All the Houses (22 page)

In the hallway a man and a woman are arguing in Spanish. Or maybe the woman is angry at someone else, maybe she's telling the man about it, for every so often the woman's voice surges, while the man's remains barely audible. At one point, her harangue coincides with a pause in the discussion, and some of the Nicaraguans smile, as though what she said was foul-mouthed or sensational.

I think we'd better clear the perimeter, North says. Tim steps out of the room to ask them to leave. The woman is much smaller than her voice led him to expect, and she wears the uniform of the hotel restaurant—khaki pants, a white blouse, and a colorful necktie. She carries herself erectly, while the man, slender and bald, with gold rings on his fingers, slumps against one wall.

When Tim comes out, they both turn to look, and as he doesn't know how to speak to them, he makes a tentative, sweeping gesture with his hand. The woman regards him with flared nostrils. Excuse me, she says, simultaneously an apology, a sneer, and a genuine request. Then they walk away, down the hall.

You can kiss all of it
adiós
, North says. Back in the room he is now admonishing the Nicaraguans about something else. My son's Boy Scout troop could do better, he says. Without logistics you don't have anything.

The white-haired
comandante
purses his lips and pouts. You see, he interrupts at last, that's all very nice, but without the funds, what can we do? He holds out his hands. He alludes to targets and quotas, while North wants to discuss moving more troops from rural to urban areas. They weave around and around each other, arguing about supply and resupply, about end-user certificates and the best way to take down a helicopter, until finally the Nicaraguans stalk out of the room.

But North stays, with Tim and the other Americans, talking on into the morning about how to tighten oversight of the rebels' operations. They are a few men in a hotel, trying to administer a foreign war. They move out of the conference room into the lounge and then, when the lounge closes, into a guest room, and there they sit on two beds and a desk chair and consume beers and snacks they've bought at a convenience store. Tim doesn't say much. He came to Miami, after all, as North's surrogate, and since North's arrival, he's had no other task than to listen. He's been thrown into this arena midgame and is still trying to glean the rules. And that's what he wants to do, he's not dwelling on the ramifications of all this, just figuring out his place.

The room is stuffy, and when North tries to turn the knobs on the AC unit, nothing works, not even the fan. Tim calls down to the front desk and is told the repairman won't return until the morning. Do you have a screwdriver? he asks. Pliers? He runs down to pick up the tools, and back in the room he dismantles the unit and manages to get it running again. It's the first useful thing he's done all day.

The talk grows looser, and every so often he joins in. At around three in the morning, he offers up a story he heard from his friend Jodi Dentoff, about a cabinet secretary, a deliberate, weary man, telling a joke after a press briefing. This was the same man who typically greets the president's zingers with an awkward nod or a “right,” who is maybe trying to learn a new skill, straining as everyone is to ingratiate himself with the jokester in chief. The joke is one step removed from what you might find printed on the inside of a Bazooka wrapper.

Q: What did the elephant say to the naked man?

A: How do you breathe through that thing?

When Jodi told the story it was poignant, a miscalibrated attempt at camaraderie by the secretary, but upon leaving Tim's lips it contorts into ridicule. The other men guffaw and grab for the last of the salted nuts.

*   *   *

To my own surprise, I'd developed a kind of respect for North. Not for his patriotic posturing, certainly not for his later career as a right-wing radio host—I hadn't kept up with that—and not even for his military service, valorous as I gather it must have been. It was just that this man, this midlevel puffer fish in an inertial bureaucracy, someone whom I have trouble picturing as anything other than a comic character, managed to more or less run a war in another country! I couldn't help but think of its unfolding like an episode of
The A-Team
, like something that would've been on TV in the mid-1980s, in which a ragtag group of renegades pulls off some impossible rescue.

My quasi-admiration would've been treacherous to confess in 1987 and maybe still is—in my generally urban, generally liberal circles, at least. I can hear the objections: Any number of fascists have been
effective.
We don't give them points for that
.
But North wasn't a fascist, and much as I wouldn't want any more like him, I'll secretly tip my hat to him. To North, who loved secrets. The guy got shit done.

Of course this had everything to do with my dad, with how I thought about my dad, in contrast to how I conceived of a Dick Mitchell or an Oliver North. Different as Mitchell and North were, they both knew what they wanted to do and how to do it. I was exaggerating that quality in them, exaggerating their talents and minimizing my father's, so that even as I tried to write a book that would somehow rehabilitate Dad, I was subtly undermining him at every turn.

 

 

“It's fifty percent pure bullshit,” Jodi Dentoff said to me, speaking about James Singletary's memoir. I'd asked her whether she'd read it
.
“You might say that makes it a hundred percent impure bullshit.”

When I'd run into her at Dad's panel, I hadn't expected that either of us would follow up on that wispy promise of a get-together, but then I'd found her card in my purse and sent her an e-mail, and she'd replied at once. We met for a drink at a downtown hotel, the same hotel I'd been taken to for birthday lunches when I was in middle school, and I was sorry to discover that the dining room had since been renovated, turned into something more generic, more mauve. My memories were of velvet drapes and long shrimp ringed around a pewter bowl, and when I was twelve it couldn't have seemed more fancy. Now it was nothing special. But Jodi made it seem classier, or clubbier at least, leaning forward so that her chin grazed the yellow blooms that had been placed there, and talking in barely more than a whisper.

“To be expected, with any of these guys and their books. They have selective memories, obviously, like anybody, and big egos, and then there are the unfortunate conventions of the form. If I know one thing from too many years of journalism, it's that any time you try to write the story of a life you distort it,” she said.

