by Karen Olsson
These photos are the ones I stare at, trying to stare them into life. My unofficial investigation would seek to discover what they said to each other and what they didn’t say, the husbands and wives and fathers and children. My own final report on the matter would detail what they were able to let go of, eventually, and what continued to rankle or haunt, what they bore for years and years, after everyone else had forgotten almost everything, after their disgrace became a footnote.
One way in which the affair is remembered, for those people who remember it at all, is as a bunch of sound and fury: for all the drama, the hearings, the prosecutions, in the end nobody suffered serious consequences, at least not officially. Nobody went to prison, and those few who were convicted were later pardoned by the first President Bush. The main figures in the scandal had gone on to well-paying jobs in the private sector, and Oliver North had almost been elected a U.S. senator!
As for my father, it was true that on paper he’d done fine. But there was more to it than that.
* * *
In the evenings, Dad and I came and went, passing on the stairs or watching the news on the small television in the kitchen. Sooner or later he would go mess around with the computer. He might come to the kitchen and fix himself a drink—he liked a martini with plenty of ice—which he would take back to the study with him and sip slowly as it turned to boozy water. Or he might forget it there on the counter, and I would find it and bring it to him in his office on the second floor, where he didn’t always bother to turn on the light. He’d be sitting in the dark in his captain’s chair with a clog in his throat, making clogged throat noises as he checked on his stocks. A line graph on the screen in front of him.
He’d taken to playing music from his computer. With the exception of one or two Linda Ronstadt records from the eighties, Dad had kept himself ignorant of popular music after about 1975, but he liked female singers from his youth and young adulthood, a woman singing gospel or country or R&B. Something’s got a hold on me. Why am I treated so bad? Move on up a little higher! I’m too far gone. Some of the songs were upbeat, but many more were slow and sad, so that the overall mood flowing from his study was a sad one, the same computer that plotted his stock portfolio also wailing over lost loves. It was as though he had a designated mourner in his PC.
Twice I heard him making a phone call after 10:00 p.m.—who could he be calling at that hour? I didn’t know. Was he okay? Was he not okay? He seemed to me a little lonely, a little slowed by his surgery, otherwise his usual self, his usual impenetrable self.
* * *
“You know what I think would be a good TV show? A political show with regular people, instead of the professional talking heads,” he was saying. I’d been cooking dinner, and he’d been keeping me company in the kitchen, drinking a beer he’d poured into a glass, both of us half-watching the news. “You’d have whatever issues that week, say it’s the farm bill, and so you get a farmer and let’s say a barber from out in farm country, maybe some other people who are affected economically. They could analyze it from their perspective. From inside the barber shop, even.”
“Like, Sunday-morning reality TV.” I was skeptical.
“The entire show could happen in barber shops. Every week a different one,” he said.
“Sure.”
“I think people would watch that.”
“You want me to set up some meetings for you, Dad?”
“I could see a C-SPAN or even a CNN—”
He stopped short. He’d knocked his beer over but didn’t bother to right the glass or wipe up the puddle on the counter. He stared at the TV. On the screen, a man near his age was being interviewed about a book he’d written. I looked back at Dad, who hadn’t budged.
His eyes were bulging and his face was going red.
Oh, I thought, oh god. I rushed over to him.
He was trying to talk but nothing came out. I reached out my hand in the direction of his arm.
“I’ll call 911,” I said.
At last he said, “No! No, no…”
He shook his head and pointed at the TV. The man’s name, it said at the bottom of the screen, was James Singletary, and his book was A Call to Honor. “I used to work with that—that weasel,” he said. He coughed ostentatiously, like he was trying to cough a weasel up whole.
“At Intelcom? Who is he?” The name sounded familiar to me, but it was that kind of name.
“He was at the White House. Piece of work.”
“Oh right. He quit pretty recently, didn’t he?” I remembered: another defector from the Bush administration, now peddling a memoir of his time on the inside.
“He was also there before. He was on the NSC staff when I was.”
NEW BOOK CRITICAL OF ADMINISTRATION, said the scroll at the bottom of the screen, CALLS PRESIDENT BUSH “A WEAK CONSERVATIVE.”
“And?”
Dad changed the channel, then wiped up his spilled beer with paper towels.
“What was his deal? He was a hard-liner?” I pressed.
“Oh sure. They used to call him Red Menace. In his mind there were communists plotting to take over Mexico and the public school system and the Methodist church. But that was the least of it.”
“What else?”
“He was always a self-promoter. I see that hasn’t changed. And he was a liar. He lied. That book of his is full of lies, I guarantee you. You wouldn’t believe some of the…” He stopped, walked over to the trash can, and threw out the soggy paper towels.
“What?”
“Forget it,” he said. “Forget it.”
