“Politics is an obnoxious business,” said Judge Reed. She cut us chunks from a block of cheddar with a cheese knife, the mother-of-pearl handle steady in her grip. “When Robert was little, I thought maybe he’d be a preacher. He had that presence. A litigator, maybe. But he had no interest in school.” She closed her eyes and slipped into a memory. “He had potential in the military, but then he chose politics. Still can’t fathom it.”
“I’m beginning to forget, too,” I said, “why I chose this profession.” Constant concern for optics, appearance, could be extraordinarily exhausting and tedious. Even far away from DC, despite the pleasantness of the evening, I’d been unable to fully break myself of this habit of monitoring Wallis.
“I like your guy,” said Aunt Jane. “Miles, I mean. He seems like one of the good ones.”
“Always seemed a little cocky to me,” said Judge Reed. “Like he thinks the sun rises just to hear him crow.”
This cracked us up, and when we surfaced, I wiped tears from my eyes. We were quiet for a moment, until Aunt Jane had another question for me. “Speaking of cocky,” she said. “Is it true that your sister is in a relationship with Charleston’s own Blake Darley?”
Not sure how they felt about the Darleys and our former chumminess with one of them, I tried to chart a neutral course. “The relationship is somewhere between is and was.”
Judge Reed paused, sipped. Even the way she drank was elegant. “There’s rumors, you know, Daisy,” she said. “Rumors about Melinda Darley’s Senate seat. The successor she’s handpicked...”
At this I turned my body on my stool to face her directly, bracing. “No, you can’t mean... Blake?” I looked between the Judge and Aunt Jane, waited for them to break, for signs of mischief. Nothing. How? Blake had spent large amounts of time talking about how he never wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps.
“Money is passed through generations,” said the Judge. “So is power. Are you really so surprised Melinda Darley would want to turn the seat over to her son?”
She was right; it shouldn’t be so surprising, yet here I was, my mind blank with shock, my thoughts scattered off the page. “Oh,” was all I could say.
“Oh is right,” Judge Reed said. “Blake—well, let me tell you a story. So, for a while when they were in high school, Blake had a thing for my Jessica.”
“They dated?” I gathered myself. This was more than Bo had ever let on.
“They did. Went to senior prom together, too. Hers was a different high school than Robert’s. Jessica was dying to transfer, so when she was a sophomore, we let her. She knew people there, but we didn’t.”
“You were doing what was right for her at the time,” Aunt Jane said. “It was different then, wasn’t it, Collette? Between them and us. Between those type of people and us, I mean.”
“I’ll tell you this,” said Judge Reed. “When Jess and Blake started dating, Melinda Darley was pleased as punch that her son had a Black girlfriend. I’m telling you, that woman took a picture with me every chance she got. She threw the whole damn prom dinner in her house! James and I suspected it was so she could control the photography.” She lifted her hands to her face. Click, she mimed. Click, click. “Now, there they were at Melinda Darley’s house, for prom dinner, at one long table, Jess told me later. And her friend, Rebecca, beautiful girl, by the way, I’m still friendly with her mother, she apparently starts putting some butter on her dinner roll. Blake’s best friend—I mean, this guy, right out of the plantation house—Scottie Ellis, his partner in crime, makes a crack about her being Jewish and hogging all the butter.”
“These damn people...” Aunt Jane said.
Yes, I thought. These damn people. Earlier that evening, I’d caught Wallis standing alone in a corner, next to a drop-leaf table with tortoiseshell inlay, topped with a crystal vase of tulips and a saucer of mints. Engrossed in her phone with these damn people, this Blake Darley—potential senator—with whom she’d rather have been spending her night.
“Melinda Darley was right there,” continued Judge Reed. “Right there peering over the tables making sure everyone got the right salad, God only knows. And do you know what Blake did? What he said to this nasty, anti-Semitic Scottie boy?”
Now this I could see coming. “Nothing,” I said.
