“Do people ever say their vibrators?” Ursula asks.
“All the time,” Leland says.
“That’s not my answer,” Ursula says. She sounds nearly offended, as though Leland were the one who suggested it. “I was just wondering.”
My BlackBerry.
2. Song you want to hear on your deathbed?
“Let It Be.”
3. Five minutes of perfect happiness?
“Cool-down after a good, hard run on the treadmill,” Ursula says.
“Do you want to think about that answer a little longer?” Leland says. “Maybe mention your husband or your daughter?”
“Oh,” Ursula says.
Sixty-degree day, blue sky, fifty-yard-line seats, cashmere sweater and jeans, sitting between my husband and daughter, Notre Dame versus Boston College.
4. Moment you’d like to do over?
Accepting money from the NRA.
Brave answer, Leland thinks. This interview is looking up.
5. Bad habit?
Correcting people’s grammar.
6. Last supper?
“I don’t understand the question,” Ursula says.
“What would you like your final meal to be?” Leland says.
“You mean before I die?”
“Yes.”
“People are interested in this?”
“Very. It’s a little more in depth than just asking your favorite food. You get to pick a meal.”
“Oh,” Ursula says. “Cereal, I guess.”
“Cereal?”
Rice Krispies with sliced banana and skim milk.
7. Most controversial opinion?
“Men are not the enemy,” Ursula says. “I realize that’s going to be very controversial for your readership. But what I’ve found in Congress and in my professional life in general is that men want women to succeed. It’s the women who are cloak-and-dagger.”
“Hmmmm,” Leland says. She’s not overjoyed with this answer. The whole basis of Leland’s Letter is that women can learn and grow from the experiences of other women.
“I hope that changes by the time my daughter, Bess, is grown,” Ursula says. “When my mother was young, she was focused on helping my father succeed. That was her job. And then in my generation, our generation, women became focused on their own success. The logical next step is that women will become not only supportive of one another but vested in one another’s success.” She pauses. “But we aren’t there yet.”
Women have to support each other, be vested in one another’s success. Men are not the enemy.
8. In a box of crayons, what color are you?
“Black,” Ursula says.
“Black?”
“My father used to say I was as serious as a heart attack,” Ursula says. “Plus, you outline everything in black. It’s a hardworking color.”
“Right, but—”
“I’m not going to say yellow or pink or purple. My answer is black.”
Black.
9. Proudest achievement?
“Being elected to the United States Senate is probably too obvious,” Ursula says. “I would bring up the welfare-reform bill, but that would put everyone to sleep.” Ursula pauses. “I guess I’ll say my marriage.”
Leland jumps like she’s been poked in the ribs. “Your marriage?”
“Yes. I’ve been married for sixteen years, but Jake and I have been together for over thirty years. Honestly, I don’t know why he stays with me.”
Leland waits a beat. Move on to the next question! she tells herself. But does she? No. “You’re an intelligent, accomplished woman.”
“I’m a witch at home. I’m demanding and ungrateful and I have to schedule in family time, though that’s the first thing I cancel when things get busy. I’m aware that if I don’t start having some fun with my daughter, she’ll grow up either hating me or being just like me or both. And yet I have this idea that if I stop working, even for an hour, the country will fall apart. People throw around the word workaholic like it’s no big deal, like it’s maybe even a good thing. But I suffer from the disease. I’m a workaholic. I’m addicted to work. So, yeah, I’m not sure why Jake stays, but I’m grateful.”
My sixteen-year marriage to Jake McCloud.
10. Celebrity crush?
Ted Koppel.
11. Favorite spot in America?
“I should probably pick someplace in the state of Indiana,” Ursula says. “But I already mentioned Notre Dame stadium, and where else is there? Fishers? Carmel?”
“Are those places that inspire you?” Leland asks.
“I wish I could pick someplace magical, like Nantucket,” Ursula says, and Leland flinches again. “Jake loves Nantucket, but I’ve never been. He goes every year for a guys’ trip. I keep telling him I’m going to crash one of these years.”
