More than anyone else, Bill Clinton's mother Virginia Kelley served as his model of joy amid adversity

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

The heart that stopped early last Thursday morning had been given over many years ago to the fatherless son who is now President of the U.S. It was his mother's indomitable ways, her ledger that listed credits and not debits, her capacity for friendship that exceeded even his own--all this accounted for Bill Clinton's ability to get up off the mat just as the count was about to reach 10. He didn't respond like most candidates do when the campaign hits the ropes. If Gary Hart was a sulker, Paul Tsongas a whiner, Jerry Brown an out-of-body existentialist, Clinton was the sunny optimist, emerging on the coldest, darkest days of New Hampshire to pump hands at a V.F.W. hall as if he were 20 points ahead in the polls. As he accepted the nomination most of the press had predicted would not be his, he said the fighting spirit people remarked upon had one source. On the podium, he turned to Virginia Kelley and said, "Thank you, Mother. I love you."

At that moment, Kelley was suffering from breast cancer. A radical mastectomy in 1990 had slowed the disease, as had chemotherapy and radiation treatments that had severely thinned the black mane with the silver streak. But she was a survivor. She had buried three husbands, one a sweet-talking salesman who died before her son was born and another with a weakness for bourbon and beating her up. She was a working mother before it was cool, leaving her infant with her parents to finish nursing school in Shreveport, Louisiana, and pulling long hours as a nurse anesthesiologist at the local hospital when she graduated. All the while, she acted as if she had no cause to complain and led a life that would never please the life-style police: she liked to take a drink, eat red meat, play the horses, stay up too late and exercise too little. "She wasn't one," says a friend, "to worry about a high-fiber diet." She preferred to win like her son but was never discouraged by defeat. Political columnist Jack Germond, who went along on her last visit to Laurel Race Course outside Washington, said she lost money that day. "But she had the same attitude I do. If you can't have a winning day at the track, the next best thing is a losing day."

Last Wednesday evening, after a day out lunching with friends and an evening cheering on the University of Arkansas basketball team, she turned to her fourth husband Dick Kelley, a retired food broker. "I have a chill," she said. "I think I'll go to bed." When he looked in on her a few hours later, he told the President, she was dead.

All deaths are shocking to the survivors, even those of the terminally ill, and the President was stunned by the call, which came at 2:30 a.m. Washington time. The week before, Clinton had given a routine hug to his mother on the porch of her modest lakefront home in Hot Springs, Arkansas, as he headed off to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and she to Las Vegas for New Year's weekend. The only sense that Kelley, 70, might be counting her days came when she appealed to her son to have the whole family together for Christmas. That included his half-brother Roger, who was deep in the doghouse for being as yet unmarried to his five-months-pregnant girlfriend.

At the President's behest, Harry Thomason, the television producer and an old Arkansas friend, took Kelley six months ago to a prestigious bone-marrow transplant clinic at the University of Colorado, where she could have had surgery. When she found out the treatment might have extended her life but not necessarily its quality, she decided against it. She preferred to exit laughing. Her son's first Christmas in the White House was her last but, she told a friend, her best. She slept in the Queen's bedroom, watched a screening of A Perfect World and helped her granddaughter Chelsea wrap gifts. She brought in the New Year playing the slot machines at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and sitting transfixed at Barbra Streisand's first concert in 22 years. Back home, she took care of unfinished business: she went with Roger to the local jewelry store and bought rings for the wedding he promised would take place before her second grandchild was born.

With the death of the First Lady's father in April and the suicide of Vincent Foster in July, this is the third loss in a year for the Clintons. The couple seemed limp with sadness in a rare public embrace on the South Lawn, as the President boarded Marine One bound for Little Rock. The funeral on Saturday was private. Even so, Virginia Kelley's son ordered up the 3,700-seat Hot Springs Convention Auditorium for the crowd he expected. The acorn does not fall far from the tree.