“He laughed!” She slapped her palm against the marble of the island. “He laughed and didn’t say a damn thing. But then again, neither did Jessica.” She took a sip of her Pimm’s. “So many years James and I preached the importance of speaking truth to power. One fancy dinner in some old-money Charleston house and those lessons were all but forgotten.” Another sip, this time sucked through her teeth. “Ah, but maybe I’m being too hard on Jess. God, she felt guilty afterward. Wrote this long letter to her friend apologizing.”
“And what happened later, to Jessica and Blake?” I asked.
Judge Reed lifted a shoulder. “Blake went to some college around here with the rest of his shaggy-haired friends, looking to get some ‘gentleman’s Cs,’ like they call it. Jessica went to Harvard.”
My Pimm’s was finished. Judge Reed topped me up, and I was grateful.
“I never told you this?” Judge Reed asked her sister. Aunt Jane shook her head. “Well, maybe I was embarrassed.”
“You did great with Jessica,” Aunt Jane said. “Bo, too.”
“Both of them, spoiled down to the tips of their toes.” Judge Reed looked toward the kitchen door, as though expecting one of her children to appear. I wondered if Cricket did the same when she talked about us. “God love ’em. You see, Daisy, even when Robert and I weren’t as close as we are now...” She flinched—the pinch of a painful memory, it seemed—but it was soon replaced by a peal of laughter. She pushed her glass away. “Enough with this drinking. Let’s turn on some music, right, Janie?” the Judge said, but she made no move to rise. “Daisy, what do you think?”
But my mind wasn’t on music. It was on Blake. Like the news about his upcoming bid for office, the Judge’s anecdote about him and his friend wasn’t shocking, really. I suspected I’d known the truth about him all along, though in the face of Wallis’s happiness, I hadn’t wanted to believe it. Wallis would be crushed. But something else was bothering me more. “It was Jessica who apologized to her friend,” I said. Judge Reed tilted her head, quizzical. “And I’d bet my inheritance—if I still had it—on the fact that not one of those other boys apologized. You might get an apology from Blake if someone calls him on it now that he’s running...”
“That’s just the way it is.” Aunt Jane was more alert now, her voice that of a woman who’d gotten her second wind. “Men misbehave and the women apologize for it.”
“Or women try to make excuses for them,” said the Judge. “I’ve spent enough years on the bench to have seen plenty of that.”
I took a sip—all right, a gulp—of my drink. I needed it. “Here’s what it is,” I said. “Here’s what gets me about this. Blake doesn’t even want it. The seat, I mean. I know him well enough to know that with perfect, crystal clear certainty. He might want it in the way I want that bowl of pretzel thins there. He only wants it because it’s in front of him.”
“It’s easier for men to take things, isn’t it?” Judge Reed asked, observing me as she might a novice lawyer pleading her case.
“Take things,” I said, thinking of my father. Then, thinking again of Blake: “And be handed things.”
Judge Reed was quiet. Then a grin, wide and disarming. “Girl,” she announced. “You should run for office.”
Twenty-Three
Wallis was up early, with the sun, which blazed into our room gradually, then all at once, for neither of us had remembered to shut the curtains the night before. I kept my eyes closed, drowsy, thirsty, headachy, everything I didn’t want to be. Wallis padded around, in and out of the bathroom, back in bed and out of it. Suitcases were opened. Zipper
s and snaps were fiddled with. After some time, when the possibility of more sleep was well and truly spent, I flopped onto my back, stared at the ceiling and said, “Wallis, sit and read or sit and stare at your phone, but just sit, be still, please. It’s too early for rummaging.”
“Should I shower?” Wallis asked. “I wonder if I should shower now or later, before the engagement party? Maybe twice. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, right? Can one overshower?”
“Shower,” I said, rolling over and grasping my phone from the bedside table so I could forage online for any intel that might verify the rumor Judge Reed had relayed. I couldn’t say anything to Wallis without confirmation. “Or don’t. Bo is going to take us to see a very old house with some old furniture. He wants to have lunch at one of these trendy places uptown where you can order brisket or a banh mi. It’s going to be casual. You don’t have to wash your hair.” Blake Darley, on the ticket. The thought of it made me ill.
