blah, blah,
blah.  It was a real belittling kind of thing.

"Dinner conversations would revolve around his day and how he had
gotten somebody.  That was what you were supposed to do, get someone
who had crossed you.  He wanted us to do the same thing, because he was
protective of us.  If I came home and told him about something bad a
nun had said to me, he'd say, 'Now, you go back and say this and this
and this,' and I would start crying and say, 'Daddy, I can't do
that."

The youngest of all the sisters, Dotti Matthews, had similar feelings:
"I was definitely afraid of him but not because he directed his anger
towards me as much as just being afraid of his anger in general.

I saw him throw a license plate at a dog once, and you'd always know
when he had been looking for keys when you saw everything on the
kitchen counter knocked onto the floor.  It was never a slow boil with
him.  All of a sudden you'd realize that you had done something
wrong.

And yet all three remember how important their father's approval was to
them.  He was a community leader.  People called out to him on the
street, "Hey, Doc."  If they could gain his respect, they had achieved
something big.

"It was nice if our mother signed our report cards, but it was really
something if Daddy did.  We were all very proud of him and it meant a
lot if he did something for just us," says Martha.  "He'd hand out a
silver dollar if you got honors, which was very exciting."

"I remember feeling that I had really earned something when he put his
arm around my shoulder," says Dotti.  "It felt like heaven."

Charles certainly was capable of showing affection for his family.

He nicknamed Charlotte "Schatz," German for "treasure."  When she was
away at camp for the first time, he sent her a telegram telling her
that he missed her.  But such moments were few because of his frantic
schedule.

Most of his displays of love were saved up for big, lavish spectacles,
displays befitting a family man of means.  His gifts to Helen, for
example, were glittery and presented with ceremony.

Once he surprised her with an ornate chandelier for their dining room,
purchasing it and having it hung before telling her.

Each summer he sent his wife and daughters to Ocean City, Maryland, for
at least a month.  The doctor stayed in the city during the week to
work, but when he came down, he'd fix huge Dagwood-style sandwiches for
lunch, take them body-surfing and fishing, and treat them to a stellar
night on the boardwalk their last weekend at the beach.

"Those were very festive moments," says Martha.

There were trips to Niagara Falls, the World's Fair, and Montreal, and
five-star outings to New York City, replete with tickets to Broadway
shows-Flower Drum Song, The Music Man, and My Fair Lady-and dinners at
the Latin Quarter nightclub, where stars such as Merv Griffin
performed.  When in New York, they stayed at the Sheraton and only in
large rooms that passed his wife's inspection.

Just as Charles preferred to wear only expensive Countess Mara ties, he
wanted his family swathed in the best dresses that money could buy.

Each Easter, for instance, the doctor paid for complete new outfits for
his girls: suits, shoes to match, and hats, plus a corsage for each.

He sent them to shop at some of Baltimore's finest stores, such as The
Tweed Shop and Peck & Peck.

Charles's attitude was simply that only the best would do for his
daughters.  That included the best private Catholic education in the
city.

All five of the girls attended the prestigious Notre Dame Preparatory
School from first grade through high school, where tuition was an
average of $600 a year per child.

"There was a real largess about him," says Dotti.  "The sky was the
limit.  When we went out for a good meal, we could have steak, lobster,
anything.  We knew that if we could please him there was this reward at
the end of the rainbow.  But it was feast or famine with him.

There was very little middle ground.  It was either grandiose or you
were tiptoeing around.  There was no day-to-day support.  That was
Mommie."

Perhaps Charlotte best summed up the children's relations with their
parents in two poems she wrote in the innocence of sixth grade: My
Mother I love my mother, truly I do and I know my mother loves me
too.

Every morning when I leave for school I love the way she waves
goodbye.

I don't know why God gave me such a sweet mother And I guess that's why
I really love her.

My Dad My father is a doc, he works round the clock.

I love him, really I do, although I don't see him as much as you.

He is really very nice, like fathers usually are.

And I really love him by far, by far, by far.

So the basic family unit for the O'Donnells was Helen and the girls.

In many ways, their mother was as simple and giggly as her offspring,
willing to play and tease with them.  They could dress her up as Ringo
when the Beatles were idols and challenge her authority gently.

Once when she complained about their rooms and all the stuffed animals
the children had, she awoke the next day to find five dozen fluffy
creatures lined up against her bedroom door.

Another time she admonished them not to take their heads off their
pillows before 10 AM the next morning because she and the doctor were
tired.  The girls were up and downstairs long before the appointed
hour, watching cartoons on television.  When their mother stormed in,
she found each of them had a pillow wrapped around her head.

"What could I do but laugh?"  asks Helen happily.

She made all their lunches and tucked notes into the bags of the girls
who had tests or special events that day.  Nothing fancy, just small
words of encouragement.  Helen was the one who took them to Mass each
morning during Lent, and packed donuts and orange juice in the car for
the ride to school afterwards.  She had no friends other than the
couples she and Charles saw together socially.  She didn't belong to
bridge or garden clubs.  Her life was her family.

"She was the best mother," says Charlotte, "because she was always
there.  She taught us all the words to her favorite musicals and we'd
dance in the kitchen and sing in the car.  I wanted to be just like her
when I grew up.

"She was just a great mom who could solve any problem, fix any wound,
never told you no," says Martha.  "I never thought my mother was a
creep when I was a teenager like most girls do.  There was never
anything that was too much for her to do in terms of cooking, baking,
decorating, or entertaining.  She just loved it."

In fact, their mother could make home so appealing that Charlotte
rarely wanted to go out.  She preferred the company of her family,
especially since she could be a reticent child.  "Charlotte was
definitely shy with people she didn't know," recalls her mother.

"But she was just the sweetest, gentlest child.  When she was two or
three I could put her in a chair and say, "Mommie has to go upstairs
for a minute, you stay right there."  And she wouldn't move, and be
happy as can be.  I never had to say anything like "Stay there or I'll
shake you."  She just naturally wanted to please."

In her quest to help her daughter be the best she could be, however,
Helen may have contributed to Charlotte's growing insecurities.

"My mother tried to build me up," says Charlotte.  "She'd always say,
'Don't you look pretty."  But she'd also say, "Always wear makeup, you
never know who you might see.  Don't bite your fingernails."

And I don't have a real feminine walk.  I remember once in the den her
showing me how I walked.

She looked like a gorilla as she did this and I was so embarrassed.

I thought, "Oh, my God, I can't look that bad."" But for the most part,
life at home was happy, even if sometimes restrained.  The most
traumatic event of Charlotte's young life was when her sister Martha
was badly burned.  Charlotte still blames herself for the accident.

"It was February 14, 1953.  Valentine's Day," recalls Charlotte.

"I was nine.  I was fixing breakfast for my parents and Martha pushed a
chair up to the stove to watch.  She was only two.  She was wearing a
little green cotton dress and an organdy pinafore.  That pinafore
touched the electric burner and shot up in flames.  She ran out into
the hall, screaming.  My parents heard and ran downstairs.

They rolled her up into a throw rug she was standing on.  She was
hospitalized and sick for a long time.

They thought she was going to die at one point.

"They never yelled at me.  They never said anything.  But I felt just
terrible, that it was all my fault.  How could I have been that
stupid?

How could I have not thought to roll her in the rug myself?  I buried
it, never talked about it until 1971, when we were at the beach, and my
mother was absolutely appalled when she heard me break down over it, so
many years later.

"You see, it had just never occurred to her that I might need to be
reassured.  That generation had a whole different way of parenting.

They didn't have Dr. Spock.  We spend all this time worrying about
what to say to our kids, but they didn't back then."

The terms "interpersonal relations" and "emotional well-being," after
all, just weren't household words in the 1950s.  Helen and the doctor
were basically everything that the culture demanded of them at the
time.

He was supposed to be ambitious, wasn't he?  Didn't his being
successful mean that they were happy?  He provided for his family,
provided royally, in fact.

It was simply an era that pushed preoccupied with their careers and
their financial success.  As a result, a lot of fathers didn't have the
time or impetus to spend many unstructured hours with their
children-hours necessary to provide enough intimacy for a child to know
a parent as a person, not just as an authority.  Many of Charlotte's
contemporaries grew up naive about men in general and dependent upon
male jurisprudence.  Charlotte, in particular, wasn't confident enough
to try a relationship in which she had a truly equal voice.

But there is no question that his children were important to the
doctor.  In his backyard, Charles planted a dogwood tree for each
daughter.  And in his medical office, under the glass on top of his
desk he had a collage of their pictures, plus the following poem:
Children Learn What They Live If a child lives with criticism, he
learns to condemn.

If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.

If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy.

If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty.

If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient.

If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence.

If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.

If a child lives with fairness, he learns justice.

If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith.

If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself.

If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love
in the world.

CHAPTER TWO

o Lord, I am not worthy That Thou shouldst come to me But
speak the words of comfort My spirit healed shall be And humbly I'll
receive thee The Bridegroom of my soul No more by sin to grieve Thee Or
fly Thy sweet control.

On May 14, 1950 Charlotte stood with twenty other six-year-old girls
singing the hymn "O Lord, I Am Not Worthy," their translucent voices
rising like the sound of wind chimes in the chapel of Notre Dame
Preparatory School.  They were dressed in stiff, white dresses, and
were crowned with waist-long white veils, the picture of purity.

Within a few moments each would walk to the altar and receive Holy
Communion for the first time, an important rite of passage for
Catholics, and one that would affect Charlotte more than most.  While
many of her schoolmates would eventually reject a great deal of the
Church's teachings, Charlotte would not.

The hymn "O Lord, I Am Not Worthy," in fact, became her favorite.

In many ways, Charlotte would remain as innocent as she earnestly
promised God to always be that day in 1950.

As the priest placed the blessed wafer, or Host, on her tongue,
Charlotte believed she received the body of Christ into her own, and
through that sacrament became one momentarily with God.  She felt very
special, very holy, very lucky as she walked back to her wooden pew to
say her small prayer of thanks.

Several weeks before, Charlotte had been made fit to receive Communion
by going to confession for the first time.  She had climbed into the
dark, wooden confessional, pulled the heavy red curtain closed, knelt,
and waited nervously for the priest sitting in the adjacent chamber to
slide back the door covering the grate, and press his ear toward her.

She had recited her litany of faults quickly, fearing a long
conversation with the priest would make her classmates, waiting their
turn in a line outside, think she had been very bad, indeed.

Now, kneeling in the pew, with the last bit of the Communion Host
dissolving in her mouth, she felt completely cleansed.  Charlotte
imagined her soul to be a shiny white canvas and any sin to be a black
spot on it.

Confession and Communion had absolved whatever smudges a well-behaved
six-year-old could possibly have accumulated, and she was momentarily
in a state of grace.  If she died right then, she would have to spend
only a short time atoning in purgatory.  All she had to do to remain
this pure was to avoid fighting with her sisters, coveting their toys,
disobeying her parents, saying a bad word, watching too much
television, or eating too much.  It was a lot to remember.

But she knew she could do it.

Charlotte felt a bit more blessed than others anyway because she was
born on the eve of a Holy Day of Obligation-the Assumption, the day the
angels carried Mary up to heaven in a cloud.  Because of the proximity
of her birthday and that special day, Charlotte chose the

Mother of God as her special patron.  She prayed to her exclusively,
somehow trusting her more than God or His Son or the other saints.

Like many good Catholic girls, she had a foot-high statue of Mary in
her bedroom, and each May, which was Mary's month, she would adorn it
with azalea clippings from her yard.

Her family was hardly fanatical, but Catholicism was a constant, daily
influence in the O'Donnells' lives.  Each night the girls went in to
kiss their parents good-night, and typically the doctor was on his
knees in evening prayer, often with a nightcap of Scotch on the
bedstand.

Grace was said before each meal.  The family ate and drank nothing on
Sunday before Mass, and on Fridays abstained from meat, in remembrance
of Good Friday.  Those were basic requirements of Catholics before
Vatican II, the papal conference in 1965 that relaxed many of the
Church's rules, as well as changing the Mass from Latin to modern
languages.

But under the influence of Notre Dame's nuns, the O'Donnell girls tried
to make their family more devout.  During October, for instance, the
month of the rosary, they persuaded their parents to try to recite its
Holy Mysteries (a twenty-minute process) together each night.

Often on a long car trip, they did say the rosary.  A Saint Christopher
medal hung in the car for protection as well.  And when the family
vacationed in Canada, they went out of their way to visit the Basilica
of Sainte-Anne de Beau pre', where the doctor and Charlotte climbed

thirty stairs to the altar on their knees in penance.

All the O'Donnells wore Miraculous Medals, oval gold medals that showed
the Blessed Mother stepping on a serpent.  At the top of each piece of
paper the girls used for schoolwork, they wrote "JMJ," for

"Jesus, Mary, Joseph," to remind them that all aspects of their lives
were to be dedicated to the Lord.

All these things contributed to Charlotte and her sisters' believing
that they were constantly watched by Him, His archangels and angels,
their personal guardian angel, the saints, and all the heavenly host.

Dotti can remember leaving candy and flowers out for Saint Cosmos and
Saint Damian, who she was sure strolled through her bedroom at night.

She hoped that they'd look out for her in gratitude for her gifts.

It was both a comforting and frightening thought, since the children
believed that any little mistake would be immediately seen and
condemned by all the persons of heaven.

Each girl had a crucifix above her bed, a holy water font by the
bedroom door, and a statue of Mary on the bureau; all of which were
decorated with palms from Palm Sunday.  They could not throw the palms
away because they were blessed.  So, the palms stayed up until Ash
Wednesday the following spring, when they took them to church to be
burned and used for ashes in that holy day's service.

Charlotte was tutored to gaze daily at the crucifix and to recall
Christ's bloody and painful death, his "humiliation" and "heartbreak,"
so that she would remember that any sin she committed was not simply a
harm she did to herself.  She was inflicting more pain and suffering on
Christ, who had endured so much for her already.  Not only was she bad
if she sinned, she was ungrateful.  A child who always wanted to
please, Charlotte took all this to heart.  Guilt became a familiar
feeling.

* * * Most of the O'Donnell girls' religious training came at Notre
Dame, with the nuns, with daily religion classes, and yearly
retreats.

It began with the Baltimore Catechism, the book used to teach Catholic
children the basics of their faith.  It was written in singsong
questions-answers, and the nuns required their students to recite
passages to them.

"We studied religion every day," Charlotte remembers.  "It was the
major subject.  You'd stand up to answer and every word had to be
exact.

There were no discussions or questions.  The dogma was set and we were
supposed to just memorize it.

"If you didn't get it right, it was a terrible thing.  I remember the
first time I raised my hand in a class in first grade was to answer the
question on when Communion came in the Mass.  I got it wrong and the
nun made me feel so stupid that I don't think I ever raised my hand
again until high school."

The nuns drilled such rote memorization in order to discourage
individual thought, because it led to trouble.  Charlotte and her
classmates were also cautioned to comply with the commands of the Pope
and priests, who were more holy than their congregations and who
understood more clearly the word of the Lord, and to avoid "near
occasions of sin"-"any person, place, or things that might easily lead
us into sin."

"It didn't give us a lot of credit for strength of character," says
Charlotte, "that, given the slightest opportunity, we'd commit a
sin."

Her religious beliefs contributed to Charlotte's deepening lack of
self-esteem.

They also paralleled the intellectual and emotional dependency she was
learning at home, where she was encouraged to accept her father's
opinion as gospel.

She certainly never challenged any Church edict, even to the point of
refusing to look at a King James Bible when her family traveled and
stayed in hotels.  The King James version was the Bible of the
Episcopal Church and wasn't embossed with the imprimatur, a mark in the
front cover that told Catholics a book had been approved by the
Catholic Church.

"In my mind in those days, it was almost like looking at a dirty book,"
says Charlotte.

Such compliance to orders was part of being a good Catholic.

Obedience and respect for authority, then, were prime virtues and
methods of living a holy life and thus deserving God's favor.

Charlotte's Baltimore Catechism says: "Besides our parents, the fourth
commandment obliges us to respect and obey all our lawful superiors.

.

. to refuse to obey anyone with true authority, as parents, teachers,
etc is to refuse to obey God and to reject His will."

But Notre Dame's girls rarely had to think for themselves anyway, on
matters ranging from their dress to performance of movements during
Mass.  They wore prescribed uniforms and when they went to chapel, at
least once a month they went in procession, led by nuns who were armed
with clickers.  Click-click-click, time to genuflect,
click-click-click, time to stand.

Following the rules, however, was not just something to do out of fear
of hell; there was a promise connected.  If you abided by the rules
with faith, you would see the kingdom of heaven.  The Catholic Church
is relatively unusual in the Christian religion in that it does offer
practices that more or less carry specified guarantees.

For instance, indulgences, collecting money for "pagan babies," regular
Bible study, making pilgrimages-bought time out of purgatory.

Those who made sincere confessions, followed the penance prescribed by
the priest ("Usually all I had to say were a few Hail Marys," says
Charlotte), and promised never to commit the act again gained
absolution.

Novenas, a set of prayers said nine days in a row following certain
procedures, were more likely than regular prayers to bring the desired
answer.

Using relics of saints-bone chips, pieces of their clothes, or articles
they touched-while praying would also give entreaties extra clout.  And
special blessings brought special protection.

Charlotte always looked forward to February 2, when the priest blessed
her throat to guard her against sore throats and choking.

Taken simply, these sanctified rites pretty much guaranteed that the
devout who practiced them would be shielded from harm and rewarded with
good things.  A trusting, nonquizzical child, Charlotte basically
accepted every word and interpreted the message conversely as well-if
something bad happened, you deserved it, because you must have done
something evil to make God turn his back on you.

"Until my marriage broke up, I honestly believed," says Charlotte,
"that if I was good, prayed, went to confession and to church, obeyed
the Ten Commandments, and devoted myself to my loved ones that nothing
bad could happen to me.  I was convinced that bad things only came as a
punishment for some fault in me.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  It was an idea that has
plagued her much of her life.

Of course, women were far more susceptible to evil and to causing evil
than men, according to the scriptures.  Eve was the one who directly
disobeyed God by taking the fruit of knowledge from the serpent.

She then coerced Adam into tasting it.  This idea was dramatically
brought home to Charlotte by a woman she knew who had to leave her own
relatives to live with friends because she was pregnant.

"She was with [them] only until the baby was born," Charlotte
recalls.

"Then, it was given up for adoption.  It told me that if you got
pregnant you had to hide until the whole thing was over because it was
your disgrace.  It wasn't the man's fault if you got in trouble, it was
the woman's for letting something happen."

A concept of Catholicism that would have a profound effect on Charlotte
was the idea of turning the other cheek and patiently enduring
injustices.  The eight Beatitudes promised the poor in spirit, the
meek, those who mourn, hunger, and thirst for justice, the merciful,
the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and those who suffer persecution
that they, not the proud, the rich, or the successful-would see
heaven.

Charlotte's catechism included the following: "Love is purified,
increased, and perfected by suffering.  . . . God sends everyone all
the sufferings they need on earth to cleanse, strengthen, and perfect
their love.  But most people waste their sufferings.  They do not want
them, complain about them, and try to escape them.  . . . Our cross is
everything that happens to us during the day that we do not like.

. .

.

Crosses heal us quickly if we accept them and even love them the way
our Lord did."

The virtue of trusting endurance was especially associated with the
Mother of God.  Mary always forgave, was always patient.  She was the
female figure the nuns taught Charlotte and her classmates to
emulate.

"Imitate that which Christ treasured in her: her simplicity, her
devotion and love, her obedience," reads one of Charlotte's Catholic
manuals.

Each May, Notre Dame paid tribute to Mary, holding a special
procession.  As the students reverently marched through campus to a
statue of the Blessed Mother, they recited the rosary and sang hymns
about the Virgin.  Then, the May Queen, dressed in a full-length white
dress, climbed a white ladder twined with blossoms and crowned Mary
with a wreath of spring flowers.

The day Charlotte graduated from Notre Dame she asked her parents to
drive by their church in Towson before going home.  She wanted to place
the spray of red roses she had received during the ceremony on Mary's
altar in a special supplication.  She knelt and dedicated her life to
the Virgin, asking for her motherly protection, murmuring a prayer such
as this one from Youth Before God by Reverend William J.

Kelly: Holy Virgin Mary, mother worthy of all love, give us a heart
like yours, strong in its decisions and of unshakable loyalty.

A heart full of love that radiates forth good will and is not
hardened.

A pure heart which lives in the flesh without living for the flesh.

A noble heart that quickly forgets its wounds and is ever ready to
pardon.

A sensitive heart that shares in the joy and sorrow of others.

A heart gentle and kind that judges no one and never ceases to have
confidence in others.

CHAPTER THREE

Notre Dame sits atop one of Baltimore's highest hills,
nestled in a staid residential section on the city's northern border,
shady and still.

Its campus is convent-quiet, a place seemingly designed to inspire
strolling and contemplation.  Solitary stone benches are strategically
dispersed amid unruly hedges and under tall, old trees for privacy.

Sacred statues are tucked into modest, protective gardens.  The narrow
walkways eventually wind their way up gentle slopes to the tall, red
brick administration building, where a gleaming white statue of the

Blessed Mother awaits, hands outstretched reassuringly.

When Charlotte was in school, Notre Dame was the city's best private
Catholic girls' institution.  Part of that prestige came from the fact
Notre Dame's college and prep school shared the Charles Street campus
at the time, infusing the lower school with space and programs
generally afforded only a college.  Also, the student population was
decidedly upper-middle-class, earning the school the nickname "Snob

Hill."

Indeed, Notre Dame was part of a Catholic enclave that could seem
snobbish and insulated to the outside world.  The campus was buffered
on one side by another small but landed Catholic college, Loyola, and
on the other by the neighborhood for well-to-do Catholics, Homeland.

Across Charles Street and up a few blocks was a newly constructed
neo-Gothic cathedral that would become the center of the Church's
politics in Baltimore, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Mary Our Queen,
its 128-foot-high stone tower looming huge on the horizon.

Unlike their brethren in some Eastern industrial cities, Baltimore's
Catholics had integrated themselves into power and affluence early.

The colony of Maryland, after all, was started by Lord Baltimore, a
Catholic Englishman.  The city became the site of the first American
Roman Catholic cathedral and home of the first American archbishop.

Baltimore's diverse religious and cultural groups, however, were
tight-knit and territorial.  Laborers of different nationalities stuck
to their own in residential areas rimming the docks and mills, and
nothing much changed as they achieved affluence.  Rich Catholics did
move to the cool, uncrowded northern dimes of the city, along with
successful merchants of other religions, but they remained sequestered
together.

Yet, side by side these elite neighborhoods and the adjacent Notre Dame
and Loyola campuses created quite a privileged and comfortable
stronghold, in which Catholics with proper credentials were an accepted
part.

Notre Dame's hills, then, were far away from the everyday stress and
struggle of the city's harbor, from which most of this wealth came.

Far away from the ethnic groups that found work there, as disconnected
from the throb of the city and its discomforts as clouds are from the
surface of the earth.

On the campus itself there was little to tell the students about real
life.  The School Sisters of Notre Dame had started their academy in
1848, and one hundred years later the nuns still wore medieval
garb-floorlength black dresses with white bibs and stiff, elbow-length
hoods that looked like bells sliced down the middle.  Charlotte
remembers them smelling musty and that the habits were so starched that
the nuns had difficulty returning the embrace of any student courageous
enough to touch them.  She also remembers one nun telling her with an
unusual show of pride that she brushed her teeth with Ivory Soap
instead of expensive toothpaste.

The nuns meant to cultivate innocents like themselves.  They believed
that their responsibilities stretched beyond academics and religious
topics to instilling patriotism, recruiting new sisters, and
strengthening the moral rectitude of their charges.

Each day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and morning prayer.

Convocations occasionally included a lecture on fighting Communism.

This was the age of Eisenhower, and pride in country stuck with
Charlotte.

"I can still tear up at 'God Bless America,' she says.  "That attitude
just came along with thinking we were in the best school, the best
religion, the best country."

The morning prayer time more often than not included a plea for
"vocation," that youngsters suited for the cloth would recognize their
calling.  But if the girls didn't want to join the order, they were at
least going to be properly decorous.  The nuns chastised them for
sitting in immodest poses, such as legs crossed at the knees.

(Legs were to be demurely crossed at the ankle.) The nuns also
encouraged students to join the Legion of Decency, a group Charlotte
belonged to that promoted "modesty in dress, decency in entertainment,
and the reading of clean literature."  Prom dresses were required to
have straps.  A perceived penchant for promiscuity or using a bad word
could bring expulsion.

Being transferred to public school was an oft-heard threat.

Charlotte entered the first grade with twenty other well-behaved,
well-heeled, "private-school material" Catholics and stuck with them
through high school.  She never really knew many Protestants, let alone
anyone of a different race or creed.  It was a cloistered, provincial
way to grow up.

"It was very secure, very safe, and a beautiful environment," she says
simply.  "It was like a big family.  I was very happy there."

Except for when she accompanied her father on house calls or to the
nursing home, Charlotte saw little more of the world through her family
life.  The O'Donnell daughters were sheltered and coddled at

home as well.  Maids, for instance, came daily.  "There was someone

there to clean, cook, iron, or baby-sit every day except Sunday,"
remembers Dotti.

"And there was always someone there for parties.  We were never
expected to do more than keep our rooms.  They did everything else.

It wasn't until college that I learned how to wash dishes.

"We were basically prepared to be princesses," she jokes.

According to Charlotte's high school diaries, most Saturdays she stayed
in bed well past 10 AM, catching up on sleep she had lost the night
before, giggling with girlfriends who had slept over.  She spent
weekend nights going with them to such movies as Tommy Tell Me True and
Gidget Goes Hawaiian.  No scary or racy fare for these girls.

She did help her mother bathe, dress, feed, and shuttle the four babies
who came after her, but Charlotte did not hold a job until after she
graduated from college.  Her parents paid for a trip to Bermuda with
three girlfriends following high school graduation, and for two trips
to Europe during college.  In addition to these trips and family
excursions, Charlotte traveled to West Virginia's exclusive resort The
Grecubrier with her aunt and uncle.

"I think maybe part of the reason I had so much trouble later on in
life and in my marriage," says Charlotte, "was that I had led such a
simple, happy life that I just wasn't prepared for anything bad, for
any kind of turmoil.  Of course, it wasn't the real world.  But I just
expected life to be this lovely forever."

Yet, despite the material ease and financial success of her family,
Charlotte never felt that she fit in anywhere.  "We never had a normal
neighborhood life in terms of having kids running in and out of the
house from next door," she remembers.  "We didn't know any of the kids
around us.  Our house was much larger than those around it and faced
away from the neighborhood onto York Road, which is a very busy
street.

We were Catholic, most of them weren't, and they went to the local
public schools.

We did join the neighborhood pool, but we never felt comfortable
there.

"It didn't matter that much when we were at home because we had each
other.  The five of us were so close in age-there's only a nine-year
span-that we played with each other."

Charlotte, however, didn't feel entirely at ease with her Notre Dame
friends, because the majority of them lived in Homeland, the city's
Catholic promised land, and had been born into Baltimore's upper-crust
society.

She lived in the suburbs and was the daughter of a self-made man.

No matter how important Dr. O'Donnell was in medicine or his
neighborhood, Charlotte felt that he just didn't have the same social
stature many of her friends' fathers had.

It was not a prejudice entirely of Charlotte's making.  It was an
attitude of the city's high society.  Like the rich in many industrial
towns on the East Coast, Baltimore's elite, blessed with the prestige
of blood line as well as cash, often snubbed the newly arrived,
successful professional, such as Dr. O'Donnell, as being merely an
illegitimate half-brother, his offspring as pretenders.  Charlotte
could never shake the fear that her friends saw her as a second-class
citizen.

While she waited for the public bus to go home, Charlotte watched her
classmates walk across campus and disappear under the tall oak and pine
trees of Homeland.  Their homes were mainly built in the 1920s and were
large, fieldstone or brick, Tudor or Colonial in style, imitating the
subdued grandeur of English country manors.  They had latticed windows
and tall ceramic chimneys, and wide, manicured lawns.  The pristine
neighborhood even had a string of man-made ponds, with fountains in
their centers.

"Some of the girls would schlepp us in to go ice-skating on those
ponds," says Charlotte.  "It was very nice and all, but we definitely
didn't belong.  Homeland is a closed system.  The biggest dream for
most of the girls I knew was to move back to the neighborhood with a
suitable well-bred husband and to send their children to the same
private schools they attended.  I never felt deprived, just
inferior."

Much of her inferiority complex came from Charlotte's unfavorably
comparing herself with her friend Lawre, the daughter of the president
of the construction company that had built the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Her Tudor house was one of the most stately in Homeland.

"My father was her father's doctor and the two families were very
friendly," remembers Charlotte.  "Each New Year's Eve we went to
someplace like the Belvedere Hotel.  We'd get very dressed up and have
an elegant dinner.  We always had an apartment at the beach just a
block or two away from theirs.  Her father took mine hunting and
deep-sea fishing.

"But I always felt a little unworthy of Lawre's friendship.  My father
couldn't really afford to treat her father to things.  They belonged to
the Baltimore Country Club and we belonged to Hillendale, which was
fine by me, but it was smaller and out in the country and my parents
really wanted to join the Baltimore Club.  It took them a long time to
be accepted as members.  I don't know why.  They knew the right
people."

Charlotte took on a kind of handmaiden role to her friend, partly in
deference to the doors her family could open for Charlotte and her
parents, and partly following the ancient female ritual of pretty
girls, like Lawre, leading a pack of not-quite-as-pretty friends.

It was a role Charlotte instinctively and willingly imposed on herself
and one that helped gel the passivity she was learning at home and at
school.

"I guess Lawre really was my closest friend.  She was very nice to me,
always.  But she was socially there and very popular.  I just followed
along behind her.  She was a debater, president of the athletic
association, and a member of the holy group around school.

I was never an officer in anything.

"She was pretty.  I went through some really plain periods.  She never
had a hair out of place; mine was always fly-away.  She never had a
weight problem and I was always fighting ten pounds.  I wore glasses,
she didn't.

And she always had dates.  No one ever asked me out in high school,
which didn't do much for my self-confidence.

"None of this was her fault.  It was me making myself insecure.  I just
never felt good enough."

But Charlotte had always doubted her attractiveness.  In fifth grade,
at Camp Happy Valley, she carefully filled out all details about
herself in the camper's handbook-age, address, family names, etc except
for her height and weight.  And at five-foot-nine inches she was taller
and therefore often bigger than most of her high school friends,
something that made her self-conscious.  In her 1959 diary, she wrote:
"I have lost about ten pounds.  I weigh only 143.  I feel really
good."

Her mother tried to help Charlotte feel prettier and once enrolled her
in a modeling seminar at Hutzler's, a local department store.

She learned to walk down a ramp, turn, and go back.  In all her
full-length photographs following that, Charlotte stood with her feet
in a perfect balletic V. Her insecurity blossomed fully when she was a
teenager, however, and it came time to find dates for school events.

Charlotte was shy anyway with anyone outside her gaggle of
girlfriends.

But she was positively terrified of the opposite sex.  She simply
didn't know any males.

None of her friends had brothers.  She didn't know any of her
neighbors.

The only time she had really seen boys up close was at the Milbrook
Cotillion in the seventh and eighth grades, where she had been sent to
learn the box step and waltz.  And that had been a small disaster.  She
was so tall that no one asked her to dance.

"Poor Charlotte was a bit of an oddity in that group," says Nancy Long,
a high school and college classmate.  "She never felt attractive
because she was gawky and wore glasses and her hair was straight.

It didn't help that most of her friends dated regularly.  I think she
really envied the girls from Homeland because they were petite and
always well put together and very, very popular with the boys."

Charlotte became a bit obsessed with the problem, recording in her
diary all the dates her friends had and pining after any boy who talked
to her at a party, writing: "I wish he liked me at least a little," "He
has had more prayers from me," "I somehow feel that God might not want
me to go out with him," and "Frankly, I don't know why I even try."

In Charlotte's senior year, her parents arranged an escort to Notre
Dame's spring "Soiree" and hosted a late dinner party for her and two
dozen friends afterwards.  Charlotte had a marvelous time but was
depressed that her date didn't seem to.  She prayed that he would ask
her to his prom several weeks later, but he didn't.

Finding an escort for her senior prom turned into a minor crusade.

She enlisted the help of all her girlfriends and finally, after several
boys were called and had declined, Charlotte snared a date, the son of
a well-to-do ophthalmologist who also happened, not coincidentally, to
be a friend of her parents.  He went to a prominent private boys'
school, Gilman.  He called before the dance to ask Charlotte which
family car she wanted him to drive-the convertible or the
Continental.

"I was dumbfounded," Charlotte chirped to her diary.  "But I chose the
convertible."

They had a good enough time that she invited him to Notre Dame's White
Dance, held the evening of her graduation.  Then they went their
separate ways.  But not before Charlotte had asked him for one of his
Gilman varsity letters, which she lovingly sewed onto her own white
cardigan.

"I had to work so hard to get that blind date for the prom," says
Charlotte, with a sigh.  "It was really embarrassing.  He never asked
me out.  No one in Baltimore ever asked me out.  All my friends
dated.

If a boy was nice to me, then I'd spend a great deal of my energy for
the next month liking him, thinking about him, or driving past his
house, looking for his car, a boy who never even called me.

"That poor boy who took me to the prom called me a couple of times and
I was head over heels.  I don't know how I got that letter.  I guess I
asked him about it enough that he thought, "Shut the broad up and give
her a letter."  I was so proud of that thing.  I even took it to
Bermuda with me.  You would have thought it was a serious boyfriend's
letter sweater.

It was my sweater, his spare letter.  I just wanted someone so badly.

"I guess all that rejection contributed to my feeling so lucky when I
finally found John Fedders.  I felt so unworthy of him, like it was all
a big mistake.  I'd think, "Nobody tell him, don't let him find out
that he's really too good for me."

CHAPTER FOUR

Charlotte did date
one other boy before she met John Fedders-Dave, a Dartmouth history and
language major who cared enough about her to take Catholic instruction,
in preparation for converting if things got serious.

But Charlotte felt that he just didn't quite match the O'Donnell family
standards.  Despite his attending an Ivy League school, Dave was not
well-off financially, and the O'Donnells feared he was too much of a
dreamy idealist to ever be as good a provider as the doctor had been.

Charlotte met him the summer after her senior year at Notre Dame,
following a vacation in Bermuda with three school friends.  The week
was hardly as liberating as it might have been, but Charlotte wasn't
quite as naive when she came back.  She and her friends had had their
first cocktail and actually had a date with some Navy officers they met
at a beach party organized by the hotel.  They went to see the Talbott
Brothers, a legendary duo on the island, and then Charlotte received
her first good-night kiss.

Of course, she and her friends were nevertheless up early the next day
for Sunday Mass.  They hardly needed a chaperone.  One of the group
later became a nun.

When Charlotte returned, her family met her in New York City.

They traveled through Quebec and then stayed for a week at Stonehurst
Manor, a resort in Conway, New Hampshire.  Dave was waiting tables
there, earning money for college.

He introduced himself to the O'Donnell girls when he brought them
dinner and later that night saw Charlotte playing bridge with her
family.

He sat down to watch and gave her some advice.  Charlotte began
referring to him in her diary as "Rave Dave."

Soon, the two were playing Ping-Pong and pool and going to movies-The
Absent-Minded Professor and Jungle Call.  Their eighteen-month romance
stayed as innocent as those first dates.

"Dave was tall and blond and very, very nice," says Charlotte.

"Stonehurst was a quiet, peaceful place, so we did things like playing
cards and going to a square dance the resort hosted.  I even helped him
wash the dishes a couple of times.  And we would just sit and talk and
talk.  He was the first boy I had ever really talked to.

"He taught me how to hold hands and to send little messages to each
other that way.  It was very sweet and very platonic.  I remember once
sitting in our living room.  He was in a chair and I was sitting on the
arm of it, sort of leaning against his shoulder, talking to my parents,
and my father pulled me aside and told me that I was putting myself in
an "occasion of sin."  That's about as passionate as it ever got
between us.

Yet, for a while, at least, Charlotte did think about Dave as being a
serious beau.  She wrote about him often in her diary.  She was very
happy that, when Dave visited her family during Christmas vacation, he
attended Mass with them.  She was careful to flash the

Dartmouth charm he had given her for her bracelet when she had a
picture taken with a Baltimore department store Santa Claus.  She was
also ecstatic when her parents let her go to Dartmouth's Winter
Carnival.  When Dave left following a visit, she wrote: "I hated to say
goodbye I came into the room and cried.  I really like him but C'est la
vie!  C'est l'amour!  I hope he gets home okay."

But their relationship was not to last.

"There were two things that contributed to our breaking up," says
Charlotte.  "One was that Dave didn't have much money and his father
was really sick, so that there was pressure on him from his family to
quit school to save money.  I used to write my mother and tell her to
pray with me that his parents would let him follow through on his dream
to study abroad.  Dave had a lot of legitimate problems and could be
sad when he wrote or called.  I just wasn't mature enough to deal with
it.

"The other main thing was that he wanted to be a college professor or
an interpreter, neither of which brought in a lot of money.  My parents
didn't think he was going to be successful enough financially.

I don't know how many times my father said that it's just as easy to
fall in love with a rich man as it is with a poor man.

"So I sent Dave back his ring while he was abroad.  It was a skunky,
rotten thing for me to do.  But I just couldn't do it face to face.

I was afraid of his blowing up or of me backing down.

"It's just that I knew it wasn't right.  In those days dating was
serious.

You thought immediately, "Do I want to marry this man?"  And if you
didn't think so, then you shouldn't waste his or your time.

"All I ever wanted to be was a wife and mother.  To marry a man who
could give me children and a comfortable life, filled with love and
little strife.  That was my dream.  So finding that man was very
important.

I went to college just because it was the thing to do.  My parents just
assumed we'd all go."

Charlotte remembers that they also assumed she'd study nursing, which
Charlotte dutifully did.  The only other course she had ever considered
was being a stewardess, but she dismissed that idea quickly because of
her weight.  Charlotte says she never really enjoyed nursing.

"I was always afraid of doing something that would cause someone to
die," she says.

The college Charlotte chose, however, was hardly prime hunting ground
for husbands.  In 1961, she began studies at Saint Joseph College,
another all-girls' Catholic institution, buried in a tiny hamlet in the
foothills of Maryland's Blue Ridge Mountains.  There was literally one
stoplight in the town of Emmitsburg, and four hundred girls in the
school.

They were all good Catholics who, like Charlotte, wanted good Catholic
boys for husbands.  They didn't even consider traveling to Gettysburg
College, in the nearest big town, "because it was a state university
and non-Catholic," Charlotte says with a laugh.

Fortunately for some, Mount Saint Mary's, a small all-boys' Catholic
college, was ten minutes away by the school's bus (Saint Joe's girls
weren't allowed to go over to "the Mount" by themselves).

But Charlotte wouldn't meet another man who was interested in her until
she spotted John Fedders her senior year.

Emmitsburg was yet another sheltered world for her.  And if it was
possible, Saint Joseph's was even more stringent in its Catholicism
than Notre Dame had been.  That was because it wasn't just a college,
it was a shrine to Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, a teacher who started
the college plus an order of sisters, and who would become the first
American-born saint.

It was said that a little girl dying of leukemia in Baltimore had been
saved by her parents' praying exclusively to Mother Seton, placing one
of her relics near the sick child.

That was one of the miracles attributed to her that led to Mother
Seton's being beatified in Charlotte's sophomore year.  She was
canonized two years later.  At that time, the school exhumed Seton's
body and placed the remains in a gold-leaf casket behind the main altar
of the church.

Saint Joseph's grounds were holy.  Busloads of pilgrims, accumulating
indulgences, came daily to visit Mother Seton's homestead and her
original classroom buildings.  As they passed by the library in which
Charlotte and her classmates studied, they recited the rosary together
in loud, joyful voice.

The campus also had the Mother House, or regional headquarters, for an
order of nuns called the Daughters of Charity.  So, besides the twenty
sisters administering the shrine and the twenty sisters who taught in
the college, novices and postulants roamed the hills in reclusive
prayer.

The nuns were hard to miss-their habits had extravagant, tall white
crowns, as stiff and winged as Japanese paper sculpture.

"God's geese," the girls used to jokingly call them.  The nuns' heavy
wooden rosaries also called attention to them-students could hear the
beads rattling as the sisters walked in the halls and be forewarned to
stop whatever pranks they could be up to in such a proper place.

Even scientific courses retained a Catholic overtone.  In Nursing 203,
for instance, an introduction to medical and surgical nursing,
Charlotte took the following notes during a lecture: "We are expected
to be excellent Catholic nurses.  If a patient becomes critically ill,
call a priest, then a doctor.  Stay with the dying patient .  . .

say prayers for or with the patient.  If patient is non-Catholic or
even Jewish try saying the "Our Father."  In an emergency, baptize
anything that looks like human tissue.

... When the priest passes you in the hall distributing Holy Communion,
kneel; after he passes, you can get up.

"Everything was a little more intense there because it was a shrine,"
says Charlotte.  "But I really believed that I was at a very special,
holy place and that made me feel very, very special as well.

And it was an exciting time because of Mother Seton's being beatified
and then canonized.

We all would pray at chapel for her becoming a saint.  I would never
have questioned that that girl in Baltimore had been saved through
prayer to Mother Seton.  I was just a good Catholic girl at a good
Catholic school.

"It was an excellent nursing program, even with the religious
doctrine.

I also thought it was a really good school for me to attend because it
allowed me to continue my slow, steady growth instead of thrusting me
into something big that I couldn't cope with.  There were only one
hundred and four girls in my freshman class.  It continued my
childhood.  Saint Joe's was a very safe place.  I thought that was the
best thing for me.

Maybe it would have been better had I gone someplace that would have
exposed me to more.  But at the time I was very happy."

"Yeah, we were naive dumb bunnies, but that was acceptable in
Emmitsburg," says Charlotte's friend Sally Sullivan, who studied
nursing with her.  "We joke about the rules, but I don't think there's
any Joe's girl who doesn't tear up at Howard's 'Ave Maria,' the
arrangement of that hymn we heard at convocations.  We loved the
place.

Many of the sisters were very good to us, very protective.  We also had
wonderful friendships.

It was so small, there was nothing for us to do but know each other.

So we got to know our friends really well, like sisters.

It truly was like a family."

Cloistered with other gentlewomen, Charlotte easily made friends and
displayed the natural sense of fun that before she had generally saved
for her family.  She giggled and joked and quickly charmed classmates
who took the time to draw her out.  Several of them adopted her
father's nickname for her, "Schatz," "treasure."  The inscription under
her senior year photo, composed by friends, reads: "She grasps Life's
hand .

. . a treasure chest of thoughts .  . . praised stability .  .

.

donned in mischief."

Of course, the mischief had to be pretty tame.  Rules at Saint Joe's
were strict.  Attendance at Sunday Mass and Thursday evening
Benediction was mandatory.  Rooms were checked to make sure students
went to church.  Caps and gowns, issued at freshman orientation, had to
be worn to all chapel services, all four years.

"You had to go to Mass even if you were sick," remembers Nancy Bentley,
another classmate of Charlotte's.  "I tried to go to the infirmary one
Sunday because I was so sick with the flu and they wouldn't let me."

Dress had to be demure and feminine.  No tennis shoes, no pants worn on
campus, even when students were on their way to ride horses, even when
they were walking down dorm hallways to the bathroom.

Slacks were allowed only in the privacy of their rooms.  The standard
dress was a kilt, matched with a crew-neck sweater, and loafers.

All meals were mandatory as well.  Rooms had to be neat and orderly and
were checked routinely.  Mess brought demerits.

On weekdays, women had to be back on campus by 5 P.M. The Student
Center closed at 9 PM, and prayers were led by the hall proctors in the
dorm each night immediately afterward.  For freshmen, lights out at
11

P.M. Not that they were missing much in town anyway, since Emmitsburg
didn't even have a movie theater.  Students weren't allowed to go into
any of the town's few restaurants that served liquor without their
parents.

Drinking alcohol brought immediate expulsion.  The only place they
could really go to, then, was the drugstore, and that had to be in the
company of another student.  No solo trips off campus were allowed,
even to buy aspirin.

When they did depart, Saint Joe's girls had to sign out and in.

They were not allowed outside a 25-mile radius of the school's grounds
without written permission from their parents.  If they planned to go
home for the weekend or to stay at the home of another student, they
had to send postcards to their parents telling them when and how they
were going to arrive.  Housemothers would read and record those
cards.

Single dating, one boy with one girl, was not permitted until senior
year, and only if the couple was engaged.  Boys were allowed only in
the Student Union hall, never in the dorm lounges.  There were a few
mixers at Mount Saint Mary's, after which Saint Joe's students had a
curfew of 11 P.M. Sometimes boys would ride back to campus with
girlfriends and snatch a quick embrace in front of the dorm.  It had to
be quick, though, since proctors and housemothers stood at the door
waiting to flash the lights right at the appointed curfew hour.

Friends could also be merciless, teasing those with dates, as they
passed: "Child of Mary, you owe him nothing."

But chastity and the appearance of it was not a joke to the nuns.

The body was the temple of the Lord.  In Youth Before God, a collection
of prayers and meditations popular with Saint Joe's girls, the Church
deemed any kind of sexual pleasure outside marriage as being a "mortal
sin against chastity."

"Subdue your passions and do not let yourself be carried off," it
says.

"Learn to give up things that are allowed now and then.  Do something
that is hard and does not please you.  A few times during the day
overcome yourself in this way and you will soon sense how your will is
being steeled."

The book includes an entire section on purity for girls, although it
has no such directions for boys: "What is my attitude toward dress?

Am I orderly and clean, or negligent?  .  . . do I dishonor the temple
of God through vain and scandalous clothing?  What is my attitude
toward young men?  Do I meet young men with polite modesty or with
crude importunity and gaudiness?  .  . . Have I allowed myself to
become bound to a young man of another faith so as to put myself in the
danger of a mixed marriage?  Is life all play for me, or am I preparing
myself to be a helping, understanding companion on the way to God for
my future husband?"

Good Catholic women were to fight for purity and avoid any kind of
temptation or unseemly behavior.  "If she neglects this duty, then she
will gamble away and lose that beauty which she should treasure.

She will be shallow and superficial and in the end incapable of lasting
and successful love," continues Youth Before God.

The school administrators took such rhetoric to heart.  Some of
Charlotte's nursing friends were once put on strict social restriction,
having to sign in at the dormitory hall's front desk every hour when
not on duty at the hospital-when their hospital supervisor discovered
them simply talking to three male interns in the clinic's waiting room
right after the clinic was closed.

But the girls retained their sense of humor about their unisex
predicament.  Loaded on the "cattle car" buses, on their way to Mount
Saint Mary for a mixer, for instance, they sang these songs, which
Charlotte and her friends can still belt out: Far below the hills of
E'burg Everybody knows, There's a bunch of desperate spinsters, We're
the girls from Joe's .

The boys from Mount Saint Mary's They say are very sweet, But how the
hell would we know, They're always on retreat Oh, I don't want no more
of college life.

Gee, Mom, I want to go home.  . .

We drink Scotch with the Harvard men, Beer with the rest of them, Milk
with the Mountain men.

We like big, strong, umph, Hairy-chested men, But we ain't got them
here.

Most of Charlotte's friends remained as ingenuous as she was.  The most
shocking aspect of their college careers before they began nursing was
a teacher who actually-they fake gasps in telling the memory-smoked in
class and wore high heels.

Their first glimpse of the outside world came when they made rounds as
public health nurses in Hagerstown, driving a pink station wagon
belonging to the health department and calling on families who needed
such social services as immunizations for their babies.

"Everything was a shock to us in those days," jokes Sally Sullivan.

"We were all pitifully shy.  Even at the dances with the Mount, there
were the with-it, really social girls and then there was us.

The boys were on one side of the room and our gang was usually on the
other."

Charlotte's roommate was also devout and wholesome.  "Susan said grace
before each meal and attended chapel almost every day," remembers
Charlotte.  "She was one of the valedictorians of our class.

She was petite and incredibly neat.  I felt like a slob next to her,
because she was just so perfect.  She'd take three days to write a
letter to her boyfriend and it had beautiful handwriting and was
poetically turned.  Her drawers were unbelievably orderly.

"She was a perfectly lovely person, though.  I know she helped inspire
a little more devotion in me.  Before I left for Rome she did a
"spiritual bouquet" for me.  She went to five Masses, five Holy
Communions, ten visits to the Blessed Sacrament, said five rosaries,
plus fifty ejaculations, short prayers.  It meant that she offered the
bouquet for me, to wash me of some of my sins and to protect me on this
trip."

The trip to Rome was a school-sponsored pilgrimage for the
beatification of Mother Seton, March 17, 1963.  Charlotte traveled in
Italy for nine days.  The summer after her junior year, she would again
travel to Europe, this time visiting seven countries over seven
weeks.

This too was a group tour, organized by a travel agency authorized by
the Church.

Her diary of this last trip in particular indicates how inexperienced
and fearful of the world Charlotte was, how guileless but prejudicial
her culture could be.

June 29, 1964, aboard the MS Aurelia: "The Statue of Liberty was
beautiful-made me proud to be of the USA.  Joke of the day-some girl
asked me if I were Jewish-after a gasp I replied, "Far from it."

August 5, in Paris: "We saw all the artists and found a real lively
place to drink and talk.  Got home after a terrifying walk with three
Negro men following us.

