Watergate (16 page)

“You’ll have to thank Betty for this,” said LaRue, putting the picture in his pocket.

“And
you’ll
have to thank the president for suggestin’ such a nice gesture to his little girl.” The senator looked at a button that had lit up on his phone. “Well, I’d best be gettin’ to the floor for a vote.” He rose from his chair and shook LaRue’s hand. “Freddie, you get back here soon with another good judge for me, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” said LaRue.

Eastland walked him to the door, gave him a wink and patted the jacket pocket into which he’d seen him put the picture—as if to tell LaRue that his little romantic secret involving Clarine Lander was safe with Senator James Oliver Eastland.

What the senator did not know, and what LaRue never forgot, was how Clarine Lander remained the keeper of a much bigger secret, remained the one person in the world who could tell him what had really happened, fifteen years before, in the Canadian duck blind where Ike LaRue met his death.

LaRue took a cab back to Foggy Bottom. There were no more Tuesday-night dinners at the Mitchells’ apartment, as there’d been in what he already thought of as “happier days.” So inside Watergate West 310, his own place, he began heating some leftovers for dinner, wondering as he did if there’d been any truly happy days since the long-ago ones he’d stolen with Larrie.

He heard an unexpected knock. With the first of the day’s meetings still on his mind, he felt a momentary fear that this might be Ulasewicz. But he opened the door to find Mrs. Anna Chennault, another Watergate resident, the beautiful still-young Chinese widow of the American general whose “Flying Tigers” had fought the Japs for Chiang Kai-shek. Mrs. Chennault had continued to champion Taiwan in all the years since her husband’s death, but even after the president’s
trip to Red China, she remained an ardent supporter of Richard Nixon. She was an important fundraiser and back channel and, by one or two accounts—which LaRue didn’t believe—the only woman who had ever made the president stray from Pat. LaRue himself had met her several times at the Mitchells’.

“I won’t come in,” she said quickly, batting a fine pair of false eyelashes. “But I wanted to give you this for the Committee. I hear you have some special needs, and this comes from some grateful foreign nationals who are not permitted to contribute by check.”

She handed him an envelope, the third one he’d seen today, and then waved to a man halfway down the hall, asking him to please hold the elevator. She dashed off as if she’d just dropped by to return a cup of sugar.

As his dinner cooked, LaRue spread the envelope’s contents on his coffee table. He counted thirty thousand dollars in cash.

Pat Nixon looked out the hotel window eighteen floors above Park Avenue. It was ridiculous for the campaign to be shelling out for this suite of rooms in which she’d spend less than an hour before the event downstairs and a late-evening flight back to Washington. But there was apparently money to burn, so she let herself stop thinking about it, kicked off her shoes, and called Connie Stuart in the room they’d taken for
her
.

“Can you get hold of Julie for me?” the first lady asked. “And tell her I’m thinking that maybe tomorrow afternoon we could take that same walk we took a week ago? On that little island near the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge?”

Mrs. Stuart said she’d track Julie down.

“Thanks, Connie. I’ll be ready here whenever they come for me.”

The little island in the Potomac was, in most ways, a good bet. The drive from the White House, in a regular car with just two agents, took only five minutes, and the trail, once you got there, was as pretty as any at Camp David. Almost no one would be around, and the agents stayed far enough behind that she and Julie could have an actual non-whispered conversation. And yet, last week the two of them had never quite relaxed. The Watergate complex, on the east side of the river, had glowered like some enemy fortress, and Julie had not been able to stop talking about how the campaign’s headquarters in Phoenix had burned to the ground. (In what little had been reported, the blaze was said to be “suspicious.” As Rose had said the other day: “Gee, you think so?”)

Well, maybe this time she and Julie could look west instead of east, and rise above things. A walk outdoors would still be better than sitting in the Solarium yet again, or going down to the basement bowling alley, where she was beginning to find the speckled red ball too heavy for her arthritic—
slightly
arthritic—right hand.

