Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (6 page)

The bowl might be an accessory to the flash-forward. “Mrs. Nixon” would peer in with her own perspective, but since I know certain aspects of her future life now, as I write, I could interject a land mine’s shattering explosion in Vietnam, or a person named Henry Kissinger, years hence, down on his knees praying with Mr. Nixon, or the Irish setter, King Timahoe—recognizable as an Irish setter but not yet as her dog—streaking across grass she’d have no reason to think grew on the White House lawn.

When writing about a well-known person after that person’s death (or at least at the end of that person’s life of significance for fictional purposes), the writer is largely constrained by facts. If not entitled to invent out of whole cloth, the writer can still imagine. The philosophy of Walter Benjamin is well known, but Jay Parini, in
Benjamin’s Crossing,
decided to view Benjamin on the run from the Nazis, which the author can only imagine, for obvious reasons. Probably any fiction writer deciding to write about Mrs. Nixon would undertake a story that was not merely hers but her husband’s. History is based in story. But where to begin, when she did not speak to the point, as a matter of principle, and the writer could only be tempted to project onto such an enigmatic person? Recently, Silda Wall Spitzer stood at her husband’s side as he gave his resignation speech and inspired a skit on
The Daily Show
. In Mrs. Nixon’s day, television had no Jon Stewart, no
Saturday Night Live
. People understood and more easily accepted that Mrs. Nixon was standing by her husband. Now, such standing by is suspect. We question the advisability of her actions (“Time will say nothing but I told you so”—W. H. Auden). By all accounts, Mrs. Nixon was dutiful and modest. She felt she had a role to fulfill. She did it unflinchingly, if sometimes teary-eyed, and left no record of her innermost thoughts. The bowl might have been passed on to one of the daughters. It might have broken, though we don’t like stories to end that way, with such telegraphed imagery. Mrs. Nixon might have considered the words spoken during the bowl’s presentation and come up with a few of her own:
polite, plodding,
and
pained
. No one inscribes a bowl that way.

But what about a husband who calls for a photographer to commemorate for posterity a family so sad and shaken by his forced resignation that the photographer found it almost impossible to take a picture without recording someone crying? Mrs. Nixon,
obviously surprised, tried politely to suggest that their imminent departure from the White House, under a cloud of scandal, was not a moment that should be photographed. But no: Mr. Nixon had decided that it was a good idea. The POV of photographer Ollie Atkins would be interesting, but all we know is that eventually the picture was taken. Mr. Nixon was a man who knew how to pose and, in posing, tried to ensure that everything in his demeanor and facial expression, his body language, with his family an ungainly chorus line but nevertheless willing, even smiling, would suggest the way people in the future should interpret him, and his presidency. Mrs. Nixon looks animated, turned to the side, as if caught in an off moment. You get the sense she’d happily rise like Mary Poppins and disappear, if moving sideways to escape the picture frame wasn’t enough of an escape. Mr. Nixon is intent upon giving the photograph his conventional best, crossing his arms to indicate he can’t be touched, protecting himself while simultaneously suggesting authority, looking right into the lens with a big smile. Mrs. Nixon looks like she’s already out of there. She’s going toward someone, or something, but her eyes aren’t on her husband. The bowl is forgotten, every insignificant symbolic thing is forgotten, she is trapped in the present as certainly as if she’d been manacled.

Her daughter Tricia, nicknamed Dolly by Mrs. Nixon, is the one who doesn’t like interviews and won’t speak to the press. Younger sister Julie is the family spokesperson, who urged her father strongly not to resign, having no idea what evidence of his involvement in the cover-up plot would emerge when the tape of June 23, 1972, was handed over. On the eve of his resignation, Julie, then twenty-six, wrote a letter to her father, saying, “I love you. Whatever you do I will support. I am very proud of you. Please wait a week or even ten days before you make this decision. Go through the fire a little longer. You are so strong! I love you.” It is signed “Julie,” and
“Millions support you.” She had internalized what Mr. and Mrs. Nixon believed: that it was never an option to give up. This was to the chagrin of her husband, David Eisenhower. Tricia’s husband, Edward Cox, simply could not speak to his wife about the resignation at all, it seems, though he was so worried his father-in-law might commit suicide that he spoke to people outside the family about Mr. Nixon’s condition.

