All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  * * *

  “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 pl
ace 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.

  But he’d had a long and varied career before then, and afterward went on to write two books, to give speeches, to live for many more years—and that, perhaps, was its own kind of victory.

  * * *

  We’re sitting at the kitchen table, Dad and I are. I’m peeling an orange, and he’s scanning the newspaper. The phone on the wall rings. He tells me not to get up and speaks to the phone—hold on, hold on—while closing in on it.

  He says hello and then asks a bunch of questions. “You’ve talked to him?… Pamunkey Regional Jail, where on earth is that?… When’s the hearing?”

  Dad was able to find the court-appointed lawyer representing Samed a.k.a. Sam, and over the last two weeks he’s been hounding her about the case, hounding her and helping her too. He was the one who figured out how to locate the kid’s parents in Turkey. My father would’ve made a good reporter—I have no idea how he’s tracked these people down. As it is, he’s taken his animus against the current administration and funneled it into trying to advocate for this kid. He’s also contacted Daniel a couple of times, who has agreed to let Nina attend any court hearings that don’t conflict with school. Presumably they’ll all conflict with school, but we’ll see.

  Back at the table after the phone call, he tells me what the lawyer had to say, breaking it all down, the procedures, the time line, how the lawyer thinks there’s a chance that Sam will be able to stay in the country, though not an excellent chance. I offer Dad half of the orange and the papers draw us in again. The radio is tuned to the classical station and the smells of toast and orange peel surround us, and I don’t even mind the pseudospouse thing that we seem to be doing here. Maybe it goes without saying, but the relationship of adult child and parent has not been an easy or obvious one for us. It keeps on shifting too.

  He’s calmer these days. We both are. He still listens to melancholy music, but lately I’ve not heard him go off on the subject of the Bush administration, which is probably for the best.

  How glad he’ll be when Courtney tells him that she’s going to have a baby! I might be happier for him than I am for her. I can picture just how her announcement will light up his face, how his eyes will widen and shimmer even as he makes his stilted reply. (“Very good,” he’ll say, or maybe “Hurrah.” As though he were not allowed to use the word I, to say I am excited for you or I am so delighted to hear that.)

  I’m headed back to L.A. next week and in a good mood about it. From a distance the city seems full of possibilities, and though I know that once I’m back there it won’t seem quite that way anymore, I’m treating this good mood like a house plant, trying to keep it alive, to do better than I’ve done with my other house plants. I already have some meetings set up—that is, I have one meeting on the books and some other tentative meetings. The scheduled one is with my manager’s ex-wife, who recently joined one of the big talent agencies as a junior rep. I’m going to tell her about some new ideas I’ve had for Washington comedies.

  On the table is a sugar dish that dates to my childhood, a white ceramic bowl that stands on legs, with lion’s paws at the base, at least I always thought of them as lion’s paws. They are paws of some sort. Two of them are chipped, but amazingly the bowl has never broken, and I consider swiping it—I’ve been scooping up tokens to take back to California with me, things I’ll never need there, but for some reason I think it’d be nice to have this physics textbook, or that unfinished painting I made in tenth grade, or the sugar bowl, or snapshots I’ll surely misplace: my sisters on the back deck, me on a hobby horse. I’ve been eyeing everything in the house. There’s a part of me that wants to compress it all and bring it with me, even as there’s another part of me that can’t wait to escape one more time.

  The phone rings again and Dad yells at it again, then picks it up. “Hi, Maggie,” he says, and then, “How’s New York? Getting much snow up there?” Here, it’s one of those days when the atmosphere seems to have arranged itself in distinct thermal strata: slow, fat snow falls out of a cold sky, through layers of warmer air, and melts upon landing.

  He returns to his chair with the phone, a strand of hair falling over his forehead, his lips parting to speak, his torso filling and emptying. Here’s this body that has lately become a disruptive guest, hinting at an intention to leave before the party ends. His eyes range around the room and I can tell he’s waiting for an opening in the conversation, so that he can inform Maggie of some random thing he read in the paper. He’ll share that, then offer to hand over the phone to me. He reaches for a section of orange.

  I can remember watching my dad like this when I was a kid, looking on as he did his projects around the house. I can remember thinking a thought that had the force of an inner mandate, which was that I would not, could not outlive him. Oh no. That just wasn’t going to work.

  Better that he be frozen, I felt. And so I tried to freeze him—we tried to freeze one another. As he wipes a bit of juice off his chin and tells Maggie about Sam’s case, that same announcement sounds inside my head, as resounding as it is ordinary: I do not want to be here without him. No, no, I do not. I should tell him this, I think. Would it be so hard just to say it? Why can’t we say these things to each other? Instead I get up from my chair on the pretext of taking a plate to the sink, and as I pass by him I reach for his shoulder and let my hand rest there. He tenses and then relaxes and then goes on talking.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Tha
nk you to everyone who read drafts of this book and offered advice and encouragement: Kirk Walsh, Dominic Smith, Amy Olsson, Alix Ohlin, Andrew Bujalski, Rebecca Beegle.

  Thank you to the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. Thank you to Amy Williams.

  Thank you to everyone at FSG, most of all Emily Bell, for masterful edits delivered sunny-side up.

  And thank you to Alexander and Irene, for coming along in the meantime.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Olsson is the author of the novel Waterloo. She has written about politics, science, and popular culture for magazines including The New York Times Magazine and Texas Monthly, where she is a contributing editor. She is also a former editor of The Texas Observer. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she now lives in Austin, Texas, with her family. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY KAREN OLSSON

  Waterloo

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  For a few years my father was known.