All the Houses (49 page)

Somewhere in my head there was a picture of everyone I'd ever known, and now another person in it was blacked out. More and more of the people who'd been present for some stage of my life were now gone, and though this would've been true of any adult following time's arrow in the usual direction, it still gave me pause, and made me think about how I'd grown up in a disjointed world of people from other places and how after college I had mostly lived in other places myself and had never come across most of those people again, never heard a thing about their lives and deaths. I'd turned away from that picture of everyone I'd ever known, I'd rarely looked at it, but still it was a part of me, and the darker it became, the more it demanded to be seen.

I asked Mom if she knew how Dad was doing, and she said only that I should talk to him myself. I called, but he didn't pick up. When I finally got him on the phone he wouldn't talk much about it. He agreed that it was a real shame and then changed the subject.

The service was hardly what Jodi deserved. A woman like her should've been remembered at a palace or at least the Kennedy Center; there should've been a choir or a second-line band or tropical birds; but the Jewish and Catholic sides of her family had disagreed on what sort of funeral to hold, and the compromise service took place at an event space on Florida Avenue, low-ceilinged and musty. It was packed. There were reporters and politicos, but also friends from other places and a handful of young women whom Jodi had helped pay for college.

My mother and Maggie had both come to town for the funeral, and we all went together, except for Hugo, who was visiting his family in Mexico. I sat between Mom and Courtney, and then to Courtney's right came Maggie, and then Dad next to her, on the aisle. We'd reassembled the old family unit, which was strange and comforting at the same time. I couldn't have said how many years had gone by since I'd been someplace in public with both my parents, and strange as it was, still it felt like the most regular thing in the world, even the way they were bookending us—they used to do that in church or at the movies, to contain my sisters and me.

Jodi's mother was still alive, a ninety-year-old woman as tiny as Jodi, or maybe tinier, stooped over, shutting her watery eyes as she accepted one hand after another and held it loosely between both of hers. She didn't get up to speak, but a brother and a cousin and a couple of Jodi's colleagues did. They told charming stories into a microphone that had been placed just slightly in front of the first row of chairs, as it might be at a question-and-answer session following a lecture. And then Dad stood up, unexpectedly, hiked his pants, and walked slowly toward the front. He had a handkerchief in one hand and a set of index cards in the other.

Jodi had been wrong about him, I thought. He hadn't been wrecked, not really. His government career had ended early, sure, but that didn't mean wrecked. For here he was, very much intact, as were we. Pressing on was one of my family's strengths. Let it be said about the Athertons: we had okay manners most of the time, and we ate well, and we went on with it. Dad lifted the microphone from its stand and stepped forward, in front of the crowd, and turned to face everybody. I was nervous for him and I guess instead of him. He was calm, gazing above us at some spot toward the back, where maybe he could see Jodi hovering in midair, hands planted on her hips, chin tucked, eyes full of private glee.

“I should've straightened that bow tie for him,” my mother whispered to Courtney.

It was a peacock-blue bow tie—askew, yes, but only slightly—that he'd worn with his black suit. He'd combed his hair so that it hugged his head more closely than usual and traded his everyday glasses for tortoiseshell reading glasses. His look was classically Washingtonian, not exactly well-heeled, not exactly professorial, but a cross between the two. He was entirely of the city that had ground him down and then kept him on.

*   *   *

“I first met Jodi when I was at the State Department,” he said. “Back then she was a young reporter covering foreign policy for
The Washington Star
. Some of you here are as old as I am and will remember that newspaper. One day our public information guy comes to me and says can you talk to Jodi Dentoff from
The Star
?

“I won't bore you with an explanation of what the interview was about,” Dad continued. “Suffice it to say that I was pretty confident, I thought I knew my stuff, and this young woman on the other end of the phone just took me apart. She caught me completely off guard. She knew ten times as much as I did. And it was still one of the more enjoyable conversations I'd ever had with a reporter. She was just somebody you wanted to talk to, even when it wasn't in your own best interest. She was so smart but also so gracious. Always friendly even when she didn't agree with you. We've lost that kind of sensibility in this town and now we've lost her too.

