My first days at home with Dad, it became clear that if he needed any genuine help, he wasn’t about to tell me what kind of help that might be. He was moving around more cautiously than usual, but he could manage just about everything himself, or so he insisted, and I even caught sight of him one afternoon, in his bedroom, doing exercises with some small purple hand weights that must’ve belonged to, then been abandoned by, one of my sisters or maybe our mom. He did let me take him to a doctor’s appointment. Other than that the most useful thing I could figure out to do for him was to make lunch or dinner. A low-fat, low-salt cookbook had come into his possession, and I followed one lackluster recipe after another, most of which involved blended-up vegetables, so that the food might as well have been baby food, and though Dad and I would try to improve the situation with eleventh-hour transfusions of butter or soy sauce, usually it was too late to salvage the baked chicken, the pureed squash, the pasta with peas.

What he wanted me to help with were his projects around the house, and here I dragged my feet, because these had always struck me as make-work. He had this Protestant itch he had to scratch. Not only that, he’d been a part of that tier in Washington that defined people by their occupations; he’d been, for many years, as dedicated to his work as anyone; and once out of that world, missing its pace, he jerry-rigged his own treadmill. He liked to be constantly running errands and doing chores and making needless improvements. One afternoon he asked me to go out to the shed with him, a long narrow shed he’d put up himself years ago, where as it turned out he was having a hard time unscrewing a plastic hose hanger from the wall. His reason for removing the hanger was that he’d bought a little wheeled cart for the hose instead, a summer remainder, half off. The final screw was jammed in tight, the head rusted, and he wanted me to brace the hanger as he worked the drill. I didn’t think it needed to be braced, but he’d grown frustrated and in his frustration needed me to be working too.

After a series of long exhales and G-rated oaths, he told me, “I had a talk with Judge O’Neill the other night.” Kit O’Neill was a retired appellate court judge who lived down the block. Some nights he would walk over with a bottle of Evan Williams and wobble home after they’d drunk the better part of it—when Dad said they’d had a talk, that’s what he meant. “His son-in-law just started law school, and he’s thirty-six. Come to find out, there are a lot of second-career attorneys these days.”

I pretended that I hadn’t understood him. “This is Ruthie’s husband?”

“I bet that someone with your experience in the entertainment world—”

“I don’t think I want to be a lawyer.”

Actually I had considered it, like I’d considered so many things, pouring myself a glass of wine and then sitting down with my laptop and clicking away at one web link after another, studying the sites of various law schools, picturing my life as an entertainment lawyer, that is to say the suits I would wear and the house I would own. When I was younger it had seemed more important to be interesting than rich, and law school hadn’t had the slightest allure, but the older I got, the more the idea of financial security overshadowed whatever notions of self-actualizing I’d once had—I could no longer even recall why I’d thought that becoming a screenwriter would help me be myself. What would help me be myself, I now thought, was money, and there was something pleasing about the notion that Dad had tipsily imagined me as a lawyer, just as I’d done.

And yet, even if it wasn’t too late in principle, it was too late for me. I would not go to law school. Surely he knew that.

I used to get these e-mails from him, often time-stamped midnight or 1:00 a.m.

Helen:

The other day I ran into Roger and Ann Sullivan at Safeway. They are well. Geordie (their son) is living in New Jersey and has a job working for Bell Labs. They said he is always happy to connect with old D.C. pals and tell them about potential opportunities with the company.

You should consider opening an IRA (Individual Retirement Account) since you aren’t invested in a 401k. I’ve attached some information.

Love, Dad

“I just thought it could be an option worth exploring,” he said. He’d taken his eyes off the drill, and it was starting to carve out the center of the screw head. I pointed at it and said, “Stop, stop.”

“All right,” he said. “I think I know what I’m doing.”

“Sorry.”

“Have you talked to your mother lately?”

“Not since I left L.A. Why?”

“No reason.” He patted the hanger. “You try holding it over on this side and I’ll try from that side.”

At last the screw came loose. I took a step back and the hanger came with me. “There we go,” he said.

“So who’ve you been spending time with these days? Anybody besides the judge?” I asked.

“Spending time?”

“Do you still get together with the Osborns?”

“They have a place in Florida now, so they’re gone all winter.”

“You see Courtney, I guess.”

He’d taken the hanger out of my hands, and carefully, as though it were something he intended to save, he set it down just outside the shed door. “She’s very busy, as you know. And I’ve been busy myself. I mean I was, before the surgery.”

“With teaching?”

My dad’s postscandal career had been uneventful. Right afterward there’d been a scary stretch when he’d been out of work, but then he’d joined a big telecommunications company, as public affairs director. He’d been paid very well, though he never liked the job. On the side he’d taught night classes in government and policy at American University. This he loved. Many of his students were immigrants, for whom he undertook to explain the ways of our nation. A few years earlier he’d retired from the day job, and now the classes were it.

“I’ve also been preparing for—I’ve been invited to speak on a panel in several weeks. I’m preparing for that.”

“What about?”

I assumed it would be related to the telecommunications industry, his area of reluctant expertise, and so I was surprised when he told me the name, a long-winded name, something about Bush’s national security policy in historical context. It was at the S____Club, he said.

“Who’s sponsoring it?”

