In the days following my father’s cardiology appointment I found myself still contemplating his too-old body, where by contemplating I really mean flinching from: I would picture him failing on the treadmill, attached to an octopus of wires, or I would see him lying on a kind of man-size tray and being slid inside a big white machine that in my ignorance I pictured as a giant copier. I would see these things and then try to block them out.
I kept returning to what he’d said about Jim Singletary. When I’d read the memoir, wondering what Singletary had done to offend my dad, it hadn’t occurred to me that the insult might have been personal, that it was Dad’s loyalty to his old colleagues and friend Dick, rather than to larger principles or truth itself, that had made him so hostile. Singletary had helped bring Dick Mitchell down, that was why Dad hated him, even though (or maybe because?) there’d been a part of Dad that had wanted to see Dick Mitchell brought down.
This was moving to me but also dizzying: there were so many personalities and episodes involved even in my father’s small portion of history, so many battles that had been fought over how to define the story even as it was unfolding, that I felt a new, or maybe renewed, hopelessness. I am no relativist—I do believe there is such a thing as the truth of the matter, not just a jumble of different versions—but that truth was seeming less and less available to me or to anyone.
I told the temp agency that I was leaving, moving back to L.A. I did think that I would probably go back sooner rather than later, although I had yet to buy a plane ticket. And then I arranged with Dad to borrow the car for a couple of days, because I had this idea I would take a long drive that weekend, out to Shenandoah, and do some thinking, some strategizing.
I drove the car to work on my last Friday of employment, then came home early, just after lunchtime, and parked down the street from my building. When I turned to shut the door, I caught sight of Nina headed my way, her backpack over her shoulder. As she came closer I saw that she was wearing eye makeup, which I hadn’t seen on her during the daytime. It made her eyes look bigger but also aloof, masked. And with no real prompting, it hit me that I’d been wrong about her, I’d thought I had maybe half an understanding of what it was to be without a mother, but no, I only knew what it was like to be half-mothered, and that was different. She was fiercer than I’d given her credit for. Inside her an iridescent girl and a cackling, clawing bird shared too-close quarters.
I wanted to gush, I wanted to say hi, hi, how have you been? But something straitened me, and I asked, “Don’t you have school?”
“Not today. It’s parent-teacher conferences.”
“Where are you headed?”
“A friend’s house.” I had the feeling she might keep walking, but she stopped and then asked, “You’re not working?”
“No, I— No.”
As I was fishing quarters from my wallet to feed the meter, I lost hold of the car key and it fell in the gutter. Nina went over and picked it up. She examined it, as if it were transforming before our eyes into something more than a Toyota fob, and even as I told myself it wasn’t true I had the sense—by the way she glanced at the car, the way I could practically hear her gears turning—that she was tempted to take it, hop into the car and drive away. Instead she handed the key back and said, “See ya!” and headed on down the street.
* * *
The encounter troubled me, although I couldn’t put my finger on the reason. I tried to distract myself. The pages that Dad had given me, his attempts at a memoir, had sat on the table ever since I’d brought them back to the apartment. That afternoon I finally read them. They were fragmentary, the first page a single paragraph:
From 1966 to 1987 I worked in the United States government, first in the State Department and later in the White House. My tenure as a public servant coincided with a tumultuous period in American history, spanning the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra Affair, and the end of the Cold War. Because I was privileged to observe from close up and at times participate in those significant events, I have endeavored to set down some of my recollections and reflections. It is my hope that these may provide a useful, and at times corrective, footnote to the existing record. Although there is no shortage of primary and secondary material regarding this period, it is my belief that the proliferation of accounts has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing, through sheer repetition, certain misinterpretations of what took place.
That I could recall, Dad had never showed much interest in writing. The books that he read were not memoirs, not even Washington memoirs, but histories or biographies of historical figures, books he didn’t necessarily finish but absorbed a lot of facts from, adding to his mental stockpile. I couldn’t reasonably expect him to turn out something top-notch, but I was hoping for something a smidgen livelier. What followed was a slightly longer effort, a page and a half in which Dad summarized his early life:
I was born in 1941 in Trinity, Pennsylvania. My father, William (Bill) Atherton, worked at a dry goods store, which he later bought from the original owner. My mother, Dolores Kelley Atherton, grew up on a dairy farm, became a teacher, and met my father at a dance in Trinity. They married, bought a two-story house outside of town, and had three children, my older brother, Bill Jr., my younger sister, Edith, and me. Despite her country upbringing, Mother had a love of politics that she’d inherited from her father. She and my father were active in the local Republican Party, and I can recall passing out leaflets and attending candidate events from a young age.
