A bittersweet, biting, sharply observed family drama from the author of Waterloo After her father has a heart attack and subsequent surgery, Helen Atherton returns to her hometown of Washington, D.C., to help take care of him and, perhaps more honestly, herself. She's been living in Los Angeles, trying to work in Hollywood, slowly spiraling into a depression fueled by hours spent watching C-SPAN-her obsession with politics a holdover from a childhood interrupted by her father's involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. "I don't know whether to think of him as a coconspirator or a complicit bystander or just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Though the rest of the world has forgotten that scandal, the Atherton family never quite recovered. While living with her father in her childhood home, Helen tries to piece together the political moves that pulled her family apart. All the Houses is, at its heart, a father-daughter story. With razor-sharp prose, an alluring objectivity, and a dry sense of humor, Karen Olsson writes about the shape-shifting of our family relationships when outside forces work their way in-how Washington turns people into unnatural versions of themselves, how problematic and overbearing sisters can be, and how familial nostalgia that sets in during early adulthood can prove counterproductive to actually becoming an adult.
Release date:
November 3, 2015
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
416
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For a few years my father was known. I mean his name was known, in Washington. It floated in the swirl of names around the Reagan White House: not a big name, not a Weinberger or a Deaver, a Casey, a Meese, but one that surfaced every so often in print, toward the end of a piece in The Post. At other times his name was hidden, that is to say he was quoted anonymously, as a source within the administration. A source orbiting close to the sun. He worked for the State Department as a deputy assistant secretary and briefly for something called the Office of Programs Review and then joined the National Security Council staff, where he remained through the spring of 1987. So he was known to the people that knew people.
I remember certain signs of his authority, the deference of other dads, for instance, who asked for his opinions while their daughters, my friends, fidgeted and tugged at their sleeves. I remember the tan-colored telephone in his study that we weren’t allowed to touch, which I now know to have been a secure communications device, and then there was the fact that he was so rarely home, and tied up on that sacred line when he was home.
Still, I wouldn’t call him a “Washington insider.” He never had the social chops for that—no clubby inclinations, no instinct for placing himself at the center of the story. He didn’t want to be there, that’s my hunch, if only a hunch, since back then I was a girl, and I thought he was important in the way that kids think their dads are important. He was the dad, the smartest man in the world, who left before dawn every morning for his big-deal job (something I felt pride about but hardly understood) and who was more significant to us, my sisters and me, for having built all our wooden beds himself, for snaking the drains when they were clogged, imposing the punishments when we strayed, paddling us down the rivers of Maryland and Virginia in rented canoes, and taking us out for dinner at the Magic Pan or the American Café. And now that I am—I still hesitate to say this—an adult, it’s not the peak of his government career but the abrupt ending that I remember most vividly.
One Saturday morning in December 1986, two men showed up on our porch. I happened to be in the front room, prone on the sofa, when I saw them through the window: a couple of men wearing overcoats. I’d been waiting for my older sister because it was basketball season, and on those winter Saturdays we were due at the school gym at 10:00 a.m. sharp. She often made us late to practice, though, and then the two of us had to run extra sprints, a.k.a. suicides. So beforehand, I would lie on the sofa and attempt a kind of ESP summons, trying to will her downstairs by repeating her name in my head, over and over, until the sounds forced their way out of my mouth and I would shout: Court-ney!
That morning I kept quiet. I answered the door. The taller of the two men had a briefcase, his bare red fingers curled around the handle, and the shorter one was carrying flattened file boxes under one arm. They said nothing at first, as though each were waiting for the other to begin, or maybe they expected me to speak up. I didn’t say “Yes” or “Can I help you” but just waited. I already knew them to be adversaries. Then one of them, the taller one, asked for my dad by name, and what struck me as strange was not that I’d suddenly found myself acting out a scene from TV (the one in which detectives knock on a door, and the door is answered by a woman or a kid)—no, that wasn’t strange, since some part of me still believed that life would eventually take the shape it took on television. What was strange to me was how young the men seemed, younger than my teachers, much younger than my parents.
