All the Houses (3 page)

As an adult I had tried, off and on, to write a screenplay about Dad and the scandal that waylaid him. It was the form I was most familiar with, and its demands—the tight structure, the periodic reversals—helped me to fill in the gaps. (Better to invent than to ask him directly. He never brought up the scandal, and neither did we.) In the draft I wrote, the government official “George Swansinger” blows the whistle on his boss, a well-intentioned but compromised national security advisor, with the help of a brassy female reporter. I never finished that script. The story I'd come up with wasn't anything like what had happened in fact, and when I complained to other people that I was stuck, they invariably (if gently) questioned whether there was really a need, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, for an Iran-Contra movie of any kind. I had those same doubts myself, and eventually I set the project aside. I couldn't get the tone right. It had toggled between satire and thriller, as though my only options were to ridicule Washington or to inject it with false drama.

My dad's real name is Timothy George Atherton.

He had a small part in that whole mess, enough of a part that he was questioned by investigators and later summoned before the congressional joint committees, and for more than two years the threat of prosecution hung over him. But he was a peripheral figure, even in a scandal crowded with obscure people. Some of them were made famous by it—not him. After he testified, during the second month of hearings, the article in
The Washington Post
was cursory, with no accompanying photograph. The record of his testimony takes up only nineteen pages in the official proceedings, and there's not much in those pages. He's one more source for a committee already drowning in data, a committee impatient to move on. None of the honorable members (Cohen, Rudman, Hamilton et al.) imply that he himself was at fault; they hardly even bother to posture, for Dad wasn't going to make the nightly news, although in his own life, this was the closest he ever came to Washington notoriety.

Page A16, lower left. “Singlaub, others, offer details on Contra funds.” He was one of the “others.” To this day I don't know whether to think of him as a coconspirator or a complicit bystander or just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

 

He still lived in the house that had been our house, the house on Albemarle Street that he and my mother bought when Courtney was one and Mom was pregnant with me. After they split up, she'd wanted to sell, but he paid her for half and preserved it, a little museum of our family-no-longer. The interior had been rehabbed from time to time—furniture had been rearranged or replaced or divvied up, rooms repainted, a wall between the kitchen and family room knocked down—but the changes had been gradual, so that it felt like the same house it had always been, though a little smaller and emptier every time. It was the house my parents had brought me home to, when I was just a wailing bald thing in a thin blanket, and the house I had left behind when I left, long-haired and pimply, for college, and the house that awaited every time I came back to visit. Not the largest or the most elegant house on the street, but a stalwart painted-brick three-story house with black shutters and squared-off columns on either side of the porch. And do they have a technical term for the kind of memory that flared during the walk I took from the driveway, along the path by the shrubbery and up the porch stairs? I mean the series of trivial recognitions—there is the concrete step, there are the porch planks, there is the brass doorknob, there is my outline in the storm door—that sum to something greater than the parts, an “Ah!” of wistfulness and dread.

Dad took advantage of my little trance and grabbed my suitcase, then started to heft it inside. I reached for it, and at first he didn't want to let go.

“I can lift a damn suitcase,” he muttered, but he let me take it from him. He opened the front door and I hauled it straight up to the second floor and parked it just outside my old bedroom. I heard someone whisper “Fuck, fuck, fuck”—it was me saying it. Then I went back downstairs, still winded (no, I was not in the best shape) and suddenly at a loss for how I would occupy myself for even one day in D.C., even the half a day that was left.

The house was too cluttered and too empty. When she'd moved out, Mom had taken some of the furniture but not the boxes of videos, the board games, the paint-spattered screwdrivers, and Dad instead of getting rid of the stuff had hunkered down. Everywhere I looked I saw artifacts of our lost civilization, pot holders we'd made at summer camp, bicentennial coasters printed with excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, old headphones, a cracked lazy Susan that Dad had recently dug out and superglued. He was the museum's custodian—he kept it all up.

I tried to tell Dad about the soldiers in the airport, but what was my point? I didn't know.

“It's good that they let them board first,” he said. “Do you want coffee?” I'm all right, I told him. “A beer?” It was not quite noon. I said no. He was still wearing his jacket, and he took his phone from one of the pockets. Slowly he pressed some buttons, which seemed too small for his big fingers, and then brought the device to his face. “Hi there,” he said. “Helen's here.”

Whenever I came to town he took great pleasure in informing the other members of our family that I'd arrived. It was Courtney he'd called, and I knew that after the call ended he'd likewise inform me about whatever task my sister was completing at work, probably a transparent excuse she'd used to get off the phone—“she's doing her expenses.” Both our parents would tell my sisters and me these kinds of basic facts about the other two, as though telling us about people we didn't know well. In fact we knew one another so much better than our parents knew us that it was almost unfair, and at times it even seemed to me that when my dad reported my presence in D.C. to Courtney, or when he told me about her work, he was unconsciously asking us to give him something in return, some of our deeper knowledge. But we would never betray it, no matter how mad we sometimes were at one another, for it wasn't even something we could express in the language he spoke.

That night we went out to dinner with Courtney and Hugo. They swung by the house, and we took their car to the restaurant. Hugo, ceding the passenger seat to Dad, joined me in back—my brother-in-law and I were the kids in this group, and not just because of where we were sitting. I heard my sister and father cut in and out, their voices mingling with the radio's voices.

My sister got louder and asked, as though refuting a point he'd just made, “But how've you been feeling?” He said he was feeling well, thank you, and she asked whether he'd been taking all his pills. She said that I should double-check that he was taking them. “Helen, do you know where his pill box is?”

I pretended not to hear, scanning the Connecticut Avenue awnings for new additions. Every second or third time I came home, a new bistro or bakery would have popped up, replacing an older bistro or bakery, or else rising up from the ashes of some defunct repair shop, one of the businesses that used to exist around there, shops where the owner fixed lamps or vacuum cleaners, or would sell you one he'd already fixed. Now it was mostly upscale food. People threw broken lamps and vacuums in the garbage.

“Helen?”

Courtney had tied a soft, expensive-looking scarf around her neck, and her hair, falling over the folds of the scarf, looked expensive too. Her hips seemed wider than last time I'd seen her, I noticed after we got out of the car, and they shifted mechanically as she walked, like big wooden gears. I wondered whether she was having an affair. Recently on the phone she'd mentioned a man she worked with, mentioned him more than once, for no other reason than to relate some opinion or anecdote he'd shared with her. So I was looking for signs, a telltale glossiness, a coiled spring in her step.

She did strike me as chattier than usual. As we entered the restaurant she was cataloging for my benefit the chef's lineage, listing all the places he'd worked before this one, and at the same time she was surveying the dining room for people she knew, until at last she lit on a middle-aged couple—but no, I realized as she waved to them, they were my own age, only dressed like older people. They were precociously stodgy, but also perky, in that Washington way. It wasn't like L.A. lacked for ambitious preeners, but this city had its own brand of them, I thought, people who glowed with purpose and intramural knowledge, glowed with wonkish visibility itself, as though they were headed to or had just come from a guest spot on a political talk show. We sat down, and Courtney told me their names and the place where each one worked, which might have been law firms or consulting firms or some other kind of firms, who the hell knew.

My sister herself was the deputy director of an environmental nonprofit. Her job was to raise money from wealthy people and foundations, the same thing our mother had done for much of her career. The work didn't really suit Courtney, in that she hated to ask people for anything, but she hoped eventually to become executive director, if not there then someplace else.

“What do you guys usually get here?” I asked Hugo.

“It's all very good.”

“Not all of it—remember that time the risotto wasn't hot?” Courtney said.

“Oh yes. You sent it back to the kitchen.” Hugo was from Mexico City originally, and his English was more careful than a native speaker's.

“This man would never send anything back. He thinks it's rude. But I mean, it was not hot.”

Dad's face, as he listened to her, seemed to become broader and livelier, full of an appreciation she'd never had to earn.

“Risotto's not supposed to be piping hot, is it?” I asked.

“Of course it's supposed to be hot.”

“I just feel like I've had it when it's not all that hot.”

“It was, like, cold. They took it off the bill.”

I made the mistake, once we'd ordered, of asking Dad whether he was still thinking about voting for Kerry. He had been a Republican all his life, but he couldn't stand George W. Bush, in part because he thought the war in Iraq had been a terrible mistake, yet his aversion ran deeper than that. Something more fundamental offended him, the president's whole persona rubbed my father the wrong way, and after a few glasses of wine he would make overblown declarations like, “We've lost our moral standing in the world!” As if the United States' moral standing—whatever that even meant—had been untainted until Bush took office. He meanwhile joked that I had become a “Hollywood liberal.” I think he really did believe that I'd come by my political leanings in California, that I'd more or less tossed them into a cart along with a bag of avocados and some flip-flops. The truth was that I'd been much more idealistic as a teenager, if fuzzily and quietly: it was when I'd last lived in the same house with Dad that I'd actually been the ardent lefty he thought I was now. Since then, we'd both inched toward the center. Earlier that year Dad had said he wouldn't vote for Bush again, and I let myself hope that he represented an entire tribe of disaffected Republicans, one that might tilt the election toward Kerry. But now he drew back and pinched his lower lip before he spoke.

“I don't trust John Kerry,” he said, as though he knew the man personally. “He strikes me as a panderer.”

“Oh please,” Courtney said. “They're all panderers.”

“Some more than others.”

“So you're going to vote for Bush?” she asked.

“I may leave it blank.”

“Blank?” She scoffed. She looked down at her lap and read a message on her BlackBerry that made her smile.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“Oh,” she said, “work.” Then she started complaining about their realtor. She and Hugo had sold their Adams Morgan condo and bought a house in Spring Valley (which was incredible to me, Spring Valley!) and it had all been very hectic and fast and stressful and thank god it was over, but now she was having déjà vu because she'd been trying to contact the realtor—she needed a forwarding address for the previous owner's mail—and she hadn't been able to get through to Bonita Pope. That was the realtor's name. It had been like that ever since the house went under contract, she said. All the subsequent back-and-forth had taken place over voice mail, a series of demands left after the beep.

“Once they've got you on the hook, that's it,” she said.

“So you're moved in, that's amazing,” I said.

“The whole time we were closing, we would call and call and nothing.”

“But she left you messages.”

“She knows our schedules. She knows when to call so that she doesn't have to talk to us.”

“I can't wait to see it,” I lied.

“She did leave us a nice gift,” Hugo said. “It was a pie.”

In the middle of the meal, Courtney excused herself, and I said I'd go with her. Although we're not those women that need or even like companionship in the bathroom, I wanted to see her away from Dad and Hugo. I was hoping for something, I'm not sure what. She walked ahead of me into the ladies' room, and we each entered a stall and then were silent.

“Dad seems like he's doing okay,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, but her tone condemned me. My sister could tell me she liked my shirt and I could hear in her compliment that she thought the whole way I lived my life was incorrect.

“What do you mean?”

She sighed, which I took to mean the usual thing, i.e., that she, the only sister living in D.C., understood something that I didn't. She bore the burden of our dad, or so she'd convinced herself, no matter that she was married and worked long hours and so it wasn't as though she saw him all that often. She
knew
, and Maggie and I didn't know. I waited for more of an answer, but none came. I heard a series of tiny clicks, the sound of her fiddling with her mobile device.