Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (15 page)

For me, Mrs. Nixon became a minor character who would not keep quiet. She was so often silent (the Checkers speech; her final exit from the White House) that it’s tempting to think she had little to say. Writers tend to love people who volunteer very little, for their silence frees the writers to project onto them, though such characters are also confusing. Why are they so quiet? We now know Mrs. Nixon was too pained, leaving the White House, to speak; that she was given no lines to say in the highly orchestrated Checkers speech. But was she acting? It seems likely that she was,
during the Checkers speech (she felt the accusations against them were unfair and didn’t want to make a response), though it was a different matter, and she was just trying to keep it together, as she said her good-byes to the White House staff. Acting shouldn’t be thought of negatively; everything could be known from her gestures, from her silently grasping the staff’s hands. But a penny for her thoughts, years earlier, as she sat ramrod-straight in a chair while her husband explained their finances to the nation, on TV, and his insistence upon keeping their gift dog. Those thoughts could have been pretty much anything, but if they appeared in fiction, the reader would, justifiably, have certain expectations that had to be met. Interpolating with a unique approach (perhaps Mrs. Nixon was thinking: I should be a Buddhist) would seem to suggest that the writer was obtuse, or worse, that the writer was revealing something about himself/herself but nothing, really, about Mrs. Nixon, who would have to have the thoughts
anybody
might have in the moment.

Yet how can writers be sure about what
anybody
might think? Especially when writers think as little as possible about
anybody
and almost constantly about
the exception
? Err in the direction of giving an account of that generalized “anybody” and Mrs. Nixon’s interior life would be so predictable, it would be as unconvincing as it would be boring. More interesting would be to imagine something within the realm of Mrs. Nixon’s imagination. A role she acted in, for example. Maybe
Becky Sharp
. Contrast her role in that with her presence as a minor character in the Checkers speech. It would also be credible because both moments were public performances, though diametrically opposed, for in
Becky Sharp
the title character is rebellious, flirtatious, manipulative, and gets away with wild misbehavior.

Mrs. Nixon is a fictional character only to the extent we all are,
having both public and private selves. Journalism may be more effective than fiction in offering a new perspective on a public figure because when facts are informative or telling, they automatically redefine. A list of ten things we wouldn’t expect of Mrs. Nixon immediately tells us that she isn’t a stereotype (for example: Mrs. Nixon knew how to change a tire). How to come up with a fictional equivalent—to surprise and inform us about Mrs. Nixon without merely being facile and fabricating? (To be avoided: Mrs. Nixon’s dreams, a conventional easy shot.) Since the public persona is what we can see, albeit distantly, we have to import such information into her private sphere. Onstage, Mrs. Nixon stood where she was told to stand and delivered her lines, but the writer follows her backstage to her makeup table, where she daubs at her greasepaint, looking intently in the mirror, surrounded by a mandorla marquee of lights. That is where the fiction writer—like any other member of an admiring audience—wants to follow, or intrude.

T
he news of President Eisenhower’s heart attack on September 24, 1955, sent camera crews and reporters to the Nixon home. Vice President RN was there—shocked by the news, but at home—though a plan was quickly concocted to have Bill Rogers, Acting Attorney General, spirit him away, so that he would not have to come up with reassurances. Eisenhower’s heart attack is one of RN’s “six crises”: crises in his life and how he triumphed, basically. If one could generalize, one could say that any “crisis” was a red flag and that RN was a bull. There was no “running away.” However, if he could spend the night elsewhere and temporarily evade the questions, that was acceptable. He writes: “As I hung up the receiver, I suddenly realized that Pat was unaware of what had happened and I went upstairs and told her the news. I then telephoned my secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who was still at the wedding reception, and asked her to go to her apartment so that she could handle the incoming telephone calls on an extension of my house phone located there. Pat in the meantime had tried to break the news, as quietly as possible, to the children.”

