For Paladino’s Wife, the Past Is the Past

NY Times

Cathy Paladino stroked the arm of the couch she was sitting on in her husband’s campaign headquarters, first in small circles, then larger ones, as if to assure the couch that both she and it would get through this just fine.

She was talking about her husband’s affair, a subject she was ready, if not eager, to address. Since her husband, Carl, won the Republican nomination for governor of New York last week, the only story in the race as compelling as his upset victory has been their personal back story: that her husband not only had an affair, not only fathered a child with that other woman, but also told his wife of 40 years about it all the same week that their 29-year-old son, Patrick, was killed in a car accident. He pulled her aside, Ms. Paladino said, as she was looking for family photographs to bring to the wake.

“He said he was very sorry to cause me pain, the relationship with the mother was over ... and there was a child,” she said.

At the word “child,” Ms. Paladino, 63, leaned back slightly, absorbing, once again, this news.

“Then he waited for me to say something,” she said. “And the only thing I said is: ‘Every child is a gift. You’re a lucky man.’

“And I still feel that way. You know, I had lost my son. And when you lose a child, everything that seems so important or that you would find disagreeable — it doesn’t matter.”

Sometimes the worst times are the best times for confessions: perspective is never more painfully sharp. But Mr. Paladino chose that moment, his wife said, because he knew that Patrick, who had been close to the young girl, would have wanted her name included along with the other family members mentioned in the obituary.

Since then, as has been widely reported, Ms. Paladino has embraced the girl, including her in family occasions and campaign appearances. When I referred in passing to the Paladinos’ daughter as a half-sister to the child, Ms. Paladino looked confused, then offered a correction: “We just say sisters. We don’t bother with ‘half.’ ”

So far, Mr. Paladino’s campaign has not exactly been classy. He admitted sending racist and pornographic e-mails to colleagues, he sent mailers that literally reeked of garbage, and he announced his eagerness to take a baseball bat to Albany.

Yet, in terms of standing by your man amid scandal, Ms. Paladino might be considered a national model of grace under pressure. In public, at least, she neither fell apart nor pointed fingers, even under the burden of grief, and now, just 18 months later, was prepared to answer inevitable questions about one of the hardest weeks of her life. How long did her own children know about the affair before she did? “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t grilled them. I’ve never brought it up with them. I’m not that way. It was over.”

Ms. Paladino, a striking woman dressed in the black capri pants of many a middle-aged woman on an unseasonably warm day, did not portray her marriage as a perfect melding of two souls who cannot be separated. Authenticity, after all, is a buzzword of any campaign in these times.

Days go by when their paths don’t cross or they don’t speak, she said, either because she is at their country house just outside Buffalo or is baby-sitting their grandchildren, or because their schedules do not overlap. “I have a life,” she said.

But Ms. Paladino, the eldest of 10 children, also seems like someone who would not be sitting in that campaign office unless she supported both her husband and his platform.

Depending on how much of her independence she decides to cede for the sake of the campaign, Ms. Paladino, elegant and more articulate than her husband, could provide an invaluable counterpoint to his sometimes clownish stumping.

Once she had told her husband she supported his decision to run, some members of his campaign staff told her that if she had any reservations about talking about her personal life, she had to get over them. And so she did.

“Everybody knows anyway,” she said. “And they should know. They should know the background of people, and they should know that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, how rich you are — things happen. And you deal with them and move on. Every family has problems. Mine’s no different. The only difference is that you happen to know them.”