Say You're Sorry Page 15

  “You know,” Pat said now, her voice soft, with the sound of the faraway in it, “that very first election, when Dick ran for Congress in 1946, I sold my part of our family farm in Artesia to my brother Tram for three thousand dollars. We spent most of the money printing pamphlets to introduce Dick to the voters.”

  The visitor remembered. She’d told him this story before. But he nodded, Go on.

  “And I was so naive, that was before I learned how vicious politics can be, that I was thrilled when a labor leader requested fifty pamphlets. I didn’t realize that he was the opposition, that he’d use the pamphlets against us, or at best, throw them in the trash. But Dick was already wiser than I to the way these things worked, and he said I had to suspect everyone. So the next time there was a large request, I questioned the caller and got him to fess up that he was a Democrat.

  “And you know, it wasn’t long after that our campaign office was broken into. They took all the pamphlets that my money had paid for, every last one of them we hadn’t yet distributed. We had such a slim chance of winning that election. No one knew Dick. We desperately needed those pamphlets. But did anyone care about our break-in?” She shook her blond head. “No, of course not. No one knew how devastating the loss of those pamphlets was to us. No wonder I couldn’t understand the fuss over Watergate. By that time, I knew all too well the way the game was played. How could anyone think that this wasn’t business as usual?” She paused, then added. “No, people have no idea.”

  Her visitor said, “I just read an article the other day about a young congressman who came to Washington thinking it was all about limos and parties and making momentous decisions.”

  Pat’s laughter was not a pretty sound. “Thought he was going to make a difference, did he? Well, you know,” she said, settling again into her chair, “that’s what Dick and I thought, back at the beginning. That first term, he threw himself into the work. There was the Alger Hiss case, and, of course, the Committee on Un-American Activities, and Dick was trying so hard to drum up support for the Marshall Plan, to help the Europeans who were starving after the war, we didn’t even discuss whether or not he would run for office in ’48. It was never a question. It was simply a given. You run. You run until you can’t run anymore.”

  She paused. “Of course, while Dick was routing out Communists and taking care of the world, and working for the Dewey candidacy of ’48, I was home in California, pregnant with Julie, taking care of Tricia, who was a baby, and looking after Dick’s parents, both of whom were in failing health. Plus they were going through a terrible patch with that little farm of theirs. It was a hard time. I finally told Dick how hard it was. I said that I needed him to be around a little more.” She ran her right thumb over the fingers of her left hand, glancing off her wedding band. “You know what he did? He wrote me a letter. In it he said that he’d try to spend more time at home.”

  Then Pat Nixon stood and turned and looked out past the gardener, out to sea, out at the horizon. “He was so caught up in it all. He was going to do such great things. Though I think I saw from that first election, back in ’46, how hard it would be to actually accomplish good. I saw that politics were more complicated than that. That they’d never let us…” She paused. “Let him accomplish much of anything, or if they did, it would be at a terrible price. But it wasn’t us anymore, you know. Not what we wanted. Dick stopped listening to me in that very first race. He thought his political consultant knew more than I did.”

  She strode back and forth before the window now. The visitor was struck by how thin she was—and how tightly wound. “Those people, those consultants. There are thousands of them, of you, a never-ending army of advisors and handlers and counselors. All with your own agendas. With your lists. All wanting to play. You wanted to play, didn’t you? To play at politics?”

  “Yes, I did,” the visitor said. “I did.”

  “Why?” She’d wheeled and thrown the word at him.

