Ladies of the House

by Lauren Edmondson

  I walked the interns through the Old Senate and Supreme Court Chambers, then the Senate gallery, where the majority leader was getting ready to make a unanimous consent request to recess. The interns, savvy and prepared for their school credit, didn’t need me to explain what that was. “You give me hope,” I told them.

  I ended their tour in the Rotunda, at the foot of suffragettes Mott, Anthony, Stanton, carved in towering white marble. “They unveiled this statue six months after the ratification of the nineteenth amendment,” I said. “Then, the very next day, it was moved to the basement, where it lived in storage with brooms and mops.” This fact, when delivered, produced horrified expressions from my new friends. “It wasn’t until 1997 that it was finally brought back here, to its rightful place. An original inscription,” I continued, “reads, ‘Woman first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declaring herself an entity to be reckoned.’”

  “Where is this inscription?” one asked. “Where are you looking?”

  “It was taken off,” I said. “The same day the statue was moved to the basement. And never replaced.”

  For many minutes, I let them discuss how they could organize—perhaps with other interns—to get the inscription reinstated. “You give me hope,” I said yet again. Our conversation carried on, we talked about glass ceilings, men who constantly interrupted, icons Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm, who refused to be silent, who battled while dancing backward in heels.

  Their lunch break over, they departed, chatting about their favorite anecdote from the tour: the one about the senator who beat his colleague to unconsciousness on the floor of the chamber with his metal-topped cane.

  As I descended the steps to Emancipation Hall, I considered having a leisurely lunch in the Visitor Center café. I’d be working again soon, and I might as well imagine this week as a kind of budget vacation. But my thoughts were interrupted when I heard my name. Turning my head, I saw none other than Blake Darley, in an orange polo shirt the color of a Creamsicle and sunglasses on his head, striding determinately down the stairs behind me. He looked like he was coming from the golf course, or the tennis club, but his expression was the opposite of casual. I took the last few steps at a hurry, fleeing as fast as I could, but I didn’t get far. It was summertime high season, and too many people with backpacks and guidebooks blocked my path.

  Blake caught my elbow. “Daisy,” he said, supplicating, “please. Ten minutes. That’s all I need.”

  I drew my arm free, not wanting to be seen with him. Or have anything else to do with him, for that matter. I started to move, maneuvering my way through the crowd.

  “Five minutes,” he said, following me. “Two.”

  “What are you doing?” I stopped by the feet of the Statue of Freedom, spun to face him. “How did you know I was here?”

  “I called your office,” he said. “The guy at the desk told me you were here.”

  Another intern, probably, sitting in while Sara was at lunch, not knowing any better. What rotten luck, I thought, for me.

  “I’ve been trying to contact you for the past few days, since your segment on Monica’s show.” His hand was outstretched—on his palm I saw those fine, thin scars, and remembered angrily the apocryphal story that he had told us about their origins. When I sank back, he closed his fist, then let it fall. “I’m really sorry to sneak up on you.”

  “I don’t like this.” He’d cornered me, and I wasn’t even near a wall. If only I could reach up, grab the laurel wreath from the statue’s plaster hand! I might smack him with it.

  “We just need to speak, then I’ll leave you alone forever.”

  The shock of seeing him had worn off. “You can’t talk to me here,” I whispered. “Jesus, look where we are.” I couldn’t help it; I still worried about Miles, about appearances.

  I led us as quickly as possible out of the great hall and toward the House appointment desk. It was more secluded there, less risk that we might be overheard. I took him all the way down to the emergency exit doors. There was my ground; I would stand it. “You have two minutes,” I said. I waited, barely breathing.

  He stared down at the floor, his hands in his pockets. He appeared small but not tender, and pensive, but maybe only in the DC way. That is to say, I couldn’t tell if he was truly reflecting or just wearing a mask. “Do you think I’m a bad guy?” he eventually asked.

  At this, I was able to exhale. I waited until he met my eyes, and then I rolled them. “That question is a waste of time. You can’t possibly care what I think of you.”

  “I don’t care? I do.” His accent had gotten thicker; I wondered if this was the unintended result of being in South Carolina more, or if it was an affect aimed at wooing his electorate.

  “Men only ask questions like that for one reason—absolution. I’m not your priest. I’m not your girlfriend or wife. You have no business asking me that, because you don’t want my honesty.” I spoke quickly. After so long, I was saying what I needed. “You want me to feel bad for you, and to lie, and to collapse on your shoulder and cry about how the world has misunderstood you.”

  “I’m not—” he stuttered. “I’m not asking the right question. I’m dancing around it because I’m so fucking nervous I’m not thinking straight.”

  As he stood before me, shifting, agitated, I saw him for who he was: a guy who was clearly confused and in pain. But no matter what he said, I couldn’t forget that his own choices were responsible for getting him in this position in the first place. “After everything that has happened these past months, why are you tracking me down now?”

  “The way I left things,” he said. “Wallis must hate me.”

  “Of all the things Wallis feels,” I said honestly, “hate is not one.”

