Watergate (8 page)

Poor Joe, pouring himself a cup of tea and looking as if he’d swallowed a bad clam. He was miserable these days with Susan Mary, and nothing, thought Mrs. Longworth, could be more ridiculous. What was the point of a
mariage blanc
if all the partners did was fight? She’d known Joe was queer as a plaid rabbit from the time he was a boy, and back in ’61, unlike everyone else, she had
not
approved of his marrying the widow Patten—as if that could solve everything, or give Joe equal status with all those virile men of Camelot on whom he had his carnal and ideological crushes.

He was twenty-six years her junior and, sitting across from her, looked like a very old man. “So, Joe,” she asked, as he took another sip of tea. “When did I last see you?”

“The Gridiron dinner. April.”

“That’s right. And it was no fun at all, except for crossing the picket line.” The club now allowed female guests at its big annual event but still didn’t admit women as members. “So stupid of Dick not to go. For the second straight year, too. All because he finds the jokes rough. That’s carrying your
homme sérieux
business a bit far.”

A thought struck Alice, and pleased her. “He should have said he couldn’t go because he was siding with the women. Had his cake and eaten it.” She sliced Joe a piece of the delicious chocolate layer cake that sat between them. Her guests were always surprised to find what she served so moist and fresh; they expected Miss Havisham’s wedding cake along with the cracked leather cushions and the crumbling taxidermy.

“I just wrote him a contribution for forty-nine dollars,” said Alsop. “That’s one dollar under the limit of what’s got to be reported.”

As if, thought Alice, Joe’s journalistic integrity, or whatever it’s called, was what he really had to worry about—instead of those photographs
the Soviets had had in their possession for years, of Joe in his Moscow hotel room in bed with a soldier.

“You know, you really
do
look awful,” she told him.

“Nothing’s felt right since Mother died.”

“Your mother”—Father’s niece, and Alice’s first cousin—“was a grand gal. She was also eighty-five.”

“You’re eighty-eight.”

“And perfectly willing to be dead. How’s Stew?” How foolish that she should find it easier to ask after Joe’s brother, dying of leukemia, than to inquire about Susan Mary.

“Not good,” said Alsop. “You’ll notice I haven’t gotten up to mix myself an actual drink. I’m back to playing blood bank this week.”

“Easier than donating bone marrow, I suppose.”

“You think?” said Alsop, grimacing as he swallowed more tea.

“Poor Stew,” said Alice. “What a nuisance.” Reflexively, she looked out into the hall, where an old stuffed tiger had lost a paw the last time Stew was here and decided to shake hands with it. “Slice yourself more cake.”

Joe declined, and she admired his discipline. What a preposterously fat young man he’d been when he arrived in town in the thirties to cover Franklin and the New Deal. A reporter with a Harvard diploma; silly. She supposed he’d slimmed down to please the boys.

Suddenly, Joanna’s voice came up the stairs.

“I’m off, Grandmother!”

“Enjoy yourself, dear!” Alice cried in response. “Try not to be home before midnight!”

“Where’s she off to?” asked Alsop. “And why doesn’t she come in here to say goodbye? Or, for that matter, hello?”

“She probably thought Mrs. Braden was still in here. For God’s sake, Joe, she’s twenty-five. I haven’t the slightest idea where she’s off to.”

“Doesn’t she eat with you? What, in fact,
are
you going to eat tonight? Does she let you live on cake and tea? Is there a servant left in this whole place?”

“Janie’s off for the night. Don’t worry. Joanna will come home around one o’clock and bring me a lovely veal chop from Anna Maria’s, that little place up on Connecticut Avenue. And it will be
exactly
what I want.”

Alsop knew that Alice’s routine hadn’t varied for decades. She would read through the night, until almost dawn, when she’d mark her place, probably with the bone from the veal chop, and then fall asleep until noon.

“Tell me,” he asked. “Are we related to Elliot Richardson? Are
you
, I mean.”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Elliot
Lee
Richardson? Not one of your Boston Lees?”

“I cannot imagine. I should think that in the forest of Lee family trees I’m fewer branches away from Robert E. or Lorelei.”

“I spent half the afternoon with him at HEW. An interview, supposedly, but there was a camera crew traipsing through the office taking ‘footage’ ”—he said it as if the word were new—“for some film they’ll show at the convention.”

“What possessed him to leave State?” asked Mrs. Longworth. “Even being one of Rogers’s undersecretaries has to have been more interesting than sending out welfare checks.”

“He left because he was asked to.”

“By your
homme sérieux
?”

“Of course,” said Alsop. “And this won’t be the last job he’s given to do. Nixon
needs
him from time to time. Almost the way he needs Ed Brooke.” He referred to the Senate’s only Negro, a Republican to boot. “Richardson is somebody to put in front of the cameras when they have to show a bit of probity and class—all the Harvard, high Establishment stuff Nixon’s usually able to do without.”

“You sound as if you’re back on the New Frontier, Joe.”

“No,” said Alsop, loudly putting down his teacup, as if the gesture might reaffirm his new fealty toward the incumbent. “But Nixon’s going to require Richardson’s type a little more than he thinks.” He pointed to a copy of the
Washington Post
. “Kay seems determined to make something serious out of this burglary, doesn’t she?”

“Dick’s second-story men?” asked Mrs. Longworth. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Well, my dear, I wouldn’t dismiss it just yet. A CIA connection one day; a link to the White House the next.” The
Post
had today run a report of Howard Hunt’s involvement.

“I
almost
like Kay,” said Mrs. Longworth. “Her mother detested me.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“I’m glad she did. I detest their paper. That copy you’re pointing to belongs to Mrs. Braden, not me.”

