Story of My Wife

NBC's Tom Brokaw, whom Trillin asked to preside at Alice's memorial service, says he first met Bud while they were working on the same Vietnam story in 1968. Later, when Brokaw's job took him to New York, the two families got together. "It was love at first sight," he says. "It truly has been an extended family."

On Sept. 11, Brokaw was on the air all day. He made it through somehow, he says, got home at 2 a.m. and checked his emotional pulse. He felt as if he'd had "an out-of-body experience" -- but he hadn't broken down.

The next morning, at 7, his assistant called to tell him Alice had died.

"I wept for an hour," he says.

Among many memories, he mentions one from Abigail's wedding. Alice had checked herself out of the hospital to be there. She had a toast to make and she stood to make it.

"Frail, beautiful Alice," Brokaw says. "Bud never took his eyes off her."

Ask Trillin's family and friends how he's doing today and they're likely to say, as James Edmunds does, "far better than I feared." It helps that he has four grandchildren to dote on. He calls them the Wonder Tots.

It may also help that, since Alice's death, he has expressed a bit more emotion in his writing. Abigail points in particular to a New Yorker article, published last year, about a young soldier her father didn't know who'd been killed in Iraq.

Trillin got interested, he wrote in the article's opening paragraph, when he found himself in tears listening to a National Public Radio piece about the man's death. He was en route to visit Sarah and his grandson Toby, in New Jersey, and "for a moment or two" he thought he might have to pull off the road. He linked his feelings to "the way I felt about my wife's not having lived to enjoy her grandchildren."

His new book, of course, is another case in point. It's also something Trillin had no intention of writing.

As the months went by, he says, "people would occasionally ask me, 'Are-you-going-to-write-about-Alice?' " He rushes the words together, conveying the awkwardness of the exchange. "I don't think so," he would reply.

Last year, after New Yorker editor David Remnick asked the same question, he changed his mind.

The article took him a few months to write, "a long time compared to, say, going out and doing a murder story." It got a huge response from widows, widowers and cancer survivors, which Trillin had anticipated, but also from "young, unmarried women, talking about the sort of marriage that they hoped to have."

If all happy families are alike -- well, they wanted the secret of his.

Trillin's daughters say their father is unusually excited about the book's publication. Abigail offers what seems a likely explanation.

"I think my mom would have loved it," she says, "and I think he knows that."