Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (22 page)

In what book? That’s interesting, I didn’t realize the Great Gatsby made up his last name. Well, there you go. Might have been a little immodest if he came up with “Great,” though. Oh, I’m being silly, I know. I’m just so happy to have my daughters curled up with me here, and not to be on an airplane. It makes me very proud to know you’ll be conducting tours of the White House tomorrow. You be sure to let your father know how things go, but don’t tell him anything that’s troublesome, because he needs a bit of cheering up. Not that we’ve ever told him every little thing that’s gone wrong. It’s life, so things go wrong!

Well, for one thing, that book I read to you when you were little.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
. You loved it. Maybe not more than
The Night Before Christmas,
but your eyes got big as saucers and you just loved that book.

I’m keeping you up. They’ll have finished vacuuming by now, my loves, and you should get some sleep. We have more noise and interruptions to put up with than people could imagine, don’t we? Wouldn’t it be grand to open the windows and hear the ocean or to hear the birds singing in the trees? I saw the biggest crow on the lawn the other day. Just one, all alone. I watched for a while, expecting a whole bunch of them to land, but the crow
just went pecking along all by itself, and then I had to go to a meeting.

That color is beautiful on you, Dolly. You should wear it more often. I don’t think it
is
a strange color, though the pastel nightgown has an even softer hue, doesn’t it? It’s beautiful, and so are you. Good night, Dolly.

“W
ell, all right, I’ll try. One of those guys from NBC with a long name I can’t remember . . .”

“Fred Flamenhaft.”

“That’s it. Well, Fred came along to the dinner at the Peking Roast Duck Restaurant, and after the dinner there were quite a few toasts.”

“Mao-tai brandy.”

“That’s right. You certainly read the information I gave you carefully, Julie. I just held the drink to my lips. I didn’t want to give the appearance of not toasting.”

“You’d never do that.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. Well, Fred wasn’t the first to give a toast, he was pretty much the last, and when his turn came, you know what he did? He toasted the duck! He said, ‘I don’t give a damn what you all said, I’ve just had the best meal of my life, and I toast the duck!’ It gave us a good laugh.”

“You don’t think President Nixon might have spoken to him later about cursing?”

“Oh, Dick has a fine sense of humor. He knew it was all good fun.”

“Flamenhaft is a funny name, isn’t it?”

“People can’t help the names they’re born with. If he’d decided to call himself that, that would be another matter. Are we about done?”

“I’d like to ask just one or two more questions. As I mentioned, this will be edited, and it will have your approval.”

“All right. What else?”

“What you should do when you’re traveling and you’re in another country and you’re served something you can’t eat. Like something slimy.”

“I grew up on a farm, remember. I’m not a vegetarian or someone who won’t try most things once.”

“What if it was really repulsive, like some gray, mushy fish?”

“Julie, as I’ve taught you girls, you delicately push it a bit to the side and eat the other things.”

“Watching the acupuncture made you squeamish, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it did. But the needles didn’t leave any scars, I noticed. And that is their way. They’ve done this for centuries. I think we’ve talked enough now.”

“This is going to be the most impressive home movie project ever: interviews with all the important people who went with Daddy to China.”

“I’m not going to approve some of these questions and answers, you know. Now I would appreciate it if you could get that camera out of my face.”

I
thought Lady Bird would be the one to cut up, but that young man was so proper, I just couldn’t help myself. “We’d like to have tea with the Queen,” I said, and of course he couldn’t comply. There was no way he could. He just didn’t know what to do. What if the Queen had been there, and she’d said, “Yes, of course, one does so wish to see Pat and Lady Bird.” I don’t suppose she would have said it that way, she’d say “Mrs. Nixon” and “Mrs. Johnson,” and her butler would have said, “Yes, mum, most certainly, mum.” Or is “mum” just the Queen Mother? I need a briefing about the English royal family. We could call Henry in.
Henry
is a man who dearly loves an important late-night briefing. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

“F
rom the moment of taking office, when he promised, in his first Inaugural Address, to build ‘a great cathedral of the spirit’ and unify the nation, to the spring of 1973, when he had Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott announce on his behalf, ‘We have nothing to hide,’ he filled the air with empty and intentionally misleading phrases—phrases that in both tone and content were without relation either to each other or to the actions of his Administration,” writes Jonathan Schell, in
The Time of Illusion
.

