Loose Threads

By Glenda Burgess

Glenda Burgess' novel LOOSE THREADS explores the uncommon thread, the way not taken as we compose our lives. How we turn to and from opportunity as we brace our daily moments with choice. Engaging, fresh, and unforgettable, LOOSE THREADS is about the journey to authenticity and the redemptive power of genuine passion. The novel opens in Washington DC and moves into American embassies around the world in the nineteen-eighties, a time when diplomacy bordered terrorism, and a young diplomat's future was limited only by ambition.

LOOSE THREADS is the story of Ellen d'Ullay, one woman's search for herself across three decades of life. Fast-paced and surprising, with a penchant for paradox and hidden truth, the hearts and minds of Burgess' characters are s interesting as the landscapes we find them in.  

Burgess' novel eloquently probes the human search for meaning, lasting love, and roots in an unpredictable world. "...Glenda Burgess takes readers on an armchair world tour with Ellen d'Ullay and the changing map of her inner world."-Saratoga News.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 20, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467866330

Glenda Burgess

Glenda Burgess was born in New Mexico and lives in the mountain Northwest.  She spent her early life traveling the world, falling in love with customs and cultures, and eventually, the photographer Kenneth Grunzweig.   Her work encompasses the complexities and mysteries of human passion and art.  Also by the author, the novel Loose Threads (1998), and a forthcoming novel on sculpture and the vineyards of Argentina.  

Book preview

© 2008 Glenda Burgess. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/14/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6192-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-6633-0 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008900509

Publication history: first published in Great Britain in 1998 by The Malvern Publishing Company Limited, 32 Old Street, Upton-upon-Severn, Worcestershire, WR8OHW England. ISBN 0947993762, Catalog record available from the British Library. Copyright Glenda Burgess 1998.

Contents

Part One — Leaving Places

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Two — Places to Stay

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Part Three — Threads

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Acknowledgements

About the Author

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point.

That’s a basic spelling that every woman should know.

Mistinguett {Jeanne Bourgeois}, 1874-1956

Loose Threads

Part One — Leaving Places 

Chapter One

Pink Slips

The day they buried my father, Court Alain d’Ullay, he left behind two nearly grown daughters, and my mother, Marie, stoic in the face of the sudden importunity of my father’s passing.

I was nineteen.

The morning of the funeral, the sky was a perfect enamel blue against the cool forests of the Cascade Mountains. We stood gathered, an hour outside of Seattle in the single stoplight town of Snowmist River. I glanced away as the mossy earth thudded down on my father’s casket, pushing my hands deep in the pockets of his black woolen coat.

In the folds of the coat, I clutched my grandfather’s watch, curling my fingers around its cool weight. You can be anything you want to be, Elle, Grandfather William’s gruff voice echoed in memory. Anything you want, you can do.

The minister’s brief prayers ended. The choir glanced heavenward and the melancholy strains of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord began on an unsteady off-key note. A standard as funerals go, sung today by the middle-aged choir of the Congregational Church my father had attended only on holidays. His truth is marching on…swelled the choir with gusty fulfillment, soaking up the weak spring sun.

The choir fell silent and my mother stepped up to the edge of the turned earth. After a moment’s pause, she threw in a long-stemmed red carnation. I watched as the carnation left her fingertips and arced through the air, swallowed from sight at our feet. A carnation, I thought. Not a rose.

It had recently rained, and my shoes were wet in the damp grass, numbing my toes. I found myself thinking of the Periodic Table of Elements. As a child, my father had drilled me on the scientific elements as we rode our bicycles around the Sammamish Bike Trail, shouting out the acronym or the elements as we pedaled for miles under the fronds of cool evergreens. My eyes remained fixed on Dad and the drizzle rolling off the back of his jacket as we checked off the elements, one by one, to the rhythm of our wheels. The year he died, my father had six registered patents to his credit at General Electric. He had been smart; but in the ways that mattered, not smart enough. Court d’Ullay believed peace of mind, or perhaps the soul, floated in the clarity of a perfect vodka martini.

