* * *
Betsy looks at Doug, placing her hand over his. “Did I tell you we got accepted into the Washington Club?”
Doug, in a haze: “No, you didn’t mention it.”
“Well, we did.” Betsy smiles wide before she remembers they’re on their way to a dead boy’s funeral. She picks up the newspaper displayed next to the empty flute glasses of champagne:
A RECKONING OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT FOR POWER PLAYERS IN WASHINGTON
Cate studies Betsy again, watching her read the article. Betsy squirms in her seat, cracks her window. “Hot flash, phew!” she says, fake-smiling, when she reaches the end of the article—Doug’s name absent among those of some of his oldest colleagues, whom Betsy knows quite well. Cate smiles in her direction for a moment as Betsy glances at her then quickly rolls up her window, a common unknowing of being inside a symptom of the patriarchy.
* * *
Doug turns back as motorcades blaze past them preparing to stop average pedestrians from getting in the way of government officials attending Billy’s funeral. Doug remembers his brother, Ken, and he hates himself. He adjusts his tie and clears his sore throat, a cold coming on, tries to flip his thoughts to his pending bill again. Someday I will be buried there, with the generals and the saints! Famous men.…
* * *
And just like that, Cate reaches into her pocket, scoops out her phone like one of her emotional rocks. She refuses to be painted as a victim under any man’s power. But she will do something to thrust herself into the spotlight if it makes her look like a hero.
She texts Anne from the Washington Post: … but I do have this… She uploads the recording of Doug’s racist monologue telling Mackenzie to break up with Marty. She hits Send.
By the end of the funeral, Cate’s life will have changed. Photographers and reporters will swarm her; she’ll be invited on every late-night political reporting news show and every panel. She’ll be famous. She’ll start her PR firm… she’ll move to New York. She’ll never look back.
Anne from the Washington Post: Holy. Shit.
Cate: You’re welcome.
* * *
Bunny sits in the breakfast nook wearing black. Numb and heavy, she stares out of the aged-glass window forming a distorted reality as though she were hallucinating—a stray black cat tiptoes along the porch, its tail like the arm of a ballerina, twirling around a white column. With salad tongs, Meredith places a boiled hot dog on a china plate in front of Bunny. “You have to eat,” she says. Away from the outside world, time stands still. Bunny has never felt more present inside of her own home before, inside of herself; she’s so uncomfortable she wants to peel her skin off. Looking at her mother sitting across from her, the way her throat moves when she clears it and raises her eyelids, her pupils pinned to a random point on the wall between the floor and the windowsill, Bunny thinks, Could I be brave like Billy suggested? Could I cut them off, could I run away? Could I survive?
“My high school boyfriend killed himself,” Meredith says.
The sentence lingers in the air between them for a long time. Bunny doesn’t try to fill the silence. It belongs to her mother. She looks down at her soggy hot dog and swallows.
Meredith’s eyes squint like she’s trying to will the memory back to her. “I knew he was going to do it because he called me twice with instructions on what to tell his father.” She picks up her fork and knife and begins to saw off a piece of her hot dog. “I remember my hair was wet.”
Bunny picks up her fork. Her hand begins to shake like Meredith’s.
Billy’s funeral is in an hour.
“He hung himself with his father’s favorite ties. He was a clever bastard.”
Bunny bites off a piece of her hot dog, breathing out of her nose, and chews.
Meredith breaks her gaze from the wall and looks directly at Bunny. “Did you know that the idea of a utopia is inherently contradictory? No two people’s ideals are the same, and can therefore never exist together. The human condition won’t allow it. If the laws of the universe are correct, born out of utopia is dystopia, and that is a much more frightening place to live than somewhere in the middle. But no one really thinks that deeply about the world, Elizabeth.” Meredith sighs and sticks her fork into her hot dog. “I am afraid history has done it again.”
