All the Houses (43 page)

I could imagine that person, trained in what to do next, saying, “It's okay,” and adding robotically, “You did great”—the way they so often did, these doctors and nurses, telling you that you did great, just for submitting, and even for failing to submit. Then it was explained to him that they were going to give him a drug to raise his heart rate, in place of exercise.

Dad sat down next to me without saying anything. A woman was exclaiming, “They want me to drink barium. I'm not going to drink barium!” and a little radio in the receptionist's area was emitting a tinny “Pink Houses.” They called Gail's name again.

I started to feel drugged myself. My own clothes were too heavy on me. I looked over at Dad: he was studying the
TV Guide
so closely, he might have been cramming for an exam on its contents
.
His lips were parted, and I thought I could see in his face both the endless curiosity (the ability to be curious about anything, even this week's TV schedule) and the way in which, in seeking out information, he kept disappointment at arm's length. He kept the disappointed old man within him confined to a small area, fought valiantly against becoming only that.

Dad was still waiting to be called again when Gail emerged from the interior for the last time. She put her hand on her husband's shoulder. “Ready?”

“All set?”

“They're finished with me.”

“Did you find that parking stub?”

“It's not in my wallet.”

“Can you check one more time?”

“I know it's not in there.”

“What about your purse?”

She glanced in Dad's direction. “I'll check one more time if it means so much to you.”

Dad had been watching them, and now he stood up and retrieved our own stub from his pants pocket. “Here,” he said, “take mine.”

“How are you going to get out then?” Singletary asked.

“I can afford it.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Singletary said.

“You sure you don't want it?” he asked.

“Don't be ridiculous, Tim,” Singletary repeated. “For chrissake. You always did want to be the good guy, didn't you?”

“And that's wrong?”

“You sit on your high horse—”

“I'll withdraw my offer then.” Dad put the stub back in his pocket.

Gail tried to usher her husband toward the door. “Let's go, Jim.”

He and Dad were staring each other down. Now other people sitting nearby were watching the two of them, and what they saw, surely, was a pair of old guys arguing, a geriatric comedy. None of us could've told what Dad and Singletary were reliving just then.

Finally his wife managed to steer Singletary out of the room. Dad sat back down and looked straight ahead. He didn't move for a while. Then he took a pack of chewing gum from his coat pocket and offered me a piece before unwrapping one for himself. More patients came and went as a cloud of cinnamon smell formed around our heads. I looked at our matching knees, my knees smaller than his but shaped the same.

“I don't know how she could stand to be married to him for so long,” he said. “Jim Singletary. Always looking out for number one. Which is not exactly unheard-of in this town, but he took it to another level.”

I wished he would elaborate, but having swallowed much of the
TV Guide
, he was now an expert on the television industry and wanted only to engage me on that subject, i.e., which were the top shows and why were they successful and why didn't I go work on
Lost
, and while this was annoying, it was less annoying than it had been when he'd hinted that I ought to do something entirely different with my life.

In the car, though, Dad told me more about Singletary, whom he painted as a scourge of the workplace, circa 1985. An alarmist, a busybody, a Red-baiting pest in the Old Executive Office Building, Dad said. Now that I'd met him myself, I couldn't quite reconcile the figure my father was rendering with the man in the golf shirt. To me he was just a gamecock of an old man. Dad picked up on my general attitude. “I might as well tell you. When push came to shove he really tried to screw everybody over.”

“How so?”

“As the whole Iran-Contra brouhaha was starting, we had these meetings at the White House. I guess you'd call it spin control, though that makes it sound more organized than it was. Most of us didn't know all of what had been going on, and those of us who knew part of it found that some of our colleagues had a different idea of the facts. So we were all trying to get on the same page. The idea was, we all agree on one story that we can give to the media. It was supposed to be the truth, as much as we could agree on what would've been the truth.

“Singletary, he was always a schemer, always running off to meet with people from other departments, from the military, from intelligence, people who considered themselves the real conservatives. Then all of a sudden he wasn't with those people anymore.

“Suddenly he was with the chief of staff, with Don Regan. Singletary was strutting over to his office and feeding him lord knows what, all sorts of nonsense. Regan had never gotten along with our folks, and being the chief of staff, he saw it as his responsibility to cover the president's rear in whatever way he could.

“So Singletary teams up with Regan and they start telling this story that the whole Contra operation and the weapons sales to Iran were all the handiwork of my former boss Bud McFarlane, who'd stepped down by then, and North, with the help of Elliott Abrams and Dick Mitchell and myself. That nobody above them, the president, the vice president, nobody else knew. There was a big article that ran in
The New York Times
to this effect. Singletary was obviously the source of it. He wasn't named, but still. And you know, it was just one story, one theory out of a dozen or more that were floating around, but … the man had no loyalty whatsoever.

“There's no question that Dick and I would have been part of the investigation no matter what, but we got roped into it all the more because of that. Especially Dick. Jim Singletary wanted to bring Dick down, I know he did, and he helped do it. The investigators and the lawyers were asking Dick about these stupid rumors that Singletary had started. They made so much of things that I would consider to have been relatively insignificant.

“This is not—I don't want you to think that I'm saying that this is why Dick, you know, didn't make it. He'd always struggled. He had his demons, and from what I understand he stopped taking the medication he was supposed to be taking. But the nonsense with Singletary, and the silly rumors, it was all such, such … such
horseshit
! And then they indicted Dick, which was outrageous.

“People like Singletary, they don't even have any awareness of the damage they do, they just go around like, like insects, spreading disease. That man, to me, is an insect. A bloodsucking tick.”