“It’s a group affiliated with Hopkins. I hope you’ll be able to come.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said, though something in his voice made me nervous. And was he blushing? It might’ve been that the cold air had reddened his cheeks. A lean gray cat had snuck into the yard, and now it padded into the shed with its tail high and hooked. “Oh hello,” Dad said. We watched it for a moment, and then he added, “Too bad Maggie isn’t here.” There was this idea in the family that my younger sister was a cat lover, because as a kid she had followed the neighbors’ cats around, though as an adult she had never owned a cat. “If Maggie were here she would bring you some milk,” he told the cat. “Wouldn’t you like that?” The animal completed its tour of the shed and slipped back out again. We followed in time to see it climb the back fence. It walked along the top and then disappeared.

Ours wasn’t a huge yard, but it did have a pool, a rectangular one with flagstone around it. The pool had been drained for winter and covered with a sheet of green vinyl pulled taut with springs. A grid of nylon straps ran across the cover, like coordinates for locating points in the hole underneath.

*   *   *

Mostly how I remember that first week or two in Washington is as a series of nights, long nights in a quiet house, during which it gradually became apparent that while I had come home, supposedly, to help my father, he believed that I was the one who needed assistance. We quickly arrived at a mutual-aid stalemate. Neither of us had a clue as to how to help the other. Neither of us knew how to talk to the other: that much had been true my whole life, but only recently had I detected in myself an old, flattened-out hope, a dulled dream that we would somehow, someday be more fluent. I’d carried that hope for such a long time but hadn’t named it, and even now that I recognized its existence, it was only a vector, pointing to an outcome I couldn’t see or even envision.

I did little during those two weeks but was often exhausted by the evening. I’d been taking an antidepressant that had put an air pocket between me and the sadness that had paralyzed me over the summer, so that instead of feeling bad I felt neutral, even while having some of the same thoughts that had gone along with the erstwhile bad feelings. Over the summer I’d often woken up at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and thought, What the hell am I doing with my life? What am I supposed to be doing? Is it too late for me? Now I slept through the night, and when those questions came to me, intermittently during the day, I just let them go by. Sometimes it was like I was watching the movie of my life and wondering why they hadn’t cut out some of the slow parts. I don’t mean that I was entirely passive, only that there were days when I wished I could speed things up, and I couldn’t.

I did still intend to rewrite my old screenplay, or reinvent it, and so I tried to read (secretly, in my room) a long account of the Iran-Contra Affair that I’d bought in Los Angeles. The book was a thick, oversize paperback, exhaustive, exhausting, which I would leave splayed facedown on the floor as I dozed off, so that its binding became a register of my naps, each one logged by a new crack in the spine. What I did stay awake for, I couldn’t wrap my head around. To me, it was a suggestive but ultimately indigestible scandal. I’d read other Iran-Contra books, or sections of them at least, but for all the facts I’d taken in, if someone had asked me to explain the whole thing I could barely have managed a summary.

Here’s what I could say. The main players were a few bureaucrats and a gang of freelance old hands, drawn to the rush of counterrevolution and back-channel deals. Their foes were communists and hostage takers, not to mention certain State Department guys with their thumbs up their asses, not to mention the U.S. Congress. They had encryption devices for sending secret messages back and forth. They had secure telephones. They met with middlemen and mercenaries in foreign cities. They kept cash in a safe. They gave themselves false names. They got carried away with it all, and they almost got away with it all.

Some aliases: Mr. Goode. Mr. East. Steelhammer. Max Gomez. The Courier. Blood and Guts.

Compartmentation, that was one rule. The big box, the one that investigators would later pry open, contained smaller boxes, which in turn contained smaller ones. You knew only what you needed to know, the contents of your compartment.

The men in their tiny boxes wrote memos in coded language. They caught flights down to Miami or Tegucigalpa and glad-handed commanders who asked for more bullets, por favor! During the three or four hours of sleep they allowed themselves each night, they dreamed of sorties over the jungle, of walking across hot tightropes, of cats circling. They awoke in a room in the Old Executive Office Building with three video terminals and three phones and a window overlooking a neglected courtyard. A warning bell, connected to one of the terminals, rang all day long.

Who were they? These men, or most of them, had served in Vietnam. They were in government now but not of it, no sir, they still set store by clearly defined missions and chains of command, not by the vagaries of politics. Or that was one way of putting it. Another thing you could say was that they would do almost anything to keep from abandoning other men, other fighters, the way they themselves had been all but ditched over there and then had been forced to ditch the Vietnamese in turn. Another was that they were desperate to please a genial but distant father figure, their commander in chief.

As their children must have wished to please them. To the extent the men led private lives, they led them largely in absentia. They whispered drowsy goodbyes in the early morning, called home from the office to wish the kids good night, drove the station wagon to church on Sunday. Now and again the histories of the affair will allude to families in Chevy Chase or Falls Church—for instance, there’s a moment when Oliver North (a.k.a. Steelhammer, a.k.a. Blood and Guts) and a Justice Department lawyer chat about their daughters’ love of horseback riding. A different set of books, the biographies and memoirs, lay out the domestic basics: where these men grew up, how they met their wives, when their children were born. More than once the reader encounters a flashback scene, circa 1970, in which the father-to-be, at his desk, learns that his wife is in labor and must speed to reach the hospital in time. The sections of black-and-white photographs, while dominated by pictures of men in the company of other men, serve up a few family snapshots too: baby pictures, Mr. and Mrs. X walking down the aisle on their wedding day, Mrs. X with their young children, and then, much later, Mr. and Mrs. X leaving the congressional hearings together, marching hand in hand past the reporters.

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 alongside 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.