Sad Endings

We see her crooked smile on the back of a racing car at Daytona, in national magazines, on the nightly news. Political pundits bandy her name about with familiarity, commentators editorialize about her, psychics look for her in crystal balls. Yet all the public really hears about Chandra Levy is that she had an affair with a congressman, was dearly loved by her parents and is missing.

There must be so much more to this pretty young woman at the heart of so much pain, sadness and controversy. Until she disappeared from Washington, D.C., at the end of April, she was just one of thousands of ambitious college interns flocking to the capital as a first step on a fast-track career. One day she was anonymous, the next she was a world headline. John and Jane Doe, take note: This could happen to any of us.

We go along marking off ordinary days -- finger-painting in kindergarten, dressing up for the prom, making salad with Mom, promising Dad we won't speed on our way back to college -- and think nothing much is happening to us or is of interest to anyone outside our circle. When we're young we're learning to pay our bills on time, service the car when the oil light comes on and figure out how to make good choices. It's a process; we make mistakes and grow from them. Along the way, we acquire a secret or two we wouldn't want anyone -- particularly our parents -- to find out about. 

That, apparently, was Chandra Levy's progression through her young life. Barely 24 and just 10 days away from graduating from the University of Southern California when she vanished, she had one big secret -- she was having an affair with Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., a married man and father of two who was old enough to be her father.
Hand-wringing pundits and glass-house dwellers make instant judgments on the assumption that we can't think for ourselves. Some draw sweeping conclusions in case we're too dumb to reach our own. Columnist Jan Jarboe Russell, in the San Antonio Express-News, loosely linked Levy's "tale of forbidden passion gone awry" with the tragedy of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother in jail for murdering her five young children. She worried that these two disparate events would reinforce stereotypes of women as tarts and/or long-suffering mothers with compromised, small lives. 

Hogwash. You can't link aberrations. I don't recall anyone trying to connect Timothy McVeigh and Bill Clinton as representational examples of American manhood, and if anybody did, they ought to get out of the pundit business and go into chicken plucking. 

What happened to Andrea Yates and Chandra Levy are two very sad, isolated incidents that will tear your heart out if you stop and think about the real people involved in these very real events. What if your daughter had vanished or your wife had gone mad and murdered her children? It's impossible to imagine because the mind can't accept it. Unfortunately, all who love those real women must somehow come to grips with the nightmare that has befallen them. 

It is doubtful we will ever learn the truth of Andrea Yates' tormented tale, but it should be our fervent hope that Chandra Levy will soon appear before us to tell her own.

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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