She was not a somber, reflective traveler.  A viewing of a Nazi
concentration camp was as casually mentioned as what she had to eat
that night.

But the daily accounts also indicate how simple Charlotte was, how
affectionate, how easily she could be happy, how quickly she became
immersed in friends' lives.  She wrote not of the countless historic or
artistic landmarks and sights, not of the shopping, but of the people
with whom she traveled-the girl who fixed her hair, the boy who asked
her to dance, the illness of their tour guide's father.

July 20, Switzerland: "Stopped to swim in Lake Lucerne in Un.  It was
great and so refreshing .  . . we came down (after supper), went out
and sang on a rock.  Everyone was so happy and gay.  Hans, Parker,
Gene, Dotti and we five were all there .  . . we laughed so hard "I
didn't realize then what really made me happy," says Charlotte.

"I like people.  I like having a lot of people around.  The country
club and all was nice, but it wasn't what made me happy.

Give me a good relationship, some unconditional love, that's all I
really want.  But then I thought I was supposed to look for an
ambitious man who could take care of me, like Daddy had."

Charlotte came upon a man much like Daddy five months later, in the
second semester of her senior year, when she was finishing her nursing
degree by working in Providence Hospital, in Washington, D.C. Several
of her other close friends were in the capital with Charlotte.

Many of the restrictions of Saint Joe's were relaxed when the students
lived off campus, so Charlotte and the other young women could actually
experience some of Washington's nightlife firsthand.  But they didn't
go downtown or to Georgetown much, because their shifts on the
hospital's wards were long.

Usually when they were off duty, the Saint Joe's nurses walked in a
giggling brood to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for Mass, and
then to eat in its cafeteria.

The Shrine just happened to be on the campus of Catholic University.

That, of course, was part of the attraction for them.

That also happened to be where John Fedders was in his second year in
law school.

Early in February 1965, Charlotte spotted a lanky, handsome man across
the cafeteria and lost her heart.  She and the girls immediately dubbed
him "the Jolly Green Giant" and set out to discover all they could
about him.  There was never any question about for whom the catch would
be.  Charlotte wanted to meet him and they were going to help her do
so.

They noted the time of day he ate, and ate then as well.  They followed
him to the parking lot and learned that he drove a new Ford Falcon.

They noted that he wore a new leather coat.  They grilled a friendly
waitress on what she knew about him.

On February 16, Charlotte wrote her parents: ". . . am after a guy at
C.U.  Know nothing about him except he is at least 6' 8" tall.

(Looks like Paul Newman on stilts!) No, I'm not boy crazy-it's just a
riot having someone to talk about."  Two weeks later, her friends
convinced her to send a silly note-"Have friends, will travel"-to John
as he ate dinner, by way of the friendly waitress.

John crossed the cafeteria.  "Charlotte saw him coming and got all
aflutter," says Nancy Bentley.  "The main thing I remember was his
presence, big and hulking over the table."

John told them that he was a former basketball player at Marquette
University and now was in C.U law school.  That, as Charlotte recalls,
he wanted to have a dozen kids and that when he married he was going to
take his bride on an elaborate honeymoon in the Bahamas.  He was
everything she wanted-a Catholic who wanted a family, a man who
promised a comfortable life, a man with a dream for himself.  And he
was tall, dark, and handsome.

He asked them if they'd like to come to a party that evening that some
of his law school buddies were throwing at a restaurant in the

Holiday Inn next to C.U's campus.  Blushing, Charlotte managed to
slammer out an acceptance.

"Charlotte was always bubbly, always laughing, always happy, but coming
home after this-" begins Nancy Bentley.  Sally Sullivan interrupts
her.

"Charlotte had always been a chatterer, but that night she was in the
hallway twirling around, laughing, shouting.  I think my mouth was
hanging open; I just couldn't believe how Charlotte was acting.

She was bursting with joy.  He had talked to her and she was going to
see him at this party.  She had won the lottery of her life.

She had met the man of her dreams.  This was it.

"After that, Charlotte just wasn't normal.  Everything in her life
revolved around John."

CHAPTER FIVE "Dear Mommie and Daddy, have been dying to talk to you.

So much has happened.  Things are going super-well with John.

He is just the finest fellow.  I hope this lasts a while.  Had a short
date last Friday-just beer and talking.  Saturday we went to a cocktail
party at C.U.  It was a rush party for his graduate school fraternity,
Phi Alpha Delta.  . .

. John was one of the co-chairmen so I was real proud to be his date.

(He seemed proud to be mine too.  that's what really counts!) .  .

. Do you know he even bought Jack Daniels black label for us to
drink-he knew I considered it the BEST!!  What a guy.  Had a dinner
date Sunday-only three hours, but it gave us both a little break.

.

. .

I can't wait for you to meet him.  Found out Saturday (one of his
friends told me) that he was allAmerican b-ball at Marquette.  How
lucky am I. Now don't get upset.  I'm being sensible and have not gone
over the deep end so to speak but I'll say he is really GOOD and good
for me!"

Charlotte wrote this letter twelve days after meeting John.  There was
never any question in her mind that this was the man she wanted to
marry, if only he would have her.

He seemed to want her.  John had singled Charlotte out from her klatch
of friends the night they went, on his invitation, to the law students'
gathering.  When the girls arrived, he held a lobby door open for them,
then jokingly shut it on Charlotte as she tried to pass through.  She
and John laughed and started talking.  His flip, easy manner impressed
her.

So did his aplomb, and the popularity and respect he seemed to command
from his compatriots.

Then John asked her out to see the movie Zorba the Greek.  Even though
she recalls that he fell asleep and slept through the entire film, she
didn't care.  She was so excited that he had called at all.

They were together almost constantly after that.

John took her to the NCAA regional tournament at the University of
Maryland, to a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera at Washington's Sylvan
Theatre, and to more fraternity parties.  Charlotte lovingly tucked all
mementos into her bureau drawer, including a parking ticket he had
received at Providence Hospital when he had come to pick her up, as if
these slips of paper would validate the existence of a relationship
that seemed so dreamlike to her.

Although John was never really possessive of her, he told Charlotte to
save special outings for him.  A flattering demand no other man had
ever made of her.  She spent less and less time with her girlfriends.

"I only remember his getting really angry once while we were dating,"
she says.

"It was over my seeing My Fair Lady with the girls.  It was a big movie
and he was annoyed that I hadn't waited to see it with him.

I was taken aback because I didn't remember our having discussed going
before.

I felt very guilty because he acted so hurt.  So I thought, "Gosh, I'll
never do anything like that again without asking him first."

"We did go to see Sound of Music together after that and the date was
very romantic.  He took my hand during the wedding scene.

Mostly, they dated around his studying-reading in the majestic Library
of Congress, right next to the Supreme Court and the Capitol, followed
by a steak-and-cheese sandwich at the Hot Shoppes on South

Dakota Avenue.  They also attended Mass every Sunday.  John was as
ardent a Catholic as Charlotte, mostly tutored as she had been in
Catholic schools.  She remembers that he often would carry a rosary in
his pocket.

"Most of our dates were poor-student type things," says Charlotte.

"He was putting himself through school.  He worked as a proctor in the
dorm he lived in, so he didn't have much spare money, even though his
parents would basically send him "book money" whenever he asked for
it.

"Of course, I didn't care what we did, just as long as I was with
him.

When we first started seeing each other he would ask what I wanted to
do and when I said I didn't care, he'd laugh, and once he said, "This
is too good to be true."" Charlotte had been originally attracted to
John because of his height.

It was unusual for her to meet anyone who towered over her.  And
indeed, they were a striking couple with their combined stature.

Charlotte wouldn't notice until later, however, that, because he did
stand a full foot higher than she, she couldn't just spontaneously
reach over and kiss him.

He would have to lean down for her lips to reach his cheek.  She and
her sisters remember that sometimes John just wouldn't accommodate such
displays of affection.

Quickly her admiration for his physique was augmented by awe for his
intellect.  John was charming and witty, fast on the comeback.

He was business editor for the law review, administrative editor of the
law school newspaper, president of the student bar association, and an
outstanding scholar.

Charlotte preened in April, two and a half months into their courtship,
when he led his C.U team to victory in a moot court competition with
students from Fordham, Yale, and Cornell universities.

The Sutherland Cup Appellate Court Competition was a substantial win
for John, especially since a retired justice of the US Supreme Court
was one of the judges.  Charlotte presented him with a miniature wooden
gavel as congratulations, despite the fact that she had been hurt when
John neglected to introduce her to his parents that day.  They had even
been sitting directly in front of Charlotte in the audience, she
says.

"John Fedders was everything Charlotte had been told to want in a man
and probably thought she would never be able to get," says Nancy Long,
Charlotte's Notre Dame friend who also studied nursing at Saint
Joe's.

"He was aggressive, bright, and a lawyer.  She could go back to the
Homeland crowd with him and say, 'I couldn't do this in high school,
but look what I have now."  It gave her an image she never had
before.

She fell madly in love as only a young person can and overlooked
anything bad."

Charlotte swallowed her hurt when John didn't come to her graduation
that May.  Emmitsburg was only a two-hour drive from Washington, if
that, but John was studying for his exams and she recalls that he
couldn't be disturbed.

"I couldn't understand that," says Charlotte, "but I never said
anything to him about it.  I look back on it now and realize that was a
telltale sign of how much he was willing to commit to me.

Of course, the following year, John didn't attend his own graduation
ceremony from law school, even though he had been a leader of his
class-because he was preparing for his law boards.  Work simply came
first.  Charlotte learned to accept that.  After all, her father was a
workaholic.

"John studied all the time," she remembers.  "He had incredible
self-discipline.  He never seemed nervous to me about his studies
because he just worked all the time on them.  He always seemed
self-assured and cocky, although people he lived with told me how
compulsive and high-strung he could be about his studies.  But the
truth is, once John put his mind to something, he could do anything."

He studied hard because he wanted a job with a Wall Street law firm, to
be an undeniable success there, and to live on easy street, says
Charlotte.  "We didn't talk that much about his specific plans," she
remembers.  "But he definitely didn't plan to represent the poor.

John never talked that much.  I was the talker of the two.  But I knew
from the start how ambitious he was.

John traveled to Baltimore to meet Charlotte's parents shortly after
her graduation from Saint Joe's.  He also escorted her to her parents'
elaborate twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration at Green Spring
Inn two months later.  John fit right in with the doctor's prosperous
friends-this was a decade of incredible economic boom, and young men
were applauded for high dreams.  The O'Donnells, too, were impressed
with the tall man and his tall aspirations.

Says Dotti, who was thirteen: "My only impression of Charlotte before
this was about how social she must have been because of all the
girlfriends she had in high school.  She went away to school when I was
only nine, so I don't remember much else.  Then I met John.  I knew
that Charlotte absolutely had to be the best of all us sisters because
this fellow wasn't going to have anything other than the very best,
because he was so handsome."

A few months later, Dotti and Martha went to stay for a few days with
Charlotte in Washington.  John took the three O'Donnells out to dinner
and the younger sisters developed their own crush on him.

"We went to the Mayflower Hotel," remembers Dotti.  "It was the first
time I had ever had Caesar salad.  He ordered aspic or something
similar, which to me was so Continental.  I just figured that this was
it, that this was the way you were when you grew up.

Also that summer, Charlotte met his family.  The visit went smoothly,
except for his mother's accidentally calling her by the name of
John's old girlfriend, says Charlotte.

But the Fedders seemed to like the match.

With such approval from their families, Charlotte renewed her
commitment to John.  She found a nursing job at Georgetown University
Hospital and arranged to work the night shift so that she could have
her weekends free to be with him.  She openly adored him.

Her friends felt differently about John.

"He treated her like dirt," says one.  "He said that she was too fat.

That he didn't like her hair.  We'd hear him be very critical of her
when he came to pick her up.  And she'd be upset about it, but then
she'd just do it.  She'd lose the weight when he complained.  She
wasn't depressed about it, though; it was like John was remaking her.

But she became more self-critical after that."

Charlotte thought so little of herself anyway that her own opinion came
to mean almost nothing to her.  Only John's approval really mattered
and she gladly let him play Pygmalion to get it.

She was mortified once, however, when John asked her in front of some
of his friends, "Charlotte, what happened to your mustache?"

He had complained about her facial hair and Charlotte had taken it off
with depilatory to please him.  That indignity angered her.

But for the most part, she just tolerated the criticism and followed
his instructions.

"One time he came to pick her up after work for dinner," remembers
Nancy Long, who shared a rowhouse with Charlotte when they worked at
Georgetown, "and he was annoyed that Charlotte had perspired through
her blouse.  It was a very hot day.  But he told her to change her
clothes and she did without a word.

"He was critical about all our appearances.  If my hair had been blown
around by the wind, he'd comment on how messy it looked, or if he
thought the dress I was wearing was ugly."

"John just didn't like us," says another Saint Joseph's classmate.

"We were all dumb according to him.  He was very sarcastic to us.

When we saw him in the lobby, it'd be "Oh, you again."  But we never
said anything about our not liking him to her because she was so
excited about him.  It wouldn't have made any difference anyway.

I've never seen anyone so blinded by love.

"And on the surface, he seemed to have everything.  He was a big man,
athletic, very handsome, with great potential, a brilliant mind, a
lawyer.  Obviously, he was going to go far.  On the outside, it looked
perfect."

But their relationship didn't progress perfectly.  In September,
Charlotte remembers that John kissed her good-night and told her he'd
call the next morning.  She didn't hear from him for almost two
months.

For weeks she plaintively asked her roommates, "Did he call, did he
call?"  remembers Nancy Long.  "She was just devastated.  She did start
to tell us a little bit then about some of John's criticism of her.

But none of us told her that we hadn't liked him, because she was so
depressed.  We worried that it would just make her feel worse."

"We hadn't had a fight," says Charlotte.  "Nothing.  When he did call,
eight weeks later, it was just "Hi, Charlotte, how are you?

This is John."  And I thought, "John who?"  I had never expected to
hear from this man again.  I had seen him a couple of times at parties,
dating other girls.

He had ignored me.

"It never occurred to me to call or walk up to him and say, "Hey,
what's going on?"  I didn't have the confidence to do that.  And, in

1965, a good girl knew that if she was dumped, she was dumped; she
didn't fight it.

"I was just so relieved that he took me back that I didn't ask him to
explain it.  Later he told me that he felt he had to concentrate on his
studies because it was his third year at law school, and, of course, I
accepted it.

"My first reaction was to worry that I had gained weight since he had
seen me and that he would be displeased.  But he told me for the first
time either that first date back or shortly thereafter that he loved
me.  Of course, he also confused me by adding on to that, "That's what
you want me to say, isn't it?"

"But there was no gradual rebuilding at all.  We were back together
like gangbusters.  He had first called around Thanksgiving and three
weeks later he took me to the Barristers' Ball, the law school's big
dance of the year.  It was a big deal for him because he was president
of the bar association.

And he was introducing me as his lady."

December 11, 1965, the night of the black-tie ball, was very important
to Charlotte.  She had her hair frosted and swept up in a flattering
bouffant.  She spent a large portion of her monthly paycheck on an
extravagant evening gown with a velvet and beaded emerald bodice.  She
wore appropriate cocktail-length white gloves and had her shoes dyed
emerald to match the dress.

"The girls I was living with made a big fuss over helping me dress,"
remembers Charlotte.  "They were all so excited for me.

For once, I felt really attractive."

But the evening's real importance for Charlotte came when she proved
herself a valuable companion for John in a refined, formal gathering.

At the Mayflower Hotel, she stood in the receiving line with John with
the law school's dean, associate dean, and the rector of the
university.

She charmed them all.  Even the dean's wife commented on Charlotte's
tutored graciousness to John.  In many ways, because of her association
with the Homeland crowd and Notre Dame's stringent instruction in
propriety, Charlotte was as much a catch for John as he was for her.

Of course, she never saw it that way.

But the fact remained that John was a non-affluent boy, whose father
had only finished high school.  John had dreams of walking in higher
circles, circles for which Charlotte was trained.  He even joked to her
about someday being governor of his home state.  Socially, she would be
an asset for him, cultivated, yet not threatening because she was
naturally obedient and grateful to belong to him.

"That evening meant a great deal to me.  One of the professors' wives
actually told me I looked like Jackie Kennedy with my hairdo.

All the feedback really buoyed my confidence that I could bring
something to John.  I think I passed a kind of test that night, whether
either of us realized it or not.  For years, the first thing that I
hung on our Christmas tree was a simple red ball that we had gotten at
the dance."

Charlotte felt close to John again, although he was beginning to talk
seriously about moving to New York City following graduation.

For Christmas, she gave him a black, lacquered rocking chair with a
silver plaque on the back, inscribed with his full name and "Christmas
1965."

"A la Jack Kennedy," she says with a laugh.  He gave her two Krementz
pins, a gold circle with small rhinestones and pearls, and an ivory
rose on a gold stem.

When she was home for the holidays, Charlotte dreamily danced in the
kitchen when her mother put the Ray Conniff song "Santa, Make Me His
Bride for Christmas" on their stereo.  The tune had always been a
favorite of the O'Donnell girls, but this Christmas Charlotte sang the
words with a greater longing.

One month later, John told Charlotte they were going to be married.

"He had been saying, "Oh, don't worry about my going to New York,
you'll probably be there too"' remembers Charlotte.  "I had hung on
little crumbs like that.  Then one day he just walked in and told me
the date in August that he had free for us to get married.  Never
asked, just told me.  But I didn't care.  I just thought it was all too
good to be true.

I didn't want scads of money, just a comfortable life with a house and
lots of kids.  Here was this man I was madly in love with, and I was
going to get all this good stuff, too."

Charlotte called her mother and told her to start planning the
wedding.

Within a month, she moved back home to help her parents organize the
festivities.  She took a job as a public health nurse in the county,
earning an annual salary of $5,437, almost as much as a recently
graduated lawyer could hope to start with.  But most of her time was
taken up with shopping, dress-fittings, showers, and parties.

That Easter, Charlotte traveled again to see John's family.  It was her
first glimpse of John as a community hero.  Besides being an
outstanding athlete in his high school, John had been a popular swim
coach, taking a group of neophytes to victory at the state
championships.  He had even won an award as one of the state's most
outstanding coaches.  When John and Charlotte went shopping or to
church, children he had coached ran to him.

"He really did seem like the Pied Piper then, he being so tall with all
these kids hanging on him," says Charlotte.  "I was so happy about what
a wonderful father he was going to be."

During their drive to his parents, Charlotte recalls John singing along
with the radio to the hit by Herman's Hermits, "Mrs. Brown, You've Got
a Lovely Daughter," inserting O'Donnell for Brown.  But their return to
Towson was not as happy as their departure had been.

John never seemed to like visiting the O'Donnells and Charlotte
remembers their arguing about it.  Besides the two months when John
hadn't called Charlotte the previous fall, it was the first sign of
trouble her parents saw.

"I think Charlotte had been doing all the driving," says her mother.

"They just were not happy as they drove up.  I was so excited to see
them, because I had bought all these silly little presents and strung
them all over the house with ribbons.  She was so slow getting out of
the car, I knew something wasn't right.

"Charlotte never knew this, but I saw a letter from him, opened
already, on her dresser, and I read it.  In that letter he wrote that
he couldn't wait for them to be independent of us.  I tell you, I
thought I would die.  I nearly died when she graduated from high
school.  But I closed it up and never said anything because I felt so
guilty about having read her mail.  I never even told Charles.

"John had never liked me but I just thought there was something wrong
with me."

Although her friends never said anything to Charlotte about their
concerns over John either, two of his friends did.  "They told me that
I didn't really know what I was getting into, that I was too nice for
him," she remembers.  "I was horrified.  I just figured that it was
sour grapes because John had beaten out one of the guys for the
presidency of the student bar.  The other I dismissed by thinking, "You
just don't know him as I do, you don't love him."

"I think Charlotte always felt that she could change John, that he
would settle down, if she just loved him enough," says Nancy Long.

But Charlotte's dutiful place in John's life seemed hardly to be gentle
teacher.  He was to be the catalyst.  As were most brides of the era,
she was to wait to respond to him.  That spring, John wrote her a note
after they had had a disagreement.  He wrote rather than calling
because, he said, he couldn't afford a phone call.  It's not clear
whether he meant he couldn't afford the money or the time to call.

He concluded with: "I love you, and don't you forget it-although I do
have my nights of preferable separation."

Charlotte recalls, however, that John had been willing to disobey a
priest for her.  Earlier that year, they both felt that they had sinned
when John touched Charlotte in what the Church decreed an improper
manner.  They each confessed to separate priests.  Both clergymen told
them the same thing: "Break up, you are obviously bad for each
other."

"The priests said that we were leading each other into sin and
therefore weren't right for each other," recalls Charlotte.  "I
remember feeling very bad about it.  So did John.  But we didn't stop
seeing each other.  We just tried to be good.  John did say to me after
that, though, that he had never sinned with his old girlfriend.  I felt
really awful, like I was corrupting this innocent man."

The priests Charlotte and John had seen were at Catholic University, so
they proved no obstacle to the wedding to be held in the O'Donnells'
parish in Towson.  The young couple, however, did attend the prewedding
sessions ordered by the Church.  "A priest and a successfully married
couple led the lectures," remembers Charlotte.

"They talked about not going to bed angry and to not use birth control,
and about mutual respect and communication.  But I really didn't listen
that carefully because John and I had never had a major argument before
then.

I just assumed either we wouldn't argue or that we'd be able to work
things out easily."

The wedding day, August 13, 1966, dawned unusually clear and cool for
the month, a reassuring blessing on the union about to take place.

As Charlotte awoke and saw the sunshine, she said a swift prayer of
thanks to the Blessed Mother.  She had placed her statue of Mary on the
windowsill so that she would bring good weather.  Charlotte had also
chosen blue bridesmaids' dresses because that was Mary's color, a
gesture she hoped might add a small extra blessing to her marriage.

There was no time for lengthy prayers or meditation, though.  The
wedding was at high noon and there was still so much to do.  She and
her sisters were off to their mother's beauty parlor early to have
their hair done.  The bridesmaids would be arriving soon to dress at
the O'Donnells' and pose for the photographer.

The night before, at the reception dinner, Charlotte had slipped John a
note that read in part: "Tomorrow will bring the beginning of this
love's fulfillment.  I say beginning because I feel our love has only
just commenced on the undoubtedly rugged road to perfection.

Indeed, it will be difficult at times, but just loving each other will
compensate for any and all hardships, as it will also complement our
successes and joys."

Her thoughts this morning were hardly that solemn.  She was atwitter
with a maiden bride's imaginations.  "My mother had come in to say
good-night after we got home from the rehearsal dinner, to tell me
about my wifely duties," says Charlotte.  "She told me that it was my
duty to accommodate my husband whenever he felt the urge, even if I was
almost finished dressing for a big night out.  And I, of course,
thought, "Gee, that sounds like fun."  I was just very happy and very
excited."

The rehearsal dinner, however, had not gone quite as smoothly as
expected.  "We were at the Tail of the Fox," remembers Charlotte's
father, "which is a very nice private club.  The guests were very nice
people.  One of the ladies walked up to John and said, "Do you mind
telling me how tall you really are?"  And John says, "I'm six-foot-ten;
did you win your bet?"  Charlotte had been a little hurt by John's
choice of a wedding present for her.  "I gave him fourteen-karat gold
cufflinks and a tie pin.

He gave me avocado-green alligator shoes and purse.  I know they were
expensive.  I know he thought they were very nice.  I guess it just
showed our difference in cultures and standards.  I had wanted to give
him something he could keep and use all his life as a reminder of the
day.

It was just a disappointment, especially having to open them in front
of everyone.  I never said I didn't like them, though, because I would
have felt I was betraying him."

But this morning, nothing soured Charlotte's joy.  She was about to
enter a world that she had dreamed of all her life.  Her only concern
was that John had a slightly sore throat.  She hadn't seen him to
inquire after his health, however, because that was bad luck.

Charlotte's sister Susan, the next in line of the O'Donnell girls, and
Helen helped the bride don her ornate dress.  The gown was white
organza over taffeta, with an empire bodice embroidered with lace.

The short sleeves were also lace, and a sleeveless coat of the same
materials fell to the ground in a long train.  Her veil headpiece was a
web of pearls.

Her mother's dress was an elaborate pink affair, of stiff silk, with a
jeweled bodice and matching short coat.  The bridesmaids-Susan; John's
sister; Nancy Shepard (Long); Charlotte's college roommate Sue
Flanigan; and a high school classmate, Cyrilla Bollinger-wore
floor-length dresses with matching headpieces of blue silk
chrysanthemums.

Charlotte swept downstairs to have her portrait made.  She was
twenty-two years old.  She was wearing contact lenses and had chiseled
her weight down to 129 pounds.  She smiled at the camera with unusual
confidence and warmth.

The wedding at Towson's Immaculate Conception Church was formal and
traditional.  Charlotte's one innovation was the playing of "Here Comes
the Bride" as she entered, a secular piece of music just allowed by
Vatican II reforms the year before.  She also asked the organist to
play "O Lord, I Am Not Worthy."

The ceremony retained the reading of the epistle of Saint Paul that
tied a wife to love, honor, and obey: ". . . the husband is head of the
wife just as Christ is head of the Church .  . . just as the Church
submits to Christ, so should wives submit in everything to their
husbands .

. . each one of you should love his wife as he loves himself; and the
wife should revere her husband."

The reception, too, was punctilious, a lavish sit-down dinner for two
hundred in Baltimore's elegant Belvedere Hotel.  The tables were
covered with pink cloths, conveniently the same hue as Helen's dress,
and were ringed by gold chairs.  The three-course meal was served by
waitresses in black dresses and stiff, bobbing white aprons and caps.

"Everything was just perfect," remembers Charlotte's sister Dotti.

"The wedding was lovely, the band was great.  The nicest of Baltimore
were there in attendance."

While the guests danced and happily exchanged proper pleasantries,
however, Charlotte says she got her first real taste of John's
churlishness.

"There were two things that upset me that day.  He was very annoyed
when the wedding party discovered where he had hidden his car.

He didn't want anybody to touch it.  I hadn't told anybody where it
was, but he was furious with me.  He had me in tears right before we
were supposed to march into the reception with 'Here Comes the
Bride."

"The other thing was he ground the wedding cake into my face after we
cut it.  People might think it's funny, but as I know now, it's a sign
of power and control.  It embarrassed me.  The cake was all over me.

One of John's uncles filmed the cake-cutting.  John and Charlotte
kiddingly struggle over the knife before pushing the blade into the
cake.

They pick up two pieces.  John places a linen napkin under his chin;
she smiles at him adoringly.  He faces the camera, grins, and holds up
his finger in a "watch-this" gesture, then busses her on the lips.

John holds the cake to Charlotte's lips, hesitates as she starts to
nibble daintily, then pushes it up into her nose, holding it there as
the pastry crumbles.  Charlotte steps back and turns away, bent over
almost double.  The film stops abruptly before another of John's uncles
hurries to the bride to wipe her face with his handkerchief.

In the next photos, the garter-throwing also seems to embarrass
Charlotte.  She stands on a chair, with her leg on a table, her skirt
hoisted modestly.  John pushes the dress up her leg, she pushes it
down.

He turns away from her to play to the crowd, she reaches out for him
and turns him back toward her.  John grasps the garter right below her
knee and tugs and tugs, as if it's stuck.

She whispers something to him and finally he takes it and throws it.

Watching the films today, Charlotte grows quiet and sad.

"Everything my family prepared was so storybook and he just played
around and downed."

But the image of the ideal couple remained for wedding guests.

"That fall one of my teachers asked me to write an essay about what
event in my life had affected me most," says Dotti.  "I chose
Charlotte's wedding.  I wrote that her wedding had made the biggest
difference in my life because I had never before seen "the culmination
of perfect love."

PART TWO THE DUTIFUL WIFE She'll be the first one to praise him, when
he's going strong, The last one to blame him when everything's wrong.

It's such a one-sided game that they play, Ah, but women are funny that
way.

"When Woman Loves a Man" 
CHAPTER SIX

Finally finished with the
reception's rituals, Charlotte retreated to one of the hotel's private
rooms to change.  As she pulled off her gown she discovered icing from
the smashed cake had trickled down her front and congealed into a
nasty, sweet plaster on her skin.  She grimaced as she wiped it off,
but said nothing.  She was a good sport, she could take a joke as well
as the next girl.  Besides, the wedding ceremony had been beautiful,
and she had more exciting things to think about.

Charlotte still had no idea where John was taking her for their
honeymoon.  All she knew was that they were spending the first night in
Washington, D.C at the Sheraton-Park Hotel on Connecticut Avenue.

She had arranged that, and the price was right-because they had had
their reception at the Belvedere, which was part of the Sheraton chain,
the night's stay was free.

After that, everything was unknown.  Charlotte just knew John had a big
surprise planned.  The Bahamas.  It had to be the Bahamas.

He'd gone there for an Easter break during school and loved it.  The
first time Charlotte had talked to him at the Shrine, a year and a half
before, John had said that he was going to take his bride there.  That
their wedding night he was going to play a record of the sexiest music
he had ever heard.

That he would make it all so romantic.  Charlotte blushed at the
thought and tittered nervously.

She yanked at her dress, a drop-waist linen shift, and then attacked
her hair, stiff from the beautician's hair spray.  She brushed, she
twisted locks, she pouted.  She had looked so fresh and lovely as a
bride and now she just looked, well, wilted.  But there was no time to
fuss.  She shoved her white pill-box hat on her head, put on her white
gloves, and took one more critical look as she pinned on a corsage
taken from her bouquet.  She was ready.

When Charlotte met John, she was followed by an entourage of giggling
girls in bright, pastel dresses, he by a gang of boisterous boys,
crowing about what they had done to the groom's prized Ford Falcon.

The car.  Charlotte had momentarily forgotten about the darn car.

How bad was it?  Why couldn't John believe that she didn't have
anything to do with their decorating it?  What was the big deal,
anyway?

Charlotte thought it'd be kinda fun to drive off, a fanfare of cans
clattering behind them, advertising their happiness.  She had waited
all her life to be a Mrs.  Somebody.

About twenty-five people gathered to toss rice and heart-shaped tissue
cut-outs as they walked out of the hotel.  John slowly inspected the
car.  It didn't look too bad, thought Charlotte.  Only some shaving
cream on the windshield and trunk and some rice and tissue inside.  She
remembers, however, that John started grumbling as soon as they drove
off.  The first order of business, he said, was to clean and vacuum the
car.

Fifteen minutes later, just outside Baltimore, they stopped at a car
wash.

That done, John seemed to relax a little, even though his sore throat
continued to plague him.  Charlotte slid across the car seat and
slipped her arm through his, content.

Mr. and Mrs. John Fedders arrived at the Sheraton-Park in the late
afternoon.  He told her to take off her corsage before they went in.

He didn't want to be conspicuous.  Inside the lobby, Charlotte sat with
the luggage, waiting.  She kept her eyes cast demurely down as the
bellhop took them upstairs and down the hall to their room.  Her heart
pounded as he reached the door.

The room was already occupied.  So they trooped back to the lobby and
John checked in all over again.  By now everyone seemed to know they
had just gotten married and Charlotte's face flamed red.

Finally safe in their room, Charlotte was mildly disappointed that John
hadn't carried her over the threshold.  That there didn't seem to be
any champagne waiting.

John did present her, however, with two small boxes, one a wedding day
gift, and the other a gift for her twenty-third birthday, which was the
next day.  He didn't want to wait until tomorrow to give them to her,
he said.

"They were two gold charms for my charm bracelet," says Charlotte.

"One was a scale of justice, and the other was a set of teeny wedding
bands.  I was really very touched by it.  Those charms always meant a
great deal to me."

The rest of the night, unfortunately, was not quite as wonderful as
that moment.  "John was sick.  He slept and I had a bit of a problem.

I found out a few days later from a doctor that I had a torn hymen.

I was mortified later, when John told people and joked about it.  I was
just so embarrassed that I had done this, our first encounter, so
ungracefully.  I had never felt too happy about my body anyway and this
just made me feel worse about it.  And guilty because it certainly
wasn't his fault.  It was my body that caused the problem.

"Then, in the middle of the night, one of his relatives called, just to
annoy us.  'What are you doing?"  he asked.  He wanted to talk to John
and I explained that he wasn't well and was asleep and the man says,
'Sure, he is."  It really embarrassed me."

Charlotte finally fell asleep, concentrating on imagining what the
islands would look like.

The next morning, she and John woke early, starving.  They ate in the
hotel's coffee shop and attended noon Mass.  After checking out, they
got in the car and Charlotte waited.  Now he'd tell her what fantasy
trip he had arranged.

But John didn't.  He just drove south.  "Where should we go?"  he
finally asked.  Charlotte figured he was joking and waited.  He must be
driving to the airport, she reassured herself.  But he wasn't.

"John hadn't planned anything," remembers Charlotte.  "We honestly just
drove south, looking for someplace nice to stay.  So I think I
suggested going to Rocky Mount, in North Carolina, where my Aunt
Cha-Cha lives, for the second night.  We stayed in a dumpy motel.

The nicest thing about that was I woke up the next day and found a huge
picture and story about me on the front page of the society section,
because my uncle had been so important in town.  That made up for the
fact that I had been buried in the back of the Baltimore Sun.  We just
weren't socially high enough to rank a big mention in Baltimore.

"Then John and I just sort of wound our way to North Carolina's Outer
Banks, which were very rustic in those days, then to Virginia Beach,
then back up to Williamsburg.  We had a hard time getting decent rooms
because we didn't have any kind of reservations and it was summer
vacation time.

"I was crushed that John hadn't made any kind of plans at all.  But I
didn't say anything, because I didn't want him to think I was
complaining.  I also continued to have my physical problem, which
wasn't very pleasant.  It was terrible as honeymoons go, but it was
mine and I told everyone it was wonderful."

Charlotte and John arrived back in Baltimore on August 21.  The
O'Donnells had gone to Ocean City, so the newlyweds were alone.

They had much packing to do before leaving for New York City, where
John had taken a job with the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham, and
Taft.

While they were at Virginia Beach, John had written a gracious
thank-you to Charlotte's parents expressing his gratitude and praising
the perfection of the wedding and reception: " .  . . I want to say
thank you for making a daughter so lovely.  .. she and I are what our
folks have given us.  .

But now John seemed to resent being back under the aegis of her family,
says Charlotte.  He also seemed to resent the fact that a doctor in
Williamsburg had told her that she was hurt badly enough that she and
John should abstain from sex for a week.

"We had a terrible fight," remembers Charlotte.  "I told him I wanted
to be with him, too, but the doctor had told me not to.

Then John told me that he didn't like being married.  That he was going
to join the Army and that I would never see him again.  I was
frantic.

He had me convinced that he was leaving me.  I actually bolted all the
doors-they had double cylinders-and held the key away from him.  I
couldn't believe his face, the hateful way he looked at me.  It looked
so distorted that I just stared at this person I didn't know.

"I promised him it'd be better.  That I'd be what he wanted me to be.

I'd be better.  So we went upstairs to make love, despite what the
doctor had said.  He really set the tone for our marriage right
there.

He controlled me from that moment on, if he hadn't already.  That kind
of fear, having come so close to him leaving me-I'd do anything to
avoid it.  It put me in line right away."

A few days later, her hurt over their fight dissolved in Charlotte's
excitement about moving to New York City.  This was the real beginning
of the life of Mr. and Mrs. John Fedders, she told herself as she
drove north, following the U-Haul truck John was driving.  Everything
was going to be fine now.  The honeymoon might have been less than
first class, but their new home and his prospects certainly weren't.

A month before, Charlotte and John had leased a new, one-bedroom
apartment at 7th Street and Second Avenue.  She worried that they
should have found something less expensive, but John wanted to live in
Manhattan, an area befitting an associate in a prestigious Wall Street
firm.

Football hero Joe Namath lived nearby.

They arrived in the city on Labor Day weekend.  Most of their furniture
was delivered a few days later.  It too was new and expensiveold
hand-me-downs and bookshelves made with cinderblocks simply wouldn't
do.  The right image was crucial.

Shortly after announcing their engagement, Charlotte and John had
ordered complete sets of living-room, dining-room, and bedroom
furniture from C. H. Lears, a Baltimore store, owned by the father of
one of Charlotte's Notre Dame classmates.  The pieces were "Italian
provincial" style-big, long, and tall to suit John's size, modern yet
conservative, and very formal.  Straight-backed and boxy, the furniture
was probably more to John's tastes than to Charlotte's.  But then
again, most everything in their home was.  Even their china had a
masculinity about it-white plates rimmed with a thick, gold-leaf
border, inset with tiny rectangles of indigo blue.

Buying three rooms of furniture was no small proposition financially.

The total cost, says Charlotte: $7,000.  An astounding sum in 1966 in
any case, but especially for two people just out of school.  John had
had difficulty scraping together the $150 for Charlotte's modest
engagement ring.  So they borrowed the money from Charlotte's father
and received credit from the furniture store.  The payments on those
loans would so siphon Charlotte and John's finances that she says she
often had trouble buying their groceries.  John's starting salary at
Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft was about $8,000; her nursing salary
$6,00.

But Charlotte tried not to worry as they moved in, enjoying the fuss
over where things should be placed.  No room for error in that either,
though.  Charlotte recalls that John wanted everything perfect from the
onset.  He carefully measured the distance from the ceiling to the nail
for each picture he hung.  Framing had to last a lifetime, too.  The
Williamsburg prints they received for a wedding present had to be
encased in ornate gold frames, and done for the young couple by a ritzy
frame shop on Third Avenue.

Those frames were one of several such only-the-best-will-do
purchases.

That Christmas, for instance, John told Charlotte to order Christmas
cards imprinted with their names from a Hallmark store on Fifth
Avenue.

Soon, he ordered what would be the first of several tailor-made suits
from Bernard Weatherill tailors.  Part of John's reason for custom-made
clothes, of course, was his unusual height and lean physique.

But the suits also had to have certain refined, Continental touches,
such as real button holes in his coat sleeves, and button flies on his
trousers; his custom-made shirts, French cuffs.  He eventually wore
suspenders, which he called "braces," as do Britons.

"I think John was insecure and thought having all these things would
make him look better," says Charlotte.  "I think he felt he had to
prove himself.  He entered Cadwalader at the same time Haven Roosevelt,
one of FDR's grandsons, did.  He was in a law firm with people from
Harvard and Yale, and he was from the Midwest and Catholic University,
with no family connections.  So we had to have all the things that
other people, like the Roosevelts, who were secure in their social
status, overlooked.

They didn't flash their money around.  They lived in an older apartment
with old furnishings.  But we had to have this spiffy, spanking-clean
apartment and all this furniture."

But Charlotte deferred to her husband and trusted him.  John knew what
he was doing, she was sure.  Her father always had, and her mother
trusted him.  She dispelled her fears by concentrating on being proud
of where John was working and what he was going to achieve.

That first month, John took her to see his office, and later they
filmed the street where they lived and where John worked, in a home
movie that reflects their small-town awe of their surroundings.

It starts from the roof of their apartment building.  The camera sweeps
the horizon, a swell of high rises.  Then the viewer sees footage of
the Irving Trust Building, John's office, and the plaque on the
entrance, "One Wall Street."  Again, there is a slow, panoramic creep
of the camera up the length of the tall building, pausing momentarily
at the spot where his office was, then up to the sky, in a telling
metaphor of John's soaring ambitions.

His daily work experience was quite different from his wife's.

While John took the subway downtown, to a sea of three-piece suits and
well-guarded wallets, Charlotte took the train in the opposite
direction, to East Harlem, where she had taken a job as a public health
nurse.  There, she worked in clinics and public schools, and made home
visits.  Most of her patients were poor, many on welfare; many spoke
only Spanish.  She had taken this job rather than a hospital position
not out of social conscience but to ensure regular hours and free
weekends.  She wanted to be home to cook John's dinners and to be
available on his free days.

Her territory was a decided shock to the sheltered Saint Joe's
graduate, and Charlotte worried that she was "way over her head."

But she did well in her position.  She consistently received high marks
in her progress reports and, by 1968, after two years in the field, her
responsibilities included students enrolled in one parochial and three
public schools, plus duties in a child health station and a chest and
social hygiene clinic (i.e tuberculosis and VD).

Right before Charlotte took maternity leave, her supervisor wrote this:
"Mrs. Fedders has carried a heavy case load in the most difficult
north end of the East Harlem district, which abounds in narcotic
traffic and addiction.  The multi-problem families with whom she works
have frequently enormous medical and social pathology .  . . her
approach, always [is] sympathetic, understanding, never judgmental.

She has been alert in detecting and referring the unmet needs of her
patients and families... Mrs. Fedders is soft-spoken, dignified and
composed...

. She is an excellent public health nurse, courteous, patient, and uses
sound judgment.  . . . Her intelligence and interest in the job, in
people, and in specific cases she is working with led to more
responsible assignments as a trouble-shooter on the field.  . . . She
should be encouraged to compete in the promotional examination for
supervisor of nurses."

But despite her own professional growth and accomplishments, Charlotte
still saw John as the center of their world, his job as being the only
one that mattered, his happiness with her as the only real talisman of
her worth.  She worked only because they needed the money.  As soon as
she had a baby she was going to quit for good.

Because her job was completely secondary in her mind, Charlotte bother
to disturb John with work-related problems.  When she had difficulty
transferring her nursing license from D.C. to the state of New York,
something she had to do before she could start her job, Charlotte drove
up to Albany and back, a round-trip drive of more than six hours, in
one day, by herself.

Within a few weeks of starting her rounds, Charlotte was slugged in the
face by an irritable pregnant woman she was visiting in Harlem.

Her supervisor called the police, and Charlotte's lip swelled into an
ugly knot.

She hoped for sympathy from John when he came home.  The whole incident
had unnerved her.  The woman had called her "a white bitch" before she
struck and Charlotte hadn't even said anything to her yet.  But John
didn't baby his wife at all that she remembers.

"He didn't really show any concern about it," remembers Charlotte.

"It was more just 'Well, you're okay,' and then he encouraged me to go
back to work the next day.  It was probably the best attitude for him
to have because it kept me from being scared and sent me back on my
way.

But I was a little hurt that he didn't seem more worried about me."

Even though she worked full days for a full salary, Charlotte remained
doggedly traditional.  John was the head of the household; she would
turn her paycheck over to John.  If she needed money, she asked him for
it.  He didn't provide her with a weekly allowance.  He kept the
checkbook.  She pushed herself to keep a spotless apartment as if she
was home all the time, playing the perfect housewife.  She alone did
all the cleaning, even though it was John who set the standard for
it.

Each Sunday night, for instance, she remembers that he held what he
jokingly called a "white glove" inspection, making sure Charlotte had
the apartment in top shape.  Occasionally he would run his fingers
along the tops of doors and windows.

Besides doing all the cleaning and shopping, she moved the car every
day, as the city required, made his breakfast of two eggs over-easy,
cooked every meal, did the wash, ironed his shirts, and packed his
suitcase if he went off on business.

When Nancy Long and her husband visited Charlotte and John, Long was
amazed to see that Charlotte's schedule seemed so dependent on his.

"In the morning, she asked us not to go into the bathroom before John
did, because he was so compulsive about his routine.  We waited in the
living room while he showered.  John had the whole routine timed."

Charlotte knew that when she heard John drop his newspaper, it was a
good time for her to start his eggs and toast.

When Charlotte and John visited Long and her husband several months
later, Long recalls that Charlotte slept on the floor of their living
room so that John could stretch out on the fold-out double bed.

Although her hostess disapproved, Charlotte was proud that she could
"tough it out" to make John comfortable.

"We left their apartment in Cleveland around midnight to drive home,"
remembers Charlotte of that visit.  "I drove for six hours in the dark,
in an incredible fog, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, while John slept.

He didn't offer to drive until dawn.  He would occasionally wake up and
say, 'God, you're such a strong woman, you're so wonderful,' and go
back to sleep.  Of course, I was dying I was so tired, but I wasn't
about to disappoint him and pull over to ask for help.  I was so proud
when he said that to me.

"I never moved the car seat up to adjust to the length of my legs.

I kept it at his setting, and was proud of that too.  That Saint
Patrick's Day we went to a Marquette basketball game in the National
Invitational Tournament at Madison Square Garden; we didn't have enough
money for the cab ride home.  So I walked the thirty blocks back in my
high heels, and kept up with him, even with those long legs of his.  It
made me feel good about myself that I could keep up with him."

And John did reward Charlotte with generous gestures, much as Dr.
O'Donnell had lavished gifts and trips on his girls.  In the fall of
1967, for instance, he took Charlotte on a buying spree to her old
favorite, Peck & Peck, in preparation for a Christmas visit to his
parents.  Of course, she didn't buy clothes on her own, because he
controlled all their finances.

But Charlotte saw this and the other shopping expeditions they went on
in New York City as being very grand affairs.

"We went in on a Saturday and I tried on things for him and he said I
like this and this and this, and that's what I got.  He bought me three
lovely dresses, at full price.  It made me feel wonderful because we
were on show at that store.  His paying that kind of attention to me
was incredibly flattering."

Charlotte was also flattered by John's suggesting she try certain
styles of the day.  He gave her scarves, for instance, because he liked
the way women slicked their hair back and tied it in ponytails with
them.

Charlotte struggled to grow out her fine hair so she could wear the
style, even though she didn't like it much.  She lived for the times
she murmured, "Oh, look at that woman, she's so beautiful," and John
would respond, "You're prettier than all of them."

And there were simple, happy afternoons, just walking through the city,
window-shopping in boutiques and art exhibits, or sauntering through
Central Park, holding hands, dreaming.

"Those were very romantic moments," says Charlotte.

To repay John for his love, his confidence-building attention, his
bringing her to such an exciting place, Charlotte worked hard to become
not only a competent but a gracious hostess, a polite American 1960s
version of a European nobleman's courtesan.  The perfect helpmate to
the rising attorney.

Their dinner parties were mostly business, recalls Charlotte.  John
usually chose the guests.  They were typically legal associates and
often the Roosevelts.  She prepared meals that included "meat and
potatoes," no short-changing casseroles, no matter how tight their
budget, served on their good china, with silver settings and
candlelight.

Serving the guests was also entirely her responsibility.  John would
loudly announce, so-and-so needs water, Charlotte, but he never left
his seat to fetch it himself.

"The dinners were always sit-down, so that meant I could have only six
total, because we had to have the full service," says Charlotte.  "When
we went to other people's homes, I saw them mixing their china sets,
but we couldn't.  And these had to be full meals.  I used to have to
use Kennedy half-dollars given to us as a wedding present to buy
groceries for us, but we always had the money to host a big dinner, to
put on a show.

And I always put on a good show for him when we entertained.

"People must have thought we were rich.  We had things people ahead of
him in the firm didn't have.  But he wanted that, especially since the
first people we were really friendly with were the Roosevelts.

John was always very competitive and our friendship with them gave him
a taste for the good life.

"We used to do a lot with them.  They would take us to Hyde Park, to
the childhood home of Haven's grandmother Eleanor, to play golf.

We went to sports events with them.  They'd also take us to Bunny's
family home at Salter's Point in Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, near
Martha's Vineyard.  That was her family's summer home; their winter
home was in Bermuda.  It was right on the Sound, and there was a small
golf course there too."

Quite a social circle And although Charlotte was in another "poor
cousin" relationship, similar to the one she had had with her Baltimore
friends, she no longer felt quite as inferior to the Homeland
contingent.

How many of them knew a Roosevelt?  How many of them had a husband
succeeding on Wall Street in his mid-twenties?  Someone whose career
was built totally on his capabilities and not on any family
connections?

Charlotte and John's climb was becoming an intoxicatingly fast one.

One that infected her family as well.  "I don't know how many times I
heard my father say that he bet one of his lawyer friends wished that
he had John Fedders as his son-in-law," she says.

John worked hard but didn't keep ridiculously late hours.  He was
generally home by 7 PM and would take time away from work for a month's
vacation, things he would sacrifice later in his career.

He seemed to be a natural.  "Of all the firm's associates, he was the
best," says Charlotte.  "He told me that."

John even found his legal niche relatively early.  Although he had
planned to specialize in litigation, the Wall Street fever took hold
and he switched to securities and corporate law.  He never really
discussed his changing professional interests with Charlotte, though.

She just saw him circling tender offers in the morning paper as he ate
breakfast.

When Charlotte's parents visited the newlyweds, John took his
father-in-law for a tour of his office.  Dr. O'Donnell remembers that
when they passed the largest corner suites, the cushioned bastions of
the partners, John smiled slowly and said, "Now, there's power
corner.

Dr. O'Donnell says he disapproved of John's awe.  Perhaps his
son-in-law's obvious ambitions recalled a melody the doctor himself had
hummed in youth and then outgrown.  Perhaps it was too earnest an
expression of a lust most were too sophisticated to warble outright.

But it was the song of the age.  America was the richest country in the
world and getting richer all the time.  Anything was possible.

Americans, after all, were even landing on the moon.

One of Martha O'Donnell's best memories of her brother-in-law, in fact,
had to do with the Apollo 11 astronauts.  She came to New York City's
ticker-tape parade for the returning crew in the summer of 1969.

John took her and Dotti downtown and told them where to stand and wait,
playing the concerned older brother.  He'd be back to join them before
the parade started.

"It was one of those golden moments with John," says Martha.  "It was
the first time I had ever ridden the subway during rush hour and I
remember being so impressed with John.  He didn't even have to reach up
to put his hand in those rings on the ceiling, he was so tall.

