by Ann Beattie
Friendly, Faithful, Fair
As 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.
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.