  He found himself startled. Why? Why had he wanted to participate in the Big Game? No one had ever asked him that before. No one, in all those years…

  Pat was smiling at him, her head canted to one side. “Don’t try to answer,” she said. “I know you can’t, because the answer is a part of who you are. That kind of lust is in your blood. You have to play. You start out saying, telling yourself, that it’s about honor or nobility or governance or justice or the will of the people. Like Dick, you may start out believing that. But before long, you have to see the truth. You have to recognize that politics is nothing more than one long powerplay. An exercise in ego.” She held up her hands. Empty. Then she plopped back in her chair. “You know what I think? That you ought to play at politics in an arena. Strip down, then use your fangs and claws and bludgeons, your skill at dirty tricks, your fists, your feet. Just go ahead and get filthy, knee-deep in blood and sweat. Stomp on your opponent’s throat, then listen for the crowd’s roar. Do it out in the fresh air, where everyone can see. Stand proud and show your hands, covered in shit and blood. All of you, Republicans, Democrats, whatever you call yourselves, what difference does it make? You are politicians.” Pat Nixon spat the last word off her tongue as if it were a bug which had crept into her drink.

  Her visitor sat. He had no response.

  Now Pat Nixon was on her feet again, her posture as ramrod straight as it had always been. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. Even now, at sixty-four, she was still quite lovely, with young flashing eyes, the eyes of a girl whose father, Will, a gold miner, had nicknamed Babe. Her pale gold hair would be as close as Will Ryan ever got to the real thing.

  “Pat Buchanan,” she said. “Pat told them at the hearings that everyone was knee-deep in muck. Those high-and-mighty Democrats, sitting there in judgment as if their souls were saved, asked him what he’d do in the way of political tactics, and he said, ‘Anything that is not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns.’” Pat Nixon clapped her hands together. “Oh, I loved that. But no one wanted to hear it. They were out for Dick’s blood, and they didn’t want to hear that everyone was guilty. The FBI operations under Kennedy and Johnson were much more serious. They didn’t want to know how Kennedy stole the 1960 election from us. Stole it. He did.” Pat Nixon’s voice rose as she warmed to her subject like a revival minister under the big tent, the hot lights. “That LBJ bugged the 1968 campaign plane. That Bobby Kennedy used everything he could put his hands on to get Jimmy Hoffa. That Adlai Stevenson’s workers bugged JFK at the ’56 convention. That JFK in peacetime tapped well over a hundred individuals, way more than the wartime Nixon administration. Did they want to hear that LBJ had wiretaps on Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King at the Democratic Convention? That Bobby in turn tapped King? That FDR’s son John once said to a columnist, ‘Hell, my father just about invented bugging. He had them spread all over, and thought nothing of it.’ That Roosevelt had taps on Charles Lindbergh? No, of course not.” She slowed now, and her voice dropped, almost to a whisper. “It all depends on which side you’re on, doesn’t it? The Washington Post adored publishing papers stolen from the senatorial committee investigating Watergate. It all depends on which office you’re burglarizing, doesn’t it?”

  Yes, he agreed. It does. It did. It will.

  “The Post,” Pat Nixon repeated. “The goddamned Washington Post.” Then she said, “Have you read it?”

  He nodded. The Final Days. He knew that’s what she meant, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s new book about Nixon’s last days in the White House. The same reporters who had so doggedly pursued the story of the Watergate break-in. Who had broken story after incriminating story about the president and the president’s men.

  “They’re all over the TV,” she said. “The two of them, gloating about that piece of trash. We can’t even watch Bonanza without running into them.”

  Pat turned then and fixed her eyes upon her visitor. “If you read the book carefully, you can see it. You know that, don’
t you?”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I really don’t think so. Well, maybe, if you knew what to look for. But like I told you, back then, and I’m telling you now, no one’s ever going to know.”

  Pat Nixon’s hand trembled slightly as she lowered her glass of bourbon to the tabletop. “Not that it made any earthly difference what we did, of course. Nothing could have turned things around, not once they smelled blood.”

  “Absolutely. But you should never regret any of it. You did what you could, and that’s what’s important.”

  “What I could?” Her laughter spiraled high. “What could I ever do? Once I made the decision to stick it out, not to divorce him, back in 1962, I’d made my bed, hadn’t I? Then, after he lost California. After that…well, it was over, really. We didn’t talk. We didn’t have any kind of real relationship.” She lifted her drink again and took a long pull. “I was just along for the ride. For the girls. For appearances. And I did a little good for a few people.”

