Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Ronnie went into the bathroom. She knew she should use these minutes to call Ron and Maureen and wish them a Happy New Year; they’d done their best the other day. But that could wait until morning. Her head would come off if she didn’t get a few minutes by herself.

She stepped through the sliding glass door and into the cactus garden, waving to the agent to indicate that everything was fine. She was just going to stroll past the corner of the house and get a breath of air.

She looked for what everyone called “the peacock sculpture,” a spray of wires that had always reminded her not so much of that bird’s tail as a weeping willow. There was something calming, a sort of floating suspension, to the filaments. But as she stood before the piece of art, she continued to fixate on all that was coming — the hearings; the revelations; the instant memoirs written to curry favor with the prosecution and the press. And the ridicule! What didn’t the president know, and when did he forget it?

Suppose Ronnie did apologize and get rid of Don. Suppose something could shake him free from this mystical torpor that had come over him since Reykjavik. Could the great ocean liner of the presidency come off the sandbar and begin to sail again, until Saturn and Uranus had finally finished their murderous dance?

Before it was over, one way or the other, her mother would be dead.

She looked up at the stars in the desert sky and knew they meant nothing. Astrology was no more real than religion or a script. That she pretended to believe it wasn’t a weakness; it was a sign of will and self-discipline, an ability to pull the wool over her own eyes if that’s what it took to feel better and get through.

Her heart sped up when she heard the last of the limousines pulling away. She looked over to the cottages and lakes before turning around on the path that would lead her back to the cactus garden. Within seconds she was at the sliding door to the Yellow Suite, which was now bathed in only the glow of a night-light. Ronnie, lying in bed in his boxy, old-fashioned pajamas, had already fallen asleep. She went to slide the door and discovered that it had locked itself.

She didn’t want to make a fuss with the agent. In a moment Ronnie would stir, get up, and let her in. So right now she just looked at her husband in the night-light’s glimmer and felt flooded with a love for him she hadn’t experienced in weeks. He had always been her script, to read and study and revise. As she gazed at him, sleeping peacefully and floating toward ruin, she struggled once again to pierce the mystery of the last two months. Was he fearful, and manfully hiding it? Blindly faithful that everything would work out? Possessed of a factual certainty— I know something you don’t know— that it was going to? He seemed to feel that everyone’s desire for him to act was a kind of imposition, an unreasonable demand from people who didn’t know that his work in the presidency was done, that he had completed whatever he was supposed to do and that nothing more could be asked of him.

Her moment in the rehab facility with Mike came back to her now — that feeling she’d had of being dragged by a current when she asked him: How did you understand Ronnie? She had seen from the look on his face that Mike was protecting her, but realized only now why he hadn’t answered. If he had — had admitted that he didn’t really understand Ronald Reagan — she would have had to ask the same question of herself, and her answer would have been the same as his.

No. Still looking through the glass, she shook her head: it couldn’t be. Not when Ronnie had told people, time and again, forever, And then along came Nancy Davis and saved my soul. The letters, the endearments, the Truluv canoe that was tied up beside Lake Lucky, at the ranch, even at this moment — all were evidence, proof, of the closeness they had, the closeness that had been their own sort of space shield against others, even their own children, deflecting and pulverizing them when they flew too near. It was real.

The desert stars twinkled implacably. She heard a coyote in the distance. She kept her fingers on the handle of the door that would not yield. Her breath fogged the glass as she whispered I love you .

Which she did.

But she didn’t know who he was, and she never had.

A woman in a white uniform comes in and sets down a glass of what he thinks is called cranberry juice.

“Why, thank you,” he says, never having lost his manners.

He doesn’t lift the glass to drink, and he can see her following his gaze, trying to pinpoint whatever he is looking at. This happens whenever she is in here, and his instincts tell him that she has been told to do it.

“Cattle Queen of Montana,” she says, slowly and clearly, pointing to the framed poster he’s looking at. “Yes!” she adds, with a wide smile. “You were once in the movies!” She points to the poster with more insistence when his eyes start to wander from it. “Barbara Stanwyck,” she says, meaninglessly, in the Spanish accent she shares with the men who tend the pool outside the house. Sometimes, until he hears the accent, he thinks that she is Miss Darby, back in Illinois, preparing the fifth grade for a test.

“That’s a Remington ,” she says, pointing now to a bronze cowboy and horse that sit atop a long table covered with important things, treasures. “And that’s you ,” she adds, pointing to the small marble head of a man beside the cowboy.

“Dick Nixon is dead,” he tells her.

“That’s right!” she replies, excited, as if he’s imparted something fresh and extraordinary. “Two years ago. And there he is,” she adds, indicating one framed picture amidst many others. Encouraged, the way Miss Darby is when they get things right, she points to another photograph. “The Statue of Liberty. On the Fourth of July,” she says.

More pictures: “Mr. O’Neill. Mrs. Thatcher.” He moves his eyes from one to the next.

She picks up a giant card that has been here for some time but not so long as the photographs and the bronze cowboy. “You’re eighty-five years old,” she says. “This birthday card was signed by all the congressmen, the senators, the ambassadors.” She points to several swirls of ink. “Mr. Crowe in London. Mrs. Harriman in Paris.”

This time, once his gaze shifts, her enthusiasm fades. She smiles, as if accepting defeat, and begins to straighten things up without saying anything more.

He knows that there is a whole building full of these pictures and objects. You can find it where the mountains begin, not a very long ride from here — and not where they first said they would build it, far to the north. The last time they took him to it he thought he was going to the ranch, thought he was going to ride his horse. Everyone at the building seemed stunned to see him arrive; they all waved and applauded as he got out of the car. He wanted to stay outside in the sun, but they made him go inside and look at all the pictures and all the things that were carefully arranged and labeled. He can recognize letters and numbers, one at a time, but cannot put them together, and he soon grew tired of half-recognizing things, of being on the verge of saying their names, of almost recalling whatever event went with them. And then he had become frightened, looking at the headless woman standing inside a glass box in a long red dress. He understood, after a minute, that this wasn’t a real woman, and wasn’t really her , but not before he’d begun, just for a moment, to cry.

When they were back in the car, everyone remained cheerful, the way everyone always does, but on the way home, when they thought he was dozing, he heard her say to the man in the seat in front of them: That’s it. No more. Not here; not even to the ranch. And, above all, not to the convention. Tell them no. Not for so much as a wave. If Bob Dole wants me to speak, I will.