“In those days it wasn't always easy to be a woman in Washington, in that type of job. I gather it still isn't. From
The Star
, as many of you know, she went to the Washington bureau of
The New York Times
, and then
The Post
after that, and wherever she went she did excellent work, but she was always an excellent friend too. She took an interest in everything, and that included my family, my wife, my daughters…”

*   *   *

Dad barely looked at his index cards. He seemed at ease and yet he was, I think, mystified to have found himself at Jodi's funeral. The voice that filled the room, I knew it better than my own, I knew every enunciation, every “er … um,” and as I looked away, at the other heads, the other pairs of ears, I knew what he would say, knew even though I didn't know. Wherever I looked, his voice was all around me. I thought of Jodi entering the next world as if it were some terrific party, standing just inside the entrance and rubbing her hands together. I imagined a Washington afterlife full of gossip and jostling and long, tedious hearings.

Suddenly I saw myself, at seven or eight, pulling small rocks out of the sand at the water's edge and washing them off, piling them up, then taking a fistful to show my father, who was just climbing into his sailboat. His hair brown, his skin tanned. Waving to me as he tacked away in the Sunfish. I remembered days when he'd tried to teach us sports he didn't know how to play himself, kicking a ball in the park with the three of us girls. I thought of the times he'd lit the grill, opened the wine. I heard his voice and saw all my dads, the driver of cars, the in-house lecturer, the reluctant punisher, the dad waiting with his too-complicated camera as we unwrap the Christmas presents, the dad in a patterned shirt with a huge collar, who leans over a baby, me, tucked in a pram. And then as a young man, the college debate champ, and before that, running across a field in Pennsylvania, wearing a red knit cap, and before that, a two-year-old wrapped in his mother's arms.

Then he was in a boat again, only this time it was my present-day dad, and I saw all the unreachable life he'd already lived, now behind him, an anchor that kept moving, pulling him out to sea. Come back, come back! I ached for all the fathers he'd been before now and all the pre-fathers I'd never even met.

But wasn't that very desire our curse or at least our hobble, the ball my whole family refused to unchain? We wanted one another to be the people we used to be, we wanted for Maggie to play games and love cats, for Courtney to achieve whatever was out there to be achieved, for Dad to be powerful and Mom to keep us out of trouble, for them to be married, and for me to remain the go-between and the goof.

*   *   *

His voice broke off, and it was the silence that made me realize I'd stopped listening to his words. He looked down at the index cards. He seemed perplexed, as if everything he'd written on them had disappeared. When he raised his head back up and stared into the room, he blinked like a man coming out of the water, and I wondered how much he could see through those reading glasses.

“
Agape
is a Greek word for love,” he said slowly, then paused again. The room itself seemed to grow more still, as we all waited to see whether he could recover his train of thought, if there was in fact a train.

“Selfless love, in the Christian theology. The love of God for man.”

He scratched his nose.

“Is he all right?” Mom whispered.

“If we are lucky, we experience many kinds of love in our lifetimes,” he said. “Without that, though I speak with the tongues of men or the tongues of angels…”

“We should go get him,” Mom said to me. I stayed put. I saw (or thought I saw) an intention in his eyes, in the hold he had on the microphone, in the slow, steady breathing that rustled from the speakers.

“Well.”

He took off his glasses, and his naked face was serene as he went on thinking his thoughts, unhurriedly, with no trace of the anger that had lately been percolating in him, or shame, or any self-consciousness whatsoever. His uncorrected eyes seemed to locate us, to find Mom specifically.

“I know I was a burden,” he said. “It was too much to ask, perhaps.”

She whispered, “No.”

“I let you down.”

There was scattered applause, as though people wanted to assure him that he hadn't let them down. “Thank you,” he said, and with that he walked back toward his seat, coming up the center aisle. As he reached our row, he gripped the back of the chair he'd been sitting in earlier.

His trips to the hospital, had they been false alarms or warning bells? The question of how much longer he'd be around wasn't a question I'd even been asking six months earlier, but then his heart had faltered, and now Jodi had left us. She'd been close to his age.

“I feel a bit off,” he said.

Mom popped up and nimbly skirted the rest of us, until she was in the aisle, next to Dad. She took him by the arm. “Can you walk?” she asked.

