Only in America

In the distance we heard a gun salute being fired at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s only a few hundred yards away and through the trees you could see the gun carriage bearing the coffin of a fallen officer. Waiting at the graveside was an elderly lady, dressed in black, slumped in her seat, surrounded by mourners. The cemetery occupies two hundred acres of land seized by the government after the Civil War from the family of Robert E. Lee, the best-known general on the losing side. President Kennedy is buried here as well as 25,000 veterans from America’s sixty-five wars. Since 2003 a new section of graves has expanded far faster than anyone had ever imagined. The Iraq war keeps the staff at Arlington busy, including one woman who is present at every funeral and whose job it is to hand the folded flag that once covered the fallen soldier’s coffin to the presiding officer. He will then give it to the mourning mother or father. It is one of the strict rituals of the nation’s most famous cemetery and the woman who carries out this task is called ‘the Lady of Arlington’. Her black, silhouetted figure is like a symbol of grief in a medieval painting, always unobtrusive, always present.

The clatter of horses’ hooves, the haunting notes of a bugle, the wind in the trees and the muffled tears of mothers and fathers were the white noise of grief interrupted now and then by the roar of military helicopters flying between the White House and the Pentagon, the Pentagon and Quantico, the Marine base south of Washington, or just keeping an eye on the people below.

As you look down at the Mall from the Iwo Jima Memorial, past Arlington Cemetery, you take in the panorama: the square temple of the Lincoln Memorial, Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the museums, the White House, tucked away in a corner and barely visible. And somewhere to the right, out of sight but never out of mind, thanks to those helicopters, is the Pentagon. And then it strikes you. The layout of Washington, the monuments, the architecture, the quotations in marble all celebrate quintessentially unimperial notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. And yet this city feels like the imperial capital. I can imagine all the marble-clad splendour one day covered in moss, crumbling with decay. I’m keen to test this idea on Mr Wyeth, the historian. But he’s escaped just in time. He and his charges have gone. I can see them in the distance heading down the hill towards a waiting bus. The sun is beginning to set.

The war memorial that is missing from the stage is the one that hasn’t been built yet because the war it will commemorate is still being fought. If we could see how the Iraq war monument turned out we could probably guess the future of the conflict and how it affected America’s role in the world. Will it be another wall of names like its Vietnam counterpart or a man toppled from a slab? And should that man be Saddam Hussein or George Bush? And will the final result in stone be as honest as its predecessors?

Like other artificial capitals, Washington was chosen by the man after whom it is named for all the things it was not: the dot on the map next to the raging Potomac River barely amounted to a village. It would never compete with New York, Philadelphia or Boston, the obvious contenders for the crown. And most importantly the notion of a central capital simply wasn’t very important to a group of settlers and pilgrims whose very escape across the Atlantic had been motivated by a desire to get away from any form of central government. Washington was thus born under the worst possible circumstances as the necessary, unavoidable offspring of administration. It is hardly a recipe for a love affair. But as America’s power has grown, so has Washington’s. What distinguishes it from Canberra, Bonn or Brasilia is that this capital is also the custodian of the near-sacred idea that has inspired the country around it. The monuments, vaults and rituals of Washington capture the essence of how America perceives itself. They are the self-conscious windows into America’s soul. The slums of Southeast Washington, the lobby firms that have mushroomed on K Street, the vast and Orwellian bureaucracy that luxuriates on the south side of the Mall – these are the grubby flip side of a noble idea. Washington is the festering interface between America’s rhetoric and reality. It is a perfect place in which to rummage for answers.

TWO Tilden Street

We live on what is called a ‘no thru road’. The term ‘dead end’ is considered far too terminal. It is a quiet street flanked by a small park that looks more like a jungle set for a remake of Apocalypse Now. The street descends towards Rock Creek Park, the green belt that used to divide Washington between rich and poor, black and white. Because the angle is quite steep our road turns into an ice rink in winter and a mud slide in the summer when it rains. It is named after Samuel Tilden, the hapless Democratic candidate for the presidency who won the popular vote in 1876 but lost the electoral college to Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican. The result, oddly, hinged on the outcome of the vote in Florida. It is an irony that one of our neighbours, a staunch Democrat, never ceases to remind me of.

