Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (5 page)

A milk shake is easy to make. All you do is take down your cocktail shaker and put in a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or whatever your favorite flavor is, and fill the shaker half full of milk, then add a tablespoon of flavoring, such as Hershey’s chocolate syrup. Then shake away, and pour your milk shake right into a big glass and enjoy it. It’s festive, pretty, and full of calories.

We girls aren’t the only ones who can benefit from a “milk shake boost.” My husband has recently been running for political office, and the television—which is rumored to add weight to your image—turned out not to be his friend! Also, he’d let the makeup person use “shave stick” on his beard, which only made it worse.
He was debating a robust-looking and, some would say, handsome man, John F. Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy has a full face to begin with, and his makeup person seemed to do the right thing—and also he doesn’t have the heavy beard Dick has. In any event, our physician, Dr. John C. Lungren, took me aside. “Pat,” he said, “Dick looked rather puny on television. You can see his hectic schedule has taken a toll. I think he’d do well to drink a milk shake now and then.” I agreed with him, and then I found out exactly how many milk shakes he wanted me to prepare for Dick. It was four a day! We had from October 8 until October 13 to put some weight on Dick, and I began my milk shake making right away. A man doesn’t mind a chocolate milk shake, let me tell you! No sooner had I hung up the phone than I interrupted Dick, letting him know the doctor’s plan. Then I went out and got the ingredients and came home and scooped and shook. I think Hershey’s makes a lovely, rich chocolate sauce, so I punched the can in two places (which makes it flow more easily) and put in a little more than a tablespoon, and I shook the shaker until I felt everything was blended, and then I got a large glass and poured in the thick mixture, then carried it in to Dick. He was still fretting about the debate the night before, Mr. Kennedy saying that we should apologize to the Russians for the U-2 spy plane incident. Dick feels we should never apologize when we’re doing the right thing to defend our country. I agreed with him again and handed him his milk shake. I didn’t tell him that he should be drinking four a day, because then it might have seemed like a chore rather than a treat. Several hours later, when he was on the phone, I just put another milk shake in front of him, and though he looked surprised, when I passed by his door later, I saw he’d taken a few sips.

At dinner I told him, “Dick, Dr. Lungren thought you looked too pale and thin on television, and we don’t want people to have
that impression, so he’s come up with a plan for you to drink a number of milk shakes every day before the third debate.” We already knew the makeup had made his beard look worse, so that was going to be changed.

“Pat,” he said, “how many milk shakes are we talking about?”

“Four,” I said, honestly. “And if you drink two more today, you’ll have had at least twenty milk shakes, and will have gained a bit of weight before you see Mr. Kennedy again.”

“Apologizing to the Russians would make us look weak!” he said. He was really very upset about Mr. Kennedy’s proposed solution to Mr. Powers’s plane being shot down.

“Dick,” I said, “be that as it may, I will bring you milk shakes four times a day, and you can have the last one before bed.”

“What if I miss out on sleep, getting up to pee?” he wanted to know.

I told him that I would give him the last milk shake half an hour before bed.

This is what we did, from October 8 to 12, and on the morning of the thirteenth, he drank a final milk shake before leaving for the studio. I reported to Dr. Lungren that we had executed his plan, and I know he was pleased. Also present were Dr. Malcolm Todd and Dr. Hubert Pritchard, who were there to brief Dr. Lungren on Dick’s knee infection and his stay at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Dick did well in the debate and looked better on television, in my opinion. The milk shakes were chocolate, except for my presenting him with one strawberry, for variety. It was an easy way to prepare his “prescription” milk shakes.

Rinsing immediately afterward keeps you from having to immerse the cocktail shaker in soapy water.

