Ladies of the House Page 3

  “You’re being a—”

  “A what?” she asked, eyes narrowing.

  “Wallis.” I tried to stay calm, if only because someone had to be. “I need you to go downtown and convince Uncle Danny to brave the ridicule and come over here, so he can talk to the guys who are, as we speak, reading my old diary and opening the drawer where you hide your vibrator.”

  “How in the world are you so rational right now?” she asked me. “How are you not joining me in this freak-out?”

  “Wallis,” I repeated, taking a breath. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “God, Daisy! Who even are you right now?” she said, and without a backward glance, she left—stormed, rather—out of the kitchen, smoke in her wake.

  “She didn’t mean that.” My mother slumped against the doorframe. “She’s just upset.”

  “We all are,” I said, hands on my hips, wondering if we should offer the Feds the remains of yesterday’s catering stuffed in the fridge. If only Miss Manners provided etiquette for raids! “She doesn’t have to take her anger out on me.”

  “She’s young,” Cricket said. “She’s still learning.”

  “She’s twenty-five.” Something crashed in the parlor, and I closed my eyes, hoping it was just a lamp, and not the urn that contained my grandfather. “She’s not that young.”

  “Lord, Daisy, then what am I? A world heritage site? Might as well send a bus of tourists to snap some photos of me.”

  One of the Feds—he’d introduced himself earlier, Finkle, Fickle, Fickett, something like that—cleared his throat from behind my mother. “Ladies,” he said, “I’m sorry to trouble you. Can you point me to the bathroom my guys can use?”

  “My husband, when he was drunk, sometimes relieved himself in the ficus by the piano,” Cricket said, waving her arm in that direction. “That should be fine for you and your henchmen.”

  “The powder room is right under the stairs,” I said quickly. “Let us know if you need more toilet paper.”

  “Obliged,” Ficus said.

  “Uncle Danny will come.” I turned back to Cricket. “He’ll have some good advice.”

  “Daisy,” she said. “I—”

  She was interrupted by two men who came into the kitchen and asked me to please step aside as they unplugged Cricket’s answering machine from the wall with an efficiency that suggested they’d done this task many times before.

  “I’m worried,” she continued, lower. “This house is still mortgaged, Daisy. Your father’s salary is gone. We’ve long since blown through his book income.”

  “You’ve got money from his life insurance,” I said, bidding a silent goodbye to the ancient answering machine. Maybe now Cricket would move into the twenty-first century and give up her landline.

  “There was none,” she said, stillness in her voice.

  “What?” I smiled with the cheerful intensity of one clinging to their last threads of optimism. “That can’t be true,” I insisted, though her face conveyed that this was not a joke.

  I started for my father’s study in the back of the house, but found it jammed with people. “Excuse me.” I tried to push through to his filing cabinet.

  Cricket followed. “I met with our old financial adviser last month. I’ve always hated him, you know. He always showed up to meetings in a golf shirt and blazer, totally unprofessional. But he reminded me that Gregory’s life insurance policy had already been cashed out five years ago.”

  “Why would he cash out his life insurance?” I said, giving up on my efforts and pivoting back to face her.

  Cricket avoided my eyes. “He—we—were having some liquidity problems at the time.”

  “At the time? Cricket, it sounds like you’re having liquidity problems now.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” She said this as though I hadn’t been listening, when in fact each word she’d said rang furiously in my ears.

  “If things were this bad, why did you pay my rent for so long? I could’ve lived with you here.”

  “You didn’t like it here. And anyway, I just wanted things to be as normal as possible for you and Wallis.”

  We scrunched ourselves against the wall of the hallway as more agents on a mission brushed past with fistfuls of evidence. Somewhere in this house, there was a warrant. Cricket had said they’d presented it when they knocked on the door early this morning, but she couldn’t remember where she’d put it.

  “Where’s your money, Cricket?” I asked. “There has to be some left.”

