by Karen Olsson
She was taking a midday train. There was a dinner party she’d been invited to, that was her excuse for leaving early. And papers to grade.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t go to New York.
“Did you ever hear back from that guy?” she asked.
I’d been proud of myself for not bringing him up, and so no doubt sounded oddly proud when I told her that I had not. “Possibly he’s just been busy, but…”
“These busy men.”
“Yeah.”
“We just need to move someplace where there are more men than women, and people are not that busy. I’m wondering about the Dakotas.”
“You’ll never move to the Dakotas. To either Dakota.”
She tried to break a cookie in half, and it fell apart, into crumbs.
“I didn’t tell you, though, who he actually was,” I said.
“The guy? Some D.C. d-bag, it sounded like.”
“He’s not so bad.”
“Not a douchebag.”
“Maybe a little bit of one. A douchebaguette?”
Maggie waited, and I told her who it was.
“Courtney’s Rob? Her ex?”
“They didn’t go out for very long,” I said. “I doubt she’d even call him an ex.”
“Wasn’t he like a drug dealer?”
“I wouldn’t say that. He was not a full-on drug dealer.”
“I know I was only in junior high at the time, but my understanding was that he gave people drugs and they gave him money.”
“It was just among friends, though. He was not a real dealer.”
The sunlight had left her face, and I could see that she wasn’t going to accept my distinction between offhand drug sales and genuine dealing, but she wasn’t going to pursue it either. In that way she was more sensible than Courtney and me, who would’ve spent another five minutes debating the point.
“Did you tell Courtney?” she asked.
“No. I shouldn’t, right?”
“I wouldn’t. She’s been so prickly lately. I know she’s still upset about losing the pregnancy—”
“Wait—”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“You didn’t know.”
“No.”
“I assumed you did, but then last night, when you said she should have a kid, I wasn’t sure…”
“Fuck.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t—well, whatever, I already said it. She had a miscarriage. It was pretty early, but still.”
“She told you about it?”
“It’s probably just that I happened to call that day?” Maggie said. “I guess they’d been trying for a while.”
“I thought she didn’t even want kids.”
“She was on the fence at first, but Hugo wanted to, and she came around.”
I was having all the wrong feelings. I felt bad for Courtney, but a miscarriage was something I had no experience of and could barely fathom, and I was nearly as envious as I was sorry, mainly of my sisters’ intimacies with each other, but also of the whole idea that marriage, even to an oddball like Hugo, could nudge a person past her ambivalences and propel life forward. Courtney in her lifetime had attracted more—I don’t want to call it tragedy—let’s say adversity, more than her share and certainly more than I’d had to deal with, and in my worst moments I envied that too. More adversity was still more life. More adversity made more life happen. For my part, I’d always thought that in some nebulous future I would have kids, picturing two boys, but now that I found myself in my thirties and single, I could sense, not a ticking clock, but those boys themselves fading away.
Something had curdled, and we fell quiet. Dad came home with his haul (batteries, a case of seltzer, razor blades, printer paper, and two chocolate bars) and then took Maggie to the train station.
“See you at Christmas,” I said to her before she left, and she told me again to come up and visit her. “I will, I will”—I said that and meant it.
There were dishes from the night before in the sink, along with the pans that Dad had used to make breakfast. I left them for the time being, put a spare key in my pocket, and stepped out for air, still woozy as I rambled around, and pissed off and sad in the same muzzled way I always felt pissed off and sad after family occasions, holidays especially—and add fifty points for a hangover. It’s not right! It’s not fair! Those childish complaints rang in my head without referring to anything, the “it” was life as a whole, and so I was walking around and waiting for those emotions to clear, what else could I do?
I could run, I thought. Running was much better for metabolizing all that crud, and so even though I was wearing jeans and boots, I started to run down the street, my boot heels clopping against the sidewalk, my jacket drawstrings bouncing up and down, my hair flying everywhere, dogs barking as I loped by. I ran after those imaginary little boys, who were so much faster than me, around the block and down Reno Road and past my old elementary school.
