Archive of Our Own

Leonard Fowkes had three carburettor gaskets spread across the counter when his wife came through the door carrying the newspaper against her chest. The television above the parts shelves had been on since he opened, its picture slipping sideways whenever a truck passed the Tacoma shop, and for the last twenty minutes he’d been listening to men explain how a presidency changed hands. He’d watched Beale often enough to recognise his voice from the stockroom. Whitford he knew chiefly as the woman who stood beside him, though now the camera seemed unwilling to leave her alone. Marjorie waited until Leonard finished writing a receipt, then laid the newspaper over the gaskets. “What was that girl’s name?” she asked. He glanced at the screen, assuming she meant the woman standing close to the new president. “Which girl?” Marjorie tapped the open page. “The one you went to school with. The one whose mother came in and gave you boys hell.”

He looked at his customer, who was counting change into a tobacco tin, and gave Marjorie the small, warning smile he used when something domestic arrived at work. “There were plenty of mothers did that.” She didn’t answer until the customer had gone. Then she turned the paper so the column faced him and put a finger beneath a line halfway down. The profile gave Whitford’s birthplace as Silver Ridge, her parents’ names, her childhood name. Leonard read it with the same deliberate attention he gave a part number that seemed almost right. Yaakova Katelya Petrović. His eyes moved back to the photograph at the top, then across to the television. “No,” he said, although Marjorie hadn’t asked him anything. She pulled the newspaper nearer to stop a draught from lifting it. “You used to call her Kova when you told that story.”

He remembered the name properly once she said it. He remembered how some of them had stretched its first syllable until it sounded like an animal noise, and how the girl had kept walking when they did it, except on the afternoons when she turned around. He’d told Marjorie about one of those afternoons years ago, during a conversation about how much trouble boys could get into before they learned sense. In his version, there’d been an argument over a book, a girl with a temper, a mother who descended on the school like a sheriff. Marjorie had laughed at his imitation of himself trying to explain matters. He could hear that laugh now, though she was standing quietly on the other side of the counter. “She went away,” he said. “Summer of forty-five. She was thirteen.” Marjorie looked from the printed age to him. “That fits.”

On the screen, Phoebe Whitford stood in ivory silk with her left hand resting on a book. Leonard leaned forward, trying to get past the interference, and the picture steadied as though his attention had repaired it. He didn’t recognise a particular feature so much as an arrangement: the chin held level, the eyes lifted towards someone taller, the mouth at rest before she spoke. He’d seen that arrangement across a school desk. He’d also seen it from much closer, with his fingers twisted in the strap of her bag while another boy searched it. She’d told him to let go. He’d held on because the other boy was laughing and because letting go, at that moment, would have looked like obeying her. Nothing in the newspaper could have supplied that memory. He reached past Marjorie and turned the television up.

When the oath ended, he stayed with his hand on the volume knob. Applause rattled through the little speaker; someone entering the shop stopped beneath the bell and waited to be noticed. Leonard served him a packet of fuses, gave him too much change, corrected it, and apologised twice. Marjorie moved the gaskets away from the damp ring left by his tea. Once they were alone again, she said, “You never mentioned she was Jewish.” He bent to shut the till. “Didn’t seem part of the story.” Marjorie folded her arms, not tightly, and looked at the newspaper. “Was it part of what happened?” The question was so ordinary that he couldn’t take offence at it. He put both hands flat on the counter, spreading his fingers among the scratches left by years of customers dragging metal across the wood. “Yes,” he said. “It was.”

For a while he occupied himself with finding the gaskets’ envelopes. He could remember the girl’s mother’s scarf more clearly than her face, and the peculiar indignation he’d felt when she spoke directly to him. He’d thought it unfair that a grown woman should stand over his desk and ask him questions while everybody watched. He’d gone home and complained about it. His own mother had said foreigners sometimes had different manners, which had pleased him enormously, because it restored the proper order of things. Now he was forty-three, with a shop lease, a son apprenticed to an electrician and a wife who knew exactly how much kindness he was capable of on an ordinary day. He couldn’t find a way of fitting the boy into that account without leaving something out. “I took her things,” he said, still searching the pile of envelopes. “It wasn’t an argument. That’s how it started.”

Marjorie didn’t tell him that thirty years was a long time. She took an envelope from beneath his elbow and passed it to him, then waited while he slid the first gasket inside. On the television, people were coming forward to shake the president’s hand. Leonard watched her turn towards each of them, attentive even when the room pressed close, and tried to remember whether he’d ever spoken to her alone. There must have been a morning before the others arrived, a stretch of road, a moment at the drinking fountain. He found occasions on which it would have been possible, but nothing he’d actually said. When Marjorie asked whether he wanted her to leave the paper, he nodded. She laid it on the cleared end of the counter, and throughout the morning he kept putting invoices beside it instead of on top.

Beverly Clegg had known since the Senate election. Her brother had sent her the Nevada clipping in November 1966, with three blue circles around the photograph and a question mark so large it crossed into an advertisement for tyres. She’d recognised the name in the profile before she fully accepted the face. Since then, Senator Whitford had become Vice President Whitford, and Beverly had acquired a small, useful fact about herself that she brought out at dinners when the conversation approached Washington. In her San Diego dining room, where the curtains were drawn against the morning glare, her daughter stood close to the television with a slice of toast cooling in her hand. “Mum, she’s doing it,” Celia said. Beverly had already seen the announcement, had already telephoned two women before breakfast, but she came in carrying her sewing basket as though history had caught her in the middle of an ordinary morning.

Celia was twenty, home for a few days, and wearing a blouse Beverly intended to take in before she went back. She moved a dining chair in front of the set and sat backwards on it, her arms along the wooden back. Beverly lowered herself more carefully into the armchair. “You know I was at school with her,” she said. Celia turned so quickly that a crumb fell from her toast. “With the president?” Beverly smiled at the title, enjoying its new weight. “With Phoebe. Years before she called herself that, of course.” She’d never called her Phoebe to anyone before. The name came easily now, intimate without requiring explanation. Celia put her plate down. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Beverly opened the sewing basket and lifted out the blouse. “I’m sure I must have.”