My father had succumbed to a fatal love of vodka.

As the minister concluded the benediction I looked over at my sister, Tula, just fifteen, her usual tangle of hair swept back in a formal black headband. She had that familiar distance in her eyes. Tula was looking over the heads of the mourners, regarding the pattern of ruffled clouds spanning the sky. A mackerel sky, the English called it. I envied my sister. How was it she could paint landscapes in her mind while we mere mortals buried my father?

The blessing ended with a last amen and my mother turned from the gravesite and crossed the uneven grass on the arm of her best friend, Bess, who in silence wadded tissue into my mother’s trembling hand. Solemn, we filed back into the hired black limousines. The heavy doors shut with a certain, cushioned hiss, and the procession filed out of the cemetery gates onto the long gravel road, headed for the family gathering on Belmont Street.

Later, as I passed out cups of coffee and slices of pound cake, I thought again of the single carnation, hitting the casket with not so much as a whisper.

Really, why hadn’t Mom thrown in a rose? We had enough of them. Dad himself had turned the black earth for the beds of cottage roses that bloomed about the wide wooden porch. Thick masses of Jacob’s Ladder, and deep red Forever entwined to the tops of the porch pillars. Sometimes superstitious in her old Scottish ways, Mom must have had a reason. But a carnation? A waxy, false face on a flower if there was one. And yet the carnation endured: well past the time a bloom should be gone. I wondered if that carnation was a requiem, the reprise of a troubled marriage.

I waited in a pool of fallen cherry blossoms on the south sloping lawn of Sixteen Hundred, Pennsylvania Avenue. I had been daydreaming, I realized, snapping to attention. The cool, verdant perfection of the White House Presidential Park had evoked long-forgotten memories, fleeting snapshots from my father’s funeral. I glanced up. Even the afternoon sun appeared the same, offering that watery, tentative April warmth. But this was no funeral cortège, rather an official Head of State arrival ceremony. Fourteen neatly suited men and women from several branches of the United States Government and the British Embassy awaited the arrival of Marine One. We stood shoulder to shoulder in a loose semi-circle, keeping a safe distance from the helipad the Presidential chopper would touch down upon.

C’mon Ellen, I admonished myself, shaking my head clear. Stand tall. This is it.

The Presidential helicopter crested the trees, a sleek black rocket of glass and chrome. Sunlight bounced off the chopper blades and flashed across the windows of the solarium of the White House behind us. The helicopter hovered for several moments over our heads, swinging imperceptibly back and forth in the still air, a shadowy spider dangling from an invisible silken anchor, before lowering to the ground.

Blasts of wind current from the thundering rotors whipped my hair across my face and I tugged it aside, anxious for a first glimpse of the man inside. The waiting greeting party craned forward, squinting into the beating gusts of wind. Moving smartly, the Marines secured the landing pad before releasing the door.

A slight figure appeared framed in the narrow doorway. Lifting a pale hand, President Jimmy Carter stood for the flash of press corps cameras, waited for the rotors to stop churning, and then hopped awkwardly down from the last step. Jimmy Carter. My President. The man seemed worn out, thinned from within.

I smiled nervously, awed by the nearness of the man.

Behind Carter appeared the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Dame Margaret Thatcher, not a hair on her head disturbed by the whirling blades. Thatcher nodded stiffly, assessing the small official greeting party. Leaning on the white-gloved hand of a Marine, she squirmed down the landing steps in her snug skirt, exhibiting all the awkward grace of a beetle.

The official State Arrival Ceremony was perfunctory and brief. A welcome, a gathering, a dispersal. I was here, as were the others, in an official capacity, fulfilling my duty as a United States State Department desk officer to attend an arrival of any relevant dignitary to Washington. As most of the senior London desk were in New York for the week, preparing for the UN summit on the Middle East Peace Accords - the very reason Thatcher and Carter were conferencing privately beforehand in Washington - it fell to me, the junior European Desk Officer, to cover for my missing colleagues.

