THREE

LEARNING CURVE

I had a rough transition out of the house.

I dreamed of going to Boston College or Georgetown. But the University of Delaware was less expensive than either of those private Jesuit universities and offered more financial aid. Delaware was the practical choice. Thirteen thousand students, two and a half hours from home, far enough but not too far. For the first time in my life, I’d be moving out of New Jersey, a full twelve miles over the state line to the historic Delaware city of Newark, a name that certainly had a familiar ring. And I wouldn’t exactly be going alone. Thirteen of my Livingston classmates also said yes to Delaware.

In August 1980, just as I was packing to leave, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was forty-eight years old. For the first time in my life, I felt genuine terror. The doctors said it was advanced enough that she needed a mastectomy and probably radiation after that.

Her surgery was scheduled for the day before I was supposed to leave for Delaware. Even from a hospital bed, my mother wouldn’t hear of my delaying anything. My father and my aunt Minette, my mother’s younger sister, drove me to campus. That first month as a college student wasn’t fun at all. Worried about my mother, I felt lethargic and depressed, feelings I wasn’t used to. My mother wasn’t recovering well from the surgery. I couldn’t focus on my studies, and I didn’t feel like going out. But when I told my father I was thinking of coming home for the rest of the semester, he was adamant. “No, no,” he said. “You wouldn’t be helping your mother. She’d feel like she took you out of college.”

On the last Friday in September, I didn’t say anything. I just got on a bus in front of Rhodes Pharmacy on East Main Street and rode to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, where I caught the DeCamp 77 bus to Livingston. As I came walking up Northfield Road from the Route 10 circle with a duffel bag of dirty laundry, my mother was sitting alone on the porch. She spotted me before I saw her. By the time I hit the driveway, she was out of her chair, smiling and crying at the same time. I hadn’t seen her express joy like that since my first Little League home run.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

I could have turned around and gone back to campus right then. I saw that she was okay. I felt like my job was done. I stayed the weekend and bussed back to campus with a clear conscience and a bag full of clean clothes, finally ready for college life.

Once I gave it a chance, the University of Delaware was a perfect fit for me. I was challenged and inspired by some brilliant teachers. My political science professor Jim Soles, an older Southern gentleman, made politics seem fascinating and became my academic adviser. My civil liberties professor, a young Boston liberal named Jim Magee, made constitutional law come alive. I began to ponder a career in law.

Meanwhile, just as I had in high school, I found my way quickly into student government. I was elected president of my dorm. Then I chaired the lobbying committee of the Delaware Undergraduate Student Congress, pushing our issues at the state capital in Dover. In that role, I testified for a bill that would install a student representative on the university’s board of trustees. We actually got a yes vote in the senate committee before the university came back full guns blazing and got the bill killed on the senate floor. “I gotta give you credit,” John Brook, the university’s government-relations guy, said to me afterward. “You’re the only kid that ever got that bill that far. You made me a little nervous.”

It was around that time that I got to know a fun-loving business student named Mary Pat Foster. The ninth of ten children from an Irish American family in the Philadelphia suburb of Paoli, she was a year behind me. We met the first day she arrived on campus. I was helping a freshman friend from Livingston move into Smyth Hall. Mary Pat and I literally bumped into each other. She seemed energetic and smart. And she was definitely pretty, with long, brown hair. We had a short conversation, but that was it. As the year went on, we’d see each other on campus from time to time. Like me, she was involved in student government.

In the spring of junior year, I decided to run for student body president. At Delaware, that meant pulling together a slate of candidates. For our Campus Action Party, I recruited one of my best friends from high school, Lynn Jalosky, to run as my vice president. Lynn was smart and popular, and she knew me as well as anybody. She could tell me the hard truths when I needed to hear them. She was a perfect number two. I asked Mary Pat to run as secretary. I always liked Mary Pat. She, too, was very smart. She gave us a presence in the College of Business and Economics and was a prodigious worker. I was sure she’d be a tireless campaigner. Lee Uniacke, the student I was running against, was the sitting vice president. He just might have been the most popular guy on campus, a wonderful kid who seemed to be everybody’s best friend. He also happened to be a dwarf. He certainly never let that interfere with anything. Lee and his slate were formidable opponents, but we went dorm to dorm and just out-campaigned them, capturing all six positions and 62 percent of the vote.

It was clear to me that I was more conservative than most of my classmates and almost all of my professors. On our campus in the early 1980s, here was the conventional wisdom: Nuclear power was a dire threat to the environment. Ronald Reagan was a warmonger, ready to blow up the world. Things would be better if we elected as president someone like Walter Mondale or Mario Cuomo. Those weren’t my views, and I was always up for a lively political debate. But I wasn’t an ideologue. I was never active with the College Republicans. Student government was my thing, and the issues I pushed there were day-to-day concerns. Faculty evaluations. Activity fees. We fought federal financial-aid cuts and got the university to hold its first commencement ceremony for winter graduates. I also learned the importance of being quoted in the student paper, The Review, and having my issues highlighted there. I started a real friendship with Tobias Naegele, the liberal New Yorker who was the paper’s editor, though some people considered us an unlikely pair.

