Watergate (64 page)

Manolo, Dick’s valet, was gone, too. He and Fina had retired and moved to Spain.

She’d agreed to the picture only this summer, when Julie at last gave them a grandchild. The baby was now three months old, and Henriette had been on the scene for three weeks.

An odd bond between painter and sitter had grown up around their hands. In Henriette’s case the right, not the left, was twisted—from childhood polio. But she had taught herself to use it; she drew with her left hand and painted with her right. The division of labor, the self-discipline that must have been required to make it happen, fascinated Pat, though the two women had spoken of it only once.

She had lots of time to think while sitting here facing the blank back of the canvas. But her mind rarely traveled back to any past but the recent one, the four years that she and Dick had been together in this house. He had been the first one to approach death’s door, just after they arrived here in ’74. The blood clots nearly killed him, and the hemorrhaging during surgery was even worse. But he’d come home and rallied and written his book, and the two of them had fallen into a strange, anesthetized routine. She often felt that the ocean was not just on one side of the house but all around; that they were on an island, a little two-person leper colony.
Able was I ’ere I saw Elba
. She wondered if she would live long enough to teach Jennie, her new grandchild, about palindromes.

As for her Napoleon, his plots involved reclaiming not his throne but his reputation. He was now at work on another book—not another memoir, though she thought he’d gone too easy on his enemies in the one he’d written. This new project was a book about foreign affairs, how to handle the Russians. It would display the kind of expertise people were willing to concede him, the way they’d admit that the Bird Man of Alcatraz did have a way with canaries.

He was lately talking about returning to New York, where he could live amidst thinkers and editors and make himself available to any foreign minister checking in at the United Nations. Well, if he wanted to go, she would. She would give up the garden here for a window box there and be perfectly all right. She’d have little reason or desire to leave the apartment.

Dick never tired of saying that she’d had her stroke, in July of ’76, because she’d made the mistake of looking into Woodward and Bernstein’s second book, which spared not even her—tales of drinking and so forth. He had convinced himself of the connection, and he’d railed against the two authors throughout her recovery, every time he saw her
struggling with the stair-steps of the exercise box, or trying to draw out the pulley they’d attached to a wall by the patio.

She
had
read some of the book, but it didn’t make much of an impression, certainly not the kind made by the spring 1976 number of
The Tom Thumb House Newsletter
, which had noted with regret the passing of the charity’s longtime friend and generous supporter, Mr. Thomas Garahan of New York. A heart attack at the age of sixty-six.

On February 20, 1980, eight days after her ninety-sixth birthday, Alice entered the last five minutes of her existence. The television in her bedroom showed Ronald Reagan fighting for his political life in New Hampshire and then, a moment later, the Russians marching through Afghanistan. Alice imagined that Father would soon be on his way to the Khyber Pass, forcing the combatants into peace talks.

Her mind, like the television, was sometimes on and sometimes off, but she felt certain, as did her granddaughter and Janie, that the end was quite near. Bronchial pneumonia, the doctor had said. When he told her, she’d experienced a slight disappointment that such an ordinary complaint would be what finally carried her off.

On the table by the bed lay the last piece of mail she would ever receive, a printed change-of-address announcement:

So far, she had to admit, he’d done rather well, and if he went on as long as she had, he’d be around for another thirty years. An advance copy of his latest book, sent a week ago “with the compliments of the author,” sat on another table in the room. There would be no funeral for her, and no wake, but the dress she’d be buried in
was
laid out, at her insistence, across a chair near the foot of the bed. She had managed to place inside one of its pockets a little scrawl of Paulina’s from fifty years ago:
Dear Mother
,
I love you very much. Love
,
“Kits.”

One piece of jewelry lay atop the dress: the wedding bracelet from
the kaiser. The jewel thief who’d gotten hold of it in ’66, when she was up in New York at Capote’s party, had pried out all the diamonds, and they’d never been recovered, so there didn’t seem any reason what was left of the thing shouldn’t be buried with her—just those empty gold settings, like a mouthful of missing teeth. What could be a better memento mori?

Of course
she
wouldn’t be needing any reminders, since she’d be dead, lying in Rock Creek Cemetery beside Paulina, with Hilda Wilhelmina Luoma as their neighbor a few grassy feet away. No Nick, no Bill, and no prospect of meeting up with either one in any sort of afterlife, let alone the big reunion bash that Bobby’s widow continued to expect.

All at once she groaned, realizing that Joe was no doubt getting ready to write something about her for a newspaper or magazine. He’d repeat a half dozen of her hoariest remarks, at least three of which she would never actually have said.

Her mind again flickered off: she suddenly wasn’t sure which of the brothers, Stew or Joe, remained alive, and which of them was dead. She looked out into the hall, toward the old stuffed tiger whose paw had once fallen off in Stew’s hand.

As soon as she closed her eyes, for the last time, she saw it—the tiger, quite alive, coming toward her.

“We love you, Muggsy!”

The crowd in the hotel ballroom laughed and cheered, and Elliot Richardson acknowledged his self-bestowed nickname with a dignified, defeated smile.

“I’m proud of what I’ve done and what my conscience would not let me do,” he declared, conceding his loss, by more than twenty-five points, in the Massachusetts Republican Senate primary.

