All the Houses (12 page)

“God knows how much money we're wasting, how many millions per week, that's what I think,” he said. “Millions down the toilet, down some gold-plated latrine in the middle of the desert. We're not bolstering a thing, except for our egos.”

“That's one way to look at it—”

“And these absurd discussions, these agency reorganizations—”

“All right Tim. Thank you. Let's move on.”

“Yes, let's! Our government needs to move on, we all need to move on from the idea that we can better our interests through belligerence.”

“I don't think anyone here has necessarily advocated for more wars, but we can't turn back the clock, can we? What we're here to talk about tonight is the question of postconflict strategy.”

“Postconflict. Hah!”

It might've been an effect of light and shadow, but I thought I could see purple veins in his neck where normally I just saw his skin. His hands pressed down on the table. “Hah!” he said again.

“We have to do something,” Maggie whispered to me. “Can we do something?”

“What can we do?”

“Pull the fire alarm?”

I thought it was worth considering. Then Dad noticed us and flinched, which led me to think that he hadn't seen us before then, that he'd believed even his own daughters hadn't shown up. He opened his mouth a bit, in such a way that you couldn't see his teeth, just a darkness between his skimpy lips: for a moment he looked like an old, toothless man in pain.

“Hah!” He pushed himself to standing and stepped back from the table, shoving the folding chair out of the way, and started toward the door. “Hah!” he declared again. He walked out, leaving behind a hushed room. Maggie and I stood up and went after him. People watched us go. I held the door for Maggie as she fetched her suitcase. We should hurry, I thought, we have to catch him before he makes it back to his car—but when we stepped into the hallway we found him sitting in a wing chair. He was gripping his knees and breathing in and out through his mouth, and as we walked toward him he continued to stare straight ahead.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I'm having some twinges,” he said.

“What kind of twinges?”

He didn't answer but inhaled sharply.

“I'll call an ambulance,” I said.

He said he didn't need one, it wasn't that bad. I said I would call the ambulance just in case. He objected again, and I could tell he had a horror of having an ambulance come there to the club, of being seen leaving in an ambulance. “A cab,” he repeated. “It'll be faster than waiting for an ambulance to get here.”

Maybe it was foolish of us to give in, but we did, we took a taxi to the emergency room.

*   *   *

Four hours later, after Dad had submitted to a series of tests, a doctor told us that there was no evidence of ischemia, as she called it, in other words she could find nothing wrong, but given his recent history, they would admit him overnight for observation. Dad protested, arguing that he didn't care to be observed, but by then Courtney had joined us at the hospital, and Courtney could tell him what to do in a way that Maggie and I couldn't. He listened to her—sometimes he even seemed intimidated by her—so that when she said, “Don't be ridiculous. You're staying,” he gave in practically at once and started filling out the admissions paperwork.

If it had just been me, I might well have let him go home. I hated hospitals, they were full of their own risks, contagions, mishaps, and besides, as soon as Dad had left the club and settled into the front seat of the taxi he'd seemed better. He'd carped about what idiots the other panelists had been, not to mention the moderator (that thumbsucker, he called him, whatever that meant), while Maggie and I said nothing. And then once he'd talked past his anger, all the knowledge he'd failed to tap during the panel, the contents of his restless, pack-rat brain, came bubbling up, not in any organized way but because of something he happened to see out the window or just one thing reminding him of another thing.