The house we eventually ended up calling home has Georgian-style windows, flanked by duck-egg blue wooden shutters and a façade of whitewashed brick distressed less by age than by bitter winters and baking summers. It is described as ‘genuine colonial’, which means it was built in 1953.

The shutters on our house don’t open or close. They have been nail-gunned to the walls and are only for show. Most of the house is made of wood, so fragile that a small troupe of termites could devour it as a mid-morning snack. If our house is ‘colonial’, then the one on our left might as well be ‘imperial’, or ‘impérial’. It has a hint of Versailles about it, offering the faintest architectural nod towards a miniature French château. Three doors down is a log cabin, which looks as if it has been beamed down from Montana via the Swiss Alps. It is hideous. Across the road is the last antebellum – pre-Civil War – residence in Washington, which means that the vultures from the local planning commission guard it as if it were the Holy Grail. Two hundred and thirty years ago the whole area was a vineyard planted by George Washington. Today it could be an international exhibition of different architectural styles. Curiously, this mishmash has conspired to produce a very attractive street. What all the houses have in common is that they are overshadowed and threatened by a cluster of enormous trees. The District of Columbia takes no responsibility for trees growing on private property and, since ‘tree work’ is even more expensive than ‘face work’, the willows, oaks and poplars have been allowed to grow to an obscene height.

As a result we await every hurricane season with trepidation. Not only could our fragile house be blown away by a robust wind but it is ‘challenged’ by a poplar that is more than 100 feet tall and hangs over our ‘colonial’ residence like the Sword of Damocles. It could slice our house in half like cheese wire. During the hurricane season the Freis sleep badly in the basement. Penny pins her hopes on the fact that the previous tenant was the founder of the Sierra Club, America’s most influential lobby for tree lovers.

Although we live a mere fifteen minutes from the White House and three minutes from the Homeland Security compound – the mega-agency that controls a staff of over 170,000 bureaucrats and is the nerve centre of America’s ‘war on terror’ – the power cables in our street droop like washing lines attached to flimsy poles, above roads pitted with potholes the size of bathtubs. I have seen better roads in Mozambique. The last tropical storm dislodged a branch which ploughed through the cables, plunging Tilden Street into darkness for a whole week, disabling the telephones and the TV. When we finally got hooked up to civilization again it was thanks to Barbara, our neighbour and street kommissar. Barbara, a sturdy fifty-year-old matriarch who wears starched jeans and sports a flowing mane of grey hair, organizes everything from the Labor Day neighbourhood working breakfast – ‘a new season brings new challenges’ – to the Earth Day ‘neighbourhood trash sweep’ – ‘this year I am counting on all the Freis!’ – to the bruising trench warfare with the private school at the end of the road and its team of bedraggled architects. For Barbara getting the power back on line is a cinch. It is a battle she has fought and won many times. After two decades of storms she knows who to call, when, and how to threaten them. In fact, she prefers to outsource the small stuff to her neighbour and understudy, Susan, so that she can focus on the mother of all battles: getting the District of Columbia education department to authorize a new playground and clean up the tangled jungle of poison ivy, rampant bamboo and leaning willows otherwise known as Hearst Park. Barbara, whose own children have grown up, genuinely cares about the safety of ours. ‘We need new blood on Tilden Street!’ is her battle cry to get the playground fixed and to minimize the menace and maximize the attractions of our little corner of Washington. With whatever nasty surprises lie in wait for Osama bin Laden’s least favourite city, I want Barbara on my side and by my side. When she isn’t berating us about our neighbourly negligence she seeks to protect us, mainly via e-mail circulars. ‘Beware the swarm of bees on the corner of Idaho and Tilden’ read one. ‘My dog and I were bitten this morning!’