He didn’t forget Singletary, though, I knew it by how cranky and gruff he was all through dinner, he hardly ate anything, and afterward he trod heavily on the stairs, shouldering some invisible beast. And I was left with a strange and unnerving afterimage, a trace of the way his face had changed when he’d spotted his old colleague, hardening into a mask of anger that I had at first taken for something worse than that. It lingered, this wisp of what I’d seen, like the ghost that used to hover on the screen after you turned off a television. That angry mask, as I called it to mind, transformed from a rigid and superficial expression to something molten, as if I’d had a peek inside of a private furnace. As if I’d looked where I shouldn’t have been looking. At the same time I couldn’t keep from second-guessing Dad, from wondering whether his denunciation of Singletary had been motivated by something other than outrage. Or more than just outrage. Could it have been envy? Envy, that is, of a former colleague who had managed to hang on to his status and was now on TV touting his memoir, while Dad taught at American University as an adjunct.
Later that night I heard him talking loudly, in his bedroom. “Damn it!” he was saying. “Damn it!” I thought he was on the phone, but then I heard him say, “Damn it, Tim!” He was cursing to himself, possibly cursing himself.
* * *
A day or two after that he invited me to come to the campus with him, to see the place where he now worked. With his adjunct professorship came a shared office in the political science building, and Dad would go there most mornings, to prepare for the panel, he said. I don’t know what he meant by that exactly. My guess is that he read news articles online and chatted with his officemate, a Dr. Mohammad.
I hadn’t been to that campus since high school, when I’d gone to the library a few times to do research for papers, though often as not the book I’d gone looking for was missing or had pages torn out of it. The office was small and cramped. Dr. Mohammad was out. On Dad’s desk, in the same cheap frames, sat the photos that had logged years on much larger desks elsewhere, at government buildings and later at Intelcom, vacation pictures of my sisters and me, beach-brown and bug-bit, tummies pouting between the panels of our little-girl bikinis, teeth missing from our sky-wide grins.
“This is not bad,” I said, a poor diplomat. But then he took me to a café in the student activities building, and as we walked there I felt better about it all. I loved to stroll alongsi
de my father. There was something about the fresh air and the movement that took him out of himself, or rather lit up the part of him that had majored in history, and he would grow expansive, free-associating, deciding for whatever reason to tell me about the wisdom of a decision Eisenhower had made or to dredge up some little-known facts about Whittaker Chambers. His stride was strong, and in his wool overcoat and crimson scarf he drew interrogative looks—not from undergraduates but from people my age and older, trying to figure out whether he was somebody they ought to recognize.
After lunch he was quieter than usual, and when we reached the benches in front of the library he said he wanted to stop for a moment. It was cold out, and we shivered under our coats. I asked him whether he was all right. He didn’t answer, nor did he sit. He said, “There’s something I want to give you. It would be best that you take it.” He withdrew an envelope from his coat pocket and I shrank away from it. “Dad—” I began and then stopped. It was as though this entire outing had been an excuse to give me a check, as though there were some reason he couldn’t do it at the house.
If I’d said there were strings attached, he would’ve denied it. He would’ve said he just wanted to help. But that meant: to help me help myself. I could prep for the LSAT, I could apply for an internship, I could ease myself into a reputable life like a good solid car my dad had bought me, I could drive it off the lot and cruise toward retirement.
I was in fact unsettled, and had I any reason to think that a check from my father would settle me, I would’ve snatched it out of his hand. Or I might’ve taken it if I’d thought that taking it would rid him of his worries. Was it because I myself felt uneasy that I saw in my father so much discontent? But I had evidence. In the place where we’d eaten, he’d barked at the cashier because they’d run out of lemon meringue pie; he’d bemoaned that his preferred style of shoe had been discontinued by the manufacturer; and then he’d criticized the war in Iraq in the same aggrieved tone, as if all three things had come from the same source, some central kitchen of disappointment.
The reason to accept Dad’s money was not that I had no savings, though it was true that I had no savings. It was not that I should’ve used it to subsidize a career switch, to try to hail-mary myself into whatever legitimate profession might’ve sheltered me, much as that would’ve eased his mind and maybe my own. It was that he wished for me to accept the money. Taking it would have pleased him. I didn’t let him give it to me, though. I didn’t even look to see the amount written on it. I’m pretty sure that if he’d been in my position, he wouldn’t have taken it either.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Dad took me with him to a meeting at the White House?” Courtney had asked me once, a long time ago. It was my first year out of college, when I lived in San Francisco. She’d come to stay at my little apartment on Dolores Street. We’d watched a videotape and afterward lay on the dusty rug and spoke as much to the ceiling as to each other.
“It would’ve been when he was working at the State Department. I think I was, like, six or seven. It was a Saturday. Mom had gone away for the weekend to see Grandma or something, and Dad had to go to a meeting.”
“I have no memory of this.”
“Dad brought us all over to the Behrendorfs’, you and me and Maggie. He was going to leave us there while he went to his meeting. I hated it there, though, you had Sarah Behrendorf to play with, but I knew I was going to get stuck watching Maggie. And that house always weirded me out, it smelled weird and remember Mrs. Behrendorf, how you could always see her nipples through her shirts?
