Ladies of the House

by Lauren Edmondson

  Thirty-Six

  Monday, Miles’s office; L.K. and I were on one couch, Bo and our boss on the opposite, talking headlines, administrative chores, tasks for the week. A rural police department needed three new vehicles. Maryland needed a dam, flood prevention studies, protection for crabs and oysters. Miles took notes in a college-ruled composition book, which he brought everywhere. It was old-fashioned; people either found it charming or excessive. I knew it was utilitarian—recess was over. Class was in session. There was work to be done.

  I was sorry I wouldn’t be there to see it completed.

  When we made it through the list, Bo had some gossip: there were rumors, he said, that Melinda Darley had chartered a jet, naturally at taxpayer expense, to fly to Columbia to meet her son at a campaign event.

  Miles was about to respond to this when we were interrupted by a knock; we all turned and Sara peeked her head in. “Is this still morning meeting?” she asked. “Or have you all transitioned to shooting the shit?”

  “We’re done.” Miles leaned back, rested his brown penny loafers on the coffee table between the couches, seemingly glad to be off the topic of the Darleys.

  “There’s a photographer here to see Daisy,” Sara said.

  I’d forgotten about that. Sometime last night between the peanuts and the crackers, Atlas had scheduled a time for me to have my portrait taken. He’d thought my office would make a good backdrop—the law books, the papers, the dry-erase board with plans and agenda items. Now I realized this had been a bad decision, made when my attention was consumed by the interview. Of course I couldn’t be in my office for the picture. My employment here would only last about five more minutes.

  Miles looked at me, seeking an explanation. L.K., too, all curiosity. Bo, though, was nodding, as though to say, On with it. In my head, I’d imagined explaining the article to Miles alone, at the end of the day, when I’d had a chance to reply to required emails, clean my office, prepare. I’d gone through scripts, role-playing both sides. This wasn’t the way I’d planned it, but—spoiler alert!—sometimes plans don’t work out.

  “Thanks, Sara,” I said, and she withdrew, closing the door behind her. I shuffled my papers and my binders to form a neat stack on my lap. My phone I silenced, then lay it facedown on the top. “There will be an article coming out next week,” I said, halting at first, then gradually with more confidence. “It will be about my father, our family, and how he stole from his office to help support us as well as another woman who was not his wife. I am one of the sources, and not an anonymous one.”

  “What Melinda Darley said that day, about your tuition,” said L.K., tapping her pen, in a slow rhythm, against her knee, “was true, then?”

  “Yes,” I said, meeting her eyes, then Miles’s.

  But Miles and L.K. seemed about as shocked as the average DC insider when it came to public scandal. Which is to say, not very.

  Instead, Miles articulated what I suspected was on everyone’s mind. “So, you’re throwing yourself to the wolves.” His feet were on the ground again, his arms crossed. “Why?”

  “Because I’m done hiding from them,” I said.

  “Bo,” Miles said, rising, beginning to pace, “talk her out of this, my God.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said to Miles. “That’s not his job. And I won’t be persuaded.”

  “You may have to resign.” L.K. scooted closer to me on the couch, her hand pressed to her stomach. “If this goes south.”

  “I will have to resign,” I said. “Atlas will write in his article that I am a former staffer of yours. Not a current one. It will sound better.”

  Miles and L.K. began to voice their objections. They talked over me and around me. Their verbal battle, if I could understand it, was about who disagreed with my choice to resign more.

  “I’m sorry to ambush you!” I raised my voice, intent on making it heard. “This all happened quickly. But I don’t want you to think I take it lightly.” I had the sensation that people were quieting, drawing breaths. Or maybe it was just them drawing back the arrows in their bows. I resumed at normal volume. “This was, in so many ways, my home. You were—are—still my people. I can’t have the fallout from this, whatever it ends up being, land on this office. That’s why you’re going to let me go.”

  “How much time do we have?” Miles, pausing to ask for a prognosis.

