Watergate (62 page)

“Good for the Post Office,” she said.

“For delivering news like that?”

“Tom … you understand.”

“I understand. In fact I’ve already carried out your instructions.”

She had sent him back the gold shamrock. She’d told him not to keep it but to go to Schrafft’s and leave it—a shiny, mysterious piece of luck, for someone else to find—on the table where they’d first sat together.
The gentleman said to tell you that he’s an independent
,
but that everybody likes apple pie
.

“Schrafft’s has seen better days,” Tom informed her.

“So have I.”

“I offered it up, Victoria.”

He had once explained the phrase to her. It was what the Catholics do with any sorrows and trials that had to be borne: accept the burden; carry it; and make a gift of the labor to God. She’d asked Tom why they couldn’t make an offering of joy, and he’d replied, “Are you sure you’re really even half-Irish?”

“I offered up the joy,” he now told her.

She could no longer walk between two fires, one steady and warm, the other a wild alternation of blaze-ups and gutterings that now looked on the verge of going out for good. But only the second truly needed her tending. She did not know what lay ahead—certainly not joy—and she doubted her strength to endure it, let alone offer it up, but she knew where she had to be.

“Thank you, Roger.” She felt relief and sadness, a cold wave of each crashing into the other.

Oh, Tom!

She had gotten through this, too.

She realized from the funny blank buzz on the line that the connection had cut out, the way it sometimes did at this altitude. The communications man came on: “Mrs. Nixon, we’re sorry; the call dropped. I’ll try it again.”

“That’s okay. We were finished.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, thanks.”

She hung up, safe in the knowledge that there was no recording of the conversation: Johnson had taped every call to and from Air Force One, but Dick had had the system removed after taking office and had left the jet unwired when, two years later, everything else got tapped. The mystery of this exception was one more thing she intended never to think about once they were back in their own house.

After the plane had traveled another ten minutes, another hundred miles west, she knocked on the door of Dick’s cabin. Ziegler opened the door and cleared out instantly.

Her husband looked so hollowed out that the swivel chair he sat in seemed like some prescribed medical appliance. She spotted the Teddy Roosevelt book on the table, wondering who’d brought it along after Dick had used it in the East Room.

“Are you sure it’s ours?” she asked, pointing to it. “Not the White House library’s?”

“Yes. Don’t you recognize it?”

“Sort of. I’m just afraid they’ll accuse us of stealing that, too.” She took the seat beside him. “How’s the leg?”

“All right for the moment.”

“It ought to be up.” She pulled the hassock toward him, and as she leaned over to do so their faces came closer. Each could see how much the other had been crying.

“What’d you think of what I said?” he asked. “You couldn’t really call it a speech.”

She didn’t answer.

“I know you didn’t want the cameras there.”

“No,” she said softly. “But I realized once you started that it would have been just as hard without them. Did you see Herb Stein?”

“Yeah.” The stolid economist’s eyes had been gushing tears in the East Room. “I almost broke down watching him,” said Nixon. He paused. “You know, that’s why I mentioned my mother and my old man instead of you and the girls. I was afraid you’d break down, too.”

“Oh, you don’t need to tell
me
that!” She lightly touched his knee. “
They’re
the only ones who wouldn’t get it.” She pointed in the direction of where the press used to be.

“I’m so … mystified!” He groped for this word she couldn’t remember him ever using, and once he found it he started to sob. “I don’t know how it happened, how it began. Half the time I hear myself on the tapes I realize that I’m barely remembering who works for who over at the Committee. I hear myself acting like I know
more
than I do—pretending to be on top of the thing so I don’t embarrass myself with whoever’s in the room—especially Ehrlichman. Christ, I can’t now apologize for what I can barely understand! I mean, if Mitchell and Martha—”

“Dick,” she interrupted, patting his swollen knee. “You’re going to make yourself sick.” Martha, the most ancient of history, headed the list of things she would never think about again.

He closed his eyes and the sobs let up, at least for a moment. The tears continued down his face, as copious as the sweat that had drenched his suit jacket last night.

She was worried, even with the engine noise, that someone would hear him, the way she’d worried when he wept on the train going through Oregon in ’52. She was alarmed by how bad he looked, and didn’t know how he could put himself out in front of another crowd an hour from now. She wanted him to stop crying, the way she’d made herself stop this morning.

“Dick,” she whispered, taking his hand.

He was looking at her now, wanting to tell her that he loved her. She knew that he couldn’t, no more than he could make himself ask if she loved him. For an awful second she feared he would say, “I hope I haven’t let you down,” as if she were one more congressman from Nebraska. But he knew better than to try that with her.

She rubbed her thumb back and forth across the top of his hand, soothing him, trying to change the subject. “You can’t say this isn’t a smooth ride. Remember that first one?”

He nodded, like a child subsiding from a tantrum. He knew what she was referring to: their first plane trip together, after the ’48 election, flying east to west, the four of them, with both the girls in little bonnets. Six prop flights to get them from Washington to California. Julie’s infant ears hurt each time they touched down; but the baby’s mother never lost her temper, or so much as a pair of gloves, the whole trip.

She looked at him now, a sight so painful she couldn’t conjure any image from the happier years behind them. She could only see the months ahead—the encouragements, the scoldings, the jokes and stratagems it would take to keep him alive, at home or in prison. That would be her work, and she would offer it up with whatever tenderness she had in her. It was the one thing left for her to do, and she would be worthy of it.

“Do you love me?”