Oh God, oh God, Leland thinks. Please stop talking about Nantucket.
“I love Newport, Rhode Island,” Ursula says. “But as bizarre as this sounds, I think I’m going to say Las Vegas is my favorite spot. I worked on a case there when I first went into private practice…” Ursula breaks off and Leland assumes she’s just gotten a text or another call but then she realizes, from her wavering tone, that Ursula is overcome. “Those were happy days. Vegas is…crazytown, right? But it’s unapologetically itself, and I appreciated that. I loved it there, for whatever reason.”
Las Vegas.
12. Title of your autobiography?
“Straight up the Fairway,” Ursula says. “That’s in regard to my politics. I’m centrist. People might not agree with all of my stances, but they won’t disagree with all of them either. I believe in common sense and hard work and American capitalism and the Constitution and the equality under the law of every single American.”
“Okay.” Leland is very liberal, just shy of socialist. She doesn’t want to get into a political debate here; however, she thinks that “straight up the fairway” is a compromise and a cop-out. She had wanted Ursula de Gournsey to come across as some kind of Superwoman. But maybe the takeaway for the readers of Leland’s Letter will be this: A woman with real power in Washington is just as self-critical and beleaguered as the rest of us.
Leland also finds herself hobbled by her secret knowledge. Does Ursula de Gournsey have it all? Anyone who reads the Dirty Dozen will see the answer is no. But only Leland knows that Ursula de Gournsey has even less than she realizes.
Straight Up the Fairway.
The Dirty Dozen with Ursula de Gournsey goes live on January 20 in advance of the State of the Union, and Leland waits for Mallory to call in a rage. Mallory didn’t explicitly ask Leland not to do an interview with Ursula, but her “So, please…” had seemed to indicate that she wanted Leland to exercise some kind of restraint. Which she had, because this isn’t an in-depth profile.
No angry call comes. Instead, Leland receives texts and e-mails and Facebook messages and hits on Twitter and Instagram that say: Loved the piece with UDG! LL is taking it up a notch!!
It takes a few days but eventually, the Dirty Dozen with Ursula de Gournsey goes viral. The answer everyone is talking about is “Men are not the enemy.” That line is the subject of an op-ed in the New York Times written by the male governor of Nevada, who agrees that men are not the enemy and that men should not be receiving so much blame for social injustice. (The governor is also thrilled with Ursula’s answer of “Las Vegas” as her favorite spot in the country.)
The Dirty Dozen with UDG and the attendant chatter about it result in a near doubling of Leland’s audience—she’s up to 125,000 readers (one of whom is Ursula de Gournsey herself!) and lures in seventeen new advertisers. Leland’s Letter is now making enough money for Leland to quit teaching and focus solely on the blog.
Still, Leland worries that she has cashed in on her longest friendship for this success. A week later, Leland looks down at her phone and sees she’s received two successive texts from Mallory. She thinks, Here it comes. Mallory will say Leland is
opportunistic (she is), selfish (ditto), and ruthless (well, yes).
Leland starts reading the texts with trepidation. The first says, Happy birthday, Lee! I love you!
The second text says, Oops, sorry, I thought today was the 29th not the 27th. I’ll text you on Wednesday!
Okay, Leland thinks. So Mallory isn’t upset about the Dirty Dozen? This is great news because now that Leland has some momentum, she can take Leland’s Letter to the next level. She can lay claim to some cultural influence. She just needs to keep her foot on the gas and not get slowed down by sticky issues like best friends with hurt feelings.
It’s only as Leland is falling asleep that night that she realizes Mallory might not have seen the article. It went viral, but that doesn’t mean it reached every person in America. Mallory is a single working mother on an island thirty miles off the coast. She’s immersed in her school day, her students, Link, the painful and painstaking work of dismantling her parents’ financial and business affairs. She might not spend hours online Googling Ursula de Gournsey the way that Leland Googles Fiella Roget and tracks her every move.
Leland opens her laptop (she sleeps with it; she is that pathetic).