“I begged him to take me along, until finally he said that he would. That’s when I found out that he was going to the White House. I was psyched. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. I remember walking in—everyone always says how the White House seems smaller than they thought it would be, but to me, as a kid, it was not small. It was a castle, and everything I saw, I thought must be the best possible way for that thing to be, like a mirror—I remember a mirror with a gilt frame, thinking that must be the best kind of mirror there is. There was this room where I was supposed to wait for Dad while he went into his meeting, it had a desk and a sofa, and the sofa was upholstered in the same fabric as the curtains. I thought, that’s what fancy is, it’s having a sofa and curtains that match. Dad sat me down on the sofa and said I had to keep quiet. He was using that Dad voice, you know, Courtney, this is a very important meeting. Do not make any noise.
“This room, it was a little office or something, was connected by a glass door to where Dad was having his meeting, but there were curtains over the glass, so you couldn’t see what was on the other side. I sat on the sofa for a while. I didn’t have anything to do. Then I saw this pink eraser on the desk, and I went and got that. I played with it on the floor, I don’t know what I was doing, whatever a bored kid does with an eraser.
“It wound up under the sofa, I guess it rolled there, so I had to get it. I lay down on my stomach and tried to reach. It was dark under there, I couldn’t see much, so I was just feeling around with my hand. Then I heard this pop! At first I didn’t feel anything and then I did. It was a mousetrap. It closed on my hand. Right at the base of my thumb.
“I didn’t know what to do. I opened my mouth and then I remembered what Dad had told me. Don’t make a sound. So I didn’t. I got myself back up to sitting. That metal bar was pressed into my thumb, I remember the skin bulging around it. I tried to pull it off, but that hurt even more, so I just sat there, and tears were running down my face, and I was wiping snot on my sleeve, but I was quiet the whole time. I don’t know how long I waited there like that. It could’ve been five minutes or it could’ve been an hour.
“Finally Dad comes out to check on me and when he sees me he freaks out. Freaks out. I’ve never seen him look that way, like, I don’t even know how to describe the look on his face. ‘Oh Jesus, Jesus,’ he was saying. He got the mousetrap off, and then my hand started to hurt even more, and he picked me up and I think I might have peed on myself. He carried me out, he carried me all the way back to the car, and I mean that must have been hard, I was a decent size, and he was—well, definitely upset. I know we went to the emergency room, but I don’t remember that much about that part, except I think I was bummed when I didn’t get a cast. It turned out nothing was broken. I had a huge bruise, was all.”
* * *
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that,” I’d said to her when she was done.
“You were only five.”
But it wasn’t that I couldn’t remember it, it was that I’d never heard the story retold. In my family we hardly ever recalled our past to one another. We compartmentalized.
“That’s so crazy.”
So crazy but so Courtney: the wanting to go where our dad went, the wanting to please him, the tremendous will she had, the tolerance for pain. After she told me, I switched off the TV and went to pour myself a glass of water, bothered in a way that I didn’t understand. I suppose it bothered me that I’d never heard that story before, but then I turned around and never spoke of it again.
I left my father at the AU campus and went to a movie, and afterward I walked past a bookstore and saw James Singletary’s memoir stacked in the window display, A Call to Honor A Call to Honor A Call to Honor A Call to Honor. Between piles of books, a placard announced that the author would soon do a signing there at the store. Singletary’s photograph was at the bottom of the sign, his wrinkled face like a face etched on money, weighty and remote. Or it was trying to be such a face. He had a small mouth and a large forehead, and though you couldn’t see his arms I imagined that they were folded across his chest. He looked every bit the hard-liner. While I couldn’t say for sure based on that one image, it seemed that even his skin had a hard quality, like old rubber.
It started to rain, and I went inside. During the short journey from the store entrance to the shelf of new releases, I started to concoct a fantasy in which I would attend the Singletary book-signing and ask
piercing questions on Dad’s behalf, questions that exposed the author as full of shit. A revenge fantasy, even though I didn’t know what it was I’d be seeking retribution for: I would get back at this man I’d never met for various unspecified lies from twenty years ago? It was a desire that had less to do with Singletary than with a certain impression I had of Dad’s career. For my father hadn’t been utterly disgraced, he’d led a perfectly decent life, and still there was something I wanted to avenge. Some kernel of shame that he and maybe our whole family had never managed to disgorge: Who was responsible? Maybe this crusty would-be pundit? Once I had the actual book in hand, the specific fantasy of debunking him at his book-signing faded, for what did I know, compared to the admiral, the columnist, the CEO whose accolades appeared on the back of the dust jacket?
The darkness outside made the store a bright shelter, and people twisted and sidled to pass one another in the narrow aisles between the shelves, readers floating in and out of worlds. A Leonard Cohen album played softly in the background. I scanned the book’s chapter titles, oblique and portentous. Saigon 1973. Phoenix Rising. Morning in Central America. The cost was $24.95. Then I saw someone I knew, or had once known.