Our landlord, Bailey Dornan, lived in the largest house I'd ever seen. It had balustraded porches, balconies under the windows, and four flagpoles flying the American, Irish, District of Columbia, and one other flag that I couldn't identify: black, red and green with a shield-and-spear coat of arms. My father said it was the Kenyan flag, and that Bailey had told him he'd bought the place from the Republic of Kenya three years before, when a sub-Saharan drought had devastated the country and forced its diplomats to move to a humble residence on R Street.
We were surprised Bailey invited all of us to his election party. He'd given money to Republican causes and had seen the Carter/Mondale signs on our lawn. My mother had said we shouldn't go, but my father insisted. After all, Bailey was his long-lost friend from the University of Wisconsin baseball team, and he had let us have a few rent-free months in a huge scruffy house he owned on 16th, where my parents, my mother's brother and a couple of my uncle's hippie friends were trying to launch an alternative school called Our House.
We'd moved to D.C. in July after my father had been fired from yet another teaching job, this time in Illinois, but thus far we'd had little luck recruiting students for the new school. We'd signed up a novice guitarist and a black kid named Quinn whom I'd met at the Mount Pleasant library. Quinn and I were both thirteen, gangly and bookish. I was obsessed with presidential history and he was into airships. My father was bringing us to the party to show us off, hoping our precocity might win over parents of school age kids. I knew he was getting desperate, with two months to go before our proposed first day of classes. "This was your crazy idea," my mother had kept telling him. She might as well have said, "You have one last chance."
A stocky maid with mannish hands answered the door and let us into the great room, where Bailey was holding forth to a coterie of slim-hipped women and smock-faced men who looked like many I'd seen on homecoming weekend at the private school from which my father had been let go. The downstairs rooms were decorated in an African safari motif: zebra throws over black leather couches, wicker tables on giraffe print rugs, teak shelves holding leather bound volumes between ebony hippo bookends, and on the walls, masks, wood carvings, shadow boxes filled with tribal figurines. Thick candles scented the rooms with wild sage and woodsmoke. I was surprised not to see mounted rifles or the heads of wildebeests and cheetahs. I thought of photographs I'd seen of Teddy Roosevelt from his big game hunts in Africa, his large square teeth flashing, the barrel of his shotgun planted on a rhino carcass.
Bailey left his conversational circle and greeted us by a table that was topped with a soapstone chess set. "Pretty authentic, huh," he said. "We wanted to keep the African flavor." He picked up the king piece and handed it to my father. "These guys are Massai warriors. They used to dominate East Africa until the English showed up. Even today they're still so proud and stubborn that they refuse to Westernize." He took the chess piece back from my father and placed it behind its regiment of pawns.
My father gave him our first rent check, reduced as part of our sweetheart bargain. Bailey slipped it into his hacking jacket then shook everyone's hands perfunctorily -- my parents, Quinn, me, my sister Molly and the hippies: Uncle Linc, Cinnamon and Tino. "So, who do you think is going to win this election?" he asked no one in particular.
"It's going to be close," my father offered. "Ford has run a smart campaign."
"Are you kidding?" Like many of the partygoers, Bailey wore a Ford/Dole button on his lapel. He waved at the maid as she crossed the room with a tray of drinks. "We should have nominated Reagan," he said. "Ford's giving away the Panama Canal. And he was a fool to sign the Helsinki Accords; you might as well hand over the whole of Eastern Europe to the Russkies. I know you folks voted for the peanut farmer -- it's a free country." He took glasses of wine from the tray and passed them around. "A toast." He raised his glass. "To democracy."
Soon Bailey's wife, Ann, joined us. The tallest, thinnest woman in the room, she had straight blonde hair dark at the roots and wore a tight fitting pink top under her blue blazer. The cross around her neck hovered incongruously over her surprising cleavage. "I can hardly believe how many years it's been," she said. "And these are your children? How wonderful." She shook my hand as I imagined a praying mantis might, with the ends of her long fingers.
"I understand you're starting a school. Isn't that something," she said to my mother, acknowledging the hippies and Quinn with a passing smile that ended with a trace of suspicion. "Here, let me introduce you to some friends."
