Free All the Houses by Karen Olsson Page B

would’ve seen through him and fallen under his sway all the same. He had that kind of charisma. I think this, I know this, I feel sure of it despite having very little hard evidence. I’m just drawing from my adolescent perceptions, from seeing them interact at family parties. (Later I would read Mitchell’s testimony before the congressional subcommittees, not that it included any information about his friendship with my father.)
    Dad, for his part, never talked about Mitchell now. Aside from the outburst that Singletary’s TV appearance had triggered, I couldn’t think of the last time he’d brought up his White House years at all. And so I was looking for a way in, a trapdoor to Dad’s past. I wanted more from A Call to Honor than it could’ve possibly contained—that is to say, when I picked up the book I think I’d subconsciously hoped to discover the story of Mitchell in it, if not the story of Mitchell and Dad. Some clue, at least.
    But naturally I didn’t find anything like that.
    Singletary had written: “After September 11, confusion prevailed inside and out of the White House.” And: “Regrettably, there were those in favor of what I would call a run-and-hide approach.” And: “Every administration has to make tough choices.” And on and on. Still, those clichéd pages had opened something up for me, a box full of questions not answered. While my days were still loose and undirected on the surface, I began to feel that I had come home for a purpose, albeit a purpose that wasn’t clear to me.
    One afternoon while Dad was out, I checked my e-mail and then stayed at his desk, succumbing to screen daze. I scanned the headlines and did some clicking, downloaded the class schedule of a yoga studio in Dupont Circle, then closed the browser and started hunting around for the download.
    I opened a file on the desktop with an opaque name (DL061504.doc) and found not a list of yoga classes but a letter that Dad had written, earlier in the year, to Senator Richard Lugar. VIA FAX it said at the top. He had a habit of communicating by fax. The only letters I’d ever sent by fax had to do with changing my car insurance or terminating a health club membership, but my father used his fax machine to send notes to people he didn’t care to call on the phone. I guessed that these were people, like Senator Richard Lugar, who wouldn’t have been likely to take his call, and that Dad might’ve been hoping that they would nonetheless be moved, because of the wisdom contained in the fax, to want to talk to him. But then again I have a way of making him sound needier than maybe he was. For all I know, he didn’t give a fig whether they talked to him or not.
    Dear Senator Lugar , began the fax, I enjoyed our conversation last night at the National Press Club. The document went on to suggest a foreign policy agenda for Bush’s second term in office, with a series of bullet-point proposals (Scale Back Our Military Commitments, Reopen a Dialogue with Iran, and so on) followed by short explanations. I had no problem with the proposals, which seemed reasonable enough, but the fact that my dad had written the letter, and presumably faxed it to the senator’s office, where it lay, no doubt, in a bin of other unread faxes—I wished he hadn’t done it. I preferred to view Dad as someone who’d gone into more or less permanent exile and who possessed, if nothing else, an exile’s dignity, better that than a pitiable faxer.
    I looked in the fax machine itself, which had in its tray of already-sent pages a couple dozen invitations to the panel he’d told me about, personal invitations he’d faxed to people I doubt he knew, at best barely knew. They were members of the present-day national security establishment (administration officials, congressmen) and of the city’s old guard more generally. Dear X, Because of our shared