All the Houses (10 page)

Which current policy?

The president's.

It seems your president is incapable of choosing a policy. That's the trouble.

My father might have joined them. What's that? What trouble? And then Dad would've taken hold of an indisputable truth (that the president hated to disagree with anyone, that his hands weren't on the wheel but rather waving hello to whoever had come to visit) and blunted it, blaming Congress for one thing and another, and emphasizing the administration's strong commitment to its friendship with Saudi Arabia.

I clambered up to my room and exchanged my huge wet T-shirt for a dry one of normal size. Then I put on a tape and stared in the mirror, making faces, watching myself sing along for a few lines,
hello, hello again
, but I didn't like my face when it was singing. It was all mouth and nose.

Courtney, Maggie, and I shared the hall bathroom, which stank of Noxzema and acne cream. In that mirror I was yellower, and I could see the outline of my bathing suit under my shirt, and my little tummy, and, in the hopes of improving myself somehow, I took one of Courtney's razors out of the medicine cabinet and started to shave my damp legs at the sink. I'd done so a couple of times before, not very well—later I'd find remaining patches of hair on my ankles or knees. In trying to be more thorough this time, I nicked my shin. A red drip of blood traveled slowly toward my ankle. I watched it fall into the sink. Then I hopped over to the toilet paper and held some to my shin until the bleeding stopped. I trotted back down the stairs until I reached the third step from the bottom, and from there I jumped to the floor. The men weren't in the kitchen any longer, and in the family room Jamila was watching a black-and-white Western on Channel 5.

“These movies are so boring,” I said. “It's like, men with hokey accents arguing, and then they get on their horses and go shoot people.”

“I love Westerns. I've seen this one, like, five times.” Her purse was lying on the table next to the sofa, on its side, so that I could see what was in it: a pack of gum, a tampon, a stubby pencil, and little balls of paper, like fortune-cookie fortunes or straw wrappers that had been crumpled into tiny wads.

I meandered back into the kitchen, where the watermelon my mom had bought for the party was sitting on the counter, unsliced. I would be helpful, I thought, as I was so often urged to be, and I took the largest of the knives out of the knife drawer and a cutting board from the dish rack. I made my first attempt through the middle, and the knife got stuck in the melon and I had to wrestle it back out and start again, but the cuts after that went cleanly through the fruit. It was a sharp knife, satisfyingly effective. Watermelon juice dribbled onto the cutting board as I made the pieces and stacked them up.

All of a sudden blood was pooling with the watermelon juice, crimson into pink, and it confused me—how could my shin have bled on the cutting board?—before I saw the source, the stinging middle finger of my left hand, its tip liquid red. I stuck my hand under the faucet to wash it off and realized the blood was still flowing. I hadn't seen blood come so steadily out of me before. My stomach turned. There was, I noticed, a little nugget of finger flesh clinging to the side of the knife.

I moaned, and from the family room Jamila asked what was going on.

“I cut myself. Pretty dumb.”

“Is it bad?”

“Maybe.”

She came into the kitchen and peeked over my shoulder as I pulled paper towels from the roll to wrap around my still-oozing finger. “Oooh. My father went to medical school. He can tell you if it's bad,” she said.

“I probably just need to find a large Band-Aid.”

“I'm going to get some ice.”

“I don't think I need ice.”

“I like to chew ice when I'm nauseous.”

“You mean nauseated.”

“What?” She pulled open the freezer and leaned over it, while I started to cry a little, because of the blood and because I didn't want to present myself to my parents and their guests this way. I sat down and watched TV for a couple of minutes, but the blood kept coming through the paper towels.

“Mom?”

Outside, everyone stared at me. Suddenly there were gnats everywhere, gnats in my eyes. My mother sat me down on the deck and crouched there, lifting up the paper towel bandage, which was already soaked. Mr. Abdulaziz stood next to her.

“I'm sorry,” I said, inhaling through my nose and then trying to wipe my nose with a bit of the paper towel.

“What happened?”

“I was cutting the watermelon.”

“Why were you doing that?”

