Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

by Ann Beattie

  The father, being “crazy,” cannot (or, at least, does not) express himself except through his actions, and, in the moment, neither do the children—being children—express their thoughts about what’s going on. The story’s brilliance lies in giving us the most dramatic moment first, and then, as the story progresses, we—as we’ll come to realize the main character, Sean, has—forget the whole interaction. A moment of crisis in a stopped elevator much later in the story precipitates Sean’s remembering this traumatic moment (“Midair” is filled with moments of suspension: the young boy, held out the window by his crazy father; airplanes; elevators), but by the time he and a young man who reminds him of his son are trapped together in the elevator, Sean has learned to be an adult, and his version of being an adult is to take charge—to tell the panicked young man, emphatically, that they can’t fall. He is speaking at a great remove from the dramatic early scene in the story, but clearly its effect on his life is something from which he has never recovered.

  The reader understands it all—in fact, the reader has always had more of an ability to analyze Sean than he has—but the errors of Sean’s life cannot be undone, and his triumph of seeming almost unnaturally sane (really: no possibility the broken elevator will fall?) is undercut by our sudden awareness of how Sean is coping in the moment, versus the way Sean has coped, or failed to, his entire life. Like the old Polaroid cameras that had to be focused manually, moving the lens so that the double images become one, sliding two rectangular blocks with one superimposed over the other to sharpen the single image, the reader brings Sean into focus by overlaying the early scene with the similar scene that comes later. The Polaroid’s layering is called “justifying the image.” It works metaphorically to explain what we do, as readers, when we see the parallel elements of a story conflate. Had Conroy’s Sean spoken and had an epiphany, however, the story wouldn’t have had the same power. The tension and its potential resolution exist not as words, but as images. We have to see, and we do.

  I can’t take one moment of Mrs. Nixon’s life and juxtapose it over another without pretending to knowledge of her intimate life none of us can have. She is now a historic figure, but while alive she may well have been unknowable, even by her family. In writing about her, I see her as a child standing on her parents’ farm, which seems to be in the middle of nowhere. (Like Mrs. Nixon, even the town changed its name.) And then, in her teens, she is orphaned. Her determination to survive and to do well through work and perseverance seems to permeate any image of her from then on—supplying one rectangular block against which subsequent events will have to be justified. When I jump ahead to that future, and to Buddy becoming Mrs. Nixon, and then the wife of the President of the United States, my tendency is to bring her into focus by noticing the child underneath.

  This is not the moment when you have to throw the book over your shoulder because I claim Mrs. Nixon spoke to me. She spoke to me as being indelible—as a young person, a figure in a landscape—not by speaking words; in the many ways in which she withheld information (perhaps, like Conroy’s character, unintentionally); as a person on the sidelines—always more interesting than the people on parade. People who are enigmatic, who don’t give you a lot to work with, are more intriguing. There’s no reason, though, to want to turn such characters inside out; in fact, the more potentially revelatory thing is to let them have their integrity, but not to be so intimidated or reverential that you forget to also play with them—to see if you can tease them out of their silence; to reveal them in their off moments. Some writers have a more systematic approach to character, while others are more at ease feeling that a character evolves, and that the Rorschach test is open to vast interpretation. There’s absolutely no way to verify that you got it right, no matter how many positive responses you get, saying Wow, you really nailed it. And those times the subject escapes, it doesn’t matter if other people assure you that the subject’s in custody. In my perverse heart of hearts, I applaud the runaway. Though I’m the one supplying the Rorschach, I’m always secretly delighted to know that the blot is not definitive, only taken by some to be so.

  Writers I know tend to be superstitious—at least, about one aspect of writing—in that they don’t want to describe what they’re writing about in medias res. They feel that the energy will dissipate, or that they’ll talk about it rather than write it, or that the book will change on them (it quite often does, and being on guard won’t protect you). When I lived in a small apartment and my desk was in my living room, I threw towels over the papers on my desk before people came over. Others might hide the medicine bottles, but with writers, it’s usually the manuscript. Therefore, I hid the many books I read about Mrs. Nixon from everyone except my husband. (One friend who walked into my writing room made no comment but later brought me a two-ton book by Bob Haldeman.)

  When I teach literature, my reactions are very much a reader’s reactions; it never occurs to me that what I’m discussing has the slightest thing to do with what I sometimes do (write). There’s a system or world that requires me to discover its inherent logic, to learn to navigate by subtle signs (anything from punctuation marks to descriptions that might eventually suggest a motif). Every reader has to read enough (and to have read enough in general) to understand a particular writer’s tone. The writer must educate the reader, yet writers can do this only if they’re lucky enough that the reader returns repeatedly to that writer’s work.