My interest here is not merely in the narrative (“Pat in the meantime”), but in giving the reader a sense of how people reacted, what it felt like on a scale of 1 to 10 for both Mr. and Mrs. Nixon to hear that the President was out of commission. Certainly we can believe that Mrs. Nixon was composed, but her husband’s tendency to rush the narrative gives the reader no breathing room in which to form any assessment of people’s real states—the thing I’m most interested in. It would have been uncharacteristic of RN to digress into Mrs. Nixon’s response, to her real emotional state, because he saw only the important integers in a story (Nixon and Eisenhower). He never stopped to consider anyone but the primary players.

So: Mrs. Nixon got the news about President Eisenhower and probably said, what? “Oh, Dick!” and immediately ran off to the rooms of her two daughters? Even if she did, the fiction writer would be alert to a general awareness of mortality, of conventional dialogue that would have to be presented truthfully (truthful to the character), but, since it would indicate almost nothing, and could seem to be a conventional contrivance of the writer, and therefore a liability, something else would have to be offered immediately, so that this would be not a generic story about a traumatic moment but something that revealed to the reader
these
people in
this
traumatic moment.

In the chapter called “The Heart Attack” in
Six Crises,
RN hurries to get to the point. To instruct us. He feels that the essential narrative has very little, if anything, to do with how people
felt
. He would not have noticed, and therefore would not report, whether Mrs. Nixon might have stumbled on her way to see Julie and Tricia, or whether the family pet perked up its ears. No, what mattered was that, because something was happening to the President, something was happening to RN. This is the narcissism of mediocre
storytelling. The narrator is going to provide us with only the important players in sharp focus and let us assume what we want about extraneous figures, like Mrs. Nixon. (It is interesting that one of the daughters gets quoted, blurting out: “The President isn’t going to die, is he, Daddy?” while Mrs. Nixon is only wordlessly animated.)

More things happen: the Acting Attorney General, summoned, arrives at the Nixon home—and, in a skit from a comedy routine, Mrs. Rogers, waiting on a side street in their Pontiac for her husband to leave the house, finds that both her husband and RN jump into the car, having left by the back door when one of RN’s daughters inadvertently got the attention of the newsmen outside by going to investigate, so the reporters didn’t see RN or the Attorney General quickly cutting across the neighbors’ lawn to the waiting car.

Did RN say good-bye to his wife? (Not reported.) They had arrived in Bethesda in approximately fifteen minutes, we learn, and his hosts for the night gave Mr. Nixon a pair of pajamas, a toothbrush, and a bed to sleep in. Did RN call Mrs. Nixon? He does not say he made a call to her. He says he slept badly—in fact, not at all—but there is some glee in having escaped the press.

Mrs. Nixon, however, is stuck with them. Maybe she isn’t if she doesn’t open the door, but their job is to show up and wait, and Mrs. Nixon is herself, so at some point she has them in and offers refreshments downstairs—not in the main house, but in the finished downstairs. Previously, she has lied to them, telling them that her husband was not home, that she does not know when he can be expected, and—offering a bit of good advice—telling them they’d do better to call his office in order to keep posted.

As a fiction writer, I want to know: What do the daughters do when RN disappears? Does Mrs. Nixon have an easy time reassuring
them, or is it difficult? At what moment does Mrs. Nixon decide to be nice, and to have the members of the press in (even though it’s only to the basement) and serve them something? Is she on autopilot, or does she sense something that makes this a more genuine gesture? What is it like for this woman to be with people it would be unwise to communicate with? Does a water bug scuttle across the floor? Has one of the bulbs in the overhead light fixture burned out?