There’d been a birthday at Beverly’s house when they were eleven. Her mother had let her invite the girls she wanted, and Beverly had written their names herself, in careful coloured pencil, making the invitations large enough to be admired when she handed them out. She’d waited until Yaakova was beside the cloakroom pegs before distributing the last three. Nobody had asked where hers was. Afterwards Beverly had described the cake within her hearing, the little paper cups, the game her older cousin was going to organise, and had enjoyed the effort Yaakova made to appear occupied with her coat. That memory arrived while Celia asked what the president had been like at school. Beverly pressed the blouse flat across her knees. “Very determined,” she said. “She always knew her own mind.”

Her husband, Ross, came in halfway through the oath and remained by the door with his tie hanging loose. He knew the Nevada story in more detail than Celia did; Beverly’s brother had spent a holiday with them once and talked too freely after dinner. Ross looked at his daughter, then at Beverly, but said nothing. When the applause began, Celia caught her mother’s forearm. “Imagine sitting in a classroom beside her and having no idea.” Beverly let herself be held. The young hand was warm through her sleeve, the pleasure in Celia’s face immediate and unguarded. She wanted to remain inside it. “Well, she certainly stood out,” she said, and heard Ross draw a breath before deciding against whatever he might have said.

Later, while Celia telephoned a friend, Beverly pinned the blouse at the waist and watched her own fingers tremble enough to make the work awkward. She could hear her daughter in the hall saying that her mother had grown up with the president. It was a bigger statement than Beverly had made, though only slightly. She could have called out a correction. Instead she kept the pins between her lips and waited until Celia came back for the fitting. Her daughter stood patiently while Beverly tugged the seams into place, still talking about Washington, still delighted that something so immense had turned out to have a loose thread running into their house. “Were you friends?” she asked, looking down. Beverly took a pin from her mouth. “We were in the same class.”

Celia accepted that for a moment, then said, “I know, but did you go to her house? Did she come here—well, to your old house?” Beverly’s hands stopped at the blouse’s side seam. She could have said they’d lost touch, which was true only if the phrase meant nothing more than that they’d once occupied the same building. Ross was in the garden now, visible beyond the glass, kneeling beside a sprinkler. There was nobody in the room to correct her. “No,” she said. “She didn’t come to our house.” Celia looked faintly disappointed, but the disappointment wasn’t accusatory; already her attention was returning to the television. Beverly bent to retrieve a fallen pin and remained there a moment longer than necessary, searching the carpet after she’d found it.

Gordon Satterlee received the news in a Wichita hotel bar, where the bartender had propped a small television on the end of a shelf usually reserved for bottles. Gordon sold commercial refrigeration equipment and had been on the road since before breakfast. He was hungry, hot beneath his jacket and pleased to discover a place where he could get a sandwich without sitting through a proper lunch. The man beside him was watching the replay of the oath with the absorbed expression of someone whose business had been interrupted but who didn’t resent it. Gordon glanced up, took a long drink of beer and said, “I used to pull her pigtails.” He hadn’t, precisely, but it was a more agreeable opening than the things he had done.

The man turned. “You’re serious?” Gordon nodded towards the screen, chewing. “Indian Springs. Little school out in Nevada. She didn’t have that name then.” The bartender came nearer, wiping his hands on a towel, and Gordon felt the familiar shift of a room making space for him. He’d learned that sensation early. It had once begun with a whispered imitation, a noise at the back of the classroom, a remark just loud enough to reach the right ears. He could still locate the exact point at which other people’s amusement became his property. “She’d fight you,” he said. “Little thing, but Jesus, she’d fight.” The bartender grinned. “Looks like she still would.”

Gordon extended his left hand as though it might provide evidence. There was a white mark along one knuckle, received from a broken bottle in his twenties, but neither man knew that. “We had some battles.” In fact, there’d usually been three of them and one of her, with the fighting beginning only after they’d exhausted the pleasures of keeping something out of reach. Once it had been a scarf. Another time a lunch pail, swung by its handle from boy to boy while she ran between them. Gordon remembered the sound of it hitting the dirt when the latch opened. He remembered laughing at the indignation on her face. At the bar, he made a smaller, gentler memory of it with his hands: children chasing, a spirited girl, a harmless distance everyone had travelled.

“Did you know when she was vice president?” the man asked. Gordon wiped mustard from his thumb with the edge of his napkin. “Sure. My sister sent me something when she got on the ticket. I said then, that’s Kova. No question.” He’d been surprised, but pleasantly enough. People he’d known had become foremen, owned stores, married money, lost money, ended up in places he’d never visit. One of them entering national politics had seemed another curiosity to mention when a conversation thinned. This was better. He raised his glass a little towards the screen. “Look at her now.”

The bartender asked whether Gordon thought she’d remember him. Gordon gave a broad, immediate smile. “Oh, she’d remember me.” The answer pleased him so much that he repeated it, leaning back to let the thought settle. He pictured an introduction, the president looking closely, the astonished laugh when he supplied his old surname and the name of the school. There’d be a story for the room. He could almost hear himself telling it, with her standing beside him and the important people listening. He didn’t picture the lunch scattered on the ground. That belonged to the version nobody had asked for.

When the man next to him paid his bill, he paused with his wallet open. “Funny how things turn out.” Gordon agreed and ordered another beer. He had an appointment in forty minutes, but the plant was only a short drive away and the purchasing manager habitually kept him waiting. On the television, the replay gave way to a panel of commentators. Gordon watched a moment, then told the bartender that she’d once thrown a book at a boy’s head. He supplied enough detail to make the incident lively and omitted what had been written inside the cover. The bartender laughed, shook his head and went to make a fresh pot of coffee.

Sybil Ransom was cutting the browned centres out of strawberries when her husband called her into the sitting room of their Providence house. She disliked being summoned from one end of a task, especially when Everett knew where she was, and she carried the paring knife with her to make that inconvenience visible. He stood beside the television holding a folded section of newspaper. “Wasn’t your father at Indian Springs for a while?” he asked. Sybil’s irritation softened into caution. She didn’t speak often about Nevada; she’d spent most of her adult life cultivating a more coherent account of herself than the dusty succession of houses in which her father’s work had put them. “We lived there,” she said. “Until after the war.”

