Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (23 page)

Still, she was not without the ability to imagine. She accompanied RN on his trip to Russia, and RN himself wrote in his diary: “As we looked at the sea, there was a three-quarter moon. Pat said that since she was a very little girl, when she looked at the moon, she didn’t see a man in the moon or an old lady in the moon—always the American flag. This, of course, was years before anybody ever thought of a man actually being on the moon or an American flag being there. She pointed it out to me and, sure enough, I could see an American flag in the moon. Of course, you can see in the moon whatever you want to see.”

Together, the Nixons might have had a moment not unlike the one in the Carver story where the characters sense that something ineffable eludes them. RN seems unimpressed when he is invited to share his wife’s version of what can be seen on the moon; he
could have wondered at the fact that two Americans in Russia saw their flag plastered across the moon, or that neither of them was moved to see a man there, as others did. RN misses a chance to share some uncertainty or humility with his wife; they avoid the subtly life-changing intuition that Carver’s two men share. Using a cliché to dismiss his wife’s imagination, he reinforces his pride in his hardheaded common sense. We see RN bluntly cutting off a realization that “it’s really something.” (On seeing Hangchow, Nixon called on what might have been his highest praise, as close as he got to true wonder: “It looks like a postcard with those mountains in the background.”)

T
hat’s the question. She did not want a public life, so, beyond a certain point, she didn’t want RN to be involved in politics at all. He reentered the race despite her desires.

Consider this: She was an actress. I’m not suggesting that, because she appeared as Daphne Martin in the play
The Dark Tower,
her character described as “a tall, dark, sullen beauty of twenty,” Mrs. Nixon glided onstage at the Republican National Convention with equal ease, being—as I would describe her—“a woman of average height, light-haired, attractive but no beauty, in her forties.” But, because of training, she was accustomed to ignoring stage fright and simply proceeding. Also, the plays she had acted in or was aware of, such as
The Glass Menagerie,
had some things in common, and it seems reasonable to assume the play’s ideas affected her, as well. Our literature defines us, and, in those days, I think plays were generally considered more important than they are now.

Mrs. Nixon also had a role in the movie version of
Becky Sharp
(though she was cut out of the final version).
Becky Sharp
was published with the subtitle “A Novel Without a Hero”—a common
concept now, but less usual when Thackeray published his novel. Becky’s rise in society has to do with climbing the social ladder, marrying well, traveling. She is primarily interested in being a well-off, notable person. (There is still some debate about whether Thackeray wanted to suggest she actually murdered another character: an illustration done by the author shows her behind a curtain with a vial of poison and uses the word “Clytemnestra,” though this was later deleted.) Again: murder, or intimations of murder. A woman having to work within social constraints, but willing to do any number of things, go any number of places, to get ahead.
Becky Sharp
has entered the vocabulary to describe a particular kind of ambitious woman, the same way Kato Kaelin awakened people to the fact that there are people who are
not exactly
servants, who have vaguely defined roles in wealthy people’s lives while sponging off them.

The Dark Tower
is set in the France of the Sun King, and Act I requires two props of Richelieu: “Richelieu hat and gloves under glass dome” and “Picture—Richelieu—on stairs.” World War II is the backdrop for
The Glass Menagerie
. All have in common families as the dominant social reality, subtexts of unhappiness or even despair, the theme of unrequited love (Dobbin, in Thackeray, is the most remembered character, after Becky herself), as well as the idea of the enterprising woman who takes charge of her own life—or its flip side: the woman or women (
The Glass Menagerie
) who literally or metaphorically collapse, done in by their frustration.

As people know, if their older relatives lived through the Depression, that generation learned to live frugally and never forgot doing without; therefore, they do not make long-distance phone calls (except sometimes to report a death) and have a very strange reaction when looking at restaurant menus. Thelma Ryan’s family was poor. Her father died of tuberculosis contracted in the
mines. They had barely enough of anything. There was, however, a piano that had come with the farm Mrs. Nixon’s parents bought, and in mentioning her grandmother’s piano playing, Julie Nixon Eisenhower remembers the following song: “The music she most often chose was the plaintive song of the Indian maid Red Wing, who ‘ . . . loved a warrior bold, this shy little maid of old. But brave and gay, he rode one day to battle far away.’”

