Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

by Ann Beattie

  Along the same lines (no pun intended), this past summer I was on the porch, reading essays on poetry by Louise Glück, all of them astute, remarkable, succinctly written:

  A case can be made that publication reinstates vulnerability, collapsing the distance between both poet and materials and poet and reader. This overlooks the artist’s most stubborn dilemma, itself a corollary of distance: specifically, the impossibility of connecting the self one is in the present with the self that wrote. The gap is both absolute and immediate: toward a finished work, only the most tormented sense of relationship remains, not a sense of authorship at all. The work stands as a reprimand or reproach, a marker permanently fixing an unbearable distance, the distance between the remote artist self, miraculously fluent, accidentally, fleetingly perceptive, and the clumsy, lost self in the world. Critical assault of a finished work is painful in that it affirms present self-contempt. What it cannot do, either for good or ill, is wholly fuse, for the poet, the work and the self; the vulnerability of the poet to critical reception remains complicated by that fact. And the sting the poet may suffer differs from the risks of more immediate exposure: the ostensibly exposed self, the author, is, by the time of publication, out of range, out of existence, in fact.

  That’s it. You write by darting out of the spaces in the stone wall to show yourself and to go about your business, or just to have some fun, then return to hide in what have become, to you, the already intricate, private spaces, and whatever catacombs exist within the wall—whatever complex systems you use for protection and survival—nobody really knows. If you’re a chipmunk, nobody much cares.

  Finishing any writing project, I always feel myself simultaneously retreating. Though you have to stay alert, be open to possibility, continue until the last period, or whatever punctuation serves as your final, tiny ending, I still feel instinctively when I’m nearing the end of something. There’s a second in which (because all writing is about altering time) things flicker into focus, though their illumination presages their diminishment, their going out of focus. The second you have it is the second it escapes you. So you let it go out into the world at the same time you retreat into the spaces between rocks. Writer as chipmunk.

  Barthelme, in catalog notes to an exhibition of work by Sherrie Levine: “A picture on top of a picture. What happens in the space between the two.”

  Me, on Mrs. Nixon (I’m not using a question mark, either): We can’t be conflated, but what happens in the space in between.

  As with paper dolls, so with writing: pick your favorite and dress it, talk to it, animate it. That’s how imagination works: you talk to it, it talks back. You’re playing both parts until the moment the paper doll takes on a life of its own and says it wants to go live with someone more interesting, or that you have a big nose.

  Mrs. Nixon didn’t talk back to me—I’m not that far gone—but sometimes I’d write a sentence and feel it was my sentence, not hers, so I’d delete it and wait. All the while, I was reading books about him. It was difficult to lift her out of his context, but if I’d let her stay there, she would have hidden forever. She’d put on her scarf and go out only at night, and not say a word to herself that I could overhear, because she wasn’t crazy. So I began to look at her in the background. Sometimes she came forward and sometimes she didn’t. I left her where she was if she didn’t give any inclination I might move her. I realize that I was acting on my own cues, but I began to experience the amazement James Merrill felt with his Ouija board, as he suspended disbelief and responded to spirits who gave him information. (If you haven’t read Alison Lurie’s book about David Jackson and James Merrill invoking the spirit world, do: Familiar Spirits.)

  Mrs. Nixon didn’t make it easy for a writer to write about her—nor was that any obligation. There isn’t anything confessional written down (that I know of). We don’t have the advantage of reading the stories of John Cheever and later—to our surprise—learning that we are suddenly able to read his diaries, so different from his fiction: such a different sensibility. Shocked readers held their breath until the next excerpt of his diaries was published in The New Yorker. Of course Mrs. Nixon was interviewed by her daughter when Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote her mother’s biography, but the two were so simpatico that Julie Nixon Eisenhower was always highly aware of her mother’s boundaries. How did Mrs. Nixon—rarely fierce, by all accounts—maintain them? I don’t have the answer to that. Sometimes people engender enough respect that others back away. Sometimes they’re lucky. There are many possibilities. Occasionally a photograph betrayed her true emotions, but she did not confirm or deny what anyone perceived. She didn’t let us have a lot of information through words. I’m convinced she gave up on them.