He knew exactly where to go and what to do to get the best view of the
parade.

"Even in that crush of people, he stood out."

CHAPTER SEVEN

John and Charlotte seemed to be a flawless portrait of
the model, thriving, all-American couple, a portrait to be envied for
its seamless perfection.

Yet, that hard-cultivated persona was like the pictures Georges Seurat
painted in the late-nineteenth century.  Seurat meticulously lathered
together dots of color to create images of polite Parisian gatherings
and serene landscapes The closer one moves to the canvas, however, the
more the individual dots become evident and the smooth image
distorts.

Sometimes it dissipates entirely in a rainbow of paint smudges.

John's life seemed ideal, effortless perhaps.  Yet to maintain that
image, he seemed to need complete control over it, including his
wife.

Charlotte was naturally obliging and happy to comply to his imposed
order.  But she wasn't as disciplined as her husband.  Sometimes she
forgot his instructions.  Sometimes she didn't understand them.

Sometimes she was just plain stupid, he said.

Like forgetting to unplug the iron when she left the apartment to fetch
more of John's laundry.  He had told her to pull that plug, that
turning it off wasn't enough.  It'd just slipped her mind.  But when
she seemingly countermanded him with such forgetfulness, Charlotte
recalls that John told her she was "openingly defying" him.

She made mental lists of things he didn't like, trying not to repeat
the same mistakes.  Once he had gotten angry when she took her winter
coat off during Mass, even though she had on a Sunday dress
underneath.

Charlotte hadn't understood his reasoning.  But John seemed so
irritated, as he hissed at her to put it back on, that from then on she
tried to always wear thinner dresses so that she could keep the coat on
throughout the service without becoming overheated.

When Charlotte told John she needed a check, often he opened her purse
to put it in her wallet.  If her purse was messy, he told her to clean
it up.  He didn't like coffee on her breath, so she tried never to
drink it around him.  She also recalls that he didn't like her weighing
over 135 pounds, so she started dieting whenever the scales' needle
crept upward.

He didn't like her hair frosted, so she didn't do it frequently.

He didn't like her wearing much makeup, so generally all she wore was
lipstick.

The list of "don'ts" seemed to get longer and longer and sometimes
Charlotte just couldn't keep things straight.  And the criticism was so
hard to take.

"It was black-and-white with John," says Charlotte.  "One day he'd tell
me I was beautiful and the next day I was letting myself go.

He'd say, 'Your hair's a wreck."  So I'd cut it or perm it and then
that was all wrong too.  I would cry when he'd say these things and
that would disgust him.

Crying was for babies.  The criticism of my appearance really hurt,
especially after I discovered that he was still carrying a photograph
of his old girlfriend in his wallet."  She remembers that most of their
arguments, however, were about money.  Because of the furniture loans
and their high rent, paying the bills of their day-to-day living
expenses was almost impossible.

"Yet, we'd have money for these binges, like the framing, the clothes,
and the dinner parties," says Charlotte.  "Whenever I tried to talk to
him about it, we fought.  Maybe it threatened him.  Maybe he thought I
was questioning his judgment.  So he'd say something sarcastic and then
I'd get upset and say something he'd consider argumentative or
combative and it'd escalate from there.  He hardly ever raised his
voice.

But he could be very brutal, very firm, very authoritative.  I'd
usually run away, crying, and go throw myself on the bed.

"He never followed me or came to see if I was all right.  I never
stayed away from him, though.  Once, he threw me down on the bed and it
frightened me, so I tried to never withhold sex from him."

About a year after they married, after a particularly explosive
argument about their finances, Charlotte thinks it might have been
caused by her opening her own checking account-John locked her out of
their apartment.  She spent the night with a friend from Catholic
University's law school, who was also living in town.  It was the first
person she had really confided in about her disappointment over the
honeymoon, their stretched pocketbooks, John's criticism of her.  The
friend listened sympathetically.

John didn't call her at work the next day to see if she was all right,
she says.  So Charlotte checked into the Barbizon Hotel for Women,
afraid to go to the apartment, afraid to leave, not knowing what to do,
all alone in New York City.  Finally, she called John and he told her
to come home.  In Charlotte's mind, John was taking her back.  "Thank
God," she thought.  They quickly reconciled and Charlotte closed the
checking account that she suspected had caused the trouble.

Several months later, when she and John were visiting married friends
in Maryland, the wife told Charlotte that she knew about the night she
had stayed at the friend's house.  Was there anything she could do to
help?

"She did try to reach out to me and help me and I didn't respond," says
Charlotte, "because I was so embarrassed.  She was this beautiful
blonde, a cheerleader-type woman, perky and happy and married to a
seeming sweetheart of a husband.  Here I was, sitting in this perfect
little suburban home, which belonged to the perfect little suburban
wife, and I was mortified that our mutual friend had told her that John
and I fought.

Mortified that our life was not as perfect as theirs seemed to be and
ours was supposed to be.  So I changed the subject."

Besides, everything was better with John now.  That charming, witty
winner-of-a-guy was back.  Like a drug addict, Charlotte would tolerate
the deterioration of almost everything else in her life for the rush
she felt when John was good to her.  "When things were bad with John
they were very, very bad," she says, "but when they were good they were
perfect."

Despite the occasional wrenching arguments, Charlotte remembers the
first years of her marriage as happy.  But she also remembers, vividly,
the first time John hit her.

"It was in the early spring of 1968.  I was sitting in a side chair
next to the dining table.  I think it was a Saturday morning.  We had
been talking for a while.  All I remember is that this conversation
seemed to be going well.  That we were really conversing, sharing
ideas.  We were not fighting, we were not being sarcastic or nasty.  I
swear we were just talking.

"But I think it was the first time I disagreed with him and was
sticking to my guns.  I was arguing my point calmly, but I was holding
to it.

"I got his right hand to the left side of my face," says Charlotte
quietly, as, almost in a trance, she sweeps her right hand up across
her body and sharply turns her face away from it.  She pauses.  "That's
how I always got it."  She repeats the gesture.  "He is right-handed.

"It was one good sock to the left side of my ear.  Then I heard this
ringing sound.  I found out later that he had broken my eardrum.

I was completely shocked.  I can remember thinking, 'I wasn't even
yelling."  I would have thought I deserved it had I been yelling.

"I had been slapped in the face only once before in my life.  My mother
slapped me when I was about fourteen.  I was being flip, so I knew I
deserved it.  She was the authority and I was talking back to her.  I
had the same feeling when John slapped me.  I kept wondering what I had
done wrong, like a child who had been spanked.  I thought, 'I've been a
naughty girl."  You see, I never considered myself an equal with him,
so he was the authority figure disciplining the child, just as my
mother had done that one time.

"I think he left and went to work.  I sat and cried, a really sad cry,
at the table.  Then I just shut down.  I felt sick.  I couldn't eat.

I'm sure I slept on the couch that night.

"My ear kept ringing, and I couldn't hear well, so I knew I had to see
a doctor.  I called the hospital to ask for a recommendation, because I
didn't know anyone.  I went to a doctor on East Sixty-eighth Street, in
a neighborhood of old brownstones.  It was an old, dark building, with
a dark lobby.  His office had older equipment.  I knew it wasn't that
bad but I was so upset and the office seemed so dark it felt as if I
was going to a back alley for an abortion.

"I was ashamed to be going to a doctor because my husband had hit me.

I sat in that examining room in a dental-type chair for ten minutes
going back and forth, 'Should I tell him how it happened or not?"

It seemed like an hour went by.

"Of course, I didn't tell him.  I fought hard not to show any emotion
and I lied.  Said that I had blown my nose and suddenly heard this
ringing.

But I was mortified.  I was convinced that he could look into my ear
and know that it had been caused by a slap to the head.  And I just
knew he'd think, 'I wonder what she did to deserve this."  Because I
didn't know that this ever happened between people who loved each
other.  I had never even seen my parents argue.  My intelligence kept
telling me that I had done nothing wrong, but my heart kept saying I
must have.  Why else would he have done it?"

The FBI estimates that today in this country a woman is battered every
eighteen seconds; that every day, four women are beaten to death by
their husbands or boyfriends; that more than 30 percent of female
homicides are committed by their mates; and that battering predates one
in four suicide attempts by females.

In fact, battering is the single major cause of injury to women, more
significant than auto accidents, rapes, or muggings.  According to data
compiled by the Minnesota Department of Corrections, 20 percent of
visits by women to emergency medical services are because of injuries
inflicted by men they love.  A total of one million women each year are
believed to seek medical help after being hit.  And in almost 24
percent of violent families, the wife is attacked when pregnant, says
the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Yet, only one out of twenty-five cases of abuse is recognized and
treated as such by the medical professionals seeing them.  The women
are bandaged, billed, and sent home, without their doctors recommending
the couple seek counseling or maybe without their even realizing what
awaits their patients at home.  Police studies show that once a man has
attacked his woman, a taboo is broken.  It is easier for him to strike
her again.  Her staying after that first attack is an unspoken
acquiescence that can be fodder for his dominance.  Although she
believes each assault is the last, statistics indicate that the
violence will only escalate over time.

These, of course, are recent studies.  In 1968, no one talked about
domestic violence.  It was a private matter.  And even if you had asked
people what they thought about a man who hit his wife, you probably
would have been told that the husband, as head of the household, had
the right to quell a hysterical, shrewish woman.  Nearly ten years
later, during the feminist movement's prime, a Louis Harris poll
revealed that one out of five Americans, including women, still
approved of a man slapping his wife.

Or the people you quizzed might have repeated a joke to you.  The
comedian Jackie Gleason was inundated with laughter and approval on the
television series The Honeymooners, when he shook his fist and
threatened his wife: "To the moon, Alice.  One more time and, pow,
right in the kisser."  ("Atta boy, Ralphie," applauded his henpecked
friend Norton.) Charlotte remembers John's joking at cocktail parties
that the first thing a man ought to do in his marriage is sock his wife
to show her who's boss.  People laughed, perhaps only tolerantly, then
Charlotte followed suit, even though her stomach churned every time
John said it.

Or you might have gotten this response: "Oh, that only happens in
hot-blooded immigrant families or in ghettos."  Or "She must like it;
why else would she stay?"

All stereotypes and social attitudes that helped shove women back into
a cage of silence and shame.

Charlotte couldn't imagine any other husband hitting his spouse.

She concluded that she must be a horrible wife, indeed.  How could she
admit that to anyone, especially since the only real goal of her life
was to be a good wife?

The doctor put a thin sheath on her eardrum to help heal Charlotte's
physical ailment.  Then Mrs. Fedders went home to fix dinner for her
husband.

She says that she and John never talked about their fight or about her
injury.  He never offered an apology that she recalls.  She never asked
for one, afraid he would tell her what horrible deficiency in her
personality had forced him to hit her.  She just tried to forget it
ever happened.

But shortly thereafter, perhaps trying to escape the tension caused by
the slap and their avoidance of talking about it, Charlotte fled home
to her parents in Towson.  She stayed two days.  During that time, she
told her father what had happened.

"To break an eardrum," says Charlotte's father, "a slap has to be good
and hard because air is what ruptures the eardrum.  Nothing went down
the ear canal to puncture it.  The slap forced enough air down the
canal to rupture the drum."

As a medical examiner, Dr.  O'Donnell had seen a lot of ugly scenes.

This, however, did shock him.  "We were genteel folk," he says.

"You can disagree but you don't get violent.  I called his father and
told him to talk to his son.  That this wasn't what we raised our
daughter for and that this marriage was headed for disaster."

John's father did call him.  And then his mother called Charlotte.

She

recalls that her mother-in-law said, "Johnny's crying and he says that
you left him."  A true fact.  A clever twisting of the sequence of
events by John that engendered Charlotte's guilt.  Suddenly she saw
John as the victim of her insensitivity.

Her father didn't buy it.  He says now emphatically: "I told Charlotte
to divorce him, that he'd never change.  She got upset with me."

"My father told me to get out while I still could," says Charlotte,
"before I had children.  But I just couldn't leave John.  I loved him
and I was convinced God had sent him to me as an accident, that I
wasn't good enough for him.  And I was convinced I couldn't live
without a man and that John Fedders was my only chance.  My father told
me that of course I could, and that I probably wouldn't have to.

"I was only twenty-four at the time.  I could have started over.

But I thought the ultimate disgrace was a failed marriage, especially
coming so soon after being married.  Nobody was more shunned than a
divorced woman.  It wasn't just a scandal, though-the Church told me
divorce was a sin.  I could just scream now that I was that
insecure."

Charlotte went back to New York City, back to John.  She didn't
communicate with her parents for several months, a silence that
particularly hurt her father when he had a hernia operation and still
didn't hear from his daughter.  But Charlotte just couldn't talk with
them.

She was too embarrassed, and she believed that they were too
disappointed in her.

Denial was becoming one of Charlotte's main ways of coping with her
life.

If she could avoid people who knew about the flaws in her marriage, she
could almost forget they existed.

And Charlotte was pregnant.  John was ecstatic.  She was sure
everything would be fine now.

They had been saving up money to go to the 1968 Olympics at Mexico
City, the honeymoon they really hadn't been able to afford.

But now, with the baby coming, they happily diverted money to another
use.

It was time to buy a house.

House-hunting, however, seemed to cause a lot of tension between John
and Charlotte.  In late August, when Charlotte was almost four months
pregnant, John hit her again.

"He hadn't threatened to hit me after he broke my eardrum," remembers
Charlotte.  "He never threatened it.  I honestly don't believe any of
the attacks were premeditated.  Once it happens to you, though, you are
afraid.  You know it's there.  And his being so big-he's a foot taller
than me and weighs around two hundred thirty pounds-was very
intimidating.

"But things seemed to be all right.  He didn't seem to like how I
looked pregnant, but we still had relations.  And he was very happy
about the baby.  I thought everything was fine.

"There was tension over the fact that it was getting close to when we
had to move out of the apartment and we still hadn't bought a house.

I think we were arguing about something like what kind of street the
house should be on.  It wasn't anything big.  It hardly ever was.

The intensity of the argument, what you were talking about, didn't
matter.

There were plenty of big arguments that didn't erupt into violence.

It depended on his mood.

"We had found a lovely little house in New Jersey.  It was perfect.

But it was on a busy street and I didn't want my child playing near so
much traffic.  We had always had that problem with my little sisters on
York Road.  So again, I was sticking to my guns.

"I was on the sofa.  I remember because he towered over me.  I was also
just getting over tonsilitis, so I was probably lying down.

"He was very angry.  He loomed over me and hit me in the abdomen,
three, maybe five times, hard.  I bent over, trying to protect my
tummy.

They were powerful blows.  It felt like taking a heavy fall.  It's not
like someone is stabbing you so that it's sharp pain.  It's pounding,
like the pain you feel when you fall into a heavy object and bruise.

It seemed like it went on forever, although the whole thing probably
only lasted thirty seconds, maybe a minute.  How long can a blow
take?

"I tried to push him away, which only seemed to make him madder.

He yelled that he didn't care if he killed me or the baby.

"I don't remember how it stopped.  If I managed to run away or if he
walked away.  The next thing I remember clearly is sitting in the
doctor's office.

"I was afraid for my baby.  A baby was something I had wanted all my
life, so I went to the doctor and told him what happened.  I didn't see
my own doctor; I saw one of his associates, who could take me the next
day.

"Telling him was as bad as I thought it would be.  He gave me a
complete examination to make sure the baby was unharmed.  It was
humiliating.  I thought that I had 'openly defied' John, so that I
deserved being hit.  I was already making excuses for John.  He had
been tense and I was nagging him.  We had found a perfect little house
and I was being stubborn.  I had been sick and unable to take care of
the apartment the way I was supposed to and he was justifiably angry.

"The doctor didn't say that what John had done was wrong.  He did tell
me to get out of the situation.  It wasn't what I wanted to hear.  I
was pregnant.  I was convinced I couldn't take care of myself anyway.

How could I take care of a baby too, on my own?  I guess I wanted to
hear that it would never happen again.  Reassurance.  Something.

"I found out in 1985 that all the doctor put on my record was: 'Husband
trouble."  But I didn't know that then.  I assumed it said, 'Examined
woman because her husband beat her."  I was so embarrassed the next
month when I went in to see my doctor for my regular monthly
appointment.  I wasn't going to bring up the last visit.  But when he
didn't say anything I figured that he didn't want to discuss it, that
he thought I deserved it.  It also reinforced the idea that this wasn't
something you should talk about.  I never told another doctor until
1976."

Charlotte wasn't going to tell her family either.  They had already
told her to leave John.  Going back to him was the first time she had
really disobeyed her parents.  She thought they probably thought her a
fool for staying with him.  How could she admit to them that John had
hit her again?  And when she was carrying his child?

"After a while," says Charlotte, "I just stopped telling my family.

Because John and I'd get right back together, and they couldn't
understand.  And it made it so uncomfortable for them, knowing.  So it
became my own horrible secret."

Riding home on the bus from the doctor's office, Charlotte felt more
alone than she ever had in her life.  She was helpless.  To whom could
she turn?  When Charlotte got home she said the rosary, as she
frequently did intimes of stress, keeping her mind and her fingers
busy.  Then she flipped through her Women Before God meditations,
looking for something to offer solace, something that fit her
situation.

Of course, there were none for a wife fearful of her husband physically
harming her.  Instead, there were prayers such as this one, "For a
Happy Married Life," included in Mothers' Manual by A. Francis Coomes,
S.J..

Lord, bless and preserve my cherished husband, whom you have given to
me.  Let his life be long and blessed, comfortable and holy; let me
ever be a blessing and a comfort to him, a sharer in all his sorrows, a
consolation in all the accidents and trials of life.  Make me forever
lovable in his eyes and forever dear to him.

Keep me from all ungentleness; make me humble, yet strong and
helpful.

Then Charlotte closed with a plea of her own.  She recalls murmuring
something such as: "Hail, Mary, full of grace, you are so wise.

You are so loving.  You were a good wife.  Help me to be more like
you.

I don't seem to be able to understand my husband.  Help me to
understand him so that I can be a better person, a better woman, a
better wife."

CHAPTER EIGHT In the last week of September 1968, Charlotte and John
moved into their new home, a cream-colored, six-room Tudor cottage
surrounded by dogwoods, in Westchester County's Pelham Manor, a suburb
just outside New York City.  John's commute to Wall Street would take
about fifty minutes.  Charlotte would drive him to the last subway stop
on the Pelham Bay line, in the Bronx, which bordered the county.  She
continued to work only through the end of December.  The baby was
expected to arrive in February.

The neighborhood was a homogeneous, established one, populated with
husbands employed in Manhattan and their well-educated wives who stayed
home with well-scrubbed babies and joined the Junior League.

Like countless other suburbs of the age, Pelham was a verdant, female
ghetto during the day, a pretty hatchery for the upwardly mobile.

It was also a cloister with which Charlotte was familiar and
comfortable.  She would happily retreat into the world of Pablum and
housework, hearing nothing but the coo of her baby for hours at a time,
occasionally chatting briefly with other mothers pushing children in
strollers, her world shrinking to the circumference of her house and
the man she lived with.

Their street, Clay Avenue, was more modest than most of the affluent
byways of Pelham, but it was sheltered, shady, and quiet.

Tall trees and thick, well-trimmed hedges lined the streets and
delineated individual yards.  In the spring, settled and content,
Charlotte would watch for flowers to shoot from bulbs planted by the
previous owner, a widow who had recently died.  The first few days they
were in the house, in fact, John and Charlotte shared the space with
the widow's furniture, awaiting the estate auction her executors were
going to hold that Saturday.  They crammed all their possessions into
the bedroom and posted a sign telling people coming to inspect the
furniture that it was off limits.  But even when she was trying to nap,
exhausted from the move, Charlotte had to keep shooing out strangers.

"But we actually had a lot of fun the day of the auction," says
Charlotte.  "We bought a table and cabinet and a couple of other things
for very little."

They couldn't buy too much, however, because their money was basically
spent.  Drained by the payments on the furniture purchased in
Baltimore, Charlotte and John didn't have much cash saved.  They had
needed two loans to pay for the $29,500 house-a loan for the down
payment as well as the mortgage.  John was making about $15,000, and
despite the fact Charlotte's paycheck would shortly stop, the banks
were more than willing to take a chance on the young lawyer.

Charlotte had been surprised initially that John wanted an older house
that needed a lot of work; he had been so adamant two years earlier
about finding a new, clean apartment building in the city.  The kitchen
on Clay Avenue, for instance, had a filthy, old linoleum floor and an
almost unworkable sink.  But they had found the house through one of
the law firm's partners, who had purchased a similar house in the area
and renovated it, and John trusted the advice of his superior.  Driving
to see the house for the first time, Charlotte remembers John
forbidding her to say anything against it.

A few weeks after they moved in, John's parents came to help paint and
clean.

"By the time they left a week later," remembers Charlotte, "there
wasn't anything that didn't look brand-new except the kitchen, the
basement, and the spare bedroom.  We worked dawn to dusk, every day
they were here.  We painted everything, including the closets.  It was
spotless.

"His mother was very conscious about appearance.  She'd didn't like us
to take a snapshot of her if she hadn't just had her hair done.

Her house was always extremely clean.  She had ant traps in practically
every corner.

I remember she was worried once that neighbors might think she had a
problem at her home when the exterminators were going to the house next
door and parked in front of her house.  I think her neatness probably
had to do with the concept of cleanliness being next to godliness.

"John's father had his own business, installing and repairing
industrial refrigerators.  He would be dirty when he came home.

They had a separate shower built downstairs in their basement, and he
would use the garage entrance, go downstairs, and shower before he came
upstairs.

"Everything had to be very orderly as well.  She bought groceries on
sale to save money and then marked almost everything, cans, soap, even
Kleenex boxes, with magic markers or nail polish as to when they were
bought and at what price.

"I remember there was some controversy and tension between John and his
mother when they came to help us about what was going to be done
first.

I didn't have anything to say about it, so I stayed out of it.  I never
questioned her, even the time right after we were married, when John
and I went to visit them and she put us in separate rooms.  We were
married, but I slept with John's sister.  John didn't challenge it
either.

"She seemed to have complete control over everybody.  She purchased and
laid out all his father's clothes.  She kept all his books.  When she
came to stay with us, often to help take care of me right after I had
had one of the babies, she was the boss.  She didn't let the boys open
the refrigerator without asking her first.  She thought it was terrible
that I would let the children open the door and stand there for a few
minutes trying to decide what they wanted.  I think their not asking
for permission was an act of disrespect for adults in her mind.

"No one crossed her.  She wasn't nasty or vindictive; she just had this
terrible Catholic saint martyrdom about her when she was upset.

She'd say to my kids, 'If you love [me]-you won't do that."

"She did everything by the Catholic rules.  She went to church as much
as possible.  Every time she got into the car, even to go to the
grocery store, she'd say, 'Jesus, Mary, Joseph, we pray, be with us on
our way.

"She seemed to have total control of her emotions and a strong belief
that self-discipline could accomplish great things.

as a "I think John picked up a lot of that.  I know he was an altar
boy, daily-type thing, for several years.  He was very disciplined
about doing his homework and I'm sure that he rarely did anything
wrong.  So I doubt she really had to punish him much.

"She had several unsuccessful pregnancies in John's early childhood and
gave birth to at least one baby who died.  So sometimes she was,
understandably, preoccupied with those tragedies.  But she was very,
very proud of John and his accomplishments.  She even did his laundry
for him all through college.  He'd mail it home to her.

"But even though he loved her, I think John had felt dominated by her,
growing up, so that he wanted the total control now."

Despite tensions over renovating the house, these months were happy and
peaceful for the young couple as they awaited the coming of their
baby.

John wanted his first child to be a boy, and he was certain that it
was, says Charlotte.  Certain enough to cover the pink walls of the
baby's bedroom with blue paint.  Before beginning work in earnest he
had taken the paintbrush and written the name he and Charlotte had
chosen across the wall in big letters.

Charlotte remembers that John wasn't the type to be fascinated by a
pregnant body, wanting to listen to the child's heartbeat or kicks.  He
made a lot of jokes about pregnant women being fat.  In the early
months of her pregnancy, Charlotte had run into the bathroom after they
had made love to put on a nightgown so he couldn't see her rounding
tummy.

John told Charlotte that they couldn't afford to buy her a Big Mac, a
new McDonald's hamburger, one of the few real cravings she had during
those nine months.  But John did attend Lamaze classes with
Charlotte.

"He was very good about that," remembers Charlotte.  "I remember him
turning pale only once, when we saw a film sort of from the doctor's
view of a birth.  He came to every class.  We were going to Elizabeth
Bing, one of the pioneers in Lamaze, because the Roosevelts had gone to
her.

That's how we got interested in it."

Fortunately, Charlotte's first pregnancy was a relatively easy one.

Fortunate in that John didn't seem to tolerate his wife being ill.

When John caught a stomach virus, Charlotte says he demanded that she
spoon-feed him soup.  If she contracted the flu and was sick to her
stomach, however, she had to fend for herself.  But with this
pregnancy, his seeming indifference didn't matter much.  Charlotte was
healthy and resilient.  The day before she gave birth, in fact,
Charlotte walked almost a mile in snow with John to the house of one of
his partners.

"It was one of the major snowstorms that New York ever had," remembers
Charlotte.  "The highways weren't even open.  One of the firm's
partners lived nearby and John had helped shovel out this man's car.

We had walked over and back to do it.  I felt fine.

"When my water broke the next morning, we called that partner.

Our car was in our garage and the snow was piled up God knows how
high.

John hadn't shoveled us out.  We weren't in too big of a hurry, though,
because I wasn't having any contractions yet, so I knew it would be a
while before I was really in labor.  I drank a little hot tea and fixed
John's breakfast.  The usual thing, two eggs over-easy, bacon or
sausage, and toast.

"The partner picked us up but we could only make it as far as the Bronx
subway stop.  Just as the train was approaching, some guy tried to
snatch a lady's purse and John went running after him.  The partner
stayed with me until John got back a few minutes later.

"We got on the subway and then had to take a bus to get to the hospital
from the station.  Luke was born at 11:30 PM, February 12.

John was there coaching me.  He was very emotional and held my hand and
wiped my brow.  The births of my children were some of John's and my
happiest days together."

Within a few hours of having Luke, Charlotte baptized him herself,
holding her newborn close and dabbing his forehead with water from a
glass sitting on her nightstand, saying: "I baptize thee in the name of
the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost."  It was a moment of
special bonding between mother and son and was an act John seemed to be
proud of as well.  Charlotte baptized all her children this way and
John seemed pleased by it.

Two weeks after Luke was born was the official ceremony at John and
Charlotte's church in Pelham.  Charlotte hosted a party afterward,
preparing a meal for about twenty guests.  They had the ceremony so
soon after Luke's birth because John wanted an uncle to be the
godfather and that was the only time he could come to New York for
it.

That was fine by Charlotte; she was tired but jubilant.

"The food was lovely for that baptism party," remembers Charlotte's
friend Nancy Long, who drove down from New Haven, Connecticut, to
attend.  "There was a fire in the fireplace.  It really was a lovely
affair.  She had done it all herself.  John was so proud of Luke.  He
had his son."

The only bad moment came later that day, when John and his sister had
an argument.  Charlotte listened with concern and confusion; she and
her siblings had rarely fought.  But she also listened with an almost
desperate interest.  It was the first time she had heard John argue
with someone else.  Charlotte noted how his sister's rising anger
cooled John, how he got quieter as she became more emotional, his
answers becoming shorter and curt.  She resolved to try not to make the
same mistakes herself.

Right now, anyway, most of her time was taken up with Luke.  Care of
the baby fell almost entirely to Charlotte, she says.  John never
changed Luke's diaper except for the day before Luke's baptismal
ceremony, when Charlotte left to have her hair done.  She doesn't
recall his ever getting up in the middle of the night to quiet or feed
Luke.

But John did like to bounce the baby and was elated when Luke stood in
his crib as early as six months old, evidence that his son might grow
into an athlete.  John could be rough with the baby, but obviously,
thought Charlotte, he loved his son.

The home movie of Luke's first Christmas almost a year later shows John
lying on the floor, flat on his back in front of a Christmas tree
stacked high with toys.  He holds Luke above him, throws him
breath-gaspingly high, catches him, throws him again, and turns him
over, letting the baby slide down his belly to the floor.  Luke laughs
and flashes dimples and climbs up for more.  John patiently lets his
son kick and fall over him, rolling and laughing, then hugs him close
and rocks him for a minute.  It was the kind of scene that sustained
Charlotte for months.

In March 1969, a little over a month after Luke was born, John
presented Charlotte with a black Labrador puppy.  She really didn't
want it, she knew nothing about dogs, and there was no backyard for
it.

But it seemed to complete the image John wanted to project.  John and
Charlotte named the dog Cassius, playing off the name of their street,
"Clay."  For the following Christmas, December 1970, she and John had a
formal portrait taken in the living room, with Luke and Cassius.

Charlotte was always amused by the photo, since Cassius was never
allowed in the living room except for that day.

November fifteenth, Charlotte and John hosted Cadwalader, Wickersham,
and Taft's annual party.  "John came home and told me that we were
going to have the 'privilege' of hosting the firm's party for seventy
people.

"I was panicked.  I had done little parties but never anything like
this.

The other people who had done it were partners, and they had huge homes
and domestic help.  I definitely remember that we were the only
associates to ever have anything this size, something for the whole
firm.

"Of course, we had to have the kitchen redone because of this party.

So, two days before all these people were coming, everything from the
kitchen was in the dining room.  It was a mess.  I couldn't have done
it without my sister Martha.  I had to do all the cooking and
cleaning.

She helped.  John went and got the ice and liquor basically.  But it
turned out to be a beautiful evening.  My mother had given me all her
recipes for a cocktail buffet.  I fixed meatballs, chicken wings, dips,
steak tartare, pastries, shrimp molds.  I don't think anyone went home
hungry.

"Those events were usually high times for us.  We'd pull it off and
people were impressed.  John would be very proud and up, up, up.

He'd hug me and tell me how great I was, and I'd be singing in the
kitchen as I cleaned up.  He'd go to bed, leaving me to clean, but I
didn't care.

I had so much energy then it didn't matter, and I was happy that he was
so happy.  Entertaining was something I could do, knowing it would
please him rather than doing it out of fear, or to avoid making him
angry.

So they were good experiences for me."

That night, Charlotte managed to gracefully juggle all her roles,
playing hostess to dozens and taking care of her baby, without missing
a discernible beat.  Her self-confidence was perhaps at the highest it
would ever be in her married life.

Says her sister Martha: "Luke was crying because John kept coming into
his bedroom and flipping on the light to introduce him to people.

Charlotte went up there but Luke still kept crying.  She realized right
away, in all this hubbub, that the trouble was that she had her
contacts in and Luke was used to seeing her with her glasses.  So she
just put her glasses on overtop her contacts and sang to him and Luke
fell asleep immediately."

"I basically was living this charmed life then," says Charlotte.  "I
was taking care of only one lovely little baby.  John seemed happy.  We
even took a few trips together by ourselves.  My parents seemed to be
happier with us.  They gave us a washing machine for Christmas the
first year wewere in the house and John was honestly so touched by it
that he cried.

"Those were our most innocent days."  Charlotte doesn't remember any
physical abuse during the three years she and John lived in Pelham.

But she faced new problems with John's black moods" and silences that
could stretch on for days.  She had learned that during an argument the
more distraught she became the more likely John was to clam up and shut
her out entirely, at best becoming brusque and patronizing, at worst
glowering at her without saying a word.

But these moods were different, more unnerving, because they seemed to
come out of nowhere and to last forever.  She remembers that small
transgressions could trigger them, but nothing she did seemed to pull
John out of them.

Two especially difficult times occurred around Thanksgiving of 1969 and
Luke's first birthday in February 1970.

With John's permission, Charlotte promised to spend Thanksgiving with
her parents.  She says that John made no attempt to leave with her that
morning.  Instead, he lay in front of the television set, refusing to
answer her questions.  She finally left him there, driving down to
Towson and back in one day with Luke in tow, to keep John from getting
angrier.

Again, with John's prior approval, Charlotte had made arrangements to
celebrate Luke's first birthday at her parents' home in Maryland.  John
seemed withdrawn the day they were to leave and told her to drive
ahead; he would join her there, he had things to do at work.  She and
her parents delayed the party a day, hoping John would show up.  He
never arrived.

The home movie of the party captures somber smiles on the faces of
Charlotte's family.  Luke is sleepy when they give him his cake, in a
noticeably lackluster presentation.  Charlotte remembers that she
finally woke him from a nap to eat the cake when it became clear John
wasn't coming.  Not exactly the celebration she had hoped for her
firstborn's first birthday.

"Those were the first real black moods I remember after we got
married," says Charlotte.  "Looking back on it I realized that his not
calling me for those eight weeks when we were dating was a withdrawal
period like this one.  Right before we were supposed to go down to my
parents', John had been getting quieter.  I blamed myself later that I
had made it worse by pushing to go, by going ahead without him, even
though he had approved of the trip before.  But I could always figure
out why it was my fault.  Real easy.  I would think, 'I shouldn't have
gone home.  I should have kept my mouth shut.  I shouldn't have gotten
upset."

"The physical stuff was bad enough, but I think the silences were
worse.  They were psychological torture.  You could never predict what
would send him into one of these silences.  Or how to get him out of
them.

"These silences were the ultimate control.  He must have known not
talking to me, not responding, would make me crazy.  You can't imagine
what it's like to walk into a room where your husband is, your husband,
and to get absolutely no response.  None.  For days.

Maybe weeks.  Or just responses like: 'What's wrong?"  I'd ask.

'Nothing's wrong.  I'm fine."  'But you're not acting normal."  'I'm
acting perfectly normal."  'Why won't you kiss me, then?"  'You want a
kiss?  Here,' and he'd kiss the air.

"There was nothing I could do to make him come out of it.

He came out of it when he was ready, not before.  I would get more and
more emotional, trying to get a response, and he would get more and
more silent.  Self-control was very important to him, it was important
in the Catholic Church, and I think he viewed my getting upset, losing
control, as being very wrong, a sin.  He would look at me with
disgust.

Or if he answered, it was terse and icy.  'Look in the mirror,' he'd
say.

'There's our problem."" John's rejection of her would so frustrate
Charlotte that sometimes, out of self-loathing, she would actually slap
her own face.

"The first time I did that was in New York City," she says.  "We had
been arguing about something and he was lying in the bed ignoring me.

I tried to seduce him.  Making love had always seemed to settle
arguments between us, to make things better.  The culture at the time
told us that sex was the way to make men happy, that that was the main
thing they wanted.  So I tried everything.  I even begged him to make
love to me, and he rejected me.  I was humiliated and hysterical.

Finally I said, 'Maybe you're queer.

"The way he turned and looked at me terrified me.  I was sitting in the
rocker I had given him, by the bedroom window, and I slapped myself in
the face, several times, hard.  'I'm so stupid,' I said, whack, 'I'm so
ugly,' whack, 'I'm so fat,' whack.  He watched me do it.

"By Pelham, I would do what he told me to.  I'd look in the mirror, at
the cause of all our problems, and say, 'I hate myself,' over and over
again as I slapped.  His response was 'You see, you're crazy.  That
proves my point."

To try to prevent arguments and his silences, Charlotte became obsessed
with not repeating mistakes.  For instance, somewhere along the line
when she was packing his bag for a business trip, she forgot an item he
needed and had been reprimanded.  Consequently, she hung a list of
everything he needed in his closet and referred to it each time she
packed after that.

"It was almost like a game-'Well, he won't catch me doing that
again."

I was very sensitive.  For me to put up that list, he had probably said
something like 'You forgot my razor, don't do that again,' and I would
be crushed by that criticism and get too upset.

"I've often thought that had I not been so afraid to make a mistake and
so anxious to please at the very beginning of our marriage and had had
enough confidence just to tell him a couple of times that he was being
ridiculous, that maybe things would have been different.  If I had
realized that making a mistake was no big deal and treated it as such,
maybe he would have learned to accept that I'm human, he's human.  I
think my fear almost justified his anger to himself.  Because I was so
apologetic, my goof really was a big deal after all and he was right to
be mad."

Reconciliations, when they came, generally happened quickly, and
revolved around making love.  There was little talking beforehand.

But a honeymoon period, during which John was attentive and loving,
always followed.  For Charlotte sex was an unspoken acceptance and
praise of her, and she subconsciously defined it as expression of what
John really felt about her.

Though other aspects of their relationship fell into painful cycles,
she says their sex life remained healthy, and perhaps was the most
normal, most naturally loving, part of their relationship.  Charlotte
was not the first to try to be content in an otherwise mediocre
marriage because of the gratifying communication provided by
love-making.  She came to rely on it to establish a temporarily healing
yet ultimately false intimacy between them.

"I can't explain how these reconciliations happened.  I would look for
little signs to tell me that he was coming out of it.  He would answer
a question that day.  Or actually give me a command instead of being
silent.

Somehow, we'd end up in bed and-boom-things would be back to normal,
immediately.  There was no gradual, tentative building.

Back to normal.

"I guess it is surprising that our sex life was normal and giving.

But it was.  There were never complaints on either side.  It wasn't
routine.  He wasn't domineering or aggressive.  Sometimes he tickled me
hard.

But he could be gentle.  It was spontaneous and very loving.  I guess
that's why we always turned to it when nothing else seemed to work
between us.

Charlotte wasn't the only one to feel the sting of John's occasional
aloofness, however.  Slowly, her family was experiencing his sarcasm
and his moods for themselves.

"I felt that John never approved of me," says Dotti, who was in high
school during Charlotte and John's time in Pelham.  "And he rarely
spoke to me.  When he did, it generally wasn't very nice.  One time,
when they were visiting us in Towson, I was in my parents' room
watching television and talking on the phone and John came in, I guess
to use my parents' bathroom.  I was sitting cross-legged on the bed.

As he walked by, he said, 'You ought to sit like a lady-that's
indecent."

"But I thought John was so cool, that his humor was so cool.  He was
sharp as a tack.  He'd set you up for the kill, to pull the rug out
from under you.  One time we were coming back from church, and John
said to Mimi [Charlotte's middle sister], who didn't have the best
voice, 'What did you do with the money?"  She thought he was talking
about the collection money and said, 'What money?"  And he answers,
'The money for singing lessons."

"If you said something that was really obvious, his reply was 'No shit,
Red Ryder,' or if you said that you didn't like a band or a politician,
he'd say, 'Yeah?  Well, they always spoke well of you."  There was no
letup in the teasing.  If I had a boyfriend and he heard me talking
about him to my parents, he'd interrupt with 'Who you talking about,
Bart the turkey?"

He could be merciless and once he found a tender point, that was it, he
kept going until someone else saved you by changing the conversation.

"When I was fifteen or so, I felt like I was coming out with some
relatively intelligent remarks, and he flattened me.  But I just
figured that that was the way men were, what did I know.  I figured
they were a father or they were John."

Martha was John's favorite of Charlotte's sisters, perhaps because she
looked like Charlotte and had a similar, light sense of humor.  But
that preference didn't save Martha from his roughness.  Once he badly
hurt her arm, wrestling with her in the O'Donnells' home.

Of all the O'Donnell clan, Martha saw the most of John and Charlotte
when they were in Pelham, because she attended Manhattanville, a
prestigious all-girls Catholic college in the hamlet of Purchase, about
thirty minutes north of Pelham.

"I was aware that I was the favored sister," remembers Martha.

"John would always say to me, 'if they knock off Charlotte, you're the
replacement' kind of thing.  I had a terrible crush on him.  But even
with his liking me, I didn't see that much of them together.  When
Charlotte and I talked on the phone, it was only during the day, when
John wasn't around.  If I was there for dinner when he came home, he'd
usually just say, 'Hi Momma,' and go upstairs and eat in their little
den in front of the television, and we'd eat downstairs.  Charlotte
would always buy four lamb chops and give one to me, one to Luke, and
two to John.  She'd eat something else.

"Usually, she'd ask me over to dinner when he was out of town.  She
really was my security blanket during college, but I tried not to
intrude.

I didn't know any specifics in those days, but I knew that if I did
intrude, Charlotte would pay a hefty price as far as his taking on an
attitude.

"I was so innocent in those days, so inexperienced, so uncomfortable
with men that I didn't realize how strange all this was until I got out
of college.  I've often thought how lucky I was that I didn't fall in
love with someone while I was in college, because I probably would have
ended up in a similar situation; Charlotte and I are so similar."

Charlotte recalls that John just didn't allow many people into their
lives.  Perhaps he wanted to be the sole influence on his wife.  If he
permitted any of Charlotte's friends in their home, he could make them
feel so uncomfortable they'd leave.  Nancy Long says she preferred to
visit her old school chum in his absence, sometimes willing to drive
from New Haven and back in a day to avoid John.

Even if he didn't somehow make their guests uncomfortable with his
kidding, sardonic cracks, or vulgarities that shocked Charlotte's
Catholic girlfriends, he'd often make them feel unwelcome by falling
asleep on the couch as they talked.  People generally excused it as
evidence that he was tired and working too hard.

"It was just something people knew about John," remembers Charlotte.

"A few days before Luke was born we had gone to dinner at another
associate's house and John had fallen asleep there.  I had to stay and
talk with these people I barely knew until he woke up.  I guess that
really was a sign of being self-centered."

He also seemed to expect people to wait for him.  Once, when John and
Charlotte visited her parents for Thanksgiving, Helen says that he
refused to come to the table when she announced dinner was ready
because he was still watching a football game, splayed out on the floor
of the O'Donnells' den.  Helen remembers that she managed to hold the
meal until the game was over.

"Charlotte and I were only nine-to-five friends," remembers Joy Ricci,
a Pelham neighbor who was the first and the closest friend Charlotte
remembers making after she married.  "My son would play with Luke all
day, and she and I went to the zoo and shopping together regularly, but
at five o'clock Charlotte disappeared into the house to prepare for
John's homecoming.  She seemed very pressured by him.  The house was
always perfect.

"It didn't hurt my feelings that she didn't ever suggest our doing
something with our husbands, because I enjoyed her so much.  She's the
type of person you like very easily.  The day after I moved in,
Charlotte appeared on my doorstep with this beautiful little boy and
this casserole for me.  It was like something out of Family Circle
magazine, but she was for real.  She's a very gentle, sweet woman, with
a great sense of humor, even though she was always surprised when I
laughed at her jokes.

She was very generous with her time.  She would make special events
like Halloween so much fun, by making costumes for the kids.

"She made excuses for John all the time, saying he worked very late.

I knew he was on the fast track and that we weren't really going to be
a help to him [professionally or socially], therefore we were
expendable.

Charlotte never said that to me, but I could tell that was his attitude
because of the people she told me John wanted her to become friendly
with.  He almost insisted that she join the [Pelham women's] club.

"I rarely saw him or talked to him.  Maybe we waved when he was raking
leaves.  One evening-this was highly unusual-she and John arrived at
our door after dinner.  Maybe they had been out for a walk-it was early
evening.  One of my children had spilled something on the kitchen
floor, so I had the mop out.  And John says to Charlotte, 'See, she has
a mop in her hand,' almost chastising her."

Charlotte hypothesizes that John didn't like Joy Ricci's possible
effect on her.  Ricci was one of a rare breed in those days, a career
woman, who still free-lanced while she cared for her children.  She
introduced Charlotte to shopping at discount stores and told her that
she should be able to buy things for herself without asking John's
approval, that she should purchase things occasionally to make herself
feel good, not solely to make John look good at a special event.  Once
Ricci bought Charlotte a little Christmas angel, presenting it to her
and saying, 'I know that you never buy anything for yourself, so I
wanted to give this to you."

Her comment surprised Charlotte.

Ricci also insisted on giving her money for baby-sitting with her
children, because she often asked Charlotte to watch them when she left
the house on business.  Besides easing her own conscience about
imposing on Charlotte so frequently, Ricci thought her friend should
have a little pocket money for herself, since she rarely had more than
a few dollars in her wallet.  When Charlotte told John about the
arrangement, she says he wasn't pleased.

"It's funny," Charlotte says now, "John didn't mind my watching her
kids.  He just didn't like my taking money for it."

Because she, too, was a product of stringent, all-girls Catholic
training, Ricci knew some of the reasons Charlotte seemed to passively
accept so many things.  "Charlotte was very religious.  I didn't buy
into the philosophy as much as she did, the attitude that if someone
smacks you, you turn the other cheek.  And if something is going wrong,
you offer it up as a penance for your sins.  It's your lot in life.

You don't do anything to stop it, you just survive it, believing firmly
this too shall pass.

Like many of Charlotte's friends who now speak about her past with
regret, Ricci worries that she wasn't enough of a support.  "I think
Charlotte was as frank with me as she was with anybody, and that wasn't
very frank.  Occasionally she would hint at something about John and
then back off it immediately.  Women just didn't talk about those kinds
of things in those days.  We were the last of a generation that stood
by its men no matter what."

CHAPTER NINE

In late 1971, even though they were much younger than
most of their neighbors, John and Charlotte were well on their way to
becoming established in the affluent community.  They had joined the
Pelham Country Club, and Charlotte was being wooed by the wives of
Cadwalader partners to join the Manor Club, the local women's group,
which held its meetings and luncheons in an old Tudor mansion nearby.

John and Charlotte had already picked out their dream home, a large,
stone Colonial on the Esplanade, near the home of one of the firm's
partners.

"To get into the country club we needed about three sponsors.  But it
wasn't that big of a deal," says Charlotte.  "It was pretty small.

It had swimming, golf, and tennis, and a small clubhouse.  We were only
Junior members because of our age, but it was still going to be
expensive for us.  The annual dues were $350, plus $50 for the wife.

Swimming fees were $100, and golf was $575 for the year.  We also had a
food minimum of $300 per annum.

"I hated the idea of joining that women's club.  The name alone was so
stuffy.  A lot of the members were into garden shows and that type of
thing, which was totally foreign to me.  Three partners of the firm
lived near us, and their wives took me to a meeting.  They were all
quite well-to-do.  I just couldn't have kept up with them.  But John
was already acting like we had money that we didn't.  He was
impatient.

He wanted everything right then.

"I was miserable about that women's club, but it didn't matter.  I was
on my way to becoming a member."

Charlotte was saved from joining, however, when, in November, John
unexpectedly announced that he had accepted a position to be executive
vice-president with Gulf Life Holding Company.  They were moving to
Dallas.

"The whole thing was very sudden," remembers Joy Ricci.  "One day
Charlotte told me that they were moving to Texas and the next day,
almost, they were gone.

"It did come as a complete surprise," says Charlotte.  "I was more
stunned than upset.  I wouldn't have been that surprised if he had told
me we were going to his home state for him to run for political
office.

He was still talking about doing that.  But I had never heard him
complain that he didn't like Cadwalader, so leaving the firm for
business completely surprised me."

John, in fact, was doing well with his firm.  He seemed to be one of
the favorites.  Going to the annual meetings of regional bar
associations, for instance, was a perk within Cadwalader, Wickersham,
and Taft, recalls Charlotte.  He was sent in both 1970 and 1971 and she
accompanied him.

And in 1971 in New Hampshire, when his firm was assigned the task of
picking up legal dignitaries at the airport for the meeting, John had
the distinct honor of driving Warren Burger, then the chief justice of
the United States Supreme Court.  That was very exciting, she says.

"He had friends in the firm," says Charlotte.  "Once a month he'd go to
play poker with three other lawyers, and we wives would come along.

I was very happy with these women.  I really thought that this was
where we were going to be forever.

"Looking back on it, I think leaving New York was one of the biggest
mistakes we ever made, because John did seem satisfied and happy with
his firm.  He was never happy in his work again, from what he told me,
until he joined the SEC, ten years later.

"But then it seemed to be a great idea.  John had two more years before
he made partner, and the job in Dallas promised so much more money
immediately that he thought it was just too good an opportunity to
miss.

"He just told me that we were going, he didn't ask.  But I didn't
mind.

It was a challenge, and we were young and he seemed so excited.

At that point I always thought that more money would make John happy.

It's what he said he wanted and it was a definite sign of success.

So I was

willing to follow him anywhere.  We were going to Dallas to be rich.

He was making $22,500 annually plus a $3,000 bonus at Cadwalader.

Gulf offered him a $50,000 salary."

John relocated to Dallas almost immediately, leaving Charlotte to pack
up their possessions.  Charlotte visited Texas to look for a new
home.

They narrowed their choices to two large houses before she returned to
New York.  The difference in price was about $20,000.  Charlotte
preferred the smaller, less expensive one.  It had only one less
bedroom, and she liked its layout.  It seemed much airier to her than
the other one.

The smaller size also made more sense to her.  Following Luke's birth,
Charlotte was having trouble conceiving again, and after a series of
tests the doctors informed them that Luke, then almost three years old,
was certain to be their only child.

John had seemed to agree with her reasoning, and Charlotte returned to
New York making mental notes as to where she'd place the furniture in
her new home.  But after she left, John purchased the larger house.

The house John chose was a prototypical, spruced-up, and suburbanized
Texan ranch.  Its nine rooms sprawled out along one floor, wide and
flat like the landscape.  An ostentatious half-circle driveway cut to
the front entrance from the wide street, and the spacious yard was bare
and sun-bleached.  It and the surrounding houses seemed to be
purposeful islands.  Charlotte would rarely see any of her neighbors,
since the garages were in the back of the homes and the owners were
busy, private people.