Everett held out the page. “This says she went to school there. She’s about your age.” Sybil looked at the photograph, then at the screen, where the new president was listening to someone just outside the camera’s view. The name meant nothing familiar. The place did. She read down the column and reached Petrović, at which point her fingers tightened around the knife. Everett, noticing, took it from her and laid it on a side table. “You did know her.” Sybil kept reading, although she’d already passed the lines she needed. “There was a girl,” she said. “But she wasn’t anything like that.”

She remembered a girl who returned insults, who refused to cry when a reasonable girl would have cried and thereby let the rest of them finish. Sybil had found the refusal particularly aggravating. She’d copied the way Yaakova’s mother spoke, repeating a few words until the other girls could recognise the performance without needing an explanation. Once, Yaakova had told her to shut her mouth, which Sybil had reported to a teacher as though the sentence had arrived without a morning attached to it. She remembered being comforted. Remembered how readily she’d become the injured party once she spoke in the correct tone. Now she looked at the president’s poised face and experienced the old, unreasonable annoyance of discovering that the girl had again declined the position prepared for her.

“She must have married,” Everett said, studying the two names. Sybil was already shaking her head. “No. It says she chose it.” He looked back at the article and found the sentence. “So it does.” She took the page from him. The ease of the explanation irritated her: a name could be changed, a career built, a woman placed before the entire nation, and everybody behaved as though those facts settled who she was. Sybil read the original name again, inwardly giving it the ugly rhythm the children had used. Then she looked up and found Everett watching her. “What?” she asked. He shrugged. “I wondered what she was like.”

“Difficult,” Sybil said. The word relieved her. It was adult, restrained, capable of carrying a great deal without submitting any of it for inspection. “She was always getting into fights. Her mother was forever coming to the school.” Everett settled into his chair, apparently content to listen. “About the fights?” Sybil nodded. “Well, I suppose she would,” he said. There was no challenge in his voice, which made it harder to answer. Sybil folded the paper along a new crease. “You didn’t know the family.” He glanced at the screen. “No. That’s why I’m asking you.”

She returned to the kitchen before the coverage ended and stood over the strawberries, looking at the empty place where she’d left the knife. For a moment she considered going back to fetch it. Instead she took another from the drawer. When a neighbour telephoned that afternoon to discuss the resignation, Sybil mentioned that the new president had attended her school. She gave the old name carefully, with an air of possessing the unabridged version of a public story. “Quite a transformation,” she said, and waited for the neighbour to agree. When the woman replied that it must be wonderful to see someone from such a small place come so far, Sybil pressed her lips together and turned the bowl on the counter until its chipped edge faced the wall.

Luther Bellows learned who Phoebe Whitford had been from a newspaper abandoned on the table in a Chicago postal workers’ break room. He already knew she was president; the radio had delivered that information between a weather report and a discussion of the morning traffic. He sat with his lunch on his knees because the table was crowded with newspapers and someone’s half-finished game of patience, and he began reading the profile upside down while a younger man across from him worked through the sports section. Silver Ridge caught his eye. He asked for the page, turned it, and found Yaakova’s name above a paragraph about her departure for Las Vegas. The sandwich in his hand sagged where his fingers loosened.

Luther had been the boy who carried things along. He hadn’t needed to invent a name or devise a trick; somebody else generally supplied one. He’d repeated the names, passed the notes, put a foot across the aisle when it was expected of him. If a teacher asked who had started something, he could usually say, with technical accuracy, that he hadn’t. For years he’d remembered himself as a quiet child, and in most respects he had been. He’d spoken little at home and disliked answering questions before the class. Looking at the newspaper, he remembered the relief of hearing everyone laugh at somebody else. There’d been days when he joined in before he even knew what had happened.

The younger man asked whether he’d found bad news. Luther shook his head too quickly, then had to correct the movement because it felt like a denial of something larger. “I knew her,” he said. The man leaned over to see whom he meant. “Whitford?” Luther nodded. “At school. Back home.” His companion looked impressed and began asking the ordinary questions: same class, same town, had she been clever, had she always talked the way she did now? Luther couldn’t supply much. He knew which bench she’d chosen on the bus. He knew where she’d put her lunch pail so it would be less easily reached. He remembered the way her shoulders tightened when laughter began behind her. Asked what she’d liked, he stared at the page until the younger man repeated the question.

“Books,” he said at last. It was probable. She’d often had one. He couldn’t name a single book he’d seen her read, and the realisation embarrassed him more sharply than saying he didn’t know would have done. The younger man was telling him that his own sister had voted for Beale because of Whitford, that she’d been waiting for a woman to get that far and had called their mother before work. Luther listened and nodded. He had no story to offer in return. Thirty years earlier he’d spent entire mornings within arm’s reach of Yaakova and had never once wondered what she might tell him if he asked her something kindly.

At home that evening, he wrote her name on a sheet torn from a pad used for shopping lists. He put President Whitford beneath it, then crossed out the childhood name because he didn’t know what right he had to begin with that. The apartment was quiet except for a neighbour moving furniture upstairs. Luther had lived alone for six years, and on most evenings the quiet suited him. He cooked, washed up, listened to the radio and went to bed without feeling that anything essential had been omitted. Tonight he kept remembering a bench on which he’d spread his coat when she approached. There’d been room. He’d looked out of the window until she went elsewhere.

He began a sentence about having been children and disliked it before he reached the end. Another began with the news, as though the news were what he needed to discuss. He imagined the envelope opened by somebody at a desk, the page read quickly, placed with others, perhaps answered by a person whose work involved thanking strangers. He wanted her to know he understood, but beneath that was another wish, less comfortable to inspect: that she might remember him as less bad than the boys who’d actually hurt her. He set the pencil down. After a while he tore the page across, put the pieces in the kitchen bin, and took the newspaper out of his work bag. He read the rest of the profile, including the parts that had nothing to do with Nevada.