She walked us into the preppy gyre that Bailey had earlier abandoned, and we met a mortgage broker, a few lawyers and lobbyists. We knew a couple of them already; they were the parents of Dawn, our second student. Linc went on about Dawn's innate musical talent, though in truth she'd been struggling with "House of the Rising Sun," and had skipped several lessons complaining that her fingers hurt.
Her father said, "If she keeps this up, we're going to have to build her a studio out back. She's always banging on that guitar and spinning her Janey Mitchell records."
"Joni Mitchell," his wife corrected him. She sported a wealthy bohemian look, with her gauzy cotton tunic and Navajo jewelry. "So who's in charge?" she asked, and my father stepped forward. "We have another daughter, Brie," she said, rolling her eyes. "You want to talk about a handful? She broke records for demerits at Pilgrim Hill and now she's at Woodrow Wilson, the public school. We don't like the influences there. I think we might be giving you a call." She glanced at her husband, who looked away. "Brie is tough to keep an eye on, let me tell you. She's -- how best to put this? -- adventurous."
"Well, we're all about adventure." Tino stroked his Zapata mustache then with his rolling Mick Jagger walk headed off with the other hippies to watch the election coverage. Bailey followed in their wake, to point the way -- or to keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, the adults talked about upcoming vacations. One was going to Breckenridge, another to Bermuda; and Ann said her family was going to Ireland for Christmas and later, over the kids' spring break, to Kenya on their second safari. As she was talking about their last trip, her daughter Cleo walked by and Ann pulled her into the conversation.
I'd been flirting with Cleo since summer and always went to the Adams Morgan basketball courts on Saturdays at noon when I knew she'd be there. She was a deadeye lefty from around the free throw arc and had the most graceful swan's neck follow-through. I still got tongue-tied trying to make small talk with her and too often fell back on my storehouse of presidential trivia. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson had a mockingbird named Dick that he used to feed from his lips at state dinners? But Cleo put up with my bumbling and said she liked hanging out with me because I was "more real" than the rest of her friends, whatever that meant. And she said I had great hair. Earlier in the day, getting ready for the party, I'd dabbed some of my father's English Leather on my neck and blow-dried and brushed my hair until the wings fluffed out and the ends nearly touched my shoulders.
"I was just telling everyone about Kenya," her mother said. "We're going to have a great time, aren't we?"
Cleo narrowed her eyes and gave no answer.
Ann turned to Quinn. "Have you ever been to Africa?" Quinn was helping himself to a canapé of some kind of cheese and relish. "You must want to go," Ann said. "Isn't that the fashion these days? Everyone celebrating their heritage and wearing the traditional clothes?"
"Mom--" Cleo exclaimed. But Quinn answered as if the question were perfectly reasonable. "I do want to go to Kenya someday, but not overland in jeeps and tents. I'd like to run a zeppelin safari company, where we can follow herds of elephants across the savanna and watch lions sun themselves on rocks and hyenas pace and carry on. My zeppelin would be incredibly maneuverable; we could park it on a tree, stop for the night and sleep out there above the animals."
Quinn continued talking about zeppelins and flying machines, and when he took a breath my father seized the opportunity to introduce him as one of the bright students at Our House whose interests we were fostering. Quinn seemed to be disarming the crowd when Cleo grabbed my elbow and steered me to an empty corner by the hallway. She wore gray gabardine pants and a white bell shirt, loose at the waist, a silver-banded watch and meticulously applied burgundy nail polish. I was used to seeing her in shorts and a tank top: Our Lady of Perpetual Help, #13. Faced with someone suddenly transformed into an adult, I grew anxious.
"Can you believe my mother?" she said. "She's so ignorant."
"I'm sure she meant no harm."
"Look around at what I have to deal with." Cleo gestured toward a crowd of people spilling out of the TV room -- strident men in loud shirts talking over each other, stiff-backed women refilling lipstick-clouded glasses of wine. A voice I recognized as Harry Reasoner's floated from the television into the hallway. The nation is split between West and South this year, he was saying. We're waiting on Ohio and the Midwestern states to see who will be the 39th president.
"Can you tell what network they're watching?" Cleo asked.
"Sounds like ABC," I said.