Mr. Abdulaziz kneeled next to my mom. Lightly (and distastefully? Or did I imagine that?) he took my hand in his. My tears dried up and not only that, I felt my whole self shrivel, sensing some violation of his religion or mine. There was an unwelcome message in his cautious attention. Like it or not I was some sort of woman.

“You should go to the emergency room,” he said. “They'll get you sewn up, don't worry. For now you should keep your hand elevated.”

There was a brief negotiation over who would take me to the hospital. Every adult there volunteered him or herself, even Mr. Abdulaziz offered to go. I wished they would just send me to the hospital with Courtney. It fell to Dad instead: “I'll do it, I'll go,” he kept saying, with a martyrish note in his voice, as if repenting for not having kept his house in order. Although Mom objected, saying it made more sense for her to go, he went inside for his car key. The Abdulazizes announced they were leaving. “Oh no, stay,” my mother said, fooling no one. For some reason Dick came with us to the ER, maybe to keep my dad from panicking, since he was so wound up, while Dick sat shotgun, making jokes. I was in the backseat, holding up my hand, and he would say, “This girl keeps giving me the finger!” and so on until he leeched a smile out of me. He was there the whole time, there in the emergency room, and right outside the door as the doctor took a piece of skin from my arm and grafted it over my fingertip. It may not have taken any special valor for him to be there, but even now when I think of him it's with a fondness, because of his company that afternoon, his reassuring attention. Dad, on the other hand, was so anxious he hardly said a word to me—he only began to relax on the way home, rolling down the windows and playing the Beach Boys and stopping at a McDonald's for soft-serve cones and coffee.

 

 

Later, in retrospect, that abortive pool party would seem unreal, a hallucination. It was one occasion when my family's history may have intersected with that of Iran-Contra, but the stories seemed all but impossible to put together. To bring my dad—the dad who fixed things around the house, washed the cars, ate chips—into that tangle of secret machinations and planes full of weapons parts, meant recasting him as a different kind of person, a naive gringo in a geopolitical melodrama. Yet to work the other way, to try to reconcile the bigger picture with the kitchen on Albemarle Street, with our life circa 1985, seemed just as distorting, the product an erratic family comedy in which a cartoonish Oliver North had an odd cameo. I could inflate everything or I could minimize and poke fun. It was the same thriller vs. satire problem I'd had with the screenplay.

But this much I do know: eighteen months after the party, the joint select committees' investigators learned that my parents had entertained the special assistant to the Saudi ambassador, and they made a point of asking both my dad and Mitchell about it in the depositions each gave in advance of the hearings, as though perhaps a deal had been done poolside, i.e., my father and/or Dick Mitchell might've solicited an illegal contribution to the Contras from Mr. Abdulaziz. The suggestion seems outlandish to me. No way did that happen: I'm convinced. Still, I wonder whether they could've possibly meant to do it, intended to make their own freelance solicitation, until I'd interrupted them with my injury.

(From the deposition of Richard Mitchell, March 9, 1987
)

MR. LEGRAND.
What did you hope to gain from your contact with Mr. Abdulaziz? Or is it Prince Abdulaziz?

MR. MITCHELL.
I was never clear on whether he is a prince or not. They have a lot of princes over there. He may have been one.

MR. LEGRAND.
But in terms of your objective.

MR. MITCHELL.
I would say that I was pursuing a relationship but not that I had a specific objective.

MR. LEGRAND.
Did you notify your superiors at the State Department?

MR. MITCHELL.
Yes. My boss was Elliott Abrams and I told him about it.

MR. LEGRAND.
Did you notify anyone on the National Security Council staff, other than Mr. Atherton?

MR. MITCHELL.
I personally did not. I believe Mr. Abrams may have mentioned it to Ollie North.

MR. LEGRAND.
Were he and North friends, to your knowledge?

MR. MITCHELL.
To the best of my knowledge they had substantial professional contact, which was friendly in nature. I would describe them as being close, on a professional basis.

MR. LEGRAND.
And were you friendly with Mr. North?

MR. MITCHELL.
Our interactions were always friendly.

