"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."