Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (7 page)

At the beach, Mrs. Nixon liked to draw sea creatures in the sand with her big toe. She was also good at drawing the chambered nautilus. She thought anyone could do a starfish. She sometimes did octopi, though they were unlikely to be in the water. She was not sure whether the Portuguese men-of-war were in the Florida waters, so she continued to outline octopi, much smaller than scale. Her husband preferred the pool. Actually, reading in a chair by the pool.

She often hummed “Camelot.” She had loved the musical, but of course Camelot had other associations. Robert Kennedy, after his brother’s death, recited from Shakespeare, in his thick Boston accent: “And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night /And pay no worship to the garish sun.” It was Mrs. Kennedy who had called their time in the White House “Camelot.” Was it Mrs. Kennedy, or had she just gone along with that?

Mrs. Nixon played a game with her grandchild Jennie Eisenhower. “Where’s Patricia?” she’d say, covering her own eyes and lowering
her hands with a sudden, surprised smile. “Where’s Pat?” she’d say. “Where’s Jennie, then?” she’d ask. Mixed up, Jennie would sometimes put her hands over her own eyes. “And where is the St. Patrick’s Babe?” Mrs. Nixon would say, looking puzzled. Jennie would sometimes point at Mrs. Nixon, sometimes at one of her toys. “Where’s the White Sister?” Mrs. Nixon would say (remembering having been called that when she worked with TB patients). “Miss Vagabond?” she would ask, drawing out the syllables but not so they would be scary. Her husband had referred to her that way in a letter, noting her love of travel. “Is Grandma in the room?” she’d ask, and Jennie would laugh, pointing.

A
. A. Milne’s play
The Romantic Age,
written in 1922, the first play in which Thelma Ryan, then sixteen, acted, indirectly spoke to her upbringing by being about romance versus reality, where reality is defined by domesticity. Milne’s play often refers to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. There is also much talk of food, and of the importance of cooking and of being in the kitchen. (Until her premature death, Mrs. Ryan baked pastry for her three children when they came home from school.)

Much is made of the character Melisande, whose unusual name (which the playwright seems to have fallen in love with, having the characters repeat it and discuss its bestowal over and over) has been given by her father. Her mother misunderstood what her husband said (as women often do in plays of this period) and thought she was agreeing to name their child Millicent. In any event, Melisande is called Sandy by her mother. Having many permutations of one’s name would be familiar to Buddy, known more formally as Thelma Ryan.

The play is not so much about mistaken identity as about appearances. The odd Gervase (as opposed to the generically
named Bobby, the spurned suitor), lost in the woods in his bizarre cape/costume, turns out to be more stable than his behavior at first indicates. We learn that he is a stockbroker. Stable versus a vagabond. He and Melisande get together, but not before she confronts him with her awareness that he is not exactly a dashing knight who has come to her rescue. He then confronts her with the reality of
her
life: housekeeping. Nevertheless, this being a didactic comedy, she is still his “Princess.” Their union is going to work out (farewell, prosaic Bobby), and at the end of the play Melisande/not-Millicent /Sandy/non-Princess/Princess is in the kitchen, cooking.

Mrs. Nixon, very domestic, sewed and cooked for her family, even, as a senator’s wife, ironing her husband’s trousers until there was so much talk that this was de trop that she stopped.

In
The Romantic Age,
Mother is ailing—vaguely ailing—and has a crush on her doctor. In reality, Mrs. Nixon’s mother, dying of Bright’s disease and liver cancer, lived briefly at her doctor’s house, which was not so unusual in those days.

In the play, the concept of romance is suspect, yet essential. “There’s romance everywhere if you look for it,” Gervase Mallory exclaims. The message seems to be: have your illusions, have them punctured, realize that conventional ideas about romance are silly, be more practical (while still in love), and reinflate as a woman presiding over her kitchen.

Interesting dialogue from
The Romantic Age:

Gervase (showing the ring on his finger): Yes, my fairy godmother gave me a magic ring. Here it is.

Melisande (looking at it): What does it do?

Gervase (pointing to ring): You turn it round once and think very hard of anybody you want, and suddenly the person you are thinking of appears before you.

Melisande: How wonderful! Have you tried it yet?

Gervase: Once . . . That’s why you are here.

