All the Houses (17 page)

She couldn't help but notice the way I inspected her. She looked right at me and called, “Hel-lo,” in a singsong. My reply tripped in my throat, a froggish “Hi.”

We passed each other, then she mounted the stoop of the town house next to my building. As I took out my key she took out hers. We lived next door to each other, apparently, and when I glanced at her one last time her expression contained a latent laugh, as though she found it funny to be the object of my attention.

 

 

My father and Dick Mitchell both moved to Washington in 1963, Dad to start law school at Georgetown and Dick to work for a Republican senator. They were already familiar with the city from summer internships and doubtless captivated by the place, by the sense of being in the thick of it, even as underlings. The marble, the bustle, the diplomatic cars gliding in circles, the stone creatures with their fittingly puffed chests guarding the bridges over the Potomac, the crises large and small, a thousand men in corrective lenses deciding the future of America.

For the most part, my father's 1987 testimony in the Iran-Contra hearings addressed what he did or didn't know about Contra resupply operations in 1985 and 1986. But in one digression, he confirmed that he was present at the first meeting of the Committee for a New American Peace, at Dick Mitchell's apartment.

*   *   *

From the hearings transcripts:

MR. COHEN.
Are you familiar with the Committee for a New American Peace, or CNAP?

MR. ATHERTON.
I was at the first meeting.

MR. COHEN.
That was when?

MR. ATHERTON.
I believe it was in 1968.

MR. COHEN.
And what were the qualifications for membership in this organization?

MR. ATHERTON.
There were none, I mean it's not a formal membership process. A group of us who were at that time young staff members and students, who were interested in policy, started meeting informally.

MR. COHEN.
Was Richard Mitchell a member of that group?

MR. ATHERTON.
I guess you could say he was the leader of it. Again, we didn't have a formal structure, but he was the guy who got the ball rolling.

MR. COHEN.
And what was the purpose of this organization?

MR. ATHERTON.
As I mentioned, it was to discuss policy, discuss the direction our country was headed, propose solutions.

MR. COHEN.
What do you mean by solutions?

MR. ATHERTON.
We were young and believed every problem had an answer.

*   *   *

So here he is, Tim Atherton, venturing inside the grand but decayed Woodley Park building where Dick has rented a corner apartment. Chandeliers and fallout shelter signs decorate the halls, and Roosevelt-era tenants hide behind their doors. From the television comes a low voice, Cronkite's, reminding everybody where they aren't: Da Nang, Phu Bai, Can Tho.

Instead they are sitting on Dick's mismatched furniture, drinking jug wine from paper cups and eating Triscuits and canned olives, a half dozen young men. CNAP was Mitchell's idea, his baby, and notwithstanding the grand title it's essentially a discussion group for young men on the rise, one that allows them to take part in the central pastime of the political set, which has always been very much occupied with talking to itself.

Let's write to Melvin Laird, says a young professor wearing a brown smoking jacket.

The man doesn't know a damn thing about foreign policy.

What about Haldeman?

Vaht about Haldemaaann?

Dear Bob …

Tim sticks a finger into his wine: a piece of something has fallen into it, cheese or maybe plaster, and he drags whatever it is up to the edge of his glass, leaving it suspended there, for he doesn't see any napkins or plates to put it on.

Dick carries a typewriter out from his bedroom and sets it on top of the coffee table, then inserts a piece of stationery—he has actually had stationery printed, with
CNAP
in block letters at the top of the page.

What are you writing? somebody asks.

Our first press release.

Press release! Everyone laughs, but Dick is intent.

While men discuss national security in the living room, women smoke in the kitchen. Jan Mitchell, Dick's wife, has set out Chablis, cold cuts, and an ashtray. All the women roll their eyes at the men's pretensions, but Jan takes it the furthest, scoffs at Dick and his stationery. You'll notice the word
nap
is in the name, she says, feigning a yawn. A lawyer herself, who dresses smartly during the day, she doesn't bother to put on nice clothes or shoes for Dick's get-togethers, but carries out her assigned duties in a kind of peasant dress and house slippers.

