White Houses

by Amy Bloom

  * * *

  —

  I sat in Marion’s living room, so we could drive over to the White House, like we were both visitors. She called me into the bedroom. She wore a blue skirt and a pretty peppermint-striped blouse and a pair of red fuck-me pumps. Yowza, I said. She took them off. She came back in sensible navy walking shoes and I said that even if I was a lesbian lady of a certain age, she was not. She said she thought the walking shoes were appropriate and I said that wearing shoes like Winston Churchill’s hand-me-downs was not appropriate for our lunch at the White House.

  “You still love her,” Marion said.

  “Of course I love her,” I said. “To know her is to love her. She’s an extraordinary person.”

  Marion said, “I’m a Democrat, I know. I don’t mean you admire her. I admire her. I mean you’re still in love with her.”

  I said it wasn’t true. And it wasn’t. I wasn’t in love with Eleanor. We had agreed that “in love” had burned out after four years for us, the way it does for most of us, in two months or two years and, I guess, never for some lucky people. Instead of a trail of fire roaring through, those people get small candles steadily lighting the way home until death do they part, and only the young are stupid enough to think that those two old people, him gimping, her squinting, are not in love. I got by. I lived amputated, which sounds worse than it felt. I learned to do all kinds of large and small tasks, with part of me missing, and I feel pretty sure that the people who watched me in the world thought that I was entirely able-bodied. (Often broke, occasionally bitter, but not disabled.)

  “I want you all to myself,” Marion said.

  “You have me,” I said. Which is why, although I talk plenty of trash about Franklin, I have never faulted him for telling women what they want to hear.

  Every couple has the same five arguments in their lifetime, which is really just the one, over and over, until people die or divorce. What it is depends on who you are and what your parents did to you. Franklin said, Love me, without criticism or condition, and Eleanor said, Be worthy of my love. Or maybe Eleanor said, Make life matter, and Franklin said, Make life easy.

  With Ellie, my first girlfriend, rich, pretty, and a bottomless well, our only argument was her saying to me, You don’t love me, and me arguing that I did. I said I loved her deeply and truly. I said that anyone with eyes could see how much I loved her but that it was my nature to be a little reticent, to grumble, to keep my softer emotions in check.

  We broke up and stayed friends of a certain kind (the kind where the person you’ve hurt gets happily married and comes to see you as a dodged bullet). We never argued again. And I’d found myself having that same argument twenty years later with Marion, who was twice as smart as Ellie and probably loved me twice as much, from which I conclude that the problem is not the women in my life.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I said. “Please put on the red shoes, and take off your skirt.”

  I made love to her as if we had twenty minutes to live and we were a little late to lunch and both of us were flushed and all of that was okay with me.

  * * *

  —

  We passed the guards, the Secret Service, two aides, a couple of maids, and Tommie Thompson, and every one of them lit up, as if Marion Harron was a favorite niece come to visit. At last, they could just like me, or not. I wasn’t the worm in the apple, anymore. I was just a plain old visiting apple, and nobody minds that.

  “Iced tea, hot tea, or sherry,” Eleanor said.

  Marion declared that she loved tea. I asked for sherry. I thought lunch couldn’t last more than an hour and voilà, we’d already used up four minutes on beverage choice.

  Marion thought lunch was an invitation to confide in Eleanor. She talked about how well I’d done with my diabetes, about my admirable willpower, about the peonies she planted at my house on Long Island. She talked a little bit about her admiration for both Roosevelts, about her own dear mother and how hard it had been to move out of her family home, and finally, get settled in a place of her own (“soon to be our own,” she said). She talked about her thesis in law school on Justice Louis Brandeis and how much she’d learned from me about writing a clear sentence.

  “You know how Lorena is,” Marion said. “So direct. Such a strong, smart writer, and no depth or important detail is ever sacrificed. She goes after my baggy sentences, all my convolutions, and she just blows them apart, like a strong sea breeze.”

  Eleanor nodded and smiled. “Oh yes,” she said.