Mallory Blessing isn’t a subscriber to Leland’s Letter. Leland’s first instinct is to be offended. Her own best friend!
She snaps her laptop shut. Actually, it’s a major relief.
Summer #22: 2014
What are we talking about in 2014? Polar vortex; Jimmy Fallon; Flint, Michigan; The Twelfth Man; Vladimir Putin; Malaysia Airlines Flight 17; Ebola; Janet Yellen; mindfulness; Robin Williams; Ferguson, Missouri; CVS; the Oregon Ducks; Cuba; Tim Lincecum; One World Trade Center; Clooney and Amal; ISIS; Minecraft; Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, and Shosh; conscious uncoupling; Tinder; Greg Popovich; “I’m all about that bass (no treble).”
The summer after Mallory’s parents are killed…
Okay, wait. She needs a minute just to process this phrase. Her parents killed. Senior and Kitty dead. All through the first half of 2014, Mallory struggles. She wakes up feeling just fine…until she remembers. Then it’s like falling into a black, bottomless hole, wind rushing in her ears, vertigo, nausea, a weightlessness, a loss, not only of Senior and Kitty but of herself. There’s an assault of emotions, all of them unpleasant, some of them ugly, and the most hideous is guilt. Was Mallory a good daughter? Or even a decent daughter? She fears not.
She resented all the rules. Step one, napkin on lap. No yelling to someone in another room; no stomping up the stairs. Bread and rolls were to be broken in half first, then into pieces that were buttered individually. Salt and pepper were always to be passed together. Nail polish could be applied only in the bathroom. Thank-you notes were to be written and mailed within three days. There was a list of forbidden TV shows, among them Prisoner: Cell Block H, Falcon Crest, Hill Street Blues. No Rocky Horror. Good morning. Please may I be excused. Hello, Blessing residence. And above all: Never refer to a person using a pronoun while the person was present. Kitty was a stickler for that one.
Mallory loathed their expectations of her: good grades, good posture, sparkling conversation, spotless driving record, irreproachable work ethic. She had rebelled mentally even as she complied, and she was certain Senior and Kitty could tell. There was nothing her parents had taught her or asked of her that had not served her well. She should have been grateful instead of surly. She should have taken her mother up on her offers of makeup lessons and ballroom dancing. She should have gone shopping with her at the Mazza Gallery; she shouldn’t have called the David Yurman earrings Kitty gave her for her fortieth birthday “matronly.” Mallory had rejected all of her mother’s efforts to refine her. She had joyfully spent her four years at Gettysburg wearing sweatpants, her hair in a scrunchie. She had gotten a tattoo her first winter on Nantucket, a vine that wrapped around her ankle. If anyone had asked her why, she would have said it was just for decoration, for fun, but the real answer was that she reveled in becoming the anti-Kitty.
Mallory avoided the emotional work of dealing with the loss of her parents by focusing on the practical work. What had to happen? Well, immediately, there was the service, burial, and reception to plan. Somehow, Mallory did this on autopilot; Cooper was less than no help. Then there was the house to put on the market, the furnishings to give away or auction off, and Senior’s business to sell. Again, Cooper took a pass, so Mallory worked with the family attorney, Jeffrey Todd, and her own attorney, Eileen Beers. During February break from school, Mallory and Link drove down to Baltimore to sort through each room of the Blessing house. Over April break, Link flew to Seattle to see Fray and Anna, who was pregnant with a baby girl, and Mallory and Cooper met in Baltimore to finalize the sale of the house and the business. Even split between them, the money was considerable. To Mallory, it was a fortune. But money, once her largest concern, now meant nothing.
What does Mallory say to herself to fend off the demons?
They were together.
There was no suffering.
They had lived full, happy lives.
She had given them a grandson, whom they both adored.
It wasn’t her fault.