  “My official employment with you will end today. But I’ll be in for the next two weeks or so, unofficially, to help Bo transition into his new role. Though everyone in this room knows he won’t need my help.” It wasn’t presumptuous, I bet, to state the obvious; it went unsaid that Bo would be Miles’s next chief of staff, and I assumed we could just do away with formalities. I was grateful for Bo, my friend, and whatever millions of tiny life decisions had bent our roads toward each other. We’d been a team for years, partners in work and buddies outside of it, and an era was coming to an end. But the world, and this office, would keep spinning. “It will be hard, but only for me. You all will be fine.”

  Bo looked up and met my gaze from across the coffee table. He’d been silent so far, and when he spoke his tone was unemotional, but in his eyes I saw more. “‘Nothing forces us to know what we don’t want to know,’” quoted Bo, “‘except pain.’”

  “Which of your favorite dead Irishmen said that one?” asked L.K. From somewhere on her person she had procured mousse, a comb, and started on my hair, prepping me for the photographer. She adjusted my part, smoothed my flyaways and the collar on my jacket.

  “Aeschylus, actually,” said Bo, ever our resident scholar, “coming in hot with the wisdom.”

  “So, what do you know now, Daisy, that you didn’t know before?” Miles asked, taking his seat again next to Bo.

  “You’ll be able to read the answer to that question,” I said, playful, “in next week’s Post.”

  “Well, fuck.” Miles rolled his shoulders; I sensed he was adjusting, resetting. “I hope this works for you, Daisy.”

  “I’m optimistic,” I said. And I was, mostly. My hair already felt fuller, thanks to L.K., so that didn’t hurt.

  “Well, optimism is contagious,” Miles said, smiling slowly. “So, let’s raise our coffee mugs. L.K., put the lint roller down and raise your cup of tea, Bo, your can of toxic energy slurry. There. Now, let’s cheers to Daisy. The swamp will miss you.”

  Hear, hear, they said. Cheers.

  * * *

  Shortly after the meeting ended, and we all dispersed to our separate offices, the photographer Atlas had sent—a petite girl with straw-yellow hair and a mammoth camera bag—appeared at my door. She asked where she should set up her gear. “Not here,” I said. “This isn’t where I work.” Not anymore.

  I led her out, to the elevators, across Constitution Avenue, to the Grounds. I knew the Hill’s best side, and wanted to make sure she got it. We marched through the gardens, past my father’s favorite bench under a canopy of wisteria, down the cascade of marble steps, heading west toward the monuments of improbable victories and higher loyalties. “Perfect,” she said when we arrived on the great expanse of lawn in front of the Capitol. With the cupola rising grand behind me, she turned me this way and that, straight on, profile, standing, sitting, into the light. Outside of it.

  Thirty-Seven

  The Good Daughter No More: The Older Child of Late Senator Gregory Richardson Grapples with His Legacy—and Her Own

  By Atlas Braidy-Lowes

  June 21 at 3:01 p.m.

  A few weeks after Daisy Richardson found out her father had written checks to the University of Virginia with money that wasn’t his, she tells the story of how, after the most recent and particularly brutal reelection season, her father decided that he wanted a quiet Christmas with his family in their Georgetown row house.

  This was a surprise. If you remember anything about Senator Gregory Richardson, besid
es the fact that he died in bed with his lover and saddled his widow with leaden bags of debt and detritus, it is probably his reputation for being an indefatigable good-timer, who never refused a cocktail or a free steak dinner. People said that he’d survive a nuclear fallout, him and the cockroaches, and they meant it as a compliment. He was unbeatable, which is not to say he was unassailable; it turns out Gregory Richardson made just as many enemies as friends in this town. But we can say that the heart attack, to kill him, had to have been powerful. Anything less than massive and Gregory Richardson would have fought back, tooth to gum, nail to quick.

