Embassy Wife

by Katie Crouch

  “Embassy … Wife?” her sister had gasped out between squawks. “You don’t think that’s a little sick? I mean, you were a Jefferson Scholar, Perse! You could have done anything.”

  The point, really, was that during a time when her president—whom she, as a State Department representative, could not directly disparage—was doing his best to paint Americans as a country of rude, orange Oompa Loompas who shoved others out of the way for photo ops and paid off porn stars, Persephone was working as hard as she could to be a vision of grace, empathy, and kindness. She was listening to people. Paying attention to what they needed. And she was talking to them, whether they wanted to or not.

  Today’s Embassy Wife task: a quick coffee with her new (best?) friend Amanda in order to hear about the orphanage fail. No surprise there. The minute Amanda had told her about her appointment, Persephone knew quite well that Our Hope Children’s Hostel most certainly did not want Amanda to “help manage,” or make them “more efficient,” or help them save money, or anything of the sort. Neither did the Katutura Women’s Collective, the Namibian Christian Orphanage, or any of the essential organizations that aided the less fortunate citizens of this country. The administrations of these organizations had been contacted by every well-meaning American coming to Namibia for an extended period of time—every Trailing Spouse, every junior-year-abroad student, every tourist looking to “make a difference.” Arriving with fantasies of wearing flattering safari clothing (already an impossibility), they would go around looking to help “manage” or “teach” or “counsel wayward children.” Whatever. It was a nonstarter. Shoshana had tried to save sick baboons, only to be marooned in a pen at N/a’an ku sê, forgotten by the paying college-age volunteer, and then mauled by a baby cheetah; Margo had hung out at the women’s clinic offering free ultrasounds until she was asked to leave when she wondered aloud why all the donated baby formula was being loaded into the back of the head nurse’s bakkie.

  Ah! Here Amanda was now, already sitting at a courtyard table. Persephone hurried into the courtyard of Stellenbosch, a veritable fantasyland in the middle of the desert. Built by a homesick South African marooned in Windhoek due to marriage, the restaurant replicated one of the lovely villas built a thousand miles south in the actual town of Stellenbosch, a green jewel of Cape Town’s wine country. Here in Stellenbosch Namibia, green vines grew, birds chirped, and a fountain trickled with a seemingly endless supply of water, impervious to the barren scrub and dust blowing by outside.

  “Amanda! My, you look lovely.” And she did: black linen skirt, a crisp white shirt. Was that Prada? Lord.

  “Oh, this is the dressiest I’ve got. I have to go to the school to meet with the headmaster, and I want to look, you know, as intimidating as I can. They say Meg hit another student.” She shook her head. “But I know her. I just can’t believe she would do something like that.”

  “I’m sure it was nothing,” Persephone said. Though, having witnessed a decade of the antics of diplomatic children, she was pretty sure little Meg was capable of far more mischief than her mother imagined she was. “Why don’t you eat something?”

  “I already ordered a milk tart.”

  Pie before noon! Now Persephone really liked her.

  “Well, Headmaster Pierre is a lovely man, anyway. Very Canadian and understanding. Likes scotch. African enough to accept a bribe, in case it’s necessary.”

  “Well, it’s not just him. I’m also meeting the mother of the girl she hit. It was your friend—Mila Shilongo.”

  “No!” Persephone flagged the waiter down for coffee. “Amazing. She probably deserved it.”

  “Persephone.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll stay out of it. It’s just … well. You already know Mila and I have some friction.”

  “I do.”

  “It’ll be fine, my dear. Don’t worry. So what happened at the orphanage, darling?”

  Amanda told her. The fee, the blow-off. No surprise there.

  “Don’t worry about it. There will be lots of opportunities to help. I told you about the International Women’s Association of Namibia, didn’t I? We do a fashion show that raises money for schools, and then there’s this Nearly New sale. Also once a year we go to the Katutura Nursing Home and take a bunch of elderly ladies to lunch out at a game ranch. We need to be clearer, actually. Last year they had no idea what was going on, and some thought they were being kidnapped. One lady was so frightened she had to go to the hospital once we got back. But it’s all very well intentioned.”

