All the Houses (30 page)

Meanwhile Dick Mitchell is running his little office, administering what is termed humanitarian aid. He has learned to bend the rules without really thinking of it that way. He does certain things on the clock and certain things off the clock. Food, medicine, apparel are on the clock, magazines and grenades are off. The same L-100 or C-123 transport can carry the approved supplies and, on a second leg, the freight provided by outside donors. The M-2 and its magazine weigh ten pounds total. You can fit a hundred of those on the plane, a thousand pounds. On paper it's a no-brainer. In reality, though, there are frequent malfunctions, and so Mitchell is grateful to have a friend on the NSC staff who can help fix them, who can, for instance, travel to New Orleans to check up on things.

(From the testimony of Richard Mitchell, May 21, 1987)

MR. BOREN.
Were there concerns about how the money was being spent?

MR. MITCHELL.
There had been a lot of rumors and speculation that some money was going where it shouldn't go. There was no proof, but Colonel North always wanted the Nicaraguan resistance to be as clean as possible, and he was concerned about their image.

I think in hindsight much of this program, ever since the beginning, its inception, has probably been done—well, obviously not as well as it could have been. So I think we all had regrets.

MR. BOREN.
I believe you talked about a plane being used that had been used previously to run drugs?

MR. MITCHELL.
Yes, sir.

MR. BOREN.
I have before me exhibit number 11, a memorandum to Colonel North in which you stated that you feared that for some of the top Nicaraguan commanders, the war had become a for-profit business?

MR. MITCHELL.
Those were not my exact words. I did come to the conclusion that compared to the
campesinos
putting their lives on the line, some of the leaders were acting out of self-interest and some of the money was not accounted for.

MR. BOREN.
And nonetheless you decided to keep pursuing these activities, in secret?

MR. MITCHELL.
Senator, I think that there are times when there is the necessity for secrecy.

*   *   *

Of all the scenes from my father's government career, his trip to New Orleans is the strangest, I think, the hardest to conceive of, it's like I'm trying to insert my dad into one of the García Márquez novels that all the Washington wives were dreamily reading in those days, fictions they hoarded and savored like South American caramels even as the husbands fought proxy wars in the territory between here and there, here being the United States and there a magic land of jungle loves and yellow butterflies.

They send him to New Orleans to talk to the
comandante
's cousin, who is running—just barely—the procurement side of things. Some of the supplies for the Contra rebels have been warehoused out of New Orleans, in a dingy corrugated-aluminum hangar off Interstate 10.

The middle of May and already the air is like warm, dirty jelly. Driving his rental car to the address he's been given, Tim sees two boys fishing in what might have been a ditch full of sewage, under a bright red industrial sunset. He arrives at the warehouse to find the gravel lot empty and the dock door shut. No sign of the man who told Tim to meet him there. It takes Tim two hours to find him and another two before he sobers up enough to make any sense. By then it's close to midnight. The man is blaming corrupt Teamsters for what he calls, with a buzz of rolled
r
's enclosing a barely pronounced
o
, “errors,” and claiming that the reason he's acquired frozen as opposed to canned food, when they have no means of transporting frozen goods, is that the vendor delivered something other than what had been ordered and then refused to take back the shipment.

The man's glistening white Mercedes smells brand-new. A holster lies on the backseat, as well as a small black shopping bag. A month earlier, unbeknownst to anyone, this man invited an NBC news crew to come along on the initial supply flight to Tegucigalpa. The plane door opened and out popped a cameraman, in a Yankees cap no less.

I'm going back to my hotel, and tomorrow I'm going back to Washington, Tim tells him. Is there any reason you can give me for not recommending this whole operation be shut down?

The man, uncomprehending, shouts, To help the people!

Which people do you mean, the frozen food people? The Teamsters? The employees at the Mercedes dealership? Much as all those people I'm sure appreciate the help, that was not the intent here.