It was a big, flashy home, perfect for an attorney who had just struck
oil, and seemed to suit him better than the understated Tudor homes of
the East Coast.  John paid $83,900 for the house, a quantum leap in the
value of their residence almost equal to his new salary.  The mortgage
was $66,700 and their monthly payments $716.

''This house was in a little bit better neighborhood than the other,"
remembers Charlotte.  "But it was way too formal for me.  It had lots
of ornate, gold-flocked wallpaper, vaulted ceilings, a marble
fireplace, a master bedroom which opened out into the covered patio and
had two dressing rooms, and a huge sunken tub in the bathroom.  I'm
just not the sunken-tub type.

"Luke immediately got lost in it when we moved in.  I remember him
standing in the hallway, crying in his toddlerese, 'Mommie, where you
are?"  We didn't even have enough furniture for it.  All we had to put
in the living room were two chairs and a table.  But John seemed to
like it.

He liked big things."

Again, as in New York, John wanted the house to be showcase-perfect
immediately, recalls Charlotte.  "We spent $1,337 for draperies all
lined with white to look the same from the street," she says.  "He
always had to have curtains up in every room right away.  We also spent
$1,500 on a sprinkler system in the yard, $750 for a fence, $90 on a
dog run for Cassius, and $3,542 for shrubbery, grass, and trees.  It
pinched us.  It made it harder for us to pay for Luke's Montessori
school, which I thought was the priority.  John and I had always agreed
that a good education was very important.  In fact, he was the one who
introduced me to the Montessori method of schooling.  But private
schools cost money.

"It would have been a lot easier on us buying that other house.  We
wouldn't have had so many expenses furnishing it and surely a $20,000
or so difference in the mortgage would have given us more money each
month.  But we stretched as far as we could.  This neighborhood also
had a public pool, but we were already looking at Dallas's most
prestigious country club.

"But I always knew that I could live with what John was comfortable
with, not vice versa.

Charlotte recalls that John took to Dallas, a prairie town just
starting to flex and grow into one of the Southwest's major commercial
centers.

It was a town whose people happily crowed about its achievements and
new stature.  He worked in the LTV Tower, one of the city's tallest
buildings.

John also quickly adopted Texans' zest for healthy, brawny bodies and
became an avid runner, telling Charlotte that he wanted to improve his
time each day.  Gulf Life paid for his membership at the Cooper Clinic,
a prestigious gym where aerobic exercises were invented.

John would come home at 4:30 or 5 PM each day and then head over to the
clinic's track.

Perhaps because he was so physical and agile himself, John liked
Charlotte to be fit also, even though athletics were never her forte.

She hurt her knee playing tennis a month after they moved to Dallas.

Even though she was on crutches for several weeks, John insisted that
she go out and pick up after the dog each day.

And when John roughhoused with Luke, he could inadvertently hurt the
child.  That spring he was swinging Luke around and dropped him.

The fall knocked out a front tooth.  Accidents like that happen during
childhood, especially with a little boy as game and rambunctious as
Luke.

But John's way of playing with his son often frightened Charlotte.

The summer before, when they had vacationed with Charlotte's family at
Ocean City, the O'Donnells say they had had to bite back criticizing
their son-in-law for the way he would pick up Luke.  A home film
captures John, so tall, leaning down to lift Luke from a hole he had
dug in the sand.  John yanks the two-and-a-half-year-old up by his
hands and, quick, hauls Luke way up over his head before plopping him
back on the sand.

"Babies aren't as fragile as some people think," says Charlotte's
father, the doctor, remembering John and Luke on the beach.  "But the
fact remains that one of the things that helps a baby grow up calm is
the way he's held.  They can lose their feeling of security when
they're thrown around."

That scene in Charlotte's home movie is followed by another, very
different, picture of John-sitting on the beach, at the water's edge,
curled protectively around his son, holding him loosely and gently,
pointing out something far down the coastline.  Luke laughs and smiles
at his father during this filmed play.

And yet, despite his obvious ability to be tender, John demanded that
his son be tough, say Charlotte and her family.

"Once, when Luke was about eighteen months old, Charlotte and John
visited us," remembers Dr. O'Donnell.  "This little fellow was out in
back of our house, standing on a brick wall about eighteen inches high,
jumping off.  I was sitting on the stoop watching him.  He would jump
off and laugh and climb back up and jump off again.  One time he fell
and banged his head on the concrete.  I reached down to get him and his
father pushed my hand away and said, 'Let him learn to do it right or
take the consequences.  He thought letting a child bump its head,
that's how you toughen them up.  That's a macho man thing."

Charlotte hated.  when John held her back from rushing to one of their
children when they were hurt.  But she did what he wanted.

She remembers that John seemed committed to a tough-man style of
parenting.  None of his sons were going to be sissies.  America still
frowned on little boys who cried.

In fact, Charlotte doesn't recall really disapproving of anything John
did with Luke until that year in Dallas.  "Really, John was a good
father until Luke starting thinking for himself and challenging John.

The first time I really remember not agreeing with something he did was
when Luke said a bad word for the first time.  John used the words
'shit' and 'damn' all the time.  John didn't 'use the bathroom,' for
instance, he 'took a shit."  If he thought something someone had said
was stupid, he called them 'a dumb shit."  I don't know how many times
he called me that.

It's the way he talked.

"Luke said either that or 'damn,' and John made him repeat it and then
slapped him.  I agreed with John that I didn't want Luke using it, but
I didn't agree with the way he handled it.  I can remember seeing that
Luke didn't want to repeat it.  John lulled him into a false sense of
security by saying something like 'I'm not going to do anything, I just
want to make sure I heard you."  And as soon as Luke said it, John
slapped him."

Looking back on it, Charlotte says she is grateful that her firstborn,
the child John spent much more time with, was as plucky as Luke was,
instead of quiet and shy.  At this age, Luke seemed able to handle his
father's demands.  And his father was pleased with him because he was
so naturally coordinated.  Luke could ride a tricycle before he was
three.

He also seemed to have inherited his mother's capacity for being a good
sport.

When Helen and the doctor visited their daughter and grandson in Dallas
during the fall of 1972, Helen remembers how Luke could stubbornly
stand up to his father.  "John wanted to see some sports event on
television.  Luke was trying to watch cartoons and kept turning the
channel.  John picked up Luke bodily and threw him across the room into
the couch.  Luke got right back up and turned the set to the
cartoons."

Charlotte and Helen laugh at the memory.  They can't remember if John
laughed or not.

John wasn't laughing much during that visit anyway, says Charlotte.

Something had sent him into a silence that stretched on for several
weeks, even during the O'Donnells' visit.  It was the first time
Charlotte's parents had witnessed John's simply not speaking to their
daughter.

"I would try to joke with them about it," remembers Charlotte.  "If
he'd throw a command at me, I'd say, 'See, Mommie, it's getting
better."

At that point, I didn't realize that not talking for several days, even
weeks, was really weird.  It did embarrass me, though, because it was
so strange and awkward for them.  We took them out to dinner, and John
talked to them, but wouldn't talk to me at all."

"There was such an air of fear in that house," remembers Charlotte's
mother.  "I stayed for three days.  They were the longest three
days."

But this time Helen didn't advise her daughter to leave John.

Despite her doctor's prognosis, Charlotte was pregnant.  Helen tried to
reassure her by telling her that John probably just didn't like the
looks of a pregnant woman's body, even though he wanted the child.

Things would get better when the baby came, she said, as she hugged
Charlotte good-bye at the airport.

And Charlotte believed it.  John really wanted a second child.  In
fact, he had initiated the paperwork for adopting a baby in March.  But
Charlotte had gotten pregnant right around the time they had filed
their application with a Dallas adoption agency.  Just as he had been
certain Luke was going to be a boy, John was positive their second was
going to be a girl.  They were going to name her Maggie Hagan.  It was
one of the few times John was wrong, jokes Charlotte.  Mark was born
November 18, 1972.

The year had passed quickly and for the most part uneventfully.

Charlotte basically spent her time shuttling Luke back and forth to
school, often driving John to work as well, and taking care of the
house.

She and John were starting to put down some tentative roots.  They
attended the parish of Saint Rita, the saint of lost causes, and John
was even starting to serve as a lector.

Charlotte remembers only one long silence, when her parents were
there.

She was even learning to stick up a little for herself.

For her twenty-ninth birthday, she pierced her ears, even though John
had told her not to.  The only reason she had courage to do it, she
says, was because her aunt had sent her the money for it.  The day she
had her ears pierced, Charlotte tried to pull her hair down over her
ears so that her husband wouldn't notice, but Luke chirped out the
news.  John was annoyed, says Charlotte, but she survived.

During the silence that she remembers, Charlotte tried a new way of
communicating with John.  When he ignored her or turned vindictive,
Charlotte had trouble remaining calm.  She knew she made it worse by
pleading with him, crying, or yelling.  So she wrote him a letter on a
legal pad, rationally explaining that she thought he was being
unreasonable.  It had seemed to help.  A few days later John started to
talk more freely with her.

But she was also learning to fight back verbally during their
arguments, something she didn't do much in New York, and which she says
she still isn't proud of.  Slowly, she was beginning to assimilate some
of the language she heard John using regularly into her own
vernacular.

And during February, when tension between them was high-they had been
in Dallas only two months, his parents had been visiting for Luke's
birthday, she had just hurt her knee, money was tight-John said
something critical to her, recalls Charlotte, and she threw a package
of sheets at him.

"Of course, I missed him," she says.  "And this was my luck; he moved
and it knocked over a vase, which broke.  I'm pretty sure he gave me a
slap then, but I knew I deserved it for having thrown something at
him.

"I remember scouring the papers, trying to find someplace to fix that
vase.  I went to a place in downtown Dallas and had a car accident.

I ran into someone.  There was hardly any damage, but the worst thing
was having to call John and tell him.  I was in tears, and said, 'Well,
you better get the divorce papers out right now."

"But this was one of the times John came through for me.  He handled
it.  And he handled the insurance claim.  I wouldn't have known how to
handle it myself in those days.  The only thing I didn't tell him was
where I had been going when I had the accident."

Although John enjoyed his new salary and privileges with Gulf
Life-whenever he traveled for the company, for instance, he flew by
private jet-his and Charlotte's tenure in Dallas lasted only a year.

She remembers that John was uncomfortable with his employer.  When he
was approached at the end of 1972 by Arnold & Porter, a well-known law
firm in Washington, D.C he jumped at the opportunity.

Three weeks after Mark was born, Charlotte was hosting a formal dinner
for Dennis Lyons, the partner from Arnold & Porter who wanted to hire
John.

"It was a terrible experience," she recalls about that evening.  "I had
had to go to Neiman-Marcus and buy myself a full-length skirt and try
to stuff myself into it, right after having a baby.  John told me to
fix a hot seafood salad with lobster.  As I was handing out hors
d'oeuvres that had some kind of seafood in them, Dennis declined.  I
realized then that he didn't eat seafood.  I did manage to make a
joke.

'Would you like a hot dog?"  I asked.  After all that preparation, I
had to send John out for a steak.

"I was exhausted.  I was having a slow recovery from the birth.  I had
to leave in the middle of the meal to nurse the baby.  He was only
about twenty days old and he was just beginning to develop an awful
cough.

That night, after Dennis and his son left, the cough developed into
some awful virus.

"John never accepted any weakness from me.  I had had to ask my sister
Martha to come down after the baby was born because I knew that John
wouldn't be able to handle cooking a meal for Luke or for me when I was
laid up that first week back from the hospital.

"I didn't think to ask John why he didn't just take Dennis out for
dinner.  Or just have him by for dessert and coffee.  Instead, I was
good old Char.  I went into it with great vigor.  I always did.  I
guess that's part of what kept me in all this trouble."

The move to Washington, especially coming so quickly on the heels of
the transfer to Dallas, did surprise Charlotte a little.  She can't
recall that John ever told her that he had started inquiring about
other jobs.

"I think that was part of his compartmentalization," she says.  "He
prided himself on keeping his work and his home separate.  I think he
might have thought it was a weakness to complain about work.  That your
family shouldn't know about the hardships at your job.  He'd come home
in a bad mood, but he wouldn't say why.  I just learned that I
shouldn't interfere."

Charlotte simply threw herself into preparing for the move back East.

Again, John moved ahead of his family, right after Christmas, leaving
Charlotte to pack and, this time, to sell the house.  She had trouble
finding buyers, partly because the house was just beyond the line for
Dallas's best public school district.  It was hard work trying to
juggle that and the care of a newborn and a four-year-old.  Finally, in
March 1973, she and the children moved on to Washington, even though
the house wouldn't sell until July.

Charlotte was excited about moving back to Washington.

She liked the city and would be close to her family again.  She had
been lonely and uncomfortable with the fast-living, sun-worshipping,
money-hungry circles of Dallas.  And Arnold & Porter was a law firm of
renown.

Surely John would be challenged and happy working there, she thought.

Little did Charlotte know that the pressures of the nation's capital
would only make the troubles between her and John worse.

PART THREE BUILDING A WASHINGTON FAMILY You who are wives, be
submissive to your husbands, this is your duty in the Lord.  Husbands,
love your wives.  Avoid any bitterness towards them.  You children,
obey your parents in everything as the acceptable way in the Lord.

And fathers, do not nag your children, lest they lose heart.

Letter of Paul to the Colossians, 3:12-21, read each year in the
Catholic Church's celebration of the Holy Family

CHAPTER TEN

In 1974,
the reporter Sally Quinn, then the queen of the Washington Post's
"Style" section, wrote of the city: "Prominence in Washington has
little to do with traditional social credentials or wealth.  . .

. Washington is about the only city in the world where the word
'nouveau' is laudatory, where the least known people often have the
greatest chance of making it."

Quinn wrote this in a profile savaging one of the city's most
well-known social climbers.  She used the story as a springboard to
lampoon the how-tos of Washington's social circuit.  But her analysis
was apt beyond the city's parties.

Washington is unique in that it is a functioning microcosm of
democracy, a place where a nobody who's smart and works hard, really
hard, can actually make it big.  The city is filled with ambitious
people from someplace else, with children of manure-poor farmers, who
made it to Ivy League colleges on the power of their brains, and have
everyday hopes their parents never even dreamed.  It's a haven for
intellectual Jay Gatsbys.

That's because Washington is the only city purposefully built in modern
times to be a country's political capital.  There's no manufacturing to
speak of, so there are no factory lords and the imposed social strata
that come with them.  National elections keep the population turning
over, so longevity doesn't count for much either.  It's not a trading
center, an artistic center, or a commercial center.  Politics was the
reason for its genesis, and politics is the linchpin of the entire
whirligig of Washington.

But only the linchpin.

Today, only a fifth of the civilian workers in the District are
employed by the federal government.  The majority of Washingtonians
work in industries that are natural leeches-in both definitions of the
word, parasite and physician, policy-makers.  People are needed to
interpret the laws and regulations being made, to write about them, to
pressure and sway those making them, and to explain the complicated
issues tangled up in those laws.  Interest groups, policy analysts,
economists, lobbyists, think tanks, foreign experts all have homes
here, as well as politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats.

The major currencies in the nation's capital, then, are knowledge and
influence.  Witness the fact that one of the most commonly asked
questions during cocktail parties in the city is not "Where are you
from?"  or "Who is your family?"  but "What do you do?"

It is a city that is heaven-tailored for someone like John Fedders, a
corner from nowhere in particular, a man who had pulled himself up by
his law books.  Of course, it is seen as the promised land also by
thousands of others just as smart, just as aggressive, just as
ambitious as John.

Washington has the highest proportion of college-educated residents and
of lawyers per person of any United States city.  The latter fact
prompted the comedian Mark Russell to once quip that "Washington
without lawyers would be like Rome without priests."

So, Washington is an open-doored coliseum full of promises for the
intellectually stout, but a highly competitive one, pitting equals
against each other.  Just to stay in the game requires the stamina of a
gladiator, since above-average job performance is standard.  The
strategic advantage needed to win laurels often comes only with
befriending the right people.

That makes for a lot of insecurity and stress, especially since some
people try to get ahead by fawning to superiors and backbiting peers in
a calculated, Darwinian campaign.

Arnold & Porter, the law firm employing John, was a formidable arena.

It is one the city's most venerated firms, because of its age, size,
Fortune 500 clientele, and the fact that it is indigenous to the city,
not merely a branch office of a New York firm.  Arnold & Porter was
started after World War II by some members of President Roosevelt's
administration.  FDR's New Deal programs and the restrictions
implemented by Congress and the White House during the war had spawned
a whole new body of federal regulatory law, and an unprecedented need
for Washington-based lawyers who understood how to challenge it.

As high-ranking veterans of FDR's programs and of government service,
the firm's founders were especially well-qualified to do just that.

They included: Thurmond Arnold, one-time chief of the Justice
Department's antitrust division and then a judge on the US Court of
Appeals; GAbe Fortas, under secretary of Interior; and Paul A. Porter,
chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and then director of
the war-time Office of Price Administration.  The firm grew quickly.

Its attorneys defended civil liberties by representing individuals
fingered by Joe McCarthy's anti-Communism campaign, and also developed
an extremely lucrative practice defending the needs and interests of
big business.  By the time John joined the firm, at the end of 1972,
Arnold & Porter had quite a reputation for successfully representing
corporate clients in trouble with federal agencies and commissions, for
assigning a lot of employees to a single case, for the long hours its
150-plus lawyers put in, for hiring only the best young attorneys, and
for the difficulty the associates had in making partner over their
well-qualified colleagues.

Charlotte used to joke that the phrase "the prestigious law firm of"
was actually part of Arnold & Porter's name, since it almost always was
referred to as such when mentioned in the press.

Charlotte noticed changes in John's work habits immediately.  She
remembers that before, in Dallas, John had left for work around 8

AM.

In Washington, he set his alarm for 5:55 AM and usually left by 7,
often not returning until 7:30 PM.  He started staying at the office
several nights a week and on weekends, and also brought work home.

Just as John's work habits grew more regimented, his morning routine
became more regulated, his demands of Charlotte more dictatorial.

To Charlotte, it seemed John feared that anything being out of place,
any deviation in practices at home would distract him from work and
hamper his concentration.

"I noticed the change in his work habits instantly.  He spent less time
at home, less time with the kids.  It was work, work, work.

Everything got worse between us here because of pressure on him and his
need to have a non-problematical and orderly family.

'There's just something about Washington that's even more cut-throat
than New York City.  For John anyway.  Maybe it's because he didn't
stand out as much here.  I think he had always been the star everyplace
else.  Here, he felt like one of the pack.  Arnold & Porter is filled
with very smart lawyers.  I think he felt that he'd have to do
something really outstanding to be noticed the way he wanted to be
noticed.

"I think all the rules at home had to do with completely controlling
his environment so he could focus on his work.  Since some of our sons
have learning disabilities and they are hereditary, maybe he had some-a
lot of brilliant people do-and his obsessive neatness and order were
unconscious ways of compensating for them."

Perhaps John was subconsciously distancing himself from his family and
the disconcerting demands they could make.  In her best-selling book
"Women Who Love Too Much, the family therapist Robin norwood suggests
that some men who felt as children that their emotional needs weren't
always met grow up to concentrate on their jobs or hobbies, whereas
women of similar circumstances become obsessed with relationships.

Such men, according to Norwood, often become "workaholics" as a way of
avoiding the emotional intimacy they fear.  Norwood also states that
rigidity about housework "can preclude contact and intimacy, because
the emphasis is not on relating, but on following the rules."

Charlotte remembers that she had a lot of rules to follow, such as the
ceremonial feeding and dressing of John each morning.  The routine was
as meticulous and ritualistic as a squire would have had when arming
his knight for a joust.

"I don't know how I started helping him dress," she says.  "It just
happened one morning when he was in a hurry and it stuck.  The routine
never deviated.  He got out of bed.  Took off his pajamas.  Brushed his
teeth and shaved.  Then he would stand in the shower for two minutes or
so, cut off the water, and soap up completely.  Then he'd turn on the
water and stand for a long time.  I knew I had enough time, when I
heard the water come back on, to get up, put out a fresh towel-it had
to be a fresh towel every morning-go downstairs, get the paper, and
start his breakfast.  After he dried himself, he took the towel and
wiped the counter, the floor, and left it in the sink.

"Breakfast was either eggs, cereal, or frozen waffles, which I would
butter, cut up, and put syrup on for him.  I didn't cut up his eggs,
because he liked to eat the white first, then the yellow in one
chunk.

"I laid out his clothes, including all his underwear.  He told me what
suit he wanted to wear.  I would hook up his suspenders, tie his bow
tie for him if he was wearing one, wash his glasses and hand them to
him, put his wallet in his coat.  Then I'd either help him put his coat
on or, in the summer, carry it on a hanger down to the car for him.

"I kept doing all this for him even when he was in one of his moods and
not speaking to me, because I didn't want to rock the boat.  If we had
an argument and I held back from these routines, or was caught up with
something with one of the kids, he told me that I was being really
selfish.

Sometimes I'd have to stop nursing the baby to help dress him.

Sometimes I'd forgo taking a shower for a day or two because there just
wasn't time for me.

Eventually, as more babies came, I was too overwhelmed to wash and iron
all his shirts for him.  But I never told him that.  I found a laundry
that used pull-off tags instead of stamping the shirts and would do
them in one day.  I would bring them home, rip off the little tags, and
hang them on hangers in the basement and bring them up a few at a
time."

There were household Systems as well.

"When the mail came, I put it all on his desk.  Even if it was a
magazine for me, I'd put it on his desk first, and he would distribute
it later.  If a letter came to me, I'd open it and read it, but then
I'd put it on his desk.  He often rubbed the stamps I had put on
letters to make sure they were really stuck on.  Almost every envelope
that left here had to have a piece of tape on the flap.  Once a week,
all the magazines were thrown out The only ones I remember his saving
were Fortune, Architectural Digest, and any of his law reviews.  If I
wanted to save something, I had to put a note on it.

There was no privacy or freedom of choice.  The radio was always on
WTOP, an all-news station.  We really only used the stereo when he
wanted it on, but sometimes he'd let me choose the records.  When
things were good with us, I'd sit in John's study with him at night and
we'd read.

He'd get up and turn the light off when he thought it was time to go to
bed.  I finally learned to say, 'I'm in the middle of a sentence, could
you leave the lights on, please."  But I'd always follow him to bed
within a few minutes.

When he was coming home, he would call me as he was leaving work so I
would know to start dinner.  We always had to have meat, no macaroni
and cheese, even when we were short on cash.  Once I gave him a
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch and he was annoyed.

Then I'd make sure the house was straight.  If I washed curtains, I
made sure to get them down and back up in one day.  All the beds had to
be made.

"I'd have the kids dressed.  He didn't like it if the baby was just in
diapers.  The TV was off.  He'd drive up, honk the horn.  I'd open the
garage door automatically from inside.  All the kids were spit and
polished, at least in demeanor.  It was almost like The Sound of Music,
lining up for inspection kind of thing.

I don't remember that day-to-day, knot-in-your-gut,
how-is-hegoing-to-be-tonight fear until we got here.  It was a terrible
way to live."

Much of that tension revolved around Charlotte's fear that she wouldn't
have the house neat enough for John.  It was his castle, a
non-refutable talisman of his success, and he wanted it orderly and
perfect, all the time, she says.

Right after accepting Arnold & Porter's offer, John had come to
Washington to look for a house.  He went to Potomac, a nearby Maryland
suburb, which once had been the haunt of landed horse breeders and fox
hunters.  Because of Washington's population boom and the affluence of
the times, farms were being subdivided for the upwardly mobile, with
plantation-sized mansions sitting on half-acre lots.  Many of the
houses had their own swimming pools, tennis courts, and telltale
burglar alarms.

Most of the residents belonged to a country club.  With such opulent
development, Potomac was fast becoming the place for the city's newly
rich.  In fact, today Potomac has the metropolitan area's highest
concentration of households earning an average of $100,000 a year.

It seemed to be John Fedders's kind of place.

Of course, they couldn't quite afford one of Potomac's more lavish
spreads.  But John did find a suitably large, impressive, cream brick
Colonial in an established neighborhood, McAuley Park, which had been
carved out of lands once belonging to the Sisters of Mercy.  The house
was the last one built on Carmelita Drive, a street named for one of
the order's important members, and was across from a monastic
retreat.

The street was on the back perimeter of the development, facing woods
and the monastery's grounds, isolated and quiet.  At Christmas,
Charlotte would see the star atop the Spanish Mission-style chapel,
gleaming somberly through the bare trees.

To reach McAuley Park from the city took about thirty-five minutes.

John drove down the long, winding River Road, past the austere gates of
the Congressional Country Club, one of the city's premier
establishments and the past site of the Kemper and PGA golf
tournaments, and turned onto Bradley Boulevard, a two-lane road left
over from Potomac's rural era.  After turning left at Our Lady of Mercy
Church, he was in his neighborhood, an area studded with Monopoly
hotel-like houses, big brick boxes obviously completed at one go.

There were no unsightly additions to suggest the owner might not have
been rich enough to afford a sun room when he purchased the house.

Many of the homes, including John and Charlotte's, sat atop knolls,
scaled-down, suburbanized chateaus.

Dollhouse-size mailboxes lined the curbs.  The lawns were manicured.

No unruly wildflowers or rose bushes, no impatiens growing in colored
waves, spilling onto the flagstone walkways.  Instead, there was a
predominance of low-growing, spiky flowers, marigolds or red salvias,
marching in straight, orderly flowerbeds.  The only real touch of
flamboyance was an occasional purple crape myrtle bush.  The major
landscaping device of the neighborhood was thick evergreen shrubs,
clipped flat into sharp cubes and geometric shapes, creating dozens of
mini-Versailleses.

During the summer the smell of freshly mown grass constantly hung sweet
in the air.

It was a formal, well-groomed subdivision, one without any hints of
idleness or bohemian whim.  A striking metaphor for its polished
residents, who were savvy enough to be chameleons in a conservative
town.  A buttoned-down, proper, "I'vealways-wanted" kind of
neighborhood for the upper-middle class who still dreamed of bigger
things.

Charlotte didn't see the house until after the signing of the closing
papers.  She gasped when she did.  What was John thinking of?  The
house was even bigger than the one in Dallas, with five large bedrooms,
including a master bedroom with a huge dressing room off it, a living
room, family room, kitchen with a breakfast nook, and dining room, plus
a full basement.  She was still convinced that their second son was a
gift from God, that she wouldn't be having any more children.  What
would they do with the space?

"I was stunned by the size," she says.  "I don't know why he wanted
something so big.  It was larger than most of the homes of partners at
Arnold & Porter, who were several years ahead of John.  But while it
made me self-conscious, I think John was really pleased that he had a
bigger home."

But at the time, Charlotte said nothing.  They did seem to have enough
money for it.  The house cost $116,500, and, even though they wouldn't
sell the Dallas house for several more months, John had received a
lucrative contract settlement-about $75,000 total-from Gulf Life when
he left.  His salary at Arnold & Porter was even better than what he
had received in Dallas.  They could easily handle the $70,000 mortgage,
as long as they were careful about their other expenses.

But Charlotte says she and John quickly spent more than $20,000 on
decorating the house.  When Charlotte arrived in March, John told her
that he wanted the house furnished quickly.  He just never felt settled
until everything was in its place, remembers Charlotte.  She was to
contact the decorator who had done the home of the neighborhood's
builder, who lived down the street.  John wanted it as grand as
theirs.

"At first, I thought it would be fun," says Charlotte, "because I had
never 'decorated' a home before.  But we had to do it so fast it was
very intimidating.  By October, eight months later, this house was
pretty much the way it is now.  And it was so expensive.  We had to buy
several pieces for the family room-a couch, a bench, and a chair.  The
rug in the family room cost about $2,000, and that was more then ten
years ago.  It was about two inches thick, an all-wool shag.  I had a
smaller, less expensive one picked out, but John said we had to have
this one.  The curtains in there were beautiful.  During the day you
could see through them and at night you could see trees etched into the
material.

"In the living room, we had to have this gold, hand-cut, custom-dyed
rug.  The couch was re-covered and the back cushions resculpted, and we
refinished a tabletop.  We wallpapered the living room and the
hallway.

The hallway paper just happened to be the same as that in the builder's
dining room.  The dining-room furniture we left alone except for
re-covering the chairs with blue velvet, to match the specially made
curtain rod.  We put wall-to-wall carpeting in all five bedrooms and
the upstairs hall.  And curtains in all the rooms.  In our bedroom, we
had a bedspread made, to match our new curtains."

With the new house and its fancy, new furnishings came more household
rules, including that no one in the family would wear shoes indoors
because it would wear down the carpets.

It was hard teaching a toddler to walk in stockinged feet and to
constantly stop Luke each time he ran into the house to tell him to
take off his shoes.  But Charlotte did it.  She'd even tell her guests
that John didn't wear shoes in the house, subtly hinting for them to
remove theirs as well.  Most complied without a word.

"We knew what John was like," says one Saint Joseph's friend, who had
teased Charlotte about the size of the house the first time she came
by, asking, "Is there a servants' quarter I should use to enter?"

They visited in the kitchen, since Charlotte didn't want to disturb the
living room.

"Things were new and perfect, and they had to stay that way because we
no longer had the money to replace anything," says Charlotte.

"This was a shrine to him, not a home.  Whenever he brought people
here, he wanted it clean enough that he could take them on a tour and
open up everything, including the closets, to show them.  And he did
throw everything open like that, even after we'd been here awhile.

"We weren't allowed to have a fire in the fireplace because he thought
the room would smell of smoke, although every time we had guests, there
was a burning log.  We couldn't open the windows.  He was worried about
dirt from the street blowing in and bugs, even though we had screens.

Every other month or so we had to totally clean out the garage and hose
it down, even during the winter.  He'd cut the kids' toenails only
outside on the patio, so that none of the shavings would get in the
house.  He had the same fetish about the car.  I wasn't allowed to file
a nail, even if I broke it right then, in the car, and I had to keep my
feet on its floormats.

"All the furniture had to be in the same indentations in the carpet.

I was never allowed to move anything from the place the decorator put
it, even though I thought it was a little too formal.  We didn't have
family pictures up downstairs because he preferred paintings and
prints.

"When he came home, he liked to see the vacuum marks in the carpet all
going the same way.  If there were footprints from one of the children,
he was irritated.  Not violent or anything, but annoyed.

And he would tell me that I didn't control them enough."

Nancy Long remembers one of her Saturday visits to Charlotte's Potomac
home.  "I went to visit her with my two children and they ran into the
family room and she called after them, 'Oh, don't do that, I just
vacuumed in there."  She was joking about it, but clearly she was
nervous.

They played instead in the garage.  John came home for lunch and came
roaring into the kitchen, yelling because the boys hadn't put the
garage back in order.  I thought my boys were going to die of fright,
John's so huge."

"Eventually," says Charlotte, "we just stopped using the living room
and the family room because little things out of place would make him
angry.  The dining room was never touched except for special dinners or
entertaining guests.  If he was late getting home and the boys were
asleep, he'd often flip on their lights to check on them.  If their
rooms were a mess, he'd complain to me, so I was reluctant to let them
play there.  So they pretty much played in the basement.  My neighbors
later told me that they always knew when we were away because that was
the only time they'd see lights upstairs during the evening.  We'd set
timers for them to go off, but when we were there, we were never
upstairs.

"I'd let them play only in the backyard, not the front, because John
was so proud and particular about it.  He wanted it perfectly green,
and orderly.  I wasn't allowed to plant any flowers because the
blossoms would die and look ugly.  He ordered his own fertilizers, as
well as hiring Chem-Lawn and another maintenance firm to spray the
bushes.

God, the grass.

Cutting the grass made us all miserable.  He used to write down on his
calendar each time it was cut, and it had to be perfect.  If it wasn't,
we ended up cutting it twice in one day to make him happy.

"He didn't like my putting a swing set up for the kids in the backyard,
so it had to go all the way in the back, where no one would see it.

I would go out and rake up any dribbles of sand from the sandbox before
he came home.

"I know it all sounds crazy.  These weren't direct orders, but we knew
what bothered him.  We did anything to avoid trouble."

Charlotte wasn't yet thirty years old when they moved into their
Potomac showplace in 1973.  John was thirty-one.  They were both much
younger than their neighbors, who tended to have children in junior
high or high school.  McAuley Park residents were mostly diplomats,
ex-congressmen, doctors, and lawyers, and for most it was the second
home they had purchased in Washington.  Charlotte remembers that often
when people came to the door they would hesitantly ask her if her
mother was at home.

Although she could sometimes be bashful about having so much more than
most of her contemporaries, Charlotte could also have moments of
boastfulness about their house.  She was very proud of everything her
husband had accomplished and accumulated so early in his career.  She
had never dreamed that she'd be loved by so outstanding, so handsome a
man, and her wonder at that sustained her even as she watched him grow
more obsessive about their home.  Besides, it was a beautiful house;
John was right about that.

Shortly after all the decoration was completed, Charlotte, prodded by
her mother, invited a dozen of her Notre Dame friends to a luncheon at
Carmelita Drive.  Now she had a home as big as their childhood homes in
Homeland.  John seemed pleased that Charlotte wanted to show off a bit,
especially since her mother wanted to pay for the food and flowers.

Helen offered because, after all, this was partly her triumph as
well.

The Homeland delegation arrived and "oohed" appreciatively.  Yes,
indeedy, their friend Charlotte, funny, gawky Charlotte, had made quite
a catch.  But Charlotte didn't enjoy the afternoon as much as she had
thought she would.  "Revenge is not sweet, if you call that revenge.

It was just real phony, the whole thing.  Yes, we had made it, and I
wanted to show them that.  But I guess I knew in my heart that our
outward image was really a facade, so the event just seemed flat to
me."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

During their first year in Washington, Charlotte
started feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of her new life.  Part of
the trouble she had adjusting to Potomac came from the fact she had
spent several months on her own in Dallas after John had moved to
Washington and had become accustomed to some independence.  Suddenly
she had more rules to deal with, in addition to completing a major
decorating project and caring for a four-year-old and a baby.

John was tense as well, not only with his work but with the fact that
the decorating seemed to be taking so long, says Charlotte.  She
recalls that even a vacation to Disney World turned stressful for
her.

In July, they traveled to Florida with Luke and another couple, old
friends of John's from Marquette University, and their little girls and
baby-sitter.

They stayed in a new townhouse on Lake Buena Vista, at no cost, through
a connection of Gulf Life.  Disney World was only about two years old,
still new and exciting.  But it was hot, and even though the house was
lovely, eight people were a few too many.  Charlotte was also very
upset when one of the little girls ate the Ex-Lax she had bought for
herself and became very sick.

One day late that summer, when Charlotte was talking on the phone to
her sister Mimi, she broke down and sobbed.  She just wasn't feeling
right, she said.  She was so depressed and she should have been
happy.

She had thought moving to Washington would be the tonic for John's
seeming dissatisfaction with her.  But he seemed more rigid, she
said.

Her sister suggested that Charlotte see a psychiatrist she knew of in
Silver Spring, another Maryland suburb of the city.

At first, Charlotte hesitated.  Didn't going to a psychiatrist mean you
really were crazy?  Was John right about her after all?  The one
psychiatrist she had talked to-a man her father had taken her to in
Baltimore for one session after her eardrum was ruptured-had simply
told her that both she and John were immature, reinforcing her belief
that things were her fault.  If only she'd grow up, maybe things would
be right.

What if this man told her the same thing?

But Charlotte was desperate enough to swallow her pride and insecurity
and to go see him.

She nervously drove the twenty minutes around the Capital Beltway to
his office.  It was not a productive experience.  Charlotte sat in a
chair, next to a table with a blindingly bright lamp and a box of
Kleenex.

The doctor seemed to sit miles away, across a large room, hidden in a
net of pungent pipe smoke.

The first hour was taken up entirely by questions about her past: How
old are you?  Tell me about your father, your mother, your sisters.

When did you get married?  How many children do you have?  On and on.

She didn't understand.  She wasn't a biology lab frog in need of
dissecting.

Wasn't he going to tell her anything about what was wrong right now?

Wasn't he going to give her something to hang on to, some advice as to
how to survive the week?

By the next meeting things were better with John, so Charlotte started
cloaking the harshest aspects of her situation, wanting to protect her
husband, not wanting to sound like a crybaby.  She suspended her visits
when she and John took another trip, in mid-September.  This one she
felt was, indeed, recuperative.

They went to Europe for sixteen days with one of John's former
Cadwalader clients.  Their travels included Germany, Poland,
Yugoslavia, Hungary, Switzerland, and Spain, with stops in Frankfurt,
Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Zurich, and Madrid.  The vacation seemed to
ease some of the stress.  Away from work and financial and child-care
burdens, they enjoyed each other's company.  This trip was one of the
rare instances when John and Charlotte traveled without the children
and without visiting family or attending a Marquette basketball game,
she says.

On one of their last nights in Madrid, Charlotte recorded in their
travelogue, "It's really nice to have John alone.  We can really laugh,
joke, and have fun together, alone.  Not bad after seven years!"

Charlotte was very excited as their Pan Am plane left Dulles Airport,
heading for Germany.  She hadn't been overseas or on such a grand tour
since her junior year in college, nine years before.  The flight was
pleasant.

They were lucky enough to have an empty seat next to them on the plane,
and after dinner John fell asleep stretched the length of three seats,
his head in Charlotte's lap.  She sat up the entire flight, content
that she was being a comfort to him, watching the movie Oklahoma Crude
and the sun rise over the Atlantic.

The couple with whom they traveled ran an importing company.

They knew many diplomats and business leaders in the Eastern bloc
countries the four visited.  Charlotte and John were able to tag along
on several dinners with trade ministers and well-placed American
foreign service officers, treats they would not have had if traveling
on their own, treats Charlotte knew she never would have had without
being John's wife.  Her gratitude to and pride in him swelled.

Their shared diary of the trip reflected how widely they could differ
in their abilities to relax and take note of the world around them.

Charlotte's passages were filled with descriptions of sights, even the
prostitutes they saw on the street, the couples they met, the lifestyle
and poor plumbing of the countries, and the foods, especially sweets.

John's notes were mainly tallies of costs, even though Charlotte
recalls that their traveling companions were paying for almost
everything other than John's and her meals and gift purchases.  His
final entry was a precise listing of all their expenditures, including
everything from a ladies'-room fee in Frankfurt, to tips to doormen, to
hot dogs purchased from street vendors, to the final taxi fare home,
from Dulles to Potomac.

Clearing customs in New York had taken a while, and running across
kennedy Airport to catch their connecting flight to Washington
wasexhausting.  They were carrying two large suitcases1 a flight bag,
boxes with porcelains and liquor, and a painting they had purchased in
Warsaw that They were carrying two large suitcases, a flight bag, boxes
with needed extra care in handling because it wasn't completely dry.

But despite the cumbersome load and their hurry, Charlotte remembers
that John didn't want to pay a porter to help them.  He yelled at her
when she couldn't keep up in their dash.  On the plane to Dulles, she
wrote: "It has been a fantastic trip although right now I ache and hurt
so much physically and emotionally and every way.  I wonder why all
trips end in such turmoil.  But the entire sixteen days were a thrill
that will never be equalled."

The trip was a source of wonderful memories and stories for a long
time, including one, however, that Charlotte was a little uncomfortable
with because she felt it was a hyperbole.  One night on an old estate
in Poland they had been served a cold dinner, liberally washed down
with vodka, and finished with hot scrambled eggs.  Charlotte says that
as John told the story, they had slurped down raw eggs.

Many people embellish anecdotes and Charlotte didn't mind the
exaggeration except when John turned to her for confirmation, saying,
"I swear this is the truth, isn't that right, Char?"  She felt like it
was a test, and says that it happened with stories about workmen and
household crises.  But Charlotte says that she corroborated his stories
because that kept him happy.  Besides, she felt it was part of her duty
as a good, supportive wife.  She hated to question him or to make any
kind of mistake that might anger John.

en she did make what she feared might be a mistake, Charlotte would
spend more time telling John why she did something than what she did,
trying to ward off his irritation; going on and on.  She realized,
however, that her nervous babble could be infuriating in itself.

She knew that not knowing when to be quiet could make matters worse.

But she just couldn't stop herself.

Sometimes, when Charlotte defended herself by expansively explaining
the reasoning behind her actions, John would say that she just couldn't
take criticism.  That's what her father had always said to her.  In
fact, John told her that, before their wedding, the doctor had pulled
him aside and forewarned him about her inability to take criticism.

"I remember feeling very betrayed by my father if he had indeed told
John that," says Charlotte.  "But it also convinced me that maybe I was
too stubborn, maybe I couldn't take criticism."

There was a lot worrying her that Charlotte could have told that
psychiatrist in Silver Spring.  But she didn't.  She just couldn't.

She didn't trust him.  He never said anything, just sat there puffing
his pipe, occasionally asking one-sentence questions.

In December, she told him that she wasn't coming back to see him.

She had seen him for only a few sessions anyway.

She didn't need him, she said, because she was pregnant.  She was sure
everything was going to be all right now.  A new baby always made the
marriage better.  She also joyfully stopped believing the doctors'
theories about their inability to conceive.

John and Charlotte's third son, Matthew, was born in July 1974.

John agreed to hire a cleaning lady to come once a week to help
Charlotte with the house.

That year would also be an eventful one as John started image
building.

Charlotte recalls that he announced that they were going to join the
Congressional Country Club, the posh, spacious club he passed on River
Road.  He asked two of his socially prominent clients who were members
to sponsor them.

John also purchased seventy acres of undeveloped land across the
Potomac River in Virginia's Loudoun County, for $83,000.  He said it
would be a good investment for the boys' college fund, but Charlotte
says John also liked the fact that the county was known for its
blue-blooded gentry and that some people would assume the tract was a
lavish horse-breeding estate.

"The land was something that really strapped us, because we paid around
$12,000 a year for it.  It was supposedly for the kids; still, it would
have made so much more sense to have made smaller investments slowly.

He liked the sound of it, though, and kept referring to it as the farm
in Virginia, like it was hunt country or something.  There wasn't any
building on it.  It was just acreage.

Whereas John called the land an investment, membership in Congressional
added status as well as recreational opportunities for the family.

Country clubs are American phenomenons, a democracy's rather
undemocratic stab at a European, landed-gentry lifestyle.  Many on the
East Coast were started as fox-hunting associations.  During its first
years, in fact, Congressional kept extensive stables and forty hounds
for its members.  It and the other clubs like it retain that air of
refined, to-the-manorborn fun.  They are bastions of weekend recreation
and of polite intermingling with social peers, safe from
the'er-do-wells and other undesirables.

Membership means you belong to a her of society that may not have
lineage crawling back for generations, but one that has money, success,
and community prominence.

Washington has more than a dozen country clubs from which John and
Charlotte could have chosen.  About half of those, including
Congressional, had a membership roster that would prove helpful to an
attorney with high aspirations.  Congressional was started in 1924 by
then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and over a dozen US senators
and representatives; hence, the name.  Original members also included a
smattering of sons from some of Maryland's oldest families, such as
E.

Brooke Lee, rich industrialists, and national dignitaries: presidents
Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, and William Taft, plus J. D.

Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, William Carnegie, and William
Scripps, to name a few.

Today, not that many members of Congress belong.  They are on the golf
courses constantly, however, as guests of lobbyists and corporate
executives who can afford the hefty dues, and who befriend them by
playing on their love of the sport.  Congressional isn't Chevy Chase,
the area's oldest, perhaps most blue-blooded, and most exclusive club,
but it was close enough to nicely round out John's curriculum vitae, by
God, its posh grounds a fitting backdrop for entertaining clients or
meeting new ones.

Congressional is entered through a long, straight, tree-lined
driveway.

A driver waits at the stone entrance to park cars.  The clubhouse is a
very large, aristocratic, Mediterranean-style whitewashed villa, with
an ornate, red tile roof.  Housed in the huge labyrinth downstairs is a
coed mixed grill; a men's grill, cloistered behind closed wooden doors;
bowling lanes; plus a small indoor pool.  The halls are lined with
photographs of the club's illustrious founders and of the various
national golf tournaments held there.

Upstairs, on the ground floor, is a large cocktail lounge and an
equally large dining room.  Both are formal and filled with light from
floor-to-ceiling French doors and windows.  The dining room's pervading
flavor is medieval, with chairs with wide, cushioned seats and backs
atop swirled wooden legs.

The main attraction of this floor, however, is the lavish ballroom,
with a two-story-high ceiling and with monastery-like windows cut into
the second floor where people can stand and watch the dancing below.

The wooden floor glistens.  The ceiling's beams are painted in somber
tones and pristine lines, small tapestries hang on the walls,
tremendous chandeliers drip delicately cut glass, and two tall marble
fireplaces stand on either side of the room.  Across from the
ballroom's entrance tall, wide archways, festooned with gold drapes,
lead to a long, sunny sitting room.

That room opens through a wall of French doors onto a wide terrace,
offering an exquisite view of the golf course and the four pools
below.

It is easy to imagine the meeting of Juliet and her Romeo during a
courtly dance in such a ballroom.  All in all, Congressional is an
elegant, romantic environment, seemingly custom-made to shut out the
real world and any of its ugliness.  In other words, not a place to
bare one's soul and find sympathy since many people might willingly
make slight ideological and financial compromises to belong in such an
aggrandizing setting.

"I really didn't want to join Congressional because it was so
expensive," says Charlotte.  "I think the initiation fee was around
$4,000, even then, in 1974.  There were monthly dues, and eventually we
had to use up an $800 yearly food minimum.  All I really wanted was a
club with a pool.  John certainly wasn't an avid golfer, which is what
Congressional is really famous for.  We were just as close to the
smaller Bethesda Country Club.

"But John wanted to join Congressional and was very proud of the fact
that we got in so fast.  We were summer members and then went to one
cocktail party, where members could inspect us.  I was very nervous for
that but very soon after it we were in.  John used to brag that even
Vince Lombardi, the former coach of the Washington Redskins football
team, had to wait six months to get in, insinuating that we got in just
as fast."' Financially, John and Charlotte were spread about as thinly
as they could be, she recalls.  But December 1974, John made partner at
Arnold & Porter.  He was thirty-three.

By April 1975, four months later, Charlotte was pregnant again.

"Those first years here I was totally subservient," says Charlotte.

"I was barefoot and pregnant, literally.  I had three little ones and
was expecting a fourth.  I didn't seriously question any of these
financially burdensome things John wanted to do.  I didn't think at all
except when I was dressed up and sent out to be a social asset at
parties.

When we went out, John would go over all the names and tell me whom to
talk to and what not to say.  I could make a good impression.  But I
was basically just a little housewife.  Under 'profession' on our IRS
forms, John would put 'none' for me.  He didn't even say 'homemaker."

Charlotte doesn't remember John striking her those first three years in
Washington, but she does remember the time in October 1974 when John
came home from an Arnold & Porter basketball game against another law
firm with a broken hand.  John told her and Luke that one of the
opponent's players had nudged him roughly and hurt him.  They recall
that John said it had angered him enough that he retaliated, hitting
the offender and thus breaking his hand.  "He was cocky about it," says
Charlotte.

"He wasn't exactly proud of it, but he joked about it.  It went along
with his attitude that boys will be boys and to play with the boys you
gotta be tough."

Her family remembers one Christmas during those years that Charlotte
looked as if she had been struck, that her left eye appeared bruised
and swollen and that her glasses were broken.  "There were quite a few
bruises from shoves and such that I just don't remember specifically,
but my family remembers seeing," says Charlotte.

Martha, Mimi, and Helen gathered in the O'Donnells' pantry during their
holiday meal and asked each other in concerned whispers: "Where do you
suppose she got that bruise?"

"We all knew," says Martha, "but none of us was willing to confront her
about it.  She had said something like she had walked into a door.

What were we supposed to do, say, 'You're lying'?  Back then, none of
us would tell anybody anything anyway.  In the early seventies, you
didn't rock the boat.  And you figured that if that person really
wanted to tell you they would.  Part of it was respect for privacy.

"That was a pattern in our family.  We just avoided unpleasantness.

Our mother always used to say, 'I don't allow my girls to fight."

And we didn't.  Anger was impolite, unacceptable behavior.  So we
wouldn't have brought up the subject of a bruised eye to Charlotte.  We
didn't know how to express our own emotions much less try to find out
about hers."

CHAPTER TWELVE

While Washington gleefully celebrated the
bicentennial, glorifying all the promises of the American way,
Charlotte and John's difficult yet seemingly stable marriage burst into
violence again.

The year before, 1975, despite his making partner, was full of pressure
at work for John, remembers Charlotte.  He told her that he was eager
to become a percentage partner, the next and final rung in Arnold &
Porter's salary ladder, which meant profit sharing.  He worked even
harder to prove himself and to stand out from his colleagues,
specializing in white-collar crime and internal corporate
investigations of questionable payments and money management.  It was
an opportune choice of specialties, because more and more companies
were responding to the public's demand for corporate openness after
Watergate.

But his responsibilities meant more and more out-of-town travel and
ultimately more stress.  They probably also brought a lot of strain
since he was, in essence, often serving as a kind of judge, weighing
the testimony of his clients' employees and deciding whether they were
truthful.

John rarely talked to his wife about his work, she says-perhaps because
he felt that she wouldn't understand the complexities of corporate law,
perhaps because she didn't know how to ask about his cases, perhaps
because the house was full of active, tiny children when he came home
at night, exhausted.  He just didn't tell her much about it, so
Charlotte never really knew who his clients were, or with whom he felt
he competed at Arnold & Porter.  At that point, she had never even met
his secretary face to face.  The few times she met him downtown during
the week, John would join her someplace other than his office.