Lyrics like these get instilled in children’s minds: the nobility involved, but also the sadness and inevitability of the beloved going off to war. Every girl must identify with Red Wing (unless she is the one doing the leaving—and those song lyrics don’t leap to mind). Mrs. Nixon was left alone by people she loved (who left her by dying). Mr. Nixon left, too, enlisting in World War II and going to the South Pacific, as Red Wing’s warrior departed long before. Our civilization carries countless variations on the theme: every woman was Penelope, every man Ulysses. Women were expected to be strong. Mrs. Nixon, like so many wives, wrote her husband daily and worked for the war effort. She was patriotic, recognizing our flag, rather than the man-in-the-moon face, in the moon, and she could not understand young people who didn’t share her version of patriotism, who marched against the war in Vietnam, who waved signs at the White House urging an end to the war, who wore crazy-looking clothes not because they were poor but because they had enough money to cut holes in their jeans when they didn’t have time to wear out the material, who had enough time to tie-dye T-shirts into smashed kaleidoscopes of color because they didn’t have to do the weekly wash, and to take over universities in their copious spare time.

Youths’ counterculture never made sense to a lot of people of Mrs. Nixon’s generation. Perhaps if she had reflected on her reading of, and performance in, plays, such rebellious youths would
have become more accessible. Becky Sharp fights her way out of society’s expectations, and the women in
The Glass Menagerie
pay a terrible price for not questioning the prescribed roles of men and women. It might have helped Mrs. Nixon to see Mr. Nixon as a Williamsesque “gentleman caller”; not necessarily reliable, or who he claimed to be, and certainly not a knight in shining armor. When she resisted him initially, it was because she was interested in going against the script and making a life for herself: to act; to travel; to do whatever seemed compelling. Socially, things were beginning to open up a bit—especially because women were needed to go to work during the war—so there was a little less emphasis on marriage and motherhood. Though she had to work, she must still have thought that she had quite a bit of autonomy. Didn’t Becky Sharp and the other women she knew from plays?

It was to her workplace that Mr. Nixon sent the engagement ring. Instead of her putting it on and dancing in circles, we have Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s report of the gift’s recipient: “For a few seconds, she stared at it blankly. All morning she had anticipated her future husband’s arrival, the unveiling of the ring, the romantic moment when he would put it on her finger. And, now, here it was, in a May basket. Impulsively, she shoved the offering a few inches away from her.” Another teacher is described as entering the classroom: “Look, you are going to put on that ring and right now.” How much did Mrs. Nixon intuit about her future husband by the gesture he made? Did she want more romance (his presence), or merely a more conventional scenario (a personal presentation), or might she have wanted none of it and reacted spontaneously in a very significant way? This possibility is skipped over, as if anyone might have had such a reaction.

A writer would see such a response as a not-so-subtle gesture that expressed something important about the character. Depending
on the story, her actions could be a moment’s faltering, or fear mixed with happiness, or—more interesting—a gesture that is unexpected, even by the character.

Writers may give the impression that their characters are truly surprised by something, though quite often they’re the ones who are startled into a new consciousness. Flannery O’Connor, whose essays contain some of the most sensible things ever written about writing, says it this way (she is commenting on her story “Good Country People,” in which the character’s wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman): “This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason for this is that it produced a shock for the writer.” Subconsciously, things are working in the writer’s mind as the writer acts as scribe, transcribing events. If something totally unexpected happens in real life, it can’t be revised except in the story that is
told
about the occurrence. A storyteller can omit things, decide on a different starting point, play things for laughs, or emphasize certain elements of the story to elicit the desired effect. But mostly, since the fiction so many write is already at some distance from the actual, writers retain a superstitious respect for what was somehow told
to
them, rather than
by
them.