Maxine Toller had been celebrating the new president for nearly an hour before she discovered she’d once helped make the girl’s schooldays miserable. In her Denver office, two clients had postponed appointments and her assistant had wheeled a television out of the storage room, balancing it on a typing table between an architect’s rendering and a pot plant that nobody remembered to water. Maxine stood with her shoes kicked off beneath her desk and watched the oath with a pleasure so fierce it made her laugh. She’d voted for the ticket. She’d argued for Whitford at dinners where men kept explaining which kinds of power women could reasonably expect. Now she clapped once, loudly, and said, “There she is,” to nobody in particular.

Her aunt telephoned just after lunch. The older woman still lived in Nevada and had a habit of beginning conversations in the middle, as though Maxine had been standing beside her all morning. “Did you recognise the Petrović girl?” she asked. Maxine held the receiver between her shoulder and ear while she signed a purchase agreement. “Who?” Her aunt repeated the name and added, “The president, Maxine. Yaakova. You were at school together.” Maxine stopped writing with the pen still touching the page. Ink spread into the downstroke of her surname. “No,” she said, then, after a silence, “Are you sure?” Her aunt was delighted to have supplied a surprise of this size and began recounting everything she remembered about the family.

Maxine scarcely heard her. She was seeing the school steps and the loose arrangement of girls that had somehow always closed when Yaakova came near. She’d been one of the girls on the outside of that arrangement, eager to move inward. When Beverly Danner laughed, Maxine had laughed a little louder; when a girl made a show of moving her lunch away from Yaakova’s, Maxine had moved hers too. She remembered once being alone with her near the water pump, both of them waiting for a younger child to finish. Without an audience, there’d been no immediate reason to be unkind. Maxine had looked at the girl’s shoes, then across the yard, and said nothing until somebody arrived whom she could safely address.

She put the receiver down only after her aunt asked twice whether she was still there. Her assistant, June, came in with a message slip and found Maxine standing by the little television, examining the face she’d watched all morning. “Everything all right?” June asked. Maxine gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “I went to school with her.” June’s eyebrows rose. “You never said.” Maxine shook her head. “I didn’t know.” The admission sounded absurd. She tried again, explaining the changed name, the town, the aunt who’d remembered. June glanced at the screen with fresh interest. “That must feel extraordinary.” Maxine put her hand over her mouth, then lowered it. “It does.”

The pleasure returned before she expected it. It came through the shock, through the recollection of her own small calculations, and remained recognisably pleasure. Yaakova had got out. She’d gone beyond every adult they’d once considered important, beyond the families whose invitations had determined how Maxine behaved, beyond the town in which a girl could be made to feel that an empty place beside somebody was more than she was entitled to ask for. Maxine sat on the edge of her desk and watched a replay of people moving forward to congratulate the president. She wanted someone to telephone who would understand how astonishing it was. When June asked whether they’d been close, she answered without trying to improve it. “No. I was nasty to her.”

June paused with the message slip still in her hand. Maxine could see the quick, involuntary reassessment, and for a moment she wanted to explain how young she’d been, how much she’d needed the other girls’ approval. She recognised the shape of the explanation before she spoke it. “I liked being included,” she said instead. “She paid for some of that.” June set the message on the desk and asked whether Maxine still wanted the afternoon appointments moved. Maxine looked towards the television, where Phoebe had turned to someone beyond the frame and was smiling with her whole face. “Keep the four o’clock,” she said. “And leave that on.”

Floyd Pell had known about Whitford for years, but until the morning of the inauguration he’d failed to make anything useful of it. From his office above a building supplies yard in Lakeland, Florida, the distinction seemed glaring. A senator was one of a hundred people who might know somebody who could help. A vice president was important, certainly, but largely attached to somebody else’s administration. A president was a fact that could be placed near the beginning of a conversation and alter everything that followed. Floyd watched the ceremony from the doorway while his secretary ate her lunch at her desk. When it ended, he went upstairs, opened the lower drawer of his filing cabinet and searched for the envelope in which he kept addresses from Nevada.

The first number he tried belonged to a man’s widow. The second had been disconnected. On the third attempt he reached an old classmate’s brother, who gave him a number in Washington State and asked why he wanted it. Floyd told him with an expansive warmth that made the distance seem less than it was. “We ought to do something. Some of the old crowd. Let her know we’re proud.” By mid-afternoon he had Leonard Fowkes on the line. They spent several minutes identifying brothers, fathers, old houses and a store that had changed ownership twice before reaching the reason for the call. “Thought we might get a letter together,” Floyd said. “A few signatures. It’d be nice for her to hear from home.”

Leonard didn’t answer immediately. Floyd heard a bell, then a muffled exchange with somebody in the shop. When Leonard returned, his voice was flatter. “What would we say?” Floyd leaned back, pleased to have reached practical matters. “Congratulations. We always knew she’d make something of herself. That sort of thing.” Leonard made a sound Floyd couldn’t identify. “I didn’t know that.” Floyd laughed gently, as though his friend had mistaken a social expression for a sworn statement. “Well, you know what I mean.” Leonard said he had a customer and would have to leave it. Floyd promised to send a draft, although Leonard hadn’t agreed to receive one.

On his own company letterhead, Floyd began with Dear Phoebe, then considered whether Madam President would be more effective. He settled on the formal greeting and restored the intimacy in the first sentence, where he called himself an old school friend. He could remember her clearly enough: quick to anger, sharp with an answer, never willing to accept that some jokes were easier endured. Once he’d persuaded her that a teacher wanted to see her after the other children left, then hidden behind the corner to watch her wait outside a locked classroom. He’d told that story at least a dozen times before he left Nevada. Now he searched it for something that could become evidence of perseverance.

His secretary brought in a supplier’s invoice and noticed the letter. “You know the president?” Floyd gave the modest smile he’d been practising while he wrote. “From way back.” She was impressed, and he let himself enjoy it before asking her to type the page. He added a paragraph about the growth of his business and the work they were doing for families settling in central Florida. It wasn’t a request. He was careful about that. A first letter established a relationship; asking too much immediately made a man appear crude. He mentioned that he travelled to Washington occasionally, although he’d last been there on a family holiday, and said it would be a pleasure to renew their acquaintance when her schedule allowed.

