All the Houses (41 page)

I saw my father's pursed face in profile. He disapproved, but I didn't know whether he faulted Mitchell, the show, the situation, or my mother for that matter. At the same time there was something childlike in his expression, he was so fixated on the screen, and maybe it was that youthful rapt attention or the angle, but I believe there was something hungry in it too. It could be that I misread his face, yet I would learn soon enough, if I didn't quite know it yet, that even when our friends are genuinely sorry for our misfortune, often they are not merely, plainly sorry.

Courtney entered through the back door. She'd been out with Tanya, and she walked in just like she always did, still bound up in the outside air and her outside people, and when she encountered us in the family room it irritated her, I could tell. She would've rather gone straight upstairs. Then she saw who it was we were watching on television. She paused. She sucked that irritation inside of her and, oddly, smiled.

“Why is Mr. Mitchell on TV?”

“He just is,” our mom said.

Dad countered: “He's explaining our Nicaragua policy.”

“Oh, we have a Nicaragua policy?”

But Dad didn't take the bait, nor did she wait for an answer. They were both too riveted by the show. Finally Maggie came in, planted herself right in front of the television, and said that she needed help practicing her report. “We're watching this,” my dad said. My mom stood up and left the room with her.

Not long after that, Mitchell was linked to one of Iran-Contra's odd footnotes. It had to do with that part of the affair my dad was not involved in, the Iran side of things, the doomed negotiations and half-baked arms deals that McFarlane and North had arranged. During the secret talks, North had given the Iranians, as a gift, a Bible inscribed by the president (or, in the ass-covering language that was used at the time, inscribed “in the handwriting of President Reagan”). Of course when this detail came to light, the press had a field day with it, and at the same time word got out that Mitchell had known about this Bible and had maybe even bought it for North at a B. Dalton in Bethesda. When he testified, later that spring, the congressmen started asking about that, whether it was consistent with U.S. policy to hand out Bibles in the course of secret negotiations, and so on and so forth. They seemed more preoccupied with it than with any of the larger questions, presumably because they knew it would make better copy, get them quoted in somebody's column. A day or two later came the Herblock cartoon of Mitchell as a gap-toothed Bible salesman.

The inscription had come from Galatians:
All the nations shall be blessed in you.

Mitchell became the star of his own sideshow. Though many things would bother our dad about the way the scandal played out, this was one that really got to him, the way his friend Dick Mitchell was mocked, lampooned, not for taking part in the supply operations but because he'd maybe purchased a Bible that had then been given to somebody in Iran.

The night that we saw him on television, he hadn't yet been brought low, at that point nobody knew what was coming. Mitchell was just commenting on another story of the week, and I'd watched him with the excitement that came from seeing someone I'd met talk on TV—but also with a premonitory shiver. I may not have been especially attuned to the subterranean shifts around me, but I could tell that Dick Mitchell was on the brink.

*   *   *

It never occurred to me to say no to my sister's request. It made me uneasy, but I longed to please her, and more than that: I thought that I was helping her. There were some false starts. I would spot Rob and head toward him and then chicken out, because he was with other people, or because I'd forgotten what I'd practiced saying.

Finally I found him by his locker. He looked so amused by me that I guessed he had seen all my prior failed approaches.

“Okay, finally. What is it?” he asked.

“Could we talk privately please?”

He steered me around the corner, to a short, empty hallway that led to the lunchroom, and I found myself backed up against the wall, Rob standing over me with one hand planted near my shoulder. I held my breath until I realized I was holding my breath.

“Courtney needs some of that stuff you gave her.”

“I'm sure she does…”

I took the money out of my pocket. “She gave me this to give to you.”

“You have your sister's lying eyes,” he said quietly.

“I have my very own eyes.”

“You have her mouth too.”

It was as though he were going to kiss me, and in that moment I wouldn't have resisted. But we were standing right under a school bell, which rang, loudly, and he straightened up and took the bills out of my hand. “Come find me again tomorrow and I'll have it for you,” he said. I had a notion that this was the wrong way to go about things, that I shouldn't have given him anything until he had the goods, so to speak. Yet it seemed too late to get the money back.

I countered: “Or why don't you come find me?”

He said no, I should find him, actually. Which I did, the next day as school was ending. He unzipped my backpack and put something inside of it, and later on, at home, I mounted the stairs with the sandwich bag full of pills concealed in my bathrobe, and I passed that on to Courtney. She took the bag and shut her bedroom door.

On the weekends she would go out with her friends and come home electrified or angry, in one high-voltage mood or another. She would return at midnight or later, after our parents had gone to bed. I'd be in the family room, not waiting but waiting.

“Where were you?”

“Adams Morgan.”

“How'd you get home?” I hadn't heard a car come or go.

“I walked.”

“You did?”

“It's a beautiful night.”

I looked at her. “Dad would be so pissed.”

“So don't tell him.”

My thinner sister became a bat in our midst, flying away every evening at sundown to feed, ignoring our parents' (weak, unenforced) instructions to be home by nine on school nights. I never knew what to say to her. I worried about her sprain, but it was righteous worry, i.e., she was wrong to hide her injury just as she was wrong to hide everything else she was hiding from me. I judged her and feared for her and resented her, and finally, one Saturday, I told our mom.

She was down in the basement, shoving clothes into the dryer. I felt shaky and kept one hand on the table where we folded our laundry. My parents had let the housekeeper go, that's why Mom was transferring gobs of damp bath towels from one machine to the other—in dozens of small ways she was holding our household together, but she was unhappy to be doing it. And there I was, serving up another nuisance.

“It's sprained, maybe broken.”

“But she's been playing on it, hasn't she? Could it be just a bruise?” my mother asked, hopelessly.

“Anything's possible.”