MR. LEGRAND.
Would it be fair to say that your friendly relationship with Oliver North ran counter to the prevailing attitude at the State Department?

MR. MITCHELL.
He had his detractors, but it wasn't a universal attitude within the department. Certain people considered him an activist.

MR. LEGRAND.
Activist in what sense?

MR. MITCHELL.
Very operationally driven, and capable of manipulating people in order to get done what he wanted to get done.

MR. LEGRAND.
Did you share that view?

MR. MITCHELL.
I saw him as someone who was very passionate and very effective.

MR. LEGRAND.
Would it be fair to say that his detractors included the secretary of state?

MR. MITCHELL.
I was present at a meeting during which the secretary of state told Abrams to “watch Ollie North.”

MR
.
BENNETT
. Can we go off the record?

MR. LEGRAND.
Sure.

(Discussion off the record.)

MR. LEGRAND.
Back on the record.

The inquiry into the alleged solicitation was dropped, after it was revealed that the Saudis had already been contributing to the cause, secretly, for more than a year by the time of the pool party. Only a handful of people had been briefed on the Saudi contributions, and my father and Dick Mitchell had not been among them. Even the president may not have been fully briefed—at least that would become his defense. Nobody had the big picture.

We never had anything close to a big picture on Albemarle Street. I hardly had any picture at all. The scandal would bewilder me, it would become entangled with the general confusions and fears of adolescence, so that I still, all these years later, wanted to sort it out, to arrive at some kind of big picture for myself. What had my dad done—who had he been? I still wished we could collaborate, which is to say I wanted Dad to tell me what had happened and then I could write it, or both of us could, but if he chose to keep quiet I would go on trying to piece it all together, assembling fragments and figments.

I'm inclined to believe that Dick Mitchell was the type of person who would find older mentors he could flatter and profit from, men who liked to see themselves in him. In the early eighties, he'd met North
,
and though North wasn't much older than he was, not a mentor exactly, Dick ingratiated himself with the lieutenant colonel. By that time my father was already on the NSC staff, and so it was easy enough for his friend to pull him in, to cut him a piece of the action. I'm not trying to blame it all on Dick, but had it not been for him I bet Dad might not even have known what North was up to. After all, there were plenty of NSC staff people who had no idea.

*   *   *

My quote-unquote manager called me while I was at the grocery store. I always felt a quick jab of hope at the sight of Phil Franklin's name on the phone display. Although I was not an optimist in general, I would enter contests (screenwriting competitions for one, but also raffles to win luxury cars or gourmet cookware, whatever was there to be won), and I answered phone calls from him in the same spirit, wanting to believe and so semibelieving that a studio executive had gone into raptures over an idea or a script of mine. That never came to pass, though. Now Phil announced he was quitting the entertainment business to help out a friend who'd started a custom yacht company in Marin County.

“You're going to build boats?”

“Of course not. I'm going to sell boats.”

“Boats.”

“It's a great opportunity.”

Here I'd thought of him as one of Hollywood's enthusiasts, someone who would never leave the industry, but turned out he was just an enthusiast. His sentiment for TV and movies could be transferred to boats. And where did that leave me? Even though Phil had not actually helped me to become the working writer I'd hoped to become, his news was upsetting.
Now I have nothing to go back to
, I thought. It wasn't necessarily true, but I thought it anyway. There was nothing for me in Los Angeles anymore.

The house was empty when I returned from the store. I didn't know where Dad had gone. The answering machine blinked:
Tim, this is Roy Kotler, I wanted to let you know I won't be able to make it to the panel on Tuesday. I've got family coming into town, and …
The event was less than a week away, and acquaintances of my dad's kept calling to say they weren't coming.

It had been a while since I'd found myself alone in the house where I'd grown up, and without my present-day dad to remind me that the twenty-first century was well under way, I started to feel as if I would wake up the next morning and have to get ready for school. That my sisters and my parents would all be in the kitchen, eating breakfast, reaching around each other for the milk—and when I pictured that ordinary, harried, unfeeling moment I both regretted what I saw there and longed to return to it, as though I might better appreciate something about it or even inject a larger dose of love into it than had been there the first time.