Nixon did a lot of his own speech writing, but it’s equally probable he was reading the words of a speechwriter when he made his metaphor about the “cathedral of the spirit.” That doesn’t sound much like RN to me. The idea of citizens being part of a group—even a group that met in church—would have set off his paranoia. Also, he didn’t tend to think in terms of “the spirit.” In any case, Schell jumps on him for this phrase.

Years later, Raymond Carver wrote one of his most famous stories, “Cathedral.” It, too, is about a cathedral of the spirit, but Carver was one for understatement. The word
cathedral
signifies
well enough. Say the word to a minister, and he or she would probably conjure up the architectural building. Say it to the American public, and they would probably hear it as mere fancy rhetoric. Say it to a writer, and there’s every chance they’d conjure up Carver’s story.

The story concerns an unusual but plausible event: one evening, a woman whose friend is blind (absent for years, though she has kept in touch with him) finds out he is going to visit. She introduces him to her husband.

Carver depends on certain things. Among them: our own uneasiness upon meeting a blind man. He must also realize that by the time he writes “Cathedral,” late in his career, his readers are educated to the way he inflects a story, and to the way subtext almost becomes text itself: characters speak to keep emotions at bay; subtext fights to rise to the surface and wreak havoc. Metaphorically, there’s often a wild animal in Carver, and the cage that contains it never seems very secure.

The wife turns on a recording sent from the blind man to her, but Carver sees to it that just when the man’s words might reveal something important, his sentence does not conclude. Rather, they all stop listening. It’s a cliff-hanger, and the readers are left at the edge. What kind of story has the wife previously told the blind man about her husband? We don’t know, and if the husband has curiosity (rather than dread), he decides that not knowing is better than asking the question.

As the story progresses, people seem to relax—or, at least, have the opportunity to do that. The wife leaves the two men alone, and when she reenters the room, she promptly announces she’s going to fall asleep, and does. When her robe falls in a way that reveals her body, the husband at first reaches out to close it, then, instead, flips it open. Carver allows the husband to literally finger
text and subtext in this gesture. As time passes, the TV is turned on: “Something about the church and the Middle Ages . . . was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.” The blind man says it’s fine: “It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he says.

The blind man can’t envision a cathedral. He knows about how they’re built. He knows the factual things, but they don’t excite his imagination. It is his idea, finally, that his host draw a cathedral on a piece of paper. The paper selected is utilitarian: large, because it’s a grocery bag, but not exactly something to accommodate a work of art. This is the world of Raymond Carver, though, so no one is an
artist.
Neither is an artistic depiction necessary; what’s necessary is that the two men bond as the husband attempts to draw, for the first time (his own house metamorphoses into a cathedral), and the blind man begins to learn something meaningful. The TV show continues.

“I said, ‘They’re statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.’”

“‘Are those fresco paintings, bub?’ he asked, and he sipped from his drink.

“I reached for my glass, but it was empty. I tried to remember what I could remember. ‘You’re asking me are those frescoes?’ I said. ‘That’s a good question. I don’t know.’”

