White Houses by Amy Bloom

Author:Amy Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Remembrance Has a Front and a Rear

We came back from our northern holiday, more in love than when we’d left. People could see it a mile away. People asked Eleanor if she’d changed her hair. They told me I’d lost weight. We acted like people who’d leaped off the shipwreck just in time, and found themselves on a desert island with sunshine, shelter, and plenty of pineapples. I smiled when I saw other reporters. I could live without the bylines, easy. The night we came back, we were invited to a big lesbian dinner party with some of Eleanor’s old friends from Mademoiselle Souvestre’s boarding school. Your debut, Eleanor said. There were married ladies with a wandering eye and Eleanor’s Seven Sister friends in Harris Tweeds and jaunty walking sticks (silver swan handle, are you kidding me) and elegant English walking shoes (Lobb’s, the woman next to me said, holding up her foot, like I should sail right over and order a pair). One woman was divorced and after two martinis, she said she was as happy on the day they got divorced as she was when they got married and maybe more. Eleanor looked down at her plate.

Everyone talked about whichever girl they’d had a crush on in boarding school. Eleanor had been the reigning princess at Allenswood, which apparently made me every junior girl who laid flowers at her feet, screamed for her on the hockey field (where I would have kicked her ass, I’m pretty sure), and made her bed for her while she was brushing her teeth. The women laughed and clinked glasses: Here’s to mad passion and pash madness. Eleanor squeezed my hand, in front of everyone, which was not a small thing, and then she said, Oh, Dearest, you know what English boarding schools are like. I sat up straight, representing my people, the hired girls of South Dakota, and I said, Oddly enough, I have no idea at all about boarding schools, English, French, or Fuck All. The prettiest woman from the old boarding school days coughed up her champagne and everyone pounded her on the back. Someone asked me what I did and Eleanor broke in to tell them I was Harry Hopkins’s right-hand man, and there was suitable tittering. I was invited to describe the terrible things I’d seen in our great country, by two women who did care, and by women who were on their third glass of champagne, and then there were strawberries and cream and then we went back to the White House and we made love but we didn’t talk.

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