Bunny wants to know before it’s too late: How do you change the script of a storied institution? Power can change in an instant, the POW! of a bullet, the ringing of a phone, the click of a bank deposit, the sentence of a crime—the touchdown of a tornado. It is not in the undoing, but afterward, in the sound of someone else’s silence, when you know that it has left you.
* * *
Friends and family exit the glass doors of the Cathedral beneath the carved mural of a swirling God. The same photographers and bobbleheads as after the Bankses’ funeral wait along Wisconsin Avenue, arranging themselves in the order of their hierarchy—a cruel schadenfreude for the general and Carol’s fall from grace, the two of them still sitting in the shadows of the great nave before tombs of famed generals. If shame could coil inside of grief, this kind will not find its way out.
Crows perch atop the angry gargoyles as pallbearers carry Billy’s casket into the black hearse. A tiny American flag whips against its windshield as it drives away.
Bunny watches, a crinkled slit forming between her eyebrows where her mother likes to stick her finger (“Botox soon!” “Smile!” “Lucky girl!”). She staggers behind the crowd and backs into the nave, slipping into the Children’s Chapel beside it. Cold as a ghost, Bunny tiptoes down the aisle between the little chairs where she learned to cross her ankles during nursery school prayers.
The altar before her is covered with candles below the mural of a baby Jesus—for the mother undergoing in vitro, the toddler with cancer, the stillborn, the secret abortion—but not one for the baby of the damned.
As Bunny reaches for a candle, she hears footsteps behind her. Spooked, she spins around.
It’s Marty.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she says.
“What are you doing?”
“Just… lighting a candle.”
Marty nods then turns around to leave.
“Marty?” Bunny calls out.
“Yeah.” He turns back, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“Why do people come here?” she asks.
“To pray,” he says.
“No, I mean to Washington. To this town?”
Marty puts his hands in his pockets, looks down at his shoes, rocks back on his heels. After a moment he looks back up at her. Poised, he flashes a wry smile. “Isn’t it obvious? To change the world, Bunny.”
Bunny crinkles her forehead, pushing what’s left of the irony inside of her out with a laugh. “Love you,” she says.
“Love you too, Bunny.”
* * *
Bunny turns to face the altar. Taking the unlit candle, she dips it onto a lit flame, lighting the wick like a sweet kiss. She places it back on the altar and kneels in prayer position. As her palms press against each other, sunlight ravages through the stained glass windows, forming warped shadows of angels on the wall behind her. And she remembers as a child all the times she sang “This Little Light of Mine”—when Billy pulled her hair and pinched her arm and she told on him for hurting her. The children’s chairs still have their silk cushions embroidered with faded fairy tales: “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Frog Prince,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” And she misses him, she misses the way he’d play his ukulele for the gargoyles on his balcony, the way he teased her for her strawberry-colored hair but called her the most beautiful—otherworldly. She misses all those nights pressed close together in the rickety elevator climbing the inner walls of their history—all the times the ropes never snapped. She wishes she could tell him that she loves him.
As the light hits her, Bunny winces. She cups her hands over her eyes, falls into fetal position, and cries herself to sleep.
> AUTHOR’S NOTE
The year is 2020. As I write this, America has lost more than a hundred thousand lives to the coronavirus, our White House has gone dark, St. John’s Church across the street is on fire, and protestors across the globe are marching and screaming and rioting in the wake of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders, among countless others. Meanwhile, our president is alternating between hiding in a bunker and calling on the military to shoot protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas.
I was born in our nation’s capital, Washington, DC, in 1985, nurtured and educated inside of one of the most privileged communities in the world—the epicenter of institutional power—among the families of politicians, military officials, CIA agents, media moguls, ambassadors, lawyers, socialites, and philanthropists. Despite the District of Columbia being a primarily Black city during my childhood, I rarely socialized with people who weren’t white, nor was I encouraged to do so. My parents readily ignored the city’s massive economic disparity, inherently formed and generationally cycled as a result of our nation’s history of white supremacy. And none of us were willing to examine our complicity in perpetuating it.