Of course, her major concerns were those of her children.  Perhaps John
began to feel like an outsider in his own home, since his and
Charlotte's day-to-day worlds were almost entirely separate.  Their
mutual circles of interests were quickly shrinking.

Maybe John began to resent Charlotte.  He had claimed the kingship of
being the sole provider for his family, and now he was faced with its
overwhelming responsibilities-four needy people, completely dependent
on him for their daily bread.  Perhaps if he had opened up to Charlotte
and shared more of his professional life with her, she wouldn't have
seemed so cloying to him, their relationship so one-way, his burdens so
overpowering.

Charlotte says that he was not pleased that she was expecting again,
and tension mounted as her pregnancy with their fourth child dragged on
beyond the predicted due date.

"I wasn't thrilled either about having yet another baby, since it was
happening so soon," says Charlotte.  "There was only an eighteen
months' difference between Matthew and John Michael.  John Michael
wasn't born until the end of January 1976, three weeks late.  When
you're pregnant with your fourth baby, every extra day seems a week
long.

"In early March, there were some other children here playing with my
boys, and I pulled my back and started having trouble breathing.

It was one of the few times I called John at his office for help.  At
first, he wouldn't come.  By the time he did get home, I could hardly
breathe.  I was hyperventilating.  I asked him to get help.  The rescue
squad came.

Neighbors were here trying to help.  When most of these people finally
left the house, and he figured out that I was going to be okay, he
started being really abusive verbally, yelling at me about his being
late for a practice game of a school basketball team he was coaching.

He also yelled at me about the casserole I had been fixing for the
boys' supper.

It was a macaroni thing.  It wasn't the greatest.  But he said that the
neighbors would wonder about what kind of mother I was, serving my
children such 'shit."  Then he left.  That incident started a siege
that didn't stop until June.

"My sister Dotti and her husband were coming in from overseas that
night, and they stayed and helped me.  That was about the worst
twenty-four hours of my life.  Later that week, I packed up the kids
and stayed with a neighbor across the street for two days.  I never did
that unless I was afraid of him hurting me physically.  I stood at
their window and watched him come and go for those two days.  He never
tried to find us.

"When I came back, he wasn't talking.  He barely spoke to me for three
months.  I moved out of our bedroom.  John never seemed to have any
trouble sleeping, which made me feel that, since he seemed so
guilt-free, I probably was the guilty party.  He also even slept mad
when he was angry at me.  He'd lie flat and rigid, staring up at the
ceiling with this gulf between us.  I couldn't bear the thought that
even subconsciously, in his sleep, he hated me.  But even though I had
left our bedroom, each morning I went in and made his bed.  And I
continued to do his laundry.

John didn't even come to John Michael's baptism March twenty-sixth.

That was humiliating.

"I was starting to lose control.  I was driving car pools for two
different schools at 8:30 and 11 AM and 3 PM every weekday.  I had a
seven-year-old, three-year-old, almost-two-year-old, and a newborn.

I had to take them all with me whenever I went to the grocery store or
n an errand.

It took two grocery carts just for the kids.  John didn't help me with
any of these chores.  He hardly talked at all and barely touched John
Michael then, his own namesake.  That was the biggest hurt.  Nothing I
said or did got through to him."

Finally, too distraught and scared to stay at home one night, Charlotte
went to the home of her friend Sandy Oseroff, around dinner time.

She arrived with all her children in tow.  It was the first time her
friend, a friend she had made when she first moved to Potomac, heard of
the serious troubles between her and John.

"I can remember John Michael sitting in his little infant seat on the
counter," says Sandy Oseroff.  "We were having spaghetti when she
arrived.  She was very upset about the fact John wouldn't touch that
baby.

It was the first time she told me about real trouble.  I remember once
before seeing Charlotte with a bruise, but she had said that she had
bumped into a door and I believed it because she always flits around
like the wind, with all those kids.  I didn't even think to question
her.  It wouldn't have even occurred to me that he might strike her.  I
mean, this was John and Charlotte, a successful young attorney and a
sweet, good mom."  Charlotte contacted a lawyer right around the time
of John Michael's baptism.  A sympathetic neighbor had recommended
him.

Charlotte wanted to know what her rights were.  She recalls that when
John did speak to her these days he threatened that he was going to
sell the house and then she'd have to go live in a cheap apartment in
Silver Spring.

The lawyer was "an old-timey Catholic," as Charlotte describes him.

She told him she didn't want a divorce.  She just wanted to know how
she could make things better.  He suggested that she needed something
other than legal advice and gave her the name of a pastor he thought
would prove helpful to her to call.

The priest turned out to be very helpful.  "He didn't tell me that I
was a battered wife or anything," says Charlotte, "but he did suggest
that we needed marriage counseling.  And either the priest or the
lawyer suggested another psychiatrist, whom I started seeing.

This psychiatrist was very nice.  It was a much better experience than
the one I had in 1973.

I sat right across his desk from him in a cheery room and he was a
reassuring, gentle, fatherly-figure type.  I started going to him about
once a week.  I paid for it with our insurance so I wouldn't have to
tell John until the time was right.

"I could talk to this psychiatrist about almost everything.  He was
into finding out all about my history too, and what in my past screwed
me up, but at least I liked him and I could tell he liked me.

That made me feel good.  He seemed genuinely interested in me, and he
seemed to continue liking me even when I told him about some of the
awful things that happened between John and me.  Of course, I never
told him about slapping myself.  I came as clean with him as I probably
was able to in those days.

"I did tell him about the beating.  That psychiatrist was the first
person to say to me that John's physical treatment of me was
'inappropriate behavior."  Of course, he didn't say that it was
unacceptable, or that I was abused.  Now I know that then only a few
specialists were just starting to write about the battered wife
syndrome.  It wasn't something people wrote or talked about at all.

Because I was still so insecure, I didn't realize that, no matter what
I did, no one deserves to be hit.  So I figured that there was still
something 'inappropriate' about me that was eliciting this
'inappropriate' response from John.

"That feeling was probably accentuated by the fact the psychiatrist's
emphasis was not on the marriage but on trying to make me happier with
me.  Once we had done that, we'd see about the marriage, he said.  So I
set out to make myself better, too, mainly by going on a diet because I
knew John hated me fat and unattractive.

"I continued to try to talk to John about going to see the marriage
counselor the priest had recommended.  That was pretty brave of me.

John told me that he didn't want to see this counselor because he was a
former priest.  In other words, I guess in John's opinion, this man
hadn't lived up to his religious vows and he had never been married, so
what would he know.

"Another factor in all this trouble was that John's sister was getting
married on Memorial Day weekend.  She wanted us both in the wedding.

John told his parents that he wasn't going if I was going.  When I
tried to reason with him about it, he told me that I was messing up his
sister's wedding.  My psychiatrist told me that John was
'transferring,' accusing me of things he actually was doing himself.

But I still had to get him to that wedding somehow.  I had his parents
call the priest, because he had been so helpful.  He told them to tell
John that they expected both of us there, period.  So that's what they
did.

"In May, the marriage counselor called John and got him to agree to a
meeting with him and me, to take place about a week before we were
supposed to leave for the wedding.  Of course, John wasn't talking to
me, so I still didn't know if he was going or not.  I went to the
appointment with the counselor but John never showed up."

Even though John had failed to come, Charlotte owed the counselor for
the session.  The bill was about $80.  She took a check from the
checkbook in John's closet and left information about the amount and to
whom it was written on top of the desk.

"I was in the bathroom," remembers Charlotte, "sitting on a closed
toilet, bathing two of the boys in the tub.  John came home, went
upstairs, and saw my note.  He came into the bathroom and started
beating me with his fists and pulling on my hair.  I turned away to
protect myself, and he beat me on my back.  I managed to get out and
ran into Luke's room, because I didn't think that he'd hit me in front
of Luke.  But he ran after me.  I can remember crouching in the
corner.

He beat my neck and shoulder and back.  Then he chased me into our
bedroom.  He yelled at one point, 'I don't give a shit if I kill
you."

"It was one of the worst beatings John ever gave me.  And I hadn't done
anything but written a check.  I hadn't even talked to him that night
before the attack.  It really frightened me.  I went to see my
internist because I realized that I might need evidence at some point
if John did decide to divorce me.  I never thought that I might need
the evidence in order to divorce him.  The doctor measured all the
bruises.  But the only thing I can remember him saying was 'This is
very immature."

Nothing else.  It must have been uncomfortable for him.  He belonged to
Congressional Country Club as well and John and I saw him and his wife
socially.

But I was probably ready to hear the truth this time."

Right after the beating, Charlotte fled up the street to her neighbor
and friend Denise Gogarty.

"Charlotte appeared at my door, holding the baby," remembers Gogarty.

"Then the other boys came in from the car.  She was crying.  She was
hurting.  I saw the bruise starting on her shoulder.  She was afraid to
go home and I was afraid for her too.  My mother was visiting here and
I didn't have room for all of them.  So I called the police.  They told
me that they wouldn't come unless she was willing to press charges.

I turned to Charlotte and she shook her head and said, 'No."  She
didn't want to charge him.  And I couldn't even keep them on the phone
after she said no.

"Charlotte had told me before that John had broken her eardrum.

We were sitting in the park at Cabin John, and the kids were playing on
the swings.  We were talking about something and she said that she'd be
afraid to tell John that.  And I asked why and she told me that he had
hit her.  I was astounded.  The idea of someone I knew being hit was so
foreign to me.

"I knew about the daily routine of the dressing and the house, too.

I wondered why she loved him so much, although I understood why she was
intimidated.  Even when he was being polite, he was always baiting you
in conversation.  I also found it very difficult to talk to him when he
was standing.  It was a little bit easier when he was sitting.

"Charlotte was such a capable person.  She could handle anything,
without having to plan it.  If something broke she fixed it.  If the
kids hurt themselves, she took them to the hospital, no problem.  She
handled everything easily, except for John."

As Charlotte drove to the airport with her children, she still didn't
know if John was planning to come to the wedding.  "I didn't know if he
would get on the plane.  Just before boarding, he showed up at the
terminal.  He didn't talk to me during the whole rehearsal dinner,
wedding, or wedding reception.  It did embarrass me.  It also
embarrassed me because the bridesmaids' dresses were sleeveless and I
still had a very ugly bruise on my arm from the beating over the
check.

I remember having to turn the left side of my body away from the camera
for the wedding party pictures.

"It really confused me, because he had a great time with all the
guests.  I figured since he seemed so happy with everyone else, that
obviously all this trouble came from some terrible flaw in me.

It had to be my fault.  Luke fell during the reception and had to have
some stitches.  The husband of one of the bridesmaids drove me to the
hospital."

Because her in-laws had been so immersed in this travail, Charlotte
tried to talk to his mother about John and his treatment of her.

Her response, as Charlotte remembers, was: "Well, honey, I think you
better get some help so that you learn how to deal with Johnny."

"Which, of course, simply reinforced the idea that the root of all this
was me," says Charlotte.

Somehow, in the motel, Charlotte and John reconciled.  "We got back
together with the usual romp in bed, nothing more concrete than that.

But this time there were all sorts of promises.  He promised that he'd
never hit me again, that he'd do anything, anything to make it up to
me.

I made him promise me, as I held him in my arms, that I could keep
seeing the psychiatrist.  And he agreed.

"I went back to Washington feeling really proud of myself.  I had
managed to go and handle being at that wedding.  It was the first time
I had been able to play the role of the happy couple while knowing that
things were really awful between us.  That was a major accomplishment
for me.  I couldn't have done that a year before.  I had pulled myself
together.  I had lost weight and looked good.  And I had won my husband
back.

"I had so much more self-assurance; even the psychiatrist asked how my
husband liked the new me.  I was pleased that I was pleasing my doctor,
too, that he thought there was a new me.  I thought things were going
to be great from then on."

For a while they were.  When John left for a business trip to London,
Paris, and Brussels in June, Charlotte lovingly tucked little notes
into his shirt pockets and jackets when she packed his suitcase.  He
gratefully I acknowledged them in one of the nine postcards he wrote on
his travels, cards rich with details on his doings, which he signed
with "I miss you all."

When he was home, he was affectionate.  "I could always judge how a day
was going to go with John according to how he woke up," says
Charlotte.

"If he stretched and reached across and hugged me, then he was in a
good mood and things were going to be great.  Those were the days when
he'd do the giant hug, when the whole family would just gather up in a
bunch and do one big squeeze on the count of three."

But by August, Charlotte and John's relationship was already strained,
she says.  For a day's retreat from the tension in the house, Charlotte
took the boys to Catoctin State Park in Thurmont, Maryland, near Camp
David and near her alma mater, Saint Joseph's College.

"I never took the kids away by myself like that unless John was in one
of his moods or silences.  It was an escape for me.  I went back to the
mountains, back to an area where I had been so happy.  I took the boys
to see where I had gone to school and then took them to the little
beach at a lake near Thurmont.  It was a lovely day, even with my
having to manage a seven-year-old and three children under four by
myself.

The boys and I always had a good time on those kinds of outings.  I
tried to make John's moods into relaxed times for them as almost a way
of self-preservation for me.  I knew that I could do that outing
because I wouldn't have to explain everything I had done that day,
because John was just plain ignoring my existence."

Although John had promised Charlotte that she could continue her
therapy, he began complaining about the cost.  Perhaps he didn't have
confidence in psychotherapy, perhaps he was threatened by his wife's
fledgling confidence.  Perhaps he didn't like someone else influencing
her.

Perhaps he thought she should have the self-discipline to help herself,
or at least control herself.  In any case, his comments about her
sessions could border on ridicule, recalls Charlotte.

"He'd sort of sneer at me: 'What did you do at your shrink today?"  she
says.

In the early fall, Charlotte decided to stop seeing her doctor.

Withstanding John's complaints did her more harm than the sessions did
her good, she says.  She was losing the energy to fight him about it.

When she told the psychiatrist she was stopping, however, she didn't
admit the real reasons for it.  "I padded it," she remembers.  "I told
him that things were working out so well, and I was so happy.  I didn't
say anything about the money, because I knew he'd see that as a hint
that John might be pressuring me and I wanted the doctor to still like
me.  He left it very open about my coming back to see him.  But I never
did.

"It's hard to explain how depressed you feel when you realize that
things haven't really changed when you thought they were going well.  I
was so sure that we were making progress and then John would be moody
or silent and we were back to square one.  It would make me crazy and
so desperate.  I would think, 'I've worked so hard.  Good God, what do
I have to do now?"" The feeling Charlotte described is one that keeps
many abused wives in their situation.  Each time their husbands
apologize and they float through a honeymoon period their hopes are
rekindled.  "This time will be different.  He's so repentant that this
time I can really trust him," they think.  But after the
reconciliations fade, time and time again, the women become more and
more hopeless and depressed, making decisive actionsuch as
leaving-almost impossible for them.

The weapons for control, then, don't have to be physical, says Dr.
Susan Forward.  She writes in Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love
Them: "Abuse is defined as any behavior that is designed to control and
subjugate another human being through the use of fear, humiliation, and
verbal or physical assaults.  . . . [It is] the systematic persecution
of one partner by another .  . . they wear down their partners through
unrelenting criticism and fault-finding.  This type of psychological
abuse is particularly insidious because it is often disguised as a way
of teaching the woman how to be a better person."

After having their spirit broken cyclically like this for years-whether
it is purposeful or not on the part of their spouses-abused women, as
defined by Forward, are worn down enough psychologically to be
malleable and obedient.  They become incapable of the self-confidence
needed for changing their lives, and learn to hate themselves.

"I used to bang my open palm against the kitchen cabinets in complete
frustration, hard enough to bend my ring," says Charlotte.

"I also used to hide in the closet during that horrible, horrible year
of 1976.

It was terrible, a human being huddled in a closet like a prisoner of
war.

I wasn't hiding from him because he was yelling at me, or because he
had threatened me.  I'd usually hide when he wasn't responding at
all.

Looking at me with hate or looking straight through me, saying
nothing.

I just couldn't stand the emotional rejection anymore.  I'd go in the
baby's room and cower in the dark, curled up in a fetal position.  It
was like a tranquilizer, because it was a void.  It was quiet, and I
couldn't see him.

But most importantly, it was dark enough that I couldn't see myself."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Some of the pressures on the burgeoning family eased
in 1977, when John's yearly income at Arnold & Porter rocketed to
around $137,000.

Charlotte recalls that their increased bank account relieved much of
the tension between them.  They started planning more family outings.

During basketball season, for instance, the family traveled to
Blacksburg, Virginia, for a Marquette game, and the boys had the thrill
of sitting on the team's bench with John.  Charlotte stayed in the
bleachers with the baby, watching her husband and children with
pride.

Charlotte says that they were given such wonderful seats because John
was an active alumnus of his college, a steady contributor-starting in
1978, he would give $1,000 to Marquette annually.  That April, John was
one of three people chosen for the 1977 alumni service award.

That spring, the family also planned summer vacations to Maryland's
Ocean City, Charlotte's old haunt, and to Florida's Disney World.

It seemed to be a time of rebuilding after the explosive year before.

Late that spring, Charlotte even told her sister Martha that things
were going so well that she was afraid something bad would happen.

On July 3, their seventeen-month-old baby, John Michael, died of spinal
meningitis.

The tragedy was even more wrenching for Charlotte because a few days
before John Michael became ill, she and John had slipped into another
tense time, and she later blamed herself for being too preoccupied with
their troubles.  She remembers that John had become moody and terse,
speaking irregularly to Charlotte or throwing snide comments.

"We were at a neighborhood picnic when John Michael was still alive,"
says Denise Gogarty, "and we were talking about teenagers and sex.

And John said something to everybody about the liberties that Charlotte
had allowed him before they were married that she shouldn't have.

It shocked me to my core that he would say something like that in front
of all these people.  The inference was that it had been bad and that
it wasn't his fault, it was hers.  Charlotte's response was an
embarrassed laugh, and so was everybody else's.  What could you say?"

"There are times I think had I not been so obsessed with trying to make
things better with John," Charlotte says, "that I would have realized
how sick this child was sooner.  Or I would have had the strength to be
more forceful with the doctor and the hospital.

"John had been coming and going without a word for about a week.

In those days, he used to go to the men's grill at Congressional to eat
dinner.  He didn't tell me that's where he went.  He never told me
anything.  I used to drive over to Congressional and look for his
car.

I would be relieved when I found it and just drive back home and
wait.

Occasionally I would go in to look for him and if he happened to pass
by me, he would actually stare right through me and say nothing, even
if I was going in the entrance as he was coming out.

"Two evenings before my baby would die, July first, I was sitting out
front with the boys, watching them play at the bottom of our hill.

It was a Friday night.  John came home, went upstairs, and changed his
clothes and then got back into the car and drove off.  He didn't even
wave or nod at his kids.  I sat there like a prisoner watching my
captor walk away and thought to myself, 'I just wish he would die."  I
had a hard time forgiving myself for that, too.  I thought for a long
time that God had heard me and punished me by killing my child.

"I put John Michael to sleep that night.  He had a fever, but the next
morning he woke up and was fine.  No fever, nothing.  That was the day
I started packing John's suitcase for him, saying 'This can't go on'
type of things.  Sometimes that would have gotten me a slap or anger;
this time it snapped him out of it.

"We made up that morning and went to Congressional to swim.

While we were there John Michael got hot and lethargic.  I took him
home and put him to bed.  He had a high fever so I called the doctor.

It's funny the things you have the hardest time forgetting.  One of the
things I feel worst about is following the doctor's orders and putting
this child, who was twenty-four hours away from dying, through the
trauma of immersing him in a cool tub of water to lower his
temperature.  He was screaming hysterically.  But it worked; the fever
came down and he slept.

"But the next morning John Michael wasn't better.  I took him to the
doctor's and that's when they discovered that his neck was rigid.  I
went to the hospital.  At first they thought he had pneumonia.

Eventually they found that he had bacterial meningitis, the kind of
meningitis that kills.  But I still didn't think he could die.  Modern
medicine was so wonderful, there was no way a doctor would let my baby
die.

"By the time they were doing the spinal tap, John had come.  I had had
to call the neighbors to get him, because he was outside cutting the
grass.  He thought I had just gone to the doctor's office.

"We had to sign papers allowing them to give John Michael medication
that might cause deafness.  They had put him into intensive care.  We
thought the deafness was the worst that could happen.  There was no
indication of how serious his condition really was, so John went
home.

"Things got bad very quickly.  I called John and told him he better get
back to the hospital.  He asked me if I thought we were going to lose
him and a few seconds later John Michael turned to look at me and said,
'Mommy."  Then the numbers on the monitor started going down, 90, 89,
88.  I turned to the nurse and asked, 'What does that mean?"  He was in
cardiac arrest.

"They got me out of there so fast.  John got there very quickly and
went in while they worked on him.  They tried to save my baby for more
than an hour.  My faith utterly failed me.  There was a priest there
trying to get me to say the rosary, and I thought, 'How can I pray to a
God who's letting my baby die?"

"I went in and held him.  I had to.  John was with me.  John was very
good to me then.  He handled the funeral arrangements for me.  When we
got home, I saw John Michael's little red sneakers and that's when I
became hysterical.  So John told the children what happened and did it
very well.  He was a great comfort to me.  If anything, I feel that I
didn't do enough for him.

"I didn't want the children to see their brother in a coffin, so we
didn't have a viewing.  John agreed with that.  He's buried in his
OshKosh overalls and he's holding his Sesame Street Ernie doll.  He's
also wearing a Miraculous Medal I had worn for years.  I couldn't give
up his sneakers; I still have them."  John Michael is buried in Saint
Gabriel's, a small Catholic cemetery tucked into a Potomac
neighborhood, where, ironically, John had found the only other house
they had considered purchasing upon leaving Dallas.

The baby's flat, white tombstone reads: "Having become perfect in a
short while, he reached the fullness of a long career."  It is a verse
from the Bible's Book of Wisdom, read at the funeral mass for
children.

Charlotte requested they play "O Lord, I Am Not Worthy" at the
service.

On the day of the funeral, July 5, hundreds of people crowded into John
and Charlotte's church, Our Lady of Mercy, and followed the hearse to
the cemetery.  Through her tears, Charlotte recognized relatives and
school friends she hadn't seen for years, interspersed with many of
John's work associates.  At the graveside, after the ceremony was
concluded, John chose to lead a song unusual for a Catholic ceremony:
"We Shall Overcome.

Afterward, many of the crowd went back to Carmelita Drive.  Their
friends brought so much food with them that Charlotte says she just
didn't have the heart to ask them to leave, as John would have
preferred her to.

"I went upstairs and found John lying on the floor in his dressing
room, attached to our bedroom.  He was crying.  He said, 'God has
sacrificed our baby to save our marriage.  It's to shake us up and make
us realize our marriage is worth saving and to make us work harder.""
Charlotte recalls that she and John pulled together well during their
child's death and its aftermath.  She loved him more for his strength
and attentiveness during this time.  The only thing they disagreed on
was the gravestone.  According to Charlotte, he preferred to have only
a headstone, rather than the full-length stone.

"I just had to have something special covering the entire grave," says
Charlotte.  "I stuck to my guns on it.  John was in Alaska when we had
to make the final decision.  I told him that was the last expense we'd
have for this child.  And then he accused me of being cruel.  Maybe it
was.  But we had the money for it and I really wanted John Michael to
have a tribute for all the happiness he had given us.

"I don't think anything is harder than burying a child.  John grieved a
great deal about it, even though he didn't talk about it much.

Different people handle things differently.  We read The Bereaved
Parent that summer.  They say the divorce rate after the death of a
child is incredibly high.  And John claims that that's when the
marriage started going bad.

I can't help but resent his saying that, because that's not the reason
our marriage failed.  I think the turning point for us had been the
year before, when there had been so much violence.  How can you ever
really recover from that?  And I know that after John Michael's death,
we both worked harder on our marriage for a while."

John and Charlotte had always been regular church goers, and despite
her momentary loss of faith when their baby died, they continued to go
weekly.  She prayed especially hard the day the Mass included a special
tribute to the Holy Family and all families went as a group to the
altar for a special yearly blessing.

Each Sunday, John attended Mass whether he was with his family or
alone, says Charlotte.  If he was out of town, he asked if she and the
boys went.  John had always held on to the self-control taught by the
Church as his way of coping, she says, and he clung to it now as he
doggedly tried "to go back to normal."

"John never missed going to church," says Charlotte.  "Even when we
were having terrible fights and he was staying away from home, I'd see
him drive past the house up to the monastery's chapel for Mass.

Those were the times that I'd spend hours by the window, waiting and
watching, not knowing where he was.

"He'd always receive Communion, even when things were bad, which I had
difficulty with.  I believe that you have to be in some kind of peace
with yourself before you receive the sacraments.  If you believe, as I
do, and Catholics are supposed to, that the sacrament is truly the body
of Christ, then a soul in turmoil is no place for the Host.  When we
were in one of these bad periods, I would go to church with him but not
go up for Communion.  Even if he had just been yelling at me or the
boys, he went.  There were even times that we went to church happy and
left upset.  John dragged Luke out of church by his collar a couple of
times.

He would get very angry with the boys if they misbehaved.  Of course,
this was not for screaming 'I hate God' or something; it was for giving
a brother the elbow or giggling.

"John told me that he never went to confession from the birth of Luke
until after our divorce trial.  Confession is not a very pleasant
thing, especially for someone like John, because he would have had to
admit that he had weaknesses.  Confession is a strong part of the
Catholic Church, so it is surprising that he didn't go.  But I think he
felt he had not done anything wrong.  He's too ethical and too smart to
do anything wrong at work, and I don't think he realized that the
beating was wrong, so in his mind he probably didn't have anything to
confess.

"But what was important to him was the self-control taught by the
Church.  He believed totally in it.  If he set his mind to something,
by God, he could do it.  It was almost scary.  He really could achieve
anything, no matter the pain.  I think that's why he was so good at
work.  And even though his quietness about John Michael hurt me a
little bit, because I needed to talk about it more, I think that his
self-control is what got him through the death."

Despite the tragedy, the family went on its prearranged vacations.

Charlotte and John thought it would be better for the children.

Their stay in Disney World was particularly pleasant, since an
executive of one of John's more important clients, Coca-Cola, had
arranged for them to rent a lavish room at the popular Contemporary
Hotel.  Without his influence, John and Charlotte probably would have
had difficulty getting any reservations within Disney World.  Charlotte
remembers the room (overlooking the lake) as being one of the nicest
the family ever had while traveling.

In September, Charlotte and John also traveled to California, for a
wedding of a business associate.  They stopped for a night in Las Vegas
with some of the other guests for some betting fun.  Sometime on that
trip, Charlotte became pregnant, and the joy of having another chance
with another child carried the couple for many months.

On Mother's Day, 1978, John gave Charlotte what she thinks was the most
thoughtful present she ever received from him, a top-flight camera in
acknowledgment of what a good mother she was.  In his card he wrote:
"You're the greatest.  I love and appreciate you more each day."

From then on, whenever they attended Marquette basketball games, John
arranged for Charlotte to have a photographer's pass so she could sit
on the floor, next to professionals from publications such as Time and
Sports Illustrated.

"It was wonderful," says Charlotte.  "It was one of those exciting
status things that only John could have gotten, because he was so
friendly with the assistant coach then.  I really learned a great deal
about photography during those games.  It was a really nice thing for
him to do for me."

Jekyll and Hyde.  It's the best way Charlotte can think to describe the
two personalities she saw of John: one generous, admirable, and
affectionate, so easy to love; the other harsh, manipulative, and
belittling.  The kind man could dissolve into the oppressor so
suddenly, and leave Charlotte just bewildered.  Had he been just all
bad, she could have left him, she says.  But the memory of the shining
knight kept her lingering in the nightmare forest, waiting, watching.

Where did the man she fell in love with go?

A mere month after that heartwarming Mother's Day, for instance, she
and John had dinner with several friends.  Charlotte would go into
labor later that night, several days early.  Both Denise Gogarty and
another friend, Nick Deoudes, remember Charlotte being in tears over
John's comments about her during the evening, and that he reached over
and roughly squeezed her belly, teasing her about her weight.

Within a few hours John would be holding her hand in the delivery room,
so attentive.  Then he questioned Charlotte, she says, for asking for
an epidermal painkiller when the contractions became too much to
bear.

She felt that he was criticizing her when she needed his support.

And so it always was, back and forth, back and forth.  Was she dancing
with Dr.  Jekyll or Mr.  Hyde?

Then Andrew Marquette came and everything was wonderful.  She smiled
gratefully into the eyes of Dr. Jekyll.  The baby came on Father's
Day, and seemed to be an answer to prayers.

About two months later, the family flew to Wisconsin to spend a week at
a lake in Hiles.  They shared a large cabin with one of John's college
friends and his family.  They had a lovely time, fishing, hiking, and
just talking.  Charlotte hadn't known the couple that well before and
she was interested to see that the college friend's wife didn't fetch
and carry for him.  She recalls that John commented that he thought she
was selfish because of it.

One night, the couple told Charlotte they wanted to play a record for
her.  They said, laughing, "This really describes your and John's
relationship."  It was a country song performed by Tompall Claser
called "Put Another Log on the Fire" and the verses go like this: Put
another log on the fire.

cook me up some bacon and some beans.

And go out to the car and change the tire.

Wash my socks and sew my old blue jeans.

Come on baby, You can fill my pipe, And then go fetch my slippers, And
boil me up another pot of tea.

Then put another log on the fire, babe, And come and tell me why you're
leaving me.

Now, don't I let you wash the car on Sunday?

And don't I warn you when you're getting' fat?

Ain't I gonna take you fishin' with me someday?

Well, a man can't love a woman more than that.

Ain't I always nice to your kid sister?

Don't I take her driving every night?

So sit here at my feet, 'cause I like you when you're sweet.

And you know it ain't feminine to fight.

Charlotte laughed, although she was surprised that their friends had
picked up on how much she catered to John.  She was also surprised that
John laughed good-naturedly and thought it a fine joke indeed.  "If he
can laugh at it, why can't he ease up a bit?"  she wondered.

The night before their twelfth anniversary, while they were in
Wisconsin, Charlotte wrote in a diary she kept haphazardly through
several years.  She started relating the boys' fishing expedition, and
then somehow, alone in her reveries, all her childlike insecurities
spilled out: "We are in Wisconsin now.  The boys think it is heaven-it
is lovely, cool breezes, large lake and everyone is relaxed.  John is
so calm now, seems happy.  I really love him.  How I wish we did this
more often.  Every year.

It would be a renewal.  . . . When am I going to feel successful?  I
still have poor handwriting, still pick at my nail cuticles, I still
freak out on homemade, chocolate chip cookies .  . . I really am a
weakling.  Sometimes I think if I could only feel more useful I'd have
a better self image and better figure.

I'd love to lose another ten pounds and keep it off.  Once you feel
fat, you always feel fat.  . . . Hair is a wreck.  I guess I just wish
I was a natural beauty.  I hate glasses, flabby chins, and being 36.

John says I'm unhappy.

I love my kids.  I really do enjoy being a housewife.  I'm simple
enough to enjoy driving my boys to school and other activities.  I am
impatient especially with John.  . . He says I have a good life.  Why
aren't I good enough for him to want to take out alone or go away with
to something other than a basketball game?  .  . . Maybe too much has
happened.  Too much meanness-too much taking each other for granted.

If only he could understand that I need a man to want to be with
me....

Sometimes

I think I'd like to live alone with the boys, but I can't imagine life
without John.  I just wish I was more important to him."

But all in all, the trip was a regenerative one, says Charlotte.

Unfortunately, the healing didn't last for long.

John was becoming more and more restless at Arnold & Porter.

Sometime during the middle of Jimmy Carter's administration, he was
considered for a government post, says Charlotte.  He didn't get the
job, but suddenly the partnership and the lucrative salary, the goals
of so many years, didn't seem to be enough.

Long ago, John had considered going into politics on the grass roots
level.  But now a Washington fever seemed to possess him-a desire so
many have in the capital, to seep into the corridors of power without
having to answer to a constituency; to snare a prestigious job high up
in the bureaucracy, close enough to real politicians to ride on their
jet stream, without having to sweat through an election themselves.

Twice during the Carter administration, Charlotte and John attended
black-tie dinners hosted by the Democratic National Committee, as
guests of the father of a friend of John's involved with Marquette's
basketball team.  One evening John sat next to the mayor of Detroit.

Muhammad Ah, President Carter, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, all
manner of celebrities were there.  Charlotte remembers John making a
beeline to Congressman and former basketball star Bill Bradley.

Maybe those evenings fueled his discontent with a mere law practice.

"I think John was beginning to realize," says Charlotte, "that even
with the money and the prestigious law firm, he wasn't happy.

Maybe it's impossible to maintain the intense kinds of lives we were
leading-me I running around doing this, this, and this for the kids and
him going up, up, up-unless you really work hard at the marriage.

Maybe the great American dream-the nice, big family, successful
children, money to do whatever you want, prestige job-is a farce.

"John had reached it.  He was a partner in one of the city's best law
firms.  We were beginning to get out of debt.  But he wasn't happy.

That's when he started telling me he was a gypsy and wanted to move
around.

He thought about moving to Los Angeles and to Denver, where the firm
was contemplating opening offices.  He talked about being a judge,
about taking some time off to coach basketball.  I couldn't understand
it.  We were at the end of the rainbow-he had everything he had told me
he wanted-and then suddenly we weren't.

"He had been in one of those silences since September.  He had been
coming home late, around nine, and eating only soup.  I found out later
that he had been having dinners with a woman lawyer at Arnold & Porter,
who was going through a divorce.  But they were just friends.

"Halloween night, 1978, John handed me a piece of paper with a lawyer's
name on it and a telephone number.  He told me that she would be
calling me about a divorce.  That's all he said.  Then he walked
away.

I was devastated, stunned, hurt, panicked.

"I actually stopped helping him dress in the morning.  I called a
lawyer, and he told me to sit tight until January, because the divorce
laws were changing at the first of the year.  So I waited.  I was a
wreck.  I pleaded with John not to leave me and he laughed at me and
said he had been 'dating' for years.  I couldn't believe it.  But I
asked one of his secretaries and she told me that it was true.  So my
lawyer hired a private detective to check out John's claims.  But he
never discovered anything.

Later, John admitted in his deposition which was read in court to one
affair that started either Christmas 1973 or 1974.1 think it was at an
office party to which no spouses were invited.

"In desperation I went to see our priest at Our Lady of Mercy.  I sat
in a big chair in his study and cried.  I didn't tell him anything
about the past physical abuse.  I just told him about the communication
problem and the divorce John wanted.  I talked to him twice and he
called John.

I was so hopeful when he told me that John was coming to see him.  I
went to see the priest afterward and he told me that John didn't really
want a divorce and that I should just give him time to sort things
out.

That I should just love him.  Just love him.  I thought I had been
loving him.

"Meanwhile, John wasn't speaking to me and took the three oldest boys
to New York City for Thanksgiving.  We had won the firm's lottery to
have its apartment up there over the holidays.  Suddenly out of the
blue, he called from the train station and begged me to come with
them.

To forgive him.  To take him back.  Then he called from the train, then
from the train station in New York, then from the apartment.  I
couldn't believe it.  But this time I resisted and said no.

"I stayed home with the baby and pampered myself by reading The Thorn
Birds.  I even read in bed, something John didn't like me to do.  I had
Thanksgiving dinner with my family.  It was a wonderful break for me in
some ways because it had been years since I had been alone with only
one small, quiet baby to take care of.  And I was feeling strong
because somehow John had changed his mind.  "When he came home, I had
made Brunswick stew and I went upstairs to ask him if he'd like some.

And I don't know what happened but within a few hours we were in bed.

He said that he had lied about the women to hurt me.  And he was going
to be so good to me from then on.  Because I knew that in this frame of
mind he would agree to anything, I had actually drawn up a list of
rights that I wanted him to agree to.  Of course, they were very little
things, like being able to plant flowers if I wanted.  He would later
ridicule my measly demands as being my 'bill of rights."  But at the
time, it felt wonderful that he said okay to them.

"That first week, when he came home, he tooted the horn and opened the
garage door himself and came into the kitchen with a big 'Hi, Char,'
'Hi, boys, Dad's home."  Then he'd give us all big hugs.  It was
wonderful.  I was so happy.  Our honeymoon periods weren't the kind of
willing and dining fantasies you hear about, but they were periods of
really nice behavior on his part.  He would say over and over again how
beautiful I was.  He would call me more frequently during the day and
tell me all the things he had done.  They were wonderful periods of
real communication."

Some people, though, weren't as thrilled about their reconciliation as
Charlotte was.  For Charlotte's sister Martha, the disappointment was
great.  Ever since Pelham, she had heard Charlotte tell the same sad
stories.  Charlotte used her sister as a kind of wailing wall, gaining
cathartic solace from releasing all her emotions.  Then, renewed
herself, Charlotte left her sister atremble with the weight of her
sorrows, expecting Martha to still be standing strong, waiting, next
time Charlotte needed her.  It could be too much for Martha sometimes,
particularly since Charlotte didn't seem to want to leave John.  Martha
felt as if she was watching Charlotte slowly die, as surely as if she
had terminal cancer.

After all the frenetic closeness she and Charlotte had had during the
crisis of John's announcing he wanted a divorce, Charlotte suddenly cut
Martha off.  Hurt and angered, Martha pulled back from her sister.

The relationship between man and wife is not the only one to suffer in
marital discord.  Ultimately, such strains only isolate the spouse
more, making her husband's influence even more profound.

"She would call me after these fights, crying," says Martha.

"She'd be in pieces.  I didn't know enough to say to her, 'Hey, look,
this isn't normal."  I would tell her to ease up on herself, that she
really wasn't an awful person at all.  During these really bad periods,
she needed constant attention.  I was worried that she'd throw herself
off a bridge or something, so I called daily, sometimes hourly, to
check up on her and see how she was.  Then, as soon as they made up,
she'd pull away from me.

After this intense period, then, you felt like she had dropped you off
a cliff.  You see, for her to be close with him during these honeymoon
periods, to rationalize her decision to go back to him, she had to cut
off the person she had told all these horrible things to.  That's
partly how she could deny that the bad existed.  So I never got to
share in any of the good times.  I heard only the bad.

"And I had been bludgeoned by his comments.  I had seen the silences
myself.  One time he came home when I was there.  He walked in, didn't
speak to me, to Charlotte, to the kids.  He went upstairs, changed, sat
down to tie his shoes in the kitchen where we all were, and went out to
run without saying one word.  I was gone before he got back.

So I knew what her life was like.  Charlotte deserved better.

"The Thanksgiving that John went to New York, I thought she had finally
gotten strong enough to leave him.  She talked about it with Mimi and
me over Thanksgiving dinner.  She had even gotten a lawyer.  I thought,
'This time, this time."  Then he came home and she called me and gave
me the I-can't-live-without-a-man and
the-Church-says-it'swrong-to-get-divorced conversation, and told me
that they were back together.  I hung up the phone and went completely
to pieces.

"I had to distance myself after that.  I was around, but just not as
much.  I just felt too hypocritical trying to be friendly with John.  I
couldn't condone what she was doing to herself.  I tried to be happy
for her, but I knew the whole cycle would only repeat itself.

Charlotte and I are very much alike.  To have to accept the fact that
she really doesn't see something your way, and especially when that
something is so important, that's really hard.  It's like losing
someone you love, because it is their life ultimately.  Charlotte just
gave so much to John herself that she expected too much from other
people.  She expected herself to swallow things lovingly and she didn't
realize that someone might finally say, 'I can't take any more of
this."

"After that phone call, I went through a real grieving process.  I
probably would have felt worse if she had died, but not much."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN After John won Charlotte back in November 1978, he
seemed to settle down a bit, perhaps exhausted by the fall's
upheaval.

He seemed to enjoy a few of the pleasures that his high-paying,
high-visibility job could bring.

Charlotte, in fact, remembers 1979, 1980, and the beginning of 1981 as
being "peak years" of their marriage.  John's salary was high enough
that they could afford more treats for their children and themselves.

Charlotte also recalls that she and John began to enjoy more of the
social perks Arnold & Porter had to offer their partners.

In the spring of 1979, for instance, Charlotte recalls they received a
refund on their income taxes because of a loss from an investment the
firm had made, and John used the money to purchase a Sohmer console
piano for Charlotte.  On one of his business trips to Rio de Janeiro,
he returned with an emerald ring for his wife.

Charlotte says It was by far one of the most romantic things he ever
did," says Charlotte.  "He gave it to me right when he came back.  I
was so excited that he had brought me back something so pretty and gave
it to me as a surprise.  It had three emeralds and eight little
diamonds in between."

At Easter, 1980, John again won the firm's lottery for the New York
City apartment overlooking Central Park, and he and Charlotte took all
the children to the city.  They went to the Easter parade, to see Peter
Pan, a musical starring Sandy Duncan, and to tour the Empire State
Building, museums, and other sights.  It was a wonderful, exciting,
happy trip, as were the week-long vacations the family now took at
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.  John and Charlotte also took quick jaunts to
basketball tournaments in Boston; Providence, Rhode Island; and Salt
Lake City, Utah.

They tried to take their sons to special events in Washington-when the
Pope came to the city in October 1979, for instance, the whole family
went down to the Mall to see him.  They also went to the Washington

Ballet's Christmas production of The Nutcracker.

And there were other jeweled moments that could leave Charlotte
speechless with appreciation.  Such as July 1980, on her parents'
fortieth wedding anniversary, when John picked up a substantial bill
for their surprise party in an unheralded gesture of largess.

"His picking up that check made me very happy, because I hadn't asked
him to do it," says Charlotte.  "He just did it and never complained
about the cost.  That was the kind of moment I lived for and which kept
me going.  And the trips were things we were just starting to be able
to afford.  These were the kinds of things that my father had done for
us, which are so exciting for children.  It may sound trite, but having
the extra money to do special things for the kids and for us made it
easier to excuse, to survive the bad times."

Rich on its clients' fees, Arnold & Porter also hosted special events,
such as yearly picnics, for its attorneys and their families, which
gave Charlotte and the boys pleasant days to look forward to.

Charlotte particularly appreciated the firm-sponsored outings because
they gave John an opportunity to relax and spend happy afternoons with
the children.

"Those picnics were great," says Charlotte.  "They rented a farm in
Maryland and set up every kind of sport.  There were clowns and
hayrides and square dancing.  The food was amazing-they had lobster and
corn cooked in pits, and homemade pies.  They were really wonderful
events."

During those three years, Arnold & Porter arranged an annual black-tie
extravaganza.  "John used to call them 'the proms."  The last one we
went to, at the Mayflower Hotel, was really a little too much.  The
hors d'oeuvres buffet included a man in a half-dinghy and a slicker
shucking fresh oysters, like the old man of the sea.  There were ice
sculptures, and after the sit-down dinner there was a flashy, patriotic
entertainmment group, 'llp with America' type of kids.  The other
dances were subdued and nice."

These grandiose moments, however, sometimes had their little
disappointments, says Charlotte.  One year, she had gone to a great
deal of trouble to find a dress for the Arnold & Porter formal dinner
that would be as striking as what she knew another partner's wife, whom
John had always admired, would wear.  But she recalls that John didn't
like it and made her take it back.  That hurt, because she was trying
so hard to imitate a style of dressing he had always loudly
complimented.

And when he brought her the emerald ring, Charlotte remembers John
immediately worrying about her wearing it-telling her that she would
dirty or damage it.  He took the joy out of wearing it, she says, so
she stopped, except on fancy occasions.

After John purchased the piano, Charlotte took lessons.  She wanted to
be good enough to play real music for her husband.  "But that got to be
unpleasant too," she says.  "He became like a parent about my
practicing.  He'd always ask if I had practiced that day and was testy
if I hadn't.

And then when I did practice when he was around, I would start with
scales, as my teacher taught me, and he would complain about that
because they sounded boring.  He'd come into the room to listen every
now and then, but I would get so nervous I couldn't do anything.

"I know I was overly sensitive about the piano, but I knew he would
have liked to have had a wife talented enough to play for his guests,
and I just didn't have that in me.  So I felt inadequate, which again
took the fun out of it for me.

"It was like a beautiful but very complicated Williamsburg needlework
sampler he gave me the first or sechnd Christmas after we married.

It was tedious, difficult work.  I never finished it and he never let
me forget it.  Or tennis.  I had started tennis lessons at
Congressional at John's very nice suggestion and was getting pretty
good, but then I'd play with John and he'd return the ball so hard I
couldn't get it.  And then he'd yell at me for making mistakes.  I'd
leave the courts completely demoralized.  He just wanted us all to be
as perfect as he could be.

"But despite all that, these gifts and the happy times were enough for
me to live on.  They truly were grand, nice, and, I think, heartfelt
gestures.  And I honestly didn't mind his being a workaholic, if that
had been all he was.  That was the kind of relationship I had grown up
with-we hadn't seen my father much and that could hurt, but the good
times seemed to make up for it because they were so good.  I would have
been basically very satisfied and settled in the marriage had it not
been for the control and for the abuse."

And there was more physical violence.  On Easter 1979, John had slipped
into a semi-silent mood.  His parents were visiting, and feeling
protected by their presence, Charlotte tried an approach that before
had usually worked.  She says she tried to cajole him out of his mood
with sex.

John had gone to bed early.  He always slept more during these quiet
periods.  When he didn't respond to Charlotte's overture, she teased
him about it.  John slapped her, hard, in the face.

She went downstairs and told his parents what had happened.  "I guess I
wanted them to realize that their son really needed some help," says
Charlotte.  They went upstairs to talk to him, and he claimed that I
had punched him.  They believed him and said that I basically deserved
what I had gotten.

"You can't believe the overwhelming rush of sickness I felt.  Here were
three adults who meant a lot to me telling me I deserved it.

It just reinforced my belief that I was the cause of it all."

John left the house that evening and told Charlotte afterward he had
checked into a hotel.  He would later testify that having to discuss
the incident with his parents was "very humiliating."  He didn't call
Charlotte until several days later.

"He said that he would come back but only on his terms," she says.

"He basically read me a litany of my faults and told me what had to
change.  It was his way or no way, he said.  And I just told him to
come home.  I took him back because I thought I definitely had been in
the wrong this time.  And I was terrified.  Before I was mostly
terrified of losing him.  Now I was also terrified of not having a
provider for my family.  I had four little children, and, I thought, no
skills, even though I had been trained as a nurse.  He had me convinced
that I was worthless.

What could I do to make money?  Who in the world would hire me?  Once
again he had me convinced that he could sell the house pretty much
overnight without my consent and that I would be out on the street
destitute.

And I believed him.

"When he came back I tried to do anything I could to soothe him."

The year ended happily.  That summer the family rented a pretty, large
house at the beach for a week and Charlotte recalls that they had a
pleasant time together.

She began to make some real friends, whom she held on to regardless of
John's opinion of them.  That fall, Charlotte joined a book club, with
several of her neighborhood friends, which met once a month.  She even
went away to the beach with them overnight.  Under their encouragement,
her confidence began to grow a bit, though she still never talked to
any of them after 5 PM.  She started coaching one of her son's soccer
teams.  She was slowly carving a tiny life of her own outside her home
and marriage.

John didn't mind Charlotte's coaching the boys' soccer team, she says,
because that involved sports and his sons, although he was not pleased
by the other flickers of independence.  But Charlotte managed to
genuinely please him by losing twenty pounds and successfully
hostessing a sumptuous Christmas party for about seventy Arnold &
Porter attorneys and wives.

The book club, however, was probably the most significant addition to
Charlotte's life that year.  Now she had a support group, which she had
never had before during her marriage.  John had always censured her
friendships before, she says, mostly limiting their social
acquaintances to his business or sports friends, people Charlotte would
never have felt comfortable confiding in.  If any of his friends became
more hers, John would almost disinherit them.  Years before, when Molly
Head-originally exclusively John's friend from Marquette but later
predominantly Charlotte's-had planned to visit them with her husband,
John told Charlotte he didn't want them to stay.  Charlotte remembers
his making jokes that only his friends were allowed to stay overnight
in their home.

The Potomac book club would nurture Charlotte and gradually wean her
from total dependence on John for her self-esteem, helping to build the
strength she would need to eventually stand on her own.

Interestingly, the first book the women would read for shared
discussion was The Women'S Room, a novel about a middle-aged housewife
trying to piece together her life following a divorce.

"That book club was the first thing I did with just the ladies," says
Charlotte.  "It was a big deal because we went out to dinner and I
actually spent maybe $20 on myself.  John didn't like it at all.  But I
prepared his dinner, fed the boys, and had the house perfect before I
left.  I also never read any of the books around him because that would
aggravate him.

And I knew that he'd be in a bad mood for at least a day about it.  But
I didn't fight it or try to change him about it.  I just did it and
tried not to get upset, which actually was a big step for me.

"These nights were really good for me, because it got me dressed up and
out of the house.  John just assumed that this was an excuse for us to
go out and talk about our husbands.  But we never did.  We talked about
the books.  The discussions were so good for me.  I would be absolutely
floored that these educated women I thought so highly of would actually
listen to me.  It was so exciting."

"I think the book club had a profound effect on Charlotte," says Denise
Gogarty.  "I think we gave her such different feedback from what she
got from John.  We were accepting and uncritical of everyone, no matter
what anyone's opinion about the subject matter was.  And reading
prescribed books on a variety of topics allowed all of us to think
about something beyond the scope of our homes and children.  Also, I
think it was a community in the way Scott Peck, author of The Road Less
Traveled, defines it: it was inclusive, had a sense of commitment, was
a safe place for people to be themselves, soft individualism could
grow, it was immune to mob psychology, was realistic in expectations,
and had a spirit of love."