Barbara is the boss and although our neighbours include the former head of the American Peace Corps, two senior partners in a big law firm, the CEO of a biotech firm, a nuclear scientist, a deacon and the chief of staff of one of America’s best-known senators, it is Barbara who runs Tilden Street. It was Barbara who gave the reluctant nod to the wooden fence in our front garden, erected to prevent our small children from spilling over onto the street and being run over. When Alice, our fourth child and the only genuine American in our ranks, was born at nearby Sibley Hospital, it became even more important to herd our brood into a secure location. Some of the neighbours couldn’t be deterred from their displeasure. The Frei fence ruined the ‘line’ of the street. It was Barbara who organized the ‘working brunch’ in her house to discuss the controversial school extension at the end of the road. As we sat around her plush living room with adhesive name tags on our shirts, munching on bagels and smoked salmon, Barbara took us patiently through a PowerPoint presentation, outlining each aspect of the extension as if she was planning a counterinsurgency. The detail was as mind-boggling as the earnest-ness with which it was delivered. I snuck out after two hours feeling as if I had walked out in the middle of a High Mass. The next day Barbara accosted me in the street: ‘I know why you had to leave early,’ she said with a mixture of menace and sympathy. ‘The kids must keep you so busy!’

I was seized by paranoia. Had she seen me sneaking out and then chatting to my neighbour for half an hour? Did she know that my wife had taken the kids to the zoo and that my childminding services weren’t even required? Had my facial twitches revealed the fact that I was bored to death by the whole presentation?

Barbara’s PowerPoint briefing is part of a civic spirit that has thrived in parts of Washington – and in much of the rest of America – despite, or perhaps because of, the increasing transience of modern life. Almost none of our neighbours was born in Washington or grew up here. They have all lived elsewhere, many have been posted overseas, and yet they all behave as if they are tenth-generation residents in a Shropshire hamlet. When I first walked down Tilden Street to case the neighbourhood, two future neighbours stopped their cars and asked me what I was doing. The British accent immediately reassured them and news that we had just bought the Tuplings’ house triggered smiles and a wave of questions about our children. One ageing neighbour reiterated Barbara’s call for new blood in the place, making me wonder whether we had just bought into a suburban version of Rosemary’s Baby. But the Tilden Street solidarity has been a refreshing experience. If we forget to lock our front door at night we don’t wake up in a cold sweat. When Penny’s father passed away suddenly in January 2005, Lisa, one of our friends, who was born in Kentucky, turned up on the doorstep with baked rigatoni: ‘In the South it is a tradition to cook for our neighbours when they are busy grieving.’ This was a first. Steve and Betsy’s daughters Olivia and Mona regularly babysit ours. In Rome we lived in a three-hundred-year-old block of flats that was still inhabited by the descendants of the noble family for whom it was originally built. In five years we barely managed to extract a greeting from our neighbours, let alone a bowl of rigatoni. In Hong Kong the couple living below us regularly had screaming rows that went from threats of homicide to protestations of passion, finishing only about three hours before we had to get up with our young children. Our relationships could best be described as AMA – assured mutual annoyance. In Singapore the house next door was deserted apart from those days when it was apparently used by the secret service for interrogations. So the whole neighbourly package on Tilden Street came to us as a novel and welcome surprise.

What also cements the spirit of Tilden Street are the annual rituals, repeated all over America. On Memorial Day, which marks the beginning of a sweltering summer, the Stars and Stripes are displayed in a flurry of patriotic fervour, even though almost everyone in our street is a sworn Democrat and hates George W. Bush. Under the red STOP sign at the top of the street, one wag has added the letters BUSH! Before Halloween the street is transformed into a witch’s cavern, with fake skeletons, giant spider’s webs and glowing skulls adorning every porch and front garden. Even the neighbours without children feel the urge to hang a few cobwebs from their front door or prop a glowing cauldron on the lawn.

