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    THE WASHINGTON DOSSIER STORIES
    THE WASHINGTON DOSSIER STORIES
    THE WASHINGTON DOSSIER STORIES
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    THE WASHINGTON DOSSIER STORIES

    By Warren Adler

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStonehouse Press
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9781532982323
    THE WASHINGTON DOSSIER STORIES
    Author

    Warren Adler

    Acclaimed author, playwright, poet, and essayist Warren Adler is best known for The War of the Roses, his masterpiece fictionalization of a macabre divorce adapted into the BAFTA- and Golden Globe–nominated hit film starring Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas, and Kathleen Turner. Adler has also optioned and sold film rights for a number of his works, including Random Hearts (starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas) and The Sunset Gang (produced by Linda Lavin for PBS’s American Playhouse series starring Jerry Stiller, Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, and Doris Roberts), which garnered Doris Roberts an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries. His recent stage/film/TV developments include the Broadway adaptation of The War of the Roses, to be produced by Jay and Cindy Gutterman, The War of the Roses: The Children (Grey Eagle Films and Permut Presentations), a feature film adaptation of the sequel to Adler’s iconic divorce story, and Capitol Crimes (Grey Eagle Films and Sennet Entertainment), a television series based on his Fiona Fitzgerald mystery series. For an entire list of developments, news and updates visit www.Greyeaglefilms.com. Adler’s works have been translated into more than 25 languages, including his staged version of The War of the Roses, which has opened to spectacular reviews worldwide. Adler has taught creative writing seminars at New York University, and has lectured on creative writing, film and television adaptation, and electronic publishing.

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      Book preview

      THE WASHINGTON DOSSIER STORIES - Warren Adler

      Author

      The Grace of Her Exit

      Molly Harrington was angry. She was so angry that she glared at the telephone as if it were a beast that had clawed her into submission.

      She had taken the call in the kitchen, where she regularly spent the hour before Jim rose having her coffee and cigarette and mulling over the Style section of the Washington Post.

      The time of the call should have been a clue. Seven-thirty. What self-respecting person would call at that hour? When Jim was White House counsel, such interruptions were to be expected. But now?

      Bess Tarkington’s voice had been, as always, like a frail bird call, exactly in keeping with the tiny-boned fragility of her appearance.

      Molly dearest. I hope I didn’t wake you.

      Of course not, Molly had said. Didn’t the woman know, as the papers said repeatedly, that Molly Harrington rose with the roosters?

      Isn’t it an absolutely lovely morning, Molly? The bright small talk should have been another clue to what was coming. Above the telephone, Molly’s big box calendar had an inked-in reminder of the dinner party at the Tarkingtons’, set to take place that night.

      I hope it’s as lovely tonight, Molly had replied. It did occur to her that the call might be a postponement or cancellation of the party. That, too, was troubling since she had already made elaborate plans of preparation. A bleach job. A new gown. And, if time permitted, a new bag from Saks.

      I hope so too, darling. There was a long pause. Molly could hear the wheeze of Bess Tarkington’s lungs. I wouldn’t ask, Molly, if you weren’t one of my oldest and dearest friends. But I truly feel that I can. There’s simply no one else I can possibly ask who would really understand. Bess Tarkington’s hesitancy confirmed the worst. Molly knew what was coming. The telephone’s earpiece grew hot and she moved it slightly away from her flesh.

      The ambassador has these friends coming in today from London. Very last minute. And he’s made this request. After all, the party is his farewell, and I feel obligated to extend him this courtesy. You understand, Molly.

      Molly didn’t understand at all. There was a time when Bess Tarkington had groveled to have Molly and Jim at one of her dinner parties.

      You know, Molly, I couldn’t possibly just jam in the ambassador’s guests, could I? Believe me, I feel awful about asking you this. But I don’t know what else to do. I know that you and Jim will understand. After all, what are friends for?

      Friends? The very word suddenly seemed obscene. I was never your friend, Molly silently protested. But she murmured, Of course. It was a reflex without intelligence, although she had meant it to be sarcastic.