She noticed a basket of fruit and flowers on the table and thought she ought to read the card. The envelope was marked with a little green-and-gold harp, symbol of the American Irish Historical Society, the organization honoring her tonight. The flowers were lovely out-of-season ones, and they took her mind back more than thirty years to the May basket in which Dick had hidden her engagement ring.

She extracted the note, expecting to find greetings from the Society’s president, Mr. Joseph T. P. Sullivan—as always, she’d done her homework—but she discovered something quite different. She recognized the handwriting as much as the names:

VICTORIA—I’LL BE AT TABLE 28—ROGER

“Oh my,” she said, the twang in her voice suddenly exaggerated, the way it got when she became tired or elated. Her right hand was also trembling, as if she’d just bowled several frames.

“Oh my,” she said again, sitting down on the bed and looking out the window toward the part of Manhattan where the two of them had met six years ago. It had been a fall day like this one, early afternoon, when walking home from Elizabeth Arden she had stopped in a Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue.

Dick had been in the Midwest, speaking for congressional candidates, nine of them on one trip, collecting the IOUs that would get him nominated two years later—doing what he’d sworn he wouldn’t do, if only because it was supposed to be impossible. After the loss in California, the single greatest appeal of New York had been Dick’s assurance that no comeback could be mounted from here because the state party was so firmly in Rockefeller’s grip. A candidate, after all, needed a home-state base, and Nelson wasn’t about to cede his. But as it turned out, all those dozens of candidates he campaigned for in ’64 and ’66
became
Dick’s base, made him a new sort of stateless candidate.

And so, in their way, they’d brought Tom into her life.

That fall Tricia had been at Finch and Julie at Smith, and she herself had relished having so many hours alone—until for the first time ever she found herself with too little to do. She actually began watching a soap opera,
Dark Shadows
, late in the afternoons.

Victoria. Roger.

She would go out in the mornings by herself, and she never wore dark glasses. In New York she wasn’t often recognized, and when it did happen she was almost always let alone. That day she’d had a big kerchief on, protecting her just-tinted hair, and so she was all the more startled when the Puerto Rican waitress in Schrafft’s brought her a dessert she hadn’t ordered and said, “The gentleman said to tell you that he’s an independent but that everybody likes apple pie.”

For some reason she hadn’t felt edgy, as she usually did when approached by even the nicest of strangers. She’d started to laugh, and to look around for whoever had sent the pie; she smiled when he nodded at her. She took him in right away, thanks to twenty years’ practice with quick introductions and size-ups: a few years older than herself; Irish, of the laciest-curtained sort. As she would learn in the next hour and over the coming months, he was a widower, an early-retired trust-and-estates lawyer with plenty of money who lent his efforts to so many boards and organizations that she now realized she’d never known the American Irish Historical Society was one of them.

It was the mischief in his eyes, the kind her father used to have after the first drink but not the second, that made her wave and then beckon him to her table. Before she knew it silver-haired Tom Garahan had sat down and they were talking, for two hours, until she joked that it would soon be time for her to go home and watch
Dark Shadows
.

Which is how they became Victoria and Roger, pet-named for two characters on the program.

All that fall, and during the winter and spring that followed, they would meet on a corner of Park Avenue at whatever time they’d arrange when she called him. If they went to the Frick, and someone did recognize her, people would assume he was a docent; if someone came over while they were in a restaurant having lunch, she would introduce him as one of her Ryan cousins, or a valued old contributor to the California campaigns who was here in the East on a visit. When she went to his apartment on Madison, she
did
wear dark glasses, and identified herself to the doorman as Miss Ryan, as if she were still answering the telephone in Dick’s Senate office.

She always got home well before Dick did, and always carried a shopping bag from Rizzoli or Bergdorf’s to show where she’d supposedly been.