  I have no trouble understanding that. Writers may love words, but most also mistrust them. It’s why so many writers like action: rafting; hunting; dancing; hiking into forests and countries where language, alone, doesn’t define the experience. Words create an illusory reality. Being adept with language, writers often reel back from their desks wondering: does this just sound good, or do I mean what I’ve said? Sometimes the truth is, you don’t know. Once it’s there, the words arranged, alliterating and alluding, it seems shapely and eloquent, and its existence—its tidiness and length and depth—can seduce the writer as well as the reader. If it does, the writer will fail to write the real story.

  Mrs. Nixon’s prominence when I was a child and a teenager couldn’t help registering on me, even if what I saw dismayed me and made me want to stay far away from that world. The haunting songs Mrs. Nixon and my parents’ generation understood in terms of the war, I registered only as sad, filled with longing and promise. But those were still the sounds to which I fell asleep. I don’t have love letters exchanged between my parents, but I do have a note to my mother that my father signed “Jimmie.” He was so young, he hadn’t yet changed the spelling to “Jimmy.” I have a photograph taken in a picture booth of my parents, both nineteen, that proves they were in love, and that every real love is unique. Mrs. Nixon was my nonmother—my mother was youthful and eccentric, often one of the kids. As a voter, she was registered (I like the metaphor) “Independent.”

  Though there was a huge gap between my mother and Mrs. Nixon, I sensed that she was something my mother might have become, if not for fate. If you married a man and that man became something else, it could trap a woman. One possibility, when captured, has always been dignity: composure can (at least) land you, with a long pointed horn on your forehead, enclosed with a virgin inside a fence, around which flowers bloom. Not only I, as a young woman, but my mother before me, had escaped being Mrs. Nixon: domestic and modest; picture perfect; always smiling (such a wistful smile, though). A lot of people liked her, but something seemed wrong because she was married to him.

  It seems obvious to me now that she puzzled herself. Someone who had what is euphemistically called “a hard life” moves on, having integrated life’s difficulties. David Halberstam called her “heartbreaking.” He said: “She ha[d] a childhood so harsh it is Dickensian.” To overcome misfortune, Mrs. Nixon became a person who would try things, and who would persevere—quite possibly, it was a mode on which she overrelied. Nixon’s immediate family vehemently did not want him to resign the presidency, even when there was incontrovertible evidence of his guilt.

  There’s all that—the mind keeps going back to that—though the birds seem happier than ever this year. Bright red cardinals (everybody knows those are the males) in among the pink roses, having a drink of water from the fountain, pecking beneath the bird feeder, fledglings learning to fly. It seems they all coexist: the butterfly moving off the flower for the hummingbird; the chipmunk disappearing as the rabbit hops out of the woods. Sure, you can sometimes hear the shrieks at night, find feathers on the grass. But as you rock, you can also have the feeling that you’re pleased to be watching a life you’re not orchestrating, and couldn’t imagine meddling with. If you happen to be a writer, your thoughts might wander
lazily: Did I write before? How exactly was that done? Because even if you stop watching, right that second, and begin writing, even if you write for a very long time and then get something down that pleases you and surprises you and all those other lucky things, you’ll still disappear. You’ll be a different you if your words are ever published, and there will be less and less possibility of ever connecting with them in the same way. You erase yourself every time you write.

  The beach is ten minutes away, but I love to sit on my back porch.

  Mrs. Nixon’s Thoughts, Late-Night Walk, San Clemente

  The Pacific is a grand ocean. It’s oh so pretty to look at. He thinks so, too. We’ve taken many a walk here, but his leg’s been so bad, he still can’t walk. He’s been asleep since just past dinner.