  “Sure there is.” Cricket’s eyes touched on her hardwood floors, the painted balustrade of the upstairs landing, her custom window treatments. Then she looked back at me. “You’re standing in it.”

  Five

  “Honey,” I said to Wallis. She was in her bedroom, pulling on a pair of boots. Twenty-four hours after the Feds had ransacked Cricket’s house, the address had been doxed. It was now widely available to anyone with an internet connection. “The photographers are still out there. If you’re going to go out, let me come with you.”

  “Fine,” she replied. “But I refuse to hibernate anymore. I’ve been inside for a full day. I’m going to get a coffee, and then I’m coming back. I need to remind myself what fresh air smells like.”

  Cricket called my name from downstairs. All morning she’d been showing me the latest news: leaked emails between my father and his girlfriend. They were filthy, as we should’ve expected. She’d learned, after almost forty years of marriage, that her husband had a foot fetish and seemingly loved to describe acts involving breasts, toes, and butts that were, by all accounts, physically impossible.

  “Can you wear a hat?” I asked Wallis, ignoring my mother. “Or go out the back and climb over the fence?”

  Cricket yelled for me again, louder this time.

  “Mom!” Wallis exclaimed. “We’ll be right there. Christ!” Then to me, she said, “Cricket is driving me nuts. At least you have your apartment to escape to. I’m ready to check into a hotel.”

  “We don’t have the—” I began, but Cricket, apparently tired of waiting, showed up at Wallis’s door.

  “‘You’re slime,’” she read from a letter in her hand. “‘Die already.’” She scoffed. “Modern day Tennyson.”

  I took the envelope from Cricket, and when our hands touched, I realized, despite the flippancy, hers trembled. “Is there a return address?” I sounded hoarse.

  “Not even a stamp.”

  Wallis snatched the paper from me. “‘You’re slime,’” she read. “You’re—Y.O.U.R. This person is garbage. He probably isn’t smart enough to blow his own nose.”

  “Wallis,” I said. “They were here, they hand delivered it to our mailbox. I think we need to call the police.”

  “Fine,” Wallis said, throwing the letter on her bed. “Although they were zero help last time. I’ll call, but after I get some damn coffee.” I reached for her arm, but she tugged it away. “Let me go, Daisy! I need to get out. Do you hear me?” We sure did. She was all but shouting. “I have to get out of here because I’m starting to believe all the things people are saying about us. I’m starting to believe that we are slime.”

  “It’s not safe,” Cricket pleaded.

  Wallis pointed to her open laptop. “It’s not safe in there, either.” Determined, she left the room.

  “Grab that letter, please,” I said to Cricket, “and put it somewhere safe. Worst case the police might be able to fingerprint it.” I hurried downstairs and tried to remember where I put my coat. There—over the back of the couch. I shrugged it on, set to chase after my sister.

  “Let me get my shoes.” Cricket had followed me. “Hold on! Just let me find my shoes. I’ll come with you.”

  I prepared to go out the back, but suspected Wallis had not exercised such caution. “I’ll meet you outside,” I to
ld Cricket.

  My assumption proved correct when I pushed open the front door and saw her on the sidewalk below, along with a man in an oversize jacket and yellow T-shirt stretched tight across his belly. He was indignant, accusing, standing in Wallis’s way and slapping the back of one hand into the palm of his other.

  “You’re all liars,” he insisted. His face was bloated like a tick. “Where’s the money?”

  “Leave us alone.” I rushed down the stairs and stepped between my sister and this stranger. “Get back.”

  He talked over me like I wasn’t there. “Shame,” he continued. “Shame on you.” Slap. “Shame...” Slap. “...on you.”

  “Go away,” I pleaded, voice shaking.

  “I’ve called the cops!” Cricket, now, behind us too. She held her cell phone up and waved it as though it were a flag on the Fourth of July. “Aren’t you men going to help?” Two paparazzi had appeared and were filming us with their shoulder-mounted cameras from farther down the sidewalk. There was no indication they heard her or cared; the one wearing a flat-brimmed baseball hat darted around the shouting man, looking for close-ups, good angles.