And then the summer of ’67 had arrived, and there was no more denying what would soon be upon her. For three weeks she tried to delay giving Dick the answer—
Yes
,
you can run
—that she knew all along she’d be giving in the end. She went out to California to stay with her old pal Helene Drown, pretending for a last little stretch that things might stay the way they were. And then she’d come home and said yes. She gave up Tom, whose merry and hurt way of letting her go made her love herself for the first time in her life.

They had not seen each other or spoken since. But here he would be at table 28. She willed her heart to slow down, telling herself the two hours ahead would be easier than the hailstorm at Yellowstone or the wind in Billings, both experienced in recent weeks. The campaign had her lightly scheduled, mostly making stops in safe states, but even here in New York Dick seemed to be way ahead.

She heard the knock, and then Connie’s voice saying “We’re ready.” The agents and the advance man took them downstairs to a little spot outside the ballroom where they had a chair for her to sit on while being photographed.

“I’m glad you don’t get to see my bony knees,” she said, adjusting the floor-length hem of her emerald-green dress. One gal with a camera laughed—the photographers were always nicer than the writers—and protested that she looked great.

The reporters had been told “no questions,” but of course that didn’t stop them.

“Mrs. Nixon, do you have any response to the protesters outside? Several of them have signs saying ‘Irish Blood on Nixon’s Hands.’ They’re referring to American military cooperation with Great Britain.”

“I haven’t seen them, so I really can’t comment.”

Actually, she’d seen them through the tinted windows of the car, and heard them even up on the eighteenth floor. She’d thought that “Irish blood” was a nice change from Vietnamese.

“Do you have any reaction to the latest Watergate developments involving—”

“Only that I think it’s all been blown out of proportion.” She’d noticed that they no longer used the word “caper”; it was now a “scandal” or at least an “affair,” or just the word by itself. Connie was reminding them about “no questions,” and the female reporter who’d asked about
Watergate actually tsked and shook her head. Pat kept smiling. Alice Longworth had once told her that Mrs. Harding used to keep a fat red notebook for the recording of every slight; but didn’t one remember them all, without writing them down?

Mr. Sullivan said it was time for them to go into the ballroom. As she stood up, she could feel the Lexington Avenue subway line rumbling beneath her feet, and she got a kick out of realizing what it was. She had
loved
the subway back here in the thirties, and had ridden it again, dozens of times, each one a lark, with the man who would be at table 28.

The ballroom contained nine hundred guests, and the flowers on the dais weren’t nearly so pretty as the ones Roger had managed to get to Victoria. She had the card in her clutch purse and was glad to realize that the lights, just like at the convention, prevented her from seeing beyond the first row of tables.

The program listed her as Patricia Ryan Nixon, and the lieutenant governor of New York was now extolling her as “this gracious woman of Irish lineage,” all of which somehow only made her think of her German mother, and of the names she herself had dropped along the way, not just Catherine but Thelma, which she knew—thanks to Rose—Haldeman sometimes called her behind her back. She’d kept things as simple as possible with the girls, given them easy names that sounded like nicknames, and no middle names for either of them. She was counting on them to be more public during the second term, to take over a lot of the things she was doing now. Julie was better prepared and less lazy than her sister, but if both of them helped she might really be able to recede into the kind of privacy Mrs. Truman and Mamie had had.

“Thank you, thank you,” she heard herself say a few minutes later, while holding up the crystal plate they gave her. Her remarks were no longer than the ones she’d delivered at the convention, and in less than a minute she was back in her seat, eating dinner, chatting with Mr. Sullivan, forcing herself not to look beyond the dais, now that they’d dimmed the lights a bit. As the coffee came, Carmel Quinn and a trio of Irish girls began singing. She wondered if one of them might surprise everyone with a shout of protest over the Irish or Vietnamese blood, take your pick, on Dick’s hands. You never knew. Last January, one of the Ray Conniff Singers, not exactly the Rolling Stones, had done just that in the East Room.