I mentioned I'd been reading her recent articles. Jodi was still working at
The Washington Post
, as she had been for years, and recently she'd been assigned to cover the hearings and legal proceedings that had followed the revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. She'd seen so many tempests blow through Washington, she said, and so she had low expectations, predicting that none of the evidence or testimony or reports would lead to any genuine accounting, that the end result of all the agitation would be to bury the facts in heaps of paper, that the public response would amount to a kind of distracted fatalism, if not sheer indifference.

“At what point is it all just more entertainment? I'm beginning to think of myself in those terms. As a pornographer,” Jodi said.

She'd tried out this speech before, I sensed.

“Jodi Does D.C.”

“Basically.”

“But you're still doing it.”

“The alternative would be what?”

Jodi was very much of the 1980s, even two decades later. She had made her name then, coaxing secrets out of retired two-star generals and discontented agency staff. Her sense of style, while of the type a magazine might have labeled “timeless”—black shifts, anorexic litheness—recalled another notepad slogan from my childhood:
You can never be too rich or too thin
. Her writing was as spare and chiseled as could be, avoiding the lyric and the folksy in equal measure. Again: timeless, according to the ideal of a particular time. Out of all the adults who had showed up at our house for parties when I was young, Jodi had been the one I'd been most curious about, maybe because she was so small, not much larger than I was at age nine or ten, but also so modish (I remember in particular a tasseled suede cape and snakeskin heels), with a husky voice that made everything she uttered sound like an extraordinary disclosure.

Now an older, huskier echo of that voice curled out of her throat, dipped in butter and ash. “The system always works the same way,” she said, back on the subject of scandal. “A few lower-level people get hung out to dry, while the higher-ups … let me just say I'm not worried for Rumsfeld.”

“He'll land on his feet, I guess.”

“Those guys always manage to cover their asses. Almost always. They misrepresent things, and they end up believing their own misrepresentations. They publish them even, write memoirs and wind up in some law firm or a consulting firm, they do a little lobbying. In the end everybody's fine except for the poor bastards who drew the short straws.

“But,” she added, “your dad knows a little something about that, doesn't he?”

I felt as though I were exaggerating my expressions, my nods, making faces and bobbing my head up and down in lieu of responding. I didn't want to seem as ignorant as I felt. Then I confessed to her I was trying to write something about what had happened to him, and she didn't say anything for a long time, so that I imagined she was testing out words in her head, working out the best way to let me know it was a dumb idea.

Instead she started to tell me, disjointedly, something of her own past. She'd come to Washington in 1966, as a cub reporter, that's how she put it, though the term sounded quaint to my ear, movie-musical romantic, like she'd arrived hanging by one arm from a Pullman car, wearing a fedora with a pencil in the brim. It was the first time I thought of Jodi as a transplant. She was much more tightly bound to the city than I was by the accident of having been born in it.

She paused and sipped her wine. “I met your dad when he was at State.” She paused again. “And then he went to the NSC and then, as you know, some shit went down. What questions did you have?”

I felt foolish for not having come with any questions. Struggling to produce one, I asked her what part of the Iran-Contra story she'd covered. She stared back at me.

“I was not assigned to it,” she said. “I filed a few related stories, nothing major.”

And then how could she have said what she said next? Stating so matter-of-factly, “Of course your dad was wrecked by it.”

“Wrecked?” Damaged, yes, but
wrecked
? As a father, he'd remained intact. Sometimes crazy, sometimes a pain in the ass—but intact. I didn't know what to do with her remark, and maybe I didn't even want to talk about Iran-Contra, maybe neither did she.

“His career I mean, it never recovered. I always wondered why he didn't just move, get out of this town. That's what I would've done. Then again he had his family to consider.” She looked at me, part of the family in question. “And now he's so upset about that book, Singletary's book. I mean, who even takes Singletary seriously anymore? He's totally on the fringe. The fringe of the fringe. When he asked me to write some kind of takedown—”

“Singletary did?” I asked.

“Your father, he wanted me to write an article about the book, about the errors in the book. It's not the kind of thing I write. He was very insistent, but…” It seemed she was trying to apologize to my dad through me, or else she was trying to convey to him, through me, why she couldn't have done what he wanted her to do.

“Yeah, when my dad disapproves of something, he can get pretty agitated,” I said. “Sometimes I think it's because he grew up in a small town, it was a lot of German immigrants, and there were all these unwritten rules for how to behave. So when he has these big reactions, it's because someone did something you just wouldn't do in his hometown.”

She looked at me from under scrunched brows, as though what I'd said didn't parse, or maybe she found it distasteful, this daughter's offhand analysis of a father. I'd been trotting out that theory about Dad's small-town background for years, I realized, ever since high school or college when I'd developed it, believing I'd solved the puzzle of him.

“Or that could be part of it,” I added.

“Mmm,” she said into her glass, before taking another sip. “He would always talk a lot about you.”

I smiled at the mistake. “Not me. My older sister, Courtney. She was always—the impressive one. He saw himself in her.”

“No, not her. The middle one. You.”

“He talked about me?”

“He worried about you.”

I didn't know what to do with that. “Were you friends with Dick Mitchell?” I asked.

She inhaled slowly and exhaled his name. “Dick Mitchell,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“I remember him, but after he died it was like he'd never existed, my dad never talked about him.”

“I haven't thought about him in a long time.”

“But you knew him.”

“We were friends. Back in—the early eighties, I guess it was. He wasn't a close friend, but we would meet for lunch or for a drink from time to time. We would talk about whatever was going on, what we knew. He was a big flirt too, not that I minded that, or ever took it seriously. I also used to have lunch with your father, though there was not so much flirting with him, of course. He was always more proper. And since they were friends, Dick and your dad, sometimes we would get together, the three of us, which was always a lot of fun. It was also very interesting to see those two together. Sometimes they would vie over me, like boys trying to get their mother's attention. They knew they were doing it, and they could be funny about it, but I saw the rivalry there long before…”