"That's right. And you know why? Because ABC stands for 'Anyone But Carter.'" Cleo smiled, and my heart leapt.
"Word's traveling fast about your school," Cleo said. "And not just from people at Our Lady. You might be hearing from Dawn's older sister, Brie. Watch out, she's a real wild child. She got booted from Pilgrim Hill for sending notes -- you wouldn't believe what they said -- to one of her teachers."
Cleo paused and I thought of asking her about the notes, but her face had turned scarlet and I didn't want to embarrass her further.
"Even a lot of normal kids are frustrated," she continued, "because most of the schools around here just don't get it. You'd think the Civil Rights Movement or Women's Lib never happened. We use old-fashioned textbooks, and forget about taking courses like World Religions or Native American myths or getting to read books you care about. I brought "Forever" by Judy Blume to Our Lady one day -- it's about a senior in high school who goes on the pill -- and I was reading the book in the library when one of the nuns snatched it from me. She probably took it back to her bedroom," Cleo leaned in to whisper. "Anyway, I think it's so cool what your family is doing. A school where you can study whatever you want. Why can't they all be that way?"
I couldn't tell Cleo that we were out of money and completely disorganized, so I went in the opposite direction and said we'd received a huge grant -- which of course hadn't happened nor likely would -- and that we had a fabulously wealthy aunt who'd left us a pile of cash. "Her husband was Henry Ford's right-hand man," I said, though in fact Uncle Les had been in sales and detested Henry Ford. "He designed a lot of the great cars. You know: the Corvette, the Mustang." I couldn't remember if Corvette and Mustang were even made by Ford. But then, to my relief, I felt a tug on my sleeve and there was Molly.
But instead of bailing me out she sniffed the air and said, "Are you wearing Dad's cologne?"
"No." I blushed, then stepped back so Cleo wouldn't catch the scent. "My sister doesn't know what she's talking about."
"What are you guys talking about?" Molly asked.
"Daniel was saying that you have a rich aunt." Cleo wore the same bemused look that I'd seen on Bailey's face. It was the first glimpse I'd had of her even vaguely resembling her father.
"Aunt Natalia wasn't that rich," Molly said matter-of-factly. "Mom thinks we need to save the money in case of emergency."
I tried futilely to correct her. "Uncle Les had a special account," I lied. I hated for Cleo to think of my family as pathetic, a bunch of Midwestern hayseeds unable to get by on our own. "It's the school account. There's a ton in there."
"I've never heard of it." Molly crossed her arms. "Mom would have told me."
Years later when Cleo's name would come up I'd ask Molly why she went out of her way that night to call my bluff and make me look foolish, but all she remembered from Bailey's house was what happened afterward, and how, in this actual mansion, the kind of place where she'd always imagined herself, she felt small and inconsequential.
A chorus of boos resounded from the television room, and we went over to check in on the election coverage. Carter had just won Missouri, and though he was expected to lose the West he had locked up nearly the entire South, including the biggest prize of all: Florida. Now, with sixty percent of precincts reporting he led by three percentage points in Pennsylvania, and was in a dead heat in Ohio. To win the election all he had to do was capture one of these two states.
"Christ!" Bailey said, and the crowd quieted. He'd been right up close to the television, but now he turned and headed back toward us.
A charge of anticipation ran through me, the like of which I hadn't felt since the closing minutes of Game Seven of the 1973 ABA Championship when George McGinnis and the Pacers were putting away the Kentucky Colonels. But I knew I had to bottle up my excitement.
Bailey stopped and zeroed in on me. "Are you ready for four years of tax-and-spend?" he asked.
Cleo answered for me. "He doesn't pay taxes, Dad."
"That's right. And his family doesn't pay rent either."
I wanted to say Yes we do or speak up for my father, but I froze.
After Bailey had continued on past us, Cleo said, "Don't listen to him. He's just a sore loser."
I remembered my mother once telling me that in my father's sophomore year at Wisconsin he and Bailey both vied for the starting third-base position. My father had won the job and gone on to lead the team in every batting category, while Bailey languished at the end of the bench. It seemed as if that competition nearly twenty years before had never gone away.
"Do you want to see the rest of the house?" Cleo asked, and soon we were touring the downstairs rooms, my kid sister a bothersome hanger-on.
