Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (18 page)

In the same way we’re all the characters in our dream, we’re Guotai, Duncan, and Bing Bing: we’re the perverse master of ceremonies; we’re the awed and frightened audience; we’re the helpless child who is performing, out of his mind. The moment will go on as long as it does because it and we are out of control. But the dialogue isn’t: it does just what the writer intends it to do, operating explicitly and subtly—“embarrass him to death” may resonate, at first, only as a figure of speech. When the words have done their work, however, the writer concludes the scene with exposition: “But he was wrong. In fact, a hostess was already headed their way with a frown on her face when Bing Bing passed out and fell into the tureen of duck soup.” Conjuring up the Marx Brothers (
Duck Soup
) is clever and underscores the seriousness of the situation: this isn’t harmless slapstick, this is real desperation.

As a writer, what do you do either with dialogue that is badly written (unconvincing, for many reasons), or—always a possibility—when you have only the words of people who are not speaking genuinely, but as actors who’ve written their own unconvincing script? Monica Crowley’s
Nixon in Winter
is a book about a young woman (Ms. Crowley) who works with former President Nixon during the time he is living in New Jersey, written from the point of view of an admirer. Mrs. Nixon—though she lived in the same house the author spent so much time in—figures in the book very little. However, there is a scene in which Mr. Nixon first introduces Ms. Crowley to his wife:

“I want you to come meet Mrs. Nixon,” he said on July 12, 1990, shortly after I began working for him. “She’s in the office today to do some things, and she knows you have joined the team,
and she’d like to meet you too.” He walked with me from my office to the conference room, where the former first lady was seated, signing autographs for a charity event. “Pat?” he said. “This is Monica.” She looked up, smiled warmly, and took my hand with both of hers. “Well, hello. I’ve heard so much about you. Dick tells me that you’re right out of college. What a wonderful opportunity for you to be here.” I thanked her, and she squeezed my hand. “Don’t let Dick give you a hard time, now,” she said, smiling at him. “If he does—well, just report it to me.” He turned to me. “Are you going to squeal on me?” “Only if you give her a reason to,” she said, winking at me, and Nixon leaned forward and gave her arm an affectionate squeeze.

There’s no reason not to accept the words the author says were spoken, but except for their being too formulaic to be informative, almost nothing was communicated among the three people, who instead stuck to their lines. It’s believable RN spoke of “the team.” Mrs. Nixon’s kindness is also recognizable as a polite verbal blockade. You yearn for someone to pound on the door and scream “Fire!” to see if anything would shake them up, make them drop their transparent but apparently exquisitely adequate defenses. Ms. Crowley has been presented with a common problem: no one gave her anything. She recorded the nothing she was given, but, in so doing, she gives us nothing as well. The problem with this account is that it seems inevitable in a way that is deadly dull. People are enacting a ritual, everyone aware of what’s expected, everyone playing a role, while pretending their roles are unscripted. A fiction writer would have to do more than say Mrs. Nixon was signing autographs, would have to make us
see
something (her handwriting? the paper?). We can’t see anything in the meet-and-greet scenario, though, because the focus is on the people, not the world
they inhabit. The dialogue is banter, its intent to communicate that everything is going along according to plan, rather than that what is happening is precarious and relies on everyone’s playing along. Nothing shimmers. As hard as the reader looks, there’s nothing to see because nothing is particularized. As Ms. Crowley narrates the scene, everyone gets to occupy his or her own discrete space; in fiction, those times there is no physical motion (she, at her desk; he—never an expressive man, physically—standing stiffly), the writer has a vast repertoire of ways around this stock standoff. What did Ms. Crowley, as an outsider, see that Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Nixon did not? Presumably, nothing. Could we expect her to write, “But I wasn’t about to take them at face value, so I asked whether they were aware that they were stonewalling”?

Predictable dialogue condescends to the reader and makes us yearn for what we hear between the lines; paradoxically, bad dialogue sharpens our sense of what really might be said, what
is
being said under the surface and off the page, at first indistinct but building to a crescendo so that finally we’re happier sinking under the surface instead of floating at the top, stranded with characters who bore us.