What sort of person would remember the bowl, in such troubled times, with the public watching and waiting? But, in fiction, what if she had just then stumbled upon it? Would it now be an omen, a symbol, an ironic mockery? What if, decades earlier, she’d kept the May basket her husband sent to her at Whittier Union High School (delivered by his parents’ employee Tom Sulky), with her engagement ring nestled inside? She had thought they’d be together when she became engaged, but instead he’d sent it by messenger, unexpectedly, and hidden the ring in its box within the basket. She didn’t like that: it wasn’t the moment she’d anticipated. A fictional story about such a woman might relate the presentation of the ring to the presentation of the bowl, both being things that were meant as affirmations of something important. If Mrs. Nixon thought about symbols, weren’t there times when she yearned to take off the ring? When she looked at her hand and thought, What have I done? How? How? How? Years later, after her stroke, she had to work hard to get back the use of her hand. The physical therapy consisted of using the afflicted hand rather than the functional hand. The theory was that if you forced yourself to use the weaker hand, you might regain its use. Imagine the struggle. Think of all the shortcuts people constantly take to do things with the least effort. The idea of not being a quitter applied unilaterally, so Mrs. Nixon practiced and challenged herself every day.

The day she accepted the gift of the bowl, she was in good health. She was energetic, accustomed to activity, an achiever.

As a fiction writer, I wonder: what could be known that the person, or character (Mrs. Nixon), wouldn’t necessarily understand? Revealing these things is not a betrayal but rather the writer’s admission of life’s complexity, in which the central figure is sometimes the least informed, the most vulnerable. When Gatsby refutes Nick Carraway by insisting that the past can be recaptured, it is a sincere belief but untrue. (Nick, on Daisy Buchanan: “‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’”) We have to see through, and around, the character to see that things do not add up, or that we understand differently than the character does. If Mrs. Nixon had the ability to look at “Mrs. Nixon,” what might she have seen? (She did, after all, have photographs of herself to study, as well as watching herself on TV being interviewed, et cetera.) She probably would not have wanted to dwell on herself. Some things might have pleased her, such as her neat appearance. What she said might have sounded fine, because she was judicious in her speech. So given her televised faux pas, and her awareness of having been out of control in front of a huge audience, how aware might she have been that in literature characters can play out their lack of awareness for hundreds of pages? Would she avoid speech knowing that words could have connotations beyond her control, that self-revelation defies our intentions? Disguise can be exhausting and futile. In early life as well as later on, when she looked tired, no makeup could disguise her fatigue. When Clare Boothe Luce was served breakfast by Mrs. Nixon after her stroke, she made the remark that she could see no signs of the stroke, and Mrs. Nixon replied, “Yes, but I
have
had a stroke. You don’t know the struggle I had getting back the use of this hand.”

Given her distrust of words, Mrs. Nixon might have had some glimmer of the fiction writer in her outlook, for many of that breed are the first to doubt the reliability of their means. About Watergate, she said: “He’ll never get any credit for anything he says on the subject anyway. I wanted him to just state frankly that he didn’t know, that no one knows, the full story of Watergate.” Because she realized the danger of words, she’d wanted her husband to destroy the tapes and had given him that advice early on. But she wasn’t much listened to: she put up effective blockades with the press, and her reactions were so habitual that her family seems not to have seriously engaged with her, knowing in advance what her position would be and not having the inclination to do anything but accept it. Later, she was able to retreat behind a guard station and fence at La Casa Pacifica (though it was hardly that) and spend much of her time in silence.

In Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the character, as a young man in 1909, has a dream: he has the opportunity to watch a movie of his parents’ as yet unlived future life, and he is upset because he can understand that they might not get together, but even if they do, he is implicated in how their lives will turn out, and they will not turn out wonderfully well. The often-quoted lines from the story have to do with his increasing awareness of what the future holds for them and, by implication, for him. (He awakens at the end of the story—at the end of the movie—to realize that it is his twenty-first birthday): “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing will come of it. Only remorse, hatred, scandal and two children whose characters will be monstrous.” It’s a showstopping moment that leaves the reader breathless. Mrs. Nixon didn’t sit at such a movie and tell her future self “Don’t do it.” If she could have seen a movie where she spontaneously pushed away the basket she knew
contained Nixon’s engagement ring, might she have thought, It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you? She briefly and tellingly rejected her ring, in the same way she eventually pushed aside her concerns about marrying and being tied down. “Nothing will come of it. Only remorse, hatred, scandal . . .” When the lights came up, she stayed in the spotlight right through the final family portrait before leaving the White House, then accompanied her husband on his rounds of saying good-bye. She was so choked up, though, and her staff was so upset that, unable to speak, they only squeezed each other’s hands. That would have been the picture that said more than words: a close-up of Mrs. Nixon’s hand grasping a staff member’s hand.

There are times when nobody sane believes in words.

(Recounted by Julie Nixon Eisenhower)

A
trip to Mexico with her longtime friend Helene Drown. Posing for a picture in a donkey cart, Helene wearing a sombrero imprinted “I Love,” and Mrs. Nixon wearing a “Mexico” sombrero.

As part of her job as a saleswoman at a California department store, she modeled clothes for Walter Pidgeon and his teenage daughter. This took two and a half hours. Ms. Pidgeon exited with a new wardrobe.

Driving an elderly couple across country to make money, and being driven crazy by the man’s constant clicking of his dentures.

On inauguration morning, the Lyndon Johnsons arranged a little joke, or something. One can’t be sure what the Lyndon Johnsons thought. Somehow, they got the Nixon family dogs into the White
House. Julie Nixon Eisenhower narrates: “Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson [were] waiting at the top of the steps. A few feet away were our French poodle, Vicky, dressed in a new white jacket trimmed in red, white, and blue, and Pasha, our Yorkshire terrier, his thin hair pulled back from his face by a ribbon. President Johnson sentimentally had arranged for the dogs to be the first to greet us in our new home.”

Mrs. Nixon took a trip with Lady Bird Johnson to Scotland. Since there was no advance notice, officials had to scramble to accommodate the women. As a little joke, Mrs. Nixon said that Mrs. Johnson was “the President’s sister.” Asked if anything could be provided for them, Mrs. Nixon said, “Why, yes, we would love to have tea with the Queen.” This could have backfired, but it didn’t: the Queen was away at Balmoral Castle.

As a girl, Mrs. Nixon walked on railroad tracks.

As a girl, Mrs. Nixon rolled and smoked cigarettes.

(On the theory that facts can provide only so much information, and fiction has similar limitations)

A
fter her trip to Peru, where angry citizens stormed the Nixon car, breaking windows and trying to turn it over, Mrs. Nixon began a lifelong habit of taking a bath at night. By the glow of a night-light, she poured bath beads into the water and immersed herself. She ran her hands back and forth, gently popping the bubbles. Only then would she lean back against a plastic, inflated bath pillow, eyes closed for as long as she could stand it before peeking to see if any tiny floating islands remained.

Several photographs were given to Mrs. Nixon of herself, to decide which she thought best. H. R. Haldeman had noted: “All okay.” Mrs. Nixon was not sure why H. R. Haldeman would have been consulted. There was no note from “RN,” as her husband referred to himself. A blessing. She favored two photos. As she was debating, a vacuum started. There had been a dinner at the White House that night, and the house was still being cleaned. Mrs. Nixon, in her dressing gown, went into the corridor and asked the first Secret Service agent she saw which photograph he preferred. Startled
to see the First Lady, he did not immediately respond. Several seconds elapsed before he said, simply, “Mrs. Nixon.” She did not repeat the question. Finally, he pointed to one and said, “That one gets the brightness of your eyes.” She thanked him and returned to her room. She looked at both photographs and thought her eyes equally bright in each. Why had it taken the man so long to respond? Had he simply been afraid to express a preference? Mrs. Nixon had trouble falling asleep. She wondered if the photograph the Secret Service man had rejected might not be best, after all.