Free All the Houses by Karen Olsson Page A

although Courtney was more photogenic.
    â€œYeah,” she said, in no way encouraged.
    â€œYou will. You’re great.” That only made things worse, of course. It was one of those phone calls that faded into weightless assurances and unspoken disappointment. She said she’d see me soon, at Dad’s panel. He’d mentioned it to her multiple times. He seems really excited about it, she said. Yes he does, I said.
    *   *   *
    Dad had a cable modem, and so to check my e-mail I had to bring my laptop to his study and connect it, or else use his machine. I was, post-Rob, checking all too often for a message from him, one that didn’t appear, and still I would go back again and again for my sugar-drip. Just checking! In my spare time, i.e., the intervals between e-mail checks, I would often read in my room, where I’d hidden A Call to Honor under the bed as though it were something dirty. If only: the book could’ve benefited from a little obscenity, a little salt at least. In fact it was just another dry political memoir, a self-serving recap of James Singletary’s employment history, full of meetings, crises, encounters with important people, abstractions. Other than the occasional mention of his wife, there were no relationships to speak of besides relationships of power, in other words what you might expect from one of those Washington men who believed that the warp and woof of their own lives mattered less than their ideas about foreign policy, who hadn’t exactly kept track of their own lives for that matter.
    I had no way of knowing whether the book was full of lies, as Dad had said it would be. Certainly it was self-serving: Singletary seemed to hold all the right opinions, while those around him were misinformed, weak-kneed, blind, naive, dumb. He was absolutely free of self-doubt, on the page at least. More than once he made a point of saying that if he’d had to do X or Y over again, he would do it in just the same way he’d done it the first time. None of it felt real, none of it felt at all felt .
    Most of the book was devoted to an insider’s take on the Bush White House, circa 2001–2003, but in the first few chapters Singletary recounted his prior career. He’d been on the National Security Council staff in the eighties, specializing in Latin America. That would’ve put him in regular contact with my dad, who’d worked there too and had expended much of his time and energy on conflicts to the south of us.
    When I say Dad had a role in Iran-Contra, that’s what I’m talking about, really just the Contra side of the hyphenate. The U.S.-backed fight against the leftist government in Nicaragua. How many people even remember it? If you were alive and watching the news at the time, maybe this rings a bell: circa 1984, Congress blocked military aid to the Contra rebels, and after that a small clique of people did an end-run around the ban by creating a privately funded, secret supply system. And so followed the whole fever dream: you had the Contras, bunches of ragtag, bantam boys with indigenous faces down in the jungle, continuing their fight against the Sandinistas, while in the fun-house mirror of our own country another sort of unlikely brigade—this one composed of midlevel officials, soldiers of fortune, and blue-rinsed wealthy widows—went on providing them with their aftermarket weapons and secondhand camouflage.
    My dad was pulled into it because of Dick Mitchell—even as a teenager I’d inferred as much. Dad had followed his buddy into the murk and had suppressed his own better judgment along the way. I don’t mean to suggest that Dad resisted doing what he did, just that it began with his friend. Mitchell the schemer, the political savant, the flirt, Mitchell the alpha to his beta. They’d first met when my dad was a Cornell undergraduate and Mitchell was a teaching assistant. I suspect that Dad