The more Dick drinks, the more fluent he becomes, more urgent with his ideas, even as his consonants start to bumble into one another. Sprawled across half the sofa, in shirtsleeves and loosened tie, he gossips. He knocks William Rogers, Nixon's secretary of state, by saying that Nixon has tied Rogers's hands and won't let him do anything of significance. The president wants to run everything out of the White House, Dick says. He's got ol' Hank Kissinger in there to take care of it for him.

But Rogers and Nixon are old friends, Tim says. They were law partners.

Yes they were, but Rogers was always on top. The alpha-friend. You wait and see. Now that Nixon's got it flipped around, I bet you anything he'll rub Rogers's face in it.

Where'd you get this?

I've got a buddy that works for Kissinger.

Isn't that what they'd want to believe?

Trust me, Dick says, coming to his feet and walking to the window. Or don't. You'll see.

Now he actively scans the street as though waiting for somebody down there to give him a signal. Some assistant to Kissinger, maybe, come to relay more privileged horseshit. Tim is skeptical of Dick's gossip, but in the time he's known Mitchell he's learned that the things he deems impossible often turn out to be accurate, while unremarkable statements turn out to be lies told for no reason, or not any reason that Tim can figure out.

Mitchell moves nearer to the window and places one palm on the glass. Christ, he says softly. The street is deserted but for a young woman in a short fur coat and a short skirt who walks toward the building on skinny stork legs. Very young, maybe twenty or even younger, and beautiful, at least from a distance she is. Thin and fair-skinned like Dick himself, with dark brown or black hair piled on top of her head. As she walks her pocketbook swings on one axis, her hips on another.

Look at her, Dick whispers.

Pretty, Tim says.

Gorgeous. Let's go down and talk to her.

I don't think so.

We'll invite her to come up. We'll make her recording secretary.

Your wife is in the kitchen, Tim says.

Mitchell reflects on that fact but isn't ready to relent. I just want to see her close up, he says.

Tim puts a hand on his arm. I don't think that would be in the organization's best interests, he says.

Dick snaps out of his trance, smiles, says of course he was kidding. He returns to the room, to the making of pronouncements.

But a year or so later, after Jan leaves to join a commune in southern Virginia, Dick shows up at a party with a too-young girl who reminds Tim of the girl they saw that night, she might've been the very same girl. He couldn't say for sure. Dick Mitchell, he hears another friend say, has a weakness for the poreless. Tim doesn't understand at first.
For the young gals.

*   *   *

By the midseventies Dick Mitchell has completed his transformation from a son of wealthy Democrats to a denouncer of the liberal elite. Not that he's given up his pretty clothes and refined demeanor, but he stays on a rightward course, and is rewarded with jobs at the Pentagon and later the State Department. He is staunch in his thinking and genteel as ever in his social life. Tonight, Dick announces one evening when Tim and Eileen are over for dinner, as he tends to a pot of boiling water, we're having
pasta al détente
!

MR. COHEN.
Isn't it true that in 1976 your good friend Mr. Mitchell was appointed by Vice President Bush, who was then serving as CIA director, to a commission assigned to evaluate arms control policy?

MR. ATHERTON.
I believe the CIA director named people to the committee and that they then hired their own researchers. Dick and several others from our group were researchers.

MR. COHEN.
So did the CNAP group help produce this research?

MR. ATHERTON.
There was no direct involvement, to my knowledge. Only an overlap in the people involved. I was not part of it.

MR. COHEN.
This was the commission known as Team B.

MR. ATHERTON.
Yes.

MR. DESHAZO.
What is the relevance here? Mr. Atherton has already mentioned, he was not part of this.

MR. COHEN.
What I'm getting at is that these kinds of views, the conservative position that our national security policy was too soft and that seeking a broad consensus was actually a grave threat to the country—this same type of thinking that apparently motivated some of the actions we're here to investigate—has a history.