Looking back at that time, I can see the seeds of my adult political career. I tried to be practical, well informed, and open-minded, whatever the topic was. I didn’t use politics to settle personal scores. I tried to unify the student body behind issues that affected all of us and to combat apathy.

I loved being student body president. But my greatest personal achievement up till then happened the Saturday night before spring semester of my senior year. I was sitting with a couple of friends in the Deer Park Tavern, a famous bar on campus where Edgar Allan Poe supposedly wrote “The Raven,” years after George Washington supposedly slept there.

The band was playing. We were throwing back some drinks. I was watching a young woman on the dance floor. She was facing away from me. But I could see she was an enthusiastic dancer and had short, brown, wavy hair. Only when she turned around did I realize that the dancing girl was Mary Pat, with short hair. She’d been in Paris for winter term, and she’d decided to cut her hair. I don’t know if it was the new Euro haircut, but I found myself looking at Mary Pat in a very different way.

She came over to the table. We talked and then we danced. I walked her back to Christiana Towers, the university apartment complex where both of us lived. We chatted some more along the way. As we walked up to her building, I thought to myself, I’m gonna try and kiss this girl and see what happens.

She looked surprised. “What’s that all about?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “See you soon.”

Nothing more came of it until we ran into each other the following week, and I said to her, “Why don’t we go to a movie Saturday night?” She agreed.

We stayed up really late that night. At dawn we went to Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. And that was the real beginning of Chris and Mary Pat. She wasn’t just a friend or a fellow officeholder anymore.

As spring semester rolled along, Mary Pat decided she wanted to be my replacement as student body president. I was committed to helping her win.

This set the stage for my most aggressive political maneuver up to that point.

Mary Pat was going to have a challenger in her bid for student body president. I persuaded the guy to step aside. “You really don’t want to run,” I told him, “because, if you do, I’m gonna work as hard as I can to make sure you lose, and that would be humiliating. You should go to Mary Pat and offer to be on her ticket.”

He went for it. Mary Pat ran unopposed. And I gave a quote to The Review. “This is not an election,” I said. “It’s a coronation.”

For her part, Mary Pat didn’t like any of it. She felt like the quote in the paper had diminished her accomplishments. I thought I was being pithy, but she had a point. She especially didn’t like it when the paper’s editorial cartoonist drew a ballot with “Mary Pat Foster” listed six times. “Choose one,” the cartoon said.

She blamed me for that, too.

In September, as Mary Pat began her term as University of Delaware student body president, I was off to a new adventure: Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. But the distance didn’t cool our relationship at all. At Thanksgiving, I decided that I would ask her to marry me. I told Nani before I told anyone else. “I just want to know if you think I’m nuts,” I said to her.

“No, absolutely not,” Nani gushed. “She’s fabulous, and she’s just perfect for you. If you love her, you should marry her.” And then Nani said, “Wait here.”

She went into her bedroom and came out with a tiny box. Inside was a diamond ring. “This is the engagement ring your grandfather gave to me. I want Mary Pat to have it.” After all the bitterness of her marriage to Poppy, who knew that Nani would still have the ring? “You’ll want a different setting,” she went on. “This isn’t the style anymore. My granddaughters are going to be upset. But I’m going to tell them, it’s not about them. It’s about Mary Pat.”

I told my mother and father on Christmas Eve. My father pointed out how young we were, twenty-two and twenty-one. But I told my parents I was certain, and that was good enough for them. I popped the question to Mary Pat at her house after Christmas dinner. We sneaked away to her room where I presented her gifts one by one. The last one was Nani’s ring. She agreed immediately.

We then broke the news to her folks in a quiet corner of their bedroom. When I asked her father’s permission, the first thing he said to me was: “Well, Chris, we really like you, but how do you intend to support my daughter?” Jack Foster was a Wharton business graduate. He thought in practical terms.

“We’ll work it out,” I stammered.

“That’s not a plan,” her father cautioned me.

But I hung tough. “We have confidence in each other,” I said. “We’ll be able to work it out.”

He turned to his daughter and asked, “Do you love him?”

She answered, “I do.”

Her father melted at that. “Okay,” he said. “You have my permission.”

When we stepped back into the dining room, seventy Foster relatives already seemed to know. They broke into applause before anyone said a word. By then, Mary Pat was halfway through her senior year. I had finished my first semester of law school. I’d met the woman I was going to marry, and soon we set a wedding date—March 8, 1986, spring break the following year. My mother was almost five years cancer-free. Mary Pat and I were visiting back and forth on weekends. She was applying for finance jobs. I felt like my life had a clear path. I was heading toward a law career. If the opportunity arose, I told myself, maybe at some point I’d get into politics.