  Oh, it will work out. It will be all right. The doctors have operated, and if only he follows their instructions, which I know he will, now that he has time to take care of himself, it will get better fast.

  Even in such darkness, I can see the little whitecaps.

  He used to take walks and think of me. He called me Miss Pat and sent me a note: “Miss Pat, I took the walk tonight and it was swell because you were there all the time. Why?—because a star fell right in front of me, the wind blowing thru the tops of the palms.” Then all these years passed, and I got my code name, Starlight. We all got fictional names. I wonder if the bestowal made us just a little bit different. People in somebody’s story that was being made up as it went along. Starlight reminds me of “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight . . .” And there’s one up there, tonight: one little star shining bright, people everywhere must be making a wish. Maybe Dolly sees it outside her window in New York.

  Scarf double-knotted to keep the breeze from blowing my hair. What would be so bad if the wind blew it every which way? Out here on the beach with no one to see me, except my little friend the star. Off it comes, and I don’t believe I hear any gasp from the universe. I’ll put it in my pocket and fold it later when I’m inside, with nothing to do. If he’d come along, would he have remembered when my hair was strawberry blond? Silly Dick told me it was “titian-colored.” He always did see things in his special way. When I worked at the department store, I’d try to show the clothes to their best advantage, daintily turning up a cuff, twirling a wide skirt. I’d put on a necklace so the blouse would get more attention. When a gentleman was buying a lady a blouse, he’d want to know if it should match her eyes and be so surprised if I said it should flatter her skin.

  Did he get down on his knees with Henry to pray? Can what that book says be true? If I asked Henry, would he—even once in his life—be capable of just answering yes or no?

  Quiet out here, quiet, quiet, quiet. That’s what Aunt Neva said, when I told her I was marrying Dick. “What are you marrying him for? He’s too quiet.”

  I got my first orchid corsage the day of our wedding. And Dick and I got orchids again, for the wives of the returning POWs. People decorate with them now, like they’re roses. They don’t seem mysterious the way they did, coming from faraway places. I’ve heard there’s a grower in Malibu.

  In the Peking Hotel the chef sculpted a praying mantis from a green pepper.

  Now there was something unexpected. You wonder how such a creative idea like that comes to someone.

  Such a lovely feeling, the scarf deep in my pocket. When men carry them, tucked in a breast pocket with just the edge showing, they never feel them, but this scarf of mine is my sweet little security blanket. I could lie on the beach and pretend the sand was my bed, and the scarf a cover, and the breeze an invisible ceiling fan.

  “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” They say no one knows who wrote that. It was written by “Anonymous.” Lucky Anonymous, who never had to field any questions.

  What to wish for . . . You won’t stop winking till you hear what I want most, will you?

  Chronology

  3/16/1912: Thelma Catherine Ryan born Ely, Nevada, to a farmer and his wife; has half siblings and two brothers, Bill and Tom (both of whom she helps put through school)

  1925–1929: Member of high school drama club; lead in junior year play, The Romantic Age. Also lead in senior year, The Rise of Silas Lapham

  1926: Mother dies of Bright’s disease and liver cancer

  1930: Father dies of tuberculosis

  1932: Attends Fullerton Junior College; lead in play Broken Dishes

  1933: Attends one semester at Columbia University; tours the White House

  1934–1937: Attends University of Southern California, graduates cum laude with B.S. in merchandising, teaching certificate for high school; many jobs (while in school), including salesperson at Bullock’s Wilshire department store, waitress, librarian. Enters movie studio contest to “find a starlet” and is offered a job, but because it is for only one film, refuses

  1937: Meets Richard Nixon when they both act in The Dark Tower as part of Whittier Community Players

  1940: Marries RN (after much internal debate) in a rented room (the Presidential Suite) at Mission Inn, Riverside, California

  1941–1945: RN an attorney in Washington, D.C., Mrs. Nixon a clerk for the Red Cross; RN a naval lieutenant, commissioned to Iowa, Mrs. Nixon works at a bank; RN to South Pacific, Mrs. Nixon in San Francisco as a price analyst for Office of Price Administration

