Grief gnaws at Levy's parents as wait, mystery lingers

And Rep. Gary Condit's TV interview last week outraged Chandra Levy's parents. They say he lied and was evasive.

©Washington Post

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 26, 2001

MODESTO, Calif. -- Her voice is strained, she's hitting sour notes and botching lyrics, but Susan Levy is determined to sing this song. "All I need is one of your smiles -- sunshine of your eyes," she croons, accompanied by an indulgent jazz instructor and pianist at Modesto Junior College. "Give me lovin' -- baby, I feel high!"

Popular nearly 40 years ago, the song just bubbled up like an intoxicating memory from her youth: Scotch and Soda by the Kingston Trio. She was transported, if only for a few moments. And that is why we find the mother of Chandra Levy standing at the front of a vocal-jazz classroom this afternoon, wearing an auburn wig and a yellow ribbon, singing, "Oh me, oh my, do I feel high."

The other students blink in bewilderment, then break out in applause. Levy, 54, laughs and apologizes for her ragged performance: "That was a hard song. I don't sing . . . not jazz." (Actually she does sing in choir and community theater.)

She felt naked, she embarrassed herself, but so what? She showed up on a whim to enroll in the class because that's just how she is -- spontaneous. Susan Levy says she must somehow maintain a "normal life."

You have to understand that normal existence for Levy, even before her daughter disappeared in Washington on April 30, often veered into odd circumstances. She is, by her own definition, a "little nutsy." She is a capable painter, photographer and sculptor who has followed her muse to exotic locales far beyond Modesto, a sun-baked backwater 90 miles southeast of San Francisco. Once she dropped everything to go to India for a month to witness life among the lower castes.

Her greatest talent is playing herself. Now fate has cast her in an ongoing piece of performance art, the modern media drama, which accentuates her quirks for the world to see.

She is the Mother of the Missing Intern, the worn-looking woman who first came to Washington clutching a fuzzy yellow duck, wearing a floppy purple hat, pleading for her daughter's safe return. For 47 straight days, network pool cameras and producers have been camped in front of the family's ranch home in Golden Estate Acres, next to Susan's horse trailer. They videotape her getting the mail and record her clenched-jaw quotes, delivered in strange cadences. Sometimes she sounds like Edith Bunker -- her voice shrilly unmodulated, her laugh slightly hysterical. For recent TV appearances she has been more polished, donning pearls and solid-color pantsuits, her hair done up as befits the image of a successful doctor's wife.

In some respects Chandra was like her mother: fearless, strong-willed. But, Susan says, her daughter was much more cautious. She was methodical, like her scientist father. She planned things. Chandra was not one to take risks.

So what happened? Where is she? After watching their congressman, Gary Condit, on television Thursday night, they remain suspicious of him. Even though police have always said that Condit is not a suspect in the case, the Levys still think he's hiding something. But like the rest of us, Bob and Susan Levy have no solid answers. They can only wait.

No escape on weekends

Their sprawling four-bedroom house is decorated like an ethnic bazaar, full of Oriental screens and carpets, tapestries and weavings. Middle Eastern brass urns and American Indian feather-pieces are displayed on stone fireplaces. There's Western kitsch, too: a bar stool carved like a horse's rear end.

It's mid morning, a Saturday in June, and the house is dark, tightly shuttered against the lenses of the TV cameramen who lounge on the sidewalk in the shade of two large ash trees. Susan Levy putters around in her nightgown, trying to clean up. Her maid was in a car accident and has quit.

Bob Levy, 55, sits pandalike on the sofa in the sunken living room. Periodically he buries his head in the soft cushions and sobs. When friends visit, he rises to hug them and won't let go. Some of the family's friends can no longer endure his phone calls; he starts a conversation about Chandra and dissolves into painful wails.

Weekdays he can distract himself with work. Today, in T-shirt and shorts, the doctor attends to chores and runs errands, but soon he's back in the rec room, with its billiard table and wide-screen TV, watching vacation videos. Of Chandra. Over and over again.

The moaning begins. Susan Levy plugs her ears. She can't endure his keening. It can go on for hours.

"Damn, damn fate," the father sobs.

This is how they spend their weekends.

Mystified by affair

All children take on pieces of their parents' personalities, rejecting some, integrating others. Chandra's mother studied mysticism and worked for years on an autobiography she titled Life Is Illusion, or Is It? She copied poems about God into her paintings.