(The Writer Fast-Forwards into Mrs. Nixon’s Future)

M
any dogs preceded him, and other dogs would follow, but King Timahoe was a special favorite of the President. Training a dog was of no interest, however. It was a dog. Dogs acted like dogs. The President was not under any illusions about dogs. They ran around and did whatever they did. Got into things, and all that. Sure to cause trouble. Animals: you’d expect them to present some problems. There was always somebody to take care of them. Put Alex on it. Have him talk to Manolo, if need be. Mrs. Sanchez. They had a bird, themselves. Well, they couldn’t add to the problem by bringing in a dog, could they? They could, but it wouldn’t be right. They had ideas about propriety and so forth. Those were the days, back in the White House.

Did Mrs. Nixon try to train any of the dogs, or did she secretly sympathize and take some satisfaction in their causing trouble? It’s obvious that some people want to live vicariously and acquire pets so they can misbehave in ways the owners wouldn’t dare.

One wonders if Mrs. Nixon did any vicarious living through Mr. Nixon. After her stroke, when she was not as able to cope with things, Mr. Nixon found a dog wandering on the property at their home in New Jersey and brought it home: their new pet, Brownie. She is reported to have found its behavior irritating. It survived her, though, and provided companionship for her husband, though he was happy to let other people feed it and walk it. (He would have preferred the companionship of whatever president was in office, but the phone calls seldom came. He disdained Carter and Mrs. Carter, whom he imitated, calling her husband “Jimmah.” There was a
lot
of waiting for the phone to ring, as you find out if you read Monica Crowley’s
Nixon in Winter
. President Clinton did call. Good for him, RN thought. He could impart quite a lot of good advice to Mr. Clinton.)

What exactly do you do if your husband brings home a dog? Checkers was a gift, as we all know, but in the case of Brownie, Mrs. Nixon was no longer even steady on her feet: Mr. Nixon found the dog wandering one night when he went out to take a walk, and then there it was, trotting in the front door.

“Oh, Dick, it must belong to somebody.”

“Well, we don’t know. It might belong to some people down the road, but we don’t have their number. You know what I mean: we don’t have their
telephone
number. Not the sort of number I keep on the Rolodex, it goes without saying. Fine to exchange a greeting, but what do you do with phone numbers except that they mount up, business cards, little pieces of paper. Before you know it, you’ve got the names of a lot of people who could be anybody, and why would you call them? We could let the dog wander. We could do that, but we don’t know it wouldn’t get into the road and find itself in trouble. Is it wrong to have the dog in the house this one night? Well, maybe it is, but it isn’t right to let a dog go on
its way when it might be killed. You look for a tag, or something. But nobody took the time to put a tag on the dog, and my point is, that tells you something. It could also be a dog dumped by some kids from the city, getting tired of it and driving it all the way out to the suburbs, just to get rid of it. They see these big houses, they think, Oh, they’re a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals who’ll take in a dog on a cold night. Some people do that, invite street people in, so some of them end up killed. Cold out there. I’m going to fix a cup of tea. Would you like some?”

“Let me do it.”

“You remember that trip we took, all your shopping with Mrs. Gorbachev, and the way the press didn’t want to talk about anything else? Damn fools. Why, you got the groceries all your life. Mrs. Gorbachev was told to go buy groceries that day, you can bet on that. If they’d told her to put on her bathing suit and take a swan dive from the highest spire on the Kremlin, she would have done that, too. Groceries! They didn’t want her taking you shopping for expensive clothes and so forth, because there were none to be had. I suppose they could have airlifted some in from Paris. Had a fashion show for you ladies at the hotel. The Arabs do that to keep the women happy.”

“Dick, I don’t think this is the right time for us to have a dog.”

“Is there a right time? I suppose it’s always better when you’re young. What isn’t? Though maturity does have its advantages. Things get clearer. You take action because what are you going to do, sit around and wait for the grandchildren to pay a visit? They do, and it’s good of them, but you know what I mean.”

“Dick, if we feed the dog, it’s going to want to stay.”

“Dog’s in the other room. Doesn’t seem so interested in food, but we might give him a bowl of water.”