Crossing the threshold from the original structure to a newer addition on the east side was like taking a giant step from Africa to the United Kingdom. The Kenyan motif gave way to a folk-Irish assemblage of Celtic-inspired tapestries and antique pine furniture. We ducked into a room off the hallway -- "the glory days room," Cleo called it -- crowded with baseball memorabilia: team pictures from the 1950s of the Washington Senators, aerial shots of the old Griffith Stadium, a photo of Senators' star Harmon Killebrew signed "To Bailey: Keep slugging," and posed pictures of Bailey himself from high school, glove down, as if fielding a grounder. Cleo pointed to a team picture of the Wisconsin Badgers from 1961 and next to it a photo of my father posed with a bat on his shoulder, his muscular forearms tensed in the vernal light.
"My dad still idolizes your dad." Cleo stood on her tiptoes to look closely at the picture.
I was thinking that he sure had a funny way of showing it.
"You look like him, you know. Around the eyes," Cleo said. "You have nice eyes."
I caught a glimpse of Molly, who opened her mouth as if to speak then mercifully refrained. She lifted the end of her ponytail as if it were a pet and rested it on her shoulder.
In the room at the end of the hallway, a capacious library with high shelves and a ladder on wheels we found Linc, Cinnamon and Tino curled up on a plush sofa watching the returns. Linc was tossing a handful of cashews into his mouth, while Cinnamon laughed as she read aloud from a book of limericks. The room had the dungy sweetness of Tino's high grade Hawaiian Indica, a smell that had become familiar ever since the hippies arrived from the west coast. On the library television, set into a wall of shelves, John Chancellor was saying that with seventy-five percent of precincts reporting, Carter was now a percentage point ahead in Ohio and four points up in Pennsylvania.
This news inspired Tino to come up with an impromptu limerick of his own, which he recited loudly, leaning toward Cinnamon:
There once was a Georgia gov
Who used to be tight as a glove,
But he won the election,
Then got an erection,
And now he believes in free love.
While Cinnamon giggled like a schoolchild, Tino got up from the couch and said he wanted to talk to me for a minute. I followed him back into the hallway while Molly and Cleo stayed for Chancellor's analysis.
"I've got something to show you." Tino squinted as if peering through smoke. He opened one of side of his Afghan coat, where he had a huge sewn-in pocket that I'd later learn he used for shoplifting. "Look what I brought." He reached in and pulled out a handful of fireworks, then pointed out each one as if he were working the counter of a candy shop: "This is a pinwheel. That's a cherry bomb. Here's the fizgig, the squib, the flowerpot. And here is the main event --" He was about to reach in for another handful when the maid with the mannish hands came down the hall and said dinner was about to be served.
The hippies made short work of their carved roast beef, scalloped potatoes and asparagus with hollandaise sauce and had gone through the line a second time before most others had gotten firsts. Tino still had his coat on, and I worried that people might catch a glimpse of the pyrotechnics in his pockets. But he seemed cool as a fan as he piled his plate high.
I caught up with my mother, who exclaimed over Quinn and said she was sure that after tonight's performance we were going to attract more students. Quinn had yet to eat, and was still working the room.
It was just after dessert -- a yellow cake with white frosting, topped with icing in the shape of an American flag - that the house fell silent and Harry Reasoner announced that ABC was now ready to put the state of Pennsylvania in the Democrats' column. Ohio is leaning toward the challenger, but it's academic now. James Earl Carter, Jr. will be the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
Some gasped, others said, "Can you believe it?" and I held my breath to stifle a reaction. On the way over my father had coached us that under no circumstances should we show any emotion if our candidate won; we'd have plenty of time to celebrate later. During the tense quiet that followed I sneaked a glance at the hippies, and had never been so proud of them. They stood solemn-faced watching the coverage. Except for their long hair and relatively dressed-down appearance they could have passed for three more crestfallen Republicans.
Bailey broke the silence. "So what do you think, Pete?" he called across the room to my father. "Looks like you backed the right horse."
My father's face turned crimson. "Close race," he said. "Hard-fought." He tried to dismiss the topic.
