Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life by Ann Beattie Read Free Book Online

or something, but her eyes aren’t on her husband. The bowl is forgotten, every insignificant symbolic thing is forgotten, she is trapped in the present as certainly as if she’d been manacled.
    Her daughter Tricia, nicknamed Dolly by Mrs. Nixon, is the one who doesn’t like interviews and won’t speak to the press. Younger sister Julie is the family spokesperson, who urged her father strongly not to resign, having no idea what evidence of his involvement in the cover-up plot would emerge when the tape of June 23, 1972, was handed over. On the eve of his resignation, Julie, then twenty-six, wrote a letter to her father, saying, “I love you. Whatever you do I will support. I am very proud of you. Please wait a week or even ten days before you make this decision. Go through the fire a little longer. You are so strong! I love you.” It is signed “Julie,” and“Millions support you.” She had internalized what Mr. and Mrs. Nixon believed: that it was never an option to give up. This was to the chagrin of her husband, David Eisenhower. Tricia’s husband, Edward Cox, simply could not speak to his wife about the resignation at all, it seems, though he was so worried his father-in-law might commit suicide that he spoke to people outside the family about Mr. Nixon’s condition.
    What sort of person would remember the bowl, in such troubled times, with the public watching and waiting? But, in fiction, what if she had just then stumbled upon it? Would it now be an omen, a symbol, an ironic mockery? What if, decades earlier, she’d kept the May basket her husband sent to her at Whittier Union High School (delivered by his parents’ employee Tom Sulky), with her engagement ring nestled inside? She had thought they’d be together when she became engaged, but instead he’d sent it by messenger, unexpectedly, and hidden the ring in its box within the basket. She didn’t like that: it wasn’t the moment she’d anticipated. A fictional story about such a woman might relate the presentation of the ring to the presentation of the bowl, both being things that were meant as affirmations of something important. If Mrs. Nixon thought about symbols, weren’t there times when she yearned to take off the ring? When she looked at her hand and thought, What have I done? How? How? How? Years later, after her stroke, she had to work hard to get back the use of her hand. The physical therapy consisted of using the afflicted hand rather than the functional hand. The theory was that if you forced yourself to use the weaker hand, you might regain its use. Imagine the struggle. Think of all the shortcuts people constantly take to do things with the least effort. The idea of not being a quitter applied unilaterally, so Mrs. Nixon practiced and challenged herself every day.
    The day she accepted the gift of the bowl, she was in good health. She was energetic, accustomed to activity, an achiever.
    As a fiction writer, I wonder: what could be known that the person, or character (Mrs. Nixon), wouldn’t necessarily understand? Revealing these things is not a betrayal but rather the writer’s admission of life’s complexity, in which the central figure is sometimes the least informed, the most vulnerable. When Gatsby refutes Nick Carraway by insisting that the past can be recaptured, it is a sincere belief but untrue. (Nick, on Daisy Buchanan: “‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’”) We have to see through, and around, the character to see that things do not add up, or that we understand differently than the character does. If Mrs. Nixon had the ability to look at “Mrs. Nixon,” what might she have seen? (She did, after all, have photographs of herself to study, as well as watching herself on TV being interviewed, et cetera.) She probably would not have wanted to dwell on herself. Some things might have