Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Hitchens watched Anders pour her a glass of white wine and pondered whether the gesture looked connubial or filial. E. M. Forster and Mom back in Weybridge? Once she sat, he said to Anne, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She thanked him, still unsure of how he’d learned whatever he knew about Peter and the parked money.

Nor was Hitchens sure he should tell her. A couple of days ago he had gone to work in earnest on Mrs. Harriman’s tip, calling Cox’s apartment once he got hold of a phone number. A Spanish-sounding nurse answered and told him that the occupant had “passed,” making it seem as if Cox had just wandered by her or succeeded at his O-levels. How insistently to press the more-or-less widow, now that he was in her presence, remained a question.

He didn’t need to worry about the matter for long.

“Christopher,” Anne said, “in the Hart Building you asked me if it was better for you or the FBI to have Peter’s secrets.”

“Anne,” said Anders, cautioning her.

“I thought, instinctively, that the answer was you. And I think I was right.”

Hitchens replied, “I’ve been trying to get Mr. Little to entrust me with his secrets, as well as his beliefs.”

Anne turned to Anders. “Have you made a decision?” She could see from his face that he was ready to go over the edge and say yes, so she pushed him, handing Hitchens the envelope with the rest of the money. The writer made a quick, silent inspection of it. “I did always imagine it was Mr. Cox and not ‘Mr. Katz,’ ” he finally said.

Anders and Anne looked at each other. There was no point in asking exactly what he meant; the point was he knew .

“Okay,” said Anders, “you want me for your article?”

“Madly.”

“Two conditions. You don’t mention Peter Cox or Nick Carrollton. Not in that article or any other you write.”

“Done.”

“That was two names but one condition.”

Hitchens smiled. “Liberation is making you quicker, Little. What’s the second?”

“ You get rid of this money — as you see fit.”

Hitchens contemplated the four crisp stacks of bills. “I have a thought,” he said at last. He turned to whisper it to Anne, who was soon laughing for the first time in weeks.

“Are you going to tell me?” asked Anders.

Hitchens explained: “A small remnant of the Greenham Common women”—the antinuclear protesters so despised by Mrs. Thatcher—“have settled in for a long winter. I know just whom this can be given to, so that the pasionarias can be fed and clothed in their vigil against American missiles.”

Anders appeared ready to explode, until he looked at Anne, whose expression seemed to say We’re beyond all that now. He then looked back toward Hitchens, realizing, with a sort of exasperated wonder, that he, too, trusted him more than the FBI.

“There’s not much you can do, Little. You’re caught between two fires. That’s the terrible thing about having principles.”

“I think you just complimented me,” said Anders.

“I did.”

Nancy didn’t like the way she looked. In the mirror, getting ready, she’d seen a sort of burnt matchstick in a long red gown. But the dread could only be dealt with by throwing herself into the evening. As the forty-five-minute cocktail hour got under way and the men posed in front of the fireplace for official-looking pictures (Walter was nothing if not an archivist of his own life), she played off her own bossy image, supervising the photographer, fussing and flirting with each group she rearranged around Ronnie.

While some of this went on, Annenberg pointed to the painting above the mantel. “As most of you know, that’s van Gogh’s Pink Roses. If you want to see his White Roses, you’ve got to go to Pamela Harriman’s house in Washington — but I suspect that invitations there have been pretty scarce for this crowd!”

Nancy looked toward the other paintings, lots of Postimpressionists that hung on the room’s pale-green wooden partitions — simple, almost rustic planks that didn’t go quite to the ceiling. Ted Graber had been in on designing the house back in the sixties and had explained to her that the truncation was designed to keep this enormous modern space feeling like a single room. She understood the theory, but the planks always reminded her of the “walls” for an interior set that had been built upon a soundstage. She half expected to see a boom mic above the edge of the wood.

Ronnie was pointing to one of the madrone wreaths, which he’d just noticed. “Ted Graber told us about those!” he informed Lee and Walter and everyone listening. “We feel right at home!”

—

Nixon had walked over from his cottage to the main house — it was good for the phlebitis — wearing his black-tie rig and arriving at the front driveway twenty minutes into cocktails. He passed the fountain, some sort of Mexican column, then entered the huge single-story premises. A waiter greeted him with a tray of drinks near a little indoor pool surrounding a Rodin. The former president noted the bandstand set up on one side of the prodigious living room, and he hung back from the picture-taking, which was properly Reagan’s show.

Taking his drink, he went off alone to Walter’s “Room of Memory,” a little self-created museum to the owner and his wife. Annenberg’s new Medal of Freedom was conspicuously displayed near a wall with nothing but framed Christmas greetings, year after year, from the Queen Mother.

Suddenly, across the room, Nixon saw Pat, her black-and-white image inside a little silver frame. In the picture she was talking to Lee and Walter, and he could tell from the tight curl of her hair that the photo dated from the vice-presidential years, when Walter was still making his climb.

On another wall, higher up than the Queen Mother and the rest of the royal family, you could see Walter’s ancestors, humble Jews photographed or painted into oval frames, all of them looking too shy to speak while they presided over their descendant’s unlikely domain. Walter’s whole life had been spent redeeming his old man, who’d gone to prison on a tax rap, and for all that he was bent on overcoming the disgrace, he had never done anything to hide it, either, a thought that made Nixon feel ashamed. This morning he’d pushed away half a lemon on the plate beside the tea they’d brought him; it was his own know-it-all father — the failed lemon ranch, the crazy nostrums, the temper — that he was shoving aside.

Unlike Walter, Nixon had never been much interested in curating his own past. The goddamned tapes had been meant to prove a point, that he, not Henry, had crafted the big ideas in foreign policy. When he’d written Six Crises, the first of his autobiographies, it was less to preserve his experience of those half-dozen calamities than to make sure he’d have a chance at another six, and six more after that. Even this make-believe library of his that was aborning in Yorba Linda: there are times when he finds it hard to sustain interest in the thing.

He didn’t want to head into the clatter of cocktails any sooner than he had to. So he asked one of the waiters the best way to slip off outside for a moment by himself. He’d also had too much of the past; too much decay and dying. He’d called Anders Little this afternoon from his cottage — Walter could afford the long-distance charges! — and learned that Connally’s man Cox, that odd character who’d looked so bad at the party for Jeane, had just checked out. He should write a condolence note to the wife — or was it the ex-wife? He forgot what Little had told him.

He made his way along a pebbled path, guided by the memory of an earlier visit to the garden Nancy had pointed at this morning. And sure enough, there it was, Pat’s flower, a few rows back, with her name on a white card. My wild Irish rose!