Before signing, he changed old school friend to schoolmate. The second word felt sturdier. It couldn’t be challenged, and he disliked leaving a weakness in anything he put his name to. He read the finished page once more, found the tone warm without being familiar, and called downstairs for an envelope. By the time he left the yard, the letter was on the outgoing tray and he’d told three people that he was writing to the president. Driving home, he began considering which of his better suits he’d wear if an invitation came.

Arlene Quist had kept the Senate clipping in a recipe book for almost nine years. She couldn’t later explain why she’d chosen that particular place, except that it was somewhere her husband was unlikely to look and somewhere she herself would encounter it often enough not to forget. When the radio in her Minneapolis classroom announced Beale’s resignation, she was taking children’s drawings down from a display board at the end of the school year. The paper had faded everywhere except beneath the drawing pins. She stood on a low stool with three paintings under her arm and listened until the announcer repeated Phoebe’s name. Then she climbed down, set the paintings on a desk and switched the radio off because she wanted to hear the words again in her own head.

Arlene knew what she’d done. She’d known before the clipping, before becoming a teacher, before having a daughter who once came home sick with dread over a group of girls who’d stopped speaking to her. She hadn’t spent adulthood believing herself innocent. Yet the memory had remained manageable so long as she described it in the plural. They’d been cruel. They’d made fun of the girl. Nobody had helped. When she spoke about such things in general terms, as teachers sometimes did over lunch, Arlene felt the seriousness of experience behind her opinions. She knew how a classroom could turn. She knew that quiet children participated. What she rarely allowed into the conversation was the particular afternoon on which she’d drawn a face on Yaakova’s exercise book and passed it to the girl behind her for improvement.

She’d done the nose. Somebody else had written the words. That distinction had once mattered enormously to her, although she couldn’t remember exactly when she’d stopped believing it mattered to anybody else. Yaakova had found the book, looked at the cover and then looked around the room. Arlene remembered concentrating on the teacher’s desk with a ferocity she’d never given a lesson. There’d been laughter in two corners. The girl had torn the cover off rather than carry it home, leaving the binding ragged. Later Arlene had watched her hold the pages together with one hand while she wrote with the other. She’d never offered paper, thread, another book or an explanation.

At home, she took the clipping from the recipe book before her husband returned. Paul found her sitting at the kitchen table beside the television they usually kept in the bedroom, the old newspaper flattened under a saucer. He knew the story in outline and recognised the clipping. “I wondered how you’d be feeling,” he said. Arlene pulled out the chair beside her with her foot. “I’m glad,” she answered, and found that she was. Paul sat down. On the screen, Phoebe listened to the oath, her expression composed, the bright fabric of her sleeve moving as she raised her hand. Arlene watched closely without trying to locate the child inside the woman. She’d already done that years ago. Today the woman was allowed to be visible too.

Afterwards Paul asked whether she’d ever considered writing. Arlene ran a finger along the old crease in the clipping. “Several times.” He waited. She knew he wasn’t encouraging her towards a particular answer; he’d been married to her long enough to recognise when a question needed room. “I always get to the bit where I explain I wasn’t one of the worst,” she said. Paul glanced at her. “Were you?” Arlene thought of the carefully drawn nose, the satisfaction of passing the book on and seeing the next girl smile. “I don’t know how she’d have sorted us.” She moved the saucer aside so she could see the whole photograph.

That evening she returned to the school to collect the bag she’d forgotten. The corridors smelled of floor polish and warm paper, and the emptied classrooms were strange in the long light. On her desk lay the records she’d been finishing for the next teacher. She sat down and read a paragraph about a boy who’d spent much of the term getting into arguments at recess. There were dates, examples, sensible observations. There was also a sentence about his inability to take a joke. Arlene read it three times, then drew a line through it. Beneath it she wrote what the other children had actually been doing, using the names she’d previously kept out. The page was untidy when she finished. She left it that way and clipped it to the rest of the report.

Owen Bracknell had never expected the president to know his name. It wasn’t something he’d considered worth expecting or not expecting; presidents belonged to the radio, to newspaper photographs, to the great machinery of the country that continued while Owen repaired smaller machinery in a Norfolk shipyard. Then his wife came home from the hairdresser with a magazine somebody had let her borrow and asked him to look at a childhood photograph. He was standing at the kitchen sink with his hands under the tap. “That school’s yours, isn’t it?” she said. Owen wiped his hands, leaned over the page and recognised the building before he recognised any of the children. “Where’d you get that?”

The photograph was part of a profile being brought out again after the resignation. A small arrow identified the president as a girl in one of the rows, and the caption supplied the name he’d last heard shouted across the yard. Owen sat down. His wife, Janet, watched him with growing interest. “You really were there together.” He nodded without looking at her. He’d seen Phoebe Whitford in newspapers for years, but the face had belonged to somebody called Phoebe Whitford. Even the Nevada connection hadn’t travelled all the way back to a child whose name he’d kept in another part of his head. Now the two accounts closed together. He put a thumb over the arrow and found that he could still pick her out.

He’d once held a door shut while two boys told her she could come out if she said what they wanted. Owen had stood with his shoulder against the wood, enjoying the pressure from the other side and the authority it gave him. He couldn’t now remember the precise words they’d demanded. He remembered the other boys laughing when she kicked the door. He remembered being startled by the strength of the next shove. Eventually a teacher came, and Owen stepped away quickly enough to pretend he’d only just arrived. Nobody had asked him a second question. He’d gone home that afternoon and helped his father mend a gate.

Janet asked what he was thinking. Owen turned the magazine a little farther from her. “She might remember us.” His wife smiled at first, taking that as the usual wonder. “Well, she might. Were you one of her friends?” Owen shook his head. The speed of the answer changed Janet’s expression. She sat down opposite him and looked again at the photograph. “What happened?” He didn’t want to tell her with the children likely to come in, although the children were both out and wouldn’t be home for hours. He said they’d been rough. Janet waited until the inadequacy of the word became uncomfortable. Then he told her about the door.

