Ada Louise Burnham was from Parker's Corner, Ohio, a small town not far from Chillicothe where people went after church to the Fireman's all-you-can-eat buffet held on the fairgrounds. Billy Graham had led revivals there which the Chillicothe Sun Times reported had brought one hundred souls to Jesus, a record for the county.
Jemima Flanders, however, thrice widowed and grandmother of twenty-four, insisted that back in 1904 her mother and grandmother were both saved by Billy Sunday, America's most famous preacher of the day. He, Jemima went on, had chosen their little rural community because the Bible had pointed the way. In 1 Peter:24-26 it was written:
All people are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever
'Parker's Corner', he had said, 'was the place Peter had in mind when he reflected on the Lord's bounty and that of the Creator, a place of faith, spiritual prosperity, and homespun goodness'.
Parker's Corner had always felt itself important - forgotten, overlooked, dismissed by those living far from its pristine beauty, peace, and harmony; but never by its families who had farmed the land since the first great Westward expansion. Parker's Corner was indeed God's country.
It was, of course, no stranger to lies, jealousies, innuendoes, and false accusations. The townspeople would rather forget the brutal murder of Hiram Walker, disemboweled and hung by the heels from the rafter of his barn.
Finding the murderer was not difficult, for the dispute between Walker and Frenchy LaMotte had gone on for years, a real Hatfield-McCoy feud. The knife that had sliced Hiram up was found in the corn crib and it didn't take much to trace it back to LaMotte who was so stupid he left his tracks in the mud from the barn directly to his farmhouse a quarter mile down the road.
That and the famous 'Well Water Scandal', so called because Philomena Roberts was caught by the well with her lover in flagrante delicto, undressed to the waist, petticoats above her head, her hand on the handle as though ready to haul up a bucket of water.
In any case Ada Louise, as proud as she was of the Midwestern idyll where she grew up, had big ambitions - Washington, the Nation's Capital, Congress, the White House, the corridors of power and home to the best and the brightest. Although the Congressman from her district was a saggy, lumpen man far from the JFK charm that had seduced Marilyn Monroe, the other younger members of the political elite had a macho charisma which appealed to the young girl; and knowing little but hogs and soybeans, she was easily wooed.
Flyover country. When she first heard it on the Baltimore & Ohio from Columbus, she was surprised but the man who casually said this to his travelling companion was the kind of man she had always hoped to meet - the stranger on the train who would take her to places unknown.
This, like everything else in the Midwest, was nothing new. The very first scenes of Sinclair Lewis' novel, Sister Carrie was exactly like this. Carrie, on her way East to make her way, is approached by an impressive young man who charms her with his savoir faire, snappy dress, and presence, and he becomes her patron and lover. Carrie is no dupe, however, no ingenue, no naive girl, but a savvy, calculating, and intelligent young woman. She takes up the traveler's offer, the first of many on her way to success and stardom.
Lewis understood, respected, and admired the Midwest, and his heroine in the novel Main Street is both from that simple, unadorned middle American community that was to be the heartland of the new republic, and critical of it. She goes to a small rural community not unlike Parker's Corner, Ohio, and finds herself irritable, dissatisfied, and emotionally lost; but instead of giving in to depression and the vision of insular life she has consigned herself to, she commits herself to changing the way things are, to bring art, theatre, and a lively intellectual life to this horribly removed place.
She is unsuccessful, of course. Old habits are hard to change, and the very qualities that give the Midwest its simple appeal are the cause for its characteristic intolerance and unwillingness to change.
Ada Louise was far more like Carrie than Carol. Without knowing it, she had the same willful ambition, the same unconcern with received wisdom and morality as Carrie Underwood. 'Flyover country' simply hardened her resolve. She would nevermore be thought of as a rube, a hick, a backcountry calicoed milkmaid.
