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people who read certain newspapers and bought certain magazines, most people who knew what kind of girls came with the life, most people who knew where there was big green on the barrelhead, most people who were apt to have noticed Inez buying printed sheets on sale in Bloomingdale’s basement or picking up stemmed strawberries at Gristede’s or waiting for one of her and Harry Victor’s twin children, the girl Jessie or the boy Adlai, in front of the Dalton School.
    These were people who all knew exactly what Inez Victor did with the stemmed strawberries she picked up at Gristede’s (passed them in a silver bowl at her famous New Year’s Eve parties on Central Park West, according to Vogue ); what Inez Victor did with the printed sheets she bought on sale in Bloomingdale’s basement (cut them into round tablecloths for her famous Fourth of July parties in Amagansett, according to W ); and what Inez Victor had paid for the Ungaro khaki shirtwaists she wore during the 1968 convention, the 1968 Chicago convention during which Harry Victor was photographed for Life getting tear-gassed in Grant Park.
    These were people who all knew someone who knew someone who knew that on the night in 1972 when Harry Victor conceded the California primary before the polls closed Inez Victor flew back to New York on the press plane and sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with an ABC cameraman and the photographer from Rolling Stone .
    These people had all seen Inez, via telephoto lens, drying Jessie’s fine blond hair by the swimming pool at the house in Amagansett. These people had all seen Inez, in the Daily News , leaving Lenox Hill Hospital with Adlai on the occasion of his first automobile accident. These people had all seen photograph after photograph of the studied clutter in the library of the apartment on Central Park West, the Canton jars packed with marking pencils, the stacks of Le Monde and Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Business Review , the legal pads, the several telephones, the framed snapshots of Harry Victor eating barbecue with Eleanor Roosevelt and of Harry Victor crossing a police line with Coretta King and of Harry Victor playing on the beach at Amagansett with Jessie and with Adlai and with Frances Landau’s Russian wolfhound.
    These people had taken their toll.
    By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had come to view most occasions as photo opportunities.
    By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had developed certain mannerisms peculiar to people in the public eye: a way of fixing her gaze in the middle distance, a habit of smoothing her face in repose by pressing up on her temples with her middle fingers; a noticeably frequent blink, as if the photographers’ strobes had triggered a continuing flash on her retina.
    By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had lost certain details.
    I recall being present one morning in a suite in the Hotel Doral in Miami, amid the debris of Harry Victor’s 1972 campaign for the nomination, when a feature writer from the Associated Press asked Inez what she believed to be the “major cost” of public life.
    “Memory, mainly,” Inez said.
    “Memory,” the woman from the Associated Press repeated.
    “Memory, yes. Is what I would call the major cost. Definitely.” The suite in the Doral that morning was a set being struck. On a sofa that two workmen were pushing back against a wall Billy Dillon was trying to talk on the telephone. In the foyer a sound man from one of the networks was packing up equipment left the night before. “I believe I can speak for Inez when I say that we’re looking forward to a period of being just plain Mr. and Mrs. Victor,” Harry had said the night before on all three networks. Inez stood up now and began looking for a clean ashtray on a room-service table covered with half-filled glasses. “Something like shock treatment,” she added.
    “You mean you’ve had shock treatment.”
    “No. I mean you lose track. As if