That night he lay awake considering things he’d never considered together before: the spelling of his surname on the school roll, the address on his tax return, the employer whose contracts brought men in dark suits through the yard offices. By morning he knew his fear was ridiculous, but knowing didn’t stop him looking twice at a car parked opposite their house. He was ashamed of that too. When Janet found him at the kitchen table with the telephone directory open, she asked whom he intended to call. He’d been looking for an old classmate whose family had moved east, though he wasn’t sure what he wanted from him. Agreement that it hadn’t been serious, perhaps. Evidence that nobody else was worried.

“She’s got a country to run,” Janet said, pulling a chair out. Owen shut the directory. “I know that.” She poured herself a glass of water and sat with it between her hands. “Then what are you expecting?” He looked at the closed cover. He wasn’t expecting a knock at the door in any sensible meaning of the word. He was trying to imagine what it would be like to have somebody powerful decide that a thing he’d done was worth their attention, without his being able to explain it away or leave. “Nothing,” he said finally. Janet watched him for another moment, then got up to make breakfast.

When he reached the yard, a colleague had pinned a photograph of the oath beside the time clock. Owen stopped under the excuse of checking the notice beneath it. Men came past him, took their cards, complained about the heat and the work waiting for them. Nobody looked at him differently. The president’s face remained in the same calm arrangement while the minute hand moved. Owen put his card into the machine, heard the stamp fall and returned it to its slot more carefully than he needed to.

Lorna Varga’s husband told her while she was ironing pillowcases in their Queens apartment. He’d been reading the evening paper at the other end of the table, moving his tea whenever she advanced the damp bundle towards him. “Petrović,” he said, sounding out the name with the comfortable interest he took in other people’s family histories. “That was her name before Whitford. Born out in Nevada.” Lorna kept the iron moving. Her husband, Miklós, read the next line. “Silver Ridge. Isn’t that near where you were?” She lifted the iron from the cloth and held it in the air until he looked up. “Lorna?”

She’d known the president was Jewish. She’d known it without discomfort, had defended her in conversations, had once told a woman at work that anybody still complaining about a Jewish vice president ought to find something useful to occupy their mind. She’d said it with the confidence of a woman who’d been married into a Jewish family for eighteen years and knew how stupid people could be. Now she was looking at a name she’d pronounced cruelly before she was old enough to understand much beyond the usefulness of cruelty. “I went to school with her,” she said. Miklós lowered the paper. “With Whitford?” Lorna set the iron upright on its heel. “Yes.”

He was delighted for perhaps five seconds. Then he saw her face and put the paper down altogether. Lorna sat with the damp pillowcase spread between them. She could smell hot cotton and the starch drying near the iron. “We weren’t kind to her,” she said. Miklós said nothing. His silence differed from the pauses she knew in ordinary conversation; he wasn’t preparing reassurance or waiting for a detail that would make the matter easier. He was allowing her to decide what she meant. Lorna looked at the newspaper. “I wasn’t kind to her. I used to say things about her mother.”

She remembered the headscarf, the accent, the fierce pleasure of being able to produce laughter by copying a woman who wasn’t there to answer. In the first year of her marriage, Miklós’s mother had sometimes tied a scarf beneath her chin before going out, and Lorna had helped her find a pin when the knot wouldn’t sit comfortably. She’d loved the older woman’s brisk hands, her insistence on feeding visitors, the way she pronounced Lorna’s name as though it had become part of the family’s language. At no point during those years had she made the connection waiting now at the ironing table. It hadn’t been hidden from her. She simply hadn’t gone looking.

“Did you know it was her when she ran?” Miklós asked. Lorna shook her head. He watched her carefully, and the care hurt more than disbelief would have. “No,” she said again. “I’d have told you.” She stopped, hearing the assurance she’d reached for. “I think I would.” Miklós folded the paper along its original crease, then unfolded it because her childhood name had disappeared inside. “How old?” he asked. Lorna told him, and told him when Yaakova left. She didn’t add that everybody had done it. The sentence waited near her mouth several times, offering itself as part of the history.

Their daughter came home while the pillowcases were still on the table and asked why the television was off. She’d been talking about the new president with friends and wanted to catch the replay. Miklós got up to turn it on. Lorna resumed ironing, working slowly around a crease that hadn’t been there before. When her daughter asked whether they’d watched the ceremony, she said they were going to now. She didn’t tell the girl about school. She wanted a little longer with the fact before she handed it to somebody who knew her only as the mother who stopped other people saying such things.

Miklós sat beside her when she finished, leaving enough room for the warm folded linen between them. On the screen, Phoebe turned towards a tall woman nearby, and the look that passed across her face was so easy that Lorna felt an unexpected relief. There were people who knew how to stand beside her. People who’d learned what pleased her, how she sounded when she was tired, what she might say when the cameras were gone. Lorna picked a thread from the top pillowcase. “I’m glad she has them,” she said quietly. Miklós looked at the screen and nodded, then stayed where he was until the broadcast moved on.

Curtis Hardesty recognised her laugh in an Albuquerque furniture store. His second wife, Gail, was testing the depth of a sofa she wanted for the den, while Curtis stood before a row of television sets showing the same news programme in slightly different colours. He’d spent the morning hearing about the new president and had formed several opinions without giving the matter sustained attention. Now a piece of earlier footage showed Phoebe laughing at something said beside her, her head moving back for an instant before she leaned towards the speaker again. Curtis stepped closer. The laugh ended across six screens, and he remained staring at them with his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Gail,” he called, still watching. She pressed the sofa cushion again. “This one’s firmer than ours.” Curtis shook his head impatiently. “Come here a minute.” She joined him as the footage changed to the oath. He pointed. “I know her.” Gail glanced at him. “Everybody knows her.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “No, I mean before. I went to school with her.” Gail looked back at the screens, interested now. “You never said.” Curtis was doing arithmetic, subtracting the years since he left Nevada, arranging one face behind another. “I didn’t know it was her.”

He’d remembered Yaakova as funny when she was angry. That was how he’d have put it if anybody had asked him before the television sets made him hear himself. Some of her replies had been quick enough to turn a laugh against the person who’d started it, and Curtis had enjoyed those moments almost as much as he’d enjoyed the rest. It hadn’t occurred to him that laughing when she defended herself was different from liking her. He’d never sat beside her if another place was available. He’d joined in with the boys who made a performance of refusing anything she touched. But he remembered her mouth forming a retort, and the movement afterwards, the brief lift of her head when somebody else finally looked foolish.