I turned from the garden as Thatcher and Carter, surrounded by a waiting group of advisors, disappeared briskly into the shadows of the Western Colonnade. The fourteen of us, gathered from the various cabinet administrative offices, dispersed quickly into waiting cabs outside the front gates. The Pentagon guys were headed back to their Crystal City warrens, the USIA pair probably to an early lunch, and the two or three White House interns and aides would wander off doing whatever interns and aides do.

Pennsylvania Avenue was a long way from the old wooden porch on Belmont Street, I reflected. I hefted my briefcase closer as the Yellow Taxi careened from the curb, and made a mental note to send my mother the embossed White House napkin I had pocketed from the ornate silver water tray moments before Carter’s arrival. Another souvenir.

The year was l980, and in the nearly eight years since my 1973 swearing-in ceremony as a Foreign Service Officer, I had garnered my mother many such souvenirs. They stood about my mother’s house, small medals of my determination. The bronze Senate ashtray - a souvenir of my internship awaiting the Foreign Service Exam results; the State Department blue leather embossed key fob Mom used for the golf cart. Souvenirs or talismans, or perhaps both: even the State Department sweat pants I wore on Saturdays, the official gym bag I had sent Tula. I had made it happen.

A Foreign Service Officer, launched into the cultural waters of strangeness. My life painted in the hues of the delicate Formosa trees of Tokyo; the arid, bone-white stones of the Oracle of Delphi; drifting away on the pungent incense of New Delhi. Approaching thirty, I had little thought for that nineteen year old I had been: directionless, bewildered by her father’s death. Such an awkward, stooped teenager, lost in my father’s shadow, intimidated by my mother’s fierceness. The last days on Belmont Street long gone, I marked the hours forward.

I glanced down at the watch on its battered leather strap around my wrist: Grandfather William’s timepiece. The worn metal carried the solid comfort of the man, the weight of his goodness. Caught by unaccustomed thoughts of the past, I let my mind wander as the cab carried me back to the Main State Building entrance on 21st and C Streets.

Flashing my building pass at the guard lounging amiably by the security desk, I glanced up at the impressive multi-colored array of International flags standing proudly above our heads. There it was, the world. It never failed to quicken my heart to pass under those banners in the course of my day. Looking up at the colors of the four corners of the globe, the shady streets of Snowmist River retreated, unreal and remote. I smiled. Mom would be on the golf course. Tula would be in her studio in Santa Fe. And I was here, here at the center of things.

I sped up the steps to the second floor and down the hall to my cubicle - a yard-sale affair really, constructed of other agency hand-me-downs and tucked far back in the marble recesses of the building’s old wing. I set my briefcase in the creaky chair behind the army surplus desk that inhabited the lion’s share of my cramped space and lifted the stack of pink message slips.

Two from Larry, and one from the desk officer for Crete, requesting assistance in arranging an island water delivery. The island had experienced a three-month drought.

I dialed Larry’s number first.

Say who! Larry’s cheerful, resonant voice answered.

Elle d’Ullay. I smiled into the receiver, half-sitting on the corner of my desk, undoing the buttons on my gray suit jacket. I just this moment got back from the White House. Another dignitary cortège. You know, the usual ‘meet and greet’ cattle call. What’s up?

Had to phone you, Butternut.

Larry’s goofy nickname for me, something to do with the color of my hair.

Yeah? Why?

New posting! Just this morning. His voice possessed an ill-concealed exuberance. I grinned. It had to be good.

Where? Where?

Cairo.

At that moment the bureau secretary, Wilma Thomas, stuck her grizzled gray head through the glass door and slipped in a thick sheaf of papers.

Today’s cable traffic, she whispered, and I nodded, taking the folder from her hand. After Wilma shut the door, I turned my back to the clear glass and faced the cracked paint behind the credenza.

How wonderful, Larry! A prime seat on the Middle East - orchestra center, I’d say. The Camp David Peace Accords had just been signed and Egypt had played a key role in the negotiations. Larry would be in the thick of authentic political history, every diplomat’s dream.

Don’t I know it! Larry crowed over the phone. I could picture him so easily: his narrow face split in a ready grin, his sandy hair tousled from a restless habit of raking his large-knuckled fingers through it whenever he was distracted, or bolting off down the hall.

Boy, I had to kiss up to the Undersecretary a good long time to land this peach, Larry confided. "Writing all those strategic position papers he fed to Vance, with his name on them."

When do you go? I asked, bending a paperclip around my little finger.

That’s the rub, dear girl. Typical ‘need you there yesterday’ bureau planning. The current envoy’s staff is dissembling this week, and Sinclair wants the new bodies in before they leave his orbit. I’ve let my apartment to a buddy of mine coming in from Nairobi - did you ever meet Robby Nicholson?

When, Larry.

Next Tuesday.

Tuesday? The paperclip dropped. You mean this coming Tuesday?

One and the same. Gosh, I’m sorry, Elle. That doesn’t leave much time for good-byes. An awkward pause lengthened between us. Larry spoke up hopefully. Meet me at Dejà Vu for dinner? Say around seven?

Okay, sure. Of course. Seven.

I set the phone down, blinking at the folder of cables sitting unopened on the desk. Why was I reacting this way? Comings and goings – all part of the job. I breathed, forcing myself to think. The Assignments Bureau moved us about like chess pieces as events and talents dictated. But this, this was regrettable. Larry and I…. Well, I had hoped for more. Time at least.

Draping my jacket over the back of my chair, I scooped the paperclip off the floor and tossed it into the trashcan, and then began the business of returning phone calls. For an hour I worked steadily through the incoming problem file, tracking down solutions to the crises cabled to my desk from the far-flung embassies in my care. I telephoned a shipping company regarding a junior officer’s case of missing household goods, last seen on a freighter presumed lost at sea; processed a request for new Drexel Heritage pieces for the embassy foyer in Athens; and priced out the options on a back-up generator for Sardinia. And the Paris RAMC, the Regional Administrative Computer Processing Center for European activities, seemed chronically in need of technical support.

It was past six before I discovered the pink message slip caught under the Rolodex. I picked it up, surprised. An odd one… a phone message from Drew Abrams. I looked at the number for a long reflective moment. Drew was in Madrid now. Why would he call? I shoved the message into the desk drawer, forgetting about it, and worked undisturbed until seven.

Larry left at a late hour that evening from my studio apartment. Slipping into his slacks and shirt, he hoisted open his briefcase and matter-of-factly stuffed in the book sitting on my bedside stand - his copy of the biography of Anwar Sadat, which I had not yet finished reading.

Until we meet again, fair Butternut, he planted a kiss on the top of my head. Maybe sooner than you think, depending on how these accords go.

Of course. I focused on Larry’s shoes. I had always admired the way he kept his tasseled burgundy loafers gleaming: a habit quite in keeping with his upper class, Yale-educated origins. I knew the way of the world would soon find those loafers parked beside some other young woman’s bed, the French Attaché perhaps. It hardly mattered. There were so few hard margins in this business. Companionship was the Holy Grail all of us hungered for - any intimacy, however fleeting, that might grace the nights. Ours was the false familiarity every stranger seeks.

Larry and I had just become such strangers.

I held out my hand. Good luck.

I watched as the door closed behind him.

Two weeks later, on the third of May, I remembered to return Drew’s phone call. I wasn’t being evasive. I just couldn’t physically seem to make my hand pick up the phone. I had been swamped with work, and drafted an analytical report on the ways embassy links to the processing center in Paris might be improved. It was a hot topic with the administration. The buzz on Capitol Hill concerned funding of mini-computer technology, and I firmly believed that with some on-site embassy input terminals for accounting and payroll data, the department could find better ways to manage resources.