Says Charlotte: "I think I did grow.  Of course, I saw it more in terms
of the marriage.  I was handling his disapproval about the book club,
and because the evenings didn't turn into major fights I felt like we
were growing.  But I realize now that I was really starting to come out
of my shell some.  Maybe I was beginning to handle things a little
better with John because I no longer made him the total center of my
universe.

I had the boys.  I had a few friends.  I was doing a lot of volunteer
work at the kids' school.  I was no longer quite as devastated when I
felt that he rejected me.

"Sometimes I think that, had we not moved to New York right after we
married and I had stayed near my family, or if we hadn't moved to
Dallas just as I was starting to make friends in New York, maybe I
wouldn't have felt so alone and would have had the support I needed to
have gotten out of the marriage sooner.

While the book club bolstered her confidence about her
intellectualcapacities, Charlotte also gained some self-assurance when
the Christmas party seemed to be such a success with John's friends and
with John.  Of course, it was much simpler to pull off, because, for
the first time, John and Charlotte hired a catering company.

"It was a lovely party," says Charlotte.  "John said there were no
expenses barred.  So we ended up spending a couple thousand dollars on
it.  We had printed invitations.  The caterers brought waiters, a
bartender, and a lady in a proper uniform to take people's coats at the
door.

The dining-room table was covered with food.  The family room had a
sweets-and-coffee table.  I had given the catering firm my recipe for
Brunswick stew and we gave some of the guests jars of it as they
left.

I didn't have to do a thing, so I could really enjoy it for a change.

John was really up.

He was bragging about how thin I was.  It was a very elegant evening.

There was not one flaw.  That night we achieved the social status John
had always seemed to want.  I figured that this was the way the rest of
our lives was going to be."

In the summer of 1980, Charlotte was asked to join the board of
trustees of The Woods Academy, where three of the boys were enrolled.

Right after John Michael had died, the principal, Sister Celestine, had
preoccupied Charlotte with volunteer work at the school to help her
cope with her baby's death.  Charlotte had updated all the students'
health records and had helped design the school's new uniforms.  The
school knew that she was a hard, dedicated worker, although Charlotte
doubted their wisdom in asking her.

Charlotte told John about the request at the beach.  She recalls he had
just come out of a long period of semi-silence that morning.

She had purposely waited until they made up to tell him, because she
didn't want him to forbid her to do it.  They were on the boardwalk.

She remembers that John handled it well, although he did ask her, "What
do you have to offer?"

But Charlotte says they discussed her involvement at the school
rationally.  John seemed to accept the fact that she would be going to
a meeting once a month.  She viewed the conversation as a victory for
them both.  She certainly wouldn't have been able to be that calm the
night before.

The trip down to the beach had been a convulsive one, says Charlotte.

The previous several weeks, in fact, had been hard.  A month or so
before the beach vacation, John had been speaking infrequently.

Charlotte recalls that he had instructed her to buy a Bar Mitzvah gift
for a friend's child.  Without turning around from his desk, John told
her to spend around $100.  Charlotte balked at being ordered to spend a
certain amount of money, especially since it was a large sum, which was
often denied her or the boys, and she crumpled the invitation.  John
chased her downstairs to the front hall, picked up a Chinese vase, she
says, and threw it to the floor, smashing it at her feet.

Another argument delayed their leaving for the beach by one day, even
though they were paying more than $1,000 a week, for a house that was
only a block from the beach.  When they did leave, yet another
disagreement erupted in the car.  Charlotte was driving and pulled over
on River Road's shoulder because John had her in tears.  She got out of
the car, hysterical, and she says that John started to drive away,
leaving her on the highway.  The children began screaming in the back
seat.

John stopped.  Charlotte got back in the car and they went home.

The next morning they did manage to make the three-hour drive to the
beach, but John ignored Charlotte once they arrived.  He really didn't
like the beach, anyway, she says.  He went to bed early.

Left alone and depressed, Charlotte tried to forget her fears, her
anger, her self-recriminations, her insecurities.  She sat in the
living room and drank wine.  Drank and drank until she was sick.

"I remember drinking like that only a couple of times," says Charlotte,
"and I'm not proud of it.  It was like hiding in the closet.

I was trying to escape.  It hurt less after a glass of wine.  And I
think I was trying to grab John's attention without really hurting
myself.  I guess I thought if he knew how affected I was by all this
turmoil he'd realize how much I needed him to help me.

That August, Charlotte was pregnant again.  John was pleased, but she
was a little embarrassed about expecting a sixth baby, which would
bring a fifth living child to a family already strained energy-wise,
emotionally, and financially.  She asked that John wait to make the
announcement until she was a little further along in the pregnancy and
he agreed.

But on their way to Wisconsin for a vacation, they stopped to visit
John's parents.  While there, Charlotte celebrated her thirty-seventh
birthday.  That night, at dinner, John presented her with an expensive
purse.  Inside was a poem he had written that she says he insisted she
read aloud.  Charlotte swallowed hard, turned red, and complied.  In
essence, John's verse said that he hoped she'd carry the purse to the
hospital when she had the baby.

"It embarrassed me," she says.  "It just seemed a little devious to
me.

When they returned, John again ignored her request and told Charlotte's
friend Denise Gogarty.

"That time was cruel," remembers Gogarty.  "They were standing in the
garage, just back from their trip.  John immediately said to me,
'Charlotte has a big surprise for you,' and Charlotte said, 'Oh no,
John, don't."

He kept at it, saying things like 'Wait until you hear the news."

She started crying and went into the house.  I guess Charlotte thought
I would disapprove-I wouldn't have urged another pregnancy, but once it
was a baby I would only congratulate her-so it was especially cruel of
John to tell me that way."

The children, in fact, were becoming a major source of trouble between
Charlotte and John.  Although she thought that she was learning to cope
a little better with John's demands and moods, his pressure on the boys
and desire for them to be outstanding students and athletes were adding
friction to their uneasy relationship.

It started with Luke.  Two years earlier, following John Michael's
death, Luke's schoolwork had begun to slide.  His third-grade teacher
had noticed that he "puts tremendous pressure on himself and seems
terribly anxious for a nine-year-old," and by the fourth grade he was
acting the class clown in a conservative, Catholic environment.  It
became a serious enough problem that Charlotte sent Luke to a
therapist, Dr. Mary Donahue, who speculated that because his home life
was stressful, school had become Luke's release, his time to play.

Charlotte made plans to move Luke to another school and held him back a
grade.

She remembers that John never seemed to believe there was anything
wrong with his sons other than laziness.  Like many overachieving
parents who expect their children to be as driven and competent as they
had been, John rode his boys hard, probably believing they would thank
him later.  He and Charlotte enrolled Luke in soccer and basketball
camps.

He wanted his firstborn to be a swimmer like he had been and pushed him
to join Congressional's team even though Luke preferred and was better
at diving.

Family meals became especially tense.  In addition to quizzing the boys
about their schoolwork, John forced them to eat large quantities of
food.  Although he was now six-foot-ten and weighed 230 pounds, John
had been thin as a teenager and he wanted his boys to be well
developed.

From 1980 on, says Charlotte, most of the trouble between them resulted
from her trying to relax some of his rules for the children.

"I used to hold report cards for days at a time because he would get so
angry," she says.  "It got to the point that when I told the boys that
John wasn't coming home for dinner, they'd cheer.  They just weren't
pleasant times.  John expected too much out of them, probably for the
right kind of reasons, but it was just too much for them.  He used to
force them to eat helping after helping because he wanted them to grow
up big.  It happened almost every meal.  It got so that I just gave
Luke smaller helpings to begin with and wouldn't put any extra food on
the table, because John wouldn't get up to get the seconds.  In fact,
the kids had to wait on him.  When he wanted water, if they didn't put
in the exact number of ice cubes he wanted-I think it was four-he'd get
irritated.  If I suggested that he do it himself, since he didn't like
the way they did it, he'd yell at me, calling me a 'fucking bitch' a
lot of the time.  I don't know how many times he called me that in
front of the children.

"The dinner conversations were rather controlled.  They weren't
monologues by John, but it was mostly question and answer.  If Luke
tried to tell a joke that might include something a little bit naughty
or one bad word, something he had heard at school, John would listen to
it and then say, 'We don't use that kind of language in this house; if
you want to use it go out in the street."  And five minutes later, John
would say 'shit."

Mostly he'd ask them, 'What did you do today?"  and when they'd answer,
'Nothing,' like kids do, he'd say that he wasn't paying all this money
for them to do nothing.

"When he got angry at one, he was angry at them all.  Like when he was
angry with me, he wouldn't talk to the whole family.  They just didn't
understand it, and they made it worse because my kids are fighters.

They never learned to sit there prim and proper and just eat.

"They were like me.  I knew that if I could just keep quiet, things
would at least be quiet with John.  But how can you sit still and let
someone walk over you?  Especially in front of the children."

Something Charlotte had written in a diary when they were vacationing
in Wisconsin in 1978 was beginning to become a daily concern for her:
"If I could just hear him and not let him bother me-he would be
happy.

Why do I have to defend myself?  Why can't I let him walk over me and
keep quiet.  . . . I wonder what the children really think of me.

I imagine they'll grow up thinking I screamed a lot, was unjust to
their Dad and was usually totally unreasonable.  I'm pretty good alone
but can rarely handle John and his clean obsession and the boys.  I do
try, but I rarely remain calm.  The boys will probably grow up
wondering why I never stood up firm and proud to their father.  They
can't respect me.

I love them all so much, but I sometimes feel that I'm no good for
them...

PART FOUR THE STING OF POWER Washington is full of famous men and the
women they married when they were young.

Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a White House dinner honoring her
husband 1903

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By the end of 1980, John seemed more and
more restless to Charlotte.

She says he told her that he wanted to leave Arnold & Porter.  He
wanted to do something new.  He wanted to move-all this just as
Charlotte and the boys were becoming more and more attached to the
community.

Charlotte began to wonder if anything would ever make John really
happy.  He seemed naturally content when Marquette won a basketball
game or when he spent quiet times with the boys, just holding their
hands as they walked the canal trail next to the Potomac River.  But
Charlotte says that these events were rare and that he seemed to be
pushing his family away from him as he grasped at some fleeting dream
that he couldn't even describe to her.

Perhaps the election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980 was an answer to
her prayers.  Reagan favored corporate types in his administration.

The Californians would need all sorts of new people, come the
inauguration, people familiar with Washington.  They couldn't import
everyone from the West Coast.  Maybe John could find a position in this
administration.  It might be easier than trying to secure one in
Carter's, since John was a registered Republican.

Of course, John wasn't talking about just any pencil-pushing
bureaucrat's job.  He was talking about one affecting policy, one that
would be worth leaving his lucrative partnership for.  The power that
came with a federal job must have appealed to him, but what John told
Charlotte was most attractive to him was making use of Washington's
revolving-door tradition, popularized in part by the founders of his
firm, whereby high-ranking federal officers move on to high-paying
private industry jobs.

It took a few well-placed phone calls to let the appropriate people
know he was willing to move from Arnold & Porter, if offered an
enticing office, says Charlotte.  That done, John was first considered
for a position in Treasury.  It didn't pan out.  But within a few
weeks, he was being considered for the chief of the enforcement
division with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  In the old
game of musical chairs that happens in Washington every election, the
man then holding the job decided to move over to the post of general
counsel to the CIA.

With his white-collar-crime background and the fact that he had
represented many corporate clients in front of the SEC, John was
uniquely qualified for the job and the new emphasis of the
commissiontracking down and prosecuting those engaging in financial
fraud and insider trading on Wall Street.  In late June 1981, John
Shad, Reagan's political appointee to the SEC chairmanship, chose John
over forty-nine other applicants.

John was thirty-nine years old, the first person in his position not to
have been promoted to it from within the agency.  A man who had never
deliberately made political friends.  A man who, to Charlotte's
knowledge, had not given money to any campaign other than Nixon's
presidential race.  John had won the position on professional merit.

Not that he hadn't had to do some quick lobbying.  But John simply
hadn't done enough within the Republican Party for the job to be
returning a favor to him or to some well-placed sponsor.  Charlotte was
very proud of him.

There had been some tense moments during the selection process.

Like when the FBI interviewed neighbors about John, asking questions to
determine if John was at all corruptible and therefore unsuitable for a
sensitive government post, or had any secrets that could make him
vulnerable to blackmail from foreign agents.  The questions included
what kind of husband and father he was.

The bureau's investigator spoke to Denise Gogarty and her husband for
about twenty minutes.  She remembers they asked if John was honest and
loyal to the country.  Did he seem to have integrity in his work?

Those were easy to answer yes.  Then he asked if John dressed well.

Her husband fielded that one: "He should, he has his suits custom
made."

What kind of neighbor is he?  "Fine" was the answer.  Then came the
hard question: "What kind of husband and father is Mr.  Fedders?"

Gogarty knew how much John wanted this position, how badly Charlotte
wanted him to have it.  Charlotte was convinced that this job would
finally make John happy.  But Gogarty hesitated a moment, long enough
for her husband to answer for her, saying he saw John playing catch
with his children all the time, that he must be a good family man.  The
investigator didn't pursue the line of questioning other than to ask if
Charlotte was a good mother.  Gogarty says she had no difficulty in
answering that with a resolute affirmative.

Once in his SEC office at 450 Fifth Street, near Union Station and
close to Capitol Hill, John looked at the FBI records about him.

He told Charlotte that she should have seen some of the comments their
neighbors made.  She presumed they must have overheard some of their
arguments, but John never elaborated and obviously the information
didn't hamper his getting the job.  Besides, Gogarty remembers that
nobody other than Charlotte's neighbors across the street, with whom
Charlotte had taken refuge in 1976, really knew about the pain inside
John and Charlotte's home.  Only one neighbor had overheard a bad fight
between Charlotte and John as they stood in their driveway while he
jogged past their home.  He later sent some reading material to
Charlotte about how to improve Christian marriages.

So, to most McAuley Park residents, the cream brick house on Carmelita
Drive was as pristine and orderly inside as it was outside.  The
Fedderses were that nice, attractive family that came to church
together every Sunday.  The reality of John and Charlotte's
relationship remained a well-guarded secret, except to those she had
tearfully taken into her confidence.

How prestigious was John's new position?  John told Charlotte that his
was the most important job in the city.  That's a bit of an
exaggeration, but the person who was "top cop" at the SEC-as business
journalists nicknamed him-wielded a powerful scepter, one that could
fell some of the richest individuals in America.  John was underneath
the aegis of the five SEC commissioners, all of whom were political
appointees, confirmed by the Senate.  They really set the tone of the
commission's actions.  But John would be the one to implement them and
the one whose staff-two hundred lawyers, accountants, and support
personnel in Washington, plus four hundred lawyers in regional offices
across the country-would ferret out and prosecute wrongdoers.

A phone call from an SEC staffer could make a stockbroker or a
corporate executive tremble, although many an American uninvolved with
the stock market is unfamiliar with its work.  Charlotte certainly
didn't know much about it until John explained it to her.

The SEC was founded just over fifty years ago to keep the stock market
and large corporations honest.  It ensures that publicly traded
companies disclose their finances to stockholders and keep clear
records of dealings; that stockbrokers are properly registered and
comply with a prescribed code of ethics; that stock prices are not
manipulated by their companies or executives; and that takeovers or
mergers are done openly.

As one former commissioner put it, the SEC keeps "con men and
pickpockets" out of the stock exchange.  Its first chairman,
interestingly enough, was JFK's father, the late Joseph Kennedy, who
found himself constantly reprimanding old friends.

Although the commission is only one strand of a large, intricate web of
federal agencies designed to catch individuals corroding American
freedoms, the SEC's investigations can have far-reaching ripple effects
throughout the country.  It, for instance, is the federal body
responsible, in late 1986, for exposing Ivan Boesky, one of the
country's most successful arbitrageurs (a person who specializes in
buying and selling stocks of companies about to be bought out), as
being guilty of receiving inside information from companies before he
bought or sold their stocks.

That meant Boesky was no longer speculating when he traded, he wasn't
taking any kind of risk, he had an unfair advantage.  Speculation is
the lifeblood of Wall Street, what keeps all investors equal and the
little man willing to play the market.  And that willingness of the
public to keep investing in company stocks is vital in keeping the
American economy healthy.

So John's job was both obscure and far-reaching, one that had a lot of
pressure when he took it over in the summer of 1981, because the
country was in a recession.  Companies desperately needed seed money
from stock sales to reinvest in new technology and training.  That
money would only come from Americans if their faith in the market as a
safe, profitable place to invest was restored.  And the SEC and John
would have to restore it through prosecuting a lot of cases.

When John decided to join the SEC, he and Charlotte knew it would
require some financial sacrifices.  His annual salary would start just
under $60,000, a hefty government wage but one that was half his salary
with Arnold & Porter.  It also wasn't the best time for the family to
be cutting back so drastically, either.  Their sixth son, Peter, was
born in April.  They had five young children to raise.  Four were in
private Catholic schools, a type of education that Charlotte says both
she and John strongly believed in, but that had large tuition costs.

John promised her that the boys wouldn't have to switch to the county's
public schools, which Charlotte feared were too competitive and too
large for them to get individual attention.  She also strongly believed
that the boys should get daily religious instruction, that they
couldn't really know about Catholicism by only attending Sunday school
once a week.

Charlotte remembers that several people questioned her and John about
the wisdom of John's career decision, considering the needs of his
rather large family.  But John told Charlotte that he had it all
figured out.

To compensate for the lost income, he arranged for a $150,000 line of
credit with Washington's Madison National Bank.  He also promised
Charlotte that he would leave the SEC within four years, no later than
January 20, 1985 (the date of the next presidential inauguration),
although publicly he promised to remain until Shad left.  He said to
Charlotte and to friends that he'd be able to springboard to at least a
$300,000 salary with a Washington law firm and he was probably right.

As one Wall Street journal opinion piece stated following the publicity
of their divorce hearing: 'It's hard to think of a government job with
more lucrative revolving door potential than director of enforcement at
the SEC."

John's confidence of being able to easily find a job following the SEC
was boosted by the number of farewell dinner and cocktail parties
Arnold & Porter colleagues threw for him.  At one, a partner raised his
glass in a toast, saying there would always be a candle in the window
at the firm for John.  With so many promises, he and Charlotte could
borrow to survive until he returned to the private world, the
triumphant prodigal son.

Charlotte was enthusiastic because John seemed so happy for the first
time in years.  Right after the announcement of his getting the job,
they left to spend a week at Rehoboth Beach.  She recalls that John
spent most of his time reading and responding to a flood of
congratulatory mail, from old Cadwalader and Dallas associates,
long-lost school friends, plus current admirers.  When they returned
from the beach, John and Charlotte attended a neighborhood party, where
John was warm and complimentary to her book club friends.  He was in
high spirits, indeed, and Charlotte prayed the job change would be a
turning point for their marriage.

"I thought John would finally be satisfied," she says.  "Money had been
a problem, so, looking down the road, it seemed that he'd be making
twice as much.  I was happy because we were staying in Washington after
all his talk of being a gypsy.  I was worried that we had no cash
reserves, but John seemed to think that it was all taken care of.

"We were all very excited.  The boys joked about having to give up
lollipops for four years.  I started packing his lunches and tucked
little poems and notes in them.  I'd write "Top Cop" on the bag.  I
even cross-stitched a paperweight for him that said 'I'm a legend in my
own mind,' which he seemed to really like and put on his desk at
work.

And, of course, since he told me that this was the most important job
in Washington, I was all set to be going to the White House for
dinner.

"John wanted prestige and power, but he didn't want to kiss up to
anybody.  That's why he disliked Arnold & Porter.  I think he always
believed that his hard work would speak for itself.  And, remarkably,
with the SEC it did.  The Midwest country boy had really made it on his
own.

He was giddy about it.  It's just that his lack of savvy about what
public figures have to do to stay in office would get him in
trouble."

John's ego ballooned, Charlotte says, starting with the press
conference to announce his appointment.  How many of his legal peers
were ever photographed and discussed in the Wall Street Journal, the
New York Times, and the Washington Post all in one day?  Charlotte went
to the press conference and sat quietly in the corner with John's
secretary, listening to her husband answer reporters' questions.  She
was amazed how well he fielded them.

Although future monetary reward had been the catalyst he had stated to
Charlotte for entering government employment, a new lure soon seemed to
tug at John-budding celebrity.  It was minor league celebrity, to be
sure, compared to that of cabinet officers or congressmen, but it
certainly was more than he had ever tasted since his days as a tall,
cool man around Marquette University.  And this was the big time-this
was Washington, D.C not a college campus.

John started checking the Washington Post business section each
morning, says Charlotte.  When his boss, John Shad, was quoted on an
SEC matter and he wasn't, or if a reporter had contacted him and then
not quoted him in the story, John was perturbed.  He had his secretary
check all the other newspapers for mentions of him.  He also started
keeping records of each day's happenings on legal pads.  He told her
that he planned to write a book when he left.

John replaced Stanley Sporkin, a man who had been with the commission a
long time and was very popular with his staff.  Many of the lawyers
under him quit right after the changeover.  Part of the disgruntlement
of John's attorneys, according to press accounts, was the switch in
emphasis at the SEC, from the splashy expose's of corporations' foreign
slush funds and attempted briberies, for which Sporkin had been famous,
to more painstaking and less flamboyant investigations of insider
trading and stock manipulation.  It didn't lessen the pressure on John
that, at his first press conference, Sporkin made a much-quoted joke
that he would be keeping an eye on John from his new post at the CIA.

The difference in style of the two enforcement chiefs was, in fact, a
recurrent question during John's interviews.  He constantly had to
respond that he would be just as creative as Sporkin had been, the SEC
just as newsworthy.  But he did love the attention, says Charlotte.  It
wouldn't be long before he was called to appear on radio and TV talk
shows, Good Morning, America, Larry King, and Nightline- however
briefly.

Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, Legal Times, Forbes, and
Barron's all interviewed him.  And his new entry in Who's Who in
America was impressively long.

Almost all the newspaper stories mentioned that John had been a former
basketball player, that he was unusually tall, and that he liked to run
his staff as he would coach an athletic team.  Of all the reports,
however, the one in Barron's was probably the most revealing of John's
private personality.  In answer to a suggestion that the SEC might go
soft on corporations by spending so much attention on policing illegal
stock tips, John countered: "As the most severe critic of my own
conduct, I see absolutely no evidence to justify that conclusion.

There's nobody who's a more severe critic of himself than me.  I'm
always looking for avenues to criticize myself.  My best friend is Al
Maguire.  He used to coach basketball at Marquette; he's the NBC
basketball commentator now.

I've known him for years.  And he stops me all the time and says, 'You
never stop to smell the roses.

The final question and answer of that interview was: "Q.  John, is
there anything you see going on in the securities markets that makes
you personally angry?

"I don't have the capacity to be angry.  If you're six-foot-ten, you
find that anger is not necessary."

During his first months in office, besides learning to cope with all
his responsibilities and getting to know his staff across the country,
John made several public-speaking appearances out of town.  He often
traveled to the city and back in a single day, which added to his
increasing weariness.  But he seemed to thrive on the attention of the
events as well, since he kept a detailed file on each appearance,
including letters, his speech notes, and press clips.  Typically he
left before the children were up and came home after they were in bed,
even when he was in town, says Charlotte.  Now that he was also making
speeches, there seemed to be little time left for his family.

Charlotte too was becoming increasingly fatigued, taking care of a
newborn, a three-year-old, a seven-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a
twelve-year-old.  She had four children in school-three in one, and the
fourth, whom she had to pick up at lunchtime, at another.  She felt she
was constantly driving the car.  And, despite the overload of so many
children, Charlotte knew the house should be just as perfect, just as
orderly as when she had only two sons to watch; that John would want
his meals waiting for him when he got home, no matter what the hour.

"The major change the SEC made in John was his ego," says Charlotte.

"There grew even more desire in him for power at home.

And he got so that if someone got in his way, he walked right over
them.

People didn't seem to matter anymore.

Although John had occasionally flattered Charlotte during his last
years at Arnold & Porter by asking her to proofread some of his
writing, now he was more reticent to discuss his work with her, she
says.

Perhaps he worried that she wouldn't fully appreciate the secrecy
needed when he was working on a case.  And perhaps John was becoming
challenged and absorbed by the work itself, liking it more than he had
anticipated, and didn't want to tell his wife that he was changing his
mind about leaving the SEC.  Maybe he thought she couldn't appreciate
how gratifying enjoying one's daily work can be, how deadening
disliking it is.

So, despite her cheerleader enthusiasm about John's new life, their
relationship seemed to grow even more distant, exacerbated by
break-neck schedules.  John and Charlotte became like two whirling tops
rarely moving in the same direction, and ricocheting wildly apart when
they did meet.

John hadn't hit Charlotte, that she could remember, since Easter
1979.

But John's control suddenly cracked and he beat her violently in
November 1981, barely five months after he became a major US law
enforcer.  Had Charlotte pressed charges for his actions, John could
have been arrested for assault and battery, an action that is against
the law, no matter who the victim, who the attacker, or what their
relationship is.

"Fall was always bad for us for some reason," she recalls.  "That's the
time each year John slipped into a mood of some kind.  That night I had
been following along behind him, trying to get him to talk to me.

Crying, pleading, yelling.  By that point in our marriage I had really
gotten so that I could argue like a truck driver.  I even spit at him a
couple of times, anything to get him to respond and to talk to me.

"He had been downstairs eating, and I followed him up the stairs into
his study.  I was verbally pushing, pushing, pushing, trying to get
some kind of response.  He was ignoring me completely.  I guess I had
finally come to realize that not being able to wear shoes in my house
was weird.

I had them on and I stamped my feet and said, 'And another thing: I
will wear my shoes in my own house.

"He turned, and his face was terrifying, filled with this incredible
hate and wide-eyed anger.  I knew I had gone too far.  I ran.  He came
after me and caught me right outside the room, at the top of the
stairwell.  I ran because I was afraid.  But I never expected he would
try to throw me over the banister.  He denies it, but I'd like to know
what he thought he was trying to do.  He was pushing me over the
railing as he beat me.  There is at least a six-foot drop straight down
to the landing of the staircase from where we were.  I felt I was going
to fall over backwards, so I collapsed my knees and fell to the
floor.

I was trying to push him away, but he had me by my hair.  He shook me
up and down, back and forth, by my hair, like he was shaking out a
towel.  The fury of it was terrifying.

I think he finally realized what he was doing and walked away.

"The first thing to ache was my scalp.  It wasn't until later that my
neck began to hurt so badly.  I finally had to go see an orthopedic
surgeon, it was so painful.  John said he was sorry for the incident
later, because he had seriously injured me and he could see that it
gave me pain.  I still have to wear a neck brace sometimes.

"Luke and one of his brothers came out of their rooms and saw us.

Seeing the shock on their little faces hurt me most, I think."

This time, Charlotte called the police herself.  Surely they would help
her she thought.

"I was really upset when I called them," she says.  "I asked them what
I should do, what I could do.  They didn't ask if I was all right, or
where he was.  They didn't tell me to leave, or give me any telephone
numbers of hotlines or counselors to call.  All they said was that I
could go to the police station or the courthouse and swear out a
complaint.  How could I swear out a complaint against our provider, I
asked myself.  I think I knew even then that it could hurt his
career.

"And it was just too much work for the condition I was in.  I would
have had to pull myself together and do something the next day.

After a beating, depression takes over immediately.  All the feelings
of inadequacy, of guilt, of fear, they totally immobilize you.  I had
mobilized myself enough to make the call, and maybe I'm naive, but it
was crushing to me that the police, the protectors of the innocent,
weren't going to do anything to help me.

Until very recently, because of common law, the police simply couldn't
do anything without the victim's swearing out a complaint or without an
officer's witnessing the attack.  Although police officers spend about
one third of their time responding to domestic violence calls, police
reports indicate that they have typically made arrests in only 30
percent of those cases, mainly because women have refused to press
charges.

Police officers have hated responding to them, say experts, partly
because it is in domestic quarrels that they are most likely to be
injured.

Cultural prejudices that manipulate law enforcement also die hard.

A man's right, as authority of a household, to beat his wife is
embedded in Western civilization.  The phrase "rule of thumb" comes
from English common law, which gave the husband the right to discipline
his wife with a rod no thicker than his thumb."  Typically, the
justification for the punishment was that the offender was a nag, an
attitude that crossed the Atlantic with the Puritans, who set up
dunking stools in the New England colonies to publicly discipline
shrewish women.  And many states, including Maryland, where Charlotte
lived, had laws allowing men "the right of chastisement" without fear
of prosecution for battery, laws that were not revoked until the early
1900s.  The judicial system simply did not meddle in the home's harmony
and hierarchy, and that attitude trickled down to the police in trying
to quell domestic violence.

But research has shown categorically that the beatings will only get
worse unless some outside authority or agency intervenes.  A recent
study done in Kansas City found that in 10 percent of the city's
domestic homicides, police had been called to the home at least five
times before the spouse was killed.  That information plus studies done
by the Police Foundation, which prove a night in jail effectively
deters aggression, has compelled lawmakers to finally make some
changes.  In 1984, Minneapolis was one of the first major US cities to
push for arresting rather than simply talking to batterers.

Today, more than half of the states allow officers to make arrests when
they have "probable cause" to suspect a crime has been committed-such
as seeing bruises or cuts on the body of a crying victim-without the
victim's making a formal complaint.  But as an officer in a northern
Virginia police department admitted, it will take some time and
training on the battering syndrome to get officers to universally use
the new prerogative.  It's hard to break old habits, she said, and
they've seen too many hysterical wives who seem unwilling to help
themselves once the police do arrive on the scene.

In 1981, however, there was no such legal safety net in place for
someone like Charlotte.  And as she would say, she didn't even realize
that what had been done to her that day was against the law.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ever since the beginning of their fifteen-year-old
marriage, says Charlotte, she and John had had periodic flare-ups about
their finances.  They began arguing over spending almost immediately
after he moved to the SEC.

With five growing boys, a house mortgage, payments on the Virginia
land, and dues at Congressional, his federal paycheck seemed a pittance
after the $161,444 salary John had made one year at Arnold & Porter,
when the firm's profits were exceptionally high.

Of course, elsewhere in the country a $60,000 salary would seem
generous, but in Washington many complain about not being able to get
by on a government paycheck because of the city's high cost of
living.

Several of Reagan's close friends and advisers, for instance, have left
their positions in the White House complaining of being pinched by
$72,000 salaries.  As members of the administration, they aren't
allowed to supplement their income, although congressmen, in
recognition of the problem, allow themselves to collect additional
monies from outside endeavors, up to 30 percent of their $75,000-plus
salaries.

Much of their financial problems result from trying to maintain an
image.  As a 1985 article in The Washingtonian magazine, titled "Going
Broke on $100,000 a Year," points out, visibility, Washington style,
has a hefty price tag.

Not that John was expected to appear at parties in the same social
stratosphere as are congressmen or cabinet officers.  But a
snobbishness does exist in the nation's capital about persons perceived
as cheapskates.

They are not tolerated-Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's no-frills White
House was mercilessly ridiculed.

John was probably also aware of another axiom, stated in The
Washingtonian: "Visibility has a cash value once you leave the
administration."

He couldn't afford to slip into social obscurity, darting from his SEC
office to spaghetti dinners at home.  He would need the contacts he
made while traveling in upper-crust society once he decided to return
to private life.

Besides, John was accustomed to certain luxuries for himself, says
Charlotte, and he wasn't going to give them up, just as he refused to
give up the fifth bedroom he used as his study, which put his five sons
together in three rooms.  Image had always been an essential part of
his bravura, ever since he and Charlotte lived in New York City, she
says.  They could just borrow until he left the SEC, he told her.

The children's tuition, however, remained the top priority.  Yet, that
was an expensive proposition, since the combined tuitions for a year
exceeded $11,000.  Charlotte tried to do her part to cut back
elsewhere.

Just as many well-off matrons with large families do in Potomac,
Charlotte had had her cleaning lady come twice a week; she trimmed that
to once weekly.  She learned to pump her own gas, would even drive out
of Potomac to find cheaper gas stations, and shopped specials at the
grocery store.  But she knew that it wasn't enough.

Charlotte would later testify that they would spend $137,000 in 1982,
more than double what the federal government was then paying John.

Charlotte says she urged him to cut back on some image-related
expenses, and to stop entertaining, but that John wouldn't.  In
December, he and Charlotte hosted a Christmas party for about seventy
of his SEC staff.  There would be no problem paying for it, he told
Charlotte, because in January he would be getting $28,283 from Arnold &
Porter as a partial buy-out of his interest in the law partnership.

That would more than cover the party and the boys' school and leave
some cash left over.  He would receive one more check of the same
amount from the firm the following year, so there was nothing to worry
about, he said.

"John wouldn't think about limiting our membership at Congressional.

At that point the club's required food minimum alone was about $800 a
year.  He wouldn't cancel his expensive subscription to Architectural
Digest.  He insisted on continuing ChemLawn, plus another service to
spray the bushes, on top of buying his own fertilizer.  He kept
Terminix.

That must have totaled about $1,500 a year.  It was cheaper to take the
trash down to the bottom of the driveway for pickup than to leave it in
the garage.  He wouldn't let me change that either.

"He had been giving $1,000 a year to Marquette.  I know he kept giving
them some money.  I don't know how much.  He also stayed on their
alumni council.  He told me that they reimbursed him for the cost of
traveling to Wisconsin and his accommodation expense for the yearly
meeting, but they didn't.  John also continued to give extra money to
the boys' schools, so he was still playing the part of the great
philanthropist.

"We spent about $600 on that Christmas party.  I did most of the
cooking.  This was just after the banister incident, so my neck was
still bothering me a little.  I had a little help from a friend who ran
a catering service and Sandy Oseroff, who has a florist shop.  I bought
a honey-baked ham, and fixed Brunswick stew.  We had mini-croissants
and petit fours.

It was very nice.  We had liquor, of course, but no bartender.  And by
now the boys were old enough to take coats.

"Yes, we had the money coming in from Arnold & Porter that would cover
the debts we had accumulated by that point.  But I was beginning to be
very frustrated that, instead of saving the money, we always spent it
before we even got it.

"His line to me whenever I tried to talk to him about it was: 'You
gotta live."

In February 1982, John traveled to Switzerland to finalize an agreement
that would help the SEC find and prosecute American business executives
illegally stockpiling funds or trading stocks through secret Swiss bank
accounts.  The US ambassador to Switzerland, Faith Ryan Whittlesey, who
helped negotiate the treaty, seemed impressed with the earnest young
enforcement chief.

They became professional friends, and under her patronage John met some
White House officials and other influential Republicans.

Whittlesey was uniquely positioned to help advance John because she had
high visibility within the party.  She was, at the time, one of the few
women politicians possessing clout with the Reagan clan.  She was a
lawyer, a conservative who had served two terms in the Pennsylvania
legislature, and then been chairman of her county's board of
commissioners.

When she lost a bid for Pennsylvania's lieutenant governorship, she
turned her energy to campaigning in the predominantly Democratic state
for Reagan in 1980.  The President rewarded her election efforts with
the Swiss ambassadorship.  And in early 1983, when Elizabeth Dole
became Secretary of Transportation, Reagan would ask Whittlesey to
return to the States and replace Dole in the White House as his
assistant for public liaison.

"When he came home from Europe," remembers Charlotte, "all he could do
was talk about how smart she was.  He sent me to Lord & Taylor's to buy
sweaters for her and her daughter and an electronic Pac-Man game for
her son.  He told me to spend between $175 and $200 total.  It seemed
crazy to me to be spending so much money on thank-you gifts, when we
were so strapped financially.  But I did it."

That spring, on May 1, Charlotte had been asked to speak at a farewell
dinner for Sister Celestine at The Woods Academy.  In her own way,
Charlotte was making small steps toward leadership in her little,
cloistered world.  The school's board had even asked her about possibly
serving as its president, but she hadn't told John about it yet.

John was in a quiet mood and Charlotte didn't know if he was coming to
the dinner or not.  That evening, he showed up at the reception
preceding the meal.

As Charlotte remembers it, he spent most of the cocktail hour working
the crowd and avoiding her.  But once she left the podium after
speaking, John did something that really pleased her.

"After I finished talking and stepped down, the master of ceremonies,
who was an old friend and is rather short, said, 'Charlotte, you're the
type of woman who makes me want to wear lifts in my shoes."  And with
that, John, who was barely speaking to me, calls out, 'Bob, I do,'
which, of course, made everyone laugh because John's so tall.  But it
made me really proud that he would say something kind of nice-that I
was worth trying to make happy, so to speak-in front of my friends.  It
was wonderful.

"But I guess in the long run I would rather have had some consistency
in our lives than these extreme highs and lows."

Later that month, John and Charlotte hosted a cocktail party honoring
Faith Whittlesey, who was in Washington on State Department business.

John had told Charlotte that he wanted it to be a "garden party."

"Having a garden party was ridiculous," says Charlotte, "since we had
no garden furniture because John hated to sit outside.  I had to borrow
furniture from a neighbor.  Faith sent me a four-page list which had
the names of eighty couples she wanted to invite.  Thank God, they
didn't all come.  We spent over $500 on it, even though I tried to keep
the cost down.  I kept it a simple but elegant cocktail party-the best
liquor, hors d'oeuvres, pastries, and coffee.  I got some kids from the
neighborhood to direct the parking and a son of a former congressman
who lived nearby to tend bar.  The Swiss ambassador to the United
States arrived in a chauffeur-driven limousine and was accompanied by
an aide.  It was a very nice party in our backyard-but it wasn't a
'garden party."  I'm also sure the party wasn't quite the caliber of
receptions she was used to going to.

"The day of the party, she sent me a huge, very formal flower
arrangement as thanks, which I put on our dining-room table.  She and I
never had a very easy time talking, though.  I guess we just had
nothing at all in common.  I must have seemed like a dope to her; here
was this man climbing up, up, up and here was his wife, seemingly
stagnant in the suburbs, changing dirty diapers.

"I know she helped John.  He became friendly with H.P. Goldfield, who
became deputy assistant secretary of Commerce, and Craig Fuller, an
assistant to the President, through her.  And we were invited to some
fancy parties with Faith.  We went to dinner at Drew Lewis's apartment
at the Watergate.  He was Secretary of Transportation then.

Richard Allen, the former National Security adviser, and Peter
McPherson, head of the Agency for International Development, were
there, too.  John had told me to buy a very fancy dress for this
dinner.  He told me at first that it would be black tie.  So I found a
very dressy cocktail dress and once I got there I found I was grossly
overdressed.  That was embarrassing.

"That night, figuring that I was protected by the company, I told John
during dinner that the board at The Woods Academy had asked me to be
its president and that I had accepted.  Drew Lewis's wife thought it
was wonderful and said so.  John just said, 'You're kidding."

I smiled and answered that I wasn't.  He was not happy when we got in
the car to drive home.

"It was so confusing for me.  Here he was impressed by this powerful
female lawyer, but he didn't want me to grow at all.  He resented all
my attempts to expand myself.  Yet, he would call me with disdain an
'anti-intellectual' later on, during the divorce trial.

"I think he was attracted to Faith's power.  The next year, when she
came back to the United States to be the White House public affairs
liaison, he thought about being her assistant.  I thought that would
have been such a step down from being the chief of enforcement at the
SEC, with his own huge staff, but I know he considered taking it for a
couple of days.

'I think Faith liked having John as her protege'.  He would be easy to
sponsor because he really can be very charming and he's very smart.

She'd always say to him, 'There's someone I want you to meet."  He was
this up-and-coming young man, a pretty much undiscovered Republican, a
rising star who would be a sort of feather in her cap in the party."

A few months later, in September, Whittlesey was again in town, and
John and Charlotte had dinner with her and the Swiss minister of
finance.  During the meal, as Charlotte listened to the lively, intense
conversation about world politics among her husband, the diplomat, and
this powerful, important woman, she says she began to feel more and
more insecure about herself.  John's day-to-day work seemed to be
slipping further and further away from her.

Shortly thereafter, John entered a silent period.  It persisted, even
as he was about to leave for a week's vacation in Wyoming with his
friend Al McGuire.  The morning of his departure, John still wasn't
talking to her.  Charlotte was desperate.

"That was the final time I would ever degrade myself for him.  He had
barely spoken for weeks, and he was leaving for a week.  He was
upstairs getting ready to go, and I was following him, pleading.

'What's wrong?"  I kept asking.  He laughed at me.  He probably told
me, like he had so many times before, that I had let myself go.  That
my hair was a mess.  I was overweight.  'Don't leave angry; give me a
kiss good-bye,' I said, and he did that humiliating thing of tossing me
a kiss in the air.

I had been saying that we had problems, to please come with me to a
marriage counselor.  He said, 'Look in the mirror.  There's our
problem."

And he walked downstairs.

"I ran after him.  I threw open my nightgown and started rubbing myself
all over my body.  I don't know what I was trying to do.

Seduce him to stay, I guess.  He looked at me and said with this icy
tone of voice, 'You have proved my point.  You're crazy."  And then he
walked out the door.  He wouldn't call even once during that entire
week to check on me or on his boys, who were being cared for by a
supposedly crazy person.

"When he walked out the door, with me standing there, half undressed, I
had never felt that low in my life.  It was worse than hitting myself
or hiding in the closet.  I was acting crazy.  I knew I had to have
help.  I called my internist, the man who had measured my bruises in
1976.

He was very kind.  This time he told me that he could see that John had
problems and that I needed to see a therapist.  The idea was that I
should pull myself together first and then deal with John.  He
suggested that I go back to see the doctor who had helped Luke in
1978."

The following Monday, Charlotte went to see Dr.  Mary Donahue.

She told the psychologist what had happened, how the arguments between
her and John sometimes ended in violence, about the silences that
either followed or precipitated those arguments.  It was the first time
she was totally honest with a therapist.  Maybe it helped that Donahue
was a woman and that Charlotte already knew and trusted her.  Or maybe
Charlotte just realized that she had finally hit bottom and that it was
now or never to get real help.

Donahue calmed Charlotte and told her that she was obviously overworked
and overburdened, that John's actions were detrimental to her mental
health, and that much of what he had done was "unacceptable
behavior."

Unacceptable?  So she wasn't entirely to blame for all their strife,
Charlotte thought with some relief.  It was the first time that she
really got the idea that there might be something wrong with John's
behavior.

Donahue probed Charlotte's present life as well as her past.  Such an
approach proved to be far more beneficial for Charlotte than pure
analysis.

Because Charlotte wanted to keep the marriage together, Donahue helped
her learn to respond to John in rational, controlled ways, with the
hope that she could avoid further physical confrontations.

When John returned from his vacation, he told Charlotte that she owed
him a major apology, and then he fell silent again.  The next weekend
they attended a wedding, but John sat in a pew behind her.

They had a discussion and reconciled the next day, but the peace
between them lasted only a few hours.

Later that week, the baby became sick with an ear infection.

Despite the baby's being ill, Charlotte tried to arrange a family
celebration for John's birthday, October 21.  He came home carrying
balloons, a gift from his staff.  But Charlotte says she had to beg him
to come down to the dining room to open gifts from his family, which he
then left in the dining room for weeks.

That night, the baby came down with a high fever and suffered symptoms
much like those John Michael had had right before he died.

Charlotte was terrified but didn't talk to John about it.  Also that
month, John refused to join the family for one of his sons' birthday
party, and for Thanksgiving dinner, says Charlotte.  On another
occasion that month, John, evidently irritated that the front door was
locked when he came home, smashed his briefcase through the front
door's lead-glass window.

"I was upstairs helping Luke study," says Charlotte.  "I heard him ring
the deorbell, but I said to Luke, 'Don't worry, he can get in by
himself,' because a few days before John had actually opened the door
himself.  And John is a creature of habit, obviously.  He always
carried his house keys with him and he admitted to me later that he had
them with him that night.  He started ringing the doorbell more
frantically, as we started down the stairs.  Luke and I were halfway
there when we heard the first crash.  I got there to open the door for
him; I was only a few steps away when he broke the glass.  He walked
into the house and walked right past me without saying a word.  I just
started to clean up the glass immediately, since I had little children
around with no shoes on their feet."

For almost six weeks then, John spoke barely a word to her, says
Charlotte.  Although she continued to fix his breakfast and to bring in
his morning paper, she stopped helping John dress.  He spoke long
enough, she says, to accuse her of being selfish and petty.  Even so,
in early December, they attended together a party hosted by the Swiss
embassy, bidding farewell to Faith Whittlesey as the US ambassador to
its country.

She was returning to Washington to work in the White House.

"I knew that the invitation was to both of us and I just informed John
that I was going," says Charlotte.  "I knew that I should make an
appearance.  This was a big step for me, trying to be calm and assert
myself where he didn't want me.  I got a short black skirt and a beaded
top and a black velvet jacket.  He later referred to it as my plastic
outfit, but I knew I looked pretty good except for my glasses, which I
now wore all the time.

He did drive me down there.  But he got out of the car and was walking
a quarter of a block ahead of me.  He did have the sense to wait at the
door before he rang the bell.

"John ignored me the entire reception and didn't talk on the way home
either.  But I stayed calm and quiet.  I was learning to not panic or
become argumentative or combative.  And I think that evening, my
seeming to be more rational and confident helped.  He started to come
out of the silence a little bit and a few days later called me from the
office and asked me to go to a private premiere of the movie Gandhi
that his friend, the president of Columbia Pictures, was hosting."

Charlotte let John go alone, but the brief telephone conversation and
his invitation encouraged Charlotte to try to reopen communication with
John.  Rather than try to talk to him in person and risk yet another
fight, however, Charlotte sat down and wrote a letter.  In it she
stressed that they needed counseling.  It read, in part: A man of 41
who is not speaking to his family should not expect them to wait up and
open the front door for him just because he had been on TV.

You are powerful enough in your job [that] you don't have to break
leaded-glass windows to impress us.  . . . Do you realize the
responsibility you have to find out what your problems are to help your
children now and in the future?  Do you realize you are more likely to
succeed further (i.e cabinet position, etc.) if your problem is taken
care of now by counseling and/or medication than if your neighbors and
friends and coworkers begin talking to investigative agents about your
bizarre treatment of your family?  .  . . We are all very proud of your
success, but none of us can build our whole life around your fame and
power.  A well-rounded, healthy man can balance his family and
business.  We do not resent your long hours, if you could just be
pleasant and interested in us for the short time you are home.  . . I
am committed to the children and my marriage and I know you are a good
decent man when you are healthy-that is the man I loved.

I know he's in you somewhere.  I pray you will get the help and
guidance to free him from his prison within you.

The letter affected John enough that he agreed to talk.  Charlotte
recalls that he called and asked her to go to dinner.  The dinner ended
up being another party in honor of Faith Whittlesey, in a private home,
so he and Charlotte waited until they got home and then took a long
walk around the neighborhood.  Charlotte stuck to the advice her
therapist had given her for having an effective discussion.  Don't get
sarcastic, don't use any four-letter words even if John does, don't
keep explaining the same points over and over, don't get hysterical
even if he frightens you.  She kept the checklist in her brain as they
talked.

She told John she had been seeing a therapist.  She also said that she
thought they needed to see a marriage counselor together, that they
obviously weren't happy and needed to work on changing the dynamics of
their relationship.  No personal invectives, no pleading, no tears, she
says.  Not even when John said he thought they should try separating
for a while.  Charlotte swallowed hard, and agreed.  They went back to
the house.

That night, John woke Charlotte up to make love.  They were
reconciled.

Charlotte looked forward to the holidays with a new kind of
thankfulness.  Maybe if she kept going to the therapist and could learn
to have such productive discussions with John, their marriage really
could be saved.

The next few weeks were relatively tranquil.  Christmas Day seemed to
go smoothly, although John would later claim that it had been very
tense.  They attended a friend's New Year's Eve party and John took her
to see the movie Tootsie on John Michael's birthday, since that was
always a particularly hard day for Charlotte.  On January 25, they
attended a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra, sitting in
the presidential box at the Kennedy Center's concert hall as guests of
Goldfield.  On the twenty-eighth, they were invited to a dinner in a
private home in Kalorama, one of the city's most elegant neighborhoods,
just off Embassy Row.

But the peace between them was deceptive and shortlived.  John was
under a lot of pressure and again became preoccupied with work.  He was
being questioned by two House subcommittees about his initial
resistance to an SEC bribery probe involving a client of his old
firm.

And a former client of his, Southland Corporation, the Dallas-based
owner of 7-Eleven convenience stores, was being charged with trying to
bribe a state official.

He could eventually be called as a witness in the case, which would
probably bring a flood of press questions about his work for the
company.

John was starting to eat dinner away from home, not going to
Congressional as he had before because of the expense, but eating in a
fast-food restaurant near the SEC.  He'd come home around 10 PM, just
in time to go to bed, says Charlotte.  Then one night, he vented his
anxieties at Luke, throwing his son's ice skates at the boy when he
talked back.  John accused the boys of acting "like girls" when they
cried and was, Charlotte feared, beginning to turn his temper as
quickly and violently on them as he did on her.  It frightened and
angered her, but she managed to keep her opinion to herself that
evening.

"Luke and John were arguing," she says.  "I heard it going on.