"This is my friend, Pete Truitt, everybody," Bailey announced to the crowd. "Maybe some of you have met him and his colorful friends. Pete's new in town and I thought we'd show him some hospitality." Bailey's scalp shifted forward and back and he blinked rapidly, as if he were going on the fritz. "I hope Pete won't mind me saying, but he's needed some hospitality lately. What do you do when you get fired from your job? You count on friends not to turn their backs on you. Jerry Ford got fired today, and we're not going to turn our backs on him, are we? Even if he did run a stupid campaign. Come on. Everyone get a glass." The guests put down their dessert plates, emptied the caterers' trays of champagne, and when enough glasses were raised in the air, Bailey made his toast: "To losers," he said. "And to the winners who give them a second chance."
People seemed confused at first. They turned to each other with odd looks on their faces, then shrugged and clinked their champagne flutes. I didn't know what to think, though I was pretty sure that my father had just been terribly insulted. The blood drained from his face; he turned toward my mother and they seemed to huddle in the corner of the room.
Molly went over to join them. Linc walked by, licking icing from his finger. "Can you believe that sonofabitch?" he said as he passed, not waiting for a reply or seeming to care that Bailey's daughter was standing right next to me. Linc continued on through the crowd. Trailed by Cinnamon and Tino, he walked out the French doors that led onto the back patio.
Cleo touched the sleeve of my shirt. "Do you want to go upstairs?" she asked.
I felt like I'd walked onto the set of a movie where the pretty, modern girl, dispensing with ceremony, invites the near stranger up to her apartment. "Sure," I said.
When we got to her room, on the third floor, the lights were out and she didn't bother to turn them on after we stepped inside. All I could see was the outline of her face, backlit by the copper glow of the light-polluted city. She took my hand and squeezed it, and neither of us spoke, as if we held some truth between us that words would shatter. I closed my eyes and could feel her stepping toward me. I'd been kissed only once before, in the parking lot after a tea dance at Lake Bluff Academy by a girl named Carly Manning whose father had financed half the buildings in the Chicago Loop. She stuck her tongue in my mouth, a sensation that reminded me of the time a group of schoolmates had dared me to swallow a goldfish. It swam up from the back of my throat and bumped against the lining of my cheek until I lost my nerve and spit it out. But I couldn't spit out Carly Manning's tongue even if I had wanted to.
Outside, the sound of fireworks interrupted Cleo and me. When I opened my eyes she was walking toward the window.
"Did you see that?" she said after a bottle rocket shot up through the trees, popped and flared in four directions.
She opened the window.
Soon we were standing hip to hip, looking down. A small crowd had begun to gather on the back patio to watch Tino launch his fireworks high into the clearing between the house and the trees. Another bottle rocket rose above us and burst into the night. Then came a series of squibs with their cackling, witchy cries. Cinnamon and Linc ooohd and aaahd. This was so close to a fantasy -- Cleo and me up high in a perch watching fireworks rain over our own little kingdom - that I forgot about any trouble that might follow this display. Us versus them, the yippie revolutionaries on the attack.
"I want to see two at a time," Cleo said, and I leaned out the open window to call down the request to Tino. For a minute the skies were clear. I thought I heard my mother yell, "Stop. You can't do this. Wait till we get back home," but I couldn't spot her in the crowd so ignored any warning. All I could see was Tino and crouched next to him, my unlucky Uncle Linc, fumbling with a box of matches. Linc yelled, "This one's for Jimmy Carter!" He struck a match and the flame grew large and I heard a sound like a psychotic bird flying directly toward my ear. Then it seemed as if the bird's beak had struck a bulls-eye in the middle of my scalp. I felt a sharp pain, like alcohol spreading to the corners of an open wound.
"Oh shit," I heard Linc say. "His hair's on fire! Someone do something!"
I reached toward my head but the heat made me drop my hands. I thought of calling for help or jumping from the window so the air would blow out the fire, but the patio seemed a long way down and that crowd of figures, as still and dumbstruck as chessmen, couldn't save me now.
The room went black again, a cool burn washed over me, and a pair of hands with burgundy fingernails lifted a blanket slowly over my head.
"It's okay," Cleo said. "The fire's out."
I turned toward her, her shirt glowing like the moon. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes.