Watergate (60 page)

Within a few minutes the car was nearing the White House. The crowd singing “Jail to the Chief” was smaller than an hour before, though even at its jeering height it had been somehow easier to take than the quiet along the Potomac three nights ago, when Rose and the rest of the presidential party aboard the
Sequoia
had sailed past silent clusters of spectators on the banks, all of them keeping a solemn death watch in the summertime twilight.

She held up her pass to the policeman on duty and drove to her parking spot on West Executive Drive.

Alice pointed out the exceptionally bright lights that appeared to be on in the East Room. Several of the people who’d attended her wedding there had filed past Lincoln’s body in the same space forty years before that, but none of this was on her mind now; her attention and will were fully focused on the present moment.

“They’re setting up television equipment in there,” Rose explained. “He wants his farewell to the staff to be broadcast live.”

She helped Mrs. L out of the car and onto the walkway leading to the West Wing. Only now, on the floodlit grounds, did Alice notice, and remark upon, Rose’s pink dress and pink shoes.

“I was determined not to look as if I were at a funeral today,” Rose said, stiffly.

“I
always
dress for one,” Alice replied.

Rose took her past the Cabinet Room, where the boss had earlier tonight said goodbye to more than forty men, mostly longtime supporters from the Hill, many of whom had been in tears. Once the two women went inside her office, Rose saw Alice crinkle her nose: she was smelling smoke and assuming, correctly, that some papers had recently been burned in the room’s fireplace. “Good for you,” said Mrs. Longworth, who then admired a long feather boa hanging on an old clothes tree. Rose explained that she’d gotten it at a tango party at the Argentine embassy; Bob Gray had been her escort. “Take it,” she said to the old lady, who did.

Rose then called the Residence to say that she was coming up. The
Secret Service man was surprised but accommodating. Yes, the president was still awake, still in the Lincoln Sitting Room.

“I want you to go home after you bring me up there,” Alice instructed.

Rose hesitated. “Well, I could get a driver from the pool to take you home. The agent could bring you down to him when you’re through.”

“Yes, do that,” said Alice, who was already back out in the hallway, trailing the boa behind her. The two women made their way toward the Residence and into the elevator, and when its doors closed, Mrs. Longworth remarked to Rose, “I really must get one of these installed in the house. You have no idea how cramped the dumbwaiter can be.”

At 1:45 a.m., they walked into the sitting room. The president, in shirtsleeves, was startled to see Rose and unsure whether to believe his eyes at the sight of Alice.

“Mrs L!” he said, rising to his feet and wincing; he’d forgotten to favor his phlebitic leg.

How much thinner he looked than at her birthday party six months ago, thought Alice. She noticed a plate of bacon and eggs, and saw that the sofa had several books, some of them open, on one of its cushions.

“Memoirs by men who’ve lived in this house,” Nixon said, rather oratorically, when he saw the books capture her attention. “None of them were written from prison, though. Mine may be the first.”

One more club he was excluding himself from, thought Alice. She said nothing but peered at the face she had regarded an hour or two earlier on her television. Nixon was now wearing a pair of large, unfashionable reading glasses. The TV makeup, which he’d not removed, was streaky with tears. Lowering her eyes, Alice noticed the yellowness of his fingernails—a bad sign in a nonsmoker.

“I’ve been wondering how I’ll support myself,” he told her, without remembering to suggest she sit down. “It’s not only the lawyers who need to be paid; there are my taxes. My debts exceed my assets,” he confessed, flashing a smile, as if he’d just announced that he was double-jointed.

“I was once in the same position.”

“How did you get out of it?”

“I did an advertisement for Lucky Strike.”

Nixon said nothing, but then observed, “My watch has stopped. Honest.”

“Simple coincidence,” said Mrs. Longworth.

“I had a quote from your father in the speech, about being ‘in the arena.’ Did you hear it?”

He was still buttering her up, more than a quarter century after coming to town. “Yes, I heard it.”

She moved closer to the couch and saw, amidst the presidential books, a copy of her father’s diary. Beside it were Grant’s memoirs, Lincoln’s letters, someone’s biography of Franklin. They were, she could see, not volumes from the White House library but rather Nixon’s own copies, which he’d been reading for years. She noted that the back of his suit jacket, draped over an arm of the couch, was still soaked with sweat.

He at last gestured for her to sit down in a club chair across from the sofa. Returning to his own seat, he said, sighing, “I hope I haven’t let you down.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She was annoyed by this fishing for compliments. He was worse than Father.

“There’s so much I still could have done in the Middle East—almost like TR, bringing the Russians and the Japanese together. Making peace when you’re not one of the combatants.”

“Yes,” said Alice. “You’ve lost that chance.”

Nixon looked surprised. This was not like the bromides he’d been hearing all night on the phone.

“I’m finished, Mrs. L.”

“Politically? Yes, of course.”

“Every which way. I may even be dying.” He pointed to his leg, now much remarked upon in the press. “There are enough drugs in Dr. Tkach’s black bag to finish me off fast.”

Alice said nothing, just picked at the feathers of the boa, which might have been an ordinary raincoat for all the notice Nixon took of it.

“We’ll be in San Clemente by this time tomorrow night,” he said. “Then I’ll be alone and it will really be over.”

“I detest self-pity, and I find self-destruction absurd.”

Nixon looked at her, knowing she hadn’t always felt that way.

Alice could see what he was remembering. “Yes, that night in 1957,” she said.

“When you came to the house on Tilden Street.”

