ONCORD, N.H. - Ernestine Schlant Bradley has just finished a 15-minute off-the-cuff speech outside the brand-new state headquarters for Bill Bradley's presidential campaign. She has cut the red ribbon, posed good-naturedly for photographers, and waded into the crowd. An old man stops her. ''That was a fine speech,'' he says, ''but you didn't answer one question. Do you love him?''
Mrs. Bradley - or is it Dr. Schlant? - promptly returns to the mike, where she hushes the crowd and relays the man's question. ''So here's my answer,'' she says. ''Yes!'' The crowd erupts. Someone whistles.
A while later, when a reporter asks a natural follow-up - ''Why do you love him?'' - Ernestine Bradley looks startled. ''Oh no, I can't tell you that,'' she says. ''To go into the details ... ''
She had better get used to it. The American media are nothing if not detail-oriented. Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore know the harsh spotlight, but it's all new to Ernestine Bradley, who met a basketball star without ever having seen the game played, married him, and stayed in New Jersey to pursue an academic career while he went to Washington to pursue a political career.
Now she has put that career on hold to campaign for her husband. At age 63 - she is eight years older than he - after a distinguished career as a scholar and author, she is, as she puts it, about to become a full-time volunteer. (She has taken a leave of absence from her work). ''I gave up my job,'' she says. ''I gave up my salary. I gave up my writing.'' Does she mind? She pauses. ''This may be the only thing I'd give it up for.''
''This'' is the quixotic presidential campaign of a man who took her on their first date to a dinner party - by bus. ''I think he wanted to see if I thought it was beneath us,'' she laughs. Or perhaps the notoriously frugal young man, nicknamed ''Dollar Bill'' by friends, wanted to save the cab fare.
The couple met in New York City, where she was working for an educational film company. Her boss asked her to arrange an interview between poet Marianne Moore and basketball star Bill Bradley (Moore apparently loved sports). There was one problem: Ernestine Schlant had never heard of Bill Bradley, even though the New York Knicks were then at the height of their power, led by the cerebral forward who had also starred for the Princeton Tigers and helped win a gold medal for the US Olympic team. She'd never been to a Knicks game. Undaunted, she contacted Bradley, who asked to see a script. They met to discuss it.
''Then Marianne Moore had a stroke and we could not do the interview,'' she recalls. But still, the basketball star could ask out the assistant producer. Last January marked the couple's 25th wedding anniversary. How did they celebrate?
Again, the look - half-flustered, half-bemused. ''Our life is so frazzled that we celebrate whenever we are together,'' she responds. So what's the most romantic thing he's ever gotten her? ''You know, we're not very ritualized that way. I get very nice things when I want them.'' She finally offers ''a painting'' as the answer to the romantic gift. Either Bill Bradley is not a mushy guy, or his savvy wife has learned to draw the blinds on their marriage.
It's clearly on-the-job training, training she has managed to largely avoid despite her husband's visibility. Asked if she feels sympathy for Hillary Clinton or Tipper Gore, whose lives have been fodder for public consumption she responds: ''You accept it as part of the deal.'' But in the next breath she concedes that she doesn't know what it's like. ''We haven't had Secret Service yet,'' she says. ''I'm just going one day at a time here.''
At Montclair State College, she's Ernestine Schlant, professor of comparative literature and German. On the campaign trail, she's Ernestine Bradley, her husband's main cheerleader. A German scholar with a PhD in comp lit, she has written three books, the latest ''The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust.'' But the woman who researched how postwar German writers treat the Holocaust operates in a vastly different world from the woman who is cutting the ribbon, posing for photos, and glad-handing. She seems surprisingly comfortable in the superficial setting, speaking fluent French with a Parisian in the crowd, patiently obliging nosy reporters, and giving a supporter a second kiss upon request.
Still, she acknowledges that she is not political. ''You,'' she tells the crowd, ''might know Bill's record in the Senate much better than I do.'' But she pointedly adds, ''Obviously, I would not be married to my husband if he weren't a man of total honesty and integrity. He's an authentic person. He's not a phony. That to me is very important, and I cherish it.''
Her husband's advice to her as they kick off his campaign? ''Don't worry, a sense of humor will help.'' She says she responded to him: ''I don't have a sense of humor. How can I get one?''
Of her husband's humor - ''it's a little out of the ordinary'' - she acknowledges that ''some people think it's offensive when he's really just being funny.'' She adds quickly: ''He's not like that with me. He knows I can't take it.'' (For the record, she has never shot hoops with her husband, but they did try to play a little tennis together. ''It was too frustrating for me,'' she says. ''And for him.'')
Ernestine Schlant was born in 1935 in Passau, Germany. She was a child during World War II but remembers her childhood fondly. ''We were very lucky. We lived in a town that wasn't bombed. The men were all gone, the women worked, and all the kids were roaming. There was no adult supervision at all. We'd sneak into the movies. I remember in 1942, in the middle of the war, seeing a Shirley Temple movie.''
In 1957, she came to America as a stewardess for Pan Am and became a US citizen in 1963. Her first marriage ended in divorce; she has a grown daughter and four grandchildren. She and Bill have one daughter together, Theresa Anne, 22, who is in college.
Perhaps one of the biggest decisions of their marriage centered around their child. When Bill Bradley was elected to the Senate in 1978, Ernestine chose to stay in New Jersey and continue her teaching career. Theresa Anne, 2 at the time, stayed home with her mother. Dad would come home on weekends, but those were crammed with meetings and appearances. As a father, he felt cheated.
So, when Theresa Anne was 10, she moved to Washington. She stayed there until she graduated from high school, developing a close relationship with her father and a mean jump shot. Her mother remained in Montclair and would commute on Thursday nights to be with her family, returning to New Jersey Monday mornings. For four days a week, Bill was Mr. Mom, fixing the breakfast, bandaging the boo-boos, and taking his daughter to school.
''Bill felt he was missing out on Theresa Anne growing up,'' Bradley explains. ''As an academic, I had a flexible schedule, so I was there four nights a week. The debate we had was what would be best for our daughter.''
Theresa Anne will spend a semester abroad in the fall, something her mother is passionate about. Bradley loves to travel and describes with emotion the summers she and her husband took off and saw the country and other parts of the world before life became too hectic. ''We're becoming more and more of a global village,'' she says. ''I think tolerance and understanding of other cultures is so important. You know,'' she adds, ''we are not the only ones who know how to do things.''
Ask if she's a feminist, and Ernestine Bradley hedges. It's that vexing f-word again. ''I translated Kate Millett's `Sexual Politics' into German. That was a real eye-opener into all of this for me,'' she says. ''I think the next frontier is men. Women cannot go any further until the men are ready. ... They still owe it to us to become complete, nurturing fathers. They need to become more fully developing persons who can admit that they have emotions.''
One of her priorities will be the fight against breast cancer. In 1992, she was diagnosed with the disease and underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy. Some say her husband decided against a presidential run that year because of it. ''Bill was there for me the whole time,'' she says. ''He took all the notes, he talked to all the oncologists up and down the East Coast. I couldn't listen when the doctors spoke.''
Cancer, she says, has made her life better because she discovered an inner strength. ''That is something I still have and can live with every day.'' Is she proud of herself? ''Pleased is a good word.'' She pauses. ''Grateful,'' she adds, ''is even better.''
