Ladies of the House Page 2

  “Oh, dear,” he answered, feet shuffling nervously under his frock. “I don’t know. We’ve never had to use it.”

  “We are not just sneaking out the back door,” Wallis said. “I mean, that’s ridiculous. We didn’t do anything. We don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Fuck that. Sorry, Pastor.”

  “Wallis, please call the black car and have him come around to this side of the parking lot,” I said, ignoring her. She did as I asked, although her teeth were clenched. “Pastor, thank you, for everything. And I’m sorry, in advance, if we trip the alarm. Cricket, do you have your purse?”

  “I have five dozen tea sandwiches at home,” said Cricket. “I hired a bartender. There are people delivering glassware at any minute! What about the reception?”

  “Believe me,” I said, “people know it’s canceled.”

  * * *

  In the car, on the way back to Cricket’s, the Times called. I recognized the number and chose to answer because they’d been the ones, only minutes earlier, to break the story that Senator Gregory Richardson had died with his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend in his bed, and I had some things to say to them. Wallis did, too, and told me to put them on speaker.

  “I couldn’t get a heads-up?” I asked the reporter on the line.

  “Heads up,” he said flatly. The gentle sound of fingers on a keyboard infuriated me.

  “We were at my father’s memorial, Todd.” I did not bother to keep the sharpness from my voice.

  “Yikes.” The typing paused. Then resumed. “Actually, I’m calling about another piece I’m working on about your father.”

  “What else do you possibly have to say? Are you going to report on whether they were in a queen or a king at time of death?” It was singularly humiliating that, of all the outlets in the world, I was talking about this to the New York Times, the distinguished Gray Lady. Beside me, Cricket dropped her head into her hands, and I immediately regretted my question.

  “There is evidence,” he said crisply, “that Senator Richardson used his office expense account to buy Andrea Pell a cell phone, a car, and plane tickets.”

  “Who?” I stalled, even though I recognized the name. Cricket was asking me for a tissue; her eyes were wet. I fished in my purse and handed her an old receipt. It was all I had.

  “The lover, companion, whatever the correct nomenclature is these days,” said the reporter. “She was—is—a photographer, and she’s listed on Senator Richardson’s most recent expense ledger as his employee.”

  My mind emptied, then swiftly filled with every swear word in every iteration I could imagine. He had the woman on his payroll?

  Todd continued: “We even have a source who says your father gave her money to buy a condo in Bethesda. Did you or your family know about this?”

  “Who is this source?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “We have no comment at this time,” I said.

  “I figured. Publication will probably be within the hour online and above the fold tomorrow morning.” He ended the call.

  I stared at my phone, which was still pinging with incoming texts. The letters shuddered and twitched on my screen. Or maybe that was just my shaking hands. Wallis asked me several questions in a row, none of which I could comprehend. Cricket went on dabbing her eyes with my receipt.

  When we arrived at the house, the driver asked if we needed anything else from him, then told us, sunnily, to have a good rest of our day.

  Once inside, we all appeared lost. We bobbed around the living room like flotsam in the ocean, Cricket running her fingers across the dessert plates and linen napkins she’d stacked on the sideboard the night before, having unceremoniously vetoed my idea of disposables. And Wallis, gazing at the upright piano and the silver-framed photos on its lid. She picked up the one of me, around age nine, cuddled into Gregory’s side on a horse-drawn sleigh. We’d been on Prince Edward Island, a trip after Christmas, and I’d fancied myself Anne of Green Gables, minus the red hair and good spelling.

  I dragged myself into the kitchen, where trays of croissants and pastry awaited, tucked under plastic wrap. Apple tart, too, and tiny muffins. Cricket had laid out small cans of soda and sparkling water; the ice bucket stood at one end of the counter, ready to be filled. I drew out a chair from the round wooden table, wishing that I could magic the stuff away.