  Katherine Anne Porter, considering Virginia Woolf, describes the writer’s landscape by channeling her subject: “Life, the life of this world, here and now, was a great mystery, no one could fathom it; and death was the end. In short, she was what the true believers always have called a heretic. What she did, then, in the way of breaking up one of the oldest beliefs of mankind, is more important than the changes she made in the form of the novel. She wasn’t even a heretic—she simply lived outside of dogmatic belief. She lived in the naturalness of her vocation. The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly. She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.” This assessment is inspiring, as well as astute. It raises the question: how many writers do feel there’s a “naturalness” to their vocation?

  Today, when writing has been taken up by the academy, writers are nudged toward a new form of self-consciousness (ask any MFA student); there are now numerous forums for delivering one’s words aloud—a different test of the text—as well as putting them on paper. Naturalness seems like a loaded word—a lovely word (the s’s trail away) that connotes desirability, but at the same time makes me nervous and a little defensive. Any writer can claim certain territory by interacting with it repeatedly: the objective place becomes subjective, because the writer was drawn to it for personal reasons; Faulkner’s South is different from Flannery O’Connor’s, but once inhabited by both of them, the South will never be the same. (The setting of a work of literature has to do with geography, but of course that terrain can also be imagined: in dystopian literature, the dream is the nightmare.)

  But that other notion—the idea that writers live under their “own sky.” They do. In writing fiction convincingly, what they have to do is point to a specifically literary sky, a sky under which anything is possible, and move their characters through a landscape that’s right for them, even though their scribes may live elsewhere, or prefer other territory. We could literalize Ms. Porter’s metaphorical sky: when writers are absolutely integrated into their own landscape, and have chosen to place their characters there, they have a clear advantage (Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Jim Harrison), but for the many writers who grew up anywhere, and belong nowhere, the sky can’t easily be invoked with conviction. I think that’s why it’s not often referred to—or is referred to with self-consciousness. The fiction writer tends to look as high as a tree, or even a mountain, but often the sky seems too much. Poets consider their sky a lot more than fiction writers. I wonder if the inherent constraints o
f a poem give the poet an impulse to look at something vast, while the many pages available to the fiction writer nevertheless suggest that the writer focus on detail.

  Mrs. Nixon may have had her own sky, one she felt at home under, when she was a child, or remembered wistfully as she spent years under city skies, looking up through smog and obliterating lights. Walking under such gray skies, hiding behind a head scarf pulled over her forehead to provide anonymity as time went on, going out at night so as not to be seen, she might have felt the openness above her both as a vanished world and as a reproach. Her world really did begin to vanish in her lifetime, though her choices in life would have taken her far from that farmland in any case. She believed in facades, as well: she was the one who wanted the White House illuminated at night, its lights bright in celebration. Though she never wanted a life in politics, once she had it, there was no reason the ultimate symbol of what had been attained shouldn’t burn bright.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, in “The Crack-up,” writes: “Fifty years ago we Americans substituted melodrama for tragedy, violence for dignity under suffering. That became a quality that only women were supposed to exhibit in life or fiction.” This was written in the 1930s. The notion of a woman’s “dignity” has been somewhat rethought as repressive, though the number of political wives who have had to apologize for speaking out continues to grow. I don’t think Mrs. Nixon would be surprised by the continued assumption that first ladies are to be seen and not heard. Remember Hillary Clinton furiously backpedaling after dismissing as unimportant the idea of baking cookies, and Michelle Obama excoriated for implying that she hadn’t been unilaterally proud of her country every second of her life? Women are coached on how this is done—how they can say two seemingly contradictory things at the same time, and be true to no one, including themselves—in order to come clean and make amends on The View.

  The view, indeed: depending on who you are, where you stand, and whether you’ve got the chutzpah to stare down the sky.

  Mrs. Nixon Considers Automatic Writing

  The idea is that you pick up a pen and just start writing. Can you imagine? If you saw a thread dangling from your hem, would you pull it and keep unwinding and unwinding until the skirt became a miniskirt, and then nothing but a waistband? If you did, what would you have except something you’d destroyed and couldn’t wear?

  The Letter

  Richard Farnsworth smiled good-bye to the secretary and strolled out of the office, a piece of stationery tucked in his briefcase. John Hayes, his boss, tended to be suspicious of his employees, especially if he thought there might be any romance going on. At the office Christmas party, he’d stood like the former soldier he was when his own wife came in late and threw her arms around him. If you knew John, you could have seen a tiny gleam of pleasure flicker in his eyes, though, as he’d handed her a cup of punch. The office was all about business, and Richard worked hard and wanted to do well—at least as well as he’d done at Princeton.

  “Mr. Farnsworth,” Belinda, the secretary, called after him, as he was walking down the stairs. “Mr. Farnsworth, would you have time to sign this letter?”

  He walked back to the doorway, where she stood smiling inquisitively. Belinda Hayes had just graduated from school and come to work in her father’s office. She had golden hair and smiling cheeks. She was a clever girl, so she might have known that quite a few men in the office admired her beauty, but would not dare approach because she was the boss’s daughter. He took the fountain pen she handed him and put his signature on the document, practicing trailing the final h of his name into a little upward turn, like a check mark approving his own name.