“Ah, of course,” said Alsop. He had his own problems with Kay Graham, who had gently let him know that she regarded his column, still running in her pages, as increasingly uncivil and out of touch. But he knew that his ancient cousin was talking about something else.

And she, moreover, knew that he did. Mrs. Longworth would never forgive the
Post
for making it clear, fifteen years earlier, that Joanna’s mother, Paulina, had committed suicide by swallowing sixty pills. Except for the
Post
, her only child might have gone out of the world as ambiguously as she’d come into it: recognized as the daughter of Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House, but the child, in reality, of Senator William Borah, Alice’s lover of many years and the one man she’d truly hoped to make president. Paulina’s paternity had always, among anyone who counted, been an open secret—which was the best and most civilized kind of secret—and there was no reason her death at the age of thirty-one couldn’t have been treated the same way.

Dick had come to the funeral, even agreed to be a pallbearer, just a week after his second inaugural as vice president.

Mrs. Longworth now looked across at Joe, one of Jack Kennedy’s spear carriers. These days he liked to present himself as someone who’d made an
intellectual
conversion to Nixon—one
homme sérieux
to another—and liked to regard her own affection for Dick as rote Republicanism, crude. Well, he didn’t know the rest of the story, what else Dick had done for her that January, besides carrying Paulina to her grave. The rest of it was very much a
closed
secret, one she would never tell to Joe or anybody else.

There he sat while she cut herself another piece of cake: reading the detestable
Post
, certain that each of her antipathies was more childish than the next, calling on her this afternoon as if
she
were the old lady instead of himself.

She felt the urge to inflict a little pain. “I hear rumors that Susan Mary is going to leave you. Are they true?”

He allowed the newspaper to collapse into his lap, and he crumpled
along with it. “I don’t think so, but she’s threatening to. She’s even looked at a place for herself.”

“Where?”

“Where else? The Watergate.”

The two of them laughed. Her yellow teeth flashed and bit into the cake, and she forgave him.

But she did not forgive Kay.

“Bob,” said Rose Mary Woods, nodding curtly.

She brushed past him on the way back to her office, outside of which Marje Acker and two other secretaries sat at their desks. If one charted the pecking order and included Marje, it was possible to say that the president’s secretary had a secretary who had secretaries of her own, which made Rose Mary Woods sound rather grand, but this was not what she had hoped for
at all
when the boss finally reached the White House.

All she’d ever wanted here was the same setup that Ann Whitman, Ike’s head girl, had once had. No matter who was serving as chief of staff, Ann remained the gatekeeper, just as Rose herself had been for the vice president. That included barring the door—the incident was now legendary—to the head of the Republican Policy Committee, Senator Bridges of New Hampshire, when he tried to see Nixon during the ’60 campaign. “To bother him about nothing,” Rose remembered. “I told him no.”

For eighteen years, whether they were “in” or “out,” that’s how it had been. But it had ended once and for all in the elevator of the Waldorf, the morning after the ’68 election. Riding down to his press conference, the boss had told her that Haldeman would control all access to him after the inauguration. She’d practically seen stars when he said it, and for the rest of the ride down to the ballroom and the rest of the week after that, she wouldn’t say a word to him, refusing to lose her temper and give him the chance to make an awkward little joke about her getting her Irish up. He hated hurting anyone’s feelings, least of all hers, and she let him know how bad she felt by her stony, out-of-character silence.

Even so, he never budged from the structure Haldeman had sold him
on, a chain of command that made sure he never had to hurt
anyone’s
feelings, at least face-to-face. Now, almost four years later, the place was crawling with a whole second generation of admen and junior executives even a decade younger than Bob, all these good-looking dumb-bunnies like Magruder who provided Richard Nixon with a whole new cloud of insulation, like those little Styrofoam peanuts Rose’s mail-order knickknacks came packed in.

They all, of course, had college educations, and knew full well that she had none—no matter that she could correct the grammar and spelling of every one of them. College would have been lovely, but it wasn’t in the cards for a girl from Sebring, Ohio, who had to help out at home. As it was, nobody could say she hadn’t come a long way.

Over the years there had been plenty of times when she’d had to pull the boss up with her, lift him from some funk and point the way out of whatever jam he was in. And, with the exception of Harry Robbins Haldeman, you wouldn’t find anybody along this whole high-and-mighty corridor who didn’t think she’d been underutilized for the past three and a half years. Actually, she thought, “underutilized” sounded just like them. What was wrong with “squandered”?

“And what are you looking at?” she asked with mock fierceness, raising a chuckle from one of the subsecretaries who’d just come in and noticed the pickle-puss Miss Woods was displaying.

“Oh, nothing,” said the girl, Lorraine, a strawberry blonde like herself. “I somehow thought you might have just run into HRH.”

They both grinned at the use of Haldeman’s too-perfect initials.

“Get out of here,” said Miss Woods, taking a file from the girl and laughing.

At least the folder contained something she could enjoy working on: an invitation list, last-minute additions, for the Polish-Americans’ reception they’d be having on Monday in the Blue Room. Such guest lists constituted Rose Mary Woods’s chief remaining power, a meager tribute to her memory, smarts, and Rolodex, which over two decades had grown almost to the size of the potters’ wheels back at the Royal China Company, her very first employer, in Sebring.

Henry Helstoski? A Democrat from the Jersey House delegation was on the list just because of his name. They could do better than that, she thought, scratching him, ethnic suffix and all, and substituting Charlie
Sandman, a Republican from the same delegation who always stuck with the boss, and had plenty of Poles in his district, besides.

Should Agnew be coming? she wondered. Would that seem like penance for the crack he’d made about “Polacks” during the ’68 race? Or would his appearance add insult to injury? The whole thing had always seemed ridiculous. None of her Irish relatives had ever called a Pole anything other than a Polack, and they’d never meant anything by it, either.