LITMIR.BIZ

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issue up and taking steps to deal with it, this work has grown into a convincing example of an effective policy for peace.

      The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to express the hope that the Ottawa process will win even wider support. As a model for similar processes in the future, it could prove of decisive importance to the international effort for disarmament and peace.

      I can't remember our immediate reaction when I hung up the phone, because we heard people outside. I crept to the window to see several cars parked in the driveway. Panicky, we threw on the clothes we'd taken off only a few hours earlier and went out to see who they were.

      Journalists? The house sat at the end of a mile-long unmarked dirt road in the-middle-of-nowhere-Putney. We weren't prepared for them, and even less so for the onslaught that would follow. By 5:15 I was serving coffee to them in my kitchen. They were the first and last journalists we let in the house that day.

      I was so thankful it turned out to be a glorious eighty-degree Indian summer day in Vermont. I kept wondering what we would have done with all the people if it had been raining.

      By midmorning, the field in front of the house overlooking the beaver pond was studded with satellite feed trucks. Eight or nine of them. There were TV cameras dotting the field. On the deck. At my front steps. The day didn't stop, except for one ten-minute break, until the last TV truck rolled out at 8 P.M.

      The interviews flowed from one to the next almost seamlessly. Journalists arrived from all of the morning TV news shows in the United States. From several in Norway, Canada, Sweden, and other places I can't begin to remember. There were some from several different shows on the BBC. We had local media. National media. International media.

      All of them wanted to know how we'd use the Nobel Prize to pressure the Clinton administration especially, and other holdout states, to get on board. For the whole day we had media attention resulting from the Nobel announcement to further the message of the ICBL: Come to Ottawa. Sign the treaty. Ratify it as soon as possible. Join the tide of history.

      I had no time that day to think about the course of my life and how I'd come to be surrounded by journalists, talking about antipersonnel landmines and the Nobel Peace Prize. No one would ever have predicted it. That a quiet kid from Vermont had become a hardheaded, straight-talking woman who'd helped change our world. But I did, and this is my story.

      PART I

      If You Could Be Anyone

      CHAPTER ONE

      What Do You Mean I Can't Be the Pope?

      At some point in grade school, I finally realized I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the first woman pope. Then again, I'd also been slow in noticing I couldn't even be an altar boy. Perhaps that turned out to be not such a bad thing, but at the time it felt unfair. Why boys only? What was so special about them?

      I so wanted to be clothed in magnificent vestments one day, head bowed to receive the Papal Crown. And of course, I'd be fluent in Latin. At church on Sundays, I'd imagine myself gloriously robed, standing at the altar, cloaked in incense. The tiniest whiff of its burning fragrance still summons vestiges of my religious upbringing.

      Even after my papal dreams were shattered, I remained mystified by the pageantry, the drama, and the majesty of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Simply saying those four words made me feel transported. I was enthralled by the stories of the lives of our brave and tragic saints and martyrs. I, too, wanted to be resolute and heroic and leave a big mark on the world. No one would ever have guessed that one day I would manage something of a lasting mark, but it most definitely wasn't in the category of saint or martyr.

      As a young child I'd breathlessly awaited my chance to begin attending catechism, where I'd learn about sin and how to avoid it. The Ten Commandments, the categories of sins and their implications, and Church rules would be taught to us to help guide us in life. Then, in my little white dress and veil, I'd march down the center aisle in church and receive my First Communion. I would be absolved of my sins, Catholic ground zero. It came fast. We received First Communion around the age of seven, at which point we were supposedly able to reason clearly and therefore reliably exercise our free will to avoid sin.

      My younger sister, Mary Beth, who is now the nurse in the family, insists that studies demonstrate today's youth aren't fully capable of understanding the consequences of their actions, religious or otherwise, until their early twenties. Ages ago, we were expected to get on with it at seven. Now they can't manage until they reach drinking age? Would that mean they shouldn't have their First Communion until reaching twenty-one?

      In any case, and unfortunately for my seven-year-old head, catechism had its downside. I was a quiet kid with a tendency to fear authority. It didn't come from my parents, Ruth and John. Disinclined to exact punishment, they were also very bad at “no.” But once I'd begun catechism, life smacked of “no.” Almost everything in my world seemed to be a sin or to threaten one. Sometimes the simple act of living felt like running temptation's gauntlet, as if hydra-headed demons of evil were waiting at every turn, trying to lead me sinfully astray.

      If Mom corrected me for some minor wrongdoing, like trying to beat up my younger siblings, I worried I was earning a one-way ticket to hell. With catechism's emphasis on sin rather than the compassion and forgiveness of Jesus, avoiding the inferno sometimes felt impossibly beyond my reach. Fear trumped reason, and I lived with it for years.

      I prayed every night before bed. There was the standard “Now I lay me down to sleep ...” and then you could mention your specific issues to God. I always prayed hard for a miracle so my older brother, Steve, would become able to hear. I added my own little pleas to the multitudinous ones of my parents, who'd been praying for the same thing almost from the day of his birth. My dad stopped by church every day for solitude and consolation. Although at some point Mom gave up praying for the Steve miracle—her knees raw from novenas on his behalf— Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, remains her primary saint.

      At some point in the lives of all five of her offspring, each of us either became or threatened to become the particular lost cause Mom prayed to save. While no patron of her saints, these days I am convinced my mother has powerful energy that she prays into her universe. When I need a little extra protection or strength, I get Mom on the phone and ask for her prayers to Saint Jude. It makes both of us feel better. Also, from time to time—and even though we've had amusing debates about religion—I fire off an email to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and ask for his prayerful support, too. So far he hasn't turned me down.

      Perhaps surprisingly, these days I find satisfaction in contemplating Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god. He is revered as a remover of obstacles, an attribute that seems to parallel Jude's intervention on behalf of lost causes. Ganesh makes me smile, in contrast to my unhappy recollections of sin and Catholic hellfire. But when I was a kid, even the dashing of my papal hopes didn't alter the fact that being Catholic was a central element of my life. I came by it naturally.

      My grandmother, Marianna Bertolino, whose name was ultimately shortened to Anna or Ann after she came to America, was born in Italy. At the beginning of the 1900s, when she was about a year old, her parents left that seat of the Church's power for the tiny village of Poultney, Vermont. It didn't matter that years later my grandmother married my grandfather, Ralph Colvin, a self-proclaimed heathen. To get her hand, Ralph had to solemnly agree that any offspring would be raised Catholic. The same promise was required of any of the other heathens who wanted to marry my grandmother's seven sisters: it was the Catholic way or no way.

      Therefore, my mother, Ruth, and her younger brother, Chuck, were raised in the Church. As was I and my two brothers and two sisters. It didn't matter that my father's side of the family, who we almost never saw in any case, was Scottish-Welsh Presbyterian. Despite the small percentage of our blood that is Italian, we kids all cleaved to that heritage and its religion. Ralph and Anna B. Colvin were my “real” grandparents. Dad's parents didn't figure hardly at all in our family equation. He didn't particularly like them himself.

      · · ·

      My father, John Clarence Williams, was drop-dead gorgeous. I have a picture of him at around age eighteen, and to my eyes

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