I loved this idea of a new angle on old ways of doing things, and the work suited me: not too many of my colleagues knew I had graduate coursework in information systems design completed through MIT in the seventies. A reasonably logical step at the time following contacts made in the technology labs during undergraduate Wellesley - MIT exchange classes. In truth, the master’s degree had been conceived as a consequence of a lengthy, stupidly torrid affair with a married professor, whose only honest gift to me was the crystallization in my brain that computers were not the enemy. Just boxes speaking another language, microwaves learning French.

So, imitating the locals (the MIT students), I spoke FORTRAN and COBOL and conjugated keypunch instructions, having a lark. Only recently had the degree become any more useful than the literature of comparative cultures. One doesn’t usually think of the fountain pens of the State Department translating technology, but apparently external forces - the Office of Management and Budget for one, the Government Accounting Office and the CIA for another - were urging our senior people in this new direction.

Yes, I admitted to myself, the systems report was a bit of a sidebar, and personally I preferred the hands-on problem solving for departmental personnel in distress, half a world away. There is no gratitude like that of an officer when you have offered assistance facilitating his son or daughter’s life in a distant school, or expressed persistence springing a car out of customs. Small things; oiling the squeaky wheels of life.

Margery had convinced me to call Drew. Margery O’Hannon, who sat across the central foyer and made faces through my door glass as she trundled to and from the copier machine in the corner. Margery, seventh daughter of a Boston union pipe fitter, kissed the employed ground she walked on nearly every day. In that regard we had much in common. But Margery’s broad face seemed immune to flirtation: for her, there was only work, but for her undying interest in my love life.

Good Lord, Elle, she poked her head in to my office at the end of the week. For a warm-blooded lass such as yourself, this is one frigid office!

I crumpled up a paper and tossed it at her.

She ducked, laughing. We all know he called you! she shouted. And you’ll have to call him back!

Margery slipped back to her office, still chuckling, her generous backside jiggling as she squeezed herself in behind her desk. Looking across, she stuck her tongue out at me through two walls of glass. Wilma saw her, and her smooth black face broke into a merry grin. In unison they wagged their fingers in mock chastisement.

I scowled and turned my attention back to the matter of the Paris generator. Who cared why Drew called. I didn’t call him; so let him wait. Paris on the other hand was a real problem that needed a real answer, not an old dysfunctional love affair. Paris needed a new generator. Why not get the equipment from there? Europe had these things. It irked me no end that the government did business only with itself - sometimes resulting in thousands of dollars of additional expense in shipping, and certain delays.

At lunch in the first floor cafeteria, Margery plunked her tray down next to mine and poked her short nose directly into the line of fire between my salad fork and my mouth. I paused.

What now, Margery? I sighed, crossing my eyes at her.

You have to call him.

I do not. I forked my salad.

Oh, Ellen! Everyone knows what an item you two were around here last year. We thought you would be the twenty-third - or whatever the count is now - couple in the department to make it a team USA affair.

Oh sure, I said. Drew at the embassy, me at the consulate… a mere five hundred miles in between after breakfast. A nice solution to the married officer dilemma.

"Well, of course it’s bass-ackwards. Everything in the department is! In the personnel handbook ‘nepotism’ must fall immediately before ‘patriotism’. But you can’t not call him. You two were meant to be. You have to call him." Margery bit into her sandwich, fixing me with her fierce bluebird eyes.

I looked away. She was right, to a degree. The chemistry between Drew and I sparked the moment I had joined the tiny EUR staff. Spontaneous combustion, if you believed in such a thing. There had been no hiding it, and no wanting to.

Drew had graduated from the Kennedy School of Government, and in fact, we had once cross-enrolled at the same graduate seminar, although unknown to one another at the time. The discovery of small things like this - from a shared love of toffee and certain songs of the Rolling Stones, the acting out of Hollywood spaghetti westerns as kids, possessing big feet - these were ways in which we clicked and resonated through one another’s history and idiosyncrasies. Office proximity had fueled the manner in which the shy New Englander and I had gone from awkward subtle gawking at staff meetings to secret steamy Sunday mornings under the tangled sheets of my double bed. Drew and I shared weekends over the New York Times, listened to old Eric Dolphy recordings on the stereo as we watched the morning light sliver through the window blinds, comfortable in the surprise of each other’s arms.

No, I would not call Drew.

Three days later, another pink message slip showed up on my desk. Fine. He was determined. The phone popped and clicked as the number for Madrid connected through.

Drew? I made sure the office door was closed tight behind me. It’s Ellen.

Ellen! I could hear Drew recoil in slight shock, and I gripped the phone tightly, the familiar clipped sound of his accent evident even in the pronunciation of my name. Hold on a sec, he muttered. Let me get some privacy.

Heh there you, he came back on the line. What’s new in your life?

Chitchat? I frowned, and a new uncertainty grabbed hold.

Well Drew, I was surprised to get your messages. How is Spain? I kept my voice even and friendly.

Spain is great. This has been a fabulous posting. And nearly time to move on - I’m back in that six-month reassignment window again. I think it’ll be another southern European country within the region, you know. Maybe Italy. Drew spoke quickly, and I visualized his feet tapping the floor restlessly under his desk. Tennis shoes. Drew always wore tennis shoes. A rebellious holdover from his college years. He wore them under cashmere flannel slacks as well as jeans, and when he could get away with it - his suit. And how is the bureau treating you? he inquired.

I like being a post management officer. Feels good to solve people’s problems and not just push more paper around. I held my breath, hating the uncertainty. Drew – um, why did you call?

I’m getting married, Ellen.

I tilted back in my chair and stared upwards at the ceiling, a flush of something almost like anger - or was it pain? - spreading through my chest.

You need to call to tell me this?

Yes. I do. Please, Ellen. Hear me out. The dead earnestness of Drew’s voice forced me not to hang up.

Shoot.

Her name is Cynthia. Someone I knew from school, that I knew before you. I was always very fond of her. That does not mean I wasn’t, didn’t love you. It’s just… easier this way.

What the hell do you mean by that?

She’s not in the service, Ellen.

Silence deepened between us.

Goodbye, Drew, I released my breath.

Damn it, Ellen, wait! I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t because I, I cared.

Thoughts crashed through my mind, tangled and unsaid. But I didn’t hang up.

Look, Ellen, honey. When I was posted to Spain we talked about this. We’ve both been in the service exactly the same amount of time. We haven’t - either of us - the seniority to pull any favors from the bureau. So what to do? You’re serious about your career, as I am about mine. He exhaled. "When I headed to Spain another relationship was the last thing I wanted to do. I loved you, Ellen."

I pressed a hand to my forehead, willing away the memory of his eyes. Dark and sincere, Godiva chocolate in color, I’d always loved Drew’s eyes.

I know, but I always hoped, that maybe, when you came back —

Me, too. Only the more I thought about it, the clearer the situation became. One of us would have to make some serious career sacrifices. And I respect you too much for that.

But you never asked me to, I grieved in silence, my hand in a tight fist. Why, Drew, why didn’t you at least ask?

So you see? When Cynthia passed through Madrid last October on a vacation trip with her girlfriends, she looked me up and things kind of, well you know, got going again. We’ll be married in June. Cynthia’s going to quit her preschool job in Brookline and join me here.

I dug my fist into the center of my brow and pressed hard. There it was. The perfect Foreign Service spouse. The able and adoring, fully dedicated wife to set up housekeeping, manage the money exchange and the marketing. The wife who would never, but never, raise any other priority that might conflict with the posting of her husband. Why weren’t the men interested in the role of spouse? Be content to read the international press and drink cups of café or burgundy through lazy afternoons as their spouses worked the embassy? Why just the women? Were female officers too assertive, too focused, or simply too competitive to make good wives? Too talented to be interested in ambitionless men, but too restricted by our careers to have the men we chose?

Congratulations, I said thinly. Have a ducky life.

Wordless feelings vibrated between us, pushing hard.

I wanted you to know.