  That Christmas, Daisy Richardson recalls, he had it in his head to make Peking duck. Neither she nor her mother was in the habit of questioning these sorts of whims. So Gregory took to the kitchen, dealing with baking soda, boiling water, and, at one point in the process, a bicycle pump. But the duck skin would not dehydrate. Daisy found her father, the last Christmas he was alive, softly weeping at his kitchen table. He looked small, and wounded, and—this was important—worried.

  “It wasn’t about the duck skin,” she says now. “I knew it wasn’t. But I backed away, left him in peace, because I was scared to know what it was that had him in tears.” She sits on her mother’s couch, casually dressed, a senator’s former chief of staff, as of this week. For the first time since her father’s death, she is ready to discuss the depth and breadth of his deception to the American people and his own family, and what she’s learned in the aftermath.

  “I worked for my father for many years.” Richardson speaks softly, with precise, thoughtful phrasing. “All my life I’d thought he was an honest public servant. I even accepted his erratic, harmful behavior as a parent because he was, as far as I knew, doing good in the world. That’s what he had trained me to believe. So when I found out that he’d stolen public funds, for me, it was such an incredible betrayal. Even if he thought it was for the right reasons, he had taken control of my life in this awful way that was harmful to other people. I had no say in the matter. I couldn’t go back in time and change it.”

  On the table before her, she’s placed three framed photographs, all with her mother, Catherine, and younger sister, Wallis. “The only way I could think of dealing with it was to be silent. Speaking out, seeing the words written on the page or aired across television screens, would have confirmed just how wrong I’d been about my father, and how so much of my life had been lived based on a lie.

  “And, honestly, I thought there had been power in silence. I felt that by even being able to make this choice not to speak, I’d regained some control of my own life, at a time when control was in short supply. I realize now that was me just taking the easy way out. Because I did have power. But instead of using it to be open, accountable, I used it to bury truths that were inconvenient to me—painful, yes, but also inconvenient. In staying silent, I had become like my father...

  “We are in the process of paying back all we can of the money Gregory owes this country, but I can’t give back the time I spent trying to conceal his mess so no one would find it. And that’s what I regret most. I hope by speaking out I can begin to reckon with my father’s actions and, in whatever small way, make it easier for those who find themselves in similar positions. Because nothing good in this world was made so by a woman keeping her mouth shut...”

  Thirty-Eight

  I got ahold of Atlas on the phone that afternoon. He’d had to fly to London last week, only a day after our interview. His father had needed him. I was on Cricket’s couch, a copy of the Post scattered around me. We’d read the article first online, Cricket, Wallis, and I, shortly after dawn. Immersed in Atlas’s words about me, I had the sensation of standing in a waterfall. There was pressure on my shoulders, but it was a welcome force. I felt the power of the world, but also freedom and wholeness. Cricket had remained mostly silent, neither compliments nor scolding, and then had gone off on an “errand.” That was five hours ago.

  “How are you holding up?” Atlas asked after I’d heaped praise on his prose.

  “I have so many voice mails that I need to listen to. Wallis is in the next room watching my name trend.” Through my sister’s open door, I saw her stretched out on her stomach on her bed, her eyes scanning her computer. She’d turned on music, orchestral, dramatic. “I’m girding myself to open my email.”

  “The noise is going to get louder,” Atlas said. “But—hey—did you see that picture of you that was printed? You look regal. One day someone will paint you in oil.”

  “Now you’re lying.” L.K. had worked magic on my hair, but I’d been far from regal. My outfit was nothing special, but my legs looked—I won’t say shapely—not unattractive, at least. And the photographer had managed to capture my eyes, clear, thoughtful, contemplating the future. I removed the phone from my ear; another call was trying to get through: unknown number. And look, sixteen new texts. I ignored them all, for now, and savored the few remaining minutes before Atlas had to run and help his father in the bath.

  After we hung up, Wallis emerged from her room in an oversize sweater and what appeared to be a pair of Cricket’s old jeans, so out of fashion they were in again. She tugged at her cuffs so they covered most of her hands and walked to the living room window, lifted the edge of the curtain. “The cop car is outside,” she observed.