Luke had left his ice skates hanging on his room's doorknob, where he
wasn't supposed to, and was being flip to John about it.  John ordered
Luke to put the skates away, and like fourteen-year-olds will do, Luke
asked why he should.  John said, 'Because I said so,' and Luke talked
back.

That's when John threw the skates, just as I walked into the room to
try to smooth things over.  I was trying to remain calm and somewhat
neutral, but seeing him throw something at Luke was frightening.  I
said something really ridiculous, like 'Go to your room' to John, but I
was trying to not say anything accusatory.  That's when John looked at
Luke and said, 'Go suck on your mother's tit."  I felt like John had
hit me when he said that, it seemed so sick and low a thing to say to
your son, but I kept quiet and just calmed the kids down."

In mid-February, the day before Luke's birthday, a large snowfall kept
John trapped in the house over the weekend when he wanted to go to his
office.  He and Charlotte got into a fight over the boys' shoveling the
driveway, and John gave Charlotte a black eye.  With that blow,
Charlotte sorrowfully concluded that even though she was controlling
herself better under her therapist's guidance, it didn't seem to change
anything between her and John.

"it had snowed a foot or more," Charlotte remembers, "and John couldn't
get in to work.  We cleaned the driveway and it had taken all day
basically.  The boys were still young to be doing such hard work.

Luke, the oldest by several years, was only fourteen.  John had that
look in his eye.

He had actually shoved me a few times and once pushed me down into the
snow as we worked, but it hadn't hurt me so I tried to pretend that it
was just playing.

"It was late that Sunday afternoon and we had just gotten inside and
taken our boots off and were resting.  John was outside poking at the
gutter over the garage, worrying about the snow on the roof.  It all
fell down, of course.  It would have been another hour's work to shovel
it.  I didn't want the boys to have to go out again right away, so I
said that I'd help him after dinner.  That wasn't good enough for him,
and he started yelling at the boys.  I had just picked up a little
wooden toy because it was on the floor as I tried to reason with him.

He said that line to the boys again, 'Go suck on your mother's tit,'
and I saw red.  I threw the toy at him-it missed him-and he hit me with
a clenched fist right in my eye, and broke my glasses.

"I packed the boys and left them at a friend's and this time actually
went to the police station in Rockville.  I don't know what I wanted to
do.  I wanted someone to make him stop.  The bruise was beginning to
show.  I had my friend take a photograph of it later for proof.

The police were so cold to me.  They told me all they could do was
issue a warrant for his arrest if I would swear out a complaint.  I
didn't want him hauled off to jail.  I didn't want to ruin him.  I just
wanted someone to talk to him.

They were so impersonal to me.  They didn't say to me, 'Aw, honey,
you're still walking, and you should see the stuff we see,' but that
was the attitude.  I just felt like a fool, so I left."

Charlotte went home.  A few days later, John left for Florida on
business.  He sent flowers on Valentine's Day.  But he didn't call when
he was gone, says Charlotte, didn't tell her where he was staying in
Florida, or when he was coming home.  When his boss, John Shad, called
on a Saturday morning looking for him and kept pressing Charlotte about
when John was getting back, she finally blurted out that she didn't
know and didn't care because he had just given her a black eye.  Shad's
response was that he was sorry, but that John had been under a lot of
pressure recently.  Charlotte responded that it had been going on a
long time, but Shad didn't seem to want to discuss it further.  She
hung up the phone, terrified about what she had done, but hoping that
Shad would talk to John.

Charlotte decided to talk to a lawyer, and on February 20, 1983, she
wrote John a letter telling him she wanted a divorce: I am writing this
letter to tell you how and how much I have loved you and indeed still
love you.  . . . Although you deny it, I have always been intensely
interested in you and your life, your work, your worries, your ups and
downs.

I have yearned to be included in your confidence-you have constantly
shut me out.

. . . You are the major being in your life.  . . . And you, like so
many chose .  . . your profession to devote all your being.  This is
not uncommon in this societyespecially Washington society.  The
difference is that you .  . .

have lost much, much more than the everyday workaholic.  . . . Oh, how
I have wanted to believe the fact that we would always be together-you
said it so many times, yet you have never been willing to help that
promise live.  It apparently [was] too much trouble for you to seek a
concrete basis for keeping us alive.  .

. In order to love another, one must love [him]self first.  As much as
I love you-and I have finally learned (and it was hard) to love
myself.  . . . Can you possibly remember how many times you have beaten
me?  .  . . Why didn't you believe me when I said I would never let you
do that to me again?  Know this-no woman deserves to be beaten by her
husband, not ever.  . . . The final realization is that you are
incapable of showing me and my children the respect and .  . .

love that we deserve.  . . . I have cried the entire weekend because I
now have to do the only thing I can.  . . . I can no longer have you
living in the same house as the boys and me.  . . . It is a shame
because most men would kill to have children as good as yours to
nurture, guide, and love.  Indeed, look around you and see if you can
honestly find a better wife than me.  And I would caution you not to be
too macho in telling all your acquaintances about our situation-the
truth will come out and no one admires a wife beater.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

John's response to Charlotte's letter was a one-page
note in which he thanked her for hers, calling it "generally
constructive" and asked what were the plans for informing the boys
about their future and joint concern for their welfare.  He commented
that her threat to tell people he was a "wife beater" was "unseemly"
and closed with: "If you will not do my laundry today, at least leave
me written instructions for operating the washer and dryer."

By his reaction, John seemed to easily accept the idea of a divorce.

And yet, she recalls that when a letter arrived from Charlotte's
lawyer, Bryan Renehan, confirming that she wanted the marriage to end,
John became upset.  After finding him in tears as he talked to Luke,
explaining the situation, Charlotte agreed to give him one more chance,
but only if he saw a therapist.  John had to make an appointment before
Charlotte would reconcile with him.

John seemed enthusiastic from his first visit, on March 5, and made
Charlotte promise that she wouldn't let him stop.  He knew that he had
several years of work ahead of him, but he was looking forward to it,
he told her.  He even told one of their friends about it over the
telephone.

Charlotte knew that this really was their last-ditch effort, and hoped
that they were finally on the road to recovery.  But quickly John's
interest in psychotherapy seemed to dissolve and he stopped seeing the
psychiatrist after only six sessions.  By Easter Sunday, when they had
friends over for dinner, John was again ordering Charlotte to get
people water.

In the first week of April, yet another confrontation, over cutting the
grass, finally ended Charlotte's hopes.  John had always been obsessive
about the grass, noting on his calendars when they cut it and what
number cutting of the year it was, and had demanded the entire family
participate.

No matter what Charlotte was doing, she had to be available to bring
water to him as he mowed, or to help bag the trimmings.  But this
particular incident was unusually bad.  As she remembers it, John
yelled at the boys for being "lazy shits," and pushed one of them off
the swing in the backyard because he didn't get off it fast enough when
John told him to.  When the child cried, says Charlotte, John called
him a "baby."

All the boys ended up in tears and later that night, when Charlotte
tried to discuss it with him, John roared that he wasn't raising a
bunch of girls.

"It was such a quick change in attitude that day," recalls Charlotte.

"He and I had driven to our accountant's and as we were coming back
John said to me that he had been trying to make a list of the ten most
important things in his life and that I was the top three together.

I was feeling really happy and then came the grass-cutting.  I saw my
son on the swing.  He was swinging high when John yelled at him, so he
was letting the swing slow down before he got off.  Had John waited a
few more seconds, he would have been off.  I got really upset that
night, and John just went into one of his moods on me.

A week or two later, Charlotte decided that she just couldn't stand the
silent treatment anymore and called John at work and told him that he
had to come home that night for dinner to be a real father.

John said he was too busy to leave the office, she recalls.

Charlotte told him the marriage was over.  And this time she stuck to
it.

"It's funny how a tiny thing can be the final straw," she says.  "I
guess it was all the tension building up.  It was weird.  His not
talking to me at all was just no longer acceptable.  When he said,
'Gee, lion, I just can't come home,' that was it for me.  I said,
'Fine, it's over."  He called back immediately.  He called and he
called.

Finally, when I answered, he told me to hold dinner, that he was coming
home.  I answered, 'Fine, but it's still over,' and this time I didn't
back down.  He did come home.

We had a pleasant meal.  Then we went upstairs.  There was no
fighting.

I just told him that I couldn't live this way anymore and he said very
calmly, 'If I ever walk out this door, I'm not coming back."  And I
said, 'Fine."

It was probably one of the most adult conversations we ever had."

The civility ended there, says Charlotte.  She and John would sleep in
the same bed, but he didn't speak to her until six weeks later, on June
5, when Charlotte discovered he had taken all her credit cards from her
wallet.  He also called the gas station and told them not to allow her
to charge any more fuel on his account.  She was frantic.  How was she
going to feed the boys, drive them around, clothe them?  "I called him
just about every name in the book that night," says Charlotte.

John surreptitiously taped Charlotte as she yelled at him about the
cards, but she found the cassette the next morning and destroyed it.

Three days later, John closed their checking account.  She remembers
that he started taking his briefcase into the bathroom with him when he
showered.

When he moved out of their home, July 2, 1983, he had not told
Charlotte where he was planning to live or given her a home phone
number where he could be reached.  The day would bring a final, ugly
brawl.  Charlotte had asked two of her sisters to be present in case
John threatened her, anticipating trouble.  As they squabbled over
possessions, John would ask Charlotte if she liked something, implying
the question "Would you like to keep it?"  and then dash it to the
ground when she answered, "Yes."

After witnessing John's throwing a Steuben ashtray and hitting
Charlotte's hip with it, her sister Mimi called the police.  By the
time they arrived, John's hands were bleeding from the flying bits of
smashed glass.

His shirt had also been torn, when Charlotte had grabbed it and pleaded
with him to stop breaking things.  The police read both Charlotte and
John their rights and explained how each could swear out a complaint
against the other.  When John and Charlotte declined, the police left
and John drove away shortly thereafter.

As John's marriage crumbled, his career also started developing
cracks.

The spring had not been an easy one for him.  The press and some
congressional committees were beginning to criticize and question his
work at the SEC.  Although he had brought more insider trading cases
than had ever been filed in the commission's fifty-year history,
critics charged that he was overly sympathetic to big business, shying
away from bribery cases against them.  In his two years at the SEC,
according to the Wall Street Journal, John's division had brought only
one overseas bribery case.

Two House subcommittees were questioning him about his initial
resistance to an SEC probe of Ashland Oil, a client of Arnold & Porter,
while the company was purchasing oil in Oman.  John's answer was that
he simply hadn't known that his former firm represented the company.

But his real trouble came when a federal grand jury in Brooklyn
indicted Southland Corporation, owners of 7-Eleven, on charges of
conspiring to bribe New York state officials in a tax dispute in 1977,
and subsequently trying to cover up the scheme.  John was questioned as
a witness by the grand jury because he, as an attorney with Arnold &
Porter, had helped Southland's in-house lawyers conduct an
investigation of the affair, requested by the SEC, in 1977 and 1978.

John was handling most of Arnold & Porter's questionable payment cases
in those days.  At that time, Southland submitted its findings in a
report to the SEC division that John now headed.  Federal prosecutors
charged that the inquiry failed to uncover the bribery scheme and
might, therefore, be an illegal cover-up.

John was never accused of any wrongdoing.  He was, however, called to
testify as a witness about the internal investigation he, as an outside
consultant, had helped the company conduct on the matter.  Although
John's testimony on one key matter conflicted with that of two members
of the audit committee of Southland's board, according to the SEC
Southland report, John said that Southland executives had lied to him
during the inquiry.  The Wall Street Journal quoted the report, signed
by Atlanta regional administrator Michael Wolensky, which concluded
that John had not violated any law.  But because Southland was being
investigated, his work with the company was under examination and he
was scrutinized by the press for almost a full, nerve-racking year.

John would later testify in his divorce proceedings that the Madison
National Bank cut its promised line of credit of $150,000 to a mere
$35,000 because of the adverse publicity surrounding him in the summer
of 1983 (although a bank official denied it had limited the funds
available to John when Charlotte called to ask about it) and that the
whole affair had caused him great anguish.  He felt it was a witch
hunt.  "You don't know John Fedders," he would say, "unless you know
what I've gone through on Southland."  He claimed that one of the
prosecutors working on the Southland case had said that he would give
up everything else "to get John Fedders."

John appeared before the Senate banking subcommittee examining
Southland on June 28, a few days before moving out of his home, the
same day the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page profile under the
headline "SEC's Enforcer Runs Tight Ship, But Critics Charge He's Too
Soft."

In that article, which raised the possibility of his being driven from
office, John said that the congressional scrutiny of him was
politically motivated and that some congressional aides were out to
"get" him.

But, he quipped: "I hear the crack of their guns, but I don't feel
their bullets."

His final quote in the story: "I've always operated best under
pressure.

The majority of the article discussed John's style at work, and the
many pressures on him there.  He claimed that his hero was General
Patton, because the warrior "was the most disciplined person that ever
lived" and that everything in his own life was "discipline,
organization, and structure."  The reporter Richard Hudson wrote: "The
SEC official's fondness for 'Old Blood and Guts' Patton will come as no
surprise to those he calls his 'troops' at the agency.  . . . Since his
appointment two years ago, an SEC staffer says, management of the
enforcement division 'has been tightened up."" John's aggressiveness
and control were already legend in the agency.

According to the June 28 article, some staffers felt compelled to wear
suit coats in his presence and to pursue cases they thought coincided
with his priorities.  John had also designed a management chart "with
the chain of command clearly and rigidly established."  Brooks Jackson,
the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the news of John's abuse of
Charlotte two years later, after their divorce hearing, wrote then:
"Some attorneys who have worked with Mr. Fedders concede his
intelligence and drive but say he is a socially awkward and sometimes
arrogant man, given to locker-room bravado and macho management that
women sometimes find offensive.  One SEC staff member recalls Mr.
Fedders' opening a meeting of women lawyers with the remark, 'Get out
your Title Seven (sex discrimination) notebooks, girls."

But what Charlotte read with the most avid interest in June 1983 was
the paragraph about her and the boys.  Despite the fact he was about to
leave them that very week, John painted a molasses-sweet portrait of
his family life, probably knowing how crucial a proper image was for a
Washington career.  "He says he keeps in touch with his origins, said
the

Wall Street Journa4 "by occasionally taking his wife and four [sic]
children tenting on a 70-acre spread he bought in the mountains of
Virginia outside Washington.  'You can see forever from there,' he
says, describing a little stream on the property and its proximity to
the Appalachian Trail.

'I put on my cowboy hat and my cowboy boots.  It's me.  Someday I'll
put a log cabin on it."" Charlotte resented his depiction.  They had
walked on the land, gotten apples nearby, and had picnics-lovely events
in themselves-but they had never "tented" there.  Charlotte says she
called the Wall Street Journal to let it know that she and John were
separating and that John was moving out a few days later.  And ever the
protective mother, she wanted to report she had five, not four, sons.

The editor she spoke with at the newspaper told her that they had
already received several calls about the article on Mr.  Fedders.

Was it true that he had physically hurt her, the voice on the telephone
asked.

Charlotte gasped.  "Yes," she whispered but declined to elaborate.

She hung up the phone, terrified that an expose' was to follow, but
nothing happened.

Charlotte didn't know how people would react if she did tell them.

John was a powerful, admired man; who would ever believe her, a nobody,
a little housewife in the suburbs?  Certainly, although she was
relieved that the newspaper had done nothing, the Wall Street Journal's
silence galvanized that fear, as did the response of a woman at the
Congressional Country Club.

"Right when John moved out," says Charlotte, "was the first time that I
ever said anything to the wife of a friend of his, a beautiful woman.

They were country club friends, and we were talking around the pool.

She said that she heard that we were splitting up and I said, 'Yes,'
and then I broke down and cried and told her that John had been abusing
me for years.  Her response was: 'Oh, what a shame, such a sweet
guy."

That was it.  That certainly took me aback and kept me from talking to
anybody else about it."

Without realizing it, Charlotte had broken an unspoken Washington
law.

Despite the fact it has more women executives than any other US city,
wives of important men, women who aren't consequential themselves in
terms of employment or connections, are to be seen and not heard.

(Even women in power are expected to retain certain aspects of
femininity, such as tenderness and quietude.  For example, one senator
commented that he gladly approved the appointment of Sandra Day
O'Connor to the US Supreme Court because she would bring a motherly
perspective to the bench.) With each election, a bevy of new
congressmen's wives are invited to a luncheon by the Congressional
Wives Club.  They are informally advised by their veteran cohorts about
how to be good political spouses-how to dress, who to know, what to
say, and most importantly, what not to say.  It is accepted convention
for them to avoid having any public ego of their own; they are to be
proverbial straight men for their husbands, nothing more, but nothing
less either.

In Washington, a spouse can be seen more as an indicator of a VIP's
taste than as a person, and, therefore, as primarily an asset or a
liability to his reputation.  Witness a sterling exchange recorded by
gossip columnist Diana McLellan in her book Ear on Washington: Any wife
won't do.  When Carter aide Greg Schneiders' star was on the rise,
columnist Rowland Evans called him on the phone [to invite him to a
dinner party].  . . . [He] asked Schneiders, "So, would you like to
come?"

"Sure," said Greg, an unspoiled soul.  Inquired Rowly, "By the way, do
you have a wife?"

"Well, yes.  As a matter of fact I do."

"And is she presentable?"  asked Evans, quite unself-consciously.

Silent suffering is admired in a Washington wife.  McLellan points out
that Joan Kennedy was forgiven her troubles because of her steadfast
support of her mate, Senator Edward Kennedy, following Chappaquiddick,
and that Maureen Dean was admired for sitting quietly by her husband,
John, during the Watergate hearings.  Speaking on the vagaries of the
important spouse is simply bad form, and ex-wives who divulge
unpleasantries often become non-persons.

And Charlotte unwittingly tripped over another prejudice with her
poolside conversation.  At that point, she was not worldly enough to
recognize that, because some people wed as much for money or social
position as for love, they and their friends might resent innocents
still ingenuously searching for real love.  She had gotten a pretty
good deal, would be the disdainful appraisal of some, mainly women,
perhaps unhappy themselves.

The next time she and the country club acquaintance met, the lady would
look right through Charlotte.

When John left his family, he moved to a one-bedroom apartment in a
large, well-established high rise on Massachusetts Avenue in
Washington.  His friend Goldfield lived there as well.  John's
apartment had a balcony, a washer and dryer in the second bathroom, a
lighted doorbell, and an arch over the door to make it look more like a
house entrance.  The Art Deco lobby had fresh flower arrangements and
someone at a desk to take messages.  The rent when he moved in was
$655.  It was far from Spartan housing, says Charlotte, although the
press would later depict it as such.

John explained his reasons for choosing the apartment at the pendente
lite hearing held in the Montgomery County courthouse on September 13,
1983.  (In Maryland, pendente lite determines interim custody, support,
and use of possessions until the divorce proceedings, held after a
couple has been officially separated for a year.  No reasons for
divorce are given at the hearing.) Charlotte's attorney, Bryan Renehan,
asked about the apartment because John was giving Charlotte only $450
every other week.  (He also paid the $841 mortgage and the utilities.)
With five boys to feed, house and car insurance payments, gas and car
repair bills, and dental and medical obligations despite Blue
Cross/Blue Shield, she simply couldn't survive on that amount.  Wasn't
the apartment a little expensive?  Couldn't John have found a
two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Bethesda, for instance, for $500
or less, one that ultimately would have been more suitable for housing
the children when they visited, and made more money available to his
family?  asked Renehan.

Answered John: "Not with the sort of cleanliness that [pause],
Charlotte would tell you, I'm sort of an anal personality and I like
cleanliness and neatness and things like that and the things that I've
seen in Bethesda are a joke."

The hearing also revealed that John had been borrowing heavily from the
bank since leaving the house.  On July 5, he borrowed $6,600, which
went immediately for the payment due on the Virginia land; July 20, he
received $5,100; and on August 12, $1,800.  All the amounts were
ninety-day notes, and were in addition to $19,500 in debt accumulated
before he moved out.  The total accumulated: $33,000, at an interest
rate of 15 percent.  Since moving out, he had also acquired $1,200 of
furniture at Sears.

Not so much debt really, for a well-known lawyer planning on returning
to private practice within two years.  But the problem was that John
testified he really liked the SEC and didn't plan on leaving it anytime
soon.  He had made some cutbacks, withdrawing completely from the
Congressional Country Club, for instance, that very month.  But
Charlotte still worried that John didn't seem to recognize how pinched
they all were, trying to maintain two separate households on his
government servant's paycheck, which was then $65,500.  Especially
since, one time, quite by accident, she had seen John come out of a
notoriously expensive gourmet shop, with a full grocery bag, and then
get into someone's glistening Mercedes.  She also knew that he had gone
to the Kennedy Center opening of 42nd Street and fumed, wondering if he
had purchased the tickets.

Meanwhile, Charlotte says she started selling some silverware and
jewelry, and borrowing money from her church to feed the children.

In her testimony at the September 13 pendente lite hearing, she said:
"We have cut back on food-no fresh vegetables, little meat.  No snacks
that we used to.  . . . None of us have had [our] yearly physicals.

We've cut down on activities and clothing.  [One of my children] has
given up soccer and scouts.  The other children gave up all the money
that they earned this summer in an attempt to help the household
run."

Despite her needs, the court acknowledged John's limited finances and
essentially kept his payments about the same, ordering him to send $500
alimony plus $100 support per child, for a total of $1,000 per month.

She made plans to curb everyone's wants, but Charlotte was beginning to
resent John's Mercedes-driving, play-going, politically potent friends
and what she saw as his attempt to keep up with them.  She borrowed
from her sister Dotti and finally asked her parents for assistance.

They contributed, but said with exasperation that John should be forced
to give more.

On January 25, 1984, Charlotte was half-listening to President Reagan
give his State of the Union address when she heard him say, "This year,
we will intensify our drive against.  . . other horrible crimes like
sexual abuse and family violence."  Suddenly, she had some hope.

She may have been naive to think so, but Charlotte believed that if
Ronald Reagan-a president who professed a commitment to strengthening
the American family-knew about her family's plight, he would quietly
force John out of the SEC and back into private practice for the good
of John's children.  John had told her he couldn't give her more than
$12,000 a year, plus pay the mortgage and utilities, because his
government salary, then up to $70,000, couldn't accommodate it.  In
private practice, if he could earn the $300,000 salary he had claimed
he would, Charlotte knew he could afford to do more for the boys.

She says she was tired of her children going without.  She couldn't
believe that John seemed to equalize the needs of one with the needs of
six.  Even if he did like the SEC, he had to put the boys as his
priority now.  It was time for her to take action.  President Reagan
seemed so sincere, she thought; surely he would help her.

She thought carefully about her wording.  The letter read in part:

Mr. Reagan, I am the victim of wife abuse.  . . . It was obviously
beginning to be a very threatening situation for my entire family.  .

.

.

The boys and I live in a very comfortable home in Potomac.  (I know
this will sound silly, but you fly right over [our] house when you go
to and from Camp David and we frequently wave-honest we do.) My husband
moved to a luxury high-rise (and high rent) apartment .  . . in the
District.  . . - The schools have been wonderful and are keeping the
boys.  They feel strongly that these fine young men need to continue
their education and religious training.  I have been working for both
schools to compensate for the tuition-free education they are giving.

These jobs are mainly done in the home so although I am working many
hours a week, I am also able to remain as a full time Mother.  . . . My
husband seems by all accounts to be living quite a charmed life.  He is
seen in the finest restaurants and theaters.  He travels in the best of
circles with several friends in the White House itself.

- .  . In 1981, my husband left the private practice of law.  With all
his family supporting him, encouraging him, and being very proud of
him, he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission as the Director
of Enforcement.

My husband is John Fedders.  . . . When John took the SEC post, we had
little savings, and we knew this job would put a tremendous strain on
us financially, but I felt this was the "break" John was looking for to
finally make him happy and relaxed.

- .  - John Fedders did not improve while at the SEC.  - .  - I hope
you do not feel this letter is from a bitter and vindictive woman.  I
asked John to leave.  I am sure that you can see it was the only wise
choice I could make for the welfare of my children and myself.  - .

This letter is in no way meant to undermine your confidence in John's
ability as a top-notch SEC enforcer.  I do not understand, however, how
a man can enforce one set of laws and abuse another.

My only explanation is that John must not think what he did to me was
wrong.  . . . I feel strongly that a man of the caliber of the others
in your administration would have resigned by now and returned to
private practice for "personal reasons" to end the strain on his
,children and even on himself.  I can see why he is so hateful towards
me, but my sons did nothing to deserve his behavior towards them.

Charlotte immediately had second thoughts and never sent the letter.

She gave it instead to her sister Mimi for safe-keeping, just in case
she ever needed it.  But several months later, frustrated that John
continued to refuse to voluntarily increase support payments to
Charlotte, her father and her sister Mimi had the letter delivered to
the White House through a politically connected friend at the American
Medical Association.  Dr. O'Donnell, always confident he could fix
matters, had decided it was time for the family to do something.  He
and Mimi didn't tell Charlotte.

Eventually, the letter found its way to Fred Fielding, White House
chief counsel.  Martha called Fielding to see what he planned to do
with the information.  She recalls: "He said that the President would
never knowingly keep a spouse abuser in a top administration job, but
that it was a private dispute and that nothing had been proven and that
there were two sides to every story.  Then he asked me if I had ever
seen John hit Charlotte, which I hadn't, but I told him that I had seen
the black eyes and bruises and the broken glasses."

John later told Charlotte that Fielding had called him to his office to
discuss the matter after Martha's call.  But Mimi, not knowing that and
thinking Fielding planned to do nothing, contacted Richard Vilkin, a
freelance reporter who had taken a fervent interest in John's work and
the Southland case.  Again, neither sister told Charlotte about their
actions.

Mimi would eventually tell Charlotte, however, that the reason she had
contacted Vilkin was to add pressure to the White House, believing that
if the administration discovered that a reporter was digging around in
John's alleged domestic violence, during an election year, he would be
quietly forced to resign from the SEC and to return to private
practice.

Although John would later say that her family waged a campaign to ruin
him, the O'Donnells claim all they wanted was for the job change to
occur quietly, without any publicity, so that Charlotte and her sons
would have enough money to go on with their lives.  They knew newspaper
stories could harm his career and ultimately his ability to support the
boys.

But they were emphatic about his returning to private practice.

They didn't care how much he liked the SEC.  They thought he had done
enough harm to Charlotte and that it was time for him to put his
children's needs first.  Dr. O'Donnell was the master of pressure
politics in the A.M.A; he knew what he was doing, he told Charlotte's
sisters.

But the subtle leverage strategy didn't work.  John remained at the SEC
and in six months his private life became public knowledge in an open
divorce hearing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

On January 22, 1984, three days before Charlotte
heard President Reagan refer to domestic violence in his State of the
Union address, she was sitting in the basement with the boys, watching
the Washington Redskins play the Los Angeles Raiders in Super Bowl
XVIII.  After the game, she and Luke stayed put to see 60 Minutes.  The
news program was featuring a seventeen-minute report, "Dirty Little
Secret," about Richard and Deborah Jahnke, two teenagers in Wyoming who
had been abused by their father.  A little over a year before, Richard
Jahnke, no longer able to stand his father's physical abuse of him and
his family, had shot and killed his father.

Alan Prendergast, the author of The Poison Tree, an account of the
teenagers and their trial, described the 60 Minutes program: "The
report's most powerful moments came in a series of tight close-ups of
Richard Jahnke, who recalled his father's 'evil voice' and merciless
treatment of him with the uncanny talent for mimicry he had first
displayed at his trial.  Angry, bitter, and occasionally sarcastic.

.

. .

This was one Angry Young Man, gnashing his teeth and playing the
crowds."

Charlotte listened with growing concern to her fourteen-year-old
sputter, "That's just like Dad," when the Jahnkes described their
father brushing their teeth until their gums bled.  She didn't want
Luke as angry as the boy on television.  It couldn't be healthy.

Charlotte had known all along that John was demanding of his children,
particularly of their firstborn.  Luke was to be the star athlete, the
star student, "another John Fedders," as Luke says.  In fact,
witnessing John react in sudden anger to Luke was pretty much what
had pushed Charlotte to finally want a divorce the previous spring.

John had thrown objects, even a small television set, to the ground
near her before.  But when he threw the ice skates at Luke, she says
she realized that her son was no longer safe from the same kind of
instantaneous retribution she had experienced with her husband,
especially since Luke was becoming old enough and sassy enough to say
no.  Contradicting John was what had always gotten her in trouble, and
what endangered Luke.

"I think John really loved Luke," says Charlotte.  "They had the
closest bonding of any of the children.  He spent far more time with
Luke than he did with his other sons.  But the real trouble started
when Luke started to think for himself."

Today, Luke is eighteen.  He is a handsome, lanky, earnest young man.

His face bears an uncanny resemblance to his father's and has an
intriguing agelessness.  At times, he seems twice his years, at others
half.

He's accustomed to answering difficult questions about his feelings,
and looks his questioner straight in the eye as he talks.

In the past, he has been frustrated by his relationship with his
father, but that seems to be waning, and he remains an engaging,
likable boy.  He wants to be a veterinarian, and is the type of
teenager who constantly brings home injured animals, who hugs his
youngest brother easily, and who can make his mother giggle with his
stories.

After his father left home, Luke started working at a veterinary
hospital, walking the dogs and doing various odd jobs.  At first he
says he was very afraid he would do something wrong and be fired, since
mistakes had often brought serious consequences at home.  But as Luke
saw that the doctor he worked for was understanding when he faltered,
his own confidence began to grow.

John never slapped Luke in the face, never pummeled him as he had
Charlotte, but his discipline could be harsh.  The main method of
punishing the boys was with a fraternity paddle, say Luke and
Charlotte.

And his expectations and his impatience, when Luke in particular failed
to achieve the goals he had set, could be high.

Charlotte recalls that John had Luke reading Sports illustrated aloud
to him when the boy was six years old.  As Luke grew older, his free
time was restricted so that he could concentrate on his schoolwork.

Luke says that his father forced him to bed early and didn't allow him
to play a radio at night for fear that it would make Luke forget what
he had studied that evening.  To try to build him into a strong, brawny
athlete, John often insisted that Luke eat two helpings at dinner, and,
by the time the boy was ten, had him doing push-ups.  Luke remembers
that it was not unusual for John to say when he entered the room, "Hi,
son, why don't you drop and give me thirty?"

Luke was put on swimming teams, soccer teams, basketball teams, but
wasn't particularly outstanding at any of them.  The thing he did excel
at was diving, an endeavor John seemed to disapprove of.  To be allowed
to dive competitively, Luke had to join Congressional Country Club's
swim team as well.  When Luke was older, John jogged with him.

They ran a two-mile course that John had mapped out, even in the
winter, says Luke.  Athletics was serious business.  When they played
football or baseball in the yard, it was "not playing," says
Charlotte.

"They were supposed to learn how to play the game right during those
sessions."

Says Luke: "He was more a coach than a father."

"The main message Luke .  . . got from his father was that he was]
inadequate, inefficient, and lazy," says Dr. Mary Donahue, the
psychologist who counseled Luke in 1978 when his fourth-grade work
began to slide and who later helped Charlotte.  "Luke was looking for
more positive input from his father.  . . . He went through a period of
disillusionment and then just shut down when he [felt] it was
hopeless."

What had struck Luke about the 60 Minutes report was not just the
strictness of the Jahnke children's father but his roughness.  Luke
remembers that before church John would comb the boys' hair, sometimes
raking the brush so hard against their scalps that their heads pounded
for minutes afterwards.  When he cut their nails, he trimmed them so
low that their fingertips were often sore for a day or two.  Once, when
Luke had smashed his finger bowling with friends, his nail turned black
and looked as if in a few days it would fall off naturally.  When he
was showing it to his mother, John came by, grabbed Luke's hand, and
pulled the nail off.

"Which made it bleed considerably and kind of hurt," says Luke.

John would do similar things as coach of Luke's basketball teams.

"If I jammed a finger," remembers Luke, "he'd pull it out and I had to
keep playing.  He'd let the other kids sit out for a while.  I was the
one who always seemed to do the drill wrong, all the time.  Even if I
did most of it right, I had to do it over.  It made me feel low because
he was a coach and was supposed to help me with that stuff and not have
me do it over by myself in a corner, like a punishment.

"But his son had to be the best.  He would criticize me on the drive
home.  He'd say I was doing everything wrong and that I shouldn't be on
the team.

"We all played football out front, on the street.  If we didn't catch
the ball, or dropped it two or three times, he'd start to go inside,
saying, 'I'm not going to play with someone who can't catch."  We'd beg
and beg and beg, but he wouldn't come out again.

"If I didn't do real hot at a swim meet one day, he'd take me up into
his room after we came home and show me pictures of him swimming.

He'd tell me how he had been a coach and a star and that if he could be
that good, why couldn't I?"

"I think John truly wanted Luke to be a great athlete for good
reasons," says Charlotte.  "He wanted him to be accomplished; what
parent doesn't want that for his child?  A lot of men try to achieve
what they didn't themselves through their sons.  It's just that Luke
was never as competitive as John had been as a youth, and it was hard
on him that John rarely praised him."

In fact, the best thing about the Arnold & Porter picnics, Luke says,
was the fact people would applaud his abilities in some of the
organized games.  "I'd go and play volleyball or Frisbee and get more
recognition there than I did at home.  I wasn't the first person to get
picked for a team, but I wasn't the last either.  Somebody wanted me.

That made me feel real good.

"I guess I just would have liked my father to have been around more, to
be more understanding, more patient.  My Dad never said 'That's great'
to me.  Never."

One of the major activities John did do with his sons, according to
Luke, was drilling them on their push-ups.  When the boys hadn't done
them, he told them that their upper bodies looked weak.  When Luke
broke his hand, he remembers that John made him try to do a push-up to
see if he could still do the exercise even in a cast.

"We did push-ups every night most of the time if he was home and in a
good mood," says Luke.  "He'd call all of us in and say, 'Give me
thirty."  And then at the end of thirty, we'd have to hold ourselves
two inches off the ground for a few seconds.  I think doing the
push-ups is what drove us apart from Dad the most because everyone
hated it.  It was a real bad time.  That and the chin-ups.  We did
those in the summer hanging from the bar on the jungle gym outside.  It
wasn't a chin-up bar, it was a big, thick pole that the swings were
attached to.  Even now I can barely wrap my hand around it.  So that
made it really hard.  We would have to climb up the trapeze to the bar,
then he would pull that back.

Sometimes he'd do it before we were set and we'd fall.  I was about
thirteen when we started."

Luke and Charlotte recall that John could also be brusque when helping
him with his schoolwork.  "Whenever we got talking, we got into a
fight," says Luke.  "When I had to read to him, we'd always argue that
I had skipped a word or pronounced a word wrong.  It was always 'Gosh,
you don't know this?  I'm not going to help you."  One night I had to
memorize a poem for school and he came in and said, 'Well, let me hear
it."  I got nervous, so I messed up.  So he said, 'Stay in your room
for another hour until you have it."  So, the next hour, he made me
nervous again, and I messed up again.  I'd get one line wrong, and he
made me do it all over again.

"He came home with a guitar one night and nonchalantly talked me into
taking lessons.  I probably did it for two years.  I never really
enjoyed it; none of us are very musical.  He was never pleased with
me.

When I started doing songs on the guitar, he'd say, 'Here, play me
something,' and I'd get all nervous and I could never play like that.

"Then he brought down this old trumpet that used to be his from the
attic and told me that I was going to play it.  He said, 'Why don't you
take lessons at school?"  I didn't say no because he'd get mad, and
when he got mad, he got mad.  You knew that going along with him made
him happy.  As long as you did everything his way, you were safe."

John disciplined his sons with an old Sigma Delta Chi journalism
fraternity paddle.  He called it "the board of education."  "We'd be in
church sometimes," says Luke, "and if we started-we weren't fooling
around-but if there was a giggle, he'd lean over and hold up his finger
and that meant one hit.  If we did it again, he'd hold up two fingers,
then three fingers.  We'd get home and you'd hear the screams upstairs
in his den.  He was like Big Brother in 1984.

"Once in a while, someone would take the board and hide it so he
couldn't use it.  Then he'd hit us with these floppy lead weights he
said he had put in his shoes when he was young.

"I remember that when John did that," says Charlotte, "or when they
were roughhousing, he'd say to the kids, "I didn't hurt you."  I think
he had no idea how strong he really was and that one good swat from him
could hurt a great deal."

"Toward the end," says Luke, "he used to run at me like he was going to
grab me when I refused to cut the grass a second time.  I'd say, 'No,
we're not going to do it again today."  I was always speaking for all
of us.

Then he'd run at me from maybe fifty feet or so.  I'd get freaked out
when he did that.  I'd run away, so he never caught me.  I don't know
what he would have done had he gotten his hands on me, but I wasn't
planning to find out the hard way.  It was real scary, because I knew
what he was like when he was mad and from the simple fact of having a
six-foot-ten guy running at you full speed.

"Yeah, I was afraid of him at the end, when he wasn't talking and
stuff.  Because you never knew what he was going to do next.  His moods
changed like the weather.  You were on guard all the time.  If a cop is
walking his beat, he doesn't have his gun all locked up on safety; he
has it unlatched and ready to fire.  That's how we were around the
housewaiting for it."

Charlotte tried to make the sporting events as pleasant as possible.

In 1981, when John and Luke jogged together they made a bet that Luke
wasn't as fast a runner as John.  They set a race for Memorial Day
weekend.  John promised Luke $10 if he won the two-mile contest.

Charlotte and the boys strung their driveway with toilet paper as a
finish line and waited for the runners to appear at the bottom of the
hill.

The family was in a festive mood because they knew John was being
considered for the SEC position and he was so happy.  Charlotte took a
photo as Luke, indeed, broke the paper ribbon first, to the cheers of
his brothers.

John, however, never paid Luke the bet.

"I don't believe in bets or bribes for children," says Charlotte, "but
if you make them, you should honor them.  Several times John promised
the boys a penny-an-acorn type of pay for yard work and he never paid
them."

The summer of 1982, John had also promised to reward the boys
monetarily for their chin-ups, if they reached his goal for them by his
chosen deadline.  They all did, but John still didn't pay.

"He'd always say 'later' about the money when we asked," says Luke.

"One time we were at the beach and we asked him for some money to go to
the boardwalk and he whips out a $100 and two $50 bills and hands one
each to me and two of my brothers.  We were out of that door so fast,
so excited, heading for the boardwalk.  And then he yells up the street
for us to come back.  'Do you really think I'd do that?"  he asked and
then handed me a $5 bill and gave them $2 apiece.

"He was big on making promises and getting everybody excited and then
never doing it.  We'd go out to that farm in Virginia.  We'd go up the
same hill and he'd stand there and say, 'We're going to build a house
right here and it'll overlook the creek."  We'd run around and be
excited because all kids love woods and a creek.  Then, the next time,
we'd climb that same hill and he'd say the same thing.  It happened
over and over again.  I finally starting thinking, 'Bull."  I knew it
would never happen.  He liked making promises.  I'd never believe any
of them unless he was promising something about his work-that he'd
do."

John took the boys to his SEC office only a few times.  Luke remembers
that one Sunday afternoon John worked for over an hour while he and his
brothers picked up staples in the commission's copy machine room as
John told them to.  (John would later have the carpet in the room
removed, apparently because the staff continued to drop staples around
the copying machine.) But, for the most part, Luke remembers that he
didn't see much of his father once he became SEC enforcer.  "That last
year he was more like a boarder than part of the family.  We didn't
even have to do the push-ups much then.  He just came in for his meals
and then went upstairs.

You could always tell if he was in a bad mood by the way he sat on his
couch in his study.  If his feet were toward the door so you could see
his face, he was okay.  When he was in a bad mood, he'd face the other
way, with his back to the door, ignoring you.  Most of the last year he
sat the other way.

John had left the house on Carmelita Drive seven months before the 60

Minutes program was aired.  When he did, Luke says he felt overwhelmed
by some of his new responsibilities.  He had always had more than most
boys his age, changing diapers and watching his baby brothers, but now
he felt he needed to be even more of a surrogate father, that he really
needed to discipline them when they acted up.  He says he followed the
only example that he had.

"When he first left," says Luke, "I thought I had to be like a father
for my brothers, and I followed his role and slapped them.  The first
time it happened, I felt terrible because they said, 'Get away from
me."

I reacted like my father and tried to be all nice.  It made me see how
terrible it had been for both sides, for him and for me.  So I
stopped."

Luke feels that tension lightened for him after his father left,
despite the household's economic paralysis.  "I'm sure there were some
good times with my father.  It's just hard for me to remember them."

PART FIVE TRIAL BY FIRE "When did you stop beating your wife?"

"Who said I did?"

Old vaudeville joke

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Preparing herself for her divorce
trial, scheduled for February 1985, was one of the hardest things
Charlotte ever did.  She spent hours with her lawyer, Bryan Renehan,
telling him all the sad, all the embarrassing details of her marriage,
defending herself against the accusations John made through his
deposition.  When giving her deposition, she tried to answer
succinctly, yes or no, whenever possible even though she feared that a
yes or no wouldn't tell the judge the whole story, wouldn't explain how
she had felt.  But she remembers that Renehan reassured her that he
would bring up the gray-zone elements of incidents in the divorce trial
if they needed telling.  He suggested she look at the judge as she
answered, even though he, Renehan, would be asking her the questions.

She trusted Renehan because he was accessible, soft-spoken,
compassionate, and more respectful to her than any man had ever been.

She was amazed that whenever his wife telephoned, even when they were
in the middle of something, Renehan immediately took the call.  He also
really listened to Charlotte, pulling on his brown mustache or
adjusting his horn rim glasses as he contemplated her answer.

"Bryan is a very empathetic, nice man," says Charlotte, "which I think
I desperately needed emotionally at the time.  A really cruel,
cut-throat lawyer would have made me vindictive, which ultimately would
have been very detrimental to my emotional health."

One of the things that terrified her was having to face John's lawyer,
Hal Witt, who intimidated her.  During the pendente lite hearing, in
September 1983, he had rattled Charlotte with a series of questions,
rather brusquely asked, she thought, about her driving abilities.

She remembers the deposition Witt took from her in fall 1984 as
painstaking and difficult.  For more than three hours she had sat in
his office, a legal stenographer silently typing, and answered
questions about her check stubs, notations on her calendars, letters
she had written, the part-time job she had taken at the boys' school as
a development coordinator.  What was he trying to imply by some of
them, she indignantly asked herself.

"His voice was very quiet," says Charlotte, "but he definitely seemed
insinuating.  He went through all my checks, for instance, asking about
any that had a man's name on it-like one to the man who delivered my
newspaper-who was he?  Witt was trying to establish a connection
between me and some man, I suppose.  Of course, he asked me if I had
ever had a relationship with another man during my marriage and when I
answered no, he asked if I had been with any woman.  I suppose John had
told him my book club might be a group of men-hating lesbians.

"The one time I notated on my calendar my appointment with Dr. Donahue
as 'Mary,' he wanted to know if I always called my therapist by her
first name, I guess implying that she had become too familiar to be a
credible witness.  He also asked about some notes I had written to
people who were primarily John's friends, informing them that we had
separated and saying that I hoped they would remain supportive of both
John and me and of the boys.  I did state that the reason for the
divorce was abuse, but that was all.  I didn't elaborate at all.  John
claimed I had launched a letter-writing vendetta against him, so I
guess what Witt was trying to find out was what I was trying to
accomplish with them.  Now I wouldn't even write those people.  But
then I was so insecure that John would tell them that I was a bad
person and that they would believe him.  But how could I try to explain
that kind of lack of confidence to John's lawyer?"

Charlotte knew many of John's complaints about her already: that she
didn't discipline the boys enough, confided too much in Luke and
alienated him from his father, talked too intimately with his secretary
about their problems, that her mouth was their biggest problem.

But he also claimed that she hadn't been tender, that she hadn't
supported him enough.  She had tried so hard to be everything he
wanted.  Was the court going to believe that she had been a cold,
spoiled brat and therefore deserved brutality?

In addition, John was pressuring her to cut the expense of sending the
boys to private schools and of her seeing her psychologist.

Tuition alone was up to $15,000 a year.  Charlotte refused on both
counts-she felt she needed to continue therapy and the boys needed to
stay in their schools, where they'd get more individualized academic
attention.

She also felt she needed to maintain some stability in their lives.

Besides, she remembered that John had always supported their private,
Catholic education.  Why was he changing his tune now?

Nine days before February 4, 1985, the first day set for their trial,
Charlotte began saying a novena to Saint Martha, the patron saint of
homemakers.  Each evening she went to her parish, Our Lady of Mercy,
and lit a candle before the Blessed Mother's altar, and said her
prayers.

The modern chapel looked particularly stark during those nine winter
evenings.  The larger-than-life Jesus, hanging against a cold wall of
slate, was splattered with shadows cast from candles on the Blessed
Mother's altar to its right, where flames flickered cool in rows of
blue glasses, and from candles on the Sacred Heart's altar to its left
that burned hot in blood-red glasses.  Those were the only lights in
the chapel.  But Charlotte braved the foreboding gloom, asking the
saint to protect the interests of her children.  On her way out, she
also said a small prayer of contrition, guilty that she didn't have
enough pocket change to pay the church's suggested contribution for the
candle she lit that night.  She was counting every nickel these days.

The day of the trial arrived cold and clear.  As she dressed, Charlotte
berated herself for not losing weight.  She hated the idea that John
would look at her and think that she had fallen apart after he left
her, that, as always, she had "let herself go."  She drove the twenty
minutes to the Rockville courthouse by herself.

The trial was to begin at 10 AM and Charlotte met Renehan in the
courthouse lobby at 9:30.  About 9:40, he and Hal Witt withdrew to an
antechamber to discuss a proposal he had submitted to Witt several
weeks beforehand.  Charlotte prayed that John had accepted her alimony
and support requests so that she could just go home.  She had heard
tales of people "settling on the courthouse stairs," and kept hoping
that Renehan would return with glad tidings.  As she waited anxiously,
she watched clusters of lawyers gather and lean against the walls,
smoke cigarettes, peruse papers, argue, make deals.  Her hopes built.

Five minutes to ten, and Renehan still wasn't back.  Charlotte went
into the courtroom with an associate of Renehan's firm, there to help
him present her case.

Renehan appeared in the courtroom seconds before Judge James McAuliffe
arrived.  He shook his head.  There were no substantive additions to
John's original plan in his counterproposal.

"John had always said," recalls Charlotte, "that a man couldn't be
successful and be a nice guy.

John was willing to continue paying $1,000 a month to Charlotte in
alimony and child support, continue life insurance payments, health
insurance for the children, plus the mortgage and house utilities (all
of which he calculated totaled $2,211 a month); to give Charlotte three
years' use of the house and half the proceeds from its sale; and to
keep the boys on his health insurance and Charlotte as beneficiary on
his life insurance policy.  He based his plan on his current government
salary of $72,300.

After paying taxes and all his monthly obligations to Charlotte, John
figured that he had about $1,086 left over for himself, from which he
paid his rent, which had been raised to $720.

But Charlotte knew that she and five boys couldn't exist on $12,000
support per annum.  John expected her to pay the house insurance out of
that amount, which alone was more than $1,000 a year.  She was spending
$500 a month on food.  They had already sold the Virginia property and
she had used those proceeds to pay tuitions and legal and medical
bills.

What was she supposed to do after the house was sold?  Even with half
the cash from the sale of their house (which had been estimated to have
a fair market value of $285,000) she wouldn't be able to find a house
to accommodate six people that would have a mortgage less than the
$820

John now paid.  She probably wouldn't even be able to find a place to
rent for that amount.

She had been working part time at The Woods Academy, producing
brochures and helping recruit new students, for which she had received
$3,784 the previous year.  She didn't want to work full time because
her youngest son was only three years old and another five.  The cost
of day care would almost negate whatever pay she figured she could get,
even if she did renew her nursing license and found a related job.

Besides, she strongly believed in full-time mothering.  She reasoned
that John simply had to shoulder more of the economic burden.  Why
didn't he just return to private practice?

Charlotte and Renehan had decided to accept what they considered
reduced alimony and child support based on John's government salary
until he left the SEC (probably at the end of Reagan's second term), if
he would also give Charlotte the house.  With those qualifiers, they
asked for $2,000 a month in alimony, and $1,250 for child support ($250
per child), which would include the boys' tuition.

In Maryland, a divorce settlement is an "equitable decision"; there is
no presumption of a fifty-fifty split even in cases where the
separation is voluntary, as Charlotte and John's had been.  If one of
the parties can show the other was more at fault in causing the
divorce, the less guilty party is generally awarded more.

Abuse is one of the few reasons of fault the court still takes
seriously, says Renehan.  He had to prove fault so that John would pay
his client more than the $12,000 a year he offered.  So he and
Charlotte built their case around the abuse.  And, in truth, given her
background, Charlotte says she would never have ended her marriage had
it not been for the violence and psychological control.  Renehan
planned to present only seven incidences of physical attacks, for which
they had undeniable documentation, doctor's reports and records of
treatment or witnesses.

Charlotte says John knew walking into the Rockville courtroom what
Renehan planned to present.  Several weeks before, Renehan had
disclosed his list of witnesses and evidence to Witt-there are no
surprises allowed in a court proceeding despite the romanticized
depictions of TV dramas.

In the evidence was a photograph of Charlotte with a black eye.  On the
list of witnesses was the name of her therapist.  Renehan was stunned
that John didn't want to settle out of court.

