All the Houses (8 page)

This sounded revisionist to me—or at least not true to my memory of my own past. For most of my twenties I'd wanted to hang out with men and to sleep with some of them, and twice as a result of those activities I'd fallen in love and stayed with one person for a while, but until recently the notion of “settling down” had been off-putting, and I put it off. I did suspect that I was at a disadvantage compared to the people who'd come around to the concept sooner, but that was my own fault, not the result of cultural forces.

I didn't say any of that. “You'll find someone,” I told Maggie, and I meant it: underneath her harried professor guise, she was the sweetest person in our family, the one who'd played nurse to her dolls and doted on animals and been friends in school with a bunch of gentle, giggly, artistic girls who hugged one another a lot. It had surprised me when she decided on academia—I'd seen her as a doctor or a therapist, tending to people in some way. She was also the prettiest one of us, I'd always thought, although Courtney was more photogenic.

“Yeah,” she said, in no way encouraged.

“You will. You're great.” That only made things worse, of course. It was one of those phone calls that faded into weightless assurances and unspoken disappointment. She said she'd see me soon, at Dad's panel. He'd mentioned it to her multiple times. He seems really excited about it, she said. Yes he does, I said.

*   *   *

Dad had a cable modem, and so to check my e-mail I had to bring my laptop to his study and connect it, or else use his machine. I was, post-Rob, checking all too often for a message from him, one that didn't appear, and still I would go back again and again for my sugar-drip. Just checking! In my spare time, i.e., the intervals between e-mail checks, I would often read in my room, where I'd hidden
A Call to Honor
under the bed as though it were something dirty. If only: the book could've benefited from a little obscenity, a little salt at least. In fact it was just another dry political memoir, a self-serving recap of James Singletary's employment history, full of meetings, crises, encounters with important people, abstractions. Other than the occasional mention of his wife, there were no relationships to speak of besides relationships of power, in other words what you might expect from one of those Washington men who believed that the warp and woof of their own lives mattered less than their ideas about foreign policy, who hadn't exactly kept track of their own lives for that matter.

I had no way of knowing whether the book was full of lies, as Dad had said it would be. Certainly it was self-serving: Singletary seemed to hold all the right opinions, while those around him were misinformed, weak-kneed, blind, naive, dumb. He was absolutely free of self-doubt, on the page at least. More than once he made a point of saying that if he'd had to do X or Y over again, he would do it in just the same way he'd done it the first time. None of it felt real, none of it felt at all
felt
.

Most of the book was devoted to an insider's take on the Bush White House, circa 2001–2003, but in the first few chapters Singletary recounted his prior career. He'd been on the National Security Council staff in the eighties, specializing in Latin America. That would've put him in regular contact with my dad, who'd worked there too and had expended much of his time and energy on conflicts to the south of us.

When I say Dad had a role in Iran-Contra, that's what I'm talking about, really just the Contra side of the hyphenate. The U.S.-backed fight against the leftist government in Nicaragua. How many people even remember it? If you were alive and watching the news at the time, maybe this rings a bell: circa 1984, Congress blocked military aid to the Contra rebels, and after that a small clique of people did an end-run around the ban by creating a privately funded, secret supply system. And so followed the whole fever dream: you had the Contras, bunches of ragtag, bantam boys with indigenous faces down in the jungle, continuing their fight against the Sandinistas, while in the fun-house mirror of our own country another sort of unlikely brigade—this one composed of midlevel officials, soldiers of fortune, and blue-rinsed wealthy widows—went on providing them with their aftermarket weapons and secondhand camouflage.

My dad was pulled into it because of Dick Mitchell—even as a teenager I'd inferred as much. Dad had followed his buddy into the murk and had suppressed his own better judgment along the way. I don't mean to suggest that Dad resisted doing what he did, just that it began with his friend. Mitchell the schemer, the political savant, the flirt, Mitchell the alpha to his beta. They'd first met when my dad was a Cornell undergraduate and Mitchell was a teaching assistant. I suspect that Dad would've seen through him and fallen under his sway all the same. He had that kind of charisma. I think this, I know this, I feel sure of it despite having very little hard evidence. I'm just drawing from my adolescent perceptions, from seeing them interact at family parties. (Later I would read Mitchell's testimony before the congressional subcommittees, not that it included any information about his friendship with my father.)

Dad, for his part, never talked about Mitchell now. Aside from the outburst that Singletary's TV appearance had triggered, I couldn't think of the last time he'd brought up his White House years at all. And so I was looking for a way in, a trapdoor to Dad's past. I wanted more from
A Call to Honor
than it could've possibly contained—that is to say, when I picked up the book I think I'd subconsciously hoped to discover the story of Mitchell in it, if not the story of Mitchell and Dad. Some clue, at least.

But naturally I didn't find anything like that.

Singletary had written: “After September 11, confusion prevailed inside and out of the White House.” And: “Regrettably, there were those in favor of what I would call a run-and-hide approach.” And: “Every administration has to make tough choices.” And on and on. Still, those clichéd pages had opened something up for me, a box full of questions not answered. While my days were still loose and undirected on the surface, I began to feel that I had come home for a purpose, albeit a purpose that wasn't clear to me.

One afternoon while Dad was out, I checked my e-mail and then stayed at his desk, succumbing to screen daze. I scanned the headlines and did some clicking, downloaded the class schedule of a yoga studio in Dupont Circle, then closed the browser and started hunting around for the download.

