Excerpt from When the White House Was Ours
Prologue
For years we lived in boxes. Box rooms at the end of narrow hallways. Box houses so small we drew shallow breaths. We moved so often we didn’t bother to put the boxes away. They grew flimsy from overuse and slumped against our living room walls. We piled into the old tan van, a moving box on wheels, and scribbled across the Midwest like bewildered pioneers.
We left six places before I had turned thirteen: Duluth when my father’s baseball career ended with a play at the plate, Bloomington after my parents pursued their teaching degrees, Cincinnati where my sister was born. We lived long enough in Indianapolis that I thought we might settle down, but then we packed up for the north side of Chicago and my father’s first private school job.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised when, two years later, in March 1976 Lake Bluff Academy fired him. He’d lost work before but this time he knew that my mother was at the end of her patience. He kept saying that he had trouble with institutions, and my mother reminded him that marriage was an institution, and this one was heading for trouble. At breakfast two weeks after Lake Bluff had let him go, my father announced his new plan: he was going to start a school of his own, a forward-thinking one, he said, where no one would be hemmed in by rules. My mother laughed, but he said he was serious. “Where?” She pressed him on it. “How are you going to get funded, Pete?” When he admitted he hadn’t thought it all through, she shot up from the table. “You’ve finally lost your mind,” she said. She packed a duffel bag, rounded up Molly and me, and told our father that we were leaving for a few days, long enough for him to come down from his cloud. We spent the Easter weekend at our grandparents’ house in Wausau, Wisconsin, and returned to find my father smiling broadly at the apartment door.
“We’ve got our school.” He opened his arms. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you, Val?”
My mother didn’t believe him at first, but over the course of a month he convinced her. As if by magic he even produced pictures of the place: a magnificent white Victorian house on the corner of 16th and Hill Streets in Washington, DC.
“Is it a mansion?” Molly asked.
“Better,” he said. “A free mansion, and it’s all ours.”
Later, my father told me that the house wasn’t free. We were alone in the apartment. My mother was off walking Molly to the elementary school where she was teased for her bargain-bin clothes. “Your mother would kill me if she knew this,” my father said. “So you’ll have to give me your oath.” We had a ritual whereby I’d place my hand on the head of Chester, our indifferent gray tabby, and pledge by the earth, sea and stars that I would not reveal the secrets of the Fellowship of Chester, on pain of tumult and general unhappiness. Then we’d each take a piece of loose fur to keep in remembrance of our vow.
My father confided in me because he was running out of second chances, and he knew that I’d do anything to help him hold the family together. He wasn’t the only person who bent my ear. The kids at school gave me grief for my sticking-out ears that I hid by growing my hair into wings. “Tell them that Buddha and the Pope have big ears, too,” my father used to say. “Those chumps are jealous that you’re privy to the secrets of the universe.” I did seem to be a magnet for secrets, and liked to imagine that I had bionic hearing. I used to sit at my desk pretending to divide fractions and listen to my parents argue in the next room. If I really concentrated I could hear the whispers of the dormitory kids down the hall saying, Mr. and Mrs. Truitt are headed for divorce.
My father had told my mother that his old friend, Bailey Dornan, from the University of Wisconsin baseball team, was giving us the house rent free for as long as we wanted it. Bailey’s family owned entire blocks of downtown Washington, and he had once said that if my father ever needed anything he should just call. But my father was proud and stubborn and he knew that his friendship with Bailey had always been tinged with distrust. So he’d kept the offer on reserve, to be used only in case of emergency. And he was selective about what he told my mother. By sharing the truth with me, he was passing on the burden. “Bailey’s not asking for rent for the first four months,” my father admitted. “But after that, we have to pay.”
“Is it expensive?” I asked.
“He said he might cut me a deal, maybe half the going rate, but I figure four months is a long time. We’ll have this school up and running by fall. Mark my words, Daniel.”
Even then I could have imagined my father, picking up the phone after yet another disappointment. He wouldn’t have said he was fired. He’d have spoken in the bantering way he always used with his old baseball friends. “So whaddya say, Bailey. I’ve got this idea I’ve been kicking around.” He wouldn’t have used the words “alternative school,” though in fact that’s exactly what he’d had in mind. Hands-on learning, an open laboratory, where the students would be free to explore their own interests. My father had written his Master’s thesis on democratic education, where students and faculty have equal say. And though he’d taught only in traditional schools he had talked about going to innovative places like the Free School in Albany, the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, or even the seminal Summerhill in Leiston, England. But money and timing had stood in the way, and he’d never felt bold enough, raising two kids and still clinging in times like these to the safe and familiar. Now, with a resume of short-term appointments and haphazard zig-zags across the map, finally aware that his marriage was on the line, perhaps he felt he had one last chance.
Besides the house he’d arranged with Bailey, my father did have another ace in the hole: a small inheritance from a godmother who had married a Ford executive. She was the only person of means with any direct tie to our family. A widow with no children, she used to send a Christmas card each year with a crisp fifty-dollar bill folded inside it. “For the Truitts,” she wrote in her crabbed hand. “Affectionately, Aunt Natalia.” My parents had come to count on that fifty dollars; it paid the credit card bill at the end of the holidays. Molly and I used to draw crayon self-portraits on our thank you notes, addressed to Mrs. Malcolm McRae of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
The inheritance, my father explained, could cover operating costs and salaries for a year, and by then the school would be running on its own.
“Three thousand dollars is a lot less than you think,” my mother said.
“So we’ll save,” my father promised.
“We’ve never saved a dime in our lives.”
And on went the argument until my mother tired of asking questions and finally acquiesced. We had no other prospects, after all. So one June morning in the bicentennial year we assembled the boxes again and left the Midwest. “Just for the record,” my mother put in. “This was your idea.”
Like Jimmy Carter’s presidency, our years in Washington began with hope then slid into crisis. Three administrations and more than two decades have come and gone, and this year we marked the Millenium. But there was a time, back in our own white house, when every possibility seemed to open up for us.
Copyright © 2008 by Porter Shreve. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company.
Note: An excerpt from later in the novel, adapted into a short story called "Election Day" can be found at the literary website Five Chapters.