MR. DESHAZO.
My client is not here to testify about historical trends. He is here to discuss only the things, the limited things, of which he has firsthand knowledge.

MR. COHEN.
In point of fact, even participating in this, whatever you would call it, this young men's debating club begun by Mr. Mitchell, turned out to have more serious ramifications.

MR. DESHAZO.
Is that a question?

MR. COHEN.
It's a statement. We'll move along.

 

 

I had nocturnal bouts of sister-nostalgia. All those hours we'd spent lying around in front of the television in our nightgowns. All the mornings waiting for the bus. The afternoons at acting class or art class, held in an old house in Cleveland Park repurposed as a community center. We dreamed of stage lights, sang “Maybe” in the tub. We sent away for the K-tel Superhits on cassette. We fell asleep to the tick-tock of a shifty-eyed cat clock, its tail going to and fro, to and fro. We were sent to ballroom dancing school, in our white gloves and Mary Janes, and paired with one beet-cheeked boy after another.

But now that I think of it, each of us was sent to dancing school in seventh grade. We weren't there together. For that matter, only I sang in the bath. Still I include my sisters in all of it: we ate the same food, breathed the same air, went to the same places in the same cars, and I walked around with their sayings, their jokes, their accusations in my head.

Courtney would've scorned all that as false feeling. She saw herself as pragmatic and oriented toward the future, though the way she lived, the clothes she wore, the house she'd bought, these all seemed to express a wish for things to be as they had been thirty years ago or even before we were born.

I'd hoped that she'd forgotten about taking me to give blood. In fact I'd just misunderstood which day she meant to take me. She'd called me on Friday and said she would pick me up at ten the next morning.

“I'm squeamish,” I said. “I'd be ill.”

“That's silly. It'll be quick, and then after we can go shopping,” she said, as if that were a good trade, your vital fluids for a sweater or a handbag.

“I'm broke,” I said.

“They don't charge to draw your blood.”

“What if I have a disease, like an STD?”

“You have an STD?”

“You never know. Do we need an appointment or something?”

“I already made one.”

The day was cloudy and dull, the city sketched out in crayon strokes. Courtney pulled up outside my building in her clean white car. She wore unnecessary sunglasses and watched impatiently as I put on my seat belt. She lived according to that principle that a body in motion wants to remain in motion. Back in her sports-playing days she'd had this gift, and how she came to it I don't know, for perceiving the geometry of an instant, the sudden pocket of space between lacrosse defenders: she could see the opening, you might say, though really it was more instinctual. She knew it was there before it was visible. She slipped right through it, barreled toward the goal. Now as she drove I thought of her fierce and red-faced, with that chimpanzee look her mouth guard gave her, cradling her stick; I thought of this while she accelerated too much for the distance before us and braked too severely at the stop signs.

“I think if you turn right, up there, that'll get us onto Mass Ave,” I said.

“How can you stand driving around here?”

I didn't say anything. She knew I didn't have a car.

“Right, right, go right.”

She swerved and the car screeched, but she kept her cool, asking, “Is that it?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I'm pretty sure.”

I rummaged around for a question to ask her. “How's Hugo?”

“He's fine.”

“Does he ever get, like, homesick? It must be exhausting having to speak a second language all the time.”

“He's fluent, though. He speaks English. When he speaks.”

“I didn't mean he doesn't speak English, just, it's not his first language.”

“
Language
is not his first language, if you know what I mean.”

I did not. “Oh.”

We parked in the garage of a medical building on Foxhall Road. Courtney marched inside and I bobbled along behind her. I had never been to a blood bank before and so had pictured a clone of a regular bank, with tellers behind windows. Instead it was a small office where a nurse in a festive smock of a shirt tried to talk me out of not only my blood but also extra platelets and maybe, she hinted while glancing over at a poster of a frail, hairless child, maybe I could also spare a little bone marrow? I half-expected her to request in addition my hair and a couple of toes. As she waited out my hawing and humming she pecked at a form with her pen, leaving a trail of black dots around the spaces where my refusals would be marked with an
X
.