“Thank you for having us,” Bart says. He ushers the young woman forward. “Margaret, this is my girlfriend, Allegra.”
A girlfriend! Margaret thinks. Kelley and Mitzi must be overjoyed.
Margaret takes Allegra’s hand. “Allegra is one of my favorite names. I’ve loved it ever since I read ‘The Children’s Hour,’ by Longfellow.”
“‘Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,’” Allegra quotes. “It’s my mother’s favorite poem.”
“Two minutes, Margaret,” Mickey, the producer, calls out.
Margaret blows everyone in the greenroom a kiss. “Off to work,” she says.
One last time.
Margaret greets the world with a smile and says, “It’s Friday, November tenth, two thousand seventeen. From the CBS studios in New York City, I’m Margaret Quinn.”
The news is serious as always—the president, Congress, Syria, Russia—but there is nothing earth-shattering. No surprises. Margaret feels the minutes pass in seconds, and when they break for the last commercials, she experiences a moment of pure panic. She has made a mistake! She doesn’t want it to end!
She hears a whisper—her name—and she looks out into the darkened studio to see Darcy, her former assistant, standing next to Camera 1. Darcy waves like crazy, and Margaret fights to keep her composure. Darcy works for CNN now. Did she fly all the way up from Atlanta just to be here for Margaret’s last broadcast? She must have. It’s an incredible gesture.
There is one last human-interest story—at the National Zoo a baby gorilla who lost his mother has cottoned to one of the zebra mares—and then it’s back to Margaret to say her final words. She has nothing written down. It’s every nightmare come true: Margaret is in a play but didn’t memorize her lines. Roger forgot to dress her and she’s naked on camera. The teleprompter falls over and smashes, and Margaret has to talk about the new Republican health care bill off the cuff.
She focuses on Darcy, who looks impossibly chic and professional in her pencil skirt and sling-back heels.
“Tonight marks the end of my broadcasting career,” Margaret says. “When I first started out as a copy girl in the newsroom of WCBS, I never dreamed I would someday be sitting in this chair.”
But that’s a lie, Margaret thinks. She did dream about it, constantly. She had grown up idolizing the great newsmen of her youth—for back then, they had all been men: Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Ed Bradley, Harry Reasoner, and the greatest of all time, Walter Cronkite. And then, as Margaret was coming into her own, she looked up to Diane Sawyer, Lesley Stahl, Connie Chung, Jane Pauley, and Christiane Amanpour.
Like any dream, hers has required sacrifices. Why that seems true for women more than men, Margaret isn’t sure. All she knows is that when Kelley came to her saying he wanted to move the children up to Nantucket, Margaret let him go. She could have insisted he stay in New York. Or she could have left New York and taken an anchor job at the CBS affiliate in Boston. But she didn’t do either. She let Kelley go with her blessing; she praised him for quitting his high-powered job trading petroleum futures. She was happy he was taking over the parenting duties.
And yet the most horrible, awful day of Margaret’s life was the day she kissed the kids good-bye. Ava was only ten years old. A ten-year-old girl needs her mother. Everyone knew that. Margaret had convinced herself that she would still be Ava’s mother; she would just take care of things from afar. She had decided that the best way to parent—especially with Ava—was to lead by example. She would strive for excellence. The kids would see her and then they would be inspired to strive for excellence.
Did it work out? Maybe—but there were innumerable lonely nights and countless days where the only word Margaret could find to describe herself was selfish. She wanted to be in front of the camera. She wanted to fly to Port-au-Prince, to Fallujah, to Islamabad. She let Mitzi and Kelley do the drudgery, the heavy lifting. Mitzi packed Ava’s lunch and delivered Ava to piano lessons. Mitzi bought Ava her first bikini, filled her Easter basket, chaperoned her first girl-boy birthday party at the Dreamland Theater.
Margaret tried to compensate with Ava and the boys by being the Disneyland parent. She spared no expense in taking the kids on lavish trips during her limited vacations, and in buying them whatever they wanted.
She lived with guilt, night and day.
One night during the holidays, when the kids were teenagers, Margaret called the inn from the back of the car; it was after a broadcast and Raoul was delivering Margaret to her apartment. The kids were decorating the Christmas tree, hanging ornaments, eating popcorn, and drinking hot cider in front of the fire. That they sounded so happy only made Margaret feel more lonely and miserable. It was Kevin, her sensitive child, who noticed something melancholy in Margaret’s tone, because he dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “The cider Mitzi made is really terrible, Mom. I’m only drinking it to be polite.”
Margaret stares into the camera. She wants to somehow convey that her career has not been all glory. It has entailed an equal amount of heartbreak. Margaret is a broadcasting icon now, but she is also a person—one who made choices, one who made mistakes. She wants Darcy and every other Millennial woman out there watching—many of whom idolize Margaret and think of her as a pioneer who broke through very thick, very real glass ceilings—to know that success always comes with a price and that greatness often doesn’t allow for balance.
In the end Margaret defaults to her trademark qualities: she is calm, she is reserved, and most of all, she is professional. To nail the landing here doesn’t require a display of emotional fireworks. It requires only gratitude and grace.
“It has been my privilege to bring you the news each evening. Thank you for allowing me into your homes and into your lives. Over the past sixteen years, I have visited faraway places. I have dined with presidents and princes. I have seen unspeakable horrors—those inflicted by nature, and those inflicted by man. But I have been buoyed and inspired by the people of this diverse and magnificent country, and by the indomitable strength of the human spirit. God bless each and every one of you. For the CBS Evening News, I’m Margaret Quinn. Good night.”
The montage plays, but Margaret can’t watch. She tells everyone that if she sees photographs of herself from sixteen, twelve, even five years ago, she’ll bemoan how much she has aged, but the truth is that the magnitude of what she is leaving behind will make her cry. After the montage ends, the screen goes black. A second later one sentence appears, written in white type: THANK YOU, MARGARET QUINN.
“And… we’re out,” Mickey says.
There is silence, during which Margaret stares at her desk.
Then Darcy gives a resounding whoop, and the studio bursts into a round of applause.
It’s over.
BART