“Of course I can walk.”

They started toward the door. Courtney got up too, but Mom waved her back, signaling us that we should stay. We'll be outside, she mouthed while pointing at the exit. The crowd took a minute to settle. The next eulogist was an elderly fellow, now creeping toward the front of the room. Just before he reached the microphone, Courtney stood up again, and Maggie and I followed her out. I feared to find Dad as he'd been after the panel discussion, in pain, refusing an ambulance, but when we made it to the lobby and then to the street there was no sign of our parents. We called both their phones, left messages.

Halfway down the block was a steak restaurant, and we took refuge there, at the bar, and though it was not quite noon Maggie and I ordered cocktails, which we guzzled while waiting for our parents to call us.

At last Mom called, from another restaurant. She said they were having lunch. We paid our tab and slowly made our way to the address she'd given us. At first we couldn't find it. We were giggling and wandering, and we stopped at a convenience store, where we bought cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers and candy bars. We're starving, we told the guy at the register. We can't find our parents. Take care now, he said. We were twelve years old! I could've spent the rest of the day roaming the streets with my sisters.

At last we turned a corner and there was the place. Our parents were finishing up their sandwiches, which, our mom said, had not been very good. But she and Dad seemed to have been enjoying themselves. Maggie swiped a few potato chips off Dad's plate and asked him how he was feeling.

“Feel fine. Sad day. But I feel fine.”

My mother checked her watch. “There's a train I could catch if I leave now,” she said, and at first I was taken aback—how could she possibly leave? But then I remembered, she's headed home. And Maggie decided to go with her to the station, and we all hugged, and I tried not to feel left behind, now that it was up to Courtney and me to take Dad back to Albemarle Street.

The house was cool. Dad went upstairs to lie down while Courtney and I turned on the lights, turned up the heat, and boiled water in the kettle, trying to liven up the place by some means other than talking to each other. When we did speak it was in hushed tones: What kind of tea do you want? Should we try to make dinner? The rapport of the other day had faded. Instead we were courteous.

My tea tasted strange—smoky and bitter—but I kept sipping at it. I sat in a chair in the living room with my mouth puckered over my mug, and Courtney sat across from me, on the sofa.

I told her I'd quit temping. I was going back to L.A.

“Oh,” she said, sounding two notes, higher and then lower.

“What about you, how's the office?”

“The office—” She stood up and bolted to the bathroom. I heard her throwing up. I heard a faucet go on, off, on, off. When she came back, her eyes were wet and she was holding a glass of water.

“So has it been bad?”

She groaned. “I'll be fine for a while and then it's like, boom. Get me a paper bag.”

“Oh man. So have you told Dad yet?”

“Not yet.”

Our father upstairs, resting. Our old house, stilled. The creases now starting to show on our own faces. Our eyes met: an unexpected, raw shyness. We drank our tea.

 

 

I'm not great with endings. Neither was Lawrence E. Walsh, who in December of 1986 was appointed independent counsel for the Iran-Contra matter, and who persisted in his efforts for more than six years. A former judge, already in his midseventies when he was summoned to Washington from Oklahoma City, he worked relentlessly at the job. He limited himself almost entirely to his downtown office and the Watergate Hotel, where he took a room. Even his staff considered him aloof: he brooded behind his desk, a tall old man with uneven front teeth. To this city of pragmatists he'd come like a patrician avenger, a ghost of justice past, a righteous perfectionist on a mission to elucidate the murkiest of cases. He sought, in vain, access to the classified documents he needed to press a conspiracy charge. He watched as the joint committees granted immunity to North and Poindexter so that they could testify before Congress, and he later saw those two men's convictions overturned because of it, while others against whom he'd won convictions were granted pardons by President George H. W. Bush. “The path Independent Counsel embarked upon in late 1986,” he wrote in his final report, “has been a long and arduous one.” Though a jury sided with him in every case he brought to court, Walsh was only able to prosecute the lies and cover-ups, not the weapons sales to Iran or the aid to the Contras or the diversion of funds from one to the other, and when the eighty-one-year-old Walsh finally returned to Oklahoma, many rated him a failure.