Sweetness And Light Are So Yesterday In Washington - The Tale Of An Ambitious Bad Girl

Felicia Brandon was a good girl - cute, pert, lovely, and obedient until she hit fourteen when the wheels came off and she realized that her toast tasted better on the burnt side - bad boys. 

'Isn't that always the way', snipped Helga Parsons to Felicia's mother one morning as they were both tending to their roses; but Mrs. Brandon was still in a state of denial.  There was no way that her daughter, child of dutiful parents, educated by the sisters of the Convent of St. Mary, guided and taken in hand by Father Brophy, could possibly turn out bad.  Why, there was nothing bad whatsoever about her, thought Letty Brandon, remembering the two of them making chocolate cookies, laughing over the crumbly bits and tossing them in the air like confetti.  No, there must be some mistake.  Her daughter could never turn out bad.

 

But it was Letty who was wrong, for Helga Parsons had seen Felicia rutting in the back seat of Bobby Farrell's Lexus in full view of anyone who passed by.  It was that indecency, that impropriety, that careless disregard for the community that irritated, revolted her.  Not so much the rutting.  God knows she did plenty of that in her day before she met her husband, a tired out, greyish short of man, the very caricature of indistinction.  So it was not with little nostalgic envy that she looked in on the two of them and in fact didn't turn away, watching till the end until Felicia howled like a wolf at a full moon. 

Felicia was not exactly promiscuous, for she chose her partners carefully. There were plenty of ciphers who wanted her, but she picked only the creme de la creme, boys from the West End, the Anglo-Saxon end, the leafy corner of the city reserved for the descendants of the captains of industry who had built the town two hundred years ago.  The Potter, Booth, Hart, Vibberts, and Stanley boys were all headed to Yale where their fathers and grandfathers had gone before them, but all of them had sowed their share of wild oats along the way.  

 

They were confident legatees of an aristocratic tradition where the rules of proper New Brighton did not apply.  They were the Nietzscheans of the Farmington River valley, forceful, determined, ambitious, and less concerned with those who got in their way than where they were going. Bad boys only in the eyes of the timid burghers of the East End and the likes of Letty Brandon who lived among them but didn't belong.  Their ways - the vodka bottles in the trash on Sunday morning, the golf, the summer homes on the Vineyard, the tan, and Scottish wool - were not hers, although she admired them, peered into their windows at night just as Helga had ogled her daughter in the back of Bobby Farrell's Lexus. 

Felicia not only wanted those boys, but wanted their insouciance, their absolute sense of privilege and expectations of respect and position. Reassembling her underthings, she saw the road ahead as clear as day. 

Now, Felicia as well as being an attractive, available girl, was also quick - before the Potter boys started calculating dimensions, she had gone on to elliptical quadratics and theoretical calculus available only at Yale where she commuted every third day.  Her grasp of the tight logic of mathematics enabled an almost instinctive understanding of complex grammar, and by graduation she had mastered both Russian and Japanese.  Harvard took her without question. 

Harvard, not far from stereotype, had more than its share of geeky Asians who smelled of fish sauce and some other rancid thing.  All polite and deferential - they, like all non-white boys, wanted a taste of Felicia's blonde hair, blue eyes, and creamy, luscious complexion - they were of no interest to her.  So she vetted and culled until she found the Cambridge version of la creme de la creme and rutted with them as often and as openly as she had with Bobby Farrell.  

By Senior Year, she had assembled a stable of promising suitors, all anxious to follow her wherever graduation might take her, willing to defer law school for her, quite a sacrifice given the hard-driven families from which they came and the expectations of partner and millions. 

Felicia knew that there was only one place for her - Washington, the nexus of power, the seat of unrestrained ambition and the apotheosis of what she saw in the West End boys.  Nothing would stop these one-man amoral juggernauts, these expresses of hot, driving, uninhibited desire from getting what they wanted.  Washington was a witches' brew of sex, sedition, and a marvelously care-free insurrectionist mentality. Here was where one's mettle was tested.  Deciphering the complexities of rival palaces and the insidiousness of both friends and enemies all existing in a miasma of suspicion and dishonesty was the challenge she wanted. 

 

Good girls went to Washington to make a difference, to do good. Felicia only wanted the prize that the capital offered - unlimited, unmitigated power - and she had the moral abandon, intelligence, and fierce ambition to get it. 

She sussed and vetted the men in Washington just as she had in New Brighton, and picked them off one by one, a seductive little tramp with a Harvard degree and a summa cum laude mind.  Congressional aides, influential lobbyists, and elected representatives found themselves falling for her charms. Promises were made, paths were cleared, note taken, and in a short time she was being considered for top positions in government. 

She was a Rasputin, a Cardinal Wolsey, a Robespierre - a woman of preternatural savvy and understanding of the ways of men.  She was able to negotiate her way around pricky brambles, bear traps, minor plots and intrigues, frontal and rear-guard skirmishes, and always come out ahead. She like Rosalind, Portia, and Viola of Shakespearean Comedies, she bested each and every man around her.  She played them for fools and geniuses, built them up or castrated them like a Strindbergian vixen.  She  was brilliant, a player, a marvelously complete woman. 

 

It was a perfect symbiosis, this happy marriage of devilishly ambitious woman and the craven, corrupted souls of Washington.  An American morality tale to some - nothing could be more Dreiser-esque but less of an American tragedy than the tale of Felicia Brandon and her insatiable desire.  Clyde Griffiths, the hero of Dreiser's great work, is a man of limited intelligence and ability but with the undaunted, unrestrained ambition that characterizes all Americans. 

Griffiths comes to a predictable, sorry end, but there is no bad ending to the saga of Felicia Brandon, an American hero, a feminist legend, a woman revered and adulated.  Her questionable means to these storied ends were either forgotten or never discovered; and besides, in America it doesn't matter how you get where you're going, only that you get there. 

'Whatever became of Felicia Brandon', one journalist asked many years later after she had surprisingly and unconventionally left Washington without a note of explanation or destination.  She simply disappeared; but anyone who knew her was not surprised in the least.  It wasn't results that Felicia was after - a law, a piece of influential legislation, or major public works.  She had never had any such interests. 

It was the pursuit and attainment of unchallenged power in a hyper-competitive world that got her juices flowing, the be-all and end-all of her ambition.  Victory was not in doing good or making a difference, but the number of recognizable heads on sakes down Pennsylvania Avenue.  Her heroes were Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, not The Great Conciliator. 

'Quite a woman', said the journalist's colleague. 'There'll never be another like her'.