Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

by Ann Beattie

  A couple of days later, RN took his wife and daughters to church, where the minister prayed that the President’s health be restored. RN then invited some reporters back to his house (living room), and, of course, RN was hardly spontaneous, if anyone might have mistaken his gesture: “My first meeting with the press, in which my words, my actions, even my mood, would be reported to the nation, for me was a crisis. I wanted to be prepared for it as best I could. Even my manner of my meeting the press, no matter what I said, could be subject to misinterpretation. . . . If I refused to see the press altogether, it might indicate a lack of confidence or even fear—and this would be a reflection upon the whole Administration.” RN put on an act. He doesn’t tell us he rehearsed his lines, but he does tell us he was guarded, fearful, intent on making a good impression. Where was Mrs. Nixon, even if she vanished into the house, into the background? Did she try to overhear, or did she go upstairs, braid her daughter’s hair, hem some clothes . . . What did she do? A minor character doesn’t disappear just because the major character loses sight of her. Does the phone ring unexpectedly? If so, should we assume she answers? Is anything served to the guests? The Nixons don’t have servants. It would boggle the mind to assume RN might do the serving.

  Of course an essay about oneself is going to be self-serving. (Six Crises was written pre–memoir craze, in which self-bashing became almost as much fun as complaining about everybody else.) If you are an animate version of the Sun, there is no reason that you should constantly look toward Pluto and Mercury. But for those of us who know there is a solar system, exactly how at ease are we going to be if planets or galaxies or stars we know are there simply flicker out? How much are we going to trust an inadequately narrated story?

  Many do trust journalism, though recent problems with Pulitzers having to be returned from The Washington Post and plagiarism at The New York Times and The New Republic have opened people’s eyes. Readers of fiction—which is supposed to be artifice—have a somewhat easier time, because the narrator, when not taking the pose of being some transparent, hovering presence, is a character in the story—meaning, as potentially flawed as anyone under his or her consideration. The unreliable narrator is sometimes insistent about being a force in the story (André Gide), sometimes cleverly withholding, even in ostensibly making a confession (Ford Madox Ford), and sometimes simply someone so acclimated to warping the truth that the purpose is to puff out a fog of words, as the main character prevaricates.

  Russell Banks and Peter Taylor have been interested in narrators who seem to reveal themselves but gradually present contradictions (Banks’s “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”), or who never reveal the cards held close to the vest, though the reader, as the story progresses, watches the vest disintegrate (Taylor’s “The Old Forest”). In fiction, our tendency is to believe what the narrator tells us. We have no orientation to the story initially; we’re at the mercy of the information given to us. Whether or not we are of the same class as the characters isn’t a big issue—at least, not consciously. We are taught to trust voice. We are taught to listen to someone’s tone (a bit angry? defensive?), as well as to the words spoken. Autistic people, who can’t “read” tone, have a problem because of this lack of perception. Nuance, inflection, allusion . . . it doesn’t exist in their awareness to inform them. A smile is a world apart from a grimace, but an autistic person does not perceive the difference. Fiction is all about covert winks, deliberate stumbles, things happening off the page, allusions that function as scaffolding. Metafiction announces, and inherently questions, itself.

  In primary school we were taught to give earnest reports on, say, corn production in Kansas, and we came to believe in the reliable story. Like RN, we think we should stick to the facts. But what story unfolds without complexity? We are not supposed to digress (“I might be wrong here, but I think the light was red. . . .”) because we are telling someone else what happened. But why are we telling the story? Why is such value placed on what happened? Maybe we’re telling the story because we were in a fender bender, and we want sympathy. But even when we tell what we think of as a simple story, listeners form impressions the storyteller can’t shake: X has always been a bad driver; X is gesturing wildly, a bit too defensively; X should have been at work when this happened and has not said why she wasn’t. We’d go crazy if we did nothing but listen to subtext, read body language, and extrapolate meaning in terms of what we know about the person telling the story while simultaneously introspecting about our own desires, assumptions, and fears. But at least when the storyteller is present, and admits to telling a story, we can fleetingly experience these things as additional elements. We understand that at least two stories are happening simultaneously (theirs and ours). Fiction is no different, except that we have not a person in front of us, but rather that person’s voice (which we make a mistake to conflate with the author’s, even if we’ve met the writer). The disembodied voice is more difficult, and because writers know this, they usually work to create a character as well as a narrative voice, trying to make the character come into focus so that the character will seem physically as well as psychically recognizable, and therefore more convincing. If only voice is relied on (Beckett), we are startled.

  Peter Taylor often adopts first-person narrators. There is a faux friendliness that can proceed for some time before the reader begins to suspect something is up. Many reviewers never understood what Taylor does, and still think that affable, Southern Peter Taylor was writing about affable, slightly loquacious, and slightly befuddled Southerners—but aren’t Southerners that way! Perhaps they often are, so that, really, Peter Taylor set himself a very hard task: both to accurately invoke and to expose the narrator. To ask us to rely on our knowledge of geography, terrain that we may not have seen, and how it was “back then,” though many of his readers never experienced it—the unmistakable smell of apple pies baking that Grandma never made for us, though we believe in Grandma’s apple pie. It’s sacred. It’s our American myth. It’s unreal.

