A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

He throws me a bone, offering to phone upstairs and ask Wanda to come down and collect me.

Wanda is tall, black, efficient. She handles me like I am a specimen — the confused professor.

“Apologies for making you come all the way down,” I say in the elevator.

“Not a problem,” she says as the elevator door opens on the twenty-seventh floor. “The firm is located on this floor and the one above.”

The firm is silent; telephones don’t ring, they blink, and people glide soundlessly across the carpet. The only noise is the shussshing of their clothing. Wanda leads me down a corridor, unlocks a door, and ushers me into a conference room filled with innocuous, if expensive, furniture. In the middle of the table sits something that looks like a UFO, a telephone pod for conference calls. On the far end of the table are two battered cardboard boxes with “R.M.N.” written in block letters on the side. My heart races.

“You’ll have to leave your backpack with me,” Wanda says.

“My backpack?”

“Your bag.” She points to what I am carrying in my right hand.

“George’s briefcase?”

“Yes.”

“It’s for taking notes”—I pat the briefcase—“paper and pens.”

“No outside materials,” she says. “We have supplies”—pointing to legal pads and pencils on the table. “And, please, no quoting more than seven words in a sequence.”

I nod and hand her my briefcase. She hands me a three-page confidentiality agreement. I sign the document without reading it.

“How much time have I got?” I ask.

“I’m here until five.”

“Thanks.”

She moves to leave and turns back. “You’re under constant surveillance; that means no funny business.”

“Am I allowed to unpack the boxes?”

“Yes,” she says.

“And handle the material?”

“There are gloves on the table. You’re not allergic to latex, are you?”

“Latex is fine,” I say. “Perfect.”

I put the gloves on, imagining myself as a physician and RMN as my patient. With enormous excitement, I open the old box. The sight of Nixon’s handwriting makes me blush. My cheeks are warm, my palms sweating inside the gloves. I’m glad to be alone, because, frankly, I’m a little overexcited, like a twelve-year-old with his first girlie magazine.

I am touching the paper that he touched — this is not a reproduction, this is 100 percent real. The legal pads are embossed with Nixon’s rich blue cursive, with cross-outs and fresh starts, numbers, underlines — often a page has several headings, things numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.

He quite literally breathed on these pages; these are his thoughts, his ideas. “Eat less salt. Try pepper instead” is scribbled in the margins. “Or cinnamon. I hate cinnamon,” he writes in response to himself. “It’s like dirt.”

Holding these well-used legal pads, I am overwhelmed with pleasure. I hear Julie’s voice in my head, “Take a look, and then we can talk.” I think of Julie marrying David Eisenhower, grandson of the general and former President, in December 1968, only weeks after Nixon won the presidency, the ceremony officiated by none other than the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale — Mr. Power of Positive Thinking.

Pondering the high hopes, the promise, the great aspiration of RMN, I start thinking of myself. I trip over a psychic speed bump, tumble down, and am deep into my own family history. The irony is that, though my parents expected George and me to grow up and be president, they didn’t believe we were actually even capable of crossing the street on our own. It was the mixed message, simultaneous extremes of expectation and reminders that we weren’t worth crap, that in retrospect seems abusive. I am sure it was “unintentional” and was born from their own deprivation and the sense that we should be lucky for anything we got. I always had the feeling that my family was somehow “defective” and that it was those well-matched flaws — the ability to love and loathe all at once — that kept my parents together. Basically, they were lousy with bitterness. We were supposed to become president ruling from the children’s table while never daring to dream of going beyond where our parents had been; never transcending.

My heart sinks — here I am with these legal pads, the literal hand of my subject in mine, and I’m losing time, digressing.

I begin again, staying focused on Nixon and his contemporaries and a period of enormous change in this country — the bridge between our prewar Depression-era culture and the postwar prosperous-American-dream America.

FROM R. M. N. BOX 345 LEGAL PAD #4 NOTES MARKED; GOOD AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Wilson Grady is a man alone. Each morning Grady wakes with pride swelling in the center of his chest — he is filled with possibility, the hope that each day will be better than the last. He is a lucky fella, a fella of good fortune, crossing the plains, mile for mile, trailing a cloud of dust, his holey muffler so loud people think it’s a crop duster flying low. He sees folks in the distance looking on as he’s coming in — he jokes about it when he gets out of the car. “No surprises here,” he says. “She may be loud, but she’s what got me to you folks and I’m countin’ on her to get me back home at the end of the week.”

The lady of the house steps off the front porch and comes towards him — a woman home alone will never invite him in — that’s understood.

“Wilson Grady,” he says, extending his hand. “Thank you in advance for your time.”

If she likes him at all, she’ ll offer him a cup of coffee.

“That would be nice,” he says, whether or not he had another cup two miles down the road.

“How do you take it?” she asks and then before he can answer she adds, “We’re low on milk.”

“Black with sugar would be fine.”

He waits while she goes back inside. You can tell a lot about folks from their porch — Is it painted? Are there chairs, flowers? Curtains in the windows? Crocheted doilies under the lamps in the parlor? He has made himself a kind of a mental checklist.

The coffee is hot — the thick ceramic cup nearly burning Grady’s hands.

“You mentioned your children; how old are they?”

“William, the oldest, is eleven, Robert is nine, Caroline is eight, and Raymond is six.”

“One of the things I’ve got with me is an encyclopedia set, packed full of information, history, maps, things each and every one of us should know.” He leads the woman towards his car — carefully opening the trunk, which is outfitted like a traveling five-and-dime. “What I can tell you about these books is that every night when I have my supper I myself sit down with another letter of the alphabet — there is so much to learn. I’m on the letter ‘H’ right now — and getting a good education.”

“How much is it?”

“I’ ll be honest with you,” he says. “It’s not cheap. The 26 letters of the alphabet are combined into 13 volumes and it comes along with an atlas of the world. Makes a heck of a Christmas gift and it’s something all the kids can use — even the little fella will be reading soon.”

“Do you have children, mister?”

“Not yet — but someday. I’ve got my eye on the girl I want to marry, she just doesn’t know it yet.”

The woman smiles.

“I could let you have the full set for forty dollars.”

She nods. “That’s quite a lot.”

“It is,” he says. “It’s an investment, a lifetime of knowledge.”

“Do you by chance have an iron?”