He'd pointed to what had once been a hardware store, then to the former Chinese embassy (paid for in cash and occupied immediately, he noted, so that the CIA couldn't bug the building). He remembered a party he'd gone to thirty-five years ago at the Hay-Adams (though we were nowhere near the Hay-Adams), where he'd met Robert Bork, at that time the number three man, or some low-numbered man, at Justice. This prompted a digression about Bork, whom Dad said would have been a better pick for attorney general than John Ashcroft, never mind the man's baggage or the fact that by the year 2001 he'd been a little old to be nominated for anything. It was the kind of counterintuitive position that my father liked to stake out at parties. He would anticipate a skeptical response and then deliver up a polished gem of an argument in support of his peculiar thesis. As he talked in the cab, I could picture him saying the same words at a cocktail reception, a fund-raiser for this or that, leaning into another man, Senator Richard Lugar even, intent, tactless, impressively clever. I could see the other man parry once or twice and then make his escape, and that made me want to listen to Dad, to appreciate how smart he was, even as I was, of course, not quite listening to him, but rather half-listening to him while picturing him elsewhere.

Once he'd filled out the admissions papers, we waited with him until a nurse came to take him to his room. As he and the nurse walked down the hall and then disappeared around the corner, my own chest tightened—
wait!—
and I wanted to run and get him and take him home after all. I didn't, though. Courtney drove us back to get Dad's car. By then it was close to midnight, and I was too tired to ask her where she'd been, why she hadn't come to the panel. If she'd been there and we'd all sat in the front row then maybe everything would've gone fine—I hardly believed it, deep down, but even so I resented my sister for that reason, and when she asked me to fill her in on what had happened, I said, “I don't even want to get into it.” Before Maggie could tell her, I turned on the radio and started fiddling with the knob. One of the low-bandwidth stations at the bottom of the dial was playing Al B. Sure!, of all things, and I said, “Al B. Sure!” too loudly, and really I couldn't have said why it was such a relief to hear that airy voice from one of the worst years of my life, singing
I can tell you how I feel about you night and day
, but it was, and I started singing along, and then Maggie did too. Courtney said, “Christ,” and drove the car.

 

 

When we picked him up the following day, Dad complained that he hadn't slept at all, had lain awake for hours listening to the beeping of the hospital machines. This was on the eve of Thanksgiving, and nobody was much in the mood to cook or even to risk the madhouse grocery stores, so I'd made us a restaurant reservation. But on Thursday morning, Dad wandered groggily downstairs in his robe, long after he usually woke up, and asked whether we'd defrosted the turkey. I told him we hadn't bought one, we were going out. He hated the idea, and I felt sure that one reason he hated it was that he didn't want our mom to know that we hadn't pulled off a proper feast. So at the last minute Maggie and I made a run to Whole Foods to try to cobble together a holiday meal. Although we'd hoped to find a smoked turkey, they were sold out. The available substitutes were rotisserie chicken or a vegetarian “field roast,” and so we bought a couple of the chickens, along with some prepared sides and a pie, and walked out with a meal in a bag like you might deliver to a needy family, plus a chocolate chip muffin that we split in the car.

Back home, we waited most of the afternoon for Courtney and Hugo to show up. It was part of what we did at that house, what we'd always done, waiting for Courtney. When we were young she would always take the longest to get ready, and any time we were going someplace as a family one of us would stand by the bottom of the stairs and yell up to her. She was meticulous about her clothes, and not only her clothes: before leaving the house, she wanted to arrange everything just so, to straighten her bedspread and line up her stuffed animals, and to go to the bathroom, sometimes more than once, because she hated the feeling of having to go when she was in the car. Although I made fun of her for it, I also coveted her room, it was so clean and orderly, and sometimes when she wasn't home I would go sit in there instead of in my own mess.

I felt the same covetousness as I talked with Maggie about Courtney and Hugo's new house.

“She sent me pictures,” Maggie said. “It's something else.”

It was unclear to me how much money my older sister and her husband had: more than I did, but the same could be said of anyone with a positive net worth. Hugo had spent ten years doing something in finance, then had left to pursue a doctorate in anthropology or maybe it was archaeology. His family was rich too, though I didn't know how rich.

“I hadn't even realized they were looking for a house until she told me about this one,” I said.

“I don't think they were. They just saw it for sale, it's right by where some friends of theirs live. The ones with the twins. They went to an open house and one thing led to another.”