Eight days before our wedding, Mary Pat was fired from her first grown-up job. She’d graduated in June 1985 and gone to work as a municipal-bond analyst at Printon, Kane & Company, a New Jersey brokerage firm. And now, on the last day of February—invitations mailed, a dress waiting, flowers ready, and a huge crowd of Christies and Fosters expected in Paoli for the big day—her supervisor came to her and said, “We love you. But we’re cutting back in your area, and you’re the junior person.”

“I’m getting married in a week,” Mary Pat protested.

“Sorry,” the supervisor said.

Not only were we about to get married, we had just signed a lease on a $600 studio apartment above a liquor store on Ashwood Avenue in Summit, New Jersey. What were we going to do? I had a job as a part-time law clerk, but my entire monthly salary was less than $1,000. Mary Pat’s yearly salary of $25,000 was gone.

Then, I had a thought. Louis Krutoy, one of the senior partners at Printon, Kane & Company, was a lifelong friend of my parents. He was even coming to the wedding.

“I’m going to see Lou,” I told Mary Pat.

“You can’t do that,” she warned.

“I’m doing it,” I said and drove to Lou’s house in Livingston.

“Lou,” I said after he waved me inside. “You’re coming to the wedding, and she got canned?”

“It’s complicated,” Lou protested. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not complicated,” I countered. “You can’t do this. You’ve got to help us figure out a solution.”

Honestly, I don’t know why I believed this would work. But Lou thought for a minute and then he said: “I have an idea. Have Mary Pat call me in the morning.”

Lou set up an interview for her with a woman named Angela Puccia at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, the New York investment bank with a thriving junk-bond practice. “Angie is a great girl,” he said. “She’s an old friend of mine.” On Monday morning, Mary Pat had an interview at 140 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. On Tuesday, she went down to Pennsylvania for last-minute wedding details. On Thursday, she called me and said, “I got the job!” She’d be a DLJ desk assistant for $20,000 a year with endless possibilities for upward mobility.

It had been a crazy week. But now with smiles all around, Lou and his wife were among the guests when we tied the knot at Mary Pat’s local parish, Saint Norbert’s, and celebrated with a reception at the Portledge Manor Mansion. After a weeklong honeymoon in Jamaica, a gift from my parents, I returned to law school. Mary Pat began her exciting new career on Wall Street. And we discovered the joys of married life, which at first glance appeared to be vastly overrated.

Marriage was a difficult adjustment for both of us. Until then, Mary Pat and I had essentially been weekend partners. Now we were a full-time unit. Our lives were far from glamourous. I was in law school and working three or four nights a week at a small law firm. She was getting up at six in the morning and taking the train into New York. The apartment was bare-bones and cramped. A half wall separated the living and sleeping areas. The kitchenette had a hot plate, a minifridge, and no freezer or oven. Our only luxury appliance was a small TV. After rent and my law school expenses, money was still extremely tight, even with Mary Pat’s salary. The first time her parents came to visit, even our wedding china wasn’t enough to put their minds at ease. Years later, after a few cocktails, my father-in-law would tell me what my mother-in-law had said on the drive home to Paoli: “Can you believe the dump he put our daughter in?”

There was another issue, too. Until we got married, Mary Pat didn’t fully grasp how mammoth a baseball fan I was. She knew I played in high school. She knew I followed the New York Mets. But 1986 was going to be an epic year. All Mets fans could feel it.

Opening Night was Tuesday, April 8, one whole month after the wedding. The Mets were facing the Pittsburgh Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium. Dwight Gooden, the young phenom, was starting for New York. Of course I had the TV on. And right at the national anthem’s impossible-to-reach high notes, Mary Pat announced, “Dinner’s ready.”

I grabbed my plate and utensils off the Ikea white ceramic tabletop with blue-and-red sawhorse legs and carried my dinner to the couch.

“Where are you going?” Mary Pat asked sharply.

“Dwight Gooden is starting for the Mets,” I said. “It’s Opening Night.”

She shot me a contemptuous look. “We don’t eat dinner in front of the TV.”

“Tonight, we should eat dinner in front of the TV,” I answered, “because it’s Opening Night for the Mets, and I want to—”

“Chris,” she cut me off. She was serious. “I’m not going to eat dinner in front of the TV.”

“Well,” I countered, “I’m not gonna miss the first pitch of the season, so I’m going to go in there and eat.”

Nineteen eighty-six turned out to be the amazing year Mets fans expected. The team won night after night. I watched night after night. The team won 108 games and the World Series. As the summer progressed, Mary Pat seemed to grow more accepting. She actually went to a World Series game with me. But there’s no denying it. My obsession with the Mets put an enormous strain on our first year of marriage.

