Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Anne thought she heard her coming out of the bedroom. “Marita, is that you?”

“Yes, Anne. I’m going to get some dinner. He’s quiet now.”

“Would you like me to cook something for you here?”

“No, no, it’s all right. I need the air.” She was already getting her coat and hat, but once she had them on she came back into the living room. “I don’t think it will be very long,” she said.

Anne nodded. She knew this was Marita’s gentle way of urging her to get back in there, to return to the deathbed — which she didn’t want to do. She hesitated even when Marita had left, going instead into Peter’s office to call Anders, as she’d promised to do when he phoned her, briefly, from North Carolina on Christmas Day.

Once he was on the line she heard crying. Again? It turned out to be Nick Carrollton, a foot or two away from the receiver. “A friend of his died today,” Anders explained.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“How’s it going there ?”

“Very close to the end — maybe even tonight. The nurse has a lot of experience and good instincts.”

“Anne, I know a few details now that I didn’t know the last time we talked about Peter and the money — that night at the White House. Does he have a safe-deposit box in Dallas?”

“I can look.”

“When is your son coming back? Can he get into it?”

“I can probably get into it myself. I seem to have been given every possible legal power. For Peter that’s a form of affection.”

“You should be able to find the money — the Channell money parked with Peter — in a safe-deposit box. That’s where he would have been instructed to put it, and it’ll be cash.” He paused before adding, “It’s the same with Nick.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Go to the bank and get it as soon as you can. Then bring it back to Washington with you.”

Was this maneuver supposed to save Peter’s reputation? Ensure that the Argus-Press back in Owosso, the town he left so long ago, ran a respectful obituary rather than some scandalous wire story, what would be that day’s dose of Iran news? She agreed, almost absently, to do what Anders asked, and she promised that she would call again once Peter had “passed”—Marita’s word.

Still postponing her return to the bedroom, she stopped in Peter’s kitchen and regarded the array of amber-colored prescription containers lined up on the counter. She looked forward to sweeping them — a little army of valiant but defeated pawns — into the trash once Peter was gone. Passed: she liked the word. It suggested that there was a next phase to things, which she didn’t believe in, but then again didn’t dis believe so strenuously as Christopher Hitchens did. She decided she would try the verb out on him if they ever met again.

Standing against the kitchen counter, squeezing one of the drawer handles, she gathered her courage. Then she yanked open the drawer and went rummaging for the Truman button she’d found there last October. She put it on before walking to the bedroom and turning the doorknob.

She lay down beside him. His body felt cold, as if the chess game between the cancerous cells and the healthy ones had already ended. She placed her arm across his chest, the way she always had during their early years in the marital bed, and she felt an absurd 1940s-ish fear that Marita would return earlier than expected and “catch” them this way.

Within minutes her dread subsided; Peter remained so quiet that she nearly fell asleep watching the outdated digital clock. Each minute, printed on a tiny square, dropped down like an eyelid. When Peter finally did begin to stir, and moan, she felt frightened, and wished Marita would come back quickly. She tried soothing Peter with a gentle petting of his shoulders, hoping he knew who was doing it, suspecting he had no idea she was there.

She glanced over at the wire-mesh wastebasket, half-filled with tissues that she and Marita had used to mop sweat from his forehead all yesterday and today. The sight of the balled paper threw her back absurdly, yet again, to the fall of ’48, to a crowded high school football field in Owosso, where one Friday night she had tried to teach Peter to fold and staple crepe-paper flowers. They were for one of the floats being built for the big Dewey parade. The hometown boy would be at its head, leading them all to a permanent spot on the American map. She and Peter got into one of their sparrings that night: she was going to marry Jack, she told him, and he’d just have to accept that. No, he’d insisted, he and she were going places, together. She had come to Owosso to write The Time Being, her small-town novel, just as he’d picked the town off a wall map at the state Republican headquarters — one that marked it as having an open seat in the state senate. They would be leaving Owosso before she knew it; she loved him, he explained, because he represented risk. I’m the only person within a hundred yards of you who’s likely to fall on his face in the next ten years.

She could now feel the letting-go, though there was no sign of the death rattle one always heard about. She kissed her husband’s once-golden hair and held him, falling all the way back into that long-ago, upside-down autumn. Her own life had proved an upset; but had she won or lost?

Nixon finished his grapefruit juice along with the L.A. Times ’s obituary for Harold Macmillan — a more formidable character, he thought, than the mustachioed fop Americans used to imagine — if they even paid attention to overseas news!

The former president was up early this New Year’s Eve morning, happy to be in one of the guest “cottages” on Walter Annenberg’s desert estate, rather than a bedroom suite inside the enormous main house. He had more privacy this way and was just as lavishly cared for.

Annenberg had been the most loyal of friends, resigning the British ambassadorship Nixon had given him as soon as Nixon had to resign himself. In the years since there’d been many visits here to Sunnylands, and the treatment was always “Mr. President” all the way. Whenever he thinks of the tapes being released — with those stupid, compulsive remarks about the Jews; his own goddamned idea of locker-room toughness, he supposes — it’s the thought of Walter hearing them that makes him cringe.

Looking out the cottage window, across the golf-course fairway, he could see a couple of white ducks resting on one of the eleven lakes. Annenberg has told him that once in a while they’ll be chased by coyotes. Christ, what a place. It brought to mind the old joke about what God would do if he had the money, but why would God force himself to keep living in the Middle East? Nixon knew that Lee and Walter didn’t come here in the summer, but really, why did anyone come to the desert at all?

He decided to put on his windbreaker and go for a walk before the sun got too high in the sky and burnt the patches of bare scalp on both sides of his square widow’s peak. Finding a path through some olive trees, he spotted Reagan’s helicopter, its blades motionless, resting near the edge of the estate. The current president had been here for two days. Nixon himself had gotten in only last night and had yet to see him. Too frail and too little interested to make the trip, Pat had assured him that she’d be fine in Jersey with visits from the girls and the grandchildren; he should go and enjoy himself and meet with some of the Nixon library people while he was out in California. Christ, even now they hadn’t broken ground for that thing — a Potemkin Village that would be devoid of his papers, which were still held hostage back east! It was unclear whether it would even rise before Reagan got his library.