In telling Julie the story of receiving the ring, Mrs. Nixon is not writing fiction, exactly, but giving what she thinks of as an honest account of how something happened. She depends upon her daughter’s not asking for clarification (Julie doesn’t), trusting not that the action will speak for itself, but that it will
not
speak for itself. Leaving us with the words of someone essentially outside the situation is a clever way to deflect attention from the main event. History—time—already informs the person hearing the story: Mrs. Nixon did marry him, so the implication is that her friend gave good advice. But a fiction writer could not include the
scene as recounted without realizing that the action of the story abruptly stopped.

The fiction writer could, quite possibly, think the character’s response to receiving the ring was a much too obvious moment of real, unverbalized feeling asserting itself and try to rewrite the scene to be more subtle. I sometimes find myself in the position of emphasizing things not by raising the volume, but by muting the sound. This is where breaks in the text, such as white space, come in, where asterisks are as frightening as asteroids coming at Planet Earth, where little things retain their size, but gain great weight, in falling.

What happened in those moments between Mrs. Nixon’s seeing the ring and the friend’s walking into the classroom, seeing the basket, seeing the ring, and putting it on Mrs. Nixon’s finger?

That’s where we may have our answer, but no one’s talking.

A
friend, Radici restaurant, Portsmouth, N.H., June 2007: “Do you identify with Mrs. Nixon?”

My mother, in the nursing home, 2008: “Are you kidding?”

Salesclerk, Lyrical Ballad Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., July 2007: “Some
Life
magazines, huh? Look at that [Tricia Nixon Cox, on the cover, in her bridal dress]! You know, I saw Mrs. Nixon once, in Washington. At the Kennedy Center. She was so thin. (Long pause.) It wasn’t her fault.”

T
om Tierney has done a number of books of paper dolls. He gives a brief biography of his subjects and draws figures to cut out (“Do not cut out white area between arm and body”). There is a diagram of how to make stands for them. It has fold lines and tabs and measurements. Its construction is something I could never accomplish, though my husband could make the stand while also drinking coffee, talking on the telephone, painting, and listening to music. Like many writers, I am preoccupied with the horizontal world—reading books—so paper dolls don’t have to be upright for me to enjoy them. Neither do I think the book was really intended as an opportunity to cut out paper dolls. It’s a riff on coloring books and cutouts, aimed at adults. The book is funny because it pretends to be something it isn’t: fun for children. The humor is tongue-in-cheek; it’s a diversion for the audience that involves real, historic figures, deflated and made laughable by their presentation as things a child would play with. It’s the sort of thing Mr. Nixon always feared: being disparaged, somehow diminished, “dissed.” There were plenty of rolled eyes and derogatory terms behind his back, though to his face he remained Mr. President.

A friend gave me the book of paper dolls long before I thought of writing about Mrs. Nixon. I laughed, flipped through, then put it away and forgot about it. When I was writing this book, I opened a file drawer and there it was, tossed in among the many uncategorizable items; it was probably a sign of mental health not to know how to file them. It has a plaintive quality. No embellishments, the figures as slender as they were in real life, with Mr. Nixon’s slight shoulder slouch well drawn. In a way, we’re always dressing up and dressing down political figures. The press takes note of anything out of the ordinary, whether it be a belt buckle or a slightly different haircut. As a public figure, Mrs. Nixon knew she was being scrutinized, and her response was to scale everything down to make sure her clothes were never worthy of comment: conservative; well pressed; well chosen. She hoped to hide behind her attire, to seem proper and invisible at the same time. This is how she proceeded generally as First Lady. She did things behind the scenes when possible. She did not search out the camera lens like Princess Di. She appeared proper—always proper. She let herself be defined by her acts, whether she was a representative of the United States or simply a housewife visiting schoolchildren. She wanted to be able to do what she did more or less unnoticed. Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most restyled First Hair ever, ultimately indicated insecurity, rather than perfectionism. When you really can’t decide on a post-headband hairstyle, it becomes a problem. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t that way. She opted for protective coloration. She was the generic president’s wife, suited, modestly slipping into sensible shoes, conservatively coiffed. Yet her husband, when asked what he would like for his wife’s birthday, responded: “A walk on the beach, with the breeze in her hair.” He knew that she loved the breeze, representing freedom.