  We ate the terrible food.

  I talked about my new job with the Democratic National Committee, and I told a funny story about me and Gladys Tillett giving a speech and knocking them dead in a hick town, until the audience realized we weren’t from the DAR. Marion said that I was a fierce advocate and Eleanor smiled. Eleanor mentioned she’d been in Puerto Rico and she said that she’d thought about our time there ten years ago.

  “It ended up being a huge press junket,” Eleanor said. “The kind I get in trouble for now.”

  I said that it hadn’t started out that way, that it had just been me and Eleanor going to do some investigation for Federal Relief. We’d seen ourselves as partners, and pioneers.

  Eleanor said, “Well, it ended up being a big group, didn’t it?”

  I said that it had been a fucking circus and we both shut up.

  Eleanor called for dessert and talked about where her sons were stationed and her constant worry about them. Marion made sympathetic noises. Eleanor held forth about wartime economies and sugar rationing and the kind of recipes she recommended, which was hilarious, all things considered.

  I asked if the prune whip in front of us was one of the new recipes.

  It was, she said.

  I said I thought it might be and we looked each other in the eye.

  Eleanor said that it was a shame, but we had to end our luncheon. She said that she hoped we’d have a chance to do this again soon.

  “With Lorena still living here, you’ll get tired of seeing me,” Marion said.

  Eleanor said that it was wonderful to be able to host me for a little while longer. I said I appreciated it. Eleanor said she was glad I had no complaints and Marion said that honestly she’d never heard me complain and Eleanor raised an eyebrow. Everyone kissed everyone goodbye.

  When I moved out of the White House, I moved into Marion’s new apartment and Eleanor sent a big silver vase. I left it on the mantel when I moved out.

  * * *

  —

  “You broke her heart,” Eleanor says to me.

  I don’t say a word.

  * * *

  —

  Eleanor didn’t keep secrets from me. If transparency is a sign of true love, then I was loved, like nobody’s business. She told me all of her ups and downs, the deepest depressions, even her complete and sweet delight when one more person, great or small, adored her. And she liked to hear about everything in my life that needed fixing or saving, wise counsel or sympathy, and I told her plenty: unpaid bills, unappreciative bosses, the occasional diabetic coma, and some other colossal errors in judgment. I loved being the brave and battered little dinghy. She loved being the lighthouse. It worked for both of us, perfectly for four years, and imperfectly since then, and what I’ve kept to myself is only what she doesn’t really want to know.

  My friendship with Parker Fiske was one of those things. We saw each other at the Rowers Inn, where I ran a tab, and at a racetrack dive in Baltimore, where he did.

  I even met with him at his house in Maryland. His chauffeur drove me through antique wrought-iron gates about eighteen feet high and down a mile-long gravel drive. We drove past horses and even a few painterly cows, grazing among the trees and the honeysuckle. Jonquils and buttercups were thick on the ground, tossed all over the green lawn, like handfuls of gold. I’d been to the Big House in Hyde Park plenty, and six governors’ houses, and a few movie stars’, and I had lived in the White House. Hyde Park was just an old co
untry home, stuffed with heirlooms and crap by a woman whose terrible taste was formed in the 1880s. The White House, my home away from home and the seat of power in the Western world notwithstanding, was just a rambling, run-down boardinghouse for the extended Roosevelt family. White Horse Hill Manor was beauty itself, shaped like a house.

  There wasn’t a butler. Parker Fiske took my hat and coat in the big front hall. Now, may I call you Hick? he said. You call me Parker.

  He looked thinner and older. He had dark blue circles under his eyes. There were faded murals of Greek gods (I think; I saw a swan with a coy look) on one of the walls and worn Oriental rugs over squares of black-and-white marble. Eleanor had taught me about vulgar, and I was pretty sure this wasn’t vulgar. I’d never been in a place that so impressed me and I tried to shake it off.

  He led me into the kitchen.

