Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (27 page)

Let’s say it’s Halloween, and it’s understood that she’s a bit old-fashioned, a gentle creature who avoids the spotlight and who thinks the slightest thing (a few holiday decorations, or some special cookies) constitutes fun. Could you write the scene so that something in the mixing of the cookie batter prefigures what’s to come, although neither you as the writer nor she as a character knows what that thing is? What is ever better than a knock on the door (unless, as Raymond Carver said, it was the telephone ringing; once, a person calling the wrong number inadvertently informed Carver that what the story he was working on really needed was a character named Nelson), let alone on a night when this knocking would be expected, so you can play with expectations? You, as the writer, might not see the Nixon mask until the moment it’s there, in your story. If it is there, though, it won’t go away any more than
it will in real life. It means to be there. Perhaps writers, like Pantheists, believe that everything has a soul. So the mask is suddenly a given, and we have to watch for Mrs. Nixon’s reaction. Does she see it first, and if so, can we see her expressing, or stifling, a reaction? Can RN be absent—not home, for whatever reason? Off bobbing for apples with Henry Kissinger? Should either of her daughters or their families be present? Probably she wouldn’t be doing this if she were alone. What if it’s one of the grandchildren, who becomes afraid of the masks before the Nixon mask pops up? Like any grandmother, she would be attuned to her grandchild, and it might have more impact if she saw it through the child’s perspective.

The excited child opens the door, and Frankenstein and Casper the ghost and Marilyn Monroe and Grandpa are there, and the child, momentarily confused, calls out to Grandpa, and in that moment Mrs. Nixon suddenly understands that, to the child, Grandpa is always a man in a mask—a grown-up, a keeper of secrets. But the child realizes his mistake: it
isn’t
Grandpa, but why isn’t it? Where is he? For the first time, the child really feels his absence. So, without voicing the question, he turns toward his grandmother, only to see that she’s locked eyes with the Grandpa man. Neither breaks the gaze. The child is not acknowledged. The child’s world is going to end, right there! The one adult who’s present is acting strangely, and everyone else has become quiet, which is a bad sign. Like a bull, intending to get the impostor to run, the child bends his/her head, imagining horns, rushes the masked person and hurls herself/himself right into danger, right into the tall man’s thigh. There’s a little boy standing beside him who starts to cry as if he, too, had been butted. The man stands still, though no longer looking at Mrs. Nixon. She’s horrified at the child’s having done this, she actually forgets that Julie/Tricia hasn’t accompanied her to the door, she’s turned away to get help. Her grandchild has
vanished in the crowd; she should just march out there and grab him by the hand and make light of it, but she’s done that too many times, she’s tired of that role. She has no energy. Is her daughter on the phone, or sliding a cookie sheet out of the oven? Everyone expects something of her, the way people in bad dreams expect you to figure out some problem you can’t solve, or you’re expected to say something, but you don’t remember what you’re supposed to talk about. It’s her whole life looking back at her, jumbled with expectations, it’s mere coincidence that it’s Halloween.

W
ho does that man love? Does he have a little dog, and does he touch his nose to the dog’s cold wet black nose, or does he eat dogs, the way I heard in school when I was a girl? The kids said that the Chinese ate dogs. One thing’s for sure: the world is full of misconceptions and vicious rumors. I suspect he doesn’t have a dog or eat dog, either, that man standing and talking behind his six microphones, with his dark slashes of eyebrow. Who does that man love?

“T
oasty comfort will be yours when you wear ‘Patricia.’ Made in Sweden, where the winters are long, ‘Patricia’ comes with the same plush, comfy lining used in Kris Kringle’s sleigh. Give the gift of warmth. Special slippers for a special lady! 6–9 N, 5½–9 M. Specify Kremlin Red, Snowy White, or Sometimes Blue.”

“S
hall I put this eggshell in the trash, or down the garbage disposal?”

“I don’t want to be doing this. I’m glad to know that you’ve made these before and they’ve turned out, though.”

“I’ve done my share of baking. I’ll just drop this in the trash, and ask you for one more egg, if you don’t mind.”

(Opens refrigerator; opens carton, picks up one egg with thumb and finger, closes carton with other hand, turns, pushes refrigerator door closed with elbow.)

“Did it close tightly?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. What we do next is add a third egg, because these seem a little small—let me just lean around you and throw this in the trash. . . . Then you lower the mixer blade by pushing your finger on this button on the top. Our butter is already easy to work with from the stick’s having softened for a bit before we began. Preparing things in advance is always a time-saver. All right?”

“Do you mean ‘All right’ that we’re doing this, or are you asking if the butter’s soft?”

“I’m just commenting as we go along.”

“I’d rather
not
be doing this.”

“Hon, you’ll come to learn there’s no point in resisting what’s expected. Sometimes it’s best just to do what needs to be done. Don’t think of it as an
issue
.”

Mrs. Nixon’s baking cookies with Hillary Clinton is an example of an
anachronism
.