  “A little! You did wonders.”

  “No, no,” she waved him off. “Even if I had, if I did help a few, nobody wanted to know about it. Even that business about trying to fix up the White House, that most ladylike of tasks. It was worn, you know. Filthy with those millions of visitors and hundreds of parties, but Lady Bird was smart, knew better than to try to touch a thing. And when I set to it, they screamed. I had dared to touch Jackie’s handiwork.”

  “Yes, but in the end, you did so much more than she did in the White House. All those wonderful antiques. Twice as many as she acquired.”

  Pat shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I enjoyed it. And I was glad to do it. And Jackie herself was so sweet, she could see what I’d done with the house, when I arranged for her and the children to come and visit that time, to see her portrait. The children hardly remembered the place. She was quite lovely, you know.’’

  He nodded. “She knew how hard it was for you. And she could have told you, even when you didn’t see it, that people loved you. They did. All those children you visited and helped…”

  Pat raised a hand. “Do not,” she said, her voice clipped and low and dangerous, with long spaces between each word. “Do not patronize me. They hated me. I was attached to Dick, and no matter what I did, they’d hate me for that. They presumed…” Her voice broke. She stopped. Then she said, the words like shards of glass, “They called me Plastic Pat.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “The last thing on earth I’d want to do is bring all that….”

  Her head jerked up. That carefully coifed head. The only time she’d ever appeared in public with her hair undone was the day Nixon resigned. She said, “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To talk about our feeble plan. Our attempt… To remind me how stupid I was, thinking that I could save us some shred of dignity by siccing Woodward and Bernstein on some of those horrible little men. Those insects. Those bottom feeders.” Her lip curled with disgust. “Why did we think that if we fed them bits of the story, of what we knew, or at least I knew, that they would stay away from Dick?” She waved her hand in front of her chest, above her heart. “That they would leave us alone? That they would go off on another track? That they would desist? All it did was unlock doors and open closets I didn’t even know existed.”

  “It was a good plan,” he said. “It was. It was solid.” As he said the words, he was back in a dark parking garage in the middle of the night reliving the subterfuge, the fright, the cloak and dagger silliness of it all. And the sweat. Jesus, how long had he lived in his own stink? “It just didn’t work.”

  “Because of those damned tapes,” she hissed. “My God! Those tapes!”

  “They were bad,” he agreed. “Very bad.”

  She closed her eyes. “They killed us. Dick was so stupid. Those goddamn tapes. After that, well…” She shook her head. “There was nothing we could do, was there? Didn’t matter how many times you met with Woodward, that son of a bitch, what you told him, who you sacrificed. Deep Throat!” She hooted suddenly, her face merry with laughter. “Dick was offended by that, you know. As much as by the leak, he was offended by the image. For all of his language, he’s such a prude.”

  She laughed again, and he could see, just for a moment, the fun-loving girl she’d once been. But he had to correct her on one point. “We weren’t a leak,” he said. “We were a counteroffensive.”

  “Oh,” she sighed, “we thought so. I did, anyway. I thought for the longest time the mess was all their fault. The plumbers, the Cubans, Haldeman, all of them out of control, acting on their own. I thought Dick was above all that, that he didn’t know.” She knocked back the last of her drink and reached for the crystal decanter of bourbon which Manolo had left on the silver tray. “What was I thinking? How could Dick not have known where every single body was buried?” She poured herself two fingers, three. “And to think that he did nothing to protect us. That he recorded it all. Was he mad?”

  The visitor shook his head silently. He had no answers. He never had.

  “No,” Pat Nixon said. “Dick wasn’t crazy. At least, not in the way you think. He made those tapes to prove to himself that he was president.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. So he could listen to them in the privacy of his study and know that he was really the president of the United States.”

