On Friday morning I spoke to a class of graduating seniors at the all-girls Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans, and I was surprised to find that one the first things they asked me was a variation on wOw’s Question of the Day. I had visited the school two years earlier, just after I’d interviewed Elizabeth Edwards for Vogue, and they wanted to know what I thought about what is going on with her now. They may be only 17, but they got right to the point: “Why in the world is she staying with her husband?” Clearly, they were mystified – and not just a little grossed out.

Theirs is a normal reaction. Last spring, when it was revealed that Eliot Spitzer, the then-governor of New York, was also Client No. 9, I ran into a woman I know at the grocery store, a woman who is several years older than I am and extremely active in the church to which we both belong. The topic of the moment was if and when Spitzer would tender his resignation. “If he were my husband, that’s not something he’d have to worry about,” she told me. “Because if he were my husband he’d be dead – I would have shot him by now.”

Silda Spitzer did not shoot her disgraced husband, just as Joan Kennedy and Hillary Clinton and Wendy Vitter and a host of other women did not shoot theirs. Not only is Eliot Spitzer still alive, Silda is still with him more than a year later, just as Lee Hart is still with Gary (they recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary).

I can’t explain any of these women’s actions any more than I could answer the girls’ – or wOw’s – question about Elizabeth Edwards. But I did manage a few things. First, I told the girls, as you get older, you learn never to presume that you know what goes on between any two people in a relationship, Second, the one person I would never presume to tell anything at all to, period, is Edwards, a woman whom I respect and admire and like enormously. She has been through hell, after all. Her teenage son was killed in a freak car accident. She gave birth to another daughter and a son when she was 48 and 50 years old. The first time she found out she had cancer was just after the 2004 Democratic Convention that nominated her husband for vice president; she learned that it had returned – and that it was incurable – while he was in the midst of his second campaign for the presidency. Now the whole world knows that during that same campaign he had an affair (and very likely fathered a child) with his “videographer,” Rielle Hunter, a woman who served as the model for the crazy, druggy character in Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life, as well as an even crazier, druggier character in both American Psycho and Glamorama by McInerney’s friend Bret Ellis. Further, her husband had given Edwards the story piecemeal, so that she would stick with him on the trail

Now she’s written a memoir, Resilience, in which she addresses the infidelity, and talked to Oprah. Meanwhile, the whole family grimly hunkers down together in the “dream house” that was built between campaigns (and illnesses) just outside of Chapel Hill, NC – the one with the big open kitchen and enormous beamed family room, the one with the barn she turned into a regulation basketball court for her self-indulgent husband. I cannot begin to imagine how it must feel to be inside that house – or her head.