  The milk tart came, a lush, creamy disk of deliciousness. Still, Amanda looked glum. “Those are all good ideas,” she said. “Pretty much. I just want to do something, you know?” She attacked the tart. “I feel like I have something to offer. But maybe I don’t.”

  “You do,” Persephone reassured her.

  “And now I have to go to this damned school appointment.”

  “Shall I come with you?” Persephone asked. “To the school?”

  “Thanks,” Amanda said, standing. “But I’ve got this.”

  “All right.” Just then, through the white stone archway, something caught Persephone’s eye. Amanda’s handsome but rumpled husband, clutching his laptop and an armful of files. “Amanda, is that Mark?”

  “Oh,” Amanda said. “So it is.” Only it seemed to Persephone that Amanda was hiding from her husband, as she had gotten up from the table and was ducking behind an Italianate pillar.

  “Shouldn’t you say hello?”

  “You know, I actually have to leave now to get to the meeting,” Amanda said nervously. When Persephone gave her a quizzical frown, Amanda relented. “Well, we’re friends, right Persephone? So I’ll just tell you … I really don’t want him to come to the school with me.”

  “You don’t?” Persephone tried not to look too curious.

  “It’s a long story. Let’s just say he’s a bit controlling where Meg is concerned? And that might not be that helpful at the meeting … and also, he doesn’t even know about the meeting. So I’m just going to slip out before he sees me.”

  “Well. That was a quick coffee date,” Persephone said, feeling a tad put out. “But ten-four, doll. Good luck.”

  “Thank you.”

  Persephone watched Amanda ridiculously over-tip the car guard—rookie!—and waited until she drove away before she herself innocently approached Mark Evans, who had made himself comfy at a café table on the other side of the fountain.

  “Why, hello!” Persephone said. Mark Evans jumped, covering his papers. Despite his quickness, Persephone caught what they were: old obituaries from The Namibian. Intriguing.

  “It’s Persephone, from the State Department?” she said. Mark blanched and nodded rigorously. “How are you settling in, Mark?”

  “Good, good.”

  “Mind if I sit?”

  “Sure.” He shoved his papers away and gave her an easy, professory grin.

  Too late, she thought. I’ve seen them.

  “You know, I’m the official community liaison. So if you have any questions…”

  “Oh. Great, great.”

  “I’m just adoring your wife, getting to know her and all,” Persephone said. “Is that all for the book you’re working on? I’m very interested in the Nama genocide issue, actually.”

  “That?” He scratched the back of his head furiously. “Ah, well, it’s part of it. Hard to talk about until I’m finished.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.”

  “You know, I just remembered, I have an appointment at the archive.” He jumped up, shaking the delicate café table. “Would you excuse me, Persephone?”

  “Of course!” She beamed up at him. “Press on. I’m for financial retributions, by the way. For the Herero, specifically. They’d have to give about a fifth to the Nama, too. What was the Nama-to-Herero ratio again?”

  “I’d, um, have to look at my notes.”

  “It’ll be tough to parse out. And most horrendous, of course, was the concentration c
amp in Walvis. A national travesty.”

  “Yes. Um, I’ll see you,” Mark mumbled, practically running out the door. Persephone sat alone in the courtyard, listening to the water in the fountain burble.

  Well, Persephone thought.

  It was clear to her now Mark Evans was most definitely not here to study the Nama holocaust. Persephone Wilder always did her history homework before moving to any country. And she happened to know that, while the incident most certainly was a national travesty, the horrors of 1905 did not occur in Walvis Bay, but in Lüderitz. Had the professor been seriously interested in the subject, he would have been unable to resist mansplaining her mistake. No, her new friend’s husband was covering for something. Because not only did Mark Evans not know anything about the supposed topic of his research, he didn’t seem particularly interested in Namibian history at all.

  This was nothing Persephone would tell anyone. Not yet, anyway. For this was what Embassy Wives did—gather information. Their findings, of course, would not be parsed out until there was a very good reason. But the reason, in Persephone’s experience, always came in the end.

