XVII
Ellie miserably surveyed the room from behind the curtain of her hair. This reception was as hellish as she'd expected it to be. Hardly anyone she knew, and those she did were all bugging her. Liz and her mother and even Annie had all got on her case about being nice to her dad for Zoey's special day. How come they weren't all bugging him about being nice to her?
Finally, she spotted the Surgeon General talking with Sam. At last, a friendly face. In fact, two of them; she'd never had a problem with Sam. She remembered him as the quietest out of her father's campaign staff; passionate, but never loud or aggressive. She could handle hanging out with Sam.
Hell, any company would be better than Jeff.
Her 'date' had been sullen and arrogant the whole day - around the people she wanted to get on with as much as those she didn't. It had seemed like a good idea to play into her father's expectations and get the "why are you always such a disappointment to me?" portion of the day out of the way as fast as possible, but she hadn't banked on the mortification of having everybody else in the room believe this was the best she could do for a partner.
She could hear the whispers now.
Oh, poor, poor Eleanor. Tragic, really - she never could measure up to her sisters. Really, can you be surprised she ended up with such a no-hoper?
Jeff had been rude to everybody she introduced him, and not in any kind of cool movie-star way, either. He acted like a brat, and the perpetual sneer he affected had long stopped being mysterious and interesting, and now just made him look petulant.
"That's my godmother," she pointed out, as if he'd care. "We should go over, say hi. She's just over there with Sam."
Jeff just rolled his eyes as he turned. "Oh, great. You want me to go make nice with the fairy-boy again?"
At that point, she snapped. But because she was Ellie Bartlet, she didn't explode like any other member of her family would.
"Get out," she said quietly, feeling the tears of frustrated humiliation beginning to prickle at the backs of her eyes. How had she ever talked herself into bringing this, this complete Neanderthal?
"What?" he frowned.
Oh, you can't even say pardon?
"I said get out," she repeated, in just as low a voice. It was too much against her nature to even think about shouting and screaming and making a scene. "I don't want to see you anymore. You're an oaf, you're a bigot, and you treat people who are way, way better than you like crap. I want you to leave now."
Instead, he pushed his way into personal space. "Oh, you're better than me now? Is that it?"
Yeah, I know I am. Why, why couldn't she ever say these things out loud? Why couldn't she stand up for herself? She back away from him, pushing him back with an ineffectual hand to his chest. "Just go, Jeff," she pleaded.
"Oh, so you drag me to this stupid party just so you don't look like a total loser, and now you want me to just... disappear?" He made an obnoxious flicking motion with his hands and continued to push towards her.
"I asked you to leave, Jeff," she repeated, horribly conscious of the people all around them, who were beginning to stop and notice the two of them.
"Yeah, well, I'm not gonna just-" He stopped abruptly as a hand thumped into his chest. The slim, smartly-dressed man with the hidden earpiece gave him a nod.
"It's time for you to go now, Mr. Coleridge," he said, mildly but with steel behind the words.
Idiotically, Jeff made a move to go towards her anyway. Miraculously, there were suddenly three more Secret Service people between him and Ellie.
"Let me escort you to the door," said the first man, in the same even tone. Jeff scowled impotently, then threw out his arm in a gesture of angry dismissal and stalked off. One of the agents trailed him at a discreet distance.
The Secret Service melted back into the crowd, and Ellie was left alone. A couple of people shot her sympathetic looks, and that was just too much. She wrapped her arms around herself and rushed out of the room.
Abbey found her middle daughter sitting outside with her arms wrapped around her knees. There were presumably Secret Service agents about, but they had the sense to be discretely out of sight. Ellie's detail had quickly learned that her sombre or distressed moods were something she preferred to experience in solitude.
As her mother, however, Abbey had the luxury of vetoing that particular decision.
"Ellie." She sat down beside her daughter, ignoring what it might be doing to the lines of her dress, and sipped from her glass of wine while she waited for a response.
Ellie continued staring at the ground; it was a habit she'd had since she was a very little girl, and one that infuriated Jed. A man as verbose as he was didn't know what to do with a daughter who went mute and refused to even look at him.
Truth to tell, Abbey found it more than a little frustrating herself. After a moment she reached out, and tilted her daughter's chin so they were looking at each other. Tears glistened on the edge of being shed, and Abbey recognised their cause too well; not pain or distress so much as helpless frustration.
"Your boyfriend run out on you?" she asked gently. Ellie allowed herself a bitter half-smile.
"He's not my boyfriend. And I told him to go." She sniffed and sat upright.
"Well, good, honey." Abbey regarded her wine thoughtfully, swirling it in the glass. "Because he wasn't-"
"Mom-" her daughter cut her off warningly.
"-He wasn't good enough for you," she finished relentlessly.
"I know that." Ellie rubbed at her eyes angrily.
"Then why did you bring him?" Abbey asked deceptively lightly.
"I wanted to bring somebody," she shrugged defensively, already withdrawing into her shell. She became like a turtle, retracting all her vulnerable parts behind her armour; expressive eyes hidden behind the screen of hair, fingers that twisted around each other tugged up into sleeves where they couldn't be seen.
Abbey adopted a sterner tone, not wanting to but knowing from experience that timidity would get her nowhere. "Maybe so, but you've never been shy about going places on your own if you didn't like the company, so don't think that'll wash with me, young lady."
"Fine," Ellie retorted. Sullenly, because that was how Ellie fought and argued; slow burning resentment, not the sparky, easily-extinguished anger of her father and sisters. "I brought him to annoy dad, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? I brought him because, because- He always has to find something to be disappointed in me for." She wasn't talking about Jeff now. "I figured I might as well give him an easy target."
Sympathy warred with a desire to give her daughter a good strong whack upside the head. "Honey, your father could never be disappointed in you."
