T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

At the Geneva Conference, the two came together once again, and what had begun ten years earlier as a riveting infatuation blossomed into the mature and passionate love that would haunt them the rest of their days. Ike was sixty-five, in his prime, the erect warrior, the canny leader, a man who could shake off a stroke as if it were a head cold; Nina, ten years his junior, was in the flush of womanly maturity, lovely, solid, a soft inscrutable smile playing on her elfin lips. With a subterfuge that would have tied the intelligence networks of their respective countries in knots, the two managed to steal ten minutes here, half an hour there — they managed, despite the talks, the dinners, the receptions, and the interminable, stultifying rounds of speechmaking, to appease their desire and sanctify their love forever. “Without personal contact,” Ike said at a dinner for the Russian delegation, his boyish blue eyes fixed on Mrs. Khrushchev, “you might imagine someone was fourteen feet high, with horns and a tail.” Russians and Americans alike burst into spontaneous laughter and applause. Nina Petrovna, first lady of the Soviet Union, stared down at her chicken Kiev and blushed.

And so, when the gargantuan Soviet TU 114 shrieked into Andrews Air Force Base in September of 1959, I stood by my president with a lump in my throat: I alone knew just how much the Soviet visit meant to him, I alone knew by how tenuous a thread hung the balance of world peace. What could the president have been thinking as the great sleek jet touched down? I can only conjecture. Perhaps he was thinking that she’d forgotten him, or that the scrutiny of the press would make it impossible for them to steal their precious few moments together, or that her husband — that torpedo-headed bully boy — would discover them and tear the world to pieces with his rage. Consider Ike at that moment, consider the all-but-insurmountable barriers thrown in his way, and you can appreciate my calling him one of the truly impassioned lovers of all time. Romeo had nothing on him, nor Douglas Fairbanks either — even the starry-eyed Edward Windsor pales by comparison. At any rate, he leaped at his opportunity like a desert nomad delivered to the oasis: there would be an assignation that very night, and I was to be instrumental in arranging it.

After the greeting ceremonies at Andrews, during which Ike could do no more than exchange smiles and handshakes with the premier and premiersha, there was a formal state dinner at the White House. Ambassador Menshikov was there, Khrushchev and his party, Ike and Mamie, Christian Herter, Dick Nixon, and others; afterward, the ladies retired to the Red Room for coffee. I sat at Ike’s side throughout dinner, and lingered in the hallway outside the Red Room directly thereafter. At dinner, Ike had kissed Madame K.’s hand and chatted animatedly with her for a few minutes, but they covered their emotions so well that no one would have guessed they were anything other than amenable strangers wearing their social faces. Only I knew better.

I caught the premiersha as she and Mamie emerged from the Red Room in a burst of photographers’ flashbulbs. As instructed, I took her arm and escorted her to the East Room, for the program of American songs that would highlight the evening. I spoke to her in Russian, though to my surprise she seemed to have a rudimentary grasp of conversational English (did she recall it from her school-teaching days, or had she boned up for Ike?). Like a Cyrano, I told her that the president yearned for her tragically, that he’d thought of nothing else in the four years since Geneva, and then I recited a love poem he’d written her in English — I can’t recall the sense of it now, but it boiled with Elizabethan conceits and the imagery of war, with torn hearts, manned bastions, and references to heavy ordnance, pillboxes, and scaling the heights of love. Finally, just before we entered the East Room, I pressed a slip of paper into her hand. It read, simply: 3:00 A.M., back door, Blair House.

At five of three, in a rented, unmarked limousine, the president and I pulled up at the curb just down the street from Blair House, where the Khrushchev party had been installed for the night. I was driving. The rear panel slid back and the president’s voice leaped at me out of the darkness: “Okay, Paderewski, do your stuff — and good luck.”

I eased out of the car and started up the walk. The night was warm and damp, the darkness a cloak, street lights dulled as if they’d been shaded for the occasion. Every shadow was of course teeming with Secret Service agents — there were enough of them ringing the house to fill Memorial Stadium twice over — but they gave way for me. (Ike had arranged it thus: one person was to be allowed to enter the rear of Blair House at the stroke of three; two would be leaving an instant thereafter.)

She was waiting for me at the back door, dressed in pants and a man’s overcoat and hat. “Madame Khrushcheva?” I whispered. “Da,” came the reply, soft as a kiss. We hurried across the yard and I handed her into the car, admiring Ike’s cleverness: if anyone — including the legion of Secret Service, CIA, and FBI men — had seen us, they would have mistaken the madame for her husband and concluded that Ike had set up a private, ultrasecret conference. I slid into the driver’s seat and Ike’s voice, shaken with emotion, came at me again: “Drive, Paderewski,” he said. “Drive us to the stars.” And then the panel shot to with a passionate click.

For two hours I circled the capitol, and then, as prearranged, I returned to Blair House and parked just down the street. I could hear them — Ike and Nina, whispering, embracing, rustling clothing — as I cut the engine. She giggled. Ike was whistling. She giggled again, a lovely windchime of a sound, musical and coltish — if I hadn’t known better I would have thought Ike was back there with a coed. I was thinking with some satisfaction that we’d just about pulled it off when the panel slid back and Ike said: “Okay, Paderewski — let’s hit it.” There was the sound of a protracted kiss, a sound we all recognize not so much through experience — who’s listening, after all? — but thanks to the attention Hollywood sound men have given it. Then Ike’s final words to her, delivered in a passionate susurrus, words etched in my memory as if in stone; “Till we meet again,” he whispered.

Something odd happened just then, just as I swung back the door for Mrs. Khrushchev: a car was moving along the street in the opposite direction, a foreign car, and it slowed as she stepped from the limousine. Just that — it slowed — and nothing more. I hardly remarked it at the time, but that instant was to reverberate in history. The engine ticked up the street, crickets chirruped. With all dispatch, I got Mrs. Khrushchev round back of Blair House, saw her in the door, and returned to the limousine.

“Well done, Paderewski, well done,” Ike said as I put the car in drive and headed up the street, and then he did something he hadn’t done in years — lit a cigarette. I watched the glow of the match in the rearview mirror, and then he was exhaling with rich satisfaction, as if he’d just come back from swimming the Potomac or taming a mustang in one of those televised cigarette ads. “The White House,” he said. “Chop-chop.”

Six hours later, Madame K. appeared with her husband on the front steps of Blair House and fielded questions from reporters. She wore a modest gray silk chemise and a splash of lipstick. One of the reporters asked her what she was most interested in seeing while touring the U.S., and she glanced over at her husband before replying (he was grinning to show off his pointed teeth, as impervious to English as he might have been to Venusian). “Whatever is of biggest interest to Mr. Khrushchev,” she said. The reporters lapped it up: flashbulbs popped, a flurry of stories went out over the wire. Who would have guessed?