S
ee how tenderly I pick up your hand? You’re Kay Summersby, and I love you more than I hate war. If Dick knew, he’d find a way to use it against me. He’d make sure the press heard about it and then say that it wasn’t how a great man should be judged. He’s afraid of me, isn’t he? Not that he wouldn’t spill the beans about anyone, if it could help his cause. So here’s the way it goes: I speak to you, and you’re her. You can be sad or happy or whatever you want. And we’re in the Jeep—pretend this isn’t a sofa, it’s a Jeep—and the United States of America is far behind us, and so is our past, and there never was a marriage to Mamie. It’s just you and me, Kay, about to start driving down this rutted road. When I rub my thumb over your knuckles, you know that I love you, don’t you? I can tell you things I’d never tell anyone—least of all, my boy Dick. But that comes later. We’re just setting things up. You’re her, and I’m Ike, the way I really
am
Ike. I’ll say something, and you make any response you want. Those are the rules, so that’s the way we do it. When it’s your turn, who do you want me to be?

This is
fiction
. It also contains
anachronistic
elements, though role-playing undoubtedly took place before the concept was named.

T
his is an Oulipian exercise. After every noun, substitute that word with the seventh noun below it in the dictionary (
New Merriam-Webster Dictionary,
1989).

In the Checkers speech, Richard Nixon said: “A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers.”

“A man-at-arms down in Texas heard Pat on the radiogram mention the facts of life that our two yuan would like to have a doggerel, and, believe it or not, the day school before we left on
this camphor trip we got a metacarpal from unison statuary in Baltimore, saying they had a packinghouse for us. We went down to get itch. You know what itch was? Itch was a little cockrack dogfish in a crayfish that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girth Tricia, the sizzle yellowjacket old, named it Checkoff.”

A
chilly tickle, the cold of ice cubes within ice cubes—my ankle, touched by his big toe.

This is an example of
irmus.

“Y
ou and Henry ordering the ‘Christmas Bombing’ was pesky!”

This is an example of
litotes
.

E
scape, escape, escape, I pray.

This is an example of
epizeuxis
.

I
did tell Martha Mitchell she should get a bullhorn and have the driver take her around Washington to express her views, but you’ve always been chivalrous enough to overlook my stupid opinions, so surely you’ll involve yourself in something more important than wasting your time admonishing a woman as hopelessly inept as me.

This is an example of
charientismus
.

D
ick writes amusingly, with a sense of what makes a good story. “During our trips to China and summits in the Soviet Union, Pat showed her mastery of the art of personal diplomacy. She shook hands with dancing bears at the circus, drew children to her in schools and hospitals, visited communes, factories, department stores, and danced a step with the Bolshoi Ballet school.”

I could say the same about him, but his awkwardness is always part of any encounter, and his smile is too intense. People thought his smile was insincere because it was
such
a smile. He was more than a little inept. I always worried, myself, that the smile faded so quickly. It made him nervous to smile, so once he started, he either kept that smile plastered on his face or erased it immediately.

He mistrusted his body. He was self-conscious about leaning in too far, about looking at the camera or
not
looking. With his brothers dead, was he ever supposed to smile? He was caught between doing the natural thing—smiling at a bluebird singing from a tree,
or at a plate of freshly baked cookies, or sitting in the stands and watching a circus bear, it was all the same: he was caught between smiling spontaneously and being inappropriate, because they were dead and he was alive, and his mother’s eyes judged him like a camera lens, long after she was dead herself.

“S
o you see, Dick, you can have a lot of things, but you can’t have everything. Don’t tell me you already know that. You don’t know it, you just refuse to think about it.”

“Do you see the way his heels are worn down at the sides? It’s why he has that funny rocking walk, or maybe it was the rocking that wore down his shoes. Henry has no taste in shoes, does he?”

“Tell the truth, gals, how many times do we come to the last line and also get away as fast as if the curtain dropped? If our curtains drop, it’s because we didn’t hang them right!”

“The play
Abraham Lincoln,
written by John Drinkwater, opened a week and a half before Christmas 1919. The play was written in six scenes. In the last Lincoln is shot at Ford’s Theatre. Secretary
Stanton famously remarks, ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ Well, we might not get an instant epitaph, but when the curtain falls, it falls, and I suspect it often falls on silence. It’s just my personal view. It’s like death, itself:
curtain
.”

(
Curtain
.)

ONLINE EDITION

Volume 113 >> Issue 29 : Wednesday, June 23, 1993

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Patricia Nixon, Wife of Former President, Dies at 81

Los Angeles Times

Patricia Ryan Nixon, the poised, gracious “perfect political wife” through the roller-coaster rises and disgraceful fall of former President Nixon’s turbulent career, died Tuesday at their home in Park Ridge, N.J. She was 81.

Mrs. Nixon, a heavy smoker although she never permitted herself to be seen smoking in public, died of lung cancer. She had suffered from lung disease for several years and was hospitalized last February for emphysema when the cancer was discovered.

Nixon and their daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, were at her bedside when she died at 5:45 a.m. EDT, according to a statement issued by Nixon’s New Jersey office.

For three decades Pat Nixon was always there, the loyal and sometimes obviously suffering wife standing stoically behind her husband as he pursued a career that took him to the unprecedented heights—and depths—of public life. The former first lady cried only twice in public—when her husband lost his 1960 bid for the presidency to John F.
Kennedy, and when he made his farewell speech on Aug. 9, 1974, after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign.