A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

My eye is throbbing. I feel it starting to close, and the other narrowing to a thin slit as though in sympathy. “Okay, so where are we?”

“Watergate,” someone says.

“Very good. And what do we know about Watergate?”

“It was the first of the ‘gates,’” one of the students says. And a few others laugh.

A student’s phone rings. It rings and rings while she digs through her bag — everyone watches. She answers: “Hello.” I stare, amazed that she actually answered her phone during class.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“My mother,” she whispers loudly.

“Pass the phone forward,” I instruct, and the phone comes to the front of the room. “Hello,” I say.

“Who is this?” the mother asks.

“This is Professor Silver. And who am I speaking with?”

“Malina Garcia.”

“How many children do you have, Mrs. Garcia?”

“Four.”

“That’s lovely,” I say. “You must be so proud; but right now we’re in the middle of class.”

“Oh,” she says. “Is it yoga? My daughters love yoga.”

“No, Mrs. Garcia, it’s not yoga. Does the name Richard Nixon ring a bell?”

“Yes,” she says, “the president who died of the forgetting disease. Such a shame, a beautiful man.”

In the classroom, her daughter blushes.

“Yes, Mrs. Garcia, he was a beautiful man. It was a pleasure talking with you. Your daughter’s paper was due today. Did she mention that to you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Any idea what she might be writing about?”

“Not really.”

“Does she typically discuss her schoolwork with you?”

“Not so much; mostly we talk about the family and her friends and things like that.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Garcia,” I say, hanging up and passing the phone back to the girl. “Anyone else have a call they’d like me to make?” There is no response. “Isn’t it interesting that during Nixon’s time there were no cell phones, no texting, no BlackBerrys. Imagine how things might have unfolded differently if Nixon had been more of a future-forward president, instead of running an old-fashioned tape recorder with big bulky buttons that could get confusing — so that his secretary could accidentally push the wrong one and then, while answering the phone, put her foot on the remote pedal and erase all the good stuff.”

The class stares at me, blankly.

“Okay, well, let’s get back to it. Where were we …? Can one of you refresh us about what Watergate was?”

A single hand goes up. “‘Gate’ is a suffix applied to a word to modify that word into a scandal, as in ‘Watergate,’ which was also named as such because it took place at a complex in Washington known as the Watergate. But in the years since then, any big blowup is called Whatevergate. So in fact it was the first of the ‘gates.’”

“Interesting, and thank you. Do I have your paper?”

“Yes, you do,” he says. “I am here from far away, and I must have very good grade in order to stay in this country. My family will cut my head off if I do not do well.”

The class laughs. “You mean your family will cut you off if you do not do well.”

“I mean what I say,” the student says.

“I will take you at your word,” I say, and carry on, quoting from Nixon’s memoirs:

The factual truth [about Watergate] could probably never be completely reconstructed, because each of us had become involved in different ways and no one’s knowledge at any given time exactly duplicated anyone else’s.

I explain that at the time the scandal unfolded it was the most public example of political dirty tricks in American history and prompted the only resignation of a United States president and the indictment of the Watergate Seven (with Nixon named as co-conspirator — again a historical first). John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson all served time; Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson were never jailed. Among the others who served time related to Watergate were John Dean, E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Fred LaRue. … As is my habit, I digress, laying out the evolution of Nixon’s Special Investigations Unit, dubbed “the Plumbers.” Their first job was to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and get the scoop on the former RAND employee who felt it his civic duty to leak the Pentagon Papers. Nixon felt this leak was a “conspiracy” against his administration and wanted to discredit Ellsberg. He ordered his Plumbers to get everything they could find out to the media and “try him in the press … leak it out.” The attempted burglary is a comedy of errors: the burglers wait until the cleaning lady leaves, then find the door locked and have to break through a window. There are three burglars, Bernard Baker, Felipe de Diego, and Eugenio Martinez, and two lookouts, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Oddly enough, several of these “Plumbers” are CIA and ex-CIA and can be traced back to the Bay of Pigs and forward to Watergate. …

My eye is killing me; after class I go to the Student Health Center. They have an actual eyewash station built right into the sink. The “nurse” on duty, who turns on the faucets, makes a point of saying, “Just so you know, I’m not really a nurse, I’m a health aide; they cut the nurse a couple of years ago, during a budget crunch; there is no nurse …” and then asks, “Are you sure you didn’t get some kind of chemical in there that might have burned your cornea?”

“It was just dirt,” I say, thinking, for all I know, I could have gotten a chemical in there; maybe there was one of those toilet fresheners in the bathroom, maybe I waterboarded myself with fucking Ty-D-Bowl.

The not-a-nurse gives me some ointment for my eye. It’s so thick everything becomes blurry. “It’s a lubricant,” she says, handing me the tube. “Put more in tonight, and if it’s still sore tomorrow you’ll have to see a doctor.”

“Thank you.”

Half blind, I walk to the parking lot, the voice of the Indian student calmly saying they’d cut off his head echoing in my mind. The goddamned envelope is still in my car. I sit on it and drive to Schwartz’s house. His wife answers the door. I hand it to her. “This is for Schwartz,” I say.

“He’s not home,” his wife says. “He’s at a department cocktail party.”

“Take it,” I say, pushing the envelope slightly aggressively towards her.

“It’s really not necessary,” she says.

“I am returning it to him,” I explain. “The envelope and its contents belong to him.”

“What is it?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t open it, he left it in my car.”

She takes the envelope. “It was very good of you to return it.”

I shrug.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Spider bite,” I say, without knowing why.

“Maybe take something for it,” she suggests. “It doesn’t look good.”

“Will do,” I say, turning to leave.

“I look forward to reading your book,” she calls after me. “My husband speaks of it often.”

Without stopping or turning back, I say goodbye: “Goodbye and good luck.”

As I’m cooking, the phone rings, I grab it, thinking it’s her — Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

“Hi,” Nate says. “I tried you earlier and you weren’t home.”

“Teaching day,” I say.

“Might want to change that outgoing message,” Nate says, his voice tight. “It’s still Mom.”

I haven’t been able to bring myself to change it — I can’t erase Jane, but I can imagine how hard it is for him to hear.

“I’ll get a new machine tomorrow,” I say, though I’ve secretly liked hearing Jane’s occasional “Hello, we’re not home right now. …”