DC By the Book

Excerpt: Hell, if Fred LaRue were still as rich as people thought, he would be living on the other side of this crazy, round, Italian-made apartment building, facing the courtyard or the Potomac instead of Virginia Avenue and the blinking old Washington Monument. God knows there’d been plenty of money to inherit back in ’57…Daddy had made his money fast, and his son was now losing it slowly. Back home in Mississippi, the oil-and-gas business was starting to sputter out. There were no more big strikes to be made, and the idea that Fred LaRue’s being inside the White House would redound to the benefit of I.P. LaRue Oil and Minerals was just that, an idea—one that others, though not Fred LaRue himself, entertained. He preferred the business of politics to the business of business…LaRue…looked up at the clock over the television and wondered if it was too late to call Mitchell at his apartment across the courtyard. Hell, he’d wait until he saw him at the office in the morning…He decided to skip the ten o’clock news, which was local anyway and would probably lead with whatever colored guy had just killed another one over in southeast Washington. He’d go down to the People’s Drugstore instead—below the fancy bridal shop and past the Chinese restaurant and the barbershop and the Safeway and all the other stores that made the Watergate a whole damned world unto itself—and he’d get himself another pouch of tobacco. -- HISTORICAL CONTEXT --> Designed by an Italian architecture firm, DC’s most famous apartment complex takes its name from the wide staircase descending to the Potomac River from a plaza in front of the nearby Arlington Memorial Bridge. That Water Gate was designed to be a grand entrance to the city for boats along the river. In keeping with its namesake, this Watergate’s curves allow for grand views of the Potomac from its apartments. These vistas, along with a massive interior courtyard, health club and pool, built-in shopping mall, and proximity to the White House and other federal buildings, have attracted well-heeled---and well-connected---residents since opening in 1965. Among the early residents were Attorney General John Mitchell and his wife Martha. As the head of Nixon’s re-election campaign, Mitchell oversaw the 1972 burglary and bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate, and was later served 19 months in prison for his role.

Excerpt: “Amigos,” said Hunt, “you’re here.” The Manger-Hamilton Hotel, at the corner of Fourteenth and K, had seen better days, but at least there was a room waiting for each Cuban. When he’d called here yesterday, after learning that the Watergate had nothing, he’d been told this place hadn’t been full since Hoover’s funeral almost three weeks ago. And, indeed, it looked like the sort of modest spot where sentimental old FBI agents lived on fixed incomes in Davenport and Des Moines might book a room in order to come east and say goodbye to their old chief.

Excerpt: Alice dozed during the drive to Petworth, the cemetery neighborhood near the District’s northern tip. She guided Mr. Ellis, who had remained silent, through a gate on New Hampshire Avenue and then, at under five miles an hour, along the path to the graveyard’s section A. "I’ll get out here," she said.... Alice set off slowly through section A, wondering as she went whether Stew had gotten around to choosing where he wished to be buried. Perhaps he’d decided to send his carcass back to Connecticut, where it had been raised—a line of reasoning Alice always faulted for the way it made one’s whole adult life seem a detour rather than a destination. She passed the grave of Agnes Harvey Stone, widow of the chief justice, dead for fifteen years without ever having returned Alice’s copy of Ten North Frederick. The mausoleums of Riggs and Heurich, the District’s biggest banker and biggest brewer, soon came into view, each much nicer than that ridiculous "Grief" statue by Saint-Gaudens, a vulgar extravagance thrown up by Henry Adams to pay off the guilt he felt over his wife’s suicide, just as another man might provide a diamond bracelet to a spouse he’d neglected for a chorus girl. Eleanor used to come out and sit on the bench across from this monstrosity, a fact Alice had turned into one of her party pieces. She would put a dish towel over her head to mimic the statue’s veil, then raise her hand to her face, just like the sculpture, shutting her eyes to complete the imitation. And then, when her tableau vivant appeared fixed, she would buck out her teeth and say, in Eleanor’s horribly untethered upper register, "I have just returned from surveying conditions in the afterlife!" A circle of trees now shielded her eyes from the statue, so popular with visitors that it had become a celebration of suicide rather than a caution. She preferred the plain lawn and modest headstones of section F—and there it was, her own eternal reward, the half-filled plot beneath the granite marker for PAULINA STURM 1925-1957.

Excerpt: From this seat, Alice recalled the expression on Dick’s face as he helped to carry her daughter’s coffin to its open grave. She also again remembered the night that had followed, her going to the Nixon’s house on Tilden Street, Pat returning upstairs, the girls, out of sight, watching television somewhere. Alone with Dick in his study, she had forced herself to speak of suicide, the subject which all day had ruled everyone’s thoughts and stilled their tongues. "She didn’t do it, but I believe I shall," she’d told Dick, meaning it, her voice quavering as it never had before or since. To her surprise, he’s gone to one of his bookshelves, as if to fetch a Physician’s Desk Reference, and taken down a volume of Father’s collected works. It took him no time at all to find the passage he wanted: And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever. He read out loud, astonishingly, what Father had written about her mother and, by extension, about her, the child whose birth had brought on such a foul death and such inordinate grieving. She knew, right at that moment, why Dick had picked those lines, and why she’d come to him. No, he had not yet protested the Post’s libel about suicide, and not yet pressured the insurance company to pay out. But she didn’t need to see him do those things. She’d come to the house that night because of the look on his face when he’d shouldered the coffin—the creased, naked expression on this darkest of dark horses, this misanthrope in a flesh-presser’s profession, able to succeed from cunning and a talent for denying reality at close range. She didn’t share his general dinginess: she smiled in delight, however viciously, whereas he smiled only in a kind of animal desperation. But she shared the darkness beneath and the capacity for denial; she could sometimes change or negate reality just with her contempt for it. By the time she left his house that night, the two of them had effected a little sorcery, succeeded in convincing her that Paulina had been her own heart’s dearest and that all the world knew it. She held on to this illusion long enough to get home to the empty house in Dupont Circle and throw away Bill’s old straight razor with which she might have put an end to herself the way she’d imagined doing it, draining the blood as if she were her own taxidermist.

Excerpt: Now, in the still-not-full darkness, as the helicopter flew parallel to the Roosevelt Bridge, Rose looked down at the monuments to Jefferson and Lincoln and wondered what would be standing there two or three generations from now commemorating Richard Nixon. He'd already earned a bridge, at the very least, she thought; and if the next four years turned out anything like the past six months, it was hardly foolish to think he might have his own marble template on the Mall someday.