The crowd applauded his sentiment, though not so loudly as it had applauded the nickname he’d assumed six months ago at a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon roast hosted by Billy Bulger, the state senate’s president, a man less famous for his legislative accomplishments than for his gangster brother, Whitey. When Bulger held up a mock-advertisement urging those who saw it to
VOTE FOR ELLIOT, HE’S BETTER THAN YOU
, Richardson
had come back with a suggestion that the monicker “Muggsy” might serve to warm him up for an electorate either put off by his manner or unsure of who he was. He had, after all, been gone from Massachusetts for most of the last fifteen years.

Nineteen eighty-four hadn’t looked completely hopeless back in March, but now, in mid-September, the smart money was moving to a Reagan reelection victory even here in Massachusetts. The fellow who’d just trounced Richardson in the primary was very much the president’s sort of man—a self-made millionaire in what was now bewilderingly called “high tech.”

“The Former Everything” had done his campaigning at Irish taverns and town dumps, flinging his Muggsy buttons like doubloons to whoever showed up. But once he began to speak it was usually of arms control (unlike Mr. Reagan, he was for it) or tax increases (with all due respect to the president, he saw their necessity). He was sorry to have to disavow so much of the Republican Party and its platform, but there you were. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to, he would tell them. Some remembered what he was talking about; many didn’t.

The jobs between Justice and now had gotten ever more rarefied and finally Ruritanian: ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; secretary of commerce; chief negotiator for the Law of the Sea treaty. By the time he left Washington to make this Senate run, heading up to Massachusetts had felt almost like going off to Hawaii. Rather a lot of things were upside down now; he’d realized just how many when this May the American Society of Newspaper Editors—ten years after his own appearance—had chosen Richard Nixon for their speaker.

“I congratulate my opponent but hope he’ll remain mindful of the kind of people and principles that have preceded him here in the Grand Old Party.”

The applause had become decidedly weak, and he could tell from the camera lights that two of the local TV stations had cut away from the ballroom. It was time to wrap this up and have Muggsy bid everyone a fond good night.

Richardson imagined that from this point on—he was, after all, sixty-four—he’d be grazing in the pastures of the Kennedy School of Government just across the river, ruminating upon the Saturday
Night Massacre for the next dozen students writing a master’s thesis on Watergate. Maybe Dick Darman would have some other ideas, but having found his way into the Reagan White House, Dick lately seemed uneasy taking his calls.

Howard Hunt was reading the final proofs for
Chinese Red
and watching the fifth Republican National Convention since the one that had renominated Nixon in ’72, right here in Miami. He had been unmoved by the rhetoric of both George Bush and Pat Buchanan, each a very different veteran of Nixon’s White House. The troubles of his own children, exacerbated by his time in prison, had deafened him to the culture-warring cries of the insurgent candidate; and it seemed to him, Gulf War aside, that Bush had done little these last four years but take the victory lap Reagan deserved for winning the Cold War. As for being a fellow “Company” man—well, how long exactly had Bush directed the CIA? About as long as Elliot Richardson had run the Department of Justice? Certainly less than the total of thirty-three months Hunt himself had spent shuffling from one prison to another—attaining, after the loss of his appeal, what must still stand as the longest sentence ever served for burglary by a first offender.

“Papa!” cried his youngest son. “Can I have money for the ice cream truck?”

Hunt found two quarters in his chinos and told the boy to be careful of the cars on Griffing Boulevard. He took a quick, protective look out the window, beyond the
NO TRESPASSING
sign, to see what the traffic looked like.

He and his wife had been married for fifteen years now. After his experience with Clarine Lander, he’d been wary of any out-of-the-blue prison visitor, but Laura had turned out to be the real thing. She was
less dark and complicated than Dorothy, and while he still missed his first wife, he no longer found himself in conversation with her ghost. He traveled a straight and simple path these days, not preoccupied with stepping on the white squares or the black. Nearly seventy-four, he was too intent on supporting his new family to cultivate any instincts for self-destruction—that check he’d left in the hotel!—or even to engage in Transcendental Meditation. And he’d certainly lost his appetite for club memberships and housekeepers.

Along with the proofs and his bills, his desk was piled with letters prompted by recent twentieth-anniversary TV appearances. There would be another round of them two years from now, commemorating Nixon’s resignation instead of the break-in, and in between he could count on a steady stream of inquiries and accusations from the Kennedy crazies, who were determined to put him on the Grassy Knoll back in ’63. None of the anniversary interviews paid anything, but he liked to imagine they helped to move at least a few copies of novels like
Chinese Red
. He hoped his sales figures were better than Colson’s. A copy of Chuck’s latest born-again production,
Why America Doesn’t Work
, inscribed with a nauseating “Yours in Christ,” sat unacknowledged on a nearby shelf.

He read little about Watergate, but from time to time did discover some fact that was new to him. Only a few years ago he’d opened Magruder’s memoir to check something before an interview and discovered—the story of LaRue’s old man! So that was Mr. X, the person mentioned inside the envelope he’d carried throughout the maddest weeks of those mad two years. Even now he had to hand it to her: if he were still in the game, he’d probably try to recruit Miss Lander for the Agency.

But as he sometimes now said, “I don’t do derring anymore.” The long fever of his life, spiking even before the break-in, had thrown him into delirium and then it had broken, and he had no desire to exchange the improbable domestic contentments of old age for the excitements of his early and middle years. His novels, for as long as anyone wanted them, would be enough in the way of vicarious high flying.

He checked the cozy dedication of
Chinese Red
.