  The longer I sat, staring out the window at the winter trees, the more I thought of this kitchen, and my childhood, and my father, who inhabited this house the way he inhabited the six syllables of his own name: boldly, fully, never lacking confidence. He’d take his place across from me, eating the sugary cereal Cricket rarely allowed for her children, telling us Norse god Loki stories, reading Anansi the Spider, or doing his perfect leprechaun voice. It was those moments, the glimpses of safety, predictability, when I understood what having a good father felt like. This is what we do at breakfast. Here’s how he looks at me. Here’s what he says. They made the other ones—the bad ones—bearable. I loved—love—my father, is what I’m saying, even though it was proving very risky to do so.

  I pulled my necklace out from my black dress. For my seventeenth birthday, he had gifted me a sixpence. Your mother wore this in her shoe, he’d said, when she walked down the aisle. May it bring you fortune. Even then, there was no pretending he was a perfect father, what with his ungovernable moods and torch-hot temper. But I’d been touched by the gesture, thinking it a kind of peace offering, and had a jeweler mount it in a pendant frame before I left for college. I’d worn it today as a tribute.

  Cricket called for me as I rubbed the pendant between my fingers. Would she miss me if, instead, I just left, dashed south as quickly as my kitten heels could take me? Past M, over the canal, under the freeway, straight to the boardwalk, where I could hurl my father’s lovely gift into the depths of the Potomac and allow the ancient currents to carry it away for good. An old clock clunked into the top of the hour, and I stood, took a few steps toward the kitchen door. Then I stopped. Who was I kidding? I’d get about three blocks in these pointy, pinchy shoes.

  I found Cricket in the parlor, resting in one of the cream armchairs by the fireplace. Wallis was curled on the sofa, gnawing at her cuticles, which she’d do until they bled. I sat at Cricket’s feet, on the rug, hand loomed, no doubt. A gift from one of my father’s trips abroad.

  I didn’t want to, but I turned to my phone, compelled, in a self-flagellating way, to check the most recent news alert. “She—there’s apparently a recording of the 9-1-1 call Gregory made when he was—during the heart attack,” I paraphrased. “You can hear her in the background. And her name is on the police report the Times found. She was there. She was with him.” I looked up at my mother. “He didn’t die alone, Cricket.”

  “I’m furious,” she said, and I nodded. Her arms were crossed, her expression blazed. The discovery that she wasn’t her husband’s only—anger was more than expected. But then she continued: “He broke the rules. I told him no sleepovers. I told him she couldn’t be in our houses.”

  This I didn’t expect. “You knew about her?”

  “Of course,” she said, as though it should be that obvious. When we were silent, she shrugged. “We were going through a rough patch.”

  “Why,” I asked, trying to be patient with her, “didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was private. Between your father and me.”

  “No,” I replied. “It wasn’t. I knew.”

  “How did you know?” asked Wallis. Her hands, with their inflamed fingers, dropped to her lap.

  “Our father never went to the lake house alone,” I said. “I figured he had to have been with another woman.”

  “But you didn’t say anything,” said Cricket, sitting forward in her chair, the popped collar of her starched white shirt almost reaching her earlobes, “when I told you he died alone.”


  “But I didn’t know you were lying,” I admitted. “I thought you truly didn’t know about it.”

  “That’s almost sweet.” Cricket smoothed her skirt over her knees, turned to Wallis. “Wallis, I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”

  “I already knew, too.” Wallis traced the brocade embroidering on the couch, following the petals and the stems, the intricate gold blossoms. “I’ve known for a while. When Dad visited me in Seoul last year, he left his email up on my laptop by mistake. He asked me not to tell you guys.”

  “So, we all knew,” I said.

  “But no one admitted to knowing,” said Wallis.

  “He was a great man,” Cricket said. “We didn’t want to ruin that for each other.”

  “He was a cheater.” Wallis rose, began to pace. “And a liar. And now they are accusing him of being a thief.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Cricket said.

  “If you do,” I said, “please tell us, right now.”

  “I don’t. He’s an adulterer, but he wouldn’t steal money from his own office. He’s not a criminal. I wasn’t married to a criminal.”