Across the room, Wallis declared that she was not going to shower. Then she changed her mind. Her waffling, about a shower, of all things, annoyed me. I put down my phone and scooted up on the pillows. I could feel my hair plastered to my scalp. If anyone needed a shower, it was me. “Why the torment over a shower?” I asked, searching Blake’s name on my browser.
She didn’t answer; instead, she resumed the task of taking each item of clothing out of her suitcase and laying it over the arms and back of the rocking chair.
The bathroom free, for the time being, I gave up my search and dragged myself to the mirror over the sink to inspect my damage. It was just as bad as expected. I was stealing some of Wallis’s makeup remover pads when the chime of an incoming text sounded.
“Where did I put my phone?” I heard Wallis ask, slightly panicked.
“I think that was my phone,” I called.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “It was yours. A text from Atlas.”
She leaned against the bathroom door and held out my phone. “Or should I say, about a million texts from Atlas.”
Last night’s borrowed mascara only half-removed, I took my phone, put it on silent. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get back to him in a minute.”
“Just answer the texts, Daisy. Jesus. Quit playing these games with him.” She marched to the shower, yanked back the curtain, turned on the water.
“You’re showering?” A question with an obvious answer, but—I don’t know—a second ago it seemed like she was about to pick a fight with me and here she’d abandoned it so quickly. I’d been ready to try to understand, to draw out the real reason for her frustration with me.
“Yes. I’m expecting a text from Blake. We’re going to meet later.”
Speaking of games. I hesitated, hoping that she might expound, but she just undressed and stepped in the spray. “I see,” I said.
The bathroom filled with steam, I gave up on my makeup removal and turned to my phone, Atlas’s texts. She’d been right; there were already many of them, and more kept coming. I skimmed, anticipating Ari’s name splashed everywhere. Instead:
I know you told me to kill the article...and I have...
...But I wanted to keep following the money, just to give you peace of mind, nothing else...
I think you should know...
Then these words, which had me clutching the edge of the sink:
...Stealing seems to have started with your college tuition...then escalated... Wallis’s, too.
I put my screen to sleep and flipped my phone over. But it wasn’t enough. I picked it up again and, from the bathroom doorway, tossed it onto the bed, watched as it bounced off the comforter and landed on the floor. Then I closed the bathroom door. I couldn’t even look at it.
“You still there?” Wallis’s voice, over the running water, sounded like she was keeping back tears.
I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me. “Yes,” I said. But, no. No, I was not there. I was falling, down through the past, flailing for a hold, trying to find something to clasp, something my father hadn’t broken. I’d thought we’d be safe in Charleston, but reality had tracked me down.
“Sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’m tired and stressed.”
With the side of my hand, I wiped off the steam from the bathroom mirror. “It’s okay,” I told her. I’d been born with Cricket’s nose—a dainty one, turned up at the end. Somewhere along the way, though, it had inflated both at the bridge and the tip, a coup of my father’s genes. My father, the hijacker, clear as the nose on my face.
“They’ve got good shampoo here,” Wallis said. “It’s making me feel better. It smells really nice.”
“It does.” I took up again the makeup remover and scrubbed. Soon the mascara was gone, but I kept going. “Everything here is so, so nice.”
Twenty-Four
For our first activity of the day, Bo brought us down to Charleston’s seawall and to the former home of a man named, naturally, Beauregard. On the walk there, I let Bo and Wallis stroll ahead so I could take many deep breaths and get straight what had to be the most convincing happy face of my life. This was difficult as I kept being sucked back to the same disquieting question: How could my father have done this? After Atlas’s texts, I’d considered canceling the touristy plans we’d made for the day, but to what end? So I could panic alone in Judge Reed’s third-floor guest bedroom surrounded by jars of potpourri and monogrammed pillow shams?