  This was the afternoon he had long been waiting for, through the long winter with snow that piled up everywhere like reams of untouched typing paper. It was not Belinda Hayes, however, to whom he wanted to dedicate the novel he was planning to write. It was his best friend Bill’s sister, Harriet Reese Miller, who had returned from summer camp the day before, and called Richard just as she’d promised she would.

  Harriet Reese Miller, at eighteen, was too old for summer camp, but she loved it so much that the owner of Camp Walla-Wahee had arranged for her to return as a counselor. Though Richard had never seen her in a bathing suit, he imagined her dressed in one every night before he fell asleep, a black bathing suit that drew attention to her beautiful swan neck, with a white band that accentuated her slim waist and provided a clear indication that she was mostly girl and just a little bit swan.

  The street ahead was lined with buildings where angels peered from pilasters and columns supported impossibly heavy weights, like performers whose act involved standing stock-still. It was the act performers wanted you to notice, not them, because they were mere instruments of transformation. He looked at the sky and saw the clouds slowly drifting, like sentences trailing other sentences, growing wispy and evaporating if they were not recorded. He should be writing his book, he knew that, but he needed a job so he could save the money to marry Harriet, and when that book was closed, when she was his very own, he would have the courage to take on anything in the world. He noticed, again, the Corinthian column, with its ornate top, and patted his hair to make sure he looked neat, stood upright because rising an inch higher made him feel a bit more powerful. He had learned from his boss’s manner, without being told.

  He went to a florist’s and gazed at the flowers, imagining them as a bouquet Harriet would hold in front of her, walking slowly toward the altar. But today he could pick only one, the perfect flower for the most beautiful girl. He considered Queen Anne’s lace, but his love was an all-American girl, so he decided that was too regal. And if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, perhaps it would be more imaginative to select something other than a rose? “Does she have a favorite color?” asked the perky young woman behind the counter. Of course! Her favorite color was . . . well, it might be pink. He had never asked, he realized. He remembered the white belt of her bathing suit and decided white might be better. White suggested purity, but also conjured up his secret vision. He pointed to a vase that contained a stalk of something whose name had as many syllables as his heart had constant thoughts of her. The flower was called “delphinium,” and it had many, many blossoms all the way up its tall stalk to the still tightly closed tip, which, too, would flower as time went on. It was carefully wrapped in a cone of lavender paper and tied with a pale green ribbon, whose ends were made to curl into happy confusion as the young woman ran a scissors over the tips.

  Back on the street, he walked until he turned in to the park where she said that she would meet him. He was early, because choosing the flower had not taken as long as he’d anticipated, but still he had to write his note. He wanted it to have the immediacy of something deeply felt, but also seem to have been written spontaneously. One of his fears in embarking on his other project, his book, was that so much time would be spent that in every word one might hear the ticking of the clock. He had spoken to no one but Harriet about his dream of being a writer. He would write their love story, but it would be one that took place in the future, without time passing and parents hovering and the obligations of the office swarming him like worker bees surrounding the queen. Their story would reveal itself as the stars did, small but distinct, sometimes unobserved, but always there in the night sky to lead the way, to remind people of a world whose horizons knew no bounds.

  He sat on a bench and began his note, the tip of the lucky pen that Harriet had given him for his birthday caressing the paper in the same sure but gentle way he dreamed of caressing her.

  “Dearest Heart,” he wrote, then paused. In the distance, two elderly ladies walked arm in arm, their hats as feathered as if birds had dared to perch atop them. What advice might two older ladies have for him about how best to express himself to the one he loved? He almost stood, but thought better of it. They might be frightened by his sudden intensity. He did not think he could keep his voice calm, neutral, as he always did in the office. They passed
by, bird-heads bobbing, and he wondered why ladies selected such hats, unless perhaps they had a secret wish to fly away. At night, birds nested and were not seen, just as the hats resided in their boxes. But what were all these thoughts, when his Harriet did not particularly like hats, and wore them only because it was expected? She wore no hat when she raced into the water, unless you might call a swimming cap a hat. Oh, she might wear a sun hat with a wide brim if she sat on the beach, but still he did not think she was the sort of girl who liked a hat, or who needed one to be beguiling. No, when he closed his eyes, he saw her in the black bathing suit with her neck stretched high, her eyes squinting in the sunlight under no hat brim, only her curly hair, slightly reddish blond, sheltering her from the sun’s rays and falling to her shoulders. In the future, he thought, there might not be so many hats. Hadn’t bathing suits at first had long skirts that had become shorter and shorter until now they were cropped into short pants that hugged the torso? Perhaps hats would also become smaller, no more than a gesture, like a comma. But he was lost again in speculation, putting off writing the letter the same way he delayed writing his book.