  “Take a picture of him, Cricket!” Wallis ordered. “I want to compare it to his future mug shot.”

  He sneered. “You all should be the ones in prison.”

  The three of us had formed a wall, one right next to the other. “Get gone,” Cricket said. “Sad, sorry worm of a man.”

  He spat at the ground, then with some crude hand gestures and mutterings about bitches and losers, shuffled away, down the sidewalk and around the corner.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Wallis when he was out of sight. I was touching her face and she was touching mine. We both seemed to be checking for wounds.

  “Holy shit,” she said, her brown eyes catching mine. “Holy shit, are you okay?”

  “Do you want to go back inside?” I asked. “I can go and get you coffee.”

  “No,” said Wallis. “I’m okay. Just stay close to me.”

  “We’re fine,” Cricket shouted at the paparazzi, who’d chased the man partway down the street. “In case any of you scallywags were wondering!”

  Wallis and I couldn’t help it; Cricket’s words immediately had us clutching each other, laughing until tears leaked from our eyes. Wallis kept repeating Cricket’s insult: scallywag!

  “I’m getting something chocolate,” Cricket said when we recovered, and we set off down the block. “Something with whipped cream. Something with a million calories. After that encounter, I think I deserve it. Jesus, my heart is still racing. Who was that man? And why do I feel like he’s going to come back around the corner with an army behind him?”

  * * *

  He was one, but there were many more who followed.

  I left my apartment and temporarily roomed with Wallis and Cricket on P; though I was glad we were together, I’d severely underestimated the number of people who were interested in shouting directly in our faces. They were there, the angry, the indignant, the betrayed, the taxpayers of this country, the only honest ones left in this town, on the sidewalk almost constantly, staring, taking pictures, leaving posters and nasty handwritten memos all over the front door and the stoop. We huddled inside, nervous, jumpy, wondering when the next brick would crash through.

  I called Miles. I hated to do it, but I had to take some time away from the office. I’d return as many emails as I could, I told him, be on all possible conference calls. But Cricket and Wallis needed me.

  But even indoors, the glorious world revealed new fears to me: the sound of my phone ringing, the flat, hard voice of the IRS, again, on the other end, the stack of Cricket’s folded bank statements, the parade of congresspeople going to the Senate floor to denounce my father on live TV, the chime of a news alert on my phone—a more courageous person, I believe, would have put the phone on silent and kept it there. But I had to check; I had to know what they were saying. Otherwise, how could we begin to defend ourselves?

  That, it turned out, was the wrong question to be asking in the face of unbridled vitriol. The question was, should we even bother? The masses had already reached their verdict: we were canceled. What was the use in mounting an appeal?

  In the week after, we managed to get the charming lake house in Virginia on the market. We priced low and received an offer, seemingly within moments. We’d spent so many Augusts there, along an old trade route that someone forgot to pave, the pulse of the water lapping at the dock as Wallis floated in her favorite pink inner tube, the smell of pine trees and earth. The night after the contract was accepted, I dreamed about the bunk room under the cottage’s sloping tin roof, where I read whatever I wanted, listened to owls and crickets and frogs. It was there I felt like I didn’t have to try so hard.

  The proceeds from the sale would help pay the retainer for our litigator for Gregory’s estate and a meager percentage of billable hours. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  The house on P, after more than half a century as the Richardsons’, would have to pass from our hands to strangers.

  February

  Six

  The apartment on the floor above mine had recently been vacated by some graduate students, so soon after we resolved to let go of P, I made arrangements and my mother and Wallis signed a lease. Although first Cricket had to take issue with the building’s charmless architecture, the thin, greige carpet on the stairs, the narrow and gloomy hallways...

