THE CANDIDATE'S WIFE.(Teresa Heinz Kerry)(Biography)

The child of nature was a creature invented by the Romantics, whose cult of authenticity informed the literature of the next two hundred years. His direct descendant is the protagonist of countless modern films and novels: the prisoner of a false self revolting against the artifice of conventional narrative. On the face of it, Teresa Heinz Kerry makes an unlikely rebel. She is a sixty-five-year-old Catholic billionaire, born into the colonial society of Mozambique, whose tastes, pieties, and hobbies--cultivating roses and collecting still-lifes--are those of a traditional, if not Victorian, lady. But when she calls herself "a child of Africa" one can hear an echo of Rousseau, and it reverberates in the impulsive salvos (playful, caustic, or profane) for which she has been ridiculed as "bonkers" and "a loose cannon." The natural woman refuses to suppress her elan or subordinate her character to a role. "I don't want to lose myself," she said to me recently, "because if I do then I think my husband loses something, too."

Three years ago, when John Kerry was discussing a potential Presidential race with a small circle of advisers, his wife "blessed his decision and accepted it as a partner," a member of the group recalled. "She said she knew what was involved, but, to be fair, no one does, and any thinking human being would have qualms. She certainly made it clear that she would be her own person, and we wondered if she was going to be perceived as a breath of fresh air or as a threat; if her straight speaking would motivate voters--women in particular--or if we were going to spend the campaign watching our back, tensed for a blowup. We called it the Teresa factor."

The role of First Lady is, in many respects, as archaically courtly as the title, and history suggests that a woman who plays it may be forgiven for weaknesses perceived as feminine--Betty Ford's depression, Jackie Kennedy's extravagance, Pat Nixon's fragility, Nancy Reagan's faith in astrology--but not for strengths perceived as manly. In a deeply pious country founded by Puritans, the spouse of a President is also, to some extent, the minister's wife. She commands sympathy and reverence only so long as her conduct is irreproachable or her husband's isn't. Though she is not ritually invested with the sins, evils, or ill luck of the tribe, she is nevertheless a scapegoat of sorts--a propitiatory figure saddled with the culture's burdensome ideals of wifely and maternal virtue.

Heinz Kerry has made a feminist issue of her entitlement to express herself, and if she were a man, she says, no one would denigrate her as "opinionated." She lectures knowledgeably on the inequities that confront women in the workplace and champions the excluded and discounted women of the Third World. One of the lucky charms that she wears on a necklace (another is a four-leaf clover that Kerry gave her one Valentine's Day) is a religious medal that her dying mother received from her confessor. He got it from Mother Teresa, who embodies the vocation for which Heinz Kerry would best like to be known--tireless caregiving. Her father, a Portuguese-born oncologist, had hoped that she would become a doctor, "and she kind of wanted to," a close friend, Wren Wirth, the wife of Tim Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, says, "though she wanted to get married and have children even more." At the height of the women's movement, in the nineteen-seventies, she was the stay-at-home mother of three little boys for whom, she says, she washed cloth diapers. She calls herself "a spokesman for women's ability to be at the center of the family."

But Heinz Kerry intends to be the first spouse of a President employed outside the White House (Hillary Clinton gave up her legal career when her husband was elected), and though she performs her share of the expected campaign chores--reading to toddlers and laying wreaths--some of her speeches and seminars on the hustings would not be out of place at Davos. They have focussed less on John Kerry's legislative achievements, human qualities, or political agenda than on her own eventful biography and the work of the Heinz Endowments, a charitable enterprise seeded by the family fortune of her first husband, H. John Heinz III, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania.

Many of the voters who come out to meet Heinz Kerry are middle-aged working women, chafing at constraints they have outgrown, and they applaud her defiance in breaking the mold of First Lady-like self-effacement. (Breaking molds is otherwise known as iconoclasm.) Kerry himself admires his wife's intellect and independence, he told me, and he seems to accept stoically, if not with relish, that she is "saucy." Even if he doesn't, "he wasn't blind," she says. "He knew what I would be like, what he was getting."

Nevertheless, recent approval ratings for the infallibly sunny and conventional Laura Bush, who is her husband's greatest booster, are vastly superior to Heinz Kerry's (seventy-two per cent, according to a poll taken by the Los Angeles Times, to thirty-five per cent). Even many Democrats admire Mrs. Bush. Americans in large numbers, regardless of their party, tell pollsters that they don't vote for a First Lady and that their opinions of Laura or Teresa won't influence their decision on Election Day, but the two wives have a significant influence on voters' perceptions of the candidates. Kerry's image is still sorely deficient in the warmth and human definition that Heinz Kerry herself possesses and might lend him. The adviser involved in Kerry's early strategy meetings told me that he is surprised by her reluctance "to trim the sails" of what he and others describe as a "self-referential" presentation that has often dwelled, at inopportune moments, on her memories of Heinz and on his legacy. "She made some stirring and lovely speeches, particularly during the primaries, when you thought, Goddam right, Teresa!" he said. But her habit of running on private rails rather than on the main line has dissipated some steam from the campaign. "It isn't as if there have been no specific conversations with Teresa about the necessity to fill in the picture," the adviser said. "John had a few himself, but he would ask others to convey the message." Perhaps, he reflected, she tends to reject criticism imperiously "because she's used to tremendous deference. When you have so much money, and give so much away, everyone, from governors on down, courts your approval. I think she sometimes has problems with a secondary role."