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In politics, she lets Bradley have the court to himself. "Some of the Senate wives played an active role in policymaking or in running the office," says Marcia Aronoff, the campaign's senior policy adviser. "Ernestine never did that, and she won't be running the education department either." Schlant says the extent of her influence on her husband is the literature she presses into his hands as he travels abroad: Carlos Fuentes for a trip to Mexico, for instance. "I'm the wife, not the politician."
And the politician has shown he can be the liberated husband. When his daughter with Schlant, Theresa Anne, was 10, Bradley fretted that he was not seeing enough of her. But instead of requiring his family to move to Washington, the then-U.S. Senator from New Jersey moved just his daughter there and became the primary parent, while his professor wife at Montclair State University became the commuter. "I was the one who called the doctor, worried about where dinner was coming from, made the rules," he says. (Theresa Anne, now 22, is an English major studying abroad.)
Bradley also found a way to play an active role in his stepdaughter's life. He and St. Onge, both night owls, would stay up late after Ernestine had retired at 10 p.m. Bradley would read as St. Onge did her homework, and sometimes she would ask him questions. "He'd give these elaborate, wonderful 'I-was-there' kind of answers," she recalls. Once, when she was studying Vietnam, he brought out textiles from there, which she used to help illustrate her report.
It is Bradley's marriage that gave his life its biggest test. At a recent stop in Iowa, Bradley was asked by a man in overalls if he had ever had a brush with adversity. Bradley answered that nearly failing his first semester at Princeton and a lackluster rookie Knicks season were hard. "But neither were as hard as when my wife developed breast cancer," he said. The disease was diagnosed in 1992, and Schlant underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy. Bradley became her secretary, taking notes in doctors' offices and making schedules for his shell-shocked wife. "I just remember his long arms around her, protecting her," says Betty Sapoch, Bradley's finance director.
Bradley says the episode made him more willing to speak from the heart. Ernestine says it helped her shed life's unimportant demands. "I refuse to be harassed," she says. She calls it quits at 9 (the hour she and Bradley talk if they are apart) and fiercely holds onto her one day a week off with her husband. But what about campaign life, which is famous for riling--and pigeonholing--spouses? Shrugs Bradley: "Ernestine is going to be Ernestine."