This went on for several more paragraphs, in the same mode. He named the schools he’d gone to, the piano lessons he’d taken, his boyhood friends. His was “an all-American childhood,” he wrote. “Bill and I went fishing and ice-skating at Mill Pond, dreamed up pranks to play on our sister, and worked afternoons in Dad’s store.” He’d done well at school. He’d been part of a championship debate team. He was accepted at Cornell, where he’d struggled his first year but eventually found his footing. Then Georgetown for law school.
I turned to the next page, glanced at its first lines:
Churchill once said, “The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.” These words came to mind on November 13, 1986, as I watched President Ronald Reagan give his first press conference regarding the Iran-Contra Affair.
That was about as personal as it got. I skimmed the rest: no revelations, minimal detail. Nothing I didn’t already know. I stacked the pages and set them back on the table.
* * *
The buzzer rang. I’d been making cheese toast when its obnoxious peal sounded. Over the intercom I heard Nina’s scratched voice, asking could she come up. Of course, I said. I felt newly ashamed of my place. The moment she walked in, I thought, she would see how unsuited I was to be a big-sister figure, or whatever kind of figure I’d been pretending to be. When I opened the door, though, her face was like a sack full of stones. She made straight for my bed and sat on it and grabbed the edge with her hands.
“I really need to go to Wheaton. Can you take me in your car?”
To me Wheaton was a name on the Metro map, a suburb I’d been to maybe once or twice or maybe never.
“It’s my dad’s car.”
“Please. It’s important. We don’t even have to take the car, we could go on the Metro.”
“What’s out there?”
“That’s where Sam lives,” she said.
“I don’t think—”
“It’s an emergency.”
“Don’t you have a friend with a car?”
“If I’m out late with my friends, my dad gets all frantic. He trusts you.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
The stones in her face were shifting now, grinding against each other. “Sam hasn’t answered any of my texts for the past week. I think he could be in some kind of trouble. I went to AU to try to find him today, but I couldn’t.”
I brought her a glass of water, even though she hadn’t asked for one, and set it on the floor. Then I sat down next to her.
“You know, guys, sometimes … sometimes they just—”
“That’s not what happened.”
“One day they’re all into you, and then the next day—”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“It’s not even about you, it’s that men basically suck, most of them do.”
“I did get a text from your friend Rob,” she said, biting back, and that instinct to bite upset me as much as anything.
“Texted you. How did he have your number?”
“He got it when we were at dinner. You were in the bathroom.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “So you won’t take me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sat there glaring at the wall and then launched herself to standing. “I guess I’ll see you later.”
My cheese toast was burning. “Why don’t we do something else, like on Sunday?” I asked as I opened the toaster and waved my hand through the smoke.
By the time I turned back around she was halfway out the door. She called back to me from the hall, “Yeah sure,” but it was as though she’d said yeah right. The door shut, and I was convinced I’d said the right thing in the wrong way, which was not much different from saying the wrong thing. Or was it that she’d said one thing and I’d heard another, I couldn’t be absolutely sure. And wasn’t it too late to take a neutral stance with Nina and her dad and Sam, now that she’d already dragged me into it? I should’ve either gone to her father and told him everything or stuck by her and driven her to Wheaton, but I couldn’t bring myself to do either, and even without saying anything to Daniel I’d probably lost her, lost them both, because really there’s no remaining neutral unless you’re okay with remaining by yourself.
And then there was the fact (alleged at least) that she’d received a text from Rob, which confirmed some fears I’d had but tried to not have when we were all at the restaurant.
It took me a while, at least thirty minutes, to notice that the car key was missing. I’d put it with my own keys, in the middle of the table, and now only my keys were there. Maybe I was misremembering? Maybe, I said to myself, I’d set the car key someplace else, on the counter, in my purse, left it in the bathroom. But it wasn’t any of those places.
I called Nina’s phone and she didn’t pick up. Then I called Daniel. “Is Nina there?”
“Isn’t she with you?”
“No. Are you at home?” He was. “I’m coming over, okay?”