  RN was not exactly an unreliable narrator. He believed he could tell a story for his convenience and still persuade. If he’s telling the story of General Eisenhower’s coronary, then it is about the General, and it is about RN, the General’s Vice President. Leave it to the ladies’ magazines to sweep up and let us know Mamie Eisenhower’s three rules for functioning in times of stress. (A hypothetical example, but I’ll play my own game: make fudge; talk to your mother on the phone; put on your fur coat to feel warm and safe.) If RN’s nonfiction account of this “crisis” had been fiction, Mrs. Nixon’s dropping in and out would have looked like it was orchestrated by an inexperienced writer who assumed that, at the writer’s whim, a character could disappear and conveniently reappear.

  I think that RN put his wife in his account because he was reporting truthfully (to his way of thinking) what happened. Because he never sees (or acknowledges) her as a real force, though, he lets her get away because she probably did drift away. She was used to doing that. My inclination would be to track her, though: upstairs, into her bedroom, into the bathroom, wherever one had to go to find her. If everything is really as RN says, then the way she puts on her nightgown would affirm his insight, her whispered assurances to her daughters would contain no ironies (intentional or unintentional), we—along with the writer—could risk including her at the conclusion. But all we have is a mention of her at a dinner given by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and then her husband continues his story, in which General Eisenhower had numerous health problems, but he, RN, has passed through this “crisis” and learned a lesson he wants us to understand, as well. As usual, it has something to do with not being a coward, with facing things down, with acting. In the last paragraph, he grandly widens his scope so that we understand: “They were to a less and different extent personal crises for me. But even more, they were potential constitutional crises of the greatest magnitude for the nation.”

  Oh. And upstairs, does Mrs. Nixon fumble and slip into her
nightgown with a sigh? Does she go to Julie’s bedroom and peek in and wonder if Julie might be pretending to be asleep to spare her tired mother from having to say something else consoling? And because sleep has something in common with death, does Mrs. Nixon think back to her mother’s illness, when she sat at her side through the night as her mother lay dying at the home of the doctor who diagnosed her illness? Does she recall sitting, later, at the bedsides of TB patients, and who knows (though anyone could guess) what happened to them?

  The fiction writer in me wants to know: who let the dog out?

  Prophetic Moments

  Princess Diana’s sisters, upon learning of her reservations about marrying Prince Charles: “Too late, Duch, your face is on the tea towels.”

  Mrs. Nixon’s best friend, Helene Drown, upon learning that Eisenhower had chosen Nixon as his running mate: “Oh, Pat, you’re going to be in the history books!”

  My Meeting with Mrs. Nixon

  Yes, I met her. There was a store in downtown Washington called Woodward & Lothrop (“Woodies”), where my mother often took me shopping. My mother always got more pleasure from dressing her daughter than from dressing herself—with the exception of high heels. One pair for her, one for me.

  I wasn’t a Birkenstock sort of girl. I wore high heels to college.

  I met Mrs. Nixon not in the White House, but in the shoe department of Woodies. Tricia was with her, but at no time did she say anything. She looked pleasant but unapproachable, while Mrs. Nixon seemed almost giggly. Several Secret Service agents were in the area. Perhaps more I couldn’t see.

  Mrs. Nixon was trying on shoes. If Tricia didn’t need shoes, or if nothing appealed to her, I don’t know. But many shoes appealed to Mrs. Nixon. Some had a higher heel than I’d seen her wear in photographs. One pair had an ankle strap, but she didn’t even close the strap—just slid her foot in and out, talking to her daughter about something I couldn’t hear.

  “Do you belong with that group?” my mother said to me. It was the same comment she made to my father, those times he stared in restaurants and listened too intently to another table’s conversation.

  Every salesperson in the area was pretending not to notice the Nixons. Mrs. Nixon sat with her coat folded on a chair next to her and shopping bags on top of it. Her daughter sat on the other side, with her coat on the chair next to her. The coats and packages were blockades, in case anyone wanted to plop down and visit. My mother was not even sneaking looks; she feigned interest in a mannequin being dressed in the lingerie department.

  A Secret Service agent looked at me, blank-faced; I dropped my eyes and leaned a bit toward my mother. I was twenty-two years old, back in Washington on vacation from graduate school in Connecticut. It was 1969. In a bag at my feet was a long nightgown (Connecticut was really cold in those days) and some other small purchases, I think. But the shoes were what I was really interested in, impractical as they were. They had a very high heel and were a burnt orange color with black ribbons twined across the front. The toes were neither round nor pointy. I remember these shoes so distinctly because my mother bought them for me. It would have been counterproductive to tell my mother that I wore several pairs of kneesocks under fishing boots to walk the pathways of the snowy campus. The beautiful heels could be an art object. Come spring, I could wear them.

  The Vietnam war was going on and on and on. That totally left my mind, that day. There seemed no larger context than Mrs. Nixon and Tricia and their coats and bags and . . . the fact that she was trying on the same shoes I was! These were not Mrs. Nixon shoes. They were not. She’d topple exiting an airplane. And they wouldn’t be comfortable to stand in a receiving line. Dancing? She’d have to be pretty adept.