In 2004, while I was a college freshman in Los Angeles, my father, an associate of Jordan Belfort (“the Wolf of Wall Street”), was arrested for securities fraud, convicted, and sentenced to five years in a federal prison. He had stolen my social security number and left me nearly $100,000 in debt. Those dark years pushed me into a life of poverty, addiction, and loss, though my whiteness and the socioeconomic network I’d been handed in my absurdly privileged childhood protected me from any further institutional harm. I detail that experience in my memoir, After Perfect.
For many years I did not go back to the city of Washington, as it represented everything I thought I had lost and many things I was glad to leave behind. When I finally returned in 2015, it was for a reading of my memoir, and it was at this time that the idea for The Cave Dwellers began to emerge. During that visit, there was a story in the Washington Post about the murders of a wealthy Washington family whose mansion had been set ablaze. On the outside, the home and the family superficially reminded me of my own, and I was gripped by the media images of what are now known as the DC Mansion Murders. But any resemblance this story has to that tragedy ends there. This is a work of fiction. Any events and characters depicted were created from my imagination.
In the aftermath of my father’s incarceration, I became deeply involved in criminal justice reform (although certainly not for his sake) and began to wake up to the inherent inequalities and injustices on which our society is built. If for this awakening alone, I’m grateful for my father’s incarceration. I don’t know that anything less could have opened my eyes.
But it wasn’t until I returned to DC in 2017 to write this book that I fully internalized the extent to which white supremacy perpetuates itself, and how it unconsciously and consciously continues thriving in white communities through the abuse of political power, discriminatory clubs, galas, property, family inheritance, and greed, to name a few.
I went in search of information that would help me understand how and why the white, antiquated culture in Washington, in which I’d grown up, was being preserved through the next generation. What I found was Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, which explained to me what I was experiencing. At a birthday party for a childhood friend I overheard one of the guests say, “Let’s go downtown and hang out with the commoners.” When I confronted him, bystanders laughed, and I was met with “I was joking!” and “He’s a good friend,” or “He didn’t mean it like that.” How did he mean it, then? And why were they defending him? DiAngelo’s book describes this defense as a psychological phenomenon that happens to white people when confronted with white privilege: we become “fragile,” expressing defensive emotions out of guilt, anger, fear, and centuries of silence.
Visiting my father in a minimum-security prison in El Paso, Texas, after spending my childhood flying in private planes paid for by the exploitation of others forged a sense of urgency within me to sound the alarm. But it was White Fragility that helped me begin to understand how to do it as a white woman. There were many other publications I read that inspired themes throughout the story. You will notice footnotes in the book where I provide historical context; a list of these publications is in the acknowledgments. But I am still continuing to learn and unlearn my own inherent biases.
I completed this book at the end of 2019. Given the current state of the world, I am encouraged that white Americans are being confronted with our whiteness and our personal responsibility to break subconscious and conscious cycles of classism and racism—that we are finally being challenged about what our whiteness means in our daily lives. However, I am also skeptical. So I ask: What does it look like and what will it take for us to break those cycles—institutionally, personally, and within our own families? Is it possible? These are the questions The Cave Dwellers sets out to explore.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are so many people for whom I owe an enormous amount of thanks. First and foremost, this book would have been impossible without my genius editor, Alison Callahan. Thank you for your unwavering belief in me. I am the luckiest to have you. Nancy Palmer and team: Molly, Carter, and Hope, for welcoming me back to Washington with love and open arms, and for giving me a room of my own. You are my family. Aaron Karo and Joshua Thurston, my first readers, my champions, thank you for taking my calls at ungodly hours. Thank you to my dearest friend and forever soul sister, Annie Hudson-Price, for your endless love and support, for your tireless legal work on behalf of those most vulnerable, and for our honest discussions on race and class. Thank you to Hannah Sward and Claire Titelman, for our weekly gatherings and critical feedback, and most important, your friendship and support. Alice Fox for countless hours listening to chapters and Valerie Johns for telling me I wasn’t allowed to hand in anything until it was finished! To my agent extraordinaire, Peter McGuigan, and the entire team at Foundry Literary + Media, especially Kelly Karczewski for being one of the first to read. Thank you.