You give me time, the man says. I fix it, I fix it. Then he starts to bellow about how they are being fleeced by the suppliers, and from there he launches into complaining about what a shithole the city is and you couldn't expect magic and why aren't they warehousing out of Miami, you think I like to live here? He switches to Spanish, slurs the locals. Do I look like a black to you? he asks.

Tim writes to North that there are some serious concerns about New Orleans, and afterward he never hears a word about it. The same thing happened some weeks earlier, after Mitchell reported similar misgivings in a memo, writing that he'd found many of the Contra leaders to be untrustworthy, that some of them were greedy and deceptive. False receipts have been sent to State, and hundreds of thousands of dollars are unaccounted for, he wrote. But North would not—and maybe could not—digest that.

The bad news disappears. Tim keeps his head down. The song they keep playing on the radio goes
throwing it all away, throwing it all away
, the melody slow and wistful—Tim hears it at a deli downtown and again at Peoples Drug and again echoing in his head just before he goes to sleep.

 

 

Christmas was a challenge, as ever. It deflated us. We would participate in the standard traditions just enough to more or less fail at them, to remind ourselves that we were not exactly one of those loving families gathered around a tree in matching sweaters, whose cards and photos arrived every December at Albemarle Street and were piled in a basket on top of a radiator. Much as I felt sure that those other families had troubles of their own, we still had to contend with their cards. And there were no kids at our Christmas, which I think made everyone feel aimless and cranky, and made children of my sisters and me.

Yet I knew Dad hoped for something better this year, he'd said as much at the Morgans' party, and so I wanted that for him. It was as though he were the kid, only not one to be satisfied with a new toy truck or a dollhouse. Worse, he told me over the phone that he had a special gift he was excited to give me, which I feared would be something wrong and expensive that I would ultimately return. I had a break from work, and I sank into the holiday spirit as into a sugary trance. I looked at websites with adorable tips and pointers and DIY crafts, I consulted cookie recipes, I made plans and lists. Although I am not a crafts person and hardly ever use an oven, I made a supply run and then got down to business.

The bourbon balls bombed. Greasy little cow pies. I left them to cool and attacked the next project, which meant spray-painting white a couple dozen pinecones—having sampled a good bit of the bourbon by then, I also managed to paint parts of the table and, somehow, my pants. I set the cones out to dry on the previous day's Style section of the paper and then proceeded to eat half the nonpareil candies I'd bought to decorate the gingerbread house, which I had not started making yet. And so it went. Fast forward to that afternoon, and what you would've seen in my apartment was: a giant mess of bags and dough bits and tinfoil, a kicked fifth of bourbon dappled with floury fingerprints, a bowl of white pinecones with bits of Style section stuck to them, a gingerbread Depression-era shack, and me passed out on my bed.

*   *   *

On Thursday Maggie took a train to Union Station and I met her there, toting a supply of clothes and the pinecones in my overnight bag so that I could stay for a few nights at Albemarle Street instead of schlepping back and forth to my apartment. The city mouse in her motorcycle jacket: I found her smoking a cigarette out front, while men coming and going assessed her furtively, or not so furtively. As did I, admiring her jeans and her new haircut—and more than the particulars, the way it all cohered. She
looked
like an academic from New York City, and although hers was no more secure a life than mine, it made more sense to me.

That wave of thought came and went, and then I was so glad to see her. As we took the Metro to Van Ness, she told me about some old duffer on the train who'd talked at her without ceasing. Then she showed me his card, from some foundation.

“Was he hitting on you?” I asked. She made a face and told me he was our father's age. “Well dressed,” she said, “and very … genteel.”

“A genteel man on the train. Don't those usually turn out to be murderers?”

“I was bored. Listening to him was better than this.” She showed me the book she'd brought along—
Jacques the Fatalist.

“Why are you reading that?”

“This dickhead left it at my place. I can't get into it, though.”

“Was it that kid from your class?”

“No. I wish,” she said. “But not really. I don't really wish that.”