“Where did Dad go?” I asked.

She didn't know. “Look at this giant mound on my face. Every month before I have my period I get these monster zits, I hate them,” she said. I couldn't see any giant mound, only the beautiful face that I might've had myself, had the genetic cards been dealt differently—except then I wouldn't have been myself. I was often, too often, aware of other ways my life might have gone, but around my sisters that awareness was most acute, because I could clearly see some of the other ways my very face and breasts and legs might've gone.

“There's no giant mound.”

“There is! Sometimes I look forward to menopause.”

“Uh, not me. Is he in the kitchen?”

“For some reason I thought he was going to take a nap,” she said.

Dad emerged from the kitchen with a mouth full of cracker, holding a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. How many times in his life had he done that, I wondered, walked out of the same kitchen with the same bottle of wine.

The doorbell rang and then the door, which hadn't been latched, swung open. “Hellooo!” Courtney cried out, as though calling to us from the opposite bank of a river. Hugo followed along after her, a half smile on his oddly wide face.

Here came my older sister in a hive of wool and silk and perfume and—was there such a garment as cashmere tights? Under her layers of fine clothing were more layers. She made a present of herself, one you couldn't unwrap. Maggie and I had once confessed to each other that we both feared her arrivals a little bit, though after ten minutes or so she softened. We had to steel ourselves for her entrances, her way of breezing in and saying things she'd thought of to say beforehand, mostly for Dad's benefit. Around her I always wished I'd worn something else. After college she'd gone to Italy for eighteen months, and it was there that she developed a taste for fashion, high heels, real jewelry, even as I kept dressing the way she used to dress, in sweaters and corduroys. We joked that she'd applied to business school to increase her clothing budget, and sometimes I wondered whether that notion was so far off.

It might have been the longest conference call in history, she was saying. “Do you know who we had on the phone?”

She named the former chief executive of an oil company, and Dad smiled in wonder. He loved that she consorted with such people, or at least sat in on calls with them.

“He was only on with us for ten minutes, but then we had to spend another two hours dissecting every little thing he said.” I couldn't understand why she would've been on a conference call on Thanksgiving morning. Another minute or two passed before I understood that the call had happened Tuesday evening, that she was explaining why she'd missed the panel. She'd had to work. It was her bulletproof excuse. For her (and honestly for most people I knew), having to work was the universal defense—in almost all cases, in any nonemergency situation, it was understood to be a perfectly good reason for letting you down, not calling, not showing up, though she would claim to feel badly about it and try to make up for it in ways that were irrelevant at best, or that exacerbated the slight.

I brushed cheeks with Hugo, who, as he drew back, had the same moony look on his face he often had. I could never tell whether that moony look was intended for me (and if so what did it mean?) or whether he mooned at the world in general. I sometimes thought of him as the Hugo-knot, and I had a fear that someday I would address him that way out loud, by accident.

Hugo pronounced my father's name “Team.” As in: Team, how are you doing? What can I tell you, Team?

Dad asked Courtney and Hugo what they wanted to drink. “Unfortunately we missed the boat on turkey,” he said, “but we're heating up some of those rotisserie chickens.”

“Hmm. I'm not really eating meat or dairy these days,” Courtney said. “But that's all right.”

“Didn't you have short ribs the other night, at the restaurant?” I asked.

“It's since then that I stopped. I had a bad reaction to the short ribs. Then I started reading this new book on plant-based eating.”

“We also got green beans and mashed sweet potatoes,” Maggie said.

“Is there butter in them?”

“Shoot,” Dad said, and he meant it. “Why don't I run to the store and get something.”

“No, that's okay.”

“Really. What do you want?”

“I think the stores are probably closed by now,” I said.

“Sit down, Dad,” Courtney said.

He stood there as if he'd forgotten how to sit.

“I'll make a salad,” I announced, rising from my chair. “Sit here, Dad.”