“I’ll use this bowl.”

“We had some great times with the dogs, didn’t we? Oh, everybody didn’t understand. A dog’s an expense, that’s for sure. But you see the delight in your children’s eyes, what should you do? Some parents would say No! Walk away. But we didn’t do that.”

“Tricia called this afternoon. She’s going to come for a visit.”

“Julie will come, too. Won’t she?”

“I’ve only heard from Tricia, who’s bringing Christopher.”

“Boy likes to run around. A boy and his dog. Well, that can be
our
dog. Would be a good photo opportunity. Christmas card, and all that. Get the neighbors to come on over, crowd around and smile, give them a photograph of them with the President and his family, informal, something they can keep for posterity. I got a letter last week saying I was the most misunderstood president of the last fifty years. Where the fellow got our address, I don’t know, but it was nice of him. Got to remember to make a note to have Monica write him back. Send him one of those bookmarks with the presidential seal.”

“Dick, what do you think the dog is doing?”

“I guess I could ask him. It’s a ‘he,’ I saw. He was peeing against our tree.”

“Here’s the bowl for—”

“Don’t you bend over, I can do that. Is the heat on high under that teakettle? I don’t notice it whistling.”

“The whistling kettle rusted. We have to replace it. Julie said she had an extra one she’d bring us.”

“I wonder if David will come with her. Kids will, but David might be working. I don’t know what he really thought some of the time, when things were so bad and so forth, but he shows up a lot more than Eddie. Eddie said some things he shouldn’t, but that’s water over the dam. Been a fine husband and father. You hope they will be, but you don’t know when they marry so young. Here’s the
bowl. Looks like a pretty good one. Of course, we wouldn’t have bad ones. What would be the point? Some might say, Well, we never clear out our old bowls, chipped and dented and whatnot, but here in the Nixon household, Mrs. Nixon keeps watch over the bowls and replaces them when there’s reason to. Of course, Mrs. Nixon is thrifty, which is a virtue not often valued enough these days. Glad to know Julie has an extra kettle. All the neatniks and recyclers and those sort would be happy, too. Keeping the landfill down. All those sorts of issues they think about. Drinking water. Well, if you boil water it’s safe, but try telling that to some people. They have a big family, they don’t have time to boil water. We boil water and we’re doing our part as citizens, which we’ve always done, though at times we’ve been misunderstood.”

“Here’s your tea, Dick.”

“Some might say the President has people who write all his speeches, tell him his own thoughts, but that wouldn’t be right. I used so much pencil lead, I could have drawn a line down the Great Wall. Automatic signature thing was helpful, but there are those who wouldn’t even notice, just want some indication they were heard. I can understand that. You express your thoughts, you want a response. You’re not writing to Stalin, you’re writing the President of the United States. In the old days, Rose Mary would send off an immediate response if I flagged something. She’d jump to it, just like the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ was being played and she was in the bleachers. She had special seating, of course, because she was part of the President’s team. Took some criticism for it, too, but she understood politics. That’s one of the things I respect. Loyalty. Remind me to speak to Monica about answering some of the mail. Piles up, otherwise. Not enough time to do everything. Other presidents understand. You know, the Johnsons never did have us to the White House, but the Nixons weren’t petty that
way. You know as well as anyone we weren’t; we talked about those lists, and you stood in the receiving line how many times? Bet you didn’t keep count, did you? You should have, because you deserve credit for standing there, shaking hands, no matter what. Lady Bird was always nice to you, but he was a different character. Spoke to me from his bed that time I visited the White House and never did get up. Then again, I’d heard he talked to people sitting on the toilet. Showed the nation his scar, where he had his gallbladder removed. Very involved in himself. Lady Bird wouldn’t disagree. Her name was what? What did you call Lady Bird?”

“Lady Bird. Her name is Claudia Alta Taylor.”

“Lady Bird’s just as good.”

Mr. Nixon took his tea into the living room, where the dog lay by the fire. The dog looked up.

“You’re not having tea?” Mr. Nixon said.

“No. I think it’s about time to turn in.”