A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“Maybe,” I say. “Let’s see how they are in the morning.”

“I can’t believe how blasé you’re being,” she says

“I don’t feel blasé, I just don’t know what we should do about it. Go into the house and create a distraction? Do you want to confront them in the act? Maybe this is how they do it, the way they’ve always done it. Remember, you’re spying on them; they may be senior citizens, but they have rights, and at least one of them still has feelings of a certain sort.”

She is mad at me.

“If you feel so constantly worried and overburdened, why don’t you put them in a retirement home?” I ask.

“Why don’t you go to hell,” she says sharply, turning off the monitor, then rolls away from me and feigns sleep.

I am in the office three days a week. I have my own ID card to get in and out of the building, the office, and the men’s room. I have been given a small office with a narrow window — Ching Lan sits in a cubicle outside. Often I ask her to come into my office and read the stories out loud; she is practicing her English. It’s interesting to hear Nixon’s words with a strong Chinese accent.

Nine of the stories are in close to finished form. I review them, tease out the narrative thread, trim the digressive dross. For a man who didn’t like a lot of small talk, Nixon was almost verbose in his fiction.

“What’s the best way for me to contact Mrs. Eisenhower?” I ask Wanda. “There’s a story I’d like her to consider sending to some magazines.”

“I’ll let her know,” Wanda says. “Which magazines?”

“ The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vanity Fair. What the hell, we could even try The Paris Review. ”

“What about McSweeney’s ? or One Story ?” Wanda asks. “They take risks.”

“All right, let’s go wide, send it everywhere,” I say, not wanting her to know that I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“I minored in creative writing,” Wanda says, exiting deftly. “Mrs. E. is on the line,” she says an hour later, when she rings the phone in my office, which never rang before. “Press the blinking light to take your call.”

“Much thanks.” After a minute of small talk, I make my proposal: “Ultimately, it will be easier to place the collection if a few have been published first. There is one which is ready to go out, but I’m wondering, under what name?”

“What do you mean?” she says rather aggressively, like she thinks I mean perhaps under my name.

“Richard Nixon? R. M. Nixon? R. Nixon? It depends on how ‘out there’ you want to be, how obvious or not.”

“Interesting,” she says. “Let me discuss that with my family and let you know. Can you send me the story?”

“Of course; do you want just the clean copy or all the revisions?”

“Both, if you don’t mind,” she says.

“I’ve read the story,” Mrs. Eisenhower says in a measured tone the following Monday. “The original version was eleven hundred seventy words, and yours is less than eight hundred.”

“Yes,” I say. “I worked on that one pretty hard, took it down to a short-short, what folks call flash fiction.”

“You cut a lot,” she says.

“It shouldn’t be so much about word count but about impact. This particular story had a limited vocabulary, and I wasn’t sure how long readers would stick with it until they got to the punch line.”

“‘Cocksucker,’” she says.

“Yes, that’s the punch line.”

She pauses. “My father wasn’t given to spontaneous humor, but when he’d let himself go, it was quite something. He liked to bang out songs on the piano and it would drive my mother crazy. We would go to pieces, laughing. I still have the letters he wrote me as a kid — very formal, full of good counsel. He wanted things to go well, but often felt so isolated. Whatever it was he was after, he had to find his own path to it. A life like that takes its toll, more on my mother than on him,” she says, ruminating aloud. And then, abruptly, she stops. “All right, then,” she says, “send it out, let’s go with Richard M. Nixon.”

“Thank you,” I say, and hang up.

I draft a cover letter:

Dear Ms. Treisman,

Enclosed, please find a short piece of fiction of great historical significance. In recent months I have had the pleasure and responsibility of bringing into the light the collected fiction of the notable R. M. Nixon. And while Nixon was long known to have made copious notes about all manner of things, it was only during a recent transfer of materials that a particular series of boxes was fully explored. You are the first to be reading this story, because I can’t imagine a better place for it than in the pages of The New Yorker. I will hold my breath awaiting your response.

Thanks in advance,

Harold Silver

My phone rings again. “I’m not ready to go public,” she says. “I want you to continue with your work, and we’ll talk again when the collection is complete.”

“Of course,” I say; my balloon’s been popped.

Ricardo comes for a week. I drive him to school; the bus brings him home. The house rules: no television during the week, no video games, no sugar.

“And what am I supposed to like about this?” he asks.

“That I care about you.”

In the late afternoons we play, do homework, and walk the dog. I check his spelling, his math, make sure he bathes, takes his medication. I make his lunch and pack a snack for the bus trip home. By the end of the week, I would swear that Ricardo is doing better. I’m not sure if it’s true, or if I’ve gotten used to him.

I call the Department of Social Services to see where we are regarding the foster-parent approval. “Your paperwork is in the system; that’s all we can say,” the woman tells me. “Have you got your references, your clearances, your letter from the bank, and the psychiatric evaluation?”

“I was waiting to hear from you about the next step.”

“Never wait for us, just keep moving, and eventually we’ll catch up.”

“All right, then; is there a psychiatrist you recommend? Someone ‘in the system’?”

“No idea. I’m new — I usually work in the Motor Vehicle Administration. Hold on, let me ask.”

I am on hold for what seems like forever.

“I couldn’t find anyone who knew, so I looked in some files of approved families; here are some names of who they used.”

I write them down, Google each, and call the one whose office is closest.

Cousin Jason phones to say he’s gotten an e-mail from George. “Does that seem weird? I thought he was in jail?”

I don’t say that I got him an iPad for his birthday.

“He ‘friended’ me on Facebook and sent a message: ‘I always knew you were gay, sorry if I embarrassed you at the family dinner.’ I wondered if maybe he was in a twelve-step program and making amends. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously, but he was so specific. I said thank you. Yesterday he wrote to say all my Facebook friends were so masculine and good-looking and he bet I was getting ‘it’ a lot. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t answer. Today I got another one, asking if I knew anyone in the ‘holy land’ with a bank account.”

“What was the e-mail address?”

“Woodsman224@aol. com,” Jason says.

I write it down.

“I wonder if maybe he’s involved in a cult or some weird activity, or maybe his e-mail was hijacked. I had that happen, and all my friends got an e-mail saying I’d been robbed in London and they should wire me money — cost my buddies a couple of thousand bucks.”

“I’ll look into it,” I say. “And you, are you doing well?”

“I’m fine.”