DC By the Book

Excerpt: The house I lived in that winter in Washington had been a rooming house with fourteen rooms, rented out mostly to addicts, when my landlord bought it in 1974. Friends told him it was a bad idea, but he bought it anyway, and his father came from Alabama to help rebuild the interior from the ground up. As soon as he could, he rented the basement apartment. The bedroom on the top floor he rented from time to time. The rest of the house was his. It was one of those row houses people walk by on fall nights and stop beside to look at the architectural details, the molding, the chandeliers, the bookcases, visible through the tall windows, while straining for a glimpse of life within.

Excerpt: My mother lived on Connecticut Avenue in the sixties after my father died--I had to go there and play bridge with her every Wednesday and Saturday night. She wanted me to move in with her, but I refused. I wanted to live in the Miramar. That's Spanish, you know, for "view of the sea" --though there was no sea. "That's Washington," he said, looking into his own dark glasses and shook his head of blonde hair, too glamorous for his native city. "My mother would never have lived in the Miramar," he said, coming to a stop before a big brick building on Fifteenth Street. "But it might be just what you are looking for--a room with a hot plate, a place for tricks!" The Miramar had a waiting list, we learned upon inquiring inside, and an application form one had to fill out, which Frank had helped me with, till we got to a space for "Project or Purpose in Washington." The two of us paused, then Frank said turning to me "Why don't you write 'Aging homosexual seeks to reinvent life'?" Instead we left that space blank and handed the form to the woman at the desk.

Excerpt: The house I lived in that winter in Washington had been a rooming house with fourteen rooms, rented out mostly to addicts, when my landlord bought it in 1974. Friends told him it was a bad idea, but he bought it anyway, and his father came from Alabama to rebuild the interior from the ground up. As soon as he could, he rented the basement apartment. The bedroom on the top floor was he rented from time to time. The rest of the house was his. It was one of those row houses, people walk by on fall nights and stop beside to look at the architectural details, the molding, the chandeliers, the bookcases, visible through the tall windows, while straining for glimpses of life within. Often when they did my landlord was sitting there in the dark in the front room with his dog on his lap, looking down in the street. He would sit there thinking of the nights he used to look at houses like his, enjoying the reversal of roles.

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Excerpt: One afternoon I stumbled on Ford’s Theatre. The box in which Lincoln had been shot was closed, the park ranger said, so it might recuperate from the thousands of feet that trod it every year. So I went down to the little museum in the basement and stared at the coat from Brooks Brothers Lincoln had been wearing when he was shot, and the blood-soaked scarf, and the gloves –all the slightly morbid memorabilia of an age when the cult of mourning was more intense, if not macabre, than in our own.

Excerpt: Walking alone was the only thing that relieved my mood. The longest walk was to and from school. When our schedules matched, Frank would give me a ride, in one or both directions, but mostly I walked. Walking up in daylight, there was traffic and the occasional pedestrian to deal with; walking home after class, I had the whole journey to myself - uphill to National Cathedral, then down Massachusetts Avenue to Sheridan Circle, then past the spot before the Irish embassy where the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier had been assassinated, down Nineteenth to N Street: a long gentle descent to town.

Excerpt: That was the pleasure of the city after dark: it was empty. Most people were home. Often, when I was walking back from the Mall, the bell of the Episcopal church began to ring as I was crossing the square, and I would feel myself in another century - when church bells had been more common - and try to imagine Henry Adams reading in his library on the north side of the square, convinced the United States would collapse in the year 1951 - the whole effrontery of building a house across from the White House became clear.

Excerpt: From the terrace of the Capitol the city felt strangely hushed, like a seaport after dark, lights ringing a dark harbor- only here the harbor was not the ocean but the mall.

Excerpt: Everyone was living in the present. There were concerts and lectures that cost nothing, I noticed in the paper, all over town, cultural events of every conceivable sort. There were so many museums one could spend days on the Mall wandering from one to the next.

Excerpt: The city was a repository of loot, though the more I walked around the more I realized how much was not on display. It was only when I happened to be walking with a historian through Lafayette Square one day that I learned Henry Adams had lived in a town house on the north side, a few doors down from the house he had built near the corner of Sixteenth Street, where the Hay-Adams Hotel now stood, the house designed by H.H. Richardson his wife had never moved into because, just before it was completed, she had gone to her room one morning while her husband sat downstairs reading and swallowed cyanide.

Excerpt: In other words, the stories associated with certain blocks were invisible for the most part, unless you were walking with someone who happened to know that the National Gallery stood on the site of the train station where President Garfield had been assassinated (second president whose deathbed Robert Lincoln had to sit beside, since he was the secretary of war at the time) or the building across the street from the Treasury was where Walt Whitman had worked as a clerk, or the east side of Lafayette Square the home of Mark Hanna, the Ohio boss.

Excerpt: Eventually I crossed Lafayette Square so many times I ceased to think of Adams or the fact Seward lived on the east side of the park when he was nearly killed the night Lincoln was shot. What continued to soothe me was the emptiness of the city after dark. It was the perfect city for grief: like walking through a cemetery.