  “Listen,” he said, and the command irked me. “I think if I explained things from my perspective—”

  “God,” I said, shaking my head, “please, don’t.”

  “At first,” he continued anyway, “I didn’t think Wallis and I were headed anywhere serious. It was fun. I loved how excited she was when I was around. Can you understand?”

  “How you toyed with her?”

  “No,” he said, the ache in his voice becoming more pronounced. “It wasn’t a game. You can’t be astonished by cards, by cornhole. She was—is—astonishing. And as the days went on. Then weeks. That was the closest I’ve ever come to falling in love.”

  “The closest you came?” I asked.

  “To avoid falling out with my family, I gave up the only thing that could’ve made the estrangement easier. My mother, she was perhaps willing to overlook Wallis and me when things were quiet. But then the pictures of us started to surface.”

  Blake and I stepped apart to let a group of teenagers wearing matching neon T-shirts and lost expressions ramble through. “Oh, I remember,” I said once they were out of earshot.

  “The pressure to leave Wallis became intense.”

  “You should’ve pushed back, with equal pressure,” I said.

  “I did,” Blake said, and it was awfully close to a whine. “Me leaving DC—that was pushing back! That was the only thing I could think of to keep both my family happy and Wallis in my life. I just needed time to figure something out. I thought my mother would come around.”

  His eyes silently begged me to take it easy on him. I could not. “You strung her behind you for weeks, Blake. You gave her hope. You tossed her crumbs. For weeks this went on, until Charleston, when you acted—”

  “I know! I know. Seeing her in Charleston was devastating for me. I know it seemed like I was a sociopath, but I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to say or how to act. My mother had sent her chief of staff down to spy on me, and I knew he was going to report back.”

  “Do you hear yourself?” I asked him, truly astounded at how easily he deflected blame, and onto a woman, no less. Onto his own m
other.

  “Daisy!” he said. “Of all people, how do you not understand? This family is my life. Their work is my life. There’s no separating it. There are no professional and personal compartments for me. How could Wallis coexist with my mother? What would family meals look like? Wallis can’t just sit and nod politely. When she disagrees, people hear about it. Maybe if there had been a way for her to be a little more accommodating—”

  “Accommodating? Of your family? The corrosive nonsense you all spout makes my hair stand on end!” My voice was raised, and I feared soon I would be shouting. All he was explaining to me was that he was playing the same old game of linear ambition and domination at all costs, and I was tired of it. “You think you’re something special, don’t you? You think you’re unique. But you’re just one of the millions in this town who will regularly choose power above all.”

  “Do you despise all those millions forever?” he asked. “Or just me?”

  A dawning—yes, finally, I understood. “You’re worried,” I said slowly, and my anger of a moment ago morphed into something more manageable, something that felt a lot like smugness. “You think Wallis and I have dirt on you?”

  “You do.” He glanced around, worried, seemingly for the first time, that someone would hear us. “My mother told me.”

  “And now that I’ve aired my dirty laundry, you think I would air yours? What kind of person do you take me for?”

  “Daisy.” He sighed my name, as though to say, come on. “This is ridiculous. I want to call a truce. So, can we? Just—can you not speak about me or my mother? I see you’re going on shows, speaking to media. Can we move on with our lives and leave each other be?”

  “No,” I said. I had no plans to speak on the Darleys, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “If you come forward with something about me, something I maybe said to you, or to Wallis, I’ll have to discredit you. I’ll have to say you lied.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose you would.”

  “I’m a good person, Daisy,” he said. “I’m always trying to be a good man, and to do the best for the people I love.”

  “So you did love my sister,” I said. “I think maybe you still do.”

  “She’ll always be that person for me,” he said. He admitted this like he was admitting to a crime. “There will always be something there. But I can’t be the person who fell in love with her, and also be a senator from South Carolina.” He looked irate now, as though the way of the world was my fault, as though I had built our current reality from scratch. “I had to choose.”

  Before I made my way back through the hall, threaded through the crowds around the statues of humans far better than I’d been, I drew myself to my full height and mustered one last line:

  “You chose wrong.”

  July

  Forty-One

  We were enjoying morning coffee and soft Sunday light on Cricket’s couch. I was borrowing her reading glasses to scour the front page of the real estate section of the Post. “Bo told me it’s here,” I said.

  “There you go,” Wallis said, pointing to a thumbnail picture at the bottom of the paper. “Oh, God, it looks like they painted it.”

  “And they changed the windows,” Cricket said, squinting, lips pursed.

  “We’re going,” Wallis said. “We have to see it.”

  “Open house begins in an hour,” I said.

  “I just need to brush my hair,” Cricket said.

  “Atlas landed earlier this morning,” I said, folding up the paper and tossing it aside. “He wants to come see me.” When I’d gotten his text, my reaction had been decidedly muted. I recognized the necessity of the meeting, but I dreaded it just the same. I knew what he was going to tell me. Regardless, tomorrow was my first day at the new job, and I was determined not to spend the rest of my minivacation a wreck.