It was a long time ago, but I do believe that these things I recall are more or less true. A sourness in my stomach. The way my socks slouched around my high-tops. How I found my father after I went to get him: lying on the kitchen floor with his head inside the sink cabinet, surrounded by the spray bottles and desiccated sponges he’d taken out of there. He grunted as he fiddled with the pipes. I told him some men had come to see him, and when he pulled himself out of the cabinet, he had a small wrench in his mouth. (He was always trying to fix something, whether or not he was fixing the sink on that particular day.)
At practice we ran and ran and ran. When we got back, Dad was still in his study, and the men were still in there with him. Our mom had taken a quiche from the freezer, as though these visitors were friends who would join us for brunch once they’d finished whatever they were doing, and I remember how angry she was after Courtney and I, gobbling up whatever we could find, ate more than half of that quiche. Still frozen in the middle. To Mom, the fact that we hadn’t heated it up or used forks made things worse. And even then, even as she was asking us how come we had to go and stuff absolutely everything down our craws, the house was so quiet, all fogged up with a silence that her words, or the sounds of the faucet or the refrigerator door, wound their way through without dispersing.
Courtney started up the stairs, and I trailed after her, and just as she reached the second-floor landing, the taller of the visitors came out of the study. For a second or two we all froze: this man (who, I could see now that he’d taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, had fleshy arms) and the two of us in our sweatshirts and shorts and damp socks. As if he were one sort of deer and we were another. Courtney tossed out a “hi,” like a challenge. From behind I saw her stand up straighter, and when she started walking again, it was the walk of a girl who knows she’s being watched. The man looked, then caught himself looking, coughed out a “hello” and turned toward the hall bathroom. Courtney bolted up the next flight of stairs, to her bedroom on the third floor, and I slipped into mine on the second.
Maggie came in and sat down next to my bed. She asked whether Dad would be arrested. I said the men had probably come to the wrong house, though by then they’d been there for more than three hours. She lay down on the rug and arranged my lip gloss and chapstick tubes into a geometrical design while I turned the pages of a magazine I had already read.
Up in her room, Courtney turned on her stereo, and I could hear the muffled extremes of a song, a pulsing bass joined by the off-and-on babble of a synthesizer’s high notes. I guessed that she’d climbed out onto the roof to smoke, something she did even when our parents were home, daring them to go up there and catch her at it. They never did. Wanting to catch her myself, I opened the window for a whiff of the cigarette. Then we heard slow, heavy footsteps descending the stairs, and we hurried into our parents’ room, which overlooked the street, to watch as the men carried their file boxes, now filled with the contents of Dad’s desk, to a gray sedan.
And did I really see one of our neighbors, Mrs. Morse, watching from her doorway? That might be an embellishment, some stock image that I converted to memory. The day that the FBI agents came and seized Dad’s files, I had no idea who they were, what was happening. Even after they left, we weren’t told. Although the idea that parents should communicate openly with their children was on the rise in 1986—we were supposed to have heart-to-heart talks about drugs and sex and feelings—our mom and dad didn’t really go in for all that. Drugs and sex were not mentioned, never mind matters of the heart. We were more of a head-to-head family. I used to see this as a failure, the failure to speak honestly and candidly. In my twenties I decided it was my parents’ great flaw, though I’ve since come to recognize that (surprise!) I’m much more like them than I once believed.
What do I really remember from that day, what would I state for the record? We were all in different parts of the house when they came. I was lying on the sofa. Even before the men rang the doorbell, I sensed a shift in the light, or the tone, or the key. A yellowness. They stayed for a long, long time.
And suicides: hurtling forward and back, forward and back, on jelly legs, from one line on the court to another, slapping the floor with our hands. My sister was fast that day. I chased her, flailing, never catching up until the very end, when we stumbled right out of the gym and through the lobby and out the door, drawing icy blades of air into our lungs. As I ran, parts of songs would spin in my head, one bleeding into the next, you and me, my part time lover, and la di da di we like to party and then, when everything else had been wrung out, a bit from the Black Beauty record we’d listened to on our plastic turntable when we were younger. After each chapter had come a sung chorus about the poor horse’s plight: Black Beauty! In the wind and the rain! We used to tear around the house singing that.
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