She leaned over and picked up her father’s diary, quickly locating a
passage from 1884. She read it aloud:
“She was beautiful in face and form
,
and lovelier still in spirit. As a flower she grew
,
and as a fair young flower she died … As a young wife; when she had just become a mother
,
when her life seemed to be just begun
,
and when the years seemed so bright before her—then
,
by a strange and terrible fate
,
death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died
,
the light went from my life forever.”

“Yes,” said Nixon, neutrally.

“You read it to me that night.”

“And you scolded me,” the president reminded her.

“Yes. I thought it was preposterously inappropriate. Since I was the baby blamed for all the trouble and death in 1884, it could hardly be consoling. Especially when we were talking about the death of my
own
daughter more than seventy years later.”

“I was trying whatever I could,” said Nixon. “Trying to point out how your father had managed to go on, despite what he wrote.”

“In its own way, the passage was, I suppose, weirdly pertinent. You reminded me of what
I’d
managed to survive before Paulina’s death: the subconscious hatred of my father.”

Nixon didn’t say, “Oh, of course not,” as he might have, had he not known what it was to survive the wrath of his own father. “You’ve done well,” he said instead.

“Up to a point,” said Alice. “I allowed my personality to swallow whatever real person I might have been. But you’re correct: the strategy was not without a certain success.”

“It’s too late for strategy in my case. This is a tragedy.”

“This is
not
a tragedy. It simply does not qualify as such.”

Nixon said nothing. He was unsure, even now,
what
Watergate really was. He remained as baffled as he’d been when talking to Haldeman on June 23, 1972. He would forever be able to hear himself on the tape: confused; groping; taking the first approach that came to mind; dooming himself.

With difficulty, he turned away from his own story and back to Mrs. L’s. “Why did you come to the house that night?”

“Because I saw the look on your face when you were carrying that wretched girl’s coffin. You understood the ghastliness of it all, and you
knew how to deny it, too. I realized that you could do that with almost anything, always find another layer of makeup to put over the tears.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“No, it’s a fact. If I let myself be swallowed by
one
personality, you hid yourself behind dozens of them, one ‘new Nixon’ after another.” She paused for a second or two before asking, “Do you remember what else we talked about?”

“You told me about Senator Borah.”

“That was hardly a secret,” said Alice.

“Still, I don’t suppose you told many people.”

“That’s true. I never told
her
. I let her know that Nick wasn’t her father, but I didn’t tell her who
was
. One more species of cruelty I visited upon that impossible, sullen, stuttering child. But by the time I left your house that night, we’d convinced ourselves that I had been a wonderful mother, and that the only cruelty to worry about was the article in Kay’s paper. I went back to my own house and threw away Bill’s razor, which I’d been looking at for days. The illusion we created sustained me for years. It still does from time to time.”

“What else sustains you?” Nixon asked. He was by now too exhausted even to lift his drink.

“The truth, mostly. I was a
terrible
mother. In my deepest, swallowed self there was no denying it. But I eventually found my means of expiation.”

“What was that?”

“I became a
marvelous
grandmother. None better.”

Nixon offered her an atta-girl campaign smile. Alice realized he was too ravaged to see the point she was trying to make. So she would explain. “For a long time, like it or not, fair or unfair, you are going to be regarded as a terrible president.”

“Not much I can do about that.” A second grin, different from the first, but still automatic and false.

“You can rise above it the way I did. You can be a marvelous
ex-
president.”

She could see another, deeper reflex now operating—his eyes were shifting, his inner wheels turning. He was responding to the mention of resurrection the way a plant does to light. But he was also dangerously
riven. His immediate need was to get through the night and then tomorrow morning, and then to get out of the city.

“There’s something I want you to do tomorrow,” Mrs. Longworth said.

“Tomorrow?” asked Nixon.

“Yes, during whatever you have planned in the East Room. By the way, it’s a terrible idea to put your wife through that on television, but I gather from Miss Woods that it’s too late to call things off. Do you know what you’re going to say?”

“No. I thought I’d just speak from the heart. Do it off the cuff.”

Another terrible idea, thought Alice—as if he were some great ad-libbing wit. “I want you to send me a signal,” she instructed. “A signal that you’ve understood what I’ve said and put away your morbid thoughts, as I once put away mine.”

“What sort of signal?”

“Read that passage from Father’s diary. Work it in. It will be our secret.”

However bone-weary he might be, Nixon’s internal meter made a quick measurement of the pros and cons. “They’ll be ringing you up afterwards, you know. The press.”

“I won’t even be watching. I’ll be asleep. And when they do get to me, I’ll tell them that it was ridiculous, vulgar, whatever. It will be an intense pleasure to lie to the
Washington Post
. That’s one more thing you and I share.”

Nixon looked at her. Two tears were running down his makeup.

Alice rose from her chair. “I shall, I’m sure, never see you again.” She extended her hand. “Take care of yourself. And go to bed.” She motioned for him to summon the agent who would take her down to the car Miss Woods had promised.

As soon as someone in the hall opened the door, she walked toward it and did not look back. She flipped the Argentine boa over her right shoulder—and looked smaller than whatever red bird had supplied its feathers.

While he waited for the hotel operator to put through his call, Elliot Richardson sketched a Laysan duck, an endangered species native to the Hawaiian Islands. Richardson himself had been here in Hawaii only since Tuesday, but he was increasingly worried about his own extinction. Yesterday’s
New York Times
lay on the bedspread, open to an article that put him at number three, behind Rockefeller and George Bush, on a list of vice-presidential choices available to President Gerald Ford.