  1946: RN runs for Congress, Mrs. Nixon does research on opponent Jerry Voorhis and helps with campaign; daughter Tricia born

  1948: Daughter Julie born

  1950: RN defeats Helen Gahagan Douglas (who gives him the nickname “Tricky Dick”) for Senate

  1952: RN is chosen as Vice President of Dwight D. Eisenhower; RN gives Checkers speech after he is accused of taking campaign funds; Eisenhower is advised to drop him from the ticket; RN, in an unprecedented move, appeals to the nation on TV; Mrs. Nixon is silently present, as an example of their frugality and honesty, in what he calls her “respectable Republican cloth coat.” The public buys it: RN stays on ticket

  1953–1954: Eisenhower-Nixon elected; RN tells friend Murray Chotiner he will retire from politics after vice presidency (“I still resented being portrayed as a demagogue or a liar or as a sewer-dwelling denizen of a Herblock cartoon”); RN and Mrs. Nixon travel to Venezuela, where car is attacked by anti-American mob, daughters hear about this on the radio

  1956: RN re-elected VP

  1960: RN loses presidential election to John F. Kennedy by a slim margin

  1961: Live in California; RN practices law and writes a book

  1962: RN runs for governor of California and loses; RN publishes book Six Crises, writing about Alger Hiss, the allegations he had a private money fund, Eisenhower’s heart attack, the trip to Venezuela, Khrushchev, and the campaign of 1960

  1963: Moves to New York and practices law; Mrs. Nixon asks him to leave politics for good; RN is doing business in Dallas the day before John Kennedy is shot, hears the news on cab radio

  1965: RN turns 52; reconsiders entering political life, breaking his word to Mrs. Nixon

  1966: RN campaigns for Republican candidates

  1967: RN travels extensively abroad; no mention in his memoirs about Mrs. Nixon being along

  1968: RN runs for President; George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller withdraw; RN wins nomination and election

  1969–1974: As wife of the vice president, and eventually as First Lady, Mrs. Nixon travels to eighty countries. Editing her husband’s speeches et cetera. Mrs. Nixon acquires antiques and many paintings for the White House, holds “candlelight tours,” has “Evenings [of performances] at the White House,” feels there should be more public parks. She visits South Vietnam, the first First Lady to visit a combat zone (she favors amnesty for those who do not serve, at the same time she supports the servicemen)

  1970: Mrs. Nixon goes to Peru in a humanitarian effort after the massive earthquake; shootings at Kent State (Mrs. Nixon is “appal
led”)

  1972: Trip to China; Mrs. Nixon goes alone to Africa

  1973: Roe v. Wade; Mrs. Nixon is pro-choice; she also endorses ERA, wants a woman appointed to the Supreme Court (and never tires of telling RN this). She does not get her way. She spends about five hours a day answering the majority of the mail she receives at the White House. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, her nemeses, and “two of the finest public servants” her husband has ever known, resign in the growing White House scandal about the Watergate break-in

  1974: Return to Venezuela twenty years after initial tumultuous trip; Watergate scandal and eventual resignation of RN as President (Aug. 9, 1974), against Mrs. Nixon’s wishes (her advice had been to destroy the tapes he kept of White House conversations, which proved incriminating); the couple depart for their home La Casa Pacifica, San Clemente, California, after a teary good-bye speech to White House staff, in which RN thanks many and forgets to mention Mrs. Nixon

  1975: Mrs. Nixon gardens, has visits in California with her daughters, takes walks, is reclusive, worries about RN, who has physical problems (phlebitis that nearly kills him); RN is depressed

  1976: Stroke

  1980: Return from California to East Coast; live in East Side NYC town house

  1981: Move to Saddle River, New Jersey

  1984: Mrs. Nixon declines further Secret Service protection

  1991: In a rare public appearance, Mrs. Nixon attends dedication of the Reagan Library with RN