The man on the train was a whistle-stop salesman - an old school samples-in-the-briefcase hawker. He was an anachronism in an age of Amazon and social media but as he explained he was schooled in the art of Barnum & Bailey where salesmanship is an art - not of deception but conviction - and if the young lady would be willing to have dinner with him at his next stop in Pittsburgh, he would be delighted.
A first step, she later reflected, for what did she know except Billy Baxter behind the silo on a cold, snow-flaky winter day - but even that was a dose of reality. It didn't feel exactly good but not bad either, but that was beside the point. It was something that had to be gotten out of the way before too much time passed.
Some women, Ada Louise among them have a well-defined, well-articulated, irresistible sexuality - men are drawn to them like bees to flowers - and as she went along her path she knew that this was not only an endowment, the Creator's gift, but the key to her future. Her intelligence, her savvy, and her canny understanding of human dynamics, social, political, or economic, were only ancillary to this ineluctable sexuality.
Women have slept their way to the top since time immemorial. Cleopatra bedded both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony - two of the most powerful men in the Empire - certainly not for love but for advantage. Hollywood starlets have seen bedding the producer nothing more than paying dues. Morality, self-esteem, respect had nothing to do with it.
As her train pulled into Washington's Union Station, she felt confident of her abilities, her ambition and above all her willful control of men. How was she able to deduce such an innate trait from one man in a seedy Pittsburgh hotel? That was her genius, her talent, her greatest piece of art.
Child prodigies are able to play Bach at five years old, solve complex mathematical problems at ten, graduate from MIT at twelve. Why did such innate talent have to be confined to that? Her ability to navigate her way in sexually chaotic waters and always, inevitably come out on top was no different.
D.H. Lawrence understood this and placed sexual satisfaction at the heart of human enterprise. Few would have the ability to reach the untold heights of sexual epiphany, but those who did were physical and emotional geniuses.
Too much ambition, will, and desire - as Shakespeare well knew - was always and inevitably women's downfall. Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Lady Macbeth and many others fell to ambition and greedy hunger for power and dominance. All the emotional sentience in the world is no good unless parlayed properly.
The train traveler had his Washington connections, and as basic and old-world as they were, they were fine indeed; and savvy as she was, she was able to parlay them into much better, much more promising opportunities. With this natural savvy, indomitable will, and natural, irresistible sexuality, Washington was an open door.
Did she sleep her way to the top? Yes and no, for sex is a commonly exchanged currency in Hollywood, Washington, or the streets of New York; but the laws of supply and demand apply in all situations. Ada Louise knew her Milton Friedman and Adam Smith and did quite well. Before long the had a sinecure with one of the most powerful men in the Senate and a promising political career if she so chose.
In America the days of patrician, old-money, aristocratic governance is a thing of the past, and anyone can be President, so the political and sexual ambitions of those around her who saw advantage and satisfaction were not unfounded and misdirected.
Washington is not so venal and self-absorbed a place that the tale of Ada Louise suggests, but politics is a graspy affair. It takes ambition, will, and a certain moral diffidence to be elected, a few years to enjoy the perks of office, and then back out on the hustings to flaunt success. By the time the cycle is completed, the politician is convinced of his righteousness, entitlement, and appeal. He is on the lookout for cash contribution and sexual trophies like Ada Louise.
It didn't take a cycle for Ada Louise to learn what's what. Such an innately savvy and perceptive young woman knew exactly how things worked - the predictability of the male ego, his quick and easy abandonment of propriety, and his sexual gullibility. Plums were there for the taking.
The whole political shebang however was just a game for Ada Louise. She could have become a politician - there were a number of vacant safe seats out there and she was courted by members on both sides of the aisle, but she demurred. The fun was in the getting, the manipulation, and the control. She was Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, a woman for whom the exercise of pure will was the only validation she needed. To subject a man completely to it was an exhilarating exercise, worth every moment.
Ada Louise worked her way through the men of Washington, young and old with such dexterity, agility, and sexual savvy that she could have anything she wanted from them; but, like Hedda, just brining them to heel was enough.
So much for flyover country.
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