  So, Professor Evans, Persephone thought. What, exactly, are you hiding?

  / 6 /

  Forty-one years before Amanda moved to Namibia on her husband’s whim, her mother dressed her in a pink flannel dress. She changed Amanda’s diaper—though she was surely not called Amanda then, but instead another name no one would ever know—and wrapped her in a receiving blanket. Then she drove her to the fire station in Charleston, South Carolina, and left the infant on the front step.

  The Meeting Street fire station was an official safe haven for foundlings, so no inquiry was made as to where the baby might have come from. The deputy chief made the discovery. He hadn’t come out because of her cries; even as a newborn, her new mother, Merritt, said, Amanda acted as if she was in the world to cause as little trouble as possible. What the deputy chief noticed, as he sat up drinking Sanka and watching M*A*S*H, was the screech of tires around the block. Thinking it was a group of drunk teenagers he had to report, he went outside to see if they would come back around again. The car was gone, but at his feet, in a milk crate, was a tiny face looking up at him, its expression mirroring his own in wonder and surprise.

  Abandoned babies in milk crates weren’t common in downtown Charleston; word traveled fast. And that next Sunday, the fate of Baby X, as The Post and Courier called her, was the mainstay of a sermon at St. Michael’s Church. Merritt Pruitt, who usually stayed to make certain the coffee urns were full, was so moved she went straight home to speak about it with her husband, Albert.

  Merritt and Albert were old Charlestonians with plenty of money, but no designs on grandeur. They came from a long line of merchants, having owned Pruitt’s Furniture on King for three generations. Theirs was a somber, dark mansion at the end of Society Street, rife with antiques and inherited silver, short on lamps and natural light.

  There was no question that the adoption of baby Amanda, as she came to be known throughout town that week, was the most surprising and generous thing they had ever done. Indeed, soon the event became the main source of the family’s local identity.

  So, though Amanda never really knew who she was, she also never really wondered. She was Amanda Pruitt, the little miracle who had saved her mother and father. Her adoption was never a secret. The Pruitts’ theory was that letting Amanda know the truth was much kinder than a jolting, TV-drama revelation later in life. She was far from spoiled, but she enjoyed the same privileges as the other downtown Charleston girls: private education at the Day School, cotillion lessons, riding lessons, ballet.

  Merritt, who was forty-eight when she brought Amanda home, unleashed the physical affection she’d been saving up for the baby she never had. She slept with Amanda until the child was two, and even after insisted on adjoining rooms. She hugged and cuddled her daughter so much it drove Albert to worry, with the fuss over strained baby food, and then later the obsession with healthy school lunches and purified water. Bridge and travel were things of the past; obviously, her friends said, the woman had just been passing her time, waiting for motherhood to happen. And it was a good thing she had never been silly enough to get a job, as now she channeled any potential professional energy into ensuring Amanda’s well-being.

  Albert fathered mostly from afar, giving the fatherly lectures on cleanliness and manners his own father had given to him in the same house. Once a week he gave Amanda five dollars, instructing her to bike over to First Federal on Broad and put it into her savings account. They had started the practice when Amanda was seven, and Albert reasoned—correctly—that if she did the same until she left for college, she would have a respectable nest egg. On Sundays, he took her through the newspaper, explaining current events, both national and international, no matter how alarming and ghastly. The Post and Courier was too sanitized, so he made special arrangements with Burbage’s to carry The New York Times. He inspected Amanda’s room, Navy-style, at seven on Saturday mornings. Other than that, he left things to Merritt.

  When Amanda was twelve, Merritt went to the grocery store for mayonnaise (the main ingredient of Amanda’s favorite chicken salad). Merritt was a healthy woman who walked the Battery every day and loved swimming, so who could blame her for never having a doctor scan her brain? She collapsed at the Harris Teeter, dying instantly of an aneurysm, her fashionably tanned arm stretched out among the broken shards of a Duke’s jar.

