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Election Day - Part One

By Porter Shreve

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."