Coming back to Washington had not quite had the effect I’d hoped it would have—I’d hoped it would help me clear more space in my head. Now, though, I just felt like a woman who’d come to the end of the line. I had ridden back home disguised as myself and could ride no farther, having arrived at the shore to find the horizon flat and empty, not a ship in sight. They’d all sailed. It was too late for me, I couldn’t stop thinking that. What else was there for me to do in the meantime but keep busy? I’d gone on temping, I’d read about Iran-Contra, and I’d tried not to ruminate too much on what my long-term plan might be—which is to say I didn’t think about it at all, because I didn’t want to go back to California, back to what I’d been doing, but when I imagined changing my life what I thought to change was the past.
But, I told myself, life is no stationary bicycle. Rest assured, change is the only constant.
But: I was not resting, I was not assured.
But! Only later do the toings and froings add up to a direction. You change and you don’t notice, other people see it first, and you’re someone you never expected to be, and at the same time you’re the person you always were. I told myself this, believed it too. More or less. Even so I was terrified.
I didn’t think of myself as missing L.A. I did miss the Honda that I’d left with a friend. I missed my old duplex apartment. I missed my L.A. friends, I missed Griffith Park and taco trucks, I missed my fruit guy, and I missed that balmy weather that sometimes felt like a benediction and at other times felt unnatural and menacing.
And now, because I’d grown up in D.C. and then left, it was both the place I belonged and a place I didn’t recognize. I’d been raised in a well-off white blister attached to a black city I hardly knew, but the blister had since burst. Starbucks and yoga studios everywhere, and all these new apartment buildings, cute new shops. Defense contracts weren’t the only thing that had brought them here, not every young professional in D.C. was part of the national security workforce, but I still felt as if the wars on the other side of the world were indirectly underwriting the colorful awnings and the artisanal ice cream; and though ten years earlier that fact would have disgusted me—I would’ve felt outrage, refused to eat the ice cream, etc.—now I reacted with the same learned helplessness I felt toward the stupid movies they kept making in Hollywood. I had no say in the making of war or in the making of stupid movies but had lived most of my life in cities sponsored by one or the other, and though stupid movies were not as damaging as stupid wars, my options seemed to be the same in either case, I could watch them or I could not watch them, and if I felt so inclined I could make comments about them in an online forum.
I’ll acknowledge that this line of thinking seems a little pat. I could see that it might be flawed, but I couldn’t shake it loose. I was the sty in my own eye, I’ll say that much. And there were days when it all piled up, it all seemed too much, returning a phone call like lifting a car by its bumper, retrieving a prescription a trek across the tundra. The diffic
ulty came not in spite of the trivial nature of these activities but because of it.
I walked the last stretch. I was not in shape, and not until I’d almost made it home did my breathing return to normal. Looking up at the house, our impervious, oblivious house, I thought: I should not be living here. This place could swallow me up.
Dad had come home while I’d been out. Because he wasn’t on the first floor, that I could see, I called “Hello-o” in the direction of the stairs, and waited for his reply. He didn’t answer. “Dad?” Still nothing. I climbed up halfway to the second floor. “Dad?” I heard the toilet flush.
“Helen?”
“Hey, I’m back.”
“Could you clean up those dishes please? The kitchen is a mess.”
I was silent, until he said “Helen?” again.
“Okay!”
“Thank you.”
PART TWO
Dick Mitchell was Dad’s best friend—I heard Dad say that once. I don’t know whether the best friendship was mutual. The Dick Mitchell of my memory is a bon vivant, a joker, not really the type to have a best friend, though no doubt he was more complicated than the affable operator he’d seemed to be. The main thing I know about him is that he killed himself; I don’t remember how I learned it. After he died, our parents told us that he’d been sick. But we found out, somehow everybody at school seemed to know that Rob Golden’s stepfather had committed suicide, a fact that kept circulating because none of us could absorb it. There were two girls at our school who’d tried to kill themselves but survived, and there was Ernest Hemingway, but before Dick Mitchell died I couldn’t have conceived that a man like that, a friend of my parents, might take his own life.