The notion of “frescoes”
is
a good one. It tells the reader the blind man has a certain level of sophistication. Perhaps also that he’s trying to get the upper hand with his guide. It introduces an important concept: frescoes are painted directly on a wall of wet plaster—quickly, with the artist having almost no ability to redo
anything. The process is very tactile, it happens quickly, and the artwork has a freshness that painting done over a long period of time may lack. One subtext of this question (along with testing the husband’s knowledge and sophistication) is: is the painting spontaneous? Because the husband and the blind man are two people who are clearly plodding along, dope smoking or not. They are both going through the motions. Arduously. On television (which only the husband can
see
), we realize that, unless the husband has been told (
his
sense of hearing matters here, too), he isn’t able to say whether he’s looking at frescoes or at oil paintings, a more drawn out medium. The question, though, and the issues it raises, hangs in the air. When the husband metamorphoses into an artist of sorts, he’s speaking words about cathedrals, but he’s also drawing—creating them. He finds his efforts inadequate: “I’m just no good at it.” In part because he admits some vulnerability (lack of talent), but also because spontaneity is about to burst forth finally, the blind man asks a question: is his host “in any way religious”? The answer: “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?” Notice the echo of
it
(“I’m just no good at it” and “I guess I don’t believe in it”).
It
means a lot—so much that the shorthand is deliberately used to gloss over the deep significance of an
it
that is so vast, it is impossible to define. Carver uses words judiciously. One could think that he had a small vocabulary—or that his characters do, and he’s trying to represent them faithfully. The meaning of a word as vague and seemingly minor as
it
shifts in Carver. There’s not much that doesn’t shift like sand in a windstorm in a Carver story—or become a sinkhole.

There’s a sense of exhilaration near the end of “Cathedral.” The tables are turned, and the blind man, Robert, is instructing the husband—and also telling the husband to keep his eyes closed. His hands atop the husband’s, they have been drawing their cathedral.
Significantly, the husband does not want to open his eyes to look at the finished drawing. The suggestion is that what is seen might be (must be?) either inadequate or, however complete, still lacking. Paradoxically, in putting himself in the blind man’s position and keeping his eyes closed, the husband sees more and more inwardly, until—after this night of having created facades—he says: “But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” Earlier, of course, he’s been in his routine. He’s been inside his house, inside his life, watching TV. But through imagination, he’s escaped. Talk hasn’t done it. Neither has smoking pot. He concludes, in the last line of the story—which is quintessentially Carveresque in stating the inexpressible in a banal way, while making the reader infer the layers of underlying inexpressible complexities. The character says: “It’s really something.”

The story is also about creation—about fiction, about being an artist. It’s easy to see the husband and the blind man as opposites, yet opposites that inform one another. The yearning is sexual, and it’s also aesthetic, and it’s also a moment escaped into, we don’t know for how long. The story is a paradigm of the artistic process. Something greater than the will of the two men is taking its course (Beckett); something is happening, but (as Bob Dylan sings, sneeringly) “you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” The story is full of religious undertones, as is much of Carver’s writing. Art aspires to the sublime. In this case, as with Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, the most unlikely character is, ironically, the one who provokes the reader’s deepest (most spiritual) belief.

Something of grandeur—something vast and noble and beautiful—is being invoked if we hear about a “cathedral of the spirit,” as if the spirit can be touched and built upon, as if something new and important will exist, something we can point to, if only we will envision it, if only (like Peter Pan) we
believe
. Lyndon Johnson was
a bit vague when he spoke emphatically of “a great society”—and anyway, he said we already had it: we just had to recognize it. Kennedy had Camelot, but that was in-house talk that was eventually heard by others, an inflated sense of personal nobility. Nixon and the cathedral of the spirit . . . it’s doubtful it was something he truly believed. It just sounded good, and he was a man who liked formality and for things to be substantial—which was synonymous with impressive. He cared very much about how things
looked
.

Mrs. Nixon didn’t think metaphorically. She did, however, think for herself—even if she thought well within cultural conditioning. Imagine that RN asked her to conjure up a “great cathedral of the spirit” that would unify a divided, chaotic America. To her, a “great cathedral of the spirit” would probably be quite abstract. She seemed to live in the here and now—or tried to. At least, she tried very hard not to live in the past. Imaginative speculation? Mrs. Nixon? There wouldn’t have been much sense in asking her opinion on that.