  “You’re done waiting for him,” Wallis said. “If he wants to see you so badly, tell him to meet you at the house.”

  We’re going to the house on P. I’ll be there in an hour. Then I’m booked for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  When the taxi arrived at the address that used to be ours, Cricket was the first to exit. We stood on the sidewalk and inspected. “Look at that,” Cricket lamented, pointing to the clapboard siding that was once yellow. “Are people supposed to like this color? I’ve never seen an uglier gray. And they took off the shutters!”

  “This is what you get when all people care about is cashing in,” Wallis said. “A generic disappointment. A dearth of style. God, I hate it.”

  “I like the windows,” I said, and almost immediately I was wheeled on. They were aghast. “The bay window,” I said, ready to defend myself, gesturing to the one that had been shattered by a brick earlier this year. Only January? It seemed longer. “The way they replaced it with—what is that? Looks like black wood, I guess. It’s like a shop window, or something you’d find in an old English Tudor. I don’t mind it.”

  “This used to be our house,” Wallis told a young couple who were standing near, clearly admiring the curb appeal. The husband—boyfriend?—gave us a polite smile before being pulled up the steps and inside by his companion, a woman with a straight spine and a no-nonsense expression who clearly called the shots.

  “All right, let’s see what else they’ve done to it,” Cricket said. “I wonder if Daisy will like the interior as much as she likes the windows.”

  In short: no, I did not like the interior. The renovators had made choices that clearly were intended to dazzle, but had no such effect on me. There was marble, quartz, cheetah-print wallpaper in the powder room, a light fixture that looked like a crown of barbed wire hanging over the dining room table. The kitchen drawers, the agent, short, slicked, blue-loafered, told me, are soft close. They did not keep Cricket’s butcher-block counters.

  Cricket and Wallis stood by the fireplace, which had been converted to gas, muttering. I left them to it and ventured upstairs. I ached to hear the staircase creak in the same spots.

  My old bedroom was similar and also different. Much like me, I supposed. I had the sensation of looking both backward and forward in time, into my past, but also the future, altered, unexpected, in both good and bad ways. What would my father think of this house now? Easy. He would’ve hated it. Not because of what the flippers had done, but because he hadn’t been a part of the transformation.

  This had been his biggest flaw: he’d clung so tightly to the displays he presumed would make him relevant, and needed, and powerful, he forgot about where power truly lay. With us, his family, his wife and daughters, and the happiness and peace we’d found with each other and ourselves.

  We didn’t have the house, or the money, but this knowledge was my inheritance. His mistakes, ironically, had become my saving graces. In this way, I could never cast him as worthless, I could never say good riddance, because that would be writing off myself, too. And I wasn’t going to be doing that anymore. I couldn’t erase my past, but I could try and reconcile it with who I wanted to be.

  And Gregory, for his part, had helped set me on this path. It was Gregory, years ago, who had caught me one day in the office watching a clip of Miles early in his Senate run. I’d felt energized then, as I listened to him rally for systemic change, and also reason, decency, the wisdom of an evolving majority.

  Gregory had seen it. Go work for him, my father had said. Go on. You’re fired.

  At the time, I’d taken this as an act of selflessness. Gregory was letting me go, not because he wanted to, but because he could see I needed it.

  Now, looking back, I questioned whether he had also been trying to protect me from the scandal; he had to have known it would eventually be exposed. He’d certainly started stepping out on Cricket by that point. And the stealing had already started. I wondered if he’d wanted me not to see. I would never get answers to these questi
ons, but I could use them to help me forgive, and to nurture gratitude for all that had transpired. Because even though I wasn’t working for Miles anymore, I was still undeniably grateful to be one of his many true believers.

  That’s where Atlas found me as I sat on the staged twin bed and studied the new closet doors—nice quality, heavy, paneled on the outside with mercury glass. He said hello, and I turned. He looked rumpled, a bit rough around the edges, but otherwise himself. “What do you make of it?” he asked me. He was nervous; he had both hands in his pockets, one jiggling spare change.

  I smiled, determined to keep it, no matter how much this conversation would pain me. “I’m a little jarred,” I said. “This room also looks smaller than it did before. Which doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “You’re coming into it with fresh eyes,” he replied. He removed the strap of his computer bag from his shoulder, lowered it to the foot of the bed. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you for weeks. I kept putting it off because I’ve been out of town. I also convinced myself I needed to see you in person to say what needs to be said. I’m not sure if that’s totally fair, though. The truth is, I’ve been putting this off because I’m absolutely chicken.”

  “You’re here now,” I said. My heart thudded so loudly I wondered if he heard. Of course he would be worried about telling me of his engagement. I think he suspected—he knew—that it would hurt me. But I would not retreat from him, or deny my love, or fall back into the patterns I pledged to leave behind.

  “Indeed.” He cleared his throat and sat carefully beside me. I’d finally gotten him in bed, I thought, and such perfect timing.