“She’s changed,” he said. Gail folded her arms. “Well, she’s grown up.” Curtis smiled, still examining the screens. “I mean, look at her.” Gail did. She could see what he meant, and it irritated her a little without surprising her. Curtis had a way of discovering women’s importance through their appearance and then believing he’d made a more comprehensive observation. “She’s been on television for years,” Gail said. He nodded, as though that made the discovery more impressive. “Different name threw me.” A salesman approached and Curtis immediately told him that he’d attended school with the new president.

The salesman was eager to hear more. Curtis supplied the town, the approximate years, the fact that she’d left young. He described her as spirited and said the teachers had never quite known what to do with her. Gail sat back on the sofa and watched the two men talking. Curtis was enjoying himself. He’d begun the morning as a man whose wife wanted an expensive piece of furniture; he now possessed information neither of the other people in the room had, and the day had improved accordingly. When the salesman asked whether she’d been popular, Curtis hesitated only briefly. “She kept herself to herself.”

Gail looked up at that. Later, in the car, she asked how a girl who kept herself to herself had got into so many fights. Curtis adjusted the mirror. “Kids bothered her.” Gail waited, one hand resting on the sofa’s fabric sample in her lap. He glanced at her. “We all bothered one another.” She looked out of the window without agreeing, and Curtis felt a small annoyance at having an enjoyable coincidence made complicated. At the next traffic light he pictured the laugh again. He was pleased he’d recognised it. By the time they reached home, he’d decided to telephone his brother and tell him who they’d both failed to identify for years.

Wilma Deakin was behind the counter of her Indian Springs motel when the reporter arrived, carrying a notebook and looking too young to have driven all the way from Las Vegas alone. She’d expected somebody eventually. Since the resignation, people had been telephoning the town to ask about the new president, as though thirty years could be reversed by finding the correct local number. Wilma knew the young man had already spoken to the owner of the grocery and somebody at the school. He introduced himself, explained his paper and asked whether she remembered Yaakova Petrović. Wilma slid a registration card beneath the counter before answering. “We were in the same class.”

The reporter brightened at once. Wilma had watched that happen twice already that morning. The town’s connection to the president was passing from person to person, becoming warmer and more affectionate each time it was handled. Somebody had described her as a local girl everybody remembered fondly. Somebody else claimed the place had always been proud of her. Wilma had heard the claims while filling the ice machine and felt herself growing angry, though she wasn’t certain whether the anger was directed at the lies or at the possibility that she wouldn’t be included in them. “What was she like?” the reporter asked. Wilma looked through the office window towards the road. “She had a temper.”

He wrote that down. The sight of the words entering his notebook gave her a small, unpleasant satisfaction. There was Yaakova again, fixed for an adult by somebody else’s account of her behaviour. Wilma remembered how easy it had been. A girl could stand with tears in her eyes and say she’d only been asking a question; a teacher could scold the girl who’d answered too fiercely; the other children could resume the business of the day with one more piece of evidence against her. The reporter asked what she’d become angry about. Wilma opened her mouth and found that the expected next sentence didn’t arrive. Outside, a car pulled in beside the office, and she used the customer’s entrance to put the conversation aside.

When she’d given him his key and directions, the reporter was still waiting. He hadn’t filled the silence for her. Wilma sat on the stool behind the counter and took the notebook in with a glance. “Cross that out,” she said. He looked down. “About the temper?” She nodded. “Or write the rest. We gave her reasons.” The young man’s expression changed, becoming more attentive and less pleased. Wilma rubbed a thumb over a crack in the counter’s varnish. She’d been a collector of exclusions. Who would sit where, who could join a game, which girls were wanted at whose house. She hadn’t needed to shout. Most days a look towards the others had been sufficient.

“We weren’t her friends,” she said. The reporter’s pen stopped. “None of you?” Wilma considered the invitation to nominate somebody better. A person could always produce a gentler recollection if she searched long enough: a boy handing back a dropped pencil, a girl answering a practical question, somebody declining to laugh on one particular afternoon. She knew what those scraps would become once printed beside a presidential photograph. “Nobody tried to be,” she said. “That’s what I mean.” He asked whether she included herself, and for the first time she disliked him a little. “Yes,” she answered. “I include myself.”

She fetched the class photograph because he asked whether she had one. It had been kept in a box with certificates, Christmas cards and pictures of relatives whose names her sons no longer remembered. The children stood in uneven rows, dressed as carefully as their households could manage, with the school wall bright behind them. Wilma located herself immediately, then began identifying others. Some were dead. Some had moved so far away that their last known addresses belonged to other lives. When she reached Yaakova, she stopped supplying surnames for a moment. The girl was standing where she’d been told, looking at the camera with the serious patience children sometimes gave an adult whose instructions they’d decided to endure.

The reporter asked whether he could have a copy made. Wilma agreed, then asked to hold the photograph once more before he put it away. She’d spent much of her life believing that remaining in a place gave her a special authority over what had happened there. Looking at the rows, she discovered how little she could say about the child the country now wanted described. There were incidents, certainly. There were things other people had done to her and things she’d done in answer. Wilma didn’t know whether she’d liked rain, whether she’d been frightened of the dark, what she’d hoped the next year would bring before deciding there wouldn’t be another year at that school. She handed the photograph back by its edges. “Put schoolmate,” she told him. “If you put what I was to her.”

Eldon Grieves had recognised Phoebe long before most of the people now telephoning one another. In Reno, where he managed a hotel and belonged to the right clubs without having to remind anybody, Nevada politics reached him through men who considered themselves entitled to know things early. He’d followed her rise with the sour familiarity of someone watching an old subordinate promoted through another department. The Senate had irritated him. The vice presidency had seemed a national lapse. On the morning she became president, he watched the ceremony from his office with the sound turned low and completed the last page of a staffing memorandum before looking up at the oath.