A few weeks later, when the last Halloween gourd has rotted, it is time for the Christmas fairy lights. Barbara deploys a twinkling regiment of reindeer and sledges. Her next-door neighbours have gone one better: the single sparkling reindeer, which looks as if it has been irradiated in the forests around Chernobyl, swivels its head in serene and infinite disagreement with the world. The tax attorney on Upton Street makes up for his lack of neighbourly communication with a super-sized inflatable Santa Claus that sways gently in the icy wind and carries a huge see-through sack full of fake snow. There are no limitations on the number of lights or the shapes in this annual extravaganza. You can transform your house into a blinking Camelot. You can show the Nativity in rhythmically flashing colours of the rainbow. Your house can be bright enough to be spotted by the space shuttle. There are no limits to bad taste, but there is one iron rule: the lights must come down by the end of January! You should ignore the advice belted out by Gretchen Wilson, one of America’s most famous country singers, in her hit song ‘Redneck Woman’: ‘I keep my Christmas lights on/on my front porch all year long!’ That would be lowering the tone of the neighbourhood.

Our street is not unusual, but if it seems to embody the civic spirit and ritual promulgated by our neighbour Barbara, the picture is by no means uniform. You need only travel down Washington’s P Street to see what I mean. It starts in the elegant neighbourhood of Georgetown, much of which still displays the quaint cobblestones and tramlines that date back to the late nineteenth century. The architecture here is not much smarter than in other parts of Washington but the tenants have scrubbed up their homes so that they look as if they’re competing for space in The World of Interiors. The streets are lined with manicured trees and cute terraced houses whose flowerpots overflow with geraniums in the summer and mums (chrysanthemums) in the fall. There are no unseemly additions because the Georgetown Historical Association is more draconian at sniffing out any irregularities than a troupe of IRS investigators. Here a bijou two-bedroom house can cost well over a million dollars. Senators, lawyers and lobbyists jostle for space with IMF officials, World Bank gurus and the occasional journalist.

But, oddly for a place with so much money and so many domestic treasures to protect, there is very little privacy. The more opulent the house the less likely it is that the curtains will be drawn or the shutters closed. The lights will be on, even if the owners are nowhere to be seen. Gawping is encouraged. House-proud America wants you to share in their pride. Or at least to feel a little jealous. Since this end of P Street is crawling with police patrol cars and responsible, like-minded neighbours, the assumption is that crimes are less likely to be committed. The open view of a sumptuous interior is seen as an invitation to imitate or get inspired but not as an invitation to smash the window and grab the first Ming vase.

All that changes if you travel a few miles down the same P Street until you cross 10th Street, which was in recent years the front line of gentrification. Here it’s impossible to peek inside the homes, not because the curtains are discreetly drawn but because the broken glass has been replaced by plywood. You can always tell the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood you find yourself in by the amount of furniture outside the front of the house. A faux leather sofa or a dislodged car seat on the front porch is a giveaway. So are metal bars on the front door. There are police cars here as well, but instead of gliding about with silent, reassuring menace they screech around, sirens blaring, lights flashing. In Georgetown the shops sell those pointers to affluence, kitchen tiles, bathroom fittings and fixtures and bedside lamps. At the dodgy end of P Street there are no shops apart from the occasional liquor store, where a terrified Korean couple cower behind iron bars as thick as their son’s arm, and dollar and dime stores that announce they accept social security cheques. The two Washingtons live cheek by jowl, the filthy rich next to the dirt-poor, not rubbing shoulders but giving each other the cold shoulder in close proximity. It happens here and in just about every other American city where there is enough space to sprawl and live among your tribe.

That America is a melting pot is a myth. If anything, this country is a vast archipelago of exclusive neighbourhoods surviving in an ocean of no-go zones. Washington, DC, boasts the U Street Corridor, which is a growing island of prosperity in a swamp of grinding poverty. We live in the so-called ‘Northwest Corridor’. It is green, leafy, predominantly white and overwhelmingly middle class. The majority of parents send their children to private schools, which is why 80 per cent of the students at the state primary school opposite our house are bussed in from the poor black neighbourhoods of Southeast Washington on the other side of town.

Many would disagree that the civic spirit is alive and well in America, even if only in bubbles across the country. The influential social historian Robert Putnam believes that civic America has been killed off with the passing of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. Television, the internet, social mobility and social insularity have all conspired to keep the American family cooped up at home or in their cars, unable or unwilling to interact with each other. Perhaps. But on Tilden Street, Barbara made sure that we would be the exception.