The funeral took place at a narrow, slate-gray church in a transitional part of downtown, a sparse few blocks lodged in between more residential and more commercial neighborhoods. Outside the church, on a blackboard shaped like a pope’s hat, white lettering spelled out Richard James Mitchell, 1938–1988, and I remember the strangeness of seeing the current year written that way, as the year of someone’s death. Courtney was away at college by then. Maggie and I wore Jessica McClintock dresses, lace bibs falling over floral prints, as if we were much younger than we actually were. We wore stockings and black Mary Janes.
I saw my father press his shaky lips together, look down at his shoes. I had the impression that he was supposed to give a eulogy, but he never did. We sang hymns, and I could barely hear his voice, though my mother’s was strong, maybe a little too strong. Rob Golden was there too, of course, home from whatever school he’d gone to—Bennington, I think, or was it Wesleyan? He’d dyed his hair platinum blond and had an earring in one ear, and was sitting in the front row, his hair all the whiter by contrast with his black-suited shoulders. I didn’t speak to him, too shy and also embarrassed by what I was wearing. Mom had bought us those little-girl outfits, and after the service we became little girls. We ran giddily, giggling, around a park across the street from where the reception was, sweating and scuffing up our shoes. We waited there while our parents drank wine and talked to people. We came home with bloody ankles because of those stiff shoes and had to throw out our stockings.
* * *
An obituary from the Branberry, Connecticut, Weekly Record, dated September 27, 1988, for Richard J. Mitchell, fifty:
Richard J. Mitchell, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, died suddenly at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, on Sunday. Mr. Mitchell had been an aide to the assistant secretary for international security affairs at the Department of Defense, an executive assistant for policy planning at the Department of State, and a deputy assistant secretary of state. He also served as a trustee of the St. Albans School and as an officer of the Metropolitan Club.
Mr. Mitchell was born in Branberry. He graduated from Milton Academy in 1956 and from Harvard University in 1960, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He entered the doctoral program in political science at Cornell University and received an M.A. degree before discontinuing his studies. He then went to Washington, where he was an aide to Senator Leverett Saltonstall and later worked for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Mr. Mitchell is survived by his second wife, the former Martha Golden, his stepson, Robert Golden, his mother, Mrs. Wilbur D. Mitchell, and two sisters, Lillian McCrory and Marjorie Reiss. A service will be held at the Christ Church of Washington on Friday, September 30, at 11:00 a.m.
I found this online. The Record from that era had been scanned whole, and so I read from an image of that week’s actual page B7, set in one of those round 1980s typefaces, with halftone-dot shading around the names of the deceased. On the same page were three other death announcements and two advertisements for local businesses. A world-class bank with a hometown feel. I read and reread Mitchell’s obituary, as if by starting again I might find the story changed, though he died every time, suddenly, at his home in Bethesda, Maryland.
My father had always looked up to him, that was my impression—albeit an impression based in my protean childhood ideas of who looked up to whom, and maybe an adult would’ve noticed that Dad had other feelings about his friend as well. I remember Dick’s once tossing a dollar into the lit charcoal of our grill, making a joke about inflation. My dad never would’ve done that. And yet, as dutiful as he was, Dad still cared about what Washington cared about, whether you call it power or whether you call it a compulsion to get as close as possible to the action, and here was Dick, who found the action as if without effort.
* * *
I thought of him as the pied piper who led my father to Washington. Dick Mitchell with his long neck, his confidential smile. At Cornell, they’d both been members of the College Republicans. Mitchell rarely went to the meetings but always seemed to know everything that happened at them, my father once told me. He was one of those guys who soaked up all the members’ personal information, the dynamics of the group itself, the political nitty-gritty. There was a rumor, Dad said, that he’d managed to fix a campus election, though Dad hadn’t believed it—vote stealing seemed beneath Dick. Then again, I discovered later that there were other things that would’ve seemed beneath Dick Mitchell but which, in fact, he did.