  “Surely—” he began, but Pat Nixon cut him off.

  “You don’t think I’m going to let you get away with this, do you?” She was suddenly standing again, turning toward the huge plate glass window with her drink.

  On the other side of the glass, the gardener in the scruffy clothes unbent from the white geraniums he’d been tending. In his arms he held a very ugly automatic weapon.

  From behind him, three other men—tall, broad-shouldered, with the short haircuts of the Secret Service—appeared, all armed. They stood still as statues, their weaponry shining in the late afternoon California sun. It was much too pretty a day to die, the visitor thought.

  “I always knew,” Pat said, “that this day would come. That one afternoon I’d be sitting here reading, minding what little business of my own I have left, and you would call and ask to come visiting. With your hand out.”

  “My hand is not out,” he said. “You’ve misread me.”

  She leaned forward. “Do not screw with me. Don’t even try. I’ve been screwed over by much bigger men than you.” She may have been a schoolteacher back in Whittier, but this day, she spoke like a general.

  “I assure you—”

  “Do not assure me. Do not lie to me. And most of all, do not threaten me.”

  He nodded, very slightly, not wanting to alarm the armed men on the other side of the glass. “It seems to me that you’re the one doing the threatening.”

  “No. I am simply telling you the way things are. These men are loyal to me. I have told them a story about you that they believe because they want to believe it. Because they want to think that they are on the right side. That there is a right side. And that their lives make sense. These years. Watergate. The whole thing has been such a goddamned mess. It would be good for them, a catharsis, don’t you see, if they could kill someone. To take slow and deliberate aim and kill someone. Do you know what I mean?”

  He nodded slowly. Yes, he did. He knew exactly what she meant. He had often thought the same thing. How satisfying it would be to string someone up. The Roman arena idea she had, that was precisely the ticket. A public execution, a bloodletting in the open air, that’s what they needed so they could begin to forget about the waste and the ruin and the stupidity. Then they could begin to see a little daylight. To feel better about themselves.

  But, in the absence of that he’d thought, a little money might be nice. After all, things had gotten rough. A little silver in his palm…

  He could see now that he’d been wrong.

  Pat Nixon watched him nod and said, “Good. That’s good. Now, here’s what you do. You will pick
yourself up and you will go away and you will never ever again in your lifetime bother any of us again. For if you do, do not misunderstand or underestimate what I’m saying to you, they,” she turned and smiled through the glass at the men, still at ready-alert, “will track you down and eat you. Do you understand what I’m saying? Eat you.”

  “I understand,” he said. And then, very slowly, very carefully, his hands out from his sides to show that he was unarmed, that he meant no harm, no, not really, he was innocent as a babe, the visitor backed out of the room. Then he turned and ran as hard as he could.

  Pat Nixon offered the Secret Service men a small smile and a nod that, in lieu of blood, they accepted. Then they saluted sharply and withdrew.

  Whereupon Pat Nixon returned to her chair, freshened her drink, and picked up her book, a Taylor Caldwell novel of international intrigue, of plots and counterplots and conspiracies. Once more the silence enveloped the many rooms of the rambling house. Deep deep inside somewhere, in a dim quarter, Richard Milhous Nixon pored over his papers, hashed and rehashed, twisted and turned, and stewed. Pat Nixon had never visited that room, nor would she ever. Back in her bright, flowered perch above the sea, Pat Nixon found the page where she’d left off reading and resumed the story of imaginary people running, running, running. She settled into her chair and reached for her glass, secure in the knowledge that, at long last, her own running was done.

  If You Can’t Take the Heat

  Jane Millman stood at her kitchen counter dicing water chestnuts and peanuts. Along with creamy chunks of cooked taro, they would serve as toppings for the tapioca pudding with coconut cream she’d already prepared. The dessert, as popular in Thailand as apple pie was to Americans, was a dish Jane had learned the previous year.

  Before. That was how Jane thought of everything back then. Before.