Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Lew let Richard sit on the edge of a redwood picnic table on the brick patio that took up most of their postage-stamp-size backyard, and all of Capitol Hill rang with fireworks, and maybe, Richard knew now, gunshots. Lew asked him to hand over the pull tabs, and Richard asked, How did you know about that? and Lew laughed and said, I have been married to your mother for a very long time. He talked to his only son about the responsibilities of drinking beer and told him it was something he needed to learn, the ability to drink most of the day and not lose his composure, and to the nine-year-old Richard MacMurray, composure meant a clean shirt and a freshly shaven face and his father, almost always immaculate and smelling of beer and Aqua Velva.

Richard could not tell his sister these memories, because she would want to know what her place in them was, and the truth was that she had so little place there; she had been a spectral presence, a dervish that hustled in and out each summer and around the holidays, and before that she’d been the moody girl in the bedroom next door to his who yelled at her parents and ridiculed her little brother’s clothes, or hair, or teeth. The truth: the most distinct of Richard’s memories of his sister centered around tragedies—packing up Lew’s personal effects at his office and arguing over which child was going to get the flag that had been draped over Lew’s casket.

It felt like he had lived on this balcony for years. What he remembered most of that last visit of his sister’s was the party upstairs, a world he had never been invited into; he’d spent his reckless twenties pretending to be first responsible and later married, and he had abdicated any interest in the more surface recreations of his friends: weekends at the beach and softball and drinking games and charity bar crawls. His neighbors upstairs samba’ed and cha-cha-cha’d and generally had themselves well lubricated by sundown, and the girl who lived in apartment 43 was there too, and she’d leaned out over the fire escape and shouted down, inviting Richard and Mary Beth upstairs, and his sister was halfway up the escape ladder before Richard could tell her that he did not want to go.

He was a stranger at the party and sulked and didn’t really talk to anyone. Mary Beth brought women back to the sofa to meet him and kept repeating, “You gotta get back on that horse,” as she gave the briefest of introductions: “This is Lori, she works on the Hill.” He’d forgotten that his sister was, at her core, as much a Washingtonian as he was, inherited her brusque manner from the same father. He dreaded these kinds of party conversations; he kept up with the Redskins not out of a true love of football but because it felt like the only neutral thing anyone in the city was prepared to discuss. Half the women he met were interested in networking, not dating, and the ones that announced their interest in dating carried their insecurities with them like some sort of ritual scarifications, as if they had realized just that morning how most of their friends were now doting suburban parents. He was in his forties and had never learned how to talk to a woman without introducing that famous Beltway question, “Who do you work for?” as if it were still the era of the Roman Empire and you were defined by who owned the product of your work.

At the end of the party, Richard had nothing but heartburn and a pocket full of business cards of women he never intended to call. His sister was staying at a friend’s house in Silver Spring and had to leave in time to catch the last Red Line train. When she left, she embraced him, her head against his chest. He’d been taller than Mary Beth since he was twelve but never realized just how much; as he rested his chin on the top of her head, he could see the emergent gray hairs at the roots of her part. That couldn’t have been the last time he’d touched her, but he could conjure no other memory, no other likely time they had hugged or even kissed each other on the cheek.

He conflated memories of his sister too. His sister as a teenager, slathering her arms with suntan lotion, his sister at their childhood home, with her shelf full of facial cleansers and herbal shampoos. He could not remember what she smelled like or if she wore perfume or even what she had been wearing that July. Had that really been the last time they’d seen each other? You should be talking to one of my officers now.

He felt the cold, abrupt and shocking; he had been standing on his balcony for who knows how long, and three strangers stood whispering in his living room, the specifics of what they were saying lost in the drone of the television— Continuous live coverage of the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503— telling him again and again that his sister was dead. His sister.

This city was his childhood, and how much of it he’d spent heeled at her side. She’d taken him to the Smithsonian to see Charles Lindbergh’s airplane and John Glenn’s space capsule and bought him a bootleg FBI T-shirt from a Korean street vendor whose cart was a cornucopia of pizza by the slice, soft pretzels with huge, glistening crystals of white salt, and ice-cold seven-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. Together they’d waited in line to see the touring treasures of the Egyptian king and sat in the House gallery on the day that the Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon and then ate lunch in the cafeteria of the Rayburn Building with their father, who took Richard back into the committee room and let him sit in Chairman Rodino’s big leather seat and even take a crack or two with the chairman’s weighty gavel.

Later that same afternoon, his sister took him to the top of the Washington Monument, and Richard asked her if the first president was buried on the grounds; Mary Beth laughed and asked why, in the patient manner of a mother, and Richard said, “Because it looks like a tombstone.” And the view from the monument’s small windows was not much different than the one from his balcony.

His building was situated at the crest of two intersecting hills. To his right stood the hotel where President Reagan waved to the lone gunman. Though the clouds had thickened into what forecasters called a low ceiling, visibility was still good enough that Richard could see all the way south to the new tower at National Airport, which rose like a parapet. His eyes roamed across the cityscape, all its polished granite and etched concrete, the monument built of marble blocks carried on the backs of Union Army carts, and that was when it struck him: there were monuments to dead cops, and a black granite tombstone hundreds of yards long inscribed with the names of the dead from America’s most foolish war; there were plaques to honor the dead army nurses from the two world wars, and in the suburbs there were eighty-three stars blasted with a pneumatic hammer into a marble wall at Langley, two and a quarter inches tall to represent the life of an intelligence operative lost in the line of duty, a cenotaph so inconsequential that the sculptor who chiseled the recesses into stone never even knew the names of the dead.

There was life, a future, but not here. His nephew was the only necessity now. Dallas, that modern cartoon; how could a boy live there? Gabriel needed space and sunlight and the soft undulations of a half-acre lawn. He needed a dog. A room with a desk for his homework, and a captain’s bed with secret compartments and comic books. None of that was here, not in this dour apartment and not in this disappointing city. There were cities of angels and cities of light, windy cities, and cities of night, cities that never slept, cities of magnificent intentions, cities of big shoulders and kisses and promises, cities of balconies, and brotherly love, but it was this city that had been poisoned for him; what the young Richard MacMurray had once seen among the marble and granite landmarks of his hometown was a living history, where now every notable building of this city he had once loved with all his heart was nothing but a monument to the fallen dead.