  From my spot, cross-legged on the carpet, I took hold of her hands, guided her body so she was facing me. “Cricket,” I said. “What if you’re wrong?”

  A knock on the front door. “If that’s the bartender, tell him to stay,” Wallis shouted as I got up and walked into the small foyer, or foy-yay, as Cricket pronounced it.

  I answered the door, surprised to find Atlas on the stoop, his peacoat buttoned to the chin. “I don’t want to impose,” he said immediately. “Are you all right? I just wanted to check.” He rubbed his gloveless hands together. “Sorry, Daisy. I should’ve called—”

  I opened the door wider, relieved to see his face, to hear his voice. I rocked forward on my toes and smiled, trying to embrace the power of his calming presence. “You’ve been invited in, Dracula.”

  “Dracula, is it?” In the entry, he glanced in Cricket’s small giltwood mirror topped with a nose-diving eagle. “I am pale enough.”

  “Look at me.” I took quick stock of my own reflection. I swear I had put on makeup that morning, although there seemed to be no evidence of it now; my dark circles and fine worry lines had defiantly surfaced. “Better yet, don’t.”

  “An impossible order,” he said quietly. “Despite—everything, you look lovely, Daisy. Really.”

  “Atlas!” Wallis had found us. “You didn’t bring vodka, did you?” she asked, hugging him.

  “Afraid not,” he replied. In the living room, Cricket kissed him twice on the cheeks and then wiped off her lipstick stains with her thumbs. “But I have tea.”

  “Perfect,” said Cricket. “I’ll set the kettle. And I hope you’re hungry. I ordered enough finger sandwiches to feed this entire town.” There was a pause as we all considered the emptiness of the room. Cricket had rented chairs, the nice bamboo sort, placed them carefully around the room to encourage flow and conversation. Unlit votive candles decorated nearly every surface alongside small vases of roses, white, classy, timeless. “You can have your pick,” she pressed on, cheery. “Smoked salmon? Tuna? Watercress? Don’t know why I ordered that last one, never liked watercress.”

  “I like watercress,” said Atlas. “My father does, too. Watercress and—”

  “Egg salad,” I finished for him. “Your favorite. At The Savoy, right?”

  He tapped my temple with his finger and smiled at me. “Memory like a steel trap, this one.”

  We gathered around the kitchen island, and Atlas inquired again how we all were. All of our answers included the word okay.

  I’d been about to ask Atlas what would come next—if he might be able to predict how this story would play in the current news cycle—when the sudden sound of glass shattering made Wallis scream. I saw the alarm in Cricket’s eyes before Atlas pulled me down with him behind the island. My back slammed against his broad chest as he curled—fell?—around me, his arm around my waist. For a moment I was completely encircled; he’d even placed a hand on the top of my head. But no debris fell, no sound, even, followed the initial crash.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me. Then, louder, to everyone: “Are we all okay?”

  “What the actual fuck,” cried Wallis, her voice wavering.

  Atlas’s grip loosened, and he scooted around so he could see my face.

  I nodded. “I’m all right,” I told him, wanting to appear brave.

  He pushed to his feet, and made for the front of the house, ignoring my pleas to be careful.

  When I got my shaky legs under me, I circled the island and helped Cricket up.

  “What on earth?” she said, breathless, as she got her bearings.

  Wallis made a move for the kitchen door, but I yanked her back.

  “It’s okay!” Atlas announced from the living room. “It’s just a brick.”

  Indeed, as we discovered when we joined him, the brick had torn through the bay window overlooking P Street, leaving a comet’s tail of glass both inside and out. Georgetown bricks—old South bricks, Jeffersonian bricks—are the color of rust and amber and clay, but this brick was new, almost lipstick red. I wondered, as it taunted us from Cricket’s rug, if someone had gone to a home improvement store and bought it. How much did one brick cost? The brick through the window, such an old-fashioned way of delivering hate.

  “Did you see who did it?” Wallis asked Atlas.

  “I’m going to find out.” Atlas threw on his coat.