      I knew you would understand. You’re a real dear. Bess’s windup was perfunctory. The blow had been struck and Molly was left reeling, helpless.

      Give Jim a big kiss for me, Bess concluded. The empty line buzzed. Molly looked up at the calendar and watched the notation begin to mist and disappear.

      So this was the sound of the other shoe, she told herself. The fall from grace was now complete. Dinner at the Tarkingtons’, everyone knew, was one of the city’s ultimate status symbols. You simply didn’t get invited unless you were somebody. Not that anything meaningful had actually happened there. In fact, the dinners, occurring with two-week regularity over the past 25 years, were remarkably repetitive.

      The Tarkingtons themselves, everyone knew, were insipid nonentities. He had some mysterious connection with real estate that apparently provided enough income to finance a grand house and a magnificent table, and to keep his wife’s frail body swathed in the latest fashions.

      Each dinner was created around a contrived event: In Honor of… or A Farewell to… or To Welcome… The guest of honor was drawn from the political or diplomatic world, was someone with clout, a much abused but usually accurate Washington appellation.

      The pattern never varied. Dress was always black tie. Guests were expected promptly at eight. A small receiving line of the Tarkingtons and their honoree ushered in the guests. Cocktails lasted precisely 50 minutes. Ten minutes were given to settling down in the beautiful dining room, with its predictable flower decorations and tableware. Then came dinner. Wines, white and red, of excellent vintages, matched to the fish or meat course. Clusters of vegetables, carried on silver trays by white-gloved waiters. A salad. A sweet dessert.

      When the lovely, long-stemmed crystal goblets were filled with Dom Perignon champagne, Tarkington rose to extol his guest of honor in a singsong falsetto of platitudinous praise, which the honoree absorbed with mock humility and well-hidden embarrassment. The guests then rose, pointed their glasses in the proper direction and, after providing a chorus of to whomever, sat again.

      The honoree then stood and, in phrases purple with undisciplined praise, remarked on the graciousness of the host and hostess, the glories of the food, the beauty of the women and the brilliance of the men. A pecking order of toasts would follow.

      It was, as the guests knew, quaint and arcane. Yet, if one were objective and had an eye for satire, it was marvelously amusing, especially if one of the responders was a raconteur. But the real secret of a dinner’s success was a kind of euphoria created through the vanity of the guests themselves, who glimpsed their own significance in the imagined or real importance of their fellow guests. They were all peers in power, whether social or political. This was the brotherhood of clout, come together in ritualistic self-aggrandizement.

      The Tarkingtons, of course, basked in the glorious glow, having provided both the theater and the cast of characters. It didn’t matter that the guests left almost immediately after draining their demitasses in the elaborate drawing room that was the backdrop for the last event, the resident society bandleader’s playing requests solo on his accordion. The party even unraveled in sequence, with guests of honor departing, as they had arrived, before the other guests.

      Yet, despite the predictable sameness of these evenings, the symbol persisted. An invitation to the Tarkingtons’ was a glittering jewel in the diadem of status in the nation’s capital and it well deserved the flamboyant description. No venom that Molly might generate now, in her humiliation, could dilute that fact.

      For the first time in more than a decade, Molly questioned the decision she and her husband had made to stay in Washington. When Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run again for the presidency, the couple was faced with a choice of whether or not to return to Oklahoma or stay in Washington. They had concluded, like so many before them, that they could never go home again. Washington was too exciting.

      So Jim had attached himself to a prestigious law firm and Molly, by lavish entertaining of Nixon appointees, nurtured the illusion of their own continuing importance, despite the inevitable label of yesterday’s stars. After all, it was an axiom of Washington’s social circuit that yesterday’s stars must never mingle exclusively with each other.

      Contemplating this, she found the oil scum that floated on top of her lukewarm coffee a symbolic reflection of her own condition. Her near-empty box calendar was filled now mostly with the chores of simple survival—shopping lists, hair

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