“Christ.”

Mom had confronted Courtney as soon as she got home that night and, after inspecting her big purple sausage link of an ankle, had dragged her to the emergency room. The worst part of it wasn't that my sister was put on crutches for the rest of the season, that for our last game and the league tournament I would start in her stead and she would sit on the end of the bench in her street clothes and ace bandages; it wasn't that we were eliminated in the first round of the tournament by a team we'd beat twice during the regular season, or that my sister was now treating me with a thousand cutting looks and under-the-breath comments, silences, snubs, slow rolling of the eyes, daily reminders of my zero worth. More than all that, it was that I'd set off a chain reaction: Courtney was furious with me, Mom was furious with Courtney and also (she couldn't help it) with me, Dad stayed in his study most of the time, and Maggie, we thought little Maggie had no clue, but of course she knew as much as anybody. A couple of times I saw her sucking her thumb, a twelve-year-old. Courtney refused to sleep on the first-floor sofa bed and instead hopped her way up and down the stairs, which became the erratic drumbeat of our distress.

*   *   *

In March Dad gave his first congressional deposition, which would be followed by grand jury testimony in May and an appearance before the joint committees in June. Then would come a series of interviews with the Office of the Independent Counsel. We never knew what happened at any of them, we were never told. During those months he spent hours and hours—billable hours—at his lawyer's office.

Further cutbacks were imposed: Did Courtney really need a salon haircut? What was the matter with last year's bathing suit? It had as much to do with my parents' panic than with the actual cost of anything. Mom still had her fund-raising job, and she started working on weekends, which wasn't going to bring us any more money but which served as a distraction, I suppose, an escape. And she traveled more, visiting donors and going to conferences, two purposes that were combined in my imagination. I saw her floating through a ballroom full of wealthy donors wearing name tags, my mother in a chiffon blouse with a sash at the neck, kissing people on the cheek as she lifted the change out of their silk-lined pockets.

One day during that spring of our family's unraveling, I'd come home from school before my sisters, and I walked into the first-floor bathroom, only to find Dad sitting on the toilet. I shrank and backed out before I understood what I'd seen. The toilet lid was closed. He was just sitting there, in an unlit bathroom. I stood outside the door. “I didn't know you were here,” I said.

“I came home early,” he said.

My head was full of Shakespeare's Henrys and Richards, the rulers of my assigned reading. It was as though Dad had come home from a battlefield upon which glory had been exposed as a sham, kings were only body doubles of kings, friends betrayed friends, and cowards outlived the brave.

“Do you have homework?” he asked.

“I have some,” I said.

“Is there anything you'd like some help with?”

He hadn't helped me with my homework in years. It had been years since we'd discussed my homework, or played card games, or done anything like that.

“Not really,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Do you want to watch TV?”

He said that he did. He got a beer and I got a Coke; we turned on the set and watched
Wheel of Fortune
, and before one puzzle had been solved (
CHERRIES JUBILEE
was the answer) he'd fallen asleep in his chair.

Dad was now under a kind of low-intensity, erratic siege by reporters, a zillion of them all rushing to develop their own angles. They called the house, they sometimes stopped by. There was a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking, an urge to make the big story even bigger, so that suddenly men my father had worked with on the NSC staff were being talked about as possible Mossad agents—I heard him rant about this to my mother. He himself was never accused of anything so exotic, though he was named in some of the articles: there was one piece in
Time
that referred to a phone call Dad had supposedly made to an official in Costa Rica. “Like many of the young bucks on the NSC staff,” it said, “Atherton was tireless, committed to the cause, and sometimes arrogant.” After that, Mom actually called an editor at the magazine, someone whose kids we'd gone to grade school with, and gave him hell for it. “Arrogant?” I heard her saying.
“Arrogant?”
As for Dad, he was less angry about that one article than about the sheer amount of classified information that had come flooding out of the White House, every last administration official suddenly unburdening himself.

He continued playing video games on our Apple IIe, late at night.
Apple Panic
was the name of one: you had to climb ladders and lure pulsating bad guys into holes and then hit them with mallets until they vaporized. One day I turned the game on and saw that he had all the high scores.

*   *   *

On plenty of nights that spring, just Maggie and I were home, while Mom worked late or attended a conference, Dad racked up more hours at his lawyer's office, and Courtney went out with her friends. We'd order a pizza and pay for it with money that Mom or Dad had left on the counter, and we'd watch fantasy households on TV,
Full House
,
The Cosby Show
,
227
,
The Golden Girls
. All those hijinks and misunderstandings and reconciliations. Sometimes I'd look over at Maggie, who'd be sucking on a Jolly Rancher, one skinny leg launched over the chair arm, and I'd wonder who she was, who she would be. She was the changeling of the family, fair-skinned and fine-boned, and when we were younger she'd been content to spend hours on her own, drawing elaborate maps of other worlds or talking to her dolls in an invented language.

Or, we made the mistake of treating her as that, as an imaginative child instead of as a full-fledged person. On one of those nights the two of us were sitting in the family room with the TV on, and she got up and went to the kitchen, and when she came back she had a bottle of beer for each of us. I'd never seen my twelve-year-old sister drink before, but I shrugged off whatever concern might've pinged at me. A single beer wouldn't kill her. And there was something about how we'd been left there alone, to guard the house that the rest of our family had abandoned, that made me think the hell with them. Cheers. I drank about half of my beer, rested my head on the sofa arm, and fell asleep.

When I woke up a different show had come on, and there were two more bottles on the coffee table—Maggie was on to her third. I found her in the kitchen, standing on the stool she needed to reach the wall phone, and dialing a number. As soon as she was done dialing she planted her free hand on the counter to steady herself.

“Is Brian there?” she asked, her voice all in flux.