By the time we’d arrived at our destination—as Bo put it, it was a well-preserved museum of atrocities—I’d found no answers, but I did land on what I hoped was a working approximation of Daisy In A Good Mood.
We had about thirty-five hours left in Charleston. Telling Wallis about our tuition and her ex—current?—boyfriend maybe running for Senate would take a wrecking ball to her weekend and fell whatever hopes Bo had for an enjoyable time at his sister’s party with family he didn’t see often. I wouldn’t do that to him. I agreed to keep everything to myself until we got back to DC. A day and a half was nothing. I’d held the secret of my kiss with Atlas for much longer than that.
When we returned to the Reed manor for a rest after our day out, I was relieved. With Wallis leaking her sour mood all over our lunch of pork nachos and beer, and checking her phone every six seconds, it had taken infinitely more effort for me to pretend all was well.
This trip was supposed to have been a way for me to escape DC and all its machinations. I hadn’t been that fortunate. But the day was almost over, and while I would never admit this to Wallis, it thankfully appeared she wouldn’t see Blake this weekend after all.
Wallis, though, was now showing signs of hope once again. She showered for the second time that day, curled her hair, and put on a black dress, long sleeved and short skirted, low neckline displaying the ridges of her clavicle. If only my unrequited love burned calories, I thought, I wouldn’t have to wear compression underwear.
The engagement party was less than a half mile south of the Reeds’, below Broad Street. In the walled garden of the grand antebellum house, flagstone paths looped around formal boxwoods shaped like globes and cones. There was a small tent at one end where waiters in white and black served pisco sours and bourbon. There was champagne, too, the fancy type, and Bo was kind enough to fetch us glasses. In the meantime, we introduced ourselves to the hosts, who were standing by the reflecting pool. They were gracious, but only to a point; going inside the main house was not allowed, they told us with a smile. The bathroom for guests, they said, was inside the carriage house. They’re come-heya folks, Bo said, rolling his eyes.
As a jazz trio took up on the porch, Bo led us around, introducing us to family and friends we hadn’t met the night before. I did my best to follow the small talk, to ask all the right questions, to maintain the look of polite interest, but my mind kept slipping back to what Atlas had texted me that morning. It didn’t help that the unfolding celebration remi
nded me so much of the showers, anniversary fetes, fundraisers my parents once threw at P. Cricket used to joke that my father would pop champagne when someone finished a crossword puzzle.
Look, there’s the tray of shrimp canapés. There’s the French macaron tower. Here’s the cocktail napkin with the host’s monogram. Observe: the same string café lights that Cricket used to have. And the guests, in attendance—people of influence, puffed, confident, assured that whatever they were talking about was of the utmost importance. I’d never been here before, of course, yet I felt eerily trapped within distorted memories of my father, my life, both of which, it turned out, were just as strange to me as this house.
When it was time for dinner, I trailed Bo passively through the buffet line. I tonged mixed greens onto my plate, not really seeing what I was collecting. I overdid it on the chicken and, for some reason, decided to pour Thousand Island dressing, which I hated, over everything. I was too focused on this question: Why was it my tuition that launched this whole disaster? I couldn’t help but feel deeply, newly culpable.
Bo and I ate our plates of chicken and greens on the steps of the main house, and watched as Wallis, paying no attention to the party around her, lingered near the bar, restless, phone in hand, eyes on her nude pumps.
“Wallis is preoccupied,” Bo observed, wiping his fingers on his napkin. Then: “So are you.”
Bo was one of the most perceptive people I knew, and I wasn’t that good of an actor. “I know.” I set my plate down beside me and ran my hand over my face. “Sorry.”
Bo’s smile was wan. “I think I understand why.” I recoiled, immediately wondering, irrational as it was, if he knew. But: “It’s Darley, isn’t it? You’re both—what? Hoping he’s here? That you’ll see him?”
Ladies of the House Page 18