  “I’ll make us some lunch,” he said. “I love scrambling eggs. Eleanor and I are as one in our domestic inclinations. Good on a little light nourishment, useless otherwise. I’m the one who should be famous for wheeling in a bar cart with all the fixings and whipping up eggs, every time Cousin Franklin wins an election. I love cracking the eggs”—he did it one-handed in a big white bowl and looked to see that I’d noticed—“making that splash. The whisking. Eleanor can’t actually cook, you know. Of course you know. Did you leave her a little note that we were lunching today?”

  I had not.

  He poured the eggs in.

  “I go low and slow, the way eggs should be cooked. Also, entre nous, a little hot sauce.”

  He wiped one hand on the gray canvas apron covering his trousers and elegant white shirt, and tied in front, like a real chef. He added chives and diced red pepper and shreds of yellow cheese, from small, pretty ceramic bowls. He pinched salt into his palm and tossed it in. His pepper grinder was the size of a lamp and he tossed it from hand to hand and made a few turns with it. He put four slices of toast (Brioche, he said. Melts in your mouth, and isn’t that what we want?) in an old-fashioned toaster, which brought the slices so close to the red-hot coils, they smoked. He spooned eggs onto my plate. I was eating scrambled eggs and buttering toast with a man I liked, who seemed to mean me harm.

  “Let’s not talk business over lunch. In re Eleanor’s cooking, it’s too bad you missed their wedding. One of the highlights of my life. The food was terrible. She looked beautiful.”

  I smiled. It was my favorite thing to hear.

  “Oh, you do love her. That wedding was quite a do. The food, well, I said. Have you ever been to a Jewish wedding? I love Jews. The Roosevelt wedding was the opposite. Enough booze to float the Navy, as it were, and barely enough stale sandwiches for the first hundred guests. Potted shrimp. Cucumber disks with a wisp of crème fraîche, a hint, really, and exactly one tiny, tiny caviar egg. People think he was so dashing back then, not that you’d make that mistake. He was a stuffed shirt and a bit awkward and when he was at Harvard I don’t think there were five men outside the family who liked him. Everyone loved Eleanor. Not Cousin Alice but Alice was a bitch, even then. Talk about See You Next Tuesday. Oh, I see we are in complete agreement, Miss Hick. Alice was jealous. Teddy never loved her. You know he would have thrown Alice in a ditch to have had Eleanor as his own, natural child. Plenty of young men, believe me, admired that beautiful pile of hair and her big beautiful blue eyes. And her brains. And her posture. Eleanor Roosevelt knows how to cross a room. One could marry Eleanor with full confidence that she’d never make a scene or throw a bowl, or do something ridiculous in public. Well, not quite, as it turns out.”

  He buttered more toast. He poured himself a coffee cup of Scotch and waved the bottle at me. I shook my head but I liked his style. I missed my tough and reckless friends, rounding the corners too hard.

  “Aren’t you wise?”

  I ate like I was alone, eyes down and steady. I peppered my eggs. I sipped the excellent Bloody Mary he put in front of me. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Whitman said, ‘I am as bad as the worst but, thank God, I am as good as the best.’ You ought to spend more time with people who know how bad they are.”

  “Well, I know,” I said.

  “Good. You know. I know. Forgive me for beating this particular horse, but people are going to find out about the two of you,” he said.

  “They will if you have your way,” I said. “This is the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever had.”

  He grinned like a boy. “Celery salt. Bring your drink and let’s sit in the drawing room. It is beautiful in there today. The light. Like a Bonnard.”

  He put out his hand for mine and led me into the beautiful pine-paneled library.

  “You’re literary,” he said. “I thought you’d like this.”

  “I’m not literary,” I said.

  The pillows on the divan were rough blue silk, with thick, softly twisted blue and gold fringe. I wanted to lie down among them.