  Cricket protested, as did Wallis, but I’d seen his face change, the slight reshuffling of his features, turning him from polite guest to man on a mission. He was a journalist. Here was a story.

  “I’ll call the police,” I said.

  It was thirty minutes before the officers arrived. Wavering between sympathetic and disinterested, they took our statements and scouted the room, nudging pieces of glass with their boots, explaining how difficult it would be to lift prints from a brick. Only then did Atlas return, with names and numbers of possible eyewitnesses, the addresses of security camera footage, and a dozen pictures of the scene. The officers weren’t nearly as happy to receive this information as I would’ve hoped, but they dutifully jotted it down and departed, giving us absolutely no confidence that we’d ever find the culprit.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon in an anxious kind of silence. Cricket gingerly trod through the broken shards back to the kitchen, returning with a dustpan and a mop. Wallis sat by the hole, a sentinel in stockinged feet, armed with a hammer from our late father’s toolbox. Atlas kept the kettle hot, made sure we ate finger foods, bandaged Cricket’s hand after she had a run-in with a stray piece of 150-year-old glass on her sofa.

  I spent time dry heaving over the porcelain sink in the powder room, clammy, retching and feeling wretched, unable to catch my breath. This was my father, my blood. This was Senator Gregory Richardson.

  My entire life, I’d taken this as fact: he was a complicated man but brilliant politician.

  I’d suspected the affair, but never this.

  Later, as the sun set on P Street, we patched the window with a cardboard box and duct tape.

  Four

  “I don’t know anything about this,” Cricket kept saying the next morning. Wallis and I sat on the couch in the parlor, embarrassed, as officials in blue windbreakers carted away papers and electronics. “You don’t know my husband.” Cricket swooped from one room to another, trailing the Feds, tidying what she could of the mess in their wake. “You don’t know him.”

  After a few too many of these refrains from Cricket, Wallis pulled me into the kitchen. “The lady doth protest too much,” she said. We could hear footsteps and floor creaks directly above us, strangers searching through our parents’ bedroom.

  “You think she knew,” I asked, “about the stealing?”
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  “How could she not?” Wallis said. “She lived with the man.”

  I had wondered, in fact, about this very thing. No—wondered is the wrong word. One doesn’t spend all night, as I had, wondering about things. Wonder didn’t make me toss so violently that the corner of my fitted sheet had popped off and curled around my feet. Wonder didn’t cause me to take a scalding shower at three in the morning, or to buy a multipurpose can and bottle opener from an infomercial at dawn. Only the agony of obsessive thinking could do that. Around breakfast, as I had been preparing to meet Cricket and the Feds at P Street, I’d come to this disquieting realization: I believed my mother. Toward the end, my parents hadn’t even been speaking to each other. If I was coming by the house, I had to inform each of them separately. So it was plausible, likely, even, that Cricket hadn’t seen or known. Yes, she had known about the adultery; she had not bothered to think about the money it required.

  “He must’ve taken pains to hide things from Cricket,” I said to my sister, not wanting to load her down with the ugly reality of our parents’ estrangement. “Even if they’d fallen out of love, I think he would’ve wanted to protect her.”

  Wallis rolled her eyes. “Bullshit, Daisy. He didn’t care. Clearly! All he cared about was the show. And how many hours have we spent performing for him, Dodo? How many years of our lives have we wasted?”

  “Girls,” Cricket said from the doorway. “I can’t get ahold of Uncle Danny.” She meant our father’s former chief of staff, not our real uncle, just the kind of guy who liked to be called one. “He’s not picking up my calls. I know he went to law school. Was he ever a lawyer, before working for your father? I can’t remember. Maybe he can come over and help.”

  I turned to Wallis. “His office is right off Farragut Square. He told me before the memorial. The exact address is in my planner, which is in my purse, which is on the table with the fake flowers in the hall. Can you go get him?”

  “Why do I have to go?” Wallis frowned. “I’m not the one who needs a lawyer. Dad is dead anyway. What are they going to do? Prosecute a corpse?”