They were both in the thrall of Gerald Sayles, the nuclear strategist: for his famous course on technology and war, in which the assigned reading included his own writings as well as Wohlstetter’s and Markov’s, a hundred or more students would crowd the lecture hall, among them Dick Mitchell, in the back row and without a notebook, and Tim Atherton, who would show up early to claim a spot in the front row.
I could see it, my dad and Dick at Cornell.
* * *
… Sinewy old Sayles is a campus celebrity, technocracy’s champion and prophet. His winged eyebrows and the deep crease between them contribute to his aura of genius. Trained as a physicist, he favors quantitative analysis, he likes to assign a probability P and write formulas on the blackboard in noisy, jabbing strokes, yet he emphasizes that these equations have “unknown terms,” because so much information is not available to the public. The body of secrets is one name for that material, as in, “Any public assessment of military policy is of limited significance, given the body of secrets within the U.S. and Soviet governments.” At other times he speaks of “the expanding frontier of secrecy,” his tone approving. Some knowledge is and should be the special province of the elite, he implies, and part of his mystique is the implication that he has some larger access to the body of secrets—that he belongs to that elite, or at least knows it intimately. Mitchell can often be seen in Sayles’s office, cross-legged in the chair opposite the great man’s desk. He has the smoothness of wealth as well as the premature lines that appeared on his face during an extended stay at McLean, the psychiatric hospital, during which time he submitted to shock treatments that left him pretty well stripped of any memories of his years at Milton Academy. Mitchell takes note of a bright undergraduate named Tim Atherton, who asks questions he hasn’t thought to ask, and what
begins as discussions in the corridor after class would grow into walks across the quad and then beers at night …
* * *
That was what I started with, the two of them way back when. Even in death, Mitchell still had this magnetism about him, so that I could picture his life in a way that I found it difficult to picture my dad’s—and then, once I had him, I could put the two of them together. It’s true that these images, conjured out of bits and pieces, led me away from the small set of facts I had about my father’s past. Although I considered my project to be biographical, I was inventing much of it as I went along. I decided—not at the outset, but as I scrawled and scratched out—that the best way to improve upon the kind of I-was-there! bullshit served up in A Call to Honor would be to create a more honest story, even if it was an honest invention. My aim was to flesh out the book that Dad had stalled on, to finish what he’d started. That I didn’t know the full story, that he was reluctant to tell it to me, that we remembered those days so differently—these were not trivial obstacles, but I started to think I could write my way around them.
Which is not to say I was pulling it all out of my ass. I continued to consult outside sources. I’d lugged my dad’s dusty old course reading up from the basement, textbooks and technical papers that he and Mitchell would’ve been assigned. Studying with the likes of Gerald Sayles and others had steeped them in a set of methods, an approach to geopolitical conundrums, the arms race in particular. The threats against us became terms in equations. Computers were programmed to evaluate the likelihood of nuclear war.
“The Delicate Balance of Terror” was the name of one of Albert Wohlstetter’s widely circulated papers, from 1958. I found it online and printed it out in nine-point font, and of all things I climbed into bed with it. “I should like to examine the stability of the thermonuclear balance,” he begins—and then he goes on to suggest that it’s hardly stable at all. The postwar world, that happy land of big cars and big refrigerators, rests on a fulcrum made of uranium. I read the whole paper, every tiny word. The sentences washed over me and away, but the tone, the assumptions stuck, the crazy (to me) clash between the grand pessimism of overall outlook and the optimism about methods. The ongoing threat of global apocalypse could be countered with quasimathematical analysis. Numbers of missiles, payloads: what faith in their own calculating! It was a doomsday algebra they invented, to combat our math-savvy antagonists behind the Iron Curtain.