  “Cricket called them before she left.” I sipped from my mug of tea. I’d fixed it, thinking it would relax me, but I had let it steep too long and had to dump in volumes of sugar to compensate. I’d be up on my feet and doing laps around the apartment in a minute. “I think she wanted us to be protected. Where is she, anyway? Have you heard from her?”

  “She went to Uncle Rob’s in McLean,” Wallis said. “It’s funny. All these months she told us that he cut off communication with her because of our father, but—” Wallis shrugged, turned to rest against the windowsill. “Actually, she had stopped talking to him. Was embarrassed. Anyway, I’m glad they’re talking again.”

  “Me, too.” I pulled my computer onto my lap and patted the seat beside me. “Will you come sit with me? Might as well get this over with.”

  As we snuggled into each other’s sides and went through my email and then my phone messages, I discovered that while I was on the receiving end of some vitriol (fat ugly skank), the vast majority were positive. Television producers had been trying to get in touch, each more enthused than the previous. Wallis and I weighed my options, did some research, watched clips, and returned the call of an especially persistent one, a young woman. Her show, too, was anchored by a woman. There were women on staff, and not just in hair and makeup.

  The thought of facing a stranger, live, on-air, was already giving me heart palpitations, and I was still in my apartment building. Even being photographed, having just one woman and her camera focused on me, had been entirely discomfiting. But growth never came out of comfort. One interview, enough to face my fear and, if I didn’t screw up massively, articulate my message. And that would be it. There were too many more important issues, and women, who needed airtime.

  Thirty-Nine

  My sister, as usual, entered my apartment without knocking. Her hair was down, waves loose, dress flouncy and pink. “You ready?” she asked, plunking the gold hoop earrings I’d asked to borrow on the coffee table beside me.

  I was sitting on the floor of my living room, still in my stage hair and makeup, painting my nails royal purple. We were celebrating, which is to say we were putting on nicer clothes and shoes that were not sneakers and going down the block for dinner, before my interview aired.

  “Just about,” I told her as I put the finishing touches on my left pinky.

  “Before we go, you need to come up and help Cricket choose which outfit to wear to dinner,” said Wallis.

  I twisted the cap back on the polish, glancing at the clock on my cable box. “Isn’t the reservation at seven? We’re supposed to be leaving in three minutes.”<
br />
  Wallis rolled her eyes. “You know Cricket.”

  I did. Not wanting to be late, I stood and hustled into my room to grab my flat sandals and clutch, trying not to mess up my nails in the process.

  “Excited for the show?” she asked once we were in the hall.

  The answer to this question wasn’t as complicated as I might’ve predicted. I’d done the taping earlier that day, and although I’d been in news studios before with Miles, it had always been behind the cameras, never underneath the impossibly bright lights myself. So yes, I had nerves regarding seeing myself on television. But they weren’t leaden. The anchor, Monica, imposing and confident, had begun the segment by saying she’d been fascinated by my story. I must’ve said a few passingly intelligent things, because when we had stopped rolling, and a production assistant unraveled the mic and its wire from my blazer, Monica had told me I’d done well. I had left the studio thinking about what Miles said recently, about how people can be infected by optimism.

  There were things to look forward to: I had a job interview scheduled for Monday—my birthday, it turned out—in Alexandria. A nonprofit advocacy group for open and honest government needed a new deputy director of operations, and I’d be meeting with the HR rep, the president, the chairman of the board. They seemed excited; so was I.

  And Atlas was coming back from London next Sunday, almost exactly nine and a half days away, but who was counting? He’d been in England for almost two weeks already, moving his father, resistant and incontinent, into a smaller place. Although there had been some moments of reconnection and grace, the experience was, as he explained it to me, mostly torturous. I was anxious to wrap my arms around him. There was only so much encouragement that could be doled out over FaceTime.