Her daughter became a strict vegetarian, loved to exercise like her mom, but didn't go for yoga or metaphysics. They got along well, but frankly, Susan Levy says, "Chandra always thought I'm a little flaky."

Chandra inquired about Conservative Judaism. Her writing was more grounded. She earned an undergraduate degree in journalism and once hoped to cover baseball as a sports writer.

Then she completed a master's in public administration. She interned in the California governor's office and at the federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington. She put in an application at the FBI.

Chandra's sense of focus seemed to come from her father. With him she studied the stars through a telescope and examined cancer cells under a microscope.

Robert Levy was protective. He urged Chandra to carry pepper spray on her key chain. She did. She came to him when she needed birth control. He prescribed it.

Maybe she found it thrilling. An affair demands secrecy, deception, lies and sacrifices in trade for passion. Why was Chandra drawn to Rep. Gary Condit, a married politician three decades her senior? Her parents say they're mystified. "He's a smooth talker," Bob offers, "and obviously seduced a lot of other -- you know, it's not secret."

Love -- or infatuation -- explains some of it. Chandra, by several accounts, was smitten with Condit, who had long represented her parents' district in Congress. She found men her own age too immature, her parents say. In her teens she dated a Modesto police officer, Mark Steele, then in his late 20s. (But not married.)

A five-year plan

The Levys knew for months that their daughter was dating a politician. But Chandra never named him. She told them the congressman was divorced and in his "late 40s," Bob says. Condit is 53, and has been married for 34 years.

"First she said it was a Southern Democrat," Susan recalls. They pressed for details. "She kept telling me she had to keep it secret, that in five years she could make it public, that I would understand." (Her confidants say Chandra told them about a five-year plan that involved marrying Condit and starting a family with him.)

In late April, about a week before Chandra disappeared, her mother called her and asked if the congressman she was dating was Gary Condit.

"How did you know?" Chandra replied, according to Susan.

Mother's intuition, she said.

"She told me that she couldn't say his name," Susan says, "that I would eventually understand."

'Hiding is just not right'

"G--d-----, how the hell did she think she was going to get away with all this and be okay?" Susan rages one day in July. "She could be such a pain in the ass," Bob says at another unguarded moment, referring to his daughter's stubbornness.

Throughout the summer, the Levys vent their anger. At themselves. At Chandra and her secrecy. At the best target they have, the man whose name they speak with contempt and disgust. Gary Condit.

It doesn't matter what he says -- that he had nothing to do with Chandra's disappearance, that he's done "more than anyone in Washington, D.C.," to help the authorities find her, that he's always tried to be a source of comfort to the Levy family. ("My heart aches for them," Condit told People magazine last week.)

The congressman preys on women, Chandra's parents say. He obstructed the investigation, they say. He's a shameless liar, they say.

In private, they watched a tape of Connie Chung's Thursday night interview with Condit. "Last night was very bad for them," Billy Martin, the Levys' lawyer, said Friday on the Today show. "He continued hiding during his interview."

Susan was outraged to hear Condit deny that he lied to her when she asked, in May, if he was having an affair with Chandra. "There is no doubt in her mind . . . that the congressman is again being dishonest and untruthful," Martin said.

Condit repeatedly told Chung he was honoring "a specific request by the Levy family" not to disclose details about his relationship with Chandra. The Levys say they have pushed for full disclosure by Condit from the beginning.

"All this hiding is just not right," an exasperated Susan Levy told a Washington Post reporter in her home on June 13. "I think he should come out and share what he does know. We would appreciate his help."

Waiting, on edge

For months, Bob Levy was unable to discuss Chandra without weeping uncontrollably. He took tranquilizers, but wouldn't wear a microphone on talk shows, fearing he would break down. He equated his emotional state to torture, a long-term hell, an unending slow-motion car crash.

By mid August, he's more stable. He can view the case in more dispassionate metaphorical terms. It's like cancer, the doctor says. You have to try treating it however you can. "But it's not gotten better," he sighs. "Not responding."

On his lunch break, he visits the mini-mall offices of the Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, created after three sightseers were killed in Yosemite National Park in 1999. Susan Levy volunteers here, helping to track cases of missing persons. Wall charts show who has been lost or found -- dead or alive.

"And there's my daughter there," Susan says, pointing to a display of "missing" mug shots.

"It is scary. It's like a coin standing on its edge. You don't know which way it's going to go. It could go either way."

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