  Amanda had been at swimming class. It was one of those warm Charleston days in which the very air, heavy with jasmine and the pungent tinge of the marsh, swelled with unnamed possibility; perhaps a kiss from the boy who looked at her sometimes in math class, or a sleepover invitation from a new best friend. Returning home, she wore her wet bathing suit under her school clothes, her hair still damp and smelling of bleach. She parked her bike in the basement and climbed the back stairs to find her father sitting in the dark in his study.

  “Merritt is dead,” he said. His daughter didn’t say anything, so he cleared his throat and began again. “Your mother. She died in the grocery store.” Albert got up and hesitantly put a hand on her shoulder, then took it away. “I expect you’ll need a bit of a serious cry. And that’s okay, so you do that. I’m going to lie down myself for an hour with this glass of bourbon. Then we’ll go to the mortuary to arrange things and say our private goodbye.”

  Amanda waited until she heard his feet on the stairs, then collapsed onto the floor, wailing. She must have screamed and cried for the entire hour, because the next thing she knew her father tapped her shoulder to tell her to wash her face, because it was time to go.

  Was Amanda Pruitt fated to take care of men? By thirteen, she was running the house on Society Street, doing all the cooking and household management. Merritt’s intention had been for Amanda to be a downtown Charleston girl like her older nieces—traveling in pastel herds on ribboned Schwinns, soaking in good manners by gossiping in ladies’ kitchens, and spending idle afternoons in each other’s bedrooms studying while sucking on candy from Lakeside-Schwettmann’s. It seemed to Albert that Amanda was cut from a different cloth.

  Amanda was serious. She had to be—there was no alternative. She fitted her bicycle with baskets so she could pick up various sundries without a car. She learned to plan meals for the week and order groceries from Burbage’s, which delivered for a small fee. Albert didn’t mind the cooking repertoire of a preteen, as long as there was food on the table when he got home. Amanda’s initial menu offered hot dogs, cheese sandwiches, and peanut butter, though she eventually graduated to Hamburger Helper, chicken cooked in Campbell’s mushroom soup, egg noodles with butter, and pasta with mayonnaise and tuna. Meals were usually enjoyed in front of the television. During commercials, Albert would press the mute button and ask her, gingerly, if everything was fine. Sometimes they would play bridge after dinner, a game Amanda, like Merritt, was freakishly good at.

  Something happened to Amanda the day h
er mother died that she was too young to explain properly. Later she would guess that it was one of her aortas turning to ash, causing her to feel less than other women. And the way it happened, the suddenness and the indignity of it, both made her seethe with anger. But the truth was, Amanda liked her life. She liked the responsibility, and the freedom it provided. She managed the household accounts, so if she wanted, say, a shirt from the Gap, she didn’t have to beg anyone for it. At sixteen, she took over her dead mother’s car. As long as the bills were paid and the house was run well, curfews were not an issue.

  “If you need to know about sex…” Albert started saying, during a break between Miami Vice and Law & Order.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “There are books I can purchase. Would you like a book?”

  “Sure.” She had already been penetrated by Alec Freeman at a beach party, but there certainly seemed to be more to know than the rough, sandy pumping he had introduced her to. The next day, The Joy of Sex and Our Bodies, Ourselves appeared on her bed, wrapped in brown paper.

  As is often the case with children allowed to make their own choices, Amanda Pruitt ended up not only managing, but acing school and her social life. Amanda knew, because Albert had told her, that she was only of average intelligence. Yet it seemed that she was born to work. And in some situations, her teachers gave her a little extra leniency. After all—as more than one instructor murmured in the teachers’ lounge, the words winding their way through the blue smoke—the girl had been left on the street as a baby, for God’s sake. And then her adopted mother had to go and die beside a jar of mayonnaise.

  Though, if Amanda knew she was gaining advantage because people felt sorry for her, she didn’t mind it. Wins were wins. She had friends, but she wasn’t reliant on a clique to coddle her. Senior year she had a boyfriend, Jack, whom she liked enough, and he served his purpose, which was for her to learn properly about sex before college. And when time for college came, there wasn’t much to think about there, either. Albert had gone to Dartmouth.