  “No? Aren’t you the writer? Half of Washington thinks you ghostwrite everything she does. The My Day columns, and let me just say, my God, who can churn that out six days a week? The books. This Is My Story, This Troubled World, This Merry Christmas. Whathaveyou. More coming, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. I was sure. Eleanor loved to write in a way that is not natural for writers. She ripped off sentences like unspooling a thread. She wrote letters to all of her loved ones, not only because she loved us, but because she loved the pen racing across the paper. She loved the appearance of her thoughts in blue ink on white paper. She could have had a bake-off with Anthony Trollope and come in first, most of the time.

  “She must keep you busy, writing in the shadows.”

  “I’m not. I write for money, I always have. I’m not her ghostwriter. She loves to write. I’m a journalist, an ink-stained wretch. I stand with Samuel Johnson.”

  He waved his glass at me.

  “ ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ I had no idea you were so…erudite.”

  “Or even educated.”

  “As you say. It can’t be easy, making your living as any kind of writer, knowing that everyone who hires you is, in some way, waiting for the big White House scoop. Or wanting to please Eleanor. I mean, you’re talented, I remember those Lindbergh articles. It’s not really fair.”

  It wasn’t fair to me, it had not been fair for the last ten years, and even when Eleanor did leave the White House, I didn’t see my career taking a terrific upturn. Parker Fiske was the only person in the world who’d ever said so. Everyone else said I was lucky.

  “Why am I here?” I said.

  “Why did you come?”

  I said that I’d come because he sent a car and a driver. I said my curiosity would probably be the death of me and that I hoped he hadn’t poisoned the eggs.

  “I have no wish to poison you,” he said. “I wish to help you, and the woman you love. And I wish for you to help me. You see, utterly transparent.”

  “I don’t think I can help you, Mr. Fiske.”

  “Parker, please. Well, let’s talk about you first. I know you don’t want people gossiping about you and Eleanor.”

  “I don’t care if people talk,” I said. “Eleanor and I are very good, very dear friends.”

  I was anxious and my voice rose. I sounded a little like Eleanor.

  “Yes, I heard you’d moved on. That pretty judge. Harmon? Harron? Of course you care. Eleanor doesn’t care because she doesn’t have to. She’s been in gold armor her whole life. She cares about the suffering of the poor, which is completely to her credit, but you actually know what the suffering of the poor is like. She doesn’t. And what has her suffering been, in fact? A foolish and unkind mama and Franklin’s harem but, on the other hand, First Lady. It may bother her, more than she lets on, that there are people who don’t like her pushy, Negro-loving, Bolshevik ways. I do, by the way.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  I lifted my glass in a way that said, Let’s have another, and h
e poured more Bloody Mary from a tall, almost frosted silver pitcher. He pulled a celery stalk from a crystal snifter, gave it a shake to open the leaves, and put that in my glass too.

  * * *

  —

  “There is going to be a big, juicy, headline-shredding scandal in the White House coming up and unless we do something about it, it will probably destroy the President’s reputation and his legacy,” he said.

  “We? It won’t be about me and Eleanor,” I said. “It’s over. We’re as dull as rocking chairs. Just like you said, it’s me and the judge these days.”

  “Dull’s in the eye of the beholder. And the point’s not to catch you between the sheets. Not anymore. The point is, you were the First Lady’s lesbian lover. The point is, she had a lover. The point is, you’re a lesbian.”

  I said I was following him so far. I said we’d already been through this the last time, in the diner, and I thought he’d let it go.

  “I’m sorry about that. I was already running scared and I thought you’d be useful, if you were scared too. I thought we might share information. I didn’t even have a proper plan. I suppose I thought that I would wave scandal at you and you’d leak me useful tidbits and I’d pass them on to J. Edgar Hoover and he’d keep my files to himself. But, you weren’t scared enough,” he said. “You were too goddamn happy. Afterward, I thought about you. I liked the cut of your jib. How’s that?”

  “Hilarious,” I said. “I’m still happy. It must be my nature.”

  “Like mine.”

  We both laughed.

  “I don’t even have tidbits for you, these days,” I said. “The Roosevelt sons are not paragons of virtue. Anna loves her father. Princess Martha of Norway is just as good-looking in person, lusting for Franklin, and a goddamn idiot. Does that help?”