My part-time job was with a lawyer named Myron Kronisch. He was a taskmaster and a real stickler for legal-writing style. One of his rules was that no sentence could have more than seven words. I could plead for exceptions, and sometimes he granted them. It all seemed a little rigid. But I had to admit that my boss’s rigor did sharpen my writing. I second-sat him in a medical malpractice trial. We had the plaintiff. The doctor was represented by the attorney Russ Hewit. Gregarious, physically large, incredibly friendly, Hewit was everything Kronisch wasn’t. Our opponent kept whispering to me during the breaks, “What’s it like to work for Myron Kronisch? Does he ever tell a joke?” When the trial was over, Hewit slipped his business card into my palm and said, “If you ever want to come work for the good guys, give me a call.” I called him in the fall of third year.

I went in for some friendly catch-up with Hewit and an “instant feedback interview” with his partner, John Dughi, who barely looked up from signing a tall stack of papers until he asked “What characteristic do you think is most important in a successful trial lawyer?” and I answered, “The discipline to focus on only one thing at a time.”

Then a smile slid across the partner’s face. He stopped signing and lay down his pen. “Okay, Mr. Christie,” he said, “you have my attention.” He summoned Hewit. They offered me a job and told me I could start the following September as a young trial lawyer at Dughi & Hewit.

That summer, Mary Pat found us a roomier apartment, the second floor of a two-family house in Westfield. I can still hear the excitement in her voice when she found it. I was away at a deposition, so I couldn’t come to the walk-through. But she wanted the apartment and was afraid if we waited we’d lose it. I said yes sight unseen. Two years later, we bought a handyman special at 515 Elm Street in Cranford. My parents, her parents, some of our siblings—just about everyone!—told us not to buy. We didn’t listen. Big mistake. Our careers were going fine, but our lives were still in turmoil. That house really was the nightmare on Elm Street, and it became a painful symbol of our fixer-upper marriage.

The issues went a lot deeper than home repair.

Mary Pat and I weren’t getting along. Twice we separated. I moved out and went back to live with my parents. After we reunited, Mary Pat moved out for six months. We went for marriage counseling. We went for more. We even made a conscious decision not to have children. We weren’t at all sure the marriage would last. We weren’t enjoying each other’s company anymore.

Looking back, I can see we were both immature. We were two people who had never learned to compromise. We kept ramming heads with each other. It was a thousand big and little things. Mary Pat was resentful that she had to leave Pennsylvania and move to New Jersey. I was resentful that we didn’t spend as much time with my parents as they wanted since we lived so close. I was trying to manage my parents’ expectations about our independence, and I didn’t think I was getting credit for that. I refused to change some long-standing habits even if they were inconsiderate to my new wife. Even though a reservoir of love was always there, we weren’t liking each other all that much.

One day, I was sitting in my office when my secretary said, “Jack Foster is on the phone.”

Oh, no, I thought. This can’t be good. But I didn’t want to dodge my father-in-law.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “How are you?”

“Good,” he said. “How are you?”

“Good days and bad days,” I replied.

“Listen,” he continued. “I was sitting here today thinking about you. I just want to tell you I love you, and I’m praying for you every day.”

With all that had happened between his daughter and me, he could have been angry and bitter. Instead, he called to tell me he loved me and was praying for me. That’s how great a person Jack Foster was every day.

“I really appreciate that.”

“Okay,” he answered. “Time for us to get to work.”

“Yep,” I agreed.

“Good,” he said. “Get back to work. Work hard. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Jack Foster was all heart.

The three years that Mary Pat and I lived in that house on Elm Street was the darkest period of our married lives. But we kept working at it. We weren’t quitters, neither of us. We came to recognize we had something special that was really worth saving, and we both learned to compromise. That whole experience forced each of us to grow up.

Just before Mary Pat moved back in, my brother, Todd, asked me: “How do you know it’s the right thing to do?”

“I don’t,” I told him. “But I know getting divorced is the wrong thing to do.” That wasn’t based on religion or money or fear. It was based on our mutual refusal to give up.

We sold the house on Elm Street—at a $30,000 loss—in March 1992. We built a beautiful new house in Mendham, the town where we have lived ever since. I was working at the law firm. Mary Pat was rising on Wall Street as a highly successful junk-bond saleswoman. We were socking money away. She was pregnant by December. Our first son, Andrew, was born the following August. What an extraordinary time that was, becoming a father. I would stare at him in his crib and dream big dreams for him.

Mary Pat and I felt like we’d gotten through a rough patch and had put all that stuff behind us. We were happy with each other. It was a wonderful time for us.

It was at that point I began to feel a familiar itch: politics.