Suddenly the words were out of him, making her flinch, like a firecracker thrown during a motorcade. He wanted her to answer a question he hadn’t asked in more than thirty years, since before those propeller flights. She leaned over to kiss his forehead, trying to find words to use herself, and they came to her, from all the campaign banners they had walked under two years ago, on their way toward this moment, this ruin. “Now more than ever,” she whispered.

Clarine had left Washington five days ago. “Gone to Spain, darlin’ Hound,” was all she’d written, near the word “MOOT” on the crinkled envelope she left with the doorman at Watergate West. LaRue suspected he would never see her again.

He had no idea whether she had read the envelope’s contents; whether the original sealing was intact or if the flap had been reglued. He had still not opened it himself, let alone read whatever was inside, though he’d carried it around since Tuesday, sometimes thinking of it as his fate and sometimes as just a poor papery trace of Larrie.

He had it with him even now, at the counter in the waffle shop across from Ford’s Theatre. He’d driven downtown, passing a Sunday-morning crowd outside St. John’s. Word must have gotten out that the new president would be attending services. Well, he had plenty to pray about, thought LaRue.

Wishing he had some bourbon instead of maple syrup to pour over them, LaRue was fortifying himself with a large plate of waffles before he headed off to see Magruder for the first time since that hour in the neighbor’s driveway a year and a half ago. Jeb had been asking for a visit ever since June, but Allenwood, the first place he’d been incarcerated, had said no: they didn’t want two Watergate guys having the chance to align their stories, never mind that both of them had already pled guilty and testified in public to every part of the scandal’s minutiae.

But at Holabird, where Jeb had just been transferred, things were different. The old fort up in Baltimore was getting ready to shut down, and fewer than eighteen prisoners remained on its grounds, doing their own cooking and wearing their own clothes. A whole little Watergate platoon was now stashed there in advance of the Mitchell trial: Kalmbach and Colson were in residence along with Magruder, and Dean himself
had lately arrived. With all of them already living and talking together, the authorities hardly cared if LaRue came to shoot the Sunday breeze. One of the marshals had even told Jeb he’d be happy to take him to his son’s birthday party when the boy’s big day came—and then drive him back in time for lockdown.

Cozy as it all might sound, LaRue was not looking forward to the reunion. He lingered over his coffee and the
Post
before paying his check and hitting the road. He kept the envelope on the passenger seat as he drove. It traveled with him like a passport: if he feared opening it, he was also by now afraid to be without it. Next to it sat a box of peanut brittle, something Clarine had suggested as a present for Magruder’s sweet tooth, before she took off.

LaRue had once told Jeb about Larrie—during the high-water bosom-buddy days of “Magrue.” In the early spring of ’72, he and Jeb had spent a long evening at a booth in Billy Martin’s Georgetown tavern, the same wooden nook where John F. Kennedy was said to have popped the question to Jackie. LaRue had been sporting a double glow of booze and well-being, knowing the latter wouldn’t last, that he would soon enough be remembering the dark spot at his center, the duck blind he carried inside. And yet, before all that took over, before he got as sweaty as the Old Man during a big speech, he’d let himself feel the bourbon and contentment and tell Jeb all about the affair with Clarine—almost the whole story, from the Jackson law office to the dude ranch and beyond. He’d told him he met her because he needed help with some legal technicalities after the hunting accident, not that there’d been an investigation; and he’d never mentioned this letter now beside him on the passenger seat. But he did tell him how the later flamingly liberal Larrie had gone to work for the DNC, which had gotten them laughing about life’s ironies and tilted the conversation back to the usual campaign bullshit.

He’d wondered for days now whether Clarine had left because of something inside the envelope. Had she been repelled to find out for certain what she’d for so long been able to accept as mere possibility?

When would he open the damned thing? When the trial was over and he’d finished speaking his piece against Mitchell? Or maybe the night before he, too, went to prison? That way, if it was bad news, he
could imagine he was being sentenced for something truly awful, not the little cloak-and-dagger foolishness of Watergate.

A breeze came through the car window. The clouds were scudding by fast in the direction of Chesapeake Bay. Thoughts of its marshes took him back, yet again, to the spot in Canada; to the two blinds they’d set up because he and Daddy weren’t getting along; to the six snorts of bourbon he’d had while sitting by himself; to the gun that felt as heavy as his limbs felt light; to the moment he’d raised it to fire at the birds; and then to the weirdly long report that came back over the reeds; the cries of “Ike! Ike! Ike!”

Who knows what impulse the drink might have made him give in to?

He tried, as always, to banish the image, turning up the radio’s volume to the point where Rosemary Clooney was singing “Tenderly” as loud as the kid in the next lane had Jimi Hendrix or whoever it was playing the guitar. And then the station interrupted the record for an unexpected piece of news, a recorded announcement that Jerry Ford had made sometime between going to church and teeing off at Burning Tree:

LaRue knew what was coming, no matter that Ford had spent all spring assuring his fellow American citizens that the Old Man was innocent.

Did the Old Man make a deal for it—through Haig? Or was it simply that Ford couldn’t get his presidency going with everyone still lined up outside the courthouse waiting for Nixon to arrive in shackles?

Or maybe it was honest-to-God pity. Eastland had called LaRue a week or so ago to say that the Old Man had been crying on the phone from San Clemente. He was in the worst shape imaginable and, according to the senator, both Jaworski and Jerry Ford needed to know it.

Well, Nixon was now off the hook, and that was fine with LaRue.
He tried to imagine the Old Man enjoying the moment, feeling the relief as he sat on the ash heap of his life beside the Pacific Ocean. He couldn’t begrudge him the reprieve, and he wouldn’t complain that he and Mitchell still had prison stretches ahead of them.