A
s a young woman, Buddy was busy taking care of the house, cooking, and cleaning, before and after her parents died. There was always very little money. Pleasures were few, and those were intermittent and small: when her father had money, he occasionally bought her a strawberry ice cream cone. She worked when she went to college—among other places, in a bank, where she was both a teller and a floor cleaner. She was always busy, and she had no objection to hard work. She had a lot of energy, but people with energy can also be self-indulgently lazy, so we can’t draw too tidy a picture here. She had ambition, but that can be even more problematic than energy: ambition dissipates, does not necessarily prosper by being thwarted, devolves over time into other ways of achieving things. She yearned to travel, and in 1934 went by bus to Niagara Falls—a forerunner to Princess Di going alone to the Taj Mahal. We have no shoe box filled with her childhood memorabilia under the bed, no drawings, poems, or even report cards. At one point or another—often when young—people usually write a few poems. I have no idea if she ever wrote one. What come to mind are the rare occasions when Mrs. Nixon
expressed herself quite tersely and sarcastically, being nobody’s fool. Again like Princess Di, she was drawn to the sick and needy. She did work nursing patients, and she preferred seeing schoolchildren to seeing politicians, as who would not. She sewed curtains and slipcovers for the houses the Nixons rented or bought. Many people rolled their eyes about her pressing her husband’s trousers. More people rolled their eyes about her “respectable Republican cloth coat,” but this was her husband’s term, not hers—and eventually there were plenty of photographs of her attired in fur. She was not averse to sitting with fur flung over her on a cold day, and was willing to share with her friend Mamie Eisenhower. Julie Nixon Eisenhower recounts: “In the bitter cold of the football stadium Mamie and Pat huddled shoulder to shoulder, the future First Lady’s warm white-fox fur draped protectively over both.”

She once walked some distance to the house of a friend, the wife of Senator Stennis, tromping through the snow in order to go to tea, carrying her shoes in a bag. There is nothing wrong with being practical, which she seems always to have been. While her husband was fanatically concerned with appearances, she seems not to have shared his concern. Neatness was necessary. She liked to have a pleasant environment, but small comforts pleased her, and she never cared about acquiring anything just because it conferred status. She selected her wardrobe primarily on the basis of what would pack well. As First Lady, she did travel with her hairdresser. She kept things, including herself, neat, all her life. She rolled bandages with a group of other women, and we can assume she did it carefully.

She was given a present in June 1960, by an appreciative group called “The Ladies of the Senate,” whose bestowal Julie includes in
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
. Probably there was a written record of the ceremonial speech, because otherwise, how could Julie, who
was not present, know? It does not seem like a speech Mrs. Nixon would have remembered distinctly, nor did she ever, in telling a story, speak of herself as “Pat Nixon,” though her husband often referred to himself as “he” or “the President.” Here is Julie’s account of Mrs. Nixon receiving her present:

Pat Nixon, we have a gift for you. It is a crystal bowl. We chose this because it was crystal clear eight years ago when you became the president of our group here, we liked you. Later on it was crystal clear we loved you, and we still do. You are
friendly, faithful, and fair.

You are friendly, irrespective of party or age. You are faithful, far beyond the call of duty. You are fair, adding beauty to our interior decoration!

You have a rare and heartwarming quality of making everyone you greet seem more important than yourself.

Our gift is a crystal bowl, not a crystal ball. You won’t be able to see into the future, but we hope you can see clearly into the past, and how much happiness you have brought us. Great happiness to you, Pat Nixon, and God bless you.

She might have been thrilled. She might have taken the bowl home and written a poem about it, or the gift might have provoked her to read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and ponder the word
fair
. It’s a conventionally structured speech in which words were judiciously selected and used to make a nice turn of phrase. We move from “liked” to “loved.” This is because the recipient of the love has been
friendly, faithful, and fair
. These words stand out because of their meaning, because they alliterate, and because they have a job to do. They are emphasized for being set apart from the other words in their appearance, just as Mrs. Nixon’s physical
appearance has brought the ladies much delight. And they have given thought to the gift—a conventional present but here imbued with specific meaning for what it is not as well as for what it is. “Crystal bowl” versus “crystal ball” lets us see how close, yet how distinct, these two objects are. This crystal ball is unusual in that it might provide a look into the past rather than the future.