He had been one of the worst. Other children had followed his lead not because he was particularly inventive but because he was certain, and certainty travelled easily through a schoolyard. He’d decided Yaakova was somebody they could do things to. Once that was established, everything else became an opportunity. He’d taken her scarf, blocked her path, invented offences to explain why the boys were chasing her. When she fought back, he’d been furious in a way that outlasted the pain. He could still remember her getting the better of him in front of two younger boys. That memory had remained vivid through marriage, fatherhood, promotions and the accumulation of things that ought to have made it irrelevant.

His assistant came in while the applause was still showing on the screen. “Quite a day for Nevada,” she said. Eldon signed the memorandum and handed it over. “She’s fortunate Beale decided to go.” The young woman glanced towards the television. “I suppose she knew it could happen.” Eldon capped his pen. “Could happen to any vice president. That’s the arrangement.” He liked the phrasing and used it twice more before lunch. It reduced the event to a mechanism, which he found more comfortable. A door had opened because somebody else left. There was no need to admire the person who’d been standing next to it.

At lunch, one of his companions mentioned having heard that Eldon knew her as a child. Eldon cut into his steak before answering. “Same school for a few years.” The man wanted stories. Eldon had plenty, but discovered that several sounded different in a room where the woman concerned had just become commander in chief. He settled on her leaving school at thirteen. “Wouldn’t have thought you could get much farther on that,” he said. His companion shrugged. “Apparently you can.” The answer wasn’t intended as a rebuke. That made it more irritating. Eldon put his knife down and began discussing the hotel’s summer bookings.

On the drive back, he remembered a day when Yaakova had refused to hand over a piece of paper he wanted. He couldn’t remember why he’d wanted it. He could remember telling her that everybody thought she was dirty, and waiting for her face to change. There had been a change, but not the one he’d intended. She’d looked at him with such open contempt that he’d hit the paper out of her hand. Now, stopped in traffic, he found himself arguing with the remembered look. She’d always believed herself better than the rest of them. That was what people failed to understand. There’d been something provoking about her, something that made ordinary teasing impossible.

Back at the hotel, he telephoned his golf partner to confirm the following morning. He inspected a repaired window in the dining room, complimented a waiter whose wife had had a baby, and authorised an extra day’s leave for a housekeeper who needed it. These were things he did without strain. When the evening paper arrived, he read the story about the new president, made an impatient sound at a description of her courage and turned to the financial pages. A guest passing the desk asked whether he was watching all the coverage. Eldon smiled professionally. “Hard to avoid it.” Then he went upstairs to change for dinner, leaving the paper folded with Phoebe’s photograph on the inside.

Pearl Wetherall watched the third evening’s news in an Anchorage apartment where the June light kept the curtains glowing long after supper. She’d known since the vice-presidential campaign. A name in a profile, a description of the small settlement north of Las Vegas, the date she’d left school: Pearl had fitted them together at her kitchen table and then sat for a long time with both hands around an empty cup. By 1975 the discovery no longer surprised her. What surprised her was how much farther the fact could go. Senator, vice president, president. She could say each title without difficulty. Put beside the girl she remembered, they still made her stop whatever she was doing.

An old classmate called while she was clearing supper away. Pearl had spoken to the woman perhaps three times in twenty years, but tonight the voice arrived with the energetic familiarity of a friendship they’d never maintained. There was news of who knew, who’d always known, who had photographs, who might be contacted by a newspaper. Pearl stood with a plate in her hand and listened. “We ought to have a reunion,” the woman said. “Can you imagine if she came?” Pearl looked towards the television, where a reporter stood outside the White House. “I don’t think she’d want that.” The woman laughed. “You never know. People get sentimental.”

Pearl set the plate down. She remembered the last summer before Yaakova disappeared from their lives, although she didn’t remember knowing it would be the last. There had been no departure scene arranged for the rest of them, no chance to demonstrate generosity at a convenient moment. The girl had simply ceased to be there. When school resumed, Pearl had noticed the absence, waited for somebody else to mention it and joined in when the first joke was made. She could still hear herself laughing. By lunchtime they were occupied with new arrangements, and the place Yaakova had taken in the room was somebody else’s.

“Are you still there?” the woman asked. Pearl said she was. The conversation returned to the possibility of a reunion, to names they ought to collect, to the woman’s certainty that a president might enjoy seeing where she came from. Pearl remembered a lunch she and two other girls had eaten on the steps while Yaakova stood nearby with nowhere they’d let her sit. She’d put her bag on the open space beside her before the girl could ask. That small movement had required no encouragement. It had been hers. “Leave me out of it,” she said. The woman sounded hurt. “I only meant it would be nice.” Pearl looked at the plate waiting on the counter. “I know.”

After the call, she finished washing up and dried the sink with the cloth she kept folded beside it. Her husband was working late, and there was no one to ask why she hadn’t turned to the usual programme. She sat nearer the television than she normally did, close enough to hear over the traffic outside. The news returned to Washington. Phoebe was coming through a doorway with people around her, moving briskly but slowing when someone spoke. Pearl watched her attend to the speaker, then reach towards the tall woman beside her and briefly touch her arm. It was an unconscious-looking gesture, easy and familiar, completed before either of them turned towards the waiting cameras.

Pearl had spent years assuming that, if they ever met again, she’d know what to say. The speech changed as she grew older. At twenty it would have been an embarrassed laugh and an assurance that none of it had meant anything. At thirty she’d have explained how children followed one another. By forty she’d stopped rehearsing the explanations, but the imagined meeting remained arranged around her own need to speak. Now she watched the president listening to a question and found she didn’t want to intrude on the room at all. There were people waiting for answers that mattered to their lives. Phoebe looked directly towards one of them and began to reply.

Pearl reached for the volume and turned it up. A neighbour’s car door slammed below the window; footsteps crossed the landing and continued upstairs. On the screen, Phoebe paused while another voice interrupted, then resumed without losing the thread of what she’d been saying. Pearl listened through the whole answer. When her husband came in a few minutes later and asked whether he’d missed anything, she moved the folded newspaper from the chair beside her. “Sit down,” she said, making room while the coverage continued. “They’re going to show her again.”