A couple of days later, RN took his wife and daughters to church, where the minister prayed that the President’s health be restored. RN then invited some reporters back to his house (living room), and, of course, RN was hardly spontaneous, if anyone might have mistaken his gesture: “My first meeting with the press, in which my words, my actions, even my mood, would be reported to the nation, for me was a crisis. I wanted to be prepared for it as best I could. Even my manner of my meeting the press, no matter what I said, could be subject to misinterpretation. . . . If I refused to see the press altogether, it might indicate a lack of confidence or even fear—and this would be a reflection upon the whole Administration.” RN put on an act. He doesn’t tell us he rehearsed his lines, but he does tell us he was guarded, fearful, intent on making a good impression. Where was Mrs. Nixon, even if she vanished into the house, into the background? Did she try to overhear, or did she go upstairs, braid her daughter’s hair, hem some clothes . . . What did she do? A minor character doesn’t disappear just because the major character loses sight of her. Does the phone ring unexpectedly? If so, should we assume she answers? Is anything served to the guests? The Nixons don’t have servants. It would boggle the mind to assume RN might do the serving.

Of course an essay about oneself is going to be self-serving. (
Six Crises
was written pre–memoir craze, in which self-bashing
became almost as much fun as complaining about everybody else.) If you are an animate version of the Sun, there is no reason that you should constantly look toward Pluto and Mercury. But for those of us who know there is a solar system, exactly how at ease are we going to be if planets or galaxies or stars we know are there simply flicker out? How much are we going to trust an inadequately narrated story?

Many do trust journalism, though recent problems with Pulitzers having to be returned from
The Washington Post
and plagiarism at
The New York Times
and
The New Republic
have opened people’s eyes. Readers of fiction—which is supposed to be artifice—have a somewhat easier time, because the narrator, when not taking the pose of being some transparent, hovering presence, is a character in the story—meaning, as potentially flawed as anyone under his or her consideration. The unreliable narrator is sometimes insistent about being a force in the story (André Gide), sometimes cleverly withholding, even in ostensibly making a confession (Ford Madox Ford), and sometimes simply someone so acclimated to warping the truth that the purpose is to puff out a fog of words, as the main character prevaricates.

Russell Banks and Peter Taylor have been interested in narrators who seem to reveal themselves but gradually present contradictions (Banks’s “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”), or who never reveal the cards held close to the vest, though the reader, as the story progresses, watches the vest disintegrate (Taylor’s “The Old Forest”). In fiction, our tendency is to believe what the narrator tells us. We have no orientation to the story initially; we’re at the mercy of the information given to us. Whether or not we are of the same class as the characters isn’t a big issue—at least, not consciously. We are taught to trust voice. We are taught to listen to someone’s tone (a bit angry? defensive?), as well as to the words
spoken. Autistic people, who can’t “read” tone, have a problem because of this lack of perception. Nuance, inflection, allusion . . . it doesn’t exist in their awareness to inform them. A smile is a world apart from a grimace, but an autistic person does not perceive the difference. Fiction is all about covert winks, deliberate stumbles, things happening off the page, allusions that function as scaffolding. Metafiction announces, and inherently questions, itself.

In primary school we were taught to give earnest reports on, say, corn production in Kansas, and we came to believe in the reliable story. Like RN, we think we should stick to the facts. But what story unfolds without complexity? We are not supposed to digress (“I might be wrong here, but I think the light was red. . . .”) because we are telling someone else what
happened
. But
why
are we telling the story? Why is such value placed on what happened? Maybe we’re telling the story because we were in a fender bender, and we want sympathy. But even when we tell what we think of as a simple story, listeners form impressions the storyteller can’t shake: X has always been a bad driver; X is gesturing wildly, a bit too defensively; X should have been at work when this happened and has not said why she wasn’t. We’d go crazy if we did nothing but listen to subtext, read body language, and extrapolate meaning in terms of what we know about the person telling the story while simultaneously introspecting about our own desires, assumptions, and fears. But at least when the storyteller is present, and admits to telling a story, we can fleetingly experience these things as additional elements. We understand that at least two stories are happening simultaneously (theirs and ours). Fiction is no different, except that we have not a person in front of us, but rather that person’s voice (which we make a mistake to conflate with the author’s, even if we’ve met the writer). The disembodied voice is more difficult, and because writers know this, they usually work to create a
character as well as a narrative voice, trying to make the character come into focus so that the character will seem physically as well as psychically recognizable, and therefore more convincing. If only voice is relied on (Beckett), we are startled.