She barked a bitter laugh. "Oh sure, that's what everybody always says. But he never..." She didn't finished, picking at the end of the sleeves of her dress.
"He finds it hard to talk to you, Ellie."
"He never tries!"
"You never let him!" Abbey sympathised with her daughter's difficulties - because God knew Jed could be difficult - but her tolerance for 'woe is me' tactics would only stretch so far. "Every time he tries to reach out to you, you move a little bit further away. I don't know how you think you're ever going to mend anything if you're not prepared to meet him in the middle."
"What's to mend?" she asked bitterly.
"Eleanor Emily, don't you start with that," she warned sharply. "Much as you two like to be boneheaded about it, you love your father and your father loves you, so there'll be none of that kind of talk, thank you." She was more sensitive than she would have been, too conscious of the skulking spectre of Jed's father.
She had been shocked - more than shocked - to realise that her husband could be so insecure over his relationship to the girls. It had honestly never occurred to her that he could question any aspect of his job as a father; how could any rational human being ever question that? But of course, she should have known that logic took a back seat wherever the footsteps of papa Bartlet had left a lingering echo.
Ellie looked at her knees. "I just feel like he- I..." She shook her head. "It's just easiest if we don't... if we just stay out of each other's way. We're both happier that way."
"No you're not," she pointed out softly.
"Mom, he doesn't want to mend any bridges with me," she snapped. "I'm different, he doesn't like it, he only wants to change me, make me more like Liz and Zoey - but I'm not like them! I'm me, and he doesn't want to get to know me, whenever I try and be the real me it only makes him angry."
Abbey shook her head, endlessly dismayed by the hopeless level of misunderstanding that existed between her husband and her middle daughter. "Ellie, don't you know he's... your father's terrified of you, honey."
She snorted disbelievingly. "Of me?"
"Of the fact that you don't talk to him."
"Then why doesn't he try and come after me? Why doesn't he care enough to do that?"
Abbey hesitated for a long moment. It really wasn't her place to break the silence of the ages - but she couldn't bear the thought of this rift, this manufactured problem when there were other, much deeper ones looming on the horizon. She set down her wine glass, suddenly no longer finding any taste for it, and carefully sought out the words. "Your grandfather..." She broke off. "Your father..."
"Mom, I'm really not in the mood for some big sob story about how dad didn't make up with his own dad until it was too late," said Ellie sulkily.
She'd been through her share of motherly nightmares, but Abbey didn't think she'd ever felt such a strong urge to slap one of her children as in that brief moment. She sucked in a deep breath, and spoke with the cool, brittle anger that she usually kept reigned in around her daughters. "No, your father didn't make up with his father, and I'm glad of that, and I'd be happier still if he'd driven a stake through his grave and told him to go screw himself, but I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that it's never going to happen."
Her hands were shaking with long-suppressed anger, and she had to clasp them together in her lap to hide it. "I love you, honey, and I hate to break it to you, but I can only listen to the 'my father doesn't love me' sob story for so long. Because it's crap, and you know it's crap, and sooner or later it comes down to the fact that if you take away the stubbornness on both sides of the divide, there really isn't any problem here at all."
Abbey needed another shaky breath to calm herself down enough to get it out. "Ellie..." she began quietly. "Your father's childhood... he had problems. There was some very real, very serious stuff with your grandfather. His father used to beat him, and he used to cut him down, and he used to treat him very, very badly, and... and when you act like you're afraid of him, he doesn't know what to think. He doesn't know what to think, Ellie. He doesn't want to hurt you, he's so terrified of hurting you..." Her voice cracked, and dammit, she was crying now, and she really didn't want to cry...
She squeezed the words out. "He is frightened, Ellie. You frighten him, because you won't talk to him and he doesn't know why and he doesn't know what he's done wrong. And dammit, Ellie, sometimes I don't know either. You can't keep coming to me with your father doesn't understand you, because sooner or later it's gonna come down to the fact that you don't want to let him try. Yes, I will be the first to agree that he is not an easy man to live with, but you can't keep expecting him to do all the work! You know why he doesn't try to break through to you, Ellie? Because he thinks you don't want him to. And you might take it for granted that you don't mean it when you act like you don't want anything to do with him, but he doesn't know that!"
She was silent for a beat, and then looked up at her daughter sadly. "Ellie... when are you gonna stop getting angry that he won't follow you long enough to realise that he thinks you're genuinely trying to get away?"
Ellie was staring at her. Her mouth worked silently for a moment before she could manage a tentative "Mom?"
Abbey stood up. All the anger had abruptly flooded out of her, and now she suddenly felt... deflated. "I'm sorry, honey. I didn't mean to blow up at you. It's just..." She sighed heavily and rubbed her forehead. "This is not a good time for your father right now. It's really not."
Ellie, still seeming dazed, got up and walked over to her, and Abbey planted a kiss on her forehead and smiled at her. "Oh, honey," she sighed. "I love you. And I know it's hard with you and your dad, but... he's not trying to make it difficult. Maybe it's hard for you to believe it, but he's just as confused and frightened and lost and mixed-up as you are. You have to give him a chance, babe. You can't expect him to fix it all by himself, he can't read your mind if you won't let him anywhere near you."
"Mom, I..." Ellie's face was contorted with distress and shocked confusion. "Dad really-? How could I not ever have a clue? How could I not know this?"
"Because," Abbey smiled wryly, "like certain other people I could mention - your father doesn't ever tell anybody about his problems." She slipped an arm around her daughter's shoulders. "Now, come on. I know it's a lot to ask you to take in, but it's all in the past for now, so how about we get back inside and be with our family and enjoy the celebrations, just for tonight?"
"Okay," said Ellie softly, with the beginnings of a tentative smile. Together, they headed back inside.