The accident had nothing to do with Mallory. She had spoken to both of her parents on Christmas and thanked them for her gifts: a new Wüsthof chef’s knife, Malouf linens for her bed, a hardback copy of The Goldfinch. They had thanked her for the black-and-white picture of Link and the gift certificate to Woodberry Kitchen. She had told them she loved them. Link had told them he loved them.
Mallory hadn’t known about the Yo-Yo Ma tickets, and frankly, she was surprised Kitty had been successful in convincing Senior to go, though he did love Washington in general and the Kennedy Center in particular. Cooper hadn’t known about their plans either, but he hadn’t been offended. They were two healthy, happy adults, completely self-sufficient. The car they drove was an Audi A4, which Senior had bought the previous spring. There was no reason for the tire to blow other than raw bad luck.
Cooper is of the opinion that when your number comes up, it comes up. Nothing to be done about it.
Mallory tries to adopt this perspective as well, though she has a difficult time. She keeps thinking something went wrong, that there was a mistake; it wasn’t supposed to be this way. She wants to fix it. She wakes up in the middle of the night crying. She wants them back. Please—for just a day or an hour or even a minute so that she can tell them she loves them. So she can thank them.
The summer after Mallory’s parents are killed, an unlikely savior arrives, and that savior is baseball. Lincoln Dooley is chosen as the starting catcher for the Nantucket U14 travel team. Mallory spends the month of July in the bleachers and behind the backstop at the Delta fields on Nobadeer Farm Road as well as at a dozen fields across Cape Cod and the south shore. As time-consuming and expensive as it is to attend every single game, it’s just the preoccupation Mallory needs. The Nantucket U14s are the best team Nantucket has fielded in the history of their baseball program; they have a winning record, which is impressive given that the island has such a small pool of kids. One reason for their success is that ten of the twelve teammates have played together since T-ball. The other reason is the coach, Charlie Suwyn.
Charlie is in his sixties; his own children are grown, he owns a prosperous caretaking business on the island, and he recently lost his wife, Sue, who was the biggest champion of youth sports that Nantucket had ever seen. Charlie’s love of the game is infectious, but more than the game, he loves the kids, who are, frankly, at a challenging age. Charlie has schooled his players in strategic baserunning, which is how they often win; the Nantucket team steals home more than any other team it plays. Off the field, Charlie is warm and nurturing. His motto is three words long: Kids playing baseball. The players are developing skills, learning sportsmanship, creating a team atmosphere, and having fun. There are many things that are wrong with the world, but this thing is right.
As catcher, Link is the key to the team; he’s not as
glorified as the pitchers, but he’s involved in every pitch of the game. He has a deadly accurate arm, and at least once in every game, he’ll throw out someone trying to steal second. He has been inconsistent at the plate and Mallory is never so tense as when he’s up to bat. He strikes out a lot, that’s fine, but he strikes out looking, which is not fine. He bats seventh in the lineup.
Fray hasn’t traveled east to see Link play even once. Mallory knows this bums Link out, though he doesn’t talk about it. Mallory sends endless videos with captions that say, Look at our son! And Number 6 is en fuego! Fray occasionally calls after a game (at Mallory’s prompting—Call now, before the pizza comes!), and although Mallory hears only Link’s side of the conversation, she can tell it’s stilted.
The travel season culminates with a week of tournaments in Cooperstown, New York, at the end of July. Mallory splurges on a room at the Otesaga Hotel. The place is filled with history and old-fashioned charm; this is where all the Hall-of-Famers stay when they’re in town. In addition to watching a lot of baseball, Mallory squeezes in some pool time and breakfast every morning on the veranda overlooking Otsego Lake.
The living is good; the baseball not so much. Nantucket plays seven games and loses the first six. Link is brilliant behind the plate but abysmal at the plate; he strikes out sixteen times. In the final game, however, his luck changes. He hits the ball at his first at bat and it goes sailing over the fence: home run! Mallory is so excited—and so shocked—that she starts to cry. Throughout the season, Mallory has pictured her parents up in the sky, sitting in some heavenly version of lawn chairs (like earthly lawn chairs, but comfortable), cheering Link on.
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