I’d like to thank the incredible team at Gallery Books/Scout Press for their hard work, Maggie Loughran for your fresh eyes, Brita Lundberg for your early support, Alexandre Su for bringing this to fruition, Joal Hetherington for your sharp eye, Lisa Litwack and Claire Sullivan for this clever and gorgeous cover, and Queen of the house, Jen Bergstrom. I’d also like to thank Aimèe Bell and Sally Marvin, as well as Bianca Salvant and Jessica Roth, for your early support.
I’d like to thank my friends on the frontlines of social justice in this country. Heather Warnken, thank you for your passion and dedication to restorative justice and all that I have learned from convening with you, you are forever my Swamp soul sister. Jim St. Germain, for your advocacy on behalf of the juvenile justice system and for picking up the phone when I called four years ago to tell you I wanted to write this story. Thank you for your encouragement and grace during our many discussions. Tony Lewis Jr. for your leadership in the District and your advocacy work on behalf of children with incarcerated parents. Sarah Comeau for your work at the School Justice Project and for sharing what you’ve witnessed. Carlton Miller for your work at Fwd.us and our discussions about families impacted by prison. I’d like to thank Amy Friedman and Dennis Danziger for your love and support and your tireless work on behalf of students impacted by prison and the founding of POPS The Club.
A lot of time and research went into forming the characters, historical inserts, and settings. I’d like to thank Richard Price, Lorraine Adams, Paul Hammond, James Frey, John Hudson, Luke Russert, Jeff Nussbaum, John Arundel, Tony Powell, Bob Weiner, Ben Lasky, Bob Costa, Bill Eggers, Will Rahn, Alexander George, Jill Schary Robinson, Valerie Woods, Alex Haight, Rob Bouknight, Ben Polk, Daniel J. Jones, and Caitlin Dietze for sharing your knowledge and expertise, and sometimes granting me access to certain figures and otherwise impossible locations. You know who you are.
I’d like to thank
the Gritz family, Randi and Scott, and the McDowell family, Brianne and Alex, for your love. And the Seidlitz family, Ashley, Liz, Uncle Pete, especially my godmother, Anne Seidlitz, for your wisdom and love and our many dinners together.
Thank you to my best girls, Claire Woolner, Leanne Tomar, Christine Nolan, Catherine Trifiletti, Katie Shannon, Drea Renee, Jackie Aitken, Anusha Salimi, and Zoe Persina for being one of my first readers.
I’d like to thank Robin Muller for your tutorial on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave all those years ago. Jacob Meszaros, Shirley Sacks, Albert Owens, and Roberta Villa for your early support and Elliott O’Donovan for photographing who I really am. I’d like to thank Luis and staff at Martin’s Tavern and Roberto and staff at Compass Coffee and Jose and staff at the Tabard Inn. Thank you Judy Hudson for lending me your gorgeous home, and thank you Allan Loeb for answering all questions about writing and “the biz,” and our decade-long friendship.
I’d like to thank my friends from MiQ: Melissa Kurstin, Chase Anderson, Emily Hohman, MacKenzie Kerrigan, Cedrick Yancey, Daniel Schwarz, and Will Harrington for your support.
I’d like to thank Melissa Randall for your faith in me, and my little bundle of joy, Ms. Zelda Fitzgerald, who always knows when I need a good walk. Lastly, I’d like to thank my parents, Gayle and Tom, for giving me a lifetime of stories to tell.…
The following authors have been some of my greatest teachers, and I’d like to thank them for their work: Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Ibram X. Kendi: How to Be an Antiracist, Kathleen Menzie Lesko, Valerie Babb, and Carrol R. Gibbs: Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present Day, Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son, Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me, Arthur Herman: The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, Elijah Anderson: “The White Space,” from Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Howard Zehr: The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Thank you.
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