*   *   *

I said something unmemorable in response—yes, I see, how awful—and at the same time I was privately thanking Jim Singletary, bloodsucking tick, for having latched onto my dad and drawn this out of him. He was telling me this, at last, and as he did I felt something in myself unlock, because it seemed to me that once he was willing to tell me the story, I would be released, finally, from needing to know it.

(
From the deposition of James Singletary, March 17, 1987
)

MR. LEGRAND.
At what point did you become aware of the negotiations with the Iranians?

MR. SINGLETARY.
I was not aware of them until last fall.

MR. LEGRAND.
After details about those negotiations were revealed in the media in November of last year, and also details about the plane that went down in Nicaragua, did you then become involved in preparing a chronology for Congress that would explain the NSC staff activities with respect to Iran and to the Contras?

MR. SINGLETARY.
At first that wasn't seen as necessary. There were reports coming out of the Middle East, but because they contained a number of inaccuracies, we didn't expect them to hold up. At the same time there were some other things happening, a hostage was released. We also had the midterm elections. However, by the following week, it became clear that the president would have to say something about these news reports. We therefore had to assemble all the relevant facts and present them in a coherent way. And so internally within the White House we were putting together the chronology.

MR. LEGRAND.
Who was assigned to be principally responsible for the chronology?

MR. SINGLETARY.
It was North.

MR. LEGRAND.
He was the author of it?

MR. SINGLETARY.
He would do a draft, and then we would meet on it and Poindexter or somebody else would remember something else, and North would try to verify it and if he could verify it, he would modify the draft. There were several iterations.

MR. LEGRAND.
And were there any disputes—disputes may be too strong of a word—any differences of opinion as to what should go in the chronology?

MR. SINGLETARY.
No more than what you would expect.

MR. LEGRAND.
Did you agree with the consensus on that chronology?

MR. SINGLETARY.
In some places yes, in some places no. I would say there were some things left out of the official story.

 

1987

Another night when just Maggie and I were home, I stayed awake after she went to bed. I roamed through the house, picking up books and trinkets at random, peering into cabinets, closets, the freezer. At last I went up to my room and crawled out the window and perched on the roof, pretending to be at ease though the air was biting and there were shingles pressing into my butt, and I didn't want to move around too much because I was afraid of falling. I liked sitting on the roof, but I was also posing there, posing for nobody. Sometimes I would bring a notebook out with me and write wretched poems—once I'd torn one out and then lost my grip on the paper, so that it flew away and landed in the neighbor's pool. But that night I just sat with my hands around my knees and shivered and wondered what it would be like to fall, to go sliding over the gutter and land on the back deck.

I heard the phone ring and hoisted myself back inside. On the other end of the line, Courtney's voice was low and flat, steady like she was trying to keep it steady. “Can you get Dad?”

I told her he was still at the lawyer's office.

“It's almost midnight.”

“He's not here.”

“Seriously,” she said, and then hung up. I lay down on my parents' bed, the bed upon which I'd been, or at least might've been, conceived. I listened to the clang of the heating pipes. I put my cold hands over my face, and when I did I saw Courtney's face disembodied and surrounded by sunbursts of yellow and pink, as if her head were inside some psychedelic television set. She wasn't in trouble and she wasn't smiling either. She was floating there coolly. I slid to the floor and went to the door of Maggie's room and peeked in: she was curled up in a lump in the middle of her bed. Her faint snuffle had a hint of melody to it, against the ticking of the clock. The phone rang again.

“He's not answering at the law firm,” Courtney said.

“Where are you?”

Her voice took a cracked, woozy turn. “I don't know. I don't feel good.”

“Okay. What do you see around you?”

“Wisconsin Avenue.”

“Who are you with?”

“Nobody. I just need Dad to come pick me up.”

“I can come in Mom's car.”

“You don't have your license.”

“Duh. I can still drive.”

“I have the spare key with me.”

“Then get a cab? Or do you want to wait for Dad? I'm sure he'll be home soon.”

“Why are you sure?”

“Just tell me where you are.”

She said, “I'm—” Then her voice cracked. “Shit. Shit.”

“Should I call—”

“No! Don't call anybody. I just need to fucking get picked up.”

“Just tell me where you are right now! I'm calling a cab!”

“I'm near the grocery store.” It was another battle to get her to tell me which one she meant, and she kept saying she didn't want a cab, no, no, and so I told her I was coming to get her. I didn't know how I would do it. “Just stay where you are. I'm on my way.”

“I need a sweater,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Or a coat or a blanket. I'm freezing.”

I called Anthony. We'd been avoiding each other. Once in a while I'd catch him watching me, in the lunchroom or in class, with a look on his face that I would describe as forensic. Still, he had his own phone line, one I could call without waking his parents, and I knew he would help. He'd spent his summers as a camp counselor, and at school the teachers would entrust him with tasks like taking copies over to one of the classrooms or showing a new kid around. The sound of his sleepy voice comforted me, though when I told him why I was calling I got scared again.

While he was on his way, I filled a school duffel, the kind we used for our gym gear, with things I thought might be needed. I had become entirely practical but had lost common sense in the bargain, packing not just a sweater but also sweatpants, a plastic baggie full of crackers, a package of wet wipes, a handful of Band-Aids, and a bottle of room-temperature cranberry juice. Courtney was fine, she was fine, I said to myself. I'd just talked to her and she was waiting for us and I was bringing supplies and she would be fine.

I must've looked all too happy to see Anthony. He turned quickly away from me and, facing the windshield, asked me where to go.

The night was a forest of traffic signals diffusing in the haze. Anthony drove fast but not fast enough for me. At one point he slowed for a yellow light that he easily could have sped through.