Things didn’t always go smoothly. Civic spirit bristles at the unnecessarily unseemly and on that front the Freis have a problem. It comes in the shape of the three cars that we bought in our first year. In Europe these days three cars would be seen as an obscene overindulgence, a guarantee of social ostracism, an indelible black mark as big as your carbon footprint. That, however, is not the problem we have on Tilden Street. Most of the families in our neighbourhood have two or three cars. The issue is the state of our cars, their physical appearance, their roadworthiness and the kind of milieu they reflect. If America is having a love affair with the car then we have neglected our lovers to an extent that can only reflect badly on us. The convertible BMW, which is almost thirty years old and blotchy grey, has a black canvas roof so lacerated and threadbare that it looks as if it has been mauled by a tiger. The grotesque people carrier, used to ferry our four children to and from three different schools, appears to have been involved in several minor collisions. Whenever its doors are opened, a large quantity of sweet wrappers, empty bottles, broken toys, stray gloves and stale sandwiches spill out onto the road.

And then there’s the offensively red Dodge Neon, a car that looks as if it was designed for hobbits but hasn’t been driven anywhere in three years, thanks to its irredeemably illegal status. The red car is seeping slowly into the tarmac of our drive in a state of decomposition. It looks so downtrodden and crestfallen it might well be atoning for the sins of all the other gas-guzzling vehicles of America. The Frei cars are an exhibition of neglect that not even our British otherness will explain away. First they asked: ‘Are you ever gonna drive that car?’ Then: ‘Are you ever gonna sell that car?’ Now they have stopped asking. The red car has become permanently established as a mouldy fixture on our street. I could have it scrapped or ‘disappeared’, but since the car was never registered in my name that would be legally complicated and costly.

If Tilden Street offers an insight into the intrusive yet reassuring nature of American neighbourliness the purchase of our house was an early lesson in the excessive rituals of real estate. As an alien with no credit history in the US it took me a whole year before I became worthy of a credit card in this country. But I had no trouble finding a bank that was prepared to lend me a king’s ransom immediately to buy a house. Like most of the other hopefuls in the Washington real estate market my wife and I attended the ‘open houses’ that take place every Sunday afternoon; never in the morning because that clashes with church. Since we did not experience this scheduling issue ourselves we spent Sunday mornings snooping round the neighbourhoods, casing the houses before they flung their doors open in the afternoon.

Would anyone find out that we hadn’t been to church? Would they care? Perhaps they would only sell to a good Christian? Paranoid? No, as it happens. We are always being approached by Americans who want to know which church we belong to. And we are still working on an answer.

At first an open house seems a lot like a drinks party. Invitations are issued in the newspapers and at the realtors’ offices. Dressed as immaculately as Georgetown hostesses, the agents, with names like Clarissa and Mary-Lou, greet the guests as if they are old friends. In fact if you have done your homework and read the blurb you would know about Clarissa’s likes and dislikes. Likes: snowboarding, hiking, riding and baking. Dislikes: being late, traffic jams, air and noise pollution. With hair that has been blow dried to a new gravity-defying dimension and a face that has seen the careful attention of at least one plastic surgeon, Clarissa, who must be in her late forties, looks like a gently fading movie star. Her picture and profile give her celebrity status. And amid all this it’s quite easy to forget that she is an estate agent and her mission is to sell you a house and not sign an autograph. But America respects the individual, celebrates him or her, gives everyone – well, almost everyone – their shot at stardom. As the man selling me a tie at Saks said after I successfully completed the purchase and he shook my hand as if he had just agreed to let me marry his only daughter: ‘Matt, it was great working with you!’

Clarissa has done a fabulous job in turning the house into the kind of place you can imagine yourself living in. There is virtually no trace of the real people who still actually live here with their three children. The dining room table is adorned with a beautiful bunch of seasonal flowers. All evidence of the current inhabitants has been clinically removed by teams of sweepers who have left the house like a blank canvas onto which the buyer can paint his own fantasies. Mozart, Schumann, or some suitably soothing mood music seeps inoffensively from the stereo and if there is a fireplace a fire will be burning in it, even in summer. All that’s missing are the drinks, the nibbles and the customary bonhomie among the guests.