  It wasn’t as terrible as all that. Since it was on the top floor, the ceilings were higher than in my unit below, and the rooms flowed in an open and comfortable way. The main room, which Cricket immediately took to calling the living room, was bright and square and cozily sat six. The two bedrooms both had windows with generous views south over the ginkgo trees and slate turrets of stately Victorians, toward the leaf-shaded center of Logan Circle.

  Before the estate-sale people came through P, we had to do the deciding: here, the pile to donate. There, the pile to sell. No, Cricket, the new apartment won’t fit your mother’s old sewing machine desk.

  Wallis, still pallid in yoga pants and an old rugby shirt, was no help. I tried to get her through her bedroom the first afternoon, but she’d find an item in the corner of her closet and call me up from Gregory’s study to reminisce. Dolls, lunch boxes, school T-shirts, a big green mason jar filled with pennies and dimes. All had to be touched, all had to be discussed. Remember...? she’d begin.

  My childhood bedroom I saved for last. Most of my former possessions—into a single pile. Trash. Best to throw it out. Best not to dwell.

  When I was done, I joined Cricket in the kitchen, sunny yellow with butcher block counters. I sat on a counter stool and watched her sort silverware.

  “Your father was born upstairs in this house,” Cricket said, “too impatient to wait for Grandmomma to get to the hospital. Did you know that, Daisy?”

  “You’ve told me,” I said. About a hundred times, including twice in the last week.

  “The Limoges,” Cricket said. Spoons. Spoons. More spoons. All on the counter. “You should take it. Wallis wouldn’t want it now, I don’t think. Maybe someday. But now it’s yours.”

  “Which set is the Limoges?”

  She pointed to the stack of white porcelain with petite purple flowers.

  I thought about how often I chipped my sturdy white cereal bowls as they came out of the dishwasher. The Limoges would be wasted on me. If I were the kind of person who wanted to own and display fine china, I’d know that by now. “There are one hundred pieces of china in that set. Isn’t most of it in a barrel in the attic? Where would I keep it?”

  “Use the barrel as a side table,” Cricket said, “next to your couch. I was in that shop on M we love the other day—”

  “You can’t shop, Cricket.” I tried not to sound like a scold. I really did.

  Cricket’s hands paused i
n her work. Then she cleared her throat. “I was just looking,” she replied. “Anyway, the girl was trying to sell me an old soda pop crate for seventy-five bucks. Can you imagine?”

  “I can’t take the china, Cricket,” I said, hoping this would nudge her toward the inevitable. The china she’d have to sell; we had Gregory’s debts to pay, and our lawyer cost six hundred dollars an hour.

  “You mean you won’t take it.” Knives now. Butter knives, so many butter knives. “This. Is. Our. Home,” she said, and I knew she meant more than this house. All over Georgetown, there were plaques that bore our name, on the church, the park, the university hospital. As a tween, she had walked me around the neighborhood and pointed them out, giving me, in her words, an education.

  Two decades later, those plaques remained. For now.

  “It’s just plates, Mom. It’s just stuff.”

  Cricket stopped sorting. She walked around the island and wrapped her arms around me. I tensed, feeling trapped, wishing Wallis would come down. Cricket had put on perfume, bless her. “This is yours, though, Daisy. This stuff,” she said, voice cracking, “it’s really the only stuff you’ll get, in the end.”

  “Please don’t cry.” I gripped her forearms, not knowing if I should push her away or draw her closer.

  “I was a good mother, wasn’t I?” she asked. “Did I not teach you civility, dignity? Enroll you in the best schools? Give you priceless experiences? Those pink curtains in your bedroom, with the pom-poms? I made those.”

  “Breathe, Cricket,” I pleaded.

  “I still have Grandmomma’s scrapbook, of all the news clippings that mention the Richardsons,” she whispered. Then, seeing me at once moved but unpliable, she tried one last tact. “We can’t go because there is no way I can leave.”

  My Aristotelian mother, felled by circular reasoning.

  “I’ll take the Limoges, Cricket,” I said, ceding the point that was easiest. “The barrel will make a nice side table.”