Know what? That I’m your first choice? But you didn’t want, or care to make it work? There it was. The carnation, and not the rose. I’ve always hated carnations, Drew.

Ellen, that’s not fair. You know the facts as well as I do. What we had was good. Fantastic, in fact. It’s just…it wouldn’t have worked. And what the hell do mean about carnations?

Forget it. Well, thanks for letting me know. A nice postcard from Spain would haves sufficed. I couldn’t believe it was ending, and like this. Didn’t he know? Hadn’t I told him? I shook my head, stunned. Drew, I, I loved you!

The confession flew out of my mouth, and horribly too, like the bleat of a lamb abandoned in the rain.

I know, baby.

I held the phone away and stared at it, feeling hot tears roll down my cheeks. Oh damn, oh damn, now he was feeling sorry for me.

I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand and forced out a tight, tinkling voice. Well, you know what they say in the policy business, Drew. A compromise is never ever as good as the right choice. Be well.

I lowered the phone and stared blankly at the wall. Two men gone in one month. One I had loved, and one I thought I might.

Margery stole into my cubicle and handed me her box of tissues.

I blew my nose and opened the new file of cable traffic on my desk. Rolling the piece of paper with Drew’s phone number into a crumpled ball, I flicked the scrap into the trashcan. There would be no pink message slips from tasseled loafers or tennis shoes. Those men had gone walking.

Chapter Two

Laundry

Wilma popped her head into my cubicle. You better get up there, Miz d’Ullay! she hissed, her brown eyes alarmed. They don’ like to be kept waiting… She glanced pointedly at her watch.

Startled, I leapt up and smoothed down my skirt. Thanks, Wilma. I shuffled together my notes, clipping them to the top copy of the newly-bound automated system reports stacked on my desk. Did I have everything? Were there enough copies?

You’ll be fine, Wilma clucked, pushing me out the door. You just be yourself, honey. They ain’t monsters, just terribly important.

Wilma’s words echoed in my ears as I ran for the elevator. I pushed the button for the sixth floor. Once inside, the elevator ground upwards, even though my stomach fell on a full tilt. How many times had I actually come up here, I wondered. Maybe half a dozen times in as many years? Once on the official building tour, twice with deliveries as a new officer, and the one time I snuck my mother up. She had insisted on seeing where the big guns operated. The elevator doors had slid open and she had poked her silver head out, taking a very long gawk before I pulled her back in and let the elevator ride back down.

Ellen, she had pouted, I didn’t even get to see the offices!

No one does, Mom, I had countered, dying inside, afraid someone at the reception desk might have recognized me. They’re important people - that’s the point.

Here we go. Tugging my skirt straight, I held my breath as the elevator slugged to a stop and the doors rolled silently open. I wished I had more of a sense of the layout of the executive floor, that I felt less foreign. I approached the receptionist’s wide oak desk. Her plaque said Mrs. Henley.

Ellen d’Ullay to see Undersecretary Connors, I said.

The secretary nodded, although I suspected I had seen the quiver of a tiny laugh in her eyes as I squeaked out my request. She buzzed the intercom and in a moment I was shown in behind the massive double doors.

The inner sanctum revealed a richly appointed room of priceless Americana - Federalist period furniture, antique oriental rugs, and early American Illuminist landscape paintings hung on the walls. I gawked for a second before the panoramic view beyond the massive windows: in the distance stood the Washington Monument, a pale spike against a cloudless sky. Mrs. Henley directed me to an upright chair in crimson and gold stripes facing the conference table and inquired if I would like something to drink. A crystal pitcher of water and glasses rested on the gleaming conference table centered in the room. I shook my head.

Welcome, Miss d’Ullay, greeted the man seated at the head of the conference table, Undersecretary of Administration, Benjamin Bradley Connors. He was older than his official portrait, but better looking too: the hawkish nose balanced by a strong linear brow. The brisk efficiency of his stare unnerved me to the core.

Only then did I notice the other staff members present.

Introductions were made around the