  “No?” she said, turning her foot sideways.

  She was speaking to me. And I was sitting there with the same shoes on both feet, not standing to try them out because I was so mesmerized by her.

  “We wore these in the forties, didn’t we?” she said to my mother.

  Indeed my mother had. Every picture of my mother showed her in such shoes. This color, though, was new. My mother’s shoes had been black or brown, or white, in the springtime.

  I felt it, the bond between the two women.

  “You get them because they’re beautiful shoes,” Mrs. Nixon said to me.

  This doubled my chances: though they were expensive, both my mother and Mrs. Nixon admired them.

  A Secret Service agent picked up Tricia’s bag. Tricia looked at him briefly, wondering if he was hinting that they should leave. He stood there with the bag. Then Mrs. Nixon noticed what Tricia was noticing while at the same time noticing that we, too, looked at him, puzzled. And then all four of us smiled, understanding that this was a man who’d had enough of shopping. He just wanted to go.

  “I’ll get you those,” my mother said decisively, reaching for her wallet.

  “I’m going to be the customer they hate to have, who can’t find anything that’s exactly right,” Mrs. Nixon said.

  But no one hated Mrs. Nixon. Not me, as someone who hated her husband’s politics; not the blasé salesladies who would talk about it for days to come; not my mother, who had established a little blip of recognition based not on who she and Mrs. Nixon were in 1969, but on their having been young women who had bought high heels and worn them to work during the Second World War.

  Woodies is gone. My shoes are gone (how could that be?). When we left, my mother said: “I raised you well, not to do something silly, like ask for an autograph.”

  I Didn’t Meet Her

  But you wanted me to have met her, didn’t you? Because books are always about the author, however well or badly hidden, as well as being about the book’s subject. Writing just isn’t impersonal. My story brought me forward, for a moment. Even if my little story wasn’t very momentous—or maybe because it wasn’t—it seemed real. It was a clue about the author and the author’s project, but now has turned out to be a lie. So the work of fitting together the author, her subject, and how to understand the text is suddenly thrown back to the reader. You certainly won’t fall into that trap again.

  Readers have a desire to know the author. They can read biographies. If the author is hip enough, they can read the review and look at the author’s photo in People. They can look at pictures of “Literary Lions” in evening wear at the New York Public Library in New York magazine. I do. I study those pictures. I study them because they’re all I have of the person behind the text.

  If I’d met her, it would at least partially explain why I was writing about Mrs. Nixon. The reader could understand the spark—though just a little spark, granted—that must have ignited something in the writer’s brain.

  I didn’t meet her—no more fooling around, nothing follows to contradict this—but I did shop with my mother at Woodies during the time Mrs. Nixon was First Lady. As a fiction writer, I did an okay job of bringing in the Secret Service—a detail you’d expect, with just a little something erratic added. I loved those shoes and can’t imagine where they went because I certainly never wore them out, and they would be as stylish now as they were then.

  My mother got old and wore sensible lace-up shoes that ladies her age wear. I have a ridiculously large shoe wardrobe—a way, perhaps, to resist moving into old age; one friend recently wore her super-high-heeled Etro ankle straps to my door, carrying another pair of shoes in her purse. She knew I’d squeal in admiration, and—since they didn’t fit her comfortably (or she was kind enough to say they didn’t)—she was there to hear my squeal and to step out of them and generously give them to me. They fit perfectly, and are the prettiest shoes I own.

  But how much do you want to hear about me and shoes? Even if shoes are a way of talking about something else?

  Is what you’ve been reading fiction or nonfiction? Or is it my memoir, which appears—like certain weeds, I can’t resist saying—only in the cracks? Years ago, in the seventies, a journalist who later became a friend had just become editor of a maga
zine and was receiving manuscripts that were subtitled “A True Story.” Then it turned out they were—by the author’s admission—fiction. Similarly, he received stories in which he recognized real people, barely disguised. That, however, he could grant was fiction. But about the others . . . the ones that identified themselves as being true when they were not: how was he to understand, exactly, what was going on? “Ann, what is fiction?” he said, striking terror into my heart. When he asked, I thought he wanted me to get into some philosophical discussion. “You can ask them, if you’re confused,” I said, lamely. But didn’t I wonder whether they would tell the truth? Oprah once believed in “emotional truth,” until there was something of an uproar and she changed her stance.

  While I was working on this book, I was sent the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology: the best from the small magazines. In it was a poem: “Skinny-Dipping with Pat Nixon,” by David Kirby. I almost jumped out of the chair. Someone else, thinking about Mrs. Nixon! (I am quoting only part of the poem.)

  But now I’m the age you are in the portrait, and I can see

  how hard it was for you, how different it would have been

  if you’d had a good marriage, a good man.

  I would get in that pool with you, Pat; as the guests swirl, unseeing,

  you’d turn your back to me and wriggle out of

  your old-fashioned white undies, dive in and surface

  where I wait, then throw your arms around my neck.