I opened a file on the desktop with an opaque name (DL061504.doc) and found not a list of yoga classes but a letter that Dad had written, earlier in the year, to Senator Richard Lugar.
VIA FAX
it said at the top. He had a habit of communicating by fax. The only letters I'd ever sent by fax had to do with changing my car insurance or terminating a health club membership, but my father used his fax machine to send notes to people he didn't care to call on the phone. I guessed that these were people, like Senator Richard Lugar, who wouldn't have been likely to take his call, and that Dad might've been hoping that they would nonetheless be moved, because of the wisdom contained in the fax, to want to talk to him. But then again I have a way of making him sound needier than maybe he was. For all I know, he didn't give a fig whether they talked to him or not.

Dear Senator Lugar
, began the fax,
I enjoyed our conversation last night at the National Press Club.
The document went on to suggest a foreign policy agenda for Bush's second term in office, with a series of bullet-point proposals (Scale Back Our Military Commitments, Reopen a Dialogue with Iran, and so on) followed by short explanations. I had no problem with the proposals, which seemed reasonable enough, but the fact that my dad had written the letter, and presumably faxed it to the senator's office, where it lay, no doubt, in a bin of other unread faxes—I wished he hadn't done it. I preferred to view Dad as someone who'd gone into more or less permanent exile and who possessed, if nothing else, an exile's dignity, better that than a pitiable faxer.

I looked in the fax machine itself, which had in its tray of already-sent pages a couple dozen invitations to the panel he'd told me about, personal invitations he'd faxed to people I doubt he knew, at best barely knew. They were members of the present-day national security establishment (administration officials, congressmen) and of the city's old guard more generally.
Dear X, Because of our shared concern about the progress of American intervention in the Middle East, I am writing to invite you to a panel discussion …
All that time he spent in the study, I'd thought he was just checking his stock portfolio. Come to find out it was this.

I began to feel irritated by all the Northwest Washington nabobs who wouldn't answer his faxes or attend the panel, who would sweep him aside. I thought about James Singletary, who was clearly no smarter than my dad, only more arrogant, and yet there he was on TV, pushing his ponderous book, the capstone to his dully distinguished career.

Too late, I realized Dad had come home. He walked in on me. His faxes were still in my lap. He saw them there and his face cramped up.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, “I was just looking for a fax I sent.”

“I see. Carry on,” he said. He turned to go.

“You can stay. I'm pretty much finished in here.”

“Did you find it?”

“The fax? I think I must've thrown it out.”

I heard what sounded like heavy equipment outside, a bulldozer on the move.

“Do you have the number you sent it to? The machine will tell us whether it went through or not,” he said.

“That's okay. I bet it went through.”

“You can just press the up arrow button, and it'll tell you the last ten numbers it dialed, and if you want a report—”

“It's okay, Dad.”

I was depriving him of something he wanted, which was to take refuge in the subject of the machine and its capabilities. He found that kind of talk easeful, and I did too, since it was simple enough to listen to him explain things and so color in the silence. Here I don't mean the silence of things not said, of elephants in the room, but the silence of people at some remove from whatever it is they might've said in an alternative, talking universe, the silence of family who after decades of elision and evasion know each other both too well and hardly at all. Who sit like well-trained dogs on either side of a nonexistent fence and regard each other with a trampled-on, mute curiosity.

It was then that a suggestion arrived in my head and slid out of my mouth. Had he ever thought about writing a memoir, I asked him. He could write about his time in government, lay out his views, and (though I didn't say it explicitly) surely he could outdo the likes of
A Call to Honor.
He could write something real—whatever that meant, I was suddenly convinced he could do it.

I was surprised to hear that he had, in fact, considered it. “I was working on a proposal,” he said. He mentioned the name of a lawyer and deal maker in town, and even I knew who this man was, somebody who brokered book contracts for ex-presidents. “I met him once, and we chatted for a bit. I thought I could send it to him, see what he says.”

This seemed as unpromising to me as all his faxes. “And did you?”

“I started it a few times and then—”

“I could help you with it,” I said.

“Well. It's a question of what I remember, my getting that down on paper.”

“You'd be the one writing it, but I could interview you. Or you could record yourself talking about what you remember, and I could take a stab at writing it up.” Offering to serve as Dad's assistant was a terrible idea, but I went on. “Or we could start with an outline.”

“I don't think so.”

“Or I could just send you some questions. I could e-mail them to you.”

“No, no. Thank you, but no.”

“Okay. I just thought I could—”

“I don't think so. No.”

“Okay.”

I suppose it had been fanciful of me, downright obtuse to think that I could barge my way through a locked door. Yet even his out-and-out refusal didn't deter me. Just the opposite. I believed I could still convince him. I indulged this vision in which my dad was a weird, wounded king and I the knight come to heal him. No matter that the king had shuffled off to the kitchen for a beer, that the knight was now checking her e-mail yet again, now looking at clothes online.

Later that evening I was still thinking about the book I could help my dad write, which in my mind had turned into something important for my father to do, something “good for him,” as if remembering and writing were unalloyed virtues. And, I thought, what if he could write a halfway-decent Washington memoir, one that wasn't dead on the page, a real book? Wouldn't that be something?

I found him in the family room, sitting in front of the TV, and I asked him, abruptly, whether he remembered the time he took Courtney to the White House and her hand had got caught in a mousetrap. It was the wrong place to begin. He frowned.

“Her wrist, I think it was.”

“How awful. You must've been freaked out.”

“Freaked out?”

“What did you tell Mom?”

His hand went toward his shirt pocket, reaching for the pipe he'd stopped smoking years ago, then traveled up to the side of his neck. My father had always been lean, but because age had softened his body, it now seemed at odds with itself, skinny here, fleshy there. Although he still jogged, still took his shell out on the Potomac, a small gut had appeared on his frame, like a jellyfish on a pier.

“I don't recall,” he said.

“She must've been surprised.”

“I could ask you some questions too,” he said. “How about I ask you some questions.”

“I'm not accusing you, Dad. I just wanted to hear your version. Never mind. It's no big deal.”