The past was always catching up with Mrs. Nixon, whether or not she had their gift to gaze into. When she had freedom, it was in the past: when she married a politician, her freedom was curtailed. Things were decided for her. She was summarized in the words of other people. Whether she had a proclivity for silence or merely decided upon it as adaptive behavior for survival, she was often silent, and that silence was unquestioned by the family. Publicly, she did not discuss politics but instead made innocuous remarks. Like so many people receiving a gift, she might have felt a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment at being singled out. There is no record of her response to the bowl. A writer could set that bowl spinning, reading into it as those who selected the gift did, imagining what image from the distant past Mrs. Nixon would have most liked to see: Her mother or father? The ice cream cone, as significant to her young self as Lady Liberty’s torch? But you can’t tell, when you look: she could have seen an English daisy, one she’d grown on the farm, liking not only its color but its durability as a cut flower. You take a risk when you look in the bowl /ball. Of course, you take a risk when you look in the mirror, or pass a store window and see yourself vis-à-vis the merchandise inside, an intruder in a winter skirt and jacket, standing in a window display of bathing suits, in the middle of March.

The bowl’s presenters did not assume its recipient could see the future (that is just too silly, the stuff of fairy tales), but still there was a convention for suspending disbelief: it would be for a writer’s
convenience that a person could see the future in a crystal ball. Had she been an invented character in a fictional context, the bowl might not be elaborated upon when presented, so it could subtly and gradually become a symbol the reader could read into. Or everything that was said might be said, but by story’s end the gift would prove to be something empty, and in its emptiness might be the expression of a greater emptiness.

In Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” which takes place in Italy, the woman wants many things to make up for the emptiness she feels. Silver and candles are among the things she names. She also wants a kitty, a romanticized cat, something that is nothing like the uncommunicative, unempathetic man with whom she is trapped in the hotel room. The proprietor brings her what she desires at the end of the story, but it’s a random cat, big rather than small, dripping wet and unappealing. He presents it to her as if the presentation closes the circle of desire. We see it’s the wrong thing as well as she does: it’s an anti–fairy tale, with romance unrequited; you might want a kitty, but what life hands you is going to be a big wet cat.

Just to speculate: What if Mrs. Nixon had wanted something small and clear, like a diamond? If this incident were fiction, the story could be constructed any number of ways, so that the engraved bowl could be as disappointing to Mrs. Nixon and to the reader as the moment when the wet cat was offered up. In fiction, she might have found the bowl years later and reflected on herself, younger, with different hopes and aspirations—someone who put the bowl away and forgot it, who was now finding either a more important bowl or one even less interesting. Things found years later can never be exactly the same. Again, I think of the widely held belief—erroneous but appealing to people—that Chekhov insisted if a gun appears in a story, it has to go off before story’s end.
Analogously, if a bowl appears, it has to be used. But I don’t know what became of Mrs. Nixon’s bowl. We know that she hung paintings by Dwight Eisenhower in her home, and that after her trips abroad, there were many souvenirs, many reminders of the different cultures in which she’d traveled: large vases, Chinese paintings. But who knows where the bowl went? Who knows how she protected it on the ride home? Front floor on the passenger’s side? Or did it nestle, again, in protective wrapping, inside a nice box? That would matter, in fiction. The writer would make that decision. A baby discovered, lifted from its blankets, is different from a baby already noticed at the beginning of a story, or a baby first viewed in its mother’s arms.

As narrated by Mrs. Nixon’s daughter, the words matter, and they say what they mean. But words are always altered by the things that exist apart from them that they cannot control, such as light coming through a window. The words will mean more or less depending on the light, transforming the speakers’ intended meaning beyond their control. So the writer yearns to see what’s been omitted, where the wrapping paper is, what pattern it had. Did the paper get ripped? Did she dig into the packaging? Mrs. Nixon doesn’t seem like a ripper; she ironed her husband’s trousers. But in this account—as opposed to fiction—the moment is gone. We could invent something, but we didn’t get to see.