She had on fingerless gloves, very
Breakfast Club
, a kind of joke about looking tough that still conveyed something of the referenced toughness. Once when I was visiting her in New York, she'd taken me to a packed yoga class in an overheated room above an electronics store, and everyone in the class, my sister included, had seemed to be straining and striving and agonizing. They were there to master yoga, to conquer it, and they threw themselves into difficult asanas I would never do, as I crouched in child's pose.

At the house we clomped around in our coats for a while. Maggie was a great praiser: she praised, in her admiring-younger-sister way, things that I saw as shortcomings, or evidence of shortcomings. “I love those pinecones!” she said when she saw me pour them into a salad bowl, bits of newspaper and all.

Another thing about her was that she was solicitous toward our father, attentive in a way I didn't know how to be. That afternoon he'd gone to his office and come home just as the sun was setting, and as soon as he walked in and saw her, his face softened. They hugged, and she went to get him a beer.

“Here you go, sir,” she said as she delivered it.

“Thank you very much,” he answered. He asked her about the train ride and she told him she'd met someone who worked for the C
____
Foundation.

“Aha,” he said, as if she'd named an old classmate he were struggling to remember. Finally he summoned up some related information. “They used to have their office right over on 16th Street,” he said, and then continued on from there.

After he'd finished his beer, we went out together to look for a tree. With two days left before Christmas, the pickings were slim. We stood in a parking lot behind a Catholic church, surveying the sparse, lopsided product.

“That one,” Dad said, pointing to the most robust—but also the tallest—tree on the lot.

“It's got to be ten feet,” I said. “It won't fit in our house.”

“We can trim it to size.”

“Then it won't have a top.”

“Not if we trim it properly, from the bottom.”

“I don't know, Dad.”

Maggie had wandered over to a scraggly specimen and was circling it. “How about this one?” she said. “I love this one.”

“That runt?” Dad asked.

I remembered her at six, seven—she'd always had the most natural enthusiasm of anybody in the family, which meant that we made fun of her attachments but also deferred to them. She was the reason we'd brought home our first dog, and in junior high when she joined the softball team and became an Orioles fan, we started going up to Baltimore for games in the summertime. She pointed to that sad little spruce, and I went along. “Let's get it,” I said.

“You girls need corrective lenses,” Dad said as he opened his billfold.

That evening she tied strings around my pinecones and hung them on the tree, along with some old yarn ornaments from our childhood, and though Dad kept on grumbling about the eyesore in the living room, I think he secretly agreed with me that it was perfect. He went about his Christmas improvement efforts in the meantime: he strung white lights around the porch and put a wreath on the door, and he came back from a shopping trip with a three-foot plastic Santa that lit up when you plugged it in.

“Oh god. What is that?” Maggie asked him.

“They had these on sale. Fifty percent off.”

“Where are we going to put him?”

Discount Santa went on the front porch.

Maggie helped me bake a more successful batch of cookies, and then we went for a walk, and it was so nice having her around that I started indulging a vision of moving to New York and rooming with her. I did sometimes wish I lived there. We would console each other in our struggles, bake treats in her tiny kitchen, go out to bars together and bring home dickheads with French classics in their messenger bags.

In the kitchen, we talked about Courtney. She and Hugo had decided not to go to St. Bart's after all. But when were they coming over?

“She's probably avoiding Dad,” Maggie said, and when I asked why, she answered, “Because that's what she does.” I remembered how short she'd been with him at the party.

“She might be avoiding me.”

“Why?”

“I think she's pissed.”

“Did you tell her about Rob?”

“That's part of it.”

“And the rest?”

“I don't even know.”

What Maggie did, what Maggie would do: shift very dramatically from light to dark. She could be the best, most helpful, most genuinely cheerful person to have around, and then, for no reason that you could discern, some unseen change in barometric pressure maybe, that person would disappear, nine-tenths of her normal personality would submerge and what was left was a sulking, walled-off clone of my sister.