Melisande: Oh! (Softly.) Have you been thinking of me?

Gervase: All night.

Melisande: I dreamed of you all night.

Gervase (happily): Did you, Melisande? How dear of you to dream of me! (Anxiously.) Was I—was I all right?

Melisande: Oh, yes!

Gervase (pleased): Ah! (He spreads himself a little and removes a speck of dust from his sleeve.)

Years later, in 1938, Mrs. Nixon auditioned for
The Dark Tower,
to be performed by the Whittier Community Players. Mr. Nixon also auditioned. Like any good young American, he knew about romance and knew the moment he saw her that he would marry Thelma Ryan (then not quite twenty-six). She was prescient only in sensing—as he sensed about his bride-to-be—that important things awaited them, but wasn’t sure about getting involved with him. As we know, though she was never as smitten as Melisande, in the role she acted much earlier, she changed her mind.

I
n the play
Broken Dishes,
by Martin Flavin, Mrs. Nixon, then nineteen and enrolled at Fullerton Junior College under the name Patricia Ryan, had the best role, yet again. At least as the prettiest of three sisters, and the one most often onstage.

The situation: Elaine (Mrs. Nixon) is in love with a deliveryman named Bill, whom her mother considers beneath her. Clever and intent upon defying her mother and marrying Bill, Elaine takes the opportunity of her mother’s and unattractive sisters’ absence not to do what she is expected to do (the dishes) but to persuade her hapless father, Cyrus, to give the wedding his blessing. He, too, feels that he should be doing the dishes; his wife, Jenny, has told him to do them. She legislates the rules. It is well known in the family that she married beneath herself. She is not kind. As with
The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams, which followed years later, we observe a delusion of happiness that becomes unhappiness as it boomerangs back. Women in plays of this period seem to have many self-sustaining delusions that ultimately also punish others.

Nice, naïve Cyrus is tricked and ends up giving permission for
his daughter’s marriage without knowing it, then feels obliged to allow the wedding to take place. The minister doesn’t seem to know what is going on. He is deaf—ah, the miracle of finding a deaf minister just when you need one!—and, although his other senses are operative, he performs the ceremony while Cyrus, and the audience, anticipates what hell there will be to pay when the awful wife and her ugly, unmarried daughters return. This is
Cinderella
without the shoe; we strongly suspect the evil sisters may prevail.

But first, there is much running around by the prospective bridegroom: hiding (he breaks a vase), confusing Dad by disappearing and reappearing. The wedding takes place—the wedding gown, like the deaf minister, is quickly found—but thereafter Dad, who has had too much “hard cider,” becomes ill. Elaine feels it is incumbent upon her to stay and nurse her father back to health rather than go on a honeymoon with her groom, who runs off too quickly—heaven knows, he must think this is how things are done in this family—then returns to reclaim his wife.

Home comes Cyrus’s wife, Jenny. She had cautioned against leaving cutlery soaking but finds cutlery soaking. A broken vase. Teacup handles, too. It’s all a mess, and we feel Elaine will not assert herself but rather stay in this matriarch-ruled family forever, though when Bill unexpectedly becomes assertive (he’s been an aw-shucks kind of guy himself) and insists that his bride leave with him, he does prevail. Someone, we think, managed to get out.

But not before Elaine’s big speech. She tells her mother that if there’s wreckage in the family, it isn’t the broken dishes per se but metaphorical wreckage Jenny has caused by being overbearing and self-absorbed. Just about then, a stranger enters. A stranger, but not such a stranger: it is Chester Armstrong, whom Jenny has used as a cudgel throughout her marriage, ever since she loved him as a little girl, and he ostensibly loved her. By the time he has
become what Jenny has presented him as being (with his luxurious hair and diamond rings), it is because he is a con man, in disguise. He is on the run from the law, so he finds their house in order to hide (and escape through a window the minute the police arrive). Exposed as a criminal and a fake (including wearing a black wig; when Jenny knew him, he was a redhead who went by the nickname Brick, which, in this play, would seem, more aptly, to refer to Cyrus’s mental state). He’s gone again—leaving Jenny to confront the truth. He was never a hero: not hers, not anyone’s. Kind Cyrus does not rub it in. He tries to smooth things over, so Jenny will not be devastated.