"I think you have to know John Fedders to understand this," says
Renehan.  "I think he was psychologically incapable of compromise.

That's what made him such a successful lawyer.  He is a very
hard-nosed, determined, macho kind of guy.  It was always winning,
winning, winning for him.  He ran the SEC and his home like armed
camps.  I think he had come to believe that he was invincible."

"I really didn't want that much money," says Charlotte.  "But what John
was offering was realistically not enough for a six-person household.

And because he didn't bring it up in his proposal, Bryan and I had to
assume that he also wasn't planning to contribute to the boys'
education, high school or college, or contribute to rehabilitative
alimony for reeducating me so that I could work.  Nothing.

"We truly thought that John would settle out of court.  This is crazy,
we kept thinking: there is no way he'd take the chance of taking it to
court.  Once we were there, however, I couldn't just say, 'Trust me,
Your Honor, this was bad, but I don't want to publicly discuss it."

"People have said that I murdered his career, but I think he committed
professional suicide.  I honestly think the man didn't think he had
done anything wrong.  Or that people would question whether he could do
his public job well given his private problems."

The Wall StTeet Journal's reporter Brooks Jackson approached the bench
to formally announce his presence after Charlotte's testimony, when the
judge called for a recess.  But John later told Charlotte that he knew
who Jackson was all along.  When the judge returned to the courtroom
following lunch, he announced that Jackson was working on a possible
story and that the court would make transcripts and evidence available
to him.

Charlotte cried quietly through much of her testimony.  It took several
hours to relate all the details of the specific seven abuse incidents,
the slow breaking of her spirit by John's criticisms, his moody
withdrawals, his rules, their overspending, all the shattered hopes of
a marriage that Charlotte always believed should have been perfect.

Her testimony included: I remember trying to protect my abdomen.  . .

.

It was just a frightening experience, because .  . . I was really
afraid for my life and the child I was carrying.

During these periods [of withdrawal] he would, when he was home, just
sleep a lot.  And then the next morning he would wake up and be singing
in the shower.

When I tried to talk to him he would laugh at me or tell me everything
was fine.

I constantly felt that I should be doing something more .  . . he made
me convinced that I was causing the major problem and I really felt the
responsibility to get help.  [But] he was bitterly against it [seeing
the psychiatrist].  . . . I was losing control.  I kept feeling that I
should be doing more for John, because I could not make him happy.  .

.

. I went to [John] and pleaded with him not to get a divorce.  . . . I
really wanted our marriage to work.  He laughed at me and he said that
he's been dating for years.  He said: "Ask anybody at Arnold &
Porter."

. . . I was .  . . devastated.  I never denied him sex at all.  I'm a
bit of a heavy-weight myself and I figured he couldn't throw me over
the banister with, you know, ease, if I was on the floor.  But he had
me by the hair.  And I was on my knees, yelling at him to stop, and he
just shook me by the hair, * .  . up and down and back and forth, and
then just kind of.  .

. threw me down.

* .  . I threw open my nightgown .  . . I guess in my mind I was trying
to seduce him.  . . . But he just looked at me and laughed and said
that I had just proved his point, that I was crazy.  And then he
left.

Except for when my baby died, it was one of the most horrible moments
in my life.  . . . He yelled at [the boys] to come on out and [when
they didn't] he yelled at them, "Why don't you just suck on your
mother's tit He stopped going to [the psychiatrist], saying [to me],
"I'm not going with that attitude of yours."

Finally, Renehan asked her why she had stayed so long.  She responded:
All I ever wanted to be when I was growing up was a wife and mother.  I
knew I was a good mother.  I kept trying to be a good wife.  I felt a
good bit of the abuse must have been my fault.  . . . My religion says
[marriage] is sacred .  . . I never wanted to leave him.  He was just
my life .  . . I felt no other man would want me.  I didn't feel
particularly attractive when I was younger.

Although John married me, he didn't encourage me to feel attractive.

There was always something wrong with me.  I was too fat, .  . . my
hair was too curly.  . . . I think the only reason that I ultimately
felt there was no other way [than divorce] was because of the effect it
was having on my children Even when John left I didn't have the
self-esteem to think that I deserved to be treated better.

But I knew my children did.

The final witness Renehan called was Charlotte's therapist, Dr. Mary
Donahue, who described the dynamics of the marriage and Charlotte's
resulting emotional state: [Charlotte] has episodes of depression.  .

.

. Mrs. Fedders never felt she had much to say about .  . . how the
relationship was going .  . . and basically he made the decisions as to
where they would go, and what they would do, and what sort of things
they would buy.  . . . Mrs. Fedders saw herself as submissive and
dependent on Mr. Fedders.  . . . She never felt that she had an equal
role.  . . . Mrs. Fedders presents almost a classic case of someone
who is a victim in that she felt inadequate and less attractive .  .

.

and felt that she was indeed fortunate to have someone like Mr. 
Fedders be attracted to her.  Therefore, whatever problems existed were
her responsibility.  . . . She always looked to herself to see what she
was doing that provoked this .  . . whatever problems the children
presented she felt were her fault in some way.  . . . I don't think she
had the ability or skills * .  . to get out [of her marriage].  . . .

It was only as the children got a little older and she began to move
out into the community a little bit more and had some exposure to other
people reacting to her [that she realized] that she could do things
successfully.

While listening to Renehan's arguments, the testimony of witnesses, and
even the tearful statements by his wife, John sat quietly, taking notes
or looking away, not visibly showing any emotional reaction.  On the
stand the next day, however, John's calm failed him.  His
uncharacteristic lack of control started almost as soon as he took the
oath on February 5. When asked where he attended college, John's voice
cracked as he answered, "Marquette," and the judge asked him if he
needed some water.

Later, John stumbled through his testimony, sometimes repeating
himself, sometimes speaking in fragmented statements, sometimes
interrupting himself in a tumble of thoughts.

Charlotte stared at her husband in disbelief.  She had never seen him
so seemingly distraught or heard him ramble on so, this man who
regularly testified in front of Senate committees and talked to the
press, this man who had always been so tightly controlled with her.

He went to the SEC, John said, for "the opportunity for public
service.

Intellectual enrichment, to do something extremely challenging, ah, to
push me every day, to put enormous amounts of pressure on me.

The exhilaration, and the constant challenge and the pressure was
something I wanted so badly.  . . . I told her that it .  . .

provided me two things I needed desperately in life: the combination of
my management skills and my intellectual capabilities.  And it was
exhilarating and it was going to push me."

The judge interrupted Witt's questioning to ask: "There is an emphasis
in your testimony about something you desperately needed.

And you emphasize the word 'desperately."  Can you tell me what led to
that desperation?"

"I'm ambitious," replied John.  "I would like to excel.  I have said to
more than one person that.  . . I would like to be recognized as .  .

.

one of the outstanding securities lawyers in the country."

Judge: "Was it a professional desperation?  Was it limited to
professional matters, or did you feel a desperation about
everything?"

John: "Desperation, upon reflection, as we dialogue, might be the wrong
word."

Judge: "It's your term."

John: "Yeah.  I wanted to be in public service very badly, because I
think that no place do you get the intellectual challenge and the
enrichment combined.  I don't care how good you are in private
practice, you don't face the same kinds of problems day in and day out
that you can face in a law enforcement position of this magnitude.

And, ah.  It provided me.  I am told I have a talent-rather than saying
I have it-I have both an intellectual talent and a management talent.

In a law firm you can be a lawyer, but your management is limited to
the number of cases there.

At the commission today I have 739 open investigations, that are in the
nature of formal orders.  I have hundreds of.  . . inquiries going
on.

I have just a staff to work on so many things.... I never have to work
on anything more than ten minutes.  I can deal with things
intellectually.

"The most satisfying thing is working with young people."  John
suddenly spoke in a torrent.  "To take young students or young people
two years out of law school and show them how to excel and push
themselves.

And I never demand anything of anybody that I don't provide ten times
myself.  And that's caused problems for Charlotte and me.  But I would
say that my greatest success there is the acquisition and management of
talent.  You can forget all the cases we've brought.  I've transformed
that into an institution-not myself; I don't like the word 'I' at the
SEC-but the senior staff I've selected, into what is being called the
finest law enforcement agency in the world.  And I take great pride in
that.

I don't want to dwell on it, but it's a wonderful job."

Witt continued the examination by asking about his finances.  When
questioned about a deduction in his pay, John struggled as he said, "I
am told that, ah, ah [pause], that when the court declares the
divorce."  He paused.  Seeing his discomfort, Judge McAuliffe suggested
a ten-minute recess, but John replied: "It's not going to get any
easier, Your Honor, we might as well keep going."  There seemed to be
an eerie awareness in the courtroom of watching a successful man
self-destruct, as John, confronted with the realities of his life,
seemed to be unable to speak without great emotion.  Despite his
suggestion to continue, the judge declared a break to let John collect
himself.

Back in the courtroom, Witt continued his questioning: "Mrs. Fedders
testified that you struck her possibly on seven occasions.

How do you feel about having struck your wife?"

John: "There was no justification whatsoever."

Witt: "She testified that on one occasion that you hit her in the
stomach [when pregnant].  Is that true?"

John: "I don't believe so.I prayed on this last night for God's wisdom
as to whether I did it.  I just cannot believe that I did it."  He
gathered momentum as he spoke.  "This occurred before the birth of our
first son.

I was in love with her.  Nobody wanted a first son more than me.

I was up there, painting his name on-we called him Oscar for a while-I
painted his name across the ceiling.  It is incomprehensible to me that
I had that capability to say .  . . that I didn't care if she died, .

.

if he died, or .  . . if I went to jail.  I deny it vehemently."

Later, Witt asked: "Mrs. Fedders testified that in November of 1981,
you tried to throw her over the banister.  Did you, in fact, try to
throw her over the banister?"

John: "I remember the incident.  I remember it all too well, again.

It was by the banister.  I don't believe that I tried to throw her over
the banister.  I don't believe that I indicated that I wanted to throw
her over the banister.  I did a dumb thing.  You know, I am forever
remorseful about it.  I did hit her.  She suffered from that, but, ah
[pause], and I know she was scared at the time.  But I don't believe,
God is my witness, that I tried to throw her over the banister.  We
were by the banister.  My actions, pushing and shoving each other, may
have been such that she said, 'Whoops, I'm going over the banister,'
But that was not my intention."

About the 1983 snowfall and giving Charlotte a black eye, John
struggled through his answer: "In November of 1981, when I hit her, and
she suffered the back problem, I promised to her, to myself [pause],
and I remember going to church and promising to God that it would never
happen again, and ah, ah."  His voice became hoarse.  "I remember
beating my arm on, I was at Saint Matthew's Cathedral, near Arnold and
Porter, I went like that the banged the witness podium] on the altar
rail, and I said, 'Lord, you've got to provide me some help here.  I've
made a lot of mistakes.  It just can't happen again."  And things were
going well for a while.

"I would say from September of 1982, until the time of this incident,
it's a scenario.  As I told Mr. Renehan, I couldn't blame the incident
on the events of that day, there were so many incidents that had
occurred.

I felt that she was keeping me away from the kids' education, which I
cared about desperately.  And I wanted to be provided report cards.

I

would say, 'Aren't report cards due?"  and everybody would frown the
other way like I was going to raise holy hell.  . . . I was very
demanding of the children.  I am very demanding of everybody, including
her, and me.

The Southland investigation, which had been going on, began to clearly
focus in on my own conduct at that time.  . . .1 was very tense about
that.  . . . I needed a lot of support at that time and I don't think I
got it.  I think one of Charlotte's biggest concerns was how this would
hurt the ultimate dollar-earning capacity of the stud.  And on the
weekend before this occurred, Charlotte accused me of taking the
$96,500 bribe [involved in the Southland investigation].  . . .

Christmas was a disaster.

There wasn't ten minutes of peace between Christmas and then.  .

. . I was ready to go to work beyond belief and I wake up and there's
sixteen to eighteen inches of snow on the ground.  I try to go to work,
down the driveway, and up the street.  No work.  . . . It's that sort
of mid-to-late afternoon period where the snow is melting, pressuring
down on the gutter.  I'm worried about the house I'm out there trying
to save the gutter, jiggling it around and, sure as heck, all the snow
from the roof comes down, right on my good clean driveway, as one would
say.  .

. . I go in the house, and probably carry on a little bit.  'Let's get
everybody outside."  .  . . [My Son] is on the stairway and, uh, I said
that awful stigma to him."

The judge interrupted again.  "Did you mean that when you said that to
your son?"

John: "I hope not, Your Honor.  God, I hope not."

Judge: "Let me ask you something It became very important for you to
get to the office, didn't it?"

John: "I like to work a lot, yes."

Judge: "Yes, you do.  And when you couldn't, home didn't look very
good, did it?"

John: "No.  There was a lot of tension.  And, hey, you're talking about
the death of a marriage, and it's going on, and, you know, this is
bizarre.  .

Judge: "Did you think, at the time, that it was healthy for you, to
have to go to work [to find happiness] that day, to leave your home?"

John: "That wasn't the only day, Your Honor.  That's the problem."

Judge: "That was the day you couldn't go.  That was the day nature
interceded and you couldn't go."

John: "Probably the Lord was telling me to stay home is what you're
saying."

Judge: "Do you think that kind of anger, that you built in, is the kind
of anger that you could have and exist within a family framework?"

John: [Pause.] "Now, that's the problem.  When we talk about these
periods of silence, we bred on each other.  She'd get depressed, I'd
get depressed.  Hey, I'll take the first blame."

Judge: "All you had to do was think about each other to get angry?

Is that right?"

John: "Let me tell you about a little expression I used to use about
our marriage when I prayed to God.  We had the capability of building
the Eiffel Tower in a day together, but we also had the capability of
destroying it in ten minutes together."

John continued telling the story of the February snowfall and giving
Charlotte a black eye: "I did it.  Hit her in the eye.  You know, she
was out of the house with the kids in a millisecond and I'm there
alone.

Jackass.  And Valentine's comes and I bring her candy.  . . .

That's the first time I realized that it was over.  There was a skit
that we played out for the next couple of months, with each other, but
in my own mind, it was probably over that day.  [In conclusion, there
were] A number of incidents.

I put a different coloration on them.  The only place that I'm going
berserk is saying to you that I deny .  . . this stuff about trying to
kill her.  I don't think I'm capable of doing that, or saying that
even, particularly in the periods she talks about.  There was too much
love between us in those days.

Mistakes, yeah, from day one.  We did a lot of dumb things to each
other.

We bred on each other's hatred at times.  I think we enjoyed it at
times.

These silent periods.  Ah.  I take the blame, but-" The judge stopped
him to ask: "What makes you think your wife looked at it that way?

Even if you possibly did enjoy those silent periods, what makes you
think she enjoyed it?"

John: "I honestly believe, as we talk about some of the taunting that
went on in the marriage, that Charlotte really enjoyed it.  Yes, I
demeaned her.  I did a lot of dumb things."

Judge: "Why did you do it?  Did you lack respect for your wife?"

John: "Yes.  No question about it.  She didn't demand respect."

Judge: "Well, she admits that her problem was gaining self-respect.

But did you help her with it?"

John: "Oh, no, I mean."

Judge: "You took it from her, didn't you?"

John: [Crying.] "Sure.  We both took it ... Anytime anybody had a
bubble in life .  . . we were always the thorn that pricked it.

You know, it's crazy.  We wouldn't be here today if we could solve
it.

Believe me.  But there we are.

"I have tremendous remorse for this.  I pray.  I have remorse for
Charlotte.  I hurt five kids, hurt my folks, her folks, and I hurt
myself enormously because of this thing."

Witt began his questioning again, focusing on the letters Charlotte had
written to John's friends following their separation and the
concentration on money in their marriage.

Said John: "She told me that she would ruin me There was a lot of
concentration in our life on money.  We are both insecure about it.

I have the capability to make it.  But I'm afraid of it.  The things
about the house.  I worry about the house because I think it's all
going to disappear.  . . . That rug is supposed to be here until
1999.

That's sort of my crazy attitude.  I worry about things too much.  I
do."

Judge: "Was it accurate, when she testified that you asked the family
to remove their shoes?"

John: "Yeah, we always took our shoes off in the house, but, I mean.

Judge: "Was that a rule?"

John: "Yeah .  . . she used to call me the rule-maker.  Yeah, I had a
lot of rules, but at our house, it was always comfortable to take off
your shoes.  We had so many wonderful, nice things.  .

Judge: "Mr.  Fedders, at the time, did you ever ask yourself .

whether you were preserving a house or a rug or raising five
children?"

John: "Yeah, we talked about it from time to time."

Judge: "That's what rugs are meant for, aren't they?"

John: [Talking over the judge's question.] The kids are terrific.

Don't get me wrong.  We hurt the kids.  They've got some problems.  .

.

Judge: "You can tell on any given day whether you're up or down, can't
you?"

John: "I don't think so.  Not at the beginning.  I'd really be more
interested in Charlotte's answer to that than mine.  [Pause.] .

. . Most people have said this to me, 'The only person you're down with
is Charlotte."  Everybody at the SEC, Arnold and Porter, hey, I'm the
guy who's going and blowing and that's why I think this just hasn't
worked.

Why do I do what I do to her and not to anybody else?  .  . . [But] I
push the kids.  I push everybody, I guess.  Ask [my secretary], why did
she leave?  'Be there at 6:45 [AM].  Tomorrow let's be here at
.......

.

But nobody could do it like this secretary]."

Judge: "And you even exhausted her?"

John: "Yeah .  . . she'll be back though."

Almost finished on the stand, John concluded about his and Charlotte's
life together: "We're very very intelligent people, both of us.  She
was insecure, and I was dumb.  We did dumb things.  The only problem is
we're playing ours in the circus of life, everybody else is keeping
theirs under the rug.

The trial was supposed to conclude the next day, February 6, but the
judge became ill and it was postponed until February 25.  The Wall
Street Journal would hold its story until then.  For three anxious
weeks, Charlotte waited, trying to ignore a torrent of phone calls and
love letters from John.

Suddenly, after one and a half years of barely speaking to her, he
wanted to reconcile.

CHAPTER TWENTY

On February 25, 1985, the judicial system failed to let
Charlotte out of her marriage.  After giving his testimony, on the
fifth of the month John decided to contest the divorce.  He wanted
Charlotte back and begged the judge to give him time to attempt a
reconciliation.  Perhaps impressed by how repentent he seemed, perhaps
feeling sorry for him because of all the controversy now surrounding
him, the judge granted John's request.

He delayed what was supposed to be the last day of the divorce trial
until May 21, despite Bryan Renehan's protestations.  While meeting
with Renehan and Hal Witt in closed chambers, Judge McAuliffe suggested
to Charlotte's lawyer that she go out to dinner with John to talk
things out.

Charlotte was stunned when Renehan told her.

"The judge's attitude went along with all that Bryan had warned me
about before the trial," says Charlotte, "that the courts tend to view
abuse as a symptom rather than a cause of a bad marriage.  The judge
seemed to think that the guy had said he was sorry, so that everything
was all right.

I really think policemen and judges and lawyers should be required to
read about the battered wife syndrome so that they understand the
pattern, so that they know that the husband's great show of sorrow, the
promises to be better are only part of a cycle.  That it's not
something that could be worked out over dinner, only through hard work
and longtime counselIng.

But Charlotte was hardly so philosophic that morning.  "I felt like I
was in the Twilight Zone.  The judge was in effect telling me that,
after all this trauma I had lived through, I didn't know what I
wanted.

He had been so sympathetic and concerned with John when he was on the
stand, and I just felt like my pain was being ignored, that once again
I wasn't as important as John Fedders.  I was almost hysterical when
Bryan told me.

Bryan said he knew that I didn't want to have anything more to do with
John but that the judge's sympathies had swung and that maybe I should
consider going to dinner just to show I wasn't unreasonable.  But I
knew how John and I had operated in the past.  I knew that any sign of
an opening on my part would encourage John to push harder and harder.

He had been pushing me ever since the day of his testimony.  Now the
judge was pressuring me as well.  I felt like I was being caged.

"Then I started to doubt myself.  If all these people were convinced he
really was sorry, maybe John really could change.  Maybe this time
would be different."

This time, John seemed determined to win Charlotte back.  He pursued
her doggedly.  It started with telephone calls and then with almost
daily letters, page after page filled with his ardor for her, his
remorse, his claim to have refound God, and his promises that this
time, with the Lord's help, and with the help of counseling, he would
change.

Letters that before would have made Charlotte weep with thankfulness,
but now only confused her, she says.

On Valentine's Day he sent an ardently penned card in which he
proclaimed his love and apologized to Charlotte for not showing her
"love, respect, and honor."  He promised that his job would never again
come before his family, that he would never mistreat her again.  He
closed the note with: "I desperately want to hear your needs, desires,
plans, and goals.  . . . how God is affecting your life.  I need
confession.  . . . But, how do we begin-we need a courtship.  May I
have a date with you, Char?"

His pleas became more urgent.  He wrote poignantly of his sorrow and
loneliness in many letters: "Charlotte, please give me a chance to
prove my total commitment to you and our sons.  . . Please extend your
hand and help me.... I so much want you as my companion and help mate
on my way back.  . . . Push me.  Test me.  . . . Ask anything.  Do you
feel spring in the air?"

Also on Valentine's Day, John ordered a dozen red roses from
Charlotte's friend and florist, Sandy Oseroff.  As strapped financially
as he and Charlotte were, "John came into my shop and handed me a $100
bill," recalls Oseroff, "to send Charlotte $80 worth of long stem
roses.

He said that he was going to get her back one way or another.  My heart
was going a mile a minute.  I had just testified against him.  But he
was happy as a lark; it was strange, but that's John, one minute he's
one way, the next he's another."

But despite his pleadings, despite his promises to do anything for
Charlotte to make her happy, to make their family whole, to put the
needs of their sons first, John didn't do the one thing she says she
really wanted him to do, the one thing that would alleviate their
crushing financial problems.  He didn't voluntarily quit the SEC.  He
had three weeks following his February 5 testimony to leave the
commission quietly and to return to a more lucrative private practice,
before the publicity from the pending 'Wall Street Journal article
could adversely affect his professional marketability.  But John
didn't, even after Brooks Jackson interviewed him regarding the trial,
even after his lawyer for the Southland case, Nathan Lewin, wrote a
letter, dated February 12, which later appeared in the trade paper
Legal Times, asking the newspaper not to print the story.

Lewin's letter called a possible story on the divorce an intrusion on
John's privacy and read, in part: "You cannot be oblivious, in this
regard, to the self-fulfilling effect of a Journal article that
discusses whether the pressure is too much' on John Fedders.  Even if
the article's text concludes that pressure has not affected his
performance, the mere publication of an article discussing such
speculation will raise doubts.  The public knows only the adage that
infers fire from the presence of smoke."

The Wall Street Journal's managing editor would later be quoted as
saying that the decision to run the story was one of the hardest he
ever made, but on February 25, the newspaper published Jackson's
unusually long story on its front page, titling it: "Storm Center: John
Fedders of SEC Is Pummeled by Legal and Personal Problems."  The
article detailed the events of the trial, Charlotte and John's
testimony, their chronic overspending, plus recounted John's
involvement with the Southland investigation.  It included both
criticisms and praise of his SEC administration.  John, SEC chairman
John Shad, White House counsel Fred Fielding, and Lewin were all
interviewed for the article.

Wrote Jackson: "Nobody has accused Mr. Fedders of misfeasance in
office.  SEC Chairman John Shad says that despite Mr. Fedders's
personal and financial problems, his work remains top-notch.  He is
'doing an outstanding job,' Mr.  Shad says.

"Mr. Fedders himself says his work at the SEC isn't being affected by
his marital, financial, and legal problems.  'I have the unique
capacity of burying myself in my work,' he says.  But he also
acknowledges that his hard work and burning ambition have affected his
personal life.

'I've put my work in front of my family for eighteen years,' he says.

'In my own mind, I was the proudest guy to take home that full
briefcase."

In the next two paragraphs, Jackson summarized why the newspaper
decided to run what seemed so intensely a private story: "Problems like
Mr. Fedders's were once routinely swept under the rug.  Many prominent
people, in and out of government, have serious marital, financial, and
other personal problems.  But only rarely-with film stars or
occasionally with prominent elected officials-have such problems
surfaced in the press.

"There are compelling reasons, however, for telling the John Fedders
story.  Family violence, whether tied to pressures of the job or other
root causes, is becoming a matter of increased national concern.  So
too, in a different way, are the financial problems incurred by
successful people when they leave the private sector for positions in
government."

Author Laurence Leamer wrote in Playing for Keeps in Washington, a
collection of profiles of the city's powerful, that "success and
prominence are Washington's true transients."  John was about to
discover just how true that statement could be.

Perhaps, as Charlotte hypothesized, John hadn't realized his treatment
of her was wrong.  Maybe he thought he could explain it-she had pushed
him to do all those horrible things, after all.  She and her lawyer
were exaggerating things.  Besides, that was home, a separate place, a
private place, where he was king.  What did it have to do with him
professionally?  He was not being charged with a crime and there was no
insinuation by the Wall Street Journal that his private problems were
eroding his performance in his public job.

But no matter what he was thinking, John misjudged the morality of the
city.  There was an attitude in Washington, perhaps spawned by the
heartland's idealistic expectations of its capital, that public
officials should be irreproachable, that their conduct should be held
to a higher standard than simply abiding by the law, since the law
could be stretched to legally allow somewhat questionable behavior.

Senator Joseph Biden, for instance, said during confirmation hearings
of Edwin Meese for attorney general that: "The higher .  . . the
government position held, the stricter the ethical standard should
be."

No, John had not been charged with a crime, although had Charlotte ever
pressed charges, he could have been charged with a misdemeanor.

But his conduct seemed to outrage the country's sensibilities and their
attitude about what home should be-a safe harbor-especially since he
was one of the nation's top law enforcement officers.

A line in Charlotte's letter to President Reagan contained a pivotal
thought: "I do not understand.  . . how a man can enforce one set of
laws and abuse another."  A paragraph from syndicated columnist Ellen
Goodman neatly synthesized the attitude of much of the press and
country: "Let me rephrase Charlotte Fedders' question.  Should a man
who has brutally violated one code of behavior have the power to
enforce another?

The answer is no.

Charlotte's revelations were also of overwhelming interest because they
yanked family violence out of the ghetto and wedged it right into
upstanding suburbia.  She proved that rage and violence knew no
socio-economic barriers.  That in itself crushed stereotypes that
before had allowed middle-and upper-class Americans to ignore the
problem as being one that couldn't possibly affect them.

Two other factors, both political, contributed to the newsworthiness of
John and Charlotte's saga.  John worked for the Reagan
administration-an administration that, more than any other, preached
the sanctity of the family.  Reagan had publicly declared war on
domestic violence.

What did it mean that he employed a man who admitted to beating his
wife on seven separate occasions?  And could financial pressures caused
by taking a comparatively low-paying government job cause or exacerbate
emotional problems?  The trial's revelations that one reason John might
have initially joined the SEC was as a means to leap to a higher-paying
private job was mildly disturbing, particularly when coupled with the
fact of the debts he had run up while working for the federal
government.

News broadcasts immediately picked up on the story and reporters
swarmed the Rockville courthouse, scrambling to catch up on details.

More than a dozen journalists pursued Charlotte to her car following
the meeting between Judge McAuliffe, Witt, and Renehan, shouting
questions.

As a result of the publicity, John would probably face an official
review of his marital violence.  According to the Wall Street
Journal.

Fielding was expected to request Shad to conduct a factual review at
the conclusion of the divorce trial when reconvened in May.  White
House spokesman Larry Speakes announced that President Reagan wouldn't
comment while the divorce trial was pending, but added: "The President
obviously does not condone or advocate or tolerate any type of abuse,
whether it is [against] children, wives, husbands, whoever."

But John saved the administration and his boss the trouble of an
official review.  Late February 26, after two days of front-page
stories, he resigned, writing in part: "Newspaper reports of yesterday
and today have exaggerated allegations in the divorce trial and have
unfairly described occasional highly regrettable episodes in our
marriage.

On seven occasions during more than eighteen years of marriage, marital
disputes between us resulted in violence, for which I feel, and have
expressed, great remorse.  These isolated events do not, however,
justify the extreme characterizations made in the press.  Although I am
thoroughly satisfied that my private difficulties have in no way
affected the execution of my duties as director of the division of
enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission and would not do
so in the future if I remained in office, the glare of publicity on my
private life threatens to undermine the effectiveness of the division
of enforcement and of the Commission."

SEC chairman John Shad accepted John's resignation "with regret,"
saying that John had done an excellent job, increasing the volume of
enforcement cases by 50 percent, even though he was working with 5
percent fewer personnel than his predecessor.  Shad had given him the
SEC's award of excellence.  He credited John with cracking the
traditional secrecy of Swiss bank accounts and cracking down on
corporate fraud and insider trading.

Charlotte learned of John's resignation when a television reporter
called her for a comment about it.  "I had felt nothing when I read the
'Wall Street Journal article, really," says Charlotte.  "I was just so
numb by then.  But when the reporter told me that John had resigned, I
felt flushed in the pit of my stomach.  I wanted to call and tell him
that I was sorry.  But I just couldn't, because he would have seen that
as the beginnings of a reconciliation.  I didn't feel guilty because I
knew he should never have gone into that courtroom.  But I felt really,
really sorry for him, for my family, for all of us."

That night John and Charlotte made the network news.  CBS gave the
fullest report, with reporter Lesley Stahl narrating.  Footage included
a view of the home at Carmelita Drive, slowly pulling back, taking full
advantage of its hill to make the house appear the suburban castle, as
Stahl talked about John taking a $100,000 pay cut to join the SEC.

Court testimony and Lewin's statement about the case involving only
seven incidents were printed on the television screen underneath an
instant-logo of akimbo marriage rings encased in an outline of a
courthouse.

CBS even interviewed Congresswoman Pat Schroeder as a voice of critics
who had been calling for John to be fired.  She said: "The President
has been one who would have you believe that no one around him would
ever do such a thing, that they are the saints and that everyone else
is the sinner."

In closing, Stahl stood before the White House and said: "White House
officials insist that there was no pressure on Mr. Fedders to resign,
although they admit that, given President Reagan's emphasis on family
values, the Fedders case, if allowed to linger on, could have been
politically damaging."

Following his resignation, John cloistered himself in a Trappist
monastery and sought psychiatric help.  He would not take a private job
until May, when he joined Nathan Lewin's firm of Miller, Cassidy,
Larroca, & Lewin in Washington, D.C. Charlotte, meanwhile, tried to
ignore a photographer from a grocery-store tabloid who followed her
around, jumping in front of her to snap pictures as she took the
children to school, went to her therapist, or ran errands.  She also
tried to resist the insecurity and anger she felt when watching talk
shows dissect her situation and debate the press's right to report it,
such as the time Lewin appeared on the CBS Morning News and said with
indignation: "In the interest of decency, there are things which a
newspaper cannot know in terms of relations that go on in the home.

.

. . But that doesn't mean that the public should be deprived of a
superb public servant.  . . . There's .  . . a substantial difference
between allegations of criminal conduct .  . . and really what are
disputes in the home..  . seven times over a long marriage-that is, I
think, quite different even in degree and in kind from somebody being
charged with committing a crime.

In the next weeks, it became harder and harder for Charlotte to resist
John.  He publicly stated that he was seeking a reconciliation, and
reporters kept asking her about it.  The pressures on her built.

John seemed so sincere about changing.  And Charlotte's father was sick
and was unsure if he could continue to assist her financially.  She
hated to keep relying on her sister Dotti and her brother-in-law Bruce,
who generously gave, but who also had their own family to raise.  It
began to make sense to Charlotte when John said the burden of
maintaining his apartment and their house was too great, especially now
that he was unemployed.  Charlotte felt enormous remorse about his
professional status.  She herself was traumatized and exhausted and
here was this man she had loved so much telling her constantly that he
loved her, wanted her, needed her.

In April, she hesitantly decided to give him one more try.  But it
lasted only three weeks.

"It all started because he came by the house to pick up the boys and I
asked him about what we were going to do about the income Charlotte
remembers.  "So he came into the house and that started this three-hour
conversation.  Had I not asked him that question he probably would have
driven away and none of this would have happened.  He came into the
kitchen and we talked for hours and he kissed me and touched me and it
felt good because I, of course, hadn't been with anyone other than him
almost two years before.  I had been through a hell of a lot and I was
vulnerable.  I wanted someone just to hug and comfort me.

"But I felt cornered, so I made him leave.  He took two of the children
for the evening.  The next day was Easter, so he brought the kids back
by 8 AM.  He came in for breakfast.  He hugged me and his whole body
was shaking.  I felt this overwhelming need to comfort him, and feeling
him tremble like that made me think he really was sincere, that maybe
he really could be different now.  He had been going to therapy and he
claimed he had renewed faith.  We decided to go to church together.

I asked that we go someplace where we didn't know people.  Then we went
with the kids to the restaurant Hamburger Hamlet.  We had a lovely
time.

Then he came home and he almost forced himself on me.  It just felt
like what it must feel to have sex in the back of a car-the act itself
might feel good, but the setting was all wrong.  I wanted it to be more
romantic.

So I agreed to come to his apartment the next night.

"I have to be honest and say that a lot of the reconciliation had to do
with sex.  It had always been loving and good between us, very
spontaneous.  There was one time that we were even driving along the
New Jersey Turnpike and just pulled off the road to a secluded spot.

We had always been happy with each other through it.  I missed him, so
I succumbed.  But I didn't want this to be a full-scale
reconciliation.

I wanted it to be a trial run.  I knew that having sex was viewed by
the court as a forgiveness of past sins and could throw off our
divorce.  He promised that he wouldn't tell anyone about it, in case it
didn't work.  I should never have believed him, because he used it
against me later in court.

"I think John wanted to reconcile because when all these other people
reacted so badly to what he had done, he was suddenly awakened to it.

And to how much he wanted to stay with his family.  And whether he was
aware of ulterior motives or not, I think he knew that it would save
face if I accepted him back.

"He wasn't working, so we continued to meet at his apartment for those
three weeks.  He was trying to please, I know, but it got to be totally
overwhelming.  He started calling my friends to tell them that we were
back together."

Her friends were not pleased.  "When they reconciled I didn't know what
was happening, and I didn't hear from Charlotte at all, and I was
getting concerned," says Molly Head, their Marquette friend.  "I kept
calling.  She had her answering machine and she wouldn't call back.

I finally caught one of the boys on a Sunday afternoon and he went to
get Charlotte and she wouldn't come to the phone, which made me
angry.

Well, John was there and I didn't know it.  A few days later John
called me to tell me about their reconciliation and he went into lurid
details about their sex life.  He told me that all her friends had cut
her off.  I was just sick.  I could see that Charlotte was falling
hook, line, and sinker for all these goings on with him, and that she
was dependent on him again."

But Charlotte says she soon realized on her own that John hadn't
changed and that she couldn't stay with him.  "Almost immediately he
started causing me to question myself," says Charlotte, "telling me he
really didn't like the color of my hair, chastising me about the boys'
leaving fingerprints on the walls.  A major stumbling block was his
claiming that my family had ruined him.  I just couldn't accept the
blame for that.

He had done it himself.  I just knew that eventually his anger over
that would erupt into some kind of awful confrontation.

"And he hadn't changed about the money.  He went to Saks Fifth Avenue
and bought me earrings with a small ruby center and diamond petals.  He
also wanted to look for a new house-not a smaller, more affordable one,
but larger ones in Potomac, with several acres of land.

There was no way we could afford that.

"I tried once more because I had loved him so much and had given him so
much energy.  I knew I could never love at that pace again.

Plus, having six children with someone creates a very special, strong
bond.  And what had disappointed me most about all this was that we had
the potential for a good marriage and a good family.  We had good kids;
I was basically a good woman; he was basically a good man.  We were
hard-working people.  Our goals weren't that unrealistic.  He didn't
want to be President.  All I really wanted to be was a good wife and a
good mother.

And I think now I was both.  I just couldn't do it alone."

Because of the attempted reconciliation, the May court date was again
extended, to the fall of 1985.  That meant Charlotte would still be
subsisting on $1,000 a month until then.

In October, Judge McAuliffe granted Charlotte a limited divorce on the
grounds of cruelty.  It was a limited divorce because of the brief
April reconciliation attempt.  Under Maryland law, an absolute divorce
is not allowed if a couple has spent a night under the same roof within
the preceding twelve months.  According to Renehan, it was the
equivalent of a judicial separation.  It did not entail a final
division of property and forbade Charlotte and John to remarry until a
final divorce settlement could be granted, no sooner than April 29,
1986, a year after Charlotte had called an end to her and John's brief
encounter.

Charlotte won full use of the house for three years, custody of their
five children, and $1,500 a month in support.  John was also to be
responsible for paying the mortgage, house insurance, utilities, taxes,
and half of the maintenance costs on the house.

Charlotte could have used more money, but there wasn't that much left
to divvy up at the time of McAuliffe's decision.  Although John's
initial salary at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca, & Lewin had been $6,000 a
month, approximately equal to his SEC pay, it had fallen to just under
$800, according to John's testimony.  In his financial statement, dated
September 23, 1985, and submitted to the court, John described the
$6,000 per month as loans, and outlined his salary agreement with the
firm at the time thusly: "I am entitled to receive 15 percent of the
first $600,000, and 10 percent of any additional moneys, received by
the firm as fees attributable to matters brought to the firm by me, and
35 percent of the fees received by the firm for time worked by me."

Judge McAuliffe's decision followed two days of testimony in September,
during which Charlotte told why the reconciliation hadn't worked and
why she still wanted a divorce.  John continued to contest it, claiming
that Charlotte had been under pressure from her "advisers" to leave
him.  This time there were few tears from John, says Charlotte.  His
self-control remained intact.  He asked that the court dismiss
Charlotte's petition for a divorce and to order psychiatric counseling
aimed at achieving a reconciliation.  He said emotionally: "We'll make
it, Your Honor."

But Charlotte just slowly shook her head, refusing to return John's
intense stare.

In his October ruling, however, Judge McAuliffe rejected John's plea,
stating that Maryland law no longer recognized the resumption of sexual
relations as a conclusive reconciliation.  He stated in his 95-minute
oral opinion: "It was a trial run and only that and it didn't work She
never manifested an intent to forgive the facts which affected the
parties over many years."  But it was still only a limited divorce that
he could grant.

After having an individual conference with Luke, Judge McAuliffe was
convinced that his relationship with his father had deteriorated
perhaps beyond repair.  "It is not appropriate to require him to visit
with this] father over his strongest objections," said the judge.

Finally, the judge concluded about John and Charlotte's marriage:

"When you put it all together, you have as classic a situation of
cruelty and a classic situation of excessively vicious conduct .  . .

as one can find."

EPILOGUE

John and Charlotte's tragedy seemed to
strike a motherlode of pain in American women.  After the trial,
Charlotte immediately received many letters and phone calls from other
battered women across the country, women like herself who didn't fit
previous stereotypes.  They were educated, wealthy, and many were even
professionals themselves.

In April 1986, The Washingtonian magazine published a lengthy article
told from Charlotte's perspective about what had gone wrong with her
marriage and her dreams, a story about-as the magazine's editor, Jack
Limpert, said-"the promises Washington offers and the price people
sometimes pay."  Many of the city's overachievers opt to throw all
their efforts into their work so that they don't have the energy or
emotional suppleness to be a strong part of their families.

Limpert wrote: "Many hard-driving Washingtonians-both men and
women-know how hard it can be to balance the pressures of work and
family.  There is also the question of control: At work a high-powered
executive can hire and fire, give raises and promotions, and demand
quick action and obedience.  But home is a place of love and gentle
persuasion.

I wonder if John Fedders now understands that.  I also wonder whether
Charlotte Fedders won't always love him."

As Charlotte had been, the magazine was deluged with calls and letters
from battered wives.

Overwhelmingly, the women were well educated and articulate, and
clearly belonged to an upper-middle-class society regarded as
civilized, as arbiters of proper conduct.  Many of the callers had
advanced degrees, and most were mothers who say they finally found the
courage to end their marriages when they saw their husbands begin to
rage at their children.

Their husbands were civic leaders, lawyers, journalists, physicians,
university professors, politicians, even ministers, who typically had
low self-esteem themselves and reacted violently to anything that
questioned their authority or masculinity.

The wives told of broken limbs, of black eyes inflicted for such minor
infractions as taking too long to brush their teeth, of rapes, and of
threats to their lives.

But although most recounted shocking beatings, they complained more of
the control their husbands demanded at home.  They said that the more
power the men garnered at work, the more staff under their direct
command, the less tolerant they became at home, the more they wanted
traditional, submissive wives.  At the job, the men were privileged and
pampered, and they expected the same slavish deference from their
families.  And the women said that, as their husbands achieved top
management positions, they used the same motivation techniques at home
that they used at work, granting or withholding approval to spur action
or produce emotional dependency.

Most managers are not this maniacal, but somewhere in the husbands of
these callers the valued American drive for achievement twisted into an
obsession with power.

Stories such as these women's painfully bring home the reality of
otherwise sterile statistics: that every eighteen seconds a woman in
this country is battered, that every day four are beaten to death.

But because such stories have spawned community programs designed to
aid victims and their families, the pilgrimage to freedom will be a
little bit easier than it has been.  A decade ago, there were few
places for a battered wife to run.  Now there are twelve hundred
shelters across the country.  Demand is so great that the country could
use even more facilities, though.  My Sister's Place in Washington, D.C
for instance, has to turn away seven families for every one it takes
in.

Law officials, as well, have started to change the way they handle
spouse abusers.  Now, if police officers have "probable cause" to
suspect a crime has been committed against a spouse, they can arrest
her assailant without her having to swear out a formal complaint.  Many
of these men are now jailed overnight, and crime research in
Minneapolis indicates that only 19 percent of those held repeat their
offense during the next six months.  With previous tactics, the report
found 35 percent beat their spouses again within that time.

Of course, there are still serious problems, even with the improved
laws.  For example, because their crimes are typically misdemeanors,
not felonies, the bail for spouse abusers is low.  That means they
usually make bond with ease and return home the same night-which
terrifies their victims.  Out of fear, many women still refuse to
testify against their husbands, and without a witness prosecutors
simply have no case.

"Women wanting to drop charges unfortunately reinforces all the
stereotypes of battered wives," says a Virginia commonwealth's
attorney, who prosecutes spouse abuse cases.  "It makes people take the
cases less seriously.  Changes won't happen unless battered women are
willing to help the system change by coming forward.  If we get the
cases to trial, about 80 percent of the abusers are found guilty, and
nationwide studies have shown that if there is court intervention a
woman is 50 percent less likely to be subjected to abuse again."

Many jurisdictions divert convicted batterers to counseling programs
aimed at changing their behavior rather than sentencing them to time in
jail.  They are sent to alcohol rehabilitation, anger management
programs, or hospital psychotherapy.  If they complete the required
counseling, they have no criminal record.

"Typically, the woman doesn't want the man to go to jail, she wants
changes in the home, and these programs really seem to help," says the
Virginia prosecutor.  "But without the court forcing the husbands to
counseling, they rarely go and the violence only gets worse."

Other professionals serving the public and coming in contact with
spouse abuse victims, however, are still hampered from helping them.

Staff in hospital emergency rooms, for instance, are constantly
treating battered women but are unable to report the cases to the
police for fear the spouse will sue the hospital.  There is no
protective law to cover them, as there is when they report child
abuse.

More often than not, abusive husbands accompany their victims to
emergency rooms and insist on staying with them throughout treatment,
preventing them from asking for help.

But slowly, slowly, the country is responding to the often
life-or-death needs of battered spouses and their families.

Charlotte Fedders is still not finally divorced.  John continues to
battle her in court, fighting for extension of his visitation rights.

In his suit, he says that he loves his family and wants help in
restoring and Improving his relationship with it.  John also wants the
court to assess the detrimental emotional effects on the family that he
feels are sure to result from Charlotte speaking out publicly about
their marriage.

Charlotte points to a letter mailed to editors of The Washington Post,
which was never printed.  It came from a social worker, recognized in
the Washington metropolitan area as an expert on family violence.

"Mental health professionals who are knowledgeable about the dynamics
of family violence know that physical abuse is accompanied by
psychological control and that when the victim takes action to end the
violence, the assailant often turns to the court system to regain
control and continue the harassment."

In court, Hal Witt asked John's psychiatrist if he thought John's legal
actions were "an effort to assert control or pressure his wife?"  The
psychiatrist answered that he thought the statement to be "nonsense"
and, although John's controlling nature had been "a detriment to his
functioning" in the family, that his client has worked hard to change
and done so.  The psychiatrist added: "I have no doubt whatsoever that
he has a very sincere, very genuine, very abiding wish to do what is
best."

Charlotte remembers that John once told her sister that the person who
endured the most in a lawsuit won it.  Her divorce lawyer's fees alone
total about $30,000 now.  In many ways, she feels that John still
controls her life.

Her other debts mounted as well, and in May 1986, Charlotte filed for
bankruptcy, listing more than thirty creditors and bills accumulated
over three years that totalled nearly $130,000, which she said she
could not pay.  Of that amount, $16,000 consisted of loans her family
made her.  In the bankruptcy proceeding, Charlotte testified that she
was living a hand-to-mouth existence, even though John was making all
his court-ordered support payments.  And although she still worked part
time at The Woods Academy at the time, the boys' income from odd jobs
and lawn-mowing often had to be used to pay for groceries.  The court
dismissed all her debts except for $10,000 to her lawyer and $5,000 to
one of the boys' schools, which will be paid, she says, when her
Potomac home is sold.

Still, Charlotte and her family are moving on with their lives.

The boys are doing well in school, says Charlotte, and that the house
is happy and loud in the way a house of boys should be.

Says Charlotte: "I want happiness for them.  And my definition of
happiness is very different today than it would have been five years
ago.

Before, I would have identified the means of happiness as being good in
sports, getting into college, becoming a doctor or lawyer, having a
successful career.  Now, I want them to have the self-confidence that
comes from liking themselves, not being afraid to try anything.  To be
good to their families and to really enjoy everything a family can
bring.  I don't agree that success and being nice are mutually
exclusive.  I want them to be nice because I believe the greatest
success in life is being a warm person, capable of tenderness.

"We've survived.  But we've not only survived; we're starting to
thrive."

Charlotte, in particular, has gained confidence and often speaks to
women's groups now.  Also, in April 1987, she appeared as a witness
before a House Education and Labor Select Subcommitee.  The subcommitee
was holding budgeting hearings to review the need and effectiveness of
the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Family Violence
Prevention and Services Act.  The Reagan Adminstration had proposed
ending the family violence act, passed by Congress in 1984, then funded
at $8.7 million for counseling programs and shelters for battered
wives, according to the subcommittee.

Charlotte sat in a crowded room in the Rayburn Office Building, in
front of a panel of congressmen.  Despite the fact the congressmen had
to scatter several times during the hearing to appear on the House
floor for votes and made Charlotte wait over an hour to testify, she
spoke with new poise.  This time, rather than recoiling from the
microphone as she had two years earlier at her divorce trial, she
leaned forward to meet it.

She recounted much of her experience.  She told them she had once gone
to the police for help only to leave the station, "feeling like a
crybaby."  She closed by suggesting police officers, lawmakers, and
doctors should be required to read literature describing the "battered
wife syndrome" so that they understand it.  "The system must be changed
to provide protection for the real victims," she said, "not the abusers
who say they are sorry.  The issue that a woman has been beaten or
otherwise terrorized by a man for any reason he might feel is justified
must be addressed."

Charlotte calls herself a "reluctant advocate," yet says with
conviction: "I want to help other wives understand that no person has
the right to make another afraid."

AUTHORS' NOTE Primary thanks must go to Jack Limpert, editor of The
Washingtonian magazine.  He had the wisdom to recognize that the saga
of Charlotte and John Fedders was an allegory for overachievers as well
as a story of domestic violence and, therefore, deserved a more
in-depth look than that allowed by newspaper reports.  Likewise, thanks
to Harper & Row editor Larry Ashmead, who had exuberant faith in the
book and whose trust in me gave me confidence; to our agent Gwen
Edelman for her persistence and invaluable, constant encouragement; to
Washingtonian senior editor Randy Rieland, who edited the magazine
article and kept it on track; to Harper & Row's Margaret Wimberger, who
made the manuscript's painstaking work less painful; to my sister and
brother-in-law for their steady and steadying counsel; to George
Sheanshang; and, of course, to Charlotte Fedders for her brave candor
and willingness to answer my incessant and often difficult questions.

Most importantly, I thank my husband, John, whose loving support,
patience, and ever-ready wit saw me through Shattered Dreams.

Words fail me when trying to acknowledge so many.  I join in
Laura's praise and appreciation of Gwen Edelman, Jack Limpert, as well
as Larry Ashmead and countless others at Harper & Row.  In addition, I
thank Mary Donahue and Bryan Renehan for their professional wisdom,
patience, sensitivity, and encouragement; my parents, sisters, and
wonderful friends for their amazing memories, incredible fairness, and
broad shoulders; and Martha, Bruce and Dotti, Joy, Mr. B Frank and
gentle "Doc," who so lovingly supplemented my parenting when I was
short on time or energy.  A standing ovation to Laura Elliott, whose
investigative talent, amazing insight, exquisite literary style, and
extraordinary compassion have made working on this book an unbelievably
satisfying experience.

And above all, I thank my children for their abundant supply of
laughter and love.

THE END