We are wiser at the play’s conclusion. The henpecked husband has behaved out of character (he lies about Chester’s presence to the police), but he has also acted to protect his wife. Elaine and her new husband find the courage to leave and start a new life. Mom has confronted reality and is humbled. The little lies by which we live have popped like so many bubbles of dishwashing liquid in the sink. At play’s end, Mom dons her apron, in preparation for doing the dishes.

So: we have characters who are afflicted (the minister, by his bad hearing; Dad, by his obtuse good nature; the sisters, by their unattractiveness). Then we have the girl with gumption, ambition, cleverness, and beauty. She wins. Bette Davis wins, Mrs. Nixon (Patricia Ryan) wins. Men are untrustworthy impostors, like Chester, or kind (if underachieving) good guys: Cyrus is lovable and not quite up to the task of being a man. Bill stakes his claim to his bride and says he will leave town if she won’t leave her family, making her take a stand. But it works out. We have to think that, even for Jenny, it works out, because her wickedness has been taken away from her; she will no longer be able to invoke the ostensibly handsome, perfect Chester. Of course, the audience has long ago
been told to believe that people must face the truth in order to get on with things.

Broken Dishes
was written the year of the stock market crash, in the period between two shattering world wars. The world was safe for democracy, and, domestically, things would have to be sorted out, too. Strong women were still feared, and presented as shrewish. Weak men were pitied or looked down on: real men had to govern the household as well as fight for their country. This is a play about a woman who, while acquainted with suffering, has spent her life taking the upper hand, punishing a man who is not the enemy (but who has not been her savior, either). Cyrus (an old-fashioned name, even a bit feminine, compared to Sam and Bill), like America itself, has to wake up. Cyrus has to seize the day in order to seize his life. But he does it so nicely, so protectively. He’s a bigger man than he seems. He’s the good, gentle American (if a bit silly), but he can be pushed around only up to a point. Elaine acts, while her parents can only respond. She could falter, but she does not. Mrs. Nixon’s character contrives to marry the man she loves and leaves her parents—wiser, surely a bit humbled—to their new domestic arrangement while she and Bill embark on their new life.

Elaine’s note to self: You’re a clever girl, so use your wits; don’t accept oppression; stick up for what you believe in; love whom you love, and demonstrate courage. If you act correctly, your actions will liberate others as well. Patricia Ryan’s note to self: ditto.

When
Broken Dishes
was first performed in New York, on November 5, 1929, the
Evening World
enthused: “For one jaded by jazz, songs and music, there’s a worth-while change offered at the Ritz Theater. And judging from its reception, the players will be jolly well tired of reading their lines before another offering gets a chance in the house in 48th Street. . . . Donald Meek [is] perfection himself. Received with fervor.” The reviewer is suggesting
that, though the play is a comedy, it is nevertheless substantial, entertaining, or informative to those “jaded by jazz.” Things were being shaken up in the society, so the play can also be seen as letting the status quo get shaken up in order to reaffirm it. It isn’t a “jazzy” play but rather typical: family life; an examination of the roles of men and women that also exposes the unhappiness caused by romantic delusions. F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing at this time, knew the same. Take away your illusions, and what do you have? Someone who has been brought up short, whose self-justifying lie has been exposed. And, folks, Jenny doesn’t go out and dance the Charleston, she gets some humility. She does the dishes. Elaine, though—youthful, pretty, clever Elaine—seems to have managed to escape doing the dishes for all time. She’s off, like Mrs. Nixon, married to the man she loves, believing in his ability to get a better job, to have a future that will be all the more perfect because she believes in him.

RN made lists when considering both sides of a question. Mrs. Nixon found one that listed the pros and cons, circa 1954, of continuing to run for political office versus doing what she wanted and withdrawing. She kept it as a souvenir and told her daughter about it years later. She probably kept it because it allowed her to point to the moment when things could have been different. But she’d already caved: pursued by RN, she’d given in and married him, though freedom had meant so much to her. In the play, Elaine leaves only when she has—
because
she has—a partner, Bill. We never hear that freedom, in the abstract, is important to her, though the attainment of freedom is a subject of the play. “Some convince selves (they are) indispensable—but not the case,” a seemingly humble RN noted (his item 3) as a reason to aspire beyond the Senate.